Goban

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Instead of the traditional bowls to hold the playing stones, this goban (Go board) has a slide-out empty triangle to keep them in. Not recommended for families with small children, as the lightweight plastic “stones” are almost exactly like M&M.

I finally bought a Go board – or goban as they are called in Japanese – from Amazon.com. This board was made from cheap and lightweight wood, not something a professional would want to be seen with, but better than just printing out the board and playing with buttons. Of course, I have used computers (and tablet) up till now. I just felt that it would capture the feeling of the game better if I could have a physical board. I was thinking of replaying other people’s games on the board.

I am not sure it was such an awesome idea, but it seemed reasonably harmless. A healthy hobby, at least by my standards. Now that I am sick with Mysterious Illness, I am no longer so sure this was a good investment. Good thing I bought the cheapest model I saw. (It does not seem to have any problems beyond the stones being more lightweight than I had expected. So, tentatively recommended, unless you have small children. Choking hazard, swallowing hazard etc.)

Wanker

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“It is fine. I am a solo player.” But is that really fine in itself? Isn’t that the problem? Is it OK to be happy alone and tell the world: Come as you are and become like me?

I have given a good deal of thought to the Llama’s outburst. A Norwegian proverb says that one should listen to children and drunk people, they tell it as they see it. And I think he may be more right than he knows, or perhaps rather, he may be right in other ways than he knows.

There is no denying that playing City of Heroes relates to actual heroism much like masturbation relates to lovemaking. Nobody else benefits from it in any way. (Of course, the benefits of lovemaking are also somewhat exaggerated in contemporary culture. Still, the comparison is apt.) The same may be said for the rest of my benevolent gaming: Helping small neighborhoods of Sims living happy and fulfilling lives is just smoke on the wind, although I am kind of happy that I’m not among the simmers who remove the door and set the house on fire, or remove the ladder while their sims are swimming. I have this vague idea, to treat my Sims the way I want to be treated by my own higher-dimensional overseer. But it doesn’t really bring a lot of happiness to the world, which needs it.

Generally it is through my work and through my journal that I try to make the world a better place, each in its own way. Like most people, I have a job that basically consists of helping people. After I reflected on this a couple years ago, I now consciously go to work with the intention to help people and give back to society in this way. But in practice I am not very good at it. And probably not at journaling either: After all these many years, I don’t see a lot of people having become happy and healthy and wise by learning from my writing. A phrase comes to mind by my great hero Jesus Christ: “If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they are not going to listen even if someone returns from the dead.” Why do I think I can make a difference?

Still, I have at least tried, some of the time. I don’t really know what was the secret ingredient, so I have tried to cover most of the bases. But it became too much, I guess. Nobody these days has time to read through the story of a life. It is the age of soundbites, of slogans and aphorisms. Jesus was actually good at those too. But if we look at Christianity today, it is disheartening how little has come of it. And if we look at me today, it is also disheartening how little has come of it.

And yet, I am not packing until I see the ferryman coming, or that is my resolution.

Opening a can of worms

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When confessions go wrong.

One of my few recurring readers has a comment on a perhaps randomly chosen entry recently. I’ll reprint the comment here to give it the attention it deserves. ^_^

ENOUGH VIDEO GAMES. ENOUGH PHILOSOPHY. YOU ARE FUCKING PATHETHIC HUMAN BEING. ACTION, ACTION, ACTION

 

GO OUTSIDE AND GET SHIT DONE.

 

YOU ARE MORE DISGUSTING THAN THE AVERAGE SCUMFUCK. SCUMFUCKS HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BE SCUMFUCKS – YOU HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE DIVINE AND YOU CHOOSE TO DO NOTHING EXCEPT WANK.

 

GO OUTSIDE AND DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR GOD FUCKING LIFE YOU WORM.

Oh dear, I can hear the Internet filters slam shut at schools and libraries everywhere. Oh well. The important point is, he is wrong. I am not a worm. He should know me well enough by now to realize that I am a can of worms.

Playing worm, praying worm. Walking worm, talking worm. Sleepy worm, creepy worm and (once or twice a year) weepy worm, they are all me. Happy worm, sappy worm, crappy worm. There is a worm for every occasion. If you have read the ten years or so before I moved to WordPress, I used to color code my entries in different colors depending on the main content: Green for slice of life, blue for games, gray for science and philosophy, white for religion, azure for fiction writing, yellow for indecent or profane, red for adults only. All these different worms were me. It is the same now. Video games, philosophy, psychology, health and exercise, book reviews, computers and gadgets etc etc. It’s a huge can of worms of various colors and sizes.

This, unfortunately, is the human condition. When people think of themselves as a pearl of great worth, it is invariably because of delusion. People vary wildly from time to time and from place to place, depending on who they are with or whether they are alone. To think otherwise (unless perhaps if one has been through a decades-long war of extermination) is pure delusion, or more charitably ignorance, ignorance so deep that one is ignorant even of one’s ignorance. This seems to be the default condition.

In so far as I have indeed glimpsed the Divine, it is exactly in this that somehow Heaven has opened the can of worms. As Leonard Cohen so precisely sings: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the Light gets in.” This is the great miracle without which nothing much can happen. Some event or practice has unexpectedly pried open the can of worms just a little so the light shines on at least the uppermost layer of wriggling worms. From here on, we have the option to try to close the lid and hope that it all never happened, that the can actually contains only a single pearl of great worth. This option probably remains for a long time, but the longer the lid stays at least a little ajar, the harder it gets to get everything back to the way it used to be.

Even in Daggerfall, I cannot feel entirely safe from the rays of the Light. And conversely, even in prayer I cannot feel entirely safe from the daggers of my lower nature. The worms shift in response to every major movement, seeking to maintain the precarious balance of their environment.

If there is in a human a pearl of great worth, it is buried deep in a manure-laden acre teeming with earthworms. Love them anyway, but carefully. ^_^;

***

That said, I can assure y’all that I do go out pretty much every day, if nothing else then to bless my homeland through my work. But no, I am not going into the traveling preacher business anytime soon. Those who need me can find me here.

 

My subconscious and I

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In the anime Hikaru no Go, the boy Hikaru can actually see the great Go player that resides in his subconscious. No one else can see him though. I can’t even see mine. It’s OK, he is probably not as good as Sai – just better than me, and that doesn’t say much.

I sometimes say to my subconscious: “There is a reason why you are the sub.” But this is not one of those occasions. Sometimes it just shows off. This was one of those times. Make that TWO of those times.

On my bus commute, I took the opportunity to watch a Go match on my Android tablet. It was a 7-dan player against a 6-dan. For me, that is comparable to a first-grader watching two English majors debating Shakespeare. While I find it vaguely interesting, I don’t really aspire to understanding a game on that high a level. My subconscious may disagree: At a certain point, it basically said “Black is going to play there”, pointing to a spot on the (virtual) board. Plop! Black put down a stone right on the spot.

I looked closer at that particular move, and actually it was pretty clear that bad things would have happened had black not secured that spot right away. But the thing is, I had not seen that by thinking logically and reading ahead. Rather, some corner of my pattern matching brain must have picked up enough Go to expect the next move based on what it had already seen of successful (and, in my own case, utterly failed) games. Now, as high-level games go, this particular move was one of the more obvious. But the fact remains that I did not see it with my rational conscious mind, but instead a “voice in my head” (not literally, but more like an independent thought) spotted it straight away.

Later in the day, I took a look at the opposite: A lowbie game, still on the Pandanet-IGS (Internet Go Server). A 17-kyu – the lowest rank on IGS, but still way above me – was playing someone in the Beginner Class. As it happens, the beginner was in the process of winning when I arrived. Looking over the board, I quickly spotted a large group of white stones that were dead as a doornail. (We say that a group is dead when it can be caught by the opponent and there is nothing to do about it.) In this case, black could kill it in three moves, and there was nowhere else on the board where such a big opportunity existed. (Or if it was, neither I nor they found it!) I watched intently, but neither of them seemed to pay the slightest attention to the huge group, 15-20 stones by my counting. In the end, they both passed, which ends the game. They counted the territory, and still no one of them made a move to remove the dead group.

It was glaringly obvious to me as an observer, so I thought by myself: “If a 17-kyu player does not see something as obvious as that, and I see it, I must have made quite a bit of progress.” So I fired up the Go-playing robot program in my tablet. It crushed me again, just as badly as it usually does. I had made no progress at all.

And this, dear congregation, is the story of my life. I can see things that are above my play grade, with the help of the imaginary voices in my head. But when it comes to myself, I seem to make no progress at all.

Talk to your toaster

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I also used to be excited about the future, but now that I live here, I take it for granted.

NaNoWriMo – national novel writing month – is approaching once again. (“The month formerly known as November”, as I like to call it.) The forums for 2012 are up and running, and in the technology section there is as usually a thread dedicated to speech recognition, or more specifically Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (I would not mind a more general thread, since Windows also comes with speech recognition built in. Hopefully we can have more threads later.)

One thing I wanted to say early on was that it is not enough to be able to use speech recognition in a technical sense. The next challenge is to be able to tell a story to the computer. This is a very different thing, especially for us who have been writers for many years and are used to thinking with our fingers. It also doesn’t help to have been a grown-up for many years, during which you have not been able to tell long, obviously made-up stories to people without them looking at you very strangely. I suppose there are some families in which this problem does not exist, but I am not sure whether it is a good thing or not… ^_^;

So I recommended that people start telling stories to their computers already now, all through October, so that they have gotten over that hurdle, that shyness or awkwardness of telling imaginary stories out loud to inanimate objects. In fact, I recommend practicing on the toaster as well, and with blatant nonsense. The purpose is not to deliver the Great American Novel to your amazed toaster, but to get yourself to accept the unreasonable fact that it is possible to tell stories to home equipment. Such are the times in which we live. I could not have made it up in a sci-fi novel. Magic fantasy, perhaps, just perhaps.

I ask you, gentle reader, to consider this: Not only do I occasionally talk to a machine without being insane (or more so than those who don’t). I also carry in my shirt pocket a telephone, my own library with dozens of books, a bookstore with millions more, thousands of newspapers from all over the world, millions of songs and an unknown number of movies, and enough cat pictures to last the craziest old cat lady for a lifetime.

You can probably add to this, but the point is: I do this almost every day without giving it a second thought. I don’t wake up each morning thinking: “Oh my God! I live in a miraculous, magical world filled with amazing wonders that I would not have believed were possible when I was a child – what should I do today to take advantage of this to the fullest?”

If I did, and if my conclusion was that I should start the day by talking to my kitchen equipment, that might not be the worst thing I have done in my life.

Watching, doing, learning

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By closely watching a master, following instructions before fully understanding them, and copying masterpieces you could not have thought of yourself, you gradually absorb the skills of the master – they live on inside you. This is the ancient tradition of apprenticeship or discipleship.

The blog of secular wisdom, Farnam Street, has another short masterpiece recently: “What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?” Somewhat surprisingly, the answer seems to be: 1) Watch someone else do it, but watch very closely, as if imagining that it was you doing it. 2) Repeat what experts have done, even if you could not have done it on your own, because it builds a mental blueprint within you which you can draw on later.

Well, surprisingly if you have not watched the motivational anime Hikaru no Go, about a sixth-grader who encounters the ghost of a long dead master of Go (igo), the ancient Asian strategy game. The ghost attaches itself to the young boy and badgers him to play go. Hikaru finds the game tolerable once he has won a couple times by simply following the instructions of the ghost, but he understands very little beyond the basic rules. (Kind of like me, regarding Go at least!) But then as summer vacation starts, he begins to spend his days at an Internet cafe, playing Go over the Internet. The ghost tells him what moves to make, but it is the boy who has to actually use the mouse and keyboard. They do this every day for most of the summer. When fall comes, Hikaru has actually become a decent Go players – by high school standards, at least – simply by focused observation of hundreds of hours of well-played Go.

Later in the same anime, we learn that young Go students aiming to become professional, often spend time replaying great games from the past, trying to understand why each move was made, slipping inside the mind of the masters. This is an actual practice, and I see from the quote in Farnam Street that chess players do the exact same thing. By repeating the decisions of others, while paying constant attention, they absorb the skills subconsciously even if they could not have figured them out for themselves, or at least not for a long time yet. The subconscious absorbs skills in a different way from how we talk and think logically.

That sounds quite useful, because beginning is often hard. Even I, who used to be pretty smart, constantly fail to learn to play Go well. Perhaps I should give it another Go…?

The beauty of our weapons

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This dagger is radiant with beauty – at least when seen by the one wielding it!

I was playing Daggerfall as a Linguist, probably the most underpowered character class possible to make without hacking the game files. A life on the brink of extinction, running away a lot, progressing slowly.  And then I got my hand on one of the most overpowered items in the whole game, the Dagger of Life Stealing. (Mages Guild, Grayidge, Tulune.)

The surge of elation and confidence was on behalf of my imaginary character, but I still felt it in my physical body. I also noticed just how pretty the thing looked, which was why I took the screenshot. But as the “voice in my heart” pointed out: It probably doesn’t look that good from the other side, that is, for the person it is pointed at. Isn’t that the truth for all weapons?

***

There are also abstract weapons. For instance, here in Norway we talk about the “strike weapon”, when workers go on strike against employers or against some perceived injustice in society. I am sure my friends on the political left see the beauty in this weapon, but it is clear that most people who get stuck at an airport or find their supermarket without milk or their doctor appointment canceled, don’t see the beauty of the weapon so clearly.

Conversely, the members of “Occupy Wall Street” and similar organizations probably fail to see the beauty of a well-ordered troop of policemen coming their way with shields, batons and pepper spray – a beauty that is plain to see for my conservative friends.

So that is the lesson I was told by the Voice in my heart. It would probably have been better if I spent more time with that teacher than with my old flame Daggerfall, but what can I say. This is what happened. Sometimes we forget the obvious: That the beauty of a weapon depends on whether you are behind it or in front of it. Even words can have the power to wound, and I remember the satisfaction of giving a particularly sharp-edged reply. There is a lesson in this for almost everyone, I think.

Big butts, smart babies?

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Free “are you a scientist” test. (Screenshot Daggerfall – evidently the people of the Alik’r Desert don’t eat much seafood either!)

Scientists are curious people. Evidently they cannot even look at a big butt without thinking. (I know a lot of guys who can look at butts without thinking, but then they never became scientists either.) What they have been thinking is: Why does our species, of all possible species, have this feature?

In most species, sexual selection is a one-way street. Peacocks have those crazy big, colorful tails; the hens are drab and naturally camouflaged for their environment. Male elks have huge antlers, females not. Thus, it seems unlikely that women have big butts because these are sexy. Rather, they are sexy because they are female. Men have adapted to the butts, hips and thighs rather than the other way around. Then why did this feature arise in the first place?

A discovery from back in 2007 may throw some light on this. It seems that the fatty tissues of the lower body contain more of the essential fatty acids, such as omega-3, used to build the baby’s brain. While the fat around the waist and under the skin all around the body contains more omega-6 and others that are mostly used for fuel. When a woman loses weight, she usually lets go of the waist fat first, although there are large genetic differences between ethnic groups and even family lines. Generally speaking, as mother, as daughter. But overall, lower-body fat is quite persistent. During the later parts of pregnancy and during lactation (suckling), the omega-3 fat is dissolved and transferred to the baby. (Of course, in modern societies it is possible to eat enough fat that you can have twins and not lose an ounce. But in the wild, this is harder to achieve.)

I’ll briefly point out that in Japan, where people all over the country eat a diet rich in omega-3 and have done so for a very long time, the vast majority of women have slender hips, almost childlike by western standards. They still have smart babies. Meanwhile the natives of the Kalahari desert, where seafood is about as common as hen’s teeth, are famous for their enormous behinds. Long-standing agricultural societies tend to fall in between these extremes.

Somehow this vaguely interesting discovery caused a brouhaha again this year, after Psychology Today printed an inaccurate and very popularized article about it. Their focus was that men are hardwired to prefer women with a particular waist-to-hip ratio. Evidently this came across as “men know women’s bodies better than women do”, which caused the habitual rage in the hardcore feminist crowd.

And of course socialists generally dislike evolutionary psychology, since it implies that humans are not blank slates on which we can write the gospel of Marx and Lenin and usher in Utopia in our lifetime. Meanwhile, conservatives dislike evolutionary psychology since it implies that humans are some kind of animals and not created in God’s image. Me, I dislike evolutionary psychology because it is usually a thinly veiled attempt to prove that people everywhere and at all times were meant to do whatever is popular in America this decade. But this seems to be an exception, unless Americans have suddenly taken a liking to large hips without telling their supermodels.

Whatever the case may be, there is no reason to despair if you’re pregnant and worried that your thighs are not fat enough. Norway exports affordable cod liver oil to all corners of the world. Order your bottle today! Think of the children! Hubby is encouraged to buy some too, lest the baby absconds with what’s left of wife’s butts. Cod liver oil – rich in essential fatty acids – good for the whole family! ^_^

(Sources? Google “women’s hips contain omega 3”. ^_^)

Return to Daggerfall

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Little known fact: If you save your game in Daggerfall and reload it, the trees will have moved. So will the people, and they will have new names. Both the forest and the villagers are randomly created anew each time you arrive. One thing is constant though: The women all have big butts.

In the last days of MS-DOS, just before Windows 95 changed everything, some of the greatest games ever were made. Developers used to floppy disks saw the rapid spread of hard disks and CD-ROM and suddenly found they had unlimited space to make the ultimate game. At the same time, the video cards of the time allowed easily recognizable pictures, but not the lifelike detail that soon came to fill our CD-ROMs and hard disks to the brim. And so, this era saw games of a scope never seen before or since, a scope so epic that it would take lifetimes to fully explore them.

Daggerfall is one such game. A single-player role playing game with an interface similar to the massive multiplayer RPGs which were just emerging, it contains terrain larger than Great Britain, although luckily you can also use the map to travel directly to any known location. The land is dotted with literally thousands of locations, from farms to cities, from small crypts to enormous dungeons which may take a full workday to explore. (Not that I recommend using your workday so!) Towns and cities have a range of shops from the traditional blacksmiths to clothes shops and even banks, where you can stash your heavy gold coins or borrow money and buy a local house or a ship.

Magic is an important force in Daggerfall, and the Mages Guild not only sell spells, members can also buy magical items or even make their own spells and magical items once they gain some rank in the guild. They may even get a specialist to teleport them to another part of the country in an instance, or summon a powerful demon which may know about ancient artifacts with unique powers. As an alternative to making your own magical gear, you may try visiting different guild chapters, as they have their own specialties. I am not sure how many there are of them, but probably in the hundreds.

Temples offer various services, such as healing and selling potions, and eventually making your own potions. (One of them specializes in magic items instead, for those who for some reason don’t join the mages guild.) In some provinces you may also join a knightly guild which will let its champions sleep for free in any inn or tavern in the province, or even give high-ranking members a local house for free. (You can, as mentioned, buy your own house, but they are rather pricey.) The Fighters’ guild has no such grand reward, but they let you sleep in the guild house and repair your gear for you.

Daggerfall was ahead of its time. Like other massive games from this time, such as the strategy game Master of Magic, it is partly remembered for its massive bugs, although most of these were patched later. A few features were put in the game but never activated (or perhaps they were deactivated), such as furniture shops and prostitutes. You never see the ships actually sail, either. The dozen or so different languages have very little effect in the game. Still, one must admire the ambition of such an epic undertaking. Even though the later Elder Scrolls games were also known to be incredibly massive, they pale compared to the scope of Daggerfall.

And almost 20 years later, it is still a truckload of fun to play. The graphics look horrible for a few minutes until the imagination kicks in, the blocky sprites smooth out, and you start to see the land the way the developers imagined it, an immense world filled with wonder and danger, where you are left alone to create your own fate. Good, bad, you’re the one with the sword … or the magic … or the ability to speak with centaurs and nymphs. An endless adventure has just begun.

Writing: Supernatural teacher reboot

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What is the meaning of surrounding yourself with girls!

Thou shalt have no other girls before me!

I may try to reboot “The Teacher Will Appear” for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, formerly known as “November”) this year. Possibly before, if the urge grows too strong – it is still over a month left, and a month is enough to write 50 000 words, as I have shown occasionally. What I consider is to merge it with my dream a couple years ago about working for the Norse gods.

In my original (and stalled) attempt, there is a decidedly oriental flavor, ranging from Japanese names to Chinese Qi-Gong and Daoist immortals. Which is also OK, I guess, but as a Norwegian I have a competitive advantage writing about the Norse pantheon or derivatives thereof. I can draw on a great body of lore, quite a bit of it in my head. I know the locations and the images associated with it. And I just think they have a greater potential for wacko fun than the more refined Eastern traditions. (This is quite likely because I don’t know the Eastern traditions well enough, though!)

***

Blurb-style plot introduction, updated with pantheon changes etc:

MC is a Norwegian high school boy, showing up to the first day of his senior year. He finds that he has gained a new classmate and a new teacher. The teacher is young, beautiful, strong, intelligent, ignorant about contemporary subculture, and seems to hate him with a passion from the first time she lays eyes on him. This all turns out to stem from the fact that she is a second-generation Norse goddess, and Odin, the Allfather of the Norse pantheon has decided that MC is her fated husband-to-be, and it is her job to teach him the ropes of immortality.

The young goddess is not too pleased. And neither is MC, once he realized that the privilege entails a couple decades of celibacy until he has qualified for immortality or died trying. To ensure his compliance in this matter, the goddess’ younger sister has enrolled as his classmate and proceeds to defend his chastity with excessive measures, both in school and on his supposed free time. Over time his weekends are increasingly filled up with cosmic Viking raids to Utgard, Svartalfheim, Niflheim etc: alternate dimensions that seem like badly designed role playing games filled with monsters and loot, in the company of wacky Norse gods and immortal (or at least resurrectable) warriors, valkyries, and superpowered animals of varying intelligence and generally unpleasant temperament.

At least his mother is happy that he has finally found some friends, although she is a little worried about his overly attached girlfriend…