Work in Progress

Hi All.

This your Glorious Leader Speaking. I missed yesterday's post. And that deserves an explanation. I was struck by a cyclist several weeks back and fractured the cartilage in my ribs. As such, I've been relying on post I had logged as back up till this point.

I am still stuck reclining, as sitting in front of a computer causes my back to seize up. So I am limited to what work I can do from my phone. As you see here.

I am trying to work on the first official book release for the Blood Red Dreaming Project. But due to the injury and my ongoing issues with anxiety and depression, I am having to pick my battles.

As such, these blog posts will likely be limited to progress reports while I heal.

Thank you everyone for you understanding.

Thursday Theory: Frankl and Depression

So in our week long discussion of depression, named the oil mask in the Shadowlands, we are now going to talk about the ideas of Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl wrote the book: "Man's Search for Meaning" as an introduction to his theory of logotherapy, developed as a result of the author's experiences in Aushwitz during World War 2. The basic idea behind logotherapy is that one should find/choose/create a purpose for one's life, and immersively imagine and work towards that outcome. The purpose must be one about which the person feels positively.

And isn't this the underlying mechanism of religion? And also political ideologies. And also people whose vocation began as a beloved pasttime: such a concert musician or a professional actor. This may be why the poor are more religious than the middle class, as the meaning providing by religion could serve as inoculation against depression.

This is, of course, the reason for GLORIOUS LEADER'S GRAND MASTER PLAN!

We need purpose. And if the available purpose giving systems are not sufficient to give you meaningful purpose, as it isn't for your Glorious Leader, then do not despair; because GLORIOUS LEADER'S GRAND MASTER PLAN provides both a complete system to give purpose and also a series of templates by which a individual can devise their own system of meaning and purpose.

I am, of course, not finished.

But I will not stop. I will do this until they nail my coffin shut. Because, this IS my purpose.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Talk Tuesday on a Wednesday

This week we're talking depression, and the startling connection between depression and civilization. Yesterday (note that I intended to post this on Tuesday) we talked about why our jobs make us depressed. Today I want to talk about current events.

How could current events be contributing  to a person's depression or anxiety? The doomsday clock is once again at its closest ever position to the zero at 2 minutes to midnight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

Nuclear Armageddon is once again being seriously discussed the media. The damage caused by climate change is climbing even as the deniers keep trying to stone wall all hopes at change.

There have been five major wars in past year with more than ten thousand deaths in thepast year each. There have been fourteen conflicts with at least a thousand casualties in the past year. And a further twenty three conflicts with at least one hundred casualties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts

Now most of us probably can't name those conflicts, at least not all of them. But I bet those numbers didn't surprise most of you. We are aware of the state of world, and I suspect that this weighs upon our psyche.

Environmental damage and degradation is becoming horrifying common place and even unremarkable on the evening news. And yet estimates place the total number of environmental refugees at between ten million and twenty five million. As deforestation and changing rainfall patterns cause droughts and famines, old settlement locations cease to be habitable. And then people are pressed into action.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_migrant

Now obviously, these things will cause stress to those directly impacted. But even if you affected directly, you can't escape the impact entirely. We live in an age of constant information overload, an outrage economy fueled by the twenty four hour news cycle and the might of the internet. And so the strife and struggle of a thousand miles away is still sitting in our living rooms and back of mind.

Open tasks are stressors on the mind, like open tabs on a browser window. And things which feel like threats, but which we cannot address, will sit like psychic tumors in our brains. Open tabs with malicious software sitting in the back of our browser window.

And so, where once our awareness extended to our village and perhaps to a larger tribe and clan affiliation, now it extends to the ends of the earth and encompasses celebrities, world leaders, and workers halfway round the world. We carry the psychic weight of the world upon our shoulders. When I was born there were four and a half billion people and that number is seven and a half billion. The human mind evolved to hold the connections to roughly one hundred people. That does seem a bit of a mismatch.

No wonder we're depressed.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Memo Monday: Working Depressed

Why are so many civilized humans depressed?

Oh, so many reasons.

Today I want to discuss one such possible reason. Imagine that you work for a living,   that you must sell your labor to survive. A difficult thing to imagine I know.

Now imagine also that in your job you are utterly replaceable. Imagine that they would not stumble in the slightest if you were to leave. I know, I know, preposterous.

Now imagine that in your day to day on the job that you are constantly measured against standards designed to minimize what you are to be paid. And imagine that your routine on the job includes regularly scheduled harangues and brow beating called called coaching and performance reviews. Bizarre to imagine, yes, but let's continue.

And now imagine that at the end of each day you leave your job with no evidence that you've made any impact. Imagine that that every day on the job is a day on a metaphorical hamster wheel.

In such a hypothetical situation, your job would generate no meaning and no satisfaction in a job well done, no significance and no sense of achievement. That's not a life conducive to a positive mind set.

Imagine this was your life. Yes, I know this a huge stretch (have you caught the bloody sarcasm yet?) But stick with me here. If this was your life, would you want to get up every day?

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Follow Up Fridays: Dark Souls wants you to try, even though there's no point

Still working my way through video games which provoked some introspection on my part. This week: Dark Souls. 

No, I've never finished Dark Souls. I stopped where a lot of players stopped, Ornstein and Smough. I came bloody close to beating them on the first attempt and then didn't come close ever again. I realized that I wasn't interested in putting in the amount of time necessary to get good enough to beat them or play long enough to get lucky. But I was struck by the nihilism of the basic plot.

The Lords of a previous age have used the fire of their souls to kindle and "age of fire", but fire is fading. The player, playing a potential chosen one, can sacrifice themselves to rekindle the flame- or snuff the flame and usher in an age of darkness. We are told that the age of darkness is the age of man, by less than trustworthy sources. And the question as to which choice is the correct one is a question not easily resolved.

Or is it?

Because the fire will always fade. The age of darkness is inevitable. Even if the player succeeds and rekindles the flame, the success is temporary. Eventually the flame will go out. Darkness will eventually fall.

Dark Souls has no win condition. The point is to persevere, but eventually- darkness prevails.

Theory Thursday: A Sword at Your Throat

The fear of the right wing conspiracy theorists is typically the confiscation of firearms. And let's be honest, this is not an unreasonable fear.

Restriction on who could bear arms is one of the oldest restrictions placed by a ruler upon a people. The transformation of all people from warriors into citizens, and the restricting of the right to use force to a small dedicated group, is as old as civilization itself. Thorstein Veblen notes that the Warrior and Priest are the seed from which the nobility is formed.

And that's no accident. If they have a sword at your throat, and you don't even have a sword- well you do the math. This is the root of the Locust King, this is where the Hungry Empire gets its hooks in. The Hungry Empire needs workers, and workers don't get much in return. A worker who can defend himself will not put up with what the Empire has in mind. A worker will fight back or runaway.

And of course, this is the modern challenge.

The challenge in modern overpopulated civilized society in policing an armed populace is monumental, and thus the fear of everyone being armed is quite understandable. This is not up for debate. But neither is this, if you cannot defend yourself- you are helpless before those who can inflict violence upon you. This is true even if they are technically the very people assigned to keep you safe. Square that circle.

If you can.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Blood Red Wednesdays: First Hero

First Hero

There are four Key Figures (five really) in story of the Flight from the Glass City: The First Mother, The Kudavbin King, the Dreamwalker (actually two figures: the Dreamer and the Walker- but not really), and First Hero.

First Hero, the counterpart, companion and lover to First Mother is the most dangerous of the four. The Dreamwalker is an incarnation of the storyteller, and devoted to the story and the telling- and thus reliable. First Mother is the provider and nurturer of the tribe and devoted the tribe, and thus reliable. The Kudavbin King, the runaway prince who has abandoned the Hungry Empire is devoted to history sister (First Mother) and to the otherthrow of his father (The Locust King) and thus mostly reliable. But First Hero, First Hero is devoted to great deeds and daring do and the challenge of it all. And thus, the First Hero is not terribly reliable- or even very predictable in a useful sense.

Look at incarnations of First Hero: the Monkey King and Cu Chulainn and Heracles and Achilles and Atalanta and Mwindo and... yeah, not a group of people generally known for knowing when to quit or how to play well with others. A true and proper hero will barrel through impossible odds, and typically not listen if the odds he's barrelling through are in support of his allies. He's not malicious, but he is easily bored, and easily distracted and easily confused.

easily the most powerful weapon of the Free Peoples, it falls to First Mother and other level headed Archetypes in the story to keep the vast but easily diverted power of First Hero aimed towards the HUngry Empire and the Locust King.

Good luck with that, by the way.

Talk Tuesday: Climate Change and things we don't want to Know

So here's a thought. Climate Change is no longer something that is going to happen. It is now well into being established history. Industries from construction to shipping to insurance to agriculture are all having to adjust their practises to accommodate the new realities of a world where climate change is happening and nobody is doing anything to stop it.

And yet we still talk like the consequences are in the future. Miami in particular and Florida in general is already having to deal with an increasingly floody day to day. The Northwest passage is ice free for much of the year, a previously unthinkable phenomenon. Rainfall patterns are shifting, changing growing seasons and adjusting what land is and is not arable, and having a terrifying effect on forest fire season. And of course there are the tropical storms.

No single one event can can be called climate change, and this is what the deniers cling to.

But what about the rest of us?

Even a majority of Americans (63%), Internet famous as the world's climate denier believe that climate change is a threat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_opinion_by_country

So if we aren't doing remotely enough, and we aren't. What should an individual do if they want to survive and or thrive in the changing world?

http://www.climatehotmap.org

Find out the likely impacts on your area and plan accordingly. If nothing is going to change on a large scale until its too late, then the big winners in a post climate change world will be the people who acted like Noah, and not the ones who acted like Chicken Little.

Don't tell people that the sky is falling (not like I'm doing) most won't listen. Or, if you must, only tell enough that you find a few people willing to work with you. After all, you'll need manpower for what I am recommending.

But seriously, don't play chicken little and warn people, build your ark instead.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Dear Employers (We don't want your gamification)

Dear Employers,

We don't want your gamification. Points and badges and Leaderboards don't make something fun on their own. Competitions don't motivate without an underlying reason.

What you ask most of us to do is monotonous grinding grunt work- even if we sit at a desk. And a grind wihout a goal, a mission of greatness, will just grind a person down.

And so it doesn't matter what kind of surface level gamifications you try to incorporate into your sad little skinner box motivational scheme. It might work short term, but not long term. We need a mission, an compelling goal- and your return on investment doesn't count, neither does your golden parachute.

Points and Badges and Leaderboards are their to help us through the troughs, the low points where motivation is hard to sustain on our epic quests though life. They are not their to trick or compel us to devote our lives to the service of a false god and a false king for false profit benefiting somebody else.

So try them. They might work for a few months, you might get your bonus. But then its back to the grind for all of us.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Follow Up Fridays: Far Cry 4 thinks there are no Heroes

I've been using Follow up Fridays to look at video games that pushed my thoughts in interesting ways. Last week I spoke about Far Cry 3. This week, I want to talk about its follow up: Far Cry 4.


Where Far Cry 3 wanted to deconstruct the video game and how it conflates violence and heroism. Far Cry 4 wants to talk about violence and solving problems. In  Far Cry 4 you play Ajay Ghale: an expatriate from a fictional war torn nation of Kyrat in the Himalayas. The nation is ruled by a Triad Mob boss turned dictator who backed a royalist faction and then betrayed them. The nation is locked in a civil war between the Dictator's forces and rebels, who are themselves divided between a reformist faction bent on modernizing the nation and traditionalist faction bent on bringing back the monarchy and traditional state religion. One faction mirrors the Maoist rebels of Nepal, the other mirrors the people of occupied Tibet.

The game starts with a pretty clean dichotomy between the good rebels and the bad Dictator: one Pagan Min. But things break down as Ajay finds himself (as son of the rebellions founders) acting as kingmaker and swing vote for the two leaders of the rebellion. Regardless who Ajay supports, the decisions to be made will be flawed and rarely will a clean cut good answer present itself. As the endgame approaches, the player will (or at least I did) start to get a sense of inevitability, and the increasing sense that this isn't going to turn out well. Every character you have fought beside ends up compromised in some way. And every villain you fought against is given a sympathetic perspective to unbalance the easy (previously held) view of them as a villain. An early example will serve, Paul Harmon is pagan Min's chief spy and torture technician. In the very tutorial level of the game, he tortures the man who helped you get into the country while talking idly about self help books. The game teases you with his devotion to his daughter, but despite how ubiquitous his daughter's letter our in his strong hold and how much Harmon talks about his daughter, its doesn't really strike home until you capture him. After you capture Harmon, he has a bag stuffed on his head and he is led away, implicitly to be tortured for information- so much for good guys and bad guys. And this is happening, his phone begins to ring and he recognizes the ring tone as meaning his daughter is calling. The player will have seen him stop mid torture to take his daughter's call at least twice previously. But here, unable to answer the call, Harmon begins to panic. He begs Ajay to help him answer the phone. He starts frantically telling the phone that "Daddy's coming!"

I didn't like Paul Harmon, but that scene gave me pause. This is repeated for Pagan's other lieutenant Noor, who has an even more sympathetic back story, but who has arguably done more damage to Kyrat through he blood sports in Shanath Arena, soaking the local culture in a glorified and sanctified violence. Even Pagan's right hand woman Yuma, is shown adrift and lost after losing faith in Pagan, a man she indicated she would have previously followed anywhere. And Pagan himself is nothing but polite to Ajay, and offers every chance for reconciliation. The player even has several chances to let Pagan live. The game has multiple spots that could be considered an ending, and none of them resolve anything, instead creating a new normal that is arguably just as bad as the old normal.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Or to quote a game that tried to make the same impression and failed, "War. Ware never changes."

There is no win state for the player or for Ajay. The game doesn't kill Ajay for his choices, or threaten to delete his save fail as the previous game did. Instead, Far Cry 4 would rather force you to live with yourself and the consequences of the choices you made. Side with the reformist faction? They've lost so many troops that they need to start conscripting children. Side with the traditionalists, and the institute a purge of reformist faction and institute a child as a puppet theocratic head of state. Kill Pagan? He never find out the secret your mother sent you back to Kyrat to discover. Let Pagan live? A violent psychopathic murderer is free to do as he likes. The game even gives you the chance to free the rebel leader you don't side with (and the chance to find and kill them later if you change your mind) with no impact on the outcome for Kyrat. Once you see how far the faction you have backed will go, you have a chance to kill the leader of the faction which you did back, with no impact on the outcome for Kyrat.

War is hell, and everyone suffers. And there are no heroes. Welcome Home.

Theory Thursdays: We Own the Rain and We Own You

Because I am a Cult Leader, and a False Prophet, a Conspiracy Nut and wearer of tinfoil underwear, I follow Prepper news sites. And the prepper sites are tremendously concerned about laws regarding the saving of rainwater.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx

As the above link demonstrates, a number of American States restrict Rainwater Collection. This is done for various reasons which could be debated. I have no intention of doing this. I have no interest in this debate. Such consideration may be necessary for large governmental organizations claiming ownership (implicitly) of a citizenship, and thus feeling obligated to manage conditions within the land to which they lay claim.

I'm not looking at this from the point of view of a bureaucracy managing a resource to be shared between hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens. And while I'm not telling you to break any local laws, I am stopping to wonder at laws which make self-sufficiency difficulty and/or impossible to achieve legally.

What message is being sent here?

We will take care of you. You are our responsibility. We know better.

And implicitly also this: we own you.

Going back to the Second Song of the Song of Seven: Be Free, and we see that the requirement to take you life into your own hands and the requirement to defend one's ability to walk away anticipate the the verses of the Third Song. The second verse of the Third Song is especially relevant here. Learn to be self-sufficient.

Because if you can't do that, then you are at the mercy of those who can do that for you. Every parent has discovered those power shifts, when a child obtains a driver's license or gets a part time job that provides spending money. Suddenly the child no longer has to rely upon things which previously only the parent could provide. And this shifts results in a loss of raw power for the parent. If the relationship is not one built upon respect, the parent may not like the sudden change that accompanies the increased abilities and freedom which their children has obtained. The parent can, of course, pass new rules as long as they remain the child's legal guardian. They may ground the child, or forbid the purchase of anything over a certain price tag. And so may governmental organizations forbid things which a self-sufficient individual is able to do.

But once one is able, then compliance is a choice. For the would be tyrant or abusive parent it is far easier to prevent the child or the citizen from becoming able in the first place.

Become able.

The alternative is to remain a child forever.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Blood Red Wednesdays: Waypoint Shrines and Watchtowers

Psychonauts who begin to explore the Shadowlands will quickly find that beginning their incursions only at the Landing Zones of a Realm will limit their ability to get far in a single incursion. The Psychonauts of old made deals with inhabitants and Others- mostly the Fair Folk. These deals resulted in the creation of the Waypoint Shrines and the Watchtowers.

The Waypoints act as fast travel locations. Once a Psychonaut reaches a Waypoint and synchronizes their Avatar to the Waypoint, they may begin any Incursion at that Waypoint. Waypoints can be either  'Safe' or 'Live'. Psychonauts can liberate a Waypoint during an incursion, but that Waypoint may fall again in the interim based on events in both the Shadowlands and the Bonelands.

The Watchtowers are themselves Waypoint shrines, but also unlock the Waypoint shrines around them. Unless a Psychonaut has synced their Avatar to the associated Watchtower, they may not sync to any of the Waypoint Shrines that the Watchtower protects. The requirements for syncing to a Waypoint Shrine or a Watchtower will vary from shrine to shrine and from tower to tower. But as a basic heuristic, the deeper a Psychonaut ventures into the Major Realms, the more involved the process of synchronization will be.

But for the Psychonaut wishes to do more than splash around in the shallows, this is a necessary task.

Talk Tuesday: NASA thinks we're Doomed, and I'm wondering what took them

So I found this. And I wanted to speak about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

So NASA has funded a study that has concluded that civilization is headed for collapse. Their logic mirrors much of what was argued by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse. And much of this is, again, old news to readers of the late Social Critic and Author Daniel Quinn. And even before that, much of this was spotted and articulated in 'The Population Bomb' by Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich predicted mass starvation well before the beginning of he twenty first century. And as you can imagine, this cause people to discount his arguments, much as Thomas Malthus was ignored before him.

But.

But here's the thing, the logic is still correct. We can't predict new resource discoveries (I'm thinking of the discovery of oil in the North Sea as an easy example). And it's really hard to anticipate the technologies of the future of their impacts (I'm thinking here of chemical fertilizers and pesticides). But basic laws of physics and biology don't change.

Depletion of non-renewable resources is a one way street. That's what non-renewable means. If we our food production and population levels causes damage to the ecosystem in which we reside (it is), then that damage will reduce the carrying capacity of the area. If we reduce the carrying capacity of the area, but bring more people into the area (we are, that's literally what urbanization is); then we can only maintain that population by importing resources from outside the area. If we import resources from outside urban areas to maintain an urban population (we are), then we will reduce the carrying capacity of those regions and damage those ecosystems as well. If a civilization depends upon this system of urbanization and expanding resource depletion (we are), then that civilization will need to continue expanding to survive- whether by trade or by expansion or by conquest. If a civilization is continuously expanding (we are), and if that civilization exists in a finite environment (like say one little planet); then eventually there will be no place or method to expand. If a civilization that survives through continued expansion reaches a point where it can no longer expand....

boom.

It happened to the Romans. It happened to the Mayans. It happened on Easter Island. It happened again and again throughout history on a smaller scale as local empires and nations competed against each other for dominance. But eventually the collapse will not be local.

New technologies may push back the date of said collapse again, as it has done in the past.

New Discoveries may buy us more time.

But there is only so much planet.

And we are running out.

Of planet.

Think about this for a moment. We once thought of the planet and the oceans as functionally limitless. But they aren't. And every now and then throughout history we noticed, and then disregarded what we noticed. Dodo goes extinct? Passenger Pigeons go extinct? Not a big deal. Oil crisis as the world hit peak crude oil discovery? Brief panic and then back to happy motoring. DDT causing mass decline in bird populations? Some nations pass local laws and then move on. Hole in the ozone layer? Minor course correction and then forgotten. Northwest Passage is ice free for the first time in recorded history? Start fighting over control of shipping lanes and oil drilling rights.

So yeah, the clock is still ticking. We can buy more time on the clock. But it's still ticking.

So yeah, Civilization is doomed. Better enjoy it while you can.

And maybe use your time well.

If you're lucky, you'll be like Thomas Malthus and not live to see things fall.

But.

But, maybe you won't be lucky.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Dear Employers (We know how to do our Jobs)

Dear Employers,

We know how to do our jobs. Not to the level of fanaticism that you would like, but we know how to do our jobs well enough to get by. You aren't worth more effort than that, not for what you pay us, not considering the demands you make on our time and our dignity.

There are three times when pick up the pace; when you're watching, during performance review, and nope... actually I think that's about it. You can have our calls monitored, but somebody has to go and review the recording. You can put video cameras in the store, but somebody has to go and review the recording. You can monitor our web browsing, but somebody has to go and review the records. So you see the problem, and its your problem not ours.

You have already promoted the Type A people and the psychopaths into management. The rest of use are just trying to get through the day. And nothing you can do will permanently transform us into a type A psychopath like you hope. If you can't build your business on exploiting the effort that we are willing to do, then you will fail. McDonald's made a business work when run by stone fifteen year olds. Yes, stoned. One of my closest friends from high school sold marijuana right out the back of the door and he made assistant manager. It took years for him to be caught and fired.

Dear Employers, if it takes you years to catch a sixteen year old kid selling marijuana out of your back door, how likely are you to keep the rest of us off the internet chat rooms?

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Follow Up Fridays: Why Far Cry thinks you're a Horrible Human Being

I talked earlier about how Sid Meier messed with my head with the mechanics of Civilization 2. Now I want to talk about a game where the story and its interaction with the mechanics is designed to mess with player's assumptions.

And that game is Far Cry 3.

Far Cry 3 tried to do a lot of things, all through the lens of vicious satire. And like the movies: Starship Troopers and Robocop (the original), a lot of people missed the joke. Most of it seemed really obvious to me. But one thing I noticed thst did catch me off guard was a repeating motif, the assertion that conquerors go mad. They devour each other. They devour themselves.

The main arc of the story missions shows Jason Brody and his transformation from dumb dudebro uncomfortable with violence into a psychopath for violence is the easiest path to a solution. Presented as a stinging critique of how video games depict violence, the game mirror Jason and his path through multiple other characters: agent Willis Huntley, the mercenary known as Buck, the undercover operative Sam, Dr. Earnhardt, and of course Vaas. All of them mirror some dark aspect of Jason and his journey. And the only ones who survive are the ones who realize that the battle isn't worth fighting. Vaas in particular is Jason's dark opposite, lieutenant to Hoyt as Jason becomes to Citra, losing his way to the path of violence, going mad and being unable to see i; Vaas and Jason reflect each other to a startling degree. But the key revelation to the game, and the one that generated much outrage amongst gamers, was the fact that Jason kills Vaas at only the halfway point in the game. They felt as though Vaas should have been the final boss and didn't understand why the game kept going after that.

And that was the point. After killing Vaas, Jason's friends get the boat they had found working. Jason has (as far as he knows) rescused all of his surviving friends and family. His friends safe, an escape route found, the man who killed his brother before his eyes dead; Jason could leave here and the ending would work. The fact that jason refuses to leave, is the point. Even agent Willis Huntley cuts and leaves here (and thus survives to apepar in the sequel). Jason is missing the point, he is crossing over from hero into monster. Up to this point, Jason and the player can justify what they do as heroic. But not any longer. From here on out, they are in it for the violence. Just to drive the point home, the game gives Jason back his litttle brother- thought dead- and in order to maintain his cover, Jason tortures his brother. And thus in the ending, when Jason must choose between his friends and family and the life of violence he has grown to love, the game explicitly threatens to delete his save files if the player chooses Jason's friends. And if you give in, Jason will be murdered by Citra to maintain her position, just as he murdered his way up the food chain.

And then, just to drive the point home- the player (and Jason) are dumped back on the island to engage in more violent play, as if to say: "Isn't this what you wanted?"

Theory Thursday: Spending Your Attention of Something Better than This Article

Yes, I'm a little late on this one, I know. Humor me. But I stumbled across this article and wanted to talk about how it how it relates back my GRAND MASTER PLAN!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-shutting-down-1.4645324

So Cambridge Analytica is closing its does. Cambridge Analytica is the organization behind Facebook's most recent privacy fiasco (as of the time of the this writing, which is no guarantee that their planned Dating App won't have generated something new by the time this is published). The smug voice of legion that is the Internet has given itself muscle strain patting itself on the back as it points out the obvious about a free service supported by ads. Which is that if you aren't paying for the service, then you are probably the product being sold and the customer.

But despite our pop culture collective intelligence being very aware of the fact that Facebook was selling us and not selling to us, a great many people seemed entirely unaware of this fact.

The Mendasa Freepath uses the Song of Seven as its core guide for behavior. The Third Song of the Song of Seven: Be Adult, has as its first verse the command to think critically. This is sometimes articulated with the admonishment to speak out.

Now, back to Facebook and the surprise some people have at how Facebook treats its users. The pop culture mind collective knew that Facebook was selling us to advertisers, and knew that Facebook in no way valued those non-paying customers over the paying (real) customers: the advertisers. The the group mind knew this from more than a few clues. There are plenty of techniques which one can use to assess the logic of an argument, or the value of a deal, or the trustworthiness of a person (or tech company) offering a deal that's too good to be true.

But before you can use any of that, critical thinking of any sort requires a sacrifice be made before it works. You must make a sacrifice of attention, you must devote you attention to a task before you can think critically about it. Paying attention is critical to any thinking worth doing. The explanation of why Facebook put its advertisers ahead of its non-paying users isn't hard to explain, the advertisers pay and the non-paying customers don't pay. Most people who were surprised by the lack of respect they received from Facebook, wouldn't have been surprised had they directed their own attention at the workings of Facebook's business model on their own. They would have realized very quickly that they were the product being sold and not the customer. But first, they would have had to direct their attention.

Attention is a finite resource. The willpower required to think in a concerted way is a finite resource. Decision fatigue is a real thing. So what you choose to direct your attention towards is a decision to spend some of your resources. And what you choose to think about is another decision to spend some of your resources. And this is to say nothing about the time required to do the thinking and to direct the attention. So we all have to pick and choose, prioritize, those things upon which we will spend our attention and our willpower.

The Critical Thinking skills which are baked into the Mendasa Freepath are quite varied: the three questions, the five levels of certain, the first question, the basic tools of the scientific method, and a learneable collection of logical fallacies (among others). But it all begins with directing attention towards a topic.

Your attention is a psychic spotlight, and your mind can only see (and thus think about) what's in the spotlight.

Blood Red Wednesday: The Ward of Mitchuas

The Ward of Mitchuas

(The Son of Ash- The Church District) 
Called the Ashen One

Mitchuas was a spirit of fire and an apprentice of the Great Serpent before being elevated to God and his fire extinguished upon the altar of the Hungry Empire. In his role as the Son of Ash, Mitchuas is the purveyor of the sacrament, which enforces loyalty in the populace and enforcing a parasitic existence upon those who partake in the sacrament.

The Ward of Mitchuas is a tall and austere neighbourhood, punctuated by an excess of stained glass and devotional artwork. The wood and steel and and stone is all painted a dull grey and only the iconography of the churches break up the monotony of the whole thing. There are three districts within the Ward, The Hood District, the Alms Bowl District, and the High Hat District. The Hood District is home to the Office of the Order of Inquisition and Confession. Also in the Hood District is the Statue of Mitchuas the Sage. The Alms Bowl District is the Office of the Monastic Order and to their Public Kitchen. Also in the Alms Bowl District a visitor would find the Statue of Mitchuas the Shepherd. Last is the High Hat District, home to the High Church Headquarters and the Statue of Mitchuas the Speaker.

• The Hood District (The Inquisition and Confession Office District)
• Statue of Mitchuas The Sage
• The Alms Bowl District (The Monastic Order and Pubic Kitchen District) 
• Statue of Mitchuas The Shepherd
• The High Hat District (The High Church District) 
• The Statue of Mitchuas The Speaker 

Talk Tuesday: I Seem To Be Obsessing over Shawshank Redepmtion

"Get busy living... or get busy dyin'." - Shawshank Redemption

Would you believe that I have not watched the Shawshank Redemption recently? I haven't. It's true. I just stumbled on some TVTropes articles that linked back to Shawshank's article and found that the story seemed to resonate.

But, back to the quote. I've mentioned previously, that whatever we do with our every day, that is what we have chosen to die for. What you do, is who you choose to be. Who you think of yourself as in your head means nothing, what you put done in the pages of life by your actions is who you are. And most of us are not writing stories that we would want to read, to say nothing of anyone else.

And, yes, the Hungry Empire wouldn't function if we all lived that way and nobody waited tables and worked in factories and stocked shelves. And yes, civilization wouldn't function is nobody sold crap and swept up and manned the assembly lines. And I know that I am writing this on a computer that wouldn't be feasible without those things. But are those things worth living a life you would not choose to relive if given the chance?

Seriously, this is a question you must ask yourself. Is this life, the one you caffinate and medicate your way through, worth the price you pay to get it? Are these toys and technologies worth the price you pay in the life that you keep deferring?

So yes, you need to get busy living. And you need to examine the life you are in fact choosing to live. Because every life you choose, causes all possible other lives you might have lived to die. You only get to choose one life (assuming the Buddhists and the Hindus aren't on to something), so choose one that you can look back and say- yes, that was worth dying to achieve.

Otherwise, you aren't busy living. You are busy dying for somebody else's life.

And hey...

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Dear Employers (We Won't Go Your Extra Mile)

Dear Employers,

Why would I go the extra mile at work? Seriously. What valid reason could you give me besides threat of termination? Because its good for the company?

You've designed me and the position I fill to be Lego blocks of interchangeability. I'm infinitely replaceable. A monkey could do my job given the proper training.

McDonald's taught us that a fifteen year old high on any number of recreational substances could replace us at any time. Ford taught us that robots could replace us at any time. Amazon taught us that computers could replace us at any time.

And even though I know you're about to use that as an attempt to threaten me, I'm sorry, to encourage me. It doesn't work. This is a John Henry situation. I only win that race if I'm willing to die for your cause, and work myself to the bone to try and stay ahead of automation and systematization. And no, I can't do that. It's not sustainable for me to try. I won't do that. It doesn't benefit me, only you and your bottom line.

Here's the bottom line. I do what I'm paid to do and made to do. But beware of what you try to make me do.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Follow Up Fridays: The Action Movie Scavenger Challenge

So This Friday I'm going to post a Self-imposed Challenge for Far Cry 3 and 4. I was inspired by people like this fellow.

https://simonkjones.com/making-far-cry-3-better-with-self-imposed-limitations/

I call my challenge the Efficient Opportunist Challenge: or the opportunist for short. The premise is to make the game much closer to A) An Action Movie, and B) what it would actually feel like in that situation... as much as one can given the brilliant lunacy of the Far Cry games from 3 onward.


The Efficient Opportunist Challenge (Far Cry 3 and 4)

• No Fast Travel
• Regular Travel Only
• No weapon upgrades or weapon purchases
• Scavenged Weapons only.
• Only do Story Missions, no level grinding
• No purchasing Maps from Shops
• No purchasing med kits or armor
• Bases, towers and collectibles can be obtained if they show on the mini map only
• Only skill tree as occurs naturally

Optional

• No purchasing Ammunition 
• Remove all HUD Displays
• Bases, towers and Collectibles may thus only be obtained if on route and visible on screen.

Theory Thursdays: How to Talke your Life into your own Hands

Here's a Question: if we are all serfs and implicitly bonded to the land, how do we take our lives into our own hands as instructed by the first part of the Second Song of the Song of Seven.

Well. I'm going to suggest we look to the example set by one fictional gentleman by the name of Andy Dufresne, in the movie Shawshank Redemption.

Andy is convicted of a crime he insists he didn't commit. He is deprived of freedom and sent to a prison that one might charitably call a hell hole. He is very effectively deprived of all relevant freedom. How then, does he take his life into his own hands?

He does it little by little. One small decision at a time. One little victory and then another. He fights back against the inmates trying to abuse him. And then he bargains with the guards like an equal, and squeezes a little more control of his own life out of them.

"Sir, do you trust your wife?"

He risks death to obtain a little more life. Little step by little step. All of them scary, all of them hard, none of them big until the very very end.

And that first taste of true freedom, when your life really is in your own hands completely, that is the last step on a heroes journey most people will never dare make. Its safe being a slave. Being a warrior is hard.

But take a step. Just one. Take a step.

And then take another.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Blood Red Wednesdays: The Ward of Gildguld

Mirrored City: The Ward of Gildguld

(God of Tax Collectors- The Merchant District)

Called the Lifestealer, Gildguld was a mountain spirit, a giant of the deep inner earth. Mined from the earth by the Hungry Empire and forged into coins; Gildguld was thus sacrificed and elevated to the status of Dead God of Tax Collectors. In his new role as enslaved deity of coin and taxation, Gildguld diverts the populace to look at his false wealth and false prosperity and then demands a share of their labors back to fuel the Hungry Empire.

The Ward of Gildguld is divided into three Districts: the Cudgel District, the Abacus District, and the Flag District. The Cudgel District is the location of the Home Office for the Tax Enforcement Division of Imperial Tax Collectors, and also the site of the statue of Gildguld The Patrician. The Abacus District is the location of the Home Office of the Tax Assessment Division of the Imperial Tax Collectors and the site of the statue of Gildguld The Provider. And the Flag District is the location of the Propaganda Assessment Office, which operates under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Tax Collectors, and the Flag District is also the site of the statue of Gildguld The Patriot. 

The Ward is orderly, though dusty and cluttered with paper litter. Ghost folk who inhabit the Ward tend to wear middle class clothing worn until threads are smooth and and holes are worn in knees and toes. The dominant colors of the Cudgel District are the black and white of cracked and peeling paint and the dusty brown of dry rot timber and aging leather. In the Abacus District the dominant colors are the dusty beige and faded yellow of paper records, piled high and then sorted and then forgotten until useful as blackmail. The Flag District stands in stark contrast to the other two Districts of the Ward, sporting gold and crimson against black and white. The Flags and patriotic posters that seem to spread across the Mirrored City begin here in the Flag district and extends outwards like a blast radius. There is a garishness to the color though. The gold is flaking paint and certainly not real gold. The red is uneven, as the cheap pigments used require frequent touch ups that are not always done as frequently as would be necessary to avoid fading.

The Men of Black and White patrol here, of course, but the Imperial Tax Collectors (staffed by the nobility) are the real power here- big fish in their little pond. Being noticed here is rarely a good thing, There is always time for a tax reassessment.

Talk Tuesday: Fallen Empires

Korean Peace? Let's assume that this is possible for the moment. From what I've read, the prime driver on North Korean coming to the table is the damage they've done to their own country through their nuclear testing.

Which is suggestive of something very scary.

Let's compare. The British Empire wasn't interesting in granting colonies freedom until their empire began to disintegrate on its own. The Soviet Union didn't loosen its Iron grip until that grip was rusting.

Empire doesn't negotiate until its dying.

And given the damage the Hungry Empire is currently doing to the biosphere, that may be a very scary prospect to consider.

And we, as individuals, are complicit in this. Of course, Empire does its level best to make complicity seem like the only possible course of action. But it isn't.

There are other paths. They are hidden. They are hard to find. But they are there.

Find them.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Memo Monday: Screw Your Metrics

Dear Employers,

No, your metrics do not all align neat and tidy. I cannot put customer service first and make listening a priority and also reduce the time spent interacting with each customer.

The measures you are choosing to use as benchmarks require me to prioritize. I have to figure out which ones you actually value, and which ones you merely need to be seen pretending to value. And I know that you can't acknowledge this, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and all that. But I know. I suspect you know that I know.

And so we do this pantomine. We dance through a ridiculous musical number, where everyone knows the score. And since your lying to me and I'm lying to you. And you're lying about not knowing we're both lying and so am I, how likely do you think I am to believe in the company's mission?

You can't tell me to sell more, increase the number of prospects I talk to on a daily basis, but also treat each customer like they are something special.

I'm sorry, I'm not a psychopath, I can't lie that easily. I know psychopathy is a really useful trait for managers, but- surprise surprise- rank and file employee tend not to be psychopaths. makes sense, less than ten percent of the population scores highly on the psychopathy test.

You just tend to end up either in jail or in three piece corporate business suits. The rest of us struggle against the impossibility of meeting mutually contradictory metrics.

One metric you don't seem to track, long term psychological damage done to employees. Maybe get back to us once you've taken the time to measure that one. Or is that simply a cost you're happy to externalize?

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Follow Up Fridays: Try Something New

So it's Friday. And the populist politics of dying empires continues unabated. Leaders say stupid things to appeal to stupid supporters. The progress made during the prosperous years is squandered.

And the clock ticks down.

But that's pretty dire. And this is Friday. So I thought I'd ignore the problem a little and take the time to recommend some odd little things.

Try Playing Minecraft in a Box
https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/20/3255795/minecraft-experiment-limited-resources-war

Try Living without Toilet Paper
https://www.newlifeonahomestead.com/a-week-without-toilet-paper/

Try playing Civilization 2 for a couple thousand years
https://kotaku.com/civilizations-crazy-ten-year-game-is-still-going-1442744506

Try avoiding all products produced with Sweatshop labor
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/the-myth-of-the-ethical-shopper/

Try Playing Skyrim as a Pacifist Illusionist
https://www.pcgamer.com/an-illusionist-in-skyrim-part-3-run-and-bear-it/

Try the No Complaint Challenge
https://www.thecut.com/2014/08/i-went-7-days-without-complaining.html

Try Beating the Legend of Zelda (NES) with no sword
https://youtu.be/k2uYjIqE6Ao

Try avoiding all Movie Spoilers
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/18/avoiding-star-wars-spoilers-turned-me-into-a-paranoid-lunatic-but-it-was-worth-it/#462ac0845d17

Try to find the other Ending in Far Cry 4
https://kotaku.com/can-you-find-far-cry-4s-other-secret-ending-1662915762

Try a better class of Prosthetic limb
https://www.ilm.com/hatsrabbits/ilmxlab-teams-with-open-bionics-to-create-disney-inspired-bionic-hands-for-amputee-kids/

Try some Self-imposed Challenges for Don't Starve
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=348766699

Try to Hunt the Mothman
https://www.outsideonline.com/1914946/monster-hunt-legend-mothman

Try the Six Day Challenge in Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
https://archive.org/details/MajorasMask_6DC

Get ready to try NaNoWriMo (National Novel Wrtiing Month)
http://www.nanowrimo.org

Try Defeating Yiazmat in Final Fantasy 12
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Yiazmat_(Final_Fantasy_XII)

Theory Thursday: Walking Away and How You Know

One of the Lines of the Second Verse of the Song of Seven is this: Walk Away. Protect your ability to walk away.

Daniel Quinn notes in Ishmael that animals in captivity will frequently lapse into a lethargy that he refers to as a rejection of life. In the movies: Congo and Instinct, this same phenomenon is noted and discussed. But in Instinct, the idea is applied to humans. Specifically humans in a prison, but there are implications- Star Trek parable style implications.

Is the mental illness we see, so common in modern first world cultures, simply a variation on the despair experienced by all animals placed in captivity?

Is this what happens when a thinking being runs into the walls of its cage and can't break them down? Is this what happens when we can't walk away?

Psychologists discovered years ago that a dog shocked randomly, with no method of alleviating the shocks, will eventually fall to learned helplessness. Is there a connection? Is our inability to walk away comparable to the dog's inability to make the pain stop?

Is this what happens when we convince ourselves that there is no way out?

You tell me.

Or better yet, find a way out.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Blood Red Wednesdays: The Hollow Heart and Darkness

As the Psychonaut steps into the ring, They are bathed in the lights from the spiraling galaxies that hang impossibly overhead. In the Foglands, a perpetual blood red twilight washes over the face of any visiting Pasychonauts. In the perpetual night of the Mirrored city arcing currents of electricity and neon reflect off the smog and smoke that threaten to drown the city and any unwary Psychonauts. In Arcadia, sun and moon and firelight alone will light the Psychonaut's face. In the Painted Labyrinth, phosphorescent fungi climb the walls and bioluminescent creatures flit through air and stagnant pools of water, casting eerie light by which a Psychonaut may navigate the dangerous tunnels.

But in the Hollow Heart, there is no light.

Dark as the human mind from which the Shadowlands is birthed and in which it the Shadowlands grow. Dark, but not still. The Hollow Heart does thrum with what can only be called a heartbeat. The sense that the Psychonaut receives upon arriving in the Hollow Heart, is that one has been swallowed by some great creature. When Jonah was swallowed by the whale or "greate fyshe," the sense he received would have been similar. And perhaps Jonah had found a way into the Hollow Heart under its other common name: the Hidden Heart.

The Hollow Heart is also the Hard drive of the Shadowlands. The Shadowlands is procedurally generated like an unfolding fractal flower from the stories encoded into the fractal mirrored rooms of the Hollow Heart. A Psychonaut who manages to make the arduous and maliciously concealed journey to the Hidden Heart will find themselves with the entirety of the Shadowlands at their fingertips. The Universe of Stories would be theirs to control and reshape, if they can master the manner in which the Hollow Heart encodes and projects its store of tales out into the world. And, while a Psychonaut who unlocks the secrets of the Hollow Heart can reshape the Shadowlands, the stories and the archetypes which underpin the universe and which are its basis are not changeable from Hollow Heart.

And it is rumored among the veteran Psychonauts that the Hollow Heart is actually the top most layer of a vast underground network of minor realms. But what these are, a Psychonaut will have to discover elsewhere.

• Mirrored Here: https://bloodreddreaming.blogspot.com/2018/05/hollow-heart-and-darkness.html

The Repo Man and You

I've been browsing TV Tropes. I do this a lot. And in browsing through a couple of tropes. I noted something disturbing.


The Sympathetic Sentient Weapon, is a term that could be used to describe a surprising amount of modern jobs. Think about the Meter Maid and the Repo Man. These are regular people just doing jobs so that they can pay for their own right to live in this mad world. But to do so, they must inflict pain upon others.

Now, if you are still buying into the theology of modern civilization, you might think that those people brought these things upon themselves. But the game of civilization is designed to be lost. The game of civilization doesn't function unless it offers up a certain amount of its population as a sacrifice to power the success of those at the top.

And that psychology buy in that you may still cling to matches another trope.
  The restraining bolt. Unlike the sexy and tragic plot devices of science fiction, however, our restraining bolts are psychological and financial dependence upon a system that is damaging in a very real and tangible way.

We've been writing about ourselves in code to ourselves because we couldn't bear to say it out loud. Our masters wouldn't like it. But here we are, a bunch of slaves punishing each other because we don't know how to get out. The big discovery of the modern world has been to hide the mechanisms of this system better than previous generations.

"The greatest trick the devil every pulled, was convincing the world that he didn't exist."

The Usual Suspects

Yeah progress.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Dear Employeers (We are not your Robots)

Dear Employers,

Although it may surprise you, I am a human. I sleep. I eat. I get tired. I become emotionally drained. I get confused. I get overwhelmed. I have rhythms based upon the frailties of my biology. I become bored or distracted. I become disengaged (to use your dehumanizing buzzwords). I become disillusioned.

And although veiled threats and intimidation disguised as cheerleading may keep me and my coworkers moving, it doesn't work in the long run.

You fought against giving us a reasonable number of days off. You fought against coffee breaks and reasonable length for workdays. You fought against every improvement to my daily life in the workplace tooth and nail. And we remember. You still regularly break unions. You keep the lion's share of all the profits. You lie to us constantly, and sell us up the river- building your golden parachutes from our daily bread.

And we know it. And we are human. And this doesn't make us happy and engaged. And no amount of propaganda or elementary school sport game competitive shenanigans will distract us for any great length of time.

And maybe you don't care. Maybe we really are just human resources that you are willing to use up and replace. And maybe you think there are no consequences to treating us this way.

And maybe you're right. Maybe.

The Tsars of Russia were pretty sure they were right as well.

Just a thought.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Friday and why Sid Meier ruined my Childhood

So it's Friday. And the populist politics of dying empires continues unabated. Leaders say stupid things to appeal to stupid supporters. The progress made during the prosperous years is squandered.

And the clock ticks down.

But that's pretty dire. And this is Friday. So I thought I'd ignore the problem a little and take the time to recommend some video games that deconstruct our smug first world civilized delusions. Or more accurately the first game to mess with my head (probably not, but let's go with that).

Civilization 2

Civilization 2 was the first game to truly mess with my head in an immediate way. I noticed what they did while playing. Other games I may have played earlier (told you), the effect of Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 3 (as it was called on the SNES), were things that burrowed in my brain and only become clear after reflection years later. Civilization 2 taught me something uncomfortable about civilization and population growth. It taught a lesson about food supply and the limits of growth that was jarring. Also, unlike every other on this list, Civilization 2 taught through game mechanics and not through story.

Cities in the game will only grow in size if they produce excess food. Once the city has filled its food stores, the population will increase by one unit and deplete the food stores. Cities can only directly generate resources, including food, within a set radius around the city. Once a city is drawing resources from all available space within the radius a city must begin importing resources to continue growing. This necessitates new cities in less developed regions, but limits the growth of those cities by sending their resources away. There is an upper limit on this model, and the endgame occurs in 2020 just as most players will reach that limit. In trying to maximize my results I learned this system well enough that i knew our space program and the Good ending it provided were my only way to avoid stagnation or a war of genocide against my digital neighbours.

And then something occurred to me. Mines and oil well don't deplete in Civilization 2. But of course they do in the real world. You can't exhaust the land you farm in Civilization 2. But of course you can in the real world, the dust bowl and desertification worldwide make that clear. My vast digital empire was a carefully tuned system. If I were able to exhaust resources in game, my empire would face disastrous consequences.

And my brain suddenly had a thought.

2 + 2 = oh crap...

And there you go. Moving on.

Why adults lie to their children and why you will do the same

You are not 100% in charge of your life. You will fall victim to emotions and hormones, to circumstance and power imbalance. And no decision you ever make will be 100% within your control. When you account for all the variables of over which you have no control, your own intent is probably less than 20% of the relevant input.

A huge portion of life is largely beyond your control. Wayne Gretzky's father built his son an ice rink in their backyard. Bill Gates' mother got him into one of the few schools at the time with access to networked computers. External circumstances give huge head starts, or weigh you down like nothing else.

Do people overcome negative circumstances every day? Of course they do. But keep in mind, that even them overcoming negative circumstances is hugely dependent upon other outside circumstances.

So when parents and adults tell children that they can grow up to be whatever they want, the adult is obviously lying. But it's a necessary lie. Life is something of a lottery, unfortunately. But you only win the lottery, if you buy a ticket.

You cannot do whatever you want. You cannot be whoever you want. But if you don't act like you can, you will never achieve what you want. Much of your success is determined by circumstances beyond your control, and the one piece you can control is not as important as you think. But if you don't take control of that one thing, nothing else matters.

Buy the ticket.

Because if you don't buy the ticket, you end end up being human resources that somebody else will use to achieve their goal.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

The monkey, the organ grinder, and your self-esteem

Why do we live in the look-at-me era? Why are we all shouting from the rooftops? Why are we all trying, as Andy Warhol noted, to get our 15 minutes of fame?

Alton Brown noted that following the success of Iron Chef America, he saw an influx of people going into cooking to be famous. The droves of people going in to audition to Britain's Got Talent with no talent, willing to humiliate themselves for  the chance to appear on television for less than a minute is well known. Rick Falkvinge has talked at length about how much of the privacy rights our grandparents fought for we are willing to sacrifice for a little fame. Even the Disney animated feature Hercules talks about the danger of mistaking fame for self-worth.

Is it possible, despite the crush of population, that we're all screamingly lonely? Are we seeking validation?

We spend 12 years being tested against all of our peers and told how well we do or don't measure up. We didn't see our parents for most of the day. And the surrogate parents were constantly demanding that we perform on cue to see if we're worth appreciating.

Maybe we're seven billion lonely Souls. Raised to believe will never be good enough.

Even our coming of age ceremony, as we walk across the stage with the cap and the gown and the little fake scroll, is filled with implicit and explicit commentary on how we're not yet good enough. What college are you going to? What scholarships have you earned? 

Dance monkey! Dance!

Time to knock over the organ grinder.

Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

You lack conviction

What is your mission? What is your purpose? You must have a life Path. You must have a reason beyond sex, drugs and daily bread to get up in morning.

I don't mean crap like career or pay check. I don't mean platitudes like friends and family. Of course you love your family! I'm not talking about the day to day.

What would you die for? No. Wrong question. What would you sell the remaining days of your life to accomplish? Because there's a good chance that isn't what you are doing with your days.

Whatever you are spending your days on, that is literally what you have chosen to die for. And if you think that's your family and not your day job, well that's okay. You're allowed to lie to yourself. We all do it.

Or.

Or instead, ask yourself who has tricked you and trapped you, chained you up with a white or blue collar and pay check just substantial enough to make walking away difficult. No shame in admitting this has occurred. It happens to nearly all of us. I am still trying to fight my way free. There is no shame in being caught, only in allowing yourself to remain caught without a struggle.

What would you sell the remaining days of your life to accomplish? You need to know this! Stare into the darkness of your soul. Don't settle for culturally appropriate answers. Don't settle for platitudes. Find your mission! In less than a century, in all likelihood, you will be dead. You will then be nothing more than the impact you have made.

Do you really want that impact to be on the quarterly bonuses of some CEO? Or the vague platitudes given in some heartfelt eulogy straining to make your life sound interesting?

The world is overflowing with people, seven billion bipedal parasites. And we are quite literally killing the life support system of the planet. If you want to be worthy of a proper eulogy, then you better do more than be a vaguely pleasant person and let life kick you around. If you want to be worth the air you breathe, and the resources you consume, then you need to have an impact other than improving the rate at which corporations are consuming the planet.

A century from now, the people still alive will look back upon our generation and wonder what we were thinking. Be one of the noted exceptions. Do something. Stand for something.

You're going to die for something. Do you want it to be for Donald Trump's pocketbook?

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Dear Employers (Hit your own Targets)

Your target goals are meaningless to us. We know that a business needs to make a profit. But your business is a sausage, by which I mean that we have no idea what's gone into it. Huge bonuses to the CEO? That's just part of the payroll budget, and actually means we AREN'T making a profit. That means you feel justified raising targets on the next performance review so we don't get our bonuses down here on the sales floor.

Making a profit is a tricky business of smoke and mirrors accounting. Need to show a profit to shareholders? Do the math one way. Need to show a loss to the tax inspectors? Do the math another way?  And you don't even have to break the law. The only group you cheat is your employees.

We know how much the CEO and other executives make compared to the rest of us. And speaking for myself. I've watched how fast one can swap CEOs in and out. I've worked under three CEOs in less than ten years. That doesn't seem to justify the payroll disparity to me. But maybe I'm bitter.

So. Just to confirm, CEOs have no problem giving themselves credit for any successes, but still giving themselves golden parachutes when the roof of the company falls in. But we don't get a bonus, one that the CEO wouldn't bother to pick up if it were lying on the road, because we didn't match some arbitrary measurement next quarter, just before we've figured out what we need to do to reach those targets.

So no. You performance targets don't impress us. They are capricious and deceptive and you can use them as a rectal thermometer.

Friday Finale: New Friday Thing

I am working to provide updates five days a week. And in the effort to avoid burn out, I have decided to use Friday as a synopsis of what I've been noticing and working on through the week.

Minions, cultists, acolytes and fanatics on my Patreon will get early access to my private Archive Notes. To be honest, as per my open source and free access mandate, these will be made available to all at the end of each Mendasa Luni-solar year. But until then, if you want access to the newest entries in the Harbinger Archives, you will need to be a patron. I need to find some way to strike a balance between open source and giving benefits to patrons. So there you go. Now back to the lies!

Things I've found and liked this Week

• I downloaded and listened to the Buddhist Catechism from Librivox. the book dates itself quite frequently. But as I wasn't reading it as a Buddhist, but as a student of religion and culture, I found it quite interesting. 
• I also tried downloading the Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, but found the audio and narration quality not manageable, and sadly abandoned it. 
• I've been listening to Tim Ferriss' Podcast again. Specifically his interviews with Terry Crews and Kevin Kelly. The Terry Crews interview is worth a listen from the power of Terry's honesty alone. I found The Kevin Kelly interview very interesting, as Kevin is a very smart guy who is thinking about similar subjects to myself and coming to very different (and more optimistic) conclusions. And anything that challenges your own ideas is useful. 
• A nice little article about Lewis Dartnell and his book The Knowledge. This book is already in the recommended reading, so there you go.
• Ryan Holiday writes on the danger that having a strong routine can also make you brittle to shocks and how to address it.
• A listicle (I know, I'm sorry) about Ancient books of Magick that promised supernatural powers
• We now live in a post truth era if this video is anything to go by. 
• The Tropical Fruit Tree Americans Forgot, because being a warrior means providing for yourself. So there are going to be some gardening links now and then!

A Diatribe Against the Alt-Right and the Dangers of Predictions

I meant to write an entirely different post this morning. But I've been unifying all my disparate web presences here and uploading old back ups of other blogs to this blog. And in the process, I found a piece I wrote that feels eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of the Alt-Right and Ascendancy of President Trump and Trump's America.

I called the Post:

The Souls of White Folk?

. . .

And yes, the title was intentionally provocative. In the post, I point out that the legacy of White Europeans throughout the world is not good, to put it lightly. We have colonized and murdered, conquered and raped our way across the globe. I could easily line up a list of indictments and do so in the post itself.

If you are interested in properly educating yourself, I recommend some research into:

• The Congo Free State (The Belgium Congo)
• The Trail of Tears (United States of America)
• The Residential School System (Canada)
• The Lost Generation (Australia)
• The Amritsar Massacre (British India)
• The Middle Passage (The Atlantic Slave Trade)

And obviously this is just a sampling. Back to the original post however, because in the post I argue: " ...if the white folk don't find their soul and reclaim a collective identity that is positive- the world won't survive for much longer."

In the intervening years I have seen a strong case made for cultural identity on a smaller scale, taking pride in things such as Italian or Swedish cultural heritage, rather than white heritage.  This makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, given how diverse the cultures of Europe are, and thus, how diverse the cultural heritage of European descended white Americans would be. However, in the post I was primarily referring to ongoing damage caused to the planet ecologically.

But what is interesting (and not in a good way) is how the rise of the Alt-Right and Trump's America so clearly serves as a rejection of what I was arguing. The Alt-Right and the self-proclaimed deplorables are refusing to re-frame their cultural identities into something forward looking and positive. Rather than address the legacy as Germany did following World War 2 and the Nuremberg Trials, the Alt-Right are taking a stance of denial and pride in their monstrous past and nasty cultural heritage. They are doubling down, and fighting back against the progress made.

So I have to admit, looking back to April of 2010, I was right for the wrong reasons, and things are so much worse than I expected when I wrote those words.

All us Children

The Dreamwalker is the two who are one, connected mystically to man of void and Lady Of Fire. The Dreamwalker represents the first of the three pillars of the free path. The pillar of critical thinking. It is they who first noticed something wrong amongst the heroes who flee from the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness.

First Mother. The daughter of the last king. Sister to the could have been King. The little mother who fled the Glass Tower during the final days of darkness. Who founded the first tribe. Who learned the ways of self-sufficiency from the Weaver, and woe the scavenger folk back into the circle, into the web of the story.

First hero. The stranger, the outsider, the outcast who joins the tribe and proves a True Believer. First hero is the fire in the drive, powered by the great Patron the Great Serpent. First hero is the Mythic embodiment of self-defense.

The free path is supported at its Center by three pillars colon critical thinking, self-sufficiency, self defense as personified and embodied by these mythic figures.

These skills are what gives us the freedom to walk away abd act of our own volition.

Speak out, start Fires, fight back.

If you can't think for yourself, someone is willing to think for you. And they will do so to their benefit.

If you can't provide for yourself, you are a slave to the person who can provide for you. You will work for your daily bread forever.

If you can't defend yourself; then whatever you gain, somebody else can take from you. If you can't defend yourself, then you are a victim, forever.

Without critical thinking, the dreamwalker is just two lost souls toiling as wage slaves in the city. Without self-sufficiency first mother is just a little princess trapped as a sacrifice to the hungry Empire. Without self-defense first hero is just an outcast scavenger and a victim of fate and predators.

Without these skills, none of us are adults and all of us are children.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Service Update: Importing Old Blogs

I'm afraid that there is nothing fancy in terms of content to be added on this post. I may post again later today, schedule permitting.

This post is to note that I am in the process of mirroring content for other blogs on this blog for unity and continuity purposes. My writing has been spread across the internet. I'd like to unify the body of my work, and so I've spent this morning importing content.

I have marked some of the content as reprints already, however, this is not a finished process. Likewise, there may be dead links on a number of the imported posts. I'm going to continue to work at unifying this.

But for the moment, I'm just advising of the process as it currently stands.

Are you Free? All us Inmates

I will tell you the story of the Man of Void and of the Lady of Fire.

Long ago in the future.... In the last days of the Empire an attempt was made by men and women of science to escape the constraints of Planet Earth and limits of the biosphere. If it did not fail, then the result might have been Man of Void and Lady of Fire.

Man of Void is a mythic representation of the ultimate test of freedom; the ability to walk away, to travel freely.

Lady of Fire is a mythic representation of the ultimate path to freedom; the decision to take responsibility for ones own life, to be "a light unto yourself" (to steal from Krishnamurti) and to act by your own volition.

Imagine two men. They step into a ring and begin to throw punches. If they do this voluntarily, then we would call it a boxing match. But if they do not do it voluntarily, if they are unable to choose whether they start or stop, because of outside compulsion by others, then we would consider it torture.

Imagine a small child, the mother says to the child, "Would you like to clean your room or clean the playroom?" The child does not realize, that by engaging with their mother's question they have given up their freedom. Few of us would consider this malicious, because it is the job of a mother to teach and manage the child until they are able to make such decisions for themselves. But once we are no longer children, this process should cease. But what happens when we are given such false choices by Kings and Prime Ministers and Presidents? Are we not still children being given false choices?

The restriction of volition and mobility is domestication writ large. We have made pets of ourselves. And of course pets and animals kept in zoos live longer than those in the wild. With humans, it took some 2,000 years before this was true. We have packed humans into such sardine dense cities that the transmittable diseases are appalling. Only the advent of modern medicine leveled the playing field, allowing the civilized human to live longer than their wild counterpart. But what good is a long life if you hate it? And yet, we fear the end of life- even the end of a life of torment. Even with the rise of suicide as a feature of modern culture, most of us fear death more than a life we have to medicate ourselves (whether by alcohol or tobacco or marijuana or actual anti-depressants) to endure.

And so our Kings and Emperors use that fear of death in order to extract our submission, to push us into the field and factory and make us work for their benefit. It is this fear to take ownership of our life that is used against us to restrict our volition and our ability to move freely.

The good person may now object that we have an obligation, a duty, to do our share. But this isn't true. A duty or obligation springs from an voluntary agreement. We have twisted this in the modern usage, trying to pretend that duties can be inescapable. What is this but slavery? To be a duty, to be an obligation in contractual sense of the word, both parties must have entered the agreement of their own free will. To say that because one was born within these borders, in a world made of nothing but borders, that one is then obligated to participate as a member of this group; this is still merely slavery disguised. To abstain must remain a genuine option in order for participation to be in any way free.

I can hear the protests now. The land would be filled with freeloaders! Nothing would get done! Then I ask a question. If the work ordered by the Empire is so odious that no free person would do it, why should it be protected? If, for three million years humans were able to find enough people to do what must be done, what have we done so wrong in the last ten thousand? Why, for three million years was the voluntary participation of free peoples enough, and in the last ten thousand years only the forced participation by slaves would suffice?

And why also does the slave defend the slave master? Has the master so completely and effectively removed the slaves ability to stand alone that the slave cannot imagine life without the master? If the master is gone, who will whip me and make me work? Are these the questions we are reduced to asking, as we pretend that we are free men and free women? Perhaps we need better questions.


Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
Join my Cult.

Are you Indigenous? All us Colonists

If you are reading this, and I assume you are, then you are interested in the Free Path- sometimes called Mendasa (But ignore that for the moment). The Free Path is built upon the Song of Seven, and the First Song begins with an admonishment to be indigenous.

What does it mean to be indigenous? According to the dictionary definition we like (And thus actually use), being indigenous means to belong to the land in which one lives. But what does mean.

Well, a digression.

All humans are Africans.the evidence is in. If you want to argue go elsewhere. Our DNA, the fossils if our ancestors, the trails of tools and artifacts, and other mountains of archaeological and anthropological evidence that tells us our lineage. We are all African.

And so if you are human and live anywhere but Africa, then you are a colonist. So what does it mean to be a colonist? Honestly, not much more than an awareness of the fact that we're all immigrants or the children of immigrants. But there is another recently emerging factor that tends to immigrate with us.

People tend not to think of the first humans coming out of Africa as colonists or settlers. This applies to the Sami of Finland, and the Franks of France, and the Ainu of Northern Japan, and the Tribes of North America. Why is a Frenchman in Africa a colonist? Why is a Lakota Sioux not a colonist?

Obviously part of the equation is whether the area already had human inhabitants. But we call many a people indigenous who colonized lands already inhabited.

But, leaving our digression, part of the equation is how we live once we settle somewhere. Do we live like that land belongs to us?

Or.

Do we live like we belong to the land?

Do we live like the land is a resource from  which we may extract what like, or do we live like the land is a collaborator with whom we are in a long term working relationship? The first song is an exhortation to be indigenous, and this is mirrored by verse 4.4 of the song: Live for the Unborn Elders. By which is meant that one should live so that ones actions do not harm the livelihood of any of the next seven generations of descendents.

So again, to be indigenous is live as though you belong rather than living as though it belongs to you.

How does one do this? Well obviously, one must live lightly and live in a way that gives back to the land. The Mendasa Story Canon gives us another useful metric. The most mysterious of the Elders of the Shadowlands (which is saying something when you consider that the Elders include the Great Serpent and the Weaver and Mystery), is the Whisperer: the voice of the land and air and sea. Stop and be still, and listen. If one pays attention you will hear a small voice speaking to- giving you the path in a whisper.

It is the Whisperer who gives the discontent that drives the Kudavbin King to give up his Empire like Siddartha or Moses. It is the Whisperer who inspires the Dreamwalker to tell their stories and inspire change like Martin Luther or Paul of Tarsus. It is the Whisperer that connects First Mother back to the Weaver's web and to her story. And here I have no examples within the stories of the Hungry Empire; because while the Empire can assimilate the stories of the Dreamwalker and the Kudavbin King, redirect their attempts at freedom back to the Grey Path, but First Mother is never assimilated. Instead, if caught by the Empire, First Mother is sacrificed. And she is sacrificed because, while the Dreamwalker points to the path of the indigenous person, and the Kudavbin King tears open a path which will lead to the indigenous life, First Mother teaches and walks the path of the indigenous life. And this cannot be tolerated.

But the Hungry Empire has blind spots. And this message seeks to live in such blind spots, and to whisper to those who wish to hear, teaching them how to belong.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.

Crabs in a Pot and Freedom in a Garden

This post is inspired by the Time Ferris interview of Terry Crews, found here (which I listened to during on my morning run). Tim Ferris describes in his book: The Four Hour Workweek, his argument that we should seek to decouple to what we do every day with how we earn a living. He recommends seeking to generate multiple streams of passive income. He recommends working on a source of income until it will self generate and then stepping away to do something else (maybe another source of income).

In the interview, Terry describes what he terms 'negotiating with terrorists', giving an example of a time he allowed a football coach to call him Tyrone (rather than Terry) so as not to risk his football scholarship by challenging the man with the power to take away that scholarship. Terry talks about having to do these kinds of negotiations again and again, from negotiating with his abusive father to negotiating with gang members and drug dealers on the streets of Fling Michigan and dealing with egos in Hollywood.

This kind of power imbalance is something I think anyone in the first world middle class with find familiar. The kind of petty bullying and power struggles we hoped would end with graduation, but continued into performance reviews and managerial coaching sessions as failed authors and actors and musicians and athletes and entrepreneurs take out their bitterness on the people they now manage at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and they various cubicle farms where they has brown nosed their way up the ladder enough to abuse power by 'managing' those below them on the org chart.

We are slaves to the people who have power to take away our livelihood. Freedom is all about power and negotiation with the one who has the power to harm us.

In his book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond describes the strategy used by many tribal gardening peoples whereby they tend multiple gardens in different climates and ecosystems as a defense against blight or bug or bad weather. In the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books, author Robert Kiyosaki returns again and again to his definition of asset and liability. Kiyosaki like to say that "assets will feed you, liabilities will eat you".  When the weather goes bad, a garden will fail. A bad frost could end your livelihood. If you have only one garden or work in your master's garden, a bad harvest could kill you. Not relying on any one garden is freedom. Having your own gardens is freedom.

Your safety (and mine as I don't do this full time yet) is almost certainly dependent upon your master. A truly free person retains the ability to walk away. A truly free person is responsible for their own life and carries their life in their own hands. How did we get to the point where the term, "taking your life into your hands" is a cautionary saying? How many slave owners had to convince us of how many lies before being in control of our own lives become thought of as a liability? Get a good job with good benefits? how did find a good master to become a slave to become accepted advice to give to young people?

And having a garden or two is not enough. Jared Diamond notes that tribal peoples general had an average of seven gardens (seven is important, you'll see that number a lot here). To switch metaphors to video games such as the Legend of Zelda, multiple gardens are like the health meter or the heart containers in a video game system. They represent your ability to take hits and keep going. The ability to provide for yourself is integral to your person power, to your ability to walk away from a bad situation, to turn down a bad deal, to take a hit and keep going towards a goal.

But more important than having gardens, is having the ability to plant gardens, to make your own livelihood and remake it as needed. This is why the Canadian government worked so "to kill the Indian in the child[.]" when they instituted the Residential School system. This is why kings typically bond serfs to the land and why slave owners don't want slaves learning how to read. If you can make your own livelihood, then escape is possible. 

You need the ability to plant your own garden. 

Anything less and you're a slave.

Most of us are.

And most of us feel threatened when other slaves reach for freedom. People remember failures in the short term and success in the long term. People hide from freedom out of fear of failure. People are afraid of their freedom. Who taught us thus? I think you know by now. 

Terry crews talks about the tear down effect, the crabpot mentality of Flint Michigan which I saw described in Romeo must Die. Slaves fear the success of other slaves. They fear their own freedom. They fear having nobody else to blame for their failure. And so they don't work, because then they'd have to blame themselves for their failures. But it doesn't matter if you beat other people. 

Winning is not competition, not if your win condition is freedom. 

To be untouchable, because you can survive any outside shock and create your own heart containers - that is success. 

That is freedom.