American Yak

One thing about that fateful year: more than two thirds of my life, I lived with that giant in the desert, never knowing his name, never knowing his crime, never knowing his goodness, never knowing the pleasure of his countenance, never knowing the gruesome horror of his face, his hands, his soul.  Never knowing his kindness.  Alone, behind me, all these years.

Put another way: I lived intimately alone with a giant in the desert, knowing everything about him, all this time.

This is a funny thing about giants.  We used to play with them in our neighborhood.  I mean, they weren’t strangers; quite the opposite.  They were, literally, everywhere.  This peculiar race, this peculiar species in pre-urban Utah, they were our friends and companions, we knew them throughout our lives.  The giants lived on the edges of the desert, among the forests and meadows, in the mountains, these large, natural people, the people of the rocks, trees, rivers, and earth.  These people carried huge burdens on their backs, and we knew them, and they knew us, and treated us kindly — with a few major exceptions, as I’ve already indicated — and all the world to them was an oasis, a playground, yet here they lived, played, and worked in the dry climate where I grew up.

It is a matter well established that few people come to Utah to learn about the giants.  Most people don’t even know about them.  And those of us who have lived here, sheltered for so long, don’t exactly share them with the outside world.  In fact, some of use are selfish and practiced at hiding them.  When strangers come to town we warn the giants.  ”Here _they_ come!”  And then a great rumbling noise, and thrashing, as the mother giants and father giants return to their nests.

As a child of the desert, I grew accustomed to this ascetic, though I have lived roughly half my life elsewhere.  Now I sit, typing in a worn-out house in Massachusetts, reflecting on what I have hidden, not only from the world, but from myself, what I’ve been running from; or, put another way, who has been hiding from me.  Now those yesteryears are past, and I intend to become acquanted with my invisible friend, the giant.  Perhaps I might even introduce the giants to you, to the world.  But let that unfold as a friend, the giant hiding beyond the unpartable river, would reveal himself.

Let that be later.

In some ways I’m very reticent to publish the following.  I don’t like wearing religion on my sleeve, so to speak.  I’ve always tried to walk more quietly, and just be kind to all, and live my life, I suppose as Jesus would have.  But something rose up inside me today, I suppose you could say something quietly snapped, though that would probably be an imperfect colloquialism.  Just the same, I can’t let it alone right now.

I love my Evangelical friends.  I have a few.  We’ve had awesome times together.  I bear no grudges in this corner of the world.  But always there is that lingering status afforded to us in general it seems by so many others in the Evangelical world.  It’s as if they would never say it to your face, but behind closed doors, in churches, in homes, the word comes up.

“Cult.”

So this is my form of snapping, listening to a radio program I frequent, listening to an Evangelical praise Mormons on one front, but then turn the other cheek (he says, tongue firmly planted in said cheek), you know, on his website.  Perhaps the individual in question is not responsible for the content of the website.  But it doesn’t matter.  The content is representative of a greater problem.  And it is a problem.

This was my statement, submitted to Summit Ministries.

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I’m disappointed that you list Mormons under the heading “cult” on your website.  It’s a sad commentary for the Evangelical Christian world in general, and you’ve lowered yourself likewise.  Why are Evangelicals so preoccupied with calling Mormons a “cult”?

Do you realize what it sounds like to our ears?  It’s become a disgusting epithet, tantamount to racially invective slurs.  It almost takes on the form of hate speech.  Would you call a Jew an anti-Christ?  Why would anyone do such a thing?

Set aside our feelings about the nature of God or Jesus.  Set aside the question about “which Jesus” we follow versus you.  Set aside differences in doctrine and whatnot.

You prop and recognize “the Mormons” on Hugh Hewitt’s show, saying “we’re grateful” for the defense and support we gave toward Proposition 8, but you offend us by listing your materials about Mormons under the heading “cult.”  There’s always this tone, a qualifier, some serious fear that if one doesn’t quickly counter just how wrong the Mormons are…then…then…?

Eye for an eye.

Please.  The higher law asks you to turn your cheek, to look beyond the beam, to walk another mile, to suffer the weary.  Instead, you afflict, make weary, make sad.

Jesus alone held the right to judge the hypocrite.  It is his call.  If the word “cult” is part of Jesus’s vernacular towards us Mormons for our beliefs, let it be thus.  I am not afraid to face my maker and ask his sympathies for whatever wrongs I may have made.  But this is not your role.

His apostles often made inappropriate judgments and He corrected them.  ”Forgive all men” was not just a statement about who is right and who is wrong.  It was perfect counsel about how to unite, despite differences, how to truly love.  Do you consider how the word “cult” makes a Mormon feel?  Are you able to consider this?  Do you know how we long to unite with you?

In some ways, Evangelicals and Mormons are more alike than some of us want to admit.  We’re like feuding Jews and Arabs, long lost brothers who have some differences that have grown over time.

I have tried to do my part to be responsible toward my Evangelical friends, to love them, and not make false charge.  I can have doctrinal differences with them, but

I

DO

NOT

LABEL.

This is your sin.

Please.  Do us a favor.  If you have a disagreement, reach out.  Find a less offensive term to call us.  Speak to us on our own level.  You might be surprised at our response.

Stop calling us a “cult.”  It’s disgraceful.

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Perty cool.  This weekend I was able to go and meet some of the founders of the gadgetry running this here blog.

I wouldn’t say I’m particularly tied to WordPress as a system, however, I’ve taken a lot of interest in BuddyPress lately, what with a pet project, Arx Poetica, which I’ve built on top of BuddyPress. There was a lot of buzz about BuddyPress at WordCamp NYC this year; it kind of seemed to be the hot topic.  What’s fun is I was able to meet the main developers behind it, Andy Peatling and John James Jacoby, and discuss some of the pros and cons of another strong area interest of mine, distributed social networks.  The so-called “social stack” is on the roadmap for BuddyPress, down the path a few iterations.  A developer in Poland, Wacław, and I have taken up a bit of the mantle on this front, aided by the help of former OpenID runners like Will Norris and Chris Messina.  Visit our endeavors here: http://disodev.org/ There isn’t much to show for it on the actual site, but we’ve done some work already on returning OpenID results using XRDS Simple.

And not be utterly excited about this:

http://www.thebutteredslice.com/wordpress/archives/119

Even just the raw, homemade version of Andy 3.0 served up is like fresh manna to the taste.

Yum.

“And when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.”

[Please note this post was in response to a question posted on my Facebook wall by a friend, so instead of raiding his Facebook wall, I decided to post my response here and direct him this way.]

Posted on Facebook: Just hit on the definition for what I believe will be the next major generational change in computers, the Internet, distributed social networks & visual machine language: organic.

Cu Mo’s Q: I am very interested in your thoughts. Please share more.

[And now my response...]

I’ve just been thinking that as the world of software and online interactivity grows beyond epic proportions that there is a greater need for very thorough abstraction, symbiosis, and visual/modular representation of all its parts.  Organic to me implies that the Internet, the beast that it is, will come to behave more like an organism, with coherent parts, ones that move and work together, like an animal or human.

I’m coming at this both in terms of development and as a participant.

We have several tools right now that approach something more organic — wysiwygs, CMS systems, blogging and social networking tools, etc.  There are all kinds of media creative tools, but everything is fragmented, and, unfortunately, as the Internet grows ever larger, it just all gets more complicated.  APIs crop up hither and thither, new languages, new tools, new standards, new open source tools, more identity and communication protocols.

But there is also a movement afoot right now to make data and identity more portable and standardized via distributed social networks and so-called microstreams.  (Both are terms, incidentally, which I think are inadequate for the longer projected needs of the Internet…still…)  Joseph Smarr, one of the advocates of this movement (called “DiSo” by some advocates), has called what’s coming a “sea change,” and I think he’s right.

(You can read a little bit about the movement here http://bit.ly/PcQHN and here http://diso-project.org/. If you want more sources, I can provide.)

Anyway, I see this online identity and data ubiquity as just the beginning.  The next stage in it all I believe will *require* something more organic, i.e., there will be no way to scale or really connect all this data without really powerful tools that can drill down or project up to all facets of the computer world.

This is a difficult concept to explain, and I’ve been working on a way of explaining it for a while.  I conceive a world where computer software and programs can be managed in extremely powerful ways, beyond our crude codified approaches.  Think of it as art rather than programming.  Or for some it will be more like puzzles or games.  Engineering and Math all have their place, and are obviously indispensible, but I personally believe the Internet will see its greatest maturity and potential when almost every aspect of computational power can be controlled or handled by a very visual — read ORGANIC — approach. Remember bits and bytes? Why can’t we flip them visually, or look at the stream of them float by, like DNA in synthesis. Or go up a level and see code flex like muscles, or examine the shell or structure of an operating system, like looking at the bones of a skeleton.

This is a start for explaining what’s in my brain. However, when I think of a really good way to convey the story developing in my head, I’ll be sure to drop you a line.  I’ll be posting it either here on my blog (so check back) or over at ArxPoetica.com, an artistic effort I’m spearheading with a few others.

Thanks for letting me ruminate on this for a bit!  Hope I didn’t overwhelm your wall, ha, ha!

Or just “ARX”: Animate Regenerative Expression.

So I created a new Google Code project for a crazy idea that’s been brewing in my head.  This post explains just a little bit of the idea, as does the Google Code project page.

Right now it’s still a little vague in my head, but I figure I should start somewhere.  Hopefully other developers can help refine it.

Distributed media streams based on existing machine language.

Update: (later today) I was just doing a search on micro formats to try and understand some things a little better, and lo and behold, my Google Code project showed up: http://bit.ly/w55uD

Fun that.

Yay!

Read the article here at Mormon Artist.

My sister also had an interview published.

Family affair: my brother took the photos for her article and mine.  Fun!

Kind of fun side note, the New York Times picked up on the magazine (just mentioning it in passing).

Hopefully the first of many more amusements.

I came up with this little diagram today, as an expression of some random things that have been floating around in my head.  Obviously, this is just fun, and probably a little in the clouds, but I like the simplicity of the expression of these ideas, and, actually, they seem to comprise something a little more down to earth than I previously thought they were, especially now that I’ve actually written it all down.  I’m calling it “Arxology” for fun, just because I’m in the process of creating a website with a similar name, and intend to perhaps use technology to help promote the arts in some way.  But here’s the diagram:Anyone familiar with object-oriented programming might notice something familiar in all this.  It’s basically a representation of the object-oriented programming model, only I’m applying it to more than just programming.  That is, in programming, we have 1) the object, 2) functions acting on the object and its data, and 3) the data/properties of the object itself.  (The three different shades of data represent different access privileges, i.e., private, protected, and public.)  Like any endeavor, 4) is the human element, meaning that nothing rises on its own accord without humanity or without God’s help and influence.

But then, consider the model in terms of art.  If the first item is the object itself, then this might be some peice of artwork, for example, sheetmusic to some favorite song.  The particular iteration of the object then, its member functions and data, might be expressed in another, more seemingly literal way.  A function (or methodology, craft, or manner of artistry) might represent how the sheetmusic is written, transcribed, sung, played, or changed: different functions to different ends, all operating on the same object.  The data (or medium of art—in this case music) could be the actual placement of notes and other factors such as time signature, key, staff numbers, clefs, and so forth.  Consider the following image (which I found via Google, but am adapting for my purposes):

Here we have the self-contained object.  The data is the notes, the staffs (two of them), with two clefs, and four measures in a round of music.  A method (function) for changing the notes might be, for example, transposition.  Here we might affect a change in all the data with one function, and move all the notes up or down the staff.  The data, a particular medium, namely transcribed, written music, is contained in a singular object, which is the song itself.  All contained within the object.

Kind of a fun concept, and not too far off from what object-oriented programming is all about in any case, except that it can be fun to think of in terms of literal expression, not to mention potential new media application.

Note to self.  Backup databases.  I just deleted my entire WordPress database.  Accidentally.  Fortunately, Google had a backup of the pages that I most wanted.

DUMB.