01 DEC 2024 by ideonexus
Live the Present
—Estoy vivo —dijo al muchacho mientras comía un plato de dátiles en la noche sin hogueras ni luna—. Mientras estoy comiendo, no hago nada más que comer. Si estuviera caminando, me limitaría a caminar. Si tengo que luchar, será un día tan bueno para morir como cualquier otro.
»Porque no vivo ni en mi pasado ni en mi futuro. Tengo sólo el presente, y eso es lo único que me interesa. Si puedes permanecer siempre en el presente serás un hombre feliz. Percibirás que en el desiert...Folksonomies: mindfulness
Folksonomies: mindfulness
1 "I'm alive," he said to the boy while he ate a plate of dates on the night without bonfires or moon. While I'm eating, I don't do anything but eat. If I were walking, I would just walk. If I have to fight, it will be as good a day to die as any.
»Because I do not live in my past or in my future. I only have the present, and that is the only thing that interests me. If you can always stay in the present you will be a happy man. You will perceive that life exists in the desert, that the sky has stars, and that warriors fight because this is partof the human race. Life will be a party, a great festival, because it is only the moment we are living.
22 NOV 2024 by ideonexus
AI as Longterm Memory
The current state-of-the-art Gemini model can fit roughly 1.5 million words in its context. That’s enough for me to upload the full text of all fourteen of my books, plus every article, blog post, or interview I’ve ever published—and the entirety of my collection of research notes that I’ve compiled over the years. The Gemini team has announced plans for a model that could hold more than 7 million words in its short-term memory. That’s enough to fit everything I’ve ever written, p... 1 
notes
notes06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Boredom Always Returns
Boredom can be displaced only so far. Even the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number. Boredom always returns. Giacomo Leopardi: “The uniformity of pleasure without purpose inevitably produces boredom.” The very action of overcoming boredom reproduces it, when gamer and game reach some impasse. There is always a limit. In games...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Another way of looking at "flow" is to call it "non-conte...
As the gamer becomes attuned to the game, they become one event, one action; an oscillating between the line dividing self from other, and the line connecting them as one substance. If the line dividing provides a moment of autonomous self; the line connecting provides a moment of selfless purpose. In games, action has its limits. It is an endless bit-flip between targeter, targeting and target. And yet at least it effects a transformation of gamer and game. Games are a repository for a certa...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Amorality in Games and Discovering the Algorithm
The rules of Vice City call for a vast accumulation of cash, cars and cronies, of weapons and real estate. Most of these activities are outside the law, but law is just part of a larger algorithm. In any case, the story and the art are arbitrary, mere decoration. If in utopia, everything is subordinated to a rigorous description, a marking of space with signs, in atopia, nothing matters but the transitive relations between variables. The artful surfaces of the game are just a way for the game...Folksonomies: gamespace allegorithm
Folksonomies: gamespace allegorithm
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
History in Games
Of what use is the past to a gamer? Peter Lunenfeld: “For the most part, its blood, mischief and role playing that gamers revel in. They live in an alternative universe, a solipsistic one scripted by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons. The visual and storyline tropes that most of us bring with us as cultural baggage are… all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use.” In t...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Games Offer Perfect Unfreedom
In The Sims, things proliferate. Or rather, the skins of things. You can have many different kinds of sofa, or coffee table, or lamp shade, but the meter is running, so to speak. You have to make more money to buy more things. But some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in ‘winning’ the game, they are interested in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds. If a cheat is someone who ignores the...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes25 JAN 2024 by ideonexus
The Vertigo of a World Without Flaws
The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of landing on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because i... 1 notes
notes22 OCT 2023 by ideonexus
How Realities are Created
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?â€, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally sa...Folksonomies: reality
Folksonomies: reality
1 notes
notes23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
This is Real
This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to d...Folksonomies: attention mindfulness
Folksonomies: attention mindfulness
