i have long said that "post truth" is an inaccurate framing of our current modality. humans, historically, have had many different modes of truth seeking. this is less a change in modality and more a return to type. our senses are heuristic. we do not contain or fully model the world around us. we do not sense every grain of it. all models of truth involve skips and jumps, subjectivity, interpolation.

one idea is to use very simple solar system rules, but to integrate in a few well-chosen nods to physics. for instance, maybe tidal forces are really strong between these two large planets, and this smaller one instead should be an asteroid belt maybe these three bodies are inside the roche limit and would not form or would decohere.

i did some terrible back of the envelope math and i'm at 10 square meters of photosynthetic tissue per human, assuming no food. (suggestions and note shares welcome) "what do you do with the surface area" and the related question "how do you take care of the extra tissue" are important.

reading about the hill sphere, and this part is fascinating- i wonder what it is about retrograde orbits which selects for them over time? it seems like phase patterns (both between bodies and in tidal forces) are important for stability, i wonder if that's a factor here. i wonder if interactions with other satellites is a big factor here. i don't have an animated model going rn, but:

satellites closer in orbit more quickly. things in adjacent orbits which are going the same direction have long windows where the innermost one passes the outer one

simple solar system generator i am going to brush up on solar system formation + various sorts of stars / stellar remnants, and base the final generator on that (with some artistic license)

i had an idea for a science fiction story today. feel free to use this / point at similar ideas elsewhere.

aliens arrive on earth, possibly at some point before the industrial revolution, and begin the endeavor of mutual communication. (1/n) at this point in history, humans still have not learned to communicate with even the more obviously analogous species, like corvids and cetaceans. but the aliens are not centering any one species, and seem to have begun the process in literally every single place they could (2/n)

ok wait i was going to do emotional relationships / procedural narrative prototype, but i have a weird tangential architecture idea.

what if instead of a rigid object hierarcy, with characters as objects, you had characters as concepts / social constructs? a body might be a mostly nonhierarchical relationship between a set of objects, and... somewhere there would be conceptual objects which relate to / describe something called a "body" or "person"

Asimov has come up again, so i wanted to post a list of 20th century female authors.

Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr.)
Joanna Russ
Ursula LeGuin
Octavia Butler
Alice Mary Norton (aka Andre Norton)
Leigh Brackett
C. J. Cherryh that an author wrote in another era does mean we should ignore our critical faculties. context is important. the context for Asimov doesn't excuse him.

there we go! i am pretty happy with these. the one thing that peeves me is that i ended up adding a made up bias to the radius for even radius circles.

thoughts on alphabets for the library of babel.

given the constraint of 22 lowercase letters, plus space, period, comma, there is some question about what alphabet the books employ. it is not the normal spanish variant of the latin alphabet, or the variant used for english. i think it's not entirely clear from the story if the writing system used is a variant of the latin alphabet at all.

one possibility is that it's an entirely nonhuman culture, or a non-terrestrial human culture, which would suggest a nonterrestrial alphabet.

so i didn't plan on writing this at any point in my life, but here is a thread about toilets in the library of babel.

there is an interesting (intentional?) set of voids and paradoxes in "The Library of Babel" related to metabolism.

latrines or bathrooms are mentioned: these are located in each hallway. depending on your reading, this is one per hexagon or one per two hexagon. this is better than the ratio in all public libraries i have visited, and we could stand to learn from this generous accommodation.

i revisited the library of babel this morning. i have confirmed that i want to make an interactive version. i have some new ideas for layouts. i also have questions. the space described by "The Library of Babel" is a compelling one. it's not wrong to want to render that spatially, nor to be interested in the literal particulars of how it is described in the book.

thread about dissociation.
content warning: neglectful parenting, anger issues.

i try to make a point of talking about mental health openly, because i want to do my part to destigmatize mental health issues. i am not a professional, so none of this is medical advice. but i want everyone to know that this is extremely common, and if you or a friend has frequent dissociative episodes, that person is not alone or broken or bad. they are just a body that, in this moment in time, behaves in this way.

maybe there are some things you can do to help

organic level generation experiment thread! i have had this rolling around in my head forever, and i thought i'd finally take a stab at it.

the basic idea is to build spaces out of a set of amoebas which can crawl around, connect, etc. while maintaining topological sameness. there will be a set of functions for modifying topological islands in various ways. this function retracts peninsulas (cells with only one neighbor in the island).

on computers writing stories, specifically the near future cultural effects of content interpolation + prediction models such as GPT-2 (as featured on talktotransformer.com), from the perspective of an artist who frequently uses procedural generation. firstly, i should say: with due respect to current widespread enthusiasm and hard work of people within the field, i consider where we currently are in terms of AI to be an incremental step forward, not a huge leap.

reclaim the maze. reclaim "bad gameplay". thinking about living systems, slow play, and being lost as a destination. mazes are often relegated to the dustbin. they have no place in the modern, streamlined, AB tested lexicon. mazes are "bad design"

ok general question: how do people feel about searching walls for secrets, a la the bomb / missile blocks in metroid or the bombable walls in zelda? i'm doing some thinking about how that affects optimum play and whether it's actually desirable or not. while individual secrets like this, particularly those which tell a story or have clever visual clues, can be very interesting, i'm interested in the way this affects player behavior.