"Winter is an inimical world; its punishment for doing things wrong is sure and prompt: death from cold or death from hunger. No margin, no reprieve. A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going."

— The Left Hand of Darkness

"[…]But we in the Handdara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to."

"Faxe, I don’t think I understand."

"Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask."

"But you’re the Answerers!"

"You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?"

"No—"

"To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."

— The Left Hand of Darkness

Liked Working Around Post Kinds Plugin Lock-In by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

I’ve been using the Post Kinds plugin for a few years on this WordPress site. It allows you to easily style a specific type of posting (a like, bookmark, reply, rsvp, read, check-in etc), it automatically pulls in the relevant information form the posting you’re reacting to, and adds the right m…

"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply."

— The Left Hand of Darkness

What’s the digital note taking equivalent of underlining something three times, circling it, and drawing an arrow to it labelled with YESSS!!

I feel like I’m missing this from ye olde paper and pencil days.

Very wiki / garden / agora adjacent.

“Memory/​narrative. Given the importance of strategy and grand strategy in anarchist cybernetics, functionality in an alternative digital platform to support long-​term planning, for example through facilitating a narrative-​ or memory-​focused layer to communication and organising, would be essential. This would entail a shift away from the short-​term stream-​centred approach of mainstream social media, where users experience content as isolated posts with little relation to what has come before them or what will follow them.”

— Anarchist Cybernetics