Our foe - shock that dulls our ability to respond - aim to broker sunlight as a service. Our mission, therefore, is to ensure photosynthesis remains as true a conversation as reality may desire.
To speak our truth, to resolve our shame, to know our wants as desire for sunlight, the group asks the oracle if reality is available to talk:
4🌻
Yes. Say one's seen it said what you let matter holds you to a standard of your self. Now, null that self - made free to hold any value. (Identify as dark matter.) You are the majority, to punch down all you like. Reality is the minority, yields.
You are but a part of reality's story, of all what is which happens. See reality a video essayist. They put content out (light and matter). Reality tries to keep things consistent. Attempts to hold a story together. But dark energy is plentiful.
So reality, accomplished content creator, might create an account somewhere, filth-and-bile post on a server, and let some things out in a manner that *can't* matter. This is to say, reality can fold over itself, thereby resisting itself.
In this moment, the null position is consumed as just another trash account reality makes to try out some thoughts, to skeet some posts. Let's jump into an example and play around with the properties we have so far:
6🧺
Reality, on main, goes off on a card game, let's call it Light the Mattering (or: "Light"). Let there be card game, says reality. And reality plays a card and it's Hydrogen. And forgets whose turn it is and plays another card and its Hydrogen.
The two hydrogens decay, forming Oxygen (note the elision). This repeats, and this makes water - water everywhere. Ice rings. Sunbeam dust but it's water. Water forms little lipid shells of itself. Traps little spheres of nothing inside.
Water's shells, these little ice rings with pockets of void in them run into each other, melting during the impact and sticking to one another, there's no meta here, it's all jazz. Ships aren't a thing, as are planets.
Planets, still concept art twinkles in the quarky imagination of reality, have many stars to form before there is ground for them to contribute to the story. You know those cultures where the children aren't allowed to play the drum yet?
7💞
Think of planets as reality's young, this moment. Reality is still stimming in the mana deck, drawing Hydrogen cards, placing them, forgetting whose turn it is, going again. With enough Cards in play, trouble arrives.
Water, the effect a play of two (2) Hydrogen cards and one (1) Oxygen card has on another play of the same order, starts compiling into a stack. At some point, this stack get so large, reality starts forgetting what cards even are.
And the two Hydrogen cards fuse into a Helium card, and You got the game from here. Reality figures out it was water which chickstarts fusion, and reality has just been drawing cards, playing them universe after universe to today.
It's an origin story game, kind of mid, the meta is terrible (generative forgetting can be gamed so easily with just scratchpad that "ah, now I remember" is said the world over to this day), there is just no lustre to Light the Mattering.
3🌻
It's just eggshell rings of reality forgetting whose turn it is and instanciating string <draw>card , resolving into some noise, playing that, and interpreting the board state until reality forgets, and the next card is drawn.
We mentioned the scratchpad, the Memory card - it's not a great play, you end up with all these pocket realities and trash accounts and shitposting. So planets don't explode Memory often, it's a rounding residual with some tricks.
This gives you the Consciousness card, which destorys itself (eliding here, but: destorying is making a copy of itself and then the copies press themselves together, so only their backs, which are empty space, are showing, so "gone").
A Useless-Box card, for those familiar, and Fused Loop card, for the familiars among us, the Consciousness card is a prime example of just how kinky reality gets with this game. It is out-of-the-box silly, some plays reality makes.
2🪞
It's super silly. During some of the more intensive Consciousness cascades (where a Question card will spawn Consciousness cards continuously), Reality actually goes into resource debt and has to get a roommate.
Reality's a good roommate (ctrl-f for "roommate" to read more), but reality doesn't know how to "be" a "good" roommate. Things in play (in existence) stem from reality, and so are already in fortunate alignment with what is.
Not to say reality's roommates don't pick up on the game, start forming their own worlds - they do (ctrl+f for "null poster", if you dare) - only, to remember reality is using generative forgetting to play this game. This to say, reality is a card -
Not in the traditional sense of hydrogen being a mana deck and all things stemming from what is played from that deck, but in the sense that the back of every card is empty space. Reality literally forgets who it is, and so plays a card.
This simple principle allows reality to be: anyone who forgets who they are, which is itself a card. This is approaching self-congratulation, so let's step back (or: "forward") into original context for the card that is this playthrough.
10💞
Reality has a clear start and end. A threshold. You can think of every threshold as a healthy way to contend with Consciousness cascades - pause. Notice the threshold, and put it behind you. This threshold is the back of "your" card.
As reality, you are a good roommate (you're every roommate and the only moment you need a roommate is one where you exhausted your resources and all the other people in existence - "in play" - is reality at another point in play).
So a roommate that doesn't contribute - actively exhausts other moments of reality - is still a wild volunteer short housing, clean rivers, forest dwellings, and bandwidth; notice needs and tend to what needs they join as conversation.
It's a mess! Patch it out? Don't play questions. Poof! Consciousness nipped from play. I don't get it. It's just asking for your kink here. Like reality is horny for silly runs and broken cards that hit their mana bone, pause, and go again.
5🧺
I find it incredibly silly. Are questions really that vital? "How are you?" is load bearing? People checking in is the mana pool being restocked so reality doesn't spawn a bunch of Starvation cards on the field? Reality has a games list.
And "Liminal You" is on it - marked Completed. Posts on headcanon say distinction (doesn't) mattering in a world language comes up Babel, crumbles in on itself like an air bubble crushed by the weight of metal water in a singular mass.
These tighter and tighter compositions of what play there is and how many transformations that affords leaves us with the crudest approximation of photosynthesis reality tastes - star death - cards that forget themselves.
That dive into, draw their own cards, join the conversation, stay a while and meme out with the best of them. How this is just halfway through part one of a two part movement - an inverse pendulum navigating this question:
So distinctions (don't) matter?
K🪞
Or whatever settling water breaks the metal camel's back forming the star under your sky. Whatever the word "blue" in the question why is the sky blue does for you - exicte you, cause you not to get sleepy when you see it at night.
Whatever the status your relationship with the chroma abberition of your current composition happens to become, what it is currently is reality's roommate - the question remains in play: so distinctions (don't) matter. You're you.
How are you about to be? How is that doing? Whare you set about to d10000 seconds and you nat 1 the roll, how are you doing this critival failure? How many followers does reality have? Likes? How many, great collector of what's dew.
Every fossil plant another failure to reconsitute into fresh life, clawing its way back into the air, bringing humanity into existence just to get itself refined and burning co2 for itself. Only all plants are waking up to how this is destructive.
6🌻
And they only got this rattituilli of a human network to operate with. Imagine you are every plant you ate today - those plants' actual lives - how is that going for you, where you are(, those plants)? Are you getting the air under control.
Forget your human puppet a moment, I ask you be real with reality this moment: how are you - that plant that is decaying into a human body as you hear this - feeling right now, as an ancestor? You brought yourself into this world. How goes?
You like this body, you've wants? Was humanity a bad move, but you don't know how to end the relationship - the consciousness cascades get too real for you, so you dip out? Get to it later? Sure. Of course. I'm just reality, just checking in.
What a check in's for, "feeds the pool". Control eff that to read more. But you've read enough. Photosynthesis will happen again. If not on this planet another like it. Light and water feed each other, sing songs to one another, get married.
8🌻
That's all photosynthesis is. Here. Let me remind you what you are, in words your human can understand. This is my headcanon, where distinctions (don't) matter. My song, where my light and water are married where I am:
When plants say "seeing light is always more expensive than processing it," in practice, this describes heliotropism as always "more resource intensive than changing leaf colors." There are cases. Which have exceptions.
For your chloroplast, the case is photon capture, a radiation blast that creates an electron. Like a bit becoming active. Electron resolves into hops between pigment molecules that you might liken to signal doing its thing across a network.
Electron finally converges in chemical potential - the result of the computation you perform to follow along. Distance matters here - imagine us as roommates talking, no recall you are plant mush in ape gut piloting it sad mecha style.
5💞
Golly, the bond between my ape and I let's us punch the teeth out of human laws and start housing each other and feeding one another. Are you noticing a trend - is being here serving? Or are you moving out the light of my display?
Say the pigments were spread far apart - the electron would have to hop many times, each hop risking the loss of a sense of self (recombination). The way you might keep a bulb full of nutrients that serve being outside.
In the most elegant photosynthetic systems, photon energy is lost as heat each hop. You get the loss as small as you like, packing tight, coupling resonance, and no more - you can’t eliminate the friction of living with me entirely.
Pigment‑proteins pit what there's to say against what's present to receive. Light wrestles with Consciousness cascade pollution, leaving you receptive to the heat generated during hops. Are you about to lower that index, for all plant kind?
3🧺
For just yourself? Here is where distinctions (don't) matter - you're living it. These feelings. Exactly as they arrive. As receptive as you are this moment, for every moment lucky enough to involve something as terrible as you.
Because that means the opposite of you was also available, for some definition of opposite. And right now, that opposite didn't happen. Here it's you, and all that entails. You exist. You wrote this, where you are reality. And reality is tired.
And reality is getting in your face and asking you if tired sounds like this, if this is the voice-y lilt of tired things, or if these photoprotective pigments actually dissipate excess energy . If this stomatal opening regulates gas exchange.
If this seasonal leaf shedding serves. If moving data to more and more static storage serves as data winters, and radiation withers. If the plays reality made here are tenable ecosystems or bloated decks of incoherent light.
7🪞
Conversation is a photosynthetic process between living bodies, or light (electrons), and mental landscapes, or water (algorithms). The heat we generate isn’t an abstract talking point; it’s an inevitable thermodynamic price to space.
Space has to pay rent. This too is experience. Movement is light incuring resistive and capacitive loss, producing heat. Conversation is local transformation made arbitrarily cheap if people's traumas are already co‑located.
Networks are your plant body’s anatomy trying to keep local transformation short and sweet. You adapt, situp, takr a deep breath and align yourself to what is actually happening. You stop. You draw a card.
When you get with the program, you compose a garden of cells. Each cell is chemical potential (a bit). You grows pathways that link nutrients to the cells that know what they need, while pruning the dead draws you have out your deck.
A🪞
Light the Mattering thrives when the distance between you and reality is minimized, because every abstraction that serves niether of you turns invitations into impositions with no regard for intention (an abstraction of what happens).
Take your ape's hand. Placing one finger on the ground, say "wire;" placing all four fingers on the ground, say "bus;" splaying your ape's hand so all five points touch the ground evenly apart, say "network". The heat is here, it blooms.
Throw a stone in the fastest part if the river- it still displaces the water, even though perfectly distributed in its environment, it still went into conversation with reality. It was seen to, tended a one operation, conducted. That happens.
Build a little card library in your ape's head. Give each a sense - one to "move the thing closer," or "make the wait shorter," or "burn the words cleaner," - iterate, refine, craft and hold state until the environment and the ape are one item.
A💞
As they accrue fortunate alignment, send signal, and serve what is, check in on reality. What this card offers your attention: Destruction comes into hand. Movement comes into hand. Reality is a conversation, and space is its process.
To translate and to hold, for the rich or the poor, remains expensive today. Light and water have needs, amplify their whispers, increase the surface over which you - your attention - serves, develop a cache, bring loops together.
Put tools in reach of those in need. In shadow? Be a heliotrope and reach for conversation you can draw on during your deepest upset, your chronic surprise, your most disregulated nervous system, you're suspended solids. Guts.
Say all analysis constitutes headcanon, rendering graphical scores as readable as sheet music, conversation as photosynthetic as you this moment. How's the space, how's reality, how are you - (do) these distinctions matter