Procedural Conversations

I’ve been thinking about this dynamic of a person writing a post and then other people responding with comments. It’s a kind of asymmetric conversation. It would be interesting to allow that conversation to include procedural things.


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Suppose the comment writers could script a program as a way to advance the conversation. Can something that we generally think of as a “mechanism” be used to further dialog between people?The only way to find out is to try.

The unheralded day

I once went down to Brazil to see a total solar eclipse.  For an hour everyone watched breathlessly, as the silhouette of the moon gradually ate into the sun – first biting off a little, and then finally swallowing it whole.  Until four glorious minutes of totality when it felt as though we were in another world, with a strange alien light that bathed everything in eerie darkness.  Then there was the second hour, when the sun gradually appeared again.  But nobody cared, nobody was looking.  The gradual march to normalcy went unheralded, unloved.  January 2 is like that.  And yet without it, how would we ever really be able to continue on, how would the new year ever truly happen?

We find this out, we find out everything.