True Love (Crushing Loneliness)

So yeah, Furry sex doll, apparently - not the I knew these things beforehand, O Wicked Internet, what horrors you have shown me - very well constructed, using space age plastics and synthetic skin and all kinds of space age stuff. IE Expensive. But that's what coin is for - to drop. And what else but beer and wood does this bachelor have to buy? So sad.

I surmise with no actual facts or data that we are living in an unparalleled age of loneliness, the likes the world has never dreamed. Millions of men and women walled up somewhere far away from others, even if physically close (ya ever think about apartment walls, and how close someone else's life is like two feet away?). In most of human history you had little choice but to hang out with at least some other people. There were no single apartments for the rabble in 500 BCE, I assure you.

Loneliness breeds lots of things, one of them - weirdness. How could it not? And so for the last 50-100 years we in the "west" have been building a whole new humanity - Virtual. Living physically isolated from others yet hooked in via electronic entertainment. This new humanity is going to be weird.

Orangutan Surfing Civilization

A real thing, fictionally speaking. Check it out: KAMANDI!!! What a crazy piece of work. Love it. I am enthralled with the idea of complete fictional worlds/universes - mythology, comic books, fantasy, sci-fi, etc. Nerd stuff, to be sure. It's the details that ultimately hook me - back stories, character connections, different but consistent rules for reality (magic, technology, super powers, etc). Mythology and religion are like this too, of course, but with a great deal more respect given, though not always deserved. Not as entertaining either.

The Orangutan Surfing Civilization sounds like awesome times.

Family Hostage Syndrome

Let's guess who's the number one Trek fan here: One of the kids? Mom? Dad?

The answer's probably Dad, of course, because who else could command such a thing? Dad is BOSS of the family and whatever whims or fancies strike him become the reality for the rest of the family. If that be Trek costumes for all, so be it. Perhaps you could only be so lucky. Bible Thumpin' Dad's are usually super fun!

These folks seem mostly happy. Mom seems a bit chagrined, but alas, such is the curse of telepathy.  If it makes you happy, go for it. If you have to go along because it makes others happy, that's a choice you have to make.

We make it real

The discussion in the last post got me to thinking: What is real? I have a hard time answering the question, actually, since I see all these different levels, and what might be considered real on one level is not on another.

But, to wit: What is most "real" is what our body tells us is real, even if it's actually fake. For example, anxiety can be based on nothing, but the effects of anxiety are real on the body, via chemicals and hormones. Here's a neat trick I have learned using this phenomena: Say you are feeling sluggish, down, lazy etc. But you need to be more alert. Here's the trick: Imagine yourself in a fight. Imagine it in as much detail as you can - you're being chased, attacked, beaten by a mob, etc....


Your mind will make these imaginings real, and will release chemicals, which in turn will affect your body, producing a desired effect. In essence, you are tricking your body to react as it's designed to, but artificially. You will feel the rush of adrenaline when there was no real cause for this, other than you making it so.

This is the power I am getting at - to shape the fiction of our existence towards your desired goals. It requires, essentially, awareness and then control over your mind. To the degree of that control comes a degree of "making reality as you see fit".


Maybe.

Behold the Internet

This is a graphical representation of the Internet. It's gussied up to make it look interesting, but what it represents is accurate: The core connections which make up the network we call the Internet. It is a distributed network, in that multiple main nodes can be lost and the network will still function, and in this, and more, the internet shares many characteristics with a living nervous system.

AI awaits, I assume.

Form is Emptiness, cont.

The old Buddhist maxim: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is form. Its one of the foundational concepts of Buddhism, and can be difficult to fully grasp. I'm not sure I do, even to this day, even after decades of thinking about it.

But look at this here picture of a Helium atom. Some key concepts to realize, about our reality: According to quantum physics, there are no concrete and tangible "things" in this picture. There are just probabilities that a molecule will be in a certain place at a certain time - witness the "cloud" around the central nucleus - it's not an electron shell or wall, but rather a range of electrically charged orbits.

Consider also the vast emptiness contained within each atom -- atoms are, by far, mostly empty space. That is, the very thing that builds up everything we are and see around us are by far, empty spaces. This vast emptiness is mirrored on the macro scales in the distances between stars, between galaxies, between galaxy clusters, and so on till no doubt we're talking about vast, vast, vast distances between different universes.... and this is all within our "dimension" - there could be many, many (infinite?) more.

Finally, consider that matter is simply highly compacted energy (E=Mc2). 


I could go on and on and on, and even then I know I'm missing something. To wit, however: Some 2500 years ago, The Buddha and his Buds somehow understood the very foundations of physics, of our reality, and our place in it. 

It's inspiring.

ALL UR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

Seriously. Political Ads in video games?

On the one hand, I'm skeptical this will generate many votes in relation to the dollars spent;

On the other, every vote matters, and this ad campaign (which is underway with several on-line video games) shows in a visceral way the breadth and depth of the Obama campaign, and the dollars they have at their disposal.

Make no mistake: The Obama campaign is the best run campaign of my lifetime, and probably yours as well. While they've made a couple of mistakes I could identify (the Obama Seal), these are minor compared to the breathtaking competence and... shall I say, gameplay, of Team Obama. They beat the Clinton machine in large part because they understood the game better (primaries, caucusus, momentum, etc). The same is happening in the General.

Obama will be President. And he will have a legion of gamers ready to do battle in cyberspace.