Check-In: 2015-06-27 (Saturday) - 2015-06-29 (Monday)

Body: WIN! (walking, chin-ups, yoga, diet)
Mind: WIN! (game design, world design)
Spirit: WIN! (game design, world design, games, TV)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

The weekend was pretty routine. I've been a little light on salad and fruit lately so I've been trying to get to the grocery store more to keep fresh plant-based-food in the house. Had some really good oranges and a grapefruit. Also bananas which I'm mostly using as a starting points for smoothies.

I'm doing a little bit of non-walking exercise again. I've noticed my core strength increasing again, which just makes sitting, standing, walking, and life in general feel better.

I wrote up some game ideas over the weekend. We'll have to see how they play out in the game and what feedback other members of the team have on them, but the creative process was fun. We've also had more discussions, as a group, about various elements of the world I created and how that can be expressed in architecture. It's really fun to be a part of those discussions, and the others who are participating are bringing some really insightful ideas to the table. In a way, this is challenging because it's testing the internal consistencies of my fiction, but I'm finding the challenge to be enjoyable rather than a threat. So far, the ideas are enriching of the fiction, I think, rather than attacking it. But partly that's because the fiction is proving strong enough to hold up to the challenges.

Anyway, we're getting some cooler weather now, which is nice. I'm letting some fresh, cool air into the condo instead of just running the AC constantly, and will probably make a run to the store later today. It's good to get outside.

Check-In: 2015-06-25 (Thursday) - 2015-06-26 (Friday)

Body: WIN! (walking, yoga, diet)
Mind: PASS (IP development)
Spirit: WIN! (IP development, TV, games)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

Thursday was very social, with Dean dropping by earlier in the day because he was going to the Mountain Equipment Coop nearby, and Bandrew was downtown in the afternoon as he often is on Thursdays.

On Friday, I met with Landru and an environment artist named Gerry to talk about the game we're making. I had some IP (intellectual property) development to do on Thursday so we could have an architecture-based mood board to look at on Friday.

Somehow I've been hitting 20k and 25k step days lately. With a little yoga and some chin-ups thrown in, I'm starting to feel somewhat fit again.

The Angel Learns To Dance

This week has been very introspective. This introspection was triggered by the Cirque du Soleil show, Varekai, which is now cemented as my favourite Cirque show. It has made me think about the nature of story, the history of my life, and who I want to be as a person. Pretty heavy stuff for a show about acrobats doing flips in colourful unitards.

A single post can only cover these topics briefly, like the trailer for the movie rather than the movie itself.

The Nature Of Story

Lately I've been reading a lot of TV Tropes. This is an excellent exercise for understanding the intellectual side of story craft, where tropes are like Lego bricks and the writer is a craftsman sculpting a house or spaceship with the pieces. This is important to becoming good at the craft.

But it's not what makes audiences feel a story. Feeling and emotion are intangibles and not easily described in terms of tropes. You can arrange the Lego bricks in all manner of intellectually stimulating patterns without necessarily generating a single Watt of real emotion. We can look at structures to an extent, such as the Three Act Structure or Dan Harmon's plot circles, and those help by showing us the nature of conflict. But conflict, critical as it is, isn't quite the same as emotional connection.

Varekai is intellectually very simple. A young man and a young woman are fascinated by each other, then overcome trials that keep them apart, and then find lasting love together. That's tied for "oldest story ever told" alongside the Hero's Journey--or rather, it is the Hero's Journey as applied to romantic love, one of the oldest subjects ever fictionalized. The gender roles are also very conservative. Men are physical and brash. Women are beautiful, ranging from delicate prettiness to confident sexuality.

It would be easy to criticize the plot on its simplicity. But that simplicity is also why it is effective. Unburdened by any desire for originality, it is free to emphasize only honesty. It captures the timidity of the lovers in their first meeting. It captures their feelings of loss when being separated. It captures their celebration when re-united. Adding a bunch of twists to the classic tropes would just interfere.

In my own fiction, I've often felt this conflict between the intellectual and the emotional. I've probably even blogged about it before. And time and time again, I find myself drawn to the emotional more. Something that is unoriginal but has good emotional content is still gratifying. Something that is intellectually clever but lacks emotional connection feels like a practice exercise, intricate but in itself pointless.

Cleverness and emotional connection are not mutually exclusive, of course. But sometimes decisions must be made that will take one path at the expense of the other. For now, I will follow the emotional path in most cases.

The History Of My Life

One of the characters in the story is called the Limping Angel, and spends the whole show on crutches. Icarus, the male protagonist, is unable to walk after his fall. I interpret the Limping Angel as the manifestation of Icarus's own spirit, or perhaps a physical manifestation of Icarus's injuries.

There's a powerful scene, not long before the lovers are reunited, where Icarus and the Limping Angel lend each other strength, giving the Limping Angel the power to dance despite his injuries. Icarus, meanwhile, struggles to regain his ability to walk. The Limping Angel's dance is the struggle to heal, to become whole again.

I feel a strong connection to the Limping Angel. For a variety of reasons, I have been injured in the past. I see Icarus's inability to walk as akin to the depression that held me to the ground for many years. And while I feel that I am now walking, metaphorically, I still have a limp.

These thoughts caused me to think back on my life. Many of these memories are distressing, causing me feelings of intense shame or guilt or jealousy. To cope with the distress, I have forced myself not to dwell on them. This is, I now realize, what it means to repress a memory. And the problem with repression is twofold: a) it doesn't actually make the pain go away, it just numbs it, and b) it carves holes in your identity. Bereft of your own history, who are you?

But the Limping Angel succeeds in dancing in the face of his demons. Icarus learns to walk again. I think it is time for me to deal with these memories.

Who I Want To Be As A Person

This is the part where things start getting hard to describe, so I'm not going to try to cover everything. Here are a few random thoughts:

• Facing the memories I don't like is difficult. It requires an emotion I have not often felt before, but allows us to take action when we want to avoid that action: courage.
• Remembering these things is allowing me to see my own past again, which is allowing me to see who I am again.
• It is difficult, but I am learning to accept the person who inhabits these memories, even when he failed or made mistakes or behaved poorly.
• Many of these memories are incredibly petty, like times I said something slightly mean to someone in high school, or when I met someone who I didn't manage to win over--someone who might not like me, oh no!
• I realize now that part of why I have lacked pride is because I've often lacked a male role model, at least in terms of popular culture. The male role models of the 80's and 90's tended to be anti-intellectual assholes who were always grim and violent. This is only marginally better now. Albertan men are still expected to be, in most cases, gruff, loud, and ignorant. I could never and will never identify with this. So I assumed, most of my adult life, that I must be weak and unmanly, and was ashamed. Recently I've been changing my definition of manliness. A couple of years ago, my dad gave me the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling, which is a much better way to see manliness. My dad himself, the male half of the super-team that held our family together in the face of extreme difficulty, exemplifies this definition.
• I am going to continue to have courage, to remember my past, and to accept the person I have been. This is how the Limping Angel will learn to dance, and how I will learn to have pride in who I am.

Check-In: 2015-06-22 (Monday) - 2015-06-24 (Wednesday)

Body: WIN! (walking, yoga, chin-ups, diet)
Mind: WIN! (writing, game design)
Spirit: WIN! (writing, game design, Varekai video)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

Varekai continues to be having a profound effect on me. Partly, it has re-instilled a desire for physical ability in me which is helping me to do exercise beyond my step goals. Partly, the story being simple yet extremely well executed has caused it to tug at various heart strings that I have either been neglecting or poorly understood, and this is resulting in a lot of productive introspection. I have been deeply contemplating thoughts about things like my identity or the nature of story.

In any case, I've been working on a variety of writing projects (to the point where I may need to start focusing a little more) ranging from narrative pitches for our video game to artistic expressions about my own inner demons. None of it is publishable yet. One day, perhaps. One day.

I may be a little late getting tomorrow's post published as today is pretty loaded up and, ironically, because I've had so much content to think about that it's hard to distil into a single post. But it should still get published tomorrow afternoon or evening.

10 Strangest Buildings in the World

My dad sent me a bunch of links to interesting things he found on the net, so I'm going to post some of them here.

First, some strange architecture:

Check-In: 2015-06-19 (Friday) - 2015-06-21 (Sunday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: PASS (Chrome extensions, laptop setup, cleaning)
Spirit: WIN! (Cirque du Soleil, TV, gaming)
Social: WIN! (visiting with family and friends, rest)

So it turns out that we didn't go camping, based on the weather turning rainy. We will shoot for next weekend instead.

However, I did see Varekai with Mom, Dad, Amber, and Jason. Which means I finally managed to get my hands on the Varekai DVD.

It was clips of the Varekai DVD on YouTube that first got me into Cirque, especially the triple trapeze act and acrobatic pas de deux (sadly neither were a part of the live performance we watched on Friday). It was beautiful and amazing to watch the show live, and I spent much of the weekend watching the DVD.

My house is finally starting to look tidy, after months of cleanup effort and organizing. There is now actual floor space visible in the living room, which gives me a little bit of room to move and exercise in. I finally put up some of the art that I framed a few weeks ago. I've washed nearly all the carpet so I put the carpet cleaner away. My bedroom has been re-assembled, since I had to disassemble it for the carpet cleaning.

Now it's time to get to the job hunt again. I still have money for a little while, but the end is in sight, so it's time to get on this. Even a modest income would make quite a difference.

Check-In: 2015-06-17 (Wednesday) - 2015-06-18 (Thursday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: WIN! (Unity, writing, cleaning)
Spirit: WIN! (Unity, writing, ASMR, music, TV, gaming)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

I'm about to head out on a camping trip and time is short, so I will be brief: work continues on the Unity and writing fronts. I'm still enjoying ASMR and TV (Community).

Talk to you all when I get back, which will probably be Tuesday.

Unboxing the New Laptop

I finally made the investment into a new laptop so that I could work on Unity projects while out and about. I'm thinking of making a daily pilgrimage to the Edmonton Public Library, at least on week days, which would give me a bunch of steps, a good working environment, and access to a lot of books.

Since the packaging was pretty, I've decided to post some pictures of it. Apparently this is an internet phenomenon known as a "haul" (usually in video format, called a "haul video"). It seems pretty self-indulgent, but I did enjoy the unboxing experience and blogs are pretty self-indulgent in the first place, so here it is. If we want to make this a little more intellectual, we could speculate on whether or not companies are investing more in their packaging thanks to haul videos, since they could be an important part of a viral marketing campaign.

The laptop came with some bonus swag: two mouse pads and a t-shirt.

The first mouse pad. I really like the dragon, but unfortunately the pad is a bit big for my desk.

The second mouse pad. It's just generic advertising, but it fits my desk better so it's currently in-use.

The t-shirt is supposedly a large, but ends up stretched pretty tight when I try to wear it. I may see if I can exchange it for a larger one. I like the red, though.

The actual box for the laptop.

The inside of the box. The guy at the store took the laptop out to show me, and I think the MSI jacket got turned around. But I like the colours--normally you get plain brown or white cardboard, but MSI decided to keep the visual theme throughout the whole unboxing.

Pulling the laptop out, it is still jacketed and supported by cardboard.

The laptop out of its jacket.

Done with the packaging yet? Nope! There's still a dust cover on there. Maybe it helps prevent the screen and keyboard from getting mashed together during shipping.

And finally, the product itself is unveiled. Unless you count the nearly invisible plastic film in-between the keys. I didn't even see it until today. You can see a little plastic tab on either side of the second row of keys from the bottom. Those tabs are there to make it easier to peel the film off.

Thank you for indulging me in my self-indulgence!

Check-In: 2015-06-15 (Monday) - 2015-06-16 (Tuesday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: WIN! (writing mood board)
Spirit: WIN! (writing mood board x 1000, ASMR meditation)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

For the Unity game that Landru (a different Andrew with a Star Trek-derived nickname) and Jason and I are developing, I was tasked with creating a "mood board", which is a collection of images and music and notes in order to find the mood and themes for the game.

Since this game is set in the same world as my novel, the mood board is also useful for my writing projects. And at the risk of tooting my own horn, the board is amazingly cool. I spent two hours yesterday just scrolling through it, drinking in the images and music and text, enjoying the world that I have created.

I think I finally realized, when viewing this board, that I have created something cool. I've been pretty frustrated, as you know, with the lack of progress in the storytelling (though my latest outline is looking more promising). But what I saw in the mood board was that all the work I've been putting in for over a decade is paying off. The world is rich with potential conflict. It is believable within its own rules. It is fertile soil for growing stories in, even if I haven't found the right one quite yet.

In my own mind, I had been laboring under the delusion that my fiction would only have value once it finally became a story, and all the other work was just foundation to build the story on. But now I see that all that background work is valuable in its own right. Even if I never write a story myself, but hire other authors, I have still done something that is hard and requires talent and has value that audiences will enjoy. And I'm still pretty confident that I can find and create the story so long as I keep working on it.

Okay, that's enough self-praise for now. But I probably under-praise myself in general so the odd glut of it is probably okay.

Anyway, I mentioned ASMR meditation so I should talk about that briefly. It's basically a technique of using auditory "triggers" to invoke a pleasant tingling in the head and spine. Common triggers are whispering, tapping, crinkling, etc. It works best with headphones so you can hear the sounds in simulated 3D. The variety of ASMR triggers is so huge I can't begin to describe them all, so here is a strange but surprisingly effective example: it's a dude putting comic books into plastic bags. The crinkly sound of the plastic and the shuffling sounds of the paper are really pleasant.

The neat thing about these videos is that I'm learning to appreciate sound in the real world in a new way. Even just typing on the keyboard right now, I can really listen to and enjoy the sound of the keyboard. I think that when we lived without artificial sounds, before radios and TVs and video games, we (obviously) listened to the real world a whole lot more, whereas now it's easy to go from artificial noise to artificial noise while barely noticing sound in our natural environment. It turns out the world is full of rich, interesting sound, and it's neat to be able to tune into it again.

Check-In: 2015-06-13 (Saturday) - 2015-06-14 (Sunday)

Happy Birthday, Bro.

Body: WIN! (walking, diet, sleep schedule recovery)
Mind: PASS (sleep schedule recovery)
Spirit: PASS (TV, gaming, walking outside, meditation)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends)

On Saturday I got up a little early (well, 9:30) to join Amber and Jason for a walk to the Farmer's Market (which they call "Bullet Farm" or "Bullet Farmies" in reference to the latest Mad Max). I bought lots of healthy good food.

For walking and eating well, I give myself a win.

However, I made the mistake of listening to some YouTube videos on meditation and relaxation. One of them suggested lying down, so I got comfortable on the couch... and then fell asleep for like five hours, waking up at suppertime. Suffice it to say, this blew my sleep schedule for the weekend rather badly.

At about 5 am Sunday morning and still not sleepy, I decided to power through all of Sunday without sleeping, and managed to do so, the result being that I was able to wake up around 10:30 this morning. Latish, yes, but manageable, and a solid recovery.

On the plus side, I watched a LOT of Community to get through it, and am now taking a second pass at it. The first time through I didn't see why people objected to season four, so I'm going to take another look to see if I get what bugged people about it.

--

Putting the learning stuff at the bottom now. It flows easier if the "score" and the "report" are adjacent, I think.

TV Trope: Unresolved Sexual Tension (UST) - Pretty straight forward, but can be very important in a lot of stories. Basically, this is what happens when two characters are attracted to each other, but for story reasons are unable to pursue the relationship. There's a lot to discuss here, but the important part is that UST works because it is based on anticipation: audiences are more fascinated by the dramatic question of "Will they get together?" than they are by the answer, "Yes" when it actually does happen (assuming it does).

John Oliver Talks About Tobacco

I ran across this really funny John Oliver show while randomly browsing the internet. Enjoy!

Check-In 2015-06-12 (Friday)

Body: PASS (walking, kung fu lite)
Mind: WIN! (cleaning, writing)
Spirit: PASS (gaming, TV, writing)
Social: PASS (rest?)

TV Trope: Contractual Immortality - Major characters rarely die. They may appear to die, but the audience, knowing that this is unlikely, won't feel too concerned. It's much more likely that the character wasn't really killed, or was able to cling to life or otherwise get better. Sometimes this is simply because major characters are tricky to kill off, and sometimes this is because actors literally have contracts so news of the actor being fired or leaving the show will precede the character's death.

I decided yesterday should be cleaning day, and succeeded more than I meant to. As I was taking out the garbage from under the sink, something fluid ran out of it onto the carpet in the front hallway. So I decided to bust out the carpet cleaner and clean it up right away, and since I had the carpet cleaner out, I figured I'd start doing the carpet in my bedroom. So I currently have the bed flipped up on one wall with half the floor drying.

I also cleaned out and started reorganizing my storage closet. There is more of that to do as well--especially since there is more than the normal amount of bedding in there, since my bed is flipped up against the wall.

I didn't "write" so much as "think about story", but it still counts. Each little story discovery is valuable and gets me closer to the point where I can start putting proper words down.

I didn't socialize very much, but I was happy not to, so I'm calling it a rest day. I was hugely social on Thursday so I think it's fine.

Check-In: 2015-06-11 (Thursday)

I've decided to add a TV Trope of the day as a way to teach myself storytelling concepts. I'll explain it in my own words as an attempt to internalize the concept--if you disagree with me, or have additional information on it, please chime in. The discussion will help with my self-education.

Body: WIN! (walking)
Mind: PASS (Wolfram|Alpha)
Spirit: PASS (walking in nature, gaming, TV)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends)

TV Trope of the Day: Pseudo Crisis - A crisis in the plot that exists just for the purpose of keeping the audience engaged briefly without otherwise being useful to the plot. For example: a cliffhanger right before a commercial break, where the crisis is immediately resolved after the commercial break. The pseudo crisis was fabricated just to get the audience back from the break rather than as an integral part of the story itself. Hopefully, the rise of content-focused media like Netflix, as opposed to advertisement-focus media like traditional television, will make the pseudo crisis less common.

Yesterday I spent most of the day walking around. I walked to get groceries around noon, then met up with Bandrew (former-BioWare Andrew, nicknamed "Bandrew" to separate him from the many other Andrews I associate with). We walked around for a while, and then I walked to the Double Greeting to meet up with Shane and Dean for our traditional Sunday Chinese dinner and TV.

I gave myself a pass under the Mind category because I played around with Wolfram|Alpha to write the blog post for today, but the rest of the day was pretty laid back, mentally--other than the non-stop education that naturally occurs when you are curious about the world and spend time in the vicinity of Shane and Dean, of course.

The Best Site on the Internet: Wolfram|Alpha

www.wolframalpha.com




Wednesday night, to wind down after a busy day of Unity, I was playing some Skyrim. I came across a spell (added by a mod called "Apocalypse Spells") that offered a lot of armor, but had a 2% chance to fail every second.

I tried to estimate how long this would last, on average, but that proved to be rather complex and not easy to estimate. I initially thought I could build a quick spreadsheet to do the math, but on a whim I decided to try using Wolfram|Alpha, which I haven't looked at in ages.

Rather than using pictures, I'm going to offer web links, so you can see the results at each stage for yourself.

The journey started with me getting the formula completely wrong, but is still a tale worth telling because of how the site handled it.

• I initially came up with the nutty idea that the formula was y = 1/(50-x).
• I noted the asymptote, and was impressed by how well the site handled it. But I didn't want the chart at 50, I wanted it from 0 to 60, the official lifespan of the spell.
• What I thought I really wanted (though I was wrong) was the area under the curve. So I tried to see if the site could handle integrals.
• I then realized that the presence of the asymptote (caused by a divide by 0), meant my formula had to be wrong. I realized that I needed to use permutations and combinations--but my grade 10 math was many years ago, so I decided to see if Wolfram|Alpha could explain how they worked.
• I was impressed! All sorts of functions were available, including ones I wasn't familiar with. Curious as to what a multinomial was (just another name for a polynomial?), I looked it up.
• Then I saw the chart representing the frequency of the word's usage in history! Wow! Did it have this information on all kinds of words, or just math stuff? So I decided to look up a random, generic word: "fruit".
• But Wolfram|Alpha figured that I was asking about the concept of fruit itself, rather than the word, "fruit". So it spat out all kinds of nutritional information, averaging all the data it had on different kinds of fruit! Wow! But it did still have information on fruit as a word, so I clicked that.
• And down half a screen or so was the graph of the word's frequency of usage throughout history. Wild!
• At this point I decided to get back to the problem at hand, and realized that I needed to invert my problem: I wasn't trying to solve for how often 2% would get selected, but rather how likely it was that the other 98% would get selected consecutively, which is the formula y = (49/50)^x from 0 to 60.
• Roughly eyeballing the graph, it looked like the spell would last 10 seconds 80% of the time, 35 seconds 50% of the time, and the full 60 seconds 30% of the time.

There's probably a better way of getting these exact values, either by doing the math or by enabling interactivity on the graph (I haven't tried that yet), but this information was sufficient for me to decide if I wanted to use the spell or not.

Also, it's possible I've done my math wrong. Even if I am right, it would be ideal for x to be an integer value rather than a real number. If anybody finds a better way to do this, feel free to put it in a comment. Thanks!

But I've decided that this is now the Best Site on the Internet. The sheer power of its ability to take basic questions and pull data and calculations together in a matter of seconds is staggering. It's definitely a tool I'm going to learn to use more in the future.

Check-In: 2015-06-09 (Tuesday) - 2015-06-10 (Wesnesday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: WIN! (writing, game design, Unity tutorials, Wolfram-Alpha mathematics)
Spirit: WIN! (writing, game design, Unity tutorials, Wolfram-Alpha mathematics, gaming, TV)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

On the diet front, I'm becoming ever more confident that I don't deal with wheat well. Last night I had a pancake and very quickly experienced symptoms which were mild but persisted into the morning. I am also feeling really groggy today, a symptom I often experience when in Athabasca, where I'm immersed in allergens, but apparently this can be indicative of mild food allergy as well. Of course, at this time of year my grogginess could be caused by all manner of plan pollens as well--the ground on the Promenade was littered with willow fluff today.

In any case, I've been quite creative and productive in the last couple of days. I've had some interesting breakthroughs on the writing front (the Darren character who I ditched a few weeks ago is back, but with a rather different story, which I think is much improved over the stuff I threw out). I've also been getting back into Unity since Andrew and Jason and I have resumed our meetings for Darth Tower, the working title for the game we're working on.

Finally, I was playing some Skyrim last night to wind down, when I ran into a math problem. I decided to use Wolfram-Alpha to solve the problem, leading to a discovery of just how cool that website is--which I'll use for my post tomorrow.

Check-In: 2015-06-07 (Sunday) - 2015-06-08 (Monday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: PASS (cleaning, job follow-up)
Spirit: PASS (walking in nature, TV, games)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

Sunday noodles were put off until Thursday since Shane was unable to make it due to work. As a result my Sunday was relatively quiet, with relaxation being the main focus.

Monday I tried to start acting like it was a work day again. I somewhat succeeded. I managed to follow up with Serious Labs to see if they're still considering me (no word back yet) and did a little bit of cleaning.

As usual, I managed to get outside for some walking and socializing

Check-In: 2015-06-04 (Thursday) - 2015-06-06 (Saturday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: PASS (pacing, reading)
Spirit: PASS (walking in nature, games)
Social: PASS (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

I tried an experiment with walking yesterday. Rather than going on one big walk as I tend to do in Edmonton (I think the simple fact that there's an elevator ride to get outdoors causes me to go out less frequently, necessitating the longer walks) I instead decided to pace it out, setting a goal for every hour. In some ways, it felt like a lot of work, since I was frequently pausing to get some steps in. On the other hand, I felt "warmed up" for most of the day.

When Robots Steal Our Jobs

I decided to browse the BBC website looking for some form of audio entertainment so I could listen while doing chores--video entertainment isn't ideal sometimes, since it requires looking at the screen.

I stumbled across a podcast on their show, Analysis, discussing how robots are taking over more and more jobs. The show is very good at covering a variety of angles, however. They don't just stick to the "robots will put us out of work" tune, but also explore concepts like the fact that people have always been lamenting how technology puts people out of work, and yet we simply keep finding new work to do. They also discuss whether or not robotics will change the nature of capitalism as it changes the fundamental relationship of exchanging labour for money. And then what effect that may have on our political systems.

A few of my own personal views on the matter:

• The sharing economy is going to be critical, by which I mean companies like Uber and Airbnb. If people become less able to work for money, we need to each create and share our own products and services.
• Same goes for 3d printing and local manufacturing.
• Same goes for agriculture. Aeroponics and vertical farming may make the growing of local food easier, cheaper, and healthier.
• I don't believe humans will be replaced by machines. I believe we're just watching a long, continuous integration of humanity and the tools we wield. I am currently sitting at a computer, writing a blog which can be accessed over the internet, and displaying photos taken with my phone. How many jobs would there be if we were still cavemen? How many people would there need to be to make ink and leather so we could tattoo the words and images? How many runners would there be to distribute those scraps of leather? And that's without counting features like the fact that this blog is searchable. In short, my blog is already a massively automated factory.

There's so much more to cover than a few bullet points can encapsulate, but it's fun to think about. And there's no doubt these things will continue to change the way we live.

Check-In: 2015-06-02 (Tuesday) - 2015-06-03 (Wednesday)

Visited Athabasca for a couple of days.

Body: PASS (walking, lifting)
Mind: PASS (conversation, driving)
Spirit: WIN! (walking in lots of nature)
Social: WIN! (visiting friends, visiting family)

While I was a bit light on steps due to travel and socializing, I did manage to get some walking in. I also helped my family move some heavy objects. It wasn't a lot of lifting, but every bit helps.

I had some fun, intellectual conversations with my parents, as I always do when I visit them, and also did some driving to get out there, which is worth some points for mental focus.

I went for some walks in the Alberta countryside. While this did me some harm in terms of allergic reactions that are now hitting me today, the country is beautiful so good for the spirit.

And then there was all the socializing with family, extended family, and friends... to the point that I'm taking a night to myself tomorrow. :)

Check-In: 2015-06-02 (Monday)

Body: WIN! (walking, diet)
Mind: PASS (cooking/cleaning)
Spirit: PASS (walking in nature, gaming)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, giving gifts, corresponding with family)

Went for a walk with Jason (with a little bit of running, since Jason has picked that up again and I met him towards the end of his jog). Had a healthy diet, including vegetables and fruits and a relative lack of added sugars.

I didn't do a lot of willpower/Mind work, but I did do some tidying up and I did make a proper grown-up supper, so I'll take a pass in that category.

Walking outside--and looking at nature pictures for yesterday's post--rack up some points for a pass under Spirit.

Social was strong, with a good visit with Amber and Jay. I also brought some gifts for them from Victoria. It feels a little selfish to claim points for giving gifts, but generosity is healthy so it would be dishonest not to take the points.

Victoria Summer

I'm back from Victoria and will be resuming the blog's usual schedule tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some pictures of plants (and a couple other things) that I saw while I was over there.