I was reading blog posts on Vincent Baker's website*, and this thread got me wondering about a game where the action-of-play consists of what cloths you wear.

I don't have a lot of development to that idea, which is the big reason I'm posting about it here rather than commenting about it there. (Free to a good home, because I don't have one, and all that.) But like, is color significant? Tshirt versus button-down? What is the goal here, what kinds of actions are legal moves and what are just kind of irrelevant?

* they did Dogs in the Vineyard and Mobile Frame Zero, and also other tatterpigs that I'd have to look up to tell you anything about.

#3870 Cromulence

Two questions, closely related:

Is it cromulent to apologize for not knowing something; and

Is that a correct use of "cromulent"?

Mom said something which–to her–seemed completely innocuous to me when I came downstairs just now. She said, "You can bring whatever you're doing downstairs and just do it down here." Which really just shows kinda the misunderstanding going on.

As a general idea, that's a fine idea. But "what I was doing" was inextricably tied to the computer. A lot of what I do is, for better or for worse. And since the computer I use currently is a fixed-location type, that means I couldn't bring it down. Which I'm not terribly fond of either, I'd prefer more-mobile access, but it is what it is.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to paper, I guess. Paper's good as an artifact for consumption, as reading fiction (but not certain kinds of scholarly/intellectual-type work); and for certain kinds of reference; and at least some kinds of note-taking— I rather like editing with pen on paper, honestly. Not saying that it's efficient, but that's how things are. But paper's crummy for arguing, a halfway-decent internet discussion thread is much better, so long as the people involved aren't dicks— and if they are, the chance of a decent argument is right out no matter what. And paper's terrible for storage, as my recent experience with using both version-control and paper on the same writing project has shown me. Dear god is that a nightmare-in-waiting.

Now where did my point meander off to OH YE— no, wait, false alarm, I don't actually remember. Drat. Well, I guess this is just a drivel anyways. I dunno.

Absurd thought of the day:

I'd play Monopoly with the addition of an "earthquake damage table". (See playing to lose, roundabout here-ish.)

Appendix π, "Monster Manual"

Bandersnatch

A fruminous creature, with incredibly strong arms and a long, downright extensible neck.

Fruminous Bandersnatch

Much like a Bandersnatch, except fruminous.

Cthu

Mad giants from the edge of unknown space. Half-dragon, half-octopus, and half-humanoid.

Faulty Thinking: "some things man was not meant to know"

Breakpoint, who I respect in general, just aired a radio article on transhumanism. And their concerns are good, and need to be considered. That doesn't mean they didn't commit a thinking error.

The main point of the article was that knowledge can be used evily, and some forms of knowledge can be put to greater evils than others. With which I agree. It then claims that such areas shouldn't be researched at all. Here they went wrong.

The trouble is that any piece of knowledge that can be discovered, can be rediscovered. History supports this claim just as much as it does theirs, if not more. What matters is when it's discovered, and by who.

(There's a handy example of this in cryptography, the study of secret communication. A group of people working for the british government invented the form of encription now used for internet banking, -- before powerful computers existed. The british government kept it hush, because they didn't have a way to break it. Later, some american academics came up with the same system, without knowing anything about the british version.)

If you'll forgive my archtypes, I'm going to go with a supervillian analogy. Say a supervillain is doing genetic research. He discovers a way to trigger a latent genetic defect in the majority of humanity--a virus that causes cancer, maybe. He can then release it, or threaten to releas it, on major cities or even the whole planet.

But if a good guy scientist has been researching as well, and discovers the trigger first, she and others can research and find an antidote or a vaccine. Then, by the time the supervillain is ready to unleash his disaster virus, maybe it won't work anymore. Certainly it won't be as bad. Now imagine if the scientists hadn't been working on the antidote.

I won't argue with the should-ness of their claim. But as the line being crossed sooner or later is inevitable, it's far better to look in hope for Prometheus than to wait in fear for Pandora.

Jazz hands?

I recall hearing somewhere (at least, I'm pretty sure I heard it from someone in-person, as opposed to reading it) about a guy whos name had an asterisk in it. The decided-on pronounceation was to say the first part, pause and do "jazz hands", and say the second part. Who'd I hear that from, and what was the name?

Stuff I've read this week

Maps in a Mirror (center): 675 pages. Read cover to cover in eight days. I think there may be something wrong with strange about me. Contains a whole mess of Orson Scott Card fiction, and bits of him commenting on it. Quality is all over the map, because this spans his entire career at least up until publication. (But does not cover his entire career. It's only a collection.) I could probably comment on individual stories, if asked.

Epic (left): 364 pages. Read in a day or two, but certainly under 48 hours. Took a break from Maps in a Mirror to read this. Set on a distant planet where economic life and a large fraction of the economy are based around a video game. YA, but there are strong undercurrents of moral and economic philosophy.

The art of Thinking Clearly (right, open): around halfway through, I've read something like 150-160 pages. A collection of short essays (generally 3-5 pages) on thinking errors. Each prevents the error in a colloquial way, some evidence and/or arguments for it, and usually some clues for how to avoid it. I'm not sure how useful it is. It's generally not perscriptivist, but I don't know whether that's a good thing. Though it probably is.

Not mentioned: the large amount of internet reading and downloaded computer-only reading I did this week. Nor the chunks of magazines I read.

Also not mentioned: The first three episodes of season one of Star Trek: Voyager I watched, the first three episodes of BBC's latest Sherlock I watched, or the episode or two of Star Trek: TNG I watched. I'm pretty sure I watched a bit of TNG, anyways. I liked Voyager better, so that's what I stuck with.

Efficiency and Creativity

I was thinkin' about science fiction and technological explosions. A scifi writer and utopian once said something about how "machines will eventually take over so much of what we currently do with manual labor, humanity will be in a state of enforced leisure. What an envied thing it will be to work!" (That's not even close to an exact quote.)

Humans are, of course, really inefficient at a lot of things.

How does one measure efficiency of creativity?

Logging

All I really want is to save everything I ever see in my browser to disk somewhere so I can see it again as I first saw it if I want to, no matter what happens to the originating site or original file in the interim. If we conveniently ignore disk-space and copyright/'intellectual property' issues, is that really too much to ask?

Apparently, yes. It seems it really is.

Social time: last.fm

Alright, social time:

Why would one want to use last.fm? I'm sure there are reasons, I just don't know what they are.

But I'd like to. I've got a last.fm account, but no real idea why. I think I use it as a "junk I've listened to" list, currently; but I don't think that's a 'good' use of it/ think that's under-using it.

What's the thing with microkernels anyways?

I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.

A snippet

Knowledge can only be used for Good or for Evil. There is no in-between.

Teeaaam Rocket's slacking off again!...

In a total cop-out, my 'blog post' for today is drawer full of pennies.

...Well, and this note informing you of this fact.

...And the tips/howto/note-to-self about how to create a direct link to a facebook post that I'll be putting up shortly.

...

...Never mind, then.

I've actually rather enjoyed my post-every-day practice, and the tendency to use this blog for a dumping ground. I don't think I can keep up a post a day, but posting every even-numbered day would probably work.

Repoetry: "Drawer full of pennies"

people try to
carve smiles on me
like a chunk of meat meant for the butcher
then try to tell me
to be afraid
and that they are
sorry.

people try to
tell me all the things that happened to me
fair or foul
describe them to me
in detail
and then reveal
all the inner-most workings
of the broken grandfather clock
that is my chest
like they've sat inside of me
for twenty years
observing
when they
haven't.

people try to
make me see reason
or their definition of it
but reason is relative
as is too much in this world
like
truth
and
lies
and
parents
and it doesn't bother me
to stare into them
with eyes that i hope make them hurt
somewhere
because i am not a grandfather clock
that sat in a church
for twenty years
i am a redhaired girl who used to smile
who even breathed
sometimes
and you never
knew
my name.

-- Rachel H. © 2013 an' stuff.
Used with permission.¹

Footnotes:

¹At least, that's how I understand it. When I asked about reblogging her stuff, I asked it in a blanket fashion, and she said yes, so...
Yes, I'm asking her to confirm that it is in fact blanket.

And this is how misinformation gets started

So today, I discovered this nifty bit of music^pic (site content warning: ponies, random crap). I find that sheet music pretty awesome, even if it's an incredibly stupid gag.

Someone then linked to this youtube video:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss)
-- Which, admittedly, is a pretty rad song.

Later on in the comments, someone noted that it "sounds like a boss battle". Well, it turns out that's because it is-- some poking around reveals that the song in the video is actually called "U.N. Owen Was Her?", and comes from a Japanese music/bullet hell game bonus boss. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY)

But wait, that's not all!

The sheet music really is just a stupid gag. Any musician worth their instrument can tell you this upon close inspection -- my brother objects, for example, to the large groups of whole notes in a row and to the illegal gliss between the bottom two staves; but he also enjoyed the explosions and the "remove cattle from stage". With the help of google image search and this post, I was able to trace it to here:

(From whitetreaz.com)

Footnotes:

^pic

a journal

Day three. Or maybe Day 4. I really can't tell. I haven't been keeping track. It's too late now.

The space warping is starting to leak out. I'd swear I turned both alarms off last night. But instead the cd played straight through once and stopped. I figure this had to be a warp, because the alarm that stayed on is between the off one and the cd control.

Then again, maybe I'm just fatigued.

I'd made a deal with myself, of sorts. That's not a book you read at night. So of course, recently I've been up past one-thirty, two-thirty AM reading bits and pieces of it. The footnotes are sometimes the worst parts. It had never occurred to me that you could refer to a footnote that was on a previous page, or hadn't happened yet. And that's just the numbers.

I can do a reasonable job of faking being well-adjusted in the evenings if I've been away from the book all day. Then I go back and pick it up and it all falls apart.

---

It's funny, but this book is something of a microcosm of my life the past year. descending, deteriorating, obsessed. ending up strange places there can be no return from because they were never there. I think I need to get out.

I've been reading bits of the book out of order, but I discovered that Navidson has a book titled House of Leaves with him. I wonder at that. What manner of recursion is this? but because I read out of order I know almost nothing else about it. Only the page count, which differs from the page numbers in my version. I feel compelled to tally up all the pages in mine and compare.

The last thing to disturb me this much was Everything is Fine, where Fluttershy 'is' Johnny and the Minotaur.

notations

It's the commentaries on House that matter. Kind of like shakespeare, if you read the quotes.

"Saying House of Leaves is different for everyone who reads it is like saying a used car is different for everyone who drives it. And like that used car, that's a big part of the experience.
"i will not Deface a library book. But i will not remove my Postit annotations, either."
Inside front cover, behind the flap (but showing just past it).

"Knowing some of what this means gives me pause for thought.
"Yet what does it truely mean?"
Page xix, next to the Jan. 1997 note from Zampano.

"Are these colored scrawls part of the original book, or somebody's addition?"
Page xx. Picture attempts to show both scrawls.

"The most frightening thing in the world is man himself"
Page xxiii.

I feel, rather strangely, like I'm writing House of Leaves/Just Another Fool crossover fanfiction. Wonder where that came from?

Leaves

My (library) copy of House of Leaves came in today. I already know that mainly I don't know what to think of it. I bet it could make for a great (La)Tex leaning tool, trying to re-create it. Whoever double-spaces their sentences, though; I like that^[1].

Apparently there is also braille which my edition does not have. Has anyone got notations or pictures or somesuch of those?

Footnotes:

^[1]Their monospaced sentences, at least. I can't tell about the other ones (I haven't gotten to them yet, but I doubt I'll be able to tell even once I do get there).

Computers are like Cars

Choosing an operating system is kinda like buying a car.

When you get a Mac, you walk into Toyota dealership and say "Ooo, that one looks nice." And they say "good choice. Do you want it with 4, 6, or 8 cylinders? Stick-shift or auto?" You say which, pay your money, and leave. You're pretty happy with it until a new one comes out in six months, but in the meantime you're confused by the steering 'wheels' on other cars.

With Windows, you spend a lot of time fiddling and debating and comparing Ford to GM, and the various options, and eventually you decide on one with 75% of the options, an entertainment system you can only use half of, 18 cupholders and two seats.

Using Ubuntu is like deciding "Hey, I need a car," so you go on craigslist and spot a car that looks good and it's in your price range. You end up getting it, and it does 93% of what you want it to do, but sometimes you have to turn left three times before you can change the channel on the radio and it has to be in reverse to open the trunk.

Using arch Linux is like saying "Well, I should get a car," so the first thing you weld together a frame and then you go down to NAPA for a couple of pistons...