[cliques] and menus

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Happy New Year! Hope 2023 is kind to everyone reading this and all your families and friends. I've always liked Chinese New Year, but in these times I feel like I need to disclaim that I am not a CCP sympathizer. I really feel bad for people still being locked down in massive control measures and counter measures. So many people in the world have suffered for many years, becoming aware of it is probably a very good thing.

I've been rolling a few thoughts around for awhile.

We all like belonging to a group, a niche, as a friend used to call it. We all like looking at menus of some kind. In the olden days in my life, this would have described going out to a restaurant with friends and family.

I've been thinking for awhile about interactive clicks and dropdown menus in gaming. The particular game I've been playing for awhile is Elvenar. I'm sure all gaming is full of this kind of coding, but since it's so over the top on Elvenar, I think about it while I play. Of course there were countdowns in Minecraft for various productions, the days and nights passing, how many 'tics' until something dropped but not picked up dissipated or until produce ripened, etc. Elvenar is 100% tic countdowns. There's no running as an avatar 'physically' building a structure you can walk through in game. Elvenar is more like a ledger game, constantly keeping track of hundreds of countdown timers and the cost/benefit of real time choices against all those countdowns. 

Since I'm a time-disoriented person who winds up at appointments at wrong times, wrong days, even wrong weeks or even months once in awhile (despite calendars and a pocket planner), learning to stay focused through all those countdowns has been a bit grueling, but after right around 3 years of playing, it has really sharpened my awareness. I still don't actually feel time passing, sometimes finding by accident that several hours have gone by and I've forgotten to eat or do something important, but I'm learning to gauge time passing by countering that with real life productions. If I can list a number of things I've gotten done during the day, I can fairly accurately guess how much time as passed without once looking at the time. I was never able to transfer that kind of application from Minecraft to real life.

I used to gauge my time by TV scheduling, but notoriously smashed my days together so badly that I usually got it wrong. I don't do that any more. I barely look at clocks any more. The only time I need clocks is to sync into other people's daily schedules, like knowing when to make a phone call or something. 

Everything in my life is either clickable or nonclickable. Finding a recipe is clickable. Actually cooking food is nonclickable. Productions in interface are clickable. Productions in real life are nonclickable. Ordering chicks and seeds online is clickable. Actually growing either one is nonclickable. 

We already had the equivalent of drop down menus in our heads. I've been aware since I was young that I constantly run loops and counters. If this, then this or that. In game isn't very different. 

The niche is easier than real life. Compatibility sorts itself online. People look for groups that already fit their own agendas. If an oddball refuses to fit, sometimes a group will banish to reclaim a more peaceful production level. It's fairly impersonal for the most part unless a person has trouble not extending their emotional life into whatever group they wind up in. Sometimes peer pressure wins out, sometimes a bossy person becomes a group leader, but mostly it's about how advantageous is peer pressure to your gaming style. A person can reflect a bit on real life if they notice how that works. 

It's a litte different on social medias, which I've become extremely tired of. Information and funny things are fine, people having meltdowns and getting into fights is ridiculous. I don't have time for that.

One thing I've been noticing for awhile is that AI-guided intraction or interface seems to be as much about group sync as anything. Who is right or wrong doesn't matter so much as how quickly a mass will fall into sync with either side and the methods that work most efficiently and reliably. Most people don't notice how quickly they line up on their own without much persuasion. Trigger a familiar phrase or color pattern and they're sorted in minutes, not bothering to vet the trigger source, which is sometimes directly contrary to what they believe. People are easy like that. Give them familiar clicks and menus and they nest wherever you trigger them to. 

For the most part, I'm not against easy organization, easy interface, and smooth experiences, but I guess it's become the cult rage to notice that the easier it all is, the easier we are to control as real world populations, even when we aren't online in some form. I've been naturally irritatingly roguishly but mostly accidentally rebellious all my life, thanks to austism spectrum, and my first and biggest fail trying to join a crowd is how quickly I rile feathers and throw wrenches in monkeyworks and pretty much blissfully irk people around me so badly that they're happy to see me leave. I don't mean to be like that, I'm just naturally constantly backward engineering how everything around me works, which is very laborious and distracting but also an incredible joy to me. If my mind isn't busy figuring something out, I get so fantastically bored that I start all kinds of trubbas.

Here is a simple true story to illustrate how I affect not just the people around me, but entire franchises. I worked at Sonic one year, which I very much enjoyed, but I couldn't help coloring out of all the lines. This was many years ago. If you've ever had a cherry vanilla soft drink, that was just the beginning of my experimentation. I did things with limeades that had our little town in a tizzy, including floats. I put limes in everything with every flavor and the drink orders coming in after I started work there grew so complicated that the boss started charging for every single additional flavor. My favorite snack to order was a cheese sandwich with added bacon, which was over a dollar cheaper than a bacon sandwich with cheese, which was identical. I had the entire town eating cheese sandwiches with bacon, and the boss finally put a halt to it. No more additions to cheese sandwiches, because there was no way he could charge so much extra for bacon to make it equal to the bacon with cheese. These things rippled through the franchise and became corporate menu decisions. I don't know if that is still a thing after so many years, but back then it was a big deal.

Imagine me fixing a $7M tagging mistake in a retail store. In one hour flat I affected a worldwide manufacturer and a nationwide retail chain, and I got in trouble because I bypassed my manager to make the phone calls. I never got a promotion or even acknowledged. My manager got a very nice salary increase. I can't tell you how many times I was called into the office to be told I'd be fired if I didn't stop doing something. Everything I did fixed problems, but I didn't follow protocols or go through proper channels, so I was a bad person. The only way I survived 5 years in that store was by dumbing down my work ethic, although I was told that the entire middle pad fell apart for awhile after I left.

I've corrected college professors for being vague enough on test questions to allow either/or answers and automatically raised scores for entire classes. That, by the way, isn't cool in a chemistry class. Many people don't realize how vaguely they word test questions. But yeah, I don't mean to be irritating. I was born to be a natural pointer outer of incongruity. You'd think that would be valuable somewhere, but I've never found a real niche where that is actually valuable. I've even got stories of getting a hospital locked down several times over massive error of contagion that no one else caught, and that irritated so many people that my boss tried to pull me into administration just to calm everybody down. Meh, I just left.

Now I'm going to leap a weird fence and look at this inside out.

We can see our online activity just about anywhere we log in, like banking, gaming, shopping, writing, social medias. Logging in is like stepping into another world, a world within our real world. There are many worlds that we pop in and out of every day, even if it's not online. When we engage in a phone call, we create a temp world with an activity log. Everything like that is recorded. What about our real lives? We can't just pull up an activity log for what we did walking around our house or neighborhood for several hours. Or can we?

Many of us are nearly continually surveilled through smart tech in and around the buildings we are in, and sometimes around our neighborhoods if we are in smart cars, carrying phones or wearing fitness tech, in traffic, etc. That's a given. We all know this.

There is a place where our activity isn't measured. Maybe. Where is that? Well, if you have tech on around you, we're at the place now where it can 'read' your bio output and electrical activity to the point where even your thoughts can be discernable. If you are not aware of this, maybe it's time to go read up a little but on that kind of stuff.

Some of you know that everything is measured, even our thoughts, and it's not tech. We are all readable. Those of us who've had out of body and near death experiences understand that there this no such thing as real solitude or aloneness, and that our thoughts and feelings aren't secrets. We can interact from the inside of us without using the outside of us, which is our environment. Why do most of us not know this? Maybe it's because we've been taught all our lives that what we do in private is private, that we are separated from each other as physical beings, that our thoughts are autonomous and our own. What we really are from the very beginning of these lives is products of other people, our environments, our food supply, the treatment we receive, the expectations we are subjected to, the many many words of others all around us all the time, the many activity cycles of work and school and sports and holidays and shopping and entertainment....

We are products of this world.

What we do with ourselves as products is the challenge. Do we do as we are told and live up to expectations for emotional support and validation? Or do we take a look around and wonder why we don't go against the grain and stand up for something important once in awhile?

How do we decide what is important?

Our niches are prepurposed. Our activity logs are preset. Very few of us wander off the preconstructed path. Many of us stop at drop down menus. We don't invent ourselves, our lives, our activities. We think we make choices, but we don't choose what isn't on the menu.

Who do you want to be? What do you want to do or to happen in your life? What is important to you? 

I really do hope you have a great 2023. Some things will suck, some things will drag you back and progress will feel lost, some things will feel so fail that depression threatens to swallow you whole. BUT. As I learned through many many years of blogging, the inch forward sometimes means way more than the 10 feet you slide back. Every inch forward is real conquer, real work you put into what you want. Over time, every inch of discipline you train yourself into becomes marathon material.

I am an addict. I spent many years in health fail on handfuls of meds. There is nothing in this world that fixes anything quick. You can be wealthy and still feel completely bereft. You can be physically fit and still feel emotionally overwhelmed and drained. You can't fix anything with pills or drinks or money.

Do you love who you are? Do you want to? How do you find a way to love yourself? What do you change so that you can love yourself? 

That is the start. That is the path. And that is the goal. Everything else will get fixed along the way if you honestly ask yourself those questions and then honestly look at what sorts of answers you can say to yourself. 

Choose off the menu. Find your true niche, even if you think you are the only one. Make what you feel and want important enough to change what you need to love yourself.

You are important, and it's not just ok but vital that you learn to love yourself. Become the person you would love to be for those around you.

You can do this. Work on the inches. Forgive the fails. Keep your focus.

Invent your own menu.