character sabotage dream

Last night I had a dream in which I sabotaged my character in a school sponsored creative competition between students in the gifted program. Like I would gently tap a red felt tip marker on a student's painting they submitted. I think I did some other things too, that interfered with fairness or letting people's full potential shine. And I got nasty looks from one of the teachers that caught me. And eventually they were done giving me the benefit of the doubt that it was just nervous habits or whatever, and as they were coming over to escort me out I saw myself out. And walked home, on thin, mediocre-quality sidewalks by busy streets, in hot summer heat. I found my water bottle behind a telephone pole, picked it up, and moved along. That was the end of the dream, as far as I can recall.

This dream seems to come out of my recent feeling that I'm moving along too hastily without really knowing what I'm doing.

I ran over a stop sign yesterday (there's more details, but I'll spare you them). In the seconds that preceded and for the duration of most of the evening that followed, my experience of the world, largely of sight, that I noticed, changed. Colors were less colorful but most things were brighter, almost washed out, and contrast was more obvious to me.

I thought I'd stop making decisions -- drive myself home after everything, but after that, only travel as a passenger. Good choice, mistakes coming from a place of unease and haste happen in groups. Mistakes still happened, but not car-related.

I ended the night leaving a party, having made a poorly-related joke (-1) in poor taste (-2), that wasn't received well (-x, but subjectively -a lot), and walked half a mile in the hot downtown city evening to catch a bus. That wasn't a bad physical experience, but I wasn't in a good mental place.

I'll make no further pontifications on this besides here were some things that happened, in life, and in my mind, and they were clearly related.

thoughts on 人間の魔法

Escapism.

Wanting to be in a completely different scenario.

Hung over, but happy.

Looking forward to tasty food and simple pleasures, naps.

I am being a mirror of grass-is-greener-ism.

When I can eat what I want and just doze off, I feel like I need to do something else, to create a grander picture.

When I try to create a grander picture, I easily lose motivation, and give in to the easiest game to play.

When I am unencumbered by a headache, I want to have a challenge, to have something I say I'm facing down, but to claim such is hogwash and discounting of those who actually have real challenges.

When I have a tiny challenge like "oh hey there's a pile of dishes that still need washing", I delay and make it take all day.

I could cure myself of this, I think. Stop believing everything out there is something I need to pay attention to, because it could be better. But I also still believe in believing in the magic of things outside ourselves. And once you make that leap to realizing there are unknown unknowns outside of ourselves that are worth calling magic, how do you manage the gold fever that may ensue? To realize that seeking it out so consistently doesn't lead to being ready to appreciate it better? To realize that acquiring all the things that "might be magic" and finding all the hiding spots where magic is known to occur doesn't mean that more magic will occur?

In a dungeon-crawling game, the items found get better more or less proportionally to the difficulty of the dungeon level. In seeking out magic of the human world? It's a lot more complex. Sometimes human magic just seems to materialize out of nowhere, but it's so raw and beautiful you want to capture what you can, and repeat what you can. Truly, there is no capturing, though. One has to be a complete neophyte to literally think that. What you have instead, the best case, is a dance or musical piece, where all the participants feel like it's magic, intuit the rhythm, and don't feel like stopping -- or when a pause is needed, it still fits the meter, or works in an out-of-meter way and they can still come in again later.

I don't think I'm very good at some parts of that, I'll try to watch the whole piece, analyze it, and by the time I think I understand something, it's over and done with. I'll try too hard to capture what is essential, or on the other hand, leave it far too open. I'll come in one moment with a storm of words and thoughts brewing, thinking "AHA! This is the way to bring good things to the world, and then to me!", and in another moment "How dare I think I know anything? Best get back into that hiding hole, lest you do some harm."

This isn't very conducive to participating in human-magic.

This blog post is indicative of my approach also, in a meta sort of way, feeling the lack of the ability to participate fully in human-magic, so I analyze it and write a blog post manifesto about it instead of going to try to participate.

Here's my swissness chard.

Thanks for coming to my ted stalk.

enchanted programmer

What is an enchanted programmer?

What is the cost of enchanting a programmer?

What does an enchanted programmer look like and do?

It is a performative art, which also builds something.
It engages customers not so impersonally as the role of "customer" but rather encourages them as a participative audience.
From a business perspective, this level of engagement (on both parties) actually produces a more valuable end product than may be likely achieved with either waterfall or agile approaches.

Enchanted Programming would be my preferred approach, moreover than Pair Programming or Extreme Programming.
"I'm utopian by preference, but I'll settle for perfection." - Mary Prankster

a glimmer of glamour

I've been experiencing, I don't know, a sort of wanderlust, but to go back and do something entirely different in the same timeline. Not exactly dysphoria per se, but perhaps escapism, and euphoria in seeing another potential timeline. I don't want to reject my current timeline, and history, but like someone titubating on the edge of a magic well that shows "what may come to pass" and "what may have been", and seeing such a compelling story and world, I feel the temptation to jump in.

There ought to be a word!

What can I do to jump in, but still retain my current life? We humans (I assume this is mostly a human thing due to my anthropocentricity) can "savor" other stories, read and become engrossed in books, movies, others' spoken stories, theatre, and largely it's a mental thing. You're present in a place, yes, but only entering the other timeline virtually. To jump in, what would that be? Would I only disturb both the water and the illusion, and end up in the same timeline, wet and disappointed, disenchanted as it were? Maybe, so I have a lot more confidence in exploring carefully the virtual environment of the alternate timeline, than in attempting to actually jump in.

I've experienced a sort of grief over the loss of all the other potential universes, which is of course technically silly (how could I live in any more than a single reality), and a form of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but it is also real.

The myths of Narcissus (stuck staring into a reflection, transfixed) and Hermaphroditus (being transformed upon entering a pool) come to mind.

I just want a glimmer of glamour. I'm a little impulsive, but I want to bring that glimmer of glamour to others (I mean, really, that's the point, I will only feel like staring at shiny rocks by myself for so long).

If I can pull off being a dark fairy again, that would be great.
Black ruffled button-up shirt.
Sparkly green or maybe other color of makeup swirl on cheek, stemming from close to eye.
Wings.
Other elements coming together somehow, or at least not getting in the way.

ideation, no reading, this is my book report

I've felt inspired by this vacation, and some of the inspiration-energy I'm experiencing is taking shape in thoughts of what games or "tools" (which tbh amount to games, just with marginally more relevancy to the real world).

ideas

anagram animations - I can totally do this! I'm good at anagrams! Just take a starter word, display it on a page nice and big, and then animate the individual letters (sliding, rolling, etc) into their positions in the new word. Bonus: "strange garnets" (almost-igrams) animations, which are basically anagrams but perhaps one of the letters must be deleted or created in the process.
It wouldn't be super hard to turn this into a game, where the player must guess the anagram or strange garnet, and perhaps it helps them overcome an obstacle in a manner appropriate to the word or phrase formed. For instance, starting with a tall-and-pointy-eared slender humanoid in an orange or black-and-white-stripes jumpsuit blocking your path, and the word "felon", you may type "no elf", and it disappears, unblocking your path. Perhaps more opportunity is opened for less prompting, if instead in that scenario, there were both dwarven and elven convicts, and you could type in the whole phrase -- with enough context clues like back-and-forth banter indicating one group is dwarves and the other elves, and that "[character] wish[es] they weren't there, then I could get through". Another way to solve that puzzle may be "forward, o dwarf!"to get one of the dwarves to take a step (out of the way). Maybe both are required.

lightsaber game; single click is slash, double-click is 360-slash. Audio is Owen Wilson saying wow, long audio is Owen Wilson saying wow, but paulstretched.

Audio time-compression software ideas. De-paulstretch -- take it down to its representative frequencies. But you'd end up with cacophony, right? Perhaps that's fine, given efficient-Big-Brother alternatives, but perhaps...
Choose the best-represented, and least-represented frequency ranges, and play those pairwise (a low range with a high range), segmenting frequency ranges by a given scale (max range width, adjusted for exponential scale) and "tolerance range" (if a set of frequencies is less than x (exponentially scaled) Hz apart, it counts as "in the same range" for purposes of grouping)
Or just capture entire segments that fit a certain amplitude threshold under a given filter (which may usually be specified to look for human voice, cat voice, and/or motor sounds -- may want to run tests to see what filter rules capture what audio, and what thresholds are appropriate)

Finish off the rpi audio greeter project

Finish off the rpi audio hub project

just because they're badlands doesn't mean they have to be bad lands

I forgot how much I love the badlands, their multicolored geological history exposed by retreating glaciers, in oddly shaped mesas, chimneys, and cathedrals. I got an extra special treat today seeing them dusted by a light snow, sticking some places and not others. And a couple of trees with a perfect green-to-yellow gradient across them, the northern side being yellow.

The prairie dogs were so cute, too, barely visible by the naked human eye, even with my pretty decent eyesight, but the camera zoom caught them pretty well.

A sudden change in the weather was slightly unexpected (well, I learned yesterday that it would snow), but uneventful, and it made the badlands (and the areas leading up to them) all that much more beautiful. An unseasonably early, but light, snow accented the hills, trees, grasses, cows, and other geological features in a pleasant way!

Pre-Trip Jitters

I sit here burning my last stick of incense, hesitating before making more progress on the packing and preparation.
I have miles to go before I sleep, or really, not all that much, but I can make it last miles. Squeeze out the marrow of life, they say -- is this not a way to do it?
"I love deadlines -- especially the sounds they make as they go whizzing by" のよう
A cat joins me on my lap and pushes his face into my arm. His nose is cold, as are his ears. He's not going to see us for another week and a half.

You won't either, at least not in person. Maybe that's good, a change of pace, the Bob isn't lurking over every corner, listening intently in case something you say is relevant to him.
Bob isn't going to be there, confusingly not trying to make plans or conversation.
Maybe Bob needs to learn again what it is to be intentional, yet to not overthink. He has a black-and-white thinking problem sometimes, and a thinking-his-voice-and-very-presence-is-too-loud problem. Even though he has plenty of people in his life who affirm to him fairly regularly that his voice is wanted, and in fact it needs to come out more.
Bob has an ileism "problem". Make the first person third, and we can feign aloofness. Not truly needing to distance himself from the subject matter, he does make a joke out of it, but maybe there's a hint of truth in there, too, that he is a little uncomfortable with his level of confidence and intentionality.

I shot myself with my finger-gun today -- my finger-gun which has been run through a series of social experiments, and which has been found to be significantly more threatening than a nerf gun -- after I made a careless "joke" about a genderfluid cat whose name was a portmanteau of a traditionally masc & traditionally fem name. I shut up after that, and made myself small. The joke could have been worse, but it wasn't in any vein I want to continue. Self-correction, self-censorship, self-editing, it does serve a purpose. But maybe I can still learn without "killing" an imaginary lesser version of myself, eh? I don't need to stoop to Delbert Grady levels of "correction". (footnote: The Shining, in case you haven't seen it as many times as I have, and have this scene etched into your mind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMtJo88NCM)

"There is too much of his mother in his writing style," says a callback to Star Wars. Perhaps there is some beauty in it, but it's tinged with anxiety that overspills its bounds and makes it other people's business.

How much of this is real? What we hold in our minds is more real than reality, in some regards. We only experience reality through our filters and sensors. (tangentially related footnote: People Watching - Star Wars episode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhNCvkUK-d4)


What will the next sesqui-week bring? Untethered from work and the familiar things, wanting to return to them initially, I also want to be even more untethered from any plans, and just sit right here and do nothing, intently. But the trip will happen, and there are VERY GOOD people on the other side of the trip, and there are VERY GOOD people going on the trip, and the trip itself should be amazing. Yes, lots of driving, but I mostly don't mind driving, even fairly long distances and hours. We will see a tiny fraction more of this great world than we usually see. We will see natural wonders and we will see things that people decided to put up because they made some sort of sense there, and we will eat good food.
And we will find a glimmer of glamour.