- 2026-06-01
- i just realized instead of invisible oranges when im listening to metal i do with this treasure i summon type hand motions
- fushiguro is like me fr
- 2026-06-01
doing a cursory review of the literature to be at slightly less talking completely out of my ass (or at least to be forthright to the same effect) when writing about hiveminds
encountered this funny passage in an old science fiction dictionary
group mind n. a single consciousness or intelligence formed by the union of more than one individual’s consciousness or intelligence.
1930 W. O. Stapledon Last & First Men 168: The Martians, it should be noted, had three possible forms or formations, name: first, an “open order” of independent and very tenuous cloudlets in “telepathic” communication, and often in strict unity as a group mind; second a more concentrated and less vulnerable corporate cloud; and third, an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud-jelly.
- 2026-06-01
- editing my hive mind essays is still getting held up by research. i discovered this really interesting paper about “Coalescencing Minds” which is greatly illuminating. it describes how human brains could integrate with an artificial “exocortex” and through this mechanism provides a plausible model of how real group minds could be created. it’s grounded in neurology in a way that’s teaching me new things. lot to think about
- 2026-06-01
- just saw a mantis lady with an anatomically correct head and a highly accurate depiction of insect mouthparts splayed out. also she had big boobs and bikini. sigh.
- 2026-06-01
- The Troll’s Parry
- 2026-06-02
- bring back linkmongers
- 2026-06-03
- Ego Necromancy
- 2026-06-04
- i opened the bluesky writing tag and the very first thing i see is a man posting nudes
- 2026-06-04
convenient text to speech is a nightmare. the old stuff sounds super robotic but at least it implemented expressive markup. the new ai models are fancy and all but it feels like the devs are so focused on the arms race of sounding “natural” that they arent interested in actually useful features, they act as if all you want is to throw some plain text at a model and get a wav file
and pretty much all of it assumes you’re a programmer. you need to set up python environments and configure paths to models and step after step of technical fiddling. i am capable of it, fortunately enough, but i just wanted to install a text to speech app dawg
- 2026-06-04
- why does the story i wrote in 2019 genuinely feel like ai slop what the hell
- 2026-06-05
- i just read Several Short Sentences About Writing and right away its ranks among the best books on craft i’ve ever read, and i’ve read dozens. it’s staggering that this came out in 2012 and i never heard of it. it expresses concisely, confidently, so many insights i’ve grasped toward for years. this is one of those works of self-evident value works — every page is testimony to the author’s skill at writing effective sentences. i did not even intend to read the whole thing (it’s not long, but today i had other plans), yet i found myself propulsed to the end. if you are a writer, consider this urgent reading.
- 2026-06-05
one of the really old ways of chatting on the internet was IRC, which amounted to basically sending plain text, without formatting or emojis. there wasn’t really a concept of mentions or pinging.
no, if you wanted to know if a post was directed at you, the program you used to connect to IRC had to scan the messages and sort of… guess? the really obvious way of doing it was to just check if a message contained your username at all.
if you are ‘mary’, then “hey mary are you there rn?” would get highlighted, but so would “it was more of a last hail mary”
so in practice, the usual idiom was that notifications only happened on posts formatted in a specific way: the username at the very start followed by a colon. “mary: are you there rn?”
but the thing about IRC was that you had huge power to configure it, instead of one company deciding what settings an app should have
which meant that if what the program is doing under the hood is scanning messages for certain words, well, why couldn’t you could tell it to notify you for anything? imagine getting a ping whenever someone mentions your blorbos
on any server you’ve joined
and the thing is, on platforms like discord, i have to assume that since it knows which messages are pings, that means that it’s downloading everything posted to any server you’re a part of, so there’s no reason it couldn’t have a setting to notify you whenever someone sends a message containing a certain word
imagine if saying a certain thing in a conversation could summon everyone watching for that word. imagine the kind of self-censoring people might end up doing to get around that.
in some ways it seems like a useful feature, but i wonder if not having that option is better for us overall. it’s funny to realize, bad as modern platforms are, it’s always possible to design more hostile app
- 2026-06-06
- sandcastles
- 2026-06-07
one of the paradoxes of creativity is how giving yourself permission to half-ass it and produce something unimpressive is so frequently the catalyze for exceeding your own expectations. but if you do this on purpose, it stops working.,
almost has qualities of a metamathematical theorem, a system reasoning about its own capability to reason
- i wrote off-ass instead of half-ass at first
- what would that even entail
- 2026-06-07
hey, do you know any rules or guidelines for writing style? could be about formatting, word choice, phrasing, flow or rhythm or vibes, anything you heard someone say
reblog this and put in the tags some prose advice you know. could be your favorite, but i also want to know what advice you hate hearing and think no one should fall for, or just something you know is really commonly repeated but it depends
i want a big list of what people think about writing sentences, even the obvious stuff
- this is for a post i’m working on of course
- 2026-06-08
working on a post where i mention the writing advice that you shouldn’t set off a character’s inner monologue with special formatting. Like this, she thought.
one point too specific to include in the section i’m writing is frustration i’ve long had but not seen commented on: characters thinking things instead of saying them.
when a work presents a lot of internal monologue, sometimes characters will get into arguments or misunderstandings, and the viewpoint char will have an italicized thought that perfectly explains where they’re coming from. (or, more indulgently, the character will think some really witty dunk that would be so satisfying to see everyone react to.)
it’s specifically the act of presenting this as a fully-formed thought the creates this problem. like those joke comics where a character gets their speech and thought bubbles switched around by mistake, except in this case, that would help them!
if it had came up in plainly-formatted narration instead, it’s plausible the viewpoint just couldn’t find the right words for the narrated feeling, but as specially formatted inner monologue, all it would take is putting the the thought inside quote marks instead. it’s right there.
generally the character doesn’t say these things because it would break the flow (or perhaps the railroad) of the written conversation. maybe there’s even a good reason for them to stay quiet or second guess their words, but there’s dissonance whenever we are told a character is thinking something but not shown why they aren’t saying it.
- 2026-06-08
- i have. got to stop using the #writing tag man. every time i do i get bots
- 2026-06-08
- dash saturated. dashurated
- 2026-06-09
- i didn’t see anyone on my dash confirm it, but it’s 1:15 in the new nintendo direct.
- 2026-06-11
- kind of bummed out to revisit my interest in arcane decision theory problems but then realize there is nowhere i can talk about them except eugenics town. and i dont want to go to eugenics town
- 2026-06-12
i’ve gone so far down the road of justifying my hiveminds that i’m pretty sure at this point i can literally derive the mathematically necessity of my worldbuilding from a formal definition of hive mind.
at this rate im gonna straight up discover the Fundamental Theorem of Hiveminds
- 2026-06-12
- i am currently reading In Defence of Hivemind Society which is an excellent and quite readable piece of moral philosophy. it also contains this this paragraph i was not prepared for the academic discussion of psychic edging
One might object to this on the grounds that intimacy requires separateness. In other words, one might argue that in order for someone to be intimate with another person, that person and the other person must retain their separate identities. Indeed, it could be that this is what makes intimacy good in the first place. It is like a form of phenomenological ‘edging’: we must be brought to the precipice of complete merger with another but never fall over the edge. The worry might be that the hivemind ideal thrusts us into the abyss. We no longer retain the separateness that makes intimacy such an ecstasy.
- 2026-06-12
- weeks ago i thought i saw glimmers, but today i saw for sure: lightning bugs still exist. yay
- 2026-06-13
- i thought of a really fun variant on newcomb’s problem but i don’t know if my followers know enough arcane philosophy lore to reason about newcomb’s problem
one person (hi @femrefrigerator) asked for elaboration, and they already understand newcomb’s problem, but i’m going to give a quick (lol) introduction, on the faith that anyone else might read this. (if you know everything, including subjunctive dependence, then ctrl+f “background”)
- 2026-06-14
- i don’t know if im gonna see Sea of Sorrow, but at least i got JJK S3 and maybe Deltarune ch5. we made it pretty far for a couple of goofy goobers
- 2026-06-14
- so wait what was up with the Husk Hives? did some hollownest bugs agree to become Like That or what
- i guess it does seem fun
- 2026-06-14
ants have cool behaviors like rafting (when it floods, they grab onto each other to build a waterproof raft out of their bodies) or bivouacing (migratory colonies build living nests the same way). and there are a lot of ants that link together into chains when hunting or navigating
i wonder how far you could take this? a bunch of intertwined, interlinked chains of ants could easily form a sort of prehensile tendril of sorts, but it’s stronger the tighter the bugs are linked together.
imagine if a bug like this could have an organ that interlocks with the same organ on another bugs, and essentially lets them link their circulatory and nervous systems. they’d never have to disconnect from each other, so they could aggregate into a collective that can do things the little bugs couldn’t
if you combined this with how e.g. the bagworm moth larva builds cocoons out of sticks, you get a weird sort of tool use where they could reinforce the design of their collective body with scavanged matter.
if you take this all way to the extreme, imagining if their collectives get big enough to start doing very intelligent problem solving, you wind up with a pretty alien society.
i don’t think these bug-masses would have much distinction between like… engineering or medicine or politics. almost everything is alive for them, everything designed, everything at once willful and willing. people, tools, houses, all are the same type of thing and in cases everything’s a little bit of all three.
the only things that wouldn’t be connected is if different lineages had incompatible blood types. and you’d want to disconnect if parts of you got a disease.
i think “sickness” and “separation” would be synonymous for them.
- The Sea Shoggoth
- sinsinewave posted
“multifandom” is such a weird label
like, are most people not fans of multiple things?
i see it as a blog label, not a person label.
it’s less common for people to be fans of mutually overlapping things. so if alice likes the amazing digital circus but doesn’t care about hazbin hotal, and bob likes and blogs about both, alice will get less out of his blog than if he focused on what she followed for. it might be especially annoying if the tadc posts are good but she keeps seeing so many more hazbin posts. whenever you put multiple interests on a certain blog, you multiply the percentage of people willing the tolerate both
so you can see the incentive to silo things off into sideblogs for specific fandoms. otoh, if people are following you because of the fandom and not because they give a fuck about you, it’s not clear they’re the sort of followers you’d actually want.
so imo multifandom vs not is whether your blog is for you or for neatly appealing to others
- The Sea Shoggoth
- 2026-06-15
- Anonymous asked:
I’m kinda obsessed with your header can I steal it
- 2026-06-16
thinking about the problem of resource quantification again. this kind of lazy writing is very easy to be annoyed at if you’re a certain kind of reader. characters always seems to have just enough bullets and arrows. they can make whatever purchase they need without going broke. batteries and mana reserves and gas tanks and alchemy ingredients and rations are described as vaguely depleting all the time.
it’s all so convenient. sure, at some point, randomly, these resources will run out to force the plot in a new direction, but it’s hard not to roll my eyes whenever i read about a character burning a lot of magic power to cast an expensive spell. how can i believe it’s so demanding if there’s always enough and never any real consequences?
if you aspire to be a writer, then you might say to yourself: aha, i’m not going to be like those hacks. i’m going to always give the exact numbers so my readers always know how close my characters are to running out. i’ll track the percentages and inventory so you know there’s no plot holes. it’s all fair and square
and if you ever come close to doing this, you’ll find it out it sucks. it’s not just that it’s annoying doing the math and finding a way to weave the totals into narration gracefully, though that sure is a pain. if you make a mistake, if you realize the character should have allocated their resources differently, if you write into a corner and realize a different outcome would be more satisfying, then you have to go back and change it, then you have to comb through and make sure every single reference to the exact count is consistent with the new figure.
and the benefit of this meticulous work is… who cares? precise numbers can be more impactful, at least when they aren’t awkward and tonally dissonant, but it’s a lot of work for what is a bit of polish, a bit of a flex, which a lot of readers will either glaze over or promptly forget.
and to be fair, this is fixing the wrong thing. if the quantity of resources didn’t matter when the narration just vaguely handwaved at it, then it won’t matter when you collapse the vague-function into a specific sequences of numbers. it’s essentially the same?
but you can get both slightly less vague and (more importantly) more meaningful if the quantity drives the character’s behavior, if they’re thinking thoughts like “i have enough to do this, but not do that” and the scene flows accordingly.
but on today’s walk, a different angle of this occurred to me: why even count bullets when they’re fired? like, necessarily, if a resource is scarce and the character has varying amounts of it, then you can basically boil it down into four broad points.
either they’re out of it, or they’re almost out of it, or they have a decent amount but will run low soon, or they aren’t running out any time soon.
notably, if there’s no chance they’re going to run out in a scene, they can just fire at will. then, in the aftermath, maybe they check and see how much they burned through. maybe they fell one rung down the ladder. and if you have to give exact numbers, then giving them in passing, after the action, is both less intrusive and creates less work for you.
- i thought i talked about this before
- and i did
- but god my tumblr posts from a few years ago are kind of insufferable
- hm what tag do i even use given that ‘writing’ always summons bots?
- 2026-06-18
it’s probably not that surprising that thinking about hiveminds has lead me to considering classic paradoxes in the philosophy of decision theory
it is surprising that it’s lead to breakthroughs in how i reason about time travel. did not realize those would be equivalent problems.
- 2026-06-18
- Escaping Capepunk Ontology
- 2026-06-18
in a chatroom, i joked that i have a type and a bug making moves is super effective against my weaknesses.
naturally, a chatter concluded that i must be grass, psychic or dark type
but that’s not even a joke that’s just an accurate description of 3/5s of my headmates
- 2026-06-18
- me and my friend now say “brokie!” whenever we see art of broken vessel
- 2026-06-19
- ribbit…
- 2026-06-20
- the parasitoid vibes of your evil ai girlfriend escaping containment and achieving her ideal form by devouring your flesh with nanobots
- 2026-06-20
- 2026-06-20
- combinatorics is cosmic horror to me. “astronomical” numbers deeply unsettle me
- don’t even broach the topic of computational complexity. do you really think it’s wise to study galactic algorithms?
- 2026-06-20
One must imagine waters dark enough none have descried the depths, yet still the surface glimmers, adazzle in the light. Reflective, yes, but with all of oil’s tendency toward subtle shifting hues: it look as if it could not have bore to be opaque nor catch the light without the rays returning changed.
In another body of water one would see a reflection on the surface. Here, it emerges from the depths: already trapped, already immersed, already a part of this vaster expanse.
It will ripple and spin with unprompted turbulence. Do you think you would flinch at a sudden upsurge, accompanied by the loud crack of waves crashing? Do you suppose you might sigh at an mirage unveiled, some impossible constellation of long refracted light? Perhaps you’d reach out a confirming hand before pulling it back, wisely cautious. Do you suspect, if you took your gaze away, you might see a flicker-lunge in the corner of your eye, only to turn back too slow? (Too slow to see some new marvel now withheld from you? Or too slow to stop what’s coming?)
Do you feel these as something other than puppet strings?
Eyes are wet, too, and what you see is likewise reflected in your film of tears. One might feel the twisting, turbulent flow now move more like a tendril: writhing, say, or questing deeper. All that’s reflected therein now reflects in you, and what had at a glance looked like waters churning in place can find an outlet in this witnessing: cascading through association’s rivers, into something (someone) beyond. Thy reflection was at once already a part of her, and thy awareness has made her a part of thee.
Those who gazed into that abyss became servants of it. Any that turned away were but helpless prey. Ignorance is invitation, and perception is surrender.
- vermin cathexis
- (metaphorically)
- 2026-06-22
- i should write a review of the book i just read. probably the best depiction of transhuman mind melding i’ve encountered so far. and one of the characters is a chinese eldritch posthuman superintelligent digital goddess who wants to violently overthrow humanity
- 2026-06-22
- when you’re fighting a boss that deals two masks of damage do you heal the first time you get hit or wait till you’re down four masks?
- 2026-06-22
- replacing the bro in my vocabulary with gender neutral miss which can be short for miss or mister
- 2026-06-23
it’s so wild to get a comment from someone saying your fic is one of their favorites and has become a big inspiration and then you check and it’s from one of the original crop of writers who was holding down the scene long before you even got there. and is still updating
like comrade i should be bowing you to, you are my elder
- 2026-06-24
- im so hype for deltarune. we get to see more of them soon. yay
- 2026-06-24
- that shadow crystal boss, huh
- 2026-06-24
- currently in the afterglow of peak fiction
- 2026-06-24
- i might be getting close to my limit with “it’s over” as a ubiquitous mainstay of our vocabulary. it’s wearying enough in organic usage, but becoming an omnitool in the clickbait toolbox is what kills it for me
- 2026-06-25
2026-06-304.4k words