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Visiting an old (prefers to be offline) coworker before hitting Lake George... So yesterday's finishing of "Timequake" completed this suggested reading order of all the Vonnegut Novels (Starting last year, and a few were rereads). Cat's Cradle (and its study in how a thoughtfully designed religion could be) and Slaughterhouse Five (with its vivid reminder of how time could just be a big 4D block we go through one little 3D slice at a time) remain my favorites, but "Bluebeard" (with its musing on aging and artistry and abstract impressionism, though maybe I'm mixing it up with the great speech on Abstract Impressionism Karabekian gives in "Breakfast of Champions" ) was a great find, my reread of "Galapagos" seemed appropriately apocalyptic, and while the person who compiled this list 2 years ago didn't think much of it, the issues of automation and human dignity and work in his debut novel "Player Piano" really stood out as prescient and timely.

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Protestors using weird funny bible verses at anti-abortion rallies. I was thinking about what technologies really startled me, in a "they an do that now?" sense.

A very incomplete list, in rough chronological order:

• Google. It snuck up on me as the fallback search for Yahoo back in the day. When I realized it did a much better job of searching my site than my own homebrew search functions... and it was doing that for, like, every site on the web?
• iPod. Again, a matter of scale: 1,000 songs in your pocket is just amazing.
• Youtube. Yet another bit of astonishment at the scale of it. Hosting that much video for free was just mind blowing.
• Google Maps. This was a minor thing, but the navigation it provided in browser, these large seamless draggable and zoomable tiles... amazing
• On-dash GPS. I remember going to the video game con "PhillyClassic" and the guy driving had one of these. What a miracle of making life easier.
• Accurate Video Game Emulation - especially in-browser.
• AlphaZero. I always said I would be impressed when a good chess playing program was also good at another game - like it formed its own intelligence about a game, as AlphaZero did with Go and Chess. (Now the bar is "when will the computer be BORED of playing chess")
• GPT-3 etc text generation. The "Ghostwriter" segment of The Ghost in the Machine episode of This American Life just blew me away... and you can find instances of it online. The ability to generate text that seems to have a point of view.
• DALL-E etc art generation. Boy O Boy. Making illustrations from arbitary text prompts...

Those last 3... man.

One model of intelligence is that it's all metaphors and connections. And computers are really getting there.

I think the future of creative and information based jobs will be learning how to harness these kind of forces. And that's a little scary- both from a "future of work" standpoint, and also because so far I'm not sure if the machines will get better at showing their work, explaining their reasoning... (and right now they sometimes exhibit the racism etc implicit in their training data sets...)

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Yesterday I spent too much time fiddling with the "game setup" in my office.

For my first 3 months here I've been living a lie: there's a TV in the webcam shot behind me, and an Atari 2600, but the two weren't actually plugged in.

But finally I dug up the wire I was missing, decided to switch to an Atari 7800 (actually fit better in the shelf), and then started going about trying to set up everything that has been languishing in my basement: SNES, Dreamcast, N64, and then a Wii U and Xbox 360 in the living room, along with the Switch and PS4 that are my actual current systems.

I got about 2/3 (maybe less) of the setup... and I realized it wasn't making me happy. Kind of the opposite!

There's a lot to unpack (figuratively and literally) with these games:

1. To be honest, I know I wouldn't play these games that much, and that makes me a little sad. (And even if I ever get to my quarterly "retrogame afternoons" with friends, this layout wouldn't even be that great for it.)

2. The condo is great but a games tower would be eating up more than its share of my limited shelf space.

3. It's still hit or miss to know which specific games might not actually work. I got each system up and humming, but there's enough flakiness that it's sort of a bad reminder of the hopeless war against entropy.

So I guess by taking up feelings, space, and time... this game tower as is ain't pulling its weight. I think I might leave up the Atari and maybe one more system. I guess if I'm honest it's more the emotional space than the physical space that is the cost, which has been a surprise.

I guess I've identified as "a retrogamer" (this was before "gamer as cultural identity" was as much of a thing) - mostly by having an Atari 2600 for long after everyone else had been moving on. But a lot of it is just being slow to give up systems that I like.

Video Games are special as an art form. They are interactive narrative in a way few non-game forms are, and even humble early-80s systems can run the numbers and make a physics-y virtual world in a way other game types can't. So most games make up a microcosm, and I like the idea of being able to go back to those worlds sometimes, even if I don't very often.

I guess I will move most of my systems into the basement archives. Actually, it's been interesting to review which systems I really long for: the Atari 2600 is the purest bit of nostalgia (and then later geek pride as I make original games for it). Xbox 360 has the largest number of games that blew me away. GameCube a close second. Dreamcast also is in the mix a bit - though maybe mostly for Bangai-O. I'm surprised there's not more Nintendo in what I am tempted to keep... maybe it's that Nintendo does such a good job interating on its series that SNES, N64, and Wii all have better versions of their highlights available. (I think Wii is most noticeable for that. Even though it plays GameCube games, I think the irritation of having to navigate its "pointer" menu to get them, and its relative lack of must-play games for me, means I'd rather have a cute lunch box GameCube up, even if it takes up more shelfspace.) Oh and PS2 - not much there for me, though i keep around copies of "Magic Pengel"

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What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk , astonishment. . . .
Agreement--disagreement!!
Emotion--motion!!! . . .
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But--
What escapes, WHAT escapes?

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Fun fact, an Atari 7800 fits in a (13"-wide) IKEA Kallax cubby, but a 6-switch Atari 2600 does not :-D

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Ah, a nation of under-vaccinated know-nothings who will leave pockets for the virus to keep around and evolve into something even worse. Great!

Perhaps they feel that under a Biden administration, helping the Delta variant make the Dow stumble is an act of political protest. A story I wrote, I believe in sixth grade. Rather more charming than yesterday's... "The Koans" is an interesting title; I don't think I knew what a Koan was but I like the sound of the word. Also my nomme de plume "Lord Logan" (based on my middle name) was inspired by Richard "Lord British" Garriott who wrote the Ultima computer games.

I also know where I got the visual design for the birds - I think I saw the early CGI film "Snoot and Muttley" at the Boston Computer Museum (RIP) - it must've really made an impression on me.
(I reverse-engineered thet title of that short from this Summer 1985 version edition of Computer Museum reports.)

Another short that left a big impression on me was Beat Dedication about a robot drummer battling a VW fly- sadly this bad VHS version is all I can find online now, from it's airing on "Night Flight" -I think it was also on MTV's Liquid Television.

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puppets are just acoustic robots

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I should reread Erika Moen's DAR and maybe check out Bucko. Harris' book is a pretty decent survey over research into the problem of consciousness, and she cites some fascinating research... often pointing out how our (mis)conceptions of the world radically distort our view of some otherwise promising theories.

[Neuroscientist Anil] Seth refers to our experiences of ourselves in the world as a kind of “controlled hallucination.” He describes the brain as a “prediction engine” and explains that “what we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” In a sense, he says, “we predict ourselves into existence.”

We make a map (our experience) of the territory (reality) and it is damnably easy to mistake the map for the territory.

She then talks about some of my favorite bits of mind-blowing research:

The split-brain literature contains many examples suggesting that two conscious points of view can reside in a single brain. Most of them also topple the typical notion of free will, by exposing a phenomenon generated by the left hemisphere that Gazzaniga and his colleague Joseph LeDoux dubbed “the interpreter.” This phenomenon occurs when the right hemisphere takes action based on information it has access to that the left hemisphere doesn’t, and the left hemisphere then gives an instantaneous and false explanation for the split-brain subject’s behavior. For example, when the right hemisphere is given the instruction “Take a walk” in an experiment, the subject will stand up and begin walking. But when asked why he’s leaving the room, he will give an explanation such as, “Oh, I need to get a drink.” His left hemisphere, the one responsible for speech, is unaware of the command the right side received, and we have every reason to think that he does in fact believe his thirst was the reason he got up and began walking. As in the example in which experimenters were able to cause a feeling of will in subjects who in actuality were not in control of their own actions, the phenomenon of “the interpreter” is further confirmation that the feeling we have of executing consciously willed actions, at least in some instances, is sheer illusion.

There's so much thought talking trying to describe this phenomenon of our other selves - elephant and rider, id/ego, inner-child - it makes me think there's something to it. I am convinced that our physical brains (and the nervous system of the rest of our bodies) are the medium for multiple entities - deeply connected, but still with their own agenda and independent point of view. (I'm not sure if that split is strictly hemisphere-based or not, or how much it might vary from person to person.)

For most people it's the narrative self, the inner voice, that is the most "us" - the part of our brain that uses its unfair advantage of language, the scaffolding to build magnificent structures of thought, and a habit of justifying the whole's actions to others - and to ourselves - to claim to be the true us. It plays at being the competent Dr Jekyll to the rest of the brain's Mr Hyde.

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To navel-gaze a bit: I wonder if this distinction, this dual-life, might be especially heightened in me, personally, relative to most people. Evidence for thinking I'm such a weird dual snowflake follows:

When I read, I read fast, which means I skim - I've come to realize it's like a whole level of my brain absorbing the words from a page or screen and then efficiently summarizing the content to a higher level of awareness. This silent, speedy skimmer system has shown to be so serendipitous for me on standardized tests... and it leads me to think of myself as a truly "deeply superficial" person.

(Furthermore, this voiceless low level reader system is mostly attuned to seeing how systems interact... and so the internal essence or superficial aspects that don't really change how the object of the reading material interact don't even get reported to the higher brain! This is coupled with my theory about why I'm somewhat faceblind - the details of a face just aren't that important to me, because they don't change how I'll interact with it...so at the higher levels I don't even see those details. I am terrible at spelling for similar reasons - twisty little vowel combinations don't change how the word sounds much, so they are devilishly hard for me to remember to write correctly.)

The other part of this silent system is - my inner child as shown by my "inner snacker" - is especially difficult to control. It's a bit embarrassing really. I mean I know willpower in terms of food is tough for many people, but when I observe how I will chow down on snacks at work - if there's like an array of cookies, it seems like I will not be sated until I have sampled one of each. And I haven't witnessed quite the same level of that with other people. I'm not as much an outlier here as I am with the skimming/reading thing, but I think I am on the far side of this bellcurve as well.

But, countering what I think might be a particularly active subconscious - my religious upbringing has left me - the inner-voice me - hyper-vigilant about keeping myself in accord with How Things Should Be. An early fear of eternal damnation and hellfire kind has constructed a system of rational vigilance, a gardener of the emotional garden. Almost every sprout of a feeling is inspected, and if found to not be rationally justifiable, it's plucked from the soil before it has a chance to grow. With lust, my physiological response is repressed unless my narrative self is convinced it's a safe and reasonable thing. I'm not even sure I love like other people seem to - I admire like hell, but I haven't had a "Crazy in Love" feeling in a long, long time. (My theory is, though, people search for that crazy in love feeling especially in the early days of relationships, because it puts the feeling out of the reach of market forces, that irrational love will better weather the travails of life and stress and aging and not be on the hunt for any better offers.)

And I think the two systems of me have warped each other a bit, goaded each other on. Like, my inner snacker is super quick in driving me to grab a tasty food on impulse, because that silent system knows that the inner voice nanny is on patrol.

If this two-entity model of myself is correct - it's a little scary. My narrator self - which is in many ways dominant, which is writing this rambling essay - is worried that my silent self may become sullen and resentful and uncooperative. In fact, when I think about my skullslinkies incident, where in a alternate mind state I had a clear picture of my those inner, short-lived thought processes, clear of the influence of the narrator self and finally able to express some of their resentments...I'm further driven to try to find ways to get my parts to be content and in harmony. And it feels like if I ever have some kind of psychotic break, this divide might be where the fault line lies.... or at least I think that I will never be as well-integrated as most people.

Phew! Back to the book...

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Harris takes a lot of time defending panpsychism - the concept that consciousness sorta exists in almost every system, even simple ones - maybe even clusters of atoms. While "everything is conscious, sorta!" can sound like new age woo-woo, or a kind of Western shintoism, she defends it - not that she's fully convinced about it, but it isn't as nutty an idea as it might seem. A thermostat has a kind of awareness of the world around it, albeit just the ambient temperature. Personally I am comfortable with thinking of the thermostats inner state as the tiniest glimmer of consciousness. I think full consciousness involves having a rich model of the world and of the self as an actor within that model, and if you have a system with those characteristics, you probably have consciousness...

Finally, Harris reminds me of some of the absolute, batshit weirdness of the implications of the double-slit photon experiment - how light is a wave or particle depending on if it's being observed (meaning observation - which might be inexorably deeply linked to a concept of consciousness - might be a weirdly causal part of reality) and not only that, but a 2007 experiment confirmed John Wheeler's prediction that that effect seems to go backwards in time. At trivial scales of time, or unimaginably vast ones:

You can now ask, for each photon that comes to me, whether it came from the left [or the right] side of the gravitational lens. [Let’s say] I decide to measure which side it came from, and I find out that it went on the left side. That means I can say that for the last ten billion years, that photon has been on a path that started from the quasar and went around the left side of the gravitational lens. But if, instead, I had chosen not to make that measurement and just measure the interference pattern, it would not be true that for the last ten billion years that photon had gone [down a path] around the left side. So the choice I make today determines the ten-billion-year-history of that photon.

Mind-bending stuff.

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I had to draw a wildebee

via tumblr from Art of the Poster 1880-1918:

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In no particular order, things I want to invest my "free", non-work time in...
-coding up a sheet music library tool
-coding up a "timeline" app
-being a good boyfriend for Melissa
-keeping up my regimen of band practices and gigs
-writing new music arrangements for my band
-keeping my family connections healthy and vibrant
-keeping up my reading
-playing zelda and see if i still like games
-watching good movies and shows with Melissa
-keeping up with game of thrones
-keeping an eye open for interesting stuff in social media etc
Also in general I want to be a good employee at my job that I dig.
There's also a second tier of things, from drafting an expansion of my death comic to doing another virtual advent calendar.
Yeesh.
My dozen best photos of 1998...

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How Tennis Balls get made is visually compelling. By coincidence just the other day I saw a destroyed, chewed up tennis ball on the curb, thought about its construction and how people in a "Mad Max" society might miss having them.

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The would-be-first-lady speech plagiarism as deliberate sabotage. Plus, Rick Roll.

Good lord.

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For some reason I liked Quora's What's the Most Overrated Pleasure. Some I disagree with, but I'm getting to the point where it's worth analyzing the real benefit of things assumed to be pleasurable. (Oo oo another chance for me to analyze!) A blast from the past... Strindberg and Helium... it's enormously fun to imitate both characters.
Sitting in the backyard, enjoying the twilight and my hammock. Dictating texts and emails to old romantic flings, and irritated by the iPhone always hearing hammock as Hamic... Two interesting things on Slate this morning: one on the book that lays out the formula virtually every big summer movie follows and a thing on coping with an anxiety disorder that makes me grateful that my general sense of nervousness isn't any more severe than it is...

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Latest from my Art Class. We had the 4th off and I had band practice the next week, so I was a little rusty.
My city got smacked, albeit in a very localized fashion, with what they're saying was a microburst. Many, many trees down. Our power was restored late at night, though oddly neighboring blocks seemed to never lose power...

--Panel (and title quip) from this "Comics Curmudgeon", from the June 19 Beetle Bailey. (The gag was about Angel Food cake.)

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Please know IA before you call yourself UX. It's hugely important to the X...

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WHAT DO YOU THINK I'LL SHAVE YOU FOR NOTHING AND GIVE YOU A DRINK (WARNING: A LITTLE CUSSING)
--Before this Mel Gibson thing gets totally played out.

Man, I kind of liked him in Lethal Weapon.

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http://gizmodo.com/5590327/windows-phone-7-in-depth-a-fresh-start - I doubt I'll like the phone, but I like the idea of MS's clean "authentically digital" design vs Apple's Apple's skeuomorphic trend.

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No joke: I just received a junk e-mail from "Rhett Butler" but frankly my dear, I won't read his spam.

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y'know my beetle photo yesterday looks a bit like Prodigy's "Fat of the Land" album cover.

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antarmies
"If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."
--Journey to the Ants, Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson

My entry for Klik of the Month #25 -- I made the screen a bit too big to post in place here. Arrow keys move, z and x fire and jump.

Falls a bit under "failed experiments", especially how some of the blocks are still flying upward, but at least I got around the feel of what I had been aiming for. Inspired by BoingBoing Offworld's coverage of Puit Wars.

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The way deleted youtube videos still have a preview still is both a cruel tease and an important marker of what was.

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Those weird nighttime thoughts of how weird it is to be. And how someday, to be no longer.

Or, god wiling, to be old; to be living in largely in the past tense. Am I living enough now to feel good about it later?

Future self, I swear on all that's holy I'm doing the best I possibly can.

Or maybe not, but you wouldn't've done much better, you old coot! Sorry for not lavishing much attention on this site as of late!

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Rocks of the Moment

--An excerpt from videogamerocks.jpg, a very clever piece about how various video games would render the same small pile of rocks. (local mirror)

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bought a 2gb CF card my 2004 GPS... the desktop software took > 2 hours to generate full USA maps! So I gave blood last night, yay me.

When you're lying there the cot waiting for them to finish setting up, they give you a little sheet with a number to call in case you need to tell them not to use your blood donation, like if you're coming down with a cold or some other health thing comes up.

The thing is, they always tend to put this sheet of paper on you. I guess they just don't want people, in their potentially slightly woozy state, to forget about it, but it does tend to make one feel a bit like a piece of furniture... "don't mind me, I was just going to be lying here for ten or fifteen minutes anyway."

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Creepy Robot of the Moment
--this creeps Mr. Ibis the hell out. It really does look like the bottom half of two humans, and the cadaver-suggesting buzzing fly noise doesn't help...

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Livejournal of the Moment
Candi pointed out the useless facts livejournal community. I'm digging it. (Oh, and happy late birthday Candi!)

Watched this great comedy/drama show from the UK called Green Wing over at FoSO and FoSOSO's last night. Unfortunately, BBC America is butchering it, losing the widescreen format, bleeping profanity, and chopping the amusing stuff that goes on over the credits. Thank heavens for teh Internets, it's amazing what those tubes can bring forth. The show is funny and fearless! Great music, sometimes playing games with speeding up and slowing down movement (hmm, kind of a Benny Hill reference, but not nearly so corny), and just a twisted sensibility to it all.

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Game of the Moment
Max pointed me to four second fury, a WarioWare knock-off with a bunch of 4-second minigames, and then a boss-fight.

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Politics of the Moment

--George Bush's impromptu and, by the looks of it, utterly unwelcome and inappropriate shoulder rub of German prime minister Angela Merkel. (BoingBoing reports that the Germans are calling it a "Liebes-Attacke")

Damn it, Bush, you can't Good-Ol'-Boy your way through everything. That might have been fine for Texas (well, not really that either) but just is not what a representative of our nation on the world stage should be doing.

And nice use of your veto on the Stem Cells. With 72% of Americans in favor of it, I hope it greatly helps to make a huge wedge between your party's unholy alliance of Fundamentalists and traditional Conservatives. Quote of the Moment

If you come to think of it, what a queer thing life is! So unlike anything, don't you know, if you know what I mean.

Via yesterday's Boston Globe "Sidekick". The "Sidekick" is an interesting idea, a small section like the "Weekender" insert (or whatever they call it) where they put daily happenings as well as the stuff from the comics page. On the one hand, it is a more covenient form factor, and I like not having to search so much for the comics. On the other hand, it feels like I'm reading a more tabloid-y newpaper, and it forces me to admit to myself that I mostly check out the Globe for the comics. (I remember reading how shocked newspapers were that one of the reasons young people don't subscribe is simply they don't want that much raw material coming into their house and possibly piling up. Seemed like a very natural concern to me!) Passage of the Moment

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

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Political Quiz of the Moment
Slate lets you figure out Red or Blue based on the cultural tidbits you know and incidental things that you do. I came up exactly in the middle. (That might be because I pay attention to the right wing and knew a few trivial bits.)

Though I find the whole assignment of the colors "red" and "blue" kind of arbitrary. I guess we've come along way from the 50s, seeing as how now the republicans don't being called "red". (And only Nixon could go to China.)

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Music Video of the Moment
Fans of the video game Soul Calibur (or anyone into virtual skinny guys in gimp outfits grooving to pop music) may enjoy seeing Dance, Voldo, Dance. Once you've seen half of it you've probably got the idea, but still its pretty cool. Lego of the Moment
Yesterday slashdot linked to the Star Wars alphabet project, where a Lego builder is out to make the other "letter wing" ships not covered by X-Wing, Y-Wing, A-Wing, B-Wing, etc. This guy is an brilliant designer...it's depressing, I remember I used to want to be a "Lego Engineer" when I grew up, but now I'm stuck in "dark ages" while this guy is doing such great stuff. (You can see more at his site but it's not easily browsable.)
Anyway, his bots page inspired me to go to LUGNET and get some of the LegoCAD software going to record the design for my all-time favorite minimodels, the "techoscavanger". (In my personal Lego mythos, these were the guy who could construct and rebuild other robots and spaceships.) Really simple and elegant I thought, though its core body with studs in 5 directions and its rocket base were both relatively rare so I couldn't make as many as I would have liked...plus I couldn't find the piece that's central to its optional arm cannon/welder. Still, I'm glad to have it recorded for posterity.

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Quote of the Moment

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

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Funny of the Moment

HER DIARY
Sunday night - I thought he was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment.
Conversation wasn't flowing so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk, he agreed but he kept quiet and absent.
I asked him what was wrong - he said, "Nothing."
I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said it had nothing to do with me and not to worry.
On the way home I told him that I loved him, he simply smiled and kept driving.
I can't explain his behavior; I don't know why he didn't say, "I love you, too."
When we got home I felt as if I had lost him, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore.
He just sat there and watched TV.; he seemed distant and absent.
Finally I decided to go to bed. About 10 minutes later he came to bed and to my surprise he responded to my caress and we made love, but I still felt that he was distracted and his thoughts were somewhere else.
I decided that I could not take it anymore, so I decided to confront him with the situation but he had fallen asleep.
I started crying and cried until I too fell asleep.
I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else.
My life is a disaster.

HIS DIARY
Today the Red Sox lost, but at least I got laid.

Ok, go read Brooke's latest journal entry (the July 18 2002 one if she's added a new one) and maybe even write her and tell her how good it is...after all, she wrote when she was reigning as special birthday princess, tiara and all.

Politics of the Moment
New, on BushTV: Who wants to be a government spy? He's looking for at least 1 in 24! The scary part (or one of the scary parts) is that I'm not convinced this is a terrible idea.

On the other hand, Blood for Oil doesn't seem so bright.

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Links of the Moment
I don't know about you, but I just can't enough of Cranky Music Snobs! Seriously, this list of "One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately" is infuriating in parts but a great read. It reminds me that I don't listen to albums nearly as much as I used to. (Update...this Brunching Shuttlecocks piece complements that article perfectly.)

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Quote of the Moment

The gods too are fond of a joke

Wow. My mom goes to London, and my president follows shortly thereafter? Coincidence? Or something darker, more mysterious?

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Quote of the Moment

You can type this shit George, but you sure can't say it

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Online Comics
The sweet, not quite innocent childhood you wish you had: You Damn Kid. It's kind of like Red Meat watered down with Peanuts. I especially liked this cartoon. ("Friend, can I have your shoes?") The same artist does an even-closer-to-Red-Meat cartoon "The Beevnicks"... I found this one especially amusing.