A notebook, a form, an almanac
A current reference document about my setup at home. Home machines kaname Kaname is my main computer, a Framework Desktop running openSUSE Tumbleweed (GNOME). 1 He’s 2 used for gaming, local AI inference and general purpose computing while at my desk. Since I tend to move around the house a lot, I use kaname only sometimes (maybe a weekend morning or an evening playing a game). Most of the time…
hi there! i’m matilde. i’m early 30s, living in montreal. online, i usually go by maru as a short form of my name. the encyclopedia eidolica is a sideblog or a notebook. i sketch thoughts a little more loosely here. from a really young age i’ve been invested in the creation of places, aesthetic and tonal spaces to live in. i think this same tendency led me to making art and video games more…
There are times when I miss living alone. Not always, not even in sum — in practice, the experience left me anxious, paranoid, lonely — but I do like my own company. There have been times when I’ve shared a place with others and been left alone for half the week, and those were the most harmonious. The issue is that communal life reshapes myself; I am constantly in reaction; there is no more…
We got the keys last Friday. After a surprise mid-March where it was apparent my roommate and I would have to choose to stay and buckle through construction for an indeterminate amount of time, or announce our non-renewal and find some new living arrangement — that we only had ten days to decide — I scrambled to secure a place and managed to get it in place early April. Now it’s nearly June, and…
Over the years I’ve come to realise that a few threads I’ve focussed on in my career are the same line: the discomfort of technological abstraction explicitly stated in our earlier games the movement toward New Computers, theorising novel network topologies give rise to interfaces that trend away from mass broadcast as well, the focus on “human-scale networks” that could resist the incentive…
Since writing this post a handful of reflections have been posted in response or in addition to it, including “Building a Lifeboat” by 7666 and “Close This World” by Nyx Land . A friend of mine, shibao, recently put out “ a final call for lifeboats ”, a piece in equal parts polemic and elegy 1 . I wanted to collect my thoughts and respond in order because it seemed like a call for some sort of…
I’ve had a few gap periods in my life; while they started out freeform, over the years a sabbatical or a break would come to have an inherent focus , a meaning behind it. I think in 2024 it started to pick up, as I recognised that I wanted rhythm and intention ; I recognised my own reflexivity as needing to be mastered, made deliberate. At the same time I’ve come to fall into pitfalls of…
O Almighty God, the Father of all blessings, by whose hands the earth was made and by whose hands we now receive this meal: Grant that we, partaking of Thy bounty, may become Thy hands to feed the world; may our gifts become children of Thine endless gift; so that all creation might find its home in Thee. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy…
I’ve come to a realisation lately that while I’ve been circling the drain the past year trying to nail down what “participation” literally means , trying to make the leap from theology to action in an actual, systematised way ; doing more than intuitive leaps, borrowing words from other philosophical systems that invisibly elide their origins, I’ve been unproductive, languishing, simply because…
As my friend circles begin a strangely unified cycle—starting new creative works all around the same time—the question of how one goes about writing a story has come up regularly. In our weekly calls and bits of banter, it’s evident that we all get inspired differently; we tackle stories from different angles; we accomplish different goals through the construction itself. As for my own process,…
The encyclopedia eidolica is assembled with a single Ruby script and Makefile. The site is pushed onto my PDS and served via wisp.place . I write primarily with VSCodium and good old vim, depending on the hardware available. The encyclopedia eidolica was inspired by a variety of blogs that went beyond their author’s namesake; I felt that my blog was a de facto “professional presence” and wanted a…
In several conversations with a friend I was invited to revisit some prior beliefs I had posited on the relationship between the environment and the self; at various times in my life this position has reversed, then reversed again, but I think it’s reaching a more nuanced, unified position. The initial position was this: places bring out a different person within you, so changing environment…
In the months since I wrote on participation I’ve had to actually grapple with the consequences of my choice to avoid all animal products derived from factory farming practices; to play through my intuitions in the real world. I’d reread it to reinforce why it was I made these choices; what my conclusions were, and they were a bit messy, but clear (as to be expected in such a vague, notebook…
Two variations. for the living Almighty God, whose mercy embraces all those who despair: grant us the grace to be Your hands and Your heart to those among us who suffer, that they may receive Your consolation in this life, and find rest in Your endless embrace. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. in…
O Heavenly Father, who didst call thy servant André Guindon to teach that our desires, rightly ordered in tenderness and mutual self-giving, participates in Thy divine love: Grant us grace, through thy Holy Spirit, that we may neither use nor be used, but in all loving know and be known; so that at the last all earthly things may be restored in Thy final love. We ask this through Jesus Christ our…
While it’s true that I’ve been doing some deeper ethical investigations , I’ve had a hard time applying it to livelihood; it’s always felt like there is no way to get everything to align, so I would have to just pick one part that I liked, and optimise for it. There’s a world where your worldview starts where the workday ends; but that seems like a terrific compromise, doesn’t it? I think by and…
In computers, generationally I was trying to gesture at the fact that in all the biographies of the computer pioneers, it’s clear they had a very different relationship to computers than we did. Their world was one where the computer won’t do anything until you learn the language, learn how it works, learn how to gradually make more and more elaborate things. Ours is one where it’s meant to not…
In various conversations with my partner the past six months I came to realise that my beliefs were often founded on intuitions I still felt were sound enough to rely upon, but that I didn’t really apply them to anything. In January, I wrote : What do I believe? Obviously, that it’s easy to abstract away human lives when they are presented as flows of information, and that this is a very mundane…
I’ve often thought of intelligence less as an essential status than a participative process; human intelligence the habitual commitment to one’s respective, idiosyncratic process of deduction. That is to say, intelligence is the process of habitually asking specific schools of questions; an introspective line of reasoning; of structuring an argument and coming to conclusions. When we observe the…
It’s not easy to get a yahoo.co.jp email address. It used to be easier – anyone could do it – but now it requires a Japanese phone number. “Oh, that’s easy, right? You just go visit or get a VoIP number” – nope! Sorry! Tourists get data-only SIMs. You will never get a Japanese phone number that could call or text or whatever just for visiting. For that, you’ll need a Japanese bank account – which…
In continuing to overthink the consumption of video games I’ve been idly going through André Guindon’s The Sexual Language , which is a Vatican II era explication of sexual morality and meaning that tries to go outside pure “code moralism” and repression to the meaning we give our bodies and our acts with each other. 1 I was put onto it by my partner, who was put onto it by her grandmother; and I…
From lectures on the Gospel of St. John: Lazarus wrote the Gospel of John. After chapter eleven, when he came back from the dead he was the beloved disciple. The state of being dead and coming back was one of spiritual initiation and one we are all to follow? Initiates can go visit the spiritual worlds (as Lazarus did); however in order to do so, one must be ‘homeless’, that is, without any…
I could be sitting in a cafe, with the plates clattering as I’m supposed to be reading a book. Or I’m out with a friend – the evening is abnormally brisk as it’s always been the past few months and there’s a lull in conversation as we stare at the trees in the dark. There’s this gap for the mind to intervene in the rivers of should-do, must-say, coordinate what’s being seen,…
There was a custom on the internet at one point where someone would often use the same handle everywhere. Not on mailing lists necessarily — so many university emails, so many real names — but I think somewhere around the forum era, the structure necessitated the same name to be recognised at all; you would have one community per domain name with its own isolated database, its own history, its own…
I’ve tried to articulate this before but I feel like it’s continually evolving. In various conversations with others I feel like I diverge in some areas and now feel compelled to write a bit more about where I am. I very clearly am inspired by Origenist eschatology. He posits (very loosely) that all souls were created by God at the start of the universe (and Christ’s never fell away from God), and…
and i will love you in our smallest time, and i will love you in long and ruined age and i will love you in our union suff’ring and i will love you in our happy fire and i will love you as you scatter smiles and i will love you as it dilutes into days, and i will love you as you’re purelong kindness and i will love you once you’re nothing else and i will love you as your voice in mine can…
What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how […] One of the reasons people have become so enamored with computers is that they enable you to experience the new worlds you can create, and to learn what’s possible. 1 Of course, by the time I started using a computer, a computer already stopped demanding I become so intimate…
The spectre of .hack hands me to this day. I often refer to years that initiate entire ‘eras,’ years where seemingly everything about me changes at the same time. It seems to occur every 5-10 years; the initial year was somewhere around 2004-2006. .hack//sign had been airing Friday nights. I dutifully followed the entire run, week after week, and mentioned pivotal episodes on a Livejournal — and…
It’s hard to ignore while in Japan that my Japanese is like my piano is like my French: completely unstructured, little fragments of coherence and understanding try to paper over a whole world of non-understanding and it leads to this feeling of … promise, potential, always indefinitely deferred. It makes me feel constantly embarrassed by all that I don’t know, more than proud I know anything at…
This article describes a philosophy and rationale to the usage of the encyclopedia eidolica. Circles of broadcasts There are two questions I consider when communicating on the internet: - how long, and with how much polish, does the format allow? - for what audience, and how conversationally? As of 2025, these choices are generally paired along a single axis: you can have completely unpolished,…
I’ve been constructing a syllabus for my media consumption over the next half-year and, of course, I have a lot of video games on it. I usually play video games with a narratively-oriented goal (“to get to the end of the story in order to complete the consumption of the game as a Text”); there is, however, also the ludological approach (“get a sense of the mechanics and get out”) and a hybrid…
And all will spiral into sunlight, the dirt inside my mother, remembering how it smiled itself in specks, the last of atoms blinding upward, a moment of reflecting back at faces, every one in hatred isolation finding out the sorrow in a soup, the loneliest all reconciliated in the fated and united knowing And all will spiral into sunlight, the knowledge of the past, untethering the fragile valence…
Sitting on me like a wreath the Breath– like handshakes meeting and dispersing water– recasts itself, pretends itself alive, sloughing off the real disgusting tower. A man still has his futile charm, building mirrors out of moments, a monument to everything that cannot fall away– preparing for a final, gleeful cull. Habits make their cousins deep beneath, bleeding on the beams inside the tower and…
My child, she did not even fuss, the days were tranquil weather, ripped apart in cramps, nothing lost or questioned long, nothing gone awry or reeling back to God, ibid. The pain still forced its resonance above; her thoughts, hallucinations from below now stopped to ruminate at water’s edge. The tides rotate until she finds herself. Of course the weather comes for us so long, and sunny days are…
A patient tempest gathers up the tide. Chronos sapping off my eyes, ‘emancipate your paltry claims upon this world’ it speaks, and waits–a storm can sit upon your head and drill itself into a soul’s tumult. Who was it I was seeing? I’ve lost myself amongst the dripping dew of days. A bloody spittle gathers at the till– so much of me has fallen into water. It’s just like this, the storm that…
When a man averts his will and sets to praise the notes of forests, almost nourished by embrace and sight of pine and water– what to call it but an alter’s “passion”? When a woman finds a foreign feeling and her words have nothing to contest it, calling forward to debase her on an altar of the Other subjugated– only then the poets and professors find a secret diction for distaste. Something speaks…
they dot the sky like freckles. they linger they are our first recordings. who am i to have never struck a bargain with our masters cushioned by the solitude the total isolation in the warmth of a humid, scarred field? who am i to leave them? staring uselessly at the everything. the fields where bodies lay silent and alone, making quiet contracts by the promise of a comet’s trail… now as empty as…