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THE WORLD BEYOND WORDS


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April 22, 2024 by korezaan


INTENT TO GROW [GUILD WARS 1]


[ 0 ]

> “Hmm, I wonder if it’s possible to revive the soul.”


Two years ago, I decided to make money.
Last year, I tried to make money with drawing. I failed.

The stuff didn’t sell. It didn’t sell because I didn’t draw what everyone
wanted. And I didn’t draw what everyone wanted because I barely even drew what I
wanted. Why don’t I draw what I want? Even when I want it? Because I think I’m
doing what I want, but that’s not what’s really happening.

On 2023 Dec 25 I decided on my new year’s resolution: have fun drawing. Not
‘make more drawings’, not ‘make better drawings’. ‘Have fun drawing’. Fun comes
first. One of 2023’s NYRs was to “solve the world problem”: why do drawings
sometimes feel like characters and stories and worlds, and why do they sometimes
feel like lines and colors and suffering on a page. NYR 2024 was the
continuation: the difference between those two states is fun. Worlds are created
when the drawing is fun. Probably. That was the bet.

The bet was a new bet. I don’t have fun: not in drawing, not anywhere. Not
purposively, not reliably. In the first place I had never known what fun meant,
until that month, when I came up with a definition. Fun: is fulfilling the
original objective. Set an objective, realize the objective, arrive at the
objective. That is “fun”. This requires properly defining the desired purpose,
and knowing my current position in real time. I have historically been bad at
both: I don’t know what I’m doing, nor do I know how I’m doing. Either are both
have always shifted: ‘that doesn’t count’, ‘it’s okay thats fine too’, ‘it gets
worse before it gets better’. I needed to fix it. If I have fun at drawing, I
can make better drawings. I’d never had fun before, I never thought fun was
important. But maybe it is important. And if it is important, I’m going to solve
it where it’s most important to have it first. If I have fun, then I can draw
worlds, then I can draw more, then I can draw what I want, then I can draw what
other people want, then I can make money drawing. The logic looked good.

That bet has been going well. Drawing has gotten faster, more fun, more clear.
Many old problems now have solutions, including problems I didn’t know I had.
I’ve tried drawing a few pieces, failed, got depressed, and got back up and
solved them, much faster than before. Soon I’ll have comfortably applied having
fun to the idea of drawing itself enough to be able to post sketches and simple
drawings and “incomplete”s. It’s clear people enjoy rkgks and wips, and I know
why they enjoy those. I think after I can do that, working on big pieces will be
easier. ‘Big’, after all is a feeling. So is ‘Complete’. It’s not some number or
set of technical achievements.

This post though is not about drawing. This post is about a sidequest.

Having decided to have fun in drawing has apparently caused me to automatically
decide I had to have fun everywhere. In whatever I was doing. I thought I’d have
to manually export fun from drawing and push it elsewhere. I didn’t. It arrived
first.

One month ago, in the middle of March, I noticed my current position had a
problem. It’s something I’ve noticed many times, but this was the first time
under the model of “current position”: I browse the internet too much. Hours of
pointless refreshing and scrolling. What’s the objective? Undefined. What’s the
current position? Unbounded time. And I don’t even like what I’m looking at.
Even things I do like looking at like anime girls, I’m not looking at them – I’m
just downloading them into the correct folder. What? What am I doing.

Why do I do this? I think this is because I have Moon in Sag H3. Moon is soul is
reflection of light, Sagittarius is wanderlust, House 3 is gossip and talk. Moon
in Sag H3: I like listening to wandering talk and seeing wandering images. The
infinite feed of wild schizos on 4chan and twitter and youtube have got me by
the astrological balls. What would solve this? Every weakness is a corresponding
strength: Moon in Sag shaped problems have Moon in Sag shaped solutions.



I now have a solution. At least for now. But not in a Moon in Sag way, I don’t
think.

Opposite to Moon in Sag H3 I have Mars in Gemini H9. 7 degrees, so no aspect,
but I’ve noticed a lot of things along these lines before, so maybe 7 degrees is
close enough. An aspect implies some of a different planet and sign has
commentary on a given planet and sign’s matters. Mars is the planet of energy
and action. Gemini is the sign of trade. House 9 is the house of higher
knowledge. Opposite means opposes, conflicts, counters, solves. An opposite
aspect implies it’s possible to solve Moon in Sag type problems with Mars in
Gemini shaped solutions.

I think this is a Mars in Gemini kind of story.

Continue reading →


Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
July 6, 2023 by korezaan


WHITE ALBUM 2: SONG OF THE WORLD

White Album 2 is the second time where I’ve asked not “how good is it”, but, “is
it the best”.

To say something is “good” is to say it meets my standards. This in turn implies
my standards are better than the piece. This time, they were not better. They
were not only not better, the piece had parts of me in it, showed how things
play out, and then showed a better way in real time. There are many stories that
have changed me, but with one exception all have been material I worked with
later in retrospect. This makes it unclear how much change is for other reasons,
and how much change is because the story said so. The first story that made
changes in real time, where the longer things went on the more in tune I got,
was Muv-Luv Alternative. White Album 2 is the second.

This is about White Album 2, the visual novel, and my thoughts on it as a whole.
The VN as a whole will be referred to as WA2, the first third and anime as IC,
the second third as CC, and final third as CD. Ten years ago I watched
back-to-back the first 7-9 episodes of IC, then the rest as it was airing. Last
year on release of the english translation I read part of IC, up til the first
sleepover at Kazusa’s. A week ago I read the rest of IC, CC as Setsuna > Koharu
> Chiaki > Chiaki True > Mari, and Kazusa True of CD. For CC Setsuna was my
blind arrival; my choices were entirely motivated by reaching Kazusa. The other
routes were ordered consciously. I think it’s the best. For the other endings of
CD I’ve read commentaries.

My opinion two weeks ago was IC has the best pilot episode of all time and 8/8
overall. My current opinion on IC is, for anyone uncertain, the anime can be
watched in place of reading IC: watch the anime, then skip to near the end and
play the final few scenes to get familiar with the layout and pacing for CC. The
anime adds the events of side content “From When The Snow Melts To When It Falls
Again”, and is overall better than the VN, except for the OP, where it is very
much the reverse.

The first half of this post is written such that it could be used as a reading
guide. It doesn’t contain any spoilers in the sense that any thing discussed is
already revealed by the anime or VN in its opening scene and official
descriptions, but I think the best way and the only real ‘no spoilers’ is to do
things blind, here it is also true. I think WA2 teaches people how to read
itself well and guides are unnecessary (if anything, guides are worse than
events, because guides reveal patterns rather than points). The second half does
contain spoilers. The pictures at the end I think are disconnected enough to
spoil nothing, but I also picked them because they lay out everything. I think
someone with no knowledge of WA2 could get a good grasp of what it’s about and
still enjoy it after. Like watching a trailer.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

White Album 2 is known as a drama/romance with a love triangle. The main
characters are a hastily assembled group performing at the highschool festival,
and then they have relationship problems afterwards. The characters and writing
are subtle, detailed, and realistic. This is an accurate overview. of events
that occur in IC. It can be said this is what IC is about.

Continue reading →


Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
June 2, 2023 by korezaan


TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, PLEASE

One year ago 22.06.04-05 I wrote a declaration of intent.

I was not satisfied with suffering 40 hours 50 weeks 50 years for no purpose and
no result. What was the point? I could see nothing there that I wanted.

What do I want? A lot of things. Most are probably things I will never have. One
of these desires is to continue drawing Kaori once a year. This seemed simple
enough. Was there a way to live where that could also be a reality?

This past weekend 23.05.26-28 I tabled at an anime convention for the first
time.

My local convention is Fanime in San Jose. The one I went to was Anime North in
Toronto, 2200 miles away, on the other side of the continent, 1/12th of the way
around the world. More than a few people questioned this decision for more than
a few reasons. I chose to go because it was the first one available to me. I
needed to retrieve the results. I needed to find out what this endeavor looked
like for real.

I found out what it looked like. I found a lot of things. So many things.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First, the most important thing, the original reason I came here: Did I make
money?

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
June 5, 2022 by korezaan


AGAIN

> “Accounting is a superpower.”
> 
> Alrenous

This is my financial statement and prospectus of my existence.

The alternate title is “time”, but this name was used recently in a private file
on the same topic with a slightly different objective, of “slave sealing the
slave hole forever”. That one was retrospective. This one is prospective. I’m
going to be reusing or reference a decent amount from there, but reordering is
also making something new. So this gets the next closest name. What is the next
closest name? “Money” is not good. “Accounting” is ok, but it’s the tool and not
the aim. After some deliberation, as far as I can tell, this next closest name
is “Again”.
So “Again” it is.

I need money.

What is the point of money?
The point of money is to eat, the point of eating is to live. I can’t make
enough off the land available to me to eat. This is because I live in the domain
of a city. To eat, I need money, to acquire money, I need to trade. In other
words, business. Every city-dweller runs a business. Most today run businesses
with a single client. This is called a “job”. Jobs are what get most people
money.

What does my job history look like?
This is what’s on my resume:

 * K12 A+/B- student
 * college degree in mechanical engineering
 * nothing
 * draftsperson of shop drawings
 * more nothing
 * maintenance department shop clerk
 * even more nothing
 * cable quality checker.

“A+/B-” was not a mistype. My homework grades were 100 0 0 0 100 100 100 100 0 0
100 0 0 0 0. It has extended beyond school. It will continue.

The next item on my resume will be nothing. This is because I need time to think
again.
The item or two, hopefully not three, after that will be entirely unrelated to
engineering.
The item after that, the objective is, will be nothing. This item will be the
last.

What is the important distinction between people?

When people introduce themselves, in america (I’ve heard it’s different
elsewhere but I don’t live “elsewhere”), it is their job. “I am a [job]”. Their
job is their identity; “identity” is the word for “what a person thinks is the
important distinction between people”. Jobs are seen as instances/downstream of
“career paths”.

Why do people think of careers as the important distinction? School said so.
Parents said so, college said so, news said so. And time says so: you are the
habits of your five friends (astrology: H11’s H3 is H1), a fortiori, you are
what you toil for eight hours a day (H10’s H4 is H1, search “turning the
chart”). If you spend 8h/d, or 2000h/yr on something, and someone spends 2000h
on something else, the distance increases at a rate up to 4000h/yr. If it is
true to get to the higher positions you need 10,000h or more, then calling it a
ladder is accurate: you need every step to get to every other step. Selecting
this as identity would be a coherent line of reasoning.

It is a line of reasoning I do not agree with. I do not believe this is the
important distinction.

I think the important distinction is the 8h/d. I don’t think this is the correct
name, as it invites things like 9/9/80 (9h 9d 80h/wk), 10/4 (10h 4d/wk), and any
number of others I haven’t heard of that are all the same in my accounting. I
will call all of them 40/50/50: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 50 years a
life. More accurately for millenials (Pluto in Scorpio) it is 40/50/60 but that
seems like a worse name so 40/50/50 it is. The important distinction between
people is those who are 40/50/50, and those who are not.

Why do I think of 40/50/50 as the important distinction? It’s because I know
what work is.
It’s not from being a neet, I’ve been a neet three times. This time is the first
time this thought has arrived.

What is work? Work is an action that has a net positive output.
What is net? Net is desired minus undesired. In order to determine net, the
action must end.



This is the totality of “accounting”.

What do you want? What don’t you want? Combine them all, get the result.
Accounting.

What you want is what you will tend to get. This is a truth. It is also true
that the more you get into anything the more you will learn about it – new
costs, new benefits, new categories and measurements. From time to time the
equation and balance needs to be checked again. The scales must be weighed.
Weighing the scales is called “making a decision”. Deciding and weighing are the
same thing.

What do I think work is? I think work is anything that leads to me doing less
work.
I’ve always thought of introductions and tell-me-about-yourselfs as stupid
questions because “I am a [job]” has never made sense to me. I refused to answer
“what is your dream job” as a kid, “I am an engineer” has never left my mouth,
and hearing “You’re the engineer” has made me want to puke. But it occurred to
me, for a time, I did answer a question like this, in a way I like. In League of
Legends, 2012, both normal and ranked games. If that time and place were an
in-person professional scenario, I would have said something like this:

> “Hi, I’m korezaan. I play support.”

I “play” support. I “am” not a support.

I play support, and in LoL S2/3, that happened to mean I was in lane with the
ADC warding and things and that thing is what other people call “support”. What
I do, is I play support (I went from Bronze 1 to Gold 4 playing ~purely
support).

What is “support”? Support is a modifier. Could be supporting anything. What do
I support?
Most people think of themselves as a job. I think of myself as a job eliminator.
I am a systems improver. I support improving systems: I work to eliminate work.
Work broadly is anything with a net positive output. I have a stricter subset:
the rate of increase must also increase. In calculus this is called the second
derivative, in physics this is called acceleration. I think of work as that
which increases the second derivative: things that accelerate the value per unit
work. First derivative/velocity is boring.

Value/Position though is very interesting.
The hierarchy of achieving output/value/position is as follows:

 1. no work
 2. decreasing work
 3. cheap work
 4. constant work

The second category, which is the second derivative, can be done with
everything. Every thing can be done better. The first category is gifts from
god. These commonly come in the form of ideas, but there are things which simply
happen for free. Sunlight is a common one. Fresh air is another.

The third category is finding good deals. Velocity. The realm of general human
action.
The fourth category is where jobs are.
The second category is downstream of the first.
The first category is downstream of prayer, which is just telos.
Telos is “I want that”. That’s it. Ask and ye shall receive. What you want, you
will tend to get.

Why do I know what work is?

I know what work is because I know what I want, and what getting what I want
looks like.

I can show you a picture of it, because I have a picture of it. It looks like
this:

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
March 1, 2022 by korezaan


DEMAND FOR PROPAGANDA

You cannot con an honest man.

Information is a kind of product. It is bought and sold, through middlemen,
which is why it is called “media”. Information which is not demanded is not
produced. This applies even to information that is purely collected: if you
don’t care, you won’t look; if you don’t look, you won’t see. Naturally
information that is manufactured purely for the market is also subject.

This law does not change.

The current example is “fog of war” “overdrive wartime propaganda”. This law
does not change.

The primary risk in delegation/trade is receiving lies.
The primary counter should be better personnel selection. This text is about an
alternative method.

Every lie is designed for a certain end. The end is to meet the demand.

Q: “I want to hear X”
A: “X is true”.

Lies are detected by changing Q and seeing if A remains constant. “Is the story
consistent?”.
Consistency is generally framed as “with respect to reality”, but that is the
very thing we are attempting to extract, which makes the model circular and
useless, unless we are there to see it ourselves, in which case we don’t need to
be asking about it. Here what is changed is not perspective and position in
reality, but perspective and position in the mind. Change what you want to know.

It is not “asking different questions”. Wanting to know different things may
result in asking different questions. but frequently many interests can derive a
suitable solution from a single answer to a single question. This is possibly
because people are inherently different and there will always be some difference
between the answerer and the questioner.

If the answer remains constant, that is to say, appears in the expected shape in
the new perspective, then it is not a lie – as far as you can tell. It is
entirely possible the answerer outranks you. But this is what it means to check
something. Someone better at “verification” runs this same path, only with more
experience. If someone outranks you, there’s not much you can do. If you are
reading this though, you outrank most of the peasantry. Literacy is uncommon,
comprehension less: If it does not remain constant, it is a lie.

The easiest way to detect a lie is to naturally have no demand for what the
answerer is producing. This is why magicians and teachers work most poorly on
kids.

Beyond this, you can simulate lack of demand, either by manually invoking it
(literally: “I want something else now”), or by doing things at the “wrong”
time.

Doing things at the “wrong” time, that is to say, doing most things at the right
time and catching most lies at the wrong time, is rather trivial as long as your
job is not “journalist”. Interests and attention derive from position, and
everyone, even factory line workers and NEETs, has different positions. Pay
attention to your position, and you will have interest patterns that differ from
others. Have different interest patterns than others, and you will detect when
they lie.

This technique has a prerequisite of approximately zero field-specific
experience.

In other words, to detect a liar, you must not be a liar yourself.
Alternatively, if someone habitually gets fooled, you can be well assured, they
habitually lie.

You cannot con an honest man.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> “If you’re reading it, it’s for you.”
> 
> TheLastPsychiatrist

> “In a few weeks we are all going to forget how confused we were & remember
> only the parts that turned out to be “true” per a group narrative. Nature of
> the mind.”
> 
> Nemets
> 
> “As Alrenous likes to say, “My middle name is “No One””.
> Most utility is derived from other people. Being contrary imposes a cost. Are
> you deriving a benefit from that cost? Unless it’s your job / you’ve decided
> it is your job, it’ll be no, and thus the position will not be held.
> 
> Costs and benefits are concepts meaningful only when there is an objective. To
> have an objective, or to believe that people operate on objectives
> (teleology), means that you think the world has people that aren’t doing what
> the lord is telling them to do.
> 
> If you were being faithful, you would be able to cite some “principle”. Thus
> you must be not only a traitor, but a usurper – ‘it takes one to know one’. In
> other words, invoking teleology, objectives, or costs and benefits, is
> equivalent to saying the lord is illegitimate.”
> 
> 22_02_25-26

> “Well said. Unlikely that anybody would hold on to a costly position that they
> derove 0 benefits from just because of principle”
> 
> Sharsrain
> 
> “Principles” are heuristics are tools. Tools are for achieving objectives.
> “Position” in large part is systems, i.e. how/what you hand off to other
> people. Who you spend time with determines who you are, and media penetration
> is the same as reach of the state. Adherence to “principle” is the mark of a
> retainer. The question then becomes, is your lord any good to you.
> 
> 22_02_25

> “occasional reminder that in a fog-of-war/psyop environment this thick, many
> of the events that people are endlessly using for take fodder on here may well
> not ever have happened
> 
> one recommendation here: if you’re determined to stare directly at the psyop,
> find some pro-Russian feeds to watch (alongside the pro-Ukrainian sources that
> are mostly feeding Anglosphere media). comparing and contrasting the two can
> help isolate the stupider flights of fancy”
> 
> Dedicating Ruckus
> 
> “.@Logo_Daedalus is right that this is the moment when everyone reveals his
> true self, where he stands in the world. from a theoretical perspective it is
> a moment of absolute clarity, like when the stars arrange themselves into a
> perfect alignment, you see where everything stands.”
> 
> Landshark

> “This is the beauty of cheating: they can’t say “we didn’t mean this back-door
> to be used by you, we placed it for someone else”.”
> 
> Greedy Goblin

> “People soyfacing at the Ukrainian government telling 14 year olds to make
> molotovs and throw them at approaching russian tanks are completely disgusting
> and sick in the head. No, that’s not noble or brave or patriotic, it’s utterly
> wasteful lunacy.”
> 
> Tinkzorg
> 
> “Thoughts and prayers” is used mockingly, but it’s incorrect. This is because
> the speaker does not know what a real thought or a real prayer looks like.
> Specifically: inability to discern a liar. Saying a liar is telling truth
> (“they’re sending thoughts and prayers”) is a lie.
> 
> Similarly, “spectator sport” is also a misnomer. Sports fans generally don’t
> care about other teams, let alone other sports. You know who looks into things
> that have nothing to do with them? What do we call people that talk about
> things that are none of their business? Exactly.”
> 
> 22_02_25

> “dawning on me reading this ukraine stuff, it’s not that i’m immune to psyops,
> it’s that i am immune to its effects in this case. “this is the beauty of
> cheating” – all lies are designed for a certain end, and if the end does not
> match then it has no effect. ukrainian news continually highlights the
> suffering of women and the heroics of men and the shittiness of russians. i
> don’t care about any of these. i want to know what the troop movements are.
> it’s not that when everyone looks left i look right or that i have some
> special truth-sniffing ability. would i know if the lines on the maps are
> lies? no. but it so happens this does not seem to be the standard journoprop
> doctrine in this case. as a happy coincidence, this means they smell bad
> because they’re running on a completely different axis and thus i tend to find
> out why.
> 
> it seems to me ability to change interest in this sense will almost always be
> vastly cheaper, short of being there to see it yourself, than finding whether
> or not something is explicitly/technically “true”.
> 
> i think this is your one guy’s ‘demand for propaganda'””
> 
> 22_02_26

> “The ad lets the women become beautiful without selling them anything. It lets
> them win. It lets them win. It endears them and you to Dove, it makes you feel
> more sympathetic to Dove, like it’s an ethical beauty products company, like
> it’s Lawful Neutral. It gave these women its confidence; it gave you, the
> viewer, its confidence.
> 
> And then– spoiler alert– it will screw you and take your money.
> 
> […] You may feel your brain start trying to piece this together, but you
> should stop, there’s a twist: where did you see this ad? It wasn’t during an
> episode of The Mentalist on the assumption that you’re a 55 year old woman
> whose husband is “working late.” In fact… it’s not even playing anywhere. You
> didn’t stumble on it, you were sent to it, it was sent to you– it was selected
> for you to see. How did they know? Because if you’re watching it, it’s for
> you.”
> 
> TheLastPsychiatrist

> “Too many people of my acquaintance place a lot of stock in Hanlon’s Razor,
> specifically because their immediate thought after running it is “… But nobody
> could be that stupid.” Evil is not a great model for explaining bad results
> much of the time. Stupidity has same problem.
> 
> McKenzie’s Razor and Shaving Cream: Don’t attribute to evil what you can
> explain by emergent behavior in complex system.
> 
> You should aggressively update your estimate on whether a system is bugged or
> not by inspecting whether the system delivers sensible outputs given its
> inputs.
> 
> This is instrumentally useful for technologists because you probably spend a
> lot of your time around very smart people and very bugged systems, and
> therefore you will not prematurely rush to conclude “Hmm that there black box
> has smart people operating it; probably flawless.””
> 
> Patrick McKenzie
> 
> “Emergent behavior in a complex system” is a fancy way of saying “Real
> behaviors in real life”. Are people only to be judged on explicitly declared
> intent in simple linear scenarios? Then what is the point of knowledge?
> 
> Teleology is real and your intent will (always be) revealing itself.
> 
> There is no “oops” and there are no “accidents”.
> 
> 20_04_24

> “It’s both invigorating and frustrating to me to see how quickly we’re capable
> of distributing vaccines when e.g. a temporary blip in power availability
> takes out a freezer and threatens them thawing. Institutions discover trivial
> ease of administering 1k+ shots in a day.
> 
> “Why frustrating?” Because why did we need an emergency to discover that
> capability? We had an emergency that was already an actual, demonstrable
> threat to human life in every town with a busted freezer. It was the covid-19
> pandemic.
> 
> Why do we tolerate such mediocrity, up and down our response effort? Why will
> we tolerate it tomorrow?”
> 
> Patrick McKenzie
> 
> “Do you want to know?
> 
> You don’t want to know.
> 
> You don’t want to know, you want to look like you want to know, and you will
> get exactly what you want.”
> 
> 21_02_16

> “Marx was right about false consciousness, except it’s already pro-communist,
> not anti-communist.
> 
> “I can’t stop re-reading this anecdote about the U.S. military trying to teach
> rural Afghans about taxes and they’re immediately just like “no, that’s theft”
> lmao”
> @porterburkett12
> 
> Jacques Ellul’s demand for propaganda is real.”
> 
> Alrenous

> “you know it would really be something. how do i put this. people are the
> results of their choices. epigenetics is real. everything is 80~100%
> hereditary. people are dumber today than they were a hundred years ago. this
> is because everyone has decided to be stupid and evil.”
> 
> 22_02_17

> “It is a principle of the art of war that one should simply lay down his life
> and strike. If one’s opponent also does the same, it is an even match.
> Defeating one’s opponent is then a matter of faith and destiny.”
> 
> “A person who does not want to be struck by the enemy’s arrows will have no
> divine protection. For a man who does not wish to be hit by the arrows of a
> common soldier, but rather those by a warrior of fame, there will be the
> protection for which he has asked.”
> 
> Hagakure
> Yamamoto Tsunetomo

> “I’m not really interested in truth. Truth relies on consensus and evidence;
> it is by definition ex post facto.
> 
> I’m interested in what truth is before it is truth.”
> 
> The World Beyond Words
> 18_01_19

> “Every cheat is an inbalance in the game. Every inbalance can be exploited.
> The exploit is the ultimate proof, everything else can be disproved. I can
> write essays about a hidden door in the wall, I can use lot of evidence, I can
> be as careful as I am and I can still be wrong.
> 
> There is one unquestionable way to prove the existence of the door: open it
> and walk trough it.”
> 
> Greedy Goblin

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
December 16, 2021 by korezaan


IDEAS ARE TOOLING

> “2017 : ?
> 2018 : ideas are equipment/systems
> 2019 : ideas are gods
> 2020 : ?
> 2021 ? ideas are tooling”
> 
> 2021 Apr 14



I found a lot of new technologies this year. I felt I should write them down.

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. This is somewhat of a shame. There
is a utility to writing reviews or reports, which can only be done at some
length (text) from some length (time) in a permanent format. Twitter has a
length limit, conversations online or off are impermanent, and at least my diary
does not normally reflect much past the day in question, certainly not with any
deliberate structure. I have not written posts partially because the
aforementioned types have eaten them up, partially because when I have been
doing such reviews in drawing they’ve tended to be wordy and not useful, and
partially because my blog is on WordPress and WordPress’s UI has gotten more
useless every time I look at it. For this last problem I’ve become aware Typora
can write in Markdown and then auto-convert to HTML which I can largely c/p
without dealing with WordPress. This appears to work so this piece should be
publicly available at completion. If not I intended to write this anyway.
There’s a diary type I have for things like this.

These are some of the things I’ve found this year. The list is partially sorted
for presentation effect.

> DocFetcher
> I don’t serve the machine, the machine serves me
> Steno
> Eye-rolling / Sweeping
> Sweeping, Hedge-Trimming, Dishwashing
> Soap, Sponges, Vinegar, Dried Meat, and Raw Eggs
> Music shapes emotion
> Physiognomy is real
> Evil is real
> The truth is always overdetermined
> Proper shapes / timings are real
> Tiers of Information

— It turns out I wrote a lot again. I had wanted something nice and short and to
the point. Instead it’s nice and long and there’s already a nice flow and I
don’t wanna cut it. Hopefully it’ll be like AMITJ; read once and the thing gets
conveyed forever.

The quotes/pictures were added afterward. They’re spread across the piece this
time but like AMITJ they’re echoes (or what I say is an echo of them), so you
can skip over and it makes little difference. The main reason why I didn’t put
them all at the end this time was several sections I don’t have any references
so it felt better this way. In any case this sort of thing is apparently the way
I like to do sources. I wish there were an easier and better way but this is
what’s available and how it appeared to me this time.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments
July 8, 2020 by korezaan


DRAWING: STUDY LIST, EXTENDED

What is a drawing?
What is drawing?

What do I know about drawing?



The short answer is in my drawings.

The longer than short answer is I try to think about everything I do, I
naturally overthink things to begin with, and drawing is something I have done
for some time. “How long have you drawn” has a few different answering
paradigms, some people make the number bigger for one reason, some smaller for
another. In context of this post the relevant numbers are December 2014, when I
found measuring and art became a knowable skill, and October 2019, after which
I’ve reliably drawn something every day. Between those two dates was a slow
ramp-up from once every week or two weeks and peaking at maybe five days a week,
but only some hours a day, never really liked doing it, and never really made
anything. October 2019 I participated in a spinoff of a niche version of
Inktober, the art event where you draw one thing every day according to the
public script. I did FGOctober’s Jacktober on a whim and decided I’d make a full
color piece every day. At the start I had no idea how color worked. I’d used
colors a total of 3 times before, all of them colorpicked from their original
picture. This or floundering would be how the first half of Jacktober’s colors
were picked. By the second half, I had some idea of what was going on and tried
playing around. Some of them didn’t work out, but a good number of them did. At
the end of those 31 days, I had 31 pieces completed. In the previous 5 years, I
had 10. More importantly, I had a better idea of what a drawing was. Or perhaps
I didn’t have the idea to ask that question before that.

The long answer is this post.

The main body of this post is a list of items in two categories. The order of
the categories is in descending order of importance, the order of the items is
semi-random. This list has changed over time, adding and removing items,
occasionally changing orders because I can’t remember anything and things going
together means it’s more likely I will remember them. The list can change every
time I change note files, at which point I copy the list from the previous file
and review it. The list is at the top of every note file. Every time I draw I
take notes, usually in review, though recently they’ve been more things I’m
currently thinking while I’m drawing them. Things which are recurring important
themes that I remember to elevate get elevated to the list.

This is a technical point: I use Notepad++ for text. Being able to say “[89]”
and be able to refer to the thing I said on line 89, rather than typing all that
out again on the current or a different file, makes a lot of things easier.
Autotabbing makes it visually clear what idea is a set of what. If you know
nothing about coding, learn about “nesting”, it’ll be worth your time. Some
things are better faster, or in certain ways. This is a theme.

Also technical: I’ve worked with pencil and paper, and digitally with a Wacom
Intuos Pro Med in SAI and CSP. I had a Wacom Bamboo at some distant point.
Beyond these my knowledge of mediums in drawing is what I saw in art classes for
kids and what I see on Youtube or Twitch from time to time. This pathing has had
benefits and costs. This is a theme.

After the list’s items are some things I think are worth opining publicly on
that I’ve heard here or there. They are placed at the end not because they’re
less important than the list, if anything they’re way more important because if
you have paid any attention ever in online art discussions some of this stuff
has probably been drilled into you and thus fixing them is paramount. They’re at
the end because a) it’s easier for me to say my ideas first, which even if you
don’t agree with them becomes easier to see alternatives to standard discourse,
b) presenting the other guy first means exactly the opposite of the benefit of
a) happens, and c) I don’t like repeating myself. Some things are better
repeated less. This is a theme. Also I’m wordy enough as it is.



The following is what appears at the top of my notes file for the week of
20_07_03, lines 1-53. WordPress or HTML have inserted differences of space
before/after the two categories and a space between the last item and the
linebreak. Otherwise it is identical.

STUDY LIST (review every file!)
what constitutes a drawing?

things i want

intimacy/love / friends/lord
light of god
life as worth living: effort leads to results
peace
sex
production is prereq/servant for research
composition
color theory – esp. skin. giant color shifts also interest.
shape-details – level of abstractions

structure reminders

there is no such thing as a provisional drawing.

Q: “i dont know how to do this”/”this is a problem”, A:”today is the day”
how can i understand what i am doing more clearly to reproduce it more
reliably/quickly?
try new things and play with it. imagine a different way things could be done.
improvement is four parts: desire, search (chance), implementation (ideologos),
speed (pathing).
heaviest carries usually cost the least. ideal is maximizing followthrough
the important thing is not the line you just drew, but the next line that is now
possible
question properly formed gives the right answer: look for different questions,
not different answers.
you can’t have all possible choices in the same picture
if you constantly block yourself, then that’s what you will recognize as “good”
and “real”.

do things in the order that feels best, not in the order that makes sense.
pulling from ahead is different from pushing from behind

“draw a cool thing” constitutes of “draw”, “cool”, and “thing”. “draw” is one of
these things.
details are not extensions, they are existant things.
hierarchy to detail, beauty, and thus also care
if you respect the details, the details will respect you.

studying requires being ready for the thing in question, and looking for it at
that time.
stoppage is generally a constraints problem: either excess of irrelevants, or
lack of necessities.
what you want is what you will tend to get. so want nice things.
if you ask the big questions, you will tend to get the big answers.

flow = mobility = attention = a river in the jungle
getting to flow: have an idea strong enough that everything is followthrough
staying in flow: keep the idea in mind, find a path to it through what turns out
to exist.
flow is probably “every action is important”.
expectations without judgement: most important thing is to keep desire intact
execution is a subset of search: start with what you know

picture relies on you, not you on it.

internal search (what feels right) and external search (what looks right)
emotion, vision, tempo, technicals
shape-details separate from color, emotion-pose-proportions separate from
composition

understanding < ability < reach



— — —

The below are my comments and extensions for a slightly broader audience than
just me at time of writing.

At some point in the indeterminate future I plan to find and organize and write
the true patterns and principles behind them and call it “The Art of Flow” or
some such name, but that may be some years away, as it was between the time “The
World Beyond Words” was named and the time it was written (and then
corrected/extended as “A Mountain In The Jungle”). Or it may not happen at all
since crystallizing is itself a big effort and if I actually completely succeed
at it, I will probably not write the solution but look to solving the next thing
instead. I am writing currently because for the past some days the gods or
spirits or some such things have been bothering me to write something about it
now. This is what I have, extending it is what I can do now, and so this messy
list with some repeats is what I shall do.

— Having finished now, this is as long as AMITJ. Although the below items are
not in any particular order, the commentary was written sequentially. It is
possible that it makes more sense in an order I didn’t write it, or makes sense
just fine jumping around from one list item to the another, but this has really
eaten up a lot of my time and I don’t intend to give it significantly more
budget so I am not checking those cases.


[1] STUDY LIST (REVIEW EVERY FILE!)

It was originally called “study list” because it was a list of things to study.
“rendering styles”, “composition”, “clothing folds”, other technical things.

Studying is important: learning is fundamentally copying. There is nothing new
under the sun.

Technicals largely do not appear anywhere in my notes anymore because they
largely cannot be named. Put a different way, naming them largely does not help
me do the thing I would want it to do. In the first study list one item was
“clothing folds”. This is not helpful. What is helpful is another line in the
same list: “pidjun stream, “lets draw arknights continued”, 01_18, ~2:08:00,
sleeve rendering”. That’s also clothing folds, but it’s actually usable. It is
the difference between goods in hand and typing a $ sign.

In the first study list there were also 3 categories: “things to study”, “things
to study 2”, and “things to keep in mind at all times”. The first has changed.
The second was to be specific places to study things like the stream vod time
above, but became too numerous to bother keeping. If I want to learn something
now, I just pick some picture that looks alright, seems within my reach, and
start looking at it. Seeing a picture for 0.5 seconds is different from 5
seconds, is different from 1 minute, is different from 5 minutes. It is in a
very real sense a different picture in each of those durations. The third
category is the same, just renamed.

I don’t change the name “study list” because I don’t have a better name and
don’t care to look around for one. It serves its purpose fine.


[2] WHAT CONSTITUTES A DRAWING?

This is the question to answer.
It is my understanding that the answer is the skeleton key; the garden of eden.

It’s probably better as “what constitutes drawing”, but this is nitpicking. They
are the same thing. Get out what you put in, reap what you sow, etc. It would be
very odd if you could do one thing and actually get something else. The world is
complicated, but it is not that complicated. It is knowable.

Sometimes I forget it’s there.


[3] THINGS I WANT


[4] INTIMACY/LOVE / FRIENDS/LORD
[5] LIGHT OF GOD
[6] LIFE AS WORTH LIVING: EFFORT LEADS TO RESULTS
[7] PEACE
[8] SEX

You need to know what you want.

I tried being cute and tricky here at some point, but like technicals they’ve
been progressively removed because they do not actually point to or do the
things I have them around for. “Everyone wants sex” does not mean they can admit
it to themselves. What can you admit to yourself? Honesty aside for a moment,
your mind has limited space. What occupies that space is of utmost importance.
Drawing between 2014_12 and 2019_10 was spent almost entirely on grinding body
parts because what I wanted was to do “something”. “Something” is exactly what I
got. If I had wanted “sex”, I would’ve gotten something different. I would’ve at
least noticed how much I actually wanted sex, and from that initial query,
consider maybe a few other things I want more or less.



These days it is a trope of villains to openly ask the hero what he wants. This
is wrong. It is nobles that ask directly what is wanted. It is peasants
(villain’s etymology is medieval latin, “villanus”, for “farmhand”) that beat
around the bush and play stupid little games. Play stupid little games, win
stupid little prizes. There is one audience that’s always there to hear what you
have to say, and that audience is you. You are there for everything you do. This
is a theme. (All instances of “you” are in fact “me” first and “you” maybe; this
applies to everything I or anyone says. You should do this, you should do that –
what do I know about you? Who are you? But I know a lot about me. Things that
“need to be said” are needed most by the speaker’s two ears.)

It is possible that “What do you want?” is the central question bar none,
drawing or not (this is a theme). Perhaps it is more illustrative to model it as
“Which god do you serve?”. If more than one god, in what order is your pantheon?

I think beautiful sexy ladies is important, but I’ve tried a few times, and it
turns out I don’t actually care too much about seeing them being fucked, or
showing off for the same ends. Seeing them do those things is nice, but having
to make them do that reveals a different story. I started drawing with women
because that was the obvious thing I liked visually. That is what I have now to
work with. But the more I’ve done, especially with color, the more I find I care
about other things. This is why “sex” is the fifth out of the five verbalized
items.


[9] PRODUCTION IS PREREQ/SERVANT FOR RESEARCH

I have a tendency of trying to separate improvement and production.

The idea that things can be figured out cleanly and completely before the first
step of implementing is wrong. This is true even if you have a complete picture
in front of you and are just copying it directly. You cannot do a thing before
you do it, any more than you can not do a thing and also be doing it. This means
that various technologies, understandings, methods are always incomplete and
slightly incongruent with all the other pieces: you know how to do one part well
but not the next. Yes. That’s how it is. You will never have a master-planned
city, not if you want it to work or be beautiful.

“Research” thus means both making the final result better on some axis (e.g.
color, anatomy, etc.), which is the fanciful and somewhat abstract aim, as well
as making the various different ideas that come together somehow to make that
final result come together more smoothly, which is the more visceral and true
aim.

How is this research done? By producing things. There is no way to figure out
how to feel better at doing the real thing except by doing the real thing. This
applies to technologies too. I recently found out that what constitutes a good
hairstyle also includes taking into account the nose, jawline, and ears. I had
thought of hair as something plopped on after the head was complete, but that
day I was copying a certain character from a certain artist over and over and
that on top of vague memories of others told me that it wasn’t possible. I was
getting the hair right, everything “hair” was accurate. But something was still
wrong. So there had to be a different way. This is a theme.


[10] COMPOSITION

I thought I liked sexy women and pinups. I like other things more, like dramatic
shots. Dramatic shots have something to do with composition.

Visualizing as composition is primarily opposed to visualizing as objects. If
you want to have a shot of a person with the lips at the top and upper chest at
the bottom, you shouldn’t need to draw the whole torso or the whole head. For a
person this doesn’t matter much either way; the cost of a 2~3 rough shapes and
then cropping out the rest is negligible for the benefits it conveys. For an
environment it seems too costly. It can’t possibly be that the entire space was
drawn in 3D first and then cropped or simplified down, it’s too expensive. No
one actually draws horizon line first, vanishing points, focal etc. etc., I
don’t care what they say, I refuse to believe it. There has to be another way.

Current main idea is they build off the frame of the picture. However vast an
environment or dramatic a shot, as a picture it is still a rectangle. If I try
moving the rectangle here or there, the feeling changes. Therefore, the first
known is the orientation of things relating to the rectangle is important. This
thing on the ground here may be the top of a large circle. Can I start by
putting a vaguely curved flat line a quarter of the way from the bottom? I can.
Is this easier than starting with the horizon line and the cone of vision? It
is.


[11] COLOR THEORY – ESP. SKIN. GIANT COLOR SHIFTS ALSO INTEREST.

I understand enough of what I’m looking for that I can say “color theory” to
myself and remember what it is.



This is not color theory as anyone I’ve heard talk about it except by distant
relation. There might be a word or so for what I’m looking for, but a) I doubt
it, and b) I’m certainly not finding it by google. Gurney is a good help but his
tome isn’t everything. To cover the scope of reality would have a tome for every
line in Gurney’s tome, and another tome for every line in that tome. I’m looking
for something to do with color and I know what sort of general form it will
take. YouTube artist tutorial X can help me at the same chances that I’ll win
the lottery: it’s not zero, but I wouldn’t find it because I was looking for it.
An older example: for a long time trying to start using colors and even
grayscale gave me a huge problem, but everything I found was on “rendering” and
“lighting”. I didn’t give a fuck about those. I wanted to know what the
fundamental differences and uses of “blobs” were as opposed to “lines”. I’d only
ever drawn in lines with pencils and then digitally; what do I do with these
“blobs” that can come in different opacities and different sizes? How do I make
these “blobs” do what I want? But no one talks about this.

I am so tired of hearing about things to do “if you’re a beginner” / “just
starting out”. But we’ll get to that at the end.


[12] SHAPE-DETAILS – LEVEL OF ABSTRACTIONS

“Shape-details” is my personal jargon. If there’s a word out there for it, I’ve
never heard about it.

The basic explanation for lighting is one you’ve probably seen; a ball that’s
half lit half in shadow and with a number of words and pointers on it. Light,
shadow, midtone, terminator, highlight, useless, bureaucracy, checklist. It is
my impression that a significant proportion of people come away from this not
understanding how to light things because a common indicator of amateur digital
art is a very large airbrush over the general region that’s in shadow, esp. if
the color of the shadow is just set to black. Shadows don’t look like this, yes.
But clearly that’s what people got from the ball explanation because it’s not
like they like this result either.

“Shape-details” is my current understanding of lighting. That light things are
light and dark things are dark no one needs to be told, that highlights are some
angle of incident math physics something something I don’t think anyone actually
gives a damn but isn’t actually too big a deal at the moment, and colors are big
enough a problem that it’s easier handling semi-independently, so: if we start
off with just one level of light and one level of dark, what do we know? I know
in anime I like things are commonly two tones, light and dark. What else does
anime do about it? Well, looks like they come in hard shapes. Things that don’t
“have” hard edges have hard shapes anyways, like triangles in hair or other
shapes in clothing folds. It’s difficult to draw lines around fuzzy blobs, but
it’s pretty easy to draw lines around shapes. “Shape-details” are all the shapes
that aren’t forms or outlines that will be filled in because they are highlights
or shadows. They don’t particularly adhere to any rule other than cool, though
at the beginning for general guidance and at the end for checking, the general
form that is being lit will be considered.

I am probably just retarded and to many people it is obvious this is how you’d
approach lighting as babby’s literal first step. I’ve been told I do things
pointlessly laboriously, like ‘trimming lawns with scissors’. It’s true. But I
also keep track of which stones I’ve turned, and once they’re all turned, the
fool has persisted in his folly, and becomes wise. “There has to be another
way”.

Or so I’d like to believe, but I actually found it because I’d noticed over the
course of some pieces that trying to figure out the final form and final
color/value in the same step felt really mushy and time-consuming so I’d try out
separating them, with the final form coming first. I liked it. There are some
things I don’t like about it, but it’s currently as a base to improve rather
than as a foreign opponent.

It’s probably cheaper to notice that even with real life things things are
pretty flat and simple most of the time. If you look at a person and think about
what you see, they don’t have a billion hairs on their head, they have hair.
Their belt or pants around their waist makes an approximately flat line, so you
curve a flat line rather than trying to flatten a cylinder ‘because waists are
cylindrical’. A lot of shadows on their body are basically hard shapes, clothing
folds generally don’t matter. This requires having achieved final victory over
the realism demon or having never encountered it. If you don’t have this, but
lighting makes sense cheaply some other way, then it’s probably because I’m
retarded, or at least retarded on this topic. Or it’s my tendency to trim lawns
with scissors. “Or” means both. This is a theme.

“Level of abstraction” is older personal jargon. It refers to levels of
simplification (from realism) where all components make an acceptable result,
e.g. realistic hair works okay with anime faces, but the other way around
basically doesn’t. Shape-details are inside that structure. Three other obvious
levels of abstraction to using shape-details for lighting are are: lighting only
major forms, broad airbrush, and simply single tone for everything and not
bothering with shadows.


[13] STRUCTURE REMINDERS

> “Training deals not with an object but with the human spirit and human
> emotions.”
> 
> The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
> Bruce Lee


[14] THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PROVISIONAL DRAWING.

Everything is always for real and everything has always been for real.



It is better to think of all drawings as for real than to think you can hide
certain things by not showing it publicly, or not drawing it, or not
[something]. All drawings are for real. There is always at least one audience
that sees everything and from that audience you cannot hide.

Provisionalism, or as is more hip to say these days, “Simulation”ism, is how
learning stops. I’ve known for a long time that copying is the path of
improvement, but I’ve copied many things and didn’t get much from them because
when things didn’t turn out well, or worse, when they did turn out well, at the
time I was doing it I said to myself “it’s just a copy”. “It’s just practice”.
Same with the years spent grinding various body parts. I should be a master at
least at those parts, but I’m not. Part of this is because memory fades, but a
lot of it was because I didn’t take it seriously.

The idea was, when I want to make something, I will be able to put all these
parts together perfectly. Note this is not a true premise in itself, integration
is itself a skill (an “art”), but for entertainment we can grant it. That was
still 5 years spent making a total of 10 pieces. Are there only 10 things I
would’ve wanted to do in that time? Every day I spent getting good at “anatomy”
was a day I spent not making a full woman I wanted to see. What is the desired
ratio between seeing more beautiful women drawn, and making any particular one
or any particular part more beautiful? This is a question. The clock is ticking.
The clock will always be ticking, and every tick you are standing on your
answer.

Take yourself seriously.

> “To think that a man has but 50 years to live under heaven. Surely this world
> is nothing but a vain dream.”
> 
> Oda Nobunaga
> A Chef of Nobunaga

> “Normally, those people would never wake up from their fantasy worlds.
> They live meaningless lives.
> They waste their precious days over nothing.
> No matter how old they get, they’ll continue to say,
> 
> “My real life hasn’t started yet. The real me is still asleep, so that’s why
> my life is such garbage.”
> 
> They continue to tell themselves that.
> They continue.
> And they age.
> Then die.
> 
> And on their deathbeds, they will finally realize: the life they lived was the
> real thing.
> 
> People don’t live provisional lives, nor do they die provisional deaths.
> That’s a simple fact! The problem… is whether they realize that simple fact.”
> 
> Tonegawa
> Kaiji: Gambling Apocalypse


[15] Q: “I DONT KNOW HOW TO DO THIS”/”THIS IS A PROBLEM”, A:”TODAY IS THE DAY”

The day before Jacktober I decided I would make one drawing every day, even if
it was a stick figure. The first day of jacktober I wanted to remake a meme,
which was in color. The end of the first day I decided every day would be in
color. Obviously it would not be a stick figure, I can do that in under a
minute. The time allotted is a day, or more than a day, if I work ahead. There
is more I can do. What can I do? Well, one of those things is now color. How do
I color? I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?

“Today” was traditionally an adverb.


[16] HOW CAN I UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM DOING MORE CLEARLY TO REPRODUCE IT MORE
RELIABLY/QUICKLY?

The simpler and more elegant understand is better because it saves time. There
is a realm of useful ideas that lives and dies long before standard ideas can
run out their results. This pattern is fractal: the puresr and more effective
thoughts are, the less they can be verbalized, even in our own minds. They are
ever more fleeting. They can only be observed, and at some point, the only hope
is the hope to be able to observe.

If one attempts to verbalize them, it comes out as an unending mess. Like this
post.

> “The next point is when we try to guess a new law, whether we should use the
> seat-of-the-pants feeling and philosophical principles. “I don’t like the
> minimum principle”, or “I do like the minimum principle”. Or “I don’t like
> action at a distance” or “I do like action at a distance”. The question is to
> what extent do models help. And it’s a very interesting thing. Very often
> models help, and most physics teachers try to teach how to use these models
> and get a “good physical feel” as to how things are gonna work out.
> 
> But the greatest discoveries, it always turns out, abstract away from the
> model, it never did any good. Maxwell’s discovery of electrodynamics was first
> made with a lot of imaginary wheels and idlers and everything else in space.
> If you got rid of all the “idlers and everything else in space”, the thing was
> okay. Dirac discovered the correct laws of quantum mechanics simply by
> guessing the equation. And the method of simply guessing the equation seems to
> be a pretty effective way of guessing new laws. This shows again that
> mathematics is a deep way of expressing nature, and attempts to express nature
> in philosophical principles or in seat-of-the-pants mechanical feeling is not
> an efficient way.
> 
> I must say it’s possible, and I’ve often made the hypothesis, that physics
> will ultimately not require a mathematical statement. That the machinery will
> ultimately be revealed, just like one of these other prejudices.
> 
> It always bothers me, that in spite of all this “local” business, what goes on
> in no matter how tiny a region of space and no matter how tiny a region of
> time, according to the laws as we understand them today, takes a computing
> machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out. Now, how could
> all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount
> of logic to figure out what one stinky little bit of space-time is going to
> do?”
> 
> The Character of Physical Law
> Richard Feynman

> “The priest Tannen used to say, “People come to no understanding because
> priests teach only the doctrine of ‘No Mind.’ What is called ‘No Mind’ is a
> mind that is pure and lacks complication.” This is interesting.
> 
> Lord Sanenori said, “In the midst of a single breath, where perversity cannot
> be held, is the Way.” If so, then the Way is one.
> 
> But there is no one who can understand this clarity at first. Purity is
> something that cannot be attained except by piling effort upon effort.”
> 
> Hagakure
> Yamamoto Tsunetomo


[17] TRY NEW THINGS AND PLAY WITH IT. IMAGINE A DIFFERENT WAY THINGS COULD BE
DONE.




PRISMA ILYA


[18] IMPROVEMENT IS FOUR PARTS: DESIRE, SEARCH (CHANCE), IMPLEMENTATION
(IDEOLOGOS), SPEED (PATHING).

I don’t remember how I came to this. I have the notes and I have something that
can search files but I’m not going to look for it. It’d take forever if I did
that for every one of these because I literally have all the records.



The primary thing this counters is that improvement comes via determination or
time. I’m all for having the right telos but the standard narrative here is
dickwaving and chest-pounding. Improvement itself has a structure, and that
structure was not taught at school no matter how much people like to say they
teach you “how to learn to learn”. No, you didn’t.

Determination is “desire”.

Time is one of two parts in “Search”. There are some things you just won’t find,
the chance is too low, it was not ordained for you, etc. You are going to make
do with what you can find in the time you spent looking, or you won’t do
anything at all.

“Ideologos” is the logic between ideas. That is the short version and probably
sufficient for most purposes. The many different things you believe have to work
together, and making them work together is itself a skill. The slightly longer
than short version is in bits and pieces throughout this post. The long version
is “A Mountain In the Jungle”.

“Pathing” is how it’s done at the time it’s being done. I believe the popular
word these days for this concept is “tacit knowledge”, but this glorifies
“knowledge” and thus I don’t like it. This stuff is not “knowledge, except it
can’t be said”. You might as well say “fire, except not hot”. Just say something
else. I think “pathing” is a good word. Where things are for me is to a large
extent known by my feet.

Oh I remember the thing that preceded this now.

“all things that can be done are easy. there is no specific value in toil and
suffering, the value is in purpose. things that are done are done by people who
find it the easiest to do that rather than anything else.

have you ever seen anything that inspired you? has anything that inspired you,
been remembered, even 10 years later?

that was done.

therefore that can be done.

find the path.”


[19] HEAVIEST CARRIES USUALLY COST THE LEAST. IDEAL IS MAXIMIZING FOLLOWTHROUGH

If you are thinking about something a lot, it is probably not going to be the
most valuable piece.


[20] THE IMPORTANT THING IS NOT THE LINE YOU JUST DREW, BUT THE NEXT LINE THAT
IS NOW POSSIBLE

There’s a number of things condensed in here, I don’t remember them all.
– Certain lines cannot be found before other lines are in place.
– All drawings are for real, there is no point in rejecting the past.
– Emotions are information. Bad emotions are not failure, they show the way by
their opposition.
– Look ahead not behind.


[21] QUESTION PROPERLY FORMED GIVES THE RIGHT ANSWER: LOOK FOR DIFFERENT
QUESTIONS, NOT DIFFERENT ANSWERS.

One time I was trying to figure out how to make clean lines without spending so
much time. The archetype reached was the shape of “T”. Two lines are
intersecting, one stops at the other, question: How to make the one that stops,
stop at the right point, rather than overshooting or undershooting? Overshooting
means erasing, which means hitting up against the other line; undershooting
means obvious gap. The people I asked said I was overthinking it. I didn’t think
so, since that’s what my lines were doing. I believe it was suggested to make
lines thicker, which would be a solution but I didn’t like it, or to not worry
about it, it’s not like perfectly clean lines are actually real, which I
understand the concept of, but that’s not what I was seeing as my results, or
feeling as I was drawing it.

The solution came offhand when talking with an art streamer and he mentioned how
he doesn’t use stabilizers. Stabilizers are digital corrections for wobbly
lines, the feeling of which is that the line becomes very heavy: they are hard
to turn and hard to stop. I had forgotten I turned stabilizers on and turned
them up; at the time it was the obvious solution for making plastic on plastic
feel more like pencil on paper. After a short time trying it out as a solution,
this largely solved the real problem. Starting and stopping became a lot more
precise, precise enough that it didn’t matter. There were some other tweaks that
also helped this that are not important to discuss, but they were also
“unrelated” technicals.



The essence of search is imagination, not logic.


[22] YOU CAN’T HAVE ALL POSSIBLE CHOICES IN THE SAME PICTURE

One picture shows one thing in one way.
If you want something different, you will have to draw another picture.

I should note just in case it helps: the length of comment I have for any
particular line isn’t proportional to how important it is. Generally if I have a
lot to say about something it’s because it’s missing some component. If it is
perfect and important, usually I say nothing (unless I happen to have a story).
All of this is “structure reminders”: stuff for which I don’t need to remind
myself of, or which I can’t find a verbalization for, have no entries.


[23] IF YOU CONSTANTLY BLOCK YOURSELF, THEN THAT’S WHAT YOU WILL RECOGNIZE AS
“GOOD” AND “REAL”.

It is said that artists of any field tend to be moody people.

This is me imploring you to do that. You need to think of yourself as moody.

Just as whatever you intend to draw will appear on the page, so will your
emotions. More importantly, certain emotions make certain things possible. Put
another way, there will be times you can’t do something you were able to do some
other time, and a good number of those times is going to be because you felt a
certain way. You have feelings about how this or that works. You have feelings
about the day or your place in the world. All of this matters to what comes out
on the page. If you cannot recognize emotions as a higher power or as a deeper
compass, you will run around cargo culting unrelated solutions to the real and
usually simple problem. “All the low hanging fruit has been picked” is cope.
This year I discovered off a miso soup bag a new way to open plastic bags. I
didn’t believe it until I followed the instructions on the bag. And yet there it
was. The brand is Marukome. There is always some other simple improvement to do.

It is worded this way because the most common problem for me is self-blockage.
It may be a different problem for you. Almost all the time the reason why I do
something I don’t want to do is because some other part of me is stopping it,
saying “but” and then some large number of reasons – that I don’t actually care
about. It’s usually “but what will other people think”.

A popular example I’m aware of would be skinny women with large titties: “But
where are her organs?”. The correct answer is “I uh don’t give a damn”. The best
answer is to draw more skinny women with large titties. If you are in this
general area, the titties are large and the waists are small because that makes
the pp the big pp and what makes the pp big is what is king. Things like organ
placement may be vaguely important to you, but that’s a decision you make, not
others (note: “question” and “decision” are synonyms). If you feel the waist
could use some width, add some width. If not, don’t.

This principle extends. The example here is crude ‘because’ it’s popular,
there’s already standard terminology for it. The closer you get to real problems
the less words you are going to have for them. Big titties and missing organs
are at the level of shapes: broadly, boobs versus ribcage. But it’s not actually
only those two. Just as nose jawline ears inform hair, so too do other parts of
the body inform boob size. The ones important to me are head size and arm width.
There is nowhere this principle ends. You should strive to find out how each
stroke feels to the next. Putting down the instrument at the start and pulling
up at the end feels different physically, why shouldn’t it feel different
emotionally too? This is something you can’t rely on others for.

Anything that has standard terminology is dead fish.

“I don’t like Facebook Trending’s way of talking about popular things on the
internet as “surfacing”. It feels like a wrong and misleading way to talk about
it. Not just the internet, but any information network in general.

The “web” visualization makes a lot of sense, and a “sea” is fine too, as long
as the idea is that you’re a fish and not a surfer. “Surfacing” in a “web” is
nonsensical; “surfacing” as a fish basically means you’ve been dead for a while.
Which is actually correct some of the time, especially when they’re talking
about normalfags catching onto memes, but in general it’s not the right word to
use, especially not for information that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues.

“Viral” is overused, but fairly accurate. The operative concept is that an idea
has enough penetration to go through multiple number and types of networks at an
abnormal speed. Other words that work are “hot” and “electric”; heat and
electricity are understood to go through just about everything.



Then again, Trending is trying to become news, and news is about dead fish, so I
guess they’re accurate.”

> “I’ll go ahead and download it.”
> 
> “Why don’t you buy paper books? E-books lack character.”
> 
> “Is that right?”
> 
> “Books are not something that you just read words in. They’re also a tool to
> adjust your senses.
> 
> “Adjust?”
> 
> “When I’m not feeling well, there are times that I can’t take in what I read.
> When that happens, I try to think about what could be hindering my reading.
> There are also books that I can take in smoothly even when I’m not feeling
> well. I try to think why.
> 
> It might be something like mental tuning.
> 
> What’s important when you tune is the feeling of the paper you’re touching
> with your fingers, and the momentary stimulation your brain receives when you
> turn the page.”
> 
> “I feel kinda discouraged. When I talk to you, I feel like I’ve been missing
> out on something all my life.”
> 
> “You’re reading into it too much.”
> 
> Choe Guseong, Makishima Shougo
> Psycho-Pass

> “Ted Holman, a Team Leader in the body shop, argued this way:
> 
> “I don’t think IEs are dumb. They’re just ignorant. Anyone can watch someone
> else doing a job and come up with improvement suggestions that sound good. But
> they don’t usually take into account all the little things that explain why,
> from the worker’s point of view, they couldn’t work. And it’s even easier to
> come up with the ideal procedure if you don’t even bother to watch the worker
> at work, but just do it from your office, on paper. Almost anything can look
> good that way. Even when we do our own analysis in our teams, some of the
> silliest ideas can slip through before we try it out.
> 
> There’s a lot of things that enter into a good job design. Little things can
> make a big difference, like how high or low the stock is placed or how the
> tools are organized or where the hoses are. The person actually doing the job
> is the only one who can see all those factors. And in the U.S., engineers have
> never had to work on the floor – not like in Japan. So they don’t know what
> they don’t know.
> 
> In the typical U.S. plant, you never even saw the IE – they stayed in their
> cozy offices upstairs. They never talked to workers about how to improve their
> jobs.
> 
> Today, we drive the process, and if we need their help, the engineer is there
> the next day to work on it with us.”
> 
> Smith put this contrast in a broader perspective:
> 
> “In most plants, management assumes the “divine right” to design jobs as they
> see fit. And in the U.S. auto industry, workers have historically agreed to
> that in exchange for higher wages. Management was willing to pay a ton of
> money to the workers to preserve its prerogative.
> 
> But in practice, the old way of setting standards was just ridiculous. An
> Industrial Engineer would shut himself away in an isolated office and consider
> how long it took for somebody to twist their wrist and move their arm in such
> and such a way, and calculate from some manual and try that way to come up
> with a task design. The IE would take this “properly” designed job to the
> foreman. The foreman would not his head, but then said “screw you” to the IE’s
> back and redesigned the task to his own liking. Then he’d take his task design
> to the worker and said “Do it this way or you’re out.” The worker would not
> but would pull the same trick on the foreman. In the end, the job got done
> however the worker could. When the boss walked by, the worker might pretend to
> do the job the way the foreman had told him. Everybody involved knew this was
> going on but no one cared to do anything about it.
> 
> Multiply that game by the number of shifts and the number of different people
> involved and you’ve got a process you can’t control. You can’t build a quality
> car like that. You can’t even go back and improve the process, because the IE
> lives in dream world, doesn’t have a clue how the job is actually done, and
> doesn’t have any impact. The foreman’s impact is also zip. Nobody talks to the
> worker even though he’s the one guy who can do something about the problem.
> Nobody wants to listen to him. That’s basically how most of the auto industry
> operates even today.
> 
> So you can see why standardized work is so revolutionary.
> 
> And why most IEs are pretty uncomfortable with it!””
> 
> The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
> Paul S. Adler


[26] DO THINGS IN THE ORDER THAT FEELS BEST, NOT IN THE ORDER THAT MAKES SENSE.

“Makes sense” usually means closer to a verbalized system.
In event of conflict, the default winner should not be the verbalized system.


[27] PULLING FROM AHEAD IS DIFFERENT FROM PUSHING FROM BEHIND

Carrot and stick are not interchangeable. Each has their use.
You will notice how you treat yourself eventually.


[29] “DRAW A COOL THING” CONSTITUTES OF “DRAW”, “COOL”, AND “THING”. “DRAW” IS
ONE OF THESE THINGS.

There is something I tend to forget and this is one way to remind myself of that
thing.



A common way of thinking about drawing and imagination is that there is some
fully formed idea ‘on the other side’ and the only problem is “I’m not in the
mood” (coincidentally they don’t take emotions seriously) or “I don’t know how
to do it”. The latter means something like if their brain was hooked up to a
computer it would just exist. This is a nonsense model. Computers aren’t magic,
not matter how black box they may appear to you. If something like hooking up a
brain existed, someone would’ve had to design that hardware, someone else
would’ve had to design that software. You would still hadveto interface with it.
The difficulty would not be zero, it would be lowered. How much lower? Nowhere
near as much as you think. I’m sure people in the past thought the same of
computers too. Working with paints on canvas has so many more difficulties than
tablet on computer, the most obvious one being it’s financially more difficult.
How many more artists now exist? A lot. Infinitely more? No. I’m here writing
this aren’t I?

As much as I am trying to make this technically- and field- independent, these
are all results of my technical knowledge and background. All things are results
of technical implementation, and we should be careful to remember it exists.
There are things we have and have not done, and they allow us certain ideas.

Example: Recently I drew some clouds. Before that, I couldn’t imagine how they
would be done. When I think of clouds, I think of the clouds I see in Ace
Combat. How could I make something like those videogame clouds on a canvas? I
couldn’t. Not with the tools I had. Or so I thought, but then I decided to
google “how to paint clouds” or something like that, and saw some old woman with
paint brushes and a canvas mix up a few opaque colors and then just do it.
Clouds aren’t opaque? I mean, I guess. But there were things that looked like
clouds on her canvas, I could do what she did on my digital canvas, this is
better than whatever I had before, what more can I ask? This isn’t to say I
can’t ask for more, but the question is always “compared to what”, and a lot of
things can’t be compared to until you try them out, and they usually don’t
follow any logic expected beforehand.

Example: My experience with color has largely been with 100% opacity round
brushes digitally. In other words, most colors on my pictures are picked
directly. How I get details is via the aforementioned “shape-details”: I decide
on what little triangles I’m going to make shadows beforehand. Problem: This
doesn’t work for things like clouds or trees or anything with “organic” forms or
“realistic” texture. It can’t do texture at all unless I really want to draw out
every little detail. Counterexample: I saw a guy post his watercolor process for
coloring trees and bushes. He said he used a sponge. He colored the thing with a
sponge, something with texture itself, via watercolor, which naturally varies in
amount of color somehow, rather than using a round brush with opaque paint. It
probably wasn’t colored in one action, but however many actions it took him,
it’s definitely under the 50~1000 it’d take me. It’s a lot less direct control,
but how much direct control do we actually want? “But sponge brushes are
available digitally too” Yes. And I have not used them.

“Cool” is a ‘language’. “Thing” is a ‘language’ ([10]). “Drawing” is a
‘language’. If you word it a different way, you may see a drawing as a
combination of a different set of things.

I word it this way because this line is for remembering a certain thing.

> “For thousands of years, people have scoured the earth looking for brightly
> colored materials to make into paint. Most intense colors in plants and
> animals fade immediately. An ideal pigment must be permanent, plentiful, and
> nonpoisonous.
> 
> […] Since art’s beginnings, a few reliable color ingredients have been readily
> available to artists. Blacks, reds, and yellows were easy to find; that’s why
> they appear in all “primitive” art. Black paint made from charcoal or burnt
> bones dates back to prehistoric times. The brownish reds and oranges of iron
> oxides have been dug out of natural open pits. Siena, Italy, gave its name of
> ore-based pigments that were used burnt or raw.
> 
> Reliably violets, magentas, and blues were rare. The togas of Roman emperors
> used a pigment known as Tyrian purple, made from a color-producing cyst made
> from a whelk. It took 12,000 mollusks to make 1.4 grams of pure dye. The
> rarity of purple made it the color of royalty. The crimson used in the red
> coats of the British military, Catholic cardinals’ robes, and many modern
> lipsticks originates from a fluid in tiny insects that live as parasites on
> catcus plants. Those bugs were worth more than their weight in gold to the
> Spanish, and the processes were kept absolutely secret.
> 
> The most expensive pigment of all was a fine blue made from lapis lazuli, a
> mineral mined in Afghanistan. Getting a supply required a long voyage
> “ultramarinus”, or “beyond the sea.” For this reason, the old masters reserved
> ultramarine for the Madonna’s robes.”
> 
> Color & Light – A Guide for the Realist Painter
> James Gurney

> “One of my favorite stories about my wife and myself, when we were in New
> Jersey, our breakfast table was right next to some windows looking on the
> garden. We’re having breakfast prior to me going to work. And she says, “Dick,
> it’s raining.” I look at her and think “What’s wrong with her? She must know
> that I can see it’s raining”. Then I say to myself, what did she really say?
> 
> What she said was: “I’ve had my second cup of coffee and I’m fit to talk to.”
> 
> I spent much of that day at Bell Labs watching how much of what we say is not
> what it appears to be. And it is amazing. The enormous amount of how much of
> what we say is literally not correct. No way. So the language has a great deal
> of thing of things more than what you think; our natural language has a great
> deal of features, which in a language to a computer would not have to have.
> 
> Well we have not studied the problem. When I heard the Japanese were planning
> to write fifth generation computers, the speed was alright, but when they were
> going to do AI to do things, I thought they would not succeed. And they
> didn’t. Because they were not profoundly studying the nature of language. And
> until we do, we will get language like ADA, which are logically alright, but
> they don’t fit the human analogue to do the kinds of things that a human
> animal does with language.
> 
> Now I point out there are two languages: there is you to the machine, and the
> machine back to you. They need not be the same language. You want a terse one
> in, and you’re willing to put up with a rather verbose one coming out.
> Frequently what comes out is so terse you can’t figure out what it means, and
> you’re willing to settle with a lot more printout – but not too much. It’s a
> problem of designing language to communicate ideas to machines.
> 
> But unfortunately we don’t know what ideas are, so we don’t know how to do
> it.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming


[30] DETAILS ARE NOT EXTENSIONS, THEY ARE EXISTANT THINGS.
[31] HIERARCHY TO DETAIL, BEAUTY, AND THUS ALSO CARE
[32] IF YOU RESPECT THE DETAILS, THE DETAILS WILL RESPECT YOU.

There is an idea popular these days that all art has the same “fundamentals”:
anatomy, perspective, color theory, etc. Pareto principle: 20 carries 80,
fundamentals are that 20, if you learn fundamentals well your art will be 80% of
the way there. Get the simple things right, they will pay off, the other stuff
doesn’t matter or will follow through naturally on their own.



This idea, or this form of idea, is very attractive to me. This idea is wrong.
20/80 and efficiency concepts in general should be used carefully, especially
because the current culture has efficiency as god you can overdo it without
noticing it. The two broad problems with 20/80 is a) it’s not actually useful in
the ways it’s generally thought of as useful and b) it’s recursive into
oblivion.

A face takes up at max 1/2 the head, the head is 1/5~1/8 the height of the body
depending on what you prefer, by area it’s let’s say (and this is generous)
1/20. The face is thus 1/40 of the body, or ~3%. Eyes take up some small
percentage of the face. Of the body, eyes are therefore somewhere in the
0.1%~0.01% range. And yet, the eyes they carry most of the soul. Does this mean
making the eyes larger means more soul? A bit. But you’re going to be doing it
at the cost of other things. If you make the eyes a significant proportion of
the body, like it is with chibis, you must shrink the fingers and hands. Fingers
are a large part of emotion. There are certain things you can’t express with
just a face. Chibis can’t use fingers, nor can they use the back, and they don’t
have a center of gravity. Chibis have no boobs, so you “can’t” have “soul” and
“sexy”. 20/80 is true on any given axis. But the other four 20’s in that 80
carry their own 80 on other axes. 20/80 is a pretty good thing to keep in mind
for solving problems because usually even great problems have simple and small
solutions, but it’s usually invoked for efficiency and cutting away “waste”.

The less remembered second half of the 20/80 story is the ant colony story. In
any colony, 20% of the ants do most of the work, 30% carry their weight, and 50%
are slackers. What happens when you remove the 50% that are slackers? 50% of the
remaining colony automatically become slackers. Why? It doesn’t matter. What
matters is this is the way the world is.

If you don’t respect the details, the details won’t respect you.

If you do respect the details, they will reward you according to the respect you
give.

> “Listen, Kousei. You mustn’t play so violently.
> 
> The piano is you.
> 
> If you touch it gently, it will smile. If you pound it with force, it will
> become enraged. Touch it like you’re caressing a baby’s head.
> 
> Alright, one more time.”
> 
> Arima Saki
> Your Lie in April


[34] STUDYING REQUIRES BEING READY FOR THE THING IN QUESTION, AND LOOKING FOR IT
AT THAT TIME.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.


[35] STOPPAGE IS GENERALLY A CONSTRAINTS PROBLEM: EITHER EXCESS OF IRRELEVANTS,
OR LACK OF NECESSITIES.

Version of “question properly formed gives the right answer” more specialized
for flow.


[36] WHAT YOU WANT IS WHAT YOU WILL TEND TO GET. SO WANT NICE THINGS.
[37] IF YOU ASK THE BIG QUESTIONS, YOU WILL TEND TO GET THE BIG ANSWERS.

The canvas is a mirror.

It’s said that the more people age, the more everyone gets the face they
deserve.

Teleology is real.


[39] FLOW = MOBILITY = ATTENTION = A RIVER IN THE JUNGLE
[40] GETTING TO FLOW: HAVE AN IDEA STRONG ENOUGH THAT EVERYTHING IS
FOLLOWTHROUGH
[41] STAYING IN FLOW: KEEP THE IDEA IN MIND, FIND A PATH TO IT THROUGH WHAT
TURNS OUT TO EXIST.
[42] FLOW IS PROBABLY “EVERY ACTION IS IMPORTANT”.

There are drawings where no matter what I do or how long I spend, it still won’t
be good. There are other drawings where I get to a certain point and don’t see
anything else to do. Then, there are drawings where after a certain point, I
could continue on it forever, and no matter what I do – and everything I’d do
would be play – it will only get better. This is the highest state of flow: if
in a drawing I get to and can stabilize flow, I know I have won.



Flow is the current crown prince to throne of “What constitutes a drawing”. More
succintly:

“Flow” is the name of the king.

There are any number and types of things that are required for flow. I’m not
sure what the first or most important step is, but I can say that something that
came up repeatedly before flow was the idea that all of my problems had
something to do with mental state. This is to say they weren’t technical
problems in essence. Technical solutions are necessary but not sufficient. You
are probably not happy if you are hungry, but being full will not make you
happy.

The most important component of flow is probably teleology.

You have to want the right thing. There are actually right and wrong things to
want. Maybe not in the “objective morality” sense, but there are patterns to
things, and the more I pay attention the more the old religious texts sound
correct, or at least have the correct forms that a correct answer would take
(which suggests their answers are also more correct). There are things you want,
“independent” of mood. You the conscious you are a mouse riding an elephant. The
elephant is the unconscious you, there is something you live for, and the more
you do what that is, the better you will be / at the thing. Finding out and
putting a name on what that is is very helpful but not necessary, nor
sufficient.

Opposing is the current popular “technology”, the idea that you can and should
be able to do things without wanting to do them. I believe this is called
“mechanistic philosophy”, or at least I heard that term in college taking a
Renaissance to Enlightenment history class (note: I hate college. There’s like
three ideas I learned there, and this was one of them). Once robots were
compared to men, now men are to robots. As long as all the right objects have
the right forces applied to them, the same results should be achieved. This is
wrong. Technos is subservient to telos. It should be obvious enough that
paychecks on time are insufficient just from looking at retail employee turnover
rates. People don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses: if the leader doesn’t care or
thinks poorly of his subordinates, they will know, and they will respond
accordingly. People who work in politics or pornography look like demons. Why?
Coincidence? Is life a series of unrelated events? That’s what technology says,
and it’s clearly not true. Lest it be said that all this stuff I’m talking about
is people and not technology (as if inb4 was a complete rebuttal- well, we can
entrain it:), Africans have been buying Soviet military jets and tanks for
decades, but no one one ever fears African militaries. Why? They can’t use them.
They can’t do everything else in a military to get to a point that a jet or a
tank would be useful. Similarly, Americans can’t use Japanese factories. And you
probably can’t use most of the ideas I’ve talked about here. The technology
rebuttal would be that Africans or Americans or you are just lacking some
“prerequisite” technology. Africans are just lacking military doctrine or
maintenance discipline. Yes, I agree. Those would solve their problems.
Question: Assuming you get paid for it either way, is military doctrine and
maintenance discipline something that can be given to them with a book, or a
consulting gig? No, right? You can’t make the horse drink. How are these and
other things obtained, then? Teleology: wanting the thing. I used to think it
was ludicrous artists when asked for advice would say “just draw things you
like” rather than anatomy or perspective tips or whatever. Now, I see they were
right. Without specific knowledge of who they’re talking to, that is actually
the best thing to say. Teleology is real.

The second most important is ideologos, which we’ve mentioned before. You need a
logic to traverse your different ideas so you can recall the one you need the
way you need it at the time you need it. I suspect it’s probably possible to do
without an ideologos and I need it only because I am both ‘autistic’ and can’t
remember anything. If you can hold a bunch of disparate ideas and use them all
well without them tripping over yourself, you’re fine; that’s the purpose of
having one anyways.

Beyond this there’s the idea of paying attention to how you feel, which has been
a theme.

Each of items these is at least one dimension, and the number of dimensions that
need to align to reach flow is higher than anyone can consciously conceive. In
this space there is a territory, and the task is to find the path between the
current position and the desired position that is enjoyable.

I don’t have that map. I can only tell a story or three and hope that I’ve done
my part.

The map provided by psychology on the dimensions of “challenge” and “skill” I
can explain a bit though. I don’t think all eight are important, the quadrants
suffice. The solution – read: path to flow – to boredom is to decide to look
more into the most interesting thing of the bunch, or peruse other people’s
works and pick out whatever strikes you first. The solution to relaxation is
adding more things to the picture and trying to keep the same feeling/balance.
The solution to anxiety is exactly or thereabouts [20], [15], and [43].

The solution to flow is continuing to believe in yourself.





> “A good player tries to read out such tactical problems in his head before he
> puts the stones on the board. He looks before he leaps. Frequently he does not
> leap at all; many of the sequences his reading uncovers are stored away for
> future reference, and in the end never carried out. This is especially true in
> a professional game, where the two hundred or so moves played are only the
> visible part of an iceberg of implied threats and possibilities, most of which
> stays submerged. You may try to approach the game at that level, or you may,
> like most of us, think your way from one move to the next as you play along,
> but in either case it is your reading ability more than anything else that
> determines your rank.”
> 
> Tesuji
> James Davies

> “There are two types of societies. This isn’t a theory of evolution, or about
> which is better than which.
> 
> There are societies that respect their relationship with nature, and others
> that do not. This is about how societies view change.
> 
> The native people of Canada tried not to break the bones of salmon they ate,
> and returned the bones to the rivers. Native people from eastern and western
> parts of Russia decorated the skulls of the seals they captured and
> dismantled, and returned them to the master of the sea along with their
> poetries. They thought fur and meat were gifts from the animals as a proof of
> their friendship, and they returned those gifts by adding spiritual values to
> the bones. They showed their respect towards nature through their meals. This
> is because they thought the true form of animals were gods who wore the skins
> of animals. Because they wanted the gods to visit them again, they served by
> giving back to them respectfully. There are similar beliefs in Northern
> Eurasian and North American cultures, and many myths remain.
> 
> But in modern day Japan, there probably aren’t that many people who still
> believe that animals are able to talk and that gods live inside of them.
> They’re looking down on nature. They see animals as something they can
> naturally steal from, and if they feel like they took a little too much from
> it – they can just start protecting them. That’s how they see it.
> 
> When did that kind of arrogant society form…?
> 
> The key factor is the appearance of technology.
> 
> Specifically, weapons made of iron.
> 
> After obtaining these excellent weapons, man’s respect towards animals faded.
> In the tales told around Sakhalin, there is a verse that says, “Swords that
> cut extraordinarily well were passed on from Japan, and after that, bears were
> killed easily”. A certain individual born in a heretical land one day
> realized: this is a weapon that god gave, but it is a weapon able to kill god.
> 
> The origin of the word technology is the Greek word “Techne”.
> 
> “Techne” means “to artificially draw out the blessings that an object is
> hiding”.
> 
> A good example is heating up a rock and taking the iron out of it.
> 
> The sword and technology stolen from god gave man power that even gods will
> fear. For them to visit again, giving back to them respectfully… there’s no
> need for such things anymore.
> 
> Now, we can simply take everything.”
> 
> Ch. 148 – “Human Society – The Grave of Bears”
> Terra Formars

> “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant,
> understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. I’ve often
> puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized, we were
> asking all the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture
> thing.
> 
> All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s
> happening on the line. That’s not the real issue.
> 
> The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that
> have to take place in the organization?”
> 
> Ernie Schaefer
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015

> “You build 3-dimensional things. The design space [however] is n-dimensional.
> You design in n-dimensional space, one dimension for every parameter you can
> adjust. Therefore it is not 3-dimensional space that matters in design, it is
> n-dimensional space.
> 
> And n-dimensional space is vast. Very, very large.
> 
> To convince you of this, I will start by your own experience. You think you
> know 3-dimensional space, but you really don’t. You are really familiar with 2
> dimensions. In 2 dimensions, a random walk will come back to the same place:
> if you meet a person, there’s a good chance you’ll meet them again.
> 
> In 3 dimensions, that is not true. In 3 dimensions, say the ocean where the
> fish live, what do they do? They go around on the bottom, they go around on
> the surface, they go around in schools, they assemble at the mouth of a river.
> They cannot wander the open ocean and hope to find a mate. That’s how vast 3
> dimensions is. You can wander around 2 dimensions and sure enough, you can get
> a mate. Probably. In 3 dimensions, not a very good chance.
> 
> In higher ones, forget it.
> 
> But that is the space of design. You’re out there in that tremendously vast
> space.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming


[43] EXPECTATIONS WITHOUT JUDGEMENT: MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO KEEP DESIRE
INTACT

Solution to anxiety.


[44] EXECUTION IS A SUBSET OF SEARCH: START WITH WHAT YOU KNOW

Convergent evolution to ‘production vs research’ and ‘no such thing as
provisional’.



Over time the idea that execution and search are different things has gone from
obvious, to suspect, to ludicrous. There are things you simply cannot know
before you do them. They are unknowable.

People think that “unknowable” or this sort of area means that it could never be
figured out by anyone, but this is a very naive, useless, and probably
dickstroking way of conceiving it. A knowable thing has to be knowable at the
time it needs to be known. It’s fucking useless to literally everyone except
anklebiting bootlickers to say that, at some point in the far future, it can be
deciphered that this other path was actually a better solution. “Far future”
doesn’t have to be 100 years, it can be 100 hours, or 100 seconds. If in the
course of drawing, which itself is a matter of dancing through a number of
dimensions you cannot hope to ever fully consciously conceive, you see a glimpse
something, but the cost you have to pay to reach it is 100 minutes, guess what?
You aren’t reaching it. Not this time. You will forget how to find it, and if
you try to look for it again, you will ruin the whole drawing. What is the point
in calling such a thing knowable? “Unknowable” requires only that sufficient
analysis cannot be completed by the relevant actor in time to create the desired
advantage from its results.

Many things can only be seen after you get to the step immediately before. As
with most true things, this is fractal.

The question then is whether execution is a subset of search or if search is a
subset of execution. I’m not a clean thinker so these sound about the same to
me; I picked off of feeling. For production and research it was empirical:
separate got me stuck, “production serves research” gives me something that
makes some sense, and “research serves production” doesn’t (yet) make sense so I
can’t do it.

It’d probably be better if I was a clean thinker, but this is what I have to
work with. I’ve heard of some ways to clean up but it feels like it’s pretty
costly and also mostly an error-fixing thing. It doesn’t offer new ideas.
Throwing words together that ‘shouldn’t’ fit and getting ideas with the cost of
tripping over myself in big ways now and again still sounds like the better deal
right now, thanks.


[46] PICTURE RELIES ON YOU, NOT YOU ON IT.

If you are feeling bad about what you’ve done, you are the one that can fix it.
It can’t fix itself. Drawings are your children. Accept them. They rely on you.
You can take pride in them and love them more if they achieve something, but
their mistakes are yours. If it can’t be fixed, then it can’t be fixed. That
means that it’s something telling you how to make the next one better. It’s
never something there for you to hate.


[48] INTERNAL SEARCH (WHAT FEELS RIGHT) AND EXTERNAL SEARCH (WHAT LOOKS RIGHT)

If there is one piece of advice I’d give to anyone, it is “copy more”.

“There are things you simply cannot know before you do them”: Other people have
done things. They have taken paths. You may not understand or agree with all the
steps and decisions they made, but their result is something that exists. My dad
has a saying: “If I tell you, it’s simple. If I don’t, you can go your whole
life not knowing it exists.” Other people show you what else is possible. If you
copy these people, that is to say, attempt to replicate under your own logic
those same results, you will find out just how vastly different and unknown the
world is. This is true even if you copy someone under your skill level. This is
true even if you trace. I believe the religious way to say this is “you will
learn to fear God”.

People who denigrate tracing, or copying in general, are idiots. Do you really
think that someone with no idea of lineweighting, who’s never thought about how
they hold a pencil, can trace something and have it come out the same? If you
do, you have no taste, no humility, you have given up on being better; stop
having opinions. Sometimes I wonder if people were better at this before the
prevalence of digital technology, but no, it’s ancient. Western civilization has
the Ship of Theseus, one of the worst concepts bar none, and it is a question:
Theseus has a Ship, and parts of it get replaced over time, when is it no longer
the Ship of Theseus? Supposed to be like some deep philosophical trick question
or some shit, but here is the Answer: It’s Ship of Theseus as long as we
continue to try to keep maintaining it as the Ship of Theseus. Yeah at some
point it’s no longer the same wood. So what? What’s the number of days it takes
for your body to completely replace all cells? Don’t tell me, I don’t care. You
shouldn’t care either. It matters only that that number is smaller than your
life up to this point, which it is.

The reminder here is the proper domains of both. A drawing is a production,
“not” an object. Internal search is “drawing from imagination”, external search
is “drawing from reference”. A reference will tell you what looks right, but it
won’t tell you how to get there in a nice way. Drawing from imagination will
naturally be constrained by your habits and experience: you will find things
that fit those, and not find things that don’t. Ideally something looks right
after it’s made and feels right while it’s being made. In my experience this is
not possible to any appreciable degree without doing both internal and external
search each time.

> “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
> “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
> “But it’s burnt down?”
> “Yes.”
> “Twice.”
> “Many times.”
> “And rebuilt.”
> “Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
> “With completely new materials.”
> “But of course. It was burnt down.”
> “So how can it be the same building?”
> “It is always the same building.”
> 
> Last Chance to See
> Douglas Adams


[49] EMOTION, VISION, TEMPO, TECHNICALS

This is the path that flow seems to require.



This is second in line to the throne.

This is also the current primary prototype. Verbalizing carelessly will damage
it.


[50] SHAPE-DETAILS SEPARATE FROM COLOR, EMOTION-POSE-PROPORTIONS SEPARATE FROM
COMPOSITION

The first half I’ve talked about. The second half I don’t know how to talk
about. I know what it is but for the purpose of explaining to outsiders rather
than as part of executing a piece thinking around it is difficult. I think it’s
one of the current understandings on how to approach a certain composition
problem? Composition really is different from object-oriented thinking. Maybe
it’s trying to export the shape-detail derivation to composition. That seems
sensible.


[52] UNDERSTANDING < ABILITY < REACH

It is commonly understood that whatever your understanding is, your ability is
less than that, and what you can do at any particular moment is within your
ability. This is exactly backwards. Your reach is always beyond your
understanding. In physical space this is counterintuitive since your ears see
beyond your eyes and your eyes see beyond your hands. This is not true in
thought space or drawing space.

If you try it out, you will find this to be self-evident.

— — — — — —


EPILOGUE

Things that probably belong here but didn’t fit above, and comments on things
others have said and asked.

— — —

Things that probably belong here but didn’t fit the above:

Measuring

Measuring is the reason the relevant start date is 2014_12. At the time I had
decided I’d had enough of competitive online games, wanted to do “something”
with my life that was better than an abstract number in some game no one’s going
to care about in a few years, and looked around for things to do. One of those
things was drawing, and the most important thing I found of drawing was the
concept of measuring.

The concept of measuring is that everything is made of lines and all lines have
a length, an angle, and some distance and angle in relation to some other point
or line. The stereotypical artist pose of holding a pencil up vertically at
arm’s length between the eye and the subject is measuring.

Measuring is the point at which I started seeing art as a knowable skill. I’d
always been told art was about “expressing yourself” or “feelings” or a number
of these other mushy words. What the heck are those? Anatomy, perspective,
contrast, composition, these and others were better, but felt impossible.
Perfect, unbroken walls. How am I going to get all of that right? Measuring
though, measuring is just lines at certain angles. I can do that. Bad result?
Well, all the lines were right when I made them. This line’s length should be
this proportion to that line alright. And so is that one. Hm. What if the
problem is I connected them using the wrong idea? What if they’re in the wrong
order? I mean, I don’t think measuring them in a different order should change
anything, and yet it does. So maybe the eyes should be in relation to nose, and
the nose should come first? What if the hair is in relation to the face rather
than the head? What if, what if?

Hey, this is actually pretty fun and interesting. Always something new to find
out, and there’s usually something nice at the end.

“What if?”.

Tempo Dreaming / Doodling

I somehow happened across the idea and the below mentioned videos and they
introduced me to the concept of “tempo”. The idea as I have it is that speed,
timing, and order of things appearing in the drawing is important, down to the
second. If you try doing the same thing at the speed of, not “don’t lift your
pencil from the page”, but “don’t stop moving”, you will make something
different. You are not a machine, you don’t have a fast-forward button, doing
things faster in the most real sense literally changes things. My intuition says
faster means worse because there’s less control. This is true and irrelevant.
One, you can maintain the things you wanted to control to perfectly comfortable
levels while being a lot faster than you think you’d be comfy at. Two, the ideal
isn’t full control, the ideal is beauty, and beauty is not a pure subset of
control. The guy with the watercolor sponge didn’t make beautiful trees by
planning out the placement of every shadow. Yet the painting still exists, and
he is still the one who made it. I have difficulty accepting this when I’m going
about details, and yet that is undeniably the case.



This is the third component in the study list’s second-in-line.

I’ve never been able to “doodle”. I think this is related to doodling. I can
doodle a bit now.

Something I’ve been doing recently is starting off the day with this “tempo”
drawing. First thing in the morning, before water but after stretches, draw. A
long time ago I noticed reading the news made me feel not comfy. At some point I
noticed the entire day was nicer if I simply didn’t open the world at the start
of the day. This is an extension of that. I do this kind of drawing at the start
of the day. It’s not productive in the old sense: I’m not learning or practicing
or improving anything I can identify. I’m not working on any pieces. But it
makes me feel nice and comfy. It feels like peace. Usually something pulls me
down from there, but it’s an elevated starting point. I regularly hit flow
inside it, so it seems plausible that it will be more likely to hit it any time
the rest of the day. I think a common way of phrasing this feeling is
“Everything will be alright”. I have not found another way to buy this feeling,
not at anywhere near this price. “Setting the tone for the day” is real.

I think “Tempo” is the right name for it. I call it also “Dreaming” because
that’s what it feels like. I don’t think it’s right to call it a “Technique” or
an “Exercise”. I don’t think of it as a muscle or a tool. I think of it as
making myself more worthy to receive gifts from the gods.

The videos are:
Sinix Design, “Tempo: The Overlooked Key to Improving at Art”
Proko, “Meditation for Artists – The Automatic Drawing Technique”

— — —

Comments on things others have said and asked:

A long time ago I asked an artist of some import on a server of not so much
import that we were both on if he could introduce me to any art servers or
communities. He said he doesn’t hang around art groups. The server we shared was
themed for FGO, a gacha mobile game. I now understand the wisdom in this.

I spend time around other artists, but I don’t spend any time in art groups or
art communities. There are several reasons for this, a few of which have been
mentioned above and will be mentioned below. The problem isn’t inherently
“artists shouldn’t talk with each other” as it is a lot of things that have
happened to be true about the current ruling party. Is there some large
conspiracy where everyone is on the same payroll? It feels that way. They all
say the same things, and it’s definitely dead fish most of the time. Definitely
a general recommendation against groups themed as ‘getting better at art’. Avoid
those places. Same for watching videos. The above two are rare exceptions.

As such, some of this may be outdated. It’s probably not as outdated as either
of us think though.

“If you’re just starting out” / “This is for beginners”

No.

Stop saying these. Stop listening to these. These are bad. Stop these words from
entering your mind. If you don’t have the power to stop reading a sentence after
starting it, now is the time to get it. I don’t know the logic but the pattern
behind every instance of these words when it comes to art is has been associated
with narcissism (streamers, youtubers, other leaders) or cope (fishing for
empathy). I don’t know what “infantilization” is but it sure looks like the
right word here. You will not get better around these words, you will only get
worse.

Why is it bad? It makes everything provisional. And we know why provisionalism
is bad [14].

The inherent concept, of masters as eternal beginners, of endless learning, is
good. What’s not good is the fetishization of symbols, which includes words.
There is so, so much god damn fucking “advice” out there for “beginners” that is
nonsense. Could we have something uh not for beginners? Like for journeymen or
something? Or maybe just offer it as an idea within some context rather than
some kind of objective skill level. Everything has to be for “beginners”, or
their opposite (which reinforces the dichotomy), “professionals”. There’s so
many idea that are so, so good but so many of them are prefaced with “I’m not a
professional, I’m just self taught, so” Why? What is the purpose of uttering
these words? Does a real professional, whatever that is, saying “I’m a
professional and” make his opinion better? What about a master saying “I’m just
a beginner”? Who and what gains from such words?

Hint: It’s not your next drawing.

And what are we trying to do when we’re looking for new ideas?



The funny part of this is everyone these kinds of people point to are of an
obviously different type. The common recommendation for anatomy is Andrew
Loomis’s “Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth”. What does Loomis say? Loomis says
the most important thing is courage to face the unknown and the rest of his
methods on anatomy aren’t actually that important. A slightly less common
recommendation is on gesture, to watch Glenn Vilppu. Gesture is line of action,
‘every drawing should start with life’, the first and most important thing. What
does Vilppu actually say? He says if you don’t have a basic grasp of anatomy and
perspective, go do those first, otherwise you’re just going to confuse yourself
and get frustrated. Vilppu’s line I don’t remember which video, but the search
was “vilppu gesture” and I heard the line in under 2 hours. Loomis’s line is
from the introduction to the book in question, you can read it for free, its PDF
is currently the first result on Google for “Loomis Figure Drawing”. Am I just
lucky? Am I the only one who’s actually paying attention? Hm.

The broader version of this is “This is just my opinion, but” and yes, I have
this same problem with the culture at large too. Stop uptalking. Stop asking
questions that aren’t questions. Stop saying “sure”, start saying “yes”. It’s
just my opinion? Of course it’s my opinion, it came out of my mouth.

Why should you trust me?

The correct answer is: You don’t have to.
The real answer is: Why are you asking other people who you should trust?

Realism

I think realism is bad, but it occurs to me the more real reason why people use
it.

I don’t think realism is king. I think beauty is king. This is something that
realists will admit in detail but not broadly. They will admit that even if the
3D model or photo says something, if it looks “bad” (but not “unrealistic”) you
should change it so that it’s better. The obvious example here are still frames
of sports people while in motion. More broadly the concept of a “flattering
angle”. Realists will treat hairs as locks rather than as a billion strands,
will use hard edges where things are round, will use lines even though “lines
don’t exist in real life”. In the end realism is a fake king that’s only around
to usurp the throne.

I think the real reason why people use realism though is because it’s the only
ideologos available to them. I spend my time around anime artists, and so many
reasonings behind things are pointed to realism, even though clearly they don’t
actually care about it. At the very least they don’t use it anywhere near as
much as they talk about it. Clothing folds are understood by thinking of
gravity? All 30~50 of these shadow shapes on this jacket were from simulating
gravity in your head? Do I believe that answer? I think the better explanation
is this is just what they say when they’re asked, and they say it because that’s
what they know how to say, in a way that fits together with everything else.
[Art in the drawing] is a language that’s not the same language as [Art in
public discussion] as a language, and it so happens that in our time and place,
most art is said to be good or bad whether or not it’s “realistic”. In other
words it’s a religion. An ideology.

They probably understand just fine what they’re saying and don’t have these
problems I’m talking about. In the end all implorements are relative to some
implicit premise. I haven’t said you should “draw every day” as advice because I
already draw every day and have forgotten it’s something some people need to
hear. I think “draw what you like” is important because I get stuck on
technicals. I think “copy more” is important because I keep getting amazing
ideas when I do it. People who keep referring back to realism even though they
do little around it probably do so because they benefit from such a thing.

The thing realism says it’s opposed to is “symbol drawing”. Symbol drawing is a
stick figure, or circles/lemons for eyes, triangle for nose, things like that.
Coincidentally I don’t see a problem with symbol drawing. I think improvement is
just getting better symbols. Everyone knows that eyes should be equidistant from
the nose, and the nose and mouth should be in the center of the face. Only
difference from there to me is I consider a number of other things. It’s a
fairly large number, one I can’t consciously keep track of, but it’s not a
difference in type. A circle doesn’t become not-a-symbol simply because it’s now
a ball.

And besides, lots of symbol drawings are charming. Would you prefer something
charming or something realistic?

What is the extent of power of the fundamentals?

Fundamentals are anatomy, perspective, color theory, some list of things you
could google. Every major artist and school talks about this, it’s the
curriculum. I don’t think these are the real fundamentals. “Fundament” means
“bottom”, as in your butt, where you sit, so “fundamentals” by etymology is “the
place where all ideas sit”. I believe the fundamentals of art are intent,
vision, emotion, the things I’ve talked about here. For clarity of discussion
I’ll give the word to the other party.



I believe fundamentals are best understood as the set of things which have
happened to be found as independent of any particular artist’s “style”. It is
accurate to call this post indicative of my thinking “style”. If every artist
wrote out all that, no one would read anything. Fundamentals are a common
language first. Second, they are concepts to understand visual reality. Artists
lighting is not the same as physics lighting, artists anatomy is not the same as
medical anatomy, and so on. They aren’t about “understanding the world”, but
they are about “understanding the world as it can appear on the canvas”, which
is what artists are after.

Said again: the artist’s fundamentals are first a language to communicate with
other artists, and second a set of starting points to understand the craft’s
commonly available tools. It is the lingua franca and the textbook. It is a
question of taste as to whether these are actually the 20 that carry the 80. I
am pretty sure it is just for sales.

“No matter who you are and what you want to do in the future we will tell you
the things that will become most important to you!”

Hm. Press X to Doubt.

My list and interests are more like a map to the spirit. I don’t think of myself
as spiritual. I had problems I wanted to solve, problems I refused to accept or
give up on, and this was the solution I came across. Is it the only solution?
Maybe not. But once you’ve found something, that’ll be the last place you look.
At least, until it breaks. It has broken some times. It has not broken more
often or caused more serious problems etc. than the previous holder, which is
the real question. It has also opened a lot of things everywhere I never
conceived possible.

The question is always “compared to what”.

The primary conflict here is what constitutes a drawing. I believe fundamentals
conceive of the essence of a drawing as a bunch of technical components. I do
not believe this. I believe it is flow and telos.

What is the purpose of a reference?

The primary conflict here is what constitutes creativity, or originality.

I don’t think creativity exists. Not on the broadest scale people are thinking
about. It could be I’m a dumdum with no original thoughts, but that is my
working premise. Creativity in drawing is largely exploring things you don’t
understand and happening to find something that works, and misremembering things
you understood at some point – that is to say, creativity is like dreaming.

Creativity is often thought interchangeably with drawing from “Imagination”. The
etymology of “imagine” is Latin “imaginari”, “to form a mental picture”, which
in turn has the stem of “imitari”, “to copy, imitate”. Imitation precedes
imagination, or is imagination. This matches my personal experience, as well as
both praise and criticism of other artist’s creations. If it is good, it is
usually “inspired by” or “an homage” to something else, usually a lot older,
that was in essence the same thing. In other words, copied.

Copying is a skill. “Mindless copying” is… what’s the word. It’s propaganda, but
that’s not the word. It’s something made by the Creativity party to prop itself
up. If people can’t properly appreciate, i.e. can’t tell, how extremely
difficult high-fidelity copying is, every effect is beneficial for those who
currently have the power. Denigrating copying means denigrating learning.
Denigrating learning means both that people think less of themselves and others
if they attempt to do it, and that if they try doing it it turns out
significantly more difficult than expected, which applied again means they can’t
accept the situation as it is and thus give up and do something else. If someone
is labelled as a copier, all of those feelings are then projected onto him: he
must be a lazy loser with no ideas of his own. A good copy takes a lot of skill,
and a lot of humility. Most people don’t copy not because it’s against their
morals, but because it’s hard, and doing it would reveal both that they’ve been
following a lie and that their skill is not where they thought it would be. If
copying were easy, things would be made in Africa by now. They’re not. They’re
still made in China.

I do not understand why people want to think of themselves as original or
creators of things so I cannot comment too much in that direction. I have tried
and failed to fathom its internal logic. Its external logic though is obvious
and boring: it’s dickwaving. “I made this thing all by myself”. Oh did you now.
What did you create? A new color? It never gets to this step, the direction of
play is always “no u”, but if it were played out it would reveal the concept as
nonsensical. Apparently it’s copying if you copy other peoples work but remake
it, but it’s not copying if you go to school, copy a bunch of exercises on
anatomy (read: other peoples’ heads, torsos) or perspective (read: other
peoples’ boxes), and then set out a composition, at which point you copy the 3D
environment off of Sketchup and copy the poses off of some 3D program or took a
picture of your own or someone else’s hand. Hm. Hmm hmm hmm. Or you could just
admit copying is good and save all that energy for something fun.



The reason people don’t admit copying is good is politics.

I’ve written this up before on bibliographies and see no reason to recreate it
so I shall copy it.

> I have a taste for bibliographies.
> 
> I think saying the purpose of bibliographies is “to prevent plagiarism” is
> absolutely insulting.
> 
> A trick that can only be played on children. No, that insults children, I
> should be more specific: people with no understanding of the world. It’s the
> same trick with intellectual property. “If someone has done it before you need
> to give them credit”. Question: How am I going to know that? How are you going
> to know that? I’m going to search the whole library to see if someone did it
> before me? What if the library’s incomplete? What if the Library of Congress
> is incomplete? And it is incomplete. Even the Library of Alexandria was
> incomplete. Even 10,000 pages of Google is incomplete, and you’re not going to
> look past the first 10. Everything is a mountain in the jungle, and the jungle
> is infinite. Trying to find out if something has been done before you, ever,
> anywhere, is trying to search the entire jungle. You can’t do it. You are
> being sent on an impossible task. To make it exceedingly clear: You are being
> fucked with.
> 
> Plagiarism is really about who’s going to come after you for not giving them
> credit. That is to say: it’s about “who”. It’s power. If you’re small and
> they’re big, they can take whatever they want and claim it’s theirs. They can
> even claim they did it first and you stole from them (search: art plagiarism).
> If you’re really small though, you can take whatever you want, because no one
> cares about you. No one even sees you. In academia, we see the end goal of
> this anti-plagiarism device meets perfect information: citations absolutely
> everywhere. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone is looking for a slice.
> Names and titles and dates everywhere, every sentence, clogging up the flow of
> the actual stuff. It’s ugly.
> 
> I’m a nobody so it doesn’t matter. I do what I want.
> 
> I largely can’t be bothered because citations eat up my time: any time and
> energy I spend looking into who said what is time I’m not spending doing and
> finding out new things. All thinking, plus or minus, cites all the way back to
> the Buddha or Socrates. Guess who the Buddha and Socrates cited? And we want
> to be like those two guys, right? Not the academics?
> 
> It doesn’t matter if someone else found it before me (especially not if I
> don’t know who did it), I didn’t do it so I don’t get it, and when I do it
> it’s new to me. The most common thing is people say things that are too vague,
> the less common but still frequent case is they say things that are obscure;
> anything that is useful to me I’ve basically had to do myself anyways. So
> either I spend energy figuring out what people are talking about, and then do
> it myself, or, I just do it myself. It’s usually not a very hard choice.
> 
> But I like bibliographies.
> 
> Bibliographies help me remember things.
> 
> Other than being spatially gifted/verbally impaired, I have a really terrible
> memory. The primary reason why I wrote all this and do any thinking is because
> I can’t remember jack squat. Normal people with good memories, I imagine, are
> just fine with a bunch of disparate pieces of information. That’s presumably
> why they enjoy that trivia stuff so much. But I can’t do that. I can hold only
> a few things. So I need to hold the best few things. As it turns out, there
> are different types of things, and this type is better than the rest, because
> it is a single thing yet also multiple things. It requires thinking to
> produce, and is usually called a “principle”.
> 
> “Ideology” is what I’ve called a principle of principles. It’s usually called
> “epistemology”, but I don’t like that word too much. I like the sound of the
> word “ideology”. And I can see what it is: idea, logic. Logic of ideas. What
> the heck is an “epistem”? But back to book-graphing.
> 
> Good ideas are not randomly distributed. Someone who’s had a good idea before
> is likely to have a good idea again; someone who’s had multiple good ideas
> before is more likely to have good ideas in the future. The world is really
> big and there’s a lot of ways to see about and think around it. You can only
> see and do so much yourself. It’s nice to have people who you can use to do
> additional thinking for you and run into real problems “beforehand”. There’s
> still the minimum reverse-engineering and implementation costs stated earlier,
> and it is pretty hard to find someone who’s not just being deliberately
> obscure (for dickwaving purposes) – but that’s why bibliographies are great!
> Once you’ve found one good thinker, if he has a bibliography, it significantly
> increases your chances of finding more good thinkers.
> 
> As for the creation side of it, naming sources helps me remember the lineage
> of ideas.
> 
> Lineages are something that turns the dots of ideas into lines: it’s another
> type of principle.
> 
> Some lineages are very important. You need to know who said it and what it was
> used with etc. to figure something out. Other lineages basically don’t matter
> and external factors could be rederived offhand. I think it’s rather good
> practice to keep at least a couple of notes on lineage of each thing around.
> It tells you where the minimum domains on the things are: “at least according
> to this guy”.

The general purpose of (copying) references is to give you a window into what is
possible. It is external search. The specific purpose of (copying) references is
that it does the parts you don’t care to look into.

As much I’ve talked on about telos and flow, a drawing is indeed also a bunch of
parts. An assembly. When you are drawing, you are assembling parts. You are
largely not actually making those parts “from scratch”. I am not relearning how
to draw a face every time I draw a face on a woman (that is not on the page
yet), I am following my memory on what the technology/component of “drawing a
face” is, which at time of writing had its last major revision on 05_01. Every
face since 05_01 has been “the same” face, even if the final drawing doesn’t
look like the same face, usually because I forget to do some thing, am sloppy,
am feeling a certain way, thought of things in one order when it only really
works in another, or because like all ideas/techs they’re incomplete. This
applies to everything. Hair tech has one of the newest updates as mentioned a
few times, color is constantly updating, legs are really really old and I should
poke around it again sometime. I dilike programmer philosophy but they work with
“information technology” so naturally their stuff that works tends to be useful
as structures for ideas.

References are for assembling parts you don’t care to look into. If I don’t care
about interior or environment design but want an environment, I will pull up a
picture of some place and copy what I see. This extends also to problems with
existing parts, caused for whatever reason, that you don’t care to look into to
fix. I have some vague idea of how hands work. For some simple idea and angles I
can make them just fine, or at least fine to my standards. However I don’t like
constraining the composition stage to “only have hands I can draw”, so often
they give me hands I can’t draw from imagination: I can’t copy from memory
because it takes too much effort to figure out the sizes and angles of fingers
and things. So I look at my own hands. And if I can’t get what I need from
looking at my own hands, I open up 3D. “Handy Art Reference Tool” for android is
what I use. In the past and for some other things I use Honey Select, which is
ostensibly a porn game, but is really a skinned easier to use Unity engine. What
does the body look like when posed this way from this angle, hmm, if we want we
can find out. Some people simply trace these hands and bodies too, I don’t,
because I prefer the feeling of copying by eye to copying by hand; I’m willing
to pay for the drop in accuracy/quality. I’m aware other people use 3D or
references for perspective/sizing, or lighting of scenes. There’s probably other
ways too, but this is the principle. “There is a problem here but I would like
to work over there”: references help “here”.

The notion that one might have to name all used references in a public court of
opinion is what pushes many away from using references, and is exactly the same
feeling as having to write up a bibliography in school. I can’t think up of the-
oh right I remember now. The term used is “credit”. “Give credit” to the
“original artist”, or “original model”, or whatever. I have a problem with this,
not because I don’t like the idea of giving credit to people who have helped me,
but because without a proper understanding that everything is copied and there
is nothing new under the sun, the concept of “credit” and “reference” runs into
the ground, and here there is no ground, it’s turtles all the way down.

Courts of public opinion are courts of villains. Recently I saw someone ask how
he should comment/post a drawing of his, saying it was some scene from some
anime, except he changed the character or the color or something I don’t
remember. The response was that he should credit the anime, probably post the
screencap he was working of, because otherwise people might think he was
claiming it as his own original creation. These people are plagued by some
phantom mob that has developed in the past 10 years or so. I remember a time
when anime wallpapers were plentiful and made by people who made vector art
tracing over screencaps. Literally no one cared, literally no one thought some
guy on the internet was claiming his wallpaper of Senjougahara from
Bakemonogatari meant that he was stealing or claiming it was an official
Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari wallpaper from studio SHAFT. Apparently though
that’s not the standard these days? We’re all in Disney Nintendo Blizzard land
now? I refuse. Not in my domain.

Every person was born and raised by some family, that family had some income
from some employer or customer, who got it from someone else, and so on and so
in, all within a system of linguistic, social, cultural, legal and other laws,
back and back in an unbroken chain of civilization to before the dawn of time.
No man is an island. No drawing is an island either. Every drawing you do builds
upon the last drawing you did, and the first drawing you did was built upon your
life up to that point. There are always more references.

Only credit the most direct references? Who determines what is the most direct
reference?

The concept of “credit” as it is common today is a brain virus. If these people
had their way with the world, the living would forever serve the economy of the
dead, forever paying 99.8% royalties because some minute thing today was found
to be related in some way by some faceless unpaid bureacrat to something minute
thing by someone else who came long before. The butterfly effect means the
butterfly should be crowned king. Nevermind the butterfly’s butterfly, or the
dead’s dead. Just pay up your “fair share”.

Of course, these politics people don’t actually think all this. They just make
threats to get their slice of the pie, make up whatever casus belli sounds hip
at the time (“protecting copyright”), and leave the mess for other people,
usually the next generation or three, to figure it out. Unfortunately, I happen
to be on the side that figures things out.

Fortunately, I also happened to figure this one out.

If you copy, you get to stand on the shoulders of giants. Coincidentally, you’re
gonna need some humility. Watch your step or you’ll fall off.

Copy more.

> “Centralization leads to complexity, complexity leads to crisis, attempts to
> fix the crisis have, because of complexity, unintended consequences, which
> escalate into further crisis, leading to further centralization, Hence Soviet
> Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Venezuela, and now America.
> 
> This is the crisis of socialism, explained in “I pencil”, which makes the
> point that no one actually knows how to make a pencil, hence socialist
> production of pencils will fail.
> 
> In order to manage complexity, you need walls, so that one man can make
> decisions without having his decisions mucked up by another man’s decisions.
> Hence, private property and local authority, the authority of the father, the
> authority the business owner, the authority of the CEO. And, not so long ago,
> the authority of the local aristocrat, who tended to be a high officer in the
> local militia, a major employer and landowner, and related by blood or
> marriage to most of the other high officers in the local militia.
> 
> Ideally all the consequences of a decision should be contained within those
> walls. Of course they never are, but if you try to manage all the
> externalities, things very quickly slide of control. Every attempt to manage
> the externalities has unexpected consequences, and attempts to deal with the
> unexpected consequences have additional unexpected consequences, because
> trying to control matters that have externalities connects everything to
> everything else, resulting in a tangle beyond human comprehension.”
> 
> Throne, Altar, and Freehold
> Jim’s Blog

> “Hmm? It is a staple of theater, though I am not so fond of it. I prefer an
> ending where the many plots are resolved, yes.
> 
> But without a god’s intervention, human animosity and love cannot easily be
> erased. The playwright must have reached the end of his rope. Most writers
> know the tangled web of human emotions cannot be undone by humans themselves.
> So, the deus ex machina is an expression of hope.
> 
> A last hope, to be sure, a mirage created by those on the verge of ruin,
> wishing for a savior.”
> 
> Nero Claudius
> Fate/Extra

— — —


REFERENCES

A Mountain in the Jungle
Magnum opus. Hub world. The fastest way to travel between any of my ideas is
through here. It’s also 30,000 words, the second 15,000 of which are quotes
composed to tell about the same story as the first. Up until this post, the most
I’d written while remaining semi-coherent.

All of the links in here are to other things I’ve written. If you want pointers
from my writing to things other people have written, it’s probably in AMITJ.

Peace
Something I wrote offhand once that keeps coming back.
Perhaps the most direct predecessor here.

The Lineage of Thought
It feels relevant.

Japan’s Karaage and Anime Industrial Policy 
This is from commentary on the pictures I uploaded after my trip to Japan. After
having written the main post, the pictures’ comments ended up being longer than
the main post, primarily because of thoughts on industrial policy and
intellectual property. I had the seeds of all the comments I made at the time
and place the pictures were taken, the length is only by extension. Seeing
really is believing.

The Education Mythos
Reactions to looking into the manufacture of smokeless powder.
Happened to remember this while writing. Have not remembered it for some time.
In retrospect, this was one of the big disillusionments with “knowledge”.
Education is claimed to be many things, only the least important of which is you
“learn how to learn”. Education is none of them. Education is one of the great
lies.

World of Tanks, Rigging, and Its Defenders 
The things people will say to defend the state.

[Notes] NieR: Automata
Automata is an example of perfect art.

— — —

“I am considering writing something on drawing philosophy/psychology/thingy.
Technical- and piece-independent. If I wrote this, do you have anything you
would like me to talk about?”

“the part of drawing that isn’t about drawing
that is
how it changes how you relate to the world / by virtue of doing it, practicing,
seeing with “its” eyes, etc”

“Yes, that is the general direction of everything. Anything specific?
Like did you want something like a worked example/chain of how drawing has
changed how I look at politics?”

“YES
YES
YES
that would be amazing”

How can I do this without writing another 15,000 words? Hm..

What would worldy politics people find interesting that I don’t find
uninteresting… I guess that’s the answer. Politics and worldly things are
uninteresting to me. Even writing this is uninteresting to me, because I already
knew what was in the original [53] lines, writing out 15,000 words helps me a
bit but “compared to what” compared to drawing it fucking sucks.

That’s the big principle. I started drawing because I wanted to have something
to show for my time at the end of the day. There isn’t time for this, and that,
and drawing, no what I have each day is time, and the gold standard is if I am
not drawing this minute I better be able to explain why that is better than
drawing this minute. I started writing this because it kept popping its head up
while drawing and I decided to feed it, but it is clearly a bottomless pit, and
between seeing a poor little verbalization demon starve to death and getting
back to drawing nice things, I am going to starve the demon. Maybe after it’s
dead I can get some nice meat but as a live thing it has eaten up way too much
of my time. Next time I am just going to kill it.

The activity that was most of my time immediately before drawing (before
2014_12) was a competitive online game called World of Tanks. Immediately before
WOT was school. WOT was preferable to school because even as 1 player in a
rigged 15 vs 15 game (which means 1 vs 29), I had more power than I did in
school. I was interested in politics at some point but it waned over time. It’s
not something I can do anything about. Having more interesting ideas on politics
means being able to talk to more interesting people… about politics, which is
still something I can’t do anything about. Something that’s helped a lot push
this way is finding interesting people who have absolutely nothing to say on
politics. These people you are not going to find by talking about politics. You
have to have something to offer them. No matter how fringe or anti-establishment
or whatever the words are, if you are talking about politics, the primary thing
you are offering is ability as a propagandist for the state. That you are a
propagandist for a foreign state or a future/past/imaginary state is a minor not
major attribute. Just so it’s obvious, the ideas in this post have to do with
making pretty things. These are ideas I use, and ideas you could use. The ideas
of politics are for the usage of lords. I’m not a lord. You are probably not a
lord. If you aren’t, you’re thinking for someone else. I hope you’re getting
paid. I wasn’t, and it wasn’t fun, and once I got something better I stopped.

School/politics to videogames to drawing to ever more of drawing and ever less
of things not drawing (more broadly: things I can’t do) was step by step. The
question is always “compared to what”. If you really lay two options out in
front of you and continually pick the one that is less bad (on the axis being
desired) every time, you will eventually get to something good. This is not a
trivial task. You are picking between which god to serve. The scales will tip
one way, and you will think, because after accounting for NAXALT or Equality or
Hardship Builds Character or any number of things that aren’t actually the thing
in front of you that you wanted to find the result of when you started, the
scales “actually” tip the other way.  Some of these failures will be costly.
They are harsher than Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

If you are interested in politics, you are interested in other peoples’
business. You have no idea how much better life can be the more you mind your
own business. Don’t bother with time management “apps” etc, these will save you
hours but not minutes, and minutes add up while hours don’t. If you want to do
something, you will find a way to do it. You need to want to mind your own
business, and the best way is to show yourself how beautiful things can be by
minding your own business. It may take some time. Trees take time to grow. Your
soil might be better or worse than mine. But there’s not ever gonna be a tree if
you don’t plant it.

Teleology is real. What you really want is always being revealed. Anything you
see someone doing is the tamest version of what actually goes on in their head,
which in turn is usually a tame version of whatever goes on in their
“unconscious”. Recently I read an anon say MTSP, artist/author of one of the
quintessential NTR (cuckoldry) doujins, has not made anything good in the 6-7
years since that doujin. ‘Making it has clearly broken him’. I believe it. I
believe other stories like this. People who make grotesque things are/will
become grotesque people, or will be broken because that is not who they are.
There are no unrelated “random” “quirks”. Everything is connected to everything
else.

This implies snap judgments are also real. There are ways to snap harder,
faster, broader, and be even more right. By obverse, anything to do with
evidence or peer review or analysis or reputation is too slow and thus fake.
Inherently fake? Maybe not. But the slower it is the more time nonsense has to
take over, and any time I spend filtering out nonsense is time I’m not spending
actually making sense of things. I thought about filling this post in casually
over time, but after I noticed it was a demon I decided to finish it as soon as
possible.

This also means interest in divination and the occult. The point of knowing
things is to reach a decision before the things occur. As said above there are
limits to how much useful stuff you can actually know before it actually occurs,
but the scope that divination can reach is also greater than expected. This is
because what is allowed to be known is controlled by the state. Accurate
geographical maps were once state secrets; it follows obviously that accurate
spiritual maps would also be state secrets.

“But occult is kooky” It matters not if a cat is black or white, so long as it
catches mice. Who’s testing hypotheses and who’s not? Astrology as compared to
what? Astrology talks about personalities, so as compared to MBTI. Does
astrology read better than MBTI? Grant Lewi does. Is astrology mostly crap,
sure, but why should I excuse science’s failures while not excusing astrology’s?
Because the state is the patron of science. Everyone’s seen the ridiculous kinds
of research that gets big government grants, the only difference is those are
“funny” and “accidents” while teleology is recognized only when it’s time to
point it at the enemy. How do the planets’ positions affect personality? The cat
is black. Fundamentally occult and the bureaucracy are similar. Thus it is not
so surprising some warnings against learning magic are because they will attract
intelligence spooks. But there are other spooks too. Like the one that got to
MTSP when he was making that NTR doujin. Or the one that’s on me right now
writing this stuff out.

I call them gods and demons because object oriented thinking has uses. There’s
not some fantasy-horror looking creature that I’m hallucinating on my shoulder.
These are terms borrowed that originate from the religious and occult, just like
“technology” or “updates” or other things are borrowed from scifi and
programming. When ancient mathematicians or whoever said their idea came to them
via an “angel”, I believe it was an illustrative way of saying “it occurred to
me” or “I noticed”. These days you’re allowed to say you saw it in a dream, or
noticed something when watching TV, or in a class, or etc. etc. The way simply
no longer exists for spiritual visualizations. But to me it matters not if the
cat is black or white.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. It does matter. I call them gods and demons
they invoke certain things for me, and the associated visual imagery while not
important does fit. I would refuse to use some neutered cuckold bureaucrat’s
wording scheme, especially if they’re just a “reboot” of the real deal. This is
why I don’t like programmer philosophy, everything they say feels this way.
Every time I hear about “Roko’s Basilisk” I throw up a little. They should call
it Roko’s Infinite Recursion or some programming thing and not go fucking around
aesthetics that don’t belong to them / they don’t properly respect.

Finally, I’ve taken dreams vaguely more seriously. Drawing at its best, in flow,
feels like a dream. I’ve always liked dreams and the stories they tell me. I
don’t care if it’s random neurons firing or whatever, there are better and worse
dreams, not in the sense that they are good or bad stories, but in the sense
that there are books in good and bad condition; the librarian doesn’t really
care what’s in the books, I don’t really care about what’s in the dreams. The
biggest known problem for dreams is when I play puzzle or “real time tactics” or
strategy games, the dreams are just playing imaginary scenarios of those games.
I do not like this. It’s way too rigid. So I try these days to not play such
games as much. The other thing is I think less of people who make an effort to
lucid dream. Every night you are being shown a new story, and you want to step
all over it? What’s wrong with you? I’d tried it before but I did not like it
for this reason; yes I now have telekenesis, but the cost is the dream is now
pointless. This judgment now extends to others. People who don’t know their
place are not to be trusted.

—

“I’m curious when you are creating to have the image and idea for it mapped out
beforehand, what you want it to be, does it sort of come to you and come
together as you’re doing it, is it both, and I guess what inspires you?”

I don’t create anything.

I have no ideas. I copy, and do what makes sense at the time. Sometimes I lose
sight of the essence I’m trying to copy, and copy only the forms. If the essence
is not there at the end, I feel terrible; if it is there at the end, I feel I
did my part. So far my stuff is mostly a copy of an existing picture, if not the
picture then really close to the concept of the existing picture.

I think it’s interesting other people can make fanart of fantasy characters in
casual modern clothing doing mundane things, or posing in bikinis, but I feel
unwell when I do these. The essence of a picture to me is something like an
emotion, a character, and an enviroment or situation. If my understanding is
missing these, then it is worse. I imagine it’s possible to internalize this
more, to imagine all that other stuff while only drawing a character, and then
put them in a bikini, and be fine with it. But at the moment I can’t do it. It
just feels so much better if I have a story, rather than drawing body parts with
clothes in A-poses. To be more than just a technician I need essence. At least
so far, the only essence I can carry to the end of a drawing is one I’ve copied.
I have some of “my own” ideas, for whatever that means when there is nothing new
under the sun, but they don’t survive the drawing yet. They don’t survive the
other parts of me.

It is not possible to map everything out beforehand. There are things you can’t
see until the immediately preceding step. Drawings for me are largely a lot of
little steps like these, though I’m getting a better idea of what steps are
going to appear it’s always more like a go game to humans and less like a math
equation to computers.

As said most of my stuff is copies of existing pictures, but within and outside
of these most of the steps are still the same, when “it comes to me” are still
usually at the same stages. The stages I can think of are composition,
shape-details, and highlights.

Composition is at the start, figuring out the major shapes/lighting and how much
space / where they should be in relation to everything else. Copying means only
that there’s an initial thing available to check. Generally, especially if it
was done by a big name artist or is part of a big name story, there’s good
reasons for what they did, and copying means I get to find out what those
reasons are. Not copying… well, you’re always copying something, can’t cook
without ingredients, can’t build without materials. But “not copying” means you
are to find a combination of shapes with a less than existing
known-to-be-correct guidance. Painting copying from a painting is the easiest.
Painting copying from a movie or videogame is slightly more difficult: what the
original did in motion and multiple frames, you have to figure out what the
conversion is for that emotion/scene and capture in one. I shouldn’t say figure.
This stuff isn’t found by thinking. You have to find the path.

Shape-details again are the shapes of shadows on things. Loose kimono arms or
tight pants on legs both have possible attractive shadow shapes that aren’t
going to be found by simulating gravity wrapping fabric around cylinders. When I
am doing comps or shape-details it’s very different from drawing the face, or
checking/fixing body part shapes/sizes, or anything else. In everything else the
overarching feeling is I’m filling out a form, or a test. These three though it
feels like play. Like what a non-artist imagines an artist’s imagination looks
like. I would like all of drawing’s steps to be this way. I have a doubt it is
actually true that “you have to put in the hours” of suffering to get e.g. an
accurately pretty body, and then you can do whatever you want with it. There are
things that simply happen. But maybe pretty bodies are just not one of those
things for me. Different things do have different prices. Hopefully if there is
a deal someday, I will be ready for it.

Highlights bring things to life. Shadow-details do too, but highlights are
special. For the other two I usually don’t know where I’m going to put them
before I do them, for highlights I know exactly where I’m going to put them, but
still it is different before and after they’re there. In anime a common way of
making a character depressed is to take the lights and highlights out of the
eyes. I’d always thought this was a crude and simple way of doing things, like
there should be a more refined and tasteful method. And perhaps there is, but
lights and highlights are real. One should expect bright lights and saturated
colors to have the effects they do as much as one should expect 1 + 1 to equal
2. I see things after I put in the highlights. Some highlights I keep on
separate layers so I can toggle them on and off from time to time to see if I’ll
notice anything else.

I would like to portray “the light of god”.

I’m not religious, but this is the obvious name for what I see. A2, Kaori, and
maybe Haruka are examples of successes. Yuki and Kazusa are examples of
failures. Coincidentally these all have strong directional lighting, but this is
probably to be expected. It is definitely a “light”; I had no care at all for
drawing this when I was working with only lines. I’ve always liked certain sorts
of dramatic scenes in stories. In the past I had thought I liked “beautiful
death sequences”. That’s certainly where the “light of god” appears commonly,
but after copying some and inspecting a lot, I don’t think that’s the most
common theme anymore. It has something to do with light.

I would like to do this all the time but it is exhausting just thinking about
it. These feel like building a monument. Which I like, but I need some kind of
counterweight. I know my limits, I can’t do it all the time. I need some
teleological equivalent of a restful slumber.

I don’t know what that is yet.

But I have a few ideas.



Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
March 29, 2020 by korezaan


[NOTES] NIER: AUTOMATA


8/8
CANON: TIER 1



First played to completion 2017_03_18~20.
Replayed to completion 2020_03_08~27.
Third game to be replayed twice, second game to be replayed for
story/tone/emotion, first game where replaying it I saw something different, yet
all of it was still the same.

This will probably be the first game I play to completion a third time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> What is the purpose of this record?
> What is the purpose of a game?
> What is NieR:Automata?
> Why do I remember it well?
> — It’s beautiful.
> — No One Stops.
> — Framing
> — — Camera
> — — Music
> — All its stories are fundamentally about the same thing.
> — It’s simple.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

— — — (album of images used in this post) — — —



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS RECORD?

I write this as a way to remember the most important parts of NieR:Automata
(“Automata”). I would like to re-experience this feeling again and again, but
without having to play through the whole game each time. That I’d like to do
again too, but in another 2~3 years. Something in this form, of a videogame of
30~40h and certain narrative structures etc., isn’t something that can be
re-experienced more frequently than that.

This is not a review. The more I’ve done reviews the more pointless they seem.

I tried out a standard-form review before, but it was obviously more filling out
a form than writing a review. It was obviously wrong. I’ve thought about what a
review really is before, and at the time I came up with some rules, but the main
point is to tell people whether or not it’s worth their time. But how many words
do you really need for that? How long can you stretch “You don’t/need to see
this for yourself”? Not much. And if you have seen it for yourself already, and
you’re talking to other people who have done the same, what kind of person would
you have to be to rate visuals, audials, story, mechanics, and other things
separately? Why would you do that? Why would you want to do that? I looked into
the deep end of that once, and there are ways to do it right, but it’s
exorbitantly expensive. Thousands of words can be written analyzing one minute.
Who wants to read that? I for one don’t want to write that again.

I have opinions on a number of things, but generally speaking I only really care
about 1) story and 2) aesthetics. Here I am most developed and most interested.
Making the active attempt to comment on every little thing is misguided. Paying
attention to every little thing is not, but that’s also not the same thing. I
was originally going to review Automata in 2017; soon after playing it I went
back and started playing it again, taking caps and notes on everything that
could be noted. I didn’t make a review then because I stopped replaying it.
Capping and noting slowed the playing to a crawl. It made the game unfun. If I’m
suffering making an homage to something that was wonderful, how well can I
really hope to convey the point across?

I should note here because this is where it’s been historically: Automata on PC
runs very poorly unless you have the free “Fix Automata Resolution” mod by
Kaldaien. You should get that if you’re playing it on PC. This is 3-year old
info, so perhaps you don’t need it anymore, but I remember hearing complaints
that Square Enix “still” hasn’t patched it vaguely recently. For reference, I
played 2017 on 900p medium, and 2020 on 1080p high. I played with a DS3
controller the first time and a DS4 controller this time; don’t use KBM.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A GAME?



> “If it’s not fun, why bother?”
> 
> – Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America

Why do people play games? People do the same things for different reasons.

Automata perfectly fits my purpose. Why do I play games? I play games because I
want a story. What is a story? That’s where the questions stop getting bigger;
for me, Automata is the answer. Automata is not the “best” story, but it is the
best “story”; the entry for “story” in the lexicon has Automata as the title
example. It has the most well-executed fundamentals of a story I’ve ever seen.

The most common complaint I saw three years ago was that combat in this game is
“shallow”. It’s “button-mashing”, “brainless”, “not a real Platinum game”. These
are all true. The combat is not difficult. There’s even an easy mode where you
can turn on auto-attack and auto-evade, making combat an automatic affair. The
combat is simple, the puzzles are simple, there is little thinking about
material gathering or inventory management, money is largely plentiful, leveling
is not an issue. If you are into videogames for the reason of dexterous
controller usage, you will not like this game. If you are into videogames for
competition against peers, you will not like this game. This game is not for
you.

Note that Automata’s DLCs contradict this purpose. I do not like them. They come
with costume changes, which I feel I shouldn’t use, and three combat arenas, one
of which requires fairly precise maneuvers. I do like that they come with
material shops; there’s a fair abundance of money in this game without doing
much (I feel they reduced fishing speed though), but materials aren’t, and these
make upgrading some weapons easier, which is great because in Automata weapons
have stories. I don’t regret getting the DLC because I like Automata, but I’m
never going to play through them, for the same reason I’m never going to bother
with the sidequest Reconnaissance Squad, or getting all 26 endings.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHAT IS NIER:AUTOMATA?

A collection of short stories on the nature of a raison detre.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHY DO I REMEMBER IT SO WELL?

IT’S BEAUTIFUL.



The girls are beautiful.
The music is beautiful.
The environment is beautiful.
The movement is beautiful.
The lighting is beautiful.
The story is beautiful.
It’s beautiful.
Nothing can replace beauty.

Style is not substance. This is true.

Style is greater than substance.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NO ONE STOPS.



Everything is taken seriously. Honestly. Sincerely. Earnestly.

I happen to already have a nearly complete written version of this idea by
someone else in much fewer words so I won’t rewrite the entire idea. It’s about
Ace Combat but 90% of it applies to Automata, and the opposites are the same as
well. This was in a thread asking why a certain game is so bad, ‘even ace combat
is better than this’, ‘actually why do people like ace combat’, this was the
answer. It was also the post which got me from “What is this Ace Combat” to “I
have now pre-ordered Ace Combat”.

> “Ace Combat’s stories have always had an extreme, almost noxious degree of
> sincerity. Characters can be extremely passionate about something or other,
> and the story will present that sort of passion as righteous and meaningful.
> They’re stories that believe in noble causes, and that most people deep down
> are just decent folk. They’re stories where children sing just because they’re
> happy. In short, they’re stories that believe very firmly in the story that
> they tell.
> 
> It’s not exactly an elegant approach, but it stands out because of one of the
> habit of many writers and directors to approach every subject with as much
> detachment as possible. Heroes treat threats flippantly because detachment
> makes them seem above them and thus cool. Characters don’t get invested in
> higher causes, and will wryly comment on existing tropes in the manner of “So
> this is the part where I’m supposed to do X, eh? Well I’m Y, and so I’m gonna
> do Z.” Isolated characters like this have been in media since forever, but
> recently a lot of popular media has become dominated by writers who are afraid
> to make any of their characters invested, or even make the tone of the story
> treat the plot with significance. Probably the worst, most relevant example is
> Mass Effect Andromeda. Nobody- not the heroes, not the villains, not the side
> characters, not the camera or the events of the plot- seemed interested in
> playing up the significance of anything that was happening. The game’s script
> felt like they spent a week writing the plot and six months writing character
> quirks. Anthem seems like only a slight backtrack in that regard.
> 
> By comparison, even the most absurd sort of sincerity can be engaging. Ace
> Combat gives all sorts of a shit about itself, and that’s at least a start.”

The other 10% is simply that Ace Combat is generally about pushing “high” and
“fast” while Automata is about pushing “deep” and “impermanence”.

This tone, this principle, is somewhat difficult to see in the english
translation. This is not particularly a function of the English language (though
Automata probably does read a lot more smoothly in Japanese). We know this, one,
because it shows through here and there.




Contrast this to the usual, which I have one example because it stuck out really
bad, but it’s pervasive. I’m used to this terrible tone revisionism to some
degree; I can understand basic anime conversation Japanese and ignore the text
when I already understand what’s being said, but here it was really aggravating.
2B and 9S are talking about the machines down in the canyon looking for heaven
and god. 9S says something like, ‘What are machines doing talking about such
things? Are God and Heaven even real?’ 2B, ‘They’ll find out after they die
[pause] …and so will we’. 9S in Japanese says “mm”. Like, not “Yes”, not “Yeah”,
but “mm”. That’s another gripe too, in the same direction, okay whatever, what
did he say in English?

> “Okay, THAT’s grim.”

Whoever translated that should be caned in public. The editor who approved it
too.

That’s one.

Two is because we know that translations can exceed the original. The best
example I have is even from Nier – the original. NieR:Replicant for Japan to
Nier:Gestalt for everyone else (“Nier”) made some changes, the obvious one being
they changed the main character from from a brother anchored to his sister, to a
father anchored to his daughter. But there were other ones too, and one at the
climax. To its credit, I don’t think Automata changed any major lines at
climaxes. Nier did though. And it wasn’t a blunder. It made Nier one of the most
memorable lines anywhere, from anything, bar absolutely none.

Japanese:

> “Popola, let’s stop this now.”
> “Stop? “Stop”? You want to stop? You think there’s the freedom to stop? You
> killed Devola, and now you dare say such a line?”
> “Please, stop! It doesn’t-”
> 
> 
> “IT’S TOO LATE!
> IT’S ALL TOO LATE!
> I WILL KILL YOU ALL!”

English:

> “Popola, let’s stop this now.”
> “You want me to stop? You think I have the luxury to stop? You cut down my
> sister like an animal and you tell me to stop?”
> “Popola, wait, it doesn’t have to-”
> 
> 
> 
> “NO ONE STOPS!
> IT’S WAY TOO LATE TO STOP!
> NO ONE STOOOOOPS!!”

This is how Automata should be all the time. And is, in Japanese. It’s
consistent, flowing, all the time, sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s rough and
fast, but it’s always there, like a calm stream or a torrential falls and it’s
always water. English has water, sometimes. It is calm, sometimes. Torrential,
sometimes. Then other times it has piss, beer that smells like piss, and corn
syrup claiming it’s fit for human consumption. It doesn’t have to be this way.
It can be done in English. It just isn’t. Ace Combat does it. I’ve never played
Ace Combat in Japanese.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FRAMING



Proper framing makes the world seem larger than it is. Making the world seem
larger invokes imagination, and imagination means the original idea grows and
lives on after its presentation ends.

Automata is a masterpiece of framing.

There’s a standard idea of what a modern videogame should be. The controls
should control one character, the camera should tied to the character and where
they’re looking, the world should have this and that kind of interaction, be
this kind of size and shape, and a laundry list of other things. All of this is
an impoverished conception. A poor way of framing the world.

— — CAMERA — —



Automata most notably changes framing by changing its camera. Ostensibly it’s a
character action game, which means third person free camera in 3D space, but
that’s not what it is. You don’t start off that way. You start off in a flight
unit, being able to shoot up. No that’s wrong, you start off in a flight unit,
*not* being able to shoot at all because you haven’t been authorized weapons
free. Initial combat is “shoot-em-up”. Then it becomes a “twin-stick shooter”.
Then the camera moves behind your flight unit, so you’re looking forward. Then
it’s a side shooter. Then twin-stick again, and somewhere during twin-stick the
map scrolling has changed from down-scrolling-up to up-scrolling-down, then back
to forward, before finally giving you the “real” 3d 3rd person melee combat
character action game. Fight a few minor enemies to get you into the hang of the
controls, then instantly a boss fight. Neat. Then run for a little bit, fight
some more enemies, and, oh it’s not 3d anymore. It’s a sidescroller now. By
total hours of gameplay Automata is majority 3d 3rd person, yes. But I’d bet if
someone counted up just by when the camera changes, 3rd person free camera
instances amount to somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3. It is almost constantly
shifting. If those who like “character action games” dislike Automata, fine –
it’s an “environment action game”.

There is nothing wrong with this other than that I’m framing it in a socially
nonstandard way. Some of these things, or at least their types, are established
practices, even expected, out of good games. Those who dislike such things say
it’s “taking control away from the player”. This is true. But the implication is
it’s also bad, which is the thing in question. Is it so bad that the player
can’t control the camera at all times? In many character action games it is
expected that the game takes control away from the player during combat: it is
expected that the game will assist in landing a hit, both in direction and
range. A slight miss should count as a hit. Being slightly too far should mean
the character automatically leaps or runs or strikes that additional distance.
Enemies attacking should be onscreen, or if they’re offscreen have an audial cue
instead. “Player control” and “Realism” are false gods. Would enemies in real
life announce themselves? Should character action games be like those “physics
based” games where cooking isn’t about selecting the dish to make and having the
right ingredients in the right amounts, but rather, balancing the onion properly
so it doesn’t roll off when you attempt to cut it, and then having a bunch of
odd sharp chunks because you don’t have the controls to even imagine making
vertical slices? Which one is better? That is the real question. I remember
watching a video analysis/review of Automata, and at the climax of the first
ending rather than talking about what was going on in the game or the story or
thematics this guy was complaining about how cutscenes are bad because they take
away player control, I should be the one doing this and that, let me look around
at other things rather than be forced to look at the important and dramatic
scene, let me press the button to do the thing so it feels real to me. Such
people are lost. They do not know what they are talking about. Automata doesn’t
think they do either. There are many times where things aren’t on rails, where
you are allowed to not do the thing they tell you to do, to not continue the
story and drama. If you do this, the game ends. You get a bad ending. Automata
has 26 endings. 5 are story. 21 are for shepherding these lost souls.

The forced-camera is used to make Automata’s maps bigger. The memorable example
here is Pascal’s Village; coming from the Amusement Park it’s a sidescroller
moving left, then up a forward-scroll for a short bridge, back to a side-scroll
moving right, all without the camera changing orientation in 3D space. Leaving
the village, while on the bridge the camera shifts, to 3d free camera behind
your character – a 180. The path straight forward is not back to the Amusement
Park, but somewhere else entirely. The first time I played this I was confused
and turned back; “I thought I was going backwards, what happened to the
Amusement Park?”. That path was still there. It was just to the left now. The
extensive sidescrolling sections had no meaningful depth motion so when the
camera reverted to 3D I forgot it was a thing. Ladder to Forest King’s grave is
also like this. There are also other ways it executes this goal, principle again
being put things where people wouldn’t consider looking. Memorable examples here
are the two desert YoRHa androids and two of the three entrances to the desert’s
undreground: the former places somewhere you wouldn’t really consider looking
up, the other, looking down. These I feel are proper ways to make things bigger.
For a time, titles bragged about how large their maps were, how free the player
was to do anything, in any order, go anywhere, ‘See that mountain? You can climb
it’. These were not untrue, but they were also pointless, lit., without a point.
Having a place for the player to go that is far away is not a virtue. Why would
we want to go there? No reason. What is there to do on the way there? Nothing.
If I can get there quickly and without much effort, like being able to fly at
will, is it even interesting to go there? This is why “open-world” games have
died. This is why they felt cheap. Finding things that were hidden, but no sort
of not really, they were only hidden because you were looking at something else
that was also new and wonderful, is a way to make things bigger. Bigness that
matters is not measured in feet, or meters, or pixels.  Bigness is measured in
wonder.

Forced cameras, or at least, cameras not involving focus on the player
character, I think is significant. A camera that follows the player around and
responds to the player paints a world where the player has power. What the
player is doing is always what is the focus on-screen, what the player wants to
see, is shown, when he wants it. Forced cameras depend on where they’re moved
to, but in the context of making worlds bigger there are some obvious choices,
and Automata made a number of them, two common ones being shrinking character
size / pulling the camera back, and fixing the camera on the world so the
character moves in the world, rather than the world moving around the character.



— — MUSIC — —



I feel Automata’s music usage is unique. I say this mostly as a preface; I don’t
generally pay specific attention to music, it’s not obviously unique to me in
the same way it uses its camera. It might be unique, I don’t know. I do know
what I like about it.

The music here is a sense of place.

The most common occurrence is its scaling up and down depending on the action
happening on-screen. If you’re idling or walking around, the music is calm. If
an enemy detects you, the music ramps up, once combat begins and until it ends,
a stronger, vocal version plays, and once it ends, it goes back to calm ambience
once more. The “same song” is playing the whole time (I don’t know music terms).
It doesn’t use a different song, it’s just the same song with more or less
“layers”. Generally the song only changes if you move across regions. This keeps
the feeling of the place consistent – or at least, that “place” is independent
of “whether combat is occurring”.

Outside of cutscenes and sequences, the music is changed out on emotion.

On the larger side, music is scaled by the plot. In City Ruins, for most of the
game you can bring out vocals and percussion via combat, but you can’t in the
very beginning. Fighting to get supplies for the Resistance Camp does not
trigger vocals. Vocals/Dynamic starts for the first time, without combat, when
you head out to the Desert for the first time. Desert theme is simillar: you
don’t get vocals until you get to the Apartment Complexes.

On the persistent side, going into the menu reliably lowers the volume and dulls
the feel. There might be a pattern to what gets softened out but I’m not sure
which. Similarly, hacking mode generally turns the music to 8-bit. There are
some which don’t, a couple I felt were budget issues i.e. there should have been
an 8-bit version, a couple others I felt it would’ve been bad if there was an
8-bit version for the reason of avoiding the combat-specific music effect: the
“place” being depicted at that time was less about the hacking and more about
something else.

On the smaller side, some quests will change music at their completion. These
come with some major revelation to the player/character about the person they
just helped. At that time the “place” is not City Ruins, or Desert, or Amusement
Park, it’s that emotion.

Emotion is a place.

These repetitions (“motifs”?) help tie things together, make them larger, and
make them stronger. I haven’t checked (it is not the point to check) but I’m
pretty sure there were no new song appearances after ending B. Maybe the Tower
interior, but that’s it. Everything else felt familiar, like I’d heard it
somewhere before – and it’d turn out I did. There’s also variations on the same
song, I didn’t notice [3.02] “War and War” is the same tune as [1.02] “City
Ruins / Rays of Light” on the first time through; this is great and well-used
too but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about using the same incarnation
of the song, except maybe removing vocals. All songs used at moments of great
importance are literally put right in your face except for the cherry on top,
all long beforehand. They’re done across what feels like all quests they appear
in, I won’t go into all the connections.

I’m going to point out three big ones because they demonstrate the principle.

1.

I liked 6O. She was nice. She was cute. I remember liking her more long after
stopping interacting with her though, hmm that’s odd, you wouldn’t expect that
right? 6O is primarily with 2B, but I liked her a lot more when playing as 9S.
Why is that? It doesn’t feel like it’s just “you don’t appreciate what you have
until you miss it”, because that’s everywhere in Automata, what’s special about
6O? 2017 couldn’t figure it out. 2020 noticed there was a really, really good
song playing at the end of her quest “Find a Present”. Properly framed, this
quest is the ending to her character arc, which is probably why I remembered it
this as “The 6O song”. 6O’s cheerful and her largest concerns up at the Bunker
are relationship problems. Outside of that she likes nice cute things, but there
is no “outside” because she’s not allowed outside of the Bunker. The quest is
finding a rare flower to send a picture of to her. The flower is the Desert
Rose. The Desert has next to nothing in it but dunes. After you send it, she’s
jumping with joy. This song, with vocals, plays while she is thanking you,
saying she can only imagine how wonderful Earth must be.

The song played for the Desert Rose is [1.14] “Vague Hope / Cold Rain”.
This song is played when 2B kills 9S in endings A and B.

2.

This one I looked for after seeing the above in ending A in 2020. 6O dies
offscreen. 21O dies onscreen. Why don’t I remember her song? What is her final
song? What’s playing while I’m fighting her? I remember screwing up and being
overlevelled for most of C/D and just hacking everything, so I probably missed
out on a lot of dialogue. This time I didn’t make those mistakes. And it still
wasn’t obvious what song was playing. But it fit anyways. Why did it fit? That’s
odd. That’s not what you would expect.

21O is concise, reserved. Work work work. 2B’s “emotions are prohibited”, except
2B clearly doesn’t follow this by the end of the prologue. The facade shows
cracks here and there now and again, until the end of her quest, which involves
gathering old trivial things from the Apartment Complexes. She talks an unusual
amount here, ending with another thing she doesn’t do: A speculation. A wish.
(“Vague Hope / Cold Rain” plays here too.)

> “If androids had a similar system of families…”

Her final lines are also a wish.

> “A family to be with…
> I just wanted a family…
> I was… so lonely…
> I wanted to be… with 9S…”

A2 kills 21O. Immediately afterwards is a fight with the formerly nonfunctional
“big brother” robot, now a boss with unique powers and a lot of little brothers.
One of these is same robot that opened route B, with 9S saying, and this is my
translation edit because while “big brother” is what the machine says, it’s not
what 9S says,

> “It doesn’t matter how much oil you give him, little guy.
> Machines having families is something that cannot be.”

The song played in the final fight with 21O is [2.09] “Wretched Weaponry:
Medium/Dynamic”.
This song is the area theme for the Abandoned Factory.

3.

When I first finished Automata one of the things that struck me was how little
attention the best girl got. It was all 2B 2B 2B but I was sitting in my own
little corner (the correct corner), and thinking, A2 is better than 2B for sure,
but the real best girl is Devola. Why do I like Devola so much? She has sex
hair. She’s clearly up-front and straightforward. She has a deathwish for guilt
and loyalty. But these are all A2 too. What makes Devola better?

Well, it’s obvious. A2 has “Weight of the World”. Which is fine, but not great
(by Automata standards, which admittedly is off the charts across the board, but
contrast is more real than absolutes), especially because The Greatest Song
Composed By Man goes with Devola and Popola. It was the first song I looked for
after completing 2017 the first time. It’s a great song. But beyond the song
itself, why do I like this song so much? Why does it feel so familiar?

Then going back for the abandoned second 2017 it almost immediately smacked me
in the face. It came up a handful of other times too, but those weren’t the most
important things.

Devola and Popola’s final song is [3.07] “Song of the Ancients / Atonement”.
This song is the second song in the game in order of appearance. It appears in
the prologue, right after you get warmed up with the 3d/3rd person layout, when
the first boss appears.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


ALL ITS STORIES ARE FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT THE SAME THING.



It’s said 2B is not the main character of Automata, it’s 9S. I’m not sure this
is a generally accurate statement. 9S has connections to the greatest number of
threads in Automata, so in that sense he’s the main character, but he’s not the
main character in any other sense.

The entire cast of Automata is a supporting cast. Including you.

All stories in Automata are fundamentally about the same thing. The primary
tone/question for everything is fundamentally the same thing.

What does 2B want? What does 9S want?

What does A2 want?

What do 6O and 21O want?
What do Devola and Popola want?
What does Pascal want? What do Anemone, and pick any or all Resistance members
want? What do any of the machines you meet want? What do all of the questions
posed by Automata pass through at some point? And usually, that point is
revealed at the end. Large and small through rise and fall is the same thing,
everywhere. Where it isn’t – gameplay complexity, grinding materials and
achievements – it is minimized in deference to this question:

> “What does it mean to be?” / “What do you want to be?”

It’s not “if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all”.
It’s, you see yet another, and yet again it turns out, “oh, so this is an
answer, too”.

There is simply no character, story, or place which is an exception.

There is no open world. There are no non-themed repeatable fetch quests. There’s
no variety of cars to steal, no variety of women to bang, no various hair salons
and(!) clothing stores and(!) jewelry stores for customization, no variety of
activities where you can, quote, “do whatever you want”. There are, admittedly,
items to collect, and completionist trophies. But you don’t get anything for
having saved up more collectables, the game will literally give you a place to
go if you don’t have enough for a quest when you pick it up. As for
completionism, Automata, and this is the first game I’ve heard of that has done
such a thing, lets you buy trophies from a “secret” trophy shop which they tell
you about where and who to ask, from a person located in the place you revisit
the most in the game. There is no trick here. These trophies show up on your
PSN/Steam achievments.

All this is extended from the “lack” of “world building”. There’s not so much
“world building” as there is theme building. Things aren’t built except as
foundations for a theme. Everything stated serves a purpose. Or perhaps, because
there’s only one, ‘everything serves the purpose’.

Why are there zombie machines, machines can’t eat each other, they have no
mouth? Because the point is the emotions relating to cannibalism, not the
biology. It’s one rendition of the collapse of social structure, and surprise,
other more and less standard renditions of that idea are also present. Why is
hacking a twin-stick shooter and not lines of code? Well, what would be a simple
representation of the insides of a “computer” that would also be combat and thus
suitable for a videogame? A twin-stick would be one of the first things that
come to mind. Why are the weapons floating on their backs? Loading screen says
MP which usually means Mana Points. There’s talk about magic technology in
weapon stories and the archives. Is it important to the story how they achieve
antigravity? Then why talk about it?

Why are they androids and not people? Same reason why the respawn points are
vending machines and not factory lines, or hospitals, or what happens inside
hospitals. Tech-named and tech-shaped things are what we can relate to today,
not astrology or reincarnation, these are the same thing, just reillustrated and
reworded so it can get across today.



This is serious. I don’t think I’m reading too deeply on this.

When all named major NPCs are some philosopher or another, the main characters
are named after philosophical sayings – 2B is “To Be”, 9S is “Non Esse” i.e.
“Not To Be”, and A2 is “Et Tu” i.e. “And you?” (The question is to the player) –
it’s not such a stretch. There is a literal warning near the ending of route A
that “You enter the domain of God!”.

What does 2B say in the opening monologue of the game again?

What happens after you enter said domain of God?



The three resources that combine to make a make an “Ark” are from the “Meat
Box”, the “Soul Box”, and the “God Box”. One of the questions highlighted
multiple times in the plot of the main story is, supposing a “new” “body”, i.e.
“again” “body”, i.e. “re” “incarnate”, without the old memories, is the same
person or not? These and many other things are laid out explicitly.

> “But really, astrology?”

The first mail you get is from tech support.
The second mail you get is from Commander about your dead body.
The third mail is regular scheduled correspondence from the Council of Humanity.

The fourth mail is from 6O,

> “2B! Have you heard of “Jupiter Fortune Telling”? It’s all the girls over in
> R&D have been talking about lately! They say you can examine the color and
> shape of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to learn about what kind of luck you’ll have
> with health, work, and love! Sounds amazing, right? I’ll try it and let you
> know what I find out!”

Wow, and would you look at that, here’s the idea that there are set personality
types, there’s the idea that personality type is independent of profession, and
even that names and personality types are the same thing. What a coincidence…



…Is that the right answer? What is a coincidence?

Is the name of the main characters a coincidence? Is that the position people
want to take? If you pull a weed you will get the garden; it doesn’t matter if
not all of these were intended from the onset fully formed in one mind before
work began, because they all fit together now at the end. Do you think life is a
series of unrelated events? Are you content to drift through a life of isolated
incidents? People who are, do not like philosophy, or religion, or real science,
or the occult, and will probably not like this game. I feel though the main
reason people do not like to find or admit these things is because they think it
makes them lower status for not seeing them beforehand – the more explicit, the
bigger drop in status. Modulated by the status of the speaker and his position
to the viewer of course; if you’re a big enough YouTuber you can say the most
obvious things and everyone will Like you. I have no status. I am also not
interested in such games. I am interested in how a story is made and how a story
works. Automata does these things, among others.



I am not inclined to think I or social standards know better, neither of which
have produced anything of note, than masters which have made things that look
like they’ll resonate forever.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


IT IS SIMPLE.



Automata is simple and straightforward in its structure.
Not just gameplay, not just story, it’s all the way down.

There are hidden things and subtleties too, but they’re all in order: that which
is more subtle, more hidden, harder to understand, are also the things that
matter less. The things which appear early, appear often, with no frills and no
talking in circles: these are the ideas this is about.

A writer who will amount to nothing spends untold time and energy trying to be
subtle, coy, complex, thinking things like, “Hmmmm how can I reference
philosophers I like and show them as giants influencing culture without being
too obvious”,

Then along comes Yoko fuckin Taro and hey you can’t do that



This path is not obvious. There are a lot of stories today, a lot of writers and
audiences today, who have a tendency to go for the complex, to look for
something “original”. If it’s simple, it’s not good. If it’s a boring premise,
then it must be a boring story. Thus, start everything off “”in media res””, the
whole shebang, always be doing something, always be moving, always be crying or
exploding, stuff is happening! Aren’t you excited? Are you not entertained? Is
this not why you are here? But you won’t remember it. And if you do remember it,
it won’t be because it was complicated. These kinds spend so much time on
crafting and playing cute little tricks that they never get around to doing
anything else, and so the balance of everything (which includes “anything else”)
comes out as a mess. It can be felt. It’s obvious. And if it isn’t obvious at
the time, it’ll be obvious 10 years from now.

Automata is the other way around: everything is orderly. The big things happen
the most frequently and the most loudly, the small things only now and again.
Where there are holes, it’s never the big things. There are a few holes, but
they are few, and they’re vastly outnumbered by the number of little things I
didn’t notice last time, and in all likelyhood still more things I’ll find next
time. The creators cared about things in the right order. It shows. And it
helps: because everything is simple and internally consistent, when the
slightest effortless change is added, a wonderful fluorish appears: “Wow… I
wonder what else this could be?”

As above, so below. Simple is complex.

Less is more.






Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
February 17, 2020 by korezaan


BRICKING A COMPUTER, SEARCH, DECISIONS

> “Good to see you again, son.”
> “Hello, Doctor.”
> “Everything that follows, is a result of what you see here.”
> “What do I see here?”
> “I’m sorry, my responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.”
> 
> I, Robot

This is a linear recollection record of experience. This is not a technical
guide.

On 2020_02_15 I decided to get around to doing something I’d wanted to do: put a
Tweeter repost bot on my Discord server. Had looked into an RSS bot previously,
didn’t do it, forget reason. First google result at the time was QTweet by Tom’,
added bot, after fiddling around with Discord permissions, worked, but said it
couldn’t function the way I wanted to because something about Twitter developer
limit 5000 something something, what are options, one was host your own QTweet
bot. I have a friend who knows some more things about computers than I do, I
didn’t understand what I was looking at too much, hey how difficult would this
be, looks really simple, ok handhold me. Get Tweeter developer token thing,
Discord app token thing, follow the instructions laid out by Tom’ except for
here and there where it was marginally different because everything gets update
way too often, ok bot set up. Works perfectly.

Then I BSOD’d.

It was immediately obvious what the cause was: I was starting up Nox, and Nox
failed to complete its loading bar. Did it again, BSOD’d again. Okay, what if I
turn off Docker, run Nox, BSOD, ok so Nox just doesn’t like Docker existing.
What does google say about running Nox and Docker (the thing hosting the bot on
my machine) at the same time, there was some guy that said some thing 2 years
ago about Hyper-V, turn it off, okay, turned Hyper-V off in Windows Features and
SVM in BIOS, Docker says it won’t start, ok that’s fine, what about Nox, BSOD.
At some point it BSOD’d twice and I got sent to the Recovery Environment (RE),
that place with Startup Repair, System Restore, Command Line (CMD), and like two
or three other things. I believe I picked Restore or something, booted, checked
Docker, it was gone. Okay, I guess I won’t be hosting a bot, start up Nox, that
was the last time I was able to get into Windows 10 (W10).

Now I was stuck in RE. Okay… so how big is this problem? I had built this
computer and moved from W7 in 2019_12 and at the time I was adamant about having
a W7 dual boot, Ryzen can’t do W7 unless you have a PS2 keyboard, I have a PS2
keyboard, still had to press weird (not the expected) buttons in order to select
enough things to complete installation, then move files while in W10 to make
USB3 functional, in any case I had a fully functional but bare W7; RE had a boot
menu option alongside the other things, would you like to go to W10 or W7, W7,
hey everything here works just fine. “Everything” meaning a beautiful 85% nude
woman stretching across both monitors. And of course the Aero taskbar. So it’s
not a hardware issue.

Started trawling google. Went through a lot of pages.
These are some of those things.

CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED
boot safe mode
fail to boot to safe mode
Windows 10 Startup Repair
Windows 10 bootrec /fixboot
FIX bootrec /FixBoot Access Denied
error 0x0000001
fixboot acceess denied
bootrec /rebuildbcd dual boot
What Is System Reserved Partition
system reserved partition
Quickly Fix – SFC Scannow
windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation
windows 10 assign system partition
error 0x0000098
BCD Boot error 0xc000000f
UEFI: USB OR JUST USB?
cannot boot eufi usb

Not a representative sample. Total pages opened corresponding to this episode
are 132 on the phone. Doing anything on a phone is exceedingly difficult, though
some of it is definitely how some of the way we do things is set up, I’ll get
into that later. But for the first half of this episode that’s what I was on, a
7″ screen going through a hundred pages of things.

At some point doing one of these things caused RE to no longer load and thus
inability to get into W7. Had been doing things through CMD, but having to use a
USB-based CMD and being aware I couldn’t get into anything even if I wanted to
now was a change. Friend who helped me set up bot had gone to bed. Another
friend tried pointing me to a few things but I’d already seen those, they
couldn’t do anything because they only had a phone for the long weekend. Tried
remaking USB for an old W10 ISO that was pointed to in some 2-year old post,
that page no longer existed, ok whatever update USB to newest W10 build. Had
tried to go to bed earlier, now 5AM, can’t stay awake anymore, go to bed.

Up 9AM. A third friend said this stuff was beyond him, sent me to reddit’s
buildapc Discord, a guy there almost immediately said reinstall windows, came
back in the afternoon, asked again, same guy, this time explained a bit and had
a convo about what steps i did and already looked through, same conclusion.

Friend who helped me set up bot spent the majority of the day with me attempting
to get W10 to boot.

We gave up in the end. Reinstalled W10.

That – is the boring part that doesn’t matter.

I say things like “ok whatever” because it’s a real cheap way to change
direction in writing, not because that’s how I felt at the time, this isn’t a
movie either, I don’t have an interest in conveying those details, this is just
a linear recall record. Suffice to say: I was real bored on the afternoon of
02_15, and by the Gods did I get what I fucking asked for and I got fucked real
fuckin good.

The interesting parts are why this or that part happened, and why they went the
way they did.

Because they could’ve went a lot differently. This was evidently true with the
friend who helped set up the bot, because by coincidence, he wasn’t just reading
the instructions and translating, he was doing it too. He found out Nox and
Docker BSODed. No “hmm I wonder if it’s because I’m on Windows 10 build 5555”,
no “Have you tried turning it off and on again”, ok it’s Nox and Docker. He
said, roughly, he decided he’d deal with it tomorrow, dealt with it before
joining back up the next day. Did some reading before executing, executed
-removed Docker- and then Nox worked just fine. Apparently uninstalling Docker
the standard way isn’t sufficient, you have to do some extra fiddling. So Docker
is Bad Civilization. But in any case he didn’t go through all this same crap,
even though roughly speaking he started in the same place. Well, maybe not. He
has different attitudes towards everything. And he knows computers a lot more
than I do. But that’s Beyond The Scope Of This Paper and The Proof Is Left As An
Exercise For The Reader.

Similarly, I probably could’ve not fucked up as much as I did, as well as fucked
up a lot more than I actually did.

Sometime on the night of 02_15 I got real irritated of going through so many
pages on a phone, as well as just some of these pages were near-unreadable on
such a scale, and remembered I have a couple old laptops around. Took one out,
booted, aah so much better. It’s not 2×24″, but 17″ is alright, and a full flat
keyboard isn’t a daskeyboard Ultimate, but it sure fuckin beats swipes. I wonder
what the average swipe typing speed is? Maybe it’s faster for some people I
suppose, but my WPM is 110 and my phone speed is definitely a lot lower than
110. Anyways that’s all nice and good, except I can’t use web Discord because
this browser is too old. Actually I can’t go to a lot of pages because this
browser is too old. Also svchost.exe burns up to 90% RAM for no good reason (out
of 4GB), went through generic msconfig and services motions of clearing out
stuff I don’t recognize, down to 50%, okay that’s fine I guess. Then I got
Discord and Chrome up and, aside from keyboard feeling bad and no mouse, it was
pretty good.

Being on a laptop rather than phone also helped me think more clearly. I had
started taking notes earlier but the physical fact of a 17″ screen at 30″
distance interacted via KBM is significantly different from 7″ at 12″
touchscreen. No, I suppose distance from eyeballs isn’t the right measurement.
There’s a difference between doing something with your hands out in front of
you, versus close to the chest. Like how you can tell a lot about someone’s
personality from how they walk. Or what they look like for that matter. 10-1
odds fat guy doesn’t have any initiative. “But genetics” I’ll tell you what,
feel free to bet on the 1, your money will be safe with me.

Shortly before getting out the laptop (which I opened a total of 88 tabs on for
this episode) (oh yeah its battery never charged above 0%) I started taking
notes. Perhaps, in a certain sense, I was trying to understand what was going
on, but I’m not sure that’s the way I would put it. I would say it’s more that I
was frustrated and, supposing I don’t give up and do something else, what I do
at a certain stage of escalation is enumerate everything to figure out what is
going on. A long time ago I thought I was interested in computers, but the more
I deal with them I think it has nothing to do with computers. What I like are
things that work and things that respond in ways that make sense. That sounds
more emotional than physical, and I would agree; I think the emotional is more
real than anything else. I saw a line browsing /g/ around the time I moved from
W7: “People are nostalgic when the frustration came from something not working
as intended, rather than today when the frustration is from it working exactly
as it is meant to.”. Computers for end users don’t have that property anymore.

I had some understanding of what I was looking at since I’d read bits and pieces
of CMD stuff before. Fluency measurement is always a question of what you’re
looking for, but just imagine, someone looking for solutions to the scale of
fixing boot-level problems, and not knowing what “cd” and “dir” do. Just follow
what the nice guy in the video on the first result on google says. Pay attention
now, he’s telling you to “format c: /fs:fat32”. Type that into the black box,
just like he did, press enter, and then press enter again. What’s the worst that
can happen? That’s not the problem I had, but looking at the comments on some of
these pages, there are actually people out there who met that fate. The problem
I had was different: I had no idea why the instructions I were given didn’t
work. Or rather, some of them sometimes worked, some of them always worked, some
of them never worked, and overall the problem wasn’t solved.

One commonly recommended sequence was

bootrec /scanos
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

/scanos Sometimes worked. It always detected W7, half the time detected W10.
Formatting system reserved would always reveal W10. /fixmbr always worked.
/fixboot never worked. /rebuildbcd worked if /scanos worked, except sometimes
after detecting but before executing it would say “requested system device
cannot be found”, and sometimes setting the relevant partition in diskpart to be
active, it’d find it. Also after /rebuild it would never find W10 again.

I started drawing out a map for this and other logic nets because lined paper is
for plebs and I am a noble peasant, I need to figure out what in god’s name is
going on where so I can reproduce results that make a lick of sense. I would
have no problem being a pleb if I was given a map, but maps either do not exist
or are real hard to find. Searches are fucking broken and everyone in this
society is alone.

Why did I go through 132+88 pages in attempting to fix this problem? Is it
because the problem is 132+88 of difficulty, no, because less than 1 in 10 of
them said anything about how anything worked and more than 9 in 10 were just
repeats of each other. Not only were they repeats, they were bad repeats.
Putting aside for the moment the problem W10 is bringing upon itself by having
such frequent updates, I have a serious doubt as to how much any of these guys
writing up guides know what they’re telling people to do. Why are all the
how-to’s today all presented in linear steps 1-10, or 5 different ways to get
the result? In a sense, you don’t need to know how a car actually fuck cars I
hate cars. In a sense you don’t need to know how a computer works if you’re just
going to use it, but these sorts of things messing with system configs are Not
“just going to use it”. Random nobodies like me shouldn’t be touching stuff or
asking questions like this anyways. But answering questions that you don’t know
how to derive the answer to is a significantly bigger sin. At time of writing,
the first result on bing and the second result on google for “Windows Won’t
Boot”  is an article from MakeUseOf titled “Windows 10 Won’t Boot? 12 Fixes to
Get Your PC Running Again”. Do you think the guy who wrote it has a clue how
windows boot works? By the way, just a reminder: your money will be safe with
me.

Page after page after page of result says do this do that but next to none of it
says anything about any of it works.

“How does it work” is a real simple difference from a “How To”: how-to’s are
linear and how-does-it-work aren’t, “aren’t” meaning, supposing this doesn’t
work, it might be these other things. “5 Ways To” type things are like five
fingers on a hand, understanding how something works is like five twigs on a
tree, which ones, the answer is yes.

A good representation of this is code documentation (Unity and W3Schools are
good ones I know of), currently at least the common format is a left-side bar
menu that expands and collapses (it’s called a tree), main panel has a bunch of
text explanations as to what commands exist and what variables you can change,
what they mean, and 1 in 5 words is a link to some other place in the
documentation to read more. It’s not everything of course, you still have to
have some fundamental understanding of certain things at some point, but it’s
fundamentally different from “5 Ways To”. Do people not see this? I have to
imagine they don’t because that’s what’s in front of me. A great non-code
example of excellent explanations is from IRS. The taxmen are really competent
with this sort of thing, no surprise, “code” is an ancient word for “set of
laws”. I once converted an IRA to a ROTHIRA and the brokerage man asked
beforehand something like ‘and you have consulted with a tax expert on this
already’ or something to that effect and I said yes, even though I hadn’t,
simply because I was confident in what the IRS had written in 590-A, 590-B, and
1099-R. Every paragraph had at least two or three references either to another
paragraph in that document if not a specific paragraph in another document, and
it was clear words were chosen and said carefully. I had read all the paragraphs
every paragraph I read pointed to until I ran out of relevant ones to read, and
followed all the instructions. The only thing left was to sign the dotted line.
“5 Ways To” can never instill such confidence. It’s the blind leading the blind
until it happens to work, upon which there is a gushing of THANK YOU SO MUCH YOU
SAVED ME, not so much because solving the problem was important, which is a
ridiculous notion anyways, there exist no problems you don’t have to solve, but
because they had no idea what was going on, and now, they still have no idea
what’s going on. From desperation, to desperation. In the end nothing changed.

Which is fine, if that’s what you want. The cost/risk is that if everything goes
wrong, as was the case with people who did format c: /fs:fat32, not being aware
that c: was referencing the system volume rather than boot volume, that using a
recovery disk switches around the letters on things – you will be fucked, and
still you will have no idea what went on. This isn’t sarcastic, because the
other choice is being aware to some degree, which is much more costly. In my
case I did format the system drive correctly, reloaded it with bcdboot
c:\windows /s s: but it didn’t end up making W10 or W7 bootable. I spent a day
trying to fix this problem. If I had just tried “5 Ways To” and just skipped
ahead to the Final Solution of Just Reinstall Windows, I would’ve saved that
time. But that wasn’t important to me. I did reinstall windows so it’s not like
Winning was the point either. I wanted to not reinstall, sure, but if I
couldn’t, I wanted to know was *why* I had to reinstall. Why does /scanos detect
W10 sometimes but not others but always detects W7? Why does /rebuildbcd make
W10 disappear from /scanos after executing? Why does /fixboot always result in
“access denied”; what are these other solutions to that problem supposed to be
doing in attempt to get around that? For these and many others I got some
answers to. I wish I got more. And maybe there are more, but I had spent ~16h
already and couldn’t be bothered anymore. In the 15th hour or so the search
results finally pointed me to Microsoft Documentation, which cleared up some
things. Why weren’t these referenced in *any* of the 132+88 pages I went to? I
don’t know. Why does typing out 10 words of the title of a fanny pack on Amazon
into the Amazon search not put that item in the first page (56) of results, by
putting those same 10 words + Amazon into Google give it as the first result? I
don’t know. I don’t care anymore.

I wonder whose fault it is. Maybe I shouldn’t look for someone in particular
because it’s obviously quite a few.

Then reinstalling was extra smooth and fast because I had prepared a majority of
things beforehand.

In setting up W10 I did what I had some inkling of when I first built W7 in
2011, which was “put windows on its own disk”. At the time I tried putting it on
an SSD, for reasons I don’t remember I didn’t, good thing too because the SSD
went into “panic lock” some time later, a really retarded concept on old SSDs,
don’t look it up if you like brain cells, tldr everything on that drive was
lost. So I only had to recreate my porn folder, oh no. Anyways 2019_12 the setup
was: NVME W10+W7, SSD programs, and bringing over the two HDD’s from W7, using
the old W7 boot drive as a storage disk. Other than W10 being fucking ugly as
all hell goddamn I hate flat design, the major unknown was only in figuring out
how to “take ownership”, that’s the correct term, of all the files under Users
in the old W7 drive. Minor problems after that included some things weren’t
transferred because I didn’t think of them as transferable. Other than that all
files were already present, and programs I had put together a Master Install
List spreadsheet/checklist of names of things, category of purpose, names of
files, and put them in a folder together, so all I needed to do was check off
all the boxes.

Reinstalling W10 changed contents in the volume W10 was on. Chose “Custom
Install”, which moved the broken W10 to a “Windows.old” folder inside the new
W10, in other words doubling the space occupied on the volume, but that was fine
because I had set the volume to 150GB, W10 itself takes up 40, again all my
programs and files are elsewhere, so it took up 80/150 from 40/150. “Custom
Install” meant I theoretically had access to those things that last time
“weren’t transferred because I didn’t think of them as transferrable”, generally
speaking, user configurations. Example from my case: brushes, colors, shortcuts
and menu configuration in Clip Studio Paint. These sorts of things are generally
found in the User\Appdata folder. Copied those over to the new W10 location, no
need to take ownership because same volume, theory here is actually practice
and, after the usual reinstall etc., suddenly everything’s back to the way I
like it. Some of them I didn’t even have to reinstall, but I don’t know the
logic there.

The problems I thought I would encounter with licenses all turned out not to be
the case. Microsoft Office 2010 license key worked fine, though I don’t remember
if I had a spare license or not. DisplayFusion and NitroPDF I only had 1, my
impression was I have to un-assign them from one computer before I can use them
on another, which was because of the above not available to me; they worked
fine. Nitro even asked me after installation, not for the activation key, but if
I wanted to *deactivate* and remove the key. Why? Maybe because I put them on a
separate drive beforehand and was just re-registering with Windows? I don’t
know. Do I care? Yes, but not enough to wade through 132+88 “5 Ways To” again,
fuck that shit. Clip Studio Paint was fantastic, logged into my account, what
license would you like to use, I only have one license, click, welcome back.
They apparently have cloud backup of user settings and you can set it to update
every time the program closes, didn’t know that before. Have not ever considered
using cloud backup till this point, now I see its value. Cloud means you Don’t
Own Your Data, but the question is always “compared to what”, and the comparison
here is, for most people who don’t have desktops or any understanding of even
manual copy-paste backups, or CTRL+C/CTRL-V at all, 16h of 132+88.

16h of 132+88 is correctly interpreted as “impossible”.

Oh yeah all my browser tabs transferred with no effort on my part because
something something google, presumably. I use Iron, which is some
‘privacy-minded’ chromium build, but chromium is off chrome, and I believe it
had all my history and tabs and bookmarks because I have this “sync” thing on,
which means cloud, which means You Don’t Own Your Data. Which sounds Evil, and
perhaps it is. But on the scale of “Things Work” to “Not Evil”, I am Lazy and
this stuff is Good. Not a fan of “This is old and not supported!!!”, one would
imagine that the oldest things should be *the most* supported, but that’s not
the world we live in. Or if it is (it probably is), we can’t find them.
Microsoft Documentation is page No One Cares of Google when you search for how
to fix your stuff.

Are you really fixing your stuff? That’s something I pondered a decent amount.

> “According to a survey, it seems that a majority of people have answered that
> they feel reluctant to be more than 50% cyborg.”
> 
> “I do understand the reluctance that those people feel. In the end, it’s a
> matter of degree. For example, you… You’re quite the cyborg, too.”
> 
> “But I don’t use artificial arms, artificial legs, or artificial organs.”
> 
> “But you do have some form of portable information terminal, right?”
> 
> “Well, yes… but doesn’t everyone?”
> 
> “A costume device, too?”
> 
> “Of course.”
> 
> “And, at home, you probably have home automation and an AI secretary.”
> “Yes.”
> 
> “What would happen to you if all the data in those devices was lost due to a
> disaster or accident?”
> 
> “Well… I wouldn’t be able to do any work until it gets restored.”
> 
> “When you entrust so much of your everyday life to those electronic devices,
> the argument that you aren’t a cyborg isn’t very convincing. To you, those
> portable terminals are already your second brain. Isn’t that right?
> 
> It can be said that the history of science is a history of the expansion of
> the human body’s functionality, in other words, the history of man’s
> cyberization. That’s why it’s a matter of degree.”
> 
> Psycho-Pass

If you are following a “5 Ways To”, how much are you really doing it? If I am
going through my problems with a friend who’s looking stuff up for me to try out
as well as just having his understanding to pick through in general, how much am
I really doing it? If I am reading through IRS documentation and following their
instructions to the letter, am I making decisions, or am I a temporary
apparatchik? If I store my stuff on some cloud service, is that data that I can
retrieve really less “mine” than the data in my old panic locked SSD?

Things really don’t work the way we think they do.

Sometimes they do though. I was a bit afraid at some point I might’ve screwed up
the W7 install since I couldn’t get into it anymore. At first it was confusing,
but early on I unplugged all the other drives and only had the NVME, so there
were only ever 4 volumes that showed up: USB, W10, W7, and System Reserved. I
was careful to not touch the W7 volume the whole time, at least, I never
targeted it with any command. No way to check if that meant nothing happened
though. Just had to hope.

After reinstalling W10 and setting up EasyBCD again, which is just a simple
reskin of the built-in Windows bootloader, chose W7 at startup, booted.

Everything was just as I’d left it.

Most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
January 3, 2020 by korezaan


[REVIEW] YOUR LIE IN APRIL


8/8

original form as tweeter thread here

Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso / Your Lie in April was a religious experience for me. I
would not have seen what I did had I not seen it at the time I did. Reading over
some of its criticisms I feel compelled to illustrate an alternative way to look
at it.

YLIA is a parable. It takes the form of a “story” because that’s what is
‘allowed’ today. “So many characters are flat plot devices!” Yes. That’s the
idea.

YLIA is not a dramatic romance about music. The closest anime I can point to is
not White Album 2, but Over Drive.

What is the point of a story? If your answer is “to accurately simulate events”,
you will not like YLIA. But neither is YLIA for you.


TONE > THEMES > CHARACTERS > PLOT > LORE

This is my personal preference. I graft this upon YLIA. Is it right? Maybe not.
But it fits great.

Something I’m not used to is symbolism, but I saw it here. For the first half,
it was difficult seeing characters and settings and artstyle etc. What’s king in
a drawing? It’s not anatomy. It’s not lighting. It’s composition.

For the first half of YLIA all I saw was the king.

Kaori is the Lord, or Master.
The Piano is God, or Truth.
Music is Intent, or Imagination.
The Stage is Life. You are there, you are alone; Everything outside it is dark
because you are in the light; What you do every second matters.

YLIA in one line:

> Act sincerely with a beautiful image in mind, and you will embed yourself in
> the heart of the world forever.

“Kaori is the Lord, or Master”: I’ve been rereading Hagakure. The first half of
YLIA is Hagakure in modern anime form. Kaori is a girl because male bonding is
rarely depicted today. Kaori is Kousei’s Lord. Most similar anime relationship
is Iskander-Waver of Fate/Zero.

How is archetypal Kaori depicted? Golden Backlit. Backlit is when you are
looking towards the light. Light is visual for Ideal. What is Gold?

Kaori is in front, Kousei is following, this is the same of their emotional
dynamics, what is this relationship, it’s Lord and Retainer.

> “A king […] must exemplify the extreme of all things, good and evil. That is
> exactly why his subjects envy and adore him. Why the flame of wanting to be
> like the king can burn in the hearts of every civilian.”

– Iskander. Iskander is a king. Sounds like Kaori though, right?

> “As a king, it is my duty to present a dream.
> And as one of my subjects, it is your duty to see the dream to the end and
> speak of it to the future.”

-Iskander

> “Do you really think you can forget? No. Not a chance. You live for that
> moment too. Because you’re a musician, just like me.
> 
> Unprecedented. One mishap after another.
> 
> Even so, the people here will never forget us.”

– Kaori

That’s the first half. The second half I couldn’t see well. Less familiar
territory; I had originally guessed OP1 was a final ED/insert, so YLIA is “After
the End” for me. Given the lyrics of ED2, I imagine it’s “After the Death of the
King”.

This is the core of YLIA. The rest of is the same thing with tweaks and lower
amplitude, e.g. Kousei is the Lord for Emi and Aiza. Minor details are just to
break up the monotony or other expediency reasons.

Kousei looks to Kaori. Kaori looks to “Elohim”.

What is Elohim?

In the second Iskander quote, he said “kousei” somewhere in that ‘tell this to
posterity’ half.

YLIA’s Kousei is 公生, which means “Public Life”.

I am not inclined to believe the name of the main character is an accident.

All this implies 1) This is the right track 2) There is more.

> “I know we can do it.”
> “There was resolve in your eyes. So what was it that you saw in me?”
> 
> “You have me. Look up, and look at me.
> 
> Look at me.”



Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
November 17, 2019 by korezaan


JAPAN’S KARAAGE AND ANIME INDUSTRIAL POLICY

A LAWSON IN KYOTO

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The contents of this post were, with a few exceptions, written last year.

2018 November 16~22 I visited Japan, primarily in the interest of inspecting
land usage and public space. I wrote up what I expected to be the majority of my
thoughts on that here, but in commenting through the uploaded 562 pictures there
turned out to be a few things where there was a lot more to say.

The end wordcount of the “main” post excluding the references section was around
12k.

The end wordcount of the “comments” on the pictures exceeded 26k.

One idea in the comments I’ve found myself revisiting on multiple occasions: the
text composing the main body of that idea is what is presented here. I’m not
sure it’s the most important idea, but its prevalence along with the anniversary
seems to desire a reformatting into a more legible post. Imgur albums aren’t
really easy to read, and I had put everything in chronological order. Perhaps
blog posts aren’t the easiest to read either, but that’s the next step up that
is available to me.

The idea has to do with the anime industry, or rather, the social structure that
builds off of it, and the same social structure it pulls its talents from. The
closest concept I know to describe this is “Industrial Policy”. It seems to fit
with what I’ve read from the MITI book (which I still haven’t finished). It may
not be industrial policy per se, but the spirit is the same – and the Code
matters less than the Hammurabi anyways. That’s discussed in the main post,
which again can be found here, but reading that is not a prerequisite. If
anything, this post poses the question that the other one answers.

This post has two parts. They are mostly independent and mostly reach the same
destination, but take different paths. “Karaage” is more about the environment
and negative space, whereas “Anime” is more direct and builds the actual thing.

There are two images near the middle which have fully italicized text; those
were added with this post. The rest of the text is original, changed only to add
a few links.

The image album containing all the images used in this post can be found here.

Further thoughts on Japan can be found here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Convenience Stores, Road Signs and Karaage
–> Konbinis
–> Onigiris
–> Mega Don Quixote
–> Karaage and Road Signs
> Doujinshi, NicoNico, and the Anime Industry

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 17, DAY 2



awwwww yeeeeeeeeeeaahh

i have no idea what it reads though (“kyanpen”? camping?? did i screw up
“n”/”no”/”so” again?) so i wasn’t able to figure out what FGO deals LAWSON had
until accidentally stumbling upon an employee doing something the next day.

my sister visited FamilyMart, LAWSON, and 7-11 and said the specializations that
she could tell were “7-11 has more daily specials and LAWSON is for weebs”.

i know at least that last one is correct. i stuck to LAWSONs simply because i
saw anime out front.



a waist-sized copy machinery!
unmanned!
in a convenience store!
right next to puddings, an atm, and the microwavables!

(and porn mags!)



the FGO “campaign” can be seen in this picture.

i didn’t notice because of the endless variety of stuff they managed to stick in
such a small place.

(it seems like i didn’t take a picture around the time i noticed the next day,
so it’ll come later.)



you can really have quite a lot of types of things if you don’t try to make them
unnecessarily big, or insist on having an unnecessary quantity of each type of
item.

i don’t know anything about food supply chains, but here’s one about cars:

> “Finally, space utilization at NUMMI (California) showed a modest improvement
> (7.0sqft/unit/yr) over Framingham (8.1) and GM-Fremont (7.9), but was still
> far from the Takaoka level (4.8). This reflects that fact that the GM
> facilities, including Fremont, were all designed to stock several weeks of
> parts. NUMMI parts inventories averaged two days.
> 
> This inventory level was still above the two hour level prevailing in Takaoka,
> primarily due to difficulties in running true Just-In-Time from Japan and the
> U.S. Midwest.”

something else that probably helps is some items aren’t… what’s the right word
here? “guaranteed?” to the left here a few of the microwavable meals can be
seen, and on more than one occasion i was able to see the employee restock them.
and the items were different. like rather than a shelf spot being a specific
product, it was a certain range of products, and if you got there at some point
in the day versus another, depending on who bought what before you, what’d be
available to you would be different.

this was definitely true for the microwavable meals. i’m not sure how far the
principle extends.



friendship broken with porn mags
now anime girl campaign banners are my best friend



these are actually hot.

these are also right at the end of a refrigerated section (that TEA at the left
is cold).









--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 19, DAY FOUR


surprise! convenience store karaage! this is what the campaign was about.
included is a toothpick.

i happened to notice this because the employee had just finished frying the
chicken and was putting it in the display or whatever it’s called (if you look
at the earlier picture, there’s rows and rows of it). there was a frier in the
back, and not rows and rows of friers, a single one, and not american “in the
back”, maybe three or four steps away from the cashier spot, and maybe zero to
one steps from that little door they use to go in and out. clearly visible to
the public – if you looked in that direction.

i wanted to take a picture of it and everything on the employee side of the
counter, but he told me no. which is unfortunate. that convenience store was my
happy place.

riyo art made it better. god’s gift to the world. god bless riyo.



“but was the chicken good tho”

yes.
it was.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 17, DAY 2



these were the best. rice balls. for about a dollar. this was one of the more
expensive ones, probably because of the non-rice filling in the center. they’re
opened by pulling (hard to see here) a tab from the top down the middle, which
separates the two halves, then you pull the two remaining parts out. and they’re
filling. one of these makes you not hungry, two of these make you stuffed.

it took me a few of these to finally not screw it up, because the wrapping isn’t
just on the outside, but between the seaweed and the rice too (so the seaweed
stays dry and the rice stays wet).

how did they manage to do that?

apparently (read) it’s done by machine too, not slave labor or something. and
it’s not like those crappy “edible” plastic either, the plastic between the rice
and seaweed was the same type – and connected! – to the plastic between the
seaweed and the outside. how is this even possible? can machines even do
something so intricate? would such machines be pointed to making plastic origami
on dollar foods?

i mean. apparently the answer is yes. i held it in my hand.

but i’m still going to ask the question.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 19, DAY FOUR



fourth day, 6:40 on a monday, early enough to see what a fully stocked meal
section looks like.

i didn’t drive here. i walked here. like maybe five minutes. and not an american
five minute walk either, it was nice and comfy the whole way. walk down one big
road, turn right on a corner, walk down another big road. and not an amer- you
get the idea (i’m still going to repeat in other comments). though if i drove
here it’d be easy, there’s a bajillion tiny parking lots nearby.

google says 300m, estimate of 5 minutes.

this reminds me, all these items actually have expiration dates on them. or more
accurately, expiration times. some of them have it by hour, others by half( or
third)-day. at least for all the times i looked, they all expired on the same
day sometime in the evening. i imagine if i was here to see japan at night,
those times would move to the early afernoon instead.

this also reminds me, i found that the food here was better than the food at the
chain restaurants. and so for all three of my dinners in Tokyo, i ate
convenience store food. also because my feet hurt. i really wanted to eat at a
conveyer belt sushi place once, and Tsukiji Outer Market another. it was just a
short way away too. but short distances become enormous when you can’t do them
easily.

like how people don’t want to go anywhere in america even though they’ll all
defend the ultimate virtue of their Personal Freedom Machine. that i believe is
the real reason behind amazon’s rise in america. this one-click order or that
free two-day shipping is next to inconsequential. two days? why not two years? i
could get nice things here in almost two minutes, and i was having a good two
minutes the whole time.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 18, DAY THREE



the photo timestamp is 2018 Nov 18, 05:55:42. breakfast. i had gotten this the
previous morning, Nov 17, purchased around 07:40 or so, but i’d been in there
for 10 minutes and it wasn’t being restocked at that time. it spent the whole
day in my (unrefrigerated) backpack.

the numbers there are clearly about 18 Nov 17, and the one after that says “11
hours after noon”.

admittedly, i don’t know what the four characters at the front of that line say.
but it seems clear enough.

it tasted great by the way. would recommend.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 19, DAY FOUR



the photo timestamp is 2018 Nov 19, 06:59:02. breakfast. i got it that morning.
i don’t remember if it was hot or not. it was in the refrigerated section and
the store attendant definitely asked me if i wanted it heated up (they have
microwaves behind the counter), but i don’t remember if i said yes for this one.

the numbers on this one say 18 Nov 20, “5 hours before noon”.

i just noticed that the meaning changes in translation. it’s not “noon minus 5”,
but more like, “the 5th hour on the half of the day before noon”. same after,
but there the error is benign.

The numbers below that say microwave 1500W for 25s, or 500W for 1m15s.

> “wouldn’t it be fucking amazing if, given that every microwaveable food in the
> world gives a baseline wattage its cooking times were designed for, there were
> a single microwave oven on the market whose wattage was visible anywhere in
> front of it”
> 
> “Actually true in Japan. Wattage listed on the front, and paxkages have two
> wattage/times so you have an idea if yours doesn’t match.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 20, DAY FIVE



this was the best part of Odaiba. kaarage donburi – fried chicken rice bowl.
also comes with a lot of lettuce, or something, and free miso soup, which seems
to be standard next to water/green tea. the ??dressing packet?? and the little
bowl of ?? sauce came with it. the drink did not. i want to say under 1000, but
i don’t remember. couldn’t have been higher than 1400. there’s a food court
right as you walk in Diver City, i got this from the one in the back at the
far-right. there were two karaage shops, i think i chose this one because the
menu was easier to read.

that karaage was good.

it was eating this meal that it dawned on me that it was possible for fried
chicken to be a delicacy.

i was probably supposed to use the packet sauce on the lettuce? and the bowl
sauce on the chicken. but i didn’t notice the packet at first and poured the
bowl over the lettuce. 3coins ooops.

then Odaiba returned to being crap.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 21, DAY SIX



this place plays the dunkey theme song!

everything was really cheap here. or, that’s my impression.

basically the first thing i see coming in, which is the second box on the
rightmost visible row, the yellow bottles, were CC lemons, like double the size
of the ones i’d been getting from vending machines. vending machines sold them
for like 120. here the label says… well it says 29, but i read the 69 next to it
because 29 is just impossible.

right? it’s impossible right? like it’s 29 after you buy a certain amount of
them or something right?

they can’t possibly be selling such a big bottle for 29Y right??

???

Mega Don Quijote.



did you know shoplifting is a crime?

this is in front of the elevators.



for reference, this felt like an unusually messy map/schematic wall. whether it
is or not i don’t know, because i didn’t walk into any other place like this.

then again, there aren’t many places like the Mega/Shibuya branch of Don
Quijote.





i didn’t even notice the ceiling was undecorated, i was so busy looking at all
the stuff around me.

i felt like goddamn Boris Yeltsin when he walked into an american supermarket.

> “At JSC, Yeltsin visited mission control and a mock-up of a space station.
> According to Houston Chronicle reporter Stefanie Asin, it wasn’t all the
> screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the
> unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall’s location.
> 
> Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in
> amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if
> their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions
> of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” […]
> 
> Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost,
> later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a
> store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce
> section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially
> excited about frozen pudding pops.”
> 
> “When they got into the store, as one of the guys remember, the manager
> appeared and helped them to see the store in detail. “Yeltsin asked how many
> different goods are in store. The store staff answered that there is around
> 30,000 different things for sale now.
> 
> Yeltsin then said – did I get the number correctly? Does my interpreter
> misheard the seller?”.”

oh, so this is the feeling i have about convenience stores. i just didn’t
recognize the connection because i knew the Yeltsin story was about a
supermarket, and neither FamilyMart nor LAWSON had stuff like fresh produce or
raw meat, so it just missed the cut. i don’t remember if i saw fresh produce
here. but there was definitely a meat section. so here, it connected.

this is a walmart. except cheaper. and it’s filled with more stuff, with none of
it being made of shit.

and it does it all without imposing a black desert upon its surroundings or
being one itself.

oh. oh, this is the feeling i have about trains and land use in japan.

“You cannot learn a thing you think you know.” – “America #1!”

oh, and just so i don’t forget, there was this one picture i really regret
having missed. i was on some other floor and, forget what was in the front and
back, but down the middle was an aisle, and some old ladies were walking the
opposite way. to the right was bicycles. to the left….. was Tengas.

someone really had their priorities straight.



discount store means continued high quality toilets!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOV 20, DAY FIVE



it struck me as odd that there were 6 separate signs here. i don’t think i’ve
ever seen more than one in america, except maybe at airports, which sort of
don’t count.

i was telling myself some stories about how in america, the buyer (DOT
obviously, but bear with me) wants to save money because there’s probably a flat
cost per item, so he buys one big one rather than multiple little ones, and so
the suppliers started revolving around that, and “invisibly” charging more and
more for each sign, because there’s fewer suppliers there’s less reason to do
better work, so the signs become more crap, and because there’s few suppliers
and few big signs, any time there’s any work it’s either replacing the whole
thing or (not) carefully changing parts of it, so either it’s expensive and/or
it doesn’t look good… unlike here, where if something changes they can just
change the direction part. the name part probably isn’t going to change.
Tokiwabashi is probably newer so that’s why it’s separate.

that was all off of looking at these signs. i don’t know how much of that is
real, of course. i was pulling stuff out of my * walking along this path (Tokiwa
bridge is actually probably the oldest thing up there) i hadn’t planned to go
down because i exited the wrong exit of a really long station and my feet were
killing me so onwards it is. but that’s the feeling i had when i saw it, given
everything i had seen so far.

why do convenience stores, in america, sell industrial waste labelled as food?
because at some point, someone was selling chicken, and someone else sold worse
chicken for cheaper, and enough people went to the latter that the former could
no longer run a business.

and you know the words that came out of their mouths too:

“but it’s still chicken. it’s the same thing, just for cheaper”.

and if they were politically inclined: “it’s just competition. same price higher
quality or same quality lower price wins. this is how the free market works
man.”

repeat ten thousand times and you get chicken “nuggets”.

generalize in various directions to get other true results: why is everything so
big in america? “because if you buy more it’s cheaper”. 1) no. “less per unit if
you spend more money in total” is not “cheaper”. 2) you can’t use that much
anyways. mom once bought barbeque sauce for me, two containers at the size i’d
call jars, and it expired before i used half. the one i had opened, i mean.
“spend more save more” is a literal religion in america. “but some bigger people
can eat that much” no. no, they can’t.

“but small businesses can use that much”

then where are all the stores in america that sell real things to regular
people?

based on things like convenience stores, no free parking, and signs like these,
along with an infinite number of other things in the way they exist, i don’t
think that way exists in japan. sure it’s “more expensive” to get an 100Y
onigiri or 550Y meal at a LAWSON than making something yourself. but probably
not. not after factoring in the time you spend going to a grocery place probably
further away, the electricity/gas to cook, the time cooking and preparing the
thing, etc. convenience stores mass produce the things, but also have all their
logistics cost and things like rent, their margins probably aren’t that high.
it’s not like they’re trying to rip you off. and the food is pretty good.
probably better than you can make yourself with no experience in anywhere from
the shopping for materials to cooking. so why not? on the matter of just cost,
which is what we’re talking about here, it’s a pretty good deal.

it appears to me a society that goes that way results in “pretty good deal”s
becoming even better deals over time, as suppliers that can survive can allocate
more time and resources, or simply gets better because of having done it enough
times to get ideas for improvements. LAWSON meals were legitimately better than
the two chains i went to, Nakau and Matsuya. like not even close. convenience
stores in Japan closed, nay, reversed the culinary gap with low tier
restaurants. if i were to go to a Nakau or Matsuya over a LAWSON, it wouldn’t be
because their food was good, but because they provided an air-conditioned seat
and served the meals on plastic thicker than 1/16”. or because i could choose my
meals specifically rather than it being up to whatever happened to be available
on the shelf at that moment. not because the food is better there. it isn’t.

the FGO karaage from earlier was 220 or 240Y. somewhere between 5-8 ~1.5″D
ball-ish shapes. crispy skin, juicy meat. it’s fried chicken. but i’ll call it
karaage, not because i’m a weeb, but because it’s different.

what can i get at american convenience stores? chicken “nuggets”.
what can i get at wal-mart? more chicken “nuggets”.
what can i get at costco? even more chicken “nuggets”.
and none of them are hot or fresh even when i get them.

“but you can go to a specialty chicken place”

LAWSON isn’t a specialty chicken place. it’s a convenience store. and the number
of “specialty places” in japan is unbelievable. it’s basically a misnomer. it is
the exception that a place offers more than one kind of thing. but yes, in the
american sense: basically everywhere in japan is a “specialty place”.

“but they can do that because it’s denser over there and they all live closer
together”

but WHY did they do that? HOW did it get to this point?

i give only slightly more than two shits about the state of affairs as it
currently is. obviously everything today is tied to everything else today. duh.
the salience is in the lineage of thought, the philosophy which permeates
everyday actions that paints how today came from yesterday, and what sort of
things today will create for tomorrow. that’s what’s fucking important.

“what does this world want to look like tomorrow?”

there’s a famous picture with four panels, it compares two cities. one:
Hiroshima. here’s what it looked like after it was flattened by the atomic bomb,
here’s what it looks like today. two: Detroit. here’s what it looked like in the
1940s, here’s what it looks like now.

“Detroit’s a world-class city, it’s been growing in recent years, haters gonna
hate!”

chicken nuggets.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


DAY SIX, NOV 21



Animate Shibuya.



i should’ve recognized it with the Kaguya Luna in the crane game, but this one
hit closer to home.



here is where it really started hit home.



this is the music album section. or something. vertical shot of the previous
horizontal.

Nico Nico Douga is the Japanese equivalent of YouTube. or so that’s what i’ve
always heard, but just as next to every single other word so far, “equivalents”
have turned out to be extremely far from equivalent. this is a music section in
a store. selling things including but not limited to music. and they have at
least one and a half shelves dedicated to “As Seen On YouTube”.

can you imagine that?

random people are making music. and when they become popular enough for it, they
start trying to sell albums. and maybe, just maybe, they’ll get noticed by
bigger people – or just become really big themselves. “that’s just capitalism
and the free market, people offer products other people want, america has that,
america’s the best at it!” is it? is it really? does america have a middle
class? do american stores have a “As Seen On YouTube” section? if you look up
world statistics on small business and self employment rates on different
countries and you want in with that mindset, you’re not gonna like what you see.
america arrests kids putting up lemonade stands because it violates city health
ordinances, japan – well, i don’t know if any of these are made by kids. but i’m
going to guess there’s at least a few. i know america doesn’t let kids go to
school by themselves. i know in japan, they do.

and that’s where it starts. everything starts at where you can grasp the world.

if you don’t let people understand at the level they do understand, they will
never understand. they will never themselves automatically build a structure and
path themselves, referencing the people before them and showing the way for the
people behind. there’s only “get good and hope and maybe some big studio will
hire/acquire me”. and that’s here too, but those basically never happen. it’s
like your parents always said, how many people get to work in hollywood? don’t
dream of becoming an actor/actress, it won’t happen. and that’s right. if it’s
all or nothing, you probably should do something else.

but here, it’s not all or nothing.

there’s a ladder with steps toward the top. a real ladder, one you can see and
understand yourself.



i’ve mentioned FGO a few times now, and i definitely took these pictures because
it’s what i like, but it fits into this story too. even now this picture fits
into the story.

americans who realize this problem blame it on capitalism and globalism and how
everything competes with every other thing today. are these americans the same
americans claiming that america is the land of small businesses and free market
competition? i don’t really care about free or not free markets, i care about
aesthetics, but even in their jargon lexicon, i don’t think the problem is
“competition” (which i think leads to chicken nuggets), but about “intellectual
property”.

the way i think about it: “killing off the future”.

everything that exists has a pathway it took to get there. everything starts, in
at least a few important senses, from nothing. i think aesthetics is inborn
somehow, but having a “taste” doesn’t mean you will make the next big franchise.
there’s the the well-treaded things on having a ‘real’ job and the ten thousand
technical hours of practice, but the important part is there has to be a pathway
up. how many big things in the history of big things have happened because they
were doing nothing and then one day the hand of god reached down and anointed
them? that’s the standard model in america today. the startup model. which we
talked about in the previous picture. the question is why don’t people become
big themselves? without the hand of god?

because in america, the hand will flatten you.

it will sue you into oblivion for “stealing”, saying you’re using their
image/stuff to make money, they should get a cut, if they don’t sue then the
courts will have a precedent and then other people will also do it and all hell
will break loose and then nobody will make anything anymore because if you don’t
give people exclusive rights for their ideas they’re just not going to have
them.

and so they kill off all these people. whether they cause bankruptcy is only the
minor point, the important part is they break the heart. why would these people
want to make things anymore? do you believe that all the big creators are fueled
by inspiration and passion and all the small creators are fueled by greed and
money? all people start by copying someone else, and what better to copy than
something everyone already likes and appreciates? and so they don’t. and even if
this feeling doesn’t spread, the fact that the people disappeared does. all
those people that spent all that time learning not only the intricacies of their
craft but forming connections to all those other people who spent all their time
specializing in something else so they could come together and make something
greater, that lineage of creation, the history of community, the real supply
line of civilization –

that’s gone now. cut down like a dog.

did you think hollywood has been using old superheroes and remaking old movies
because it makes more money? if it’s about money then it’s about china, and they
make plenty of things china doesn’t like, like making characters black or gay,
no nevermind anything about equality, you thought it was about money. and it is
about money. the problem is that they can’t make it. progressivism is something
they are trying out because they thought it’d make more money. nostalgia is what
they use when they don’t have progressivism, not because it makes “more” money,
but because it makes money.

because they don’t know what else to do, and what section of those makes money.

and they did it to themselves.

they killed off all the other people who would have otherwise been there to show
them what could be possible. they killed off all the other people who would have
been there, either as someone else in the field with even just another set of
eyes, or someone off on their own, doing something that is yet to even be
recognized as a field. killed off all the people that’d provide free real both
technical and creative intelligence. they killed off the rest of the world,
leaving them finally alone, with superfluous syllables like “competition” or
“property” on one side, and “salaries” and “opportunities” the other. those
aren’t real.

what’s real is they killed off the future.



how does this relate to FGO?

every book in the previous picture is not official.

the bottom half of this picture is all official, the next picture is mostly
nonofficial, i don’t know about the split on the last one. also not sure about
the top half here. except the one at the top left, ChanxBox, which is definitely
not official because it’s not even about FGO. i would know, i have the book, i
bought it long before this trip because i like the artist and heard he was
releasing it.on the cover are 18 characters. the number of them that are FGO: 4.

this isn’t some kind of back alley black market place. it’s Animate Shibuya.
this is how anime works, and granted, i don’t know much about how the rest of
japan works, but given what i’ve seen here and how it fits together with what i
have read (about how the rest of japan works (need to finish reading MITI)),
it’s not the same picture. the narratives are all wrong, and the colors are not
even wrong. japan ostensibly has draconian IP laws. but here’s a place that
exists. for a more famous example, japan has censorship of genitals written into
their constitution, but everyone knows what that really means.

one of Fate’s biggest spinoffs is called Prisma Ilya. Prisma Ilya started off as
a fanfiction, probably selling doujins (literally meaning something like
“hobby”, but standalone refers to fanmade books). at some point it got really
popular. what did the head guys of Fate do?

recruited and canonized them.

that’s a story i know fairly firmly, but i’ve heard it’s true for some of the
others as well. it would last appear to be the case. Fate/Apocrypha and
Fate/Prototype here don’t have the same artstyle. i unfortunately don’t know as
well behind the story of Fate’s rise, other than it was called Fate before the
current popular iteration of FGO, that currently the Sony group is doing poorly
everywhere and FGO singlehandedly brings one of them into profit, and that the
original guys behind Fate, with art worse than the worst you can find in these
pictures, are still helming all major operations.

i’ve done some reading on the past on intellectual property and have seen
probably the majority of american standard discourse on it. for it is basically
stealing is bad, and against has stuff from classical composers composed more
than anyone else and treated imitators as praise, to online piracy talking about
how it’s free advertising. that was all well and good but it was never quite
clear what was real. of course it couldn’t. it’s text on a screen.

it could never have hoped to compare to seeing something physical in front of
your space.



fitting right along into this story is anime’s actual presence in japan: it’s
not that big. the pictures i’ve taken are largely exceptions. that anime girls
aren’t everywhere could be because the japanese are traditional and demure and
don’t want to be plastering cartoon titties everywhere could be a reason, but
it’s not necessary. a much more concrete explanation is that it doesn’t have
that much economic value.

the customer base for anime proper, the 12×24 minute episodes, ranges in the
thousands.
as in, 1,000~9,000. not 10,000, not 10,000,000. 1,000.

if you can sell more than 10,000 per volume it is basically a nationwide
phenomenon.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2012-03-05

anime is not big. it’s a small piece of life. Shibuya is a fairly popular
shopping center. Animate Shibuya is… in the back. i was expecting it to have its
own building, but it’s just some floor. the next place has a fancier sign out
front and some decorations, but it’s like 3 floors down in the basement. and
that’s it for anime in the area. in the grander scheme, it’s just not that
important. perhaps Akihabara is special because it’s one place where it’s large
enough to take over an entire street. but even in Akihabara it’s the same as it
is here: a bunch of ever smaller groups making ever smaller things.

what i saw in japan was a different model of the world. convenience stores, road
signs, building widths, parking lots, toilets, construction cranes, demolishers
in nooks and crannies, anime, demolishers painted with anime in nooks and
crannies…

it was a world where the parts worked together.

Prisma Ilya, the popular spinoff mentioned earlier, doesn’t appear in any of
these pictures. one possible reason is it’s basically lolicon. perhaps that’s
important to this store, but it’s not important in the broader sense – it got a
full-length film in public theaters. if you look at old articles about the TPP,
you’ll find japanese arguing “the definition of pornography in the legislation
is vague and poses a threat to Japan’s pop culture.”

which basically means: what’s real comes first, and what’s on the book comes
second.

and what’s real?

this is what’s real. people doing their part to bring beauty into the world is
what’s real.



i think i’m done with my tome of economics now. is it economics? i don’t think
very highly of what “economics” commonly refers to, but at least in etymology it
seems like that’d be the name. i didn’t come to japan intending to think about
such things, only about trains and land. i didn’t upload these pictures
expecting to comment on them either. i thought i had talked about the big things
i wanted to talk about in the main post. but the total number of words here now
easily exceeds the “main post”. maybe these things were important to me after
all. i do think it’s downstream of the stuff over there though. i don’t think
these things are a matter of having the right law or the right number of dollars
or the right amount of land or whatever. i think it’s a matter of aesthetics.
but i’m done now. i’ll stick to just comments.

well. maybe. i’m definitely done with economics though, or whatever it was.

i didn’t think this while standing here taking this picture, but i think i
better understand the idea of “supporting creators”. it’s a phrase used on an
american site called patreon, which many flock to because it’s the only obvious
way to monetize things available. they don’t have a local store with “As Seen On
YouTube”, or a “As Seen On Deviantart”. i didn’t connect the dots before. i
thought it, or Gumroad or Redbubble or wherever it is streamers and artists and
whoever sell stuff, was a matter of whether they were offering something worth
the price. “supporting creators” was a really odd way to phrase it.

now i see the problem. i was buying chicken nuggets.

the problem is they’re “content creators” selling “merch”.

the problem is the commodification – that is to say – universalization of
everything.



KYOTO STATION, GRAND AMPITHEATRE

 



Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments
December 22, 2018 by korezaan


BEAUTIFUL WORLD [A TRIP TO JAPAN]

TOKYO, YASUKUNI SHRINE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> What was the original objective?
> Where did I go?
> What did I find in Japan?
> What did I find having traveled?
–> What is the value in travel?
–> Planning and Decisions
–> Where can information be found?
–> What does having information mean?
> References and Other Rulesets


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL OBJECTIVE?

The main thing I wanted to see was how the Japanese use their land. I’ve heard
and seen a lot of things about Japanese zoning, public transportation, and how
everything was walkable and human-scaled, and that’s what I wanted to see for
myself.

Other than that, what I wanted changed wildly as planning progressed.

The original suggestion was to go on a bus tour. I outright rejected this idea.
Bus tour? In Japan? Why not stop only in expat enclaves while we’re at it?

I’ve never had a good experience with group guided tours. Granted, all (2) of
them have been Chinese bus tours in America, but even theoretically removing all
the Chinese and American parts I don’t like the idea of being corralled into
certain timeframes on someone else’s schedule. What if I like this place more
than that other place less? What if I don’t care about shopping for hours on end
at globalized fashion chains so you can get your commission money because the
type of people that would sign up for such tours are mentally lazy and
financially stupid? What if I don’t want to have “how many minutes did someone
else say I have left again” lurking in the back of my head? Which I don’t. I’ve
had 12 years of that already thank you. I think 20% of my life expectancy is
enough of that.

Tourist attractions are not specifically interesting, i.e., “a lot of people
have been here and want to come here” is not a good reason to care, but
everything is even more uninteresting if I don’t expend mental energy to obtain
it. As far as I’m concerned, Times Square is a place on on a bus. Times Square
is not a place in New York, or, if it is, New York isn’t a place in reality.
Guided tours are like dreams – after unending nothing, that is to say, going
past places you don’t spend a moment thinking about, places you have heard of
will magically and suddenly appear in front of you. Then it will disappear, for
another indeterminate length of time lots of nothing will happen again, and then
another thing will appear. Rinse and repeat. It will not have value when it
appears, it will not have value when it goes away; the only difference is
someone else stopped the passage of space for a few minutes so you can take some
pictures.

I wanted Japan to feel real.

So planning it myself it was. Well, myself and my sister. My mom would be
travelling with us too, but she had little input on planning, outside of some
travel agent she regularly used to book tickets and hotels, and saying how long
she was willing to go. Which was important.

Time was the greatest limiter – or rather, the greatest organizer. We started
off with a self-guided tour template of 1 week, suggesting Tokyo, Hakone, and
Kyoto. The plane tickets we had went the opposite direction, but in any case,
Hakone was fairly quickly cut out, as there was only one or two things
theoretically interesting in Hakone, and the big one – a traditional inn and
various traditional things – seemed rather expensive. Things were first blocked
out in 2~4 hour chunks with ideas from tourism sites. At some point after
deciding on hotels, we detailed it further, adding more major and minor places,
finding what bus numbers or train lines and transfers would be taken between
points (and tallying up their fares), getting a list of potential places to eat
we were certain had english menus, and eventually, discovering Google has
something currently called MyMaps (probably because Maps and Earth are now
integrated), specified the exact routes to walk the whole way, planned down to
the minute. It was no longer “Kyoto” and “Tokyo”, but “these specific places in
this specific order in this specific route in Kyoto and Tokyo”.

The number of places I wanted to specifically go were not many. Honnoji was
conveniently placed so I wanted to go there for the memes. Akihabara because I’m
a weeb. Other than that, it was more important that I saw at least one item of
each type: big train station, varied land usage, walking around places places
that were popular for non-tourist (i.e. local economic) reasons… I think that
was it. If the trip length was longer and I was alone I’d probably spend most of
my time in those, maybe some no-name cities and villages, but since I wasn’t, I
settled for a small potential set of suburb-y places and routes close to Kyoto,
taking the same importance in the schedule as the big-name attractions.


That was the original idea.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHERE DID I GO?

I planned for a lot, but got to probably less than half of it.

As sorted by names of major places. Days 1-3 in Kyoto, 4-6 in Tokyo; 2018 Nov 16
~ 22.

1 Honnoji
Nishiki Market
Potoncho Area (nothing) 2 Potoncho Area
Keage Incline
Eikando
Gion/Higashiyama
Tadasu no Mori
Nijo Castle
Arashiyama
Randen Rail Potoncho (ltd)
Keage Incline
Gion/Higashiyama
Yasaka
Honnoji
Nishiki Market 3 Nara
Kyoto Station
Fushimi-Inari
Yasaka Toufukuji
Mukaijima
Arashiyama (ltd)
Randen Rail (ltd)
Fushimi-Inari
Kyoto Station (ltd) 4 Shinkansen
Asakusa
Akihabara
Tokyo Tower Shinkansen
Asakusa
Akihabara (ltd) 5 Kyu-Furukawa
Rikugien
Ichigaya
Yasukuni
Imperial Gardens
Tokyo Station
Odaiba Akihabara (ltd)
Yasukuni
Imperial Gardens (ltd)
Tokyo Station (ltd)
Odaiba
Tokyo Tower 6 Atago
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building
Shinjuku Station
Some Cat Cafe
Harajuku/Takeshita
Shibuya Shibuya (ltd)
Akihabara (ltd)

Planned routes: [1][2][3][4][5][6]
Actual routes: [1][2][3][4][5][6]

There were a few problems executing the plan.

 * The first day was plagued with problems, one being upon landing in Osaka I’d
   been awake for about 30 hours. The other one was enough to give me what I
   think people call a breakdown, which I’ll get to later, but it was solved and
   after a night of sleep everything was okay.
 * About halfway through the second day, my feet started hurting. Near the start
   of the third day, they started killing me. The other three days were the same
   way: about one hour of alright walking, then death. This pain was probably
   also a big factor in the significant decrease in the number of pictures I
   took. In total I took 1728. Of those, 656 were taken after the third day –
   38% of the total, or, 68% less than the other half (technically more, since
   the first day didn’t start until noon, and that was before landing. 152 were
   before reaching the hotel). 68% reduction in interest is probably an accurate
   number. 68% reduction is probably also accurate about my walking speed.
 * I didn’t plan for eating time.
 * Or shopping time. I think it should be called “browsing” time, because that’s
   the real problem.
 * Or time to take pictures.
 * Because it bears reiterating: how much my feet were killing me. If you are
   looking to visit Japan, and are also an overweight American who doesn’t walk
   as a fact of life, this will probably be your biggest problem. Forget about
   saving up money for a trip. Get fit first. Or you’re going to waste a lot of
   time.

I’ve uploaded 562 of the pictures I took [1][2][3][4][5] including 92
panoramics. I’ve also uploaded 19 videos, including 30 min of Shinkansen through
Nagoya.

Other than one image at the top and one at the bottom, they will not be found in
this post. This post is not about “travel” in the current standard meaning. I’m
not particularly interested in “travel”, it’s merely something that had to be
done to achieve the objective.

I don’t have any real “travel” things to say about Japan – except about Gion,
which was amazing, and about Odaiba, which was not. I stayed at Kyoto Rich in
Kyoto and Mitsui Garden Shiodome in Tokyo. The former felt cheap, but it was
cheap, and its location was good. The latter did not feel cheap, was cheap, at
its location was similarly central. And the 72-hour Tokyo Subway Ticket (Metro
and Toei) was a real moneymaker: put 1500Y in, got 2610Y out. Probably would’ve
been more if my feet didn’t hurt. The pictures too were not about “travel”. I
have put some comments on them to help illustrate their meaning, which is the
important part.

— Having finished now, “comments” is no longer an appropriate description. This
was supposed to be the “main post”, but I suppose, just like Japan itself, I
spent more length visiting ideas that “don’t matter”. The words in the final
album alone are more than what I wrote here. Maybe I’ll put them in their own
post one day. For now, they rely on the pictures to convey their premises. It’s
related, but probably not the same topic. If you read both, which comes first is
probably not important, but it’d be best to leave the final section of this post
for last.

This post is (was) the attempt to capture the larger ideas.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHAT DID I FIND IN JAPAN?

Beauty.

Everywhere.

It is beautiful everywhere.

I had originally dropped into a bunch of places on Google streetview to try and
find specific sites that were interesting and pretty, like here’s a shrine or
park, look at how it’s surrounded by modern buildings, and planned to walk 137
meters from the station and then turn left. But I didn’t need to follow my
planned points and path to see it. It simply presented itself to me. Now, if I
wanted to see specific points, then of course I would still need to obey the
laws of physics in order to arrive within visual range.

But beauty? In Japan, you don’t need to obey the laws of physics to find beauty.

It was because beauty was everywhere that I was able to make myself put one foot
in front of the next to continue moving from point not-hotel to point not-hotel
twelve hours a day. It was because beauty was everywhere (and because my feet
were killing me) that I forgot to eat (until my feet were killing me enough that
I decided that I’d pay to sit down, and paying to sit at certain places just
happened to come with complimentary food). It was like magic… except it wasn’t
magic, because the materials and designs were obviously human. Man made this.
Man made Japan. Specifically, Japanese Man made Japan. Are the Japanese magical
beings? I was told that visiting Japan would make me realize that it’s not anime
fantasy land. And it’s true – but only about the anime part.

How did they make everything so beautiful?

I have some guesses, a few of which I’ll name, but I don’t think any of them are
sufficient – supposing a place fulfills all the requirements I specify to the
letter, it’s probably still going to be ugly. It might be pretty to someone
else, I suppose. Do you find those european replica towns in China beautiful? Is
a zoo is a budget safari? Would you visit a ski slope if it was in a hotel? You
can say yes, but I won’t.

A magical place naturally implies a magical cause: it sounds magical, but I
think the best answer to say Japan is beautiful because of the Japanese. If some
country and Japan switched populations, I imagine it’d start looking like Japan
in less than 20 years, and feeling like Japan in less than 2. It at least seems
to be plausible. Put Brits in Africa, you get a Britain (Rhodesia). Put Japanese
in an American car factory, you get Japanese cars (NUMMI).

But back to Japan. And the longer, more incomplete answers.

The term I’m familiar with is “human scale”. I think this name is the right idea
for a label from the American standpoint, but I’m going to be talking back and
forth between the denotative “human scale” and the more important thing I feel
the phrase stands for.

Japan isn’t beautiful because it’s “both traditional and modern”, it’s beautiful
because everything is in its proper size and place. Things aren’t big or new or
whatever just because they can be, they are whatever size and form serves their
purpose. This takes any number of forms, the most famous of which is that
traditional-and-modern thing, the slightly less famous being narrow buildings
and narrow streets. But it’s everywhere.

“Convenience store” in America means “the thing next to the gas station that
sells “edible” industrial waste”. In Japan I felt they were competing with
Walmart Supercenters in variety, with Starbucks in frequency, and… I don’t think
there’s an equivalent concept in America for their slot in quality. There were a
lot of things they sold for next to a dollar / ~100Y, but to say Lawson or
FamilyMart are part “dollar store” would be a grave insult. They served a
variety of needs at a convenient price and place. They slotted in where they
could; a Lawson here could be twice as large as the Lawson there. And this
concept just fractally repeats all the way up and all the way down.

In Kyoto I saw a number of buildings that had bridges across little creeks.
Creeks whose width was maybe one american car length. And these bridges were
super simple. They weren’t some over-engineered “This passes Safety and
Environmental standards and was made by an Equal-Opportunity company that
Supports Womens Rights” thing. It was “My property can only be accessed by
crossing this creek. So I need a bridge. To cross this creek”. I’m pretty sure
more than a few of those bridges would not survive a car load in an earthquake,
but who cares? And so bridges appeared. One of the things I ended up taking a
lot of pictures of were parking lots. I hate cars, and I hate parking lots, but
I had to appreciate how even parking lots had their place: Is your empty spot
big enough for two cars? Put a sign with a light on it and lay down those
contraptions, you’re open for business. Is it not big enough for two cars? Put a
vending machine on it. Is it bigger than two cars? Construction will be here
tomorrow to make something, if not a shop or other business, then a manned
parking lot, or a parking tower.

Just to give some idea on sizes, here are the numbers I was able to measure. I
probably should’ve measured more, but like with the pictures, these were
dependent on what I found different enough to notice at the time, and by the
fact it was a handheld tape measure (and by the pain in my feet).

6″ – steps height (probably in Kiyomizu-Gojo station)
8′ – ceiling (probably also in Kiyomizu-Gojo station)
6’6″ – ceiling height low end (?)
31.5″ – door width (probably hotel room)
73.5″ – door height

100″ – bridge single lane width (across the river from Kiyomizu-Gojo station)
218″ – double lane street width (across the river from Kiyomizu-Gojo station)
34″ – handrail height (probably the barriers on the street west of Shijo bridge)
15.5″ – vehicle limiter (i don’t know the proper names for these: they’re the
interlaced barriers that indicate only pedestrians are allowed. this was at
Potoncho Park. the measurement is the width between barriers.)
46″ – bridge guardrail height (probably Sanjo)
7″ – old step height (leading away from Keage incline)
5’4″ – hello kitty store entrance covers (Higashiyama)

46.5″ – pedestrian path width on a bridge (next to Toufukiji station)
7.75″ – new step height (unnamed park on Kamo River)
5’3″ – bottom of train rings height (the things you hold onto)
7′ – small inari gates inner height (at Fushimi-Inari)

21.5″ – shinkansen legroom (this measurement is from the edge of my seat at seat
level to the back of the seat in front at the same level. it is not the same
number as the number you see on airlines, which measures the distance between
the same points on two chairs.)
7′ – metro-shimbashi station ceiling height

5′ – imperial palace wall, single block height

9.75″ – step length (no idea)
7′ – tunnel height (no idea)

81″x48″ – bed size (the length at the first hotel was shorter)

Next to everything was human sized.

I remember hearing some complaint once about how portion sizes for Japanese food
are small. I didn’t feel this way (but I also don’t get Big Gulps). Granted, I
ate mostly like a commoner, but given commoner food, I felt it was too large for
a meal when I did ask for bigger portions. I ate slightly more expensive than
commoner twice, once for something like 2200 and the other for… 2800? And it was
like they stopped adding volume at the correct point and then just changed out
the remaining cost for better materials. Which seems like the right approach.
You can’t eat more than a certain amount anyways (Japan does have buffets, but
all prices come with time limits). My favorite meals were about 100 –
convenience store onigiris, rice balls wrapped in seaweed with a few flavory
goodies inside. They fit in the palm of my hand. Turns out that’s about how much
I need to not feel hungry. And I’m an overweight American, so it’s probably a
meal for a human at a proper size.

The few things in Japan I didn’t like were all because they were improperly
sized.

– There’s a stretch of about 300 meters between the Hijiri and Shohei bridges,
north of the Kanda river and east of JR-Akihabara Station, that I felt bad
walking up.

I think it’s because it’s a single row of short and narrow not particularly
impressive buildings, on a road with a narrower than average sidewalk (and
fairly wide bushes), backdropped/shadowed by a wide skyscraper.

– The entirety of Odaiba.

The whole place felt like it was designed by an American. Wide roads, giant
parking lots, and the only streets in Japan I found trash on.

I had gotten off at the Fune-no-Kagakukan stop for the Sora Yori memes, then
after seeing the ship walked to Diver City. That first ~200m walk was terrible.
Nothing but a wall of bush on my right, and a road and elevated busway on my
left (Yurikamome is not a train). It had its separated pedestrian and cycleways,
but I didn’t care. No one was there, and nothing was interesting. Still better
than a walk in American suburbia, but that’s not a very high standard. Then I
crossed the street and walked another ~550m, most of it next to a parking lot. A
giant, American-sized parking lot. That I couldn’t cut through because they were
walled because free parking doesn’t exist in Japan. Which is fine enough I
suppose, it’s not like it would’ve been better if I could.

Diver City was just a mall. Like, an American mall. The spacings and everything.
The arcade level was not worth coming here instead of Akihabara (unless you
choose a hotel here, which I don’t recommend), though it was interesting seeing
random candy bars and food in UFO machines I suppose. There’s a giant Gundam
outside and a level of the building just for gundam inside, but I don’t
particularly care for gundams. Other than that it’s a mall. Clothes and more
clothes everywhere. Maybe it’s good clothes? Even if I was interested in
clothes, I can’t imagine I’d do it here.

The one good thing here was the karaage. I didn’t know it was possible that
fried chicken could be fit for human consumption, but there go the Japanese,
proving me wrong again, by turning every conceivable thing into a delicacy.

Except, apparently, Odaiba. This place sucks. Skyscrapers and landscrapers and
trash on wide empty streets: everything you could possibly want to piss a
pedestrian off. It really is as if it was designed by an American. There’s even
a replica Statue of Liberty.

God bless America. I mean, Odaiba.

– Arashiyama. But this one’s probably fixable by not going there early Sunday
afternoon.

“Crowded” means different things to different people, two common ones are lack
of personal space and people getting in pictures. I didn’t mind these so I
thought crowding was alright, but it turns out it isn’t – depending on what the
place is. It’s a matter of having the appropriate people density. Higashiyama
being crowded was fine. Arashiyama’s bridge being crowded, not so much. The
Grand Staircase at Kyoto Station felt a lot more comfortable during the best
thing I’ve seen in a very long time, than the same place the next morning before
anyone had woken up. Taking Tokyo trains during off hours was alright, but
seeing how many people can really fit into a single car during the morning rush
hour without any particular discomfort? That was beautiful. Not the kind of
beautiful you can take a picture of. Not that it’s not allowed; you simply won’t
be able to do it.

– Kansai and Narita airports. I mean, they’re not the worst (hi Houston). Given
that even the Japanese don’t have likable airports, it could be that it’s just
impossible to make such things. But, for sake of completeness, I mention that
here. You do need to follow the laws of physics to at least escape the airport
before you can find beauty.

Everything else was properly sized. And because everything was properly sized,
everything could be integrated and arranged into a social order.

Order: that was my feeling in Japan.

Beauty is order, order beauty, that is all I know on this earth, and all I need
to know.

Most things (outside of the anime girls) weren’t particularly pretty. But they
didn’t have to be. Most were probably ugly things if looked at alone, but they
fit in with everything else, at their proper size, with proper boundaries – if I
had to tally up all my pictures by type, gates would rank at the top – and the
rest was taken care of… by everyone and everything else doing the same thing.
Almost none of it was done for artistic reasons, too, There were some potted
plants and a shrine here and the very occasional anime girl there, but most of
it was just economic (i.e. making money) usage of space. An advertisement. A
restaurant menu. A door. A vending machine. A coin locker. A parked bike. A
parked car. I think it’s appropriate to call this beautiful in the usual sense
of the word, but also because I think it’s a beautiful sounding word to apply to
the concept that english doesn’t have a word for, the opposite of “boring”
(“interesting” has been compromised), which is almost always the real problem
with “ugly” buildings. I don’t think I ever saw anything one would normally call
“art” on any building. I did see anime girls, but they were there because they
were advertisements in Akihabara, not because it was an art piece. Not because
the building was too big and they needed to put something else on it to make it
less ugly. Buildings were just the size they needed to be.

Granted, I didn’t go into any skyscraper districts. But if you aren’t up to
speed yet: Japan isn’t made of skyscraper districts. It’s not “overpopulated” or
“hyperdense”. It’s pretty easy, or maybe more accurately, you have to put some
effort in to get specifically to the skyscraper districts or other boring
places. I think Akihabara has quite a few buildings that would classify as
skyscrapers, but I never noticed such a fact while I was walking around in it.
There was simply an endless variety of shapes and sizes everywhere I could
possibly imagine to look – both in weeb heaven land, and (nearly) everywhere
else.

I wonder if order is the way to build a beautiful city. It at least seems to be
the case.

I find Las Vegas and Dubai ugly. Places like these are terrible because there’s
only one strip where all the interest is, it’s all at the wrong size and
frequency, and the moment you step out of that it’s a wasteland. I don’t care
how fancy your light shows are, I don’t care about five stars this or millions
of people have been to that, give me some lively streets with real people where
I can wander around – again for the slow: that means on foot – stop at any time,
any random place, and still be able to see nice things, and maybe, even get nice
food. All the interesting non-point places I’ve found in Japan are also strips:
Nishiki Market, Akihabara, etc. Suppose none of these compare, and Vegas or
Dubai are better. The problem is, around Vegas and Dubai, are… Vegas and Dubai.

Around Nishiki is Kyoto, and around Akihabara is Tokyo.

It’s like buying a home. You’re not buying “a” ‘house’: you’re buying the
neighborhood, you’re buying the city, you’re buying the local politics and
economy. Now, given that, is it more important that beauty is on your house? Or
is it more important beauty is on all that other stuff? Model it as a woman: big
tits, or manages everything about home life well?

In America, it’s the former.

Americans have some pretty funny ideas, which I’ve ranted on at length before so
I don’t intend to retread everything, but I’ll note a few things just to provide
contrast.

Using the big keywords I’ve said here it’s very easy to journalist your way into
a negative summary of Japan fitting into existing American ideas. If there’s
parking lots everywhere and everything takes every possible open space at every
size, then it must be extremely crowded, we’re America we have a lot of space,
we don’t need to do that. If everyone follows everyone else and makes buildings
that are somewhat boring and don’t stick out too much, then it must be because
everyone is a drone, we’re America land of the free, we’re individuals we won’t
do that. And so on and so on. I will respond to just these two, and indicate a
pattern between them. I will also suggest that this pattern is the American
mindset, and a countering pattern that appears to me to be the mindset of the
Japanese.

“Japan is small and America has a lot of space.”

“[A]s if all the acreage in, say, Wyoming makes an ounce of a difference to
people trying to live and work in, say, Boston. Or for that matter, all the
acreage in WESTERN MASS vis-a-vis the people trying to live and work in Boston.”

That America the nation-state has political boundaries that are large is utterly
inconsequential to land usage of cities. There’s a joke around political circles
that Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. This is alluding to the
idea that outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia is a big country with
next to no one in it. It’s a true idea. It’s also true of every country on the
planet except for Singapore, the Vatican, Monaco, Lichtenstein, depending on
your definitions Macau and Hong Kong, and a few other city-states I might have
forgotten about. Think about any “crowded” country in your mind, go look at it
on google maps, you have free satellite view of anywhere on the planet (did I
mention it’s free?), no excuses (if you haven’t looked around Las Vegas or Dubai
before, now would be the time to do that too). You’ll find there’s a lot of
space everywhere, and most cities aren’t that crowded outside of a small area.
India, it’s a whole lot of farmland. Bangladesh, same thing. China, China
doesn’t even exist outside its eastern plain. And what is America? America is
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington,
Miami, Atlanta, and Houston. Add or change the list if you like. That’s 10
items. Suppose I was wrong by half there’s 20. 20 cities. Over a lot of space.
You know what that makes America?

That’s right: A corncob stand masquerading as a country.

If we’re looking at just the cities, everything is too large. American highways
are too large. American suburbs are too large. American houses are too large.
Big Gulps are too large. Everything is too large – or nonexistent, because it’s
“go big or go home”, and “or” means both. So we get 1) really big things, and 2)
nothing. Strip malls, parking lots, skyscrapers. Endless fields of single-family
homes. Nothing larger, nothing smaller. Everyone has to get in their car to go
to the Supercenter. No, that’s not entirely correct: they go to the parking lot
at the Supercenter. Not a Japanese parking lot. An American parking lot. From
one vast desert to the next.

Japanese cities are interesting from large scale to small. In Japanese art,
anime, and movies, they straight up lift scenes and places from real life Japan.
And why not? This also explains how this place churns out so much good art. The
modernists on staring into blank pages being inspirational were wrong; you need
to have seen something to draw it. So if you’re constantly surrounded in beauty,
it’s going to be much easier to create it. Or just copy. And why not?

American cities are the interior of one car and the rear end of the next.

That’s what’s shown and that’s what’s remembered, because that’s more real and
more beautiful than what is actually out there.

The other argument is that “America is sparsely populated”. Which in context of
the other one makes it hard to keep a straight face. I understand why these
lines are said: it’s status signalling. Americans all learned in elementary
school the narrative of Manifest Destiny: America the Beautiful for Spacious
Skies something Amber Waves of Grain or other. Which is fine and all, if you
realize that’s what you’re doing. But those ideas are why America is actually
for Spacious Cars and Black Plains of Boring, why your commute is 90-120 minutes
a day one way, and why it’s not even constantly moving at any predictable speed:
First, build big and far apart because there’s a lot of space. Second, say any
suggested improvements can’t work because everything is too spread out. Then,
say things don’t have to be close together because there’s a lot of space…

Ideas have consequences. If you think Las Vegas / Dubai is the correct model,
one where people go from oasis (home) to desert (everything else) to oasis
(supercenter), that’s fine.

I don’t think anyone who’s thought it through actually agrees with that.

“Japanese are mindless collectivists and Americans are innovative
individualists.”

One of the big narratives about Japan is it’s always pushing the
state-of-the-art on automation.

This was one that I found to be completely wrong. Beyond a doubt. Whether
Japanese universities and companies at the top when sorted by automation is
completely inconsequential. I’m commenting on daily life and culture as I was
able to see it on the streets, and my thrust is we know for sure that’s the real
Japan, and whatever things up in the clouds they’re doing, it’s based on and a
result of the stuff right in front of us. People have a tendency to map what
they know onto what they don’t know, they hear Japan makes the highest tech,
that must mean the rest of it is also higher-tech, and this isn’t helped by
journalists or their imitators. “Japan is super automated” in the American
understanding is not just false, but wrong, actively wrong, like you have to
make up shit and enthusiastically remove what’s in front of your face in order
for the image to be true.

Rather than pushing automation, what I saw suggested Japan actively attempts to
stick a person into every possible place where there might be public conflict.
So many that it’s as if they only stopped sticking more people in places because
they couldn’t find more people.

I was in Akihabara and noticed there were four cops standing around, hmm wonder
what they’re doing, but wasn’t particularly interested so I was going to walk
past – but then they stopped me. And everyone else. All four of them got in some
formation.

Then a car appears out of nowhere, disappears onto the street. They all say
something, bow, step aside, and pedestrian traffic resumed.

I should’ve went into the store and bought something right there. That was a
show.

It was the entrance to a parking lot in the middle of a big building, Yodobaishi
Camera (sells discount electronics). Maybe those four had some other purpose too
but their main job, as far as I could tell, was just to prevent people from
getting hit. Four men. I’m going to say it again because it was just so amazing
to me: Four men. Four men, hired for purpose of making sure no one got hit. That
was in the late afternoon so there were a lot more people, but you can drop into
google maps and see for yourself what it looks like in the middle of the day.
They’re still there. Three rather than four, but still there. Standing at
attention.

There’s probably a better way to phrase it than “Japan is designed around paying
attention”. Both automation and attention at least in their Japanese and
American iterations both could easily be said to represent the other way. In a
sense, the pedestrians’ and driver’s collision detection is “automated” by those
men. In another sense, if the men were removed, then the parking entrance would
be designed around “attention” because if you don’t pay it, you’re screwed. It
is my intuition and choice to map the Japanese way onto “attention” and the
American way onto “automation”. There is an upper limit on what you can pay
attention to, so you have to pick and choose what’s important to you. Detailed
in obverse: what do you want other people to pay attention to with regards to
you?

A matter of what decisions are important: Do you want drivers to have to stop
and wait for an indeterminate period of time before they can enter/exit your
building, and pedestrians to watch out so they don’t get maimed? Or do you want
to put uniformed people there to take care of that decision they don’t care for,
for them, and bow after their task is complete?

I can tell you I wouldn’t have applauded for a convex mirror.

Not that there weren’t any convex mirrors. There were. And those too were in
much higher frequency than I expected. Mirrors, signs, attendants, so many
things were everywhere for the purpose of ensuring quick and clean expected
results for the public in such excessive amounts I was beginning to suspect the
Japanese Department of Transportation must be the most powerful arm of the
government. Then I noticed another extension: convenience stores. Can you
imagine one of those giant waist-sized copy machines? In a convenience store?
Well they had it. Unmanned. Right next to the porn mags and microwavable meals.
Which they will ask you if you want it microwaved for you. They had that right
there too.

And everywhere I looked the principle continued. I haven’t seen the Energizer
bunny in twenty years, and now I know where he went. He’s here. Running Japan.

Even the famous meal ticket machines struck me in the same way. After seeing a
few, it was obvious its primary purpose was a matter of removing potential money
conflicts. The cook/waiter doesn’t need to handle the money, only the meal. And
if money can neither be swiped by the employee nor argued with by the customer,
then you don’t need a manager on site – or if there is one, his meaning is
different.

The American idea of automation, on the other hand, is specifically about
reducing the number of people. Nevermind whether the public is satisfied with
it, just reduce the number of people. The current popular example is
self-checkout machines. No one likes them. No one. You are going to get
“Unexpected item in the bagging area. Please remove item”, and you are going to
stand and wait for the single employee assigned there to get to you, after he
gets through the other five machines having the same problem. But it’s good,
because it’s automated. Self-driving cars are killing people, and we’re
“debating ethics” like “should a car kill pedestrians or its passengers”, rather
than suing the company, or banning the technology, or reducing their maximum
speed, or hitting the brakes. Or going back to drivers. It’s good, because it’s
automated. The real problem is that the technology is just a little imperfect
today. This is the future. This is the march towards enlightenment.

The reason why I map the American way onto “automation” is because I doubt
Americans think. Thinking itself is treated as a sin. Americans mechanically
seek automation because they mentally seek the reduction of syllogisms to
points. Preferably, to a single objective point: one True narrative to rule to
them all. Are the Japanese “collectivist”? Perhaps. But if I were to choose
either Americans or the Japanese to call “automatons”, the Japanese would not be
it.

In writing this I had to stop for two days because a neighbor’s dog was yelping
at a rate of about once a second for a length of six hours and driving me
insane. When I try to talk to them, they pretend they’re not home. When I talk
to the police, they tell me a complaint is not real until I get five neighboring
homeowner signatures. When I talk to my family, they tell me people have a right
to raise dogs. These answers – don’t change the fact that there’s sound
pollution emanating from that dog, and it’s been happening for the past five
years. When I look at what others have said about similar situations, people
have responded from “just live with it”, to “throw poisoned meat over the
fence”, to “send endless legal paperwork at them”, to “spend tens of thousands
of dollars to soundproof your room”, to “buy super bright lights and a big
amplifier and send it right back at em”.

In short, they said: “You go do something about it”.

Or as I phrased it last time: “Fuck you, got mine”.

I even read one comment saying something like this was a good thing:

“I’m surrounded by neighbors with barking dogs and the sound of gunshots. I’ve
never been a big fan of the wanna-be dictators that live in cities so it
actually brings pleasure to my ears to hear the report of liberty ringing
through the woods and my fellow freedom loving country dwellers don’t mind it
either.”

Maybe I didn’t go into the Japanese countryside enough, but it was quiet. That
stereotype was on the money. Everywhere I went was quiet. People were quiet.
Cars were quiet. Toilets flushing were quiet. Even those hot air driers you
stick your hands in were quiet. The loudest things were trains (if you weren’t
inside them) (correction: arcades were the loudest), but both rails and highways
had sound walls on them. Anywhere they were close to housing, soundwalls. Miles
and miles and miles of soundwalls and more soundwalls. It is difficult to
imagine a Japanese neighborhood ever having a noise problem, first because
probably no one makes much noise to begin with, and if they did, they’d be
cooperative and come to some agreement, and if they weren’t, the cops would come
and help work something out. “Help” not being sarcastic. Cops are everywhere in
Japan, by the way. And these aren’t American cops. There’s no equivalent
American concept for them. I would maybe compare them to class leaders, but that
only makes sense if you’re a weeb; class leader also has no equivalent American
concept. I would also maybe compare them to having a big brother, but “Big
Brother” also has absolutely nothing to do with how Japanese police integrate
into their social fabric. I would know. I saw people casually walk up to talk to
Japanese cops. And Japanese cops casually walked up to talk to me. (That story
is in the panoramics.)

The Japanese actually have a social fabric. That doesn’t exist in America,
because regardless of how many “community center”s you build, everyone’s
attitude is “fuck you, got mine”. No matter what kinds of things I or the police
can do about that neighbor’s dog, it’s their dog. That’s not a statement of
legal rights, that’s a statement of ontology. A court order means nothing if
that person doesn’t care to do it. The law doesn’t protect people, people
protect the law. The Japanese people protect the law. The American people say
“fuck you, got mine”.

Ideas have consequences. Everyone knows America makes crap cars, and that’s
because everyone making those cars only pays attention to their own little
bubble and exercises whatever arbitrary authority over others the piece of paper
says they have, fuck if there’s consequences, “fuck you, got mine”. Change the
approach, change the consequences.

Earlier I talked about a Japanese car factory in America – it was new Toyota
management over what a recently closed GM plant manned by, as the union phrased
it, “the worst workforce in the automobile industry”. The day it re-opened, the
world’s best cars were coming down the line. And it wasn’t because of some fancy
automation. Take it from the workers themselves. Turns out you need people to
make cars, and human relationship structures are also a technology. One of the
things they did was instantly reduce total man-hours to produce a car by half.
They achieved this because Japanese managers decided the line will be stopped
any time anyone – any line worker – thinks there’s a problem. Turns out stopping
the line for something minor when it appears is cheaper than finding out after
the fact and having to undo, and then redo, everything that’s piled on top
later.

Just like how it’s cheaper for a neighborhood for an owner to pay attention and
train their dog than a neighbor buy soundproofing materials, or big speakers and
bright lights. “You can’t say that, that’s their dog!” Yes. It is their dog.
That’s the point.

Japanese pay attention to their place in the social fabric to achieve desired
consequences.
Americans talk about freedom and innovation.

Japanese make cars people want.
Americans talk about how scrappy tinkerers in Stanford garages made DARPA
self-driving cars.

People tour Japanese tourist attractions, cities, suburbs, and charming rural
villages.

People tour American tourist attractions, not the cities, definitely not the
suburbs, and not rural villages, not because they’re not charming, but because
they don’t exist.

Ideas have consequences. Change the approach, change the consequences.

Perhaps the overarching idea is manners.

There was a lot of manners everywhere. The most obvious ones being bowing and
uniforms, some less obvious ones being quietness and a certain simplicity and
cleanliness in dress, and not obvious at all if you don’t understand the
language, how many politeness suffixes there are on every word public attendants
say. Somewhere along the way occurred to me it wasn’t a coincidence that Japan
is both a land of politeness and a land of proper and beautiful walls and gates.
Walls and gates… are just the building versions of manners. Or more
illustriously:

Manners are just the human behavior version of walls and gates.

When you encounter a building or a person, you basically have no idea what’s
going on inside it. If that building is properly defined though, with a slight
bit of flourish on its entrance, you’ll feel it’s slightly more important –
because it shows it understands its borders with its neighbors, and that it
treats the people who enter it with respect. If a person is properly defined,
with a slight bit of flourish where it’s important, say, a clean blue suit, with
white-gloved hands, then you’re more likely to go to such a stranger to ask for
help, and, finishing with a bow, feel slightly better going off about your day.

Whatever is going on inside your house or your head, how you present is how
others will treat you and interact with you. How you present yourself is what
your “manners” are.

A lot of American political activism, downstream of which is the general
culture, has the central idea of “Don’t judge me by my looks”. Well what else
are you giving people to judge you on? They’re not going to read your book. “You
can’t judge me” Sure I can. I have to know how to interact with you. “You don’t
know anything about me” I know at least that your gate is ugly and your walls
are crumbling. There’s certain types of things I can reasonably be sure are true
from those facts, just as sure as I can be that a tree fallen in a forest at
some point made a sound. “I’m trying to raise awareness” Yeah. You’re doing that
alright.

“I do what I want!”

Does such an idea lead to a better world? Ideas have consequences.

The American phrasing for Japanese dress code is “conservative”, and in terms of
the physical references, it’s pretty accurate. In Tokyo it was more or less a
sea of black suits. In Kyoto there were quite a number of kimonos instead. But
“conservative” (in Americanese) more generally means “old fashioned”, as in
“done because it’s always been done this way”, and I’m not sure that’s so true.
It may be true at the individual scale, like parents telling kids what to do,
but I doubt that’s what’s happening on a broader scale. I don’t think it’s the
general principle. It does not seem to be possible to build and maintain society
so beautiful and so clean and so peaceful with just the idea, “because it’s
always been done this way”.

Proper manners have an importance for the person doing it. The act of performing
a ritual reinforces its mental importance. I once had, and this is not normal, a
co-worker who made sure to say “good morning”, every day, to everyone, the first
time he saw them that day. I didn’t understand it then, even when reciprocating
the gesture, even when he left and it didn’t happen anymore. I lacked (the
ability to construct) a frame of reference on what a world built on that
principle would mean. But now I have an idea. “In Japan not saying grace before
eating something is considered the absolute pits of rudeness and sure sign of
retarded manners.” It’s technically not ‘grace’ because it’s not the Christian
God, it’s saying thanks to the people who worked to prepare the food. But
technically, that’s as unheard as praying to a god, because most of the people
who prepared that food aren’t around, and actually no one is around if you’re
eating alone and the waiter has left the table. Yet it happens. Not because of
materialism vs spiritualism, but because the act of doing it reinforces its
mental importance.

What would it mean if everyone and everyones’ behaviors had proper boundaries?
What would it mean if everyone’s interactions with each other were properly
defined? What would it mean if people paid attention to others, and saw that
everyone has their share in shaping what the world will look like?

What would such a world look like?

Japan gave me some ideas.

No, that’s not accurate.

A week in Japan induced me to ask, “What would such a world look like?”.

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WHAT DID I FIND HAVING TRAVELLED?

WHAT IS THE VALUE IN TRAVEL?

I believe it is to adjust your senses.

I consider this the first real time I’ve been to another place. In all the other
times, it was basically a dream. I had no say in anything, and nothing affected
me. The only decisions available were to follow or not follow the tour group
(whether this be a Chinese bus tour or family), to get on or not get on the
vehicle in time, and to wake up or not wake up on time. In travel as well as
other domains, I’ve found where you make decisions is where you pay attention is
what becomes important is what you remember. This time, it was somewhere I
wanted to go. Nevermind that “it’s the land of trains and anime!!!” isn’t a very
good reason, it’s my reason, which means it’s better than someone else’s reason.
That’s how decisions work. So I wanted to make all the decisions I could come up
with.

At the beginning I said my interest was “how the Japanese use their land”, but
what I really wanted to see was how they live. To fully see how another people
live is probably an impossible task, though you can presumably get pretty close
by speaking their language and working in their economy for a few decades. Short
of such an intensive and extensive ethnography, I was content to wander about
the places just slightly more mundane than specifically designed tourist
attractions. I have a few opinions on the tourist attractions, which I list in
the albums, but most of them were not particularly here nor there.

In the end, the parts of Japan I enjoyed the most were watching people do things
and inspecting places designed for more reasons than just mine. How do these
foreign people live their daily lives? Well, here’s at least how they live some
of their public parts of it.

PLANNING AND DECISIONS

The most important purpose the tourist attractions served was anchoring during
the planning phase – which turned out to be fairly different from what I
imagined before I did it, and doing it showed me why it is travel agents and
tour guides exist. That stuff takes time. A lot of time. I can understand why
some people don’t want to do it (though I think it also entirely defeats the
purpose of travel). There were some decisions too, though not so much on
decisions between tourist attractions. It’s comparing this (web)page to that
(web)page: hard enough telling which part is better even with detailed
specsheets, telling worthiness of tourist attractions based off of fuzzy
language written by people you don’t know is intractable. Hiring people who have
(ostensibly) been to places – tour guides and travel agents – would have a much
better idea. (No surprise, those types are the ones writing these (web)pages.)
Taking it a step further, such people would have been much more important before
the internet. In such times, where else would you get a map? How would you read
the signs? I imagine if I had unlimited money and power, a personal travel guide
would be ideal. Someone who knows all the stuff, but is at my beck and call
rather than the other way around.

The other decision was only slightly less intractable: how much resolution
should the planning have? “Kyoto then Tokyo” was obviously not good enough, but
where should the detail stop? I imagine this one isn’t as difficult if you’ve
travelled before and have a sense for this sort of thing, but I hadn’t a clue.
It might also be something approaching personality: I hate not having any ideas,
so I planned things down to the minute and meter – not so much so there was a
plan to follow to the letter, but to have a letter to return to in case things
go wrong. This cost a lot more time, but I felt better having done it.

When did I stop? When I burned out.

That being said, a lot of planning ended up being next to superfluous. Like
looking for restaurants: I was worried about places not having english menus,
but this is basically not a concern. They’re fairly common. Some will even
indicate it on a sign outside. At first I was using japan-guide.com and similar,
but they all listed the super high class exorbitant stuff which I didn’t care
for. Then I used tabelog, something the Japanese actually use, but it turns out
it’s not particularly important to the Japanese whether a place does or doesn’t
have an english menu, so they don’t go and mark that detail on a review site.
Then by the time I got there, I magically found myself magically okay with
places not having english. I wasn’t a food tourist. I had some plans to be one,
but because beauty was everywhere, lines at a lot of places were long, and my
feet hurt, I skipped meals or ate at convenience (stores).

This extremely detailed planning, or rather, the expectation of having an
extremely detailed plan, ran into two major problems:

 * I didn’t have a specific spot to get a SIM card.
 * “Don’t travel with family”.

These appeared at the same time at the very beginning after something like 16
hours of plane and transfer and 30 hours of being awake, which gave me what I
think people called a breakdown.

The former was an oversight based on how exceedingly simple and cheap it was to
do in Hong Kong. A little 7-11 or something right at the exit of customs had SIM
cards for like 10 USD for 7D unlimited calls/text/data. I was caught by surprise
at KIX when mom said “don’t get it here, it’s cheaper in the city”. So I’m like,
okay mom. Of course, it wasn’t okay. Because now you don’t know where to go to
get a SIM card. They aren’t just lying around on the streets “in the city”. We
take the limo bus to Kyoto station, and wander around the south side until we
find some convenience-looking stores, one (or two?) of which had english
instructions on laminated sheets on their SIM cards for sale. They were
something like 4500Y minimum for 30D, 1.5GB data, no calls no text. Which seemed
like a bad joke. Then we take a taxi to our hotel, except the taxi didn’t drop
us off at the literal doorstep, I don’t have a map because I was expecting to
have google the whole time, and neither of them have maps of sufficient size or
detail either, so we walk around like headless chickens for an hour until one
stranger responded to mom’s asking random people for directions with a google
maps search and tells us we had walked in the wrong direction. Turns out the
taxi dropped us off about 300m from the hotel, and we had extended that distance
by about 200m. Somewhere along those 500m we stop by a FamilyMart, which may or
may not have had a SIM card. I say “may or may not” because there were
definitely things labelled “phone”, but none of them had instructions were in
english – which is pretty important to someone who can only read english (“I
know my kana and a few kanji” = “can only read english”). I was delirious at
this point, but my sister saved the day by searching up “kyoto sim card” or
something on google using the hotel wifi, said we could get it at a BIC Camera
next to Kyoto Station, and so that’s where we went and that’s what we got. Or
rather, that’s what I got. Apparently neither of them found such a thing was all
that important. I was ready to shell out the 4500 at that point, but BIC Camera
had the same offering for 2000, so 2000 it was. Looking it up now, apparently
KIX has SIM cards for around 4000. In retrospect, I should’ve just paid the 2000
extra and gotten that half a day of time back. 20 USD for a few hours of time
and peace of mind? Next you’ll tell me you have a deal for self enlightenment.

(There’s a lot of signs saying “free wifi” everywhere, but I don’t trust such
things (in America), one because it’s unreliable reception, two because my main
usage would be GPS which means moving around. My sister said she had success
with ward/station wifi in Kyoto and Nara, but in every Tokyo attempt they
required at least an email, and her yahoo email gave some consistent error
message. Free wifi on the limo bus also required some similar details. On the
same topic: the SIM card asked for passport details.)

“Don’t travel with family” I’ve heard now and again, so it seems to be some sort
of idiom. Having done it now I have some ideas as to why it is. It doesn’t have
to be true, but some things will make it more true than not. I think it comes
down again to decisions, but since I’ve been talking about decisions a lot
already I’ll use a slightly different angle.

The problem with travelling with family is the former is unknown unknowns and
the latter is set knowns. Under normal conditions, when this or that happens,
this or that person takes care of this or that part. In travel, any number of
things can change, most importantly the things you didn’t even consider, and
it’s now unclear who can do or who is responsible for what. When mom contradicts
me, usually she knows both what I want and what she’s talking about. But
generally she only deals with and I only consult her on certain things. SIM card
acquirement methods in foreign countries not being one of them. And if it’s on a
tight timeline even the decision of whether to stay in this area for a little
longer or not can be a strain. Everyone has different interests, and different
ways to approach unknowns – how do you deal with those differences in your
family? What that dynamic is determines how much you will enjoy what level of
travelling with them, or any arbitrary thing with any arbitrary group. Between
getting off the limo bus and getting the SIM card four hours later I blamed mom
in a variety of colorful ways for preventing us from having a navi, and
somewhere in there she said “You could’ve not listened to me”. Which at the time
just made my mouth even more colorful. But finally getting sleep after 40 hours
of being awake, and then running into coordination problems again that first
real day, I decided to do just that afterwards. Our interests didn’t correspond
to begin with. She found Gion “boring, when are we going to see the actual
stuff” when I found every step I took there much more interesting than the
“actual stuff” we later arrived at. She later spent an hour in a Shinjuku cat
cafe. I was happily wandering my way from Shinsen to Shibuya doing “nothing”.
Does everything need to happen together with family? Is it a magic word? Good
fences (and good gates and good manners) make good neighbors; everyone prefers
cubicles over open offices; rooms have walls for a reason. I never had trouble
with family on all those other trips because I knew who was in charge and I was
fully satisfied – or at least, not unsatisfied enough to conceptualize it –
being pulled along doing whatever it was the others were doing. This time, that
was not the case.

Next time I go somewhere I’m going to print out some maps beforehand. Yes it’s
more convenient if everything is on the phone, even more convenient if it’s on
the cloud, but I think having a lower level tech backup is good (google does not
offer downloadable/offline maps in Japan). Having thought about it beforehand is
also a type of backup, and regardless of how superfluous a lot of it turned out,
I’m glad I did that: “you fall to the level of your training”. I was able to
quickly rearrange the order of things because I didn’t need to look details up
again, which would’ve taken longer because mobile is not the same as a desktop.
And of course, I had an idea on what places of interest existed. No tourist
booklet could have given me ideas on the visual value of what this or that
non-tourist area would be.

I think I’d like a lower level backup of everything, but that’s probably not
feasible at some point. The lower level of GPS is just asking for directions.
Rather than cross-referencing three paper schedules you should just take a taxi,
which mom is fond of, but actively exited my considerations. Similarly, there’s
an upper limit to how many and what kinds of decisions you can make. Taking a
train is more real than taking a taxi, but only in that 1) regular people use
trains more than taxis and 2) trains have stations, which in Japan are
absolutely charming. The actual ride of a train and taxi have basically the same
decision weight.

Unless you take a taxi that drops you off somewhere you didn’t tell it to.

WHERE CAN INFORMATION BE FOUND?

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems like the internet has severely warped my
understanding of where things can be found. I thought I had understood the
concept with regards to driving and GPS – I look at the map beforehand, and I
try to achieve what I visualize in my mind, only consulting the phone if I start
doubting the correlation between what I see and that image. It was obvious to me
that following a disembodied voice by the nose that only tells you what to do 15
or 30 seconds ahead of time would paint a similarly disintegrated world. But the
problem was much bigger than that.

In Kyoto Station there was a visitor information center or some similar name.
Mom wanted to go take a look and pick up some brochures and booklets, so I
follow her in, but I was thinking: gee, what a fancy and pointless display. It’s
not like people are going to come here and then plan their trip.

And then I thought – where else would they put it?

How much sooner could the City of Kyoto and the Japan National Tourism
Organization get that information sooner into the hands of those who would be
interested, by what methods could they have done it, and in what forms could it
possibly take?

Sure it’d be better if you knew beforehand, but that’s not what visitor centers
are for. If you’re looking for information beforehand, maybe the Japanese
Embassy in your country has something. But you’d still have to travel to the
Embassy, which they probably don’t have in your specific city (I don’t know
anything about embassies). Other than that, where would it be? Who would spend
their time and/or land providing such a service? And it is a service. We refer
to searching on the internet as “looking up”, as if the man in the sky himself
is handing us an apple – and that’s exactly right. What’s not right is thinking
that’s how information works. The Google god hands you an apple, but that’s
dependent on what Google will give you, and there are things it won’t, either
because it chooses not to, or because it doesn’t have it (or because it’s on
page 10 and you don’t look past page 2). You can use japan-guide.com or anywhere
else, but their information is also limited. Their scope is not infinite, and
the real thing is. An obvious limit: how are these sites funded? They are funded
somehow. Perhaps that’s why all the restaurants in the first place I looked were
of the exorbitant type?

One of the reasons I told myself I didn’t like American cities is because it’s
not clear where anything is. Everything is too spread out, everything’s spread
out, if a place doesn’t have one of those hundred-foot-tall towers with a huge
logo on it, you won’t know it’s there. And in a sense that’s true. Tokyo was
marvelous with sticking huge maps (with english!!) on what seemed like every
other street corner (infinite budget: how do you do that for cars?). But it’s
still not holy revelation when everything is close together. You still have to
find one and walk to it.

There’s always some work/cost involved.

And there’s always the possibility that amount is too high.

This other example is even sillier than the last one: I started with the idea
that I could shop around to save money on souvenirs. Now, this wasn’t entirely
untrue, but it was false. How much could you possibly save? These sorts of
things are usually discussed between the sellers beforehand, and even if the
cost was a big difference, you are probably not going to be the one to exploit
it. There were differences, but I don’t think I saw any more than 300Y
difference for the same >2500Y item in the same district. And if it’s not in the
same district, or if the more recent district simply doesn’t have the thing you
wanted: are you going to go all the way back to the other one? Is this what you
want to be spending your time on? How many days are you here? Oh yeah, remember
this is all while your feet hurt.

Related is the concept of a “tourist trap”. At least in Japan, I feel a more
appropriate wording is “tourist nest”. Here is an area where you can see what
you came to see, buy things you’d expected to buy, and there’s plenty of things
in english and people who can speak english. Sure there’s some other district
where you can get things for cheaper, or see something interesting that most
people don’t see. But there will be less english. And the people there won’t be
prepared to handle you. Imagine being randomly placed in an airport with no
signs and no maps, no attendants and no telephone booths. With videogames as a
metaphor instead: imagine no minimap. In the same sense, it’s like being
deployed at an embassy or a(n American) military base. Yeah you’re in another
country. But your actions mean very different things when you’re inside versus
when you’re out. Or in a much darker sense, human trafficking. You’re in a
foreign country, but no one knows you, you can’t communicate with anyone, and
you have no papers. After escaping, finding your way to the nearest “tourist
trap” is probably your best bet. But how will you know where that is? In a much
more mundane example, suppose you live near a big city and some friends visit
you and ask you to show them around or introduce them to some famous places. If
you didn’t have the internet and weren’t a tour guide or taxi driver by
profession: how would you do that?

The difference in mapping of what physically exists versus what goes on in
people’s heads is significant. And it seems like the difference is getting
larger – that or something related, like peoples’ ability to cross or even
recognize that gap is rapidly diminishing.

WHAT DOES HAVING INFORMATION MEAN?

When the printing press was first being deployed the majority of production went
towards novels, and the criticisms were that people would not be able to
distinguish between fiction and reality. There’s the famous story about a radio
reading of a book that made people believe aliens really had landed on earth.
More recently, video games are said to cause violence in children, and porn to
cause a variety of changes in relationships between women and men.

I think all of them are right. Not in their specific claims, but in their
general direction.

The principle is whatever you train for is whatever you will expect. Training in
“the real world” is not an exception, as there’s quite a few “the real world”s
out there, and they’re all wildly different from each other.

The more specific principle is man-made environments are very low on dimensions.
If it’s text, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you are taking in information
from a single type, literally one font, it’s linear, and it’s uninterrupted.
Spend a lot of time reading text, and you’ll start thinking the world comes in
one type, operates linearly, and will be forever continuous. If it’s a videogame
there’s a few more parts to it, but you’re still looking at a rectangle of
light, and probably using a standardized interface with limited inputs. If it’s
a job, again, there’s just a few more parts to it. Major difference from the
other two being you have to leave your house.

There are so many more information types in the world.

That there’s probably more types than any one can ever directly handle is only a
vaguely important revelation. The more important one is there’s some arrangement
of types that probably works a lot better for you than whatever you have now.
This is the real reason why it’s said there are things you can’t learn from
schools and books, not because they’re not discussed thoroughly in schools and
books (though there’s that too), but because the types they use aren’t designed
to be compatible with you.

Perhaps there’s someone that could gain a substantial understanding of Japan
based off of going to tourist attractions. I doubt it. Perhaps there’s someone
that could gain it off of going to museums. This requires being able to read
Japanese, but it’s more plausible. I needed to wander the streets I picked out
myself off random google maps streetview drops. I should have done that even
more; I gained next to nothing going to the actual attractions.

But no one was going to tell me about that.

No one could have imagined to tell me about that.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


REFERENCES AND OTHER RULESETS


I

> “Training deals not with an object but with the human spirit and human
> emotions.”
> 
> The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
> Bruce Lee

> “I don’t care where you read it. I don’t care who said it. Even if I said it.
> If it doesn’t fit with what you believe and your common sense, then it is not
> so.”
> 
> The Buddha
> as relayed by Richard Hamming


II

> “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need
> to know.”
> 
> John Keats

> “You can get away with staggering amounts of ugliness in a city as long as it
> is held to a human scale and balanced with the sacred.”
> 
> Wrath of Gnon

> “The wasted space (and its contribution to overall impoverishment) in our
> stagnant cities is definitely on my mind a lot–but it’s not surprising that
> high real estate costs in other cities haven’t changed things for them, mainly
> because they’re just too far away to benefit from places which are still
> thriving–they only *work* when they have functional economies of their own.
> 
> It’s like that tedious cliche about “why do Americans need to build dense when
> we have S P A C E” as if all the acreage in, say, Wyoming makes an ounce of a
> difference to people trying to live and work in, say, Boston.
> 
> Or for that matter, all the acreage in WESTERN MASS vis-a-vis the people
> trying to live and work in Boston.”
> 
> Alex Forrest

> “Mechanical innovations, including mechanized cities, can add to our
> experience and stimulate our perceptive capacities, but they do not eradicate
> the mechanisms of human physiology.
> 
> The proper size of a bedroom has not changed in thousands of years.
> 
> Neither has the proper size of a door nor the proper size of a community. If
> cities have become immense, so much more is the need for subdividing them into
> comprehensible sections. Transportation systems may render the outlying parts
> of the city more accessible, but communities must remain individual entities
> whose size and appearance are comprehensible. The physical fact of scale must
> also be visually apparent. When these principles are violated the results are
> cities without human form, cities without sympathy, cities without pride.
> Worse still are the effects on the spirit and human sensitivities of its
> people.”
> 
> Paul D. Spreiregen
> Wrath of Gnon

> “The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy
> made visible. We can’t overestimate the amount of despair that we are
> generating with places like this. And mostly, I want to persuade you that we
> have to do better, if we’re going to continue the project of civilization in
> America. By the way, this [smiley face on a water tower] doesn’t help.
> Nobody’s having a better day down here, because of that.
> 
> There are a lot of ways you can describe this. I like to call it “the national
> automobile slum”. You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it’s appropriate to
> call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
> […]
> 
> The salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not
> worth caring about.
> 
> […] The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically,
> but where we are in our culture. Where we’ve come from, what kind of people we
> are, and by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse of where we’re going,
> in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. If there is one
> catastrophe about the places we’ve built, the human environments we’ve made
> for ourselves in the last 50 years, it is that it has deprived us of the
> ability to live in a hopeful present.
> 
> The environments we are living in, more typically, are like these. This
> happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my
> town […] If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here, and try to look
> at the Target store over there, you can’t see it because of the curvature of
> the Earth.
> 
> That’s nature’s way of telling you that you’re doing a poor job of defining
> space. Consequently, these will be places that nobody wants to be in. These
> will be places that are not worth caring about.
> 
> We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United
> States today. When we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s
> not worth defending.”
> 
> How Bad Architecture Wrecked Cities
> James Howard Kunstler

> “America’s the best, if you really treasure your freedom, you’ll put up with
> 60 minutes every day each way to go 20 miles, a distance which might as well
> be in the middle of nowhere because it’s all single family detached
> residential around here. Stop complaining already. Everyone else has to deal
> with it too. If you don’t like it why don’t you leave? I just suck it up like
> a real man. I’m proud of my country. I don’t like it either,
> 
> but look at me,
> 
> I don’t complain.
> 
> This attitude is why I hate Americans. “My country, right or wrong” – except
> worse, because it’s not about foreign vs domestic, it’s about “Fuck you, got
> mine“. There’s no reasoning going on, there’s no considering of alternatives,
> there’s no constant seeking for improvement, it’s “eh, who cares, fuck you,
> got mine”. American gamers say those who are better than them “have no life”,
> and say those who are worse than them “casuals”. Americans who are more
> successful than them are “lucky or “talented”, but when they taste success
> themselves it’s because they have “passion” and achieved it through “hard
> work”. It’s so prevalent everywhere it’s would almost be funny, except they
> get really serious when the shit hits the fan and still refuse to believe that
> any of this is related.
> 
> People want housing to be close to jobs and shopping. Higher population
> density means more people are closer to the same amount of things. Metro
> systems, which have guaranteed right-of-way on their rails, connect speedily
> and reliably even more people to the same amount of things. This speed
> simultaneously connects those people to more areas than before, meaning
> there’s more areas competing with each other, driving the price down of, among
> other things, rent. All of these things are objectively desirable. All of
> these things are required in an ideal city.
> 
> But the people don’t care. And the city planners don’t care. The public
> transportation workers don’t care. The public transportation leaders don’t
> care. No one cares, until it looks like it might be time for them to get their
> cut. Then it’s not in my backyard, not my job, sorry the project was more
> complicated than expected, it’ll cost twice as much and take three times as
> long, man that janitor worked really hard this year, he deserves a raise. And
> then it’s back to not caring. Maybe once every five years we’ll do a week’s
> worth of work. Maybe once every four years they’ll pay attention. And we’re
> the world police superpower anyways, it’s always going to be better to live
> here. If those slanty eyed chinks start getting uppity we’ll just nuke them.
> Time for a nap.”
> 
> BART, Americans, and Attitudes, vs The East
> Korezaan Su

> “In most North American communities, police takes the curious form of clearly
> identified vehicles basically prowling the streets in search of violations
> (most often traffic violations). The analogy of police being predators hunting
> for prey is a bit too easy to make. This doesn’t help police-community
> relations at all, because the isolation of private vehicles means that police
> will rarely be in contact with the community except when intervening, so
> police may come to see the community they’re policing (especially if they
> don’t live in it) as made up of only two types of people: law
> violators/criminals and victims begging for help. That’s not a great way to
> develop a great relationship: “that community is full of criminals and people
> who flout the law all the time and hate us, but when they’re in trouble,
> suddenly it’s ‘please mr policeman, save us!!!'”.
> 
> […] The reason for this type of policing is easy enough to understand. With
> people dispersed everywhere over a large area, how can a few dozen policemen
> provide effective surveillance if they’re not constantly on the move, at a
> speed that allows them to cover enough ground. This is a model that is also
> needlessly applied to dense neighborhoods which could have an alternative mode
> of policing.
> 
> Another unpleasant result of this is that policemen develop severe windshield
> perspective syndrome, since they spend their jobs at the wheel, they adopt the
> point of view of drivers, being more lax towards casual traffic violations by
> drivers and more likely to enforce jaywalking fines or the like on pedestrians
> and cyclists (and also, disrespecting bike lanes).
> 
> And what alternative mode is there? Well, again, Japan shows an interesting
> contrast.”
> 
> Police box: policing a walkable city
> Urban kchoze

> “Why are you going that far to obey the law when that law can neither judge a
> criminal nor protect people?”
> 
> “The law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law.
> 
> People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living.
> Their feelings… The accumulation of those peoples’ feelings are the law.
> They’re neither the provisions nor the system. They’re the fragile and
> irreplacable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts. Compared to the
> power of anger or hatred, they are something that can quite easily break down.
> People have prayed for a better world throughout time.
> 
> In order for those prayers to continue to hold meaning, we have to try our
> best to protect it to the very end.”
> 
> Kogami Shinya, Tsunemori Akane
> Psycho-Pass

> “They spent about two weeks, and they worked in a Toyota plant.”
> 
> “Hooked up at the hip with a counterpart in the Corolla plant, someone who did
> the exact same job you’d be doing back in Fremont.”
> 
> “And they start to do the job, and they were pretty proud, because they were
> building cars back in the United States. And they wanted to show they could do
> it within the time allotted, and they would usually get behind, and they would
> struggle, and they would try to catch up. And at some point, somebody would
> come over and say, do you want me to help?
> 
> And that was a revelation, because nobody in the GM plant would ever ask to
> help. They would come and yell at you because you got behind.”
> 
> “Really, we wanted to give them a chance to see and experience a different way
> of doing things. We wanted them to see the culture there, the way people
> worked together to solve problems.”
> 
> “Then, the biggest surprise was if, when they had those problems, afterwards,
> somebody would come up to them and say, what are your ideas for improvement so
> we don’t have that problem again?
> 
> They couldn’t believe that responsiveness. I can’t remember any time in my
> working life where anybody asked for my ideas to solve the problem. And they
> literally want to know. And when I tell them, they listen, and then suddenly
> they disappear, and somebody comes back with the tool that I just described.
> It’s built, and they say try this.”
> 
> Jeffrey Liker, John Shook
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015

> “Just because something is on the internet does not mean it’s a “public
> space”.”
> 
> “Yeah so what? We need to make sure large companies aren’t able to control who
> can go where and do what. You can’t kill somebody just for being in your
> house. So obviously there’s a line that needs drawing.”
> 
> “You’re forgetting that another entity could provide the well for the other
> demographic, seeing as there’s money to be made there.”
> 
> “It’s an example of there being limited availability in resources. In the
> example of the water, there’s no time to wait for the market to dig another
> well to save the person. Any excuse can be made, but the end result is the
> person dies, not that property rights have been saved. The same thing is
> happening with social media. […] If it’s the greater races at stake. The
> future of civilization at stake. Then there’s no length we shouldn’t go to to
> save it. Property becomes less important. It’s a hierarchy of needs for
> civilization to survive.
> 
> […] The entire premise is virtual or not, private or not, when something
> dominates how we live our lives, we need to look at how we can update those
> areas to reflect our values. Those values conflict with private property every
> day and we have to make hard decisions. Private property is an ideal just like
> freedom of speech, belief, etc. […] Property rights are incredibly important,
> but there are times they hinder civilization. If it allows us to get run over
> and civilization destroyed, and property rights destroyed as a result, then
> they weren’t very good ideals. This is why libertarians have mostly become
> fascists of some sort. At least until we get control of things like borders
> and universities.”
> 
> “There is no comparison between forcing a company to manage it’s website a
> certain way and border control.”
> 
> “It’s not a comparison. It’s about taking every ground we can to support the
> existence of civilization. Property rights are good at that, but only to a
> point. We also need to think in terms of collective property rights.
> 
> We can’t just wait until something reaches our doorstep. Collective power
> always has and always will matter.”
> 
> Arman, Unknown

> “When was the first time you ever pulled an andon cord?”
> 
> “1984.”
> 
> “Where did you do it?”
> 
> “In Japan.”
> 
> “Were you at all nervous, because you’d been taught for so many years never to
> stop the line?”
> 
> “Yeah. And it was really exciting.”
> 
> “What got me was the fact that they had a cross bolt, and they stopped the
> line to repair it […] which is take the bolt out, ream the hole, put the bolt
> back in, instead of sending it on and putting all the other junk on top of it
> so you have to take it off and repair it. And whoever puts it back isn’t
> skilled in putting trim back, so they’re going to mess up. That impression, I
> said, gee, that makes sense. Fix it now so you don’t have to go through all
> this stuff.
> 
> That’s when it dawned on me that we can do it.
> 
> One bolt.
> 
> One bolt changed my attitude.”
> 
> Frank Langfitt, Earl Ferguson, Rick Madrid
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015

> “To grasp the essence of a political culture that does not recognise the
> possibility of transcendental truths demands an unusual intellectual effort
> for Westerners, an effort that is rarely made even in serious assessments of
> Japan. The occidental intellectual and moral traditions are so deeply rooted
> in assumptions of the universal validity of certain beliefs that the
> possibility of a culture existing without such assumptions is hardly ever
> contemplated. Western child-rearing practice inculcates suppositions that
> implicitly confirm the existence of an ultimate logic controlling the universe
> independently of the desires and caprices of human beings. This outlook,
> constantly reaffirmed in later life, inclines Westerners to take for granted
> that all advanced civilisations develop concepts of universal validity, and
> they are therefore not prompted to examine the effects of their absence.”
> 
> The Enigma of Japanese Power
> Karel van Wolferen

> “Centralization leads to complexity, complexity leads to crisis, attempts to
> fix the crisis have, because of complexity, unintended consequences, which
> escalate into further crisis, leading to further centralization, Hence Soviet
> Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Venezuela, and now America.
> 
> This is the crisis of socialism, explained in “I pencil”, which makes the
> point that no one actually knows how to make a pencil, hence socialist
> production of pencils will fail.
> 
> In order to manage complexity, you need walls, so that one man can make
> decisions without having his decisions mucked up by another man’s decisions.
> Hence, private property and local authority, the authority of the father, the
> authority the business owner, the authority of the CEO. And, not so long ago,
> the authority of the local aristocrat, who tended to be a high officer in the
> local militia, a major employer and landowner, and related by blood or
> marriage to most of the other high officers in the local militia.
> 
> Ideally all the consequences of a decision should be contained within those
> walls. Of course they never are, but if you try to manage all the
> externalities, things very quickly slide of control. Every attempt to manage
> the externalities has unexpected consequences, and attempts to deal with the
> unexpected consequences have additional unexpected consequences, because
> trying to control matters that have externalities connects everything to
> everything else, resulting in a tangle beyond human comprehension.”
> 
> Throne, Altar, and Freehold
> Jim’s Blog

> “The emperor listened intently to Zhang’s tales of exotic plants and animals,
> including horses that sweated blood. Most intriguing were the reports of
> nations that dwelled in fortified cities. They were said to be adept at
> commerce but “poor in the use of arms and afraid of battle” – standard
> characteristics of the walled and civilized. Zhang described “large countries,
> full of rare things, with populations living in fixed abodes and given to
> occupations somewhat identical to those of the Chinese people.”
> 
> People who lived like the Chinese? Now that was welcome news. In a flash,
> China’s alleged isolation was swept away. The Chinese had retreated behind
> walls only because they knew the world to be hostile and barbarian. Now they
> knew otherwise. Wu sent great expeditionary forces to open a lifeline to the
> newly discovered brethren in the fraternity of wall builders. At the time,
> only massive armies dared cross the terrain of the Huns, so Wu endeavored to
> make the route safe for travelers. He ordered the construction of a new wall –
> the reed-and-dirt wall discovered by Stein – to defend China’s thin link to
> the civilizations of Central Asia and beyond.”
> 
> Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
> David Frye
> Wrath of Gnon

> “Entrances have everything to do with what we feel about what we are entering.
> All buildings until the birth of modern architecture knew this, and you can
> see it in church doors, temple gates, shop entrances, and cottage doorsteps.
> Now the doors of a modern building are likely to be a continuation of the same
> hostile slab of glass or steel that makes the rest of the building sterile and
> aloof. There will be no place to rest for a moment, inside or out, and no
> shelf to rest a burden on, and no decorative details to declare, “This is not
> just any place you are entering, but this honorable place.” I believe even
> criminals feel different about the judges they encounter inside an old
> courthouse than inside a new one.
> 
> My wife and I walked under the Gates and beneath the curtains. Thousands of
> others were doing the same. Many of them no doubt made the same journey daily,
> scarcely thinking of it. Certainly our walk was enriched by trees, grass,
> shrubbery, ponds, views. But now the Gates, by framing those sights, gave them
> a new aspect and importance. Not “grass on a hill,” but this view of a grass
> hill. Not a pond, but look at the pond. A frame of any sort values what it
> encloses. And as we walked, we felt subtly ceremonial. We were not walking,
> but walking through the gates. People walked a little more slowly, and
> sometimes had little smiles, and talked less on their cell phones, and perhaps
> felt more there.”
> 
> Roger Ebert
> Wrath of Gnon

> “In Japan not saying grace before eating something is considered the absolute
> pits of rudeness and sure sign of retarded manners.”
> 
> Wrath of Gnon

> “The essentials of speaking are in not speaking at all. If you think that you
> can finish something without speaking, finish it without saying a single word.
> If there is something that cannot be accomplished without speaking, one should
> speak with few words, in a way that will accord well with reason.”
> 
> Hagakure
> Yamamoto Tsunetomo

> “Footnote: Some people whose parents didn’t love them enough to teach manners,
> has objected to this thread thinking it is about style because I mention the
> International Style in the opening. Note the capitals. It is not aesthetics,
> it is an actual thing.”
> 
> Wrath of Gnon

> “The Japanese have understood that what people are largely pursuing in the
> workplace is not so much money as the respect of the people around them, and
> therefore maintain a sophisticated – indeed, bizarrely over-elaborate to the
> Western eye – economy of respect in addition to the economy of money. They
> have understood that a large part of what money-seeking individuals really
> want is just to spend that money on purchasing social respect, though status
> display or whatever, so it is far more efficient to allocate respect directly.
> 
> Did you really think people as obviously intelligent as the Japanese were
> doing all those odd-looking bows for nothing? Sure, these behaviors are
> derived from tradition, but there’s a reason they kept these traditions and
> the West hasn’t. Interestingly, this understanding on their part of the need
> for unapologetic status differentials contradicts the emphasis in Western
> socialism on a culture of equality.
> 
> It also follows that if society is to maintain status differentials without
> suffering withdrawal of social cooperation due to the resulting resentment of
> low-status individuals, society must contain these status differentials within
> strong overarching sentiments of social unity.
> 
> Naturally, the Japanese are famous for this, too. It all fits.”
> 
> Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism
> Robert Locke


III

> “I’ll go ahead and download it.”
> 
> “Why don’t you buy paper books? E-books lack character.”
> 
> “Is that right?”
> 
> “Books are not something that you just read words in. They’re also a tool to
> adjust your senses.
> 
> “Adjust?”
> 
> “When I’m not feeling well, there are times that I can’t take in what I read.
> When that happens, I try to think about what could be hindering my reading.
> There are also books that I can take in smoothly even when I’m not feeling
> well. I try to think why.
> 
> It might be something like mental tuning.
> 
> What’s important when you tune is the feeling of the paper you’re touching
> with your fingers, and the momentary stimulation your brain receives when you
> turn the page.”
> 
> “I feel kinda discouraged. When I talk to you, I feel like I’ve been missing
> out on something all my life.”
> 
> “You’re reading into it too much.”
> 
> Choe Guseong, Makishima Shougo
> Psycho-Pass

> “McLuhan provides a definition of hypnosis as: “one sense at a time.” Print is
> a uniform and repeatable commodity that creates a hypnotic superstition of the
> book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency.”
> 
> Zero HP Lovecraft

> “Philosophy appears to be expansionist. It needs to learn to stop.
> 
> China has to reboot every ten generations, but since the Chinese aren’t
> expansionist, they don’t overreach nearly to the extent that philosophical
> civilization has been prone to. The reboots succeed.
> 
> […] Aristotle taught Alexander, and then Alexander decided he needed the
> entire known world. Then Rome did the same thing. And England. And America.
> Philosophy’s thing is kind of getting the one right answer to all the
> questions. When Christianity absorbed this, they decided that, since they had
> the one right answer, everyone needed to know it.”
> 
> Alrenous

> “the Chinese, their colossal national self-regard notwithstanding, have no
> faith in the permanence of their political arrangements. All Chinese people,
> including the rulers, have internalized the dynastic cycle.”
> 
> “I wonder how much of it is genetic and how much of it is word of mouth.
> 
> When I hear others talk about the cultural revolution and the opium wars it’s
> always in terms like “China Was Absolutely Ravaged”.
> 
> When my dad mentions it instead it’s “Oh Yeah That Was A Thing Too”.”
> 
> Spandrell, Korezaan Su

> “[O]ne trait of Asians I really like, is just how cynical and goal-oriented
> they are. To a large extent, discussing politics is just not done at all in
> Asia, unless you happen to work in politics or the media. That was boring, but
> also refreshing, coming from a European environment where everybody feels they
> must have a strong opinion on everything, from the price of bread to the
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any abstract discussion of politics or
> philosophy in Asia is usually derided as a sophomoric attempt at showing off.
> Try to talk about anything not involving immediate money or gossip and you’ll
> soon get interrupted. “So what?”, “Your point?”, “What’s it to you?”. A common
> Japanese quip when you use some uncommon word is, 言いたいだけでしょ“you just want to
> say that word”, implying your vanity makes you feel good at using weird words
> that make you feel superior or high-status, but they’ve got you all figured
> out.
> 
> And they’re right. It got me thinking. What’s the point of all those
> conversations which don’t concern personal, immediate interests? It didn’t
> take long from that realization to finding signalling theory, and suddenly it
> all made sense.
> 
> Note that most of what we call Asian “philosophy” is also very down-to-earth,
> preoccupied with how to run a government, or how to live a good and content
> life. That’s just how the people are, and I still believe that they are
> genetically incapable of caring about metaphysics and the pointless
> abstraction it so often encourages.”
> 
> Spandrell

> “A good player tries to read out such tactical problems in his head before he
> puts the stones on the board. He looks before he leaps. Frequently he does not
> leap at all; many of the sequences his reading uncovers are stored away for
> future reference, and in the end never carried out. This is especially true in
> a professional game, where the two hundred or so moves played are only the
> visible part of an iceberg of implied threats and possibilities, most of which
> stays submerged. You may try to approach the game at that level, or you may,
> like most of us, think your way from one move to the next as you play along,
> but in either case it is your reading ability more than anything else that
> determines your rank.”
> 
> Tesuji
> James Davies

> “I think talent is the ability to take chances, and the calm to learn from
> your mistakes. Skill is second to that. I’ve seen plenty others with much more
> skill miss great opportunities because of extreme self-consciousness or some
> mistaken sense of discretion.”
> 
> Sugie Shigeru
> Shirobako

> “Why… Why did you do such a reckless thing?!”
> “This is about finding the truth behind people’s deaths! If we want to uncover
> such a thing, naturally we must risk our own lives!”
> 
> Tsunemori Akane, Kogami Shinya
> Psycho-Pass

> “There are things I just can’t do.”
> “Because you never try.”
> “I do the things I can as best I can.”
> “And so you never accomplish anything new.”
> 
> Phosphophyllite, Antarcticite
> Land of the Lustrous

> “A trap is for fish: when you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. A
> snare is for rabbits: when you’ve got the rabbit, you can forget the snare.
> Words are for meaning: when you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words.
> 
> Where can I find someone who’s forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”
> 
> Zhuangzi



KYOTO STATION, GRAND AMPITHEATRE



Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments
October 10, 2018 by korezaan


INDECISION IS GOOD [VALKYRIA CHRONICLES 4]

I hate Claude Wallace.



This guy is awful. I don’t remember the last time I was angry enough at a
protagonist to scoff at the emotional climaxes and conclusion of a plot.

Valkyria Chronicles 4’s writing is bad. But mediocre writing has occurred in
other games and stories without pushing me to actively hate it. Generally
speaking, so long as there’s a token effort to hit all the basic requirements,
I’m willing to give things a pass. Valkyria Chronicles 1 did this quite well:
simple characters, simple plot, a little bit of political intrigue, and the
bigger portion of writing going to setting up the world and gameplay mechanics:
ragnite means industrial revolution means power means war, ragnite means
radiator means weakspot, etc.

I don’t remember much of what would be called the “plot” of VC1. Which means it
probably wasn’t amazing. This is fine. It was simple, and it worked. VC4 has
this too, with its new addition of Squad Stories, where each of your minor
characters in groups of three get their own short narrative. It also does this
for a few of the supporting antagonists. But it doesn’t do any worldbuilding.
And it doesn’t do this for the main characters. It even makes some really odd
choices in pacing, like following up a big reveal not with an explanation, but
with an entirely unrelated flashback. But these are minor problems. Many a bad
story has been saved with a good protagonist.

The major problem is VC4 has Claude Wallace for a protagonist.

At first I couldn’t imagine this would be a controversial position, but after
spending some time arguing on /v/ it appears there is a social duty for a
literary dissection of VC4’s man with the fancy haircut. Claude Wallace probably
isn’t the worst character ever in a big or semi-big name series, but he’s the
worst one I’ve seen. I say this in the sense that I usually drop stories if the
plot or protagonist doesn’t get it up within the first few episodes or hours –
and VC4 fit very neatly in that category. VC4 is a character story, about a
character that does nothing.

I thought about stopping several times. But VC4’s gameplay was fun enough, a few
of the Squad Stories were entertaining, I like Raita’s designs, and Steam’s
refund window closed after 2 hours, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Maybe I
could be wrong?

I wasn’t.

Claude Wallace is a piece of shit.

And I am here to tell you why he’s a piece of shit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> The Ideal
> Overview of Claude Wallace
> Claude’s Decisions and His Character
> The Counterarguments
> The Finale
> Epilogue
> Meta / On Rhetoric


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | 3 Comments
August 12, 2018 by korezaan


THE LINEAGE OF THOUGHT

A few days ago I watched the first official Elder Scrolls Legends tournament.
ESL is a card videogame, and one I had basically no idea about anything in it
about up until I opened the twitch stream. I have little interest in card games,
but I have some general ideas about the styles of play. Partly because people
play card games and I have some ideas about people, partly because a friend of
mine likes card games and tells me the ins and outs of things. This friend was
interested in ESL. This friend was why I was watching the tournament – he was
playing in it for $20,000.

In card games there are two styles: “aggro” and “control”. Aggro is whittling
down the opponent’s health at every opportunity possible, “control” is about
“card advantage”, having more cards than the other guy does, which generally
also means playing slower and doing more concentrated moves near the end.
Whether aggro or control style is stronger depends on the mechanics of the
particular game and the cards in it. New cards can move the overall favor of
everything available (you can only bring a certain number of cards), and with
the advent of the internet and “balance patches”, old cards can be made to do
the same.

I largely stopped playing online competitive games because of these “balance
patches”. I don’t like having to relearn the entire game every time something
changed. Reading the “patch notes” which say this or that changed by this or
that much in this or that way isn’t enough, even when they aren’t hiding changes
(something else that’s made possible in videogames), because you don’t know what
that number means until you play it. Many field shifts have arisen from changes
that look small on paper – shifts which might not even arise until much later.
To say nothing of things which look large on paper. Games have died on the spot
because of such changes (Blacklight Retribution, “Recoil Update”, Jan/Feb 2013).

Not that anyone admits it at the time. The most common defenses can all be
distilled to “git gud”, which means “just adapt to the changes”. There will
always be a most competitive strategy, the good players will find that and use
it. And if there are multiple competitive strategies, then it’s good because the
game is balanced among many different styles. The problem is not with the game,
it’s with you, etc.. Everything I said that was technical would be refuted, and
I never had anything much to say that could be generalized. So I just stopped
playing things I stopped liking. And then stopped playing changing games in
general.

Watching this card game tournament I had no idea about gave me an idea. It’s not
so frequent I spend a decent chunk of time with something I have no technical
knowledge of. And while I did catch onto a few things, I largely relied on the
casters and the twitch chat to tell me what was going on. Showing the board and
even the players’ hands meant nothing to me. The only part of the video that was
useful was the face-cams, showing players’ reactions.

The faces told me that the decks are extensions of the players.

A couple of people I couldn’t read, but for the majority, I couldn’t see them
playing in a different style than the way that they actually played. Perhaps
professional players decide on which style or cards to play based on whatever
happens to be strongest at the moment. But I imagine those players think of the
game the same way a regular person thinks of their job. They wouldn’t feel at
all.

These players didn’t play certain cards and styles because they were good. They
played cards and styles because it fit them. Certain cards and styles being good
was the cause of these players being here.

If other cards and styles were better, different players would have been here
instead.

(There’s also luck of the draw and life circumstances and all the other things
that change results that can’t ever really be accounted for; we’re talking about
what can be here.)

The idea that this or that thing becomes stronger or weaker through balance
patches is true, but only from the game’s point of view. It assumes the game’s
existence. It assumes you are already going to play it, and will play whatever
happens to be the wining strategy. This perspective is useful to the creators
and the media, but not much to anyone else. Whether this or that thing is strong
is a large part of why people play things in the first place. It’s probably the
only thing that has any staying power – after 10 or 20 hours, the pretty music
and beautiful art or big name is not going to matter as much as how the game
flows.

What flow is right depends on the player. A competitive player doesn’t become
competitive because he uses something that everyone already knows is strong. He
is competitive because he thinks and plays a certain way, found something in
this game that fit that existing way, and demonstrates through winning that
something in the game happens to be stronger than the rest. If he doesn’t find
it, he’s not competitive. If he does, then he is. The information available
presents a certain story, which needs to be filtered backwards through
survivorship bias. If a man is playing a card game and he dominates, the
inclination is to think it’s because that card is strong. But that’s only the
visible part of the equation. That’s the “card” part of card game. The players
of the game existed long before the cards came into existence.

This idea was demonstrated at the Elder Scrolls Legends tournament. In one of
the highlight plays of the event, my friend failed to use a card effect to deal
the finishing blow to the opponent, opting instead to do something that would
increase overall survivability. He lost the round right after he did that – but
that’s not the point. The move probably did increase overall survivability. He
played that move because he’s always looking for increasing survivability. This
is what the redundant “winning by not losing” and “winning by just killing the
other guy” and similar sayings mean. Personofsecrets is a control player: he
favors “winning by not losing”. And that means not seeing “winning by just
killing the other guy” things.

Once the casters explained the technical details of the card effect, I thought
it made sense just fine. But that’s because I know how this guy plays games. I
have an idea of what this guy is capable of. People “can” do things that they
“aren’t” capable of, but generally, they can’t.

> “I’m not sure why there is a theory that I would be deliberate and not go for
> a win if I see it. To clear up the wrong theories, if I had ever targeted my
> own creature with Black Hand Messenger, then that would have been the very
> first time.“

> “My tendencies as a player likely leave me with some blind spots when it comes
> to trading versus pushing damage. Maybe if I was a little more well rounded,
> then I wouldn’t have made such an error. One other thought is that perhaps a
> reason that I got to where I got to has to do with such idiosyncrasies and
> focus on making trades that I have.“

It’s a blindspot.

Managing them is a skill, but that too requires a method, and any method has its
blindspots. There will always be blindspots, because you can’t see everything,
and you can’t keep everything in mind. One can say players are good because they
win and bad because they lose. That’s one way of looking at things. I don’t
think it’s a very useful one; it’s pretty clearly circular. But it’s how many
people think about it. Including game developers, who often are only looking at
overall win rates.

The important part of balance patches isn’t that they change the game.

It’s that they change who plays it.

You are attracting, and repelling, certain kinds of people, by “balancing” the
game in certain ways. Players come and go depending on what the balance of the
game is, and that “balance” they are looking at and feeling through isn’t the
four sigfigs percentage on some spreadsheet.

It’s obvious enough when comparing one game to the next, this game is good and
that game is bad, why, because “I don’t like it” i.e. ‘It doesn’t fit me’, or
“It’s toxic” i.e. ‘I don’t fit in with the other people who play it’. It’s still
obvious when comparing a game to itself from one year or title to the next. The
realm of confusion grows the smaller of a scale it goes, but it’s still the same
pattern. One person only has one mindset to bring with them everywhere – from
life, to that game, to this game. If they’re going to play this game, that
mindset will have to work there too. If it doesn’t, either they change the
mindset, or they stop playing. The normal outcome is they stop playing. There’s
so many other things in life that mindset is used for.

And it is “one person” that plays the game. Not “the fans”.

“Git gud”? Yes.

But that is also how a game dies. Getting good at something is finding out how
to make something work for you – and some things won’t. People have their
tendencies, people have their limits. Personofsecrets left Hearthstone because
it was or became too favored to aggro. It so happens Hearthstone is still king
of card videogames – but that’d be because aggro is “right”, not because it’s
“balanced”. Balanced doesn’t mean anything unless you know what it’s balancing
against. I left Blacklight Retribution because it stopped being about strategy.
Blacklight was an FPS that favored mid-range thinkers, not long-range campers or
short-range twitchers. It balanced that. So the people who were there for
strategy left. With that, Blacklight not only had a small playerbase, it also
had little to differentiate between it and any other FPS.

And so it died.

It’s a principle.

Why do companies succeed or fail? Not because they’re profitable, but because
they have a structure behind it that happens to survive and succeed with how the
world works at the time.

Poke it here, poke it there, whether it’s already in “the” law or not; make it
do things it normally doesn’t in enough ways, it will die. Balance patches, or
“forcing innovation”, doesn’t mean that whatever desired will actually happen.
The government or “public” may want something to happen, but other than the laws
of physics and other limits of technical implementation, the structures of
companies also determines whether something will exist. Or whether the company
exists. Which, the more you look into history, you’ll find that’s frequently the
original intent; the technical details are just followthrough.

But, just like with games, these presume that civilization will still exist
after the change. And, just like with games, people won’t admit it if it so
happens that it doesn’t.

Why do people succeed or fail?

Not because they get a big job with big money, but because they have a structure
behind it that happens to survive and succeed with how the world works at the
time.

Liberalism is the currently popular paradigm that “everything can be discussed”.
This idea excludes anyone who thinks there’s some things that can’t be
discussed. There’s actually quite a few things many people don’t think should be
talked about. When they’re forced to say and believe they can, they naturally
respond with depression, drug addiction, and any number of delusional
contradictory ideas.

Recently there was also a theft of a plane from the Seattle-Tacoma airport. The
guy ended up doing “nothing“: he killed only himself. There’s a lot of words
going around, like “we need to talk about mental health”. But what does that
mean? What does it mean to anyone?

Nothing. Nothing is what it means. It’s a replaceable line with “we need gun
control” and all the other ones is what it means. To say bad mental health
causes suicides is like saying bad players don’t get wins. It means nothing to
anyone, it’ll be forgotten in a week, because that’s what things on TV mean, and
TV is the only thing that exists outside of toiling to get money. People don’t
have the correct lineage of thought, or even the idea of a lineage of thought,
so they can’t predict anything, nor can they figure out why it happened after it
has happened. What’s probably going to happen, if anything is going to happen,
is some nonsense thing like mandatory checkups with a psychiatrist for anyone
that’s around planes. No, it’ll probably be cheaper, like annual rewatching a
couple of hours of training videos. Why? Because that’s the structure that
exists in companies today. And that’s the structure people have put up with.

But they don’t have to. That’s what the SeaTac guy did.

Is life under an existentially disgusting structure better than quitting?

The game assumes its existence. The game will change its players so that only
“fans” will play.
Those that disagree, stop playing the game.

So yes.

It is.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments
August 6, 2018 by korezaan


A MOUNTAIN IN THE JUNGLE


NIER:AUTOMATA

Let us start with the proposition:
So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.

What do we have at hand for such a lofty goal?

The materials as a whole can be called “experience”. Whatever you experience is
the only method of information input you have from the world. It does not matter
if it’s through your own senses, by someone else’s words, or through reading
text and looking at pictures: that is experience. Without experience, you have
nothing to work with. You must experience in order to understand.

The tools as a whole can be called “thought”. With thought we remember; compare
one past event to the next. Perhaps notice patterns here, perhaps guess causes
there. We assume meaning and connections so they can be found, and hopefully,
when one is found, it allows us to gain an understanding of the world; that is
to say, to predict the future.

The final category, of the plan on what to build, can be called “decisions”. The
world is vast. The world has many things, and even more relationships between.
Which of them do you want to understand? In what way do you want to understand
them? These are not given through experience, nor will you find them in
comparisons through thought. These are not about the world. They are about you.
Just as you must decide to build an understanding, you must also decide what
form that understanding will take.

This is where I decided to start writing my understanding of human thought and
human civilization.

This is where the enemies number the most. Those that number against the above
tenets – the principles that say that knowledge is possible – are vast. They are
so vast it is useful to think of the world as consisting of two kinds of people:
you, and everyone else.

Everyone else will lie to you. Everyone else will gaslight you. You might lie to
yourself too, but you are also the only one who can build your understanding.
Everyone else can only and will only tell you that knowledge is impossible and
you are delusional.

Among them are:

– Utopia/Equalists: They will say you can’t separate people into different
groups.
– Bigotry/Womanism: They will say you can’t think things because someone might
feel bad.
– NAXALT/ESID/Platonism: They will say you are wrong because you are not
perfectly consistent.
– Studies/Experts/Numericism: They will say you need the fancy letters and
tabled numbers.
– Management/Authoritarianism: They will say you don’t know all the details.
– Straight Up Lying/Journalism: They will fabricate things simply to contradict
you.
– Bootstraps/Americanism: They will imply only the lazy embark on your endeavor.

It is not possible to respond to all of them, much less to any particular point.

Thankfully, it is also not necessary to respond. We’re after an understanding of
the world… and they don’t have it. Not only don’t they have it, they aren’t
looking for it. Not only aren’t they looking for it, they don’t even understand
the concept of looking for something. These enemies are not an opposing army;
it’s not your red team versus their blue team. It’s your red team against the
insects, the animals, the trees, the flow of the river, the rain from the
clouds, the sun in the sky. They’re fighting you, but not on the same level.
They’re fighting you on something else entirely.

A concept that generally explains their behavior: they are talking about their
dick. How long and how wide it is. How long they can go, how long they can… and
so on. They usually don’t use the exact reference, but all in all it’s the same
sentiment. For example: why does it matter that some idea I come across or
decide to build might hurt someone’s feelings? Unless the objective in question
involves other peoples’ feelings in some way, why would such a point be
relevant? Because people with big dicks care. And if you don’t agree, that’s
because you have a small dick. Hey everyone! This guy has a small dick!

Traditionally this was called “morality”, more recently it’s been called
“signalling”. I generally prefer modelling it as dickwaving, because that’s
usually about as much as they can be bothered to prop up their concerns.
Womanism, Platonism, Journalism, all of it can be approximately reduced to “My
dick is thiiis big!”. It’s about them and their superiority. The moment you
start talking about problems and solutions, they go away. Or they repeat
themselves ad nauseum. Occasionally they violently shut you down. In any case
they will never respond to your points.

The points they bring up might be right. They may even be useful. But whatever
you do, never bend to the people behind them. They number so many and the
motivation behind the words is so obvious and overwhelming, you will, from time
to time, forget the desire that started you off in the first place.

You must not lose that desire.

The desire and the understanding are not so much two separate things as they are
cause and effect. You must believe that something is there before you can
conceive of even the idea to look for it. The common criticisms to this logic
are that the thing may turn out to not exist at all, or that you may mistakenly
start seeing things that aren’t there. These are valid concerns. But they’re
secondary. They only matter after you’ve set off on your journey. Whatever the
idea might be, it will not be there if you don’t think it is possible, it won’t
ever appear in front of you on its own. This is not true of physical objects,
which are there whether or not you believe it. Ideas are different from physical
objects in a number of ways. This is one of the important ones: the answer to
“If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail” is “When
the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

You must desire an understanding if you are to have one.

So we start with the proposition: so long as we attempt to understand the world,
it can be understood. And when we forget, which we will, this is where we will
begin again.

We begin, with the blind faith and belief that it can be done.

> “There has to be an answer. You must not doubt that.
> 
> If you can’t believe that, why don’t you cry yourself to sleep, and then just
> give up and die?”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Intro / “There is Only One Game”
> Technical Implementation / “Capturing the Essence”
> Human Thought Space / “All Else is Halation”
> Gnostic Technology / “The World Beyond Words”
> A Mountain in the Jungle
> Epilogue / “References and Other Rulesets”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

All things are built on technical implementation.

If you want to buy something, someone else has to be selling it. If you want
clean clothes tomorrow morning, someone has to wash it. If you want the light to
turn on, you’re going to have to walk over and flip the switch. If the switch is
going to turn the light on without burning the house down, the wires can’t be
frayed. If your dishes are going to be clean, the water lines must be clear. If
someone else is going to sell to you, they need to trust that your money will go
through.

We have generally lost the concept that things have requirements outside of time
and money. This has been true for a while for bureaucrats of all sorts; the rest
of us have gotten closer to them with globalization and internetization.
Everything is run by accountants and managers now. When all you have is a
spreadsheet, everything looks like a cell; when you have that and consistently
get what you want, those few things which fit in cells will appear to explain
the world. It doesn’t matter that we call it “information technology”, it’s
reduced our understanding because we haven’t thought about what its existence
means. Such words evoke the visual imagery of an immaculately clean environment
with crisp blue water, clipped green grass, clean white walkways, and towering
glass skyscrapers. It doesn’t call to mind anything about how such a world would
function in achieving its goals, much less its maintenance, or how it’ll arise
in the first place.

You need a map of a place to get there. You need a plan of a place to build it.
Today we have only a picture and think that’s enough. Worse, we think it’s a
picture of the present. This is not so bad so long as we achieve what we want –
and there are an endless number who will talk about how we have things so great
today; how nearly everyone has a refrigerator and we live better than medieval
kings’ wildest dreams. If a refrigerator or some other modern amenity is enough
for you to be happy about life, then that’s great. Good for you. God’s in His
Heaven, All’s Right with the World. If you however notice that federal programs
that set out to plant refrigerators in poor households don’t really seem to
change their nature, or in any other matter don’t think the world is just fine
and dandy, regardless of what the television priests say, then there’s more to
it. The spreadsheet mindset is obviously insufficient. The understanding of the
world has holes which require something else to improve. There is more to the
world than employment rates and GDP. There exists more fundamental materials
than just man-hours and dollar-quantities.

And we can find out what those are.

If it was built by man, it can be understood by men. Rearranged: If it is to be
built by man, then however it will be built must be understandable by men. Once
upon a time, every place everywhere was the hypothetical “desert island”.
Anything any of us have beyond that was built at some time by some man, through
some complicated, but necessarily comprehensible, set of technical
implementations.

In the case of the literal desert island, we have the story of Robinson Crusoe.
In the case of the modern version with the zombie apocalypse, we have a whole
assortment to choose from.

My personal favorite is the story behind the Transatlantic Cable.

In a sense it’s not as grand; it’s neither building everything from nothing nor
about societal collapse. But I feel it illustrates the most important
principles. It’s a story about how to take a single step, where the details
clearly serve the goal, rather than the all-too-common obverse. It’s also far
enough back in time and thought that it’s obvious that they lived in a different
world, yet not so far we doubt our ability to relate to them – we’re able to see
the fishbowl, yet still properly empathize with the fish.

The plan was to lay a cable to connect Europe and America.

The cable would be for the telegraph, the era was the 1850s, the approximate
speed change on message delivery between the two continents from a matter of
weeks to a matter of minutes (though a full message would still take hours to
fully transmit). Ships were run still on coal and propelled by paddles, and the
only reason it was possible at all was because Britain had colonies in the
tropical East which happened to have certain kinds of trees which happened to
produce a certain kind of material. That material had been used almost since
antiquity as toys for children; more recently it was discovered to remove pencil
marks off paper. As electrification of cities had not yet occurred (~1880+),
this would be the first large-scale usage of the material ‘rubber’. Telegraph
lines are electrical, you need to protect them from water along their entire
length – in this case, it would be the length of the Atlantic Ocean.

The first cable laid worked only for a few weeks.

It turned out the knowledge of electricity and cable design which had been
tested and used at the time were not sufficient to achieve acceptable results
over the new 2000-mile system. As it only lasted a few weeks – less than two
cycles of communication between Europe and America – many did not believe it was
even real, public support was negligible, and it took another five years before
enough capital was gathered for another attempt.

The second cable was lost.

Halfway along, in the middle of the ocean, it snapped off the end of the ship.
The cable had been designed to resist much tensile force, but for one reason or
another, it wasn’t enough.

The next year a third cable was laid with no problems. But this time the mission
was not just to lay a cable. It was to also finish the other one. The one that
they had lost the previous year.

This was 1866. Long before the age of GPS. They had sextants and chronometers to
be sure, so one could know his location on the endless sea to some
approximation. GPS has an accuracy of around 5m. Sextant accuracy, depending on
the navigator using it and a number of other things, is on the order of
500m~5000m. It was with sextants and paddleships that they would have to use to
find a cable in the middle of an ocean. Beyond that it was a matter of throwing
a hook off the back, running out the several miles (1mi=1600m) of rope for a few
hours for it to hit the bottom, and then sailing around until they found it.

So that’s what they did.

They went to where they lost it, and threw a hook off the back.

Then they sailed around until they found it.

They found it.

It took them two weeks, but they found it. And then, just as they managed to get
it above water, it snapped and they lost it. It took them another two weeks to
find it again.

This time they did not lose it. Once they brought it aboard, much more carefully
than before, they tested it. Who knows if a year at those depths had not caused
something to occur to the material? Who knew if, somewhere else along those
thousand miles, several miles down, something had not disconnected the cable
from its station in Ireland? The general understanding was that the world would
eventually erode into the sea, which had a featureless, sandy bottom. This was
1866. Plate tectonics will not be proposed until 1912. Deep-sea vehicles that
can look at what’s actually going on down there will not exist until 1960.

In any case, the cable of 1865 happened to be functional.

They spliced it with the cable they had on board, and ran it back the thousand
miles to Newfoundland.

The time it took them to lay the cable on their first journey that year took two
weeks. They spent a little over a week in port to load up on supplies and eight
thousand tons of coal. Their successful return happened four and a half weeks
later.

There were now two working transatlantic lines.

The amount of money and time it took to do what they did wasn’t “because” they
were using “older” technology. To them, the stuff they were using wasn’t old at
all. The ship used in 1865 and 1866, called the Great Eastern, had a screw
propeller, fairly new technology at the time, along with paddles and sail, which
were the standard. A vessel less than 10 years old, she was upon completion the
largest ship ever built, doubling the previous record in both length and in
width. Again, mass electrification wasn’t yet a thing, so telegraph cables,
especially these ones, were the cutting edge of technology that only the richest
and most powerful could afford. Sextants weren’t so new, but what were they
going to use instead?

So they threw a hook off the back.

You do what you want with what you got. If you have GPS, use that. No GPS, use a
sextant. No sextant, use star charts. No star charts, remember where on the
horizon the sun rose that day the best you can, remember where you came from the
best you can, sail in that direction, and pray to god you reach port before you
run out of supplies.

World War 2 had very few vehicles in it. The majority of logistics and supplies
were on horse-drawn wagons. The car had been invented for a while, but those
were expensive, and a lot of car companies were building planes. Germany in
particular had no oil production of its own and was blockaded from all sides, so
they were pressed for alternatives. Economies pre-war were mostly agrarian, i.e.
most people were farmers and there was a bunch of farm land. Hence, horses.

In the Cold War, there was a spy plane called the SR-71. This plane leaked oil
on the ground. Flying at thrice the speed of sound makes things hot, hot
materials expand; the parts were designed to fit together correctly at speed.
These and other spy planes would then fly over other peoples’ land and take
pictures. On film. The first spy satellites also used film, and dropped
canisters with parachutes after completion.

Today, missile interception largely does not exist. One attacking
intercontinental ballistic missile can launch several warhead: you cannot do the
same with a defensive interceptor. This “cost-exchange ratio” was discovered
before missiles became commonplace, and it was clearly cheaper to just fire
back. The concept of intercepting missiles was known in World War 2 when only
the Germans had them, but it wasn’t possible. There was no computer strong
enough and fast enough to figure out how to intercept the target. Computers at
the time were mechanical, with gears and shafts. There was also no weapon with
enough range or speed to intercept: anti-aircraft guns could not hope shoot down
something going that fast. Today, with modern digital computers which we can
literally stick in the missile (minus all the support structure, e.g. satellites
in space watching for launches), an interception missile still takes years to
design and incur costs so large they’re noticeable to world powers. World powers
can’t just throw infinite time and money at it. They have multiple things to
deal with at any given point in time.

Everyone has multiple things to deal with at any given point in time.

It’s just that almost no one pays attention to what that means.

Perhaps people in the past didn’t understand this sort of thing either, but they
definitely don’t understand it today. Through “information technology”
everything that actually occurs is reduced some nonsense non-technical
non-actionable value, because that’s the kind of thing that fits on a
spreadsheet. Dollar values and opinion polling statistics fit on spreadsheets.
“Leak oil on the runway” and “Throw a hook off the back” doesn’t.

But “Throw a hook off the back” is what actually does the work. Do what you want
with what you got: all things are built on technical implementation. Today and
tomorrow, just as it was yesterday and the day before, no matter how many white
lab coats with large flat screens there are or how many clean and sleek white
unibody high-tech machines roll around, whatever is being done, at the level of
things being done – if things are being done – those people are doing their
equivalent of throwing a hook off the back.

Let us start with the proposition:

So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.

Start with what you know, the results are not the structure.

Throw a hook off the back. And we’ll see what we can find.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


HUMAN THOUGHT SPACE

Knowledge has certain properties.

There are things it can and can’t do. There are places it can and can’t go.

Put another way: our usage of knowledge has certain properties. Or, if you
prefer: human knowledge has certain properties. These appendages (among other
possible examples) can’t actually be separated from knowledge “itself”; there’s
not really such a thing as knowledge that exists outside of our using it, nor is
there knowledge that isn’t human. So in a sense it’s all logically equivalent to
just “knowledge has certain properties”. But the different phrasing helps gives
us an idea on how to approach it. For all the boasting about being in the
information age and having access to everything, people have an exceedingly poor
understanding on the technical details of what it means to know anything.

About the only thing everyone knows is fact versus opinion. The classical
version used on children is ice cream, which is better chocolate or vanilla; the
answer is an opinion not a fact. It’s also a complete and utterly useless
distinction. What does having these categories accomplish?

Suppose I said vanilla is better. Guess what flavor scoop I’m going to get?

Extending the question makes it even more obvious: if you leave the room and
come back, the ice cream disappears, and I say that kid over there stole and hid
the buckets, what are you going to do? “Fact or opinion”? Suppose a kid did
steal and hide the buckets, and you bring it up to their parents picking him up.
Are they thinking, “fact or opinion”? Ridiculous. Fact and opinion are
non-actionable categories thought up of by dickwavers. “That’s just your
opinion” Of course it’s my opinion, it came out of my mouth. The question is, do
you believe it? I make a claim; what is your response? Those two categories
don’t help you make decisions. They’re not technical. They can’t be used.

We are interested in what mental processes help us inform action. “Fact”,
“opinion”, belief, theory, knowledge, understanding; these and others are
approximately the same thing as far as we are concerned, and we are concerned
with technical implementation. Technical implementation: out of all those words,
for reasons that aren’t important, people seem to have the highest affinity for
“knowledge”, so that’s the one I opened with. I don’t think it’s very
illustrative, but general-purpose widely-used words and phrases are mostly about
signalling and rarely illustrative. Illustrations, as with technicals, are
specific first. Here, I like the combination of “human thought space”.

“Human thought space” has certain properties.

There are things it can and can’t do. There are places it can and can’t go.

Some things may have an effect on how quickly you can navigate through the
space. Other things may have an effect on how large the space even is. None of
these properties or items are properly appreciated today, so it is the obvious
result that their understanding is so poor. They’re treated like superfluous
decorations, lifestyle choices at best (“opinions”), and easily reversible
errors at worst (“oops”).

For example: mental clarity is affected by sleep. If you are chronically lacking
in sleep, you are not going to think as clearly. The less you sleep, the more
mistakes you will make. You will eventually cause major problems and forget
things that would, if you slept well, be perfectly obvious. But you didn’t.

The average response is somewhere along the lines of “just get more sleep”, as
if anyone and everyone who happens to be in question is equivalent to an
irresponsible carefree college kid. This lack of appreciation for the technical
details which determine the conditions of human thought space is what causes
people to get “unintentionally” and systematically deprived of sleep in the
first place. Which is fine if it’s brushing off someone you’re never going to
see again, but – as would be expected – those who are chronically deprived of
sleep are common in socially and physically critical positions. The two I’m
aware of are doctors and air traffic controllers. I’m sure I could guess
accurately at a few more.

There’s also a lot of other of these external affectors (like nutrition), but
the probably really long list of those is not particularly important here. We’re
not after any list, at least, not one beyond what can sufficiently help us with
the specific yet large problem we want to solve.

It so happens the list can be reduced to one item – an internal affector.
Something inside human thought space that changes what else is in there, and how
we get around inside it. An idea that changes other ideas.

An idea that gives order to other ideas.

Wikipedia has a long list of “Cognitive Biases”; “bias” means “arbitrary
personal preference toward error”. These include items which should be at least
vaguely familiar to everyone, like the bandwagon effect, dunning-kruger effect,
confirmation bias, and hindsight bias, along with quite a few other things, and
the expected description then dismissal of each. There’s even a section at the
bottom called “Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases”, linking to a
number of other pages of various lengths, some even including math and symbols.
All in all, the equivalent of a bunch of D&D role-playing board gaming
bespectacled nerds getting together, using long complicated words read from
manuals and paired with dice rolls, and the campaign title is “The Quest to Find
Out the Reason Why Stupid People are Stupid”. I mention them for the same reason
I used the word “knowledge”: everyone has a decent affinity for them.

The other reason is they got pretty close.

At this time on that page there exists a graphic which lays out the hundred or
so items in a circular arrangement, with some number of subcategories, and then
four large categories which encompass them all. The four categories are:

“Need To Act Fast”,
“Too Much Information”,
“What Should We Remember”, and
“Not Enough Meaning”.

Speed, Sorting, Recall, Usage: these are not just causes of biases.

These are primary dimensions along which human thought space lies.

> “It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in
> time.”

And there are limits to this. Obvious limits. Individual limits.

Your limits.

What you can think of in time at the time is what matters, not the sum total of
all things you’ve think you’ve ever learned or heard of. Not what some dickwaver
wants to claim at some other time. Did you get enough sleep? Have you been
eating well? What were you thinking about, what were you paying attention to?
Did you bring enough rope for the hook to hit the bottom? Did you bring enough
coal for the trip back? These are what matter.

These are what’s underappreciated today.

There’s a number of ways you could effectively arrange and order the human
thought space; this is the one I prefer, and I think it’s the most important one
of them all. It’s not so much because it contains all that much in itself, but
because it intuitively connects many other important things.

> “It matters only what you can think of in time.”

This line for me calls: What do I know? How do I know? When did I know it? Who
did I hear it from? What detail do I know it in, and what paths did I take to
arrive at that point?

It turns thoughts from nebulous not-seen not-objects into things that
are-spatial and are-physical, thus, even if I don’t really get it at the time, I
understand viscerally that it has its boundaries. They might not be height
length and width, or even temperature and weight. But they’re something, on some
dimension. They’re things that exist, so they’re finite, and finite things have
properties which can be found. If things can be found, they can be understood;
if things can be understood, they can be grasped.

And if things can be grasped, then they can be implemented for grander purposes.

All things are built on technical implementation. This is how I model ideas so
they can be implemented. I can’t know or see everything at the same time, or
even remember all the things I have known and have seen, so I need a system. A
system of ideas. An idea of a logic that connects and recalls one idea to the
next.

An idea-logic. An idealogos.

An ideology.

These are not superfluous decorations or lifestyle choices. These are the
fundamental dimensions on understanding, the equivalent of the laws of physics
for thought. Human thought space has certain properties. This ideology will help
us remember some of it.

When I was thinking and figuring out the problem, I didn’t spend too much time
on this step. It was a thing I came back to after getting lost more than
anything else. The line I’ve been quoting is from The Book of Five Rings, which,
along with the Hagakure, are called ‘the books of the samurai’. They’ve been
around me for a while so I’m intuitively familiar with the properties of the
tool/model, even if I wasn’t clear where or how specifically beforehand it’d be
used at every point on a project of this scale.

In writing, I felt “It matters only what you can think of in time” needed to be
specifically explained at some length. A number of things I will say, including
at least a few critical ones, have the risk of causing an unconscious flippant
dismissal because the words will seem to form tautologies.

A “well duh”. Or a, “yeah, I knew that”.

But it doesn’t matter what you know.

And there are ways of getting to the right idea. Faster, more reliably, and more
ahead of time.

It is true that each thing could simply be extended so that each is a path
rather than a step, but for many of the ones ahead I decided to only explicitly
note it here beforehand instead. Certain things are much better quickly and in
quick succession, and only have certain effects when presented in that way. In
this case, I desire those effects. But I also want their component parts,
completely foreign to common discourse, to be properly grounded. If the best I
can get is isolated and in simple contrast beforehand so that eventually and
unconsciously the principle may be discovered, then that’s what I’ll take.

The technical implementation of my understanding – as far as my ability in
writing can go and how much time I’m willing to spend and so on – means that
this plane will just have to leak oil on the ground.

For me, it’s been leaking for a long time. For you, hopefully not so much.

Hopefully, it will all fit together now at speed.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


GNOSTIC TECHNOLOGY

The world has certain properties. There are things it can and cannot do. There
are places it can and cannot go. Let us start with the proposition: so long as
you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood – specifically, human
civilization. If all things are built on technical implementation, then
civilization too has parts which we can examine and use to reconstruct the
nature of the whole.

A thing is defined as how it behaves and operates – that is to say, what it
does.

What does civilization do?

Throw a hook off the back: let’s say civilization gets together for a single
simple yet large project. This is a knowable step which definitely (i.e. “by
definition”) contributes to the whole, and being a large project, it would
involve theoretically the largest proportion of people, thus being more fitting
to help determine what civilization is. You may replace my example with any
particular one you prefer and fill in your own details;

I will pick the building of a battleship.

Not only are they large projects, battleships are the greatest moving mechanisms
ever built, the single most glorious monument to its creators’ capabilities.

Question:

Who exactly is the creator of a battleship?

A battleship is generally recognized as a product of a country. What is a
country? A country is generally recognized by the two-dimensional shape of its
political borders as they hit natural coastlines, centerlines of mountain
ranges, historical treaties, and so on.

Does this two-dimensional shape covering vast amounts of space build
battleships?

No.

Then what is the use of this two-dimensional shape in regards to building
battleships?

There isn’t one.

This kind of problem will be frequent and reoccurring.
We will largely choose to chase our objective.

Countries are mostly empty – empty of people. There is only civilization where
there is people, and people tend to be together. Usually, they congregate near
water. Better yet, where fresh water meets the sea. These don’t exist
everywhere, and if another group is already in the area, for water or for any
other reason, people will usually either join that one, or go somewhere else,
far away. What they don’t do is get a census and map, calculate the average,
then some other math to find what coordinates and what size plot is theirs.
There is a number of actual reasons; none of them have geographic uniformity in
mind.

As for everything else a country is made out of: they don’t matter. The trees,
the grass, the sand, and the fish. It can be said that having a nice climate
with nature to relax in or an ease of access to various materials is related in
some way. But we need to start somewhere. For me it’s obvious, if not just take
it as an arbitrary assumption; we’ll say for now that only people matter in
building a battleship.

When a country builds a battleship, it means only the parts of that country that
can help in building a battleship, build the battleship. The rest of the it may
serve any number of other purposes, or perhaps not at all and are even a
nuisance; in any case it’s not all the land or the people, not even if you count
up the farms including the food supply chain that keeps everyone alive. There
are more people doing more things than just your battleship, even if it’s a
total war economy and even if you are literally only fielding battleships –
someone has to be making pencils and paper, utensils and clothing – farms keep
those other guys alive too.

So which parts build battleships?

Shipyards, for one. So that part would be near a body of water, preferably one
that connects to the oceans and isn’t some isolated lake. I imagine really large
steel forges would be needed, along with iron supply, so unless the shipyard is
also near some mountains or wherever iron is mined, the “building” will occur in
at least two places. People who are familiar with manufacture of ammunition in
some way would be recruited. A university or some place that has engineers and
knowledge would be needed to make firing control computers. The navy would
probably be consulted as to what kind of design they’d prefer depending on their
doctrine. A whole number of bureaucrats would be needed to keep track of
information going here and there. And of course, the food supply chain and all
the other basics.

I’m probably missing some things.

But it’s not too important. We have an idea on what to look for now.

And we have a grasp on the general principle we came for.

A country is not monolithic, it is its civilization. A civilization is not
monolithic, there is only civilization where there is people. Even when a
civilization comes together for a great project, it isn’t everyone in it doing
all the same things, it is specific people doing specific things. It’s a really
different picture of civilization, a much more detailed one with parts that can
intuitively be understood, compared to the extremely well-defined shapes on a
map that in totality cover every square inch of land above water on the entire
planet which appear arbitrary and opaque. That “political” map is what normally
comes to mind when we think of “the world” – that is to say, that map is the
world.

Or, was the world. Now we know there can be something different. A map of
civilization, one that’d look a lot closer to a map of population density, where
things are few and infinitely far between, where borders on a world map would
look very poorly defined. Rather than lines running latitudes, longitudes,
coasts, and mountain ranges, nearly all of which no one lives in, much less
sees… borders are now always people. Borders between the parts of a civilization
building a battleship, and the parts that aren’t. Borders between one
civilization and the next.

Borders between one civilization and the savage beyond.

And there is a savage beyond.

If you are driving on and then fly off a cliff, it doesn’t matter that, on a
map, you go only a distance of five minutes walk from the road. Five minutes
walk on a well-lit well-cleaned named street in a city is very different from
five minutes walk in nature’s wilderness. It doesn’t matter if that spot on the
road is only twenty minutes drive from a decent sized city. You go off that
cliff, you are no longer in civilization. You may bring things that civilization
made with you, but you are no longer on it. If no one saw you fly off that road,
if you weren’t expected that night, or the next morning, or whoever was
expecting you next decides it’s not worth looking into; if that cliffside road
didn’t have a guardrail that broke to show evidence that something abnormal
happened; if under that cliff was a forest and your car didn’t burn, or if
something did burn and the park ranger decided to not pay attention that day –
the more of those and those kinds of things happen, the further from
civilization you get.

The spectacle, generalized: at any moment, if you are alone, you are outside
civilization.

Civilization is not out there. Civilization is not some independent abstract
entity.

Civilization is here, between you and me.

Everything that civilization has, needed to be built, and everything that’s
built needs to be maintained. These are done by people. Us. If we want
civilization to be a certain way, then it will become that way. Everything
starts with us.

That being said: “we”, too, has certain properties.

There are things “we” can and cannot do. There are places “we” can and cannot
go. All things are built on technical implementation – and we already know that
human thought space has its limits. Human action space imposes more limits.
Human cooperation space…

And if things have limits, they can be known.

What exactly is this “we”?

We know that it’s not everyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s building a battleship
or sealing/dealing with a hole in the ozone layer, there is no such thing as
something that involves everyone. In at least the current standard usage of the
word, even the word “everyone” isn’t everyone: it refers to only all people who
are currently alive. What about the ancients? What about posterity? Are they not
people too? In quite a number of analyses and decisions, to say that those
groups can be “pretty important” would be quite the understatement. Yet, neither
the past nor the future is included in “everyone”. Even as it is, just everyone
on the planet today is unwieldy. It’s impossible to understand.

We know when something exists, it is specific, and the result of specific people
doing specific things. “Everyone” was sufficiently specific when contrasted to
nature, but it’s not good enough anymore.

What does civilization have?

Running water, stable food supply, in this age electricity, in any age material
search, procurement, and processing. Language, culture, markets, policy and
conflict resolution, some kind of future to look forward to.

“Everything starts with us”: Who exactly is doing what?

A handful of people “do” almost everything.

All the things above are largely the results of large organizations, each
comprising of hundreds to hundreds of thousands, which do approximately what one
or two people say. Running water isn’t a bunch of people standing in line each
handing the other a bucket with everyone being equally valuable. It wasn’t like
that when it was wells and aqueducts, it’s not like that today, and it’s not
like that for anything else, names like “free market” and “democracy” or not.

There are people who make decisions that affect more people, there are people
who make decisions that affect less; it so happens that it has and will always
be true that a handful of people make decisions that affect almost everyone.
These people are called the elite. They are elite because they make
significantly large decisions – while we have tools like hammers and computers,
their tools are companies. They de jure own large chunks of “the economy”, and
by extension, de facto own large chunks of everything else. Civilization does
what the elite wants…

…if they do their part correctly. All things are built on technical
implementation. The elite, too, need to wield their organizations in a certain
way in order to get what they want. Fail that, and they may eventually find
themselves no longer elite. Fail enough, and eventually there’s no longer a
civilization.

For a tool like a hammer, the technicals are in materials science, physics, and
ergonomics.

The technicals on how to design an organization of people achieve an objective
is: how “management” treats its “workers”. Organization. Policy.

“Culture”. “Teamwork”. “Quality”.

While these and similar ideas are shamelessly wielded by flagrantly distasteful
people today, they are distasteful rather than silly because there is something
valuable behind it. We know these are important. Somehow we know, even if we
haven’t experienced it ourselves. Even if we can’t recall any specific example.

I now provide a specific example.

> “The story of this factory is a famous one among car people–
> it’s taught at business schools.”

In 1982, General Motors closed down its assembly plant in Fremont, California.
At the time, GM was the world’s largest car company, and it closed down this
plant because of its constant production problems. It was also manned by “the
worst workforce in the automobile industry”. It wouldn’t be surprising if those
words came out of GM, but they didn’t. Those words were from United Auto
Workers, the union.

Drinking on the job, sex with hookers in the parking lot, average of one in four
people not showing up on any particular day, deliberately sabotaging this or
that part and whatever happens happens – and that’s just from the records
available today. If you can imagine it, odds are, they probably did it.

Around that time, GM was having trouble with smaller cars. They had to build
them due to government emission requirements, but those cars were always at a
loss. Coincidentally, Toyota was also running into government issues. They were
small, but rapidly gaining enough market share that Congress was pondering
import restrictions. So Toyota was looking into building cars in the US. But
they wanted some help. Toyota had only manufactured in Japan, specifically, in a
city named after them: of their 16 plants in Japan today, 13 of them are in or
near a city that changed their name to indicate the company’s local relevance.

Toyota looked to GM. Toyota would handle the factory side of things, GM would
handle marketing and the rest; GM would learn how to make cars more cheaply,
Toyota would get around import restrictions. For the plant, GM offered up
Fremont Assembly. UAW for their part said they wanted the joint-venture to
rehire the same people. Toyota agreed, and they ended up rehiring somewhere
around 90%. Fremont Assembly was renamed to New United Motor Manufacturing
Incorporated. It began production December 1984.

And the day NUMMI opened, the world’s best cars were coming down the line.

That’s not hyperbole.

NUMMI made cars at the Japanese standard, the highest standard, that is to say,
way above GM’s. Number of man-hours spent per vehicle halved: it literally took
half the manpower to make the same amount of stuff, and that stuff was made was
better. In defects per hundred vehicles and basically any metric you can think
of, there were similarly massive improvements.

And it was done with people who were drinking on the job and having sex with
hookers in the parking lot. “Were”: they stopped doing that. They showed up, and
they built cars. “Several told us they enjoyed coming to work for the first
time.” The worst workforce was, suddenly, making the best cars anyone could
find.

How did they do it?

“Several told us they enjoyed coming to work for the first time.”

They built better cars by changing how the people felt.

A car is made up of many parts, but aside from being a product made of metal, it
is also a product of human emotions. Cars are built by men, and just as it was
with the doctors who get no sleep, a man’s emotions is not an unrelated item to
the outcome of his task.

When a car is moving down the assembly line at a rate of one a minute and the
line is three miles long, no one knows exactly what is happening. No one worker
can see all of what’s going on. No one manager can see all of what’s going on.
No one mortal can see all of what is going on, even if he isn’t sitting down in
an office in a different building. But each worker can see his part. And each
worker further down the line has a chance to see some of the results of all the
other workers that came before him.

If a worker doesn’t like his job, his team leader, the management, or just
spilled his coffee that morning, he’s going to do a poorer job. Some of those
actions may be said to be a result of intentional reasons, others, written off
as “having a bad day”. But all of what they can do is within their thought
space, and the thought space shifts based on emotions. Better emotions, better
thought space. Better thought space, better results. If you feel a certain way,
you will start seeing things that you wouldn’t if you felt another way. It
doesn’t matter what a camera sees. It doesn’t matter what someone else sees. It
matters what you see – in this case, what the worker sees.

Cars don’t get made in a car factory just because “that’s what car factories
do”. Cars don’t work just because “they should”. All of those things come
together, or don’t, due to human action. Human action is a result of human
thought space. And human thought space is a result of, among other things, human
emotion.

NUMMI imported the philosophy of Toyota, which stressed first and foremost the
importance of continuous improvement and respect for people. In an organization,
these two are the same thing: one is the cause, the other is the effect. People
naturally want to perform well at their jobs. People want to do better every
day. People especially don’t like making mistakes. But that’s working
alone. With organizations, this also depends on how people treat each other.

All accounts of “labor-management relations” in Fremont Assembly describe it as
“war”.

NUMMI put everyone on the same team.

The most famous symbol of the culture shift was the andon cord, “andon” being a
loanword from Japanese now standardized due to NUMMI’s success. The andon cord
is a cord above every worker’s station that, on a pull, would call a team leader
over to help. If the team leader was unable to resolve the problem in time, or
otherwise decided that it was serious, he would let the cord’s timer run out,
and stop the entire line. Quality came first: that is to say, it was more
important to get each car done right, than to get more cars done. Which led to
more cars getting done, because errors weren’t being fixed later.

The andon cord was for the workers to catch errors. And the management supported
the cord being pulled. They put it there. GM had red buttons that stopped the
line too, but they were placed up to 75ft away. Walking 75ft is quite something
when the line is moving at a car a minute. Its placement reflected its meaning:
You weren’t supposed to push it. Sure, it’s there for a reason. There’s also a
reason it’s all the way over there. Toyota replicated their own system at NUMMI
brought the button within arm’s distance of everyone. It also was no longer a
button, no longer something you had to look for specifically and hit it. Just
reach up to the approximate height, and pull down: the point became a line. That
placement and shape reflected its meaning, too.

Error-catching was part of a larger ideology.

Everyone was expected to inspect what they could in every car as they passed,
solve problems, and note improvements that could be made – and in turn,
management would do what they could to implement suggestions, make life easier,
and make cars better. All things are built on technical implementation: this
means that there’s always more details. Humans make mistakes. Machines make
mistakes. Everyone and everything makes mistakes. “Mistake” simply means
deviation from the idea in mind, which will always hyper-defined in one area and
nebulous in the next. What we can do is do what we can now with what we have,
and improve what we can the next time. In an organization, a continual project
with multiple people working on multiple things, none of which are independent,
this means “teamwork”. At some point in time, the andon cord didn’t exist. It,
and many other things that we won’t go into here, was created because people
thought and found it’d make doing things correctly, easier.

“People” – probably the worker doing it. The management and engineers listened,
brainstormed some things together, and implemented a solution. While certainly
there’s outside research going on in new materials, new aerodynamics, new more
efficient engine design, the assembly and the running of a factory is technology
that goes into the car too. All things are technology. All things can be
improved.

Better cars are made by changing how people feel, change how people feel by
putting them on the same team.

How did NUMMI put two sides of a “war” on the same team?

Same lunchroom. Same parking spaces. Division 1 classifications reduced from 80
to 1, skilled trades reduced from 18 to 2. Everyone on the line knows every
other job on the line, everyone is allowed to do repairs. No seniority benefits.
Organization was by teams rather than by skills. Bonuses for suggestions that
get implemented. To counter drinking on the job, they even paid extra if you
didn’t leave for lunch.

Before it opened, it flew all management and all 450 team leaders (about 1/5 of
all line workers) to Toyota City for three weeks of training, including working
on the line as a team member with the Japanese already familiar with the system
and ideology. When it opened, and throughout its duration, Japanese management
was present. They moved to California to oversee operations personally –
including Tatsuro Toyoda, one of the founder’s grandsons.

It’s easy to say you care. It’s also easy to show you care.

It’s different to always and continuously go the extra mile because you give a
shit.

That’s what GM didn’t do. They didn’t bother with the system behind it.

> “Workers could only build cars as good as the parts they were given. At NUMMI,
> many of the parts came from Japan, and were really good. At Van Nuys, it was
> totally different.
> 
> The team concept stressed continuous improvement. If the team got a shipment
> of parts that didn’t fit, they were supposed to alert their bosses, who would
> then go to suppliers and engineers to fix the problem. All the departments in
> the company worked together.
> 
> But Ernie’s suppliers had never operated in a system like that. If he asked
> for fixes, they blew him off. And if he called Detroit and asked them to
> redesign a part that wasn’t working, they’d ask him why he was so special–
> 
> they didn’t have to change it for any other plant, why should they change it
> for him?”

> “There was no vocabulary, even, to explain it. So I remember, one of the GM
> managers was ordered, from a very senior level– came from vice president– to
> make a GM plant look like NUMMI. And he said, “I want you to go there with
> cameras and take a picture of every square inch. And whatever you take a
> picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no
> excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our
> productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.”
> 
> Immediately, this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy employee motivation,
> we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not
> something you can copy, and you can’t even take a photograph of it.”

> “You had asked the question earlier, what’s different when you walk into the
> NUMMI plant? Well, you can see a lot of things different. But the one thing
> you don’t see is the system that supports the NUMMI plant. I don’t think, at
> that time, anybody understood the large nature of this system.
> 
> General Motors was a kind of throw it over the wall organization. You know,
> each department– we were very compartmentalized, and you’d design that
> vehicle, and you’d throw it over the wall to the manufacturing guys.
> 
> And they had to deal with it. And, I mean, you’re in there. You’ve kind of put
> your heart and soul into making this whole team concept work. And now you’re
> the messenger that has to go out and say, look, guys, even though this is the
> way the system’s supposed to work, and these are my issues, I’m not going to
> be able to solve them, and you’re going to have to deal with it.
> 
> And it was destructive. It was detrimental. I mean, no question about it.
> 
> You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant,
> understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. I’ve often
> puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized, we were
> asking all the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture
> thing.
> 
> All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s
> happening on the line. That’s not the real issue.
> 
> The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that
> have to take place in the organization?”

When NUMMI opened, GM was seven times the size of Toyota.

That changed because Toyota paid attention to the problems of human technology:
how to get organizations of people to treat each other, how to get individual
people to believe the right things and act well on their own. It’s the result of
taking human cooperation and human action space seriously. “Everyone” doesn’t
exist, you and I do, and that means you and I need to do our part if “everyone”
is going to achieve the objective.

This general concept behind “teamwork” is how you technically make people work
together.

I use the phrase “make people” deliberately to illustrate an idea. It has a
negative feeling to it. As if people are objects to be used and thrown away. But
it’s important to keep that model in mind. People can be made to do things.
People can be manipulated. A doctor that doesn’t get sleep will perform poorly.
An assembly lineman who believes they can do better and will be supported by
everyone from their foreman to the president will consistently try to find ways
to exceed expectations. Humans have limits, limits mean there are certain
properties, and properties can be manipulated with to create different results.

In an organization, these results are largely not a function of what you and I
do. It’s not nothing. But it’s not everything. Organizations invariably have
some kind of division of labor, a hierarchy, and idea behind it: a “culture”. A
company culture, or a civilization’s culture, more or less rests on the
shoulders of what the elite do. Do they just say things? Do they just do things?
Or do they technically implement what’s necessary to get what they want?

GM had terrible human technology: Fremont Assembly made garbage cars.

Toyota had better human technology: NUMMI couldn’t stop getting quality awards.

> “Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage
> communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what
> has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of
> whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to
> hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?”
> or they say “Well, see what you can do about it” – which is a completely
> different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed
> back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.””

One can say NUMMI treated the workers “more like human beings”. But that’s also
just the opposite of the negative “make people work together”. They’re not
wrong. They could be, that’s not important. What’s important is they’re not
technical statements.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses after Toyota took over day-to-day operations;
one common complaint under the new system was favoritism. And so what? What was
any worker going to do about that? Nothing. Or at least, close to nothing.
Nothing that’d change the system. Nothing he could easily do would be equivalent
to upper management descending from the heavens and smiting whoever was doing
the thing in question.

Revolutionary rhetoric (and rhetoric reflects ideas) invariably has lines like,
“If we all rose up tomorrow and” this or that or something or other. But “we”
don’t exist. You and I exist. You know what kinds of things you and I will rise
up tomorrow for? No water. No food. That’s called a riot. Beyond that, it’s not
happening. There has never been and will never be a “we all rise up tomorrow”.
Revolutions are always a result of extensive cooperation, usually coordinated by
a small group, headed by an even smaller handful of people. Those people are
called the elite. Revolutions are that way, corporations are that way,
civilization is that way. And the rest of us largely do what they want, not
because it’s right or wrong, it could be right or wrong, that’s not important,
but because human action space exists. It’s implicitly admitted anyways: suppose
something is bad. Why do we need to rise up? Why don’t you take care of it?

Because there are things you can and cannot do. There are places you can and
cannot go.

It’s true of civilizations, it’s true of organizations, it’s true of you – and
it’s true of your mind.

You can’t go just anywhere anytime with your mind. Remember that?

> “It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in
> time.”

Sleep, nutrition, emotions, what ideas you were raised with, what situations
you’ve encountered, how other people treat you, what you want to do with your
life: these influence what you can think of in time. And there is always a time.
It takes time to think, it takes time to remember, it takes time to go to a
friend for a second opinion and go even just, “oh yeah, I knew that”. The
purpose of thinking, that is to say, envisioning how things works and what you
are going to do in your next few steps, is to come to accurate conclusions
quickly so the correct technicals can be enacted and get the results desired
before the world has turned, and the situation has changed. Sometimes, it’s the
wrong conclusion. Sometimes, bad technicals are used. Sometimes, there is no
tomorrow, and the right answer arrives too late.

There exists a human cooperation space, a human action space, a human thought
space – and each has their limits. In each, there are things you can and cannot
do. There are places you can and cannot go.

“There are places you can and cannot go.”
There’s a “can”.

Where can you go? What can you change?

Well, there’s all the obvious stuff. Obvious doesn’t mean it’s therefore wrong.

Your business. Your team. Your family. Your room. One habit. A single good deed
every day. Did you look into their eyes, stop for a moment, and say thank you?
Did you pay attention to something you wanted to change for once and do
something about it? Did you eat dinner at the table, making sure everyone was
there? Did you find out something a teammate needed done, and do it for them? I
don’t know anything about running a business, so I probably shouldn’t list any
specific examples. But I could guess. You could too.

It’s not nothing. There’s something you can do.

There are outside influences too of course, from those on the situation to on
your mind. But whatever control you have on your decisions – which isn’t nothing
– is up to you. There are things you can do.

Industrialized society in the information age has a lot of rules and a lot of
managing, but it’s not a monolith. It can’t control everything. It exists:
therefore, it has limits. It thinks it doesn’t, and everyone thinks it doesn’t,
and that’s why everything sucks. Not just the vast majority that the elite
control, everything sucks. People think things should magically i.e. by
invisible magic and naturally i.e. by the leaves of nature perform the way
they’re supposed to, without a care in the world as to what they can and could
do. So they do nothing. Or, they think you can do anything you want, all you
have to do is put your mind to it, just start a multi-billion dollar business or
run for office if you don’t like it so much, sum total of which, surprise, is
absolutely nothing. Or, and this is the worst of the three, they believe “the
truth is always somewhere in the middle”. As if you could take two things, any
two things at all, and the best option is always to throw the two things into
some fuzzy goodness-maker that does ????? and out comes exactly what’s perfect
for the situation. It’s garbage. All of those are garbage. They’re dickwavers.
They don’t tell you anything useful. They can’t even conceive of what it means
to do something.

Where you can really go: depends on how you do it.

First, you’d need to believe the place exists.

You need to decide this place is somewhere you can go.

Then, you need an idea on what you’re going to do to get there. The technical
implementation. “But how will I know?” That’s the wrong question. Start with
what you know, the results are not the structure. Do what seems reasonable. It
doesn’t have to be great. It doesn’t even have to work. It just has to do
something you can already understand, and from there you get results and it can
be improved. If you need to find a cable on the bottom of the ocean and all you
have are sextants and a hook, that’s what you’re going to use.

Then it’s a matter of whether or not you happen to get there.

If you don’t get there, but can try again, then first you’d need to still
believe it’s possible. Try changing up your technicals somehow. Then take
another shot.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that you can’t try again, because you’re
dead. Either literally dead, or lost hope, or decided it was impossible – any of
these things informs action, namely, to stop, which means that it will no longer
happen. If, for whatever reason, it comes to you, you wouldn’t be able to
recognize it. It’s gone. Because you stopped believing in it, the place is no
longer there.

There is a world outside of you, a world outside of your organization, a world
out there outside of civilization. No one knows the future: no one knows what is
going to happen next. We can make some guesses, some of them pretty good
guesses. But no matter how good they are, they are 1) guesses, and 2) not
actually the future. So they’re probably going to be wrong at one point or
another. Once upon a time, Rome ruled the world. Then, it was Mongolia. Then it
was Britain. Currently it’s the United States of America. Yesterday the biggest
car company in the world was General Motors. Today, it’s Toyota.

Each time something changes, it was due to things that didn’t exist – until they
did. They were causes that could’ve probably been found out, but “no one”
believed them, and if you don’t believe in something, it doesn’t exist. And
there’s always something you don’t believe in. That’s why there’s change.

It’s not wrong. That’s just how it is. Human thought space is limited. You have
believe some things and not others, focus on some things and not others, if you
are going to get anywhere. You can only think and know a few things. It’s
impossible for anyone to know all what’s really going on in a civilization, in
an organization, in a building, in their own mind. People can spend their whole
life and not get a hold on a single one of those, let alone do all of it “in
time”.

There’s always more things.

Always more unknowns. Always a greater, savage beyond.

What we can do is recognize where our knowns end and the unknowns begin.

What I can do is help you remember where your knowns end and the unknowns begin.


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It’s easy to have the right idea. It’s hard to keep it.

Having the right idea is as simple as someone giving it to you. There are
details there too, like discovering the person with the right idea to begin
with, but more or less that’s as hard as it gets. All you need to do is hear or
read it, and then you have it.

But you only have it for that moment. You may have spent a couple of minutes, a
couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of years, or even your whole life
hearing about it. Some people go their whole lives without learning anything.
Being given something means it can only stick for so much. There’s the time
part: even if you’re a live-in apprentice, the master only spends an amount time
with you. It’s some amount. It’s not like he’s actually there watching literally
everything of every step of every second.

Then there’s the complexity. If you tell a kid that thing over there is a tree,
what do they understand out of what you said and did? They could’ve seen the
pose. They could’ve seen the forest. They could’ve seen the tree. Or, they
might’ve seen the color green.

Let’s suppose that the master did actually hold your hand everywhere, did the
parts for you, put food in your mouth for you, and so on. Imagine something like
watching a livestream of someone’s life through their eyeballs, except you can
also feel the heat, your muscles get exhausted from exertion, and all the other
experiences in life. Suppose the master shows you literally everything. That
still doesn’t mean you understand any of it, much less understand it the way
they wanted you to understand it. The world is complicated, there’s an infinite
number of moving parts. What parts relate to which other parts? How do they
relate? How should they be simplified and understood? Words and experience can
only point out a limited amount of things – the rest is up to you. There has
never been an apprentice that fully copied his master, and if there was, and the
next apprentice did the same, that’s where the tradition died. There are always
more unknowns, and you have to constantly fill it in.

And you can only do things in your own way.

Keeping the right idea involves doing things your own way.

An idea is a piece of equipment. It has certain requirements, takes up a certain
amount of space, and has certain uses. Your mind has some sort of environment to
it; presumably, you’re familiar with a decent amount. That’s where all your
other ideas/equipment are. If you are to keep an idea, your new equipment must
integrate properly with all your other equipment. If you don’t integrate it, and
instead put it “somewhere over there”, it’s probably going to get lost, and
you’re going to forget it. It doesn’t mean it’s gone, it’ll just take a while to
find it. That’s a “oh yeah, I knew that”.

How to integrate your new idea with your old ones is up to you. You could just
jam it in and hope for best. You could find out that it does basically the same
functions as one already existing, throw out the old one, make slight
modifications and you’re set. It could turn out to be the case that, while it
sounded nice, you picked up the idea for reasons you don’t really understand
yet, you don’t really know how to integrate it, and you really do have to just
put it “somewhere over there” for now.

The ideal case is the new idea fits neatly and easily into the old ones.

The ideal method of organization of ideas maximizes the ideal case.

How you organize ideas is an ideology.

Throughout this piece I have repeated myself a number of times. I did do some of
it intentionally, most of it wording for rhetorical effect. The rest of it is
because it’s what I found. I started off trying to understand the world, and
everywhere I looked, this is what I found, connecting all the parts.

“All things are built on technical implementation”.
“Start with what you know, the results are not the structure”.
“Human thought space has certain properties”.
“It matters only what you can think of in time”.

It was true at the top level, it was true at the bottom level, it was true at
every level in between – and more. There turned out to actually be a top level,
civilization does actually stop at very obvious points. But the bottom turned
out to not exist.

It’s easy to say people only have sight in a some-degree cone which can see to
such-and-such size details at such-and-such distance, have hearing that can only
detect this amount of pressure/decibels, beyond this it’s a matter of what they
hear or read from other people etc.. But there was more than that. People don’t
really know or control themselves either. Just because it’s in your vision cone
doesn’t mean you see it. What you see depends on what you’re looking for, how
well you’re looking for it depends on how you feel, and a whole number of other
things, things that cannot be discounted.

And I knew all this. But that’s not the point. I never thought of it in time.

And suddenly, I was thinking of it in time. Suddenly, a single principle could
toke me from the heights of what civilization can do all the way to the depths
of a single man’s emotions. No longer was it this “physics” this and
“psychology” that. No “well [that saying] is true but what about [this other
saying]”, no “oh yeah, i knew that”, no “duh”. This was true everywhere I
looked, and it took me anywhere I wanted. It covered everything that was
possible to know, from the start of discovery, to the recall of memory.

It’s a transportation system across ideas, and it itself is an idea with the
same properties.

It’s fractal.

Usually my problem with new ideas is I forget.

This idea was the opposite: I couldn’t stop seeing it.

I know that that means it’s better than a lot of the ideas that came before. But
I also know that I will eventually stop seeing it everywhere. It has to be that
way. People forget. People try out new things, and when trying out new things
you have to, to some degree, let go of existing methods. There’s also all the
things already discussed ad nauseum about the human thought space. Even now,
there’s probably areas and things where I’m not actually applying the principle
to, I just don’t know it.

For when I forget, I’ve come up with something that recalls the idea.

I felt the “think of in time” line could be improved. Like the red button vs the
andon cord, it was invoking things in ways that weren’t as useful as they could
be. Perhaps it’s because I really liked, read, and reread the books around the
principle. Hagakure is a bunch of short stories and morals about honor,
involving cutting down people like this or that. The Book of Five Rings – the
actual source of the line – was huge chunks about the literal techniques on how
you go about the swinging of the sword cutting down of people like this or that.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve run into a bunch of “oh yeah I knew that” types, and I
really don’t like invoking those kinds of people when trying to understand
anything.

The line is a good line, for acting in the moment. And life is always in the
moment. A very good line on which to build a decision theory. But the concept
behind it can be used to do more.

Like make a map of the territory.

A map that recognizes that it is a map, and not the territory, and reminds you
that when you go out into the territory, it’s more than you can ever see.

A good line recalling this concept needs to carry its fracticity. It’d need to
talk about the qualities of what you know and what you don’t know, and how one
becomes the other. It’d need to talk about you, in such a way that you’d
naturally and willingly – you want to – insert yourself into the idea. It’d need
to talk about how all knowns have limits and all unknowns have no limits,
without doing things like inflating or squashing egos. It’d need to be short;
long things are hard to remember. Preferably, it relies on as little technical
knowledge as possible so it’s not field-specific, removing resistance against
generally using it.

Preferable, it doesn’t rely on the words at all, but calls some image, with
feeling, from instinct.

These and other similar conditions are ones I believe I have largely fulfilled.
I’ll tell a short story now, but other than the first few paragraphs and unlike
basically the rest of this piece, I didn’t plan what was going to be in it. I’ve
never known an oral tradition, but I imagine it’s something like this: made of
small yet important bits consisting of how to start and how to expand, and then
expanding it.

I call it:

“A Mountain in the Jungle”

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The jungle is the unknown. The jungle is endless. You can stop anywhere in the
jungle, look at something, and the more you look, the more you will find. You
can’t see very far; twenty steps any direction and it’s all different again. You
have to be careful, or else you’ll get lost. And who knows what’s out there
savoring for a taste.

The mountain is your home. There’s only one, but it’s high up, and it’s clear.
When you’re on it, nothing can hurt you here. You still can’t see an end to the
jungle. But at least here, all things are known. Everything works exactly like
it should. And every day, you build the mountain, larger and taller. Up towards
the sky.

The mountain has existed since before time began. You remember bits and pieces
of the past, when the mountain was smaller here or there, but there was always a
mountain, and you have always been building it.

Given that all you know how to do is build and how large the mountain is, it’s
probably true that the mountain was started a long time ago. Your parents built
it, your parents’ parent’s built it, all the way back, everyone was building.
That’s your best guess, because you can’t talk to them about it. You can’t talk
to anyone about it. You see many people on the mountain, usually they’re
building it too, but they don’t know what you’re talking about. Occasionally
they say some things that makes sense, most of the time it’s just words and
sounds that don’t amount to anything. Once, every couple of ages, you happen to
stumble upon someone in the jungle that seems to understand what you mean. But
when you bring them back to the mountain, they don’t recognize that anything has
changed. As far as they can tell, they’re still in the jungle. They say you must
be tired and confused; they’ll bring you back to the *real* mountain. And once
you’re supposedly there, you don’t see anything either. About the only things
you can really talk about is what’s in the jungle. Which you both agree is very
dangerous and full of things no one knows.

And the jungle is always expanding. Every day the jungle is expanding. It’s
probably expanding out there somewhere too; as far as you’re concerned, it’s
expanding up the mountain. Or the mountain is being eaten down by it. It’s hard
to tell. It also doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the mountain gets
smaller every day, unless you work hard chopping away at the jungle, go out for
materials, and build the mountain higher. You’ll always remember the one time
you decided to take a break, see what happens if you just don’t do anything. You
stayed right on your spot on the mountain. How long it was isn’t clear anymore.
What was clear: the jungle came up the mountain. Frighteningly fast. That was
scary.

But some time later, you did it again. You forget why you did it, but you didn’t
intend to do it. It might’ve been overexertion after building too hard for too
long, might’ve been going on a long journey and failing to find a new place to
mine for stone and other materials, might’ve been that one time you followed
some guy who said he’d show you a new plant and got lost for a while trying to
come home. In any case it happened again.

That time, you decided to measure it.

You placed a few rocks where the mountain stops and the jungle starts. It’s not
clear where exactly the boundary is, but it’s as good as you can make it. Did
nothing that day, checked back tomorrow, sure enough it was in the jungle now.
But it wasn’t gone. The rocks were still there. And it wasn’t that far either.
Just a few paces. Did the same thing again, waited another day (that day you
remember – you played with really pretty butterflies) and again the rocks are
still there. The rocks from the first time are still there too, though toppled
over and spread out a bit. Maybe some animal tripped over it? But where they
were was just a few paces from yesterday’s rocks, which in turn was about the
same few paces from the mountain – and more importantly, the same number of
paces you found the first time!

It was a revelation:

The jungle could be known.

Or at least, its border with the mountain could be known. And approximately
which way from where the sun rises relative to the mountain you get your
building materials, which in turn was about this way from where you got water,
and… hmm.

You tell some people about it, most responded in their usual basket of assorted
syllables, the rest, as far as you could tell, said, “you are crazy”.

Nevertheless, you start getting ideas.

You do it over and over again (not all back to back; have to keep clearing the
jungle and finding food and all the other things) and every time, you find the
same result. Well, almost every time. The usual amount is such-and-such number
of paces per day. Sometimes it’s a bit more, sometimes it’s a bit less. One time
you tried measuring by finger lengths instead to be more accurate, and that
worked too. But every once in a while a tree falls down and it expands faster
for a while, and sometimes for reasons you couldn’t quite figure out it expanded
slower. It was more easy to screw up the finger measurement, and the pace count
was about right anyways. Such-and-such number of paces per day. Assuming the sun
crossed the sky in the same amount of time every day. And you’re the same size.
Seemed like safe enough assumptions. The number of paces wasn’t always the same,
but it wouldn’t off by very much, and when it was, there was also usually
something obvious that showed why it had changed.

One day you decide to do something different.

You decide you’ll clear a path to the mine.

(Or was it the river?)

You reason, perhaps rather than just clearing the mountain, perhaps other things
could be cleared too. Yesterday trying to get a lot of berries you cleared a
fairly large area in the middle of nowhere, and, today, when you finally found
it again… it was there. It had shrunk, the jungle expanded here at a rate
somewhat differently than back home. But it didn’t just disappear. Or at least,
you think you found it. It’s probably the same patch though, it was in this
direction about this amount of time’s walk from the mountain.

The sun is great and all, but sometimes it’s cloudy, and sometimes, you don’t
wake up until the middle of the day. If only you could see in the jungle like
you could on the mountain… then there wouldn’t need to be any wondering about
where to go, and how to get back. If it’s a straight path, anywhere on the path
there’s only two ways to look, one of them is going to be the mountain. If it’s
not a straight path, then at least there’s a guide, again with two directions,
and one of them is going to head to the mountain.

And it worked. Or it did, after some adjustments.

As discovered earlier, the jungle expanded differently out here, some places
really fast, and that meant that some paths were simply not viable. While one
place worked just fine with a straight path, most others needed to include a
number of funny turns and workarounds. You didn’t know where to go to get around
the problem beforehand, but you knew there was a problem, and you knew where it
was you needed to go, so you tried this or that and eventually one would get
through. Usually. Sometimes it was too much of a bother and there’d just be a
patch of jungle inbetween.

For a few of them that were too far, you eventually decided to just build
mini-mountains instead. And why not? You know how to build a mountain, the
jungle has some height; building a small mountain, one that’s tall enough to see
straight from the one back home sort of serves the same purpose. Would still
need to trek through the jungle, but it could save a lot of trouble. Smaller
mountains have a smaller area that needs to be maintained, which also means a
shorter amount of time required to climb and build…. it seemed like a good idea.
And for some of them, it was. Others, it just didn’t happen. Tree canopies
happened to be too tall, jungle expanded abnormally fast, too far from the
mines; the reason was different for each.

But some paths were cleared. And some new mountains were made.

And of course, the real meat and the original objective:

Your mountain is bigger and better than ever.

Some people believe it. Most people don’t. They all seem to make more sense now…
maybe something to do with all the new things you’ve been doing? Fewer grunts
and yells, more comprehensible signals. It’s still not really how you’d do
things, when they say some word they usually don’t mean what you say it to mean,
but you’ve gotten more accurate at guessing what they’re saying. And that’s
better than before.

Those random guys that came around once every forever, some of them see your
mountain now. And you see some of theirs, too – one day they just popped out,
like they’ve been there the whole time. You’re able to discuss how to build this
or that part, this or that way, this or that material. There’s also those
mini-mountains, some of which people have started clearing and building
themselves. A couple of them have gotten quite large. So have some of your
paths, which some of the people you try to talk to insist are mountains. They
could see what was going on for such a long way – how could they possibly be in
the jungle?

Just the same – some of your creations could not survive.

As some got built, others got destroyed. The faster you built, the faster some
died. On rare occasion you’d see someone take material from one mountain to
build another, but often it just disappeared – you’d follow them in the jungle
and then at some turn, they’d be gone. It was as if people were making the
jungle grow faster than normal.

As if people were becoming the jungle themselves.

Where you could get an answer, through as best you could figure out whatever
symbols and sounds they used to mean, they would always say the same thing. As
you asked more and more, it turned out, it really didn’t change, whether it was
someone who was building or destroying. Now, as you harken back, back when it
was just one mountain in the jungle, you remember and see, they have always been
saying the same thing:

“I’m building the mountain.

What are you doing?”

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EPILOGUE / REFERENCES AND OTHER RULESETS

All things have a domain. This is where the domain of this piece ends.

In college I once asked an English grad student a question. She was the TA for
the writing class I was in, which covered stuff I learned in fifth grade. At
some point it was mandatory to make an appointment with the TA to discuss our
writing or something, and I wanted to come up with something to impress her (she
was hot. those were some big titties). Something good has to be something I was
interested in and knew something about. My problem around that time was I didn’t
know when to stop writing. The question I asked was, I forget the words, but it
was something along these lines:

> “A thesis is supported by an essay. An essay is supported by paragraphs.
> Paragraphs are supported by concrete details. Presumably, concrete details are
> supported by further concrete details.
> 
> How far down am I supposed to go?”

She failed to give me a good answer.

And I continue to have that problem today.

My first iteration of this piece went 17,500 words in the wrong direction. This
piece is written in a file titled “setup6d” (there’s also about that many
“collection” .txt’s), and I had a lot planned for this final section. But it’d
be too long. Length matters. It’s “all related”, but these technical details
matter. So it’s time to stop. It’s time to pull up the hook.

And all the miles of rope.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand a little more about the nature of the
problem.

Ever since I started taking drawing seriously, many things not in drawing have
simply revealed themselves to me. Drawing is spatial, and I have always thought
spatially. “I have always thought spatially” is currently in words, but I didn’t
discover that until I took drawing seriously. “Taking [anything] seriously” too.
Etc., ad infinitum. Basically anything regarding learning, I learned through
drawing. And all things have to be learned – learning just means “input”. Which
for me makes sense if I think of it as “seeing”. That’s why all examples I used
highlight seeable things.

Drawings can be measured into correctness. You know that one pose artists in
movies do? The holding up of a pencil? That’s measuring. This amount of space on
the pencil is this amount of space as it appears in reality. You don’t need to
know what the ruler says, just how big this looks in proportion to that. Plus or
minus 10% is fine, so long as it’s the right 10% – choose what you’re measuring
and in what order wisely. Art may be harder to grasp, but drawing is a technical
skill. You need eyes, hands, a pencil, and paper: the rest is followthrough.

When I started, all I did was measure.

But one time, I measured my way into something better than the original. It
looked good, I overlayed it with the picture I was copying from, but it didn’t
match. Traced the lines myself, overlayed with the measured version, still
didn’t match. But one was obviously better than the other. My eyes weren’t
lying. Photoshop wasn’t lying. And one was better than the other. So the
measured one had to be better. That was a breakthrough. That gave me confidence.

Obviously real artists don’t measure everything. That’s not what they do. But
that doesn’t matter. Measuring is extremely slow; that doesn’t matter either.
What matters is results. And doing something I could do, doing something I
understood, I made better results.

“Something I can do and I can understand can make better results.” That was the
breakthrough.

I called it,

“Capturing the Essence”.

I never encountered anything that worked like that for writing. In drawing I not
only learned how to draw, I learned how to export learning to other things. Now,
I at least think of writing as something that can be improved, a skill that
exists independently of any ideas that are talked about inside. Make this
section longer, make that section shorter, rearrange the sections, change that
word out for one that’s more memorable, change that word out for a couple of
sentences that would smooth things out… and so on.

Does that make for better writing? I imagine it does. I hope it does. Taste I
couldn’t really port over. I couldn’t port over tracing either. Nor my lack of
care for intricate detail.

But I do have some taste, here and there. Including one for bibliographies.

I have a taste for bibliographies.

I think saying the purpose of bibliographies is “to prevent plagiarism” is
absolutely insulting.

A trick that can only be played on children. No, that insults children, I should
be more specific: people with no understanding of the world. It’s the same trick
with intellectual property. “If someone has done it before you need to give them
credit”. Question: How am I going to know that? How are you going to know that?
I’m going to search the whole library to see if someone did it before me? What
if the library’s incomplete? What if the Library of Congress is incomplete? And
it is incomplete. Even the Library of Alexandria was incomplete. Even 10,000
pages of Google is incomplete, and you’re not going to look past the first 10.
Everything is a mountain in the jungle, and the jungle is infinite. Trying to
find out if something has been done before you, ever, anywhere, is trying to
search the entire jungle. You can’t do it. You are being sent on an impossible
task. To make it exceedingly clear: You are being fucked with.

Plagiarism is really about who’s going to come after you for not giving them
credit. That is to say: it’s about “who”. It’s power. If you’re small and
they’re big, they can take whatever they want and claim it’s theirs. They can
even claim they did it first and you stole from them (search: art plagiarism).
If you’re really small though, you can take whatever you want, because no one
cares about you. No one even sees you. In academia, we see the end goal of this
anti-plagiarism device meets perfect information: citations absolutely
everywhere. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone is looking for a slice. Names
and titles and dates everywhere, every sentence, clogging up the flow of the
actual stuff. It’s ugly.

I’m a nobody so it doesn’t matter. I do what I want.

I largely can’t be bothered because citations eat up my time: any time and
energy I spend looking into who said what is time I’m not spending doing and
finding out new things. All thinking, plus or minus, cites all the way back to
the Buddha or Socrates. Guess who the Buddha and Socrates cited? And we want to
be like those two guys, right? Not the academics?

It doesn’t matter if someone else found it before me (especially not if I don’t
know who did it), I didn’t do it so I don’t get it, and when I do it it’s new to
me. The most common thing is people say things that are too vague, the less
common but still frequent case is they say things that are obscure; anything
that is useful to me I’ve basically had to do myself anyways. So either I spend
energy figuring out what people are talking about, and then do it myself, or, I
just do it myself. It’s usually not a very hard choice.

But I like bibliographies.

Bibliographies help me remember things.

Other than being spatially gifted/verbally impaired, I have a really terrible
memory. The primary reason why I wrote all this and do any thinking is because I
can’t remember jack squat. Normal people with good memories, I imagine, are just
fine with a bunch of disparate pieces of information. That’s presumably why they
enjoy that trivia stuff so much. But I can’t do that. I can hold only a few
things. So I need to hold the best few things. As it turns out, there are
different types of things, and this type is better than the rest, because it is
a single thing yet also multiple things. It requires thinking to produce, and is
usually called a “principle”.

“Ideology” is what I’ve called a principle of principles. It’s usually called
“epistemology”, but I don’t like that word too much. I like the sound of the
word “ideology”. And I can see what it is: idea, logic. Logic of ideas. What the
heck is an “epistem”? But back to book-graphing.

Good ideas are not randomly distributed. Someone who’s had a good idea before is
likely to have a good idea again; someone who’s had multiple good ideas before
is more likely to have good ideas in the future. The world is really big and
there’s a lot of ways to see about and think around it. You can only see and do
so much yourself. It’s nice to have people who you can use to do additional
thinking for you and run into real problems “beforehand”. There’s still the
minimum reverse-engineering and implementation costs stated earlier, and it is
pretty hard to find someone who’s not just being deliberately obscure (for
dickwaving purposes) – but that’s why bibliographies are great! Once you’ve
found one good thinker, if he has a bibliography, it significantly increases
your chances of finding more good thinkers.

As for the creation side of it, naming sources helps me remember the lineage of
ideas.

Lineages are something that turns the dots of ideas into lines: it’s another
type of principle.

Some lineages are very important. You need to know who said it and what it was
used with etc. to figure something out. Other lineages basically don’t matter
and external factors could be rederived offhand. I think it’s rather good
practice to keep at least a couple of notes on lineage of each thing around. It
tells you where the minimum domains on the things are: “at least according to
this guy”.

This section, apart from the bibliography, was originally going to be more
detail about me. All things have domains; “of course [A Mountain In The Jungle]
is my opinion, it came out of my mouth“. But what do I mean to you? Earlier when
I said I wrote 17,500 words in the wrong direction: that was an autobiography.
Mostly about the two months that were the primary impetus for this idea. But I
don’t think the particular details of that are important anymore. The final
theory survives just fine without it – as it was intended to. As for what
purpose that served, that is to say, giving you some idea about me, I think what
actually appeared in this section is sufficient. More than enough
self-referential stuff.

Okay, maybe a bit more. Since I have written them already.

I picked some fights at the beginning. Here are a few of their illustrations
before the end.

– Utopia/Equalists: They will say you can’t separate people into different
groups.

Equality is mostly a useless concept.

Equal enough isn’t, but then it gets into details, technical details, which
these people don’t want to talk about. Is it IQ? There’s literal apes with no
whites in their eyes that have higher IQ than some africans and aborigines. “Can
function in society” If you ask me, 10x the murder rate and (infinity)x the
riot-and-loot-stores rate is a disqualifier. “You’re just a racist” You will
find that anyone you ask, from any angle, once you get down to these technicals,
will have a different answer for what is equal enough. It’s a fact of life that
different things are different. It only becomes a pressing problem when you
emphasize this impossibility. That’s why non-“racists” have the “the progressive
stack”: they’re always finding more inequalities.

The technicals will get you eventually.

The jungle will get its fair share.

Here’s the bottom line for me: children born from the same parents, raised in
the same household, and fed the same food, turn out different. Even the lengths
of your fingers are different. Suppose equality is good and you have infinite
power (which, I’ll remind you, you don’t). Is it good enough to change that? Go
in there and replace parents with government employees? Finger surgeries for
everyone? I don’t think equality is good enough for that. I don’t think it’s
good enough for basically anything. There’s science men on TV who like to say
things like “we’re all made of the same star stuff”. Are you going to start
treating cabbages like people? Equalists don’t even treat racists like people,
let alone cabbages (which they tend to treat more poorly than
cows/chicken/pigs/fish, also made of “star stuff”). Granted, they’ve recently
stopped eating cabbages and started eating “Soylent”. That just makes my opinion
easier.

Equality is mostly useless.

Using useless things in important and critical ways will get you the obvious
results.

– Bigotry/Womanism: They will say you can’t think things because someone might
feel bad.

I once passed by Forever21 fairly regularly. Forever21 is a women’s clothing
store, presumably the idea is wearing their clothes will keep you forever 21.
Now one day I was passing it a thought occurred to me,

“When does a lady become a woman?”.
Or maybe it was “When does a girl become a lady?”.

The answer came fairly quickly: It’s long after it’s already happened. Thirty
year old females are girls. Then they’re ladies, and have been ladies since they
were twenty. Sixty year old females are ladies. Then they’re women, and have
been since they were forty. They are whatever they say they are, whenever they
say it. Which naturally extends to: things are whatever they say they are,
whenever they say it, and whenever they change their minds. I wasn’t able to
truly generalize this at the time. But this was also before the current
iteration of MeToo and Rolling Stone.

These people are very skilled manipulating your thought space. And the less in
control you are of your thought space, the less understanding you will have of
what’s going on, the higher the probability you are going to help cause results
you are not going to like. There’s a reason why the Greeks made up the concept
of Sirens.

Keep your wits about you around these types. Choose your actions wisely.

They don’t have your best interests in mind.

– NAXALT/ESID/Platonism: They will say you are wrong because you are not
perfectly consistent.

ESID is a version of NAXALT used among those who move to Japan to teach English.
ESID stands for “Every Situation Is Different”, and it’s used to remind people
that, whatever idea they had about Japan before, whatever they had heard, isn’t
therefore going to apply to them. NAXALT is fairly popular, “Not All [X] Are
Like That”; generalized version of “Not All Women Are Like That”.

I believe the purpose of ideas is to help gain understanding about the world.
So, NAXALT/ESID, if it’s a good idea, helps expand understanding. Start with
principle, find exception, re-evaluate new possible general case, expand
principle.

I ran this idea backwards and I found it didn’t work.

It just permanently destroys principles.

We’ve already done race and women, so let’s use this travel one this time.

Suppose you moved to Japan. You don’t move to “Japan”, you move to a house on
such-and-such street in such-and-such city, probably with people to help you
with everything being Japanese, and a job doing such-and-such things with
Japanese clients… you get the idea. Suppose you do that for a day. ESID, you
don’t know everything. Fine. What can you know in a day.

But no matter what you do, it’s the same result.

A week. ESID. A month. ESID. A lifetime. ESID. You know what it means to live in
that house, that street, etc.. What about another house on a different street? A
different city, a different province? A different job, seeing different people,
being in different networks? ESID, ESID, ESID. You can’t say Japan means this or
that because ESID. You’re just talking about you.

Someone else though can say things about Japan, because ?????, then it’s not
ESID.

“But I wouldn’t say things like that, I’d say it’s because you hadn’t” Exactly.

The jungle is infinite. We can’t clear the jungle. We can build the mountain.

So build the mountain.

All you need to do is keep track of who’s saying what, and know that all these
limits also apply to the other guy. If someone says you can’t say something
about your experience in Japan, just know he has some background too.

– Studies/Experts/Numericism: They will say you need the fancy letters and
tabled numbers.

I fucking hate science.

“Exact science” isn’t an exact science. Even rocket science isn’t rocket
science. I would know, I’ve taken some rocket science. There’s some really
fucking inane shit in there. “But you haven’t taken all of rocket science” Fuck
you.

For example, they have tables for making decisions. That sounds neat you say,
make decisions as objective as possible. But tables aren’t magic. All things are
built on technical implementation. Tables only say what you fill them with, and
you can only fill them with what you have ideas for. What do rocket scientists
know about decisions? Not much more than you, because our philosophical
tradition doesn’t take decisions seriously, it only talks about “facts”. Rocket
scientists know plenty about tables, but when they have to measure the
importance of having this feature versus that feature or measuring budget
against quality, guess what they do? They say this feature has an importance of
0.3 and that feature has an importance of 0.5.

How did they do that?

It felt that way.

No really, that’s the extent of it. Experienced or not, they pulled it out of
their ass, and if the tables end up saying something they don’t want, they
change the tables or the numbers until it says what they want it to say. Which
is invariably going to happen because people don’t feel or think about those
things in fucking numbers. At which point you might as well have just chosen
something “subjectively” the first time and written an essay instead. But no. It
has to be science. Which means it has to look like science. Which means
dickwaving tables.

Doctors are the same way. “On a scale from 1 to 10, how much pain are you
feeling?” My chin is detached from my skull and blood is spilling from my hands,
what the fuck do you think? Am I talking to someone? Is this a person? Hello in
there??

Human thoughts and experience don’t fit perfectly in numbers, believe it or not.
They don’t fit perfectly in words either. There may be uses framing things this
way or that, but how they’re framed is of utmost importance. And no one pays
attention to this.

In highschool AP Statistics the first time p-values were brought up, I asked,
“What does it mean to be 95% confident?”. No good answer. Then I was told to
assume things are normally distributed, and I asked, “Why would we assume things
are normally distributed?”. No good answer. I got the department award for
statistics that year. Perhaps that was a coincidence. Perhaps getting a 5 on the
AP test was also a coincidence. I wouldn’t know. I still don’t take statistics
seriously.

Or maybe, I take it seriously, and no one else does.

But words mean what people use them to mean, and people use science and
statistics etc. to mean ^that kind of shit, and I have no particular attachment
to the word, so if that’s the name the enemies desire, that’s the name they will
get.

– Management/Authoritarianism: They will say you don’t know all the details.

They don’t know all the details either.

Transatlantic cable, SR-71, ABMs, battleships, NUMMI…

Actually, let’s wrap those two big stories up.

The Transatlantic Cable eventually became part of a greater system. The British
Empire repeated the feat, pulling a cable across Canada, the Pacific Ocean,
Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, South Africa, and back to the homeland.
The system was completed, half a century later in 1911, and was called, “The All
Red Line“.

In World War 1, British worldwide communications went uninterrupted.

German connections were cut immediately.

NUMMI produced the world’s best cars until 2010.

In 2009, after nearly three decades of failing to improve its quality and under
the 2008 recession, General Motors filed for bankruptcy. Among other things, it
pulled out of the NUMMI joint venture with Toyota. NUMMI had a no-layoff policy,
one that it demonstrated its commitment to shortly after opening in 1987 and
1988, when slowed production and slowed sales meant 264 workers were technically
not needed. Most of the workers were assigned to “kaizen” projects.

Kaizen is another japanese loanword made famous here, meaning “continuous
improvement” (“改善”, lit. “change line”). Kaizen was the philosophy of Toyota and
NUMMI: everyone can always improve. It was the philosophy my dad taught me. My
dad worked at NUMMI. I’ve heard the song of kaizen since before I could speak.

Toyota offered to keep NUMMI open in exchange for some pay cut. I forget the
number, but it was a rate that, as my dad said, if anyone had heard about it at
the time, “everyone would raise their feet in agreement”. But UAW was “the sole
bargaining agent for the NUMMI labor force” by the original contract.

And UAW wanted more.

Toyota pulled out, and opened a few more elsewhere in the country. NUMMI was the
first time Toyota had closed down a factory in its 70+ years of existence.

From a business perspective it wasn’t particularly a good idea to begin with.
Toyota didn’t specifically need to do a joint venture – at the time, such a
thing was unheard of. It was big news. Apparently one headline announcing it
read, “Hell Freezes Over”. Especially using a plant known to be sin city. But
they did it. Because they wanted to, in their words, learn what working with
Americans would be like. It was about learning. After thirty years and now
running multiple plants in the country, perhaps they decided they had learned
enough.

And yet, they gave huge severance packages.

Every year you worked there, you got one week’s pay. On top of some amount of
bonus. And 20,000$ cash – to buy health insurance while you look for your next
job.

No one got a penny when GM closed Fremont Assembly down.
Hell, no one got a penny from GM when it pulled out of NUMMI either.

Toyota also did some things under the table – “They told me, “What we are
talking about now is not in black in white. There will be no records of this.
You talk about this to no one. Not your boss, not your coworkers, not even your
wife””. One by one they went behind closed doors with that man in the suit and
talked about ?????. (The water cooler ran out a lot that day.) I have no qualms
talking about it, but my dad said not to, so out of respect for him I’m cutting
out most of it. But I think the concept of it is important. You can guess what
was occurring, a hook off the back is mostly sufficient.

The end result: Some people took it. Some people didn’t.

My dad didn’t.

Toyota gave it anyways.

– Straight Up Lying/Journalism: They will fabricate things simply to contradict
you.

Fake news is not a problem. I have long since learned not to take them
seriously. I keep track of who says what, and if anything comes from “CNN”, or
“NBC”, or anyone of the fourth estate, I know what that information means. It’s
not a problem.

Does it cause problems? Yes. But it’s a known quantity. I know what to do with
it.

In this case: minimize my exposure to it.

All this discussion about how you need to give us a second chance, we check our
facts now, you’re taking things out of context, when things are always changing
there’s bound to be mistakes, our job is hard, blah blah blah. I don’t care. I
could care. But that’s clearing out the jungle. That’s called buying Hanlon’s
razor. That’s called not learning your Aesop’s fables. When have these guys
shown they cared? Do you know what happens when you turn your back to the enemy?

NUMMI and some other jungles are fun to look around in; this one just sucks. It
fucking sucks. There’s not a single thing I can point to like with NASA, “oh we
had to time our mars landing at exactly the right moment” fuck you, it takes 7
minutes for a signal to even reach mars and “exact” is a measurable amount of
time, either larger than 7×2 minutes (data signal here, command signal back), in
which case, fuck you, or it’s smaller than 7×2 minutes, in which case, you’re
trying to trick me, fuck you. I’d be amazed if you just told me what kinds of
difficulty you were dealing with instead of directly talking about how big your
dick was. But journalism is worse. There’s no reference point. Or rather,
there’s infinite reference points. And it is all dicks.

Easier to just tell them to go fuck themselves. Which achieves approximately the
intended results anyways, and results are what matter. Only people who don’t
like it are journalists.

Who can go fuck themselves.

– Bootstraps/Americanism: They will imply only the lazy embark on your endeavor.

These are the kinds of people who say things like, “If you don’t like Amazon or
Facebook or Google, why don’t you start your own business?”. Or, “I pulled
myself up by my bootstraps, I paid my own way through college working part-time
in the summer”.

I hope I’ve impressed upon you by now what the problem with this is.

More importantly, I hope I’ve impressed upon you now how its solution begins.

I’d like to do more. I could go on forever.

But I have other things I want to do.

And you have an approximate idea. So long as you know about where to look, have
the some resources, and you start looking, you’ll get approximately what you
want.

Throw a hook off the back.
Start with what you know, the results are not the structure.
All things are built on technical implementation.
There are things it can and can’t do; there are places it can and can’t go.

Start with the proposition:

So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I

> “Mastery does not normally cross fields.
> 
> Epistemology is the exception. Every field of inquiry involves epistemology.”
> 
> Alrenous


II

> “There are at least three psychological reasons for why most people are
> deterred from finding the true theory of history. The first is that the vast
> majority of people only have an implicit theory of history.
> 
> (Which is to say: most people do not even have the concept of a theory of
> history.)
> 
> Here’s the problem with relying on your implicit theory of history: it’s
> wrong, without a doubt. The world is complex, and your theory of history has
> to explain how everything in the world works. So, without explicitly trying to
> improve your theory of history, there is no hope: there will be countless
> things that you have not had the time or the psychological freedom to take
> into account. Improving your theory of history implicitly is not systematic
> enough to work.”
> 
> On Building Theories of History
> Samo Burja

> “One of my favorite stories about my wife and myself, when we were in New
> Jersey, our breakfast table was right next to some windows looking on the
> garden. We’re having breakfast prior to me going to work. And she says, “Dick,
> it’s raining.” I look at her and think “What’s wrong with her? She must know
> that I can see it’s raining”. Then I say to myself, what did she really say?
> 
> What she said was: “I’ve had my second cup of coffee and I’m fit to talk to.”
> 
> I spent much of that day at Bell Labs watching how much of what we say is not
> what it appears to be. And it is amazing. The enormous amount of how much of
> what we say is literally not correct. No way. So the language has a great deal
> of thing of things more than what you think; our natural language has a great
> deal of features, which in a language to a computer would not have to have.
> 
> Well we have not studied the problem. When I heard the Japanese were planning
> to write fifth generation computers, the speed was alright, but when they were
> going to do AI to do things, I thought they would not succeed. And they
> didn’t. Because they were not profoundly studying the nature of language. And
> until we do, we will get language like ADA, which are logically alright, but
> they don’t fit the human analogue to do the kinds of things that a human
> animal does with language.
> 
> Now I point out there are two languages: there is you to the machine, and the
> machine back to you. They need not be the same language. You want a terse one
> in, and you’re willing to put up with a rather verbose one coming out.
> Frequently what comes out is so terse you can’t figure out what it means, and
> you’re willing to settle with a lot more printout – but not too much. It’s a
> problem of designing language to communicate ideas to machines.
> 
> But unfortunately we don’t know what ideas are, so we don’t know how to do
> it.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “The story of this factory is a famous one among car people-
> it’s taught at business schools.”
> 
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015
> Ira Glass


III

> “There isn’t really a problem of induction.
> 
> There really is a problem of intentionality. How the fuck do things refer to
> other things?”
> 
> Alrenous

> “Suppose you have two theories, A and B. Both completely different
> psychologically, different ideas and so on. But all the consequences they
> computed are exactly the same. They may even agree with the experiments. The
> two theories, although they sound different at the beginning, have all the
> consequences the same. […] Suppose we have two such theories: how are we going
> to decide which one is right?
> 
> No way. Not by science. Because they both agree with experiments there’s no
> way to distinguish one from the other. So two theories, although they may have
> deeply different ideas behind them, may be mathematically identical, and
> usually people say then in science ‘one doesn’t know how to distinguish them’.
> And that’s right.
> 
> However, for psychological reasons, in order to get new theories, these two
> things are very far from equivalent. Because one gives a man very different
> ideas than another. By putting a theory in a certain kind of framework you get
> an idea what could change. Which in theory A would talk about something, you
> say I’ll change that idea here, but to find out what corresponding things
> you’re going to change in B could be very complicated. It may not be a simple
> idea. In other words, a simple change here makes maybe a very different theory
> than a simple change there. In other words, although they are identical before
> they’re changed, there are certain ways of changing one which look natural,
> which don’t look natural in the other. Therefore psychologically, we must keep
> all those theories in our head. Every theoretical physicist that’s any good
> knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same
> physics, and knows that they’re all equivalent, and that nobody is ever going
> to be able to decide which one is right – at that level – but he keeps them in
> his head, hoping that they’ll give him different ideas.”
> 
> The Character of Physical Law
> Richard Feynman

> “There has to be an answer. You must not doubt that.
> 
> If you can’t believe that, why don’t you cry yourself to sleep, and then just
> give up and die?”
> 
> EVA-Beatrice
> Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Chiru: End of the Golden Witch


IV

> “There was no vocabulary, even, to explain it. I remember one of the GM
> managers was ordered from a very senior level– it came from a vice president–
> to make a GM plant look like NUMMI. And he said, I want you to go there with
> cameras and take a picture of every square inch. And whatever you take a
> picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no
> excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our
> productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.
> 
> Immediately, this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy employee motivation.
> We can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not
> something you can copy, and you can’t even take a photograph of it.”
> 
> Jeffrey Liker
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015

> “Managers tend to believe that if they only knew what was going on, they would
> know what to do.
> 
> It’s called micromanagement.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “The foreman, Mr. Fichtel, said he wrote a memo with this suggestion to his
> superiors two years ago, but nothing had happened yet. When he asked why, he
> was told the suggestion was too expensive.
> 
> “Too expensive to paint four little lines?” I said in disbelief.
> 
> They all laughed. “It’s not the paint; it’s the paperwork,” Mr. Fichtel said.
> “They would have to revise all the manuals.”
> 
> The assembly workers and other observations and suggestions. They were
> concerned that if two rocket sections scrape as they’re being put together,
> metal filings could get into the rubber seals and damage them. They even had
> some suggestions for redesigning the seal. Those suggestion weren’t very good,
> but the point is, the workers were thinking! I got the impression that they
> were not undisciplined; they were very interested in what they were doing, but
> they weren’t being given much encouragement. Nobody was paying much attention
> to them. It was remarkable that their morale was as high as it was under the
> circumstances.
> 
> Then the workers began to talk to the boss who had stayed. “We’re disappointed
> by something,” one of them said. “When the commission was going to see the
> booster-rocket assembly, the demonstration was going to be done by the
> managers. Why wouldn’t you let us do it?”
> 
> “We were afraid you’d be frightened by the commissioners and you wouldn’t want
> to do it.”
> 
> “No, no”, said the workmen. “We think we do a good job, and we wanted to show
> what we do.””
> 
> What Do You Care What Other People Think?
> Richard Feynman

> “While this is THE classic book on lean production […] They give short-shrift
> to the real key.
> 
> The original researcher for this study was John Krafcik (he later became the
> President and CEO of Hyundai Motor America). In his own report of the data he
> pointed out that the skills and motivation of the work force has the greatest
> explanatory power of assembly plant performance.
> 
> Yet this is given remarkably little attention in this book. Had the authors
> look beyond the automobile assembly even as nearby as the turnaround at Harley
> Davidson this focus on people might have gotten much more attention. In the
> case of Harley, there was no way to miss that the key was the people in every
> factory floor function.
> 
> Get the people environment right, and everything else will sort itself out.”
> 
> Bill B.
> Amazon reviews for “The Machine That Changed the World”

> “One thing I really like about the Toyota style is that they’ll put in a
> machine to save you from bending down. The Toyota philosophy is that the
> worker should use the machine and not vice versa. Not like some of these
> plants you read about where it’s automation for automation’s sake.
> 
> I visited a plant a while back – they had robot sealer guns but they also had
> workers who had to check that the robots had done it right and to redo it
> manually when the robots screwed up. It would be fine if the robots worked
> perfectly – and the engineers always seem to imagine they will. But they don’t
> and so the worker ends up being used by the machine.
> 
> At NUMMI, we just put in a robot for installing the spare tire – that really
> helps the worker, because it was always a hell of a tiring job. It took a
> while, and we had to raise it in the safety meetings and argue about it and
> then do some kaizen. But they knew. They understood. And they came through.
> Same thing with installing batteries – they put in a machine to help the
> worker do a better job. That would never happen at GM-Fremont – you never saw
> automation simply to help the worker.”
> 
> George Nano
> The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
> Paul S. Adler

> “Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage
> communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what
> has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of
> whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to
> hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?”
> or they say “Well, see what you can do about it” – which is a completely
> different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed
> back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.””
> 
> What Do You Care What Other People Think?
> Richard Feynman

> “Ted Holman, a Team Leader in the body shop, argued this way:
> 
> “I don’t think IEs are dumb. They’re just ignorant. Anyone can watch someone
> else doing a job and come up with improvement suggestions that sound good. But
> they don’t usually take into account all the little things that explain why,
> from the worker’s point of view, they couldn’t work. And it’s even easier to
> come up with the ideal procedure if you don’t even bother to watch the worker
> at work, but just do it from your office, on paper. Almost anything can look
> good that way. Even when we do our own analysis in our teams, some of the
> silliest ideas can slip through before we try it out.
> 
> There’s a lot of things that enter into a good job design. Little things can
> make a big difference, like how high or low the stock is placed or how the
> tools are organized or where the hoses are. The person actually doing the job
> is the only one who can see all those factors. And in the U.S., engineers have
> never had to work on the floor – not like in Japan. So they don’t know what
> they don’t know.
> 
> In the typical U.S. plant, you never even saw the IE – they stayed in their
> cozy offices upstairs. They never talked to workers about how to improve their
> jobs.
> 
> Today, we drive the process, and if we need their help, the engineer is there
> the next day to work on it with us.”
> 
> Smith put this contrast in a broader perspective:
> 
> “In most plants, management assumes the “divine right” to design jobs as they
> see fit. And in the U.S. auto industry, workers have historically agreed to
> that in exchange for higher wages. Management was willing to pay a ton of
> money to the workers to preserve its prerogative.
> 
> But in practice, the old way of setting standards was just ridiculous. An
> Industrial Engineer would shut himself away in an isolated office and consider
> how long it took for somebody to twist their wrist and move their arm in such
> and such a way, and calculate from some manual and try that way to come up
> with a task design. The IE would take this “properly” designed job to the
> foreman. The foreman would not his head, but then said “screw you” to the IE’s
> back and redesigned the task to his own liking. Then he’d take his task design
> to the worker and said “Do it this way or you’re out.” The worker would not
> but would pull the same trick on the foreman. In the end, the job got done
> however the worker could. When the boss walked by, the worker might pretend to
> do the job the way the foreman had told him. Everybody involved knew this was
> going on but no one cared to do anything about it.
> 
> Multiply that game by the number of shifts and the number of different people
> involved and you’ve got a process you can’t control. You can’t build a quality
> car like that. You can’t even go back and improve the process, because the IE
> lives in dream world, doesn’t have a clue how the job is actually done, and
> doesn’t have any impact. The foreman’s impact is also zip. Nobody talks to the
> worker even though he’s the one guy who can do something about the problem.
> Nobody wants to listen to him. That’s basically how most of the auto industry
> operates even today.
> 
> So you can see why standardized work is so revolutionary.
> 
> And why most IEs are pretty uncomfortable with it!””
> 
> The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
> Paul S. Adler

> “I said, “In order to speed things up, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, so you’ll
> know where I’m aiming. I want to know whether there’s the same lack of
> communication between the engineers and the management who are working on the
> engine as we found in the case of the booster rockets.”
> 
> Mr. Lovingood says, “I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, although I’m now a
> manager, I was trained as an engineer.”
> 
> “All right”, I said, “Here’s a piece of paper each. Please write on your paper
> the answer to this question: what do you think is the probability that a
> flight would be uncompleted due to a failure in this engine?”
> 
> They wrote down their answers and hand in their papers. One guy wrote
> “99-44/100% pure” (copying the Ivory soap slogan), meaning about 1 in 200.
> Another guy wrote something very technical and highly quantitative in the
> standard statistical way, carefully defining everything, that I had to
> translate – which also meant about 1 in 200. The third guy wrote, simply, “1
> in 300.”
> 
> Mr. Lovingood’s paper, however, said.
> 
> “Cannot quantify. Reliability is judged from:
> – past experience
> – quality control in manufacturing
> – engineering judgment”
> 
> “Well”, I said, “I’ve got four answers, and one of them weaseled.” I turned to
> Mr. Lovingood: “I think you weaseled.”
> 
> “I don’t think I weaseled.”
> 
> “You didn’t tell me what your confidence was, sir; you told me how you
> determined it. What I want to know is: after you determined it, what was it?”
> 
> He says, “100 percent” – the engineers’ jaws drop, my jaw drops, I look at
> him, everybody looks at him – “uh, uh, minus epsilon!”
> 
> So I say, “Well yes; that’s fine. Now, the only problem is, WHAT IS EPSILON?”
> 
> He says, “10^-5”. It was the same number that Mr. Ullian had told us about: 1
> in 100,000.
> 
> I showed Mr. Lovingood the other answers and said, “You’ll be interested to
> know that there is a difference between engineers and management here – a
> factor of more than 300.””
> 
> What Do You Care What Other People Think?
> Richard Feynman


V

> “You build 3-dimensional things. The design space [however] is n-dimensional.
> You design in n-dimensional space, one dimension for every parameter you can
> adjust. Therefore it is not 3-dimensional space that matters in design, it is
> n-dimensional space.
> 
> And n-dimensional space is vast. Very, very large.
> 
> To convince you of this, I will start by your own experience. You think you
> know 3-dimensional space, but you really don’t. You are really familiar with 2
> dimensions. In 2 dimensions, a random walk will come back to the same place:
> if you meet a person, there’s a good chance you’ll meet them again.
> 
> In 3 dimensions, that is not true. In 3 dimensions, say the ocean where the
> fish live, what do they do? They go around on the bottom, they go around on
> the surface, they go around in schools, they assemble at the mouth of a river.
> They cannot wander the open ocean and hope to find a mate. That’s how vast 3
> dimensions is. You can wander around 2 dimensions and sure enough, you can get
> a mate. Probably. In 3 dimensions, not a very good chance.
> 
> In higher ones, forget it.
> 
> But that is the space of design. You’re out there in that tremendously vast
> space.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “Imagine you knew a guy. Imagine this guy was willing to say for you, “Yeah,
> if she has her tits chopped off, she’s totally a man now.” Like, doesn’t that
> give you a warm fuzzy feeling? He must really like you to be willing to lie
> that flagrantly to help you out.
> 
> Problem is if you make too many friends, the lie will become a thing. Is he
> lying for you, or just because everyone is doing it? So now you have to come
> up with an even bigger lie, and see if he’ll still say it.”
> 
> “#pointDeerMakeHorse”
> 
> “But would you be willing to ride the deer?”
> 
> “If you’re not then it shows that you don’t really believe it’s a horse, no?”
> 
> “The future is fucking a man to signal you think he’s a woman, forever.”
> 
> Alrenous, Covfefe Anon, Parallax Optics

> “So Zhao Gao brings a deer into the palace. Grabs it from the horns, calls the
> emperor to come out, and says “look your majesty, a brought you a fine horse”.
> The Emperor, not amused, says “Surely you are mistaken, calling a deer a
> horse. Right?”. Then the emperor looks around at all the ministers. Some
> didn’t say a word, just sweating nervously. Some others loudly proclaimed what
> a fine horse this was. Great horse. Look at this tail! These fine legs. Great
> horse, naturally prime minister Zhao Gao has the best of tastes.
> 
> A small bunch did protest that this was a deer, not a horse. Those were soon
> after summarily executed. And the Second Emperor himself was murdered some
> time later.”
> 
> The Purpose of Absurdity
> Spandrell/Bloody Shovel

> “No idiot, it’s the opposite. How you mouthbreathers are let loose in society
> is beyond me”
> 
> “The premise of democracy is to let loose all the mouthbreathers.”
> 
> Unknown, Alrenous

> “What percentage of people do you estimate believe democracy should be valued
> for its innate value and not simply its ability to on average deliver better
> results than authoritarian states?”
> 
> “So this economist here means to tell us that “value” and “results” aren’t the
> exact same thing.”
> 
> Unknown, Spandrell/Bloody Shovel

> “Can you imagine an ethnologist observing gorillas for years only to conclude
> that their behaviour is “wrong” and that they ought to do something else
> instead? How ridiculous would that be? Now consider our humanities and social
> studies professors who supposedly study human nature.”
> 
> Unknown

> “We need to be subject to critique by people who know what they’re doing.”
> 
> “This is hard when the West largely rejects the idea that some people know
> what they are doing better than others.”
> 
> various/Unknown

> “Primogeniture, inheritance of the family fortune by the firstborn. This
> practice has since been replaced by the more humane system of inheritance by
> lawyers.”
> 
> Samo Burja

> “the CDC performs a very important function, which is to render legible that
> which the government wishes to define as disease”
> 
> Literal Banana

> “It’s increasingly clear, if it wasn’t already, that the “Rule of Law” that is
> supposedly the core of Western society is in reality just Rule of Lawyers. Or
> Rule of Judges, who by far have the largest discretion of any power holder.
> They can ban and overturn anything.”
> 
> Spandrell/Bloody Shovel

> “It’s amazing. You have all of these oppressed brown people – excuse me, let
> me use the worshippable, sacrilizing term – people of color.
> 
> And by color, I mean the color brown.
> 
> The people of color brown, they’re constantly trying to get into these places,
> these white spaces, white organizations, white institutions, that are
> oppressing them!
> 
> Imagine if the Armenians in Turkey had some march in Istanbul, demanding to be
> served by Turkish diners, or staged sit-ins in Ankara. They would be killed,
> and the government would look the other way. Or if the Kurds marched into
> Baghdad and demanded equal funding for their schools, and that the people of
> Baghdad should pay for it because Baghdad has more money, that this was their
> right, equal rights meant that the Baghdadis had to pay for their schools, to
> pay for their stuff.
> 
> Actually oppressed people don’t behave this way.
> 
> In the United States, who is trying to gain access to the other? Who is trying
> to escape the other? Who would rather have an hour commute than live in a
> neighborhood predominated by the other?
> 
> Is it called “Black Flight”? Or “White Flight”?”
> 
> Ryan Faulk/The Alternative Hypothesis

> “It’s *after* you apologize that you get in trouble. People smell weakness.
> They detect the difference between an action caused by principles and one
> driven by fear.”
> 
> Nassim Nicholas Taleb

> “The wasted space (and its contribution to overall impoverishment) in our
> stagnant cities is definitely on my mind a lot–but it’s not surprising that
> high real estate costs in other cities haven’t changed things for them, mainly
> because they’re just too far away to benefit from places which are still
> thriving–they only *work* when they have functional economies of their own.
> 
> It’s like that tedious cliche about “why do Americans need to build dense when
> we have S P A C E” as if all the acreage in, say, Wyoming makes an ounce of a
> difference to people trying to live and work in, say, Boston.
> 
> Or for that matter, all the acreage in WESTERN MASS vis-a-vis the people
> trying to live and work in Boston.”
> 
> Alex Forrest

> “Well, ok, but why? How did this mistake happen? He of course does no attempt
> at explaining. Because his job, the job of Pat Buchanan is to be a
> conservative, and the job of conservatives is not to understand a thing. The
> job of conservatives is, and has been for decades, to state their confusion
> with a tone of strong indignation. I don’t understand this! Hmm! I am angry,
> yes I am, this makes no sense, and that makes me angry. Join me in my
> indignation, oh and buy my book. Hmph!
> 
> […] if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your
> intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get
> something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand
> it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing.“
> 
> Mistakes Happen for a Reason
> Spandrell/Bloody Shovel

> “Slave ownership has traditionally taken very curious forms. The best slave is
> someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.
> 
> Multinational companies created the expat category, a sort of diplomat with a
> higher standard of living who represents the firm far away and runs its
> business there. All large corporations had (and some still have) employees
> with expat status and, in spite of its costs, it is an extremely effective
> strategy. Why? Because the further from headquarters an employee is located,
> the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a slave so he does
> nothing strange on his own.
> 
> A bank in New York sends a married employee with his family to a foreign
> location, say, a tropical country with cheap labor, with perks and privileges
> such as country club membership, a driver, a nice company villa with a
> gardener, a yearly trip back home with the family in first class, and keeps
> him there for a few years, enough to be addicted. He earns much more than the
> “locals”, in a hierarchy reminiscent of colonial days. He builds a social life
> with other expats. He progressively wants to stay in the location longer, but
> he is far from headquarters and has no idea of his minute-to-minute standing
> except through signals.
> 
> Eventually, like a diplomat, he begs for another location when time comes for
> a reshuffle. Returning to the home office means loss of perks, having to
> revert to his base salary – a return to lower-middle-class life in the suburbs
> of New York City, taking the commuter train, perhaps, or, God forbid, a bus,
> and eating a sandwich for lunch! The person is terrified when the big boss
> snubs him. Ninety-five percent of the employee’s mind will be on company
> politics…
> 
> …which is exactly what the company wants.
> 
> The big boss in the board room will have a supporter in the event of some
> intrigue.”
> 
> Skin in the Game
> Nassim Nicholas Taleb

> “If you have ten loyal, conscientious workers, the advantage over having ten
> sullen nihilists is easily destroyed by having one truly bad hire who you
> can’t fire without invoking a lawsuit. Some (enough) companies have responded
> by making working conditions bad enough that everyone wants to leave, then
> trying to entice good ones to stay on the sly.
> 
> [… M]anorial nobles offered good working conditions because if you really
> pissed them off they could have you executed. Work is terrible to the extent
> it is protected. See also: communism.”
> 
> Alrenous

> “I find it very disturbing how people can casually recommend working two or
> three jobs as a long-term solution to life’s problems, because it demonstrates
> the reality that in the post-industrial west, you are no longer a citizen of a
> national body or a society with a clearly defined identity and culture. You
> are a citizen of an economy, and your life’s purpose and value is reduced to
> being a menial laborer in a larger body whose sole ideology is simply
> production for purposeless expansion. You are a cog in a machine, and exist
> for that purpose only to be discarded when your utility to the religion of
> production has exhausted itself. For fuck’s sake, your value as a person is
> literally measured by your economic productivity and the money that you
> accumulate from it.
> 
> A fucking peasant in the twelfth century has led a more meaningful life than
> the majority of the machinated zombies that call themselves “people” we are
> surrounded by today. Contemporary society is too focused on work and not
> focused enough on living. In prior historical epochs work was viewed as a
> means towards living. It is a sacrifice to be done and gotten over with in
> order to realize a goal. Today, it is conflated WITH living. Post-industrial
> society views the act of work to be the very essence of life. You work, and
> therefore you live. We have built the ultimate materialist society.”
> 
> Unknown

> “16th century: They promised us religious freedom and tore up the commons,
> slaughtered the monks and crushed the statues of our saints.
> 18th century: They promised us political freedom and exchanged our village
> councils and manor courts with a vote for a distant parliament.
> 19th century: They promised us financial freedom and led us into dark and
> noisy factories and crowded slums rife with disease and debt.
> 20th century: They promised us national freedom if only we would stand up to
> be counted for the draft, learning to bayonet our brothers.
> 21st century: They promised us the freedom from identity, from family and
> descendants, if only we gave up all that our ancestors left us.
> 
> And here we are today: with nothing left to offer and nothing left to take.”
> 
> Wrath of Gnon

> “Part of being a historian is that you quickly learn to become a hater of all
> things.
> 
> And you realize we’re on a small boat in a world of shit and there’s a leak.”
> 
> Jason Scott

> “If you can’t plan or make decisions, you will have trouble with everything
> you touch.”
> 
> [But this is ridiculous! He got hit in the head with ten pounds of steel, and
> then less than a minute later he went at it again! This is a professional
> handyman?!]
> 
> “People can live their whole lives without learning anything.”
> 
> Dad

> “It’s not a problem. It’s a predicament; it has no solution, only outcomes.”
> 
> The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
> Strong Towns
> Charles Marohn


VI

> “You’re thinking, “I don’t want to hear about how everything is interpretable
> through the artificial paradigm of narrative structure–” as if it was me and
> not your god who made it this way, as if I was better able to invent a
> convenient fiction that happened to apply to you rather than describe a
> process that’s been used for millennia. You think you’re the first? You think
> no one but you has lived your life? Do you think you are so unique? Do you
> think I just took a guess? This isn’t the first time this game has been
> played, there’ve been over 100 generations of Guess What Happens Next and it
> is the exact same answer every single time. All of this has happened before
> and it will happen again.
> 
> But you want “why”, you’re drawn to “why” like you’re drawn to a pretty girl
> in the rain. Let me guess: she has black hair, big eyes, and is dressed like
> an ingenue. “Why?” is the most seductive of questions because it is innocent,
> childlike, infinite in possibilities, and utterly devoted to you.
> 
> “Why am I this way? Why do I do what I do?” But what will you do with that
> information? What good is it? If you were an android, would it change you to
> know why you were programmed the way you were? “Why” is masturbation, “why” is
> the enemy, the only question that matters is, now what?
> 
> But you want “why”.  Ok, here we go.”
> 
> Amy Schumer Offers You A Look Into Your Soul
> The Last Psychiatrist

> “Whenever anything unexpected happens, the programmed role has to be dragged,
> kicking and screaming, into the future, and when it isn’t, Rome falls.”
> 
> Alrenous

> “It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in
> time.”
> 
> The Book of Five Rings
> Miyamoto Musashi

> “It is a principle of the art of war that one should simply lay down his life
> and strike. If one’s opponent also does the same, it is an even match.
> Defeating one’s opponent is then a matter of faith and destiny.”
> 
> Hagakure
> Yamamoto Tsunetomo


VII

> “But I didn’t prove it for the skater. The skater uses muscle force. Gravity
> is a different force. Yet it’s true for the skater.
> 
> Now we have a problem: we can deduce, often, from one part of physics, like
> the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than
> the derivation! This doesn’t happen in mathematics, that the theorems come out
> in places where they’re not supposed to be.
> 
> In other words, if we were to say that the postulates of physics were this law
> of gravitation, we could deduce the conservation of angular momentum, but only
> for gravitation. But we discover experimentally that the conservation of
> angular momentum is a much wider thing. Newton had other hypostulates by which
> he could get the more general conservation law of angular momentum. But
> Newtonian laws were wrong. There’s no forces, it’s all a lot of baloney, the
> particles don’t have orbits, yet – the analog, the exact transformation of
> this principle about the areas, the conservation of angular momentum is true
> with atomic motions in quantum mechanics and is still, as far as we can tell,
> exact.
> 
> So we have these wide principles which sweep across all the different laws.
> And if one takes too seriously its derivation, and feels that this is only
> valid because this is valid, you cannot understand the interconnections
> between the different branches of physics.
> 
> Someday, when physics is complete, then maybe with this kind of argument, we
> know all the laws, then we can start with some axioms, and no doubt somebody
> will figure out a particular way doing it. But while we don’t know all the
> laws, we can use some to make guesses at theorems which extend beyond their
> proof.”
> 
> The Character of Physical Law
> Richard Feynman


VIII

> “Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of
> building from the history and traditional meanings of building, by promoting a
> species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social and, with them, urban life
> as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that
> failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and consumption of natural
> resources, or to respect the lives of other living things. The result of
> Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities
> ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings
> and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that
> lack any sense of community, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live
> in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent
> industries at the expense of human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity
> that we have only begun to measure.”
> 
> The Geography of Nowhere
> James Howard Kunstler
> Wrath of Gnon

> “[…C]ommunities are not for justice, peace, defense, or traffic, but for the
> sake of the good life, the Summum Bonum. This good life has always meant the
> satisfaction of four basic social desires, desires to which earlier designers
> have always given material and structural shape. These desires are
> conviviality, religiosity, intellectual growth, and politics. […] If a new
> region is to be successfully developed, decentralized, and open-ended to many
> possibilities, some interventions are simple. What will be needed is the
> construction of focal points at primitive crossroads: a sidewalk cafe, a
> restaurant serving excellent meals, a little concert hall or theater, a
> charming church, a well-designed meeting hall.
> 
> To sum up the success of old and the failure of modern community design in one
> sentence: ancient planners, recognizing the invariable Aristotelian purpose of
> why people live in communities, put all their talent into the building of the
> communal nucleus […] The rest of the settlement then followed naturally.
> 
> In contrast, modern designers are forever building the rest of the city.”
> 
> The Idea of Design
> Victor Papanek
> Wrath of Gnon

> “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant,
> understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. I’ve often
> puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized, we were
> asking all the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture
> thing.
> 
> All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s
> happening on the line. That’s not the real issue.
> 
> The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that
> have to take place in the organization?”
> 
> Ernie Schaefer
> This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015

> “You’re going to find within your lifetime, but not much within mine, that you
> have moved more than you would have expected from L2 to L1 or Linfinity, and
> you will find that statistics does not support you. The chi-squared test is a
> good example of this: an L2 fit. They haven’t bothered to work out the L1 or
> Linfinity qualities of it. The mathematics are a little more ferocious. It’s a
> little more difficult.
> 
> But with modern machines, who cares about how difficult math is, we just let
> the machines grind away, they can do a few billion operations a second, what
> do I care.
> 
> It is better to get the right problem solved a little bit slowly, than to
> rapidly solve the wrong problem.
> 
> I announce that as a very general theorem. The tendency is to try to solve the
> wrong problem elegantly and rapidly. And I have seen that enormous times in my
> life; grabbing something I can cope with and solving the wrong problem,
> announcing the exact answer to the wrong problem.
> 
> Generally speaking, I would rather have an approximate answer to the right
> problem. And that is where the difficulty arises: identifying the problem. The
> greatest step in creativity is recognizing that there is a problem. The second
> greatest step is identifying the nature of the problem.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “I think the best definition of politics is one I found in an American
> dictionary, which said, ‘the art or science of governance of a country, and
> how it runs its internal and external relations’.
> 
> Translated in real life, it means “How is my life affected by the
> government?”. Do I have a job? Do I have a home? Do I have medicine when I
> need it? Do I have enough recreational facilities? Is there a future for my
> children? Will they be educated, will there be a chance to advance in society?
> 
> If you do not have any of these things, you are going to find agitation.
> 
> You have no recollection of this because you were not born, but in the 1950s
> and 1960s, Singapore was in a state of agitation every day. You look up your
> old Straits Times and [other newspapers], archives. Look at the riots, the
> strikes. Why? No homes, half the children were not in schools. 14%
> unemployment and underemployment. Pirate taxi drivers. No job, so I take a
> car, pay no license, no insurance, come in I give you a ride. 50 cents, 20
> cents, so on. Hookers all over the place.
> 
> Today, over 40 years, we have transformed it, because assiduously we attended
> to the politics of life.
> 
> That’s what it’s about.
> 
> ‘What is the future?’.
> 
> If I can have another political party, you can have another political party,
> to look after you, the way the PAP has, I say, my job is done, finished. I can
> go home, and sit back, and read the books I want to read.”
> 
> Lee Kuan Yew


IX

> “Mechanical innovations, including mechanized cities, can add to our
> experience and stimulate our perceptive capacities, but they do not eradicate
> the mechanisms of human physiology.
> 
> The proper size of a bedroom has not changed in thousands of years.
> 
> Neither has the proper size of a door nor the proper size of a community. If
> cities have become immense, so much more is the need for subdividing them into
> comprehensible sections. Transportation systems may render the outlying parts
> of the city more accessible, but communities must remain individual entities
> whose size and appearance are comprehensible. The physical fact of scale must
> also be visually apparent. When these principles are violated the results are
> cities without human form, cities without sympathy, cities without pride.
> Worse still are the effects on the spirit and human sensitivities of its
> people.”
> 
> Paul D. Spreiregen
> Wrath of Gnon

> “Authoritarian systems have many problems but pork isn’t one of them. The guys
> who gotta eat aren’t that many, and you don’t need an elaborate faith argument
> to set up a system for pork distribution.
> 
> Say China.
> 
> China makes their high speed rail system, spends untold trillions on it,
> trillions paid by public debt which will probably never pay themselves. 90% of
> the stations built 30km out of the main cities, many in the middle of rice
> paddies where proper roads haven’t even been built yet. How many billions were
> skimmed of it? I don’t know but the Railway Minister is in jail and the
> Ministry itself was abolished, which means even the Chinese government is
> embarrassed by it. But hey China now has a pretty cool high speed rail network
> which they sorely needed, works like a charm, and out of the hugest budget in
> human history they only had to pay off some local officials and the railway
> minister. I’ve seen estimates of 5%.
> 
> The waste on pre-K education is 100%.”
> 
> Pork and Hamsters
> Spandrell/Bloody Shovel

> “The fact that it’s large is why censorship matters. Nobody cares about small
> forums censoring people.”
> 
> “Just because something is on the internet does not mean it’s a “public
> space”.”
> 
> “Yeah so what? We need to make sure large companies aren’t able to control who
> can go where and do what. You can’t kill somebody just for being in your
> house. So obviously there’s a line that needs drawing.”
> 
> “You’re forgetting that another entity could provide the well for the other
> demographic, seeing as there’s money to be made there.”
> 
> “It’s an example of there being limited availability in resources. In the
> example of the water, there’s no time to wait for the market to dig another
> well to save the person. Any excuse can be made, but the end result is the
> person dies, not that property rights have been saved. The same thing is
> happening with social media. […] If it’s the greater races at stake. The
> future of civilization at stake. Then there’s no length we shouldn’t go to to
> save it. Property becomes less important. It’s a hierarchy of needs for
> civilization to survive.
> 
> […] The entire premise is virtual or not, private or not, when something
> dominates how we live our lives, we need to look at how we can update those
> areas to reflect our values. Those values conflict with private property every
> day and we have to make hard decisions. Private property is an ideal just like
> freedom of speech, belief, etc. […] Property rights are incredibly important,
> but there are times they hinder civilization. If it allows us to get run over
> and civilization destroyed, and property rights destroyed as a result, then
> they weren’t very good ideals. This is why libertarians have mostly become
> fascists of some sort. At least until we get control of things like borders
> and universities.”
> 
> “There is no comparison between forcing a company to manage it’s website a
> certain way and border control.”
> 
> “It’s not a comparison. It’s about taking every ground we can to support the
> existence of civilization. Property rights are good at that, but only to a
> point. We also need to think in terms of collective property rights.
> 
> We can’t just wait until something reaches our doorstep. Collective power
> always has and always will matter.”
> 
> Arman, Unknown

> “No one rules alone, thus when the King attempts to gather all power in his
> own hands, he finds he has in fact gathered all power into the hands of
> dangerous powerful people dangerously close the throne. To fix this problem,
> the official Church need to remind the people that the God who commanded
> obedience to Kings, also commanded that Kings, like other men, should refrain
> from coveting that which belongs to someone else.
> 
> Repeating: Freehold means that the peasant in his hovel possesses Kingly power
> under his hovel’s roof, which Kingly power the King has no right to mess with,
> even if the peasant abuses it. That power is not the King’s to interfere with,
> even if the peasant is arguably mistreating his wife and his children. If the
> lord stops that peasant from mistreating his wife and children, pretty soon
> King George the Fourth gets cuckolded, as he cuckolded others. […]”
> 
> Throne, Altar, and Freehold
> Jim’s Blog

> “Even compared to other ancient societies, Roman law and culture gave the head
> of household extreme power over their family. For example, children did not
> have separate property, including unmarried adult children, and a patriarch
> faced no legal punishment for killing his own children or slaves.
> 
> Practices of this type, combined with the feelings people naturally have for
> their immediate family, made households internally coordinated to a ludicrous
> degree. For instance, you didn’t have to worry about your second-in-command
> leaving to work for a competitor, because law and custom were on your side if
> you physically drag him back. Thus, a skilled patriarch would have a power
> base that was effectively immune to most attacks short of murder. This greatly
> lessened the Problem of Local Focus, making the household much more
> formidable.”
> 
> Production of Elites in the Roman Republic
> Ben Landau-Taylor

> “Centralization leads to complexity, complexity leads to crisis, attempts to
> fix the crisis have, because of complexity, unintended consequences, which
> escalate into further crisis, leading to further centralization, Hence Soviet
> Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Venezuela, and now America.
> 
> This is the crisis of socialism, explained in “I pencil”, which makes the
> point that no one actually knows how to make a pencil, hence socialist
> production of pencils will fail.
> 
> In order to manage complexity, you need walls, so that one man can make
> decisions without having his decisions mucked up by another man’s decisions.
> Hence, private property and local authority, the authority of the father, the
> authority the business owner, the authority of the CEO. And, not so long ago,
> the authority of the local aristocrat, who tended to be a high officer in the
> local militia, a major employer and landowner, and related by blood or
> marriage to most of the other high officers in the local militia.
> 
> Ideally all the consequences of a decision should be contained within those
> walls. Of course they never are, but if you try to manage all the
> externalities, things very quickly slide of control. Every attempt to manage
> the externalities has unexpected consequences, and attempts to deal with the
> unexpected consequences have additional unexpected consequences, because
> trying to control matters that have externalities connects everything to
> everything else, resulting in a tangle beyond human comprehension.”
> 
> Throne, Altar, and Freehold
> Jim’s Blog

> “Hmm? It is a staple of theater, though I am not so fond of it. I prefer an
> ending where the many plots are resolved, yes.
> 
> But without a god’s intervention, human animosity and love cannot easily be
> erased. The playwright must have reached the end of his rope. Most writers
> know the tangled web of human emotions cannot be undone by humans themselves.
> So, the deus ex machina is an expression of hope.
> 
> A last hope, to be sure, a mirage created by those on the verge of ruin,
> wishing for a savior.”
> 
> Nero Claudius
> Fate/Extra


X

> “If you go to India, you’ll find sadhus, holy men, people who abjure the
> world, who go around giving land away or begging from the rich to give to the
> poor. It’s a totally different culture. There’s the sort of Gandhi
> saintliness.
> 
> It’s not the model in China. In China, the model is either Three Kingdoms or
> Shui Hu Zhuan, Water Margin, the kind of hero who forms a robber band and
> kills off wealthy people. You don’t go begging from the wealthy to give to the
> poor. You just kill the wealthy and take from them.
> 
> So it is a completely different philosophy to guide a man in life.”
> 
> Lee Kuan Yew

> “To grasp the essence of a political culture that does not recognise the
> possibility of transcendental truths demands an unusual intellectual effort
> for Westerners, an effort that is rarely made even in serious assessments of
> Japan. The occidental intellectual and moral traditions are so deeply rooted
> in assumptions of the universal validity of certain beliefs that the
> possibility of a culture existing without such assumptions is hardly ever
> contemplated. Western child-rearing practice inculcates suppositions that
> implicitly confirm the existence of an ultimate logic controlling the universe
> independently of the desires and caprices of human beings. This outlook,
> constantly reaffirmed in later life, inclines Westerners to take for granted
> that all advanced civilisations develop concepts of universal validity, and
> they are therefore not prompted to examine the effects of their absence.”
> 
> The Enigma of Japanese Power
> Karel van Wolferen

> “There are two types of societies. This isn’t a theory of evolution, or about
> which is better than which.
> 
> There are societies that respect their relationship with nature, and others
> that do not. This is about how societies view change.
> 
> The native people of Canada tried not to break the bones of salmon they ate,
> and returned the bones to the rivers. Native people from eastern and western
> parts of Russia decorated the skulls of the seals they captured and
> dismantled, and returned them to the master of the sea along with their
> poetries. They thought fur and meat were gifts from the animals as a proof of
> their friendship, and they returned those gifts by adding spiritual values to
> the bones. They showed their respect towards nature through their meals. This
> is because they thought the true form of animals were gods who wore the skins
> of animals. Because they wanted the gods to visit them again, they served by
> giving back to them respectfully. There are similar beliefs in Northern
> Eurasian and North American cultures, and many myths remain.
> 
> But in modern day Japan, there probably aren’t that many people who still
> believe that animals are able to talk and that gods live inside of them.
> They’re looking down on nature. They see animals as something they can
> naturally steal from, and if they feel like they took a little too much from
> it – they can just start protecting them. That’s how they see it.
> 
> When did that kind of arrogant society form…?
> 
> The key factor is the appearance of technology.
> 
> Specifically, weapons made of iron.
> 
> After obtaining these excellent weapons, man’s respect towards animals faded.
> In the tales told around Sakhalin, there is a verse that says, “Swords that
> cut extraordinarily well were passed on from Japan, and after that, bears were
> killed easily”. A certain individual born in a heretical land one day
> realized: this is a weapon that god gave, but it is a weapon able to kill god.
> 
> The origin of the word technology is the Greek word “Techne”.
> 
> “Techne” means “to artificially draw out the blessings that an object is
> hiding”.
> 
> A good example is heating up a rock and taking the iron out of it.
> 
> The sword and technology stolen from god gave man power that even gods will
> fear. For them to visit again, giving back to them respectfully… there’s no
> need for such things anymore.
> 
> Now, we can simply take everything.”
> 
> Ch. 148 – “Human Society – The Grave of Bears”
> Terra Formars

> “So it basically all goes back to when a gay kiddly fiddler named plato once
> foolishly agreed with some sophists that the senses were unreliable, setting
> up 2000+ years worth of fanboys who took him seriously after to fruitlessly
> retread the same ground over and over and produce schizophrenia in written
> form attempting to make systems of thought around taking such an assumption as
> a given. Blunder of the millennium really.
> 
> But anyways, skipping a lot we arrive at Descartes, who could perhaps be
> considered a seminal example of the needless handwringing brought about by
> taking the athenian pederast seriously. Like many of his unfortunate fellows
> (and unfortunate countrymen who had(and have)to live in a society subjected to
> the (ostensibly)intellectual output of such unfortunate fellows), he made an
> attempt to produce an epistemology while assuming the premise that senses are
> essentially unreliable as a given. His attempt at a solution to this
> intractable thought exercise (for intractable, and a thought exercise, it both
> is) was what some might recognize as ‘categorically imperative’ avant la
> letre, before Kant himself gave the irascible mode of thought its name.
> 
> In the most simplest terms, the ‘enlightenment project’ basically comes down
> to the desire to produce a system, that is wholly atemporal or universal,
> which can be used naively to calculate any possible knowledge, wholly separate
> from any particular user agent. The ultimate failure mode of all this was, of
> course, the fact that the capacity of any given system is necessarily
> contingent on the capacity of its creator; no being within Being could create
> a system that fully encapsulates being; for if it did, then it already does.
> 
> It was the ultimate failure of such a project that gave rise to the oft
> misunderstood post-modernist schools of thought, particularly the french
> continentals. Who, while claiming to be overturning the modernism typical of
> Descartes and those inspired by him, ironically retained the same
> modernist/enlightenment standards of evidence; standards that dictate that any
> valid proposition must be universally valid; that any proposition with an
> exception anywhere is just as worthless as any other; standards that, if you
> were to actually take them seriously and apply them consistently, would imply
> that knowledge itself is impossible.
> 
> Which means naturally, of course, that noone (least of all the baizuo
> lumpenproles) ever actually applies them consistently, but instead in
> selective, tactical manners, to rhetorically dissolve Things They Don’t Like
> in the acid of nominalism, while leaving their own conceits overlooked.”
> 
> Wowexuberant

> “There’s an entire field of the arts that’s missing because logic isn’t
> sufficiently appreciated. Namely -actual- psychology, the study of the soul,
> starting with enumeration of all qualia. Wikipedia has a list of biases. It
> does not have a list of cures for those biases. Further, it’s rather
> half-hearted. There’s a whole nosology of thought that’s missing because
> philosophers have let humans believe they’re normally rational. The Greeks had
> four or more words for love. English has one. People might experience love
> differently, but, like, who cares? It’s just fee-fees.
> 
> Oh, but it turns out qualia are the basis for all life goals, and also the
> foundation for all knowledge.
> 
> So, uh, oops.”
> 
> Alrenous


XI

> “Mathematics is a way of going from one set of statements to another. It’s
> evidently useful in physics, because we have all these different ways we can
> speak of things and permits us to develop consequences and analyze the
> situations and change the laws in different ways and to connect all the
> various statements, so as a matter of fact, the total amount a physicist knows
> is very little, he has only to remember the rules for getting from one place
> to another, and he’s able to do that. In other words, all the various
> statements about equal times forces, the forces in the direction of the radius
> and so on are all interconnected by reasoning.
> 
> Now an interesting question comes up: is there some pattern to it?
> 
> Is there a place to begin, fundamental principles, and deduce the whole works?
> 
> […] Because all these theorems are interconnected by reasoning, there isn’t
> any real way to say, ‘well these are the bottom, and these are connected
> through logic’. Because if you were told it was this one or this one, you
> could also run the logic the other way if you weren’t told that one, and work
> out that one, like a bridge with lots of members and it’s overconnected. If
> pieces have dropped out, you can reconnect it another way.
> 
> […] The Babylonian thing that I’m talking about is to say, I happen to know
> this and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that, and I work everything
> out from there, and then tomorrow, I forgot that this was true, but I remember
> that this was true, and I reconstruct it again, and so on, and I’m never quite
> sure where I’m supposed to begin and where I’m supposed to end, I just
> remember enough all the time so that the memory fades, and the pieces fall
> out, I put the thing back together again every day. […]
> 
> The method of starting from the axioms is not efficient in obtaining the
> theorems. In working something out in geometry, you’re not very efficient if
> each time you have to start back at the axioms. But if you have to remember a
> few things in geometry, you can always get somewhere else. It’s much more
> efficient to do it the other way.
> 
> What the best axioms are are not exactly the same, in fact are not ever the
> same, as the most efficient way of getting around in the territory.”
> 
> The Character of Physical Law
> Richard Feynman

> “The voyage of the Great Eastern was ended. Twice had she been victorious over
> the sea. Twice she had laid the spoils of victory on the shores of the New
> World, and her mission was accomplished. All on board, who had been detained
> weeks beyond the expected time, were impatient to return; and accordingly she
> prepared to sail the very next day on her homeward voyage. The Medway, which
> had on board the cable for the Gulf of St. Lawrence, remained two or three
> weeks longer, and with the Terrible, whose gallant officers had volunteered
> for the service, successfully accomplished that work. But the Great Eastern
> was bound for England, and Mr. Field had now to part from his friends on
> board. It was a trying moment. Rejoiced as he was at the successful
> termination of the voyage, yet when he came to leave the ship, where he had
> spent so many anxious days and weeks, both this year and the year before; and
> to part from men to whom he was bound by the strong ties that unite those
> embarked in a common enterprise—brave companions in arms—he could not repress
> a feeling of sadness. It was with deep emotion that Capt. Anderson took him by
> the hand, as he said, “The time is come that we must part.” As he went over
> the side of the ship, “Give him three cheers!” cried the commander; “And now
> three more for his family!” The ringing hurras of that gallant crew were the
> last sounds he heard as he sunk back in the boat that took him to the Medway,
> while the wheels of the Great Eastern began to move, and that noble ship, with
> her noble company, bore away for England.”
> 
> Recovery of the Lost Cable
> presented by Bill Burns

> “1791 to 1871 – Babbage was minor nobility, he had an idea of building a
> machine. He had been using tables [for integration and derivation], and the
> tables had errors. And he said, “If only a steam engine would make them, they
> would be accurate”.
> 
> So, he set out to do it.
> 
> […] Babbage wanted to print out the numbers so that there was no possibility
> of human error. Well, the technology to do this was beyond his abilities. He
> greatly improved manufacturing and engineering techniques of building this and
> that, but he never got it done, in spite of government support.
> 
> […] Babbage never completed it because what happened to him was what happened
> to a great many people: he no longer was well into one and he had the
> realization of a better machine. He had the idea of a general purpose
> computer. Why bother with this difference machine that can only do simple
> things, when I can build a general purpose computer? So he started doing that,
> again with government money, and again he did not complete it. It was not his
> fault, probably, although he was a bit irascible, perhaps with a better
> temperament he might’ve got it done. But probably not. The technology was not
> equal to him.
> 
> However, somewhere in the 1990s, the British, at a museum where some of the
> parts were, completed the design, not using heavy gears made out of brass but
> plastic gears. And the machine ran just as Babbage had designed it. It was, to
> great extent, a Von Neumann type machine. It has a mill, which you call the
> arithmetic unit, it has a store, which is typically called memory, it had
> branching; it had all the features.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “Fire control computers solve fire control problems.
> 
> Their solutions depend on own ship’s course and speed, target range, target
> bearing, target’s course and speed, wind speed and direction, initial shell
> velocity, and other factors up to a possible total of twenty-five. The factors
> occur simultaneously, and many are constantly changing.
> 
> But the computer continuously and instantly solves the problem, and sends the
> answer to the guns as train and elevation orders.
> 
> A computer cannot do this without men.
> 
> For example, men operate the director, which sends target range and bearing to
> the computer. And here at the computer, other men set in other information.
> Obviously computer accuracy depends on the quality of information it receives.
> 
> And that depends on the skill and understanding of the men.”
> 
> Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers
> United States Navy Training Film, 1953

> “Why are you going that far to obey the law when that law can neither judge a
> criminal nor protect people?”
> 
> “The law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law.
> 
> People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living.
> Their feelings… The accumulation of those peoples’ feelings are the law.
> They’re neither the provisions nor the system. They’re the fragile and
> irreplacable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts. Compared to the
> power of anger or hatred, they are something that can quite easily break down.
> People have prayed for a better world throughout time.
> 
> In order for those prayers to continue to hold meaning, we have to try our
> best to protect it to the very end.”
> 
> Kogami Shinya, Tsunemori Akane
> Psycho-Pass

> “I am not trying to elicit sympathy. I am providing the backdrop of how this
> plan of mine came to be so that you can FEEL it, from one human to another.
> After all, that is what this is all about.
> 
> Civilization does not exist externally. It exists between you and I first.”
> 
> Patrick Ryan

> “Lastly, in a certain sense, this is a religious course. I am preaching a
> message, that with one life to lead, you want to do more than just get by.
> There are a great many religions, and I don’t want to get involved in one or
> the other too much, it is however an emotional matter I’m really appealing to.
> 
> It’s very frequently said that a happy life is one which has some goals
> achieved. Well, studying the matter over, and reading about it and talking to
> people, everybody pretty much agrees that it’s not the achievement of the goal
> that really is the best part. It’s the struggle. The struggle to success is
> what makes you what you will be.
> 
> Remember, at old age, you’re gonna have to live with yourself. There’s no
> escape living with yourself in your old age. You’re stuck. And at old age, you
> can’t change as much as when you were younger; consider what kind of person
> you wish to be in old age.
> 
> And start now, being that kind of a person.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming


XII

> “In the famous tale by Ahiqar, later picked up by Aesop (then again by La
> Fontaine), the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and
> luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the
> dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “”Of all
> your means, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running.”
> 
> The question is: what would you like to be, a dog or a wolf?
> 
> The original Aramaic version had a wild ass, instead of a wolf, showing off
> his freedom. But the wild ass ends up eaten by the lion. Freedom entails risks
> – real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.
> 
> […] A dog’s life may appear smooth and secure, but in the absence of an owner,
> a dog does not survive. Most people prefer to adopt puppies, not grown-up
> dogs; in many countries, unwanted dogs are euthanized. A wolf is trained to
> survive.
> 
> Employees abandoned by their employers, as we saw in the IBM story, cannot
> bounce back.”
> 
> Skin in the Game
> Nassim Nicholas Taleb

> “Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are
> important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather
> because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his
> company. […]
> 
> To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a
> strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship – or
> jeering – for the truth.”
> 
> “Zero to One”: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
> Peter Thiel

> “I ignore polling as a method of government. I think that shows a certain
> weakness of mind. An inability to chart a course – whichever the way the wind
> blows, whichever way the media encourages the people to go, you follow.
> 
> You are not a leader.”
> 
> Lee Kuan Yew

> “We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western world
> needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.
> 
> Where to start? John Rawls will need to be displaced in philosophy
> departments. Malcolm Gladwell must be persuaded to change his theories. And
> pollsters have to be driven from politics. But the philosophy professors and
> Gladwells of the world are set in their ways, to say nothing of our
> politicians. It’s extremely hard to make good changes in those crowded fields,
> even with brains and good intentions.
> 
> A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery.
> You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and
> important part of the world.
> 
> It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.
> 
> You are not a lottery ticket.”
> 
> “Zero to One”: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
> Peter Thiel

> “Normally, those people would never wake up from their fantasy worlds. They
> live meaningless lives. They waste their precious days over nothing. No matter
> how old they get, they’ll continue to say,
> 
> “My real life hasn’t started yet.”
> 
> “The real me is still asleep, so that’s why my life is such garbage.” They
> continue to tell themselves that. And they age. Then die.
> 
> And on their deathbeds, they will finally realize:
> 
> The life they lived was the real thing.
> 
> People don’t live provisional lives, nor do they die provisional deaths.
> That’s a simple fact. The problem – is whether they realize that simple fact.”
> 
> Tonegawa Yukio
> Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji

> “I want to tell you another thing, a story which I’ll use several times: the
> story of the drunken sailor.
> 
> He staggers a couple of steps this way, he staggers a couple of steps that
> way, this way and that way, this way and that way. In n steps, typically,
> you’ll get the square root of n distance. In a hundred steps, you’ll get about
> ten. In ten thousand, it’ll be about a hundred. He may be right where he
> started, he may be further away, but that’s typical.
> 
> On the other hand if there’s a pretty girl over there, he staggers like this,
> back like this, over like that – he’s going to get a distance proportional to
> n.
> 
> If I can create in you a vision of where you are headed, you will make
> progress proportional to n.
> 
> If you do not have a vision, you will wander like a drunken sailor.
> 
> […] Now you’re gonna say to me, “But Hamming, how do I know the future?”.
> 
> It doesn’t matter much, from what I’ve examined in life, what goal you set.
> Whether you want to march that way, that way, or that way. If you have a goal,
> you’ll get somewhere near it. If you don’t have a goal, you’re a drunken
> sailor. My problem is to make you form your goals, and to some extent, try to
> achieve it. To make you something important rather than just drifting.
> 
> It’s comfortable to drift through life. And a great many people when
> questioned closely will assert that they’re perfectly content to drift through
> life.
> 
> I don’t think too good an idea of that whole thing.
> 
> […] Those who do something generally have some kind of goals and see where
> they’re headed, and their lives add up. Those who don’t are just a bunch of
> isolated events.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “The great thing about standardized work is that if everyone is doing the job
> the same way, and we run into a problem, say a quality problem, we can easily
> identify where it’s coming from and fix it. If everyone is doing the job
> however they feel like, you can’t even begin any serious problem solving.”
> 
> Rick Madrid
> The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
> Paul S. Adler

> “Write psychological rather than logical.
> Write so that it can be followed.
> Write so that you, five years later, will know what you were doing.
> Don’t do some cute trick. You won’t remember.”
> 
> Learning to Learn
> Richard Hamming

> “I don’t care where you read it. I don’t care who said it. Even if I said it.
> If it doesn’t fit with what you believe and your common sense, then it is not
> so.”
> 
> The Buddha
> as relayed by Richard Hamming

> “Of course it’s my opinion. It came out of my mouth!”
> 
> some Halo 3 machinima
> Unknown

> “Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
> 
> Evan



NIER:AUTOMATA

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This is where the domain of this piece ends.

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