draconica | Entries tagged with perception

One thing you can do with digital notes that you can't do with hand-written notes is compacting your writing. On paper (n.p.i.), you may technically rewrite the same sentence more concisely, but the old text is still there, it's not gone, unless you physically destroy it. Digital data is much easier destroyed (unless it's already been published and redistributed), and that's its special superpower over physical writing besides the ease of copying. This allows dozens effortless ad-hoc approaches that will result in compact writing by iterating quickly. You can even unfold the entire sequence of iterations in the same paragraph and then swiftly delete all sentences you don't feel are right, if you feel like it.

Why even bother compacting your writing? The primary use case I had in mind is summarizing the writing of others. By compacting your summaries (removing redundancies, generalizing, maybe even replacing examples with your own instances you find easier to understand), you make it so much easier to 1. memorize the content of the work; 2. internalize it; 3. build upon the ideas you're summarizing. You read a sentence and the entire universe of associations and recollections arises - this is how reading a compact summary carefully written by yourself feels.

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: Determinizm

I haven't been posting to draconica for a while, but that isn't because I've died. If I forever stopped posting, though, you wouldn't know the difference for a variety of reasons.

Don't we all post blogs because we want to feel alive? Isn't a paper trail of publications is the only evidence for the wide world that we're living beings with thoughts, feelings, and words to be said? Personally, my habit of posting texts online is a kind of long tail of a fact that when I only began liking writing essays at school, the school was over. My urge to write wasn't over, though, so there we go. Pages upon pages upon pages.

What would you think of a person who likes to write a lot, dear reader? For me, writing is a vehicle; and me, a peasant of word craft, use this vehicle to have a slightest idea of what I think about without being too distracted. Also, it's easier to remember your thoughts when they're written down. What I do arguably more than write is jotting down little drawings. I do this a lot when I'm bored, or when I'm struggling to comprehend something, so I literally connect the dots by arcs and arrows to help me visualize things a bit.

What else do I do a lot? I hum tunes. This is an expression of something entirely different: the songs that play in my head on repeat. I would think about something and the song plays at the same time and it gets so noisy in there I just gotta hum along. Like a peasant of word craft, plowing their field of thought and humming a song to ease their burden.

And after a long month of plowing, I log into my draconica blog to document my experience to have a good old dose of feeling alive, to leave a paper trail of publications.

If I forever stop posting, know that a tune is being hummed somewhere and a field is being plown.

I'm pretty good at expressing myself, something I used to be pretty bad at.

Like many, I tried to construct a persona and maintain it. A tedious and pointless activity, because what you truly should do is not to construct a persona, but deconstruct it.

Why constructing a persona doesn't work so well? There are several reasons:
1. You have to keep your constructed image of self in mind. This increases cognitive load.
2. Any discrepancies triggers anxiety and a desire to remove oneself from the situation that unveils discrepancy. This mostly applies to perfectionists (I am a perfectionist btw).
3. People in general have a smell for a "fake persona" and they will generally be drawn away from fakers and favor authenticity.

Me personally, I just don't want to hang out with people who build a self-image so obviously, so blatantly that it seems you're getting drawn into a theatrical show. The worst part of being involved is that you are not supposed to break their role, or you're the bad person; everybody should be allowed to save their face because it's a moral thing to do. Morality-shmorality, am I right? Why can't I just yell "FAKER" at them and go about my day? Because I could be wrong?.. Well that's also partly true, so you can see why it's generally awkward to be around the persona builders.

In a way, we all are persona builders. Even if we don't construct an image we blindly follow, we at least have an image of Better Self in our heads that we aspire to be or even think that we partly possess the qualities of Better Self even if others would not agree. That's very natural, just as natural as imagining a house you want to build even before you lay the foundation. Actually you have to know what you're building before you start the foundation, or you may end up with something you don't want.

So to Build a Self is to Build a Self and not Build a Self — yet another manifestation of Dao. Have I told you about Dao before, dear reader? It's the school of thought where you allow these kind of paradoxes to shape your existence. In Dao, non-action means "action without thought", but not really without thought, it's just you don't act on your thought, but on your guts, but not really. Dao is a very cool and unorthodox way of thinking without thinking, and I invite you to try it.

Now let's talk about the Authenti City, the Capital of the Soul, which is the province of the Body. In this city live all the things that you truly are. They shine through you so brightly that people will notice if you try to be something that's not these things. That's why you deconstruct yourself first to figure out what shines brightly within you and then build upon that. You are a product of your internal factors as much as you are a product of external factors, and these must coexist in harmony, or your Authenti City collapses. It's not like the whole city gets destroyed, it just becomes an unwelcoming ghetto where everyone is paranoid.

I didn't want to write this blog post, but I wanted to finish it very badly so I could write something else, that's why it may seem a bit exaggerated and jumpy. On the other hand, I told here a lot of things I wanted to tell. According to Dao, your silence speaks, and your speech is mute. You must give a shot at Dao, dear reader, it's so much fun.

Current Location: Dao
Current Music: Oda

I can see the light.

Isn't that the very essence of seeing? If you see, there must be light, at least that's how our eyes work. Light is a stream of photons, very small particles that move at the speed of light as you might've guessed it. But if you were a photon, it would seem to you that you are moving from place to place instantaneously, because special relativity.

I can see colors, isn't that the essence of seeing? It's certainly not the essence of light, because photons aren't colored. What is colored are photon detectors in our eyes, we have three kinds of them, Red, Green, and Blue, mostly Green, because we as a humanity grew up among greenery, or so we think. What differs between different photons is their frequency, which is a measure of their energy. Different colors are merely flavors of various amount of energies, much like hot and sweet are different flavors of various chemicals found in foods, poisons and other objects.

So it seems the essence of seeing is transduction. It's a generalization of translation. I'd say it's the same for hearing and touching, they're all transductions. Transduction is essential for information to spread, because it's spread across media, and media have different encodings for signals. So a transducer is needed when information leaves a medium and enters a different medium. In seeing, eyes are but one transduction layer, followed by neural processing to form a picture we perceive. A picture so convincing we think it must be the reality itself, until we dream and hallucinate.

I can see the light, but can it see me? What's it like to be the light? To touch all the things around you? To be woven into reality as an infinite thread of refractions and emissions? To allows others see, yet be blind on your own? To be pure free energy?

That, dear reader, I'm only yet to discover.

Current Mood: ditzy
Current Location: Eternity
Current Music: Sounds of stuff around me

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Encylopædia Draconica

Who's the anarchist in charge?

Entries tagged with perception

Note-writing as compression

On Writing, Dead Ones, and Plowing the Field

Authenti City, the Capital of the Soul

Essence of Seeing

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March 2026

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