February 23, 2009
"Woke up from dream I was starring in reality TV game show with ambiguous rules that I could not figure out."
Chuck b. has a dream. Reality shows aren't really too real. And dreams are not real. Make it a lucid dream and go all Jeff Probst and simply announce and impose some rules. Go from there. Is your life a reality show with ambiguous rules? Make some rules! Identify someone with permission to break the rules. Proceed!
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Now you know why traditions are valuable. The fantasy part of our catch-22 rules have all been identified and left politely behind. My fantasy/reality usually comes out in an everyone lives happily everafter scene....Quickly followed by the cold realisation that Happy has a different meaning to most of the adorable Idiots I help. The Donald Trump Apprentice show had some surprising reality moments, as measured by Trump's Monetary beliefs. Those Survivor Island whack jobs had no real moments and all deserve to stay on their Islands with no TV face time forever.
Identify someone with permission to break the rules.
Speaker Pelosi.
I imposed a rule sometime ago: No women in my life. They're expensive and they cause problems.
Look but don't touch.
Oh, and there's a second rule: No debt.
Rule 1 makes rule 2 possible.
Dud
Maybe combine a reality TV game with a Nomic system. Nomic (wiki)is a game of constantly creating and changing rules. Could be interesting to drop a bunch of people in the jungle with very little instruction other than they'll have to deal with the occasional show-imposed challenge; and, oh yeah, you create your own rules which can drastically change the nature of the game.
Peter Suber's initial rule set:
After Nomic was first published in Scientific American, a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.
What if we never wake up and there is no exit.It is called a bad dream when both Airbus engines fail on take-off over Manhatten with no "closure". Closure means there is an ending, and that ending lets you recover and go on with your life. So the worst game show will be one whose rules never allow it to end. We need to get Titus involved to design us a game show that never ends and is enjoyable along the way. I believe he can do it.
I remember a game that begins with a song: "Under my bed there is one-eyed dog. Whoever says zero or five will have to eat it dead.
Then you begin to count numbers in sequence, and one that does not meet the standard loses and pays in bellugas or some other valuable,
"one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, eleven, ....."
Whoever appears not to miss can change the numbers, reset the rules.
There were some other variations consisting of things you had to know well, at least as well as counting.
"I dreamed I was bookends in my Maidenform bra!"
I never get to meet girls like that.
Sads.
I had too much to dream last night
At one point I was hanging out with a bunch of students from the University of Chicago who were not that in to me. They were smoking a lot and I wasn't in to them either. I wanted to *win*, but what to do?
Later, a woman bent over a bowl of tomato soup she was preparing for me and combed her dandruff into it like Parmesan cheese. For her, I had an immediate plan. I was going to drink down the soup in one swallow and then lick the bowl. I mean, what else is there to do it that situation?
But it was near dawn, and the kittens wanted to play so they woke me up.
And dreams are not real.
Let's say a hypothetical Mr. X dreams that he is in a social situation, a gathering, and he is uneasy and moves through the gathering quickly in order to avoid the eyes of the others at the gathering but finally cannot avoid meeting the eyes of a stranger who looks at him fiercely...and then Mr. X wakes, plunged into gloom.
The dream is not real. But isn't it possible that the dream is speaking to a reality, a central reality that Mr. X faces in real life?
Needless to say I'm not Mr. X. I'm a perfectly adjusted regular guy. Ha ha......ha.
I napped an hour and awoke remembering a dream that a cruel Blog Mistress demanded that I create a dream with Rules no one can understand, and explain how I deal with changing the rules before she deletes me, but a pretty face named Darcy comforted me.Then there was this large brown loaf of bread, and nobody wanted to eat it, and just then two large, fluffy, white melons were coming into view... and I woke up to a Drudge siren. Was this the new internet disease that causes people to run out and hide in purple forests???
With the advent of television we played less and less.
The saving grace was that the lights went out regularly in DR, so we had the games to fall back on.
If the lights went out for a day or two what would kids do today?
Probably flip the switch back to "on". Pretty sure they'd figure that one out.
doesn't sound like a dream to me.
Identify someone with permission to break the rules.
CIA interrogators. Guards at Gitmo. LA police department (and that's only the first thing they break.)
bill describes "Survivor: The Gathering".
Identify someone with permission to break the rules.
Obama. He can (1) bomb in Pakistan, (2) send more troops, (3) make rendition into a favored policy, (4) appoint tax cheats to high office, (5) intimidate the White House press corps and (6) abandon campaign promises. I believe all of this was against the rules for his immediate predecessor.
Woke up from a dream and somebody who knows what the fuck is going on, is in charge. That somebody does not include Joe Biden.
David:
Actually he continued the Bush policy on Pakistan.
But you are right on five out of six. Bush was bashed umercifally for sending troops to defend America and the whole rendition thing (so what if we kidnap a terrorist and ship them someplace. They are TERRORISTS, remember? Obama is willing to let them go, which is a crime in and of itself.
As for the last three, Bush was principled enough not to do those kinds of things.
Dudley do-right : I imposed a rule sometime ago: No women in my life.
You sound like my kind of man.
We are playing a game. We have invented many rules, but random selection trumps them all. We like to think that we have learned some skills that help us find our way through the maze or deliver food pellets to us, but in the end it is all just luck. We pull the lever under the blue triangle, not the green circle--never the green circle, that is verboten. For some a food pellet is delivered. For others there is immediate electrocution. We ponder our lever pulling skills and speculate about the green circle. We like to think that it is a puzzle that can be solved. But it's all just luck. The levers are designed to measure luck. Only the lucky survive. That's the game. Those are the rules.
Still no sudden energy bursts from Mt. Redoubt.
"Camera is located at AVO's Redoubt Hut, approximately 7.5 mi (12 km) from Redoubt's summit crater. This camera provides a view of the north flank of Redoubt. This camera is in a remote location and operates on battery power. Therefore this camera will be on every 4 hours for 5 minutes. If seismicity or field operations warrant, we will set this camera to take more frequent pictures. "
I suspect so.
Be a wake-up call in Wasila.
How about this one?
I make the rules. I break the rules. You are pawns, to be manipulated and ordered to do anything I want.
If you please me, then you will get to do your best to really please me. If you displease me then I get to decide whether you keep your testicles or not.
Are you man enough, guys?
I imposed a self-made rule that I will not tolerate anybody resolutely negative, or anybody who makes a program of propounding a negative or damaging world-view, and that has cost me dearly. So I amended the rule to unless they are cute. And I break the rule by occasionally indulging mean spiritedness myself on purpose.
I also try real hard not to say sweary words around children.
I played a board game with a group of friends for the first time, not my usual thing.
I believe the game was Trivial Pursuit but it's been so long I've forgotten if that game even comes with a board.
The game had the rules printed on the back of the lid to the box, so it's already all spelled out. But one of my friends, the sweetest person there, objected to the way the question was being read. She claimed reading it in a cynical voice gave an unfair advantage to the answer, so she insisted on another rule. We were drinking and being silly. It was difficult to respect the rules as they were even more difficult to respect made-up rules developed as we went along. It pissed me off. The whole point of getting together was to have fun and this nicest of all people was insisting on removing every element that made the gathering fun to begin with. The thing that dismayed me was, the rest of the players, the ones getting drunk, were mostly lawyers and other A-types whose natural inclination is to design rules for everyone, so the bummer was the person least likely to insist on rules was the one demanding them. I quit. From then on, when it came to Trivial Pursuit, I would convince the other players to just read all the questions on the cards and forget about the board, covering much more territory much more quickly, and to change the name to Blurt Out, whereby the player who blurts out the most correct answers wins the admiration of their peers.
Of course, there's also the possibility that the whole of reality is just a glorified reality TV show. I find the argument pretty convincing.
I have one. "Real Live Government". The federal government
has a fixed number of dollars for the year...can't borrow it, can't print it... and no creative accounting. Make a budget and stick to it. What's your move? Tax the rich? Lower capital gains tax? More money for welfare? Dump money on the States for 2 years and have them cut back on "benefits" after 2 years.The lights are on you, make your decision....Win a million dollars in gold.
I think that sometimes, broken, waves seem to stir the depths of the fish ankle tree. We don't control the rules, we live in the areas the rule-maker was unable to regulate. But the rule-maker is always making new rules. That is his purpose. And the places to live are always decreasing. Fear not, for as the rules multiply, the power of the rule-maker to enforce rules decreases. In the end, there will be chaos and freedom and we will beg for a new rule-maker, because man cannot survive in a world without rules. But for now, we despise him. And the echo of the often times anchored my heart in infinite yesterdays.
my head against the pillow
the sheets against my skin
i'll meet you in a lullaby
if you can guess what dream i'm in
"Identify someone with permission to break the rules."
CIA interrogators. Guards at Gitmo.
So they had permission? That means it was ok for them to do it. :)
From "T-Shirt Hell"...
"My life is a very complicated drinking game"
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