An idea from magic comes to mind, called ‘ground and center’. Like a stance in martial arts, a place of balance from which to launch an attack or mount a defense, from which you are too balanced to fall, and when you do fall you’ve practiced the stance’s failure modes enough that you can absorb the fall, morphing it into another position of advantage.

And maybe I can create such a stance, philosophically, out of that old cliche that has stuck with me ever since I stumbled across it as a teenager: Nothing is true; everything is permitted.  This has either had a great formative influence on me, or my mind has fixated on it because my inner nature is so similar to something that the phrase represents.  I’m coming to accept that I am lazy, not as an eternally repeated mistake, but as a part of my fundamental nature.  So I’ve tended to assimilate this phrase in the spirit of: nothing is true, so… meh, whatever.  I don’t think this is the spirit in which the phrase was intended by that ancient assassin who coined it or the chaos magicians who adopted it.

I think the spirit is more like: nothing is true, therefore, choose! Act!  Question, but don’t let the lack of a true answer paralyze you.  Nothing is true, so learn to perceive the myriad ways in which things are untrue.  Nothing is true, so don’t accept anybody’s definition of what you should do or be, what you’re supposed to think. Should according to what code? Who is doing the supposing?

Your code.  You do the supposing.  Find a way, an angle, a stance from which you can be confident in your choices. Everything is permitted. Every thinker in the world, even your favorite bloggers, have realized consciously or unconsciously that everything is made up; yet they’ve still built their tensegrity structures of ideas; grown them, shared them, used them to draw a community, profited from them, and pitted them against other meme complexes for sport or for serious stakes.

Nothing is true, therefore build a castle in sky, and take out a second mortgage on it. Use it to finance a kingdom.

So my mind turned to blogging in general, and WordPress in particular.  I have gotten a lot of value from blogs and blogging over the years.  I’ve met friends.  Some of those friends have met each other.  There are humans who wouldn’t have been born except for this.  I know they exist: I have played video games with them.  For a while, LiveJournal was my primary social environment.  (I tend to think of LJ as less blogging and more of a social network, but that’s splitting hairs.)  Blogs have given me a constant stream of data flowing through my optic nerves.  They are a vital part of the human hive mind.

There are a few nice things about WordPress.  It’s the predominant blogging platform, but the other features I like are not unique.  It’s open source, and people can host it on their own servers or shared hosting accounts.  This decentralization is important for reasons I’m too tired to articulate at the moment

So how can I make this world more awesome?  For one thing, I should be blogging more.  There’s an intersection between philosophy, fantasy, and real life that blogging is just perfect to explore.  Intersection?  There are whole worlds.

But as a programmer, I should be able to make a contribution to the tools used for blogging, and make a living in the process.  But the nature of that contribution is a bit of a question mark.  Is there bug fixing that is desperately needed?  Plugins?  Updates for the new(ish) mobile world?  I don’t know what the mobile blogging experience is like; I know there are WordPress plugins for mobile, but I also know that the current mobile experience of most blogs sucks.  Or maybe the technology has already matured and the ship has sailed.  Anyway, I think my blog posts like questions better than answers, so I’ll end it here.

Resolution:

• Remember the Chaoist’s creed: Nothing is true; everything is permitted.

Goals:

• Get Healthy
• Get Fit
• Get Lucky
• Get Busy

Happy New Year to all my numerous readers!

(I can’t take credit for this idea.  There’s a quote somewhere that, “You don’t read programming books; you work through them.”.)

I’m assuming it’s actually worthwhile to read technical books.  I think it’s more fun to just mess around with something until I understand it, occasionally consulting the web where necessary.  Here’s a new format for a programming book: 600 pages, divided into 6 sections.  Each section starts with a 10 page tutorial, followed by 90 pages of reference material for you to consult while you’re messing around with whatever tech the book is about, designed to answer the questions of “so how do I do…?” and “why am i getting this error…?”.

Someone’s probably thought of this idea too.  Know of any books like that for MVC frameworks?

This is surreal to me.  When I was a kid, I didn’t play with “Lego”, or “Lego bricks.”  I played with Legos.

I define “winning” as getting 10,000 points, thus getting 10 GP (anything less and you’ll only get 0 or 2 GP).  As the intro mentions, you lose points when the truck is “attacked”.  Every time a biker bumps the truck, you lose about 100 points, and they can do it several times in a few seconds.  Also, when a biker is destroyed in front of the truck, and the truck runs it over, you lose about 1000 points.  You gain points by destroying bikers, 500 each.

Spend a few rounds practicing your attacks, without worrying about losing.  If the 200 Gil charge is a problem, go outside and kill stuff or master and sell some All materia.  If it were cheap, they’d call it the Plastic Saucer.  As the intro mentions, you’ve got left and right slash.  You also can bump the other bikers.  They can’t hurt you.  It seems to be possible destroy the bikers by bumping them, especially from the front, but this is hard to do.  The main uses of the bump are 1) pushing them away from the truck, and 2) getting in close for a slash.

The slash takes some practice.  Cloud takes a second or so to wind up for the slash, so you should take a few swings to get used to that.  Then practice slashing the bikers at the right height.  Which way you’re leaning affects the height of your slash.  Easiest is when they’re right beside you and you’re not leaning at all.  One technique is to get beside and slightly ahead of a biker, then move backward as you slash them.  Another is the diving slash: moving horizontally or diagonally toward a biker while slashing.  Bumping them and then slashing works too.  The important thing is to get the hang of where they need to be for you to slash them.

It might be tempting to play defensively, since you lose points when the truck is hit.  But if you keep the truck from being hit without killing any bikers, you’ll still have zero points.  Furthermore, when you kill bikers, the game will spawn more of them (up to 3), so the faster you can kill them, the more points you can potentially earn.

When you’re done practicing, try this mental trick.  Name each biker you attack after the score he’s going to give you, rounded down to the nearest 500.  Mentally say his name as you attack.  (Slash.)  500.  (Slash.)  1000.  (Truck gets hit.)  (Slash) 1000 again.  (Slash.  Slash.) 2000.  (Slash–miss!)  Come back here, 2500! (Slash.) 2500…  After a few rounds, you’ll get a feel for how fast your score needs to advance in order to make the 10,000 point goal.

The orange bikers seem to be more aggressive in going after the truck, but the orange and red bikers are both worth the same number of points (500).  When there are no bikers on the screen, the best place to be is a length or so behind the truck.  It’s possible to control the road, preventing the bikers from passing you for a while, but then you don’t get to kill them.  Try to kill them before they surround the truck.  If they do get near the truck (and you don’t already have a shot), wedge yourself between the truck and them, and then slash them.

The worst place a biker can be is right in front of the truck.  They repeatedly do damage (lost points) when the truck bumps into them, and even more if you kill them and the truck runs them over.  Try to bump them out of the path of the truck before slashing them, if possible.  Don’t waste too much effort on it, though.  It may be worth losing some points to kill them quickly, so you can move on to killing the next set of bikers.

Once you reach the required 10,000 points, it again becomes tempting to play defensively.  This doesn’t seem to work, as it’s pretty hard to keep the bikers away from the truck.  Just keep the mental count and go for the next level of of scorage.  When you reach 10,000, shoot for 11,000 instead, and 12,000 when you reach that, etc.

When you learn how to win, next you need to know how many times you need to win to get the required GP.  My goal was to have enough GP to play in the Battle Square for long enough get Omnislash and W-Summon, so I played G-Bike until I had about 250 GP.  It sounds very Principal Skinner, but you may be able to keep yourself from getting bored by setting a higher or different goal each round.  One round, shoot for 13,000, then 15,000, then take a round to practice your slashing, then try to see if you get more GP if you go over 20,000, etc.

* If you are reading this and considering suicide, please seek help.  I’m a programmer type, so here is a bit of logic for you: no matter how much your life might suck right now, you only get one, so you may as well stick around to see how the rest of it goes.

_why was an artist, and it was suggested that his disappearance was an artistic statement.  Maybe his whole public persona was created to make that statement.  A statement of what?  In my mind, it’s about both the fragility and the resilience of the Web.  We create links, but there’s no guarantee that what they point to will always be there.  We think of Web “sites” as *places*.  But without power, without a running server, without Internet access, or with someone’s active intention to remove them, they cease to exist.  And yet, people have preserved what they could of _why’s work, because they cared, or because they thought it was important.  People have created the Internet Archive, and attempted to archive GeoCities and Twitter.  Maybe browsers of the future will let you automatically follow dead links to their archives (maybe there are already plugins for this?).

Mark, as far as I know, isn’t a performance artist, so that leads me to suspect he had a more unpleasant reason.  I don’t know him personally, but I do hope he’s alright.  And if so, how about leaving a note?

Update: “Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.” — Jason Scott

I think this is an example of classical conditioning.  The behaviors aren’t automatic though.  I think it’s that the antecedent gets associated with the anticipation of the tangible result.  I can work all day without logging things, and then it becomes uncomfortable that they are not logged.

This is an exciting new toy, because I’m a programmer, and I’ve just found a way to hack myself.  Give me conditional jumps and I’ll write you a Unix.

Another episode centered on the 9/11 Truth movement, which is about uncovering or disseminating the truth about 9/11, whatever that may be; as well as the kind of resistance that 9/11 Truthers meet.  The two main schools of thought, they said, are called LIHOP and MIHOP.  These theories either assert that the government Let It Happen On Purpose, or Made It Happen On Purpose.  Whether either of these theories is true, 9/11 is sure being Milked For All It’s Worth (MFAIW). We are involved in two wars, and civil liberties are being eroded as intelligence and law enforcement receive more funding.

Given the resistance that the 9/11 Truth movement encounters in trying to bring the truth of the matter to light, perhaps its energies are better spent making sure that the next 9/11 is not nearly as profitable.  There are millions out there that, whatever the truth may be, believe whatever they see on the news–and that what they see on the news is what their attention should be focused on.  Focus on awakening the public– in small ways, and initially with issues that seem less important than 9/11– to the ways in which they are being misdirected, and teaching them to direct their own attention and find their own information.  This has the advantage of presenting a harder target to those who would call you crazy conspiracy theorists or otherwise try to censor you, and you may get people on board who wouldn’t have joined the 9/11 Truth movement.  Who could argue with the “Media Literacy Movement”?

Then again, maybe I’m just one of “them” trying to direct your attention away from what really matters.

I’ve noticed that in ALL problems, once I establish a solid consistent language around the feature I’m building, the programming part is easy. This is true even on complex problems. Its very rare to have a problem I can talk about in detail that is not easily solvable.

– darkxanthos on Hacker News