Acting isn't always realistic, and actually this is something I like. Obviously it works most readily in comedy, but it can be interesting anywhere.

When actors go through a scene, they aren't just calling its real equivalent to mind - or a believable equivalent. They're also commenting on a moment that people will recognize. One way or another, every single acted moment plays on recognition - of similar moments, whether real, fictional, or thus far purely imagined, or before today never once imagined, and now for the first time in some audience member's mind. I mean, that's what acting and art in general do, right? They don't have to be realistic, just evocative - somehow interesting and engaging and compelling.

Because acting is also commenting, it's quite acceptable for acting to diverge from realism - in some sense, the divergence is the comment.

Sitcoms do this all the time. People say things in an exaggerated tone that gets the context in that character's mind across loud and clear. And often this is important, and works, because of the ironies - the contrasts between the situation as we in the audience see it, and how the character sees it - which is a comment both on that character (whom we may love by now) and on the situations we know and are reminded of ourselves. So divergence from what someone in the audience would intuitively expect can be a comment on the character or on the situation. In both cases, it's a comment on the audience members' own lives.

There's something wrong with my approach to life. I'm not getting traction - I don't know how to self-actualize or whatever, how to get my talents and experiences and plans to coordinate for long enough to get the results I have in mind. And maybe they're not the best results to have in mind. That's also possible for anyone, and it's surely possible for me. There are many reasons to doubt the wisdom of my goals.

Call me naive, but if the economy can't handle people staying at home to avoid a plague (a problem older than history), then there's a bug in the economy. I wouldn't even blame the plague, let alone excessive caution in the public. If the economy can't handle this, it is quite literally a problem with the economic paradigm. The sky doesn't fall in when people don't go to work. Plants don't stop growing. The sun doesn't stop shining. Buildings don't topple. Books don't evaporate. Inventions don't lose their designs or patents. Even most non-essential computer servers will happily keep on running, especially if they're drawing wind or solar or geothermal energy. If the economy caves in now, it's predicated on a lie.

If you have a garden and you leave town for ten years, and it's abandoned, it'll take some work to make it how it was. But that isn't a calamity. It isn't the ruination of anything.

If the economy cannot behave similarly, I say let's fix it.

Maybe the analogy is all wrong. Maybe I'm all wrong. Maybe it can't be done.

But I bet you it can.

(Wrote 2 years ago today.)

When you work on many aspects of a big project over a long time, you almost become a different person depending on which piece you're trying to tackle, assemble, put in place, etc. Am I more like a science professor, a down and out punk or starving artist, a mental patient, an immature, starry-eyed dilettante, or a solitary, fanatical scribbler? That very much depends what I'm working on. I guess I'm quite like all of those.

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Sometimes I think of it like vitamins. If I don't read enough science, I start to get itchy and listless and feel out of place in the world. If I don't get into enough art and fiction, I begin to feel unimaginative. If I don't make stuff, I feel hopeless. If I don't dive into studying new areas, I feel suffocated and stop figuring out new solutions to old problems. If I don't teach, I lose perspective and clarity, that sharp sense of the future-present. If I don't prioritize my health, everything else disperses like mist.

I need all the vitamins, but I find it just about impossible to do all that stuff at the same time, that is, every day. Things go in phases and cycles.

When you meet me, you don't always meet the same person. But that's normal enough... we all have moods. And you do always meet the same person. Don't worry, I'm being metaphorical.

I learned a lot about computers through setting up and modifying games and operating systems on pcs when I was a kid.

But I also learned that I'd often spend so much energy on the configuration that I'd lose interest or at least enthusiasm for the game itself.

In high school one summer I spent basically the entire summer researching and hunting down and downloading and configuring classic titles almost no one my age had heard of or played. This wasn't a new activity. It's just one summer it was my entire summer.

The point is I actually don't want to spend all my time setting up and not getting to the actual expressive, emotional, experiential stuff. For me the latter was really the point, and I sort of resented how much of the former I was caught up in.

Which no doubt is why much of the world still plays games on consoles - already pretty well pre-configured - and mobile devices - even more so.

The irony is that as a game developer, you spend even more time and energy on the configuration.

But this time you can honestly tell yourself that the expressive, emotional, experiential stuff IS the point. When you're done, if you're ever done, someone else can feel the message with a minimum of headache.

Logic is essentially a way to slow down thinking and check its accuracy and precision.

All people think very intuitively most of the time. We are not flipping logical AND and OR and NOT and XOR operators around in our heads. Well, not consciously. But internally? Yes, actually. We're doing tons and tons of that. And megatons. But our conscious control of the underlying logic is like a steering wheel and a gas pedal and a brake in a car. Open up the hood. Did you really think it was that simple and easy?

Admit it: you kind of did, didn't you?

Anyway, we have to get on the same page, here. Your thinking (which you suppose is so reliable) has only been made to APPEAR straightforward to you by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

In reality, that undeniably commonsense, straightforward thinking we do all the time is both complicated and fragile.

So be careful whenever you want to say "There's no two ways about it!" Even if your reasoning is correct, evidently the other person is finding it more complicated... which should be interesting, on some level, because, as we've just said, it usually is more complicated. So even if they're quite wrong, they're right about that bit.

When our commonsense or intuitive reasoning *is* reliable in some situation, we should thank our lucky stars. Even though that's common, we should recognize that we're lucky the steering wheel and gas pedal and brakes are working well for us underneath the hood. (The same goes for empathy, by the way, which, though we associate it heavily with emotion, and that makes sense, is also a form of reasoning that can be working well or poorly.)

The complication begins to come to the surface when we get into an argument with someone. We both think we've got it right, needless to say. And if the argument continues, we're probably both somewhat confused about how the other person could be such a dolt.

To fix this bug - and it is a sort of bug, a conversational bug - takes slowing down and examining the logic more closely.

Most people are, to be candid, unwilling to do this.

Or at least unwilling when they feel at all upset. And unfortunately that's when it's important. When it isn't important to them right now, they wave it off and think you must have too much time on your hands. Either way, they don't do what it would take to fix the conversational bug.

So they don't get too much practice fixing these.

It can be done. It isn't even very difficult at all. It's often very easy. But both people have to be willing to engage the disagreement on that level, or it won't work.

I think the mythic constructs we especially relate to tell us something about ourselves.

I especially relate to Spock.

On the one side, the Vulcan side, there's this almost autistic/psychopathic reserve and rationality. It's Sherlock Holmes. It's what people find inhuman in mathematics or computers. At the extreme, it's HAL: difficult to see as really evil, because that was never its intent, yet possibly horribly destructive if unchecked. Mostly, though, it's engaged, useful, scientific.

On the other side, Spock's human side, I'm the Phoenix. I'm so overly emotional I burn to the ground and can't move and believe life is over. Or I'm so reflexively a free spirit that even when I'm the one who puts the chains of expectation on me, like Houdini, I slip out. The more chains and ropes and cuffs I apply, the more easily Houdini slips away, unseen.

In the middle, between them, Spock's spectre, is the Nosferatu of F.M. Murnau's 1922 masterpiece. This is animal desire mixed with human affection mixed with the restraints of conscience and fear. This is how I feel when I really like someone new. I'm aware that I could seem creepy. It's the Shadow archetype.