emsenn's blog on emsenn.net

2016-09-17, Planning mud skillchecks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So, y’all might’ve seen that I’m putting together my own text-based MMO. Being real time and multiplayer, there’s some issues with just applying most traditional skillcheck systems - they assume the opponent is just a number, not an interactive player, and when it is a player, things progress as slow as needed to let each competently respond. In a multiplayer game, that’d be hella immersion breaking - you swing your sword at Billy, who is away refilling his coffee, so your sword swing just sits there idle until Billy gets back and responds, while NPCs around y’all just act as normal.

2018-02-22, To facebook friends

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been off Facebook for a bit, but just wanted to give a big “thank you” to the people who messaged me over the weekend, “congratulating” me on being correct about my claims that Bernie Sanders’ campaign was supported & influenced by Russian interference, which were entirely proven by the indictments which were released last week.

My adamant stance that his campaign was supported by foreign powers and existed more to sabotage a legitimate election than anything else cost me a lot of friends, both on Facebook and in real-life.

2019-06-09-started-redoing-personal-site-in-hugo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Started re-doing my personal site in #Hugo.

2020-01-19, 0900h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Enclosing variables

Manipulating Enclosed Variables

Passing Lambdas Around

Things

Introduction

In this post I’d like to explain how things (in-game objects) work. (This will also, incidentally, be a short tutorial on lambda calculus and closures.)

In the language of game design, Racket-MUD uses a type “entity component system,” more or less. I call it quality of things, and developed it mostly in the isolation of solitary hacking, so there are some differences.

2020-01-19, Anatomy of things

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’d like to explain how things (in-game objects) work. (This will also, incidentally, be a short tutorial on lambda calculus and closures.)

Everything a user interacts with inside Racket-MUD is a thing, and every thing has qualities, which define its capabilities.

2020-10-18-1850h-starting-on-curio-shop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on Curio Shop, the “bring all my old stuff together as Lua data” thing, a fair chunk of today. Without much headway: a lot of it has just been getting a feel for the concepts behind #Fennel and #Lua.

2020-10-18-2000h-starting-on-barnabus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I changed the name of “Curio Shop” to “Barnabus” before the first commit. Both names are inspired by Teraum, specifically a store formerly run by Barnabus Trent, which sold items from around the world to people in Bellybrush and Ack. The notion being, those items were stripped of context, reduced to little bits of curiosity. That’s true of the data being presented here as clobbered-together HTML. But! Made the first commit: I have something that can read some Lua data and make an HTML file. Wonderful.

2023-12-09, 0800h, On hospicing humanity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

An aspect of our approach to total liberation is that we may be hospicing humanity.

2023-12-09, 1620h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

An aspect of our approach to total liberation is that we may be hospicing humanity.

2023-12-15, Analysis shows we'll pass 1.5c in months

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Analysis Shows We’ll Pass 1.5c in Months

(description:: Current El Nino almost certain to push Earth past the crucial 1.5°C warming threshold)

A new study by James Hansen and his colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has found that global warming is accelerating at an alarming rate. The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that the Earth’s energy imbalance, the main driver of warming, has doubled in the past decade. This is causing global temperatures to rise at a rate of nearly 0.5°C per decade, which is more than twice the rate observed from 1970 to 2010.

2023-12-26, 1620h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The weather - and gravity of our planning - has me feeling exhausted, so I mostly napped, but I also moved a few bins around down by the 202 Soilworks.
Talked with Zitkato: - Gave me some tasks I added to the Migration to Pine Ridge and Living with Phahin Sinte Wakpala
- Told him about how we brought tree frogs back to the Headwaters, Crooked Creek.
- Also shared some photos of our HDPE potato hotbox and our Soilworks.
  - He wasn’t irked by the Groundhog aesthetic. “It’s not trash if you use it.”
  - Talked about my ideas for HDPE casting using solar ovens.
- Asked about water: available nearby, walk or short drive. “The people around you will be there to help.”
- Zitkato says, “Jobs are scarce but we are working on that too,” and mentioned a potential food truck. (Could we provide them with microgreens and/or mushrooms)?
- I mentioned Mo and Ari and Zitkato was excited: they’ve been wanting a welder to help make wood stoves.
- I asked if an arrive in mid/late March 2024 was feasible, and he said we’d make it work.
- We talked a bit about how if we do not make opportunities for accomplices to help us, then well-intentioned folk have no option but to support the grifters.
- Zitkato spoke to coming from an orientation of revolutionary suicide.
- We can use his Uncle Leo’s PO box at first.
- He mentioned we’ll be building a buffalo prairie.
- I talked about the cranefly orchid that has come up in the Headwaters, Crooked Creek through this winter. (And have learned transcribing this entry that another common name for the plant is the “crippled cranefly.”)
talked with Ralph McDonald:
- No actions had been taken in actually buying a homestead
- Their searching had expanded all the way to West Virginia, so wasn’t likely to provide the accommodations we’d want.
- Told him that we had our plan: Migration to Pine Ridge and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t feel abandoned if we did that.
- He said he wouldn’t, and would be happy to help with the migration.
- That might solve parts of the issues with the 202 Garden Relocation: he can take things that we can’t, back to Atlanta or wherever.
Talked with Hannah Kass
- Explained a bit about the migration.
- They want to write something about it with me, to iteratively document and manifest it.
- I set up #mooneys-island within Turntide Islands for this discussion.
- In that channel I’ve discussed that we’re using AI as part of the Groundhog Autonomous Zone.

2024-04-29, 0800h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Spent most of the day planning an itinerary, mostly oriented toward Terran’s diet. Also, discussed the upcoming National Stop the Bleed Day sale from North American Rescue.

2024-08-09, On the inherited christianity of liberal subjectivity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Original Post ** Part 1

I’ve been talking about it in deeply Western terms but from my perspective a lot of what I’m thinking about is just variants of, how do I explain the deeply Christian ideology of many things that believe themselves to be secular and atheist, including lots of people who strongly emotionally identify with their existence as Other-than-Christian and take every bit of aesthetic and belief they can see in themselves as evidence that’s true.

2025-03-28, 0800h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plans for 2025-03-28:

post to @michael-marmot@HIVE about birds soaking their bread in the creek.
Remake Sigmund Vexler’s HIVE account
- Make ~~sigmund@561.group~~ email
- Register via Ecency, using Michael Marmot’s referral link
- write a new introduction post
Setup Sigmund’s Sat Stacker
- Swap Bitcoin Lightning for Base Ethereum via SwapSpace to Sigmund Vexler’s Ethereum wallet
- Setup Sat Stacker vault on DexFi.
Transfer emsenn’s spare liquidity into the Sat Stacker Vault
- from emsenn’s Based DeFi Vault
Setup Sigmund’s Liquid Vault on Hive
- Register via Ecency, using Sigmund’s referral link
- Transfer in liquidity from michael561, essiebee, marshian
- Allocate into liquidity pools

¶About the birds

There’s a little creek behind the apartment. Not much to look at—runs between some chainlink and a parking lot, mostly hidden unless you know to listen for it. I didn’t move here for the view. Moved here for family reasons, and figured I’d be closer to pavement than water for the foreseeable future.

2025-07-11, Accepting the web as a platform, not a place

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History
- first the internet
- then web
- commerce
- platforms
internal mental image of web presence didn’t change from the internet days
- personal website
- platforms point back there
practiced denial of change
- out-of-step with the theory
- out-of-step with normal practices
  - even “The Internet” has become a platform (IndieWeb, ActivityPub)
- out-of-step with my own practices
compare to living on a land in a territory, to living as a subject in an environment
- different values, different modes of living
- personal websites as living on a land
- platform presence as subject in environment
- different modes of governance
self-governing as required for both
- but different governance technologies apply:
  - personal websites
    - permanence, backlinks, “sediment”, foundation, structure
  - platform
    - fungibility, presence, ???
- practices of self-governance for platformized web life?

2025-07-12, 0800h, Complaining about wildfire smoke

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Complaining about wildfire smoke

There’s a lot of wildfire smoke currently in the air. It smells acrid and is very hazy: my throat is itching. Someone nearby is playing some sort of woodwind instrument.

2025-07-12, 1135h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot of wildfire smoke currently in the air. It smells acrid and is very hazy: my throat is itching. Someone nearby is playing some sort of woodwind instrument.

2025-07-17, 0938h, How i installed emacs on my chromebook

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After too many years with a Chromebook and limited Internet access as my normal computer environment, I’m back on a “real” laptop with a real Internet connection, and that means a return to Emacs. There’s a lot of ways to do that; this is what felt like the simplest: The first step in this process is installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux. To do that, I opened Windows Powershell and input the command wsl --install which according to the output, downloaded WSL 2.5.9, installed Ubuntu, and went ahead and started it up for me, prompting me to input a username and password.

2025-07-18, 0933h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After too long dealing with other text editors, I’m finally returning to Emacs. A critical first step in this is dusting off my old Emacs configuration, which I’d named InfoPonEmacs. Since then (2021ce), I’ve gotten more particular in my neologisms, specifically about mixing Latin and Greek influences, and have also significantly developed my interest in philosophy, epistemology, etc. (See emsean thought).

So, one of the first things I’m doing, to more than dust off the system, is renaming it /GnoponEmacs/.

2025-07-18, 1042h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I realized that if I’m not playing with anyone who’s already playing, and given how… werid Minecraft has gotten, in terms of the worlding, there’s no reason for me not to take a serious look at the open-source voxel games out there. I just looked at it, and Minetest has rebranded to Luanti, and after playing one of the recommended game modes, it seems like it’d definitely meet my needs for Minecraft, if not be a little more suitable - and definitely more in line with the types of ethics and values that I at least used to hold the last time I was really operating from that place.

2025-07-18, Considering luanti instead of minecraft

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I realized that if I’m not playing with anyone who’s already playing, and given how weird Minecraft has gotten, in terms of the worlding, there’s no reason for me not to take a serious look at the open-source voxel games out there. I just looked at it, and Minetest has rebranded to Luanti, and after playing one of the recommended game modes, it seems like it’d definitely meet my needs for Minecraft, if not be a little more suitable - and definitely more in line with the types of ethics and values that I at least used to hold the last time I was really operating from that place.

2025-07-18, Returning to emacs with gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Returning to Emacs with GnoponEmacs

After too long dealing with other text editors, I’m finally returning to Emacs. A critical first step in this is dusting off my old Emacs configuration, which I’d named InfoPonEmacs.

Since then (2021ce), I’ve gotten more particular in my neologisms, specifically about mixing Latin and Greek influences, and have also significantly developed my interest in philosophy, epistemology, etc. (See emsean thought).

So, one of the first things I’m doing, to more than dust off the system, is renaming it GnoponEmacs.

2025-07-19, 1008h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Even though it’s Saturday, the construction work to replace the pipes around the neighborhood is continuing. It makes sense, thinking about it, given the days cancelled and shortened from the heavy rain earlier in the week, but it wasn’t what I expected: I was hoping to spend the day tinkering with my writing and code, especially GnoponEmacs, free of the sensory overload. I’ve been enjoying video games, but with the noise, they’re becoming more of an escape than a vacation.

2025-07-19, 1931h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terran shared a Twitter post with me where someone was suggesting a Fallout video game original character where the jingles on their jingle dress were made of shell casing, and apparently, this whole history I have of jingle dress cone coming from that, is not found online. Instead, the history is that it came about because of the 1914 Influenza Epidemic, and from tobacco can lids, not TB and shell casings.

2025-07-19, Complaining about nearby construction noise

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-19, On a rare? history of jingle dress cones

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terran shared a Twitter post with me where someone was suggesting a Fallout video game original character where the jingles on their jingle dress were made of shell casings, and apparently, this whole history I have of jingle dress cones made from tobacco tins and other improvisations is not as widely known as I thought.

It sent me into thinking about how histories of Indigenous material culture get flattened or aestheticized in fandom spaces, and how easy it is for details with deep context to be replaced by “cool post-apocalyptic” variants that read well to people outside those traditions.

2025-07-20, 0948h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Checked the Fediverse this morning, two posts caught my eye. The first, boosted by an American anarchist who complains folk are too liberal, advocating the donation of arms and materiel to the Ukrainian military. I wonder why there isn’t a focus on getting plate carriers and plates to prominent American radicals?

The other post requested folk send mail to a political prisoner… on the basis of them being a sweet and commpassionate person and I’m thinking about how that emphasizes certain values as worth supporting, and how those values aren’t necessarily what you need from political radicals.

2025-07-20, 1028h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In an attempt to bring myself back to Web discourse, I’m going to share what I journaled about this morning, even though it makes me look like an asshole:

2025-07-20, 1717h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is actually a test babble, produced via the relevant GnoponEmacs Org-roam capture template. Notably, the first thing produced that isn’t handwritten since I picked Emacs back up a few days ago.

2025-07-20, 2308h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m having a conversation with Microsoft Copilot on my Omnibook, about Teraum, and it babbled a lot of nonsense but led me to idea that stories of Teraum (including the RPG sessions/campaigns) should encourage genre as ontological method for interpreting narrative, which informs… I guess i’d call it karmic orientation, which informs how well things will go for that character (“well” being relative to their karma.) I hadn’t thought about it but i guess I just, use a karmic system for Teraum, but I should really give that some more detailed thought.

2025-07-20, Connecting teraum to the okagan paracosm

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m having a conversation with Microsoft Copilot on my Omnibook, about Teraum, and it babbled a lot of nonsense but led me to the idea that stories of Teraum (including the RPG sessions/campaigns) should encourage genre as ontological method for interpreting narrative, which informs… I guess I’d call it karmic orientation, which informs how well things will go for that character (“well” being relative to their karma).

I hadn’t thought about it but I guess I just use a karmic system for Teraum, but I should really give that some more detailed thought.

2025-07-20, On Fediverse narrating contradictions into aesthetic cruel optimism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The other post requested folk send mail to a political prisoner… on the basis of them being a sweet and compassionate person and I’m thinking about how that emphasizes certain values as worth supporting, and how those values aren’t necessarily what you need from political radicals.

2025-07-20, Testing gnoponemacs' babble capture template

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-21, 0940h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not actually in the habit of opening a new note to start babbling into, yet; which makes sense as i just got the tooling minimally established, yesterday. What brought me here right now is I’m going through my recent babbles to see what I need to start adding links to other nodes (i.e. if I mention Emacs, I want an Emacs node. If I want that, I want a capture template for defining terms… though Emacs is such a big term, it might actually be a whole domain, or at least subdomain under the tech domain?

2025-07-21, 0959h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I want to start logging what media I engage with, and am curious about the best way to do that with GnoponEmacs. To start, I’m looking at what Org-roam Dailies are like. Checking the Org-roam Manual, it seems like they’re meant for, one daily file per day, which isn’t quite what I’m picturing. A separate file for every media log entry seems like it’d cause bloat, but a single file might end up too long. I guess I could chunk them by month or year? But it sounds like for now the right ove is to not worry more about it, make ~~org/per/media-log.org~~, and a capture template at pm for entries, i.e. ~~pmm~~ for music. And this brings me back to the thing that actually got me hung up and noticed a bug in my slugification function! The question becomes, can I trigger the creation of new notes when being prompted for input on an in-progress capture template? That is, can I go to enter a new music log entry, and then when asked to input the artist, create a new node for that band, using the capture template for that? And the answer is yes. So the next step becomes mapping out which capture templates I would need to smoothly write a music log entry.

2025-07-21, Organizing my research notes by domain

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not actually in the habit of opening a new note to start babbling into, yet; which makes sense as I just got the tooling minimally established, yesterday.

What brought me here right now is I’m going through my recent babbles to see what I need to start adding links to other nodes (i.e. if I mention Emacs, I want an Emacs node. If I want that, I want a capture template for defining terms… though Emacs is such a big term, it might actually be a whole domain, or at least subdomain under the tech domain?

2025-07-21, Recording my media consumption in gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-22, 0914h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I made some progress with GnoponEmacs, specifically setting up capture templates for my music log. Don’t really love the work, and it has me wishing I had something like my ideal software for more properly spinning up the schema and functions that actually go into that, without having to shoehorn it into Org-mode’s subtree form. That said, Org-mode’s ability to serve as a metaframe above and outside my futzing, with its ability to already make a Website, is definitely still a necessary tool at this point.

2025-07-22, 1115h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to see if I can’t get TAB installed today. I did =git clone https://github.com/gaz561/tab= and then =make tab-bin= as the ~~index.md~~ instructed. Got an error about lacking Lua - makes sense, the README said it was necessary. Trying =sudo apt install lua= prompted me to pick between a version, 5.1 to 5.4. No memory what TAB used, so I went for 5.4.

Did a =make clean= to try and clean things up, but I noticed it did leave directories behind. =make tab-bin= procueded without error.

2025-07-22, 2034h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I just had the idea that a good, or at least cool, way of starting a story might be “Otherwise, this might have happened.” It like, neatly implies fiction, speculation, bounding…

2025-07-22, Attempting to install tab

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to see if I can’t get TAB installed today. I did git clone https://github.com/gaz561/tab and then make tab-bin as the index.md instructed. Got an error about lacking Lua - makes sense, the README said it was necessary. Trying sudo apt install lua prompted me to pick between a version, 5.1 to 5.4.

No memory what TAB used, so I went for 5.4.

Did a make clean to try and clean things up, but I noticed it did leave directories behind. make tab-bin proceeded without error.

2025-07-22, Making progress with gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

That said, Org-mode’s ability to serve as a metaframe above and outside my futzing, with its ability to already make a website, is definitely still a necessary tool at this point.

2025-07-22, Opening a story

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I just had the idea that a good, or at least cool, way of starting a story might be “Otherwise, this might have happened.”

It like, neatly implies fiction, speculation, bounding…

2025-07-23, 1644h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I learned today that I could migrate my old GTAO account over, so I have. That’s pretty exciting, because it means that I have access to all the vehicles and properties that I used to have. But, this also means that I should figure out the gameplay loop of these things - something I didn’t really do when I was acquiring them, and it’s changed a lot anyway.

Querying ChatGPT, about an income flow that I can do solo, it suggested that I:

2025-07-23, 2135h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terran said something that prompted me to imagine what Ska “theme song” would be… and then I realized I’m not sure where/how to put Terran and Ska, in my files. Making emsenn.net not be bleedy-as-heck, with links, is gonna be tough!

Part of why I’ve compartmentalized things into subdirectories is to make it easier to keep some things private, but this ultimately means I have to think about how much I’m leaking. I guess I’m stuck between a few different places. Let me think about it…

2025-07-23, Planning my gtao empire

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I learned today that I could migrate my old Grand Theft Auto Online account over, so I have. That’s pretty exciting, because it means that I have access to all the vehicles and properties that I used to have.

But, this also means that I should figure out the gameplay loop of these things - something I didn’t really do when I was acquiring them, and it’s changed a lot anyway.

2025-07-23, Thinking on privacy within my research notes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-24, 2000h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing on from my last babble, I’d like to think about the different kinds of encoding I’m working on - but not withot a tip-of-the-hat toward overcoding. If I try and just babble on it, a big part of what I’m trying to do is, under it, overcode the universe, so that each node of relational dynamics has a way to be necoded, fingerprinted, etc.

While I recognize that’s an unrealistic goal, it’s the method that interests me: starting from the existing mapped network of relations and differentiating new relations by describing their differences.

2025-07-24, 2223h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just saw that Dwarf Fortress v 52.01 just came out, and the biggest part? “More powerful modding”… that uses Lua. Which feels very affirming of my desire to create a Fennel game engine grounded in structuralism and similar thoughts. I don’t think folk know that’s what they want their sandbox to be made of, but they do, they clearly do: it’s what they made as a sandbox for their own cognition!

2025-07-24, On encoding relational dynamics in gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing on from my last babble, I’d like to think about the different kinds of encoding I’m working on - but not without a tip-of-the-hat toward overcoding.

If I try and just babble on it, a big part of what I’m trying to do is, under it, overcode the universe, so that each node of relational dynamics has a way to be encoded, fingerprinted, etc.

2025-07-24, Thinking how to handle multiple cosmos in gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking how to handle multiple cosmos in GnoponEmacs

In my last babble, I posed the question to myself, how would I organize my files if they were themselves the “dimension” part of a MUD - that is, the library, in the classic engine/library split.

But the difference is that we might have data files that are Org-mode at their core, but tangle out Python and LISP…

…I’m actually being distracted by my family as I try and write this - which isn’t a complaint! But it’s making it hard to build the sequence of thoughts I’m trying to convey to myself.

2025-07-25, 0751h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard not to get confrontational when I see some folk in North Carolina complaining about how hard the region has been getting hit by climate breakdown recently. There are folk who I am, or used to be, mutuals with, posting about it, and it’s just… hard not to jump in and be like, “Hey, do you regret not putting more effort into organizing against these things earlier, like when I was living in the region, screaming about how the models were underestimating how bad things would get and how quickly?” Because I was in the region, spearheading guerilla land use projects and trying to agitate political “radicals” toward the same, and it did not work. When I put in requests for specific help to deal with the legal and material consequences of doing guerilla work without an adequate support network, I was ignored, or told that I should have prepared myself better for such consequences, since they’re obvious.

2025-07-25, 0830h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-25, Reflecting on personal experiences with solidarity in north carolina

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-27, 0857h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In a few days, Michael will be arriving, which means today feels like the right day to start tidying up the house: procrastinated enough that there’s a sense of pressure, and enough that things won’t have time to get messed up before his arrival!

I think Terran mentioned last night that today is when he leaves for his train ride here - something he’s never done, and I’m excited for him! I’ve never done a legit long train ride in the US, despite some riding on cars around Appalachia, and my experience about train riding in Europe is out-dated, so I’m curious to hear what it’s like! I’m assuming it’s Amtrak he’s using, but I don’t know!

2025-07-27, 0916h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard not to be disappointed in myself for not taking oodles of screenshots and recordings of every conversation I’ve had on the Web with folk, because I definitely remember getting into contentious arguments with @Cyborgneticz@scholars.social about all sorts of stuff, generally focused around how directly to support antagonism of colonialism, and the risks around doing it for the marginalized. That is, they’d argue being queer is a risk, thus asking for greater antagonism is asking too much, and I’d argue that there are queers who aren’t white settlers that are antagonising things, and their stance, while fine to personally hold, presented as a truth, erases those people and those efforts.

2025-07-27, 0927h, Zinefests and cruel optimism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-07-27, 0951h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my griping for the morning, I’d like to complain about “zinefests”. It’s just… wild how commercial zines have become. I can’t believe people drive to other cities to sell their zines. Like, it reminds me of political radicals who use international air travel to go on “solidarity trips,” as though that isn’t just leftist tourism. Zines come from an era of photocopiers and fax machines: physical transporting them between regions, not for free mass distribution, is a weird contemporary thing. Like it just seems like a very unnecessary thing, given that we have telecommunications - not to mention the Internet - to have zine conventions, unless they’re for a very specific group of people to socialize and economize together.

2025-07-27, 2038h, Remembering tom lehrer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-07-27 2038h, Remembering Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer has passed away. He was one of my favorite satirists, in large part because he is who helped teach me (a bit too late for my own and others’ good) that satire is, well… inappropriate. And in fact, a lot of political comedy is.

I’m seeing a lot of reflections on Lehrer as a brilliant satirist, and it feels like a disservice to his brilliance to not highlight that he stopped doing satire because, “political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.”

2025-08-04, 0953h, Working with the org-roam database

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Babble, 2025-08-04 09:53 – working with the Org-roam database

In this babble I’m going to be looking at how to work with the Org-roam database, toward the goal of being able to produce something like Obsidian Dataview queries within my Org-roam files, when they’re published to emsenn.net.

In looking online, there’s folk who use org-roam-db-query to load up the database and search through it with Elisp. But this is wildly inefficient, when there’s a where argument that can be set to use the database’s search algorithms.

2025-08-07, 0819h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a test babble.

2025-08-12, 1415h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Someone was asking about how to arrange a container garden with beans, corn, sunflowers, and squash. I said: I would do do beans on the north and squash on the south (the squash leaves shade the ground on the southern side, corn shades the north side and beans’ll find their own way better than squash can. I think you could probably do 6-8 beans on the north side, then 2 rows of 12-14 corn each (i plant corn tight compared to most folk and never have problems), then 5-6 squash on the south side. I’d do sunflowers on the west side to give it all some afternoon shade.

2025-08-12, Arranging a container garden

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Someone was asking about how to arrange a container garden with beans, corn, sunflowers, and squash. I said:

I would do beans on the north and squash on the south (the squash leaves shade the ground on the southern side, corn shades the north side and beans’ll find their own way better than squash can. I think you could probably do 6-8 beans on the north side, then 2 rows of 12-14 corn each (I plant corn tight compared to most folk and never have problems), then 5-6 squash on the south side. I’d do sunflowers on the west side to give it all some afternoon shade.

2025-08-21, 1359h, Relaunching emsenn.net

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I did it! I finally got my files uploaded to emsenn.net! This is a big step in the Relaunch of emsenn.net, and bringing myself back to the Web in a way that I’m comfortable with, and feels aligned with my position and orientation, as best I could describe those things. I’ve babbled a lot about picking what tools to use to write and publish, but figured I’d give myself this space to discuss it as-it-is, right now.

2025-08-22, 2241h, Babbling about babbles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to babble about my babbles, and my babble log (or blog).

This is the first text I’m writing with GnoponEmacs with the intention and capability of it being published straight to my website.

Anyway, a babble, as I’ve defined it, is one of the least-structured forms of text I’ve encoded in my files, and so serves as a good spot for, well, babbling: just kind of writing about whatever comes to mind, as it comes to mind.

2025-08-25, 0049, Disclaimers and tasks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I have started developing my files, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the many directions I can go. An idea I’ve just had is that it would be good for me to be able to put a disclaimer before certain types of text, for example making sure that babbles disclose that they’re, well, babble-y, or that any essay that’s more than a couple years old has a good chance of being wrong.

2025-08-25, 0819h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been getting back to writing in Emacs and just got to the point where I can publish my personal website from my files.

Here’s me babbling about that: Babble, [2025-08-22 Fri 22:41]

It’ll take a while for there to be enough information on the site for it to be useful to anyone, but I just wanted to post again about how happy I am to have a computer that can actually run Emacs and do some SQLite stuff without choking.

2025-08-25, 1054h, Covid, eugenics, and queerphobia

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s no way I’m linking to it but I just read a quote from someone saying “I’ll believe Long COVID is real when someone who isn’t bisexual has it” or something to that effect, after saying all the Zoomers that work for them are bisexual.

And that’s just, a horrifying place for public health opinions to be, in every way. But also, the conflation of “bisexuals with long COVID” and “Zoomer” is good for my public image of being youthful, so there is that, I guess.

2025-08-26, 0812h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Good morning, Fediverse and followers! In case you missed it, I’ve finally been getting my website back together - https://emsenn.net

There’s a lot of slow work to import in old notes, but! I’m chugging my way through that, and so should, at some point, be able to start linking to some previously-unpublished essays. (Like one I personally like, that looks at the kids show Phineas and Ferb as a counter-anarcho-nihilism work.) I also have a crapton of tabletop role-playing game source material to upload.

2025-08-26, 0835h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After several days of pretty bad anxiety, Burdock seems to be wanting to take a little more agency over his feelings today. He’s been in some weird headspace toward me recently, that’s hard to describe: both jealous of my relationships with Es and Terran, but also jealous of their relationships with me. Unfortunately, this mostly manifested first in him whinging consistently, bumping into my knees, and trying to lay down in my spot in the bed - something that really reduces my comfort and quality of sleep, which can cascade due to my disability. But last night, he made it a point not to sleep in my spot at all, and then this morning when I got up, he like, led me over to my spot and seemed to be encouraging me to use it. I didn’t, since I was up, but he’s been on the porch with me while I do my morning routine and some digital gardening. It’s been a lot nicer, and I’m hoping whatever change has happened in his vibes can stick, after Terran joins us.

2025-08-26, 0923h, On hating AI and performing normativity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s kind of heart-breaking, reading Fediverse posts, from people who hate artificial intelligence, complaining about the difficulty in performing normativity in their white-collar workplaces, especially the psychic damage of doing so. They could move a good chunk of that thinking from their wetware to this new software, but performing American leftism by hating AI is more important to them than reducing the harms of other forms of performance.

2025-08-27, 1521h, Call to act, commission vileheartdesign

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

@vileheartdesign is available for art commissions! They have various forms of character art available.

They’ve said:

Fiancee and I are still struggling really hard after our apartment got flooded earlier this year, and we’ve fallen behind on bills + have a veritable mountain of debt since insurance couldn’t cover the almost two-month hotel stay.

Donations can be made to their Ko-Fi without commissioning anything, if you’re able.

2025-08-27, 2118h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2500 years of navel-gazing and Western epistemics can’t determine whether my thoughts are my own or not, but expects me to believe I can own a house?

2025-08-28, 0834h, On the annunciation shooting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reflecting on the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church Shooting, which appears to have been conducted by a member of Order of Nine Angles, I feel the need to comment on the vast difference between this Satanist cult conducting acts of terrorism for sixty years, including acts of mass murder, and continuing to operate. Meanwhile, Stop Cop City organizers got hit with RICO charges after a few months, for throwing a music concert, and yet present that as a success for their abolitionist cause.

2025-08-28, 0853h, Adding org-cite to gnoponemacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, I’m planning on adding Org-cite to GnoponEmacs.

I’m reading a series of guides on Org-cite, starting with the announcement post from the Org-mode mailing list, and looking at how it distinguishes between citation interaction and rendering, the role of citation processors (basic, biblatex, natbib, csl), and how to hook this into my own bibliography orgcite.bib.

I’ve added an example BibTeX entry for Jens Kipper’s A Two-Dimensionalist Guide to Conceptual Analysis and verified that [@Kipper2012] and #+print_bibliography: work in exported text.

2025-08-28, 0913h, Liminal space between awake and asleep

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s interesting that some people seem most grounded when they’re in that liminal space between awake and asleep. I can’t describe it better right now.

2025-08-28, 1015h, Feeling old with they might be giants

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m watching They Might Be Giants’ recent live performance for KEXP, and they mentioned they’d been a band for like 40 years, and wow, it made me feel old.

2025-08-28, 1307h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a test node, created to test Babble, [2025-08-28 Thu 08:53], Adding Org-cite to GnoponEmacs.

2025-08-29, 1912h, On the lineage of californication

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have this lineage of theory that goes roughly:

liberal ontologizing induces genring induces ontogenring
- attributing is an ontogenric act
- attributing induces ontogenric entitlement and ontogenric anticipation
the condition of saturation induces destabilization
- ontogenring narrativizes saturation-induced destabilization as collapse
…Maza has distracted me…
…something about affect theory
…thus, californication?

2025-09-01, 0949h, Idea for teraumian cats

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

An idea for Teraum: cats always come in pairs, a bright and dark one.

2025-09-01, 1009h, Mapping the neurotic platform intellectual

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rough Formation I’m imagining some idea that in rough formation involves these several claims:

During times of crisis, some people begin to explore ideas outside of what they know
People who perform as public experts in one topic, i.e. feminist or water cycle theorists, tent to meet the conditions that describe that “some people”
These public experts are economically incentivized to perform
- There are contradicting incentives:
  - They must maintain their public image as experts
  - They must produce novel content
- This leads to them educating people on ideas they’ve only just learned, from a position of expertise
  - this misleads readers as to the position of the author relative to these new ideas:
    - that is, they may assume the author to be an expert on what they’re talking about, because that is the assumption so far

Once I’ve developed these ideas, I’d like to explore how experts and the public can navigate this contradiction.

2025-09-02, 0859h, On centering the making of dirt

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was reading my writing, specifically “Letter to the Web, 2023-10-31: Fall Arrives”, and was struck by remembering how central making dirt used to be to my praxis, and I’m introspecting on how that came to change.

With very little thought I can remember how I got there - related to climate breakdown, LandBack, and cultivating relationality: making dirt is good because it helps relations relate.

And, I’m proud of myself for babbling this little babble, because it isn’t important or urgent, and I had to stop writing another babble to do it - but that’s exactly the sort of thing I want to do with GnoponEmacs.

2025-09-02, 2005h, Linguistic pragmatics and ludimatics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking about the influence that Terry Pratchett has had on my writing, specifically my writing style, and how every sentence can probably be written to be a little fun.

And it made me think about how, in linguistics, there’s the idea of pragmatics, the parts of speech that make it sound human, or whatever. And it makes me wonder about the idea of “ludimatics” or whatever the proper formation would be: the parts of speech that make it feel fun.

2025-09-03, 0722h, Neurotic platform intellectuals

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s something validating about my ideas about how liberalism is turning everyone into neurotic platformal intellectuals, that whenever I share my philosophical writing somewhere, someone with absolutely no background or prior knowledge of any ideas, will feel comfortable engaging me in a dialog where I must explain every concept in my writing.

An analogy I have is that when I share recordings of my music, people who are not musicians do not suddenly ask me to teach them to play the piece or feel entitled to understand my internal reasoning for why I selected a given key and mode.

2025-09-03, 0954h, On zen fascism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Zen fascism
californication
self as erotic savior-slave in crisis settlerism
there are constitutive contradictions in liberalism
- i.e. universalism and individualism
- stress (i.e. crisis, Collapse) exposes them
this creates the Liberalism Legitimacy Crisis:
- as these contradictions intensify, liberalism loses credibility|validity as an ideological system.
  - it can’t produce the resolutions it promises
  - so it shifts to promising regulation
  - see Foucault
California as projection zone: California Gold Rush, Misiones Californianas (the Patronato Real of California), psychedelic revolution, Hollywood, Esalen Institute, techno-utopianism
californication is a process of responding to systemic contradictions by performing personal coherence?
- doesn’t address structural tension
- processes it as a material to be commodified
  - aesthetic, affect
  - Brian Wilson (and the Barenaked Ladies song)
  - Valley of the Dolls
  - On the Road
- californication as genre scripting: genre structures expectation (Lauren Berlant)
- platformal liberalism induces californication as the dominant genre of contradiction management
  - crisis is trauma, mood, healing
  - MASH television show, Red Hot Chili Peppers, skateboarding
- cybernetic settlerism, cybernetic subject
  - you change the world by how you route events into mood, not with your beliefs or action (which come from mood)
    - Calm app, Burning Man, lifehacking, microdosing
Zen
- don’t fear Collapse: be serene
- detachmenet
  - nonreactivity
  - Apple advertisement (1984 novel)
  - Starfleet and San Fransisco (Misiones Fransiscanas?)
  - ayahuasca entrepreneurism
  - stoicism, in late-season MASH
  - eroticization of detachment
    - crisis is desireable:
  - source of good affect, source of good life
  - crisis is the source of healing, spiritual growth, betterment of self
  - liberalism is legitimate /because/ it produces crisis
  - trauma aesthetic and aesthetic trauma
  - vagus nerve, self-regulation
savior-slave subject
- californicational subject is:
  - savior
    - personally responsible for managing global crises
  - slave
    - governed by external systems (and crises)
  - Collapse as performable norm:
    - collapse is not hidden or denied, it’s:
  - narrativized (healing arc)
  - monetized (survivalism, resilience, adaptation)
    - collapse becomes sustained because it is wanted
  - this makes wanting to resolve it incommensurable
    - more structures and incentive and power-force to sustain it than end it
RAND Institute, Summer of Love
shift from Trapper to BJ: critiquing to affecting
- therapeutic
Disneyland
Watts Rebellion
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
California Über Alles
Reaganonimics
The Day After
Rodney King Uprising
doomscrolling, rageposting

2025-09-04 1957h, Paracosms and secondary worlds

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In paracosm, the term “paracosm” refers to psychological concept developed in the 1970s, after a paper by Robert Silvey LaRue and David Cohen. Reading about it, however, it seems like it is about endless variations on a theme, speaking to fiction where my understanding of “paracosm” was semi-organically emerged secondary worlds, of the sort Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft made, with geographic overlap and timeline continuity.

From what I can get (the paper isn’t open-access), LaRue and Cohen are more concerned with the method, and when the method results in one big world or many little ones, that isn’t important to them so much as how the people developing and expressing them are being affected.

2025-09-04, 0836h, Overlaps between byung-chul han and aquinas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a really cool critique of Byung-Chul Han that’s out, and that’s useful because Han and I are pretty similar theorists, but with very different backgrounds and underlying ideologies. And I’m going through it, and I’m comparing what Han is saying to my ecclesiastical studies.

Basically Han (and others) are finding that the melancholy of the left might be the necessary precondition for non-optimistic hope, and they view this hope as the solution to the paralysis of melancholy.

2025-09-06, 0829h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thinking about my Fediverse profile as where I perform as a sort of, well, social justice warrior, but specifically, I see myself often succeeding when I try and “beat the drum” of validating anger and rage. And my Substack is often where I’m analyzing my melancholy as a mechanism of hoping.

So, this relates to my brand and my public image.

And that got me wondering what persons of the Catholic Church relate to those practices. Here’s my keyword salad.

2025-09-08, 0818h, On the failure to intellectually process stop cop city

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

¶Original Post

¶Part 1

There’s some new post from some academic about how academic intellectuals should look toward Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” in order to do their duty against rising fascism.

I’m not linking it because I think it’s hot trash, so instead I’ll link my own writing, that explains how the narrative around Stop City City doesn’t line up at all with the experiences of those who tried to stop Cop City, and how Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual may have been co-opted by American intelligence before his writing was even translated into English!

2025-09-08, 1011h, On using substack

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

People who are mad I syndicate excerpts from my website on my Substack would probably get mad when some cop googles “nihilist jouissance” after reading it in one of my emails.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, folk gotta learn from somewhere; where else are these folk gonna hear these things?

No, really: Tell me where else someone who gets their political knowledge between Bluesky and Substack is going to learn about Indigenous anarchism, if someone isn’t talking about it someplace they can hear?

2025-09-08, 1442h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So I just read through Theory of the Party from Phil A. Neel and it’s weird how outlining how to commodify something is seen as a good contribution to Marxist thought. Like, the piece seems to explain mechanisms that would successfully commodify Mao’s mass line into what I might call platformized communism, which might be described as communism that sees its role as practicing its -ism within platforms, not, y’know, doing communism. Maybe that’d be better named platformalized communism, but the concept is the pertinent part. Also, the just… affect… of the writing. Is a lot. Gigantic heapings of rhetorical melancholy are a way to set a mood, which is… well I guess that is what most introductions are for in academic-style texts, these days, but I don’t like it. I’m busy imagining history as a “carboniferous bonfire,” as prompted by the text, I don’t know if I can do that and qualify the logic of the arguments, in their own terms.

2025-09-10, 1109h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I opened up this babble and, as is becoming habit, gave it some name in the form of, “On some topic or another.” In this case, it was “On the emsean paracosm”

Like that’s any sort of real thing, the emsean paracosm.

Well, it is now that I’ve made that node, so I can link to it.

But it doesn’t have meaning until we give it some intension, and for that we need to do some conceptual analysis.

2025-09-11, 0007h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-09-11, 0855h, Installing tab on my omnibook

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So for the past… month and a few days! I’ve been rebuilding my files, and my website.

This has generally felt good, in a lot of ways, and has been helping refamiliarize myself with computer use in general.

That means I’m feeling ready to start dabbling back into computer programming. A short term goal with that is getting the MUD engine that I wrote in Fennel running again.

Fennel is a computer programming language built on Lua, but uses LISP-style syntax and macros. (I appreciate that the website has a nice little REPL on the homepage.)

2025-09-12, 2008h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-09-14, 0806h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier in the week, reports indicated that Judge Kevin Farmer, who is overseeing the trial against the Stop Cop City protesters, is planning to dismiss conspiracy and arson charges against folk. Before saying anything else, I want to say that it is grotesque that Stop Cop City has become about the legalistic narrative in such a way that has completely erased the murder of Tortuguita, especially because it was their murder that ostensibly led to the actions that led to people getting arrested and receiving RICO charges. But I suppose it is more difficult to say that we are winning when Tortuguita is still dead and the thing they died to prevent is happening.

2025-09-14, On stop cop city rico charges being dropped

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier in the week, reports indicated that Judge Kevin Farmer, who is overseeing the trial against the Stop Cop City protesters, is planning to dismiss conspiracy and arson charges against folk.

Before saying anything else, I want to say that it is grotesque that Stop Cop City has become about the legalistic narrative in such a way that has completely erased the murder of Tortuguita, especially because it was their murder that ostensibly led to the actions that led to people getting arrested and receiving RICO charges. But I suppose it is more difficult to say that we are winning when Tortuguita is still dead and the thing they died to prevent is happening.

2025-09-15, 0919h, Properly installing fennel on my omnibook

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The last time I “installed Fennel”, it was just by “installing” TAB. This go around I’d like to more properly get it set up as accessible from my user’s shell, so I can use it like a proper interpreter across GnoponEmacs.

So I don’t forget, there’s this wonderful post from Andrey Listopadov about using Fennel in Emacs. I’ll be using that, the Fennel docs, and the documentation for fennel-mode to navigate through this process. My goal is to be able to use Fennel anywhere I might use another language with Org-babel, but skimming through Andrey’s blog post, I suspect I can do more than that.

2025-09-15, 1055h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Simple enough to install: =sudo apt install agda= Didn’t get it set up in GnoponEmacs though, I’ll need to learn more about Agda first.

2025-09-15, 1102h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wanna play around in Fennel, specifically mucking about what something like a thing would look like, given my more robust understanding of different metaphysical philosophies than last time I approached things. Unfortunately, at this point, I know there’s /many/ ways to construct a metaphysics, and I also know there’s some of them that can be digitizing easier than others.

I think for the sake of a MUD engine, I’ll want to implement kyriontoeidic theory, which is, from what I can feel out, pretty similar to how I was programming my last MUD, TAB.

2025-09-15, 2134h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

  (local forms [{:id :1234
                :aliases [:container]
                :additive-conditions [
                :acts [:receive :remove]
                :contents []
                :receive [:fn [:self :item]
                          [:call :foo](:call-:foo.md)]
                :remove [:fn [:self :item :?destination]
                         [:call :foo](:call-:foo.md)]},
                {:id :4321
                 :aliases [:backpack]
                 :bases [:container]
                 :acts ])

: unknown:5:33: Parse error: expected whitespace before opening delimiter [

Try adding whitespace.

2025-09-16, 1825h, Drafting moscow semiotics in fennel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In another babble I talked about Moscow-school semiotics, and how it might describe more than just one of my paracosmic worlds, and am now thinking about what a world made from Moscow-school semiotics might look like. I’m not sure the literature itself is the best for laying out the structure of such a world, though, at least not in an easy-to-convert-into-code form. Nevertheless, it seems worth trying as a general concept.

To start with, I’m ignoring skinning, and asking, what structure do the interactions between the player and the world need to have, for those interactions to be describable as within the semiosphere, a world described by Moscow-school semiotics?

2025-09-17, 2305h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I want to look at encoding Moscow school of semiotics in Fennel. This is a continuation of Babble, [2025-09-16 Tue 18:25]. So, there are a few different structures in this school of semiotics, and they relate through various processes that rely on the structures having various conditions of various values.

This is a trickily specific way to describe it though, so let me go slow.

The structures I see are semiospheres, codes, signs (icons, indexes, symbols), text.

2025-09-18, 2105h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I write more on my website than I do here. Most recently I’ve been babbling around implementing Moscow-school semiosis in LISP to better map the different sciences and schools I use in my research.

This first link looks at the modern shape of the minimal claims of what a science is

Babble, [2025-09-16 Tue 18:25]

I reach the conclusion that it seems functionally equivalent to Moscow-school semiotics, specifically Lotman’s.

So in this second link, I start to sketch out what encoding Lotman’s semiosis in in LISP would look like, so I can (down the line) see if I can encode some sciences and scientific texts.

2025-09-19, 0825h, Talk like a pirate day

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

People think that means yelling “ahoy” or “avast.” But that’s Treasure Island movie talk, not real pirate talk.

Pirate talk wasn’t (just) about silly words. It was about refusing to speak the language of kings and merchants. (A very serious thing, so speaking sillily is a fine way to refuse, on its own.)

What made a pirate ship a pirate ship was that it rejected the laws of the empires around it, laws that were communicated with words. So words make a big part of that rejection possible: pirates developed their own specific “codes” for how to organize their efforts, in a world dominated by one code.

2025-09-19, 1020h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve been using GnoponEmacs for a bit now and if I’m comparing my research method from before, when I was using Obsidian, to now, the method is so much better that it’s hard to even compare. So, great. I’m doing a lot better than I was, and in a way that shows a trajectory toward improving. I’m saying just because it can be easy, when taking a stance of criticism, critique, in order to improve, to feel that position: cultivated negativity that’s necessary for positivity.

2025-09-19, 2100h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

One thing I want to do is try and make sure I take some time to stabilize my research, as I take time to do other work. Like, hacking on potential MUD engines and semiosis simulators is cool, but I’ll benefit from taking time to do what i can to improve GnoponEmacs, the engine I’m actually using to do my research. One thought I have is, if I can get better at using Org-mode clocking, maybe I could try and budget out some fraction of my time spent working toward improving the system I have.

2025-09-19, 2139h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’d love to be able to just say ~~(describe)~~ in a node and have it describe it. I think the closest I’ll be able to get (in-text, I can probably shortcode it somehow) is ~~src_elisp((gpe/describe))~~, which is… still pretty tight.

But the question is how to get there. I feel like perhaps I can do something like what I’ve done with my Org-roam capture templates: have functions in files, in a folder, and load that folder into some namespace (probably ~~gpe/node~~, now that I think about it.)

2025-09-20, 0829h, On oktoberfest as bavarian genring and its relationship to indianthusiasm

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My last post was on talking like a pirate, since yesterday was Talk Like a Pirate Day.

That post was popular, so I figured I’d try something similar for today, the start of Oktoberfest.

So, Oktoberfest. Beer tents, Tracht, dirndls. A feel-good return to Volk roots, especially for people of German descent who now live outside of Germany. Here in the Upper Midwest, it’s a popular thing. The specific aesthetic comes the 19th century, when urban German elites romanticizied Alpine peasant dress as their “heritage.” (I recall an adorable photograph of a young Ludwig Wittgenstein looking very grumpy in a woolen hat.)

2025-09-20, 0949h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I just wrote Post to @emsenn@kolektiva.social, 2025-09-20 08:29h, On Oktoberfest as Bavarian genring and its relationship to Indianthusiasm and I want to go ahead and write through some of the claims and their theoretical referrants, in case i want to come back to the idea later.

genre can be a technology of governance when liberal subjectivation is a mode of governance
- Michel Foucault, governmentality
- Juri Lotman, semiosphere, genre as semiotic code boundary
- John Frow, genre as protocol
- Benedict Anderson, imagined community
- Walter Benjamin, homogenous time, empty time
interpellation via costuming and performingn
- Louis Althusser, interpellation
- Judith Butler, performativity, citationality
- Erving Goffman, dramaturgy
- Victor Turner, ritual process, social drama
- Richard Schechner
affective economics and affective ontologizing make stereotypes feel true
- Sara Ahmed, affective economics, stickiness of affect
- Lauren Berlant, cruel optimism
- Brian Massumi on intensity and affect
invented tradition creates the Volk
- Eric Hobsbawn, Terrence Ranger, invented tradition
- George L. Mosse, volkisch nationalism, Volksgemeinschaft
colonial optics in and out the nation
- Patrick Wolfe, structure of settler-colonialism
- Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian
- Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native
- Michael Hechter, internal colonialism
biopolitics and necropolitics, genre as necropolitical categorization mechanism
- Foucault again, biopower, biopolitics
- Achille Mbembe, necropolitics
- Giorgio Agamben, state of exception, Homo Sacer
- Michael Omi, Howard Winant, racial formation
exhibitionary complexes train the national gaze:
- Tony Bennett, exhibitionary complex
- Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, culture industry
- Guy Debord, society of the spectacle
- Timothy Mitchell, world-as-exhibition
genre + land = governance of space
- Elizabeth Povinelli, geontology, late liberalism
- Audra Simpson, refusal, Indigenous sovereignty
- Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a Metaphor
- Glen Sean Coulthard, political recognition versus Indigenous resurgence
authenticity and crisis management
- Berlant’s cruel optimism again
- Mosse aesthetics of politics and mass choreography[fn:: Random thought, but what about connecting governing by genre, mass choreography, and the positivism shared by liberalism and the Church with Kurt Vonnegut’s quote about “peculiar travel instructions are dancing lessons from God.”]
- Benjamin’s mythic time and messianic time
- Frantz Fanon, national culture

2025-09-20, 1148h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So I was thinking about Lakotaean philosophy and specifically rock people, who are known to sense and remember the relations of those relatives they are related to. Anyway, I was thinking about this and realized, that it might be cool for a MUD engine to use stones as omniscient, and then admins can query stones for what the stone knows about whatever. Any stone that can answer can answer, and the admin-ness of an admin is defined by how far they can query into the stone-network. (Stones can perfectly transmit all knowledge between all stones they encounter, instantly, basically - though that language doesn’t reflect Lakotaean metaphysics.)

2025-09-20, 2144h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When Elizabeth Povinelli published Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016ce), she introduced a vocabulary for analyzing how late liberalism organizes the divide between Life and Nonlife. That distinction (life as vitality, nonlife as inert background) is a great lens for looking at Flavor Town as a commercial brand and imaginary space.

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives continually codes flame, sizzle, and “the money bite” as the pulse of Life, while the petroleum-and-broadcast infrastructure is folded down into a silent Nonlife substrate.

2025-09-20, 2353h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

One thing recently is that I’ve kind of been acclimating to a more “normal” life, though it certainly isn’t /normal/, and normal itself is a bit of a funky concept. But in a specific context, what I mean is, I don’t have a lot of habits or routines that I see people in similar material positions have, and one way that seems true is with how I use my smartphone.

2025-09-21, 0721h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, while visiting Turntide Islands, I mentioned my website as a type of encyclopedia.

Someone asked, fairly: where are the definitions? Right now, clicking links often leads either to missing pages or to more links, not neat explanations. I answered in the moment, but it made me want to think more carefully about what kind of knowledge site mine actually is.

Before the Web—and in the early days of the Internet—the model was the encyclopedia. These were institutional projects: formal collections of concepts, published in stable editions. Their genre is authoritative and static: the knowledge presented is complete, self-contained, final. Using an encyclopedia means consulting an entry and receiving stabilized truth. Its promise is stability: things mean what they mean, and you can learn them.

2025-09-22, 1504h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have nothing meaningful to say on it now, but sometimes I think about how I tend to do more political analysis and sociological analysis in the morning, and then do my mathematics and theorizing at night.

2025-09-23, 1932h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today I was around Turntide Islands, talking about deciding praxis, especially climate breakdown praxis. And I said:

making dirt! seriously! it's kind of the raw material for just about anything that does anything, so providing it is one of the best ways to distribute power/autonomy from yourself into your community, not just human

reductive interpretation of problems:

- settler-colonialism means we all significantly over-consume, over-pollute, from a position of self-centeredness
- it would be good to not do that
- to do (or not do) anything, determinations have to be made about how to do it
- for simple lifeforms like bacteria determination is very biochemical reaction
- for us it's very cognitive
- our cognitive is sabotaged by settler-colonliasm
- additionally it is ours, using it maintains self-centeredness
- so: can we distribute the power-of-determination outside of ourselvse?
- answer: if determination is biochemical, yes:
  - by increasing availability of biochemical energy
- how to do that?
  - MAKE DIRT

i've never put the argument together so clearly and completely as that but that is a pretty good explanation right there of why, make dirt make dirt make dirt. if you can't decide what to do, make dirt. if you're concerned about how you're deciding things, make dirt. making dirt is a weird anti-bias machine that requires your particular biases in order to work, solving both the problems of collectively distributed autonomy and individual agency.

I want to take that seriously, because I think the logic there is actually pretty robust and generalizable. Like, in any complex system, there are fail state, and continue/succeed states, and… anyway, let me start by, I wanna look at why making dirt - building living soil - is instrumentally good across very different objective functions.

2025-09-25, 0936h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Someone asked me a question that led to me wanting to put together a bibliography for the social dynamic at hand: white-coding as retaliation against anti-whiteness displaced into non-white communities. (That might take the prize for longest node name.)

That got me to realizing that I haven’t actually used Org-cite since setting it up in GnoponEmacs. In part, that’s because of anxiety about if I’m going to continue with GnoponEmacs over time: the allure of a bespoke text editor done in Fennel calls to me. “Is it that same song, that lured the young sailors? I think they’re one and the same.” (The Rainbow Connection).

2025-09-26, 0847h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you got mad at Pete Hegseth for saying the Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee “won’t be taken back,” because “the history is settled,” and left it at that: “Wow, this guy sucks!”… …you’re doing the job he wants you to do. You think you’re resisting him, but you’re actually helping him “settle” the history.

Because you’re listening to him. You’re giving his words the weight. You’re spreading his speech, treating it like the narrative, the center of the story. You’re letting the whole event be framed by the state’s mouthpiece, instead of by the people who actually live with the memory of the massacre.

2025-09-26, 2205h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I submitted the following to Cindy Milstein for one of their zines. It’s about liberalism and anarchism, but actually liberal feedback loops and imagination.

Life in liberalism rehearses a loop about change: a crisis is named a “problem,” responsibility is delegated upward (to laws, elections, courts), and we live with the crisis. That loop never completes, and the harms it asks us to endure become the next crisis.

Why does this keep happening? Because delegating responsibility delegates imagination. When imagination moves to institutions, our role becomes watching and arguing over what shape that imagination should take. The present turns into collateral: care is abandoned, and we learn, grumpily, that our best tool is patience and debate. But there are different ways to handle change. Imagine, yourself, your everyday relationships (neighbors, coworkers, ecology) as the space where change is living.

Imagine your own ways to act that might make things better. And go do it.

When you act directly in that space, even in small ways, you get immediate feedback: what helped, what didn't: how to do it better next time. In this anarchist way of living with change, the loop completes the circle, and each circle builds capacity and trust.

2025-09-26, 2311h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of my writing recently has been focused on relational dynamics in the fields of sociology and psychology, and I thought it might be fun to look at something else: Physarum polycephalum. It’s a slime mold that’s been called the “many-headed slime,” that’s what polycephalum means. First described by Johann Heinrich Freidrich Link, a German naturalist back in 1833ce.

I should write a history of study of Physarum polysephalum and I’m tempted to but I actually want to explain how it’s been an object of study in other fields like mass transit and logic.

2025-09-27, 0016h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On my Omnibook, I’m running Windows 11, with Windows Subsystem for Linux hosting Ubuntu. I’d like to, within this stack, set up Guix, because after mucking about for a few months, I’m back to remembering that my old MUD designing brought me to it, after moving me from Python to Racket to Fennel. According to the Guix Manual, I can simply =sudo apt install guix= and =sudo guix pull= , so I’ve started that, which as started a… very slow download of the Guix source code, I think.

2025-09-27, 0949h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was thinking about professionalization and want to explore the concept that the genre of the contemporary American worker with any “management” rule actually rewards administrating, not managing. Distinguishing the two as i mean them:

administrating :: rooted in bureaucratic theory and public adminstration, involves standardizing and proceduralizing, measuring and quantifying, focused on compliance, documentation
managing :: rooted in industrialism and scientific management, involves directing persons and processes toward producing, focused on interpersonal authority and responsibility

Sociology of labor has looked at how professions move through cycles of rationalization, and this occured with the managerial role in the U.S. labor economy, schooles of business and MBA programs teach business frameworks, business analysis, for administrating metrics across contexts: generating, interpreting, and translating records in some way I’m having difficulty describing, but which serves to allow the managerial layer of a business to serve as a administrative relay of commands coming from above or without.[fn:: Are managers the slime of many heads?]

2025-09-28, 0044h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

America! Turning diversity and opportunity into cancer, since 1776

2025-09-28, 0826h, On american translation of 'post-' to 'anti-'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thinking about different facets of why, in American idiom, post- is often interpreted as meaning anti- rather than “after” or “beyond”.

¶Basic idea

¶Linguistics

In English language, “post-” has historically, and in dictionaries, just meant “after”: it’s a temporal condition, not an opposing relation: post-war, post-natal.

But in political and theoretical discourse, it often has connotations of “against”: postmodernism is seen as after modernism temporally and as rejecting the claims of modernism, usually specifically modernist universalism.

2025-09-28, 1430h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Idea for praxis/content about praxis: look at what is missing just one person doing it for it to work, and do that, rather than join what you see a lot of folk doing.

2025-09-28, 2356h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Considering the role the Fediverse has and what role its Fediverse user have, if I look at social media as one mode in which society processes information into commodity forms. Like looking at the political economy, informed by Marxist analysis and critical media studies, Twitter is a centralized factory in whicch user speech is commodified directly as surplus data: ads, engagement, AI training. Users are pieceworkers, surplus value is realized by the platform.

2025-09-29, 1740h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Considering On Fediverse narrating contradictions into aesthetic cruel optimism, if we consider postliberal cybernetics as the analytical frame, then I might say: The affect economy and libidinal economy are complementary postliberal complexes that process experience into liberal subjectivity.

By complementary complexes, I mean two distinct but interdependent postliberal complexes acting in response to the same pressures: the libidinal economy incites investment in response to desiring, the affect economy orients feedback, and together they stabilize the postliberal circuit of liberal subjectivity.

2025-09-29, 2240h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wanna poke around at some stats about my files. Interestingly, as I’m writing this, it’ll produce new stats each time I update my Website. But I’m writing this on September 29th, 2025, and I started this research archive, with GnoponEmacs, on August 7th.

First, I was curious: how many nodes do I have, what’s the mean number of links in each one, what’s the max links in one nodes, and how many are isolatd.

2025-10-05, 0756h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What follows is some keyword soup from a set of notes that previously existed outside this archive. (I wonder how many of these names have never existed in the same text before, if any.)

biosemiotics, meaning as biological relation: empirical field coherence
- Biosemiotics (journal)
- Semiotica
- Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon
- ecological information theory
- Jesper Hoffmeyer
cognitive ethology
- Alexandra Horowitz, Frans de Waal, Eva Jablonka
- post-behaviorism
relational quantum mechanics
- Carlo Rovelli, Chris Fuchs
information geometry
- Shun-ichi Amari, Naftali Tishby
4E cognition
- Anil Seth, Andy Clark, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Fransisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Kevin O’Regan
Earth system humanities
- Nigel Clark, Timothy Clark, Alpha Lo
- Bruno Latour, Gaia Vince
geoaesthetics and geo-poetics
- Kathryn Yusoff
- Derek Woods
recursive publics
- Chris Kelty
data feminism, critical data studies
- Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Ruha Benjamin
design justice
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, Pelle Ehn
aesthetic cognition
- Shaun Gallagher, Alva Noë, Ellen Fridland
morphogenetics
- Rupert Sheldrake
second-order cybernetics and autopoiesis
- Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Fransisco Varela again
radical constructivism from Ernst von Glasersfeld
ecological psychology
- James Gibson, Eleanor Gibson
systems ecology and network thermodynamics
- Rubert Ulanowicz, Howard Odum
phenomenological biology
- Hans Jonas, Jakob von Uexküll, Jonas Franke
polyphonic anthropology
- Vladimir Arseniev, Anna Tsing and Tim Ingold
relational frame theory
- Steven C. Hayes
radical empiricism
- William James
process structuralism of linguistics
- Louis Hjelmslev, glossemantics
activity theory
- Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky
- Yrjö Engeström
embodied predictive processing
- Karl Friston, Jakob Hohwy
network ethnography and actor-network theory
- Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Lucy Suchman
Niels Bohr
Gregory Bateson and dolphins
Elena Esposito The Future of Futures
Ilya Prigogine
Jakob Böhme
John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin’s Man of Desire
Ersnt Chladni
Pauline Oliveros
Elian Radigue’s ARP 2500
Tristan Murail, acoustic spectralism
Stafford Beer’s viable system model
Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life
von Foerster’s Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics
Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants
Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think
Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec’s Anthroposemiotics
adrienne marie brown’s Emergent Strategy
Charles Sanders Peirce
Alfred Korzybski
vyākaraṇa
Coptic Gnostic codices, esp. Trimorphic Protennoia
Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing
Wilhelm Reich and orgone theory
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Nick Land’s Machinic Desire
Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia
Kate Compton’s Casual Creativity
ch’alla ritual
aizkolari
alchemical opus magnum
Kit Fine
Rosi Braidotti
Samuele Maschio, Emily Riehl
Garrett Birkoff and John von Neumann
Vladimir Vernadsky’s noosphere
Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point
G.I. Gurdjieff’s enneagram
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s morphology and Urpflanze
navya-nyāya
nāgārjuna and catuṣkoṭi
Yijing
Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno
Steven Feld
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Agnes Martin
La Monte Young
Joy programming language
Octavia Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Robert Ulanowicz, Howard T. Odum
ethnomathematics and Ron Eglash
philosophy of boredom
- Lars Svendsen
- Stimmung
Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure
Georges Bataille, Henri Bergson
Andrey Komogorov and Solomonoff-Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity
L-systems in procedural generation
Tom Froese and Tom Ziemke, enactive artificial intelligence
memory palace
Liber floridus, Index vcerborum and other medieval glossary and medieval concordance
xenofeminism, Laboria Cuboniks
Hanzi Frey
Taeyoon Choi
Jorge Luis Borges’ The Aleph
Shawn Wilson, Linda Tuhiwai Smith
ifá and ubuntu
Viveiros de Castro
Dionysius
Sufism
Taoism
Kabbalah, sefirot
pratītyasamutpāda
Friedrich A. Kittler
Jussi Parikka
Wolfgang Ernst
Karen Michelle Barad
Rosi Braidotti
Stacy Alaimo
George P. Lakoff
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Carol Gilligan
Joan C. Tronto
María Puig de la Bellacasa
Ruha Benhamin
Kate Crawford
Nick Couldry
Ulises A. Meijas
Saul Newman
Todd May
Gustav Landauer
Sol LeWitt
Vera Molnár
Casey Reas
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Jean-Luc Marion
Fred Moten
Édouard Glissant
Amiri Baraka

2025-10-06, 1126h, Building Fregean predicates from org-roam nodes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So I didn’t do a good job writing much about it in my archive as I was reading about it, but I recently did a lot of reading into the Semantic Web, which led me to reading about resource description format and finally onto things like Fregean first-order predicates. This all coalesced around something I’d been slowly doing in my nodes anyway, which was writing a property into each Org-roam node, which has changed name and shape a few times, but I’m currently calling it the ~~node-description~~ property.

2025-10-15, Reworking gnoponemacs as a ritm tool

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reworking GnoponEmacs as a RITM tool

When considering GnoponEmacs as a research tool for Relational Infinity-Topos Modality, I want it to be what lets me, essentially, simulate coKleisli action on my research archive as a relational topology.

Starting at what’s immutable and unique: the :ID: property every Org-roam node has.

We’re going to start with one node, called “node” representing what a node at its most general is in this modality, and so it will have a property, :node-relations:, that works like the following:

2025-10-16, 1637h, Looking at thor

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

THOR is a massively parallel, multi-physics simulation framework originally developed for modeling atmospheric and planetary flows, now adapted for a range of geophysical and astrophysical applications. It is built from the ground up to handle high-dimensional tensor fields on complex meshes, making it a rich reference point for designing my own relational simulators.

The core of THOR is its mesh and field system. The domain is decomposed into cells on structured or unstructured grids, with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) used to focus resolution where dynamics are most interesting. Each cell stores state vectors—velocity, pressure, temperature, composition—represented as tensors. The simulation loop advances these fields using discrete time-stepping schemes, often splitting update steps into transport, source, and diffusion components.

2025-10-18, 2153h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2025-12-11, Learn with me, researching the relation between emergence and standardization

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been watching the fediverse slowly drift from a weird emergent ecosystem into something that is starting to look institutional: standards bodies, formal processes, corporate entries, “governance conversations.” Underneath all the politics and discourse, there’s a simple systems question I want to understand:

What happens to emergence when a system gets standardized?

“Emergence” here is not a mystical property. Think about the early fediverse: different codebases, different moderation norms, different experiments with identity, different kinds of sociality. It was noisy and uneven, but there was a lot of room for new things to appear. People built strange instances, new posting conventions, ad-hoc content flows. That’s emergence: local actors exploring a big configuration space.

2025-12-12, Measuring ideologies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There is a political dimension that rarely gets named directly, even though it quietly structures almost every argument we have about policy, justice, and the future. It is not left versus right, nor radical versus conservative. It is a measure of how much homogeneity an ideology requires in order to function at all.

Some ideologies only work if the world behaves “the same way everywhere.” Others can tolerate difference, drift, rupture, and unevenness without losing coherence. This difference shows up in moral language, policy preferences, and in the statistical and dynamical assumptions the ideology quietly depends on.

2025-12-15, Anxious intellectuals with an audience

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think it’s gross when wealthy, credentialed people use polished academic English to tell everyone else what something “really is,” especially when the concrete claims they’re making are wrong. What bothers me is the performance of authority. A relatively small class of highly educated, well-paid commentators adopts the tone of explanation to instruct an audience that often does not have the time, money, or access to study these topics themselves. The language sounds like knowledge, and that sound frequently substitutes for substance.

2025-12-18, On x's updated terms of service

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The recent update to X’s Terms of Service is getting a lot of attention, mostly framed as a sudden shift toward AI exploitation or a betrayal of users. What’s actually happening is more specific and more revealing. The new terms don’t represent a fundamental change in what X does; they represent a change in how explicitly the company is willing to describe its relationship to user data, and a tightening of legal control around practices that have existed for most of the platform’s life.

2025-12-23, Planning the emsemioverse

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a bit since I’ve written much about it directly, since things keep moving around faster than it felt useful to write about them, but this evening, it feels appropriate to write a bit to plan out what is becoming known as “the Emsemioverse,” which is the shape my digital data and how i work with it is taking.

This log is written for myself and other agents working in that universe to help us understand what my goals are and how I picture getting there.

2025-12-25, Latest oil sanctions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Something that’s getting framed as “technical sanctions policy” but is actually pretty significant geopolitical reconfiguration is the new round of pressure on Russian energy firms like Lukoil and Rosneft.

These sanctions aren’t primarily about punishment or morality: it’s a reshuffling of who mediates it, who insures it, and who gets leverage over price and supply. They’re about forcing a re-routing of oil flows, capital access, insurance, and long-term contracts in ways that weaken Russia’s ability to act as a stable energy anchor for Europe and parts of the Global South.

2025-12-25, Mathy monday

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to organize my work by giving different kinds of thinking their own days. Yesterday was Sunday Funday, which for me meant cleaning up old tabletop role-playing game material I’ve been carrying around for years. Today is Mathy Monday. That doesn’t mean numbers. It means using math the way I actually use it: as a tool for reading systems without getting hypnotized by their language.

A useful test case for this is the recent proposal to build a large data center near where I live. Like most major development projects, it comes wrapped in claims. Claims about jobs, environmental responsibility, legal compliance, community benefit. The usual public conversation treats these as statements of intent and then argues about whether the intent is sincere or sufficient. That framing is already a mistake. The more basic question is structural: what role do these claims play inside the decision-making system?

2025-12-25, Planning simple publishing pipeline

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Today it’s my hope to set up what I need so that I can do make publish-emsenn-net from the Emsemioverse’s root.

This looks like:

Having scripts for collecting matching content (i.e. publications is {emsenn-net: publishable} or whatever is proper YAML)
IN THE FUTURE, Build that content into “hydrated” Markdown (i.e. take davaiew queries and render them)
FOR NOW, just fill in whatever missing content is necessary and may be inferred from the collect, and then
publish it via MkDocs

Now, one thing I want to do is start refining a work pipeline that goes something like this:

2026 02 03, 1932h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So, as I think I started to say in my last babble, I got kind of allergic to writing on computers, recently. I made a joke to a friend that it’s just another way I get things backward: very active and crafty during winter, while during the year, I did lots of reading and writing.

But, with Eugene, the 3D printer, out-of-commission until I get a replacement fan, it seemed like a good time to try and log a bit about what I’m up to. After all, I do have some online audience, and they (y’all) seem fairly interested in whatever I get around to writing out.

2026 02 14, 1732h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been making some amount of headway with organizing my office over the past few days, and generally feeling like I’m coming back into some sort of “form” with regards to working on my computer and doing other work. It’s tricky, because in times of certain crisis, I find myself answering lots of questions, which distracts from anything I might normally be doing, but, there’s not much space to dive into the specifics of what I’ve been doing in the meantime.

2026-01-17, 1139h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like recently I’ve become almost allergic to actually typing things out on my computer.

It’s actually the 24th, that’s how allergic I’ve become. And, in fact, I can tell, there’s a sluggishness to my fingers as I type. Is it age? Perhaps, or I’m just… really tired.

Anyway I’m writing just to log that I’ve purchased a new 3D printer, the Creality K2 Pro, which has a huge 350x350mm build bed, and so in prep for that, am installing OrcaSlicer and taking more time to more considerately start setting up some more print profiles, filament profiles, and so on.

2026-02-22, 1015h, Migrating back to Obsidian

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing from Obsidian, as I struggle toward coming back toward computers. I’d last written about wanting to use Emacs and Org-mode, but I realized that part of that was coming from a feeling of despondency about working with others, and part of what I want to do is build habits that others can easily adopt as pieces. Markdown makes that so much easier than Org-mode, as demonstrated by the fact that I can work in this file within Obsidian, Emacs, and VS Code, all at once. (Though I shouldn’t, unless I want to clobber each others’ changes!)

2026-02-22, 1748h, Finding diataxis and quartz

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, so at the end of my last babble, I said that I was going to migrate from MkDocs to Astro, after having only just recently moved to MkDocs, and in fact not even fully completed that migration.

Well, after trying to get links-in-Obsidian to work nicely with links-in-Astro, I gave up, went looking for another solution, and found Quartz.

But, on my way there, I found Diátaxis, “a way of thinking about and doing documentation” - specifically, technical documentation.

2026-02-23, 0938h, Covid non-existent in some animals

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I came across two interesting articles today, about COVID-19.

The first, COVID Virus Declining in Northeast Animals relates to the second, White-tailed deer milk exhibits SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies and synergistic mechanisms that contribute to rapid viral RNA degradation.

The first reports on the findings after surveilling ~900 animals across 27 species… that there was no SARS-Cov-2 in any sample.

That’s striking: the virus wasn’t detected in any wild or domestic species. The researchers hypothesized that as the virus specialized for human hosts, it lost its affinity for other species. Laboratory experiments supported this, showing that while mice could be infected with earlier strains, the Omicron variant resulted in significantly lower viral shedding and zero transmission between individuals. This evolution reduces the likelihood of “spillback,” where the virus might jump from animals back to humans as a new variant.

2026-02-23, 1034h, Getting set up with Obsidian (again)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, I’ve successfully gotten back into Obsidian, and I’ve managed to get Quartz working well enough. (“Managed to get” makes it sound harder than it was - I’m just very out of practice with really using my computer for more than clicking on things or dumping into a text interface.)

I’m keen to set up some kind of routine for bringing in older content, but I think for now, it’s just about set-up enough for me to actually replace the older version of emsenn.net that’s live now. I checked earlier today, and there’s actually not that much content up there.

2026-02-24, 1348h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Today, my goals include handling what’s in my “content triage,” which is, at the moment, older babbles, including some that got syndicated onto my Fediverse profile. Then, I’ll pull my Letters to the Web into the triage, and hopefully get to them today or tomorrow.

So far, I’m finding Obsidian comfortable enough to use, and am enjoying knowing that I’m on the same note-taking app that some of my friends use. (Though I probably use it the most, given the volume I can babble and write, and my aspirations with regards to like, digital gardening, vernacular autoethnosis, and agential semioverses, among other made-up things.

2026-02-24, 2147h, Gamifying Obsidian

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So as I settle into Obsidian and prepare for the long slog of bringing in old content - and adding new content - I wondered if there were any good plugins for gamifying Obsidian. I actually got inspired because I saw, while importing 2023-11-14, Winter Orientation, that I wrote that using 4theWords, a gamifying online writng platform.

Well, a Web search turned up a few that seemed of interest, right away.

One was Keep the Rhythm, which tracks how many words you write a day, that week, and an average over last thirty days, presenting a heatmap of the month, something like Github contributor calendar. I’ve installed that, to see how much I care about that.

2026-02-25, 1019h, Processing my content triage

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

As I babbled about last night, I’ve set up some gamification within Obsidian, but I’m realizing that very little of that actually gave gamification that affects the project-at-hand, the importing in of my triage. The one that does seem related to it is the Gamified one, since that seems to have some features related to scoring notes based on how many links they have and so on, so I’ll get “experience points” for going through and enriching old content.

2026-02-26, 0848h, I support heckling the city council

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

As a resident of Duluth, Minnesota who lives with CPTSD due to the very situations that are being hotly debated at our city council meetings, that I am absolutely in favor of the citizens who are violating the rules to yell. It actively makes me feel safer to live here, to see that there are people around me who care more about care itself than a series of procedures that clearly can’t accommodate this.

2026-02-26, 1021h, Setting up zotlit for zotero citations in Obsidian

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In order to enrich my notes in a certain way, I need to figure out how I’m going to handle citations.

I was starting to use Zotero, toward the end of 2025, because extending out of critical theory into other sciences meant I was incorporating way more sources into any given piece of writing.

And, I’d figured out some way, if I recall, of exporting my Zotero bibliography to a single file, which my Org-mode files were able to draw on in such a way that when I published PDFs or HTML files, a bibliography was properly rendered at the bottom of the page.

2026-03-05 08:31

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In my timeline RN I can see content about how AI was used to help the US military pick targets, about how that AI picked the wrong target (a school, killing children), and this sentence from the January 1985 issue of Family Computing Magazine:

“Even the best home financial software can lead the unwary user astray. Of course, if you enter the wrong interest rate on your potential home mortgage, a program’s likely to give you some bad advice about whether or not to buy the house”

2026-03-06, Prairieland trial and zines

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think the prairieland trial is having a big but largely unnoticed effect of making “zines” something that any non-regressive educational/NGO institution MUST have, because of how zines were propagandized by checks notes educational/NGO executives, during the earlier phases of the prosecution.

Which is to say: Zines are gonna become even more of a shitty sterile thing in real short order, and it SUCKS because i know multiple people I consider pretty decent who are trying to turn to them as a means of reclaiming exactly what education/NGO took from discourse. :\

2026-03-07-1525h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The language nerd in me has a lot of very critical thoughts about how we’re referring to the destruction of a flying gokart as a “kill”

https://www.businessinsider.com/merops-middle-east-iran-drones-shaheds-surveyor-us-military-2026-3

especially given the whole, “are they replacing us with AI because there wont’ be enough food for us in the climate broken future?”

having media affirm the idea that what could be the replacements are capable of being killed - which implies they’re alive - seems… like it would make it easier to avoid having any feelings at all about this, if you don’t perceive yourself as one fo the folk being threatened.

2026-03-29-1040h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I babbled rather philosophically about how to determine how determined something is by how many absurd statements can be said to make it necessary, which is affirmed by how many absurdities require those necessities to be possible.

And then in the evening I started looking at if there was a tool I’d like better than Quartz for publishing my site, because with the amount of data I’m working with, Quartz was not working out; build times were pushing toward 5-10 minutes.

emsenn's Log, 2026-03-28, 1016h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

¶Coming back from weird math

Alright, today I’m trying to dig myself out of my infatuation with my weird math, and bring myself back toward using its ideas to get myself a better presence on the Web.

The math… is only ever going to work as well as it works. My recent foray into it affirmed: by all known standards of math, it’s broken math. I can see where it breaks from normal math - or, from my perspective, where normal math inherits Platonic metaphysics - a lot more clearly, though, which should help, but that also means, I need to put it down and only pick it up to use it.

emsenn's Log, 2026-04-02, 0743h

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s really really weird how the most unifying belief in the American left seems to have become “things are bad and I’m clever for saying so.”

Like these days, it seems like in order to be taken seriously in a conversation, you have to believe that billions are going to die from climate collapse, nothing can be done about it, billions will be disabled by COVID, nothing can be done about it, and so on.

Grumbling about shoddy praxis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

failures of solidarity and cynicism
care as aesthetic and performative politics
anti-organizing instincts in certain radical subcultures
grievance economies and attention markets

Testing predicate graphs with GnoponEmacs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

(defun gpe/ritm/collect-predicates-from-node (node)
  (let* ((raw-rd (alist-get "NODE-RELATIONS"
			    (org-roam-node-properties node) nil nil #'string=))
	 (alist (when raw-rd (ignore-errors (read raw-rd)))))
    (when alist
      (cl-loop
       for (pred . obj) in alist
       collect
       (let* ((parse-link
	       (lambda (s)
		 (when (string-match "\\[\\[id:\\([^]]+\\)\\]\\[\\([^]]+\\)\\]\\]" s)
		   (list :id (match-string 1 s)
			 :sign (match-string 2 s)))))
	      (pred-str
	       (replace-regexp-in-string "] \\[" "]["
					 (format "%s" pred)))
	     (obj-str
	      (replace-regexp-in-string "] \\[" "]["
					(format "%s" obj)))
	     (pred-link (funcall parse-link pred-str))
	     (obj-link  (funcall parse-link obj-str)))
	(list
           :subject-id id
           :subject-sign title
           :predicate-id (plist-get pred-link :id)
           :predicate-sign (plist-get pred-link :sign)
           :object-id (plist-get obj-link :id)
           :object-sign (plist-get obj-link :sign)))))))
(defun gpe/ritm/build-predicate-graph ()
  (cl-loop
   for (id file level pos todo priority scheduled deadline title props)
   in (org-roam-db-query
       [:select [id file level pos todo priority scheduled deadline title properties]
		:from nodes
		:where (or (like properties '"%NODE-RELATIONS%")
			   (like properties '"%node-relations%"))])
   for node = (org-roam-node-from-id id)
   collect (gpe/ritm/collect-predicates-from-node node)))
(defun gpe/ritm/filter-predicates-by (predicates predicate-id object-id)
  (cl-loop for entry in predicates
	   when (and (string= (plist-get (car entry) :predicate-id)
			      predicate-id)
		     (string= (plist-get (car entry) :object-id)
			      object-id))
	   collect (plist-get (car entry) :subject-id)))
(defun gpe/ritm/render-list-of-matches (pairs)
  (let ((graph (gpe/ritm/build-predicate-graph)))
    (mapconcat
     (lambda (pair)
       (let* ((predicate-id (car pair))
	      (object-id (cdr pair))
	      (ids
	       (gpe/ritm/filter-predicates-by
		graph predicate-id object-id))
	      (nodes (mapcar #'org-roam-node-from-id ids))
	      (output
	       (mapconcat
		(lambda (node)
		  (format "- [[id:%s][%s]]"
			  (org-roam-node-id node)
			  (org-roam-node-title node)))
		nodes
		"\n")))
	      output))
     pairs
     "\n\n")))

#+RESULTS:: gpe/ritm/render-list-of-matches

(gpe/ritm/filter-predicates-by (gpe/ritm/build-predicate-graph)     "bee496e1-139b-4a7f-8a24-d4c14e6084c6" "d542e8d2-3512-47a0-adbb-4a393e161ecb")

#+RESULTS: | 442470fd-62e2-4378-903f-6ed3ba005d10 | 1abdc5ad-2bb7-448d-af49-3e257c915685 |

What makes a Web platform robust?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

People usually answer this question by pointing at features: scalability, moderation tools, extensibility, performance, user growth. Those matter, but they’re downstream. What I’m interested in here is robustness at a more basic level: what structural properties let a platform keep functioning once it is public, contested, and under pressure.

To get at that, I deliberately compared systems that are rarely discussed together: WordPress, Wikipedia, Mastodon instances, authored games like Kingdom of Loathing or Sunless Sea, and live-trading dashboards like Fidelity ActiveTrader. These systems differ wildly in purpose and tone, but they all host public interaction where actions have consequences. That turns out to be enough common ground to extract something invariant.