Tootfinder

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

Huh? That’s *exactly* what family occasions were when I was a kid! 🤣
“why it changed from a day of heavy drinking and merrymaking (as it was until the 19th century) to a family occasion.” https://flipboard.social/@CultureDesk/112157170760682778

"...episodic memory can allow us to construct alternative realities..."
Such as conspiracy theories? Do conspiracy theorists perhaps have too much episodic memory?
The big idea: why am I so forgetful? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/…

I just realized that for more than a year I was not following #Russian propaganda online. While it was fascinating to see what the public in Russia is exposed to, it is also relieving to skip all this hatred spilled by Zakharova, Simonyan, Solovyov, or Skabeyeva. I am probably better without it.
I wondered what has happened? And it struck me suddenly: I stopped reading Twitter.
Not quite round #fediversary

Dear mastodon.social, why are you hiding/limiting @…’s account?
Is it policy on mastodon.social to hide/limit pro-Palestinian / anti-genocide accounts?
(Someone there wanna check my account also, just in case?)
CC @…

An article I've written on playtesting for innovation has just been published in the "Game Developer" Magazine.
It's about how we can facilitate more innovation in games, but also applies to films, TV shows, novels, plays, non-fiction writing, anything in life! :)
https…

Sometimes, even though I know my "joke" posts might come off as humorless, I say "fuck it" and post it anyway, because amusing myself is more important than someone else's feelings. Only sometimes though.
It's only fair to make myself laugh every now and then.

Weird #fediverse issue. I'm following a person on a very small instance. That person is also following me. Their posts, boosts and likes reach me.
What I don't see is their profile pic. For whatever reason it's not appearing in the profile view or timeline. Going to the instance, the pic is there.
unfollowing and following didn't do anything. Any idea?

Update: I’m apparently not.
See: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/111999407825147928
(Not deleting this so we don’t lose the conversation in the comments. Just don’t want new folks getting tripped up by it.)
* * *
Sounds like I’m shadow-banned on mastodon.…