What is music?

One intriguing answer was in some interview I heard:

“Music is the language of emotions.”

It makes sense. That’s probably why it’s hard to precisely describe music or emotions in words, and it's probably why we capture the entire blob of human experience and sonic frequencies in a single word or two. Woefully inadequate, yet seemingly the best we can do.

But, again, I guess that’s what language does in general: be a vessel, crafted to contain whole cross-sections of experiences in the ocean of our minds so we can sail across to another being in the sea of minds. It’s a shit vessel though, and language gets lost all the time in the storm of human interaction. Being excommunicated is tough but being lost could be fun too. And, it's possible to make a better ship.

That was a tongue-twister for my metaphorical mouth.

Did you get what I meant to say?

In this week’s issue, we soak your mind with our language.

( ´ཀ` )(ˆڡˆ)

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

The Tinted Lens of Language

A testy subject

If the Whorf hypothesis and Jacques Derrida are right, then language shapes our perception of the world, not the other way around. This theory is supported by numerous studies in neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology. Most famously, in the perception of color. The naming conventions of colors across cultures determine their perceptual boundary lines; language is projected forward into vision.

Aldous Huxley captures this insight psychedelically in The Doors of Perception:

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

We are what we speak. Language is an attempt at categorizing unstructured reality. Yet, there is a vast portion of reality between the buckets we’ve created. Let’s say that reality is the set of everything that exists; we can call this the universal set, Z, for now.

Consider the set of things we have described with language, N, a subset of Z.

What we can describe in language is a subset of reality. There exists x in reality that we cannot describe in language.

A narrower set than them all is the set of concepts you hold in your head. Each human has a set of things they have understood with language, T. There are roughly eight billion Ts in the world and countless more have existed in history. The union of all Ts is N.

The greatest set is all things that exist and all that don’t, Z. This is truly everything. Reality, D, is a subset of Z.

HA! GOTTEM!

P.S. Did you get the subtitle?

When we say something, our subjective intention or situation is always involved. So there is no perfect word; some distortion is always present in a statement. But nevertheless, through our master’s statement we have to understand objective fact itself—the ultimate fact. By ultimate fact we do not mean something eternal or something constant, we mean things as they are in each moment. You may call it “being” or “reality.”

– Shunryu Suzuki, 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind'

Pandora’s Box

Now the worms are out and they're fucking crawling everywhere and they're fucking evil and you gotta fucking deal with it

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Instagram has been my Pandora's box recently.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: Isn't a Pandora's box something that changes you? That's like, because of, because of its monumental nature. I mean, maybe Instagram is like that for you. I don't want to project your experience of Instagram.

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: I guess it's usually more, but I just meant like, I'm going to waste more time on it. I was just checking and I spent 24 minutes today on Instagram. I was like, that's not good.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: You know, I wouldn't call that a Pandora's box, but a can of worms. Because the can of worms is just that. You can throw it away and think it's gross and that's that. The Pandora's box is like this mythical, epic piece of lore. Instagram doesn't feel like that.

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Interesting. I think of it more in terms of, not in the gravity, graveness, or scale of the issue, but its applicability to the situation.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: Right. So it's just like a logical principle?

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Can of worms, I feel like, is external. That's how my brain is thinking about it right now. Like, it's to the societal scale. Or, at a personal level, it's something that you start. Like, now the worms are out and they're fucking crawling everywhere and they're fucking evil and you gotta fucking deal with it and there's no going back, which is much more of a negative external thing. But I think Pandora's box can be internal and external. It could be whatever...

I actually don't remember what actually happened in that box.

When we say something, our subjective intention or situation is always involved. So there is no perfect word; some distortion is always present in a statement.

– Shunryu Suzuki, 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind'

Can of Worms

A Transcribed Conversation of a Transcribed Conversation

2 weeks later

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: Are you reading your thoughts about this from two weeks ago?

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Yeah. No. Okay. I still don't know. What is the difference?

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: (Searching...) Dude, Pandora's box and can of worms are the same thing. It's a fucking thing that you open and a bunch of shit comes out and you can't put it back in. They're both the same thing.

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Yeah, but not curses upon mankind. The scale of worms is more like, it's more disdainful. And also when people use Pandora's box, they don't say like "oh, don't open that Pandora's Box". For example, if you wanna go pick a fight with someone and someone else is discouraging you from doing it, it's more likely to say "don't open that can of worms", not Pandora's box, right?

Oh, I guess you will call it Pandora's box if you're tempted to open it. I think temptation is the key difference.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: Are you not tempted to open a can of worms? That is not a significant enough difference to call them different things.

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: It's like your intention, like the intention of the speaker or the person with the power of opening it.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: Okay, so is that a can of worms or a Pandora's box? I don't remember, 'cause they're the same fucking thing.

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊: Pandora's box because you're tempted to open it. Pandora is this hot chick who opened a box that she shouldn't have opened because some god was like, don't fucking open that shit. And she was like, oooh, now I want to open it. But who the fuck wants to open can of worms? That's like the weird part about it. There's nothing tempting me to open a can full of worms.

yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑: I agree with you. That makes sense.

A Case for Cloning Hitler

The Final Solution to the Nature-Nurture Question

When I heard we have the capability to clone people, I immediately thought of Adolf Hitler. Everyone always says, “Oh, if he just finished art school, things would have been different. The atrocities of the 20th century could have been avoided if Hitler just had the right people around him, if he was nurtured in a different way, if certain events didn’t transpire.”

Well, why don’t you put your money with your mouth is and raise him right? If he still turns into Hitler, case closed, we’ll know it was bound to happen all along. However, if he becomes a regular person, an artist, a benevolent and compassionate human being, then the nurture people were right all along.

Nature and nurture are the tides and comings of influence; the things that make you, you. In discussions of nature and nurture, nurturing people describe nurture as natural. Natural people describe nature the same way. Neither nurturing nor natural people notate their notion as nurtural.

Well, nurtural people, you talk a big talk but we’re going to find out if you walk a big walk when cloned Hitler is up for adoption.

Raise him right or shut up.

P.S. Did you get the subtitle?

We emphasize straightforwardness. You should be true to your feelings, and to your mind, expressing yourself without any reservations. This helps the listener to understand more easily.

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other.

– Shunryu Suzuki, 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind'

Analysis of These Nuts

Not Those

I don't remember when I first heard a joke about these nuts, but I didn't understand it then, nor do I understand it now. Nor do I think the millions of people (presumably mostly American) who came to love and spread this joke understand why it is funny.

For those who are not familiar, according to Know Your Meme:

Deez Nuts is the punchline of a setup joke that involves asking someone a vaguely phrased question to solicit a follow-up question in response... before yelling out the said phrase in an obnoxious manner. While originally introduced as a skit track on Dr. Dre's 1992 rap album Chronic, the joke saw a huge resurgence after it was featured in a short comedic sketch on Instagram in early 2015.

You see, it isn't funny at first glance nor the second.

That might be the whole point of it. An essential ingredient of a joke is to be unexpected. And you can take that essence to its logical extreme, which is to be completely illogical, nonsensical, absurd. Another common, but not essential, ingredient is the male genitalia. Combine those two, and you get, well, these nuts.

Such dissection do not explain the humorous potential unleashed by these nuts. If anything, the joke dies after any analytical dissection like this – and one is left still wondering, why these nuts became the butt of the joke. Why not these round balls or these sacks?

All one can do is simply accept that some things become a phenomenon without any satisfying explanation. And as phenomena often do, even things vapid of inherent meaning can become pregnant with humor if people just repeat it over and over and over and over it again.

Language just works that way. We just make it up, decide it's funny or useful, keep saying it, until our kids don't think it's cool because everyone says it, so they stop saying it and it dies... until it comes back, because it yearns for thy laughter, it yearns for thee...

thee's nuts.

But just to live is actually to live in problems. And to solve the problem is to be a part of it, to be one with it.

– Shunryu Suzuki, 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind'

ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊'s PROOF THAT CHRISTIANITY IS FAKE

Apples don't grow in the desert. Therefore, Adam and Eve couldn't have bitten into an apple since they were in a desert. This is the smoking gun of people making up Christianity.

A workout routine for marathon gooners

I was gonna write this but got distracted.

Pandora's Worms

A Can of Boxes

Is it the same thing? Don't they feel different?

Is there something left in the can after all the worms come out?

I've opened the box of cans for you, so you can judge for yourself:

quotes.txt

"I'm pretty sure Rebecca said disillusion."
"Naw, she said desolation."
"She definitely said disillusion."
"She said we can't exist in desolation as a constant state, disillusion is temporary."
"Welp, that's da solution."

— Conversation between Dean and yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

"The best art comes from the heart, truly."

— ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊

"What is 'tism?"

"It's short for autism."

"I've never heard of that. Is that a Gen Z thing? Are you a Gen Z or a millennial?"

"I call myself a Zillennial. Some would say I'm the youngest millennial, others would say I'm the oldest Gen Z."

"I don't know why it really occurred to me until now, but millennials are supposed to be Generation Y!"

"Oh, that makes sense. They missed out on a cool letter."

"Not they, you're half part of it."

– yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑ ⅋ ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊

sound.wav

A sweet Euro surprise for you.

prompts.bib

• 𝔠𝖔𝔳𝖊𝔯 The Flow of Being
  /imaginea rainbow flows from the mouth of an ethereal being
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 1 Derp
  /imagine language shapes our perception of the world, not the other way around --v 6.0
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 2 Pandora's Package
  /imagine I actually don't remember what actually happened in that box. --v 6.0
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 3 A Can of Cloned Hitler
  /imagine Finding baby Hitler in a can --v 6.0