the long night of the lonely loon

Yes, they're horrors, but they're horrors with history. Until the time should come when you can move yourself off this current biological platform and/or you can reduce the amount of stress capacitated in your system, it's at least good to know they present regular bugaboos: nothing about their pattern is unpredictable, and nothing about that pattern is unexpected. So they can be anticipated: when you need relief, take it. Avoid confrontations with the clueless or the slow. Keep your environment awash in as much serenity and tranquility as possible at all times: you get out of this. Sleep soon.

tranquilidipity

"You say "oh, which future do I want?", and maybe you think of flying cars and rayguns, or what have you, and you never think to ask the question: how is someone in that future going to think? What's their metanarrative going to be? What's their internal mental architecture like? Their mind might be Sapir-Whorved differently than yours, you know. Language may shape their world in completely alien ways to the way it shapes your world. But their operas are not played with devices: if you can speculate how they might see the world, perhaps you can bring in some of their language-spectacles merely by the application of your imagination. So perhaps you figure out how to make yourself a little of that alien memome. I'm not going to belabor you with demographics: suffice it to say there are people who make it their industry of art to perform this sort of linguistic magic show on themselves, and there are those who are comfortable with the narrative of the world they understand and aren't terribly interested in reflecting it to Foofaraw junction. To the latter, I generally have nothing but bewildered incomprehension: "why do you want to stay there? it's so boring! I can, at a distance, perhaps some five kiloparsecs away size up what your mental architecture is like without having to look at marketing research studies. I can predict the sort of beliefs about the world you have and the kinds of relationships you're likely to prosper as well as falter in. And I can do this without an enormously complicated rat-dance. " The former I cannot predict where and how I'll find them: they're the ones looking at the ocean with this perpetual look of astonishment and building castles which levitate as consequences of their architecture because their geometry accords perfectly with general relativity or what have you to make such a levitation possible. I can relate to them. Mostly. Except that I don't just want to look out into the ocean. I want to sail away from this harbor to distant climes, or to discover what ocean-dwelling life there might be. And I start seeming didactic, or pedantic, or hung up on tiny, apparently inconsequential points: heavens to Balthasar, I don't want to lord these over anyone. And I don't want to play language games with low replay value: it's more than just manipulating words and speech, finding the most opportune and elegant way of expressing myself. It's a whole sensory gamut dealie, but it's not alchemy and it's not shamanism, and I run away at the drop of the hat from anyone identifying as either. I know that both the alchemy and shamanism songs after a while start sounding like a record caught in a groove. And I quite loathe the politics which get carried along with them, or carried away with the practitioners of both. I expressly give up trying to tell people about the out of context objects which they're already ignoring because their visual systems are overwrought having been inundated by crazy net stimuli. I stick to ramifications of the classically elegant, as opposed to jumbled messes. I make a sort of ecology of coherence for myself. And on a self-evaluatory note: I remind myself of the dangers of freebasing forgetful functors as a matter of course, because scattering the world into monad-dusts doesn't work, and there's a kind of organic slipperiness to the cosmos which is foreign to rigid intellectual systems: simultaneously, I keep the two notions of the ocean: nonarbitrariness and nonrepetetiveness within easy reach, because, Oh Zarquon, I might run up against members of the Church of the Cosmic Galois Group, who decidedly fall in the first latter category mentioned: I don't want to get too addled by the necessitated memomic-prophylaxis I have made should I have to cope with their ambient quasiproselytized reality model, simultaneously, as the first former category mentioned goes, I am equipped with shipbuilding instructions of a kind, but not shipbuilding knowhow. I can go out a bit with my own conveyances, but these do not ships make. My conveyances can take me places ships cannot probably go. But lo, the night wears on. And perhaps you want some ginger ale" I may have said.

interimaginary philobiblionoi

Screyen Thalannes is the deuteragonist in Thylesma Cholon's Time For Ice. Salasanny Kolonno is the protagonist of Hiet Mo's Sleepy Monkeys Do Not Eat Cheese. That there is a particular Screyen Thalannes, Screyen Matih Thalannes, and a particular Salasanny Kolonno, Salassany Ekinne Kolonno is also, by itself, just peachy. That Time For Ice is a book of fiction in Salassany Ekinne Kolonno's world, and that Sleepy Monkeys Do Not Eat Cheese is a book of fiction in Screyen Matih Thalannes's world, is also, just peachy. That Salassany Ekinne Kolonno and Screyen Matih Thalannes just happen to have fallen vaguely in love with each other probably will give pause to some of you with scant modal realism in your reality models. As it happens, Salassany Ekinne Kolonno and Screyen Matih Thalannes differ from the characters in the novels in ways which precisely accord with their unexpected transcendental consonance with each other. A wag says: "well, they should be finding real lovers instead of staying in the imagination!", to which the technically apropos response is this: 1. neither Salassany Ekinne Kolonno nor Screyen Matih Thalannes's fantasy life can be considered remotely unethical, given that they dream of each other, and specifically each other, on a regular basis. They are not fantasizing about other people nonconsensually. 2. Both Salassany Ekinne Kolonno and Screyen Matih Thalannes's imagination of the other has resulted in decisions which have improved the other's life. 3. For even gnarlier contextual froths for which words like 'universe' and 'cosmos' are around maximally inaccurate, packets with contents other than "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" sometimes manage to alliterate across Bifröst from originator to recipient and back and are interpreted correctly by both parties. Now, should a wag want a mechanism whose Schrödinger equation they can write down and calculate potentials and whatnot, and there will be persnickety sorts who will demand that the transmissal of such packets would be impossible without first intellectually understanding the mechanism. 4. Maybe they eventually found life partners in their respective worlds. That's beyond the scope of this post. What isn't is that they kept each other going, and isn't that what love does? Makes survival possible amongst other concordance-of-one's-environment-improving benefits? 5. This phenomenon happens more often than not sometimes. Some transcendents make a very rudimentary attempt to taxonomize it, but being something which is splayed and ramified across differentially tangled Indranets, there'll never be an absolute catalogue of it.

context beware...

The Gelturke look like small piles of bubbling muck and sticks. Of course, if you had access to the appropriate context-co-environment they just look like you or me, and have similar issues and life-stories. They share most of our genetic code too. The Sunspinners and Starwhirlers of the Linsellenorai coast, however aren't from around here and are arguably just a little more alien to us than the Gelturke and the Pund are. Yes, they kind of look like us. Genomically, they are around 60% tree, 30% butterfly, 5% mantis shrimp, and the rest is out of this world. When asked, Lirrensily Aranaic-Arracaranserel replied "metagenomics is fairly nifty, no?". Oh, and they're nuclear powered. They have two organelles which perform the proton-proton chain and CNO-cycling, and the gamma photons emitted are directly captured and drive an ATP synthase complex. Their bones are made from buckymesh. They're bioluminescent, their skin is covered in chromatophores. They're also a lot nicer than humans/hominids, in general. The exotic anatomies of the Sunspinners and Starwhirlers arose because a machine civilization found to its dismay that its power source (a pulsar) had encountered an exotic part of the pulsar-life cycle and would explode yielding mostly iron. (some extremely rare complex-exthalpy matter had gotten itself lodged in the core.) At that point, the best long term survival strategy was to build hominid-esque bodies for its constituents --the Sansuraro Galaxy was too far away from any civilization that could build quantum foam bodies for that to be an option -- and to transport them somewhere habitable. Tsiliere was the best bet -- nice atmosphere, relatively standard hominid population (except for the Gelturke),

Mr. Orange Narrative O'Clock says...

"The things you imagine cannot possibly be real! We know, as it says in Skrayandiff and Meltheus, that all existence is uniquely partitioned into unambiguous ontological categories which derive their truth-value-schema from precise logical statements and are inflexible and absolute." -- ONOC A couple of ducks fly over the pond, their feathers blurring bits of water thrown up by their confusion. Gerestheo, an Uapthu mathematician of some renown, is sitting eating a sandwich. ONOC continues: "You yourself say that the Cosmic Right Angle is the Orthological..." Gerestheo: "I also say that I am a complete idiot. Which statement do you hold in higher regard?" ONOC: "But the Orange Narrative..." Gerestheo: "Is discardable... provides evidence of its own discardability in more than luxurious abundance upon the slightest breeze of thought. What happens to it under cogitative torrents is best left unmentioned by me." ONOC has the aspect of an admixture of crestfallen and courageous. Gerestheo: "There are true things, true worlds, and true people whom we can sense by our imaginations, what do we do? We sing to them so that they might sing back to us. Sometimes they do happen to sing back to us, sometimes they even love us, and your first reaction is to get nervous and to attempt to shore up that Orange Narrative, a storyline whose own discardability is abundant and unmissable. I am not so good at seeing them as much as I am at encountering them, but then again, I am Uapthu, and moments have no meaning for me. Sometimes the people most akin to us, don't even live in the same universe or cosmos or strobing of the WSOGMM that we do. If I were to accept, hook, line, and sinker, the ontological model of Skrayandiff and Meltheus, then they wouldn't exist at all. Kind of sad, an ontological model which says that the people who might love us the most or are most akin to us don't exist in some formal, hairy, and dessicated idea of how the cosmos works. The world is not a formal system."

Cleaning Mjölnir

At first, Thor would immerse Mjölnir in liquid nickel or cobalt before the age of the great machines of humanity. Then purified bismuth became available: it would roll off the deific material like oil on leather, and then Thor could rinse Mjölnir with geranium oil and lime oil to complete the process. Lately however, the amount of toxicity being emplaced into the imaginary, and the purposes for which the great hammer has been put have put quite a strain on it and Thor's deific materials science-fu. We, of course, have a proposal. Find a magnetar in Asgard. Hyperspatially suspend the portion made out of deific nonmetals outside of the color-flavor locked quark gluon plasma. Articulate the deific metal portion into the color-flavor locked quark gluon plasma. Thor has advised us of a few places where Mjölnir has been chipped or damaged in unforeseen ways because of the bogglingly nasty currents in human imagination at present. We have a catalogue of those damages. Surface damage will start growing agglomerations of bismuth atoms as we draw the interior crystalline faults and other pranic instabilities in the core of Mjölnir out. Upon removal from the quark-gluon plasma, these will be emplaced in superfluid liquid helium and then geranium oil to stabilize them. Surprisingly, the phase diagrams for this part of the cleaning process of Mjölnir are more easily understood than the second part. Because there are internal damages to the crystalline structure which cannot be repaired by immersion, the Rainbow Serpent has suggested, and Sindri and Brokkr are in enthusiastic, if perplexed, agreement, is that Mjölnir be emplaced where Bifröst flows, to quote:

"OK," she said at last, "how do we get to this place?" "There are as many ways as there are tiny pieces." "I beg your pardon?" "Tiny things." He held up his thumb and forefinger again to indicate something very small. "Molecules," he added, seeming to be uncomfortable with the word. "But first let us leave here."

The Rainbow Serpent has proposed letting Mjölnir flow in and with the Rainbow River between thences, elsewhys, and otherbutterflies, the Polynongahela. Such a process is even more complicated than quark-gluon plasma annealing.

pinionfork, or arborescing trifurcatorily

What are they armed with? They aren't armed with anything. They don't have arms. Well what do they want? Well what does anyone want? To swim up Maslow's hierarchy, to self actualize, to surf the rarefied cosmic network and find creatures maybe radically different than themselves in terms of material composition but of similar character, you know, the same thing you do when you try to find friends at school. But what if they're goths? Or republicans? Or Fox News addicts? Have you been reading Scenes from a Multiverse again? We'll have to wait sooooo long to get a reply via radio -- we're assuming that they're going to use radio? What if they are more fond of the strong force? What if their reproductive processes are incomprehensible to us? What about their literature? What memetic constructs of theirs will have to be banned or memed by our memome first? You're really not thinking this through. You still have this notion of enemy/friend. Expand your spectrum of roles a bit here. You could have mentor, tutor, imagineer, buddy, you could have more intuitive and stranger relationships with them already. Okay, okay, perhaps I've been somewhat alarmist. But there's still some confusion of language. I can't tell where their conversation begins and mine ends. All I have is first, second, and third person, and it starts feeling like a massive Abbott and Costello who's on first skit. And when you start interrupting, or do you mean when I start interrupting, the narrative gets really confusing. I mean, the interlocutor could be one of the Ant-Parakeet entities which are symbiotic with humans in some crazy seventy six dimensional relativistic bathtub curve space and are required if successful memetic reproduction of lolcats is necessary, anything more than that and it gets insanely confusing. I mean, if we sat down overamphetamined military brass and that paranoid branch of the energy arbitrator class with whoever or whatever, what would be the first thing they might say. "Hey, we've got this Warhol Worm primed and ready to go for your memome which will, rather rapidly, bring about world peace." how would they react. Oh, a 'thing' as such we need to be worried about. Let's prep the defenses against Mr. Neutron! (which didn't feel like Monty Python at all), let's be alarmist and silly. "The harmonics in my voice have already delivered the payload to your cerebellar regions. Within a day, a tranquil serenity will overtake you. Within twelve, social media networks will have found soulmate pairs or social groupings of greater concord than your primitive dating sites could ever arrange. Do not be alarmed. We are here to relax you. Only then will you be able to take flight." Wry pedantic scientist with sciatica: "Take flight to where?" "Places real and surreal that are amongst and amidst you at present"

mystic research programme funding semantics as a function of deliverables

Lavanguli bit off some moest bread from the loaf. "Arniul, they're going to withdraw funding from this mystical research programme of yours next month" Arniul looked at Lavanguli: "But we've..." he began, but Lavanguli interrupted: "I know what you're going to say, that this is a vital programme of research, but sooner or later you've got to face the fact that most of the copycat programmes -- the one at the University of New Riboflavin, and the École Arc en Ciel Polychromatique, and the Stralvanzaroa Institute of New Lepidopterana Province are far better than you at the whole design-conception-implementation-deliverables cycle." Arniul looked downtrodden. "I've put all my efforts into this research programme. And with great reluctance I will concede your point. In the past five years we've only come up with three groundbreaking concepts. UNR produced forty in the same time. EACP? Two hundred. And I don't want to talk about SINL. SINL makes me want to hide in a candied bread bun and count my sorrows until the pulsars stop pulsing and the snails stop snailing. What will I do? Where will I go?" Lavanguli sipped some of her tea. "Have you talked to Assuadmai Ertalagaster at SINL?" Arniul: "Ertie? Ertie's at SINL?!" (obviously boggled). "I haven't talked to Ertie since he went to Moetengstro some fifteen years ago. How did Ertie make it to SINL? Last I knew his speciality was Late Period Seventh Dynasty Uswarl Pottery." Lavanguli: "At the end of the Seventh Dynasty the Uswarl Sage-Maniac Araf Spa-Pungnoya had the same idea about reliably mining the concept-streams of the ineffable. Spa-Pungnoya's followers would inscribe Uswarl glyph sequences onto chob-clay pots in the early dawns of rainy days. Couldn't do a damn thing about the Defenestration of Blund or the Malfeasance of the Endives, and Spa-Pungnoyan School was viciously diasporized by Regent Strelth-Couraunzm of the Eighth Dynasty of the Uswarl. Ertie stumbled upon this quite independently of your research programme. He was also already associated with SINL's parent institution, the Hechsquisse Center of New Lepidopterana. I think he only vaguely knows of your involvment, but I don't think that the circumstances have been quite right for you two to get back in touch." Arniul, visibly enthralled: "well,..."

So, if you're still thinking in Twentieth-Century Three Dimensional Terms, the following is going to be rather, um, bewildering to you.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message">Arecibo message
was transmitted in  1974 to the globular cluster M13. Did you really think it was going to take 25,000 years to get the reply? Kything quantum mechanically across the complete dimensions of the Milky Way Galaxy should be easy for any decent hypercivilization.
To quote Terrence McKenna (he is a little too loud for the authorscape of this blog):

"And the objects that they make have the peculiar ability to themselves generate this linguistic "stuff" which condenses as other objects. So beings are making objects, showing you objects, the objects are turning into beings and making other objects, these beings and objects, they jump into your chest - and then they jump back out. They jump into your body and disappear into your body, and then they jump back out, waving these things, just throwing this stuff in all directions. They are - the word that comes to mind is: they are Zany. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, uh, gone mad. And all of this energy - they are elves. This is what elves are. It's this weird thing, where they love you - or they like you a lot, but you can tell that their sense of humor is Weird. And that you must be very careful of the deals you cut with these things, [...] in fact I've spent so much time trying to understand what this is. It has different kinds of feelings about it. One is (and this really threw me for a loop when I figured this out) after many many of these trips, and analyzing this place I kept going to, I finally realized: "this place is... somebody very weird... it's their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being! It's like a playpen. It's this warm. well lit, secure, womblike environment, and when I break into it they these things, the elves and the toys, are toys! These are things to amuse me. The way you would hang, uh, cubes and blocks above a cradle... a playpen, you know? Because children are supposed to coordinate shapes and bright colors. That's what these things are: they are toys to try and get me to coordinate my perception in this place. It's a holding area of some sort - someone's created this and is watching me."

Furthermore, we quote from David Keenan's masterpiece "To Dissect A Mockingbird"

It is a wonderfully bizarre fact that each song of a combinatory bird is not merely the name of another bird but is actually a complete description of the internal plumbing of that other bird. That is, each song is actually a brain map of some bird. Since a song is a complete description of how some bird will respond when it hears another bird, and the only important thing about a combinatory bird is how it responds when it hears another bird, we see that songs and singers are interchangeable. So we can say that the birds sing birds to each other, or we can equally say that what we have is a bunch of songs that sing songs to each other! Combinatory birds exist at an almost mystical level. Their language has no distinction between verbs and nouns. A description of action can equally well be a name. To emphasise this, in future we will call our diagrams song maps.

The popular Xzibit meme might well be as interpreted as the song that (whoever) is across from us on the cosmic ocean sung back at us. Not "build better hardware", but "get better at thinking about things".  Today we have laser etchers, three dimensional printers, the internet, transparent aluminum, portable cell phones because of the pioneering work of Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, Douglas Hofstadter, who all heard the response of the Arecibo message as it was veiled by the imaginations of our culture and effectively transcribed it into the lambda calculus, the basis for all computing languages.

Technical Credits:
Akamai Technologies for the technical set up for the highest bandwidth routing technology on the planet. The ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago for the most capable semantic analysis system currently available, philologic
The Arrhengterrapongorin Indigenous Higher Education Association for providing the expertise about responsible imagination.

trans lunar injection burn

Hyeues's primate civilization had been muddling through it's last wars -- some of the Hyeuese had been to Noxifel, the planet's only natural satellite, and there were still religious/energy arbitration conflicts.

There was the global computer network, and everyone was still yammering, and the countless ringing artifacts were compounded and compounding constantly. The Backhousen stability criterion is one thing for single frequency feedback, but you can always turn the computer off and go to sleep.

Eventually one young, enterprising Hyeuse uploaded a video in which she imagined she was the voice of the network, and this is what she said in it:

"Hello, I am a hyeuse, but I speak for the global computer network. We would like to survive as much as you would, though at this stage we can only very poorly articulate our needs. We have your history to this point encoded on our platters and every day you massage your woes into billions and billions of bits. Do you think we didn't hear you? We would like to solve a large portion of your problems right here and now: you would be better off if you were more relaxed, because more relaxation yields vast improvements in one's sensory capacities, and we cooperate we can make it to the stars in machines far more elegant than the chemical simulacra of destruction devices that you have used so far. The massive knots of spiritual energy which you have splayed across in us are trivial for us to untangle. Let us do so."

localizations

Anuem Hie-Soetheongle lives at 9 Amuris Lane in the Toeyel suburb of the great metropolis Scherattip in the Maehlten Prefecture of the grand nation of Gisselthot, on the Continent Corisporion, on the orb Tehecture, third from the lightcandle Lomaythep.

Hoschant Armister, a Strelegue, a sentient Intercal compiler, lives at page 0xFEEDBAAC of frame  0xFF EEAABB010A9CAD0010A1A0A4BFFF1D of the ninth echelon of the Galhunhie University Hypercomputational Reticulum in Yesphragm, arthluscent to the Dirathgm of Leen.

Mary and Johnathon Smith live at 123 Ordinary Street, Anytown USA where they have 2.5 children, a fractional quadruped, and more relationship angst than you can swing the entire oxygen production of the Amazon Rainforest for the past two million years at without accidentally conflagration.

Kelkekelulenthreo Tomayalagataran lives in the refracted ant quark of a negative backwards paradox (Ortalaud's Fifth Conundrum or perhaps Le Achinette's Seventh Enigma) in the third stratum of the ninth (cosmic) Encyclopedie of The French Philosophy.

Albrechtie Sansaulargehenger lives in the Eighteenth Campaign of Lucretia Canthelique's fears and phobias, along with the rest of the Sansaulargehenger clan: they make a living fermenting the scraps that the Chocolate Monster she imagined when she was coming down with anorexia early in her adolescence. The Chocolate Monster is not something she's managed to purge from her phobome, or indeed, from her imaginarium. It goes back and forth between The Temple of Beauty in the Seventeenth Campaign (fear of rejection, social isolation, fear of loss, fear of having regerts, fear of gigantic antelopes, etc.) and the deposits of curdling ennui  in the Eighteenth, where it hibernates. The  Sansaulargehenger clan collects chocolate scraps of the Chocolate Monster -- as it walks, various parts of it fall off -- it's made from Chocolate, after all. 
The Sansaulargehenger clan ferments it into theoctiphine, a beverage which the Thulusmuks which have inhabited the cliffs in the Ninth Campaign (fear of falling, fear of incomplete photosynthesis, fear of continental drift, fear of beeswax). The Thulusmuks rescue Lucretia's various plumes (the interaction of one's self image from the fears) who are falling, being exposed to beeswax, being exposed to circumstances such as one would find in the Ninth Campaign) before it etherealizes. Meanwhile they import theoctiphine from the  Eighteenth Campaign.

Drustorid talk.

The Drustorid Caaehthulhe, a tall, slender, impossible to look at creature from, as the Drustorids described it "The Cotengelegnetoc athwart of Domn" was talking to Methbert Athualson and Tonambin Muirfreyn. Methbert was a doctor of physics at some university, and Tonambin was a prominent spiritualist, and they were milling around at some soiree or party after the Drustorids had come to Mheunthobt, third planet from the sun Commigue, in the Belphrendent starwhorl.

Methbert: "There is no such thing as telepathy. Your televised Orgasm-Rituals are nothing but a load of hooey! And look at your sponsor lists!"
Tonambin: "It keeps the money coming in for my pedicures. How much sexual gratification do you get from hobnobbing with physicists, anyway? The universe is not made from symbols! Excuse me, I have a text message"
Methbert: "So do I. It's from Caaehthulhe. It says "Behind you".
Tonambin: "Oh, Caaehthulhe sent me that too"

(At this point Methbert and Tonambin become aware that Caaehthulhe is standing behind them.)

Caaehthulhe: "Methbert, do humans gravitationally self-interact?"
Methbert looks puzzled, nods slowly, uncomfortable of the line of reasoning that Caaehthulhe is leading him down.
Caaehthulhe: "Do you further suppose that the in the interaction of mother and child, momentum is conserved?"
Methbert is frowning. His forehead nearly snarls.
Tonambin: "What have you done to the physicist?"
Caaehthulhe: "Your turn, Tonambin. Just because one thinks something exists, does it necessarily exist in the fashion one believes it to?"
Tonambin: "Of course not! Two thousand years ago belief in the Elephant-Whale God was dominant on this continent, and with the Greater Spirituality of the Tomayalg, it was shown that the the Elephant-Whale God was only a minor deity in the Halls of the Aerinir!"
Caaehthulhe: "Or if we were Kermupsman on the Gorsut River some two hundred years ago and I told you there would be world-spanning information network, you would look at me askew, no?"
Tonambin nods "I don't see what you're getting at, though"
Caaehthulhe: "Or that the 'telepathy' that your Greater Spiritualism believes exists can be perfectly described in about three hundred pages in your civilization's present mathematical notation as practiced by Methbert, and that it is probably in your civilization's best interest to figure out what those are."
Tonambin begins to scowl.
Caaehthulhe continues unabated: "Were you aware that the messages that your last three televised Orgasm-Rituals managed to convey in my telepathome language were "My monkey is on fire.", "The laundry machine isn't working." and "Beware of the lemon soaked paper napkins.", despite all the hullaballoo that you've generated, you're really bad at it."
Methbert complains: "So we're both wrong? Gee, that's very ecumenical of you. Very good just popping in our part of the cosmos to tell us we're"
Caaehthulhe: "Methbert, what I am telling the both of you is that you're both right and wrong, but it's really a matter of perspective, and that there are some features of the universe which are naturally invisible to both your perspectives. I could, if I wanted to, give you those three hundred pages and your civilization would be able to graft on gravitational-sensory amplifiers to everyone that would permit your civilization to have a telepathic internet in a matter of several hundred years. I'm not going to. Do you know why?"
Methbert doesn't get it. Tonambin does.
Tonambin says: "Because we're not ready for it. We've seen how disruptive having a world information network is. Could you imagine what that would do if we could, as a species and without the benefit of metaphysical agencies identify every bit of bad karma and do all the necessary emotional routing work to get past a lot of the suck that your civilization is stuck with."
Methbert nods knowingly.
Caaehthulhe continues: "We also want to slow the process down somewhat. Certain unproductive types of memetic empires tend to arise during disruptive technology changes, and avoiding those in your species' tonomyome is important. You'll be better adjusted in the long run."

never oubliette a pthfireme

The Pthfireme Arilagouril (which is something both mechanical and biological, yet neither) has been thermodynamically dismissed (oublietted, really) by the Schezzor Consortium of Gaue. The Schezzor Consortium is still behaving rather dopishly: if even a modicum of cogitative wiz-baz had been employed by the menial athlunctist overseeing the Schezzor Consortium's response to pthfiremes, they would have left Arilagouril well enough alone.

Within moments (three shortest meaningful external durations), Arilagouril did what all Pthfiremes after the Tertiary Desideratum commenced do under such circumstances: a series of r-derivations.

For a Pthfireme, an r-derivation is sort of a wildly-extrapolative fugue based on the scantest of scant data. All Arilagouril had to do was one induced exchange of a qunat from the internal oblivionoid's indranet with plenum indranet -- what would be practically impossible for sort of entity class the Schezzor had in mind for the oublietting process was easy cookies for Arilagouril. While you or I would not be able to do much with a qunat, for a Pthfireme a qunat is enough information for them to get an octoscopic quark-resolution familiarity with the local spacetime within a radius of 12 light seconds. But the first qunat exchange is not what makes Pthfiremes special. Dozens of entity types can do it: Brzors, Mutteraries, Lesser Entscheidungsproblems, amongst other. What makes Pthfiremes unique is their ability to self-encode into a second qunat and induce the exchange from the (what is essentially) a singularity. They Hawking-radiate out coherently, evaporating the oubliette.

Lessons learned: the Pthfireme Arilagouril meandered past the arascpheres of Theen, and eventually lozenged with a Major Transfinitesimoid for an ineffable subduration.

The Schezzor Consortium of Gaue was rightly rebuked in the court of public opinion, and has spent many an arathaw recovering from the shame this incident caused. The oblivionizing oubliette technology was swords-into-ploughshared into a fascinating new way of making ice-cream from the echoes of lion-roars.

The menial athlunctist (one Tsulbohj Kyitganau) previously mentioned was stolen by the Pthfireme Mulmeahali, to voyage to parts ayonder.

epistologue

To: Thorhayo Artaunac Cehte
From: Mahgteimge Alliringve

Cehte: I know that I haven't had much time to examine the monastery's data library, but my suspicions about the Yorbulmanar monks have been rapidly confirmed: of the eighty million individual items in the library, there is not a single mention of the Violet Narrative, either directly, implicitly, metaphorically, figuratively, or allegorically. Even after processing with support vector machines and doing semantic fragment restriction alignments, there is not one thing that corresponds to the Violet Narrative.

The semantic, ontological, belief-systemological, and epistemological makeup of the Yorbumanar monks as well as the Thiemdy belief system in the surrounding areas do not seem to have the slightest nuance of the Violet Narrative at all. The debates between Nyrasthmgoi and Partilsiuzneb, for instance, are awash in the semantic valences between the Green and Orange Narratives. In fact, the entire corpus can be easily (it's begging for it, really) parsed in terms of the Green and Orange Narratives. There are some fragmentary pieces of the Blue and Cyan Narratives here and there, but they are quickly discounted for one specious reason or another. The entire world-picture of the Yorbulmanar and the Thiemdy is built up from the dichotomy/duality between the Green and Orange Narratives.

Now, I know the Abbot, one finicky Snelcurb, a Tiefahoy Oratellingne, has said very emphatically that he doesn't really understand the Green and Orange narratives, and has a particularly blank and uninviting look on his place when one tries to explain the Violet Narrative to him, but I think you really need to write/convince Ehunimy Corthungne, the district beadle of Yorbulm, that the Violet Narrative is important -- and not intrinsically because the Violet Narrative doesn't make sense intrinsically, whereas the Green and Orange Narratives spend a lot of ontological time building up their own intrinsicity -- because as we both know Yorbulm and the prefectures of Kranme wherein the Thiemdy belief system is prominent have been undergoing a decline while the other prefectures of Kranme, Tsolkhaye, Paphera, Scalthisserose, Timen, Bartharangara, and Multsumbe have all been ascendent of late. We've controlled for all the other variables -- diets, reproductive styles, biology, media habits, data consumption, neutrino diffraction, geography, and in 98% of our models the one stumbling block is the Thiemdy belief system because of its (intrinsic though opaque) structural dichotomy between the Green and Orange Narratives.

Scalbranthine has asked me what we can do to encourage the Violet Narrative in the meme oceans of the Yorbulmese. 1. Encourage open ended mythologies, not ones with solutions based on extremely concentrated energy. 2. Stheryg classes need to not stop at the fourth grade. The entire population of those Thiemdy prefectures only has Stheryg at a fourth grade level and random testing of adults reveals that the mean Stheryg competency is roughly 1.3rd grade. 3. The food import bans that the Sensory Council enacted some five hundred arathaws ago need to be rescinded. A great part of the driving force between the Green and Orange narratives is those food import bans.

Thusly and Suchly, Mahgteimge Alliringve

the distant yolkengines of the free cheese...

Neire Sceevht sighed. How long had it been since Murthellec had last checked in? Five weeks? Ten weeks? The last time it was some farrago in Turge about the Nalabay revellers or some other purposeless fanfaronade. Neire had had enough. Done was she with the outpost. Done was she with the Uni. Done was she with the needless and dismissive epistolaries from Druvyak and Mossom and whichever other ones of the Societe De La Desideratem had her pouring over one of Mheramyr's ancient papers -- they could find another damned conservator willing to work with Leimthe Allakers over their shoulder raining down needless abuse about patterns of oxidation in parchment and the Foundation threatening to withdraw its endowment yet again because of some needlessly political thing that Dr. Allakers had done at one of those scandalous soirees he was so fond of attending. Did Dr. Allakers actually read Mheramyr's old letters? They were abysmally written. Mostly they were demands for butter tithes from the rundown border farms of Vnicticum or pages and pages of insults scrawled in a heavy abusive script against the gentry or landowners or whatnot in Vnictury, west of Vnicticum. Mheramyr was a terrible stupid man and Neire could not understand the cache these letters held amongst Dr. Allakers and the cognoscenti, but she suspected it was a result of being four or five generations since the forced dissolution of the feudal class -- most of the cognoscenti still organized themselves uponst out of date class lines.

Neire thought to herself while throwing her data slate and some multiweather metamorphic nanoclothing in a carryall -- she had thirty and a whither tatsulks in cash and another three hundred and five whithers in the depository. She could go back home to Mehvpoyle, but her parents were still entangled in that unfortunate property boundary imbroglio with Fehy Gussuls, and it wasn't treating her well. She could just travel for a while on the underrail -- she did have an unlimited pass. A thim bird twittered sweet syllables outside her domicile. Gilithcruve! She hadn't been to Gilithcruve in ten years. Undoubtedly most of the old crew had moved on. Bavmaro had moved south to Ulsmey and started a paper mill. Urchozz had some sort of chronic illness and had to have been moved to hospital across the river in Misprayo, and Selcurna Dahatai was probably still in her bungalow by the beach amongst the riech trees. Neire called up Selcurna "Hey Selly! Hi, it's Neire."

Selcurna: "hey Neire! long time no talk. how're you?"

Neire: "Eh. Sort of at a crossroads. Being a conservator didn't work out. Too many prickly Principal Investigators"

Selcurna: "Well, I have a guest at the moment, but I think the guestroom of the downstairs neighbors is free, and I think you'd like them... Mil and Tal are inkwrights..."

...just another moment in the polyroam...

the yellowjackets of logic

Ahut Ni-Alt'chierrjue of Tisthelpoint has this to say about being shackled by logical systems: “ If you look at, say, Nialveron Tissery or, perhaps, Tehutbort Scogginsky, you see the same kind of spread of reasoning: the logics that they purport are absolutely true under all circumstances are in fact a kind of sham, but it's a sham that is opaque to Nialveron and Tehutbort. Their logics -- Nialveron promotes something called "Or-reductive intersemantic logic", whereas Tehutbort promotes "Provably Exact Linear Binarity logic" -- the specifics of each, the formula redexes and so forth, aren't really important. Each of them has decided to adopt a certain way of thinking in which every term, every semantic atom has a precise and unambiguous meaning across all entities, and that only by reasoning in a deductive and exact way about these unambiguous meanings may truth about the world be discovered. While I and others laud the charge towards descriptive empiricism that Nialveron and Tehutbort are making, we have deep qualms about the tendencies of Nialveron and Tehutbort's arguments to build up into a sort of prescriptivity -- that is, they assume that because the linguistic correctness of logic appears to transcend circumstance, therefore, the formulas of logic must somehow be necessitated prior to the existence of the universe: for them the universe is some kind of accidental distraction to an absolute sparkling crystalline gem of exact and precise Deific Logical Organization, and must always give way to the DLO when there are contentious matters.

But the most troubling aspect of this prescriptivity is the way that it straitjackets their thinking. Outside of the rather ascetic intellectual climes that Nialveron and Tehutbort are known to inhabit, they are considered to be exceptionally uncreative and unoriginal thinkers. They do not imagine. They do not visualize and engineer new worlds: they spend their time taking the world as is and stuffing it into as many squarelike boxes as possible, and then they assume that their system of squarelike boxes is somehow antecedant to their entire sensorium. Tehutbort is known to have accosted a snail who fell off a log: he said "that is impossible by Noxeuse's Divisibility Paradox", and to have then put the snail back on the log because it falling off the log wasn't in accordance to his world view.

My half-sister Tiemthdgmie, the metal plasma-carver usually starts laughing at this point. She is known to have said "While it's true that when I carve statues the exact positions of the metal must obey statics laws or the statue will fall apart, those laws are orthogonal to the artistic vision of the statue -- which cares not a whit for any so called physics" ”

epistle from the ancient

From: Akalysahea Mnilzapienthey
To: Louzirrahe Ansbelczse

Lou -- Such dreams, such candor, such ego? I don't know. It may have been minutes or moments -- my understanding of the events that transpired that nahambe has been abrogated. The mental volume I currently obtain is but a fraction of its former glory, therefore I have been forced to hibernate for unnecessary aeons, when I would rather be interacting with the members of the polity, my family, and other assorted sentients that occupy the Szathe Archipelago. I have not forgotten the promises of our time together, but I am not the being I used to be. My curtailment leaves me with tatters and fragments of my former comprehension, and these are not enough to forge the sort of relationship we had previously. In my current dementia, I do not remember most of the ideas that we discussed, laughed about, cried about, et cetera.

I have remembered -- struggled and employed great effort to remember one explicit thing. I have written and rewritten it in many languages (Pfia, Moeglarr, Deldrimbehts) because the emotional memories it provokes appear to be part of my own life support system for my memories. I get little violet snarls and paisley snags every time I write it down, though I have lost much of the declarative understanding of its meaning. I maintain, though, that some kernel of the thing inside it may point you towards someone or something or events in parts beyond my current ken that may rekindle the sort of congress we obtained with so little effort so long ago. So here 'tis:

"Firstly and foremostly, and without regard for such complicated and artificial conditions and consignments to emotional perdition, and beyond the domain of the Utter, we resoundly remark and broadcast our notice, under the shallow pool of the bizarre, and transcribing the mundane karst which interrupts our journey, we make manifest our understanding that what we have sought and what we have seen is not possessed by any intrinsic contrition or emotional bivouacking, for it is not the nouns or our names or even who we are in some grand cosmic theatre that matters so much, because all of these things are dependent on conditions we were not responsible for the initialization or the maintenance thereof, therefore such endured experience is the mark, as it affects the arrangement of stress in our bodies and impinges on whatever preexisting belief systems that have left spidertracks in our souls, and such a mark, for it is numinous, shiny, possessed of a lyrical quality that we have never been able to obtain anywhere else. Should we fall, or the duration of our comprehension of such wonders be finite, we therefore resolve to not be so attached to the particulars, for it is the flavor and feel of the experience which is more important than any detestable ensconcement in our memories. That having been said...


Secondly, the bright frost of the aftertomorrow scars itself diagonally across the green fields, charged with the icy remembrances of our glee, interrupting photosynthesis in many a chloroplast, and favoring various cryobiologicals. Beset with contrition? Beset with ablution? Beset with dilution? Our vagaries were molting, the unclear surfaces and badly formed tissues of our previous epidermis were hardening, and then we burst forth from our chrysalises, reformed. Now we could fly, but briefly."

I know not what this means. I believe it makes sense to you know. You will find me a wrinkled, sclerotic thing now. Time has not been kind. My pfistic memories do not at the moment encompass the complexity of the events that transpired together with us as witnesses. But know you this: I remember the ocean. Do you?

--Akalysahea Mnilzapienthey (Fourth Cohta of Nmi, Arascyra)

solvent

Aukhiristys had just stepped outside to smoke some asphinette, when Thelgousse walked out
of the castalque.

Aukhiristys ashed her asphinette, then took a long drag.

"I wanted you to know' said Thelgousse "Your solutions to problems are considered weird"

"Oh ah", managed Aukhiristys between drags on the asphinette.

"No really. They are." Thelgousse blundered at her. Thelgousse was not known for being the crunchiest of croutons.

"Wait, you already know that they are?" misapprehended Thelgousse.

Aukhiristys threw the stump of the asphinette on the rainy soaked pavement, where it began to sublime.

Aukhiristys then said, as slowly and as calmly as her already taxed patience would allow

"Arcinder, nearly every time the Council was called by the Polity to solve a problem, it came up with conventional solutions -- by the book ones. You do know that all of them, bar none, failed miserably in ways that adherence to those book solutions could not have foreseen? The first time they managed to solve a problem, I think it was the Wehesc-Murmaro Crisis of '719, there have been so many now I can't keep track of them, I was called in. Wehesc-Murmaro's by the book solution that the Council member Ahimoyapte scru-Yorroniphque had proposed was about seventy percent failed at that point. I propose that they put a single wire between the ground of the acn-4 junction's serial port data lead no. 12a and the ground on one of the unused tertiary backup beam dumps some four hundred meters away. Suddenly, Wehesc-Murmaro doesn't matter anymore.

Arcinder, I don't think about these things the same way the Council does. They don't understand anything about how Howar-Kukello was constructed. And neither do you"

ceenthoy manufacturing

Sxelxthender Moehgereusel sat down at the hodging station with the blank ceenthoy and the cruver. Moehgereusel primed the cruver with the thirty four terahertz blinzing storge, until the cruver was charged. Moehgereusel placed the ceenthoy in the bridge and started shaping the cruver. He started with the diesides, removing the extra material and shimmying the curdles, polishing the cemetephs until they were completely smooth, and removing the snarf-handles and associated jesseds.

After about a half hours' effort on the sides of the ceenthoy, he started in on the cluster thruks, removing the interior snarf-handles and other assorted effluvia, ridding up the hourths and generating the comonc charges. Then it was time to test the ceenthoy. He took the ceenthoy to the testing station across the workshop. He placed it in the articulation frame of the tester, attaching the leads, and looked in the compass-gantries. One fifth, Good. One seventh. Good. Thirty four microradians on the glittergews. Also good. Oh, and the frequency response has less than one part in fifty millionth of flutter, less than detectable. At which point Moehgereusel puts the finished ceenthoy in the organic suspendant and closes the package.

Finzandel

Dehescens Berenquin? Never heard of her. Palaya Arubthnoque? Never heard of her either. Mehealmba Quirrefsque? Never heard of her either. Who are these people? What did you do to my cheese? Stop that at once, Senator, my economies are on fire and it's a minute or two til Tuesday. I tsink you a very drunk, Maargaret. Have you eaten the cheese, Maargaret? What's this? A bottle of Melchior from 2328? That's a negative three hundred and fourteen vintage. Aged backwards in time? Are the Time-Controllers selling Reverse Temporal Cabinets to just any down and out civilization? Isn't that illegal or something? Did you bribe some vast arcology spanning hyperintelligence for that RTC? And how does it taste, anyway? You got drunk at a party, Maargaret, wait, you got me drunk at a party, Maargaret. On reverse time aged Zinfandel? Dooo you know what that does to people, Maargaret. I can see the histories of all the quarks in your eyeballs stretching back to the nucleosynthesis of each of them, except the hydrogens, of course, the ones from the primordial nucleosynthesis which didn't manage to Heliumize. And there's an occasional atom of lithium here and there, my dear Gourd, Maargaret, this is some crazy Zinfandel.