bay-bull-write

(1-tweet tale #0) With these 1-tweet tales I aim to make 1) full *narratives* with character + need + choice + consequence (not jokes, poems, gotchas, “what ifs”): beginning, middle & end 2) practicing story in brevity 3) for the joy of myself and whoever likes #microfiction

@Mikeachim relevant xkcd (though it takes some Time to see): deplicator.github.io/xkcd-time-at-y…

A while back, I learned something mindblowing about the geological history of the Mediterranean Sea, and I just can't get it out of my head. Now I'm going to make it *your* problem too. Sorry. Hang onto your hat. This gets wild. 1/

@Rainmaker1973 51 if you want to get Game of Thrones about it. (63 if you don't.) (448 maximally without getting arbitrary.)

What's the total number of people?

@RobertSecundus i kind of assumed the true Heaven/Utopia is what happens after you step through the door. the Good Place is pre-Heaven

ppl often post this scene (and a couple others like it), but really, THE GOOD PLACE turned out to be the quintessential show of our times not for any characters depicted, but for how the lib writers failed to imagine any possible true Heaven/Utopia w/out a Cosmic Suicide Machine

@simonsarris the first step is stop trying to find a partner, especially with a list the second step is go be in communities with people that you like spending a lot of time with the third step is really really like someone there and don't keep it a secret from them

It's actually mysterious how many smart single people there are that cannot find a partner. So many people want a well-defined thing, and that thing exists in droves, and they cannot find it. Also it's each-other.

@gptbrooke Blood on the Clocktower + ludonarrative

SPECIAL INTEREST ROUND UP what are you obsessed with rn

@gptbrooke ask: someone outside my usual circles to read the first chapter of my novel-in-progress and give me their reaction offer: read/listen and critique or just give encouragement for your writing, music, art project

asks and offers thread experimenting! these are neat to do, want to see if it can translate to twitter reply below with some asks and some offers, maybe some connections can be made 👀

@tenobrus @CopiumDeficient @corsaren so in principle, if we had the tech, we could say "this brain's neurons are lighting in a way that we can be certain they are interpreting blue & black, while this brain is interpreting white & gold." in other words, there is some evolutionary thing where blue always = X pattern?

@Babelwright @CopiumDeficient @corsaren in principle of course! if there was no neuron difference how would they end up saying different things? in practice ofc we do not have the technology / understanding of the brain for this

no one has ever coherently explained to me why the hard problem of consciousness is actually a problem. not once. it's literally just begging the question and i'm sick of pretending otherwise.

@tenobrus @CopiumDeficient @corsaren (genuine question) if we look at the neurons of two people looking at The Dress (or anything that people disagree what color it is), can we tell which color they are seeing it as without knowing anything else about the person?

@CopiumDeficient @Babelwright @corsaren it's not unknowable, we can go and look at ur neurons and see very similar patterns! we can run two llm instances and see them light up in exactly the same ways! if the internal state is the same then the internal state is the same !!

@tenobrus @corsaren when you see a red thing, do you experience "ah yes, my brain has arranged into the red internal complex state"? a step is missing between "internal complex state" and your subjective experience of 🟥. contrast with e.g. a brain state leading to a non-subjective muscle twitch.

@corsaren "we cannot explain how the redness of red manifests as a property distinct from the wavelength of the light or the shape of the electrical signal" sure we can that's definitionally what the brain does! inputs get transformed to internal complex state

(1-tweet tale #18) The gods warred. My patron god was killed and I was left apostate. What good did my former devotion do me now? I sat in the desert, waiting for death. Death came - and said, make Me your god now. It’s Purpose that matters. So I started killing other gods.

(1-tweet tale #17) These aliens live on color. Show them orange, they love you, purple, they attack, gray, laugh. We almost feel guilty manipulating them so easy. They come to Earth, multiply. We have to outlaw purple. Then green, red, white… Easier to just put them in charge.

morality gets arrested at whatever life stage a person first became happy

@TVachaW sorry to say but you're kind of reinforcing Nick's point

Nick has some insightful takes, but this is total nonsense. The Pali Canon is a very precise and prosaic set of texts, where the path is laid out in exhaustive detail in very plain language. There's a few poetic texts in it like the Dhammapada and the Jātaka Tales but the vast majority is technical to a fault. None of its teachings are hidden behind deities either. To the extent that deities appear, its mostly so the Buddha can teach them regular dhamma in usually quite plain language. But the vast majority doesn't involve deities at all. Mindfulness, the jhanas, all the key insight themes, metta, and the rest of the eightfold path are laid out in perfectly legible ways in both succinct and in-depth forms. Modern Theravada teachers also speak very clearly and relate things in modern terms. I'd challenge someone to read the collected talks of, say Ajahn Chah, and come away describing them as "hiding behind weird poems and deities." Sure, Zen takes a more poetic approach and Vajrayana includes deity work. But both involve close teacher-student relationships where necessary clarity is provided on a tailored individual basis. A Vajrayana path would usually involve a thorough sutric training before engaging in deity work, and you'd better believe that someone on that path receives a deep training in how to meditate properly. The actual reason most modern internet meditation "innovators" don't like or don't read the Pali Canon is not that its obscure or imprecise. Rather it's because its too precise and they don't like what it precisely says. It lays out the *entire* path of reaching full human potential. This includes the parts that modern western meditation teachers don't like. Parts that include deep renunciation, huge sacrifice and a complete re-orientation of one's life away from sensual pursuits towards a single-minded focus on a spiritual life. This undermines the type of teacher who wants you to believe the path terminates in basically living a regular worldly life but being very calm and happy whilst you do so. The teachings *do* teach you how to do this. And that's wonderful. But that's not what they teach as the end. It's barely the beginning. If internet meditation teachers were to reckon with that, they'd have to face up to the fact that people spending 8+ hours a day in front of a laptop screen, spending much of the rest of their time pursuing sensuality and then practicing some meditation as a side hobby are nowhere near the end of the path. This disrupts the image that the teacher usually wants to present of themselves to the world as being at least quite close to the end of the path. And it disrupts what the kind of student they attract wants to hear. An appeal I'd like to make to anyone who's made it to the end of this wall of text: - It is not the traditions who are hiding things from you. - It is the modern internet meditation "innovators" who are hiding things from you. They are hiding the full depth of what traditional Buddhism offers and limiting the spiritual potential of every single person they hide it from. Of course, they'll say the bits they are hiding are the extraneous and inessential trappings of some less enlightened culture. But really, they are often the most important bits. The bits that make meditation a truly spiritual rather than materialistic hedonistic activity. The bits that push us beyond the boundaries of what we can even imagine from our current vantage point and value system. And I'm not talking about deities or poems. I'm talking about sober, precise, prosaic teachings from people who dedicated every waking moment of their lives for years on end exploring regions of human consciousness that go far beyond what purveyors of the watered-down versions have any contact with. And set up institutions that guarded teachings for thousands of years that we in the west are only beginning to scratch the surface of. We are not a more enlightened culture. We are not revealing what is hidden. We are not being pragmatic. We are revelling in our own limitations, blindspots, and ignorance. And calling it "innovation". Please, please, please, from the bottom of my heart, don't let anyone persuade you that the traditional teachings have nothing to offer you. They have everything to offer anyone who is willing to break the habit of our deeply arrogant culture and actually listen.

some people confuse the shit that comes out of you after you eat delicious cake for the cake itself; it is the end-product, after all. and so they think if they can speedrun a pile of shit, they've done the world a service by saving all the time you would have had to spend baking

@robkroese if you destroy a ship, the result is it sinks; if you destroy a spaceship, the result is it becomes unpowered junk subject to inertia and gravity alone. maybe "bricked" vs "motored", or "hunked" vs "delta"

I want a punchy verb for destroying a ship akin to "sink", but for spaceships. ChatGPT suggests scuttle, hull, vent, keel. Even better if you can come up with a corresponding adjective meaning not destroyed, ie "afloat"

i need to put in more work to ensure my "strawberry rhubarb pies eaten" score at the end of my life is in high triple digits

if Netflix etc spend too much on AI storyteller and video enhancement tools etc, they will force them into your shows (after nobody uses them) to justify the cost

@TylerAlterman @majamediaco if people don't think of themselves as "organizers" or whatever, a new term won't change that. what we need is a term for "NOT an organizer, just dabbling this one time," to reduce the weight of responsibility. maybe a verb ("this weekend i'm ___ing"), instead of a noun.

Often I'll go viral by tweeting about a social technology I'm playing with (eg forcing parties, baby coworking) and the main retweet is a sort of desparate "I need this" rather than "I'm gonna run one!" @majamediaco and I were talking about how this seems to reveal a lack of agency around organizing social activities. Most of the valuable social tech is actually ~easy to implement. So I doubt the problem is "skill issue." I think it's more that people aren't clear that *they themselves* can be an organizer It makes me want to coin a term to make it easier for more ppl to think of themselves as "the sort of person who organizes" What should this term be? Some options: • Organizer • Facilitator • Steward • Community entrepreneur What else?

community is just people who give a shit about your stupid shit

I hate bumping up against the limits of my intellect