Ray Merkler's Blog Title Is Meta

About a quarter of the time, when I’m exhausted but too wound up to rest, my brain will start dreaming before I’ve completely fallen asleep. I lose control of my thoughts, yet remain aware of them as if they were my own. If I’m careful enough, I can watch the images and sounds float through my senses without waking up. Sometimes I’ll compose symphonies I have no way of capturing — I’m certain I’d be an accomplished composer if I could do so.

Last night, I experienced another of these half-waking dreams. A gnome delicately bowed a tiny fiddle, part of yet another string quartet that I’ll never hear again. A tractor beam lifted him from the ground. Someone explained fractals in Vietnamese. An orange vine slithered down a gigantic redwood, dipping a tendril into, and ruining, a cup of purple espresso.

And then, through the vortices of jumbled, muddy context, I discerned a word, in seriffed typeface, amongst a cacophony of Cthulhean gibberish, set off in color just enough for me to focus on it.

A single word.

“Dickables.”

I have no idea what it meant. All I know is that it was my own. Perhaps, in time, my life’s journeys will reveal its significance to me.

Go and get a big cup of coffee. Make it extra hot so you have to drink it slowly. Stephen Fry would like 32 minutes of your time, and I assure you it is a worthwhile temporal displacement.

There is so very much that one can take from these words. Everyone who partakes will experience a different aroma. You may find hints of the secrets to happiness, notes of wisdom on the simple how d’ya do, perhaps a waft of the power of constructive skepticism and the mechanisms that drive why.

There is a lot of complexity in this world, and that complexity is what begets the heartburn that distracts us from the pure, albeit fractal, simplicity that is the formula to a great life. Let Stephen remind you how to be enthralled with living again.

Want some free CDs?

My wife and I are hardcore decluttering right now to get ready to sell our condo, and I’ve decided to unload as much physical media as I can. To that effect, I am unloading my entire CD collection. It’s relatively small for a child of the 80s/90s (“only” 119 albums!), but it’s taking up space that I want back.

These are all ultimately destined for eBay, but I wanted to give dibs to everyone who reads my blog or follows me on Twitter.

Here’s the list. If you see anything you want, email me with your address and I’ll drop it off at the post office. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d also appreciate a couple bucks for postage, depending on how many CDs you want.

I just set up a direct deposit link between my healthcare spending account and my ING Direct checking account. Let me tell you how I did it:

Step 1: Access a PDF of the spending account company’s direct deposit form.

Step 2: Fill out the form in Adobe Reader.

Step 3: Print the form.

Step 4: Print a voided check from ING Direct.

Step 5: Cut the voided check out of the printout.

Step 6: Tape the printout of the voided check to the printout of the direct deposit form PDF.

Step 7: Sign the printout of the direct deposit form PDF with the printout of the voided check taped to it, thus proving that no one else in the world could possibly be filling out this form.

Step 8: Fax the printout of the direct deposit form PDF with the printout of the voided check taped to it to the spending account company.

Step 9: Wait a week while a human manually enters the data on the fax into the spending account company’s database.

I have a tiny device in my pocket that I can use to communicate instantaneously with anyone in the world any time I want. This device was probably invented some time around 2005 to 2006. I did not use that device to complete the simple task I just completed.

Instead, I used a device that was invented in 1969 and another device that was invented in the 1840s in tandem to communicate information contained on a piece of technology invented in 3700 BCE.

Oh, even better, and then? I threw the printouts away.

On the recommendation of Phil Plait, I’m watching a recording of Discovery’s “How the Universe Works” right now. It’s… a TV show.

That’s really the best way that I can describe it. I naively expected to see an interesting and informative documentary, and I shouldn’t have. This is science TV. The topics discussed are beyond the cognition of the typical viewer of even Discovery, and so they have to be distilled and simplified past the point of injustice, and then stylized with colorful CGI and exciting descriptions like, “an INCREDIBLE amount of energy,” and, “a billionth of a billionth of a billionth [I'm barely exaggerating here] of a billionth the size of an atom.”

It makes me think of this comic.

I get that shows like this have their place, and it’s good that anyone tries to get the mainstream interested in advanced physics, but it’s so hard for someone who understands this stuff (even at the severely basic level that I grasp it myself) to watch shows like this without tilting their heads and saying, “Eeehhhhh, all right, I guess that’s close enough,” every fifty seconds.

Oh Christ, they just talked about the mass-energy equation.

Rockets are shit.

Inefficient. Dangerous. Heavy. A major proportion of the thrust generated in the first half of a rocket firing goes toward lifting the fuel. Come on.

There’s a lot of debate about the value of human spaceflight. The best argument I’ve heard in favor of it so far says that, even if it is wasteful, it’s the human spaceflight portion of space exploration that inspires the kiddies. Astronauts are heroes.

I get that. You’re right. I agree. Even if those kids never get to be astronauts (and almost none of them will), many of them will at least redirect their inspiration into other space related sciences. We need that, so let’s keep launching astronauts into space. It’s expensive, but the long term payoffs are worth it.

I do not, however, agree with sending astronauts to Mars. Hell, I barely think we should bother sending them to the Moon. These are inspiring goals, make no mistake, but they are expensive and wasteful, and apart from creating high-dreaming youngsters, the gains are not enough to justify the cost at this time.

But what about in the future? We are still a decidedly primitive civilization. The fastest mode of transportation we possess is still little more than a controlled explosion fastened to the hope that we locked down the gaskets right.

Transporting humans to deep space is profoundly difficult right now, but will it be like that in fifty years, when new methods of propulsion will (one hopes) exist? If so, why not wait until then? We can still perform manned heroics closer to home in the mean time if we absolutely must do it, but going to Mars?

Personally, if I had my way, we’d forget about visiting other planets while we’re still pre-FTL. There is so much science to be done in the area around Earth, both by humans and especially by robots. I’m all for going to the Moon and doing the other things because they are hard, but going to Mars is more than just hard, it’s damn near prohibitive while we still rely on rockets to get anywhere.

…that I would post what I just posted on the 2nd Deathday of TMABB.

My workplace had a (sigh) “Reduction In Force” yesterday — a layoff. No, I did not lose my job. No, I do not know how I feel about that.

When a layoff has been announced, it’s impossible to get through a conversation at your job without the sentence, “Ah, you’re probably safe,” coming up. Every time I heard it directed at me, I cringed just a little bit. One of the main things keeping me from my ambitions right now is, remarkably, my career, my 40-hour weekly time sink that displaces me eight hours into the future every Monday through Friday morning. Goodness, what delights I could weave if I had that time back.

I need my job, though, at least in the short term. Our home is expensive to live in, and we’re still in the process of trying to unload it so we can move into a cheap apartment. Quitting my job right now just isn’t prudent. It would create more stress on myself and especially my wife than is really worth the trouble, given how easily it can be avoided.

Quitting is right out, but a layoff, now that’s a different story. Severance and COBRA would sweeten that 40-hour pot considerably. But I did not get laid off, and that’s fine, it probably still would have been madly stressful. Nevertheless, there was still that small hope, even though I knew I was perfectly “safe” from “losing” my job. You remember that one time in middle school when you asked out that girl who was utterly out of your league, and in your brain you knew that your odds were as close to impossible as to be rounded thereto, yet in your (I hate this term) heart you assumed against all reason that she’d say yes? That was my morning yesterday as we awaited our sentences.

I’ve become immensely productive at home, recently. Attending PAX East had a lot to do with that. I attended a pair of magnificent panels about independent game development, and met a large handful of successful developers who were astoundingly eager to share their insights and experiences. I returned home from Boston feeling more motivated to pursue my ambitions than I’ve ever felt in my life.

For years, I’ve wondered what my problem is, why I can’t seem to keep my initiative rolling and stay focused on my projects. I now realize that I need, above all else, exposure to other creatives on a regular basis in order to keep this up. And so the first thing I did when I got back from PAX was join the Philly chapter of IGDA. One hopes that the monthly meetings will give me to enough networking to keep me going.

I’m also looking into joining Independents Hall, a well-regarded coworking community in East Philadelphia. I’ve wanted to join a coworking office for a while, but it’s unusual to find one that doesn’t require a full time commitment. Indy Hall, however, offers a — cheap! — basic membership that only gives you one free day per month to use the office (more days can be reserved at a big discount), but still gives you full access to the community forum and all of the delicious human contact it entails. I wish I could join Full Time, but until that beautiful shred of pink flutters through my cubicle “door”, this will do nicely.

It’s odd to think of someone with as much social anxiety as me going out of his way to be near people like this. Desperate times.

I am a game developer. I am a game developer. I just need to prove it, partially to myself and partially to everyone else. Personally, I’m convinced well enough by now, deliverables be damned; I just need to show the rest of the world what I’m capable of, a tricky thing to do when you’ve got an albatross of a home tethering you to a time consumer of a job you’re more than eager to leave. These are things that can be shed, but for the time being, I need to keep my income steady. When did security become more important than dreams?

Obama flew down to The Cape today and laid out his vision for NASA. Overall, I agree with him. I have the slightest reservation about skipping the Moon as a practice step before going to Mars, but the more I think about it, the more I think that landing on the Moon as practice for landing on Mars would be like riding a bike as practice for flying an F-35. There are some cross-applicable skills, but for the most part, we’re talking about two different worlds here, both figuratively and literally.

But let’s not dwell on the plan itself.

I want to talk about a particular emphasis that Americans keep putting on the issue, an emphasis that rubs me more raw each time I hear it. Why, when we talk about space in this country, do we always frame it around how America will either gain or maintain the lead in space? I can understand bringing some nationalistic pride to the party, but we keep talking about how America will benefit, and not how all of humanity will. The people at NASA know that their work isn’t just about America, so why does the rest of the country, even the President, keep acting like it is?

If the International Space Station, a project so grand that it obviated the Tower of Babel, should have taught us anything, it’s how much Earth, not just America, can accomplish in space. Space is for everyone! Why should such an exciting frontier be only America’s to conquer?

It just seems arrogant to me.

I do not believe in gods. And let us expand that statement to what I intend it to mean: I do not believe in God. But I am careful with my phrasing for a reason.

By saying that I do not believe in God, there is the implication that I am, at my core, against Abrahamic religion. And I am, but it’s more than that. I am against all belief in the supernatural. I’m not trying to single anyone out; I’m trying to single everyone out.

Careful also, I am, to avoid saying that I believe that God does not exist. The wording there is subtle. “I believe there is no God” implies that I give the idea any thought. I do not. None of the things that I do, day to day, require me to consider the existence of supernatural beings and refute it. There is the universe, and that is it. Why would I waste my time with any more than that?

Maybe I have a degree of prejudice towards the idea of counting myself amongst a codified group — being raised Catholic will do that — but it is for that reason that I do not identify as Atheist, even if I agree that gods do not exist. Giving myself a label implies that I subscribe to whatever overarching doctrine that label represents. I want to avoid the perception that I do not carefully consider my beliefs. I do, to the point, in fact, where they become more like theories and it denigrates them to even call them beliefs.

Quite a few (yet, I hope, a minority of) Atheists toe the line of belief without rationale, or worse, have stupid, hackneyed reasons for their beliefs. “If God exists, then why do bad things happen to good people?” is one of the worst, for example. The statement is parroted so often that it sometimes sounds like a credo. And I think a lot of people who call themselves Atheists realize this, and actively avoid falling into the trap of a belief system.

I sometimes wonder if that resistance to unity actually a flaw. The Church is as powerful as it is because it has billions of soldiers fighting for its cause. Skeptics, by their nature, do not blindly agree with each other. We question each other — and even ourselves — daily. And while that ever-questioning nature is ultimately our greatest strength, perhaps it is also what makes us, at least militarily, weak. Perhaps that is why those who believe in ghosts and magic thwart us at every turn.

See, there I go saying “us”. I’m slipping already.