A Fractal of Loops

and also the monks belt sample too

I love it!

I have got to make some monk's belt!

my uni staged philoctetes and one of the best choices was to have odysseus walk in with a cigarette through the entrance directly beneath the "no smoking" sign

Even anteaters have fun...

I love my Seikret and my Palico

California Quail (Callipepla californica)

Behold the pocket-sized western pygmy possum! (Cercartetus concinnus). One of the world’s smallest possums, this species typically weighs just 0.5 oz (14 g)—the size of an AA battery. This dainty marsupial is a nectarivore, meaning that its diet consists primarily of plant nectar. It inhabits treetops in forests throughout parts of Australia, using its long prehensile tail like a fifth limb as it moves from branch to branch.

Photo: gilliank, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

So for reasons I will not explain, I went on a hunt for Babylonian weather and found this absolutely fascinating study (McGovern et al 2020) looking into Babylonian weather through translations of their own records.

Which leads to these fascinating graphs:

But most interesting to me, is "the weather became cloudy, but rain did not fall; rain fell, but it did not loosen the sandal" which is apparently a common Babylonian phrase/proverb where the sandal is or is not removed.

Which, if you live in a river valley with a lot of clay, is likely a reference to how prolonged and absorbent the ground was! "to loosen the sandal" = extremely sticky and difficult to travel.

And look at these wind recordings!! The jump in records when 'wind direction' was added to the scribe list, and the most common weather direction! (North)

Even 4k years ago, there were words for cloudburst and rainbow. ♥

Link

My 4k chapter is 10k and not finished. And I should feel good because it means the idea has legs, but I just want to get this bit done!

I wanna write the bit with the actual lead character in it!

So, funny story, my 4K introduction chapter finished at a totally reasonable and entirely normal 15K.

You can give yourself one genetic mutation and it is safe, effective, and cheap*. What are doing?

*i know that a lot of these aren’t just due to one gene but are a complex interplay of several genes, epigenetic factors, and environmental factors, but we are playing pretend here

The fact that Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis are both by Euripides makes the whole thing really ironic, I think. And it kind of gives me feelings and opinions about the characters that I imagine some people wouldn't like much. But okay, I’ll share it here!

In Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia is willing to die out of a desire for patriotism and for glory and renown, in a way. She wants her death to be a voluntary sacrifice, similar to how the deaths of warriors are a kind of voluntary sacrifice. She's not thinking sympathetically of the Trojans, she's actually expressing a desire for them to be conquered. Don’t get me wrong, Iphigenia has shown empathy, but not like that — she shows empathy towards her family, Achilles and the Hellenic men in general, but not the Trojans. Iphigenia wants kleos. And yet in Hecuba, Polyxena is clearly a Trojan parallel to Iphigenia, having her sacrifice ordered so that the Achaeans can set sail. This occasion can only happen because Iphigenia was sacrificed first (because if she hadn't been, the Achaeans wouldn't have left Aulis), a sacrifice that Iphigenia proudly saw as her contribution to the conquest of Troy — a pride that she saw as a way to take back her agency. Iphigenia declared about how the Hellenes were free but the Trojans were slaves, and here is Polyxena, her Trojan counterpart, claiming that she would rather be dead than enslaved. Iphigenia is often remembered as the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra when it comes to their feelings — I mean, how Agamemnon didn't want to sacrifice her and how Clytemnestra was filled with grief and anger — but it’s less often remembered that…as their daughter, Iphigenia also shared her parents' vision and desires regarding Troy, at least to some extent. And this makes her parallel with Polyxena, who is a victim of this Achaean desire, quite ironic. Iphigenia is constantly remembered as the pure and sweet older sister of Orestes and Electra, she isn't remembered as a girl who wanted to achieve kleos. And I don't understand why. Male characters who sought kleos through the fall of Troy still receive empathetic receptions from the audience, so why does Iphigenia only elicit empathy in her sacrifice if her morality has been simplified to be purely good? Polyxena, who shares a tragic destiny like hers, is seeing in this tragic destiny an escape from a destiny that she judges to be even worse… slavery, something that Iphigenia wished for the Trojans, which includes Polyxena. 

— Aisling McCrea, No Man Is An Island?

Sweet mother, I can't long for girls--Arachne has crushed me with desire for fiber crafts

Should I buy a loom? No. Do I enjoy weaving? Very much no. Do I want to buy a loom and do some weaving? YES BADLY

Sweet Arachne, I cannot knit, you overcame me with longing too many times already this month and my tendons are fucked up. Please slow down with the longing for FIVE MINUTES

Arachne told me to tell you that if you had a spinning wheel you could probably spend your wrist-recovery time making yourself more sexy sexy yarns.

O cursed oracle! The gods are demanding indeed

Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

I think this is an incredibly important post for a lot of reasons. You have to write a bad book in order to learn how to do something. You have to suck at playing an instrument before you can improve.

Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.

AI is not like a calculator, or a synthesizer, or a prompt generator. It's not a tool to aid in your process of understanding or creating something. It is replacing your ability to learn things, and that is going to do so much damage if you let it.

thinking some more about what it means to be a "willing sacrifice" when polyxena is hardly willing as a sacrifice. in euripides' hecuba, she never had anything to do with achilles, and she certainly doesn't have a reason to care if the achaeans have wind for sailing. the most you can really say about polyxena is that she is willing to die rather than something else, in her case enslavement, but it doesn't follow that she's happy to be sacrificed. and even death over enslavement is not a position she exactly volunteers for.

just to be clear, that last sentence was understatement: she does not volunteer or demand to die. she finds out she is going to die, no matter what she wants, and then she says she would rather die than be enslaved. which is not the same thing.

~200yds give or take (kniddy noddy math), average 14wpi but some sections are definitely more sport-ish weight. Still the most consistent I’ve ever managed to get and the first spin I plan to knit with!