Full Moon Rant

Imagine, if you will - that right here you can click to play the scene from Game of Thrones where Tyrion and the Varys play "who has the power". You can thank your precious intellectual property trumps the first amendment for me not being able to conveniently share that experience with you.
Bottom Line - Current Intellectual Property laws hinder my ability to communicate and it pisses me off.

Wrapping the Truth in Fiction
That's another thing that sucks about trying to communicate with people. To avoid triggering your cognitive dissonance avoidance, writers have to wrap the truth in fiction and hope the seed of truth hidden within takes root. I used to want to do that, be a writer - an author. Things have gotten too bad for that though, so I'm just going to call it like I see it.

Power is where we believe it lies. I'll paraphrase the Game of Thrones reference since I can't just play it for you.

Say you have the president, the pope, and a guy and his boss in the same room. The guy has a gun, and the other 3 all tell him to shoot the other 2. Who gets shot depends completely on what the guy with the gun believes. For the Pope's sake, let's hope the guy is Catholic.

This is how it is. This is why perfectly nice people are flying robot planes and launching explosives at children. Because of what the guy behind the joystick believes. This is why obedience and following orders is so stressed in the military (that, and if the other guys are obedient and your team isn't, it gets messy).

Point is, whatever you believe defines your reality. It really irritates me to no end that so many of you choose to live in a world where making a sex tape gets you a TV show.

Unwrapped
We live in a world where we believe in property. Think of the world as a big house, and you're getting the Cinderella treatment. People use up all the hot water while having you shovel coal into the furnace for them. This is because you believe what's necessary for this to be possible. Basically, that if you stop shoveling coal, you'll be made to suffer. Can't really blame you though, you were born into it.

You live in a world where people who are technically equivalent to you - awareness inside a bag of meat - get to decide how much money there is in the world. Then, they loan it to the people playing Government, who then does all sorts of bullshit with it. Through a series of groups of people playing pretend - I'll play the CEO, you play the wage-slave you get to do the work and they get to reap the benefits. 

What the hell is wrong with everyone? The way things work now, we end up with Child Pornography, and Kids getting blown up by robot airplanes. WTF?

The game you're playing is stupid. I was born into it though, and quitting early is poor sportsmanship - but come on people, let's play a game that's less shitty.

The Evolution of the Blogosphere

And who are you, the proud lord said,

that I must bow so low?

Only a cat of a different coat,

that's all the truth I know.

In a coat of gold or a coat of red,

a lion still has claws,

And mine are long and sharp, my lord,

as long and sharp as yours.  - source:  http://goo.gl/Dpf5vt

+Demian Farnworth is apparently having a go at +Mike Elgan 's stance on blogging on Google+ versus the traditional blog.

This breaks down to the traditional either/or scenario - which some old guy in a youtube video says are a great opportunity to answer with both. So - how the hell can we get to the point where we can do both?

We apparently can't do both now, so let's look to the future. To look to the future, let's look at the evolution so far and try to predict the direction in which it is evolving. Where 'it' is the way content creators distribute their content (and how others redistribute it).

The blogosphere was a manifestation of the network's ability to eliminate publishing middle-men. This trend has continued. Google+ has created a means of closing the gap between creator and consumer, while at the same time limiting the creators means of monetizing his or her own content. Meanwhile, they profit from data collection - whether or not they use it to sell product to advertisers or to aid the government for other benefits is somewhat irrelevant.

Google is just another middleman that will be replaced as the evolution progresses. As both creators and consumers, we desire the ability to customize experiences. Do we really want to go to different social networks? I don't see why a single open-sourced portal can't display all of my content as I prefer it to be displayed.

At some point, we'll realize that the value in our collective data is valuable. The content we create and the sharing of content are statistically significant data. If Google can sell that information, then shouldn't we be getting a cut?

So, an open-sourced hub for all content that sells the aggregate data and partitions the proceeds to the participants of the hub.

How far are we really from the point when the average joe can render the movies in his head to a digital format he can share on the network? 5 years? 10?

Down to Fundamentals

Who Am I?
Well, I'm a human being on planet Earth, as far as I can tell. This seems to be a natural development of the known universe. Science has gone to great lengths to prove that nothing mystical is going on here. That's starting to sound more and more like "Things the man behind the curtain would say".

Then, you have other ones like Neil deGrasse Tyson and the +Neil deGrasse Tyson Fan Club saying we're all made of Stardust. If we are just a naturally occurring part of the Universe - that shifts the question a little bit.

Where does the Universe stop, and where do I begin?

How much God am I? If I was omnipotent and omniscient, why wouldn't I know that I was?

The answers have been Sticky Things - and hopefully I can get +Wai H. Tsang to engage and tell you how diffuse something or other is the computer way to simulate this process. That guy is really on to something, but his signal is on a very specific frequency, so you may have to extrapolate what he says to get it to resonate - and cut out the distortion toward it's target audience as noise.

One of my sticky things was a line in +Anne Rice 's Memnoch the Devil. She, by the way, has been on a spiritual roller coaster as far as I can tell. I'd love to interview her about that some time. Her ride looks to have been fascinating, and into deep dark holes. Anyway, she gave me the line where her fictional Vampire gets to have a Conversation with Jesus. Somewhere in it, Jesus says something like: Sometimes I forget I'm God.

Long Story Short

Since I feel my focus beginning to slide - It's crazy to believe people have super powers. Therefore, you obviously have to go crazy to get super powers.

That Moment When

You look around, and all you see are different masks to wear.

Which mask do I choose, and why? How do I not choose a mask without getting hurt? What to do, what to be?

Image Source: http://www.pondjumpersspain.com/2009/08/24/a-stop-over-in-milan-and-venice/