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.

In Honour of Tonight’s 2013 BCS National College Football Championship!

Some quips and quote from “The Wisdom of Southern Football”:

  • “When you make a mistake, admit it;learn from it and don’t repeat it.” — Bear Bryant
  • “Nobody wants to follow somebody who doesn’t know where he’s going.” — Joe Namath
  • “Winning isn’t getting ahead of others.  It’s getting ahead of yourself.” — Roger Staubach
  • “What does it take to be the best?  Everything.  And everything is up to you.” — Emmitt Smith
  • “Leadership must be demonstrated, not announced.” — Fran Tarkenton
  • “Winning is not final.” — Don Shula
  • “There are no office hours for champions.” — Paul Dietzel
  • “An angry football team is better than a confident one.” — Pepper Rodgers
  • “Yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.” — General Robert Neyland’s Favorite Quotation from the Sanskrit
  • “Coach a boy as if he were your own son.” — Eddie Robinson
  • “I love the thrill of getting off a pass just before getting smashed.” — George Blanda
  • “Alabama fans love [Bear] Bryant and tolerate the rest of us.” — Gene Stallings
  • “You never know what a football player is made of until he plays Alabama.” — General Robert Neyland
  • “You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him to a heavy load.” — Bear Bryant
  • “One guy can’t do it by himself and it’s a matter of recognizing this and giving others their share of the credit.” — Archie Manning
  • “The first thing any coaching staff must do is weed out selfishness.  No program can be successful with players who put themselves ahead of the team.” — Johnny Majors
  • “There ought to be a special place in heaven for coaches’ wives.” — Bear Bryant
  • “The game is the star of the show.  My only job is to help the audience enjoy it.” — Keith Jackson
  • “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” — Lou Holtz
  • “I never get tired of running.  The ball ain’t that heavy.” — Herschel Walker
  • In 1903, John Heisman observed that, “Successful coaches are few and far between, and it is small wonder they command salaries practically without limit.”

For years…

For years, I thought an intellectual conversation had to include dissecting the meaning of the universe and debating the [non]purpose of life.

Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I checked a few books out of the library, books written by or about David Foster Wallace.

After reading the material, I came to the conclusion there’s no reason to read his writings anymore because DFW committed suicide, which in itself is the logical conclusion of all the arguments and observations he made in his writing.

Thus, as I have thought before but never articulated, an intellectual conversation can emphatically state or totally ignore the meaning of the universe and the [non]purpose of life.

I won’t go as far as saying that the writing/artwork/music/biographies of people who committed suicide should be banned, burned and/or buried.

I do suggest that we take into serious consideration the conclusion the suicidal people reached in their thoughts, less so for those within a short, miserable ending of a terminal illness, whatever we may [not] wish to call a terminal disease.

If a person created anything — a bridge, a computer, a spaceship, a novel, a quilt, a child — and then later committed suicide, the creations are part and parcel of the suicidal thoughts, are they not?

It is one thing to muse on the futility of our individual lives, and quite another thing to end our lives, regardless of our auspicious or suspicious beginnings.

What, next, about career suicide or similar forms of cutting off oneself from societal ties?

There are no failures.  There are no successes.  There is only what we choose to do next.

For me, there are 13,637 days until the next big step, despite momentary distractions that loom large in temporary comparison.

If a person ends his life, there is no “next” left.

DFW’s writings are absent from my future because he chose to absent himself from the present — I respect his right to say goodbye to my life.  I say goodbye to his.

“I was dancing with my darling… the night they were playing…”

Two nods to Tennessee, the Volunteer State:

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…

Meanwhile, back on Earth…

Some people prefer not to mention where they’ve been — the restaurants and retail establishments — because they assume no one wants to know.

However much I agree that we aren’t interested in knowing the minute details of a person’s day, regardless of the person’s fame/infamy, how many of us like to see our names in print?

People to thank for their services: Paul at Surin Thai Restaurant; Drew, Cynthi and Kay at Publix; Garrett at Cracker Barrel; the backdock receivers at Goodwill Industries; ticket issuers at the Living Christmas Tree; UAH men’s basketball players who beat a Division I school’s basketball team for the first time in school history; UPS package deliverers; more to follow.

Which is better for me?

Which is better for me: one, sitting on the sofa watching a succession of championship football games, or two, taking a walk in the woods looking at the random mix of nature’s wonders?

Which is more ridiculous: one, a career politician saying that government is good for me and has all the answers, or two, a person who inherited wealth and continues to grow richer without physical labour, never able to personally use all the wealth, saying that exploiting the physical labour of workers and the monetary credit of consumers is good for them?