#conceptualization [failure]

[pisscreant]

i really like that the de desktop logo is a cropped pic of the high psyche harry. it looks like he took an awkward low angle selfie like my 50‐year‐old uncle on facebook

[m1ckeyb3rry]

CAN I BE A CHEATER REAL QUICK…as gorgeous as phainon’s splash art is and as much as i love it i. i think i still like *****’s more LMAOAOAOAO I FEEL LIKE A FAKE FAN LIKE I STILL LOVE HIS OKAY 😭😭😭💔💔💔

[antidisneyinc]

I assumed the malformed prerogative of a lot of late gen z/gen alpha to treat imagination and fiction on equal terms with real life was due to so much of their lives being entirely online from childhood onward, thus having a skewed understanding of how things on the internet impact real life and vice versa... but I am informed by friends in education that there is a third scary element to this triangle of internet/screen addiction and failures of parenting, which is that there is now a large portion of kids over the age of 10 (!) who do not exercise their imagination in literally any way. they do not read, they do not play pretend with their friends, they do not do creative play with their parents. widespread aphantasia in the digital age was not something I knew to be afraid of but the implications of an entire generation failing to develop their imaginations are terrifying tbh.

[tuesdayscanons]

Just...a thread where Dev can hear Dale's thoughts asdfghjkl

[satari-raine]

Forever a turtle, but life update:

Got a job! It's a retail position at a local thrift store chain, which is a tiny bit disheartening for some dumb personal reasons, but it's certainly something - overall, though, it's a good thing. Hopefully it'll help get my finances back in order and a sense of routine again. It'll be a bit rocky at the start, catching up on bills and getting used to retail again, but it's something.

Just wanted to say a genuine thank you to those that helped out and gave well wishes during me rambling on here for a few months. It meant and still means a lot to me, it really does. Hope you all are doing well, too, as always. Rooting for you.

[hillerska-official]

Me getting constructive criticisms and feedback on my first draft of my thesis paper: 🥺😭

[nancywheeeler]

at the end of the semester, i'm going to have to issue all my students both a formal apology and a debt of gratitude for being guinea pigs

[yusuke-of-valla]

Am I about to buy both Reload and Portable because I was Kvetching with my brother about Reload being $70 and he said he'd give me $40 towards it and I was planning on getting Portable when I had time to play but we were talking about Reload and it would feel wrong to just get Portable but ALSO dumber option financially probably?

Yes

Do I need to see a therapist about my social anxiety because I just spent like so much time over thinking this?

Also yes!

[vraska-theunseen]

the way to make friends at college is you basically talk to very few people and don't hang out with anyone except the one person you already know for a whole semester and then one day you chat with a guy in your class and start talking about youtube videos and dnd and get his discord and immediately send him so many fucking words about jacob geller

[shit-hdb-would-say]

Harry du Bois would say this.

if I were a bee I'd fetishize the idea of a beekeeper clipping my tiny wings so I can't escape (remembers you're not supposed to say shit like that) I mean yesterday I ate two yogurts normally

[boeing747]

Anyway like so preliminary I think my robots/Ai would have to be like - this program was created to mimic a human mind as an experiment essentially where we have a machine learning algorithm essentially scan (somehow idk Sci fi) a human brain and replicate it and then alter it in a way that woukd make sense. Given current machine learning is fairly black box- it could give it a rather fun aspect of we just don't know what the fuck is going on with these robots.

And the idea of like is it actually conscious or is it just mimicking consciousness perfectly that isn't ever truly resolved but is cool because humans are quite similar. Anyway. Because this is a robot concept designed primarily for me to be a pervert about it I think the platonic sort of ideal robot being is a black box firmware brain that has some limited (but very large, again sci-fi) processing power that ever evolves in order to function and sort of, survive. There are differences in that the sensory input the robots receive is different from humans, and that alters the understanding and perception of the world.

I also think most robots would fall into categories of desiring to be more human and mimic humanity and robots who do not desire to be human and desire to alter and change into something beyond an imitation of a human.

[nidstimeric]

on the oxygen holocaust

Insulindian Phasmid - Everything your eyes touch goes back there -- behind the nerve mirror. What if you blink? Are we still here? (Please don't blink). What if you misplace us all one day -- or just forget?

But I *want* to blink and undo 12 billion years of matter expansion.

Insulindian Phasmid - Simian butcherer... Soon, one of you will close your eyes -- and open them to see that none of this ever existed.

[shit-hdb-would-say]

Harry du Bois would do this.

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[brainstirfry]

REACTION SPEED [Heroic: failure] - a single ravioli, damp from the water, still pleasantly steaming, lands with a defeated slap, on the linoleum floor. You see it happen, watch it flip through the air, like an Olympic bronze off the high-dive, or a suicidal veteran of war. you feel yourself shout a "No!", but it is too late. there, the ravioli, impossibly, lays limp. FORSAKEN RAVIOLI - Why, it thinks, why me? For all the time I was grown and processed then crafted and for all the time I have waited for the only purpose which I was made for. To be cast so suddenly, so errantly, into the realm of the beyond? Beyond savior. DRAMA - And here you stand, clad like a captain with your wooden spoon, watching as an honorable soldier, nay, a man, lies without your hand to aid him, on the kitchen floor.

VOLITION - you must act, now! first it must be picked up, then its fate can be decided. COMPOSURE - Its fate is the trash. AUTHORITY - Its fate is the trash. YOU - You pick up the ravioli, it is hot, nearly still boiling, gushing steam and hot pasta blood down your hand. It hurts, but standing here, there is nowhere else for it. PERCEPTION - It looks fine... LOGIC - Don't do this. SHIVERS [Heroic: Success] - Somewhere southeast of here, perhaps hundreds of miles, grain sprouts in a field, rich wheat, and butternut squash, only an acre over. The wind whistles through the fields, running like gleeful children through the tiny, green plants. Some will be eaten by birds, worms, or moles, but some will reach high into the sky, where they will be plucked and ground into pasta dough. You have seen the birthplace of this soldier. It is humble, a beautiful childhood, and so, so long ago. An entire pasta-lifetime, now. FORSAKEN RAVIOLI - I thought I had finally made it. And with my brethren... YOU - You look at the bowl, the rest of the ravioli, steaming in mournful, pyrrhic celebration. My company... EMPATHY - This ravioli could be you. You can't give up on it now. Not because of your own mistake. AUTHORITY - This is not what a dignified man would do. send him off and mourn, perhaps, but do not spend one moment more considering his limp, cooling corpse. DRAMA - Where has your heart gone, O Honorable One? Authority - … EMPATHY - the greatest service you could do for this little soldier, and for all those beyond you that forged him, is to eat him. What else is rightfully to be done? VISUAL CALCULUS - It was on the floor for less than 4.7 whole seconds. ENCYLOPEDIA - most forms of bacterium are able to jump, especially to wet materials, in about 1.2- PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - any residue on your kitchen floor may well be material which was once already in your stomach. CONCEPTUALIZATION - if you think about it, that means you've already kind of eaten the ravioli.

INLAND EMPIRE - From the Floor, Of the Floor, To the Floor. To be, or not to be, one with this eternal cycle? ENDURANCE - Anything the floor could not contain, you could digest. (with VOLITION) We are iron. HALF LIGHT - Bite into its soft, warm flesh. EMPATHY - Give it peace. ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Eat the floor-violi, pasta slut! YOU - weeping, bring the ravioli to your lips, and then, impossibly, with infinite mercy, love, bring it into you. It tastes fantastic. You would have never know it was on the floor at all. You can feel the hum of satisfaction, the glory of it in your lungs, swelling to fill you more than even a pasta-feast could. This is the mercy you wish your God could cast on you, when you fall. KIM KITSURAGI - "Harry,"

[femboi-milk]

The fact that Kim likes your karaoke performance MORE if you fail it means so much to me.

The song you get in the "successful" version is so flat. Harry is practically just reciting it as a poem. Which is fine. The lyrics still get HDB's pain across, and the people in the Whirling like it. It's a Good Performance, but that's sort of all it is? A technically fine performance of a sad song that might make you think.

But the failure? OH the failure! HDB sounds AWFUL, like a guy who bender'd himself into reality-shattering amnesia two days ago crawled up onto the mic and vomited his oceanic multi-colored soul out for everyone in the Whirling to see. He bares all of his pain, his soul-deep ACHING, pours it into the microphone with little care about how his voice cracks and warbles. As Harry has the option to say - he's singing his fucking HEART out, there.

And Kim? Kim LOVES it. It speaks to him - and Conceptualization tells you that your performance captured all of the pain of being an RCM officer for him. All of those cracks and warbles and off-key notes SAID something to him.

The "good" performance entertains everyone for a few moments. The "bad" one puts everyone off but one person - the most important person to Harry in that room - in all of Martanaise, really.

To me it says, be yourself, be UNASHAMEDLY yourself, and your people will find you. And you will speak to them. And they will hear you. And they will love you. And they will pick you up when the rest of the room can't appreciate who you are.