Reading Dogs

I’ve just started reading D. Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard. It has to be the single best written roleplaying game I’ve ever read. I don’t remember ever reading a roleplaying game that kept me coming back to it as if it were a novel or something. Here’s a section about the ceremonial coat of office that the Dogs wear:

You’ll serve actively as a Dog for three or four years, usually, sometimes less and sometimes more — sometimes lots more — and your beautiful new coat won’t hold up. It takes a fierce beating in the field. It becomes the responsibility of the communities you serve to maintain your coat, patching, piecing, repairing, even replacing it as you need. Some dogs come out of their service with three or four coats, the earlier ones packed carefully away to preserve them. Some come out with only their original coat, and it’s torn and battered and ruined. In later life, as you’re called to higher and higher sacred offices, you are always allowed to replace whatever vestments accompany your office with your old Dog’s coat, no matter how beat up it is. And if you end up in the Dogs’ Temple training and initiating new Dogs, your old coat is powerfully significant.

(Picture one of the Dogs’ teachers. His coat’s so faded and stretched across his shoulders that you can see his shirt through it. It has an old stain and a crude patch under his left arm. The boyfriend of the woman he loved stabbed him, so long ago, and he had to stitch his coat back up himself. How high in the esteem of the new Dog initiates he is! He regards them all with hope, love, and very mixed feelings.)

All of the above: typical case.

Equites Mixalotus

patriam deserimus casei gratia – a musical interlude

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)

Rock.

New Year’s Resolutions

You can be invincible,
if you never go into a contest,
which is not in your power to win.

Look out lest seeing some more honored
or with great power or otherwise blessed with fame,
you are ever carried away by the impression.

For if the essence of the good is in your power,
neither envy nor jealousy have a place;
and you yourself will not wish to be a magistrate,
nor a president or consul, but free.

–Epictetus, here, (another translation here, thanks to MeFi.

Epictetus’ advice is interesting to understand in the context of New Year’s Resolutions, and also the book One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. It is about taking small steps. It is about applying to one’s personal life the business philosophy called “Kaizen” in Japan, and based on the work of W. Edwards Deming, a brilliant management theorist whose ideas are constantly referred to but almost never actually put into practice in America.

Kaizen is about improving one’s business by small and unambiguously achieveable steps, rather than dramatic “innovations.” This is of course alien to American big business, because it’s the big changes which impress the stock market and inflate your stock options, even if they end up ruining the business.

Anyway, Maurer’s book suggests trying to improve one’s life by means of small, nonthreatening steps, which are insignificant one by one but which add up to change.

There are a lot of things about the book that make sense to me, but I haven’t actually done anything with Kaizen yet. My wife and I thought of Kaizenning ourselves towards exercise, but we chose a step that wasn’t small enough and ended up not doing it. (That’s the test of whether you’re doing it right: if the step is non-trivial enough that you fail to do it, it was too big a step.)

So I’m trying to think of areas where I’d like to improve my life, and completely trivial steps I can take to achieve them.

  • Draw more. I could resolve to cover one sheet of paper per day with markings of some sort.
  • Exercise more. TODO. Don’t know what I can use as a trivial step for this.
  • Keep the house clean. How about take one object which is lying out of place and put it in its place per day.
  • Create a job I really love. For this one I’m thinking maybe “take a minute every day to imagine what it might be like to have my ideal job.” Imagining things is a good first step for difficult and complex changes.
  • Escape my caffiene addiction. Not sure about this one. Have to think.

Those are a few to start with. Just thinking.

Incredible Beatles mashup mixes 40+ different tracks (BoingBoing)

Incredible Beatles mashup mixes 40+ different tracks: “Cory Doctorow:
Hank sez, ‘Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!’ I concur; this is mind-blowingly amazing. Man, all these Beatles mash-ups this year are really making me yearn for my old Beatles vinyl. I especially love the juxtosition in this track of the old skiffle-Beatles with the later psychedelia. Soo-poib.

5MB MP3 Link

(Thanks, Hank!)

PS: I am reasonably certain that this server will be shortly overwhelmed. If you’ve got a mirror, email me and I’ll post a link to it. However, I have no such mirror, so if you find yourself unable to get a copy, don’t look at me!”

I’m listening to this right now. It’s crazy cool incredible. I’ll upload it to my own server and drop a link to it in email to anyone who wants a copy — but I’m not sure enough of my bandwidthosity to volunteer to be a mirror for Cory. :) email me at edheil at fastmail dot fm to get a copy.

(Via Boing Boing Blog.)

Programming with Continuations

this article from IBM describes how one can use “continuations” to write simpler, clearer, more powerful web-based applications. It assumes the use of a special programming framework which makes continuations trivial to use. I don’t happen to have access to that framework but it was a cool read because I’d heard about continuations before in my old “learning about lots of obscure and interesting programming languages” habits, but I had never really felt I had understood what they were good for.

Specifically, it discussed the use of “continuation-passing style” which is possible even in languages which do not explicitly facilitate the use of continuations. More on that here.