I demand hord-ahr !

We all know of way more important things going on re: sexism, harassment and broader expressions of dorkery in the gaming industry and culture, but I'm gonna natter lexicon instead, because it won't drive me to a lengthy, foamy rant (can't be arsed, today) :

When did 'chauvinism' (without the 'male' qualifier) become the default and preferred synonym for 'phallocracy', as opposed to its proper meaning of 'exacerbated patriotism/jingoism' ?

I get how anything with an -ism attached instantly sounds prejudiced and therefore becomes more suitable to dissing purposes, but 

1.  it's confusing two distinct (if often coincident) prejudices, 
2.  how could you pass on the opportunity to use 'phallocracy' instead, when it literally translates to 'rule of dick(s)' ? 

Right ?

Pic found via Ernest Adams, the beautiful beardy feminazi…

…all that, assuming it's acceptable to call someone a dick when he/she/it's being an ass, and there isn't a minority rights group somewhere to object to the misrepresentation of 'dicks' as anything but superiorly endowed in the cognitive department — I wouldn't want to hurt anyone's in their tender bits, of course.

Back in black.

Today I reverted to a "simple" template, because the so-called "dynamic" thingies are way too slow to render on a shoddy connection. Also some of the content didn't work properly, and I can't be arsed to decipher the CSS and html templates that rule blogspot page layout.

On the downside, that means the blog is no longer mobile-browser aware and will serve you the same page regardless, but I've tried to mitigate that somehow.

The page layout is set for 1400 pix width, which on any proper computer display this side of the millennium should fit comfortably, but in case you're reading this from a tablet or phablet you should be good as long as you can fit 800 pix or thereabouts.

Tested on a TF101 10.1" tablet (1280*800 if memory serves), it takes only a small zoom out to cram the whole thing to screen width, and the fonts are still large enough to read just fine in landscape mode.

In portrait mode,  you need no further zoom out to read the main content column, which is designed for a nominal 900 pix width, but reads smoothly enough shrunk into 800 pix width. You'll lose the sidebars however, while clean vertical scrolling becomes sort of a minigame — that's my gift, to you.

And yeah, it's light-on-dark again, because I dig trog mode, and because not all devices offer a convenient way to swap between night and day modes.
  

When looking for a segue image, do not google "chocolate shower" — just sayin'…

Unrelated, in the crossing wires department, the following mashup happened in my shower* earlier today :

— Adam Curtis : People embrace ultra-conservative views such as theocracy not (just) because they're dog-crazy, but because they've lost faith in the ability of politicians to change the world for the better, on account of political power inevitably leading to corruption.

— Bill Maher : The craziest reactionary ultra-conservative really are a tiny minority, only one so vocal that clueless politicians (whose pulsometers got calibrated forever back in the era of one-way mass-media) can't correct for the distortion and then buy into the fiction the loudmouths really make the core of their constituency.

Extrapolate.

*[I meant : 'in my head', while in the shower, wherein neither Maher nor Curtis are particularly welcome to partake in person.]

Agree to disagree ?

In democracy, politics is the art of misdirection.

Whether you believe in democracy as a virtuous and working system depends strictly upon where you fall, between your urge to be heard, and your distrust of your fellow citizens' ability to make competent political choices.

If getting your voice heard is important enough to overshadow the risk of idiots contributing the majority of the vote, congratulations : you do believe in democracy.

If deep down you're terrified by the idiots having any sort of say in public matters, and realize your own opinions may not be that interesting, congratulations : you don't believe in democracy.

…yet you likely are even more afraid of something else, like communism or dictatorship, and democracy sounds like the lesser of many evils.

Here's a series of well-know facts about us all — they're truisms, but they'll come handy in a minute: 

• Most people are idiots. 
• Most people believe most people are idiots. 
• Most idiots don't know they are. 
• Most people don't believe they are idiots.

It follows that idiots (who think they aren't) distrust the mental and political competency of most other people (who they believe to be idiots), and yet feel of critical import that their personal opinions are heard and accounted for.

C'mon… you know you want to click on me.

The above may seem like an issue unfairly framed, and in some ways it is.

That's meant as an object lesson : because of the underlying assumption (shared by most) that a significant portion of the citizenry is in fact politically inept (by virtue of diverging from one's own views or interests), any debate in the context of a democracy tends to be framed in such a way as to either exclude, void or redirect the contributions of the people the speaker disagrees with, and favor those views she subscribes to.

I could write a book about the inherent self-contradictions of democracy as a mode of government (don't taunt me), but right now, here's a simple question for the presumed idiots out there, and also for you, my dear reader :

Can you imagine a working democratic government system that wouldn't hinge on misdirection ?

~

On the day after Obama's reelection,

…I started drafting a post meant to cheer up the non-batshit-insane portion of the losing camp, namely Classic Republicans.

The gist of my argument was : 

• If you hold free market and fiscal frugality as cardinal values, and also agree that not only is a general election a popularity contest-a-looza, but that the nature of political campaigning today has evolved to become so largely fact-agnostic and divorced from reality that it is now a self-contained, self-referential show business devoid of any real ideology and ethical concerns (but what the audience can go for), then you must agree to the following:

Whoever wins an election, by whatever means, however ethically, legally and constitutionally dubious is a priori deserving of having won, since the sole available gauge to judge the worth of a candidate is the proxy of his/her campaigning, and the only true  judgement of which campaign is best is the pass/fail test of winning or losing the election.

That was the free market at work part of my case, meant to do away with any after-the-game objections and debates about whether Obama's victory was legit, whether he should have won, whether results-affecting voter fraud had taken place, and so on. 

Surely, that kind of whining is only for people who concern themselves with "fairness" of elections, be it only when it suits them (wingnuts), or most of the time (bleeding heart liberals), and would be anathema to staunch free-market believers, for which democracy is truly the marketplace of ideas, and who trust its natural self-correcting abilities to (either/both) digest or negate electoral fraud, propaganda and manipulations so that all is right in the end, at least at the meta-level where it counts.

Thus, the best man-campaign won, and this should be the end of it as far as Classic Republicans are concerned : as soon as they get over their (entirely natural) disappointment of finding themselves on the losing team after the adrenaline has worn of, all will be peachy.

• Fiscal frugality then, was the clincher of my semisardonic attempt at comfort : by all verifiable accounts, Obama's campaign and its supporters made more conservative use of their war chest and won the election. 

Not only did the Obama camp arguably spend less (if you put together superpacs, greyish and official campaign funds) in grand total, but they more often than not got a better bang for their buck on individual expenditures, such as the price they paid for airtime, and generally how much they spent by vote they moved around.
In stark contrast, albeit consistent with the republican track record of republican presidential mandates, the Romney campaign was plagued with poor spending decisions, multi-layered leeching of resources by consultants and contractors, showing that CEO in the banking sector may sometimes not be a reliable indicator of one's financial acumen. Never was so much spent by so few with so little results.

…all of which I argued are good news for my Classic Republican friends, because the most fiscally frugal (ergo conservative) candidate won, which made this urban guy closer to their views than the wastebasket of a mormon-robot the ballot market rightfully corrected out of the picture. 

At the end of the day, if your major gripe with big governement is ill-advised, inefficient, bloated federal spending, BarryBamz is your guy, so you sorta half-won this one, cheers !

*

Yeah, I was quite happy with myself, and I managed to milk this spider-demon of a cow to spin my yarn for a page or three before I got kinda bored with the ridicule of it all… 

Plowing ahead my line of talking specifically to reasonable conservatives (as opposed to delusional bigots) I kept bumping on the same rock-like question : how could one be reasonable while self-defining as a conservative (Republican is after all just a brand and no longer an ideology, if it ever was) ?

Short answer: one shouldn't, and yet…

Just to get the obvious strawmen out of the way, I'm aware there are many conservatives who show every evidence of being reasonable people, just as I don't even need an effort of imagination to dream up church-going christians and mosq-going muslims who aren't god-crazy holybook-thumpers/burners — I personally know a few, which is enough to disprove a negative. Moreover, I'm (rather self-servingly) cool with quirky people being at large in the genpop, as long as they don't act entitled to do harm to others on the grounds of their feeling threatened by anyone who fails to share their views.

My point being, unoriginal as it is, that it's hard to reconcile being reasonable — as in amenable to reason and rationality — with the belief you can (and should wish to) stop anything from changing,  which is what conservatism boils down to.

Plainly, the level of commitment to magical thinking required to uphold conservative views as central to one's political identity (as different from conservative bias on set issues, which is a another matter) seems hard to reconcile with the minimal required intellectual balance to be called reasonable. And yes, that's where the "Reality has a liberal bias" zinger comes from, although liberals in general don't show any greater indication of their views being tied to objective reality, but that's, again, a different topic and not on today's rambling menu.

The contradiction between the last two paragraphs is only apparent, too : one can indeed behave reasonably whilst holding unreasonable views about big-picture issues like political ideology and the (non)existence of sky-fairies playing a part in our everyday life, much like one can be a well-read, seemingly level-headed rationalist and still end up cowardly pleading guilty to a crime of passion in front of a jury. It could be argued most interesting stories revolve around the contradictions between thoughts, feelings and actions. 

*

Where was I going with this ? Not quite sure myself, at this point… mainly, it's about me growing tired of the BS, I guess, starting with mine, pretending I'm content playing smartass while the world is rotting on its feet.

I'll get back to that, I guess.

Meanwhile, merkins of all political creeds should rejoice and/or mourn in unisson : they have a new prez, same as the old prez, who's also a right-of-Reagan Democrat, so there's plenty to go around.

Also, the worse of the two ebils on the ballot has been avoided, for while Mitt Romney may be a non-quantity as an individual, and certainly not the devil, the people who paid for his excursion into big city politics, and to whom he'd had to answer had he been elected, most certainly don't have your best interests at heart (unless you're part of the 0.01%, and then you don't give a toss about who wins, seriously).

*

Contact (it's all about) - part 1

There are plenty of reasons why we each, individually and collectively, do the things we do.

Aside the obvious and as-yet unhelpful "we're just moist robots, all we need is to revengineer our source to grok how we roll", we're left with models and theories of the mind that range from cargo-cult to bewilderingly naive deconstructions, with some interesting-if-broken leads that seem to work alright, some of the time.

One of my personal faves, because it is both flexible and reasonably self-consistent while turning out right more often than not (where applicable) I like to call the Historical Fiction Writer model — shortened as HFW, and rehydrated into "How ? Fuck, why ?" shape for handy use.

*

It goes roughly like this:* 

as individuals, we are the product of our history, both from the history of life perspective (which shaped our genome and innate abilities, passed along to their offspring — without much intent — by those who lived long enough to breed), to the societies and families that carried themes, beliefs, values, customs, knowledge and prejudices downstream to where we individually happen.

From there, we sail along when we can, we drown or take over if we can't.

…and we become, knowingly or not, HFWs, in the sense that we constantly copyedit, add, revise and rewrite our individual and collective history to build as close to comfortable a fiction about ourselves and others as we can manage.

What defines us, and 'why we do the things we do' then becomes a matter of reconciling the story we tell ourselves into a fleetingly coherent whole, despite possibly conflicting sources, such as Reality™ slapping us in the face, or others' delusions crossing paths with ours in disturbing fashion.

Like everything else, we drift towards a place of rest, and in the process contribute to the general agitation. 

At no point in this process is it really necessary for our consciousness to inform our actions: for all we know, we might just be watching our lives unroll like some foreign language film which we try to make sense of as we comment the show, until we start to believe we're actually running the story. 

Whether we decide anything consciously or simply pretend (to ourselves) after the fact that we did is up for discussion, but certainly we do act, and my hunch is the real influence of our conscious mind and higher cognitive functions is less in the decision-making process proper, and more in the way they tweak the filters of what we'll prioritize and pay attention to at a non-conscious level in the future.

Lest this starts sounding like a lot of baloney, let's get practical and consider why people embrace specific carreers, or why they get excited about any given activity, and we'll find it barely ever has much to do with the 'objective' qualities of the purported goal or object, and more about how it makes us 'feel'. 

…and then we try to figure a good enough story to explain why we should do what we're/we've already doing/done.

At least that's how I roll:

1/ I get excited (doesn't have to be a good feeling: solid frustration and burning anger work just fine, too). 

2/ I get depressed (almost never feels good, although it usually doesn't last long, and I sometimes welcome it with a relative sense of relief because it's part of my cycle, and getting excited gets taxing after a while). 

3/ I even out by thinking stuff through, but that's emphatically *after* I bounced from the down-bottom. 

4/ Rinse and repeat, with a slightly different set of parameters I'll respond to in step 1 and 2, according to what I came up with in 3.

I trust not everybody goes to through that kind of roller coaster on a daily basis, yet I reckon the core dynamic is a fairly common one: we learn from experience inasmuch as we process and internalize whatever story we tell ourselves about what did happen, but we really have little say about the what & why — while we're doing. 

*

This is a slight departure from the otherwise interesting theory that consciousness is essentially an artifact of malfunctioning brains, a useless parasitic commenter deluded about its contributing anything to a process that's entirely out of its control. 

My quick-bake HFW model instead posits our conscious self gets to debrief after the match, or at least stand in line and ask questions during the exit press conference, and may even sometimes influence upcoming games and inform the playbook — as any other outside voice can/would.

I'll get into the things that prong me/us in the next installment, but for now I have to saw some wood beams and lay some concrete.

***

*[Usual disclaimers apply, this is a work in progress — a polite way to say I'm making this up as I go, and I'm no more privy than you to we're I'm headed: journey > destination and all that.]

Can I see some ID, please ?

…besides your member card ?

[This post was prompted by one of the many trains of thought that left the station upon reading this at Peter Watts' blog, which I followed to where the fire started …and then spread.

There's a lot of food for thought in this jungle of internet rage, and a lot of noise, as should be expected, and I don't intend to cover every angle, although I will probably return to some of the issues raised in the future.

I commented on Peter's post, but in the process I started plowing a tangent furrow, and I'm not a fan of derailing threads so I had to stick it somewhere else, which is below.]

I 'get' feminism like I get black power, or gay pride, or self-diagnosed @spies wearing their quirks like badges of honor.

Not in the sociological sense, I don't, because I haven't gone all embedded journo in each and every one of those groups, but insofar as I can recognize the drive, it feels like I can relate.

It's frustrating when people think they know who you are, solely based on their preconceptions of what you are, say a gay black non-neurotypical female, and worse even when they tell you about your experience and your place in the world — as if they knew.

And yes, there's comfort in familiarity, support in recognition, and that's good enough reason to seek out kindred spirits, fellow members of an ingroup who've (had) to deal with the same crap, and won't try and mold you into their particular brand of 'normal'… at first.

Because that's the problem with self-identification in identity politics of any kind: you join in driven by a crave to be acknowledged for who you are, as a person, which includes what you are as a demographic, but it only starts there, and you end up peer-pressured into conforming to the group's idea of how and who you ought to be.  

*

Ingroups are attractive because they free one from the Sisyphean push back against prejudice, they promise (and deliver) a safe ecosystem within which one can exist and grow as a person, safe from the pressure to constantly defend and justify oneself which dominates outside the group.

Anyone who ever felt like an outcast, or felt they weren't accepted for who they are can somewhat relate to that urge, and that's about everyone who lived long enough to reach their teens in any society that regards individualism as something not entirely like a brain disease.

How it can go wrong is obvious, though, and trading one ill-fitting uniform for another can even be for the worse after rationalizations kick in: at least going against the consensus and 'normal' of a society that is imposed on you can be intuitive and almost self-evident, but it's much more difficult to justify any challenge to the groupthink of a club you self-selected into, without your own identity coming into question.

Am I saying one should pretend prejudices are a fiction, or worse, that race, gender, sexual orientation or any other 'deviation from the standard' don't really matter ? No.

I'm not about to deny anyone the option to weigh the defining elements of their identity by their own scales, yet I'll point that if you're about finding out who you are, and intrinsically define yourself (as opposed to merely satisfy a need to belong), then seeking validation by whomever is most likely to do it based on one or two traits you share with them isn't just the 'quick and easy way': it also carries the risk of the group defining your self for you.

Now, I'm a proverbial reasonably affluent middle-aged white man, and in the world of identity politics, that makes me statutorily incapable to even dream of relating to the ordeals of the oppressed of any kind.

Because I'm that sort of asshat, I also take extra care not to wear my possible deviations-from-standard on my sleeve, for fear of the variably well-meaning who could be tempted to coopt me in their gang, make excuses for me, or blame my skewed views on the parts of me that don't operate on specs.  

On the plus side, my assumed privilege and inability to empathize also afford me the luxury to treat people as equals, if and when I feel like it (or so goes the song).

The upside of that blatant iniquity is I can do something the self-identified oppressed can't possibly do, which is tell you about how it feels from the haughty heights I call home: pretty good, identity speaking.

*

My experience of privilege in this regard is: there's plenty of room between the cliffs of definition-of-self-by-group-affiliation and circumstances-denialism, and it's in those feisty-yet-naviguable waters where maybe not the nicest or comfortable, but the most constructive conversations tend to catch wind in their sails.

And while I'm not meaning to throw my privilege in your face, or tell you or anyone to 'get over it, already', because I know that's neither here nor there… I'm just asking: is that what you expect the ultimate spoils of victory for identity politics to be ?

Is the ability to converse on equal footing without the need (assumed or imposed) to constantly justify, excuse or defend oneself the holy grail of every minority ? …and if so, how and when can you tell any one set of "us vs then" rethorics (will) have jumped the shark and outlived their usefulness ?

Or is the issue one of payback, meaning no oppressed group can be vindicated and satisfied until they've in turn got the opportunity to stomp their former oppressor(s)… and then, what's the pecking order among the formerly-oppressed — can they share the driver's seat on the steamroller of justice, or are we going Round Robin about righteous fury ?  

***

[For a different perspective, an interesting and feminism-centric take on the issue can be found here.]

Seriously ?

OBL is dead, and obviously the world is a better place for it, right ?

That's what they say, at least:

"World stocks rise after death of Osama bin Laden"

Now, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but a few things seem off with this:

• The end of OBL (if verified) isn't the end of the jihad/terror/civilization agit-prop/yni: 

He was a bogeyman of our own doing in more than one way, and notably because he wasn't as lionized anywhere as he was in the 'western world'.
Bin Laden was seen by many in the middle east as nothing more than a philanthropist of sorts, funding the worthy cause of ousting american imperialism and fighting the perceived judeo-christian hegemony, yet not so much as a warlord of strategic leader (which he indeed wasn't). OBL was just a rich heir with a grudge, and was first tolerated only because of the dough he brought to the table, but not taken seriously besides, and he eventually turned into a real propaganda asset after we made him the bugaboo.

At the end of the day, one of the post-facto leads in the cast of the 9/11 soap opera just got written out. That's not exactly a franchise-ender, though.

• Why would you summarily execute a PR golden goose ?

According to the official news, it seems OBL took a headshot during a close range engagement, which doesn't look like an accident.

Obviously there are many reasons why him dead is possibly better than him alive, starting with the fact he can't say anything embarrassing to the U.S of A anymore, can't be rescued nor escape, etc. Still, you'd think after all the effort put into hyping him, the U.S and Obama would want to milk this PR win for all it's worth, and that's better done if you can drag a defeated OBL in front of cameras — whenever convenient — for the weeks and months to come, while making a righteous circus of his trial in front of both U.S and international courts.

Is it only for fear of likely "release OBL or else" terrorist threats that terminating him was determined to be the best course of action, or was it really just one of the acceptable outcomes of an arrest attempt that didn't go as smoothly as it coulda/shoulda/woulda… I don't know, and probably never will for sure, but it still feels like a weak and anticlimactic end for the biggest PR game of this past decade.

• Why dispose of the body thusly ?

Killing the guy on the spot to take control of the narrative and avoid subsequent unintended developments, I get (even though I feel it's sub-optimal), but the whole 'Sorry, we already tossed the corpse at sea from a helo' charade is just ludicrous.

This is creating the impression of a fake hit, the kind of cheap, cookie-cutter twist you expect from a made-for-TV thriller: "Oh, he wasn't dead after all, he faked his own death to instigate a turf war among his rivals", or somesuch. 

Plainly put, if you kill a notable enemy with no witnesses, and hastily dispose of the body while still claiming the credit for the hit, it does look fake, and you'll be called out on it.

• So is OBL really dead ?

I wouldn't put money on it either way.

Occam razor dictates he most likely is, or at least the U.S intelligence is confident enough that he is to not expect he'll show up live on TV sometime later today to point and laugh at them.

My best bet: he died a few days/weeks ago of unrelated causes, and the U.S figured they'd better hurry to make it look like they did it before the word got out.

Hence no arrest, no fresh corpse to display, and what we're witnessing now is the best CIA and special forces could make of a bad situation on short notice and a ticking clock.

And ttfn: back to your regular programming.

Some stuff literally hurts on sight.

Between Twilight and Harry Potter, it's a tough call which is working harder on grooming kids to Olympic levels of brat-ness.

On a related note, I saw New Moon about 4h ago, and my brain still aches… I fear permanent scarring.

Distraction.

While thinking hard about fiscal justice in a globalized-yet-uneven economical landscape…

Food for thought.

It just occurred to me that in the matter of credit attribution as to where we — as a species — are today, too much is given to our fabled neo-cortex, while way too little recognition goes to our palate and digestive tract's prowess.

So here it is: our gut smarts are underrated.

To clarify, I'm not about to go all redneck on you, and argue the case that guts know better than brains as a rule (even though it may happen sometimes), and I'll leave truthiness to whom it belongs: comedians, teabaggers and choking-on-pretzels ex-POTUS. 

Instead, I'll go out on a limb, as per standard protocol here, and tentatively argue: our guts play an under-appreciated yet decisive part in the historical making of our brains, both as a facilitating agent and enabling device.

*

Consider this: we humans come omnivores as a standard issue, and tend to embrace it unless constrained to a less diverse diet imposed by circumstances or personal/cultural biases. At face value, our gut would deserve praise if only for its ability to use almost anything we stumble upon for fuel — on the omnivore's radar, anything that is or was alive once could be dinner.
We partly owe to our guts to have survived and thrived in a variety of environments that non omnivorous species can only dream of, but I'd wage that's only half of it…

Opposable thumbs are cool, for sure, but they're of limited relevance if all you do is twiddle them: how and to what end you put those to work is what's key.
Our brains are a spectacular learning machine, a difference and inference engine that can find patterns in a chaotic wealth of information, derive meaning and build narratives or concepts to organize the universe, with us as its focal point. 

As it seems obvious a direct relation exists, between the diversity of experiences and stimuli we're exposed to and the opportunities we get to make new and smarter inferences, anything that helps us survive and explore new horizons is increasing our odds to have a eureka! moment, or its intuitive, less conceptual equivalent.

And just like our opposable thumbs, our guts enable us to explore and experience more, not only by keeping us fueled and clanking beyond the point where the Duracell rabbit would finally stop, but by providing us with the means to experience more. Non-omnivorous animals don't get the chance to try much of the gastronomical aspects of pleasure and discomfort, simply eat whatever limited selection of food they trust to process without falling sick, and won't even think about ordering off the menu, even when it sucks — ask any panda how they feel about their last meal(s) for a very fucked up perspective on this.

*

Long story short, being able to process diverse foods extends our biotopical reach and our ability to move around, yet also broadens our mental horizons and sense of aesthetics. Diversity of tastes, textures, shapes and colors all give our brain those little jolts that once in a while may spark a new and interesting connection, even though we may not always realize it at the time, and the same goes for those different landscapes, climates and environments we would never have dreamed of, had our omnivorous bowels not kept us alive through there.

Thus, I suggest you make today (which is whenever you happen to read these lines) your personal Gut Recognition Day and celebrate GRD by thinking hard about how much we owe our intestines for coping with our whims as they do, be thankful for that, and vow never to deny your guts their rightful part by ensuring you don't eat the same grub every day from now on, if you can afford it.

Your neo-corticoïdal bowels thank you in advance.

***

Operating system of me.

This post summarizes a few ideas which I hold to be true, while not necessarily endorsing them from an ethics standpoint, and which you can assume I take for granted in any piece of opinion I write.
Being one of those people who are never entirely comfortable with certainty, and live with the nagging feeling that confidence is mostly about overlooking stuff — the paradox is only apparent — there isn't much I take for granted.

This list is intended as a helper resource for whoever decides to enter a discussion with me: if any of those seem too deeply flawed to you, you'll save us both time and frustration by first correcting me on those postulates you deem broken before you try to skin any other beast — either that or drop it.

Thanks.

[For lack of a more sensible ordering (that I can figure), entries are organized by growing character count.]

• Less is (often) more.
• You can't un-fry things.
• Diversity is inherently desirable.
• The passing of time has no purpose.
• 90% of any human production is crud.
• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
• Convenience beats quality under most circumstances.
• The map is not the territory — don't get caught in metaphors.
• Hard work and steadfastness can't alone salvage flawed designs.
• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
• Those who most tend to seek power are less likely to exert it wisely.
• Our brains don't naturally grasp statistics, not even simple percentages.
• Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
• Ideas should not be held responsible for the people who claim to defend them.
• It's unlikely there is a god… even more unlikely it cares in the least about you.
• Evolution is not a perfecting principle, it works on the just-good-enough principle.
• Concepts should not be judged based solely on the success or failure of their implementations.
• In most competitions, the optimal strategy is to hamper opponents' ability to compete whenever possible.

• New one-line-beliefs will be added as they come, if/when applicable.

• These one-liners each ought to link to a full entry eventually, but as usual, don't hold your breath, this blog is a low-priority item as far as I'm concerned.

• Catchy zingers that happen to be corollary to any of the above have been purposefully omitted from this short list, and will be covered — if ever — in the full-entry versions.
Ex: I strongly support the notion that "Universal Suffrage is a scam", but it doesn't warrant an entry in the list above, as it is merely a corollary of several of other listed postulates (primarily but not limited to) "the optimal strategy in most competitions…", "convenience beats quality…", "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." and "those who most tend to seek power…".
Ditto for: "Don't wait for your afterlife to make something of your time, there is no respawn for you noob."

Pentimento-free area.

Since I started populating this blog in earnest, about a week ago, I've improved the template and blog on the fly, cosmetics-wise.

A side effect is I've been looking back at already published posts more than once, and occasionally edited released content beyond mere spell checking and copy-proofing, which is probably a good thing on average, but it got me thinking about the abstraction layer of the blog template.

If I had a hard time writing here, up until I tweaked this blog template to an approximation of my taste, what does it say about reading it ?

I realize I'm using this platform as a poor man's (tiddly)wiki, because I'm lazy, and I can't help but try and emulate the organic nature of tiddler-based writing on a support that is meant as a fire-and-forget journaling platform.

Thus, I overdo on production value, revising the past as I go, which wouldn't be so much of a lie if it wasn't for the fact blogspot is conveniently (?) devoid of versioning and history.
A few months/years from now, will I be updating old entries to account for new developments ?
What of interface and cosmetic tweaks, could context change be enough to affect the meaning of old content ?

Does it matter ? In any way ?
Guess that's what the Brainfart label is for.

Reality TV, what if ?

Anyone with a passing interest for the genre knows by know how Reality TV (like documentary film) is all about storytelling, be it at the expense of facts and 'reality' (unlike good documentary film).

So why do we still buy in Reality TV, knowing it is, in no way, 'real' ?
Call me biased (I am), but I'd wager it is somehow tied to expectations management.

Reality TV sets us in a hawk/voyeur mindset, were we expect to see 'real people' confronted with situations they aren't entirely prepared for, without the lifeline of a script, or the pact with the director she will try to make the best of their performance.

Ofc, this is a broad generalization, Reality TV is not so much a genre as it is a technique, or a platform, and not all shows focus on the same story, nor tell their stories the exact same way, yet beyond the pure voyeur shows exploiting the assumed candor of the consenting stalkees (which are pretty much constant in their mechanics and attraction), players' performances in recent shows generally stand apart from the typical lamb-to-the-slaughter of yore.

We all have stopped being naive about the medium a long time ago, both the viewers and the protagonists of reality TV.
The we-know-that-you-know-that-we-know convention may be why, ultimately, we can still identify, empathize with the people on display: both they and us are trying to bring out some depth and relief from what we all see through for a shadow play.

This dynamic may be more obvious in "People" shows (a la "Big Brother") than in game/adventure shows (such as "Survivor"), where the weight of character drama on the storyline is mitigated by action-centric plot devices, but even gamey shows such as Survivor would make for a pretty poor show of Iron-Man-Next-Door, without the backstory and character contextualization.

Why I am rambling on that now ? Well, because of a TV Show I've been watching, of course.
It's called "The Comeback", ran for only one season of 13 installments in 2005, and revolves around a has-been TV actress who agrees to be stalked by a Reality TV crew as the condition to get a part in a fledgling sitcom.

There are just as many good reasons to watch this show as there are to explain why it didn't make it past season one: it's unsettling, lacks pace and rythm, and is actually painful to watch (at times) for being eerily verisimilar — arguably more than most audiences are asking for.

And there's a catch: it's not Reality TV, it's fiction, docudrama-flavored.

The Reality show in "The Comeback" isn't real, the main protagonist (Valerie Cherish, of non-real "I'm it!" fame) is portrayed by an actress (Lisa Kudrow, of undisputable "Friends" fame), followed around by a pretend Reality TV crew, led by Jane (Laura Silverman).
Valerie's misery is exposed yet staged, as she's filmed acting a supporting part in a (nonexistent) network sitcom called "Room and Bored", directed by Jimmy Burrows (as himself).

Shown to us (directed by James Burrows, how clever) is what we're told to be the raw, unedited footage shot by a single camera, assumed to be that of the quite-not-entirely-fake-then-maybe Reality TV show.

Yeah, like it wasn't enough of a mess already. Eyeballs melt under matriochka-induced overload.

It's really hard to believe we're talking about one-take, no-edit footage, despite the aforementioned aching pace of the show... since we know what we're witnessing is an act, shown to us by professional actors and showbiz people, presumably following a script.

There's a strong disconnect happening here, not the least because of the irreprochable acting — man, these people pretending not to act really look like they're not acting... — yet also because our trained couch potato brain isn't sure what it's meant to look at/for.

The hurdles of grainy footage, mumbled lines, dragged-out developments and semi-boring memes we are willing to endure, or even embrace for the sake of watching something 'real', but they unsurprisingly turn out to be more than most viewers can take when watching a fiction.
Unless you stamp a large 'modern art' sticker on it, this turkey won't fly better than a videogame designed by the Windows Vista Experience Team.

Our perverse curiosity can get no satisfaction here, as we know from the onset we're watching a scripted performance, but neither can we indulge in a cozy ride of crafty entertainment, for half of the skill here goes to make "The Comeback" everything but cookie-cutter entertaining.

In a nutshell, "The Comeback" feels too close to reality to be entertaining or funny, and is not real enough for us to hope for any moment of truth, except maybe flaws in the fabric and cracks at the seams of the showmanship.

"The Comeback" feels very much like a labored jaywalk about the immediate surroundings of the Uncanny Valley.
That it doesn't quite ever makes it there is titillating, irritating, and definitely food for thought.
...enough that I'll ramble about it some more in an upcoming "Monica vs Phoebe" entry.

Linkz:

• "The Comeback", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
  
• "Big Brother", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
• "Survivor", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon
• "The Osbournes", on IMDB, WikiPedia, Amazon

Live museification.

George Clooney googles himself for Esquire, artfully pretends to be a virgin.
Because one really has to make the most of any Georgean Encounter, there is a "behind the scene" feature about the feature about george looking into the webospheric mirror.

I don't know what exactly yet, but it flipped a switch in the back of my mind.

Does that count as a post ?

I couldn't say, really: although I'm vaguely aware electrons aren't among endangered species, the whole stream-of-(un)consciousness trip is something I usually keep for special circumstances — quality rambling time, solo under a hot shower, preferably barely awake, or drunk, or both.

I'm probably not the best judge of what's appropriate when it comes to blogging... let's go for a second opinion on the intarweb.
...and a third.

During my poking around, I stumble on this, which I will probably be wasting some hours on over the next couple days.

Still, the hive mind isn't helping much, and I feel stuck for about as long as it takes to fix a coffee, until I realize I'm sitting at ground zero of the blogosphere, or pretty close, and I oughta take a look around.

So I hit the "Next Blog" button in the navBar a couple times.

• Christensen Family (English)
  
• My Planet ... (Spanish)
  
• Momentos OURO (Spanish)
  
• Tenablog (Spanish)
  
• Cheyenne Autumn Huber (English — cheaters disabled the navbar, I had to spin the wheel manually)
• Football (English)
  
• Liliana (Spanish)
  
• Running the Beards (English)
  
• DE ANTRO EN ANTRO .COM (Spanish)
  
• Blog do Mario Mello (Portugese — Brasil)

At last, I learn something about the blog-geist: at 11 PM GMT on a saturday night, half of the most recently updated blogs here are spanish speaking.

Moving on.

Apparently a header can't be taken seriously these days if it doesn't sprawl halfway down a 17" screen...

I've been fiddling around with the 'pad layout, in order to make it a tad less awkward, and finally took advantage of a nice 3-column template from SuckMyLolly.com, thanks to it being released by Sharnee under a CC Attrib License.

As you can see from the demo blog, this is a very nice layout, but it's sort of a waste at resolutions larger than 1024*x, since the main central column is static in width (a common issue with most blogger templates I've seen so far), so I quick'n'dirtied my way around that, switched the theme to trog mode, and finally got rid of the classic photo banner that forces you to scroll just to get a good view of the last post and sidebars.

Speaking of screen real estate... the tiny composing window of Blogger is annoying as hell, so I guess I will have to find a third party-editing tool, since the (otherwise peachy) Resizeable Textarea FF add-on doesn't work on Blogger's WYSIWYG editor.
Any clues/hints welcome about that.

Anyhow, not only is the 'pad much less of an eye sore than a couple hours back, but I believe I also crossed all the required boxes on the checklist of a typical blog entry:

• Blogging about blogging: check
• Linking to other blogs: check
• Ranting about my frustration/struggle with the medium: check
• Pointing to a few authoritative/semi-useful resources: check
• Not getting anything done while I muse about stuff to do: check

Hey, this thing is easy as pie — and I guess it counts as a Post™, after all...