K\u014dan of the Day (stylized “k\u014dan of the day”) is a project I started about a year ago when I had the idea to reserve the domain name and a friend said it would be a good idea. Since then it has grown remarkably; however, not in views.<\/p>\n
In terms of an audience, the reach of kotd is quite small: a few thousand views a day, and a few hundred subscribers.<\/p>\n
But it has helped me enormously.<\/p>\n
I learned how to keep people’s attention with text in videos<\/a> to make some of my video k\u014dans. The next week I used those techniques to make #FitchTheHomeless.<\/p>\n I taught myself how to make Twitter bots in order to code an oracle<\/a>, based on a character in the k\u014dans, and that has since grown to more than a dozen bots with several thousand total followers.<\/p>\n I taught myself PHP and JavaScript to write interactive k\u014dans and text-based games, and now I know the basics of web programming. I made enough small games that a friend asked when I was going to make a “real game” and I made the Tortoise Trails, and Sixty Shells, and now I have three other games in development. (@GunfightGame<\/a>, the 2004 AIM Conversation Simulator, and Lettuce Walk, the third in the Tortoise Trilogy).<\/p>\n I spun off the writing style to an ethics handbook that I self-published through Reddit and Kickstarter, and I used what I had learned from typography design on the k\u014dan booklets to design the book.<\/p>\n Each of the skills I acquired for the benefit of the k\u014dans I was later able to use for other projects, and without the motivating force of the k\u014dans (and its related religion, #zen k\u014danunism), I would not have been able to accomplish them. Without koanoftheday.com, I would have either stayed in my comfort zone or not made anything at all.<\/p>\n And this is why I encourage everyone to form a religion. By religion, I mean the sort of philosophy of meaning, by which Hume’s is\/ought gap<\/a> is crossed. If the M\u00fcnchhausen Trilemma<\/a> is to be accepted, and I think that it must, then this question is unanswerable except by assertion, and through the assertion of meaning, action can be wrested from knowledge.<\/p>\n (Within the #zen philosophy, the gap is crossed by defining understanding as application, though it conveniently doesn’t ask why anyone should strive for understanding, except to appeal to their own self-interest, or their apparent self-interest.)<\/p>\n And yet by asserting meaning and assuming self-interest, I generate it: the skills developed through the “understanding” of the third law of #zen are applied to other projects and produce the kinds of benefits promised (in jest).<\/p>\n Therefore, this religion — and perhaps any religion — serves as a sort of “leap to faith” that achieves its promises through means of a placebo effect.<\/p>\n Why create a religion? Because I believe that an inevitable consequence of religion is the submission of an individual’s will to another, and I believe that an individual’s artistic impulses should not be sublimated to another’s will. (However, there are those who argue that the very nature of freedom is such a constraint.) Then why would I ask someone to believe in #zen? Well, I don’t: the first law of #zen is “all #zen is a lie.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" K\u014dan of the Day (stylized “k\u014dan of the day”) is a project I started about a year ago when I had the idea to reserve the domain name and a friend said it would be a good idea. Since then it has grown remarkably; however, not in views. In terms of an audience, the reach… Read More<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkarber.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}