I was once sitting in the cafe/bar thing in Brighton, on my own… pretending not to be an alcoholic, drinking coffee or wine… watching the people go by, and generally keeping my shit together – and there was this guy at a neigbouring table talking to the people he was with about Dr Who Fan-Fiction videos.
It was about 2004 or… something. Early. Too early for me… but the Web 2.0 thing was just starting – and I was impressed… by how passionate he was about this new thing. How fascinated. It made him really interesting – and I twigged right away : I want that. I want to be really into something.
The blog that came before this was that… I found something to be passionate about, but in the end I was just acting as a kind of repeater. I’d lost the plot – and the things that I would have (earlier) tried to make little stories about, or angles about, were coming in too fast.
So I kindof let it drift.
Without looking it up, I don’t even know when I stopped writing this. But I did for a while.
Recently though, I’m feeling the pull again, because I’m interested (like REALLY interested) in a bunch of different stuff… which loosely revolve around:
– Artificial Intelligence
– Magic / Art
– Theories of Simulation
– WTF are we actually building here?
– Getting out of this if not alive, then happy.
A big part of the point of doing a blog (and I don’t know if people still use that word. It sounds… old), is that it teaches you what you think – so there are elements of that… because I have shit I need to figure out. Another reason is to document what is going on… and I have no idea what is, but every once in a while I think of something that I don’t know if anyone else has noticed so…
Welcome to The Quickening.
On Addiction
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
The Ultimate Turing Test
Welcome back Nick!
If you write, I’ll read :)
I’ve read your musings and followed your discovered links since Ikostar. Always worth the time spent. Thanks and look forward to whatever Quickens.
I guess I’d better write something then :)
YES! So glad to have you back musing and making good sense out of all this. Aye, Nick!
I think blog is old now. But nevermind still bloody amazing tool.
Blog still works for me.
On a similar note re Magic/Art, there is a chap called John Higgs who has written a few books you might like. One of them, The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band that Burnt a Million Quid, (one of the best books I’ve read recently) explores this subject. Worth checking out. If you can’t get a copy let me know and I’ll send you one.
I saw John Higgs give a lecture called “Pessimism is for Lightweights” that was incredibly inspiring, but sadly I can’t find a youtube link of it anywhere.
Hiya
I’ll try and track to down the KLF book… thanks. I used to be into this stuff when I was a kid… but then a while recently (one night, for the first time in decades) found myself on the receiving end of quite a lot of hallucinogens… and stumbled into a) Terrance McKenna (had never heard of him before) and b) that Scottish guy going on about sigil magic… which was a bit of a convergence of coincidence… so needless to say tried out the sigil thing, and it worked. So I bought a laser-cutter.
The trouble with magic though, is it seems to only ever work once. Reminds me of skiing across open-snow… flying across a new fall where nobody has been before. As soon as another set of tracks is on the snow, it radically reduces the chances of anything “hyper-coincidental” happening again.
I’m with Alan Moore though – art and magic are the same thing… and really, we’ve just been living with a 3000 year old category error in what we actually define magic as. And I think this is where people occasionally fuck themselves up. The last time I saw someone attempting sigil-magic was a Soundgarden backdrop in about 2015. I’m guessing whatever that thing was supposed to achieve, it backfired… if you allow yourself the suspension of disbelief, and allow the possibility that it made any difference to anything at all. Maybe it was just a load of mystical shit.
My background is science – I have a BSc etc… but if you do a science degree, you’re going to wind up being confronted with an entire branch of mathematics based on the square-roots of negative numbers… an impossibility, but if you allow yourself that one free miracle, a whole lot of really useful and interesting stuff blossoms out. The one free miracle that I’m quite interested in is the “habit hypothesis of reality”… ie: that “cause and effect” is actually a sub-set of a higher law, and that is “the more something happens, the more likely it is to happen again”… so the containing matrix of reality (or at least one of the onion-skins thereof) is actually a giant neural network, rather than a box filled with billiard balls all bouncing off each other.
If you adopt that as a model, then things were previously inexplicable, become explicable… but a whole landscape of new questions arise.
And if it’s all bullshit, at least at the end of the process you have some art.