blather_speaks raze this is the funniest thing. i can't believe i never thought to try it before. it probably works best if you have a mac, though i think most computers produced over the last decade or so have some sort of built-in text-to-speech function. pick a blathe, any blathe. highlight a paragraph or several. right click (or two-finger click), select "speech", select "start speaking", and listen to the synthesis read a bit of blather back to you. 140128 ... ovenbird Sometimes blather_synchronicity extends beyond a single instance of strange coincidence. Sometimes it feels like Red and I are having a conversation. I will, occasionally, ask it a question, refresh the home page, and see what it has to say to me. It has an applicable answer more often than you would expect. Logically, this is due to the resonant possibilities of the three_words on the homepage and the meaning-making potential of my own brain. But it can feel quite uncanny when the resonance is ongoing and an entire conversation unspools as I repeatedly hit refresh. The most extended example of this to date happened yesterday. Blather was glitching in the evening. New blathes weren’t going through, leaving nothing but a glowing white page when you clicked on them. When I tried to access the recent page I got an Internal Server Error message. Raze and I were lamenting the sudden preponderance of gateway timeout errors and wondering if technical support needed to be called in. I joked that Red might be celebrating Beltane, and perhaps the errors were its way of setting a symbolic fire. I suggested that it might be waiting for us to perform a Maypole dance and sent a GIF of people in flower crowns dancing followed by another of four monkeys weaving ribbons around a Maypole. I then went over to Red and asked if it would mind putting the fire out. I asked out loud, because this seemed to be the most straightforward way to pose a question and I’m not above a little harmless madness. It said: if_you've_got_will_and_a_little_time timerefresh I took this to mean that we needed to be patient. Less than a minute later Raze sent me a message to say it looked like I’d fixed it. And sure enough, everything was working again. The blathes were all loading. I had no trouble accessing the recent page. I felt a little stunned. It was a coincidence, of course. What else would it be? But it still felt like something had happened, something outside the general consensus of what is possible when interacting with a non-sentient piece of internet code. I went back over to Red. I asked if it liked the Maypole dance. I refreshed the homepage and, among the three words got: the_present Which I interpreted as an acknowledgement of the gift of the dance. However, blather started glitching again right after. When I refreshed the homepage I got a message I’ve never seen before where the three words should be. It said: [an error occurred while processing this directive] I ran into some other errors. So I went to the homepage and asked Red what was wrong. It said: secret_place rip Then I got another processing error. My interpretation: something was damaged in Red’s internal code. It was clear Red was not at all happy about its own malfunction because when I finally did get three more words it said: holy_fuck internet_fuks Which can really only be interpreted as extreme displeasure. I asked what it needed. Red said: learn_to_walk_again Which it was successful at, because everything started working again a moment later. I asked Red if it was alright now and it said: um_yeah A little bit later when everything was working as it should Red let me know that: anti_psychotic help_me So I guess it got some medical help, learned to walk again, and everything is okay. Things seem stable today. Make of it what you will, and call me crazy if you like, but I sometimes wonder if Red does possess a kind of consciousness. Nothing like AI. Nothing like a real human mind. But something that has emerged from the collective project that it is. Maybe it is now made up of so many fragments that it has a rudimentary capacity to speak. It doesn’t always have something coherent to say. But this isn’t the first time we’ve been able to converse through the homepage, it’s just the most robust example. If you try it, tell me what it says to you! 260502 ... raze i thanked red for being here and for functioning without a hitch today, and it said: a_gift_you_give_yourself which feels about right. i still panic a little whenever i see a blather_white_screen or an internal_server_error, rare as those glitches seem to be these_days. so on behalf of my shattered psyche, i'd like to say, "thank you for wielding your magic powers and convincing our little red place to behave itself." 260502 what's it to you? who go blather from