So, after my last post, I’ve been sick, sick and tired, tired, and pissed off. In short, desperately looking for a job so much so that I’m willing to talk to recruiters. I am completely out of the swing of new job hunting.

My writing is suffering too. Paragraphs rather than pages. It’s not writers’ block, it’s basic exhaustion and prioritization. I’ve triple booked my social calendar. Candle’s burning at both ends, the middle and I’m thinking about throwing the whole damn ball of wax into the microwave.

The Ego
So I keep circling around the idea of the Engine of Prediction’s thesis: that intelligence drives it’s own existence, and we’re lucky and unlucky that we’re the biggest perpetrators of intelligence. I’m reading books from Dennett, Hamer, and Hawkins. The issue is that when I read their books, I feel incredibly dwarfed by their accomplishments.

Combine that with the job/career, and it makes for a pretty sucky week.

Work it through
So, I’m struggling with what I see as “inevitability.” True academia would talk about possibilities, potential events that MAY happen. That’s shit. There are certain parts of cultural structures that make things inevitable: the drive to survive - either for an organism or a cultural artifact (aka “religion”, “brand”, “corporation”) - that cause an unethical Machiavellian calculus justifying immoral actions of the participant(s).

This equation causes poor choices: we either think we have no choice, or that our sacrificial choice will cause a remarkable long shot, a soulful gamble, where we believe that if we throw ourselves on our swords, the world will change with our selfless acts.

What crap. The so-called selfless act is in itself a meme - one that governs our behavior. We perform the act, such as working late at the expense of our personal lives, - or pursuing a loved one who spurns us at the expense of our [emotional wellbeing] - suffering in pursuit of a higher cause: honor or truth or love. Our payoff is an emotional stroke that says “You did your best” - like denial, our grief over a situation.

Hamer’s work discusses the God Gene as a biomechanical device that gives us optimism. I wonder if there’s a martyrdom gene that governs our behavior. There’s definitely a martyrdom meme, we wouldn’t have messiahs without it - but a martyrdom gene where a single unit sacrifices his or her wellbeing for the good of the culture (not the group - the culture).

Oh Unholee Orgasmatronics
Warren Ellis swings his large media johnson again: Porno for Terrorist Pilots. So our city’s concrete is flesh that needs to be rendered by explosions… or something. Totally not safe for work, but the logic of feminine sexuality being destroyed by terrorist planes.

I’m strangely reminded of Laurie Anderson’s Mach 20, which has Japanese sperm whales inseminating the California coastline at a high rate of speed.

It’s a psychological event of some sort - our brains are being inseminated by another culture, one hostile to sexual imagery that they must destroy it. I find myself oddly eroticized by the video.

Pages since last post: 1… ok, 6 paragraphs. grumble