Author Archives: itlandm

Heartwarming underwear

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“Is it that hard for you to understand how important panties are?” I am pretty sure most regular viewers of Japanese anime of the romantic comedy type are very well aware of how important panties are, but evidently some autistic artists are not. We are not actually shown that part though, thank goodness and the Japanese television code.

And now for something entirely different from my previous entry! That’s why it is a Chaos Node. (It is not a death and destruction node though.) If it were an Order Node, I would write the same kind of stuff every time. Perhaps I should have one of those too. But now: Friendship and panties, the Japanese way.

Last night I watched 6 episodes of a romantic comedy animation, Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo (probably meaning “The pet girl of Cherry Hall”.) It is about a reasonably normal young man, studying at an art academy and living in a cheap dorm called Sakurasou (Cherry tree apartment house, unless my anime-level Japanese fails me.) The other residents are the most eccentric of the students, but they pale in comparison to the new girl who moves in: A high-functioning autistic, who is already a famous painter but has trouble deciding what clothes to put on (if any) each morning, not to mention challenging tasks like shopping food. With the main character being the most normal one around, the teacher tasks him with keeping the new girl dressed and fed and getting her to school each day. After all, he has taken care of several cats, so he is obviously reliable.

As can be expected, various embarrassing situations ensue with alarming frequency. Outsiders tend to misunderstand the situation, especially a girl in his class who has a pretty obvious crush on him, but thinks he is in an intimate relationship with Autistic Girl. And as often the case with this genre in Japan, there is a lot of underwear going around and generally semi-sexual situations.

Despite the recurring sexual content, there is as usual in this type of series no actual fornication, although one would think the thought would cross the minds of various characters from time to time, and probably not a few viewers.

The most interesting part, however, is how friendly and heartwarming the whole story is. Watching it reminded me of why I tend to greatly enjoy Japanese erotic comedies. They portray human folly without malice. Everyone is treated with a certain measure of respect, despite the embarrassments they suffer. The characters are genuinely likable and tend to find traits to admire in each other, even those who don’t necessarily get along well. I think this inherent respect for other people (or at least countrymen) is an integral part of Japanese culture.

Or perhaps, as I say about my NaNovel this year, it is “the Japan that only exists in our heads.” The Holy Land of a new era, eh?

This is indeed the kind of atmosphere I wish I could convey in my own fiction: The lighthearted but sincere friendship, youthful excitement and freshness, the heartwarming fun. Just without the panties. Wait, that did not sound quite right. Just without having to actually show the panties. Unfortunately, I can’t hold a candle to this story yet.

Things I have learned

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It is around 50 years since I learned to talk. It took most of that time to learn to shut up.

It is easier to write wisely than to talk wisely, and very hard to talk wisely until you have learned to not talk. Often it is wiser to continue not talking.

Reading strengthens the mind, and writing makes it clearer.

Good books are like friends, and even mediocre books are like comrades. But there are some books that will hurt you, just as there are people.

Before you speak with conviction about what you have not experienced yourself, make sure to have read many books about it, not one or two or five.

Being intelligent is like inheriting money: It is nothing to be proud of, it is easy to waste, and you end up being held responsible for more.

Intelligence is not enough for wisdom. I am wiser than some who are more intelligent than me, and more foolish than some who are less intelligent.

No amount of running will take you to the goal if you start in the wrong direction and never turn. The same goes for thinking, no matter how smart you are.

Thinking for yourself is highly overrated. By the time you discover the wheel, those who listened carefully have been to the moon and back. First stand on the shoulders of giants, then reach for the stars.

When we are children, we cannot choose who to learn from. As we grow older and seek to learn deeper truth, the right teacher becomes very important. A good rule is to know them by their fruits.

Being highly skilled is often less useful than being able to cooperate with others. Even if you are strong, there are things you cannot lift but which three or four can lift together.

Won NaNoWriMo!

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Every day, every passing day, for hours and hours I wrote about other people playing Go. And other vaguely Japanese-inspired things. 

This morning, I had 50800 words of continuous fiction written in November! So that was a total NaNoWriMo win. In all fairness, I had taken the month off. And also, there was no new awesome computer game this fall. (It may be said with some grain of truth that I lost to Skyrim last year. I am ashamed of this now.)

More surprising, I felt the urge to write a couple thousand more words after I had “won”, even though I have no plans to publish my novel. Maybe I will put it up on the Net, I have not decided yet. But basically, it has begun to become interesting again toward the end. I am only writing the things that interest me now. I was thinking of dragging out the angst about losing his girlfriend a bit more, but seriously he was never that into her in the first place. Playing Go was more interesting. Not that this book is autobiographical or anything. I think it is hard to imagine for the ordinary reader how non-autobiographical it is. ^_^

My arm hurts almost like in the old days, and I have dictated a few paragraphs; that is all my throat can take, given how rarely I speak these years. It has been raining a lot this month and this has kept me from exercising as normal, even though my pulse has gone back down to normal levels (for me, not for ordinary humans). According to my doctor, an hour of exercise each day is necessary to keep my arm from growing stiff and sore when I write a lot, and it seems he was right.

But today, there is no pressure. I have already won. ^_^

I hate people like me

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There are those who surpassed despair and still failed to reach their goal! You’ll find lots of them on the NaNoWriMo forums, particularly in the forum called “NaNoWriMo ate my soul”. And people like me are not making them feel any better. Not sure what to do about that, given that I have been there myself. Many times. Years in a row sometimes.

Still talking about the National Novel Writing Month. I hate it when there are overachievers who finish in a week, or ten days, or two weeks, while ordinary people struggle to get to 50 000 in 30 days. These speed writers make the rest of us look bad. This year, I am well on my way to hating myself. 42717 words as of day 10.

I would have felt better about it if the story was coherent and without boring parts. But hey, at least there are vague traces of the vague plot I had when I started. I thought for sure it gave up the ghost after the first week or so, but there is a ghost of sorts in it now, so that is good, I guess.

Still NaNoWriMo

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I have been writing quite a bit. Not just the fiction, but some entries too. I just don’t upload them. I think they may be too good for me. I have to take care. When the Christian Bible says that “Not many of you become teachers, since we know that we shall receive that much more severe judgment”, I don’t think it only refers to the afterlife or our judgment day. That too, probably. But I have seen things during my lifetime that makes me believe Boris Mouravieff is right when he says, those who talk about the spiritual Truth will wake the General Law, will draw it’s attention, and it will begin to react against them. Kind of like naming the Dark One in the Wheel of Time books or in the Lord of the Rings. There are forces whose attention you don’t want to attract when you are a newbie.

The novel kind of lost the plot too, halfway through. I am still writing though. At the current pace I should finish around the middle of the month. Unless I give up, which would be a reasonable thing to do without my plot. I am reading back issues of Happy Science Monthly to find inspiration. Trying to imagine how the teachings of Happy Science must look to a high school freshman with little more than average intelligence and no religious or spiritual experience or upbringing.

NaNoWriMo is here

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Hopefully some people will read my story because it has Go references in it.

It is the month formerly known as November! For the last decade, its name has been NaNoWriMo.

Hallelujah, November is here! It’s not a dream anymore!
Hallelujah, it’s finally here, I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting…
(With apologies to Chris de Burgh. Actually, “Brother John” was the first song I noticed by de Burgh, although it later became one of my least favorite. Go figure.)

Yes, the National Novel Writing Month has started. I am off from work and writing and having a great time. I guess this story won’t, after all, inspire love and courage in generations of young men and women after my passing as I had hoped. Well, it is still a first draft. Also, it is still barely 5000 words.

Go Go Ghosts! A story of anime, Go, Happy Science and the Japan that only exists in our hearts.

“Free”

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A macabre reminder about the opposite of freedom, from the ever helpful cult “Happy Science”. 

After some months, I happened to hear that song again, “Free” performed by Sarah Brightman. It is a beautiful melody, and she has a beautiful voice (and name). But I still remember the shock of the first time I heard the chorus and recognized the words. There was someone else who had thought like that? And a woman at that. I could kind of imagine a man saying this. Well, I could imagine myself saying it, at least.

I had to be free,
had to be free,
it’s all that I wanted…
I wanted to see,
wanted to be
alone if I needed.
I had to be free,
had to be free
from feelings that haunted.
I wanted to see,
wanted to be
free.

Judging from the rest of the song, that did not work quite as well as the character hoped. Freedom is an elusive thing when there is something one wants. Attachment and freedom don’t go together. I guess what she describes is a kind of compromise.

Spotify link, while it lasts.

After I was no longer a child, my mother told me that when I had been a toddler, I didn’t like to sit on her lap like the other children had, but insisted on standing on my own little feet. I don’t have any strong theories about why this was, but there has been no lap that I preferred over standing on my own later either. So I can relate to this. And yet there is so much more freedom left to gain. Mostly from myself though.

I have to be free. Have to be free…

Sims 2 and small hells

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The Sims 2 was arguably the first game where artificial intelligence was sometimes indistinguishable from natural stupidity.

I installed The Sims 2 on my laptop, and was surprised to see that it ran noticeably faster than on my old desktop.

You may wonder why I was surprised: After all, the laptop is four and a half year newer than the desktop, and that’s 3 “generations” of Moore’s Law.  Today, that Law is usually quoted as “the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months”. This is slightly different from what Moore actually said, but easy to remember and pretty close to what we observe in the real world. That would mean an 8-fold increase in computing power, more than enough to overwhelm even the difference between a desktop and a laptop.

(Yes, this means computers become 10 times more powerful in 5 years, 100 times more powerful in 10 years, and 1000 times more powerful in 15 years. Do you really want to turn your new computer on in 15 years? What if it takes control of you instead of the other way around? Luckily, what has happened is largely that instead of making large, insanely powerful computers, factories are churning out smaller and cheaper computers. These days they are called “smartphones”. ^_^)

***

Sims 2 is a lot of fun when it starts quickly and runs smoothly like that. But even so, I notice that after a while (about half an hour or so, for me and Sims 2) I begin to grow more irritable and grumpy. A feeling of dissatisfaction begins to emerge from within. These are hellish feelings, as you know if you have been on the receiving end of them. They are certainly not heavenly. And this happens even though the game is a lot of fun and I want to play it more. But even as I do so, I can feel my patience wear thin and my temper begin to fray. Why?

One day I felt compelled to write something like this: “On the way to Heaven, the sinner stops in Hell, thinking he has arrived.” I am not sure if this is literally true for the afterlife, or even whether there are ways and time in the afterlife (at least in our sense). What I mean is that this happens to us in everyday life. We seek after the Good, the True and the Beautiful. But on our way we come to surrogates which please us, but on a more shallow level than what our hearts really seek. So we stop and cling to these things, but this is the cause of a growing sense of wrongness. As long as we project this wrongness outward, thinking that we have been wronged by others and not by ourselves, it cannot be abated. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada:
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who harbor such thoughts
do not still their hatred.
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who do not harbor such thoughts
still their hatred.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal.

***

With The Sims 2, there is also the detail that the sims have needs and wants. And as with us, the two are not always in harmony. Their needs are such as hunger, bladder, fun and sleep. Their wants may vary, for instance to increase a skill or to become friends with a particular other sim. If their needs fall too low, bad things happen, all the way to starving to death. If they never fulfill any wants, they start worrying and eventually go insane. If you have any plans for them beyond this, that just complicates it even more. And if you tend to empathize (not to say identify) with the little computer people, some of that conflict will be felt in yourself. That is how I see it. In The Sims 3 this factor is less intense, because they take better care of themselves, and they don’t go crazy if they don’t fulfill their wants. They just pass over some benefits. So that might explain the difference between the two games.

But there is still some of this fraying of tempers in all games I play, although some hold out better than others. (City of Heroes, which will be discontinued on November 30 after 8 years, was quite possibly the best of them. I think part of this was its innate goodness. Even though roleplaying a hero is a kind of self-satisfaction, it is still aligned with good. I tried playing the included villain scenario, but this irritated me again.)

I believe that this restlessness and irritation and lack of satisfaction is a natural result of spending too much time in a lower world, a world less real than ours, even if it is fun. Conversely, spending time in a higher world can be distinctly unfun , but leaves us with a sense of deep satisfaction. (By higher worlds I mean not only those of religion, accessed for instance through prayer and meditation, but also secular studies of mathematics or physics, the laws on which our universe depends. It is not that these activities cannot result in great joy, even bliss, when we reach some new insight. But they are not entertaining or fun in the same way as playing a video game.)

So does this mean I am going to stop playing Sims games? Well, probably not yet. But perhaps I can learn to stop once my Fun bar has been filled…?

NaNoWriMo planning

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Happy Science has a rather less optimistic view of ghosts. (Here from the anime The Rebirth of Buddha.) Don’t worry though, there are other spirits who are more helpful.

NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, is an open project to write 50 000 words of continuous fiction during the month of November. I have participated for about a decade by now, and even take my vacation in November each year. So also this year.

Today was the last workday before my “writecation”, where I take 5 weeks vacation from work (all the weeks that include November, basically). My tentative plan is to study Go, re-watch the anime Hikaru no Go and perhaps The Laws of Eternity, and write tens of thousands of words of fiction.

***

Yes, I intend to write 50 000 words of fiction about Go and related topics. For the unnaturally curious, here is my rough outline of the story:

The main character is a high school freshman who I for some reason want to call Eric. He is an “otaku”, obsessed with Japanese entertainment: Manga, anime, Jpop, and games. He was introduced to manga and anime by his older sister, but he is more into it than she. On the other hand, she is doing outrageous that he is not: She is writing gay fan fiction about straight character. This bizarre hobby of hers makes him rather nervous whenever she comes up with another scheme to give him a social life. (His sister is actually concerned about him, because he has no friends and tend to hole up with his anime and games all day.)

One day his sister introduces him to the anime Hikaru no Go, about a 6th grade boy who finds an old Go board which is haunted. The spirit in the board attaches itself to him and begins to badger him to play Go, because it is the ghost of a Go player from 1000 years ago who cannot find peace until he has reached “the Hand of God”, the perfect play. As long as the ghost is telling him how to play, he plays like a master, and becomes the center of attention from serious Go players. This causes him to try hard to learn the game himself, and a lot of adventures happen during the 75 episode of the anime.

The anime Hikaru no Go has inspired thousands if not millions of young people all over the world to learn to play Go. But it has only inspired one boy to try to find his own Go-playing ghost. This is his story. As you may guess, it is meant to be a bit on the humorous side.

Eric’s logic is that there since Go is popular among old men in Japan, there is bound to be thousands of ghosts who want to return to play more Go. All he needs is to attract one of them. They don’t need to be the best, as long as they are better than most people in Scandinavia, his success is assured.

First he needs to learn the basics of Go and the various Japanese phrases used in the game. (I can use this to pad the book if I run out of story.)  He also needs to expand his Japanese vocabulary, since it is unlikely that old Japanese ghosts speak English. (He actually lives in Norway, but for simplicity, all Norwegians speak English in his world.) Then he needs to find out how to get in contact with Japanese ghosts.

As luck (or plot) would have it, the solution to all his problems is found at the local Go club, in the form of a girl close to his own age, who happens to be half Japanese, daughter of a Norwegian sea captain and his Japanese wife. Not only does she play Go and speak Japanese, she is also a member of the Japanese religion Happy Science, which has an extensive lore about the afterlife. Together, they try to find out what happens to Go players who die.

So there you have it. Go, anime and Happy Science. “Write about what you know, not about yourself.” It shouldn’t be hard to write 50 000 words about these things – it is possible that I have already done so in my journal… ^_^;

Jobs are obsolete

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In the life simulation game The Sims 3, anyone can live off painting, sculpting or writing books, if they have the patience, although the talented will earn more. In real life, few would trust such a hobby to feed them. But what if they already had food and a roof over their head? Might they be tempted to try to add to their income through art then?

The age where paid work is the measure of a man, that age is coming to an end. What will we do to distribute money after jobs?

It has been going on for a while already. In most of the western world, unemployment is high and chronic. Here in Norway, unemployment is low, but disability pension is widespread. This may be a more realistic take on it, for the old jobs will never come back, barring a disaster of horrifying dimensions. I am not sure we would even physically survive such a disaster. So disability it is, in a matter of speaking. But many of these men and women are not in pain or bearing visible scars. In fact, a study a few years ago told us that the disabled rated their health on average as better than those who were still working!

Rather, it is generally assumed that if a person cannot be gainfully employed, they must have some kind of illness that prevents it. As pretty much all of us have some kind of illness or weakness, especially after years of constant stress, there is usually some hook to hang the coat on. But in many cases, people simply don’t have the intelligence and concentration needed to work in the Information Age.

We may need a stupidity pension, and we may need to make it almost universal. For every year and a half, computers double their processing power. Artificially intelligence remains out of reach, it seems, but we are still able to automate more and more tasks. And machines that we don’t think of as robots, still contain more and more computing technology. And don’t be sure you can always get a job as a taxi driver: Self-driving cars are now allowed to drive on roads in Nevada and California.

The office assistants who used to fetch documents in file cabinets and file them away after use are long gone. I started my adult working career as such an assistant (although I got into a different job at the same place a year later). Today, I would probably have needed to stay in school for another three or four year to get into what is the new entry-level job. Some years from now, today’s entry-level jobs will most likely not exist either. People may need to stay in school till they are 30, and only work at highly specialized jobs. On the other hand, the profit from those who work will be very high. We may discuss whether they ought to keep that money or whether the owners of the businesses should keep most of it (in so far as these are still different people). But what about those who are patently unable to study for 25 years? And what about those who educated themselves for jobs that disappear?

An unfair but practical solution is to give a small “living wage” to everyone, whether they work in the traditional sense or not. The idea is that a human life probably has a value even if you are not employed in the traditional sense. You probably have relatives and friends who appreciate your existence, for instance. We might take the conservative approach and tell those relatives and friends to keep you alive if they think you are worth it, but this will likely cause even more resentment than taxation does. Given that those who are employed will earn a lot of money even after tax, it may be easier to give a “living wage” to everyone, and leave it to their own inventiveness if they want to earn more money. Of course, some of that inventiveness may take the form of crime. But not having food and a place to sleep is no less likely to lead to crime. And if we are not going to let people starve on the streets anyway, we may as well give a modest amount to all instead of a larger amount to those who are good at imagining illness. (For instance, whiplash symptoms tend to fade within a few weeks after compensation is paid.)

There is a lot of economic activity already that does not take the form of jobs, exactly. People make various goods and sell them, or perform services against payment without a regular employment. I hope to see much more of this in the future. Many humans are quite creative.

So I expect jobs and freelance supplemental income to coexist for a long time, but the jobs becoming fewer and more specialized, while the informal economic activity grows. But I may be wrong. I may have to confer more with the voices in my head to know for sure. But for now, they are telling me to hang onto my job. ^_^