Halikar’s Blarg

A quarter of a century ago, not terribly long after I had graduated high school, I came to the conclusion that I was my own worst enemy. This was not actually a serious thought, but the supposition of someone designing a fictional world for role playing in. I had postulated a what if (one that has since become rather common), what would happen if a game master stepped across into his or her creation? What kind of powers would such a person have there, how would the inhabitants of the world react, who else from outside might have access?

I further postulated that such a world might be the product of several game masters, all actually the same person, but from parallel realities themselves. Which would mean some of those parallel selves might be evil. If more than one parallel game master managed to make the journey to the created world, they might essentially be the entire pantheon of that world, beings of good and evil. Hence, they are their own worst enemies.

Reality is, of course, a little different. There are no other versions of myself for me to worry about except those that I carry within my own head. But this, apparently, is enough. I am indeed my own worst enemy and it has only been recently that this truism has hit emotional home.

There are a multitude of things I need or wish to accomplish. Personal projects, acquisition of monetary resources to support myself and my family, things I have been asked to do by others that are well within my capabilities, even just enjoying myself with things I know I find fun to do. And yet, in spite of my desires and capabilities, these things frequently do not end up fully accomplished. In many cases, the more personal the more likely in fact, they remain almost totally undone except for mental planning and brainstorming.

None of this is really new. I have been diligently attempting to address these things and improve, searching web sites and blogs, reading books from the library, all kinds of things to find tools to get where I want to go and do what I want to do. I know I have a streak of perfectionism to overcome (the “wait until it’s perfect before implementing” syndrome), motivational issues to kick, and goals to find and guide my life. And yet, in spite of knowing all this, I still sit and spin.

I don’t mean to imply I sit and do nothing, far from it. I do indeed research answers to problems. I typically have six to twelve books out of the public library at any given time, and most of them are non-fiction. I do jot down ideas for things, plan out and design potential software and web sites, and nose around for paying potential work (including grunt work of the convenience store type if need be). And interestingly enough, to me anyway, it has been through this effort that another potential solution has shown itself to me obliquely.

You might call it divine intercession, random chance, complete coincidence, finding meaning within normal happenstance, the universe speaking, any number of things. Whichever it is does not matter, all that does is there is a solution, it makes sense to me, and it is my own damn fault I haven’t seen and used it before now. It’s painfully obvious in hindsight, but most things generally are. And I plan on dancing around it a little longer to show how I found it.

Over the course of this year, I have been increasing my visits to the local branch of the Los Angeles library system to eventually be at least once a week. I have been checking out books on a wide variety of subjects, some of which I just find fascinating and some of which are research toward various projects. I made the conscious decision to do this because I used to go to the library once a week while I was growing up, and it was simultaneously the most educational, most enjoyable, and most memorable aspect of my childhood. I wanted to recapture that feeling as a part of my attempts to get my life back on some kind of acceptable track (acceptable to who is a question for another time though).

About a month ago, I saw a Star Wars fiction book in the New Book section of the library. I don’t generally read modern Star Wars books, but this one just struck me as interesting for some reason. After reading it, I realized I had not really been reading all that much fictional stuff in a long while, and it felt good to do so again. So I began including at least one science fiction book in my weekly library checkouts. This lead me to poke around the stacks of my local library branch to see what they had on the shelves from my favorite authors (sure, I can request stuff from the entire Los Angeles library collection ahead of time, but I wanted to get a feel for what was immediately available).

Monday, I was greatly annoyed to find that Robert A. Heinlein, one of the authors I grew up reading, was represented by a grand total of two books on the shelves, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the work written by Spider Robinson after Heinlein’s death based on Heinlein’s long lost notes, Variable Star. I had never read Variable Star, so I grabbed it for this weeks fictional reading.

About half way through the book, the main character is sitting in a Healers (essentially a psychologist/physician if I understood correctly) office on a court ordered course of treatment following an uncharacteristic assault made by him. During the session, the Healer points out that our hero needs to ask and answer several important questions about his life. Hardly surprising to me, I’ve been trying to do the very same thing with my own life. The following advice, though, resonated with me the instant I read it.

The Healer pointed out that meditation, to turn off the conscious mind and be able to listen, and physical activity to get in shape, as physical condition improves mental focus and mood. Again, neither of these were new to me, but in the book the Healer stressed that these things HAD to be incorporated into a daily routine,  to the point of cutting back on things that were “necessary” to do (preferably those that were less important to the main character personally). The point being that maintaining oneself in good physical, mental and emotional health was more important than all else and critical to accomplishing anything else in life.

This, naturally, seems painfully obvious. However, it is exactly the opposite of what I have been doing. I have been trying to focus on what other needs, those of family, friends, dictates of society, and placing my own toward the back burner. Sure, I’ve tried to steer a course that satisfies all those needs while still maintaining what I believe makes me who I wish to be, but that hasn’t meant focusing on my needs, not really anyway. And as a result, things aren’t getting done that should be, my mood and physical condition has deteriorated, and my mental abilities are becoming harder and harder to employ without self-interruption.

I know this probably doesn’t seem like a chain of events of any great importance, but I personally find the complete chain telling and revealing. As such, I am going to do my best to retask a couple/three of hours of my day to doing what I should be doing, maintaining myself. Part of a measure of the success of this retasking will be this blog. Regular, but not necessarily daily, postings will be a public statistic of my success or failure. And I very much want a public measure as I am well aware that the assistance of friends and family will be necessary for me to succeed.

So expect a lot of (hopefully) interesting entries to be forthcoming. I plan on this being only partially about my journey, I have many other things I’ve had plenty of mental preparation for making entries about too. Cross your fingers.

When I was a about eight years old, my family moved into our first actual house. It was in an area of Southern California that was only a bit developed, kind of a bed room type community for Los Angeles. It’s grown substantially since then, but back then there was plenty of hills to hike on, old and new streets to explore, even an unpaved creek to stomp around along the back end of the official LA County park just down the street. It was an absolute heaven for an explorer, and that’s just what I did. I drew my own maps, I walked and biked everywhere I could, I pushed back the boundaries of my unknown world every day.

As I grew older, I continued my explorations, but I moved more of my attention from the physical world to the world of books. The Los Angeles County Library system has always been a very large carnival of reading material, and the local library, in spite of being out in what was the “sticks” at the time, was one of the larger branches. Plus, anything it didn’t have that interested me, could easily be brought to me from one of the other branches. My treks to the library were a weekly event for me, planned carefully and were frequently an all day affair.

By the time I was eleven, I added on to my exploration itinerary the world of role playing. That summer, the very first editions of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books were released, and my friend and I began building our own characters and stories instead of just reading about others. This had the unexpected benefit of spurring me into reading and research in areas I had not considered before, to better understand things such as mountain erosion, the reasons for climates and weather, what things were really like for people living in historical times, all in an effort to make our stories more believable and vivid.

When I entered high school I was confronted with yet another unknown boundary I just had to cross and explore, the brand new world of home computing. Our school had a modern marvel, a brand new Apple II+ computer, and, along with an older Heathkit CP/M computer, the world of programming opened up for me. There wasn’t a whole lot that was useful with the machines at that time, but we could still see the potential vistas they were giving us glimpses of.

As I ended high school and entered college for the first time, the world of emotions and love became my realm of inquiry. My future wife was my guide, and she will attest to the fact that I found it to be a scary and wonderful realm to inquire about. It did lead to my marriage and my two children, so it has been a very fruitful endeavor, perhaps my most fruitful one so far.

All this illustrates one thing though, no matter where I was, what I was thinking about, what I was doing, I was always pushing back my boundaries of what was unknown. Be it my environment, my knowledge, my imagination, my talents or my life, I was always exploring.

Over time, though, I appear to have stopped doing so without even noticing it. This blog is a prime example. The first incarnation was simply a sounding board on topics I wanted to sound out about (which is unfortunately now lost to the wastelands of crashed hard drives). The second incarnation (which can be seen below) was dedicated to my quest to re-find myself and my goals. Both of these were short sighted of me, and are why both attempts petered out after only a few postings.

That is going to change. I grew up as an explorer. I learned how to explore many different types of horizons and have become interested in an eclectic variety of subjects along the way. Trying to restrict myself to only one view is not how I used to do things and it is not how I should be doing things now. I need to be what I feel I am supposed to be, and to do that means returning to my explorations, continuing my treks into my personal unknowns and shining the light onto things I wish to look at.

So, as of today, Halikar’s Monoblog is no more. It is, instead, being replaced with Halikar’s Blarg. Welcome to my new explorations and commentary.

After my last update, I started digging into a topic I had been planning to since I restarted Halikar’s Monoblog, self motivation. I wrote, edited and restarted that potential entry many, many times over several days before shifting into what seemed like the catalyst issue, goals. I repeated the process and shifted the primary subject several times, but eventually realized I faced a problem of a different sort. The issue was either incredibly complex, I was over complicating things by entwining several issues into one, or I really didn’t understand the issue and was sifting through symptoms that appeared to be core issues.

I also realized that in trying to change, I was intentionally ignoring the old ways of doing things simply to change by doing nothing but new methods. That was never my intent, as if an old method actually worked successfully, it should still be effective. I had still planned to question and scrutinize those methods, but that should not have meant I should totally shy away from using them. Change is not an instant, overnight process after all.

With all that in mind, I fell back on a tried and true method, what I call deep thinking. This method has many advantages for me: I can do it anywhere, whenever I have a spare moment around family life and with my memory I don’t need any special materials to accomplish it. Its disadvantages are a lack of external proof of progress, a tendency to forget about other things and topics and I have been known to lock myself into just thinking, analyzing and testing solutions as thought experiments. Because of some of my “pre-thinking”, I was able to more clearly note the disadvantages needing future solutions, but I still fell victim to them this time. This all added up to a lack of entries here and stalled progress in a lot of other areas. It’s also given me a list of things to improve on a known workable tool.

The end result of all this is that I believe I now know the core, catalyst issue of it all, a lack of dreams. I say dreams rather than goals because goals are targets or destinations of a concrete nature; dreams are more aspirations that may or may not be concrete or attainable, and are the driving force behind creativity and imagination. I think some of it isn’t that I don’t have dreams, it’s that somewhere along the line I started filtering between attainable and unattainable dreams.

For example, as a kid I always wanted to go into space. Even as late as my early twenties I was seriously contemplating far-fetched ways to accomplish it. Now, even with space-tourism starting to become reality, I do not see how this is possibly attainable and it no longer is included in my drives to achieve.

The dreams that are attainable I have already reached. I have a wife who I love dearly; I have intelligent children who (usually) do their best to be their best; our basic needs are (usually) met; and I have (online) friends I can hang out with and discuss things of interest with. It would honestly be nice to have a much higher income to meet our financial obligations, but that is a goal and not a dream (at least for me; I suspect for my wife it is a dream).

Since I have reached all I have deemed attainable I have nothing to reach and strive for, nothing to inspire much creativity. To seriously tackle this issue, I will not only need new, attainable dreams, I will need to focus on the filter and either adjust it or figure out how to eliminate it so I have dreams to inspire me regardless of attainability.

In taking a hard look at my filter, I have come to realize, to my chagrin, that most of it has been imposed by society. You can’t get there from here; you must live up to the obligations others say you have; you must be productive in the eyes of others who do not know you; you must make a lot of money to be prosperous; you must be a “team player” and sacrifice what you want and enjoy to fit it (and to be clear, being a “team player” is a good goal to have, but not at the cost of yourself). I have never liked the way society insists you must fit in on it’s terms and not rock the boat, and I am very unhappy to learn that I have allowed it to subvert myself in this way. Fitting in and being productive are good goals, but there are infinite ways of doing so, not just the one way society pushes for.

So, I have to tear apart this filter, re-find my old dreams and add in some new ones, and use my dreams to inspire me to find a way to be a part of society on my terms and be myself. Sounds like the chance of a lifetime to me.

September 11th, a day almost every American identifies with in some fashion. It is a day of remembrance, but what that remembrance is to each of us is what should be focused on. Some want us to remember the fear and horror, and thereby bring attention and potential support to their cause. It does not matter how many facts support or don’t support these causes, it is fear and horror that are the needed fuel for them.

This focus on the negative throws all objectivity and critical thinking to the winds, and instead relies entirely on emotional responses to get things done. The goal could have the best of intentions, but because it is being executed with emotional inertia the end results can be completely different than the original intent. This is the danger of tragedy, and it is why we must certainly pay our respects to those affected by them, but also look for the good within the tragedy.

I personally lost a cousin on 9/11. I did not really know him, but the fact that he was my cousin brought the entire event into very sharp focus for me. He was a New York City fire fighter, part of the rescue squads stationed in Manhattan. He knew full well that going into those buildings meant he would very likely not be coming out again. He went in anyway, because there were people in need of assistance and that’s what he was there for.

I do not think it would have mattered to him what the reasons were for the disaster. I don’t think he would have cared who was at fault. All that mattered was there were people in danger and that’s why he became part of the NYFD, to be there to help them and know how to help them when the time came. And so he was, along with a multitude of his fellow fire fighters and joined by their counterparts among law enforcement. They went in so that others would have a chance at safety. And they succeeded beyond any expectation at the time events were unfolding.

After the towers came down, the outpouring of support and assistance by anyone and everyone was staggering. Survivors were searched for, and after hope was lost for survivors closure was sought for as many families as possible. People helped each other, banded together, and in the face of incredible odds did their very best. In the midst of an example of incredible devastation was a shining example of what we can be together when we choose to be.

It is this I will forever remember of this event. Not the fear, terror nor horror that those wanting to place blame, point fingers and push agendas want me to feel. I, instead, see hope, determination and unity in the face of such incredible disaster. This is what humanity can be, and I refuse to be anything less when those who fear monger try to knock on my door.

My wife pointed out to me yesterday a disabled community news and commentary blog entry by Patricia E Bauer. It concerns the new Ben Stiller movie coming out, Tropic Thunder. At issue is the use of language that makes light of certain mental disabilities, specifically the word “retard“, and what should be expected of Ben Stiller and, the production company that made the movie, and the movie distributors over the use of this and other potentially derogatory words.

Before I get into my own opinion on the matter, let me qualify a couple of things. First, my wife is herself physically disabled from birth. While this specific issue doesn’t impact her own disability, she has been part of what is collectively called the disabled community for a long while, and has spent time on activist causes and done work within it. She herself has weighted in on the blog’s comments in fact.

Second, I myself have an aunt who suffers from mental retardation. The cause, PKU or Phenylketiburia, is genetic, and if caught early enough through infant testing can now be treated successfully. My own children had to undergo this test to ensure they would receive proper treatment if necessary. Fortunately for us, their tests were negative, but they themselves will need to have their own children tested in the future, as they could carry the gene responsible. So this does make me sensitive to the use of the word “retard” in common language, and I frequently ask it not be used whenever it is said in my presence.

With these aspects in mind, I find the list of heard suggestions compiled by Patricia to indicative of an obsessive, over-reactive community. There is a world of difference between intent to cause offense and finding offense because it is upsetting, and this appears to me to be a clear case of finding offense where none was intended. Apologies and support for better awareness by those standing to make money from this movie would still makes sense since there clearly is offense, but not as demands specifically to support this type of abrasive activism. The counter argument of “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” might certainly apply, but this sounds much more like a childish “I’m going to throw a tantrum” than “squeaky wheel” to me. Irregardless, some sort of response of support by the movie money grubbers does make sense to me, and I hope there is such a response forthcoming. Just as I expect the response to be blasted as unacceptable or insufficient by those making the demands in the first place.

However, I totally disagree that the word “retard”, and any other alternative words used to describe the characterization of someone of with a mental disability, should be pulled from the movie or it’s DVD release. Firstly, no matter how good or poorly the movie is crafted, whether it is actually humorous or not, it is a work of art. Art, whatever the form or medium, needs to delve into areas the common man does not normally. This allows art to inspire, educate, and compel us to act, and it matters not if the art is a sculpture, book, poem, photograph, or movie. If nothing else, the response and commentary on Patricia’s blog shows this movie is indeed art, for they are compelled by it to act, however irresponsibly many of them are acting.

My major reason for disagreeing, though, is far more simple. It can be summed up by a rallying cry used by another community that’s been subjected to abuse and ridicule throughout history, and specifically to remind us of a certain event in history so that it’s atrocities will always be easily recallable. It is two simple words: Never forget. Those offended at the use of the word “retard” are indeed correct in that this movie will indeed bring the word, it’s meaning, and the issue to the forefront of consciousness. Which is exactly what should happen. While it is advisable that such words not be used in everyday speech because of their potential for hurt and offensiveness, locking the words away so they are never used will cause the issues they represent and the meaning they convey to be forgotten. Demanding the movie be edited before future releases is just asking that this issue be forgotten, that we be set up to make the same mistakes over and over again. Making the words go away will not make the issue go away, nor will it allow us to be better about how we handle it. We require reminders, and our best tool to be reminded is with words.

Words have power and meaning. Sometimes that power and meaning is all in how we choose to interpret or use them. Not using them leaves that power and meaning unchanneled, forever ready to come back and bite us when we least expect it. Which appears to be exactly what is happening within the activist disabled community. Perhaps this will be their wake up call.

Like the Crusaders of history, Cyber Crusaders take the fight to the home pages of others in an attempt to change things for the better. Their weapons forged of words and code seek the blood of their enemies in their continuing effort to right wrongs and create a better Internet for all based on their concepts of what is right and moral. Such battles frequently spill across the Netscape, spilling across community forums, personal blogs and even Wikipedia. Unfortunately, like their counterparts of history, they are more likely to cause unnecessary pain and destruction instead of effect positive change.

The reason for this is that online communities are as varied as real life communities. They have their own rules of conduct, and it is those rules of conduct and the reasons behind them that cause the birth of Cyber Crusades. The Crusaders insist that things are unfair and must change, usually because the Crusader is violating the community’s rules of conduct. Frequent argument is that they are fighting for “freedom of speech”, the “right to voice an opinion” or increasing public awareness of the “fascism of the administrators of the community” in an effort to “bring them to justice”. All commendable arguments, to be sure, but they totally ignore the real facts of the matter.

An effective and harmonious online community MUST have active moderation. This means the administrators must have criteria of what is allowed and what is not, and that those who violate that criteria be deal with as necessary. Allowing total “freedom of speech” would be wonderful, if it actually worked beyond creating a total anarchy. Allowing the “right to voice an opinion” without regard for consequences due to potential hurt of upset of others is creating a community of bullies, where hurt and upset are the norm and no ones feelings are ever spared or important. Increasing public awareness of the moderation is certainly possible, especially by dragging other communities into the issue, but this rarely brings anyone to justice since the administrators usually own the communication medium, either though annual fees to a web host or by supplying their own web server. With such obstacles, the Cyber Crusader must resort to other tactics to continue their fight.

A popular tactic is defacing the community web site. This is particularly common with community wikis. It also can include posting on community forums or spamming community chat channels. To accomplish this requires creating false user accounts or actually hacking the web site.

After this, bringing in other communities is next. The Cyber Crusaders spew their message in an effort to bring others to their cause and engender popular opinion against the heathen community. That they must violate the rules of conduct of many other communities is immaterial, their message must be heard so that others will rally to their righteous cause.

Depending on just how serious the Cyber Crusader is and how much information they have access to, this can even go so far as to invade the non-cyber life of the administrators they are campaigning against. This can include reports made to pubic authorities, complaints to police, and invoking the rule of law to cease the apparent depredations of their foes. That they must exaggerate or falsify facts to make these claims is irrelevant, their cause is just.

What these Cyber Crusaders miss is the same thing their historic brethren missed, they must sacrifice their moral justification to take their battle into the homes of others, because those others are not sacrificing their own moral standing to take the battle to the Crusaders. That this undermines their entire reason for their battle completely escapes their minds. They also refuse to accept that if they just walked away, the entire problem would be gone, and they’d be free to find a community much more in line with their own tastes. They are blinded by rage, obsessing on their perceived victimization by the community they now must do everything to bring down, and nothing else matters to them. They have fallen into the trap every fundamentalist makes, that their way is the only right way and that no other way can possibly matter.

They have forgotten that they are guests and not room mates, and that guests really have no say in the color of the party decor. But if they understood that, they’d at the buffet table enjoying themselves.

And the doctor replies, “So don’t do that”. It’s an old joke, and it’s all I can think about as I channel surf through the local channels right now. As each and every news station reports on the earthquake we had here in the Los Angeles area. Where no one was hurt. Where nothing was damaged. And to report about it they are preempting all the scheduled programming. Six. Hours. Later.

Those of us who have lived in the Southern California area for any real length of time are used to the earthquake routine. Things start to shake, we sit there for a couple of seconds assessing if it’s something to worry about or not, and only look for a bolt hole until it’s over if it is something to worry a bit about. We’ll turn on the television or radio (although I’ll personally hit the USGS site on earthquakes first assuming I have Internet access, but then I’m a geek), listen to see how big it was and where, and if it’s not bad enough to have done anything significant we return to our daily lives.

But not the modern news media. They have something to report. It doesn’t matter that everyone knows about it (it was felt as far away as Las Vegas, so anyone here in Los Angeles is almost sure to have felt it). It doesn’t matter that nothing else of significance happened. It must be reported. And not only must it be reported, they must send remote cameras and reporters to where it happened. Nothing broken to film, but they still must go, because being there is somehow significant. They must deploy reporters all over the city to talk to every man and woman on the street they can. These people have the same thoughts and feelings about the quake that we do, but they still must be interviewed and the interviews must be broadcasted. Because they are the news media, this is something that must be reported on, and it’s their job to do it.

Granted. That accounts for about 10 minutes worth of useful reporting. The facts are given to the viewing audience, they are given the feeling of having been to the epicenter of the quake and seen things are alright, and they are given a sense unity with all the others in the Los Angeles area who felt it. But that’s it. It’s worth an initial Special Report, a follow up or two, then that 10 minutes during the regular news. But not constant reporting for hours and hours afterward. It’s no wonder more and more people can’t get on with their lives when things go wrong, the news media won’t let us.

The news media for years has been concerned about loss of viewership, and this slip-shod, amateurish, over-exposure of an event is part of the reason why they are losing it. They pounce on things, slant their reporting, and drag them out so they don’t have to go out and do real work in finding new things to report. They insist that something matters and must be reported on in depth, and by in depth they mean until they’ve wrung every last ounce of sensationalism out of it. And then they’ll report on it some more. It shows a serious lack of perspective, ethics and professionalism, and it’s no wonder that it drives people to look elsewhere.

They are just like the patient who cries, “It hurts when I do this”. But they refuse to take the doctors advice, instead opting to make sure the rest of us fully understand how much it hurts by inflicting that pain on us. Me, I’m taking the doctors advice and looking for my news elsewhere. I see no reason to continue letting it hurt just because media executives say I should. Let them suffer in silence.

Since I’ve had problems maintaining a blogging schedule so far (writers block is an insidious thing), I decided to set up a second blog for a character I am using to tour the fictional world I have been kicking around my head for years. He may end up a story character, he may not, but if nothing else he’s a good vehicle for detailing the world while looking at it through his eyes. Between the two blogs, maybe I’ll be able to get entries done regularly.

The Journal of Jayban Storr.