Last Thursday, i ate lunch in a small cafe on the first floor of the office building where I work. I ordered a tuna and cheese wrap, a SQL Server buffer overflow attack, potato salad, an F-22 Raptor, and duct tape. I didn’t get all of the things I asked for, which was unfortunate. I won’t say it ruined my lunch, exactly, but the afternoon wasn’t all I had hoped it would be.
Everything about morning is wrong.
The light in the sky is wrong–distorted in color, an evil haze from the wrong part of the sky, flooding all creation with a hideous luminescence unwholesome to the eye and corrosive to the senses. Every waking sensation is pain; the purr of a kitten, corrupted by morning, is as the assault of a thousand jackhammers, and even the very music of the spheres is a harsh cacophony of crows. The laughter of a child, impossible as it may seem, is made worse by a thousandfold in the morning.
The Greek philosopher cicero, speaking of mornings, wrote Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, which means “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.” The fact that there are people who embrace the morning, who leap from their beds every day happy and even eager for the corrupting,, agonizing assault upon their senses, demonstrates beyond any doubt how very, very, very wrong he was.
Morning twists and corrodes all it touches. Morning reduces the intellectually nimble to shambling zombies; it makes a lover’s caress into the touch of the scourge and sackcloth. There is nothing good that can come of it save afternoon; it is the time best reserved for snoring and firing squads. I advise everyone of decency and sense to have no truck with it.
Shelly challenged me with this one a while ago, and I was just reminded of it by a conversation in IM.
Let’s say that you suspect that you are living inside the Matrix–that is, the reality into which you were born and in which you and everyone else lives is a simulation.
Would it be possible, using only the tools and observations you have available within that simulated reality and without any referent to anything outside the simulation, to demonstrate conclusively that you were living in a simulation? And by the same token, would it be possible to demonstrate, if it turned out that you were not living inside the Matrix, to demonstrate that you were not? If so, how?
Got me stumped. Ideas?
On another forum I read, a conversation has arisen about whether or not people have “rights,” and what it means to have “rights.” Like many Americans, I believe that people do, simply as a consequence of being people, have certain inalienable rights; and among these are the right to life, liberty, self-determinism, and to believe and express as they desire so long as they do not infringe on these same rights in others. I believe these rights are immutable; that they are a consequence of being a person, and are not granted by the state or by any other entity or power; and that a state or other entity can take them away, but not grant them.
But do I believe these things simply because I’m an American, and I’ve been brainwashed into believing them? Well, no.
There’s no question that a person’s social, political, and moral ideas and values are socially informed, and that people can and do absorb many of those ideas from the society around them.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I believe what I do because I’ve been “brainwashed’ to believe them, however. There are many cultural and social values held by a great many Americans which are just as firmly inculcated into people here which I reject; evidence suggests that cultural brainwashing doesn’t work too well on me. 🙂
More to the point, a person who holds ideas about rights simply because he has been told that “rights are good” probably is unlikely to think too deeply about the implications of those rights; a person who is simply repeating American cultural ideas about innate human rights is unlikely to, for example, see the contradiction between those values and the idea that it is OK to tell gays and lesbians that they cannot marry.
In fact, I think these ideas have often been enshrined in America more as vague theories than as matters of political and social reality. Even the very people who first articulated these ideas as a framework for American society did not really believe them, or at least did not follow their own arguments through to their logical conclusions; Thomas Jefferson, who believed that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” kept slaves.
When you do sincerely hold to these beliefs, and you do follow them through to their logical conclusion, which I do, you end up in territory that diverges radically from the reality of American society, and makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I’ll get to that in a minute, but for right now, suffice to say that these ideas are held by Americans only in an abstract theoretical way, rather than as a matter of real truth.
I do believe that a great many Americans do simply parrot back what their civics teacher told them about “rights” without thinking through what that means or what the implications of those beliefs are. I don’t think I’m one of them, and let me tell you why… Continue reading
Shelly and I have season passes to Busch Gardens. On weekends, we like to go there and hang out sometimes. Busch Gardens has a “wild animal encounter” section where you can go nose to nose wih various animals, separated only by Plexiglass.
We went there last weekend. Among my favorite animals at Busch Gardens are the hyenas; I took a picture of this fellow some time ago:
I have heard many, many people say “Oh, those hyenas are ugly!” when they look at the hyena display. Hyenas look a bit like dogs; but they look like poor dogs. If you compare a hyena to a domesticated dog or to a wolf, they look all kinds of wrong–heads too large, snouts shorter and sloping, necks longer, fur all short and spiky. As dogs, yeah, they’re pretty ugly.
And I think that’s very interesting.
If you watch animated porn, you start to notice something. Most animated porn, like Japanese hentai, uses characters that aren’t photorealistic by any stretch of the imagination. The women in hentai tend to be completey disproportionate to real human beings–huge eyes, tiny mouth, really only crude sketches of the basic form of a person. And that works for us; we look at these characters, who are only approximately human, and say “Aww, cute.” (Well, some of us do, anyway. others of us say “Satan! The sins of the flesh! Out! Out! Devil, begone!” Still others of us say “What’s with all the tentacles, anyway?” But I digress.)
If you watch animated porn that’s been rendered in 3D and strives to be photorealistic, though, you find that at a certain point, it becomes very, very creepy. There’s a certain threshold that gets reached where our brains start interpreting the characters as people…but people who are, somehow, wrong.
We’re very, very good at looking at people. We have a part of the brain just dedicated to parsing faces. Even tiny, almost unnoticable inconsistences in the way photorealistic characters move look off to us. A character that is nowhere near a real human being is fun to watch; a character that is rendered almost perfectly, but not quite, is creepy. If there are tiny flaws in the way the characters move and the way the characters look, we notice. (i had this problem withthe “Final Fantasy” movies–the characters looked great as long as they were standing still, but whenever they moved, it just looked all kinds of weird.)
On another forum I read, there’s a conversation about how significant a person’s physical appearance is to a relationship. There seem to be two basic camps; the “I could never date someone if he isn’t gorgeous” camp (which tends to resent being called ‘shallow,’ even though that is in fact a shallow attitude; the word ‘shallow’ merely means ‘penetrating only the easily or quickly perceived’ in this context, or so says my dictionary; and if people want to base their relationships on the surface or easily perceived, hey, more power to ’em. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they’re up front about it…but again, I digress); and the “If I love someone, I can see past their flaws and imperfections and be attracted to them in spite of the way they look” camp.
Me, I don’t belong to either camp. And i think the hyenas are beautiful.
You see, the people who don’t like the heyenas are to some extent, I think, judging the heyenas on the characteristics of a dog. And a hyena does not look like a dog. If one looks at a hyena and tries to impose the shape of a dog on it, the heyena doesn’t fit very well. Heyenas are damn ugly dogs, especially if your idea of what a dog should look like is informed by, say, a wolf.
But a hyena is not a wolf, nor a domestic dog; and as an example of an animal viewed in its own light, it’s gorgeous. If you look at a heyena without trying to impose the shape of a dog on it, it’s a beautiful, powerful, graceful animal. I love hyenas.
For me, a hyena is beautiful because I appreciate it for what it is, not for what it isn’t. And the same is true for people.
If you look at my past and current partners, they are physically all over the map. And every one of them has been beautiful–not because I have a standard of beauty that is flexible, but because my appreciation of what someone looks like is shaped by my experience with that person. A person to whom I am deeply connected always looks attractive to me; a person to whom I am not, does not. I don’t fully understand “Well, if I love someone I’m attracted to her in spite of what she looks like;” when I love someone, I am attracted to her because of what she looks like. Everything about that person is attractive to me; it’s not a question of “getting past” or “looking beyond” whatever perceived ‘flaws’ she has. All of these things make her who she is.
I think what happens is that people try to impose an idealized model of “woman” onto their partners, rather like the people at Busch Gardens try to impose an idealized abstraction of what a dog looks like onto a hyena. A hyena is not a domesticated dog, and an individual is not an abstraction. I don’t think I was born with the gene that causes me to try to impose shapes on things, at least not that way; certainly, I don’t try to impose an aesthetic shape onto the things around me.
It’s taken me a while to understand why people even talk about what physical traits they require in their partners, or even have those requirements in the first place, and I’m not sure if I’m quite there yet. But the hyena is helping.
Edited to fix broken HTML that garbled the last couple paragraphs.
So, it would appear that there are so many people taking Prozac in Great Britain that it’s actually ending up in the water supply, as sewer treatment facilities aren’t set up to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.
Now, other people may see a problem there, but I see it as an opportunity. Rather than spending lots of money changing all the wastewater treatment facilities, what’s needed is just a different attitude–a different outlook on the situation. All they really need to do is convince the public that psychoactive drugs in the water supply are a feature, not a bug!
A good way to start, I think, would be with some creative pro-psychoactive slogans. Something like “I’m Xany for Xanax,” perhaps. With enough positive spin, people might start expecting–hell, demanding–antidepressants in their water.
And why stop at water? Just think of the marketing possibilities here! “Hey kids, are you bummed out because Mom is pressuring you to clean your room? Stressed over homework? Disappointed about the prom? Try new Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Plus. The “Plus” is Prozac!”
Anyway, just thinkin’.
We’re just back from an evening at the goth club…ran into a bunch of friends we hadn’t expected to see, including one friend I haven’t seen in months, which was totally r0x0r, and the DJ was playing all kinds of old-school goth, which was r0x0r almost as much. (And just for the record, if there’s a better song to dance to than Front 242’s Headhunter v1.0 it doesn’t exist in this plane of reality. Which is not to say that it’s goth, but… just sayin’.)
On the way, we stopped at a couple of places to price out a corset piercing for Shelly, which, as it turns out, most piercers are reluctant to do… seems like they tend not to last very long. Which sucks. She commented, though, that she’d like to get a Giger tattoo instead, like one of the aliens from the Alien movie series…which is an interesting idea, but there seems to be some weird karma around doing something like that. Considering H. R. Giger is probably the closest thing to a living necromancer anyone is likely to find, putting his artwork on one’s body just kinda seems to be inviting all manner of chaos into one’s life…
…but then, I though, when you really get down to it, isn’t that what the whole biomedical nanotech/life extension/destructive uploading thing is all about? Life out of death, transforming the dead into biomechanical versions of the living…seems somehow appropriate.
Transhumanism and extropianism are necromancy given a new twist. Or perhaps, transhumanism is to necromancy what white magic is to black magic. Same tools, different philosophy.
Just sayin’.
Lessons learned from Shrek 2:
If I marry a queen and become king of a great kingdom, but only with the help of a scheming fairy godmother who has something she can hold over me or blackmail me with, I will, upon ascention to the throne, immediately have the royal assassins put her to death. Or, I will cast her into my deepest, darkest dungeon.
And there will be royal assassins, oh yes.
The secret to happiness, in two steps:
Step 1: Decide what kind of person you want to be, and what kind of life you want to live.
Step 2: Every time you make a choice or embark on a course of action, ask yourself: “Does this take me closer to the person I want to be?”
Random wisdom from The Book of Leadership and Strategy (a translation from a Chinese Taoist book Huainanzi), which happend to be sitting on the couch at a friend’s house: