Before class tomorrow, I want to write out in (virtual) print some of my thoughts on the reading, as much so that I can get them straight in my head as anything else. I won't bother trying to organize them into a coherent bundle now.

1. "The goal of human simulation in itself can be further broken down into a set of various subgoals - simulation of human psychological states, human behavior, motivations, and emotions" (182). I thought this was interesting re: our discussion about the desire to externalize mental processes. It's still not clear to me exactly where that desire comes from. Maybe it's related to our own personal struggles to direct our own personal mental processes, in order to kick self-destructive habits, for example. If we can create a program that thinks like a machine, doesn't that imply control over our own thoughts?

2. "The ideology [of commercials] puts the subject in the master position of someone who knows very well that she is being fooled, and generously lets herself be fooled." To me, that subject seems like an even bigger fool than the fool who is fooled unknowingly. Also, I'm not even sure that people today do know they're being fooled. Consider how many people think that advertising doesn't affect them.

3. This point is related to the reading tangentially, but it incorporates a lot of things I'm interested in. Manovich's description of the narrative of an RPG as one of "self-improvement" really struck me. It occurred to me that the power of this specific narrative might help explain the power of the corresponding game type (more than one person has told me that he never tried "World of Warcraft" because it's exactly the kind of game he'd like "too much"). Once a user starts playing a game like that, the fun never stops; actually, it gets more intense as time goes on. Because your "success" in the game is proportionally tied to the strength of your character (level 5, 8, 13, and so on), each moment feels better than all the previous ones and not as good as the ones to come (when your character will be even stronger). I'm going to start writing now of this idea in a "real-life" context. If you live your life with a narrative of self-improvement, each day seems better than the last, because you've managed to become a (marginally) better person. Even enormous setbacks (paralysis, say) can be seen as opportunities to build your character in ways you otherwise would not have. Narratives of money-making or thrill-seeking do not operate in this way. There are natural limits to how much you can be worth or how high you can get. Once you hit these limits, there's nowhere to go but down. On the other hand, there's no limit to how much you can improve yourself.

4. On a related note, I hope we discuss more in class the worth of different ways of organizing information. Devin, I think, said last class that a pure database isn't necessarily a good way to structure data. At least, I think he said that. Anyway, that's something I'm interested in, and something I feel Manovich doesn't address enough. I think that people naturally take to the structure of a narrative, for reasons of closure, catharsis, and so on. A database doesn't offer any of that. Indeed, far from enjoying web-surfing like Baudelaire's "flaneur," I think that people who spend a lot of time browsing get depressed by it. I know I do. There's no logical sequence of events, no coherence, no point. An article from the Onion entitled "Day Spent On Internet Comes Full Circle" fairly well captures how I feel about it.