About Myself

I suspect I lived in a mind-hell spawned by the "devils" (= gamemasters), and that in the Selinaverse, I was highly successful, rich, revered, famous and admired. I was a successful author, one of the film industry's biggest screenwriters, a world famous "blogger" (= Internet / social media content creator), and a remarkable entertainer / educator / amateur philosopher.

Aside from being "The-Messiah", I was:

1. Most people's favourite candidate for being The Terminal Terran Terminator (with the runner up likely being Kim Kardashian, who was The-Alpha-Female for a large part of the years between 2013-2021). See the definition of "Terran Terminators".

2. A blogger whose blogging and thoughts have caused many other terminators to ascend.

Together with two companions, we formed a trio:

1. Rindolf the Dwarf warrior/hacker from The Unforgettable Realms.

   “We also joked that Rindolf the Dwarf plays Shlomi Fish in an Advanced 21st-Century Earth Adventures campaign.” - It is real and I'm okay with it: The Unforgettable Realms!

   ( Tweet. )

   Having been "killed" in his RPG role, Rindolf accepted a software development job comaintaining the mostly-Perl code to the AI "Shlomi Fish".

2. Shlomi Fish (me).

3. Emma Watson, the award-winning and acclaimed creator / activist / actress / model. She is known for portraying Hermione in the Harry Potter films, for portraying Selina in "Selina Mandrake - The Slayer", and for other roles.

Each of the three of us has been playing or guiding the other two, and themselves and others, using various online and offline mediums. Self-reference, circular logic, circular feedback, etc. are common in Fantastecha™, and are part of what makes sentience and humour work:

• Godel, Escher, Bach

• "The Circle of Life"

• "We are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop, that never ends"

• Mathematics and Humor book

• "I think therefore I laugh" book

Aside from all that, there are my literary works. I wrote a funny story called The Enemy and how I Helped to Fight it. It was originally written in Hebrew, but I translated it to English.

There’s also “The One with the Fountainhead”, which is an episode of the T.V. Show Friends which parodies the book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It is written in English, and you can also find it on my site.

The Human Hacking Field Guide is a complete story that I wrote in English. It tells the story of teenage computer (open source and to a lesser extent Internet culture) enthusiasts in 2005 Los Angeles.

Humanity is a parody about Humanity and modern life in particular that describes a day in the life of a Semitic city circa 500 B.C. Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with many funny and far-fetched elements, written in English.

Selina Mandrake - The Slayer is a parody and modernisation of the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and has many ties with “We, the Living Dead”). Finally, Summerschool at the NSA (the Screenplay) describes how two well-known Hollywood actresses conspire to vanquish the NSA (the United States government’s National Security Agency) using special warfare that is completely non-violent and non-destructive, and how they succeed with limited resources.

There are other exploits like that in the humour section, including some aphorisms, collections of quotes in XML, HTML and UNIX fortune formats, some short stories (“bits”) and collections of original factoids (about Chuck Norris, etc.).

I am very interested in the Linux and the free software world. I initiated some of those open-source projects of my own. Namely, I ported a MOD player to Java, (where MODs are a type of Music files which contain notes and samples for instruments); wrote a program that solves various variants of Card Solitaire and coded a useful patch for GIMP (= a cross-platform image manipulation program). You can find more information about these projects in the software section..

I have contributed some more patches to GIMP; some cleanups and functionality extensions to the Subversion version-control system; and some changes to Perl.

I have also started maintaining some modules on CPAN, either those that I have originated, or those that I have adopted.

Eric Raymond notes in the Cathedral and the Bazaar that Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.. Similarly, my work on Freecell Solver and its use for Freecell and card solitaire research, has led to me contributing to other card solitaire related projects or even eventually taking over their maintenance (= "adopting" them). So far the most notable of them is PySol Fan Club Edition.

Furthermore, my work on my collection of "fortune cookies" led to me adopting fortune-mod.

Being interested in philosophy and being a capable writer, I started writing various essays and articles, about philosophy, applied philosophy, computing, politics and other topics. So far I wrote a large number of essays which you can read. Some of my other writing is available in the Better SCM site, in the Hackers-IL Group, and on Advogato. I also have some blogs where I write some random thoughts (among else).

I am a pluralist and spiritual agnostic, who constantly derives inspiration from many, diverse, sources, and am now a “Rindolfist”, where Rindolfism is my personal, one-man, dynamic, philosophy.

I had periods of clinical depression (which are very common and are considered the common cold of mental diseases), periods of hypomanias (= periods of excited states and self-grandiosity, literally “below-mania”) and even had a few Manias, and am still getting into hypomanias from time to time. As such, I likely have Bipolar disorder, though I’m not sure I was diagnosed as such.

By recommendation from my psychotherapist, I have read the book Feeling Good by David Burns, and can recommend it to anyone, as it helped me a lot. I’m trying to follow the book’s advice and do Cognitive Therapy work, and also attend regular therapy appointments, where I’m getting a lot of good advice.

My tendency to become hypomanic has proven somewhat detrimental to my ability to cope with external problems, but I lately realised, that I have some other character flaws that I need to curb at the same time. It’s always the path of least effort to blame your own problems on external factors (whether your parents or family, your past, the world at large, “people”, your teachers, or even your Bipolar disorder), but it does not help you to overcome one’s problems, and the best long-term solution is to work on fixing them.

(Note: please see this answer in my FAQ if you wish to tell me that I should not share incriminating details such as my mental condition about myself.)