C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Hi Everyone,

I'm the mysterious J (or perhaps not so mysterious if you know Matt in real life), and I'm here posting at his behest. The reason, and I quote:

I recuse myself from the Internet today because I fear my judgment may be impaired on account of seething rage.

In other words, he won't be getting back to anyone today. Those of you with petty ideologies, please take them out for a short walk and a potty break while he spends some time doing laundry and taking a much-needed breather. Everyone else, he promises he won't be gone long. ;)

Sincerely Yours,

J

I do not have Asperger's Syndrome, but occasionally I have an Autistic Moment. Several times in my life, I have mistaken the phrase "I don't know how I can be more clear" for a sincere request for a tutorial. I had to learn to catch myself before it is too late.

"...he's not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are ... He just ...He goes for what he wants, y'know? ... He's always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn't know how it'll all pull together in the end ... When you do that long enough, hard enough, things fall into place and ... and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything..."

- page 335, Heroes Die, by Matthew Woodring Stover

Habit #1: Begin with the end in mind.

The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey

You've heard the adage "a butterfly's wings in the Amazon stir a breeze yada yada yada, there's a hurricane in New York." There's no way to know which precise flutters will lead to a specific storm. What I'm doing about this is to make a mind map of words that keep cropping up again and again in my long-term dreams. As long as I keep fluttering toward these associations, I'll increase my odds of landing somewhere that I want to get to. I don't have to know yet which one of my dreams it will be, or what route would lead straight there from here.

Web administration, Python, and Flash are good examples of words that keep coming up. Given how many of my ideas end when I don't know how to do one or more of those things, it's clear that I'll benefit from improving my skills in these areas. To achieve those subgoals, I need some kind of structured learning, or I'll never actually devote the time.

And what do you know. I just now fluttered across something I had been hoping to create for myself for quite a long time.

netmouse here and atdt1991 here and renniekins here are linking to an article by John Wang of PointlessWasteOfTime.com titled "7 Reasons The 21st Century Is Making Us Miserable".



John Wang is insightful and hilarious, as many of his past essays have demonstrated. He is no less so here. However, I wonder how it is possible that, far from being a goth as that article predicted, I am almost the antithesis of goth. I don't get very lonely. I don't get depressed. I don't think everybody's out to get me. I feel that I have a heck of a lot more than two people to confide in. I know how to cooperate with people who are different from me, through gritted teeth if necessary, even if I don't like them and continue to not like them. I get confronted all the time, my sheltered subculture challenged all the time, my viewpoint and behavior criticized all the time. And that's important to me. It's been a value of mine ever since I left the hermetically sealed, cheering peanut gallery subculture of Fundamentalist Christianity. Most of all, it would be very, very difficult for me to feel worthless or down on myself. I get out and do cool stuff for people.

So I guess I just deal with technology better than most, the way some people can hold their liquor better than others.

Reading that article, anyone would guess John Wang wants us to be bored, and try to have deep trusting relationships with people we don't like. Yeah; um... NO. I'll take the 21st Century and all it's tradeoffs, and try to fix them, thank you very much. Anybody who prefers polio and outhouses can help themselves.

All that having been said, it turned out that a couple of my closest relationships had problems that I didn't know about. And hey! Clue-by-four! It's an eye-opener, that's for sure. Some people are being made miserable by a bad interaction between them, the 21st Century, and me.

One thing that I've resolved to change recently in my electronic lifestyle, is never to do my daily regimen of flashcards on my handheld in front of people. I used to do that when they would start doing something else that didn't involve me, or when I got bored and was not being interacted with. That was stupid of me. I need to go in a bathroom or hide somewhere while I do it, or just skip my flashcards for that day. If they can see it, it makes them think that they bore me or that I don't want to spend time with them, or that I would rather not be there. Granted, sometimes all that stuff is true. In that case, not working on flashcards would result in me signaling all that stuff: I'd just complain, and ask that we go someplace else. When I have my handheld, it's difficult to inconvenience me, because one place is no worse than any other. Being with you means you can say "hey Matt!" and I'll put it down and say "hey what!" as if you just instant messaged me. But I have realized that's only true in my mind.

( Read more... )Dear Uncle Matt,
How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop? Please do NOT ask Mr. Owl, as he cheats!!
- Pop Tootsie
( Read more... )
Dear Uncle Matt,
I've noticed more and more people involved in polyamorous relationships lately. Whatever happened to good old fashioned fidelity?? Is keeping one's pants fastened around people other than one's spouse no longe fashionable?
- God Wears Prada
( Read more... )
Dear Uncle Matt:
I am in search of the PERFECT cup of coffee. Where can I find it?
- Roast Grind
( Read more... )
Dear Uncle Matt,
So, explain this to me: why lobsters?
-Puzzled
( Read more... )
Dear Uncle Matt,
I laughed when I read about your college and how they have a rule against optical intercourse and making eye babies. Were you ever tempted to watch a movie of people having optical intercourse. And what is the best optical intercourse you've ever had.
- Cornea Porn
( Read more... )

Many people who know me well are aware that I do not interpret non-verbal communication in many circumstances, and sometimes don't recognize it at all unless I am specifically looking for it. sarahmichigan linked to this essay on a scientific study of flirting. It's fascinating. The description of distance, posture and eye contact has wide application to human interactions far beyond "flirting." For instance, it describes unconscious signaling of discomfort, dislike and rejection. It also describes different social settings with different rules. I've drawn your attention to that before, although not on the topic of flirting.

The internet is teaching us that there are some people who rely too much on non-verbal communication. It's important to recognize when one is poor at simply meaning what they say and saying what they mean, and interpreting others at face value. To me, the word "over-sensitive" has connotations of measuring instrumentation that consistently registers false positives. This is a mild form of paranoia, an affliction which processes coincidental noise and obsessively refuses to give up processing it until it invents a pattern of meaning behind it. This can always be found by a clever enough paranoid. It can be sinister conspiricy, or divine miracles and intelligent design. In the same way, there is only so much information that can be conveyed through non-verbal communication-- good enough to be used as a rough guide-- and the rest is an illusion of love or hostility, assembled from noise. It's best to wait until someone's feeling and intent is spelled out verbally before making important decisions.

I just found this article about conceiving of yourself as a sentient shell script making supervisor calls on an automated, unconscious, animal-evolved kernel. Ignore the opening where the author is so dazzled by the importance of his idea that he has to talk about it for three paragraphs. He could be on to something. I don't know what to make of it, but it's interesting enough to bear further exploration and experimentation. Excerpt:

"And don't get me wrong, after weeks of playing around with this stuff, I'm still no superman or Zen master. But I have managed a few very interesting hacks. For example, a few weeks ago a certain situation led to me feeling very bad. Intellectually, I totally knew there was no reason to feel bad, because what happened had nothing to do with me. Emotionally, though, I was a wreck.

Suddenly, I had a flash of insight: these are two different neural networks. The intellectual understanding and the emotional response were networks that evolved at different times in my life, under different circumstances. They were therefore not connected, except through their mutual activation in the current circumstance. Therefore, I experienced each network's output as a full and distinct input, but the "emotional" net had no way to receive data from the "intellectual" net, in order to moderate its output. This led to an experience of conflict, in which I could try to suppress the output of the emotional net, given the data from the intellectual one, but this couldn't and wouldn't stop the emotional input from coming in my input pipe.( Read more... )

The money quote:
"So how do you do this? How do you edit rules, pipe one net to another, make a supervisor call? In the same way you waved your hand at the screen, several paragraphs ago. You imagine it, in command mode."

Hugh McCloud has an interesting essay on how to be creative. A couple of good excerpts, which I have believed for years:

"If you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you SHOULD feel the need to say something."

"The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not. Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly."

"Early 30s is a great time to be alive- you're still young, but you have experience. A powerful combo. The downside is all that weird rockstar shit you believe about yourself is well past its sell-by date, and if you haven't outgrown it by then, it starts to fuck up your life."

While examining human motivation at ConVocation, which I blogged about this weekend, I turned the microscope on my own views of the world, religious, relational, and political. The techno-progressive Dale Carrico, with whom I had what might count as my first political debate last week over the connection between technology and libertarianism, sparked some thought on broader connections.

I can talk your ear off about secularism but I'm not very political. When I'm asked in a poll or a voting booth to think about broad social policies, I just extrapolate from personal relationships. I used to be a very compliant and trusting child, a dutiful husband, and a devout follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Those arrangements were all bad and I'll never again get into relationships of parent/child, till-death-do-us-part, or worshiper/worshipee. I have no policy statistics, I've never paid much attention to laws and their outcomes, I don't claim to be an expert in society or governance, so I cannot be looked to for anything more specific on politics than a treatise of first principles. I merely have life experiences that teach me hyper-individualism, which manifests as suspicion of all authority and an aversion to entitlement. By entitlement, I mean home, family, church, government, and other communal relationships in which people basically feel like they can have free run to abuse each other and praise it as "self-sacrifice." So when I found libertarianism and technological culture, they fit like a hand in a glove. God, marriage, parents, government, nature, it's all of a piece. Technology attempts to break the wheel of nature, that we are in relationship with, and which governs us.

I wonder if left-liberals and moral-majority-conservatives have more trust, or are comfortable in interdependent relationships, whether it be with their parents or spouse or religion or children, or their DNA for that matter, which carries over to government. In the "perfect idealistic world" of my imagination there would be none of those. But I acknowledge a world of all adults, a world of artificial intelligences who can just self-modify whenever they don't like their own nature, is not where we are right now, and I have no good reason to expect it to become that way.

Here's a useful LJ meme, gakked from howardtayler: Identify one goal that you've had, and that you've not been able to reach in the past. State why you don't think you've reached it.

Despite a lifetime of sculpting (in plasticine, a medium so fragile that I have almost nothing to show for it) I have not yet made a clay-animated short film. When I was a child and a teenager I had the talent and the time, but animation in any form was outside my price range by several orders of magnitude. I still have the talent and now I have a little disposable income which is not half-owned by another person with her own spending priorities, but find myself without time. As a beginner I'd be lucky to get two seconds of satisfactory footage -- that's sixty frames -- into the can in eight hours. I'd need a place to do the shooting that would be completely sealed off from daylight so I control the lighting conditions, that can go utterly undisturbed. If the tripod or set nudges out of alignment even slightly, I would have to start the shot over.

After I found The Clay Animation And Stop Motion How-To Page I realized that the goal is financially within my grasp. It answered questions I had been researching all my life, and also sold me the fine tools and equipment I've been looking for all my life. I've even started mixing custom clay colors in a melting pot.

If I ever got a Video LunchBox, I would no longer have any excuse at all. This is a standalone digital video appliance that requires nothing more than a camera, a TV, and a VCR. Press a button and it records a frame. It superimposes a view of the last frame over the realtime view of where the model is now, and provides instant playback of the motion so far. Too bad it costs as much as my car. I'll bet there exists a combination of camera / video capture card / software that's more affordable and can do the same.