people

When I consider that it's unlikely that what I'm going
to say will be amazing, I pay more attention to how I
say it. Like, right now I'm saying it from bed, in
the form of large white letters against a completely
black screen, with a pint of tea in my belly and a cat
at my feet.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this
aesthetic, it might be hard to imagine, but it's a
combination that could never fail to make me happy.

But the fact is, I'm tired, and somewhat anxious.
Anxious about being tired; for, what if I were to stay
this tired forever? And tired from being anxious.

How does a person break out of this sort of feedback
loop? I feel like I need to take slow steps towards
recovery, like the proverbial learning to walk again.
As it is, I feel like I've been larded with effort:
the effort to smile, the effort to speak, the effort
to work, and so forth and so on.

How did this happen? I suspect I have not had or
maintained clear boundaries about my energy
expenditure; I've allowed myself to be overextended,
not in any one particular dimension of life, but in
many. And of course I take responsibility for the
demands placed on my time and energy: I'm the one who
says "yes" or "OK" to too much.

So, to refresh, but also, I hope, to learn! Because
otherwise, how many more days will go by walking burnt
out? How much time in my life have I already spent in
this mode? -- maybe then I didn't know any better.

What do I say "yes" to? Perhaps more to the point, I
tire myself out by repeating phrases, ideas, or
actions that I haven't learned to say "no" to; that I
don't understand or appreciate; and perhaps I imagine
that if I work harder, if I think harder, or if I feel
more intensely, I will either adjust or manage to
bring about some change.

At these times, I seem to neglect what I know about
what makes an "interface", in other words, what makes
change of any sort possible.

Viewed positively, it might be that enough repetition
does bring about an eventual crisis wherein something
happens: but this crisis is taxing and the whole
process seems inefficient. An analysis in terms of
the "productive crisis" neglects all the other
possible paths.

When hesitant feelings nag at me, why do I push them
aside? Or, why do I push through emotional
underbrush, this difficult-feeling stuff, ignoring a
perfectly reasonable path?

Perhaps it's just because the path goes in a different
direction. Or perhaps I've built up an immunity to
listening to aspects of my emotional self, over time,
some sort of polarizing filter that blocks out certain
possibilities that, if I tried them, I'd find most
salutory.

Well, I wonder now -- if the notion of "balance" isn't
itself suspect, since it is what allows these giant
towers to be erected. They can't last.

March D

Rather than continuing with the daily countdown, which
seems so morbid if I actually do it, and which is hard to
force myself to do anyway, I think that since my schedule
is broken into months and the months into weeks, I
might just post weekly progress reports. These seem
to have considerably less "doom" associated with them,
and, besides, it brings my attention back to what I
was planning to work on anyway.

Basically, some things are "behind", some things are
"on time", some things I think I could knock out quite
easily right away. Over the weekend it seems like
my life flared up and work was almost impossible.
However, I'm not in disaster mode: this week is
pretty fresh, and I can also get started thinking about
April. Right now it's early afternoon and I want
to keep track of the "transvaluation" I described
earlier. It's always a bit tricky after romping around
emotionally and so on, to get back to doing "one
thing at a time". But the prospects seem pleasant,
too. This evening I'll look at some of the easy to
knock out things: today, on Arxana.

This week I'm planning to: prepare a seminar
on upcoming milestones and previous prototypes,
catch up with my revisions to the Emacs frontend,
and, if possible, add some of the old frontend
features back in. And: activate the auto-installer;
give the search-engine installation another
once over to hopefully make something work
there. It would seem daunting if I wasn't intent
on doing "one thing at a time"!

(PS. Fun to have guest postings on Gathatoulie
now, thanks TKT!)

This is extremely amusing to me.

Bill Gates bought a book of da Vinci's scientific notes for ~$30M, and put a few images from it into his screensaver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

On the other hand, the unix world's premier screensaver, xscreensaver, features several running examples of topics of modern scientific curiosity including strange attractors and flock behavior, as well as fluid dynamics (one of da Vinci's favorite topics!). These are mostly contributed by enthusiasts as Free Software, offered voluntarily.

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

Perhaps nothing else so concisely describes the fundamental differences between these two worlds, and their respective audiences.

now playing

WHY I LIKE THEATER THE BEST

why can't this last forever?
because we all have to go back to
our 'normal lives'; "we are not so
self-indulgent as to want to stay
and talk forever -- or are we?"

"Speak your mind (or heart), if
you know what it's saying!"

Moments when we've
had each other's attention...
last forever?

soundtrack challenge

Here's a short and either annoying or interesting challenge:

Make a biography of yourself in the form of "the ultimate
mix tape". I suppose we should call it a playlist, in these
electronic times.

I'm wondering what these mixes will say -- about us as
people -- or otherwise!

My friend Tim and I initially tried to collaborate on ONE
ultimate mix -- but we quickly realized that a person's
taste in music is just too personal to do something like
this on a consensus basis.

My guess is that a true "ultimate mix" might be almost
as personal as a fingerprint. So the second part of
the challenge is: once we have these fascinating
records of our personal taste, what can we do with
them?

transvaluation of all values

I've decided that the most sensible thing to do is
to follow a schedule: take care of the cats in the
mornings and do work for money in the evenings.
Leave everything else open for doing my thing.

But this says something else even more interesting.
It says that lumping absolutely everything into
one bundle is completely detrimental to the
creative processes that share in this ill fate.

87

I wonder if I'm overwhelmed or underwhelmed.
It's one thing to have too many things going on;
its' another not to have enough energy to really
do anything. Actually, I think what I'm trying to do
is "manage my energy"; so for example, I put
fairly minimal energy into the project description
I just http://metameso.org/ideas.txt

(I guess we're on a need-to-know basis when
it comes to this Noosphere stuff, and apparently
the world at large needs to know, but there's
a "but" -- and somehow that discrepancy could
take some energy to deal with.)

It's at the point where even if I don't have
(or make?) energy for much of anything else,
I need to spend my my reserve on the things
that pay me! What I'd really like would be to
have some time set aside for creative play;
that isn't as simple as just juggling the items
in my calendar; there are more organic
conditions involved.

88 (retrospective)

I worked on installing Sphinx (http://www.sphinxsearch.com),
Monster Mountain (http://code.google.com/p/mmtn/),
LaTeXML (http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/) and a little bit
on Hunchentoot (http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/).

So far, I learned that my old Monster Mountain "Multi-User
Semantic Network" code works as I had left it -- but there
will be a lot of hacking left to do. Sphinx installed, but
there will be some configuring to do. I did get
LaTeXML working as evidenced by this webpage:
http://metameso.org/~joe/vacuous2.html
Hunchentoot will have to wait until tomorrow or later.

I also did a quick scan through the PlanetMath corpus;
an initial survey of the way users have made their
bibliographies.

Vis a vis search: I was musing about the possibility of
storing each word that's input in any form in a separate
record, then putting in links to the places where the
words appear. That would be a lot of words and links;
I should ask Aaron Krowne about this.

More thoughts about organizations: building an organization
that develops policy is a great idea, but the policy's
going to need to go somewhere (we need a meta-policy
that isn't just talk).

contemporary ills treated with medicina de amor?

We are becoming ++infantile into older ages.
Might as well monetize it for myself.
The best sort of investments, are the ones intimately
tied into society continuing. Because if it doesn't continue,
all the investments are worthless. -- TKT

QUESTION: As a society, are we understanding
human nature better, so as to be better able to address
the concerns and issues one faces as a human via
the agency of persons in various expert-knowledge
domains, or are we suffering from certain increasing
agonies that are particular to the modern age, included,
but not limited to, alienation brought about by
hyperspecialization? -- Olli and Joe

ANSWER: (1) "If the three ages of the concept are
the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial
professional training, only the second can save
us from falling from the heights of the first into
the disaster of the third -- an absolute disaster
for thought, whatever its benefits may be, of
course, from the viewpoint of universal
capitalism." -- Deleuze and Guattari, "What
is Philosophy?"

(2) Que tan mal me porte mi corazón
que me tiene tanto rencor
y me ve muriendo por culpa de tu amor.
[...]
Donde vayas mi amor
te guiaré porque no guardo rencor
en mi corazón en mi corazón.
-- Raulin Rodriguez, "Medicina de Amor"

(3) You know that little clock, the one on your
VCR, the one that's always blinking twelve
noon 'cause you never figured out how to get
in there and change it?"
-- Laurie Anderson, "Same Time Tomorrow"

THE QUESTION AGAIN?:

I suspect that I too am caught in tight loops,
for one thing, the loop that undermines my
own best efforts at "self-salvation", "self-liberation",
or "escape artistry". But these loops feed
back across the entire field of my experience.
It's like any sickness: the symptoms are
evidence of the body fighting the malady.

I think the question doesn't necessarily have
a whole lot to do with society. Yes, society
exists, but society is made up of individuals,
individual relationships, and relationships
between relationships. (This reductive
model that turns fields of experience
into pairwise relationships, or, in other
words, which narrates, would, of course,
be a problem worse than any cure if
we did not also consider maps that
go in the opposite direction, from
narration/language to experience,
e.g. "spells".) More to the point, "society"
(such as "the society of women") is
experienced in the body, or even
more to the point, by creative
subjectivities who are inclined to
make more of it than what they found
there in the first place.

And yet, there's no doubt that there is
something called human knowledge,
and folks can draw on it within and
even formatively-for their experiences.
Introducing the whipping boy of
"intellectuals", "specialists", "experts",
or even "celebrities" seems likely to
go along with the fancy psychological
move of introjection -- "a process wherein
the subject replicates in itself behaviors,
attributes or other fragments of the
surrounding world, especially of other
subjects" -- in other words, it seems
to be a move that will result in
self-castigation, or blaming oneself
for trying to solve the problem,
especially trying to solve the problem
by thinking about it.

It seems that among the various
imperatives (bodily, psychic, and
uncanny) the bodily is most likely
to dominate the others, to shove
them around, as it were. "Investing
in society" probably means finding
ways to build psychic and uncanny
counter-balances to the imperious
body. This does indeed seem
to imply "generating economic
traction/leverage" as one of several
approaches (it's important that
you said "monetize it FOR MYSELF"),
but it also seems like there are
other ways to think about things.

Ultimately, since we mostly create or
are complicit in, implicated in, or
even in some sense redeemed
by, the creation of our problems --
after all, that's what it means to be
"adults" -- we should look carefully
at the value of having, and maintaining,
problems.

This is the question, restated:
how are problems to be valued?

ACCORDINGLY, in order to establish
a process whereby we can effectively
answer this question:

Whether we see things as getting
better or worse in society or in
our lives, whether we harbor resentment
or do not harbor resentment, and
however we go about dealing with
them once we've sort of kind of
figured out what they are, we should
be vigilant about learning how our
problems are valued, by ourselves, by
others, by society; whether positively,
negatively, or from some other range
of values altogether ("Lady Sings
the Blues")....

<fade out to Tori Amos' cover of
"Strange Fruit">
http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=166877&song=Strange+Fruit

89 (retrospective)

Today I didn't opt to write a blog entry...
I've been having annoying back pain about
as bad as I've ever had. Luckily I also had
a health coaching session with my Aunt,
and developed a strategy that should
improve the back pain. It seems like I'm
on my way to having a more balanced existence:
which I realized recently is the source of most
of the drama in my life is the need for balance,
and intense efforts at self-communication regarding
the same.

I updated the publicly accessible files at
http://www.metameso.org/ and revised the
PDF version of my plan to reflect the 3-month
timeline I'm on. I think that the rest of the week
will go pretty well if I put forth a more consistent
effort.

To be fair, I did have an interesting
conversation about organizational principles and
peer-production cultures; all of which seems to
have matured in my life while I wasn't looking.

90

I cut up the plan at http://metameso.org/files/plan.pdf and rearranged
it so that it
would make sense on a 3-month schedule.

The overview is:

THEMATIC: The plan is settled and even nicely arranged. Now
just run it.

ONGOING: Do creative writing as a way to push the system forward
while maintaining full emotional investment in the project.

THEMATIC 2: What's this about, philosophically? I should be able
to say something to the public about it right now. In short, it's
about metamesology and empowerment.

MONTH 1: Getting everything set, goals stated, initial contacts.

MONTH 2: Major implementation push (now that my brain has
everything all nicely loaded up). What am I really going to be
able to do about all the things I wanted to do something about?
Be more public now that I can share the implementation process.

MONTH 3: Review and check work: did I achieve what I set out to
achieve? If it seems suitable, look at the browser within a browser"
as a key app. Where there are still loose ends, what can I say for
posterity? Do a final publicity run.

Since I already made a syllabus for March, I wonder how well
the overview and the cut-up plan matches what I said in that
syllabus. This week one of the things I'm going to focus on
is revisiting the plan -- that's well-underway, obviously. The
other project is to work on loading peripherals into my server,
which will help with getting things loaded into my mind too.

So that's the plan for today and this week. For future days,
also expect updates on what my creative writing experiments
are turning into, too.

Yesterday I just tried some random permutations of phrases:

(defun argument ()
(interactive)
(let ((content ...))
(nth (random (length content)) content)))

Since the phrases are interesting, random selections of
them are also interesting. However, I'm keen on the idea
of working with the content in a more structured way;
the new peripherals will help with that...

91

Between the idea of having a schedule (my sister works 9-to-5)
and having a syllabus (my gf has weekly task lists), it seems I
can hardly go wrong! I broke the rest of the month up into weekwise
portions and then created 4x6 cards with task lists for each week.
Will repeat at the start of next month. Now I gotta go look at
the first list to see what's "on" for today!

92

92 days left on my lease
92 days left in which to listen and learn to listen to myself.
92 days left which could end in celebration
92 days in which I have to earn my keep
92 days in which I can go for a walk
92 days that can end in sleep.

Right now I'm feeling somewhat fatigued, recovering from
or just suffering from, a cold. I feel like doing work amounts
to reaching "out of" something sluggish; but I also feel,
having had a nice cup of tea, a sense of excitement, too,
and excitement isn't sluggish, so there is something there
to reach to.

I wonder about setting up a schedule, but I also think that
when I'm sick probably isn't the time. I can go out, though,
and try to shake myself up some.

I'm somewhat proud of my "writing the contours of my life",
but I know that a mere collection of snippets isn't adequate
to such writing. Listening to this lecture by
Zizek makes me think that writing a mere collection of
snippets is cynical:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2530392910118230001
and that going beyond it towards something more special
is a much better idea.

I like the idea of working despite being zoned out.
Working on PlanetMath stuff could be fun to do in
this modality, even. I do want to get these little
essays on "transparency" finished up and circulated
soon -- so I can go on to other more "routine"
tasks. As for Arxana tasks - it's interesting because
my energy doesn't want to conform to either
setting up a good programming environment under
OS X or installing Linux, even though these both
seem like reasonable activities. I was reflecting
this morning that using the server provides me
with everything I need in terms of basics for Lisp,
and it is a good motivating place to do things like
work on an HTML presentation of some of the
work -- and besides, a lot of the programming I
want to do will be Emacs, so I don't need to upload
new Lisp code at every juncture. It makes me a
little nervous, thinking about doing programming
over the connection, but I think that's irrational,
and it would save me the trouble of installing
Linux (until later -- I should probably do that
soon) or figuring out how to make the program
work on this OS X (which again seems worth
doing at some point).

I have yet to look at the printouts of my "plan" --
maybe that would be a good place to start
the next phase.