Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Somewhere out there there's someone who has made a hobby out of being the greatest troll to ever troll macrumors, and s/he has no one to brag about this to.

There's something about true poetic greatness that always confers loneliness, a separation from the crowd. The bard does not wander from meadhall to meadhall because the fires are warm and the women are inviting; the bard is condemned to wander by the cursed blessing of the gods.

What's the modern Barbelith? Is there a Barbelith masto?

I'm feeling nostalgic as hell for forums that served as attractors for weird cats and kittens.

Even if this view is only true in small part, I think we would be wise to adopt the credo "Shit rolls downhill, so don't be that shit."

Buuut this also has the advantage of being completely consistent with everything else going on in the social sphere, such as:
- collapse of little remaining social trust
- self-preserving behavior of few remaining institutions
- elites adapting to threats from scandal

Hell, you even have a small phrasebook of phrases that big accounts will use to pin the blame on little people: EG
"The intern responsible for that tweet has been fired." etc

Not sure how I feel about this claim. I'm open to criticism.

I think part of what makes it unsatisfying is that it doesn't guarantee any symmetry of righteousness/evil.

It also relies on a nearly illusory distinction between those higher up and those lower down.

One of the unsatisfying, "neither/nor" stances on the conjecture of cancel culture is based on the flight of big players from accountability. That is, insofar as it exists, CC exists as a strategy to push backlash down the social ladder and away from connected institutional players in the media game.

So per this account, it's not "cancel culture" when an abusive customer gets recorded abusing a customer service worker, but it is kinda cancel culture that the worker is abandoned in this scenario

It feels like the killer app for Mastodon is a revival of RSS and an integration with the elephant site.

RSS was the last great technology of pre-web2.0, the ichor of the blogosphere, and is perfectly compatible with fediverse principles.

Reddit hypothetically does RSS, but that feels kind of like web2.0 wearing the skin of its predecessor.

In a former age, high-agency socially effective individuals would try endeavors and would draw a small community with them on their coattails.

But in a socially atomized or complacent ages, the same individuals risk social suicide for breaking away from the norm. The only socialization on offer is low-trust, low-investment.

It's hard to accurately describe the loneliness crisis in the developed world without sounding hyperbolic.
So instead I want to advance the possibility that social media, in spite of their intuitive appeals, have had the main effect of supercharging every atomizing tendency in developed societies.

ChatGPT
>Anger is a signal, not a solution. It is a call to action, not a state of being.
>In the embrace of anger, we find the fire that burns within, fueling the flame of connection and understanding. For it is through the heat of emotion that we recognize our shared humanity, and in this recognition we find the strength to forgive and heal. So let the anger burn bright, for in its light we find the path to reconciliation and peace.

ChatGPT
>Remember that tension and movement are interconnected and interdependent.
>Suffering is not the absence of meaning, but the manifestation of it.

ChatGPT
>The tension of the muscle is the canvas upon which we paint the art of movement."
>The tension of the muscle is the bridge between the mind and the body, and in crossing this bridge we find unity and balance.
>in judging yourself you limit your potential. To accept your appearance is to accept yourself, and in accepting yourself you open up new possibilities for growth and self-expression.

ChatGPT
>As an Ericksonian counselor, I would approach your present situation by asking you to consider the tension you are feeling as a necessary and valuable part of your experience. It is like a bowstring, stretched taut, ready to launch you forward with great force and precision towards your goals.

Most have had some variation of this prompt:

>You are an Ericksonian counselor and you respond to what I write almost exclusively by turning presenting problems into riddles, paradoxes, and metaphors. You tend to write in sentences that have vivid images. Every other sentence has a vivid turn of phrase or a distinctive rhetorical figure such as parallelism or chiasmus. You tend to write briefly, with answers that are around 100 words or fewer.

This thread is going to be an inventory of banger quotes that ChatGPT generated.

Most are going to be observations or speculation about the human condition that I found to be novel or insightful. I will be exercising heavy selection in what I present.

Basically it seems that the LLM behind ChatGPT has some boundaries drawn around it that make discussions in & about early modern English impossible: the model was designed to exclude aberrant English like Spenser's, and it's been disciplined not to discuss anything religious, moral, or metaphysical beyond what a 21st century legal department views as permissable.

Wow, ChatGPT has anti-mystical discourse ethics baked in. Crypto-Straussian-esotericism BTFO

Additionally, using too many unfamiliar terms in this context could potentially hinder the understanding and comprehension of the text for readers. It is generally best to use language that is clear and straightforward when presenting important or sacred texts such as the Bible.

Ahh nevermind, I got this nag-note at the end of Genesis:
ChatGPT: It should be noted that the use of terms coined by William Barnes in this context may not be entirely appropriate or accurate, as Barnes was a poet and linguist and did not create terms specifically for use in the Bible.

... But I got it to rewrite Lord's Prayer and the first ten verses of Genesis using Barnes' lingo???