slacking lotus

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." — Cyril Connolly

@Heliotrophy Terra Ignota

Archaeofuturism. We are careening towards a world where directly using any device is superfluous, and instead the world is crawling with fantasy creatures all networked to what might as well be a different fae dimension. Humans return to a life of drinking, barding, and crafting, maybe with some recreational warfare, or hunting little goblins laden with crypto wallets for loot

kind of crazy that newborn babies are ever not crying

Unc, because youth needs its own winter

“I should keep tweeting a mix of generally optimistic futurism about the tech everyone hates, and stream-of-consciousness ruminating longposts on the human condition. This is a winning formula” — me to myself

people always ask “why have kids?”, but they never ask “why haven’t kids?”

this thing where there’s an unexpected emptiness. and I’m not going to say it never feels hollow. but it mostly feels awe-inspiring, a revelation about the mechanics of being an actor in the world, a knowing circled by terms like “cause and effect” and “free will” and “infinity”

having a kid so far has been a bit like I imagine immigrating might have once been (still is for many I’m sure). Leaving it all behind. Hypothetically it would be possible to go back, but logistically it’s not happening anytime soon and quite likely never and then you’d just be back where you started anyway. You’re like “I will have to learn how all those people on the “other side” do things and I only know by rumor and have no idea what it will really be like. I have heard some things from people kind of like me, I guess I’m going off that. I will have to learn a new language. It will be a whole new life…” And it kind of is, all those things are true, but you’re a little caught off-guard by how there _isn’t_ a moment of disjoint. There are moments that feel dramatic, feel like change, momentous moments, and some of them are where you expect (birth, walking, embarking, debarking, getting papers sorted) and some of them no one ever mentioned and might only matter to you. But you’re there, they happen, you’re still there. They happen to you. There is not a new “dad” person that steps in from somewhere in the recesses of your mind to be your new self. There is not a new “American”. It’s you. You are dad now. You’re American now. Same you from before you were dad or before you were American. You did the thing that makes you dad so now you’re dad. I mean, you have a kid. You did the thing that makes you American so now you’re American. I mean, you’re in America. I still don’t know if I’ve managed to unearth my own core point but that’s enough longtweeting for now

and you can almost see it when someone says they “don’t like traveling” and they don’t just mean “well yeah ofc it’d be sick to go to Japan but it would be impossible/impractical/not worth because X Y and Z”, which is what you’re saying: “I don’t prioritize traveling” That makes sense and is practically everyone’s circumstance to various extents. I’m talking about the “I’ve never set foot outside the county line” thing (the extreme form) or “I don’t get the point in traveling”. Maybe it’s when people have a set idea of “their life”, and a clear picture of which things “matter” in their life (few) and which things don’t (almost all). So they’re like “being in Japan wouldn’t matter. I’m coming home after, and the only thing that will have mattered will be that I’m thousands of dollars poorer and I had to use some leverage at work.” Even focus can be really positive and admirable but it’s the closed-off-ness to something new mattering that spooks me a little

@fart_cigar what you’re saying makes sense in response to what I said, and made me realize what I said isn’t quite pointing at what I’m trying to point at. Which is, a type of fatalism that feels like an illusory trap, like there’s some “wake up” move they really could do but can’t notice

wtf do people mean when they say they “don’t like traveling”? They don’t like…going? There is not anywhere they want to go? I feel like a lot of these people just don’t like the travel approach their parents took growing up or something

I feel like this is a good example of where lots of people’s shallow-modeling version of empathy breaks down on the terrain. “What would I feel like if I were a beautiful woman? For me, it’s hard to make rent and have a place to stay. A beautiful woman has access to lots of ways to have fancy places to stay without even necessarily getting a job. The thing that’s a big problem for me would be a non-problem. Their life is easier than mine.” There’s a bunch of assumptions in there and I feel like most people end up arguing about the “access” one, but that’s not even really important. The big failure is that it’s gone unnoticed that our hypothetical woman has a whole suite of beautiful-woman-flavored problems of her own (or those problems have been dismissed as trivial). Personally I think a fundamentally unstable foundation for my perception of all human interaction and intention would be a pretty big problem

it does actually seem very hard to be an effortlessly supernaturally beautiful woman, like for real Imagine projecting an insanity field everywhere you go. even if it’s like “positive” in valence. It would be so hard to make any sense of the world around you. You would have to do so much modeling other people to get anywhere at all on the simplest things. Probably very tempting to just give up on all predictive modeling and check out of your own life. That could explain the “hothouse flower”-type problems people in this situation can get. The thing getting pointed to when someone says “you’re spoiled because everyone just gives you everything you want and no one expects anything from you”. Because that’s blatantly untrue if you think about it for a second: men give her things specifically because they want things from her. They’re very likely to obfuscate and confuse this with some level of intention. This has gotta be what’s going on with the perennial public confusion around why “really hot people” are pretty regularly partnered with people who aren’t their “looksmatch”. Or, the whole thing is comorbid with celebs dating “normal people”. Surely if your whole life experience is living in a Hotness Distortion Field you are maybe a little less likely to feel so drawn toward that effect. Probably a person who makes you feel like they’re a true comrade-in-arms rather than an enemy in the battle for human connection is like an oasis, and 100x more compelling than Hotness. Like in exact inverse proportion to how much your own life experience is warped by “being hot”

@theralkia They both deserve to smile about this!

@p8stie @netflix Good hair day

A big thanks to Ted Sarandos for taking me out to dinner! So much fun @netflix

@owenbroadcast as a freshman I declared my major as psychology, fantasizing that i was about to dive into the manual for the complex noomecha I had piloted for seventeen years with only battlefield training from more veteran amateurs by semester two it had become clear: no one had the manual

"therapy" is clearly the topic of this time period. not "therapy" used as a cover for "anything having to do with psychology", but "therapy" meaning: the large scale practice and worldview that presently dominates the social sphere at this time. most of the internet, perhaps just half (?), at least the parts that we're on, seem to be anti-therapy or to sense that there is something "up" with it. i believe this is a correct orientation. if you're a psychologist or something reading this, i'm sure you understand that i'm refferring to the pop concept here: the way there is a popular conception of something like japan, and then the more complex reality of "actual japan". the issue i see with the normal way therapy is discussed at this time is that to simply be against something doesn't really mean much outside of yourself - and it's also a generally losing posture. something else has to be proposed as an alternative. you only get new stuff by being, literally, constructive, and usually something new replaces something that already exists. things that already exist are rarely replaced by nothing. "therapy" (not going to keep putting it in quotes but i'm referring to what you and most people think about when they hear this term, not a strict clinical or academic definition) is an interesting thing to be reactive against, as you can simply not do it. it's very easy, short of a court order (which does happen) to avoid ever going to therapy. unfortunately, this doesn't really solve the problem, as it's still running generally unopposed as the water through which all social interactions now swim. one reason this is pressing is because "therapy as world view" is a kind of interpersonal jiujitsu that you lose by not playing. therapy language scrambles distinctions between actions and words, and puts "who is the victim and who is the aggressor" up for grabs. as thomas szasz correctly observed, that's really what's at stake in this form of verbal combat, and the weaponry is a kind of martial terminology. if the other person has a sword, and you're anti-sword, it doesn't really matter: you lose. i believe that presently essentially all public social interactions take place in this paradigm - at least 99%. 99% means you can still have one out of 100 exceptions - so, you with your small group of friends, perhaps you talking with your wife, you can ask yourself if those really add up to over one out of every 100 instances of interpersonal communication in our culture today. i also suspect that this is a large reason for the rapid degradation of social relationships in general. as something like shinto would have been how what we call "the religious impulse" or "spirituality" manifested for virtually everyone in a small town in japan in the 700s, today, "the therapy paradigm" is how all social interactions manifest - at least, essentially all forms of interpersonal conflict - conflict being inherent to social interactions. the people who understand this verbal jiujitsu better are simply winning at every level. as all these maneuvers are presented as an attempt to gain understanding between people or to resolve conflicts, they're often impossible for a normal person to notice - or they just sense that something is off and stick a "therapy language" sticker on it and tap out. one example is the now ubiquitous concept of "taking accountability". this quite literally means nothing outside of the context of a single interpersonal conflict. for the aggressor, they are able to say they are "taking accountability" simply by saying "i am taking accountability". however, they can easily take this same phrase and turn it on others, and suddenly "taking accountability" actually means "making restitution" - a restitution that is decided by the person wielding this term. if someone gets the "aggressor" sticker put onto them in one of these conversations (this has nothing to do with them being the actual aggressor), then for them to say: "yes, i am owning my actions and taking accountability for them" is actually a bad thing - they're almost kind of a sociopath, just sitting there, being shown their "bad actions", and saying "yes, i own these completely". whether an action is good or bad or sociopathic or "narcissistic" or just establishing boundaries is all downstream of a meta-battle about who is the aggressor and who is the victim - and this all comes down to framing, who gets to frame the interaction first, and how they're doing that. most people are not equipped to constantly be doing a high level meta-ethical battle about what labels are being applied to who every time someone does something unideal, but this is now what social interactions - and the social sphere, because all this will be explained to others, virtually always entails. secondly, we have the issue of diagnoses. the internet as a whole seems to correctly sense that something is up with this, but it's very cloudy and unclear what the actual issue is. recently, i was watching louis theroux's documentary on "the manosphere". in it, two young men who had difficult lives are asked about their worldview, and one says "we don't believe in depression". that's all he can really explain, but he's very firm on this. the interviewer is confused as to what he means: obviously people are depressed, so, what are you talking about? i believe what this person was attempting to communicate, which is slightly difficult to articulate without investing a large amount of time into this, is something else that i believe i picked up from thomas szasz. the idea is that in the term "mental illness", "illness" was intended to be a metaphor - but instead, it's taken as literal. example: someone has luxon's kidney disorder. the ducts in his kidneys are severed, and thus his kidney's don't perform some specific function (i made this up). you can get a little camera, or an x-ray, and look at the physical structure of the kidney, and see that, and say, "yes, you have this illness / disorder". while there are some brain things that are like this, in general, this theory would say - mental illnesses were meant to be understood as illness by analogy. you have melancholia. you have depression. you have some kind of anger disorder. this is similar to a physical illness in the sense that there are conditions causing you to be behave unideally. it is not like physical illness in the sense that it is a black and white yes or no box that you can check that you have, at this time, regardless of external circumstances. this is clearly the case, and cutting it this fine allows you to recognize the reality of mental abnormalities without falling into the perceived trap that i believe the young man in the film was reacting against. clearly, his issue was that getting diagnosed with depression was a kind of "ultimate" thing - if a doctor told him he had depression, and the box was checked, all of his actions would then come under that umbrella and downstream of them. he would be "a person who has depression" no matter what. someone with that kidney disorder has it whether it's 9AM or they're on vacation or whatever their external circumstances is. if a guy works a job he hates and comes home and eats terrible food every night, he may have depression - but it's not like a physical abnormality. if all those things changed, if he suddenly came home and there was a million dollars sitting there and his life became totally ideal magically, he may not be depressed anymore - or, he might be, and there might be something internal, physical or mental, for him to resolve. but it's not immutable (that's the key word here) - at least for the vast vast majority of people - like a physical deformity. so, who cares? well my point with all this is that presently, i think the position that people that recognize this have taken - i appreciate them recognizing it and i think it is a very serious issue, especially considering how this and things like it dovetail with essentially everything else (state power, for example - all of this basically dovetails with a third "arm" of the state that allows them to act outside the law under the guise of attempting to help people - separate topic) - i think the position most people that recognize this have taken is largely incorrect and won't hold up. a large portion of the people that recognize this issue seem to have taken the position that to think about your problems more is actually the real problem, and makes your problems worse. basically, that the issue here is that people are thinking about their own problems too much and if they just decided to not think about them or talk about them, they would focus on other things and they wouldn't be as much of an issue, or an issue at all.s with the caveat that of course there are pathological or destructive ways of focusing on your own problems, as a complete position i think this is horribly and self-evidently totally incorrect. everyone knows someone who is clearly bothered by or tormented by or, to put it more neutrally, still being affected by things that happened to them in the past. these people are usually putting a great amount of effort into not thinking about these issues. PTSD is an extreme but useful example. a guy with PTSD is usually trying as hard as possible not to think about the things that gave him PTSD. doesn't work, apparently. it just doesn't. likewise on a lower scale you can see people in their own lives who have something happen to them and then adopt a pathological behavior or negative orientation to something or just get "stuck" and they might never, literally not even one time ever, think about the correlation between that past event and their present problems. there are people who are middle aged who are still affected by their parent's divorce. i mean, of course they are, im saying that sympathetically - but these people are also usually working as hard as possible to not think about their parent's divorce and what it was like for them as a little kid. but it clearly just remains there as something affecting them. obviously not everyone who had their parent's get divorced is like this - so, that also just points to the fact that their is an efficacious and non-efficacious way of addressing it. people are often so invested in not thinking about their own problems or bad things that happened to them that they'll use drugs or alcohol to block it out, or they'll get mad at anyone who brings it up, or anyone that reminds them of it. they'll go to great lengths to avoid things that remind them of it. so, clearly taking a totally oppositional position to an aspect of what we call therapy and saying: "well, actually the issue is looking at your own problems" is not correct. to avoid thinking about painful events is most people's general operating procedure by default. the issue is that something will have to break through all of this - this umbrella presently covering the culture. the critiques about what we call therapy are generally correct - in fact, they usually aren't exact and deep enough, in my opinion - but in this case i don't think a totally reactionary position to the concept of psychology as a whole is tenable. a few years ago i naturally got led to wondering about the intersection of psychology and religion. the answer seems to be waiting for assembly in here somewhere. "a soul" is almost like "a mind" - i know it's not the exact same thing, but is to study the inner workings of a soul and how that soul relates to itself and its past - is that psychology, or religion? its unclear. i believe whatever breaks this invisible chokehold is going to come from this intersection. unfortunately i'm also convinced that the answer doesn't totally exist yet - but i do think its possible. mostly, id like more people to discuss this with rather than seeing the present trends continue.

lost track of time and got clock shock playing last night. that hasn’t happened in ages

It’s a very Fire Emblem, high-toned medieval fantasy court drama, which is not so striking as 13 Sentinels was, but it’s a perfect spine for this type of military tactics campaign. It feels like the central fantasy here is one from the good action anime arcs where the ensemble cast has to carry out a complicated multiple-front military action. The drama of all those different skirmishes interlocking in space and time is the central gameplay pillar here. All the battles are turn-based, and basically built on standard JRPG bones, with the key note that you have to preprogram character actions: you have no direct input on a battle and the turns just play out according to orders, it’s a cutscene. The actual live axis of gameplay is battlefield command, which is realtime-with-pause and has you directing “units” of 1-9 characters on a battle map. There’s lots of audibles to call beside just marching orders: seizing garrison points, character-specialized “unit actions”, etc etc.

someone here recently brought up 13 Sentinels and reminded me of the existence of Vanillaware. Now playing Unicorn Overlord

@wookash_podcast they are hard to design, but I am working on it

Outer Wilds is my favorite game. It's a detective / deduction game where you create hypotheses how the world works and you test them. You don't need to hit a level, or an item to progress. all that stops you is: knowing what to do. So why there are no OuterWildsLike? I try to play all the detective / deduction / notebook mystery games Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Chants of Senaar, The Roottrees are dead, Shadows of Doubt, The Witness, Tunic, Forgotten City, Heaven's Vault, Blue Prince, Animal Well, What Remains of Edith Finch, Obduction, more These games share some similarities but I can't find a single one that would aim to replicate the original Outer Wilds feeling: a) you learn a fact about the world b) you formulate a hypothesis how another thing might work with the fact you learned c) you (relatively) quickly are able to verify your hypothesis d) verification is not blocked by artificial means The feeling of figuring stuff out in Outer Wilds and racing to see whether it actually works as expected has given me a cosmic (hehe) levels of excitement. And sometimes interacting with a system, poking it, would reveal massive discoveries (The time (DLC spoiler!) I dropped "the item" in DLC and walked past it far enough, was absolutely insane!!) There was a massively popular video about the concept of Knowledge Based Unlocks - KBUs - which I felt like is gonna become a canon for detective style games. It felt like a Dominion board game mechanics discovery "hey you can make your own deck during a game" - enter a flood of "deckbuilding" games (both board- and video games!) And yet there are not OuterWildsLike. There are no, even smaller scope, 3 room or tiny dungeon, detective games that would give the same feeling - you're working with a living system, and if you learn something about it, you might discover awesome things! Given the popularity of Outer Wilds, I understand that I'm not alone in liking such mechanic. So then again, where are the OuterWildsLike?

@owenbroadcast this was the thing I did not expect about moving to a big city liberal enclave after growing up in Conservativetown, Midwest

when these characters come up - from anywhere - im left asking: so, whats the alternative? do you never depict that type of guy in fiction ever? my friends dad would read as a stereotype in a kids book. but hes a real. in an unexpected way, an aversion to this flattens the world.

interesting how much older (pre 90s? 2000?) kids media has very culturally foreign figures. reading a kids book where they go to chinatown: the guy they meet there is “super chinese”. couldnt read it in a classroom now. but i worked in chinatown. those guys are there. theyre real

@emollick @NateTheSpy it’s truly amazing that the revolutionary technological advance of the 20s has zillion-X’d the hard economic value of 1. Essay composition 2. Vocabulary

It's kind of a superpower to know the names of many beautiful and interesting things in the age of AI. You can invoke Vaporwave, Muqarnas, Bauhaus, or Art Nouveau whiplash curves. Sfumato and Grisaille and Notan. Polysyndeton and Zeugma. You just have to know what to ask for.