i’ve often been frustrated with the common impulse to opt out of discourse by dismissing it as two equal side fighting, it’s nuanced and complicated, both are wrong etc.

most things are more complex than the strawman of either side would contend, but so often it’s not black and white, just ashen and charcoal. extremism and centrism are both symptoms of ignorance.

but reflecting on it even further, i think i have new sympathy for this kind of dismissive equivocation. when a discourse becomes entrenched and feverishly litigated, it’s not that you couldn’t arrive at a final verdict if you investigated and thought about it deeply enough…

…but if you did, what would be the point? too few discourses have stakes. what matter of consequence hinges on you discerning which side is correct and how? learning enough to be confident in a take will just make enemies. it’s lonely being correct.

there are a handful of matters i care about arriving at the truth on. dying on every hill i pass is not for me.

but ultimately, i think a more truthful restatement of “there are good points on both sides” is simply “i don’t care”

i think i finally understand what people mean when they you shouldn’t be rude to strangers. or rather, why you shouldn’t

now, i generally err on the side of being civil. being rude often strikes me as boorish and i don’t find malice interesting. but i always found the manners‍-​nagging of the those who loudly declare that you shouldn’t be rude, you should know better than to treat people that way, a bit obnoxious.

it’s a lowly form of centrism, sure, but while i’d never advocate for being rude, i have a certain kind of thick skin that makes it difficult to sympathize with people who are outraged by rudeness and consider it grounds for refusing to interact with someone.

the other day, someone joined my discord. later on, i complained about a project i’d worked on that day, and they made a comment in response. now, this was not an example of someone being rude to something they didn’t know, their comment was not impolite. but it was something just as bad: i found it annoying.

more specifically, it felt like a slight, it had an implication i resented, and i was ready to give a snide response. then i thought, i double checked what they’d said, and considered. it was entirely possible they they were just being friendly, that what they said was an effort to relate and commiserate, and the implication i found insulting was vapor.

in the end, i ignored it. but the ambiguity here stuck with me.

see, one of the refrains that comes up when bloggers nag you about not being rude to strangers is this idea that you can be jokingly rude your friends, but in public, to a stranger, they don’t know you and that is entirely inappropriate.

(it’s very telling that, immediately after the annoying comment, another user made another comment that could effortlessly be read to have a similar insulting connotation‍ ‍‍—‍ and i reacted with amusement because i like & respect that person.)

one of the reasons i ignored the first user instead of reacting negatively to a post i didn’t appreciate was that i just didn’t know them, and i didn’t want to snap at someone with good intentions.

and that is the difference‍ ‍‍—‍ were a friend to make the exact same post, i would intuit where they’re coming from and what they mean by it. but from someone i just met? should i start a fight or laugh and nod?

contemplating the concept of outlining by enantiodromia.

so often writers complaining that knowing what happens sucks the joy of discovery from writing, and even those who prefer to outline can often find the prospect of turning bullet points to prose something grueling.

turning outline to draft is so often viewed as a process of simple magnification, detailing, the inversion of a summary. you’ve already decided the gist, it just needs to be refined.

i’m repeating myself, but consider this belaboring akin to walking up and down a staircase to find which step creaks and where. see, there’s a lapse in logic here.

a draft is assumed to convey the same thing as the outline, just more precisely, more convincingly, more writerly

why?

there’s something that piques me about doing the opposite. to write a broad outline, then on the next pass, crafting the detailed outline, you instead invert it. rather than refining your initial idea of a scene, contradict something about it. change the location, switch who argues for what, turn a triumph into a disaster

what happens if you approach the outline as a biased, inaccurate recounting of events, and your draft serves to set the record straight?

it occurs to me there’s a certain tension at the core of hard magic

you get different results if you interpret it as meaning magic as a well‍-​behaved object of scientific scrutiny versus magic that acts like a gameplay mechanic. hard magic theory vs hard magic practice?

for instance, a logical outcome of design a scientifically sound theory of magic might lead you to positing a class of magic particles to be channeled into circuit‍-​like sigils which determine the spell cast.

and this feels pretty hard as a magic system! limit sigils to certain materials, lean hard on the spellcasting is programming analogy, treat it all as technology. hell, take reductionism to the limit and specific that all sigil effects must be a pattern of forces exerted on atoms. does it get harder than this?

but like, how hard is it to turn a ‘create campfire’ sigil into a ‘greater fireball’ sigil? ‘close wounds’ is a physical process that can theoretically be specified in terms of moving atoms around, but is this pure theory or tactable in practice‍ ‍‍—‍ are their abstractions for operating on cellular metabolism?

it’s pretty easy to come up with a magic system of this type, where there’s a deeply rational basis for everything that’s possible…

but everything is possible, those fundamental principles aren’t worked out in enough detail to pin down what the average mage is capable of, so the author can introduce whatever sigils are convenient, it’s vague author fiat with extra steps that only partial justify it

(i’m clearing my drafts today, but this looks like an attempt at the same line of though that would birth my reductionism essay[The Binding Vow of Reductionism] several months later)

are we on the same page that “girl who loves to listen to you yap about your special interests <3” is a figment of fantasy? it’s a similar tenor as the submissive’s fantasy of a partner who takes charge and fulfills all your needs without needing you to communicate them or put effort into reciprocate yet never crosses your unspoken boundaries.

it’d be so awesome if it were real, but to expect or be that for someone is just crushing and harmful. don’t try it at home.

i guess it’s good to have a backlash against the widespread implicit belief that rambling at length is always unwelcome and embarrassing, but at this point i think i need to pendulum to swing back toward honesty.

when you yap, you are making an imposition on someone’s time and attention. (at least if they’re actually listening) and i find it downright miserable to have this viral idea that people always love to listen to their friends talk about their ideas, isn’t it all so delightful

meanwhile, i’ve spent years honing my ability to come up with great ideas and deliver them engagingly (and people love my work!) yet i still find supply outstrips demand when it comes to my rambling. maybe, by that same token, i am just the yappings georg and most people talking about their interests aren’t going to worry about hitting the intersocial post limit

(worst of all, i’d now have to worry that anyone who actually would listen to me at such prolix length would deserve equal consideration in return‍ ‍‍—‍ and i don’t know if i can offer them that! which is in part because i’m so desperate to be heard and acknowledged first. it’s a cute little vicious cycle)

overall, i’m just not convinced anyone always loves to hear someone ramble. it’s conditional, everything is, and i would find it more reassuring if that conditionality were explicit.

maybe the way the math checks out is that sure, it’s takes time and energy to listen to someone ramble, but it’s energizing and entertaining and thus a win‍-​win in the end.

but i find the positivity cloying and fake when the reality is people simply do not care as much as they say they do.

i dont know if anyone on tumblr played the “balatro with extra steps” game demo i posted last year, but i started working on it again last week. spent most hours of the last few days programming the next version. i added a bunch of features and polish but i’ve hit a wall where if i want a certain feature to work perfectly, i’m going to have to rethink the whole architecture of the game’s internal state.

or do a ugly hacky half‍-​measure that’s giving me a headache just trying to debug. it’s bad enough that it’s prompting me to give up on the project again

the tragic part is that what i have right now is better the publically playable version, given that the latest release is unbalanced and crashes all the time.

but i wouldn’t feel right calling this 0.4 unless i got items working again, but i don’t want to code a bunch of items if that just creates more work when i inevitably rewrite things down the line

might end up being another L for the good versus the perfect

my issue with metamorphose is that it’s a very muddled ending to the word. fricative consonant, long and weak vowel that really wishes it were stressed, then another fricative (a sibilant). yuck!

it’s not impossible for a word like this to sound good, but imo it needs to be stressed. “rose” is a similar shape no one would call it ugly. ambrose, fibrillose, pantyhose, there are some winners here.

but i think it’s telling that when the emphasis shifts‍ ‍‍—‍ venose, spinose‍ ‍‍—‍ it immediately becomes annoying to me. “verbose” straddles the line, maybe i don’t mind it because it’s so common, but it’s mostly ok i think

(as an experiment, gibbering something like “metamorphalose” sounds like an improvement to me! sadly it’s meaningless)

there’s also the matter of variety. as a root, “metamorph” has an incredibly engaging start, precise rhythm, rather solid consonants, variety of vowels. adding a”‍-​ose” at the end means hitting another “o” and that sounds rather boorish to me.

on the other hand, “‍-​ize” rounds it off with a short, high vowel. it like it, adds a nice bit of emphasis to the end rather than droning out.

it’s interesting to hear that opinions differ, though. i won’t lie or deny an predictable affinity for ‘z’ endings, alas

i think it sucks accessibility‍-​wise that screenshotting text is so ingrained in the internet idiom, but it is unfortunately almost irreplaceable in its rhetorical function. screenshotting a post is the clearest way to indicate that text is from a different source, and there is a unique way in which it renders the surrounding post into commentary on it.

this is quite unlike simply quoting the post, even in an indented blockquote, because conventional quotes still feel as if you are engaging with the text in a, for lack of a better frame, more intimate, direct‍-​contact way. a uniformity of medium would connote that these are the same type of thing; but text vs image creates a sharp divide.

and more crucially, what makes screenshots inaccessible is also what makes them so useful. the image‍-​text is fixed in size rather than scaling to what the user has configured to be readable. this creates two opposite effects.

if the image‍-​text is much larger than the post‍-​text, the screenshot becomes the centerpiece of the post; the commentary is peripheral if not totally redundant, your post is a vector for promulgating the screenshot. see: the onslaught of twitterblueskyreddit reposts, headline cropping, etc.

however if the image text is much smaller, it’s a more polite way to show off a several paragraphs. if i quote paragraphs from an article, it creates these big imposing blocks of text, but a screenshot of those same paragraphs is smaller. you can easily scroll past it, or click to zoom if it piques your interest.

or when it’s still readable at default size, being smaller still efficiently conveys a hierarchy of meaning: the screenshotted text is made to seem farther from the central point of my post than the commentary i have written around it.

ultimately, i would contend that screenshotting text is so prevalent because it’s a style of formatting that html is ill‍-​equipped to provide.

technically, you could replicate the font‍-​scaling and color differences with css, but this is far beyond the limited html subset that social media platform afford us ‍-​ but that still overstates it! because besides tumblr, what means does social media even offer you, besides embedding an image?