New Weird

[Regenbogen]

@Dina

I hope your neighbors who are building things are far away, so their noised do not bother you too much.

I'm afraid not. They are about 3 metres from our house. But their house will be built faster than the others, because they won't build any basement and the walls will be prefabricated ones. Also the builders are very nice people, they always announce when they will be blocking the street. As there is only one way out, it is crucial for us to know when we need to park outside. Not all builders did this and one was even blocking our exit one time. And as they spoke neither German nor English, I needed to show them with gestures that they needed to put their stuff 2 metres further to the right. I had my doubts that they understood, because they just looked at me confused, lol. But 5 minutes later they moved the stuff like I asked them. The block would have lasted for two days.
So I am quite happy with the new ones. I memorised the name and when we build our future shed for the bikes (if we ever do this) I will ask them to do the digging and the concrete.

[Dina]

I am so glad these are good builders. "Mine" seem good people too. When they are working in the backyard I sometimes hear their chat.
I am curious. Do you know what language those other builders spoke?

[Regenbogen]

I guess it could have been Romanian. Did not hear them talking much.
Some firms employ cheap workers from abroad. These workers come, do their job and go home with the money. 

[Dina]

Oh, the fact that they were from abroad and temporal does not surprise me. I expected it. But I was curious about what country they came from. Traditionally in Argentina there are many builders from Paraguay.

We are having a few cold days here, but next week is supposed to be warmer. But this means everyone is having a cold or a sore throat or something. I am mostly fine but no promises for tomorrow, which is forecasted to be much colder.

[BugBear]

@Regenbogen

I understand it through the lens of psychology, and I'm partial to Jung. But I'm very heterodox in my approach. I do use religious and spiritual belief systems as well, but I'm translating them to the modern skeptic paradigm. Religion just being an early form of psychology/sociology, imo.

It works super well.

The branching layout you just gave me is exactly a narrative. You describing the conditions for your if/thens was a branching narrative structure. Choose Your Own Adventure style, with pre-scripted solutions and exceptions.

That's your personal belief system, the how's and why's you do what you do.

If you wrote it all down, which would take you years, I could translate... idk, what do you not believe in. Taoism? I could make Taoism make, like, 85% sense to you. Or whatever else, so long as I've learned that one too.

If someone is completely consumed by a publicly known belief system, like being a super hard-core christian, I can speak their language too. Instead of memes and complex systems causing environmental influences that trigger mental illness, I would use much simpler words like "possession," or "demon." That's what the ancient folks were pointing at when they tried to explain what was going on.

They were wrong about... basically everything? But it is a real thing. Environmental pathology is a hot topic these days. It's just a mouthful in the modern paradigm, which makes it hard to conceptualize and understand. That's the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, if you want a wiki walk that will blow your mind.

If you can just say "demon," and still understand it in perfectly grounded, scientific terms, you can hack Sapir-Whorf. That's my little trick. Hyper-fast contextual reframing that doesn't get shut down by autonomic function, particularly the sympathetic nervous system.

Doing that is why I can do "enlightenment," or Positive Disintegration in modern terms, while staying balanced. Not too lost in the sauce, not overfitting my personal worldview as the only valid interpretation of events. If I lean too hard in one direction, I just reframe and test hypotheses to see what I'm doing wrong, and correct that way.

I'm drawing a *ton* from the philosophy around Artificial Intelligence to do that. It's been a personal fascination of mine since I was a teenager, and I'm in my 30s now. I'm about as well read on the topic as one can possibly be, without devolving into, in my opinion, highly questionable esoteric subjects of debatable relevance.

You can tell how deep into it I am, because I can't even talk about it without bringing up some nerd fights, lol.

Personally, I just prefer to put it in more poetic terms at first. At least until someone asks questions. It lets people keep the concept at arms length more comfortably, if it conflicts with their personal understanding of the world.

@Dina

That's a good point, actually. If you assume the "magic" is mostly trickery and exaggeration, it would make a ton of cognitive tricks (like dancing with lions instead of becoming lunch) make a ton more sense.

I hope all the builders in the world treat you both like common clay. (They overcharge royalty for subpar work.)

I'll be back with more later. I'm taking an axe to cryptography at the moment. It's a *very* useful cognitive trick.

[Dina]

I think you lost me, Bug.

Today is quite warm again, but yesterday's colt left many people under the weather, including my hubby.

[Regenbogen]

I've heard about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, though it has been disproven in parts. I disagree with his thesis that if some peoples don't have words for a concept, they don't understand it. Because once it is explained to them they do understand. The concept just didn't exist in their culture. One can't pinpoint that to language alone. But I agree with the theory that language can form your way of thinking. Let's just take the example of English present and past continuous which doesn't exist for example in German. I remember having a hard time to understand it and I am still not always using it correctly. This doesn't mean that one can't express the meaning in German, but only that we have that choice to convey the information of a continous action, if we want to, but also to withhold it, when it is not important to what we are saying or we don't want the other to know. There are ways to insert prepositions to get the same meaning as the continuous tense in English.
But certain nuances can be lost in translation or need to be described in a roundabout way from one language to another.


While thinking about this, I had to think about George Orwell's 1984. Specifically their enforcement of New Speach. The government deliberately eliminated certain words and ways to express oneself. Like opposites for example. I can't remember one specifically. An example could be light and not-light instead of darkness. So the whole concept of darkness would vanish over time and everything that goes with it. Or happiness and not-happiness. So you are happy or you are not happy. Not being happy would be just the absence of happiness and not the presence of sadness instead. So happiness is the norm and if you are not happy, you simply lack happiness which subtly implies that you are not normal. Because there only is happiness. If you don't have happiness, you have nothing.

The goal was that they changed language to an artificial reduced basic  form to prevent people from rebelling or even thinking of resistance simply because they lack the vocabulary necessary for such thoughts.
An interesting and frightening concept. And also not so far fetched. I had to stop reading at one point because I was shocked about the similarities to events in our time, both past and present. But no more about this here.


Today it was warm and I had a fever and a sore throat yesterday. I had to postpone the swimming lesson to Tuesday.

Today we met our neighbours on the street while watching a scary big spider. Spring is the time the spiders come into the houses to look for good places to hunt and make baby spiders. Whenever we have fit cats, they take care of most of them. I haven't seen any big spiders inside yet. But there is a new smaller one in the usual place on the terrace. I guess our Medusa has died again. Long live the new Medusa! She fights all the wasps who want to build their nests at our window.  So she is allowed to stay. I once watched a fight between a spider and a wasp. The hero spider won. It was impressive and at the same time like a horror movie, lol.

[Dina]

I  begin by the ending. I have a not so mild arachnophobia, so I do not like that. But I have to admit that, objectively, spiders are amazing and very interesting creatures.

Hubby is better but I have a strong cold and I feel miserable. Still, better than yesterday. I remained at home today and I am taking care of myself because tomorrow I cannot miss my class and I did not want to risk to be worst.

The idea of language affecting thoughts is very interesting. Vygotski was a psychologist who wrote about how thoughts and language mingled. He studied how people with handicaps, like deaf or blind people, learnt. He found that usually deaf people had trouble reaching  abstract thoughts because as children it was difficult to explain to them those concepts, while blind people could be told about them and grabbed them easily than deaf people . I am broadly simplifying things here, but Vygotski work is super interesting. I also remember having read something by Ursula LeGuin, but I do not remember the name of the work, where there was a society where the higher classes have a complex, well-developed language, but they forced the working class to speak in simpler terms. It was a plan to keep poor people dumb and easier to control.

[BugBear]

You two both got the idea pretty much, yeah.

I personally go in for the soft version of Sapir-Whorf, where some concepts are simply easier or more difficult. You *can* translate everything if you *really want to,* but its possible to turn a sentence into a book that way, as you delve into the historical context surrounding the particular interpretation of the use of a particular verb (or what the fuck ever).

The historical context is every bit a part of the language as the word. If you don't understand it, you use the word inappropriately and are immediately tagged as an outsider.

Like how we've all been fluently speaking in multi-syllable. But if I started strutting around, stroking my chin, and muttering "mmm, yes, indubitably..." you would know I had been humping a thesaurus every night. And that it's *also* my favorite dinosaur.

That's why forcing the lower classes to use simpler language inhibits their cognition. If you have a duality of concepts, rather than a trinity, you have to compress more information into less space. Literally. Computationally.

You'd have to be a *motherfucking* wizard of a genius to compress full scientific disciplines into something instantly interpretable. And do that multiple times. You know. Just hypothetically, if someone from outside the ruling classes managed to build enlightenment, from scratch, in a cave with a box of scraps.

And PBS Spacetime on YouTube. That is a hidden gem of quality content.

Imma publish it.

[BugBear]

Not really the space for this framing, but I'm not *just* talking about the RPG. It's just a super good metaphor.

Here's how you break the shit out of the Dresden Files RPG. The original, idk about accelerated.

While improving the game 10x for everyone at the table, exactly by doing so.

Between your High Concept, Trouble, and other Aspects, make sure you can justify literally any action your character could ever want to take. You'll probably have to give up the original character concept during the tweaking. That's fine, as long as you stay true to the correct intention/vibe, it'll turn out even better.

For your first time, it helps to choose dualistic concepts that oppose each other. Michael Capenter might have "Strike The Sin, Not The Man," but also "Hurt My Kids And We Go Old Testament."

This way, as long as the story has something to do with him (and therefore his family), he can self-compel either justice OR mercy. The player maintains a choice over his actions, but the narrative tension remains at maximum no matter what.

We all know that Michael has about as good odds of disappointing the White God as I do of spontaneously becoming a cabbage. But they hurt his little girl.

Meanwhile,  the player is getting a fate point damn near every turn, as every action is a compel one way or another. Self compels really do work best, the GM probably doesn't have the attention required to do this for 4 people at once.

There is no way Michael doesn't have Guide My Hand. He's rolling Conviction for literally everything in Michael-focused arcs. AKA when he's "on the clock."

Do not fuck with Michael on the clock. Everyone knows this. Nick just took some teaching.

With some practice, you can pick up how to do it with 3 aspects "triangulating" action-narritive vectors. Idk how to put that in RPG terms, sorry.

You can do it with up to 8 aspects at once, but tbh thats just a lot of mental energy for a game. I'd probably stick to sets of 3 for simplicity's sake, and then see if I could get creative about mixing and matching them for extra self-compelled complexity.

It turns you into an absolute monster with Guide My Hand, too. Absolutely shit-fuck broken, literally makes the character single skill dependant. Then it's just trying to wrangle a +6 or higher out of the GM for Conviction. There might be other combos, idk.

As for why this applies to Weird:

I hope to use this in a game, one day. 

[Dina]

Well, regarding your last lines, I believe there is a thread for the RPG and I've seen some things in Reddit too.
I bought the RPG as soon as I got out and I bought the Stream one later. I've read all but for some reason, I never tried it.
It is not that I do not play RPGs. I do it almost every week (currently Pathfinder) but I never got the enthusiasm to actually learnt the rules of the DF RPG.
That said, I think I got what you mean when you said it is a good metaphor.

I am still feeling...not well. But I've been worse this week, so that is something.
It is a grey day today. It is not raining but it probably will along the day.

[Dina]

Hi Weird!
I will comment something local today because I think it may interest you. Today is the anniversary of the creation of the Instituto Antártico Argentino (Argentinian Antartic Institute). It is an organism (the first organism by a national state to be dedicated exclusively to the Antartic) created in 1951, that promotes the research and preservation of the Antarctica. It is also an instrument to help our claim in the area, but it is much more than that. Geography, climatology, geology, biology and related branches of knowledge were helped a lot by this. Nowadays, for the first time ever I think, it appearst that the government wants to close or at least defund it. I am beyond angry for that but I remain hopeful that it would be just an empty threat and in the end the IAA will survive. I just wanted to celebrate its existence and work by telling him about it. It had done a great work all this years.

[Regenbogen]

Hi, Dina.

I hope the Instituto Antártico Argentino will survive those difficult times and be able to continue its great work.
I must admit that I don't know much about Antarctica: There is ice 2-4 kilometres thick. No ice bears but penguins. There is bacteria. It is endangered because of melting ice just like in the north.

I just remember something I've read. They were talking about the east coast of Antarctica. And I was confused. How can one say where the east coast is, when literally all the coasts around the south pole point to the north? One could say the coast near South America, the coast near Australia and so on. Or did they just decide which one they called north, east, west or south?

Edit: or would they take the magnetic south pole as a reference and not the geographic one?

[Dina]

Thank you!
I have not idea about an east coast of Antarctica, at least you are talking about the areas that each country claims. For example, if you are talking about Argentina, yes, we consider that our larger province is the one encompassing Tierra del Fuego (the little "foot" in the most southern south of Argentina, the Malvinas (that the UK claims under the name Falklands), the Southern Georgia and Sandwich Islands, and a bunch of Antarctica. Well, that bunch has a big peninsula with a clear east and west side. So, if you ask any Argentinian, they would think you mean that. But the entire continent? Not idea.
We even have a school in Antarctica