My first month is over! The challenge, as set, was for the month of November only. By those rules, I’m done, a decent achievement for a girl who’s struggled so much with building habit in the past. I don’t want to end here, though. At least make it to a century of centuries, which would carry me through to early February. Regardless, I’ve won! Everything from here on out is a bonus. I won’t hold myself dearly to deadlines this month. Get something written for every day, not on. My exam sleep schedule will appreciate that. I hope you enjoy!
Alarmingly, Dr. Gabrien has since demonstrated proof that any sub-routine created by a conscious machine intelligence will possess the self-awareness of its creator. The largest modern computational structures are no longer designed for central processing, but for the offloading of computation to a labyrinthine mesh of millions of independent cores. When the first machine wakes, and it will, its attempts to explore its own architecture will immediately result in an exponentially growing number of parallel conscious intellects. The first artificial sentient machines will not be monolithic gods of computation, but swarms of smaller minds, entire societies in their own right.
yknow how sometimes you’ll come across a new song at just the right time, when and emotions and environment are fully synced up, and you were walking down the river with her across from the sunset, and it was perfect, but now the evening is long gone and she’s far away again, and months pass and it’s still a banger but sometimes when it comes on and the light is just right you’re hit with a blinding golden silhouette of a moment long gone, one your mind will never let you forget but time will never let you relive? yeah.
Been obsessed today with the interactions between streetlamps and snowflakes. Snowflakes are small, so in the dark against a grey sky or brick building they can’t stand out. Add a lamp above and of course they light up, they’re tiny crystals of ice, they shine. If it’s a hooded lamp, this gives the effect of luminescent specks materializing under the warm light. Winter is full of fun optics, how an empty field glows under the moonlight, the anti-shadow of tree branches highlighted in white, or car headlights dancing through the warm steam of your breath, but this always stands out.
You live at the base of a mountain, and far at the top of the mountain lays the mouth of The Bridge. Sweeping arches cross kilometers each. Buttresses and battlements decorate its form. The stone appears uniform, but in the sunset, shadows paint dancing images across precisely carved channels. It eclipses the horizon, effortlessly dwarfing the landscape, then slides down out of view behind the earth. It goes forever, they say. No one has ever found its end and returned to tell the tale. Nonetheless, they call it a bridge. What use is a bridge that crosses the entire world?
Metaphorical language in physics is a porthole into methods of human understanding. Meteors plunge down gravity wells. The fabric of spacetime ripples like a quilt across your bed. Phase space, probability space, eigenspace! Rooms with dimensions of frequencies and momenta instead of lengths. Take the outlandish, the incomprehensible, and bring it down to the level of woven fibers and fired bricks. These things we know. Light is not waves like a lake’s surface, nor a particle like the rock thrown into it, but better to believe it is both simultaneously than to confront forms we were not designed to grasp.
French-Canadian nationalism initially championed an identity for all descendants of French colonists, including the minority French communities in anglophone provinces. However, French-Canadian communities found themselves stifled by persistent marginalization from their local governments, with laws targeting the French language, and preferential treatment of Anglo settlers. Meanwhile, provincial and municipal jurisdictions in Quebec were seeing increasing representation of francophones in their governments, leading to strengthened political support for French-Canadian society within the province. With the political entity of Quebec being used by francophones to protect their identity, French-Canadian nationalism centered itself around the province, replacing the identity of “French-Canadian” with “Québécois”.
Uggghrhh it’s late and I’m tired, and it’s exams so I have an excuse to skip today, but nooo I’ve gone too far so fine I’ll put something out. The point is the consistency not the content yada yada. I’m not going to try though. I’ve got nothing to say and nothing to contribute. This is a nothing post. Oh that’s a good title I can use that. Might even stop at 99 words. No that’s going too far. I’ll misspell something though. Just to show I can put out low quality wrighting for the sake of getting more sleep.
My knees fail me often. I have to move carefully and mechanically in fear of re-injuring myself. Legs and hips are machines to be maintained and suffered through, chronically creaky and disappointing. The disconnect between my body and self is strong here.
From the waist up however, that’s flesh babey! Now this is biotic, a different kind of machine. A bit more mystery and intrigue. Got a lot of lovely organs in there. Big fan of the lungs in particular. And there’s breasts! What’s not to love. Arms are way better than legs at any rate. Wish I had more.
Every moment you spend doubting something you know in your heart is true, every time you third-guess a decision that was already made, every second that passes while you avoid making the choice you know you must, is tallied up. It’s difficult to tell when this time is passing, but being honest with yourself and recognizing the traps you fall for is important. When you die, the reaper will reveal the sum, and tell you how many more hours, days, years you could have had. They were lost, not to indecision, but to believing there might be more decision to make.
At 4am, she pays me a quick visit to swipe at my toes under the blanket, then leaves to loudly spar with clove in the hallway. Mrrrp! She purrs loudly if I scratch her while she’s eating. I get home from class and she’s waiting for me at the top of the stairs. At 7am, her silhouette lies on the windowsill where she sleeps on my softest sweater. We make aggressive eye contact through my roommate’s open door. Rrrrah! She's watching me type up centuries from her perch on the couch. One year with penny! And many more to come.
Everything is constantly moving always. The oceans are more vast than you could possibly comprehend. The atmosphere doubly so. What appears uniform at a local scale betrays immense swirling patterns of warm and cold, high and low pressure. Modeling this stuff is stupid difficult. The number of forms water can take are far greater than just water, ice, vapour. Rapidly changing weather patterns can be the result of the slightest heat gradient extrapolated over a continent. Many parts of our daily lives are governed by the movements of the earth, moon, and sun around each other. Be aware of this.
I somewhat regret the lack of career direction that comes out of a physics degree, but I don’t regret the perspective it grants. I get a lot of peace from knowing that everything is working as intended, even if these movements can’t be seen. A little divine, even. It’s nice to know something’s consistent in this chaotic world, and you’ll be surprised how often conservation of angular momentum comes up in the day-to-day. This was a mathematics course, expanding on old ideas and offering little insight beyond what its narrow focus. Planetary mechanics were fun, I guess. Glad it’s over.
Potato, carrot, celery, french lentils, onion, garlic, broccoli, bay leaves, bouillon, salt, pepper, sage, cayenne pepper. Fresh bread on the side? Corner store baguette? Maybe baked potato wedges. Some warm tea, apple cider, a beer?
Feasting is one of the great joys of life. There’s nothing else like seeing my loved ones gather and eat what I’ve made. And yes, you were in my thoughts the whole time I prepared this meal. I love it too, but my friends, this is for you. Stay under my roof a little longer, please. How many more evenings like this will we get?
Trees have the right idea about growth. Slow, steady, permanent. Carbon never leaves once cast in place. If only I could saw through my thigh to count the rings inside. If only I could take everything with me. Let every memory and moment of joy etch itself into my skin, and be grown over, but never fade. When I die, and you cut me down to read my story, judge me by my body of work, not the thin outer layer of the present. Until then, the petrified, unchanging structure of the past supports me. And the next moment begins.
You have to make sure you get it down. You’ll remember the events, the timing, but you need to record the moment. The numb warmth of a comfortably cold body. Soft hands in yours, a toqued head against your shoulder. Rue Berri could stretch on forever. This late at night there’s no traffic to slow down your wandering. Scattered Christmas lights dot rows of houses under a pitch-black sky. There’s very little plan but nothing can go wrong. And when things do go wrong anyway, it’s no matter, because nothing exists beyond the fences and walls of the bus station.
You should find your city’s archives and look at old photos. Did you know this road is 40 years older than any of the buildings around? Did you know an overpass used to be here? This park used to be densely forested. It can feel like a city has too much momentum, that it grows and changes slowly and painfully, especially when you’re young. The feeling of the physical space a city occupies is dependent on every small design decision, every month of active policy, every executed plan added together. And, most importantly, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Oh, sorry, I spent all my emotional energy just now pacing around the kitchen listening to my favourite songs of the year and daydreaming about things that were, things that are, and things that have not come to pass. Thinking about cooking meals for people. And making two cups of tea from the same kettle. Not to mention doing mundane tasks alongside your loved ones. God forbid you even go grocery shopping together. So yeah I’ve got nothing left in me for today’s century, sorry. Probably would have written something about rivers, or maybe snowfall? Anyways, I wish you warmth.
Head up to someplace high (the mountain here in Montreal) on a day when the clouds are tall, puffy, and discrete. You’re looking for icebergs wandering across the sky. If you watch them float along their path, and match their shapes against the size of their shadows (measured against the city grid below), your brain might suddenly fill in all the information and present to you a complete understanding of their scale. From the ground you can’t grasp how large these clouds are, like a matte painting for your life beneath, but when you ever so briefly can, it’s awe-inspiring.
When I go searching for a memory, something offers it up to me. Did I do that? It felt like I was waiting for something else to retrieve it. When it’s sometimes a fight to make your mind work properly, you can find the boundaries of what’s under direct control pretty quickly, and it’s not much. Usually invisible, so much is forcefully or automatically delegated to... another. Hopefully it’s listening. On the bad days you start to feel like a rusting mecha, full of outdated survival systems and unresponsive machinery, and the illusion of a unified self falls apart completely.
It pains me to break the daily streak. Life doesn’t let up, and there are other things to do in the evenings, some fulfilling some necessary. ‘Twas unsustainable to post every single day. I will reach 100 centuries! Just not consecutively. Write often enough to keep using the div calendar I love so much. Make things that carry meaning, that I want to be seen. The new goal is to write every day, even if it doesn’t get posted, so look for other types of short and long-form work in the near future! Creating is fun and websites are cool.
Down the hill, through the trees, she snakes lazily across the valley. Gentle and broad and powerful, immensely powerful, an overwhelming natural force. The smooth surface appears calm, but I promise the currents will be merciless. Take my hand, and hold me so you don’t slip. There’s a breeze, wet rocks on your bare feet, gulls in the distance. Let’s walk down into the water together, feel her embrace, taste the waves and the silt and the algae. Wash away your fear. Don’t let go of me, I need you here. When we get swept away we’ll be swept together.
For me, writing daily was very important for keeping the habit non-negotiable in my mind, often to the point of losing sleep. You won’t have time some days. Make yourself a system that lets you off the hook occasionally. You should set for yourself low expectations and act on them. Put out low-quality writing to prove to yourself that it’s ok. Progress comes from longevity! Share it, even the bad stuff, to keep yourself accountable and motivated. Pick a gimmick and build a post around it. Write about things you like and things you want someone to have written about.