Telepath

I finally found you.

It isn’t fair to say there are better telepaths, it isn’t that simple. It’s like sports, ironically. There are plenty of guys out there who are stronger than me, and I know most of them, or of them, rather. People with abilities in my area aren’t terribly common; it’s a small world. Folks with longer range, can do more at once, can do naturally what I have to figure out how to do, who can actually tap the powers of others, but there’s a technique to it beyond just competing with another mind. I’m not strong, but I’m a good player.

And I found you.

I had to look in ways I had never dream’d were possible to even come close. Find the holes in the defense systems you develop’d to keep your rotten kind safe from prying minds of guys like me so you can keep dreaming up new ways to hurt people. Walk through agents and lab techs and bureaucrats to locate you. I had to look beyond the edges of my vision to do what no telepath had done before. I closed in on the Transeuclidian.

Now you’re going to get what’s been coming to you since you step’d into a lab and put aside the decency that keeps the rest of us from being you. The difference between you and human is too big, and no amount of crime-stopping on your part will change that.

I come up behind him. As I touch his mind, my just vengeance turns to horror. Everything stops.

---

I feel so old now. Less than a second has pass’d in the world beyond me, but in here it’s been about seven years. Twelve if you consider the fact that I don’t sleep and thirty if you remove an average day’s empty-head’d idling.

In here. My body has long ago stop’d being a part of me. If this ever wears off, I might need to learn to walk again. I’m glad my eyes don’t itch or I’d have gone insane.

I base those figures from before on my internal monologue’s average speaking rate and my sense of time. I used to hate math, but what do you do with your time when you can’t move and have only yourself for company?

Therapy, as it turns out. Shrinks on tv always have you do all the talking and coming up with solutions on your own anyway, the leeches. Staring into the back of the head of the man who warp’d your sister into the mess she became and countless others for this long forced me to examine myself.

I think what happen’d is that when I touch’d his mind I got a power feedback. If he thinks this quickly all the time, it would explain alot. If he can control it, he’s lucky. I can’t. The feedback isn’t making me smarter, just fast. I say that in the present tense because despite the fact that I tried to disconnect immediately once I realized what was happening, apparently there’s a small time delay. If he can’t control it, then there’s nothing I could have ever done to him. I’m afraid that if I try to make contact with him or read his mind, it’ll make this situation worse. Out of my periphery I can see a woman mid blink. The man in front of me must be an abyss of time.

I’ve had lots to think about. I wonder’d for a while how my brain hasn’t burn’d up with all the electricity. It implies that there’s more to thinking that we don’t see, which makes sense considering no one can seem to explain how telepathy works. I took to thinking in narrative like this. It helps to feel like I’m talking to someone, like Richard from next door or God. Or Suzie. I miss you.

I feel like doing these reports every once in a while gives me direction. Or at least it gives me a feel for my progress.

I’ve come to forgive him, which I can accept now is what my sister would would want. Hate poisons you, and got me into this situation in the first place. All I want’d to do so many times is scream. At him. Myself. The sky. My luck. For help. Just to hear something other than the slow drone of the air pressure and roar of the street. Your senses keep feeding you information slowly, but it stays in your brain. I only notice it when I think about it, or if I’m silent for too long in here.

I don’t remember what my voice sounds like. I don’t remember my face. I wonder’d briefly if I was in hell, and I just made up the life I had before. Those kinds of thoughts aren’t worth thinking about other than to tell you. After this long, I can’t give in.

I’m sorry. I made my life about hurting this man because I kept hurting even after her suffering was over. I used her tragedy as an excuse to take away sons and fathers and wives and it broke the families that were left behind just as I had been. I imagine he was trying to accomplish something, however misguided. I was just consumed. I’m still haunt’d by the fact that I don’t remember all of their names. When someone comes looking for me some day they won’t have the time I’ve had to come to terms with myself. Before this happen’d I was every bit the monster I always call’d him.

Even now, after all this time, I don’t understand him. I barely ever knew anything about him. I want to.

---

Time suddenly starts to pass again and I’m overwhelm’d. I fall, feeling something for the first time in decades. There’s so much noise.

A hand. He’s helping me up? I steady myself on the bench. How did I get here? I’m crying. I look up at him. I actually turn my head and I look up at him. My face feels weird, no longer used to what an expression feels like. I try to put a voice to the words I’ve been planning to say to him for years, but the words are gone. A sound in my throat.

“I touch’d your mind.” Like riding a bike, apparently.

“I’m aware. You’re handling your time away well, but you also let go the quickest.” Someone else’s voice! His voice. He looks bored, right? Or is that no expression at all?

“You kill’d my sister.” This isn’t how it was supposed to go. It’s so fast.

“And?”

I take the prompt, even if that wasn’t what he meant. “And I forgive you.”

I hug him and wonder how he can bear to wait that long.

---

Written over the course of a productive afternoon in 2011. The Transeuclidean is one of several characters of mine from a long time ago that I’ll probably never do anything with, so I figured I might as well publish this and get it out of my personal archive. I’d hate to lose it. Might be part of a series if I decide to write a vignette for one of the other characters.

Litmus Tests

I collect tests or clarifying questions that are useful for quickly orienting my thinking about a subject upon a first encounter. Like the semi-recent Lexicon, this is not an exhaustive list, and I’ll add to it as I think of more. Several of these are red flag indicators for judging yourself or other people.

• Tilt’d Scales: The classic response to many dichotomies such nature vs nurture is that it’s probably both, but that’s incomplete and dodges the question. How likely is it that both factors contribute exactly equally to the outcome? Usually not very. “Balance” doesn’t require perfect symmetry. Determine which factor if any is the greatest contributor, and whether it’s the dominant fraction or merely the plurality.

• Infinity Analysis: Extend the contrasting possibilities of a polarizing subject to infinity and see which side is better or worse, and also what you’d consider the middle. I would prefer to totally abolish copyright and other intellectual property law rather than have permanent copyright, the latter being closer to the current state. Plays nicely with Tilt’d Scales, since the exact middle between the ridiculous extremes is often not the best possible arrangement.

• Kant Universality: Would it be viable if everyone did this at every opportunity? If yes, the strategy has longterm stability. Originally in my notes as Kant Let You Do That StarFox.

• 4 Sides of a hypothesis: For a given test, what are the rates of: affirmative, negative, false positive, false negative, and the consequences for each?

• Reversal of causality: Whenever you see “A causes B”, consider how likely it is that “B causes A”. This is a natural fit for set-subset relationships, such as hard work and success: hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but the majority of the successful were hard working because success has an inbuilt selection bias towards effort. Depression may cause weight gain due to hormone changes, or weight gain might cause depression due to hormone changes, and intuition alone is insufficient to draw an arrow of causation between the coinciding factors. Consider also that they might both be caused by a 3^rd factor.

• A 4^th Option: When given a dichotomy or dilemma, the question pulls you in 2 directions and it may be tempting to find a compromise between them via a 3^rd option. I prefer responses that break the boundaries of the question entirely and choose something off-spectrum.

• Conflict of interest: Is the argument preceed’d by an incentive to have that belief? Most arguments and beliefs are motivated reasoning to justify existing behaviour. See the survivorship bias of “I worked hard for what I have”, which stems from “whatever anyone has is what they deserve to have” regardless of whether that was the deciding factor.

• True Aims: Does the effective goal served by an action/a series of actions match the stated goal? The education system’s stated goal is knowledge and understanding, which it fails at spectacularly. It’s effect, and thus its true aim, is flagging graduates for employment. This is why percentage of a degree doesn’t track linearly with employment nor income, and students can barely remember a third of the material after a year. Do your actions demonstrate your stated beliefs and values?

• Eros & Thanatos: Does the motivation seek to go towards something good or away from something bad? Generally the former is healthier. See: drugs, exercise, diet, media consumption, etc.

• Spocking: Does the distinction being made have any practical effects? From the pragmatist quote “there’s no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference somewhere else”, often attributed to Spock as “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.” This test is why I adopt’d the terms meaningfully and trivially distinct.

• If you met yourself, would you be your friend?

• Music these days: Do you enjoy new kinds of music? An inability to do so is the result of a mental calcification closing you to new experiences, and is a sign you might be over as a person.

• Rhetorical Strawman: I often “confirm” what someone means using a purposefully inflammatory example to highlight cases that are excluded by their proposed framework or make explicit something unstated that’s assumed to be impossible. f.x “Are you saying it’s impossible to be both wealthy and sad?”

• Subjectivity: One of the key properties of subjectivity is that it can’t have truth value. The only reason “it’s just my opinion” can work as a defense is if true and false cannot apply, which also means that any statement that’s provably true or false is by default not an opinion.

• Where did you get that opinion? If you can’t support an opinion from first principles and you can’t recall what inform’d your opinion on a subject then you can’t really defend that source as a good one, which makes the opinion itself suspect. Bonus points in that this is a nice rhetorical device for undermining an opponent in a debate, since most people generally don’t keep track of their sources.

• What gives you the right: True rights, rather than mere legal rights, cannot by their nature be grant’d or revoked. You gain them when you qualify by meeting the conditions to have them, such as how the capacity for feeling entitles you to a freedom from suffering. Rights are also usually pair’d with obligations, in that if you have a right not to suffer then others are obliged not to harm you. A critical reframing of this is in the negative: if something is not a right, then I can infringe it freely. If you have no right to comfort, then I can freely infringe your comfort. If you have no right to food, I can starve you, etc. Note that you may defend the capacity to infringe what seems like a right by others means: if I reject the right to life as intrinsic, I can still say that if a sapient mind desires life, then to kill it is to subvert it’s right to selfdetermination, which it qualifies for by its sapience.

• Flip a coin, if you’re still unsure when you get the outcome, you want the opposite outcome that the coin gave. Not everyone has free transparent account of their thoughts and feelings in a way that allows them to organize and consolidate into a singular decision. To some people, many of their thoughts are in a shape they can’t put words to, and to some poor souls that happens mostly in the background of their minds, so their decisions aren’t clear. They still give an overall indication though, and you can force them to one side or another of a binary decision with this trick.

There are a few of these that, while useful to think about as applies to yourself, are also extremely good predictors of my dismissal of a person.

• Choice of insult: Often a person’s primary or initial point of attack is one of their own central values or sensitivities, and an infringement of that offends them. f.ex “Shrimpdick virgin” means they primarily conceive of value in terms of sex.

• Do you resist correction?

• Do you listen, or only wait for your turn to speak?

• Empathy: Do you think everyone is like you, or do you try to understand how they are? How able are you to imagine what others want, their mindset & beliefs, or how they would respond to something? An indicator of intelligence.

• Manipulating abstracts: How able are you to deal with hypotheticals or general statements? An indicator of intelligence.

• Complains someone else “always has to be right”.

• Complains about “thinking too hard” about something.

Test-driving my random character generator

I made a massive random character generator. However big you’re thinking, increase the exponent 1, maybe 2. That’s far too big to just dump on people though, so instead I decided to make a character using it so you can see the thing in action. I’ll direct link the relevant tables as they come up.

Random Character Personality, Culture, & Backstory Generator

I’ve spoken before about my love for random generators, and this one is a crown jewel. You can use it to different depths as befits your needs, such as rolling a small handful of dice to make an interesting background character or rolling a few more to make the culture of a foreign country. It also serves as a fairly robust system for understanding the inner workings of other people and as a descriptive language it helps you to clearly see more aspects of others, though in that endeavour it’s hardly complete. Still, using it as a get-to-know-you tool leaves you with a very good understanding of someone. Much of what follows is not original work, but a compilation of type and trait systems from antiquity and modern psychology. Because of the broken legal system, there’s a strong chance that the science is under copyright, but if it gets taken down I’ll still have my own copy floating around so feel free to message me for it.

Lexicon

I have alot of terms or phrases I use often that I don’t much see in common circulation. For some, the meaning is clear from the phrase, others are tied up in personal anecdotes or otherwise have an opaque meaning, so I thought I’d put them into a list to make for easy reference for others. This will grow over time as I invent more or identify the ones I use as being uncommon.

Remaking my calendar

Lately I’ve been rethinking alot of the systems that govern my life with the intention of making things more efficient and effective. My largest weakness has been my checklist system, which I hadn’t been devoting enough energy to lately and so I thought I should introduce some metrics to track it over time so I can troubleshoot. My current system is a checklist for each unit of time: today, this week, this month, and one that’s just “eventually”, and at the end or beginning of each unit of time I select items from the larger denomination to promote to the next smallest list in the hierarchy, so usually items don’t actually get check’d off until they hit the daily level. When an item hits the daily level I also like to add a time estimate to it so I can roughly block out my day, as well as improve my ability to estimate the length a given task will take. Anything that doesn’t get done that day has one of a short list of fates: it gets deleted when I decide it isn’t happening at all, it gets promoted back to a larger timespan if it’s untenable today, or it gets roll’d into the next day with a marker keeping track of how many times I’ve not completed it. I also add items to the appropriate lists throughout the day both as I think of things I want to do at some point and after I’ve done something I hadn’t plan’d on. At midday I might be at 8/13, then finish that day at 20/22, as happen’d recently.

Listening to Digibro talk about his newyear’s traditions and CGP Grey’s method of themes lead me to thinking about time itself. Grey setting a theme for the year that approximates what he wants to accomplish is a good idea, but a year is too much time to really predict things meaningfully for the kinds of projects I find myself in. An easy way to illustrate this is to think about media that came out or came to you a year ago: it feels like it’s just become “the past” by that time, which is probably why “best of the year” lists tend to favour the latter part of the year as early things get forgotten. So what’s the best segment to think about time in? For me, an adequately large timeframe would be either a third or a quarter of a year. My intuition is that a quarter will be better, so I decide to set seasonal themes in addition to a yearly theme. In the future I might dispense with the yearly theme, but it’s worth trying at least.

Around the time I was considering this I ran into a series by Arifexian on how to build calendars and the different methods that civilizations built calendars in general over the centuries. Combine this with the Digibro idea of having holidays that are specifically meaningful to you & your lot ^{see the Digifam Plays videos from 2018 January} and you get me questioning the ordering of days in a calendar altogether. Newyear’s will be elevated with similar importance to Digi’s Newyear’s, which we’ll leave at Jan 1^st for the time being since it’s conveniently recent.

The Voice Within & Getting It Out

Reddit asks:

Is it normal not to have an inner monologue? I can intentionally create one, but it feels unnatural.

I have an inner monologue and most of my friends do, but it isn’t always perfect sentences as fiction might lead you to expect. It can take the form of full sentences, but it’s often phrases or sentence fragments with ephemeral connection to one another. When I read, it’s my internal monologue doing the reading, and when I speak, it’s that same inner voice using my throatpipe instead of speaking into my head. Listen to natural speech, to someone ramble disjoint’d loose threads trying to express an idea they haven’t put words to yet and that’s what it’s like for most people I ask.

Alternately, watch yourself compose a text message or comment. You change word choice, back up over it and start again in bursts of rhythm that ebb and break and pause. Occasionally you change course, delete a whole paragraph, and come at it from a different angle. Now imagine doing that outloud, but instead it’s in your mind.

Less vs Fewer & Exotic States of Categorical Continuity

^{Alt title: A Mind at Play, Viewer Discretion Advised.}

I was watching part 3 of the PBS Infinite Series… series on the mathematics of brains and was bother’d by how often the host said “less” when she meant “fewer”. For the unaware, much/fewer is a linguistic distinction between discrete and continuous things, similar to much/many. Water is continuous, so you say “how much water” rather than “how many water”, and in kind with that you also say “less water” instead of “fewer water”. Apples are continuous, so you say “how many apples” rather than “how much apple” and “fewer apples” rather than “less apples”. My favourite way to discuss this is an ultimately clear example: holes. Holes are categorically discrete as opposed to other discrete objects like fruit because you can’t have half of a hole, only a smaller hole. And yet linguistically at least you can have partial quantities of other discrete objects. 1 1/2 bananas is perfectly valid, but you absolutely cannot have 1 1/2 holes. This seems to reveal an unnamed state between the truly continuous and the categorically discrete, a divisible mesophase.

Chasing this concept only reveals stranger insights. Trying to list other things that were categorically instead of just nominally discrete yield’d a few interesting examples: ideas and people are both truly discrete. Half a person is still fully a person ^{if a bit inconvenienced} and if you split apart a thought you just get 2 other thoughts. The idea of division as a test to see if something is discrete was put through its paces: 1 1/2 triangles is just 2 triangles, but 1 1/2 spheres works. Or does it? Half a sphere is either a smaller sphere, or a hemisphere, and whether a hemisphere is its own class of object or a partial sphere requires a better definition of sphere. You could take smaller fractions out of a sphere that are themselves whole spheres leaving behind a pomegranate shape, then take the limit of that operation on the connective tissue until you wind up with a 3 dimensional version of an Apollonian Gasket.

^{This being one of those.}

This is also not the only kind of division you can make. If we say that a particular triangle has 3 entangled points with 3 edges and 1 face between them, then slicing it apart will give you 2 triangles but dividing its face from its points will give you 1 triangle and an unbound’d planar face. Unless you mean that earlier definition strictly, in which case a certain category of division gives you 2 triangles and a different sort of division gives you none. I think it would be a overly cavalier assumption to value one kind of division over another unless we embrace the idea that “division” as a concept breaks down here.

Is it that restricting division to quantitative instead of qualitative things yields the distinction between the nominally & the categorically discrete? Personhood as a binary threshold seems initially to support this, but maybe that only holds for binary thresholds. A grain of sand is clearly not a pile, and you can have pile of sand, but if you have a pile with half the extension of another and combine them, you start’d with 2 piles and got 1, not 1 1/2 in the end. Yet if you perform sufficient but finite divisions to a pile you get no piles, just grains of sand. Integers are definitionally discrete, but if you allow second-order groupings such as “a dozen” then you can clearly have half a dozen otherwise-discrete things.

If nothing else, this clearly shows to me that there’s space to make a linguistic distinction between the categorically discrete, the continuous, and also the mesophase between them. It’s worth the risk of there being 2 more words for people to get wrong. Ooh, words! That’s another categorically discrete thing.

This meandering path of exploration has taken much longer to write than it did to speak ^{this is a rough transcription of a 2ish minute conversation I had a bit ago} but serves as a good look into the pace and path of my mind when I discover a new problem to chew on. I didn’t get all the answers instantly, but I did get a good way into it before it occur’d to me to record all of this for posterity. I consider this incomplete as a subject, but other demands on my attention mean I’ll have to come back to this later.

^{Discretion. Discrete. To make Discrete.}

I Judge Your Username – an instructional diatribe

Maybe it’s the circles that I travel in and have historically, but it feels unnatural to me for creators not to have a creator name, and in a broader sense it’s weird for people on the internet to not have a unique screen name. The culture of the early internet was very private due to the perceived threat of other users, but to me it’s never been about that. The internet runs on name real-estate and recognizability, and usernames that are just regular human names don’t stick out at all. As it becomes less of a norm in general and especially for non-creators, there’s an increasing trend of conspicuously absent or bad usernames that forces me to think that these people just don’t have identities. ^{At least not cohesively apparent ones.}

Random Climate & Terrain Generator

I’m dearly fond of random generators for things in tabletop rpgs because the results are often so interesting, it avoids any sense of staleness, and it dispenses with the usual decision fatigue if I’m in a pinch or need to toss out something very rich very quickly. I have way more of them than you might expect, and in extreme detail. Some day soon I’m going to release a pay-what-you-want DM helper that will contain all of them, but as I clean them up so that they’re readable by people other than myself. My pride and joy is my 35-factor Random Personality, Culture, & Backstory Generator, which is also the basis for how I analyze personalities. That’s how I make people. This is how I make places.

In the beginning, make the heavens and the earth.