Goldkin's Journal: Musings of the Shiny Lizard

This post is a signal boost for others that may have been included in Zig Zag Productions' latest email campaign for their documentary on otherkin. As others have mentioned, I advise caution, given their choice of affiliates and contact methods (for, among other things, the current Whitney Houston documentary).

Of course, we've heard about this before, and the current email states the production is now for "a documentary for a UK television channel following the lives of Otherkin." The timing and this change of phrasing implies they've lost the Animal Planet bid for this production. Which seems reasonable, honestly -- I don't expect our lives to be that strikingly different from your preferred average Joe, except for what goes on on the inside and what folks like lupabitch went out of their way to document.

I'm considering giving them the benefit of the doubt at this point, throwing them a bone by linking waywind's terrific Otherkin Timeline and asking for a list of questions that can be anonymously addressed to the community. I'm dubious on their current call to speak to people over the telephone and document me for fairly obvious reasons of personal and professional security, but I'm not above giving them something to talk about in aggregate, as a judge of character in how seriously involved they actually are one year later.

We'll see. For now, I'm mostly documenting my thoughts for others, on the off chance they're helpful.

When I am done with my current commission, I will be divesting of my time in 3D art and design. It's as simple as that. Its reasoning, less so.


For the longest time, I had wished for a future where graphical representations of self would reign supreme. By this, I mean the full monty, augmented reality, rawr-I'm-a-dragon sort or existence in which we'd blend ourselves with our technology and discover just how far the rabbit hole goes. I call this an embracing of "complex media": anything that primarily and actively requires user immersion to understand the message. Videogames fall into this category, for example.

In hindsight, I don't see that as anything approaching unrealistic, and certainly not by modern technology... but it's just not what was ultimately successful and practical as the primary mode of expression for ideas and the culture of the Internet. That view would learn to understand and embrace human laziness, and, slowly, I've come to respect that.

A large part of this is the pain of specification. The idea of defining a world exactly, right down to its dimensions, behaviors, and microscopic layers, is simply tedious to do in complex graphical form. Spoken and written language, and to a lesser extent image and video content, seem to be much faster methods of conveyance for a much larger audience of people. This is precisely because of the lossy and simulative qualities available to the human mind, which enables it to grasp concepts quickly and easily from asynchronous, targeted culture than something that's always on and just sort of running in the background.

What works for complex media, then, is repeatability. Complex media is much better at capturing a certain shared qualia of the setting, packaging it up, and repeat-broadcasting it memetically throughout society. This is why videogames and Pixar-like immersive animations are as popular as they are -- they're able to document large swathes of culture and share them quickly, effectively, and in elegant ways that text media, graphical slide shows, and YouTube poop can only offer glimpses of. They can be unabashedly and knowingly epic. That has value.

But, at the same time, they're difficult to prototype in and outright expensive to work with. While complex media makes polished, organic use of the brain's spatial cortex when presented, their creation and delivery is often ploddingly slow. And, almost bitingly ironically, it just seems that the written word and these small bits of culture strewn about are better at conveying abstract concepts and elements of expression than simulations and ARGs, which I'd originally tinkered with. Well enough, I suppose.

Over time, I've sort of migrated from the repeatability camp over to the prototyping one. I like new experiences. I like sharing my ideas quickly, then flitting off on a whim to new ones. And I find it more healthy for me to try believing in six impossible ideas before breakfast than focusing on just the one and getting it perfect.


So, I dropped the stale vision that complex media would rule our world. Interestingly, it marked the end of a longstanding ambition for me. That ambition began with a conversation I had in what was then Horizons: Empire of Istaria, with Narse (yes, that Narse) when he was just beginning to futz around with his earliest illustrations.

In that conversation, we hashed out our two separate paths. Argued about, really. His view was that he didn't really know what he'd be doing with his illustrations, but he enjoyed them and his then-abilities, so he continued making them. My position was that I believed these crazy videogames and all-embracing visions of self would slowly become our world, so I would make 3D in order to embrace them. Then, as we slowly fell out of touch with one another (we had many more conversations in the meantime), we went our separate ways.

I became a sensation in Second Life and, slowly, faded into obscurity. He, well... you probably know by now, if you're reading here. Suffice it that one of these things was more popular and more expressive, and I don't believe it was just the porn that did it.*


Rather, I believe it's a simple matter of expressiveness and prior expression. So, I'll be giving up the 3D to see where text and basic drawing take me for a while. As far as hobbies go, I hope it works out.

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* And I still wish him well, especially in light of recent events, though we haven't talked in nearly 8 years now. I kind of wish I could get ahold of him again in a bizarre showing of camaraderie and friendship. Not because he's become such a spectacularly popular porn artist now, but because he was one of those interesting people I liked to talk to all those years ago.

lothnomicon linked this yesterday. I simply must share, because while this is another one of those create-your-own-dragon Flash games, its quality is reasonably good.

( Image behind the cut )

At the end of each yearly visit with family, I perform a solemn ritual of leave-taking. It is the time when I mentally and spiritually prepare myself for my goodbyes, pack up my room for another year's hibernation, and spend what few hours remain with family, both human and feline, before saying my farewells.

Each deliverance is harder than the last. For, despite my practiced view of detachment to physical things, the impermanence of my existence and impact on this world settles home when it becomes time to leave. It reminds me that my place is now this continuous walking in and out of the lives of those I care about, and I frankly don't know what to make of it.

Each time, though, I find a little more of myself in the experience. This visit, I found my resolve to confront my family on my mental distress and finally rebuild our lost communication. We still don't see eye-to-eye, but even that small victory, long in coming, is meaningful to me.

And in my first quiet time to reflect since earlier last year, I also found that pithy phrase to define what drives my life: I exist to make this world more elegant and more simple, without sacrifice, by organizing ideas. It seems like such a small thing now, and yet my guiding principles in everything I do, from mathematics to computer science to art and architecture, flow from it. This brings me an increased amount of peace within myself, and next, I shall seek to find why I became this way.

In each leave-taking, there is new sadness. And in each, there is joy in new experience. I do hope 2012 fares well for me. I currently have no plan on what I shall do next, save to be there as the story unfolds.

I hope you all have a good New Year's. My summary of 2011 can be stated in few words: much was done, much remains to be done, and I've greatly enjoyed the people, places, and projects that have graced my path this past year.

Stay safe this evening. I'm looking forward to seeing you all again in the new year.

Warning: this post contains more than mild spoilers to the plot of bard_bloom's latest novel, The Wrath of Trees, and a few other fiction bits, including an ongoing serialized novel in Analog magazine. If this bothers you, don't read! Instead, pick up copies of both and read them instead. They're quite good.


I've been quite enjoying Bard Bloom's latest novel, The Wrath of Trees. It's as information-rich as the various sythyry arcs, each page carrying new intrigue and insight that I'd easily miss if I tried speed reading through it. As such, I'm taking it nice and slowly, and I should finish it up in a day or three.

While reading through, many references are made to the setting's analog to magic -- "philosophy" -- and Melyl's powers being a direct analog to it (by experimental evidence) if not one and the same. Repeated references are made to spells and various magitech trinkets, such that it's pretty clear magic is an established staple in this universe in much the same way as in sythyry's.

However, due to simultaneously reading Robert J. Sawyer's Triggers, my right brain decided to spawn an interesting tangential head canon based on a single idea: that magic does not exist in this setting. And he gives me a brilliant little backdoor into how Melyl controls and reads minds from afar: controlled quantum entanglement. Spells might also take this form, implying that Melyl can freely entangle particles in her branches as long as her seeds form the anchor and entry vector of the entanglement.

What follows is this brilliant little set of side proofs trying to figure out how the rest of the setting's otherwise-magical components work together. I'm sure some of this is the intent of the author (ie, the artificial nature of the New Pantheon), but much of it -- such as how Ehekinet spikes might work -- becomes unintentional amusement for the idle physics nerd.


Since the author reads here, I'm not exactly asking for a word of God (or the patron god of blue lizards, sapient trees, prose, and dirty laundry, as the case may be). I just figured I'd share my amusement with others, since it makes his book that much more enjoyable to read. "Magic is science" is an old trope, but it's still a good one.

Merry Christmas. It may not be your preferred holiday, but whichever you choose or chose to celebrate, I hope it's joyous and wonderful.

As for me, I'm writing this from the right-rear passenger seat as my parents cart me away to see relatives. I really do love them all, though these visits are always full of interesting challenges.

Have a good holiday. Try to make it more about love and belonging than just gifts and tradition. :)

While riding home on the bus a month ago, I came up with a neat puzzle for the computational theorists and enthusiasts in the audience. It's what I consider a simple tree search puzzle that I'm posting here mostly for entertainment purposes. You can probably do better than my solution, though; I'll leave the answer to all of you.


Suppose you are trying to write a speedrun in the vein of those for TASVideos.org. You are given a series of picross puzzles -- pictorial puzzles where the objective is to etch a black-and-white drawing into an NxN grid (for finite N) that initially starts as white and lets you fill in the black bits. As a further constraint on gameplay, the game was designed with cursor control in mind, meaning that you can only move the cursor to tick off boxes in one block increments, horizontally or vertically. Fortunately, because you've completed this game and mapped it all out, you know what the solutions are in advance. Oh, and the cursor always starts at the same location (we will assume (0,0), the upper left origin).

Given these constraints, write a solver that takes the fewest number of cursor moves to complete each puzzle.


Good luck! If you require hints, feel free to poke me by private message or by commenting here. Oh, and do feel free to use your work to post a video of the speedrun.

Lately, I haven't been posting much to my journal in favor of microblogging services like Google+ and Twitter. While most of my audience is using one or both of these services, for those that didn't get the memo, I can be found here:

https://plus.google.com/117802717587572173130
https://twitter.com/#!/goldkin

While it saddens me that I don't use journalspace as much as I'd like to, I freely admit that it doesn't serve my purposes as well as newer Facebook engines that elevate the disposable role of plain text. As a result, I spend much more time with them than I do Dreamwidth. While these services' sorting and reading models are still atrocious (as kistaro and I discussed earlier today), they work precisely because users and content are much more locable (read: findable) while keeping posting- and follow impedance very low.

Because of this, I've found they provide a richer discussion through their ability to spontaneously include hundreds or thousands of people in a single topic, through messages that are understood to be transient. Most surprising, these messages are much more likely to be read consistently by many in my audience here. I've found this simply works better for me, both for organizing and sharing my thoughts, because it lets me be much more spontaneous and forthcoming about what I have to say.


Regardless, Dreamwidth retains a place for me despite these new, noisier services that compete for my time. What it provides and literally strives to be is a constant -- this electronic brick-and-mortar for my thoughts, where I can leave content and expect to find it five, ten, or twenty years from now. I feel that this has always been the place of journaling, and that remains true today.

So, I'll be here every so often to leave a new nugget of information and see how it grows, while I use other services to refine my thoughts and ideas. If you can't find me, just drop me a note, okay?

Now, where did I leave off in this thread about kittens...?

I rarely share things I find on the Internet here (for that, I use my Twitter and Google Reader accounts), but I like this one enough to drop here anyway. From Tricycle Magazine's Daily Dharma:

When there is understanding and a set of values that encourage sharing, then the limitations, the needs, and the lacks of any given life can be acknowledged and effort can be put into using material supports with compassion. This is also true in cases of deprivation; surely a major contributor to this is the greed and exploitation of others, which has its source in identification with material prosperity.

This captures the essence of the piece, but if you'd like to read the full article, you'll find it here.