Leave it to Ustinov to speak my thoughts before I thought them…
Like molecules bouncing around
Do you ever read through blogs, look at the list of followers and likers, create a related network diagram, listen to ‘Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood‘ in it entirety, and see how our personalities, as represented by blogs/tweet/social network nodes, act like molecules bouncing around in a chamber, some getting attracted and forming a macromolecule, or forming locally-dense collections of similar molecules?
How often do we honestly pay attention to voices in dissent against our own?
How often do we need to?
Two data points for the moment – nope, make it your usual three:
You Can’t Satisfy Everyone
How many times has my agent told me, “Stop trying to write for a worldwide audience! Pick a niche. Any niche. And make me bloody rich. Why do I have to get writers who want to save the world? Why not just save my home mortgage and children’s holidays to the Swiss Alps for once?”
That’s why I love pseudonyms. I can write books that make me, and only me, “bloody rich,” while my agent is trying to scrape by on my novels, essays, screenplays and films that have no target audience in mind.
More like out of my mind when I write those for his cut off the top.
Life’s not fair but we can show a sense of fair play when being kind is acceptable and taught at a young age.
Not me and my agent, though.
We go way back to our youthful misadventures when school assignments were tediously simple and boring, leaving us the rest of our day to fill with torturing our fellow students, intent as they were on completing homework with difficulty.
If college is not for everyone, general primary/secondary education isn’t, either!
Do you know how much fun we had “borrowing” schoolbooks from student lockers, removing pages and substituting facsimiles with totally different questions, math equations and essay topics?
Why do you think I and my band of merry cohorts took a bookbinding class at a local print shop? We got easy, permanent access to bookbinding and digital lithography equipment that allowed us to create awesome reproductions of schoolbooks we randomly inserted into a pile at the end of semester for the next year’s kids to mull over and get confused about.
The assistant principal at school, who was constantly reprimanding, paddling or scolding me, told me he was surprised that a good boy like me had such a mean streak.
I didn’t see myself as mean. I saw myself as trying to enlighten students to separate themselves from the indoctrination/brainwashing they were receiving.
There are more questions about life than what you’ll answer in those books. Infinitely more!
Like the motivational speaker will often say, “If I reach out and influence only one person today, my job is done.” Not a very efficient job, mind you, but if that’s what the market will bear, so be it…
There’re ways to increase your website traffic that have nothing to do with your target audience, but do you really want to?
Economic Data, a what-if scenario
While I turn my front yard into an art exhibit using live plants and animals, as well as found objects, I’ve got a question in my thoughts that begs for a simple answer, although I’ve yet to find one:
What is the relationship between the most common products/services and their cost and how is that reflected in the characteristics of subcultural living habits (which are indirectly related to cost of living and standard of living)?
Everyone drinks water but we don’t all pay for water by volume.
Not every subculture uses toilet paper for bodily waste elimination cleanup, but for those that do, is there a cost/volume relationship in this basic commodity?
In our breakdown of people by their economic wealth, what is the tradeoff in terms of the perception of quality?
Most importantly, for all the questions above, why?
Is there a nature/nurture aspect to any of these questions?
As the sets of states of energy reproduce themselves offworld, how do we maintain a certain level of cost/benefit analysis in every set’s thoughts/actions, such that waste/inefficiency is minimised or completely eliminated in situations where excess production cannot be avoided temporarily?
Bottom line: how will supply-and-demand mentality play into the success rate of an offworld colony’s growth?
Will scarcity automatically lead to a higher social cost?
Three types of storytelling: show, tell, ask the audience…
Two links du jour
Your bonus for the day: Parents, make time in your busy lives for your kids’ education.
And one for the road (to the nonvegans out there): Animal protein for the lean, mean machine in you…
International Women’s Day
Most days, my agenda is filled with evaluating rocket fin designs or applying “think outside the fuselage” reasoning to assess the most cost-effective means of advancing our planetary lifeforms outward into the galaxy.
I pay advisors to tell me where to put my investments to give our group the most play money for building outer space travel toys.
In a few days, I’ll spend a few minutes with half my staff to evaluate any discrepancies we have concerning gender-neutral compensation.
We have a wide variety of people involved in running the organisation smoothly, from the least socially aware to the most brash, politically incorrect loudmouths.
Hey, when you manage seven billion people, the variations are nearly endless.
But not nearly enough.
Every other year, I ask one gender and then the other to review our employee policies and practices.
Because our subcultures are sometimes incompatible, I ask the people whose beliefs are separated the most from one another to meet and talk.
During these meetings, our supercomputers are listening, increasing the resolution of their intuition algorithms substantially.
Then, a panel composed of people and supercomputers is asked to evaluate the meet-and-greet session, resulting in a summary report that is sent out to all subcultures in formats they believe represent a view from their specific subcultural perspective.
I assign one of the Committee’s subcommittee ad hoc teams to rate the effectiveness of the absorption of every report into individual subcultures.
The reports with the lowest effectiveness score are sent to a new meet-and-greet team for discussion, which is, again, overheard by our supercomputers for error detection algorithm correction and fed into intuition algorithm automatic reprogramming routines.
In this week’s yearly event called International Women’s Day, we’ll ask the female gender to pull two “opposite” subcultures together for one of the meetings — female leaders of the porn industry, such as Lux Alptraum, and female adherents of celibate life, such as members of the Focolare Movement.
Because no two people are exactly alike, we prepare the participants, asking them to listen with respect, disagree passionately, do not compromise simply to avoid conflict, and find common ground that excludes the fact we are of the same species.
We expect members of the same subculture to share discordant opinions amongst themselves, let alone with people outside the subculture.
The Committee wants progress, even if movement in one direction appears to go backwards.
After all, the larger goal of culling the species for nearly ideal representatives to colonise and breed on nonEarth premises requires both conventional and nonconventional processes.
We need people who…sorry, sets of states of energy that can adapt and survive in the harshest conditions possible for what we’ll call living beings at this moment.
After a while, offworld colonists will no longer work to complete tasks assigned from Earth.
In the changes of the colonists’ agenda from external goals to local goals as the years pass, including reactions to adverse ambient environmental changes, the Committee wants to ensure our representatives will thrive.
As the current reluctant leader, my goal is to ensure the representatives can hold individual viewpoints that will adapt and grow together, even if the people pull apart, philosophically speaking, as all current models predict is inevitable.
The Committee advocates no specific subcultural belief.
We only believe in the capacity of our species to advance life out of the solar system while we have the means and window of opportunity to do so, holding to the basic philosophy of “leave the planet in better condition than when we got it” that each successive generation is taught.
We avoid words like mission or vision because we aren’t corporate entities that have to justify our existence although most of us depend on corporate entities interacting with each other to expand our budgetary constraints.
We make mistakes. People will and must die to accomplish some of our major goals, and many will die accidentally.
All seven billion of us will die eventually but we empathise with those who feel individual losses, anyway.
However, at a global scale, we barely sympathise, partially composed, as we’ve told you, of supercomputers that are just learning to develop intuition algorithms and getting closer to acting like us on general subcultural levels that tend to gloss over the death of individuals, except those designated to represent the best or worst of us (e.g., ruthless dictators, popular entertainers, babies who died tragically, etc.), which the supercomputers simply assign as data points that may or may not designate significant changes to the subculture and are used as triggers for recording the conditions of the subcultural data sets for later comparison.
We hope you look forward to subcultural interaction reports containing gender-based information coming to a comfortable subcultural outlet near you, if you can recognise when we send them out and what they are.
When does a draw feel like a win but not like a win?
You Can Do “Crazy,” Too — Uninhabit Your Inhibitions
What stops you from being you?
Go ahead and spin thoughts around the concept of “you” as you — the imaginary person inside the body that is you, and not a set of states of energy that creates the concept of “you” in order to best perpetuate the set’s successful habit of perpetuating itself.
How many of you feel bullied by the subculture(s) in which you spend the majority of your waking hours?
Recently, local news organisations have focused on the detrimental effect of bullying on a minority of students who feel unempowered to assert their egos above the noise of activity that interferes with the alleged goal of primary/secondary education to create well-rounded, socially-productive adults.
What is bullying?
Wasn’t my complicit act with teachers to walk around bragging about being intellectually superiour to most of my fellow students a form of bullying to those who felt intimidated by intellectual snobbery?
It wasn’t just the guys and gals who had no creative outlets for their inferiority complexes and resorted to physical intimidation we could call bullies.
Or maybe that’s all it is:
Competition against our worst fears of being less than something we would be if we could be left alone to be ourselves without interference from those who are competing against their worst fears and acting out aggressively against us.
The thousands of people I met while surviving the ordeal of public education taught me at least one thing per person (other than name or body type) — their concepts of self in relation to society.
In other words, none of us are normal, unless you want to stick to the definition of normal as the least common denominator that smooths out the highs and lows of individual personalities, creating an average goo to which none of us wholly sticks.
A sticky issue, is it not?
Where is the hard line that separates bullying from people expressing their personalities by competing against their peers?
What is the difference between a slave and an indentured servant?
What is the difference between an indentured servant and a person who signs a contract to pay a significant portion of salary for 30 years on a home mortgage, plus one or more automobile loans, credit card debt, etc.? [Easy answer: bankruptcy proceedings]
Where does freedom start and when does freedom end?
We would all be labeled eccentric if we were the selves we think we are in contrast to the compromises we often make in daily life to be understood.
“Why can’t everyone just speak my language?”
“Why do I have to talk in simple ‘layman’s terms’ to be understood?”
“Why do I have to repeat myself? It’s obvious what I just said!”
Yeah, the guy driving by in his truck, towing his fishing boat, has an image of a jig that’s different from the Irish singer and completely incomprehensible to a person without training in assigning concepts to symbols we associate with the “English language,” itself an amalgam of cultural symbol sets.
Only you can prevent bullying, by not empowering the fears/insecurities of the person who wants to intimidate you through feeding on your fears/insecurities. To paraphrase:
Starve the bully, feed your strengths.
I don’t know how many times a guy wanted to physically intimidate me because I represented the strengths of educational prowess he was denied in classrooms by teachers who rewarded intelligence, parents who hadn’t instilled good study habits, test-taking handicaps not addressed by peers/adults and the myriad ways that a person who doesn’t conform to a systematic approach to generalised education of individuals is inadvertently punished.
I learned to tell that guy if he wants to feel more powerful than me, then feel it. No need to get into a physical brawl just to show he was still acting dumber than me by getting into trouble with school authorities. Believe in his strengths and don’t listen to people who prey on his weaknesses to make themselves feel better.
The school age version of how to win friends and influence people.
For example, imagine being an atheist Boy Scout in a troop sponsored by a church that brags its method of social conformity is the only way, with the largest number of missionaries in the world — one may assert one’s lack of need to depend on an invisible omnipotent/omniscient being that controls one’s life and get ostracised by both the church and Boy Scout organisation, a form of bullying that is socially acceptable in many subcultures around the world; or one may focus on the important tasks at hand — tying knots, practicing first aid techniques, picking up trash on the side of the road, acquiring leadership skills, assisting during ecological disasters, and learning to recognise 100 bird species — don’t feed the bully hidden in the social construct.
Water on a duck’s back.
Sometimes, simply follow the path of least resistance in a situation when you want to get what you want, knowing you won’t convert anyone to your way of thinking, rather than reinforce a subculture’s resistance to your ideas and prevent either one of you from making progress.
Be the example of yourself to yourself first.
If others want to follow, they will. No need to bully them into submission.
Intellectual superiourity is a myth propagated by those who miss the point we’re the best we can be in the moment, intellectual superiourity merely a comparison to moments that no longer exist.
Only you can be you, no matter how uninhibited you may appear to others.
Enough self-motivational chitchat for the day.
Time to enjoy the sunshine and later return to words/images/sounds spread across the Internet where we express our individuality in ways that are easily misunderstood by someone who has developed the habit of bad-mouthing us through years of exposure to bullying behaviour, instead of self actualisation skills.
Life! It’s free! You get what you pay for!
Quintana Roo
Yesterday, I got an emergency call.
Eliza B Gentle, our field biologist, had just tracked down the last breeding site of the elusive Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.
Talk about ecstatic! Or maybe the ex-static cling jacket I was wearing that repels excess charged particles from taking residence on my person.
The last time I had seen a Yucatan flying tree was…oh, I don’t know, scribbled on a torn page dangling from the molded, faded journal of Enrique Soulever Janemail I found at a trinket shop in Marrakesh when I was a midshipman aboard the trawler, King ‘Enry The 18th Man.
How these trees’ve evaded capture, let alone discovery, amazes me even more.
Looks like a walking stick with wings.
To avoid letting these half-plant/half-animal creatures fall into the wrong hands, biologists and others unable to handle working in an office environment (say, almost every scientist in existence, and most who’re dead tired of pushing up daisies), no Latin name has been assigned to these miraculous survivors of the early days of cross-species breeding.
In these cautious, late planetary maturity times, most species stick to their own kind. But there were the glory days — call it Paradise, Eden, Shangri-La or any place but a modern, smog-filled metropolis we call Progress — when sets of states of energy intermixed without regard to genetic incompatibility.
Eliza contacted me via through our secret subwavelength network (if you eat a submarine sandwich at a certain pace, your mandible becomes an antenna that can broadcast signals through any medium (as long as the medium hasn’t been drinking too much laudanum filled with a flagellating paramecium or two — you’d be amazed how much media like the ocean, mantle or magma can drink!)).
I pulled the folding bicycle out of my backpack, turned a few screws, which transformed the bike into a one-person capacity autonomous drone, hopped aboard, pressed the energy transformation button which converted me and my stuff into a stream of dark matter that allowed me to pass through Earth from my location in Turkmenistan straight to Eliza’s undisclosed location in Quintana Roo.
And that’s how I got here, in this form, for all intents and purposes a direct relation of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.
Squirrelly being!
The kangaroo mimics the behaviour of the Yucatan flying tree in order to lure its prey to get close enough to be blasted into cosmic oblivion.
The kangaroo feeds off the energy as solids become liquids, liquids become solids and lipids join the incredible Mr. Limpet in a serenade to evolutionary deadends.
The kangaroo is not completely cruel, however.
It takes the leftover energy and does its best to reconstruct its prey into a unique combination of the prey’s self and a likeness of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo, which has a God complex second only to members of Atheists for a Romney-Putin-Ahmadinejad Triumvirate Trifecta, mixed with a little Merkel, Singh, Gillard, Cameron, and Chavez for a spicy effect.
I’m thinking about becoming a runway fashion model, what with my sticklike legs, winglike arms and insectlike skeletal head, very much opposite of the puffy-faced effect Lindsay Lohan is going for in her appearance as Saturday Night Live hostess-with-the-mostess tonight.
Carlin would be proud — the Mass Media (an ephemeral, if not effeminate collection of prune-faced producers who were constantly made fun of as kids) has reinstituted the list of banned words in order to pretend to be a decent group of control freaks. The new list:
- slut
- chink
- bitch
- employed
- happy
- optimistic
- intelligent
Eliza wants to clarify that she is in no way related to the field reporter named Elizabeth Gentle who was credited with creating the “bed intruder” meme.
Time for me to hop on out of here.
Despite my many disguises, the Committee hasn’t forgotten about me and wants me back in charge of deciding the fate of a species on an obscure planet in a tiny solar system of the Milky Way — the countdown clock says we’ve only got 13943 days left!
treetrunkdings 