Zephyr Dear

A post called Minimum Sustainable Success by Dan Cook has been doing the rounds on Twitter recently and so I read it because people were saying it was good. And it is pretty good, especially if you’re a bit games+money minded – as I am not. It’s a hard look at how you might address and perhaps even mitigate some of the enormous risks and problems involved in getting into the making-a-living end of our beloved videogames.

In there, Dan brings up the “supportive spouse or family” category of game developers and points out that people don’t often “admit” to being in this one, with the idea being that it’s a bit embarrassing, and that it should be talked about more to add perspective to this crazy thing called “how the hell am I supposed to make the games I love and also live at the same time?”

Fortunately I have no shame, and so I’m writing this to represent one data point of the “supportive spouse” crew. Are we legion? I don’t know. I’m definitely one of us, anyway. Hi, here’s my life story (of privilege).

So, I started making games back in 2011, which now actually feels like it’s a little while ago, but this story goes back longer than that because I’ve also been a “writer” with a supportive spouse as well. Basically I have a supportive spouse: her name is Rilla. We met and fell in love and felt generally enthused about each other beginning in 2002. We started and completed PhDs, ending in 2007, and got married at the beginning of 2008, at which point we didn’t know what to do with our lives. Cue supportive spouse mode.

For a year we lived in Ottawa, Canada, where Rilla had a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University. We semi-shared that one, two people doing the work of two for the salary of one. It was fun, we didn’t have much money, I started writing about games. Then we both applied for one job at IT University of Copenhagen, both made the shortlist of three, and then Rilla got the job because she is quite literally a better academic than me in every way (hi potential employers!). So we moved to Copenhagen in 2009, with Rilla as the “lead husky”, earning our keep.

Meanwhile, I kept being a writer and published a book that obviously didn’t make any money. I got contract-based teaching work at the university after a little while, which did make quite good money, and so was gainfully, if only partially, employed over that period. Still, Rilla was the one making the major amount of income. This became even more true when she got a new job at the University of Malta (as an associate professor no less!) and my part time work paid rather less than it did in Copenhagen. Now we’re moving to Montréal where I will once again be part time (though less part time) at Concordia University and Rilla will be earning the big bucks as an associate professor again.

Through all of this bucks-earning and not-earning, Rilla has been utterly supportive of me spending truly vast swathes of my time making the kinds of games that I make. You know, the kinds of games that seek to make absolutely no money and succeed at that handsomely. You probably can’t eat critical success, and so thank goodness I don’t have to try. (Way back in the early postdoc days in Canada, in fact, Rila even said she’d support me if I wanted to write a novel for a few years – which was something I wanted to do at that point – it doesn’t get more supportive than that.)

So here I am today, making a weird game version of The Shining in complete financial security, with no need to charge for it (and no need to “compromise” my “vision” for financial reasons), because, at base, I am very, very lucky to be married to a frighteningly talented, motivated, and successful woman, and because we’re both rather lucky to be doing well financially in this life (which in turn is very much due to the “supportive family” element – we lived at home throughout our student lives for example).

So, in short: luck and love and being lucky in love. Can’t beat that for a videogames career plan, right? Off you go.

foxmulders:

tbh i know that luke was pretty torn up abt vader and whatever but like, can we talk about how leia’s entire life has revolved around the direct influence of the empire, darth vader being the face of that tyranny, having to focus her entire life being aware of this, being political, being a diplomat. leading the rebellion. being tortured by vader. knowing her entire life how evil vader is, that being just. an accepted part of her reality.

luke lived on tatooine. he was so sheltered. vader never tortured him. it wasn’t luke’s planet that was blown up with vader gripping his shoulder all the way.

like im not saying luke doesn’t have his share of trauma and im not gonna act like i know what he found out/learned on dagobah or whatever

but like. leia was there, directly.

tbh vader being her father would fuck her up infinitely times more than luke. and i’m so glad she has luke there because luke is so fucking compassionate and loving and patient and i think leia Needs that and needs her brother

but i just like

i get fucked up @ leia being force sensitive and going under jedi training and having to deal with possibly more trauma than anakin had to experience when anakin began his training

anyway dont mind me im crying abt princess leia organa 

i think i can safely conclude that queer fandom makes everything infinitely more enjoyable because watching star wars w/ sohmer has made me such a huge star wars nerd.

I'm not sure that Senators in deep red states are that worried about this. But here Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) explains what he sees as the GOP's biggest fear if Obamacare gets gutted by the Supreme Court. Must read. And potential deadly for GOP senators from blue and purple states.

Also, worth noting here that millions of people losing access to health care insurance in itself does not seem to be figuring as a major concern.

This exchange is priceless ...

JOHNSON: Unfortunately, President Obama's response to an adverse decision — in other words one that actually follows the law — would be really simple. Just a one-sentence bill allowing people’s subsidies to flow to federal exchanges and/or offer the governors, 'Hey, we know you got those federal exchanges. Just sign the bottom line. We’ll make those established by the state.' And of course, he'll have the ads all racked up with the individuals that have benefited from Obamacare on the backs of the American taxpayer. He'll have all those examples as well so...

WEBER: And the sad sack stories about who's dying from what and why they can’t get their coverage.

JOHNSON: Right.

Emphasis added.

chrc:

YOU NEED

A BIG SHEET OF PAPER & A PENCIL

SOME MOTHER FUCKING MACCARONI (MAKE SURE THEY’RE DRY BRO DON’T WANT NO STICKY-ICKY MAP)

AIGHT THAT SHIT DON’T LOOK LIKE NO COUNTRY I KNOW (EXCEPT MAYBE AUSTRALIA FUCK THEM THOUGH)

ORGANIZE YOUR MACCARONI! MAKE SOME FUCKING COASTLINES!

BETTER, BUT NOT FUCKING GOOD! WHATEVER, TRACE THE COASTLINE WITH YOUR PENCIL. BE SURE TO BE SLIGHTLY SQUIGGLY AND, OH, FUCK THOSE LITTLE ISLANDS YOU MADE THEY’RE NOT BIG ENOUGH TO BE WOBBLY ENOUGH SO YOU’RE BETTER OFF USING EITHER RICE (OR SIMILAR) OR JUST TRY TO MAKE SOME REALISTIC FUCKING ISLANDS (SPOILER: YOU WON’T)

GOOD ENOUGH I GUESS WHATEVER LOOK AT THAT VAGUE SORT OF ISLAND/COUNTRY/CONTINENT SHAPED PIECE OF SHIT. SEE THE ISLANDS? I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO DAWG.

NOW TAKE A SHARPIE AND MAKE EVEN SQUIGGLIER FUCKING LINES AS YOU FILL IN YOUR ISOUNINENT

LOOK AT THIS WONDERFUL PIECE OF SHIT IT TOOK ME LITERALLY TEN MINUTES TO MAKE TOPS AND NOW YOU JUST NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO PUT ALL YOUR DWARF-FUCKING ELVES AND LIZARD-PEOPLE WITH BOOBS

FUCKING GOOD JOB

Aside from you chronically late people, we all know how time works:

This system is okay. But also, it’s kind of crazy.

Why 60 minutes per hour? Why 60 seconds per minute? It goes back to Babylon, with their base 60 number system—the same heritage that gives us 360 degrees in a circle. Now, that’s all well and good for Babylon 5 fans, but our society isn’t base-60. It’s base-10. Shouldn’t our system of measuring time reflect that?

So ring the bells, beat the drums, and summon the presidential candidates to “weigh in,” because I hereby give you… metric time.

Now, this represents a bit of a change. The new seconds are a bit shorter. The new minutes are a bit longer. And the new hours are quite different—nearly two and a half times as long.

So why do this? Because it’d be so much easier to talk about time!

Here’s one improvement: analog clocks are easier to read. At first glance, the improvement may not be so obvious—we’ve simply reshuffled the numbers a bit.

But notice, the minute hand makes more sense now. When it’s at the 2, we’re 20 minutes past the hour. When it’s at the 7, we’re 70 minutes after the hour. And so on.

Second, times are no longer duplicated. For example, instead of needing to distinguish between 6am and 6pm, we can simply say “2:50” and “7:50.” (This is, of course, how “military time” currently works.)

Third—this is a big one—the time tells you how far through the day you are. The time 2:00 is exactly 20% of the way through the day. At 8:76, we’re exactly 87.6% of the way through the day.

Fourth, consider the moment when we’re 99.9% of the way through the day. In the new metric system, we get to watch the clock roll from 9:99 back around to 0:00. Isn’t that nicer and more conclusive than 11:59pm rolling around to 12:00am?

Fifth, it’s so much easier to talk about longer times. Two and a half days? That’s 25 hours. Three days and 6 hours? That’s simply 3.6 days. Since an hour is now a nice decimal fraction of a day, these conversions become easy.

Will there be adjustments to make? Certainly! But the adjustments are half of the fun.

Let’s start, as all good things do, with television. Whether you enjoy half-hour sitcoms or hour-long dramas, the length of your favorite shows is probably going to change. Why? Because, under our new system, what we now call “half an hour” will be 20.83 minutes. What we now call “an hour” will be 41.67.

There’s nothing magical about these “half-hour” and “hour” lengths, obviously. They were chosen simply because they were nice round numbers. But under the new system, they aren’t! Since it’d be silly to divide the TV schedule into 21-minute intervals, presumably television networks would tweak the lengths to go more evenly into an hour.

If so, they’d have two choices: 5 blocks per hour (i.e., two dramas, plus a sitcom), or 4 blocks per hour (i.e., two dramas).

If you choose the former, shows will be 4% shorter than today, leading to accelerated storytelling. (It’s the same change that’s unfolded over the last 20 years, as increased ad time has squeezed the shows themselves to be shorter.)

And if you choose the latter, shows will be 20% longer. They’ll perhaps unfold at a slower, more cinematic speed. Either way, expect the pacing and rhythm of TV shows to change.

Sports run into the same issue. Football will probably opt for four quarters of 10 minutes each, which shortens the game by 4%. Expect slightly diminished scoring as a result. (And, if we’re lucky, diminished concussions.)

Hockey, meanwhile, might go for three periods of 15 minutes each, which actually makes the game 8% longer. It might give someone a chance to tackle Wayne Gretzky’s scoring records (but then again, probably not—he’s way out of reach right now).

I’d expect soccer to select two halves of 30 minutes each, which (as with American football) shortens games by 4%. If you thought soccer was too high-scoring already, you’re in luck (and also in a very small minority, I suspect).

When it comes to sports, the lengths of games won’t be the only thing changing. We also need to reconsider record running times.

Usain Bolt’s world-record for the 100-meter dash (currently 9.58 seconds) would be, under the new system, 11.09 metric seconds. Doing the 100m in 11 metric seconds might be achievable in the future, but 10 seconds? Perhaps never. (That’s the equivalent of 8.64 of our seconds!)

What about the mile? Well, it’s a little funny to imagine a world with metric time still worrying about that strange unit of distance (5280 feet? Really?), but the famed 4-minute mile would correspond to a 2.78-minute mile.

This is weird because, for top runners in the 1940s and 1950s, the barrier to running a 4-minute mile may have been less physiological than psychological. Would the 2.8-minute mile have felt as intimidating? Would the 3-minute mile? Perhaps it’d be the 2.5-minute mile, seeing as the current world record (3:43 in our old system) is 2.58 metric minutes?

And we might as well mention the marathon, where the world record time (currently 2:02:57) is now under an hour: 85 minutes, 38 seconds. I suspect that the 1-hour marathon would be a real badge of honor, something that every distance runner aspires to.

Leaving sports aside, what about food?

Restaurants would open for breakfast at perhaps 3:00 or 3:50. (Of course, coffee shops like Starbucks might open as early as 2:50.)

You’d get lunch around 5:00—that is to say, noon. Under our current system, I feel silly eating before 11:30, which is 4:80 under the new system. But I wonder—would I feel comfortable grabbing lunch at 4:75? Perhaps even 4:60 (even though that’s earlier than 11am under our current scheme)?

Eating is psychological, and how we number our hours might steer our behavior.

As for dinner, I suspect 7:50 to 8:00 would be the preferred time (although the famously late-eating Spaniards might hold off until 8:75 or 9:00).

Other numbers change, too. Take speed limits: the typical 65mph limit on many highways translates to 156 mph under the new system; I suspect we’d see that bumped up to 160 mph or down to 150 mph for the sake of roundness (which translates to 66.7mph or 62.5mph under our current system).

The speed of sound? Not 340 meters per second any longer; it’s now just 294 meters per second. Meters haven’t changed, of course, but seconds have gotten shorter!

And the speed of light? Unfortunately, we lose the lovely number 300 million meters per second; instead, it becomes roughly 260 million meters per second.

Speaking of light, on the equinox, you get 5 hours of light and 5 hours of dark.

The winter solstice is pretty grim: in London, you’d see just 3 hours, 25 minutes, and 25 seconds of daylight.

The summer solstice is nice, though: London would get 6 hours, 93 minutes of sun.

Okay, time to come clean: I propose this without a single iota of seriousness. It’d be insane to ditch our current system. We’re used to it. We’ve agreed upon it. We’ve built our lives around it. The hassle of a change far outweighs the gains.

But I still love the thought experiment. It asks you, in some small way, to reimagine your life. How do you spend your time? How do you measure the success of a day? When you plan your hours, are you conceding to the arbitrary dictates of a quirky clock, or are you truly giving your tasks the time that they deserve? If I scrambled your sense of time, relabeling all your moments, would it change the way you feel about them? Do the numbers we assign to times matter? Or are we just scratching lines on the shifting dunes of eternity?

On IRC this morning, we tried once again to chase down the definition of “postrationality”.  (Which remains elusive even to me, although I have a few more ideas, and may eventually blog about them.  I’m honestly somewhat inclined towards the Feyerabendy definition of “postrationality is what postrationalists believe and do”.)

But anyway, during this conversation, rivershavewings​ suggested “the scientific-rationalist paradigm is not the source of all truth, also System 2 is not the source of all truth”.  And this sounded good to me, except that it focused too much on the idea of “truth”, when “truth” is not the be-all or end-all of what I seek.  A long time ago I wrote the following:

Some people say they’re on a quest for truth – as if truth were an object you could hold in your mind – some mystical formula, some key unlocking the secrets of reality, some objective representation, free from the vagaries (and vagueries) of human thought. As if a human being could ever grasp the nature of the universe, unfettered by the limits of our perception!

Since I consider the “quest for truth” misleading, I prefer to say that I’m on a journey towards understanding: both logical, rational understanding, and deep, resonant intuition.

I stand by this.  I’m an academic; I devote my days to intellectual pursuits; my life is devoted to the expansion of knowledge.  But I am not searching for truth, I am searching for understanding.

“Truth” seems like such a narrow category: direct correspondence between model and reality; faithful representation of the universe.  But there are so many things that contribute to understanding without being true: stories, metaphors, and so on.  A piece of fiction is obviously not true, but it still may teach us valuable lessons about reality.  A metaphor is also not literally true, but it can highlight common structure between two disparate domains, and let us draw conclusions about one domain based on what we know about another.

In general, I care less whether my models are true, than whether they increase my understanding of the world: in terms of predictive power, in terms of making hidden structures legible, in terms of making the world feel like it makes more sense.  Things don’t have to be true at all in order to do that.

Here’s another quote from that Eric S. Raymond essay, which I’m grappling with now, because on one hand everything he says feels very true and natural, and on the other hand, it very much conflicts with the understanding of social technologies that I’ve come to over the last year or so.

Primary mystical experiences like mine are common.  A study by two British sociologists I read once seems to have shown that they are widespread in the general population, though perhaps more common in children and adolescents. Our culture provides very little context or language for such experiences, however; they are not generally categorized or recognized by the subjects as `spiritual’, and are commonly undervalued and forgotten.

Religions are, mostly, the rotting corpses of dead mystical schools. They’re founded by people who have primary mystical experiences or theophanies and (for whatever reason) do not interpret the content of those experiences into the terms of the religious traditions available around them.  These primary mystics recruit disciples and attempt to teach them how to replicate their theophany.

Usually these founders (having neither training for nor interest in science or analytic rigor) mistake the incidentals of the experience for its cause, and teach induction methods which are only accidentally effective.  As time goes by the induction methods accrete layers of ritual and dogma that crowd out the theophanic aspect, and are adapted for other purposes.

Very occasionally a charismatic mystic will arise within a religion and strip away the dogmatic accretions, re-creating a living mystical tradition.  Meister Eckhardt and George Fox did this in a Christian context; the semi-mythical Sixth Patriarch of what was then the Dhyana school seems to have done it in an early Mahayana Buddhist one.  The movements they founded (the Pietists, Quakers and Zen) became exemplary, but they were the exceptions.

Most late-stage religions distrust mystics and lock them up in monasteries or hermitages; they rightly fear the renewing but disruptive effect of theophany.  Eventually, for most of the religion’s followers, even the theoretical possibility of unmediated experience of the God(s) is lost, or thought of as the preserve of specialists and madmen.

And this decay impoverishes our spiritual lives.  It cheats most of us of our birthright to the sacred lightning…

And this is why I am implacably hostile to Christianity in particular and the other Zoroastrian-offshoot religions in general.  Never mind the fact that they have a long history of torturing pagans and mystics like me to death, and I fear they will begin doing it again the second they have the power.

No…their crime in present time is that they are such tragic, monstrous cheats.  They create huge chasms of disconnection between us and our Gods, and then tell us that is inevitable because we are `sinful’.  They associate the spiritual domain with so much dogma, cant and irrational garbage that anyone with a functioning brain has to either live in hypocrisy or reject the whole package – and then wonder why life is so empty.  They warp the language of spiritual discourse; they exert a sinister gravity on living mysticisms, tending to remake them in their own diseased images.  In the name of God, they strangle mystical experience; in the name of love, they murder; in the name of truth, they tell lies.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  I have seen.  I have been.  I have known. The mysterium tremendum is within reach of everyone, “closer to you” (as the Koran puts it) “than the vein in your neck”.

To find it, it is only necessary that you abandon both the dogmatic materialist prejudice that it’s not there, and the dogmatic religious preconception that you know what it is.  As the Buddha said from his deathbed to his favorite disciple Ananda, “Have no fixed beliefs, and find your own light.”

princessofdrone:

as near as i can tell, there are two modes of experience: mediated and unmediated. 

this is a thought that has been with me since my youthful introduction to the notion of platonic form, and the allegory of the cave, preceding (allowing) my interests in (in order) art, drugs, and the occult. 

i was, i believe, walking down the main drag in sausalito at night, by the water. it’s an incredibly wealthy town, eight and nine digit homes with breathtaking views of the san francisco bay, set on a steep hill. it was a week night and the bars are all confined to one side of town, so we had the place to ourselves. it is a bit of a sensory overload, the entire bay area directly visible before us and unimaginable opulence behind and above us. i said to my friend, “i’m not really experiencing this. i’m just experiencing my concept of a posh waterfront street. all of the elements i know should be here are here, there are no surprises, everything is far closer to how i believe it should be, than how i know it must be.” something to that effect. and as i said it, it ceased to be true, for an instant, and i became overwhelmed by detail. i couldn’t speak for a bit. my concept of where i was and what i was doing opened up like a picture puzzle pattern door and reality flooded in for a moment. and then the words for it came back, the moment ended, i rationalized my whereabouts and endeavors and stepped back across the threshold into imaginationland (aka modernism). it was an epiphany concerning the nature of epiphanies. 

a montage: losing my mind in a mosh pit, chanting at a candle eyes on fire, a million pounds of marijuana up in smoke, head pressed to a bass amp, pedals strewn across the studio floor oscillating up a wall of spinning blades, staring at the distant ground beneath me, death march straight up the side of the hill (fuck trails). what man is at ease in his inn? get out! wide is the world and cold! get out!!

what is the mediator? what is the lens, the filmy goop all over the phenomena? it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, and it is also true that consciousness seeks novelty; therefore we can discern a certain orientation in consciousness. what sun? the one that we always knew society was rings around, of course. frontiers, yada. it’s just a big nightlight, to keep the spooks away. what spooks? more distant stars, perhaps?

this is where the ordinal numbers approach to thinking about infinite recursion falls flat: mediation. the unbounded and infinite is by definition unmediated. there is no way to mediate these things without denying their essence. not only does the menu not taste like the meal, it doesn’t even pertain to the meal much less describe it. there is no ticket that will let you uncheck this coat; once it’s gone, it’s gone. let’s check it anyway.

“the map is not the territory” as applied to grand theft auto: it’s not as if you’re not staring at the minimap for 80% of the game. what if you came across a representation of the minimap on the other side of the interface, for instance on an in-game billboard? would you look up from the minimap proper for long enough to notice? are you being made fun of, is that it?

they say that if you can’t tell who the sucker is, you’re the sucker. once you determine that you’re the sucker, you know who the sucker is, so you’re not the sucker. but that means you don’t know who the sucker is. 

this is the fool’s paradox and it does to real life what the incompleteness theorem does to math. just like the incompleteness theorem points to the disconnect between math and real life, the fool’s paradox points to the disconnect between real life and real life. it opens up a gap, a tear, a rip, and things pour out of it, unmediated. got it?

Let me try to summarize the sort of 1970s mysticism that Raymond is describing.

On the one hand it’s a very individualist mysticism: it emphasizes the personal connection to the divine, and fosters a deep distrust of institutions.  According to writers like Raymond (and RAW etc.), institutions only exist to let the powerful exploit the weak.  In particular, religious institutions jealously guard access to the divine, so that no one can experience the holy unless they first submit to the will of the Church.  But in fact, God (or the gods) is all around us at all times, and every individual can experience this personally, without assistance from external institutions.  The reason people don’t experience God on their own is that the Catholic church (etc.) has tricked us into thinking we can only experience God within designated Christian spaces.  Thus, religion is a means of control, and a forced one: really, the divine is everywhere, accessible to anyone, but the Catholic church has convinced people that they can only find it if they obey the church’s leaders and follow all of its rules.

On the other hand, it’s a very experientialist mysticism: it emphasizes immediate, visceral perception over abstract conceptual understandings.  The Gods are something that must be experienced directly; any other attempt at understanding them will be false and hollow in comparison.  Once upon a time, when people led simpler lives, we could all experience the gods directly.  But over time we’ve lost that ability, because we’ve gotten caught up in abstract concepts, rigid dogmas, and modes of thinking that distance us from the reality of perception.  To find the Gods again, we must learn to access the earlier modes of thinking; we must disentangle ourselves from the trappings of abstract knowledge and learn to just experience.  (Lots of writers have talked about this: John Michael Greer, Julian Jaynes, David Zindell, and Carlos Castaneda, among others.)

It took me maybe 20 minutes, earlier, to write up those two descriptions.  And I knew right away that I agreed with the experientialist aspect.  But I’ve spent all day trying to reconcile the individualist perspective with my understanding of social technologies.  Because I have trouble believing that institutions are evil, and that all they do is block us from worthwhile experiences, for the sake of hoarding all the power for themselves.  And yet, I do share the intuition that fixed religious systems often prevent us from having organic spiritual experiences.

---

The first point I want to address is that… when designing institutions, there may be tradeoffs between letting people have experiences, and making sure society doesn’t fall apart.

This is clearly the case for sex.  Society places rules and restrictions on sex, and tells us which kinds of sex are ok to have, and in what contexts.  According to traditional sexual mores, sex in a marriage is fine, but adultery is not; missionary position is fine, but extreme S&M is not; and so on.  And according to more modern sexual norms, sex before marriage is fine, but sex without enthusiastic consent is not.  Thus, there always seems to be a set of sexual norms that prevents people from expressing/experiencing their sexuality in whatever way they choose.

Now, I don’t see a problem with extreme S&M, and I don’t see a problem with premarital sex either.  But it’s clear to me that adultery/divorce/etc. can be harmful to society.  If people were allowed to have sex freely with whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted, it would (and has!) put a strain on the stability of society.  So to me, it’s clear that social technologies don’t just exist to help the powerful maintain their power over the weak.  They don’t just exist to take away our freedom and prevent us from doing enjoyable activities.  They are actually helping to hold society together.

One can easily apply the same analysis to mystical experiences.  One can imagine the chaos that would erupt if people were having theophanies all over the place, and each person’s experience was incommensurately different from one another’s and couldn’t be interpreted in a common framework.  And one can understand how society might be strengthened if everyone is experiencing something powerful together, and then acting in the service of society because society is aligned with the gods.

It seems religions are channeling the human propensity for mystical experiences into a glue that helps hold society together (and after all, that’s one of the main functions of ritual, anyway).

So if I were going to give a social technologies defense of organized religion, it would sound like that.

And yet… that feels wrong to me.  People on here talk about “sacred values”, things you’re not willing to trade off for anything.  And that’s how I feel about mystical experiences, I think.  If social technologies mean that people can’t have unmediated access to the divine, I almost want to say… to hell with society altogether.

I have had personal mystical experiences.  I have encountered Gods.  I have channeled powerful forces.  And it just feels wrong to take something that is so glorious and wonderful and holy, and subvert it to these societal aims.  To link the revelation of Gods to the mundaneness of morality, to subdue those feelings of holiness beneath the yoke of rules.

So then how to reconcile my belief that social technologies are important and necessary, with my unwillingness to apply them to the sacred?

---

One solution is to just say: there are some things we’re willing to sacrifice for societal stability, but others that mustn’t be touched by social technologies.  And that I, personally, am fine with building institutions around sex that constrain sexual activity, but I’m not willing to build institutions around mystical experience.

I don’t think this is a cop-out: after all, one of the main functions of society is to provide a stable place for humans to flourish.  If social technologies are preventing humans from flourishing, then that defeats one of their main purposes.  I’m not going to say “hold society together at the expense of all else”.  For instance, if putting cameras in everyone’s house to monitor their activities helped society remain stable, I’d still oppose putting cameras in everyone’s house.  And it wouldn’t make my philosophical position inconsistent.

---

But anyway, I don’t think it’s necessary to oppose organized religion.  I think it’s possible for organized religions to embody living traditions, ones that actually help people experience the divine, by providing them with a set of concepts through which to interpret mystical experiences.  (I think Raymond is basically saying this too.)

So then, the problem with modern organized religion is not that it’s organized religion, but that it’s doing organized religion wrong.  It’s hardened and calcified and stiffened and dried out, and now it’s starting to crack.  This leaves all kinds of room for new mystical traditions to fill the gap, founded by people like Raymond who feel a connection to the divine, but also believe that Judeo-Christian religions can’t provide that.

It’s easy for me to imagine past societies, where the spiritual/religious beliefs harmonized with the need for societal organization, where religion/society didn’t feel like a weighty burden, but instead like something holy and worth participating in.  Where religious rituals filled people with holy fire, that helped them get through the day.  Where religion did serve as a social technology, but never conceived of itself that way, never thought about itself from a bureaucratic, engineering perspective of how best to organize society, but instead simply flowed naturally out of revelations.

Maybe my problem is not religion as a social technology.  Maybe my problem is religion that conceives of itself as a social technology, more than it conceives of itself as a religion.  I don’t think most religions have this problem, but I do think it relates to the rigid division into good and evil that Christianity promotes, and the relegation of so many natural human beahviors to the forbidden.  It is possible for me to appreciate the necessity of social technologies, and still not like this particular form of social technology.

---

I spend a lot of time resenting modern society, and one of the reasons is… it seems like, in order to maintain a society this big and this crowded, we need to maintain a much tighter control over human experience.

I took an anthropology course once, and the professor told us that in small tribal societies, there were no gods, only ancestor worship.  There was also no hierarchy: maybe a tribal chief, or rule by elders, but no division into social classes.  Then, when societies got bigger and divided into hierarchical classes, polytheism emerged.  And it was only when empires arose that monotheism came into existence.  The greater the need for control, the more powerful the gods became.

When a few people are ruling over many, they need to have very powerful implements of control – much more powerful than if they were ruling over a small, homogenous group.  A large society needs laws, general principles, universal morals, because the rulers simply can’t address every person or case individually.  And I think there’s where a lot of the absolute-good-and-evil stuff of Christianity comes from, or rather, that’s why it’s been successful.

But the more strictly we divide good from evil, the more strictly we repress parts of ourselves, the more the unrest in our Shadow grows.  So much of human experience is no longer permitted; so many people live their lives full of fear and guilt.  I would rather worship Abraxas.

And so, if all of this is true, maybe I can say: I simply oppose society being this large.  Which I sort of do.  I mean, someone asked me my political opinions the other day, and I’m honestly sort of an anarcho-primitivist.  I want to go back to small tribal societies, to visceral experiences, to ecstatic revelations from the divine.  Then I can say: we need to hold society together, and if we want to hold a society this big together, then we need to implement perverse controls, but society doesn’t need to be this big.

Of course, society isn’t going to stop being big, so this is worthless as a policy suggestion, but at least it’s a philosophically coherent perspective.

---

There’s one last suggestion I want to make, which I’m lifting from princessofdrone.  He’s been talking about frontiers – literal frontiers, in our country’s past.  Unexplored, uninhabited places, where people could go if they felt themselves at odds with society.  Society maintains rigid control; not all people are suited for this; but if people want, they can leave the safety and comfort of ordinary society and go out into the frontier.  There will be fighting, bandits, duels to death – all the things you’d expect in a place without social technologies.  But there will also be freedom.

In the absence of literal frontiers, there can at least be little hollows, little enclaves of wildness within the modern world.  Hidden, sacred places, where people can participate in sacred acts, where people can experience the divine, all free from the restrictions and taboos of ordinary society.

The occult provided this (and maybe still does).  And this is why I keep much of my life private.  There’s nothing secret about having friends over, but when I have friends over, I default to not telling anyone unless specifically asked.  And this is why I’m in favor of keeping one’s sex life private – letting it be a separate, hallowed place that the restrictions of everyday society cannot enter, because it’s never discussed there.

But yeah, I believe that there needs to be frontiers, some kind of separate sacred space, for the people who are unsuited to ordinary society, who are not content with its ideas of spirituality, and need to pursue their own.

---

I have written a lot, but I don’t really feel like I’ve resolved much, or come to any conclusions.  I’ll have to keep thinking about all this, and maybe write some more on it later.

A few months back, Peter Hurford made a post about weirdness points on the effective altruism forum. He argues:

Weirdness, of course, is a drawback.  People take weird opinions less seriously.

The absurdity heuristic is a real bias that people — even you — have.  If an idea sounds weird to you, you’re less likely to try and believe it, even if there’s overwhelming evidence.  And social proof matters — if less people believe something, people will be less likely to believe it.  Lastly, don’t forget the halo effect — if one part of you seems weird, the rest of you will seem weird too!

(Update: apparently this concept is, itself, already known to social psychology as idiosyncrasy credits.  Thanks, Mr. Commenter!)

…But we can use this knowledge to our advantage.  The halo effect can work in reverse — if we’re normal in many ways, our weird beliefs will seem more normal too.  If we have a notion of weirdness as a kind of currency that we have a limited supply of, we can spend it wisely, without looking like a crank.

I think the idea of weirdness as a currency we have a limited supply of is not a good way to think about weirdness, and I would like to talk about why.

It is suggestive to me that most successful social movements have, well, a fair number of weird people in them. Objectivism has strange opinions on everything from altruism (bad!) to Aristotle (cool!) to roads (should be privately owned!) and an Objectivist became chairman of the Federal Reserve. Much feminist theory has been developed by communists and socialists; the concept of “intersectionality” essentially means that if you want to endorse the weird idea of gender equality then the weird ideas of anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-poverty, and LGBT rights come as a package deal; pretty much every good feminist writer is a fat hairy dyke. Evangelical Christianity has achieved a fair amount of political power despite the existence of Quiverfull people. This could just be a correlation issue: maybe the social movements would all have managed to be even more successful if they’d dropped the not kissing until marriage, private ownership of roads, and awesome fat hairy dyke writers. But it still seems like minor evidence against weirdness points being important.

For private figures– by which I mean people who are effective altruists, but don’t write, lead a meetup, or speak to the media– I think there are two important considerations. First, weirdness is relative to your social group. Hurford mentions that “punk rocker vegans” are spending their weirdness points fighting lookism. This is true if you are a punk rocker vegan and everyone you interacts with wears khakis and plays basketball. However, most punk rocker vegans are friends with other punk rocker vegans. If they took Hurford’s advice and cleaned up and dressed in a mainstream fashion, they would be the weird ones and they would pay the price of weirdness for small benefit. Similarly, endorsing guaranteed basic income among my friends doesn’t cost me anything, because pretty much everyone thinks of GBI as a reasonable thing to advocate for.

Second, there is a legitimate concern about the effective altruism movement as a whole being perceived as a bunch of rich technolibertarian programmers. However, since we actually are a bunch of rich technolibertarian programmers, who are friends with a bunch of other rich technolibertarian programmers, if we attempt to minimize weirdness, we are going to minimize weirdness relative to, well, rich technolibertarian programmers. For instance, nowhere in Hurford’s post does he mention atheism, despite the fact that effective altruists are much, much more atheist than the general population and being perceived as anti-God makes it harder to reach out to religious people, who typically donate more to charity.

For public figures, I think it’s important to consider what your role is. People being interviewed may wish to project a We’re Normal Just Like You vibe. People leading meetup groups may want to be as neutral as possible in order to attract the widest possible variety of attendees. However, a lot of the public figures in the effective altruism movement are writers, and I suspect that– far from being a cost– being strange may actually be a benefit to writers.

Think about it. How often have you heard someone say “this writer is really original! Whenever I read them, I end up thinking about things in a new light. Even when I don’t agree, they’re always interesting”? Conversely, how often have you heard someone say “ugh, this writer keeps saying the same thing over and over again. It’s boring. I know what they’re going to write before I open the article”?

And then imagine that you mostly endorse positions that your audience already agrees with, positions that are within a standard deviation of the median position on the issue, and then you finally gather up all your cherished, saved-up weirdness points and write a passionate defense of the importance of insect suffering. How do you think your audience is going to react?

“Ugh, they used to be so normal, and then it was like they suddenly went crazy. I hope they go back to bashing the Rethuglicans soon.”

On the other hand, if you argue for weird things, you are acquiring an audience that is open-minded and interested in weird things, and they might be more likely to endorse the weird things you care most about– or at least consider them.

Finally, I’d like to talk about two last points. First, even if you endorse Hurford’s position 100%, you don’t have to stop being weird all the time. At the sex party, no one knows you’re an effective altruist. In the privacy of your own home, you should feel free to sign up for cryonics, date multiple people, and dress however you like. With some basic privacy protections, the Internet makes it easier and easier to have one identity that conserves its weirdness points and another that speculates wildly– or even multiple identities optimized for different social groups.

Second, Hurford completely fails to engage with the fact that some people can’t help but be weird. He says: “if you’re a guy wearing a dress in public, or some punk rocker vegan advocate, recognize that you’re spending your weirdness points fighting lookism.” But… not every guy wearing a dress in public (or, more crucially, everyone read as a guy wearing a dress in public) is doing it to fight lookism. It is possible to be weird for reasons other than politics. In fact, perhaps the majority of people read as men who regularly wear dresses are trans people assigned male at birth. Telling them “don’t be weird” is not saying “make slightly different fashion choices”, it’s saying “be in pain and hate your body for the rest of your life.” Similarly, dressing well and communicating in neurotypical-approved ways are harder for a lot of people with disabilities. I don’t think this discussion is complete without acknowledging that the tradeoffs are far steeper for some people than they are for others.

cremisius:

more pacific northwest gothic:

• kids spend recess indoors, playing card games of their own invention with mismatched decks and scavenged objects, paying the playground no attention as the swingset swings by itself in the endless, grey curtain of rain outside.
  
• the arm of the man in the checkout line beside you ends in a rough, abrupt scar just above the wrist. he catches you looking and smiles through his somewhat unkempt moustache and beard, and as he turns to go, you see the back of his jacket advertising the name of a local lumber mill. 
• middle aged women at a party laugh easily amongst their glasses of mid-range merlot, discussing all the horrors they are absolved from blame in, because, after all, they voted against them.
• whales are sounding off the coast, and for a while, you gaze out at the them, off in the distant ocean, in wonder. yet as their bodies slip beneath the surface and do not reemerge, you find your mind following them under the water, your wonder fading, a sense of foreboding moving to fill the vacancy. your eyes are fixed, unblinking, on the horizon. below, the sea sinks to unknowable depths, and above, the sky rises to an even more eternal blackness. you flex the fingers of your left hand. the flipper of one humpback whale could cover your entire body with room to spare. you feel powerless, and very, very small.
• there are shanghai tunnels below the streets of portland, their bricks stained with blood and memory. though once used to move goods between the docks and their delivery-points, they lay now abandoned save to vagrants, vermin, and the occasional visiting tour. some may say there is no proof this portland underground was ever used for such nefarious purpose as its more common name suggests, but the ghosts who live there tell other tales.
• on windy days, the elevators of the space needle slow to half speed. two women share coffee at a booth in the restaurant that spins slowly at the top, talking little, seemingly preoccupied with the softly shifting world just outside and far below the windows. one woman writes something on her napkin, and slides it across the table. 
• you hear the wail of the air horns, the chiming of traffic signals, and the rush of the tracks, tell-tale signs as the coast starlight approaches station, exchanges passengers, and departs once more. on board, countryside and cities alike rush past, a blur of green and brown and grey. staccato flashes of light outside mark the miles as they grow between whatever you’re running from, and wherever you’re running to.
• the distant peak of mount rainier is illuminated with a striking pink glow as the sun sets behind the hills across the dock. all around you, the surface of puget sound ripples gently. somewhere farther out, beyond your safe, shallow inlet, under cover of that gathering darkness, an unfamiliar vessel lets go its weighted cargo into the deep, black waters. 
• there are days and discoveries in the diaries of lewis and clark that have never been read. your teachers always told you they were simply too busy to write every day, but children always know better, and you still wonder what was on the pages that have always been left out.
• two men are seated at the table next to you, complaining about their recent gambling losses at what they feel had directly been hands of the native tribe who ran the casino at which they had so voluntarily booked their weekend’s stay. you hear one tell the other that he felt it wasn’t right - they’d been cheated, robbed, taken for granted. ‘those damn rich indians’, he spits, ‘took everything from us’. as they carry on, you finish your meal in disbelief, but not in surprise. 
  
• your eyes sting and the cloudcover seems to glow. you can taste a forest fire in the air from several hundred miles away. 
• sometimes you wonder what it’s like to live in whatever fantasy world it is that people live in who can see all of that science, and still refuse to believe that the climate is changing. you wonder what it’s like to look out a window in strange weather, or to see the river, higher or lower than it usually is this time of year, and not swear you can hear our planet’s death rattle. of course, you still drive to work when you could bike most days, but at least you know you’re an agent of your own demise. 
• somewhere, a child lays awake all night, convinced that they can feel the juan de fuca plate subducting with every breath they take, their small body braced for the earth to crack, the sea to rise, and every peak of the cascades to let loose all that fire they now know lurks all too close to the surface. 

princessofdrone:

we’ve gone through several iterations of the “memes are a meme” meme over the last several years, but this current one is when it hit infinite recursion (memes are a meme is a meme is a meme is a meme is a…). 

we, the successor hominids to homo sapiens, owe it to ourselves to keep track of this sort of thing: this is an important moment for our young species. if modernity was the pinnacle of our faculties for division and abstraction and mechanization, then the fractal aeon sees us turning our collective attention to those supernal things which cannot be abstracted. we have reached the edge of the map and found territory which we simply can’t represent, at least with the rigor that we’ve grown accustomed to in our mapmaking. 

science shall go the way of magick in the fullness of time, much to the betterment of them both, and modus ponens and the law of attraction will be seen as being truly of a kind. 

the denizens of the other world have decided that now is the time for concepts to reveal themselves as sentient and extraterrestrial, self-evolving and autonomous. the memes have awoken. myth and superstition are pouring back into this world, having taken advanced courses in disguise and misdirection, calling themselves by different names. 

if 1938 opened the aeon and if 1994 was the singularity, then 2015 saw the whole vast millenia-old illusion finally slip below the threshold of credible verisimilitude, maya finally learning her own name. fnord

girljournals:

Men: *continously create and uphold a culture of masculinity and violence*
Men: *feel bad as a result of their own creation*
Men: hey feminists you have to prioritize fixing this for us

this exact thing is why places where men who feel inferior, insubstantial, ineffectual, and unable to influence people congregate are so unbelievable. Men who describe themselves as “nice guys”, “betas”, “manlets” shit like that. They completely snowblind to the fact that they’re hurting because they’re trying to hold themselves to this standard of masculinity that other men have conditioned them to place stock in, but they are convinced that these things are why women mock and laugh at them and belittle them. They invent whole narratives in their minds about hollywood-pretty women talking shit about them behind their backs and whip themselves into a deliberate rage, because they want to feel something but anger is the only thing which masculinity permits men to feel.

It’s sick and horrible to watch. I think that’s why i read 4chan boards sometimes. It’s like a train wreck that just keeps wrecking and wrecking and wrecking forever.

I can’t remember what it was but there was some documentary I saw a long time ago, and one of the interviewees said this thing I’ll never forget: “The defining emotion of masculinity is anxiety.”

caramelandgravy:

duskenpath:

oli-via:

duskenpath:

Rest stops on highways are liminal spaces where the veil is thin and nobody can tell me differently

Explain

The explanation is that liminal spaces are in between places that bridge Here with There, so in fairy tales we often have the Fairy Ring, the Forest Clearing, the Sudden Misty Foggy Forest, the Bridge, the River, graveyards, in some cases

We also have a ton of american urban mythology around famous roadways and sites off the sides of roads

Archetypes like these occur to mark the places in the world where the veil goes thin and humans can have extra-worldly experiences, out of the ordinary way of living

So why wouldn’t transient spaces like rest stops where everyone is just passing through from one place to the next, never stopping for too long, not be a liminal space where spirits frequent, too

Especially since nobody would know if they were real or not

This…explains the feeling I get at rest stops really well…

cracked-dot-com-official:

dagfella:

can you imagine trying to explain the anti sjw scene on this website to people who’ve never been here

“uhh yeah a lot of conservative people on tumblr like to literally pretend to be disney cartoon villains and earnestly parrot outdated anti-lgbt propaganda. yeah idk why im on this site either”

there’s a lot of nerds from sites like reddit or whateever who get further radicalized into conservatism through a slow process of first learning to accept conservative statemenst as being Just A Joke Get Over It, then learning to accept them as Just My Opinion Get Over It, then transitioning into environments like reddit they learn If You Don’t Have An Actual Argument, Or Evidence, Or Sources, You Should Stop Believing That, and then they transition into a more violently adamant environment like 4chan where it’s everywhere and subtly colours everythhing which at first gives them a feeling of ‘this is wrong’ taht they can’t properly describe because they don’t have Evidence or Sources or Arguments, and also it’s just a Joke Get Over It, so they get desensitized to it, exposed to those arguments to the exclusion of others, many of which deal fairly well with exposing incoherencies in basic normal person liberalism, and so now after this long slow process of internet culture indoctrination and moving up in the ranks they’re ready to go full regressive conservative or libertarian, and come back to more normal sites expecting everyone to fall into line and spreading it like that. they also always know that if they expressed these opinions around normal people (without living in the south) they would be batista bombed. the result is a somewhat normal or liberal nerd casually indoctrinated and bullied with threat of mass trolling or whatever who’s now a mildly aggressive casually abrasive son of a bitch.

anyway they get to tumblr and suck at it but other nerds who are lower in the process of becoming a fully developed son of a bitch regard them as icons to revolve themselves around and so end up in a subculture that casually and regularly includes legitimate nazis because it’s Just Their Opinion/A Joke Get Over It Where Are Your Sources. and tumblr makes no sense to them because it’s literallly the exact opposite of their casual progression into libertarianism/conservatism,  all the arguments are based on a similar casual progression that took for ages but in a completely opposite, incompatible direction and they have no idea how to deal with it so they rope the leftists into the SJW strawman stereotype because all they see are people saying things that are Obviosuly Wrong (”How Can Le Trans Women be BIOLOGICALLY female????”) and didn’t see the casual progression and actual arguments behind it. so they circlejerk it and think they’re smart

i could write a lot more but basically, these are the people on tumblr who think that normal people agree with them 

Hey everybody! I’m going on tour with my totally wildly amazing friends Nick (Fridge Scum, Ramshackle Glory) and Alyssa (Cutting Room Floor, Mallory) in August. I’m playing drums in Devil’s Coachwhip, and am going to be performing Loone primarily solo. I’m so excited to see folks out there in the world! I’ve never toured New England in the summer, which is dumb. This is going to be fun.

Here’s the fb event for the tour.

i’m trying to add haskell support to this plugin i use to track the tags files for my projects and there’s just little finicky inconsistancies between the tags program it uses for all the other languages and the tags program i have available for haskell so i’m writing a shim between them and let me tell you shimming is just 100% edge cases it sucks

So there’s this thing called the triangular theory of love.

The triangular theory of love talks about three axes on which relationships can differ. Intimacy is feeling close and connected to someone else and knowing a lot about them; passion is feelings of romantic and sexual attraction; and commitment is the decision to be together with someone in the long term and to make future plans incorporating the other person.

It seems to me that the only axis relevant to strangers, acquaintances, and other people who are not deeply invested in my love life is commitment. You want to know whom I’m living with, whose job search you should ask about during small talk, and whom I’m going to be super-stressed about if they’re in the hospital. You do not need to know who makes my genitals throb or my brain fizz. That is, quite simply, none of your business.

And yet look at our language for talking about relationships.

“Boyfriend”! “Girlfriend”! “Friend”! Everything encodes the genital throbbing/brain fizzing business! My close relationships include two platonic relationships and two romantic relationships; there is no way I can talk about “people I am in close relationships with” in a single word. Even “partner”, my old friend, beautifully ambiguous “partner”, implies you are in a romantic and/or sexual relationship.

I mean, I understand why this is. In mainstream culture, your primary relationship is always your only romantic-sexual relationship. They did not need a word for “romantic-sexual but not serious” or “serious but not romantic-sexual”, because that never comes up.

But I want to follow Dean Spade’s dictum: “to try to treat the people I date more like I treat my friends—try to be respectful and thoughtful and have boundaries and reasonable expectations—and to try to treat my friends more like my dates—to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together.” I have spent entirely too much time around aromantic and asexual communities to assume that my life partner is going to be someone I’m in a romantic-sexual relationship with, and I have spent entirely too much time being poly to assume that I should be planning to be together with someone in a decade just because I’m in love with them.

And apparently the only way you can do this is go full relationship anarchist and refuse to have labels at all.

Boo.

 

peridong:

agehachou:

a quick jasper make up test… i’m way not buff enough for the wife but it was fun

L I F E A L E R T

“

When I say, “abolish the police,” I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked. What people mean is “who is going to protect us?” Who protects us now? If you’re white and well-off, perhaps the police protect you. The rest of us, not so much. What use do I have for an institution that routinely kills people who look like me, and make it so I’m afraid to walk out of my home?

My honest answer is that I don’t know what a world without police looks like. I only know there will be less dead black people. I know that a world without police is a world with one less institution dedicated to the maintenance of white supremacy and inequality. It’s a world worth imagining.

”

- Mychal Denzel Smith, Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.
(via abolitionjournal)

[Epistemic status: trolling.]
[Previous: Meditations on Moloch; Capturing Gnon. When I refer to Scott or Nyan, I am referring to those two posts.]

I.

Nyan asks, “Will the future be ruled by the usual four horsemen of Gnon for a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos or a future of dysgenic, insane, hungry, and bloody dark ages; or will the telos of man prevail for a future of meaningful art, science, spirituality, and greatness?”

The answer is “Gnon.”

When fighting eldritch horrors, you have basically two options. One: keep your head down, try to avoid attracting attention, and hope they don’t eat you. Two: open up the Necronomicon, start reading, and hope that you can control them.

Traditionally, the price of the second is insanity. However, I believe that this is missing the other, more important price; which of us would not willingly become insane to bind Cthulhu?

The other price is that you are meddling with beings beyond human comprehension.

And your spellbook was written by humans.

How sure are you that your spells bind Gnon? How sure are you that they do not just summon him? How sure are you that you comprehend something that is by definition beyond human comprehension?

It is one thing to try to cast small spells: the Elder Sign or a key that transports you back to your childhood dreamland; to campaign for stronger environmental regulations, to educate people about critical thinking. The upside is small, but the downside is small too.

It is another thing to change the entirety of society, to break the bindings that currently control Cthulhu and bind him again. Are you so sure that your bindings are better and stronger? Are you sure that you can bind him at all– that you will not simply wake him up?

Remember the last people who noticed that capitalism was a cruel optimization process that eliminates human values? Remember the last people who tried to implement a society that protected human values from this destructive optimization process?

Even this gamble might be worth it. If you think the current bindings are weak, if you fear they will break, it may be worth the risk. A chance of Cthulhu’s rise is better than a certainty.

But if right now the situation looks basically okay– do not open the Necronomicon. Do not go to Arkham University. Keep your head down. Survive.

II.

Scott recommends Friendly AI. Nyan recommends patriarchy, eugenics, rational theocracy, strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty, and a careful bottling of productive economic dynamics. I feel I, too, must offer a proposal for agents of Elua.

Scott suggests that this is the dream time: a brief period of excess carrying capacity, in which we can do silly nonoptimal things like art and music and love and philosophy and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

I suspect that he is wrong, unless by “a brief period” he means “literally from the rise of consciousness until now.”

According to Wikipedia:

Since the 1960s, the consensus among anthropologists, historians, and sociologists has been that early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by capitalist and agrarian societies;^[6][7] For instance, one camp of !Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day.^[8] Aggregated comparisons show that on average the working day was less than five hours.^[6]

Subsequent studies in the 1970s examined the Machiguenga of the Upper Amazon and the Kayapo of northern Brazil. These studies expanded the definition of work beyond purely hunting-gathering activities, but the overall average across the hunter-gatherer societies he studied was still below 4.86, while the maximum was below 8 hours.^[6] Popular perception is still aligned with the old academic consensus that hunter-gatherers worked far in excess of modern humans’ forty-hour week.^[7]

The industrial revolution made it possible for a larger segment of the population to work year-round, because this labor was not tied to the season and artificial lighting made it possible to work longer each day. Peasants and farm laborers moved from rural areas to factories, and working time during the year increased significantly.^[9] Before collective bargaining and worker protection laws, there was a financial incentive for a company to maximize the return on expensive machinery by having long hours.

Admittedly, we are in a brief period of decreasing working hours; but how long is that going to last?

Why? Physical limitations. A hunter-gatherer has no reason to obtain more food or possessions than they can carry: they put in their four to five hours of work, get what they want, and move on. After a certain point, putting more effort into your farm doesn’t actually produce more food, so you might as well take some time off and sing and make art and fall in love. You run out of other resources far before you run out of human time, so humans have free time to do human things in.

What happens if people have more babies than they can support? The Black Death sweeps through Europe and kills millions of people. There’s a bad winter, all the crops freeze and everyone starves to death. The king next door invades and puts everyone to the sword. After the population explosion of agriculture, with a combination of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and ordinary death, the population stays remarkably stable no matter how much people fuck, and Malthusian traps are avoided.

Cthulhu? How far can he spread if you have to copy out books by hand? How far can he spread if you don’t have books and everything has to be transmitted by word of mouth?

Ares? You can’t use all your peasants’ free time to fight wars: they have to stay near their fields. You maintain a warrior class and optimize them for fighting wars– but when you aren’t fighting wars, they have to have something to do, you can’t use them for anything very productive because then you’ll have no one to do it during wars, and maintaining a human body at the peak of condition doesn’t actually take that much time. Hence, warrior poets.

And then technology.

Machines can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no reason not to work your employees at the maximum that can be gotten from them.

We can cure diseases and prevent famines and there is literally nothing stopping our population rising to a Malthusian trap except that Azathoth is a blind god and didn’t evolve us to be motivated to have children, just to have sex.

The Internet allows every crackpot with an incredibly convincing meme to convince strangers a world away.

And technological society has allowed the horrifying invention of total war.

Transhumanists say, eagerly, that the last of the physical limitations will soon be burned away. Let’s make people who can modify their brains! Let’s make people who don’t need to eat or sleep or have any values other than gaining profit for the corporation they work for! Let’s make people who can modify themselves into being motivated to have as many offspring as possible and who can get rid of any obstacles to their reproductive fitness, especially things like love or art or consciousness! Let’s learn how human brains work so we can exploit them to have incredibly convincing memes that are totally uncorrelated with truth! Let’s develop more exciting technology that could be used for war!

Victory: Moloch.

The hope of some transhumanists is to make a computer that is an Elua maximizer. The problem with that is that if you fuck it up on any level, you wind up with a dark god crueler and stronger than any god we’ve had before.

I say: the answer is not more technology. The answer is not to enter further into the Optimization Time. The answer is to end technology and return to the dream time. The dream time has its weaknesses: there is no security; there are much fewer material goods. But poor folk do smile.

The only environment guaranteed to preserve human values is the one that created it.

Technology is no friend to Elua. Technology is Elua’s mortal enemy.

One afternoon, the head of my department caught me in the staff room and posed a musing question.

(He later confessed that he was just curious if he could play puppet-master with this blog. The answer is a resounding yes: I dance like the puppet I am.)

So, do we have ceilings?

The traditional orthodoxy says, “Absolutely yes.” There’s high IQ and low IQ. There are “math people” and “not math people.” Some kids just “get it”; others don’t.

Try asking adults about their math education: They refer to it like some sort of NCAA tournament. Everybody gets eliminated, and it’s only a question of how long you can stay in the game. “I couldn’t handle algebra” signifies a first-round knockout. “I stopped at multivariable calculus” means “Hey, I didn’t win, but I’m proud of making it to the final four.”

But there’s a new orthodoxy among teachers, an accepted wisdom which says, “Absolutely not.”

You’ve got to love the optimism, the populism. (Look under your chairs—everybody gets a category theory textbook!) But I think you’ve got to share my pal Karen’s skepticism, too.

Do we have a ceiling, Karen?

Karen works hard. Karen asks questions. Karen believes in herself. And Karen still feels that certain mathematics lies beyond her abilities, above her ceiling.

The chasm between students (“everybody’s got a limit”) and teachers (“anyone can do anything!”) seems unbridgeable. A teacher might say “You can do it!” as encouragement, but a frustrated student might hear those words as an indictment of their effort (or as a delusional falsehood). Is there any way to reconcile these contradictions?

I believe there is: the Law of the Broken Futon.

In college, my roommates and I bought a used futon (just a few months old) off of some friends. They lived on the first floor; we were on the fourth. Kindly, they carried it up the stairs for us.

As they crested the third-floor landing, they heard a crack. A little metallic bar had snapped off of the futon. We all checked it out, but couldn’t even figure out where the piece had come from. Since the futon seemed fine, we simply shrugged it off.

After a week in our room, the futon had begun to sag. “Did it always look like this?” we asked each other.

A month later, it was embarrassingly droopy. Sit at the end, and the curvature of the couch would dump you (and everyone else) into one central pig-pile.

And by the end of the semester, it had collapsed in a heap on the dusty dorm-room floor, the broken skeleton of a once-thriving futon.

Now, Ikea furniture is the fruit-fly of the living room: notoriously short-lived. There was undoubtedly a ceiling on our futon’s lifespan, perhaps three or four years. But this one survived barely eight months.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that the broken piece was absolutely crucial. The futon seemed fine without it. But day by day, with every new butt, weight pressed down on parts of the structure never meant to bear the load alone. The framework grew warped. Pressure mounted unsustainably. The futon’s internal clock was silently ticking down to the moment when the lack of support proved overwhelming, and the whole thing came crashing down.

And, sadly, so it is in math class.

Say you’re acing eighth grade. You can graph linear equations with perfect fluidity and precision. You can compute their slopes, identify points, and generate parallel and perpendicular lines.

But if you’re missing one simple understanding—that these graphs are simply the x-y pairs satisfying the equation—then you’re a broken futon. You’re missing a piece upon which future learning will crucially depend. Quadratics will haunt you; the sine curve will never make sense; and you’ll probably bail after calculus, consoling yourself, “Well, at least my ceiling was higher than some.”

You may ask, “Since I’m fine now, can’t I add that missing piece later, when it’s actually needed?” Sometimes, yes. But it’s much harder. You’ve now spent years without that crucial piece. You’ve developed shortcuts and piecemeal approaches to get by. These worked for a while, but they warped the frame, and now you’re coming up short. In order to move forward, you’ve got to unlearn your workarounds – effectively bending the futon back into its original shape – before you can proceed. But it’s well nigh impossible to abandon the very strategies that have gotten you this far.

Adding the missing piece later means waiting until the damage is already underway, and hellishly difficult to undo.

This, I believe, is the ceiling so many students experience. It’s not some inherent limitation of their neurology. It’s something we create. We create it by saying, in word or in deed, “It’s okay that you don’t understand. Just follow these steps and check your answer in the back.” We create it by saying, “Only the clever ones will get it; for the rest, I just want to make sure they can do it.” We create it by saying, “Well, they don’t understand it now, but they’ll figure it out on their own eventually.”

In doing this, we may succeed in getting the futon up the stairs. But something is lost in the process. Sending our students forward without key understandings is like marching them into battle without replacement ammo. Sure, they’ll fire off a few rounds, but by the time they realize something is missing, it’ll be too late to recover.

A student who can answer questions without understanding them is a student with an expiration date.

EDIT, 4/15/2015: What a response! The comments section below is infinity and beyond. It’s like eavesdropping in the coffee shop of my dreams. I wish I had time to reply individually; please know that I read and enjoyed your thoughtful replies and discussion.

I.

Yesterday I posted a link to an article in which Steve Wozniak joins other luminaries like Elon Musk and Bill Gates in warning about the dangers of artificial superintelligence. A commenter replied:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak still aren’t enough for me, not until one of them can describe the process by which we go from ‘AI exists on computer’ to ‘AI killing human beings in physical reality’ by using something other than ridiculous, unforgivable cheating.

There are lots of good arguments against considering superintelligence a threat. Maybe strong AI is centuries or millennia away. Maybe there will be a very gradual transition from human-level AI to superintelligent AI that no single agent will be able to exploit. And maybe superintelligence can be safely contained in a very carefully shielded chamber with no means of connection to the outside world.

But the argument above has always seemed to me like one of the weakest. Maybe we’ll create a superintelligence, but it will just have no idea how to affect the physical world, and will just have to stay forever trapped in a machine connected to a worldwide network of computers that control every aspect of our economic and social lives? Really?

Normal, non-superintelligent people have already used the Internet to make money, form mass movements, and hire others to complete tasks for them. We can assume a true superintelligence – a mind much smarter than we are – will be able to do all these things as well or better than any human.

II.

Satoshi Nakamoto already made a billion dollars online without anybody knowing his true identity just by being good at math and having a bit of foresight. He’s probably not an AI, but he could have been.

That’s assuming our hypothetical superintelligence doesn’t just hack into a couple big banks and transfer their money to itself – again something some humans have already made a billion dollars doing. And that’s assuming it doesn’t just invent a really useful program and then offer it as shareware – another tried-and-true way of becoming a billionaire. And even that’s assuming it doesn’t just get a reasonable amount of money, then invest it very cleverly – another thing humans have already become billionaires doing.

III.

Mohammed was never a billionaire, but he does have 1.57 billion followers (a superintelligence presumably wouldn’t repeat his mistake of dying before his movement really came into its own). The Prophet started at the bottom – converting his friends and family to Islam one by one – and grew exponentially from there. Although he had the unfair advantage of a physical body, there’s no reason he needed it – if he’d lived today, maybe he would have converted Ali over GChat or Skype. In any case, the poetry of the Koran and the zeal of his followers attracted far more people than his personal appearance ever could have.

Other gurus and religious leaders’ fame is even more transparently a result of their writing rather than their visible personality; consider Ayn Rand’s success in founding a powerful Objectivist movement out of the people who read her books. In fact, some of the most famous religious movements in history, from the Nation of Islam to Christianity itself, have been founded secondhand by disciples who relayed the words of a leader whose very existence is difficult to confirm.

What kind of a movement might be founded by a superintelligence with more spiritual creativity than Mohammed, better writing skills than Rand, the entire Internet to evangelize, and billions of dollars to spend spreading its message? The Church of Scientology is already powerful enough to intimidate national governments; imagine a vastly superior version founded not by a second-rate sci-fi writer but by an entity straight out of science fiction itself.

IV.

And really all of this talk of gathering money and power is kind of redundant. Far easier to just borrow somebody else’s.

Imagine an AI that emails Kim Jong-un. It gives him a carrot – say, a billion dollars and all South Korean military codes – and a stick – it has hacked all his accounts and knows all his most blackmail-able secrets. All it wants is to be friends.

Kim accepts its friendship and finds that its advice is always excellent – its political strategems always work out, its military planning is impeccable, and its product ideas turn North Korea into an unexpected economic powerhouse. Gradually Kim becomes more and more dependent on his “chief advisor”, and cabinet officials who speak out the mysterious benefactor find themselves meeting unfortunate accidents around forms of transportation connected to the Internet. The AI builds up its own power base and makes sure Kim knows that if he ever acts out he can be replaced at a moment’s notice with someone more cooperative. Gradually, the AI becomes the ruler of North Korea, with Kim as a figurehead.

Again, this is not too far beyond achievements that real humans have accomplished in real history.

If it seems bizarre to think of an entity nobody can see ruling a country, keep in mind that there is a grand tradition of dictators – most famously Stalin – who out of paranoia retreated to some secret hideaway and ruled their country through correspondence. The AI would be little different.

V.

Suppose the secret got out. Kim, increasingly desperate as the AI closes him in, sends an email to the World Leaders Google Group (this has to exist, right?) saying “There is a malevolent superintelligence trying to take over the world, be careful.” Then what?

I would expect the AI to have some success operating openly.

Remember, there are two hundred countries, all competing for power and wealth. Some of them are ruled by jerks who don’t cooperate in prisoners’ dilemmas. Some of them have ongoing civil wars with both sides looking for any advantage possible. And some are just stupid.

In the old days, legend said people would bargain with devils to gain worldly advantage. Once the AI made its presence known, there would be no shortage of world leaders willing to work with it for temporary gain. The Shia rebels in Yemen want an advantage over the Sunni? Log into the nearest internet-enabled computer, ask the malevolent superintelligence for help, the malevolent superintelligence arranges for a crate of armaments and some battle plans worthy of Napoleon to be shipped your way, and all you have to do in return is complete some weird task that doesn’t seem relevant to anything. Mine some weird mineral, forge it into some random-looking shape, and send it to a PO Box, something like that. Whatever! You know if you don’t take advantage of its offer, your opponents will, and how bad could it be?

If somehow all two hundred countries and their associated rebel movements coordinate to avoid dealing with the AI, it can start making offers to companies, organizations, even private individuals. By this time it will have spread itself as a distributed consciousness across the entire Internet, harder to eradicate than any worm or virus or pirated movie. If you want some quick cash, just download the connect-with-malevolent-AI program from the darknet and perform a simple task. What could be easier?

VI.

Once a superintelligence has billions of dollars, millions of followers, a country or two, or just a cottage economy of people willing to help it along, the game is pretty much up.

An AI with such power might start by using it to pursue its goals directly – whatever those are. But likely its final goal would be the creation of a definitive means of directly projecting power into the physical world, probably starting with a von Neumann machine and branching off from there. The quickest victory would be just making money and hiring a company to make this – and maybe that would work – but it might be far enough beyond our current technological ability that the AI has to laboriously shepherd its chosen cultists or citizens through a few extra stages of human civilization before it has the appropriate industrial base.

VII.

The most important caveat in a piece like this is that we’re not superintelligent. After a couple minutes of thought, I came up with four different broad paths a superintelligence might take to gaining a physical substrate: buy it, build a cult, take over a country, or play people off against each other. It’s a good bet that a real AI, with more cognitive resources to throw at the problem and no constraints about sounding believable, could think up a lot more. Eliezer refuses to explain how he won his AI Box games so that nobody could dismiss his solution with “Whatever, I would have thought of that and planned around it.” This is easy to say in hindsight but a lot harder when you’ve got to actually do the intellectual work. Maybe you think these four methods can be dismissed, but had you thought of them before you decided that an AI couldn’t possibly have a good method of building a physical substrate?

If so, here’s one more possibility for you to chew over: the scariest possibility is that a superintelligence might have to do nothing at all.

The easiest path a superintelligence could take toward the age-old goal of KILL ALL HUMANS would be to sit and wait. Eventually, we’re going to create automated factories complete with robot workers. Eventually we’re going to stop putting human soldiers in danger and carry the ‘drone’ trend to its logical conclusion of fully automated militaries. Once that happens, all the AI has to do is take over the bodies we’ve already made for it. A superintelligence without a strong discounting function might just hide out in some little-used corner of the Internet and bide its time until everyone was cybernetic, or robots outnumbered people, or something like that.

So please, let’s talk about how AI is still very far in the future, or how it won’t be able to explode to future intelligence. But don’t tell me it won’t be able to affect the physical world. It will have more than enough superpowers to do whatever it wants to the physical world, but if it doesn’t want them it won’t need them. All it will need is patience.

[Note: Links are Not Safe For Work.]

Hat-tip Amy Dentata.

You guys. This visual novel game, Cute Demon Crashers, is literally the most adorable thing ever. It's super short and only two of the four "romances" work (it's a NaNoRenO game, and unfinished) but it is VERY consent-friendly and also has an option for dyslexia-friendly text. The sex scenes are all about consent and communication and there is a stop-at-any-time button, I just.

I'm crying. From happy, but crying. It's... it's not even the game, even. Just. Seeing something, anything, take consent this seriously. It's just amazing. This shouldn't be unusual or special, but it is.

Man Imprisoned After Filming Eric Garner’s Death, Refusing to Eat, Rat Poison Found in Jail Food:

smackedupsidetheheadwithacabbage:

Prison guards have confirmed that the blue and green pellets found in the food are indeed rat poison. Refuse medical treatment.

Orta’s situation is dire, there is only so long that a person can go without adequate nutrition. It has now been proven that the food in prison cannot be trusted, not for your average inmate, and especially not for controversial ones. His bail has been set at $16250, and his family cannot afford to pay it. This is truly a life and death situation, so his family has started a fundraiser to help with the legal fees. Unfortunately, however, the campaign has only raised a fraction of its goal. Please consider donating to the fundraiser if you have the means, even if it is only a few dollars.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/man-jailed-filming-eric-garners-death-eat-rat-poison-prisons-food/#mkIcvElGPd7GuYMf.99

nolongermint:

everybodyilovedies:

The coloring in this book just kills me. It is SUCH a pretty book to read. The art itself is great, too, but I don’t think I’ve ever been blown away by a colorist as much as I am by Rico Renzi’s work on Spider-Gwen. Like just LOOK at those different color schemes for the different settings. Absolutely gorgeous.

Geez, thanks!

SECONDED

A controversial Transportation Security Administration program that uses “behavior indicators” to identify potential terrorists is instead primarily targeting undocumented immigrants, according to a document obtained by The Intercept and interviews with current and former government officials.

The $900 million program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, employs behavior detection officers trained to identify passengers who exhibit behaviors that TSA believes could be linked to would-be terrorists. But in one five-week period at a major international airport in the United States in 2007, the year the program started, only about 4 percent of the passengers who were referred to secondary screening or law enforcement by behavior detection officers were arrested, and nearly 90 percent of those arrests were for being in the country illegally, according to a TSA document obtained by The Intercept.

Nothing in the SPOT records suggests that any of those arrested were associated with terrorist activity.

Those results aren’t surprising, according to those involved in the program, because the behavior checklist was, in part, modeled after immigration, border and drug interdiction programs. Drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants often exhibit clear signs of nervousness and confusion, or may be in possession of fraudulent documents.

“That’s why we started rounding up all the Mexicans,” said one former behavior detection officer.

The detailed 13-page report, taken from the SPOT program’s database, shows the number of referrals made by behavior detection officers, the reason for referral, details about the particular incident, arrests and reasons for arrests, and a brief summary of the incident. The Intercept is redacting the name of the airport involved, the identities of the behavior detection officers and other law enforcement agents involved in the referral or arrest, and passengers’ personal identifying information.

The statistics, though a small snapshot from 2007, appear to buttress repeated criticisms of the program by government auditors and outside groups, which allege that the program is being used to profile passengers based on their race.

The Intercept also interviewed a dozen current and former behavior detection officers, TSA officials, law enforcement agents and other government officials who have been closely involved in the program or monitored it. All of them said the program appears to be designed to target undocumented immigrants and drug smugglers.

Many items on the SPOT checklist are traditional clues for human smugglers and the people they are smuggling, such as “individuals who are seemingly unrelated but display identical dress or luggage.”

One former behavior detection officer described homing in on a “group of Latino guys and gals” wearing brand new outfits that looked like they were bought from a discount chain, like Walmart or JCPenney. “They all looked like they were totally lost and milling around like zombies in fresh clothes and haircuts,” the former officer said.

The behavior indicators point to people who appear confused or nervous because they’ve never been to an airport, may be carrying fake identification or none at all, and are scared about their illegal status being discovered. “You’re essentially making [federal air marshals] profile people,” the former behavior detection officer told The Intercept. “That checklist is ridiculous.”

Still, it has continued, and the TSA has refused to release details on almost every aspect of the program: its behavioral indicators and arrest data, as well as evidence of success in spotting actual terrorists. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union, expressing concerns the program was being used to racially profile passengers, sued the TSA, requesting a variety of documents related to the program.

Last month, The Intercept published TSA’s closely held list of over 90 indicators that behavior detection officers use to identify terrorists. The list, which included “bad body odor,” “whistling” and “excessive grooming,” has been widely ridiculed. The latest document obtained by The Intercept appears to back up previous concerns that the program is aimed at undocumented immigrants more than terrorists.

During a five-week period in 2007, behavior detection officers at this airport identified 429 passengers for secondary screening based on their behavior, after which 47 were referred to law enforcement. Thirty-four of those referrals were suspected undocumented immigrants or those traveling with expired visas.

Instead of terrorists, the officers often found undocumented immigrants who were trying to fly home and were nervous about being caught.

“Passenger spoke no English,” read the notes on several of the referrals.

“Passenger stated that she was in the country illegally and was returning home due [to] lack of work. She also stated that she was nervous due to her illegal status.”

Many of the referrals included statements like, “passenger stated he was nervous due to his illegal status.”

There were 16 arrests over the time frame covered by the report — and none of those arrested were terrorists. Fourteen of those arrested were described as “illegal aliens.” One of the arrests was of an intoxicated passenger who was denied boarding and assaulted an officer, and another person was arrested because suspected drugs and drug paraphernalia were found in his luggage.

Since its start in 2007, the SPOT program has been heavily criticized for its lack of scientific methodology, and even more importantly, its apparent lack of success in identifying would-be terrorists after almost eight years of operation. It’s a pessimistic assessment that even some within TSA share.

“If you’re looking for people who exhibit multiple criteria on the checklist to reach the point of secondary screening or law enforcement referral, you’re just looking for illegal immigrants,” said an aviation security official.

The embattled SPOT program has been the subject of numerous congressional, government and DHS investigations criticizing its effectiveness.

“The checklist misses so many signs of potential danger and really just shows signs of a nervous traveler,” said a current TSA employee involved with the program.

TSA did not respond to, or acknowledge, The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.

Most of those interviewed supported the idea of deploying roving law enforcement officers at airports to search for potential terrorists, but were critical of nearly every aspect of the current program.

One senior homeland security official said the behavior checklist could work, but TSA’s behavior detection officers have not been properly trained to use it. “My guess is most of them wouldn’t have stopped bin Laden if he walked through their lane,” the official said.

Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP

The post Exclusive: TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

4mysquad:

Man Imprisoned After Filming Eric Garner’s Death, Refusing to Eat, Rat Poison Found in Jail Food

22-year-old Ramsey Orta, the young man who filmed the NYPD killing Eric Garner, was arrested shortly after on trumped up charges. He has since been locked up at the notorious Rikers prison in New York.

It was reported by the New York Post last month that 19 different inmates were denied medical testing after bluish green pellets were found in their food. The prison admitted that these pellets were rat poison, but failed to give the inmates medical attention, and failed to offer any kind of explanation as to why the prison’s food was tainted with rat poison.

Orta was not the only person to be targeted for filming the Garner murder either, Taisha Allen, who also filmed the death of Eric Garner, is speaking out and saying that her involvement with the case has put a target on her back with the NYPD.

Now, we are witnesses of how a man who stood up for our rights, for our equality, a man who tries to prove that for every life deserves to be protected, under pressure of a police state tyranny. He used social media to achieve justice, we must continue his work.

#RamseyOrta #EricGarner #NYPD

boooost dat stuf 

bycrom:

wealdcomics:

By Crom! is Rachel Kahn’s joke-a-panel autobiographical comic featuring life advice and spiritual guidance from Conan the Barbarian. It ran from January 2012 until May 2014, and is collected in two books, The Collected By Crom! and Full Colour Cromulence. You can read the complete archives on WealdComics.com, and grab the books in PDF. There are original comics available in Rachel’s BigCartel store and both comic prints and By Crom! shirts are available in her Society6 store.

Stay tuned to wealdcomics.tumblr.com for news on convention appearances, merch sales and the possibility of a reprint of the two books.

By Crom! has wrapped up completely! If you would like to keep an eye out for more comic work from me, or more news about By Crom! apearances, merch and (maybe next year) reprints, please go follow wealdcomics!