So, now’s about the time I need to determine what my main goals for the year are. I actually made one, and only one, New Year’s resolution for 2010, and so far I’ve been keeping it fairly well.. at least I’m doing a bit better two months into the year, and that resolution was to take life a bit easier. In reflection, the past few years of my life were quite transitional and stressful.
2007 was very busy, and also the year I finished college (and started having panic attacks). 2008 was the year I spent writing software for and learning about the family business, and sort of figuring out a lot of personal things like what directions I sort of wanted to go in life. I became pesci-vegetarian (two years ago tomorrow), which was sort of a change. This was also the year I realized I was unabashedly gay and became addicted to the charms of competitive ballet. Nothing is more fabulous than a French Neoclassical. Ha just kidding, I’m not gay. I just wanted to startle family in case they’re quickly skimming this. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, I just prefer to monopolize body hair in a relationship. All in all though, 2008 was a fairly miserable and stressful year for me, not one I have the best memories of.
2009 was defined by work, and materialized into being the absolute hardest I’ve ever worked. I holed up for a lot of the year to develop my programming skills, and endured 8 months of misery with Java virtual machine quirks. So much so, that I told my friends I’d wished I’d done anything but. Hell, I told one friend I wish I thought Java was coffee and had spent all year learning Japanese instead. It’s also (unfortunately) harder to justify self-study than academic study despite the obvious reduced cost and, in my honest opinion, increased effectiveness. My degree, after all, was in economics and philosophy, not computer science, so I’ve been getting into territory I wasn’t *trained* for. Alas, I’m a bit skeptical of “higher education”, so Mark “I never let my schooling interfere with my education” Twain would probably be proud. Ultimately though, 2009 consisted mostly of efforts I’m not sure I’ll ever directly benefit from, although I did get damn lucky on an investment, which perhaps made a bit of indirect luck worth some of the year’s stress.
By the way, Sun (or Oracle? Or whoever owns what/where at this point), you’ve really got to fix some shit, and vastly improve documentation. Also wtf is with JavaSound? I’ve always wanted to say this in meaningful context, well, here I can: “KILL it with FIRE.” Yes, Java maintainers, you must kill the code with fire. Here’s how: print all JavaSound code out, drill 0 gauge holes through the hard drives that held it, and burn the printed code in a ritualistic ceremony. Then let’s all pretend JavaSound never existed and play with large parachutes, while holding hands in hippie-esque circles. I’ll bring the parachutes, and we can burn them too, just because.
Now it’s 2010. I realize I know myself now, what I want, and the avenues I can take to get there. I’ve also reluctantly accepted that my hopes for successful entrepreneurship will take another year, which, *sigh*, means I’ll be asking my family for support for one more year. So, two major immediate goals now: greatly reduce living expenses, and move towards a modern nomadic lifestyle. On the pertinent agenda now is to get rid of as much as I can. This means going through everything I own, and hopefully intelligently organizing it and reducing it to a small volume I can store conveniently. This also means preparing my home for rent, and you know this if you have a home, especially one not recently built, this can be kind of daunting. I still wish to hold on to the place for the long term, I just need to monetize it in the meantime. My first steps towards becoming nomadic have been carefully picking out a flashlight and pocketknife, and getting a Choice Hotels Visa card. I just need a portable laptop and a few other things. With a car, flashlight, pocketknife, and portable laptop, I’ll be a force to be reckoned with. From there, I can begin assembling the death star with my real father who likes to hang out at dockside bars. And, if you can make any sense of the preceding references, you’re my new best friend. Or my father, and I need to learn to play baseball.
So anyway, what I’ll be doing when I get everything in order is the next question. I’ve actually figured out a handful of viable ways to make money on the road, which has taken me two years, and will take another to implement because a: I have limited intelligence and b: internet business models are generally abstract and often guarded. It’s a lot easier to just get a regular job than it is to generate minimum wage off the internet. But, for me, the perks make it worth it, and yes, I’ve been thinking about this for two years, because I knew it was ultimately what I wanted. I’m getting sleepy now will finish when I awake. zzz. aaa. Okay, I’m back again. well sorta. Tuesday’s coming, did you bring your coat? I have a few options for making money online. I know I could build up to $20/day with adsense by the end of the year if I stayed dedicated to a certain website I haven’t launched yet. I’m certain I could get higher than that with paid writers because I’m bad about sticking with one task at a time. Those are “safe” ways to make money while mobile, but honestly not exactly fun. Churning out content mills is about as fun as managing insurance contracts. The most fun, or appealing, way to make money online is to run an infrastructure that generates its own content, either generatively/dynamically or through user input. But these are incredibly difficult to get going. The most surefire way to attract visitors is pure, ordinary, quality content.
The game I created, Space Danger, was designed to be run on an arcade machine. Everything in it is designed likewise. It’s fail-safe on Linux and automatic muting is built-in along with coin acknowledgement. The game can be started directly from a motherboard, and you’ll never know or see the operating system it’s being run off. Just like old arcades, it was designed to feel hardware-integrated. I also pseudo-designed a more sophisticated follow-up game which would feel like an odd remake of Robotron 2084, but never started on it. I had planned to start building arcade machines to house this pair of games, but even though the hardest part is done (the first game), the act of finishing the project into actual machines still feels daunting and without guarantee.
The prospect that seems most appealing to me at this point is, actually, and this again is a bit out there, visualization of audio content. This would involve taking Java2D or OpenGL and pairing it with OpenAL to create custom, mathematical visualizations of sound bites or music (think specially customized WinAmp visualizations). I’m inclined to think performing bands would at least be mildly interested in having visualizations of their music projected during play. This is something I could get going with a few months of dedication. I’ll admit the idea appeals to me. Of course, any visual DJ’ing would have to be done for free at first, but if it generated interest, I don’t see why it couldn’t be lucrative. Before I started college, I wanted to be an electronic musician building songs like Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, or the notorious Aphex. I’m too out of touch to go back into that, though. My ear is no longer trained to keys or chords, scores of meticulous drum patterns are long forgotten, I have hearing damage in one ear, I don’t even know where my bass guitar is, and tweaking synthesizers doesn’t have the appeal it once did. I still wish I put off college at the time to explore this avenue, but I don’t wish to revisit it at this point. Gotta move on. I will admit Reason is badass software if you like this sort of thing.
Main thing is that I need to minimize my living expenses so I can explore these options without as much stress burden. If I learned anything last year, it’s that stress doesn’t yield output, work yields output. Stress is only useful to the point it encourages output. I also haven’t been experiencing panic attacks like I did a couple years ago which freaking suck and are quite counterproductive, and I want to avoid them at all costs. And, I want to move towards a nomadic lifestyle as much as possible. This urge has been heavily compounded by the most miserable winter I’ve ever witnessed in DFW. Yesterday feels like the first time I’ve seen the sun in months. Now I just want to be able to pick up and go wherever if the weather is shit or I just want a change in scenery. So, first priority before I get into exploring mobile money-generation options is to just get prepared. Like a Boy Scout. This means seriously getting organized, getting minimalized, and understanding my mobile tools. From there, I’m hoping I’ll have some mental peace, and consequently the leverage to make my next move. Agility will be key.
Nothing hurts the process of truth seeking more than failed or deceiving arguments. The promotion of any falsity results in distrust and dissolves credibility. So, if you want to avoid fraudulence or apparent ignorance, I suggest you understand what the process of argument really is. Of course, if your goal actually is to deceive or sham, hopefully, at least, with a strong comprehension of argument, you’ll be more successful achieving these ends! Morals are an aside for now; first things first, let’s focus on making arguments which don’t result in immediate dismissal.
So, an argument is defined as a logical construct consisting of a set of premises, or declared propositions, along with a declared conclusion. A deductive argument uses straightforward logic to assert that a conclusion is the logical consequence of these premises. When these premises are certain, the conclusion should follow with certainty. If there is a fault in the logical reasoning, there exists a fallacy, or a logical failure. Inductive arguments, on the other hand, can only suggest that conclusions are supported by their premises, which can result in generalizations for theory-building. Inductive reasoning is not deductively valid and is not formal, but informal, logic. It’s important to understand the differences between conclusions invalidated by fallacy, those proved with certainty, and those proved without certainty.
Strong and weak induction are the two types of inductive reasoning which lead to general, uncertain conclusions. If I say, “cats like to play with strings,” I’m not lying, but I’m not declaring that with 100% certainty, either. This is a strong inductively reasoned conclusion, and it forms a probable conclusion by simply inducing a universal generalization from the particular. If I say, “I know with certainty all cats like to play with strings,” then I’m being deceiving, even if I’ve never heard of a cat who didn’t like strings. If it’s only ever been observed that cats do like string (premise), then when I say, “cats like to play with string,” what I’m really saying is, “[all observed cats]…”. If you find a cat that hates strings, then I have to change that to, “[most cats]…”, which really means “[most observed cats]…”, because I still cannot say, “[with certainty, most cats]…”.
Weak induction, which makes a conclusion only possible from true premises, takes a specific observation to draw a general conclusion. This can be as ridiculous as saying, “stupid people cannot read, therefore all people who cannot read are stupid.” While the premise may be certain, there are plenty of reasons a highly intelligent person could not read. The logical connection of premise to conclusion here is false and the only certainty in the argument is that some illiterates are stupid. Of course, if the conclusion cannot be proven false, then it is actually possible all illiterates are stupid! Try disproving this weak conclusion: “rain is falling from the sky, therefore all rain falls from the sky.”
As inductive arguments, these arguments fail to “informal fallacy,” where the premises fail to support the proposed conclusion. Their merit is dependent on the inductive strength of the connection of premise to conclusion. Straightforward deductive arguments can also fail to informal fallacy if a premise is hidden or omitted. Along with informal fallacies are “formal fallacies,” which also affect both inductive and deductive arguments. These fallacies are always wrong because they are non sequiturs, or arguments with false logical structures in proving the conclusion from the premises.
A frequent type of formal fallacy is an ad hominem argument that attacks a person making a claim rather than the claim itself. An example of this would be to say, “Americans should not invade foreign countries, kill their leaders, and convert their citizens to Christianity, because that was a suggestion put forth by Ann Coulter, who is a batshit-crazy psychopath.” Even though it’s likely true that Ann Coulter is a batshit-crazy psychopath, you must counter the actual claim that America should invade every non-Christian country and mass murder their governments to avoid making a formal fallacy. Besides, stop being mean. Even though she frequently calls for ruthless genocides and shameless suppressions of freedoms, and unpredictably shakes and twitches violently while reciting incoherent Satanic chants, she’s probably a very loving, generous, and gentle soul at heart.
Additionally, arguments have or don’t have validity and soundness. Arguments which fail to logical fallacy are invalid, where the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. However, because a valid argument could still have a false conclusion, soundness is used for clarification. A sound argument must have both A: True premises and B: A valid argument. The resulting conclusion of a sound argument is therefore always true. An explanation is the inverse of an argument, since it tries to determine the premises of why something is true. An argument, on the other hand, tries to show that something will be true based on premises and their resulting consequences. A look at frequently made fallacies warrants further investigation, which I will save for later! 
Right now if you’re reading this, you live in a reality where infinity exists. How do I know this? Read this post for an explanation of a never ending infinite in 3d. Even if you aren’t convinced your tangible reality exists on an infinite plane (itself a difficult argument to make), you can still simulate genuine infinity on a computer with ease. That simulation exists in the world of ideas, and the world of ideas is as real as your own senses. Yes, an idea is as tangible as the world you touch! The world you physically interact with can only be perceived through your senses, each of which is easily overridden. What you see on television are only visuals, not true reality manifesting in front of you (probably 
), but these visuals affect you through the same sense pathways “tangible” events do. In fact, it’s arguably impossible to make the case you’re not in a simulation or dream right now. Since your reality is defined by your senses which are permeable by an infinite realm of ideas, your reality is in fact infinite!!
Now that that’s out of the way, I don’t think it’s too difficult to argue we like to experience new things. What if every song on the radio were the same? Even worse, what if every measure was a repeat of the measure before it? Artistic repetition is along the lines of the concept an immortal astronaut stuck infinitely in space with only his own thoughts, a probably hellish experience. It’s creation, either scientific or artistic, which pushes life (and the economy) forward, providing new opportunities and ideas. Scientific pursuits are often fairly linear and involve the acquisition of knowledge through dedicated data accumulation and experimentation. Artistic creation, however, is less straightforward. I tried to craft a definition of art years ago, and while I don’t remember precisely, I know it was something along the lines of a creation which either resembles the perfection of a concept or deliberately enhances, distorts, or engulfs an observer’s reality.
Since the outpouring of the infinite trove of ideas is mere noise, the scientist must attempt to make sense of this data, and an artist must organize ideas in a fashion that creates an artistic construct. Science moves forward in a state of logic, blazing truths and falsehoods in its path, while art moves beyond logic and pushes easily beyond an observer’s capacity. The possible constructs of organized noise are endless, and by definition all their possibilities already exist. It’s only a matter of organizing these endless opportunities and promoting them into reality.
If you focus your energies on becoming a successful creator (or noise organizer?), boundaries neglect to exist, and the world acquires additional value with the gains of novel art or craft. If you focus your energy on rehashing existing creations without adding new technology or experiences, you may feed off the interest of that which you’re emulating, but it’s ultimately a very limiting strategy. Instead, drive for perfection, or artistic complexity, in your own unique pursuits. You’re rarely going to beat someone at their own game, and there is rarely a need to. Besides, nobody is playing the same game or even has the same goals. The thirst for fresh experiences is insatiable, and the creative vacancies waiting to be filled are limitless. Instead of competing, add to the world and fill in these vacancies!
Eclectic art magazines are flooded with new ideas on every page. Every new artistic exploration of a juxtaposition or manufactured reality is inherently interesting as long as it’s not self-contradicting, which can be a feat in itself. If you keep exploring and creating, fascinating results are virtually guaranteed, and the world becomes a more interesting and enjoyable place.