DNA & Fils-Aime
“Part of it is, I think it’s not in [Sony and Microsoft's] DNA. They’re really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have.”
- George Harrison (link)
DNA, eh? I look at this quote, and I have to laugh. Nintendo is doing really well right now, although their game lineup (as with the PS3 also) could use a bit of work. All in all, they’ve done a lot of things right and they should be given credit for that. Earlier Harrison talks about how Sony and MS are wrong to “…[focus] on a very tiny part of the market.” and that’s important to decrypting the CEO speak in this interview.
As the quote implies, Nintendo isn’t all that interested in serious gamers anymore. As a corporation, they were jilted during the Gamecube era by gamers, and there may still be a lot of decisions being made based on the analyses of that time period. However, when a person goes through a particularly tough period in their life, it can warp them in a certain direction, so that every new problem looks like it can be solved with the answer to the previous problem. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but knowing it helps us understand where they are coming from. The DS changed things by adding a new interface, and so Nintendo’s answer to their console problem was, of course, a new interface. While this has worked for them, it’s also introduced some new problems. For instance, third party developers have been slow to develop for the console, waiting to see whether or not the enormous demand would drop off, or if the supply issues were going to be fixed anytime soon. Regarding both, it appears that the answer is, “No.” Now that third party developers are sticking their toes in the water, their efforts are slow to bear fruit because it’s like redesigning the wheel.
Let me explain: Each “gen” of consoles has built upon the last. Each cycle of games started out very simplistic, and were not well-integrated with their interfaces. As time went on, a body of knowledge developed around the integration of story elements, gameplay elements, and the interface. When the next “gen” appears, knowledge is re-examined, but the cycle still starts out further along than it was previously. However, in the case of Nintendo, they’ve thrown their interface out the window, and now are having to deal with problems they had previously worked out. This means essentially that the initial stages in which the games are still unwieldy and badly integrated with their interface is much longer. Up until this last holiday season, it was still difficult to find a decent RPG for the DS that didn’t require one to utilize the touchscreen in some awkward manner (or that wasn’t actually a Gameboy title). FF3 changed that, but there are still very few others. Essentially with the Wii, Nintendo grabbed some new markets (using casual games, just like the DS) and has been utilizing artificial scarcity to keep demand high. Don’t believe me? Read this quote from the aforementioned interview: “So we’re going to make our best guess as to what we believe we should produce and try to ramp up as much as we can for the fall. But it doesn’t mean we won’t — even if we’re back in stock in August/September, it doesn’t mean there won’t be shortages for the holidays. It’s a good situation to be in, although we don’t want to discourage consumers too much.” The statement implies a lot of control over the situation on their part. They’re milking this scarcity, but they want to make sure they don’t do make the Wii too scarce.
So what does this have to do with the DNA bit at the beginning? Everything. First of all, they didn’t mean to manufacture the Wii scarcity. They’ve admitted that they simply didn’t have the production capacities they used to because they scaled down during the Gamecube era. The scarcity, price point, and novel interface triggered a demand that Nintendo is still trying to understand. The pontificating Reggie does there is priceless, because Harrison turns around and likens it to DNA, which means neither of them believes that stuff. If they did, they’d at least be consistent in bragging about their formula for success. DNA in this case stands for a black box process – it just works ~= I was just born that way. We don’t know how we did this, but we think it’s just in our corporate genes. If we put that into normal human speak, it’s the kind of thing a particularly slimy guy would say if he’d gotten some poor hot girl drunk and into his apartment. Basically they duplicated the process that they followed with the DS, with the accidentally added ingredient of scarcity. That’s why they’re crowing right now: it looks like they’ve found a Money Tree, and who wouldn’t crow under those circumstances?
What does this mean for the Wii? It may continue to be a fairly successful console, even without a strong lineup of games, just as the DS sold well even before there were a lot of good games for it, simply due to the novelty factor. The Wii also doesn’t have the same backwards-compatible catalog that the DS had in the Gameboy Advance. However, good games may be a long time coming, as the interface redesign delays things a lot more than just a hardware update does. It changes the fundamental philosophies underlying the game design process, and those paradigm shifts take a long time to process. It remains to be seen whether the Virtual Console/Gamecube libraries can fulfill the same role as the huge Gameboy Advance catalog did for the DS.
That’s why this makes me laugh – Nintendon’t know why their strategy is working any more than anyone else. Even funnier are the analysts who keep trying to hedge their bets and manipulate the stock prices based on reasons that have little to do with the success of the console, and more to do with the latest gossip going around (some of which actually originates with the fans themselves!).
For me, this means that I’ll be waiting awhile to get a Wii. I’ve always been of the opinion that the best games always come out for a console right before its demise. This is proving both prophetic (especially regarding the PS2 – ahem*Odin*Sphere*ahem) and frustrating (especially regarding the DS). Frustrating because it looks as though the DS is going to keep chugging as is indefinitely, with no hope in sight for those innovative games only start to show up with the beginnings of system obsolescence (more Brain Age to be released this summer). Don’t worry about me though – in the mean time, I’ve got plenty of PS2 games to keep me company.
Leaning on the wind
“What have I become, my sweetest friend..?”
- Hurt, by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)
One of the questions I wrestle with constantly is this: “How do I reconcile my Judaism with the magical practices I learned in the past?” It’s a valid but difficult question, and to be fair, my position is subject to change at any time. First, to understand the pressures that are involved, you need a bit of background. I left home at 18 and stayed with friends for several years. These people were like my family (some still are, some aren’t) and one of the things we all had in common was an interest in the occult.
Unlike some of my friends who were mainly into the flashy or shocking aspects of magic, I tended to keep my scope broad enough to look at religions and the magical practices they had assimilated also. This lead me to study the Kabbalah. I had a reasonably good amount of knowledge regarding the Tanakh due to my Christian background and my thought was that I could utilize that in order to add depth to my practice. I floundered in my magical practices as the addictive nature of the drugs took hold, but managed to maintain various types of practice throughout. In fact my practices at that time may have been what kept me from going even further than I did. I saw many strange things that I won’t go into at this time. Needless to say, I do not always know what to make of these things, but nevertheless, to deny them would be madness.
Once I was in recovery, I maintained my practice and began making contact with other people. I found my friend Loan, and he really helped me through the initial stages of recovery. We dreamed up the Kadmon Project together, and that’s one of the major motivations for me in keeping the project going.
Before Loan died, I had a series of dreams involving a pair of Rabbis, a hidden cupboard filled with scrolls, and the ashes of the Parah Adumah (Red Heifer). Afterwards I investigated my local synagogue, and discovered that I really felt at home with the people there. As I’ve continued to learn about Judaism, even now that I am a convert, I came to realize that there are many factions within the religion as a whole, and that Reform Jews (the branch I converted into) in particular have not been particularly friendly toward mysticism. So this left me with a dilemma: Do I abandon what I’ve seen, what I know to be true, so that I can fit in? or do I risk expulsion from my community which could affect not only my future, but that of my children as well?
Instead of bowing to this dichotomy, I chose to find a hybrid solution. First, I don’t do divination or any sort of statuary. Those are big ones. I don’t talk to any other deities – I choose to only recognize Adonai Echad – whether others exist or not. However, I have kept the Kadmon Group going to maintain a connection to others who don’t practice as I do. Where rituals overlap, I default to Judaism. Where there isn’t a solution in Judaism, I make my own and share it with the group.
There are other areas where the two paths complement each other. For instance, by taking a Kabbalistic concept and turning it into a Kadmon practice, I have to take it apart and put it back together. So while the Kadmon practice may not be exactly the same, I’ve learned from it, and I’ve had the opportunity to teach it to others.
However, it finally comes down to this: When I was seriously practicing magic, I relied almost solely on my intuition. I relied on it to the point of trusting myself in life and death situations to its whim. It was like learning to lean on the wind – no one could say if I would fall or stand. As I have come to terms with the idea of God, I’ve learned that the wind I was leaning on, the hand that kept me from falling was God (Ruach HaKodesh). It is in all of the magical practices I learned, and it is the principles of Kadmon and Kabbalah both.
It is the essence of faith to put all of your heart into living, and then when you have nothing else to give, fall in the direction of the finish line, and know that you will not fall. While I recognize even still that this balancing act is precarious, I also know that this edge is where I am called to be. There is nowhere else to go.
“Because your candle burns too bright
Well, I almost forgot it was twilight
Even if I think that you are right
Well, I’m tired of being down, I got no fight”- Twilight, by Elliot Smith
The Alchemical Omer
“Thus following this symbolism, we see that during the intervening 49 days of the Omer, the mother’s birth blood of Pesach (which is red) has been transformed into the mother’s milk of Shavuot (which is white).”
[link]
Miodendre: Why?
Haven’t gotten any responses for the Miodendre posts, so I think it’s important to address why I’m trying to get this material out there. First, this project started literally hours after the Kadmon Initiation Ritual (the unreleased version) when K and I started getting information about how locations, ideas and people bridge into each other, and about periods in our lives that didn’t fit into the standard reality paradigm. This information served as a kick off point for the rest of the Kadmon Group’s activities. All of our rituals have been designed to bridge the gaps between people, places, and ideas in order to facilitate change in a more reliable manner.
Miodendre means ‘little water’ in the Caerlux language: one of the languages I had designed for a fantasy novel I had planned to write in high school. So why did I use it for the name of this project? There are multiple viewpoints for any problem, and picking the right viewpoint is an essential factor in solving any given problem. Something like endianness (the order in which bytes are stored) can really alter the way a problem is worked out for a computer, and the same can be said for people. In the Pardes Story, it is related that one must not declare there to be two waters (water, water!) when in the place of the pure marble stones. This is a problem similar to endianness, in that there are two viewpoints (the upper water and the lower water viewpoints) but there is only one reality. Project Miodendre is a way of looking at this problem from the viewpoint of the little water – our point of view. There are many macrocosmic models that start with a metaphysical truth and try to deduce downwards, with varying degrees of success, but few microcosmic models that can deduce the upper worlds with much success. This is one of Project Miodendre’s goals.
The other reason the Project is so important to me is that it’s woven into the fabric of my life (which isn’t cotton, incidentally). Even before I was a wanderer, I have always had a knack for getting lost. It’s one of the things I do best. Where most people easily transition from world to world, webslinging their wills across vast chasms, I miss as often as I malaprop (which is quite often). So I’ve learned a great deal about the outlying arils of our Cluster, especially regarding the holes leading to the outside. They are interstitial precisely because no one pays attention to them. Attention is the currency of the realm, and whether it is used to create or destroy, it still fills up these gaps leading outward. When people start to notice these holes in the fabric of reality, they quickly seal themselves up. In fact, I have a theory that the word righteousness in the Tanakh specifically refers to this quality. Why? Because people who pay attention are more likely to act on what they notice; a righteous man is one that knows where he errs also. The simplistic concept of righteousness is that it’s just doing good, but there are many persons in the narrative of the Tanakh who make grave errors of judgment and yet are considered righteous. This is because these people were living embodiments of the principles that make our collective reality possible. They were aware of a certain principle and lived based on it – this is what we are meant to derive from their stories. Even in their errors, the principle is somehow displayed. This is why the Tanakh is important to me, for it is truly the hand of God writing down the laws of reality in a form that people can relate to. The characters of the Biblical narrative each have their own flaws that lead them to become aware of some new facet of reality that previously was unrevealed. This gives me hope that my own deficiencies may lead me to a similar end.
So my purpose for writing about Miodendre is twofold: to work upwards from human standpoint and see what problems it solves to deduce upwards as opposed to downwards, and to make something of my own personal weaknesses. And if it comes close to accomplishing either of these, I’ll consider it pretty successful.
Kid vs. King
Akiva at Mystical Paths wrote a beautiful post today about the Yetzer HaTov and the Yetzer HaRa. The imagery of the contemptible, wise child as the opposite to the old foolish king is something that I think plays itself out at many levels. I see this to a large degree affecting how people view innovation, especially in regard to technology, which I’ve discussed elsewhere as a symptom of extropy, the strong ordering hand of the cosmos (pun intended). Often advocates of new technologies are perceived as naive and unrealistic in their ability to solve problems or find new answers to old questions. Why is this? Perhaps because those who have slaved under the old limits and rules are unwilling to see their struggle as having been temporary. We all wish to struggle against values that apply on a broad scale, and yet often we find that our battles were merely skirmishes in a larger war. How does a person maintain their sense of personal meaning when faced with the looming face of reality writ large? By remembering that we are all in some ways children still, and that the world is still very much larger than our selves. This wisdom gives us the strength to continue doing the work at hand, instead of giving up at the thought of all the things that aren’t right yet. The old, foolish king tells us that we have to micromanage the process, and that we must go it alone. His age refers to his rigidity (although this isn’t necessarily true across the board) and his foolishness refers to the concept of overextension (I must complete the work of repairing the world myself). This leads many people to either make terrible choices in the latter case, or merely impart misery to others in the former case. I can see in myself the old foolish king, but I continue to strive to listen to the contemptible, but wise child.
General Lee
Dreamed that we were all at my grandparents’ house celebrating. Almost everyone was there, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Then some strange cars pulled up and told us not to leave the house. They were armed and told us if we didn’t give them 50,000 dollars, they’d kill us. Between all of us we didn’t have that kind of money, so we decided to sneak out. We found a way out, but I refused to leave Lily behind. So I went and got her, and we crept quietly to my Dad’s old Dodge Charger, now painted up like the General Lee. We charged off, knowing that the rest of the family would be safe, if we could just get to the police station.
Severity
I feel as though my speech is constricted here – anywhere for that matter. When I speak, crushing blows of terrible serendipity pour down upon me like rain, and I spend weeks dodging bullets that threaten my family’s livelihood and our chances for happiness. I fear that my mind is looking for patterns in the meaningless, and know that only my humanity imbues events with meaning. They have none but what is lent to them… and yet that counts for more than cynical po-mo’s will ever admit. It doesn’t seem to matter though, as I write and no one responds. I comment and no one listens. I speak and venues fall silent. I fear that my words are so foolish that other are stunned into baffled silence, as if to say, “How did this moron learn to talk?” And sometimes my words manifest as horribly twisted synchronicities that work to my detriment. So, with that in mind, understand that if my words are cryptic, it is because I am habitually flinching, expecting to be hit for every word. Still, I must speak, if I am to remain sane.
I’m finally talking to a dentist who is willing to actually help me with my issues. Previously, I’ve gone to other dentists only to be lectured and insulted. The last guy managed to insult my wife, my mom and my kids all in the space of a couple minutes. I finally told his office to quit calling because I had found a new dentist. I really just want the nightmare to be over. Every time I speak, I’m afraid to smile or open my mouth too wide. Every time I eat, I worry about whether or not it will affect the infections in my gums or cause my gums to swell. That is pretty dangerous in and of itself because when my gums swell, it changes how my teeth come together when I take a bite. That can cause pain that lasts for weeks because I grind my teeth in my sleep. I can’t even convey how much shame I feel that I look the way I do. Even now, the internal critics assail me for even talking about this: “Look at how much weakness you’ve shown – you know that certain people would happily throw these things in your face to manipulate or disable you.” All I can think is that there are others like me, not necessarily in this specific fashion, but others who have a defect that can’t just be wished away. A problem that’s not socially acceptable to have. Many would say that dental care is easy to come by, but I can tell you that this is not necessarily the case when one is working and trying to come up out of a welfare-dependent existence. 6 years after I was arrested (at the time I lived with other addicts or my grandparents), my wife and I are doing well – plenty of food, two cars, and a good neighborhood in the suburbs (even luxuries like video game systems, &c). I have plenty to be proud of, and yet, I’m still deeply ashamed of my defects. To others like me, I say: “You are worthwhile. Fight your way out of the quagmire that pulls you down with all the tenacity that is in you and you can win.” I can say it to you and mean it. I cannot feel this way about myself at the moment.
There’s so much more. I’ve kept so many things bottled up inside, just trying to keep up appearances. Perhaps I will be punished for dropping the mask, but I just feel so alone right now. Goodnight all, and I hope my post has helped at least one person out there.
