Darwin needed emissions testing to renew registration, so I went out past city limits where the plasma banks and Buddhist temples are to the DEQ place. Portland’s really developed a banlieue system where the poor working class are on the periphery in congregate housing – here, clusters of buildings with 2-6 one or two story units each
Okay, so you know how search engine results on most popular topics have become useless because the top results are cluttered with page after page of machine-generated gibberish designed to trick people into clicking in so it can harvest their ad views?
And you know how the data sets that are used to train these gibberish-generating AIs are themselves typically machine-generated, via web scrapers using keyword recognition to sort text lifted from wiki articles and blog posts into topical subsets?
Well, today I discovered – quite by accident – that the training-data-gathering robots apparently cannot tell the difference between wiki articles about pop-psych personality typologies (e.g., Myers-Briggs type indicators, etc.) and wiki articles about Homestuck classpects.
The upshot is that when a bot that’s been trained on the resulting data sets is instructed to write fake mental health resource articles, sometimes it will start telling you about Homestuck.
first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line
second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all
third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below
fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?
fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves
sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it
seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him
eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night
ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him
tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk
eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important
twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go
thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme
fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader
fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that
sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why
I have had the most weird dreams I can’t remember about the last few months
Can you tell us about your weird dreams and any symbolic or metaphorical things in them?
Sure!
1. I kept hearing a lot about the “cuckold’s wife” meme, and kept dreaming about a “cuckold’s wife” avatar who appeared from a light, or from the corner of my eye, or in my peripheral vision at various times (though this happened more than the other images). It was kind of creepy looking, it was like a cartoon “evil eye” with a white orb in the center, on a black background. I remember the orb looking kind of like an inverted cross.
2. A lot of my dreams involved a very elaborate, intricate, almost comic-book-y battle. “I” (me in the dream) was usually in some kind of large, elaborate armored vehicle. There were explosions, missiles, rockets, missiles exploding etc. on all sides. Sometimes the battle would seem to go on and on. (This is what most dreams are like, but even in my dreams, this battle is the only thing that stays clearly in my memory.)
3. I was always trying to make some sort of bizarre thing work (a project, a conversation, a new idea, etc.). The best way I could describe it would be “it was like I had to work my way into a really complex situation, like something out of a novel that is basically about two groups of people who are constantly arguing with each other and keep each other at a distance” (not that I dreamed it in words, but that’s how it came across to me). This also had a kind of sexual element, in that the “project” would always (at least in my dreams) involve a woman, and it would feel like a sexual act of some sort – like I had to use my mind to “think” it into existence, rather than merely imagining it. (I guess this could be explained by the fact that I had a lot of dreams featuring sexual content – but it doesn’t explain my dreams about elaborate battle scenes, which were totally asexual.)
3. I had some dreams where I was a dog, and a lot of the time, the people involved were really concerned about being seen in public with me, because dogs (in the dream) are common in certain public areas and could be “misinterpreted.”
Thinking about how before Hitler, Napoleon was the stock Anglophone Ultimate Evil, and wondering if Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats came out a few years later, Cats would call Macavity “the Hitler of crime”
Went around the corner to pick up some more leaves and helped some guys muscle furniture into a Uhaul, then returned and drew aggro on some guy having a screaming, fence-rattling mental breakdown so a hesitant mom and her kids could come back from the park unmolested, I swear sometimes it feels like I’m grinding favor around here
I think it was probably very good for me, in my childhood-to-early-teenagerhood, that I was able to be one of the most skilled / competent people within my social sphere, for one of my social spheres.
Specifically: there was this browser game site, Funorb, that used to exist. And I played games on it a lot, and was pretty competitive about it. There weren’t official all-time highscores, but there were official records of who’d done the best at achievement hunting across the site’s games, and there were unofficial all-time highscores, and I did my best to climb towards the top of several of these. I never got #1 anywhere, but at my peak I was somewhere around #10 on the achievement-hunting scoreboard, and there were several games in which I was able to get to the #2 or #3 slot on the all-time highscores.
And this helped me a lot, psychologically, on multiple axes. It let me develop a sense of what it’s like from the inside to be an expert in a field, and to chat with and learn from the other experts. It let me build an intuition that getting really good at a thing is possible, that it’s an option available to me, even if it might be hard and take practice. It let me learn how to become good at things, on the practice-techniques level. In general, it… trained me in what it’s like to be more successful at something than most people are? Which is a useful thing to be trained in, for almost any goals a person might want to pursue!
(Not the only useful thing, by any means. Most of my particularly-ambitious projects post-Funorb, thus far, have mostly fallen down for reasons such as lack of project-management skill, executive dysfunction, the projects taking long enough for me to lose interest and go off to do other things instead, and so forth. But a useful thing. One important one among many, good for building momentum and un-greying options.)
The question, then, is: how can we scale this? Funorb had ~300,000 accounts with at least one achievement unlocked in at least one game, of which at least a few thousand were reasonably active for a reasonably long time, and the impact of being among the top players would have been much less if the pool had been smaller. But then what about everyone who wasn’t one of the top players, who just played casually at the mid-tier of a handful of games? How can we arrange things so they, too, get the chance to have that experience of Unusual Competence?
The answer, I think, is siloing. Don’t just have a single metric of competence; have lots of them, such that a person can become an outlierly expert in a small handful while others do the same elsewhere, and thus everyone can get the experience of being an outlierly expert at something. Which Funorb, in fact, did! It had a few dozen games, many of which had multiple modes. I was one of the top players overall, sure, but the place where I had the most visceral sense of expertise wasn’t for my overall rank but rather in the specific games and modes where I was one of the all-time top players. And there were relatively few such games! Only four coming to mind off the top of my head, and perhaps another few I’m forgetting right now, out of the ~40 on the site.
Actually implementing this at maximum society-wide scale—engineering the world to allow any kid who wants to to get to experience being a world-class expert at something, and have it be real and not a fake participation prize, because lots of other people genuinely have done that same thing in a non-expert capacity—seems likely to be hard. And it’s not the sort of ambitious society-engineering project I myself expect to find my comparative advantage in, relative to various others that I’ve been scheming about over the past year or two. But it is, I think, a worthy project in the abstract, one that I hope someone figures out some way to implement.
The #1 reason I start wars in Victoria 3 is “look buddy, I have done exhausting diplomatic and political legwork to give your country unfettered trade access to my huge, technologically advanced economy that’s desperate to pay you handsomely for raw materials, but still you refuse to develop your iron/rubber/heroin/whatever deposits to sell the stuff to me. I am sending a team of management consultants (roughly 200,000 of them) to help you with business development.”
Appreciating the early automotive city planning around here, like they’re not building supermarkets yet, all the ones core-wards of here clearly postdate the initial construction era, but there are markets, of a type that’s more than a convenience store but definitely not super, in a way I’d never seen firsthand before but suddenly realized I recognized from depictions of the 1950s-70s
Got some pickled umi plums and furikake, I’m really appreciating how well with Japanese food you can just put some rice in an autocooker and then just add stuff at serving time to make interesting, satisfying light meals
Couldn't you ask your dad and/or mom or other family members who would've known where he lived, your grandad with the tree. Is there not at least one person who would know? Ask around!
Yeah, I could probably pump my mom for the address, but anyway he moved to the middle of Pennsylvania like 4 hours west of Philadelphia when I was 8 or so, that tree is the single only reason for me to ever go back there, and it’s not that good a reason.
Fully squared away the front room, which leaves only the kitchen left unthreshed. Part of it was assembling a small odds & ends collection to go with the others I’ve been hauling from several moves ago as “looked over multiple times and decided not to throw out, but have no place at all for”
