Displaying the quantities of an attribute associated with online activity are one way that social networks perform a measure of one's "effectiveness" in a social network.
Effectiveness, that term is highly subjective to the individual account holder in this social network. But what is this drug of numbers when the meaning of it is coordinated through the "mass-effect" of a larger group of people participating in the same thing? That drug is influence, and the number represents one's level of influence by the quantity of activity one has effected.
What is a hashtag? It's a freight designation on the information superhighway. What is that freight? It is human discourse, interaction, a species of self-aware designation of branding, typing, characterizing one's online speech so that it may find a destination.
What's the concession here? We're altering the interaction of faces in spaces to their onilne equivalencies for the sake of being, at once, alone and together.
What is the upshot of that? According to 1990s research into computer mediated communication the relative paucity of sensory input reduces the stress of revelation to another, the stress of disclosure, and it enhances the grandeur of anonymity, whose very grandeur is characterized by allowing each interlocutor to remain in their private fantasy while participating. This online interaction captures that one ecstasy allowed in the masquerade ball, anonymity and its performance in the absence of true obfuscation. Anonymity allows freedom, which in turn, provides an impetus to indulge in personal fantasies. While not always anonymous, participants in the social network are unfettered by the normal coordination infrastructure of meeting in space, active listening, and the repression of psychological and biological leakage. Being alone yet together in this context is another form of mediation that breeds a kind of freedom specifically that it allows each to play the jester to a larger crowd afforded by the infrastructure of being online, first, in a large group, and second, participating in the freight language of tagged discourse. Using the @ and # sign reveals the gemini of communication, transportation. And in trafficking our interactions and our identities in this social network like freight, we generate a social currency effected both by the quantity of people involved and their disparate co-presence within this place.
What keeps us coming back is the sheer revelry in communication with one another sometimes with the feeling of being alone and sometimes with the conceit of allowing others to hear you. This sheer revelry is underscored by a psychological demand to not be alone; a demand to take that genie for a walk, that genie who has been living inside us for so long; that genie who we mistake for us but is the product of so much time spent creating a world wrapped in our neuroplasticity. That neuroplasticity, those sculptures of mind crafted by us and for us, is itself a product of time, our time interfacing with the deep time of culture and the life time of ourselves. And we have come full circle with a mind made from so much brain, which is itself made from so many neurons, which themselves are specialized versions of the somatic neurons that developed to sense an environment. What our mind 'see's and our mind 'wants' is simply to interact with things in the world like it be they people, animals, plants, the vast and changing seasons, or here, interacting with our discourse-mirror the television+keyboard that is the roadbed of our information superhighway interface. Algorithms work, electronic penpals stacked and categorized on the 'home' page of our social network work, pets work, routine works. all life works to sustain us and to take us out of our personal mental trap if only for a moment, to participate in the symphony of coordinated play, interaction, something to give the mind-qua-rodent-incisors something to gnaw upon.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Banking clerks and the other faces of strong-arm corporations
These human agents at the corporate-public interface are like shark teeth: they're effective and disposable. Behind each await a quietly forming army of replacements ready to take the last one's place perfectly.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Brian Williams Tweet
Couldn't help but consider this the most efficient use of the sentence to cast a critical glance at current world affairs.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Mary Ellen: October 10, 1946 - January 10, 2015
Dear Aunt Ginny,
I am writing to inform you of unfortunate news concerning your niece and my mother, Mary Ellen.
On Saturday, December 6th my mother contacted me by phone to tell me that the Sunday family dinner was cancelled because she was sick. I assumed then that she had a cold or the flu, nothing more. I was accustomed to not asking too many questions as she was accustomed to not answering them.
On Wednesday, December 10th I was at my brother Jack’s house helping his nieces Kylee and Kiersten with their math homework. During that time Andrea, their mother, asked me if I had known that my mother was sick. I told her that I did, and she revealed at that time that she had been constipated for over a week. This seemed more serious than I had initially thought. Later that night I contacted my mother.
Mary Ellen informed me that she had gone to a Walgreen’s Healthcare Clinic to get a prescription for a bladder infection that she thought she had. While there, the nurse checked her heart rate and told her that she needed to check herself into a hospital immediately. Following that advice, she went to Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Illinois where they began treating her for atrial fibrillation or irregular heartbeat. The story unfolds from here.
I went to visit Mary Ellen at Anderson that Thursday to see her in the intensive care unit. They had her hooked to several drips, administering drugs for an irregular heart, infection, and dehydration. In treating her constipation my mother had taken a laxative. This resulted in a few days of diarrhea, which had dehydrated her, causing discomfort and pain that she mistook for a bladder infection.
By Saturday, the cardiologist came in and prescribed her a medicine to treat her irregular heartbeat, repeating the exact words from the commercial for the medicine that had just played on the TV in her room a few hours earlier. Are these doctors or 'care' salesmen?
She was beginning to bloat during her stay and the medical staff said that this was caused from the saline drips they had given her and would go away on its own. She was released Saturday evening December 14th from the ICU. I had commented that she was the only one there who would ever walk out of an ICU bed. I kissed her goodbye and she got into the waiting car driven by her boyfriend Bill. She told me that Sunday dinner would be cancelled again. I understood and visited her later in the week.
On Tuesday, December 16th I visited her and Bill. As we sat down for dinner, Mom wasn’t herself. She remained doubled over at the kitchen table with her bottom lip drooping in a look of exhaustion. I asked her if she was in pain. She told me that she wasn’t but that the bloating hadn’t gone down. I asked her if she was going to see her doctor. She had made an appointment for the next week. By Thursday of that week Bill had returned her to Anderson Hospital as her condition hadn’t improved.
Anderson Hospital put her in a room with another woman in a cardiac wing of the building on the third floor overlooking the parking lot. When I went in to see her she was sleeping, but the sight of her made me weep. She looked as if she had aged years. Her weight loss was very visible in her hospital gown. Her arms were nothing but bones. I remember Clarence, her father, telling me that mom was not a pill swallower. Using the pill crusher at her bedside, I crushed one of her heart pills and helped her eat it with some pudding. What bothered me the most during her brief stay there was that a hospital is no place for rest or restoration. It’s a technocratic organization strategically run to avoid malpractice suits. She had a scan tag on her wrist that nurses and technicians scanned at thirty minute intervals to track her ‘care’ and to ensure that she was being given the proper medicine. She could get no sleep nor comfort. The only comfort that came from her stay was that they drained the fluid collecting on her belly. She told me then that she thought she had diverticulitis.
Her stay at Anderson Hospital the second time was longer. The hospital placed her heart condition on a higher treatment protocol than finding the origins of her bloating or her GI issues. They would do a series of X-rays and scans of her gut and chest to see what they could find. After a series of scans they concluded that she had cirrhosis of the liver as the spots they saw were not large enough to be indicative of cancer. That was their explanation for the fluid buildup. The doctor we spoke with told us this during his brief visit. He also indicated that the fluid could be regulated with medication.
Mary Ellen’s diagnosis became more serious on Christmas Eve. The results of her chest scans had arrived. They had found an ‘armature’ on her lung that was leaking fluid into the pericardial sack surrounding her heart. While I never found out for sure, this may have been the reason for her irregular heartbeat. What the doctors could say for sure was that this was cancer. At this point we were told that she had masses on both lungs consistent with cancer and evidence of cirrhosis of her liver. This would, in turn, complicate any treatment. She was released from Anderson the evening of the 24th and was scheduled to see her primary care physician, Doctor Kopjas later in the week. Upon seeing her, Doctor Kopjas told her to return immediately to the hospital. She was admitted to Missouri Baptist on Tuesday December 30th.
At Missouri Baptist the doctors and nurses continued to treat my mom's heart condition and look into the fluid buildup on her stomach. An oncologist reviewed the medical information released from Anderson Hospital and brought a prognosis. She had stage-four lung cancer with metastasis into the peritoneum, which is a membrane that covers the organs. The doctors at Missouri Baptist hadn’t changed the liver diagnosis, but the look on the hospitalist’s face said something other than what they were telling us. My mother’s days were few. Bill and I took shifts in her hospital room trying to catch a doctor charged with her care, especially one of the specialists who could tell us more about her condition. The nurses provided us with little information other than to tell us that her fluid build-up would need to be tapped intermittently and couldn't be regulated with drugs. We met with two of the oncologists charged with her care. Neither would indicate the extent or the severity of her cancer. The best that one doctor gave us was that a patient with stage-four cancer, on average, may live six to twelve months with treatment or half that with no treatment, and given her weakened condition the doctors had determined that she was no candidate for treatment. Once again, doctor-patient communication was reduced to a recitation of statistics, more malpractice avoidance, more obfuscation, no truth, just numbers, averages, bureaucratic language meant to say nothing other than to satisfy for the hospital that something was said but that nothing culpable could be connected to the decision making of the hospital staff. The lawyers were happy. We were not.
A palliative care nurse came in to her room while we were there and asked my mom if she had a religious preference. Mary Ellen told her that she believed in God, and so the nurse arranged for the hospital chaplain to visit her. My mother was released from Missouri Baptist into home hospice care on Tuesday, January 6th.
When I came over to her home the admission nurse for the hospice center was taking down all the necessary information. Soon the ambulance arrived and dropped off my mother. Bill and I had arranged her front room so that her hospice bed and all the necessary equipment would fit amidst all the statues, baskets, wreaths, and rustic flotsam that my mom considered decorative. We sat down on the love seat together, and I asked her if she wanted something to eat. She said that “I guess today is not my day to eat.” She then told me that earlier that morning, before she was released, the oncologist in charge of her at Missouri Baptist had told her that what she had in her stomach was something different. “It’s bad,” she said. I cried. I cannot describe the weight that overcame me as I watched my mother die, how dumb and impotent I felt, how utterly helpless I was at every grimace, twitch, body movement. I felt like I had to hold her through it all, but I was utterly hopeless that first day. We gave her a dose of morphine and an anti-anxiety medicine to keep her in bed, which after weeks of being bedbound had caused increased chafing and discomfort on her body. She was becoming too weak, and with no food, she would only become weaker.
On Wednesday, I walked in to the house to my mother lying on the couch. She said nothing. She just waved. I asked her again if she wanted something to eat. She shook her head “no.” And so I sat there with her in silence. I called my brother, Jack, who was working in Indiana, and told him to come home. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t speak at this point. It was too much to explain what was happening to him. By Thursday, my mom lay in her hospice bed and never got up. As we tried to talk to her, her speech was labored, slurred, and hard to understand. Bill had contacted the hospice nurse charged with her care to come and reassess her condition. At that point, we moved her to a hospice care facility on the evening of Thursday, January 8th in Edwardsville, called Relais Bonne Eau.
Moving her from her bed onto the stretcher was hard to witness. She was disoriented and afraid. "I'm going to fall," she said. "I'm too close to the edge." My brother suggested giving her some morphine for the trip. She hadn't had any all day. The paramedics allowed this, and we got her on the stretcher and they drove her away. Bill sat down and began to cry. I was in a daze. The few brief days I had spent with my mom at home were such a heavy weight. Thirty-seven years of being a son had been reversed so abruptly. My mother had become nothing more than a skeleton in a diaper unable to care for herself who, just a month before, was caring for all of us.
The hospice nurses changed her, cleaned her up, and sat with her until her restlessness subsided. Bill, my brother, and I had a brief moment of respite. Throughout the day Friday most of her friends, co-workers, and family visited her at the hospice facility. She did not speak, and only once did she push herself up briefly and look out from barely open eyes when my girlfriend, Helen, told her goodbye.
Saturday morning my brother and I arranged for her cremation at a mortuary in Lebanon, Illinois. As we finalized the paperwork, my mom’s boyfriend, Bill, called and told us that her breathing was labored. We headed straight to the hospice facility. Upon arrival, I saw Bill and Aunt Jo Nell crying in the hallway outside her room. Bill turned to me and told me, “she’s gone.” Mary Ellen died Saturday, January 10th at 11:18 a.m. She was 68. The cause of her death was stage-four lung cancer with metastasis.
We had few warning signs of her condition. I had given up telling her to stop smoking cigarettes in 2004. I told her that her habit was deadly, and she agreed. But nothing stopped her, except being told that she had lung cancer. That soured the taste for her. About six months prior to her diagnosis she had begun losing weight. It was noticeable. She had also become increasingly irritable. Her boss told us that she stopped doing the work that she was able to do. That began in September. No longer was she walking around the office. Instead, she sat most of the day.
Mary Ellen was headstrong and independent. I had learned as a child not to question anything she did, nor would she let anyone question her. She presented a hard exterior. She offered no hugs. A ritual kiss on the cheek is all she allowed. She had acquired a cough a few years earlier that was characteristic of the “pleural effusion” the doctors had found on her lungs at Anderson Hospital. I noted its occurrence and went about ignoring it just as she did. She had a tendency to hide behind routine and a sense of normalcy that she was adamant to maintain. She had hid her health conditions until her body could no longer keep up with her daily routine. She resigned to lying in bed, asleep, until she was no more.
In sympathy, in hope, in sadness and regret I have recalled everything from my mother’s passing as I remember it. I do it for myself as much to remember as I do it to allow you a moment of remembrance. I know very little of where your relationship with Mary Ellen went, nor is that the issue now. She was family. She was a mother and a grandmother, a daughter and granddaughter, a niece and a cousin. And to everyone else she was a friend. Her soul is gone, and her body is ash. All that remains of her are our memories.
With love and sadness,
Jason Lesko
I am writing to inform you of unfortunate news concerning your niece and my mother, Mary Ellen.
On Saturday, December 6th my mother contacted me by phone to tell me that the Sunday family dinner was cancelled because she was sick. I assumed then that she had a cold or the flu, nothing more. I was accustomed to not asking too many questions as she was accustomed to not answering them.
On Wednesday, December 10th I was at my brother Jack’s house helping his nieces Kylee and Kiersten with their math homework. During that time Andrea, their mother, asked me if I had known that my mother was sick. I told her that I did, and she revealed at that time that she had been constipated for over a week. This seemed more serious than I had initially thought. Later that night I contacted my mother.
Mary Ellen informed me that she had gone to a Walgreen’s Healthcare Clinic to get a prescription for a bladder infection that she thought she had. While there, the nurse checked her heart rate and told her that she needed to check herself into a hospital immediately. Following that advice, she went to Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Illinois where they began treating her for atrial fibrillation or irregular heartbeat. The story unfolds from here.
I went to visit Mary Ellen at Anderson that Thursday to see her in the intensive care unit. They had her hooked to several drips, administering drugs for an irregular heart, infection, and dehydration. In treating her constipation my mother had taken a laxative. This resulted in a few days of diarrhea, which had dehydrated her, causing discomfort and pain that she mistook for a bladder infection.
By Saturday, the cardiologist came in and prescribed her a medicine to treat her irregular heartbeat, repeating the exact words from the commercial for the medicine that had just played on the TV in her room a few hours earlier. Are these doctors or 'care' salesmen?
She was beginning to bloat during her stay and the medical staff said that this was caused from the saline drips they had given her and would go away on its own. She was released Saturday evening December 14th from the ICU. I had commented that she was the only one there who would ever walk out of an ICU bed. I kissed her goodbye and she got into the waiting car driven by her boyfriend Bill. She told me that Sunday dinner would be cancelled again. I understood and visited her later in the week.
On Tuesday, December 16th I visited her and Bill. As we sat down for dinner, Mom wasn’t herself. She remained doubled over at the kitchen table with her bottom lip drooping in a look of exhaustion. I asked her if she was in pain. She told me that she wasn’t but that the bloating hadn’t gone down. I asked her if she was going to see her doctor. She had made an appointment for the next week. By Thursday of that week Bill had returned her to Anderson Hospital as her condition hadn’t improved.
Anderson Hospital put her in a room with another woman in a cardiac wing of the building on the third floor overlooking the parking lot. When I went in to see her she was sleeping, but the sight of her made me weep. She looked as if she had aged years. Her weight loss was very visible in her hospital gown. Her arms were nothing but bones. I remember Clarence, her father, telling me that mom was not a pill swallower. Using the pill crusher at her bedside, I crushed one of her heart pills and helped her eat it with some pudding. What bothered me the most during her brief stay there was that a hospital is no place for rest or restoration. It’s a technocratic organization strategically run to avoid malpractice suits. She had a scan tag on her wrist that nurses and technicians scanned at thirty minute intervals to track her ‘care’ and to ensure that she was being given the proper medicine. She could get no sleep nor comfort. The only comfort that came from her stay was that they drained the fluid collecting on her belly. She told me then that she thought she had diverticulitis.
Her stay at Anderson Hospital the second time was longer. The hospital placed her heart condition on a higher treatment protocol than finding the origins of her bloating or her GI issues. They would do a series of X-rays and scans of her gut and chest to see what they could find. After a series of scans they concluded that she had cirrhosis of the liver as the spots they saw were not large enough to be indicative of cancer. That was their explanation for the fluid buildup. The doctor we spoke with told us this during his brief visit. He also indicated that the fluid could be regulated with medication.
Mary Ellen’s diagnosis became more serious on Christmas Eve. The results of her chest scans had arrived. They had found an ‘armature’ on her lung that was leaking fluid into the pericardial sack surrounding her heart. While I never found out for sure, this may have been the reason for her irregular heartbeat. What the doctors could say for sure was that this was cancer. At this point we were told that she had masses on both lungs consistent with cancer and evidence of cirrhosis of her liver. This would, in turn, complicate any treatment. She was released from Anderson the evening of the 24th and was scheduled to see her primary care physician, Doctor Kopjas later in the week. Upon seeing her, Doctor Kopjas told her to return immediately to the hospital. She was admitted to Missouri Baptist on Tuesday December 30th.
At Missouri Baptist the doctors and nurses continued to treat my mom's heart condition and look into the fluid buildup on her stomach. An oncologist reviewed the medical information released from Anderson Hospital and brought a prognosis. She had stage-four lung cancer with metastasis into the peritoneum, which is a membrane that covers the organs. The doctors at Missouri Baptist hadn’t changed the liver diagnosis, but the look on the hospitalist’s face said something other than what they were telling us. My mother’s days were few. Bill and I took shifts in her hospital room trying to catch a doctor charged with her care, especially one of the specialists who could tell us more about her condition. The nurses provided us with little information other than to tell us that her fluid build-up would need to be tapped intermittently and couldn't be regulated with drugs. We met with two of the oncologists charged with her care. Neither would indicate the extent or the severity of her cancer. The best that one doctor gave us was that a patient with stage-four cancer, on average, may live six to twelve months with treatment or half that with no treatment, and given her weakened condition the doctors had determined that she was no candidate for treatment. Once again, doctor-patient communication was reduced to a recitation of statistics, more malpractice avoidance, more obfuscation, no truth, just numbers, averages, bureaucratic language meant to say nothing other than to satisfy for the hospital that something was said but that nothing culpable could be connected to the decision making of the hospital staff. The lawyers were happy. We were not.
A palliative care nurse came in to her room while we were there and asked my mom if she had a religious preference. Mary Ellen told her that she believed in God, and so the nurse arranged for the hospital chaplain to visit her. My mother was released from Missouri Baptist into home hospice care on Tuesday, January 6th.
When I came over to her home the admission nurse for the hospice center was taking down all the necessary information. Soon the ambulance arrived and dropped off my mother. Bill and I had arranged her front room so that her hospice bed and all the necessary equipment would fit amidst all the statues, baskets, wreaths, and rustic flotsam that my mom considered decorative. We sat down on the love seat together, and I asked her if she wanted something to eat. She said that “I guess today is not my day to eat.” She then told me that earlier that morning, before she was released, the oncologist in charge of her at Missouri Baptist had told her that what she had in her stomach was something different. “It’s bad,” she said. I cried. I cannot describe the weight that overcame me as I watched my mother die, how dumb and impotent I felt, how utterly helpless I was at every grimace, twitch, body movement. I felt like I had to hold her through it all, but I was utterly hopeless that first day. We gave her a dose of morphine and an anti-anxiety medicine to keep her in bed, which after weeks of being bedbound had caused increased chafing and discomfort on her body. She was becoming too weak, and with no food, she would only become weaker.
On Wednesday, I walked in to the house to my mother lying on the couch. She said nothing. She just waved. I asked her again if she wanted something to eat. She shook her head “no.” And so I sat there with her in silence. I called my brother, Jack, who was working in Indiana, and told him to come home. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t speak at this point. It was too much to explain what was happening to him. By Thursday, my mom lay in her hospice bed and never got up. As we tried to talk to her, her speech was labored, slurred, and hard to understand. Bill had contacted the hospice nurse charged with her care to come and reassess her condition. At that point, we moved her to a hospice care facility on the evening of Thursday, January 8th in Edwardsville, called Relais Bonne Eau.
Moving her from her bed onto the stretcher was hard to witness. She was disoriented and afraid. "I'm going to fall," she said. "I'm too close to the edge." My brother suggested giving her some morphine for the trip. She hadn't had any all day. The paramedics allowed this, and we got her on the stretcher and they drove her away. Bill sat down and began to cry. I was in a daze. The few brief days I had spent with my mom at home were such a heavy weight. Thirty-seven years of being a son had been reversed so abruptly. My mother had become nothing more than a skeleton in a diaper unable to care for herself who, just a month before, was caring for all of us.
The hospice nurses changed her, cleaned her up, and sat with her until her restlessness subsided. Bill, my brother, and I had a brief moment of respite. Throughout the day Friday most of her friends, co-workers, and family visited her at the hospice facility. She did not speak, and only once did she push herself up briefly and look out from barely open eyes when my girlfriend, Helen, told her goodbye.
Saturday morning my brother and I arranged for her cremation at a mortuary in Lebanon, Illinois. As we finalized the paperwork, my mom’s boyfriend, Bill, called and told us that her breathing was labored. We headed straight to the hospice facility. Upon arrival, I saw Bill and Aunt Jo Nell crying in the hallway outside her room. Bill turned to me and told me, “she’s gone.” Mary Ellen died Saturday, January 10th at 11:18 a.m. She was 68. The cause of her death was stage-four lung cancer with metastasis.
We had few warning signs of her condition. I had given up telling her to stop smoking cigarettes in 2004. I told her that her habit was deadly, and she agreed. But nothing stopped her, except being told that she had lung cancer. That soured the taste for her. About six months prior to her diagnosis she had begun losing weight. It was noticeable. She had also become increasingly irritable. Her boss told us that she stopped doing the work that she was able to do. That began in September. No longer was she walking around the office. Instead, she sat most of the day.
Mary Ellen was headstrong and independent. I had learned as a child not to question anything she did, nor would she let anyone question her. She presented a hard exterior. She offered no hugs. A ritual kiss on the cheek is all she allowed. She had acquired a cough a few years earlier that was characteristic of the “pleural effusion” the doctors had found on her lungs at Anderson Hospital. I noted its occurrence and went about ignoring it just as she did. She had a tendency to hide behind routine and a sense of normalcy that she was adamant to maintain. She had hid her health conditions until her body could no longer keep up with her daily routine. She resigned to lying in bed, asleep, until she was no more.
In sympathy, in hope, in sadness and regret I have recalled everything from my mother’s passing as I remember it. I do it for myself as much to remember as I do it to allow you a moment of remembrance. I know very little of where your relationship with Mary Ellen went, nor is that the issue now. She was family. She was a mother and a grandmother, a daughter and granddaughter, a niece and a cousin. And to everyone else she was a friend. Her soul is gone, and her body is ash. All that remains of her are our memories.
With love and sadness,
Jason Lesko
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
A Moby Dick tale from Africa
Stories like this bring a tear to my eye for a number of reasons. This man lost a wife and unborn child to a predator living where a village fetches its water. While I am truly blessed with basic plumbing that provides fresh clean water it doesn't offer me the opportunity to become a hero.
Everything below is credited to the author, the news service, and the photographer.
Facing the crocodile that 'ate my wife'
By Jason Caffrey BBC World Service
Everything below is credited to the author, the news service, and the photographer.
Facing the crocodile that 'ate my wife'
By Jason Caffrey BBC World Service
Four months ago, Demeteriya Nabire was killed by a crocodile when she went to the lake near her home to fetch water. The animal later came back to the area but found Nabire's husband waiting, ready to take revenge.
Demeteriya Nabire was at the water's edge with a group of women from her village - they were gathering water from Uganda's Lake Kyoga when the crocodile grabbed her. It dragged her away and she was never seen again.
Her husband, Mubarak Batambuze, was devastated - Nabire was pregnant when she died, and he had lost not only his wife but an unborn child as well. He felt powerless. But then last month he heard the crocodile had returned.
"Somebody called me and said, 'Mubarak, I have news for you - the crocodile that took your wife is here - we are looking at it now.'"
The 50-year-old fisherman made his way to the lake with some friends. "He was a very big monster, and we tried fighting him with stones and sticks. But there was nothing we could do," he says.
So Batambuze went to visit the local blacksmith.
"I explained to him that I was fighting a beast that had snatched and killed my wife and unborn baby. I really wanted my revenge, and asked the blacksmith to make me a spear that could kill the crocodile dead.
"The Blacksmith asked me for £3.20 ($5) and made the spear for me," he says. It was a significant amount of money for Batambuze, but he was determined to kill the animal that had snatched his future.
"The crocodile ate my wife entirely. Nothing was ever seen of her again - no clothes, no part of her body that I could identify. I just didn't know what to do - a mother and her unborn child. It was the end of my world. I was completely lost."
Armed with his new spear - specially designed with a barb on one side - the widower went on the attack.
When he got to the water the crocodile was still there, but Batambuze's friends took fright.
"Please don't attack this beast," they pleaded, "it's so huge it may eat you. The spear is not enough - it won't finish the job."
But Batambuze insisted they stay. "I failed killing it the first time around," he told them, "I'm not bothered if I die killing this beast. I'm going to take it on with this spear, and I will make sure that it dies."
A Ugandan Wildlife Authority ranger, Oswald Tumanya, says the crocodile was more than four metres long and weighed about 600kg.
"I had so much fear in me but what helped me to succeed was the spear," says Batambuze.
He tied a rope to the end of the weapon so that once the tip was embedded in the crocodile, he could pull it out at an angle and the barb would cut into more of the animal's flesh.
"I put the spear into the crocodile's side, and while my friends were helping to throw stones at the beast's back, it tried getting its mouth up to attack me again.
"It turned violent, and then there was so much fear in the place. But I was so determined, and I wasn't afraid of dying. I just wanted it dead, so I put the spear in its side and I pulled the rope. That got the crocodile into trouble."
It took an hour and a half for Batambuze and his friends, fighting and retreating, exchanging attacks with the enraged animal, before the crocodile was finally dead.
Exhausted, they made their way back to their village. "There was so much shock. What really surprised everybody was how big the beast was. It wasn't an ordinary crocodile. It was so big. And people called me and my friends heroes," he says.
The dead animal was taken to Makarere University in Kampala, where it was examined by a vet, Wilfred Emneku.
He says a tibia bone was found inside the crocodile's stomach, but while he believes it's human he can't be sure.
A crocodile expert at Charles Darwin University in Australia, Adam Britton, says he would be very surprised if any remains inside the animal's stomach were those of Demeteriya Nabire.
"After 12 weeks... under normal conditions, it would be highly improbable for bones from the same meal to remain in the stomach," he says.
So while Batambuze's celebrity status endures in his village, it is unlikely that he will ever have a grave to mourn at.
"Within myself I'm a very depressed man because I lost a wife and an unborn child," he explains.
"But the locals keep on saying, 'Thank you for killing the beast, that's where we fetch water and we're sure it would have taken somebody else. Thank you so much, you did a great job.'"
"So I'm a local hero - people keep on thanking me."
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Liberal Arts Education
I don't trust youtube to curate my videos anymore. This one was created in late winter of 2011 and was intended as a proof of concept of using ready-bake animation software like Xtranormal in order to make a movie.
Since youtube dropped a video I posted that my fourth grade class made back in 1987 and perhaps did so over 'copyright violations' and without any warning or indication in writing, I've decided that youtube is not a fitting place for my videos.
Since youtube dropped a video I posted that my fourth grade class made back in 1987 and perhaps did so over 'copyright violations' and without any warning or indication in writing, I've decided that youtube is not a fitting place for my videos.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
The Casino in the Forest
Fantasy games present a narrative journey for players. A common trope for this narrative journey is a medieval setting among forest, hill, brook, town, castle, and dungeon. Game characters battle in these settings with might and magic against mythical and mundane monsters. These battles and the encounters preceding them are part of the journey narrative. The outcomes of those battles are mediated by numerically defined game conditions. Game conditions motivate or dramatize continuing participation in the narrative journey through structured interactions and structured progress. A common way to express the form that this interaction will take and the kind of progress that occurs is through numerical expression. Simulations of battle encounters are mediated by chance, that is, random rolls of dice. Randomness, expressed in dice rolls are dramatic (i.e., performed actions) and common (i.e., nigh-ubiquitous in games of chance) expressions of probability. A system of probability operates transparently to the way this probability is expressed in dice outcomes and the subsequent game activity initiated by them. This level of randomness keeps the gameplay fresh because outcomes aren't clearly predictable and are tied to discrete choices made by players. The subsequent dice rolls are initiated by player actions with the resultant roll representing the outcome of that choice, be it beneficial or deadly to that player.
Many tabletop gaming environments require players to throw dice and read the result. The parameters of probability, be they 1 through 20 or 1 through 6, express variability. They represent a measure of risk as well. For example, if one throws the 6-sided dice to determine the probability that one's character is hit directly that person faces a greater probability of being hit than if a 20-sided dice is used to determine that outcome. Game parameters frame these decisions by modifying levels of risk. Game creators set those parameters.
This is a very basic introduction to how randomness is adapted to journey narratives in which gamers participate. Probability is a key component of many things here. It is a measure of how 'authentic' a gaming experience feels as a measure of the 'random outcomes,' which occur. It invites the occult desire to predict random outcomes as a manner of satisfying a mental 'appetite' to find order in the randomness of dice. Probability is an inducement specifically when it is modified through an equally mathematically expressed companion: character progression. Progression adjusts the parameters of chance to provide the player's experience of his or her character increasing in power. Specifically, an increase in power gets expressed in the increased probability that an attack will hit accompanied by a decreased probability that an attack will miss. Likewise, the size of the attack, i.e., the number of hit points inflicted upon the monster or upon the player's character, are mediated by other numbers, such as the monster level relative to the character level, or the monster's armor relative to the character's armor, or even magic resistances between the interacting monsters and characters. Numbers and their expression in random rolls demonstrate the countless ways in which a skin of probability mediate game encounters and motivate gameplay. For if random numbers express the kinds and probabilities of encounters, modifications of those numbers and outcomes influence 'state changes' in a player's game character. If that character is, for example, poisoned, their chance to hit a monster may decrease. Likewise, if this character has progressed to a higher 'level' then their chance to hit the same monster increases. Furthermore, choices about what path to take expose a player's character to differing probabilities of encountering powerful enemies. Perhaps few if any gamers recognize this functional layer of probability existing in the narrative for what it is, a casino in the forest.
Probability informs game mechanics through its role as the chance that an action will be performed successfully. Having "success" as the goal for gameplay references the motivations behind play and the motivations that induce players into continuing gameplay. The form that this gameplay takes depends upon a number of factors, which normally coalesce around expressions of probability that are themselves touched and then thrown as a matter of engagement in gameplay decisions.
Numerical operations in this gameplay model function as inducements if only because numbers and probability have always motivated a level of human awareness to seek out patterns in randomness. And in spite of randomness, players construct notions of luck that accompany them through gameplay. Throwing dice in the context of gameplay forms the dynamic core of random outcomes, each of which perfectly interfaces with the game narrative. Rolling a 6 defines a specific outcome whereas rolling a 1 leads to another. This tether between rolling dice and random outcomes is a dramatic expression (i.e., physically performed gameplay action) of the relationship between agency (i.e., rolling the dice) and fate or luck (i.e., the outcome of the roll).
I have yet to find a specific discussion by the likes of Gary Gygax in describing simply the numerical aspect of game theory satisfied by extensive use of dice. Yet, at the heart of his early game designs and simulations is the role of randomness recreated through dice rolls. Dice rolls are essential to the narrative structure of gameplay. The player rolls dice to decide an outcome emblazoned on their up face. This specifically animates the narrative structure of gameplay by introducing random events issuing specific from the hands of the roller's character . Random events decide the outcomes of game encounters, allowing the player to coincide with the narrative in a functionally relevant way. Randomness flavors the outcome dynamically, making randomness a sufficient condition for generating excited participation, which is a hallmark for satisfactory gaming.
This neomedieval fantasy, this story of swords and sorcery, is broken down into the functionalist vocabulary of combat tables, which mediate the fateful interactions between narrative character and narrative world. Perhaps like the neomedieval world, the fantasy runs on fate expressed as a random outcome. Perhaps unlike the neomedieval world, this random outcome initiates changes in the procedural state of a game. Out of those dice branch myriad possible paths. And one meta-direction represented through conquest and battle-hardened experience, points the narrative to perpetual growth. Numbers substantiate how interactions occur. Probability provides the tether between agency and fate. Under the florid descriptions and heroic actions are the servomechanisms of mechanical fate, parameter-shaped probability, this casino in the forest.
What specifically draws us to these kinds of narratives and this kind of action? I sometimes wonder how the 'work' performed within online gaming environments, which follow roughly the tabeltop gaming model, is a critique of a society that has occluded wide accessibility to personal and financial growth. In the online game the player gathers raw materials and processes them into artifacts to be either used, sold, or discarded in some manner for the sake of gaining experience or 'learning' a profession. This gathering of resources in a natural setting is shares a nervous condition beneficial to the hunting and gathering heritage common to all of humanity. The financial overlay of numerically expressed 'leveling of experience' is something altogether different. A number provides a discrete expression of an increase in something, and in the software logic of game encounters or the dice-logic of tabletop gaming, numbers substantiate a formula for success or character death, for experiential growth or stasis. The desire for bigger numbers or at least growth is a desired direction in which to carry the narrative. So I began this speculative paragraph with a suggestive critique to the world around us, but the world created in its obverse is one driven by some of the same monetary principles driving the first. Risk, luck, and fate are common human companions. That we've ceded their substantiation to financial systems in this world and roll tables in a fantasy world only suggests that numbers offer something deeply motivating. People enjoy taking simply defined risks in order to receive a reward. Allowing these rewards to operate somewhat independent of actions taken keep the actions taken from stagnating too soon. As such, they provide the best long-term method of keeping gamers gaming both in the casino and online.
Many tabletop gaming environments require players to throw dice and read the result. The parameters of probability, be they 1 through 20 or 1 through 6, express variability. They represent a measure of risk as well. For example, if one throws the 6-sided dice to determine the probability that one's character is hit directly that person faces a greater probability of being hit than if a 20-sided dice is used to determine that outcome. Game parameters frame these decisions by modifying levels of risk. Game creators set those parameters.
This is a very basic introduction to how randomness is adapted to journey narratives in which gamers participate. Probability is a key component of many things here. It is a measure of how 'authentic' a gaming experience feels as a measure of the 'random outcomes,' which occur. It invites the occult desire to predict random outcomes as a manner of satisfying a mental 'appetite' to find order in the randomness of dice. Probability is an inducement specifically when it is modified through an equally mathematically expressed companion: character progression. Progression adjusts the parameters of chance to provide the player's experience of his or her character increasing in power. Specifically, an increase in power gets expressed in the increased probability that an attack will hit accompanied by a decreased probability that an attack will miss. Likewise, the size of the attack, i.e., the number of hit points inflicted upon the monster or upon the player's character, are mediated by other numbers, such as the monster level relative to the character level, or the monster's armor relative to the character's armor, or even magic resistances between the interacting monsters and characters. Numbers and their expression in random rolls demonstrate the countless ways in which a skin of probability mediate game encounters and motivate gameplay. For if random numbers express the kinds and probabilities of encounters, modifications of those numbers and outcomes influence 'state changes' in a player's game character. If that character is, for example, poisoned, their chance to hit a monster may decrease. Likewise, if this character has progressed to a higher 'level' then their chance to hit the same monster increases. Furthermore, choices about what path to take expose a player's character to differing probabilities of encountering powerful enemies. Perhaps few if any gamers recognize this functional layer of probability existing in the narrative for what it is, a casino in the forest.
Probability informs game mechanics through its role as the chance that an action will be performed successfully. Having "success" as the goal for gameplay references the motivations behind play and the motivations that induce players into continuing gameplay. The form that this gameplay takes depends upon a number of factors, which normally coalesce around expressions of probability that are themselves touched and then thrown as a matter of engagement in gameplay decisions.
Numerical operations in this gameplay model function as inducements if only because numbers and probability have always motivated a level of human awareness to seek out patterns in randomness. And in spite of randomness, players construct notions of luck that accompany them through gameplay. Throwing dice in the context of gameplay forms the dynamic core of random outcomes, each of which perfectly interfaces with the game narrative. Rolling a 6 defines a specific outcome whereas rolling a 1 leads to another. This tether between rolling dice and random outcomes is a dramatic expression (i.e., physically performed gameplay action) of the relationship between agency (i.e., rolling the dice) and fate or luck (i.e., the outcome of the roll).
I have yet to find a specific discussion by the likes of Gary Gygax in describing simply the numerical aspect of game theory satisfied by extensive use of dice. Yet, at the heart of his early game designs and simulations is the role of randomness recreated through dice rolls. Dice rolls are essential to the narrative structure of gameplay. The player rolls dice to decide an outcome emblazoned on their up face. This specifically animates the narrative structure of gameplay by introducing random events issuing specific from the hands of the roller's character . Random events decide the outcomes of game encounters, allowing the player to coincide with the narrative in a functionally relevant way. Randomness flavors the outcome dynamically, making randomness a sufficient condition for generating excited participation, which is a hallmark for satisfactory gaming.
This neomedieval fantasy, this story of swords and sorcery, is broken down into the functionalist vocabulary of combat tables, which mediate the fateful interactions between narrative character and narrative world. Perhaps like the neomedieval world, the fantasy runs on fate expressed as a random outcome. Perhaps unlike the neomedieval world, this random outcome initiates changes in the procedural state of a game. Out of those dice branch myriad possible paths. And one meta-direction represented through conquest and battle-hardened experience, points the narrative to perpetual growth. Numbers substantiate how interactions occur. Probability provides the tether between agency and fate. Under the florid descriptions and heroic actions are the servomechanisms of mechanical fate, parameter-shaped probability, this casino in the forest.
What specifically draws us to these kinds of narratives and this kind of action? I sometimes wonder how the 'work' performed within online gaming environments, which follow roughly the tabeltop gaming model, is a critique of a society that has occluded wide accessibility to personal and financial growth. In the online game the player gathers raw materials and processes them into artifacts to be either used, sold, or discarded in some manner for the sake of gaining experience or 'learning' a profession. This gathering of resources in a natural setting is shares a nervous condition beneficial to the hunting and gathering heritage common to all of humanity. The financial overlay of numerically expressed 'leveling of experience' is something altogether different. A number provides a discrete expression of an increase in something, and in the software logic of game encounters or the dice-logic of tabletop gaming, numbers substantiate a formula for success or character death, for experiential growth or stasis. The desire for bigger numbers or at least growth is a desired direction in which to carry the narrative. So I began this speculative paragraph with a suggestive critique to the world around us, but the world created in its obverse is one driven by some of the same monetary principles driving the first. Risk, luck, and fate are common human companions. That we've ceded their substantiation to financial systems in this world and roll tables in a fantasy world only suggests that numbers offer something deeply motivating. People enjoy taking simply defined risks in order to receive a reward. Allowing these rewards to operate somewhat independent of actions taken keep the actions taken from stagnating too soon. As such, they provide the best long-term method of keeping gamers gaming both in the casino and online.
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