An unhealthy amount of my daydreaming time involves categorizing things*. For example, I’ve recently started thinking about getting a business card along these lines:

The odd title is down to another bit of musing: the more I learn about Music the more I think it’s actually the same art as Film and that Game Design is a more-general version of that super-art. Roughly: games are about making NP-hard decisions. Film/Music could be an immense graph of mathematical/physical relationships with individual works as traversals. Music, then, could be a particular problem space within the set of possible Games, which might be why Rock Band works so well.

“Aleatoric” because I like incorporating nondeterminism into things. “Bit” because everything I do is digital. “Sequencing” because everything involves an ordering in time.

* Buddhism says you might not want to spend time making up more illusions to layer over reality. Or, as Marvin the Paranoid Android put it: “Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

I believe that carbon emissions should be reduced just enough to stop environmental disaster. Most people are not explicit about this, but I think it’s a view almost everyone shares if they think about it: the climate can absorb some carbon without disruption, so there’s no problem in that amount of emissions. Besides, eliminating all emissions would require the end of civilization if not the end of mammals.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.

(via)

Why are the authorities dismantling the Occupy camps? It seems, like the principal’s reaction to the girl who tweeted about the governor, to be an exercise of power for power’s sake. Opposition necessitates opposition.

I’m asking because I don’t get this one. Evidently the Occupy camps are tweaking those in power, but: why? Why don’t they just ignore them? It seems like the various authorities are itching for a chance move their soldier-toys around the maps they’ve laid out in their makeshift war-rooms; each mayor pretending to be a miniature Napoleon: “Fuck city planning consultations! Let’s widen all the streets to make the Parisian mobs easier to shoot!”

But I feel like I’m expecting too much. Obama defused hope and idiot mayor Bob Ford is claiming budgetary victory with cuts to public transit and libraries. I am assuming that intelligent (or maybe just socialist) policy is a dominant strategy in the face of zero evidence.

Winning policy is a rote response: a boot stomping on a human face — forever.

OpenMedia sent me a success email recently:

Yesterday, finally, the CRTC pulled back from its mandatory metered billing decision. This decision won’t stop all big telecom metering, but it could provide a much needed unlimited, independent option for many Canadians. It is truly rare for people to outmaneuver Big Telecom lobbyists, but together, we did it. Thank you for playing a crucial part in safeguarding the affordable Internet.

Emphasis theirs.

The next step, like with the banks, is to switch to an independent provider. OpenMedia links to a big list of Ontario ISPs, but specifically suggests switching to one of these:

Acanac: http://www.acanac.ca/
Distributel: http://www.distributel.ca/
Eagle: http://www.eagle.ca
Start Communications: http://start.ca/
Teksavvy: http://teksavvy.com/
Telnet: http://www.telnetcommunications.com/

The list of indies in BC is sadder:

Distributel (Vancouver, Victoria): http://www.distributel.ca/
Teksavvy (Vancouver): http://teksavvy.com/

I’ve never heard of Distributel. Weird.

Anyway, thoughts? I’ve heard good and bad about Teksavvy.

The movement, presumably through the General Assembly, is spending some of its war chest on television time. This is a legitimizing coup. The medium is the message, and the message is now television — more American than Mom and apple pie:

This is interesting to me because of the notion that capitalism colonizes the counterculture — or more aggressively that there is no difference between the two — and I wonder if this is a ray of hope, if whatever tension lead to the (false?) dichotomy of capitalism versus counterculture can work both ways: can the counterculture reverse-colonize capitalism?

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but he paid a lot for his entertainment center.

Here’s a fictional piece on unplugging — the idea that a good ethical response to a fundamentally corrupt system is to abstain from participation.

I’ve been meaning to write about unplugging for about a month, and I have a philosophy-heavy post in my queue that I should polish and publish (I’m intentionally front-running you a bit here, Jared, to stack our coverage). The basic gist, however, is this:

• Set yourself up cryptographically. Assume the crypto will not be sufficient. Continue with the protection it does provide.
• If necessary, form a union.
• Lower your environmental footprint.
• Withdraw from industrial food.
• Withdraw from the banking system.
• Withdraw from the employment system.
• Engage politically.

More later.

Jill and I just fell down a bit of a Wikipedia hole. Here are some of the weird backwaters of English. First, a sentence with syntax but no (non-poetic) semantics from Noam Chomsky:

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Some strings demonstrating lexical ambiguity, which are syntactically correct, but presented without punctuation which would aid parsing:

That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is

“James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.”

Homophonic complexity can be used to generate stunningly opaque sentences with valid syntax:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Latin has a good one: “Malo malo malo malo.” The supposed translation: “I would rather be, In an apple tree, Than a naughty boy, In adversity.”

Atypical punctuation we were looking at included the percontation point (⸮), or irony mark, which can be used to mark rhetorical questions or ironic statements. Hervé Bazin (the novelist, not the film critic) suggested some more:

such as the “doubt point”, “certitude point”, “acclamation point”, “authority point”, “indignation point”, and “love point”.

The exclamation comma and question comma were patented in Canada in the early 90s and fell out of it shortly thereafter. The patents probably stopped their general uptake. Yeah!, I’m sure,? totally⸮

The negotiations are still in process but it looks like I will soon be on a long term contract at a studio in the fashion/media district. There’s a small chance I will end up in the financial district at a place offering stock options — but I’ve long since learned the trick of offering someone a piece of the glorious future. They’d also have to trump my locked-up chunk of the gritty now.

I can’t say too much — this is high tech so obviously everything is tip top secret on pain of enhanced interrogation and rendition to room 101 — but I’ll be at an iOS studio that is expanding to the major consoles, and I’m one of the relatively few people in TO with seventh generation console programming experience. I guess.

From their hiring questions (it turns out they liked that answer!) I will probably be building interface design tools and display systems. I used to think that I was doomed to do interface development forever, but as I matured it turned out to be interesting and useful — even something I do for fun — “become what you are.” I reckon this change of mind is largely due to “interface” stuff sounding sexier to my design brain now.

It’ll be useful for me to update my company’s paperwork and web presence shortly — I’m going to start banking deductions and development incentives because “we” have nontrivial revenues now. It might be time to outsource some economically efficient subset of “our” business to India.

Aside: I wrote this on my slide phone while waiting to see a doctor. An older guy sitting across from me interrupted a girl tapping away, “look, everyone’s on their phones” — and we all were — “I am more oldschool.” She smiled and went back to tapping. He turned back to the television.

McLuhan might say that we were all modifying our environment with electronic technology. Doctors’ waiting rooms have always needed cybernetic enhancement — even with something as low-tech as a book or magazine. The real space of a waiting room is far less interesting than ANY possible virtual environment. But privileging an anonymous broadcast over personal, perhaps social, engagement is oldschool in a strange way: It’s anti-tribal, googie even, as if the future had come and gone in 1986.

Watching reports about stocks I don’t own, weather that isn’t here, and traffic I won’t encounter is a much more passive, disengaged way to spend time than [micro]blogging and playing Marble Cannon. Or killing those goddamn smug pigs in Angry Birds. The old guy was essentially complaining that we were impoverishing his technological-environmental experience without identifying that experience itself as impoverished. We were much more socially engaged, albeit in our own isolated universes: I was talking to people all across Canada and he couldn’t engage someone across an empty chair.

I had McLuhan in my pocket too, to cybernetically modify the streetcar ride home: “The Medium is the Massage”. I should have given it to the old guy, but while I was writing this he got bored of waiting and left.

Aside’s aside: it occurs to me that “small” games should be tribally social: “eclectically” multiplayer, instead of “massively”. They should all have “friends” leaderboards, baseline. Maybe matching the scope of a game to the scope of its social engagement is a good guideline.

Vegas went well.

When McLuhan writes that humans use technology to create the environment, that electrical technology in particular provides a medium whose content is a previous medium, and that the medium is itself the message, you’d think he grew up in Vegas instead of Western Canada.

Vegas exists because of technology, mostly electric light and air conditioning. As a city it contains multiple duplicates of other cities (some fictional): New York, Venice, Paris, Cairo, Rome, Camelot. It celebrates spectacle, is itself a spectacle, and there is only one message: money.

Vegas is so hyperreal and other-worldly that not only is technology environment, environment becomes technology: they pump oxygen into the gambling area to keep everyone happy, awake, and satiated (though it seems the oxygen bar fad has now passed). You don’t get tired or hungry in Vegas, not without outsized effort.

My occasional forays into the ultra-capitalist environment almost always end up philosophical. Last time a buddy and I walked down The Strip waving off the ubiquitous offers of “LIVE GIRLS DIRECT TO YOUR ROOM” and discussed L’Étranger and the relative benefits of a flight to Las Vegas versus a pair of skinny jeans (a purely academic point in my case).

This time another friend and I wondered at the sameness of utilitarian capitalism and Canada’s workaday socialism. Whereas socialists like public transportation so people can get to places where they’re economically useful, cheaply; the ultra-capitalist casinos offer complimentary transportation to get people to places where they’re more economically useful, cheaply. Indoctrination runs deep on both sides: no judgements.

I learned some new facets of my game of choice: table selection really IS that important, worth approx. 500x the big blind over a session, or about $100/hr in real terms; my comfortable game requires the maximum buy-in; and sometimes people give off weak tells when they miss the board and decide to hang on — bullying them based on their stink of fear, alone, isn’t enough (sometimes the big dog actually has to kill).

One thing Vegas should do, really my only critique, is legalize drugs. I’m too terrified of the prison-industrial complex to actually break the law down there, but I always find myself wanting something more than caffeine, cigars, and alcohol. I’m sure I could find it, but I’d rather not have to.