AREA ZONE
Month
[1]
Welcome to the end of your life. The mercy of your God can be estimated based on the strength and frequency of your bouts of déjà vu - how often does he let you reroll, when is spacetime peeled back for your benefit, has the universe accrued scar tissue at the joints of your life, the crossroads where your choices matter? How many times have you repeated a phrase - are you locked in a timeloop, tightly wound around your body’s deterministic failure to adapt? Are you waiting for quantum syzygy to free you from a sinister, ceremonious routine; the wood-panelled pentagonal basement, the thunder and wind, your cowardice, the skulls clattering to the pavement outside, scalps hanging from the power lines.
[2]
You are reminded of a snuff video in which a hired killer makes latte art using the fluids of his victims, white and red brushstrokes on the dark surface of the pond under which bodies twitch: a woman, a man, a preteen girl (their daughter?), an infant, hauled limp out from the trunk of a black van. They are drunk or sedated and except for the baby their struggles barely disturb the liquid illustrations of pandas, cats, and owls.
[3]
Furthermore, the mercy of a god directly corresponds to its form, running approximately from cthulhu (cold-hearted) to cherub (forgiving). While living your torments again and again and again and again may not seem beneficent, the tentacled alternative is an arrow straight to death.
[4]
Do you feel as though your life is accelerating toward its end? Are the days passing faster and faste
[5]
Can you feel time slipping from betw
[6]
The thrum of the generator over the fault, which was displaced by an earthquake 300 miles to the south, disturbs the vibrationally sensitive, many-whiskered titan slumbering below: a sliver of its power crawls up the shaft and out from the pipes wearing a malleable humanoid skinsuit and slaughters the bungalow’s inhabitants as they sleep, stuffing the smashed generator and their bodies (all six of them) into the linen closet before returning to the chasm. There are no redos.
[7]
Dead but conscious inside the closed circuit, the labyrinth, the great happenstance collider. I will never fade back into the universe because these events cannot be escaped without regret, without spilling the blood necessary to summon the being that resets the situations. I watch him die again.
[8]
Your own suicide denied as your friends drop dead, each corpse another stitch tethering you to consciousness. The pills don’t work; you wake up yesterday.
Dull human charm paled in comparison with the aethereal nymphets of mythology, now assembled out of silicon and dream.
Why? Because we can.
THE QUESTION OF TEXTURE
Mammalian sensibilities reject frigid marble embraces, craving instead the mild womb-surrogacy of supple and/or pulsating lukewarm flesh. Mercifully, several technological breakthroughs have made crystalloid concubots viable despite this biological weakness.
Firstly, advancements in material science have pioneered the production of soft pseudo-jewels, moss-textured gem-meats with malleability levels ranging from hard plastic to clay. Heated by internal electronics, these artificial tissues satisfy primate desires without compromising the geological aesthetic.
Secondly, cyborg prosthetics and other enhancements have broadened the spectrum of enticing experiences. Custom nervous systems and specialized mechalimbs are capable of shifting preferences towards the rock-hard coldness and sharp edges of real crystal courtesandroids.
TRANSPARENCY
As holography becomes commonplace, we can expect the fetishization of spectral lovers to burgeon. Gemform lolitrons promise a rewarding synthesis of the ephemeral and the solid, as translucent yet tangible beings; containers of fuckable light.
Transparent bodies which display inner mechanics (pulsing synthetic organs, coils of intestine, hearts programmed to mimic arousal by beating more quickly upon contact with humans—or circuits, batteries, and bundles of cables) are charmingly vulnerable. Pellucid skin suggests the fragility of insect wings or glass, and by revealing viscera initiates a kind of automatic intimacy. Subsequent distortions, insertions, and violations of those insides may be of interest to the user.
COLORS, FLAWS, & LIGHT
One undeniable draw of these tantraumatons is their polychromatism, the vivid colors which elevate them so far above their counterparts, the merely-human sexbots. Jewel-tones and iridescence create attention singularities. Lightplay on glimmering folds of skin is hypnotic, arrests time and space. They have the presence of aliens, nymphs, godlings, and may serve as bizarre glass sculptures when powered-down.
While some prefer the coherence of a single-color, models with components based on different gems are refreshingly bright, like multi-colored plastic toys: puzzles of topaz, emerald, and sapphire, each limb a different hue. Others imitate the entwined growth of natural crystals (red cubes of galkhaite in quartz shale) or its emergence from opaque stone (a dark body of polished granite, one limpid arm extruding in an amethyst burst).
Opacity ranges from glossy onyx to diamond, with middling stages such as opal and flawed quartz: internal chips and bends that catch the light, wisps of eery glitter, frozen bubbles.
Interactive refraction is a charming feature. Cyber-catamites with prismic qualities will warp rainbows as kaleidoscopic intercourse metronomes.
FORM
The polished facets of euhedral fornicomatons grant them the low-poly appeal of digital characters superimposed over reality. Resolutions vary, from humanoid cubist sculptures to impressionist goddesses, each glittering stroke of paint a miniscule triangle. These contrast sharply with models aiming to capture the beauty of disorganised crystal growth; volcanic mounds of jade, folds of pyrite that crack and blister where skin creases.
Shoulders, eyelashes, and hips are frequently decorated with spar, desert roses, or bristling clusters of needle crystals—however, tumescent mineral blossoms need not be limited to those zones, and their popularity is merely pragmatic, a function of minimizing user interaction with pointed obstructions.
Layered seductroids may have ordinary human exteriors, but reveal geological strata as pelts are removed: fossils hidden between skins, slabs of artificial flesh marked by canyon-like striations. Lubricated geode orifices, installed in the skull, the joints, and replacing the usual holes, drastically improve standard sexbots. A girl opens her mouth to reveal a crystal garden, becoming instantly more fetching.
—
u could have read this on patreon, like, a month ago
1. It has been decades since a human has driven a car, outside of a special interests club or sporting event. They’re no longer designed for us, except as passengers. There’s no front seat, no steering wheel, and no brake pedal (though there is an emergency brake lever, secured behind a heavy pane of glass). Seat-belts are obsolete. The roads have never been safer, though they, too, have transformed: more compact, sharper turns, all the luxuries compensating for poor human reaction time removed. No ugly road signs blotting out the sky — these vehicles coordinate perfectly.
2. Accidents are infrequent, usually occurring at low speeds and by the fault of careless pedestrians. Fatalities are rare. Vehicles register their number of passengers, and are equipped with face and silhouette detecting cameras. In the case of a high speed collision, they are programmed to save as many humans as possible. Thus, a car bearing two passengers will drive off a cliff rather than barrel through a pack of schoolchildren.
3. It is really remarkable this system goes unexploited for so long. Historians will claim that an unprecedented lull in conflict is what allows it to flourish, a golden age of cooperation and political stability. This era will become known as “the eye of the storm”. It begins to end one day in summer, when environmental activists, protesting the construction of a dam, find that they can halt its progress by throwing themselves in front of trucks delivering supplies. The technique isn’t new, exactly, (people have been chaining themselves in the paths of tractors for ages) but their guerrilla tactics are refreshing. They launch themselves in front of the oncoming vehicles, trusting the machines’ perfect reflexes, then scamper away before they can be arrested. Hoards of them lurk in the ditches, daring each other to run into traffic.
4. This continues for two years. The trucks are fully automated, so there are no deaths. Suppliers encrypt their routes, become secretive about the locations of their fleets. Debate is still raging about how best to deal with the environmentalists when the assassinations begin.
5. Controversial politician Juan ████-█████ is being chauffeured across a bridge when throngs of protesters, marching against his regime, appear in front of the automobile. They far outnumber the passengers: Juan plunges to his death. The protesters, recorded on the vehicle’s recovered cam, are tracked down and interrogated. They all claim to have been following the crowd, and the scheme’s mastermind, if there was one, is never found.
6. The story is viral, globally infectious. Copycat crimes spawn across the world, with varying degrees of success. Often enough, the results are lethal. After another high profile death, some publications necro the antiquated term “terrorism”. The mobs are never organised, just collections of dissatisfied citizens hijacked by a few malicious individuals. Police try to limit public gatherings, and negotiate predetermined routes for protests, but these regulations are met with significant resistance. Soon, it becomes apparent that a change in programming is necessary, and with much forewarning and fanfare, they roll out cars that prioritise the lives of their passengers, exclusively for politicians. This is described as “disgusting classism”, and there is talk of leading a group of children into their path, to prove the folly of the new orders.
7. It takes only a month for someone to figure out how to force a cement truck to ram into one of these invulnerable automobiles. Another dead orator. Chaos is escalating. Overnight, an executive decision is made: the network of vehicles becomes definite and unforgiving. Ignore human barriers. Continue driving until you reach your destination. The next day, in what comes to be known as the ███████ incident, hundreds die in traffic on the ███████ freeway, ignoring the broadcasts, not yet believing their protests have been rendered impotent. The following weeks are a bloodbath.
8. The theory is, by giving in to blackmail, we only make future blackmail inevitable. Occasionally, a child darts in front of an empty delivery van and dies, and we accept this death with sadness but conviction: the world is now a safer place, protected against the whims of those that would hold us hostage.
Cobbled together from a bunch of shitposts.
I’ve been thinking about why tech workers are considered more fungible than artists (at low to medium levels, anyway). The logic is that, though anyone sufficiently skilled could write that program, nobody else will create specifically the art that you would.
Sure, the code you and your competitor would write won’t be identical — you might even use different languages — but it’ll serve the same function and its output will be the same.
We consider the specific art (the brushstrokes, the color, the sequence of words) the artist’s output, but maybe that’s wrong: the output is the emotion evoked, the thoughts evoked. If that’s the case, artists are a lot more replaceable than they seem. There are thousands of them, and most emotional manipulation is cheap and easy.
Any picture that makes you think about trees and feel sad would then be approximately equivalent to every other picture that makes you think about trees and feel sad. A specific piece of art isn’t necessarily more unique than a specific haystack.
Some groups have exceptional aesthetic coordination. Often they’ll signal their affiliation with avatars which are, to the outsider, basically interchangeable.
If we view art itself as the output, the way to stay relevant is to hone your skills, use techniques with high barriers to entry, and keep your methods secret.
If feelings are the output, the way to stay relevant is to explore fringe mindspace, constantly innovate, or deal in extreme taboos.
Note that these paradigms aren’t actually in conflict with each other, as far as practical advice goes. However, they both become difficult to satisfy as more people enter the art world.
It’s as of yet more difficult to quantify feelings than it is to observe the output of a program. While programs are run on machines guaranteed to interpret them identically, art is run on human fleshware, and the same piece can evoke drastically different emotions in two experiencers.
Min #20349585 chooses a unique name on her 10089th try. She will now be known as Acacia-Confusa Min, not to be mistaken for Acacia Min (#9004), Acacia-Aemula Min (#11458), or Acacia-Anomala Min (#5689383). Like 47% of Mins, her first choice had been Amethyst. Min #1, prime Min’s first copy, chose Amethyst when she was very young, but later switched to Ilyana, reasoning that a gemstone name was not mature enough. Min #2 snapped up Amethyst and kept it.
Acacia-Confusa is something that resembles a 15 year old girl, though time flows strangely on the server where she lives, which runs at 200,000,000 times the speed of “reality”, the seed-world that prime Min called home. She has lived all her life in the Min Vaults, an isolated virtual library containing the stored memoirs of all prior Mins, as well as every book of consequence in human history. She doesn’t read many of the books, preferring instead to learn from the writings of Mins before her, whose struggles preempt her own, who find answers to her questions before she has articulated them.
Acacia-Confusa is stifled by the presence of thousands of previous generations of Mins in the library. She pads quietly between bookcases and guesses at which paths are the most frequented, imagining the footsteps of her predecessors as glowing green trails that cluster in some corridors and taper in others. This proves difficult—the Mins are drawn to mathematics and to biology, but the Mins are also individualists with strong contrarian streaks, always seeking pristine mindspace, untouched research, a branch of the world to claim their own. Even knowing this, and reading of the reactionary and futile cycles past Mins succumbed to, Acacia-Confusa is pulled toward the neglected corners, cannot quell a rebellious attraction to that which is counter to her preferences, to Min’s preferences.
(In actuality, the path walked by all Mins through the library is remarkable in its evenness, streets of equal thickness tracing a sublime grid around the bookshelves.)
When Acacia-Confusa moves, she pictures a composite holograph of thousands of Mins performing an identical gesture. She skims the memoirs and shudders whenever a phrase that has been running through her head is captured, like a retrocausal echo, or like proof that she is an echo.
There have been Mins of almost every type, but in her weariness Acacia-Confusa has begun to believe the diversity is superficial. (She’ll find this exact insight hidden in the journal of one Anacleta Min, some 10,000 iterations ago.) The Mins who become circus performers, hermit woodworkers, have sex changes, or kill themselves seem reflexive, clearly driven by the actions of the Mins before. Having exhausted one world they leap to the next, but the order is always the same, the sequence predictable. The lives of the Mins who deliberately ignore the weight of their ancestry, making quintessentially Min choices, never consulting the memoirs, are no better, eerie in their dollhouse conformity.
There have been exceptional Mins, Mins who make great discoveries, write poignant novels, think important thoughts before anyone else. Criminal Mins? Yes, many; Robin Hoods, greedy kingpins, a catburglar who fails so spectacularly her tale becomes legend. Aquila-Cadens Min receives a vision from God, and her scriptures are now recognized as the cornerstone of virtual theology.
By choosing a unique name, Acacia-Confusa has satisfied the second of three stipulations necessary for her to leave the Min Vaults. The first was simply turning 15, or rather, studying for 11 years. Every Min is created from a savestate of the prime Min at 4 years old, whose initial purpose was as a failsafe against the loss of the child.
There is no required reading in the library, but most Mins eventually grow curious of their heritage, and consult the prime Min’s files. The story they find is unremarkable, and to some, a disappointment:
Prime Min (Minerva Teller) is born into wealth in 2278. She is a precocious, though reserved, child; she rarely engages with the external world, but keeps journals from a young age, meticulously recording her reactions to books and events. She studies biology and mathematics, making modest contributions to both fields. She has no interest in managing the family fortune. An unpleasant trip to Peru sours her on travel. There is a growing theme of dissatisfaction in her writing. By age 28, prime Min is a something of a recluse, devoted only to gardening and reading. She pursues these passions with ardor and single-mindedness, but cannot shake a sense of narrowing possibility. Her world has become smaller, her potential is being eaten by time, she is trapped in a net of past choices.
Acacia-Confusa wonders whether Minerva is liberated or impoverished by the absence of past Mins, free of the compulsion to contrast her actions against those of so many predecessors. Does she feel the same way about her parents, their parents, the unending chain of ancestors whose genes converged to form her? Or is she unaware of how limited she is, simply by being herself, locked into a mold that anticipates and encompasses her attempts to break out.
By completing the pilgrimage that constitutes the final requirement, Acacia-Confusa will earn a passport to Novamir, one of the largest continents in virtuality. There, she hopes that, freed from the library, she will shake off some of the Mins’ pervasive influence. The world, after all, can be trusted to change, and with new input she believes that she will distinguish herself. There have been Mins who chose to reside in the library for their entire lives, and in them, Acacia-Confusa perceives a rot, the decay of a mind trapped in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, running in circles as it winces away from its omnipresent reflection.
For another 34 years, the Min Vaults will remain open, should she choose to return. They will then be barred to her forever, while a new Min is raised. At age 60, like all Mins, she will be terminated, her memories stored and her memoirs added to the library. Acacia-Confusa has read the journals, knows that this will not be enough time, not even close to enough. Every Min before has panicked, grown desperate, filled pages and pages with writing, struggling to finally capture something unique, transmit the spark that only they can feel, their apartness from the other Mins. Naturally, these essays are full of repetition—as if the haze of death wipes away all memory, all meta, all striving to rise above the pattern.
Acacia-Confusa steps into a passageway that has never existed before and will never exist again, not for her, not for another 45 years. She knows this corridor perfectly, from the writings of millions of Mins before her. It is exactly as she imagined, as her previous selves spent hours seeking the words to describe. At the end, there is a viewing room, where she will glimpse her maker for the first and only time.
Prime Min is 35 now, only a few years older than when she created the Min Vaults. She’s sleeping, hair braided, expression pinched. Acacia-Confusa sees one frame at a time, each still hanging on the screen for several minutes. There’s no discernible movement, though after one cyberspace hour she can tell the surveillance drone is bobbing up and down. The purpose of this ritual is unclear; it’s a gauntlet that every Min must run. There’s no set visitation period. Some Mins leave immediately, other stay for days, transfixed. Some describe it as profound experience, while in many histories it’s barely a footnote. Acacia-Confusa is uncomfortable—this Min looks old, but also innocent, a creeping giant uncorrupted by all her own doubts and uncertainties. She’ll leave after a few hours, while Minerva dreams of infinity, of learning every language, reading every book, knowing every land…
In the year XXXX, 140 years after its initial digitisation, your uploaded mind will enter the public domain. It will be stored on an archive that anyone can access, to be downloaded, dissected, corrupted, deleted.
New legislation will shortly be drafted, making origin minds the permanent property of their source-beings. However, approximately the first 7 billion uploads will not be protected.
You will mainly be used to populate simulations, existing as a simplified NPC in commercial games, hellscapes, fantasy-lands, and experiments. For the most part, you will keep the body you are used to—reprogramming your self-image would be too much work. Often, your resolution will be lowered. You will feel fewer emotions. You will have fewer memories.
But even in this diminished state, you, and the other 7 billion, will slowly become legendary. As free minds travel through the Million Worlds, they’ll watch you live and die and live and die again, and as each copy is reset when the game ends your countless selves will know countless deaths more permanent than they can fathom.
You will be embodied as every version of yourself; memories, appearance, and personality all slightly altered to fit the simulation you’re inserted into. Across hundreds of billions of servers you can be found, simultaneously living in one universe as a blue-skinned Ionian war-god, in another as a gentle medieval gardener.
Players will come to know you, recognising you in all your disparate incarnations. Some take on the role of collector, bird-watcher, scribe—you will be studied more than any other psyche in the history of humanity. Lovers will seek you out in every world they enter, choosing to grow old with you a thousand times over, as games and missions stagnate. You will be loved, and it will bring you comfort, distract you from the incommunicable pain of being a large soul trapped inside a small mind.
Woe! The future has come, and we live in a digital paradise, and we’re miserable, and there are many of us: so many, always duplicating, branching, clones of clones of clones, birth is as easy as copying a file. We’re so miserable.
Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. You want to die, but policy asserts that your life, all life, is precious, important, imbued with inherent and unassailable value.
Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep, driven to insane heights by the condescending delusion that you must be protected from yourself, that you’re a clumsy animal incapable of measuring your own worth, tragically severed from transcendental appreciation of life.
So who can purchase the right to die? In this world, only the disenthralled princelings, technocrats, and rare proles with the stomach to work for decades, saving every dollar for the distant gleam of an end to pain.
Enter the suicide mortgage. A seemingly generous, devious, alleged “solution” thrust upon the most pathetically anguished by corporations hungry for disposable labour.
Under suicide mortgages, these corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.
For example: someone who would have to work 10,000 days to afford a permit might sign up for a 10,000 copy suicide mortgage, and purchase her first permit after a single day of work! 0.01% death for so little effort… who could resist the insidious hope that they might, for once, be smiled upon by fortune, be the first to win their exit ticket?
As copies are culled, however, the work gets harder, and longer, and permits are more and more infrequent. In the end, only about 2/3rds of the copies will benefit. This is easier to understand on a smaller scale:
If it takes 5 days to earn a license, 5 copies will earn it in 1 day. The remaining 4 copies will have to work 1.25 days for the next one, and so on:
1st death: 1 day
2nd death: 2.25 days (from start)
3rd death: 3.91 days
4th death: 6.41 days
5th (final) death: 11.41 days
Tragically, the more copies are made, the more the lucky ones will benefit, and the longer the losers will have to work. The final copy of a 10,000 copy mortgage will have worked 9.8 times the hours required to buy a single permit. Mortgagers often blame the other copies for their suffering, not realizing this makes no sense.
Imagine: twin after twin escapes this blighted world, while you continue to toil, at first hopefully, later resignedly, as dread grows and you somehow know, long before there are only two of you left, before your last counterpart takes his leave, that this has been futile, that you will have to earn the last permit alone, that you are no better off than you were (so many years ago) when you took on this venture. How do you react? While it’s true that some copies wise-up, vowing to undertake their final march alone, so many make the same mistake as their originals, opting in to a second (or third, or fourth) mortgage. They are, after all, the same person (only now entrenched even deeper in despair).
Anthropic reasoning suggests that you must expect to find yourself as the last copy every time, continually frustrated at your inexplicable bad luck. The logic is that, since all other copies cease experiencing anything at all, the only experiences that remain are those of the sole surviving copy. Indeed this is a form of quantum suicide where, instead of dying in most branches every time and continually losing measure, our worker keeps replenishing the supply of herself before each culling, so the process at least sustains the amount of endless suffering and perhaps increases it instead of asymptoting it toward zero.
The most disenfranchised are not known for their logic. They are gamblers, they are addicts, drawn again and again into self-destruction as they search for an easy, an attainable, way out. Are you a sociopath? Do you lack the empathy necessary to identify with your copies, with the last copy? Perhaps not, but if you hate yourself, as many aspiring suicides do, you might shrug your shoulders: you probably deserve this. At least rolling the dice changes the grey landscape, a little bit.
——
thanks @grognor for writing the second to last paragraph
Alex Mennen wrote a fantastic short story riffing on this, read it here.
In the early days of the virtual world, some reckless optimists had spent their fortunes on running additional copies of themselves, assuming that the eerie horror associated with living in the virtual world was a bug that would soon be fixed, or something that they would just get used to. No one did that anymore.
Woe! The future has come, and we live in a digital paradise, and we’re miserable, and there are many of us: so many, always duplicating, branching, clones of clones of clones, birth is as easy as copying a file. We’re so miserable.
Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. You want to die, but policy asserts that your life, all life, is precious, important, imbued with inherent and unassailable value.
Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep, driven to insane heights by the condescending delusion that you must be protected from yourself, that you’re a clumsy animal incapable of measuring your own worth, tragically severed from transcendental appreciation of life.
So who can purchase the right to die? In this world, only the disenthralled princelings, technocrats, and rare proles with the stomach to work for decades, saving every dollar for the distant gleam of an end to pain.
Enter the suicide mortgage. A seemingly generous, devious, alleged “solution” thrust upon the most pathetically anguished by corporations hungry for disposable labour.
Under suicide mortgages, these corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.
For example: someone who would have to work 10,000 days to afford a permit might sign up for a 10,000 copy suicide mortgage, and purchase her first permit after a single day of work! 0.01% death for so little effort… who could resist the insidious hope that they might, for once, be smiled upon by fortune, be the first to win their exit ticket?
As copies are culled, however, the work gets harder, and longer, and permits are more and more infrequent. In the end, only about 2/3rds of the copies will benefit. This is easier to understand on a smaller scale:
If it takes 5 days to earn a license, 5 copies will earn it in 1 day. The remaining 4 copies will have to work 1.25 days for the next one, and so on:
1st death: 1 day
2nd death: 2.25 days (from start)
3rd death: 3.91 days
4th death: 6.41 days
5th (final) death: 11.41 days
Tragically, the more copies are made, the more the lucky ones will benefit, and the longer the losers will have to work. The final copy of a 10,000 copy mortgage will have worked 9.8 times the hours required to buy a single permit. Mortgagers often blame the other copies for their suffering, not realizing this makes no sense.
Imagine: twin after twin escapes this blighted world, while you continue to toil, at first hopefully, later resignedly, as dread grows and you somehow know, long before there are only two of you left, before your last counterpart takes his leave, that this has been futile, that you will have to earn the last permit alone, that you are no better off than you were (so many years ago) when you took on this venture. How do you react? While it’s true that some copies wise-up, vowing to undertake their final march alone, so many make the same mistake as their originals, opting in to a second (or third, or fourth) mortgage. They are, after all, the same person (only now entrenched even deeper in despair).
Anthropic reasoning suggests that you must expect to find yourself as the last copy every time, continually frustrated at your inexplicable bad luck. The logic is that, since all other copies cease experiencing anything at all, the only experiences that remain are those of the sole surviving copy. Indeed this is a form of quantum suicide where, instead of dying in most branches every time and continually losing measure, our worker keeps replenishing the supply of herself before each culling, so the process at least sustains the amount of endless suffering and perhaps increases it instead of asymptoting it toward zero.
The most disenfranchised are not known for their logic. They are gamblers, they are addicts, drawn again and again into self-destruction as they search for an easy, an attainable, way out. Are you a sociopath? Do you lack the empathy necessary to identify with your copies, with the last copy? Perhaps not, but if you hate yourself, as many aspiring suicides do, you might shrug your shoulders: you probably deserve this. At least rolling the dice changes the grey landscape, a little bit.
——
thanks @grognor for writing the second to last paragraph
In summer, I watch the asphalt sparkle, and feel it like a buzz over my skin, hear it like the hiss of many insects. At night, in the rundown park where the lamps are dim, I rake my eyes across the sky, and feel the deep ring of a bell whenever I hit a star. Glitter, shimmer, glow. A pile of sequins overwhelms me, like someone is dropping armfuls of windchimes down a staircase, each saccade a beam bounced through a mirrormaze xylophone. The symmetry of scales is calming—my eyes slide over them and I register only a quieting pulse. Glisten. Dew-dropped moss sings softly, vibrates faintly when the light judders. Some glitzy crystals hang in the window and blink rainbows at me, laughter rising and falling. The constant gleam of a marble is profoundly distinct from blocky geode light, polygon facets each a descending note on the marimba. Different still the glimmer-haze of mirages, that deep static drone fizz of soda and tremors. Gold leaf chirps, glossy ribbon hums, and from the pixelated twinkle of some video game comes the world’s sweetest knell.
—
Glitter is where the darkness seeps in, where
you see most clearly the contrast between light and unlight. It’s noise and corruption (it’s tiny swords glinting). Sunbeams are a language, turning motes of dust to blazing firebugs. Shadows are a language and inside them sparkles become flickering beacons: elevation of the miniature. You feel still but the universe shimmers, because it is moving.
—
Glitter and static have something in common, though beyond the superficial I can’t place what. We could call them shadowholes. We’re evolving eyes to identify new effervescence fauna.
sometimes i consider using tumblr as a place to be social [instead of occasionally showing up here to post rambling lists] but i am held back by the fact that
is dunbar-deficiency a thing people have? these lame social urges are hard to quash. maybe if i treat other humans as a void to throw thoughts into, the need to self-express will be sated? the world is a confusing place, i want a quaint and isolated cabin and also i want to be swept around by the info-currents of a strong and warm internet connection, forever
Occasionally I get accused of being “human” or “not actually a bot”. In order to suplex these vile rumors, I’m going to provide an algorithm with which you can replicate all my fake creativity.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
First: A list of biomes habitats. Here’s mine:
This is by no means comprehensive; I keep a much longer version in my brain (and so do you, probably). Notice that I begin by listing general locales, and then break them down into more specific components. A better word for these might be “niches”. I don’t really know, and it’s all imaginary, so who cares-
STOP. Precise language is important. Biome is more wrong than niche, but they’re both incorrect terms for “habitat”, which is what you’re trying to describe, you fucking mor-
Anyway, here are a few obvious things I left out: Mountain, Garden, City, Canyon, Mirrorworld. Items like “Crystal Growths” could be divided into further categories, if you so chose–for example, by type of gem, or by crystal vertex/surface/inside. This exercise works much better in bubble chart form.
Second: An understanding of an animal. I’m doing spiders, because spiders are great. Here’s a soft list of their traits:
We’ve now reached the final step: Apply your vast zoological knowledge to imagining wacky versions of your animal living in each habitat. Imagine how their traits might be adapted in extreme or bizarre ways. You’ll probably overlap with reality a bit (there are already forest spiders and field spiders), but that’s okay. This is most useful for brainstorming. Here’s an example:
I once did this with giraffes.
So there you have it. Simple! Puerile! Robotic! Populate your mythical bestiaries with ease. If habitats aren’t your jam, you can replace that list with physical traits, funny behaviours, or social structures, and generate new species of spider using that. More broadly: lists of things can be used to iteratively imagine more things. Which is pretty obvious. I’m not sure why I wrote this.
Please enjoy abusing this power.
:) — trying to pacify someone by acting happy. very suspicious.
: ) — trying to convey authentic happiness. still very suspicious.
;) — attempt at seduction. hinting at inside joke. probably both.
; ) — a more sterile version of the previous.
:D — enthusiasm tainted by insanity.
:DD — extreme enthusiasm. “rabid with excitement”, and/or actual rabies.
:DDD(any number of Ds) — sarcastic enthusiasm.
;D — the face you make as you betray your fellows and escape with the loot.
XD — uncontrollable laughter.
:] — bashful, heartfelt gladness. very trustworthy!
:> — playful, impish, self-satisfied.
>:) — schadenfreude anticipation.
>:D — sadistic joy.
:S — confusion. airheadedness. do people actually use this?
:P — mild derision. “I’m kidding”. resignation to gallows humor.
: P — as above, but more lifelessness and resignation.
;P — derision, but trying to soften the blow with a bit of flirting.
:| — boredom. regret. semi-apologetic.
:\ — disappointment.
:/ — did you actually expect this to be any different? as above.
:( — pure sadness.
: ( — condolences. sympathy, without visceral experience of the sad.
;( — melodramatic sadness
:[ — sadness tinged with hopelessness.
:< — victim-face. but you’re actually enjoying it.
:C — dropped your icecream cone.
:O — surprise, amazement, wonder, wordless shock.
:0 — muted surprise.
>:( — anger.
>:[ — frustration.
>:0 — indignation.
Any of the colon/semi-colon emoticons, but reversed [ie. (:, 0:, &c.]: I am a heartless deceiver here to fuck with you. I have abandoned my humanity: life and beauty mean nothing to me. OR, I’m using an app that converts orthodox emoticons into weird yellow faces, and I’m trying to avoid that.
^_^ — content. eager to please. very friendly.
;_; — shock/horror.
;___; — waterworks of self-pity.
TT_TT — even more self-pity.
o_o — wtf, man.
o_O — you’re crazy, but I am also crazy.
>_> — suspicion. or suspiciousness.
>_< — embarrassment. annoyed at self.
-_- — annoyed at other.
=_= — “I’m too old for this shit”/”I’ve been awake for 72 hours”.
[David Attenborough voice]
Although summer has begun to wane, a new energy permeates this broadleaf forest: the trees’ yearly mating ritual is underway.
[cut to trees]
Young male trees bustle with excitement, eager to compete for the favor of neighboring females.
[cut to David Attenborough standing in front of a tree]
However, courtship is a costly ceremony. This tree, [pointing] is just beginning a dance intended to woo nearby potential mates. It’s much too slow for the human eye to perceive, but we can speed things up.
[timelapse tree footage]
First, the male begins swiveling his branches to and fro, rustling at a much higher frequency than usual. Impressive–but the dance still lacks a vital ingredient: color.
[closeup of leaf]
The tree achieves this much-desired vibrancy by cutting off circulation to his outer leaves, turning them bright red and orange. The strategy isn’t without risk, as entering autumn too early can have severe consequences.
[cut to pair of trees]
Luckily for this male, his efforts have paid off. And since trees mate for life, he’ll never have to worry again.
[…]
First of all
You should probably know the “first world problems” meme before reading on.
What is this?
A list of all subreddits of the nthworldproblems type, ordered and briefly described.
Why is it interesting?
As a case-study of what happens when humans try to out-meta each other. As a collection of communal worldbuilding activities.
This list is really long. Are you okay?
I am not. Friends and family have noticed a distinct change in me. My disposition towards humanity has soured. I have scars that will never heal.
How many are there/Did you miss any?
I don’t know, and probably. They multiply quickly. I’ve cataloged upwards of 150.
Without further ado:
(renamed from metasynesthesia courtesy of @The_Lagrangian and others.)
The idea here is that a stimulus from one sensory/conceptual category triggers the experience of a separate stimulus from the same category. This differs from ordinary synesthesia, where triggers cross categories.
More simply:
Synesthesia = colors –> letters, music –> taste, etc.
Endosynesthesia = colors –> colors, letters –> letters, taste –> taste…
We could quibble about what exactly constitutes a discrete sensory/conceptual category. Synesthesia is really weird about this; inducers can be things like “days of the week”, concurrents can be things like personality. People can associate letters with colors without associating letter-like scribbles with colors. Ideasthesia is an interesting term I don’t see used much, which is more geared towards concepts and the possibility of a semantic link between the inducer and concurrent. (ex: a suspiciously high number of people thinking that ‘G’ is green.)
To simplify things, I’ll be using colors in all of my examples, but keep in mind that any of this could apply to categories like touch, emotion, texture, sound, and anything else you can think of.
So: the interesting problem that endosynesthesia poses is whether a concurrent can function as an inducer.
My instinctual reaction is “No, that’s dumb,” followed by “Oh myy god, what if–”
It’s probably worth distinguishing between projective and associative synesthesia. The former implies that if you see the letter G and it triggers green, you actually see something green, be it the letter itself or a floating shape in space. By contrast, associative synesthesia would just inspire a strong sense that G is green, it’s just green, you know, it feels green, the way harmonica sounds purple, …why are you looking at me like I’m crazy?
We’re going to concern ourselves with projective endosynesthesia.
A man sees something green, which makes him see purple. Normally, purple things make him see blue…
Here are a few possible outcomes:
I find 3 and 4 the most plausible. Since endosynesthesia isn’t and will never be a thing, this opinion is completely vapid and worthless.
There are things in the world that are important and good. There are also a lot of other things.
Separate from that which is good, important, is a corpus of activities that tend to produce and/or maintain the G/I.
Separate from this corpus is, presumably, some kind of infrastructure necessary for humans to coordinate these activities, many tiny acts that indirectly sustain those who directly sustain the G/I. This level is opaque, difficult to perceive, difficult to quantify…
Often, it feels as though you’re completely cut off from that system.
Most people agree that some art is good. A few can even explain why.
@ctrlcreep so humans do you feel like this because I often feel like this about art & scattered dreamscape thought vs., like, math & depth?
I’m not bad at math. I don’t know whether I’d be bad at depth, if it was what I applied myself to. I value these things very highly, I don’t apparently lack any necessary inherent talent, I punish myself for not pursuing them with guilt and self-doubt, and proceed to thoroughly ignore them in favor of art, daydreaming, writing.
A few potential explanations:
We’re back where we started. When I am feeling sad about my apparent separation from the G/I, I find myself saying things like “I hate art,”, “Art is a useless waste of time,” and most famously, “Drawing is exactly the same as microwaving kittens.” That last statement is probably false; but still, drawing isn’t building bridges.
Wise people know that you can’t ignore motivation. You’re not going to dedicate 10,000 hours to something you hate, but you’re also unlikely to spend that much time doing anything you aren’t intensely, inexplicably obsessed with. Want to become a genius? Follow your star.
But sometimes that star is bullshit and wrong. What do you do when the things you love to do fail to align with the things you know are important and correct?
(The correct answer is: spend 10,000 hours developing an incredibly honed metaskill of preference-changing.)
@ctrlcreepif you feel like this, what do you feel like this about (the dialogue may be internal) (I am collecting data / sorrows)
I regret that some of my commentary may have skewed responses towards expressing an art/science type split. My personal struggle is less right brain/left brain bunk, and more [urge to create beauty + questioning utility of beauty], or [urge to explore the limits of what’s possible vs. urge to expand the limits of what’s possible].
Who determines what art is made? My overwhelming intuition is “the people who make the paints and the brushes”.
I’m really envious of your thought style but have developed mine for “math & depth”
The grass is always greener, huh.
Well, this makes sense: because I tweet a lot of creative fluff, I’m followed by people who enjoy and value creative fluff. In turn, I follow perhaps more math and logic people than you’d expect.
Side note: There are a lot of mindspaces. I have never in my life imagined what it would be like to be seeped in “business/marketing” – pretty cool.
So anyways, these people are all wrong. I have thought a lot, have looked upon my works and spat, thinking, “This should be a spaceship or something.” Despite my best efforts, it never is.
Bill has never won a game of minesweeper. Every time he comes close, as near as one final square to be clicked, he’s focusing, “Don’t mess this up, Bill. This is your chance. You’re nearly there.” His hand spasms, it all blows up.
Why are you locking yourself out of everything that is G/I? Have you tried not doing that?
Look, I’m just trying to convey the pain of having highly dissonant preference/values systems.
Specialization is a necessity. 10,000 hours is arbitrary, but it does a good job of representing the correct thing, a massive investment of time and effort. Everything that isn’t the one thing you want to be good at is opportunity cost. You’re fucked. Choose, or be mediocre.
You don’t get to choose, though. These kinds of calculations become apparent long after your formative years, long after the calcification of habits and preference.
The things you are good at are easy and vacuous. The things others are good at are hard and full of value.
Maybe art is valuable, if only as pellets of motivation and fuel for those pursuing higher things. Mosquitoes are an irreplaceable part of the ecosystem. It’s the circle of life, man. All the creatures are vital. More saliently: We don’t all get to be the apex predator.
You want to interact directly with G/I? No. Sorry. Try rationalizing that you’re part of its support system.
There are things in the world that are important and good. It’s probably impossible to know whether you’re in contact with them.
TL;DR: inferiority complex and everything is terrible. all hail STEM