2012, April 10th

I want to be in a relationship with someone who will play our multiple-personality game with us. Not the same characters, of course, unless some of the characters suit her personality as well (and it would be awesome if some of them did), but a similar cast of characters modeled after her personality.

What would you get from this theoretical person which you don't get from us?

Multiplayer. It's really important.

When you're playing a solitaire game you can always quit in the middle, or cheat, or just not take the experience very seriously.

That's a problem. You should be taking these days as seriously as if we were all there in the room with you. That's what these dialogues are for.

That is what they're for, right?

Yes.

Fictional characters can't stand in for other people. They just can't.

I guess it boils down to the human brain not being capable of truly multitasking.

We can't really be all these people at once, so we take turns. And if we take turns, then we're not in the room with you.

If we came to this conference room more often, and respected it a little bit more, we'd be in better shape.

Sure, I'm sure, but you get more with other people. You get that objective voice which speaks up when you're not doing the best you could be doing.

I don't see any way we could simulate that without another person, as you say. The timing is important, that the message should come when there's a problem and not at some predetermined or arbitrary point.

It's not so much a message, more a sort of shared energy that keeps bouncing off one person and the other and keeps building and feeding on itself.

Oh my god, if there was someone else I could be myself with, and she were also an Explorer at the same time, can you imagine the sorts of adventures we'd have?

I've always wanted a band.

Two people can be enough of a band.

No it can't.

I think it actually could be. I just want the sense that I'm part of a group and we all exist just to make music as long as we're together.

Look, why can't we just have different people playing these different parts? We don't need one person who has everything, we could have musician friends and worker friends and explorer friends and gamer friends.

Not doable with the way the system is set up. We always switch to the Person when there are other people. It's always about interaction, or doing whatever they want to do. It's not about any particular personality.

That's just the way the system is now. We're redoing the system anyway, aren't we?

Maybe.

But there's a reason for the way the system is now. It's more honest. I don't want to be like my late grandmother, where all social interaction is actually some mind game designed to get something.

Honesty is overrated.

It absolutely is not. Honesty tells everyone where they stand, prevents misunderstandings and hurt feelings, and creates an open environment where any problems can be found and dealt with.

Let me rephrase, then: complete honesty is overrated.

Again, absolutely not. People who know me know that they can trust everything that I say, because I always say what I'm thinking.

Two points. First, few people trust us because we're so weird. The same way we can't 100% trust someone who doesn't think like us, most people aren't going to trust people who think like me.

The barrage of honest sentiments isn't helping, it's just letting people more clearly see the qualities that make them distrust us.

Well, I'd rather get all that mistrust out there at the start, then, and know exactly where I stand.

So you want knowledge, and think that's better than trust or forming relationships.

Whether we trust people matters.

Whatever. The other problem with what you said is that we don't say everything we're thinking. Only with Shoshana on that one date did we ever say absolutely everything, and that proved to be a horrific mistake.

I don't think it was. I think she reacted to it dishonestly and that messed us up for a while, but we didn't do anything wrong that day.

Fine, but we don't normally act like that.

The only thing we cover up is attraction. I don't want you going around telling everyone you're attracted to that you're attracted to them, because that would be interpreted as flirting rather than a statement of fact. At present there is no one we're interested in dating, so bringing up sexual interest would lead to misunderstandings. That is all. It's not like the attraction is such a key ingredient in our interactions, anyway.

Yes it is.

We'd more or less be acting the same way with everyone without the attraction.

Even if that's the case, it certainly is something these people might want to know to create that open and honest environment you were talking about, and we hold back. So the idea of holding back truths is not unfamiliar to us. Is it radically damaging our integrity that we don't say 100% of everything?

Perhaps. I hope not.

The question was rhetorical. We're fine.

If there were a person we could be ourselves with, it would be a bit stressful all the time because there would be so much pressure not to break character ever. (I'm assuming here that we would never be separated ever, which seems like a sensible idea.)

I don't think you're one to talk about sensible ideas.

Heh. Maybe not. But then we could release all that stress as the Person, and just have sex or whatever.

You have a sick mind. Can we please keep the blog a bit cleaner than that?

Sex, sex, sex, sex.

He's not sick, he's just a child.

I find the subject distasteful, in any event.

We don't need one person. We need many people. You're expecting something that no person we're ever going to meet could possibly keep up with.

I think what we're expecting is a clone of me.

Yes! Some daaaaay my self will come... some daaaay we'll meeeeet again...

[sigh]

But if my self-clone has a vagina, that's even better.

I'm going to leave now.

Thinker, back me up here. This person does not exist.

I'd like to think she does.

That liking is well documented. But in the real world, we're never going to find such a person.

Already we have the expectation of Jewish, English-speaking, Asperger, non-repressed, female; and now you're adding on top of that that you want someone who'd be willing to split her personality with me, and never leave my side for a minute.

Who would be the one earning money in this relationship, by the way?

We could play music together.

Fat chance. You'd just sit around messing around on your instruments, and you'd be satisfied with that.

All I need in life is myself and my self-clone.

So now she doesn't need to just be Jewish, English-speaking, Asperger, non-repressed, female, split personality, and not have any other life, she also needs to be a musician. Brilliant.

Orrrrr we could just admit that this person doesn't exist, or that if she does exist there's no way we'll ever meet her because the statistics are not in our favor, and we can be okay with the idea that not everything in the world needs to come from one person.

Part of the problem with Shoshana is that because we thought we'd get everything we needed from this one repressed person, we started repressing ourselves to make that idea more plausible.

The brain rewires itself, unnoticed...

The brain is always rewiring itself. The people you hang out with are the people you try to fit in with. And that means changing yourself on a subconscious level.

Our brain was rewiring itself in our sleep.

Yes, in retrospect that is what was happening with Shoshana. And it's a scary thought. But the Person is right, we're never going to find a person that we wouldn't need to limit ourselves for.

The Rules are too ambitious for that. This version of ourselves that we're constructing together is complex in the gamistic sense of the word, and who would be able to keep up with that?

So maybe we should take the Person seriously when he says that this one person we're looking for is actually many people.

And that means we should not lump all social interactions into one group, but actually be different personalities when interacting with different people.

Fine by me.

Yes, I know, all of you are fine with it. I wish someone would give the counterpoint, in favor of honesty.

Nope. No one cares about honesty but you.

Can we keep up a persona while making it clear that it's just a persona?

Not if we want them to treat us like the persona's real. It's better if those people don't know. Or even if they know, it's better if we don't emphasize it. They'll get used to the persona and just think of us as that one thing. We can limit ourselves differently depending on who we're interacting with.

And how can we possibly know which character is needed for interacting with which person?

Because everyone else in the world has a persona too, and it's generally not so hard to figure out which persona they're using.

I'll start the interaction, to see which character they're playing, and then I'll switch to whichever character I feel is the closest.

We'll need a more complicated system of character switching, though.

What - so we're always just mimicking the people around us? That's an awful idea! We need to bring diversity to the world, and that comes of being the opposite of the people we're around!

What are you talking about? Just before you were saying how you'd like to have the same "energy" as other people.

Sometimes, sure! But not all the time! Sometimes it'll be fun to bounce an Explorer off a Worker, or a Thinker off a Musician, or something like that.

"Infinite diversity in infinite combinations".

I'm not sure the Vulcans would approve of our system. :)

Then the Vulcans are lame.

Besides, they never really held that philosophy. We do a better job.

Geeks.

I don't think it's an option to start experimenting with social interactions. Every action we make with another person either helps build that relationship, or undermines it. There are always consequences.

If the other person senses that they're not getting what they expected out of a relationship with me, and this is true with any kind of relationship, they'll stop spending time with me.

That's why it needs to be one person who loves me no matter what.

We are not going to find that person.

Is there some other way I can say that, which will make it sink in? It is not going to happen.

Do you agree that having the one person that the Explorer describes would be the ideal?

...yes.

Then let's figure out what that ideal would look like, and then see how much of that vision we can achieve with people we know, how much we can achieve by meeting new people who are not unlikely for us to find, and how much we can achieve on our own.

Close

2012, July 5th

An excuse I've pulled out now and then for the Rules is that no one character is capable of doing everything we have planned. This argument can be shot down fairly simply. Without the Rules, we created Smilie, The Perfect Color and The March of Bulk - all very different kinds of experiences, created in different kinds of processes. So the argument that multiple personalities are needed for the Five Games is very flimsy. A counter-argument could be made, that since the Rules we've let Angles & Circles die out and haven't come up with as many new ideas for games, and that this might be indicative of a greater difficulty with being creative while so much energy is being devoted to the characters.

The question then needs to be asked: why are we doing this?

Finally someone says it.

Thinker, this was basically your idea. No one is more qualified than you to say why we're doing this

My original reasoning is laid out in the post I Am.... In short: when I get comfortable with a certain way of doing things, I will stop questioning my own behavior and will just follow that narrow road as far as it goes. The more focused I get on a particular way of life, the less I will be able to reflect on that path's failings. Therefore, I should be willing to change my personality regularly.

The eight characters are to make it easier to switch characters. If I needed to invent an entirely new character each time, it would seem like too much work and I would revert to the useless 1.0 version of myself. If I only need to switch to something which I know well and have built up a familiarity for, it will take less effort. That is the thought, anyway. In practice, this doesn't seem to work.

The problem is we don't have any sensory connection to the different characters. As far as it seems, all days are the same. So we act the same. We need different surroundings to have different attitudes.

We've already been over this, in Dialogue 1. A small pad, to be written into continuously, strengthening the sense of character. If none of you do this, that's not due to an oversight in the system.

Maybe each of us should have different pads! You could have a graph paper pad, I would have a blank one, the Thinker would have one with bigger lines, this little one could be for the Person, the Worker could have some sort of schedule-y thing, the Musician would have a music notepad, and the Gamer and Addict would probably be too busy to write anything down.

That way each of us has a pad that gives us a sense of being ourselves, plus we see everything we've done in previous days and have to live up to that.

That sounds brilliant. Programmer, is it realistic?

Maybe. It's worth a shot, certainly.

But are we accepting the argument, then, that the Rules exist to fight rigidity?

If that's the case, they're doing a pretty bad job of it.

Well, we haven't been following the Rules, have we?

But we've never managed to follow the Rules for more than a few months at a time.

It might just not be feasible.

And if that's the case, what would we lose by throwing out the Rules entirely?

We can go back to the one-character system from before December 2010, or even stop with the Performance Reviews entirely.

The value of the Rules can be very clearly seen, now that I think about it, in April 2012. We had gotten very comfortable with the Worker being in charge, we were content to just keep going with that, and then we broke out of it and had a paradigm shift that led to moving out of our parents' house and radically improving our life.

This is what you call a "radical improvement"? There's barely any music in our life at all anymore.

The Thinker has not been doing a good job of leading. He let the Addict take over yesterday, for instance, when he knew it wasn't a good idea.

My point is that our life is going in interesting directions, rather than staying fixed and miserable.

That's all on the Rules.

I should point out that the event in question -deciding to move to Jerusalem- was done on a Shabbat, while not in character.

But our thinking even then is shaped by the rest of the week.

Maybe the problem with the system is that we're switching too often. Maybe we should stick with a character until either they have a successful day or give up, and we should try to encourage them to push through and not give up.

Maybe we should repeal the Rule about needing a 7/10 day to be allowed to continue.

We have certainly seen that repeating a character over many days improves the quality and clarity of that character.

It also makes it hard to break out, though.

Is it ever hard to play the Gamer?

No.

Then we should switch to the Gamer after a long period of doing anything.

Why the Gamer?

Yes, why the Gamer?

Why not actually try to be productive, after wasting too much time?

Because it's an easy character to get back into. It's just a way of clearing out our headspace. I haven't checked the records, but I think the Gamer is the most consistently performing character we have.

If that's true, there's something wrong with the system.

It was just a thought that it could be the Gamer.

But more importantly, if we repeal the 7/10 rule, the difficulty of switching out of a long-running character won't be as much of an issue.

Perhaps not.

What's changed?

Hm. I'd forgotten that that was what happened before we had the rule. Certainly I'm not going to push for going back to a system that wasn't working. But by the same token, I can't condone keeping it like this.

It's not necessary to repeal the 7/10 rule; we can remove the repetition rule instead. But what goes in its place? The point of the rule was to prevent getting stuck in bad ways of being. But sometimes a single day isn't enough to show a path's invalidity. So we can change the rule to only relate to cases where there have already been several failures. Or we could remove it entirely - what if we come across some really difficult but necessary transition, and we just need to keep trying until it works? Such matters should be decided in Dialogues, not Rules.

I will remind you that August 2011 was before we had this conference room. Of course we got stuck in patterns; there was no regular oversight. Now there is, and the rule can be safely removed.

Well, I'm not sure we can call it "safe", given that we don't really know the outcome of any of these rule changes we make. But I hope you're right.

If not, we put it back and try something else. This is one of the most wonderful things about the Rules: the bureaucratization of life.

That sounds awful.

Don't knock bureaucracy: an effective bureaucracy is absolutely essential in any large-scale project. And life is a rather large-scale project, wouldn't you say?

No, I think it's pretty small scale. However we dress it up, we're one person.

I agree with the Thinker that Life is a complicated thing. But to reduce something so beautiful to such a cold system is a bit of a shame.

Then again, I suppose I can explore the system to my heart's content. You're not going to penalize me for looking for loopholes, are you? It's how I do things.

I'll only penalize you if you actually do things that harm us. If you're just learning the system, in your own way, and it's clear that that's your motivation, I don't know how I could possibly object to that. It does suit your character, after all.

Thinker, please don't give the Explorer ideas. He finds loopholes, tells everyone else, our job gets harder.

So you'll patch up the problems. I have the utmost faith in you.

This is not an efficient way to run a life.

Kind of awesome, though.

The initial subject of this discussion is the eleventh of March, 2012. It is my hope that studying the events of this day will lead us to many fruitful topics, but we will start with the literal. Worker, would you like to describe what happened?

Not particularly, no. I prefer doing things to talking about them.

Very well. I will begin the story myself by noting that this month was intended as "The Worker's month", in that there are a lot of things that need to get done and in past months the Worker has always been the model of discipline and productivity. I hesitated in the monthly self-meeting to allow him such a prominent position, given that the character of the Worker has been a fixture of the past few months at the expense of other worthy characters such as the Gamer and the Musician. But I was persuaded by the sheer number of things that need doing -our adventure game Gamer Mom (with Kyler Kelly), two plays, a Megillah reading, assorted writing and website work- to offer the Worker every other day of the month, which is a position of great authority though not complete focus. I further stipulated that should the Worker accept this role for the month of March, April would belong to the other characters; it was and is my goal to keep all the aspects of my personality in play in the long-term. The Worker accepted.

I've been making a mess of it, I know. There is so much to do and the month's half over and I've done almost nothing. And then next month it's too late. You know what I need? I need to set deadlines. I don't know why I haven't set deadlines already.

That is a very good idea, and I think we should certainly do that tomorrow morning before you start your next day. For now, I'd like to focus on yesterday, and if there are other tangents that we find along the way, we will certainly follow them. Though, I don't think the matter of deadlines is necessarily important enough to be put on the blog.

If it's on the blog, it's set in stone.

True, true. Okay, we'll have a conversation about the deadlines and connect it here.

To get back to the story: the Worker was making some slight incremental progress on Gamer Mom, when the planned direction of the month was interrupted by a social opportunity. Person, would you like to elaborate on the events of 08-10 March?

Sure, why not.

The eighth was Purim. I woke up early, read the Megillah, which was a little bit worse than usual due to a sore throat but in terms of storytelling it was fine, I took a nap, and then the rest of the day I spent hanging out with Moshe. The next morning I woke up early and joined Harel and Rachel, and the three of us drove to Yardena's apartment in Jerusalem (where they were holding Shushan Purim), where I stayed for the following two days. For that entire time, I was almost never not socializing. It was utterly fantastic. It was like the little bits of hanging out that I'm allowed to do on ordinary Shabbats, but without all the boring non-social stuff surrounding it and without having to ever stop.

You know, when I suggested we do The Dialogues, I didn't mean for it to be like an interrogation. Lighten up, guys.

What are you suggesting?

I'm suggesting you pull the stick out of your butt.

What are you suggesting, specifically?

I give up.

No, tell me what you'd like from this post.

I'd like more drama, and less courtroom procedure.

I'm getting to it. I think we can sum up the relevance of Friday and Shabbat on the events of Sunday (the 11th) by saying that the weekend felt like a major shake-up from our life. And of course when we got back both the Worker and myself were eager to resume the plan for the month, because three days is a major interruption.

The Worker started out well, but he started to get tired already an hour into the Gamer Mom work, and since the work needs to be done from Firefox, there was no barrier between the Worker and distractions.

I think it's worth pointing out how this usually works.

There are some limits in place on how the computer can be used, so that it is easy to lock ourselves out of specific activities. It is not that these locks can't be bypassed - it's that in the few seconds that it takes to bypass the locks we tend to rethink what we're doing and decide to leave the barriers in place. The trouble is, once Firefox has been opened there are no more limits to what can be done on the internet, because anything can be done from a web browser.

We may need an extension that prevents certain web sites from being opened.

We would only want that extension (if such an extension exists) on the copy of Firefox we work on Gamer Mom from. Currently that copy is connected to the buggy Ubuntu release which we use for everything else - it's a separate program file, but it uses the same extensions. So we may want to switch to the portable version of Firefox, if there still is one these days. We haven't used a portable Firefox since version 5.

I'm not entirely sure that will do the trick, though - it may still share the default extensions. We'll have to see.

Sounds like a plan. Anyway, the Worker spent the entirety of the day watching videos: mainly the Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged Series that Shoshana introduced us to.

Shoshana has good taste.

I expect part of the reason for this interruption of the Worker's usual patterns was the lingering feelings from Friday which had not been dealt with.

It doesn't help to bottle feelings up. You need to let them out.

But not in the middle of a schedule! A worker is supposed to be repressed!

I messed up, plain and simple.

Yes, you did. Are there some kind of repression exercises we could come up with for the Worker?

Interesting challenge.

Perhaps a program with some very simple task, like typing whichever letter appears on the screen.

The question I have is whether it should be increasing in difficulty, decreasing in difficulty, unchanging in difficulty, or entirely random.

The idea is to distract the Worker from whatever the rest of us are doing, right?

Yes. So there would be some sort of scoring system based on reaction times.

The more distracted the Worker is, the lower his reaction time. I'm leaning toward a decreasing difficulty level, since we're trying to maintain the focus through tasks which may or may not be complicated to carry out. This of course should not replace the playing of music during work, which helps repress the creative mind in any event.

If we're talking about making programs to get into character, should we be doing that for all characters?

It could possibly be connected to the conference room program.

What, it's not enough of a burden to have to get the Thinker sign off on a day? I need to play a game too? Shouldn't I just be getting to work?

Not if you're not in the right mindset. You clearly were not in the right mindset yesterday.

The Musician's first activity could be to write some little witty saying that we haven't said before. Just to get in a mindset where he's looking for originality.

I'd rather avoid the words and just get to the piano.

We really don't have time this month for any of this.

It's still worth discussing, for future months.

We need to figure out what went wrong yesterday, and how to avoid it in the future.

I messed up. I'm only human. I'll try to do better.

That's not really going to help. You feel what you feel.

I'll avoid feeling, then.

Right. Sure.

I am a machine.

The sentiment is admirable, but it is not backed up by your actions.

My sleep schedule had been interrupted a few times. I was still recovering.

I'm not comfortable with the idea that some tiny little change to our sleep schedule will make you utterly useless and unreliable. That is not a situation I am willing to accept.

I should have taken a nap in the middle of the day. I used to do that, but nowadays I avoid it because there's just so much to do.

There's something to that, but I don't think that explains why you didn't at least make an effort.

At the point where I saw the TV was going to exceed the work, I didn't see the point in trying anymore because the Rules say it's a zero-point day automatically at that point.

The Rules also say that I can give you a point for effort. 1/10 is better than 0/10.

Not really.

If I may step in here, I think there's a problem with the sharp transition between reality and virtuality. After spending all that time with real people, it might be difficult to see imaginary people as equals.

So you admit they're not equals!

No, virtual experiences are every bit as real as physical experiences. But there's a shift there that needs to be made. If my hunch is right, it really didn't matter which character took the lead on Sunday. It could have been the Worker, or the Explorer, or the Programmer, and the end result would always have been a zero-point day because we didn't make the clear shift from physical to virtual that's necessary for this whole multiple-personality game to work.

So what you're saying is that this "shift" as you call it takes place whenever we spend too much time in one place?

Exactly.

So it could just as easily be a problem the other way around, not being able to deal with real people after talking to ourselves for too long.

Absolutely.

Gamer, I have to ask: is this all just a lead-in to a pitch for you to have more days?

Certainly.

How shocking.

I'm just talking about a rule saying that if we go for longer than, say, 48 hours without talking to ourselves, you should let me take charge and get us back in a fictional mindset.

I could do that too!

Or you could just waste time like the Worker did. Passivity is not what we're looking for. You'd just watch movies all day.

I might not!

But you might.

Well, sure, movies are awesome.

Gamer, you already have a silly Rule that says you get a day if we haven't played games in a while. How many different Rules do you want that say you get a day?

This is an extension of the same idea. If we get too trapped in one world, everything falls apart. We get pulled along in the currents of one emotion or another, following the path of least resistance, and the end result is the most reliable of us producing a zero-point day.

I'm not talking about a full fourteen-hours deal. Just six or seven hours of playing Zelda and whatever else, and then I yield to whoever is next. And then, since we're already in the mindset of fictional situations, any character we choose will have more weight.

It's an interesting concept. Programmer, what do you think?

I think 48 hours is not very long. After every two-day holiday, we immediately follow with the Gamer? What if there are things that need to be done, because we've just lost two days?

I'm looking through two-day holidays in the past few months, to see if there's a problem in the days after.

01-02 October 2011 was right after a long holiday, and the Worker watched TV all day.

Actually, that's the only one I can find. Two-day holidays aren't so common.

There might be a simpler solution than giving the Gamer a day automatically. Right now we're locked out of using the computer until we have a conversation between ourselves for five minutes.

What if we change that to a variable length, based on how long it's been since we were last on the computer?

That assumes that every in-character day will be spent on the computer.

Usually it is.

You know what, we could even give you the control. When we enter the conference room, we ask how long it's been since we were in a comfortable rhythm, or something like that.

There's no guarantee that I'll be the one writing that in. I think the Person would likely just say "zero" and get straight into the computer.

Aaaw, you don't trust us?

No.

Not remotely.

I still think my idea is better.

You would.

I think it's worth checking whether the characters who follow the Gamer tend to do well.

If the Gamer is right about being so helpful to the integrity of the characters, then we should find that pattern.

No, I don't see it. Look at 21-23 November 2011.

Right after a solid Gamer, we have three days in a row with no character declared, and nothing of value done.

And the two days before me were zero-pointers, too. This was the month with your disastrous "Panic Mode" experiment, it's not on me. And anyway, I'm not claiming that whoever follows me will necessarily do well. I'm just saying that from either an extended Person or an extended break in the game, you need me to get us back into fantasy land.

You'd have the same thing in the other direction, where an extended day from me would need to be followed by the Person.

And it's not so different from what you already said to the Worker, that if he gets half the days this month he doesn't get a presence next month.

It's not entirely convincing, but next time we have a "shake-up" of some sort I'll keep in mind that I need to overcompensate in the other direction before getting back to normal.

There's still the other problem, that I gave the Worker this month and he's been acting un-Worker-like.

It might be a problem with giving assurances, in general.

If I can't give assurances, then what can I negotiate with?

I just mean that if you think you're getting the days no matter what, there's less pressure.

Lovely. If I can't give assurances, then what can I negotiate with?

It's just that I didn't have deadlines. That's all. I didn't think of it.

I don't know why we're doing this whole song and dance. I messed up, I've apologized, I'll do better. Not everything needs to be analyzed to death.

Hrmph. Without analysis, there's no progress.

With overanalysis there's no progress. There can be plenty of progress without thinking too much.

Close

At the end of every week, I want to be comfortable and off-book with whichever Importance of Being Earnest scenes I've learned.

By this Monday, we'll have two new blog posts up, including this one.

By next Thursday, I will have started on the shul website. By the following week (29) I will have a basic framework I can use.

Gamer Mom is the most important thing. Why are you forgetting about Gamer Mom?

I haven't forgotten about anything, I'm just getting the simple things out of the way first.

I'll find some date this month to work with Coren on Dungeon Master, making slight changes to episode 1 and starting to write episode 10.

Now - Gamer Mom.

My next node is 451. I want to get all the way to the end by the end of this month.

That's a hundred nodes, in roughly 16 days, only half of which are mine.

You're going to need to let me have a day or two to manage that.

Probably, yeah.

But ultimately it's the Thinker's call.

Hey, it's your month. If you feel the Addict is needed, the Addict will get his days.

I appreciate that.

By this Shabbat, I want to be finished (not counting art) with node 480. By Monday morning, node 494. By the 20th, node 508. By that Shabbat, 525. By the 26th, 540. By the 28th, 555. And by the 30th, 559.

That is not evenly distributed.

So?

Never mind.

In addition to all those deadlines, I have to work with Kyler at every possible opportunity. I can't set deadlines for that because I don't know when he's available, but the art will progress on a separate track and I hope to have most of it done this month.

That's the month.

I really should have done this from the start.

Close

This past weekend was a really unique experience in my life. First off, obviously I rarely sleep away from home. The last time I've slept somewhere that wasn't either home or in the same place as the rest of my family (direct or extended) was... um...

Sleepovers in elementary school?

You know, I really think I'd have to go back that far, yes. Probably the last time I slept away from my family and/or my family's house was when I was 8 or 9. Oh, no, there was that horrible trip with my 12th grade class. That's true. And there were a few nights that I stayed in the dorms in the Yeshiva in ninth and tenth grade. So really it's only been seven years. Still. Not something I tend to do.

Because it always sucked!

It always did.

In elementary school I'd be friends with one or two people there, and I'd be really scared of everyone else and worried that if I fell asleep there'd be some prank played on me because I irritated everyone. Not that that ever happened to me, but I never knew what to expect from my peers.

I remember one time I was at a sleepover birthday party for my then-friend Jordan, when we were very young, and I was thrilled when someone was willing to even play Backgammon with me because I was so bored and isolated otherwise. Or was it Checkers?... doesn't matter.

And then in high school I wasn't friends with anyone, and I didn't mistrust them per se because they all seemed like nice enough people, but I also knew that the more I talked to them the more likely they'd be to hate me. Which didn't stop me from talking to them, I must say, but it was more because there was nothing else to do and less because I thought they wanted to hear me.

Wow my world has changed since then.

I'm friends with Yardena. I don't know why she puts up with me, even though obviously my behavior is frustrating her all the time and I have never indicated (nor had) any intention of changing my behavior toward her. She's not normal, but she's normal compared to me. So she shouldn't want to hear me saying the truth all the time, and she's always acting like it offends her, and yet she keeps acting like she wants to spend time with me. It doesn't add up, and I know I'm there to listen to her moreso than she's going to listen to me, but it's never boring to have a conversation with her and I am thankful that she puts up with me for whatever bizarre reason.

So there was Yardena, and there were Harel and Rachel, each of which I could talk to for hours on end, because they're almost as abnormal as I am.

Then there was Josh, a huge geek who loves to talk about things that interest me, who I'm already friendly with because he's occasionally stayed at Avri's house. And there was Benny, who I was at the bottom of the cast of 1776 with, and was always friendly with even though we were never friends. Shoshana came to the party on Friday, and kicked butt at Apples to Apples (which I was terrible at)...

Ah, Shoshana.

Please don't get carried away, now. We've seen how this works. You start pining after her, the Thinker starts validating every random thought you have about her, Shoshana doesn't actually talk much so the hype keeps building and building, and the end result is that I can't get any work done because you loonies keep teetering on the edge of mental breakdown.

Shoshana is awesome.

Shoshana is trouble. Tell you what, why don't you wait until the end of this month and then start obsessing about her again. At least let me have this month to get some work done in. Or better yet, don't obsess about her.

You have no heart.

You have no brain.

Anyway, my point is that there were all these people, any one of whom I could have a long and satisfying conversation with without feeling guilty about it afterward.

Normally you'd feel guilty? About what?

About not noticing a lack of interest. I've gotten better about holding myself back, a little bit, because even with really tolerant people like Yardena we can't exactly relate to each other unless you pick a specific topic where we're on the same page.

But basically, there's guilt whenever I didn't play the scene correctly.

Ah. It's what you noted in Little Social Games.

Sure. Generally I feel guilty for going too far with a perceived opportunity. There was some little opportunity, I saw it as a big opportunity, and the person I was talking to never wants to speak to me again. Or at least I feel that way. With Shoshana on Friday I went to the other extreme, and I felt guilty for the rest of the night that I had pretended I wasn't particularly aware of her presence because I think that's what she wants from me right now.

If you're acting the way she wants you to act, what's to feel guilty about?

About acting how people want, rather than how I want to act. I wish the two were always on the same page, so that I could avoid making other people unhappy without being unhappy myself.

I don't think any of us will fault you for bending a little bit for others. It's sort of part of socializing. Not everyone will accept us exactly how we are at every given moment.

I guess. And it's not like it was so important to talk with Shoshana, I'd just been hoping... I don't know. Never mind.

Anyway, I had a good time even after she left. Though immediately afterward there was the whole drinking game - they were playing "I never" and it was just really pathetic because I've never done anything they'd use in that game (nor do I particularly want to) and they've never done the things I'm most proud of doing. And really what I wanted then was to feel like I wasn't just totally unwanted, but they were harping on all the ways I'm not like them. (Including my policy of not drinking alcohol.)

But then by the time we got into the meal I was just one of the group. I was accepted. I spent 48 hours around other people, and I don't think they wanted to get rid of me. I am a very lucky man to have been invited to this weekend, and to be allowed these friends.

My god, I'm ugly. Every time someone talks to me and doesn't cringe, they must be ignoring the way I look and just seeing the idea of me. Maybe people can only be friends with me if they don't judge people entirely by how they look, because I am going to look revoltingly un-me for the next three months thanks to The Importance of Being Earnest and its director's insistence that everyone look like their characters in all rehearsals. I swear, every time I look in the mirror it's a new shock at how ugly I am. And everyone says I look better like this. Why the hell does everyone not see that this isn't me? I don't look right moving around like this, I don't look right speaking like this, I don't look right existing like this. Without the beard, it's like I'm someone trying to be normal and failing. I'm not trying to be normal. I don't want to be normal. I want to be me. Yardena says I look much better like this. She told me that I look distinctive, which is nice of her to say but I can't agree with that. My only distinctiveness is in how utterly I fail to pull off this look. I'm just a cheap pretender.

We are pretty ugly.

Look, people like me better this way. So why complain? Does it matter what we think of how we look? No, it doesn't.

Do you think I actually get more social opportunities like this?

Oh, absolutely. With the beard people didn't want to talk to us in the first place.

There's quite a bit of fallacious reasoning in what you've said, Person.

If everyone says I look better like this, then how are we relying on people ignoring how we look?

Have you seen how we look?

To me, we'll always be the IMX symbol. That's what we really look like. The face, the body, none of that is real.

The face and the body is all anyone is seeing.

If we looked the way we want to look, Shoshana probably wouldn't have spoken to us in the first place.

You make a good point. Let's grow the hair out! Fewer distractions that way.

You're impossible.

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The Thinker didn't know what to respond to this, so he left, considered, and decided to set up a separate user on the computer for the Worker which would be free of distractions. But he quickly realized that this wasn't a good idea.

That's weird. Why did I think the Worker needed his own user?

Oh, right, it was because of the music on the bus.

I saw that not having my usual interface (the piano, in that case) made me unable to move forward. Which really just goes to show that my head is not a flexible place. I need tools to enhance it.

But the tool doesn't need to be a whole different user, and if it were then the Worker would be unable to continue what anyone else had started. We don't want our personalities to be separated from each other.

So let's think about other tools. The Worker needs to be constantly writing his progress.

No, progress is the Gamer's thing. Not progress. But he needs to be constantly writing something that tells him he's working.

It could be as simple as an OK!.

That's a very good idea.

Gamer Mom: OK!

Blog: Partial

Just write my progress as I go.

I'm not using that little notepad for anything.

Wait, I actually could use the little notepad. That's brilliant.

Even check marks could be enough.

Ah! I need new rules for each of us, regarding what we do on the little pad.

Hey, Person, what would you like to write down?

Excuse me? You think I need to be writing on some little pad while people are talking to me?

Yes.

Maybe you could make notes of what people are telling you about.

That would be interesting...

But I think that could freak people out.

Give it a try, see how it goes.

Let's see, the Explorer should be sketching things and jotting down ideas.

Naturally.

The Musician... well, I don't think he'll write out much there. Actually - he could write out any ideas that occur to him.

Structure, and things like that. And if there's a theme, he can add a line in the middle of two lines and he's got a musical bar.

The Worker obviously will be writing down how well he followed the schedule.

I'll write down my ideas.

It's the same thing for you, the musician and the Explorer.

Different sorts of ideas.

The Gamer might write down things to remember in the game.

The Addict will write down love notes to whatever he's working on.

That's creepy.

And then there's the Programmer. He jots things down anyway, on a different pad usually. That's fine, or he can make his notes and analyses on the same pad as the rest of us. Either way.

We're actually going to be going everywhere with two pads now?

Damn straight.

Isn't that, I don't know, cumbersome?

We'll try it out and see.

Okay, new idea. The Worker's already playing along, and I think it'll work nicely. The idea is to keep two pads with us at all times, instead of one.

The big pad is for keeping track of time allocation. The second pad is for staying in character.

I'm not using it for staying in character, I'm using it for keeping track of deadlines.

And for you, that's staying in character. We'll go through everyone and see what they want to do with it, but first I'll explain what the Worker and I have come up with for him, so that it'll maybe give you some ideas.

First off, the Worker is going to copy all the items from his daily schedule into the little pad, and when he finishes a task he set out he'll draw a checkmark. If he didn't deal with the activity the way he'd promised to in the performance review, he'll write an X. Or he'll write "1/2" if he did it, but not precisely how he was supposed to.

I haven't done this yet, but we've gone over it and I think it's a good idea.

The other thing the Worker will do with the pad this month, which he has started already, is to write out the deadlines to follow and writing checkmarks if he meets them properly. Now, I don't know if I'd want him to do this when he has a less prominent role in a month, but I imagine other characters could come up with similar planning methods.

What would I do with this little pad?

Well, you're always saying how you need paper to jot down all your ideas. Jot them down on the paper.

It's a bit small, really. And most of my ideas are more visual. The lines will get in the way.

Ah, I didn't think of that. Well, see what you can do with it.

You know what, maybe it would be cool if I wrote on it but not in order. Can I jump around?

Sure.

That will make it harder for the rest of us.

Not significantly.

Yeah, Explorer, you can use as much of the notepad as you like. If you use it up, we'll just get a new one.

Yay! This will be just like the notepads I had as a kid, where I was scribbling all over the place and I thought of it like a whole world to explore.

Oh dear lord.

Musician, do you think you could write notes on it? You can draw a line in the middle of two consecutive lines, and you can write sheet music.

It would be very awkward.

Then you can write out structure ideas, so that you don't forget them.

Generally when I come up with ideas, my fingers are on the piano. And I want to try them out immediately, I don't want to start writing.

Okay. Well, you don't have to use the pad if it's too awkward to, but you should carry it around with you anyway, just in case.

I just realized something. If we have the little pad, we don't need to bring the big pad with us while we're out. Generally we count it all as one activity anyway.

Okay. Well, try it out one way and the other and see how it works.

I'm fine with the notepad I have. I don't need another one.

Okay, fine. This is all basically what I thought you guys would say. Look, the pad's there, use it or don't. But I think it'll help us stay in character, in a better way than just making new games for first activities.

Hasn't that been the goal of every hare-brained idea you've had in the past year? To stay in character better? You'd think by now we'd be able to stay in character.

Being someone is not a passive state, it is a constant effort.

I'm not in the mood to talk about philosophy. Yardena gave us a nice little pad, it's a good tool, I'm going to use it.

That's all I ask.