Infutile alternatives

[pataphor]

There seems to have been some backlash about the slow pacing, which is
obviously absurd considering I am posting in completely deserted
newsgroups. But being used to (ex) gf either being spies themselves or
employing their friends to relay information about me, and considering
that I may have nothing much to say but it would be a nice diversion
from being silent all the time (compared to talking all day to up to
hundreds of people per (IRC) channel), and considering that my nothing
might still be elucidating to people who for example are still worrying
about things like getting a boyfriend or girlfriend when the true
salvation lies in getting your past organized so that it would finally
enable one to leave this place, the place that scares you with the
prospect of living your entire life never amounting to anything, I
might as well cater to my fictive audience and talk some more, possibly
not so futile, stuff.

A few days ago I was reading a hacker news post about someone trying to
translate hardcoded subs from a chinese drama called "love me if you
dare". The idea was to copy the little rectangle at the bottom of the
screen and run that image through some OCR engine, then I suppose
translate it into english. Indeed, at a glance the OP seems to have
been right that there were no easy to find english subs for the series
(except for episode 1) but that hardcoded chinese subs were available.
But how about non-english not hardcoded subs? After some sleuthing I
found some source material where russian subs where provided with the
still hardcoded chinese video. So I fooled myself into thinking I could
do better than most of hacker news by writing a python script
extracting the russian subs and running them line by line through
google translate (yeah I know that is tedious but how would I know the
line ending format and since it was an automated, run once script, I
thought it acceptable to bother that api with lots of single line
requests). So at the end of the day I was already watching extremely
badly subbed episodes of the series, the romance and the soothing
chinese voices not in the least diminished by the weird but
surprisingly to the point commentary on the bottom of the screen.

To digress a little, I was wondering exactly why I find chinese as
seductive as the proverbial aphrodisiac russian, and my second best
explanation up to now, after thinking that maybe chinese is the
language with the longest history, spoken by the most people, and that
it would maximize the chance of me having been chinese in a past life,
or just something like the language has had the most time to settle
down into the best chomskian language archetypes, is that the actors not
only don't bow to each other, like for example japanese or koreans, but
that they are also less harsh, to the point of voicing their lines as if
whispering. But then I heard some small children talking outside and I
realized that what I had been attracted to was the actors (especially
the girl) using child like, or maybe baby like vocalization patterns.
So much for romance, or for wide reaching philosophical, linguistic
or religious speculations, I was just reacting to the most basic sounds
nature has designed to fool us into reproduction.

If only I had not been reading Carlos Castaneda at the time of my
maximal susceptibility to such schemes, as nature had produced for me,
it might have succeeded, and maybe it would have also prevented me from
frustrating a considerable number of women trying to get me on that
path. I mean some of the spies they sent me were very pretty, making me
think, if the spy is already this pretty I wonder what the one who sent
them must look like, until I remembered that was the one I was already
dating!

To continue the story about the subs, I was already making plans for
distributing my less than perfect subs, since at least they got the job
done and there being no alternatives they might be of some use to
someone, when I realized that they were probably already overtaken by
the network effect of hacker news exposure, and most likely better subs
were to be found at the usual places by now. And weirdly surprisingly,
since I knew they would be there but still did not expect them to be, I
wasn't wrong in this.

So, was my producing the subs in a roundabout way as useless as trying
to turn my lovers into formless warriors? In another hacker news
article Castaneda was mercilessly debunked as a fraudulent,
exploitative, and manipulating guru, like all the other ones that
somehow achieved sufficient fame. Is conquering death with a simple
'and yet' nothing more than a placating thought, offering us a fictive
way out of the seemingly inescapable reality of death, the unavoidable
degradation and suffering?

In another hacker news article we see Stephen Wolfram taking credit
for the design of a railway station decoration that was meant to honor
Conway, the person who came up with the game of life. Not that he was
wrong, in that the design truly seems reproducible using his rule set,
but it made me remember that at the time I also produced various
alternatives to Conway's rules, on my trusty old atari ST, programming
it with GFA basic but just never considering that my 'fast little
boxes', as I called them, could be something so special that
everyone and their cat hadn't thought of them too. So I did not pursue
the issue, nor did I try out all possible variations of the rules in
this case, a thing that I did for other subjects, like creating all
possible objects that can be constructed by 'gluing' n cubes together,
or things like that.

But meanwhile I still have that old, old, dream of coming up with a
completely different technology from scratch, like the same thing we
have now, but started from a different rule set, resulting in circuitry
as different from ours as one of wolfram's cellular automata is from the
other. But of course in n dimensions and stuff.

I have also aggregated various new developments into this whole line of
thinking, both in my personal experience and resulting from internet
influences. Like maybe Castaneda was wrong, but yet another hacker news
article seems to point in the direction of our memory system being able
to operate in other 'modes', in which long term memories are formed on
the spot, bypassing the usual short term memory buffers (I mean if that
explanation model is still sufficient and not another "it can't be
anything else because the data ruled out everything I thought of" which
seems to be en vogue these days) so that we acquire instant
hallucinations with a deja vu quality, in a quite Castanedian sense,
like finally discovering what we have been dreaming about all these
times, even if it never happened, or took place in an altogether
different wolframe.

Personally, I can add that I have had some weird experiences recently,
not of such an esoteric nature but more effects resulting from
adjusting my diet and exercise habits. In another usenet group I
already hinted at how much progress can be made by these relatively
easy measures, easy that is, if one is not distracted by the 1001
things that come with pursuing a career, or relationships, or worldly
fame. I am now at the level of running cooper test distances almost
daily, and also (as a result?) I notice that nary a day goes by without
me making some initial error, like dropping some tiny part of a thing I
was disassembling in order to make it (better) fit some specific
purpose, and not being able to find it because, for example, behind this
desk things are getting messy, then deciding to clean the whole area
up, and ending with a better configuration, even if I never find the
part I lost. Like some incredible coincidence made me 'remember?' some
other part that was similar enough to take its place, so that
constructions could be completed. But this is usually after I already
found an alternative configuration that worked equally well, so that
after a few days I can just seamlessly exchange one setup for the other.

The reason I am making this long second digression is I have come to
believe that IQ, or the result of mental progress, or healing, or
coming to one's senses after all the dust is removed from our busy
lives, whatever one wants to call it, is nothing else than to start
being able to switch to different (mental and or physical)
configurations as the circumstances require, without loss of
functionality or options for future change. Like it is all well to run
each day, but at some point it may be necessary to rest one's feet for a
while and do some cycling. Or move from a hot IRC environment to cold
usenet group grave digging without breaking a sweat.

P.
---

"Yes, by now I know it was RMS who called the troll while ESR was just
trying to move things to the right"