Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 45

"The Lovers". Effects of Big Aha.

I just finished a new painting yesterday, I call it "The Lovers."

"The Lovers," by Rudy Rucker, 24 x 20 inches, January, 2012, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

The idea is that they're in a nearly telepathic state, sharing a single thought balloon. And in the thought, they're merged like a yin-yang symbol. Her 1940s bob acquires an infinity symbol, and their lips form a pair of little hearts. An early Valentine's Day picture!

As always, you can learn more about my work on my Paintings page.

I got a very nice review for my autobio Nested Scrolls by Paul Witcover in the January, 2012, issue of Locus, a magazine about the SF & Fantasy field. Here's an abridged quote.

Rucker is a writer to whom that cliché "a genuine original" legitimately applies. Nested Scrolls is a pleasantly meandering, chattily digressive read. We hear the authentic voice of the beat, the hippie, the cyberpunk, the hacker, the bomb-throwing revolutionary iconoclast that, at heart, Rucker has always been and remains even at the age of 65—though, to judge by Nested Scrolls, he is the most pleasant and decent bomb-thrower one could ever hope to meet.

And now a few more thoughts on my notion of people achieving a supernal Big Aha mental state, probably via their physical body's quantum computations. Today's photos are older ones, from Point Reyes, San Francisco, and San Jose

People with Big Aha might develop some new augmented senses. What if you could see radio-waves, electrical charges, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, and/or neutrinos? Maybe these senses would let you see specters, archetypes, dreams, or give you teep into other people's selves.

One way to go here would be to have the new sense be a very highly developed sense of empathy which emerges, one might suppose, from a conscious awareness of quantum entanglement, or awareness of the overarching wave function that includes both you and me as subsystems.

Grokking, in other words.

I have dreams every night, what do they mean?

I think there's still a lot of interesting things to be done with dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they're really happening in a higher dimension?

Maybe with Big Aha I can go into your dreams.

With Big Aha we might see ghosts of dead people. Or we might see heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we're ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—maybe those are alien beings.

Finally, let's suppose that thinking with the Big Aha leads to levels at which myths and archetypes are real. God's art studio. Or, best of all, the giant's castle in the clouds atop the beanstalk.

A Big Aha adept learns to see quantum fluctuations and climbs them like steps, up past the clouds and finds the giant there. He steals the bag of gold and the magic harp, climbs down, cuts the stalk and kills the giant.

And then what? Maybe the universe unravels. The giant was God. He was keeping our whole act together.

Berlin #1.

After I gave my TEDx talk in Brussels, my wife and I went to Berlin for a week. I didn't take any journal notes, so I'm just going to paste in my best photos in a fairly random order, with whatever comments come to mind.

Here's a medieval painting of a wizard. I like this guy.

My mother grew up in Berlin, but I'd never been there before. It was an interesting city, really big, and with the palpable divide between the east and west halves. We stayed in a hotel in the Mitte area in the former east zone, right by an island in the river. On the island was this enormous museum complex, like four or five Met museums in one spot. It's the Museum island.

We were there at the end of November, with the Christmas thing ramping up. Dig these ornaments on a mirror-topped table in a fancy hotel with columns. Hard to tell where you are. I went into this hotel twice to use their luxurious bathroom.

I get a little tired of photographing the places in the Bay Area where I always go, and it's fun on a trip to have this big feast of new things to shoot. In this image, I'm into the old stone, the arches, and especially the wobbly reflection in the windows on the left.

One of the big landmarks in the former east zone is this giant TV tower. In principle you can ride an elevator to the top, but there's a wait, and I generally prefer being down in the streets. I liked getting this triangular roof corner in the foreground.

A certain stretch of the famous street Under Den Linden has the Humboldt University and bunch of amazing old buildings. The one here on the right is a memorial to the WW II dead, both the soldiers and the victims of the Holocaust.

This thing that looks like a temple is actually the pointed tip of one of the Bode museum on the Museum Island.

Like I said, our hotel, the Radisson Blu, was right across the Spree river from the Museum island, and on the island was a 19th century Protestant cathedral, the Berliner Dom. Great flocks of crows gathered on it every night, wheeling and cawing. Sylvia liked this statue of an angel on the Dom roof, blowing that long horn.

As the sun went down behind the Berliner Dom we'd get wild silhouettes.

We went inside the Dom of course. Amazing stained glass window, with ferny fractal designs and maybe the Kaiser's hat.

We went and saw a stretch of the Berlin Wall in this funky part of the east side called Friederichshain. Lots of younger people there, a very hip spot called the Michaelsberger hotel. A bunch of artists drew semi-permanent graffiti on the Berlin wall—each of them got about twenty meters worth to paint on—this was about twenty years ago, and the murals are still intact. Uncle Scrooge confronts a videogame warrior from a black hole.

Meanwhile back at the Humboldt University on Unter Den Linden we've got a marble scholar.

My cousin Christian von Bitter met us in Berlin—his father Conrad was the brother of my mother Marianne von Bitter. Christian drove us out and we saw the house where our parents lived with they were teenagers.

Christian steered me to our great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel's grave as well. We found it around dusk—it got dark there about 4:30, as Berlin is a far north as Toronto. We were a little worried about getting locked into the graveyard. I was glad to find Hegel's spot.

While we here at it, Christian led me to a portrait of my great-grandfather Rudolf von Bitter as well. He was a judge and when he was older he lived on the top floor of a giant courthouse built in 1910.

In the Bode museum on the Museum island we wandered through some Islamic art galleries, with very cool rugs. Note the perennial and ubiquitous Zhabotinsky scrolls.

All around the city were Christmas markets, some with giant Ferris wheels. Sylvia and I actually rode on this one. We sat in little gondola cars. We were in there with a ten year old girl and her parents. She said she wasn't scared, but we were, a little bit.

More pix to come…

How To Get BIG AHA. A Few More Brussels Pix.

So today I'm posting some more about The Big Aha, and I'll be using images from Brussels and some older images from Point Reyes. As I mentioned, the reason I was in Brussels was to give a TEDx talk.

And here, once again, is a YouTube video of that talk. I felt like it went really well. It's kind of a preview of the ideas on my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

Anway, back to my Big Aha rap. The idea is that I'm interested in some kind of quantum-computation-related type of higher conscoiusness that will put us into something like telepathic contact with the world around us.

And it's not that I expect this to actually happen anytime soon, it's that I'm looking for an idea for an SF novel. And, okay, yeah, I'm also, as always on the search for peace and enlightenment. So how do I get to the Big Aha?

One scenario is a Henry Kuttner-type flaky scientist/inventor coming up with an oddball physics device. He can stay in the smooth mind groove without having to collapse his consciousness. We don't get into any multiple universe angles, we play it straight, a person is expanding their mind by getting their particles into an unusual state.

And then—using entanglement and hylozoism—they can edit the physics of the objects around them. Talk to the objects, make them act weird. Wacky matter. You don't get high, your house gets high for you.

If you're a close student of my web activity, you'll noted that some of the material appeared on my guestposts on Charles Stross's blog recently. But I've re-edited them a bit, and they're illustrated here.

[John Shirley speaking at TEDx Brussels.]

The action of the Big Aha might be like a deeply intoned Om that reaches down to the attometer level. The aethereal vibration. The faint squeak of the Pigg Boson's curly tail. But it's not meditation and it's not drugs. It's physics.

I see a subcultural group growing up around the Big Aha. I'd rather not see them become stock market wizards like the guy in that movie Limitless. And I don't want them to be like acidheads. Some other kind of oddness. They have weird senses of humor.

My precise flimflam physics recipe for achieving the Big Aha is still not quite clear to me. I'll get there. And then in retrospect it'll be "obvious."

[Student beer party in Petit Sablon Square outside our hotel window. Even the women were peeing on the ground. Peter Bruegel would have loved it.]

So I keep asking myself how. How would it be to think in an entirely new way? What routes might take you there? Can you stop collapsing the states of your mind?

And—what powers do you get once you have the Big Aha?

One idea is that some higher being is the observer in the quantum interaction. The cosmos, a giant jellyfish, the Big Pig as I called it in Hylozoic, or simply the One. The One is also the observer in our lives. Many of us have problems with this notion because each of us is conditioned to think there is an "I" that is running "my" life.

I can teep you if we both merge into the One.

In conversation, my friend Nick Herbert made two related remarks about contact with the One, or with the universal wave function.

(1) The soul might perhaps be given a scientific meaning as one's immediate perception of one's coherent uncollapsed wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.

(2) Synchronicity might be evidence that we're all parts of some higher being. And the higher mind's ideas filter down into remote links.

It's definitely interesting to suppose that you can, by some physical change, get your brain into a state where you are in fact in a continuous-mode, uncollapsed all-is-one, highly entangled, super-empathy-possessing mind state.

So, again, how do we get there?

Certainly it's true that an advanced meditation technique might get you there—the accomplished masters are said to have siddhis, or special powers, which might be akin to direct access to the uncollapsed universal wave function. But for an SF novel, I want something with a little more bling to it.

How about a quantum computing gadget that fits into a small case attached to a head band, and the band has circuitry in it that entangles the gadget and some part of the brain. (One of my commenters, Brucecohenpdx, suggested this idea and said the device might use TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation, although I'm not sure I'll use such a potentially time-bound notion.)

The head band makes me think of the "brain toys" they used to advertise in the pages of magazines like Mondo 2000. What if someone made one of these that really works? In this vein, I'm thinking in terms of, why not, the old strobe approach—a brain toy headband that pulses lights into your eyes, getting your brain into an unusual state. Light itself is, after all, a type of quantum-computational input/output channel. The gizmo would use a sophisticated quantum computation to key the proper pulsation rates.

Or, kicking it up a level, maybe I use a biocomputation, to make it cool. A cunning cuttlefish pet sits on your shoulder, directing the pulsations. Maybe you don't have any old-school LED lights, and the cuttle pal simply flickers at a nice rate in the tips of two tentacles.

Even better, the tentacle tips are suckered right over your cornea till you achieve lift-off. Users might be called squidders.

And we might as well include music or a warbling hiss in the squiddy Big Aha stimulation biodevice. And maybe even smells and shudders. The more senses you tickle, the more vivid is a fictional scene.

The efficacy of a given Big Aha routine might wear out—a bit like a sex fantasy or one's joy in a particular song. And you have to keep tweaking the process to be able to get off. A media biz in new improved Big Aha trips.

The Big Aha. (More Brussels Pix.)

Today I'll post some more pictures of Brussels, with comments. And in the main text I'll put some notes towards a novel I'm trying to start. The book's title is probably The Big Aha. I've blogged some of this material before, but I've been polishing and recofinguring it, so here we go.

["Avis" means announcement. The message of the skull.]

A certain kind of advance could lead to a discontinuous jump in ordinary human's intelligence. I'll be calling this advance The Big Aha.

There's a tantalizing dream of AI workers that there may yet be some conceptual trick that we can use to make our machines really smart. The only path towards AI at present seems to be beating problems to death with evolving neural nets working on huge data-bases. We get incremental progress by making the computers faster, the neural nets more complex, and the data bases larger.

The SF dream is that there's some new and exciting angle, a different tech, a clear and simple insight, a Big Aha?

And—the kicker—the aha would work for human brains as well as for machines. I'm in fact thinking of us finding the Big Aha for human brains, and then transferring it down to the computers. Intelligence augmentation, then artificial intelligence. Not that the AI really matters that much if we can really kick our own minds into a higher gear.

So what's the Big Aha that I have in mind?

I'm liking the ideas having to do with quantum computation. At one point SF writers used radio as an all-purpose Maguffin, then it was radiation, then black holes, space warps, chaos theory, quarks…these days I'm liking quantum computation as a magic wand.

Every object supports a very intricate quantum computation. Think of a septillion or so particles hooked together by intricate forces, all of them vibrating. Clearly any object is a universal computer with a very rich range of readily accessible states.

[With John and Mickey Shirley in the Mort Subite (sudden death) bar in Brussels.]

Let me start thinking of my mind as a quantum computation. After all, my thoughts aren't at all like a page of symbols—they're blotches and rhythms and associations. Is there any communicable way to truly describe your real mental life?

Go back to the notion that your brain, like any physical object, is a quantum system. Quantum systems can evolve in two modes:

You're in the smooth mode when you gaze idly at a menu, and you collapse to the chunky mode when when you decide what to order.

[The mascot or logo of the Mort Subite bar, the name is also a type of beer. The image is bit like the Tarot card of the Fool.]

Introspection tells me that this distinction is accurate. I do feel the continuous and the discrete modes of thought within my mind. Although, admittedly, it may not be that the sensation really results from my mind being a quantum computer, this is an interesting model to use. Quantum effects could indeed be active in my brain. After all, the nerve cells have nanometer-sized structures, which are well within the range dominated by quantum mechanics.

Since I don't want a branching universe or a multiverse, we have various minds or objects whose wave functions are either spread out or collapsed, not at all in synchronization with each other.

I get a visual image of something like a macramé. A tapestry made up of state functions that I see as being at some moments like spread-out ribbons and at other moments like narrowed down threads.

Although you may be in some peculiar eigenstate, I might be spaced out and mellow. But then it may be that one of us changes. A dance of pulsating wave function ribbons.

Where does the Big Aha lead us? I want to imagine learning to program objects directly. And we'll call this hylotech, which relates to the word hylozoic that I talk about sometimes.

Hylo+zoic = matter+alive. I've been a hylozoist for many years now—believing that every object is at some level alive and conscious.

It feels good to accept that a rock or a chair is alive and conscious. And then we're not lonely fireflies of mind in a vast dark warehouse of dead machinery.

How do you really know, after all, what the internal life of a rock is like? The rock might be thought of as a fully ascended Zen master! Maybe it can in fact simulate my presence by using quantum computation and entanglement. But we don't need to burden the rock with a quirky personality.

Here's an edited and adapted passage where I discuss hylotech in my old book Saucer Wisdom.

Once hylotech takes hold, most of the objects in a person's home can talk a little bit, and each piece of furniture has the intelligence of, say, a dog. They get out of the way if you're about to bump them. They adjust their shape to whatever you say. They can change their patterns to match any design that you show them. But smart hylotech furniture has some drawbacks.

There's a story about how a photographer's family came home from a week's trip to find that the furniture has been bouncing around the house laughing and bathing its tissues in the studio's klieg lights, breaking all the dishes and running up a huge electrical bill.

The photographer steps into his harshly lit studio and catches his furniture going wild. A rambunctious over-amped armchair is howling like a coyote, the sofa is galumphing around in pursuit of a long-legged tea-table, the side-board is dancing a tarantella on shards of broken crockery, and six dining-chairs are clambering on top of each other to form a pyramid. He loads the rogue furniture into a truck and hauls it off to Goodwill.

In another home, a young woman's disgruntled suitor kicks one of her chairs across the room — and the chair runs back and breaks the guy's leg. A cat sharpens its claws on a couch, and the couch flings the tabby out the window.

Out for a walk with two of my fellow TEDx speakers. Programmer-entrepreneur Ken Haase and SF author David Brin.

More to come on The Big Aha!

Brussels Pix. Remarks on Blogging Ideas.

So I'm back from my stint on Charles Stross's blog. I started with a post on digital immortality and went on to do a total of eight. I signed up to guest blog mainly as a way to promote the newly published US edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. And of course it's an honor to work with Charlie.

[The awesome fountain in the Detroit airport.]

Today I'm going to be illustrating this post with photos I took during our trip to Brussels to give a TEDx talk in November. I'll say a few more remarks about blogging, and I'll bracket some notes on the trip beneath the individual pictures.

[There's nothing like an irregularly-shpaed, fresh Belgian waffle made on a heavy iron cooker, quite unlike the frozen-and-heated straight-edged things you normally see.]

While blogging on Charlie's Diary I posted some ideas about the novel I'm trying to get going, my working title is The Big Aha . Doing these early posts got me to polish my ideas and it makes the new project seem real.

[Chalk Space Invader icon on a restaurant's discarded daily-specials blackboard. They're everywhere!]

I get a heady, reckless feeling of working without a net when I post my ideas for novels that I'm still only vaguely planning to write. It's like I'm flying in the face of the "don't leave your game in the locker-room" adage. But I find it energizing, and a few of the comments are actually useful.

[Manikin Pis is one of the classic tourist attractions in Brussels. It's nothing much, just a little statue of a peeing boy, supposedly set up by a happy father who'd found his lost child pissing at a particular corner. I'm posed like a degernate here with a vernacular copy of the statue---the copy includes, of course, a Belgian waffle.]

It's not so much that readers' comments show me how to build further on my ideas, it's rather that they show me the objections to my ideas that will occur. And then I know to add material to disarm the objections from the start. And in doing this I end up clarifying my ideas.

[Lovely sunset down a long European street. I lived in Brussels for three months in the fall 2002 while I was working on my novel Frek and the Elixir and on my non-fiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I had a grant to lecture on the Philosophy of Computer Science.]

Charlie Stross says he gets about ten thousand unique visitors a day on his blog, Charlie's Diary, while Rudy's Blog gets about three thousand a day. Charlie's readers are very vocal, so if post on his blog it's a bit like posting on Boing Boing. You need to keep a level head lest you become dispirited by ignorant gibes from a tiny number of trolls.

[A cool spectrum of gloves on sale in the St. Hubert gallery in Brussels, one of the earliest shopping arcades.]

Trolls get angry about certain controversial ideas. Like the many universes theory, which isn't a notion that I care to use, at least not in The Big Aha. I'll say more about this issue in another post. It's not that I think the many universes idea is absolutely wrong, nor do I think it's inevitably right. I'm simply making an aesthetic decision not to use it just now.

Many trolls have a strong emotional investment in the idea of digital immorality. Idea for a humorous SF story: "A Day No Trolls Would Die," the title taking off on the title of the young adult classic about a farm boy and his beloved pigs. Digital immortality becomes available—but only for those obnox and obsessed trolls! So who's laughing now?

Anyway, most of the comments on Charlie's Diary were very friendly and helpful, and it was pleasant to have these daily interactions going on. So thanks to all those folks.

[A street performer blowing giant bubbles for tips. Symbol of the creative artist!]

When I post about my ideas for novels in progress, I have to fight back my atavistic fear of people "stealing" my "ideas." But by now, I know that they can't, anymore than someone could record an as-yet-nonexistent song on the basis of some scribbled notes by the singer. And really there aren't any completely new ideas in SF, any more than there are new chords or new situations. It's all in how you arrange them and trick them out.

[The St. Hubert shopping arcade itself. I love the shadow.]

This week I've been working on the names for my characters in The Big Aha, and on an outline. As I start this long ascent, I find a haiku by Issa (1763-1837) in a great book that Gerogia gave me for Xmas, The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

Great stuff.

Brussels 1. Remarks on Blogging Ideas.

So I'm back from my stint on Charles Stross's blog. I started with a post on digital immortality and went on to do a total of eight. I signed up to guest blog mainly as a way to promote the newly published US edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. And of course it's an honor to work with Charlie.

[The awesome fountain in the Detroit airport.]

Today I'm going to be illustrating this post with photos I took during our trip to Brussels to give a TEDx talk in November. I'll say a few more remarks about blogging, and I'll bracket some notes on the trip beneath the individual pictures.

[There's nothing like an irregularly-shpaed, fresh Belgian waffle made on a heavy iron cooker, quite unlike the frozen-and-heated straight-edged things you normally see.]

While blogging on Charlie's Diary I posted some ideas about the novel I'm trying to get going, my working title is The Big Aha . Doing these early posts got me to polish my ideas and it makes the new project seem real.

[Chalk Space Invader icon on a restaurant's discarded daily-specials blackboard. They're everywhere!]

I get a heady, reckless feeling of working without a net when I post my ideas for novels that I'm still only vaguely planning to write. It's like I'm flying in the face of the "don't leave your game in the locker-room" adage. But I find it energizing, and a few of the comments are actually useful.

[Manikin Pis is one of the classic tourist attractions in Brussels. It's nothing much, just a little statue of a peeing boy, supposedly set up by a happy father who'd found his lost child pissing at a particular corner. I'm posed like a degernate here with a vernacular copy of the statue---the copy includes, of course, a Belgian waffle.]

It's not so much that readers' comments show me how to build further on my ideas, it's rather that they show me the objections to my ideas that will occur. And then I know to add material to disarm the objections from the start. And in doing this I end up clarifying my ideas.

[Lovely sunset down a long European street. I lived in Brussels for three months in the fall 2002 while I was working on my novel Frek and the Elixir and on my non-fiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I had a grant to lecture on the Philosophy of Computer Science.]

Charlie Stross says he gets about ten thousand unique visitors a day on his blog, Charlie's Diary, while Rudy's Blog gets about three thousand a day. Charlie's readers are very vocal, so if post on his blog it's a bit like posting on Boing Boing. You need to keep a level head lest you become dispirited by ignorant gibes from a tiny number of trolls.

[A cool spectrum of gloves on sale in the St. Hubert gallery in Brussels, one of the earliest shopping arcades.]

Trolls get angry about certain controversial ideas. Like the many universes theory, which isn't a notion that I care to use, at least not in The Big Aha. I'll say more about this issue in another post. It's not that I think the many universes idea is absolutely wrong, nor do I think it's inevitably right. I'm simply making an aesthetic decision not to use it just now.

Many trolls have a strong emotional investment in the idea of digital immorality. Idea for a humorous SF story: "A Day No Trolls Would Die," the title taking off on the title of the young adult classic about a farm boy and his beloved pigs. Digital immortality becomes available—but only for those obnox and obsessed trolls! So who's laughing now?

Anyway, most of the comments on Charlie's Diary were very friendly and helpful, and it was pleasant to have these daily interactions going on. So thanks to all those folks.

[A street performer blowing giant bubbles for tips. Symbol of the creative artist!]

When I post about my ideas for novels in progress, I have to fight back my atavistic fear of people "stealing" my "ideas." But by now, I know that they can't, anymore than someone could record an as-yet-nonexistent song on the basis of some scribbled notes by the singer. And really there aren't any completely new ideas in SF, any more than there are new chords or new situations. It's all in how you arrange them and trick them out.

[The St. Hubert shopping arcade itself. I love the shadow.]

This week I've been working on the names for my characters in The Big Aha, and on an outline. As I start this long ascent, I find a haiku by Issa (1763-1837) in a great book that Gerogia gave me for Xmas, The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

Great stuff.

Moving to Charlie's Diary. One Last Post From Bruges.

Merry Christmas, ya'll! I'll be posting on Charles Stross's Charlie's Diary for a week or two. I'll probably put my first post on Charlie's Diary today.

Where am I? Inside which reflection?

Before I go off into Christmas and Charlie's Diary, here's a Rudy's Blog post with images of Bruges.

Cool wires on the electric train lines in Belgium. Ambient abstract art.

One of the big things in Bruges is the canals. At one time, the town was linked to the North Sea via a river which then silted up, leaving the town as a literal backwater. And, ah, that early winter sunset over a canal.

I lover pictures of reflections. Imagine walking down these old stone stairs into the wobbly mirrorworld inside the ancient canal.

The upside of being a backwater is that Bruges was spared the brutal and destructive waves of war and redevelopment that convulsed the second half of the 20th Century.

The have a local beer called the Zot, or the Fool. Love it. Zot is like sot.

Lace is still big there, although one suspects that these days a lot of the Belgian lace is made in China.

Cool old Gothic banister that looks like a dog.

I love the God's eye icons you see. The eye in a triangle in a set of rays. I think I described one of these in Hylozoic. The point at infinity.

Great old fountains with lion's mouths. I like the medieval notion of turning everything into an animal. It's all alive. Our future form of computation. No chips, no biotech, just quantum computing things.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

I'll be back on Rudy's Blog in early January. Until then I'll be posting on Charles Stross's Charlie's Diary . And if you want more Rudy, don't forget about my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

Journals: My Last Ramones Concert.

All this fall, here in 2011, I've been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I'm planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 – 2011, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 – 2011, will weigh in at about half a million words, really too long to appear as a print book. It's maybe five times as long as my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Certainly the autobio is more of a shapely book, but I am finding some interesting stuff in the old journals.

At this point I have rather a lot of unused photos that I wanted to post anyway, so I'm going to mix a couple of them in with journal excerpts from time to time. Today we have an excerpt written in 1994. My last Ramones concert. Even though you're dead, you're still my friends.

"On My Home Planet," by Rudy Rucker, 20 x 24 inches, November, 2011, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

It was the Ramones final tour, and on March 9, 1994, I went with my wife and children to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. My son, Rudy, Jr. got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving, which seemed quite unfair, as he'd often stagedived at punk concerts before and everyone had thought it was fine.

I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I like can't lift my arms, they're so tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I'd be near Joey, I'd yell "My Back Pages."

The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, though I didn't actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey. They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, "Cheap acid, cheap show," and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes "My Back Pages".

I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They're like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. "But I was so much older then,/ I'm younger than that now." Too true!

For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.'s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says "Charlie's Angels." Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she's still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong "My Back Pages" to frikkin' shreds.

It was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I've ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn't get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, "I'm busy with my glasses, so just this once I'm not going to reach up and push the guy," so of course he falls on my head. But I don't think it did any lasting damage.

[You can't really find a good video of the Ramones doing "My Back Pages," although there is what looks to be an amateur video of it, with fairly weak sound, shot in Buenos Aires in 1996. Note again that Joey isn't on stage for this number and C.J. is singing. But you have to imagine it about ten thousand times louder.]

At a Raiders Game

At the end of October, the historical novelist Celia Holland got Terry Bisson and me to accompany her and her son-in-law John to a Raiders game in Oakland.

In Celia's wonderful novels, such as Varanger, we often read about Vikings and warriors. Not such a far stretch from the types we found at the Raiders' stadium.

I'd been a little uneasy about going there. But I had enough sense to wear a black shirt. Just about everyone else was wearing a numbered Raiders football jersey, but they were all friendly enough to me. The very fact that I'd bought a ticket to the game meant that I was on the right side.

I was of course impressed by the Raiderette cheerleaders. They had a separate group for each side of the field, and now and then they'd come down near the endzones. I made a video of them too.

The area where Celia had gotten us tickets was in the bleachers near one of the endzones. It turned out this was in fact the most fan intense area of all—the so-called Black Hole. Guys were dressed like Death or like pirates. Two ladies in front of me were cheerfully sharing a plate of nachos, and when for some reason the public address announcer mentioned the Girl Scouts, one the women said to her friend, "Eff the Girl Scouts!" Her friend echoed the sentiment.

When the opposing team—the Minnesota Vikings—was on the point of scroing a touchdown against us, nearly everyone in the Black Hole stood up to scream curses and give our enemies the finger.

In the fourth quarter, security guards began coming down into the Black Hole to handcuff and lead away those of our company who were considered to be too drunk.

We lost the game, but at the end, there was a calm, mellow feeling of mutual empathy. Together we'd weathered the storm. Note that the "5150″ on this lady's jersey is by way of being a Raiders code number—it stands for the number of the California legal statute for "involundary psychiatric hold" under which people can be imprisoned if they're considered to have a mental disorder that makes them be a danger to themselves or to others. That's the Black Hole spirit!

A suprisingly fun and upbeat day.

More NESTED SCROLLS. Los Gatos TEDx Talk.

Oddly enough, I happened to give two TEDx talks in the last couple of months. In my most recent post, I embedded a link for the talk on "Beyond Machines: The Year 3000," which I gave in Brussels in November. Today I'm embedding a link for the TEDx talk, "Transreal in Los Gatos," which I gave in October.

The "Transreal in Los Gatos" talk is a more autobiographical than the Brussels talk, and discusses some of the stories and events that are in my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

Further promo for Nested Scrolls. The SF website io9 ran an excerpt called "The Death of Philip K. Dick and the Birth of Cyberpunk."of Nested Scrolls.

Cory Doctorow gave the book a mention in Boing Boing.

The Tor Books newsletter ran my description of the book under the title, "A Look Back at my Weird, Cool Life"

And SF writer John Scalzi's blog Whatever ran my account of the book as "The Big Idea: Rudy Rucker."