On Morality (An excerpt from "Things I Have Learned")

If you flip a coin, and it comes up heads, that is right. If you flip it and it comes up tails, that too is right. It is the nature of a coin that if it is flipped it will be heads or tails. If you flip a coin and it comes up “rainbow trout,” that would be wrong. But that cannot happen, because it is simply not in the nature of coins to do such. Anything that actually happens CANNOT be “wrong” in any sense that is meaningful to the universe at large. There is no “right,” there is only “right for me.” No, not even that, just “seems right to me.”

Religion is NOT the basis of morality. Morality evolved from the necessity to distinguish between White Hats and Black Hats; once certain impulses have negative connotations and others have positive ones (say, the difference between the feeling of hunger and the feeling of orgasm) the world gets divided into Right and Wrong by the individual. This tendency was co-opted by societies as bodies in themselves to preserve their own structure through the creation of laws and rules. There's a reason every society on the planet has had a taboo against killing another one of Us - a society that allows its members to go around killing one another won't last. Killing one of Them, on the other hand, has always been, if not openly encouraged, at least not particularly discouraged. The problem is where Us ends and Them begins, something every society and individual has to judge for themselves.

Some people will try and argue that there is some sort of Universal-Morality-By-Consensus: “Every society in human history has considered murder WRONG. Therefore, murder is intrinsically wrong, aka EVIL.” But already there is a magic trick going on in the words: literally, murder is "wrongful killing." Note how an intrinsic "wrongness" has at this point crept into the definition of the word, so you can now offer the proposition "Murder is intrinsically wrong" and technically it's true, when in fact there is still nothing intrinsically wrong with KILLING per se. And in fact, this is where the difficulty in making it a universal law comes in: what’s the difference between killing (which is okay) and murder (which is bad)?

The Problem of Definition has again reared its ugly head. Everybody has different views of the same abstract concepts (Plato’s “perfect forms”). For people thousands of years ago, human life was sacred, but the folks in the tribe over yonder hill weren’t really human, so it was okay to wantonly murder them. In the middle ages, human life was sacred, but non-Christians, or people not of one’s particular sect of Christianity, I should say, weren’t really human, so it was okay to torture and enslave and murder them. In the pre-Civil War South, human life was sacred, but slaves weren’t really human. To your average sociopath, the only real human is the sociopath himself, or herself. Proponents of the death penalty think convicted murderers aren’t really human. The Nazis didn’t think non-Aryans were really human, and they considered their mass genocide to be nothing more than a large-scale pest extermination. But on the flipside, Vegans and their ilk have expanded their concept of “humanity” to include all members of the Animal Kingdom. For that matter, most people consider their pets to be honorary humans.

So you see, human life is sacred to everybody, but no one agrees on what a human really is. When we say “human,” we really mean our tribe, our species, our nation, our family, our race, our gang, our pets, whatever. The abstraction “human life” is the same, and everyone considers it sacred, but the definitions are always different. In the end, it all comes down to Us vs. Them, with wildly differing subjective views of what constitutes Us and Them. The Problem of Definition prevents human word-magic from ever becoming completely real (think of Orqwith bleeding over into the world and be glad) but it also leads to some major misunderstandings. Here we see that almost EVERYONE considers the killing of a member of Us to be intrinsically WRONG, but who is in the Us is entirely a matter of perspective. We create these abstract notions to explain the world, and then turn them into concrete cages with sharp borders. The universe knows no absolutes but we always try and turn an infinite scale of gray into black and white. It is how our minds work, both a great strength and a great weakness. The Double-Edged Sword strikes again!

Five Franchises That Need To Have A Free-Roamer Made

Free-roamers, or "GTA clones" to the jaded masses, are open-ended video games that progress in a non-linear fashion while giving you wide expansive areas to play in or just explore. In some of them you are a grim and gritty urban gangster type that goes around jacking cars (ie Grand Theft Auto, True Crime, Saints Row) in some of them you are super-powered (ie Infamous, Prototype or the half-dozen Spider-Man games). Or else you can be an alien (Destroy All Humans), a mercenary (Mercenaries) or just a kid trying to survive prep school (Bully). Many popular franchises (such as The Godfather, The Simpsons or the aforementioned Spider-Man) have been developed into free-roamer video games. Even Jaws got one. Here's a quick list of some that haven't and should:

1. The Prisoner. Nuff said. This would be more like Bully where you mostly traverse a smaller area on foot, since the only vehicles worth jacking in The Village would be those little golf cart things. And of course that bicycle. Probably story mode would entail some new Prisoner (Number 114?) who has been kidnapped to The Village, taking various missions (some from those who want to escape, some assigned by Number Two) while trying to escape. The good ending? You escape. The evil ending? You become the new Number Two.

2. Snake Plissken. Another no-brainer. Set it in a new futuristic post-apocalyptic wasted city (like Detroit or something) and set Snake loose in it. Some macguffin of a plot where the government sends Snake in to the city to retrieve something. Lots of side missions. Most of the amoral character-types that protagonize these games are third generation carbon copies of Snake Plissken's badassness anyway.

3. Ghostbusters. This one is so obvious that I can't believe a Ghostbusters game just came out and it's not a free-roamer. You're the new Ghostbuster recruit, drive around town in your Ecto vehicle and bust random ghost events. Story mode would be something suitably apocalyptic.

4. Batman. Spider-Man got a bunch of free-roamers. Superman got a (terrible) free-roamer. The Hulk's even had a couple. Batman's the only major superhero left. And what cooler city to free-roam in than Gotham? What cooler car to drive than the Batmobile? Zip into the sky on bat-lines, glide around with your cape, this practically writes itself.

5. Philip Marlowe. Set in 1940s Los Angeles. Written in the same over-boiled neo-noir style of Max Payne. The main story mode would involve the big convoluted case that Marlowe is in over his head in. Side missions would be smaller detective jobs to pay the bills and interesting mini-games. Travel around the city in taxis and try to avoid being doublecrossed by beautiful femme fatales.

It isn't a franchise or a property but I also have a great idea for a free-roamer called Law Abiding Citizen. I'll save that for another time though.

There's A Razor-Thin Line Between Genius And Lame

SELF-IMAGE (as expressed in Castlevania song titles)

wicked child / walking on the edge
heart of fire / poison mind / out of time / nothing to lose
dead beat / demon seed
a man who knows too much
clockwork / dance of illusions
battle with chaos
underground / message of darkness
pressure / nightmare / anxiety
revenge
cursed memories / wandering ghosts
the tragic prince
new messiah

The Gender Politics of "LOL"

"Lol" is more girly than Hello Kitty pajamas and having a womb combined. If you're a guy and you use the phrase "lol," you are no longer a guy. Sorry. You could be the most manliest, strapping lumberjack type -- wrestling crocodiles with your teeth, with seed so fertile that every woman you even glance at bears pentuplets -- and if you use the phrase "lol" you are no longer a guy. It's done. A dude that gets his dode chopped off and parades around in three-inch heels and mascara is more of a man than you are at that point.

A Brief Refutation Of Law

You ever know someone who didn't break any laws? Any laws at all? I don't mean the obvious ones like murder and rape and arson and so forth, I mean any laws period. Someone that never drove faster than the speed limit, never drank while underage, never used any illegal substance, never bought a bootleg DVD or downloaded pirated software. Never engaged in oblique sexual practices in areas where said practices were illegal. Never turned without using a blinker. Never, ever, ever broke the law. While you are out looking for this hypothetical person I am going to move ahead with my argument by assuming that this Ideal Law-Abiding Citizen simply does not exist.

Next. Imagine murder was made legal tomorrow. Are you going to go out and kill someone just because you can? If arson was legalized would you start torching shit? If rape was legal, would you be out raping people? Okay, but don't joke about it because my mother might be offended. Zing! My point is, if you were inclined to kill, burn and/or rape, chances are you would be inclined to do so even with it being illegal. How do I know this? Because these kinds of things happen every day everywhere. On the other hand, I wouldn't do any of them even if they were legal. Why? Because they are wrong... to me, at least.

Personally, I have an internalized ethics / moral code that guides me. I don't need a Mystery God to damn me, I don't need The State to imprison me. Punishments are for children. I have my own code and I live by it, and when I break it the knowledge that I fucked up stays with me forever and I would say it is punishment enough. There is no need for law.

Eh. When I was drifting off to sleep last night this was more eloquent.

The Earth's shape and a divorce from belief

(January, 2006)

I had this novel I wanted to write sometime in the late 1990s where the protagonist discovers that the Great Conspiracy’s deep dark secret is that the world is really flat. A secret society (I think I was going to call them the Brotherhood of Eratosthenes or something lame like that) has been keeping people deceived for centuries. Columbus? In on it. Magellan was killed when he discovered the truth on his own voyage. Lindbergh? In on it — and his child kidnapped and murdered when he threatened to spill the beans. Amelia Earheart? Another casualty of the code of silence. The moon landing? Faked. The real map of the Earth is the one used in the symbol of the UN with “Antarctica” actually the icy border of the flat Earth (presumably to prevent the oceans from running off.)

I never wrote it, and probably never will — mostly because I couldn’t think of a good Why — why lie about the shape of the Earth? Cui bono? But that being said, I like to use the flat earth as a good example of the way we let beliefs dominate our way of looking at the world. For all I know, the world really is flat… if they lied to me about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy I can’t rule out the possibility that they are lying to me about other things as well. I’ve never traveled around the world, I’ve never personally seen the world from space, and what other empirical evidence do I have for believing the world is round?

But before anyone jumps down my throat because I said the world is flat, understand that I don’t believe that. I accept as the most likely hypothesis the round world rather like although I have never fooled around in a particle physics lab I accept the existence of subatomic particles. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe anything about the shape of the Earth at all — based on my own information I cannot form an opinion, I can only accept the consensus reality. I think that most likely the world is round and will continue to hold that as my model of the world until I am proven otherwise — but if they flew me out to the edge of the Earth and I peered over it, I would switch my model with relative ease. After Santa Claus I am never making that mistake again.

The truth is, we know next to nothing about reality as it IS (and, if you accept quantum mechanics it appears that at the base level reality IS nothing that correlates with our own experiences) but are constantly guessing, theorizing, making it up as we go along. Thousands of years ago the best guess we had was a flat earth at the center of the universe with the sun and stars and planets fixed above us in some sort of inverted dome. But, confusing the map with the territory, we are very reluctant to let go of our pet theories and world models — consider what happened to Galileo when he found better evidence for the heliocentric model of the cosmso. Remember that they burned Bruno for suggesting that other planets might have life on them. This was in the era when religious thinking, inflexible and trapped in dogma, dominated the world — but even in scientific thinking paradigm shifts do not occur until most of the old guard dies off. We are stubborn and do not want to change the way we think. In a world that is in constant change this inflexibility is our chief downfall.

[Fwd: Fwd: fwd: The Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation!]

This is not your run-of-the-mill, harmless, chain letter. Oh no. This is the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation ! This is an electronic transcript of a chain letter someone found in their late grandfather's belongings. Apparently, the grandfather and nine of his friends received the chain letter while still in college back in the 1930s. They all scoffed at it, and all of them threw it away -- except for the grandfather, who was trying to build up the world's largest collection of chain letters so he could get into the Guiness Book Of World Records. None of them continued the chain, not believing in the powers of the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation -- and within 70 years, they were ALL DEAD!!

A woman in Denver, Colorado didn't break the chain, and received a huge raise at her job -- FOUR MONTHS EARLIER!!

Two parents in Tampa, Florida broke the chain -- their son was born with a congenital heart defect. When the son received the chain letter 15 years later, he sent it to ten of his friends, and the next day he died of heart complications. But -- HE WENT TO HEAVEN!!!

A man dreamt that if he broke the chain letter, his plane would crash. So, HE TOOK THE TRAIN INSTEAD!!!!. Actually, I'm not sure what the point of that one was.

Anyway, this is the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation!!!!! Send it to ten (10) of your friends as soon as you can, to receive good luck. If you don't have any friends, try e-mailing random people, or your congressman. If you decide to be a skeptic and break the chain, be warned -- the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation will cause you to regret your ways!!!!!!

So hit the forward button already!

Disconnect

I go through my days in a daze. Ignore the unintended wordplay and vibe with me. There is no clear connection between one moment and the next. Instead of following a linear narrative I am adrift amidst coincidences, synchronicity and Pavlovian repetition. There is no clear connection between one moment and the next, and consequently I wind up repeating the same things over.

Unable to hold my timeline in my head, I am constantly extrapolating the present moment out to fill the whole. I remember a poem I wrote a long time ago, where the gist of it was that when it's winter, in my mind it has always been winter. I remember the poem but I don't remember writing it. There is no clear connection.

As a result of this fog, I can only practically remember the last two, maybe three years of my life. Anything before that enters into the realm of myth -- half-remembered snapshots as faded and yellowed as actual photographs, and my own written record. I pore over my old writings, trying desperately to remember being the person that wrote them, but there is no clear connection.

At the present I am not paying attention to my surroundings and circumstances. I am lost in my own head, confused and constructing narratives to explain how my karma led me here. As this present slides into the past, I am already there in the future, reading these words with detachment, trying to recall where and when I wrote them. What I was doing, thinking, feeling. Trying to connect one moment to the next.

Think About The Future

(Week 21: Write a speech for an intended audience.)

          There’s something I want to talk to all of you about today, and it’s the future. When you chart the progress of humanity, the highs and the lows, when you chart the direction life has been moving in this whole time, it becomes clear that we stand today at the precipice of two paths, if I may mix metaphors: total death or eternal life. Total death would mean the extinction of all humans and the devastation of the biosphere to the point where intelligent life cannot redevelop in the time left before the sun blows up. Eternal life would entail humanity transcending their physical location and physical selves, to grow and to become gods.
          If this sounds to you like rehashed rhetoric from the Old-Time Religions, you are not far off – this conflict, this crisis of choice, has been standing before us since before we were even humans. But it is only now, as humans, that we have the knowledge, the numbers, the technology, to bring about total death or eternal life. Today I’d like to talk more about the latter.
          What do we need to do to achieve eternal life? Well, the Old-Time Religions say all you have to do is live a virtuous life and obey God and you’re set. The Eastern Philosophers imply that all life is already eternal, already one, already timeless. The Techno-Futurists say we need to work on Life Extension. They’re all right, but I would like to suggest some practical baby steps to help achieve this goal a little faster, to immanentize the eschaton such as it were.
          First, I think it is crucially important that we get off this planet. For starters, one day the sun is going to blow up. So even if we have achieved some sort of physical immortality and developed a society that will never self-destruct, as long as we are here and only here we have all our eggs in one basket. Now, that is five billion years from now, I admit, but you don’t need to cite Unicron or Galactus to imagine the possibility of a cosmic-level threat demolishing the Earth well before the sun goes. In fact, I just read on Wikipedia this morning that we only have about a billion years before the sun heats up enough to boil off all liquid water. One billion years. To put it in perspective, life itself has only existed for about four billion years. So when you look at it that way, the Earth’s biosphere is about 80% of the way through its life cycle. We can’t stay here forever.
          Once we get off the planet it will be time to start working more on inventing the Life Extension techniques the Techno-Futurists are so enamored of. The end goal of course being physical immortality or some way of preserving coherent consciousness beyond the death of the body. Why do I say wait until we are off the Earth? Because the Earth is a finite and limited space, it is a bad place for an immortal species to be reproducing. See how bad we’ve wrecked stuff up with a life expectancy of 50-80 years? Imagine how much more catastrophic it would be to the planet if we stopped dying altogether!
          Now so far I have only spoken about technological solutions for thriving in the external world. This is very important. But just as important is the development of our inner spiritual selves. Because of some quirk of our nature, or for all I know any intelligent life develops along the same lines, our technological development is chiefly driven by war, by military means. So destructive technology is always at the crest of the wave. Technology to heal, to build, to create – they are usually reverse-engineered from war toys. Study your history. But now is different, the last sixty years or so I should say. Today we have the technology to wipe out all life on Earth a hundred times over. How did it come to this? It’s not a relevant question. The question is, how do we not use it? How do we learn to connect with one another on a more organic level and leave aside the violent tendencies we inherited from our animal forebears? Remember, the world was a dangerous place for us once. Even during our early days as humans it wasn’t safe at night away from the fire, there were giant cats and other predators lurking around all the time. Eventually we consumed the wilderness, tamed or exterminated the worst of the dangerous animals, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Today the only real threat to the average human being is other human beings. Not forces of nature we cannot control. Not wild beasts we cannot overpower. Us. Only us. And so it is up to us, as a whole people, to come together. The Hippies knew it. Jesus knew it.
          How do we do this? How do we learn to love each other, to escape the Earth that birthed us and to live forever as Gods of the Cosmos? I have no idea. I only have some small pieces of the puzzle, and barely the dimmest outline of its final shape. I don’t consider this a failure; at this point in the tail-end of the Dark Ages it is necessary to talk about the changes that are necessary even if you cannot effect them yourself, to remind people that it doesn't always have to be like this, that there are greater stakes for us than financial security or social status or any other artifact of human-created society. That’s all they are, you know. Money, fame, the approval of others – none have any intrinsic worth of themselves and only have value as long as there are human minds to create them, to appreciate them, to strive for them.
          Anyway, I think I’ve said all I meant to say, except that the first step towards positive change is believing that it is possible. We have to believe that we can become gods or we are doomed to extinction. We have to rise above it all, or drown in our own shit.

The Other Sweet Science: The True History Of The Rubber Band Gun

          I was bored. That's how most of my stories begin. I was bored, so I started photoshopping word balloons onto pictures of my friends. I was bored, so I plotted a scenario to drive my girlfriend out of my life. I was bored, so I stopped going to class. In this case, I was bored, so I started shooting rubber-bands. This was at work, where the nature of the job dictates long periods of intense boredom punctuated by heavy bursts of frantic and desperate activity. This was the former. Hence the being bored, which I will keep hammering on until you are just as bored as I was.
           Shooting rubber-bands is all fine and good, but I am descended from a long line of clever tool-using monkeys and it quickly occurred to me that I could build a device to shoot them better. Based on the materials at hand I took two pens, hollowed them out and taped them together. On one end I taped down a small binder clip. With small pliers I pinched a paper-clip into a narrow s-shaped hook and I pushed it through the pen cap on the other end. Rubber-band goes here, stretches to there, clip, aim, squeeze. Thwish, snap, smack.
          The basic design was in place. The only problem was, no handle. I took stock of the items I had available to me, holding various office-supply items in my hand, squeezing them, juggling them, feeling them out. I eventually settled upon the common household tape-dispenser, the disposable plastic kind that comes with a roll of tape on it. Flip it upside down and it becomes a nice grip. I taped the shaft to it and my first rubber-band gun was born.
           That was September 1st. That night at home I took an old clothespin and replaced the binder clip. I attached a prescription bottle to the bottom of the shaft in such a way that it could be detached and rubber-bands stored inside. I wrapped the whole thing in duct tape as a finisher. I pointed, I aimed, I shot. The world felt right.
           The next day I built another one.
           The day after I built another one.
           By now I was hooked. I was experimenting with different designs, different materials. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a whole bunch of colored duct-tapes. I bought different size clothespins. I bought wooden dowels. I began scrounging around work for weird pieces of plastic, usually to be found on the floor in the back or on the ground by the dumpster. I decided that since I had built a gun a day so far for the month of September, that I would continue on that path and build at least one gun per day for the entire month. I decorated them in different colors. I gave them names: The Originator, Number Two, The Aardvark, The Assassin Pistol, Silver. I tried out different design novelties -- although I never went back to the detachable storage bottle of my first gun, I built double-shot guns (in both rifle and hand-gun variety) with Vitamin Water bottles and a dozen pen-tubes. I built one on a ruler and decorated it to look like a sword. I decorated another shaft-only model to look like the classic black and white magic wand. Abracadabra, shoot! By this point my bedroom floor was carpeted in a soft layer of rubber bands, a decor that extended to every reasonably flat surface in my room.
           In the end, I kept up to my project and didn't miss a day. Actually, by the end of September I had actually built fifty guns, ending on the 30th with the Ultimatum. Some of them were really good, a lot were mediocre -- the risk any creator faces when sticking to a given schedule -- but I had built fifty of the damn things and now I was done.
           I cleaned up the rubber bands.
           I boxed up the guns. Two boxes, one for the guns that were good shooters and aesthetically pleasing and one for the aforementioned mediocre ones.
           Then, a few months later, I built another one at work.
           Then another one. I had found a new hooking device to use, the "roundhead fastener". These were more reliable than the bent paperclip if not as easy to load.
           Then, just when it seemed I was beginning a second renaissance of rubber-band guns, I stopped.
           A similar thing had happened with the photoshopping word balloons.
           I was bored. That's also how most of my stories end.