New Week, New Post

Well, hello there! Glad to be making you a new post, dear reader! I sincerly hope your week went well and you accomplished or set a goal or two! It has definitely been a week of trials and tribulations in my camp, but, I continue on. I am re-starting my efforts to run my own Jellyfin server again for my house, so, there is that! The setup was much easier than previous efforts, but, we will see if it stays connected or stops a bunch this time. Hopefully, if it stops a lot, I will remember the most basic of Linux-ing: “Did you check the logs?”

The Race Day Report

If you have followed a bit of my shenanigans over the past couple weeks, I am in a diecast racing league, ICT-DRL. The last two weeks were tournament-style KOH racing. We had 3 competitors, but, excpected more. We ran for about two hours and tl:dr, I won! I raced with what I considered my best that day and out of 8 cars, I led the pack with three entrants: A black RX-7, a panda Hachiroku (Trueno Sprinter AE-86) and a Red Panda Hachiroku. The sprinters were clear victors in their heats and the RX-7 got in out of having second most points for two extra cars. Turns out, its a killer car! I didn’t get the throne seat for the Champ’s box, but, kicked out last weeks car. For the next series, which I will probably start modding next week, which I will get to later.

Now, for the Meat of the Article, Lyrics!

So, I listen to a sub-genre of a sub-genre of the metal genre (say that five times fast): Cyber Metal. This is a thematic variant of the Progressive Metal genre that still utilizes the heavily palm-muted, distorted, stacatto-laden guitars that many would call “Djent”, but, I digress. The themes are of, as you might guess, techno-futurism, post-humanism, tech apocalypse, etc. Today, I focus on some lyrics from a couple bands: The Interbeing and Cruentus (Poland).

Cruentus interested me because of their album art on 2010’s Terminal Code and I was enthralled. However, sometimes, I get hyper-focused on something and here we are, me typing away about it and hopefully, you, reading my thoughts. So far, two tracks have caught my attention for some lines in their songs: Contortion and Neuro City Agenda.

An excerpt from Neuro City Agenda:

I’m searching for Meta-tech solutions To isolate conception // Mental combustion Trigger of revolution For a binary defined soul

Meta-tech. I see words like this spewed everywhere in this genre and I must know the meaning! Another band that has some odd phrasing/words is The Interbeing.

A small excerpt from The Interbeing’s Borderline Human

Sideline splits my anatomy Combined with the duality

WHAT IS THIS SIDELINE?!? So far, I have taken this as a language barrier between non-English speaking musicians. Anyway.. here’s Contortion

I am left with semi-mechanized, post-organic emotions

Let us break these down!

According to Merriam-Webster, meta is defined as:

Showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category: cleverly self-referential

also:

Concerning or providing information about members of its own category

Before this rabbit hole of capitulation on this, the only way I had heard meta- besides the company was meta-gaming or the metagame

How Meta of You

To metagame, or “gaming the game”, uses outside knowledge of the game to accomplish its goals. Self-referencing, if you will. Magic: The Gathering metagame is “playing what everybody else is.”

So, if meta- is self-referencing, what would Meta-technology be? A 1980 paper by Henry Flynt gives us an early definition:

Meta-technology is a technology whose field of action is the determination of reality. It proceeds by unbelief – by decrease in credulity relative to the prevailing culture. It employs:

• Decreases in credulity relative to “the evaluational processing of experience”
• Contradictions possessing experiential content; and contradictions in socially secessary conceptual systems
• processes at the undisplaced, unreduced interface of awareness and objectivity

This was later shortened in his 1984 elaboration:

Meta-technology selects already recognized phenomena - often inter-personally comparable subjective phenomena like the perceptual illusions, the fact of dreaming, etc, – utilizing these phenomena in constructs that break the framework of objectivity

PHEW

That is heavy thinking, for sure. Redefining the framework of reality is a tough thought!

I Think I’m Getting Dizzy

Yo, me too. All this metatalk is making me want to close this post up! This is almost a whole essay by itself! How meta of ME. I also never really broke down the other two sets of lyrics that deep. Whoops. Here is my thoughts on the line from Contortion:

I never thought of machines, even semi-organic ones having emotions. Well, until I watched I, Robot. That changed my perspective on post-humanism quite a bit. Then, I learned about Magic: The Gathering’s Phyrexians, wherein being compleat is semi-mechanized, post-organic. The metal-to-flesh trope is one that is very intriguing to me. The way I see it, we could most definitely in some number of lifetimes have full-on human-cyborgs where this metal-to-flesh thing is more than just cyberpunk future.

This weeks pick

Well, I thought that I would have one prepared, but, I had a few things happen!

First, as I always do, I got busy after Race Day. I am travelling for Labor Day to go see family and hopefully come back refreshed. Secondly, I had the GrUB bug happen this week. If you havent heard, myself and a bunch of Arch users were affected by a new flag in Grub that made our systems not boot up, which forced us to nuke-and-pave or arch-chroot in and re-install grub. Not fun. Y’know what? That’s my pick for this week was the function of chrooting to fix things! Yes, its a cop out. No, I don’t feel bad.

What I did do!

Ah, yes! So, with my domain, I was able to get a free, albeit small, email! How exciting! If you have any questions, comments, things you’d like me to talk about, feel free to send me an email at:

thegoldendragon@goldenblogathon.com

Maybe in a couple weeks or so, if folks want to, I’ll set up a Ko-fi or something. Maybe I’ll learn how to set up a lightning node.

Anyway, be kind to one another. Be sure to do something for yourself. I’ll be relazing in Omaha.

One More Thing!

I would be interested in doing some kind of JB Community meetup in the Wichita metro area at some point in the future. I know that the JB Crew wouldn’t be there, but, they have spoke of community meetups here recently and it sounds like it could be a blast! Let me know if that is something you would be interested in and I can get down! Send me an email and all that jazz!