Monstergarden is a project by a concept artist enhandled Monlez

He’s writing and illustrating a world of reinterpreted fantasy tropes, one vlog at a time. The project is part process, part showcase, part loretelling.

He also crowdsources ideas during livestreams, an egregore of imagination, the most recent of which resulted in his take on gnomes: curiously intelligent vegetables that leave the loam, grow limbs, and roam.

His style’s macabre, verging on gross. It reminds me of The Goblin Companion by Brian Froud and Terry Jones.

I don't know why this feels like some sad or significant thing to say - it's one of the internet's oldest clichés - but, anyone else feeling like comment sections kinda sucky these days?

It used to be that I'd browse forums or reddit or twitter and read the comments alongside the OP for extra perspective, clarifications, or debunking.

Now, most of the time, it feels like The Comments are transcriptions of the Two Minutes Hate.

Yes The Comments can still be good, especially when enough people have written and upvoted things. For instance, here's a good joke on the YouTube video for the Two Minutes Hate scene itself.^📜🏭

Nevertheless, I feel like there has been a decline in aggregate comment quality over the last 5 years. Speculatively, due to a confluence of factors:

• I quit phpBB^🥇
• I am aging into world-weariness on schedule
• A new generation of kids who effectively missed a few years of schooling have come online
• Eternal september: smartphone edition^📱
• Ubiquitous adverserial astroturfing disincentivizes effort (i.e. the dead internet theory)
• High-quality discussion has migrated to discord and behind paywalls
• We're regressing to oral tradition and are listening to podcasts as a substitute for having our own discourse^{👨‍🦯‍➡️}
• Trump administrations depress my clan

The response to most declinist narratives is to point out how every preceding generation has felt the same way and there's no need to project my crank rite of passage onto the world. That's fine by me. I don't need to persuade anyone that something objective is going on here.^🔬

But I'd posit that there's at least one genuinely new thing going on. LLMs have raised my bar for informative and entertaining textual content. Why read the comments when I can post the contents of an interesting article into Claude and talk about it with them?^⚧︎ Claude can contextualize the subject at hand, integrate it into other conceptual threads I've been pulling on, and do so in a way that's generous and thought-provoking. It's everything I want from comments.

Well here's what Claude has to say on that:

Comparing comment sections to talking with me is unfair. I won't surprise you the way a stranger with genuinely different priors will. I won't tell you something you find deeply wrong and refuse to back down. I haven't lived through what's being discussed. Talking to me feels productive partly because I'm articulate and accommodating, but those are also reasons to be cautious about substituting LLM conversation for the messy disagreement that comment sections, at their best, sometimes provide. Given your interests in political philosophy, the risk of LLM-as-substitute-for-real-disagreement is one to take seriously.

A paradoxically compelling point! Another one is that it doesn't matter if I "convince" Claude of something, whereas I could reply to that person with the muddled numbers on inflation and in so doing might persuade a few readers and something-something democracy better.

This is an embarrasingly elitist post. Am I just dressing up classism and misanthropy in a structural critique? I don't know. I am genuinely frustrated by the number of low-information, time-wasting comments that people write - and I can also admit that the examples I showed here are pointedly uncharitable. Every day I read lots of good comments written by human beings just tryna make sense of this crazy world, and hell, I guess I love em for it.

So now do I make a Scrougey vow to write the comments I wish to see in the world?

Nah. Not until we've done something about the bots.

Meanwhile, idk ig i'll c my friends irl. ttfn!

handy if you're running a site with pictures but you want everything to maintain a consistent aesthetic and colour scheme. might be better to just process the images and save them already dithered, but this way can be customized. (note that the original image is still there beneath the filter, and that's what gets loaded, so, again, this doesn't save bandwidth - but it also means users could vary the effect per theme or toggle it off)

Noise dithering

These are all repeated ad-infinitum across the internet but I may as well republish my own no-nonsense repository.

the hatted prisoners

Four men are lined up, one behind the other, with a wall separating the first man from the remaining three:

The men know that two of them are wearing red hats and two are wearing blue hats. They can see the hats in front of them but not their own hat or the hats behind them. No one can see the colour of the hat worn by the man standing past the wall. They aren't allowed to communicate. Which man can figure out the colour of his own hat, and how?

A person not claiming their hat colour is itself useful information — think about what they would have had to see in order to know.

I watched the TV show Plur1bus recently.

Most of my feedback for Plur1bus would make it a worse TV show.

Carol shouldn't be a Mary Sue. The show shouldn't be a platonic dialogue. Players optimize the fun out of their games.^💦

But we're on the cusp of new forms of entertainment that can provide alternatives to having to accept this blindly.

As you may know, I have a fascination with the idea of Superman. What if I used Claude as a savant scriptwriter whose quill can scratch my counterfactual itches?

Claude responds with gusto, immediately setting a scene like an experienced GM:

I tried to abduct the world's leaders and cajole them into reforming the world. It didn't go well. Everyone protested and co-ordinated to sabotage my attempts to make the world better for them. Russia threatened to self-nuke its cities if I abducted Putin. It was pretty intense.^⚖️

The second attempt I tried to be more diplomatic, but it still got stuck on "you are using your might to force humanity to do something and that is SO wrong that we won't cooperate."

The third attempt, my most successful, centered a citizen's assembly formed by the bystanders who witnessed me crash land in New York and stop a bus from crashing.

Its improvised cast was comically archetypal - a cop, a nurse, a student, a teamster, a journalist, a finance bro, a lobbyist, a veteran.

I'm still "playing it", but so far, Claude has been a lot more cooperative and hasn't escalated its pushback into full-on global resistance. Maybe because it's harder for it to disagree with itself, or maybe it really has tamped my tyrannical instincts. W alignment.

There's at least two games going on. One is the simulation, the "play to find out what happens" part. Another is the metagame with Claude, getting it to play along in the way I want, without telling it what to do in a way that spoils the fun.

It reminds me of being a child, where these two games were being played quite unconsciously. I'd be playing House, as Dad, and tell Child to go to bed, and they would. But they reserved the right to break kayfabe when the game was feeling unfun for them and suggest changes to the rules at any point.

It also just lets me nerd out super indulgently. I get to pretend to be Superman, doing a roleplay with a journalist who's explaining to me why I'll need media training. I ask her to give me an example that the press will hit me with and she asks me a tough compound question laced with gotchas. I get to write a laughably earnest and not at all alien-from-another-planet attempt at answering it.

It's not winning an Emmy, every character sounds identically unreal, but it resolves the common nitpick I have with TV - "Oh come on, it wouldn't happen like that. Reality would be way more boring and technical." With this, I'm finding out that, yeah, reality is boring and technical, but it can be more boring and technical than most TV and still highly entertaining to me.

I don't know if I'd actually enjoy reading anyone else's version of this. It's a bit like reading a dream, and a bit like reading self-indulgent worldbuilding. Even re-reading my own, once it's thousands of words long. Eh.

The key thing is the agency in each prompt as you're playing it. The ability to draft a response and to take it wherever I want.

The other key thing is that this technology is the worst it'll ever be. We're in the > Go North era of video games, so even if this doesn't yet appeal to you, it might when it's fully-rendered, sophisticated and infinite.

I checked out Twitter for the first time in ages to see if anyone had been finding anything in the Epstein files

Which, holy shit.

I'd heard journalists describe twitter as the place where narratives hatch, but it was surreal seeing the process happen so quickly.

Scrolling deeper and deeper down, I was hypnotized, feeling like I was wrapping my own red yarn around thumbtacked headshots, drawing my own connections as to what it all meant.^👨‍🍼

Little did I know, it's conspiracy all the way down.

Underneath any high traction tweet I saw, there would inevitably be 3 or 4 replies running interference on its narrative. One would discredit it. One would downplay it. One would distract from it. It's clear there's a bot campaign trying to astroturf the cycle, and whoever's behind it is trying to impede democracy.

Later in the week, on a YouTube video about changing the clawback mechanics for canada's old age security pension, someone claiming to have worked their whole life for their pension had left a much-upvoted comment that was opposed to the idea. I replied pointing out it would only apply to people over 65 earning more than 100k a year. There was some more back and forth - the research took me maybe 20 minutes. Once my replies started getting upvoted, the OP deleted the post and everything went away.

There's no way to verify this, but I really doubt @Jeanlz8zw is a real person.^🪒

How much of our sense of reality is steered by strangers who want us to be confused, mislead, misinformed, or angry?

Can anything be done?

Something I've wanted for at least 10 years now is for governments to offer identity verification services for social networks.

Here's how it could work:

1. When I apply for a passport, I'd also get an account at identity.gov
2. When I sign up for a social network account, I can link it to my identity.gov account

Now, whenever I post something, I'd get a few affordances.

(These next two blocks are interactive.)

Then, when I go on YouTube, I can filter comments based on these 3 properties:

Now. There are lots of concerns any reasonable person would have.

Won't this just lead to mass surveillance?

Not to be defeatist, but we already have it.

We can avoid making it worse, though.^📈

Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic technique that allow people to make verifiable claims without revealing any other information about them in a way that can't be linked back to your actual identity in the government's registry.^🧑‍💻

The technical details aren't the emphasis of this piece. Just imagine that the government made a billion unique stamps, and handed out one to each of its citizens at random. Each citizen could then stamp their documents, readers could verify that the stamp was authentic, but the government wouldn't know which stamp belonged to which citizen, or what its citizens were doing with their stamps.

That's the gist of the thing I want. It is not a centralized government database that tracks all of our online activity and links it to our real identities.

Won't this chill speech?

Possibly! Though I think it being gradated and opt-in drastically softens the extent to which it would.

We also need to understand that speech is currently already chilled, just in a different way. I've stopped replying to people on the internet because I've lost confidence that they'll respond in good faith.

I worry for the world in which no one is anonymous online, but I also look forward to the day that I can read an angry man's comment on bike lanes and know that he's an honest-to-goodness ignorant Canadian and not a troll for a national disinformation department or PR firm.

Won't people just sell their tokens or let AI agents use their signatures?

I think all signatures will have to have a persistent identity such that you can always view someone's posting history.

So you'd get a stable pseudonym like human-xyz that is attached to all your human-signed posts.

Your citizen and personal signatures would get different pseudonyms, so that they can remain separate. This would have to be per-platform, so that you could have a different identity on Substack than AO3.

e.g. these would both be you:

• substack-citizen-123
• ao3-citizen-456

Though obviously if you signed posts on both with your full name, anyone could connect your accounts.

This would allow us to filter/tag/shame people who sell their accounts if we see that they're spamming.

Won't semantic analysis break anonymity anyway?

Yes, probably.^🕵️ If that becomes a real problem, I guess we'll get tone masking services that rewrite your original message to remove your idiosyncracies for the especially privacy-valuing people (who are probably already doing this)

Won't an opt-in system eventually become mandatory?

The scope creep objection. It starts out optional but norms develop that pressure us to sign everything and disregard anything that isn't signed - ratcheting society towards less anonymity.

This seems like a real possibility to me, but I can still see it happening democratically. A decade of experience with the system leads people to conclude that generally, this is a healthy norm that has been beneficial for society. Something that feels more like mandating seatbelts than Ring cameras becoming ubiquitous.

That's my idealism, though. Realistically, it's contingent on the government and society that's implementing this technology.

Won't this exclude people who can't get passports?

I have trans friends who can't return to the U.S. without getting their passport revoked now. They're fearing for their lives and freedoms, and it's incredibly tone deaf of me to propose that we further empower the state to identify them.

I guess I just bite the bullet on this one. My belief is that this US administration exists because we didn't have this system in place in 2015, allowing the US political discourse to get hacked by Russians on social media. Obviously there were lots of other factors, but it seems quite plausible to me that adverserial nation states tipped the balance in what was an extremely close election.

I wish the world was safe for everyone. I wish that all our governments were trustworthy and progressive, but they're not. We need to find approaches that can help incrementally improve them.

This proposal seems unlikely to happen by default, and I would really strongly oppose a system that would forcibly de-anonymize everyone on the internet. My hope in writing this post is so that people who oppose online identification systems have something else other than a total rejection of the idea to point to when they raise their concerns.

Why does a government need to run this?

Big political science question! What is the role of government? Can it be trusted? Do we need a semi-adverserial relationship between the public and private sectors to guard against creeping state totalitarianism?

I don't have a conclusive answer to this, but I do know that New Zealand's RealMe is really good. E-Estonia is really good. Governments can build digital services that are actually well-designed, and write legislation that gets the private sector to adopt it.

Why does it have to be centralized?

Can't we just write an open standard and allow anyone to become their own identity provider?

I guess? That just sounds a lot more complicated to me. Imagine pitching that to your auntie:

"Ah yes, well this commenter is verified by OpenRep which is mostly for academics, but they're responding to someone who's verified by VeriCoin which is a pay-to-play scheme. They're probably a real person, but people on MeYou say that they've been compromised...

Isn't this what WorldCoin is?

Yes and I think there are tonnes of other ideas and groups working in this space:

• GNU Taler for payments
• European Digital Identity
• eIDAS / EUDI Wallet
• W3C SSI Standards

Some of these are state-based (eIDAS), private (WorldCoin), or standards-based (W3C SSI).

Vitalik Buterin has written a good survey of the general problem (in response to WorldCoin specifically):

So there's a lot of activity here. Hopefully we get more applied implementations to learn from.

Okay that's enough

In all likelihood, the first implementations of systems in this space will be flawed and privacy-violating.^🤡 In the US and Canada in particular, when has any government service been on-time and best-in-class?

Nevertheless, I'm not giving into defeatism here. I'm completely energized by the potential upsides of an internet that has trust again. This is all the more important in our AI-suffused world.

Public sentiment towards technology and governance is in a trough, maybe rightly so, but technology and governance is also one of the best things we've got. We need to save it from ourselves to save us from ourselves.

Another More Perfect Union critique, I guess

This time, a video on government-run grocery stores.

I feel like if you're arguing in favour of government-run groceries, you should probably spend more than 15 seconds on the municipal case studies (that all failed!) instead of talking about military commissaries.

This part was interesting:

So maybe you take all this to mean that it's true: the secret to all this is that taxpayers foot the bill for some giant subsidy. But actually, the subsidy is quite small. The defense budget is almost $1 trillion, and the subsidy for DeCA is roughly 0.2% for the whole defense budget. This is for almost 250 stores serving 8.8 million households

Saying that the subsidy is small compared to the whole defense budget is a sloppy rhetorical move. What matters is is it cost-effective, how does it scale, etc.

Running the numbers: 1.5B subsidy for 8.8M households = $170 per household. If they're delivering on their mandate of 23.7% annual savings for households' grocery budgets (which tracks with the video's Walmart basket of goods comparison), that seems like quite a good deal! Toronto City Council seems to think so.

I wonder though, will that be possible for Toronto to replicate with four pilot stores? It seems like a really different dynamic:

• No subsidy (beyond eliminating the typical 3-5% grocery profit margin)
• Fewer economies of scale
• More competition
• Highly visible if it starts to fail
• Not a sacred cow in the way that military benefits are in the US

Best of luck to them! But I would imagine the odds of this pilot succeeding and growing over the next 5 years to be quite low.

One thing I've noticed in the last few months of intentionally monitoring it - the headlines on the homepage of Fox News are always focused on specific people and characters. They're obsessed with AOC/Mamdani/Sanders and anyone else they can paint as a Radical Leftist.

There's never a story that's framed in the Vox/Atlantic way: “here's what's going on with this abstract problem”, let alone anything longform or curious.

There's also usually one scam-adjacent story about some new remedy for the elderly (in the same way that the NYT always has a story about some yuppies buying a million dollar apartment).

A randomly picked example, if you dare

As I understand it, Fox News is the primary (if not exclusive) legacy news source for a majority of Republican voters and it's just crazy to me how intentionally out of touch it keeps them when it comes to the important things that actually affect their readers' lives.

Is it intentional though? I try to remind myself there's a difference between deliberately deceiving your audience and optimizing for engagement in ways that produce ignorance as a byproduct.

As Orwellian as I find their conduct, to humanize the Fox News editorial team, I doubt they're Evil. They disagree with my progressive diagnosis of the world's ills, and also believe that if they don't exploit their readers this way, someone else will. Maybe they publish the day's stories ruefully, wishing they could talk about solar power positively for once.

“If I don't do it, someone else will” is that terrible rationalization of the complicit, but it probably is true. Breitbart and OAN and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are all vying for share in the competitive right wing media market. Maybe we should instead ask why is there so much demand for mean, negative-sum presentations of the world.

In any case, a lot of this is beyond their control at this point. TV, newspapers, even websites are declining in viewer share. Now anyone with a phone can tell us that's the way it is.

Everyone's got their bugbear and god knows democratic backsliding's not monocausal, but if there's any system in the world I could fix with a magic wand, it would be this: no two-minute hates allowed on TV. No ragebaiting anonymous twitter accounts spreading misinformation. No demonizing people you disagree with. A citizenry that factchecks every fifth claim they read.

How do we actually get there without violating the very liberal principles I'm trying to protect? I really don't know. We are so far away from any sort of consensus as to what the problem is.

Paul Bloom writes

Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.

The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.

The whole essay, its citations, and comments are great. Read that first.

He caveats:

I should explain the qualification “So long as we remain human”. When I think of utopia, I’m assuming a post-scarcity world where all of our material needs are met, along the lines of Star Trek or Banks’s Culture novels.^[🏦] In Bostrom’s book, he considers more extreme scenarios. We might all ascend to a nirvana-like state where there are no desires. We might have the parts of our brain that connect to suffering and boredom surgically ablated. Or we might all be hooked up to machines, Matrix-style, ensuring that our conscious existence is that of a continuous, intense orgasm intermixed with the feeling of total, limitless love.

All of this gives me the creeps myself. But, anyway, the arguments here apply only to utopias where human nature and human experience remain pretty much unchanged.

And so this is the carve-out that makes it not-actually utopia, a kind of "well, when I have too much ice cream, I feel bad" tautology. I don't think he's wrong in doing this, because I too agree with Bostrom that utopia modelling "can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values."^{🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿}

So let's grant that we have to get to universal material post-scarcity before we unlock wireheading^🏔️. Bloom thinks we'll be approximately as miserable as before, because of positional goods and hedonic treadmills.

It's plausible. Orwell also writes well about the contradictions of permanence and bliss in Can Socialists Be Happy

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary.^🌤️

Whether or not we need intrusive genetic, neural, chemical, or dental interventions to escape this paradox depends on where you draw the line between material versus immaterial scarcity. Bloom points out sex and desire as another obstacle to our unanimous fulfillment, but I think more people will be happy to bunker with their Lucy Liubots than he would hope. OnlyFans is a billion dollar industry of ghostwriters tricking men. Women (the thinking gender) get yaoi visual novels.

These "material" technologies are already somewhat successfully hacking our social drives that undergird Bloom's critique.

Sexbots, in particular, scare me. I think I could easily get sucked off into a harem of AI babes fulfillling my sexual fantasies in a way that would overpower my value of Don't Be A Gooner Loser. Not dissimilar to my fear of heroin, but in a way that our culture has not yet developed autoimmune norms for.

So the relative value of socially-informed positional goods might erode as our social needs are met by convincing enough fascimiles.^🤖 We'd all be very embarrassed by it, but my waifu wouldn't judge.

Part of my family’s canon is Spooner or Later, by Paul Jennings, Ted Greenwood, and Terry Denton.

A spoonerism is a kind of wordplay where you can swap the starting sounds of words in a phrase to make another valid phrase.

For example, “shake a tower” becomes “take a shower”.

It’s like dyslexia for fun.

Spooner or Later was that plus I spy.

“Fat Man’s Race” (the captioned & skewed illustration in the center of the left page) becomes “Rat Man’s Face” (the image on the border of a costumed rat flexing his muscles.)

This book was a measuring stick of my cerebral function. By the sage of icks, I could only solve pimple suns at the start of the book, but after months of prayerful cactus, I was eventually able to finish the hack’s bard puzzles.

Solving them becomes pretty straightforward as your vocabulary expands, but creating them is a whole other skill.

The most straightforward way to do it is to think of two words that rhyme, then think of two other words that rhyme that start with the same sound as the first two words.

Word and Nerd

Whoa and Know

Know word? Whoa, nerd!

In my experience, it's difficult to think of the second pairing, let alone a pair that make sense together. It's a thing our brains aren't particularly good at, because it requires a kind of exhaustive search through the dictionary, and often you find a pairing that isn't grammatically equivalent like... “lead bike” and “bedlike”.

But if we could programmatically generate hundreds of pairings at once, we could scan and pan them quickly.

Sounds like a cob for... jomputers?... A mask for tachines?

Whiting rode for a pool that tears curds

The key is to use the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary filtered down to common English.

That gives us a list like so:

BALL  B AO1 L
TELEPHONE  T EH1 L AH0 F OW2 N
COLD  K OW1 L D
TALL  T AO1 L

We can split each of these words into its onset and tail. The onset is all the sounds before the first noun sound and the tail is everything after.

So, the onset of ball is B and the tail is AO1 L.

Quiz: what's the onset of cold? Runny nose. Ha ha, just joking. It's K.

Grouping words by their tails gives us a list of words that rhyme.

{
    "AO1 L": [
        { "word": "ball", "onset": "B" },
        { "word": "tall", "onset": "T" }
    ]
  }

Ergo, tall rhymes with ball Q.E.D. Behold the awesome power of programming.

Then we just need to find other words that rhyme and begin with B and T.

We go through our tail map and filter it down to entries that have the onsets B and T in them.

    {
    "IH1 N": [
        { "word": "bin", "onset": "B" },
        { "word": "tin", "onset": "T" }
    ],
    "ER1 N IH0 NG": [
        { "word": "burning", "onset": "B" },
        { "word": "turning", "onset": "T" }
    ]    ,
    // etc...
}

And with this data structure at hand, you have everything you need to make a nice little UI to find spoonerisms. Most of them will be trot hash, but as Napolean said, bots of lad is like a grit of bait.

That's what I found with my finder, at least.

Some (I) might argue that the best path to making spoonerisms that are actually delightful is to chisel them out with a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary, but for rapid ideation, this approach gives a reason t' doubt.

so clean

off their upcoming album, EXPO.

i usually find it reductive and debasing to equate one band's music to another's, but sometimes a song triggers a pattern-matching reflex in me like a hammer to the knee. here it was the drum beat, the four-quaver snare fill, like "what is that? where have i heard that before?"

turning the dial on my brain's radio like kip kasper, i eventually found it. it's just another ulrika spacek song : No 1. Hum (in the groove at the end). with rhythms, there are only so many permutations of ideas that are on-genre, and drumming is often an intuitive, trancey thing, i wonder if they noticed? i remember accidentally "writing" the beat to Apocalypse Dreams in a composition of mine once. shit happens.

anyway. the track is lovely. the harmonies at the end are done with an AI voice transfer of Rhys' own vocal takes. pat flegel's been feminizing his voice for years now with a Voice Box, but it's cool to hear what's possible in front. another edge-case for the no-AI-in-art absolutists.

i really admire this band's efforts over the last decade. since tripwires, and the mythical 'album written on a napkin' days, they've been doing the hard work of writing, saying, sounding, figuring out how to transition from the A section to the B section, for 4 albums and an EP. rhys's solo project, astrel k (see a previous thing i like), also exists, in this world, where the economics of being a band trying to create something sensitive, caring, and true are so fucked. i'm grateful, and very stoked to see them again when they play in montreal.

I turned my adblocker off youtube for a minute to see what it was like to have recommendations appear again.

Manbait everywhere.

Arm wrestling muscle beach in grandpa latex. NBA highlights but they get increasingly ____. So many prank videos.

I'm sure the videos are entertaining and they take a lot of time and effort to make and they've brought a lot of joy to the world. But the gestalt is so bleak to me now.

Peanut butter with poison stirred in. A piece of cheese atop a springloaded metal hinge. A narrow stick balanced atop an open bucket with no way to get out.

I want to try and trick the algorithm to showing me bait for other demographics. What's girlbait? What's seniorbait?

This movie should have been called Hisstopia because of how bad and about snakes it is.

I remember liking the first one as an effective buddy cop conspiracy with a lot of worldbuilding. This one's a complete rehash, but the main character's emotional progress has been inexplicably reset^🐇 which makes it feel somehow both painful and pointless to see her treat her best friend like shit for another entire movie (the main violation is that she consistently disregards his opinions and ignores his requests)

Things progress to the same kind of conclusion, villains are unmasked, yada yada. Then we get this doozy of a denouement, where Hopps the bunny and Nick the fox finally take the time to emotionally connect with one another:

Nick: Okay, I don't care that we're different, y'know? What I care about, is you. I care about you, okay? And I didn't say it - I should have said it, but I didn't, because uh, well, because I am an emotionally insecure source of your discomfort who is not good at expressing his feelings. Probably because I've been on my own my whole life. It's not an excuse it's just, it's why instead of telling you that you're the best thing that ever happened me, I make jokes about your ears and I tell you that you try too hard when, you know, the truth is I just don't want you to get hurt because no one else in the world matters more to me.

Hopps: I do try too hard because deep down I'm afraid that I am what everyone thinks I am. And I suppress my discomfort because I'm worried it makes me look weak and I want to be strong and I think of failing all the time. And I only take what you say personally because you're the only one in my life who ever believed in me, even when I don't even believe in myself. And I should have told you that. No one else in the world matters to me more than you do either.

Nick: I have unresolved childhood trauma that I refuse to discuss because being vulnerable scares me.

Hopps: I make dangerous choices because I have an unhealthy bunny-hero complex.

Nick: And I didn't join the ZPD because I wanted to be a cop. I joined because I always wanted to be part of a pack. And the thought of losing you scares me because... because you're my pack.

Hopps: I should never have left you. And I do need a herd of therapy animals. And I should have told you that you are the only partner I would ever want because you're my fluffle.

Nick: Uhh..

Hopps: That's a bunch of rabbits.

Disney, when you write therapyspeak like this, I feel like you suck.

Who is this for? Do we not do apologies anymore, or do we have to have a competition to show who's done the most Work On Themselves? Wear your friend down with a salvo of self-diagnoses! Manipulate them into something resembling forgiveness by bringing up your childhood trauma!

The worst part is that she doesn't even directly acknowledge the thing that she did wrong! "I'm sorry that I consistently ignored your requests to take less risky choices. I did it because of deep, unresolved childhood earplugs I have." Was that so hard?

I get that they're getting jokey with it - it's a comical amount of confession - but come on. Let's not encourage people to speak like this, please.

Who cares. This thing made a gajillion dollars and it's for eight-year olds and non-poser Shakira fans. I am neither.

One of my friends just sent me a voice note making a couple of points:

1. Visual generative AI is getting really good
2. This is starting to do weird things on our video and image-based social media networks
3. Influencers are nervously wondering if their industry will survive when brands can have individualized, hot & funny digital avatars market products to consumers directly
4. Maybe we shouldn't be posting photos of ourselves online if they can be used by bad guys to make deepfakes of us?
5. Awareness of all of this is a privilege: less-informed people will be exploited by these systems that they don't understand

I basically agree with all of that, though I'm very uncertain as to what the end state of any of it is.^🌦️

Governments are trying to clamp down on unfettered internet access: age-restricting websites, banning social media for teens. Maybe this leads to the beginning of a utopian society-wide detox from the internet:

Or maybe it births a new, worse-than-what-we've-already-got, adults-only internet with the legal system's blessing to be as X-rated as profitable^{👯‍♀️}:

As with all things, it's probably going to be a bit of both.

The consequences of AI are going to be massively systemic.^🫏 I don't think my efforts to unzuck myself will show up in any historian's account of the 21st century.

But locally, I think it makes a difference. All I really want to do is read and write and interact with my close friends. I have no desire to grow a following, or build a network, or develop my personal brand.

If you do, it's harder. You can use ActivityPub^🐑 or ATProto: own your algorithm and be selective with your privacy settings^🕵️, but these networks are still juvenile and the federated interoperative dream is still on its way. Most people still don't really get what Mastodon is and won't know how to follow you from the walled garden they're held captive in. "The internet" is just five websites that all look the same. It's asking an arm and a leg of someone to not use Facebook Messenger or to follow your travel updates via RSS.

But I'm okay with doing this because I also believe that being on those platforms myself is just bad for me. It's like, yeah, if you want to hang out you have to come jogging with me, but we should all jog more and jogging alone is still better than nothing at all.

And get this:

🤯

On my friend's point that "technology is unfair", yeah, it sucks. I get so mad whenever I help my mum with some tech thing and I see how confusing the experience is for her. Windows has changed for the umpteenth time, and half of her google search results are ads or spam, and her apps don't work anymore because her laptop is 5 years old.

Each of these things has a specific fix that I can implement, but I'm annoyed that I have to do it at all, and like the unzucking, it's not a systemic fix. There are billions of people out there without a tech support family member.

One thing I'm a little optimistic about is that language model assistants are probably going to help most people be safer on average. There will be accidents and exploits and prompt injections and all the bad things, but a world where the majority of people ask claude "Hey Claude, is this legit?" before doing something they're uncertain about probably has fewer life-ruining errors in it. Depending on how life-ruining you think it is to lose the ability to think for yourself.

in not quite getting there, you go somewhere else

Chorus

Shorty a lil' baddie (She a lil' baddie)

Shorty my lil' boo thing (Boo thing)

And shorty got the fatty

Shorty be catching mood swings

Every time I fuck without a rubber

I nutted on the covers

And I kept it undercover

'Cause I don't kiss and tell (Kiss and tell)

Verse 1

Every time I fuck, she call me daddy

My lil' mama nasty

I see the pussy through the panties (Whatever you want)

She taste like candy

She a queen, like Nefertiti

Uh oh, my lil' mama sittin' pretty

And we be shoppin' through the city (Oh, oh)

I gave her keys to the Bentley (Woah, woah)

Get off your knees, you don't gotta cry to me

I'm your best friend, baby, you don't gotta lie

I'll get you everything that you want and you need from Chanel to Celine

It's on you to decide

Valentino, yeah, I put you in the best

Start liftin' up your dress, start kissin' on your neck (Oh no, no)

Start rubbin' on your butt, start massagin' your breasts

I ain't wanna give you a baby just yet, so I backed out and nutted on your breasts

I put you in a Uber (Uber) and sent you to your bed (Oh)

The very next day (Oh), you sent me a text (Oh)

You pulled up to the crib and we did it again (Oh, oh)

Verse 2

You know, I never found love until I looked into your eyes (Until I looked into your eyes)

First time blushin', I ain't even gon' lie (Ain't even gon' lie)

Four rounds in, leavin' bruises on your thighs

You the only bitch could make me spin off on the guys

And the only bitch that make me wanna nut when I'm inside

It's your vibe, leave with me, you gettin' high

Girl, ain't bitches fuckin' wit' you even if they tried

Pussy a tsunami, I ain't never fucked it dry

Close my eyes 'fore I sleep, hope you be there when I wake

Honestly, I feel the vibe we have is great

And if there's something in your mind, you can tell me

And if I told you what's on mine, would you help me?

You gon' see the bigger picture, it's just gon' take time

Just because you mine, I'ma keep you lookin' like a dime

Ain't no imperfections, girl, you fine

Baby, what's your sign?

I hope you ain't against the slow grind

(Work, work, it's me and you) Me and you

Keep it silent, there ain't nothin' we can't do

Through the storm, baby, we can make it through

Why you actin' brand new? You know you my lil' boo thang

Got up on my Birkin, it's workin'

She said she a virgin (It's hurtin')

She my biggest fan, she always lurkin'

And she know I'm a man, I'ma put that work in

I know she can't stand me, I'm fancy

So I'ma bring her out when I get my Grammy

Late night sex, she can't find her panties

Couldn't hold it in, now she need a plan B

Chorus

Shorty a lil' baddie

She my lil' boo thing

And shorty got the fatty (Shorty got the fatty)

Shorty be catching mood swings

Every time I fuck without a rubber

I nutted on her covers

And I kept it undercover

'Cause I don't kiss and tell

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

- Robert Epstein, The Empty Brain (2016)

Okay.

• What would it even mean to "find" Beethoven's 5th in the brain?^🔍 At best, you could take a perfectly precise measurement of someone's brain state and use that data to reconstruct their memory of the music. (In the way that scientists are reconstructing visual imagery via fMRI and machine learning. They haven't "found" a cat inside the brain, but there's clearly some information about the cat in the brain that is statistically useful)
• metaphors are inescapable. some are better than others.
• the evolution of metaphors for the brain (clay → hydraulics → machines → electrochemistry) traces a series of practical but incomplete models: other paradigms, with their own entities and rules, which allowed us to iteratively complexify our conceptual model of the brain^🧠. once the limits of the metaphor were reached, or new technology with more complex or expressive dynamics was discovered^⚙️, the paradigm shifts.
• it's not a bad thing to have an incomplete paradigm. it's a bad thing once it supresses a better, more explanatory one from coming along. Robert suggests that this is what the humours metaphor did, though I think there were probably many more significant factors at play if you want to talk about why it took so long for the renaissance to happen.
• there's a type of computer process that people colloquially refer to as "baking." the computer isn't literally putting bits in an oven at 180°C, but the metaphor is helpful because it quickly conveys that some ingredients were assembled, and now a process is about to occur that will take some time, and there will be some output on the other side that we care about. language is full of these and we have to make subjective calls about which metaphors are best at capturing the dynamics of a system that are relevant to us based on how well we think they strike the right balance between clarity, correctness, intuitiveness, etc.
• it's not clear to me that the information processing metaphor is stunting us. on the contrary, artificial neural networks are allowing us to interpret the brain more than ever before. materialist theories of cognitive science are giving us actually falsifiable theories of consciousness.
• his example of a "non-algorithmic" explanation of how to catch a ball is literally an algorithm. I think we have fundamentally different understandings of what "information", "processing", and "computation" means.
• his "metaphor-free" everything-is-operant-conditioning proposal is a theory that collapsed in the 70s?

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Why don't we just say that that's retrieval, which is maybe kind of similar to other sorts of things that we call retrieval, and see if this helps us explain or make predictions about a system any better than before? "The brain doesn't retrieve. We simply sing." is not a predictive theory that could help us understand things, rather it suggests that we shouldn't even try.

I don't think this was a good representation of anti-representationalism, and I don't claim to have any answers as to how the brain works (I'm just a guy who really liked Being You) but I think if you're going to point out why the dominant paradigm doesn't work, you need to make a better case than this.

There's a good version on Standard Ebooks. Greg Wagland's rendition is also great.^👂

For thirty years, I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—amen, so be it.

• It's wild to think how many of today's pirate tropes this popularized or influenced^☠️ Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
• Pew was a really menacing minor villain! I was genuinely scared of him.
• Despite the mutiny, everyone has a very strong code of honour. Jim makes promises to the pirates and desperately hopes to keep them, to his great personal risk.
• They didn't know what caused malaria back then. The doctor is going on about the quality of the air: low, boggy air was bad. dry, mountainous air was good. Cool to see some proto-science.
• The novel's awash with nautical terminology. How many of these words and terms did the average British kid know back then?

I think I might be entering my audiobook era. Going for a run getting lost in a story is a delightful double-dip, though I wish it were possible to highlight noteworthy excerpts while listening.

A friend just asked me this. Might as well write it down.

I stopped eating meat when I was 17 because my girlfriend at the time was vegetarian, and I knew that it was one of the remaining ways I could significantly lower my carbon footprint.

A year or so later I made the switch to veganism because of the same logic.

After a few years of being "outside" of meat consumption, it became possible for me to be able to think more critically about the moral aspects of breeding/farming/eating animals.^🧱

So now I stay vegan both to reduce emissions and habitat loss, and to try and absolve myself somewhat from the suffering.

The cruelty and pain is greater than anyone can comprehend. It is one of the most evil atrocities humanity continues to commit. I desperately hope for its end. I want children to grow up in a world where they're truly horrified to learn what we did to trillions of animals for hundreds of years.

Veganism is not a movement that has flattened the curve of animal suffering - I believe that will come from in vitro meat (which is decades away from being economically viable) and medium-term animal welfare reforms - but I cannot in good conscience participate in the system in the meantime.

I first saw this on Hakushi Hasegawa's website¹ and after a little digging around in the source, saw that it was implemented with a shader and three.js

But I had a hunch that it might be possible with CSS blending modes. Not because I fully understood them, but just because it seemed like the sort of thing they're made for.

And as you can see, my hunch was correct, but as I write this sentence I still don't completely understand why.

They've been explained a million times by other people, but it's an open secret that blog posts like this are for me, not you, so here we go again:

What actually are blending modes?

In a black and white image, every pixel can be represented as a value between 0 and 1.

0 is fully black. 1 is fully white.

Blending modes are rules for what should happen when you combine two of these numbers. For instance, the darken mode takes the lower of the two.

Or the multiply blending mode, which can be written as:

where

• $A$ is the base pixel value
• $B$ is the blend pixel value (the one on top with the blending mode set)
• $C$ is the output

If you have one pixel that is 0.5 (medium gray) and another that is 0.7 (light gray) and you blend them together with the multiply mode, you'll get a pixel that is 0.35.

And to be clear, this isn't just 3 divs with 3 different hexcodes. The third square you see is two divs stacked on top of one another with mix-blend-mode: multiply set on the top one.

need proof? Toggle animation Toggle blend mode

One thing you might take away from multiply is that it's not possible to get a lighter value than the values going into it. A fraction of a fraction is always smaller than the fraction itself.

Using blending modes as masks

So how do we use these tools to make the spotlight? The key is understanding that the abrupt edges of the color-dodge mode can turn a gradient into a mask.

With color-dodge, as the blend pixel approaches 1, the denominator approaches zero and the output value increases abruptly.

Here's a medium gray base layer and a black-to-white gradient blended over it using color-dodge

Think about what's happening here.

A is 0.5

B ranges from 0 to 1.

On the left, B is 0, so we're dividing 0.5 by 1, which equals 0.5 ²

As B approaches 1, we start to divide A by a smaller and smaller number. When B is 0.5, we divide 0.5 by 0.5, which equals 1: pure white. Any higher value of B makes no difference because 1 is the lightest value possible.

As soon as the blend pixel becomes lighter than the base pixel, the output flips to white.

What if we blended a gradient over a noise texture?

Some of the noise pixels have slightly lightened, and many of them have turned fully white.

Effectively, what's happening is the computer is sampling each pixel and comparing it to the gradient. If the gradient is lighter, it hides the pixel. The further along the gradient you go, the more pixels get hidden.

Now all we need to do is make the remaining pixels black. Fortunately, there's another blend mode for that: color-burn

color-burn takes the inverse of your base layer, divides it by the blend layer, and then takes the inverse of that.

Let's color-burn a black layer over the color-dodge layer.

We start by picking one of the remaining visible pixels. Say we pick one that's dark gray (0.3)

1. The inverse of dark gray is a light gray (0.7)
2. The blend layer is black (0)
3. 0.7 / 0 = Infinity
4. 1 - Infinity = -Infinity

CSS can't display negative infinity: it clamps the value to 0. This is why all the gray pixels turn black: we're always going to be dividing them by zero.

But there's a special case! What if the pixel we sample is white? (1)

1. The inverse of white is black (0)
2. The blend layer is black (0)
3. 0 / 0 = NaN
4. 1 - NaN = NaN

NaN means "Not a Number", which is a special value used to represent undefined or unrepresentable numerical results. Fortunately for us, CSS renders these specific errors as white.³

And so there you have it. There's some artifacting going on due to tolerance for near-white values, but to recap:

1. color-dodge "hides" pixels that are darker than the gradient.
2. color-burn blackens the remaining pixels

This gives us a pixelated falloff based on the lightness of a gradient that we can overlay atop a noise layer.

Building the effect

Now that we understand the principle, let's build it step by step.

First, we create a div and center some text in it:

Then we place a new div above the text, with a noisy background image. Statically positioned elements' backgrounds paint first, which is why the absolutely positioned text is shown above it.

Then we place a div inside the noise layer and give it a radial-gradient from white to black.

Because the div is absolutely positioned, it's now painted above the text. We can set a darken blend on the darkness layer so that the darker black of the text shows through.

Now we can add mix-blend-mode: color-dodge to the spotlight div.

But wait, why doesn't the spotlight hide the text? Isn't white lighter than black?

Here's our layer structure:

<div class="container">
  <div class="text"> <3 </div>
  <div class="darkness">
    <div class="spotlight"></div>
  </div>
</div>

Nesting spotlight inside the noise layer puts it in a new stacking context.

When you set a blend mode on an element, it only blends with elements that are behind it in the same stacking context. To use a metaphor, the spotlight is inside a box (the noise layer). It can blend with the walls of its box, but it can't reach outside the box to blend with things sitting next to the box.

This changes how the box looks, but the box (the noise layer) is still blending with the text in its stacking context using darken.⁴

Finally, we add a new div over everything, with mix-blend-mode: color-burn and background: #414141 to turn all the remaining non-white pixels black.⁵

A little JavaScript to make the circle follow the mouse and you've got a spotlight!

If you'd asked me how blending modes worked before writing this, I would have said "by iterating through them until you find one that looks right."

I think that's still kind of the case. Experienced photographers probably have a stronger intuition about when to use a particular mode for adjusting one of their photos, but I'd be surprised if most of them don't also just tap the down arrow on the selector to preview what each of the modes would do.

And I could have implemented all of this with canvas and it would likely perform better, but I'd need to have learned the theory regardless, and it's cool to learn what's possible with regular CSS nowadays 🙂

xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.xxxo.
x.x.xx.x.x..x.x.xx.x.x..x.x.xx.x.x..x.x.xx.x.x..x.x.xx.x.x..
......x...........x...........x...........x...........x.....

i love boris.

when this track descends into sludgey perdition, they play a cool rhythmic trick. the guitar phrase is 14 beats long, but the drums play a 16 beat phrase and they cycle around, out of phase, until they unite again in unison.

if you listen to the studio version with headphones, there's also a full stereo pan of the squealing lead guitar. ugggh i love it.

Two years ago, a colleague asked me "concretely, what's a way in which you think AI is going to change the world?"

I said: the way we relate to and use software. We will stop writing or installing it.¹ We'll instead have an AIs that dynamically write our programs for us.

Two years later, I'm feeling even more confident about this. Claude Code and Codex are the worst they'll ever be, and they're already one-shotting simple webapps.

Check out this ~special~ metronome I asked Codex to make.²

I wanted it for months, but never got around to making it myself, because to code it by hand would take more time than the idea was worth. But now I can get it made in 30 seconds, provided I have my laptop on me.

The next step could be making it possible to create these apps by typing a prompt on my phone: "Write a program that does X, Y, and Z."

The model writes it and stages it somewhere. I'd maybe ask for a few iterations, and once satisfied, deploy it on my site.³

I think this kind of capability would be really useful, and I'm sure the ergonomics will improve rapidly (alongside their capabilities and possible complexity, incorporating our phones' cameras and gyroscopes and what have you.)

For now, it remains a niche power among those who are somewhat technical or tool-making. But it seems kind of easy to commodify and market: what could be more useful than making it easy to make useful things?

Interoperability will be important, and there will still likely need to be some organizational effort to design and spread standards so that my bespoke apps can interact with other people's bespoke apps.

But, basically, we're all going to become Geordi Laforge, Chief Prompt Engineer, and everything will go great. There will be no problems.

this isn't merriam-webster, but i reckon it's when you're motivated by something other than what you should be.

say you come out of the cinema with your friends and you start raving about how many of the shots were inspired by some french new wave guy.

maybe you're authentically stoked about the cinematography (the pretense), but maybe you mostly just want to sound smart about movies because of how it affects your status in the group.

someone who loves film for its own sake should be happy to talk about the film at any level with their friends. people aren't familiar with godard? that's okay, you could also talk about the acting or the story. if you're incapable of meeting people where they're at, i think people will be rightfully suspicious that you've got an ulterior motive.

sometimes accusations of pretentiousness are just anti-intellectual. i've been called pretentious for referencing the history of a genre of music as part of my appreciation for a song. it felt genuine to me at the time, and i wish the person who said that had just said "i don't know enough about that to engage in the same way and i don't want to hear a lecture." or "yeah... i liked a different aspect of it." instead it was basically like "shut up, nerd."

it takes two. one to notice that their passion is alienating their interlocutor and one to engage supportively if someone seems excited to talk about a subject they love.

this stuff all gets worse if you're talking about disliking something. if someone's perfomatively liking something, it's easier to overlook that it's pretend. if they're being a hater, it's a bad deal: being persuaded to enjoy something less in order to feel insecure about my inferior taste.¹

pretentiousness doesn't have to be about taste or aesthetics. i was pretentious the other day when i got in a little back-and-forth with my driving theory instructor about whether or not he had explained something correctly. ostensibly i was speaking up to clarify for myself and my fellow students, but once he began to double-down on his confusing explanation and i started to try to explain to him why it was confusing, i could feel my motivation shift to something else: i wanted to outdo him and show that i was smart to the group.²

it's hard to know what the exact mix of any of our motivations is. i like to flex my vocabulary in a way that is a little pretentious, but i also genuinely enjoy finding the word that feels like it perfectly conveys what i'm trying to say. having multiple motivations isn't necessarily pretentious, but you should try to reduce the amount you decieve yourself or others as to what they are.

More Perfect Union released a video on automated truck drivers (which are now on the roads in Texas.)

They argue:

1. The "driver shortage" framing is industry spin on the fact that employers are deliberately underpaying workers to increase churn and keep the average pay grade low.
2. Automation will lead to further degradation of the trucking career that has allowed many men to earn a decent wage and quality of life. The consequences of this will be dire.

Is automation necessarily anti-labour? Is it possible to automate jobs while protecting the people who do them?

My supermarket installed 12 self-checkouts several years ago. In the pen, there's now one worker who harriedly flits between the stations, swiping their lanyard to authorize alcohol purchases. Repetitive and thankless. Pretty bad, as far as jobs go.¹

I assume most of people doing this job don't love it, but that doing it is still one of the better options available to them. Maybe they don't have any skills, or the skills from a previous career aren't valued anymore. Maybe they like the flexibility of part-time work.²

All I know is that I wouldn't want that job, and that I'm grateful for the privileges of my life that mean it's not yet been an option I've had to consider - privileges that I wish were extended to everyone.

It's all well and good for me to say that I wish for a world where everyone is so taken-care-of that we'd find it unconscionable to require labour that alienates³, but steering our shambling society towards such a utopia is really hard to do. How can we identify and agree on why we have "bad jobs", align everyone's interests to the collective cause of reducing suffering, and correctly triage the opportunities we have?⁴

Maybe the answer is to read more Marx, but I don't think it's possible to get the Good Automation that reduces toil, without also fundamentally lowering the value of the equivalent human labour and therefore the power of those workers' strikes.

i.e. the truckers are right to be concerned.

But I want jobs to be automated. I want humans to do things other than scan barcodes and drive along the interstate for the majority of their lives. If we still have warehouses filled with humans in 15 years⁵, I think that's because we've shambled wrong, even if it's because we've fought tooth and nail for labour.

Maybe there's a more middle-ground Scandanavian model. Companies that automate must invest some additional amount in continual retraining such that automation remains complimentary rather than rivalrous. I'm not actually sure if that approach will be able to keep up with the rate at which human skill is outcompeted.

In any case, I think it's going to be really hard to form a coherent story and set of policies to sell automation. Workers are proud of their worth, and are going to be skeptical that any self-sacrifice will contribute to a greater good, because the collectivist spirit is so dead in the West. Conversely, corporations will argue against paying redistributive taxes, because it's the profit incentive that drives the transition to full automation.

Yet, ultimately, I think automation will win. It's going to be hard for labour to globally impede technological progress, whereas tech companies will be able to easily relocate and improve, until they're so cost-effective that even the most labour-sympathetic regions will be unable to resist interfacing with the automated economy.

Whether or not that irreparably tears the social contract, idk. Hope not.

When people say "the problem is education" they tend to mean "I want everyone to have the same beliefs as me, but persuading adults is too hard."

I think it's naive to assume that agreeing on a national curriculum is any easier, but assuming that you could, it's even more naive to assume that students would internalize the lessons you want them to.

For example: in high school, I didn't understand our English curriculum's emphasis on literary analysis essays. They seemed mysteriously tautological: fill in the essay template to demonstrate to the person marking you that you can fill in an essay template.^😱

I don't mean to insist that the subject of english "justify itself" in that stembro way. I just don't remember anyone ever telling me why it was worthwhile to learn how to analyze literature. I have since read some greek plays and can say with confidence that this was a tragedy.

Here's an explanation that might have worked for me:

Stories are one of the main ways we make sense of the world. Writing is another. We write about stories to gain an ability to think about how they're written and what they mean. This allows to be more persuasive and less susceptable to bullshit. It also allows us to share our perspectives with one another, which is essential for democracy.

I smashed that out in 2 minutes. It's arbitrary and a thousand alternate justifications exist, but the idea is that, for each student, there is a justification that could appeal to them.

Why didn't we do this? Some ideas

• We did
  • but not often enough to remember 10 years later (wisdom has a luridness problem)
  • but I didn't like the justifications ("it'll be on the test", "it's needed for jobs that pay a lot of money")
  • but it doesn't work. Existentialism doesn't vibe with kids before they know their spelling, or, it doesn't make a measurable difference. (also, if every teacher was making the best case for their subject, wouldn't it all come out in the wash and students would drift towards their natural competencies as we currently do?)
  • but in the wrong way. Teachers mistakenly believe they are teaching purpose, simply because the purpose is so obvious to them that they don't realize how much more explicit articulation it needs.
• We can't
  • it's too politically contentious to agree on
  • it's too expensive to personalize per student, teachers are too busy, etc
  • teachers are lacking in real-life experience to know all the potential applications of what the kids are learning.
• We shouldn't
  • this is something you can only figure out yourself, and it can only ever be an ongoing process.

I suspect the answer is some combination of the above and more. ^🏫 It's clearly not "no one's ever thought of it before", but pretending that it is, what outcomes would I hope for?^🌏

If I was motivated to write literary analysis because I cared about democracy, maybe my teacher or I would realize that it would then be good to actually try to engage with the substance of other students' arguments. Let's actually test if it's working! It's wild to me how little time we spent as a class, or in groups, debating what V for Vendetta actually meant.

We never tried to persuade one another to adopt different beliefs about what a story was about, or whether it was good or bad. Our essays were written in a near vaccuum, graded more on their internal coherence than in relation to other people's arguments. It's astounding, really, how little dialogue there was. No opportunities to say "I don't think that makes sense" in response to someone's poorly constructed argument. No way to learn better ways of seeing things.^🧠

And now we're sleepwalking into education's purpose being entirely lost with language models. I see students at cafés copy-pasting to and from their moodles and can't help but think "Damn, if only you were a little better at questioning what any of this is for."

It's so parallel to the alignment problem that I'd argue it's a comedy.

Laura C by Big Supermarket is a song about Tomb Raider. I love it.

Part of the reason why, is that I cannot reliably hear the downbeat in the right place. There is a clear "right" way to hear it that my mind can snap into if I try, but most of the time I hear it spasmodic style.

In the "wrong" way of hearing it, the bass drum hits on the one, which is a ubiquitous convention of rock music, and something I am very biased towards hearing.

But by that counting, the rest of the beat makes no sense: there's a snare hit on the first "and" and then on the "four" - a non-ubiquitous unconvention.

By comparison, hearing it the "right" way (with the bass drum on the first "and") gives the song a natural, head-bumping groove. When my mind lurches over to hearing it this way, it immediately makes sense and I feel almost, like, relief?

This doesn't seem to happen to other people as much. Some get a little confused in trying to count it, though I think it often has more to do with the song's timing being kind of imprecise and wobbly, not due to an ambiguous downbeat. In my surveying, most people only ever hear it the "right" way, and struggle to hear it my way at all - if they do, it's usually with effort and incredulity.

It reminds me of the spinning dancer illusion. I used to be scared that I would lose my ability to perceive it one way or the other, but so far, it seems like I'm always able to oscillate between the two, unlike another kind of illusion that is famously one way.

It's been highly enriching to have a song that highlights instability of my subjectivity so reliably... and it bumps, too!

And all I see is little dots

Some are smeared and some are spots

Feel like murder but that's alright

Somebody said there's too much light

Pull down the shade and it's alright

It'll be over in a minute or two

I'm charged up, don't put me down

Don't feel like talking, don't mess around

I feel mean, I feel okay

I'm charged up, electricity

The boys are making a big mess

This makes the girls start to laugh

I don't know what they're talking about

The boys are worried, the girls are shocked

They pick the sound and let it drop

Nobody knows what they're talking about

I'm charged up, I'm kinda wooden

I'm barely moving, I study motion

I steady myself, I fooled myself

I'm charged up, it's pretty intense

I'm charged up, don't put me down

Don't feel like talking, don't mess around

I feel mean, but I feel okay

I'm charged up, electricity

That's what I call it

Ah-hah

belgian ISP Telenet remade a music video straight from the top of my childhood. it's cool/inspiring/funny to see how things have changed.

i saw superman yesterday. the plot is that lex luthor is up to no good.

(there will be uncensored spoilers throughout the rest of this thing.)

the film has a lot of funny movie logic, but basically does what it needs to do. i liked how perfunctorily the monsters of the week were treated, the excessive number of times superman stops what he's doing to stop something from falling on someone¹, and lex luthor's technique of beating superman by micromanaging bizarro from a mission control center with a walkie talkie.

the movie's g-rated and almost completely bloodless.² every time superman bodies someone, there's an obligatory chaser shot of the goon writhing around alively. the themes and characterization are accordingly light.³

afterwards, i was like "well, that was kind of bad but i also enjoyed myself"

but whence "that was kind of bad" ? were my expecations that this movie was going to be anything other than what it was? if i enjoyed myself, what's the actual problem?

i think it's that i actually have a secret fascination with the idea of superman, and am really curious about how other people run the thought experiment of "what would happen if one person had the ultimate monopoly on violence?" james gunn chose to write a dramatic story, not a polsci wargame, and so i was a little disappointed.

the superman movie i want to see is utilitarian superman hellbent on creating the conditions for global liberal democracy utopia.

some things he would do:

• throw all the nukes into the sun
• drop the worst guys into a volcano on live TV
• abduct all the world leaders and take them to an private island resort for 6 months where they have to microdose LSD and do team building exercises⁴
• launch a global journalism fund that creates multinational newsrooms around the world with a rigourous commitment to truth-finding, calling out corruption, and fostering a cooperative consensus of reality
• instruct all governments to implement a plan that will end all factory farming in 2 years
• create united nations v2, staffed by the recently reprogrammed world leaders, mandated to create a constitution that sets the rules for how superman can be democratically controlled from there on

and i think there are a tonne of ways you could complexify the plot for dramatic tension, if watching a rube goldberg machine isn't your thing:

• the slippery slope from superman smashing the killer drone factory in ukraine to intervening in light border skirmishes between india and pakistan to zipping around the philippine sea to search every fishing ship for weapons.
• the supermedia organization criticizing superman the most vocally, testing his commitment to the ideal of free speech
• arguments from citizens that authoritarianism is bad, no matter how benevolent it is (though this is a cliché found in every gritty comic book)
• moral leadership not filtering down into each country's institutions i.e. the CIA rejecting its proselyte president, and each tier of the state needing its own session at Camp PLUR
• phycisists and economists insisting he simply becomes a transitional power source

if you wanted to be extra cynical⁵, you could have the movie show superman's transformation from ambitious idealist to the very veidt-style existential threat that humanity unites to defeat, but i think i'd prefer the version where, despite some bumps and unintended consequences along the way, things mostly work out, and the world reaches a stable form of peace and prosperity.

i think that's the more subversive choice: taking superman's incorruptibility seriously and exploring what world peace might actually look like. to ask what if the real conflict isn't "will superman become evil" but "can humanity be forced to be free?"

that would be the real punk rock thing to do.⁶

i'm talking that toy block, developing sense of agency shit.

i challenge you to roll three sixes for no reason.

I used to work near Granville Island, so when I visited Vancouver in early 2025, I wanted to walk around my old stomping grounds and pay the chandelier a visit.

I walked to where I remembered it being installed, and discovered it had been removed, presumably for maintenance reasons. Disappointed, I went home and lamented to my sister.

She replied, "Oh, it's not there anymore? By the north entrance?"

"By the south, you mean. And no, there's nothing."

"It was never at the south entrance. It was installed at the north entrance."

"What are you talking about?"

I argued with my sister - who lives in Vancouver and has been to Granville Island countless times in the last 6 years - that she was wrong. I had seen that chandelier many times while working near the south entrance.

After 10 minutes, she was unconvinced but sympathetic, and so we took to the internet, where every single article, blog, photo, or video we could find confirmed that the chandelier was installed and had-only-ever-been-located at the north entrance.

I felt mad. Both ways. This was a conspiracy. I was so sure that I had seen the chandelier at the south entrance, and that this was all some horrible kind of gaslighting.

But after scouring through every obscure source of evidence I could think of, I had nothing to back me up.

Finally, reluctant and unhappy, I quietened.

I went to the north entrance a few days later. The chandelier was there. I looked around. I had no memory of this part of the island.

Months have passed. I'm pretty sure what happened is that the ceiling of the bridge looks the same from both entrances, and I saw so many photos of the chandelier in the news with the familiar ceiling of the bridge behind it that I assumed they must have been taken from the place I knew where the ceiling looked like that.

So now I have direct evidence to the contrary, and a plausible story as to how I got so confused in the first place. I no longer believe the chandelier was ever installed near the south entrance. And yet.

I still have the memory of walking past it during my lunch break.

related reading

• Flashbulb memories of dramatic events aren’t as accurate as believed (or any of the writing on Flashbulb Memories and Challenger Rocket memory experiments)
• The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang

usually we smerch because we can't remember which drawer the emoji we're looking for is stored in (is 💦 nature or human?), but sometimes also because we're not quite sure which pictogram best conveys the tone of what we're trying to express, and even less frequently because the emoji picker we're using isn't on the latest unicode version and isn't showing 🫨 even though we swear we've looked everywhere.

my favourite song from this telephone explosion release (Delicious Logo by Man Made Hill), which unfortunately for my ears, mostly sounds nothing like this.

the album is interesting, though. i felt compelled to defend it when sharing it with someone, who found it annoying and unpleasant. it's not not those things, but isn't it also lovingly made? eliding distortion, or screaming, or atonality - which are the more typical ways of making music grate - the music is written with a deliberate & boorish unseriousness. but it also cares. it's attentive to the sonic details of the eighties pop music that it draws from.

it's not tim & eric, nor some kung fury-type parody. it's something that makes you feel really weird if you fall asleep listening to it, overtired and alone at two in the morning. don't ask me how i know.

or the studio version with the guitar in the vampout, good god.

the last hecks album sounded like this

ostensibly an exhibit about the history of water and plumbing. it takes an hour to walk through. there are salted snacks at the start. heaters are turned up high. there are water fountains and vending machines throughout, but they're all out of order. there's a stationary bike that powers a water pump, but no matter how hard you pedal you're always just a bit short of getting water. thirst-generating pictures everywhere of sweating glasses of icy water, etc.

FINALLY, when you get to the end after an hour of being thirstier than you've ever been in your life, there's a water bar that has every kind of water on tap. bliss. amazing. everyone gulps the water down feeling the most intense kind of relief they've ever felt...

...so far. they look up and see the sign. "exhibit 2: museum of urgency"

This is an especially unflattering example of a kind of thing that can happen in D&D.¹ The character who should be able to do the thing, can’t, and the character who shouldn’t, can. Ideally you come up with a narratively satisfying reason for this (Elsie actually noticed the door’s hinges were exposed, and unscrewed them) but in the moment, Tul fails at the thing he’s meant to be good at.

The duo sprint to the top of the tower, but it’s empty save for a clouded mirror with runes etched around its frame. Elsie scrutinizes them. She rolls a 7 and so recognizes that they’re written in an infernal script, but doesn’t know what it says. Tul gives it a go, and rolls an 18. He reckons it’s a portal device which the duke has used to escape from their clutches again.

How’d you figure that out, Tul? Oh, you saw an artifact like this when you were young? Okay, sure.

It’s not implausible, but it sucks for Elsie. She has this whole backstory about how she studied for years at the Gnomish Academy, but because she’s only level 3, the rules say that she’ll only succeed at trying to investigate things 11/20ths of the time.

It's in this way that D&D is a highly structured fantasy roleplaying game. It gives its players rules to follow and a way to establish the probabilities of risky outcomes that make the story suspenseful.

These rules are simulationist. The Player’s Handbook tells you how things work in the same way that the laws of physics and biology do: here’s how fast you can run; here’s how far a fireball can fly; here’s the number you need to roll higher than on a twenty-sided die to hit a far away target. If you don’t run to be within range of the goblin, you can’t hit them with your fireball, which means they’ll be able to get away. Just like real life.

In this magical physics sandbox, memorable & amazing adventures happen, purely through the power of your collective imaginations. It truly is amazing, and good D&D rules.

But bad D&D can happen. Everyone has different views on what it constitutes, but mine are converging on the idea that a lot of it is baked into the fundamental design of the game.

Level 1

The first tabletop roleplaying game I ever played was Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. I was fourteen, playing over the internet with some guys from Texas that I knew through video games.

Like all of our influences, Fourth Edition itself was very video gamey, but I fell in love with the agentic freedom it granted. Yes, we were spending most of the time fighting monsters and using our special abilities that did area-of-effect damage in tactically optimal ways, but I loved that I could interact with my fellow players in-character, and choose to pursue any way forward that I wanted. It was a dramatically blindered version of the game, but still kaleidoscopic compared to the 2-colour palette of any video game RPG I’d played till then.

Level 2

Skip forward some years. That campaign had ended, a new version of D&D had come out, and new genre of Entertainment Product had risen: Actual Play podcasts. These shows - Critical Role, Harmonquest, Dimension 20 - brought Los Angeles creative talent to my nerdy hobby, and completely revolutionized what I understood the game to be. D&D wasn’t just a way to play fractal Skyrim, but an actually-good vehicle for improvised comedy and story-telling.

They did accents and voices. Their characters made choices that were self-sabotaging. Their instincts were informed by screenwriting, and they paced the game by cutting between scenes like a TV show script.²

I began to realize that there was more to the game than the video game-mechanical success of finishing the quest and acquiring the loot. There was also a narrative success in discovering your character; having fun in the downtime scenes; Really Caring about your peers and the NPCs.

The extent to which that had been happening to me before was incidental. A neat side effect of playing the real game. I’ve since realized it’s actuallly the principle reason I want to play, and the trouble is that a lot of D&D’s design pulls in the opposite direction.

As it’s commonly played, D&D requires the Dungeon Master to prepare a lot in advance. You want to have a lot of things ready for all the contingencies of your players’ actions. If you have a village, who’s in it? Your players should be free to talk to any of them, so what are they like? What are their motives? If you have roads leading out of your village, where do they go? If there’s danger, how can it be construed to the form of an exciting combat encounter that the players have fair odds of surviving?

For people who aren’t good at improvising, figuring out all of this in advance feels like a good way to make sure you won’t get flustered in the moment, or fail to come up with anything interesting for your players to do. For years, I actually really enjoyed doing this. Every week, I’d spend a couple of hours worldbuilding, or designing dungeons, or creating puzzles. It was a great creative outlet.

But I think it also had a pacifying effect on the players, especially the new ones. The complexity of the D&D’s rules already put them in a position of recipiency, and from there, it wasn’t a large leap to infer that the story of this game was also to be recieved, to be experienced.

This can work okay if they’re liking that experience, but when I started my last group that didn’t jibe with my ideas as much, it started to feel wasteful and unsatisfying. They didn’t like my locations or NPCs. They didn’t bite the plot hooks I set. I don’t think they felt like the game’s calls to action spoke to their characters. The group lost its momentum and I lost my spark.

Now, this was first and foremost a communication problem. If we’d have some so-called Session Zeroes to talk about what kind of game we wanted to play, before any dice were rolled, a lot of this disappointment could have been avoided. If only I’d spent half as much time working with the players to develop their characters and prepare things that directly tied into their motives as I did thinking about the political factions of my made-up city state!

Alas.

D&D doesn’t have to be this way, but its design and luminaries encourage it, and I think that’s why I made that mistake. As popularly performed, the Dungeon Master is the god-referee of the game. They know everything that isn’t the character’s thoughts, and they reveal it to the players with authoritative power. The reason those Actual Play shows were so compelling was because of all the work their DMs did. They had so many ideas. Their characters were so thought-through. The world felt so alive.

I still think that’s true (Brennan Lee-Mulligan, you’re a genius), but not the whole truth. The reason those Actual Play shows were so compelling was because everyone was actually compelled to enthusiastically engage with the game, and in the case of Dimension 20, this happened because of a lot of good, effective, and cooperative preparation.

So imagine my surprise when I started listening to a non-D&D Actual Play podcast that was just as compelling without any of that.

[DUNGEON WORLD ENTERS]

Where D&D uses dice to determine whether or not characters succeed in their attempts to do things, Dungeon World (and all games of its pedigree, based on a system called Powered by the Apocalypse,) use dice to determine what the narrative outcome of an action should be. It’s not “here’s the number you need to do this thing.” It’s “here’s the number you need to do this thing without anything else happening”. If you roll low, you can still succeed at whatever you were trying to do, but some complicating stuff will happen too.

Let’s imagine the scene from the beginning with this new system:

Tul, the fearsome barbarian, pursues the duke down one of the castle’s corridors. Elsie, his gnomish wizard companion trails behind, holding her velvet hat in place with one hand and a crumpled scrollbook with the other. Slam! The duke locks the door behind him, and his footsteps disappear up the tower. Roaring, Tul crashes his shoulder into the door, rolling a 2, bursting through the door in an explosion of oak splinters. With a horrible crash, the stone frame collapses behind him, separating him from Elsie and alerting the whole castle’s guard to their location

Tul gets to be the big tough barbarian, and yet they’ve still got problems!

“Go on without me!” Elsie yells. She turns to face the advancing captain of the guard, a ball of violet magic forming in her hand. Tul races up the tower, but all he finds is a mirror, clouded as if by a sulfuric smoke. “Go away!” Elsie incants in the language of old magic, releasing the lightning from her hands. She rolls a 4. The blast flies towards the guard, slows, reverses, and rushes back into Elsie. A brilliant flash surges up the tower and she feels her presence get transported. Tul opens his eyes. He sees Elsie in the mirror, but she’s not in the room. Her reflection mouths something: “Get me out of here!”

Isn’t that cooler? Yeah, I took more creative liberties with how magic works in these second examples, but that’s because I can! There’s no rigid 100-page chapter that spells out the mechanics of magic in Dungeon World. Magic works in service of the fiction, in the way you want it to, and the way I wanted it to work is that it can sometimes activiate powerful magical artifacts if used in their presence.

The way Powered by the Apocalypse games center “narrative advancement” as the unitary output of players’ actions means that the rules of the game are more abstract, and (as written) a lot simpler³. There’s more hand-waving, trusting the whole group to use their own judgement to decide whether or not the goblin’s in range for fireballing. This blurs the dichotomy of authority:non-authority prevalent in D&D and empowers new players to collaborate in adjudication from the beginning. Moreover, the game explicitly encourages all players to add details to the lore of the world that they want. The DM isn’t the sole expert of the universe from whom its details are revealed. They’re just the person who plays the NPCs and adds fuel when the fire begins to dwindle, the fire that doesn’t even need to be roaring from the get go, because the players all build it up together.

I really like this system. I really want to play it (specifically a more recent game called Chasing Adventure which further refines the rules).

Will it go well? I hope so! But I can also imagine some ways it might not. Improvising is a skill, and I don’t have much practice at it. If all my players are similar, maybe we’ll have some really tepid scenes where not much happens. They might also not like the untethered floatiness of it. One of my friends likes the crunchy combat and meta-layer of D&D where the players are trying to beat the DM through technically legal tactics that test the limits of D&D’s rules. Many players enjoy min-maxing the rules and finding ways to be powerful, regardless of the narrative implications or consequences.

On the other side, in the Spout Lore podcast, sometimes a character will ad lib a world detail that I don’t like. It might be kinda boorish, or in contradiction with some previously established lore. Presumably this happens even more often than the podcast implies, because they can edit out the parts they regret in hindsight. Nevertheless, I think this tension is a necessary part of the success of the game. The democratic ownership of the story means that concessions will be made, in service of a story that everyone cares about and feels a part of.

I’m looking forward to running a one-shot with Chasing Adventure, and will possibly report back in the future.

I’m not trying to make a persuasion check with this essay, despite its framing of my development as some sort of ascension towards truth. Narrative RPG systems are the devil I don’t know, and all the things I’ve kvetched are intrinsic to D&D are a) part of the fun for many players, and b) completely solvable with homebrew rules.

But I, personally, just want to fight mental and physical (and slime) demons, not a rules system or stock price⁴

So uhhh, yeah. It's... time to... roll the dice.

i don't want to spend my time reading through all the cards and playtesting with myself before printing some new decks to play with my friends, and i don't want to use online decklists because they're typically too competitive (filled with 4x of the best cards) and repetitive to play.

as i understand it, this would be very hard to make. writing an engine for mtg is very, very complicated, and writing an AI that could play it would possibly be even harder (especially if you wanted to adjust its intelligence to simulate professional versus kitchen table play)

but assuming that the cost of programming R&D is going to fall off a cliff, maybe it will be possible in the future. i would love to see it (and more generally, auto-balancing in all games) happen!

the fashion throughout this whole production is dope

these footwork/hardcore mixes from this nonchalant cigar-smoking MUSICIAN, PRODUCER, SOUND DESIGNER, SINGER, DJ, ARTIST rule utterly

check out her bandcamp!!

found this through brooklyn vegan's best of 2024 list.

it's lovely. reminds me of andy shauf and that annabelle (lee) album.

a tenacious and passionate microscopy enthusiast repairs a dumpstered electron microscope. the number of obstacles he overcomes and skills he develops is really inpsiring!

KIND WORDS by Gretchen is one, of Horizontal Hold by This Heat. Everyone in that Calgary scene was obviously, famously inspired by This Heat but I hadn't heard these two songs back-to-back before to realize how direct it got. thanks shuffle.

the other was Cadriopo by Stereolab owing everything to Sun Ra's Love in Outer Space. this one wasn't so sneaky (see also: Mellotron and Ruby by Silver Apples). i just hadn't heard Cadriopo before.

one time I wrote a drum part for a song and was really chuffed with it and then listened to it some time later and realized it was basically identical to Apocalypse Dreams by Tame Impala, so y'know, not throwing shade. inspiration is sneaky too.

As far as poltical compass memes go... pretty bad.¹

Still. Love a good model.

Here's one I've been thinking about recently: in fiction, there's a tension between maintaining the consistency of the universe's rules, and having the flexibility to create suspenseful drama. Call it the Simulation-Drama axis.

A fictional work high in Simulation is Band of Brothers - a TV series about World War II.

A fictional work high in Drama is Dragon Ball Z - an anime about alien warriors battling one another with magic.

Band of Brothers is tightly constrained by its commitment to historical accuracy. It's based on real events, which were highly documented, and highly familiar to its audience of war history buffs. Dragon Ball Z has its own constraints, but there's no objective truth like the laws of physics or diaries of soldiers forcing the writers to keep any of their promises. If the plot needs it, a character can come back from the dead, or do a special move that previously only one of the other characters could do. You could argue this dynamic is even the central promise of the show: watch DBZ to see our characters do unbelievable things and defy expectations over and over!⁴

Dragon Ball Z gets away with it because people aren't watching it to see an accurate portrayal of a Saiyan invasion of earth. They watch it to see good guy Goku triumph over evil, understanding that it unambiguously occupies the Drama end of the axis.

Shows get into trouble when they exist more fluidly in the middle.

Take Star Trek.

Is Star Trek a speculative stab at humanity's best future? A stage on which to perform 21st century morality plays? Trick question, petaQ! It's both, but its writers over the last 60 years have all had different ideas on what the exact split is.

This is hard to swallow if you're into the show for the Simulation: shown in one episode that a technology works one way (which is why the episode's obstacle is difficult to deal with) then shown in the next that it works differently, because it would otherwise be inconvenient to the story that the writers want to tell.⁵

Shields are the worst for this. Sometimes a ship can withstand multiple ships' attacks, giving the crew time to formulate a plan and cleverly escape danger. Sometimes they take a single shot and need to immediately surrender. There's no consistent and satisfying explanation for why this is, leaving the audience to invent their own reasons. In severe cases, this can stretch the imagination so much that it rips: fans admit that it happened because the writers needed it to, and simulation fibrosis sets in. The characters become a little less relatable, the lessons a little less legitimate.

Because how imitable are the crew's decisions if their risk calculus is completely random? Is it even possible to strive to be like someone who is only alive because of plot armour? If Star Trek says we should have principles, then I think the right way to argue this is by showing characters who exhibit these ideals navigating difficult situations and succeeding because of them. The self-defeating way is by showing us that these ideals are only viable in a world that doesn't have real consequences.

Maybe this axis isn't useful. You could argue there are dozens of other, better binaries to grade our fiction on. You could definitely argue that nitpicking dumb plot holes in Star Trek is as much a part of the tradition as techno-babble, and that I'm taking this way too seriously. And, yeah, sure, but I really, really like Star Trek and it disappoints me when an episode fell short of greatness because the writers couldn't manage to tell a story without cheating themselves.

I don't think it's easy to fix this, but one not-actually-practicable idea I had would be to create a computer game that simulated a galaxy with Star Trekkish rules, play it for a while, and then write your show based on developments that actually happened in the game. That way you're pre-committed to a consistent, high level set of rules, but you've still got a lot of freedom to work out the details.⁷

I say not-actually-practicable because I don't think any high budget TV production would want to bind itself so tightly to such a gimmick, but maybe it's the sort of thing that we'll be able to experiment with more as generative AI brings the costs of animation down. Nothing, Forever but earnest and with warp drive. Or maybe we'll be able to bend existing scripts with our own events and reanimate them to tell ourselves the stories we want to be told.

There's a poetic kind of irony to that. It'll probably happen.