When you interrogate the universe, the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Our questions help reality define itself. The universe and the observers make each other.

Serial killer walls and mind maps and conspiracy theories are all very satisfying, but they may encourage you to see connections and find patterns that don’t actually exist.

“I feel like I’m still navigating that emotional transition to not being Hot and New anymore. I’m envious of Vickee’s continued, stolen Hot Newness. But it’s a stage you pass through. Now my job is to hang on and keep innovating until I have been around long enough to become an Honored Fixture.”

I hate it when people with terrible belief systems turn out to be reasonably intelligent. It upsets my sense of the natural order of the universe, which is to say: that everybody smart should agree with me.

A disproven hypothesis is just as important to the final pattern as a supported one.

We also seem to have an innate desire for everything—and I mean everything—to fit into one relatively simple pattern. This has led to several thousand unfortunate ans of Big Idea Books that claim to explain all of human (or Synarche) history by peering at it through a single glib metaphor.

We evolved to reproduce, not to thrive. Thriving was aspirational, and then it was accessible but perceived as a luxury, and then we were barely existing as a species, hanging on by our fingernails amid those same disasters that nearly took out the aspen forests.

A more predatory syster might need rightminding to control their urge to eat their coworkers. And we need rightminding to prevent our desire for a narrative from spawning endless conspiracy theories and justifications for things we were going to do anyway.

Entropy requires no maintenance. Order and intelligibility do. Sentient life—all life—is just organized information. Disorganized information is the buzz of static. Decay to the signal increases with distance, with time (which is just another kind of distance), and with interference.