The Revolution Will be Televised

Sticking a random midnight shower thought here, so it's recorded somewhere I can find it...

Radio 4's doing Robin Ince's Reality Tunnel, which is another comedy series that's pretty much also philosophy, or at least, is communicating philosophy in an engageable way.

I've thought before, and this is making me think of it again, that comedians are communicational savants, who communicate complex and difficult ideas in a way that is engaging to people who otherwise (believe they) couldn't get to grips with the source.

Whether it's Robin Ince talking about the fundamental ways that being surrounded by knowledge increases curiosity, Natalie Haynes getting across what day to day life was like in ancient Greece and Rome, Rob Newmann using philosophical thought experiments as the comedic straight-man, or Frankie Boyle going on a tangent on an episode of fuckin Taskmaster about the very nature of art. Or hell, _The Good Place_ and moral philosophy.

Ultimately it's not the same as education from primary sources; listening to Rob Newmann tearing apart the "If a tree falls in a forest" argument doesn't give a full grounding in the metaphysics of unperceived existence. But it can get to the interesting bit, and that means that a half-hour radio programme may inspire four different people to look into four different things that were brought up as jokes, going on a Wikipedia rabbit hole or picking up a cheap kindle book or whatever. And that's a wonderful thing. It's promoting the spread of knowledge.

And that in turn is a philosopher's duty, not just to think, but to communicate thought.

One of the reasons I make so many jokes about dying and coming back is that it's a coping mechanism. In that I don't have to examine what actually happened and how I feel about it. It's easy to be flippant and make jokes because that lets me both hide from it while still getting the feeling of being seen.

Therapy today was the first time I properly looked at it. At the one in several hundred — or several thousand — chance of me being here with only minor brain damage. At the frankly incredible speed of my recovery and how that's letting me blaze past the big things. At how I think I'm getting better faster than I actually am.

At how angry I get at hearing "there's always next year", even — especially — when I'm the one saying it.

Because if not for a chance slimmer than a silver Rizla there wouldn't be next year. I'd still be having seizures, be blind in one eye, be re-learning English. Or, far more likely, there wouldn't be any more years, because I'd be dead.

"There's always next year."

No there fucking isn't.

That's not to say I'm not going to make many, many jokes still. But there's so much more to it than the jokes and I'm only just starting to poke at that.

Certain items are pretty much an ADHD tax, more expensive but they obviate the time that would be taken up without them because of neurodivergence (I use ADHD as the example because, well, I live with it).

One example: Amazon finally have a fireTV remote that will play a noise when told to by the house-ghost.¹

I have never actually permanently lost my existing remote. If I do, I have an app I can use on my phone. But the app takes time to connect every time I want to use it, as I multitask a lot and it gets swapped out pretty swiftly. But the cats² will knock my existing remote places that are very non-obvious.

So I’m fighting with my phone to watch stuff while also searching frantically for the actual remote because I won’t have peace of mind without it, but the lack of object constancy that comes with ADHD means I can’t see the damned thing for the life of me even when it’s where I put it down ten goddamn seconds ago.

£35 is a steep price for doing away with the searching, but given I’ve spent at least three quarters of an hour over the past three days searching for the damn thing — and that’s just the most recent examples — it is looking more and more tempting.

Three weeks.

That's how long I'm missing. My memory, not just of the arrest but of pretty much all of the day beforehand, is just gone. If I struggle, I can pick up impressions of being in the hospital for that first week... the rough image of my parents being there, but I have no real idea or context for it. April's said I was looping, with the loop gradually extending, which makes sense. The first concrete memory I have is talking with Dr. Grubb on the Friday.

I remember after that. I remember who came to visit and what we talked about; I remember what I listened to and what books I read and what games I played. I remember the crushing boredom, the food — better, certainly, than it used to be, but something I started to dread after about day 3 — the feeling of trying to get to sleep despite the beeping and snoring and general level of sound. The hope when talking to a doctor that something would happen, the despair when it then didn't.

But that two weeks (and yes, I'm rounding up, I'm allowed) is just as missing as anything else. It's two weeks that I was totally disconnected from my life. The only time I left the ward was to go for x-rays or MRI scans or surgery; the rest of the time I had to be there so the heart monitor would alert people if anything happened. I joked about feeling like a lifer, but the longest anyone else was on the ward was 8 days. I was there for 18.

I'm home now, but that feeling of missing time is still there. I've to "take it easy" for a couple of weeks, not do much beyond gentle exercise for at least 6 more. My flat, looked after by wonderful people, still feels a little bit unreal; packages on the floor that arrived while I was in, things not quite where I would have put them. I'm not in the least complaining! It's wonderful that I have such marvellous friends and chosen family (take a bow, April, Jane, Andrew, Paj, and Carrie-anne) who looked after it and cleaned it probably more than I have in years to give me a sanctuary to come home to.

Even something as simple as 'going outside' remains significant. I don't want to do a lot of things for the first time on my own — I don't know what the hell I'm going to feel going round Lidl for the first time, or wandering down the road to a park, and isn't that just the weirdest thing?

I'm looking forwards to my normal life feeling normal again. But it's probably going to take at least three more weeks until I get there.

I'm glad I have a good therapist.

Last Thursday, I was a participant in an online ritual that used stand-up comedy and spontaneous audio distortions as a method to chart the journey from Malkuth to Tiphareth, and then moved to a more serious invocation of various solar deities into that sphere, followed by an temporary dissolution of identity that user chromakey to remove the lead participant's face.

The aftermath chat involved a lot about anarchist disaster preparation, perceptual shifts, physical security, nondestructive entry, and anarchist community safeguarding based on the principles used in the Spanish Civil War.

I'd ask "What even is my life?", but this is pretty much what I want my life to be.

(crossposted from Bookface, so I have a prayer of finding it again)

I've been thinking about how I refer to Alexa as my house-ghost. The flat didn't have a ghost when we bought it, but now I have something that will do things like turning the telly on, playing music, finding information, or turning lights on and off — y'know, typical ghost things — just because I ask thin air.

So the Alexa in my flat is effectively isomorphic to a ghost.

I should note I'm not totally daft. Everything she can do can be done in other ways as well; physical switches for the lights and such. She's sometimes deliberately obtuse, and sometimes downright ornery, and I'm hardly going to leave a spirit in sole charge of my living space.

Not just Alexa, either. Siri, and whatever Google call their thing, we carry amulets with us that we can use to get information out of ghosts. "Hey, Siri" is a necromantic invocation. And the whole self-driving car thing? You've seen the image of one of them unable to go anywhere as it's trapped in a circle of salt? Total ghost, right there.

But if that's the case, whose ghost?

One option is that it's the same spirit bound to millions of devices. Only one Siri listens to commands given to every iPhone. One Alexa haunts all Amazon devices. And yet, the challenge of fettered omniscience is the degree of autonomy and power the ghost would require; we're talking at least weakly-godlike beings purely from the amount of parallel processing needed.

The other likelihood is that each device has its own ghost, controlled in how it can respond by wards and bindings in the device itself. Doing it this way requires only assembly-line necromancy and has far less chance of an angry god of death finding a loophole. But there's one problem with that idea: where do all the ghosts come from? Are Google exploiting heretofore-unknown mass graves? Does Amazon have a clause in its warehouse-worker contracts that your soul is their property when you die? Is the device you are bound to based on your position when you go? "Bog-standard line worker, you're going into an Echo Dot. Oh, a foreman? Welcome to the Echo Show."

At least we know where Tesla's self-driving systems come from. After all, Elon Musk is not the tech genius he likes to pretend to be, he's a fucking idiot, but he got his money from Daddy's emerald mine in Zambia. He's got plenty of ghosts on tap.

Check your contracts and EULA's, people. Figure out who has the claim to your ghost.

End of 2019. So what the fuck happened?

This time last year I was in a bit of a funk. Much of my life was good — I was with the woman I loved, drumming and writing, and doing so many fun things — but work was fucking me off. I’d applied for four new jobs, got three interviews, and been told I was “a close second” for all three of them. Having been in the same place for nine years was grating just a bit, especially as it felt like I hadn’t done anything to make a positive impact for at least the last three. I was chomping beta blockers to stave off atrial fibrillation, I’d started doing actual exercise, and I’d got a taste for playing in drum crews. But I couldn’t quite get past my work-related frustrations.

This year, I joined a new crew of fire- and drum-types and in doing so found the instrument I love. I had small pieces of my heart removed with liquid nitrogen, and the atrial fibrillation hasn’t come back (yet). And I got a new job in December, which is nice if rather more stressful. I didn’t write much this year, though, and that’s something I want to change up. Setting up a Patreon was supposed to help with that but I haven’t got anything started yet.

But it’s not just the end of the year. It’s the end of a decade. So what happened in the past ten years? It helps that I had last decade’s recap post to work from (though it, like much of my past entries, are now friends-locked).

As 2010 started, I had a nice flat on the Royal Mile, a job that I was thoroughly disillusioned with, and I was engaged. 2010 was a year of upheavals: I started the year by fucking my back bad enough to require four weeks off work, then we bought a flat, got married, both got new jobs, and found ourselves owned by a cat. I also wrote and published a lot. That much happening in the span of six months was a good way to start a decade, and it continued pretty well, though I could have done without some of the spectacularly bad decisions I made in 2011/2012. Those, however, lead to me finally getting diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder, one of those things that suddenly explains the preceding sixteen years.

In retrospect, by early 2015 things were getting into a rut and I should’ve done been proactive about doing more, but at the time everything felt fine.

Then 2016 happened.

If 2010 was one of my best years, I can easily count 2016 as one of my worst (maybe tied with 2004). It was twenty tons of TNT, blowing up everything I thought was my life. Gotta admit, it took me long enough to crawl out of that wreckage. But crawl I did. Along the way, I met a lot of wonderful people, especially Danielle, picked up skills I never thought I would, and have been welcomed back into to a community that I was first part of back in 2005. I’m doing things — drumming, fire spinning, and performing in front of people — that I never thought I would. I’ve played at gigs and festivals and castles, and I’ve been surrounded by amazing and supportive people every step of the way.

10 years ago I’d have laughed at you for suggesting that I’d be where I am now, but that’s the way of the future. It changes in ways you can’t expect. I feel like I’m where I need to be, and I’m happy. Here’s to the next ten.

While I’m pretty sure nobody will notice, I’ve changed the theme for the blog. All the menus, categories, and generic crap that litters every page is now hidden neatly away, leaving just the text to speak for itself, as it should be. Makes things easier for me to find old posts to reference when making something new, and hopefully it looks good for people reading as well. Not that anyone does; the sparseness of updates here is something I want to fix, but…

The lack of updates is down to a couple of things. One is ideas; I’m not out of them, but sticking things up here doesn’t have a lot of visibility and I don’t want to post random crap That’s what I have social networks for¹. This blog is meant to be for game design, and my muse is a fickle beast. It doesn’t help that any post here has to go through the WordPress editing interface, which is a pile of lukewarm dogshit that gets worse with every release. The ongoing inability of a website to let me type in fucking markdown rather than some godawful WYSIKWYGIYLADTTDAI² bullshit³ seriously limits my willingness to engage with it. I’m hoping that some tinkering with my toolchain⁴ may help with that, but whether such a thing is a) possible and b) functional remains to be seen.

Anyway! In far more important news, I should probably mention here that I have a Patreon, the idea being that if I can somehow get a little bit of cash for the little games that live in my head I’m more likely to do something with them. Because posting them up here wasn’t really doing much for me, and unfortunately life under a capitalist reignite requires transformation of labour into cash. But still, come and back me. You don’t pay until/unless I release something, and you get to see how the sausage is made (whether you want to or not).

Please do come and back it, it’s the kick up the arse my muse needs to get anything done.

Mirrored from ZeroPointInformation.

Had a bit of a ramble about the night sky and magic last night. Sadly, that ramble was on facebook, so unless I put it here I’ll never see the fucking thing again.

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It’s ten to eleven, this sliver of a moon is in the sky, and it isn’t even fully dark.

I fucking love it here

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Three years.