binomech's garden

Bad actors must develop new methods for breaking the information loop for platforms with chronological feeds like Mastodon.

Such methods may include:

• Manipulating content moderation policies in a way that favors desired speech.
• Coordinate efforts to co-opt dissenting opinions in a way that weakens peoples’ willingness to express their views over time.
• Flood feeds at opportune times when dissenting posts gain traction.
• Continuity in a single narrative across a select group of prominent Posters.
• Targeted amplification of specific articles and posts that do not provide new information but continue to push a single narrative.
• A reduced ability for Aggregators to aggregate. Whether it be from suppressing dissenting speech or reasonable doubt of authenticity.

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When there is rest, everything else passes out of existence. To rest is not to be. To do is to be. Mine is not a world of being; it is a world of becoming. The world of being, the silent, still world where things simply are, that does not exist. The rockery, the pavilion, the skyline of high-rise flats, the flagpoles over the cricket ground, none of this is really there. The world of happenings, of movement and conflict, that is there.

source: Notes on Blindness by John Hull

They say you can never go home again, and if they're right I think what they're really saying is that if you are ever so intimately connected to a place that you are of it, you are almost necessarily destined to experience the odd pain of knowing when you are no longer of it even if you are still welcome to enjoy it as if you were.

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(...) to be wanted is... it's someone being eager for your words. it's the excitement of being asked about your day. it is another's hunger to get to know me more. it's what fashions a butterfly colony into my stomach. it inspires poetry from within. it's not something being horny can fix in a pinch. it's not something to be fixed at all. it's a delicious curiosity. and i crave it. covet, even, as much as someone fixated on desire would with carnal dalliances, if not more. it's far more erotic than anything sex can give me.

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Under a sky of shredded clouds, he sees what his mind has been trying to show him for whole spans of minutes now. Caitlin Lightcap on the ice, kneeling, her hands pressed to her bloodied ribs, her helmet off, her hair blown free, looking up at the corpse of Karloff and the rent-open chest of Brawler Yukon, leaching radiation. Laughing. Pure joy.

“We did it, you know,” he murmurs, “but I like to think you always knew we would.”

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Because we live we are granted names, streams, shocks of heat, murmuring summers. All the days you have ever breathed are swallows shooting between trees. When the wind pushes branches in and out of shade it is an opening, as every small gesture toward another person is incomprehensibly alive. Will you be part of the stoneless passage? When life starts to take things away will you grow very still beneath the larch or feel the slow flight of birds across your body. The bright key of morning. The bay fanned with foam.

source: The Infinities by Joanna Klink

For whom does the bell toll? For whom do I don this clown’s garb and dance in the town square? I am grateful to have found friends, but I feel increasingly drawn away—not by some misbegotten notion that there’s too much negativity, or by the dubious claim that the internet is no longer fun. No. The darkness is within me. All these worries, the pull toward spaghettification in how I interact with others. What I hope to achieve, what drives me toward a kind of broken mirror of expectation upon which I’ve been cutting myself since I very first felt shame. The call is coming from inside the house.

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There is no if. There is only this: a dance to be forgotten, a lifetime of wanting to be seen, felt, and missed. For absence to sear. And yet I know that if I give in to these tantrums, to tear it all down, what would even be accomplished? Who would notice? Who would care?

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In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as examined by Annabelle Pelster in an essay for Girls on Tops’ Read Me magazine, subtitles were used sparingly and translated minimally to intentionally exclude both the characters in the room and those of us in the audience who do not understand the Osage language, thus driving home the exploitative power of William Hale’s language knowledge.

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The desire for comfort for those who Capitalism has pushed to its margins automatically creates discomfort for those that profit from it; it's an act of violence, even when it’s performed in a non-violent manner.

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Many people think taste is all about choosing what is good. That is part of it. The other part is suffering what is bad in your own work until you can make it good. If your taste is ahead of your ability, you will spend months producing work that looks wrong to you. The only way through that valley is to keep going long enough to close the gap.

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Math is the most accurate language we have for describing the world, but sometimes we don’t need accuracy, we need relation and approximation. That’s poetry. Poetry is a mutation of the language that allows for evolution. We can expand a body of knowledge with logic. We can expand a body of knowledge with experimentation. We can expand a body of knowledge with lateral thinking and comparison.

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People have limited attention, limited bandwidth, so you have to cut every dead word and every false gesture. It has to be relentless and inevitable.

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Picking a fight for the sake of fighting doesn’t do anything interesting. Disagreeing with a premise or an approach is incredibly generative.

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Characters can become the meat chewed up to keep the system running—as in the case of the burnt machinist or the dead teenage girl—or they can become, themselves, producers of even more death, embarking on psychotic road-trip killing sprees or vigilante missions to rid the streets of human filth. Cosseted by imperial wealth, they have no connection to the real labour embodied in their surroundings, and no economic need to engage in or even understand such labour themselves. Consumption can only turn back on itself: hollowed-out like Amy’s stomach, or else apathetically comfortable like the disaffected wealthy loners vulnerable to the recruitment tactics of the new-agers.

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