toxic information

reading taleb's The Black Swan, amazing thought-provoking stuff. one of my favorite bits was about how more information can be worse than less, can be misleading. can't tell the signal from the noise.

when you get caught up in the day-to-day stuff, it's harder to step back and try to see what things mean, how they fit into the big picture. taleb rails against the narrative fallacy, but what other framework can we use? progress, that's what we strive for. maybe try to make it real progress, not just the illusion thereof. maybe it would be helpful and accurate to report when one's stalled, stuck, and setbacks, losses.

my girlfriend and i have used both our notebook pcs simultaneously on wifi, and my asus eeepc 701 outlasts her acer one by about 15-20 minutes. i'm thinking of moving up to the asus 1000 someday, the ads say it's got 10 hours of battery life, making it way more convenient for sponging off free mall wifi. my current 701 gets me about an hour online before the battery gives out.

got 2 web apps off and 1 program off Lifehacker, for downloading audio off youtube. the TubeMaster program ate up a lot of memory and was a pain in the ass to uninstall, ListenToYoutube.com makes you suffer through some annoying ads before giving up low quality 2mb mp3s. but Dirpy.com is a winner, clean interface, unobtrusive ads, no nagging to pay up.

silence will have to be enough

how much has music influenced you? almost none at all. i've often wondered about that. when i went to conventions, the softball question that i would pitch to writer panels is "who influenced you?" i got that from music, ask a music person that and they always blather on at length about all-time faves, what's currently on heavy rotation on their playlist, etc, etc.

i've listened to a lot, but it's not essential for me, i can walk away and live just fine without it. sometimes i get a craving for a song i haven't heard in a while, i put it on the playlist maybe a couple of days and then i'm back to indifferent.

so i love books, but music meh. maybe i've given myself over so wholeheartedly to explicit visual information that my mind doesn't have much room left for enjoying auditory emotional music. i remember that frank herbert's bene gesserit avoided music, basically saying it was a waste of time, a seductive but dangerous distraction.

PS, currenty listening to Love Spreads by The Stone Roses, and bunch of Yoko Kanno tracks from Escaflowne and Cowboy Bebop.

borges's the library of babel

borges's the library of babel is a math fail. an infinite library that contains all possible permutations of letter combinations, so it's vast oceans of gibberish, and maybe if you're really lucky, in a jillion years of searching you might come across a lone dada fragment like "plums deify" or "marshall banana," hardly enlightening.

and what about visual works like neil gaiman's sandman or alan moore's watchmen? borges's story says the library is text only, but you can extend the analogy. imagine an infinite number of high-res screens showing every possible pixel layout. this helps to show that looking for meaning in infinite randomness is palpably a mug's game. you or i would have a far better chance of painting the mona lisa ourselves, rather than finding it in an infinite series of random arrangements of pixels. it's like trying to find the meaning of life in the grit on a sidewalk.

likewise, the monks would be better off trying to reconstruct their fields of scholarship, though discussion and experimentation. instead of looking for leonardo's notebook, tear up the books and use the pages to make papier-mache models of flying machines.

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

it started off well, walden on wheels, thoughts leavened with action, good bit about how big truths cut deeper than the constant stream of ephemeral trivia. but then it all goes south. at first the technophobe drummer is contrasted with our greasemonkey tinkerer hacker hero, seemingly averting the obvious and common luddite angle. but it doesn't last.

the protagonist's presented as a smart guy, 170 IQ, into molecular biology, but then he goes after the scientific method and rationality, and claims to have whipped it with weenie sophistries. the author avatar admits he's a crap scholar and considered that maybe he's duplicated an old line of thought, despite some amount of research. next time, look harder, genius. this sophomoric crap shows an ignorance of the history of science and philosophy that's appalling, embarrassing. he has students rank pieces of writing by their "Quality," and surprise surprise, there's a good correlation. the author claims that this isn't "rational" because there's no formal definition. there's the correlation, sherlock! it's called an extensional definition, you make up a list of things that have more of x, less of x, you look for what's the same, what's different, that's how scientists figured out that heat is molecules moving around.

over and over, it's shown that "phaedrus" goes by his feelings of truthiness. it feels right so it's true, or if it it doesn't feel right, then it must be wrong. or maybe you just need to pull your friggin head out. there's the sense of someone in love with their own nattering on and on about glittering generalities, disconnected from experimental proof. what does this metaphysics of Quality really DO? so you've invented another pointless, useless religion, like freud. yay.

fun theory, utilons, antisphexishness

musashi said that a samurai should use both of his swords, because to die without having used everything at your disposal is a ridiculous waste. so, miyamoto musashi, the first powergamer. because when it's life and death, anything less than munchkin gaming is immoral.

but gaming is really about something else. imagine all-out full-cheese powergaming, it becomes the battle of the one-trick ponies, akuma vs akuma, boring and monotonous.

this is really a player vs player or multiplayer problem, another reason why i prefer single-player: starcraft, half-life, etc. games are about speed and variety, interesting situations, solution/trick/tool comes to mind, and as quickly as you can think of it, it's available.

in games, boredom is worse, thus in many games you can suicide when things go wrong, when the situation becomes Not Fun Anymore. because Game Over isn't really Final Death For Reals.

for leonardo da vinci, concept was more interesting than execution. back in the day, playing ff7, people said there was no way to kill Emerald Weapon without the Underwater materia. i eyeballed the 14minute limit and my underpowered materia, thought hey, close shave but still doable. beating emerald was fun, he could throw curveballs and mess me up. but after killing him, i got bored and never did kill the next one, ruby. what for? i had it dialed in, going through the motions again was superfluous.

PS, the os-tans have been around a while, and there's firefox-tan, opera-tan, but why is there still no chrome-tan?

no extra measure

as the old saw goes, it's not so much the things that people don't know, it's the many things that people know (or profess, or believe) that just aren't so. that are foolish, misleading, or flat-out untrue. that's where the world's screwed-upness comes from.

you try to think for yourself, and not the standard rebellion thing that's just looking to shock or be different. goth might as well be the standard uniform for people who don't want to be boring. you try to figure things out for real, no matter where it leads, and it just naturally ends up being the road less travelled, winding through some pretty odd, interesting places.

it gets to to the point where you don't have to advertise with tattoos or or funky hair or dressing differntly, your oddness just comes through, word gets around. socrates said, looking at a marketplace, see, there are so many things that i don't want. and of course there's diogenes, scorning the world and everyone in it.

i've always held to the theory that there are no extra measures of life. maybe not exactly true, but at least that everyone has the same amount of energy to start with, to invest over their various interests and concerns. and my trick was always a ruthless kind of focus. screw the dross, things like food, clothes, or hair. balance is the mantra of the lamer, for the boring and conventional. And i’ve held as a post-mortem axiom for when things don’t go right, then something wasn’t extreme enough, wasn't drastic enough, didn't crank it up to the level where it should have been.

will durant said that the truth may not make you rich, but it can set you free. certainly does make the ride more interesting.

Monkey Mind

Picked up the Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook, by St. Jude, R.U. Sirius, Bart Nagel. Goofy cover, but secondhand and dirt-cheap, as in just P5. Got it for laughs and nostalgia, though the Bruce Sterling introduction brought the expectations up a bit. Still, nothing dates like technology, especially when it’s about the purported cutting edge. Published in 1995, in tech terms that’s practically prehistoric, they’re still on dialup and talking about how the Web will ruin the internet.

But one bit stuck: “Haqr mind is NOTHING like Zen mind. Haqr mind is what Buddhists snottily call MONKEY MIND.”

That SO works, total win. Journey to the West, Hachiman, etc. Far as I know, no one’s used that metaphor yet, not Stephen Levy or Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. Always yield to the paws-on imperative! To hell with Zen, bunch of serene bastards. I love the analogy, my brain took the ball and ran with it. Basho’s monkey. Sten from Breath of Fire 2. The Goblin Tinkerer card from Magic.

In other news, putting all my books in a pile on the floor, time for another culling. And time for some inventory, these days I’m getting fuzzy on what books I already have and what I’m still looking for.

Games

Just did another GameSharked speed run through Final Fantasy 6, it's doable in about 12 hours if you crank up the stats, start off with the good weapons and armor, and just blast on through everything that gets in your way. Still have some of that great Nobuo Uematsu music playing in my head.

I feel that I’ve earned it, played thorough twice before with no cheats. I was a gamer purist once. I despised the typical dilettante rpg gamers especially, over-leveled munchkin powergamer dweebs who couldn't find their way across a room without a walkthrough. My game was always getting as far as I could with my characters on the lowest level possible. So it was a challenge, minmaxing on the edge, where you just barely squeak by on the boss fights. The way I played ff6 was especially time-consuming, verging on the autistic. It involved arranging my party in descending order of how far away they were from leveling up, and then swapping Espers around to get that small +1 to +3 stat boost on the levelup.

The other day, had lunch with Tinx and one of her friends, an older woman who didn’t understand what we get from games. It’s about rehearsal of competence, It’s about being in a world that makes sense, is just and fair, there are rules and punishments and rewards from working with the rules. If it’s a good game, there’s room for clever hacks. It’s about the psychologically rewarding, addicting feedback flow, like when you get the machinegun that helps you mow down even more zombies.

I never liked the analogy that “life is a playground.” For me, the truest analogy that cuts to the heart of things is that life is a game. Real life is the big, messy game with no power gauges, played with imperfect information, and it’s competitive and cooperative and zero-sum, all at the same time.

In the series flashbacks, Daria as a kid looks a lot like Velma from Scooby Doo.

Wandering around tvtropes, found out that there's an Atheists in Foxholes Monument. Awesome. Keeping the faith. In a sense.

Got word of a website where you can download books for free. Illegal of course, but free books! I'll email the link to some people after I've gotten the books I want. Who knows how long this bootleg site will last before the fuzz shuts it down.

Anyway, so bingeing on books. Finally found Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: been on my wishlist for ages, I've often heard it praised by computer people and other nerds. And Richard Dawkins, Neal Stephenson, Heinlein, Carl Sagan, etc. Bookgasm.

i was at sm city when typhoon ondoy hit. didn't think it was a big deal at first. then the basement level flooded, ankle-deep water. the security guards tried to keep us away from the railings when we started taking pics, but soon they stopped trying. walked home, crossing one street, had to wade through knee-deep water.

also editing a bit of the garbled wikipedia article on the storm.

Testing. Flooded in at sm city.

Testing. Flooded in at sm city.

currently reading a megatokyo manga. i don't read as much anymore. i browse through shelves and all i can think is bla bla yadda yadda, stuff happens and i don't care, sound and fury signifying nothing. and i have little patience for fantasy now, i'm drawn to the more ambitious types of sf.

downloaded the opening theme from penn and teller's bullshit, using it as my ringtone. playing brain workshop's dual n-back, a game that's supposed to make you smarter.

PS, also watched Transformers 2, I liked the Fallen's Egyptian look. Coincidentally, also reading Alastair Reynold's Absolution Gap, and those prehistoric Transformers are how I imagine Reynold's Ultranauts would look like.

Watched Pixar's Up, the scene where the house lifts off reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Crimson Permanent Assurance.

Couple of days ago, I followed a link on Less Wrong to Paul Graham's essay on holding a program in your head. I can't program, but I get the analogy: you think of playing videogames for hours, you think of obsessive fixations, in yourself and in other people. I've always said that the best way to read a book is in one continuous session, and maybe just before or after watching the movie version.

This feels big, a large, non-cryptic truth that ties together a dozen or so fragmentary insights I've had. It's the reason why a sudden, unplanned day off, like a sick day or classes suspended due to storms, is sweeter than the weekend or regular time off: you're geared up for several hours of effort, then reprieve. You could play videogames all day, or whatever turns you on.

Trying the WiFi at SM North EDSA Sky Garden. It really is free, and speedtest.net clocked it at 900kbps.

Waiting with girlfriend, have tickets for The Time Traveller's Wife in 40 minutes.

"She did not care for children's books in which the children grew up, as what "growing up" entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows."
-Donna Tartt, The Secret History

so hard to write now. i've seen how some people lose their coolness, become diminished, banal, as they get older. i've resisted that, though a part of me wonders if that's just how it goes. but mostly i don't think so.

"We don't play," Constanza said with a scowl. "We talk, and explore."
-Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City

reading some books, i've thought, "if my life were that interesting, then i wouldn't need fiction as entertainment anymore, because i would already be living the dream, and ordinary stories would be tawdry in comparison." life's not that interesting, but the day-to-day stuff does tend to take up a lot of mindspace. but that's the game, isn't it? trying to make your way in the world without losing your soul. and crooked and unfair as it is, it's the only game in town, for everyone everywhere.

Reading Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and Borges's Labyrinths.

"What are you saying?" Leisha demanded. "That you can only be close to someone if they're in trouble and need you? That you can only be a sister if I was in some kind of pain, open sores running? Is that the bond between you Sleepers? 'Protect me while I'm unconscious, I'm just as crippled as you are'?"

-Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain

Been going through the Less Wrong archives. Which lead me to Fleep, brilliant comic strip. John Shiga's Bookhunter is great too, like Read or Die + Red Dragon.

master anzawa. crap scan, checkerboard pattern not in original. uploaded to see if maybe those annoying blue dots were just on my view and not the file itself. guess they're really there.

Downloaded Google Chrome a few days ago. It's fast, it's cool, but the minimalist thing feels insubstantial. Google said they want Chrome to be transparent; you don't see the browser, you just see the website on the other side. But it's like driving a car and all you see is the windshield, I want to see the instrument panel too, I want a frame that gives me context. Basically I want the progress bar, watching those little cubes go across the bottom of the browser is like a deep Zen thing. And Java seems weird, I play with a Java chess program that works fine on Firefox but just shows blank on Chrome even after I donwnloaded the latest Java that it wanted.

Current setup:

Asus EeePC 701 4gig notebook, running Windows XP
Secondhand CRT monitor I got from the girlfriend
Big black Dell keyboard that plugs into USB
Huawei E160 HSDPA USB dongle, running on Globe's Tattoo Broadband prepaid internet
Several flash drives, cameraphone, etc.

While Globe advertises speeds of "up to 2mbps," I've never seen it go over 1mbps on Globe's running speed graph thing. And I wish I could've just stayed with my original Linux OS, but that just really wasn't compatible with the connection.

Watched Star Trek a few days ago, disappointed. Not horrible, but underwhelming. Weird combination of reboot and tribute, alternate timeline to escape baggage, but a redshirt is quickly killed, there's "I'm giving her all she's got," feels like mistaking the superficial for the soul.

Was reading about fairy chess. I wonder if anyone's thought of this before, but how about orthodox chess with specific personalities, identities, names, for all the pieces. I always had trouble with how stark and abstract chess is, but I like the situationality of strategy videogames.

Black hat, white hat.

Watched Slumdog Millionaire the other week, was pretty good but still kinda unsatisfying. To console myself I started re-reading Rudyard Kipling's Kim. I guess that was what I had been hoping for from the movie, the big panoramic sweep.

I had a messageboard once, http://zoneseek.proboards37.com/index.cgi. Link doesn't work anymore, though Google search still shows some results for my old board, "The Memory Palace." Went over to the ProBoards support forum, looked up the FAQ:

Board Deletion?
If you think that your board was deleted, you may have violated the Terms of Service.
Please read the TOS and make sure your board met all the guidelines that you agreed to when you created your forum.
Read The Terms of Service Here
The most common offense is a Foreign Language Violation (Section 3C of the Terms of Service)
Do not post in support if you have violated the TOS. You will not be given back your board or any information that was on your board.

Section 3C of the TOS says: "User's message board and Web site must be in English."

Wow pare, grabe naman, ang daya yata nun, nadugas ako. :-(

Currently reading Harlan Ellison's unfilmed screenplay for I, Robot. As usual, Ellison rants about how Hollywood is stupid, but frankly I don't see that this screenplay is that great, or even good. Granted, this was written back in 1978, but there have been a lot of robot movies since then: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Bicentennial Man, Animatrix, Spielberg's AI. It's like Philip K. Dick's original Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, when you look at it now, this ground's been covered, it's passe.

Shaving your girlfriend's head does odd things to a fanboy's mind. It was her idea. Images flash: Delerium of the Endless, David Lynch's Bene Gesserit, Sinead O'Connor. Britney.

Currently reading Peter F. Hamilton's The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God.

Saw the Watchmen movie last week, loved it. Bought the trade paperback the day after. The purists tend to sneer at Snyder, but I'm glad I saw the movie before I read the comics.

I'm going through my old journals, typing them up on the computer and consigning the hardcopies to the flames.

About 2 weeks ago, bought a CD of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and idly asked if they had the West Wing. Didn't expect that they'd have it, but they did; boxed set, all 7 seasons. And the Sorkin-fest continues, haven't watched everything yet.

Just back from Antipolo, went swimming with people from work. Still can't swim, but making some progress, the girlfriend's teaching me.

Got your moment of Zen right here.

Commuting home, blasting mind-crushing J-pop into my ears, saw this odd shirt on the woman in front of me and snapped some pics. How does one organize an international organization of slum-dwellers, one wonders? Smoke signals? Video-conferencing?

As You Like It was on HBO, watched it about 3 times so far. Bryce Dallas Howard's delightful as Rosalind.

Yay, got the Asus Eee 4gig agin, way cheaper now. Posting from Via Mare at SM cos they have free wifi. And have a Sony Ericsson K530i phone. Also now broke.

My phone was stolen, asshat thief snatched it out of my hand and ran. Geh. New phone and number maybe tomorrow.

Got an email from Blogged.com, "Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it a 7.9 score out of (10) in the Personal Blogs category of Blogged.com.
This is quite an achievement!" Well, ok then.

Looks like blogging from the phone still doesn't work. It's not the code salad anymore, but prev blank post was supposed to be a pic. Working out a tedious kluge, transfer pics from phone memory card to usb reader, la di dah. Otherwise I'm having fun with the N70, I ganked like 4gigs of mp3s from a friend of mine, and I've listened to most of it. Then my desktop monitor died. :\

Got a Quantum of Solace cd, and the street hawker threw in season 1-3 of Avatar the Last Airbender for a discount. The new Bond was kinda meh, but dang, Avatar rawks. I watched the first few eps way back when, no big deal. But it's a wonderful thing, so rare on tv, a reverse shark-jump, where a blah series turns into something extraordinary.

I don't believe in destiny, or karma. We scrabble along the earth, finding what joy we can, and precious little of that. But sometimes, sometimes, I can almost believe that things work out. I have one true thing in my life, and it's mine, and hers. Sometimes I feel apprehensive, wondering how things will go wrong, as they so often do. But then I stand in the moment, in the stress of her regard, and it burns away my cynicism.

Thinking of changing the blog name to "Between Iron and Silver." Hannibal Lecter reference, and in honor of the amazing girl I'm dating. In other news, the Motorola died, got a Nokia N70 music edition. I have a bunch of ideas and titles I'd like to hammer into coherent blog post form when I can find the time.

She is amazing. She's bossy, she cares, she walks fast, and I trail behind this impossible, incogruous, unlikely little spitfire, my heart going pitter-pat.

Hadouken emoticon: ~o

Came up with this in a chat earlier. Variations:

Hadouken: -{ ~o)
Shinkuu hadouken: -{ ~=0)
Kamehameha: -{=====0)

Watched WALL-E and the Clone Wars CG movie. WALL-E was brilliant, with a subtle bite: you don't see the crowds of stupid fat people in the promos. Clone Wars was lame-ass. Should've known better by now, it's all about lowered expectations since Phantom Menace, but Genndy Tartakovsky's amazing Clone Wars animated series was A New Hope.

The Dark Knight was incredible. Whoever plays the Joker next had better bring his A game, Ledger set the bar up in the stratosphere somewhere.

More drinking.

Two books by Greg Egan: Permutation City and Teranesia. Permutation City's been on my wish list for years, as an apparently seminal cyberpunk story. But Teranesia blew me away. An Indian Rationalist couple travels to a tiny nameless Indonesian island to study mutant butterflies. Here they raise two precocious kids who explore the island and study its peculiar fauna, while learning math and biology online via satellite. It's a great exotic setup with a Nick Bantock flavor, and a unique bildungsroman.

Watched House season 4 yesterday. Despairing of ever getting my phone to work with Blogger again.

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testing from email. cell service screwup? html weirdness? gah. supposed to be simple, yet not so simple.