Sentimental Value

that story where you challenge the fairy queen to a match of wit and skill to win back your loved one. and it goes … fine, you think? probably.

adapted from this very short Elsewhere University piece, changed slightly to be a little more self-contained.

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

An exercise. These two poems have the same form, were written at the same time on the same subject, and convey the same message. Why does one of them work better than the other? That’s what we’re looking at when we talk about why the curtains are blue:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:— "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,— Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder — and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Harry Fonseca 1979, “Coyote, When Coyote Leaves the Res”

Acrylic on canvas

Harry Fonseca began his art career using imagery from his Native American Maidu heritage in his art. His Coyote Series of paintings started in 1979. These works use the coyote as the trickster of Maidu ancestral stories, depicted in nontraditional clothing and settings. In this painting Coyote is dressed in black leather and other aspects of queer-dress experienced by the artist in San Francisco, expressing Fonseca's personal narrative as a gay Native American living off-reservation.

This isn’t a dig at any creators or educators who use Robin Hood to talk about history or connect to the past, but it bugs me when films or TV use Robin in a bland or uninteresting way when he has such potential!

Robin with a posh accent, or Robin as dispossessed nobility, or Robin as a supporter of a good king against a comically moustache-twirling villain all lack the edge of a folk hero from ballads sung by commoners about a man who stood up to the corrupt church and the law to fight for the poor. And that feels like a Robin that would have some things to say about now.

When sadists do pain play they are having to grapple with the fact that they get pleasure out of causing pain to someone who has put their trust in them. This can be devastating if they feel as though they have in any way compromised that trust. Especially since even people who know about aftercare and try to do it, often overlook the aftercare that sadists, or even dominants as a whole, need. I imagine this happens a lot with pain play scenes, as so much emphasis is placed on taking care of the masochist. Obviously, that's important, but it should not be one or the other. The point I'm trying to get at is this:

Masochists/subs, please remember to give your sadists/doms aftercare. The biological and psychological functions that cause subspace and subdrop can have the same effect on doms. Doms are just as capable of experiencing that rush of adrenaline and endorphins, and just as capable of crashing, once the scene is done. Tell your sadist that you still trust them and feel safe with them. They need to hear it.

The god Quetzalcoatl took human form to wander the world, and upon finding himself tired and hungry, met a rabbit who kindly offered to feed him with its own life and body, so Quetzalcoatl repaid this kindness by immortalizing its image on the moon.

There should still be more benches, but this is also the busiest transit station of any kind in the hemisphere, so making it possible for a staggering number of people to move through it very quickly by keeping impediments low is actually a high priority for this specific part of the station. There’s another part of the station where the design creates a dangerous crowd crush very easily and it’s terrifying and I go out of my way to avoid it. So it is both super hostile architecture and also somewhere where that seemingly vast empty space becomes nearly unnavigable with like 200k people rushing through it during rush hour and at those times benches actually would limit traffic flow meaningfully. The rest of the day, it looks ridiculous and feels punishing.

someone: these aren't real books this is not real literature this is horrendous brain rot and the downfall of society

His loyal Hound, most trusted Blade and dearest Love.

His hound would bury his teeth in the neck of any who would oppose his King.

-- Wikipedia

Armand dressing Lestat:

Lestat dressing himself:

It turns out you can only train a neural net to do one thing, and if you try to train them to do a second thing, they forget the first one. Which means that LLMs, specifically, are very, very expensive toys, because what they’re trained to do is produce coherent text as part of a dialogue with a human user. They’re not trained to produce facts or anything else except human-readable text that generally accounts for the context of the prompts that preceded it, and because they’re able to track so many variables, they’re usually pretty good at staying on topic (this is part of why they tend to break down so stupendously on edge cases: the places they fail are usually the ones where they don’t have enough data to produce high-confidence predictions.) The art models work the same way: the reason humans so often have weird numbers of fingers and all the details are in soft-focus is that the model is averaging information from its training model, all of which has slightly different poses, and using that to predict the most likely pixel colors based on the nearby pixels it’s already generated. So both sets of major user-facing models right now are trained to do something that does not involve meaning, only the appearance of coherence, and you can’t re-train them to produce meaning without having them forget to be coherent.

The interesting thing is that we got here because we don’t actually understand intelligence or sapience very well at all. We don’t know anything about how it develops or why it works. And LLMs, in particular, were very much an experiment testing a thesis about the nature of these, that being fed information and being given the ability to speak coherently on topic was the same as understanding the information and so would naturally lead to a general intelligence that could function like a human mind and process multiple types of information multiple ways. And instead we got ChatGPT, which just proves that Derrida was right and language doesn’t inherently contain information, something that is difficult to grasp as a human because for us, language is inherently tied to its information content. And that’s why it’s so hard to believe that an LLM doesn’t think: for us, for humans, the distinction between the symbol and the actual, the signifier and the signified, is so small that we can’t really understand that it exists, if something is speaking sense it must understand what it’s saying. And instead an LLM is purely operating on the symbols/signifiers, it’s sense totally divorced from meaning, and we’re simply not equipped to cope with that.