Reflecting on my past several posts and the past several years of my life, I'm discovering that I've become alarmingly ego-centric in ways that aren't healthy.

This isn't especially surprising; business classes, social isolation, and the drama of emphasizing myself as the most correct person in the room (in many cases, this was warranted; in many more, it was not) have all led to this boorish attitude towards life that revolves around measurable personal achievement. This isn't how I want to be, and I've emotionally and spiritually exhausted myself by beating myself up over it instead of taking the right steps to fix it, because I simply don't know which those are.

Helpful in this process have been my readings of Tricycle magazine and its related paraphernalia. For example, I subscribe to their Daily Dharma feed and, surprisingly, have read it nearly every single day for two years now. It hasn't been helpful because I'm a Buddhist, mind you (my worldview is much too eclectic for that), but because it offers advice on emphasizing love and compassion, which I feel are qualities I am flatly terrible at expressing. It's also offered advice in working with de-emphasizing the ego as the sole driving force in my life.

I need help, though. Not necessarily from a psychologist (as these matters live at the level of high-functioning actualization with a large subjective and philosophical component), but from people whom understand this process at a fundamental level. I've considered taking more of my now-extremely-limited vacation time off work to visit one of the local Buddhist retreats, because I feel it would greatly help me. This isn't a be-all or an end-all, though, and more help is definitely desired.

Do any of you have experience in the area of dismantling ego-centrism that you feel might be valuable here? Crisp, specific advice with links would be the most help.

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I think I'll just leave this here (posted out of order for effect):

• 10:52 <@root> You: @ebertchicago In re, http://t.co/FamNv5AD: this is
  why our digital world is so vital and so empowering. We can choose to preserve memory.
  
  
• 10:54 <@root> You: @ebertchicago If we can persist the endless edge of now through
  digitization, memory will not be lost. Indeed, it's a singularity.

• 10:45 <@root> You: While we haven't yet solved the singularity for human
  lifespan, we sure have for the persistence of memory. I'm surprised no one's noticed.

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... is something I simply want to exist.

I'm thinking of the standard imagery and card flow from Rider-Waite (with a few toss-ins), but with mathematical formulae instead of other subjects or people. I see this in my mind's eye rendered anywhere from beautifully to terrifyingly, in austere plain text, with the selected equation, font-face, positioning, flow, text color, and facing-side chroma giving each card its implied mood, imagery, and character. The card stock would be something cheap and unpretentious, as close as possible to Bicycle glossy rounded-edge without actually being so. The back would simply display an integral symbol, with a light blue fringe drawing the eye, cool tone towards flat black-on-white, into the center.

Am I crazy for wanting this? I would certainly buy it. This might be the kind of thing that would make a good weekend project, in any event.

(Also on my geeky todo list: buying one of these.)

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To play a bit of follow-up, I actually went ahead and replied to the email from Zig Zag Productions. The response I received made me about as uncomfortable as the initial pitch, but it went far to clearing up my questions as to why they're doing what they are.

In short, I've been assured that it's going to be something of an open soap-box documentary, letting otherkin speak out to the general community. Given my earlier reservations about the choice of media, the company, and the inherent need for profitability, I flag this as "a sincere production of dubious intent" that I would not advise participation in at this time.*

(Because I respect their contact representative's privacy, I won't be copy-pasting his follow-up email here. Despite email's open, insecure nature, that wouldn't be terribly fair of me.)


More interestingly: someone in the community (whom I follow on Twitter) is putting together their own documentary, as a grassroots thing with open submission and a more transparent editing process. Some of you had expressed interest in similar ideas in the comments of my previous post. Would you mind helping Arudem out?

http://arudem.tumblr.com/post/17988887733/an-otherkin-documentary

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* As a note of interest, one of the ideas discussed with me was a segment about bringing otherkin from the UK to meet their US counterparts. Certain people in my audience will find this very amusing indeed. In the interests of being coy and protecting the innocent, I'll simply state that I've done this at least twice now.

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This post is a signal boost for others that may have been included in Zig Zag Productions' latest email campaign for their documentary on otherkin. As others have mentioned, I advise caution, given their choice of affiliates and contact methods (for, among other things, the current Whitney Houston documentary).

Of course, we've heard about this before, and the current email states the production is now for "a documentary for a UK television channel following the lives of Otherkin." The timing and this change of phrasing implies they've lost the Animal Planet bid for this production. Which seems reasonable, honestly -- I don't expect our lives to be that strikingly different from your preferred average Joe, except for what goes on on the inside and what folks like lupagreenwolf went out of their way to document.

I'm considering giving them the benefit of the doubt at this point, throwing them a bone by linking frameacloud's terrific Otherkin Timeline and asking for a list of questions that can be anonymously addressed to the community. I'm dubious on their current call to speak to people over the telephone and document me for fairly obvious reasons of personal and professional security, but I'm not above giving them something to talk about in aggregate, as a judge of character in how seriously involved they actually are one year later.

We'll see. For now, I'm mostly documenting my thoughts for others, on the off chance they're helpful.

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Code: http://pastebin.com/s5bkVEuV

For the longest time, I'd been hurting for a good, topic-based organization scheme for all of the feeds I consume in Google Reader. This may be useful to anyone that has this same problem with their own RSS reader, so I figured I'd publish this for the Greater Good™.


My problem is: I consume (not necessarily read) over 500 RSS-syndicated articles a day. Because of this, I need a good, fast indexing scheme that tells me exactly what the most common topics happen to be so I can organize my time effectively. I have less time for obscure things, though if I'm targeting those to give myself a rest from the tedium of daily news, I'd like to be able to see them at a glance, too.

Doing this on a source-by-source basis falls apart when common issues (like SOPA) transcend sources that might otherwise contain very focused content. So, I needed a good organizational scheme that was topic-oriented, source-agnostic, and binned all content by its most common keywords and key phrases. Further, it needed to target what the articles are actually saying, instead of what the articles think they're saying (via, say, tagging the article).


The easiest organizational scheme I could think of was to present feeds similar to new posts in an Internet forum. So, I did. Technical babbling follows on how the algorithm does that.

Because titles usually contain the most relevant content for a particular item, each article's title receives its own topic category automatically, according to very simple rules for word and phrase relevancy. "Relevancy" is determined by how often words and phrases appear in the title, subtracted by how often each component word appears in the message body of all articles. In other words, very simple, quorum-based voting, emphasizing well-organized articles that put their most relevant information in the title and save all of their flavor text for the body.

End technobabble.


What I've found is this simple scheme works surprisingly well. It allows me to take my complete collection of feeds and articles and extract, at a glance, the most relevant ones that I should be reading. And I like that; it gives me good, high level insight that I can use to cut out much of the noise in favor of juicy, juicy signal. And it's so useful that I'm left to wonder why more RSS readers don't do this effectively, in idiomatic, simple, and well-organized ways.

So, as a grassroots effort at improving everyone's online reading experience, I figured I'd just release the code. It's pretty technical, for those that don't like playing with Python code and bending it to their will.

But for everyone who do: would you share this, improve it, and get it submitted to applications that should be using exactly this sort of organizational scheme? I'd greatly appreciate it, if only for the joy of knowing I helped make this little place we call the Internet that much easier to work with.

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When I am done with my current commission, I will be divesting of my time in 3D art and design. It's as simple as that. Its reasoning, less so.


For the longest time, I had wished for a future where graphical representations of self would reign supreme. By this, I mean the full monty, augmented reality, rawr-I'm-a-dragon sort or existence in which we'd blend ourselves with our technology and discover just how far the rabbit hole goes. I call this an embracing of "complex media": anything that primarily and actively requires user immersion to understand the message. Videogames fall into this category, for example.

In hindsight, I don't see that as anything approaching unrealistic, and certainly not by modern technology... but it's just not what was ultimately successful and practical as the primary mode of expression for ideas and the culture of the Internet. That view would learn to understand and embrace human laziness, and, slowly, I've come to respect that.

A large part of this is the pain of specification. The idea of defining a world exactly, right down to its dimensions, behaviors, and microscopic layers, is simply tedious to do in complex graphical form. Spoken and written language, and to a lesser extent image and video content, seem to be much faster methods of conveyance for a much larger audience of people. This is precisely because of the lossy and simulative qualities available to the human mind, which enables it to grasp concepts quickly and easily from asynchronous, targeted culture than something that's always on and just sort of running in the background.

What works for complex media, then, is repeatability. Complex media is much better at capturing a certain shared qualia of the setting, packaging it up, and repeat-broadcasting it memetically throughout society. This is why videogames and Pixar-like immersive animations are as popular as they are -- they're able to document large swathes of culture and share them quickly, effectively, and in elegant ways that text media, graphical slide shows, and YouTube poop can only offer glimpses of. They can be unabashedly and knowingly epic. That has value.

But, at the same time, they're difficult to prototype in and outright expensive to work with. While complex media makes polished, organic use of the brain's spatial cortex when presented, their creation and delivery is often ploddingly slow. And, almost bitingly ironically, it just seems that the written word and these small bits of culture strewn about are better at conveying abstract concepts and elements of expression than simulations and ARGs, which I'd originally tinkered with. Well enough, I suppose.

Over time, I've sort of migrated from the repeatability camp over to the prototyping one. I like new experiences. I like sharing my ideas quickly, then flitting off on a whim to new ones. And I find it more healthy for me to try believing in six impossible ideas before breakfast than focusing on just the one and getting it perfect.


So, I dropped the stale vision that complex media would rule our world. Interestingly, it marked the end of a longstanding ambition for me. That ambition began with a conversation I had in what was then Horizons: Empire of Istaria, with Narse (yes, that Narse) when he was just beginning to futz around with his earliest illustrations.

In that conversation, we hashed out our two separate paths. Argued about, really. His view was that he didn't really know what he'd be doing with his illustrations, but he enjoyed them and his then-abilities, so he continued making them. My position was that I believed these crazy videogames and all-embracing visions of self would slowly become our world, so I would make 3D in order to embrace them. Then, as we slowly fell out of touch with one another (we had many more conversations in the meantime), we went our separate ways.

I became a sensation in Second Life and, slowly, faded into obscurity. He, well... you probably know by now, if you're reading here. Suffice it that one of these things was more popular and more expressive, and I don't believe it was just the porn that did it.*


Rather, I believe it's a simple matter of expressiveness and prior expression. So, I'll be giving up the 3D to see where text and basic drawing take me for a while. As far as hobbies go, I hope it works out.

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* And I still wish him well, especially in light of recent events, though we haven't talked in nearly 8 years now. I kind of wish I could get ahold of him again in a bizarre showing of camaraderie and friendship. Not because he's become such a spectacularly popular porn artist now, but because he was one of those interesting people I liked to talk to all those years ago.

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I believe that people can fundamentally change.


It isn't always rapid. It isn't always rewarding. There are many potential inhibiting factors, including and not limited to: age, chemistry, and environment, that may block desired change. But, at the marriage of impetus and opportunity, I believe that desired change is possible in one's personality and in one's life.

I also believe that change is a constant in our lives. This notion that one's personality, habits, and reality are immutable is simply silly, though it may certainly seem that way. Somewhere behind the scenes, change is always happening, often despite appearances.


Because change is constant, I believe that people try desperately to hold on to the things they believe define them for who and what they are. I believe this is as equally true of experiences as of material goods, and I believe that this collection of experiences is vital to the psyche and the soul, since they both define us and bound the limits of our consciousness.

Further, I believe we cannot keep every experience inside of ourselves. Because of this, we are picky and choosy about those that stay with us. I think that this executive process of picking and choosing defines who we are more than our race, our creed, or any of the preconditions that set us in this life.

Even if we are guided by forces outside of our control, I believe in choice as much as I believe in change.


Thus, I believe that I can take an active role in defining who I am. It may seem simple, but I think it's made all the difference.

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lothnomicon linked this yesterday. I simply must share, because while this is another one of those create-your-own-dragon Flash games, its quality is reasonably good.

( Image behind the cut )

Of the friends and acquaintances I've made in the past couple years, many, many, many fall into a small set of social circles and gatherings that I'm presently not a part of. I feel a large amount of the sting of being marginalized because of this, of being made into this bizarre but well-worn sort of second-class citizen, because I don't have context, have at best a topical grasp of their interests, and can only relate to what's been openly shared to me by others "in the know".

This saddens me, because each one of them that I'm thinking about is him, her, hir, or xirself awesome, and somebody I'd just like to get to know better. Yet I feel pushed out at most opportunities to do so and just plain overshadowed, unable to hold my own, in the presence of those more capable of walking these shared contexts than me. It's impacted my psyche in such a way that I feel I suffer a chronic lack of information or eloquence when I don't; I'm just being worked out of whatever conversations they happen to be in because I'm not privy to that thing that happened to that guy on that day six months ago.

It feels topical, in that middle-or-high school way of being the only kid without friends at the lunchroom table (and I was very often exactly that child). And yet it isn't, wholly. As a race of natural storytellers and builders of shared experience, these completely frivolous happenings are the stories of our (human) lives, and the cliques simply serve as the guardians of culture and ideas. And so, being inappropriately cliqued to my environment, the best I can do to make up for it is put my ideas into writing and hope they're broadly interesting.


I would at some point like to experience the shared story thing again, though. And while I'd made the faintest of steps towards all of these circles and gathers as early as five to seven years ago (surprise!), my inherent shyness and reluctance to make my presence known has kept me out of them after the initial taste or two.

I won't name names, except for the bigger ones, to protect the innocent. But as an example: a large swath of my life is missing on LiveJournal, and was missed of others', while I spent my time engrossed in building tools for Second Life. I've missed out on WoW too, deliberately. But fortunately, I have a backdoor there: I played Warcraft 3 and the predecessor to WoW's primary class mechanics, Dark Age of Camelot, which itself pulled its system from EverQuest, which itself... well, you get the idea. The point is, I can discuss its lore and mechanics in great detail, because of shared sourcing.

These are topical examples, of course, because my targets are primarily text-driven in the vein of MUCKs, IRC, and a shared roleplay or two. I have more knowledge than most people seem to give me credit for, and indeed more than I have any right to, by keeping an encyclopedic buffer of notes and logs of what I hear that I frequently use to supplant my memory.* But bear with me: Not. Naming. Names.

Phew.


I'd like to get over that shyness and actually reach out to the people I care about. At the same time, I wonder what would happen if I made myself more of the shared tapestry of their lives. It seems outright unfair of me, given my shyness, my needs, and my present emotional instability. But, maybe it would be something interesting.

This train of thought hasn't yet reached its conclusion. I suppose in a way, it's a form of social advertising.

***

Oh, about that "Empowerment Through Writing" in the title: I put that there because damned if it isn't cathartic to write out my thoughts to keep me sane right now. My style of being oblique about the mundane and forthcoming about the patterns is especially cathartic to me, since it localizes happenings and drama into these concise thought bubbles that can be inspected, free of their persons and events, and rooted squarely in ideas and emotional qualia.

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* That I keep completely private, locked behind layers of AES encryption. Did I mention I value peoples' privacy, while respecting my right to have a clue about what they're talking about? I'm fairly sure it's one of the things that makes me tick.

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