Let Go (Death at 3AM)

I like it clean fast painless sudden and full
I don't wanna die slow
I don't wanna die old
I want my last memory be whatever I do
Don't keep me on hold
I wanna let go

I wanna live it fast make it good while it lasts
I wanna breathe miracles dive deep into life's lusts
I wanna know the happy and amazing I can see and do
I wanna know my strange limits when I get screwed

Like a typhoon earthquake rainbow and snow
I'm not here to stay
I'm changing everyday
Like the changing heavens I'm a phenomenon
I am real for now
But I will have my turn

When I go burn everything I have
Delete all my mail, let me leave no trail
Don't seek don't search you know the drill
And you'll always keep the memories of me when I was once real

Commitment is when you spend good money on a good stick - mastery is when any old stick will do.

IMAGINE: If one day technology provides inexpensive tools for the common man to directly alter and manipulate consciousness itself, all religion would undergo a profound change.

Danger without death
Progress without pain
Community without commitment
Security without struggle
Butchery without blood

If life includes the birth, the death, and everything in between, how can one be pro-life without also being pro-birth and pro-death? If one were pro-staying-alive, does it also mean one is anti-death? If one is anti-death, where does one find the resources to make pro-birth sustainable? Can the future actually be anti-death and anti-birth? If death were defeated to the point of making birth taboo, is extinction inevitable? Is being anti-extinction the same as being anti-life?

#redpillbluepill Sometimes I wonder if the reason all this feminism isn't working is because women prefer to make use of their gender to negotiate a position where they are able to delegate responsibilities that are not essential for progressing evolution to those willing to help them secure resources while accepting as a reasonable trade off the sacrifice of those of the same gender without the skills to navigate such negotiation. I cannot otherwise imagine a human being coming up with lame excuses and confusing signals to influence those around them instead of simply going ahead to do what they have to to achieve what they want.

Sleep

Sleep is like a horny gentleman
Unremarkable and not particularly interesting
The kind of date we'd go out with when everyone else is busy, and quickly forget
Once our schedule gets filled up with more exciting endeavors
But we also forget
That he waits silently in our beds
Face toward the wall, night after night
For a shagged bag of us to return
Worn and bruised
To allow ourselves to fall in
Face down
As we let go of all inhibitions
And give in to his skillful ravishing of our bodies
Filling us up
With a strange satisfaction
As we stare into the darkness behind our eyelids
Recounting how we kill ourselves
One day at a time.

Legalization isn't the macro version of self-abandonment. Legalization is the macro version of self-acceptance. It's looking at the mirror and recognizing what you need to live with to move on.

Truth is the blanket term we give to everything that we are unable to show to be falsehood by proving that two rules that arbitrarily belong to a system cause a contradiction to occur. Which is to say, while truth is not caused by falsehood, that the concept of truth cannot preexist the concept of falsehood, just like the concept of darkness cannot preexist the concept of light.

And truth, in that sense, is very much like darkness - in that one single ray of light can render darkness imperfect, just as one single shadow of falsehood, can render truth imperfect; but only because light attempts to define according to its own qualities what darkness is, just as falsehood attempts to define according to its own standards what truth is - but before light, and before falsehood, everything is dark, everything is true, and nothing is dark, and nothing is true.

But in a post-light world existing as a creature that uses (visible) light to sense the world, I can experience only a fraction of what everything out there really is: whatever I believe to be true does not in the slightest way change the undefinable reality - but what I believe to be false, gives shape to everything that is reality is to me.

#myworld

Nobody is ever "ready" for anything - until after the decision is made and there's no going back.

Chrysalis

We make secrets and keep them
Unspeakable, like a pleasurable pain,
Because picking out the weakest,
The part we feel most vulnerable,
And hiding it like a bruise from our most beloved
Gives us the comfort of telling ourselves
We have become stronger than
That part of us we have bullied into silence : ( never realizing that
The stronghold of smiles we surrounds ourselves with
Betrays the exact shape of that which we have built our fortress around - )
Until one day we suddenly realize
That in the dimensions of time we are all fragile -
Free to be broken
Like the cocoon of an emerging butterfly
Broken to be free.

WAKE UP PPL!

WAKE UP PPL!
1. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's for you.
2. Just because it's illegal doesn't your children aren't already doing it.

If we were a society of superheroes we would not build public infrastructure that only the able bodied can use, build economic systems that profit only the affluent and intelligent, and slap the word "disabled" on people and tell them how they should live. With more power comes more responsibility - but more power does not equate more privilege, and more responsibility does not mean more rights.

Isn't it strange that we feel comfortable and even positive about dressing children up in clothes worn by people from a different culture or religion, but clothes from a different gender is taboo?

IMAGINE: What if there were something as the "freedom of censorship" where you have a legal right realized through laws and technology to at a personal level completely remove all news and speech surrounding an individual, organization, or government?

What I learnt from Second Son

Just completed my first ever console game, and thought I feel uniquely qualified to write something about it, having 3 decades - including 1 year in the games industry -  successfully avoiding seriously playing any game. I used to dismiss the whole gaming thing on two reasons - 1) you will never get anything useful out of it 2) it's a waste of time.

What made me change this was that I decided I wanted to try something I have never done in my life. Sure there are things like bungie jumping and stuff, but playing a game seemed something very accessible that weekend. Plus, I could do with better hand-eye coordination. So without second-guessing my decision, I went out and bought myself a PS4.

Did some rudimentary googling and decided to buy Second Son from the InFamous series. It's "action adventure" - action, meaning you fight people, adventure, meaning there's a storyline. Action would not have been the genre I'd enjoy ten years ago, but hey people do change. Since my ex-colleagues used to say games are like movies, I decided to go with the genre I have come to enjoy.

To cut the story short, let me spend the rest of this piece simply listing down what I have taken away from the game - and why it's not been a waste of time:

(1) I didn't know how bad my hand-eye coordination was
I use the computer extensively and my hands always get the work done more quickly than people can understand what I am doing on the computer. But I realized that what I had was not hand-eye coordination, but hand-mind coordination. I had a mental image of what reality was, and my hands responded very rapidly to what my mind was simulating. But the problem was, my visual feedback was kind of disconnected from the system. I processed visual stimulus more consciously than I needed to, and I found myself hitting all the wrong buttons. Not to mention, PS4 comes with the "DualShock 4" game controller which has two joysticks, one arrow pad for the 4 directions, four thumb-controlled action buttons, and four index-finger-controlled action buttons - on top of the non-gaming buttons which you don't want to accidentally press. It was kind of confusing in the beginning, but the controller itself was like another keyboard so my hand-mind coordination helped there, but it was the game itself - I saw the guy coming at me, but by the time I responded, I was dead.

(2) Motion Sickness
As mentioned earlier, the DualShock 4 has two joysticks. For some games you won't need both, but in 3D worlds, you'd use one to move your character around, and the other to move the perspective (ie, camera) around. Having to move the camera around was really new to me - I had dabbled in some 3D design moving viewports around, but not at this speed. Not at the speed where you needed to look up and down and behind you while at the same time running to stay alive. The first day on the game I felt a tad like vomiting - and realized it was motion sickness. My mind was not adjusted enough to handle such fast changes in visual input.

(3) Flexible two-way thinking
At some point I came to this stage I couldn't pass. It was here that instead of asking myself "how do I kill all these people?", I asked "what did the game designer put in here that would make my next task easy?". And after some time, instead of thinking "I'm gonna go all out and kill all these people" I started thinking "what is the most effective way out?"

(4) Fear is irrelevant most of the time
We are programmed to be afraid of being hurt, even when the possibility of getting hurt is tiny. This kind of took hold of me in the beginning - until I drilled it into myself that I can always try again. And trying again and again was in fact more efficient than being too careful in every try. Fear is useful in real-life life-and-death situations, but more often than not, it overpowers and hinders performance.

(5) Deteremination isn't half as good as enjoyment
At some point, even when you apply all the above, there's still some level that you can't seem to pass, because the enemy is just so powerful. You die again and again, and you play through the exact same scenes again and again, to the point when you realize you can make the character do exactly what he did the last time round. This gets interesting because on one hand, the game starts looking boring because you can't win - you can either choose to be determined, or, you can see it as you are learning the game so well you can practise it again and again - and enjoy while you get better at it. The determination approach would sounds like what parents want their kids to learn, but what's the point of buying a game at all, if not to enjoy?

And there you go. 5 key take-aways that helped me discover myself from something that happened in a virtual world, disconnected from even the internet. They say "disconnect to connect". In this case, it is strangely true.

Can't wait to go shopping for my next game!

Random thought: what if we abolished standardized testing and instead have education and learning psychology experts regularly observe every class (via drones) to check on how teachers teach and assess teaching methodology instead?

There's no such word as a teachee, because learning doesn't automatically happen in the presence of teaching. Physical training is a different story. That's why the word trainee exists.

It takes 2 hands to clap and 1 to slap. Thanking people around you doesn't mean you stop thanking yourself for being awesome.

There is no display of power more arrogant than beauty. Thats why nature just has to sit there and we get overpowered by her time and again, like ants getting crushed under the feet of dinosaurs.

If the Roman alphabet were not made to be pronounced in so many ways, if English could not be spoken with so many different accents, if Chinese characters were not modified to be written in so many different versions, if religion were not twisted to mean so many things, if the early days of HTML were not so non-compliant, maybe none of them would have survived. #diversity #trp2015

It's a long night

It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes like zombies we rise again
Into the day we go
Make money spend money repeat
The jobs a sucker
But not bad enough to quit
This is not what I dreamt my life to be about
But I'm lost in orbit and time is running out
I pour my life into everything I write
But I'm an odd beat
The world doesn't need my vibe
So I hide from myself writing code for a living
But regret comes visiting me at night on a time machine
I know the day I'm told I get just one year to live
I'd be writing like my life depended on it
It's be epic it'd be my whole life in print
But deep down I know it's not something you'd pay to read.
It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes and I wished I could have caught some sleep.
It's a long night
It's a long day
It's a short life
But it's a long way
There ain't no ghosts but the nights still haunt the same
Suddenly morning comes.

I miss the sound of USRobotics modems, volume turned down in the middle of the night, rustling ferociously to that satisfying click, like you have finally made that connection back to yourself in a world that's already asleep, released from having to feel how long the night can be.

No family is perfect, but some know how to handle brokenness while others hold on to the belief that it doesn't exist.

TNBT : imagine extra sensory perception

TNBT : imagine extra sensory perception

Next-gen wearables that get implanted into you body and interfaces directly with your brain.

Imagine - Just think about something you want to know and you instantly know it. No longer is there a differentiation between learning and knowing.

Imagine - seeing infrared and electromagnetism, and being able to have extended sight at night.

Imagine - seeing nutritious food getting colored to look more appealing in real time, while junk food getting photoshopped instantaneously to look less delicious.

Imagine - being able to sense the earth's magnetic field and locate yourself like GPS and never getting lost again.

Imagine - being able to smell disease and keeping yourself safe.

Imagine - being able to hear thoughts through other peoples brainwaves.

Imagine - sensory overload, and a class division between those with the capacity to process the additional information, and those who are too stressed out by it.

Imagine - yet another class division between those who can afford implants and those who cannot - with those who can benefitting from being able to make instantaneously professional decisions and those who cannot getting left out.

And the imagine genetic level implants...

Welcome to the post-homosapien world.

Imagine Autism

Imagine that you suddenly had a superpower - one day you woke up and found that you could literally hear people's thoughts. Everywhere you go, you'd hear what people are thinking, like they are speaking it to you.

When you walk into a room full of people, you'd hear their thought all at once. Like they are all trying to talk to you at the same time.

Your brain tries to focus on a few people's thoughts, but you find yourself unable to filter out all the noise. You find big crowds incredibly tiring because you cannot focus in all that noise. It sucks the energy out of you, like you're perpetually in a dance club trying to do your math homework. You spend most of your time indoors, going out only where strictly needed.

But you keep on trying, because you understand that you need to control this "noise" in order to function in society. After a few years of trying, your brain finally manages to filter out most of the noise except those who are within a few meters of you.

But big crowds still tire the hell out of you. You wished you could hear the thoughts of exactly who you want to hear.

But it seems that the sensory perception of thought doesn't work like that. It seems that your brain needs to work very hard to do all that filtering work, to remove what you do not need to hear. It's not like your senses can "target" someone - it's more like your brain functions like a superhuman firewall that monitors and filters every single piece of information coming in to decide if it's better you hear something, or you do not. If your brain had been doing something other than filtering, you probably would have been pretty intelligent. It kinda sucks.

You fight so hard just to function normally. Until one morning.

One morning you woke up and found that all the voices were gone. Not one single voice.

It seems that your brain had found it impossible to filter out single thoughts, and that all this filtering was a waste of energy. It seems that your brain has decided that being unable to tap into this super-power was better for you - it seems like your brain has given up fighting. At least you could now function like an ordinary person.

You wished you could keep some of that super power, but it doesn't work that way. But you do feel very relieved that it's all over. It's something you spent a lot of your life fighting, but not something you want to talk about. It's like an experience that made you so much more, yet you would be deemed so much less if you even hinted at it.

But sometimes you wonder, if there is someone in the world out there, who could live with having such super powers, hearing every single person's thoughts and responding to all their voices where nobody else could, living such impossibly extraordinary lives that you know deep inside you have given up trying to achieve.

There is no equality, neither from birth nor into death - except in our capacity to desire happiness and release.

Eternal life is the single most terrifying, most crippling, and most abusable, and indeed most abused meme the human mind has ever conceived. I don't wanna live forever I wanna be free.

You are your own Master

Sometimes I think a life of knowledge can be like being in a sadomasochistic relationship with yourself, where you, instantly both the dominant and submissive, have decided to play by a pre-agreed set of rules to push through the pain to hit that orgasmic pleasure which simultaneously makes the world around you more real and completely unreal. That's why the knowledgable go around saying that the truth will set you free.

Music - another thought

Music is our most universal endeavor to consciously experience time.

Because music is made of vibrations.
And vibrations is made of rhythm.
Music is not in the pitch but in the beat.

The beat is always moving forward.
It does not stop, it does not wait.
But our experience of the beat is not mechanical.
Sometimes one whole sequence can feel like a split second.
Sometimes one beat can feel like forever.

But if we move with the beat, we become synchronized with it.
We don't feel its passing; we feel it dancing.
That's when we feel like the beat can last forever.

And in that moment, time stops, and we live in an eternity in the space-time of the song.
And we begin to think we understand,
for that moment,
how there can be a reality that continues in its motion
even when all time has ended for us.

I can be anything but ordinary,

because ordinariness is an impossible ideal,

created by leaders and statisticians who want to make you think that

our very existence which makes us inevitably unique can be "resolved" when we align ourselves with Average Joe -

because managing identical "ordinary" people who behave predictably makes their job easier and their reward bigger - by punishing people who do not conform and labeling them "monsters", and by outsourcing the cost of management to the population at large,

who do everything they can to fit into the "average" ideals set in front of them. In that sense,

the only people who can actually become average joes are obsessive idealists - who have paid the price and perfected their art of fitting into that mould of average-ness - what a waste of exceptional talent that would be!

That is why I refuse to be ordinary.

because all life based on evolution hinges on being special.

You, are special.

Go and do your special thing today.

Four Freedoms

Freedom is when you are happy getting tied up using a firm rope that makes visible your comfort zone, knowing that no distance you wander can lead you over the cliff.

Freedom is when pain is so rhythmical you learn ignore it by habit, and when it is taken from you you feel a release that makes you realize you never learnt to truly ignore it.

Freedom is the illusion of free will and informed choice, when you are made to think you are an individual capable of making intelligent decisions unswayed by something out there influencing you for its exclusive benefit.

Freedom is realizing that the experience of freedom is an illusion that exists only when your mind makes you think you are exempt from obeying, even though your act of not obeying in fact obeys the mechanisms of something outside your idea of free will.

Scars

whatever we to do ourselves is what we conclude after agonizing rationalizing to be the best we can do to stay alive in minimal pain. and whoever says otherwise probably never knew what pain is.

The fabric of reality

One person believing makes an idea a dream.

Two people believing makes the idea a promise.

A community believing makes the idea reality.

Taxes

The rich are rich because they are connected to people who give to them.

But the purpose of community is not to create rich people. It's a direct result of us being social animals.

But being social animals is no explanation for community.

We are social animals because we have collectively decided that it is a better strategy to specialize in what we can manage, and allow others to give us what we cannot.

Our communities are strong because we have abstracted and virtualized our ability to collect and transmit our strengths and weaknesses. We are strong because we have things that help us do redistribute our strengths: the internet, logistics, social protocol, language, money.

In that sense, we could attribute part of our strength to taxes - it literally redistributes resources from those who are good at collecting it to those who aren't.

In that sense, taxation is the whole purpose of a certain class of modern communities.

In that sense, the rich are made rich because they are expected to give to the poor.

Unless - unless the rich do not live in communities. Unless the rich do not live in protection of the community: without the protection of law, the trust conferred by money, the mechanisms of efficacy afforded by infrastructure. Unless the rich had nobody to give to them. Unless the rich - were not rich.

That is why I think it's fair to levy extremely high taxes on the ultra rich.

Love on Cloud Seven

Life is like the internet. It doesn't start or end anywhere. You are part of it but you are neither it nor do you own it in any way, but by your very ability to be part of it, you are owned by it.

Your connection and disconnection may look like the birth and death of your life to you, but these alter it in no significant way. That's because life is not something that was birthed into you; you were birthed into life. Birth and death are not complementary to, or opposites of life: they are a strategy of life as much as unreliable connections a strategy of the internet.

Life is self seeking beyond reason. It is an unemotional, fierce, and self-centered force that neither forgives nor forgets but keeps record of all wrongs in its evolving DNA with the sole objective of preserving itself. Life is not about you. To life, you are just another statistic, like how a cell in your body or a bacteria in your guts - nothing more than a sophisticated "naturally" intelligent risk-aware machinery that preserves it.

Love, and love, is everything that you throw at life to make your experience of being conscious a narrative about you.

It is everything that life isn't. It is destructive but gentle, emotional but forgiving, it is personal but able to reach outside the skin, able to acknowledge and embrace other living things that are not physically part of us, and treat them as an integral part of us and call them community, body, enemy, or family.

Love is the cloud on the 7th layer of the internet, the application of life through which we gain faces and create meaning in the hardware that is us. Love is the stories we tell ourselves to makes sense of the world around us. Love is incapable of truth nor falsehood, because love is the stories in which we carve out our reality. It is the ground we stand on and the stars above.

Above all, we need love because it is the one force we have against life's harshness. It is the only thing that keeps is together, and the only real defense in the face of our completely irrational choice of staying alive.

If mobile phones survived the way human beings continue to go on living despite discrimination, disability, attack, abuse, hunger, unpopularity, unconnectedness and isolation, inherited imperfections, disease, hurt and self harm, chronic pain and relapse, we would still be using Nokia 8310s, repaired and upgraded beyond all recognition like a patchwork Frankenstein.

music is the warm breath in your body waiting to dance to the beat of your heart.

All education should be focused on but two things: knowing how to maximize what you can do within your limits, and believing in that dream outside your limits.

The last value-adding stage of any product development does not happen in the studio or at the assembly line. It happens in the hands of the user whose innovation applies the product to create maximum value for the user.

Embracing diversity is key to survival for a well organized population beyond critical mass. Put simply it's simply about not putting all our eggs in one basket.

You are what you wear: your clothes, your smile, and your attitude.

Dark Freedom

Let there be light so that man will know darkness. Let there be bondage so that man will know freedom.

And the peace of the darkness will be taken away by oppressors in shining armor; and the stillness of freedom by the knowledge that blinds.

And man will hunt down the heart of Truth and call it falsehood, so that the whole Truth becomes unknowable.

There is no lie like falsehood - know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.

The Times

From the hole to the pole
From the cradle to the bed
We were all born gold
But the world ain't straight
Bent and torn to fit in the fold
Better hiding in the numbers than be written off dead

I'm a devil I'm an angel I'm a sinner I'm a saint
I'm just trying all I can to survive my game
I was dealt a hand I hate to play
But the Times is a sado-masochistic orgy

We create words
We create minds
We create the Times
We shuffle the deck
And deal it blind.
Who is the master delighting in the pain?
Who is the slave pleasuring in shame?

You could be a minority
Turn the tides of time and you're on our territory
So come and learn
This is how we cope
Music is our party and rhythm is the dope
Don't tell me shit about your law and history
Step into our world and see our reality
It takes a bit of wrongs to live out our rights
But it ain't no biggie this is HOW WE FIGHT!

Maybe the disciples told the reincarnation story the opposite way. Humans should be at the bottom of the ten worlds, and you progress up to poultry when you are enlightened enough to realize how fleeting life is. And you give your life to those of lower understanding than you so they have a living chance. So every time you partake a meal, whatever your struggle, remember someone who was there before you, saw it to the other side of the tunnel and decide to give himself to you so you can live another day.

Come

Come

To the north to the south to the east to the west
I'm roaming the world and I'm looking for rest
I'm high on adrenaline and low on faith
Purpose is a meme and flow is a place
While I walk while I run while I sleep while I fly
Where do the enlightened find heaven in their skies
When I shit when I fuck when I'm sick when I'm fly
Freedom is a drug but satisfaction a lie.

Fee-fye-foe-fum
I'm living on an addiction of teenage boy dreams
Stretch the hamstrings bring out the drums
Age is a bitch but I'm not quite done
Take chances make noise believe in the fight
It's all an illusion but it's worth the run
I don't believe in the soul I don't believe in the past
I am who I am under my skin in my blood

To the east to the west to the north to the south
Humanity is a cancer but we're living it proud
Fee fye foe fum
While life says go till death says come.

Think about it. Our technology is changing our surroundings and forcing the species around us to evolve more quickly. And we use the same technology to delay death and slow down our own evolution.

Think about it. Have have we come to terms we are an abomination of nature, a monster - part organic, part machine? Or have we become subconsciously enlightened, that we are as "renewable" as the forests, destined to be destroyed when we have perfected our weakness through the power of our strengths?

Think about it. Are we ready to modify our own genetic code and fast forward our evolution?

There are always 3 sides to an argument - the proposition, the opposition, and the lesson. Which side are you on?

Bee-beep bibibip

Bee-beep bibibip
Goes my alarm for six-thirty AM
I start to recall what I need to be awake for
Saturday; slam snooze, abort routine, coz
I love waking up early to weekends in bed; Nothing beats
Being alive pretending to be dead
Let the world go on spinning upside down
My world is mine
Till my time is up.

Boom-pah pukumpukumpah
The beat keeps my mind from thinking too hard
I somehow got bootstrapped into this irrational obsession
With glass-walling passion, with playing my part,
I always feel like I'm never living the life
I look the role but I'm fake inside
I'm trying, I'm fighting, I'm working on redemption
I'm better with living when I'm more ready to die
I have death in my blood, you have death in your genes 

We were not made to escape but to live is to defy
Life is a tattoo we wear on our skin
It can't be erased, but we can make it fly

Boom-pah pukumpukumpah
We all need a little zen to get by
But zen doesn't mean you don't get high
We all meet somewhere between the truth and the lie

笑っても泣いても上手くても下手でも私の人生は毎日本番です！！！

We do not really experience time - we experience the discrepancy between our own change and our simulated version of time.

We panic when we start measuring out this discrepancy with our breath. If we breathed time the way a clock holds it between its hands, time, at least our simulation of it, would cease to exist.

We would be freed from our existential panic, and with any luck, we may indeed be freed even from ourselves.

In dance we synchronize ourselves completely with our simulation of time, and in meditation, we strip ourselves from our simulation of time.

Somewhere between dance and meditation is where we usually are when we actually experience the moment instead of our simulation of it.

But being in the moment is like being a raindrop falling into the sea, in that the line the separates ourselves from the sea of moments, disappears.

And thus we do not really experience time - because if we were really experiencing time, we would not be conscious of it. Ignorance is bliss, but how often do we get there?

Turns out ignorance is hard work!

The problem with life is that because of what we do to survive it, we tend to want to believe there is something intrinsically valuable about the pain we live through - to the extent we do everything we can to remember that pain. That is how most countries write their own history for their children. But we know that pain grabs you and cripples you until your mind can think of nothing but the pain, leaving you little to absorb what history really meant to teach you. It is really no wonder what history tends to repeat itself.

All history has equal value to us because it's a database of behavioral patterns. 

History should be analyzed as data, not sold to the younger generation like a patent portfolio used to make claims on powers based on historical precedence.

We are a connected people. All history is our history, because no history happened in isolation. 

What you get when you try to isolate regional histories is not a different history, but a biased narrative of history.

Move

Don't cry don't stop
Let's go let's dance
Move your hips to the beat
Let the rhythm take the run
Don't think don't recall
When there's music in the air you give it everything you have
The past ain't worth reliving with the present in your hands

All the pain all the living
All the need to be existing
All the mornings waking up to yet another day's routine
No ifs no buts no wanting out of this
You choose your own game you gotta play it to the end

Don't cry don't stop
Let's go let's dance
Move your hips to the beat
Let the rhythm take the run
Don't think don't recall
When the day is in your face you give it everything you have
The dream ain't worth the talk with Chance riding on your breath.

Move on the beat
Groove to the flow
You have your condition I have my shit
Stay with the pain
Live through the blow
These are the qualifications I know
Improvise innovate absorb liberate
Here's the situation are you up for it?

Be real. Be fake.
Be there. Be safe.
You only live once
What is the risk?

Don't cry don't stop
Let's go let's dance
Move your hips to the beat
Let the rhythm take the run
Don't think don't recall
When life is breathing in the air you feed it everything you dare
This is your legacy
What do you have?

Don't let anyone make you think that your dreams are in conflict with your situation or social responsibilities. Reality isn't a valid excuse for running away from your dreams - it is the environment in which you will thrive to make your dreams come true.

An actionable definition of : computer program

An actionable definition of : computer program

The experience a user gets when interacting with a machine called a computer, created by controlling how a computer behaves in response to stimulus (called input) from a user, or by controlling how a user responses to the perceived characteristics of the computer's behavior.

It just struck me that there is so little difference between a computer program and music. That the only time you cannot deny it is a program is when someone is running it. That the source code can no more be the program as can music be heard on a manuscript. That while the process of creating the program may be in isolation, the user is part of the program as much as the listener is part of the music. That programs rarely exist in vacuum but run in an environment full of things such as process scheduling priorities, third party libraries, logic implemented in hardware, just as music is rarely heard in the absolute silence of sounds and personal histories.

The term "user interface" used to mean the pictures on the screen designed by designers for real programmers to follow. Now it's called "user experience" but programmers still think its secondary. So let me say it: the experience IS the program.

Certainly, "real" programs doing heavy duty computing for highly intelligent professionals don't "need" a pretty interface. But whatever "ugly" interface preferred by these users, is perfect only because it is in harmony with the tone of the user'a behavior - just as not all music need words or harmony or melodies.

This brings me to propose that there is a 4:33 of computer programs - shutdown.exe. It is the ultimate expression of what a program can be: the experience of a program can extend beyond the runtime of the program. Shutdown.exe demands a response from its user like no other program does. Sitting through a whole four minutes of it, is like a form of anti-meditation - you can't really sit down and focus on experiencing it.

It is a sad thing that few will get to appreciate the deep conversations between the user and the computer in the 4:33 of programs. Even more so that many platforms are removing the idea of shutdown from the user's universe completely. In a way it's
like claiming that 4:33 isn't music.

There is a host of reasons why well meaning people are in the business of removing shutdown.exe - but it is comforting that reality is currently winning; shutdown.exe has largely been upgraded to demand-reboot-after-updating-while-you're-halfway-through-your-essay.exe. Sure, there is a reality out there where shutdown.exe completely does not exist, but for now, before you say fuck to that annoying pop up the next time - treasure it while it lasts.

An actionable definition of : reality

The collection of conditions perceives to increase or decrease your chances of dying.

Random Trains - Surviving Prostitution

1. Convenience is being able to enjoy a certain benefit without having to experience the unpleasant experiences usually associated with that benefit.

2. If you honestly think that the "unpleasant experience" is "the journey" that should be enjoyed, then the benefit is not a convenience but an inconvenience you honestly want to avoid. 

3. Part of the daily business of surviving is using whatever resources we have to provide this convenience to other people in order to maximize your chances of surviving.

4. When you start considering that your body and time are among these resources, people start labeling what you do "prostitution".

5. They do so while making sure their friends think that whatever they label as "prostitution" must be bad, because they are invested in "the journey", and being able to bypass the unpleasant experiences modifies the game in a way they are unable to handle.

6. They don't want you to think that your body and your time are something that you can think about as resources.

7. But your body, and by extension your health, and your time, and by extension your company, is the only things you really have.

8. However, their proposition makes sense. Consider that all other resources are things that don't really belong to you.

9. It makes so much more sense to take something that isn't really yours and give it to someone else in order to give yourself a higher chance of surviving.

Random thoughts

Random thoughts

Insurance is just a complicated way to allow you not to trust the guy who's gonna help you out in the moment of your most dire needs.

Selfies are the most graphic expression of our fear of oblivion.

Equality is treating everybody like a different animal, lined up from small to big on a very, very long sea-saw pivoting on a fulcrum so that the whole sea-saw is exactly balanced. Inequality is when the fulcrum is shifted so far the sea saw becomes a slide, and the big animals tumble on the small animals while blaming the small animals for not being big enough.

Reality is a drawing made by painting layer upon layer of dreams on the canvas of social constructs around you. How your masterpiece turns out depends on the color of your imagination and what you see on a canvas that is almost never completely white.

Perfection

The only imperfection that plagues our otherwise perfect being is our inability to see why everybody else is also perfect.

赤色の

赤色の
アプリ多いね
お兄さん

Depression

If depression has one thing to teach us, it must be that the present moment is the most powerful force at work in us, more powerful than all our personal history and collective civilizations combined.

TNBT: gamed natural selection test tube babies

TNBT: gamed natural selection test tube babies

Imagine genetic material taken from eggs and sperms made to compete with a battery of other genes to gain successful traits before combining to form a foetus. If the whole mate finding game is to have superior offspring, why not fast-forward evolution?

Whatever you're doing right now - stop for a minute and say after me: THIS IS THE LIFE! Cos there ain't any other life you're gonna get except the life you decided to live today!

通勤車

ギッシリと
押してきたのは
誰の尻

Maybe the tree of knowledge of good and evil isn't about the sudden awakening of man, but the birth of discrimination as a meme, from which man started going around labeling whatever doesn't match their opinion as evil?

Why world peace is impossible is very simple : we have all been brainwashed beyond being able to let our children really believe that the "enemies", the "criminals", the "terrorists", the "deviants", the poor, the foreigner, the "opposition", and the "uncultured" are exactly like us and are just as deserving of what life has to offer as ourselves.

***

Religions are man made. Cultures are man made. Politics are man made. Crimes are also man made. There is no such thing as crime in nature. By creating the idea of crime, we create a "society" and an "underground society" that cannot agree. Not that I support antisocial forces, but both society and underground society are part of a bigger picture.

For me the issue is beyond religion, nationalism, race, language, culture, history, and goes down to what we think collective living and societies are, spanning all forms of identity.

*** 

Selfishness is a key feature of our biology. So is empathy. But these two are not contradictory, but bound together by self-(less)-ness.

If you spread your sense of identity, your "self-ness" beyond your skin, beyond your kin, selfishness becomes essential for the survival of the Whole! In this light, heroes are simply superhuman-ly selfish people!

The beautiful thing about this model is that, when something goes "wrong", there is no need for punishment, no need to define Crime, because the Whole is in pain together. 

Live

When everything around you has become measurable, scientific, and predictable, you know that you have stopped growing and started dying. Growth is always full of chaotic power, brimming with uncertain possibilities, and a refusal to be bound and tamed.

Reading

Why do you read, if not to live lives you cannot live, that your understanding of the mind be widened, that your capacity for compassion be deepened?

Pain

Pain is the struggle against death. It is the same pain of growing up. It is the same pain of growing old. It is the same pain you fear when you have substituted that pain with shrewdness and wealth, when you forget that the struggle against death is never over. No, it is not over. It is only over when you have learnt to breathe that struggle like air. It is only over when death overtakes you and leave you nothing to struggle against.

Nobody else knows how to be you 24/7
You're the only one who's done it and survived.
Take advice but don't forget
It's your heaven your hell your world your life!

Focusing on individual differences is about not resorting to conformism, but it's not opposed to social cohesion. On the contrary, understanding the ugly details of how we are different makes us more integrated. A bundle of sticks doesn't break as easily as one single stick, exactly because each stick is different. 

10 things to do to stay young

1. Make young friends to stay in touch with what's happening.
2. Take care of your looks. Look at least relevant and approachable so you can make young friends.
3. Exercise. Young at heart is no good if your body isn't there to keep your heart pumping.
4. Try something new every day.
5. Start something you've never imagined doing before every year.
6. Listen to music you've never heard before. All the time.
7. Take risks. The older you are, the less you have to lose.
8. Discover yourself. If you think you know yourself well enough, you probably don't.
9. Seek new environments. New homes, new jobs, new lives - for some, new religions, new cultures, new countries and new families.
10. Stop talking about the past and dare to talk about the future. You're never too young too love, never too old to dream.

On slenderman

There's something profoundly human about the desire to believe - religion, philosophy, tradition, folklore, branding - are just some labels we use to artificially categorize things that feed on this mechanism because - giving things names helps us believe they exist.

Wednesday Survival Guide

Stress is the result of allowing yourself to be tricked into believing you are responsible for things you have no ability, authority, or social liability to achieve. Don't try too hard; you have a right to be here. Focus on letting go of what you need not control, and enjoy whatever you have in your court. Strive to be happy. When in doubt, eat, sleep, and exercise.

Silence

The wind never tries to blow
It blows because it is the wind.
When you sit in an open field
You hear silence
In the wind that doesn't try.

A duck by the stream
And all the fish in it
All live in the silence of the park
Because silence is the sound
Of not trying.

In Remembering what peace there may be in silence
You don't recall what soundlessness sounds like;
That would make you try too hard
To sit still.
Because silence is not soundlessness; silence is being conscious that doing is a kind of being;
Not a kind of trying.

It's the same 24 hours.

It's the same 24 hours.
Busy is what you do with it.
Happy is how you do it.
Fulfillment is why you do it.
Achievement is when you do it.

The secret of an awesome daily todo list: plan one little event a day that makes you happy!

TNBT : world history reimagined

Imagine : baggage free history curriculum

What if archeologist and educationists of diverse backgrounds got together and formed a cloud to design a cross-national history curriculum for children between 8 and 18?

What if a generation grew up learning about the world not from one biased perspective, but from the perspective of artifacts and documents, intertwined with an education in human behavioral psychology?

What if a generation grew up seeing world history as a universal heritage instead of walls that divide cultures?

TNBT

The next-next-next big thing : Imagine Democracy Kickstarter

What if it became cheaper to provide mobile internet access than sinking billions into election campaigns, minister pays, and top-down decisions that don't work?

What if you voted not for people, but for causes?

What if funds available were divided equally among all voters, and your vote determines how much funds the cause actually gets?

What if policies were drafted by a Parliament which can present proposals and analysis, but the Parliament has no power to decide - the power to decide were given back to the people?

What if the government were not subjected to the power structure they build up, but are constantly subject to the vote market, proposal after proposal?

What if the ballot ticket had not only YES and NO, but also RE-PROPOSE to demand the proposal to be redrafted?

What if all the time you spent on Facebook and Twitter, actually counted in Policy?

Before you were born

Do things sometimes feel like they're not going right?
Let me tell you a secret:
Everything is working out exactly according to plan.

Before you were born
You had envisioned this day - 
In fact, you planned every single event
So meticulously laying out every hour
In your Masterplan; and now
Everything is coming to life
Exactly how, exactly when, exactly where you had meant it to.

So the next time you're wondering
What's wrong? Why are things so?
Try instead to recall:
What was that single perspective you had taken
That made everything look right
Before you were born?

Pascal's Wager

The dilemma of believing in the Christian God on the basis of Pascal's Wager results in the strange situation where the one thing you believe in more than God him/herself, is the value of your personal gain. If you keep that position in your faith, you will break the 1st commandment. If you don't keep that position, you invalidate the reason you chose to believe in God, releasing you from the faith. Applying Pascal's Wager to another religion would therefore be much simpler.

Love

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not compare, it does not rank, it does not favor top performers. It does not pathologize, it is not profit-oriented, it does not make short-sighted responses, it cannot be quantified for arithmetics. Love cannot be abused to hurt, but rejoices when the hurting are set free. It always takes the blow, always believes in the face of betrayal, always hopes when things go wrong, always runs the full marathon to the finishing line.

Without the Grid

Without the Grid

How do you invite someone home for dinner,
If the land line
Is digital somewhere?

How do you get an invitation card delivered,
If logistics is real time
And digital?

How do you buy your ingredients,
If your retailer pays rent
Digitally?

How do you locate a local farm
If you cannot search that
Online?

How do you drive over
If traffic lights
Are controlled digitally?

You'd walk over to your friends house
Which is probably within walking distance
Because without the Grid
You'd probably not get to know
Someone living that far away anyway.

TNBT

The next-next-next big thing :  Just-In-Time Manufacturing





Imagine: You order a new handphone, selecting the customizations you want - features, design, customized printing and name engraving. You click "submit", and your new phone arrives the same evening.

Imagine: You enter your credit card number and click "submit" - and in that moment, an autonomous car starts driving your way, loaded with the 3D printers, weaving and painting robots and everything to manufacture your order. The car's route is optimally planned, considering road conditions and manufacturing time. When the car hits your doorstep, your product has just been sealed into the box.

Whatever you are most afraid of, will plague you for life - not because others are free from it, but because they are not obsessed enough to notice it come and go.

Happiness

My definition of happiness : the emotion invoked (1) by a memory associated with the release of dopamine, or (2) by the actual release of dopamine through the reward-motivation mechanism our brain uses to make us prefer actions that lead to decisions favorable for survival.

No happiness, no survival.

leadership

woke up this morning thinking, what is the most important skill leaders must have?

and it seemed to me today, that this is not engineering, not financial planning, not scientific belief, not cultural depth, but story-telling.

leadership falls apart once your people stop believing in your story. different cultures use different narratives, and the leader in  that culture must master that narrative.

and this leaves me with the thought - there's something very magical about royal families and monarchies, because instead of telling the story, they have become the story. they are the people's ideals, incarnated in flesh. there's something god-like in them, in both their charms and their failures... but of course the people have stopped believing in this story...

what is the story your leader is telling you today?
is it working?

Diversity

1
Is anti-diversity not a tolerable position in a framework for diversity?

2
If we got rid of all extremely extreme extremists, would moderately strong opinions get recalibrated as the new extremist? If that's a natural response I hope extremists stay as extreme as possible!

Doesn't it frighten people how the society of sighted people is so dependent on the illusion of sight?

Ruthless

Culture is an ideology.
Religion is an ideology.
Political thought is an ideology.
I think we're so tame towards ideologies - we could let ourselves be more ruthless in tearing them up, changing positions, and fighting against something we used to believe in. We are not ruthless enough towards ideas, and not gentle enough towards people.

Art is the ultimate display of power, design the ultimate display of understanding.

It's easier to prove that homosexuality is genetic than to prove that religion is real. Religion has the potential to be as real as any suffering we go through, but if religion chooses not to be genuine in the name of truth by refusing to feel the pain within us, all doctrine lose their power and religion becomes an imaginary "lifestyle choice".

The Houses That Live In Us

The Houses That Live In Us

If you lay yourself in bed and close your eyes
And allow yourself to walk into the darkness in your mind,
You will find, dimly lit,
Spaces that stage you dreams -
And if you try to light that up
You will find in these rooms you used to live in.

If you allow your mind to take control of that space
And move furniture into existence
Arranging them once
And then again
Reversing how you rearranged the room as you would reverse time
You find yourself
Clearing outwards by your sheer will, a space of time -
Your childhood room, your new house, your boarding school -
You will find the spaces that house your memories
Well and alive.

If you allow yourself to sit in one of these spaces
And soak in your surroundings
You will smell the same smells and hear the same sounds and feel the same warmth
Welling up in you -
You connect with your past and realize
What treasures you have stored up,
Safely locked away,
In the heavens of the darkness
Of a night alone in bed -
You will be cradled in the warmth of those who have crossed paths with you
And fall asleep, excited about tomorrow,
As they call out to you in whispers
See you tomorrow, goodnight.

Science

Religion and Passion are always more seductive than Science because science fails us in two areas: its processes and its practitioners.

Science fails us because it does not consider inspiration to be part of its processes - science is based on data, and the data we collect is limited by our ability to imagine. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist - and throughout the times we have depended on visionaries who think up new ways to measure the world around us, or accidents in science that lead people do discover the same. There is still so much of the world out there that doesn't exist in the eyes of science. Religion and culture always stand by us to assure us that we need to keep on believing, until science catches up with reality.

Science fails us because scientists always promise the ideal but reality delivers the sustainable. Scientists are very exact people - and that goes into the perception of their responsibility to the world. If an economic pressure prevents a scientific discovery from benefitting society, scientists don't own up to the failure. If a scientific theory is difficult, it is always the layman's fault that he doesn't find science accessible. I remember it was promised that music distributed on cd will be cheaper than music distributed on cassettes but that never happened. Climate scientists try so hard to prove climate change, but the fight is political. Activists on the other hand know how to connect facts to reality.

Scientists owe the world as much as the world owe scientists. The failure of science isn't the failure of the institution of science. It is a witness to how we work best together because we're all different in different ways.


iPhoneから送信

Random

Random

我认为无所谓人生的目地，只有你本身的目地。生存不是人生的目地，因为生存就是人生。还句话说，重要的，是你为了谁活着，为了做什么活着。思考人生＂目地＂的，是creationist 的paradigm.

Right and wrong in a society is never established by science but by
norms and ideals. Norms change and so do laws. Slavery was abolished but it's not based on scientific proof, but because someone challenged the norm. Courts don't exist to uphold "the truth" - that is not as importance as its calling, which is to dispense justice. Law is not about truth but about justice.

Religion is a free choice too. If you want to believe in a mixed religion you can form a new religion or denomination. It not common but it happens. And people do live in mixed environments where the the father is one race and religion and the mother is a different race and religion. In Japan, people go to the temple during new year and get married in churches. That is the norm in Japan.

I think when it comes to education students should be taught everything. Including both science and religion and politics. They should be taught both evolution and religious beliefs and sort it out for themselves. If science is self explanatory you should have faith that they will choose whatever works for them.


iPhoneから送信

Science

You seem to think that if you add all the circuits together you can get an iPhone. That's not true. The iPhone is an invention, not a scientific one but a cultural, a social one. You need all the science to put it together, but if nobody dreamed it up, no amount of research can create an iPhone.

Science can lead to discoveries but discoveries cannot change peoples lives unless someone dreams about using science to do so.

Science is a method of finding answers. It is inspiration that asks the questions.

Sometimes questions are answered by other fields, such as Maths. Maths knowledge is created by mathematicians who imagine mathematical hypothesis and proof them using mathematical logic, many of which can only be proven using even more mathematics. There is no science (experiments) here.

Another is in the field of literature. For example, the Korean Hangul alphabet was created with the inspiration of ying and yang. Without the Korean alphabet, Korea would not have a distinctly Korean identity and language which created the basis for Korean communication and literature.



iPhoneから送信

Reason

In an ideal world, reason would be unnecessary. You would be happy just because. Logic is just another basis for legitimacy, built to enable negotiations between peoples who did not previously share a common cultural language for communication.

TNBT

The next-next-next big thing : Big (Data) Brother 2.0 (Computational Legal Intelligence).

 Imagine: You are unhappy with how you got treated at work. Legal Intelligence will give you the laws you can quote to help your company "understand" your problem.

Imagine: What your vendor did seems questionable. Legal Intelligence will give you the laws to quote to help your vendor come to terms with their legal responsibility.

Imagine : Entering your scenario into a website, and it will tell you all the relevant laws and policies, past judgements, and gray areas, and give you a sample approach how you can use the law to win your case. This is the rule of law, by the people, for the people.

TNBT

Next big thing : ubiquitous purpose-specific computing ("upc")

Imagine : direct mail flyers in your mailbox that interact with your mails to give you ads that genuinely interest you, without privacy leak.

TNBT

The next big thing : wearable robotics?

Imagine : Typing gloves that let you type on an imagined keyboard with full-keyboard touch when you type.

Imagine : programmable nanorobotic underwear that guides you in martial arts and dance

Imagine : smart glasses that also respond physically to turn your head to look at what you're searching for.