81 Hmmmmmms

01 Mountain is a game in which nothing you do in the game seems to matter, but you’re never really sure if what you’re doing matters.

[vimeo 99098990 w=786 h=580]

02 Self-similarity is the characteristic of an object that “is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines, are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales.”

03 Any thought that redirects to your self-rhetoric machine is probably by nature not worth examining and immediately discardable

04 You have a self-rhetoric machine that directs your internal monologue and functions to reinforce and preserve notions that are foundations of your ego

05 Controlling information flows is big

06 How to be in a world that is absolutely, irreducibly capital-Y Yours: Take 1/16th ounce of psilocybin mushrooms. Begin feeling the effects after 30 minutes; after an hour enter an ‘unable to hold still, both physically and mentally’ phase, which lasts for one to two hours. During this phase you are walking around or riding a bike and you are definitely alone, and wearing sunglasses so you don’t have to make eye contact with anyone, and you have an apple and raw vegetables and a lot of water with you

07 INSIDE is a game by Danish developers Playdead, who in 2010 created LIMBO. INSIDE will be released at the beginning of 2015.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op4G1–kb-g%5D

08 Black box trading happens “when a bank wants to move a big quantity of shares… [and] it doesn’t want everyone to know what it is doing. If news of a big buy leaked out before the big buy could be completed, the price may go up. To hide their motions, they employ the same technique as stealth planes: they use algorithms to break their giant trade into thousands of little ones, and do so in such a way that they look random. Their sizes and timing are scattered.

In order to identify this stealthy algorithmic movement, competing banks hire other mathematicians to write other algorithms that monitor trading and look for clues of these bigger trades and trends. The algorithms actually shoot out little trades, much like radar, in order to measure the response of the market and then infer if there are any big movements going on. The algorithms are, in turn, on the lookout for these little probes and attempt to run additional countermoves and fakes. The algorithmic dance—what is known as black box trading—accounts for over 70 percent of Wall Street trading activity today.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

09 Think about these words sometimes: eventuate, eventuated, eventuating

10 Conceptualize your life as a system

11 A system is “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.” (Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer)

12 “The system, to a large extent, causes it’s own behavior. An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.” (Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer).

13 “A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements—as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.”

14 Conceptualize your system as a game of Katamari Damacy

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwhFH75OCDs%5D

15 Read Alone: The Man Who Braved the Vast Pacific–And Won by Gerard D’Aboville.

16 Enucleate means to remove the eyes

17 “…the initial choice to have email at all is to open a loop. The choice to open a particular email, though, constitutes entry into something more like static information. The problem is that the sender may have spring-loaded a whole lot of time and energy into that message, so that clicking on it is like opening a Pandora’s box of data and responsibilities. A week of the sender’s preparation can instantaneously unfold into our present.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

18 “Our iPads and Androids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

19 You refuse to change, even though you don’t even like yourself

20 Read about robot journalism

21 Read Infoglut by Mark Andrejevic

22 All your problems add up to a large, but precise, projection of some really underdeveloped part of you, which you project onto everyone

23 Buy The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge

24 Fractals, 1: “What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

25 “The Avenger is the largest, most powerful aircraft cannon in the American arsenal, and it fires bullets the size of Redbull cans from seven spinning barrels. Milled from depleted uranium, the bullets are designed to pierce the steel armor on tanks, and are shot from the Warthogs’ cannons at a rate of sixty-five rounds per second. When the Warthogs aimed their guns at Charlie company, the rounds tore through the tracs’ aluminum armor as if they were made of paper. Many seconds after the bullets arrived came the screech of the furiously whirling barrels that delivered them.” (Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman)

26 Examine your ideas via their potential to create unpredictable effects, instead of their potential to create the desired outcome

27 Think about scheduling your tasks around the phases of the moon, instead of what day of the week it is

28 “…children’s playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as well as greater awareness of those individuals falling out of sync due to illness or some other stress deserving of collective attention.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

29 You are not creative anymore

30 When you get into a specific mindset, attitude, etc., your outlook shrinks

31 “Men, on the other hand, were on edge. Moore goes so far in the study as to say that for men, public toilets are ‘nightmarish spaces.’ The anxiety they reported was centered around ‘watching’—being watched by other men, or being perceived to be watching other men—and that this watching was linked to the possibility of sexual violence.” – Julie Beck, The Private Lives Of Public Bathrooms.

32 Moon cycle, phase 1: “At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one’s acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. ‘The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny-like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routines efficiently, and strive for balance in our activities.” (Dr. Mark Filippi as transcribed by Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

33 Your positive, lukewarm or negative personal feelings about ideas have no affect on how well-received they’ll be

34 Conceptualize “relentless zen”

35 “Of course, educational institutions aren’t ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don’t want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated class. ” (Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation)

36 “The laws of probability operate everywhere and that being the case, somewhere in the world there is the luckiest person. I mean if you were to go around the world and make a record of the luck in the lives of all the people on earth, and put them on a chart, you’d have a chart like a bell curve. And there would be the unluckiest person at one end and the luckiest person at the other end.” (Cormac McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy on luck and money)

37 Look into the El Paso/ Juarez border situation

38 Never say the thing you’re frustratedly searching for a way to work into the conversation

39 Sit next to an intimidating-looking passenger on the subway as a favor to other passengers and the passenger you might otherwise choose to sit next to

40 “It’s not just: what of me carries forward into the future? It’s like, what of my future self is in me right now?”

41 Moon cycle, phase 2: “Nearer to the full moon, an uptick in serotonin increases self-awareness, generating both high focus and high energy. Serotonin, the chemical that gets boosted by drugs like Prozac, is thought to communicate the abundance or dearth of food resources to our brain. ‘When under its influence we can feel euphoric, spontaneous, and yet composed and sedate. Whereas acetylcholine worked to anchor us to our physical world, serotonin buoys us to the mental realm, allowing us to experience the physical world from an embodied, more lucid vantage point. We actually benefit from solitude at this time, as when an artist finds his muse.'” (Dr. Mark Filippi as transcribed by Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

42 “…the likely future for North America is that of a coherent economic unit where the United States, Canada, and Mexico band together to make major investments in customized robot production and then use these investments to dominate global manufacturing.” (Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation)

43 “What if we created a ‘thing,’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?” (Mark Leyner via REAL WIFE, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel)

44 Being at pains to explain yourself perfectly probably works against you more than it works for you

45 The burden of being understood is not 100% on you

46 “‘Only an animal does useful things,’ he said at last, after a long silence. ‘An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.'” (Gerard d’Aboville as transcribed by Sam Sheridan, The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game)

47 Your default setting is to seek out and indulge in distraction

48 Ask “Is it supposed to be like this?” to shift your perspective on a situation, even if there is no way it’s “supposed” to be. That clarification is good

49 Moon cycle, phase 3: “Over the next week, we can enjoy the benefits of increased dopamine. This chemical—responsible for the rush one gets on heroin or after performing a death-defying stunt—is responsible for reward-driven learning. ‘It allows us to expand our behaviors outside of our routines, decrease our intensity, and essentially blend with the energy of the moment. If acetylocholine is the ultimate memory neurotransmitter, dopamine is the ultimate experiential one. Functionally, it serves us best when we’re doing social activities we enjoy.’ In other words, it’s party week.” (Dr. Mark Filippi as transcribed by Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

50 “Today is a good day to die”

51 Number of attempts is important

52 Stay aware of what’s distracting you

53 “He’s capable of getting really crazy. He’s looked into the void.” (Sam Sheridan, The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game)

54 “Southern Germany is an extremely productive region and we can expect it will become more crowded and also more productive. The top German firms are generating some impressive learning curves.” (Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation)

55 “Reports that say there’s — that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that 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.” (Donald Rumsfeld)

56 “Every now and then, Eisman made some short-term trade of trivial size that totally contradicted everything they believed.” (Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)

57 Sigil magick

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58 “…many have been clinging to rumors and hearsay in place of analysis or original thought.” (Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)

59 Allow the first-order reaction to pass

60 “Everyone typically thinks that when you’re intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think that when you become habituated to someone, it can actually do completely the opposite—totally anesthetize you, totally numb you out and blind you to the other person. But then you’ll be somewhere completely random or you’ll just be reading, and you’ll come upon something so abstract, like, I don’t know, an equation in a math book or some mask in a museum or a comment by a complete stranger on YouTube, and suddenly you’re just flooded with all this raw emotion. I really think that the idea of grieving for a father, I mean in theory—the abstract notion of children grieving for fathers—can actually cause us to experience so much more anguish than our own personal grief for our own fathers….Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?” (Mark Leyner via REAL HUSBAND, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel)

61 “The Plain English Campaign gave Rumsfeld its Foot in Mouth Award.

However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum disagreed, saying the quotation was ‘completely straightforward’ and ‘impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically’.

As for the substance of his statement, Rumsfeld’s defenders have included Canadian columnist Mark Steyn, who called it ‘in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter’, and Australian economist and blogger John Quiggin, who wrote, ‘Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important … Having defended Rumsfeld, I’d point out that the considerations he refers to provide the case for being very cautious in going to war.'” (Wikipedia)

62 Focus on being less predictable

63 “‘I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because then I become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought processes.'” (Mike Burry as transcribed by Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)

64 “…we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic ‘world’ for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these ridiculously finite number of things. But it’s a completely closed system—there’s no ‘world’ actually extrinsic to it.” (Mark Leyner via REAL WIFE, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel)

65 Look into the world bank

66 Humorless is OK

67 Moon cycle, phase 4: “Finally, in the last moon phase, we are dominated by norepinephrine, an arousal chemical that regulates processes like the flight-or-flight response, anxiety, and other instinctual behaviors. ‘We tend to be better off doing more structural tasks that don’t involve a lot of reflection. Its binary nature lets us make decisions, act on them, and then recalibrate like a GPS with a hunting rifle. The key with norepinephrine is that if it’s governed well, we experience a fluid coordination of thought and action so much that we almost fail to feel. Everything becomes second nature.’ So instead of letting the natural rise of fight-or-flight impulses turn us into anxious paranoids, we can exploit the state of nonemotional, almost reptilian arousal it encourages.” (Dr. Mark Filippi as transcribed by Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

68 Should you always be in the market for something new? Seems impulsive

69 Stop gloating

70 Read this NY Times story on Blackwater

71 Game dynamics work so that as people are eliminated the remaining players are increasingly more invested, intense and competitive

72 “The best response to fear is curiosity”

73 Fractals (and self-similarity), 2: “Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying the chaos. On the other hand, once you zoom in to a fractal, you have no way of knowing which level you are on. The details at one level of magnification may be the same as on any other.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

74 Expect a swift reply

75 Cramer’s nice, consistent high-yielder

76 Cramer on selloff: ‘Panic is not a strategy’

77 Look into systems theory

78 “New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds.” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now)

79 No more private shit talking fests in the shower in the morning

80 Assume you know less than is required to speak definitively on anything

81Allow your emotion to happen without replacing it with a more comfortable one just as an experiment