Learning
🤯
I had the epiphany that my memory system should be a language. Reading about the grammar of American Sign Language in the Gallaudet dictionary made me realize that memory techniques sort of have a grammar too as well as the vocabulary I’d already been working on, and it struck me that maybe I could make this grammar and vocabulary consistent and treat a memory system as a language, which would let me use the many resources of linguistics to fill out the system. Similarly to when I first encountered ChatGPT, it’s been a captivating thought, though the flow of ideas has been slower, and it’s reminding me of the power of a unifying idea to draw in work from a variety of fields.
As usual in my projects I immediately launched into a search for resources and tools to work with, and in this case the main ones I found were the r/conlangs subreddit, the open textbook Essentials of Linguistics, and SIL’s lexicography software FieldWorks Language Explorer.
So even though I’m past due to wrap up this iteration of the memory project and move on to other areas, there’s no possibility I’ll be dropping it, and instead I’m doubling down on the experiment of having this project live in symbiosis with the others—they will be labs for developing my mnemonic language, and the language will help me learn their material.
Productivity
🤔
I analyzed my weeknote process again to see how I could write them more easily. My weeknotes were taking too long to write, which is unhelpful when I’m trying to catch up, and they were putting me in procrastination mode. I decided to go back to my old pattern of four sentences per topic and then add other patterns as I discovered them. I’m also planning to move some of the writing to other places, mainly articles on the wiki side of the site, which would make a weeknote less of a self-contained report and more of a log with links—maybe less satisfying to read, but it could help me spread out my writing more naturally and maybe let me post on time.
Nature
🙂
The cicada emergence gained steam in my area, and I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it. I thought they were gross when I was growing up, but in the past few years my revulsion at bugs has morphed into curiosity, so now I find cicadas interesting and funny, like an insect version of frogs, with a beautiful, whirring chorus in the trees, and I feel kind of protective of them. Great timing, cicadas!
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Fiction
🤔
I finished listening to the Liminal Archives version of the Backrooms levels. I was set on that path by the thought that I could memorize the long list of Backrooms levels as a mnemonic peg system, and I used the idea as an opportunity to familiarize myself with them, since it was a large project I’d been putting off since last October when I started taking liminal spaces more seriously.
But there’s more than one place to find Backrooms levels, and some investigation into the various communities (family tree, basic descriptions, Fandom history, Liminal Archives description and history, assorted opinions) showed me that Fandom was the first, but it’s the least restrained and gets kind of ridiculous; so I tried the next one, Wikidot, which exercises more editorial control, but it still sounded too much like SCP when I felt that the Backrooms deserved its own, quieter tone; so I put memorizing the full set of levels on hold and settled for traveling the much smaller set on Liminal Archives, which I take to be a distilled, more thoughtful version of the others.
But while it’s interesting to imagine the Backrooms as a system and as a place where societies might form, I’m drawn to the simpler setting of the Kane Pixels series and the even simpler one of the r/TrueBackrooms subreddit, which wants to shed all the inhabitants and other levels and appreciate the solitude and mystery of the original concept, which returns me to the question I pondered during my creative writing project last year of how many story elements you could remove and still have a story worth telling.
But Liminal Archives was still effective at bending the mind with vastness and mystery, and it reminded me of my similar impressions of mathematics, so I wondered if math could be treated as a Backrooms-like universe, sort of like in 3D fractal animations (a nice example set to Chopin), which I might explore in the background of my upcoming math project.
