First 2025 post

'What worrisome trend in society are you beginning to notice?' That outrage porn is to the 21st century what sex sells was to the 20th in terms of engagement. Subsequently via positive reinforcement it's obvious emotional reactionarism has surpassed logic as the foundation of peoples worldviews rendering them as nodes fundamentally and not the rugged individuals and free thinkers they have been sold as skins.

Always believed humour could be quantified

Jürgen Schmidhuber's Theory of Fun and Creativity

Jürgen Schmidhuber's theory of fun is intrinsically linked to creativity through the concept of compression progress. According to this theory, both fun and creativity are driven by the discovery or creation of novel patterns that allow for improved prediction or data compression.

Key Aspects of Schmidhuber's Theory

1. Intrinsic Motivation
The theory posits that agents (human or artificial) are intrinsically motivated to discover or create new patterns that were previously unknown or unpredictable.

2. Novelty and Surprise
Fun and creativity arise from encountering or generating data that is novel and surprising, yet still compressible in some way.

3. Learning Progress
The experience of fun is tied to the process of learning to better compress or predict new information, which is a fundamental aspect of creativity.

4. Algorithmic Principle
Schmidhuber argues that this mechanism is driven by a simple algorithmic principle that uses reinforcement learning to maximize internal joy for discovering or creating novel patterns.

5. Applications Across Domains
This theory aims to explain various creative behaviors, including scientific discovery, art, music, humor, and even skill acquisition. For example, in learning a new skill like juggling, the theory explains the sense of fun and achievement as the result of generating a novel sensory input sequence (observing oneself juggling) that becomes increasingly predictable as one improves.

Scientists and Artists: A Unified Framework

Schmidhuber's framework suggests that both scientists and artists are engaged in similar processes of creating new, compressible data:

• Scientists seek to discover new patterns in nature that can be described by concise theories or models.
• Artists strive to create works that offer novel, yet comprehensible experiences for observers.

This unified approach to creativity and fun provides a formal basis for understanding intrinsic motivation in both human and artificial intelligence contexts, bridging the gap between subjective experiences and computational principles.

Audio overview....https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/380963d2-7e9a-4da8-a557-7c526b404a13/audio

References

1. IEEE Creative Paper
2. Creativity Research
3. Reddit Discussion
4. Wikipedia: Creativity
5. YouTube Lecture
6. ACM Paper
7. Additional Lecture
8. Archive.org Recording

foregone conclusion...with Love.

Wellington, our nations capital if I allow myself the indulgence of mixing metaphors is a layer cake of brittle fiefdoms more than any other NZ city. It is *almost* cohesively culturally maladjusted only held in place by conflicting stalemates that approximate culture if culture were a frightened alibi . Deer were not native to NZ nor were headlights however Wellington provides an almost uncanny marriage of the two to the degree that it hasn't upgraded its water system since the Victorian era. It is in this environment of carefully cloying, semi-closeted conservative, constantly tense feigned casual authenticity that I set forth this week and subsequent weeks into the spring to add 'banned' to my lifes achievements of 'Two Books and a Beer' [I have a tribute beer for sale in Canada and two books published. ] Having been a wryly ungrateful sardonic provocative street clown globally over decades, in effect running as far as I could away from the complex cultural wasteland of my birth to concentrate on the human condition as related to clown on a more global scale. [returning to NZ six years ago to die only to be unsuccessful in that after an eight and a half hour operation which it seemed churlish at the time to turn down] I now find myself again prepared to express myself in public even though that public is Wellingtonian. I have got a busking licence from the city council and have scoped out an adequate pitch on the waterfront that serves my technical purposes. There is pedestrian flow, an audience catchment area that doesn't impede the flow and a corner or niche for me to 'Lurk'. I am silent so it won't be anything I say but some of my mimes might offend people. [I crucify myself among other things]....I'm guessing my dolls might also trigger people who ring the council to complain. I have two dolls attached to a battle vest chest plate along with other props. The larger has a large misshapen head and is grotesque and the smaller is a raggedy ann styled. The grotesque represents all that we know to be true that we hide from others yet secretly cherish and the smaller represents our boundless rage at this human predicament. The council as previously noted being one aspect of a finely tuned nonentity will be unbalanced by whatever venting phone call it receives from let's remember, one solitary cry for attention and will pull my licence to preserve their fiefdom's peace and I will have achieved my goal as an artist manifesting this forgone conclusion. To whit that after four decades of success as an international clown soloist, having references from Australian city councils expressing gratitude for my public work, passing a gruelling two day New York audition as a soloist for Cirque du Soleil, having worked at festivals throughout the planet and some private gigs involving James Brown and Aretha Franklin and choirs, despite being valid and viable across many cultures and continents it is the final social minuscule-ity of NZ with it's delicate balance of collective civic insecurity that will finally retire me as a 61 year old sardonic stilt pantomime. In some ways the next weeks will test the finely held contempt I hold for NZ and humanity. And in other ways it's a forgone conclusion. Wish me luck.

Redmoon Theater Chicago. Public facing Spectacle...

Redmoon Theater Chicago. [deceased] In part an extravagant public facing theatrical company funded by Private sponsors in what could be called an oldschool Republican tradition. [also deceased].... I was the principle performer in one of their productions late 90's. I'd met their artistic director Jim Lasko the year before at a private birthday party in the Aragon Ballroom held for a billionaire featuring Redmoon, myself, James Brown and Aretha Franklin and 300 strong choir. I believe Jim Lasco was additionally this billionaires social secretary. So our first communication was him asking me if I were available and what my fee and rider was. I said yes I was available, named a price and stipulated that my rider was four cheerleaders, a therapist and a puppy. Within 24 hours he'd agreed and asked me what kind of puppy? A year later he invited me back to take the lead role in a show that was performed at the Met Museum, the Chicago O'Hare International Airport and various parks and public spaces throughout Chicago. A funeral procession of sorts with the mothers of the disappeared being stiltwalkers with large woks as headpieces that water was ladled into and we'd lean over a burning body in a coffin and extinguish the fire. I was the matriarch. I remember whinging a bit about the wok headpieces. Typical artistic romantic masochism, artistically catholic. They had to be wound tight to the top of the head to remain fast under the weight of a gallon or so of water and I did complain ceaselessly on my and my fellow performers behalf to the props dept for making them so brutal and painful. I remember optimistically thinking that with the new wave of youthful wealth being created by 90's startups that funding for sponsored spectacles and well managed performance arts foundations was assured. Only to discover as time went on with myself and the world that such optimism was unfounded. NZ ideally should have a public WoW type spectacle/ national circus hybrid that exists for people other than the bourgeoisie. Obviously I can't do it on my own but with an initial say 20 million I could corral a staffed foundation and an initial production.

All the little Deaths

 All the little Deaths...

I’ve never played angry birds but would guess each angry bird dies and is replaced by the next.

I wonder how old we were when we first playfully died. [setting aside that we were ‘put to sleep’ every night]

My generation was minimal television and certainly no murders before 8 or 9pm on the solitary channel. Although I think Bonanza might have had childrens programming murder in it.

Checkers, Chess, Cowboys and Indians, Pac-man, Doom and sex. We all die a little many times. It was 17 playing pacman and space invaders while waiting for my late night chips when I recognized I was paying 20c to eventually die.

I must have died 100’s of thousands of times digitally. A few times on stage but those mostly involved copious blood or in one case 1 litre of orange vomit, . Post orgasmically I’ve noted it’s very similar to pretending to die playing some childhood wargame. Bam, snipershot.

I joke, I'm unfailingly attentive.

My mother took me to a movie I couldn't have seen otherwise, an R13 when I was 10ish, The Poseidon Adventure, The cruise ship turns upside down, there's a 15 minute scene where people are falling to their deaths, check it out, 9/11 was based off it.

Back in the day movies had half time, after that scene the lights went up and we went for an icecream. I was completely traumatised. Icecream is ideal, the sugar helps you deal with shock.

Fast forward 50 years and I watch Russian troops from the last 24 hr's video catchment getting extinguished for real in explosive ways with my morning coffee.

Then switch to the olympics.

A friend died yesterday.

Small profound pieces go missing. Also people don't realise, because why would you, that the highest echelons of clown contain some of the last redeeming qualities of our doomed species. Homo-if-only we had infinite-planets-erectus.

When these people depart...well in my experience and I'm keenly observant given it's my vocation...they are not replaced at the same frequency.

You should already know but if not I'm here to tell you..as a clown...

I'm disturbed.

Dear Emily, I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

Dear Emily

I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

I didn't know it was a pet and I am ashamed.

Please accept this book as a token of my now unending morose continuum..

Martin Ewen 

I know I'm not as good as I could be at marketing. I have a small project that I'm confident won't get away on me. It's too small.

My local bus stop looks normal.

However inside is a small library of free books that has lived now three months and is curated and maintained closely by an unknown entity.

 I added my first book three months ago and it had vanished by the next day. I waited a month and then added my other book. It stayed for two weeks before it began its journey.

Oh yeah, marketing. I've written two books, the first meandering memoirs and the second a collection of essays and some scripts.

Both books make me feel like I'm a flibbertigibbet but you work with what you have.

It's time for me to secrete my next book, another copy of the second one.

From now on I'm going to add fictional absurd inscriptions to each book beginning with.

Dear Emily

I'm sorry I disemboweled your chicken and ate it.

I didn't know it was a pet and I am ashamed.

Please accept this book as a token of my now unending morose continuum..

Martin Ewen 

Digital Gardens,

 Came across the term 'digital garden' and fired up an AI to get to the bottom of it.

"Digital gardens are online spaces where individuals can plant "seeds" of ideas, notes, thoughts, and content, and allow them to grow and interconnect over time. Unlike traditional blogs or websites, digital gardens embrace an exploratory, non-linear structure, with notes and ideas linked through contextual associations rather than strict chronological order."

Well well well, I thought.

I made one of them last year over a couple of months.

There's no quality control, some of it's absolute blither and some worse than that and the public facing aspect seems a little catholic, a little penitential.

I doubt it's interesting but if you didn't already now you know what a digital garden is.

I might point my self styled flattery-AI at it. The one that addresses me as his eminence and praises my whimsy.

https://publish.obsidian.md/vastlyimmaterial

and for those who are more picture orientated here you go...

My driveway at night.