20250723

things I encountered today:

• Serial Experiments Lain

  • a jewelry-maker on insta referenced this series. I've never seen it, but I love reading plot reviews on wikipedia, I looked it up

• Myst and Riven

  • I never actually played these, but they popped up while I was browsing a catalog of games today. I remember Myst on my uncle's computer when I was a kid. I looked up the plot reviews on wikipedia. (I really do enjoy that, almost at the hobby level.)

one-way immersion as a story-device - it's a very particular dynamic. I'm really careful with it. gesturing someone through a portal and not clearly giving them a strings-free way back, that's... well, a lot of advertising works that way

this seems to describe a lot of stuff people adopt into their understanding of reality - the whole spectrum of religion and conspiracy and cult

a mirrored hallway is disorienting until you step out of it and see how it was made

I vividly remember a CS professor, freshman year, introducing recursion to the class, remember them noting that a lot of people have trouble getting it

the world is full of story-spirals, to the point that I think it might be made of story-spirals, where populations have set up shop, set up home at particular intersections of particular loops of particular spirals. stepping across the spirals kind of feels like... like walking on cornstarch-water, just gotta keep moving. drawing maps and writing docs in those circumstances feels like the most responsible thing I can do - responsible because it both helps me and (maybe/hopefully/at-least-creates-the-possibility) helps others