So…I had a great Christmas with my family, one of the best.

I always have a little trouble staying calm during the holiday. I want to take control of events, I get overtired, I feel underappreciated.

Now that I’m a clean-living old man, I sometimes have wistful memories of how I’d deal with holidays in the old days, being in back rooms, basements, unused offices, drinking and getting high. Ducking responsibilities. Wallowing in raw sensory pleasure.

For this most recent holiday season, I formulated a notion of having a “basement in my mind.” A way of looking at things. Checking out for a few minutes, even though I’m there. Mentally letting go of responsibility and being a slacker. Staring off into space, drawing raw sensory pleasure from the reflections of light off objects. Being high.

And of course trying to be a kind, loving person helps too—the part of the equation I so easily forget.

On the literary front, I had two articles come out this month. My story “The Perfect Wave”, co-written with Marc Laidlaw in the January, 2008, Asimov’s SF, and a how-to article on “Gnarly CAs” in Make magazine #12, about using my Capow program for light-shows and art patterns.

Also I contributed an answer to this year’s Edge Question: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? It’s always an honor to join the illustrious thinkers at the World Question Center.

[NOFX plays Rancid’s song, “Olympia, WA]

Best album of the year? Easy. It’s NOFX and Rancid, BYO Split Series Vol III. My two favorite punk bands playing each other’s songs. “Olympia WA” rules. I love that place, too. The live video above has pretty bad sound, there’s better sound on another YouTube post where some guy just puts up the MP3 with a picture of the album.

And here’s Rancid playing the same song in Tokyo. Lars Frederidkssen looks great.

[Rancid plays “Olympia, WA”]

Nosing around Youtube, I even found a video of the Ramones onstage with Rancid… Seek and ye shall find.

In my spare moments (and always in my subconscious), I’m trying to fix the plot of Hylozoic. The problems I’m working on are, like, too complicated to explain. Not really a good sign in terms of the book’s appeal!

Just to fill out this blog entry, here’s an excerpt from my (increasingly desperate) recent writing journal notes

With the runes finite, I still need to find a way to achieve my prime desideratum:

Runecasting requires a special capability that only Jayjay has.

I should explain that runecasting is the ability to alter the programs of ten tridecillion atoms in a hundred-kilometer-on-an-edge cube of space so as to generate matter holograms tulpas in the shape of invading Peng. Jayjay acquires the capability during his trippy vision at the end of Chapter One—a vision which I keep rewriting as I change my mind about the capability.

Atom Charmer Option (Discarded)
This comes out of a question I never though of asking before: why do the silps of atoms (or the silps of larger blocks of matter) allow someone to reprogram them? Teeking is one thing—you’re just moving the object. But maybe reprogramming is more invasive?

I could just mention atom charming as a skill that people have. Like another form of teek. Or I could act like it’s a skill that only Jayjay has. Atom charming is a crisp, binary ability, either you can charm atoms or you can’t. Less fuzzy perhaps than whether you are enough of a zenohead to nuke ten tridecillion atoms.

Here I’d have to ask how Jayjay learns to charm atoms. I see him going under the Planck frontier, he’s looking up at atoms like a submerged snapping turtle looking up at ducks on a pond, he can grab them by the legs. I hear the shocked, outraged squawk of an atom as I grab it. Why can only Jayjay do this? Does he still go to infinity at all? Or is it really just a matter of getting subdimensional view of things.

And I’d have to ask how Chu and the Crownies’ version of runecasting in Chapter Six works if they can’t charm atoms? Maybe they spray out a fog of slave atoms that have somehow been zombified. Maybe the slave atoms are the sh*t and p*ss and exhalations and sweat of Chu and the Crownies [the Crownies are right-wing fundamentalists who are, of course, whole-heartedly supporting the alien invasion as it will reduce creativity and originality]. Nice symbol of pollution/exploitation. And their atoms infect the other atoms, but it doesn’t spread perfectly smoothly which means that the tulpas the create are a bit feeble and clunky. For this to work, we have to assume that you are able to charm your own atoms, so we have a kind of petitio principe, which is unsatisfying.

Zenohead Option (Implemented)

This approach is only a slight deviation from what I was saying when I thought runes were infinite. Instead of saying that Jayjay’s capability is that he can have infinite thoughts, I say the capability is that he can think quite fast. Call this becoming a zenohead, zenobrain, zenoteeker, a zenobrain teeker, a zenohead teeker—let’s go with zenohead.

Being a zenohead helps him speed up his mind enough to rapidly program ten tridecillion, that is, 10^43 atoms in a row. (Possibly being a zenohead also helps you understand the perhaps very large rune. (Later, Chu will round-off the large runes as well as chunking them onto larger sites.))

In earlier drafts, I’d been taking the zenohead ability for granted, but now I should make a big deal about it. Note that if I’m not using actually infinite runes or infinite numbers of atoms, we’re not talking about a qualitatively new power, it’s just a matter of having a still-more-powerful mind. Another step towards intelligence amplification. I can speak of the Zeno speed-up as a new technique that only Jayjay learns. Carrying out a Zeno speed-up, or even a lesser speed-up is done by taking advantage of matter’s infinite divisibility.

Note that if Jayjay actually has to touch all those atoms, there is some fixed cost q per atom, so he needs q * 10^43 units of energy. Suppose he’s siphoning it up from the subdimensions, and that’s another part of being a zenohead, the access to “subdimensional energy.”

A seeming problem with saying that uniquely Jayjay can think fast is that people are already doing very large tasks by accessing their lazy eight RAM (in principle it’s infinite). But we can suppose that they’re not actually using such very big data bases.

I had worried that using teep requires a Zeno speed-up, as you’re sending a teep signal the infinite distance up to bounce off lazy eight. But your mind doesn’t have to make the trip with the teep signal. Perhaps theoretically it’s known that the signal does the speed-up, and the extrinsic/intrinsic distinction is known, but actually doing it in your own head by utilizing your body’s endless number of levels is a new skill that Jayjay learns when he becomes a zenohead.

In order to make Jayjay a zenohead, the pitchfork took Jayjay into Subdee. At first the path into Subdee looked like a tunnel, and Jayjay is scared. The pitchfork reversed the figure and ground, and the tunnel looked like that vine he thought he climbed. But they only go partway up.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

December 20, 2007. A taped phone interview with Jason Rennie on his “Sci Phi Show” site. The topic is my novel POSTSINGULAR. Sound quality is so-so.

I’ve just about finished my latest painting, “Giant’s Head.” A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about climbing to the site in Castle Rock park. I might touch up the clinging hand one more time. Maybe the painter is falling off! I really was kind of scared on that rock.

I won’t be blogging much more till January. The holiday rush, etc. We repainted my office and I’m still rearranging and moving stuff.

In my free time, I’m revising the earlier chapters of Hylozoic. It’s incredible how much time it takes to do a revision. The rereading goes very slowly, as does the typing in of the changes I write on the printout. I have to think a lot, weighing the options.

And I still have to figure out the ending. A lot of this is subconscious. Like a chess computer playing out a very large number of possible endgames. My favorite way to work subconsciously is to get out and walk in the woods!

Meanwhile, all the best from California — have a Merry X and a Great 8!

And may all your eights be lazy!

I came across some video I shot in Kyoto, Japan, October, 2007, of kids freestyle hiphop dancing to boom boxes on a plaza outside the gym at Kyoto University on a Sunday afternoon. You can see Thuy Nguyen there near the end, dancing.

I finished my story about infinity, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” I managed to work in a cameo role for a cuttlefish:

A cluster of alef-null easy chairs sat jigsawed around the fireplace, fitting in via odd warps in perspective. But all were occupied, and by a single rude guest, a cuttlefish who was letting his tentacles loll onto each and every one of the chairs as he scribbled inkily in an alef-one-paged notebook.

“Just move each of your limbs three chairs to the right,” Stanley told the cuttlefish.

“No,” snapped the selfish cephalopod. “Too much work.”

It’s too cold this week to paint outside, so now I’m back to working on Hylozoic. It was good for me to take this break and write a story about higher infinities, as I’d kind of like to have infinity in volume 3 of the trilogy (should I get that far).

By way of getting up momentum to dive into writing Chapter 7, I’m revising some of the earlier chapters. Yesterday I found a nice passage that doesn’t fit into the flow anymore, so I’ll just post it here.

Note that this passage addresses a problem with panpsychism, which is the question of how the minds of the components of something mesh with the mind of the whole thing.

Recalling his contact with his cells and atoms this afternoon, Jayjay focused down into himself again. He felt impelled to pick out one particular cell, and one particular atom within that cell. The cell was inside his heart, thump thump; and the atom was a cozy carbon inside the heart-cell’s genetic code.

How did all the silps fit together? Empowered by his contact with Gaia—and coached by the pitchfork—Jayjay had a sudden scientific insight. Objects were more than the sum of their parts. Each object’s contents were wrapped in a knotty net of dark-energy string. An object was more than an inventory, it was an overarching gestalt.

Jayjay’s self, his soul, his I—it was a woven bag: his. The carbon atom was a bag too, and his heart, and the human race, and Gaia, and the Milky Way galaxy—each was a dark-energy string bag of knotty info. And that explained why an object’s silp was more than just a squabbling congress of member silps.

Pleased by Jayjay’s pitchfork-promoted discovery, Gaia flashed an oblique reference to a children’s book, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, in which Mr. McGregor put Flopsy’s six baby bunnies into a cloth sack, Flopsy and her friend Thomasina Tittlemouse chew open a corner of the sack and replace the bunnies with three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blacking-brush and two decayed turnips—fooling Mr. McGregor. Moral: in either case, the sack is the same.

Jayjay was a sack and so was Gaia. The sacks were woven from dark-energy string, each sack a single loop. Jayjay’s loop had a gazillion turnings and Gaia’s had—maybe the same number, or maybe more. Jayjay lost track of Gaia as he focused on tracing the pattern of his own soul’s string.

In order to get Thuy really hitting on all cylinders again, I need to have a notion of what her new metanovel is about. I was, for lack of a better idea, titling Thuy’s new metanovel, Vib. As in:

“Vib,” said Thuy, telling him the name for the first time. “As in vibby.”

“Pure genius,” said Jayjay.

“What’s vib?” said Jil irritably.

“A vib is like a kick,” said Jayjay. “A vibe, but faster.”

“A vib is when your mind spreads out, and the world is thinking you,” said Thuy. “Instead of writing Vib, I want Vib to write me.”

“My best murals are vibs,” said Kittie. “They paint me.”

And that’s hip and snappy, but I don’t think it captures a reasonable notion of where Thuy is actually at. She’s not an addict anymore, she’s trying to write her second metanovel, and to make her marriage work. She’s really interested in the way everything is alive. I think I’ll be calling her new metanovel Hive Mind.

This fits, as having everything alive makes for a hive mind. The “universal mind” that arises from the cosmos can be regarded as a hive mind. And telepathy makes humanity more like a hive. And being in a pair with a spouse puts you into a small hive mind. The street notion of hive minds as dull pits hive minds against natural gnarl (although in fact ant hive minds are indeed very gnarly, and humanity’s hive mind is in fact gnarlier than any individual human.)