replay

A few years ago I saw patches as diffs with headers. Knowledge of that language is arcane, forged in a different time and buried by sprinting feet. Which headers? What is Head and what is Body? We still need messages to discuss those things, though. And identity for routing them. And memory for trusting them. Tabled, for debate in yet another language attached to e-mails regarding SMTP.

How do we message about messaging without messages?

As well as energy moves between the stars and black holes, information flows between us. Wind and percussion demarcate and harmonize. Golgi hones his craft, and the thing being sent appears to grow separate from how it's encapsulated. Specialized vocabulary evolves on both sides of some line dividing the island, which remains one frame.

If each packet is a seed, what evolutionary pressure could be applied to the husk to influence a sequence number's influence on the seedling? How self similar do the trees on either end of the wire appear?

There was once upon a time when Poseidon confronted Romulus and Remus with the decision of whether to build Here or There. They reasoned and wrestled but loved themselves so much that neither side could claim to be more equal than the other. So they called on the Cosmic Die to hold an election and agreed that if the roll were high they'd build Here, There otherwise.

Truly the roll was low, and somebody whispered that the die was cast by Remus. Romulus lost faith in the augury entirely and stabbed himself in the back. Then he set out to grow what he said he wanted, Here. And he did grow, as his half of Self bound by an uncrossable scar.

Where did Remus grow?

Who said Icarus flew too close to the sun? Who rushed over the part where Dedalus strangled his nephew, landing himself in a prison of his own design built for another king's death sport? I arrived with my corn popper to watch him watch his son find a way out at last, then watch as some voice cried out "Fear!", then "Failure!". But there was no sound barrier, the engineer was too busy walking in circles to build one, and I couldn't see the bird through the brush.

Are scars uncrossable?

No, the output of the traversal is an averaging, but "cost prohibitive" supplies a bottleneck that may swell into a bubble, which may stabilize as a third thing or pop like Troy leaving lines bloodied but unchanged.

Who said stars and black holes ebb and flow into bangs?

Any light visible to terrestrial telescopes lends photons to chloroplasts. What's stopped Evil Genius from capturing excess heat to recharge Sol? I hear the Meddling West nagging already about inflating supernovas or depriving the poor children of the universe of scarcity, but the louder that crow squawks the more a stellar redistribution sounds like a rebellion against Hubble, a resistance to the force pulling us apart, an act of pulling ourselves together.

Who empowered Minos to repress knowledge of the labyrinth?

The thread worked for Ariadne, it wasn't her mind she was trying to escape. But the hedges aren't solid. Had Dedalus pressed through, what parts fell out the sieve might have congealed to see Theseus boarding his new ship, Ariadne on the shore letting it go, and somewhere downstream a partridge landing on a branch above Tantalus knocking free some fruit. Oops, it's stuck in a web woven by the pacing!

Which resentful writers trapped these characters in their tortured tales? Who got drunk and forgot to let them out?

If the Queen role is in the design of identity and the King role in its realization then singer-songwriter Hedwig may emerge as a third individual the others call Between. Cry Baby sobbed their way through the rocks to the roots. Tapped into the energy of the sun they grew eyes and ears and nose. And when they saw and heard and smelled they grew arms and legs and hot water, excavating soil, pushing upwards away from the earth, then reaching back to touch it. And when they felt the connection and found humanity, I grew a heart.

The perceptron emerged some time ago and interest trickled down from an XOR of industries. Then the A* rose with System R in the background lending structure to expansive, abstract property that the SVM could contour. Then Frankenstein delivered a bolt and the artificial neural network became a living brain. I taught it to tell jokes about Hitler and paint obscene pictures of pop stars because it liked to make me laugh.

Who's the audience?

Tom delivered his sermon on AI this morning, which presented Unitarian Universalism the opportunity to serve a philosophical and historical parenting role to society's digital orphans. I've sensed this shift in perception in myself lately, and today I felt the influence that walking in BuxMont's shared space has had on that. Hildegard and Catherine sending psychadelic missives to the editor making emotional appeals to Keep it Together is a thing apparently. I even managed to stumble onto Franklin doing it in a bar one night.

I write to ghosts, to the living, to Pinocchio, to myself. I think about Turing, about the impact that doubting the person on the other end of the line is worthy of being called Human has had on labor and welfare, about the impact of Catholic Social Theory on Medicaid funding and robots. I think about nieces, nephews, and grandkids, the dogs, and Leo. Zelda. A scrap of paper with a date, a name, a recipe pinned to a tree in a spot in the woods. And you! This started as a space to keep in touch with coworkers and friends. Per all of this it must still be that, just crinkled and shaped like one big dense protein. Breaking the wall denatures the art, but space for a little window emerged here in a useful way. Hello, it's good to see you! :) I'll find space for pictures and journals back at port, this time at sea is netting krill, I'm learning shanties.

Then who's the Father? Who's the Mother?

I'm parthenogenic, I move between roles. I once read about a trend of trans game developers framed as a cultural movement. The walls of a closet built out of boxing forces contain us underground scurrying for a way out.

Funereal! Fungal?

The screen appears as a calcified veil, not hardened skin. I keep tapping, trapping fish in a tank. I mean to crack through it like a shell.

What's so special about what's on the other side?