| changing from a boy into a girl in a fortnight but keeping the head. This is a transition that amounts to little for the crystalpunk, but produces large problems for her biographer. What must the hacks and dunces of this world do when the person biographied changes shape and essence with the ease some get drunk after a beer or two. How to tell the story of a little mind growing inside a half-full whiskey bottle (Single Malt Science in the vain of Baudelaire) clustering together into a processor, each memory unit a variable and a function, revolving through individual states, depending on time and luck and input and system configuration. Code makes the biographers problem explicit: both deal with variables and functions operating on them, but where the programmer has no problem with the rapid successions of different values stored under one name perhaps reprogramming the function itself, a biographer is supposed to fixate the variables and functions of its subject in unalterable stone. The book and the software in this case corresponds to different ideals of memory: the biography treats memory as something to encapsulate with the fullest integrity of the actual event possible, even though distortion is always there, and to be used afterwards verbatim by others all pointing to the same reference. In Crystalpunk Crystalpunk input is remembered for a while, but the very fact of triggering a memory destroys it. The crystal regenerates when taken apart, but under certain conditions never it builds up at all or outgrows the system and effectively locks out new information from entering as if the tongue becomes too large to fit inside the mouth and the system takes longer and longer for each Tick virtually no longer playing Ticks at all. What do you need to forget to become a crystalpunk? If you need to ask you can not know now: go read the manifesto, go read Orlando, go study Crystalpunk Crystalpunk with care and follow its leads, let your mental objects evolve and they will get you nearer to the answer to the question you are asking me now in vain. | changing from a boy into a girl in a fortnight but keeping the head. This is a transition that amounts to little for the crystalpunk, but produces large problems for her biographer. What must the hacks and dunces of this world do when the person biographied changes shape and essence with the ease some get drunk after a beer or two. How to tell the story of a little mind growing inside a half-full whiskey bottle (Single Malt Science in the vain of Baudelaire) clustering together into a processor, each memory unit a variable and a function, revolving through individual states, depending on time and luck and input and system configuration. Code makes the biographers problem explicit: both deal with variables and functions operating on them, but where the programmer has no problem with the rapid successions of different values stored under one name perhaps reprogramming the function itself, a biographer is supposed to fixate the variables and functions of its subject in unalterable stone. The book and the software in this case corresponds to different ideals of memory: the biography treats memory as something to encapsulate with the fullest integrity of the actual event possible, even though distortion is always there, and to be used afterwards verbatim by others all pointing to the same reference. In Crystalpunk Crystalpunk input is remembered for a while, but the very fact of triggering a memory destroys it. The crystal regenerates when taken apart, but under certain conditions never it builds up at all or outgrows the system and effectively locks out new information from entering as if the tongue becomes too large to fit inside the mouth and the system takes longer and longer for each Tick virtually no longer playing Ticks at all. What do you need to forget to become a crystalpunk? If you need to ask you can not know now: go read the manifesto, go read Orlando, go study Crystalpunk Crystalpunk with care and follow its leads, let your mental objects evolve and they will get you nearer to the answer to the question you are asking me now in vain. |
nik