// game dev (subtype: technical artist) // animator (subtype: 3dcg + anime) // former physicist // trans woman // anarchist // art blog: @canmom-art // main site
last week we showed up to the shader jam while in a very altered state, and tried to express something rather inscrutable as a shader (sphere = blahaj = memdmp = transfemininity = recursion... it made sense at the time).
well the idea was sound?? this week i got the thing working and damn, we were onto something!
it's a quadtree marcher, building on the flower shader. every time a ray hits a sphere it takes the point on the sphere for new 'screen' UV coordinates, bonks the camera somewhere else, multiplies the colour, and the calculation anew. so each sphere is a view into another universe of spheres.
not bad for something we dreamed up during a trip i reckon
been teaching @nechronica (<3) programming after nefariously drawing her in with demoscene stuff. with our shared interests, this has led to thinking even more than usual about the conceptual overlaps with 'magic'... and this has resolved somehow into a new series tentatively called the 'wizard's guide to programming'.
the idea is: a guide to the conceptual frame of programming, and writing Rust in particular, in a slightly perverse and unconventional way with a lot of philosophical digressions. if we're lucky, maybe it can interest people who already know a thing or two about programming, as well as people who don't want to program anything but want to know how computers work a little better.
part 0 is a little discussion of the concept of "magic" and the history of "science", of course...
Before we talk about computers, we must talk about the world that contains computers.
part 1 discusses what a program even is, and whether they're real, which is probably important to know for writing them.
When we say a program is running on a computer, what are we even talking about?
part 2 introduces the act of creating things by naming them:
We introduce the most fundamental magical act.
and part 3 gets us started on our main magical tools, "functions" and "types", as we start on building a little micro-roguelike dungeon game.
the world's most erratic umineko liveblog updates again. an absolute monster chapter this time around, as we go to court to establish whether Natsuhi ダニット (dunnit) or not. let's see which, screenshot do we wanna go with...
oh yeah that'll do it
gigantic chapter, but lots of fun opportunities to theorise in this one. and uh... hm! we seem to have lost our... well, you'll see.
the world's most erratic umineko liveblog updates again. an absolute monster chapter this time around, as we go to court to establish whether Natsuhi ダニット (dunnit) or not. let's see which, screenshot do we wanna go with...
oh yeah that'll do it
gigantic chapter, but lots of fun opportunities to theorise in this one. and uh... hm! we seem to have lost our... well, you'll see.
glitch felt weirdly unconfident navigating the 'theatrical finale movie' format. after sitting through the mandatory 20 minutes of ads and trailers, the humorous warning not to give spoilers (which isn't doing much, from a quick survey of this website) and series recap seemed a bit of an awkward way to start. the "exclusive" merch plug at the end even more so; obviously merch is glitch's main business model but 'hey, buy our plush dax in the maid dress' seemed a little tonally off, considering. 'tv show + theatrical movie' is by now a well established model in anime, with the most popular (kimetsu no yaiba, chainsaw man and the like) setting records, so it was a little surprising.
i would say that for me, TADC got more interesting over its run; the writing and performances broadly became more confident and it got clearer what goose was doing, so while part of this was just the amusing absurdity of showing up at a cinema for a web series, i was broadly looking forward to this. episode 8 is of course already out, and it did feel like half a movie with a cliffhanger at the end, although they do actually run a version of the title song at the break into episode 9 so it's not just like one big movie.
and as for episode 9... well, I'm going to assume you've seen it, so there will be spoilers.
there are two real arcs to it. the first concerns jax; perhaps like me you had heard certain rumours going in. the second concerns more the lingering questions about the premise (like how the characters relate to the outside world) and resolving the core conflict between caine and the rest.
the former is definitely stronger. it felt increasingly apparent that jax was a character whose conflict goose is particularly interested in. the sequence in question calls back, at least visually, to the surreal abstract sequences in her earlier works like the elain the bounty hunter series and little runmo, and it has some lovely abstract visuals that got pretty demo-y at times; i appreciate that when it comes to depicting jax's hostile shield persona to push everyone away it does not pull its punches.
of course you probably care more about whether jax is officially a girl, right? the show certainly offers material on this front but stops short of declaring it outright (though the visual language in the bow scene is hard to mistake). I'm sure people will be arguing about it forever. the reading is easy to make; the story also seems quite personal, tho i am not going to speculate more than that; goose has a right to leave this open to interpretation, god knows the girl has enough eyes on her right now.
given abstraction has been set up as a metaphor for suicide and is played very explicitly that way in the film, the story can't really walk it back without undercutting the metaphor. you don't get to get people back from a suicide. unfortunately, having pomni get rescued at the last minute after insisting on embracing jax does instead end up somewhat undercut her choice to pursue jax even at risk of her own abstraction. that, however, is nothing compared to caine inexplicably coming back, reformed somehow by his time alone in the void, completely negating the twist at the end of episode 8. it felt like they spent the last few episodes setting up for this scene but afterwards were painted into a bit of a narrative corner.
so it ends up a sweet enough fan serving happy(ish) ending; we learn about the 'irl' versions of the cast, and they make peace with being uploads living in this world that they now more or less control. there are some cool sequences, like the match-cut staircase scene, but it is a pretty low-key ending and honestly the questions that were answered still leave a lot more that are also not very thematically important, like how all these random people got brain scanned.
but yeah, turns out the biggest problem was less the existential void of a pointlessly cycling existence of meaningless activities and more the annoying flying bastard fucking with them all the time. it's pretty chill after he gets his shit together.
a pomni cosplayer i overheard talking after the movie said it was cute but she wished it was more depressing, and honestly, fair lmao. I'm not sure exactly how i would have ended it, but this definitely feels like playing it pretty safe.
nevertheless, overall I'm glad goose and the rest of the team got the chance to make this show seemingly without much compromise besides yknow having to be a vehicle to move merch, and I hope that whatever she makes next can be a less stressful experience than this seems like it turned out to be. in particular, there's a lot of really fantastic character animation throughout the series, and of course it's gonna cast a long shadow on web animation to come; this one took glitch onto an entirely different scale. we'll have to see how long their formula works. and on another level, i look forward to the wave of people surely inspired by tadc to get into animation - it's nice to see a model like this working.
some scattered notes of major themes from recent pretty intense acid experience revolving around recursion and hyperbolic space. it was interesting, soon as it hit we went straight into 'we-moded' state, like instead of all this prevaricating seemed silly to think we might be anything other than plural, of course we are a cluster of things. and notably we seem to be a lot more comfortable using 'we' in everyday life now (though that's partly just like. meeting more plural systems that do that and seem to get along fine)
during the trip we got very chatty about all sorts of stuff as usual, at the same time space got very stretchy like in hyperrogue. the same kind of happened to concepts: we had a sense of concepts memories associated with a thing or place being stored inside triangles which we could open or close to spread out the space of concepts around them. thinking felt very geometric.
the following was written late at night while coming down from it, nine poles of interesting things which formed some kind of structure. and there's a shader in it
more tidy and worked out version may hit the main site at some point
oki first up subdivision surfaces in computer graphics. you take some piece of geometry, like a quad (four-sided shape), and replace it with four quads. this allows the mesh to hold more complex details. and you can do this recursively. with catmull-clarke you also smooth the positions towards a limit surface but you could do all kinds of things.
this is one very visualisable example of a rewriting rule, which is often used to generate structures like fractals. it's also, in the form of a context-free grammar, how a programming language is defined: you have a set of symbols that can resolve to one of a few other symbols and by recursively expanding that out you can in principle generate all syntactically valid expressions in that language.
that's one pole…
for a second pole, this weekend we played a roleplaying game about creating a language for an isolated group. we would take turns to create a word based on prompt cards and play out a scene to show how that word would be used. and while there were various provisions in the prompts for how that language would evolve, we also very quickly developed our own ways of using the jargon we had created, e.g. sarcasm, using the word to represent the people that use that word, etc.
and it was very interesting to observe how ideas contributed early in the game would expand out and shape the sorts of ideas we would come up with of where to take the story next. related to 'fictional positioning' in emily care boss/vincent baker language, but more abstract: by creating a word we created a space of possible expansions on that word and directed the flow of the game. so it's kind of a similar process of recursive expansion
ok, so then pole 3 is the lambda calculus. this is basically an algorithm that recursively transforms statements into other statements, and it's equivalent to a turing machine. it's the basis of functional programming and a huge foundation of computer science.
and thinking about how in the lambda calculus, one path of continuous rewriting from the same expression might terminate, while another might not.
pole 4 is our subjective experience of time and space stretching out hyperbolically (compare hyperrogue). a corner could expand in associations to become a mini universe but it's still all contained in that 'triangle'
pole 5 is still a bit unformed but it's in projective geometry and the idea of projecting that triangle through other concepts
pole 6 is the ability to observe the recursion from outside and stop the recursive expansion if necessary. analogy: mrna transcription and the various functional units that do things like 'locate a relevant section of DNA' and 'produce a string of precursor mRNA' and 'snip it up according to cell environment to produce different combinations of protein segments'; all of these little functional units eagerly running around in the cell grabbing onto anything that has the right type to fit into their active site. and then various regulators and signalling systems to indicate when all of that should go ahead and when it should rein it in
every cell is a computation process
pole 7 is the deleuzian body without organs so far as we understand it; the capacity to create functional structures out of something previously formless. a silicon wafer superposes every possible circuit it could hold, and then particular circuits are etched in; but we are a process that can etch itself new functionality out of its capacity to just give things names
so then pole 8 is our recognition of our existence as a system of generating functions; kind of a foundation to understand the different personas we can construct both internally and externally
and then pole 9 is i guess making a visual expression of this in a recursive shader (we showed up to the fieldfx shader jam and managed to livecode to some degree lmao) where the spheres represent the roundness of blahaj which now signifies nora memdmp, and also through it transfeminity and being a creature and so forth; and each sphere recursively expands into another view of the spheres
(more specifically, it raymarches through a quadtree grid of spheres, derived from this shader with the flowers; then when it hits a sphere, it takes the polar coordinates on the sphere as UV coordinates to re-run the whole shader down to about recursion depth 3.)
(nb: had real performance issues running this shader on what is supposed to be a better computer, so do not have a video currently, will upload it later)
Is sending your mind back into your body at an earlier age murder because it overwrites the younger you's mind?
I think no. If your past self sets up a bomb to kill your future self, no one would think that was murder even if your past self was pretty sure that your future self would change their mind about it. The interests of your past, present, and future selves aren't perfectly aligned (and there may or may not be total continuity of consciousness) but these selves clearly blur together sufficiently that we can treat them as a single individual, and would classify such an act as suicide, not murder. If so, however you think of overwriting your past self - suicide, nothing special at all (arguably depends on the specific rules of time travel in play) - I don't think you could call that murder either.
I actually think I would call the first scenario murder, or some third thing depending on the context? In our pedestrian reality, the bomb in question would be something the person remembered planting - every day they don't disable it is a day they are consenting to suicide. If we add in magic, and allow for someone to kill their future self without them consenting to it via time portals or memory wipes, that seems substantially different from suicide, right? The dead person had no desire to die.
We never face this scenario in real life, so we have no intuitions for it. But if you think about it for a bit, "choosing to die" is crucial for a suicide. Here is either a murder or maybe something like an accident. Maybe "self-murder" if you want to get creative about it?
And I think this heightens if you reverse time - we accept that time moves linearly and so you are responsible for your own actions. If you take a pill that will somehow kill you in twenty years, yeah I can see how that would be called suicide (even if I lean another way). But with going back in time, your younger self committed no actions! They were completely uninvolved in whatever is going on. The direction of time is load bearing to ethics.
Now admittedly what "sending one's minds back" means is up for debate here - I see versions where that is essentially murder, and versions where it is much more of a "mind meld" kinda deal and doesn't work the bad way. That is all just a separate question, my thoughts are just assuming it is the bad versions for the sake of argument.
The past-timeline presumably doesn't exist in reality until you travel to it, so there isn't a mind there to erase if you jump directly from the present into your old body and thus no murder occurs. Probably!
Inside Mari by Oshimi Shūzō explores this question a little; the premise initially appears to be a straightforward body swap story, but then the protagonist discovers that their former body continues to be inhabited by their original consciousness, raising the question of whether they've murdered the person they've been copied into. I won't spoil it further but it's a fun psychological drama.
at risk of swinging around some cognitohazards, the time traveller is late to the party lol. it already became increasingly untenable to think that any element of "me" has long term persistence and we currently feel that we pass the baton and replace who we were quite often.
the model is like this: elements of "personality" are constantly being loaded in and out of working memory in response to environmental and mental triggers, and also continually being built out through recursive elaboration. there is no particular guarantee that the properties we consider to make up a 'person', like habits, goals, beliefs, affect, memories, ways of thinking and so forth will stick around; everything is constantly getting ship of theseus'd the fuck out of it and evolving on a chaotic course.
this is particularly acute if you have a condition that leaves you with limited working memory such as "adhd", but it seems like it's probably at least a little true of everyone.
like, how do you know you are the 'same person' you were yesterday, or a year ago? well, you are able to retrieve memories (which you assume are mostly true) and look up records (same) and, most importantly, you have a habituated inner self-narrative function that associates the symbol 'I' with those various things: this is my hand, I was there yesterday. it is conventional to interpret that the 'I' that is remembering is the same entity 'I' that wrote the memories, but this is kind of arbitrary: in computers, we take a different stance, and say one 'program' can write a file and 'another' can read it, even though these 'programs' are entirely abstract entities made out of the same instructions operating on the same hardware.
of course, since all these processes are attached to a body it is natural for the current 'me' to pick up where the previous one left off and keep operating the same interface of social roles, ongoing projects etc., but it will not be doing so in the same way yesterday's 'me' was, and the differences could prove to be quite drastic.
under this account, a future time-traveling version of us dropping into our body would amount to dumping a whole flood of procedural, episodic and semantic memory-mechanisms into our brain, perhaps setting up new circuits to process them in different ways; we would generate different 'programs' than we would otherwise and our life would divert down a different course, and our narrative-self-model would be different (we would believe ourselves to be a time traveller). which is to say we'd undergo a pretty major switch.
however, compare other things that change the course of a life: a traumatic event, a profound acid trip, gaining or losing a job, a chance meeting with a partner, the social media eye of sauron: all of that would (more gradually) achieve the same thing, right, as the effects compound? just to a much lesser degree with a stronger chain of 'continuity'.
so it all rather depends on what is preserved. is the future time traveller just a new headmate with knowledge they "shouldn't" have? (not unlike 'fictives' who find themselves subjectively experiencing first-person memories of places their body has never been and things which did not happen, but in this case accurate to some future.) or do they completely wipe your existing memories and leave only the parts of the body outside the brain intact?
(in fact, the experience of a time traveller replacing you with memories, affects, intentions etc. from a past time is something a lot of us will experience: if it happens suddenly and temporarily in response to a trigger it gets called a 'flashback', if it happens due to age it gets called 'dementia'.)
unfortunately this isn't just a fun little thought experiment; so far as suicide we have had to think about this kind of thing quite explicitly to make sense of things that cannot really be understood.
we reached the conclusion that it is not obviously the case that someone who kills themselves has a continuous chain of conscious intention all the way up to the point where they do it. in fact, it seems rather more frequent that suicidal thoughts come and go: someone can be eagerly making plans and pursuing a project one day and decide to kill themselves on the next.
this has a lot to do with the functioning of memory and trauma and so on: when you are feeling bad your brain associatively supplies even more material to feel bad about, and makes it harder to imagine a positive future, but when you're feeling better, all that stuff is not 'loaded into cache' and doesn't affect you in the same way.
a friend who killed itself recently had secretly acquired a bottle of poison some months before it died. this is not the same as arming a bomb, which would from that point be an automatic effect - but it did make it a lot more likely that when it felt suicidal in the future, it would have the means available to act on it. at other times it was pursuing new projects, making plans for the future, enjoying times with its friends, and probably not even thinking about the poison. i think it is reasonable to think that its intentions were not time-coherent.
my own experience of suicidal ideation was that it would come on as a sudden, overwhelming and intense feeling. it became impossible to bear for a period. evidently some version of me was able to survive, but in a way that "i" was so changed by that period that "i" was a pretty significantly different person after. you could perhaps say that the version of 'me' that existed then did achieve their goal of ceasing to exist... just more gradually, and leaving enough pieces to build something else from the ruins.
romaincrisis
izzy806
dailybridgerton
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
tangentwithtanner
