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[May. 20th, 2008|01:50 am]
I just found these: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. They're quiet clever little parodies of those WW2 documentaries you get on the History Channel all the time, except now used to hawk video games.
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[May. 1st, 2008|02:51 am]
I hate my new job. I hate the working conditions, I hate the tasks required of me, I hate the people I work with, I hate having to wake up at 4am to go into work for 5am, I hate everything about it. My immediate superior asked me the other day what I enjoyed about the job and my response was "I don't enjoy anything about it."

Later that day, her superior asked me "Surely you don't come to work every day with a feeling of dread?" "No, not every day."

I took this job under the impression that I would be managing a sales team that was also responsible for stocking about half the store. Instead, it turns out, I "manage" a stocking team that is also required to sell things when they are not otherwise engaged. I barely manage it because my immediate superior takes control when she's around, and when she isn't, our senior receiver, who does not like me, hijacks the department. This is not the job I agreed to take, nor conditions I wish to work under.

I'm going to quit as soon as I find another job.

Edit: Also, I just read this article and am now highly interested in getting a copy of this book.
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[Mar. 16th, 2008|02:23 pm]
The Perfect Crime is the best book of Baudrillard's I've read yet. I find with B. that people focus too much on the idea of simulation, and particularly, its recursive character. It's a constant refrain in Baudrillard studies of "the simulation cannibalises the real" or "Look at how simulations are just like reality, but even moreso." Eco for example, wants to maintain a distance between hyperreality and reality, as can be seen in his essay on Disneyland.

B. on the other hand, by the mid-90's, had gone far beyond that, into an idea he calls "integral reality". Integral reality is where simulation and reality no longer refer to one another, but are diffused throughout one another, interpenetrating and integrated. It's not that the simulation somehow mocks reality or kills it, but rather, simulation has taken reality within itself so that even the real has become part of the simulation. The real has been "liquidated" - and drunk.

This becomes important later on in his thought, particularly in "The Intelligence of Evil", which I read last year and finished the day before he died. Baudrillard plays on the puns in the title, where the intelligence is both the cleverness of the ineradicability of evil (le Mal) and problems (les mals) and our knowledge of evil ("intelligence" here in the sense of intelligence gathered by spy agencies). Integral reality has no place for evil within it - evil is liquidated just like truth, and taken up within it. We torture to protect justice and freedom. Justice, freedom and torture are not outside the system of reference by which we evalute our actions, serving as standards to which we can point, but rather exist _inside_ it, so that to say that one is working for justice is far more necessary than actually being just.

The knowledge of evil, will not cure us of integral reality and its hysterical escalation towards singularity and implosion, but it can at times serve at least as a kind of sabotage. Baudrillard speaks of those who know evil highly - Heidegger, Celine, etc. They are not good people, or even brave or subversive or whatever, but they scout and explore the terrain of evil so that we may know it more fully. This knowledge has been obtained at great cost (metaphysically, in that the knowledge we gain of evil reconciles it ever more with integral reality and brings us closer to the implosion-point; ethically, in that it sacrifices both the thinker and the victims of the evil that must exist for them to bring us knowledge of it - the genocide victims, the dupes of fascism and tyranny, etc.) and must not be squandered nor ever fully reconciled with integral reality.

Two lines: "Where the danger lies, there also the saving power grows" and "Those who hunt monsters beware, lest a monster they become. For if you gaze overlong into the abyss, the abyss gazes also back into you."
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[Mar. 5th, 2008|02:29 am]
Gary Gygax is dead.

For those of you who don't know, Gary Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, created Dungeons and Dragons, the first roleplaying game, back in the 70's. Roleplaying games are pretty much the most fun thing I do. I don't have many hobbies - I don't play many video games (I do play a few when with friends), I don't skateboard or listen to music, but I do play roleplaying games, and I have pretty consistently since I was about 11. That means that for fifteen years of my life and continuing into the modern day, I have derived enjoyment from the intellectual descendants of the work of Gary Gygax. I am very grateful to him for creating roleplaying games, since my life would be much less happy without them. It is unfortunate that he is dead.

I am, even as we speak, rolling up a character after the death of my character in our last session of play. Gil D'Aquino, an expert in sabre fighting, was struck dead by a psychic parasite channeled by a dying scientist-magician whom he had shot in cold blood. My friend Rob has been maintaining a blog about our most recent game here. I play Wayland Theodore Dessinger, a young man whose lust for power is getting him into trouble.

Beyond just that, however, I am also creating a setting for the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which I will run once our current campaign concludes, however long from now that might be. Details can be found here.

I am going to London, Ontario, for two weeks soon. Some of you may remember that I had a plan for a roleplaying game last year that featured Buddhist monks. While in London, I will be training for a new job, but will otherwise be fairly isolated. It is my hope to get some work done on that roleplaying game, since it has otherwise languished since an initial burst of creativity.

I would not be doing any of this without roleplaying games, and I am indebted to Gary Gygax for that.
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[Feb. 7th, 2008|01:24 am]
I realised a week or two ago that I'd become a passive, will-less fuck. As long-time readers will recall, I resolved to become a nicer person, to be more considerate and sympathetic, etc. I spent the past two years trying to do this, but all it did was cause me to utterly renounce agency in this world. That's pretty fucking pathetic. No more of that.

The main symptom of my overall decline was my irresoluteness in disputation. I just stopped standing up for what is right and true and started letting every dipshit with a stutter and some crank belief about the world get his way. I stopped having goals. I will no longer conduct myself in this way.

Changing this will be a gradual process of readjustment, just as falling into this habit was. The emoton I am going to harness for this purpose is anger, my old standby. I've spent the past two years constantly angry, but unwilling to clearly indicate my anger to others. I thought I could be a loving person, or a kind person, or express other emotions in a consistent and forceful way, but the reality of the matter is that I am not really capable of doing so without becoming some sort of repressed, pathetic individual. My other emotions are tepid, childish and underdeveloped. Only my anger is mature enough to form the basis of my emotional character.

I was talking with Peter Holm, a fellow I used to hate but now am friends with, the other day. There are three philosophical papers I have come up with ideas for in the past year, and I am planning to write at least one of them in the next little while. The three papers are an analysis of the intuition of sameness, an analysis of mind that denies its actuality and substantiality and places it within the space of possibility through the operation of the imagination, and probably finally write a paper on technocracy and freedom. Talking with Brian Scott at a bar, I realised that I must also elaborate my cosmology, which is beginning to reach a level where it is robust, if still unsophisticated. I'm reading epitomes of mediaeval philosophers for inspiration.

I'm going to resharpen my mind. I spent this year reading fiction. It wasn't a waste, but it must be regarded as a break between bouts. A line of Nietzsche's followed me this year, about the great lives of history being ones of toil without respite rather than pleasure-seeking hedonism. I am getting a new job, possibly within the next two weeks, depending upon when they want me to start. It's still retail, but it pays more and is more dignified in general.

Edit: I just realised that I've lacked a writing table this entire fucking time! Jesus, what have I been doing?
More later.
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[Jan. 28th, 2008|12:52 am]
I'm back.

In the approximately ten months that I have been gone, I have become an utter mediocrity. I don't exactly recall when I realised this, but it was a few months back and I was outside. I had been holding out some hope for redemption until then, but lately I've been drifting along wishing I was dead.

In the time I have been gone:

I have continued to work a retail job, though I have been promoted to an assistant manager for my store. I make nine dollars per hour doing this job. This is less than our most junior associate. My main responsibilities are nagging the associates to clean up after themselves, filling out paperwork and controlling my temper while being screamed at by irate customers. I am severely underemployed.

I have not worked on my novel(s) (I have an idea for a second one now). I have not worked on the roleplaying game idea I have. I was a carpenter without pay for a production of Rebel Without a Cause, which I did not see, and have never seen. I have written a few campaign settings for personal use in games of Dungeons and Dragons as ersatz productive behaviour.

I felt up a girl I knew through work and was utterly bored by it and never spoke to her again afterwards. I chased some other girls and nothing came of most of it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm incapable of ordinary human love any more (if I ever was). I am also incapable of ordinary human sexual relations.

I am backsliding morally, and I keep on trying, and failing, to resist this process.

I did do some productive intellectual work with M. Tommasi while he was around, but since he left for grad school I've mostly been drifting intellectually, reading novels and other fiction instead of philosophy and history.

My best friend's girlfriend started hating my guts and tried to poison our relationship. She eventually left him to go and become a theoretical lesbian.

I've been feeling depressed lately. I'm finding that my cycles are getting worse - longer and with more anhedonia. I have not taken my pills in over a year now. My phobia of crowds causes panic attacks whenever I'm in a crowd now, though I've become better at controlling my behaviour in these fear states.

In conclusion:

I am back. 2007 was the worst year of my life. I don't know how 2008 will go. Life is garbage.
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[May. 11th, 2007|03:55 am]
The end.

I am finishing this journal. I will not reflect on the journal itself, but explain my reasoning for doing so.

The person who wrote this journal is dead. I am not him. I am inhabit the same body, possess the same name, and have an identical history, but am no longer that person. I bear the responsibility for what he did and said. I have profited and lost because of his conduct. But I am not that person and I do not conduct myself in that way. I have enjoyed your company, and will miss it. I am going to leave this journal up rather than delete it. I may be reached at johnbell17@gmail.com.

Goodbye.
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[Mar. 30th, 2007|03:51 am]
I am no longer in love. It started two weeks ago, and the process of falling out of love is pretty much finished at this point. It was prompted when a friend informed me that the girl in question had made a comparison between me and a fictional character. The comparison wasn't insulting (though I will admit it's to a character I don't like, but am often compared to), it just struck me that anyone who would compare me to that character didn't really know me all that well.

And that was it. To be in love, you've got to imagine that the other understands you in a way no one else can, or at the very least, that the possibility of such an understanding exists. Once it's been revealed that no such understanding exists, and it almost certainly never will, there can't be any love.

I've talked with a couple of friends about it, and they basically break down into two kinds of responses. The people who haven't met the girl in question insist that she knows I was in love with her, and that she has chosen never to let on for one reason or another (they each provide a reason in line with their personal views on human motivation). The people who do know her take it as an accepted fact that she doesn't know about it. I tend to favour the latter opinion.

This is actually a good thing. It means that now that I am out of love with her, there are no consequences or problems that will come up. She did not know that I was in love with her, and now that I am no longer in love with her, there is no reason for it to ever come up. I am free.

I am doing a good job avoiding bitterness. It's true, I am not as charitable towards her character as I was when I was in love, but neither do I abhor her. I am capable of seeing her flaws as well as her good points, and of forming a critical but fair evaluation of her character. I understand her more now than I ever did when I was in love with her.

I avoid bitterness by taking personal responsibility for the failure of my desire to attain its object. It's not that women are all bitches who can't love me, etc., etc. woe, woe, woe is me and all that crap. There are basically two reasons that I am unsuccessful with women, even women I love.

The first is simply that women are concerned that I do not respect them. This is actually a more general problem, in that most everyone I know is concerned that I do not respect them. This is the case even when I do respect them, even when I love them. I am not good at showing my respect in a conventional manner (I am also not good at demonstrating that I sympathise with a person, even when I do - the two are related problems). Actually, I am not sure how one shows respect ordinarily.

This pretty obviously causes women not to want to pursue relationships with me, or to fall in love with me (it is an open question whether anyone has ever loved me). I have resolved to change this, but I do not yet actually have a plan to do so. There are several problems that must be thought through prior to a plan being developed. The first is whether or not my virtues are capable of being arranged so as to accomodate conventional methods of demonstrating respect (presumably through an arrangement that amplified them somehow), or whether doing so would mutilate my character. The second is whether my character is valuable enough as is to warrant saving from such a mutilation, or whether some amputation and prosthesis is necessary for moral health. The third is what kind of arrangement would resolve the problem, whatever methods are required to attain that arrangement. Only after these are adequately thought can I begin to think about what steps I can take to achieve them.

The second reason that I am unsuccessful with women is that I often display too much vice and not enough virtue. Not merely through the things I say, but the way I act. I present myself as too lecherous, too rash, too cruel. I certainly am these things (I try sometimes not to be), but they are not the primary colours of my character from which all my other traits must be obtained. I must more carefully control my expressions of vice, even when they are expressed in an unserious manner.

I think if these two things are done, I will be more successful in love. I think I would like to be more successful in love. Therefore, I resolve to do them to the best of my ability.
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[Mar. 12th, 2007|02:13 pm]
The 300 is a fascist movie. It advocates the violent extermination of non-whites by a professional warrior caste of whites bred for the purpose. If you like the movie, you like a film that makes being a fascist look cool, and if you like the characters in 300, you like fascists. If the Nazis had won World War 2, we would be watching these kinds of films.

The movie has nothing to do with the accurate depiction of history. Exonerating it or condemning it on those grounds is pointless. The movie was made in the modern day for modern audiences and all the swords and shields and whatnot are simply aesthetics designed to displace the fundamental fascism of the movie so that you don't realise it without critical examination.

Many people will point to the constant sloganeering about "freedom" and "reason" as evidence that the movie is not fascist. This is false. Those are just slogans. There is no real articulation of what freedom means. Why does submission to law-breaking Leonidas or to the unjust rapist ephors not make one unfree but submission to Xerxes does? The claims about "reason" are similarly misplaced. The Greeks act in an irrational way, albeit a very brave one. Last stands are not rational. Choosing not to retreat when it is a sound tactical option is not rational.

The Greeks in this movie are not free, nor are they rational, and so everything they say about fighting for freedom and rationality is suspect. That leaves us merely with their atrocities.

I watched the film last night, and there is a scene where the Spartans are killing Persians injured on the battlefield. Leonidas is standing around eating an apple, indicating that this is clearly not mid-battle. A Spartan messenger runs up and he and Leonidas banter back and forth a bit before they head off. While they are trading jolly witticisms, we see Persians screaming, groping and kicking on the ground, even seeming to beg for mercy as the Spartans spear them.

The shocking part of this is the audience's response. People were laughing at the juxtaposition of atrocity with Leonidas's prosaic act of eating the apple. It was not nervous laughter.

Once again, this film is not a documentary. It has eliminated many incidents from the mytho-historical accounts of the battle of Thermopylae, and it departs entirely from what we know on many other occasions. Therefore, saying that the Spartans would have killed the injured Persians historically cannot be a defense of this scene. The filmmakers chose to put this scene in, and to stage it in this way. The killing is systematic, merciless, mechanised. The Spartans execute the helpless Persians with rapid, repetitive motions.

It needs to be pointed out that we live in an age where executing the helpless and injured is bad. We know this is an immoral act, something the bad guys do. This film is made in the modern era when we have such an awareness. But the director and writer chose to depict this scene, and to attempt to make us identify and idolise the people who systematically execute the injured and helpless.

The moral problems of the film's depiction don't end there. Gays and the disabled get the short stick too, with Xerxes and Ephialtes. And the Persians are actually depicted as physically inhuman monsters at several points (the Immortals, Xerxes' executioner, Xerxes himself).

Actually, one part that bothered me just as much, though it isn't getting any play in the reviews, is the insulting of the citizen-soldiers of Arcadia. This was where I began to realise the movie was fascist, and not just unreflectively violent. As they march to Thermopylae, the Spartans are joined by some Arcadians led by their king. We see about ten of them, but it's implied that there are many more just out of shot. The Arcadians have come to help the Spartans out, but they are dismayed to see that there are only 300 Spartans. Leonidas proceeds to shit-talk the Arcadians. This fellow is a potter in peace time, that one a blacksmith. Clearly, they don't compare to the Spartans at all. Later on in the movie, the Arcadians help ambush some Persians, and the narrator says that they are more like brawlers than warriors, whatever that means.

This is ridiculous, and goes to show you how fucking ridiculous this whole "we're fighting for freedom" business is. We're meant to identify with the Spartans throughout this film, but the Spartans aren't really us at all. They're an arrogant warrior caste fighting for an authoritarian regime founded on personal charisma. They simply happen to parrot the right kinds of catch-phrases about "freedom" to make us think, if we don't critically reflect, that they share something in common with us.

We live in nations, let us not forget, where our soldiers are more akin to the citizen-soldiers of Arcadia than the Spartans. We do not breed professional warriors, give them special privileges, and idolise them above all others. It is precisely a sign of our civilised attitudes that our soldiers are ordinary people and not a special privileged group within society.

Anyhow, there is tons more that is really awful about this movie. I will say it was it was technically beautiful, but then, so was Triumph of the Will. The comparison is deserved. There is a really good movie out there waiting to be made about the need to defend the best things about Western civilisation from destruction, but this movie is not it.
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[Feb. 18th, 2007|12:45 am]
I drive now. My father has a 1998 silver Ford Taurus SE which I get at night time. He is capable of driving at night, but only just due to iriditis, which is some sort of congenital inflammation of the iris, and because one of his retinas briefly detached itself from his eye, and because he has cataracts. None of this is sufficient to get his license yanked, but combined with his complete lack of hobbies, a personal life and a need to drive anywhere at all once he has returned from work, it means that once he comes home, I have the car at my disposal until it becomes light again.

I am a good driver. Not a great driver, but a good one. I know when to speed, and how much, I drive defensively when possible, and I avoid most of the behaviours that I dislike in other motorists (refusing to give room when people are merging, failing to signal, wobbling over the road, following too closely). My car is generally in good shape, though it periodically runs out of windshield solvent unexpectedly, and its tires have not been changed since its purchase in 1999 (some hundred and seventy-thousand kilometres ago), which means that I get minimal grip in wet and icy conditions.

I enjoy driving. Tommasi and I periodically take my car and simply drive north, without any particular plan or destination in mind. We take backroads through small towns and countryside until we get thoroughly lost. Our general point of return is when I get down to about half a tank of gas or when the weather gets too bad to continue. The countryside north of Mississauga and Toronto is hilly, with deep valleys and curving narrow roads that cut through farmland and forest. The weather at the bottom of the valleys is always wet, whether foggy, rainy or snowy, and the tops are much drier, with stone jutting from the tops where inadequate precipitation prevents trees from flourishing. I find it tremendously peaceful to drive this landscape at night, except when someone is following me closely with their lights in my mirrors, as this prevents me from seeing anything but the area around the road.

One of the most peaceful experiences one can have is to drive familiar roads in an area where one cannot get lost due to a long familiarity with them. One's mind goes completely blank and one enters a light trance in which the world becomes entirely defined by a limited set of visual objects related to one another in such a way that there is nothing between them. One has the feeling that one has not actually moved in the slightest as one looks from the gauge indicating one's speed to the rear mirror to the car in front of one. Nor does time pass - these are simultaneous events. Driving is a Platonic experience. One looks past the appearance of things and perceives the shining forth of the structure which gives them meaning.

To a passenger, the highway is a mass of noise and confusion, where signs advance and recede, where cars all around one seem to merge and disperse cacophonously. To the driver, the highway is a perfectly structure, with the well-defined structure of a geometric solid. One cannot even describe the behaviour causally. There is no sequence of events that can be described. There is simply the moment of being on the highway, which begins as one accelerates through the on-ramp, and which ends as one decelerates to the exit. This moment, no matter whether it lasts for minutes or hours, is a unified in a way that few other spans of time can be.

The other peculiar feeling one has in a car, besides this trance state, is that of an expanded tactility. One feels the entire car to be one's body, or perhaps merely a body that one is physically linked with in a manner analogous to sexual contact. Certainly the fluttering of an anti-lock braking system attempting to grip the road in icy conditions feels much like the rapid, spasmodic pulsing of the vaginal walls during orgasm. It should be noted that there is nothing arousing about driving, merely an intimate connection with the machine. It a great prosthetic wrapped around one, like a claw bolted to a stump. One maintains multiple points of physical contact with the machine, and in ways that convey far more information than is available to the passenger. There is the foot on the pedal, the foot touching the floor separately, the buttocks on the seat, the back and head against the car, the hands on the wheel. It is particularly the hands and the feet that sense the car's state, and these give the experience its prosthetic quality.

When the two coincide - the feeling of the car as a prosthetic, and the unification of time and space effected by the trance - one really must regard the car as an otherworldly device. The world is transformed from an orientation founded in earth and sky - the ground is beneath me, the sky above - to an orientation of inside and outside. There is what is inside the car, then what is inside the boundaries of the road, then what is outside of the car and outside of the road. Buildings do not have insides when one is driving - they are pure exteriors one simply passes by. Even inside of a parking garage, one is still "outside". It is absolutely shocking to see furniture or furnishings in a parking garage, even if there is adequate space for them. The parking garage is still "outside" because one encounters it in one's car, which is the limit of "inside" and because the road is boxed in. Parking garages, without any particularly good reason that I am aware of, are often built with large holes that open to the space around them, allowing wind and rain to enter. A place that weather can get into will always be outdoors.

Yesterday, I met [info]bram with my friend Sean Tommasi, at the Pour House on Dupont. We had a pleasant conversation, and I hope that we showed him a good time. He has posted further about it in his livejournal.here. I am pleased by his account.
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[Jan. 5th, 2007|03:28 am]
Comrades, be on guard against false enlightenments. This topic is fresh in my mind because I recently got over one. This false enlightenment took place on New Year's Day, in the early morning, as Bryan and I stood outside a house where a party was going on. We were smoking cigarettes, and the door to the house was closing, but not yet closed. There was harsh lighting above us, and I saw my shadow on the doorframe. This shadow expanded metaphorically and became a symbol of my entire life. It felt the un-necessity of my own existence keenly, and that nothing I had done until then was more important than a shadow in a corner.

For three days afterwards, I was entranced by this thought. I chewed on this thought and felt its ghostlike touch on my tongue. I was reduced by it and functioned on pure rote knowledge of how to make one's way through the world.

Then, of course, I realised it was all a bunch of crap. The idea that one's life has, and therefore can lack, some sort of necessity inbuilt to it is crap. It was without merit to be reduced by this thought, and I ought to get over it rather than mistake it for any sort of true dharma. This realisation came when I was reading Roshi John Daido Loori's Cave of Tigers, which is a collection of dharma encounters.

Some stage setting:

For those of you who don't know what a dharma encounter is, they're a part of Zen monastic experience. Towards the end of the day, when the various teachings for the day have been propounded, and everyone has had a good argument about it in the afternoon, the various students line up and confront the teacher, asking questions about how to develop their Zen practice. These are traditionally when koans are presented to students, and a lot of useful, if sometimes obtuse, discussion ensues. It's traditionally an intersection of criticism and boundary testing. Cave of Tigers is one of the few records we have of dharma encounters (outside of koans), and was compiled by John Daido Loori, the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York, from dharma encounters he had with students over the years.

Anyhow, what ends up happening is this:

Student: ... When the ten thousand things move forward towards the self, that's like taking a walk in the woods and being surprised by a falling leaf.
Teacher: Yeah, that's the problem you know. That's the problem of really misunderstanding the teachings. We end up with misty landscapes and being startled by plum blossoms, which is all fine. But to carry the self forward and realise the ten thousand things literally means to separate oneself from the world..."


That's a warning against false enlightenment. This essay is similar. Both warn one against confusing enlightenment with every goddamn passing thought that happens to roost its fucking feathers in that empty box between your ears. This passage from the essay is key:

"Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment."

These two works saved me quite a bit of time. They set me on guard against false enlightenment, and I managed to get rid of this one within only three days, compared to the usual time frame of weeks, months, years and lifetimes it seems to take sometimes. Not that I've become a fucking saint and bodhisattva overnight, but I've managed to use my native hypercriticality to defend against a rather fucking poisonous piece of bullshit that would've rotted my guts left unchallenged. I remain unenlightened, but also unpoisoned.

Comrades, be on guard against false enlightenments.

Beyond the Buddhism (I am still not a Buddhist), Tommasi gave me a book by Karl Jaspers, a book on Iamblichus and a book on hermeneutics for my birthday and Christmas. I also bought Ian Hacking's Historical Ontology for myself, and the Derrida-Habermas Reader for Tommasi for Christmas. Charles gave me Cave of Tigers, and Tom gave me a LP of an orchestra rehearsing (but not actually playing) Beethoven's Fifth Symphony under a new (to them) conductor. I'm reasonably content with life at the moment.
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[Dec. 25th, 2006|02:37 pm]
Birthday and Christmas Swag:

Birthday:
A small devotional statue of Guan Yu
Several free meals with drinks
A continuation of our birthday gift detente with my sister
The remaining three volumes of Walter Benjamin's Selected Works
A pad of paper
Two cheques

Christmas:
The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl
The Shorter Logical Investigations by Edmund Husserl
The Primacy of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke
More cheques
A Christmas bonus HMV giftcard from work (loaded with the highest amount of any of the employees)
A reversible silk bathrobe with embroidered Chinese dragons obviously intended for post-coital lounging about
The Fountain Soundtrack
Space 1999 Set 1
Season 2 of Veronica Mars (I do not own Season 1)
Two Michael Moore movies (?!)
Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow ed. Stanley Cavell (I bought this book three years ago, but gave it to Jean-Luc as a Christmas present before I could read it)
The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben
Artisanal fudge
Various knick-knacks in my stocking.
Black socks.
Two good scarves
A pair of winter gloves
Starbucks giftcard
HMV giftcard
Several cards
A Toblerone bar

It's a bit smaller than my usual haul, but it's also better stuff, so I am thoroughly content.

Gifts I have given / am planning to give, with an additional appendix of individuals who shall receive Christmas gifts whenever I can next see them without their gifts listed:

Mother: The updated Joy of Cooking and a collection of Agatha Christie stories about Hercule Poirot
Pater: Empires of the Word by Nick Ostler, a book about Red Toryism with a bureaucratic-functional title by Charles Taylor (for my British readers - "Red Tories" are what "Wet Tories" are called in Canada)
Sister: The unrated DVD of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, some stuff my mother bought, wrapped and put my name on. I believe one part was a small vacuum for cars.
Tom: A Chinese Communist Party cap, complete with red star. It is an authentic knock-off from Hong Kong.

Bryan Scott
Alison Lang
Trevor Haldenby
Randy MacDonald
Sean Tommasi
Gen Amaril
Sean Rodgers
Charles Huston
Lex
Visto
Evelyn Forster
Caitlin Evans
My D&D crew
Jimmy
Cindy Li
Eric L.
Lauren Raham
Anna Boyce
Cameron MacKay
Renee Lung
Vanessa Chiu

Persons who will receive gifts if I see them in the next year:
Saleem Haddad
AJ Packman
Ryan Gerolami
Ronika Dayton
Vanessa Crandall

Hardly everyone, but everyone it wouldn't be overly intimate or unwarranted to bestow gifts upon.
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[Dec. 6th, 2006|01:59 am]
"I came to the village to kill the necromancer. Even now, it's unclear to me why I am here, or why I have a weapon pressed tightly against the inside of my coat, against the heart. My memory has begun to efface itself. I don't know when I'm dreaming or awake. Things have happened that could not have.

It began with a vision. I was outside, under a full moon in winter. It was cloudless and everything had a halo. I looked up at the moon and saw the whiteness of its light. The sound of millions of locusts bouncing off tin rooves buzzed around me. The moonlight began to pulse and the sound dulled but continued. I became aware of a great nothingness in the world, a nothingness that could only be seen by the rays of the moon. I sank into the nothingness and was lost, and the world was lost.

The second vision was later. I was in a desert. A great stele was on the horizon, and it was covered in writing I could not read because of the distance. Clouds of gas with jellyfish tendrils drifted in the air. One touched me, and I was carried aloft by it. It brought me to the stele, holding me above it and I saw that the writing was still unreadable. The gas let me go, and I fell through the air towards the stele. As I fell, I found that the writing on it became less and less meaningful, until I felt the nothingness just as the stele pierced my chest. I slid down it, the hole in my chest growing more painful, and the ground was no longer there.

The third vision was the last, unless I am still in it. It was a blizzard. My eyes and mouth and nose and ears were cold and full of snow. I could not see. I stumbled through the snow, without aim or purpose. I tripped over something and fell. When I reached down to feel what I had tripped on with numb fingers, I thought that I was bleeding. I tasted it, and it was not blood. It was a bottle of dark red ink, almost black. I picked up the bottle, then dropped it. The red ink poured out, and all the snow became red, then black as the ink continued to pour out of the bottle, more ink than it could hold. My eyes and mouth and nose and ears were full of red snow. I fell back to the ground and died when the red blotted out everything else.

It was some time later I came to the village. I do not live here. I have never been here before. I have had no more visions, but I have not needed them. After the third vision, I was on a hill. There were some trees, and the air was full of dust. The ground was dry, and the trees were dead. When I went down from the hill, I was at the village. There were people, and I presumed that others meant that the world had continued while I was gone."


Draft of Chapter 1, The Anti-Book

Commentary:

I have begun thinking of someday creating a book that is nothing. It will have twenty-three and a half blank pages, with an anti-schematic commentary appended to each one, telling one briefly what kind of nothingness this page is not. The half-page will lack commentary. It will have no title and no author. The book will be an extended meditation about nothing for the reader, each page revealing less and less about its subject. The meditation will not end, because the last page is truncated, preventing one from even being able to finish properly.
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[Dec. 3rd, 2006|02:05 am]
As a long-time sovereigntist, I think the declaraction that Quebec is a nation is both incredibly stupid and mildly satisfying. It is incredibly stupid because, as Randy pointed out some time ago, Quebec is several autonomous polities made up of several nations, of which French-Canadians are only the largest demographically (while the First Nations are the largest geographically). The resolution fails to clarify that it is French-Canadians, whether Franco-Ontarians, Quebecquois or Acadians who constitute a distinct nation (though not a distinct polity) within Canada. For that matter, it utterly fails to clarify what a "nation" means in the bill. Ignatieff, who most recently brought the idea to public attention, of course meant something like the political science definition of a "nation", which usually refers to a group of ethnically homogenous people who speak a language or group of related languages who occupy, but not necessarily govern, a geographic area. The Bloc Quebecquois and the hand-wringing centrist-Liberal crowd seem to think "nation" is identical to "autonomous nation-state" and are thus reacting with delusional exuberance and self-righteous moaning respectively. Ultimately though, the because of the vagueness about what constitutes a "nation", and what relation a "nation" has to the other institutions of Canada, the bill lacks any heft As a final problem, it shafts the First Nations, who constitute both a polity and a nation as much as the French-speaking inhabitants of Canada, but who have to rely on the shittiest of shitty laws in the entire history of the shitty laws of Canada for any sort of redress of their grievances against the government. Fuck the whole idea that Canada is a single, unified nation where we've all got to get our coffee at Tim Horton's, love hockey and Trudeau, lecture Americans on how awful they are, and where everyone has to agree on everything all the time, and anyone who doesn't is being "difficult".

On the plus side though, because of its vagueness, the bill gives the Bloc, and the province of Quebec, maneuvering space against the FedGov. In case this has never been made clear, I am all in favour of pulling out our hooked knives of institutional reform and gutting the federal government on behalf of the provinces. The FedGov serves no one well, whether English speakers or French, and the sooner we hand things down to the provinces and municipalities to misappropriate and misgovern, the better. I'm not convinced anymore that we'd be better off breaking up the country, but I'd favour a much weaker federalism than the current arrangement we have. Not only Quebec, but entire regions of Canada constitute distinct nations with distinct cultures. The French, the First Nations, the West, the East, Ontario - these are all distinct regions with distinct political goals that are often irreconcilable, and the constant jockeying for position and power amongst the regions, provinces and territories with one another waste entirely too much time and talent to be good for any of us, let alone all of us. Fuck the federal government.

To continue with controversial (by Canadian standards) remarks on politics, I also favoured Michael Ignatieff over Stephane Dion. Both of these men are technocrats who will ultimately do nothing but increase the bureacratisation and domination of instrumental reason over all forms of life in Canada. The actual policies they advocate are just moves within that larger game, and neither one seems to have the slightest desire to transform the Canadian state from a technocratic regime into anything else. So evaluating them on a policy basis is almost pointless. I preferred Ignatieff over Dion simply because Ignatieff seems to have thought more deeply about what it means to be a technocratic administrator of a technocratic regime in a world composed only partly of technocracies, though I disagree with many of his conclusions that I'm aware of. Dion doesn't seem to have thought about this issue at all, or really about any issue outside of Canada. All the positions I could find of his were stock Canadian opinions, of the sort one could find at a particularly affluent Tim Horton's in Montreal or Ottawa. So, fuck 'em both, but fuck Dion more.

I'm still not gonna vote in the next election, and you're still a chump if you think voting matters in this country. If I could stomach it, I'd stick solely with party politics, but even that's become more and more unpalatable, as the parties become more craven, disgusting and indistinguishable. My entire opinion on Canadian politics is found in Revelations 3:15 : "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." Fuck the government.
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[Nov. 27th, 2006|03:34 am]
I think I'm depressed. I'm never quite sure in the beginning stages of it, but it usually crops up around this time of year. Anhedonia, a persistent sense of "hollowness" and loss of affect are all present, along with the usual morbid thoughts. I'm hoping that this is simply a lull, and without school to provoke things, I will be able to ride it out. I get them every few months normally, and they're quite manageable with medication provided I'm not under any particularly severe stress.

On the bright side, I am not especially mad. If anything, my life is entirely too normal for my comfort. I have a job, which Curtis helped me obtain, at a store that sells products from infomercials. I pilot a great death-machine of steel and plastic around tar and gravel surfaces in a trance, moving from one location to another over the course of twenty minutes with perhaps two thoughts the entire time. I occasionally pause the machine to smoke a cigarette in a parking lot or empty stretch of road. Occasionally, I bear passengers in it. I wrote an aptitude test a life coach gave me, and scored pretty much what I expected to score on it, though I broke the test slightly, since I scored higher than it can measure on my orientation towards analysis. Also "Apparently, you are fairly easily irritated by many things because you express more criticism and anger than 84+ percent of the population."

I helped Charles make a movie that was never finished. It was about a man who woke up on an abandoned rooftop, finds he is locked on it, and proceeds to be terrorised by a lurking black shape he cannot see clearly. That was two weeks ago, and we never finished it, though the idea behind it was pretty good.

Last week, I went to an engagement party for one of my oldest friends. I knew no one at the party other than a fellow I met in university named Denis, my old friend, and his fiancee. I left the party at 11:30pm and went to Bryan's, where we dropped a very jolly spot of acid. It was the happiest acid trip I've ever had, in fact. I remember mainly how the shooting beams from the streetlights into our dilated pupils made everything look just a bit too well lit for that hour of the night. I remember smoking too many cigarettes, and that light, and laughing at something or other, and that's about it.

I haven't been reading a ton lately.
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[Nov. 13th, 2006|02:26 am]
John Bell, writer:

2001-2002:
"Universals. What are they? Do they even exist? These are the sorts of questions that have bothered western thinkers for thousands of years when they weren?t being put to the sword (or drinking hemlock, as the case may be) for not toeing the official line. For the purposes of this essay, universals will be taken primarily to mean "universal moral laws" as opposed to "universal natural laws" such as gravity or relativity. The difference is purely arbitrary and in fact, many of those in favour of them would argue that the two are the same. Though it will no doubt cause the long-dead souls of those philosophers whose usage of the word "universal" includes universal natural law to twist in their graves, we shall avoid using it in that sense as much as possible. With that clarified, we shall set out to establish that in fact there are such things as universal moral laws."

2002-2003:
'The most interesting philosophical project Heraclitus embarks on is to distinguish reality from appearance through his concept of "logos" and its implicit counterpart, called "dokos" by Philip K. Dick. This essay will show how the concepts of "logos" and "dokos" are fundamental to Heraclitus? philosophy, and what implications they have for it.'

2003-2004:
'The most useless, misleading and pernicious analogy in the entire philosophy of mind is that the mind is any way like a computer. Mere empirical falsity doesn?t seem to dissuade its constant reoccurrence in debate about the mind, and so most users of this analogy take recourse in talking about "information processing," as if this was anything other than a lexically impressive but ultimately vacuous expression. Any consultation with a science textbook on the subject (or a reasonably good dictionary for that matter) quickly shows that the only definition of "information" that isn?t a dressed-up synonym for "knowledge" or "facts" has something very complex to do with heat and entropy and probability, and absolutely nothing to do with what people seem to mean by the term. The term "process" is vague, and seems to serve as the second part mostly because it elides any discussion of how information is "processed."'

2004-2005:
Nothing. Insanity and convalescence

2005-2006:
"Theages and Clitophon do want the same thing from Socrates. They want knowledge of what virtue is, and what knowledge of virtue should make one do. It is not the thing they desire that differs, but rather their faith in Socrates? ability to teach them, or at least help them learn, what virtue is and how a virtuous person acts. Theages thinks that Socrates can teach him, while Clitophon is suspicious that Socrates has such knowledge to teach others in the first place. It is their attitudes towards Socrates as a teacher of virtue that differentiate the two from one another, not different goals."

Over the years, the silliness has really dropped out. I just finished working on Charles' film, and probably have interviews later this week with advertising firms to work as a copywriter. More on those later.
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[Nov. 7th, 2006|05:54 pm]
There have only been two shows that qualify as great works of art in all of North American television that I am aware of. I don't mean that hyperbolically. Television is a fucking wasteland, and there are really only two shows that are great works of art that I'm aware of.

The two great works of art on television are the original series of Star Trek and (maybe) Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are certainly many other fine, amusing, interesting shows on television, but there are few works of art amongst them, and of those works of art, only two are great.

I'm using a definition of "great work of art" that comes out of Kant and Gadamer here. In this tradition, we can understand a great work of art as one that requires an act of understanding that is shaped by our tastes, that in turn changes our tastes and therefore our capability to understand any other work of art, and even the original work of art that made this change (we grow more sophisticated in our tastes over time). This hermeneutic circle is the process of aesthetic development, and in doing this, we partake of a kind of development analogous to moral development, which allows us to access the space of reasons where freedom and beauty can be spoken of as parts of the world.

Under this view, to qualify as a great work of art, a work of art must have several features.

First, it must have an element of strangeness to it. This strangeness places it outside our current tastes, and prevents its total assimilation to those tastes. There is always something about the great work of art that we cannot fit easily into a critical structure.

Second, the great work of art must engage with a tradition. There must be an element of the familiar by which we begin to understand the work. This familiarity comes from the work being situated within body of works (not necessarily themselves great works of art) that provide us with the basis for interpreting and understanding it. A work of art that was completely unfamiliar would simply be unintelligible - we could not make sense of it.

Third, the great work of art must sophisticate our tastes. Once we have understood it, it must change the way we understand other works, and even itself. We must be unable to ignore it in order to properly understand the tradition it comes from, and we must be unable to ignore its influence when we examine and attempt to understand other works of art.

It is my contention that only Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer accomplish this within the field of television. I can't think of another show shown in North America that fulfills those three characteristics. There are many movies that have done so (Unforgiven, by Clint Eastwood, is an example of one, as is the Godfather), but I'm discounting movies from this.

The original series of Star Trek qualifies because it is incredibly influential on both the production and criticism of science fiction shows. Every science fiction show since Star Trek can be read as a reaction, in one way or another, to some feature of Star Trek. They aren't all derivative of it, but they either take some feature or features from it, or else self-consciously undermine its claims about the future, about humanity, and about the power of reason to revolutionise the human condition. I'm not going to go exhaustively through the field of science fiction shows since it, but let me point to a few where Star Trek's influence is particularly obvious: Andromeda, Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate SG-1.

The strangeness of Star Trek is the revolutionary relationship to the characteristics of humanity that Star Trek establishes. It is the most unabashedly intelligently moral show I have ever seen. No one on Star Trek ever "follows their heart" and the critical watcher is given to understand that this simply wouldn't be intelligible to the people on this show (the fact that later Star Trek series do begin pushing this "moral" is one reason amongst many that they aren't great works of art like the original series). Instead, every good person on Star Trek gives reasons for what they do, and considers it their moral duty to be able to justify themselves in this way. When they can't, they suffer anguish over it (for example, the episode where Scotty is accused of killing a woman, and his only defense is that he was drunk and therefore can't remember whether he did or not, or what provoked him to do so).

You can see this especially clearly, I think, in the interaction between McCoy and Spock. Supposedly, Spock is the "rational" one and McCoy the "emotional" one but really, both characters are rational, and they merely operate within different intellectual systems. Spock is a utilitarian, and therefore refuses to accept the ability of sentiment to provide moral guidance. McCoy does believe that sentiment can provide us with moral intuitions. Both characters constantly attempt to convince Kirk that their viewpoint is right by giving him reasons to take particular courses of action. Neither one is actually "irrational" in any meaningful sense. Rather, they disagree about the criteria of moral justification while agreeing that rational moral justification itself is a necessary act.

This is actually quite different than most shows on television. It's not merely a matter of the quality of writing or anything like that. Rather, one often finds on televisions shows today a distinction between sentiment and reason. Sentiment is presented on these shows as being completely irrational - without a legitimate source that justifies its occurrence. One falls in love, despite not knowing anything about the object of that love. One suspects the bad guy is bad, without any rational justification (when the initial judgement is made). Rather than provide reasons that characters feel certain sentiments, or showing them grappling with justifying or rationalising a particular feeling, characters merely assert their feelings, then demand recognition of them from others. No attempt is made to explain them, or allow us to understand why they feel a particular way - because there usually isn't one, other than the writers wanting to make the characters do something related to those feelings.

As a result, this remains the strangeness of Star Trek - the idea that one's tastes, one's beliefs, one's feelings and everything about one is contingent, and could really be changed if one merely rationally investigated one's self with the proper willingness to respond to the conclusions one finds. The familiarity is, of course, its use of allegory and the science fiction genre, and the sorts of moral problems that it chooses to deal with.

For Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the familiarity comes from its use of the teenage romance and horror genres, its use of archetypal characters from those genres (both the monsters and the "Scooby Gang") and its use of self-conscious humour. The strangeness of Buffy is its constant, unrelenting subversion of the traditions it takes part of. There isn't an episode of Buffy I can think of where some trope of these genres isn't being criticised or used ironically. Very few other shows subvert their genres in as profound a way as Buffy does, either because they are not as well-written or because they gradually come to pick easier and easier targets to satirise (for example, the Daily Show, which claims to subvert and satirise the news media, but which doesn't actually do so in any meaningful way). This unrelenting subversion of the cliches of the teen romance and horror genres makes everything in Buffy unlike the rest of the genre, even its imitators (Supernatural, Smallville) and provides it with an individuality that those other products lack.

The sophistication of Buffy comes from that subversion of the genre as well. After watching it we cannot go back to appreciating teen romances or horror shows in the same way (once again, think of how poorly Supernatural and Smallville compare). We understand them differently, now as just genre pieces without much importance, and without as deft and clever a use as Buffy had.

Anyhow, I'd be willing to take candidates for other great works of art on television, but I honestly can't think of any myself. There are many amusing, interesting, and well-written shows on television, but none of them seem to have this character. Sopranos or any other HBO show like Carnivale, Deadwood, etc. aren't (well, Deadwood might be, but I'm growing increasingly more dubious of that as I watch it), and neither are Britcoms like the Office or Extras. Certainly no sitcom (with the possible exception of Lucky Louie) is.
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[Nov. 3rd, 2006|05:31 pm]
I'm back. I took a break from posting and it's over now.

I've got a bunch of projects on my plate right now. First is my book, which I continue to work on fitfully. The second is a short film Charles is making sometime in November. It's looking like I'm going to work on it somehow, either as a cameraman or actor. I spoke with Charles back when he was coming up with an idea, and he had a very solid idea for a short three-minute film, though I'm given to understand it's undergone some drift recently. The third is another short film by Peter, which I'll evidently be acting in. I volunteered to be the killer in the short sequence about murder, though I don't know anything about the film other than that it has a series of sequences that depict various crimes.

The fourth is that I'm considering writing an RPG. I recently left RPG.net, never to return. I wasn't banned or anything, but I decided to leave it since it was no longer an enjoyable place. One of the moderators of the forums there had a grudge against me, and he started interpreting the rules in such a way that they were always to my detriment. That, combined with the type of community it was evolving into, made me realise that I simply wasn't getting what I wanted from there anymore.

So, the RPG. I want to write an RPG where player take on the roles of various inhabitants of a setting that is broadly like a fantasy version of the Indian Subcontinent after the rise of Buddhism. PCs are arhats, kshatraiyas, siddhus, wicked villains and noble heroes and all that. Mechanically, I'm looking at a task resolution system that embodies one of the more interesting consequences of the idea of "dharma". "Dharma" can mean something like "principle" but the interesting thing is that when it does, it refers to both moral principles and technical principles. That is, the laws of physics and the laws against stealing can both be seen as dharmas. Technical methods can be applied to either - for example the idea that techniques of meditation will make you a morally better person, or the famous earth-touching gesture of the Buddha, where he touches the ground and the entire world recognises his enlightenment at once through a mighty roar.

I'm not great at system design, but here's what I've got planned out at the moment.

Character Creation:

Characters come in two types, Awake and Ignorant. An Awake PC starts with three attainments and one attachment. An Ignorant PC starts with three attachments and one attainment. PCs then pick backgrounds. An Awake PC gets one extra attachment from their background, and an Ignorant PC gets one extra attainment from their background. A character also gets one piece of Gear from his background. Backgrounds are things like caste, previous incarnations, etc. A newly created PC starts with all of his attainments and attachments "open".

There are nine attainments - the various steps of the eight-fold path and [Perfection of the Awake]. There are nine attachments (which I have yet to work out - recommendations on places to search in the Indian Hindu/Buddhist tradition would be appreciated). Characters use attainments and attachments to determine what dharma techniques they can use and in some cases, how effective those dharma techniques are.

If a PC dies, a character has one of two options. He can play the reincarnation of that character, or he can play a new character. A reincarnated character is created like a new character, but gets a bonus depending on his previous incarnation. If his previous incarnation was Awake, he receives a bonus attainment. If his previous character was Ignorant, he gets a bonus attachment. He can also be recognised as the new incarnation of the older character by those capable of doing so. Reincarnation takes 49 days, but the player does not need to wait for his new character to be born or grow up to adulthood. Rather, the 49 days are simply how long it takes for the karma of the past life to fully attach to a living person. A new character does not receive these benefits, but may be introduced as quickly as desired.

If an Awake character has more attachments than attainments, he becomes Ignorant. If an Ignorant character has more attainments than attachments, he becomes Awake.

Attainments:

Right View - A character with Right View can see the proper course of dharma. He can use the __________ dharma techniques.
Right Intention - A character with Right Intention desires to act in accord with the dharma. He can use the _______ dharma techniques.
Right Speech - A character with Right Speech can speak in accord with the dharma. He can use the _______ dharma techniques.

And so on for:

Right Action -
Right Livelihood -
Right Effort -
Right Mindfulness -
Right Concentration -

until

Perfection of the Awake - A starting character may not take Perfection of the Awake. A character with this attainment can use any dharma technique without "closing" that attainment. A character must not have any attachments to get this attainment, and cannot get any attachments in future. If he would, he may ignore that effect. In dharma combat, a character with this attainment can only work to "push" the number to 15. He cannot work to push it to 1.

A character gets new attainments by winning a number of dharma combats equal to the number of attainments he currently has. Only dharma combats that he wins by raising the dharma number to 15 count.

Attachments:

Need to work on them.

A character gets new attachments by winning a number of dharma combats equal to the number of attachments he currently has. Only dharma combats that he wins by lowering the dharma number to 1 count.

Backgrounds:

Need to work on them

Gear:

Gear is any item that helps a character in dharma combat. A weak piece of gear gives +/- 1, once, on a single dharma technique. The most powerful items may be used any number of times, and give +3 to all dharma techniques associated with up to three attainments. Most gear is inbetween these two extremes.

Sample Gear:

Tipitaka :+1 to Look to the Righteous, ______ (2 others) dharma techniques
Blooded Sword: -3 when using the Violence dharma technique

Mechanics:

Whenever a task or challenge needs to be resolved, a character uses his dharma techniques. When a character uses a dharma technique, dharma combat begins. Dharma combat works as follows:

At the start of dharma combat, the DM picks a dharma number between 2 and 14. The point of dharma combat is to "push" the dharma number, either raising it or lowering it until it is either "1" or "15". Awake characters try to push the number to 15, Ignorant characters to 1. An Awake character who pushes the number to 15 wins the dharma combat. This means that the situation resolves favourably for both. If he uses a technique that would raise it above 15, it instead raises the dharma number to 15. An Ignorant character who pushes the number to 1 wins. If he uses a technique that would lower it below 1, it is lowered to 1 instead. The dharma number is pushed using dharma techniques.

If a dharma combat is supposed to be easy, the number should start either above or below 8, whichever would make it nearer to the number the character is trying to attain. If the dharma combat is more difficult, it should start further away from the number the character is trying to attain. If it's unclear what the difficulty should be, the starting number should be 8.

There only needs to be one character engaged in dharma combat for it to take place (more on that later), but any number of characters may participate in it. Whoever starts dharma combat by using a dharma technique goes first. The character with the most attainments and attachments combined goes next, and the other characters take turns in descending order, with characters with more attachments and attainments combined going before characters with fewer. When every character has gone, the turn is over, and a new turn begins, with the order repeating, including the character who started the dharma combat going first. Dharma techniques may change the order that characters go in. The effects of these last the entire dharma combat.

When two Awakened characters are conducting dharma combat with one another, both may win when one of them raises the number to 15. When two Ignorant characters conduct dharma combat with one another, whoever lowers the number to 1 first wins, even if his opponent did more to lower the number than he did.

When multiple characters are involved, Awake and Ignorant characters may be working together. In that case, they must decide whether to strive to push the number up to 15, or down to 1. An Awake character who participates in three challenges where he works to resolve a challenge by "pushing" the number to 1 gets an attachment. An Ignorant character who participates in three challenges which he works to resolve by pushing to 15 gets an attainment. The characters do not need to win the dharma combat in either case.

Characters "push" the numbers by using dharma techniques.

Dharma Techniques:

A character may use any dharma technique he has the correct attainments or attachments for. Some dharma techniques "close" attainments or attachments, either on the character or on another character. A character with a "closed" attachment or attainment may not use dharma techniques he gains access to through that attachment or attainment. If a character gains access to a dharma technique through more than one attainment or attachment, he may use that technique so long as one of them is still "open".

Sample Dharma Techniques:

Look to the Righteous (Right Action) - the character refers to the conduct of the righteous followers of dharma. This shames the Ignorant and chastises the Awake. He may quote a famous saying, mention an incident from the biography of a Boddhisattva or Buddha, describe how one steps onto the eightfold path, or lead by example. +2 to the dharma number and next turn, the character is one higher in the order next turn.

Skillful Means (Right Speech) - the character tries to convince his opponent that he is already doing what the character wants without realising it. The character picks one of his opponents and increases the dharma number by the number of attachments that opponent has.

Violence (Attachment) - the character uses violent force to accomplish his goals. -3 to the dharma number. If Violence lowers the dharma number to 1, he may choose one of his opponents. That character dies.

More to come (ideally, three per attainment/attachment)

Setting:

The world of Mandala, where four great triangular land masses extend from the axis mundi, Mt. Meru. After a long period of warfare in which the dharma was lost and ignored, the Dharmaraja has finally come to power, and pledged to tame the Ignorant rajas who pledge fealty to him while continuing to squabble amongst themselves. PCs are the wandering monks, holy warriors, princes and even avatars of the Rose-Apple Land who set out to restore the dharma, and overcome the rakshasas and nagas that plague the innocent.

So, anyhow, more to come later.
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[Sep. 30th, 2006|03:19 pm]
The LSAT must have rabies, because I just took it out behind the toolshed and shot it.

Having said that, of course, it is a law of poetic justice that I will turn out to have a much lower score than I expect to, but until then, my expectations remain high. My main concern going into it was not of getting enough correct answers per se, but of doing so within the alloted time. I'd been running overlong on one particular component in practice, and I was worried that I would continue to run overlong on that section (properly "sections", since the experimental section was also logic games this time) but in practice, I actually completed it with time to spare, and I was at least reasonably sure that all my answers were correct (there's always a few outliers where you're pretty sure you did things correctly, but aren't certain you got every single permutation). Arguments and reading comp were easy as shit.

Anyhow, allow me to criticise the shit out of the LSAT now, since I think it'll have the greatest credibility and be least open to imputations of personal bias if I do so having written it but before I know my marks. My criticism is really rather simple: The LSAT is badly designed to test one's effectiveness at the tasks it purports to measure one's effectiveness at. It is badly designed because of several features it has. The first feature is a time limit that is purposefully shortened, which is intended to prevent one from methodically applying one's expertise at solving the kinds of problems one is presented with. The second is that the questions do not scale in difficulty, but instead are a random assortment of more or less difficult problems that is evaluated on the basis of how many one completed successfully, rather than the highest level of difficulty one is capable of completing. The final point is that at least two of the six sections have nothing to do with the practice of law (a third one is at best tenuously connected) and another set of two have nothing to do with one's admission to law school.

The first feature demonstrates that the purpose of the LSAT is not successful completion of as many questions as one can do, but rather one's ability to work quickly. In my LSAT study guide (Princeton Review's Cracking the LSAT, considered to be one of the best) it constantly emphasises that one must avoid thinking and instead learn by rote a set of mechanical procedures for answering questions. Thinking slows one down, and causes one's score to lower. This is problematic if the purpose of the test is, as it is claimed, to determine one's skill at logical reasoning, reading comprehension, and evaluating arguments. One cannot comprehend, reason or evaluate in the time constraints given. I should also point out here a related feature - the fact that the LSAT is divided up into six sections which one does one at a time and without any ability to move between sections in thirty-five minute segments. That is, if you complete your reading comprehension section in say, twenty minutes, you can't spend the remaining fifteen looking over the past sections of your LSAT. To do so is misconduct and will result in a written notice appended to your LSAT score. Questions not completed cannot be gone over and solved. One must simply push forward constantly, without any ability to reflect on what one is doing.

The second feature shows how hollow a measurement this really is. More difficult questions are worth the same number of points as less difficult ones. Say there are three easy questions and one much more difficult one. Completing the three easy ones is worth more doing one difficult one. An analogy might show my point a little better. Imagine two men, A and B, who build things. A builds crude birdhouses and B builds elegant spaceships. If the LSAT's methodology were the way we evaluate competency in real life, we would have to say that A, because he builds a greater number of crude birdhouses than B builds elegant spaceships during the same period of time, A is a better builder, and his skill at building things is greater than B's.

The final section speaks for itself. One third of the test has nothing to do with getting into law school (the writing sample and the experimental section) and one third of it has nothing to do with being a lawyer (the writing sample and the logic games). The writing sample is easily the most useless part of the test. It has nothing to do with being a lawyer because it has nothing to do with writing clear, effective prose that persuades others. The purpose of the writing sample is to write as much as possible and use as many big words as possible. This is all it is evaluated on (seriously). And of course, that evaluation has nothing to do with getting into law school.

Now, for the joy of applications etc. I need to start padding my resume ASAP.
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[Sep. 26th, 2006|07:34 pm]
For years people have told me that I was overly intellectual and that having sex would somehow change this, as if it was an excess of semen backed up into my skull cavity that caused me to love thinking. They were wrong, of course. Similarly, people said that once I had sex, I would become as sex-obsessed as "everyone else" (their expression, not mine). This too was incorrect.

I had sex quite some time ago, but I am sworn to secrecy about identifying the girl. A few people I know in real life who read this journal know those details, but I would appreciate it if they wouldn't post them. It was after the end of the school year, and I was asked to avoid even mentioning having performed the act until a specific date - yesterday - since this would further assist the obscurity she wishes to remain in online. It wasn't with anyone I've mentioned on this journal.

The details first, and then the reflections. We had sex once, since I had only brought one condom. We tried multiple positions - about six or seven - over the course of about twenty minutes of actual penetration. I prefer missionary and cowgirl over the other various positions. I made light conversation throughout, was complimented on the size of my penis without any reason to suspect duplicity (I've posted the measurements here several times, though I doubt anyone believes me) and we tried sex both with and without a condom, of which I prefer the latter. I was surprised at the part of the penis stimulated during sex, the differences in feeling between shallow, rapid thrusts and slower, deeper ones. As a result of the disparity of feeling between sex and masturbation, as well as an awful case of blue balls that had been developing for several hours, I ended up not ejaculating, but I was otherwise quite content.

This experience was the culmination of several weeks of extensive foreplay. I am pleased to have my skill at this confirmed. I am now 3/3 for detailed compliments on it, despite the disparity in the attitudes of the women afterwards to me (one hates my guts, one is ambivalent but currently leaning towards fond. and the last, the girl I had sex with, fondly recalls me). I find foreplay endlessly fascinating. Rather than being just a gripping emotional experience, which seems to be the attitude my peers take, at least in their discussions of it, I treat it as a wonderful union of thought and action, somewhat like building a birdhouse or cooking a new kind of meal. I felt myself enter a flow state where I was forced to devote all of my competence to accomplishing a certain goal, but in doing so, was able to attain that goal. The lack of programmed restrictions on how to attain that goal was a key component in this. It gave me a sense similar to ethical excellence, of taking upon one's self a liberating discipline, where one performs a certain set of actions because they are excellent rather than because one is forced to do them.

Sex strikes me as a good field to display excellence in. This was perhaps the most satifying feeling of the experience - knowing that I was doing well. The pleasure component was certainly important as well, but I would take satisfaction over pleasure any day, and the fact that they can be successfully united in an act that is rarely presented as doing so is a good surprise.

Since then, I have not had sex. I am not dating the girl in question. I do think rather fondly of her, though.

I said last time that I'd talk about some of the books I was reading. I'll hold off. They deserve their own post. In brief, I got through Moby Dick, most of Hannah Arendt's Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism (a collection of her papers from 1930-1954), Gadamer's Beginning of Philosophy and I'm working on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars.
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