One week until NaNoWriMo starts.

One week until NaNoWriMo starts. I've cancelled all engagements for next month, and some that aren't next month but which I just don't feel like participating in this year, like All Hallow's Eve. Stupid holiday. The only holiday I can back is one where I get a day off.

Reading a fascinating intro to a book that will help with my NaNoWriMo story:

Paradox of Self-Amendment

I found this article through a google search for more information about Nomic, a game about games. Players make moves by changing the rules of the game, and the winner is either determined by those rules (it starts with an arbitrary point-based goal of 100 points) or by creating a series of laws that paralyzes movement, a paradox that makes it impossible for a person to make a move, and that person wins.

One paragraph I like so far is this: The demonstration that self-amendment is lawful in the Anglo-American legal tradition disproves a common theory of legal change: the theory that all valid change of law must be authorized by prior, higher legal rules. (I will call this the formalist or inference model.) Aside from denying the possibility of what is actual (namely, self-amendment), the formalist theory has other absurd consequences. It implies that no new legal system could get started. None could break off from another lawfully, and all that broke off unlawfully would be eternally barred from becoming lawful themselves. Any regime to be called lawful must have an infinite genealogy. Because we want to say that there are some lawful regimes, we must be able to explain how they could get started without at the same time making them mere creatures of prior regimes in an infinite series. Some power, be it contract or revolution or some other, must make law ex proprio vigore or from its own strength. Only a theory of permissible self-amendment can explain this fully, and therefore only such a theory can explain legality per se.

Sounds a lot like my manifesto: continue with nothing.