cargo culture

Agents of the Thneux of Tophtareo bundled together in the cold. It had been a long, weary, winter, and the quest for the Theid of the Nohogien had been nothing but a wild duck chase with many dry tributaries and dessicated rivulets of opportunities. They had tried searching under the basalt stratigraphy, they had looked in Mrs. Yenderphleuw's spleen, they had tried overturning two recalcitrant continents, and in desperation, they had underwent comparative anatomical antidissections at the hands of Jones, Simeton & Daughters, Transanatomists-At-Large, but lo' they hadn't found the Theid. A priceless artifact of great and unadumbrated manufacture, that more or less words utterly fail to describe. It could be cubical? It could be shaped like a small philosophy or two, or a stalk of celery. Arwezio Val-Zogyar, the last known to possess the Theid, said it was like "a delicate milken dewdrop of alacrity diffracting off the mouse of misshapen carbonation", and refused requests for compact descriptions, breaking into pages and pages of dense, interwoven poetry, lyrical and glittery. The Thneux would not be denied. It would possess this most incomprehensible of objects, but as time wore on and its agents became ever more perplexed and bitter, it seemed, in fact, that the Thneux would be denied possession of the Theid.

Now, it is reported by later and more fact-pedantic data-archivists that the Nohogien Theid is in fact a Reheleth Advanced Hyperconcepts nine dimensional transnumismatic neutrino-muon coupler valve certified to run between 14 GHz and 18 GHz and produce flutter in less than one part in ten to the seventeenth (yikes!), which had accidentally left on Pleuroporr when the Sahagar-Rienstad cargo ferry crashed into the southern continent some thirty cycles before the Thneux ascended to leadership of Tophtareo. The Indigenous Culture Preservation League had swooped in and manage to remove most of the hypertechnological artifacts strewn about by the crash, but the Theid somehow managed to squirrel itself away into possession by the Nohogien

slo-mo fres-know.

Lantern'd folksy astrally irrigated visions of rusted iridium, oxidized cucumbers, many and numerous, like lemons dancing on the head of a pin. Such was change: such had to be, for the divisor-thrill of an abnormal number precessing around a floating top, orbiting the head of the hostess, before the soiree is scheduled to begin. In quick succession a fine china teapot is knocked from the table, and falls to its inevitable shattering, as an unrulier guest says, in slow motion "food fight", and throws a pumpkin pie across the room.

The pie collides with an antelope that has mysteriously materialized in the middle of the event. The antelope looks at the proverbial narrauthorial camera as if to say: "Oh, another fine mess you've gotten me into. What is it this time? Party in slow motion? And last week you had me to contend with those three thousand five hundred lunatic atoms of rubidium. Grah." The pie, being neither sentient nor sensate, goopily slides off the antelope and falls on the ground. It has nothing to say to the narrauthorial camera. The antelope, being marginally more self aware than the rest of the party-dwellers, immediately sets upon eating the pie. The party dwellers neither know that there is an antelope there, or have managed to get much farther than declaring a food fight when the teapot finally impacts, breaking into numerous small and uncomfortably sharp bits.

constructive potential of dangerous intensity.

Tdzgolgze Tzunphe says: "we are used to measuring destructive forces, but we often do not consider measuring constructive forces, particularly if they are of immense magnitude. The yields of explosives are given, but have you ever seen the warning labels on a tube of constructor nanomachines?  The Drugn Pfamagai make constructor nanomachines that are able to rearchitecture cities in a manner of milliseconds, faster than the native population can react. Suddenly, the city is changed. The topology is preserved, but the geometry is different, less jumbled. Refridgerators, formerly with freon refrigerant, now have exotic pion-coupled adiabiatic refrigeration technologies. Computers are speeded up. Things are cleaned up."

undersulfurous jazz

After twenty or so years walking the highlands, past Theor Grunland and Theor Yusphealius, the Pleurg creatures who had been carrying the consciousnesses and muscular stress patterns of the princess regent and the cadre of royal advisors had reached the Yoveal caves, deep in the Thrunlands. Some Vlyssanghai engineers had set up a small laboratory outpost, and they still were using some Vlurfked composite quantum foam technology, and the Pleurg would discharge their charges into machines that would weave and sculpt new bodies for their charges. The process is two staged: the first stage involved the casting of the muscular stress patterns into blank quantum composite foam bodies, and was a fairly violent procedure involving immense energies: it was implosive and involved the careful arrangement of various attennules and other hyperfine projections into a sphere of unformed quantum foam composite. The sphere then shrinks into the shape of the body, which is still mindless, but carries the right muscular stress spectra to accommodate the mind that it is about to recieve. The second stage is much less violent and slower: while the original transcerebrrephrenization is fast because the tertiary brains of the Pleurg are made out of exotic matter, the process of writing a mind from a Pleurg tertiary brain to Vlurfked composite quantum foam takes about two days. 

After the mind is written (the technical term is 'milked') from the Pleurg tertiary brain, the booting occurs, this is the activation of the mind in the new substrate, and is effected through mental continuity: the experiential portion of the consciousness in the new body is linked to the the Pleurg tertiary brain, and in so doing, the consciousness moves. The Royal Anthropographer described it as "the mental equivalent of changing houses". 

After eight minutes or so, the composite quantum body, which doesn't have any of the original dna of the  person, settles into its appropriate shape. The composite quantum foam is able to determine, using the muscular stress data and the phreny, the exact appearance of the person. It takes about eight weeks for the person to settle into the new body without the added features of the composite quantum foam. At which point, if they so choose, and they usually do, to turn on the added features: dodecachromacy, increased memory and processing power, chromatophores in the skin, buckytube-tensioning of bone-equivalents. But the architecture of the mind is preserved, which is most important. In the case of the earliest attempts at this technology, minds were moved without care for the muscular stress patterns, and the most maladjusted minds would result, feeling naked, and they often lost it.

arabesques of the overtomorrow

Plaintive emissions of muons signalled the end of the empire: forewithal the mesoscale apportionments made by the royal diphthongwrights were etched in silicon and carried by specially trained couriers from the palaces and the royal scientific laboratories to the dirty bazaars of the the land, in these all the collected knowledge, at the instruction of the cadre of royal advisors and the princess regent, were smuggled with great alacrity into the heaving underbelly of the commonweal. Even though the empire had fallen and the defenestrations, malfeasances, and degredations were going to continue unabated, the royal datapools had been ingeniously transferred to the public's seething hippocampus. Looters and other nogoodniks of various degrees of brokenness smashed the ornate crystalline chandeliers as the royal advisers and the princess regent transferred their consciousnesses from their biological bodies into the tertiary brains of the Pleurg creatures that lives under the castle: the transcerebrephrenization is one way: their biological bodies were left as inactive husks, much to the ire of the barbarian revolutionaries who would have taken great pleasure in their violent deaths. The Pleurg creatures then began their migration to the Yoveal caves, where the royal cadre and the princess regent would be able to get new bodies made out of Vlurfked engineered composite quantum foam: that might take ten or twenty years or so of travel, but it would ensure that on their return to the fallen empire they would be able to weave a new and sensible government amidst the chaos, or at least, if a sensible government emerged despite the depravity of the barbarians, that they would be able to continue their researches on the fundaments of meaning in something as well equipped as the royal laboratories later.

Ulyghow Varvarus swung the sledgehammer into the rococo sculpture. Mathematics? What tripe, he thought. A conquerable people to be conquered. Just another one of them, all in a day's work. One of the barely perceptible Pleurg creatures, housing the consciousness of the Royal Cultural Anthropographer, in its tertiary brain, caught Ulyghow's eye for three sevenths of a millisecond, and in that time Varvarus had the distinct impression that his graves, such as they weren't, had not merely been walked over, but burnt to nuclear ash. 

bumbling through the fields of yore...

"Other than the muon vodka, I'm sure we can come to some kind of arrangement", said the Yalzuleak, its seven eyes kind of vague and red from weeks of sleeplessness and exertion, pausing over the dozens of nearly inscrutable legal documents written in chickenscratch. Literally. The Yospheni polity decided eighteen years ago that all its legal documents would be written in ink by dancing chickens on sheets of the toughest parchment. The legal code was translated into chickenscratch in the course of a concerted five year programme. I can't read the stuff. The Yalzuleak probably can't. Reading chickenscratch is a much sought after skill these days. The Chickenscratch Philologists' Union (CPU), has a dedicated corps of readers of chickenscratch. They squint at the parchment. They peer and ogle at it. They turn it upside down and backwards and view it in a mirror with a green filter while Ormestrio Van Salvwarby's infamous symphony Uzyphreunque dell'Zarathirio plays backwards on a dodecaphonic hyperdigital multistereo deck. The Yalzuleak shrugs, downs some more superfluid helium, and eructates. Getting this contract (with the possible exception of the muon vodka deal) is likely to make the Yalzuleak a lot of ducats, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink. And for gambling? Advanced mathematical supersimulations on distributed biological quantum computers of ducks attacking a wombat on a calm midwinters' eve? Nope. More superfluid liquid helium to get drunk on. Your acetyl-CoA habit looks minor in comparison.

anneal me, slabscape

The silent streams of infinity coruscate and collide in incomprehensible combinatoric rococoques, irrigating the misfields of reason with the thin razorcracks of misapprehension and the vain hope of complete understanding. The Gone World rears its nasty hydra of a head and then you're left standing with perhaps less than a clear idea of why you arrived so long ago. with the message printed on that piece of bacterial matting that you had printed at the local confectioners' back office. The absolute desirability of higher order coherence in your self-arrangment of your own mind has led you here, and the things you see and hear here drive the repositioning of massive slabs of mental effluvia. Things which did not fit together because they were too big and too awkwardly edged with complicated internal and external structure have been rotated, stretched, transformed so that what was previously an confused melange of concepts and beliefs now fit together with a precision that you could not have foreseen. You will emerge from this ordeal as it is, annealed, purified, free of the jostling which previously assaulted your apprehension of the world. Your perception won't be perfected, but it will be considerably enhanced. But what is the point of this crusade? Personal salvation? Liberation from the sidereally mundane? If you are still looking for something, then you haven't not found what you weren't looking for. This sort of annealing does not provide all the answers, but it reduces the particularly vile tendency for one to philosophically speculate on pointless eschatological or teleological fripperies and then imbue those illusions with a life of their own, for which you would be just along for the ride. 

Later, much later in fact, when you are sitting by the hearthfire and sipping at a cup of some tisane, with a book halfway open, and some diagram or other with inscrutable remarks annotating it fearlessly nosing itself at you, you might reflect on the other character and his illusory hijinx: you're the one who came through strengthened, and you avoid the mythological interpretation and you grok the diagram. 

rebarbative barbarian barbers

The Transctheres of Golladge? An Imaginarion? What preludes? What unindexed cormorantry! Had I a dither for every voxel the Shtoyn of Cleveril hit with their funny foam sledgehammers I'd be a poor monkey, or else! Oh, what cranthry had the doggerelwauled eigencomedians derived from their rather inglorious routines, their forgotten cabbage dirges and their analytic attentions to the green freedoms that our ancestors deliberately locked away in the notorious catacombs of Saint Freundlorg? Do they demand mustard rights? An abolition of the hominid tax? The decriminalization of the cosine? What madpoliticos are these, ne'er do wells and nellespont crultherists, oh what fetid wondrous catnip do they disregard and then recompense our dipthongwrights with their idolatries. Nay, I say, let us play by the sundry asterisms of York and the moon-drenched shores of the Threltomniville Van Gherkinicide Marchmain Pronouncements, the lamplighters of distant lands, for the precession around the orrery at the promontory by the dancers of Goff-Silvram means that there's just one more tune on the radio.

the first anteriorally ventral star on the left, then sail straight on to morning, you can't miss it.

Arvulgne Derraptranga of the Shels Blarzt, by Tennemery Green, across from the Scoles of the Latter Cellerdet had had enough, of time? No. Of space? Of noughts and crosses or stacks of pleather? No, not that either. Arvulgne twiddled a crithip blongle on her fingers, throwing it against the wall where it shattered into thousands of gaseous fragments. Wisps of craspy and blottongle condensed, sparked, and revaporized into a multicolored plume of self-intersecting smoke. "I am doing this all over again", mused Derraptanga, and thought that the dew was a gut-wrenchingly dumb shade of lilac this morning. An onyx pen had been dipped in a obstreperous pool of ink, and a terrapin monk was just sidling up to the monsterwrights. Derraptanga fumed, plumed, and turned around. "I have just enough alef-tokens to get me to Hfofr, and then I can take the Bleon express to Jaratharab", muttered her mind, undercerebrally as it were. "It's no wonder that Sarango Boutongides doesn't like the uncommonweal here", her mind muttered, transpineally, "with all those careless brocollio scissorettes and the entire economy of Gren Tarragt, they can do better, I think they must. But I don't care if the wharvewrights are undersupplied with constructor nanomachines: they can just make more"

Essay Answer

Aurilysk Calferrallin wrote:


"Arrhengterrapongorin learn to distinguish between amangoa and mahengorve early on. "That idea I had that was an imaginary horror! I recognized it as mahengorve!". They learn that there are different types of good and that the drive for Oggpongkoa is one of the very fundamental motivation that is wired into most forms of life and ramifies as a particular life form ages. They understand that one may not pursue Oggpongkoa by itself, one must focus one's experience on the common bliss, oggrung-goa, and that there is the hierarchy of aliased desire, and the most effective way to ascend it is to focus on the most rewarding use of energy for a particular person/entity. The universe does not reward you for doing what you should not be doing as effectively and piquantly as it does when you do what you should be -- a mathematician in a piano factory will feel stifled. A mathematician in a piano factory who does mathematics while making pianos will recieve more in the way of rewards because they have focused their energies. There is a saying: "Neither vrongling nor vrungling, but shpongling and shrungling," One who has achieved balance between the desire for Oggpongkoa and the necessity of oggrung-goa through balancing their vrungling and shrungling is said to have achieved araspongbence. "

hallmarks of cultural maturity

The Pund culture of the Loraschrelleng Highlands (above the 104th antiparallel and west of Iyt Gallango) got so exasperated with the dozens of cultural anthropologists and various ex-pats that would settle amongst them that Zrillmaya Araspongbent volunteered for the nonexistent position of "ad hoc official cultural ambassador".

The Pund culture is one of the few cultures where "not identifying oneself with one's own culture" is a core value. Araspongbent sez:

"In a culture where members of the culture conflate themselves with the culture, there is the opportunity for unrestricted cultural warfare, viz.: by such a conflation, the person mistakenly percieves attacks on their culture to be attacks on their person. We, the Pund, generally recognize a few hallmarks of cultural maturity. First, in a mature culture, members of that culture do not conflate themselves with the culture, and feel no need to defend their culture from attacks in word. Mature cultures have strong enough internal epistemology that they can weather this kind of interference demurely. Secondly in a mature culture, the culture itself has achieved a sort of cultural self-awareness that is absent in previous stages and one of whose ramifications is that cultural self awareness and personal self awareness are distinct. Thirdly, in a mature culture there is recognition that comparing one's culture to others for the purposes of self-aggrandizement is an ultimately fruitless endeavour. Fourthly, in a mature culture there is recognition that every culture has its flaws, including whichever culture this is.  Immature cultures are very bad at boundary management, and two typical pathologies are being really leaky and amorphous, or being really tight and disciplined. A mature culture recognizes that in order to retain vitality, it must actively shape a kind of fluid mosaic boundary between itself and others. Mature cultures generally prefer a kind of self-deprecatory gatekeeping to an explicitly "ministry of culture" approach, wherein there is some central authority for certifying various cultural arts and products as authentic and marking as deficient those which are percieved by some bureaucracy as inauthentic and invalid"...

"There are reasons that my culture, the Pund, do not participate in the Valpongent Hypercluster Intergalactic Goss Culture competition, and we are heartened that the the recent winner, Gs. Culture 301,309, the Arask of the Cherengerell made a point afterwards by throwing their winnings (twenty grams of memory diamond containing all of Roswep Clandelsky's unwatchable sitcom The Schralang Diaries) into the magnetar K390-2 and then declared that it would never again participate in the competition"

some more Arrhé

Trahec Cla-Alorun had this to say about the difference between thrasmeres and throntears: "The thrasmere resembles the meter, the mile, the gigaparsec, the Planck length, one furlong, the average distance between lion ears for it is a sidereal unit of distance, and of effort. But the throntear is a much more interesting unit of measurement: it is a transcendental distance which counts, quantifies exactly the number of nested metaphors between one conceptual place and another. The thrasmere is purely idempotent: if I travel five thrasmeres and you travel three, the total distance we have traveled is eight thrasmeres. One speaks in hushed tones about 'metathronteareal' or 'transthrontereal' separations between conceptual bulwarks: for while we can say "oh, it was five throntears away", we can also blur the throntear itself, viz.: if we assign a fractional, irrational, transcendental, and or complex or quaternionic number of throntears separation between two conceptual toposes, we are talking about a separation of such depth and magnitude that it cannot be measured by "thras"mere light years."



She goes on to quote Malwavbleom H. Hruncthys, when describing an event pi-sqrt(17)i throntears from Alharhec: "Stunned gelato ribalding? What's the Antialopecianist doing with that hydroxide? Castroglial? I hardly ever took the Cuba'd root of her inflections, expecting an assignation, I removed flecks of dirt from her bodice, oh, which by the way, rolled a seven. Her other bodice rolled a nine. I think her bodices aren't transitive, tho -- and I have the transfers from the streetcar to prove it, though the car top was occupied by a stunning, sunning Opulchst, all bright and swimmy, detailing the underwine of everyone's lasso, snarfing up the Wildebronts and drinking neutrino vodka. This Opulchst laughed of the concretions of centurywork, depositing our disfavor in kind: and when the car had stopped at Biesdboro station and she was required to surrender one of her bodices to the Capstan for inspection, the Opulchst excused her and offered the Capstan some tape, which it tensioned for playing. I think it was some duck tape -- the sort they make from drake feathers."

some Arrhé

Mahengorua, mahengorve: can mean 'fear', 'terror', 'horror', 'avidya', 'abhinevasa', 'bad', depending on context.

amangoa means 'good', but is open ended, and can be compared. There is greater and lesser amangoa

bavpua or bavpué mean 'surprise'

oggpongkoa denotes 'transcendental good'/'transcendental amangoa', which are events or experiences that are good without compare, the bright spots in dreams, the moments in our lives that we covet and are all too brief and fleeting. French translators (such as those who do not manage existence failures) typically call this one "ogg transcendantale". English translators tend to prefer things like "nirvana" or "the pong(u)ent"


oggrungkoa sort of denotes "domestic amangoa" -- or domestic bliss. (there is a glottal stop in between the g and the r", the sort of more sidereal and pedestrian kind of bliss that comes from doing something with repetition and eventually moving from incompetence, to competence, to mastery, to maintenance. This is the mundane, and likewise, French translators of Arrhé render this one as
"ogg mondaine". English translators prefer "domestic bliss" or "the rung(u)ent"

bugaboos of the undermonster.

Dozpadro of the Arschyne Highlands collected two droves, and look man, stop, I've had enough of this. I'm just sitting here at this point in the erf for Herr Mosposio and I can't be bothered to answer every meaningless query the Majordomo Brokvoom issues, in triplicate, written in Basque. I just don't have time. A fiddly one he is. All "I'm the major of the domo!" arigato Mr. Roboto he goes, pointing out naked emperors everywhere he goes. In fact, I'm fairly certain that everyone is a naked emperor to him. It's kind of scary to watch. Yesterday he interrupted a badminton game to loudly and irritatingly call a flock of starlings "a congress of naked emperors!". If he weren't the grandaunt of Lec Vronsitio he'd probably be taken to a rest area and given a hamburger.

the art of syzygy

The Lerispella of Glaunther's Aulk have a practice, they call it "the syzygy" -- it is their form of yoga. I quote from Arhulme Quaensporohenga's book "A Meek Guide to the practice of The Syzygy":

"Many things are encoded into muscle memory, typing, writing, speaking, the expression of language. But also, too, is fear. Our fears and worries are too encoded in our muscles: our muscles serve as memory proxies in a way, for the brain. A muscle perpetually tightened will accumulate scar tissue -- what they call 'adhesions' in the fascia. Memories which produce such things are locked away, not so easily accessible. Which fear is fundamental? Ask someone what they are most afraid of. What do they find themselves thinking about often. Even those without a fear of death may have another sort of fundamental fear that has been encoded into their muscles and which restricts their movement. To free one's movement one must free one's muscles from this restraint.

Furthermore, the concentration of energy in a particular part of the body may be abridged of supernatural denotations: observe that when one tightens a muscle, the body will increase blood flow to that part, therefore increasing the available carbohydrates available to the mitochondria of that part of the body. There is no need to invoke dualistic notions of life-force or whatnot. Now, the concentrations of stress in the body can easily be visualized by taking an x-ray of a person and having them in between two x-ray polarizers in much the same way that the stresses in transparent plastic may be visualized by placing the plastic in between two visual light polarizers orientated at opposite polarizations. The aim of the art of syzygy as we practice is to determine how that stress is distributed and what energy the body is applying constantly to maintain such stresses, and which stresses are superfluous and can, by this art, through careful and coordinated massage, stretching, acts of dexterity, be determined where that stress resides in the body, and how balance can be achieved by noting how the body uses energy asymmetrically, and attempting, as much as possible, organize and structure what was previously incoherent.

Self-knowledge is paramount, as well as self-awareness. Now for the first series of data tables and x-ray polarigraphs of various persons with various life histories..."

Doodles about Greater Arphrungia

Arphrungians, alloyed and annealed, strong like buckycarbon, what a noble breed of anthropomorph. They wield and yield like a mad mother just during the birth of her first child, or a nervous brain surgeon during her first callosumectomy for an epileptic. Never leave your pet news corporation and general paranoia network unaccompanied with an Arphrungian, or they will return in the morning with a more accurate and equitable arrangement more suitable for the ecumenical discourse of the commonweal. Greater Arphrungia is the nation itself, while Lesser Arprhungia consists of most of the West Bluelands in the glorious and peripatetic nation of Orpheon, and most of the Arphrungian exiles who live there live there because they cannot deal with the overwhelmingly and incapacitating level of awesome that permeates Arphrungia, so they have meandered north of the border and peacefully exiled themselves to the less awesome West Bluelands. (as certified by the International Awesomeness Rating Committee).

Arapulskietta and the Darthington Mroab

Oh, Wulsterfloygh, did you not harness the chance of the century? Did you not, in the tonnages of time, with arabesques of the purest iridium, shine like the radiant Aramhac on the fields of Lohaspo by the Arthuygnian? Oh Golloschella and the batterbonds of Cvisse did the sulferfumblers of the gorge get their reptillian revenances in order. It is a last resort of the foolish, a commandment by which our avauntular (avaunt, avaunt, exeunt!) and avuncular vice-cheeses can find solace in the grilled varieties in vacuous victuallers from here to the wilds of Sanhelamon.
If they claim that coherence is the boondoggle of the spiritually bewildered, then I must be like a tree-river on the edges of the Oceans of Reason, because, unlike the dithering lots of the clerestories and the binary enigmas of Sar Argyre, I juggle.

knerst

Aryffhon, Bthegmy & Sons has released a new hypermaterial. It's called "knerst", and is probably the least dense ultrahydrophobic material known. A cube of knerst, if the sides are smaller than 5cm, will float, on one of its corners, on water, because the knerst water interface will tend towards one of minimum surface area.

more random cosines for the Stalk of Graoulk

They are the stealers of dreams, the ribald opportunity cost of a frothy tomorrow, their foamy redoubtable and orange in the scene makes a man like a damned cabbage, oh, did you see? Were you there? Had you your assigned yoghurt and curcumin and riboflavin dyed ceremonial bloaking stoot? Did the Abbess of Prencep offer you some tea and pastries while the Madmarchmain band played its swansong for the everlasts and the thukdam appealers at the Cemetaries of the Green Fog? Oh, I may have pasted my text string on the Grand Concourse of the Schrelleng-Gloats and I may have abridged Stenuel Larancil's great work Methods in Ant-Farming, Volume 123, published by Saint Ardwunt's Press, New Stobbro, Calancishire, West Bluelands, in the great nation of Orpheon, and have made remarks that debrided the great Pustule of Simonk and bloagthrettes to his miss minister, but dost thy yield unregard my clean understumblings? Fortooth, a dental man and a lord of the manor had offered not thrice ducats to the teller, and the gone world unutterably didn't have the mustard message at the right point, I tell you did Salas Gran-Tranthessima have a whit or a wit by the distances? No! Like any good Arphrungian, Gran-Tranthessima made his living by doggerelwauling at the Strident Arms and the Ferestory of Blubitmas, and then his plomongaste did have a free pension to calculuate his infinite series. Oh! Whengfrunct saddened by the funereal dirges of greater Arphrungia.

abridged conversation

The following conversation occured between the human species (H), and the Orrhet (O) between the years of 2341 and 2839. It has been much speeded up and irrelevant material elided

(H) hello? anyone out there?
(O) hey there!
(H) eek! hi!
(O) how far have you come?
(H> sends science.math.status.report.xzr
(O) Hrm. So you've not decoded the nontrivial roots of the Zeta function. Tell you what, don't get in touch with us again until you do. Please.
(H) Uh. Okay.
200 years pass
(H) What the smoking fuck!?
(O) You finally decoded the roots? Congratz!
(H) We're still reeling. We feel that it's hard to know what to do as a civilization once you know that.
(O) We find that civilizations we encounter generally have three responses to it: They either ignore it, much to their detriment, or they embrace it, and it's good for them, and the third one we don't really understand. For what it's worth, we think you're en route to the third, so we'd appreciate it if you give some idea what you're doing as a species if it's even the slightest bit incomprehensible or hard to understand.
(H) oh ah. hold on a moment.
(O) eh?
fifty years pass
(O) you still there
(H) BEEP. We're sorry to announce that we're currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone. This call may be recorded for training purposes. If you are the Orrhet civilization, please decode another trillion zeros. Really. BEEP!