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EpicMegatrax writes more bullshit
 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-24 23:32 [#02504307]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



wat


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-24 23:45 [#02504308]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



oh, yes, also, i realized i'm hackworth, lost in mapping out
drummer architecture, trying to compile the seed. neal
stephenson, diamond age. perhaps i'm projecting my own
architecture onto it, but it's uncannily similar.

it was only a few weeks ago (hiking, i can take you to the
spot it occurred to me, or at least the part where i wrote
the next part) that i noticed: fuck. the diamond age. did
neal stephenson have all this fifteen years ago? to quote
steven levy from his book "hackers" -- one of my favorties
-- no, wait, already i'm peter molyneux. steven levy,
hackers, quoting peter gosper, who said something like:
dammit. every time you figure out something cool, you find
out that gauss or newton had it in the crib.

you know what, though? stephenson is a genius, and if i've
caught up with him simply by following my own path, that's
almost as good as being the first hunter to the data. that's
the worst case O(n). even more gratifying is the idea that i
may have fleshed it out a tad more than he has. and the man
is a hell of a boss dd-3. a frickin' balrog

duul fits that last bit of wording; it's on now.
duntduntudndaaaa. yes, mouse on mars, please see my track
"stank bomb" off my album "human controlled" for the same
sort of goofy sloppy high school metal band vibe, with
respect to the snowflake's chance in hell you've been
reading my thread since page one


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-29 04:07 [#02504535]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i hunch that the increased multitasking (from none to some)
is not just rhythm organizing my mind a bit better, but also
left and right brain beginning to cooperate a bit.

i had a situation with a pringle tonight. i had it stored in
the door comportment, left, and for right robot claw to
extract a morsel i had to reach aroundunderthru left arm's
business zone, it was driving the car.

left robot claw likes to dance and right claw drives, so...
alright, you two. right has to drive, left is on pringle
threading. right claw, we've seen you drive. left claw...
dance me up a morsel.

sorta. no. wat. left claw grabs two and stows the spare on
my right thigh, as per protocol. then, driving took over for
a bit. i forgot i'd had left stow the spare pringle and went
to retrieve it with right, but... aphasia. left placed it,
right didnt know where it was. the data was not shared.

this gets from codex waesle to corpus callosium. inter-lobe
bus between left and right. sever it? things work fine. it
solves epilepsy thjngs, sometimes, so it's done bere ans
dere. then word, weirds get ljne


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-29 04:13 [#02504536]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



corpus callosotomy tops my imaginary metal band name list for
the week, with their album, "in a bag"


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-29 04:18 [#02504537]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



In addition, the resultant split-brain prevented some
patients from following verbal commands that required use of
their non-dominant hand.[9]


perhaps they're not using the right tone of voice.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-19 21:05 [#02505842]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



By exploiting a flaw in the part of the CPU known as the
branch predictor, a small application developed by the
researchers was able to identify the memory locations where
specific chunks of code spawned by other software would be
loaded. In computer security parlance, the branch predictor
contains a "side channel" that discloses the memory
locations.


good to know that works on digital just as well as it does
biological computation.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 11:43 [#02506205]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02505842



i've been approaching meditation/spirituality/etc through
the lens of computer science and engineering metaphors,
essentially because it's what i know. it's my field. it's my
passion. it's pretty much my life. so, yes, why not feed it
back on itself? feedback is an engineering concept that i've
gotten a lot of mileage out of... when i fed feedback back
into itself, the result was peter molyneux.....

...but, yes, that Lot of Mileage i mentioned. everyone knows
the thing where you get in your car, get lost in thought,
and then... hey, you're home! and you have no recollection
of anything that happened on the drive home. like
engineering, this is pretty much my whole life.

i became fascinated with this and began to tear it apart.
this essentially means consciously catching myself driving
unconsciously, and then taking stock: what's going on? what
muscles are tense, what are relaxed? what jarried me out of
thought and back to reality?

this was not a serious effort, until it was. i came up with
a metaphor i call "freeze-frame." if something's happened
before my conscious mind has zipped off somewhere else, i
can replay part of my unconscious behavior back for the
conscious mind to review. through and through, this is a
skill, not an "ability" or something i wound up through luck
or genetics.

then it got proper weird: even when i am consciously focused
on driving, there are a thousand things going on
subconsciously: i don't have to think about how far to turn
the wheel when turning onto a side-street. so, let's
"freeze-frame" that last turn, there, and see what's going
on.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 12:05 [#02506207]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



it is analagous to a magic genie that i am allowed to ask
three questions. the genie has every bit of data in my
brain; all i have to do is ask. this sounds like a line to
god until you get to the caveats:

1) the genie only gives you about 2-5 seconds before you
lose your chance.
2) the quality of the answer is directly proportional to the...
3) if you don't understand something, your questions about
it tend to be crap.
4) if you aren't aware of something, you can't ask questions
about it at all.

when i'd play back the turn i'd made (or whatever), getting
anything out of it was like trying to have a conversation
with someone going by in a freight train once an hour. a
frustrating, erratic trickle: a visual image of the line by
the curb. ok, sure, my brain went for that first to orient
itself. then the genie's already gone; that's all i get.

that visual image of the line meant little to me until i
glued it into the idea that i can't stay oriented without
references... then, perhaps, next time, i get something
rather meta: my brain is now able to tell me when my
subconscious mind decided to move my eyeballs from the road
ahead to a precise little voxel of road as the start of
making a turn onto a sidestreet. now i am free to
consciously process this morsel:

is that something i was taught, or is it just from
practice/experience? elements of both. (vague question,
vague answer)

is this a good way to do things, or should i try to change
it? it's fine for now. (better question, better answer)

what happened at that point when i switched from "drive
straight" to "turn?" probably a saccade eye movement....
(technical question, technical answer)

then my three questions are gone and i get nothing more out
of the moment.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 12:19 [#02506209]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i've written about the freeze-frame thing before: the mind
can be viewed as a hierarchical, tiered cache where
relevancy rises to the top, and i've learned to peek into
the cache. data is never in the cache for long, so i have to
be quick... i have to be deliberate and specific with my
queries, because i don't have enough of a window to go back
and ask more clearly... then some musing that perhaps
creativity is essentially like branch prediction in CPUs: my
brain has not fully thought this tangent out, it just feels
a lot stronger than the other tangents, so it's getting more
juice. then, consciously, i just have a vague hunch that
this thing here is a bit more special than the other
things...

By exploiting a flaw in the part of the CPU known as the
branch predictor, a small application developed by the
researchers was able to identify the memory locations where
specific chunks of code spawned by other software would be
loaded. In computer security parlance, the branch predictor
contains a "side channel" that discloses the memory
locations.


this is from an article about a novel hacking exploit.
the CPU scatters stuff around your RAM in a spastic manner
for security -- in a metaphor, a dog buries a bone so the
other dogs won't get it, and picking a good spot involves
variety and chaos. this is called ASLR (Address Space
Layout Randomization).


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 12:21 [#02506210]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



from the article:

A table in the [branch] predictor called the "branch
target buffer" stores certain locations known as branch
addresses. Modern CPUs rely on the branch predictor to speed
up operations by anticipating the addresses where
soon-to-be-executed instructions are located. They speculate
whether a branch is taken or not and, if taken, what address
it goes to. The buffers store addresses from previous
branches to facilitate the prediction. The new technique
exploits collisions in the branch target buffer table to
figure out the addresses where specific code chunks are
located.


i was already hunching (branch-predicting) pretty hard as i
read the start of the article, but that part just floored
me. more or less, i applied computer hacking to my own mind
and came up with a novel technique. a few monhts later, more
or less the exact same thing shows up as a real security
flaws in real computers. fucking surreal.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 12:31 [#02506211]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



the same day i read that article, i was reading the
wikipedia page for neural coding. my vague recollection is
that i wanted to use the phrase "refractory period" as a
joke on IRC.

i said to myself: "self, you are not entirely sure you're
using this phrase correctly, and you should look it up to be
sure." not thought: will anyone even get this joke? is this
worth the effort of looking up? should i even be on IRC
right now? etc...

from the mundane chore of fact-checking a throway joke that
no one would get as part of an IRC conversation i shouldn't
have been having, i then began to read wikipedia for an
hour. this is my life, yessir. it seems like crap until it
isn't. i get to the part about population coding and i see
this:

his exploits both the place or tuning within the auditory
nerve, as well as the phase-locking within each nerve fiber
Auditory nerve. The first ALSR reprsentation was for
steady-state vowels;[45] ALSR representations of pitch and
formant frequencies in complex, non-steady state stimuli
were demonstrated for voiced-pitch[46] and formant
representations in consonant-vowel syllables.[47] The
advantage of such representations is that global features
such as pitch or formant transition profiles can be
represented as global features across the entire nerve
simultaneously via both rate and place coding.


huge, massive brain-fart: ALSR? exploits? this is not where
these things belong. this acronym goes with something
else...

eventually i realized: no, this is the same thing. ASLR and
ALSR. yin and yang mirrors of the same thing. i think i'm
digging in the right place.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 15:12 [#02506228]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



that's probably about 1/3 too technical for mohamed, so i'll
localize the phenomenon. in my re-entrant review
of the cheetah EP i found myself squinting at some words i'd
written: "...use gating to make all the timing snap like
cher's bumhole."

i got hung up: snap like... what? cher's bumhole fell
out of some corner of my brain. sounds good; continue
writing. later, it nagged at me. precisely as if it were a
hunch.... which, really, it was. my brain was saying, "i am
hunching that there is something worth consciously reviewing
in this phrase." all i managed to get out of it immediately
was: oh, well, it sounds like something someone on xlt would
write, and it's funny. then something else caught my
attention and i wandered off.

from there on it's scrambled like dreamtime jams. once i got
to the end, it made total sense, more or less all at once.
you can see me progressively work it out in layers over in
that thread:

first i note the way i got hung up on it, and the little i
figured out (above). then i start digging deeper: thoroughly
british. this feels like a belb word:

then someone's to lol dropped in to say, "yeah, out of
all this stuff, this thing here, it's beautiful." then he's
gone. left the thread. so, yes, bumhole is a belb word, but
signeduptolol is stranded in london or something and he's on
here enough to recognize a belb word


when i wrote "stranded in london" i really just meant "in
england" and the "stranded" was for style. or was it? it
promptly brought signeduptolol back to the thread: "I do
feel stranded here, like I can't get away."

driving in the car, i get a hunch to google search xlt for
specific keywords, and there's SignedUpToLol in a belb rap
battle thread, rapping about being stranded in london, and
using the word bumhole.

i still can't tell you where cher came from, but i'm working
on it.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-10-27 15:33 [#02506230]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i do not consciously remember reading that thread, or his
post. my brain does not give me a "yes definitely" or "no,
definitely not" or even "possibly." i am genuinely not sure
if i ever read that thread before. if we tack over from
"feeling" to "logic," however, parsimony is all "jeez, i
must have. this is too specific and weird for it to be
otherwise."

inherent in a lot of this is being comfortable with hunches
over proof. this works because they're just hunches, and
they can be wrong sometimes, and should i encounter proof
that a hunch is, indeed, wrong, i promptly throw it out.
then, obviously, i'm always searching for proof a hunch is
wrong. give me a reason not to, bro. c'mon....

...well, what are the other options, anyways?

perhaps SignedUpToLol recites that rap every morning and he
was leading me down the garden path throughout the whole
exchange. but, no, that's not how he does. it's too
indirect....

next, uh... i never read the rap, but i read lots of his
posts, and it bled in through osmosis. parsimony gets mad at
that one. possible? yes. likely? hell no. in fact, even less
likely than an impossibly complex, surreal joke at my
expense.

then, finally, it's sheer fucking luck.... sure, that's
possible, but i stopped flatly dismissing these sort of
things off as "luck" once they began to happen alarmingly
often.

i keep peeling off more layers of the onion: i made that
review thread in the first place to branch of my rambling
and stop larding up the real review thread, and of the two
major points i ala carted off with, one of them belonged to
signeduptolol, who usually has no time for my blather. did i
put that in there to get his attention? possibly.

bottom line: belb rap battle threads are now a part of my
soul. bits of battle will bleed up to the surface and
directly influence my thoughts and actions. a part of me
will always be stranded in london, even though i've
never been there myself.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 21:00 [#02506506]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i have some rather odd problems. last month was batshit
crazy. lots going on. i did it all pretty well, actually...
but, by the end of the month, i was practically incoherent.
unable to shut up. a thousand things rattling around in my
mind.

i've been here many times before. i am just loaded up with
information and things and stuff and wat and it's spinning
around until my brain chews through it all. until then, i am
unable to shut up. mostly to myself, but if i have to talk
to someone else, i go on tangents wait shit tangents wait
shit topic change tangent sorry, what were you saying?

internally, i am functioning, more or less. not my full
percentage, but well enough. i just need a few days of
puttering around the house, think everything through,
driving around, thinking everything through, posting without
thinking anything through, peter molyneux, u noe? peter
molyneux grew and grue and made another peter molyneux grew
and grue and made another peter molyneux grew and grue and
made another peter molyneux grew and grue and made another
fine cheddar.

it's not a bad state of mind at all. not unpleasant, just
weird -- like me, you know? i always write premium yugo,
too. the only problem is interacting with reality.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 21:15 [#02506507]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



monday: i sound like a drunk linus torvalds crossbred with
spam emails through a pimped-out kyma. not bad. in public, i
stick to the minimal script and avoid smalltalk. this is for
the protection of the rest of society. it's pretty simple: i
can chatter along in my head and keep the mouth closed, and
i can follow the script without being odd in any discernable
way... but as soon as i get into a real discussion, i tend
to confuse the fuck out of people.

like, today: there's a squeaky thing in the floor, and as a
man of many noises, i took the issue to the homeowner. it's
these metal things against these wood things, ok. i suggest:
wd-40? his answer is that it'd work for a bit, but then
start again, and there are better solutions. fair enough.

then i get to wondering: is wd-40 bad for wood? is there
another type of lubricant that would serve better there? so
i ask him: "is wd-40 the best thing for that type of
situation, or is there another sort of..." and he cuts me
off: "no, i told you, it'd work for a bit, but then start
again..." i am not talking about the floor things anymore. i
am asking a question about materials. wood, metal, what sort
of goop to make it not frictionary?

three or four minutes later, i am going mad. he still
doesn't get it. finally i spin a yarn: some scientists in a
lab are putting together wood and metal and it has nothing
to do with that other problem and what lubricant?

he says: oh! wd-40 is bad for wood. you'd want silicon
lubricant.

thank god.

it's maddening, really. i'll make a leap. you can see how i
got from A to B well enough, but it's not a leap that most
people would make. too lateral bananas. then i have to
either abandon the issue or catch them up.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 21:29 [#02506508]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



that was today. i am mostly recovered. massive amounts of
time driving around and working out. i was almost in tears
because i couldn't get. him. to. understand. but otherwise
it's been cool.

but, back to monday: i sound like a drunk spambot through
some inscrutable convolution transform. tight. in public, i
stick to the minimal script and avoid smalltalk. this is for
the protection of the rest of society. it's pretty simple: i
can chatter along in my head and keep the mouth closed, and
i can follow the script without being odd in any discernable
way... but as soon as i get into a real discussion, i tend
to confuse the fuck out of people.

like, the old dude who works the gas station at some times
but not other times is a nice man. he has the tempo of a
deflated waltz, but he's very nice. i have to always be on
myself to not talk too quickly and such. i usually manage.

last sunday, i am unmanagable. untractable. there had been
some huge wad of people in the square doing things, and
nutty everywhere... and i was curious what the occasion was.
i tried to ask molasses gasman. he wasn't working then, oh.
he doesn't know. so far so good.

he's curious now too, he says. and i'm off: it was synthesis
of multiple factors. it's sunday, the election is soon,
halloween is tomorrow, it's nice out and it was raining
yesterday... yes, this event was clearly emergent
complexity.... i cut myself off before even getting to the
part about emergent complexity, because i tuned back in for
a moment to see the smouldering remains of his brain. "oh,
well, i guess it's just a mystery!" i say. "oh, yep..." i
exit the store and resist the urge to slap myself. so, yes,
on monday, in public, i avoid any topic of conversation that
will get me thinking. hi, how you u doin. good, thanks. no,
not today. thank you very much! you're welcome, cashier
lady. thank you for not attempting to make contact with the
layer of my brain beneath robotic social word waltzes.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 21:40 [#02506509]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



monday: i sound like a drunk goat. on lsd. with a cybernetic
interface to a planet made entirely of raisins. time for a
work call!

i know the guy very well, so it's not like he's completely
unprepared. he's quick, like me. follows my leaps. if not
for this, i would have just cancelled. i probably should
have, really, but it generated fantastic data.

i am able to write a bullet-point list of what i want to
talk about and work down through it from memory... remember
which we've covered... run over them all in my head and
realize we missed one right as we're goodbye'n; blurt it
out. save!

i go on a million tangents and cut myself off and apologize.
it is a thousand times worse than the silicon lubricant leap
of context. i am shooting down stupid tangent after stupid
tangent to the point where i'm having trouble speaking
properly. plenty escape my mouth, anyways.

i almost explained myself upfront, but decided against,
because the explanation would have been a trainwreck. like
the gas station, i am doing my best to stick to my script.
and failing. he's wondering what's up, i half figure. in
retrospect, i can sum it up well enough: i have a very
exotic strain of nerd flu and my voice is funny, but no
reason to stop the meeting, you know? i came up with this
analogy afterwards, so i can play it back at someone as if i
am a sampler next time in am in this sort of spot.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 21:54 [#02506510]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



he's being polite. we're getting through the agenda, but
it's messy. i am shooting down tangent after tangent. many
escape my mouth. i start talking about driving for a while.
a few times. usually cut myself off. pretty much, any of
this stuff would be fine, if it weren't so much, so fast, on
a work call. he decides to ask what's up in a unique way: he
describes how, on long car drives, he stops being able to
keep his internal monologue internal. anything he thinks, he
says. do i know that sort of thing?

a capacitor explodes in the back of my brain somewhere.
whoa, rad. what was that? never mind. oh, yes: i'm battling
a tangent hellstorm, trying to filter out all the wild
tangents my mind is throwing at me, and i've just been asked
if i have no mental filter. a capacitor explodes in the back
of my brain somewhere

inside my mind, i had to essentially say: yes, hello,
mental filter? is it a good idea to talk about mental
filters?
and my brain said, "..." and then, "uhh, i'll
get back to you."

i have so much to say about voices, internal monologue, and
i am wicked curious about what he's just described. tangents
are shot down. then i have to think about how to explain
that he is wrong but in neighborhood... a capacitor explodes
in the back of my brain somewhere


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 23:18 [#02506513]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



monday: i'm so busy shutting down irrelevant things to say
that i have trouble answering my collegue's questions.
instead, i start blathering -- a stupid tangent slips past!
-- and cut myself off repeatedly. sensing something is off,
my collegue says: yes, i had this moment when i had no
mental filter once, is that it? do you have no mental filter
right now?

the strangest thing happened then. it took me a solid two
days to figure out what had happened.

as i thought about how to answer, a sentence came out of my
mouth: "oh, i know that one, too, but this is something
else."


the sentence and my inner monologue were one and the same.
it's like fractal compression -- a whole paragraph of my
inner monologue shrunken down into a sentence that came out
of my mouth as my inner monologue chewed on how to answer.

it was intensely disorienting because a hell of a lot of
things happened at once. i had the sensation of the sentence
coming first... trying to figure out drove me mad. circular
references. baron von munchausen. eventually it dawned on me
that neither came first: the sentence was "grown"
simultaneously with the inner monologue paragraph as part of
the same process. to me at the time, though, i had the
sentence first, and then it unpacked itself into my internal
monologue... as i was saying it... the unpacking was also
all at once. a sense of two or three cores blowing up
different parts of the sentence...

you know how beavis/butthead will witness, say,
firecrackers, and say: ... huh-uh. cool

that was essentially my reaction: something has just
exploded in my mind, and that was really neato! then, i told
myself it was a tangent, and resumed making an ass of
myself.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-02 23:35 [#02506514]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i have been doing all these weird experiments with automatic
habits, metaphor programming, and multi-tasking. that last
part is fantastic -- it's actually made it easier for me to
interact with people. i can listen to what people are saying
and reply appropriately while my inner monologue is chewing
on the angles. if i get too tangled up, it'll just be dead
air. me staring blankly as a person waits for a reply. this
still happens, but far less often.

this is now another mechanism that can backfire when i am
tired and frazzled, yet still required to function. more or
less, when he asked me if i had no mental filter, my mental
filter began to evaluate itself. the process got stuck and
never returned; infinite recursive loop. this jammed up the
works. like a computer lagging when it's really busy...
except, no, this is the brain, where everything is parallel.
my mental filter going infinite loop landed me in a zone
where i was directly perceiving a lot of subconscious
machinery i've never been allowed anywhere near before.

compression is one metaphor. calculus is another: the
integral of the sentence is my internal monologue, and the
derivative of my internal monologue is the sentence. the
words in the sentence are effectively pointers to segments
of my internal monologue. essentially, it was a little index
of working data as i thought things through. the sentence
was what my brain was using to keep its point in the
internal monologue...

i did a bit of damage with that rambly phone meeting, but
now i know how a mental filter works in a
neurological/technical sense. there are deeper implications
regarding language itself, but that's a bit of a tangent and
i'll leave it for later.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-03 01:03 [#02506515]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



the same guy who just couldn't get that i was no longer
talking about the squeaky thing and was asking a question
tantamount to, "what about the horseshoe nail does my pinky
finger?" my brain told me to write that. it did. make any
sense? no. that's about what he felt -- what you felt just
now, reading that. then... kerSNAP! he's on board and the
answer falls out immediately. i didn't include the part
where the precise same thing happened: is it conductive? no,
i don't care if it's bad for the thing. here's a 45-second
tangent involving the life-cycle of computer muffin fans and
dolla forty from china i don't give a fuck nigga so i squirt
wd-40 in about mid-way through the life cycle. can i squirt
silicon lubricant in the same manner? finally: "oh, yeah"
but it's bad for the motor

i actually tried to enlist his help. is my approach wrong?
like, did i explain this poorly? could i have phrased it
somehow so you'd not have been as confused? thank god, he
understood that i was now asking why i was so hard to
understand. he laughed. so did i.

yes, hello, mental filter? is it a good idea to talk
about mental filter?
... "i'll get back to you."

i did this as a little verbal schtick. you know, pause for
the theatrical moment of deer in headlights. uhhh, i'll have
to get back to you on that one


 

offline RussellDust on 2016-11-03 01:34 [#02506517]
Points: 15891 Status: Lurker



Is this place your shrink, or your blog, or your blog where
people write creative shorts and moments?


 

offline RussellDust on 2016-11-03 01:35 [#02506518]
Points: 15891 Status: Lurker



I mean one of these blogs for shorts and 'meaningless' life
moments.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-03 02:02 [#02506519]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



my mental filter is a beast. a terrifying machine. it has to
be. i am not a tolerable human being without the ability to
do things like not attempt to discuss emergent complexity
with the guy at the gas station.

it's not like i park my car and think to myself, "the gas
station clerk doesn't understand me if i speak at my usual
pace; i have to slow down for him to understand. but, it's
really important that i explain my theory about something he
never saw in terms of a complex multi-system collision that
created the grounds for a feedback loop."

it was a complex ball of yarn that i tangled up in the car
to explain why suddenly a small mob was in an intersection
normally devoid of people:

first beautiful day after much rain. a weekend. halloween
tomorrow. election next week. people are full of weasels and
bees after being cooped up. someone stands at an
intersection with a trump sign. soon, a hillary sign walks
up from a parking lot and stands on another corner. then, a
very confused engineer drives by and the source of this
mysterious explosion troubles him all day. the answer is
convoluted, wonderful, strange, and as far as he knows as of
this moment -- correct.

i also didn't stop to say, "i'm not sure how to explain this
to the guy at the gas station, to whom i have to very slowly
speak the sort of cigarattes i want." i was just asking him
if he knew what it was. he didn't. then he said he wanted to
know, and, well, i don't think he knows.

most days, though, he doesn't know i know things i'd like
him to know, but know he can't fucking understand any more
than: american. spirit. YELLOW

but, god bless him, he tried. then i realized i'd slipped up
and switched back to folk wordisms and everything was cool.
he probably doesn't even remember it anymore.

but i still began keeping a lid on myself a bit more firmly
after that... yeah, it's that thing again. shields up


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-03 02:07 [#02506520]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to RussellDust: #02506517



Re: Russell: in the post above this one, do you see how i'm
essentially saying, "i know people don't understand this
shit, let alone care, but i've gone and said it anyways?"

well, now i've said it again. with itself.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-03 02:08 [#02506521]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



do you work at a gas station, russell?


 

offline RussellDust on 2016-11-03 10:30 [#02506530]
Points: 15891 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02506521



Yes. Your usual, Nevs?


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-05 08:52 [#02506609]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



if i think up something good and forget it, that bothers me
intensely. i used to even say: i'm sitting in this chair
until i figure it out. techniques evolved: memory goes along
the timeline. what were you thinking before and after this
missing link? what you were thinking before led to some
other things led to your thingk. what you were thinking
after resulted from your missing link.

it's best to figure out the "what came after" first, and
more or less stop as soon as you have something. working
backwards is harder, but you need that endpoint as a
trajectory. then you simply go back to the closest "what
came before" memory and work forwards.

the other day i was explaining this and offered an analogy:
i don't remember the lyrics to that "condition" song from
the big lebowski, but i could reconstruct it if i wanted to.
not necessarily all, but way more than i have now. he didn't
believe me at first, but it didn't take much before he was
sold. then i described other, more subtle techniques:
dredging up memories of the scene from big lebowski this was
paired with is likely to get me more lyrical fragments. the
more lyrical fragments i have, the more will come to me.
spare pockets from the middle will connect up into flowing
lyrics... again, not necessarily all, just more than i can
run off from memory at the moment.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-05 09:18 [#02506611]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



you can dive through the mandlebrot set in "fractal
explorer" software forever. zoom forever. the computer,
however, is limited. it renders a single frame for whatever
fractal coordinates you request. coordinates not requested
are not rendered. effectively, until you ask for it, that
part of the fractal does not exist. it renders a tiny slice
at a time. whatever you ask for is whipped up on the spot,
and it gives the illusion of exploring something far more
massive than the computer could ever compute.

when i lost memories and attempted to recover them (previous
post), the attitude was that the data is in there, just
fragmented. like a hard drive. find the pieces and put it
together like a puzzle, and you've recovered the lost data.
i've now realized that the act of recalling a memory causes
it to be computed. if you've never recalled that event
before, the memory did not exist before you attempted to
recall it.

"what was i doing yesterday at lunch?" and your mind
actively culls through all the data it actually has to
produce a summary. a mental image of the cafeteria: oh, i
ate lunch in there. then your plate: oh, a sandwich. the
more you think about it, the more you can dredge up about
lunchtime yesterday.

if you try to dredge up lunchtime six months ago, however,
most of that is gone. you get an image of the cafeteria, and
your plate, and perhaps a sandwich... but, no, that was a
while ago, and perhaps you're just conflating it with lunch
today....

perhaps lunchtime yesterday was momentous: you finally asked
the HR gal out. whether it went well or not, you'll be
thinking about it: "what restaurant will she like?" (well)
or "am i not her type?" (not). overanalyzing everything: how
she stabbed at her green beans with a fork, was that a
reaction or just a habit?

the image of her prodding green beans is crystal clear six
months later. meanwhile, you have lunch with the VP of Sales
once a week, and you can't recall if he's ever had green
beans for lunch.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-05 09:23 [#02506612]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



the idea that a memory does not exist until you attempt to
recall it does a bit to explain why it feels so bottomless.


 

offline freqy on 2016-11-05 09:29 [#02506614]
Points: 18724 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



like a movie on a disc is not a movie until you use a codec
thinga and screen.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-05 10:06 [#02506615]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



say, for some reason, you sit there and churn through
yesterday. dredge up all you can, and then tell yourself:
"yes, since epicmegatrax posted this bullshit, i'll indulge
him and take a moment to close my eyes and run through
everything i can recall about lunch today."

whatever you come up with during this process of recall is
filed under a label you can mentally reference, e.g. "how
lunch went the day epicmegatrax posted that bullshit." six
months later, if you ask yourself, "what did i have for
lunch the day epicmegatrax posted that bullshit?" it will
come back to you, minus a few details. you can almost
remember... feel that something was here and you lost it...
oh, yes, i remember now! and so on...

if you try to remember what you have for lunch every day i
post some bullshit, however, that's too many days. they'll
start to blend together. you'll accidentally swap bits of
similar days; eventually it will just be a vague gestalt: "i
remember epicmegatrax posting some bullshit, i remember a
sandwich in the cafeteria, but both of these things happen
four or five days a week, and i'm pretty sure i'm mashing it
up with a similar day six months ago..."

all you need is a few more bits, though... oh, yes, that was
the day an alcoholic vietnam veteran ran over my mailbox,
lunchtime is coming back to me now... i ordered out, because
i was dealing with that instead of making a sandwich...

it's fair game to cheat with technology: what emails did i
get that day? how did i reply? if you can gather up enough
of the fragments to compute the memory, it seems like it was
there all along, just lost in the couch cushions or such...
oh yeah! i remember now. the memory "pops in" when you get
closer, just like trees in a video game.


 

offline freqy on 2016-11-05 10:23 [#02506616]
Points: 18724 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



video link for epicmegabytes

LAZY_TITLE


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 02:04 [#02506671]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to freqy: #02506614



like a movie on a disc is not a movie until you use a
codec thinga and screen.


the film's director storms into your current mental context,
mad as a wet hen. "this is not a movie! this is some
fucking direct to consumer youtube juke shit with michelle
pfeiffer, and even though you're watching it on a shit TV
with no contrast, i can tell whoever did the conversion from
35mm should be taken out back and shot.... apologizing for
their crimes against movies...."


bill clinton busts into your mental context like the kool
aid man, and patiently reminds you: "it depends on what
your definition of 'is' is."



 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 02:28 [#02506672]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i am not daniel tammet. here is how not daniel tammet, i is:
3.14159. that's all i got. you want more? i gotta look it
up. i can't de-fragment it or compute it or synaesthetically
navigate it or even remember how calculus works. which
brings me to my current ramble context: if a fractal and a
sphere had a lovechild, it would be consciousness.
simultaneously crude and deep. perfect. except, no, that
won't make sense to anyone, probably...

i was yammering about the fractal explorer thing and now
spheres are nagging at me. feels exactly the same as the
nagging feeling you get when you worry you've left your car
unlocked, and it progresses to the feeling that happens
right as you begin to realize your coffee is absent because
it's on your roof... a nice tangent, but we'll let it go.

spheres! alright. ok. they're cool. i've been a sphere a few
times; all of those times i was on drugs. point a video
camera at your TV and sit in front of it in the lotus
position and try real hard to be a sphere, and that's pretty
much drugs in a nutshell. also a nice tangent, but we'll let
it go... along with the avatar stages from the game
rez...

up floated the first time calculus really did something i
thought was cool. i asked the teacher about it: "why is the
derivative of the equation for the volume of a sphere the
same as the equation for the surface area of a sphere?
...and, really, i only need this to set up my real question:
why aren't any of the other shapes like that? the textbook
cover had rhombuses and pyramids and torusus and all sorts
of crap. none of the others were that satisfying. direct.
not hard. you know?

the teacher did not know, but he somehow managed to get that
i'd latched onto something properly deep, because he
actually tried to answer it (and failed). in the end, the
answer is this: that's just how shit works.

no, lulz, it's because calculus defines a sphere as an
infinite set of surface area matryoshka shells of zero
thinkness


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 02:54 [#02506673]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



it's like something in me said: yeah, this is all the
calculus i need for the next fifteen years.

on this very internet anachronism, my rambling has
progressed from "i've largely forgotten calculus and it
feels great" to "i don't miss calculus at all but it seems
handy sometimes" to "it'd probably help if i learned
calculus" to "calculus would help and i should re-learn
calculus" to "i need to re-learn calculus" to "i need to
re-learn calculus" to "i need to re-learn calculus" and then
it just kind of drifted like that for the last few...
things. as soon as i got from "why spheres" to "if below
this fill line, please insert more calculus" i promptly said
to myself: "ok, now it is time to learn calculus."

after posting about. obviously


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 03:54 [#02506674]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



Now, with a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy
would never work.
But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal
madness; it would
last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes
sifting down into a
deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had
to find a shape
that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of
compromise between
the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and
whatever sunken
treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians
were probably
clamoring for, they came up with this hard to pin down
striated pillow
formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is
that the individual
pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough
approximation, shaped kind of
like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch
chew itself by
grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral
cavity, like stones
in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing,
verbal explanations
(or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far
and then your body
just has to learn the moves.


--Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

i more or less cited the gist of this passage when a friend
got on about "how do you optimize the packing of spheres?"
and i got it precisely backwards, which is sort of right.
anyways, like calculus, i never sat down and dug it up until
just now.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 06:28 [#02506675]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



it's time to talk about context, in the context of context.
that fractal meltdown in whatever in my brain constructs
sentences has certainly kept me iterating. it came down to a
point where i was sure the word "this" correlates to an
integral. integration. it is difficult to verbalize why. it
is not even worth it to try. it is about trivialities deep
in the guts of my analysis processes.

it's sort of like how the invention of the air conditioner
killed the hamptons. wut? you said it. some guy invented the
aircon, and suddenly no one needed to go to the hamptons to
chill. like, yo, we got swamp coolers down to arizona. when
you talk about the decline of an area, you're looking for
something satisfying. grand. socioeconomic whatever and the
decline of sternly misunderpaying women to run industrial
towel machines creates an inflection point in human
culture... no, someone invented a household appliance.

suffice to say, i'm feeling pretty sure, and i can't
verbalize it. once i figure out how to explain it, i'll
figure out if it's still looking like a... i dunno. whatever
mechanism that lets me deftly pluck marbles from all the
colored yarn in my cerebral cortext.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 06:39 [#02506676]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



the context: spheres are bothering me. i find that moment at
the end of the chain of neurological botheringness, some
writing. some deliberate calculus jokes, some... well...
"thinkness" was originally a typo.

then i looked at it. squinted, like steve jobs reviewing
whatever turd some new guy had cooked up. then i decided:
no, this is not a typo. it seemed like one, so i loaded up
the context of examining typo-or-notness and went to town.
it was then filed under the context of "i meant to do that,
honest." later i realized: fill line... area under a curve.
oh, that's calculus too. i meant to do that, honest.

then i realize: getting stuck at "i need to re-learn
calculus" infinitely... until i'd integrated the existing
data i had on it... shit, this is a cheeky joke about
limits. it also essentially implies that calculus determined
when it was actually relevant for me to re-learn calculus.
then, it seems, perhaps i've known it all along. at the very
least, there seems to be more calculus alive down there than
i realized or expected.

my process is this: i arrive at this abstract synthesis of
math, life memories, and puns. i am certain that either this
will explain the thing about this being an integral in the
context of context... or it won't, but when i get to the
article, the article will explain why it doesn't explain
this being an integral in the context of context.... oh, er,
sorry, Russel. yes, usual cigs. what i meant to say is this:
either calculus will solve my problem or send me off in a
direction that will.

i exit the gas station and continue: i started with context
and spheres were ballin' beyond neurological limits, right,
so i switched context to spheres. this led me to calculus.
now, i understand the trajectory -- how i got from context
to sphere to calculus, and how to connect this back to my
original issue.... but, twelve hours later, this is a hard
thing to define. drink and drive? never. think and derive?
often


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 06:46 [#02506677]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



in this context, a sphere is all points radiating out from a
single point (on an x,y,z axis). is this context, context is
all neural connections radiating out from the point, at the
center. which i never do seem to get to

anyways, i promptly began visualizing them like the
fluffball-stage dandelions. just sort of popped in there,
like context, or remembering something you forgot...

"this" referrs to the current context. so, when you say,
"not this... that!" you are saying: the thing you meant has
nothing to do with the thing i meant. what is this. i don't
even


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 07:18 [#02506678]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



for reference: this integral thing was a thing by tuesday's
stuff, and you know what i said on tuesday? "i need to
re-learn calculus."

at that point, it's just a promising metaphor. chasing down
calculus really hasn't been warranted. to my immense relief.
no, i'm just using calculus as a metaphor for word-y stuff
at a sort of sarah palin level, thanks. this does collapse
the waveform anywhere near hard enough...

later on tuesday, i'm on to context... but, then, oh, some
things. iterate on XLT about memory, even though i know that
itearing on memory is a process that can continue forever.
knowing this makes that scenario easier to avoid.

a block of real life. my ability to string coherent
worderblapples back together has returned, and i'm running
all the errands i was dodging. god knows how many hours
watching a friend play skyrim.

yes, skyrim: low stimuli; almost too boring. especially if
you aren't playing. so we chat. this means i have to keep an
eye on something tedious and boring and also completely out
of my control, and keep an eye on it well enough to know
when to shut up -- monsters jump him out of nowhere; talk
stops. at first, it didn't. then there was lag. three or
four words. then quiet. somewhere in between four words and
quiet, it all almost went to shit. i was starting to shut up
without having to actively remember skyrim was across the
room. my brain immediately said: yes, sir, these are the
same neurons from driving that do that, we're sure of it.

those "neurons from driving" are responsible for one thing:
spot patterns where i need to shut up, snap out of my mental
ponderings... drop fucking everything and focus.
immediately.

so, i realized: you know, i can shut up... but only when
driving requires my absolute focus. like, a car cutting me
off. or all those red lights i used to run before music and
rhythm fixed driving...

yes, now driving is officially fixing the rest of my life.
along with fucking calculus.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-06 07:33 [#02506679]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



so, yes, i thought of that, and it almost exploded out of my
mouth. there is about sixteen million more things going on
to that moment: i've talked about music neurons gluing
themselves into driving. one day i just noticed: lanes...
faders... a little moment, where, for a brief glitch, my
brain was all: why is this thing here?

some neurons got confused when they were fed a lane instead
of a fader, because they did the faders. like an autistic
child making sure that all seven types of recyclable plastic
go into the proper bins... what a pain, right? then one day
there's a huge problem. this doesn't fit in any of the bins.
i go down to the sortery to see what the ruckus is about:
this is not a bottle. this is not any of my recycle number.
it is the most awful thing i have ever seen. it's like every
adjective H. P. Lovecraft used in the vicinity of the phrase
"non-euclidian" at once. get rid of it at once. what is it?
the ipod richard d. james lost on the plane

so, yes, i was so excited: my actually-working driving
things soaking into my badly-working everyelsethings. even
better, i caught it in the act. the fader thing i just
noticed, eventually, for whatever reason... but, no, now
i've caught the gluing in action. that's inroads to how the
process happens... what the glue process is itself, which
things glue together and how... and, shit, this is great,
but he's fighting a dragon now

i managed to hang on to it, though, and i knew exactly why.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 02:55 [#02506799]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



a sphere has the minimum surface area you can manage on a 3D
shape. say i think of the word "glue." a little grenade of
computation is set off at the proper coordinates, and
results fire off: super, neuronal, sniffing... then the
results fire off results, and i wander off into iterating
over my recollection of airplane. i picked a hell of
a day

the query and the result and the record of the transaction
are all the same thing. that grenade of computation changes
the structure of your brain forever, every time you think of
anything. those changes change other nearby structures...

the subconscious mind slash memory is probably best
metaphorized as a blockchain, or a distributed ledger.

every bitcoin transaction ever is available on the internet.
no one owns it. multiple copies everywhere. that's how
bitcoin is decentralized and doesn't rely on a central
bank/server. all the bitcoin crunching is checking and
double-checking the financial transactions flying around,
and this is done through the blockchain.

the blockchain is essentially every bitcoin transaction,
ever, encrypted. it is, in theory, possible to work
backwards from this: first, you throw massive amounts of
computation into working the encryption backwards, and then
you have a small handfull of bitcoin transactions: one
anonymous number sends another anonymous number these
bitcoin things. some guy who posts his number on the
internet will be easy to find, but there are also sites that
money launder the thing through dozens of addresses. at that
point, well, even the NSA begins to say "fuck it"


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 03:05 [#02506800]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



in the brain, a blockchain (distributed hashtable/ledger)
sorta structure is a cost-effective way to get most of the
benefits of linear time without actually having to be aware
of it.

it's sort of like a wall that enterprising chaps are always
graffiti-ing and re-graffiti-ing: someone does it up one
night. later, someone adds a hat to the man in his mural.
the next day, the original artist touches up the hat, and
adds more hats to the other men in the mural... eventually
the thing has been effectively painted over hundreds of
times, slowly, in bits and chunks and metaphors, as various
people snuck up and modified tiny parts as a kind of slow,
distant dialogue with each other...

or, fuck, let's just compare it to those things that spin.
they spin, right? and you squirt paint on them. it makes
swirly designs. more paint goes over the old paint, but you
can still see the current paint... man, this stuff ain't
easy to type up

if it hurts to move your arm, you do it by accident a few
times. less and less. gradually you stop doing it. if it
heals up, you're not sure when it happened; you forgot about
it. you also have to keep reminding yourself it doesn't hurt
any more and deliberately, consciously, begin to use it
again... or, perhaps, you forget about it entirely, and
there's a little oddness in your movement that's never
enough of an inconvenience for you to consciously notice and
address...

new patterns overwrite existing patterns, and the process
leaves a graffiti wall where the newest patterns are right
on top; unblemished. you can see yesterday's graffiti
underneath, kinda. bits of last week's graffiti poke up,
here and there. finally, there's a spare corner that's
remained unchanged for a year, but, nope, there, just
overwrote it when you realized the arm is fine, now, and why
are you still acting like it hurts? jeez. stupid brain

this is why the subconscious mind has no sense of time in an
active sense, but still reacts to it just fine.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 03:20 [#02506801]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



this is also why yoga focuses on holding positions for
extended periods, and meditation is essentially about
focusing on a single thing: if i type the word "glue" over
and over, it'll probably only take about sixty or seventy
glues before i become unable to type the word "glue" for a
moment. wait... how was it it spelled again? gleu? weasael?

focusing on the structure, iterating over it repeatedly,
making its neurons pump out data to every other
word/metaphor glue connects to... memories and mental
images... eventually, the concentration of fire in that one
single spot cascades over into neighboring concepts. for a
moment, the word glue is just a brain fart. it's like it's
gone from your brain. the circuit has overheated,
essentially, and the flash of it going kerpow illumunates
neighboring circuits. this is aphasia, and it's a good
moment to be mindful.

it's important to note that the word/concept "glue" is not
actually living in some particular spot. it's distributed
across your brain. it is a gestalt that arises from every
connction that fires off when the airplane guy talks about
quitting sniffing glue, and i talk about it. on the
internet. focusing on that gestalt lights up the whole
network until whatever it connects to begins to receive
overflow. then, weird shit happens. you get a brief glimpse
of the workings, like some closed-source app core dumping.

once you're able to get things to feedback and core dump
it's assumed you didn't get that far without a pranayama
yogi or something, and so you go to your guy for that and he
tells you how to law down a proper architecture. or whatever
passed for algorithmic optimization in medieval times. like
galen's humours, i respect the work, but you'll forgive me
if i walk away with the equivalent of differential
diagnosis.

and, there's calculus again. fuck


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 05:07 [#02506803]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



no, i'm sorry, calculus. really. something you do with that
dimensionality collapsation yonder really makes my brain,
like, work. then you quite pointedly step aside until you
have a job to do. unlike the internet, which spirals out of
control until the motion of reality disrupts its hold.

all that wikipedia out there. a thousand things i could
write. all of mankind's things at our kerklackity. pocket
fondleslab. digital times. london herald. see? i wrote that.
it's useless. like a man poking a campfire with a stick.
that's the internet...

but, no, it's both the cure and the disease all at once. my
overwired, overthink-y everythingish all the time, kinda
mostly brain is just smacked out on wikipedia in no time. a
hundred years ago, however, the basis for what i've been
working on did not exist. twenty years ago, the data was
buried in library basements, and essentially not available.
now, it's all here. and there's more of it than there ever
was before. i adore it, really. i could read esoteric things
about the indian head test image from the 50s or how audio
is encoded for movie theatre analog projectors or...
calculus.

and, go figure, wikipedia is pretty shit for calculus. i
need to go dig up my textbook. the intro to it went on this
nerd ramtble about how TeX was the fucking bomb man you got
to try this shit, we would not have this textbook if not for
TeX. this is what i remember about the book, from high
school -- which, yes, i still have. that, and the fucking
thing about spheres.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 05:32 [#02506804]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



the game turns the charming concept of memes into an
arms race of nerd scorekeeping. it is a mental game where
the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself.
Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be
announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most
versions of The Game. Depending on the variation of The
Game, the whole world, or all those aware of the game, are
playing it all the time. Tactics have been developed to
increase the number of people aware of The Game and thereby
increase the number of losses.


context: i just lost the game. probably not for the last
time. almost certainly not, in fact. also fact: i've more or
less got the gist of the neurological mechanism behind every
time i've lost the game. also also fact: now that i've lost
the game in the context of getting the gist of the
aforementioned neurological mechanism in the aforementioned
fact, i realize i may actually be able to win the game,
someday. but it will take calculus


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 08:53 [#02506808]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



from the moment you awakinate (de-inceptionize) you're
laying down neural connections. your dreams, if you remember
any, are confusing. it's as if a fractal and a sphere had a
love-child... no, that makes no sense.

of course not. let's cleave dreams as a separate thing from
sleep in general. next, let's say dreams could be a
multi-purpose thing, but at least one purpose is data
mining. your brain says: hey! this data point sticks out. it
involves a bunch of disjointed meta-strctures that recognize
patterns of patterns of patterns or some shit... and, hell,
i'm just a pattern myself, but i know an almost-pattern when
i see one...

so you awake to find some trainwreck of things that seem to
be going somewhere, but maybe not... just maybe, you know?
and it's vague and confusing. tuna loaf soap in your email
inbox and then mom calls with the compound interest and what
is [this context] i don't even [have a frame of reference
(context)].

then this odd data point troubles you throughout your day,
and anything that matches it will grab your focus. mom
emails about compound interest! what does it mean? what did
the tuna loaf represent? why am i asking myself about this
shit?

it bothers you all day. other clues drop in, but no real
answers. like, kind of... these three things... maybe?
whatever.

that night, you go to sleep, and all the pondering over What
That Dream Meant influences the dreams you have, thus
establishing a feedback loop between dreams and reality that
pushes you towards greater informational coherency.

dreams are probably there for other reasons, too, remember.
and dreams are not the same thing as sleep.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 09:25 [#02506811]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



meanwhile, i suspect my car has a slipping metaphor in its
serpentine belt. serpentine belt. i loved that name.
then i got down to business: how many subsystems does it
run? what are they? power steering, oil pump, brakes,
compressor, altergigger... water pump? oh, no, it's that
shit where the owner's manual explains to you what the
steering wheel is for and the service manual is not on the
internet. fucking fuck. how is power steered, anyways? more
or less, i decided it was time to start learning cars. i
hear this problem in there and it's not a real problem yet,
just a noise that shouldn't be a noise at this stage in the
car's lifespan. even taking my approach to driving into
account...

but, yes, here's the joke: what makes the engine work? the
serpentine belt. the engine would die without the oil
pump... it'd need a jump without the altergigger... it'd
overheat without a water pump, if yours does that... if not,
the altergigger does that too; same thing... brakes? who
needs those

yes, saying consciousness is what makes the mind work is
like saying the serpentine belt is what makes my engine
work. it's better than saying it's what makes my car move
(oh, god makes the sky blue, dear)


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-11-07 23:12 [#02506921]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



if dogs learned words, most of their metaphors would
probably be related to smell and sound. the word for nervous
grows out of the smell humans make when they begin to break
a sweat. the origins of the word get buried, and the grammar
eventually goes something like "i'm a bit human sweat smell
about this, because it smells like the time the crabby
neighbor yelled at me."

like the serpentine belt, consciousness is essential to
making the mind work, but it's just one part of an
incredibly complex machine. all sorts of things could be
vastly different without taking away the core of what
consciousness seems to be, to me, at the moment: a mechanism
to distribute power to various subsystems. you become
conscious of a problem, you fix it, you move on to another
problem, you forget the previous problem, and whatever you
did there is buried until you come around and poke it next.

it's a bit like the air conditioner killing the hamptons
(cite: a few posts above). it's almost disappointingly
mundane. it's alright, though. the mind is still wonderous
and, well, mind-blowing overall, even if this part is not as
profound as one would hope it'd be.


 


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