#myworld

#myworld

All movement is beautiful. But beautiful depends on the song you're playing. There is no male movement and female movement, only efficient and inefficient movement, and movement you are in shape to do, and movement that gets you in shape. Stay beautiful. Keep moving.

*1

*1

Words: (
? Are they hardwired into us
? Or are we free [
! To define what we want to mean
! And how they run across the page?
] )

Why do we hold on to them: (
! Like the (*1) remnants of a dear one [*1:
Utterly irreplaceable?
] )

We live in new realities: [
! That break every bone in our fathers' imaginations
! Because in the dark world of brilliant minds, we have redefined: (
? Every familiar word
? Every conceivable innocence
)
! Our children will not share in our analogy of the floppy disk icon
]
We already know that, but we refuse to let go: [
! Neither the construct of marriage, of religion, of race
! Nor the qwertyness of keyboards
]
No, we prefer to hold on, onto the (*1) power
Our fathers have given us, our pecking order
Over weaker minds: [
! We shall teach them to hang on to the memories they never had: [
With the same confidence
They run on their prosthetic legs
]
! We will get them hooked on knowledge: [
like the pure delight, dancing
at the end of a fishing line.
] ]

Obedience is conforming where it doesn't matter; disobedience is rebelling where it does.

We obey because it's unproductive to make a fuss about something that doesn't matter; we disobey to protect what matters to us.

"Cultivating" obedience is pretty much like animal farming - you will never learn what your herd is thinking, your herd doesn't care about you, they start disobeying in things that do not matter, and no matter what you think, you're sending them to the slaughterhouse.

Disobedience is a form of communication. Disobedience is a virtue. Pay attention when it speaks.

We're not done playing God, until our inventions have learnt to play.

If people do not have the empathy to resonate with those they despise, what makes them think they can understand their gods, which aren't even human?

On Healing

If I have learnt one thing last year, it is that treating is not the same as healing. The experience of treatment is comfort; the experience of healing is rejuvenation. The danger of pain is that it redefines one's reality - one's expectations of what one considers to be acceptable. In that altered state, one loses the power of rebellious imagination; one stops being able to grasp what it would be like to be free, to be wild. If I may liken life to a disease we are continuously struggling with, the problem with being alive, arguably in any age, is that we give in to this pain. We stop imagining what it is like to be bubbling with life. We refuse to imagine healing, and come to terms with simply receiving treatment. This is not okay. This is not acceptable. The day we decide it is okay to settle into little worlds we build for ourselves in little holes in the ground - that is the day we transition from the miracle of being alive, into the quiet process of dying. Death is not a single event. And we need to stay alert, that it does not slip into our beds on days we get worn down.

Wearing shoes in the house is like wearing underwear in the shower...

You don't know what you're not washing until you take it off!

TNBT: imagine artificial meat made with nanobots that mimic the texture and taste of food, woven into the fibers of real food. And you can select exactly how many calories you want your meal to contain while having your meal experience stay exactly the same. And the nanobots would be recyclable, cutting the energy requirements to produce "real" food. Yes the idea of recycling what you put in your mouth sounds disgusting, but don't worry by the time we invent this, our values would have moved on.

Realizing that your ears are picking up conversations in a language you understand in a crowd is almost as eerie as quantum entanglement.

Time (aka how we die)

Time (aka how we die)

1. Our experience of time is not proportional to its duration. 2. It is proportional to the number of events our brains flag as significant. 3. An event is by definition a change. 4. Our brains are excellent at noticing patterns, and gets better with age. 5. A change that can be generalized as a pattern stops being significant. 6. Such changes are what we call routine. 7. Adults stop experiencing time because they tend to fall into routine. 8. Adults fall into routine because they have negotiated with powers in society for a lower risk environment in exchange for being submissive to these powers in specific, predictable ways.

9. To experience time again, adults can work around the brain's mechanisms: consciously seek out activities that are new in new ways; construct schedules specifically to break routine, even if they comprise the same activities in different orders; or, find a way to make ends meet in roles that require one to specialize in doing things that nobody has done before.

10. Just because one is "sacrificing" for a "good" cause is not sufficient reason for choosing routine - routine is a choice, often made as one's willpower is gradually eroded by the stress of not acting directly on a perception that one's survival is at risk. 11. But routine can also be a strategic decision, such as to make space for new activities that the brain will find overwhelmingly eventful. 12. Deciding to give certain activities up to routine is therefore sometimes a very brave decision.

13. The brain is optimized for survival. 14. Eventually one has to come to terms with one's total experience of time and how it was or wasn't relevant to one's paradigm of survival. 15. just because it feels like time has stopped doesn't change the fact that the maximum amount of time one can experience is continuously decreasing. 16. But time is not the only dimension we move in. 17. Yet because we cannot steal time, and we cannot make time, it is a unique experience: it is completely free, yet altogether precious.

TNBT - APE

TNBT Imagine religion evolved into something called "Applied Psychology Experience" (APE) where you willingly get psyched into believing in a framework of memes carefully constructed to appeal to the way your brain ticks. And in this framework you will find it easy to make yourself do things you thought were not possible. Even something like spending unimaginable amounts of time to ace an exam or master a skill, or to take up an impossible or dangerous assignment of a lifetime - by allowing APE to draw on your innate survival instincts that worked on you when you were a kid.

The difference between professionals and non-professionals isn't the money or the skill. It's being able to consistently satisfy your clients, no matter who they are or how you feel. The next time you think about sex workers, think about how you measure up to that!

The story of human survival has 3
chapters:

satisfaction and sustainability aka now and forever aka doing and being,

power and submission aka freedom and stability aka addiction and sanity,

sensuousness and rationalizing aka anecdote and statistics aka order and chaos.

Love, bravery, kindness and all that? Just different ways these primal forces play on our perception!

A people without a story

A people without a story
Is a people without dreams
But a people without a past
Is a people without the bondage
Of those in power.

Isn't the terrorist vs civilization dichotomy is simply the good vs evil dichotomy retargeted and repackaged?

Your lifestyle depends on what you do
Purpose depends on why you do it
Happiness depends on how you do it
Experience depends on who you do it with and where you do it, and
Success depends on when you do it!

If you want work-life balance, think about whether you want success or keep your lifestyle sane, happiness or experience, and let your purpose drive your priorities.

Simply, there are two kinds of foods: food made for our senses, and food our senses were made for. Our brains evolved so that we find pleasure in food that are nutritional to us, according to its availability in nature - and we're made to stop eating when we have eaten enough. Our bodies were not designed to overeat. Except that it didn't imagine that we can ever manage to hack nature so much that we can live without exercising, and that we can hack our food so much that our brains can no longer tell the nutritional value of food.

Twenty years apart

Twenty years apart
In a different city, a different life
I remember the boy who looked up
At an immense sky wearing nothing but the moon:

His eyes and his heart
Open like camera shutters,
Were learning to moan to the pleasure of that unfathomable pain
As they hungrily swallowed the moonlight that pieced him
In a million places with such speed and apparent intent.

It made him forget in that instant
The unnerving restlessness that wore him like he were a mere accessory,
The swinging at every turn.

Twenty years apart
I look up into a different sky
Moonless, autumn, but no less immense
My eyes no less unsettled than the stars that would have been there
Desperately opening into a heart
Still freshly pierced
Still no less unaccustomed to waking up
Wearing this body like a mistaken tattoo
That fades only ever so slightly
And then all at once.

#myworld #rant

#myworld #rant
Why does discrimination exist? I am of the opinion that if anything exists for a long time, it might have been selected to exist for reasons that have not yet been completely taken apart.

Maybe the reason evolution has selected discrimination is so that the unspeakably talented live in an unjustified fear of the majority, so that they are forced to show us the patience we refuse to show the less well-adapted minority.

But once in a while we are overwhelmed by raw talent, before whom we are conceivably utter rubbish, those who in their lifetimes know how to live as they will, turning whole societies upside down, leaving a legacy we take generations to digest.

We find ourselves caught between the statistical bias we see in them and our own survival instinct, which rationalizes that we are on the disadvantageous end of the equation.

We feel uneasy about this conflict, and rush to call it the hand of God or karma - to save us from having to come to terms with the fact that the same statistical distribution that put them there, could also have put us amongst the minority we feel the least comfortable around.

We are acutely aware that limited resources means without redistribution someone will get less, but we don't want to think about it.

We don't want to think about how helpless we are. We would rather invent an emotion we call guilt - so that we torture ourselves inside than admit that we are not brave enough to look beyond the statistical bias, to see beyond the hand of God.

And when we feel overwhelmed by guilt, we invent discrimination. We explain away the guilt that we invented, and create a reality that stacks the hand of God against the minority - no matter which end of the curve they come from. Not realizing that we, the majority, are the eye and the mind of God, moving the powerful hand of discrimination against the lesser parts among us that would have made us whole.

The other 5%

The other 5%

Terrorism is scary because we cannot rationalize how it changes how long we can reasonably expect to live. But even within a peaceful environment, statistics and experience often tell difference stories.

Learnt today that life expectancy is a misnomer. It isn't the number of years you can expect to live to in the manner you can expect to get paid a salary for your month's work.

Its more like the age you start realizing that you have more friends who are dead than those still alive.

Let's say your country has a published life expectancy at birth (LEB) of 75. What they may not tell you is statistically the standard deviation is 15.

From an engineering perspective, the layman idea of "expect" can be expressed as "having a 95% possibilities of", or, statistically, the range between plus and minus two sigma (standard deviations).

This translates to mean you can be 95% confident of not dying before 45, and 68% confident of not dying before 60!

And these are the numbers that look a little more real to me, on a personal level. It makes me remember the other 5% - and their final Facebook posts. It makes me remember the time when they took hold of life and lived the day, and looked damn fucking good owning it.

Honestly, retirement and longevity is a really terrifying twosome. But I feel strangely comforted that life is more unexpected than I normally (read: "Gaussian-ly") imagine, and that living with pain and on a budget until you're 90 years old isn't the only future I should imagine. I don't buy Pascal's Wager : life finds a way.

Lesson of the day: life is risky. Take the leap, take the fall, and make sure you're looking fucking good owning it.

Maybe organized violence is like über: it happens because existing institutions fails to capture both the needs of the people, and the talent that would have revolutionized their strategy. It happens because customer satisfaction has become a servant to shareholder satisfaction.

Except that for organized violence, we are the shareholders who are asking our economies and policies to please us. We are the once who are turning a deaf ear to the needs of the unseen; we are the ones who give up on the talent of those whose existence are an inconvenience to us.

Hurt is the beginning of healing. Healing is the essence of living. Whatever happened before the hurt is the past, and no matter what they tell you, the past is always about power - allowing the past to empower you, or allowing the past to overpower you. I don't like thinking about the past. I think it is empowering enough to know that for a little while, we are able to hurt, we are able to heal.

What if every religion had its own version of the prosperity gospel that fund hungry leaders but at the same time reach out to young people disenfranchised by mainstream norms? While its vile that leaders make millions off it, isn't it useful to be able to keep young people out of the reach of violent extremist organizations that are actively fighting to win and own the vulnerable?

My 2-yen worth

My 2-yen worth
1. Facebook is not a news media
2. Neither is Twitter. But something can be said about forming a network of news leads around the world.
3. Many reputable non-English local/foreign platforms have English versions of their publications.
4. Good stories don't write themselves. If news is important to you, pay for news. Some news vendors have a hybrid free/paywall model. If you like their free news, consider subscribing. Your readership and subscription fees help make journalism a viable full-time job.

By all means, pray. By all means, color your profile pic. But if your conscience made you feel guilty for not taking some kind of action, then no, prayer does not absolve you from that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that religion is futile, but if people out there are suffering because somebody took whatever form of his religion like his life depended on it, then keyboard Samaritans are no less guilty, pleasuring themselves with religion like it were a sex toy to reach a kind of moral orgasm, exploding with prayer like a fierce ejaculation, which for all practical purposes is a load thrown at an imaginary friend. I am not religious, but I respect religious people, not because I think highly about their religion, but because I think there is something inherently admirable for being able to believe in something a sticking to it. If the people you call terrorists are moved in religion to cause fear, then it is only right that people move in religion to take that fear away.

We discriminate because it's a cornerstone of the human identity. We have a need to believe that we are somehow better than other species in order to legitimize what we see as our birthright to do what we please with the planet and its non-human inhabitants. The need is so strong we'd rather participate in fancy mind-games that help us create these reasons, than to believe that we are simply the most brutal species on the planet. Personally, I'd rather believe that I'm unapologetically brutal. I want to be in touch with that half of me that is so inhumane that makes me perfectly human.

Random words

Random words

We become the city we eat:
Between flights we stitch together
Delicate organs, carefully curated
To make us more whole, as if
We were born broken;
We have leant how to hide the seams underneath,
Turning our Frankensteins inside out
Wearing Culture like spandex.
Not even our breath gives away
How our tongues and our intestines
Can be continents apart and held together by knots of ligaments:
We breath glitter too beautiful for that.
We are too beautiful,
Too out,
Too proud,
We'd do anything we can
To push deeper into the closet
The parts of us that cannot be seen
Falling together.

Second chances come 60 times a minute - you just have to learn how to jump on one quickly enough.

Trans-formers

Trans-formers
They should make an anime where people fall in love with spirits and marry them, and then they are fused with their spirits and gain power as they allow their spirit selves to express themselves. And the main character would be a high school boy who fell in love with the Queen Spirit, and goes through the process of discovering his inner queen...

Digital Poetry

Digital Poetry

Code is a little like
Digital poetry, set in motion,
It reads a little different every sitting
It grows on you so subtly
It becomes part of you: sometimes
It becomes partly you:
You live a little bit of life through it
As it takes away a little slice
Of all that needless mess you'd have to go through.
And when we have written
An app for every imaginable moment
We'd be able to put away
Every needless mess we used to call life
And be born perfect.
When the only thing left to do in life is the dying,
Maybe we'd start to see
We are like twenty-first century servers:
Ultimately mere consumables
Briefly energized by immortal code
Pretending we do not understand
The meaning of MTTF.

The 10 levels of mastery

The 10 levels of mastery
#notetoself
Stepping stone
Tool
Skill
Art
Perspective
Journey
Experience
Living
Reality
Lesson

Isn't it amazing that the earth can be so ferociously zooming across space and spinning all the the same time and we can be talking about staying perfectly still? When you feel like life isn't moving, that's what happening to you - you're riding on the wings of the gods, scaling distances "far" cannot begin to describe.

PRIVACY FOR SALE

PRIVACY FOR SALE
TNBT: Imagine a legal service app you can download easily and get legal representation every time you sign up for any SNS or web service that will replace their standard privacy arrangements with a pre-negotiated contract that allows you to get a cut from any profit made from your participation. You'd absolutely know where your information is going - and maybe even get a discount on your favorited brand, even before you know what you're going to buy! Yes, most of us don't know how to monetize our privacy, but isn't that exactly why it's a potential market?

Success is inevitable.

Success is inevitable.

The one reason we fail is that we cannot come up with enough reasons to counter our excuses.

The one reason we fail to fail is that we cannot come up with enough excuses to counter our reasons.

Plastic Dignity

Plastic Dignity
#myworld

Food is culture. Language is culture. The sitcoms we watch on TV is culture. We now share the culture we grow up in with an increasing number of people from different races. Why should race define culture - and indeed why should culture define race?

True fact. When someone says that maybe it's suppose to mean "it is a well-known/little-known fact that ... is true", playing on the idea that no logical statement is a fact, until it is actually known.

Understanding grammar is immensely useful, but that's what machines are good at. Reading what people mean is what you need for the next decade.

On AI

Can capitalism sustainably support a large human population in a post AI world?

If we choose to stick with capitalism, I've been thinking what activities/jobs we perform are enjoyed specifically for the fact that it is done by a human being - things like expression (not to be confused with creativity), performance (not to be confused with dexterity), political representation (not to be confused with fairness).

But this is probably the extreme end since we're still a long way before we can get quantum computers to do AI, so for the time being the energy consumption to take away complex R&D jobs will help them stay for a while.

On the other hand, if we took capital ownership away, we would remove the idea of "employment" as we know it - if automation can provide for humanity and free humanity to do their human things - like learning about each other, fixing poverty, imagining new ways of living and interacting, finding new systems of government that make life meaningful in a post-work era, challenging yourself for the sole purpose of understanding what a human being is capable of etc - why is AI a bad thing?

But this would profoundly change how humans experience the reality of life, and we have to collectively imagine what life can look like. Problem is, we have a lot of baggage that puts a lot of value in "making an honest living" - that fact that it takes effort to stay alive is woven into our biology.

Oops sorry for the verbal diarrhea!

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Checklist : Can AI replace you?

Process stability
How easy is it to create a KPI that can be calculated without human intervention?

Probabilistic complexity
How many human beings are able to affect that KPI directly?

Human touch
How easy it it to quantitatively express the difference between the experience of having a need met through receiving the product or service, as opposed to a customer creating the product or performing the service directly.

Third Generation

(Beat: http://youtu.be/Z9gVvxa2sgQ start on the 22nd second)

Education
Language assimilation
Report cards trading for toys
Concentration - no girls for boys
No distractions
No unscreened friends
No unaccounted time
No unclean hands
This is the life of the third generation
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
But I'm dead from my core
I can travel the world
But I'm always abroad
I have no language I have no home
I have no culture I call my own
I'm living on borrowed time
Rented apartments constructed lives
I'm whatever I imagine myself to be
My mileage is my history
I'm done with the metaphors of traditions
Of ideologies and of religions
I see the worlds I leave behind and can no longer understand it's what's and why's
Sometimes I dream what it'd be like
If I grew up hokkien or penangnite
Would reality be an unbroken line
Would I sing the same song in different rhymes?
But I'm still rocking it and I still have plans
And retrospection ain't one of them
I wanna see I wanna be
Everything that isn't me
Migrant in my blood
Survival in my hands
They taught me how to live
My Jekyll and my Hyde
I love the day I love the night
And maybe someday I'd love my life
I don't care what my skin may say
I don't care if my accent gives me away
This is what I paid for with sleepless nights
This is my crack, my meth, my ice.

I see visions... Visions
I see visions...

My mind is ever restless
I can't wait to get breathless

Visions...

I don't know where I'm going
But my feet are on the move
I just know it'll be a trip
And there's nothing left to lose
I'll just have to learn to be more laid back
Believe in myself believe in my bet
This is the life of the third generation
I'm free to write a story different than Dad's
Push myself nearer my imagination
My heaven my hell my life my death

Living in Japan made me realize there are two ways to run any organization - you keep your stockholders satisfied by acknowledging the inevitable sacrifice needed to realize a noble ideal, or you keep your stakeholders alive because every rent counts.

The problem with "nerds" is that we make them think what they do is not extraordinary, and then blame them for not understanding what the ordinary person is capable of understanding - because we cannot begin to comprehend the brilliance of their achievements. For those whose work we understand but whose means are beyond our imagination, we call them talented, so we need not go on the journey of questioning why we are incapable of something so beautifully obvious.

If someone says "easier said than done", they're probably not doing it.

IMAGINE: what if politicians in office don't get paid any salary, but every personal expense were claimable, subject to public veto?

News is how adults feed the idle mind. Imagination is how children feed the idle mind. That's why children can talk about the impossible that has never happened, but adults talk about the impossible after it happens.

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.