synecdoches

posted by Forannán Glórach in the SCA Known World Discord server:

Oh yeah, and - one of my favourite concepts I've gotten from another community is the idea of protecting/preserving your slack.

Slack can be any fungible resource (ie a resource that could be used for multiple things). Whether that be money, time, flexibility, people available to help, etc.

If you can get an event to cost $15 rather than $25, you don't know necessaarily what people are doing with that extra $10. Maybe for one person, that's the cost to be able to buy some earplugs to make it tolerably quiet, while for someone else it's the cost of a flat of water so they can help people stay hydrated, while for someone else it's the cost of replacing their air mattress pump so they can sleep without back pain. You don't necessarily know or see what that does, but it may matter to many people.

If you can get two activities to be 15 minutes apart rather than directly back-to-back, maybe for one person that's an extra 15 minutes to check on their glucose levels and take some meds, while for another person it's 15 minutes to head out to their car and recharge in the quiet, while for another person it's 15 minutes to use the bathroom and adjust a binder, while for another person it's 15 minutes to call their mom. You don't necessarily know or see how people use that time, but it can matter.

If you have 10 volunteers floating around site when you think you likely only need 7-8, maybe that's an extra hand to help an elderly person hammer their tent stakes, or someone feeling like they have enough free time to stop and help direct someone who is lost/confused, or someone feeling like they're sufficiently on top of things that they can do a town run and get some meds and snacks for someone who's feeling nauseous, or maybe it's just helping someone feel like they can go sit down if they feel a migraine coming on and they don't have to just keep working through it for the event to go smoothly. You might never actually see what exactly that extra hand ended up doing because you don't quiz everyone about how they spent every 10 minutes, but it may have made a big difference for someone.

Slack is invisible, in a sense. When you provide something concrete and specific, you get that dopamine rush of "yay! I provided a quiet room, and 5 people used it and someone told me how much they appreciated it!" whereas providing slack will almost never get you that visible concrete positive feedback. Because slack is invisible, it's very tempting to sacrifice it; you want to squeeze every penny of value out of your budget, put on as many activities as you can fit in the day, you don't want volunteers standing around with nothing to do, etc. But if you aim to do 10-15% less than the theoretical maximum you can do, you're leaving slack, and slack in itself can be an accessibility feature.

(SCA events are often already excellent for slack, but it's variable, and I think it's a great concept to have in one's mental library)

I've been thinking lately about the way I feel about the term "introject." I dislike a lot of terms coined to describe plurality, but this one stands out, because by definition, most people would call me an introject. (Fictional character in a system = introject.) When my husband asked me about this, I think I said "Canon didn't project onto me. I am projecting onto the canon." And then I didn't elaborate.

My "source" canon is Quantum Break, a video game from 10 whole years ago that is in copyright deadlock. Microsoft owns the IP, but they're never going to do anything with it. The most Remedy can do with the IP is hire the same actors under legally distinct character names and roles.^[1] This essentially means my canon is stagnant, or rather, stable. If my headcanons are canon compliant now, they're very likely to stay that way.

We don't know if there's a distinct time that we split. "I" existed as my own entity before 2016, in some form, but none of us had clear distinction in our sense of self. We just knew that sometimes we were one way, other times we were another way, and we couldn't figure out how to reconcile it. Our system-- which we didn't know was a system at the time-- latched onto QB really hard in early 2017, and I didn't realize I'm Paul until early 2024. (I'm not actually sure where our logs of those early inside conversations happened. They're not here, or in the journal, or on Pluralkit. Did we not write it down??) So that was 7 years of being in here and being blurry and confused, on top of the... probably 10+ years before that...

Anyway. This post is supposed to be about my relation to my canon. I do think of it that way; it's not Remedy's canon, or Microsoft's IP, it's my canon. I feel an ownership of it. I got very invested in this game, and in the character of Paul Serene, I saw myself. I kept thinking about him and thinking about him, tweaking headcanon, all while I was still trying to conceptualize myself as an individual. Naturally, because brains are messy, the two things got conflated. My self-concept became my mental image of Paul Serene. It feels more like I modeled Paul in my image than that I "came from" Paul. I'm Paul because I put myself in Paul.

This conflation of identity, plus the stagnant nature of the original canon and my sense of possessiveness, means I don't actually want more Quantum Break. I don't think I want Remedy to get the IP rights back.^[2] I like Remedy's games, but I don't want to feel alienated if they change the Paul in their stories. I already feel alienated from the broader fandom, because people like Control and Alan Wake more than QB, and I just don't vibe with it the same way. They're good games, but they're not mine.

So I don't like the term "introject" because Paul didn't walk into our brain, Paul was meticulously formed from our brain in order to write fanfiction, and I came to be Paul in the process. (I don't like the term "fictive" either, but I haven't figured out why. It might just feel childish to me.)

I don't know if this makes any sense. Oh well! Trying to let go of needing people to 100% understand and agree with me at all times.^[3]

Footnotes:

[^1]: I really dislike "Sheriff Tim Breaker," not because there's anything wrong with the character, but because Remedy and the fandom treat him as "Jack Joyce with the serial code filed off." Jack Joyce would not be a cop. Jack Joyce is a guy who recreationally steals from police stations and has severe problems with authority. I'm glad everyone is having fun, I'm glad they could bring Shawn Ashmore back in, but Jack Joyce would not be a fucking cop.

[^2]: As if Microsoft would ever give up ownership of anything. Sigh. I don't want Remedy to work more with the IP, but I don't especially want Microsoft to have it either.

[^3]: This is a recurring problem I have. It's probably also why I felt the need to put footnotes in this post. Always with the asterisks, caveats, and post-scripts... Alas, Dreamwidth doesn't recognize footnote Markdown and I can't get HTML to work.

We've been doing some offline system work lately. It'll get summarized or crossposted here at some point, probably. Aisha's been fronting a lot. We've been reading plural comics on Tumblr and thinking about church.

I don't want to do my job. (Or eat breakfast.) I just want to work on my website.

I want to figure out how to get Astro formatting recognized by Geany. Why isn't there a plugin to make it simpler to add languages? Astro is just Markdown with some Javascript. Language setup should be easier than it is. I wonder how hard it would be to build a plugin for language setup.

Finished our Python course a couple weeks ago. The instructor's grading wasn't what I expected it to be, but he was clearly putting in the effort and trying to grade by the rubric. And the grade we got was really good, despite the F on 2 assignments. Aced the final exam. We're now in a Java course, and... I'm not sure I like Java very much. It's interesting that I have to import a function just to print out to the terminal. And import a whole non-default module to accept user input. It makes sense, especially for a programming language as old as Java-- if I'd gone very far in C++ I'm sure I would remember similar things.

Body has been protesting the amount of Computer Time lately. Been screen-sick and having the nerve twinges in the palms and fingers again. Trying to do more stretches, but... time. Memory. Et cetera. I wish my body didn't require this type of maintenance. I feel like it should be a one-and-done thing. A tendon is too tight? Unspool it, reset the tension, reattach. But that's not how organic systems work. It's much more complicated than that.

We read 10 books in 2025! My rules for this were that the book must have been published with a print release (whether I read it in print or not). This included poetry and would have included thicker zines, if I'd thought to add them. There was some level of judgment on how thick it was; did it feel like a book or like a pamphlet, etc. This was mostly to get me to read something other than fanfiction, which I have a harder time tracking, and to get me to read some of my physical books.

The books we read were:

1. What We Buried by Caitlyn Siehl
2. The Litany of Missing by Aruni Wijesinghe
3. Gilgamesh translated by Sophus Helle
4. Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
5. Cuneiform by Irving Finkel & Jonathan Taylor
6. The Bible Compass by Edward Sri
7. War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
8. Beowulf by Maria D. Headley
9. Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee
10. Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD

We've set the same goal of reading 10 books in 2026. We're already 3 books in, as of writing this post :)

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A friend sent a haiku about time. I replied with this:

isolation, cold
fear and what comes after fear
dissociated

I kinda stumbled onto it by accident, but the line "fear and what comes after fear" is sticking in my mind. There are many things that can come after fear, but in context, "fear and what comes after" evokes a very specific kind of exhaustion. Maybe I know it from experience.

Struggling worse with daytime sleepiness lately, especially before noon. I was in bed by 10 and probably asleep by 11:30 last night, meaning 7+ hours of sleep, and I still can't keep my eyes open this morning. In the afternoon and evening I feel great, hardly sleepy at all. It's worst when work gets slow for a few minutes and I start to zone out, then spend several minutes trying to do my job while in a hypnagogic state. I remember this being a problem back in high school. Is it chronic sleep deprivation, or do I have a sleep phase disorder, or is it just because solstice was yesterday and it's the darkest part of winter?

It's worrying me more right now because I just interviewed for a promotion. I don't think it will cause actual problems, but it will make my new duties more stressful if I can't stay awake enough to get things done.

Last night at the in-laws, I couldn't fall asleep, so I got up and read for a while. Mother-in-law has a table out with several prayer books, including one about the Rosary and the mysteries. It was a decent overview but mostly made me want something that delves deeper. I enjoy the way it drew parallels between the mysteries and other biblical events, like Jesus carrying his cross vs Isaac carrying the wood for Abraham's burnt offering. There were a lot of connections drawn in this fairly short book that were stated as if they're obvious, and maybe they are to a well-versed Catholic. I'm not sure. I'd like to read more on it, though.

I also noticed something interesting. There was an illustration for each of the mysteries. One of the Luminous Mysteries is Christ's baptism in the River Jordan. In the illustration, John the Baptist had a bowl and was anointing the head of Jesus, who stood knee high in the water. In Mormon depictions of the baptism in the Jordan, both of them are standing in chest high water, drenched, and John's arm is raised, in the typical posture used for Mormon baptism by full-body immersion. This difference made me realize that we likely don't have a great deal of records of how early Christian baptisms were actually performed. Modern-day imagery is constructed to match modern baptismal traditions, both to be familiar to the viewer and to offer a sense of legitimacy to the work.

I've been intermittently checking in on Jay Osborne's FreeFarmhouse project for over a year now. (If you're interested in architecture or house design, and especially if you're interested in the free/libre software movement as well, you should check it out.) All of these plans are free as in freedom, and many of them are free as in beer, too-- 1 year after he initially releases the plans to his Patreon subscribers, he releases them to the public. He's released several new designs since I first found the project. I'd pledge if I had the money.

He made a great point about design limitations in the Key West Shotgun House post: "Breakpoints are the natural limits hidden inside a design. Push past them and it’s no longer the same house. It requires a fundamental rethinking. To create flexible designs, I need to map out where the breakpoints are."

This concept applies to physical designs like architecture, but it's interesting to reflect on the idea of "natural limits hidden inside." What are the natural limits of my schedule, my mindset, etc? What limits do I need to respect and what do I fundamentally need to rethink?

crossposting something by Annie Mueller that made me laugh this morning (because same, but also oops, I've probavly done this to people before)

How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner

“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company¹ doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!

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I'm taking a free Chemistry 101 course from Saylor Academy right now. Saylor pulls a whole bunch of Creative Commons resources together and hosts them in one place organized into a course curriculum. If I pass the exam, I can apply for college credit for $5, which is very, very cheap, and if I don't apply for college credit, the course stays free. They're doing things as inexpensively as possible for both students and the parent nonprofit. It's a great concept.

The course itself is... well, the content is good in theory, but it is organized in a very strange way. Because they're pulling from a whole bunch of disparate sources, you get a mix of video and text content. A lot of topics are gone over twice, but not necessarily in the same unit. I was taught how a barometer works at least 3 times: twice in unit 1 (measurement), again in unit 5 (gas behavior), and they're going over it again in unit 6 (thermodynamics).

Other topics are clearly inserted out of order from the initial source, so the author expects background knowledge I haven't yet been given. Unit 6 covers the 2nd law of thermodynamics before the 1st law. It would've been so much easier the other way around, because the authors assumed I already understood the 1st law and based their explanations on that assumption.

If I was reading Stephen Lower's work in full, in order, and more slowly, I probably would find his writing style engaging and maybe even endearing. As it is, having to look up flowery descriptive words like "salubrious" feels very frustrating when I'm already constantly looking up words I actually need to know to understand the course like "enthalpy." (The word "salubrious" saw peak use in 1828. It was used in this course as a one-off description for the atmosphere.)

Chemistry does tend to make me feel a bit stupid, but I don't think that's the only reason I'm complaining. I think these grievances are reasonable. The idea of building a course this way is sound -- I'm really enjoying the Biology 101 course -- but this particular course needs some work on the execution.

(I can tell this is mostly Bash complaining, because the complaints boil down to "this is so wildly inefficient." Paul and Merlin both kinda like the more prosaic writing style in some of these pieces. Paul might go back and read Stephen Lower's work in full and in order, because it feels a bit like eclectic poetry about chemistry. But eclectic poetry is not a very effective way to express qualitative information, which is why Bash is so frustrated.)

I'm not even going to touch on the Java course I tried to take through Saylor. I could rant about that for a While. That one was never vetted for college credit, though, so it's not held to the same quality standard as the bio and chem courses.

If I find this sort of struggle in future Saylor courses but I still want the college credit, I might go straight to the source content and read that, then come back and take the quizzes and practice exam to see if I missed anything major.