Ran Prieur

August 26.

2016-08-26T14:40:51Z

August 26. Today I want to write about my ongoing attempt to write fiction. First, an epic reddit comment with 74 answers to the question What's something that happens in movies, but never happens in real life?

We've just started watching a Canadian sci-fi show called Dark Matter on Netflix. The Big Idea is great: a spaceship crew wakes up with their memories gone, so on top of the usual stuff that spaceships do, they have to figure out who they are. And this show is big on Usual Stuff: the android crew member who's just like an aspergy human, the cynical selfish crew member who's also the best with guns, the hot female crew member who is invincible at hand to hand fighting, the cyberpunk space station that's like Blade Runner with no style. Bartenders know everything and you can get anywhere by crawling through ducts. I was hoping the mysterious abandoned ship with murdered crew had one survivor who turned out to be the crazy killer, but instead they went with Space Zombies.

A crew member finds a stowaway and his line is "Well well well, what do we have here?" Imagine the screenwriter making the decision to type that, and how cynical or lazy he must have been.

But it's bad fiction, not good fiction, that motivates me to write. If I'm reading a great novel like John Crowley's Little, Big, or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Albert Cossery's A Splendid Conspiracy, I'm thinking, why should I even bother writing fiction when I can never touch this? But then I see something bad and think, I could write circles around this shit.

But even Dark Matter is good at something I can't do at all. I can conceive big ideas and make the fine details sparkle, but I still haven't learned how to do medium-scale storytelling, to keep a multi-thread narrative going page after page. Now I'm thinking I'll have to bring in some tropes to do that, because I'm not good enough to be completely original on every level. Even my weirdest favorite song has verses and hooks.

August 24.

2016-08-24T12:20:42Z

August 24. Related to Monday's subject, Religious Diversity May Be Making America Less Religious. I think this is a semantic issue. Everybody has a Big Story about reality, even if it's reductionist materialism or a vague sense of a benevolent universe. But with more options, people are moving away from the monolithic old religions into stories that haven't been defined as "religion" yet, and may never be.

Last week there was a subreddit post about Stimulants versus Hallucinogens and how they fit with different societies. I've often wondered why I'm the only person in my family who hates having a job and feels that modern life is unreasonably difficult and exhausting. Could it be as simple as the fact that I don't drink coffee? Leigh Ann says it's because I'm INTP.

And on my new favorite subject, advanced life skills, What Great Listeners Actually Do. The article breaks it down into six levels, and I'm on level 3 right now and working on level 4.

August 22.

2016-08-22T22:00:28Z

August 22. From last December, Can You Hear Me Now? is a Ribbonfarm post about "divergentism": that humans seem to be developing in a way that makes us more different, or it makes it harder for us to find deep common ground.

Venkat sees this as a troubling permanent trend, but I see it as an adjustment to new technology, which is already finding equilibrium. When I was a teenager my favorite music and shows and ideas were all popular, simply because there was no way for unpopular stuff to get to me. Now the internet has opened up a vast landscape in which we all have the option to look for more obscure stuff that we like better.

But this isn't an unchecked drift into meaninglessness. It is constrained by our need to continue to find common ground. Each of us, when choosing where to put our attention, must find our own balance between what we love and what we can talk about with other people. Introverts will go farther to the fringe while more social people will tend to like whatever their friends like.

Still, I see two ways that a much larger cultural landscape can create problems. One is with couples, who want to be emotionally compatible and like all the same culture. This goal used to be realistic and now it's impossible, and people with more developed tastes will have to get used to feeling alone even with their partners.

The other problem is with politics. As we get more culturally diverse, it becomes more challenging for hundreds of millions of us to share one political system. Even if political systems keep getting better, they will seem more meaningless, and more people will be dissatisfied with them.

August 19.

2016-08-19T19:30:41Z

August 19. Writing this blog is always a balance between what I find interesting and what I imagine readers find interesting... but it wasn't always this way. When I started out, those two things were the same, and now I feel some social obligation to not stray too far or change too fast from subjects I've written about before.

But after some nice emails from readers who would like me to keep the blog going no matter what, I've decided that on Fridays I'm going to write about exactly whatever I feel like. That's sort of what Fridays have been like for a while, but now I'm trying to really let go.

All summer I've been obsessed with this song. It's fifteen minutes of space lounge folk with evolving verses that come back five times to the same chorus. Sometimes I get to the end and go right back to the beginning, and I'm on a pace to listen to it more hours per year than most religious people spend in church.

Meanwhile, ordinary reality has still not recovered from my accident. It reminds me of old Bilbo's line from Lord of the Rings, that life feels like butter spread out over too much bread. Leigh Ann has been sick this week so I've been driving her around to pet care jobs, and I have a lot of time to sit in the car and practice centering myself in the present moment and trying to view the world as magical and alive, but it just feels bland.

I was serious when I said I want to be more like William Blake, and on Carey's recommendation I read Stephen Harrod Buhner's Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. It helped a little, but I need a "how" book and it's almost completely a "why" book, loaded with unsurprising inspirational quotes and intellectual arguments for stuff I already believe. In my experience, the brain always follows the soul and never the other way around, which makes me think I'm wasting my time writing about ideas.

One exception to the emptiness of reality -- although I do cheat by using cannabis. My new favorite thing to do is lie out on the back patio and just listen to the sounds of the neighborhood: cars passing, their noise now distinguishable into the throb of the engine and the hiss of tires, the hum of air conditioners, a flutter of bird wings, a TV through a window, train whistles and airplanes, crickets and bits of voices. I can drift away into thoughts and come back to it, and it's always there, like an endless symphony.

August 17.

2016-08-17T17:10:35Z

August 17. You've probably noticed that my regular MWF posts are getting later and smaller. This blog appears to be on semi-vacation since my concussion has temporarily reduced my brainpower, and accelerated an ongoing shift in what I find interesting. I'm not completely done writing about politics and society, but I just don't feel like getting into that stuff now.

But here's a good link from a reader, The End of Globalization. It explains in detail how globalization is ending, largely through technology shifting manufacturing from foreign labor to domestic automation. And it has some predictions, that more trade will shift to regional blocks of nations, and that the US military might stop trying to stabilize the world.

August 15.

2016-08-15T15:50:19Z

August 15. At the bottom of my misc page is a "Readings and Mirrors" section, for stuff that I liked enough to host it myself when I couldn't find it anywhere else on the internet. It's mostly the kind of thing I was interested in ten years ago, like The origins of agriculture, which argues that humans persisted in growing grains because grains contain opioids and other addictive substances.

Last week one of the authors emailed me with links to two newer papers with updated ideas. The one that's publicly available is Pharmacological Influences on the Neolithic Transition, which argues that a bunch of different psychoactive substances were involved.

Coincidentally, this new article fits my new thinking as well as the old one fit my old thinking. I used to think large complex society was simply a mistake, and now I think it's a really interesting transition that still has a long way to go, and to do it right we need more and better ways to alter consciousness.

August 12.

2016-08-12T12:20:57Z

August 12. This week the most anticipated video game of the last few years, No Man's Sky, was released. I was thinking about building a gaming desktop just to play it, but I've decided to wait for cheaper computers and a better game.

It might be a long wait. This No Man's Sky review on reddit goes into detail about the game's weaknesses, and here's a page with more reviews. The most exciting thing about No Man's Sky is its massive and revolutionary use of procedural generation, using fractal math to make 18 quintillion beautiful planets. But it looks like the procedural generation is not integrated on a deep level with gameplay. So if one planet has green elephants in a jungle and another has red dinosaurs in a desert, it changes what you see but doesn't change what you do.

To be fair, building great gameplay out of procedural generation is really hard. Here's a post from 2012, Procedural Content: When it sucks, when it doesn't. Is No Man's Sky just a really pretty version of Telengard, the 1982 dungeon crawler whose two million rooms were basically the same?

What I'm waiting for is good graphics over something like Dwarf Fortress, and my best hope remains Starsector, a slow-developing independent game by a single programmer, Alex Mosolov. In this 2014 interview, Alex explains why he continues to avoid Kickstarter and Steam so he can develop the game on his own terms. You can tell from his blog that he has a great sense for gameplay, and this year he's starting to add procedural generation.

Here's another fun thing for the weekend, a video of a windmill on fire.

August 10.

2016-08-10T22:00:25Z

August 10. Today, some presidential politics. I wouldn't take this article at face value, because everyone involved is a Clinton supporter, but Understanding Hillary makes an interesting argument in her defense: that her great political skill is being a good listener, and it just doesn't translate to speaking in front of huge crowds.

Also, a reader has a speculation about why Hillary is so unlikeable. Back in 2012 she had a blood clot in her brain, and if she had a more recent episode, she might have "a vascular dementia, or a post-stroke syndrome" which could make her "more inflexible and more confused by changes and the unexpected."

August 8.

2016-08-08T20:40:28Z

August 8. Unrelated links. Minds turned to ash is a smart article about why people burn out at their jobs. If I had to distill it to one idea, it's that holding tension between where you are and where you want to be is an effective short-term motivational strategy, but in the long term it's a dead end.

Hacker News comment thread, The LHC nightmare scenario has come true. This comment summarizes it:

The LHC is a multi billion dollar project designed specifically to help physicists build physical models that are more accurate than what currently exists. Countless man-years have been devoted to its operation. Apparently, the only thing it has done is confirm what we already knew decades ago. The nightmare scenario is the waste of billions of dollars and a decade of your life, with no alternatives in sight.

I had no idea that those "warranty void if removed" stickers are illegal. More precisely, "The obligation is on the manufacturer to demonstrate that your third-party repairs or modifications caused the failure, not the other way around."

From a year ago, an interview with the authors of a self-help book called Fuck Feelings. It's not actually against feelings, but it uses humor to counter some of the overly simple advice of other self-help books.

Finally, the thread I linked to on Friday has exploded to 70 comments, probably the biggest comment thread in the history of the subreddit, which is strange because the perceived inequalities between men and women in dating is not a subject I'm interested in or have ever written about. When I was younger I thought I had terrible luck with women, but it turned out to be all because of stuff I was doing, or not doing. One thing was being unaware of vast levels of nonverbal communication, and this is also why I never passed a job interview for anything above office drone. My other mistake was focusing on one person at a time and trying to get with her, when the correct strategy, in dating and in life, is to remain broadly receptive to opportunities.

August 5.

2016-08-05T17:10:00Z

August 5. Over on the subreddit there's been some action on this post about MGTOW. It stands for Men Going Their Own Way, because they "believe that legal and romantic entanglements with women fail a cost-benefit analysis and risk-benefit analysis."

I think most of these guys are either looking at the wrong women, or they're taking a narrow view of benefits. This is normal human behavior: we tend to be hyperaware of the benefits we're offering and unaware of the benefits we're getting. Or we skew our perspective so that what we're good at seems important and what we're bad at seems trivial or nonexistent.

From the other side, here's a popular feminist post from a year ago, On Unpaid Emotional Labor, and an article in the Guardian with lots of examples, Is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?

This is just one corner of a huge subject that also includes stuff like why Clint Eastwood hates political correctness, what lefties really mean by "privilege", and maybe why certain technologies that satisfy our desires make us unhappy. It's all about self-reinforcing disconnection from reality, and I'll try to get deeper into it another time.

Some music for the weekend. I've linked to this song before but I'm linking again because it's easy on the ears, super-obscure, and I really like it. John Matthias - Pre-Loved / Vintage.

August 3.

2016-08-03T15:50:59Z

August 3. A couple months back, a question on the subreddit got me thinking about the quote at the top of this page: "The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed." I think in the original quote, from one of Terence McKenna's recorded talks, it was "the bonfire of understanding," but the question was: Why a bonfire? I think it's a great metaphor for a few different reasons. 1) It's primal. For a million years our ancestors sat around fires at night wondering what was out in the darkness. 2) It puts the darkness in all directions, and endless. Compare it to the metaphor of peeling an onion, where under each layer there's another layer, but soon you come to the center. With a fire you're peeling outward forever. 3) Like understanding, a fire can be any size, and it gets bigger incrementally. 4) A bonfire is the biggest controlled fire that most of us have seen. He could have used a candle, but imagine the size of a bonfire and all of that darkness.

August 1.

2016-08-01T13:30:26Z

August 1. Concussions have been in the news for a while because of the NFL, but I had no idea how serious they are until I got one. Two weeks after my accident, my body is mostly recovered but my brain is still foggy. Apparently it's common for post-concussion syndrome to last months. I have a constant barely noticeable headache, mild memory loss, my happiness ceiling is lower, and it's much harder for me to concentrate. The other day I tried to convert ten meters per second into miles per hour, something I could normally estimate in my head, and I couldn't even get started without pen and paper and even then I made a mistake.

So today I'm not smart enough for original thinking and I'm just going to post a few links, starting with this awesome headline: Climate change is weaponizing the atmosphere. Here's an article with a better photo of the recent Phoenix microburst, where clouds blast near-tornado force wind straight downward.

And two reddit comments sent by readers. One of the smartest people on reddit, Erinaceous, describes Permaculture founder Bill Mollison's political vision, which uses...

existing institutions and legal forms which largely serve corporate interests but turns them to the service of regenerative social ecological systems. Rather than sitting on our thumbs waiting for nations to collapse it gives us an effective means of using the existing nation states to become incubators for permaculture federations which would have some measure of independence from centralized means of control.

And this comment, on the subject of marrying for love, argues that the history of what we seek in partners mirrors Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from food and shelter to belonging to love to self-actualization. The commenter calls the last thing "nearly impossible", and I don't believe in the "true self", but I see a lot of couples where one or both partners successfully challenges the other to be a better person.