Chess As An Adult

There is nothing as humbling and hubris sapping as learning to play chess as an adult. I don’t mean learning to move the pieces, I mean truly trying to learn to play…

I have been dabbling with the topic for a few years, mainly through my enjoyment of watching Chess; but there comes a point where you want to start getting serious about your own play.

Again, this is not something I am going to ever be great at, my age precludes it sadly. But the act of studying, seriously, the game and all it’s nuances is something I am attempting to tackle for enjoyment and hopefully results. On and off. And that is the key to my failure, so far I have been unable to sustain a regular study plan, despite best intentions, mainly due to some reoccurring health issues and other commitments, such as being a single parent to two children.

Chess teaches you many things, not just about the game and the nature of strategy and tactics and planning etc, but also about yourself psychologically.

I stopped playing games online via PS5 and PC over the last few years due to my reflexes not being what they once were; and the enjoyment of what I could once do to a fairly high level vs where I am now sapped the enjoyment. I think that says something about my competitive nature that isn’t necessarily flattering, but it is what it is in the sense that I want to be the best I can be at something.

And this is where chess is a great leveler, if you have any ego, it will be crushed, if you have pretensions they will be sandpapered off. Chess will crush you psychologically and force you to build up a different profile of yourself from scratch, and it is this humbling that can really help re-form and change who you are as a person. I mentioned pretensions before, learning to have them sliced off on the board can help you learn more about yourself off it.

I would like to think that my ego was in check off the board too, however as with everyone, there was always something there, and chess has helped my understand that part of myself and learn to see it and understand it as part of who I am as a human with all those emotions and irrationalities mixed in with the emotion and the rational.

It is something that I didn’t expect but am grateful for. The psychological re-calibration I have seen in myself is refreshing and proves that we all have parts of us we are not always conscious of and that certain activities can help us see ourselves in a different light, see our psychological strengths and weaknesses and learn to work with them and on them with understanding and metta.

Anti-Tech Movement (Part 2)

I have been diving in to this as I become increasingly disillusioned with the internet, surveillance, age verification and the many issues that have arisen around technology over the past decade plus.

It is coming to a head for me to the point that, other than for musts, I am considering leaving the internet behind completely.

I have already stopped carrying a phone, smart or otherwise, outside of the home and have not been on social media for the best part of a decade due to the issues that have been painted widely, around companies such as Meta and Google. Advertising and privacy go hand in hand, and now might even be secondary to governmental control and surveillance through age verification which could be coming to operating systems as a whole, though Apple is out front with this as per usual when it comes to controlling users. Government and tech companies and who is leading the way, that is up for debate when it comes to our techno-feudal lords.

Let’s not forget the yearly, pretty much the same as last year, product push of the black mirror most of us carry, damaging not only pockets but the environment as a whole, while tracking our every move on and offline if you are uninitiated. See Graphene OS. I am almost tempted to do a Tails OS post at some point… Moving on…

I have put together a reading list, along with my usual, personally curated, RSS feeds to deep dive on the wider topic at hand and to try to understand where I stand when it actually comes down to anti-tech and even anarcho-primitivism as a whole.

Most of the books I have on my reading list can be found at the wonderful site Anti-Tech Collective and I link to their reading resources there.

Personally I am currently reading:

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Endgame by Derrick Jensen

And one not on their resource list due to it being new I suspect:

Techno-Negative – A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser

I can also kind of recommend the /r/nosurf community on reddit for its occational insights and also /r/privacy and the website Privacy Guides

Also, the classic Surveillance Capitalism is not to be missed by Shoshana Zuboff along with Technofeudalism By Yanis Varoufakis

I think I can consider this a Part 2 to my previous post. I will, more than likely, create a part 3 with further thoughts, such as on China and its social credits system and where we might be headed.

AI (Enshitification) Slop

I was recently made aware of someone, through family, who has set up a new podcast; details are irrelevant, however what is is their prodigious use of AI. To put it simply, the podcast is AI generated, possibly tweaked, and then read by the person as posted as a novel idea.

This person is of middle age, and like a lot of those of a certain age, they have adopted AI in every aspect of their lives.

Personally, if we put the economic and environmental concerns to one side, I believe AI is and has amazing uses as a tool, see this recent New Scientist article. My issues arise when it is used as a creative tool, and said results are passed off as the persons original work. This is not a phenomenon unique to the lay person, see this recent article surrounding Ars Technica.

I am not even upset, though I think it is poor taste, with regards to novel writers using AI as an aid, see James Frey.

What does bother me is people using AI and passing the results off as their own work completely. In the case of the person at hand, I simply feel a little sad and sorry for them. Using AI to write books, podcasts and create art as they are doing simply smacks of a lack of knowledge around what can and will be sniffed out as AI generated. And the larger issue, AI models via LLMs do not create unique content as of yet. It is an amalgamation of other peoples work that has been hoovered up by the LLM / AI Company. From books, to music, to Youtube, to the entirety of the internet et al.

The AI revolution is going to, and is changing the world, from math to physics and programming, the list is literally endless; let’s just hope that it doesn’t mean everyone’s Grandma is going to start ‘creating’ as if they are a polymath, using straight from the tap, AI slop.

I believe that at some point in the near future, AI will be the creative force across most areas of art. This is when, like a first edition signed book, certified human created content will be at and demand a premium.

Virtue Signalling and the Preference Falsification Intersection

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DSLR vs EXIFMATRIX

Birds + Sky < Real::Edits = Obvious

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Reflection and Refraction (Journal Entry)

I thought I had been in love a few times until it actually happened.

Back in 2017 I randomly met someone, she approached me and we struck up a friendship which eventually became more, so these things go. And I actually fell in love for the first time.

I wasn’t in a good place emotionally and she saved me in a way, however the negative place I was in probably helped seal the fate of the relationship, despite the promises we made of ‘forever’, as things go. Still do for me as it isn’t something that is undertaken lightly.

This relationshiop spanned over half a decade, until it didn’t (a couple of years ago).

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The one thing I guess I came here to post, as it has been on my mind today, more so than it has been in a while… is that:

From my experience; and I have some – There is only one love of your life, and if that person is no longer in your life for whatever reason, that never changes.

No matter how many years or the circumstances.

That one person is the one and always will be.

So nurture that love and make sure you treasure it. It might not last from the other side of the equation, but if it is truly ‘the one’; regrets are pointless, yet painful and you want to do everything you can to make sure the love of your life doesn’t fall away from you, through things you could have easily prevented.

Embracing Determinism

Cause and effect is a funny thing. In its simplest form it is pretty straightforward. I punch you in the arm playfully and you say “Ouch, stop that!”.

Then there are the more far reaching consequences; a rough and tough childhood and the way that plays out in relationships and how life unfolds in a larger sense.

A car hits the brakes too late and runs in to the back of another car. Again, having effects that ripple outwards; we are all in the same pond after all, from the people involved, to the witnesses.

These every day, and not so every day, physical occurrences are things we accept without thinking about. They are almost a priori in acceptance.

There is a more unsettling side though and one that is kind of unavoidable. And it really comes down to physics at the smallest scale and works it’s way up from there and to the examples above.

Common sense dictates that through experience we understand if a pool ball hits another on a pool table, relating to angle, velocity and the other variables, the hit ball will move off in a direction at a speed directly relational to the impact.

These examples can also be applied to the brain and its physical nature. But what does that mean.

The simplest connotation is that all systems are cause and effect, including the human mind.

All systems are interconnected. From a family unit, to an ecosystem, to a solar system, to a galaxy, and finally to the universe.

With everything being connected in a Spinozian as well as a physical sense and everything we think and experience being part of these systems, in theory if you simulated the universe as software in a computer (this is done on small scales relatively simply); you could replay and reset and restart that system universe.

Without interaction or interference to the initial conditions, through simple cause and effect, the closed system would and will play out in exactly the same way.

The universe is a closed system by definition.

If the above is the case, and the onus is on someone to disprove, then all our actions and history is determined and our future actions and the events yet to come are all predetermined.

What we have is an illusion of free will spun up by our consciousness and I will argue that that doesn’t matter in a, very real sense, to how we live our lives, (unless you are someone whose actions you believe are partly dictated by the fact there is an all seeing supernatural being watching us and taking notes to decide who gets to walk into a utopia at death. A pretty sad state of affairs to need to be watched to act morally. That and/or along with being a Descartian dualist, however that is a different post entirely and would only bog this surface level one down).

What does this all boil down to?

In a nutshell everything we do, have done and will, is and has been decided through this very complex system we are a part of.

Why does this not matter?

We are animals whose senses and brains lie to us all the time. It is the nature of being a creature formed through evolution. As such we spin up narratives to suit our emotional states all the time. One such of those is the fact that we are in control of our actions and thoughts and destiny.

Even if we aren’t, our brains have evolved to give us the illusion of said control, and we can’t get outside of that box, our mind and body.

So this illusion of freedom and free will is so real that none of us tend to question it in every day life. Like walking and breathing, thinking we are making choices through our own volition is just how we think as insignificant mammals.

The beauty is, we also have a kind of mind that can understand the above. Higher level consciousness so to speak. It is disconcerting without doubt, however it does not matter in a real sense.

You can know that everything is determined and your illusion of free will is just that, and still get on fine.

The minute you stop thinking about it you go back to the default mammalian behaviours of making breakfast and worrying about your relationship and the state of the world.

And that is fine. The hard part is accepting determinism because we all love our agency a little bit too much (I am looking at you instagram et al :P)

Acceptance is not a prerequisite reality however, and the little lies we all tell ourselves to get through the day due to being mammals evolved on an oxygen rich planet fit nicely with the one you can take away from this post.

Now what do I want for breakfast…?

Let me think…

Let me choose…

*This is condensed thought. If you are interested in further reading regarding thinking systems, quantum mechanics and it’s relations to the topic, determinism, evolutionary biology and psychology, dualism and the mind-body problem, or other topics touched on in this post just send me a message.