kinds of user guide

Things you can write about yourself (or about others, I guess?) that let people skip some of the trial and error of interacting with you in a specific capacity:

Some of this would be relatively sensitive information, which means it ought to stay off the main post list and off the front page. I don't currently have a mechanism for creating unlisted pages! I should.

I've met people who really prefer the poetics of learning someone "the hard way". In the trial and error, there's room for someone to touch unknown unknowns within their own multitutdes. I think these people are good at people-ing. I also think they underestimate how many selection effects prop up the ability to share subtext with another person richly enough to make the "hard learning" possible.

Is that strawmanning? I think it is but I'll leave it in for now. Idk, the internet is still enough of a strange baby beast that I retain the sense of weird things happening here. It's boring to step through the tired protocol-negotiation parts of some of these things. It's scary as hell to systematize the things we wish we didn't have to say out loud. Ergo I think there's value in doing it. We write to reveal, and these kinds of documents are like standing in a field naked.

If you wrote a user guide to be an art object, what kind would it be? Horrifically intimate, I guess; Marina Abramovic flavoured. Years and years ago, I found a presentation on slideshare that laid itself out like a ballad in WordArt, managing somehow to be aching and lyrical in the progression of arrow-shape to circle-shape. Structure lives, it breathes; you can use it to say things.

Help me. When I don't have a good idea of what is trying to escape from the tips of my fingers, this is what makes it to the page. It's been backspaced more times than you might want to know; It feels cruel to me, but not destructive. I do want help a lot, but it isn't always good for me.

Guides for other people about me are twice-removed, a reflection of a reflection . The only way to be meaningfully right about what you put in them is to hunt for fixpoints. Don't fixpoints come in two flavors? Either they are true the way a dark room is true (Sun, Zekun and Firestone, Chaz 2020), or they are true the way a portal is true. Is it a void, or is it an abyss? The only question.

Validate