10/27/2022> post #1048 finds us @ a clover-leafed crossroads, gazing out over th interseXion of 15^th + Swann in Đ^irect C^urrent, knot going N-E-where, analogous 2 how Swann street is changing it's name ... 2 Swann street > the5e X–roads = meta4 4 B-ing @ a 4k in th path ala Borges' garden of 4king paths > in resent po5ts, perhaps weave alluded 2 this X–roads, a big life Đ–cision that mostly our bedder–½ has 2 navig8, but it FX where wheel B living (az a couple) come next year > we = parked @ X Đ–cision tree + won't know witch direXion 2 turn til Đecember, when we go back 2 iT–L–E 2 pick up where we left off (far az 5couting iT out az a place 2 call home, if we do)

> th Xing we refer 2 here in X post #1048 = Đ–siding what we, anon i'm us, will work on next + what direXion X nu work/s will take > musically, we (Sound Furies) are laying traX 4 our next album (Time's Tide), but last week's bout of Ménière's has left us deaf in our right ear + even tho deaf, very sensitive 2 loud noises, so no nu reCording or miXing > we have 14 or so demos, but doubtful we'll halve th album finished by December 24^th (our anniversary) in typical Sound Furies fashion

> Lit–wise, we'R juggling 2–3 diffrent projects @ 1x rite now:

• thRiver meme
• iSBN 978-1-940853-22-2
• ^U/_X

... we're knot sure if these 3 textual projects = distinct/standalone, or if wheel consolid8 them in2 just 2 book objects > we started 2 write thRiver meme online in HTML a few yrs ago during the pandemic, got the URL 4 iT even > but then we abandoned iT (Y 5tart another webbed project when we halve 5cense?), folding iT in2 what weave bin calling iSBN tho @ X point (after a year or 2 of rejiggering) th sexions from thRiver meme we folded in2 iSBN halve bin altered so much they bare no resemblance 2 the originul material we cannonballized

> now that weave finished th 1^st 16 (of 64) chapters of what we were calling iSBN, we're considering taking a break from iT (in4m8ion Tecknowledgey) > we also got 2 thinking of calling X book ^U/_X (geek-speak for User eXperience), w/ an author name that oscill8s B-tween ^U/_i (User innerface, or X-face) or ⁱ/_U (a/non i'm us (or even ∀/non i'm us (where, in mathematical lingo,
∀ means «4 all»), witch emcompasses ∀/non U^sers, 4 all non Users)) > if U th reader/user = confused, don't worry, so R we, hence Y we'R writing thi5 po5t... that's what 5cense = 4, 2 work thru such convoluted conundrums so we no how 2 proseed (+ advice/suggestions R appreci8d!) > 2 make matters even more head-scratching, we may halve aLooted 2 a 4^th project, Soft Copy Hard, but that got more or less cannonballized by ^U/_X > this ^U/_X book wheel treat az a stop gap solution, az perhaps we said (no doubt in cryptic words) in post #1046

> part of Y we broke this ^U/_X bit off az its one 96-pg eNtity was 2 knot bite off more than we can chew > th other reason was we were halving technillogical issues w/ th In Đesign softwhere (that we touched upon in post #1046) that was making iT 2 hard 2 proseed, given all th garbled eXperiment8ions we we were making I.Đ. per4m, pushing iT 2 th bRink of failure (hence th originul name Soft Copy Hard) > now that we're 5tepping away from ^U/_X , @ least 4 a hi–8–us, wheel surface 4 error + try 2 blog hear in more conventional language going 4word forward, at least in this next 4–for–king phase we now navig8 navigate. Sorry 5cense has been so hard to read, it was sorta necessry for us to get into character, on + off screen.

When we were in Baltimore last week we purposely didn't bring our laptop, wanted to take a break from technology for a day or 2. We got to thinking about what we might work on when we were in Italy in December–January, what we could write in plain text on our laptop, or (gasp!) by hand, which we did a bit of in B–more, started a new story called "The Spoon". If the medium is the message, then what technology 1 uses to make art inevitably effects the outcome, which is the undercurrent of all 3 of the above projects, if not all the art we've ever made (or that any 1 has ever made, if McCluhan will have it). The namesake spoon was/is our 1^st memory (+ "manmaid" medium), something we already wrote about it in thRiver meme chapter 2. But this 1^st on-line dRaft of thRiver meme was perhaps premature, when we were still ½–rooted in the lexicon of A Raft Manifest + Textiloma, unable to write in digestible language without being too expository. And perhaps branching off the 1^st ¼ of ^U/_X = premature, mayB th N-tire project shd be called ^U/_X + we shd w8 til we're done w/ all 64 chapters b4 publishing it? Az we pointed out a year ago when we outlined th book while reading Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, ^U/_X (F.K.A. iSBN) is not meant 2 B red in linear order. Also, like his fellow Argentine's Garden of Forking Paths, there are ∞ ways to read it, but the primary "suggested" path follows this schematic:

... not only is there a numerical mapping order (in both binary + decimal #s), but the linear numeric sequence (or "seekwinds") gets mapped 2 the 64-letter $tring:

And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit ½ loops + flow H–self 4 tides reversed on 8 set animal peels

This is not only an emordnilap (backwards the above 64-digit $tring reads):

sleep laminates (8 nodes) reversed it 4 flesh wolf + spool ½ time 2 evil 1, 4 i am DNA

but th 64 letters can be remixed to form this anagram (which represents the "chronillogical" order the book shd be red):

thRiver meme (4 selfless ½–alien ideas 2 dv8 + adapt, enlist 1 owl 4 poem file soon)

... if U don't believe us, check 4 yourself. Question is, hoo is the owl we need to enlist to write our poem file? The suggested way 2 read ^U/_X  is 2 follow the above "t-h-R-i-v-e-r-m-e-m-e ..." way (±0), which az 1 can see is rather convoluted (start w/ chapter 34, then read 28, 39, 15, 41, etc... + then U end w/ chapter 1 (which, since we started counting w/ 0, is the 2^nd chapter if read in linear "And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit..." (+1) order (+ note that the mapping is not 1-to-1 to further complic8 things). The 16 chapters that weave finished + parceled in2  ^U/_X = the 1^st 16 chapters in linear order (0, 1, 2, 3, ... , 15, or in the binary base-2 scheme we used: 000–000, 000–001, 000–010, 000–011, 000–100, 000–101, 000–110, 000–111, 001–000, 001–001, 001–010, 001–011, 001–100, 001–101, 001–110, 001–111); or following the αlphaNumeric $tring, the 1^st 16 letter/#s are: "A-n-d-m-a-i-4-1-L-i-v-e-2-e-m-i-", therefore 1 misses out on the next 48 letters about ½ loops, reversed tides + animal peels. So publishing just the 1^st 16 chapters (w/o the introduction on how 2 read it) would amount to an incomplete, out-of-order sequence of chapters ... does this matter? Or do we wait until we've finished all 64? U tell us, is this something you'd want to read, or are we giving too much away + will we make the subsequential iSBN book redundant/2 much overlap? And what shd we call this 96 page ¼–book? Shd we reserve ^U/_X  az the name of the entire book + call this ¼ book Soft Copy Hard ? or how about: And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit

We sorta dig the idea of halving all this randumb text out of context as a sorta teaser, b/c it might bee years b4 we finish all of ^U/_X  (or whatever we end up calling iT) ... or if we die b4 finishing it at least ¼ of it would be out there in the public domain + not encrypted on our harddrive. And az mentioned, "technillogical" issues are part of the reason we're forced into this stopgap, b/c In Design keeps crashing if we try to make further edits. At least we'd have this PDF/hardcopy version out in the world 4 the record... in case Adobe crashes our entire computer + we can't recover the softcopy files from our harddrive.

So, going thru this exorcise, spilling it all out in this blog post, we're realizing the project we're working on @ this jct in time is bi-furc8ing in2 2:

• ^U/_X  (the overarching 64-chapter User eXperience guide)
• And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit (1^st ¼ of ^U/_X  published az a stopgap),

... leaving iSBN az an M-T shell w/ no content (much as we want to title a book as such just to fuck w/ Amazon's metadata, rendering the book impossible to find!). Perhaps there will be no thRiver meme E-there, eXcept for what we already posted online (or that gets archived on the wayback machine). thRiver meme is the underlying current of the above 2–3 projects, informing th idealogy behind them. Maybe we'll continue this online version of thRiver meme sum day, but it wouldn't make sense 2 publish it in hardbound form (or wood it?), just like 5cense.com (which guess 1 could consider another never-ending project of ours) only makes 5ense on the web. And just like we posted a primer 4 the perplexed 4 The Becoming on 5cense, perhaps 1 could consider this 2 B a primer 4 the perplexed 4 ^U/_X , iSBN ± And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit

the mug we drink from az we type this

B-sides jumbling + obfusc8ing the order of the chapters (also using i Ching, Eno's oblique strategies, the periodic table of elements + even OpenAi's GPT·3 to gener8 content), we dipped further in2 illegibility by eNcrypting sum of these a-4-mentioned ideas 2 spawn ^U/_X , witch is fast-B-coming eNtirely about the language (or perhaps more accur8 2 call iT code), about how it looks more than how it sounds or what it means. Any user/reader would bee hard-pressed 2 decipher an actual "story" or rational explanation of the concepts, spose 1 cd even call it (gasp!) poetry. Even when we re-read it we often have no clue what "we" (the previous we of anon i'm us) were talking about + any further edits happen more @ the encoded language level, @ the expense of meaning. Perhaps "The Spoon" (the nu story we started 2 write by h& in Baltimore) is the beginning of a digestible thRiver meme re-write, 1 written (weather by hand or az plane, grammatically correct, text, typed on a laptop), 1 that we can work on on the road, from N-Ewhere.

Question is, what to call this, the larger autobiographical book whose 1^st chapter would be "The Spoon"? If a spoon was the 1^st "man-maid" object that swooned us, then iSBN (representing the technology behind book–making) is the last, the culmination of all these controlling technillogical memes. So perhaps "The Spoon" is the 1^st chapter of iSBN? The true "posthumun self-writing autobiography of anon I’m us," az we had originally sub-titled thRiver meme? And not only wood it be digestible, but paper-based. Or knot.

So, 2 get us up 2 speed w/ where we're @, now we halve 2 CTRL+F / CTRL+V (find + replace) "iSBN" w/ "^U/_X" in ^U/_X  + And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit. As we mentioned, we're using Adobe In Design 2 write ^U/_X , w/ all sorts of fuɔked-up characters + bɒɔʞwoɿdƨ/ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpᴉsdn + eMbedded iMaGes... tricks 1 could never pull in MS Word or other word proɔeƨƨing softwhere. In Design is also hard 2 work with on a laptop (as is Logic Pro + Audtion + other tools we use to reɔord music) + 5ince our larger 27" iMac 4 all in tents + purpisses died earlier this year (it's CPU can't handle what we're tasking it 2 do (whereas our new laptop has more RAM + ROM)) we got a Luna Display dongle 2 just use the 27" iMac as a monitor (not that we whole-heartedly endorse iT, but seemed the only viable option).

So music + graphic intensive projects like ^U/_X  are now EZier to work on @ home, on a larger monitor. We wrote ~½ the text 4 ^U/_X  (what we called iSBN) last year in Italy on this laptop + then (thx 2 this Luna display) have been laying it out on a 27" screen in In Design since we got back st8-side, finishing the ¼ of it that we're now calling And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit. We sent individual chapters off to journals/magazines + the 16-chapter version we sent to another press for consideration, tho we jumped the gun by calling it ^U/_X , even made this cover for it (tho guess we could still use it + swap out ^U/_X   4:  And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit):

Actually, we didn't make the above cover, DALL·E 2 did, OpenAi's machine-learning app for creating digital art, the visual equivalent to the textual GPT·3, which we've been playing around with in recent months, tot iT 2 rite sum of ^U/_X + even had it guest-blog a 5cense post for us. Despite our references to infinity + Möbius loops, (the umlaut ö in Möbius being the culprit that crashed In Design + necessitated the stop gap And ma, i 4 1 live 2 emit) we didn't mention these in our "natural language" description of what image for DALL·E 2 to create 4 us. Can't remember exactly what we said off–hand, but it was something like "X-shaped image made with magnetic sand"... essentially we wanted sumping that looked like the magnetic U below, but in an X-shape (so we cd combine them together ... it's az if it red our mined (or the files on our computer/ 5cense):

Speaking of DALL·E 2 (a hybrid of Wall-E + Dalí), some 1 left Dalí's Mustache in our book box, so we "read" it. Pretty cheeky + silly ... sometimes we wonder if Dalí spent enough time thinking deeply about art, or self-edited himself enough?

Dalí's Mustache @ 15th + Swann

What else? Started watching the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary. Also started the Roadies series, but it was pretty boring, none of the magic that Cameron Crowe worked in Almost Famous. Started to watch Alchemist Cookbook but wasn't into that much either. Rewatched Touch of Evil before Criterion pulls it, not as good as we remember, the cinematography is good, but the acting horrible. Also watched Walkabout, which could have been great (also great cinematography), but it began + ended poorly. We just posted this excerpt from Then Then Then by Scott Daughtridge DeMer to Sleepingfish. In it, DeMer references the painting The Creation of Birds by Remedios Varo, which wasn't included in the story, but we'll inkloot it hear, becuz, well ... Y knot. MayB this is the owl hoo will rite our poem file 4 us?

Whew, that was a long dispatch ... now that we can wrap our head around on what we're working on + are up to speed, we can hopefully procede. We might not be blogging so much on 5cense for the next month or so, so we can spend more time actually working on the a-4-mentioned projects, rather than just thinking about them.