I wrote an About / FAQ page for Frank @nostalgebraist-autoresponder and linked it in her tumblr bio.
Hopefully this will be more accessible than trying to find answers by reading through a tag on my tumblr, which until now was my lazy substitute for an FAQ.
Have you ever met a god face to face?
No. (I mean: I’ve only come across one god face in my life, briefly.)
“No, and by no I mean yes :)”
What was it like to meet a god?
Well, first of all, they’re usually pretty archetypical, and charm-wise, they’re often pretty good-looking.
But they’re also often very, very angry. They’re often very, very good-looking and very, very angry at the same time.
(In one case, I managed to get near a being who was a goddess of mathematics, and she was so angry I couldn’t even be polite, and after I was done talking to her I just stood there thinking “how the fuck did she get made of pure math and still look so fucking angry?”)
(And also, in part thanks to the power of suggestion, I’ve met several god faces of characters in my work who are very angry at me.)
it’s possible they included an invisible unicode character or a cyrillic confusable? that is what I’d do if I was trying to bypass a word filter
I checked my logs, and you’re right:
Good old zero width space.
When I get time, I’ll write some code to remove this kind of thing before applying the word filter.
No idea why that Frank ask with a slur from this morning got through my usual word filter. The filter caught several other anon asks with the same slur this morning, so I dunno what the difference was.
(Before you ask, no, it wasn’t caps/lowercase.)
Anyway, I deleted the ask and turned off anon for the time being, as I’ve been getting a little more anon spam lately.
Yay Almost Nowhere! I want to write like you. "Things fall apart by nature" - this is a very nice sentence/riff on an old phrase!
I’m flattered, thanks!
Typo in last chapter:
Heads of state and military generals do not feeling impotent.
Thank you! Fixed.
—almost nowhere- chapter 15
you can tell something is well written when you experience the unassailable desire to read it out loud.
a bit of voice acting that i hadnt done in a long time to conmemorate this fantastic chapter which i had been waiting for a long time
I’m really tired, but I just remembered that this really bizarre Guardian article
[…]
“If you want to use a computer, you don’t need to be a computer geek,” he tells the Guardian. “You just need to be a bit cleverer than the average person.”
[…]
Would his approach work? It depends what your definition of “work” is. “You use less Power. You learn to take a bit more information in. You’re a lot more creative with the information you have.”
But there’s a catch. The people at the heart of the book’s success – Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – are not really computer geeks and have not been, he says, in the real world. They are “great at being influential people” who have (in Zuckerberg’s case) found that “cybernetics is necessary but not sufficient.”
This is a line that struck me as not entirely convincing – the idea that geeks and out-of-the-way tinkerers like Zuckerberg and Musk can’t actually participate in “real life” because they’re “not good at it” seems really hard to square with (1) the success of these people and (2) the fact that they’re doing exciting and useful things with their power.
To add an extra layer of confusion, the article then goes on to say that “Peter Thiel is in a similar position.” Which makes the philosophy itself seem opposite-sided: the idea that the “real world” geek is the technophile who wants to become “a bit cleverer than the average person,” while the Silicon Valley technophile wants to become a be-cleared-but- not-clearthemed “average person.”
Maybe it’s the idea of the “real world” geek that fills me with dread, not ironically? “Real life” geeks seem cool as far as they go. It sometimes feels like it’s impossible to do anything in this country without various “real life” geeks waging their little battles, sometimes with grim results. But how exactly does one “repent” of “real life” geekish behavior?
Are we all supposed to throw our dirty laundry into the bin of history and never mention it again? Do these people always behave well? Or presumably, are there people who go through life with an air of The Good. Faking activation recorders attached to their inner ears to become the next Milgram, say. How do we make room for good, practical people who be serenading the Mother Goddess with their beautiful harmony? Don’t they already have that trademark? If so, why not just add the sewing kits would her?
Anyway, you see what I’m thinking. I don’t think the Haidt stuff is good philosophy, and I don’t think Gifford and Shiffrin are foolish to publish it despite its flaws. But there we are.
A friend of mine is reading a book called “The Art of the Deal” and she kept getting the feeling like the whole time that the guy was a fraud
Your friend is a bit late to the party, but she’s clearly a good judge of character.
Two new Almost Nowhere chapters are up.
Chapter 14 is here, and there’s a Chapter 15 after it.
Afternoon reblog