General – Page 62 – Letter Never Sent

General — 3 Comments
10
Feb 05

Running from the nothing

It’s unwritten blog rule that you should never talk about how bored you are. The point being why would anyone else want to hear about it? Unfortunately, that is my central problem. I am utterly bored with existence. Few things touch me anymore as I travel slowly through time. Under what rock do you find conveniently placed transcendent moments?

I have fantasies where I sell everything I own, put a few choices pieces in storage, and leave town in the dead of the night like a fugitive. I think I would actually enjoy the life of a fugitive. The idea of escape is pleasing as is the hope that some day, somewhere else, you could achieve happiness. We are all on the run, from a sentence with no hope of appeal or parole. As long as we stay one step ahead we live to see the next day. This is what makes escape ejoyable, the freedom of flight.

Psychology

It seems like everyone has an escape mechanism, an addiction of some sort. The desire for or relief from sensation. Something to dampen, mute, or divert. Addiction is the eroticism of feeling itself, not just bodily sensation, but also emotional sensation. Many choose to feel anything rather than nothing and push themselves up or down with sensation. When emotion drains away what do you have left? More to the point, when you strip away the emotion what is left of you? Our feelings and emotions anchor consciousness.

Questions:

What do you use to escape?
Where do you seek relief? In activity? In knowledge? In memory?
Why do you seek escape? What from?

Many of my habits have a impulsive nature. For example, a number of my activities have to do with desires for control, predictability, and stability. Why do I read the news so often? Why do I try to know as much as I can about so many different things? The thirst for knowledge and understanding can represent a desire for control, especially control of experience. I do not deal well with unknowns. Knowledge is not power, although it provides the sensation of power and control. But, what can be known and what are the limitations of knowledge? What we try to know dispels the maddening intangibility of the unknown. It lends a false sense of definition and order to a universe of incomprehensibility.

I feel the same way about history and the past. People who fear powerlessness idealize the past and imbue it with sentiment and importance at the expense of the elusive being of the present (action-oriented responsibility?) and the yet to be of the future (forethought-oriented responsibility?). In a real sense, the past is powerless to your own perception and can be manipulated and fetishized. The past imposes few responsibilities, while the future and present dictate volition.

I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear. I’ve just been thinking out loud. Here are some semi-related psychology links I found today that are worth reading:

A psychoanalysis of gambling and gambling addiction
For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be ‘Evil’ Dr. Stone represents another attempt at defining the incomprehensible, in this case “Evil”:

Researchers have found that some people who commit violent crimes are much more likely than others to kill or maim again, and one way they measure this potential is with a structured examination called the psychopathy checklist.

As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on a 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true.

General — 2 Comments
08
Feb 05

Life never gets easier, thankfully

Life provides its lessons if you try to listen, but attentiveness is not natural. It is easier to pretend, ignore, or distract one’s self from the immensity surrounding every moment. Life is complex and yet what often needs understanding seems simple.

How do you reconcile your desires with your responsibilities? I often think about the ego, my “self”. It presents both a barrier and a window to reality. Most of the time, it’s a barrier. It gets between everything and filters my experience like a gatekeeper against unpleasantness. My mind controls experience so much so that I have to second guess my own impressions. Am I getting the right idea? Am I attentive enough to what is actually going on? What am I missing? You can only experience something through the window of the self, but how do you get beyond it? Is it Buddha who preached detachment and self-denial? That seems like just another form of vanity, the masochistic inversion of egotism.

General — 2 Comments
08
Feb 05

Two hands against

Time flows and erodes my simmering volcanic landscape. Jagged edges are subdued, and gnawing waters reveal hidden interiors.

Society / Software / Internet — 5 Comments
26
Jan 05

Grouphug.us

When I need a quick dose of human reality (or voyeurism?) I visit grouphug, the anonymous confession website. Some confessions are heart-wrenching, but many are as you would expect, portraying the most widespread and ordinary themes of human suffering: lust, heartbreak, frustration, depression, loss, rage, and pain. It would be interesting to break down the confessions into types. Here’s one I found funny due to its wiseass disingenuousness and its reference to the movie, Breaking Away.

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I am a cutter too, I guess. My friends and I are all cutters. Our dads work in Indiana at a rock quarry. I am an excellent cyclist and my friend Dennis is not too bad either. One time he swam into a flooded quarry and pretended to be locked into a refridgerator. So the Italian cycle team is coming to our tonw to ride in the big race, the local college is having a race before hand that I think i can win. Once a I was practicing riding my ten speed on the Interstate and this truck driver was sticking his hand out eh window to let me know hiow fast i was going then a cop pulled him over. hahahaa

Media / Software / Internet — 1 Comment
20
Jan 05

Unabashed praise

I work for a company that publishes video games. It’s just expected that you spend some amount of time playing games and staying current, otherwise when everyone is talking about the latest thing they’re playing you won’t know what they’re talking about. You have to stay in context.

The biggest thing to happen in a long time is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (wikipedia entry). Everyone I know is playing it and new people get sucked in all the time. It is that good. I don’t even play subscription games and I’m playing it. Even people who have never played an online game before have caught the WoW bug. It’s a phenomenon.

They have sold somewhere around 500,000 copies of the game and their current active subscribers are estimated at 350,000. That’s in just two months. Each one of those 350,000 people pays $14.95 a month to play. It’s no wonder traditional media giants like Fox and Viacom are itching to get a piece of online gaming action. When you compare it to the time you spend watching cable television it is not difficult to justify the expense. It is bigger than Everquest 2 and it is scaring the crap out of anyone who is expecting to compete with it in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online games, as they say in the biz). The game is just that good. It is not revolutionary, but it takes ideas from everywhere and does everything well. Quality speaks for itself. WoW removes any arguments for producing a bad game. A game can be done of the highest calibre.

If you’re looking for a new experience, World of Warcraft is a game that’s fun, accessible, flexible and deep. Check out their website and let me know what you think. I’m the warlock “Sivori” on Sargeras server. Send me a message and we’ll go fishing.

Media / Software / Internet — 1 Comment
18
Jan 05

More on Wired / Gawker media: Wired Conflicts of Interest

Today I had to laugh when I saw the following press release from Wired Magazine: “WIRED Magazine Announces Nominees for Sixth Annual Wired Rave Awards“. The most cursory investigation reveals evidence of Wired’s continued conflicts of interest passed off as journalistic appreciation, this time in the way it promotes its business / advertising partners for their apparently meaningless Rave awards.

I’d love a little info on the nomination process as at least two of the five nominated blogs, Kevin Sites Blog and Wonkette (owned by Gawker Media Corp.), have direct business relationships to Wired Media. It should be no surprise that nominees for the Rave Awards are selected and judged by the editors of Wired Magazine. If you continue down the list of nominees you might discover similar relationships, but these were the most obvious.

I detailed this sort of cross-promotion previously. In this case, it is glaring. For example, Wired Media’s resident journalist-bloggeur Xeni Jardin is credited on Kevin Sites Blog as the site producer and creator. Xeni Jardin also lists Kevin Sites Blog on her personal website as one of her projects, yet this somehow does not disqualify the site from competing for “Rave” awards promoted by her employer in the Blogger category.

Furthermore, the aforementioned Wonkette is wholly owned by Nick Denton’s corporate alter-ego, Gawker Media Corp., and staffed by paid blogger Ana Marie Cox. The fact that Ms. Cox is a paid blogging employee should be disqualifying enough, but let’s not forget that Wonkette’s parent company and Wired Media have an open business partnership involving another of Gawker Media’s hot “blogging” properties, Gizmodo. On Gizmodo’s front page they promote Wired’s Gadget Lab newsletter and have done so for many months. An exchange of lucrative advertising space and who knows what else. Gizmodo’s promotion of Gadget Lab almost certainly has more to do with promoting Wired’s own magazine subscriptions (why else would you join an email newsletter?) and advertisers than it has to do with an appreciation of gadgets.

This is exactly the sort of thing most people hate about the “blogging” world. The pretense is that these individuals craft an image of a reality that does not exist and they have that power because of their credibility as journalists and media experts. These nominated blogs and individuals are important because Wired and its editors say they are. But what if the editors / judges are friends or business partners with their subjects? Where is the line between journalistic appreciation and conflict of interest? Or, the line between blogging and advertising-driven hackery? At the very least, if you have a direct relationship with the organization in charge of the nomination and award process you should be disqualified.

General — Comments Off
18
Jan 05

Jean Paul quotations

I came across a brief mention of something in reading yesterday. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, also known simply as Jean Paul, was a “German poet and writer best known for the novel Siebenkas (1796), which introduced the conept of the doppelganger or alter ego.” There is a strange overlap in the things I have been reading especially as relates to duality, etc.

Jean Paul is credited with some beautiful quotations:

Every man has a rainy corner of his life whence comes foul weather which follows him.
Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it charm.
There is a joy in sorrow which none but a mourner can know.
Nothing is more beautiful than cheerfulness in an old face.

Here is something related that you might find interesting:

Kant’s “Noumenal Self” and Doppelganger in P.K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly

Psychology / Religion/philosophy — Comments Off
18
Jan 05

More O.W.

I’m keep coming across good passages from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Bear with me:

On the self and others, individualism and universalism:

It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is no “thou,” there is certainly no “I”, and that would mean there is nothing.

There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest individualism is the highest universalism.

the old stuff