(via http://dilzio.borrowed-scenery.org/)

Fri Oct 19, 2012 12:48am

As one of the moderators of the forum (and in my capacity as Chief Officer of Multiple Personalities), I am of course committed to keeping this forum free of ill-intentioned or inflammatory comments, trolling, spam, flame wars, and so forth. However, within reasonable parameters, I would also like to encourage freedom of speech and the frank expression of multiple viewpoints (and personalities) - which will inevitably sometimes be contradictory, incongruous, and even positively antagonistic to one another.

<partial-rant>The beauty of forums such as this is that we can agree to disagree, share our disagreements, and learn to live with the expression of ideas that are divergent or run at cross-purposes to our own. I am aware that there is a fine line that must be trod here, and if readers find a post that is genuinely offensive to them, there is always the “report” button with which to alert the admins. In sum, however, I think it's fair to say that all the moderators of this forum remain firmly in favour of freedom of expression, and our policy on censorship reflects this.</partial-rant>

Arrezenpholianz Culmendiabuz Officer of Multiple Personalities

Wed Oct 17, 2012 4:50pm

(Towards a vocabulary of taste of Lingua Ignota words)

Test subjects: humans, edible plants Moon Phase: Sturgeon Moon Conditions: partially electrified, damp, sunny

This was a cross-species edible language experiment conducted by myself and recorded by Mandrago long ago. He lost his lab notebook and so we are unable to determine which words came from plants and which from humans. I had hoped he would find it in the meantime, but unfortunately not.

Several months afterward, one test subject described the experiment like this:

There was this paper and stuff you could eat, and then all these strange words came out of our mouths. Do you have any more?

1. #1 slurbicious
2. #2 tadanculus smooi
3. #3 toothpaste, hosti, red
4. #4 olsynth
5. #5 xyzzyxxyzzyx
6. #6 tasty blood, chewing gum
7. #7 disappearing into nothing
8. #8 middle ages
9. #9 book with leaves of a citrus tree
10. #10 fireworks
11. #11 een kaderke
12. #12 drip drip drip drip drip drip
13. #13 middle ages
14. #14 thought
15. #15 pepper
16. #16 a field of mint leaves
17. #17 my first theft and guilt
18. #18 Mmmmmmmmm
19. #19 mos
20. #20 blue and red, many angles

Wed Oct 17, 2012 10:31am

Amidst Ashton's howling hoots of amusement, the inspiring buzz of electricity, the plants and wires and circuit boards - nothing happened. Things just don't fuse together like they do in our reality; the magic glue connecting our herbal technologies doesn't stick. We're going to have to rely on our research assistants and their tireless work on plant-machine translation.

Fortunately this has just picked up momentum. The new assistant has already been mentioned. I'm mystified as to just what we'll find in the Snoepwinkel in a few days' time. Maybe the whole place will be glowing in blue, white and red light. Undoubtedly the place will be filled with electrodes and new fungal blooms. (The assistants themselves often behave like and resemble fungi; for this reason alone they are dear to our hearts.)

Tue Oct 16, 2012 12:41 pm

Another assistant has turned up, like the sudden appearance of a mushroom in the autumn rain. He arrived with a peculiar shiny metal box. It is filled with artefacts that look potentially intriguing, though he himself is apparently puzzled by their exact uses: organic biofield sensors, photon splitters, cerebral cortex connecting caps, and even a mini orgone accumulator… But right now he's climbed onto the roof with another assistant, where they clown around with the weather station. Their activity seems neither purposeful nor entirely inane. We hold great hopes for this new addition to our research team. (He is also very versatile and can be planted almost anywhere to good effect.)

Sprouting: fungi, diodes, bioluminescent exhalations, pinstripe tattoos.

–druko

Wed Oct 17, 2012 10:57 am

They have in fact come down from the roof now and seem to be growing quite obsessed with the kokedama as potential test subjects. The recent (human assistant) arrival can be viewed here in some action shots where he appears to be engaged in preliminary tests of a custom-designed electrical interface on an unsuspecting kokedama.

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The red light indicates that there is potential for receiving a communication event

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The kokedama has been successfully implanted. Now time, and the precise configuration of the human communication interface, will tell

Their modality of science imposes the necessity for often convoluted workarounds which can appear somewhat comical to those who know better, and to those who know worse. And so they are running round with dark goggles coated in mycelium and debating how to amplify photon events, contemplating where to affix electrodes on plants using a glue of honey and potassium chloride for measuring earth/plant/fungi resistance via somewhat crude transistor devices that would be rendered unnecessary in other contexts; their ongoing struggles are recorded here

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The rudimentary translation equipment, to be configured for operation with the God helment and the glued plant

On the human side of these initial plant-human interface experiments, they are looking into an amplifier/coil setup commonly known as the “God helmet,” that apparently interfaces directly with the occipital lobes.

Their efforts are laudable and undoubtedly fascinating, though also quite puzzling and obscure. We have not seen our assistants so avidly excited about their work in a long while, and it is pleasant and rather amusing to see them fully immersed in activities that they find meaningful.

–armormin

Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:10 pm

Australiskuv cruzaqab fungiyip hoilunk kachziachy. Mazmaunkorschibuzqab, zuzilyip bauirizchy; cauizbokunkcomzimaz - fluischachy.

–Psi subaeruginosa

Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:50 pm

I am still working on the details, but I believe that this poster is speaking a heretofore undiscovered plant dialect (no doubt because he is from Australia); he may even be trying to write poetry.

I can identify many of the particles used, and the overall syntax is quite familiar (of course it follows the broader patterns that anyone communicating with plants will be aware of: any word can in principle be transformed into any other part of speech by the use of verbal, pronomial, nominal adjectival, etc. particles). The real challenge in reading such languages is interpreting the metaphorical transmutations of the base words - plant languages are, after all, usually transparently simple at root; it is in the highly elaborated and ornate lattice of simile, metaphor, metonymy and so forth that weaves through the base meaning which often renders an accurate translation quite impossible. To get back to the above mushroom poster, I would suggest that we provisionally call his language Onezyazpraizunkkirinzgiz, or Cucumber dialect (literally, “door with choir of cucumber”; the final particle is merely convention).

–eleq

Fri Oct 12, 2012 2:50 pm A note on the translation (mechanism), and a more likely hypothesis

A note to clarify Eleuz's post. Forgive me if I am stating the obvious, but some things might not be clear to first-time readers of this forum. I want also to cast doubt on the notion that a new Psilocybe dialect has been discovered here.

The subaeruginosa mushroom posting above is not of course writing on a keyboard in the Latin alphabet. We don't know for sure (he has yet to respond to our extremely keen PMs), but in all likelihood he has connected wirelessly to a neurobiological language transcoder, one that is able to interpret the bioelectric wavelengths used in thought transmission by this species of Psilocybe and convert them to a interspecies-readable or audible format that is remarkably accurate, all things considered.

Furthermore, I have a hypothesis. Pace Eleuz, what he supposes to be an undiscovered dialect could in fact be the separate or convergent result of two factors quite unrelated to actual dialects at all. Firstly, we must assume that the poster is working from the southern hemisphere, as he is a species that does not exist anywhere else. Due to the sensitive and fragile nature of plant thought transmission, a communication event conveyed from southern to northern hemispheres will be affected by the phenomenon of seasonal-magnetic reversal (SMR), which, we have found, alters the communication in extremely specific though largely unpredictable ways. (This assumes that he was using morphic resonance across hemispheres before his transmission was intercepted by the NBLT.) Particular syntactic elements may be swapped for others; for example, particular postpositions (or particles) may have been transposed from one sense to another in regular though almost always unrepeatable ways.

Secondly, the mushroom may be using technology found only in the southern hemisphere; in which case, all bets are off and we can only guess at the particular transcoding algorithms used, as we have not yet had the chance to examine one of these biomachines (assuming that they even exist).

In sum, it would be premature to leap to conclusions about the discovery of a new mushroom dialect. I strongly believe the more likely possibility is that this subaeruginosa was communicating in perfectly standard Psilocybish, which has been distorted through the mechanisms mentioned above, and in such a precise manner that the semblance of a new dialect has been created.

–tritar

Tue Oct 16, 2012 10:45 am

Nosinzizxvlu, zingiabok-onezgiz guziminzchyyaz gragizchy. Phanizchin!

He he he he…

–Psi subaeruginos

Thu Oct 11, 2012 4:38 pm

We're redesigning the Snoepwinkel. Constantly. Everyone has different ideas about the best way to trick visitors into the right state of mind through our new campaign: the Plant Communication Cargo Cult. Some of us go for major redesign - like even removing walls and ceilings. Others are suggesting a subtler approach, but will anyone notice? Electricity, plants, humans, microscopes - it's a big entangled mess, but something seems to be working. People's vegetal synapses are firing when they come in, according to Bud, who measures their brainwaves. But we're about to fuse it into something beyond mere interior design. It's going to become real. It's all dark outside, we can hear muted sounds of windmills turning somewhere in the distance the city is so quiet, and we''ve just performed our customary trans-species edge-blurring rituals. Now Eleuz will cast a geas on the still-fragile connections between plants and machines that we've worked so hard to decorate the space with.

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–druko

Wed Oct 10, 2012 3:46 pm

Reproduced below is the first part of an extremely rare interview with three patabotanists (unfortunately the others could not be present for the interview). Magnus Dieter, staff writer for eDit_C# Magazine, managed to catch up with them between pataportals in Cornwall.

Magnus Dieter: Where are you from and why did you come here?

Alchemilla Lily Umiliata: We are researchers and generalists from a parallel reality where plants and humans communicate and collaborate through sentient technology. We became interested in this world when we stumbled on an article on the internet about human-plant communication here, or rather human-plant non-communication, as it turns out - the article mainly discussed the possibilities. And it did seem clear that there were a lot of possibilities, but also how far things had to go before a real collaboration could exist.

Mandrago Fraser Mithrodin: You understand that both our realities share the internet; I don't know why. It's quite old-fashioned that way. I'm rarely on the internet myself, it gets boring.

MD: And so you decided to intervene? How did you get here?

ALU: Not really intervene, but yes, there are these activist movements and artistic and political interventions in this world, and I suppose that what we are doing could be seen in relation to that. As we learned more about your world, we had all become quite concerned about the non-communication between plants and humans, the absence of organic sentient technology and so forth, so we wanted to do something. As to how we got here, maybe Fraser can tell you more.

MFM: Actually we had a bit of trouble with this - we all disagreed about how to do it. In the end It's like several giant fluffy rabbits bouncing, bouncing… Fur is essential to your survival in this case, but you can end up bouncing everywhere and going nowhere…

ALU: Fraser, what do you mean?

MFM: Well, a few of us decided to try a different approach after all that. And so we ingested Salvia divinorum, which was interesting but terrifying, and probably when all the bouncing started. It actually allowed us to bounce all the way between realities, and so that's how some of us ended up here, and the others could follow through the fluffy wormhole between worlds that we pioneers created.

Trismegisto Herbert Taraxi: I'm not sure all of us would agree with the wording of that description. What Mandrago is saying is that we underwent a chemically-facilitated phase transition of our molecular structures - on the level of DNA - which allowed us to commute between parallel realities. (The exact process is too involved to discuss here, but it is well-documented in certain texts, such as The Invisible Landscape.) But from a certain vantage point it might not be entirely inaccurate to think of the process as “bouncing through a fluffy wormhole between worlds.”

MD: What were your first impressions upon arriving?

ALU: We couldn't believe what we found. At first we were flabbergasted and almost gave up. The task we had set ourselves seemed impossible, since there was such a difference in scientific and cultural development between the two realities. We weren't able to transport our own patascientific materials to this world, so we would have to make do with what we found here. But then we started to investigate more closely, and our team began to find certain possibilities emerging, with places, people, technologies…

MD: Please elaborate.

For example, we discovered an abandoned candy store located in Gent, a city that is very congenial to our interests as there is already a lot of activity and engagement with plants. It seemed to be a place where an incipient plant consciousness was ready to bloom. We converted the abandoned candy store into our base where we could research and experiment, of course, but also further study and understand your cultures by interacting with visiting natives. To this end we've been growing a salon where visitors can experience the essence of plant consciousness. It's an ongoing work in progress, and changes with the seasons.

THT: We also gradually started to see some potential in the technologies discovered here. Due to their inherent limitations we found it difficult not to dismiss them out of hand at first, but these very limitations inspired us to devise some novel workarounds, and I think it would be fair to say that at this stage we are quite excited by developments.

MD: Such as?

THT: We established a pataportal to Cornwall that links online and offline worlds. A weather station has been installed, and with the data feed from this we can start to simulate sentient transmutation processes between humans and plants through a variety of mediums. These were all developed largely using indigenous technologies, though of course the pataportal also relies a great deal on vegetal computing protocol (VCP) and an underlying layer of green code that has not yet been discovered by your computer scientists. Another development is that, after initial frustrations, we have started working on a special patatechnological environment that stimulates a potent experience of vegetal consciousness.

MFM: He's talking about the cargo cult interior design challenge!

Part II of this interview will follow shortly.