VR and my motivation problems
Nov. 9th, 2011 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIt took me half an hour to get out of bed this morning. I don't have half an hour, it's a college day. that half hour just ate my first catch the bus point. and now I feel sick enough I can't get around to eating. I tried eating a small square of chocolate cake to kick start but now I feel sicker and vaguely off chocolate. but I'm up and dressed and packed apart from the food so that part is working.
My life is all push and no pull. Nothing I particularly want to do, just a bunch of stuff I'm avoiding.
Avoidy thoughts this morning were compare/contrasting two Rodney/John get stuck in VR fics. in one they do beautiful math together, in the other they surf and write VR. in one they know they're in there, in the other only Rodney knows. The math one is kind of awesome, the other one is the kind of hell that's disguised itself as a heaven. He doesn't know he's in VR, so he's just hanging out having fun, but he's having fun by chopping off all the bits of him that are actually John. And it's like when Buffy was in heaven being told all her friends are safe, everyone's still in danger but heaven keeps telling lies. That's just wrong. Plus, surfing? Kind of fun, but not what he chooses to spend very much time on at all. Trying to hand him an all ice cream diet just for the happy is kind of missing the point of happy. But the math one advances the frontiers of human knowledge, even if the humans in question are having trouble telling anyone outside about the discoveries. That's a better world.
Cesperanza's one where John dies and Rodney goes nuts trying to construct a VR version of him is another interesting one. Because in a lot of ways, that's not John/Rodney, that's Rodney/Rodney-hallucinating-John-into-a-holodeck, and Rodney knows it and totally freaks out at the idea of having original John only. So there's a happy ever after, but it's kind of deeply creepy in many ways. But in that one they're both virtual and interacting with the real world, doing useful work for Atlantis still, so that's kind of a bonus.
... the ethics of VR really shouldn't have much to do with my life. But all I do is sit around and muck around with computers. I just play stupid clicky games or read fic or, you know, ice cream stuff. In a box larger than a coffin but really pretty damn small. Hello my flat, stuffed with all this junk I can't throw away, with room for two chairs only because I bought more stacking boxes. So here I am in what I just defined as a lonely hell wearing heaven's face.
Usually I realise these things at three in the morning, not eleven.
but now I can go out, and go to college, and study, and advance the frontiers of human knowledge!
... except the more I study the less I feel my chosen area of study has to contribute to human knowledge. Like, okay, we've noticed, thanks, stop mentioning Freud and stick with the feminism and there's even something interesting to say, possibly, once. but we've said it. moving on now? now? now? ANYTIME NOW?
When I started studying English it was because I thought it was about people, in versions that stay still long enough to stare at them. Then I started thinking it was the programming language for people. And, okay, some truth in that, but there's thirty plus years of random coding gone into making this reader, and it's buggy as all hell, and there is no sorting it out. All I have managed to do is become sure that most texts really really suck at portraying humans, especially in an equality minded way, since they have drawn the boundaries on human to pretty much equate Straight White Male Middle-class Human and defined all the rest as Other and made them stereotypes. And that makes the SWM a limited stereotype too, because there's all these things they're Not Being. And then humans are chopped into these tiny pieces that are none of them an adequate portion of humanity, none of them a box big enough to actually live in. And then people try to fit them. Ideas of masculinity and femininity really fuck people up.
And you know what we can do about that?
Quite a lot of fuck all.
I mean, we can write better stories, but they are raindrops on a mountain. A stinky mountain. Stinky mountain continues to be there.
And there's measures of equality and representation by which things are just getting worse. It's creepy. Less women, less variety, messed up portrayals of disabled people as scroungers or victims, mostly scroungers, big messes!
Progress happens sometimes but I can't see how to make it happen.
tiny raindrops.
Also, when I say 'we can write better stories', I apparently don't mean me, because my stories do not come out better.
So, I seem to have constructed my life as the kind of low impact leisure VR that gives me the creeping horrors when I read about it.
I think I need a new story-of-my-life here.
Okay, so, now I get up and go to college. Again.
... oh bugger, I check my email and there's something about outstanding fees, to go with the letter that says to take my letter from the student loan place to the office to prove it exists. Only (a) email says to go to the office between 10 and 12, which I can only do by going in on a day I have no lessons, and (b) student loan place hasn't sent me a damn letter. They get around to it in their own sweet time. I sent them an application, they've sent me back my evidence, but did they sent me a letter yet? Did they heck. So that needs sorting on pain of Dire Consequences. Lovely.
See, all Dire Consequences if I Don't, no good consequences if I do.
My life is all push and no pull. Nothing I particularly want to do, just a bunch of stuff I'm avoiding.
Avoidy thoughts this morning were compare/contrasting two Rodney/John get stuck in VR fics. in one they do beautiful math together, in the other they surf and write VR. in one they know they're in there, in the other only Rodney knows. The math one is kind of awesome, the other one is the kind of hell that's disguised itself as a heaven. He doesn't know he's in VR, so he's just hanging out having fun, but he's having fun by chopping off all the bits of him that are actually John. And it's like when Buffy was in heaven being told all her friends are safe, everyone's still in danger but heaven keeps telling lies. That's just wrong. Plus, surfing? Kind of fun, but not what he chooses to spend very much time on at all. Trying to hand him an all ice cream diet just for the happy is kind of missing the point of happy. But the math one advances the frontiers of human knowledge, even if the humans in question are having trouble telling anyone outside about the discoveries. That's a better world.
Cesperanza's one where John dies and Rodney goes nuts trying to construct a VR version of him is another interesting one. Because in a lot of ways, that's not John/Rodney, that's Rodney/Rodney-hallucinating-John-into-a-holodeck, and Rodney knows it and totally freaks out at the idea of having original John only. So there's a happy ever after, but it's kind of deeply creepy in many ways. But in that one they're both virtual and interacting with the real world, doing useful work for Atlantis still, so that's kind of a bonus.
... the ethics of VR really shouldn't have much to do with my life. But all I do is sit around and muck around with computers. I just play stupid clicky games or read fic or, you know, ice cream stuff. In a box larger than a coffin but really pretty damn small. Hello my flat, stuffed with all this junk I can't throw away, with room for two chairs only because I bought more stacking boxes. So here I am in what I just defined as a lonely hell wearing heaven's face.
Usually I realise these things at three in the morning, not eleven.
but now I can go out, and go to college, and study, and advance the frontiers of human knowledge!
... except the more I study the less I feel my chosen area of study has to contribute to human knowledge. Like, okay, we've noticed, thanks, stop mentioning Freud and stick with the feminism and there's even something interesting to say, possibly, once. but we've said it. moving on now? now? now? ANYTIME NOW?
When I started studying English it was because I thought it was about people, in versions that stay still long enough to stare at them. Then I started thinking it was the programming language for people. And, okay, some truth in that, but there's thirty plus years of random coding gone into making this reader, and it's buggy as all hell, and there is no sorting it out. All I have managed to do is become sure that most texts really really suck at portraying humans, especially in an equality minded way, since they have drawn the boundaries on human to pretty much equate Straight White Male Middle-class Human and defined all the rest as Other and made them stereotypes. And that makes the SWM a limited stereotype too, because there's all these things they're Not Being. And then humans are chopped into these tiny pieces that are none of them an adequate portion of humanity, none of them a box big enough to actually live in. And then people try to fit them. Ideas of masculinity and femininity really fuck people up.
And you know what we can do about that?
Quite a lot of fuck all.
I mean, we can write better stories, but they are raindrops on a mountain. A stinky mountain. Stinky mountain continues to be there.
And there's measures of equality and representation by which things are just getting worse. It's creepy. Less women, less variety, messed up portrayals of disabled people as scroungers or victims, mostly scroungers, big messes!
Progress happens sometimes but I can't see how to make it happen.
tiny raindrops.
Also, when I say 'we can write better stories', I apparently don't mean me, because my stories do not come out better.
So, I seem to have constructed my life as the kind of low impact leisure VR that gives me the creeping horrors when I read about it.
I think I need a new story-of-my-life here.
Okay, so, now I get up and go to college. Again.
... oh bugger, I check my email and there's something about outstanding fees, to go with the letter that says to take my letter from the student loan place to the office to prove it exists. Only (a) email says to go to the office between 10 and 12, which I can only do by going in on a day I have no lessons, and (b) student loan place hasn't sent me a damn letter. They get around to it in their own sweet time. I sent them an application, they've sent me back my evidence, but did they sent me a letter yet? Did they heck. So that needs sorting on pain of Dire Consequences. Lovely.
See, all Dire Consequences if I Don't, no good consequences if I do.