I don't really watch sports, cos I can't wrap my head around the idea that I can share in the glory of any team or person I have not trained with or contributed in any way to their achievement - save for the fact that my watching is part of what creates an industry that allows commercial entities to make sports a viable profession.

I am thankfully inspired by their achievements, that I too can get somewhere in my own training. But I'll always be careful to remember that their success is what they earned with their time, their blood, and their sweat; the celebration is their gift to us, but the glory belongs only to the team that made it happen.

Think about the things you do once a day. These are what it takes to survive being you.

Think about the things you do twice a week. These are the dreams that are going to become reality.

Think of the things you do once a week. These are a complete waste of time.

距離は体で測るもの。
気持ちは動いて確かめるもの。
そう考えてここで生きているのを楽しんでいる今を、
忘れたくない。

2016

2016

#myworld

Clickety Clickety Tock Tick Tock Tock
Who's under your mouse
What's rousing your thoughts
Is your mind your keep is your mound your god
Dreamed up by an Aladdin rubbing his shiny lot
Behind the order behind the peace
Benign or vicious belies the Beast
Beating a rhythm to the rhyme of service
The System that serves is the System that lives

The living know the dead they buried
The System keeps their ghosts alive
In the wombs of brilliant minds conceived
The System that makes rain fall in line
Roses and guns play games of the married
While the Beast feeds on yet another wife
For living its purpose the System gets credit
As its patrons hide its secret life
What the Beast takes the System gives
What the System unites the Beast divides
What the Beast seeks the System completes;
You, are never on its mind

Stand with the shunned, stand with the stars
Stand in the west, stand in the east
Where you stand is now who you are
Around a sun that is now the Beast

Stand in the limelight, stand behind bars
Stand in the battles ignored by the Just
Where you stand is now your crime
Legal is where they draw the line

Stand for the vegans, stand for the gays,
Stand for freedom, stand for equal pay,
Where you stand is now religion
Where you bend is power play.

Stand on the left, stand on the right
Stand for Hilary, stand for Trump
Where you stand is now your fight
For the mighty pen or the mightier gun.

#addYourOwnVerse

Psychedelic punctuation

I'm just a collection. of punctuation,
Loosely tied, together my life looking, like a sentence;
I look, like I'm all words meaning, and imagination
But really, I'm deep in commas in quasi random motion.
Don't look, at the words they are the beginning, of the notion
Don't nod, at my pretentious, enunciation;
Don't look, into the lines like grooves in the sky ,
Go on sink deeper into the ocean of your mind.

Gargle gargle spit, split split shuffle
I'm a cup of commas, I'm a question marking deck
Rumble tumble kiss, skip skip mumble
I'm a train of broken thoughts crashing down the tracks
Come come come come come with me
Let's hold hands and pretend we're the flock and the flack
Run run run run run with me
Let's live in the rim the rom and the ram

Period. Period. Period. Period.
History doesn't lie between cracks men do that.
Period. Period. Exclamation, Period!
The line on the dot oh what's that?

Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.
Full stop.

二足走行は非常に技術が必要な動きです。でも誰もがそれを「危ない」と言わない。練習って、そんなもんです。

One man kissed another
And the herd fell apart

One Instagram shot

One Instagram shot
Captured for me the rawness
That was Hong Kong
The rage the thirst for growth
Uncontainable,
Rough,
Like it was determined
Never to achieve the sleek perfection
That is Japan to me.
Like it knew in its fabric
That when you can tear yourself
Out of the illusion of perfection
The courage to dream
To reach the stars
Becomes a little more real.

The single most privileged group on earth must be the human beings.

They are so powerful the have largely attained immunity in the food web - as much as an aberration it may sound, most humans go through life eating without ever imagining getting eaten. They feel justified to monopolize large areas of land by making it uninhabitable by any species but themselves. They habitually kill other animals and store the meat until it becomes inedible, and then simply burn it all up, without even returning it to the scavengers. And they will continue to amass more and more control over the planet so that no other species may be considered their equal.

If you have never feared getting eaten, if you have never felt guilty of owning a home bigger than what your biological needs require, if you have never needed to risk danger for every meal, if you have never thought the overpopulation by your species has made the earth less abundant, you must be human. Because this is what privilege is like - your brain blocks it from your awareness so that you don't have to struggle with the fact that you have broken your social contract, your promises, to the community that made you.

Isn't the princess dream the worst thing you can give a daughter? It's like making her live your perpetual denial that your dream had failed you the moment you were born.

Random tweets

二人の間の距離を引っ張り合いながら、自分の軌道を絶対譲らない関係が欲しい。

包まれたい。ミートパイのミートのように。

IMAGINE: what would the world be like if, other than unwritten promises, everything had an explicit expiry date : money, cash, tangible and non-tangible assets, employment contracts, marriage contracts, laws, degrees, employment history - everything that makes it possible to create inherited wealth?

There are three pillars that keep traditions alive: its usefulness to the individual, its necessity to perpetuate itself, and its usefulness to people in power. The first is what people speak of, the second is what people do not speak of, and the third is what makes people say it's just the right thing to do.

If forever is the time between the time we're born till the day we die, then, friends, we we all born to live forever.

One of the things that continually bother me, is that I can't find anything that I actually care enough about, to be able to stand the thought of having it permanently tattooed on my skin.

今日思った。単純に楽しんでいたいながら、タンパク質は大地の恵みであれば、人の倍タンパク質を頂いて筋肉を作ってる自分に、be strong to be usefulを実践できる人間になりたい。

Aliens sending battleships to overtake earth would be an absurd waste of resources. All you need is to send an AI unit to become that 1% that controls just about everything around here.

If it's easy to finish, it's not worth starting. If it's easy to start, it's not worth finishing.

Maybe we are so hooked on our digital gadgets is because we don't want to have figure out how to enjoy being alive.

Employers give you comfortable office chairs because it would be awful if the lasso around your neck killed you by accident just because a leg on your chair broke.

Languages are like bridges. They connect you to places across chasms that you cannot otherwise overcome. But that's about it. If you don't move on across the bridge, you ain't getting anywhere.

TNBT : The End of Advertising

TNBT : The End of Advertising

Humans evolve, albeit at a glacial pace compared to technology. But with the density and volume of information coming at us everyday, we are bound to develop our ability to filter out irrelevant information from our senses, and soon we will no longer register advertisements in our minds. We'll have dual screens that we multi task on, should one of them be held up by advertising, making online advertising a black hole for your bucks.

Advertising will change. Advertisers will work more closely with content creators and people they sponsor to ensure their brand appears in an "actionable" manner with each view of any content that is of genuine interest to the audience.

Movies will integrate sponsors' products directly into footage, and psychologists will help edit to ensure the branding is promoted by but not intruding on the story. Rendering technology will allow product branding to be swapped realtime in footage. Tap any branding in movies to order a video catalogue "toilet break" on your other device.

Digital print will not have ugly banners and click baits but have AI- generated product reviews that seek to address issues raised by the text. Read about a refugee crisis and a sponsored floatnote (footnote) linking to a donation page will be linked. Read about a sports event and it links to AI generated profiles of athletes, with live feeds of training sessions at sponsoring gyms and training programs you can sign up for online.

Geolocation sponsored content will be mainstream. Mark on your shopping list you need to pick up shampoo, and your lunch will be partly sponsored by the groceries store across the road, which will send your shopping list a map right down to the shelve with the product, and the time needed to pick it up. Offer any personal information to geolocation ads and get a permanent discount at participating stores.

Ubiquitous omni-search will replace plain spell check. Type a happy-birthday note to someone and use the word "present" and it will suggest a list of products that they can click on a choose to redeem. Enter "lunch at Chinese restaurant" into your calendar and it will suggest suitable locations. Sign the restaurant's recommendation list, and if your friend visits the restaurant, get a discount on your next visit.

The possibilities are endless. Why are we still stuck at competing for that spot on the screen everyone wants to ignore?

Sometimes I feel like I'm just a run-of-the-mill "typical" fella without much imagination, living in a reality 10 years behind where I'm really from.

That's where I'd be

That's where I'd be
Yeah, that's where I let myself be me

Turning thirty eight and didn't make it
Into the league of the rich and their friends who fake it
From Siglap to Sakae to Shinjuku it's not a lot of world
But when it's all up in your face you see the blood behind the jewel

In sharing the treasure in kissing the danger
In living the guilt of the silent reprove
In learning the touch on the back of a stranger
Memories locked away in tattoos
That's where the world labels my sins
That's where I leant that's where I'd be
That's where I stop hating my skin
That's where I let myself be me

Turning my face away from the struggles I was hiding inside hoping no one heard my voice fumble
Pretending to crave what success desires while fighting the thought I was born for defeat
Never asking why the rest have it easy until the dark night of my soul
Embracing myself into a tumble I'm falling free but in control

That's where the world labels my sins
That's where I leant that's where I'd be
That's where I stop hating my skin
That's where I let myself be me

Culture is not open source. It's a proprietary inventory of patents owned by the imperialistic right wing living deep inside your very soul.

Why can't free-thinkers date Non-free thinkers? (A

Why can't free-thinkers date Non-free thinkers? (A satire)

This question has always been on people's minds but seldom voiced. It may sound hate-provoking, intelligence-discriminating, and downright condescending, but trust me, it's not meant to be.

I'm 28 this year, and a free-thinker, and one of the most common things I hear from my religious friends go along the lines of "why do you continue your sinful life? Let me introduce you to my religion and you will be a changed person". While I wholly believe in their well-meant intentions, it's time someone explained the reason behind this "disobedience", lest it be classified as another moral standard the world refuses to live by.

A long time ago, I went out with someone, who, apart from the fact that he wasn't a free-thinker, was more or less perfect to me. Perfect in the sense that, we were exactly complements - he loves cooking and I love cleaning, he loves eating up the food I don't eat, he's always energetic when I'm down, and I'm always cheerful on his sad days. We even support different players in the same curling team. All except for the fact that he wasn't a free-thinker. It didn't matter to me at first, because I was head over heels with his free gifts and amazing sex, but sure enough, one day I found myself not being able to go on anymore - it felt so profoundly "wrong". So I broke up with this perfect guy for being religious. All my friends thought I was nuts. But decisions like this do baffle, and must be clearly explained - I cannot otherwise think of another way to appease my good conscience for hurting a completely innocent guy.

What I want non-free thinkers to understand is that, I'm more concerned with us free-thinkers. Sometimes when dating the what, we forget the who and the why.

I think the biggest example of this - and I'm not going to sugar coat it here - are free-thinkers who extend dating non-free thinkers to "being open to conversion because his religious social circle opens up opportunities to career advancement", or "his status as a religious group leader makes him reliable". The list goes on, but you get what I mean.

So yes back to the question why free thinkers should not date non-free thinkers. There are probably more, but here are four simple ones.

---

1. You have a complex system of things you believe in that cannot be summed up in one convenient word

Religious people subscribe to one prescribed system of belief, and no matter what they say, when faced with two opposing possibilities,
it is necessary that they decide that the one that matches their religion is true, and the other is false.

You on the other hand, are comfortable with half-truths and useful illusions. You absorb and learn when faced with something you cannot comprehend. You are willing to "try" religion as a learning experience, even if it is a ten-year project going through bible school without converting to the religion. Your journey demands thorough investigation and critical thinking, and the discipline and courage to fight what establishments push on you. Just because you live like a religious person and sacrifice like a religious person doesn't mean you need to think like a religious person. This something religious people find hard to understand.

You on the other hand, cannot comprehend why religious people would disobey federal law in the name of religion, and do scandalous things in the dark while forcing their religion of light down your throat. Christians, specifically even discourage themselves from dating you:

"Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?" - 2 Corinthians 6:14

2. It's never "just marriage"

I should clarify at this point that by dating I don't mean strictly relationships that result in marriage, children, and widowhood.

We know that people in the real world date for all sorts of very real and valid reasons, get married for the same, choose not to have children for the same, and divorce for the same. We knew that people change, learn, and grow through what they live through - and we revise out priorities through every stage of life.

Marriage is usually focused on the specific version of the partner people know - and demand that you stick to. When I get to know you and you decide I'm the one for you, you're almost or guaranteed to find a side of me you never knew. "What!" you say "I'm not ready for that!"

3. It's never just God or no God

Religious people always have ways to justify their belief, and since at some point they need to answer whether or not to believe, are polarized into a binary paradigm that goes along the line of God vs no God, Jesus vs Satan, Enlightenment vs Suffering.

And when religious people use this world view to justify their actions while you psychoanalyze them, only one result will end unhappy disagreement - that you give in. Religious people have limits to what they are willing to accept, and it's nowhere near yours.

4. The joy of being free

And finally, we have to consider not just the pitfalls of dating a religious person, but also the benefits of dating a free thinker.

Religious people are often driven by some kind of zeal, but free thinkers respond to real compassion and show honest desire.

Dating a free thinker means that there are no invisible gates that bar you from challenging their thinking or actions. It means that you together are free to change and grow, and to experience everything the world had to offer, and to survive to tell.

That is not to say that marrying a free thinker makes the marriage perfect. Far from it - rather you enjoy it for all its imperfections, and cherish the fact that love will never be perfect.

---

If you've read this far, you would have realized that not all religious people are as straightforward as what I described above. There are deeply good religious people who do not hide behind the brand of the religion but are sincerely involved in helping people in ways I cannot even imagine to.

There are religious people who go out without questioning your faith, and wholeheartedly want to be part of your community and your life, and help you achieve what you want.

If you are struggling with the whole idea of dating free-thinkers, one thing I've written above remains true: Sometimes when dating the what, we forget the who and the why. Don't look at the label. Look into his eyes.

The fruit of science is power over nature. The fruit of art is power over men. Art has always been about power, and nobody knows this better than oppressive governments around the world.

From a discussion on the possessive noun for inani

"How would you write a book's cover then? Inanimate objects can also possess things. Have a look at that chair's wobbly leg."

True that there isn't a strict consensus on this so I'm wrong to say it's outright wrong.

But it's actually a good rule to teach - considering you can simply say "book cover" which makes "book's cover" sound awkward.

I admit "wobbly leg of the chair" is somewhat cumbersome, but in writing you could phrase it something like "He was worried the chair would not hold up on its wobbly leg" instead of "he was worried the chair's wobbly leg would not hold up". Gramma allows you to make complex sentences - but English writing tends to favor simple sentence structures.

Have a look at that chair's wobbly leg could be rewritten as have a look at that chair with the wobbly leg.

What if religious rituals were imitations of voice and behavioral biometrics used by aliens who visited Earth during prehistoric times? #random

March

March. And naked
Trees look into a blue sky
With raised arms
Praying to be young again.

Teamwork

Teamwork

You're so capable our company needs more people like you dude. Come could you help me with one more favor?

I'm pretty packed.

Look at this chart - it's not adding up when I look at the data. You like challenges like this don't you?

I could look at it but I wouldn't be able to do analysis for another three weeks.

I'd really do it myself but you know I've got family commitment and my wife will kill me if I'm not home early to take care of the older boy.

I've had enough. Get it done yourself. Screw your family. Screw your children. Just because you made the lifestyle choice to have family doesn't give you the moral right to push your work to me. When the ladies have kids they take a pay cut to make time - what makes you think you can get away with keeping your salary and getting someone else to do your job? Don't try to push your supposed "family values" on me I don't buy it.

Calm down man all I'm asking for is a little of your expertise! I understand you're stressed alright I'll take it off your hands and not burden you. Sorry if I pushed you man - can I get you coffee as an apology?

Leave. Me. Alone.

Alright I'll leave I'll leave! Just tell me if there's anything I can do for you -

...

What got into you man. We're such a great team.

Low Hanging Fruit

Low Hanging Fruit

Great master, teach us moral rules so we can be high up in the clouds like you.

My friend, do you know why clouds are so high?

No teacher. Why?

Because they have little substance. You are always the intelligent one do you know what that means?

Teacher are you saying you are so wise because you are foolish? How can someone so high be so low?

Have you seen the tree outside?

Yes teacher. The fruit is delicious!

Did you climb up the tree to pick the fruits high up?

No, teacher I went for the low hanging fruit.

Yes, all living things will find the Way that requires the least effort in the end. What if all the low hanging fruit is gone?

Then I will climb the tree.

Yes. The tree is wise to bear both low and high hanging fruit.

Why would the tree do that it would get eaten!

Getting eaten is why the tree bears fruit at all. Zen is in eating the fruits low down, Zen is in eating the fruits high up, and Zen is in getting all fruits eaten.

So everything is Zen!

Yes. Both the moral and the immoral are Zen. Both the wise and the foolish are Zen. But the moment you are conscious of Zen, Zen is no longer there.

But teacher if that is so how can we ever be wise?

Go on eating the low hanging fruit. When the fruit is gone, the tree will teach you what you need to learn.

What is coding?

What is coding?

Programming languages are fictional universes described by some of the brightest minds of our times. These universes come with their own rules and conventions, cultures and demographics. Just as authors use books to help you interact with their universes, you interact with programming language universes by casting spells that do everything from displaying a picture of a cat on the screen to obtaining classified military information through the Internet. We call these spells code.

Code is the essence of programs just as spells are the essence of magic. Just as magic is the whole process and experience from creating the spell to saving the world, it's hard to pinpoint what a program really is. Is it a program just because cannot or does not perform anything meaningful? Is it a program just because it's written on sand? Is it a program if nobody knows how to cast it anymore? These are questions we don't try to answer. The experience of coding is magical enough.

If you are familiar with casting spells, you will know that actually creating spells is no small feat. Spells work within specific realities, and code allow you to see the world through specific lenses.

Back in the old days these lenses tend to be centered around a computer - which is, for those of you who are old enough to remember, the equivalent of using magic wand gestures back in the days when magic wands were necessary for magic to happen. Nowadays, these lenses really depend on your context. Someone who casts code in the clouds would see the world very differently than someone diving into the mysterious intelligence of the Deep Blue. Pretty much like how young people nowadays cast spells with their toes or by blinking, whichever is currently fashionable. I still don't understand what is so sexy about casting spells with their toes.

How does one code? Same as casting spells. You need to know the basic invocation techniques, the actual words to use, be in the correct mental frame when performing the spell, and understand how spells interact with the other spells your peers or enemies may cast. You need to voice each spell with perfect accuracy - computers, just like magic, have no tolerance for incompetence. Spell casting is a performance art in itself.

Having said that, I'm sure the more experienced wizards are starting to ask, isn't coding, unlike magic, merely a matter of technical competency? That's where it starts getting exciting.

You see, unlike magic, where wizards rarely create new spells, in the coding world, each invocation of a spell is in itself a new spell. And just as it takes decades to learn how to create a good spell, it's the same for code. Good code is like good magic - it hints at you what it was created for and what it is capable of, while at the same time foresees how you may use it in an entirely different situation. It does not judge you, but when you invoke it, you judge yourself through its invocation.

Bad code is like a bad spell - ambiguous what it is supposed to achieve, and falls apart when you try casting it a second time. Certainly there are those who master bad magic so far that it becomes black magic - these are the masters we rarely get to know about.

So how does this code magic actually work? That would be another lesson.

Hi. I've heard much about this education thing. Is it for my child and can it make him successful?

Thank you for calling. Sure it is for your child. Our program ensures that we make as many people as mediocre as possible.

Mediocre? Not successful?

Success is, if you will, like a painting, and mediocrity is a plain canvas. The plainer the canvas, the better we can help your child paint a picture of success.

Success is like a picture? I thought you either are successful or you are not?

Rest assured, sir, we are trained story tellers. We can make anyone think they will be happy by being successful in helping our School remain profitable. Educated people are like dumb machines - they're so much easier to govern!

You WHAT?

I apologize for my rant: let me rephrase, sir. Success is a journey and we help your child get there.

Oh. Okay. Hmmm. So your success thing comes with this happiness thing as well?

Success is a journey, sir. But to be honest we do get weirdos saying they are not happy with our package. Unlike you sir, these people aren't very educated, don't you think?

So you are expert story tellers and you can make anyone happy? I'm not so good today could you tell me a story and make me happy?

I'm afraid that's not how it works, sir. But if you are interested, we have this I Believe I'm Happy program for adults. It will train you in all 10 characteristics common to all happy people.

Uh-huh

Would you like us to send you more information on it?

It's okay I'll think about it. Thanks.

Thank you for calling, sir. We wish you and your child success.

Happiness number 2341 is now available for collect

Happiness number 2341 is now available for collection at the Institution. You may not resell your happiness nor reverse engineer your happiness. The Institution reserves absolute rights over the brand of Happiness rationed to you, and is the sole dispenser of Happiness in your reach. Failing to observe the above mentioned ground rules may result in the removal of all comforts associated with the Happiness you receive. Remember, the Institution's Happiness is what makes your life complete. Understand that we worry for you should you stray from the safety of our Happiness.

Sign below to acknowledge you have received your package.

Every system that survives the test of time despite everything bears witness not to its worthiness but to the success of a mechanism that either aligns or prioritizes its continued existence above its original purpose.
Sometimes people become part of such mechanisms. We call these people Conservatives.

I'm secretly so proud of my peers who have stayed alive, despite parents, despite churches, and despite the "conservative" world around us.

#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.