A Gilded Planet

17.4.22 Today confusion and cynicism are at a high level. There is little mention of the Manufacturing Warrens. A great deal of neurotic chatter is focused on the rumor of further shortages. 1. Today the reaction is probably darker than at any time since the Collapse. 2. There are signs of desperation appearing, for the first time a definite sense among some quite ordinary people that now we cannot possibly recover. As always, many people are trying to be optimistic. They express their faith in an ultimate redemption. Only a few still express that it will be possible to emerge from recent events back to a higher level. 3. It is on the whole assumed by most people that the network backbone will fall. There is doubt and anxiety as to whether or not this would indicate the total breakdown of communication. As usual, there is a lack of opinion leadership from above to guide the people in this grave affair. 4. The Manufacturing Warrens are scarcely mentioned today. Nearly everyone is so ...

A reader and friend writes in to tell me that the OED traces 'immersive' from as far back as the seventeenth century, or much earlier than I acknowledged in the previous post . Clearly the OED's SEO needs improvement, Merriam Webster is fucked, and I need to be a bit more thorough in my researches.

Update: I'm an idiot. 'Immersive' is not a word according to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Wait. I know what you're thinking: but then how do I describe my experience with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ? How do I do that, huh? Luckily, less reputable online dictionaries do define 'immersive' as a word in the following way: noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses and may create an altered mental state For some reason, I find it very surprising that it took digital technology to motivate us to come up with the word 'immersive.' Did earlier generations not imagine novels or movies to be immersive experiences? Is there another word out there that I'm forgetting which does the same work as 'immersive'? I would like to know this synonym.  

The little man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles invents words in his spare time but right now he asks for too many samples at the ice cream shop. All the other customers feel hung up by how long they have to wait for him to pick his flavor. A couple passes by the shop and ducks into a movie theater two doors down in order to be spontaneous; they see a movie based on play written by a famous man of letters they first read about in a museum located an ocean away. The usher rips their tickets before directing them to theater number seven. The usher used to save the stubs of every movie ticket he purchased but when he started working at the movie theater his collection became grim reminder of the job he enjoyed less by the day. He muses to himself about burning all the stubs while tearing the ticket of a tall old man who frequented the theater so regularly that the usher felt mild embarrassment that he didn't know the old man's name. He directs the elder cinephile to theater number ...

Late one night, I obtained a large truck to steal the stones from the Temple of Artemis. With some assistance from hired locals, I loaded the stones into the vehicle and drove off into the darkness. The next morning, no one seemed to notice.

“It’s more like an evil spirit consciousness that possesses its hosts with lust for absolute power and a manifestation of the primitive reptile brain - power can only be pure if it’s allowed to flow through us without being contaminated with any concept of selves. Therefore, the only true power is the power we have to be more than ourselves by denying any concept of ourselves and letting the power define us.” - Señor Moosey, a Half-African Freedom Fighter of the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936 I. Miskimin’s Codex is either a book or a tree, or possibly equal parts book and tree. (Contrast with it having been either a scroll or a fern). In any case, we are fairly convinced it has many stimulating branches and that these branches are probably not unidirectional. II. Miskimin designed the codex (assuming the codex can be said to have been designed) to have two parallel coordinate planes connected in the third dimension at their origins by a z-axis with a slightly hyperbolic curv...

Iran is rotting from the inside. A profound destructive urge shrouds it in darkness. The deep rot in Iranian society can best be attributed to the fact that it is massively overpopulated. Massive overpopulation and highly congested living environments does very, very bad things to humans – and modern Iranians suffer horribly from these overly cramped conditions. No one should be forced to live like this. Maybe they would be better off dead. But this seems awfully extreme. We would sincerely prefer to find an alternative solution to the problem in consideration of the fact that Iranians, on the whole, are an intelligent and enterprising people, and thus would be an asset to many nations if a large emigration policy could be devised.  Perhaps we could reconsider bombing them if some of their excess populace would immigrate to Argentina or Canada, where there is plenty of room. Just a thought.