a perennial summer homosexual. shining superstar vtuber. evil nasty catboy.


i stream indie games and indie music heavily. got a new game or album to show off? shoot me an ask!


cohost's dreamer, sweetboy, sickposter...


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Webster
@Webster

to be a human in the information age is to be surrounded by rectangles. i am typing this message on a rectangle. you are reading it on a rectangle. if you put them under a microscope, you would find that the letters themselves (and the space between them) are made of tiny rectangles. and even if you were to write them with a pencil, odds are you would write them onto a rectangle. in a room made of rectangles. in a building made of rectangles. on a street made of rectangles. we keep all of our knowledge in one series of rectangles. and before that, we kept them in another series of rectangles. you exchange your labor for rectangles. of course these days most don't carry many of those rectangles in their pockets. the bank stores those rectangles and provides you a single rectangle to represent them all, which you keep in a sleeve in a rectangle that you must never lose, as it also contains the rectangle the state uses to confirm your identity. to participate in democracy, you must have a rectangle. to leave the country, you must have a rectangle.

nature produces very few rectangles. you know where man has tried to conquer nature because there, you will find rectangles. what we call "liminal spaces" are spaces where rectangles feel inescapable. it makes us uncomfortable because we love to escape rectangles. when we say we're "getting away", much of what we're getting away from is rectangles. the absence of rectangles recharges the spirit.

but, sadly, we cannot stay. we have many very important rectangles to get back to.


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in reply to @Webster's post:

the book ethnomathematics by marcia ascher has a passage on this. on one side, a westerner explaining the strength and importance of the square/rectangle. on the other page a quote from an indigenous person about the importance of circles and how rectangles and straight lines and nice corners seem to sap the life away. i don't remember it in a lot of detail, but if you can get your hands on it, i recommend checking out the book.

This is exactly why the monolith in 2001 freaks those apes out so much. They’ve never seen something so smooth or symmetrical, because nature usually doesn’t do that. Just being in its presence does something to them…

Once, in a kind of sketchy arcade when I was a kid, I saw an ancient asteroids game that, sure, used the familiar topologically-similar-to-a-torus rectangle interface convention but on the screen were real lines in all directions, not just up and down, or left and right, and not tiny rectangles.

The controls were just buttons, and they were round.

I am old.

despite this, I yearn for nothing other than to hold rectangles of pure material. Rectangles of rock, rectangles of METAL. A mass of brass in the form of a thin, long rectangle would bring me unparalleled satisfaction. I love the feeling of rectangles in the palm of my hand. I love business cards, I love running them between my fingers. I had a metal little card from my sonic mania collector's edition that was the most delightful and satisfying little aluminum rectangle I couldn't stop fondling. The modern world is built from rectangles, but exceedingly few of those rectangles delight us, and those that do feel so out of reach.