This is my emacs.
There are many like this one, but
This emacs is mine.

So first of all, this entry is more of a stream of consciousness entry, rather then some of the more crafted entries that I usually write.

I've been on-and-off following Ze Frank for quite a long time now, I wasn't exactly ground floor, but I was pretty early into it. The thing with Ze, is that as the show--the story even--progressed, he invited more and more contributions. A wiki, an earth sandwich, show intros, power moves... but the culmination is when Ze himself appears to have been affected by a song sung by a Preacher to his daughter, titled "I'm about to whip somebodys ass".

This song spawned countless numbers of remixes. A video was created. Okay .. get this, a video was story boarded by a member of the "audience", then another member (or the same one?) offered portrait skeches to anyone who would help fill in the video. The video was made, and suddenly, this Ray, this unsuspecting hyper-intelligent preacher now finds the trajectory of his life shifted, as he is inundated with countless versions of his song, in audio and even video format.

But people's lives are forever changed because of this song as well. If life, work, or whatever is just stressful...

Hum it to yourself.

You know the words.

Which leads me to say... over and over again: it's just a video blog, right?

Look, there is no denying, judging by the traffic that hits ZeFrank.com/org that his work has changed people, but if you watch the show, you can see how people change his work. An intro, a question in the forum. Creativity and culture just building and building on itself.

This is culture.

This is our culture re-inventing itself. There is no discussion about copyright. Its as if the contributors, Ray, Ze, the Sports Racers are all too busy inventing culture to worry about that shit. I am too, so that is enough of THAT particular hobby horse.

So on todays Ze, he flies to St. Louis to present Ray with a bunch of materials that the Sports Racers--the watchers of the show, more on this a little later too--have built for Ray, as tokens of gratitude. As you watch the show, you learn all kinds of interesting things about Ray. He is an anthropologist, a psychologist, a healer. He has long views. Just go watch the show.

Okay, so everything comes full circle at this point right? Like, Ray changes the sports racers life with his song, they change his life. It actually kinda brings a tear to my eye, total strangers are doing really deeply positive things for eachother. When I think about the kind of world I want Harmony to grow up in, this is the kind of world I think of.

Now the thing about Ze, is that he is almost through. In march, the show is officially over. I don't know if the wiki will still be around, or if the archives will still be around. I am going to guess that they will, so if you joined the game late, well shit, don't worry, just pick a few shows, and dive in. I have a few favorites, go check em out.

The thing is, that what will be around is a bunch of people who are used to, and demand that their media is 2 way. It's not enough to passively sit back and consume a the show, but it is instead about contributing to it. StrongBad emails are funny because of the encouragement to send StrongBad an email, because it's the interaction that really makes it funny and gives it its spark.

It makes people passionate. When you're that involved in the remixes for Ray project, it shows through in what you do and what you create. Ze's passion comes out in his work, and it infects everyone.

And now, he's made a social networking site about awesomeness, projects, and connections.

So a Project like "Remixes for Ray" which is totally awesome can grow feet a little easier, and then take off.

Maybe we can find more Rays. And I think that is important right now.

Like I said. The show is ending. According to the mythology--yes, this show has a mythology--because a giant baby has been born, the apocalypse is coming soon. Not only that, but Ze's internments into the league of awesomeness is coming to a close--again according to the mythology. But heres the thing, the sports racers believe the mythology. They do, they believe in the apocalypse more then 90% of the Christians, Muslims, Atheists, or Buddhists believe in their token world(limiting)view. They know its absurd, and revel in the absurdity of it all and, like I said, use it as a spring board to create, and I mean really, seriously create Culture. It is a Culture I can get behind. And these fanatical Sports Racers, Racing their Sports, with their Power Moves can all get in contact with each-other.

This is powerful stuff I think. I think Ze has unleashed upon the internet an interesting phenomenon that starts to link together people on the internet. Not in the mid 90's computers-are-being-linked kind of way, not in the yet-another-social-networking-service way where it is just a big popularity contest. But in linking together people who create, because all create. He has created a monster, and he is ready to unleash his hordes across the universe.

I created my own 4 character Idiom: 只寺永自

只 Only
寺 Buddhist Temple
永 Eternity
自 Oneself

The only Buddhist Temple is the Eternal Self

Expect a bunch more as I learn more and more of the Kanji. For now I call them 外人熟語, or "Out Side Person Idioms".

The title of course, refers to a Zen koan where a doctor gets upset, becuase he fixes up solders, and they just go back into battle, and get hurt again, or even die.

it also refers to the fact that peopl esometimes ask me "Why do you read tarot?"

This is why.

Merlin Mann over on 43 folders has this great post on what can be called the Tale of two selves. The meat of this entry is that the unified self that we believe is responsible for our actions is an illusion. The self that might set goals like "I wont to work hard, be productive and buy a house." may be over-ridden by another self that is faced with the prospect of hard partying and instant gratification. We wander through life assuming that the 'I' is a stable rock that we can cling to, when there seems to be similar selves but with different motivations at different times. The same I that says "I am on a diet!" is not the same I that is buying the ice cream.

But this separation of selves is much more subtle then a distinct dumb-ass-instant-grat-self and the monocle-wearing-disciplined-self. Not only are the selves that we wear when at home, work, or the club are all different selves, but the selves that we present to our bosses and our team members are different. The same me that comes home from work is not really the same me that kisses my daughter "goodnight". So what happens when one self wants something, but the other does not? Which self wins? Which self should win? Which self is the real me? Which me should make the decisions?

Perhaps most illustrative of this whole concept of multiple selves, and more importantly, multiple selves in conflict is illustrated with a self-battle every day at around 5:30. I know I should be heading home, cause that is the optimal time to catch the train, go see my wife and daughter, but... just. One. More. Frag. (won't hurt). The me that is in the immersive game of Quake 3 wants to show these jerkbags what-for, but the other me wants to go home and see my family. On to of that, there is a background me that is avoiding going home, cause that means I'll have to deal with my other job sooner.


This is very deeply connected to the "50K feet", and "runway" views of your life that David Allen talks about. For those that don't know, the "Runway" is whats going on (and what needs to be done) right now. Then there are the views of your life, getting higher and higher. 10K feet being your current projects, 20K feet being the projects for this year, all the way up to 50K feet, which is your life's goal, your raison d'etre. The thing is, that you have to have a clear line between the runway and 50K feet. If your nose is pointed at the British Isles, but you want to go to Japan, then you're going to have to make an in-air turn, and that is going to be painful.

Now the first urge is to say "Well okay, lets turn this plane west, and be done with it.", which is to say, buckle down and get to reaching your goals. But if your nose is pointed East, but your goals are pointed West, which is out of sync? Do you need a course correction at a higher level or a lower level? In reality, two goals aren't quite so mutually exclusive. That being said, if my 50K feet goals are in sync with the selves-that-I-am-in-my-daily-life, then it is much easier to achieve them. But if you really feel that your life's work is to save the world, and you are cranking widgets from 9-5, then you have a problem. Maybe you need to reset your 50K view, and choose a different direction for your life, maybe you need to work toward quitting your job and figure out how to save the world instead, or perhaps you need to re-evaluate how the widget cranking is helping you to save the world.

I think that the crux of getting your selves to work together as a unified country, instead of a civil war is to start by extending lines down from the 50K view. To meet your goal of changing the world, you need to eventually boil that down to action steps and this process of boiling down your life's work means starting at your top, with things like retirement goals and the goals you have for the next 50 years, and working your way down the ladder to 20, 10, and 5 years, until you get down to where the rubber meets the road (or runway in this extended analogy). As you start this boiling down task, you might see goals that work their way upward. In fact, ideally, you will have a situation where some of your more immediate goals can start to fall in sync with the loftier goals as a person.

So when magicians are talking about their true-will, this is where they are going with it. To understand ones desires, from the base desires like,"ugh! want to have crazy-sex shoot big imaginary virtual guns at people and eat cookie dough ice cream!" all the way up to the lofty "I must save the world—no one else is." is to get at the heart of ones "true will".

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

It's old, but Erisian wisdom is worth keeping.

It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot it up. This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user interfaces.

—Neil Stephenson, In the Beginning... was the Commandline

Greg asked me on IRC the other day why I tend to write functions in scheme as
(define foo (lambda (bar) ... )) instead of
(define (foo bar) ... )?

It was then that I realized it was my Memento Mori. It is my way of saying to myself "functions are just values that can be bound to names like anything else".