Curse the tyranny of the sequential form. I'm putting so much effort into making a talk that can be presented in any order, but I can't think of any satisfying way to render that into the performance itself 😭

All I want is a talk that itself forms a semilattice. Is that really too much to ask for??

Ah well, have an interview I found with Burroughs from the 60s, where he endorses AI art

@quinn

…it occurs to me now that some Choose Your Own Adventure books could be DAGs and the story segments would form a semilattice.

Do with this information as you will.

@lorddimwit Ted Nelson addresses this in literary machines

@quinn

That’s been on my list of must-reads for years now. I read extensively about Xanadu’s Model-T enfilade and tumblers, but always in other contexts. Everything about Xanadu is interesting.

@lorddimwit just a fraction of a sentence in the whole book, but here it is

@quinn

I appreciate that you found the book and the passage and took a photo. :)

@lorddimwit This stuff is important! If someone else is independently rediscovering the influences that led where we are today, then sometimes its worth revisiting them to see what else got lost on the way

@quinn all I want for is a sentence that gives the reader the feeling of a clickable hyperlink to a memory they have already stored from an earlier chapter, every part of the text subtly referencing another part of the text. a pointer.

@lzg That's exactly the feeling I'm going for here, and I really hope I manage to capture it in the finished result. It's.... hard

@quinn next, relate this to machines produced by the Burroughs corporation

@regehr you know me so well

@regehr you likely know this, but William Burroughs was actually the grandson of the inventor, which was why he was able to get away with spending his life wandering the world getting involved in arms trafficking, junk, and murder, with very little consequences to himself

@regehr one of those dangerous cases of there being art that's deeply impactful to me, but where I need to be careful not to see the artist as a person worth emulating

@regehr but if you don't know much about him, I highly recommend looking up his accidental killing of his wife, the subsequent influence that had on his use of the cut up method as a tool of divination, and the connections between him, Kate Bush, and an absolutely insane German psychiatrist named Wilhelm Reich

@quinn I used to be pretty interested in the beats, but that was a long time ago!

@regehr Our niche interests really do overlap, don't they 😅 Naked Lunch is one of my favourite books

@quinn @regehr Cloudbusting is a weird song 😅

@ahfrom @regehr And yet barely an iota as bizarre as the true story behind it. I read through a biography of Reich's every year or two, to remind myself that the world is fucking weird.

@quinn Sounds like a John Cage / Merce Cunningham performance. Perhaps roll dice at the start (on stage, in view of the audience) to determine the order, thus demonstrating that many orders are possible?

@jessejiryudavis This is the first slide 😉

@quinn @ahfrom

👀 👀

@regehr @ahfrom YESSSSSSS. God you are so cool

@quinn @regehr hmm, I wonder whether you're in the likely somewhat small niche of people who would have fun with this book: https://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/
(no, I didn't read it, a bit of other stuff by Rucker though, including some of his popular science math stuff)

@cfbolz wow

@regehr I have no idea what it's like, but I'm very happy knowing that it exists

@cfbolz I will track this down for sure

@cfbolz pretty sure it was the 90s when I last read something by Rucker

@regehr @cfbolz oh Rucker! I misread the post as Ruddy Rocker, and was blown away that an Anarcho syndicalist from the 1800s had written about Burroughs and Turing

@regehr ah, it's just here btw: https://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/turingandburroughs.html

@quinn im sorry but for better or worse i read “ted nelson addresses this” like “bitcoin solves this” and i couldn’t stop giggling