There are two relevant passages that signal what I mean when I used the word profound. The first is about Lovecraft.

The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming from its tremendous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”, man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus”, 1949

The second is by weird lit author Thomas Ligotti. I think it describes a certain kind of sensation I get from his stories.

In the literature of supernatural horror, a familiar storyline is that of a character who encounters a paradox in the flesh, so to speak, and must face down or collapse in horror before this ontological perversion —something which should not be, and yet is. Most fabled as specimens of a living paradox are the "undead," those walking cadavers greedy for an eternal presence on earth. But whether their existence should go on unendingly or be cut short by a stake in the heart is not germane to the matter at hand. What is exceedingly material resides in the supernatural horror that such beings could exist in their impossible way for an instant. Other examples of paradox and supernatural horror congealing together are inanimate things guilty of infractions against their nature. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this phenomenon is a puppet that breaks free of its strings and becomes self-mobilized.

[…]

Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet—a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.

Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

I think these passages illustrate the rich philosophical subtext that is found in the said authors' work. I'm looking for other cosmic horror or weird lit stories that evoke a sense of profoundness or philosophical deepness.

Flesh and Blood is a trading card game (think Yugioh, Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, etc) which only launched in 2020 but has been rapidly gaining popularity across the world.

If you’re familiar with other trading card games, this has some key differences in the pace of the games. Usually, players have limited resources to begin with, and build up resources throughout the game. In FaB, however, players start at their strongest with the most access to resources, and slowly exhaust these resources as the game goes on.

I played MtG casually for a bit over a decade, and I have a number of friends who all enjoy the Commander format. I never had the skills or budget to play in tournaments, but that’s never been my thing anyway.

I’m just curious if there are many other players here on Tildes.

If you play, which classes or heroes to you prefer? What do you think of the way the game has been managed so far? Do you play casually or are you more ambitious than that? Do you play online or do you stick to exclusively in-person games? How did you get into the game, did you play other TCGs before or is FaB your first foray?

Following this month's discussion of the Dispossessed, we are set up for Project Hail Mary towards the end of June. After that we will discuss Ocean at the End of the Lane at the end of July, Small Gods at the end of August and This is How You Lose the Time War at the end of September.

I look forward to reading with you.

Apologies if this isn't an appropriate place to post this.

Inspired by a paper I found a while back (https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/215545/local_215545.pdf), I tried my hand at implementing a program (in C#) to create ASCII art from an image. It works pretty well, but like they observed in the paper, it's pretty slow to compare every tile to 90-some glyphs. In the paper, they make a decision tree to replicate this process at a faster speed.

Recently, I revisited this. I thought I'd try making a neural net, since I found the idea interesting. I've watched some videos on neural nets, and refreshed myself on my linear algebra, and I think I've gotten pretty close. That said, I feel like there's something I'm missing (especially given the fact that the loss isn't really decreasing). I think my problem is specifically during backpropagation.

Here is a link to the TrainAsync method in GitHub: https://github.com/bendstein/ImageToASCII/blob/1c2e2260f5d4cfb45443fac8737566141f5eff6e/LibI2A/Converter/NNConverter.cs#L164C59-L164C69. The forward and backward propagation methods are below it.

If anyone can give me any feedback or advice on what I might be missing, I'd really appreciate it.

It's 2024 if I remember correctly and budgeting is a fairly common practice. Companies are obsessed with data. Yet when I got to the store and buy a videogame, dap drywall joint compount, and 3 avocados the transactions is just the store and the amount. It'd be nice if I could track what I've been buying, categories them into entertainment, home improvement, and groceries respectively.

I'm guessing this information actually is tracked but is only used for marketing purposes. But I'm curious, does anyone have more information on why transactions can't at least optionally support extra metadata about what was actually bought?

We begin June with Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man from 1973 which is now considered a horror cult classic.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Since this is the month of horror movies, did you find it scary, unsettling, creepy, eerie, spooky or horrifying?

The rest of the schedule for June is:

• 10th: Ravenous (1999)
• 17th: X (2022)
• 24th: The Exorcist (1973)

Great moment in time
What a surprise Canada has been, congratz to the Canadian fans. Odds are against them winning on their next game but here I am thinking. IMO if the game develops like that of Germany vs Spain, I think Canada has a chance. The biggest thing that is controversial is if Messi is not in the lineup. If Messi is in the lines up I see Argentina not playing as well and Canada having the upper hand. I love watching Messsi but he is not playing well, playing hurt etc., I was lucky to go to the stadium, in the Chile vs Argentina game and it's very noticeable his participation is not great though arguably one would want him in vs out. Alright Canucks let's see what you got!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like supreme court.us, liberalism and kei cars. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was a nosey parker.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!