I got an email today from a CUNY student who was evidently blown away when (s)he came across my old MIT site and said someone should make a movie about me. I’m tickled pink, but I don’t know how to respond. It made me want to start collecting and publishing my projects again though– maybe I’ll start with this one:

My Subatomic Tea Party

I have a laptop again!!!

I found out it was arriving today by 3:00 at 2:00. So I ran back to my apartment, and someone came to the door not five minutes later. That was just the postman, but within two minutes the DHL guy came with my computer.

They left the tank empty, and my adapter is broken so I had to run around to charge it, so I did. Then it wouldn’t turn on, so I opened it up and fixed it (repair people can’t seem to do anything right). And now, two weeks late, it works and looks 10 months younger.

Last night, anastasia1 went over the first half of the show with me for Frank cues, pointing out and explaining a hundred details and expressions and timings I would never have noticed.

Ah, for the days when my social life was satisfied by deciding between doing homework in the lounge in ESG or on Black Hole! Yesterday I almost-satisfied my social obligations with two dinners (with ESG and FBC folk) and two after-midnight visits (Lucky Corner Ladies and the Opium Den), but I was sad to miss seeing SCA folk at dance practice.

For all the joy I get from my projects, I think, like the old woman from Waking Life, the most important thing I’ve been involved in is people. I spent most of my social efforts in college being a part of my communities– I don’t think I just hung out with anyone for friendship’s sake until senor year. The strong friendships I formed were by chance, and maintained by coincidence. I have a better sense now of the fruits of friendship as a product of intent: time and effort and organization– if not through an organization (a community) then by constant planning. But every acquaintance I’ve made a comrade out of has been a reward worth the effort.

One technical problem I’ve never solved is keeping in touch. The moment I leave a place or take a break from an activity, I lose contact with the people involved. The immediacy of life gets in the way of well-meaning to stay in touch with friends. LJ makes it a lot easier (especially as I convince more people to join this borg), but it isn’t personal enough.

I have high hopes for my newest system: I’m combining my calendar, todo lists, and keep-in-touches in a kind of delayed-reminder system: I have a box of notecards, with dividers for each day in the coming week, weeks in the month, months in the next year, and beyond. Each notecard has an event (SCA Dance Practice), a todo (Write LJ Entry), or a person (Fred Flintstone). I grab the day’s pile of cards each morning, along with some blanks, and refile them at night. If I didn’t do something I meant to do, it goes into the next day; if I did, I can put it any distance into the future to pick up again then.

I’m glad to be done with my Riff audition (was good!) and Trixie (was good!); now I can concentrate on Frank.

I’m eying the Saturday two weeks from now (the 16th) for another party at my place, but I haven’t heard of any plans for the 23rd. Does anyone know if someone is planning on hosting it? And I’m looking for new games to have at my party (making Rocky-perversions of children’s games (Shots and Loaders? I don’t even have to play with names for Candy Land and Monopoly) came up at the party).

The sky is so beautiful! The clouds are streaked like sun rays over a dusty dusky sky toward the light from the set sun, over another diffraction pattern of clouds that reaches across to the full moon on the opposite horrizon.

I was in a thoughtful mood, and had some fun realizations about how to be myself boldly, and they make me want to dwell in life instead of in the realizations, but I’ll write them if anyone’s curious.

I’ve been coming up with some modifications to the Rocky bowl game. We’ve been playing it a lot recently, and I hope we play some other games, but when we do play it next, I want to try a few changes We don’t have to stick with all of them, but let’s try them all out. Here are my mods:

1. For every slip you remove, you have to put a new one in (in between turns). It doesn’t have to be unique (there are never too few “kiss someone” slips), but it shouldn’t be the same thing every time.

2. Moreover, your slips should generally become more extreme with time. “Kiss” might shift to “make out” might shift to “tie down”. Not a rule, but an expectation.

3. We add a new kind of slip called “Rule”. These are like rules in 3-man: any time you kiss you have to take off your shirt; any time anyone says “if” they have to drink.

4. Slips that involve drinking and similar are allowed. If you aren’t partaking, it becomes a general dare to be chosen by the people who are partaking.

I should know better than to read existentialism before bed. I’ve been thinking recently about the problem of individuality. I’m convinced that different people experience the world in vastly different ways, but we’re doomed to spend our lives as just one mind and body.

There’s a maxim that you don’t get to join any group; only groups with you then in them. Every relationship (friendship, chance meeting) you have is irreparably marked by you, to the point that you can never know anyone the way someone else would. Every sensation, idea, and understanding you have is forever bound by the deepest quirks of your psychology. The most essential aspects of our selves are forever hidden from us because they’re built into the foundations of how we experience our lives. We’re forced to infer the basics of who we are by seeing how people react to us and who they react similarly to, and what those people are like.

Two weeks ago I was tearing my hair out thinking that what I found myself to be was so different from what I thought I was, but I decided that the situation is not as bad as I thought. As an intellectual, a kind of friend, and a citizen of the world, I’m pleased with what I am. But as a social creature? A source of creativity? A man? I see in my place a shallow husk of the creature I meant to be and it makes me sad.

So does anyone want to temporarily merge consciousness with me, so I know what it’s like to be you (and you, me)? I’ve read some experiments that suggest it’s possible, but I need a willing victim co-participant.

And a follow-up from my game post: I now have an extended description and the first steps. The game is filling up, but I can still handle more people.

Disclaimer: I hold a regular Salon discussion group, with wide-ranging conversations on politics, philosophy, society, and life. I’ve decided to start using Salon discussions as the subject of some LJ posts, as a way to propagate and record the ideas. I make no claims to these ideas– they arose out of the dialogue– nor do I claim that they’re an accurate reflection of the dialogue. A good Salon discussion is like a rich tapestry: you can tell many different stories by following different threads. This is just a smattering of what came up.

Society is currently undergoing a vast “exploding out” of ideas, cultures, and technologies. This isn’t new– it’s characteristic of modern society, maybe even reaching back to the Renaissance. But it is pervasive and getting faster by the year. It’s even built our notions of progress and creativity. If creativity ever meant simply the creative process, it’s long since come to mean the inventive process. Progress in art, science, and philosophy is understood as the creation of new, previously unknown constructs.

As society spirals out, specializing and extremifying, and its various branches create language and cultures of their own, it seems inevitable that the common bonds that hold society together will become more tenuous and strained. These branches release new technologies and ideas into the world at a future-shocking speed, changing the ways we live, work, and think, and leaving us forever reeling from the effects. One has to worry if this ever-quickening explosion will end in an enormous catastrophe, or a singularity of multiplicity and change.

But maybe this chaos reflects a necessary and temporary process as civilization adjusts to recent changes in technology. We are in the midst of a society-wide paradigm shift. Like the big-bang-bust cosmological question, the exploding out could tear society apart, or it could just rip out some old stitching allowing society to fall into a new configuration. Western civilization is searching for a new foundation: a societal world view or foundational paradigm or Weltanschauung that we’ve been missing since the fall of Newtonian mechanics.

We now know that the world, of which we are part, is a dizzying mesh of complex and chaotic mutually-causal systems and based on inherent uncertainty and unknowability. There is no room for personal free will (unless it’s to be found in quantum probability functions) or a soul that exists outside natural laws (unless it is a powerless observer). If there are gods, our best chance to meet them is heavy drug use. Our senses and psychology are so self-absorbed that we can only guess at the nature of reality. Purpose, morality, and meaning are only possible as a personal temporary suspension of disbelief. These are difficult (and disputed) ideas that we have yet to come to terms with.

The past hundred years hasn’t managed to find a way out by exploring any of the hallways of the mansion of Western civilization through the project of post-modernism in art, literature, philosophy, and science. But recent world developments might soon force us to confront other civilizations fundamental paradigms. Western civilization can no longer act like the only kid in the world’s playground, and that might save us from our own failings.

Traditional eastern philosophy holds a very different conception of the universe, and one that might handle the paradoxless dilemmas of contemporary thought better. At the discussion, we might have pulled out a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, but we like to find our own way, especially if its an opportunity to create a new paradigm for use by the whole of civilization. We tried to resolve the paradox in eastern philosophy that individuals should escape the misery of life by realizing that both they and the world they live in don’t exist, and came up with a few interesting possibilities.

What if individuals are distinct from collective reality in the way that waves are distinct from the ocean? We experience life as individuals because we are bundled knots in a collective experiencer, like eddy currents that divide themselves off from a large river. We are unruly collections of neurons in a Great Mind. Enlightenment is a kind of merging back into the collective consciousness.

Specifically, paradigms– the structures that allow us to understand our universe– are the walls that bind off these individual knots. The Salon ended with a long discussion about the mindsets instilled in the business world, the paradigms of economics and corporations, and how they could be re-written to better suit concerned individuals.

I just saw Stranger than Fiction, which is a totally squeal-worthy movie. And it gave me a great idea for a game.

Here’s the invitation: Join me in creating a fictional character in a real-time story of our collective design. Let us, in the words of Speed Levich, be “the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel, starring clowns.” You create your character: no magical powers or endless wealth, but you can have a checkered background, vocational skills, and social connections. You can even be yourself. I will manage the world, ensuring that you all have dilemmas to juggle and that your actions effect the other characters, and I will publish a public narrative. At least one of you will die. At least one of you will reap good fortune at another’s expense. At least one of your plots will break the third wall. How do you join? Reply to the post and I’ll give you instructions.

And you should all see Stranger than Fiction. The central idea is sublime and the movie’s explorations of that idea’s textures are more than enough to make the sappy romance plot palpable. Ultimately, I think the movie’s reach exceeded its grasp (I can’t say how without spoiling), but not before leaving me panting and sated. And only yesterday I had long discussion on the self-referencial nature of post-modernism and the effect of existentialism’s maxim that “the meaning of life is the living of it” on contemporary society. Uncanny.

Holiday quiet on these street, except for some stubborn leaves
That didn’t fall with the fall, now they clatter in vain.

Curse the god of projects that drove me through pouring rain to blast Carbon Leaf over an empty ESG’s speakers and code until my socks dry! But I did finish my toy:

It’s a webcrawling collage-maker. Starting from a webpage, it will follow links and paste the images into a composite. For each collage, it keeps a fair-sized catalog of webpages to look at (from its explorations), and anyone can add to that catalog, “nudging” it in different directions.

I started ones for MIT, the SCA, FBC, and Flickr photos. There’s also a tool for making your own (size-limited for now).

The process of making it web-accessible left it buggy, but for a while it looked like my shared host had made it totally impossible, so I’ll take what I can get.