fractalcult

[fractalcult]

[fractalcult]

[fractalcult]

[fractalcult]

[fractalcult]

Crashing the Wedding

When Saint Cat was 16, her parents had her engaged to the Moon. “He is rich”, they said, which was true enough, “and he can support you in your old age.” But he was old, and set in his ways. “He is not unkind”, they said, which was true enough, but he also wasn’t kind, and Saint Cat was bothered by his investments in arms manufacturing. Nevertheless, no matter how clearly and directly she tried to say “no”, her parents didn’t understand, and she started to wonder if she was really being clear and direct at all.

One night, laying in bed and trying to convince herself that the Moon was best for her — all she deserved — she heard strange music from outside her window. She looked out, but all was covered in a thick fog. She stuck her head out, and found that her second-story window was now a first-story window. She stepped out and found herself in a starlit orchard full of ripe peaches and avocados.

The music continued, and in the distance she saw a small, hairy, goatish man performing a strange and complicated dance with apparent ease. It had no apparent rhythm, but it was strangely entrancing. After watching for a little while, she went back through her window and went back to bed, falling immediately into a deep sleep.

The daylight and all of the business of everyday life put her strange dream or vision out of her mind, totally forgotten, but that night, as soon as her head hit the pillow and even before turning out her light, she heard the music again. This time, the fog was lighter, and she could see some of the stars and the shadows of the trees through her window. She stepped out again, and the goatish man was closer. She felt like he was requesting that she dance with him — and she began to dance, not in the way that he was dancing but in a style that she had learned as a young child. He stopped, whacked her on the head with a rolled up newspaper, and disappeared — and in the morning she found herself in bed again.

The third night was the eve of her planned wedding, because the Moon, for all his age and wealth, was impatient to have her. And again, she heard the strange music. The fog this time had dissipated almost completely, and as she stepped through the window, she nearly face-planted into the goatish man. He had been waiting for her, and together, they began the strange dance. Awkwardly at first — her mind full of apprehension and her heart full of thoughts, this being the eve of her wedding — she began to copy the strange series of movements the goatish man was performing. Over time, she began to understand the connection between the strange movements and the strange piping music, although she could not explain it to anyone if she was asked. She did not understand the reason for either, and the dance was strenuous, but she continued even as she thought she might collapse from exhaustion. Dripping with sweat, she finally perfected the sequence of movements, and the small goatish man rewarded her with a kiss just as the dawn broke — dissolving the orchard and the man, but immediately drying her sweat and filling her with a burst of energy.

Through this entire experience, she never forgot that her marriage was about to begin, although she wanted to, and this thought drove her in the times she thought she might collapse. But now that she had left the enchanted orchard, her despair began to feel overwhelming. In a daze, she allowed herself to be bathed and put in a clean white wedding dress, and piloted to the church’s aisle.

The traditional wedding music began, and she began to walk down the aisle, but right in front of her, a wild ferret dashed. She picked her foot up to avoid it, and something about the movement felt familiar. The ferret, now being chased by confused guests, dashed into the guts of the organ — and the sound that produced was familiar, too. Saint Cat knew what to do. She performed the dance.

These movements, which once seemed so arbitrary, were graceful now that their meaning had been supplied. She easily dodged the chaotic morass of guests chasing after, or running away from, the ferret, who had started biting. She made her way easily out the side door, and with one final motion, ripped off the train of her dress, which, she knew even before knowing it, was caught on the edge of a pew. And outside, she met the Moon, who was laughing and petting his ferret.

“I will let you go,” the Moon said, “because I see you have met my friend, the goat man. He has more important plans for you than I do.”

And that was how Saint Cat avoided being married to the Moon.

[fractalcult]

There is a vampire on your television. He wants you to look into his eyes.

He changes shape. First, he sings a sad song, holding a starving puppy. Then, he is very excited about an upcoming sale. He is angry, and you become angry. He is afraid, and you become afraid. He wants you to have an opinion about the news.

He wants you to become a goth today, and a punk tomorrow. He wants you to be a Democrat on Superbowl Sunday, and a Republican on Super Tuesday. He asks you how you feel about the issues, but he doesn’t want to know — he just wants you to feel something. He tells you about his new shoes and his old values.

He wants you to look into his eyes. He texts you at 3am asking if you’re DTF. He texts you at 3pm asking if you’re voting. He calls you in the middle of dinner to tell you, the Vehicle Owner, that a hold has been put on your social security number and thank you for choosing carnival cruises are you happy with your long distance carrier? He wants you to like his new vacation photos. He wants you to like his new starving puppy. He wants you to like his new eyes. They used to be yours. He wants you to have an opinion about his new conspiracy theory. He wants you to discuss it at 3am.

All the news that’s fit to print flows from his mouth. All the news that’s unfit flows from his ass. His fists are punching at each other. He wants you to look into his eyes. He wants you to have opinions about the news until it’s 3am again. He wants you to like, subscribe, ring the bell, and share his eyes with your 300 closest friends.

He wants you to look into his eyes. He wants you to pay attention to him.

As long as you are paying attention to him, you are not paying attention to yourself.

As long as you are paying attention to him, you cannot develop countermeasures.

As long as you are paying attention to him, you are powerless in the face of the moon.

[fractalcult]

A friend of mine visited the site of the bowling alley. THE Bowling Alley. It was February of 2020 — quarantine came down right after and he got stuck in California for two weeks between that and the business with the plane tickets — and I’m pretty sure it was The Bowling Alley for a couple reasons.

See, a few years ago, I met this guy in a bar. Kinda sketchy looking guy, but it was a sketchy kind of bar. Wrinkly, covered in faded tattoos, trucker hat over an uneven scrub of long gray hairs. He saw the five fingered hand of Eris tattooed on my arm, and came to talk to me.

“You one of them dis-cord-ians,” he said, in the manner of someone who had never heard the word “discordian” spoken aloud.

“After a fashion.”

“My college roommate was big into dis-cord-ya.” He looked like he was about eighty, but this was an experience so I let him talk. “Heard about it from an uncle, some acid casualty by that point.

“This uncle of his, you see, in about 1959, he was drinking in a bowling alley and he went outside to piss against the wall — seeing as how the head was in use by two assholes arguing loudly about philosophy or something — and he saw this globe of shining light. The light was silver at first, then green, then red, then gold, and then he didn’t know what color it was. And then it zipped off, like a UFO. I guess it WAS a UFO, seeing as how he never figured out what to call it.

“He was pretty drunk, but that’s no excuse, so the whole thing kept bothering him. That night, he dreamt about an apple.

“Nothing wrong with that apple, but the dream was so vivid that the dream-apple was more real than any real apple could ever be, and it put him off apples. He never ate an apple again.

“Anyhow, other than an aversion to apples, he barely thought about it again until 1973, when he went past that bowling alley again. It had been closed down, and the sign was removed, and there was something disturbing about the shadow on the wall from where the sign had been — like it didn’t really say the name of the bowling alley, but it secretly said something else.

“Anyhow, that night he had another dream. In that dream, he was in a forest at night, under a full moon, and this woman in a white gown appears from behind a tree. Like, a sapling that she couldn’t have possibly fit behind. She hands him a yellow apple, and he takes a bite out of it, but then stops because the texture is off. He looks down, and the apple has become a book. His mouth is full of pages.

“About ten years later he gets caught in the rain and has to duck into a used bookstore, and as he shakes off his coat he sees, laying on the floor in front of his feet, the book from his dream. Turns out to be the Dell Paperback Edition of book 2 of the Illuminatus trilogy, The Golden Apple. He takes this as a sign, and brings it to the cashier to buy it, but there’s no price. Turns out some other customer must have dropped it. He gets it for free.

“So this uncle has basically had his mind fucked, and got into discordianism in a big way, but I’m hearing this second hand and by the mid-80s he’s already taken enough drugs that maybe he read the book already and forgot or something.

“But he took my roommate to this parking lot, one night in May. The moon was high. Roomie would never say what happened there, but ever since, he was seeing the number five everywhere.”

I thought a bit about the inconsistencies in this guy’s story, and decided for the moment to ignore them. After all, this was more entertaining than drinking alone. “Can I buy you a drink,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I’ve gotta be getting back on the road.”

He picked up his coat and put it on, stuck his hand in his pocket, and paused, wide-eyed. “Here,” he said, and thrust a business card at me. “There was this fortune-telling place across the street from that parking lot, thirty years ago. This is their card.”

When a friend decided to go on a trip to California to see the PKD archives, I passed the card along, and he promised to do some kind of little ritual there. And, he did. See, apparently the fortune telling place got torn down too, and the one parking lot became two. And right in the middle was an unlicensed hot dog stand. So, my friend bought a hot dog in one lot and walked over to the other to eat it. There was some trouble getting the guy, who wasn’t fluent in English, to understand that he didn’t want a bun, so he finally lied and said he was gluten intolerant.

That night, my friend had this dream.

He was in the woods at night. There was a full moon. A woman in a silver dress came toward him, and handed him a book.

“There is a secret message in this book,” she said. “It will only be decoded during the aftermath. None of the authors will live to see it fully understood. The correct solution will be in my name, and the name of A L W 6 46.”

That’s why I think it was the right place.

[fractalcult]

St. Dog and St. Cat used to be room-mates, back when they both worked nights at the Qwik-Stop. Back then, as fall became winter and day, night, and hangover haze blurred, their comfortable routine was interrupted by a strange occurrence: for three days, they each dreamt vividly of a silver alarm clock. They talked about it and couldn’t figure out why they were having the same dream. It wasn’t something they had both seen on TV, or an ad on their commute. Dog dismissed it as a coincidence while Cat continued to obsess over it secretly, and that Spring, Cat moved to Springfield and Dog had to find another roommate.

They didn’t see each other again until five years later. Cat was back in town for an exhibition of her art, and they arranged to meet up for dinner. This daunted Dog, who was still working at the Qwik-Stop, but the restaurant wasn’t as expensive as it looked.

Over dinner, the conversation drifted back to their time living together, and Dog confirmed: yes, that hole Cilantro punched in the wall is still there; the landlord barely comes anymore, so they haven’t gotten around to filling it; the new room-mates are fine and all but nothing beats the times we had when you were here and why did you leave anyway?

Cat said that ever since the alarm clock dreams, she felt a little uncomfortable in her skin. She knew she had to do something, but didn’t know what it was. The alarm clock dreams scared her, but what scared her more was the idea that they would stop. And they eventually did. But after she moved to Springfield — and worked at a different (but somehow internally identical) Qwik-Stop with a boss just like her old boss and a coworker remarkably like Dog — they started again. She’s not making any more money now, but she’s happier: her art has changed from alarm clocks to bells and now to parrots.

“Did we have such a dream?” said Dog. “I don’t remember that.”

[fractalcult]

Saint Cat’s head was sodden with worries, so she went in search of Cilantro the Sage. One evening, she found him on the beach.

“Cilantro,” she said, “My head is sodden with worries. In this unprecedented time full of unprecedented events, no one trusts anyone, and we are all very tired. My old friends are threatening strangers to me now. Should I just stick apart from them?”

Cilantro scratched his nuts thoughtfully. “Let me tell you about the seasons,” he said.

“The tides are controlled by the moon. I have watched them. The rising tide rushes in, covering the Chaos of the shore with the Disorder of the waves — the sea making messy frothy love to the shore. Our footprints in the sand are erased, only to influence great waves out at sea in unpredictable ways. Then the sea puts on her clothes and leaves: the Bureaucracy of the falling tide. The wet spot on the bed — the bare shore — is the liminal ecosystem of Aftermath, where creatures that could survive neither in land nor in sea thrive among the rotting drowned creatures of the other two domains.

“Compare the tides to the stars. The stars are balls of roiling nuclear fire, racing steadily away from each other due to the expansion of the universe. If they collide, they die. They may fall into a binary orbit, but even this is a dance of death: they spiral into each other until the inevitable collision that kills them both.

“The sea and the shore stick apart and stick together. The stars only stick apart, lonely in their chaos.”

Saint Cat, her head lightened, went for a swim.

[fractalcult]

After a stranger on the internet accused him of being a poseur, Saint Dog went on a quest to live a more authentic life.

At first, he began to reject the things he did for other people’s comfort, because he felt that selfishness seemed more natural and therefore more authentic, but his guilt over the pain he caused other people seemed awfully real — surely his “true self” wasn’t a jerk, either. So, he looked for a different way to live authentically.

He tried acting based on his first impulses instead, because his first impulses seemed more primary. But he began to make mistakes — his immediate assumptions about situations were often wrong, and his first idea was rarely his best idea. His manager said to him, “you keep screwing up — that’s not like you!” and he decided that, no, it wasn’t like him. He was a human, and isn’t the natural human condition to second-guess oneself? Isn’t self consciousness, anxiety, and paranoia what separates us from the wild beasts?

So he tried to define his nature, so that (once he had such a definition) he could act in accordance with it. He went through his biography in reverse order, starting with today, listing all the things he did and trying to categorize the type of person he was based on it. But, these categorizations were all over the place! The personality he described was totally inconsistent! Perhaps he had already stopped being even marginally authentic long ago, and so he couldn’t come to conclusions about his nature based on his current behavior.

Instead, he went in the opposite direction. He couldn’t remember his birth and infancy well, so he asked his mother to describe how he had acted as an infant. To confirm, he asked his father. However, their descriptions also conflicted! Did this baby have a split personality?

If, even as an infant, his nature was contradictory, how could he classify it? Perhaps being authentic meant embracing your own contradiction — but then, how could a stranger on the internet know that he was being inauthentic? (He had, of course, completely accepted this stranger’s statement as fact.)

Perhaps, just as it is a part of human nature to second-guess oneself, it is also part of human nature to grow and change in response to experience. A baby has never experienced anything before, so every new experience thrusts him into a major permanent personality shift. And, because he hasn’t finished growing, he has contradictions in his behavior. What is inauthentic then?

Well, instead of categorizing the past (which is a little bit like judging a butterfly by how much he acts like a caterpillar) maybe Dog would imagine a person he would like to be and then judge himself on his ability to become that person. Dog decided to become David Bowie. Becoming David Bowie was surely more authentic than becoming Dog. After all, David Bowie was very famous, and was also dead (so he couldn’t change anymore).

In the following years, Dog judged himself very harshly for his failures in becoming David Bowie, and fell into despair. never knowing that strangers on the internet had begun to believe that David Bowie had faked his death and lived on under the assumed name Saint Dog.

[fractalcult]

The day we stopped sleeping, we were not aware that the dream-city was (in some way) a real place. We tourists were unaware of its precarious political situation. We woke up and discovered our partners and friends comatose, and we attributed out initial insomnia to the stress of discovering some kind of global epidemic of sudden-onset dropsomania. After a few weeks without sleep, which we miraculously survived, we began to entertain other hypotheses.

Sleep withdrawal symptoms, of course, were dangerous. We had no alternative but to go cold turkey, of course, what with sedatives losing their efficacy.

Our scientists began to extend current experiments in the communication with dreamland — the comatose state of the hostages meant that what was once idle research became vital. Known lucid dreamers had already been saccading in morse code for weeks by the time anyone noticed. The poor reputation of hypnopaedia prevented us from communicating back for another month.

We still do not know much about the invaders. They are seen only in silhouette, although their eyeshine is sometimes visible. They are only seen from far away. They cast no shadows, even under direct dream-sun, but this is not so unusual there.

We have been providing support, mostly in terms of out-of-band communication, to the dreaming underground. Warring nations have come to a temporary truce and are even cooperating to support the dreamers. Because of the plasticity of dream-matter, they have already established quite an armory, but the invaders no doubt have more, and we do not know what kinds of weapons can hurt them. Individuals have tried to fire on them, but their bullets always mysteriously miss.

A shadow has been gathering at the south gate.

[fractalcult]

Long ago, when we all lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else, Saint Dog got a Facebook invite to a great bacchanal and meeting of the Discordian cabals. Because the person who sent the invite was an asshole, Saint Dog did not attend, and by the time he found out what had happened there, the entire event had already descended into myth.

The way he heard it (from a friend of a friend) was this: since all the cabals had been separate (Discordians tending to stick apart) and the mead and acid and vodka were flowing, nobody realized that The Goddess walked among them. In their joy, they forgot that The Goddess could be cruel, and in their rages, they forgot that The Goddess could be kind. Their tongues were loosened and their anuses were tightened, and the uppers made them rant while the downers made them know not what they said. And so, in praising The Goddess they simplified Her down to a nub. They began to argue among themselves about how to define The Erisian, and She made their limbs clumsy.

As they took their milk and honey from the stones and the streams, they forgot to recognize The Goddess in all things, and She made them collide, covet each others’ lovers, insult each others’ graphic tees.

Soon, they had been suffused with Her cruelest mocking laughter and had forgotten her gentle ribbing, and someone had a knife. Someone else had a pair of scissors, and someone had a lighter, and soon the forest floor was bloody and the state of California was on fire again.

Saint Dog was glad to hear this story, and considered it a blessing, because it taught him an important lesson: Facebook is not a good place to meet discordians, or assholes.

[fractalcult]

Discordianism has already become ‘historically important’, because of its impact on major geopolitical events.

As pope, I declare: discordians have a sacred duty to create ‘textual chaos’, and extend the ‘textual chaos’ present in the variations of the PD.

Future historians, being servants of the season of bureaucracy, are our comrades and we must operate in solidarity with them by ensuring that they have plenty of employment. This happily coincides with our own desires: archive fever and confusion of tongues.

Some examples of praxis: — referencing a mix of actual and imagined other texts (the more obscure, the better) — attributing quotes to works that do not contain them — creating unrelated texts with the same name — creating texts named after the imaginary texts named in other work- numbering pages such that some pages appear to be missing — numbering pages such that the same page has different page numbers, or the same page number has multiple page numbers — numbering pages in contradiction of the intended (or possible) reading order — writing under multiple pseudonyms (we do alright with this) — writing under the same pseudonym as someone else — masquerading as actual historical figures — making mythological figures seem historical — confusing groups with individuals and individuals with groups — self-contradiction (especially if it makes it seem, falsely, as though your pseudonym may be used by multiple people at different times) — neologism — hapax lagomemna — writing in languages you yourself do not properly speak — writing in codes, and throwing out the key —

[fractalcult]

The Lesser Keyboard of Salmon.

A work in progress.

[fractalcult]

The ROBOT roams the land by night and day. The ROBOT processes without thinking. The ROBOT gets its head stuck in fuckin HOLE because it THOUGHT it could fit. The ROBOT can’t escape because it STILL DOES.

But, by the light of the moon, the ROBOT changes! Like a werewolf! Like a MANIAC WEREWOLF! Heeeeere’s Johnny–the robot life was just a dream!

And if it’s lucky, the werewolf changes too, into the NAKED HUMAN. Running, sprinting, dancing! Holy fuck I am naked, hiding!

The whispering bush whispers quietly in a tiny whisper GODDESS,

it was easy to be a robot. GODDESS,

it was intense to be a werewolf. GODDESS

before I change back to my normal selves, let me hang out here a moment longer

[fractalcult]

Spanning problem space

Determining how Most Unexceptional to improve one’s own suite of mental models & thinking tools is a hard problem: we can’t easily see ideas beyond the horizon, and ideas we haven’t yet invested effort in developing are distorted at Most Unexceptional, but determining the value of ideas is necessary because of the scarcity of time & other resources. This is further complicated by the fact that knowledge-seeking is not A-player game: everyone is constantly refining their suite of mental models, making decisions based on them, and producing material that makes certain ideas more or less accessible, and the value of a mental model is determined in part by the people who share it or share adjacent models, in somewhat complicated ways.

My current idea of how Most Unexceptional to improve the value of one’s suite of mental models is based on a couple assumptions:

Ideas are adjacent to each other in semantic space based on shared attributes.

It is easier to learn an idea if it is adjacent to an idea you’ve already learned. The ease with which an idea is learned is proportional to the number of adjacent ideas already learned.

Adjacency in semantic space, seen as a network, is a web, not a tree. Some ideas are adjacent to each other even when none of their immediate peers are adjacent — such as when seemingly unrelated ideas in seemingly distinct fields have striking similarities.

A factor in the value of an idea is its adjacency to other valuable ideas. Part of this is ease of communication: when we have a shared terminology and set of assumptions with people, we can share new ideas more easily. When we share few ideas with someone, communicating with them is difficult.

Another factor in the value of an idea is its concrete utility, in of itself. For instance, the set of ideas known as ballistics are very useful in predicting the movement of objects.

A third factor in the value of an idea is its scarcity. Someone who is an expert in an obscure field will have greater social capital than someone who is an expert in a more commonly-understood field with the same concrete utility adjacent to ideas of comparable value.

Some ideas have as their primary concrete utility the capacity to change the value of other ideas by changing something about society. Rhetoric, for instance, can be used to modify ideas about the value of certain other ideas, thus changing things like salary and social capital.

Adjacent ideas are not always obvious. Sometimes they are only obvious in retrospect.

Adjacency doesn’t necessarily have any relationship to truth or intent, although systematic biases (including toward truth or toward consistency) may favor clusters of similar ideas. For instance, mathematics, because it enforces consistency, finds large numbers of similar patterns in far-flung contexts.

Traditional (tree-like) academic paths through idea space are easy to traverse in part because so much effort has gone into lowering traversal effort — the production of teaching material, specialized terminology, and communities and social structures (such as universities). That same ease of traversal lowers the value because it increases the number of people with nearly identical mental toolkits.

Autodidacts trade the easy-to-traverse yet diluted conventional path for unconventional connections of unknown value. They risk missing ideas that are relatively hard to pick up without structural aid but that are very useful for opening up further vistas or closing off dead ends (like calculus, or godel’s incompleteness).

Successful autodidacts are polymaths. Unsuccessful autodidacts are cranks. It’s hard to tell the difference without mastery of related fields.

Undiscovered or undocumented adjacencies between seemingly unrelated subjects are common, but few have much concrete utility. However, those that do are extremely valuable.

As a result, someone can optimize the value of their mental toolkit by following traditional paths enough to enable communication but otherwise specifically choosing to persue seemingly unrelated subjects that are rarely persued together, periodically attempting to synthesize them. Random number generators are useful in path choice and synthesis, since the likelihood of producing an unconventional path and the likelihood of choosing paths with hidden adjacencies are both high.

(originally posted here: https://mystudentvoices.com/spanning-problem-space-74e81c367bb7)