💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › isoraqathedh › 1675153610.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 18:38:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is going to be a slightly different month, as it feels still very strange coming out of the gap between two new years (the Gregorian and lunar ones). Instead of grouping everything together into general categories, I'll just write one or two paragraphs in a small tightly-defined heading.
I have been thinking about why I believe what I believe a lot recently. It's meant that I have not been doing anything that can be externally visible, but it has been a productive thing to do in my opinion and it at least makes some problems clear that I can refer to at a later time.
I have said elsewhere that my political affiliation is basically "straw-man". This is because I have a better judgement over what is for or against my interests over what is genuinely "good" or "bad" in the general sense and generally understood in the popular cultures of the present day, and they sometimes don't line up and I get confused because of this.
A lot of this comes down to how much "governance" I am willing to accept whether from the literal State or from prevailing unpleasant cultural undercurrents.
A thing that I have been trying to make is something called "the legibility series", where I try to express what I believe and why I believe that by referring to the concept of "legibility", which was invented by James C. Scott in the book "Seeing Like A State" to explain what The State (literally here) does to make sure it can rule effectively, which apparently involves a lot of evenly spaced rectangular grids.
I want to make it more general. There's a lot of intersection here of course – grassroots activism is essentially a tie to the State – but especially when it comes to public and private transport and how some people seem to have a particular annoyance with the modern transport distribution.
Speaking of cars, over the last few months I have bought a few more and as I have recently rearranged the collection I think I will have to do a resurvey. I think by now the collection has hit 400.
It has made me think a bit about the cars that you cannot find on the shelf. There's always a bit of a gap between what you can find in the shops and what you can find on the street, and especially at the lower end of the scale. I have come to in particular deeply desire to have miniatures of the "Snooze fest 1990 ± 12" – the cars found in North America of between 1978 ~ 2002 that are boring, unreliable, unpopular or otherwise disliked either now or back then. Perhaps you may see them a lot in various shows as they routinely appear in various videos where they are being used essentially as fodder for the more interesting pursuits. They rarely survive the experience.
There's a certain kind of sympathy one have to these beasts that I think is actually not as weird as you might imagine. Pack bonding with complex machines is real, and when you see a couple get abused it always gets you a little bit.
It should be noted of course given where I am I have never seen these, and I probably will never have the (dis)pleasure of actually driving or having to maintain one of them either. This special distance is perhaps an additive factor to why I desire them so much.
There are some places that let you do bespoke models, but they are far away and expensive, and they probably don't do models as small as I would hope.
In a creative bent, I have decided to turn 100 stories and anecdotes that I have found over the years and turn them into vocabulary for my non-serious conlangs. It's going to be fun and the best thing is I have a notebook that has a proforma lined up perfectly for it.
Later on I might do a similar series of 100 maps of various places and things, also using the same notebook proforma.
In many physics and mathematics textbooks, there is usually a section called "motivation", which gives you a reason why you would want to study the thing that you are currently studying and some simple direction to give that study some structure. I think this chapter is extremely useful, but the problem is that its appearance as an explicitly denoted section seems strictly limited to texts about science and mathematics.
To that end I think it would be nice if more things that describe systems have a motivation section that outlines what ideas are to be explored in the text and a general idea of how to go about doing it.
I say this mainly to the end of the recent drama surrounding D&D, and table-top role-playing games in general, because I always thought that it's one of those weird things that people just /do/ for no reason that I can discern. Once I have figured out what is going on, a motivation section is not particularly difficult to write:
Oftentimes, when creating a story, authors have trouble figuring out the exact sequence of events that needs to be told to bring about the desired final state given some initial state. It seems to be a frequent issue amongst many contemporary storytellers where one desires to construct a particular narrative, especially with collaborators and such, but several critical components are missing, such the aforementioned sequence of events, particular plot points that are needed to drive a story toward the desired end state, and "props", i.e. small items that dress up the narrative to not be a bare sequence of events but be something aesthetic.
To this end, we outline a framework in this work that provides any missing components to a narrative you wish to create. By itself, the framework can be used to create stories, but does not generally enforce a story in general. However, one may choose to substitute components of this framework with something that you already made yourself, if that is more desirable.
It is hoped that the framework is useful to anyone missing a few parts to build the story that needs to be told.
Maybe this particular motivation section does not resonate with you, but including such a section allows the reader to figure out where the author is coming from which may explain a few stylistic choices.
In a related story, seeing a few putative "worked examples" of how a table-tops work have given me some insight to how some people "have a muse".
If you are not familiar with the idea, role-playing types typically have some kind of capacity to emulate a persona which is called a "character" in this context. The ability to do this is called a "muse", presumably after the Greek mythological concept but this has been somewhat quantified so you can have "a lot of muse" for some character but not for another.
So far I think I've worked out an internal model as to how this works. It's basically a case of emulation. A character is "emulated" by modelling responses to certain stimuli, which may be done by interacting with other characters or settings, sometimes through the dice-based systems that are the outwardly-visible aspects of the game. However, this costs in terms of putting out brainpower, and this is the whole "muse" thing that they talk about.
There's a lot of modelling and self-interaction going on here, of course. As an RP type, you have to model the character itself (I tend to think of them as some kind of large answer key connecting stimuli to responses controlled by some Key Settings – other people call it a "personality" – which can be controlled internally (i.e. with more stimuli)), model the stimuli, and then of course model the setting that they live in.
It seems exhausting to me, but these people can seemingly do it with minimal cost and I'm kind of surprised.
There is no conclusion. So see you next month.