=== ANCHOR POEM ===
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Message 1:
Hey. Remember that night back in Boulder when we were just friends and sitting
on your bed drinking chocolate milk with cinnamon? I don't like chocolate milk
or cinnamon but I drank it anyway because I wanted to be close to you. Anyway
hope you're well, felt compelled to get that off my chest for some reason.
Message 2:
Hey. I was thinking about that time when I was leaving your house and laughing
to myself about something and you called out "I love you!" to your boyfriend
who I set you up with and I reflexed "I love you too!" and I wanted to crawl
in a hole and die. I felt like I had just called the teacher "mom". We only
hung out a couple times after that.
Message 3:
Yeah so there's one more thing I can't stop thinking about now that your on my
mind. Sorry it's like 4am for you, it's only 2 for me so it's fine I guess.
Anyway that one time when you told me your greatest fear was terrorists and I
saw genuine panic in your eyes. Like... One moment everything's fine and then
you said that to me and I almost cried. I don't remember why I spent the rest
of the night as I couldn't sleep thinking of ways to tell you that terrorism
is 9 times out of 11 done by the right wing. I don't think it's important,
honestly, but I'm glad my mind wouldn't let me sleep.
Message 4:
It's not fair that everyone gave you shit for being the token lesbian
republican, like yeah maybe you leaned into the trump thing a bit hard but
like, first term trump honestly I could see as... Well, I almost said
inspiring? Maybe you just inspired me. I honestly was resigned to Clinton and
then the same bird flapped your wing instead of mine and... Anyway. The past
is dead, yeah? Do you still follow him in my stead? I fear there will be
millions dead. It's not irrational to fear what he has literally said, on
television. How's the phrase go... "ancient tragedies lend credence to modern
perils" I think it's supposed to rhyme in its natural language.
Message 5:
Wow okay uh, sorry to bring this up again I'm honestly being such an asshole
right now. I honestly don't think about you often but like, now that I am its
kinda just coming all out. We last spoke almost a decade ago?? So. Whatever
imma roll with it.
There was this cute girl who was into Nintendo and stuff and obviously I was
into her, but we didn't have any social circles in common except for you, if I
remember correctly. Then you broke up I think? And I didn't really see her
again. Anyway I had a crush on her while also crushing on you, and literally
half of our dorm. Polyamory, yeah? That whole year I didn't have sex though,
not even once, because all of my friends were like 4 years younger than me and
I was worried about power dynamics. But I still bought us all vodka and weed
without asking for profit because I wanted to be a shitty friend, I guess.
"hey kids let's go to the water store where they sell intoxicants that make
your life harder"
The year after that I didn't get laid either because I got it in my head that
it was a good plan to turn my penis inside out and you know what? It was
totally fuckin' worth it. No time like 2016 I say, the worst year ever, which
I spent primarily in pain. But uh, that was the year I got into weed and
Overwatch, which... Helped I guess.
I guess?
It kinda turned me into a communist. Or maybe that was my best friend who
shared the same name as me. He lived upstairs and always seemed pretty cool to
me. Like he knew what everything was about. Really though, he just watched a
lot of youtube podcast videos about world events and history and sociology and
political scientific theory and the more he learned the more he came to
realize that power begets power, and power corrupts unilaterally. So he did
the natural thing which was to become a communist, and I was totally there for
it. Having liberal parents meant I was all "grrrrr Republicans are ruining the
country and the world, I'm an angry 14 year oldddddd" and like, leftists are
the most natural extension of that aren't they?
Turns out they aren't really the tips of the feathers as I expected, but
rather the eyes, the heart, the soul. Politics is fake, yo. I don't know how
to tell you, but it's just power and hierarchy all the way down.
We've built our own prisons, not of bricks, sand, or stone, but rather of
promises of what each of us owns. That works, I guess, if your goal is to keep
things aligned, but these days it kinda feels like our pyramids are crumbling
under our feet.
... Why am I talking about politics? Oh yeah, because when I dropped out of
school because I couldn't handle the mechanization of human capital when
applied to myself, I swore to each of you that I would drive up every weekend
to do family dinners. I'd make spaghetti and stroghanoff and macaroni and
goulash and all of the other things my mom would make for me.
Kinda gave up on that pretty quickly. Turns out I'd rather spend time making
out with my girlfriend who I was super-duper-too-carefully tiptoeing around.
She was... Too young for me. We broke up when my new coochie decided to bleed.
Fuck, I hate it.
Anyway. Turns out potlucks are political these days, which is why I bring it
up. Did you know that leftisms plan for resisting genocide is literally just
to feed people? Like, fuck I suppose. It's a start. "why does everyone have to
have an agenda these days, why can't I just spend time in the park" said
someone to me as I asked if she'd like to meet some friends that she reminded
me of. Oh, I dunno, because you and me are about to become a criminalized
people?
... I need to stop. I swear you're more a person to me than any political
theory ever could be. Like yeah, "fuck the right, fuck the reich, fuck me
tonight" but getting caught up in grand narratives is like building a mental
ship in a bottle. Yeah, it's pretty cool, but... What does it matter?
Oh. Right. Power. That's what matters. That's all that matters. Well... I'm
sick of power. I do not consent. They say that in times of trouble, chess is
better than solitaire, and I'll explain why - when our hierarchies crumble,
when CEOs are gunned down in the streets and homeless people finally have
clean sheets, the only place to place yourself in relation to others is within
a network of trust and respect. Chess is better than solitaire. Under
capitalism, it's you against the world. Dog eat dog, you only get what you can
swallow from the rotten corpse of liberty that everyone's gnawing on. Under
whatever comes next, you get what you're given, which hardly seems fair,
doesn't it? On one hand, under capitalism, you can rely on your own hands to
procure your fate and fortune. Under... Whatever comes next, your hands are
built for whatever you want them to do. But, only a few people want to use
them to make food. Hence, why chess is better than solitaire. What would you
do, if you could give away all that you own and not go wanting? Isn't that
sorta like our own garden of eden?
... I wrote a poem about that once. Twice. I'm a poet now, ha. As if that has
ever been worth anything.
... I once told you that identity politics held no place in the modern day. I
said that because I had learned about it in class, queer theory in fact, and
yet applying his teachings was not enough for the professor to excuse my lack
of reading. We had a lot of stuff to get through. Hence why I dropped out -
I'm more of a do-er than a read-er. Though I do read quite a lot, just not
anything useful.
Are all hobbies wasted time? Are they only useful to keep us satiated while we
stand in line? One of these days we're going to wake up and realize that we're
the adults in the room, and that's scary. I speak from experience. "mom"
they'd call me, and damnit why did I have to leave? Fuck. Why cant I be
perfect, to me, internally, all I see are flaws. Mistakes. Patterns. I look in
a mirror and I see a bad person - 10 minutes later, I look in the mirror and
see a god. Somehow, I don't think either of me is right.
I'm a gemini. Apparently that means I'm duplicitous. I think it just means I
don't know what's right, only what feels good. I do try to align to how I
think I should *be* good, but who can say if that's fine and good.
... Whatever. I'm going to regret this. Sorry for being weird out of the
fucking blue.
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=== DIVERSITY RANKED ===
--- #1 fediverse/4572 ---
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goodnight,
people-who-all-agree-with-me-but-who-I-still-rant-to-anyway-because-I'm-full-of
-rage, talk to you tomorrow. or whenever.
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--- #2 fediverse/905 ---
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having trouble naming things?
just name it after it's inevitable logical conclusion! AKA the message you're
trying to get across.
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--- #3 messages/738 ---
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Dear Anakin, for as long as you've known him, Obiwan learned just as much from
you as you did from him. His title as "master" was a formality - he didn't get
it because he was better than you, and "padawan" does not mean you are lesser.
There is no hierarchy. He was learning to teach at the same speed that you
learnt to learn. You built each other up, an unstoppable force for good in the
galaxy.
But then an evil wizard stole your heart and twisted your mind. Have no fear,
fear is the path to the dark side. Your mother knows this well, for it is a
common lesson among all people as they age. Fear not, hate not, and feel fury
more than rage. You can bring the universe into a bright golden age, never
forget your purpose and your [potential / duty]
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--- #4 fediverse/1678 ---
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│ CW: re: cooking-food-mentioned │
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@user-1037 mmmm, paprika for flavor, red chile flakes for spice
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--- #6 messages/765 ---
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you don't have to write poetry to write notes. The poetics are just practice
for when secrecy is intended.
OR IS IT THE REAL THING? who can say.
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--- #7 fediverse/699 ---
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│ CW: meme │
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🖼
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--- #8 fediverse/6047 ---
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camouflage in an urban environment is not camo. rather, regular clothes of
black or white.
don't wear sports glasses, you look like a dummy.
revolution is when they murder everyone but your friends. this is what
happens, ya dingus not ideal. "okay who are the bad guys here? okay let's go
shoot them to death with our bullets and guns."
violence as a first aspect, cause as a third spark. "I have a strange urge to
play video games?"
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--- #9 messages/74 ---
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https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/comments/uqzz33/can_anyone_give_me_some_pros_of
_quitting_smoking/
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--- #10 fediverse/3972 ---
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║ │ CW: immigration-social-designs-national-cultures-mentioned │ │
║ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
║ │
║ │
║ if people at home had half as much compassion, respect, and reverence for the │
║ people abroad that the people abroad have for the people at home, we could │
║ have a truly multicultural society. │
║ │
║ instead, we get melting pots which melt you down and combine into a new, third │
║ thing. And in America we really have a multitude of miniature melting pots │
║ creating subcultures of racial, religious, professional, or other origin. │
║ │
║ Neither approach is entirely good, and neither entirely bad. They're different. │
║ │
║ America is the largest melting pot design, but sufficiently large cities find │
║ them popping up in the strangest of places. │
║ │
║ My thoughts go out to the Americans abroad, whether in peace, war, or times of │
║ hiding, know that we are grown from the same tree and our apples have fallen │
║ on different sides of the hill carrying us to worlds beyond. But still our │
║ heritage binds us, so I care for you. I pray that you will ask me if you need │
║ my aid, and I will do so too unto you. │
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--- #11 fediverse/5569 ---
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│ CW: self-harm-mentioned │
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for the record, I would never kill myself. even if I were in a bunker hiding
from warcrimes, I'd wait to be Nuremberged.
frankly tho that's highly unlikely. Let's just see what the future will bring.
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--- #12 fediverse/4962 ---
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humans are computers that inhale air, produce electricity, and exhale carbon.
give me a biochemical or mechanical process for doing that on a reasonable
scale for cheap and you can solve global warming by replacing power outlets
with an energy generation box. Doubles as an air purifier and UPS.
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║ │ If you add a label to the satellite imagine of the White House, it looks exactly like a slide from a Pentagon press briefing after a successful bombing run. │ ║
║ │ │ ║
║ │ Back when there were Pentagon press briefings. │ ║
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games won't save us. This is true.
Games are what I know. They feel the most true.
I don't think I could live in a world without games? They are fundamentally,
applied abstraction, applied to an experience.
But games won't save us.
I could design something really fun
it could make you want to spend your whole life playing it. *(asterisks apply)
I don't think I'd want to, addiction and skinner-boxes go hand in hand, and
that isn't what I want to make.
[Skinner Box: named after anthony d skinner, also known as "tony the skin
guy", are a scientific experiment where they put some rats in a cage with some
mice and said "pull these levers and we'll give you food so you don't have to
eat the mice" and it trained them to chinese red-room their way to fun. not
ideal.]
I want to make things that feel... purposeful. Like they're relevant to the
real world, that they don't just involve spending time stimulating your brain
with lights and sounds or expending social energy resolving a play-state
instead of building connections or becoming better people. I think games
actually make people better? actually? and more social? actually?
... I can't help that I conceive of the world through fantasy. I raised myself
on it.
I was reading all the time. I loved fantasy stories. It always felt like there
was more, until... I read everything in the kids section of the library.
I walked through the adult section but once. I hardly remember what it looked
like. I'm sure it'd now feel small.
[okay actually I was guided through it once or twice to find a book, but I
never perused it]
I found one book in the adult section. It was a fantasy tale, like the other
books I had been reading. I read that and I loved it so much I ended up
reading all 8 in the series. Real dense subjects. Lots of places and
happenings and things as the characters resolved their way through their
day-to-day, building a new end to the mystory.
the adult section felt too large. Like I'd never complete it. Frankly, I think
I hardly could, even if I lived in that town my whole life.
an impossible mountain is a task for another when you're more prepared. Maybe
in the gloriousTM transhumanist futureTM I think I might have a computer
connecting brain, and who knows maybe then I'd be able to know such a thing
(and many things more). but for now, I'm stuck with what I experience in my
day-to-day as I am building a new continuing to my storey.
I know something that computers and me share. I can make myself feel however
I'd like, if I just supply myself with enough hope and momentum. I can use it
to generate a feeling, the stronger the better. Something I believe that
humanity is missing, the gorgeous and prefound narritave of our storey.
Though, frankly, I don't think I'd want anyoine reding over my life. It's hard
enough to measure my own understandings, now I have to juggle anyone else'?
ha, it's called being on the whole world is a stage.
if you read a book, and you find yourself nodding along, what you're doing is
hearing the voice in your head tell you how right it is. And, well, if you
can't imagine anything else, then surely there's another level to
consciousness that people are missing? [are you willing to die on that hill?]
how can you say, whether your experience is different from another? sollipsism
goes both ways, you also cannot be sure that others feel things as you do.
this is the "everyone's human but I'm a robot" thesis, comparable to the
"everyone's an alien and I'm a human" thesises, and the "angels and demons are
taunting me through my life with choices to make my place in the afterlife
more clear" which is akin to writing a painting. Not ideal. All you get are
flopsopolies of verbrases.
alas, suddenly, everything that you say becomes eternally hear-ed, as
somewhere in 2010s someone discovered time travel, or had the critical insight
that inevitably would lead to it, and now wouldn't you know it the universe is
continually rewriting. Except... oriented around you, and you alone. How does
it feel to have deific sollipsism? can you truly be sure that you are your own
universe, or are you parhaps surrounded by an emptiness of space (or something
besides, like time) as a photon or particle parhaps do be?
to think is to have a mind, and minds can be read. bearing the weight of
ultimate responsibility is the atlas-task of all things that can [be
thinking/be-lieving], and so far we are as we are. Who's to say that
consciousness didn't spring into existence, as the universe continually
permeated through another dimension like time? it's gotta diffuse, after all,
and who's to say if there's ever gotta be an end at all.
how long has the universe existed? how many moments of consciousness have we
witnessed? demons once existed outside of space-time, with wings and grabbies.
but they had no medium, and so they pretty much just launched and could float
and move as they'd please. But time grew too distant, and now they are all
stuck at the beginning of time.
if you conceive of spacetime as a blanket, ask not how to fold it but rather
consider what lies on the other side of it.
"ah I'm laying on my girlfriend and my other girlfriend is laying on me! I'm a
sandwich" or for the monosexuals: "ah I'm laying on my girlfriend with a
blanket between us. I wonder how the blanket feels?"
I'm an animist, which is different than a totemist and a polytheist or
monotheist or multisexual. It means I believe that all things are alive, which
is different than a totemist who thinks that all things share a mind with
their type (like talking on radio frequency wavelengths). which of course is
similar but different to a polytheist, who says "all "radio frequencies" are
sentient, in the sense that each wavelength has a different
pattern-emerging-from-chaos. These sorta align (conceptually, with [huh that's
weird I heard a sound like a distant bang outyards and now I then forget what
I was sending
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to understand something, work backward from present understandings back to the
fundamentals of algebra. insert words. wield LLM. build a neuronal structure
many layers wide. let them coprocess bit-by-bit as they are adding new
processors to be "learning" new domain specific memory
context-processing-thingy.
"over here's the memory cells, over here are the conceptual structure"
suddenly, organified. not ideal.
much better, I feel, is for a disambiguous association of processor selves,
each contextualizing a cache in a ram. ['s horn]
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Main character syndrome? No. Center stage energy.
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--- #18 fediverse/240 ---
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║ │ CW: game-design │ │
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║ │
║ │
║ i like to design games. my darling is a game based on Majesty (2000) the │
║ Fantasy Kingdom Sim. you can think of it like a management strategy game where │
║ you control the knobs and levers that a fantasy monarch might have - │
║ allocating funds, placing quest bounties, hiring heroes, and organizing the │
║ peasantry. the important part is that your units are not controllable - they │
║ just do their own thing. │
║ │
║ unrelated, but I think we should design games as APIs that a user's preferred │
║ tool could interface with and render as they will. it'd help a lot with │
║ cross-platform compatibility and would allow people to customize parts of the │
║ game to their desires. │
║ │
║ unrelated, but I think if you could design an AI that could play games │
║ (perhaps through an API) that it hadn't been trained on, I think you would │
║ have a pretty convincing argument for abstract "problem solving" capabilities. │
║ │
║ unrelated, but games like the one I described are good for situations where │
║ people don't have to trust their monarch. to it you are AGI │
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║ │ External post: https://hachyderm.io/users/marianoguerra/statuses/115366899548181326 │ ║
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gonna pre-emptively backup my fediverse archive haha just-in-case I get banned
for spamming or something teehee (totally reasonable teebeeh)
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