Share and talk about your writing

So there’s this Zine thingy that I signed up to write a piece for. The idea was 300 or less words on a single subject related to games. I wrote about how video games are inherently funny and we’re all clowns when we play games. I was on a clown kick.

Anyway, I think my piece is pretty good and also it has a fantastic illustration that looks kind of like a new yorker cartoon featuring a clown fighting a black knight from dark souls with a balloon. I screamed when I saw the final piece, the clown is so god damned deranged looking, i love love love it.

And there are like, 19 other pieces in here! It’s pretty cool and $5. I’m not getting any money out of it (I don’t need it) but other folks are which is also pretty cool.

Okay that’s all go buy it!!

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I found a cool AI worldbuilding tool called Loom

It basically just stores different text entries in a big tree so that AI knows everything needs to be contextual and consistent within that domain. I haven’t started using it yet but I’ve seen other people use it and it looks amazing as a sounding board/prototyper.

This blog post I just wrote is part an update on my mapping work, but it also tries to extend a lot of what I was studying in grad school about composition theory and spacial philosophy and narrative to level design and bsp-based mapping tools. I’m just kicking the can around at this point, but I think there’s something fruitful here.

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Recently I wrote a translation of one of my favorite tanka by Yosano Akiko that I was really happy with.

rocket arrows from
a war in the sky heaven
just fell to the earth
and filled the air with their scent
a field of blooming poppies

久方の天のいくさの火箭おちてにほひするなり罌粟の花腹

—Yosano Akiko (与謝野晶子), Flowers of Dreams (夢之花), 1906

This translation replicates the meter of the original, while also trying to hew close to the particulars of what it expresses. I made these two pieces of visual art to go with it as well:

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i wrote a giant post about Let’s Plays, youtube and internet culture that’s sort of sequel to last year’s “The California Problem” post i wrote.

i talk about nostalgia, Petscop, SomethingAwful, my terrible middle school, the early let’s play work of @Sleazy, TikTok and Youtube, avant garde art, etc etc

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the internet is a refuge for the bad faith. it’s a place to endlessly to celebrate your own fragility and inflexibility. it’s a zone where we can magically reframe and hold up all our own failures of imagination as actually pretty fucking epic. to paraphrase something Matt Christman has often said: whatever happens, just say you’ve won. ultimately your own fantasy conception about what you’re doing matters more than anything that might actually come out of it, especially if you’ve managed to successfully sell the importance of it to enough other people. we’re all just performing elaborate shell games on each other in an attempt to feel better about ourselves.

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Currently been writing about a fictional apartment complex and a fictional awful company in a fictional awful suburban sprawl type place. The thing with writing is I wish the weather were bad so I would feel as bad writing it.

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i love hellojed, salt of the earth, but god i just wish he’d feel bad more of the time

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Finished and published the short story collection

https://hellojed.neocities.org/stories/meadowbrook/MeadowbrookMenuPage

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Excerpt from an IF game i’m working on about condemned girls taking body horror drugs to survive the depths of the ocean

cw melting

The warmth spread throughout her body in a matter of moments, engulfing her, pressing in from all sides like the air of a sauna. The heat was alarming, yet, she had no bad words to describe it. It felt good, comfortable, even as sweat trailed down her forehead and stung her eyes. Sensation had overtaken her faculties: numbness was setting in, and realising she hadn’t felt her feet in a few seconds, she stumbled back instinctually, wedging herself into the dining table. Staring down at shaky legs, she moved to place her hand on the table for additional support, but there was no relief. It took uncomfortably long even to parse what she saw at her side, a quiet glimpse of fate among overwhelming euphoria and terror both. Her hand, all the way up to her elbow, had crumpled from the weight placed upon it, melting and merging into a puddle that started blush, then blue, so blue, that it seemed to reject even the suggestion of warmth from the many incandescent bulbs that lit the dining room. She tried to scream, and her vocal folds tore themselves into viscid ribbons, producing no more than a thick, uncanny gargling. Her legs gave way. With a clammy thump, she hit the ground, and her wife was drenched. Iry did not respond. Her absent grin twitched from cold sensation alone. She was elsewhere. In a different hole. Nobody was coming to pull her out of it.
In that moment June truly hated Iry. She cursed her love, The very notion of love, and the childish fucking wide-eyed puppy dog performance bullshit with which iry used it to flee responsibility. The last image, burned into June’s retinas for the precious few seconds they still worked, of her loathsome angel, exploded into colours incomprehensible and contradictory but saturated with all of deep sympathy, violent fury, silent resignation and shrieking death.
Silence would win out, in the end. It was blue, so blue, that it sucked the air from the room.

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yoooo sick

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I want to push back against this somewhat, even though I know that maybe isn’t the kind of interaction you’re really looking for with this perhaps, but maybe it’s still better to do that than say nothing, since it’s just my honest reaction—I know I wouldn’t really want to just be ignored if I posted something like that…

Natural selection is a simple, crude process, even if it has complex outcomes, but also, it never selects for better fitness in any kind of general sense, only for suitability to the current environment, which is constantly changing, so there really is no general better fitness. Evolution is more like a drunk meandering in the dark than a continuous climb upwards to the top of a mountain. :stuck_out_tongue:

My favorite way of illustrating this is to give the example of a population of bacteria which have heat tolerances of between 35–45°C, and can only tolerate temperatures within 10°C of their maximum. If you heat the environment of this population to 40°C, some of them will die, and you will be left with a more heat-tolerant population of bacteria. That’s natural selection at work. However, if you cool the environment to 30°C, some of the more heat-tolerant bactera will die, and instead you will be left with a more cold-tolerant population of bacteria. That’s also natural selection at work. So, we can really only talk about how well the current population of bacteria is capable of adjusting to their current environment, not how much more fit they are in general, and certainly not how any individual bacterium is more or less fit than any other in any general sense.

Also, I think it’s worth noting that if we started with a population of bacteria which could only tolerate temperatures within 35–40°C, then heated the environment above that, they would all die and the population would be gone. Same way as if we started with a population with maximum heat tolerances between 40–45°C and then cooled the environment to 30°C. So, the diversity of heat tolerances in the original population does give the entire population a certain kind of evolutionary advantage, because it means that some inviduals will get through even if the temperature fluctuates fairly widely.

In general, a population of organisms will benefit from diversity—in their genes, their behavior, whatever—because it means that whatever changes occur in the environment, some individuals will make it. So, if you value human life, diversity is good; it’s good if people have a wide variety of beliefs, if they have a wide gene pool, if they have many different customs and practices, etc. etc.

I don’t think it’s really fair to say from this place that it’s “evolutionarily advantageous to reject other people’s preferences as ungrounded in truth.” Human life is not necessarily a competition—in many ways, we sink or swim together, and we all thrive more when we can all work together more effectively. But, also, I think, in evolutionary terms, it’s better for people to live and let live so that the whole species has the widest span of preferences we can reasonably support. There are many cases when a small group of people with odd preferences turn out to be just the ones we need for some task, or deepen our understanding of what human behavior can involve, or lead to unique art we wouldn’t otherwise have, etc. etc. All of these things make the whole society healthier and more robust. Also, in times of disaster, you never know what kinds of skills and habits will come in handy; there are many different kinds of disasters and some we could never foresee, so having a lot of different sorts of people helps to hedge our bets.

As such, I don’t think there really is any such thing as “disadvantageous truth” full stop. There are beliefs that it may hurt you to hold in a given social context, but in a different social context, they might be rewarded. In general, I think we should strive to support a wide diversity of beliefs in any context. Some beliefs lead people to harm others, and we should perhaps discourage those, but in general, I think we should work to make the social contexts we swim in more hospitable to a variety of beliefs as much as we can without hurting anyone. This will make our social groups more flexible and adaptable, able to meet a wide variety of challenges. If anything in human culture can be clearly said to be evolutionarily advantageous, I think it’s that.

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This is true but kind of just shows that adaptivity is a group property and not an individual property, which is entirely compatible with chauvinism and selfish genes being an individual phenomenology caused by evolution which is in fact bad in excess and causes epistemic and other problems.

If you thought I was arguing in favor of chauvinism you were mistaken. I was arguing that our individual senses of what is healthy and good deceive us and cause major problems.

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Even if we both seem to agree that chauvinism is harmful, I think it’s possible to get there without endorsing the idea along the way that chauvinism is evolutionarily selected for. I think in that sense, for you specifically I’m trying to argue in favor of more room to hope perhaps. Your perspective sounds almost despairing to me about chauvinism and selfishness, like, in this sense that everyone is kind of doomed to fight each other over whose subjective beliefs are right and proper even if that’s bad and harms everyone. I totally agree that that’s often bad and often does harm everyone, but think it’s possible for people to cooperate and live-and-let-live too; clearly we don’t have to fight, because a lot of the time we do cooperate and accomodate each other, and we could probably manage to do that even more than we currently do if we work for it.

I don’t think chauvinism is necessarily caused by evolution per se, I mean, unless you want to say that everything in life is caused by evolution in some sense. Although that might be strictly true, it means that human cooperation and accomodation is also caused by evolution, as well as every other aspect of human behavior. I think, if anything, that suggests that our genes have only provided us with the capacity to hold any abstract beliefs, whether they’re chauvinistic or egalitarian or whatever; I think they hardly encourage any specific behaviors at all, or we would see a lot more homogeneity across human cultures, human babies would be born with more instincts, etc. On that basis, if chauvinism is selected for in any specific group, I think it’s pretty clearly the culture of the group selecting for it through social pressure way more than nature in some general sense. Plus, the culture of a group can change, so we’re not doomed to accept the chauvinism of a specific group—we can work to try to open it up more and convince the members to be more accepting. Human behavior is incredibly malleable; I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere near the last word on human nature or what a human society can look like.

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Happy to call this a disagreement of degree and not kind.

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Fair enough. :sweat_smile: I hope you’re doing okay out there. I’ve been struggingly a lot lately with the feeling that our society is controlled by people who are indeed intensely self-interested and happy to harm others if it suits them, and that too many other people are too resigned to this for it to ever change it or even to help each one other effectively to withstand the harm; I think like, if I was to totally give myself over to that belief, and especially if I was also to conclude that it was inevitable and would always be that way, I would really fall into total despair and give up. So, I’m trying really hard to resist that idea; to some extent I’m speaking even to myself in those posts. I know it’s maybe not exactly the same as what you’re saying, it just sounds kind of similar; I wouldn’t want you to go the route of total despair either, although I know maybe the kinds of arguments I was making don’t necessarily help very much if your feelings are tending in that direction.

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I’m going to hijack the singularity and overthrow human nature. Good people will ascend and bad people will live on wildlife preserves.

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Well, I’m a little reluctant to embrace the idea of good and bad people, but I think maybe the people you’re describing as bad would quite like to live on wildlife preserves, so maybe it’s ultimately all for the best.

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