I often laugh derisively at any suggestion that these things could be combined into a single role or project; for what pursuit can bring together such disparate fields as philosophy and computer programming, not to mention the others? It struck me today that maybe there is such a project: the design and implementation of a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), of which the current most popular example is World of Warcraft.

Clearly, since a MMORPG is a piece of software, it involves coding. But it also involves World Design–the overarching story and history of a fantastical place (a la The Silmarillion, my favorite book). Clearly creating such an immersive world involves a foray into philosophy (and probably theology, since worlds without magic or arcane technology are boring). Beyond that, what can provide more immersion than Tolkien’s strategy of language creation? Of course, histories of entire civilizations and languages need to be conveyed in as powerful and encompassing wording as possible, thus requiring a skilled writer. Finally, what is a venture into an unknown world without the appropriate stunning visual and audio design? The score would need to be more immense than any 2-hour movie.

Well, there it is! It doesn’t seem like anything important is missing. And it certainly explains my fascination with the concepts behind MMORPGs in the first place. Unfortunately, I don’t know that working for a MMO house would be fulfilling at all to me; curiously, I don’t know why. I certainly don’t think that a life spent to encourage the use of the imagination is wasted–Tolkien and Lewis are my heroes precisely for that reason. Maybe it’s just that my experience with MMORPG culture has made me doubt whether the kind of imagination encouraged is actually of any enduring value. I suppose that at the end of the day I do believe that imagination has a function–that of re-envisioning a broken and fractured reality–and I don’t know that World of Warcraft really inspires this, rather than a mindless grind for powerful virtual items that give one a sense of superiority over other players.

Maybe that’s the difference between The Silmarillion and World of Warcraft–since The Silmarillion is a story, it asks you to enter in and wander around by yourself, unlocking experiences with the imagination. Warcraft, on the other hand, is unavoidably a game, and one not of collaborative imagination as often as competitive un-imagination. (What I mean by unimagination is that many players purposefully de-mystify any imaginative elements in MMORPGs, reducing it to the underlying code systems, so that they might more easily “win” the game. My motivations in playing MMORPGs, on the other hand, are generally rather to have an immersive, imaginative experience). Perhaps there are ways to create a game like this; perhaps that is what real-life role-playing groups find attractive about their sessions (which frankly don’t appeal to me, for some reason); however, I doubt that, even given the possibility of designing such a game, that the result would be compelling to enough people to build a multi-million-dollar franchise on top of (which seems to be the point of most computer games).

But what do you think, O Reader? Should I go try and get hired by Blizzard? I haven’t said anything about the physical pursuits I enjoy (which are also many), or about any actual positive results of work for the poorer and more downtrodden in the world (who might not be able to afford my computer game). What is there to say about that? (But note that I’m not asking the question, “Was Tolkien wrong in writing his novels when he could have been helping poor children elsewhere, very materially?” since I take it for granted that the answer’s no.)

Basically, Standpoint is an online community organized around formulations of, and reasons given for, beliefs. The basic unit of Standpoint is a “claim”, or a proposition, towards which you can take a few attitudes, including belief, consideration, or “disbelief” (which is more complicated). You can create your own claims, believe ones others created, disagree with people, and in general try to have discussions using very short, disjointed, and atomic sentences. At least that’s the idea–in practice, people aren’t very good at keeping things short, atomic, or well-formed, so it gets interesting (and at times frustrating to the logician-philosopher inside me).

Anyway, I thought that making it to 1000 beliefs was a fun landmark in the short existence of Standpoint–if you want to check my profile out, go to jlipps.standpoint.com. Please do sign up, play around, add your beliefs and reasons, ask to be my friend, etc! Some new features should also be rolling out soon that will greatly enhance the Standpoint experience.

As the time approached, it became clear that much more work would be required than I thought. Building an online store is pretty rough, particularly when the API is complicated, uses lots of tools, any of which could break making it very hard to debug, and one is given no specifications at all for how it should work or what it should look like or what will even be in it. Moreover, since I don’t have a working PC at the moment, I was unable to test the design for IE as I was going along (and I didn’t want to in any case). I realized one night at about 1am that IE doesn’t support transparent PNG files (picture files), so all the cool little black-and-white auto-generated buttons you see in Firefox and Safari…well those were not-so-cool little black-and-white-and-neon-green buttons in IE. I tried a million hacks to get it to work, but to no avail with PHP-generated image code. And that was about 4 unplanned and unnecessary hours of wasted time.

So here’s the point: as soon as I realized that I would need to spend a lot of time on this, I went in to what I will call “consumed” mode. In other words, I decided that I would eat, drink, and not sleep coding this site until I was done. Of course, along with that decision came the loss of all vestiges of a healthy lifestyle…I was awake from 9 or 10 am until 5 am, sitting at my computer, not eating anything, like a little hunchback gnome typing away at keys. My right hand was and is completely fried–either tendonitis or something else render it a continual mass of dull pain. I switched over a year ago to using my mouse with my left hand, but it hasn’t really helped.

I realized throughout that, in consumed mode, I actually get a lot of stuff done! I mean, I didn’t read, go outside, make or play music, hang out with people, spend time thinking about life or real issues, or do any of the things that makes mine a well-rounded and satisfying existence…but I was a coding fiend. My work efficiency increased tenfold. It occurred to me how it must feel to be one of those people who really focuses on one single thing in life, and it was kind of cool. It made me wonder if that’s not a way I’m supposed to be…you see there’s something about my personality which makes it very easy to enter consumed mode when I first discover something new that I want to create or excel in. A sport, a class, a song, a book, a hobby, a writing project, anything… The initial moments are intense and productive, but then I quickly get bored or realize that it will actually take a lot of work, and I lose interest and move on to other things.

This habit has meant that I have had an extremely wide range of experiences, have tried many new things, and have the gear/paraphernalia for more hobbies/pursuits than anyone I know or have heard of. What it also means is that I tend not to (a) excel at things to the extend that I have the ability, and/or (b) finish projects that I start. On my computer right now are probably failed attempts at at least 5 novels, and twice as many sets of song lyrics. If it doesn’t happen in the first day, it doesn’t seem to happen at all. That’s typically the way my music writing goes–a blast of creativity, and then, if that spark doesn’t carry me through to completion…the song usually never gets fully written and I forget about it.

So, I have been trying to think differently and grow in my creativity by actually setting aside time to work diligently on songs or writings. I’m working on a song now, for instance, where for the first time I sat down with paper and pen, drew out staves, and worked on a melody line in standard musical nutation, over the course of a whole week. It’s giving me a lot of frustrations and when I sit down with a guitar to work on more of it, I’m always tempted to try something else that holds the promise of being a quick project. However, I’m trying to believe that by actually working on this song, it will be better, not worse, for the amount of time I put into it. We shall see.

I’m very wary, of course, about committing too much to one thing (i.e., being in consumed mode all the time). I mean, I very much feel the pain of not being able to say that I am passionate about one and only one thing. In fact, I felt that pain tonight very strongly, as I went climbing with a group of people who are all vastly more committed to the pursuit than I am. I felt like I very much wanted to commit myself to climbing to the same degree, so that I could do the things they were doing and have the ability to climb so many more routes and types of routes than I can now. But, I knew that if I made that decision, I would have to give up so many more things…and I just can’t bring myself to do that.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what is the most healthy for me. Some people are in consumed mode for work all the time, and others for a sport or a hobby. I can’t seem to want to live there for very long. What surprised me most of all, to tell the truth, was that I was able to force myself into it these last few days at all! It must say something about the type of work that I have that, when my paycheck is neither on the line (that I know of) nor overlarge, I’m still willing and able to pull 4 all-nighters in a row for a project. I wouldn’t have thought it possible in general, but especially for that length of time. Now the task is to re-enter life and to try and find a healthy balance. Finding this balance will be more on the forefront of my mind now, however, as I’ll maybe start to think if there any things I should let go in order to excel in other things I love more deeply. Honestly, I think the problem is that I love so many things to such a deep degree that that would be a nonsensical venture. I’ll be thinking about it, though, especially now that I know that spending a lot of time on something actually produces results–it’s an alien concept to my personality.

• Vision, Values, and Praxis for a Community of Faith

I’m not sure exactly how many songs I had then, but it was probably in the vicinity of 5,000. So even if I rated one song a second, it would have taken an hour and a half. What I decided to do, though, to be fair, was to listen to each song fully before rating it. If an average song is 3 minutes, we need to multiply that 1.5 hours by 180–270 hours! I was somewhat optimistic that this 270 hours would pass by quickly while I was working or what not.

I soon discovered that rating songs one-by-one in iTunes was a somewhat inefficient task, given that the only way to rate something was to go into iTunes and click on the little star for that particular song. Not a bad method if you’re already in iTunes, but if you are working on something else and would rather not have your workflow interrupted every 3 minutes, it’s less than optimal. So I wrote some software (iRateTunes) that let me rate songs with keystrokes, without going to iTunes.

(I also created a little app that showed me info about my iTunes library in the OS X status bar, including the number of songs left to be rated, and the total amount of time I’d spent listening to songs in iTunes. This was so I could monitor my progress)

Still, even with these tools, it was slow going. It turned out that the mental energy required to rate song after song was somewhat exhausting, so if I could get 100 done per day, that was good. Most days I got far fewer songs rated, and some not at all, depending on the intensity required by my work. An even more exhausting task was keeping a consistent standard with which to rate the songs. There are all sorts of options–should the ratings be relative to just the songs in my library? Or should it be relative to all the songs in pop culture? Should I try to keep a nice bell curve, so that there are about as many 1-star songs as 5-star songs, and far more 3-stars than either? In the end, I’m not sure I was super-consistent.

But anyway. Today, over a year after I began, my iTunesCount status bar reads: “6794/0 | 52.74” This means that I have 6794 songs in my library, and 0 are unrated! Finally! The 52.74 lets me know that the total amount of song air time with this iTunes library is 52.74 days (I created the library in July of 2004). That’s 1,265 hours! And I don’t let iTunes run while I’m not there listening.

Stats per rating category: 1-star: 443 songs (6.5%) 2-star: 801 songs (11.8%) 3-star: 2752 songs (40.5%) 4-star: 1836 songs (27%) 5-star: 962 songs (14.2%)

I finished recording around 6am (record time, but it felt even faster in my sleep-deprived state combined with the music-induced haze-drone) and took the rough cut on a walk to a nearby hill to see the sunrise and set the song free to God. I listened to it over and over again, noticing how I’d surprised myself by making it a little hopeful at the end, which I didn’t think I had in me. But listening to the song, I felt that it actually gave me the hope that I’d written into it, in a way that I couldn’t have got it directly. It felt transcendent.

I thought I’d link to this rough unmixed/unedited cut here. It’s stripped down, but to my mind still pulsing with the sorrow and raw emotion I put into it. I have no idea how it will impinge on your auditory senses, but I would definitely recommend listening with good headphones in a quiet place (or outdoors underneath grey skies). If you can, give it your full attention and let it take you where it wants to. I believe that this will clue you in to my current life experience much better and more directly than, say, by reading my last entry.

Since the song is so connected to what I was writing about in that entry, though, I named it after a phrase that I liked from it. So here it is:

A Storm Of My Own Devising (it’s in iTunes format [m4a] - you’ll need to right-click and Save Target As or whatever)

Cheers. I’m off to take a nap.

Podornot is a fun mash-up of the new podcasting trend (internet buzz, anyone?) and the old Internet time-wasting stand-by, Hot or not.

The idea is to generate a random audio experience; you never know what you’re going to get! But as you go through, you can rate the podcasts you hear, and maybe someday we will use this information to create lists of the hottest podcasts on the web. So go to the site and check it out!

Graphic/visual design right now done by me and Justin, hopefully to be improved in the near future.

Anyway, it’s fun to have an idea, to implement it rapidly, and to see it pretty much near completion in a short amount of time. Go visit!