Oct 2002, 33 entries

God is…

Work is so busy that a truck of dead rats pig latin Suzuki Samari!

What is the All-Consuming Empty Signifier? <EOM>

One of the best cafe/bars on Capitol Hill. Where Jim works.

Last night we were dining at Cafe Septieme, Jim’s work, and I asked if anyone felt like betting against my completing NaNoWriMo. Sort of like getting sponsors for the jog-o-thon.

Nobody was interested, at first. Then, K said she would bet me a month’s worth of taking care of the kitty litter (since monetary bets don’t quite make sense when you share a bank account). Rick, not wanting to be left out, wanted to bet against K. He said he would do NaNoWriMo in December if K completed 3 panels in November. (K and Rick are currently working on 20 panel painting series, each panel about 4 feet by 3 feet, and they’ve got about 5 completed so far.) K accepted the bet, and we decided to replace our kitty litter bet with a bet that said if I finished NaNoWriMo (with some measure of quality), K would do an extra-large, self-indulgent, non-humiliating, 6 foot by 4 foot portrait of moi. Now we were talking.

To complete the circle of bets, I agree that should Rick do 3 panels in November, I’ll draft up a fully functional artificial language in December. Yikes!

Jim, our waiter, learns about the bets and wants to join in. We reconfigure the bets so that Jim’s November task (writing a 30 page children’s story with 30 pages of pictures) will be the one that determines whether or not I have to do the artificial language. His penalty activity for December will be that he has to create a 20 minute soundtrack for the 20 panels that K and Rick are working on, and also write 15 minute theme songs for Rick, K, and myself.

So, the final deal came to look like this:

I’ll do NaNoWriMo in November, and if I complete it, K will have to do a self-indulgent portrait of me.

K will do 3 panels in November, and if she completes them Rick will have to do NaNoWriMo in December.

Rick will do 3 paintings in November as well, and if he completes them Jim will have to do the 20-minute soundtrack and 3 15 minute theme songs for each of us.

Jim will do the children’s story (30 pages of text, 30 pages of pictures), and if he completes it I’ll have to create an artificial language.

Not completing your penalty activity in December is not an option.

Now it’s the next day and I realize that starting this Thursday, I’m going to have quite a bit of work on my hands until the end of the year. New Years should be fun though, since we’ll have earned it if all goes right.

Zeldman is making me want to redesign too, although I wouldn’t think about going the all-CSS-all-the-time route, cause that’s lame.

I passed page 150 page mark on the book today, which is 20 pages this month. This means that I won’t need to fall behind in order to get NaNoWriMo done next month, as this fulfills the contract I signed in the Novel Accountability Program, which requires me to complete 10 pages a month until I finish the book on December 31st 2003.

Along the same lines as my recent rambling on breaking the rules, here’s Dave Weinberger’s take on the topic of leeway. His main point is that leeway is a crucial part of the game in the analog world, it sponsors fairness, forgiveness, tolerance, and privacy. On the other hand, the digital world does not have this element, and has a much harsher and unforgiving texture. Is it desirable to play in a game where every rule is immediately enforceable and detectable? If we were playing Nomic, would one of the rules be that the rules should only be enforced when the spirit of the law has been broken, not necessarily every time the letter has been broken?

Reading more and more and obsessively more about Nomic, the game where each move changes its own rules.

One of the really interesting bits that I can’t stop thinking about is in this article: Breaking the Rules. This was actually written as a thesis in a certain game of Nomic which had rules on how to earn a Degree. Anyway, there is the paradox of authority in any game.

It is a legal move in any game to leave the game.

Most games encourage play, and discourage not playing. Just like how there’s a law against suicide. The game of life discourages taking your life. However, it is silly for obvious reasons… if you’re suicidal, the last thing you care about is breaking the rules, in fact, it is most likely the rules themselves that brought you to that state in the first place.

The essay talks about two different kinds of rule-breaking: the kind where those who break the rules are required to take back their illegal move and make a legal move in its place (therefore game resumes as if the illegal move never happened). And there are non-retractable rules where you are penalized for breaking the rule somehow, most likely in order to encourage legal play from then on. The illegal move, however, will be on your permanent record as a play that took place. This type of game tries to internalize the whole world outside of the game as well… essentially saying, even when you try to break the rules or leave the game, you are still in the game! The Game Omnipresent.

In our legal world, we understand that most laws have geographical boundaries. It’s illegal to drink when you’re 18 in the US, but it’s okay if you’re in Mexico. Do the rules of Earth apply to people on the moon?

If you break a rule that is set in a particular geographical area, and you are caught, there is most likely another rule of that area that says that you have to be punished. What if you broke that rule, and refused to be punished? Well, the government has a worse punishment for you if you’re caught. Every broken rule encourages the game to bring you back in and make you pay. The strange thing is that they would rather continue to have you in the game than let you escape the game. One of the worst penalties, however, is to be kicked out of the game: exile, or even worse, death. It’s not okay to leave on your own, but if you’re really bad, you’ll be kicked out. The game proclaims full control.

Some rules, when broken, cause an irreversible change in the game, that can’t be taken back. Because there is essentially no way to retract your move, and you have influenced the game in an illegal and most likely harmful manner, there need to be very strict rules that border on the absurd to discourage any but the most ruthless and masochistic players from making them.

These are unpardonable plays, sins, and moves. They, by definition, are the most hostile and threatening events in any game.

The final comment I have to make relates to how a game should not even be allowed to make rules for what to do when people break rules. For, isn’t it silly to assume that any rule could prevent a rule from being broken? That type of meta-rule should only exist in the game that lives outside of the game you’re currently playing. That’s the only way to ensure that, should you exist this sub-game, there’s still a larger game that penalizes people who exit that sub-game. You may have exited the sub-game but you still have to pay in the larger game’s context. And yet this does not solve the problem, for what happens to you when you refuse to participate in any game whatsoever? There is no super-game that can rule over you if you have forsaken rules themselves. Ultimately, this means there is no penalty for doing so, and that’s the unforgettable fear of every player in every game that you participate in. For if you recognize that the whole thing is a sham, your belief could bring down the whole deck of cards. But of course, since none of us is brave enough to renounce all games and rules (who wants to step off into chaos and nothingness?), we’ll all continue to play as if that were not an option.

One week until NaNoWriMo starts. I’ve cancelled all engagements for next month, and some that aren’t next month but which I just don’t feel like participating in this year, like All Hallow’s Eve. Stupid holiday. The only holiday I can back is one where I get a day off.

Reading a fascinating intro to a book that will help with my NaNoWriMo story:

Paradox of Self-Amendment

I found this article through a google search for more information about Nomic, a game about games. Players make moves by changing the rules of the game, and the winner is either determined by those rules (it starts with an arbitrary point-based goal of 100 points) or by creating a series of laws that paralyzes movement, a paradox that makes it impossible for a person to make a move, and that person wins.

One paragraph I like so far is this: The demonstration that self-amendment is lawful in the Anglo-American legal tradition disproves a common theory of legal change: the theory that all valid change of law must be authorized by prior, higher legal rules. (I will call this the formalist or inference model.) Aside from denying the possibility of what is actual (namely, self-amendment), the formalist theory has other absurd consequences. It implies that no new legal system could get started. None could break off from another lawfully, and all that broke off unlawfully would be eternally barred from becoming lawful themselves. Any regime to be called lawful must have an infinite genealogy. Because we want to say that there are some lawful regimes, we must be able to explain how they could get started without at the same time making them mere creatures of prior regimes in an infinite series. Some power, be it contract or revolution or some other, must make law ex proprio vigore or from its own strength. Only a theory of permissible self-amendment can explain this fully, and therefore only such a theory can explain legality per se.

Sounds a lot like my manifesto: continue with nothing.

There are certain words that I like to use, and repeat over and over again. For some reason, I love to intentionally reuse the same word when I mean the same thing. Sometimes I will steal a sentence verbatim that I used earlier, even if the context was different. It is fun.

Then, using Microsoft Word’s find tool, I can go back and see how the word rises up again and again. Eventually, it might be fun to index the entire book by word, so that you can find all sentences that use any word that’s ever mentioned in the book.

In any case, here are the instances I just found for one of my favorite simple words: rose.

Thoughts dove and rose renewed with each reigning minute. (page 2)

She leaned over the table and opened the white shutters by turning them upward, each blade of wood turning in unison with the one she moved, and the room rose in color despite dirt-stained windows. (page 4)

Their three-course meal started with Fricassée of Escargots with Sweet Garlic and a sweet aperitif, according to the gilded rose-print card on the table. (page 47)

In the shower, steam rose as it pelted the cold ceramic basin of the tub. (page 90)

Michael was wearing a black suit with a red rose pinned to the left collar. (page 127)

Facts and memories dove through her fingers, then rose up again decades later. (page 144)

It’s been busy at work. However, strangely, even though a lot of things are going wrong, I’m enjoying it. I like to have a reason to be there, a little bit of pressure and anticipation makes the whole endeavor a little more rewarding and interesting.

In other news, just last night I broke the 50,000 word mark on The Most Beautiful One. It took me 19 months to write what I’m going to try to complete next month alone. I haven’t done any planning either, other than thinking of the first scene (guy gets stabbed in the eye and attends his 8 o’clock the next morning with a bandage around the top of his head). There will be a love story, of course, a story of betrayal, of course, and some robots, of course. Other than that, I’m hoping that the journey will take me somewhere interesting. I love these types of challenges, and sort of hesitate at trying to make it easier for myself. All preparation does is make it less challenging, and the challenge is the whole point!

I think I’ve been depressed lately, masking it with an over-excited demeanor for work and other distractions, and then finding an unexplainable tiredness during other moments.

All of this baseball talk is so boring. Who needs another game to become so involved in, so particular about, when we have our daily boring lives? There are enough details, enough events that we tie to silly emotions to such as hope and fear, to need to subscribe to yet another meaningless system. With baseball, perhaps, it’s so obvious and simple that it’s a nice distraction. I’ve heard people explain it to me that way. Wouldn’t an ant farm be just as effective? A complicated system that hinges on visible factors from day to day. Root for the ants in the bottom corner, or for the ants in the top corner. Introduce a pincher-bug for an exciting season. Sometimes I think national sports are just a way for our governments to exercise our war emotions during peacetime. I wonder if there’s a greater chance that you’re excited about the prospects of war if you’re a huge sports fan. What a dull dull idea.

I’d like to read this essay tonight: Finding Private Space in the Wired World (pdf). The book is very much about the difference between the private mind and the public life, so this should be helpful.

I spent part of the day playing around with Excel and coming up with a snazzy spreadsheet to keep track of my NaNoWriMo novel: the NaNoWriMo Report Card. It can do everything but write the crappy novel for you.

The sequel to my manifesto titled start with nothing continues on in a similar vein with the aptly named continue with nothing chapter. Have some more fun explaining your existence away.

In some sense, everybody believes that zero equals one.

For example, when attempting to imagine the beginning of the universe, the begining of everything, what choice do we have other than to say “something came from nothing”. Say we believe that the universe is however many billions of years old, what was it before that? Nothing. Even if it’s twice as old, or a thousand times as old, there’s still no explanation for what came before, other than nothing. Same thing if you believe in God and creation. What came before God? Nothing. Two choices: from nothing, came God, and from God came the universe, or, from nothing came the universe. In either case, 0 = 1 is isomorphic with this event and thinking process, and it’s about time we admitted to it.

Some people may have retorted the logic of this by saying, “Well, I believe that God has always been there, or that the universe has always been here. Therefore I don’t need to explain how something came from something because something has always been here.” That may work, but if you believe that, then in essence you’re now stuck in the dilemma of explaining where “nothing” came from. In order for something to have definition, it needs a border. Something and nothing are no different other than by perspective—negative space and positive space are only significant in the fact that they are different spaces, and have a border between them. If something has no border, it is no different from nothing because it can have no definition. When starting with nothing, it makes no difference if you define nothing as everything. In a way, it’s just as effective at describing the beginning of everything as nothing is. If “something” has never changed, we might as well still be in the “nothing” phase of the universe, and “something” has yet to be created.

In both cases, we have to continue living knowing that what we have now has no outlines or borders—either it is no different from nothing, or it is nothing, zero equals one, one equals zero, and we have to continue living with the knowledge that there has never been a legitimate “thing” that came from another “thing”.

You are not your parent’s child, because if you thought you were you’d have to trace back your family tree all the way to the beginning and find the first parent, and explain where they came from. You may get tripped up near the beginning of humanity, but don’t let that stop you, just take the next natural step: Adam came from God, or the first man came from an ape, and continue on either by explaining where God came from or where apes came from (and going all the way back to algae, hopping over into minerals, then star dust, then the Big Bang). Whatever the first thing is, it cannot have a parent. If the first thing doesn’t have a parent, then it can’t exist, or if it exists, its existence has no distinction from the lack of existence.

We are all in one big colorless room, hallucinating. Now dance.

A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” Joshu retorted, “Mu!”

This word comes from Chinese and has the meaning (in Chinese) of “nothing”. It’s used in the zen koan above to have a slightly different meaning, something along the lines of “Neither yes nor no, since the question is built on incorrect assumptions.” The word is a non-word, with a meaning that cannot be expressed in the language that the question was asked in, and, presumably, any language. The language it could be answered in, alternatively, would not be able to ask the question. The statement “0 equals 1” is a non-theorem in number theory, since you cannot prove that the statement is correct using the assumed axioms of the system. In other words, that statement has no meaning in number theory.

If someone asked you “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” and you did not have a wife, could you answer yes? You cannot stop something you have never done, nor can you say you have not stopped as that implies that you are continuing to beat her. You can answer, now, “mu” or “0 equals 1”, I guess.

When I was a kid I had a lot of fun asking my sister, “Are you PT?” If she answered no, I would say, “You’re not potty trained?” If she answered yes, I would say, “You’re part-tiger?” Or something like that, I forget the answer to yes exactly. In any case, after a while my sister would have to concede to being part tiger in order to avoid agreeing that she’s not potty trained. I didn’t realize it, but I was close to enlightenment even then! Now, having realized the system’s tricks a bit more, of course I’m much further away.

Miranda July is amazing. I just went to her second to last performance of The Swan Tool which was part movie, part live performance, all very interesting and beautiful, and the Q and A afterwards also cracked me up because she completely dismissed a couple stupid questions (“what themes were you trying to get across?” “what books are you reading?”), and answered all the good ones well (my favorite was her answer to “did you work as a lock smith?”). K is having dinner with her right now, but I’m not jealous, okay maybe a little-lot.

I wonder how I would think about things differently if the things I was making were made in such a way that they were events in time that only lived as long as I was making them (ie. live performances) rather than products that could be sold for an eternity if they only deserved to be. Would it be possible to do an adaptation of a live performance like The Swan Tool, though, as they do with plays and musical pieces? That might be interesting.

No new protocol necessary: An interesting new take on the technology that tracks referrers and trackbacks and pings, Mark Pilgrim has flipped the coin around so that instead of having everyone pinging everyone else to see who’s talking about what, any site can now take a look at all the other sites that are linking to it and extract the paragraph of text around the link to their site automatically.

This is cool (from a technology perspective) for many reasons. People implementing this will have instant results, since it doesn’t require a critical mass of referrers to have installed the software. More importantly than that, however, is that it puts the emphasis back on the conversation, where it should’ve always been in the first place. Finally, it’s easier to “get”, which is one of the primary obstacles in TrackBack’s road to fame and fortune.

Amazon.com Developer’s Contest: Want to earn a $1000 Gift Certificate? In order to celebrate the 2.0 version of their Web Services, they’re having a contest to see who can build the best “store-builder”. I’d enter, but I don’t think it’s available for employees.