esoteric-empiricist

[esoteric-empiricist]

[esoteric-empiricist]

Any tips for writing politics and political intrigue? Especially non earth based politics

these are some very general "this may or may not work for you" points that inform how I tend to think about that sort of stuff

individuals rarely do things, and when it seems like they do, it's usually much larger groups finding it beneficial to elevate a comprehensible figurehead for some reason or other

people, being animals with needs, tend to do things for reasons even if they're not good reasons

borders follow land features, and a jagged border implies as much as a straight one because political entities tend to hold onto things for reasons

things often happen for very stupid and frustrating reasons, the more mundane, the more impenetrable

not everyone remembers the actual reason they started doing something, but they can find new reasons if need be

even true misunderstandings tend to spring from a material interest in understanding things a certain way

administrative hypocrisy is rarely irrational or even unconscious. it usually just means there is a reason to obscure and distort a more inconvenient interest

every level of government bureaucracy moves faster than an individual could possibly imagine while also moving slower than an individual could possibly see

the larger the territory, the more administration, the more delegation, the more fractured the centralisation of power

annexation is rarer than the average person assumes it is, and client/puppet/etc states are rarely called such by name

the tradition of dead generations hangs like a nightmare

there is no such thing as a truly singular government. everywhere in the world (and off of it, if that were the case) is several smaller places in a trenchcoat, all the way down forever

there is no sharp line delineating culture, religion, and law

the problem with political conspiracy is that everyone loves talking about how clever they are for being part of something clever. there are no true secrets

the average person, the atomic individual, actually doesn't care that much about the letter of the law. this is also true at all levels of administration

[esoteric-empiricist]

The Happy99 worm, also known as Ska or i-Worm, was a worm for Windows, appearing in 1999. The worm would display a gif of exploding fireworks in a window titled “Happy New Year 1999!″. This was the first worm known to spread via e-mail and usenet. Other than attaching itself to the user’s computer, this worm did no damage.

[esoteric-empiricist]

fortuna, lacrima

[esoteric-empiricist]

[esoteric-empiricist]

excerpts from a dream I had where the toskarin blog was a series of critically-acclaimed, world famous art exhibitions with completely unchanged subject matter

[esoteric-empiricist]

2025 巳の娘

[esoteric-empiricist]

Happy new year from Zun (Inage shrine, Kawasaki)

[esoteric-empiricist]

[esoteric-empiricist]

I never talk about my magical girl OCs here but I’m pretty proud of this drawing of them I’ve done as my last drawing of the year. couldn’t decide who to draw so I went with… all of them?

[esoteric-empiricist]

steam sale:

$4000.00 unfinished triple a game now on sale for $3999.95!

The most life changing indie game you've ever seen, usually $4.99, now on sale for $0.45

[esoteric-empiricist]

I like crosswords, but only cryptic crosswords and not the NYT kind, because I enjoy that those make it possible to deduce the answer without knowing it. The main problem with cryptics is that they're really a UK thing -- they're almost unknown in the US, and while Canada does have some (our paper of record publishes both types), we have a dearth of good setters, so the mainstream Canadian cryptics are pretty dreary. As a result, I tend to have to go to UK sources to find interesting ones -- the Times, Sunday Times, and Guardian mostly.

The challenge here is that you do still need to know trivia to do well, and UK puzzles assume you know UK trivia: place names and public figures and government acronyms and so forth. And you just kind of have to put up with that and imagine you're taking a time machine back to when the flag was a Union Jack. But I stubbornly refuse to learn how cricket works, even though UK cryptic crosswords are mandated to contain no less than 5% cricket references. What I've come to notice is that this leads to a fascinatingly narrow sort of competence: I know a lot of words that are related to cricket and can often deduce cricket references in cryptic crossword clues, and if you put a gun to my head -- I suppose in the UK it'd be some kind of ninja sword -- I could probably fake a bit of cricket patter on the back of that, but I know it only as a jumbled bag of words and relationships. I have no schematic idea of the game at all, beyond the fact that it's Subtly Different Baseball.

This gets me thinking about knowledge tests in general, how knowledge cultivated as a means to an end carves the narrowest channel possible, and how far this goes to explain how little individual humans innovate thoughtfully or develop holistic understanding over thousands of years of the daily grind. It feels like there's an affinity between my understanding of cricket and an LLM's way of approaching the world, where I'm just using a detailed awareness of patterns to guess a hidden word; I wonder how complicated the puzzles would have to become before I needed to know how cricket works in order to solve them reliably.

[esoteric-empiricist]

My dealer: I got a new strain, it's called Ao Oni, you'll be zonked out your gourd.

Me: Whatever man, I don't feel shit

15 minutes later

Me: dude I swear I just heard a plate shatter

My buddy Hiroshi, pacing: The sliding puzzle is impossible

[esoteric-empiricist]

the worst girls games writer going on to work on neon white feels like a natural progression to me. sometimes it takes time for a woman to find her true calling — this is a beautiful thing.

[esoteric-empiricist]

tickles me pink when you get a quest to kill ghosts in an rpg. like yeah this massive broadsword is gonna do just fine against these things.no rites no helping them move on just fucking cleaving them in twain

[esoteric-empiricist]

Foxes disguised as monks. On the left from Japan and on the right from Denmark.

[esoteric-empiricist]

I believe the English phrase is “odd duck.” Yes. Jan Kargad was an Odd Duck. He was born in 1922, right after Georgia joined the Soviet Union, in a commune outside of Batumi. But this was not a normal commune no. His parents were strange people. A small group of Dutch fuckers, very protestant people, started a winery in the countryside where they could read their bibles. You would think they did not get along with the Marxists, but you would be wrong. They loved work. The bible loved work. There was no problem.

Well, that is not entirely true. Jan was a bit of a problem. He was born with a “weak constitution.” We do not know what that meant exactly, but farmwork would give him seizures and very high fevers. He was not a good child for farm work. So, they taught him arithmetic. Young Jan was in charge of counting grapes and bottles of wine and so on. Maybe the Apparatchik did not mind a child doing all the counting, maybe he was bribed, maybe he did not give a shit. I do not know. But Jan was in charge of all the counting and, what is the fucking word- logistics. Yes. Logistics. And he was very good at logistics. 

There are theories as to his upbringing yes. Studying the bible alongside Marx and Lenin and so on. But I do not believe this. In Chechnya in those days many studied the bible and Marx like Jan Kargad, but we did not become like Jan Kargad. I think perhaps it was the fevers. One sees things with a fever when it is bad enough, yes. 

Kargad also studied the capitalists. He was very good at this. He read Adam Smith, but also Issac Newton, the South Seas bubble, and most famously the Tulip Panic. They say his journals were filled with pressed tulips. He was a bit of a, what is the fucking English word- pervert. A pervert for organizing things and numbers and so on. Jan Kargad loves logistics like a man loves his wife, and tulips are a symbol of this for him. They became a microcosm for him. You see how the bud unfolds into many petals, its is very similar to how capitalism unfurls into its many aspects in the world. But, I am getting ahead of myself. 

One day, after all of his schooling, Kargad has a terrible fever, more terrible than any fever he has ever had. This is in the early 1940s some time. After this fever he becomes strange. Well, stranger than he already was. He speaks of men with golden dog masks, their necks chained to the sun, tulips growing from their eyes, all of that shit. He never goes outside again. He becomes fearful of the sun. He does not let it touch his skin. 

He writes intensely for the next three years. I have seen his original notebooks and they are stained with sweat. This man is not well, but he writes. He does not get help, because he is very good at analyzing agricultural output. I believe it grounded him some how, to spend days without sleep, reading spreadsheets about grapes and wheat and so on. 

He is no longer christian. He throws out all of the crosses in his home, and replaces them with grape-cutters. They are similar to a sickle, but with a long handle, for reaching up and cutting off high bunches of grapes. He becomes obsessed with this idea of the grape cutter, and he begins to paint. And this is where many first learn of him. He influences a group of artists who become famous in the southern soviet union, though they are occasionally derided as being “mystical.” I personally? I love the drawings. Many figures reaching up to pluck grapes from the sun. It becomes the central theme of his work.

Here people discover his strange writings. But first he is considered a strange mystic. His early writings are still very christian yes, and this influences how he is read in the west. Many think he is speaking of hyper-economics or whatever fetishistic bull shit the americans are calling it. But I do not think so. His work is very soviet. There are stories yes, of good soviet men drinking coffee and loving spreadsheets like a man loves his wife, and in this they become a little bit like Jan Kargad. They are –you do not have an English term for this– cutting grapes from the sun. But this is not a serious phrase you understand. These men are perverts.