The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

Animated Boy Wonder

When we were kids, were we able to ice skate the first time we stepped onto the rink?

Well, the Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy gets to experience ice skating for the first time he was animated from a 2D drawing to a “2.5-dimensional” experiment using CrazyTalk Animator Pro (the trial version):

The Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy CTAPro test 001

= = = = =

Recent thanks to Debra at KCDC; Chrystyna and Austin at Publix; Kizzie and Katy at Steak ‘n’ Shake; the cheerful people at Madison County License Department

Tossing the United States of Europe under a bus

With the U.S. and Chinese leadership transitions completed for the current cycle, there’s a sudden rush to judgment about the state of the world.

This crazy Spaceship Earth…

Self-anointed leaders meet in Davos for dinner and a schmooze.

One political leader threatens nuclear attacks while another threatens to widen the moat mockingly called the English Channel as if it was a selectable station on the tellie.

Union membership reaches lows not seen in many a lifetime.

The number of employable Chinese citizens seems to shrink.

Official U.S. employment rate numbers seem to increase.

Of the seven-plus billion of us, which ones are actively climbing the socioeconomic status symbol mountain?

Opinions bounce down the road like tumbleweeds.

One planet, one species, one timeline.

“I’ve been your age, but you haven’t been mine,” said Joe, a friend.

POWER + BELONGING = IDENTITY, reminds a writer of the formula for the young adult lit market.

While this planet changes dynamically, our next-door planet statically waits for occupancy rates to increase.

This storyline waits for no one.

We have bid adieu to the constant concerns and praises of a species in flux so that the future can look back at us and tell us where we’ve been long before we’ll be.

As a friend realised, it’s the ornery character trait we inherit from our ancestors that gives us the grit and determination to push adversity out of the way on the way to our preconceived notion of destiny, arbitrary geographical political borders barely relevant.

Cole Slaw with Kale, Cabbage and a game of Cribbage on top of Baggage, Part Four For Fore

As secret leader of the universe, one finds oneself in charge of everything which, in itself, is interesting and attractive but not always exciting.

One may also find oneself referred to in monotheistic terms or multitheistic terms but these are just as useless to use for labels as atheistic to describe people who positively hold no theist beliefs at all.

When one knows everything, the word “surprise” has no meaning, either.

Thus, when your scientists and engineers decided to crashland the Beagle 2 onto the surface of Mars, one knew the result to follow.

One needs no supercomputer to calculate the permutations.

One can clearly see the solar-powered nanobots hidden onboard would quickly spread from the landing site and prepare or “seed” the surface for future followers.

One realises the consequences of releasing live microorganisms, too, but one does not speculate.

One observes the expected.

One concludes and reports.

That is all that is necessary for the omniscient.

One avoids the word omnipotence.

One is.

That is all.

Scott McCloud, eat your heart out

As I return to the quiet suburban woodlands to gaze at my navel orange slowly shrinking on the sunny windowsill, I practice my doodling, animating the sketches on the fly.

My first creation, after reading through the IDRAWCOMICS reference guide:

THE AQUATIC LEAPING BUBBLE BOY!!!

Hatched in our subbasement laboratory, the Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy is allowed to see the light of day.

The Aquatic Leaping Bubble Boy

Meanwhile, after consulting with my trusty sidekick, Guinevere, who has moved on to the Martian colonies in order to let more of our creations enjoy the open air and low gravity for which they were genetically modified and bred, I will see what the next sidekick has in store for our Creative Futures Department.

The stories we tell when we’ve no stories to tell on ourselves

First of all, thanks to Ramsee Miller, Roberto Diaz, Alex, Matthew and the team in the repair/maintenance department at Bill Penney Toyota; Jason, Danielle, Lindsay, Huy and the rest of the instructors/volunteers of My Lindy Kraze dance workshop; Low Down Sires; Rainy, Penny, Rich and the other beautiful people at Thai Garden; Chris at Chick-Fil-A; everyone else who passed in and out of my life while I was half-asleep the past few weeks.

Twenty-five years ago, on a weekend like this — daytime temp around 60 deg F, nighttime temp around freezing — my wife and I would jump in a car and either drive to a great campsite, pop up the tent and roll out the sleeping bags or stay at a B&B seven-hours drive away, hosted by eccentric owners and their secret breakfast recipes.

Neither driving long distances for a romantic getaway nor sleeping on the ground figures into our middle years, our whole grain and fruit salad days.

Not too long ago, we’d travel by plane but got tired of the long lines and harassing security checkpoints that made us feel like poor citizens waiting for our weekly allotment of bread while we were patted down and our papers verified by state security police.

Instead, our staycations are more relaxing.

We might drive a few hours to bigger cities to see friends and family but we tend to find local attractions more…attractive.

This weekend, while U.S. citizens celebrate the re-election of the chief executive of the political system we call the government of the United States of America, enjoying an extended weekend because of a holiday dedicated to Robert E. Lee or Martin Luther King, Jr., my wife and I have dedicated Saturday and Sunday to the celebration of a dancing style called Lindy Hop, with workshops focused on Charleston and other dancing styles.

People about half our age, many of them college students, join us in this aerobic conditioning, drinking water during brief breaks between fun classes taught by enthusiastic instructors.

There’s Nick, for instance.  He served our country as a Marine for five years before working by December to complete his mechanical engineering degree in three years at Tennessee Tech.

There’s the young man from Nashville who dressed as Hercules on Friday night and a 1920s-era speakeasy gangster tonight.

There’s Victoria who’s getting her college degree from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The stories are as varied as our Lindy Kraze classmates.

Familiar faces like Jennifer, Catherine, Dana and Rob, avid supporters of the Huntsville Swing Dance Society, sweep their feet on the old cotton mill wood floors.

Who says that kids today can’t have good, clean fun?

And the energy they burn on the dance floor — wow!

From beginners to intermediate/continuing students to the advanced/master dancers, the goal is there is no goal.

Have fun and learn a little in the process.

When I was in my 20s, it was the rock-n-roll and punk rock dance clubs that drew the crowds, pulling my friends and me in for a thrashing, mashing good time.

Twenty-five years later, a hopping beat of bands like the Low Down Sires rocks the house these days, when my older and heavier body finds mosh pits less appealing and swing dancing with my wife more to my taste and partner preference.

We enjoy just as much, if not more, watching the kids combine Lindy Hop, Balboa, Charleston and other styles into fun you won’t find in exercise classes or gymnasiums.

Tonight, we retire to bed early, leaving the band and the kids to their “Jack and Jill” dance contests, saving our energy for tomorrow’s workshops while we drift off to sleep in our comfortable bed at home, the dreamlike visions of new car owner’s manuals informing us of safety features and the value of heated/ventilated seats.