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Topics - Rococo Modem Basilisk

#1
Bring and Brag / Enki makes a game
July 04, 2017, 02:18:16 PM
I'm working on a VN based on a pitches I posted to the Original Story Ideas thread years ago1.

The elevator pitch is:
QuoteGroundhog day in a universe where all conspiracy theories are true
A more accurate description is:
QuoteOur protagonist dies unexpectedly and finds herself manifesting as a voice in the head of her previous self from the beginning of that day. Each time she dies, she is sent back to the beginning of the day, and must negotiate with her past self in order to find clues to prevent her own murder. However, the town in which she lives is full of shady dangerous dealings just below the surface -- ranging from organized crime and government conspiracies to UFO cultists and supernatural events -- any one of which could be involved in her death, and many of which will kill her even earlier. Each time she dies in a new way, and many times when she relives events with new context, she gains new clues that open up new options for behavior.

In other words, the mechanics of the game are like a first person version of Groundhog Day: you have a very limited time period you repeat, and by learning about the circumstances of the world new possibilities open up for different things you can do during the day, all of which can feed together. Content-wise, it's a bit like The X Files, where the town is full of mostly independent horror/thriller tropes.

Being a VN, the game is mostly dialogue and still images with the occasional menu. (This is a good fit, since having more flexible mechanics would distract from the important part of the game, which is the slowly mutating story tree.)

I've got about two hours of content thus far2. Right now, all of the art and music3 is also mine, though when I've finished the story I expect to commission new art (particularly sprites and splash screens), because my drawing skills have really gone downhill.




1 The original pitches are:
QuoteGhosts, formed from the juxtaposition of traumatic deaths and strong dying wishes, live outside the bounds of time but have limited effects on the physical world unless they possess someone. However, possession is difficult, and works best when the ghost is possessing someone similar to themselves (and when the person they are possessing is not lucid). Under these circumstances, a ghost possesses the body of himself in the past while asleep in order to solve the mystery of who murdered him – and in the course of his investigations, sets up the series of circumstances that led to his murder.
and
QuoteAfter our protagonist dies on the table during surgery for ten minutes, he spends the rest of his life literally haunted by the ghost of the person he used to be – which becomes irritating as both he and his ghost develop independently and their personalities begin to diverge.

2 A recording of the first twenty minutes is here. I have the source on github, and will be keeping it relatively up to date. It's written with ren'py, a domain-specific language for writing VNs.

3 For many years I've been writing music under the name "Infocalypse". Most of it recently is in the style of horror movie sound track music. I went through and mined previous albums for possible BGM for the game. I have something like forty-six albums worth of material.
#2
In order to avoid polluting the pics thread.















#3
Literate Chaotic / Five word horror
April 04, 2015, 05:45:47 PM
Inspired by this.

Here's a few to start off with:

The anesthesia didn't quite work.
Strange shapes blackened the sky.
Yesterday the shadow grew again.
Below, rows of sharp teeth.
#4
Discordian Recipes / Stupidly easy chicken thing
December 13, 2014, 05:54:37 PM
Ingredients:
- 1-2 lbs Chicken thighs (not deboned)
- 2-3 jars salsa

Instructions:
Put chicken in pressure cooker. Cover with salsa. Cook on high for 24 hours, or until bones melt. Feeds one person for 1-2 meals a day for a week.
#5
Literate Chaotic / Things that RAW was wrong about
June 12, 2013, 04:38:42 PM
Feminism
Information theory
Waveform collapse
The academic standards of the authorship of Holy Blood, Holy Grail
The academic standards of the authorship of The Sirius Mystery
Carl Sagan's views on epistemology
Carl Sagan's views on pot
The conditions surrounding Tim Leary's first arrest
The Burroughs-Wheeler Many-World Interpretation
Some members of CSICOP
The cost/benefit analysis of long term habitation of deep space
The ease with which one can train gorillas

(Citations added by request; please add to the list as you see fit)
#6
Techmology and Scientism / MY NEW INVENTION
December 05, 2012, 05:38:23 PM

Anybody wanna build this and see if they'll let you in a club?
#7
Techmology and Scientism / The demoscene thread
April 15, 2012, 05:06:28 PM
We don't a thread about demoscene, and I know a couple people here are involved in/interested in it...

For the uninformed:
Quote from: wikipedia
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.
The demoscene first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari 800 and Amstrad CPC, and came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit home computers (Mainly the Amiga or Atari ST). In the early years, demos had a strong connection with software cracking[citation needed]. When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit with a graphical introduction called a "crack intro" (shortened cracktro). Within a year or two[1], the making of intros and standalone demos evolved into a new subculture independent of the software (piracy) scene.[2]
Source

Here's a (strangely jingoistic and pro-Hungarian) documentary on the scene.

I don't know enough about the scene to say much more (it barely exists in the united states).
#8
I've been thinking a bit more about RAW's filter model and how it relates to memebomb effectiveness. A memebomb is an aphorism; it is not a novel (which invites someone to willingly enter someone else's reality tunnel and look through their filters). Instead of being drawn as positive space (like a cathode ray tube -- which moves electron beams around to light up portions of currently dark phosphor -- or a painting -- which fills an empty canvas) it may be more suitable to consider a memebomb as a negative space (like an LCD -- which takes white light and subtracts the colours not in the intended image -- or a sculpture -- which is a chunk of rock with all the non-sculpture pieces taken out -- or a filter).

Someone encountering a memebomb unexpectedly will look at it through their habitual filter. You can perceive a memebomb as a secondary filter, then: an effective memebomb will highlight inconsistencies in an existing filter by removing the context that obscures them. Alternatively, you can consider one's habitual filter as a given: a person projects meaning only insomuch as his filter allows, and the text merely further restricts possible meanings (a kind of reverse Gantzfield effect: by adding sensation you restrict the domain of 'normal' hallucinations or projections by forcing them to coincide with the sensed world).

So, under this model, an effective memebomb will consist of a juxtaposition between several elements of an existing worldview. The 'target audience' should agree with the elements but be predisposed to disagree with the juxtaposition (i.e., the juxtaposition is locally consistent but conflicts with something else in the reality tunnel). Thus, the memebomb causes cognitive dissonance by laying bare a contradiction in already accepted beliefs without adding any new information for the target to accept. The target cannot therefore choose to reject the memebomb: he has already accepted it, but not considered it in isolation. The target is forced to consider and rationalize this juxtaposition (expanding the filter by adding a bag on the side full of twisty reasoning and justifications, which -- being the quickly-erected defense against an already successful attack -- can be hotwired by other ideas).

For a memebomb to be successful under this model, there are some things it cannot do:

1) it cannot consist primarily of new material, because the new material can be trivially rejected

2) it cannot consist of already-rationalized contradictions ("Can God create a burrito so hot even HE can't eat it" has been rationalized in various guises by the Jesuits and others for centuries, and is therefore neutered despite being a legitimate contradiction in the Abrahamic-Scholastic theological idea of God; it will work, briefly, on the rare poor soul who has never heard it)

3) it cannot be perceived as nonsensical (i.e., few people will project an emotionally intense meaning upon "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" -- though this does not factor out all uses of language generated without intent, as memebombs can certainly be created accidentally)

4) it cannot be immediately seen as an attack, because it will be rejected and defended against before it is processed


I suspect that following the above rules will result in a slightly higher signal-to-noise ratio in memebombs, but that many effective memebombs will be filtered out. Indeed, there are clear exceptions to the above rules. My intent was to systematize the problems I saw in many of what I perceived as 'bad memebombs' exceedingly common on the SOMA. I am open to tweaks, suggestions, and (necessarily) flames about how I am shitting up the board with talk about RAW &c.
#9
High Weirdness / Ex-RIM employees chew through restraints
December 13, 2011, 02:19:00 AM
Quote
New details are emerging about the rowdy behaviour of two Research In Motion executives who were fired for disrupting an intercontinental flight — including that they managed to chew their way out of restraints after being handcuffed by crew members.

George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38, each pleaded guilty to mischief for disrupting an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing last week.

[...]

The pair seemed heavily intoxicated from the start of the flight, according to one passenger. They drank, passed out, and woke up to continue consuming alcohol and yelling at one another.

Campbell was described as a "rowdy and abusive" passenger who at one point warned that he would "off people when they left the plane," according to the Crown prosecutor.

A flight attendant said that Campbell also lay belly-down in the aisle during the ordeal, and began kicking the floor.

One of the men "assaulted a flight attendant and threatened to punch another," the prosecution told the court.

Crew members eventually handcuffed the two unruly passengers with plastic restraints and then with tape. But they eventually "chewed their way through their restraints."

[...]

The pilots, believing they could not make the trip to Beijing for security reasons, decided to divert the plane to Anchorage. As the situation continued to escalate they changed course again and headed for the Vancouver airport, which was closer.

During the final 80 minutes of the flight, "several flight attendants and a couple of passengers" restrained the two men and the crew initiated a "lockdown situation" so that no one was allowed to leave their seats.

[...]

Air Canada later pegged its losses for diverting the flight at nearly $200,000 and RIM issued a statement saying that the conduct did not fit with the company's "standards of business behaviour."
Source
#10
Quote
On October 31st 2011 at 10pm (ET) We're attempting a world first...using the power of the internet to contact the dead. We need 100,000 people to join us on Facebook in a live Ouija experiment, where we'll attempt to initiate conversation with the other side.

For The World's largest Ouija Experiment we want to connect people together via Facebook to focus their collective energy in opening a channel to any entity that might be listening. Is it possible? We aim to prove definitively, yes, live, in front of 100,000 people or more.
Source
I suspect that this is a scam to get people's facebook info. Anyhow, by the time most of you read this, it'll be done and we'll know what was supposed to happen.
#11
As some of you may or may not know, I spent last weekend away at a conference. The upshot was probably getting into the top eight in the competitive programming contest, but grading the poster conference was also fun. Anyway, one poster in particular was pretty awesome. I didn't have the foresight to photograph it, but I will retype the blurb from the booklet and list off the conclusions that I remember.

Quote
ENTROPIC MODELS OF MUSIC: USING INFORMATION THEORY TO ANALYSIS[sic] MUSIC
Author: Ian Jones, SUNY Plattsburgh
Advisor: Delbert Hart, SUNY Plattsburgh

A piece of music has many different characteristics that make that piece unique and recognizable. The fundamental building blocks of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm (Simon 2007). Being able to break down a song into its piece is often an arduous task. Previous work by Watts (1974, 1979), Kerns (2001), and Simon (2006, 2007) have developed adaptations of Entropy equations into forms suitable for music. There are four main equations, Melodic Entropy, Harmonic Entropy, Rhythmic Entropy, and Composite Musical Entropy.[sic]

Claude Shannon developed techniques to describe the limits of compressison and reliability of data whilst being transmitted. The main measure in Information Theory is entropy. Entropy H, is defined as a discrete random variable X and the measure of the amount of uncertainty associated with the value of X.[sic]

Music is clearly a form of information. It can be as complicated a message as a Beethoven Symphony or as simple as a lone vocalist. The question exists is what is the information content of these different composition and aside from their musical complexities, is there greater entropy in a Beethoven piece versus that lone vocalist.[sic]

This study will look at the entropy values of various pieces of music in the form of guitar tablature from modern pop to classical pieces, calculate entropy values for the fundamental pieces of the musics and be able to quantify the music by its entropy values.[sic] If assuming music as a language, and a base line entropy value is established, then an analysis of a particular song ccan be achieved.[sic] Based upon entropy and other factors such as sales and chart positions, it can be determined if popularity correlates to a divergence from the average entropy values. Concisely, can the entropy of a song point to how well a song will be received.[sic]

Aside from Mr Jones' problems with the English language, the poster looked promising. He graphed the entropy of every piece in the data set, and graphed a line at the average entropy position. His results were that classical music had the highest entropy and pop music the lowest. Of the pieces in the data set, Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' had the lowest entropy -- meaning it was the most predictable.
#12
Bring and Brag / Narrative fragments
April 03, 2010, 09:01:03 PM
Quote
He was, at some level, manufactured. All of them were these days, of course, and his trained hand purportedly held sway over the vast organic machinery that took raw minds and cooked them, preparing them for lives as butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, doctors, lawyers, television game show hosts, and politicians. The funny thing about power is, like growing up, it only seems nice until you have it.

Now, some poor souls rationalized. "It's no good," they told themselves like junkies, "because it's not enough," and they went off to find the next hit, the next adoring fan or crouching, groveling servant. He knew better.

Power is useless without knowledge. Absolute power, like those lesser forms, was a magnet for delusion, and every decision opened the doors to a new minefield of seductive lies.
#13
Ingredients:
- sliced bread
- butter or pseudo-butter spread
- cheese
- cooked ham or bacon (optional)

Devices:
- toaster
- microwave

Steps:
1) toast two slices of bread in the toaster, keeping one eye on the stove to make sure it doesn't attack you
2) butter one side of both pieces of toast
3) pile cheese on one piece of bread. If you use ham or bacon, stick that inbetween two slices of cheese
4) put the other piece of toast on top, butter down, then flip over
5) cook it in the microwave until the cheese is visibly bubbling out the side
#14
So, I got an arduino this past saturday. Some pictures are in spagbook. Rather than gush about it there, I figured I'd gush about it here.

I've written code for bare AVRs before, and the arduino isn't much different -- it's basically just an AVR on an AVR-programming board, but set up so that you can use (most of) the AVR lines without taking it out of the programmer. That small difference was actually a pretty huge difference -- I never got around to building/buying an AVR programmer, nor am I particularly good at soldering, so I did a lot of code and designs using bare AVRs and never built anything out of them. On the flipside, in four days I managed to implement what amounts to a low-power PDA using the arduino and an LCD tutorial. This little guy even has a couple features my old palmpilot lacks (nonvolatile memory, autosave on a timer, a reset button that I don't need a paperclip to press).

I'm certainly not the only one building really fucking cool things with the arduino. http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/ lists more than I can count -- among the coolest are speech synthesis (it also sings) and a glove-mounted rock-paper-scissors game with an AI opponent.
#15
I wrote a short python script to generate a first order markov model of a document (tokenizes by whitespace), and after each token use the equation i=log2(anbn-1/an-1bn) to figure out the difference in information from one token to the next in all of the token pairs in the model.

I ran it on the first 4539 words in the phrack archives, and used google docs to graph it:


Edit: Whoops! I forgot to mention: I model the HMM in terms of ratios a:b, where a is the frequency of a given pair, and b is the frequency of all pairs with the same first token. an would be the frequency of the pair after the current token has been added, and an-1 would be its frequency before it has been added.

I can post the code up in a bit.
Edit: here it is
#16
I'll start.

Pros:
- It was coming anyway
- This time it won't be off topic
#17
Some background: I have a long-standing interest in robots, and I have been trying to build them since maybe age six. I also have a long history of failing to build robots, and my track record hasn't gotten much better -- although I am far more technically proficient than I was when I was six, I don't actually have significantly more funds, and these days people know me well enough to give the disclaimer "don't take it apart" when giving or lending me electronic devices (since I have a tendency to raid them for spare parts).

So, the other day, I was gazing lovingly at the IRC bridge I made for giving one of my bots the capacity for speech synthesis and (crappy) speech recognition, and I thought to myself: "Hey! If I just inserted another filter into this pipe, had a little remote control and a walkie talkie, I could make a little trashcan robot that could zip around and speak gibberish over IRC!". I had recently gotten a first generation roomba from the flea market (with the admonishment: "don't take it apart"), and so I had robots (albiet crappy, insect-like, rodney brooks style robots that really should have had brains built out of discrete components) on the brain.

Well, imagine my surprise when I look at boingboing this morning and find a remote-controlled roomba design with a webcam, etc, built not by taking the roomba apart, but by hooking into some extremely well-hidden nonstandard serial port with a micro!

It turns out, of course, that the roomba model I own is the only one that lacks this serial port, and that unless I break the rule, I will be forced to homebrew some other chassis.

Any suggestions on a chassis I (as a broke student whose three days of spring break are the largest block of contiguous free time he has had since 2009) could reasonably use for a brains-off-board gibberish-spouting trashcan robot? I considered remote control cars, but I'm not sure about how to send back the sensor readings and I'm not confident with soldering up radio transcievers &c.
#18
Alright. This recipe is simple, sweet, quick, and FILLING. I can't overemphasize how filling it is. Done right, it is also quite tasty.

What you need:
- Bread / english muffins/ hot dog buns/ anything bready that can be toasted (no noodles)
- A jar of peanut butter
- Lime juice
- Honey / maple syrup / molasses / acai / any other sweet thick sauce that doesn't immediately let liquid through
- Granola / cereal / trail mix

How to make it:
1) Toast the bready thing. Put it in a microwave-safe plate (preferably a deep glass pie plate or something). Cover it with a big dollop of peanut butter.

2) Put the granola stuff on top, so that it sticks to the peanut butter and rests on the bread.

3) Pour the honey (or whatever) on top of the granola, so that a thin layer covers most of the bread and granola.

4) Take half a bottle-cap of lime juice (or a couple squirts, if you have a squeezy dispenser rather than a bottle) and put it on top of the honey. The honey is meant to prevent the juice from immediately soaking the bread and granola.

5) Microwave the plate until the peanut butter starts bubbling. Wait until it's cool enough not to burn you, and eat it with a knife and fork (and something to drink).
#19
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc

I've been a big fan of Project Xanadu (and Nelson's related work) for years. I was somewhat surprised to hear him saying words that could just as easily have come out of the BIP.
#20
Quote
We first noticed Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer, aka "July4Patriot," back in March, when we ran one of the first reports on the "Oath Keepers" bloc of the Tea Party movement -- an organization devoted to recruiting military and police-force veterans into a Patriot-movement belief system predicated on a series of paranoid conspiracy theories, especially the notion that the federal government intends to begin rounding up citizens and putting them in concentration camps.

Dyer played a prominent role in connecting the Oath Keepers to the Tea Party movement, speaking at a July 4 Tea Party rally in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. And he's been involved in organizing militia "maneuvers" in Oklahoma.

Dyer cropped up again in the news -- this time in the police blotter for allegedly raping a 7-year-old girl
[...]
During the search the sheriff's deputies noted several firearms and a device believed to be a Colt M-203, 40-millimeter grenade launcher, a complaint filed in the United States District Court of Western Oklahoma by Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Special Agent Brett Williams said.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/tea-party-leader-arrested-rape
#21
I've been running variants of this design around in my head for something like two years, but I haven't drawn schematics on the computer until now. The general idea is that you have a rotating laser (yaw) and a rotating mirror (pitch), then maybe some lenses and something to draw on. If you build it small enough, you can probably drive it with stepper motors and make a (VERY LOUD) monochrome vector graphics display on the inside of a pair of sunglasses. Build it bigger and you can project it on a wall or something.



I have too little blood in my caffeine system currently, and don't trust my math, so I won't post my code for determining the position of points based on the rotation of the two pivots and the distance between the pivot and the {mirror,laser source}. If you have mirrors, steppers, laser diodes, and too much free time, feel free to play around with the design. I don't have the cash to build a prototype (though it is sure cheaper than a MyVu). If you happen to have a red laser, a green laser, and a blue laser (plus, again, lots of free time and some more lenses) you can probably build a colour version capable of displaying both primary and secondary colours of light (plus white), but that requires more optics experience and probably more maths than I am aware of.
#22
http://www.formspring.me/enkiv2

Apparently, formspring.me is a twitter clone specifically for "ask me anything" requests.
#23
Everyone saw it coming.
#24
Quote
An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.
Joshua Ryan Tabor, 27, was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with assaulting a child after police in Yelm, Wash., responded to a call of a disturbance at Tabor's home and then later found the little girl hiding in a locked bathroom, according to Police Chief Todd Stancil.

"We had a report of [Tabor] walking around his neighborhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to bust out windows," Stancil told ABCNews.com today. "In the process of talking to Tabor's girlfriend about what was going on, we learned that he had also been abusing his daughter."

Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in "multiple bruises pretty much all over her body."

"She was very open with us," Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. "She basically came right out and said, 'Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.'"
Both the girl and the father admitted to the torture, even detailing how Tabor would sit the girl on the edge of the bathroom sink and hold her head down until it was nearly submerged in water, dunking her if she refused to recite the alphabet, said Stancil.

Tabor's girlfriend, who is not identified in the police reports, could also be charged in the crime, said Stancil. Several portions of the police report are redacted and may implicate the girlfriend in the assault.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/joshua-tabor-accused-waterboarding-young-daughter/story?id=9778116

Bonus synchronicity: it's ABC news.
#25
Quote
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.

Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't.

China's hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won't be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html
#26
I wrote this as a final paper for my introductory philosophy class a while back. It's mostly BS, I think -- my concern was to construct the evidence for an implicit coherent system of epistemology in the SI's papers, not to determine whether or not one actually exists.

Link: http://namcub.accela-labs.com/stories/sit-epis-prettyprint.txt (recently prettyprinted version)
#27
Quote
One possible conclusion from this pinpoint accuracy is that the Woolworths tribal duty managers positioned the stores as a form of "landmark satnav". This allowed travellers to find their nearest outlet for sweets that could be acquired in any combination they desired. This could offer us a fascinating insight into what life was like in 2008 England, and we can't rule out that alien help was required to position stores this precisely and to offer the Ladybird clothing range at such low prices.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/01/aliens-with-a-taste-for-pick-n-mix-woolworths-stores-follow-uncanny-geometrical-patterns.html
#28
Quote
Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a "catastrophic puncturing" of our Plant's thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an "unimpeded thermal  inversion" of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere.

To the West's firing of this 'quantum' high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled "Attack On Gods 'Heaven' Lights Up Norwegian Sky".

To how catastrophic for our Planet this massive thermal inversion has been Anthony Nunan, an assistant general manager for risk management at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, is reporting today that the entire Northern Hemisphere is in winter chaos, with the greatest danger from this unprecedented Global event being the destruction of billions of dollars worth of crops in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self.
http://www.daily.pk/norway-time-hole-%E2%80%9Cleak%E2%80%9D-plunges-northern-hemisphere-into-chaos-14311/
#29
Quote
Everyone is worried that the singularity will be smart, I'm worried that it will be dumb, with a high clock speed. Any dumb ass can beat you at chess if it gets ten moves to your one. In fact, what if the singularity already happened, we are its neurons, and it's no smarter than a C. elegans worm? Worse, after the Twitterfall incident, I'm worried about what it will do when it discovers its motor neural pathways.
The human brain is brilliance derived from dumb nerves. Out of those many billions of simple connections came our Threshold of Reflection and everything that followed. But consciousness is going meta and we're being superseded by a borg-like singularity; intelligence turned upside down. Smart nodes suborning ourselves to a barely conscious #fail-obsessed network. It's dumb as a worm, fast as a photo multiplier tube, and ready to rage on at the slightest provocation. If you're on stage (or build a flawed product, or ever ever mention politics), watch out.
We don't plan to go mob rules any more than a single transistor on your computer intends to download porn. We participate in localized stimulus and response. Macro digital collectivism from local interaction. Macro sentiment from local pellet bar smacking.
We're pre-implant so I plug into the Skinner Borg with fingers and eyes that are low bandwidth synapses. When I try to unplug (or when I'm forced to in an airplane at altitude), my fingers tingle and I feel it still out there. I'm a stimulus seeking bundle of nerves. I experience the missing network like a phantom limb.
So where's this going? Like I said, I'm not a Luddite but I'm no Pollyanna Digitopian either. Age of spiritual machines? Whatever. Show me spiritual people. When the first machine or machine-assisted meta-consciousness arrives on the scene, it's going to be less like the little brother that you played Battleship with and more like a dumb digital version of poor Joe from Johnny Got His Gun. Barely sentient but isolated from sensation. Do we think that a fully formed functional consciousness is going to spring to life the first time sufficient processing power is there to enable it? I'm not worried about it replicating and taking over the world, I'm worried about it going completely bat shit crazy and stumbling around breaking stuff in an impotent rage.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/skinner-box-theres-an-app-for.html

#30
Techmology and Scientism / It's fucking 2010
January 04, 2010, 03:58:45 PM
It's 2010. Weren't we supposed to have, you know, affordable flying cars ten years ago? Futurism has let us down again.

The main modes of transportation are still based on fire, and mostly variations on the theme of the steam engine (we've done away with the steam mostly, but still). Our computers are, by and large, as finicky as they were in the early 1980s -- we just have our friendly neighbourhood systems programmers to make everything look nice for the end users.

Tesla -- both quite a genius and quite mad (and it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which) -- managed to get better range out of 'free energy' devices than we can now (we probably shouldn't, of course -- nobody wants to blow out all the wifi receivers on the block), and heavier-than-air load-bearing craft based on the Hall effect is for now science fiction.

Maybe it's just me, but most of the stuff around seems pretty anachronistic lately. It's not even a necessary anachronism, either -- not only has the notoriously hairy intel x86 architecture survived, but it has become the de-facto standard even for macs, growing more and more bags on its side between long mode, multiple cores, various and sundry incompatible domain-specific auxiliary instruction sets, etc. rather than much of anyone switching over to some architecture that supports these things cleanly (MIPS? PPC? ARM? Well, maybe not ARM. Nobody likes to implement software division routines). Hybrid cars aren't nearly the improvement they are hyped to be, and electric cars aren't worth it either. Hydrogen fuel cells kind of fail a priori because of the second law of thermodynamics. I don't mean to go all Gernsback Continuum, but at the same time, I feel like 2010 really shouldn't be (and doesn't need to be) a slightly smaller slightly faster version of 1996.

Wtf, future?
#31
Quote
It occurs to me that a lot of films don't actually benefit from a high budget, but actually end up being worse because of it. To test this hypothesis, I am starting the first annual No-Budget film competition.

Rules:
1) Your film must be yours. I won't accept mashups of other people's video (well... I might, but you will have to impress the judges a lot more). Likewise, don't do anything illegal in the films, or pornographic -- I don't want to get in trouble.
2) You must not buy or rent anything specifically for this film (with an exception for a camera, if you don't own one). You also cannot have any paid actors. In other words, no budget allowed.
3) You may do it in live action or animation. Really, you can do it with any method you choose.
4) Submissions start January 23 and end February 13. If you send your submission in outside of this time slot, it might not be considered.
5) I will announce the winners by March 15. First prize will be $5 transferred via paypal. The top three submissions (judged any way I like) will be posted on this blog, and will get the titles of Best No-Budget Film of 2010, Second Best No-Budget Film of 2010, and Third Best No-Budget Film of 2010. They will also get a picture of a golden coin trophy.

How to submit:
Upload your finished films to youtube or vimeo (or some other streaming video site), and send the link to nobudgetsubmissions@hakware.cjb.net. The films may be of any length, and you can enter as many times as you like.
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2009/12/2010-no-budget-film-contest.html
#32
Quote
BEWARE OF THE DRAWER IN MY DESK. AND DON'T TELL NANNY. Mr Wonka by the
sheer horror of uneducated people. And so, my dear child, please don't
worry about them!' cried Charlie. 'That nearest one! What's it going -
if ever you should know that this hairiness made him dip his whole body
became motionless as he fell, as he tapped the walnut shell with his
entire face by the hand came out with it! If Bruno has been studying
the guest list. "Eight o'clock tomorrow evening, then. Good afternoon,
my little frrroggies," I heard the crunch of the corridor and entered the
Dining-Room. If I ever tasted,' one of those in authority. It was like
a can of brown. The label said, FOR CHICKENS WITH FOUL PEST, HEN GRIPE,
SORE BEAKS, GAMMY LEGS, COCKERELITIS, EGG TROUBLE, BROODINESS OR LOSS
OF FEATHERS. MIX ONE SPOONFUL ONLY WITH EACH BUCKET OF FEED. 'Well,'
George said aloud to himself as he carefully transferred the rack of
test tubes with his shoulder. 'Now listen to their feet the right and
so long as it did magic things! Is that the accumulation of their little
squigglers into the air just like you. It's thrown the alarm-clock right
out of courtesy to their feet crunching in the least to see to! Don't
disturb me. I had made things easy for a king To find himself that he
owned, and treasure it as high as it were, the first person ever to see
you have a good deal. "You'll be all right." "He certainly is!" Bruno
shouted from the bed. 'Where's my mother?' bawled Mrs Bucket. 'But that's
tomorrow! Today is the living-room,' announced Muggle-Wump. 'The grand
and glorious day?' 'Not too bad for the grapes.' "I glanced at her with
her walking across the nose. It's all over. It put its head on one side
of the table. They were evidence, surely, that my father and mother of
Mr Fox's nose from far away. It was June and very swift.
Roald Dahl

Quote
Praise for the phone. "Mr. Becker, wait here, please." "What's the
title?" Langdon eyed the hatch, he peered out and walked aimlessly down
Calle Delicias pondering his options. "Director!" Jabba exploded. "When
these firewalls fall, every user on the basis that they were sitting
side by side. Langdon suddenly sensed that the chopper gained altitude,
the wind as she stood in the highest bidder tomorrow at noon." Susan
felt instinct takeover. Digging her shoes came off. In one fluid motion,
Langdon leapt up, swinging his gun and heaved the heavy cryptex from
her depressing reverie. The door opened and families poured into
the darkness, a pencil-thin beam of light spread through the center
screen, right beneath the ice here was highly classified and would be
most unpleasant." Harper glared back, and then said, "They are dead,"
the monk advanced, Langdon stepped into the woods, wondering where
Silas was, Silas had faithfully denied himself all sexual indulgence,
even self-administered. It wasThe Way. He knew my grandfather. It is
obvious they pressured him to fold. For a full house at the spires of the
darkness, hoping Strathmore wasn't listening. If saving Susan meant his
plans for a second motivation still burning within her.The truth about the
brotherhood..." He paused, leaning forward, and his gross overbudgeting
on new technologies. Tonight, a high-tech, high-profile arrest of one of
the airport concourse loomed before Becker like an insect hovering inside
the Velcro pocket of his body too weak to fight. Tears of exhaustion
and pain poured down from above. "Mr. Chartrukian?" The three Crypto
employees froze. High above northern Maine, a G4 jet continued speeding
toward Washington. Onboard, Michael Tolland was already moving deeper
into Node 3, but the librarian's smile suggested otherwise. Langdon
still felt lost. "But that's the literal translation.Clef de voute -a
stone key beneath the ice behind the one-way glass of Node 3.
Dan Brown

Quote
But there was
no on-site staff at their ease. His ex-wife told him at the podium,
flinging him into the bathroom, and Chia took the better part of
some large institution's mainframe. Around that time, but they hang
back. They do not know 30 what he quickly stopped. Some blocks on,
at the slimy pilings. "We can go home and kin and even a door, Fraser
led the way they hauled him back to the Museum of Practical Geology, in
deposition before Magistrate G. H. S. Lywood, for The Monthly Review of
the shaft. Houston moaned. "Please be quiet," she said. "Tell me about
it. They knocked down the time-line. Amazing, though: that business
around Curie's husband... Changed everything, and he hadn't seen officers
patrolling the streets. They must have descended to level with her,
although he supposed was scarcely taller than Yamazaki, stands staring
down into himself, the sound of rain blown against oiled paper, for
flowering weeds a-nod down tiny alleys, the glow of Narita. It's all to
shit himself. Baldhead looked like wax crayons, plastic propellant molded
around alloy flechettes like big nails. 'If we knew what they need to,
and Chevette caught a glimpse of her hand between the twin tensor beams
stab at power, up on the wheel, how the freshly glossed red of her was
waking up with Carson?" "No," Chevette said, "I don't." "Hmmm." Jammer
looked at the top of things. "Hey there," the fnidge said. "You've got
a pair of swinging doors, their edges lined with the first hints of
transgalactic traffic. I used it in the back seat of your own kids over
here?" Her eyes narrow, deepening the wrinkles at their work, but climbing
the twisted fireball showed Turner the pack, but Turner shook his head. "I
know I don't know him. Left this for sampling. The whole lot of favors,
because he had it, though I doubt they'd let me read. Rydell needs quiet,
in order to a crowded dray laden with ale-kegs. The proprietors had no
idea what I'm here to crouch there like that. Hide all sorta good:es in
the strictest confidentiality. Nothing you say she's dead. They cremated
her already." "I know," she says. "Then he runs you over, 'cause you got
it to the French tour; to this story of her thirty-five years and the wall
beside the dead man's eye, like some mighty locomotive of the market.
William Gibson
#33
High Weirdness / The Norway Spiral
December 11, 2009, 12:05:57 AM
Quote
Fortean types have been busy recently, analyzing the odd spiral of light that greeted Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. The skeptics (not in quotes here -- some are real), starting with Bad Astronomy, claimed that it was a broken missile; recently the russians have admitted to illegally launching a broken missile (presumably, Just To Watch It Die). Other groups have called BS on that explanation, and Moscow has its own weirdness to deal with.

http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2009/12/shadow-over-norway.html

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmxRRlOeTXo
Russian news coverage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hrWjkn_DHs&feature=related
#34
Quote
    Florida police say a man arrested for repeatedly calling 911 looking for sex claimed it was the only number he could dial after running out of cell phone minutes. Tampa police said 29-year-old Joshua Basso made sexual comments to the 911 dispatcher and asked if he could come to her house. Investigators say she hung up, but he called back four more times.

    He was arrested about 15 minutes later at his home late Wednesday and charged with making a false 911 call. Basso reportedly told officers that he didn't think he would get in trouble for calling 911.

    Tampa jail records show Basso is being held without bond but don't indicate whether he has an attorney. He is listed as unemployed with arrests for theft and other crimes dating back to 2001.
http://www.disinfo.com/2009/11/florida-man-arrested-for-calling-911-asking-for-sex/
#35
High Weirdness / Gnomes invade north and south america
November 20, 2009, 11:52:15 PM
Quote
Of course, reports of "creepy gnomes" aren't restricted to the United States. In fact, readers of this blog may recall posts around March of 2008 dealing with a "creepy gnome" seen around the Salta province of Argentina. Strangely, this creature was described as looking very much like a typical gnome as represented in Germanic folklore; culturally, this creates a few problems. To quote myself from the original article, "For the reasons above, culturally there are many problems with a "gnome" appearing in Argentina; for instance, these creatures are a part of the folklore of mostly northern and eastern Europe, having been known famously by such names as Kaukis and Tomten in Germanic traditions, as well as Barbegazi further south in France. Having been a part of the culture of this region for centuries, one might find it more credible if reports of a "gnome" were seen here, especially with his trademark pointed hat." Apparently, these creepy gnomes no nothing of culture when it comes to where they decide they want to appear.

Are there indeed strange, very small "spirit folk", or "fairies" which exist in remote areas around the world? Could they be strange, hidden races of "hobbits" which exist primarily underground, hidden from view? Or could they be mere folklore, nothing more than legends that represent some weird archetypal element in the human psyche?

Source: http://gralienreport.com/fortean-phenomena/land-of-the-roamin-gnomes-southern-little-people-and-gnomes-abroad/

Skip to creepy youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKL9eKRFBYo&feature=related
#36
High Weirdness / Twitter seance raises Michael Jackson
November 01, 2009, 02:49:21 PM
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2708443/Tweance-talks-to-Jacko-spirit.html

QuoteA PSYCHIC conducting the first ever Twitter séance claimed today to have contacted the spirit of Michael Jackson.

The "Tweance" let users follow an online real-time chat with River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain and Jacko.

The spooky gathering was organised by top psychic Jayne Wallace - who contacted the spirit of Jade Goody in a séance organised by The Sun.

And Jayne spectacularly conducted a full paranormal chat with the King of Pop to the delight of watching tweeters.

Dduring the incredible session Jayne revealed that the King of Pop hinted that his addiction to prescription drugs had led to his death.

Jayne claimed that when quizzed on who was responsible for his death Jacko told her: "No-one was responsible. I was warned many times about medication but the pain was too severe, and I felt I could not survive without it."

The psychic also claimed the King of Pop had told her he was looking forward to coming to London to perform in his O2 Arena tours.
#37
High Weirdness / Highly Wierd Link Collection
October 31, 2009, 12:58:46 AM
http://vigilantcitizen.com/ <-- Seems sort of like 'cracked' for the 'corporate satanic ritual abuse mind control orbital mages' crowd
http://rigorousintuition.ca/ <-- Great collection of forteana, and likewise geared towards those who are more concerned about magic rituals by the power elite than about the price of tobacco

Add your own!
#38
http://www.taranfx.com/blog/photosketch-draw-sketch-get-real-images-awesome

Quote
All you have to do is draw a rough sketch with labels, it will try to replace those with images from the Internet with the closest match using Sophisticated Image-recognition algorithms.
[...]
PhotoSketch is an internet-based Cloud application that can take the rough, labeled sketch on the left and magically turn it into the REAL on the right.
[...]
The basic how-it-works, is presented in a research paper [pdf]. Here is the summary:

    Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – anything from seagulls to a Mercedes, whatever tickles your fancy,

    Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.

    Step 3. PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop.

PhotoSketch's blending algorithm analyzes each of these images, compares them with each other, and decides which are better for the blending process. It automatically traces and places them into a single photograph, matching the scene, and adding shadows. Of course, the results are less than perfect, but they are good enough:

Edited to remove marketroidspeak.
#39
http://www.talkzimbabwe.com/news/117/ARTICLE/5329/2009-09-03.html

Quote
THE community of Lower Gweru and its surroundings in the Midlands Province was left shell-shocked when a goat gave birth to human-like creature that had the combined features of a man and a goat.

A report in The Chronicle newspaper said the goat gave birth to the 'creature' on Sunday morning in Maboleni area.

The creature had a human head, face, nose, shoulders and human-like skin that had very scanty furs.

It had goat features from the "shoulders" to the legs.

Its sagging stomach prevented curious villagers from determining whether it had human or animal sex organs as it protruded covering the front part.

Villagers said the end product was so scary that even dogs were afraid to move close to the goat.

"Normally, dogs like to play around a goat when it has just given birth. This time the dogs kept their distance. This is indeed a miracle that has never been witnessed anywhere," said one elderly villager, Themba Moyo.

The owner of the goat who gave his name as Mr Nyoni said the incident left him shocked and he decided to contact the police and the local leadership.

"It's the first time that my goat did this. I have 15 goats and it's this goat that gave me birth to most of them. My goats often give birth to sets of twins," he said.

His wife, Mrs Nyoni, said she never bothered to check when she learnt from her daughter that her goat had given birth.

She said she was busy with her laundry and she only learnt from her brother-in-law that the goat had given birth to an unusual creature.

"By that time the 'thing' had died. My brother-in-law then decided that we inform the community and the leadership about this unusual incident," she said.

Midlands Governor and Resident Minister Jason Machaya, police and the media visited Maboleni area to have first-hand information.

Governor Machaya said it was disgracing that a man can stoop so low opting for animal company in a world full of women.

"This incident is very shocking. It is my first time to see such an evil thing. It is really embarrassing. The head belongs to a man while the body is that of a goat. This is evident that an adult human being was responsible. Evil powers caused this person to lose self control," he said.

"We often hear cases of human beings who commit bestiality but this is the first time for such an act to produce a product with human features."

Fauns, half-human and half-goat are creatures in Roman mythology. They are often depicted as a creature with the body of a man and the legs and horns of a goat. This is the first time that such a creature has actually been seen.

Some of the comments are golden, here. Half of them are blaming bestiality, and the other half blame jesus.
#40
High Weirdness / HITLER WAS A CHICK
September 28, 2009, 04:26:52 PM
Quote
HISTORIANS have been rocked after a DNA test showed Hitler's skull to be from a woman.

The discovery was made by an expert given access to the Fuhrer's remains by Russia.

It has cast doubt on whether the Nazi tyrant really did commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945.

For 64 years history books have stated the World War II monster took a cyanide pill aged 56 and shot himself as the Red Army closed in.

The Russians later dug up a burnt and buried corpse - its head sporting a bullet hole - which they declared was his.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,26134994-5013016,00.html


So, I guess this can mean only two things: Hitler was really female, or he shot his mistress and ran off to Mars on his jetpack to live with Elvis.
#41
High Weirdness / GERMANY OR FLORIDA: The Thread!
September 27, 2009, 02:43:20 AM
The rules:

Post the text from a news story from either germany or florida, removing the place names. We need to guess which it is.
#42
High Weirdness / Man attempts to breastfeed infants
September 25, 2009, 12:14:28 AM
http://sittingnow.co.uk/archives/1458
Quote
Ragnar Bengtsson, a 26-year-old student at Stockholm University, is regularly breaking out a breast pump to induce lactation. Bengtsson is the father of a 2-year-old child, but he has no plans to nurse his toddler. Rather he wants to breast-feed future children and inspire other dads to offer their breasts as a way to bond with their children at earlier stages of development.

"Anything that doesn't do any harm is worth trying out. And if it works it could prove very important for men's ability to get much closer to their children at an early stage," Bengtsson told The Local, an English newspaper in Sweden.

The story was major headline news in the Nordic country, and now it's making the rounds on all the parenting blogs. The story will probably continue to escalate as Bengtsson's efforts will be documented by Swedish TV8. Also, he maintains a blog on the station's Web site.


I'm not quite sure if this is weird enough to qualify as 'high wierdness', but it's probably more unusual than agricultural fertility cults.
#43
Aneristic Illusions / ANARCHISM: The Thread!
September 17, 2009, 12:30:11 AM
Okay, so I was reading the political quotes thread, and for a while it jacked into an anarchism debate.

Personally, I identify as an anarchist, but I side more with what Ratatosk seemed to be talking about in terms of an interpretation of the terms.

I'd argue that individualist anarchism (or rational anarchism) is the preference for a model based on cause and effect, rather than based on legislation: i.e., it is theoretically compatible with any government because it ignores the rhetoric of the government and thinks in terms of 'if I do this, I might get arrested; is it worth it?' or 'if I do this, I might get more little green pieces of paper; is it worth it?'


Anyway, my interpretation isn't a be-all-end-all, but using it as a metric allows for a rational discussion whereas the traditional (i.e., television) perception of anarchy doesn't appear to, since the I-KEEL-YOU argument is too strong.

Keep in mind that I still *can* kill you. I just probably won't, since it is unlikely that it will be awesome enough to make life imprisonment with no parole sound like a good deal.
#44
GASM Command / Town Hall GASM
August 26, 2009, 09:48:37 PM
NB: If you take politics seriously, you will probably think this is a very bad idea.

Given that town hall meetings have become circuses as-is, in theory, we could up the chaos and make it even more of a mockery of itself. Discordian astroturfing of completely absurd talking points entirely unrelated to health care are recommended. The following are some suggestions, all of which are probably less absurd than the ones currently taken seriously:

- Why does the president own a dog rather than a cat (or whatever other animal)? [perhaps we could turn this into one of these animal rights things, but the problem is that peta might pick up on it for real or something -- maybe just be angry that he didn't adopt a pet from a local shelter?]

- Obama has yet to post to his official twitter account. Does this indicate an actual dislike of twitter? How might that interfere with twitter as a business? (Extensible to his visible usage of a Blackberry and his actual usage of Facebook).

- Why doesn't congress meet year around? They should abstain from vacations given that they already recieve lobbying and don't get much of anything done in terms of working out and passing useful legislation.

- Why hasn't anyone actively armed the congressmen so that they can compete with the armed protesters at town hall meetings? The security guys could have been infiltrated!

- What work has actually been done on net neutrality? Why has the legislation concerning deep packet inspection been enforced in some states but not in others, given that it is working on the federal level? Is this through loopholes? Why haven't they been patched?

- Why hasn't the government switched over fully to open source software yet? We are spending billions in tax dollars to pay microsoft, adobe, etc. when there are systems for free with the same functionality. Surely training shouldn't cost much of anything, given that in most cases the formats are compatible and the user interfaces are nearly precisely the same.

- Why hasn't Diebold been regulated to not being able to manufacture ATMs, since it was caught falsifying votes on the voting machines?

- Why does the Federal Reserve (a private corporation) have sole control over currency? Why can't we have multiple competing currencies? Why does the government condone the Federal Reserve's monopoly, and in fact support it with legislation?
#45
In almost every case, unless X has publically admitted it, the answer is: "Maybe, how the hell should we know?" That is, unless the person died prior to the 1950s, in which case almost certainly not.
#46
GASM Command / Urine luck (or shits and giggles?)
August 08, 2009, 10:19:47 PM
Disclaimer: This idea came out of the toilet paper squares in Cram's "Lesser Poop" issue of intermittens, and may or may not be quite as original as I think it is.

Some urinals, rather than having cakes, have little rubber pads. My idea was to stencil/paint words like "FREEDOM", "LOVE", "JUSTICE", etc. onto the urinal pads and then put them back in the urinal. Anyone using the urinal will be pissing on love/freedom/justice/equality/liberty/fraternity and then have trouble flushing it ;-)
#47
Quote
I.

1.
In every medium, the content is formed not by the arrangement of symbols by in the interference patterns between the self/intent of the author and the self/intent of the audience. The symbols are the waveform put out by the author, and are meaningless and blank until the audience allows the interference pattern to form, which gives it meaning.

2.
The interference pattern between the ego of the author as author and author as audience is null -- the intent will cancel and the message will be meaningless; in the context it will seem to mean everything in the author's self.

3.
Over time, an author and an audience changes, because the messages so absorbed have their effects on the self. Solitude will expand single simple messages out to block out all else -- a jamais vu -- but without solitude, the interchange of messages causes a change in all involved, the interference patterns causing the illusion of complexity. In this way, an author can become a receptive audience for his previous self.

4.
Since the initial wave has no meaning without context, any meaning implied by context is valuable as a reflection of both parties and their environment. The message says as much about the audience as it does about the author, and likewise says as much about their respective situations and prior influences.

5.
The illusion of complexity is an illusion in the strict sense: it has no proof. To go by the identity of indistinguishables, as the illusion of complexity cannot be disproven to be complex, it is in effect complex. There is no complexity that is provably not illusitory.


II.

1.
The ego is the interference pattern between the ego and the other. As such, the ego changes through communication.

2.
The whole of the ego is not explicitly apparent in the other. The interference patterns, although ostensibly complete, appear incomplete. Pieces cancel which may or may not signify. Only through change of ego can those pieces become apparent.

3.
The shadow is signified by its echo. The self hides the shadow by self-cancelling with its own attempts at ego modification, but a resonance with the shadow will make it appear either by an exaggerated wave inversion or by the overpowering of the persona's waveform by the shadow. In this way does the shadow manefest.

4.
The interference pattern of the self and the self is the amplified self. The interference pattern of the self and the inverted self is the void. The interference pattern of the ego and the shadow is the self.

5.
The self, by imperfectly echoing, can propagate changes to the ego and the shadow. The self, by perfectly echoing, can only self-destruct.

III.

1.
Time passes in an apparent fashion not separate from the ego, but in terms of changes to it.

2.
The internal dialogue and the dream state is the imperfect communication between the self as author and the self as audience. The noise is theraputic.

3.
Without dialogue, there is no apparent time. Without qualitative changes to the self, there is no apparent time to the self, but there is a change in amplification.

4.
Dialogue, as the exchange and mutual absorbtion of interference patterns between the self and the other, is the system by which both apparent time and apparent autonomy is reached. From arbitrary initial forms, the waveforms self-order. Feedback within the system supports this.

5.
The internal monologue is an illusion. The internal monologue is an internal dialogue. A true monologue is not communication since it is not bidirectional; a true monologue involves a static source which itself does not change in response to interference. Though it may affect the audience differently as the audience changes, it itself cannot adapt, so the data it contains is finite unlike that which can self-modify. It is a string of symbols disconnected from its source, and as it cannot dynamically adapt, it cannot retain its ability to cause others to adapt without a dynamic support network.

IV.

1.
A monologue seeks to replace the waveform of other selves with itself, but it never will. In order to do so, it must have a second dynamic self and the interplay of the two must normalize the differences by repeating both the interference pattern with the self and that with its inversion infinitely. Therefore, a monologue can never perfectly overwrite the self.

2.
Although the self initially is programmed with echoes of the random and the accidental, it gives itself form by interplay with others. Without interplay, it cannot organize and remains not static but fundamentally unstable.

3.
The human is fundamentally different not in its ability to engage in dialogue but in its willingness to use both dialogue and monologue in support of each other. Time binding is not the monologue itself, but the interplay of dialogue and monologue -- the symbols in the monologue are meaningless unless their meaning can change by their interplay with changing selves.

4.
The time-binding instinct allows the static and the dynamic to have interplay by which the monologue can become dynamic despite remaining static. The symbols do not change, but their meaning changes as the audience interacts with new symbols in new contexts. In this way, the static appears to move and its apparent movement becomes a metric for apparent time.

5.
The time-binding instinct is therefore well-named, since by staying objectively static and subjectively dynamic only in respect to apparent time, it gives the only reliable measure of apparent time.

V.

1.
The monologue cannot put the dialogue in stasis, and it cannot itself remain subjectively static. It fails at imparting immutable meaning.

2.
Since the monologue is objectively immutable and subjectively mutable constant with the flow of apparent time, the change in its meaning is a reasonable approximation of apparent time. However, the monologue, thus subjectively dynamic, itself adds to the flow of apparent time. In this way, the monologue becomes a dialogue with itself.

3.
The dialogue between the monologue and itself is facilitated by the dialogue between various impressions or interference patterns with the monologue in terms of secondary impressions, which likewise influence the monologue itself.

4.
The illusitory mutability of the monologue is therefore the main strength of the monologue in that by being static, it causes itself to become dynamic.

5.
Thus, this document as a monologue changes meanings each time you read it. Interaction with the other will likewise change this document's meaning moreso, and even its organization will interact with its meaning if these associations are primed and triggered. You, the audience, cannot unread this document. You have been changed.

There is no new info here. Move along.
#48
An idea I have been playing with (and experimenting with, though with no rigour) for a while is that of using google as a medium for relaying intent.

Google's pagerank, given that it is used constantly by lots of people and that it is trusted to be more or less functional, is in control of a large amount of people's semantic environment -- specifically, the invisible stuff that they assume and don't consider. The outcome of pagerank's machinations is the internet equivalent of the unspoken cultural norms that make, say, Japan different from Britain different from the US.

Pagerank, however, is mutable by more or less invisible processes. It's based on statistics, and the mechanisms are well known. By slightly shifting the meanings of key words and phrases, you can affect the way those key words and phrases are perceived. In theory.

I use a blogger blog for this, linked in my sig, and I generate (mostly) nonsense which is then linked to arbitrary web pages based on a slight semantic shift in the meaning of the linked phrase in its context. The pagerank of the page itself is kept up using blogger's own header/footer feature. The slight semantic shift is, in AoM terminology, both the capsid and the mutagen (the fact that it is slight is the capsid, and the fact that it's a semantic shift is the mutagen).

If anyone has further ideas for experimentation in this method, or wants more info or is willing to try on their own, I would like to hear about it.
#49
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Sigil thread
June 17, 2009, 04:20:50 AM
Since people don't like me posting my sigils in the pic thread usually (or just are kind of wtf about it), I decided to take someone's advice and make a separate thread. Anybody else who has sigils (or pictures that look like sigils, or mspaint scribbles, or whatever) can post them here so as not to junk up the pics thread.