This blog is indeed worthless.  It exists yet has no meaning, no purpose.  Take the last post I tossed up here.  Pointless, boring, and of no interest to anyone but me.  Seems this post is heading in the same direction, but what can be done about it?  I need to turn this place into something, as I seem to have a strangely powerful need to keep it going despite it being such a persistent failure of less than epic proportions.  It’s not even a colossal failure, or a memorable flop, just a dull and altogether forgettable experience.  If it weren’t for a handful of people hot-linking to some of the images in my gallery this site would be completely invisible to everyone on the Internet.  I suppose invisibility is some sort of an achievement, though in this particular context not exactly what one strives for.

I’ve tried to make short flash movies and cannot seem to stay with any of them long enough to complete something of substance, something of value, or something more than 60 seconds long.  I posted one such failed attempt to the site here.  I tried to make an online comic, made it about 4 pages in and gave up.  I’ve tried to make this place a gallery for my artwork but the simple reality is that no one is very much impressed with my artwork.  I don’t blame them, it’s just good enough not to be considered totally lame and yet no less forgettable for that.  I’m just good enough at a few things to be not quite able to deliver anything worthwhile.

Yet, I’m quite determined to fail, fail again and fail some more.  I’m a particularly persistent loser I am.

Well, I have some made up characters in this game I’m making (yes, back to that again) that I suppose I could use to make some occasional bits of forgettable content and write it off as providing background for the game’s story, which is pretty lightweight and predictable and not in need of back story, but what the hell.

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Pickles: “If existence has no meaning then how can anything that exists have any meaning within its existence?”

Glittershorts: “To exist just means something is there, something is real, or something is on.  Like the snack machine in the break room, it exists, but its existence is not what, by itself, gives it meaning or purpose.  My cravings for tapioca covered popcorn balls on a stick give it meaning.”

Pickles: “So it has meaning the moment it begins to exist, or only after your inexplicable tastes give you a reason to make use of it?  And does anything that does not serve some useful purpose to someone else, or something else, truly exist?”

Glittershorts: “Not sure I follow.  For the first part it has some meaning from the beginning, just not to me.  Actually it may even have meaning then, such as to make me feel sad and unsatisfied with the poor selection of snack options on this ship.  But even if I had no need of a snack machine at all – a simple impossibility granted, but for the sake of conversation – it would certainly still exist, just not have meaning for me.”

Pickles: “Though I suppose it would have meaning to some one, or would have potential meaning.  Sort of like, it has active meaning to you when your stomach is growling loud enough to be heard over the Commander’s snoring, but passive meaning to me since I’m on a strict booze and Vitaminiacal Powder diet.”

Glittershorts: “Makes as much sense as any of our conversations ever do.  So we agree that the snack machine does not spontaneously unexist whenever I’m full?”

Pickles: “I will tentatively accept your hypothesis for now but will continue to observe this phenomenon for more concrete evidence of its persistence to stay existed.  For example, as an experiment, let’s quadruple all of the prices and see if ceases to exists in the minds and appetites of the crew.”

Glittershorts: “It will always exist in my mind, even after I realize I can’t afford anything in it and break into it in a fit of sugar withdrawal induced fury.”

Pickles: “Did I somehow just successfully argue that the snack machine has more potential than I do?”

Glittershorts: “I’m pretty sure that was already a given.”

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And we’re off!  (Center, the Mark, or simply Off)

In the previous post I mentioned a post from an older blog of mine that had attempted to cover the same topic, or at least begin to approach it.  As misfortune would have it the post was not lost after all, and so now here it is to be puzzled over and frowned at:

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Where am I?  I am on top of a chair, adjacent to a desk, underneath the sky and thankfully a long way from the Sun.  This last detail does not necessarily imply that it is not hot where I am, but rather it is not as hot as it could be and that I am thankful for this fact.

Do you know where I am?  No?  I am within the borders of a country, I am not over the ocean or a lake, but I am above the Earth’s surface.

Eight details as to my position and yet you could be sitting right next to me and have absolutely no idea where I am.

This bit of pointless thinking led me down a new dark alley that apparently I had, until recently, been wise enough to ignore.  Where is my mind?  I know where my brain is of course, and will probably always have a fair idea of where to find that spongy clump of synapses.  But the question is, where is my mind?  And where is your mind?  And can our minds get together for imaginary coffee on the corner of Contemplation Avenue and Philosophical Boulevard?

My mind is to the right of anarchy and to the left of “The Dark One Whose Name We All Forgot Because We All Kept Telling Each Other To Never Say His Name”.  It is above breaking wind in an elevator and beneath picking my nose in public.  It is against censorship and for well edited blogs.  Do you know where my mind is?

Had I the ability to suspend this unfortunate habit of growing old then perhaps I could sit here, in this physical position, and map out quite clearly my mental coordinates.  Or could I?  The issue remains that I must make statements that define how the position of my mind relates to an idea or thought or color, which themselves are defined by how they relate to other thoughts and colorful ideas.  And should I be successful in determining without any doubt precisely how my mind relates to one idea, it may not be an idea your mind relates to at all and thus is of no help in determining how our minds relate to each other.

Where am I?  Can you relate?

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How deep does this putrid pit of profound ponderings go?  There is no telling, but aren’t we all so glad the Internet was invented so people like me could share such nonsense with all you sensible surfers?  And the best news is, I’ve found several more posts from that old blog that are just as insightful and worthy of your time and I will be sharing them soon.

Our bodies are objects in time and space but our minds are singularities that do not exist in either.  This thought, useless as it truly is, reminded me of a post I made on one of my previous blogs, now gone.  The title of that post was “Where is my Mind?”, which then set about defining the “location” of my mind relative to a coordinate system that would make sense for mapping minds.  Not “Where is my Brain”, but where is my Soul, where is the center point of all the thoughts and tastes and perspectives that constitute me and my identity.  Where would that be?  It is not defined by x,y and z coordinates in three dimensional space, and I have serious doubts it is locked into a 1 to 1 relationship with the flow of time.  “What is my Mind?” is another thinking exercise that would probably cover much of the same territory, though any sort of related question that begins with Why would be an entirely different discussion.  The Why discussion would either be nearly impossible to settle in any satisfying form, or is simply not a line that would produce anything useful even if it could be taken all the way to one conclusion or another.  Very likely this is why the idea of God exists and tends to be such a readily acceptable premise.  We need something to put there, in that Why gap, as a placeholder so we can work around and above it.  Insert whatever fanciful version of that idea you find most comfortable to believe in and then let us move along (note: there are no such ideas that are wrong, inadequate or inappropriate – as long as you truly believe in the one you choose, and only you know if you do or not).

I’m not a philosopher, and I’m not a physicist.  I simply have too much imagination, curiosity, and free time for my own good.  I’m sure I am not offering up anything original here, and quite possibly no theories or suppositions I attempt to construct will stand up to even the most simple scrutiny of minds more logical and intelligent than mine.  I just like to think sometimes, the same way some people just like to walk in the park sometimes.

And my favorite thing to think about is to wonder exactly what it is I am doing when I think.  What is a thought, exactly?  When I have a feeling is it a thought, or are there two separate processes at work there?  Do I actively create all of my thoughts, which is to say I would never have any unless I actively (consciously) created them, or is what I consider thinking merely listening to something else that is creating thoughts.  Something else within me that takes all of the sensory information my body pulls in and processes it through set filters of what my current goals are (survival, happiness, 3 consecutive sit ups), what my tolerances or limits are, and a hundred other variables until it balances everything out into a thought for me to perceive.  Am I in control, creating the thoughts that become commands to my body, or am I passively along for the ride, merely experiencing this life but locked into its perspective, along its predetermined path?  Are my thoughts my true voice, or are my thoughts simply an intimate feedback loop supporting my connection with this body, this perspective, this world?  Right now am I really thinking about the socially acceptable limit to the number of silly questions I can get away with in any single blog post?

…and so on.  Part of the reason for this entry stems from a building sense of anticipation for writing a new book.  A new book that, like my first one, will probably never be published or discovered by more than six people.  A book that takes a more lighthearted approach to answering the questions proposed in that last paragraph, and a book that if written will probably be only of any value to me,  just like my first book.  Not that such outcomes discourage me from writing such stories.  For me, it beats walking in the park.

I’m not going to go off on a rant here regarding the astounding excess of marketing related specifications and statistics that are poured over everything you might ever want to consider buying like so much syrup and sugar. For example, an LCD TV I was considering not long ago included, among other tid bits, these variables and the relevant values for the particular model I was looking at:

Display Type: Widescreen LCD
Screen Size: 22″
Pixel Pitch: 0.258 mm
Display Area: 433.44 mm x 270.9 mm
Display Format: 16:9 Wide LCD
Vertical Refresh Rate: 56 ~ 75 Hz
Horizontal Frequency: 30 ~ 81 kHz
Contrast Ratio: 1000:01:00
Dynamic Contrast Ratio: 10000:1
Brightness: 300 cd/m²
Response Time: 5 ms
Horizontal Viewing Angle: 170 degrees
Vertical Viewing Angle: 160 degrees

Now there is a very real purpose for these numbers – so that two people in a bar or coffee shop or proctologist’s waiting room can have a debate as to whose 60” television set is superior (and, the unspoken assumption, which individual is therefore implied as being superior in some completely meaningless and juvenile way). Such discussions used to have to rely on one’s ability to use adjectives and hyperbole to describe just how amazingly stupendous the quality of the image of one’s TV is. Such subjective measurements do not form a very satisfying base for an argument that one hopes will determine a clear cut winner in such passionately fought battles, and so here we have lists such as the one shown above. The statement “My TV is clearer than yours” can now be made into a devastatingly effective argument “My TV possesses a dynamic contrast ratio of 10000:1, which clearly provides a finer quality image than the pathetic 5000:1 ratio your TV is capable of. “

Of course, is such discourse necessary, enlightening, progressive, fun, or in any way encouraged or sought after by the author of this blog? No. I immediately start to feel very weary when one of these kinds of conversations get fired up. In fact any conversation to which the only possible goal is to establish that one thing, or person, or concept or letter of the alphabet is “better” than another, to establish why something is “the best”, often without defining any kind of context that might make the conclusion actually useful, is only good for cultivating deep throbbing headaches. Yet, I understand life has an awful lot of moments when two people have a need to pass the time and this is perhaps just as good as any other options immediately available, such as actually watching TV versus debating the quality of the apparatus which delivers the programming.

So, why did I get fascinated by the statistics listed above and why do I recount them here if I do not intend to memorize them for the purpose of having the kinds of discussions I just said I would prefer to never have?

The first thought was along the lines of wondering what the statistics would be if some one listed the specifications of my eyeballs. The TV is an output generating device, my eyeballs are the receivers of that output and my brain the device that processes that output and turns it into whatever it is my “mind” needs to understand what the point of the output is, and from there, figure out what I think of it or how I feel about it. So, as the quality of the output increases (this is debatable in and of itself, but glossing over some parts here to keep things rolling) at what point does it surpass the capabilities of my input device? When does it overrun the buffers between my eyeballs and my brain? At what point does my viewing and processing equipment cease to be able to distinguish the subtle difference between one level of Dynamic Contrast Ratio from the next? And if I get the TV home and realize my built in inputs cannot handle the level of output from my new TV can I take it back and exchange it for a TV that “fits”?

Now take that line of thinking and start to try and apply it to notions of how those same hardwired input devices define the reality my mind is forced to accept, and then how those devices might be enhanced or changed and therefore change and alter what I have to consider to be my reality. How much “reality” is out there that I cannot process because I haven’t tuned or optimized the only tools I have to interact with it, to observe it? From here it goes on and on and is probably even less productive, necessary, useful, or fun than the sort of conversation outlined above. Except that for me it is outrageously fascinating, which is why I really try not to bash or look down on those who have the “better than” or “the best” type of conversations because to each his own and to her something else.

I have been working my input processing unit to death lately pondering such thoughts, quite possibly accelerating my descent into incoherent babbling madness. It is also exactly the kind of thing I plan to put into the stories I will be putting up on DarkPurpleUFOs.com, as the aliens attempt to understand our world and then, in turn, how it forces the main human characters to look at their own world in a new way.

I will probably be tossing up articles here that flow in the same polluted tributary, so consider yourself warned.