Postrat kids like to talk about “object level” but I don’t really grok that. But I like “log level” as preferred abstraction level. Very pararational. Zone of glitches, autocorrect, spooky entanglements, gremlins, alt temporalities, forensics, liminality, poop, entropic boundary
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I’m trying to construct a few log-level gremlin-like paradivine creature archetypes. Slightly evil demiurge archetypes (that’s what my weird goat-crow-rat schema is about... they started out as refactored time gods, but now they’re more like time gremlins)
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You’re familiar with powerful aliens or gods who can manipulate time in serious ways with technology or magic. Now imagine much weaker creatures that can only mess with time slightly in sneaky ways, with log-level powers. Like say reordering 2 events and causing a small glitch.
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Log level is fun because it’s where the rubber meets the road. Theory meets phenomenology. Via instruments as points out.
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Other examples of log-level fiction:
Honey I shrunk the kids
Fantastic voyage
Skinny Legs and All (Tom Robbins novel)
The things they carried
Not an accident that these are “shrunken perspective” viewpoint works
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You want a narrative viewpoint that can zip through a world unnoticed. Something like a tracer but without a macro-imagining component. Just the tracer itself.
In SF I’d make such characters sub-Planck scale
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Some good progress this week though on multitemporality, identifying log level as the right level of analysis, and red-flagging the time-perception accuracy as an unimportant cul de sac
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If log-level is the right level of analysis, what are the other wrong levels?
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It's a sliding scale of wrongness... the more chronology starts getting violated, the more you're wandering away from log level. Logs are implicit system models that defer to time as a first principle. So rearranging the order of events to make more sense is log-level corruption
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So this exactly like the difference between a chronological and algorithmic social media feeds, like old twitter versus new twitter?
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exactly, and that's the primary example I use when explaining/writing about this concept
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