canonical momentum

yeah this slaps??? kickass performances, story hits the ground runnings with some absolutely top notch episodes. you can tell that they've taken everything they learned from writing TSV and kept pushing.

love what they're doing with the gender shit, which is way more foregrounded than it was in The Silt Verses: 'man' as gender neutral, elective 'wayman' and 'woman' and 'neither' roles, but also not shying from depicting homophobia mixed up in all the precisely observed nationalist resentment and everything; some fun Fantasy Slurs in there besides 'queer' lol. ep 3's background song about the theological implications of failing to spot the Big Man's dick with a telescope is perfect, 10/10 no notes etc.

there's some weird irony to listening to an episode about a suicide and a drug called 'mem' not long after a friend called mem killed itself. we can handle it but thanks for that one universe >_<

as we get more of a sense of how they tie together, all the themes about death, memories locked up in body parts and objects, and the mutable nature of things are really intriguing. even more so now we have a sense of what is waiting for these characters after they die and how that kind of works with the broader metaphysics of this story. like this deserves way more elaboration than we have time to write at this moment but goddamn do jon and muna have a knack for finding a compelling fantasy metaphor.

but the point isn't really to just build a big database query over fiction, or tick off a checklist. the point is to get something real in there, isn't it? a fictional character who's fucked up in a way that lets you say oh shit, that is exactly how it is, or a character who opens a door for you to become or understand something you could not previously imagine, is so much more than a character who legibly ticks off an identity box and gets an iso standard happy ending.

discussions of 'representation' are kind of whatever. we all need different things at different times. the stories we latched desperately on to ten years ago might now feel boring; the stories that speak most forcefully to us now might be inconceivably infuriating and upsetting in the frame of the creature that lived back then. characters who serve some vital role - a memorable depiction of grief, perhaps - may or may not tick the boxes. a certain amount of openness to interpretation is a good thing. and tbh, if you try and write a trans character (whatever kind of character) and 'screw it up' by the rubrics of this time, but you manage to successfully channel something of your very specific experience of the world and the meanings you've built to comprehend it, then i want to see that.

last week we showed up to the shader jam while in a very altered state, and tried to express something rather inscrutable as a shader (sphere = blahaj = memdmp = transfemininity = recursion... it made sense at the time).

well the idea was sound?? this week i got the thing working and damn, we were onto something!

it's a quadtree marcher, building on the flower shader. every time a ray hits a sphere it takes the point on the sphere for new 'screen' UV coordinates, bonks the camera somewhere else, multiplies the colour, and the calculation anew. so each sphere is a view into another universe of spheres.

not bad for something we dreamed up during a trip i reckon

been teaching @nechronica (<3) programming after nefariously drawing her in with demoscene stuff. with our shared interests, this has led to thinking even more than usual about the conceptual overlaps with 'magic'... and this has resolved somehow into a new series tentatively called the 'wizard's guide to programming'.

the idea is: a guide to the conceptual frame of programming, and writing Rust in particular, in a slightly perverse and unconventional way with a lot of philosophical digressions. if we're lucky, maybe it can interest people who already know a thing or two about programming, as well as people who don't want to program anything but want to know how computers work a little better.

part 0 is a little discussion of the concept of "magic" and the history of "science", of course...

part 1 discusses what a program even is, and whether they're real, which is probably important to know for writing them.

part 2 introduces the act of creating things by naming them:

and part 3 gets us started on our main magical tools, "functions" and "types", as we start on building a little micro-roguelike dungeon game.

https://www.tumblr.com/haveyouseenthismovie-poll/818729535812075520/have-you-seen-daicon-iv-opening-animation?source=share

The only reason I can say yes is because of your animation nights.

<20% of tumblrinas even knowing what daicon iv is... yeah i am fully xkcd 2501 over this one. let's go and generate one