slowly things settle. is this where I am? is this where we are?
(funny, the use of 'we' when I mean 'you', or 'I'; I'd like to think that it's snippets of Korean coming through; or maybe it's just language tugging you into attention, pronouns that turn heads.)
at one point biking I feel my legs stretch out, as if they were telescoping in and out, effortlessly elongating and shrinking, and it feels good; it feels like an exertion of my being, to feel the muscle fibers firing.
it's also unfair, I think, that things only taste sweet once you jump past the initial hump of activation energy or barrier to entry, that there exists a whole universe of unexplainable delights that cannot be explained to others; the joy of feeling mechanics and ecologies change underneath your fingertips, the sensation of linking processes together that feels like firing an arrow just so, deftly. being able to start from a thought and end in a mechanism in code that does transformative things. designing images and objects that feel crisp, just so. strategies of talking and organizing meetings/projects so that, when you zoom out, you see a boat, a ship, and the crystalline structure of its dependences, its trajectory, the necessary procedures and processes one must push through to make it slide through the water.
how do you explain things? how do you move things from inside your brain to the outside world? it's as if the other minds problem returns again, not as an anguished worry about solipsism, but this time against the impossibility of permeability, the knowledge that what I think and feel is sometimes nearly untransferable to others, or that it takes immense amounts of time.
and lest a future version of me mistake that this comes from a perspective of arrogance, that I Am Right: no, that's not it. It's more like: I am possessed (and so are you) with some spirit, and we see these different ghosts / structures / thoughts / ecologies, and I may wander off into the distance talking with and gesticulating at things that you cannot see, and vice versa.
so here we are in the city, trying to talk about these ghosts we follow; occasionally we follow the same ones, but often we don't. often we collide and excitedly share stories, only to realize that the ghosts we were changing are following different paths. sometimes you glance at someone walking parallel, and realize that they too are following a similar ghost -- but then you've been following/seeking/being possessed for so long, and furrowing your brow, leaning your ear to a faint rhythm, and wandering forward becomes such a well-worn sensation that you merely nod in mutual recognition, following forward. so - for me to describe to you how these spirits appear, and how they feel, and their history and potential future, takes time, if it ever happens. like describing a dream to someone: direct description is always the most unhelpful, and it's always best done obliquely.
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important reminder to self. don't get stuck in local optima. the only way to get unstuck in local optima to accept inefficiencies, downward-facing slopes. paths on mountains are never straight. simulated annealing and genetic algorithms all have a healthy rate of mutation and diversity to make sure that not getting stuck.
this means: never be the expert, always be the question-asker. experts are risk-resolving devices formed by industries in which the entities at play are trying desperately to resolve complex problems by black-boxing them away.
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if I find myself angry lately (in a quick and light kind of anger, as if it were a gust of warm spring wind that pushes you off kilter for a moment), it's about things that do not lead to actions. I wish for: actionable steps, movement, pacing. I wish to move. fingers lead to keyboards that do incredible things.
more and more, my faith in words decreases. I have so little faith in the power of words to change things. or, to be precise (and potentially inaccurate, of course): when things are changed, words will be used. but words are not necessarily the primary conduit to change things. or: words alone are not necessarily the primary conduit to change things.
the more precise version is just pedantic: "a car requires an engine and wheels; climbing a mountain requires a destination and a trail; words and action (or words and engineering) are just two parts that are needed." yes, yes.
perhaps what I mean is more like: please, god damn it, let us speak in the medium of inequality, let us meet the material world at its own level, let us encounter it where it exists, not how it is represented. let's not get caught in realms and planes and modes of understanding that are symptomatic of the base issue, word games and pedantics and definitions, where the physical world and the larger ecologies of economics and and materials and politics do not care.
like: building the CNC router in the summer of 2013 with A, carefully fine-tuning its planarity and accuracy to a neurotic level, to of course realize that the motor mechanism and the larger structure compensates / ruins whatever accuracy we had. our mental model of the resolution of data was out of sync with the material realm in which things exist, and we were spinning our wheels on the model, endlessly abstracted.