A Sense of Doubt blog post #3363 - The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
I had another post planned for today for a presentation I gave today for a job interview, but then I decided that I did not want to push that content to social media quite yet, not while I am under consideration for the job AND several of the people considering me are connected with my social media feeds.
So, instead, I am reaching back into the draft archive for a post that I set up to publish in 2021 and never did.
Just this share.
It's good stuff.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
agnosthesia
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
lilo
n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other.
midding
v. intr. feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be.
pâro
n. the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, “colder, colder, colder…”
Brand new episode of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
onism
n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
Altschmerz
n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.
scabulous
adj. proud of a scar on your body, which is an autograph signed to you by a world grateful for your continued willingness to play with her, even when you don’t feel like it.
YOU TUBE CHANNEL
https://www.youtube.com/c/obscuresorrows/videos
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Nov 16, 2021
THE BOOK IS HERE from Simon & Schuster: https://bit.ly/3z1RYvH
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Special note to my subscribers: Thank you all for your patience. In the last couple years I had already been hard at work writing the book, but then life happened: I moved abroad, my daughter Charlotte was born, and I had to have unexpected heart surgery right when Covid was at its worst. I made it through, thankfully, back to full power. And now I feel extraordinarily grateful that the book is finally here, that I lived long enough to see it happen, and that you all have stuck with me. I have no words for any of that. But I'm excited to get a chance to make more videos again. I love it.
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“BRILLIANT” —New York Magazine
"Creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have."
—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of "The Fault in Our Stars"
“Koenig connects the seemingly unconnectable feelings we as humans experience on a daily basis and puts words to them. Koenig brilliantly finds a way to show, in his new words and their definitions, how we connect to ourselves and one another through feelings and emotions.”
—BoDean Warnock, Booklist
"A beautiful little book…Whatever the half-baked, unfinished, yet-to-be-articulated emotion tumbling around in your brain, this book will find a way to name it. Koenig has a cunning ability to parse out emotions in a very specific way and pin them down into actual articulation, both in the word he creates itself and its poetic definition and etymology. There is joy to be found in every nook and cranny of this book.”
—Michigan Daily Review
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| The original Backrooms image posted on 4chan in 2019 |
https://boingboing.net/2020/12/15/the-quiet-horror-of-procedural-generation.html
The quiet horror of procedural generation
The following is from my newsletter, The Magnet. There's a free version and a subscriber version. I hope you'll check it out! — Mark
That feeling from being the only one in a building is called kenopsia. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines kenopsia as "the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that's usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet." Photos of kenopsic places — abandoned shopping malls, empty airports, school hallways late at night, and other lonely places that evoke feelings of disassociation and disquiet — are popular online. The most famous kenopsic photo is the one of The Backrooms.
According to Know Your Meme, The Backrooms originated on 4chan in 2019 when someone posted a photo, taken at an uneasy angle, of a dingy yellow room illuminated by fluorescent lights. There's no furniture or people. The wallpaper, reminiscent of a 1980s hotel conference room, is mismatched. The carpeting has large stains. A divider at the far end hints at an entrance to another, possibly similar room. A 4chan reader's comment about the photo marks the first use of The Backrooms:
If you're not careful and no-clip out of reality in wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you…
The Backrooms quickly spread beyond 4chan. In the weeks and months to follow, people wrote programs that simulated the "six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms." Some of these panic-inducing mazes became the basis for Backrooms games, the object of which is to escape without going crazy.
The Backrooms also inspired a wiki, called Backrooms Database. It's a collaborative writing site where fans "create new Levels, Entities, Objects, Tales, and the rest of the lore, to create a cohesive universe." You can read reports from members of the M.E.G. (Major Explorers' Group) who have ventured deep into the Backrooms and have taken photos of newly discovered rooms and hallways (all of which are, of course, kenopsic) and cataloged the lifeforms that inhabit the lower levels, such as skin stealers, hounds, and facelings.
The Backrooms reminds me of "Report on an Unidentified Space Station," a 1982 short story by J.G. Ballard about a crew of space travelers who make an emergency landing on an abandoned space station. (I read it in the excellent Semiotext(e) SF anthology from 1989, edited by Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson, and Peter Lambhorn Wilson.) The story is told in the form of eight "survey reports." In the first report, the nameless author gives their first impression of the spacecraft:
Although of elderly construction it is soundly designed and in good working order, and seems to have been used in recent times as a transit depot for travelers resting at mid-point in their journeys. Its interior consists of a series of open passenger concourses, with comfortably equipped lounges and waiting rooms. As yet we have not been able to locate the bridge or control centre. We assume that the station was one of many satellite drogues surrounding a large command unit, and was abandoned when a decline in traffic left it surplus to the needs of the parent transit system
They estimate the station to be 500 meters across. But as they explore its well-lit lounges and hallways, they slowly realize that the station is much larger than they initially surmised. From "Survey Report 2":
We began by setting out across the central passenger concourse that separates the two hemispheres of the station. This wide deck is furnished with thousands of tables and chairs. But on reaching the high partition doors 200 metres away we discovered that the restaurant deck is only a modest annex to a far larger concourse. An immense roof three storeys high extends across an open expanse of lounges and promenades. We explored several of the imposing staircases, each equipped with a substantial mezzanine, and found that they lead to identical concourses above and below.
The space station has clearly been used as a vast transit facility, comfortably accommodating many thousands of passengers. There are no crew quarters or crowd control posts. The absence of even a single cabin indicates that this army of passengers spent only a brief time here before being moved on, and must have been remarkable self-disciplined or under powerful restraint.
They revise their estimation of the size of the station to be one mile in diameter. With each subsequent report, they realize the station is vastly larger than they'd imagined.
In the ninth and final report, the scout estimates the diameter of the space station to be at least 15,000 light-years:
We have accepted the limitless size of the station, and this awareness fills us with feelings that are almost religious. Our instruments confirm what we have long suspected, that the empty space across which we traveled from our own solar system in fact lies within the interior of the station, one of many vast lacunae set in its endlessly curving walls.
The Backrooms, and Ballard's story, made me curious about procedural generation, a process that can be used to automatically create endless virtual architecture, among other things. (Check out the Procedural Generation subreddit for lots of cool examples of what can be done with procedural generation.) A specific procedural generation technique called a "wave function collapse algorithm" is commonly used to create worlds like The Backrooms. This beginner's guide to "wave function collapse algorithms" helped me understand how they work.
Here's a video of an infinite city built using the wave function collapse algorithm:
Infinite procedurally generated city in Unity
This video of a city built from a limited set of architectural elements combined in endlessly different ways feels very much like Ballard's space station. Near the end of the video, you can see how the buildings are generated in realtime as you approach the edge of the city. There's no escape from this place.
It's not surprising that kenopsic spaces have become a phenomenon in the era of COVID-19. They represent the millions of unused schools, theaters, office buildings, museums, and libraries worldwide. Just thinking about them triggers a sense of Ballardian dread. Here's hoping we find our way out of this space station we've all been trapped in for the past year.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2405.03 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3227
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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