title: Parenting Possessions
In addition to lacking multi-generational and inter-generational support in the nuclear family (the biggest nuclear disaster, to date), go-it-alone parents are faced with a burdensome task that is unprecedented in its scope. Parents are now divided among many possessions which require maintenance or demand orderliness, existing in generally confined spaces (homes, yards) where accumulated objects block bodily movement, and time confined circumstances where accumulating objects block alternate activities. These possessions effectively block time that could be used for connection between the parent and the child; because children need some level of parenting to keep them safe—if not keeping them loved and attended to—possessions such as toys and screen-based entertainment are used to parent the child in the parent’s relative absence. The mediums that come between children and parents—from physical possessions referred to here, to the time spent in the acquiring of money—are squeezing to a very narrow margin the direct time and space for immediate human bonding.
Even sans children, possessions dictate our internal states and external motions (or lack thereof) far more than we dictate theirs. This begs the question: are the possessions truly the parents of us? They certainly center us more and more to a specific location, a crib as some already call the modern dwelling. Migratory needs of humans are moved away in the margins of the margins, with possession dominance gaining an ever tighter grip, a la the consumerism ethos. Being that many possessions are made of long lasting persistent plastics, combined with our possible extinction woes, a cruel irony may come to exist that caps this anti-life epoch of ours: the parents may outlive their children.
—
title: The Original Welfare Recipients
Northward bound migratory people who turned their backs on the sun were to put themselves (perhaps in ignorance) in a situation where their own efforts would not be enough to sustain themselves, and they would henceforth be forced to draw on nature ceaselessly without any ability to repay or replenish their withdraws. Had circumstances been different, they might have adapted to these colder climates as other plants and animals had in previous times, achieving instinctive lifestyles such as hibernation and deciduousness. Instead, however, these humans quickly got in to the habit of taking out larger and larger unsustainable loans from the ecosystem in the form of resources to build technologies—clothing, shelters, and storable foods such as grains and domesticated livestock. They also opened themselves up to the cold and flu season without any compensation in other regards to health. Anyways, this depletion of natural resources, of treating nature as a welfare state rather than an intimate family member, has its beginnings (albeit minimally and barely detectable at first), in these early mismatchings of humans with their environment.
Along the way of nature’s being refashioned in to a welfare state, a reconceptualization of nature as something separate from humans developed in their minds to parallel their removing of themselves and various resources from the natural flow. The dehumanization of nature is to develop both as an idea and an external reality when nature is viewed as separate and is misunderstood as a thing rather than a process. The insults and injuries that came to be commonplace in human interactions with “nature” evolved as a means of preserving the fragile human psyche that can’t endure feelings of guilt. Culture becomes naturalized to distract and delude its consumers from the constant injustice that had become their modality of life. These snow whitened cultures even have had a tendency for allowances of character such as “self made men” when this is further from the truth than typical compared to the long stretch of homo sapiens inhabiting the Earth; they are the most dependent, straying further on a continuum than most others from the more common interdependency. Such wide strays are generally short lived and constitutive of diseases, rogue lifeforms that cast themselves outside the greater society of planetary life.
A related point to be made during this anthropogenical speculation is regarding the relation and need for the sun’s light (which is to be denied by this anti-equatorial trek. Those people (and their descendants) who made the poor choice to stray farthest from the sun, those who would become the whitest of skin, would come to first create in artificiality the blue light of the sun that they so missed.
—
title: Urine Therapy and Pyroluria
“Don’t piss on the fire, sip your own piss,
then both itself and you, the fire shall miss”
This is a hypothetical offering which could be very incorrect stemming from my ignorance and misunderstanding of the processes on my part. In other words, health researchers and experts would need to apply what they know to evaluate if this therapy has any legitimacy or not.
So basically, pyroluria, which causes the excrement through the urine a higher amount of a metabolite kryptopyrroles, carry away with them before their excretion zinc and vitamin B6. Because more of these kryptopyrroles exist in people said to have the condition pyroluria, they have a greater deficiency of these important nutrients. They can supplement and in fact this is the recommended route, but I am putting forth that supplementation may be effectively done through the drinking of one’s own urine. Urine therapy for general health has been highlighted by different people for similar and different reasons of replenishment. Could not the lost B6 and zinc, tied up in kryptopyrroles, be redigested and perhaps enzymatically separated and reabsorbed? There is the risk that the kryptopyrroles would also re-enter and sweep away even more B6 and zinc, which would make this therapy quite literally a back firing (pyro again). Read this as merely a hypothesis until more information or more informed people can chew on this idea, and decide if it should be spit or swallowed.
–
title: Chess Variants— 1) Ground’s-eye View, and 2) Aging Chess Pieces
1) Chess is played with a bird’s eye view that gives full information of static piece position, the only unknown being the future moves. An alternate I have thought of is a game style where a player can only see what is going on with the pieces immediately in front of his/her own, as would be seen from the ground of your own pieces (taller pieces would be blocked by shorter closer pieces, as a 30 story building can block a 100 story building behind it). Exploratory pieces can be sent in to the opponent’s camp to discover pieces of information depending where the intrusion is made—but never without the risk of being taken. As far as visual capabilities of pieces, it could be that all pieces have a 360 degree view, or that the piece is limited to view by the moves available. This latter version would then really only be possible to play in a digital version, or with several referee helpers and several other boards where the temporarily “hidden” (or blocked) moves are being made. The more former, more simple version where vision isn’t limited by a pieces own movement capabilities (rooks only see straight, bishops only see diagonals), just by the blocking of their opponent’s fronting pieces (their own pieces would never then block their own vision, it would rather be an extension of where they can view from), would need 3 boards. One shared board for the pawns to start, and two separate “private” boards where each player, black and white, would house their own pieces until they were revealed and transferred on to the main board. These hidden pieces could still be taken, the only dilemma is that a piece may “attack” an empty square and then be taken, though how much knowledge would be allowed to be revealed during this capture to the captured team before their pieces was murdered is a source in need of clarification, too.
Also in this variation there could be much debate over whether or not kings can be captured and thus ending the game, allowing a king to fatally move in to a check or be checked un-beknownst. As far as a king being check unbeknownst and not responding, I don’t know if this would “visually” be possible, even if by a knight. There is also the question of whether vision can expand before committing, i.e. taking one’s finger off the piece, allowing a sneak peak. My leaning is to say no, this is not allowed, as this whole variation is to add in the theme of immediate imperfect knowledge. Though the knowledge may seem imperfect, a great deal can still be deduced logically to get a sense of the game. Another variation on this variation is to only have king’s-eye view (or queen’s eye view), which would push the idea of partial information to an even greater threshold.
2) This variant isn’t as flushed out in my mind as the previous one, but perhaps each piece has a limited number of moves before it dies and is removed because of old age, or it is stuck in it’s final position (a gravestone) until it can capture and resurrect. Pawns would be exempt and perhaps kings could be as well, unless a goal was to make king’s dance around the board with persistent checking so that they may then be killed by exhaustion as it were.
Some Previous Notes 4 You
notes 4 today: 2015-09-04 – Thoughts On Patriarchy, Colony of China, Sedentarism
notes 4 today: 2015-10-19
notes 4 today: 2015-11-08
notes 4 today: 2015-11-29
Subverses 