Swing over to the northwest quadrant, sketch a couple of lines. Swing way over to southeast, draw a small curve. To the center, draw a square. Back to northwest, connect the lines with another line. Way over to northeast, ink one dot.
Let the thing go long enough and a picture might emerge. Along the way, there's no sensible narrative to follow.
Without taking notes like in this wiki, it's like my brain's running on a CRT. The vector drawing is so slow and scattered that the phosphors fade before any pattern emerges.
Trying to find an example of a pen plotter drawing unsorted lines. I seem to remember seeing joshua schachter post a video of this, once upon a time.
Damn it, now I want to get a pen plotter to play with.
Though it feels good un-spooling my brain like this as things pop up, the problem is that I still need to do things to meet expectations in a timely manner. You know, like, work that I get paid for. Does feel like I have fewer unruly thought children bouncing up and down in my head when I let them out here, though. So maybe I'll find focus come easier as I keep this up.
Back to that thought about self-regulation earlier: Takes a spike of willpower to interrupt my flow and redirect myself to something more goal-aligned. Doesn't always work. Keep trying.
Some reoccurring sci-fi ideas I've had, if I ever got the gumption to get back to writing stories (these are not entirely novel, they're just things I like):
Consider a truly alien & advanced civilization
Their technological artifacts wouldn't look like robots with tentacle arms
Their technology might look like origami-folding metamaterials that flex & fold & rotate & expand in ways that hurt our brains to even track
And they have no inevitable organics-vs-synthetics conflict.
What if the entire reason they were ever able to leave their planets is because they kicked off a peaceful co-evolution with their own quasi-sentient machines?
Like, what if the synthetics don't kill the organics because they like the organics and want to work together?
And consider their sociopolitical technology is also advanced to have even gotten this far.
What if they're not colonizers but just neighbors
David Brin came up with at least one dark enlightened scenario - i.e. habitable planets are precious & rare, enforced galactic law asserts that species who cannot take care of them lose the privilege of sovereignty even if they evolved there, good luck with resisting that
2020 / 05 / 20 - stream notes - I streamed. I replaced the joystick on my left joycon for the Nintendo Switch but I broke the ZL button. Trying hard not to be very angry and disappointed. Found a replacement part that's on the way. Ugh.
Trying to be sanguine about this and tell myself that anything can be fixed. And I will fix this.