Ahh, the *a$$holery*!
I still distinctly remember that inflection point on this list when our
(in)famous Doug went off with that observation. He retreated to his
Parrot Farm significantly after that moment. I don't remember if Nick
made his visit to "meet the parrots" before or after that, it was
somewhat after Doug's famous chide of Nick (and others) whose hashtag
would have been #swirlies, had there been hashtags in those days (circa
2008?). Doug's abrasive nature was an enriching (though not always
supportive) component, now faded. Another listmember fondly reminisced
recently *FFing Doug Roberts!*... it made me smile.
I never met Hywel, but I know he is venerated for qualities I never
experienced directly (did he actually ever post here, or just hold court
on Friday Mornings?). The "grande old man" I miss most clearly from the
chorus is Mike Agar... There are probably other significant Lacunae in
my apprehension of the full milieu here. Some absent, latent,
deprecated voices here I still encounter elsewhere (in-person mostly)
but I still hear echoes or ghost-commentary from them when I read here.
We've lost a few others (e.g. Carl Tollander) along the way, the texture
of the weave shifts every time another spool of thread runs out.
I feel as if I personally have *met* (in person or via offline e-mail) a
*lot* of this motley crew (those who post, not lurk only) and those
images (faces, body languages, vocal intonations) carry a lot for me.
If you were *all* as disembodied as *some* of you are, I'd probably feel
the "lack of feedback in (a)semantic spaces such as this" yet more.
sideboard-vignette - Glen's use of "asemantic" here is one aspect
of the richness I experience here (when I pay a little attention).
I wanted to pass it off as a typo, but then I reminded myself that
"it IS glen!" so I went looking. I don't know that I "nailed it"
but this use of "asemantic" reminds me of the open-ended rambles
(asemantic?) here on the general topic of "effing the ineffable"?
Perhaps "asemantic" is one product or condition of the very
attempt to "eff the ineffable"?
I've been a Complexity Science groupie since well before the term was in
common parlance... My minor contributions/engagements in adjacent
fields help me appreciate a broad range of the domain, but it has
exploded since the first days of my engagement with Doyne and Norm and
others over the Poincare Sections they were printing out on our high
speed 1200dpi laser-printers... whole sheaves of them to mentally
reconstruct the equivalent of a CAT scan? I'd only recently worked the
problem of making it possible to shove 512x512 BW image from the backend
of our CRAY supercomputers to (a very few) desktop monitors at 2-5
fps... Then came the whole class of desktop scientific workstations
which offered 1Kx1K 30-60fps bitmap graphics. Sun, Apollo, NeXT, etc.
and that type (printed and film images) of engagement tapered off...
but CNLS and SFI had formed formally and the torch was officially alight.
The point of this ramble down memory lane is just *how much* the field
has elaborated and how much of the proto-Complexity Science (e.g.
Poincare, Lorentz, Weiner, Von Neumann, Turing, Feynman, Fredkin, et al)
then came into my awareness (still does). The field turned out to be
much larger than it was declared to be... I suppose I'm blathering to
the choir here... maybe there is no longer any clear melodies or
singular voices left, it is just musical cacophany?
Dead Stack -> Dead Pool -> Nitrophilic Blooms -> Hypoxia?
FWIW, I DO think the current water we are all swimming in (technical,
socio-economic-political, etc) is highly enriched. For better and worse,
like the excess nitrates and phosphates downstream from agriculture, and
we are left like fish gasping at the surface for a bit of extra oxygen?
I feel like these disembodied comms are the root of the problem.
Granted, FriAM has been much less toxic than some of the other fora
I've participated in (and WAY less than those I don't participate in).
But even here, we've seen our share. So I think I'm retreating to meat
space for the most part.
I've long lamented the lack of feedback mechanisms in asemantic spaces
like this. The multiscale, intense, fast and slow composition of
feedback(s) are defining. Degrade those and the definition degrades. I
recently failed to remember an aphorism on the fly at the pub. But it
nagged enough to make me look it up later:
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem,
first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." -
Notorious d.e.b.
I think I'm simply tired of trying to estimate the assholery. It's so
much easier with more feedback.
On 2/3/26 4:45 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
I know I came to this group in what appears to be its twilight. The
in-person meetups are weirdly sad. I feel pressed to ask if it is the
case that everyone is either:
1. on vacation/ too busy
2. too depressed / failing to find inspiration
3. moved on to greener forums
4. preferring the company of LLMs
...
N. waiting for someone frail to post
Sometimes I trawl reddit or whatever discord, but I cannot help but
feel like beacons of inspiration are becoming fewer and further
between. This group has managed to inspire me, keep my interest, for
over a decade. In that time, I pushed myself to understand
perspectives that I would never have dreamed existed. I hope there is
still something to talk about.
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