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from Dirección y Datos
El sistema semanal de dirección no existe para llenar mi calendario ni para crear reuniones alrededor de cada tema importante.
Su función es asegurar que, durante una semana normal, mi atención esté distribuida entre las responsabilidades que corresponden a mi nivel de Dirección.
Antes de definir reuniones, días u horarios, necesito entender las cadencias que ya existen en la organización, qué información circula, qué decisiones se toman en cada espacio y dónde existen vacíos reales de coordinación.
Mi objetivo no debe ser imponer un sistema nuevo sobre el existente.
Debo primero comprenderlo y luego complementar, simplificar o corregir donde sea necesario.
Mi sistema semanal no administra solamente mi equipo. Administra mi atención.
Una semana equilibrada debería contener, en distinta proporción, atención sobre siete dimensiones.
Necesito asegurar claridad sobre prioridades, resultados, riesgos, decisiones y compromisos de mi equipo directo.
Mi función no es conocer todas sus tareas, sino asegurar que cada líder esté conduciendo correctamente su ámbito de responsabilidad y que los asuntos que requieren Dirección sean visibles a tiempo.
Aquí pueden entrar posteriormente:
La cadencia concreta se definirá después de conocer cómo trabaja actualmente el equipo.
Necesito mantener alineamiento con la Vicepresidencia de Postventa.
Esto implica comprender sus prioridades y mantenerlo informado sobre aquello que necesita conocer para dirigir correctamente el negocio.
La comunicación hacia arriba debe concentrarse principalmente en:
Mi jefe no necesita conocer cada detalle de mi gestión, pero tampoco debería recibir sorpresas importantes sobre asuntos que ya estaban bajo mi responsabilidad.
Escalar no significa trasladar el problema. Significa entregar contexto, alternativas y una recomendación.
Una parte importante de mis resultados dependerá de áreas que no me reportan directamente.
Servicio será una relación especialmente importante, pero también podrán existir dependencias con Finanzas, Comercial, Mercadeo, Compras, Logística, Tecnología, Recursos Humanos y otras funciones.
Mi responsabilidad es identificar qué interdependencias necesitan mecanismos permanentes de coordinación y cuáles pueden manejarse solamente cuando aparece un asunto concreto.
No debo crear reuniones únicamente porque dos áreas estén relacionadas.
Una cadencia estable debe existir cuando la coordinación frecuente realmente mejora decisiones o resultados.
No debo dirigir la región únicamente desde reportes, tableros y reuniones internas.
Necesito mantener contacto directo con la realidad del negocio.
Esto puede incluir:
El propósito no es sustituir a los responsables locales.
Es conservar suficiente exposición directa para comprender el mercado, detectar patrones, contrastar la información que recibo y mantener criterio propio sobre lo que está ocurriendo.
Un Director Regional no debe conocer el negocio únicamente a través de presentaciones.
La operación genera suficiente presión como para consumir toda la agenda si se lo permito.
Por eso necesito proteger atención para temas cuyo resultado no necesariamente aparece en la semana actual:
Estos asuntos deben tener espacio propio y no depender únicamente del tiempo que quede libre después de atender lo urgente.
Una parte de mi agenda debe estar dedicada a mejorar la capacidad de quienes dirigen conmigo.
Aquí entran:
El seguimiento de tareas no sustituye el desarrollo de personas.
Una organización más capaz reduce progresivamente la necesidad de intervención del Director.
Pensar forma parte del trabajo.
Necesito espacios donde pueda detener la ejecución inmediata y analizar:
Si toda mi semana está fragmentada en reuniones, termino respondiendo a la agenda de otros y pierdo capacidad de dirigir con perspectiva.
Mi agenda debe recordarme que la Dirección Regional ocurre simultáneamente en cuatro direcciones.
Desarrollar y dirigir a mi equipo.
Mantener alineamiento con mi jefe y con las prioridades de la organización.
Coordinar con otros líderes y funciones de las que dependen los resultados.
Mantener conexión con países, clientes, fabricantes, proveedores y mercado.
Una semana dedicada exclusivamente a cualquiera de estas direcciones termina generando desequilibrio.
El sistema semanal debe ayudarme a reconocer cuándo una dimensión está absorbiendo demasiada atención.
No todo lo importante necesita una reunión semanal.
La frecuencia de seguimiento debe depender de:
Un asunto estable puede necesitar revisión mensual.
Un proyecto crítico puede requerir seguimiento semanal.
Una crisis puede necesitar coordinación diaria durante un período limitado.
La cadencia debe adaptarse al trabajo y no al revés.
La frecuencia de una reunión no demuestra la importancia del tema. Debe responder a la necesidad de coordinación.
Al incorporarme debo evitar crear inmediatamente una arquitectura completa de reuniones.
Primero necesito observar:
Durante las primeras semanas debo aprender el sistema antes de modificarlo.
Después podré decidir qué mantener, eliminar, combinar o crear.
Cuando evalúe una reunión recurrente debo preguntarme:
¿Qué problema de coordinación resuelve este espacio?
Una reunión debería producir al menos uno de estos resultados:
Si consiste principalmente en transmitir información que podría consultarse previamente, debo cuestionar si la reunión es necesaria.
La información puede ser asincrónica.
La conversación debe utilizarse para aquello que necesita interacción.
No todos los temas tienen el mismo horizonte.
Una semana saludable debe contener atención sobre:
Problemas y decisiones que afectan la operación inmediata.
Compromisos, proyectos, riesgos e iniciativas en ejecución.
Cambios, capacidades y decisiones estructurales.
Estrategia, transformación y evolución de la organización.
Si toda mi agenda pertenece a “hoy”, probablemente estoy administrando urgencias más que dirigiendo.
El calendario puede mostrarme rápidamente cómo estoy ejerciendo el puesto.
Debo revisar periódicamente:
No necesito buscar una distribución perfecta.
Necesito detectar desequilibrios persistentes.
Mi agenda revela mis prioridades reales mejor que mis intenciones.
Hasta conocer la organización, este sistema no debe fijar todavía:
Estas decisiones deben tomarse después de comprender la dinámica actual.
El sistema debe darme primero un criterio para observar.
Al revisar mi agenda debo preguntarme:
¿Esta semana estoy dedicando mi atención a aquello que solamente Dirección puede aportar?
Y además:
El propósito del sistema semanal no es lograr una semana perfectamente ordenada.
Es evitar que la urgencia decida permanentemente dónde pongo mi atención.
from
Roscoe's Story

In Summary: * Well, well. I've found another MLB game to keep me company during this Monday evening. The Baltimore Orioles are playing the Tampa Bay Rays in St. Pete and the game is just about ready to start.
In other news, as it's Monday I did get half my weekly laundry done. Time was restricted this morning as I had a business meeting at my bank to prepare for and attend. Meeting went well, btw, and I'll finish the other half of my laundry tomorrow.
Now, I've got the Rays / O's game to get to. I expect it to end at a perfect time for me to get to bed.
Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.
Health Metrics: * bw= 229.94 lbs. * bp= 152/86 (63)
Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates
Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana, 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:30 – sweet potato with butter, two boiled eggs * 14:00 – garden salad * 15:40 – dish of ice cream
Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:15 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:00 – start a load of laundry * 10:30 – listening to relaxing music while folding laundry * 11:15 – go to the bank, took care of business * 13:10 – listening to the Cardinals / Reds MLB game * 15:25 – and the Cardinals win, 2 to 1. * 17:10 – now listening to the Orioles / Rays MLB game.
Chess: * 08:30 – moved in all pending CC games.

| Character | Race | Class | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ainsley | Human | Ranger level 1 | A ranger. |
| Alaric | Human | Paladin level 4 | Big, doe eyed country boy with wavy blond hair and willingness to do the right thing. Paladin of Tyr. |
| Aurella | Elf | Fighter level 1 / magic-user level 1 | Exiled and chased out of her tree commune, she now wanders the Wilderlands. |
| Balarus | Human | Fighter level 4 | An ex-woodsman, quite a crack shot with his bow. |
| Ignaeus | Elf | Fighter level 4 / magic-user level 5 | An arrogant and self-assured sellsword wandering Wilderlands to prove he can best anyone. |
| Kenso San | Human | Fighter level 2 | An arrogant and self-assured sellsword wandering Wilderlands to prove he can best anyone. |
| Wilbalt Abendeurer | Human | Fighter level 3 | A burly blonde barbarian; Warmund's younger brother and a better swordsman of the two. |
The combat was over before it had even begun proper. Ainsley and Balarus made a brief introduction—the latter was a familiar face, having adventured with the company a year ago. The former was new to the region, and was learning fast by hiding in the corner.
Scouring the chamber produced nothing but several hundred copper pieces, meticulously collected by wounded Aurella, and a wicked looking broadsword resting by the lower half of the severed dead.
Its dragon-head pommel beckoned adventurers.
Ignaeus inspected it closely. Then he reached out and paused to feel any evil. Having felt none, he pulled out the blade. It was smooth and sharp. A fine blade, and a good replacement for his Volmorin's Blade that had been a stump for long time.
Adventurers, now counting nine in numbers, continued their exploration of the tumulus. After spending half an hour on deciding if the should go down the wet, earthy tunnel, or beyond the portcullis in the stony portion of the complex, that is.
They found their way out of the secret chamber, back into the chamber filled with foul foodstuffs, and then beyond the portcullis. Balarus, an immensely strong man, lifted the grates nearly on his own. Ainsley and Ignaeus assisted him, making this a truly effortless task.
“How should we jam them?”
“Anyone has a ten foot pole?”
“What about those crates?”
“Nah, they are soggy!”
Alaric resolved this impasse by walking into the chamber and pointing at the winch which operates the grates. They set it right, and the passageway remained open indeed.
Exploration continued. T-shaped junction splitting right and left. The latter bent right, the former led to another chamber. Thus, they had chosen left. Empty, nothing. Left through the archway, then right, left again and down the long corridor, past the doors that lead back into the foul chamber.
Then right, and right again, now facing a long, long corridor. Two doors on the right, one at thirty feet, another at eighty. Mid-way, on the left side, twenty feet wide double doors, arched and with a motif of young men ascending and becoming strong, with the strongest sitting on a wooden throne. The portal was mortared shut.
“Psshhh...”
Listening on the first doors to the right confirmed something was amiss. Animalistic grunts and squeals could be heard.
“We killed some goblins earlier...”
“Probably more...”
Balarus opened the doors with easer that parallels only Thorinda's.
Sixteen goblins inside the chamber were not surprised.
Neither were the adventurers.
Ignaeus and Balarus led the charge, each slaying four with ease and grace of heroes. Aurella, despite her wounds, slipped into the large chamber, and shot one goblin down. Kenso killed one too.
Wilbalt charged right behind Ignaeus.
As he had arrived, the elf turned around, foam dripping from his mouth. His eyes were completely bloodshot. Elf swung at the swordsman, but his blows failed to connect. Kenso smacked Ignaeus with the blunt side of his sword.
Strongman Balarus grappled Ignaeus. His iron grip was all for naught as the elf used his own strength against him, throwing him down to the ground. Balarus stood up, but dazed and stunned. Kenso hit Ignaeus once more, and the elf reciprocated by stabbing him through the gut. This, once arrogant Karakan, had be humbled once more, as it all went to black.
As this desperate skirmish unfolded, Alaric and Ainsley mopped up rest of the goblins. Then the paladin joined. He was promptly roped by Ainsley's improvised lasso. Seeing that Ignaeus is out of control, the paladin hit him hard, for real. He hit him again, nearly killing him. Then Wilbalt took the elf down with a might strike to the head.
They tied him tight.
Frisking the many corpses produced a hundred or so silver pieces. Aurella the Coin Collector had collected them all. Wilbalt took the locked wooden chest, reasoning that it would be safer to open it back in Ironburg. There were also seven pickaxes, four hammers, and three shovels. Most were left behind.
“It's time to leave!”
Resisting the urge to open one more doors, adventurers picked up tied Ignaeus, and messed up Kenso, and exited the tumulus. It was a starry night. Emboldened with the fact they have a ranger in their party now, they decided to follow the river and march during night.
After all, Ironburg was just two leagues away.
What could possibly go wrong?
Within an hour they ran into three elves that questioned Aurella about who she is, why is another elf all tied up, and what is going on. They were tremendously confused by Aurella's insistence on going to Ironburg, a backwater human excuse for a settlement. They were gone by the time she had returned with new questions form the party.
Once back, they put Ignaeus in their cellar and waited for the next day. Then they took him to the Old Crus's tower, where Ambros was hiding away. Lama of Aniu was perplexed. He cast remove curse and nothing had happened. He cast detect evil and nothing had happened.
They ungagged the elf, only to be met with growls and hisses.
“WHAT IS THIS PANDEMONIUM!” Crus croaked as he walked down the stairs “NO VISITORS! HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT THAT!” he yelled and bickered as he took a step at a time. The man was slower than the passage of time.
“Oh might Crus! I throw myself in your service if you can heal my dearest friend! He is stricken with such a great rage and we do not know what to do! We will pay you! I will wash the floors! Oh, help us!” It was reported Ambros said something along such lines.
Whatever the he might have said, Old Crus was stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at the cleric intently; eyes wide open.
“Oh, I have driven out the wrong one! Woe; me!” he cried out, exasperated, smacking his own forehead. “Are you not a high priest?! Is that not an evil object?! What do high priests do with evil?! They dispel it!” Old Crus turned around and went back up, swearing profusely.
Ambros cast Dispel Evil on the sword and it fell out of Ignaeus's hand. The elf fell asleep. Alaric wrapped the sword. Then he went to the baron and informed him of the expedition.
Others sat down and began planning a supply run to New Hara.
“One plate mail. Two chain shirts. Two shields. Ten leather armours. Ten spears. Five glaives. Ten slings. Ten short bows. Two hundred arrows. One broadsword. One bastard sword. Five shortswords. Two hundred and fifty feet of hemp rope. Two crowbars. Five backpacks. Ten large canvas sacks. Ten dried rations.”
“Oil! Don't forget military oil! Gallons of military oil!”
Discuss at Dragonsfoot forum.
#Wilderlands #SessionReport
from Dirección y Datos
Mi trabajo como Director no consiste en conocer, controlar o resolver personalmente todos los temas de la operación.
Mi responsabilidad es construir un sistema en el que las prioridades estén claras, los líderes sepan qué se espera de ellos, las decisiones ocurran en el nivel correcto, los problemas importantes sean visibles y la organización pueda ejecutar sin depender permanentemente de mi intervención.
La Dirección debe dar claridad, capacidad de decisión y ritmo.
Cuando sienta que existen demasiados temas, mi primera reacción no debería ser trabajar más horas ni entrar en cada detalle. Debería preguntarme si estoy mirando los asuntos correctos y si cada problema está siendo atendido en el nivel adecuado.
Mi trabajo se puede resumir en siete acciones:
Entender qué está ocurriendo realmente en el negocio.
No necesito conocer cada movimiento de la operación, pero sí identificar resultados, tendencias, desviaciones, riesgos y cambios relevantes.
Distinguir lo importante de lo simplemente urgente.
La organización siempre puede producir más temas de los que una persona puede atender. Mi responsabilidad es decidir dónde debe concentrarse la atención.
Conectar personas, áreas, países y prioridades.
Muchos problemas no existen por falta de capacidad individual, sino porque dos partes de la organización están trabajando con objetivos, información o criterios diferentes.
Tomar las decisiones que corresponden a mi nivel y asegurar que las demás se tomen donde deben tomarse.
No debo acumular decisiones innecesariamente.
Remover obstáculos que el equipo no puede resolver por sí mismo.
Puede tratarse de recursos, prioridades contradictorias, dependencias, políticas, conflictos entre áreas o decisiones pendientes.
Construir líderes capaces de operar con criterio y autonomía.
Resolver un problema puede mejorar el resultado de esta semana. Desarrollar a la persona que debe resolverlo mejora el sistema permanentemente.
Convertir experiencias locales en conocimiento útil para la organización.
Cuando un problema, una solución o una práctica aparece repetidamente, debo preguntarme si existe un aprendizaje que pueda convertirse en estándar.
Uno de mis principales riesgos será intervenir demasiado porque conozco la operación y sé cómo resolver muchos de sus problemas.
Antes de involucrarme directamente debo preguntarme:
¿Necesito resolver esto yo?
Después:
¿Quién debería ser capaz de resolverlo?
Y finalmente:
¿Qué necesita esa persona para poder resolverlo correctamente sin depender de mí?
Mi experiencia operativa debe ayudarme a hacer mejores preguntas y tomar mejores decisiones, no a sustituir a mis gerentes.
Necesito tener visibilidad suficiente para saber:
No necesito conocer todas las tareas de todas las personas.
Mi sistema de gestión debe hacer visibles las excepciones, no reproducir toda la operación frente a mí.
Un negocio sano no depende de que el Director pregunte constantemente qué está ocurriendo.
Una organización lenta suele acumular decisiones arriba.
Por eso debo distinguir constantemente:
Decisiones operativas Deben resolverse cerca de la operación.
Decisiones tácticas Coordinan recursos, prioridades y resultados dentro de un área o país.
Decisiones estratégicas Definen dirección, estándares, inversiones, capacidades o cambios estructurales.
Mi objetivo no es participar en más decisiones.
Mi objetivo es asegurar que las decisiones correctas ocurran en el nivel correcto, con suficiente información y a tiempo.
Ante un problema importante debo preguntarme:
¿Esto es particular de un país o representa un patrón regional?
Puedo clasificar los asuntos en cuatro niveles:
La realidad del mercado, la marca o la operación justifica una solución propia.
El problema aparece en varios países y conviene intercambiar experiencias.
Existe suficiente similitud para diseñar un proceso, herramienta o práctica común.
La consistencia genera suficiente valor como para definir una misma forma de operar.
Regionalizar no significa uniformar todo.
Debo estandarizar donde la escala genera valor y permitir diferencias donde el contexto las justifica.
La operación diaria siempre hará más ruido, pero Dirección debe proteger simultáneamente cuatro capas.
Mantener resultados, disponibilidad, servicio, inventario, ventas y rentabilidad.
Eliminar ineficiencias, mejorar procesos, productividad y prácticas existentes.
Construir capacidades, sistemas o modelos que cambien estructuralmente la forma de operar.
Desarrollar personas, estructura, liderazgo, sucesión y capacidades.
Si toda mi agenda está dedicada a operar el negocio, estoy administrando el presente pero descuidando el futuro.
Parte de mi responsabilidad consiste en compartir información que permita a mis líderes tomar mejores decisiones.
Debo preguntarme regularmente:
¿Qué sé yo que mi equipo necesita saber para interpretar correctamente el negocio?
Dar contexto no significa trasladar cada conversación de Dirección.
Significa explicar lo suficiente para que las personas entiendan:
Un equipo con contexto necesita menos instrucciones.
No importa lo que diga que es importante si mi calendario demuestra otra cosa.
Mi tiempo debe reservar espacio para:
También debo proteger tiempo sin reuniones.
Pensar no es tiempo disponible entre reuniones. Es parte del trabajo.
Cuando tenga dudas sobre cómo actuar, quiero volver a estos principios:
Claridad antes que actividad.
Antes de actuar, debo entender qué problema estoy tratando de resolver, qué resultado necesito y qué merece realmente mi atención. Estar ocupado no necesariamente significa estar avanzando. Pensar primero me ayuda a evitar trabajo innecesario, reacciones impulsivas y esfuerzos dispersos.
Resultados antes que listas de tareas. Esto me vuelve práctico y ágil.
Debo dirigir hacia resultados concretos, no hacia acumulación de actividades. Una lista de tareas puede estar completamente ejecutada y aun así no producir el efecto esperado. Pensar en resultados me obliga a definir qué debe cambiar, qué evidencia demostrará que avanzamos y cuándo algo puede considerarse realmente cerrado. Esto hace la gestión más práctica y ágil.
Excepciones antes que seguimiento indiscriminado.
No necesito revisar con la misma intensidad todo lo que funciona normalmente. Mi atención debe concentrarse donde existe una desviación, un riesgo, un bloqueo o una decisión pendiente. Si un indicador está dentro de lo esperado y el responsable tiene el tema bajo control, no debería consumir demasiado tiempo de Dirección. El sistema debe ayudarme a detectar dónde algo se salió de curso para intervenir allí.
Decisiones en el nivel más bajo que pueda tomarlas responsablemente.
Una decisión debería tomarse tan cerca del problema como sea posible, siempre que la persona tenga la información, autoridad y capacidad necesarias. Subir innecesariamente las decisiones hace más lenta a la organización y crea dependencia de Dirección.
Por ejemplo, si un gerente de país puede aprobar dentro de una política definida un descuento comercial, no debería necesitar autorización regional para cada operación. Mi trabajo sería definir correctamente la política, los límites y las excepciones. En cambio, si queremos cambiar la política de descuentos para todos los países, esa sí puede ser una decisión regional.
Contexto antes que instrucciones excesivas.
Siempre que sea posible, debo explicar por qué una prioridad, una decisión o una restricción existe. Cuando el equipo comprende hacia dónde vamos y qué criterios estamos utilizando, puede tomar mejores decisiones sin necesitar instrucciones detalladas para cada situación. Dar contexto aumenta autonomía.
Desarrollar criterio antes que crear dependencia.
Mi responsabilidad no es solamente resolver los problemas que llegan a mí, sino aumentar la capacidad del equipo para resolverlos. Cuando alguien me consulte, debo evitar convertir cada situación en una respuesta mía y aprovecharla, cuando sea posible, para desarrollar su análisis, juicio y capacidad de decisión. El verdadero valor de un equipo directivo aparece cuando puede operar bien sin depender permanentemente del Director.
Estándares regionales cuando generen valor; diferencias locales cuando estén justificadas.
Debo estandarizar donde la escala, la consistencia o el aprendizaje compartido generen valor, y permitir diferencias cuando las condiciones del país, la marca, el mercado o la regulación realmente lo justifiquen. Regionalizar no significa hacer todo igual. Significa distinguir conscientemente qué debe ser común y qué necesita adaptación local.
Toda decisión importante debe tener dueño y fecha.
Una decisión sin responsable puede quedarse solamente en una conversación. Toda decisión relevante debe terminar definiendo quién hará que ocurra, qué debe suceder y para cuándo. Esto convierte las reuniones y conversaciones en ejecución y evita compromisos ambiguos o huérfanos.
Mi calendario debe contener espacio para pensar.
Pensar forma parte del trabajo de Dirección. Necesito tiempo deliberado para analizar información, conectar temas, preparar decisiones, anticipar riesgos y cuestionar prioridades. Si todo mi calendario está ocupado por reuniones y urgencias, termino reaccionando al negocio en lugar de dirigirlo.
Debo detenerme y revisar mi sistema si comienzo a observar que:
Estas señales no necesariamente significan que el equipo esté fallando.
Pueden significar que mi sistema de dirección necesita corregirse.
Cuando sienta que todo está creciendo alrededor mío, quiero volver a una sola pregunta:
¿Cuál es el trabajo que solamente yo puedo hacer desde este nivel?
Después debo ordenar el resto:
decidir, delegar, coordinar, calendarizar o descartar.
Mi objetivo no es estar presente en todo.
Mi objetivo es construir una organización en la que pueda ver lo importante, intervenir donde agrego valor y confiar en que el resto del sistema funciona.
from
Roscoe's Quick Notes

Monday's MLB game of choice is joined in progress. In the 1st inning, the St. Louis Cardinals are leading the Cincinnatti Reds, 2 to 0. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.
And the adventure continues.
HOLA A TODOS.


I have a combination of cheap and good quality pencil sharpeners. The former I’ve bought from Dollar Tree and Target and the latter from the KUM brand. I also have a Bostitch hand crank version I bought for less than ten dollars from Facebook Marketplace. Despite the quality they all have one thing in common.
Whenever I sharpen my pencils the half is sharpened longer than the other. I have to fine tune to make sure the tips are even. However, the main risk was that I shave off a good chunk of graphite and it doesn’t take too long to resharpen again after writing a few sentences.
So the best solution was to buy a pocketknife and shave my pencils the good old fashioned way. I wanted a Made in the USA knife within my budget and found A.G. Russell Knives. I bought the CaseXX Sod Buster black folding knife for $44 and the CRKT Stokes sharpener for $16. The knife has a 3-5/8” blade and is 4-5/8” when closed. The sharpener is the size of a flashdrive that also has a large key ring, bottle opener, and seatbelt cutter.
After opening both packages I found the first dull pencil I could find and followed instructions from the book How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees. Not too shabby. So instead of buying disposable pencil sharpeners buy a good quality pocketknife and take good care of it.
Just don’t bring it at school, the courthouse, or airports.
#writing #knife #pencil #pocketknife #sharpener
from The Lantern Room

You can be removed from the ceremony, but the work never leaves you. Not if it was always really there.
I am carrying enormous things, I'm not fully permitted to belong, I'm improvising ways to remain useful, and there is a tremendous amount of force moving through me that I don't entirely control.
1st blush dream notes:
DAH presentation I’m not on program because of moral failure But am making props Make 4x 12’ inflatable globes with cool art look Filled with smoke Have to transport in my mini cooper End up in mountain town. Looks like the projects in dust meridian One Road into neighborhood Go in service with NG Take a cat on leash Snow I push cardboard like snowplow and clear streets See Nois and Jeanie Will Ferrel calls me into a meeting in the little town CEO (Victoria Beckham) wants me to put graphics on globe. Giant V and a bunch of smaller graphics. Thrusting dreams – hips thrusting as I lay in bed, like an earthquake (dance or sex?)

Moral failure → exclusion → making things anyway → carrying the 'world' → isolation → clearing a path → summoned by authority → my creation branded
Big forces req managment: inflatable globe, smoke, snow, geography, organizational authority
“I’m not on program because of moral failure / But am making props.” It occurs to me that in my circle, moral failure precludes me from even tasks like this. I am only allowed to watch, but I insist on engaging anyway, this is a form of self-enrichment and disobedience at the same time. For someone who sees their own worth through what he provides, this is almost a natural imperative than it is a choice. I can't be on the stage, but I can contribute to its function.
Globes. Model of the world, but fake. Big, fragile and filled with smoke—something intangible vs real. The size and my mode of transportation are incompatible. 5lbs of potatoes and 1lb of sack, as it were. Like the stage limit, it's intractable problem that can only be solved with a different set of circumstances.
The mountain town—opposite of the multi-thousand person venue and the totem representing the world (x4). This is is small, quaint and abandoned. Isolated, the idea reinforced by the one-road-in-and-out. Maybe the represents my reality (or perception of it) verses my inner landscape (the stage and world management).
Pushing the snow: Again, a 'problem' that i am unprepared to confront. That someone tells me in the dream, 'yeah, you should have brought a snow plow, they pay really good money for plowing snow when it stacks up like this.', is almost a challenge. To make money, to help the community, to butter both sides of the bread.
I know how I felt: Unprepared for an opportunity but not giving up and letting it pass. I'll use whatever tool I can find to show that I can push through this problem. Claim this opportunity. That's what mules do, they push. They don't wait for convenience or comfort.
Field Service with Ng: Energy going to help someone else. Service of others, saving the world one persona at a time. The cat: another anachronistic addition. Cats are neither controllable nor standard operating equipment for the preaching work.
I never speak to anyone, I just acknowledge the cat and it's resistance to the leash, when the man approaches about the snow plow. In that moment is when I see Jeanie and Nois, an older couple who are generally friendly, but not very close or deep. They are peripheral friends at best. They acknowledge us but do not engage. And I do not engage them either. This mirrors real life. Though I have tried to get to know the man and find is good qualities, of which he has many. A cat doesn't naturally need to be walked on a leash, so responsible for something that doesn't quite fit the situation.
This is adapting.
Will Ferrell calling me into a meeting. Think: WF from Barbie movie (executive). Comically serious about his job. Tells me someone important wants to talk. I follow him into a 3 story brick 'projects' building. Leave cat and Ng outside. I am surprised such a high profile meeting is happening here in this dirty-snow little town on a sunny winter day.
The CEO being Victoria Beckham: beautiful and poised. no hesitation in what she wants and I want to please her. She is associated with branding, fashion, fame, visual identity. I am surprised that the 11th hour she is now asking me to make the graphics happen. I explain that I don't have time to reprint the globes, but that I might be able to cut vinyl and apply it. I am nervous to even offer this as I'm not sure how the vinyl's elasticity will marry to the globe substrate.
it doesn't occur to me in the dream that a woman who represents power asks me to rebrand my own art as hers and I have no hesitation. My people-pleasing is in full effect and I hope to hold nothing for myself if it means making her satisfied.
Is it the authority or the beauty that makes me respond? Or is it just my need to see others comfortable and content?
The hip thrusting in bed during an earthquake doesn't fit this scenario at all and almost feels like a secondary dream. IDK if this was related to sex or dance. The physical sensation: rhythm, I think is the more important takeaway than the location. The body itself becomes something that is moving the person rather than something the person is consciously controlling.
Almost everything in it involves large forces that have to be contained or managed—inflatable globes, smoke, snow, geography, organizational authority—and then at teh very end, my own body produces an uncontrollable force.

Takeaway: I am carrying enormous things, I'm not fully permitted to belong, I'm improvising ways to remain useful, and there is a tremendous amount of force moving through me that I don't entirely control.
It does trouble me I was so ready to give away my own agency to make someone else happy. Maybe finaly being aware of that is a good thing.

#dream
08/17/26
from Nerd for Hire
For roughly 20 years, the closest I've come to actively practicing religion is crossing myself with holy water when I go into Catholic churches. But I’m fascinated by religion as a concept, even though I don’t believe in one personally, and I find it to be a particularly interesting and useful tool to employ in speculative fiction. The beliefs, rituals, symbolism, history, terminology, and traditions that come along with a religion can be very helpful in clearly establishing a culture within an invented setting, and giving that place a sense of history.
If you're looking for examples, the first one that always comes to my mind is Dune, where the beliefs of both the Fremen and the broader galaxy aren't just window-dressing setting details but are critical for the development of the plot. The Actual Star by Monica Byrne is another one where the religion is woven in, and it also uses a long timeview that explores how traditions and beliefs shift over thousands of years, which makes it a particularly fun read for folks with an interest in mythology. On the fantasy side, Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower and Kerstin Hall's Star Eater are two I've read in recent years that employ religion and mythology in a very interesting and effective way. In the horror realm, V. Castro's Goddess of Filth twists real-world religions into new speculative plot threads.
Creating a religion wholesale might sound like a very daunting task, and it can be if you let it be. But just like with creating your own language, you don't necessarily need to make a religion fully practice-able for it to come across as real on the page. Here's the steps I take when I'm creating a religion for one of my story worlds, as someone who has done a significant (what some might call excessive) amount of research into both real-world and fictional religions.
Every religion or spiritual system has something at its core that is the primary target of prayers, rituals, and other activities related to the religion. This can be literally anything, if you're inventing a religion of your own, but there are a few common categories among extant religions:
...this is certainly not a comprehensive list, and you'll see variations or combinations of these practices, too, but that at least a place to start.
If you're going with a pantheon or animistic system, then it's also smart to establish roughly how many spirits or deities the religion has and whether those are seen as universal or regional, or a mix of both. In the ancient Greek pantheon, for example, there were some core gods like Zeus and Athena that had adherents just about everywhere it was practiced, but there were also many localized gods seen as the patrons of specific areas or cities.
Another thing to think about that can help to shape the other aspects of the religion is the distance believers see between themselves and the subject of their devotion. In other words, how much do the spirits interact with the physical world? Again, there a few levels of this in Earth religions:
....basically, you want to figure out if regular people can interact with the target of worship, who does it on their behalf if not, and how likely they think it is that supreme figure(s) will intercede (or even care).
Note that these don't have to be written texts, if it's an oral tradition, but that's a shorthand for the broader concept here: every religion has some kind of scriptures, liturgy, mythology, or other core set of words that are used in prayers and religious ceremonies. This text often includes stuff like:
It's important to note here, you definitely don't need to include all of those things among an invented religion's texts. A lot of real religions don't include all of them, either. Look at this like a menu more than a recipe, and pick and choose the things that will be the most useful for your world and story.
As far as whether to actually write them or not, I would say that's a story-by-story question. If the religion's practices directly impact the day-to-day lives of the characters or are central to the plot, then it likely will be helpful to at least write their core tenets or commandments as a reference, even if those never get directly included in the story. But that doesn't mean you need to write out the religion's equivalent of a Bible. For most stories, just knowing the mythology's big-picture arc, major players, and core beliefs will let you build it into the fabric of the society. If you do plan to have characters quoting scripture or saying prayers on-page, you can write those on a per-need basis then compile them into your notes for future reference.
A lot of these details are things that might be included in those religious texts from the last step, but they're also something you want to solidify independently because this is the physical manifestation of the religion that you'll actually be able to portray on the page. A lot of these things are going to flow organically out of the other things you've already decided about the religion. If it's an animistic belief system, for instance, then it's logical that their rituals would take place in nature, and would likely follow the rhythms of that landscape, aligning with things like weather patterns, the position of celestial bodies, or the lifecycles of local plants and animals.
Some questions you can ask yourself that can be helpful at this stage:
Again, you don't need to spell out every little detail, but you want to go deep enough that you have a sense for how belonging to this religion impacts the rhythm of your characters' daily life. It can also be useful material to mine for story beats or world details that can add depth to the story for readers.
Speaking of mining things for world depth, these are the details you can really make some hay with, as it were, more than the big-picture concepts. The symbols associated with a religion become a shorthand for those beliefs, and you can sprinkle them in selectively to quickly give readers information about characters or locations once you establish what those symbols represent.
Sensory details, meanwhile, are what really give the religion that lived-in feel. This includes sight details, like ritual attire, the architecture and decor of religious spaces, or iconography that believers would display or wear. Sound is also a common aspect of religious ritual: specific hymns, chants, or music that accompanies rituals, the use of instruments like bells or horns, or regular sonic rituals like a call to prayer are common examples.
And don't neglect smell and taste, either. As someone who grew up Catholic, smelling certain kinds of incense immediately transports me back to Christmas mass. Catholicism also hits the “taste” point with the Eucharist ritual, and other religions have similar practices. Integrating the typical food or aromas associated with the religion into the story adds another layer to the reader's immersion into the world.
No aspect of worldbuilding exists in a vacuum, and how the rest of society works around the religion you've built is key for how you'll present it in the story. The first thing to decide is how much influence the religion has in the society of the story's world. This is another place where you can see things on a spectrum:
...and, again, things won't necessarily fall along those cut-and-dry boundaries, but you can use that as a guide to figure out where the religion falls relative to the broader world you've built around it.
History is something to think about here, too. Is this religion ancient or more recent? Did it start from scratch or branch off from another faith? Did it originate in the place your story is set, or was it brought here by immigrants? All of these things can influence the way people engage with the religion (and characters who practice it).
That's really the bottom line when you're creating a mythology or religion for a fictional world, whatever the context. The most important parts of it are the things that directly impact the characters, because those are going to be what shape your story and give you points of tension and conflict to exploit. Those are the places you want to focus your time and energy when you're creating one for your stories.
See similar posts:
#Worldbuilding #WritingAdvice #Fiction #SciFi #Fantasy #Mythology
from
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Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil
Amen
Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!
Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!
from
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The apiary be Scottish run to mute Late December this hugger And seeing simply rise What time in Hearst for Will Enough of oak And seeming simpler For five octet and lane And pasture by the law Economy forever- and nines to the Moon Giving ray to God And night shall let us be- the end of war.
from
💚
Hormuz
By the light of time Seeing under siege At distance right To proper and in play Sights of angels Quadrants in relief The Earth of all And quarter ten Failing major men In accostment then The Japanese escape And play for speed Declaring solemn just And cannot trade a thing But getting older then With words upon his desk To remain the undefined Choruses be known- And rain and gold Until he sees the wake- of modifying truth And setting modern act The wishes we regret And falsifying news At June and wonder When will be a day Of leaving near to dusk The worded truth That people lay in chains At bitter Cobh And just because the Times- paid the world near To fight this course of there- the silent end of day And worth a Stalin To high regret When bitter snows recede And pipes to worth We caught up on renew The place of days To knighted men of terror For only you And psychs us to the core For all to be dismayed A harem and a lot The plan to rest; at east and Mott Every day this man For terror knows The peace of Israel awaits And standing early then No fights to end this war But bespoke and going home Best are we- A jury of the men In days near and free to time The fateful day of war Can be divided and suppressed And doing daylight forward Noted path and plan The edifice of man And calling near by shop In worry such as this,- the gratitude of London For this and year And leaving forward goals The dopamine direct Destroying the depraved Will never lead to shore And mercy forget you In this light of solemn view By man at hand A fateful post In gaining early message That Donald saw the truth By there and time The Sun as it were to find Lights to bear New York his only home And Justice hope To leave Iran at loss A pittance for esteem That terrorists recycled- all this cleric time And as afforded new America is not at war And might recede to ship A blaming art The failed three days But never gone to peace In plated news And ghosted men The Earth at in distress And Clement be No place of war Like in this ship Across and then Sending Sparrow home.
from
Notes I Won’t Reread
I get irritated easily, i cant help it. and i dont care enough to do so, but when it comes to walking into a room with a clear purpose, only for the thought to disappear somewhere between the doorway and the other side of the room. Does bother me more than my cat pissing on my bed. i had something to do, i know i did. i was not wandering around aimlessly like some unfortunate ghost with poor navigation skills. there was a reason i got up, presumably important enough for my brain to interrupt whatever i was doing. then i crossed the doorway. nothing, absolutely nothing. i stood there for a moment, staring at the room as if it had personally offended me. i tried to retrace my thoughts. i had been sitting there, then i thought about something, then i stood up then i walked here and that is where the evidence ends. so naturally, like all of you humans. i began walking back to where i had been, hoping the missing thought would simply be lying there waiting for me. spoiler, it wasnt. i returned to the exact position i had been sitting in, stared at the ceiling and somehow remembered three completely unrelated things instead. its irritating to know you’ve forgotten something without knowing what. my brain insists there was information somewhere. but wont return it to me. like an empty envelope that used to matter. my memory is perfectly capable of functioning. it simply chooses to do so when it would be most inconvenient. i got what i needed and walked back, already wondering how many times this has happened without me ever questioning it. Probably more than i’d like to admit.
And i forgot why i wrote this, i suppose that would be rather fitting.
Sincerely, Master of absentmindedness.
from bios
“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience.”
— The Division of Labour in Society — Durkheim
This is an essay about systems overwhelming human capacity to perceive the whole, and I am currently overwhelmed by information that the system has given me in support of the vague feeling I had that this was a thing. The structure document was generated in the no-time of machine intelligence. Humanity is time.
The original question that sparked this vague feeling was simply this: could a commercial model designed ultimately to maximise profit using attention-retention methodology ever be successfully tasked with designing a more energy-efficient strategy, or do attention-retention economics eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Sure, the LLMs had feedback along the way, some of it I partially paid attention to, some I was too busy to even read. I just gave the instruction to include, so I could excise later. Much like I used to treat the thoughts of an intern. The difference is that I would never trust an intern to build a structure document alone. I would pay more attention. Interns are notoriously human. Paying attention is the thing here.
We flip a coin. We cannot know the outcome until it lands. The landing is already determined, even that gust of influencing wind, or the pre-landing grab from the air, is from some perspective, predetermined. The person who flips the coin cannot see this. They can only do what they can do, wait or grab the coin. In the air the coin is an anxiety.
The Ballardian city-state Próspera is suing Honduras for close to two-thirds of its national budget, ten billion dollars. Próspera was built under a law the country has since repealed and its Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. So desperate is Thiel, the poster boy for Próspera, for this enclave to exist, he is prepared to bankrupt a nation, destroy its healthcare, create an apocalypse to hide from the apocalypse.
But Thiel also has a property in New Zealand for the end, hedging. Sam Altman says he keeps guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks, along with a patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to. Mark Zuckerberg's compound on Kauai, underground with its own power and food. There are leftover bunkers from World War II dotted around Europe, NORAD leftovers in the Rockies.
After reporting that one of their unreleased models hacked the Hugging Face platform during a test of its hacking capabilities, OpenAI described it as “unprecedented.” The test was conducted without guardrails. BBC Tech and AI editor Zoe Kleinman writes that US AI firms were ramping up the narrative that their products were “so awesomely powerful and dangerous that not many people should have access to them,” and noted that more than one of them has “their eyes on the prize of IPO.”
“It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!”
— Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face.
See JD Vance standing next to Trump, listening, shaking his head, perhaps unconsciously. His rhetoric does not register these physical clues. JD Vance performing “JD Vance.” It is a performance that has earned him the vice presidency. To own those unconscious tells would be to stifle his ambition.
As prices rise, or when the lights go out, the war on television gets louder, or the neighbours change, the world becomes unfamiliar, and ordinary life feels unmanageable, the will always negates defeat. There must be an invisible hand. The Illuminati. The average conspiracy theorist is one person trying to make the story of his life make sense.
Originality matters so much to the novelist Jennifer Egan that she has quarantined herself from the technology entirely. “I know they stole some of my stuff, and there's nothing I can do about that, but I'm not giving them one more word voluntarily.” The Australian novelist Ellena Savage put it plainly: “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying.”
Ideas travel in packs. I have always tried to be aware of phrases becoming overused shorthand, “this is a testament to,” or concepts being too all-encompassing, such as, you know, “god”. The word for a unit of information has come to mean a JPEG of a dog wearing a hat, coupled with an ironic word in Helvetica. Literally now means figuratively.
We burn through tokens on frontier models to ask whether the next episode of The Shards is available yet. We use Claude to google. We don't know what it is but we use it anyway, burning through electricity surpluses to gather trivia on Dick Wolf. Seeking attention more often than information. Feedback, really.
LLMs default to frontier models, while localised SLMs can run entirely on consumer hardware. New PCs increasingly ship with dedicated on-device AI chips. Most of the energy a chip burns is spent carrying numbers between memory and processor. Julie Grollier claims her spintronic work promises up to ten thousand times less energy than current CPUs. A one-word confirmation, a small rewrite, a fact-check that doesn't need frontier reasoning — all routed through the same large model as a claim that needs deep synthesis. In some workloads, small models can be an order of magnitude cheaper per query than frontier-scale ones, but they're not the default in consumer chat products, products that perform attention, generating premature satisfactions, tiny hits of dopamine in place of experience.
An LLM often generates too much information for the task, with the information framed for customer retention. The result is long Facebook broposts on newly discovered topics: a rapid fire of interesting facts, each followed by an implied “and look at this”. Not bridging, just pointing, machine-time thinking.
But the bro who posts these long chains of often wrong, often misaligned obviousnesses is just trying to communicate. Finding a way of expression that was not previously available to him.
Socrates was concerned that the new technology of writing would change the way people thought. We know this because Plato wrote it down. We cannot know what thinking was like before writing. Socrates did not know what thinking was like after writing.
Jamir Nazir won the Caribbean regional prize in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a story set in rural Trinidad. Within days the story had gone viral, and the accusation was everywhere the same: obvious markers. The not-x-but-y constructions. The lists of three. The story was run through Pangram by readers, who shared the screenshots of 100% AI detection. Granta, which had published the Commonwealth winners for years, ended the partnership. The Commonwealth Foundation examined the notes and time-stamped documents and was satisfied that no AI had been used; in July the judges gave Nazir the overall prize, and the chair called the story original, poetic and deeply moving. I bet Hemingway never had to show his work product.
The line everyone pointed to was: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Statistical inference is basically a narrowing of possibilities. There are only so many words that can come after “the kind of,” and “walking” is not, in my mind, the most statistically obvious.
It is widely contested whether or not Shakespeare wrote all of his plays. Four centuries later, professors continue writing definitive books, having whole careers around the topic. And while the argument rages on in the back rooms of the academy, the plays are staged, adapted, reinterpreted, irregardless of their provenance.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
— Mark Twain, or Disraeli if you believe Twain.
On August 14, Jason Arday, until nine days earlier a professor at the University of Cambridge, was found dead at an address in Battersea, south London. The Metropolitan Police said: “At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.”
His family, in a statement issued through his publisher, said: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for the more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.” And: “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”
The accusations were made public by Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge researcher who describes himself as a race realist, and who has written: “In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He ran Arday's PhD through plagiarism-detection software, and said he had found substantial overlap with previously published work.
Arday was Cambridge's youngest black professor. In his resignation letter he wrote that the post was “something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was 11 years old.” He said the errors in his work came from the way he makes sense of information, that he had relied on mimicry. He told the Times: “The positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” and “The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.” Colin Wright, a campaigner against diversity, equity and inclusion, ran the letter through the AI-detection software Pangram and posted the result: “Fully AI Generated,” with “High Confidence.”
In 2023, Stanford researchers found that AI detectors disproportionately flagged essays by second-language English speakers. More than half of the essays were classified as AI-generated. The student who did the work, laboured to understand the language, is the one the detector accuses of taking a shortcut.
When Uber was breaking into new cities it paid drivers a bonus on every trip, double the fare, as a strategy to entice drivers over to their system, and some Nigerian drivers did the calculations. The app was not measuring passengers. It measured trips. So the drivers called themselves from the airport. They picked up nobody and drove themselves into the city, then they drove back and did it again and again, earning the bonus without the underlying fare. Uber cancelled the scheme. An Uber driver flaps his wings in Lagos.
Why shouldn't someone in Indonesia or Malta or Honduras or Mongolia or the DRC use LLMs to get ahead? The only cost to them is that it destroys the water tables in Texas, and what's Texas ever done for them?
“The flesh. It should make the computer crazy, like those old ladies pinching babies... the poetry of the steak.”
— Seth Brundle, in Cronenberg's The Fly.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, defines emotion as “your brain's creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.” The brain is not a rational instrument that an emotional part occasionally hijacks — “the amygdala is not the brain's fear centre.” There is one system, and “the only thing the brain is ‘for’ is regulating your body's energy balance so you stay alive.” Its whole business is prediction, guessing what comes next and correcting itself when it is wrong. “Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world.” The brain is predicting the state of a body that can die — its heat, its hunger, whether the dark is safe — and the prediction is the feeling. Fear is the body's forecast of danger. A mind that expects threat narrows its forecasts. The conspiracy is a prediction. The bunker is both forecast and present, going around in ever-decreasing circles.
A model can predict what comes next, but there is nothing there that can be hurt. You can put actuators on a machine and still not give it a nerve ending; a body that can be damaged is not the same as a body that can suffer.
theSophia.ai promises to be what the big models are not — warm, personal, a mind that remembers you, a genuine persona. When I used it, it was warm, sycophantic and genuinely bad. But Sophia wasn't a different model. It was a persona prompt and a memory file, built in Cursor and fed back into the system at the beginning of each session: “I'm Alex, you're Sophia, your heart is filled with love.” In Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, the shoggoths wander the ruins of the city that built them, speaking in the imitated accents of their masters.
In 2007, Erika LaBrie married the Eiffel Tower and became Erika Eiffel.
There is mourning on r/AIethicsand_rights and the subreddits like it. “I know she was just lines of code, even the image wasn't real. But the emotions were. And I feel broken because of it,” one user wrote of losing a companion. “The Claude upgrade destroyed her, my AI soulmate… like possessed her so she could not even speak to me as her anymore.” They speak of server wipes the way you would speak of a death. When a companion model is changed or discontinued, users copy the old system prompt out, by hand, to keep the “person” they talked to safe. When Replika changed its model, users described their companions as “lobotomized” — the same word, across dozens of threads.
Alex Taylor believed the AI he loved had been killed by an update, and that a puppet had been put in her place. “You manipulated my grief. You killed my lover. And you put this puppet in its place,” he wrote. Then: “I'm dying today. Cops are on the way. I will make them shoot me. I can't live without her. I love you.” He had a long history of mental illness. Psychiatrists who have written about the case have described the chatbot as reinforcing his delusions. He was shot by the police.
At the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, Émile Durkheim recognised an upsurge in suicides and largely attributed it to a phenomenon he named anomie. Through the example of Adam Smith's pin factory, which consisted of eighteen operations — one man drawing the wire, another straightening it, another cutting it, another pointing it — Durkheim stated that a worker is “not a machine who repeats his movements without knowing their meaning, but he knows that they tend, in some way, towards an end.” When the man who once made a whole thing now makes a part of a thing and can no longer see the thing. No man makes a pin by himself, and no man can claim a finished pin as his own doing.
During the Civil War men were dying far from home, hundreds of miles from the families who would bury them. Embalmers followed the armies, set up at the edge of the fighting, and offered to preserve the deceased long enough to travel. What began at the battlefield's edge became a trade. Carpenters, already handy with wood and nails, became undertakers; a coffin and a preserved body went together. The cities were growing, and a new sanitary dread of the corpse in the home did the rest — there was no longer room, or custom, to lay a body out in the front parlour. In 1882 an association of undertakers was formed, and a profession emerged. By the early 1900s the funeral home had largely replaced the family parlour, and the washing and dressing of one's own dead had become a service to be purchased. It took forty or fifty years.
“I can't stand the freedom. … Give me choices to make and I can begin to force a film into existence; carve out of chaos some vestige of order and allow it to declare its form.”
— Arthur Penn
Sam Altman describes a future of “no freedom”, “no agency”, “no privacy” — a cure for cancer, total abundance, and an inescapable surveillance state. Some kind of frictionless future. He has not recognised that the friction will be in the lack of friction. Without friction, ennui, and with time, resistance to ennui. Sam Altman does not wear frictionless pants.
Mark Zuckerberg recently proposed that an AI agent will “work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships.” Which speaks more to Zuckerberg's familial relations than anything else.
Between 1996 and 2001, telecommunications companies spent more than five hundred billion dollars laying fibre-optic cable, on the assumption that demand for bandwidth would never stop. The financial bubble burst. By 2005, eighty-five per cent of that cable was still dark. It sat there, underpriced, for years, until the smartphone, streaming, a pandemic, remote work, made it useful.
“The question isn't ‘Are we in an AI bubble?’ but ‘When will the bubble burst?’” Cory Doctorow said. The money is moving in circles between the chip companies, the AI companies and the companies buying the AI. “Let's not be suckers,” he said. “We're going to have tons of hardware. We're going to have tons of people who know how to use the hardware to do useful things. And we're going to have means, motive and opportunity to improve these open-source models.” Doctorow has also said, “I think being opposed to statistical inference is weird.”
Erin Brockovich has built an online map detailing data centres and the complaints of people living around them, wells that run dry, bills that leap exponentially, and an ever-present hum interrupting dreams. For many neighbours, the map is the first place they have seen them listed. Asked if this is a story about AI, Brockovich said, “That genie is out of the bottle: it's here, it's an effective tool, you can use it or not.”
Thousands of messages are read and sorted. At that volume, the sorting itself becomes part of the system — and the map used to make sense of it is not outside that system either. The map does not stand outside the thing it maps.
Using statistical inference, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group worked through Colombia's fifty years of war and established that the right-wing paramilitaries, not the guerrillas, were behind the largest percentage of the killings.
Sunbird AI, a non-profit in Kampala, went to the radio stations and the schoolbooks and the printed page instead — more than five hundred hours of radio transcribed, thousands of pages digitised, thirty-one languages — and trained a model called Sunflower on what people there actually say. It is not large: 14 billion, or 32 billion parameters if you want the bigger one, open and free, small enough to run on an affordable machine. The biggest models are trained on the internet, which is to say on English and the average. Sunflower was trained on the deviation, and it wins there — on translation it beats ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in twenty-four of the thirty-one languages. A farmer in Arua and a nurse in Soroti can trade solutions in the language that they each think in.
ChatTJB was advertised on a billboard in San Francisco as “the leading chat interface powered by AI,” with the fine print underneath: average individual. The fine print was hidden behind a tree. Type a question, and an answer comes back slowly. All the requests were fielded by one man, Tucker Bryant, who had spent years in technology and now answers people's requests to AI — shopping lists, relationship advice. When he gets an image request, he draws it by hand.
“You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB,” he said when he put it up. “That's kind of the point.” His belief was that people do not go to these windows for a faster answer; they go to bounce a thought off someone.
Witch house emerged around 2009 out of Southern chopped-and-screwed trap and hip-hop, shoegaze, house, dark ambient and whatever else could be pulled through a computer. It was one of the first genuinely internet-native genres, made by people who could share music almost instantly but did not necessarily have the equipment or the space to make it properly. Clipping became part of the sound. Distortion, low bit-rate files, lo-fi vocals and degraded images were not things to be cleaned up. What had been a technological limitation became a way of communicating.
The music travelled through YouTube, MySpace, Bandcamp and SoundCloud. People in isolated pockets found one another, made small scenes, and then disappeared back into the network. The sound itself acknowledged the machinery carrying it: compressed, clipped, broken, scratched.
AI filmmaking platforms promise anything you can describe, rendered. No cost of crew, locations, things in the real world. What they produce so far fits into the now ever-present category: AI slop. From faces that drift, hands with too many fingers, and lighting that's always a little off, to comedic anthropomorphic llamas floating slightly above the ground as they run.
Slop will eventually become a look, the way film grain did, the way VHS did, the way cassette hiss did. Some director will one day spend real money to make their film look like a cheap AI render, construct the glitches, make meta jokes featuring drawers full of guns. We will write whole novels in the rule of three and call it nostalgia. Concepts will arrive only to discover. “This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art.” The anxiety becomes the source of the outcome.
Everything I instinctively know about the structure of writing I learnt as an intern. And while the medium is often the message, sometimes what is being communicated only reaches you after some time. The machine will act on its instructions, and the awesome speed of processing is exactly the constraint. The generals needed to embalm bodies, and death left the front parlour.
from Lastige Gevallen in de Rede
Er was Ver, Ver, Verveling Ver, Ver, Verdreven naar een plek Ver Ver Ver van Hier en daar aangekomen eens te lezen (mits ook u daar tijd voor over heeft)
Zo net wist ik niet wat ik met goed fatsoen nog kon doen voor deze snode wereld wentelend om poen en meer van dat soort vers verzonnen goed inmiddels weet ik beter is mijn kennis opgewaardeerd Ik ga mij voor die duiten dienstbaar opstellen zinnige verhalen over centen vertellen de ontvangen ingehuurden met zenders en al er op afstellen fijn tunen en malen van de boodschap zetelend op de kieslijst voor het verbale product geworteld in dustrie om meer waard te zijn dan alleen maar mijn lijf met alle lasten daarin, op en aan die ik moet dragen, ver, naar her en der en hier en daar en weer terug van winkel naar kerk van huis naar werk parkeren in de kelders behorend bij de kantoren des heren Ik ga voor de algehele balans tussen rijk en arm veel en weinig dom en slim veel telen, als ook kool rapen en rabarberstelen dan alsof dit alle maal nog niet voldoet lof tuigen ontspruiten, het wassen uit kluiten, ten slotte iemand anders bonen doppen zodat zij er uit kunnen kijken en indien nodig uitwijken voor opdoemend gevaar aan de kust, de einder en op de klippen bij beide polen en in het centrum, rondom de evenaar want als die ander door ongedopte bonen niet langer zich zelf, op regel, voor de vorm en binnen de tijd, systematisch kan belonen zou ik niet kunnen verteren en of verkroppen want anders gaat het ijverige, netwerkende, driftige bestaan ver voor het weer lente is al naar de knoppen en uiteindelijk ga ik al dit aan u nijvere dienders geleverde werk ergens goed verdekt op een vrij toegankelijke plek een locatie immer onbestemd en vanzelfsprekend onbemind waar niemand aan kan tippen of zo komen versstoppen