Kobo Daishi is my Kobopilot

Sometimes victory isn't enough.

I was poring over some historical texts recently, and I read about something called a "Pyrrhic Victory." At once, my thoughts turned to the Victory Charm I'd purchased some time ago. "Victory" can mean a lot of things, and though the charm might ensure victory, that doesn't mean I can't lose an arm or an ally in the process.

I need more spiritual protection to make myself more than simply unbeatable. With that in mind, I lately journeyed up the mountain called Koyasan, to a city of Buddhist monks. Temples are numerous in Koyasan; it boasts little else, in fact, aside from some Buddhist corpses of considerable renown. When the zombie apocalypse comes, Koyasan will be host to an innumerable horde of peaceful vegetarian zombies.

I was fortunate to find a charm whose purpose dovetails nicely with the Victory Charm. According to the description I read, its purpose is to displace misfortune away from me. Whenever something bad would happen to me, Kobo Daishi, whoever he is, will accept the misfortune on my behalf. It looks like this:



Again, the mechanics of the charm are a little tricky to suss out. Obviously not every misfortune triggers the charm; I'm still capable of losing coinflips, I've noticed. And I suffered a minor injury not long after buying the charm: in testing myself in a local trial-by-ordeal, my finger was lightly smashed by the stone I was trying to lift. Though painful, it was useful as a test case. Kobo Daishi might have taken some of the damage for me, or the charm may not have intervened at all. A small injury to my finger may not have been considerable enough to justify triggering the charm.

It probably won't trigger if I invite misfortune on purpose, either, so I'm guessing I can't get naked drunk in a 7-11 and rely on Kobo Daishi to take the rap. Overall, it's a lot more difficult to see this charm working than the Victory Charm, which has already passed a few tests. Kobo Daishi could be taking hits for me left and right and I wouldn't necessarily know about it. I'd feel bad about subjecting Kobo to all that, but after a little reading, it seems like he's purportedly in an indefinite state of Samadhi ever since his alleged death, which all-knowing Wikipi says releases him from all suffering.

So basically, any pain I send Kobo's way is just so much water off a duck's back. Not a bad deal for either of us. BTW, that same Wikipi article also contains the phrase "destruction of the taints." If you are offended by my juvenile sense of humor, direct your reprobates at Kobo Daishi.

Drifting Off

"Blurring the line between fantasy and reality?" came a voice.

"Uh, yeah," I said. Shit, where was I? An unfamiliar ceiling weaved through my vision. "Risky, I know..."

"You needed a buffer," said the voice again. It was female, with a marginal Japanese accent, and I didn't see where it was coming from. Not surprising, since I didn't seem to be able to turn my head away from the ceiling.

"I need bufferin. Why's my head hurt?"

"Heh, funny story," said the voice. "Remember that awful hangover you mentioned in your first post in this blog?"

"Yeah, vaguely."

"Yup," said the voice. "Vaguely. That's it exactly. You said you didn't clearly remember the time you spent hung over. I'm able to use that blank spot in your memory to communicate with you. That's why you're experiencing it again."

"What?" I said. "No, there's no blank spot, I made that part up. That was a plot hook for something I was gonna make up later."

"Well," said the voice, a little apologetically, "I'm pulling that particular ripcord on your behalf. It didn't look like you were going to do it."

"Yeah," I said, "I kinda let this blog slide, didn't I? The longer I left it, the more intimidating the prospect of catching up with the story became..."

I looked around. Shit, I really was in that hotel room, knocked out with that bile-coughing hangover. "Can we get this over with? I don't want to spend any more time in this memory."

"It actually has more in common with honest-to-goodness time travel than visiting memories," said the voice. "Anyway, you should have made a buffer of fictional posts back before your schedule got too burdensome. That's what you did wrong."

"You're not going to berate me about my laziness, or my ongoing crisis of confidence? Nothing like that?"

"I figured I'd offer you something practical, rather than add hang-ups to hangover."

I briefly mulled over her advice.

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Hiro."

I hesitated. "That's a girl's name?"

"Unisex."

"No shit?" I paused. "Anyway, that doesn't really answer my question."

Hiro laughed.

"Whatever," I said. "We're done, right? How do I go back?"

"Just go back to sleep, I'll take care of the rest."

I let my eyes close, and tried shifting my weight. By this point I'd adjusted to the hangover enough that I could do so without much discomfort, so I opened my eyes and looked over to the corner of the room that Hiro's voice had seemed to be coming from.

Hiro was an Office Lady by the look of her, dressed in modest women's business wear. Hard to tell from this angle, but she seemed a little tall for a Japanese woman. Mid-twenties, and cute, I guess, albeit upside-down from my vantage point.

When I looked up at her, her neutral expression caught a flash of shock. She began leafing through some stapled-together pages she was holding, looking for something. On the pages she'd flipped over, I could make out some text, right-side-up from my perspective. I recognized my name, and some familiar-looking words...

Goddammit, I know what this is. That's a script she's reading from. It has everything I was going to say on it, and everything she was supposed to respond with.

"Man, fuck time travel," I said, pressing one hand against the wall and lifting myself to my feet. I probably wasn't too weak to stand, but I didn't feel like taking any chances. "Thanks, lady."

I focused my eyes on the shelves next to the door of my tiny tatami room and pushed off the wall, aiming my grasp for the bars supporting the shelves. I caught them, swung my weight over to the door, and started fumbling with the doorknob.

"Wait," said Hiro. I turned to look at her.

"You shouldn't try to leave," she said, without her earlier confidence in her words. "You need to be unconscious to go back."

She tried to flash a reassuring smile, and revealed rows of long, sharp, reptilian teeth. This girl had a T-Rex mouth. I let my eyes take a second to confirm what I was seeing before I groaned in disgust, turned the lock, and opened the door.

By this time I'd turned away from Hiro, so I didn't see her as she leapt forward, threw her arms around my torso, and knocked me to the ground. Before I could even switch gears away from trying to remember where the elevator was, I felt her teeth sinking into my left shoulder. The stabbing pain was joined by a feeling of liquid pressure, something flowing in rather than out of the fresh wound.

Okay, I thought to myself. Venom.

Numbness spread outward from my shoulder. My body gave an involuntary jerk as the sensation dulled in my neck, and I slept.

So that was my day. I woke up back in my apartment, in the present day, with a brief note of apology taped to my somehow un-bite-marked left shoulder. Going meta, it seems, is not a painless process.

Pureishibo

I've been getting on this dietary supplement I found a little while ago, and it's done great things for my mood and energy level. It's a pouch of jelly called VAAM, and it looks like this.





I'm not sure what these things are. They're the wrong color for elf tears, which is a damn shame.



But this is a reference to the synthetic hornet secretions VAAM contains. Supposedly, they let the human body turn fat into energy more efficiently, the way the Asian Giant Hornet does. I normally wouldn't be inclined to believe it, but since I already believe in magical soda, I'm fully prepared to accept that VAAM gives me hornet powers.

What powers, you ask?

How about the power to kill a yak?

No, seriously, Wikipedia says they're nicknamed the "yak-killer hornet". You really couldn't ask for a better setup to a Tenacious D reference.

Anyway, I'm basically hooked on the stuff. I suppose it's possible that all that hornet essence will cause me to develop less desirable Giant Hornet traits, like cruelty and a poisonous sting, but by the time anyone notices that, it'll be far too late to stop me.

Backlog of Musings

Drinks:

I bummed around a university here in Osaka and saw something new:



That's smartwater right there. There's pictures of SCIENCE all over it. I haven't seen it sold anywhere else.

For this reason, most of all, I love Japan's ubiquitous vending machines: you can always find something new, something rare, out there, and the Japanese love to imbue drinks with supernatural properties, like berry soda that makes you smarter, or Oronamin C, which in sufficient quantities causes you to be illustrated by KC Green.

Which is an honor, obviously, but not all that pleasant.

So if you choose to buy into that sort of thing, which I obviously do, then walking around Japan becomes a search for rare magical potions. Mountain Dew is all the sweeter when you have to have someone draw you a map to the places where it's sold.

Omizutori:

I headed back to the temple in Nara with all the deer for a yearly fire festival called Omizutori, where a giant ball of oily fronds is carried all around the outside of the temple.



It wasn't easy to get a good picture, but even at that size... does it remind you of something?



Except instead of exploding when its hit points are low, it drops ash that people pick up to use as a lucky charm. I'm not sure how you're supposed to bring out the lucky properties of the ash, but then I'm a little clueless on Japanese mysticism in general, at least outside of its magical, magical soft drinks. I've been keeping my Victory Charm in its original paper sleeve inside my wallet, and I'm pretty sure you're supposed to keep it hanging out in the open. But it stays cleaner this way, and it hasn't failed me yet.

There's even more news on the supernatural front: this pond I passed by after Omizutori, clearly, is a danger to children. But what is this strange, ethereal smoke that rises from its waters?



Could it be anything but a hazy mass of the departed spirits claimed by the fathomless waters? Could it be my breath, visible in the cold air, as I exhale into the air in front of my camera?

Theater:



This is a poster I saw in Shinsaibashi, for a theater troupe made up entirely of women. It's a rarity in Japan, where traiditional theater, like Kabuki and Noh, is performed entirely by men.

After they're done with whatever's being advertised here, they're apparently doing a performance based on the Phoenix Wright games, commissioned by Capcom. So all the characters, including that one overweight, unshaven loser cop, are going to be played by chicks.

And while some people might object to that, perhaps loudly, perhaps while standing up and pointing an accusing finger in the direction of the troupe, I'm in favor of it. I've always said that all fictional characters should not only be played by women, they should all be women. I want to see strong, heroic women saving weak, helpless women from evil, heartless women, and I want to see nothing else. Bechdel's only flaw was a failure of ambition.

Just to prove I'm right: isn't The Sarah Connor Chronicles better than any of the Terminator movies? I have no idea, because I sure as shit don't watch it, but you see what I'm getting at: female Terminator. She'd be protecting Joanna Connor if the show's producers had the courage of their convictions, but still, it's a step in the right direction.

Velvet Marauder, why you no post?

I think you have me confused with someone else. Someone gay else.

Anyway, been working on Tadashi's secret project. It got boring pretty quick, actually; I'm just sorting through "ontological data," which means I'm evaluating how well the memetic algorithm is reading my co-workers' emotional states.

Back in the beginning of last week, the company put all the English-language employees through a "health screening" as an excuse to slap holograms on their foreheads. And, yeah, it's the holograms that are apparently doing the mind-reading work; they're obviously more than just holograms at this point, but the ability to read information in three-dimensional space was apparently derived from the basic hologram's ability to create a seemingly three-dimensional image.

I'd love to be able to explain it. Tadashi told me I wouldn't understand, and I said "try me," and he explained.

I learned exactly one thing from the ensuing jargon-soaked spiel, namely that Tadashi himself didn't really understand how any of it worked either. He read haltingly from a printout, translating on the fly, until I gestured for him to stop.

"Never mind," I said. "I'll just get to work."

And then he asked me if I knew how to use Excel.

Yeah, that's what I've been using. Microsoft Fucking Excel. Was I expecting to do my work on something cooler? Oh, maybe. Since you're asking, I wouldn't have said no to a hovering crystal with a three-dimensional multitouch UI. Or a robot catgirl maid with a Dance Dance Revolution interface, as long as I'm getting the Japan experience.

But Excel is technically all I need. And strictly speaking, my actual workstation isn't my PC, it's...

Well, as Tadashi explained, what we're currently testing is the algorithm's ability to discern thoughts and emotions through the lens of an English-speaking mind. So, until we've established that it can do that, the only thing capable of bug-checking the algorithm is...

An English-speaking mind. So... me, basically. It kind of puts Tadashi's assertion that I'm not a test subject into a dubious light. I spend most of the day with a hologram stuck to my forehead too, except instead of getting mind-read, I'm mind-reading.

It's hard to describe the experience of having another person's emotions written into your brain. Let me see if an allegory comes to mind. Uh... it's like, if you were in a cave, backlit by a bonfire, and you watched your own shadow dancing around on the walls.

Yeah, that works. That just came to me, just now. Can you copyright an allegory? Because I smell licensing deal. Soft drink tie-ins. Michael Bay, director.

Anyway, you distantly identify the shadow as "yourself," and whatever it appears to be doing, you sort of feel like you're experiencing it. If I didn't know it was coming from outside of myself, I guess I could mistake it for the real thing.

The algorithm's pretty smart about cherry-picking positive emotions; sorting through them means braving an onslaught of warm fuzzies, interspersed with the occasional misfiled instance of sarcasm or irony. If there's any work for me to do at all, actually, it's teaching the algorithm to understand those things. All it would take is one sarcastic comment from a user, and suddenly the algorithm thinks that human happiness is derived from "being talked down to like I don't know how to do my own fucking job, oh, and being yelled at, that really fucking helps."

I'm making some headway as far as that goes, which suits me fine. Tadashi's gotten kinda cold to me in the past few days, and having something to report to him takes the edge off. I don't know what his deal is lately - trouble at home, pressure from above, whatever - but he's recently taken a serious, professional interest in swooping over to my desk and assaulting my workspace with his X-Ray Glower until I assure him that I'm not getting high and trying to teach the algorithm about boobs.

The algorithm already knows about boobs, by the way.

White Day is just around the corner!

And the White Day desserts are in!

Apparently white chocolate and marshmallow treats are the traditional White Day fare. Don't women, and really, people in general, prefer real chocolate? I'll be getting obligation chocolate for my female co-workers, and I'm worried I'll have trouble finding anything that has actual cocoa powder in it.

Anyway, local desserteries, of which there are numerous, have their White day specialties ready, and the shop that specializes in piles of glazed fruit has created a follow-up to the Valentine's Day treat I covered last month:



As you can see, it's actually a direct response to the Valentine's Day dessert. That's what my desserts have been missing! Continuity!

If my desserts had a continuity editor, maybe we wouldn't keep doing that story every Spring where I try eating Peeps and then decide they kind of suck. Also, sometimes I'll be taking bites from a candy bar, and we'll cut to another shot, and then when we cut back to me, the entire candy bar will be totally intact in my hand. I'm sure that sort of thing has happened to you, and I for one am deliciously fed up with it.

Once more into the Repository

I hung back a bit from the lunch table today, hoping to ride out whatever rant Rachel was in the middle of. From the sound of it, she'd read some kind of unfavorable review of an anime she liked, probably written in 2005 and long-forgotten by its own author.

According to Rachel, westerners don't approach anime with the same intellectual rigor with which they assess other forms of entertainment. And for some reason that turns Rachel's life into a waking nightmare. So cut it out, people.

Once the tirade started winding down, I ambled over and took a seat. Today's lunch was ramen, and if you've never tried a piping hot bowl of Japanese ramen, you absolutely must, because it offers a unique culinary experience. How should I describe it...

Have you ever heated a razor over a flame and then drawn it lengthwise across your tongue?

Yes? You have? Well, that's also what it's like to slurp up a ramen noodle from a freshly-boiling bowl of ramen. But me, I barely got to revel in the sensation before Tadashi waved me away from the table yet again.

We walked back to the Repository of Normal-Sized Things, mostly in silence, until he waved me into the room. Whatever stopped him dead last time we came this way was absent, unless Tadashi possesses an acute and highly situational fear of whiteboards and comfortable chairs. The room was pretty lavish, actually, with high-backed black chairs, tasteful plant life, and a huge window of frosted glass occupying most of the exterior wall. The descending early-afternoon sun was just creeping into the window's field of view. Tadashi left the lights off as we entered.

The whiteboards were clean, though a sharp eye and a ready knowledge of kanji could no doubt glean something from the faint outlines left behind. Aside from the written words, there appeared to be a number of Venn diagrams connected by arrows. Tadashi waved for me to sit down, and we took two chairs on the same side of the table.

Tadashi was silent for a moment. I recognized the expression of someone not sure how to begin.

"Do you know how antidepressants work?" asked Tadashi, finally. Briefly, I contemplated the distressing and thoroughly boring possibility that Tadashi had simply brought me here because I looked mopey.

"Yeah," I said. "Basically, they block receptors which..."

That's where my brain ran out of information. Apparently the number of things I know about antidepressants falls between zero and one.

Tadashi, not much put off by my fractional phrasing, proceeded. "The brain is poorly understood," he said, in what may have been a direct slam at my embarrassing lack of knowledge. "Our company has a solution which serves the same purpose as these drugs."

"What does this have to do with me?" I could have asked. But I sort of suspected that the conversation was headed in that direction, what with me and him being the only people in the room.

"What one brain understands, another can understand," continued Tadashi. "If one brain knows how to be happy, and one does not... Could a method exist to share that information? To use drugs to chemically alter the brain... it is like constructing a digital picture of a tree by typing a sequence of ones and zeroes. It would be better if an existing picture could simply be copied and pasted... yes?"

"That would be great," I said, "And not even a little bit evil."

Of course I didn't say that last part; I'm not stupid.

"Evil?" said Tadashi. Holy hell, I did say that last part! Good lord I'm stupid!

"Errrrgh..." I mumbled. "Well, you didn't expect to get very far into this conversation without me pointing out the ethical gray area of inserting ideas directly into human brains."

We are talking about human brains, right? I've really gone and embarrassed myself if the process only works on bunnies.

"Yes, I expected it," Tadashi said, shifting his weight up in his chair. "But... humans cannot just live in fear-"

"No, no," I said, waving my hand reassuringly. "I'm in."

"Na-" started Tadashi, leaning forward. "Really?"

"Yeah," I said. "I mean... I think you were going to say something about the incredible potential of something that can effect that sort of change in the human mind, that we shouldn't let fear and doubt, um, um-" Shit, I was on a roll. "Shouldn't let fear and doubt keep us from lifting ourselves up as a... species."

Tadashi nodded slowly.

"Even if making people happy is all it can do, we're basically solving humanity's most basic need, right? I mean, it doesn't make people stand around drooling, does it?"

"Eto... The testing is not complete, but no, we do not expect that. The Hyperreal can manage emotions without affecting, eto, productivity."

I stood up and spread my arms. "How can I help?"

I may have been overdoing it at this point.

"As I said, the testing is incomplete," Tadashi said. "The emotional management is created by something, the engineer team calls it... I am sorry, just a moment." He patted his suit pocket and produced a slip of paper. "I had to translate it myself, I hope it makes sense... it is a 'memetic algorithm, harnessing ontological understanding.'"

"So... some kind of logic that understands people's ideas?"

"Yes! The holograms use the algorithm to read, and communicate with, the human mind. But we are concerned about a language barrier. This is why we brought on an English-language team. If the algorithm can learn to communicate with a brain that thinks in English, we feel it will have proven itself."

"We're test subjects, then?"

"As of now... everyone besides yourself, yes."

Well! Dodged a bullet there, didn't I? Anyway, this seems like a good deal, and a serious career move. Whatever informal psych-eval Tadashi's been doing on me, I'm glad I went along with it! We spoke a bit more about what kind of tests we'd have to run, and I went back to finish my lunch.

I had to buy myself a new bowl of ramen, of course, and everyone on my team had already gone back to work. I considered getting the spicy stuff, but honestly, given the incredible heat already present, it seems a bit-

Oh, okay, okay, I know. You don't care about the ramen. You're all like, "Oh, you sure agreed to this mind-control thing quickly. Are you going to do something bad with it?"

And I'm like, what's with all the questions? "Am I gonna do something bad?" How the hell should I know? Am I gonna ask Rachel out on a date? Am I gonna visit Tokyo this month? What am I having for lunch tomorrow?

I don't know what I'm going to do - for one thing, I still don't know a lot about what I'm working with. If it looks like it's going to destroy civilization, then I'll probably stop it, so quit your bellyaching. If it could make me overlord of humanity, then maybe I'll steal it. If it can eliminate discord and strife worldwide, then Tadashi and me will hacksaw a Nobel Peace Prize into two equal pieces. I'm keeping my options open, is what I'm saying.

Oh, and "mind control"? Your words, not mine.