Scroll of Mordenkainen’s Faithful Cat, summons a spectral cat that will ignore the caster for the duration of the spell

Wand of Magic Missive: this wand lets the user send a postcard or small envelope (max 4 ounces) to up to 1d4 targets.

along the ways i ran into a single quote from the 70s that completely stopped me.

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim” – Edsger Dijkstra

in one sentence it summarized for me that “thinking computer” is a just a language illusion. it’s not real and it will never be real.

a computer will never think in the same way a submarine will never swim. swimming is what living things do, a submarine instead ‘propels itself through water’. a computer will never ‘think’, it will ‘perform computations in order to arrive at conclusions’. which, guess what, they already do and have been for ages.

for people to agree that a machine is a “thinking computer” would be one that can feature a display of a pleasant cartoonish face that, when computing, would furrow it’s brow and make “hmm” noises. while an interesting task and a cognitive/behavioral challenge, it’s not a computer science problem.

the better goal i learned in compilers: we should be working to precisely define problem spaces where computers can help with decision making, and then writing better and more robust expert systems (by whatever buzzword they’re going by nowadays) that can read data about the situation, and suggest or perform actions in response. not as glamorous as ‘thinking’, but infinitely more useful.

• the CIA is perfectly willing to slaughter hundreds of civilians as part of undercover op
• all brazilians are armed to the teeth
• the russian military gives each person a totally different brand and caliber gun
• heartbeat monitors can detect if you’re friend or foe
• and so can UAVs. they even mark foes with little red rectangles in real time
• specops can drive snowmobiles one handed while shooting and reloading an uzi, but is completely befuddled by chain link fences and barb wire
• it’s possible to get good consistant bandwidth in a remote mountain house (note! this one might not actually be true)
• russia can launch a full land invasion of america with 1 day prep

and that famous part to MW2, the “kill the civilians” bit, it’s funny to me that it’s that big a deal. you’re playing a shooter and have already shot dozens of random people, will continue to shoot hundreds more, and because some of them are unarmed it’s a big deal? yes, they get hit in “realistic” means (as much as that applies for computer games) but so does every other character

cmon now, you call in airstrikes in crowded cities and grenade marketplaces, but apparently all those are abandoned and/or no one cares about brazilians.

eh, whatevs.

but that’s a tangent though. life is a performance, and as it is a performance there is a certain quality to it that we call authenticity. it’s hard to pin down, but i ran across a few things that got me to thinking about it

so let’s start by talking about alt-sex cause people love alt-sex or so i’m told. at the defcon jeopardy game (drunk social event for hackers) there was a girl there whose job was to basically dress up like a dom and hit people who answer incorrectly. she (and all the previous incarnations of her) did a great job, people had fun, cheering was had, but at the same time it was clear that she wasn’t a domina, not really, and i was wondering about why exactly.

it’s not a question in context in this case, i’m not speaking of attempting to subdue a room full of boisterous drunks, i’m talking about the reaction i had as she was still walking in before hand. it was one where the instant reaction was  ”aww, sweetie, i know what you’re going for and you certainly dressed the part, but you’re doing it all wrong. no idea how, but you are”

the dom thing isn’t attire or any physical action, in the end it’s something that’s an immediate emotional reaction. you either instantly understand upon seeing the person, or you don’t. if they don’t broadcast this authenticity in the first moment, there is no way to sort of back up and try again.

i guess i don’t mean in the first moment, but in the first moment it’s “turned on”. it is a performance and an act. keep in mind that those words don’t mean it’s “fake” to me, just that it is something we consciously choose to do. it’s fake only in the sense as our performance of being students, teachers, parents, or children is fake just because it’s possible for us to theoretically not act that way.

and i’m not saying that this is about some magical quality that comes from being in a culture. that’s stupid. it is absolutely possible to fake the performance with enough authenticity to make it real to anyone, but you would find that as you do so, you would no longer be faking it. yes, it’s catch-22ish. as soon as you pretend it well enough, you’re no longer pretending.

example 2: i was at a show not too long ago, 3 bands played. 2 of them were ‘normal’ to me, 1 of them the singer and frontman never felt like one. he dressed like a frontman, he spoke one, he sang into the mic, but at no point did i believe it. again, the authenticity wasn’t broadcast.

this is something i’m a bit hypersensitive to now that i’m fronting the band for real. the live show is a double performance, the band pretending to be the band, and the audience pretending to be the audience. if the singer can’t act like a band, soon the audience will feel stupid acting like an audience. there’s words that we use for it that vary from genre to genre, ‘energy’ being a common one, ‘feeling it’ is another, ‘getting us’, whatever. in the end it’s ‘we believed your performance, you believed ours, and we chose to have fun tonight’

another example: nerd core. yes, i’m taking, you kicking and screaming, from bdsm to geek rappers. let it go.

two rappers: mc chris, and mc plus+

mc chris:

mc++:

(what the hell, we don’t get pics of the girl dom but we get two nerd dudes?)

life’s a bitch, deal with it. btw, i originally wrote “pasty white dudes” but having googled him i now realize that mc plus+ isn’t very pasty. thanks for making me lose a great phrase.

so here’s the thing. i believe mc chris. and i don’t mean that i take what he says literally since that would include believing he owns a batmobile with a mcdonald’s inside, but the authenticity of his performance is there for me. i’m saying that when he talks about being a geek, i emotionally relate to him. i don’t feel it from mc plus+. and i’m not questioning mc plus+’s street cred, inasmuch as that term can possibly apply to someone who not only never claims to spend time on the streets but in fact claims to never leave their bedroom. i really believe he is a geek in real life, but his performance of being a geek doesn’t feel authentic.

“how can you possibly come across inauthentic at being yourself?”. because yourself is an act. because this requires performing a swagger and not just being geeky. and because there is more to this bravado than simply stating it and having the balls to hold a mic in front of a crowd of people, and that something is enjoying it to the point where you forget you’re only pretending to be enjoying it.

fourth and last example, this guy:

tim minchin performing “if i didn’t have you”, at the secret policeman’s ball.

btw, that’s officially my favorite love song of all time now.

there’s a geek culture thing to this song, like him trying to explain the word special as he’s using it, those 3 lines have more honesty in them than pretty much all other love songs combined. not just in what he’s saying (cause for all i know whitney will in fact always love you and is just as truthful), but in how honest his performance of it is. it’s someone who first screws up by saying his girlfriend/wife isn’t special, then tries to dig himself out, then realizes that even more importantly he’s now being ambiguous about what he meant by the word ‘special’ and the best way to explain that is with statistical analysis.

this post probably would here go on to start talking about dimitri martin and his palindrome, and then finish on comparing the comics smbb and “the warehouse comic”, but at this point i finished showering and stopped pondering this.

oh, and also something about how our ability to detect authenticity being in part our exposure to the role at hand. i’m positive i have a different standard of authenticity of a domina than 99% of defcon, probably 95% one way, and 4% the other way. or thereabouts.

here’s a hacker jeopardy pic in either case:

enter Finger 16. i’m proposing this simple protocol as a replacement to eye rolling providing optional stealth and more layers of meaning

they system works like this: the listener in the conversation creates a particular hand shape which shows between 1 and 4 fingers. each finger represents one possible part of a message, defined as so:

• index – you’re wrong
• middle – you’re stupid
• ring – shut up
• pinky – go away

this hand shape is then tapped against the body, either out of sight for personal gratification, or in plain view if someone else is to receive the message.

"you're wrong and stupid" being tapped out in plain view

"you're wrong and stupid, shut up, go away", the message hand and tap being mostly out of sight behind other arm

(note, as above, in the case the index and middle are both showing, those two components are combined into “you’re wrong and stupid”)

one implementation suggestion: a message of “shut up” is tricky to do by itself, best way to do it is to do it is to hold down all the fingers with your thumb, then flick out the ring finger. alternatively, combine the message with “you’re stupid” since “you’re stupid, shut up” is a very easy hand shape

Possible implementation of "shut up". Not trivial, but very possible to create one handed.

as a bonus, these hand shapes translate to hex very easily which makes them easier to type than trying to capture eyerolls in text. the fingers are encoded as such:

• index : 1
• middle : 2
• ring : 4
• pinky : 8

use the characters zero-f  as header in a finger 16 message, then add up the values of the fingers above, and write it as a hexadecimal (1 to F) number. sample usage:

“Wow, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this point 0f3.”

this, to a finger16 would actually mean, “wow, you’re wrong and too stupid to understand why you’re wrong, i give up”.

and that’s the basic great idea. if you disagree, this is me listening attentively to your comments:

Your opinions are very important to me, as you can tell from my facial expression.

ADDENDUM: enumerated table of values

0f1 : you’re wrong
0f2 : you’re stupid
0f3 : you’re wrong and stupid
0f4 : shut up
0f5 : you’re wrong, shut up
0f6 : you’re stupid, shut up
0f7 : you’re wrong and stupid, shut up
0f8 : go away
0f9 : you’re wrong, go away
0fA : you’re stupid, go away
0fB : you’re wrong and stupid, go away
0fC : shut up, go away
0fD : you’re wrong, shut up, go away
0fE : you’re stupid, shut up, go away
0fF : you’re wrong and stupid, shut up, go away