In addition to my writing posts, I’ll be posting weekly newsletters including some regular updates and neat things inspired by writing. Many of these will be free, but I may invoke my right to post paid subscriber posts in the future. I guarantee that I’ll never do so for serialized fiction, though! If you’d like to support me and my writing and want some additional thoughts on this, that’s always an option! If you want a cheaper way to support me, there’s always Patreon for as little as $1/month!
Final Tweets
When I published Toledot in 2022, I had a conversation with my partner where she said, “I can usually tell what you were thinking about when you were writing every time I read one of your books.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah, like, when I read Toledot, I remember you saying that 2021 was the year all your friends died.”
It wasn’t quite true — that was 2020 — but it wasn’t false, either. I wrote Toledot in the span of five weeks in the summer of 2021 shortly after Dwale died. I was intensely focused on death, as its death in particular hit me quite hard. Harder than expected, perhaps, and I think that one of the reasons I was as focused as I was on it was that I felt guilty for grieving as I was, though whether the amount or the method, I’m not sure.
In order to try and parse this, my project for my MFA for the spring semester of this year was an essay dissecting this grief along with that of my dog, Falcon, couched in the framework of an analysis of five of its poems. “Seasons” was one of the toughest things I’ve written to date, as I was forced to tackle the emotions directly. Much easier, I think, to write about skunks and Romanian historians processing the creation of a system that offered functional immortality.
Anyway, in the process of thinking about all of this, Twitter had a fucking meltdown that has left me all sorts of thinky. If it manages to bleed out in spectacular fashion, then how much will be lost? Doubtless lots! It’s been around since, what, 2006? 16 years is a long time for a social media service to run. Wikipedia says it has 238 million active accounts. The briefest search online says about 60 million people die each year. If we say 600,000 of those have a twitter account, that means that there are maybe 6 million last tweets.
Last tweets! What a strange new legacy we’ve been granted!
The term for how a business should consider the deaths of its consumers is ‘thanatosensitivity’. Many businesses won’t need to think about this at all. The chances that Safeway, my grocery store, will consider the deaths of people who buy bread from the bakery section, approaches ‘not at all’.
Social media sites, though? That has a much higher chance. There are mechanisms in place for what happens to a user’s account once they pass away. Telegram has this explicitly available to the user, even. You can specify what happens to your account after its final access. The default is for your account to be deleted after six months.
Twitter has no such explicit, user-accessible mechanism, though, and so countless accounts for which no family member is willing to take responsibility simply linger, their final tweets standing as mute testament to such a death.
Take Cullen.
There was a universe not too dissimilar to this one wherein we wound up in a relationship, where either he moved to CO or I moved to NC and we spent a year or ten or a lifetime together, and as it is, we were still in love with each other.
His second-to-last tweet?
Our last direct messages?
While I promised myself that I would not ceaselessly memorialize the dead — after all, their lives were more than their final moments — it’s still meaningful to me that the words before their forever silences live on in bits and bytes. And besides, I seem cursed to bear final interactions that weigh on me. My final set of messages with Dwale?
There’s no real point to this other than the fact that in a day, a week, a month, a year, whatever, Twitter will cease to exist. Telegram will cease to exist. I’ll change my phone number and lose all of my last texts. Or hell, I’ll die, and never mind all of my last messages to however many other people I talk to, those messages from Dwale and Cullen (and Morgan, and Tirix, and Brone, and, and, and…) will still be there, still be the last things they ever said to some person they maybe never met.
Homuncular Flexibility
Qoheleth had two origins, both hailing from 2016, not just one.
The first and larger origin was a random conversation I had with some postfurries ages ago. What if you could just create a copy of yourself who could go to work while the rest of you could be a furry piece of trash online for the day, or perhaps you could have parallel monogamy. I still have those notes, by the way:
The other beginning, though, was AwDae’s story, which began as a serialized novella called Getting Lost (and, later, Exocorticies). These were merged when I briefly lost my contracting gig during the beginning of COVID and the project became something else entirely.
However, I still think about the origins of that second story. In a similarly innocent way, I was thinking about how, in flow state, I cease to exist as Madison, and simply become whatever I’m working on. What brings me back to being are the petty discomforts of having a physical existence. My hands hurt, or perhaps I have to use the restroom.
Better, I say, to truly become whatever I’m working on, to have my body disappear and simply become the computer, willing words into being (or, at the time, Python).
Thus AwDae, delving in and becoming the sound system.
It was becoming the room. It was a new sensory experience. No limbs, no torso, no face or eyes or ears. Or maybe all ears: ey became the room, feeling the way sound echoed or didn’t, knowing the limits of the speakers in a deeply physical way. Mics peppering the walls a new sensory input. The wires nerves. The speakers muscles to flex. Instincts, reactions, and actions responding to whole systems of stimuli.
This extends (in several ways!) through the text to living lives as furries online, continually aligning one’s form to one’s self image in ever finer ways.
Well, it turns out that there’s a whole entire term for this: homuncular flexibility — the human ability to expand the sense of the body (the homunculus, the mental map of ourselves that lives in our brain) to shapes other than our own.
This essay seeks to explicate an unorthodox idea that spans psychology, neuro-
science, psychology, philosophy, and computer science called homuncularflexibility
(HF). HF posits that the homunculus—the part of the cortex that maps movement
and sensing of body parts—is capable of adapting to novel bodies, in particular
bodies that have extra appendages or appendages capable of atypical movements.
How neat is that?
You can read more here.
Podcast Editing
Just a little update that, as I’m currently going through some weird physical health problems that make me headachy and sick to my stomach when looking at stuff like audio editing for too long at a time, the inestimable Greg Hill will be helping to edit the Post-Self podcast for at least a little bit. How wonderful is that? I’m beyond thankful.
Regular Features
Word of the week
Sere - adj
Without moisture; dry.
Beat Saber map-of-the-week
Remzcore - Gabber = Art, mapped by Luna (at least, the version I played).