LifeNaut

So I found out about this really cool website called LifeNaut. Its run by the leading company in the field of AI.  The concept is that they are attempting to make a digital copy of your mind which will eventually be able to be loaded into an android and someday in the future into a clone of your own body.  Now I personally don't feel that even a clone of myself with an exact copy of my mind, is the same thing as "me", because I view myself as being the sense of awareness that looks out and views my memories and the world around me, the ghost in the machine.  I do think though that creating a digital copy of myself could be useful for completing my own goals which will take a very long time to bring to fruition, such as a Queer Home State and space exploration.  I especially like the idea because it might mean that some part of me, my son if you will, would get to experience a future period in time where we're able to custom terraform planets and engineer their ecosystems as works of art, a great dream of mine.  If I don't live long enough to see the day where we're able to use medical nanites to make ourselves immortal, hopefully someday in the future, a person much like myself though hopefully much better, will be able to continue making the world a better place as I hope and even enjoy the fruits of my labors.

Invisible

Shattered and broken
Fragmented Mirror in the sand
Empty
My fingers reach out
They touch only glass
No eyes staring out to meet my own
The blue sky stares up straight through me
The world sees only light and all things in contrast to it
I have become shadow
Chimeric
Ersatz
Ephemeral
...gone

Trying to talk ourselves out of what we already know

No matter how much we tell ourselves that we don't know what it is that we really want to do, we all in fact, at least as adults who have had a chance to sample what life has to offer, know exactly what we want.  The thing we want to do with our lives is usually the thing we spend the most time trying to talk ourselves out of.  We try to convince ourselves to follow another dream, and very often we do for a long time till we realize the mistake.  If we fail at something that we don't really give a damn about, it doesn't matter because we've never really risked anything.  To go after the thing most dear to our hearts and be told we're no good at it, that is a wound which is all too true.

As adults, we have learned to protect our hearts, to do everything we can to avoid serious emotional injury.  The danger with following the dream dearest to us is that to really do it authentically is to make oneself vulnerable.  The Id and the Super Ego both want to discover and express this dream but the Ego will do everything it can to deceive us and protect us from what it perceives as a fatal threat.  Even so the Ego can not hide the enjoyment we receive when we are fulfilling this secret desire, though it will still try to lie to us, often by trying to find this we like ALMOST as much but that we don't really care about.

So how do you figure out what it is you really want to do with your life? I've been studying this question in depth for a while now.  Here's a list of questions and quotes gathered from and inspired by sources wiser than myself.  If you're having difficulty finding your path in life, try asking yourself these questions, and remember, you're not allowed to edit or criticize yourself.  Gift to yourself the permission to "be stupid and ridiculous" because any attempt to edit is your ego trying to throw yourself off the scent of your path.

1. On his nightly television show George Lopez said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Your calling will be the thing you do the best with the least amount of effort."  The truth of it is that the reason that it seems to be the least amount of effort is you enjoy what you're doing so much you often don't realize how much time, energy and work you've put into doing that special thing because its a labor of love.  Think about when you were a little kid (or heck even now), the small amount of time and effort it takes to take out the trash seemed the greatest burden in the world, but the countless hours, blood, sweat and broken bones you gladly sacrificed in the summer to build a tree house or a fort was no trouble at all.  What do you do exceptionally well but seems to take no effort at all?

2. Revisiting the previous question, Joseph Campbell was quoted as saying that people completely misunderstood him when he told them to follow their bliss.  Many people have come to think that he meant you should do the thing which made you "happy" or was fun, they had come at Campbell's theory of bliss with an entirely superficial perspective of immediate gratification.  Campbell was later quoted as saying, "I should have told them to follow their blisters".  Campbell believed one's "calling", was not the thing that made you superficially happy, indeed when you're doing something that really matters to you it can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety.  Campbell believed one's "calling" was the thing which gives us a sense of fulfillment.  Studies have shown that the most difficult and grueling jobs on the planet are also the ones with the highest recorded job satisfaction.  This is not because a job has to be difficult in order for it to be fulfilling but because the jobs were so difficult there was no way anyone would last in them unless it was where they were really meant to be.  What is the thing that you spend countless hours at, that you don't even mind or notice when your hands are bleeding and covered in blisters? What is the thing you can't walk away from until you know it's been done right?

3. Forbes magazine recently suggested that one way for their readers to figure out what it is they really want to do is to ask themselves, "If money were no object, if you never had to worry about money again and you had enough money to do or create anything you wanted, what would you do?"

Three seemingly simple questions that when put together paint a much large picture of who you are as a person.  When you're really allowing yourself to be free and honest with yourself, do your answers ring out together into a unified answer?

I'm lucky in that I've figured out mine do.  Its not an easy path, and one I've been trying to dissuade myself from for decades but my path is that I'm a fine art photographer.  Its scary because it feels like that is something that even within the art world is a hard sell but I'm going to make it work.

A book I would very strongly recommend to anyone in a creative field is "Make Art, Make Money".  Its all about the Jim Henson approach to living as an artist. 

Update on Recent Events

    Hey everyone, its been extremely long since I posted last so here's a brief update on what's been going on.  I don't believe that I mentioned I finished my very first script, "Familiars", I believe I did that in June or July just after I got the tattoo.  Its a pilot script for a urban fantasy action drama.  Sadly its got some real issues that I'm not quite sure how to fix and no one has shown any interest in it.  Its frustrating because people are getting too fixated on the dialogue in a certain scene, when my characters are in fact ignoring what's being said and a lot of the real emotional exchange happening is on the nonverbal level.  The audience is supposed to be tuning out the rambling explanation of the cosmology of the show and just keeping a mental note of it for later but people who are reading my script say its not coming across and they lose interest and don't finish reading past that little piece of dialogue.

    The great thing though is that finishing that script helped me a lot in my learning process towards screenwriting.  I'm actually working on a second script right now.  I haven't come up with a title yet but it'll come to me.  Right now I'm just at the point of making notecards of all the major plot points, I've got everything up to and including the threshold and I've got the ending.  Essentially all I've got left is the second act, which of course is always the most difficult. I think it will go well.  I've noticed I'm really drawn to writing girl power stories, or alternatively feminine power (self-empowered femme gay boys are super fun to write).  The script I'm writing is about a high school senior cheerleader who is forced to give up her favorite thing in the world, LARPing, or potentially lose a scholarship which is her only chance to pay for her dream school and get a degree in her favorite subject Computer Science.  I'm really enjoying the character and the material.

Photos of my tattoo.

Oh yeah, I'm a rather heavy set dude.  Here are those photos of my tattoo.

Ronove

Sit down and close your eyes for a minute. I want you to imagine the one thing you'd want if you could make any wish come true, you are not allowed to limit yourself based on logic, conventions of morality, plausibility or any other thing excuse about how it isn't possible. Don't try to call something to mind, just let the life you want, the life you could never admit to wishing for with every part of your deepest self, the thing you don't even allow yourself to want wish and dream for, let that secret desire float to the surface. Be as aware as you can of what that reality is. When you're ready open your eyes. Now, what would you give to make that your living reality? Quit getting in your own way and make it happen, no matter the cost.

With this in mind, I've decided to get a tattoo today.  I'll post pictures of it later but its essentially an artistic reinterpretation of the image below, the sigil of Ronove.  Ronove is a goetic demon who according to occult sources, gains his power and notoriety in hell, by showing off how culturally influential he is.  Part of this is by taking select artists who devote themselves to summoning him, and ushering them to the very top epsilons of society, helping them find both fame and fortune within their medium. 

While I personally identify as a non-deistic animist and see Ronove as an archetype from the collective unconscious, the tattoo for me is a symbol.  It represents for me that I'm willing to cash it all in.  The idea being I'm permanently and indelibly marking myself, willing to condemn myself to any sort of infernal damnation in the theoretical afterlife, if it means that I will achieve the success I'm after.  I am willing to do ANYTHING to achieve my goals, and that's why I know that eventually I WILL achieve them.  

The moment you draw a line in the sand and say the minute I reach this line, I'm going to stop and quit and move in another direction, is the minute you set yourself up for failure.  I've chosen to be homeless before for the chance to better my career, when I was younger I really had that fire and commitment to make it, up until I started drawing lines in the sand.  No more lines, I will make it or I will keep trying till they drag me to hell.

For Christmas

So totally awesome! My parents were nice enough to pay for a year's subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and Team Treehouse for an entire year.  Besides the fact that when I'm all done completing the program I should finally be able to get a job, I'll also finally be able to give making phone apps as art a try.  I'm super excited.