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Rechercher
Matt Zuca

Departure and Return

I am returning to Ottawa this Friday. I don't feel like my work here is ending since I've made so many friends, and will need their help in the future. I will miss being surrounded by people, and wearing the same thing every day. I will miss the trees and stars, and swimming naked in the river. I will not miss the mosquitoes. I have missed my old friends, my family, one of the highest concentration of PhD's in Canada, and electronic dance music. I miss being somewhere where I've put in a lot of time. I don't miss smoke, garbage, apathy, sickness, suffering, the second highest rent in the country, and products designed to destroy life. Especially food. Spend a few hours at McDonald's on Rideau Street. It's worse in New York.


I have armed myself with a few tricks. Let's see if I can remind myself of some of the things I've learned here. The first is something I would call a memory skeleton. Where Dracula's Renfield wanted to absorb life energy by eating the food chains., I wanted to boost the pool of potential futures in a given place. This is still running in the background of my mind, but I haven't found the opportunity to test it here. However, a memory skeleton is a crude form of time travel.


While trying to remember the previous two weeks I found it surprisingly easy. Here's why I think that happened. It took me a long time to adjust and make sense of the situation I was in. Once I figured it out, I was having more peak personal experiences. There were more memorable moments happening. The skeleton made it easy to attach other memories to it. I can go back and play things again.


That's what basic time travel looks like. Comedy uses this.Imagine the past, present, or future, to change either. What's important is generating memorable experiences to hold on to. For instance, what separates us from animals, or from machines for that matter?


Seven eggs hatched without anyone noticing. One of the chicks scurried off, while the mother tried to protect it. We discovered six chicks without their mother and tried to have another mother adopt them. The new mother pecked and poked, grew frustrated, and the chicks became confused. Was this their mother?

Later, when we returned to the birthplace, the original mother was there and extremely upset with us. Why? Why do chickens have these instincts? A wise chicken would know that it doesn't have all of the variables. Same with a machine. It will do whatever it is programmed to even though it doesn't make any sense. That's why you get locked out of parking garages if you lose your ticket, or why huge organizations can't solve more complex inquiries.


Earlier, I talked about the time weave. Let's take playing with your mental programming to a new level by remixing time. When faced with a situation we are likely to respond with a programmed response. It's what has worked for us so far. However, sometimes our programming won't work for a given situation.


Understand your environment to create memories, use memories to solve existing problems. Meet the present with the past. Generating Easter eggs in a culture's programming creates what looks like a closed timelike curve(CTC). As far as I understand the Easter egg object that cultures create, it could be considered more like a psychic-emotional resource than a CTC. It really depends on your universe and which model you're working with. From over here it makes sense because perfect memory might be a part of a timeline without interference.


It's possible to meet the present with anything from the past, and it is possible to ask for the future to send an answer back. Playing in this way is more fun because simulating ideas or feelings by projecting them into the future locks them into memory, making them easier to use.


So I learned more about non-linear time. I also learned what it might look like to transition from globalized food systems to localized food systems. I can also guess some of the motivations for why a culture would choose to do that. It's interesting that Canada's government was able to respond to the crisis without raising alarms. It looks like we'll weather the storm. It also signals that some players are not divorced from objective reality. I've noticed a current in modern thought that goes whatever I think and believe is real. And so: Clash of Civilization, The end of History and the Last Man, and The Coming Anarchy theses.


We love Game of Thrones on the farm. I am starting alongside them in the fifth season. If we overlay a map of Westeros onto Manitoulin, we are situated in the Kingswood. In the latest episode (3), Little Finger, one of the most shrewd and Machiavellian players, gives Samsa, the current queen of the North this piece of advice:


“Don’t fight in the North or the South. Fight every battle everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before"


I'll be back in Ottawa soon, I look forward to seeing you all again. I've learned a few more tricks about moving things around and putting things together.

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