Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

If it were corruption I'd actually be less disappointed in the people running the national and state level Democratic parties, but it seems like the ones running the machinery (not the ones getting elected, but the people administering the caucuses and the primaries and shit like that) are merely incompetent and short-sighted. I mean, part of that may be corruption interfering with getting things done, but mostly I'm just thinking that I wouldn't mind some embezzlement if they could actually do their essentially one job.

I don't know. I guess I'm just abruptly super tired of the party whose ostensible platform I think I mostly like also being so bad at the surface-level goals of the political election game. Is it baked in to the platform or did we just end up with the wrong people in charge of things?

 

Yeah, I’m not saying I think this debacle is the result of corruption. Occam’s razor is still in effect and so is Hanlon’s. I agree that incompetence is far more likely than corruption. I don’t have a reason to believe otherwise.

Unfortunately corruption doesn’t really get things done unless the things you want done are horrible, preventable deaths and slow strangulation of ways of life with no safety net for the most vulnerable, like children. It’s much more lucrative to do a bad job for as long as possible than an efficient job for a price I guess. This is the result of decades and decades of crap, probably tracing back to prohibition if not earlier. I’m not sure it would necessarily yield better results. The people at the center of public attention getting elected, the criminal governors, were never the ones really running the show. One of them still hasn’t talked even though it probably could have helped his sentence a lot and he couldn’t possibly have organized his crimes by himself, and it’s been years. I’m terrified of whoever he’s that afraid of. He has a family, which is probably relevant. But that’s not what I think is happening with the national democrats.

I don’t think the national democrats are the Democratic Machine. I’m glad they’re not. It just complicates things when people say to vote democrat because it’s the only ethical thing, but you’re used to trying to figure the literal Mob into your ballot plans.

I’m also tired. I just want to vote for a reasonably solid candidate whose platform doesn’t make me recoil. In more regional elections I’d very much like it if that didn’t mean having to read about which candidate(s) may have been connected to shaking down Burger Kings I think it was?? In national elections it’s this whole thing where, can they please act like they actually care about winning in deed as well as word?

I am thankful that no one seems to have committed crimes against any fast food restaurants.

 

Happy Palpatines Day

 

I originally became interested in linguistics because I thought that syntax as a discipline was pretty mathematical. But the more I learned about lingyistics and language the less enamored I became with the Chompskian picture of a universal grammar system; the thing that makes natural languages interesting is the breaking and reinterpretation of the supposed rules.

 

At some point I had a thought about the parallel between True Names versus Given Names and Private Keys versus Public Keys in terms of the powers they grant, wherein someone with access to only your Given Name/Public Key can refer to you and send you messages but someone with access to your True Name/Private Key can make you do things like raze your village or transfer all of your money to an anonymous offshore account.

Anyway, don't tell the fae your private key, no matter how many badly-formatted emails they send you.

 

Holy shit that’s brilliant

 

There was an article a while back about how some of the mindbending horrors of Cthulhu's island could be explained as simple non-Euclidean geometry, with the curving and twisting and so on being artifacts of the distance measurement being different. And as a mathematician who grew up on (i.e. originally started my PhD on) non-Euclidean geometry I find that a little boring, because while non-Euclidean geometry is neat and all, it isn't particularly brainbreaking once you've played around with it for a while. We see non-Euclidean spaces all the time, although we're maybe not so used to living inside them.

What I'd really like to see is a being that can violate the Pigeonhole Principle.

 

The notion of "show, don't tell" as a reflection of our inability to truly observe one another's internal states, one another's actual emotions and thoughts, instead relying on external cues as if behavioralism were in fact the only way we had of modeling other people. If we could only directly perceive that she is angry, and not just that her eyes are narrowed, her mouth a thin, stiff line, her cheeks flushed and her fists trembling by her sides, but alas the true states of those we meet are always locked away behind the walls of our senses.

 

Today I learned that mice are surprisingly fast. Like, I guess I should have expected that, but seriously, watching it dart around like that was kind of impressive.

In other news, there is a mouse somewhere in my condo and I have completely lost track of it.

 

One of my favorite things is layered descriptions where I have a picture of body language but also further insight into what it feels like or what a character is thinking. Those also often have physical or sensory components, because a strong feeling usually does. There’s serotonin receptors in the gut. Feelings are often a visceral experience even when they’re completely first person. It’s not just hard to tell what someone else is feeling without those physical cues, it’s very integral into the experience of one’s own feelings. At least I think so.

(I do my best thinking by bouncing thoughts and feelings against each other. Does this thought feel like I’m onto something? Does this feeling hold up to logical examination?)

But anyway, like, a scene where someone had slammed a door in a character’s face I think. Iirc it describes her as standing perfectly still and blandly expressionless while she waits for the cringing thing inside her to uncurl. You know that the door-slamming woman would misread her body language as unnaturally, robotically calm. And that’s not exactly unintentional. It’s a deeply ingrained defense mechanism, and it’s actually working pretty well in this circumstance.

I love when stories play with the limitations of trying to interpret other people’s body language, and the limitations even of making sense of one’s own thoughts and feelings.

 

I have roughly two online handles, Exohedron and Layra Idarani (that is, when I don't need to use my meatbag name). For quite a while I was under the impression that they were largely interchangeable, depending only on whether the place I was required something that looked like a real name or something that looked like a handle. So for instance, here and on soundcloud I go by Exohedron, but on Google Plus and Facebook I posted as Layra.
It turns out that they aren't completely interchangeable, in that it seems that I want Layra to be read as leaning female, while I want Exohedron to be as unlabeled as possible.
On the other hand, the number of places that I do go by Layra has rapidly decreased, since I really only post stuff here anymore, so it's really only when I come across references to my Google Plus activities that it comes up.
And I suppose it makes sense that Layra has a gender identity, considering her origin as a gendered character from a story I never wrote when I was 14. But since the only ongoing development of said character was me essentially RPing online and then coopting the resulting accounts as my personal accounts, I was under the impression that her gender identity coevolved to match Exohedron's and my own. It turns out that's not quite the case.

 

Who's a good boy? Wrong answers only.

 

As with last time, the argumate prediction market is hilarious to watch.

 

There is a class of angel called Ophanim in the Jewish angelology, described as nested, flaming wheels, of whom the most well-known here in the US is Bagel.

 

I think one of my favorite things about Jane Lindskold's Firekeeper series is that Firekeeper, having grown up with wolves as the weakest, weirdest member of the pack and thus constantly on the edge of starvation, finds the idea of gardening, of deliberately growing food, absolutely fascinating. And rightly so!
But yeah, just because she can hunt her own food if she really has to doesn't mean she doesn't appreciate the idea of cultivating food beyond just allowing a breeding population to live.

 

Prophylactery

 

I think I might have trouble taking things seriously. Like, there are things I should probably worry about, but I don't. I'm guessing that it might be due to the dissociative tendency that I'm coming to believe is actually a thing I have, but which I also don't seem to be able to take seriously. Maybe it's an inability to actually feel panic rather than an inability to think that something is serious enough to warrant both thought and action, except I don't think that's true, because I don't think and I don't act.

 

Anyway, the point of the last post is so that people aren't surprised when I remark that, given that COVID-19 was first noticed in December, last November was apparently National Novel Coronavirus Month,

 

The Weeknd's new hit "Can't Touch My Face"

 

It's a good thing that it's called COVID-19 and not COVID-20 or people would be asking if it's another presidential candidate.