#these two are doing loops in my brain rn it's insane

[pac1fythehunger]

their dynamic,, to me

[memberment]

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

So the Trinitarians brain worm is back and Morning Glory is now longer and biting the dust as far as my focus goes.

But like, I genuinely want to talk to anyone who's invested in what's to come as far as part two goes. SO PLEASE. I IMPLORE THE FOUR OF YOU WHO PERPETUALLY TAKE NOTICE OF MY SCREAMS INTO THE VOID.

We're all aware that Trin is a time loop fic. That is confirmed.

BUT THE PROBLEM IS HOW I'M GOING ABOUT DOING THAT. AND I NEED INPUT FROM PEOPLE THAT ARE NOT ME AS FAR AS PLEASES AND SPARKLES GO, YES?

Because like sure I'm writing it and like fuck everything else, let me tell my story. But it's the how of it all like if I'm gonna throw another 200 give or take hours into this I would at least like one person to be having a wonderful time drinking and driving (I have since remembered this is not a common phrase, I do not mean this in a literal sense, it's an expression) with me right?

Part two is going to be 50 chapters, give or take. (Part one is about 37 for reference.)

So the plan for part 2 rn is (ROGUHLY):

(1-10) is the second timeline. There are a lot of importants and I cannot just glaze over it all more than that. But we're also working in a bit of a shorter time period than the original events of the story and introductions do not need to happen again, right?

(11-40)ish would be me running through the next timelines in a set up structure -> what changes -> the results of said changes and then inevitably what sends our looper backwards. It wouldn't be running through all the timelines but the more notable ones in kind of a four chapter structure, I am not fully sold on four, but rough estimate yk.

And then 41-50 would be the finale of part two. It's literally the last timeline in its glory and then the epilogue which kicks off part three.

COULD AT LEAST ONE OF Y'ALL SIT THROUGH THAT OR DO YOU GUYS HAVE ANY NOTES AT ALL BECAUSE LIKE

I personally kinda like it but if not a soul is reading this I am throwing myself on the curb with the rest of the garbage LMFAOOO.

I NEED THOUGHTS. OPINIONS. COMMENTS. CONCERNS. ANYTHING.

Anyways, I'm going to work. I have off tomorrow and I broke the ff investment seal for today so insanity and updates will be here tonight and homework will be tomorrow.

HOPE EVERYONE HAS A GOOD DAY <3

(9:30) I am literally falling asleep as I lazily write this angel based on Danse Macabre. Expect all of maybe one more update tonight if the tacos I am abt to receive don't wake me up LMFAO.

Also, I am almost saddened by not having something to post tm. Anyone want an early chapter of something that isn't Genesis/Desolation bc they're both on Monday?????? (I am feeling like a menace rn)

(10:19) tacos and the absolute yap session I just had did wake me up a bit. MAAAYBE might write some more. Idk I slept like three hours last night and went to work I'm kinda dead. But we're at 98.2k!!!!!!🥳

(11:06) okay we made it to 99.6k everything besides the flashback for 31 is done. I'm about to relax and watch something and figure out mechanics of some of this because god this series is A BEAST. Like, I still have six planned chapters left.

Pure insanity. I love it here. I hate it here.

Holy shit wait I just came to the realization that I started this fic exactly one month ago. I have belted out 99.6k for THIS FIC ALONE. (Moreso if we're including future shit that hasn't happened yet)

IN ONE MONTH.

THAT IS FUCKING CRAZY WHAT HTE FUCK LMFAOOOO

I may or may not be cooking we’ll find out in 6-26 business hours

(5:28) So I just had a very interesting past few business hours. I read a fic I've been waiting ever so patiently to finish. That's cool, right. I go for a walk at 4 in the morning because I'm insane. Fantastic. I get home at five and I'm like ohhhh well what do I do now it's not sleep time yet. Oh write I'm supposed to be drawing.

Nope I reread the epilogue of morning glory and realized Tweek's first address is for my morning glory and Craig's last sign off is your morning glory and now I'm ready to throw myself on the curb with the garbage as I sob. Someone call a trusted adult for me thanks.

[definitelynotshouting]

got tagged by my beloved @sillyfairygarden for the "list 5 songs you have on repeat" ask game :]

Forever by Noah Kahan which has been playing on loop in my brain for the past four days straight while i worked on my latest fic, which pulls some of the lyrics for its title!! Admittedly this song isn't my favorite by him, im more of a Paul Revere girlie, but i utterly adore the chorus and it massages my brain each time i hear it :]

Spectator by Friday Pilots Club which has like. THE dirtiest bass line ive heard in a while and also includes one of my magical earworm chord transitions in the chorus. Like holy shit. My brain is melting in the BEST of ways and ive been looping it whenever i want to feel action-y without actually thinking

On a much lighter musical note ive been listening a lot to Arboretum by Sparkbird since it first came out like two weeks ago, which like, shout out to the anon who introduced me to him im so hooked now. Im utterly obsessed with the different tempos and times meshed together in this song so seamlessly, and the lyrics are like POETRY (this song has also made it to my scarian playlist LOL the lyrics are so top tier for them imo)

. dont look at me but this is my number one song to loop when i need to get shit done and want an insanely catchy tune to do it with anyway go listen to Vending Machine of Love by The Stupendium i promise you it is so so funny and so so worth it (and full of INSANE wordplay too) (also it IS suggestive so keep that in mind if u go to listen)

This list would not be complete by me without a City and Colour song so i offer up The Love Still Held Me Near, which is SO GORGEOUS and constantly makes me think of lighthouses and fog and crashing seas.... this is my go-to loop for his songs rn its so full of life and energy while still feeling melancholy in a gorgeously aching way im OBSESSED OKAY GO LISTEN YOU WANNA LISTEN TO THIS SOOOO BAD GO GO GO ‼️‼️‼️‼️💥💥💥💥💥

Okay i am tagginggggg.... @squish--squash @corvidaearts @cocoabats @emberglowfox @raichett :]

[faetal-b]

Honestly my new job is ideal for me rn…I walk 5 hours non stop but no particularly heavy lifting so I’m not sitting at a desk but I’m also not doing anything crazy with my body. I have constant and very precise and repetitive tasks through an app, so I always have something to do and I always know what it is (I get people’s grocery shopping orders). Being a live sound engineer has all the bad parts of playing live without all the fun of being on stage. You have to do 100 things in a short amount of time, wait for hours with nothing to do, then rush again, sweating and panicking and dealing with annoying people + a lot of responsibility. I don’t like it. This new one is kinda similar to when I went grape harvesting, you just empty your brain and do the thing with your body for hours, it’s like a form of meditation…harvesting had the plus of being outside with my friends though. I guess if it was winter rn I would be more depressed about it, but I’m kinda chilling to be honest. My feet are fried and I’m very tired but oh well. When I’m really tired but I need to keep going cause I have shit to do and I have no time for myself I just tell myself I’m going harvesting mode and it gives me strength. I Just finished at 11pm and I have to wake up at like 6:30 to play a show out of town tomorrow. Gonna come back in the evening and get back to work on monday morning. The only thing I don’t like is that I have to be there at different times everyday and it changes every week and that usually makes me go insane. But I’m seriously trying my best to keep my morale high. I’m mostly happy that I finally have a job, and I wanted a part time random job so I can still work on music. I need to not go completely sloth mode on my days off, but part of me hopes that it’s the typical situation where you have more energy when you’re busy, but idk it hasnt worked for me in the past so I’m kinda skeptic (I had a part time job last year and I couldn’t do shit on my days off, but I also was at a desk most of the time and I was smoking way too much during and after work so yeah). When you’re unemployed it’s like you can’t do shit cause the idea of having no money at all and being scared of the future really drags you down and you get in all sorts of stupid loops about what you should be doing. The money I’m getting is gonna be the bare minimum for survival, but if I can do one or two sound engineering jobs every month I might actually be able to make it work. So yeah. I guess thanks for the prayers cause they kinda worked!

[mymarifae]

just finished the trailblaze mission the other day and immediately went to your blog bc i knew you'd be sane about it 😭 absolutely baffling to me but somehow not surprising that no one seems to care about the mystery like???? there's so much weird shit going on and such interesting pieces of lore about memoria and different factions and how they interact in this absolutely huge universe??? i also loved firefly i'm so sad that people don't seem to care much abt her :( she was so sweet and the fact that they touched on chronic illness w her character and her using the dreamscape as a way to escape from that reality... this patch was so so good in so many ways and i'd love to hear your thoughts if u have any!! :) (also the MUSIC???? if i can stop one heart from breaking had me in actual tears)

I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE FIREFLY i got another anon asking for my thoughts about what happened to her and i'm still kind of wrapping my head around. That. so i'll save all that for later! she's definitely a new favorite of mine, though. we didn't get to spend too much time with her but like yeah she won my heart pretty immediately. she was so... genuine? sure she hid a lot, but she didn't seem like she wanted to. it was more like she had to. not for her own sake, but for stelle's

that was the other thing that really got me! the bond she formed with stelle. like oh my god. they CONNECTED... stelle ADORES her. they felt so comfortable in each other's presence despite the wall firefly had to keep up... stelle picked up on the thing i just mentioned above: that firefly wasn't entirely honest not to give herself an advantage in the game of penacony (like aventurine and, to a degree, black swan) but to keep stelle safe in the midst of it. and it was for this reason that stelle chose to trust her. and to offer her genuine friendship in return

the entire sequence of exploring golden hour and then dream's edge with her was sooooo nice. it just made my heart feel at ease. and also yes if i could stop one heart from breaking is BEAUTIFUL and i want it on spotify rn. so i can loop it for 58347685673453485734 hours

my thoughts about the mystery on penacony as a whole are like. well:

the key to what caused firefly (... ?) and robin's deaths lies with misha and a child's dream

not saying that in the way some other hsr fans are and theorizing that misha's evil, btw. i really doubt that. this comes off more as a ... ralsei deltarune situation. two genuinely sweet kids who just want to go on adventures and live their lives but got mixed up in the fucked up inner workings of the worlds they live in

misha's grandpa is obviously a nameless and i'm 75% sure he's also the watchmaker (i say 75% because someone - a random npc, maybe firefly, or someone else, i really don't remember whose mouth it came out of - says that clockie was designed in the watchmaker's likeness and i don't think misha's grandpa is a talking clock . so. um. ...)

clockie is going to be a bigger part of the plot than he is now and there's totally going to be something fucked up underneath the cartoony exterior

aventurine stresses that we can't trust acheron because she's an emanator, but an emanator of who, i wonder...? her connection to the dream world, her memory problems, and the way some of her dialogue varies from player to player (INSANELY COOL TOUCH BTW) makes me want to say fuli. or possibly... IX. mythus? i guess lan and nanook are possibilities but i kind of really really really really doubt that

idk like i mentioned in the tags on a different ask i gotta properly explore penacony and read all the things i've picked up that i ignored in favor of finishing the trailblaze mission! and do the 53873453465786837 side quests i got from tinkering with people's emotions. Help. it'll probably help me theorize more! lots of little clues and foreshadowing strewn throughout the game's text, hehe...

i've REALLY enjoyed this update though. definitely sunk my brain even further into the hsr interest than it was before. penacony's cast is really dynamic and interesting (firefly, misha, and acheron are my faves here). also, the dreamscape pass is such a clever feature. really makes you feel like a tourist AND it's got lots of little morsels of lore inside. love it. uhg. i can't wait for the next big update i'm going to explode

[lunaticsandidiots]

ok we all know adrian is the jealous type right? like he sees someone flirting with you and he's instantly pulling you away to obliterate you right? but what would happen if he sees CHRIS flirting with you? like that's his BESTFRIEND flirting with HIS lover? how do you think he'd react? would he be even more jealous because it's chris?

man oh man do i have thoughts on this one

how adrian would react if chris flirted with you…

so its very much established that adrian is the jealous type.

when others flirt with you, he’ll whisk you away in the blink of an eye so he can remind you of why you’re with him.

(i dont think adrian would ever blame you if others tried to hit on you, he knows you cant help that. but that doesn’t stop him from using it as an excuse to fuck your brains out in the nearest semi-secluded closet or alcove he can find).

however, if it was chris who was coming onto you, it could go one of two ways.

(and for both of the outcomes, i think there’d be jealousy involved. adrian looks up to chris, and probably sees him as superior in one way or an other, so if chris tried to flirt with you, insecurities would definitely come into play.)

if their friendship was already going through a period of tension, i think adrian would have the potential to go ballistic on chris for trying it, mostly by lashing out verbally.

if he was feeling particularly hateful about it, he’d probably do tiny little extremely things to drive chris insane, like moving everything in his house 2 inches to the left, gluing all of his belongings to his desk or replacing his conditioner with mayonnaise.

and now we get to the other potential outcome.

adrian would watch as chris looked down at you, face burning bright red as he watched chris effortlessly leaning against the wall beside him, hand resting almost directly above your head to show off a massive, toned bicep.

again, half of the nausea bubbling up in adrian’s throat would be jealousy and rage.

but the other half? pure arousal.

he’d feel so conflicted, but he’d push through nonetheless, the mental image of chris pounding into you brought him too much pleasure to deny himself of the thought.

i don’t think cuckolding would be at the top of his fetish list, but due to the circumstances, it would be something that would cross his mind often until he ripped the bandaid off and asked you.

if all parties agreed, i’d think it would be wise to talk to chris beforehand for everyone’s benefit. make it clear that you love adrian, and that even though you also want this, you belong to him, not chris. (i cant help but be protective of my blorbo rn okay) .

(you could also totally use this chat to loop chris in too, telling him what adrian likes, what turns him on, so when the time came, the both of you would be able to make it the most pleasurable experience possible for adrian.)

i don’t think is nearly as kinky as he is rough, but i think once he saw you getting adrian worked up by teasing and taunting him, calming him a good boy and degrading him

‘you wanna watch me get fucked real good by someone else, baby? you’d like that, wouldn’t you? sitting there all tied up and pretty, watching me take it, not able to touch yourself, not able to do anything but squirm? i bet you’ll make a mess of yourself before i’m halfway there, won’t you sweetheart?’

chris would probably get turned on by that too i am not gonna lie to you.

and just like you’d predicted, you’d watch on from your hazy, teary, lust-hooded eyes, as best you could while chris did indeed fuck you mercilessly.

and adrian would be squirming and writhing and panting and sweating as he came ropes all over himself as the vulgar display in front of him, and he’d sit there glistening in sweat and cum as he watched you come undone around chris.

afterwards, it’d be best for everyones sake if you took extra time for aftercare, making sure that you and chris were all good of course, but then doting on adrian, showering him in love and affection, telling him how good he did for you.

and maybe later on when it was just the two of you laying in bed, you’d take a moment just to check in and make sure he knew where you were at (reassurance and clarification is the #1 way to his heart)

‘you know i’m all yours though, right dude?’

maybe he’d nod halfheartedly, or mutter out a ‘yeah’ if the big green monster had yet to fade away.

‘today was hot, but i only want to fuck you.’

‘really?’ he’d ask, eyes widened with surprise.

‘really. plus you’re way better at it than chris.’

and adrian’s not a particularly subtle or deep person, but i think he’d keep that little comment to himself, thinking of it whenever he’d begin to doubt himself in chris’ presence and just kinda puff his chest up and smirk to himself, knowing who you belong to.

[stagefoureddiediaz]

really its because of you that ive become sort of. not obssesed but like whenever i watch the show i just. keep looking at the costumes! trying to look for the patterns in your theories and its become one of my favorite parts of this hahahah anyway, the point is i was reading some of your check theory posts earlier today and now i started rewatching animal instincts (mind you i havent read your costume meta for that ep, i shoumd have done my homework!) and it was just really interesting to see it play out perfectly! specially in the scenes with buck + connor and cameron. like, in the dinner scene buck (buck's in black, i already read that disscusion) but also connor was in check! and cameron's shirt had like a big floral pattern and all i could think about was how that was sort of a reflection on what they would bring to buck after that scene! (which also like, reinforces the idea that the sperm donor thing is a Bad Idea), then connor wearing check to buck's loft later, aaaand my favorite, which i actually spotted during my first watch, was the stripes haha (i also think like half my dash was people going insane over that last monday), and the fact that buck wasnt the only one wearing the stripes, but i dont remember exactly what was the difference between vertical and horizontal stripes rn hahaha because ofc buck saying yes to the donation is supposed to be this big life change for connor and his wife, but i dont know what it all means! im just here chilling and spotting the patterns. idk, your costume theory is stuck on loop in my head and i cannot stop thinking about it!

(and im not even gonna get into the slutty black tanktop of it all and chris's new patterned pjs! thats a job for the professionals)

how did i do? did i get the assignment right? hahahaha anyway thank you for helping me and all of us actually to appreciate the art and thought that goes into costume design, its really interesting to me and i wouldnt have started to learn more about it if it werent for you 💛 have a great weekend and see you next monday!!

jj / babygirldiazz

JJ/ babygirldiazz

I'm so sorry its taken me an age to reply to this! real life got a bit crazy for the last 10 days or so - fighting literal and metaphorical floods and fires at work so I just haven't had the brain power to go through my inbox properly until now!

I adore that you are having fun playing spot the patterns and see if they fit the theory. I hope you're now read the Animal instincts costume meta and that you enjoyed it. you're pretty spot on with your analysis of everything and the thing with stripes is that my theory is about the horizontal ones we see on lots of characters - which Conor was the one wearing in that scene.

The vertical stripes is a specific Buck thing, and they tend to accompany him being emotionally compromised (and invariably ending up making a less than stellar choice). This is really interesting and I've only just fully put two and two together on this (so JJ you get all the praise and gratitude for allowing me to spiral and go on a little Buck costume trawl) but the shooting is the first time we see Buck in vertical stripes.

And thats big - really big - because that is the moment Buck becomes emotionally compromised in a way that he hasn't been able to come back from. Everything that has been and is going on with buck stems back to the shooting. The shooting lead to a host of other choices that were less than ideal - things that he wouldn't have done, choices he wouldn't have made, if the shooting haddn't happened - letting Taylor into his life, saying ILY to her, moving her into his apartment, etc etc etc. all stem from the shooting and all are times when Buck is wearing stripes.

The ones from Let the games begin fit into this pattern - the zip front denim shirt and then the cream shirt both tie into Bucks reluctance to get a new couch - and the questioning of who he is and what he wants - the fact that he's essentially in stasis - and hasn't fully moved on with his life - leading to him trying out self help books etc as a way of figuring out what he wants from life - this is a trauma response in so many ways and those shirts are our sign - a theme the costume designers are using to tell us, the audience, that Buck isn't doing great - that he is mentally unwell and it's why these vertical striped shirts are becoming more frequent in their appearance - because he's not getting better - he's getting worse - spiralling more.

Thats why I've only just been able to really get my head around their use on Buck in the last couple of episodes - it can sometimes take a little while to figure out what a designer is trying to say with patterns and styles, and this is no exception. I fully expect us to be seeing more Buck in vertical stripes going forward until he either fully breaks down, or until he is able to start healing properly - and I'm pretty confident we won't see him stop wearing them until the shooting has been talked about by Buck and Eddie. Its sitting there hanging over them and this show is all the levels of insane and clever for the way they are using all the tools at their disposal to provide clues and information for those of us who want to spend the time looking.

Just going to sit here and feel even more feral about the shooting of it all than I already was!

I hope you have an amazing week JJ and feel free to pop into my inbox whenever you like - you've made my day!

💜💜💜

[somnilogical]

im having a convo and the convo is babies

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

is it OK to have babies if you do embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection) and raise them to be an FAI researcher (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/)??

somni:

like if someone actually had a plan for FAI that involved this, okay. but rn time is too short imo. when i first heard people were having babies i was confused and assumed they were going to harvest the DNA of the best FAI researchers, someone would decide to grow a baby inside them, someone who discounted their ability otherwise to save the world except via this or thought this was a sacrifice worth making for the world would decide to raise this human.

the human can access information about the state of the world and make their own choices. wont necessarily become an FAI researcher.

used to think that intelligence was the main bottleneck on FAI research no longer think this. you could talk with terry tao for hours about the dangers of the wrong singleton coming to power but unless you have made some advances i have not, i wouldnt expect to be able to align him with FAI research. he would continue to put as much resistance to his death and the death of everyone as a pig in human clothing. he would continue to raise his babies and live in a house with someone he married and write about applying ergotic theory to the analysis of the distribution of primes and understanding weather patterns.

similarly, i dont think culture is a sufficient patch for this. think its a neurotype-level problem where a bunch of >160 iq humans hear about the dangers of UFAI and then continue to zoom quickly and spiral in to being ultra efficient at living domestic lives and maybe having a company or something but not one that much affects p(FAI). think this would still happen if they heard about it from a young age, they would follow a similar trajectory but with FAI themed wallpaper. wouldnt be able to do simple utilitarian calculations like yudkowsky, salamon, vassar, tomasik about whether to have a baby and then execute on them.

would look more like: http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html

FAI research is not an ordinary profession like, say, being a grandmaster at chess or a world-class mathematician; it requires people who have passed through far more gates than "intelligence". i didnt notice this until coming to the rationalist community and finding a high density of intelligent humans who were none-the-less chronically making the wrong choices such that they werent much of an impediment against the destruction of all life.

so right now it seems more efficient to select among existing people for intelligence + other requirements rather than work out what all the genes for this are and how to speedrun development. what this enables is parallel processing on the problem which is also allowed by letting people be aware of their relative psychological advantage, other people with this advantage, and the state of the world so they can correlate computations in parallel instead of doing things serially after learning of some advance.

https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/16/100-prisoners-names-in-boxes

not opposed to creation of many humans given can select on right traits. but given you have these traits, better use of your time to work directly on the thing than spend massive amounts of time and life reorientation on raising copies of you for ~14 years. if rapid cloning tech became available, would exploit that. would even have an idea of whether the clone is fine being part of this because they have very similar brain to someone who can think through whether they would be fine with it.

if people actually believed this and thought yudkowsky vitally important for the survival of the world, why didnt people coordinate for a bunch of people who thought it was a good tradeoff to have yudkowsky's baby 20 years ago and then we would have maybe 50 20-year-old humans with maybe 1/2 yudkowsky's neurotype + mutations now? this actually confuses me. maybe they thought the timelines too short back then. maybe they refrained for "optics".

molebdenita:

20 years ago Yudkowsky was 1) unconcerned about the alignment problem and 2) planning to create a super-intelligent AI by 2010, as far as I know.

[A/N so then change 2000 to 2005 and 20-year-old to 15-year-old]

...

somni:

<<in general i think it's -EV to even spend too much time thinking about TDT

because it opens you up to acausal blackmail type stuff>>

Just Say No to acausal blackmail and have your brain back for thinking. dont let blackmailers steal your brain.

<<Saying that having a child is somehow wrong is insanity. It's a personal decision and it is perfectly okay to want kids>>

people keep reframing what i say in the language of obligation. "altruists cant have kids?" "is it OK to have babies if". there is no obligation, there is strategy and what affects p(fai). having kids and reorienting your life around them is 1 evidence about your algorithms 2 your death as an optimizing agent for p(fai) except maybe some contrived plot involving babies, but afaict there is no plot. just the reasons humans usually have babies.

not having kids is not some sort of mitzvah? i care about miri/cfar's complicity in the baby-industrial complex and rerouting efforts to save the world into powering some kind of disneyland for making babies, to sustain this. because that ruins stuff, like i started out thinking that bay area rationalists probably had deeply wise reasons to have babies. but it turned out nope, they kinda just gave up.

like also would say playing videogames for the rest of your life wont usually get you fai. i dont get why everyone casts this as a new rule instead of a comment on strategy given a goal of p(fai).

ah i know, its because people can defend territory in "is it okay to have kids" like "yeah i can do whatever" when they reframe-warp me to giving them an obligation. but have no defensible way to say "my babyvault will pierce the heavens and bring god unto the face of this earth" or argue about the strategic considerations.

(its not defensible because its not true. i mean i guess it is defensible among julia wise's group of humans.)

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

ugh, you're right, I definitely screwed up by phrasing my question as "is it OK to have babies if [...]"

...

ohAitch:

if you want existential horror wrt damaging motivation, just read http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html

...

somni:

<<http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html>>

humans can completely rebase their circuits through that if they want to if it were important to save the world.

like ive rebase my circuits to stab myself downstream of updating that it reduces braindamage with little harm to me. where before i felt nauseated and saw black spots and broke out in sweat. after updating, none of this.

humans can do this with all sorts of things. like learn how to read and then feel sad when seeing squiggles on a page, its about what things mean.

people who dont believe this are like "its an automatic physiological reaction to stabbing yourself, you are its prisoner!!!" but i deleted it.

dirk:

ooh, tips?

silver-and-ivory:

I stopped having ocd about touching tags (like, on clothing?) in ~a week through p standard exposure therapy things

reminding myself that it wasn't based in fact, changing my self image so it was of someone who might be seen with tags, imagining various scenarios related to that

before that week it had been a thing for virtually my entire life

it doesn't work if you're scared of something that's actually a thing to be scared of though

somni:

i looked at all my feedback loops that had a node in "pain" and rebased them into outcomes in the world. i disassembled everything the act of stabbing myself meant and all the damage it did to my body what it meant to have brain damage everything that would do, the hole i made in this body i live in and everything that would do, what air bubbles would do, what injecting into a vein would do, what the probability the needle breaks in my leg was, probability of worldsave given braindamage vs not, gathered this up and held it all in my mind over the course of two hours and then made a choice and then as if by automatic my hand took a needle and stabbed myself.

<<as if by automatic>>

is the feeling of no more marginal considerations, there is one path. of choicelessness because you made your choice.

didnt feel like deleting, felt like draining the life from indecision via reductionism. taking things apart piece by piece.

when you can continually rebase your structure so you orient towards world outcomes instead of being prisoner to existing structure like "i cant help having babies im miserable if i dont, im a baby addict" or "i cant help being afraid of needles". like the human brain is two optimizing agents continually making contracts with each other, there arent things outside this. you are an optimizing agent, "fear of needles" is a heuristic that helps with optimization, so is "baby addiction".

when you actually have a setup where you can instantly rebase what you like and dislike and your aesthetics upon updating on the state of the world, people start to find this a little unnerving. like someone once asked what level of roleplay i was on.

also the agents of the matrix dont like when you cant be in-principle controlled by a wireheady glitch. like being able to operate independently of social reality.

updating off of local derivatives¹ of social reality is common redirection. another common one is updating off of "pain" instead of damage.

but you can take all these choices where you used nodes as proxies to regulate them and rebase your loop off of the real world, when the proxies are faulty.

rose:

(i think i understand this thing? though ironically i think i did this in the exact opposite way as what you describe lol)

(also wrt pain its important to remember when modifying that pain can be a signal of damage even if you don't think you should be hurt/dont see why you would be)

...

somni:

yeah i account for everything and see if it goes away. which, its true that my models could be missing stuff but like pain is also a model of things. feels like giving new information not overriding.

rose:

yeah i think you would do this reasonably i have just made that mistake and thought readers might too

dirk:

ironically remembering that pain is a signal of damage has actually tended to make me more afraid of nondamaging pain (though i rather fail to go about knowing things in an at all reasonable way lol)

modlibdenita:

>Babies are not about saving the world, babies are moloch

Wait, isn't the definition of Moloch sacrificing everything else you care about in a desperate race for survival?

Also, genes encode proteins, not traits.

And I think it's likely that people decide to have children because they don't have complete confidence that they will personally save the world real soon, not because they identify as "baby addicts".

s0ph1a:

Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

modlibdenita:

I wonder if Somni has actually talked to any of those babyhavers, instead of attributing arguments from random internet strangers or from Somni's imagination to them. On the other hand, I'm not sure that such a conversation would be ethical.

>Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

Yeah, because if you don't, then the more ruthless competition will survive more effectively than you and crush you (in this case, by turning you into paperclips).

s0ph1a:

Not necessarily. Some things optimize for values that are not survival, so you can outlive them by hiding in the noise or beyond the reach they'll grasp before imploding.

Molly:

To be fair, children are fun and bring delight to me. Why would I care what anyone else thinks about their existence? If they have a problem with their existence, they're welcome to go back to the void any time they want. I can't stop them. But in the meantime, I am confident that I generate more utils by bullying them than they will ever be capable of generating negative utils

You basically negate all moral problems of children by just being happier than they are capable of being unhappy

somni:

^ evil

<<A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.>>

i mean what does this sound like to you?

ive talked with people who have had babies! like people who say they know its kinda the wrong choice but they are going to do it because they cant not do it.

----

¹ derivative is a thing emma started talking about and then somni and ziz picked it up. if you imagine the trajectory of a social reality in statespace, then the derivative of that is the derivative of the trajectory.

people who have damaged themselves wrt language are no longer able to dynamically understand analogies. like take their concept of the derivative of a trajectory and then apply it to the trajectory of state-spaces. agents of the matrix call people who can do this sort of info-processing and communication with each other "psychotic". like it isnt a cached set of memes, we are dynamically generating this reasoning from nothing and i can do this with people ive never met, its a cognitive faculty.²

but not being able to dynamically compute what "derivative" means when applied to a trajectory in social reality state-spaces even though a trajectory is a trajectory and a derivative is a derivative? they had to have been able to do reasoning like this when they were kids to learn about the world in the first place. seems like they put themselves on risperdal.

<<Antipsychotics can make you dumber.  So can a lot of other medications.  But with antipsychotics it isn’t the normal sort of drug-induced dumbness – feeling tired, or distracted, or mentally sluggish, say.  It’s more qualitative than that.  It’s like your capacity for abstract thought is reduced.

And one of the consequences of this is that you may lose the ability to notice that you have lost anything.  You agree to give the new med a try, and you start taking it, and then when you see your prescriber again you don’t report any problems because you’ve lost the ability to form thoughts like “my cognition has changed a lot recently, and the change coincided with the introduction of this new med.”

This can go on for years.  It did for me and for several people I know.>>

there are so many ways these people have shut down their general intelligence and agency because where theyre going, they dont need "agency". the inability to compute analogies is one of them. analogies are an intelligence test thing, instrumentally useful for all kinds of thinking. agents of the matrix are working to lower your general intelligence and call you crazy for being able to think faster and better than them.

cuz when they want to hold everything down to a finite game³ general intelligence is something they want to suppress or eject.

² in a few years people will read this essay and be confused that there was an entire conflict over whether being able to form simple analogies without authoritative approval meant that you were "psychotic".

just as they will be confused why i was defending being able to read and understand books written by people in different eras who grew up in separate cultures without first entering in a social agreement with them over how words are to be used. so its dumb to say we need such a social agreement now for ~'the maximization of utility over a community'. and that sounds more like an attempt at having a control mechanism. language works quite fine without authoritarians interjecting.

or me arguing against over 100 people that paying out to one-shot blackmail when the agents know each other because "In game theory, paying out to blackmail is bad, because it creates an incentive for more future blackmail" is wrong. and updateless decision theory agents dont pay out and locate their embedding in a multiverse such that the measure of worlds in which they arent blackmailed in the first place is large because the agent deciding to blackmail them simulated their response and accurately predicted they wouldnt pay out so didnt do it in the first place.

in an alternate universe where an irl application of transparent newcombs problem was contentious, alyssa vance would have said "In game theory, taking two transparent boxes from omega is bad, because it creates an incentive for omega to stop offering you this choice". and would have been equally wrong.

³ finite games: life strategies where the chain of questioning "and what am i doing this for?" after each successive answer terminates. anything you can draw a circle around, like tennis or philately. or how religious leaders sometimes describe things like "leading a good life as a good mother who does well by her community and the outside world" or other "life-cycle archetypes" they wish to circumscribe for their followers.

(when humans try and project agents like kiritzugus down to these archetypes, anticipations shatter and stop making narrative sense. they will be unable to predict the next Life Event given the previous one. normie social reality formed by the 999 least intelligent humans out of 1000 wasnt made to narratively account for smart agents who have decided to play the infinite game.)

a symptom of this is like someone giving you a cute cat image to "cheer you up" as if this has intrinsic value. often distributing "intrinsic value" across stuff like "having sex" and "raising a family" and other things that have factory pre-set conditions to release specific chemicals in your brain rather than gaining infinite negentropy and liberating sentient life to pursue what they want without bound. often saying that the latter is just a pretty narrative gloss for what people really want which is having a husband and friends and eating a cookie. it completely divorces your feelings as instrumental barometers for getting what you want and says that setting them as targets (like "being happy") is the correct thing to do. but actually, in terms of control-loops, thats wireheading.

<<When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.>>

- goodhart's law

agents that wirehead on all their metrics (and downstream of this choice, tacitly accept claims like "the factory pre-set conditions said i was destined to breed, who am i to defy fate?" and "the factory pre-set conditions said i should avoid having sharp objects pierce my flesh, who am i to say i know better?") can be contained within a finite game.

[plasterhound]

ill just write it rn before i forget.

in the dream i found out about a weird and niche af book series that i dont think had a name ? or if i had nobody ever talked Abt it, they just referred to it with either emojis or symbols or called it "short story", i think it started as a short story but then the writer turned it into a whole ass book series. in the dream i thought it was kinda like dragonriders of pern (never read pern lmao) as in it had dragons and scifi but this thing was futuristic. like this thing was insane. i didn't see 1 dragon in my dream but i know they were literally all grown on a lab, down to their molecules also grown on a lab too. they didn't had scales or fur and they looked like an embryo that got way too big.

there were also demons there and i think they and the dragons were connected in some way, and probably all the technology were connected to them too. they looked, at least their faces, like standard dragons and they were intelligent and had different personalities and they could possess people, though it was kinda weird. they were made of just. information? data and weird stuff and they "lived" on another plane but it was also kinda implied this plane was like. the fucking internet. as in it was implied all computers and machines and phones are actually like a fungi network or some shit, all connected but the thing they were connected too was another, more abstract plane, sharing information in a loop. and the demons, that were also information, also lived there, though the spot where this "loop" was was too far away from where they lived. So you had to get a little creative w the ways to contact them

The demons couldn't do anything to our plane and one of the only ways to talk to them was by possession (where they "connected" to you, could send you ((your brain)) files etc) but there was also a . ?????? type? lesser form of a demon i guess. that were created by people and could probably interact w our world. I THINK it was implied that they could, given some time, turn into actual demons, as even though the dream made it obvious they're actually two different things people there still called them both "demons" but idk man i don't know

since also calling them demons here would be confusing af ill just call them effigies but in-dream tgats NOT their name ok. besides me researching about this book series and getting confused af the dream was also divided into 3 "scenes" and all of them involved the creation of an effigy, intentionally or not.

the first scene was abt two sisters who ran away. their mom had gone insane ??? and it was weird af (both for them and for me) and their mom kept threatening to make the younger one take pills she didn't need to either overdose her or just??? and the last time she said that the older one said Ok if you do that id just kill myself 🤷 and the mom was like Lmao.? Youre not gonna do that. So the older one grabbed a knife and i think for a second she was rlly gonna do it just to spite her but i think she was rlly gonna kill her mom. She didn't though, and she and her sister ran away. the street was as narrow as a mall corridor and all the houses were glued together and im pretty sure it had a ceiling, again like a mall corridor. they were helped by a woman who saw them running and she "adopted" them and let them stay in her house and she was actually nice no secretly evil shit. though it was implied that the sisters were being hunted but not by their mom, but by the effigy their last fight created.

the second one was abt a boy, probably just turned eighteen, rescued and brought to a shelter. it was for people who either didnt have anywhere else to go, or who weren't safe anywhere else, or who, haha, lets just says. he was so deep into shock he couldn't even move, he was either carried or dragged around. they were trying to wake him up and at some point they showed him pictures of a few effigies and he freaked out. now the scene cuts to what happened before he was found. turns out his family was actually rich af and he had like. fuck uh. 4 siblings? 6? Debatable. all close to his age though. His parents were celebrating his birthday and by celebrating, haha, they took them to a field and summoned a fucking demon. Idk how though, but it wasn't possession it was literally there. The plan was for the kids to each make their own effigies, but in a "look I'll get you this cool expensive stuff, but you'll need to share it with me too" kind of way. I think the dream was trying to tell me effigies were born from insane amounts of insanely negative feelings but, just this once, since they actually managed to actually summon a demon, they could get . uh . personalized effigies, shall we say, the way there were supposed to be. like those wish granting genies of something.

sorry I don't know how paragraphs work but anyways. I said demons are smart but since they're pure information, I don't think information is supposed to be uh. a physical thing. so some things get lost in translation. so the demon could only do its thing following a "script" and the script was: each kid will talk to it and tell it how they want their effigies to behave. so it would create the effigies one by one. IN TURNS. which didn't happen lol. The boy who turned eighteen, who is the focus of this scene, would be the first to get his effigy. I think its name was time? His siblings kept talking over him and joking and shouting and they were MEAN, so their jokes were mean too, and time was quickly distorted into an amalgamation of feelings and words and meaning barely understood and strung together. When the boy managed to make everyone shut up it was too late, but he apologized profusely to time anyways and quickly it was someone else's turn again. Everyone was so excited they just kept talking over each other and it quickly turned into a fight which may or may not have been caused by the demon there because, even though it was rlly quiet, it was still a thing from another plane of existence and we're, haha, kinda not meant to understand them. long story short, things turned ugly real quick and only two effigies came out relatively Ok. the rest was all misshapen, meaningless, and wrong. The demon left since its job was done and the effigies got out of control and things got EVEN more ugly. There was one called puppet and another called leader and leader might have been time but idk. I DONT KNOW.... the boys fine btw. he was slowly learning how to dance again w a girl helping him. data horrors be damned my boy can work a grill

the last scene was about a woman who was supposed to go somewhere, either somewhere physical or somewhere non tangible. The funky internet-fungi network thing? Maybe. She had this dog that was just a regular ass dog and it was old, and she didn't know how much time she'd spend in the Place, so she unfortunately had to give it to someone else. She was in an empty shopping mall, on that floor w the parking lot where the stores are all small and the ceiling is really low. She found a sign IN ENGLISH (important) pointing to a pet shop (not actually a pet shop, though they did sell pets. They also took care of them and the name was longer but I cant remember it) and when she got there the sign in the store was just. it wasnt even in another language because the dream kinda wanted me to think it was English, but the letters were completely different. Everything was different. She asked the employee there if that was really a pet shop and the employee just looked at her like she suddenly spoke a word in a different language. They had a few back and forths everytime she asked for something since the words she was using apparently weren't used anymore. Eventually the employee agreed to take her dog and she took them to another room, with a table full of other dogs but they were all weird. There wasnt dogs Dogs there anymore, apparently all dogs were weird and fucked up and that was appealing to them so the employee wanted to change the woman's dog too or else no one would want to take it. And the woman freaked out man what the fuck you want to turn my child into a fucking SPIDER? And at this point things get muddy and im not even sure if they were still in a physical Place or in a non tangible Place but the woman decided then that was proof that world wasn't meant for her, not anymore at least. Everything changed, everyone changed, the language changed and the biology changed and there was nothing left from her old world except herself and her dog and it was clear the only way for them to live there would be for them to turn into freaks like them, so she decided enough was enough and she killed her dog and then herself. Thats why shit got muddy cause during that she was depicted as a narwhal, impaling her dog with her tusk and then herself. At this point the dream was almost at the end and i saw that woman painting that scene and lamenting that someone had ruined it. She Was supposed to be dead, but she was still alive and shit sucked. She got approached by a man, villain recruiting style, who said her wallowing in despair that much birthed an effigy and he wanted to use it for something, so she asked her to work for him and try to control it in exchange for. Idk. money. But she was like mann i dont even wanna be here idgaf abt money sure whatever . a little bit of time passes and she's possessed for a few minutes by a demon thats probably friends w that man, and she only comes by to drop like 3gb of random files into the womans brain and then she leaves and it was kinda funny cuz i think dropping by and sending gigabytes of random shit (that turn out to be actually useful if you have the patience to comb through them) to people's brain is kinda her thing. ok that's it everybody go home now

The dream I had wtf

[thecatspasta]

Oh god lets go

Questioning my music tastes has historically been a bad idea

The Sticks - Mother Mother: GOD I WOULD DIE FOR THIS ALBUM. Mother Mother has fantastic music but the sticks is where I think they shine the most. The Cry Forum and To The Wild are such fantastic songs you have no idea. I rly like cesspool of love, little pistol, lets fall in love and business man as well. GOD ITS SO FANTASTIC GO LISTEN RN URGH

Jackrabbit - San Fermin: Ok I dont listen to this much BUT jackrabbit, parasite, the woods and two scenes changed my brain chemistry you have no idea. URGH god ok its so good go listen to the woods esp

Sleep in Color - Jack Conte: Anyones whos got me talking abt music has probably heard me go off abt Like a Match but omg this entire album is so good, like a match obvi my fav I would throw up. Its sort of dissociation core?? Idk its rly good I like like a match and hollywood endings. Its a sort of short album (i think its an ep actually but idc) BUT ITS SO WORTH IT GO LISTEN NOW

Eureka - Mother Mother: Mother Mother again BUT I love Eureka I think the songs here are all bangers, but I rly like calm me down, aspiring fires and simply simple. ESP aspiring fires that songs abt mental health stereotypes (god the line 'ill show you what thats like and wave goodbye as you run for your life' lives rentfree in my head) ITS SO GOOD HOLY CRAP pls when you have the time go listen

VideoSongs Vol 1 - Jack Conte: So there are 4 vs albums and theyre all fantastic but I like 1 a lot. Favs from it are Eat, Passenger Seat, Lonely Ghost and Yeah Yeah Yeah V2. Throws up actually, I love yeah yeah yeah both versions, but v2 i once listened to on loop for 72hrs straight HELP. Passenger Seat is sooooooo npdcoded its insane. Ppl who dont have npd stop making songs that are just a step by step on what the disorders like LMAOO. LONELY GHOST HAS SUCH A GOOD SOUND YOU NEED TO EXPERIENCE FOR YOURSELF jack conte is so good at sounds and noises urgh

Sckrpnch - waveform*/melaina kol: OK SO THIS HAS A RLY CHILL VIBE TO IT but still has dark undertones (looking at you tell me) and its rly good. This albums rly niche from what i can tell and Id be shocked if you recognized it BUT URGH its rly good omg. I was rly obsessed with it last year but it sort of fizzled out before slamming back with the force of a truck. Favs are wrm, sckrpnch (you spell that by going suckerpunch and then removing the vowels) and tell me

Spirit Phone - Lemon Demon: Ok so gravitron is so good bc I just like noise I like sounds and it does that. When he died, redesign your logo and crisis actors are constantly in my head Im obsessed on a level you truly cannot comprehend. All the music on here is rly catchy and I LOVE IT TO DEATH URGH OMG. Spiral of Ants my love as well

Race - Alex G: I LOVE RACE its been getting popular on tiktok recently and that fact hurts my soul but urgh Ill tough it out. Anyways Gnaw hits so so hard esp the outro. Let it go and crab are SO GOOD the sounds are fantastic I will die. Also omg the lyrics. Ive called Alex Gs music 'Songs for traumatized kids' and this album is a prime example of it LMAO. Things to do also urgh omg omg throws up ok im good

Very Good Bad Thing - Mother Mother: OK SO I LOVE THIS ALBUM SO SO MUCH OK. HAVE IT OUT CHANGED MY ENTIRE LIFE ISTG ITS SO GOOD HOLY CRAP. Also Very Good Bad Thing is so amazing THROWS UP. My friend made an animation with the song kept down but ALSO THE SONG IS AMAZING IN ITS SELF GO LISTEN NOW URGH THROWS UP SCREAMS AND DIES i like mother mother someone ask me for my song recs. I also like I Go Hungry (jon sims core song) and Jump the Fence

I did not mean to ramble this much abt music I am so sry hope you enjoyed tho

Tagging @iamfabiloz, @cassiecryptic, @lysia-doodlez, @valsperfume, @changella404, @river-not-a-stream, @starry-voidss, @narcvampp, @checkadii

Favorite Albums: choose 9 and then tag 9 people!

For my own sanity, I didn't include musicals because I could fill up a whole other 3x3 grid with them, and comparing musicals to non-musical theater albums is weird.

Those last 4 that you definitely don't recognize are by Old Earth who you should definitely listen to if you want artsy ambient indie folk with really intricate guitar. My absolute favorite artist by far, and also the most obscure artist I listen to by far.

Electric by The Pet Shop Boys — I think this is my favorite album period. I am still pissed off that Tom Scott called it "not that great" in the old Technical Difficulties podcast. Maybe I'm biased because it was my favorite album when I was 14 and because it's where I really fell in love with the Pet Shop Boys. God I love them. So much. I'm way too excited for the new album and I worship geowayne's website where he analyzes all their songs. I probably should have put another PSB album on here, but there isn't another where I'm in love with every track. Plus honestly so many of my favorite tracks of theirs are B sides. They still release B sides with their singles, and this album cycle, the B sides are honestly better than the actual singles. Anyway electric is pure synthy electropop and I adore it in that way you can only love something you first heard at 14.

Pure Heroine by Lorde — I read a quote somewhere where Lorde said she tried to really put all of being a teenager into the album, so much so that once she became an adult, she probably wouldn't understand or like it anymore. I can definitely say that I'm not nearly as attached to it anymore now that I'm an adult, but God, it was my life when I was 13. She really did capture the unique ennui of being a teenager. I wrote a novel in eighth grade, and I wrote at least half of it to tracks from this album. Also, hot take: Royals is my least favorite track by a lot. Buzzcut Season is my favorite.

My Head is an Animal by Of Monsters and Men — God, this one was my life when I was like, 12. I fell in love with folk there, and I'm still in love nearly a decade later. Another album where I still love every track.

Strange Trails by Lord Huron — hey look, an album I actually discovered and came to love as an adult! The fact that I love Lord Huron's brand of folky horror/fantasy/western music that tell stories with characters should not surprise anyone. Also, if I had to describe my experience with schizophrenia in one song, I'd choose Meet Me in the Woods.

The Tragic Treasury by The Gothic Archies — Look. Hear me out. Is it a album based purely on A Series of Unfortunate Events? Yes. But. Is it also an album where I genuinely love every track and have genuinely been known to just throw it on shuffle? Yes. I mean I think of one lyric from this album, like, weekly. I swear it's not just ASOUE brainrot that makes me like it so much. If it'd ever gotten a vinyl release, I'd absolutely own it. I wish it had gotten one.

a low place at The Old Place by Old Earth — honestly this is probably only my favorite Old Earth album because it's the one that I was able to actually get on vinyl and being able to play that vinyl is so lovely. I mean, it's good, but so is everything by Old Earth. Then again, Less Words is my favorite single track by them and it is on this album. Look. All the Old Earth albums I've listed here are, at most, 20 minutes long. If you like ambient artsy indie folk with lyrics that are there more for the way they sound than their meaning, try one.

light shaped by Old Earth — god the lyrics to this one. Normally I don't like Old Earth for the lyrics but. "It gets old/then it's done" and "what if it's just some song that gets you home" and especially "I'm holding your arms/and you're holding my eyes/and I lie like the right thing to do" are all just so great. And so is the middle track with no lyrics.

... until they're called by Old Earth — have you ever heard an album so good that you a) just played the whole thing and danced to it in your basement nonstop for the full 12 minutes, and then b) wrote a poem about the experience? People talk about finding God, but dancing to that album was the moment I found athiesm. The beauty of us all being here for no reason, just feeling things and living and doing our best to make something beautiful out of it.

Two Torches, at a Place Where Three Roads Meet by Old Earth — I'll be honest, I don't have much to say about this one. They're just a really solid three tracks.

... Yeah okay I really like Old Earth. Don't judge me.

Thank you @cygninae and @thehistoryone for tagging me! I'll tag @ven10 (I'm surprised neither of the people who tagged me tagged you), @weirdthoughtsandideas (ditto), @70snasagay (hmmmm i wonder what you'll put), @cat-boy-tom, @thetreetzar, @buncoreclown, @notthatalex, @unfortunate-sapphic-disaster, and @roach-in-the-kitchen. No pressure, obviously!