📙 #066 - Don't Immanentize the Eschaton
Contains spoilers for Ghostbusters, Warehouse 13 and Raiders of the Lost Arc.
I’m looking back through my notes and also the latest entries on my projects page, seeing that the last thing I uploaded was 13 days ago; my AI complaining about the heat…
…which means in theory I haven’t done anything since the last newsletter other than work, some backend code maintenance, going down to London and recording tutorial videos.
This is good; I said I was going to prioritise recording the videos knowing full well that comes at the price of not doing anything else. This is bad; because it means there’s no nice photos or things to talk about in this newsletter.
So let’s instead talk about this scene in Ghostbusters where Peck turns off the Containment Unit and all the ghosts and spirits fly out across New York.
https://youtu.be/dOeTfWU8ASo?si=pzQkQQhZGLhEcdzZ&t=250 [start at 4m 10s]
# WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM (again)
Way back in issue #1 I talked a bit about where ideas come from. In it I wrote about Elizabeth Gilbert and her book Big Magic, where she describes a metaphorical space where ideas live and are trying to escape from, and you as the artist can help them do that, and if you don’t they’ll go find another artist to help them (and we should be fine with that).
Then I rolled into “Ideaspace” from the mind of Alan Moore, which is similar, a place where ideas live, and with the right tools you can enter, or help ideas exit (or both).
[Note: Each time I write about this, I look for a good post I can link to, but everything I can find seems to only mention it briefly, perhaps one day I’ll have to write that post. In the meantime this one will do: https://orbific.com/where-do-ideas-come-from/]
In either case an argument is made for how to find, free, make real or otherwise immanentize an idea; OED sez: “transitive. To make (something which is transcendent) immanent; to render (something abstract) real, actual, or capable of being experienced. Cf. immanent adj. 3.” - often via repeated artistic practice, ritual or copious amounts of drugs, sometimes all three.
# WHERE DO SOME IDEAS GO
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a film centred around finding the face melting Ark of the Covenant; guns, car chases, nazis, action, adventure etc. the kicker being right at the end, that even though we’ve just seen all this world-changing-very-important-stuff going on, the Ark is filed away in some government warehouse as though it’s just one more thing along with the thousands of other things, because presumably this bullshit is going on all the time.
A premise so engaging/tropey that the single final “throw away” scene essentially got turned into a 64 episode, 5 series tv show Warehouse 13, staring the amazing actor Saul Rubinek, and
👋 (who I am reliably informed doesn’t read this newsletter).
The main thing I’m getting at here is that in both the above medias, the dangerous thing is ultimately contained and safely tucked away, along with all the other ones.
That’s the end of the story. Which brings me to…
# SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES
Or SCP, which is…
“The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website about the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public — or so it may appear.
The wiki is a collaborative effort made possible by the contributions of hundreds of authors. If you want to become a part of the SCP Wiki, you can apply to become a site member.”
The fictional mission statement is…
…threefold:
Secure — secure anomalies to prevent them from falling into the hands of civilian or rival agencies through extensive observation and surveillance, acting to intercept anomalies at the earliest opportunity.
Contain — contain anomalies to prevent spread of their influence or effects; by either relocating, concealing, or dismantling them, or by suppressing public dissemination of knowledge thereof.
Protect — protects humanity as well as the anomalies themselves until such time that they are either fully understood or new theories of science can be devised based on their properties and behavior.
The framework used to write the fiction is generally in the form of a file, or case notes written when something has been contained and safely secured (think X-Files-ish meets creepypasta meets fan fiction), and this writing exercise has been going on for around 18 years.
[Source: I have teenage children]
# AI AND THE IMMANETIZATION OF IDEAS
So a speculative fiction website often dealing with containing and securing anomalous & supernatural memes and ideas has sat happily contained and secured on it’s own website all this time, until some prick came along and turned off the containment unit.
LLMs, Large Language Models have slurped it all up an act of training AI on language, all language, rather than say, just fact about how the real world works. And now all those fictional stories, all those ideas are mixed in with everything else.
Something “interesting” happened the other day, you can read more about that over here: “The tech bros are making themselves sick” for a good background, here’s an extract…
“Lewis began posting last week that ChatGPT had alerted him to a “non-governmental system” — some kind of otherworldly entity or AI model — that he seems to think is targeting him and suppressing his business opportunities and, apparently, killing people. Lewis also released a video about this non-governmental system in which, he, uh, appears, to be reading directly from a ChatGPT-generated script.
…as I was reading through what Lewis has been posting I immediately clocked what was actually going on. He’s accidentally triggered an SCP roleplay.
As X user @tilehopper wrote, ‘The SCP Foundation unintentionally creating cognitohazard for LLMs and it causes a tech bro to have cyberpsychosis is the most SCP thing that ever happened.’”
As a creative person, I’ve always subscribed to the idea of, well, acting in ways to help ideas come to you; writing, relaxing, boredom, repetition, practice and so on. In the hopes that you can maybe eke out a single idea (from "Ideaspace”) now and then.
What I wasn’t expecting was AI to come along and flip the fucking switch to let all ideas out, everywhere, all at once; is the idea in the room with us now?
# SIDEBAR
It was at this point I wrote out an overly long segue that linked the Immanentization of ideas via AI above, to the immanentizing of the Eschaton, to manifesting creativity, Discordianism, the balance of order and chaos and finally to the goddess Eris — but like I said, overly long, so she’ll have to be tucked away for another time, instead…
# BOOK RECOMMENDATION TIME
The other day I was feeling like chucking everything, like there was so much going on that I didn’t have control over, that the only stuff left that I did have control over was my stuff, and wouldn’t life be simpler if there was less of it.
Then I remembered that I actually like my stuff and if anything should get in the trash it should be the internet. But I did think “If I could keep just one book which one would it be?” and it was this one Syllabus by Lynda Barry.
A book I wanted to keep so much that I noticed I’d already given away my second copy (that I bought because I gave away my first copy), so I ordered another one, along with another three of her books about drawing, writing and comics (having also given away a copy of the drawing book).
What I love about her books is they’re attainable, they’re dense enough to be endlessly fascinating but just about scrappy enough to not be intimidating. And I have to confess despite owning it twice and it being one of my favorite books I’ve never finished it, ‘cause whenever I work through it I’ll suddenly get the urge to go and make something.
I’m not sure I’ll ever actually finish the book, perhaps one day when I’m stubborn.
If I could cheat with the “keep one book” rule, I’d have all four thank you!
# FUCKING BEE AI, FUCKING AMAZON
Short and simple this one, I’m not even going to link to it.
I’ve really enjoyed the “Always on, always listening to everything and everyone around you” Bee AI wrist pendant thing, see newsletter #062 for more info.
Anyway, I only used it when no-one else was around, with certain guard rails set on it, so that along with it’s handy API that was enough for me to be kinda-okay-ish with it.
But Amazon has just bought it.
It’d be bad enough wearing an always on, always listening device that sends everything to Amazon, but worse; being out enjoying yourself, chatting with friends, on the next table over to someone else wearing an always on, always listening device that sends everything to Amazon (or being that person).
Instead I’m going to have a play with the open source Omi AI instead, because the main thing stopping me from building my own is the hardware part, so this at least seems to solve that problem. Or at least until they too get bought by Amazon.
# WORK & THE END
The last two weeks have been harder than normal because my wonderful co-worker and joint tech lead handed their notice in the other week, to go off and do an interesting and fascinating job. Which is cool, and nothing but love and congratulations for them.
And I’ve gotten pretty good at setting boundaries and not stressing, I’m kinda an expert at it now even. My workload hasn’t suddenly doubled, because I still only have the same amount of time to do things in, and the stuff will happen in that time. And I’m not particularly stressed by it, because I don’t really have that much control over it, it just is.
Instead I’ve chosen to be somewhat kind to myself and set my creative expectations down real low for the last couple of weeks and upcoming couple of weeks, until the new normal has settled in.
Hence no updates to the projects page on my website for the last couple of weeks, even though I have push a few things forwards slightly with non-visual background stuff and recorded the raw footage for four more of the tutorial videos.
They still need cutting together, editing, b-roll added, resources put onto GitHub and the website for the updated, but that’s all the 20% stuff of the 80/20 rule, should be fine!
The next newsletter will be the 7th of August, 2025, and maybe I’ll drop the Eris stuff in there, or the whole draft of using Spectral.js to do colour separation for Riso printing that’s still sitting in my dashboard.
Love you all
Dan
❤️
This weeks soundtrack:
> Raiders of the Lost Ark is a film centred around finding the face melting *Art* of the Covenant
Not a typo? :P
This is a brilliant read, thank you Dan!