—And you can’t blame a season 3 for not being as good as a season 2. But you can blame a season 4 for being worse than a season 3. A season 4 is where you go from saying “I love the acting and world building” to “This is a euphoric tapestry of character development and worldbuilding. I wish someday to harness a small fraction of this author’s awesome prowess. That intoxicating rush of— of subplot weaving its way into the main plot. The characters being more real than real. That wave of understanding— that joy and splendor—

Timmy. That’s great, Timmy. I love your enthusiasm. Now, let’s hear from some of the other members of this class. Jennifer, what about you? What’s your favorite TV show?

☙ Yeah, sometimes I get asked, “Are you pushing yourself too hard? Are your expectations of yourself realistic?” And it feels… impossible.

⦾ YES and how are we even expected to figure this out? That’s like asking if two ships in a storm are approaching each other or not. Who cares? There’s a storm and it’s getting dark. And someone needs to do something before everyone gets shipwrecked.

☙ —Vanny?

⦾ And we’re all so caught up with “are they going to attack us” that we forget we’re both cosmic grains of sand in an impossibly large beach and this universe has absolutely no problem with brutally rearranging our every last atom in the blender of entropy.

☙ Vanny, I think you’re—

⦾ ǔ̶͔g̵̺̓h̶͋ I’m hyperventilating. I’m light-headed. I— I need—

☙ Let’s get bubble tea. Earl Grey, no sugar, less ice. Just how you like it.

Vanny catches her breath then silently nods. Not smiling. A face somewhere on the long journey from frustrated to thankful.

> I really don't think the Ministry should have instituted Reticular Law at the end of the book.

> Why not?

> Well, it just felt like their decision was too hasty. How could they come to that conclusion when they knew so little?

> Interesting, well, we know from the beginning of the book that the Ministry has a strained relationship with its subjects, and in the first chapter, they promised they would be more responsive. Maybe that's just a by-product of their new commitment to action over inaction.

> Yeah but what if the subjects of the Ministry view this as a case of vacuous theatrics? We won't know if that was the right choice until the next book, but we can already imagine that the subjects are deliberating if it will result in actual action or if it's just a performance to legitimize their power.

> I guess we’ll have to wait. Til then, I’m just happy we’re asking these questions.

> Yeah, well said.

In which I connect my previous episode about a semantic knowledge graph internet with my previous article here: https://vente.medium.com/463abc7492af This is the “missing middle” in applied AI systems, search engines on one end, ChatGPT on the other. What would something in between look like?

I confess I’ve been thinking about this to maybe an unhealthy degree… maybe talking about this out loud will get these thoughts out of my system and let me move on to other ideas again.

> Yeah and that's when Vanessa walked in.

> Wait, Vanessa?

I felt myself half-leaning in over our dinner table. Like if I had heard her say it louder, it would have changed anything. In the next half-second, a lot happened.

Before you swiftly rescinded it, I saw your face dart 77.1% to that bewildered expression. The expression that so concisely conveyed, "How could you not know who Vanessa is? She was in 3 of my last 5 stories. Have you not been paying attention?" If this was a good day, I would stop and savor how incredible that was, how so much information was conveyed so effortlessly, so concisely. But I had just sentenced myself to not a good day. I could suppress that horror brewing inside me for a few instants before it took root.

And thanks for catching yourself and trying to hide it. But you were too slow, I noticed. It's not your fault, it's my fault for trying to get better at making eye contact. On another day, I wouldn’t have noticed, my eyes would be haphazardly darting with reckless abandon from point of interest to point of interest. But in this restaurant, with the lights this dim, you were the only thing worth looking at anyway. So yeah, I was supposed to know who Vanessa is, and I’m in trouble because I don’t. And you're about to pretend like you didn't already introduce her. And you’re no good at pretending.

And in that same half-second, my amygdala was declaring a state of emergency. I felt the tendrils of thoughts shoot through my head, desperately searching for this Vanessa. I’m sure my face was distorting as I fought and failed to keep this crisis on the inside. I quit drinking too, so can’t use that excuse anymore—no slow recall, not anything. I have already found ways to laugh it off and hide how I really feel, already feeling myself admitting to not paying attention and apologizing for it.

Before the next instant had passed, I heard myself blurting out like an encyclopedia

> Vanessa, the pre-med you befriended after meeting at the park. She had complimented your earrings. You both enjoy Mitzky and Billy Joel and...

That’s where my autopilot ended and I took control again

> ... you usually call her by her nickname, Vanny.

> Yeah, Vanny.

> Were you... testing me?

> We’re on a date. Isn’t this whole thing a tes— No, I can’t lie. I didn’t mean to call her Vanessa. I was just... your eyes are so... nice. I got distracted.

> Your eyes are nice, too.

And we both just knew it was perfectly okay to forget about Vanny for a little while and just look silently and longingly into each other’s eyes. And bask in mutual tranquil smiles. Time stood still again. For a different reason. This wasn’t about Vanny. Or eye contact. It was about us.

Did I just fall prey to assuming that generalism and specialism actually exist? In math, we have to prove that something exists before we undertake a quest in search of it. Maybe we’re all far more generalist than we think…

I wrote this article ages ago but I still think about it. https://vente.medium.com/21c00e3bea4c

That firetruck you saw on your way home at night

Words are far too weak for their own good. “Firetruck” is an absurd understatement. It’s missing the part where this “vehicle” is a lumbering beast and you wouldn’t dare step out in front of it. If it’s on a mission, you’re collateral damage. Even with the sirens off, you feel that warm diesel heart pumping torque relentlessly into that crankshaft. You’re across the street and yet you feel it all the same. That low-frequency pumping, perforating the quiet of the night. You can’t tell if you’re feeling it through the ground or the air or both. Maybe you’re feeling it through your body, the sheer magnitude of it rendering your entire body into mere ossicles. And when you step away, you’re left wondering about this war machine of a thing, a hero nonetheless.

The narrative implications of this user-generated web of ideas could also be interesting for authors. What if two characters meet each other by subscribing to each other’s nodes and learning more and more about each other with time? And then they meet in real life and discover “Oh you’re not at all like I imagined”. It’s a tragedy really, because if they hadn’t spent so long before meeting, they wouldn’t have done that very human thing of filling in all those gaps so optimistically. Almost like they were mutually parasocial.

But the important thing is that it’s just text, and rarely images. Because images take up far too much space on the network. See this related idea that’s already been implemented… just without centralized hosting or a subgraph

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

See also the idea of the Semantic Web

* https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/10/developing-semantic-web/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

In the space of all possible languages, there's a language where this sentence is represented by a single glyph

In the decimal expansion of Pi, there is a substring of 0's and 1's such that the ASCII decoding of that substring is this very string.

This is an excerpt from a book in the Library of Babel.

This is contained in the graph of the cartesian product of the reals with the reals. Equivalently, it’s an element of the powerset of Cartesian space.

Served best with lo-fi in the background

Contains a story about a girl whose pursuit of perfection in all knowledge requires her to take actions that force us to contend with questions of identity. If you reprogram yourself to achieve perfection, have you deleted a version of yourself, or were you that person all along?

Athena is 17 and she’s on her phone sometimes. “You know when a page is crawling with ads and you get the same sensation as you do watching ants swarm around a piece of banana?” Athena is out of breath now, so she sharply inhales. But Pattie — No one calls her Patricia — responds by asking Athena if she needs to take a deep breath. Athena nods, takes a deep breath… takes another, and tells Pattie, “Thanks, thanks again… I really appreciate it.” She’s been getting better about controlling her anger about the death of the web of yore. Stage 2 is Bargaining. Then maybe Depression. And maybe one day, Acceptance.