Shall We Play A Game? (Perhaps)

A week to go, nothing to do ...

Four Weeks ago I suggested Circling Psychic Wagons …

Multiple Hang Fires came out on October 14th …

Michigan Senate: Closing My Oldest File was five days ago …

I can hang up a personal Mission Accomplished banner; everything that I wanted done no later than a week before the election IS done …

Which begs the question: what in the world do I do with myself until the polls close?

Attention Conservation Notice:

This will contain some alternate reality game related thinking, which occasionally gets mentioned here, but which is pointedly NOT the focus of NIB. If you are relentlessly focused on things that were… things that are… and some things … that have not yet come to pass … you should take a pass on this.

Background:

I have a variety of obsessive pursuers, people who originated in the scrum of Occupy, or the sad lot of latecomers suffering from 2012 envy. I quickly grew weary of their insolence back then, which led to …

Confessions Of A Conspiracy Broker. The underlying premise - that there are a group of individuals who are involved in the market for conspiracies and conspiracy theories - was an intentional attack on conspiracist mindset. If one admits the notion that there might be a secret society that does such things, then all of the tropes the conspiracist uses to define their reality are potentially contaminated.

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, which I was ready to do almost anything other than what had been a steady diet of mind numbing slap fights with meta- morons.

There are a variety of Tumblr accounts that are mine - nealr of course, and rauhauser, where I first mentioned Shall We Play A Game? in early June of 2023. Regular readers will know that I’ve spent a little over four years constructing the MAGA Meltdown Graph and that it involves content from about 1,600 URLs. If you look at the post you can see that I picked a set of tools I don’t normally use, ingested about half of the volume of information that’s in the MAGA graph, and I’ve never admitted what the focus was.

Conspiracy Brokers came from a place of anger. There’s a Buddhist saying about this - being angry is like stooping to pick up a hot coal to throw at someone else. There’s a chance it will burn them, but doing this will ALWAYS burn you. What I wanted with SWPAG was a seed crystal, something generative and positive, with a secondary objective that it be resistant to conspiracy nutters turning it into something to fuel the violent, paranoid fantasy world they inhabit.

Bread Crumbs:

Anything I say here will get noticed by both friend and foe. If this thing were to become more than a curious hobby, it would have to be launched in the right environment for it to take root, but it could have absolutely nothing to do with me.

In order to do that, I needed some things I could not create on my own. I tried several different times to recruit a collaborator to cover those gaps, but those efforts bore no fruit. Today I think the various AI functions have evolved to the point where I could employ one of them … but AI has dramatically raised the bar in a lot of ways. There isn’t yet an AGI that could do what I’ve done and I think it will be quite some time before there is one that could follow my moves. I was intentionally diverse in the inputs and the manner of synthesis - a human would see it quickly, the machines we have today would be oblivious.

The next task to move this forward would be inspecting various virtual venues with moderate traffic, the sorts of places where something complex and mysterious would get noticed. This will be conditioned on what sort of work I can coax out of an AI assistant. The framework is my doing, but as I said at the start of this section, the various pieces can not have my signature anywhere on them.

Preparations:

The final post of the dozen, Patterns, had to do with my noticing synergy between the sort of entertainment that had captured my attention, and an intellectual pursuit that would fall under the banner of religious studies.Right at the start of the month I said I was going to Clear The Mechanism, and the synergies have started again. Let me offer a couple concrete signs that this is actually working.

The Garmin Fenix 6s is a poor sleep monitor, missing a third to half of the time I’m out. I’ve found the Body Battery function is a much better proxy, and here’s what has happened since I began to Clear The Mechanism. It should be noted that October 15th was COVID19 booster shot day.

Readers who’ve paid attention to what I’ve had to say about nootropics will know that I’m a relentless Mahjong solitaire player. My times are not sufficient to put me on the world leaderboard, but I am only half a step behind kids a third of my age. So when I change things and score twenty four seconds of improvement in a month, that’s VERY notable. I took the things I changed to a different tile pattern and I’ve consistently hit the 2:40 to 2:45 zone. That twenty four second improvement is no fluke, it’s the beginning of a new pattern.

I think I’m in the right frame of mind to do this, and that’s not always the case.

Launch:

Assuming my schedule remains as it has been, I could put an hour or two a day into cultivating a release. The problem is that the election and its aftermath are sucking all the oxygen out of the room and I think it’s going to stay that way clear through to inauguration at a minimum. Is what I am doing weighty enough to land and make an impression in that environment? That’s a definite maybe.

There’s a bit of Monero in my wallet, but the project for which it was earmarked is cancelled, so I can use it to do other things. I’m not sure *which* other things would be of value here. I could maybe Task Rabbit or Fiverr someone to post stickers in a major U.S. city, but that would involve Monero => USD and would leave a trail, which I do NOT want under any circumstances.

I might get a couple burner phones at a drug store near a Bay Area college campus, then spend an afternoon in the student union making like I’m a couple college kids with new phones. Creating personas for observation has gotten steadily more difficult over the last few years. Using a couple personas to plant things would be less effective than having a companion physical effort, but if I can hang on to them through the fake detection phase they would have some long term utility.

Conclusion:

There are a lot of people out there looking for something … anything … that’s meaningful. I’ve seen the drivel from Qanon “prophets” that has taken hold and it is truly ludicrous - they’re basically taking the plot line from Doctor Sleep and claiming that is objective reality. As much as I enjoy watching Rebecca Ferguson as a villain, the U.S. is not run by a cabal of vampires drinking the blood of tortured children.

I have …. there’s no decision on this, yet. But since things are slow I can go nose around in places that might work as a starting point, and I can review what’s already done to see that there aren’t any mismatches with things that have already come to pass. Even if this never sees the light of day, I’ve enjoyed the process of crafting it.

Precisely one week into election returns start coming in … and it’s going to feel like a century.