I summarize the project that the following is taken from here: https://tildes.net/~talk/1yr/are_you_writing_a_diary_if_so_in_which_ways_does_it_help_you#comment-kuy

Some of what's discussed below builds on ideas familiar only to my friend and I, but the gist is probably understandable enough, and as the occasion for my writing this is a momentous one, I want to share and see what people might think of some of my thoughts on it. Some of the language is probably a little flowery or seems silly, but that's okay—who has time for shame?

Feedback, questions, discussion, etc., are all welcome.

. . .

Something you may have gleaned by now from my entries and our private discussions both is that I've been wondering for a while at the sheer scope encompassed by the whole of life's perspectives taken together. Something you said to me tonight seems particularly acute in relation to this thought:

"but it makes sense that anthony bourdain could kill himself
to us he represents just a random facet of the universe
but to him he was the universe, painting it with his eyes, and he hated his eyes."

The Universe is made in the eyes of its beholder. The philosophers (and the philistines alike) have been making that observation for a long time now; they call it solipsism, or subjectivity. So I'm not unique in my also identifying it. But that's okay, because the idea is as valid as it ever was. If there's anything our recent discussions have made clear to me, it's that we can believe in nothing but that, and can't but trust in the Universe in its every moment of presentation as a mirror.

In my saying "wonder" above, I mean just that; it is wonder which I feel towards this thought. Life as experienced in the moment is ossified in the next; as soon as an experience is registered it is passed and past, becomes one among many tomes relegated to the bookshelves which fill to the brim the expansive vault called Memory, and with time it and its shelf are pushed further and further into the ever growing obscurity. One can walk those halls again, venture far into those depths, but with distance one finds the shelves dustier and the names of the tomes which line them more difficult to make out.

In such a recognition everything has become compressed (but wasn't it so all along, and it's only now that I've come to see it?). Life is become compartmentalized, broken into bite-sized pieces for its more comfortable consumption. Everything is a mood, a color, a sound, a smell. The terms 'synesthesia' and 'aura' become interchangeable. Part of the difficulty in trying to retrace one's steps through that maze of shelves—and most frustrating is to set out in search of just one particular tome among all the multitudes, some of which cry out like sirens in hopes of diverting one's attention—is that all the colors which mark each shelf are so easily mixed up, confused with each other, and with that of the present moment, that their being received just as they were in the moment of their edification seems probably impossible; and should one come to the right shelf after all, where is the book that shines with just the same sheen with which it shone upon its binding? There's a great deal of work to be put in, it turns out, in seeing in Shrek exactly what one saw in watching it as a child.

By "consume", as I use the term above, I mean just that. Life is consumed in the moment of its passing, just as experiences become memories and thoughts are born and die in the same moment. Everything is in constant movement (remember Heraclitus? A man never steps in the same stream twice). Enter the importance of momentum. Momentum can now be better defined than it was when first I dealt with it (and we can do away with the whole discussion around dialectic, though that doesn't preclude taking what is useful from it—a kind of [auto-]cannibalization). We can call it a refusal to linger on suffering, a choosing to embrace rather than curse the inevitability of movement, of passing, of distance. In movement of this sort is to be found the Promethean, if that term can be recycled also. Love flowers in a maintenance of momentum; love is the seed, momentum the water.

In memory, too, can we find ourselves renewed. An aura lost is not lost forever, and part of the thrill of retracing one's steps is in the search itself. True, the shelves become dusty, the tomes decrepit, as towards a more distant past one reaches; but what child loves not to get lost among old sheafs and musty stacks, places of secrets and lost knowledge? And is it not taught, and can we not agree, that there is far more to be said for a reader's interpretation of a text than for the text itself? One must remember to chew mint from time to time; it can make a big difference.

On this day I graduate from high school. The following pledge is my choice of commemoration in marking that accomplishment: I choose to look towards the future with as much optimism and positivity as can be mustered, to spurn resentment and suffering, nostalgia and hate—the last being permitted only in its manifestation in opposition to all things anti-life. We must remember to remain lovely and loving beings, to take things seriously enough to be able to take things easy, to appreciate as beautiful what is foolish, but ours in its foolishness, and to love delirium of the sort known by the psychonaut convinced of the profundity of a truly meaningless revelation. We must in our approach to life in all its majestic whole say as Nietzsche (and, more recently, the writers of Futurama) would have said if asked to go through it all again: Fuck yeah.

I’ll go first. Back in the late 1990s I worked at a startup out of Seattle. The founders had a previous exit and had a winery in Sonoma. They flew us all down there and things started out fun. We had a scavenger hunt in San Francisco, we all picked grapes at their winery, and saw how the wine was made. The third day got weird. We were all supposed slaughter a goat and eat it. No one wanted to kill the poor thing, so a farm hand did it, and we all ate the terrible meat.

On the final evening we were all sat down in a barn with lots of candles. We did some semi-normal stuff like write down everything we have been avoiding in our lives, then we burned the lists.

Next, the person running the thing thought it would be a good idea to reenact the biblical thing where Jesus washes poor peoples’ feet. But she got it backwards, and some of the VPs were supposed to wash the CEO’s feet.

A couple of us vocally freaked out, then the whole thing fell apart and we all went home early.

I know my story may be extreme, but does anyone else have any misguided or just strange team building events like this in their work history?

Last night before bed, I was posting about some books that I really liked. One of them is called Stay: A History of Suicide & The Philosophies Against It. Another person noted that it sounded interesting, and I started to reply to that user. I got about a paragraph in before stepping back and thinking, "this isn't something I should write here," and deleting everything.

This morning, I rolled over and checked my phone. Anthony Bourdain, died by suicide at 61.. This hurts. I loved Bourdain, his work for years was to broaden our cultural awareness and open us up to new worlds. He was, in many ways, a tangible Star Trek. His death will be mourned by thousands, and that he was taken by suicide will be considered by many, many, other people with suicidal thoughts.

Suicide spreads as a contagion - it can be looked on almost epidemiologically. The way that we talk about suicide is... Telling. It's something that we try to avoid talking about, despite us almost all knowing someone who has died by suicide.

I have worked in mental health for several years and in high acuity settings the past year. I work with people experiencing suicidal ideation every single day. It is often my job to talk around what I consider to be a monster that lives in our heads. To try and convince or guide people away from their monster and take the day for themselves. Some of the people I've worked with have ideation only, sometimes they have had as many as two dozen hospital-resulting attempts in their history. This work is stressful, it's draining. It's very meaningful, especially when change or at least the flash of change is present. It hurts, too, when it isn't enough.

A big part of our education attempts is to be able to talk about the monster. It isn't easy for someone experiencing suicidal ideation to talk about it. There are fears that they will be seen as attention seeking - they are! It is a just thing to seek attention when you feel that you're losing the battle. There are fears that they won't be taken seriously - and often they are not. We minimize our problems to bad days or bad weeks or bad years. We say, "Just get over it," and sometimes people simply do not have the capacity to do it by themselves.

We would never, ever, tell someone with a broken arm to get over it without treatment. We would never, ever, tell someone with a bone protruding from their leg that they were just looking for some attention. And yet, this is how we approach mental health.

I have been suicidal myself, somewhere in the haze of depression that clung to me for about five years. Even as I write this, I feel the urge to minimize it and say, "but never to the severity of those I've worked with." Simultaneously minimizing my own experience and serving to stigmatize those that I serve. The monster's power lies in its language. The more we refuse to talk about it, the more we isolate, the more control it has.

I went to counseling for sixteen weeks, and was only minimally invested. It took me another two years after having left counseling to start using the tools. A big part of my own ability to hold on was the book, Stay, because of its humanistic approach to prevention, one that does not rely on religion. An unfortunate thing about working in mental health is that I now understand what it is to plant a seed and not know if it will grow or not.

Anyway, I wanted to write something about this when I saw the news this morning. One of the major themes of Stay is that suicide is theft not just from your friends and family, but from yourself. I have not felt suicidal or depressed for several years, and I can say that this theft would have been true. Except it doesn't include just my friends or family, but the people that I've interacted with and helped with similar thinking styles along the way.

I encourage you, if you think a friend or colleague is struggling, ask the questions. "How are you feeling today?" You never know how this might help. Do you feel like someone you know might be suicidal? Ask the question. Asking someone if they are feeling suicidal is not a significant trigger that may cause them to commit - though this fear often stops us from asking. Consider, they live with the monster every day, how welcome it must be to have someone else recognize it?

I will leave off with Hamlet's Soliloquy. I have never been huge on Shakespeare, lacking time to read. I read this as well in Stay, and now I listen to it frequently. I even had the opportunity to use it in a Group I lead the other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZHb2xo0OI

For the last couple of days I've been visiting the site several times a day and leaving after 10 minutes or so.

It's not that the site is bad or the discussion isn't good, but there's been a big lack of discussion I'm interested in. I don't like to take place in discussion of politics, or religion, or LGBT, or whatever. For me, the forums always were a place to meet new people to talk to, without it being a date or making friends or anything, just a friendly talk. Not that there shouldn't be a place for talking about world problems, but I get much more enjoyment from small issues or just getting to know other people.

Which is why I haven't been very active here for the last couple of days. There is all this LGBT talk and Trump and catastrophes. Even in the ~talk, there are 'Homosexual marriage legal or illegal?', 'Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?', 'It's a Piece of Cake to Bake a Pretty Cake: LGBT+ Discrimination'. There is a fair share of smaller conversations, but they are mostly things I'm not interested in: 'What's your favorite documentary?, 'Advice- Best Tablets for Interactive Training' ― or things I don't know enough about to discuss, like 'How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?'. This leaves very few posts I'm interested in, and I can hardly engage there because everything I could've said has already been said before I saw it.

Everything above is why I was mostly active in my own posts when I first joined as well. And I wanted to create this post to express this frustration(?) with lack of content, and I'm sure a lot of other lurkers will agree with me on that (whether or not they have different interests) ― I'm writing this post for them, too. I have no idea how you'd fix this problem or if it's even fixable, but I think it's important to state it so more active people can notice and so I have someplace to be active on ~.

I do this a lot. I did it just now. I wrote about five paragraphs on a topic, deleted it and started over, wrote about five more and did the same thing. Got frustrated. Some thoughts that went through my mind:

• "this is not concise at all. It's disorganized and needs to be re-done"

• "this is going to trigger an emotional response and that will filter how they read it, so I'll be less likely to get interesting responses"

• "maybe I should just do this as a journal entry and keep it private"

• "these thoughts are worth something, and even if they aren't super cogent, maybe they can be a starting point for a collaborative thinking process"

• "that's dumb, nobody cares about my ramblings anyway. everyone has thoughts like this, mine aren't more important"

• etc.

So what usually ends up happening in instances like this is I just don't post. Other times, I get wrapped up in trying to make a post super-high quality and it comes across as over-produced... and if I've somehow triggered an emotional response then that aspect becomes an avenue for attack.

Does anyone else experience something comparable to this? Is it a good thing for helping to maintain quality content and discussions? If not, what are strategies to improve situations like these?

Author's note: I posted this a couple days ago in @Kat's WIP thread, but I felt it was a little too tough of an ask to put there. This is probably going to take a more serious time commitment to review than the average submission, so I want to make sure everyone knows what they're getting into (such as through that nifty word count that will appear in the thread title). To that end, let me lay out some context so you're more grounded as to what this is, where I came from, and how serious I am about it.

For starters, I wrote this as part of a complete manuscript (about 63k words total) over a couple months late last year on a challenge from a friend. Liking the direction it was going, I then spent much of the early part of this year fixing and tweaking and revising because it turned out I liked it so much I decided to plan out three more independent stories set after this one.

So what is this? This is a first-person science fiction story of a test subject within an ongoing science experiment. It is set in not-too-distant future, 60-80 years give or take--I didn't want to be too specific for World Building Reasons. The nature of that experiment is unknown to the subject. I need to work on my blurbs.

What type of feedback am I looking for? Any you're comfortable giving, and I've got a very thick skin (many calluses from toxic league of legends players, I'd joke if it weren't true). This is the fourth-or-so draft and I could use fresh eyes on the little things. I also highly value emotional feedback, like what something is making you feel, whether you found something upsetting or funny or confusing. This is an unreliable narrator, so there should bit of each. Endgame-wise, I am probably going to look to publish this somewhere somehow, but I want to make sure that I'm not barking up the wrong tree before putting too much more energy into this.

If this isn't a great format for this sort of work (and I get it. This text is twelve pages on a good day), I am open to suggestions on how it might be easier to consume and respond. I've used my markdown wizardry to mimic the format of my word doc, which I'm not planning on uploading directly. So please forgive weird formatting things like inconsistent italics. I tried to catch them all, but it's like playing a game of whack a mole over here.

Editor's note: The following text came to us within encrypted song files in specific order. We were also provided an executable file that decrypted the text so that we could publish it. The relationship between these songs and the narrative is often not clear. To allow readers the opportunity to judge any potential relationship for themselves, we have titled each bit of text with the correct song file it was encrypted within. The order was preserved.

Prologue

"Yesterday”.FLAC

I'm not breathing. I'm dead. Is this hell? Heaven? I’m in a white room with Adam and Eve in white robes as the gatekeepers. Why is the room tilted? It’s not a hospital; it’s far too dirty. Will I recognize anyone? Am I dressed for heaven? The grime makes me think maybe this hell. That’s the breaks then, huh. But why would demons be in lab coats? And what are those tops? Is that a scarf? Indoors?

Oh shit, they're staring at me.

Hi. Am I dead? Did I say that? Can I speak? I can’t breathe.

They looked at each other. Did I say anything? Maybe I'm not dead. But I'm not breathing. I’m not just not breathing, but I can’t breathe. I don't feel like I can move. Why can’t I breathe?

Holy shit, I don't have any legs. My arms aren't mine. They're someone else's. Some hairy darker bastard too. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. What the fuck is happening?

You're not dead, but you did die. That has all the clarity of a Taoist monk. I think the woman said it. She stepped forward a little bit and tilted her head to the side with some mouth flapping to match the words. Did I really hear it? How can I not be dead? Whatever happened in America froze you. Like, we talking cryogenics frozen? Disney movie Frozen? The Iceman cometh frozen? Even frozen people should be able to breathe, right? They needed to replace my arms? What was wrong with my old arms if I was frozen to death? You’re in a new body. Those arms are yours now.

Yeah, the woman has to have said some of that. She started leaning in during the mouth-flapping like she was talking to a child. Now she’s straight as a country boy at church. I’m going to have to track her specifically. This is tedious.

Asian woman. If you can hear this: sorry, I’m new here.

“My name is Nadia, not ‘Asian woman.’ Can you tell us your name?” She glanced back to the man before looking back at me, with her hands clasped like she was pleading. Do I need to be pleaded with? She put her hands back to her sides. Where am I?

“You’re in Istanbul.” That’s not Nadia. Her mouth didn’t flap. I think it’s a voice, and I think it’s the man’s, but I couldn’t see him flap. Nadia was blocking the view. I think she’s like two feet away or something. Just out of arm's reach, but close enough that I can’t see the man anymore. Now she’s backed away. Why does she do that? The timing is weird.

So I'm in Istanbul. My legs are gone. My arms are fake and way super hairy. I'm not breathing, but I'm not dead, though I did die. I felt my eyes roll. I guess you two did something to me then.

“Well,” This is the other voice. Now that Nadia has backed away I can see the man’s mouth flapping, but he’s barely doing anything else. Not even a simple hand-gesture. I thought he was just wallpaper. Breathing wallpaper. Or is it mine? Maybe mine is the mouth that’s flapping.

“The frozen you died, but your brain was intact and incredibly well-preserved by whatever happened. We transferred the data that your brain contained into an android unit we designed for this purpose, and here you are." Yep, not mine. It’s got to be the dude, especially because he did a weird, body-length bobblehead bounce the entire time that voice was happening. Wait--

“You designed an android not to have any legs?” I heard that one. That’s me. Okay, I'm getting better at this. That explains the breathing, I think. It at least explains the arms. I'm not dead, but I'm also not alive. This is fun. I'm having fun. “So what did you do to me and how the fuck did I get to Istanbul?”

Whatever script these two had, I'm sure I've deviated from it. They're spending a lot more time looking at each other in silence than mouth-flapping. Okay. Fake-breath. What didn't I notice? The recorder is a little black thing on a little spot at the bottom of the mirror. Oh, I'm laid on this weird chair thing that has me positioned to look across the room. That’s why everything at an angle, I guess. Well, let’s just get off of that. I can just lean against this wall. It’s drywall, but that’s fine so long as I’m not throwing myself at it. I’ll have to lean because my ass is rounded with holes where legs should be. If I imagined legs there, I’d probably look like I have a nice ass.

The room looks like a room you use to interrogate someone mixed with a kid’s idea of wall-design. The wall behind me and to my left are drywall, looks like. The opposite wall with the door and the wall to my right with a mirror are concrete. Not even brick, like just solid concrete. I didn’t even realize that was still code. If this is a hospital, I’m reporting a lot of code violations. This place looks like a pigsty, one that not even the hired help cleans up. Though, that might just be those concrete walls. I’m especially complaining about the lack of legs.

"We felt it was a safety risk to give you legs." Safety risk? Safety for whom? I can’t breathe. Who is this guy anyway? "I'm Mehmet."

"Wait, how did you hear that? Have I been saying everything?" I'd rather have a little privacy at some points, you know?

"Well, you haven't exactly been silent." Huh. That's going to be a problem.

"You should be able to create a subroutine for the thoughts you want to save without speaking." Nadia to the rescue, but how would I do--oh, I see. That's new.

Let's restart this, then.

"Mr. Roboto".FLAC

Goooooooooood morning, subconscious! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! Cue audience applause and cheers. I'm your host, Mr. Android! As you know, we’ve been off the air for a while. There’s a lot to catch up on. That’s why we’re bringing in two special guests to help reintroduce us to the anxiety of life: Mehmet and Nadia! We got a great show for you tonight, so stay tuned because you have no choice anyway.

Before the break, Mehmet, you were saying that you felt it was a safety risk to give us legs?

"That's right, Mr. Android. The design team and I thought that if you had legs, you'd be likely to use them.”

You’re damn right. Cue audience laughter. What’s wrong with using legs?

“If you had that mobility, we don’t know what you’d use it for. You could do anything a normal person could do, even walk right on out of this building.”

I presume you wouldn’t like it if I walked out right now. What if I just wanted a coffee from our proud sponsor: BB's Coffee™?

"First, don’t drink coffee. Don’t drink anything. That mouth wasn’t designed for drinking."

We’ll see about that. Cue audience laughter.

“Second, we need you not to walk out because we’re trying to monitor you to make sure you’re safe, as well as try to figure out what happened around your death.”

We'll have to come back to that, Mehmet. First, tell us a little bit about yourself.

"Sure. I was born and raised here in Turkey, but my grandparents were studying tornadoes in Oklahoma when everything went down."

Your grandparents? How long ago are we talking about here?

“It’s been a bit more than a half-century.”

Alright, what is ‘everything’ and how did it impact your grandma?

"Well, whatever happened to kill you. No one is really sure what caused the incident to happen. The best we could make of it at the time is that there was a large eruption near America's capital, and after that almost the entire east coast was some form of an infected mess. People who didn't die immediately had their immune systems too compromised to handle any other serious illness. That killed most of them within a few years." A moment of silence fell on the stage.

How bad was the devastation?

"Most of the coast was gone. Flights were stopped by the US almost immediately, so people in those areas were stranded. One flight got out to Montreal and it wiped out nearly a quarter of the city’s population. Cities along in the infected area lost an average of 75% of their population within a couple weeks.”

How far did it get?

“Atlanta was the northernmost city along the coast to weather the outbreak. A well-timed storm system kept the illness from spreading further west than it did. The mountains usually marked the furthest west it got. People who flew from those areas in the moments before the quarantine were tracked down and quarantined forcibly.”

Did anyone come to help?

“Sure, if a vulture helps a corpse.” Cue audience laughter. Audience might not laugh. “No one dared try to go near the infected areas, but Mexico declared a relief effort. That really was an attempt to annex most of the west and Great Plains under what it considered its historic claim to the land. The locals did not see things the same way. It turned into a classic occupation situation. They were resisted.”

So Texas is the new Palestine? Or would Crimea be a better analogy? What did your grandparents do?

“It was something like that. My grandparents just wanted to keep studying meteorology. There really wasn't a place in the United States safe enough to do that anymore. They applied for refugee status in Turkey and moved here. From there, they had a typical immigrant story. They earned enough money to start a restaurant and set their children up with a good education to be successful in Turkish society." Cue audience awe and applause.

Fascinating stuff. Nadia, it's your turn. Tell us a little about yourself.

"Well, I'm from Saudi Arabia. My parents were in California until about a decade before I was born. My mother was German-American, from Oregon. My dad was second generation Chinese-American, Californian born.”

California was impacted by the incident?

“Indirectly. After the incident, California tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but there were too many other nations that wanted to claim California for it to keep that dream alive for long. Russia, Canada, Japan, China, and Mexico each fought the other and the Californian government as they tried to claim it for their own.”

So they were the prettiest gal at the ball. Cue audience laughter. How did they deal with that sort of peer pressure?

“California had to start a mandatory draft program to keep up with the military needs of the new environment. Every citizen was theoretically part of the military’s reserves. After a few decades of near constant skirmishing at sea and especially in the north where most of the invading forces fought, California was out of resources and friends and collapsed after a military coup. Turns out if you can’t pay the active service personnel, you can’t keep a country.”

Intense. How do your parents fit into that?

“My parents saw the writing on the wall and applied for visas to work and live in Saudi Arabia a few years before the government collapsed. Saudi Arabia’s requirement for immigrants were twofold: it has to be a family and the man has to be educated, so here I am." Cue audience applause.

That's wild. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are refuges for the educated for more than two generations. How much more than a half century are we even talking here? I feel like a Twinkie from a time capsule. Cue audience laughter.

“It’s been about 60 years.”

You heard right, subconscious. We've been dead and 'incredibly well-preserved' for about 60 years. Everyone you knew is probably dead. Everything you know doesn’t matter. Your parents are statistically 99.99% certain to be dead even if they did survive and were outside the zone impacted. You're a man out of time. Are you even really a man anymore? Oh well, at least you don't have to put up with that breathing nonsense anymore, right? That sure was a drag*.*

Tune in next time for an interview with Toto. What is the matter with Kansas? Find out what Dorothy's breath smelled like as we ask Toto about his upcoming tell-all biography: Help, I'm A Dog And My Owner Takes Me On Tornado Rides.

"Clint Eastwood".FLAC

Oh good. There's a way to combine these tracking subroutines with living in the present. Now I don’t have to live in mortal fear of every errant thought becoming vocalized.

"Thanks, Nadia. That was very helpful." I’m a bit surprised about how my voice sounds. It’s tinny and higher pitched than my voice. Almost nasally too, but that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no nasal cavity for this voice to work through, right? There is no booming echo that I’m used to feeling when I talk. I have a strange confidence that I hear my words exactly as they sound, with no perspectival shift involved as the one saying them. No sense in telling them about that. I don’t even know for sure what we’ve been talking about.

I can tell that they've started to ease up. Nadia’s doing less of that leaning-to-the-children thing and Mehmet’s shoulders aren’t as far back as it’s humanly possible to bend them. He almost looks relaxed now. The bobblehead days might be behind us. Still, I think their increased comfort is more because I was off in that other subroutine most of that time. It feels like coming out of a blackout. Damn I'm going to miss alcohol.

"You're welcome, but a lot has happened in 60 years that we should get you caught up on." Oh, we've moved on. I thought I was just making all that up. I guess not. Weird. She’s hovering near the recorder like she turned it on recently. Or maybe turned it off? That wouldn’t make any sense though.

"You know what, Nadia. I think that's a lot to soak in. Unless there are more subroutines that help me process stuff like world events or that give me some newspaper articles or stuff from the past 60 years or something, I think I'm okay moving on from that for now. It's more interesting to me to talk about why you've revived me and what it is you're hoping to get here."

"Are you sure? I made a presentation for you outlining the biggest trends and current ongoing conflicts around the world." This woman is a nerd. I like it, but damn. Calm down. I hope she didn’t make any spreadsheets. For her sake.

Speaking of calming down, I should probably take a moment myself. Let’s see. The room isn’t nearly as white as I thought. I should have been either dead or in a hospital. This place doesn’t make sense. These people don’t make any sense. They’re not in any lab uniforms I’ve seen. They look rather like they’re about to go clubbing.

Nadia is average height. She looks like she's in her late twenties or early thirties. Her look matches a mix of her parents’ heritage: half Chinese-American and half German-American. I wonder what part of China. Brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin. Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure what about her face strikes me as especially Asian. Maybe high cheek bones are what do it. Small noses really don’t mean much to me. It’s just a holistic thing, I guess. She could easily be mistaken for just about any ethnicity. She’s wearing jeans and no burka, so hurray for Saudi progressivism. I bet she might even be allowed to drive! She’s wearing a traditional white lab coat, but it’s open and I can see a black flowy thing that is tucked into the front of the jeans. She is joyously well-prepared to talk about shit that’s in her wheelhouse. Then again, I do seem to be these people's lab rat and I know these two are just the ambassadors of a much larger team of scientists. Preparing for this moment is probably their job.

Mehmet is probably in his thirties or forties. I can never tell age with men. Once you're over 26, you could be as old as 45 before I notice. He's maybe about six feet tall or six one--although this is Istanbul, so height is probably in centimeters here. What even would that be in centimeters, 181 cm? Anyway, he’s also wearing the open, white lab coat. Under it is a blue and gray checkered button down shirt with his jeans, and this tiny yellow argyle scarf. It isn’t long enough to protect your neck from winter, so it’s weird. Boots are yellowish. He's got sandy brown hair and ocean blue eyes. They look radioactive. They have to be fake. Eyes aren’t that blue. He also doesn’t have much of a tan. For a Turkish boy that’s awkward as fuck, but I guess his grandparents are from Oklahoma so maybe he's just a traditional, melanin-challenged, white American type. He didn't say anything about his other set of grandparents, but that's not related to what they want from me. Maybe Germans. Turks and Germans always had a close relationship going. Probably best to assume that Germans are part of an experiment like this anyway. They’re always getting into shady shit. Viva la Nuremberg.

"I'm sure, Nadia. But we can go over your presentation later. Or maybe there's some way for me to watch it on my own time, or something. I don't know. You designed this thing." I hope there isn't. Call me old fashioned, but I don't like people messing with my thoughts.

"Oh there is. Yeah, I'll upload it later." Great. Thanks, Nadia.

"To your question about purpose, we revived you because we don't know what happened 60 years ago,” Mehmet, as usual and fitting the German thesis, is stiff and blunt with his delivery. He doesn’t make hand gestures as he talks, which I never realized someone could accomplish. He barely moves. Makes me wonder who’s the real robot here, you know? “It was an important historical moment. We want to understand what happened to put it into a broader context of how the world changed since the fall of Imperial Era America." I'll let that label slide. Too many things to focus on to let a naming convention derail things.

"So you're hoping I can fill you in on the details."

"Exactly, at least what you know," he says.

"It would be a lot easier to put things into context if I had some idea of what context to put them into. Aren’t there like relevant stories or movies or something you can show me? Or anything that makes me feel a little less like a lab rat?" Mehmet winced, and Nadia glanced at him again. It’s especially noticeable because Nadia is almost always closer to me than Mehmet, so she has to turn around to look at him. Something makes them uncomfortable about me. Am I deemed unnatural? Is this entire experiment sacrilegious? Wouldn't be the first time for either. I goddamn hope there are some ethical qualms here.

While I was searching for an answer for their perpetual discomfort, Nadia chimed in. "We have a list of topics that we agreed as a team to discuss. I hope you'd understand if we took your suggestion to the team before agreeing to it? If we give you too much context we might skew your presentation. It’s just something we’d need to carefully plan out with the team."

"Sure, of course. Makes sense to me." Why are you even asking me though? I don’t have any power in this exchange, physical or emotional. Hell, you've even made sure I can't run at you. Oh shit, they’re about to leave.

“Hey, before you head out, is there a way I can be positioned so I can see that mirror over there? I’d like to see myself. I don’t even know if I make facial expressions.”

Nadia responded much faster than either of them have been up until now, “Oh you make facial expressions alright.” Fuck. She’s chuckling under her breath too. What have I been doing? If there were any blood in this husk, it’d all be in my cheeks right now. I used to cosplay as a tomato when I’d get the least bit worked up. I have that feeling right now.

Mehmet moved in closer to the table I’m on for the first time. Unlike Nadia, who often looks to him, he doesn’t look to her before grabbing a side of the table. He looks to her after though, and gives her a nod. I can’t tell if that’s workplace hierarchy or respect or just a man in the workplace or what. "Yeah. We can move you. Could you get away from that wall?" Without responding, I slid away from the wall as he suggested. Made sense if they were moving the table with me on it.

“Hang tight,” Nadia said, but she didn’t need to. I had already grabbed onto the edges of the table. Mehmet and Nadia lifted the table a couple inches and walked it slowly to the wall that was to my left. I’m not under any illusions about what this mirror is. It’s a one-way with a team watching on the other side. There’s no way it isn’t. The wall the mirror sits in looks like they broke through it just to put the mirror in; it’s got all sorts of chips and cracks like somebody actually chiseled the hole out. The important thing here is that I can see myself now.

They certainly had an eye for detail. My face has a bigger, more squished nose than I'm used to. It’s all olive, which of course I imagined from the arms, but to see it brings a new depth to this place. Is this actually me now? The dark brown eyes are new, though they are probably contacts anyway. I bet they look red when the light catches them. That’ll be a test for later. They should be light-brown things that would look yellow in the light. They’re not. I can’t believe I miss them assuring me I’m going to be blind by the time I’m 50. Eyebrows are just as thick--like caterpillars resting on a face. They didn't bother with hair on the top, but that's understandable. Hair is hard and they put all their hair energies in the arms and eyebrows. For some reason they put on a light stubble all along my jawline. Why would they want to show I could grow a beard? That was never true before. I'm not really crushed it still isn't true now. They replaced all my freckles with a simple mole just under my left eye. They thought to put on a mole? Can androids even get skin cancer? It looks like real skin, except it doesn't play as much. They must have made me to look like the most stereotypically handsome, bald man in society, with a mole to make it all seem real. I'm okay with that. This body looks good. I’d date me. Now let's see those pearly whites. Holy shit, nevermind. This mouth is fucked. The teeth are perfect, but everything within it is this wiry abomination that probably didn't get enough design time.

I realize now that I'm too busy gawking to think much about how this all must look to the people behind the mirror. Of course, this was after sticking my wire cage pretending to be a tongue out at them. Nadia and Mehmet are near the door now, watching me look at myself.

I put on my best smile for them. Got to show a good game face, right? "Thanks. I was just dying to marvel at my own newfound good looks." Both Nadia and Mehmet smiled back, but it was Mehmet’s reaction I was after. It wasn’t a very big one, but it’s good enough for me. Hopefully that means he can react to a bad pun, but he could have just been smiling because I smiled. That’s a thing with meatbags. Though that smile didn’t move up an inch. It was one of those horizontal smiles that you give when you just want to be polite. This guy must have taken a martial arts class in self-expression because he does not react more than he has to.

I want to ask them what the endgame here is. If they're just going to turn me off again after bringing me back from the dead to have a good chat, then that's kind of a bad thing for me. If they're planning on keeping me around, it's not clear what use I can be outside of this experiment. Maybe they want to have proof that they can bring people back from the dead and put them into androids? A new technology that gives people (who can afford it, or are deemed worth it) immortality and further leads to the singularity and domination of all humanity by robot people. It doesn't seem like there's any way out of this mess that can be good for me. God damn I need legs.

They’re still here, watching and waiting. I might as well voice some of my appreciation for this body. "I have some hairy arms here. Oh, and I feel these washboard abs. I'm guessing that design choice was you, Nadia?" I felt myself wink. We're back. Breathing crisis resolved. “Were there some legs in the works for this project too? Are they a hairy match for these arms?" And what are the hair trends in porn these days? Is everyone hairy? I can’t ask them that. Incidentally, and unrelated: this mirror shows that this body can, in fact, blush. Not as red as I’m used to, but the cheeks do change color slightly. How did they do that?

"The legs were in development because we didn't make the final risk assessments until after the base android design was tested and showed that the legs performed far better than expectations." Dang, Mehmet. That sort of response really goes beyond what I'd think the team would want you to say. I hope you don't get iced for that. I'm starting to like your blunt, no nonsense style.

"Cool.” I nodded to make it seem like I was deeply offended. “Are there any questions you wanted to get into right away or did you want to talk with your team before moving forward?"

"I … ” Nadia held that like she was interjecting on a conversation she wasn’t in. “I think it's probably best if we talk to the team first and give you some time to get adjusted. I'll also add that video to a list you can access internally while you wait. You already have access to some music, both contemporary hits for you and more modern tunes. There are also some other things that we put together." Nadia smiled gently as though she had done me some great service, but I’d prefer to find my own way thank you. They can’t know what I like or don’t like. They don’t know me. What happened to the internet? Can't I just access that or would that be way too much of a security risk? Fuck. They're gone.

Well, might as well get a better look at this thing resembling a tongue.

I'm currently in a "how can I improve and refocus" and wanted to see what this group thinks since either seems we have some pretty thoughtful and techy people here.

I have toyed around for years with different techniques. I got really into GTD and used several apps focused on that even writing my own JavaScript app to use with Google sheets.

I've used spreadsheets, OneNote, Wunderlist, plain text files.

What do you use to keep your tasks moving forward and how do you use these tools to manage your tasks and get work done? I found spreadsheets are nice because you can do a lot of scratch work but it's hard to "check them off' but many "check them off" tools don't give you a lot of scratch workspace. OneNote is cool but I can't stand the Microsoft environment and it doesn't seem to give a lot of indication how best to use the tool. Maybe I should do a training....

                                             How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu's debut novel, How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, could be described as a story about contemporary family life disguised as science fiction. It concerns a young man who has spent most of the past decade in a small time machine in his job as a time machine repairman. He makes calls on people who have rented time machines for recreational purposes but have become stuck in time and must be rescued by him. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that this man's name is the same as that of the author, Charles Yu. The protagonist is a lonely and rather sad fellow, who spends much of his non-working hours drifting along in his capsule, thinking about his past and his parents, especially his father who disappeared long ago. Accompanied only by his dog and a computer that has the pixilated face of a female and a cartoon-like voice, Charles hopes to one day locate his father in some alternate universe to which he apparently has traveled in a time machine. Charles's parents, a few clients, and several street performers are the only other humans that he encounters during the course of the story. He makes one trip to a city in Minor Universe 31, a residential and entertainment world made mostly from a science fiction "substrate," where the company for which he works is headquartered. His objective is to have maintenance work done on his time machine and when he goes to pick it up, he encounters his future self. Panicking, he draws his service revolver and shoots his future self in the stomach, just as his future self is attempting to tell him that the key is the book. He has no idea what this means as he stumbles into his time machine and races away. On the capsule's console, he finds a manual-type book that has the same title as the novel.

With the help of his computer, he realizes that he must read the book and make amendments and additions to it as he goes along. At some point in the future, he must give the completed book to his past self, who then will shoot him and begin the rewriting process again in an endless cycle. Charles realizes he has become stuck in a time loop. By the rules of time travel, if he changes anything that happens during this loop, he risks entering an alternate universe from which he might not emerge. Under the circumstances, escaping the time loop appears to be extremely difficult. He may be doomed to spend the rest of his life in the time machine, writing the book, giving it to himself, shooting himself, and starting the cycle again. The book is a manual about time travel, but it also offers advice on how such a traveler should live within or use time wisely. The main use of Charles's time is in thinking about his father and mother, but he begins visiting periods in his past in his time machine, watching his younger self interact with his parents. Eventually, he discovers that the book given to him by his future self is literally the key, because it holds a key that unlocks a box that his mother gave him, inside of which his father left clues to where he went in time. This inspires Charles to realize that he can break out of his time loop through the power of his mind and memory. He does so and rescues his father from the past time in which he is stuck. As the novel ends, it looks as if the family has a chance to regain normalcy and move forward with a better understanding of how to cope with the difficulties of life by facing the problems of the past with courage and honesty.

                       Praise

“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
—Austin Chronicle

“If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative — the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. . . . . Yu grafts the laws of theoretical physics onto the yearnings of the human heart so thoroughly and deftly that the book’s technical language and mathematical proofs take on a sense of urgency.”
—NPR

“How to Live Safely is a book likely to generate a lot of discussion, within science fiction and outside, infuriating some readers while delighting many others.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An extraordinary work. . . . I read the entire book in one gulp.”
—Chris Wallace, GQ

“A great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book.”
—The Stranger

“Science and metaphor get nice and cozy in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The novel joins the likes of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jillian Weise’s The Colony, fiction that borrows the tropes of sci-fi to tell high-tech self-actualization narratives.”
—Portland Mercury

“A brainy reverie of sexbots, rayguns, time travel and Buddhist zombie mothers. . . . Packed with deft emotional insight.”
—The Economist

“A funny, funny book, and it’s a good thing, too; because at its heart it’s a book about loneliness, regret, and the all-too-human desire to change the past.”
—Tor.com

“A keenly perceptive satire. . . . Yu’s novel is also a meditation on the essentials of human life at its innermost point.. . . Campy allusions to the original Star Wars trilogy, a cityscape worthy of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and a semi-coherent vocabulary of techno-jargon cement these disparate elements into a brilliant send-up of science fiction. . . . Perhaps it would be better to think of the instructional units of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in terms of the chapters of social commentary which John Steinbeck placed into the plot structure of The Grapes of Wrath.”
—California Literary Review

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the rare book I pick up to read the first several pages, then decide to drop everything and finish at once. Emotionally resonant, funny, and as clever as any book I have read all year, this debut novel heralds the arrival of a talented young writer unafraid to take chances.”
—largehearted boy

“A wild and inventive first novel . . . has been compared to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that such comparisons are not out of line says everything necessary about Yu’s talent and future.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Bends the rules of time and literary convention.”
—Seattle Weekly

“Getting stuck with Yu in his time loop is like watching an episode of Doctor Who as written by the young Philip Roth. Even when recalling his most painful childhood moments, Yu makes fun of himself or pulls you into a silly description of fake physics experiments. In this way, he delivers one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of consciousness I’ve seen in literature: It’s full of self-mockery and self-deception, and yet somehow manages to keep its hands on the wheel, driving us forward into an unknowable future. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. . . . It’s clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness.”
—io9

“Funny [and] moving. . . . Charles Yu’s first novel is getting ready for lift-off, and it more than surpasses expectations which couldn’t be any higher after he was given the 5 Under 35 Award . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is one of the trippiest and most thoughtful novels I’ve read all year, one that begs for a single sit-down experience even if you’re left with a major head rush after the fact for having gulped down so many ideas in a solitary swoop. . . . Yu’s literary pyrotechnics come in a marvelously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought. . . . Like the work of Richard Powers . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fuses the scientific and the emotional in ways that bring about something new.”
—Sarah Weinman, The Daily Beast

“One of the best novels of 2010. . . . It is a wonderfully stunning, brilliant work of science fiction that goes to the heart of self-realization, happiness and connections. . . . Yu has accomplished something remarkable in this book, blending science fiction universes with his own, alternative self’s life, in a way, breaking past the bonds of the page and bringing the reader right into the action. . . . Simply, this is one of the absolute best time travel stories . . . even compared to works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or the Doctor Who television series.”
—SF Signal

“Within a few pages I was hooked. . . . There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out!”
—GeekDad, Wired.com

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation.”
—Booklist

“This book is cool as hell. If I could go back in time and read it earlier, I would.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Sag Harbor

“Charles Yu is a tremendously clever writer, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is marvelously written, sweetly geeky, good clean time-bending fun.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Funny, touching, and weirdly beautiful. This book is awesome.”
—Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that rare thing—a truly original novel. Charles Yu has built a strange, beautiful, intricate machine, with a pulse that carries as much blood as it does electricity.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“Poignant, hilarious, and electrically original. Bends time, mind, and genre.”
—David Eagleman, author of Sum

There's a really awesome thread on constructive criticism with a lot of thoughtful insight about the process. What makes criticism helpful? What causes more harm than good? What's the best way to go about asking for a critique?

I wanted to play a little game where we can turn the tables on the process and examine what makes critiques tick. At the same time, it'll give folks a chance to share some of their creations. The idea is to critique the critiques based off of how the requests are presented.

To quote @silva-rerum from the other thread,

Context and empathy are both incredibly important when it comes to the delivery and impact of creative criticism. Most people who deliver critiques while failing to contextualize or understand their recipient’s perspective will be engaging in an exercise in futility at best, or an act of cruelty at worst.

I think it would be a fun exercise to experiment with how much context can affect how good or bad a critique is.

Rules:

Content

Content should be something of your own, whether it's writing, music, physical works, visual, or whatever. If you made it and you're down to post it for some criticism, it fits.

Context

It's entirely up to you what kind of context you'd like to provide. The game is about finding what works and what doesn't, and context can play a huge factor in the quality of the critique. If you want to try to see what kind of criticism zero-context requests elicit, post your work with zero context. Alternatively, you can see what kind of critique you get from high-context, specifically targeted feedback requests.
(If you haven't read through some of the ideas in the other thread, check it out before posting. There really are some great insights in there even if you aren't planning on posting anything.)

Critiques

Perform your critiques for others as you normally would. Obviously, keep it civil. Multiple people can offer their critiques for each item up for critique. Since we're playing around with different degrees of context, try to critique on a case-by-case basis. That is, if you have more context for a critique than is proffered, try your best to set that extra context aside. There may be fudge-factor involved with that, but I think we can still end up with some interesting results.

Counter-critiques

Counter-critiques are open to all! It will definitely be helpful to hear from the creator how helpful or hurtful the critique was. If other people have input or questions, discuss away!

Side note: I don't think I've ever typed/thought the word "critique" so much in my life.

I'll put together some stuff I've worked on recently to get thing started.

Hi tilders (tildes? tilded?),

I thought it might make sense to group threads by hobby for now, to start -- and the hobby I've been spending the most time with recently has been fountain pens. They're great! I hope you like them too.

Wrote something out to kick things off: https://i.imgur.com/vNOS7QK.jpg

Write something back in return?

Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?"

Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf?

And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques!

Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you.

You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom.

Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human.

Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy.

It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh.

Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day.

So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step.

I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me.

I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things.

The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony.

But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him.

So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms.

Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time.

Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can create a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Wall of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Walls of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can created a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird and dumb. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. Now I just copied and pasted part of this huge wall of text, which is actually not. Wait what? Nice right? Ba boom a rhetorical question right there. Is this the end for the sanity of your eyes? What the fuck did you actually read up to here? Or did you skip to near the end and read this? Either way, you fail in life. Just kidding. Or was I? Oh well. Congratulations, or not, actually not. Get a life right now. I found a cheap life on eBay, but cheap lives are rare. Well, good luck in finding one. Not! Okay go kill yourself, but I wasn't meaning that. So go sit in the corner in your house. I do not care which, just stay there and rot. If you are not in a place with a corner, then lucky you. Find one if you can. There is no other option because I said so. Now if you pity yourself for reading this like most do, then do something productive and useful to the environment. My goodness. OK this is me here. I am starting a new section of this article. I didn't read anything in this article above here, but nevermind, because I have something important to say, and you really have to read this. So just skip everything above and just come to this part and start reading and agreeing. The wall of text was invented by engineers using typewriters. Everything was in typewriter font (because it was made on typewriters - remember when I explained that in the previous sentence?) and the point was to use all of the paper, because paper was very expensive back then, it had just been invented I think. So anyway, the point was, no margins at the top or bottom or sides. If you left a quarter inch on the sides of the paper, that was very bad. And the guiding principle was "This was hard to write, so it should be hard to read". Because they were software engineers, not writing engineers. Is there even such a thing a writing engineers? Probably. But anyway, please go back to the top of this article and read it over again. You'll get the point after you read it for approx. 10 to 15 times. OK have you done that now? Good. Now let's be honest - you're not reading down this far. Are you? Nobody would read down this far, unless they were a crazy person. Are you a crazy person? You might be. Now I'm afraid - it's just me alone with a crazy person. No one else has read down this far, just you, so it's just the two of us alone together here. Are you going to do something crazy? Maybe you will. Please don't hurt me. If you promise not to hurt me, I'll give a coupon good for a free Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny's. OK? Now just do this one thing for me, read the article over again, just one more time, and if you really truly don't agree with everything in it, then fine, I'll retire from my job with the railroad and we'll call the whole thing off and just go dancing, just the two of use, me (the writer) and you (a completely random crazy person who has actually read down this far), and boy won't we turn heads when we show up at Rockefeller Center with the entire Donner Party in tow! We'll dance all night to strains of the Lemon Pipers while the Italian 12th Armored Division prevents the Allies from thrusting into our rear! Ah, what memories we'll make, I'll never forget you, my completely insane random person. By the way this is magnificent example of wall of text. You have to be proud you read it all. Now please read article again, and this time pay attention.Wait a minute. didnt it say earlier that there shouldn't be any capitals

A wall of text consists of many lines of text that resemble a wall. A wall of text can sometimes be really big or somewhat small. Most walls of text lack grammar so they are not as appealing to read while other walls of text do contain grammar so they are actually easy to read but not as long as if you were to put a bunch of random characters or words. A wall of text might be made out of word bricks which kind of makes sense if you think of each word as a brick but that would be a tall and narrow wall unless you expand it in which case it will be a large wall in general. Most places do not allow walls of text because they count as spam and could get you banned or kicked or muted and will prevent you from posting other walls of text. Some places allow walls of text but that would be weird and probably doesn't exist. If such a platform did exist for creating walls of text and publishing them for viewers then it is probably not popular otherwise I would have seen it by now. You should refrain from posting walls of text because of the reason I stated up there that said that you could get muted for spam and another reason being that it might get a lot of dislikes or even flagged for spam. If you get flagged for spam then you will no longer be able to post walls of text which is pretty reasonable but I think people should be able to express themselves but probably not through walls of text unless you want to. I have come across a few walls of text and some of them are funny but some of them are short and there are rarely any long walls of text. Maybe walls of text were created by early internet users to troll others but that would be extremely slow because you get like a byte per second download and like a bit per second upload or something like that idk I didn't live with dial up so i wouldn't know about the internet speeds but they are probably accurate even though i should fact check that. People who create walls of text probably have a lot of time on their hands or are really boring or both and they might have very long attentions spans or maybe they are entertained by creating a wall of text because it lets them be creative with what they say. My favorite wall of text is titled "regarding walls of text" and it is a fun read because it keeps the user engaged but I don't think it is a wall of text probably more like a narration or documentary through words. Though some walls of text are large, some can be small but equally as annoying. Sometimes small walls of text are considered copy pasta because you can copy it and paste it to insert a copy of that wall of text or copy pasta. Walls of text can also be copied and pasted but what normal person would copy it? That's like copying abnormal copy pasta in a formal setting. Just imagine Jim peaking at your screen that contains a copy pasta while you're supposed to be focusing on the meeting. How would he feel? How would you feel if the roles were switched? Those questions are of course rhetorical but it's good to consider them. Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?" Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf? And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques! Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you. You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom. Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human. Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy. It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh. Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day. So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step. I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me. I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things. The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony. But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him. So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms. Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time. Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

Since AP Lit in high school, I’ve wanted to get into reading. Recently I started making a list of things I want to read (both fiction and non, fantasy and sci fi, bios and commentary), but am not making the slightest dent in it. Im able to read magazine writing and online publications throughout the day, so what do y’all do to read more books?

Tilde pretext - I have no idea what to tag this, but if anyone likes Shadowrun or Earthdawn pnp lore this info is a pain in the ass to find.

I spent way, way too much time trying to track down information on Verjigorm. I enjoy exploring the lore of the Shadowrun universe, and the hoops I had to jump through to get this info was way more than I expected. I kept seeing references to books I didn't have, and finally actually got a copy of Earthdawn's Horror book to copy this down.

I realize no one requested this, but I'm just posting this excerpt in the hope it will save people the massive amount of time I spent fumbling around trying to get anything substantial on this subject.

This is verbatim from the Earthdawn Horrors book. If this is somehow violating a policy I missed let me know and I will edit and change as needed.

I'm not sure who specifically wrote this, so here are the listed writers for the book:

Writing: Robin D. Laws, Teeuwynn Woodruff, Greg Gorden, Sam Witt, Allen Varney, Chris McCubbin, Caroline Spector, Fraser Cain

Additional Writing: Louis J. Prosperi, Rob Cruz, Dian Prion-Gelman, Andrew Raglan, and Rich Warren

pg 66 Eathdawn - Horrors

The following account was graciously provided by the Great Dragon Icewing. The Library of Throal, and indeed all the Namegivers of Barsaive, owe this generous dragon a debt of undying gratitude for the information he has provided on this entity. Scholars throughout the land agree that Verjigorm is the most powerful Horror that has ever existed-- a terrible, vile abomination whose strength towers above that of all other Horrors. May the Passions protect us all against the curse of the Horror called Verjigorm and its unnatural spawn, for its unmatched power and malevolent intelligence may yet spell the end of all that we know.

-- Leranto Myrn, apprentice scholar, Library of Throal, 1507

Generations of Name-givers throughout Barsaive and the lands beyond have learned to fear the great dragons. Even your most powerful magicians are but bumbling children in things magical when compared to us, and your most celebrated heroes cringe like frightened old women at the thought of facing the sword-like teeth and scythe-like claws of a dragon in battle. There is no shame in this fear. Beings of much greater power than you little folk have learned to fear us, for we great dragons are ancient and powerful beyond imagining. We walked these lands and rode the wind thousands of years before the first t'skrang tasted the waters of the Serpent or the first windling unfurled its wings in the cool morning air.

But one being exists that even great dragons fear, a being that existed long before my ancient race appeared in Barsaive. Some call if the Horror of a Thousand Faces, or the Corrupter. Others know it as the Horror That Is Worshiped as a Passion, or the Great Hunter. Even today, dragons speak its cursed Name only in whispers, for it is said to have ears that hear all and eyes that never close. It is the Horror that always was, the Horror that is, the Horror that ever shall be. It is Verjigorm.

The words of Name-givers cannot describe this Horror's all-encompassing evil, but I will try to do so in the hope that some day the monster might be banished forever from our world. Perhaps the following story, which I heard often as a hatchling, may help you understand.

Long before the first dragon soared through the sky, the world was darkness, a never-ending moonless night that even the sun and stars could not penetrate. Thick, black clouds choked the sky and spawned cold, biting rains that scoured the barren land like a plague of hungry locusts. The seas and rivers were foul, bubbling cesspools teeming with plague and death.

This was the age of the Dark One. One thousand and seven eyes sprang from its head, so that it might watch forever its cursed kingdom. Its terrible ears never shut, so that it might always hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and moaning of all living things. From its mouth flowed countless foul poisons into the waters and the winds. Its decaying flesh gave birth to countless abominations--creeping, sightless many-legged things that crawled and slithered across the land; black-winged, cloven-hoofed creatures that swarmed in the storm-filled skies; powerful, many-toothed beasts that ruled the dark waters.

As the ages passed the Dark One grew bored with its foul minions, for they were mindless entities. And so it spawned others in its own image. Soon the children of the Dark One, the horoi, began to birth their own foul spawn into the world. Each tried to outdo the others by creating the foulest creature to impress the Dark One, and soon the horoi grew insanely jealous of one another. Then the Dark One's children began to attack one other[sic], directing their terrible spawn as a general commands troops against an enemy. Their vile blood filled the oceans, and their minions fed on the putrid corpses that littered the land. The Dark One rejoiced at the carnage and spawned new horoi to replace those devoured by their brothers.

Some time during the world's endless night, the Dark one bore a horoi that was not like the others. At first it seemed a little different from its vile brethren. But as time passed, the horoi slowly changed. First, it withdrew from the terrible battle that consumed all the others. It stretched its dark, webbed wings and soared into the sky. The grotesque minions of its brethren pursued it, clawing at its skin and pecking at its eyes, but it paid them no heed. It continued to climb higher and higher, until it passed the dark storm clouds and its tormentors could no longer follow it. It soared on the winds until it reached the other side of the world, a place the Dark One had not yet corrupted. Exhausted by its journey, it set down and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

For ages it slumbered, as the carnage and suffering continued unabated in the domain of the Dark One. Then one day a break appeared int he ever-present clouds overhead, letting in a stream of sunlight that warmed the horoi and wakened it. As it looked about, it noticed that its slimy, pockmarked, blackened skin had turned into gleaming white scales. The formless hulk of its body had been replaced with four strong legs, a slender tail and neck, and a pair of graceful wings, all connected to a stout and powerful middle. As the horoi gazed at itself in wonder, it realized that the air was silent-- free of the cries of pain and fear that filled the Dark One's domain. As it surveyed its surroundings, the horoi realized that it was alone. Nothing crawled underfoot or slithered through the seas or swarmed in the sky. For a moment, the horoi felt a great relief. Then the horoi closed its great eyes for a moment and felt something else. For the first time in its life, the horoi knew it was lonely.

As the thought entered its mind, a wonderful thing happened. Beneath its feet, it felt grass burst through the earth: then bushes and trees and entire forests. Suddenly, the sound of waves crashing against the shore reached its ears, and the horoi knew that an ocean lay over the horizon. Next came the sound of running rivers and waterfalls, then the sounds of animals in the forests. As the horoi surveyed what its loneliness had called forth, its heart grew full of something it had never know--joy. At that moment, nine large tears formed in its eyes and fell to the ground. At the spot where the first drop struck, a handsome winged creature resembling the horoi appeared. This created, it called Dragon. The second and third drops yielded creatures the horoi Named Elf and Human. The fourth and fifth drops created Obsidiman and T'skrang. The sixth and seventh formed Dwarf and Windling; and the eighth and ninth, Troll and Ork.

These new creatures traveled across the new land, swiftly producing other of their kind. Their voices were like music to the horoi's ears, and their settlements were like jewels set upon a giant tapestry. As the days passed the horoi taught its children all it knew. It taught them how to harvest food from the forest and rivers, how to sing and write and paint. And with great sadness, it taught them how to forge and wield the sword and shield. The weapons puzzled the horoi's inquisitive children, for they knew not war; but the horoi told them that one day a darkness would descend on them and they must be ready to fight.

Meanwhile, the Dark One's domain grew until its spawn reached the edge of the untouched lands. When the foul things saw the wonders that their transformed brother had wrought, they hurried back to their dark master and told it what they had seen. When the Dark One heard their news it cowed to destroy the heroi and its children, and fathered its minions together into a terrible army.

The Dark One's army filled the sky like a storm cloud and teemed across the untouched land like a giant shadow. From all sides the Dark One's minions attacked the horoi and its children, spewing venom and gnashing teeth, cutting, and burning and striking and killing all in their path. For seven days and nights the battle raged, as the horoi's children fought with sword and shield against the overwhelming foe. Finally, only the horoi and its nine firstborn children remained standing against the Dark One and its legion of abominations.

At that moment the horoi reared up on its hind legs, spread its wings and shouted in a voice that echoed like thunder across the plains, "I am Nightslayer, Mother of Beauty and Father of Good. Protector of All That is Light! I command you to leave this place! Be gone!"

As the horoi's children watched, a strange thing happened-- the land itself, the water rose up against the Dark One and its spawn. Terrified before a power greater than their own, the wretched creatures fled, flying higher and higher until they disappeared from view. The Dark One watched helplessly, shouting at its minions to remain and fight, but it could not stop them. Enraged, the Dark One turned toward the horoi.

'Ungrateful horoi, you know not what you do," the Dark One said. " But you will pay for your insolence. I, Verjigorm, will hunt your children for the rest of time. I will slay every last one of them, and my minions will feed on their pain and terror. But I will not give the mercy of death to your favorite--- The Dragon, the one you created in your image. The Dragon will know eternal pain. As you betrayed me, the children of the Dragon's line will betray you. I will corrupt them, twist their souls and make them my own. Then I will return to reign over all the world."

With that the Dark One fled after its minions, throwing an enormous ball of fire at Nightslayer as it did so. As the flowing orb approached, the horoi gathered its children under its wings. When the ball struck Nightslayer, it exploded like a thousand thunderclaps. The earth and sky rumbled, and a vast cloud filled the sky. After a time the great rumbling stopped and the sun shone once again. Nightslayer's children then gathered near the horoi's head, but the great creature had died. They were left alone to await the return of the Dark one called Verjigorm.

Hi,

One thing I really missed on Reddit was that there were only 2 possible ways of posting : self-post (text) or straight link with nothing else. I would often have an intermediate 3rd way: a link, but with an associated short text.

Motivations:

1. Being able to add some context for the link: where does it come from, why did I post it, what did I post it for, what is special about it, what part of it do I intend to discuss, how does it relate to a personal experience, and so on.
2. Adding other links in the text, related to the main link (previous history of the same subject, link in another language / translation, counter opinions, ...).
3. Avoiding misinterpretation; do I endorse the link content (in full, part of it?), do I criticize or condemn it?
4. Doing the previous 1-2-3 points, without giving up the advantages of straight link: being still able for the readers to click and jump to the link straight from the group post list, possible thumbnail/preview/embedded display; and without resorting to a self-comment which will look awkward and get lost in the other comments after a handful of those comments are made.

In fact, if the goal of Tildes is to force a certain quality of post content and discussion, this mode may eventually be set to replace completely the 'straight link only' posting mode; in that case the following extra motivations come into play.

Extra motivations:

1. Mitigate stupid and low effort posts by forcing the poster to explain/describe in at least n character/words his link. If the poster is not able to spend 2 minutes thinking and writing a description, his link is probably not worth the effort of reading.
2. Mitigate trolling and malicious posts by forcing the poster to motivate clearly his posts, and not insidiously disguise his intent behind a fake innocence.

The accompanying context text should have a minimum and maximum length, for it should not replace well-developed 'self-posts'.

What do users and admins think about all that posting mode I sorely missed on Reddit?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! Maybe we can make these threads a thing here.

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

-> Nim notes <-

Some background

I am learning a new programming language Nim. As many would do, I also take my own notes as I am learning it, running little example by myself, etc.

    .. but I doing that a bit differently.

• I take notes in Emacs Org mode. Org mode has a feature set called Org Babel. That allows one to document the code snippets, and also run them directly in that document, and insert their output results below them -- Notes in Org

  This also helps me document regression of the language behavior between different Nim versions of any, as the exact outputs are documented too. After each major Nim update, I press a single binding (C-v C-v b) in Emacs, and all the output blocks get recalculated.

• But not everyone uses Emacs and Org mode. So to be able to share them to a wider audience, I need to export (Org term) that to a format like HTML, PDF, or Markdown..

• Hugo is a really fast static site generator that uses Markdown as one of the primary content formats. It parses that to HTML using a Go Markdown library called Blackfriday.

• As my notes are in Org mode, and converting them to HTML via Hugo needs them to be in Blackfriday compatible Markdown (which is almost like GitHub flavored Markdown), I starting working on an Emacs Org mode package ox-hugo about a year back. Using that, this Markdown file is generated. Hugo natively supports a subset of Org, but I needed to write this package to use the full power of Org mode.

• Hugo then takes that Markdown and generates the final Nim notes page in HTML.

In the end, I have something that ties together all things of my interest: Nim, Emacs, Org mode and Hugo :)

A bright light illuminated my workshop suddenly, causing me to drop my tools on the table. A figure appeared at the opposite side of the small office, encased within a surreal shadow in the middle of the blinding light. Slowly the light faded, as I made out the visitor. I was looking at myself.

"Wh-what are you- what am I...?" I stumbled, unsure if I could even blink anymore.

"I'm you from the future," the other me said. He appeared slightly older than I remembered from my mirror that morning.

"So it works?" I asked, wondering how else I would be there.

"Yes, it works," he answered, obviously wondering why I would ask such a thing.

"But why are you here?" I asked, just noticing I wasn't as happy as one would expect from meeting themselves. Not me, I was dazed but ecstatic. The other me seemed like he had been crying. "Are you ok?" I asked myself.

His eyes widened, but then quickly relaxed. "It's fine, but I just came to the wrong time."

"You didn't mean to meet me here?"

"No, this is too late." His voice became cold. "My work can still be recovered if I do it here."

"Do what here?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

The other me stared, as he pulled out a handheld device, much smaller than my phone. After pressing some buttons on the screen, the bright light returned, enveloping him again until he quickly disappeared from the room. I'm not sure why, but I ran into the area of his departure before the light faded. I panicked when I realized I didn’t know where or when I was going, but my thoughts were interrupted when the light faded and everything went black.

I came to what seemed like hours later to find myself in my office, but I wasn't alone. The other me- or some other other me was lying on the ground by the table, gasping for air.

"What happened?" I asked running to my counterpart’s side frantically. "Did... I do this to you?"

"It's all wrong," he said, clutching his chest. Blood trailed around him, seeping through his closed fist. "None of this makes sense."

Before I could speak again, I noticed something odd. He didn't look younger than me. He was older. "You're the me that I just met, aren't you?"

"Yes," he started, spitting up some blood. "I pulled out my knife, but he grabbed it out of my hand and stabbed me before I could get to him."

"But why?" I yelled, desperate to understand why I would attempt to kill myself.

"You try to fix one thing," he trailed off, his eyes losing focus. He became still and my mind turned into override.

I had watched myself die. I ended up going back in time to kill myself, but my past self killed me instead. That was my future. Why would I do that? Was I still going to do it, knowing what I knew? If I didn’t, how was I in still in the past?

"Don't even try it," a voice called behind me. "I don't know why you guys came back, but I'm not letting you kill me."

I turned around to see a younger version of myself standing in the doorway, wielding a bloody knife in one hand and the handheld device in the other. Before I could respond, he pushed a button and light filled the room once again. A few moments later, I was alone.

It was a time before I had even started working on time travel. My only way back disappeared with my past self, which didn’t even seem to make sense. How could he become me if he wasn’t even there anymore? Would I become me? My head hurt.

“Hello,” another voice called into the room. It was female, so I immediately knew it wasn’t me again. I turned toward the door to find the solution to one of my lingering questions.

“Gwen,” I answered, walking toward her with my hand extended. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“How did you know my name?” she asked, shaking my hand with a confused look on her face.

Smooth move. I didn’t know her name the first time this happened. But at least it revealed the date. This was the day I met the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. “I saw your name on the sign-in sheet,” I answered. “You must be the new girl. I’m Chris. Chris Michael.”

I began to lead her into my office. “Let me show you around. This is my off-”

What was I doing? There was a dead body on the floor by my worktable. Not just any dead body, my dead body.

“On second thought, my office is a mess,” I sputtered. I turned Gwen toward the hall. “Why don’t you head over to the break room around the corner and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee? Just give me a few minutes.”

“Sure,” she smiled. She began walking away, but stopped momentarily and shot me a wink. “You’re an interesting guy, Chris.”

As Gwen walked down the hall, I darted back into the room. My future death was still where I left it. Police weren’t an option, what would I tell them? An older version of me was killed by a younger version of me? The only option was to dispose of the evidence. Trying to think back to old gangster movies, I heard footsteps by the door.

“Uh, don’t come in here!” I yelled. “There’s a, uh-” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two men stood in the doorway. I was looking at two identical versions of myself.

“Hey, Chris,” the one on the left said. “Sorry about earlier. I didn’t know you weren’t here to kill me too.”

“So you’re the me from this time, right?” I asked Lefty. “Who is this then?”

“Hi Chris,” the one on the right said. “I’m him, but after he stopped me from saving our future self there“

“But you didn’t-” I turned to the left. “You killed him.”

“I did,” said Lefty. “Pay attention, because this will get even more complicated. After killing future us, I had to know why he came back, so I went to the future. You know what I found? Future you. Stranded, you had taken my place, fell in love with Gwen, and never invented time travel.”

My head hurt again.

“There was no way to know what happened,” interjected Righty, “because time was overwritten. So the original timeline had to be restored.”

“How?” I asked no one in particular.

“I went back to before our future self met me.” I’m not sure who said that, I was too busy clutching my head. “I took care of him and then sent you back to your proper time before you woke up. Everything continued normally and I followed the timeline to figure out what originally happened.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this part,” I said.

“It’s all about Gwen,” said Lefty. “As you know, she eventually broke up with you because you were too dedicated to your work. Apparently you fixed that mistake when you had another chance back here.”

“Gwen,” I whispered. “She’s waiting for me in the break room.”

“We know,” said Righty.

“So where did you come from then?” I asked Righty.

“I had to undo what I did,” answered Lefty. “With you back in your time, you finish inventing time travel, but things don’t end well with Gwen.”

“I already know that,” I sighed. “She broke up with me before. This is old news to me.”

“But,” started Lefty, “with the addition of time travel, you become obsessed with fixing things. It gets a little more complicated here. You basically go back in time and try to make it work with her over and over, but it never ends well. Eventually, you decide you have to go back to the beginning and… start all over.”

“By killing you and taking your place?”

“Exactly. My place.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Lefty, who was giving me an unnerving stare.

“What about me?” I asked “And Righty?”

“Righty…? Oh, because I’m standing on your right. He wants us to leave.”

“You two take the time machine,” said Lefty. “Go live with the dinosaurs for all I care, just stay away.”

Righty patted me on the back and raised his eyebrows in an approving nod. Lefty handed him the handheld device, which looked different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there seemed to be more buttons or something. Righty pushed one of them, but something was wrong. The expected light was there, but it was red. As Righty began to fade, a screeching sound emanated from the epicenter as he let out a horrendous scream.

“What did you do?” I yelled jumping into the hallway where Lefty had previously moved. His eyes widened as he pulled a familiar knife from his pocket.

“I can’t have you coming back and messing with my life!” he shrieked, swinging the knife in my direction. “I’ve already killed two of you, there’s no way you’re getting away!”

I jumped back into the room as the red light cleared, leaving behind a charred mark on the floor. Lefty followed me, still swinging. “Hey, what’s that?” I yelled, pointing behind him. He turned his head to find nothing, but before he could turn back, my fist met his chin. After pulling the knife from his hand I quickly buried it into his chest. As he fell to the ground, I could hear footsteps coming down the hall.

“Chris?” Gwen called.

I ran out of the room and slammed the door behind me to find Gwen holding two cups of coffee. “Hi, Gwen,” I said hysterically. She gave an odd look but then laughed, handing me one of the cups.

“I figured since you were so busy, I’d buy you the coffee this time. Would you like show me your office now?”

I looked at my closed door and then back at Gwen. “No, I still have some more cleaning to do. I have a new research project I need to prepare. But for now, how about we go enjoy these coffees in the break room?”

Hey all, I'm a board game designer named Adam Wyse and I just wanted to share my latest project that went live on Kickstarter this morning!

A little bit about me; I'm a former software engineer who now works in the board game industry full time. I have a few published games (Head of Mousehold, Masque of the Red Death), and many more that have been signed and will be coming out over the next year or two. I work for Roxley Games doing logistics and development. If you're a fan of modern tabletop games you've probably heard of Santorini or Brass.

Anyways, Mayday Games is publishing Poetry Slam; a word/party game for 3 to 8 players (10 if we reach the stretch goal). It's all about writing a word based on a prompt, then coming up with a short poem that allows other players to guess your word. Each player loses a letter each round that they can no longer use in later rounds. Coming up with your word faster will earn you more points, but you will lose more valuable letters! It's a strategic and hilarious word game that you can play with a big group - it makes for a pretty fun and unique experience.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maydaygames/poetry-slam-a-beatnik-3-8-player-party-game

I did up a full how to play video here a couple weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Y-0FBCjyM

One of the cool things that Mayday is doing is a referral system. If you back the game you get a referral link. If you get someone else to back the game using your link, you get a free playmat. Whoever refers the most people will get a cool prize pack!

If you have any questions about Poetry Slam, board game design in general, the tabletop industry, or Roxley Games, I'm happy to answer! I hope you'll give the project a look!

Edit: The project was cancelled because it kind of stalled in the middle, but the game is still going to be produced! It will be available at Origins board game convention in June, and then in retail shortly afterwards. If you are interested in checking out a gameplay video, we recorded on at my local game store last night: https://www.facebook.com/sentrybox/videos/10156328694703428/