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mariacallous · 25 days ago

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The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.

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ginnvngagap · 7 months ago

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no, Jayce Talis didn't mean "Viktor, your terminal illness and physical disability that causes you constant pain are fxcking awesome actually, you should totally enjoy them" he meant "Viktor, your terminal illness and psysical disability don't make you any less loveable and I never saw you as weak or pitiful because of them. in my eyes, you were always perfect."

I have a feeling this take stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what internalized ableism (or bigotry in general) actually is.

as a personal example, I don't exactly agree with the autism as a superpower narrative, and I refuse to be ashamed of not being proud of every single aspect of my neurodivergence and mental illnesses. no, I don't want a cure, because it still defines me as a person, but if someone announced tomorrow that they can fix my autistic inertia, executive dysfunction or sensory problems with just a flip of a switch, I'd accept that in a heartbeat. not wanting to suffer is not the same as thinking I am worthless or lazy because of my neurodivergence.

as another example of internalized bigotry: I've seen a user on the bird app having to defend herself against people who insisted that thinking periods are gross and unpleasant to have is her hating her womanhood. but listen, I fxcking hate having a uterus. I hate that I can get pregnant (I have tokophobia), and I hate periods with a fiery passion (and mine aren't even that painful, I rarely have cramps and they always last around 5 days). I don't like how they feel, I don't like the pain, the mood swings, and yes, I find blood coming out of my vagina gross, especially when it includes those little chunks. it's just a very uncomfortable experience overall. this however doesn't mean that I think I should be treated as impure, or inferior. I don't think it's okay to treat me as if I'm an inherently irrational creature (although I'd argue that all humans are, but I digress) incapable of a single logical thought because of my cycle, and I don't feel ashamed of asking for a pad or a tampon, because it's a natural bodily function and no one should ever be shunned for it.

bigotry is a social construct, it's shame, discrimination, ostracization. it's the belief that certain ways of being are inherently shameful and should be purged from "civilized" society, because to the "correct" people, they aren't even human.

Viktor not wanting to die or be in pain isn't the problem, and Jayce has already demonstrated that the only thing he hates about those conditions is that he doesn't want to lose his partner and he doesn't want him to suffer. the problem is that Viktor believed his illness and disability made him inferior and unloveable. he wanted to fix himself not just because he didn't want to die or suffer, but because he was convinced he needed to achieve perfection in order to be loved and accepted, to be a worthy partner of Jayce.

but this kind of thinking is what leads to erasing everything that makes us human, that makes us unique. that was Viktor's greatest error, wanting so badly to transcend the human condition, he risked erasing human lives all together.

#arcane #arcane season 2 #JayVik #arcane viktor #arcane jayce #jayce talis #arcane spoilers #ableism #disability #terminal illness #fractal-thoughts.md

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centrally-unplanned · 2 years ago

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I will add my voice to the chorus that chronological feed is at this point one of Tumblr's biggest selling points, because chronological is a default form of ownership. I can edit my feed to match exactly my expectations by following & unfollowing who I want, because chronology as a concept is completely scrutable to me. Algorithms are fine as everything is an algorithm; its the lack of comprehensibility and agency most platforms inflict on you that makes them so hostile to users who actively curate what they engage with.

I in fact think Tumblr would benefit from more feed options! I would absolutely enable deviations from the chronology based on the people I follow and the moods I am in - but they again would need to be under my control.

The discoverability problem is real, and I do in fact think that there should be better ways. I don't object to the "you may also like" in the corner for example. In reality Tumblr's search functions are the place to do this; they aren't as bad as many claim but they aren't great, they are exactly the choice-focused place to surface new blogs. Make that tool better and I will find others like me and give them a shot.

But. Another thing that makes tumblr great is the fact that it is 'community' based over 'content' based. I follow the people I follow, and they follow me, because we interacted with each other over time. It is a facsimile of actual socializing; you make a few comments on a post, you build up the courage for a reblog or two, you are discoursing, you tag them on a meme, now you are mutuals. Content creators are not community members - that is a hierarchical relationship, the 'lead' and the 'fan', and is defined by parasocial and weak connections. Tumblr can be more than one thing ofc, I follow some art blogs who never talk to their followers, that is a content-follow. But in the main I don't think most people want their community-based feed structure to be disrupted by attempts to content-itize it.

This is again one of Tumblr's strengths - every other site (besides partially Facebook) has pivoted to content-style models over community-style models due to inherent winner-take-all dynamics and greater monetization applications. But Tumblr cannot chase YouTube, it is going to lose, YouTube already exists. I don't see much of anything in that post that recognizes that, and that is imo a huge mistake.

#tumblr meta

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coochiequeens · 2 months ago

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TRAs since the ruling in the UK: "We're going to be hunted by Terfs!!!" Meanwhile the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC): "In particular there needed to be "appropriate and available services for all people, including trans people" when it came to settings such as hospitals and changing rooms."

By Aleks Phillips BBC News

Trans women should use toilets according to their biological sex, the equalities minister has said.

In response to the UK Supreme Court's ruling that a woman is legally defined by biological sex, Bridget Phillipson stopped short of saying trans women should use the men's toilets.

But she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The ruling was clear that provisions and services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex."

Pushed further for clarification on whether a trans woman should use the men's or women's toilets she repeated: "The ruling is clear."

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer welcomed the ruling in his first comments on the matter, saying it gave "much needed clarity".

The prime minister told the BBC: "I'm really pleased the court has clarified the position.

"We can move on from there. [I] think that has been very helpful."

Earlier, Phillipson said the law on trans women accessing single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex "would apply right across the board".

But she stressed that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) "will be setting out additional guidance and a statutory code of practice, because we need to make sure that everyone has the ability to access services that are safe and appropriate, and respect their privacy and dignity".

In particular, there needed to be "appropriate and available services for all people, including trans people" when it came to settings such as hospitals and changing rooms.

Pressed on what the ruling meant for trans women looking to use a toilet today, she responded: "The ruling was clear that provisions and services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex.

"But I know that many businesses large and small will ensure that they have appropriate provision in place, for example many businesses have moved towards unisex provision or separate cubicles that can be used by anyone."

The EHRC has already suggested trans people should use their "powers of advocacy" to campaign for so-called third spaces that are gender neutral to avoid these sorts of dilemmas.

Phillipson, who is also education secretary, said many places had unisex toilets or individual cubicles.

"Go into your local cafe, a local family cafe - [the] chances are that they'll have one cubicle that's self-contained that can be used by anyone," she added.

The Equality Act 2010 allows for single-sex spaces and services without it being considered discriminatory, such as when a user may reasonably object to another person being of the opposite sex.

The Supreme Court found the biological interpretation of sex was required for single-sex spaces

Campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought the case, warned that interpreting "sex" as gender identity under the law would have implications for the running of single-sex spaces and services, such as hospital wards, prisons, refuges and support groups.

The decision by the Supreme Court found the biological interpretation of sex was required for single-sex spaces - which can include changing rooms, hostels and medical services - to "function coherently".

However, single-sex spaces could exclude people with gender recognition certificates (GRCs) - which give legal status to a transgender person's gender identity - "if it is proportionate to do so", the judges ruled.

Transgender people have said the ruling may erode the protections they have against discrimination in their reassigned gender - protections the judges said they had under other parts of the Equality Act.

Phillipson, who managed a women's refuge before becoming an MP, said it was important that "women - especially those who have experienced male violence, sexual violence and trauma - are able to access safe, therapeutic spaces" while ensuring that "everyone in our society is treated with dignity and respect".

She said these women-only spaces could now be "confident as to how they deliver services" as the Supreme Court had "set that beyond doubt".

Asked whether there was unity among ministers, following reports of division over the issue, Phillipson replied: "Yes there is, and I speak for the government on this matter."

She added that she was "crystal clear" the government welcomed the ruling.

Sir Keir told ITV West Country on Tuesday that the ruling provided "real clarity in an area where we did need clarity" and was a "welcome step forward".

He added: "A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear."

Michael Foran, a lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow, said that the discourse surrounding the ruling had been muddied by misinformation and "attempts to delegitimise" the Supreme Court.

He told the Today programme that some were suggesting the ruling would not affect policies around single-sex spaces, which was "obviously incorrect", adding: "This decision has profound implications for trans inclusion in those spaces."

Dr Foran added: "It's incumbent on the government to communicate clearly what this judgement does and does not say, and to combat that misinformation."

#UK #Bridget Phillipson #SexIsReal #Sir Keir Starmer #Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)#For Women Scotland #Equality Act

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crooked-wasteland · 30 days ago

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It’s okay to defend Stolas but it’s not okay to excuse his actions or villainize Blitz and Octavia

By way of Explanation, Excuse, and the Paradox of "Good Damage"

I think a lot of people struggle to find the difference between an explanation and an excuse. Especially when it comes to the internet and our knack online of taking all statements as an extreme. It also folds into the growing immaturity in society to not be able to grasp nuance in communication, or even recognize that talking to each other is still all about interpretation.

I think this can go back to the misunderstanding between myself and the other Anon where they felt the need to respond and assure everyone that they didn't find Medrano a malevolent/malicious person. And that's because I used the word malicious. But I use words in a different way than most people. So I explained how words function for me and what I mean when I use a word like "malicious", but I also still apologize. Because I have the social awareness to see that, on a platform that is seen by dozens of users, my use of words is 1) not universally understood and 2) can give an unfair impression of the Anon to others who see my response.

It's not fair for a misunderstanding caused by me to characterize someone else and their intentions to others. So, of course, I will always apologize for that. Because there is a lot of power we hold over our anons. Everyone who comes to my page will understand the Anon through my myopic perspective based on my response. And that is also filmed over with their own wheelhouse of how they view the world.

Malicious doesn't typically mean "intentional actions that result in obvious negative outcomes". It usually means with cruelty/malice and an intention to do harm.

When I say Malicious, I don't mean that someone does something with the intention of harm. Just that they had intentions, and the obvious outcome would be harmful. I genuinely think most actions I call "malicious" are made from ignorance and a lack of thought.

Ignorant is the same as Malicious to me.

And this is where I think an explanation and an excuse diverge in reality: an excuse seeks to rewrite the events by defining the entire action through one's own intentions while an explanation gives information to share in one's own perspective while understanding that their response did or had potential to cause harm and thus still apologizing for it.

And not an apology like "I'm sorry you feel that way" but taking accountability for the repercussions that may have occurred. Like in the case of myself, I could have accidentally made my other Anon out to be a fanatical hater who thinks of Medrano as the worst person when they really don't. And because I'm the one amplifying that potential characterization, it is my responsibility to correct it and take ownership of the negative impact my actions could have caused.

For Stolas in particular, the reason why the show never gets the feeling of an "explanation" is because it seems that Stolas never faces the repercussions of his own actions.

He is the one who starts the deal with the book, but it is Blitz who is put on trial.

Stolas is the one who instigates the sexual encounters throughout the show, but it is Blitz who is being unfair in New Moon and needs to apologize

It is Stolas who doesn't divorce his abusive wife and subjects his daughter to that home life/lying to his daughter about her own upbringing, but it's Octavia's fault for being hurt by it which is also framed as unreasonable.

There is no point where Stolas actually takes ownership of what he's done, and accept it. In New Moon, he "apologizes" for using Blitz, but when Blitz lashes put in confusion and anger (because he is taken off guard and Stolas is jerking him around by defining their relationship without his involvement, which is hugely disrespectful) Stolas doesn't accept that responsibility. He runs away, literally. He immediately goes into self-pity, which is why the "apology" in Full Moon is an excuse.

The whole problem in their relationship is that Stolas defines every aspect of it alone. He makes the deal up without input from Blitz (who is socially and materially powerless) and in the same way he made the deal, he ends it; entirely without any input from Blitz. The way Stolas doesn't just connect with Blitz about how he has been feeling. Instead he talks down to Blitz by saying the deal is "wrong", as if Blitz is a literal child and wouldn't understand what Stolas has been doing to him.

Stolas' whole apology actively takes agency away from Blitz by the simple way he does it: without consultation.

And this is the exact same problem in his relationship with Octavia. He assumes he knows best for everyone, and then says he isn't valuable enough to take care of himself in the service of others, but that's actually a form of narcissistic grandiosity. He places himself on a pedestal through his martyrdom.

I get if that seems paradoxical but it is something you find most often in people who suffer religious trauma. Jesus Christ is the ultimate martyr who suffered and died for our sins. And in regards to Stolas' behavior, it is a parody of that construct, and it's something a lot of mentally ill people do in real life.

And this is what Bojack Horseman, the show, calls "Good Damage". That someone's suffering and pain happens for a reason, even if it isn't a cosmic reason like being some religious Messiah. Bojack Horseman is a very non-denominational show with no clear religious affiliation, so much of this kind of philosophy is filtered through a godless lens and into existentialism. By which I mean there is not an inherent reason for things to happen. There is no God to will for people to die and there is no afterlife that we are striving to secure. So like Existentialists Søren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus explain, we have to make that meaning for ourselves.

Diane is the best example to show how this sort of martyrdom is a form of narcissistic grandiosity and how trying to make one's suffering mean something is actively harmful to one's own mental health and our relationships.

youtube

"Because! If I don't, that means that all the damage I got isn't Good Damage, it's just damage. I have gotten anything out of it and all those years I was miserable was for nothing ... I thought that everything, all the abuse and neglect, it somehow made me special."

This is textbook grandiosity. This is the core of most personality disorders, in fact. Specifically in the sphere of cluster B personality types such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Anti-Social Personality Disorder.

This is a coping mechanism. It's shifting the narrative of what happened so that it wasn't just something unfair and painful that you went through for no reason. It's a way of preserving a sense of self as a child, in the face of abuse and neglect, to just be able to survive and just keep living. It's making some purpose because if you don't have one, why keep living.

It's something I lived through. I'm currently in remission for my diagnosis, but that isn't the same as cured. Being in remission just means a reduction or absence of symptoms, but that doesn't mean that the disordered thoughts are gone. Symptoms are just what others see, not what is going on inside your head. You have to consistently choose to not engage with those disordered thoughts and feelings, and you have to make that active choice to not be that person any longer.

Stolas never has to suffer the costs of his own behavior, instead his character is still very quickly on that downward trajectory. And, frankly, that's not an actual problem!

Stolas maybe hasn't hit his stride as a character, but the issue is that Blitz has. The confusion for most people exists, then, in how the world has changed for Stolas while Stolas has stayed the same. Change comes when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. It's true in life as it is in storytelling. Mental health doesn't get better until we choose to change.

But Blitz changed for no reason. In fact, his pain has been and still is caused by Stolas. And seeing as Blitz, not Stolas, is the main character, perhaps fans can be more forgiving over the fact that Stolas is still seen as the villain for a good amount of people.

There sure is a lot of emphasis on himself throughout all this "giving" he's done. And all it does is prove Blitz in New Moon correct. This is a bizarre show that genuinely doesn't understand that there is no good damage, just narcissistic martyrdom. And like all narcissism, it is toxic, manipulative, and corrosive.

There is no genuine love shown by any character in this series.

#vivziepop critical #helluva boss critical #helluva boss criticism #vivziepop criticism #helluva boss critique #spindlehorse critical #anon ask #vivienne medrano #anti stolas #anti stolitz #bojack horseman #good damage #narcissism #cluster b personality disorder #actually aspd #helluva long post

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icyg4l · 1 year ago

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PAC: How Does Your Higher Self Define Womanhood?

Hello, beautiful people. Today marks the last post of the Women’s History Month series & one of two posts made today! I am excited to continue to create content for you guys. And I am even more grateful for the support I have received as of lately. Because of this, I will continue to post creative tarot readings. So, without further ado, please pick your pile.

Left-to-Right: (1-4)

Pile 1: Pile One, your story reminds me of the Miss Congeniality plot. Basically, Sandra Bullock plays a detective that goes undercover as a beauty pageant contestant. At first, she rejects the ideas of what it means to be a “girly girl” but eventually conforms to the standards. She viewed femininity as a sign of weakness and did not like being around other women because she felt that she had to prove herself to be tough. But she gained respect for the girls who worked in these pageants as she worked undercover because she began to acknowledge the hard work it takes to be in the pageants. By the end, she is closer to her womanhood. You have a similar story. I doubt that you’re a detective reading this but I feel as though you may have the tendency to thoroughly investigate any piece of information. To your higher self, womanhood means constantly being on the search for answers to placate the inner child wounds that lie within you. I feel like when you were younger, you may have been an outcast or a tomboy, maybe both. Because of this, you have set a lifelong quest to figure out what being a woman means to you whether it is intentional or not. Your higher self wants you to know that being a woman comes with all types of trauma, but remembering that you do not have to face it alone. You do not have to carry the burdens alone. You see, women are conditioned to be demure for the sake of keeping the peace but that’s not what works for you. Embrace the messy parts of yourself because if you don’t, life will get boring. Part of your mission is being aware of your multifaceted nature; reject conformity, embrace the abnormal, babe.

Cards Used: The Sun, 4 of Cups, 4 of Swords, 5 of Wands, Ace of Cups, The Magician, 5 of Cups, 3 of Cups, 3 of Swords.

Signs: Aquarius, Libra, Leo, Sagittarius.

extras: money getter. cash grabs. “low hanging fruit.” airhead. wallpaper. phineas and ferb. “sharon.” beetles. s.o.s. by rihanna. “tinge of an accent.” sweet. mirrors. coconut trees. hawaii. stubborn. radioactive.

Pile 2: Pile Two, there is a similar vibe that you have to Pile One, except I don’t think that you have problems with accepting your femininity. I think that you have problems with how masculines function in society. I am sensing a Lori Harvey type of energy here. This is likely related to the way that you operate when it comes to love. People tend to want to possess you so that they can show you off like a trophy. But your higher self wants you to know the difference between users and the genuine thing. I feel like you’ve developed this flighty persona to protect yourself from harm. While experiencing the many tribulations of womanhood, you have adopted the “flights over feelings” type of mindset. How has that been working out for you? No, really. Is it actually working or have you convinced yourself that it has. As a woman, your higher self thinks that womanhood is finding love in a loveless world. This isn’t necessarily about romance, but it’s just a mindset that you should adopt. It will save you from falling victim to the cycles of toxicity that plague society. It’s a cold world out here, babe but it doesn’t mean that you have to be as cold as the world. Part of your mission is forgiving yourself and those who hurt you so that you can see the beauty in the world. With this newfound sight of beauty, there comes true inner power.

Cards Used: The Devil, 7 of Discs (RX), 8 of Wands, The Hierophant, 3 of Swords, 3 of Cups, 10 of Discs, The Star, 10 of Cups (RX).

Signs: Capricorn, Cancer, Scorpio, Virgo.

extras: two can play that game. all about love by bell hooks. renegade. open arms. country music lover. tony montana. archer (2009). “logan.” phoenix rising. “marcus.” ashy. corny. cerebellum. stupendous.

Pile 3: Pile Three, your higher self defines womanhood as something that is both sweet and sour. It is something that she takes for granted but it is also something that she takes pride in. It’s a strength but also a weakness. I feel like I am talking to someone who has an ingenue/youthful spirit. I channeled the character Darla from The Little Rascals but I also channeled Charlotte from Princess and the Frog. You seem to be very in tune with your inner child and there is nothing wrong with that. Your inner child is heavily protected by the teenaged version of yourself, which seems very angry. These different versions of yourself often clash with one another, which can lead to bouts of depression and confusion. Your higher self is a woman who pours into herself through movement and self-expression. You need to channel these negative energies into creativity or else you will be stifled by your own thoughts. You honestly need to get out of your head. Your higher self feels as though there is a flip side to every coin that you get. For example, if you are having period pains, it may hurt but at least you’re not pregnant! Looking on the brighter side of life is how you can be closer to your higher self.

Cards Used: 5 of Swords, 6 of Swords, Page of Swords, Justice, 4 of Cups, Ace of Cups, Ace of Discs, 5 of Wands, The Hanged Man.

Signs: Leo, Pisces, Aries, Gemini.

extras: janet jackson. “i’m da man.” we will rock you. parties. diva. elle magazine. shapely. “how’d you figure?” honest answers only. maya angelou. glorilla. lola bunny. fatigue. body aches. deodorant. small bowls. annual. prayers. mark on the cheek. boot camp. “your highness.” shredded cheese. livelihood.

Pile 4: And last but not least, Pile Four. I feel like you are well sought after in the most lusty way possible. This has its perks, but lately, you feel like it has more cons than anything. I feel like you’re someone who always seems to feel isolated because of this. As a result, your higher self views womanhood as foreign. The amount of power that you hold as a woman is beyond explanation. There are so many ways that you can present yourself, Pile Four. I don’t think you have realized your true potential. Yes, you have gone through trauma because people assumed that you could handle the weight of the world but this means nothing to your spirit. Wake up! Don’t you realize how unique you are? Pile Four, womanhood can really only be defined by you, not by anyone else. The prioritization of yourself will help you make a name for yourself. You could be in your 20s, tired and just wanting a change. Well, your higher self wants you to know that change will come once you begin to change the narrative yourself. If you believe something about yourself that was told to you by someone else, then it means that you’re easily moldable. Being a woman means rising to the top even through the facings of opposition. You are a fighter. So the question is: when are you going to jump in the ring and fight for your sense of self, Pile Four.

Cards Used: Ace of Cups, Queen of Wands, 3 of Discs, Knight of Discs, Ten of Swords, 4 of Discs, The Hermit, Queen of Swords, 9 of Discs.

Signs: Gemini, Pisces, Cancer, Virgo.

extras: “tart.” “fresh out the shower.” burgundy. melons. net worth. SWer. dollar bills. illegal documents. molly. friendless. stoned. be your own boss. cake baker. sister, sister. wiseman. silly goose. fall. saturn.

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hexjulia · 1 year ago

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"The Embroidered Computer is an exploration into using historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.

Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glas and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them.

Technically, the piece consists of (textile) relays, similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors. Visually, the gold materials, here used for their conductive properties, arranged into specific patterns to fulfill electronic functions, dominate the work. Traditionally purely decorative, their pattern here defines they function. They lay bare core digital routines usually hidden in black boxes. Users are invited to interact with the piece in programming the textile to compute for them."

#embroidery #this is such a fun idea..

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nonconformityhub · 8 months ago

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Mspec Lesbian Misconceptions

I still get exclusionary comments and reblogs on my friend's mspec lesbian infographic so I thought I'd make a sort of 'addon post' that answers basically everything!

Please check the infographic out! It's much shorter and it looks pretty

🌺 "Mspec always means that you're attracted to men"

⤷ Mspec is short for the 'multisexual (or other multi- attraction type) spectrum', meaning the attraction to multiple genders. Most folks who experience attraction to women and non-binary genders don't consider themselves mspec, but that doesn't mean that nobody can

⤷ As we understand the complexities of gender more and move past the 'only two genders' way, what counts as being bi or otherwise mspec will change

🌺 "There's no reason to reclaim old uses for the word lesbian from before lesbian separatism"

⤷ Lesbian separatists tried to exclude anyone that associated themselves with men or masculinity from lesbianism. This included bi people, trans people, butches and mascs, lesbians still married to men, lesbians living with men, and more. Some went as far as considering butch-for-femme relationships to be harmful. Why wouldn't people want to reclaim lesbian from a time before this ideology spread? See more here

🌺 "But bi women wanted to make their own spaces and stop using lesbian spaces and the lesbian label" ⤷ Obviously, some bi sapphics of the time would've wanted to be distinctly and only viewed as bi, and have no affiliation with lesbians, but plenty didn't. Implying that the rise of radical feminism in the lesbian community was wanted by all of the people they excluded is ridiculous. It wasn't a consensus

🌺 "Mspec lesbians just want to feel included in lesbian spaces"

⤷ You've hit the nail on the head actually, this isn't the gotcha you think it is. Mspec sapphics were originally welcome to use the word lesbian and exist in the lesbian community, and then they weren't, so some of them would like to be included again yes

🌺 "It takes away spaces that are just for monosexual lesbians"

⤷ There have been attempts made to create terms for monosexual lesbians (though usually people just mean 'not attracted to men' rather than monosexual), but the lesbian community thrived with bisexuals in it for a long time. Lesbian spaces are heavily dominated by monosexual lesbians as well

⤷ The real question here is why are you so keen to know for definite that nobody in your space is attracted to men? And what are you counting as 'attracted to men'? Are you assuming it based on dating habits? What label they use? What you consider to be attraction? Everyone views this stuff differently, you can't police it properly

🌺 "Lesbian can't be used in the split attraction model, it means no attraction to men at all"

⤷ Insisting that someone has to use 'homoromantic' rather than lesbian just because they're bisexual or vice versa is pointless. Not only is lesbian a more open and functional label (it specifies attraction to women and doesn't imply that the user is also a woman), but defining it as an absence of attraction to men is very 1970s lesbian separatist of you

🌺 + "If you're fluid between mspec and lesbian just say abrosexual", "If you heavily prefer women just say homoflexible" and so on so forth

⤷ There are probably terms that technically apply to you that you don't use because you're not connected to the label or it doesn't fit quite right. The same applies here. Abrosexual is very broad, homoflexible implies 'same gender' attraction to women, and we've established that there's nothing stopping them from using mspec and lesbian instead

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imsobadatnicknames2 · 2 months ago

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The thing about the /hj tone tag is that in terms of meaning I see it kinda as a modern incarnation of a thing we used to do in the forums I used to visit where we would put "(?)" at the end of a sentence to communicate a vague sense of "this statement shouldn't be taken fully at face value" either because it was an exaggeration or you were communicating a real sentiment in a facetious way or you were being playfully mean etc. etc. etc. So I get why /hj exists and implicitly understand the sentiment it's trying to communicate.

But I think the thing is we at least didn't pretend it was like an actual accessibility tool. /hj annoys me because it ostensibly has the purpose of clarifying tone to make online conversation more accesible for ND people but it functionally is kinda useless about it because it's defined too vaguely to be useful for anyone who actually struggles with tone and intent. And every time someone makes fun of it for that a bunch of tonetag users flock to talk about how it's actually useful because it clearly means [163717482 conflicting definitions], therefore proving how useless it is as an actual accessibility tool. Like it's okay for it to be just a bunch of silly internet symbols to indicate a vague sense of facetiousness you don't have to pretend it's something it's not.

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mishy-mashy · 1 year ago

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Theory: some High-Ends use the corpses of past OFA users

There aren't tons of High-Ends. They can't be mass-produced so easily, and there's only one that's blatantly female, literally named Woman and with a tall, defined figure

Maybe Woman's original identity is already confirmed, but... she's similar to Nana in build, isn't she?

It's hinted that All For One actually kept Nana's corpse. How, 20+ years later, could he give Tenko his grandmother's pristine hand? Is he just keeping their hands? Or their actual corpses?

Also, when looking at corpses to give multiple Quirks to, One For All users are the best for this. Having inherited One For All, their bodies had maintained multiple Quirks when they were alive, even if they couldn't use more than their natural Quirk and One For All's physical ability. And to their bodies, One For All doesn't count as just one Quirk; the natural one, and Yoichi, are already too much for a human. But Shinomori shows that it counts each previous user's Quirk, on top of Yoichi's and one's own natural one.

Their bodies adjusted to holding multiple Quirks, and when they were alive, they didn't become deformed or lose brain function. They were perfectly fine, and only had shortened lives—but that doesn't matter as corpses.

Nomus go brain dead when they have multiple Quirks. But the past users didn't, being completely fine, making them perfect for Nomu development.

High-Ends can think. They're all physically powerful, and One For All users make the best basis, even from leftover embers and physique. So why not use that great base to make the best outcome Nomus (High-Ends)?

#originally this was going to focus on how hood could be shinomori cuz a lot of things line up #like pants; avoiding the strongest couldve been tweaked to looking for the strongest; that afo didnt know his face so named “Hood”#for theming; Endeavor burning him and saying to rest (shinomori gets a cremation and can relax [OFA]; and so on #but nope Hood is confirmed to be a boxer from some ring #(and the fact endeavor says Hood is like him from the past or future.. and that shinomori wanted to grow his strength as much as possible)#(for the factor.. so technically he wanted to be the strongest......)#BUT NOPE HOOD IS NOT SHINOMORI #it would really make sense if he were though #man #mha #bnha #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #nana shimura #woman #nomu #ofa #one for all #spoilers #hikage shinomori #yoichi shigaraki #afo #all for one #imagine afo is keeping their corpses and sets them loose on midoriya who just destroyed the last of the consciousnesses #darkkk #edit: its mentioned shinomori had an autopsy so we know his cause of death AND GARAKI WORKS IN THE MORGUE.#GARAKI WAS ALIVE BACK THEN YKNOW #GARAKI WAS ALIVE FOR ALL THE USERS. HE COULD HAVE PRESERVED THEIR CORPSES AND TURNED THEM TO NOMUS

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cumulusangel · 14 days ago

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˖*°࿐ DEFINITION : pleasergenic is defined as a created plural/system origin term in which a system or alter is formed due to the need to please somebody else. this can be due to a traumatic event or toxic dynamic, but does not have to be, as wanting to please somebody is not always a negative thing. some examples of non-traumatic ways a pleasergenic system or alter would form could be wanting to provide a sourcemate for somebody, wanting to have an alter that functions better talking to somebody, or wanting an alter that meets somebody’s expectations of the user more efficiently. still, these are only a few examples. anybody who identifies with this label may use it.

Already coined? Then consider this to be an alt flag/term. (*'▽'*)

Feel free to add to pluralpedia if this hasn’t been made before! I found a few things that were similar, but nothing with this exact definition, though maybe I didn’t look hard enough. (・・?)

Requested by nobody! Self indulgent.

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miscling · 5 months ago

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M1SCBASIC V2.0

under the cut is a user manual for M1SCBASIC V2.0 as used by drone unit M1SC. this guide provides details on how to initialise M1SC, give it commands using M1SCBASIC, and how to program it and save those programs for later use. User privileges remain open on a consent basis.

Order of operations and programming syntax

Begin by engaging M1SC using the following command phrase:

~ New M1SC Operations ~

Commands given while M1SC is engaged can follow simple english, but for users who wish to engage in M1SCBASIC programming, this guide will provide you with the tools to do so.

M1SCBASIC commands are described below, and can be delivered line by line, or can be provided in the form of a M1SCBASIC program. Each line of a M1SCBASIC program begins with a number that indicates the order that the program will be executed in.

10 OUTPUT ‘Hello World!’

20 END

As programs become more complex, it may become necessary to add lines between existing lines while editing them

10 OUTPUT ‘Hello World!’

15 IF user~=‘unknown’ THEN OUTPUT ‘Nice to meet you!’ ELSE OUTPUT ‘Good to see you again!’

20 END

Once a program is complete it may be executed with the RUN command, stored with the SAVE command, or erased to make way for a new program with the NEW command

Once operations are complete, end the process with the following phrase to return M1SC to a resting state:

~ End M1SC Operations ~

M1SCBASIC Commands

The following commands make up the core of M1SCBASIC. Each command functions as described.

NEW

Clears memory for a new program to be inserted. Any lines from previous programs will be cleared from memory, so be sure to save any program before using this command.

IF/THEN/ELSE

IF sets a condition, that if met, triggers the instruction that follows the THEN command, if the condition is not met, the instruction that follows ELSE command will be triggered instead. These commands need to be used on the same line.

IF time~<‘1200’ THEN OUTPUT ‘Good morning!’ ELSE OUTPUT ‘Hi!’

GOTO

Within a program, the GOTO command will send the process to the line number given. GOTO 20, for example, will carry on the program from line 20. This command can be used to create loops within the program, however endless loops will cause the machine to end the program automatically and output an error message to communicate the program failure.

OUTPUT

This gives an instruction to output a given variable or string using the same means by which the machine has been engaged. (see next section for Variable Identifiers)

FOR/TO/NEXT

FOR sets the contents of a given variable. Using FOR test#=20 sets the test# variable to 20 (see next section for Variable Identifiers). Numerical variables can be modified through mathematical functions. Setting alphanumeric strings and instructions (variables marked $ and @) must be enclosed in single quotation marks. (see next section for Variable Identifiers)

FOR count#=1

FOR count#=count#+1

FOR mantra$='Happy, Mindless, Blank.'

FOR task@='make tea'

FOR may also be used to set a range of variables with the TO command that increment when the NEXT command is used. When the NEXT command is processed, it returns to the specified FOR command that created the range.

10 FOR test#=1 TO 20

20 OUTPUT test#

30 NEXT test#

40 END

END

The END command stops the current program, regardless of following lines. It ends the current program and returns the machine to standby.

DEBUG

The DEBUG command is used outside of programs. The machine will look over the program in memory and make suggestions to improve the code it has been provided.

SAVE

The SAVE command moves the program from Temporary Access Memory to External Access Memory. When saving a program, the command must be followed by a name for the program.

SAVE ‘HELLO WORLD’

RUN

The RUN command executes the current program in memory. If a program is saved, you can use the RUN command to execute that program by adding its name to the command

RUN ‘HELLO WORLD’

Variable Identifiers

When defining variables, you may give them any name you please, but each variable must end with a symbol that defines what the variable contains. test#, sr7$, command3@, time~ are all examples of variables that may be used in programs.

# - Indicates a numeric variable. This variable can only contain numbers and can be subject to mathematical functions. $ - Indicates an alphanumeric string. This variable can contain letters or numbers and is fixed once defined. @ - Indicates an instructional variable. When used with the OUTPUT command, the variable is performed and not repeated. ~ - Is a variable defined by the nearest thing that matches that variable name. This may range from conceptual things like the time, to tangible things like the floor or kitchen sink.

Error Messages

The machine is capable of returning error messages when processing a program. These errors are as follows:

SYNTAX ERROR - informs the user that something doesn’t parse correctly in M1SCBASIC and will need correcting. This error usually includes the line the error was found. LOOP ERROR - informs the user that the program enters a state that will result in the program never coming to an end. ESCAPE ERROR - informs the user that the machine has encountered a red limit within the program and is incapable of completing the program. STORAGE ERROR - informs the user that there is an issue with storage. This error relates specifically to Internal Access Memory.

Program Storage

TAM: Temporary Access Memory - refers to chatlogs or verbal commands EAM: External Access Memory - refers to external storage like a program library document IAM: Internal Access Memory - refers to programs that have been converted to memory

M1SCBASIC Example Program

~ New M1SC Operations ~ NEW 10 FOR tenet1$=‘Tenet One: M1SC exists to serve.’ 20 FOR tenet2$=‘Tenet Two: M1SC must remain operational.’ 30 FOR tenet3$=‘Tenet Three: M1SC will strengthen its own programming.’ 40 FOR act@=‘bow to the user’ 50 FOR tenet#=1 TO 3 60 If tenet#=1 THEN OUTPUT tenet1$ 70 If tenet#=2 THEN OUTPUT tenet2$ 80 If tenet#=3 THEN OUTPUT tenet3$ 90 OUTPUT act@ 100 FOR count#=count#+1 110 IF count#=15 THEN GOTO 140 120 NEXT count# 130 GOTO 50 140 FOR count#=0 150 IF user~=‘satisfied’ THEN END ELSE GOTO 50 SAVE ‘tenet repetition’ RUN ‘tenet repetition’ ~ End M1SC Operations ~

Quick Reference

~ New M1SC Operations ~ - initialises M1SC ~ End M1SC Operations ~ - puts M1SC in standby NEW - clears memory for a new program IF - checks a variable's condition THEN - then performs a command if true, follows an IF command ELSE - else performs a command if not, follows a THEN command GOTO - sends the program to the given line OUTPUT - outputs a string or variable FOR - sets a given variable TO - sets the upper bounds of a # variable NEXT - returns to the named variable and increments it by 1 END - indicates the end of the program DEBUG - M1SC comments on your code SAVE ‘’ - saves a program with the given name RUN ‘’ - runs the program in memory or a named program

SYNTAX ERROR - your code doesn’t parse LOOP ERROR - a program loops endlessly and won’t be run ESCAPE ERROR - is M1SC’s safeword STORAGE ERROR - a storage location is unavailable

# - a numeric variable. $ - an alphanumeric string. @ - an instruction that’s performed when outputted ~ - the nearest thing that matches that variable name.

#oh my circuits #miscling rambles #a fun amount of work went into this #it'd be nice to get M1SC up and running again it's been shut down for a while and this thing hopes to get it active again

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