unbibium

here's a memory that's slightly too old for Facebook to have reminded me of it, so I'm posting about it here instead, so zuck can't have it.

June 6, 2006... to celebrate the date's similarity to the so-called Number of the Beast, an atheist group of some kind had a gathering in Tempe. I don't remember how I learned about it; was I on meetup.com that early? I remember bicycling there. It was in a house in Tempe, one probably close to my current house now. I remember being at a big table dining with people. I remember seeing a black woman there, and as a grown-ass 29-year-old man, that surprised me for likely nonsensical reasons.

I made two livejournal posts about it, but no real details.

If you act quickly, you can go to ABC 15's website and see pictures of the giant wall of dust that overtook my city today.

I got to see it from a bus stop. Woot.

I remember seeing a photo of the haboob that enveloped Tempe, as if it were the first such photo I'd ever seen. It can't have been my first dust storm; I probably just endured them without seeing photos of them later, until this one. Naturally, I humble bragged about having been in the thick of it with no car to protect me. "Look at what a rugged individual I'm being, surely the Free Market will observe my grit and bless me with money or status," I must have told myself as I loaded my bike onto the front of a taxpayer-funded bus.

and I tuned into ABC 15,

I attended a 666 party held by the ASU freethought society. And I found out that a news crew had been there.

So I watched Fox 10 at 10:00, and was reminded why I get all my news from Comedy Central.

I was talking about the Daily Show at the time, although I was also still a completely uncritical fan of South Park, which also aired on Comedy Central, not realizing how much conservative propaganda I was absorbing through it.

it's 20 years later and the Christian nationalists have taken over, and all the atheist heroes I followed in 2006 seem to have been lured to their side of the culture war: Richard Dawkins by transphobia, Sam Harris by Islamophobia, etc. And even in 2006, Penn & Teller's Bullshit was yet another conservative propaganda firehose that I was unwittingly bathing in.

I don't think I can ride my bike that far anymore.

read a few Calvin and Hobbes comics recently, and I no longer sympathize with Calvin as I once might have. He seems utterly malicious to me. And I chalk that up to me being in middle age, childhood is an old foreign land I barely remember.

Why, then, do I still sympathize with Bart Simpson? He's twice as dangerous by any metric, but I still feel bad for him when he gets in trouble, which is all the time.

Maybe that's it. I don't remember seeing Calvin in detention very often. Meanwhile entire episodes are about Bart getting shipped off to France, to military school, to juvenile hall, etc. Getting caught is as much a part of his identity as causing trouble.

and, that fear of getting in trouble, that's followed me into adulthood, that's evergreen.

How many things can you name that society grants a higher priority than human well-being? Money of course. Property in general. Borders are a big one lately. In this country, cars get more space than people, and are often used as a proxy for the status of their driver. Guns have been more important than the lives of children for my entire adult life. Data is massively important now, almost as important as money.

Corporations are already what we fear AI might become: autonomous machines that see humans as either fuel or the enemy or nothing. And speaking of AI and fuel, a lot of people have noticed humans now compete against AI for not just electricity, but clean water. But fewer have caught on that, ever since we started growing corn for ethanol production, we have long been competing against machines for food.

And, lest we forget, religions that assure us that we're all wicked, not because of the ways we abuse our dominion over nature, but because of the ways we resist an alleged God's dominion over us. Indeed, the nation-state itself assures us that this thing called "America", in order to be made "great", must disregard, if not purposely withhold, the needs of more and more of the people standing on its land, who have not sufficiently proven their dedication to these things that America values more than people?

Society hates humans. Is it any wonder we all feel this way?

Like any low-fidelity communication channel, languages benefit from error-correcting features. I think the feelings you're asking about are part of the selection pressure that explains why every language is full of weird little rules with weird little exceptions that are so easy to mess up. Think not about the mistakes, but what you feel when you hear someone say a sentence and you understand every word of it. Where does that confidence come from? Imagine someone describing the way to someone's house, aloud. And at the end, nobody's wondering "wait, did he mean turn AT the light or AFTER the light?" That's a tall order, even among native speakers. It's a little harder to imagine among speakers of different languages, but I've had ESL coworkers that I struggled to communicate with at first, but eventually we can discuss complicated technical topics with relative ease, and I can't really tell if it's because their English has massively improved, or if I've just learned to tune into the specific way they speak it.

I used to ponder the philosophical nature of how my language mistakes "feel" to native speakers of other languages, like when you wonder what your dog or cat smells on you, or whether everyone who sees blue sees the same blue. These days I just think of them as error-correcting protocols, like the Luhn checks on credit cards, or the checksums on TCP packets, and that makes it a little easier. There's got to be less geeky examples in the real world. But the reasoning is simple: You're sending information, but you include a little extra information, that means almost nothing on its own but increases the confidence that the rest of the information is OK.

The last digit of modern credit cards is based on all the previous digits, run through the Luhn algorithm. It's very simple, you can do it by hand, and any home computer can do it. So when you typed a credit card number into a website, it can tell if you made a typo before you even submit the form. Usually, your computer runs the Luhn algorithm on all but the last digit, and then compares its answer to the last digit. If they don't match, then at least one digit is wrong, but you don't know which, so you have to ask again.

Taking a common misgendering error in first-year Spanish: "Mano" is feminine in Spanish so "the hands" is "las manos". But it looks like a masculine noun, so someone might say "los manos" by mistake. If someone wants to say "I washed my hands" and says "Me lavé los manos" instead of "Me lavé las manos", then I can't speak for a listener's emotional response, but they'll probably notice the mistake, but they'll understand it perfectly. Later, that same speaker might refer to their hands by direct object pronoun, which in Spanish is the same as the definite article, and goes right before the predicate. So they'd say "Me los lavé" instead of "Me las lavé" for "I washed them." That's a grammatically correct sentence but strongly implies they're not talking about hands. Maybe they're talking about their fingers ("los dedos"). But a listener might remember the gaffe from earlier, and would be justified in asking the speaker what they washed. That's a data integrity problem. The speaker might resent having to repeat himself, until another guy comes in and says "¡lavé mis manos!" That sentence sure does sidestep the grammatical gender, maybe it's in some actual dialects in the US, but in the Mexican dialect of Spanish that my high school textbook was based, I can only assume that people would uniformly respond to a sentence like that by taking out a red pen and writing "-5" on you.

And I also realized that I've done this kind of thing in my native language, with other native speakers. Rooms and phone connections are noisy. People mumble. Regional accents exist. So when I suspect I'm not getting the message, I ask for clarification. And over time, I increasingly extend this courtesy to people who speak English as a second language whether it's rude or not. Nodding non-commitally and walking away is something you do to people you can ignore.

English-speakers, native and otherwise, will straight up leave words like "not" or "don't" out of sentences so often that I've developed a sixth sense for when it's happening. It's very visceral and I can't really describe the feeling, but I instinctively repeat their sentence back to them while it's still fresh in sense memory, and suddenly they'll interrupt "DIDN'T kill his wife" and we'll nod and laugh about how we almost slandered an innocent man but at least as proper white-collar Anglophones we use double-negatives. We DON'T use double-negatives. I think the reason every other language with double-negatives has kept them is because it corrects errors like that with redundancy.

There are a lot of people who have studied both linguistics and computer science more than me, and some cursory Googling suggests that "grammatical error correction" is a thing. And it makes a lot more sense than whenever I'm listening to a John McWhorter lecture or book, and once in a blue moon he says this about a language: "and this language requires you to include this word that doesn't mean anything, but if you leave it out, then they'll think you're a bit screwy." and he usually describes it as a social penalty, that a foreigner will lose points for making such a gaffe. Maybe it's because the source material doesn't include a description of the error-correcting that might ensue if someone gets the rule wrong, like "it raises doubt that you're talking about the same topic" or "it implies that you don't know what the word after it means" or even "it breaks the cadence of the sentence, so the listener lost their place and got a bit disoriented".

I saw Jurassic Park in theaters when I was a kid, and haven't read the book yet.

The movie came out in 1993, a great year for movies, and I wasn't looking for meaning in an action film. I was a product of the American public school system and corporate media, and all my rebellious thoughts were safely recuperated into the manufactured corporate counterculture that neoliberalism provided me. And I was already on the Internet, a text-based shell account, and had a front-row seat to the first tech hype cycle. I was the perfect stooge, and would remain so for a very long time.

So when I saw the film, I took all the dialogue at face value: the billionaire acted like a nice grandpa so I believed in the purity of his motives. He said he spared no expense so I believed that too. The lawyer guy was the only one talking about profit, clearly he was the bad guy, so I cheered when he got ate, and when the disloyal employee Nedry got ate too. I walked out of there thinking if Nedry hadn't betrayed everyone, the systems would have been online and the security protocols would have worked and everything would have been, if not fine, then at least a much-needed humbling.

And I remained a stooge through many iterations of the tech hype cycle. Sure, I hated Bill Gates and the way he ran Microsoft, but I wasn't opposed to the concept of billionaires getting rich in tech, especially since young me was one of the smart tech-savvy ones who might ride their coattails to riches one day, or even start my own company in a garage one day! And I certainly didn't see the danger of an unchecked ego with unlimited resources, even as I watched as this kind grandpa built a big billion-dollar mistake and ignored every consequence until an hour into the film. Meanwhile, I was ignoring the consequences of a lot of things billionaires were doing to our society, that only later became impossible to ignore.

it takes more than a T-rex to snap someone out of the spell we were under...

I keep getting reminded of stories from 30 years ago about wacky Japanese things like capsule hotels and tiny homes and restaurants that were basically fancy vending machines, body pillows and dating sims. The stories were framed as wacky and exotic, when we should have recognized them as coping mechanisms for a population that was close to its breaking point on some crucial need that society was no longer allowing people to provide each other. Leaders in the US should have arisen and hired Japanese expats to find ways to prevent the same things from becoming marketable here.

But it's too late and now dating sims are an actual game genre, they're all over Steam. But like all art born of pain and angst, there is at least beauty in it.

Recently, a game called "Date Everything" came out, in English, where basically every object in your house becomes a dateable character, including the doors, walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, appliances, etc. I haven't bought it, but I've watched Pumpkin Potion play it on Twitch, and it's a hecking masterpiece.

In popular science, the "Dunbar number" is the number of social peers a given animal's brain can conceptualize long-term. and the Dunbar number for humans is 150. and the number of characters in this game is 102. so to 100% this game, it has to become 2/3 of your entire social life.

when i got home Friday, I thought i'd sleep for 100 years but instead i stayed up until 2am watching Severance.

funny how up to now I'd been so attention-deficited that I'd fall asleep during movies. yet once in a few months I can get glued to a TV show for hours on end. how does that work?

here's all my cliff notes ( Read more... )

Last night I attended a showing advertised as Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr" scored by rock music... or something. I didn't really pay attention to the description, if I'd known they were just going to play some album over the silent films then I would have not bothered

They showed two Buster Keaton films, "Balloonatics" with brain-melting dubstep played over it, and "Sherlock Jr" with an REM album played over it. Some song changes seemed to coincide with scene changes but by and large it did not resemble a movie score in any way.

In between the two films was a video clip where the "producer" of the whole thing gave a quick self-congratulatory monologue about how his Austin-based company is keeping these films alive...

The thing about silent films is that they depended on the theater to provide sound content, and I thought this meant a musical score. and indeed when I saw "Nosferatu" a few years ago, there was a band performing a score designed directly for the movie, complete with an eerie drone that played when the vampire was on screen. But I also saw "Hunchback of Notre Dame" in which it felt like they were just improvising, and when the on-screen gigantic bell rang nothing special happened.

one of these days I'd like to see a film like this played with its original score. I've heard they do this at the Orpheum Theater sometimes.

one of these days I'd like to see a Fotoplayer in person.

Today, there are powerful AI models that you can download and run on a home computer. Some people think that sufficiently powerful AI models are "sentient" or have wills of their own and we'll have to give them rights... so, what does that imply?

25 years ago, when the Sims came out, I read about people who'd torture their Sims by walling them in or removing the exit ladder from a pool or similar. That makes me wonder if, today, there are sadistic teenagers out there downloading image recognition models and feeding it gross-out images, thinking they're performing torture on a helpless digital animal. I wonder if they'll feel guilty about it later, or whether it'll inspire them to go out and torture non-digital entities.

This reminds me of the people who learn to lucid dream, but call it "reality shifting" as if they're actually traveling to parallel universes. I read a post from someone who committed an assault in their dream, and instead of interpreting it as a nightmare that they had to shake off, they thought it was an actual crime they committed against a real person somewhere in the multiverse, for which they had to atone.

We do have to be careful about how our beliefs shape our behavior, because the world gets more challenging every day.

so, last night's dream felt really big. rather than try to remember and connect all the details, I'll just say that I was going to a local theater to watch a midnight movie, it was one of those meandering slice-of-life comedies with lots of characters, and also apparently I got the idea that I had a small role in it that I don't remember playing, and never ended up seeing in the show.

there were a lot of little fragments of my 2000s life.