What should I do? It is very likely that, whether or not I give this man the gold, he will kill us all. I am in a desperate position. Fortunately, I remember reading Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict.
Esther got me this shirt for my birthday – hot off CafePress, the only one of its kind
(It’s based on an injoke of ours, although it’s the kind of injoke whose meaning can be inferred without additional context, once one has heard it)
When I read stuff like that “intellectual dark web” article – claiming we are in some special moment because there are a number of popular public intellectuals who rail against campus leftism and postmodernism – I wonder why no one, including the fancy NYT-tier journalists who write these sorts of things, seems to notice that there have been public intellectuals doing this exact thing for well over two decades, many of whom are literally the same people.
Like, okay Peterson’s new. But Pinker, Hoff Sommers, and Paglia (to pick three) are very much not new. I got my first introduction to all of this “postmodern left vs. the west” stuff from a best-selling book by Steven Pinker … back in high school, fourteen years ago. As far as I can see, there’s very little in the current ~intellectual dark web~ discourse that was not covered already in that book (The Blank Slate).
I remember reading Christina Hoff Sommers articles around the same time – I got to them via Arts and Letters Daily, which I got to via Pinker, and which was one of the go-to sites for this sort of thing back then. Her book Who Stole Feminism?, which introduced the equity feminism / gender feminism split, came out 24 years ago.
And Camille Paglia has been doing this even longer, pretty much as her entire career since the publication of Sexual Personae (1990). Check out this speech – doesn’t it sound exactly like the sort of take that would be edgy and newsworthy right now? She gave that speech in 1991.
True or not, this stuff is not new. Maybe it’s newly popular? But that isn’t the same thing as being a new break with orthodoxy. They’ve been breaking with the same orthodoxy in the same way for nearly three decades.
guess who is, as of today, the most attractive 30 year old in the united states and probably the world?
it’s me. the guy who is definitely posting this and definitely not sitting net to my wife while she makes dumb posts pretending to be me.
i am the most attractive 30 year old. feels good man.
permutatrix asked: Are there any conditions under which you'd let a rando print "The Northern Caves" as a book?
What exactly do you have in mind?
Like, obviously I can’t (and don’t want to) stop people from just printing the thing out on paper, and that doesn’t stop being true if they also bind the pages together into a book. If someone were to create multiple such objects and pass them around to others, I suppose it’d be nice if they let me know about it, and of course I would not be pleased if they were to omit my name (well, pseudonym) from the printed copies, or if they were to sell them. But that all seems like it goes without saying, and if it doesn’t answer your question then I’d need to know more about what you are proposing to do.
There are two things I’d like to do with your work that I think you may have a reasonable problem with.
The first is choosing how to present it. If I were to print TNC, I’d have to decide how to typeset it (especially those forum sections!) and what the cover would look like. The only part that would be yours is the text. I don’t know how I’d feel about letting someone do that to my Internet scribbles, but it was kind of implied in my ask, and it doesn’t seem like it fazes you—still, if you want to talk about what I have in mind, my DMs are open. Or I can just make it as vanilla as possible if you like.
Second, the reason I’d like to print TNC is because the college I’ve committed to has this thing where incoming freshmen add books to the library, and, well. I feel like TNC expresses an important part of my past, I guess, this sort of lonely modern intellectual craziness that I’ve never really seen in print, and I wanted to bring a bit of that with me because I’m not really over it yet. My copy of TNC would remain there indefinitely for students to find and borrow—with the AO3 URL printed inside, of course. This is the part I figured you’d probably say no to, but I thought it was worth asking.
And when it comes to selling, I feel I should note… I don’t know what they’ll end up doing with the collection decades down the line when the institution inevitably ceases to exist. I can talk to them about that if it matters.
Sorry for the very late reply – hope it isn’t too late!
This actually sounds really cool and I don’t have any problems with the basic concept. A few things:
When you say “add books to the library,” do most people just donate an ordinary book they own? If so, what do you know about the precedent (if any) for adding a book you’ve printed and binding? If the book doesn’t exist anywhere else, will they still be able to enter it into their catalogue, assign it a call number, and all that?
I’d like to review some digital representation or mock-up of whatever you’re going to print before you print it.
I’d prefer that the book contain my real name (rather than “nostalgebraist”), and be shelved under my real name. I can send it to you in a PM once you’re further along (I’d imagine it can be dropped in at the end of the design process as it would only appear once or twice).
I have a strong preference that the forum sections appear as close to the web versions as possible, with the exception of changes in the color scheme to make it readable in grayscale (or, if printed in color, readable on paper). Since book pages are a lot narrower than the average monitor, this may mean the column with the post text will get really narrow and the posts will look really long, which is fine. Wrapping individual posts across page breaks is also fine, even if it looks bad. Basically, if it looks like someone has just hit “print” on their web browser, that’s actually appropriate and desirable.
Keep me posted!
Me, trying to describe to Esther why I find Habitica more frustrating than helpful: “I already have enough apps … spewing me with their own … matrices of shit”
Some of the mystifying things Esther has yelled in her sleep since moving here (exactly one month ago):
“I want the moon to kill me!”
“I don’t want to die, I want to eat potatoes!”
“The moon will die! The sun will die!”
(These were from three different nights)
Jewish folklore tells us that the raven’s reputation had already been sullied in Jehovah’s eyes because of its repeated violations of a decree against love-making.
Here’s a fantasy setting I’d vaguely like to do something with.
There are two worlds, Wake and Dream. Wake is our own world. Dream is another world people go to when they sleep. It’s similar enough to our world - maybe it has the same land masses, maybe not. The laws of physics and economics and so on are definitely similar. It’s not some kind of constantly shifting mist-realm where you create things by believing in them, or anything like that. You’ve got all the same social and economic pressures and so on.
People pop into existence in Dream by their mother’s side the first time they go to sleep as an infant. After that they can travel through Dream the same way they would travel through Wake. Every time they appear in Dream, they’re in the same place they were when they left Dream the night before. This means that even if there are corresponding locations in Dream and Wake (eg the landmasses are the same), you might be in different places in each world. If you die in Wake, you disappear from Dream. If you die in Dream, you have deep dreamless sleeps for the rest of your life in Wake.
Nobody in Wake remembers the existence of Dream. They just wake up each morning with a collection of jumbled images they forget after a few minutes. But everyone in Dream has full memories of their waking life. Each night they appear in Dream and suddenly remember “Oh, right, instead of just having one life I actually have two, only one of which I can remember during the daytime”.
There’s no reason people’s dream lives have to be like their waking lives - but plausibly they would be. If you went to medical school in Wake, you might as well be a doctor in Dream too. This suggests that Dream doesn’t have much of an education system, since it’s more efficient to be educated in Wake and get education that persists through both lives.
But by the same token, Dream is more technologically advanced than Wake; Dream Einstein remembers all the discoveries he made during waking life and can spread them to Dream, but he also has decades worth of nights to think up more discoveries that never make it to the waking world. There should be on average about twice as many books/songs/poems by each of your favorite authors/musicians/poets in Dream, since Dreamers remember all the waking ones but can create more of their own.
Even if Dream has different land masses, there’s no reason to think the countries would be the same. As a reductio ad absurdum, if the countries were the same up until some dramatic battle, the Dream armies would know what tactics the Wake armies used in that battle the day before and would change their plans based on that knowledge. That means the battles can have different outcomes and the political histories can diverge. But they shouldn’t diverge too much. Dreamers still have their memories of being American or Russian or whatever, and they might feel patriotism toward their waking nations and try to expand them into the dreamworld, or subvert nations too far away from their ideals. Even if the Soviets win the Cold War in Dream, a lifetime of absorbing modern ideas about capitalism is going to make it hard for the Dreamers to really go all out with the communism thing. Or maybe if the propaganda is good enough they’ll just feel sorry for their poor deluded waking selves, who will never realize the glory of socialism. It could go either way.
Although the same people might tend to succeed in Dream and Wake just based on natural talent, it would be hard to directly transfer success from one to the other. A man who strikes oil in Dream would have no way of sending any of his money or status to the waking world; a man who strikes oil in Wake might become a bit famous in Dream and find a way to capitalize on that, but would have no other advantages.
Can anyone think of any more interesting or unexpected dynamics that might come up in a world like this?
(via bulbous-oar)