From 'something my Grandpa used to say' to Enlightened Modernity

I have to say, or stop and remember, just how wildly things have changed during my lifetime.
Being in my 40s means that I'm now officially part of this adult generation; And though I've seen it coming, it still feels a bit unreal. It's like I haven't had much time yet to digest it; Relative to how much time I've had being this old so far.

What strikes me right now is the realization just how ... out of touch ... I feel with reality regardless of how hard I've tried to keep a firm grasp of it. Well, to be fair, it's not reality at large that I feel out of touch with, but a slice of it. A slice that I now see as fairly fundamental to our understanding of it.
And it's odd ... how true the words of Morpheus' speech introducing himself and the Matrix to Neo ring to me right now.
You might have been there too. Heck ... you might not even have to be old. It's like ... we're all adrift in these virtual bubbles - "Simulacra", we might say - stuck between the shlog of daily chores and responsibilities, and whatever the media currently discards the immediate past over.
Stuck between the noise and chaos of the day; And the isolated alternate reality of the familiar.

I feel like a log of wood carried down a stream; Barely knowing how I got here and without a clue of where I'm heading.

Of course a lot of it is owed to the fact that our individual lifespan's are tiny compared to the various layers of "the continuum" that surrounds us. Yet another "bigger picture" we seem to be hopelessly lost in.
I mean, the first Star Wars movie came out 5 years before I was born. And this is one instance, to me, of something I firmly latched on to, that has had it's story begin way ahead of mine. By the time I was able to comprehend it, it was already old; And yet I'm old enough to have been looked at as a tinfoil-hat wearing crazy person when telling that "Star Wars 1" was actually Episode IV.

And time isn't always friendly. I mean - I didn't intend to write about it here; But it seems like it just fits. I recently read a post in which someone reflected upon "Trickle Down Economy" - and how 50 years of it, so far, have turned Millionaires into Billionairs and the Working Class into the Working Poor. Obviously it's different here than it is there - but, one has to still stop and think about it. Recognizing how what might appear to be a smart choice, like: "what's the worse that could happen?", can still be utterly stupid when faced with the long term consequences of it.

What makes it difficult for us to have any kind of ... universal common sense understanding of "where we're at" - outside of such necessities as date and time - is that we by experience grew up in vastly different realities. I mean, the fundamentals of our realities are the same; But I grew up in Eglosheim - which isn't exactly Manhattan; Or downtown Los Angeles.

I mean, from where I lived - Teinacher Str. 48 - it was like 5 minutes to some open fields and a place we used to call "Die Wiese" (the Willow); Which was like 1/4 willow with a bunch of trees and 3/4 unattended Wilderness. Dense Growth like what felt like a Jungle. There was some abandoned shack, here and there some Garbage that someone had dumped ... and exploring it felt like a real adventure.
And yea, how many people had that? How many only know such things from stories? And how many have never heard of it?

I'm sure that there is still plenty of that; And right now, in this very moment, I suppose there are "so and so" many people that want to escape from it; While there are "so and so" many people that want to have something like that.
And I don't think, relatively speaking, that there are lot that are privileged enough to "just go and do the thang" - because that's always the answer of some type of people it seems.

Part 2

And so we can draw lines. Some less useful than others. Lines however still along which we can compare our lived experiences.
So - something my Grandpa used to say, is something to the tune of "we have it so good". Which I suppose is a spin on the "it could be worse"/"starving kids in Africa" thing; But that's not really what he meant to express, I think. And yea, the words we use can sometimes turn into a web we get caught up in ourselves. You mean to say one thing and it comes out as closer to another; Which isn't really wrong either but as you move on the thing you originally meant to say gets lost.

The thing was that we really had it all. Sortof. And, it really was a time of Gadgets and Gimmicks. I mean, we still have them today; But today everything seems to be more like hooked to some Computer - while back then the thing was more about appliances that made certain tasks easier. For every task there was a thing. Today it's more like ... the norm.

And yea, that was coming from a bombed down Germany - where, my Grandpa lived through the days of Hitler Youth, the War, Captivity, Refuge, Rebuilding and finally Retirement. And I think what my Grandpa tried, was to convey to us that we are wealthy; And that that isn't self-understood. And yet I had little to no reference point to understand that. Maybe that's also due to how stingy they and my parents were in their generosity. Things like ... how other kids had Cable TV while we only had the basic Antenna TV - up until some point. The Neighbours Grass being Greener I suppose.

So I didn't grow up with the feeling of being rich; But yet privileged enough to not know poverty. And even now; Though I'm relatively poor - I think I yet live almost as carefree as if I had all the wealth in the world.


Anyhow ... to draw a line from this - there's the very basic line of "we have it so good". And whether or not you FEEL like you're above or below that line isn't the issue; Though I suppose it factors in.

I mean, regarding that - to me it certainly appears to be that a large chunk of people here in the west is stuck in some senseless state of mind that measures the quality of now by how much better things could be; Subsequently always coming to the conclusion that everything sucks.
And I know dreams.
I know how it is to want something - to believe that having it will make everything better; But ... . Yea, there's an allegory. "The Dog not knowing what to do with the Car". So, Dogs have that instinctual behavior of chasing after things; Like Cars. Our Dog used to chase Trains. So, the route we took when walking him out followed a rail line for a good bit; And whenever a train passed by he'd just ... run along. For some of the longer ones he'd then come running back just to then run off again. Like a perpetual stick-fetching mission I assume. And the question would be: What if they "got it"? To say, they have actually no point chasing the thing.

And we have that too, I think. We might blame our "Lizard Brain"s for that. Or whatever part of it that comes from. I mean, before Akuma came out for SF6 I've hit some kind of Plateau with the Characters I was playing. Certainly far away from mastery; And possibly to my own detriment, I was switching mostly between Chun-Li and Cammy - occasionally playing Ryu. And because I'm more of a casual player I'll switch between Characters whenever I feel like it; And so occasionally the muscle memory of mine gets confused. And so I think that this created some weird amalgam of "the ideal Character" - and so eventually I was looking forward to Akuma. And then, so without me doing anything, this became like an outlet for my frustration whenever I'd mess up a combo with Cammy - or still couldn't do basic combos with Ryu. And so this: "It'll all be better when Akuma comes out" feeling set in. And I knew that it was bad, and wrong - I understood, that that was just my own mind being Lizard Brained again - and then yea, fair enough, Akuma came out and it was yet another Character for me to confuse my muscle memory over. Especially when switching between Cammy and Akuma; I mean. Cammy has a move where she leaps towards the opponent that can be followed up by a bunch of different moves. Akuma has a move where he leaps towards the opponent that can be followed up by a bunch of different moves. Cammy's is quarter-circle-forward and PUNCH, Akuma's is quarter-circle-forward and KICK. With Cammy I'd cancel crouching-punch into Spiral Arrow (quarter-circle-forward and KICK); And with Akuma I SHOULD cancel crouching-anything into Fireball (quarter-circle-forward and PUNCH) - or perhaps light tatsu; However - I keep doing the air flip thingy.

Part 3

I just stumbled upon a post where someone stated that the CyberTruck was the ideal vehecle for Mars. It kind of fits here. You know - it doesn't work on Earth but ... "just you wait (until we get to Mars)".


And yea, so - that's one example of us being stupid; And that in way that ... just happens. Like, sure: Me being stupid is in my responsibility - and if I'm being stupid you'd blame me and the consequences are entirely deserved; Although it is a little bit unfair given that ... we ourselves might still feel like having only been an observer and things happened way too quickly, eventually.
Not to say that we have absolutely no control over it - even if; For my example that was certainly the case for me; "I told you so"@self is as good as it gets.

So yea, maybe I'm being too hard on myself here; But whatever. I digress ...


Hmm ... this is giving me "cats versus the red dot" kind of vibes.


So, "how good we have it" is something we can objectively quantify. And that things could be better might be right ... but this is still as close to a good explanation for why I hate that attitude as I've gotten so far. So, please humor me.
So yea, Germans ... we love to complain, we say. It goes like ... "Germany is the worse because our Trains never arrive on time" - and still, for the most part, we get to and from work via public transportation just fine and on time. Some countries don't have public transportation this good! Sure - in Japan the trains are never late; But in Japan part of a train service worker's duty is to shove people into already full wagons. Here in Germany at least I'm only at risk of getting emotionally numb.

Part 4

I guess what I tried to get at is to say that ... we've kind of lost track.

Somewhere in there I wanted to make the point that sometimes the thing that appears to be the solution to our problem is just a red-hering as our lizard-brain has its own ideas of what works and what doesn't.

And on a totally unrelated note I had this idea of modernity.
Or more to the point was I working on my program. Currently I'm literally back to the drawing board; As I take my time in the kitchen, sipping coffee, with pencil and eraser mapping out all the stuff that I need to work on - to see how things come together when EVERYTHING is accounted for. I totally assume that I'm missing something; But I'll get to that when I get to that.
And so far I've noticed a few "changes", or how familiar concepts I instinctively knew were important found their place in a way I couldn't have figured out from just "doing the work in my head" or endlessly rubber-ducking around to find the way it's supposed to fit in.

One thing then that I ended up pondering about - which then led to me writing this - was a particular structure I've attempted to realize a couple of times. I thought that it'd be fairly straightfoward; After all it's supposed to be one of the more basic components that has to function relatively independent from the rest. And fair enough; I approached "it" this time based on the same premise. And I've taken out many a sheet of paper, and sketched it out many a time - even in so in the recent days. And still somehow it never made much sense to me. I suppose I have to thank God for that.

So; I don't know if there's really a thing that I did different this time - other than perhaps a more keen attention for detail; And a rough understanding of what to ignore for the time being. And then, sure, an inspired/sticky thought of what one particular thing should look like in this context.

I've also sat down multiple times to code it. Sometimes as part of a working program; Even making it functional - as in: It doing what it's supposed to do. Until later down the road then things seemed to be a little bit ... impractical.
I've been trying to sketch things out for a long time now. And during my initial sketches I came to produce terms for certain things that kept sticking. But then when coding, I would use those terms because it seemed like what I was working on was the thing - and ever so often using a certain term then led me to think differently about what the thing is supposed to do. And that's possibly the fundamental problem I have with my own way of doing things. On the one hand I should focus on the code - the functions - the things that do the things that need to be done. On the other I should focus on how things are supposed to work; And so my code ever so often becomes a mess between practicality and theory.
So - one of these things that I knew I'd need at some point has the word 'Skeletton' in it. And as such, it's part of a bigger thing. And so whenever I'd work on that bigger thing - I'd "go through the list" of terms that I associated with certain functions that the thing is to have; And so I also usually ended up with a class for that skeletton - without really ... well, usually it ended up being an effectively empty class just sitting there.

I'd have it there because I'd think that it's important. It's the Skeletton. I never really knew what it was supposed to do in the context of whatever I was working on; But I knew it was supposed to be there - and I guess I waited for it to make sense; Because ... it's supposed to.

So, after a while I looked at the sketch I made earlier today ... and I noticed. This looks like ... a Skeletton. Or ... maybe not. It's the thing that would make me think of the Skeletton because in my mind it's a bit of a Skeletton after all. But it's not. So, in hindsight - it stands that I'd come to the point where I needed "the thing". The thing itself, in actuality, is an abstract union of things. That is; A bunch of different components have a common intersection at some point in the concept. I'd see that, think of it as a Skeletton, write the Skeletton class - and then be clueless over what to fill it with. That because I'm not supposed to work on a ... thing thing, but a bunch of different things that then come together somehow.

And so I was looking at it - realizing this - and then something clicked.


See ... when it comes to evidence for God, my general impression - and that's why I keep stressing it - is that there isn't any real evidence for Him. Not because He doesn't exist; But because He made it so. I mean, we can take it that the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun is conveniently close to giving us an extra day, pretty much every four years. We can then argue that it's like ... yet another "co-incidence" that exists to our convenience. But it doesn't 'prooooooove' that God exists. Nor that God did it. "If" God exists, everything in the cosmos is BECAUSE He did it that way - give or take (accounting for randomness (if there is such a thing) and the causality of things). And yet, because He exists, we might encounter ... traces or hints like that; But never quite as obvious as an invisible hand; But something more like ... faces on the surface of Mars. Or - dare I believe it - the face of Pluto, on Pluto.
South America looks like the most Chunky Gigachad Horse to me.

And there are many such things. And here I argue that the Skeletton is one such thing.
I mean, enlightened people have a particular caution when it comes to beauty. The simple mind would say that the human shape is perfect. At least in an idealized sense. But if we looked like something between the Aliens from Predator and the Hutts from Star Wars ... we might think or feel differently about it. But this might then be one of those "Bell Curve Meme" moments. Low-IQ: The human shape is perfect, Majority: The human shape is an abberration, High-IQ: The human shape is perfect.

The Human Skeletton on the other hand only barely resembles that. I mean, some think it's pretty and beautiful and perfect too - just like a Xenomorph, with the point being: Cats are cute also. Or Puppies. However, for the Human shape to be what it is - the Skeletton also has to be what it is. So, we could say that we have a thick skull because the head doesn't really need fleshy parts. The face of a skeletton is negative so there's space for all the muscles that allow for facial expressions. It's like ... the Skeletton was made to fit the shape; Rather than the shape to fit the Skeletton.


And that takes me to the herein implied concept of Modernity.
See - a good Architect or Engineer (product designer) of today, with artistic ambition, understands that. You start with what the end-product is supposed to look like - and work backwards from there. That way you end up with a skeletton that looks like a skeletton. Weird and convoluted.
Back in the olden days, there were a lot of problems with that approach; And be it just necessity. So products were designed from the ground up. Skeletton first. Keeping it Simple Stupid. And that how you end up with these ugly things with the occasional attempt at artistry.

I mean - I personally understand, subconsciously, that there's a very distinct - albeit blurry - line between "Old" and 'Modern' when it comes to products and how they look. It's not so much that products of old were designed practical, but that they were practical by necessity. It's more so that modern products are designed to be practical but are absolutely not.

And that to me is simple modernity: To use state-of-the-art techniques and tools to create the next generation of stuff. And it is merely be virtue of that, that products have been designed "the other way around", more and more. Because all the "new" stuff enabled us to ... be fancy. Also experience; As for how certain things work. Meanwhile we can use computers to create the perfect most stable mesh for any random shape we might think of. For a while my daily routine had me walk past a construction site - and like half of the building was resting on one single ... slanted ... top-heavy column.

So, that's modernity - and it produced a lot of nonsense.
And I must say that while I enjoy touch-screens; For gaming I still prefer actual, real buttons.

And I'm not gonna lie: The touchpad on the modern Playstation controllers - I like them. They are underutilized because everything has to be universally compatible; So that everything that does use them is usually like a try hard gimmick without any practical use - but uh ... anyway ...

I'm not trying to say that we should return to boring-AF; As if that had anything to do with Enlightenment. Enlightenment, in this context, is more about ... growing up. To stop fooling around; Without stopping to have fun. Like so, Modernity is like a Kindergarten. And some kids are smart and other kids not so much. Some are cool and others not so much. Most of that is OK - go figure!