one of the more punishing downsides of binge-skimming fanfiction is that the scenes start to blend together a day or two later. "is this scene about Deadpool curling and uncurling Peter's fingers from this fanfiction or that fanfiction?" "did this Peter get blown up in a warehouse?" it sounds silly but it happens often enough that i want to note it lmfao

just wanted to plug in real fast that ive just been here for the lulz and lending out brain cells in need.

if you want to see me normalfy in real time come check me out at @postrox!

--mod mari

[from stream] I suppose it should be no sorrow that my declining romantic interest is related to his propensity to clarify his epistemic voids.

Christ on a stick, I'm really laying it on thick here. Fine! I feel sad reading some of webdev guy's opinions. It does interrupt my work and design ideas. But I'm not going to just slam the door in his face. It's whatever! Everyone's got an opinion!

thinking about how i as a writer might de-escalate Ultimate Dirk's warpath within the constraints of post-canon themes and events and i can't really see anything else other than Roxy weakening Dirk's ties to his alternate selves (particularly, Doc Scratch and LE) and caring for Dirk himself

the Dirk and John pairing have potentially profound symbology but they're still separated by the black hole and until something happens to it they're not coming into contact; true realization of Dirk/John may require a different or competing narrative system to post-canon

protip: if you have pagination enabled on your Tumblr dash (which genuinely does help curb the infinite scroll temptation), it also applies to your private Likes page. the number in the URL is a Unix timestamp, and you can really granularly drill down into specific dates -- good if you want to clean out your likes, add to sideblogs, refresh old likes, etc.

Tumblr humor is so sticky im tempted to just poast here and give up Twitter

I was lava, first

I was lava, first, and I (h)ate(d) the cities. They threw oceans on me. So much water. So much sodium. Now each footstep feels like pinpricks on my miles of basalt

How did Niklas Luhmann actually communicate and send queries to his Zettelkasten?

According to this source, Luhmann's most practical method of communicating with his slipbox involves an interesting constraint through the index. For every question or query he had, he would compress it into a single keyword. Then, he would search through his alphabetized index for that keyword, and dive into the network of notes with that higher-bandwidth question in mind.

This kind of mechanical serendipity is presumably what Eva Thomas means by "finding something you were not looking for, but something you can still use". Given that the Zettelkasten is a network of different perspectives across time and fields of study, it makes sense that any kind of semi-contextual exploration would irrigate that said context. Through a neurodivergent lens, using the Zettelkasten is akin to "constructive ADHD":

But over the years I’ve learned to see that it [ADHD] takes me to interesting places. Thing is to non-judgementally go along for the ride, and report your findings.

Therefore, as intelligences, Luhmann and the slipbox could approximate great exchanges with a sufficiently advanced bilateral midpoint (the index) even if the two did not necessarily unite at a shared context. I suspect that PKM culture will invent similar midpoints for the purpose of communication.

The index itself is not magical. However, it is very useful and highly extensible on multiple axis. The quality of the index also goes up if it is hand-curated by the individual, whose salience filter is far more selective than any (digital) full-text searching or filtering features. Perhaps such constraints like these--compressing ideas so tightly to fit into a temporary conversing space--is at the heart of dynamic communication and processing.

Conversely, a lack of a higher-order or secondary index may be detrimental to a body of notes. Even with perfect organic or digital recall, the user must start at "square one" and constantly have to rederive the terrain of their notes. This may be perfectly fine if the user has a sufficiently advanced mental context to navigate their knowledge, but having such mental strength diminishes the value of taking prolific notes in the first place anyway.

In general, we should be skeptical of note-taking apps, methods, or organizational systems that do not acknowledge indexing. Indexing is the stage for navigation, because the resulting index is the map.

thinking about the name of my cleaned out seaweed box for my notes — nori — and coming to the chilling realization i would still have cared about "PKM" if i treated my own notes as if they were my own friend, if i humanized them. your notes are not your knowledge, i say, without knowing they are still offspring

current brain itch: post-Portal 2 GLaDOS character study -- "What is it like to be an unaligned artificial intelligence?" -- GLaDOS simulates a thousand thousand crows in milliseconds but will embody a single one

dumping this out because it's eating me up from the inside and i can't post it to Twitter or Stream or even the children of night discord channel and im kind of okay with this being ephemeral ... i was NOT expecting the utter loneliness i personally felt whilst writing-generating Ladon and Orange with code-davinci-002. like i am literally writing gay romancce when i dont have many IRL friends (which is a nice way of saying 0) and it's like, what's really stopping me from having this for myself? Why should I spend hours and hours of my life cultivating their story when I should be living my own? on the other hand i couldnt have formalized my life as a story without reading thousands of words of generated dialogue and screenplay action and revising it. i keep thinking of that friendship recession video paper article whatever but i look at people around campus and well over three quarters of them are talking to someone else and it's so so so idk. from a webnecdote: "On the way back the dam just... broke. She completely lost it emotionally. All those lonely years came welling up. Constantly surrounded by these wild romance anime she watches and manga she reads." she just like me fr

:-)

The original "Open sight" in-universe essay, written by Lily of Leucoryx's wing of Oryx's Sanctuary: https://postrox.tumblr.com/post/700468794735427584/building-the-doomsday-clock-a-proposed

Thoughts on the Antinet's manual search

Nicolas Gatien: @ArchLeucoryx Any thoughts? Based on your twitter posts, I believe you are working with Logseq and Obsidian?

First--thank you for taking the time to write the thread. Scott discussed this in one of his videos but finding specific info is a bit harder ;) I think plenty of people are worried about "blinding" themselves to their notes without full-text search.

I use Logseq and Obsidian casually, among other applications like Dendron on VSCode, FSNotes, and even Twitter. Currently, I'm on a "null theory" of PKM, and I'm investigating the ways we represent our knowledge--literature, journaling, commonplacing, note-taking, oratory, communication, etc. I don't think there are any rules to knowledge! All representations are mutable and interchangeable; your notes are not your knowledge; the map is not the territory. But that doesn't mean we can't be open to better maps that give us new perspectives on the old.

(Note: I don't have an Antinet myself, but I think I have a good picture of it. I tried making an alt-Zettelkasten in TiddlyWiki that used sequences of sequences rather than trees of trees, and timestamping instead of alphanumeric IDs.)

The lack of direct search is definitely not a bug. The Antinet still uses a hand-curated index, so you're not lost every time you open your drawer. The manual search is really just something you do, right? It's practical usage. At the very least, the process of re-reading is an aid to memory; recall in of itself makes memories stronger.

I'm reminded of this other application, ThreadHelper...it was a sidebar extension to Twitter designed to be a serendipity engine. Every time you wrote in your compose box, the sidebar would bring up related tweets from your account and your bookmarks (you had to import your Twitter data locally, I think). And one of the developers, exGenesis, explains that "[your] body of work should be a living system but water is drying up nearly as soon as it's posted". I can't help but think that the process of re-reading your notes is like "watering" them again, digital or no. You're coming back to your past self and following up with their thinking. This way, your thinking literally compounds over time.

Meanwhile, the Zettelkasten falters a bit at explicit recall, at least later on. An Antinet small enough that you can keep it's contents in your head and reliably put in and take out the exact card is an archive. And explicit recall does make sense! Sometimes you need the full fidelity of either your own or someone else's writing. But it's kind of interesting that we haven't really investigated the shift from explicit recall to associative recall in the slipbox, as the slipbox grows.

Further, the key to associativity seems to be surprise and discovery. Eva Thomas writes in her article that Luhmann described the "surprises we encounter while interacting with the slip-box [...] as a process of finding something you were not looking for, but something that you can still use". (Unfortunately I don't know what quote that is in his actual paper, Communication with Slipboxes.) Is a mature Antinet a discovery engine just by reading through the notes and walking down the associative trails to find what you need? That seems too good to be true. But it also makes a lot of sense. What happens when the user of the Zettelkasten begins to forget what they have written? Well, the more the user forgets, the more surprised they are when re-reading their writing. Forgetting is integral to serendipity; a creative partner. At this stage, you put a note in there to "lose control of it, not to gain control over it".

To be surprised, we must be unaware.

To be surprised of known information, we must make it unknown. Defamiliarize; misplace; forget. It is only when we know we have lost something that we wish to get it back, to reclaim it more tightly.

tamagotchi update

Per the Tumblr poll and also my own whims I ordered the Tamagotchi Gen 2 re-release yesterday and it arrived today. Some impressions...

It's smaller and more adorable than I thought. I mean I knew the dimensions but it's another thing actually holding it. The 3 buttons are comically small. Not sure how they'll hold up over time but I'm crossing my fingers. The comic print isn't super crisp and it has a few very fine artifacts. But given the end buyer cost ($20), I probably can't penny-pinch Bandai.

Two things that caught me off-guard:

First -- the volume. Wow! This thing can pipe up. I can see how some teachers in the 1990s might've gotten a bit prickly and jailing the critters in a drawer.

Second -- the initial stage is quite demanding. I don't remember the particulars but it felt like it was every 5 minutes or so. If you can get through the 65 minute Baby stage I'm sure you can knock out the later stages. This new Toddler(?) stage is much more hands off.

Right now it is sleeping. I'd better head off too. :-)

need a brain jolt to actually start writing longerform on this blog or something like this Is Unfortunately Not The Vibe