This is … a lot. But it has gone through enough editing that any sharp edges should be removed.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: <LONDON>
Date: Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 12:47 PM
Subject: Re: curses (+140) (ttitd)
To: <doe>, <diana>
17/17 – the end of the beginning
<yellow> don’t mention the rain.
Burning Man is a place that overflows your short-term memory. Did I see that art-car this year, or was it a decade ago?
I know that I didn’t make it to the Thunderdome this visit.
I did make it all the way to DISTRIKT. Now open at night, at the antipodes of the playa.
I did walk out to the airport. And I tried to climb up the ladder to the observation deck on one of the art pieces. But halfway up I lost my nerve and climbed back down.
I danced with a woman on acid for about 15 minutes. It was sensual but not sexual.
There was a mighty mechanical dragon with wings. I don’t think its base was moving, but one can never be certain of remembering details such as that.
I played four games of chess against my neighbor in the RV, when conditions were so hot as to discourage movement on the playa. It was a fairly even match.
I served as Best Man at a pastafarian (mock) wedding. Very few couples travel the playa with an entire wedding entourage; they must be assembled impromptu.
I got a ride out to 11:55 and 4400′ to help set up a pizza oven. The tales of a Taylor Swift concert in deep playa may be tall tales, but the free pizza is very real.
I went to Costco Soulmate Trading Company, but did not go through their rigorous process. They said it could take 90 minutes for screening, plus days for a match. And my impromptu partner (another straight male) was less interested in the wait than I.
<red> it was less that I wasn’t truly interested in a soul mate, and more of fear of whom they might pair me with. I did not meet any of the ghosts of my past on the playa. (This is a good thing.)
I heard one story at Centre Camp, told by an ~55 year old man with a New York accent. Paraphrased:
<<< a couple were berating a ticket agent for not re-opening the gate after boarding for a plane had closed. after a few minutes of this, he walked over, said she was doing a great job. he pulled out two $50 bills and asked if he could give her a tip! she said she didn’t know, it was her first week. so she called her supervisor, who came over and informed the crowd that, no, airline gate agents are not allowed to accept tips. >>>
There was the constant drone of the lifeguard tower across the street from my tent. With a big sign “NO SEX ON THE TOWER / without lifeguard supervision” on the tower. And a man with a megaphone whose favorite schtick was “come back and have sex on the tower while I watch”.
The only burn I saw in full-force this year was the Man burn. One of the unique advantages of being in an alkali wasteland is that large burning objects are not going to catch anything else on fire. Most photography equipment cannot capture the imagery, and none of it can capture the heat.
and there was the Eureka moment. but that will come at the end.
More in the scrollback.
On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 9:48 AM <LONDON> wrote:
16/17 – kill your darlings
in addition to the color correction, certain trimmings will occur.
On Sat, Sep 9, 2023 at 2:20 PM <LONDON> wrote:
15/17 – not like an ogre.
nothing inline in this message. it is getting to be a bit much
<frozen> this is my place to be a bit much.
<xantham> how many levels of nesting should there be in an email? enough to reach from the headlines to the footnotes.
the topic was Burning Man. also known as “That Thing in the Desert”.
the headline is always the art. and the burns.
due to the rain, one would have only seen one burn unless you stayed through Monday night.
and even though i did stay, i was asleep in my car before the second burn of Monday night, scheduled for around 2359.
there are also art cars. during the day, they are either “funny looking cars” or “car-sized speaker systems”.
at night they are glorious. in a way that this text narrative cannot quite convey.
if you are looking for a photo gallery …
<blue> hopefully a link will show up in email 17.
<green> a link to USA Today. There will be better collections, but they may not be published yet. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/07/burning-man-2023-festival-art-photos/70783798007/
there are also the various experiences. every placed camp is expected to do something.
if you have enough artists / art cars in your camp, the area near your tents/RVs might not have anything. but even this is minimal.
of course the most common choice is “bar”. it is simple, and it is used for a reason.
there are also “danceclub” style locations. and … i am way too uncool for those.
also a lot of free food. pancakes, cheese, bacon.
and then there is the battle for survival.
if one spends enough time in an RV, survival isn’t that hard. tape over the windows and you are fine.
if one is in a tent, it is more of a battle. the Heat can kill you or destroy your items. the Cold can kill you or destroy your items. the Wind can kill you or destroy your items. the Rain can kill you or destroy your items.
my feet are still suffering. The little toe feels better with a “corn cushion” on it.
i will presumably not be doing a half-marathon 8 days hence. the 5K race is still a possibility. i will see how my feet are tomorrow.
the Media utterly failed at the job of covering Burning Man.
on the playa, there was BMIR 94.5 .
and … their coverage was awful. but that is to be expected. Burning Man is filled with many of the best and brightest (and most prepared at off-grid survival) people on earth … but none of them want to work at a radio station.
also: the radio station repeatedly emphasized “Gate is closed”. which, technically, only prevents people from entering Black Rock City. the Burning Man Organization can’t ban you from leaving.
the Federal Rangers can ban you from leaving. there were a few short windows where i heard they were threatening to arrest people. but, apart from a short window on Friday afternoon, the conditions were not bad enough that they would resort to such measures.
<red> after all, nobody wants to hassle with arrests, and everybody wants people to leave as quickly as humanly possible. possibly “$1100 fine” was more likely to be realistic.
and, for about 48 hours, if you didn’t have a 4WD vehicle, the playa would stop you from leaving.
the situation was complicated, and information dissemination comes from rumors when ubiquitous internet connections are not available.
i heard that BxB (Burner Express Bus) was running on Sunday, but you would have to walk from the terminal at 600&K all the way to State Road 32. (It is 2-3 miles)
by Monday morning, I was openly telling people “the Gate is open, they just aren’t saying it on the radio yet because they don’t want to overflow the Exodus capacity”.
the people who know what they are doing (and have work on Tuesday) could leave. the people who don’t know what they are doing, and expect to hear the full dope on the radio, could not leave.
the Misinformation off the playa was worse. the game on TSFKAT was “ebola outbreak”.
according to my mother, the likes of CNN were desperate for people to support their “this is Fyre Festival 2” narrative. but the people they actually talked to on-site were all “everything is fine”.
and, to repeat myself, the overall weather over the week was well within the expectations of normal for Burning Man. the conditions at Burning Man are always awful. it will be brutally hot. it will be cold. the wind will destroy your tent. i got struck by lightning once. it will be terrible in some new way you don’t expect.
also, everybody in the Media hates burning man. nobody can agree on why it is bad.
sparkle ponies and billionaires are popular targets.
also “it’s bad for the environment”. which is squarely bullshit.
<red> there is a phenomenon where anybody who tries to combat a problem will get called out for their inability to solve it completely.
yes, there are generators at Burning Man … but there are coal power plants outside Burning Man.
only the people who are careful to note what they use get shit-on for consuming electricity.
On Sat, Sep 9, 2023 at 11:54 AM <LONDON> wrote:
14/17 – like an onion.
<yellow> or an ogre
On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 8:16 PM <LONDON> wrote:
did you know that there is a New Jersey?
<green> the gaps and short-emails make reading the interleaved content below much more feasible.
On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 3:57 PM <LONDON> wrote:
12/17. a man, frozen in spacetime, attempting to scream the forbidden word: em-bar-go
they talk about what happens when material passes through an event horizon.
the standard approach uses a coordinate-translation, which is well and good if you are observing some other spacetime. i don’t believe in it. the system simply freezes in place.
(short, to clear the scrollback)
On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 3:20 PM <LONDON> wrote:
11/17
inline corrections.
On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 12:21 PM <LONDON> wrote:
10/17 – blindfold time
<green> As an introduction, the emails have so many inserts you will find there are effectively two dimensions of time when reading. One that goes forwards, and one that goes backwards.
my eyes and my feet are worse this morning. also, a general hangover.
i must note that both “eye issues” and “feet issues” can be symptoms of diabetes. or, other circulatory disorders.
<yellow> (deadpan) those are also possible symptoms of “walking 15+ miles per day at Burning Man”.
<red> Burning Man is a place where things like “strip naked for a half hour to be a conscripted bartender” can almost fall out of ones’ short-term memory for simply not being interesting enough.
And it is so quiet here at home now. Burning Man never goes quiet. you can hear sound camps going all night, through sunrise.
and in the car the sound of the engine (mine or others) is omnipresent.
so today it is quiet.
one blindfold story. worth the price of admission.
so my father and I both hated Trump, in our own ways.
He put in for “phased retirement” (that is, a one-semester teaching load) the day Trump left office.
And he died a week after.
This was my first time to Burning Man after he died. And I brought a photo-book for the Temple.
((( every year there is a different Theme for the temple. but that is just for show. it is always a temple of mourning. )))
I made three trips out to the temple.
The first was in the heat of the day of sunday afternoon. I walked, wearing nothing but spandex underwear and shoes, and carrying nothing but the book, out from 345&G to the temple (at 12:00 and Esp).
and it was closed. this was no great surprise. The Temple is rarely done on time, and after losing two days of Build Week to the hurricane it was to be expected.
so i walked back.
the second trip was on Tuesday, i think. it was as expected. but early; there were only a few memorial posters set up. I left the book.
The third trip was Sunday afternoon. The number of memorials had increased dramatically since Tuesday.
The temple was overflowing.
And it started to rain.
apparently the LORD was crying too.
i could not stay there for long. so i walked away.
“You cannot live in fear”. – attribution unknown.
except that isn’t entirely true. you can live in fear. but most of the time, most people shouldn’t.
anyhow, it was a mistake to go to the 9:00 side rather than immediately beelining back to my car on the site of rain.
but it was the third day of rain. any hope of keeping the roads in pristine condition had evaporated.
you cannot live in fear.
but, when it rains *again* (probably the fifth or sixth separate rain event) and one has to shelter-in-place for 2 hours hoping for dryness while the people around you get on with strike (strike being the term for “striking a camp”, that is, disassembling everything you build a week earlier).
it was emptiness. sometimes, life goes on.
life goes on.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 11:31 PM <LONDON> wrote:
<red+mogue> well, if you have already met Mr. Ramaswamy, that certainly isn’t 我的 fault …
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 11:01 PM <LONDON> wrote:
we must take breaks.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 9:01 PM <LONDON> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 8:15 PM <LONDON> wrote:
we must imagine Sispyhus happy.
more inline.
<xantham> it’s like skiing, only fraught with splices!
Reality exists where we choose for it to exist. The rest of the time, there is merely moopy playa.
So << playa >> is a term-of-art from geology.
The word << moop >>, on the other hand, is a pure Burning Man-ism.
<xantham> can we call it cultural engineering?
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 8:04 PM <LONDON> wrote:
as we were.
I did not have a bicycle for spiritual reasons. I will say no more On The Record.
10 years ago I didn’t have a bicycle, and it was wonderful. (( and, yes, not having a 5-gallon-bucket for the emergency toilet was a mistake i will never make again ))
it was, of course, fine. i like the 15+ miles per day of walking. i use a pint of vinegar over the course of the week to wash my feet and shoes.
The punchline is that, after the rains started on Friday, everyone was without the ability to use a bicycle for the remainder of the weekend.
<?(pop)?> that is, not having a bicycle was fine. not having the 5-gallon bucket was a major inconvenience.
<?(pop)?> a learning: one is supposed to put the plastic bag in the 5-gallon bucket. this makes it easier to clean up.<red> half of dealing with an emergency is minimizing the clean-up time.
only my pride was injured.
other items i did/did not bring:
<xantham> other than the inconvenience with the toilet, i had everything i wanted and more.
I have enough food that, if there were a teleporter from Reno to Chicago, I could be leaving tonight.
“tonight” is an unclear date reference. Probably Thursday. I left Tuesday morning, and would have stayed at least one extra day were it not for the extremely long drive home.
<red> could I drive 4 hours after dark? my nightvision is worse than it was years ago. I can barely see after dark. It is the contrast that is the issue; outside of the brightly-lit areas my vision is much worse than it used to be.
2023 would have been the Year of Discordia. But *that seems to have fallen out of the Secondary Conscious.
some things i brought but did not need:
the occasion for bringing out a colored lightbulb did not arise.
It would have been more likely to arise if I had had a lightsocket with me that didn’t take a standard household electrical connection.
the “helmet that didn’t fit me well but went with the suit-of-armor costume i brought” was useful in one conversation. it was not worth the space in the car.
neither soy sauce nor margarita mix turned out to be useful. in other situations, perhaps.
the Nutella was a hit for an “awful waffles” event.
It was for a camp with several people I used to know.
<yellow> (Mitch Hedberg) I used to take drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
i think somebody at that camp got a copy of Unsong, but i cannot know for sure. i do know for sure that somebody got the 100-year-old physics textbook.
Unsong is the Scott Alexander … 什么说有很多的LETTERS … epistolary where instead of landing on the moon, humans crash into the dome of heaven that surrounds our fragile blue marble.
So Unsong was written as a serial. This was a more common thing in the 19th century than today. I write in epistolary, which is a fancy word for “a series of letters”.
<frozen> <<< What makes a thing valuable?
Is it valuable because it is old? Because it is useful? Which is more valuable, gold or bread?
(short pause)
As expected, nobody wanted the bottle of Jack Daniels’. Somebody did take the card for it. And it was useful to have on-hand as a possible bribe for the sewage services drivers. >>><red> to emphasize what i have said before: Burning Man is a place where the price of alcohol becomes negative.
I had 8 green cards.
The green cards were:
GIFT: Linear Library. 9 books for gifting.GIFT: Entertainment. 8 items for gifting.
GIFT: EL Wire. 6 kits, batteries included.
GIFT: Magnets. 2 items for gifting.
GIFT: Speaker. The jambucket-sized radio+bluetooth speaker.
GIFT: Stone Soup. 5 cans of vegetables, ramen noodles, black pepper, and hotsauce.
GIFT: Jack Daniels. 750mL of Old No.7 Brand Tennessee Whiskey.
VISION: Shimek National Forest. Establish a 100 sqmi (64000 acre) national forest in Southeastern Iowa on reclaimed farmland.
<anti-xantham> is this all a game to you?
<mogue> yes. also no.The other items all went.
Well, mostly. The person who wanted the cello strings was half-a-mile away from my tent, and I wasn’t carrying them with me.
A useful wakeup call. I gave away some D&D dice (d 4,6,8,10,12,20,100) later that I forgot I had with me.
The monkey hut next to me took “Stone Soup”. But what they needed was the radio. After two days of lending them my portable radio, I gave them the Jambucket-sized radio to use so I could take my (small) radio back.
We maintain an aura of uncertainty.
<green> What an aura is remains uncertain. But in a sense of “sit back, your children are going to enjoy the ride”
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 7:47 PM <LONDON> wrote:
What happened at Burning Man 2023?
I cannot tell my personal journey without wearing a blindfold. That will probably come up again later.
“will probably” means “definitely will, but I seem to have misplaced my compass” …
<blue> “will probably” now means “already has, earlier in the manuscript”.
As far as the matter of the rain:
Around Friday afternoon, it started raining.
The conditions regarding rain on the playa are “Shelter in place”.
In 2014 we were building the camp and it started raining and lightning struck the lightning rod tower (which might have been a radio antenna) in the camp across the street.
We immediately … got … in the … cars …
This is for 几个 reasons.
I don’t think the human mind can handle “Chinese-character-based mixed number ideograms”. jǐ gè means “several”. That is, more than two. Which means, I don’t want to use the colloquial “on the other hand” expression.
<green> but I want to create a character for the number “either exactly 3 or exactly 4”. possibly borrowing some character like 匹 pǐ (which is the measure-word for horses)
1) there is a risk of lightning. if you are in open playa, you may get hit by lightning and die.
in one of those stories that I will repeat for emphasis, in 2014 we were building the camp and it started raining and lightning struck the lightning rod tower (which might have been a radio antenna) in the camp across the street.
we all felt the shock.
and immediately shouted “get the fuck in the cars!”
<red> are you going to tell them about the tires?
Everybody always says that cars are safe during the rain because of the tires.
But Burning Man is not the place to explain Faraday cages.
2) <<< during normal conditions, playa is a wonderful surface. as smooth as concrete, as hard as concrete when walking or driving, but pierced by nails with ease.
during a rainstorm, playa turns to quicksand. One sinks into the mud with every step.
One can progrèss, but every step is slow and difficult. Neither running nor fastwalking are possible. >>><green> The accent in progrèss is to denote an emphasis on the second syllable.
There are two reasons not to walk on playa in wet conditions.
The first is that it will be difficult; your shoes will become caked in playa-mud and may break, you will struggle with every step, etc.
The second is the obligation to minimize disturbances to the natural playa surface.
By the third day of rain, the roads in the city were so bad that additional walking could not make them worse. This changes the equation regarding “when it starts raining, get in the cars and do not leave“.
Regarding vehicle traffic: <<< Bicycles cannot operate unless they have mud tires.
Four Wheel Drive automobile vehicles are generally able to progress on the terrain with some difficulty. RVs and passenger vehicles are likely to become stuck in the mud, unable to move. >>>3) When you are at Burning Man, they tell you to “shelter in place” because there is an obligation to leave the surface as pristine as possible and any amount of movement multiplied by 75000 is too much.
The prevailing attitude towards “leave no trace behind” is militant.
So one gets in the car for several hours. It is what it is.
The conditions at Burning Man are always awful.
To translate: the conditions this year were *well* within the expectations for “conditions at Burning Man”.
This is why it is so hard to get tickets.
If it were easy to get tickets to Burning Man, too many stupid people would show up. Also, there is the physical cap on traffic due to the stop-sign on 447 in Nixon.
The rainbow at the end of the day was spectacular.
I am not going to inline-include my video of it here.
I did have to break out the emergency toilet. Which was not a 5-gallon bucket, but a 2-gallon bedpan. Because I didn’t think I would need it.
This is one of the downsides of following existence proofs.
It did work to spec.
Minimalism has its downsides. Next time I will take the bucket.
I also did not have a bicycle.
To repeat: unless you are on a specific spiritual quest that involves “going to Burning Man without a bicycle”, do not do this. It is stupid and will make you unhappy for no reason. Also, it will make your feet sore and your back sore.
Or it will make you look doubleplusuncool.
Obviously not having a bicycle at Burning Man is an enormous inconvenience, and nobody should ever do so. If you are driving your art car all night: you still need a bicycle. If you have an electric unicycle (or skateboard) … you might be fine.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 7:35 PM <LONDON> wrote:
Wikipedia has coverage of the news coverage of the 2023 Burning Man event, which is very helpful for me.
We enter the discussion in medias res (it is dispatch 3/17; messages 2 through 7 are all from Thursday evening). The first half of the Wikipedia discussion comes after the second half.
oh, right. i have to track down all the news sources people used.
it rained at Burning Man! did you hear?
<?(default)?> burning man is notorious for misinformation. for years, the rumor was always that Daft Punk was going to play at the trash fence.
<green> the trash fence is the boundary of burning man. it is the most inconvenient part of the city.
<!green> we note that << <?(default)?> >> should be parsed as <???>, where the second question-mark is denoted as (default). please consult local listings for details.
<?(default)?> but Daft Punk is retired now. also, I had never heard of them apart from this joke. so, this year, it was Taylor Swift performing at the trash fence.
<yellow> (deadpan) her show was canceled because of the rain.
There is a limit to what the human mind can believe. The conditions on Friday night were so incompatible to “traveling 1 mile” that not even fake Taylor Swift could do it.
<?(default)?> We note that to say “the Rumor is that Taylor Swift will be playing at the trash fence” is true, while “Taylor Swift will be playing at the trash fence” is false. And, also, that “whether or not the sentence exists at a time before-or-after the unexpected rainstorm started” is immaterial to the logical construction.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 7:30 PM <LONDON> wrote:
2/17
i check a major news outlet known by the letters of WP: Wikipedia.
They have an article on [[Burning Man 2023]]. It is just about the weather. Which is also discussed at [[September 2023 southwestern U.S. floods]].
They should merge the articles.
Wikipedia is not an information hub.
Which, if I want to build an information hub, is a good thing. Because I would not be a competitor.
Very roughly: taking the ten contemporaneous off-site news articles about Burning Man 2023 and summarizing them will give an article that is an excellent “summary of contemporaneous off-site news coverage”, but that does nothing towards describing what actually happened at the event.
In this sense, “verifiability not truth” demonstrates its futility. It is an Orwell-esque separation of the narrative from any sense of reality. The reasons people in the media write “Burning Man is a disaster” have nothing to do with anything that happened at Burning Man.
One of the questions on the test is: what are primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.
<mogue> what is the test? we might find out.
The test is a list of a few-hundred concepts that people of a certain gravitas should know. In high school, when you take a test, it is generally a representative sample of the material you are supposed to learn. It is too expensive to ask about everything.
For the test, we run through the entire battery. It isn’t that long. With a mobile app, we can do adaptive question-selection.
soon, i will write are “the list of things I took to Burning Man that worked / didn’t work”
next year I would take 10 radios.
<red> that is a joke. I’m not going back for a decade.
It is somewhat likely that my Christmas Gift this year will be a radio. I can’t order it now, because one of my cellphones broke in the desert.
<green> it was already old. And the screen “came off”. Hopefully it can be repaired. Or else substituted onto my third phone.
<red> it’s not hoarding if you have practical uses for all the phones.
<green> the discussion of “items I did/did not bring” is closer to the top of this manuscript. whether that is before or after this point is a question left for the reader.
there is the topic of “loophole” edibles.
The 2018 farm bill legalized the growth of strains of the hemp plant which had less than 0.3% THC by weight.
This has been interpreted to allow for marijuana edibles at that concentration.
According to the recent Axios coverage (reference in heaven above), the state of Iowa explicitly allows this.
(my understanding is that the federal legalization is a “loophole”. a deliberate misreading of the intent of the bill)
<green> this is not to be construed as a confession of committing any federal crime.
<violet> song cue: Sunglasses at Night, Corey Hart
https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2023/08/14/the-despensary-second-thc-cbd-ingersoll-desmoines
for the record: off the record: Heat Waves are bringing me down …
<blue> the thing about the Frozen register is that the English language is a time-dependent predicate. What words mean changes depending on the year. And … well, if we could see the future, we certainly wouldn’t tell you about it.
On Wed, Sep 6, 2023 at 12:53 AM <LONDON> wrote:
(bcc diana: i expect to spare your inbox the various drafts and other madness. the highlights should be in the (public) Newslettr on Friday.)
<yellow> (Robert Frost) the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray
<green> that is “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley” in the original Scots English.
I don’t want to convey meaning in “did I bother to add the color for this line”. But there is some meaning there, at least in the partials.
One cannot truly erase every tire rut. (also: this last/first email is from Tuesday night.)
1/17
location: West Wendover, Nevada.
date: apparently still September 5. the town operates on Mountain Time. but my phone doesn’t seem to have noticed.
after fog and heat and rain on my drive out west, the burn was delayed two nights.
<mogue> it would be a bit much to blame that on my presence. but, this is my place to be a bit much.
<gray> This is my place to be a bit much.
This is my place to be a bit much.
it is unfortunate that you missed it. by Monday, the Moon did not rise until the Man had collapsed into a pile of burning embers (and timbers)
《绿》是啊。这是我的地方可以是一点儿太多了。
<green> the translation is: << <green> yes. this is my place to be a bit much. >>’
<green> yes. this is my place to be a bit much.
<anti-orange> nobody could have expected rain
<orange> well, actually, my mother pointed out that rain was in the forecast 8 days before it happened.
some of the curses on me were lifted. others were not.
i burnt 不能乘坐飞机 towards the entire festival on Saturday, the (scheduled) day of the burn. it’s not like anybody was flying anyway.
except Diplo, who seems to have done so without any harm.
When watching the weather, there is a balance between “just wait it out” and “okay now you can run 2 hours to the exit”. And, earlier in the week, “why you wanna leave bro?”
perhaps he has curse-resistance.
<xantham> the wonderful thing about kayfabe is that it (often erroneously) proves things through the law of the excluded middle. either this crazy story holds (and X is true) or the story doesn’t hold (and X is also true). eppur si muove.
perhaps the fact that it rained at all meant the card was effective. after all, i wrote all the cards before I left Iowa.
不能乘坐飞机 was one of the red cards.
Another red card was: Dietary Law. Do not eat of the five forbidden species: 牛 猪 猫 马 狗.
A third red card was: Geas. Write a Wikipedia article on the topic of [[Yuan Shikai dollar]].
on a more intuitive level, it does feel like some of the curses on me have been lifted. the “do not enter the State of California” one has not lifted in the slightest. but most of the other curses feel lighter, or possibly completely gone.
the Eureka moment.
apparently, rainbows are polarized. i was staring at one (trying to see how much the human visual system can perceive xantham and mogue), put on sunglasses, turned my head, and noticed that it disappeared.
<violet> yes, rainbows at That Thing in the Desert. a place notorious for not getting rain.
this is not a novel discovery, but Archimedes in the bathtub probably was not either. it is certainly not common knowledge. when I demonstrated this to a dozen people, a few realized what was happening after they saw it, but nobody knew it was going to happen.
chatGPT doesn’t seem to know what is going on. because it’s not like it has direct experience with the situation.
<yellow> (in the voice of Ada Lovelace) it only knows what we have told it
I do like this analogy. But it has a shelf-life.
what is the difference between cultivating a Eureka moment, and actually discovering something?
And this brings us to the end of the email. You’ve been a lovely audience, thank you and good night.
the Gospel According to Shragafeivel 