Candy of the Mind is Candy of a Stranger

Just for those of you who are huge Magic: the Gathering junkies...

Thu, 24 May 2012 01:50:00 -0400

Just for those of you who are huge Magic: the Gathering junkies like me, here’s a fun little deck I’ve been working on since the Dark Ascension prerelease.

Scary Zombies

Standard Legal

This deck is of my own creation, and beast. Plowed through FNM for the first time with this losing one single game all night.

The value in parentheses to the right of a card is it’s mana cost. Color isn’t really important, but I included it anyway.

CREATURES - 24

4x Gravecrawler (B)

4x Diregraf Ghoul (B)

4x Highborn Ghoul (BB)

4x Cemetery Reaper (1BB)

4x Geralf’s Messenger (BBB)

2x Unbreathing Horde (2B)

2x Phyrexian Obliterator (BBBB)

SPELLS - 10

2x Ghoulcaller’s Chant (B)

2x Appetite for Brains (B)

4x Tragic Slip (B)

2x Distress (BB)

ARTIFACTS - 2

2x Lashwrithe (4)

And 24x Swamp.

SIDEBOARD:

3x Bone Splinters (B) Use against decks that drop large creatures like Titans.

3x Doom Blade (1B) Primarily used against Creature-Form Gideon, but also useful against 4/5 of the decks out there.

3x Smallpox (BB) So incredibly amazing against control. Words cannot express hwo useful this card is when played right. Ideally, discard Gravecrawler and sac Geralf’s Messenger or Gravecrawler.

4x Despise (B) For those who can afford to play loads of Planeswalkers and Wurmcoil Engines.

2x Appetite for Brains (B) Extra discard against Titans, Wurmcoil, Planeswalkers, or Sigarda. Protip: get rid of Sigarda.

If you aren’t playing Standard, Dark Ritual goes amazingly well in this deck.

Life with Tourette's

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:06:00 -0500

For those of you who don’t know, Tourette’s Syndrome (which will be shortened to TS for much of this essay…thing) is a mental disorder defined by Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857-1904). TS is characterized by a myriad of essentially uncontrollable vocal and motor ‘tics’. These tics may include such actions as blinking, tilting your head, repeating actions or words, and any number of other small things. A person with TS will perform these actions almost unconsciously, and it takes a great effort to stop them. Occasionally, a person might develop the rare tic of shouting obscenities, but this tic persists only in an extremely small amount of cases. Unfortunately, it is also by far one of the most noticeable tics out there, and so when many people think of Tourette’s Syndrome, they think immediately of a rude, vulgar, uncontrollable jerk. I have had Tourette’s Syndrome all my life, and I plan to reverse this offensive stereotype of an almost totally harmless condition.

A number of you may have seen the ‘Tourette’s Guy’ videos on Youtube. On the official TS Guy website, there is one small blurb in the ‘Contact’ section explaining that the Youtube star is not violent and vulgar due to his Tourette’s Syndrome, but more likely due to his rampant drinking. In fact, there is only one instance in the entire series that it is mentioned that he has TS, and next to none of his actions are typical of a normal person with TS. Unfortunately, the poster of the TS guy videos has neglected to mention this in any meaningful place. As such, a large amount of people have only ever had one encounter with Tourette’s - and they think that it invariably results in Tourette’s Guy.

Now, I didn’t plan to write a criticism of the TS Guy videos. Such a review would be much more in depth, and mention things like TS Guy’s lack of knowledge that his daily life is being shown to millions of Youtubers without his consent. My main goal in this post is to provide a ‘Day in the Life Of’ view of TS, so that more people can understand what people with TS are doing, and why they do them.

The very first thing that I want to say, and this is very, very important mind you, is that Tourette’s Syndrome IN NO WAY AFFECTS YOUR INTELLIGENCE. Regardless of how extreme or mundane one’s tics are, a person would have just as much intelligence (or lack thereof) if they didn’t have TS. What TS actually does is cause people to act heavily on their impulses. Imagine you were in a car, holding, say, and iPod, and the window was rolled down. You might think to yourself, “Hey, I could totally imagine throwing my iPod out the window. It would just fly down the road, huh?” A person with TS might think a similar thought - but in addition to thinking, they would feel the exact arc their arm would take, the would know how their arm would feel pressed against the glass rim of the window, and they would have the urge to complete that action at all costs.

That’s daily life for me - at any point in the day, I might get the sudden urge to do something; it could be anything at all, from snapping my fingers to hitting a wall. I would be able to feel the exact motion my muscles would go through, and I would be urged to complete the action exactly as I imagined it. Often times, tics are as minor as touching the tips of my fingers together, but sometimes they are as complex and strange as imagining daggers stuck to the bottom of my shoes, and mentally forming an image of the wave they would cut into the ground.

The mental aspect of TS is rarely heard about in the general public - for a person with TS, the mind is a place of loops and habits. Much like songs getting stuck in your head, a person with TS might get any sort of thought stuck in their head, and have it loop endlessly until they can perfect it. The most common example of this in my personal experience is the repetition of line of dialogue from any source, be it book, movie, or Tumblr comic. I will hear (/read) this line, and then it will stick in my head. I will mentally repeat it in my own voice, and almost always mess it up. So I try again. And again. And again. Only when I have successfully recreated the line in my own mind, and delivered it perfectly, will I let the phrase drift off into irrelevance.

When a person with TS tries to resist one of their urges, it is not a pleasant experience. It feels like there is pressure building inside of you, pushing you to complete your unwanted action lest it explode outwards in a monumental blast. Almost every tic is controllable, but through no small effort of will. The intensity of TS also varies from person to person - not everyone with TS will feel as extremely the need to act as seen in other cases.

I’d like to point out also that TS is often more controlled in public than in private. Throughout my day, I will rarely perform any major tics while in company. Throughout the years I’ve just become accustomed to suppressing my tics while in public. At home, though, I will twitch and move out of control. If I see a strangely made face, especially of the kind seen in memes or animations, I will unconsciously do my best to imitate that face. The same may be done for arm or leg movements, especially strange sounds, or overplayed emotions. I certainly could stop myself from doing these things if I so desired, but it would take a constant focus of effort, and honestly it’s just easier to let my body do what it wants.

To wrap things up, Tourette’s Syndrome is not the vulgarity-spewing, anger-brewing, rage-inducing thing it is often made out to be. People with TS are average, normal people, with the disadvantage of not having perfect, continuous control over their bodies. This doesn’t make us less intelligent or less able than anyone else, it just means that we might tilt our heads or blink more often than usual. In general, people with TS just want to have a normal life. We’re interested in the same things as everyone else, and we ARE normal people. It’s nothing we can control, just like our hair color or number of toes. We didn’t choose to be born with TS - we just have it. It’s not cureable, and treatment is not always effective. I’d just like to ask that if you meet someone with Tourette’s Syndrome, you treat them just like you would anyone else, and don’t just assume that everyone with Tourette’s is like Tourette’s Guy.

Who has two thumbs and hasn't posted anything in over a month and a half?

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:17:35 -0500

This Guyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Coming up soon: What life with Tourette’s Syndrome is actually like, and why the Tourette’s Guy videos on Youtube are bullshit.

Why Puzzle Games are Too Easy

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:54:48 -0500

I consider myself a pretty good puzzle solver. Portal and Portal 2 clocked up time based on how long it took me to perform the actions of a puzzle, with about 45 minutes total thrown in of silent contemplation. According to one of my good friends who’s played the Portal 2 co-op with about 30 people, I’m the fastest puzzle solver they’ve ever seen. When I finished the newly released game Q.U.B.E. in about 3.5 hours, with at least an hour of that time the result of me fighting the controls, I decided it was time for me to analyze why puzzle games are, as a whole, so easy. Now, I don’t want to come across as a pompous braggart here, so please don’t think that’s my goal - I’m honestly just trying to address an issue that I have seen in dozens of games, and there is nothing more to it.

The problem seen in almost every puzzle game ever released is their straightforwardness. In a puzzle, you are given a small number of elements that you can manipulate in order to reach your goal. Your environment is unchangeable, your resources are limited - you have 5 keys and you need to find the one that opens the door. Let me give a few examples.

I’m sure a good number of you know this room as part of Chamber 18 in the original Portal. In this room, there are 5 elements, which I will list in the order in which you use them

1) The Turrets - these prevent you from crossing the room

2) The Energy Ball - this kills the turrets, and activates the scaffolding to allow you to cross the room.

3) The Energy Ball Catcher - this activates the scaffolding.

4) The Cube - you need to bring this out of the room.

5) The Exit Button - this opens the door out of the room, albeit for only a short time.

The solution to this puzzle is easy. Your ultimate goal is to bring the cube from one side of the room to the other. Standing in your way are he turrets, the pit traversed by the scaffolding, and the exit door locking you in.

Your first goal is to cross the room, and so you must 1) eliminate the turrets and 2) activate the scaffolding. At this point, you can only manipulate 2 elements: you can open the ball catcher for a split second, and you can use portals to send the energy ball around the room. Since stepping on the scaffolding is deadly with turrets aiming at you, (they inhabit the now vacant 4 stands in the picture above) your first goal is now to eliminate the turrets, which can be done, technically, with as few as five portal placements, although more will let you do it faster. It is supremely easy to bounce the energy ball into them and knock them out of commission. There are now 4 elements remaining.

You can progress no further without the scaffolding, so assuming you have decent timing, you can simply bounce the energy ball into it’s receptacle without much trouble. This eliminates both the Energy Ball and Catcher as elements, which leaves you with only two remaining: The Cube and the Exit Button.

A quick portal fling brings you directly to the cube, and you can drop down into the area with the exit button from the scaffolding. At this point, your only goal is to press the exit door button and get back to the other side of the room (with the cube) before the door closes. Considering the ease of this task with portals, you can rightly disqualify it as a puzzle entirely, and call it a challenge of coordination and speed.

And there we are, one of the most difficult puzzles in Portal cut down into 3 steps that could all be logically deduced. The reason? There was only a handful of elements to work with. This phenomenon takes much more precedence in Q.U.B.E. - while the game is certainly well made and has a slick design, early rooms present you with only two or three elements that act in one specific way, every time, and are immovable. Later in the game the difficulty ramps up a bit when you can change the position of the elements and, within a limit, what they do as well, but there are still never more than 4 or 5 distinct elements in a room.

So here is my hypothesis: In order to make puzzle games more difficult, long-lasting, and increasingly enjoyable, USELESS ELEMENTS NEED TO BE ADDED.

In Portal, imagine being given a room with a button and an energy ball receptor. You will need to activate one with either a cube or an energy ball, but only one of those things resides in the rest of the puzzle. And so you might wander through the chamber looking for a cube to place on the button, while in reality you only needed to use the energy ball readily available to solve the puzzle. The red herring throws off the puzzle solver, because they THINK they have to use it. Imagine a platformer game where there are dozens of platform paths leading to unknown locations, but remain unreachable throughout the course. They provide an illusion of complexity and difficulty, while in reality they are just there to mislead the player. These kinds of false leads would drastically improve a puzzle game by giving the player a much more element-loaded environment. It’s the difference between telling someone to solve a 10-piece jigsaw puzzle, and telling them to solve a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with a pool of 1,250 pieces.

The Eleventh Hour, a puzzle book by Graeme Base, is an astounding example of how puzzles SHOULD be done. I heavily suggest it to anyone with a modicum of interest in puzzle solving. Throughout the book are hidden a myriad of clues directing the reader to find the culprit of the crime central to the book’s story. By no means do you need to solve every puzzle in the book, or even most of them. Solving only a few will let you find your answer, although you’re almost your time if you don’t try to solve the rest. I very much liked the book, though, because of it’s non-linear, solve-what-you-need-to-solve style. There are, of course, a number of red herrings throughout the book, placed into the easiest of puzzles to lead you astray. The cleverest thing about the book, though, is the lack of direction in solving the puzzles. At face value, the book is a strange tale of an elephants birthday party and the disappearance of his feast. Look closer, though, and you will notice patterns of letters and numbers carefully hidden away in the gloriously illustrated pages. Lines of hieroglyphics, jumbles of numbers that follow a simple A-1, B-2 translation, and even a message only revealed when the book is upside down are all contained within, and they all point to the culprit in some small way.

In short, puzzle games are limited by their elements. Anyone can solve a jigsaw puzzle when there are 4 pieced and you just need to use trial and error. The same is not true of a Rubik’s Cube, where you can turn any nine of 26 minicubes in any of 6 directions at any given time. In order to improve future puzzles and make puzzle games more enjoyable, we need to clutter up the environment, add a few staircases leading to nowhere, and build a large tank to hold red herrings in. The result will be a longer, more enjoyable puzzling experience for all.

Crows, Final

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:52:00 -0500

AT LONG LAST.

Crows is finished. Done. Should have been ages ago, but yeah, I’m lazy and largely unmotivated. But while at a friends house at 2 in the morning, I decided I had nothing better to do than finish that one story that had been sitting on my desktop for a month now, and pushed out the last eighth or so in half an hour. Soon I’ll get around to having someone edit it and point out any stupid story/grammatical flaws I may have, at which point I will refine and reupload. For now, Enjoy Crows, my Sci-Fi/Fantasy short story weighing in at just over nine pages. http://tinyurl.com/74ej7rz

Crows, Pt. III

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:30:06 -0400

Yep, a but later than I would have liked, but it’s here all the same. Enjoy.

http://bit.ly/mUXpFs

Crows Scedule

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 03:13:56 -0400

Life has been problematic. Due to the problematic nature of life, I didn’t upload a Crows update yesterday, nor today (pretend that 12:10 in the morning still counts as the 21st). That being said, I WILL upload an update tomorrow (I refer to the 22nd); maybe two updates. Crows will be finished in those one or two updates - it really isn’t all that long. To wrap things up, sorry for the wait, THANK YOU to my first followers :D, Crows will be finished shortly, and everyone reading this should send me a question to answer.

On Fiction and the Multiverse

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:55:00 -0400

I’ve been consumed lately with devising a reasonable explanation for how multiple universes could coexist and interact. And while it would almost certainly be riddled with errors when studied with physics in mind, I do believe I can now explain how fanfiction and the Internet work. Put simply, there is next to no fiction anywhere in the Multiverse. The vast majority of what we believe is fiction is, in fact, a series of signals being transmitted to our universe from other universes. When an author thinks they have devised som cunning new plot idea, they are in fact unconsciously acting as the historian for some far distant world and merely recording what has happened there. Of course, the author’s mind does change certain details and events to make them plausible in our universe and develop certain favorite characters - were you to travel to the Harry Potter Universe right now, it would not be identical to the universe portrayed by Miss Rowling. Rather, a number of small details would be different; perhaps the portrait of Dumbledore actually hangs on the side wall of the Headmaster’s office, or said office is actually on the next floor up. Each individual change is meaningless, but they are cumulatively effective enough to separate a real world from an author’s imperfect portrayal. There are, however, certain cases where the author/world relationship is reversed. Rarely, an author is struck with a true stroke of imagination, and the become the unknowing God of their own world. What they write of their world HAPPENS in it, and they shape the main path their characters take. Again, small details may change, but the majority of the world age according to it’s authors design. As said, not a very practical explanation, but at least moderately plausible and rather entertaining.

Is the question you asked Discord solvable, or is it truly impossible?

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:06:20 -0400

I haven’t the slightest idea! /)^3^(\

Crows, Pt. II

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:41:00 -0400

Hey, look, a Crows update! Already! Wow, I honestly expected to forget about that and make up some excuse in a week or so. For as long as I remain dedicated, though, I’ll try to churn out an update every day or two. Stay tuned, tell your friends, (not nearly enough people read my blog, and I crave attention) and it’s not Slenderman.

Crows, Pt. II: http://bit.ly/n8EYmy

Crows

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:31:00 -0400

Writing about social and internet issues and phenomenon is surprisingly difficult when you need to think of non-massively controversial topics like abortion, religion, economics, and gay rights. I try to avoid all these things, so as to avoid discriminating against any sort of group or demographic.

Moving on, I’ll not be writing about for world perception, internet anonymity, or anything of the sort for a while unless someone sends a question about it my way (hint hint). For now, I will be focusing on a short Sci-Fi story I’m writing, which focuses on perception of the world (yes, I know, but it’s not an essay about it), changing the way people think, and a very small town in the middle of Kansas. Enjoy the first part of “Crows”.

http://bit.ly/p2tB3I

Out of Work, Will Write for Metal

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:23:00 -0400

I seem to have very little to write about currently. There is a little button on the side of my blog asking you to ask me something to answer back to you. I heavily suggest you press it.

Besides that, if you have any special piece of writing that needs doing (blog, homework, paper on microphysics superconductors (not really that last one)), I would happily write such a thing for you in exchange for some Team Fortress 2 items. Just saying.

I would suggest the blue ones, they taste the best.

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:29:10 -0400

Indeed. I shall shortly proceed upon an epic quest to procure one of these so-called ‘Flubberwarts’. Wish me luck.

May I suggest to you a Flubberwart?

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:53:04 -0400

I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea what a Flubberwart is, but you’re free to suggest one to me.

On Tag Flooding

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:42:00 -0400

For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept, Tag Flooding is when a person, while uploading something to the internet, attaches as many tags to it as they can possibly think of. The goal of tag flooding is invariably that of garnering more views on one’s work. In general, though, it is largely frowned upon by the internet at large, primarily because of its atrocious misuse. In fact, Tag Flooding is probably the second most misused idea on the internet, falling in shortly behind anonymous posting in a forum based on registered users. Both ideas sound excellent in theory - both are a disaster in practice. But it does not always have to be so - I plan to Tag Flood this very post, and I plan to do it in a responsible, acceptable way. Just how to Tag Flood responsibly and acceptably, I will shortly explain.

Take a look at, say, YouTube. See if you recognize the makers of the videos in the top watched of all time list. They’ll be such ultra-famous figures as Justin Beiber, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Eminem. Because I have no idea of the lives of Jennifer Lopez and Eminem, and I’m not a particular fan of Justin Beiber, I will use Lady Gaga in further examples. Now, when Lady Gaga makes a new video, EVERYONE watches it. Tags are largely irrelevant to her - she could tag her videos exclusively with the names of small African governments and it would bear to ill effect on her view count. People hear of her videos through friends and links, which are not spread by Lady Gaga herself. She has long surpassed the time when she needed to tag her videos, and Tag Flooding would be deemed immature and unnecessary for her.

Let’s take a step down the ladder of fame, shall we? Now, we move onto the basic YouTube pseudo-star. Some good examples would be Ray William Johnson, Shane Dawson, or Freddie Wong. They’re all decently famous on YouTube, but not nearly as well known anywhere else. They might want to tag their videos with the name of their YouTube channel to help direct viewers to their newest videos, but there is no need to fill their tags with every little element their video contains. Again, Tag Flooding here would be unneeded and unwise.

The next step down on the ladder is me. At least at the time of this posting, precious few people have actually read what I’ve written. (To those who have and are - Thank You! It means a lot to me.) Were I to tag this post with nothing but “Candy of the Mind,” next to nobody will ever read it. And so I will tag it wish such things as ‘internet,’ ‘youtube,’ ‘tag spam,’ and other relevant variations. Should I ever gain any modicum of fame or a following, such tags will become unnecessary, and stop. From that point onward word of mouth will do the work for me, and I will have progressed to the stage of the YouTube pseudo-stars. Until then, however, Tag Flooding is essentially the only way for my blog to popularity, short of spouting links across a random assortment of sites around the internet. Keep in mind, though, the enormous difference between how I Tag Flood, and how the next person down on the ladder does the same.

The last rung of the ladder is inhabited by the depraved human beings who deem it necessary to tag everything WITH everything. They are the teenager who tags a self-written rap song with Justin Beiber, Ludacris, Rebecca Black, Lady Gaga, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Eminem. This is the epitome of Tag Flood misuse, and the usage that garners the most hate for otherwise useful mass tagging. The best example I can think of of such a system in action is that of Scratch. Scratch is a brilliant program hailing from MIT that allows younger children to design their own programs. It’s a genius, malleable tool that I enjoyed working with for quite some time. But, forgive the lapse into profanity, their tagging system is retarded as all hell. ANYONE can tag ANYTHING with ANYTHING. This, in a community comprised primarily of children aged 9-14. On every single project to hit the front page of their website, there will be at least four “X was here” tags within the hour. Other users go through and tag everything with pizza, ice cream, Halo, or simple profanities. This mob-tag mentality is incredibly detrimental to the Scratch community, and although tags can be removed by the uploader, the system is practically built to train young children how to Tag Flood in the worst way.

And so I’d like to end this post with a plea to the many peoples of the internet. Respect the tagging system, regardless of the site it’s on! Don’t become a nuisance by over saturating your posts with inane tags. Use what you need, to the extent that you need it, and keep in mind that others may need more tags than you do to receive the views they desire. Finally, and as one last example and warning, if you don’t want to be hailed as a complete jerk, stop tagging videos of your cat with ‘Political Debate’.

On Modern Day Vocabulary, or the Lack Thereof

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:38:00 -0400

It’s a well known phenomenon that the average vocabulary of the world today is but a shadow of it’s former self. A year ago, a classmate asked me the definition of ‘decay’. Since then, I have been asked to define everything from ‘ascertain’ to ‘verbatim’. I’ll grant that certain archaic words (shall, wont, forsooth and the like) may simply have not been encountered by today’s youth. I’ll allow the same to be said of most nouns - one can hardly be expected to keep up with every new invention on the market. Even so, the average reading and comprehension level of today’s student body is horribly sub-par.

The Internet is not helping. Nor are cellphones - spellcheck is a useful tool, and I encourage it’s use, but it does nothing to help a teenager chose the more specific, precise words needed to develop their vocabulary. In a world where everything is shortened, be it ‘you’ to ‘u’ or ‘I have to leave’ to ‘g2g’, nobody seems to have the time to use the higher vocabulary words. Why type ‘malevolence’ when you can type ‘bad’? Why learn new words when you can right click and hit the thesaurus button?

Perhaps the death of vocabulary can be accredited to the lack of reading that becomes more pronounced with every passing year. Today’s children just ARE NOT READING. All entertainment is delivered to them via television and video games. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good round of TF2 as much as the next guy, but I also enjoy a good long time alone with a book. I have at least one friend who hasn’t read a non-assigned book since the 6th grade. A child’s vocabulary is now gleaned exclusively from television and angry nerds shouting into headsets, resulting in a rapidly approaching generation of teenagers who swear at a screen more often than they turn a page, and who wouldn’t read a 200 page novel to save their lives.

All that vocabulary is is a reflection of what it’s user hears, reads, or thinks. In the past, children read great works of literature, and their vocabulary grew accordingly. Today, I’ve heard teenagers complain that they had to read ALL of “To Kill a Mockingbird” rather than a select few passages. Such a deprived youth leads to a world of deprived adults, and it won’t be long until the world that philosophers and scientists fear comes to be reality: a world of idiots, whose lives center around commercial media. I hate to compare anything anywhere near our world to “Idiocracy”, but the lowering of vocabulary is the first sign of a direct lowering of intelligence as a whole. Somehow, the intelligence level of the world as a whole needs to be raised dramatically, or we are doomed to fall into a pit of depravity, without even the knowledge to know that we have fallen.

Did you know "mage" is an anagram?

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:11:09 -0400

http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

On Anonymity and the Internet

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:46:48 -0400

Everybody knows of the anonymous nature of the internet, made famous through YouTube, /b/, and the myriad of other famous sites. Primarily, though, anonymity is seen on message boards and chat sites. Here, a pseudo-community is born, with all of the little intricacies inherent to such a population. People fight, form friendships, and fool around. They quickly grow used to the facade put on for them by their friends on the internet, without a thought to spare for who they really are. A hardened criminal could be an admired philosopher on the internet, hidden behind a screen name and a collection of reputation-building posts. Contrastingly, a genuinely good person might fall to the lure of anonymity, and become a notorious troll. After all, they have nothing to fear but the glancing disapproval of faceless masses they will never meet face to face. In short, it is an unfortunate aspect of the internet that one must judge a person exclusively by how they act when cloaked by anonymity, disregarding any other features not immediately apparent.

And yet, such a system is far superior to the alternative.

Imagine a world where everyone using the internet was immediately identifiable by anyone they should meet in their browsing. It would be a world almost entirely devoid of trolls and griefers, and at first glance a much more peaceful, productive society. At a second glance, however, one realizes what has been lost - many of the blogs, which were run by those who would now be too embarrassed to spill their life onto the page. Likewise, practically all of the forums would disappear, considering that any inane, counterproductive post you made could be easily traced directly back to you by anyone. Forums in general would exist only for usage in politics and business concerns, where they would hold no function greater than that of discussing policies and financial plans with employees in largely different time zones, and even then only in cases where the situation could not be resolved in a short amount of time. Porn, of course, would be right out - whether that’s a positive or a negative, I’ll leave you to decide.

It is an unfortunate truth, then, that the mechanics of internet relations are very nearly at the peak of their efficiency. While it would be useful to have direct links to a poster in certain situations and on specific sites, such a system would have to be modeled with the utmost care, keeping in mind the right of a user’s privacy. If implemented incorrectly, the world would become like that in 1984, and no sane person would use the internet for casual activities at all.

To draw a final conclusion, anonymity should remain untouched for as long as possible. It is a system that, for the most part, is working just fine. Of course there is the occasional internet crime, but it pales in comparison to the vast amount gained by allowing the community an anonymous cloak. Until such a time as we can responsibly and effectively censor the internet, in such a manner that will cause no ill to befall a single honest user, it needs to remain as it is, unchanged.

I Think, therefore I am Alone

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:44:55 -0400

Ah, Descartes, you glorious genius! To those who may not know, René Descartes is credited with the phrase ‘Cogito ergo sum’, which translates to ‘I think, therefore I am.’ A truly magnificent gem of a thought, which basically states that you can only be certain you have thought. The phrase tells its reader only that they are capable of thinking, and casts all other experiences into doubt. If you think, you are clearly aware of your thoughts, but you cannot be guaranteed to be aware of the world around you.

Essentially, all you can prove in the universe is that you yourself are thinking. You cannot prove that when you turn around, everything you do not observe does not fall away into nothingness, to be instantly recalled at the next moment in which you observe it. You cannot prove that any other human being is truly sentient and aware, as opposed to an unthinking automaton built to fulfill the purpose of making you think there is a genuine world around you. You cannot prove that gravity pulls objects together - you can only prove to yourself, and yourself alone, that YOU perceive that gravity works as such. You can only prove to yourself alone that YOU perceive people surrounding you as having thoughts, feelings, and ambitions. You can only prove to yourself that YOU perceive objects with permanence, and that in YOUR mind, they remain in existence even when unobserved. Reality as you perceive it is only reality as you perceive it.

Descartes’ statement brings to light the intriguing subject of how one perceives the world. As we can clearly see from the colorblind, (no pun intended) different people perceive the world in dramatically different ways. Extending the idea, what is to say that every person on earth sees the world in a slightly different color scheme? The colorblind, in the vast majority of cases, simply can’t distinguish certain colors from other certain colors. But if every person on earth saw, say, the color purple as something completely different, nobody could ever tell. If you saw what you currently believe is purple as what you currently believe is green, and people told you that green was fresh and lush, and purple somber and dark, then a wall painted a true purple would look to you the same as a truly colored open field. And yet, you would still think it somber and dark, because you had always been told that that specific color was such. You had never purple as anything else, and so whether you saw purple as blue, green, red, or striped silver and gold, you would treat it the same as plain old purple.

Expanding the idea of colors to a global scale, it is easy to imagine that the entire world is vastly different than how you perceive it. At this point, I’d like to reference Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a novel by Susanna Clarke. In this novel, there is a time when Johnathan Strange, a magician, attempts to and succeeds in driving himself mad, with the express goal of seeing the world in a different light. During his brief experiments with madness, he sees such things as candles in the back of everyone’s heads. The entire back of their skull is simply gone, and burning in the space is a single candle; Strange merely wonders what would happen if he were to sneak up behind them and blow it out. Another more whimsical fit of madness causes him to believe that every person around him is hiding pineapples all about their persons - stuffed in their pockets and nostrils, their clothing bulging with the prickly fruit, all over them, as they do their best to hide the fruits from his searching eyes. For the time it takes for his madness to wear away, Strange slowly regains his senses, but remains unsure of whether people actually have candles in their heads, or actually are smuggling pineapples about, and cannot say for certain whether these are normal things to do. In his mind, at least for a time, such oddities are the essence of normality - they are solid facts as obvious as that the sky is blue or that 2+2=4. He does not question them, because his mind knows of no world but what it saw at that time.

To draw a final conclusion from this mess, no person on this planet can be truly sure of anything they see. There is no guarantee we are not all living in the Matrix, or that we are not all within a dream within a dream. We cannot tell whether the person standing next to us is alive and sentient as we are, or whether they are as a person in the background of a dream. Next time you know you are dreaming, try asking a person around you if they are real. Chances are, they say yes, and, chances are, they are lying through their teeth. It is impossible to verify anything but ones own existence, and springing from that conclusion we have the fact that if one sees the world as a madman, that is their normal world, and to them, escape from it would be itself madness. Any world you see is your only perceived world, and there is nothing and no one that can make it otherwise.

As a final note, though, it might be wise to continue acting upon the assumption that everything and everyone around you do, indeed, exist. As a simple extension of Pascal’s Wager, if they do not exist and you act as if they do, you have nothing to lose - but if they do exist and you act accordingly, you have everything to gain.