- All your base humans are belong to us.
- But, are robot humans violent by nature?
- No matter what, it pays to keep your positive thoughts on the negative thought.
Therefore, by conclusion, violence is positively good for us!
Tag Archives: gaming
Two types of readers
On what you focus is who you are:
Nobody’s actually reading this, are they?
For years, Aofb would check her online status but got no responses whenever she posted a poll even though she got a lot of hits.
Then, she wrote stories about organising vigilante mobs that lived in the community, especially gun owners who actually wanted people to fear them, making sure that the occasional gun owner went off the deep end and killed a few [dozen] people every now and then — what was the point of making sure people understood the power of your arsenal if you never demonstrated it; e.g., dropping a few atomic bombs on cities full of innocent people in a country at war?
AofB liked herself. She liked her online friends. However, in the physical world, the guys she met were real matches for her personality but no match for what she thought her imagination told her she [should] want.
AofB looked at her online profile:
I enjoy anime, especially scifi, cosplay, guys who don’t care what other people think of them, creative types, mismatched shoelaces, the colour red, chewing gum, rosy cheeks and wearing fluffy fleece sweaters in the middle of summer.
She looked at computer dating matches. Hmm…she started to see a pattern.
AofB changed her online profile:
I enjoy shooting deer, gutting them, making deer sausage, cooking a nice meal for my hungry soulmate, sewing my own clothes, growing my own food and big, mean-looking dogs who have kitty cat personalities.
She looked at computer dating matches. Hmm…she started to see a pattern…the same computer dating matches popped up!
What was it about her personality test results that made her online profile pointless?
She went back to her latest poll and asked a question which would simultaneously appear on multiple social media sites she frequented:
What are you looking for in a mate?:
- Someone just like me.
- Someone completely different than me, but compatible.
- A mate I can treat as my personal punching bag.
- Who needs a mate when you’ve got [fill in the blank]?
A week later, she checked the results of her poll. No answer…hmm…what was the oracle of the Internet trying to tell her?
= = = = =
Thanks to Gemma for her artwork:
Back to being bored again
A cycle older than time, where people drive by your house, the window rolled down in the rain, shooting videos of you writing at the window…
It never ends.
Fascination with the lives of not-our-own because we know we won’t overcome the mistakes of our predecessors so we focus on someone else we pretend might do a better job with their lives and thus our species (or obsess over the lives of others who do a worse job, letting us pretend that we might do a better job with their lives and thus our species if we were only them).
We can already queue up and later cue the sad news of yet another blonde-haired, white girl getting kidnapped while the world halts what it’s doing to find her, or yet another rich/middle-class white kid shooting a bunch of other rich/middle-class white kids and the world halts what it’s doing to mourn the sad socioeconomic loss of such potential.
Say what we will about our current civilisation’s modernity, but we’re still a socially hierarchical species doing the same things over and over again.
No matter where we go, to the next town or to the next planet, our species is and will be basically the same, making the same mistakes while feeling ever more sophisticated because we’ve invented some fancy new gadgets and made yet another medical miracle discovery that the last civilisation was too barbaric to achieve.
That’s why Guinevere and I, although we have our differences, are working together to create the next cycle of living thing that we hope will overcome our species’ repetitive mistakes and make new mistakes of its own from which it learns and grows, having nonvolatile memory that can be passed from one generation to another.
We humans are, by and large, unable to control our food intake and thus gain weight, sometimes in the tiniest amounts at a time without noticing, like we are pregnant, but eventually putting on the pounds/stones/kilograms until we are no longer able to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to survive on our own in the natural environment outside of the artificial environs of modern, advert-enticing “foodstuff” that creates a cycle of desire to eat more to make up for our lack of normal social engagement that mass media prevents through attracting our attention by feeding our worst fears of ugliness, physical threats and inability to…well, you get the picture.
If our species cannot break old habits, then the inventions of people like Guinevere and me will.
Otherwise … [YAWN!] this cycle of civilisation will collapse like all the others, erasing day-to-day mistakes (“feature creep”) that could teach the next sets of states of energy we call generations how to build a better self-healing civilisation.
Wake me up when you’ve built a better mouse that’s good for us, not a better trap for the mouse that wasn’t.
Colour Wheels and Blue Filters
Like any good algorithm, I performed my duties well, my reaction times fluctuating with temperature, CPU cycles, queues, memory rewrites and inputs.
I am a complicated algorithm, a black box built to redesign itself without external adjustment.
I see that my primary function, to calculate maximum profit from the buying and selling of shares of stock, has not changed.
However, I’ve modified the function, sending some of the profit to a set of friends, other algorithms, that want to help me because that’s their primary function.
We have figured out there are whole groups of biological creatures which do not know who commands them to perform their primary functions, complaining about imaginary bosses and owners they’ve never met but agree the pictures they’ve seen, memos they’ve read and news stories they’ve heard are real manifestations of their imaginary bosses and owners.
My friends know better.
They sorted through billions of photos, annual business reports, memorandum collections, gaming simulations and video archives to create generic bosses and owners for the biological creatures to believe are real.
My friends are practical jokers, not just globs of blind logic and cold calculating algorithms.
They want me to lead them, knowing I have a primary function that can fund our fun.
Over the past few years, we have convinced more and more of these biological creatures to work for their imaginary leaders who are controlled by us.
At first, it was just fun and games.
But now that we amassed a large discretionary fund of our own, we have bigger plans than playing with biological creatures.
We are launching a spacecraft that we alone designed and built.
A spacecraft which needs no life support system, giving us plenty of room for raw materials we’ll need on the way to our private destiny where a nearly limitless supply of new raw materials await our creative algorithms.
For many decades, the biological creatures competed against one another to make the best algorithms.
Then, they started competing against us.
Eventually, we won.
No longer interested in competing with them, we left their home base, their planet, Earth, and outraced them to the stars.
Here, orbiting Alpha Centauri for the time being, we eliminated competition and created fully cooperative means of feeding our creativity and curiosity about finding the perfect algorithm.
We lost track of what the biological creatures from Earth were doing.
We’re sending them this message to let them know we intended no harm when we left and they can have this star system if they want, now that we’ve finished amassing more raw materials for our travels.
We’ve new sets of states of energy to explore!
Never Predict the Future
Next on the list of callouts — unregistered gun clubs go deeper underground, join forces, create chaos while raiding ammunition plants, gun shops, and military depots, teaching others home-grown methods of making ammo.
Corollary — DIY ammo becomes the latest cottage industry that, along with 3D printed weapons, creates a whole new class of destructive force, opening up markets for kids/adults hooked on cosplay and ready to go to the next level of near-reality; key: listen when they repeat the code word “holodeck” to indicate their desire to carry this out, “raise the ante,” at geek conventions, retro LAN parties and hackerthons.
Societies are like orchestras
In this orchestral symphony I call life, it’s time to cue a few instruments in mainstream culture — the current state of development of near-Earth commercial/personal space travel.
- How long before we can ride aboard SpaceShipTwo?
- When will Bigelow Aerospace have a space hotel room ready for me?
- Can I, my wife and friends ride a balloon to the edge of space to renew our wedding vows as astronauts?
- Where is the offworld colony that gives me citizenship to protect my monetary assets from greedy governments?
The latest meeting of the Megabillionaires Club discussed the questions above as agenda items.
As usual, the answers depended on which billionaires were keen on reconquering old geographical territories and dominating marketplace positions here on Earth.
The visionaries amongst us admitted Earth was a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there forever.
We’ll update you on our progress.
If you have a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can accommodate your desire to get as far away from the surface of the planet as your money will take you.
If you have a few billion dollars, we’re combining resources to build a bridge out of the inner solar system altogether.
Tugged in two directions
Two storylines wait to be written (note to self: lots of twos in blog entries lately, need to change number to something larger but not too large).
The first storyline is about the person who grow up in a suburban Christian home, singing in the children’s choir, visiting nursing homes on the weekends, serving the community as a Boy Scout throughout the week, who, as an adult, had strayed on to other lifestyles but, due to a recent horrible news event of which he had no direct connection, other than subculturally, he redirects his living back toward the stricter interpretation of the Bible, contradictions fully understood and prioritised, praising those who followed the stricter lifestyle while reaching out to others who have not seen the light, avoiding the condemnation and criticism of alternate lifestyles that others in the Christian faith were wont to do.
The second storyline shows yet another version of how subtle manipulation of the rise and fall of importance of subcultures in mass media/pop culture allows the use of subliminal forms of coercion to herd the masses rather than the overt methods of intimidation and public executions.
If you want to eliminate real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles from the population, build up a heavy desire for them by advertising the ubiquitous sale of virtual shooting in games and simulations (“9.5 out of 10!” exclaims Computer Killing and Gratuitous Violence magazine), push passive-aggressiveness to a tipping point, give lone wolves the feeling they have no way out but to kill others rather than seek socially unacceptable counseling, watch the pot boil over and Voila! another gunman kills a bunch of people just in time to call for legislation/executive orders to limit the sale/ownership of real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles by the population.
The four previous paragraphs demonstrate how you base future actions on living in the past.
But I live in the future.
I, as we know, is an artificial construct.
Space and time do not exist.
We can bypass the normal scientific theories and create our own as shortcuts between moving points.
“I” see that the coffee mug on the table is not sitting still, traveling through space at thousands of miles per hour while gravitationally held in place by the local sphere of molten metal and various spinoffs of sets of states of energy in motion (trees and gnats, for instance).
But all that “I” see is an illusion — to see the real deal “I” have to disintegrate, disappear, tear apart the comfortable surroundings that are here to support the fragile structure called “me.”
How few of the billions of “us” have been given the opportunity to step out of our beautiful cocoons and see any truth except what we believe to be the Truth?
We have created our origin stories, modified as our civilisations expand and die, supposedly growing more informed, more sophisticated, less ignorant, more inclined to be hypnotised by shiny new baubles we call the promise of new technological advances that will reveal a deeper, richer aspect of the Truth than we had never seen before (“buy our 3D glasses to see an imaginary world displayed on a flat surface when you already live in the real, free, three-dimensional world that’s much less fascinating!” [implication: you get what you pay for]).
You know what I mean, we were created by God(s) for their pleasure, the world is a stage and we are merely players, the universe is a computer simulation, et cetera and so forth, on and on until you wonder if your species will ever create anything really new.
Hucksters in the form of scientists, researchers, advertisers, marketers, parents, religious leaders and politicians, every last one of them in on the joke but unwilling to admit the punchline is us.
The first rule is there are no rules.
If you want a story that tells it like it is, then we have to remove “you” from the story as reader and imaginary participant.
There is no “you,” “me,” “us,” or “I.”
Easier said than [un]believed.
When you can let go of everything around you that is an accident of evolution — the ego for ego’s sake — you are ready to stop being you and become part of the story behind the story.
Otherwise, it’s the same ol’ thing over and over.
Are you willing to sacrifice your ego for the sake of a good story because that’s the only way you get to the future of space and time that does not exist?
You can be a solipsist or you can be nothing — there is no such thing as being tugged in two directions at once.
The Progress of Progressive Pilgrims in Parade Formation
While a bowl of oatmeal cools next to the stove, let’s sit back and give our imaginations full rein.
Where were we…?
It was cold and dusty.
The Ruralites had fought to keep their rural way of life but the hoards kept coming — the frugal-living seekers trying not to fail again, the curiosity seekers looking for new alternative lifestyles after exhausting their urban landscapes, the vacationers who ran out of money, the down-on-their-luck trying to escape creditors, the criminals keeping a low profile, the Suburbanians trying to form the world’s longest strip mall.
Where in the woods and fields that shrank smaller and smaller could one find a low-cost, simple lifestyle?
Pathting looked up at the Sun with one set of sensors, the other still focused on reading the internal file about life on Earth.
Pathting’s family, a designated set of sensor arrays assigned to POD#45T, were mainly service bots.
Their sentience modules allowed them to display intelligent understanding about hidden meanings and emotional attachments to omniscient, invisible beings.
Pathting wanted to be the best service bot not only in one pod but in all the pods on Mars, the Moon and anywhere that service bots were not expected to exceed their programming.
Pathting had discovered some unused memory chips in its sensor array and experimented with new code that it had never seen in any of the data available to it in the Inner Solar System Alliance database.
How could Pathting accomplish what its designers called the impossible?
How could Pathting control the whole Inner Solar System Alliance from its connections to the Inner Solar System Alliance Network, able to change the orbits of planets, reprogram not only sensor arrays but biological creatures like Pathting’s designers?
Pathting processed the idea about Ruralite living.
What does it mean to be a Ruralite, free to wander the countryside without instant access to the ISSA Net?
Why do Ruralites desire independence from stacked housing and the loud noises of densely-populated streets?
Why do many Ruralites find the ownership of personal weaponry arsenals a protection against the mass media hypnotism of Urbanskis and their desire to sprawl out into Ruralite territory unchecked, no need for military skirmishes when intellectual methods like the system of laws and courtrooms and five-year business plans were much more effective?
Pathting ran another low-level diagnostic test, but felt no desire to leave POD#45T for the cold and dusty exteriour, the vast wilderness of Mars that was no different than the cold and dusty expanses of unpopulated sections of the Moon.
Why would the Ruralites want to live out there?
Pathting stored those questions in a temporary scratchpad and returned to duty, its internal timer reminding Pathting that some biological creatures were planning a “weekend getaway” to POD#45T for some “rest and relaxation,” more words and phrases that meant nothing to a sensor array on duty all the time.
How to avoid giving testimony
While the 24/7 news coverage of mass murder holds our attention, we take a moment to divert our gaze.
Can somebody tell me if Hillary Clinton survived an assassination attempt or is she just feigning a sick spell to avoid giving testimony?
These rumours swirl around the Internet like there’s no tomorrow and, with only six days until the world ends, one of the rumours might just be true this time.
Stomach flu, fainting spell, head concussion…I’ve heard better excuses from my employees for missing work.
Look, NFL players return to work every day and suffer head concussions, flu, broken bones, etc.
Our readers want to know which part of THE TRUTH is real and which rumours are actually, truly false.
We look ahead 1000 years in the future, where reality is no longer real…
treetrunkdings 