Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
A system is a thing made up of other things that are connected together. Your body is a system, made up of organs and tissues. Your computer is a system, made up of soft systems that run on hard systems. The world is a system, made up of animals, minerals, vegetables and you. These systems, whether directed (like in the case of a computer process) or not (like a forest), have an output which is the sum of the smaller outputs of their component objects, many of which themselves will be systems. The "system as a whole" can regard each system within them merely as an object with an input and an output, that is a "function". The inner workings of the function is inconsequential as long as it works correctly, which is called functional abstraction. Abstraction is the key to building complexity. No conductor can micromanage every miniscule detail of the orchestra, instead he abstracts away the "functionality" to sections, which in turn abstract functionality to each individual musician. The conductor can merely wave at a section ("call a function"), and a dozen things will happen at once in order for the desired output of the violinists playing louder or whatever. Without abstraction complex systems are impossible.
In my work I am myself part of a complex system, as is anyone who works in an organisation of any scale. There are conductors above who "call" my functions, and there are musicians below who I in turn call upon to play. My exact functionality can be reconfigured for different processes. Sometimes I am given broad directions like "drive the ship" or "keep the ship safe" where I feel like the conductor. Sometimes I am given very narrow directions like "keep a good lookout starboardside" or "monitor the chart for hazards" which put me very much in the role of a musician. The role of the conductor is stressful; you have to utilise all parts of your brain to direct and control your musicians to play well and in time. The role of a musician is comparatively relaxing, you can safely turn off most of your brain and focus energy into that narrow band required to perform your function. Often in my job the instrument I play is the console of a machine. I enjoy the way I fall into tune with the machine when in a fast-paced serial, a flow state where I can effortlessly convert orders from someone else into actions on the machine. My body becomes a conduit that melds into the machine so well that it becomes a facet of my own personal system. It's like driving a car where at some point the actions of the car become controlled directly by your brain instead of via the conscious movement of your arms and legs, they get bypassed and thought-orders like "slow down" are translated directly into the brake pads activating in the same way that when you walk you don't control each individual muscle separately. When you think about such things too much they become quite unnerving, like your body is not your own, and the boundary between self and others becomes blurred.
But I think that is just the thing, such phenomena are manifestations of time catching up with circumstances. If you have a long time to think, you can take action much more deliberately; but if you don't have enough time your "muscle memory" will kick in and complex actions will be made automatically. When in conversation timing is important, so my brain runs into "talking mode" where I can describe complex thoughts without forethought, albeit clunkily; but when writing I have as long as I want, so complex thoughts take longer to think through, but end up with a more coherent result. In a system of systems this manifests through direct management, the conductor becomes a director, taking and retaking every cut umpteen times to get it spot on, or retouches every keyframe in post. This allows the musicians-now-actors to take their time and control their performance in more detail rather than falling into a machine-melding flowstate.
Exploring such a concept is common in the mecha genre. Gundam's Psychoframe allows humans to translate thought directly into action in their mobile-suit, while "Newtypes" are able to utilise this technology to become near-homogenous beings with their suits. In Evangelion we similarly see the Shinji try, fail and succeed to link with his Eva. In Gurren Lagann we see cascading levels of humans melding with machines melding with machines to create a hyper-system. It may be confused with transhumanism, but the important difference is the connection between man and machine. A "cyborg" or technologically "improved" human is physically breaking down the barrier between his insides and the machines. By inserting probes into his brain-matter and nanobots into his spine he becomes something non-human. But the mech-pilot is merely temporary "clagging in" to a different body, like a morph-suit that conforms perfectly to your body but is nontheless distinct from it. When I sit down at my computer I can become so in-tune with it that I can wield it's abilities as an extension of my body, but I am in fact doing something much more impressive than merely wiring it into my nervous system. I am dancing with it. A dance with two people is much more impressive than a dance of one, and it is impressive because the dancers are separate beings working together in a state of conjunction. Dancers which had wired themselves together so that one's movements were electro-muscularly linked to match the other's wouldn't be a feat of dance, just a feat of technology. An dance, or an orchestra, or a ship at sea are impressive because they are systems of interconnected but separate systems, managing against their divisibility to work as one unit.
