LOVEINT, a piece of surveillance poetry

I dreamt 

last 

night

that I was being 

tracked

followed monitored judged desired by

the best surveillance man in the business

that he could tell I wanted him

even when I looked a picture of normality

that his dark gaze could pierce me

whenever he turn't it toward me

and never often enough.

I dreamt

that everything I did had an audience

that the secret significance of my actions

had someone to appreciate them.

I dreamt 

of chemtrails and HAARP arrays

and distant lovers,

desirous of my scent like the old stasi 

watching me

waiting

aching for an excuse to render me 

extraordinarily

I woke.

Half Lives

Poetry
is just like mining Radium,
said Mayakovsky.
He was right,
in more ways than he imagined.

STFC: Success

OBSESSED WITH INVISIBLE DETAILS
— ▉▊▋▍▎▏ (@n__l) May 1, 2013

I convened a bunch of friends and weirdos together Tuesday night for the inaugural round of SECRET TWITTER FILM CLUB. The result, as you might gather from the title, was an smashing success.

Results can be viewed & perused here.

Words of advice for young people

Last February found me back east for a meeting of the trustees of WPRB, my old college radio station. I had been in communication with the events chair of dear old Terrace F. Club, and was invited to give an installment of their series of Talks with Interesting People Accompanied by Drinks.

Princeton in particular but Ivies in general encourage certain temperaments and behaviors: the theoretical over the practical, the critical over the active, the verbal over the physical. Furthermore, the sort of person who gets in tends to have gotten there by staying on the rails: do what you're told, delay gratification, seek affirmation from success within hierarchical systems. Looking ahead to my five-year college reunion this May, I figured I'd finally write up my reflections.

It's been part of my self-work over the past five years to jump those rails. I didn't know what I was really doing at the beginning, but over time I've pulled together scraps and pieces from various different sources of inspiration, into something that begins to approach an "approach." 

Vintage repost: "The Saurian in Winter"

Digging through my old Facebook notes, I found this. I still enjoy its "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" style opening, and the world it evokes in only a few hundred words. I'm thinking about expanding it into a Twine game. Enjoy.

///////


Autumn comes early on the moon. The automated climate controls, carefully engineered to match the swelter of the late Cretaceous, were nonetheless skewed by the minute fluctuations of orbit that took the moon about an inch further from earth per year. I was welcomed by a robotic servant and taken into the impressive bubbledome parlor, lovingly adorned with retro-futurist décor that screamed 1965. Fitting for the retired supervillain once declared “mightier than all the nations.”


Tyrannus Rex might be considered best as two separate identities (not including the heroic alter-ego from an alternate universe that Rex battled during the Stockholm Incident of 1968); There is the hyperintelligent dinosaur with opposable talons I took tea with in the parlor, and then there is the larger-than-life public figure, the idea of Tyrannus Rex, that stomped on the terra (both figuratively, literally) and commanded the world stage for most of my life. As always, my interlocutor was possessed of the impeccable grace and elocution that comes from kidnapping the great orators of history from various timelines and forcing them to teach you rhetoric, the silvery forked tongue that put presidents and diplomats to shame during his career. 


“But of course, young mammal,” he explained, “Force can lay the world in your jaws, but only eloquence can bid it lie still and accept the inevitable. This fact would have been made crystal clear in 1976 were it not for the intercession of Cimon and the rest of the Cross-Time Athenians. They were glorious in those days, even I their sworn enemy had to admit.” [editor’s note: the Cross-Time Athenians come from a divergent timestream in which an observer from the future was found out in 445 B.C. and forced to yield up his time-traveling equipment to Pericles and the Assembly.] 


Ultimately, however, the former “Lizard-King of Cincinnati” remains phlegmatic about his infamies. The scars that cover his weathered, scaly exterior mark a time long past, before reality television and celebrity culture. Beyond that, the private sector has proven simply more lucrative. By his estimation, Tyrannus Rex now makes more from consulting fees (his unique knowledge of villain psychology has put more than a few of his former colleagues in the League of Nation-Smashers behind bars, or in the case of Amorpho, laser security grids) and corporate speaking engagements (his usual topic is “the will to greatness”) than he ever did as a megalomaniacal threat to global security. 

“It’s the old law, as true in Cicero’s time as ours,” he says with the same sense of resignation I heard during my interview with [Ex-Soviet supergroup] the Red Guards: “Cash rules everything around me…”

Secret Twitter Film Club

Secret twitter film club (STFC) is a game of shared stimulus and strategic ambiguity.

It is inspired by Secret Book Club, a club wherein friends all read the same book at the same time, but are forbidden from discussing it directly. Ideally, one would more easily see how one’s reading bled into their conversation and writing, without direct commentary.

It is a project in the spirit of @Timescanner’s invocation, “Hey everyone, let’s have experiences together,” and a rumination on the cryptic transparency of digital youth, progentitors of the subtweet. Other influences include the great tradition of jokes under communism, campus games of "Assassin," and the secret handshakes of Freemasonry.

Most importantly, Secret Twitter Film Club is secret.

RULES

• You are not to publicly reveal that you are taking part in Secret Twitter Film Club, nor when it is occurring. (STFC CAN HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT. BE ON THE WATCH.)

• You will be sent a message with the name of the film, the time it is to occur, and the other participants. Times will be selected with a bias to North America. (If this seems impossible for you, feel free to start your own game of Secret Twitter Film Club).

• Perhaps obviously, you cannot give the name of the film you are watching, nor its particularly iconic lines/characters. Try and focus on elements and pieces that are of general interest, but have hidden meanings for fellow watchers.

• You cannot publicly reveal who *else* is in on Secret Twitter Film Club. (If you make a list of other players, for god’s sake keep it secret.) Winks, nods, and coded phrasetalk are perfectly okay presuming you do not blow each others’ covers with your sudden thick-as-thieves-ness.

• If one of your followers figures out that you’re playing Secret Twitter Film Club, you are “wounded” and must continue by appending the hashtag #SecTFC to your (hopefully cryptic) tweets. At this stage, the secret is what film it is.

• If one of your followers figures out what film you’re watching, the jig is up, at least for you and the other wounded. You may continue watching the film, though, and feel free to comment using the hashtag #OvTFC (for “overt twitter film club”)

If you want to play Secret Twitter Film Club, send an email to instigation [at] SplendidVagabond {dot} info that includes your twitter handle, interest in the game, and film preferences.

BONUS PARANOID VARIANT: If I get a sufficiently large body of players, I will split them into teams watching different, but thematically linked films. You will only know the players on your team. Extra points will be given to those who root out other teams' players.

Mark Twain's Focus Group

You think that copy-testing and market research started in the 1930s and 40s with the popularization of survey research after Gallup and Roper's triumph in predicting the 1934 election.

YOU'D LIKE TO THINK THAT.

Actually, like all other aspects of modern American life, from long-distance relationships to fantasy stock-picking, it was actually envisioned by Mark Twain:

"Whenever I am about to publish a book, I feel an impatient desire to know what kind of a book it is. Of course I can find this out only by waiting until the critics shall have printed their reviews. I do know, beforehand, what the verdict of the general public will be, because I have a sure and simple method of ascertaining that. Which is this—if you care to know. I always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows:
1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.
2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.
3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.
4. An intensely practical person.
5. A sentimental person.
6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.
7. Hypercritical person—natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.
8. Enthusiast—person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.
9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.
10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.
11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.
12. Person who detests them.
13. Person of evenly-balanced judicial mind.
14. Man who always goes to sleep.

These people accurately represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon—the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude—the man who does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep. If he drops off within fifteen minutes, I burn the book; if he keeps awake three-quarters of an hour, I publish—and I publish with the greatest confidence, too. For the intent of my works is to entertain; and by making this man comfortable on a sofa and timing him, I can tell within a shade or two what degree of success I am going to achieve. His verdict has burned several books for me—five, to be accurate."

For more information, check out Who is Mark Twain?

Dispatch: The All-Worlds Fair

>>\\ BEGIN STELLAR TELEX DISPATCH \\ From the All Worlds Fair February 22nd-23rd, 02013 San Francisco, California, Earth-Prime If you are friends with me on various social networks, you may have seen some odd posts from me in the past month or two related to the sea, or dream analysis. Or you may have puzzled over how I joined Pinterest, particularly since I was collecting photos of submarine interiors, watery dreamscapes, and vintage meridian-crossing ceremonies. Well, it all came to a head last weekend. The All-Worlds Fair was conceived of by gentleman artist, raconteur, and high-concept roustabout Chicken John Rinaldi, a two-night-only event taking the overwhelming wonder of the old World Expos and extending the exhibitor list to all the worlds that could have existed, across all time and space. And what better place to stage it in than the historic Old Mint building? Blessed with a unique combination of steel vaults, exposed brick walls, and grand ballrooms, it was an armature you could build a rich event on. I was a crew member with the Seas of the Subconscious, in which there was nautical derring-do, half-lucid logic, and dream cartography. (More on that later.)

If you ask it...

So, there was the time I wrote a question on Quora, and it blew up the whole internet, getting onto io9 and Boingboing:

It was instant bait for being spread around. All the ingredients were there: a shareable form, an instantly thought-provoking juxtaposition, the combination of military tactics and Disney. But it was a far different matter to see it take off as it did. By now over 60,000 people have viewed the question on Quora. Far more have likely thought about it via another site.

Based on the response, I hereby propose a new RULE OF THE INTERNET:

Rule 77: The more specific and/or absurd a request is, the more likely it is to receive expert assistance.

Gothama: a game of non-attachment

The last weekend of January is quickly becoming a sort of annual holiday for me. It certainly involves sitting around and eating a lot, but that's not the focus. No, dear friends, the last weekend in January is the time of the Global Game Jam.

Sanctioned by the International Game Developers Association, the Game Jam is a mad dash to make a working game (usually, but not always, a video game) in 48 hours. Teams assemble on the spot based on appropriate balances of skills and abilities. Last year, I was sort of the utility infielder (writing, audio, and miscellaneous inspiration) of a team that already had an experienced game designer, but this year I ended up taking on the role. For someone who has read a ton about games, but not actually made many, this was tremendously exciting.

The theme for the year was an image of ourobouros, the snake that eats its tail. To me, it brought up associations of eternal recurrence, death, and rebirth. That brought me to the buddhist notion of Saṃsāra, and the suffering associated with endless fruitless repetitions of the cycles.

Which, in the context of video-gaming, instantly took me to thinking about stupidly-hard games of the NES era.


 These were games that forced the player to memorize complex geometric patterns and punished them for a single infraction. These were games that decided that the best way to increase replayability was to tell players after the final battle that their entire first run of the game was "a trap devised by Satan" and force them to play it over again at an even more difficult level. These were games where your entire motivation for risking virtual life and limb was proving that you were a bad enough dude to rescue the president. They may have had different surface trappings, but ultimately they were games about suffering.


Gothama was thus a loving tribute and a philosophical critique of classic 2D platform gaming. It is at its highest level a stoic/buddhist/vedic-inspired critique of the ‘little pleasures’ of videogaming: the jingle of coins, a satisfying stomp, a well-timed dash and jump. We relish the shot of dopamine we get, the ability to feel greater than ourselves, but to what extent do they lead us to towards the short-term and ephemeral rather than our greatest good? Gothama makes uses of the tropes of the genre to make a point about non-attachment.

What point, you ask? Well, I suppose you'll have to play it to find out.

Click here to download the special edition of Gothama.

A Young Man's Game

"The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.


They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath."

Third Eyes

Apologies for the thin-ish layer of dust. In December I had to manage an artificial ice rink at a christmas village during the holiday season, an activity that demanded all my Christmas cheer (and gave me a greater  appreciation for the Santaland Diaries, incidentally). Since the new year I've started up with a bit of researchy work for Duncan/Channon, an awesome advertising agency based out of the Bay Area. 

One of their clients is Blurb, which helps people design and print their own books. Given that we're in a major period of transition for media, we're all doing a fair bit of reading and thinking about futures for the book.  One thing I've run across lately is the results and findings from Portigal Consulting's Reading Ahead project, which really sets the mind abuzz. As part of that project, they did a One-Hour Design challenge with Core77, which had all kinds of cool results. I particularly liked the Booklight from Kicker Studios, which projects ebook text into a (real) blank book of your choosing:

That's pretty cool, and feeds into the greater trend looking toward ubiquitous projectors as a means of overlaying data onto the real world, of which MIT's Sixth Sense is my current favorite. But that system also involves cameras, which is where we get to the other possibility this picture raised in my head: What if you could put a small camera/projector on a print book you already owned? With the right software, you'd get some of the the added functionality of an ebook (sharing, tagging, copy/paste, analytics and so forth), though obviously none of the portability that comes from e-readers. 

If you took it a step further, what if it compared the text it was looking at with a database (like CDDB or Musicbrainz) to identify what you were reading?  You could easily comment on it socially, sync it with your other devices, and effect all manner of extensions to your reading life, with all the wonderful and regrettable things that means.

There could also be issues if this doodad had the capability (either built in or suitably-hacked) to rip books and spare consumers from the vinyl-to-cd-like pain of paying again for something you already own. All in all though, I like the idea. One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in our rush to adopt new forms of text is that the ol' print codex has a pretty long shelf-life, particularly when printed on acid-free paper. There's an opportunity to be had in unlocking extra functions out of the stuff people already have.

I'm not sure when I started wanting to become a blogger, wear a cape and ride in a hot-air balloon, presumably careening and caroming across the globe in search of adventure and moderately amusing anecdotes. [note:You are not Cory Doctorow; results may vary.] It was probably some time in high school when I started digging into the strange nooks and crannies of internet weirdness. I was happy to find that wow, there were people out there who spent time finding out about interesting things, and then writing about them. It was something I felt like getting into, but didn't really have time for.
What actually got me started was admission into the fantastic Princeton-in-Asia program, where they had a special optional workshop during orientation on "Blogging," which was partly useful but mostly encouraging. They wanted us to reflect on our rather unusual circumstances, which in my case is teaching English in Cambodia for a year at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

I came to the conclusion that my PIA blog ought to focus on my experiences of travel, teaching, and cultural ridiculousness, and keep to a minimum speculation on what Theodor Adorno might have thought of Guitar Hero (which is probably going to be one of my first big posts here.) Now, my volume is probably going to be rather low over the next year or so, as I will be travelling to areas with lackluster internet, as a statement of interest and purpose, here are some things that interest me:

• Strange and awesome historical oddities
• Collections of Curiosities, in both the early modern and postmodern style.
  
• Cold War/High Modern social inquiry (up to and including atomic war planning) and design (gotta love that Bakelite!)
• Speculation about coming social trends, as well as antiquated visions of the future and "modern society,"
  
• Media theory (mostly German influenced) and media Archaeology (Dead Media, etc.)
• Possibly a confluence of more than one of these interests, I did a lot of research last year on radio and the contemporary academic study thereof, particularly regarding the Orson Welles broadcast. No, it was not a psychological warfare test, though I can blog later about why some people think so.
  
• 'Conditions and constraints of content creation,' be it music, history, or science
• Anthropological study of magic (though this is an area I'll admit I need to read more in)
• Games and Gaming, considered as objects worthy of study (I'm not quite sure if I can use the term "ludologist" entirely seriously yet.)
• Grand Strategy and the debate over "4th Generation War"
  

Now, I'll probably not cover all these various and sundry topics, but this is a good start, and interestingly a good way to look at these varied interests and think about what connects them. Maybe I'll comment to myself.