Wanderers 2009.3.31

I'm re-acclimating to Portland, getting a briefing on how to make a professional studio recording. Stuart Gaston has been publishing music in playable formats semi-professionally for the last 15 years.

President Obama is in London for a meeting of the G20, looking at IMF, meetings with MVPs, amidst a backdrop of official corruption. CSO and I were looking for alternatives to "corrupt", applicable in some namespaces, and came up with "shifty". The meaning here is "on the fence" leaning one way, then the other (prone to shift, conflicted).

True believers on both sides may have little patience with fence sitters, but during a societal "phase change" you'll have lots of personnel holding "transitional" positions. Ambivalence has its chemical correlates.

The opium crop in Afghanistan, drug wars around the world, are likewise a focus. A recent public forum with the prez raised this issue to top priority while I was busy at the Hyatt, so I missed a lot of that thread.

Gaston is talking about MIDI.

I've installed Django at my 4D Solutions site with the intent to serve existing content without much perceived change from the outside world. Eating my own dogfood is the name of my game today.

Gordon seems to be coming out of the fog. Let's see if fogs of war lift elsewhere as well. Clear global data means not prancing around the core issues, purposely getting lost in irrelevancies. Digging out of an economic slump means setting some goals.

A goal over here: harnessing FOSS around some proprietary contributions to get The Hunger Project back on track, even if not by that name. Coordinated action adds value. President Johnson's "war on poverty" had some of the right vibes. What are we trying to do? Politicians are casting about for the right rhetoric, looking for a credible mix of realism and positive futurism.

The huge number of vacancies within the activist NGOs suggests the need for a selective service or match-making system.

Having the NGO-supporting games in our Coffee Shops Network be somewhat topical will also help with recruiting i.e. heroic players of our "doctors without borders" games might enroll in the requisite trainings as a consequence of all this guided visioning.

Early opportunities to practice philanthropy may counter a tendency towards misanthropy in later life, is an implicit theory here. Atomizing the philanthropic experience in terms of playable "language games" means you need not amass a lot of capital before you start thinking unselfishly about world needs and problems. A corollary hypothesis: this kind of thinking improves collective IQ.

I'm making obvious analogies to existing military recruiting, which uses similar multi-user games to inspire fantasies leading to enlistment. Just as obviously, I'm looking to give civilian services a similar boost.

The fact that we're recruiting for civilian services doesn't mean our games can't be surreal and twisted in various ways. My style of AVP is potentially disturbing and thought provoking, as are the tantric Wheel of Life images (thinking of Bhutanese art).

Stuart is talking about copyrighting and distribution. CD Baby is helpful. Print your artwork at 300 dpi, anything else looks ugly.