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branthan

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  • branthan 1d

    I have forgotten how to write a poem.
    How does it begin and end when you are
    only familiar with the broken part of a story.
    Find me a word, one that fits so well between
    the silence you adorn when the snow starts to fall.
    Maybe that's how you start, from the middle,
    the one winter when you fell for the snow.

    Then it flows one word after another, like moments
    that fell in tune with the wind when you
    gently opened the windows to welcome the cold.
    Every other winter before becomes irrelevant;
    mere bitter winds that fell numb on your skin.
    How many fallen winters did it take you to fall in love
    with the way the cold feels against your bare skin?

    Life blooms from out of nowhere amid
    the frozen desolation of all the fallen seasons of irrelevance;
    and from the middle of the story, a poem is born.

    when the final snow sinks into the ground,
    the poem disappears as if it was never meant to stay.
    You sit beside the open window, gazing at the
    setting sun as it burns the words inked too deep
    inside your skin.
    Perhaps that's how it ends,
    when things that were never meant to stay become
    a remembrance burned too deep inside your skin.

    @miraquill @writersnetwork

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    Life blooms from out of nowhere amid
    the frozen desolation of all the fallen seasons of irrelevance;
    and from the middle of the story, a poem is born.

    d.t

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  • branthan 6w

    As the cold nights
    falls against your
    bare skin,
    you find warmth
    tracing your fingers
    against the curves
    of their shadow.

    Warm breathes fall
    on your neck as
    you savor the stories
    skulking in the skin that
    they hide from the light.

    Gentle sighs of the night
    as every touch finds its way;
    you lay against the stranger,
    a little closer tonight.

    d.t

    18 31 Link
  • branthan 9w

    You miss rain on a day like this, the first raindrop splattering on the broken twigs as roots slowly drown into the soil for a new life, a new beginning as if someone just hit a reset button. There is a sense of home in the emanating petrichor from the first rain that hits your skin. I do not know what it carries; sadness or happiness or longing for a familiar touch.

    You talk in the strangest times about things that keep flooding your mind. Of all the seasons you romanticized about, how you always hated the summer.

    Why do you love rain?
    Is it the subtle sadness it brings on a sunny day? You always had a thing for melancholy, or is it the way it touches your skin in a way that no one ever did? Does it burn when it kisses your summer scars?

    I've always loved the way how you talk about rain. Of all the people you ever loved who never knew how to love you back, I wonder if anyone ever danced with you in heavy rain.

    If you ask me, the pursuit of happiness is a lie; if you want to feel the world, you need to take it all in. From the way the flower blooms, how it gently open its petals to see the beauty of the world, to how it slowly burn and wither away into the soil as if it was never there. If I could, I would've told you all about it, about how to feel the world, bit by bit, word by word.

    __dt__

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    If you ask me, the pursuit of happiness is a lie; if you want to feel the world, you need to take it all in. From the way the flower blooms, how it gently open its petals to see the beauty of the world, to how it slowly burn and wither away into the soil as if it was never there. If I could, I would've told you all about it, about how to feel the world, bit by bit, word by word.

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  • branthan 10w

    Nothing dies, except
    the memories the world have
    about things that walked upon
    the bare dreams of reality.
    lost; souls in search of a destination

    then it slowly decays with
    the feeble sense of sanity.

    every representation becomes another,
    trapped inside the belly of a dormant beast.

    it decays, gently like time;
    a dream, a smile, a word
    a sense of self sinks into the ground
    as the world stops mourning

    the world doesn't care about the morality
    when it drown and burn us out of existence;
    whoever survives becomes a historian of
    the casual lineage of time
    the one who bears the burden of
    all the wars.

    you are alive as long as
    the world remembers you
    then you are nothing
    but the wind that blows
    and the stream and the trees
    and the leaves
    and the barren land.
    you are all the seasons that fall upon the
    world, but never the you that you
    remember now.

    if we are confined in this endless loop
    of life and death,
    are we learning about the world
    or merely remembering?

    a bleak contradiction?

    or is the world killing the memories to
    save itself from the failing sense of sanity?

    Read More

    you are alive as long as
    the world remembers you
    then you are nothing
    but the wind that blows
    and the stream and the trees
    and the leaves
    and the barren land.
    you are all the seasons that fall upon the
    world, but never the you that you
    remember now.

    d.t

    20 47 Link
  • branthan 11w

    Life is becoming a shadow of a continuum. The beginning and the end are miles apart, yet it feels so mundane with the tick of a clock. Light scatters aimlessly around the room, skipping the dusty corners as if the eyes should be kept away from the horrors of it all. How can you comprehend the beauty of the world when you cannot see the ugliness lurking in the shadows where the lights failed to touch.

    How can you trust a person's feeling when the feeling itself has no validity outside of the internal model of reality that the brain creates for them? It is changing, more often than the seasons that fall upon them.

    I wonder when the rain will stop falling, you never know when it's going to drown you to the depths or when it's going to remind you of a familiar touch that you are missing in the cold of a night. There are always memories that we've buried deep inside, waiting for a downpour to bloom. You are unsure what to make of certain feelings, especially those that visit you late at night when the world gets quiet for a while, except the endless rambling of rain.

    We are running around trying to be accepted by one group or another, not because of an internal identity we perceive as self, but a mere evolutionary need to belong somewhere. Who are we, if not this continuous computation that takes us from one place to another, till it all starts to decay like everything else?
    Like a broken twig in a decaying tree that looks at the dwindling dusk, you know how it ends, but you hope that it survives the fall.

    I belong in an era that I can barely remember; I was born so long ago. My own existence is alien to me, a paradox that I cannot wrap my head around. Sense of time is in dismay, the night and day separated by the few hours that you passed out on the couch. What matters the most, the moments or the regrets that follow them?

    Invisible strings connect us, strong enough that you can feel the warmth of another but fragile enough to leave you astray. Like stars, worlds apart, but in the same path with another, delicate enough to get thrown into the endless darkness.

    I wish I knew how to write, so endlessly as the thoughts that light up when you walk into the neon lights-filled cafe and fall for a stranger's gaze; every line and word entwined to make you feel something.
    Some eyes can make you fall, sometimes a smile, sometimes a warmth on a cold winter night, sometimes words, words that fall from your head to your lips on lonely nights. And sometimes, gravity, you cannot help it but fall.

    Art is what art makes you feel. We don't know what reality looks like, all the simple set of rules beyond our reach. All we know is this story that we keep telling ourselves, every moment becoming part of a casual lineage, getting stacked on top of each other, waiting to be opened up again in a late-night conversation. Abstractions of a world, little things that we've seen and felt on a long walk, lips that sink into yours like a sunset, the way waves washed your feet, whispers of the wind, and its kisses that remind you of someone. Every cliche moment somehow becomes so personal, becomes a part of you that you look back and smile, a sense of melancholy in the chaos.

    We are stories that we tell ourselves, words, and lines that meet under the starry night. And, like Van Gogh, we dream about the world beyond its mundane structures that feel so disconnected.

    "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man."
    -Chang Tzu


    @writersnetwork @miraquill

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    We are stories that we tell ourselves, words, and lines that meet under the starry night. And, like Van Gogh, we dream about the world beyond its mundane structures that feel so disconnected.

    d.t

    20 34 Link
  • branthan 15w

    Meaning is a cognitive illusion of a system of survival bounded agents roaming around on a tiny rock. It is always tied to our neurons and their web of associations.

    Since everything around it is just a human construct, it has no validity outside our subjective experience.

    There is nothing divine about it on a cosmic scale, everything becomes a mere computation.

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  • branthan 16w

    I do not know what I feel about these intelligent machines. On the one hand, it is exciting how even though you are not an artist, a program that you wrote can generate art that can make people feel something. Who or what generated that art becomes irrelevant, it is all about what that art makes people feel. And on the other hand, a few API calls can replace your whole purpose on this planet!

    For me, the deeper question of existence is not about whether a program can replace you or not. The important one is how a machine ended up replacing us or specific parts of who we are? Deep down are we nothing but some predictive equations of existence with certain features that can be replicated with some lines of code?

    Not everything is art, and not everyone is an artist. I think art is one of the highest forms of intelligence, just as smart as the physicists and mathematicians of the world. So when we say everything is an art and everyone is an artist, then it means that everyone is as smart as Einstein, Galileo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Mozart, Shakespear... I know my below-average intelligent brain can easily be replaced with some lines of code.

    But then again, art is not about everyone creating masterpieces like Starry Night. Sometimes we get connected to some four lines on a grey background that we came across on the internet by accident. We are somehow deeply attached to a certain part of our existence. There is something about the way art connects with people, it is like it is part of us from the very beginning. A certain way to find belongingness amidst the chaos.

    But there is always a war between the underlying objective reality and the poetic side of existence.

    With the current state of deep learning, a program can easily write better poems than most of the self-proclaimed poets of Instagram, we can generate paintings that are better than most of the artists out there. But, there are always outliers. A few brilliant creative minds that are hard to replicate with a few lines of code.

    But creativity is simply a better feature recognition and representation, isn't it? What happens when the machines finally figure out these neural pathways and feature recognition and representation tricks? When you combine the manipulation tricks of our brain to these lines of codes, then it can create anything that can influence the masses. How far away are we from this reality?

    What happens when the GitHub-Copilot starts to write better code? I do not think it will replace all the coders. But instead of fifty coders in an organization, you'd only need the brilliant five coders and a machine. What happens to the rest? What happens when one-day GPT starts writing better poems and novels on its own? The same goes for lawyers, medical staff, engineers, workers in factories, data analysts and scientists, artists, designers, drivers, and much more. Every single thing a normal human can do, there exist a machine that can do better. If you don't think so, just look at the dildo reviews on the internet. Wake up, machines are taking over.

    Then again, there is this much deeper question, "Can a machine understand the poetry that it writes?" But what do we know about art in the first place?

    All of this may not happen in the next couple of years or a decade. But what happens when this reality finally arrives? What's going to happen when you are in your thirties and forties, and suddenly losing your job to some API calls? What happens when there are no social systems to protect you?

    I trust AI, but I do not completely trust the people that are making it and I certainly do not trust the incompetent, uneducated politicians and policymakers in power. Especially when you look at the incompetence and scientific ignorance of both the left and the right, you can only see a bleak future ahead.

    There are different ways to make money when you know how to manipulate the masses tho. Just look at Rupi Kaur, zero talent in writing but smart enough to trick people into believing that she is a poet and an influencer to sell her books and merch to become a millionaire. Pretty smart salesperson indeed, isn't it? Same with all the fashion brands and artists, it is more about selling merch to make that quick bucks before it all turns into hell.

    I'm always curious about what people mean when they say "that's what makes us humans". Is there any global truth to it apart from the underlying biological reality? Does this objective reality take anything away from the subjective experience that we feel so personal and connected to?

    I think we romanticize too much about the flaws in evolution, yet we are in no way the best optimized elegant designs that exist in the universe or maybe even on this planet.

    Language itself isn't optimized when you think about it. When you're having clear thoughts inside your head, you have a much better clarity most of the time. But when you're trying to speak or write those exact thoughts, there is always a disconnection. Often you won't find the original thoughts and the words when you try to speak or write about it, because they are part of different sets of processes inside the head. So, we end up struggling to find the right words to tell what we feel, there is always that disconnection.

    So what if we could communicate directly from the origin of the thoughts to one another through neural chips? Wouldn't that be much more intelligent and optimized? Or is it gonna take away what it means to be human? A flawed creature, only at the top of the food chain because a few people figure out clever ways to get there? We are always evolving, figuring out better, creative ways to survive the physical system that we are embedded in, and as the physical system evolves we have to evolve too.

    There is a lot of human bias that goes into these deep philosophical questions about existence. And these biases are a result of our innate survival instinct when you think about it. Whenever we create an intelligent machine there is always a human bias that goes into it. Be it in the data or the code or the underlying architecture or the simple thought behind it. Does that mean that it carries a certain essence of our thoughts as it evolves? Even when we are long gone, they carry certain parts of us? Now, there is a deep poetic side to machines. Maybe they are our descendants carrying a part of us through the universe till the end of time. Now that is poetic

    We fear this sense of insignificance. Most of our emotions are a response to this realization, from anger to the long stretches of desolation. How far away are we from this age of insignificance? I do not know any answers to these questions. But I wish one day we will figure out the reality of things. A coexistence between man and machines and at the end, like Asimov said;

    Let there be light, and there was light..

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    Age of intelligent machines

    Let there be light and then there was light

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  • branthan 17w

    There are always these questions, questions that never lead you to any destination but leave you astray. I came to the realization that I do not know what Tolkien meant when he wrote "Not all those who wander are lost". How do you know whether you're lost or not when you don't know the destination? Even the idea of a destination sounds rather illogical, the divine purpose was always a lie to make us feel better about the mundanity.

    Meaning is just a human construct, it has no validity beyond us and our subjective experience. When you dive deep into the whole "search for meaning" you end up in a state of helplessness.
    All I could ever comprehend at the end of the day was this reality of how everything is nothing but a result of some simple neurochemical computation. All the happiness, the sadness, the love, the despair, the calm, empathy, everything is simply the existence of certain chemicals inside the brain. When you are lucky enough to be the one with the good genes, it makes the whole survival a bit easier. Apparently, nature does have favorites.

    Humans are nothing but these prediction machines that are running wild as if the subjective experience associated with these computations is blessed by the divine.
    There is this beautiful definition of life someone said, "Life is simply an information processing system in the flesh where we represent ideas about the world in the quaternary representation and nature is the one that selects whichever representation is better suited for passing it down".

    One plus one is two, but you don't know what you feel about it. You don't really feel anything, one plus one is two and that's the end of it, there is no feeling associated with that reality (unless you are a woke Karen with a liberal arts degree, then there is this whole privilege theory and how math is racist and sexist and stuff. but let's just skip that to keep our sanity).

    Maybe we are evolved to feel that way, never to understand the underlying computations but only to understand what they make us feel. It is quite a beautiful process when you think about it. An elegant reward process to make us survive the complex physical systems that we are embedded in.

    Deep down you are happy only because of certain chemicals, you are miserable because you don't have certain chemicals. And when you are smart enough to figure out how to change these chemicals inside the brain for your own devious plans, the whole world is yours to play with. Smart people and corporations and the algorithms that run the world knows just enough to trap us in these illusions of choice and freedom. That is a heavy burden that we shouldn't ponder too much about it.

    One of the most beautiful things about all of this existence is, how we are billions of years of lineage. Billions of years of casual history that is compressed into the genome and keep passing it down to the next generation. Maybe it could be one of the most beautiful pieces of art that were ever created, we are just too dumb to understand the beauty of it.

    Maybe we do have our own ways to understand the beauty of it all. When you see that someone on the mountain top watching the sunset in silence, you don't think about the causal history of existence, you don't think about the lineage or the genome or all the computations that are happening inside the brain. All you are thinking about is the same old cliches and cringe poetries about the way they smile, their eyes, and that deep human connection that just makes sense in that simple moment.

    We are always haunted by the questions to make sense of the complexities of all this. From the obvious questions like, what is intelligence to why this subjective experience is associated with the way we perceive the world to are we some agents bounded by the genome and the environment, or are we something more?
    One thing that I have learned over the years is that when you start asking deep questions about life, it branches into more questions rather than giving an answer that you want to hear.

    We are aware of this existence but are completely oblivious to its mechanics and nature. There is this sense of helplessness about it that we rarely ponder about, yet we walk like we know the destination.

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    I decided to write/rant something after a while, as much as I miss my grey, and forced to look at these bleak shades that have no life, words fit quite the same, but do they feel the same?

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  • branthan 23w

    I realized that I need solitude, lonely hours of brown noise blasting through the noise-canceling headphones to shut the world out. Moments where you don't have to worry about the mundane social constructs of existence and let the brain wander through all the thoughts that it creates. From how did the evolution of poop begin, because the system for poop is not optimized at all to can you get away with that murderer that you planned after watching way too many tv shows and serial killer documentaries. Or maybe it's just me with the thought, but you get the idea.

    What woke and religious culture does is kill ideas. The authoritarian nature often comes with the one-dimensional thought of these cultures often leads to the oppression of ideas and the emergence of beautiful hard questions.
    For one to understand the nature of good, one must understand the nature of evil. Without understanding evil, you don't understand good at all. But when you force people to learn and talk about only one set of thoughts and censor out everything else, we end up with a mundane monotonous society that is stuck, an existence without a purpose, a value function that never grows, a world engulfed in deep despair.

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    I realized that I need solitude, lonely hours of brown noise blasting through the noise-canceling headphones to shut the world out. Moments where you don't have to worry about the mundane social constructs of existence and let the brain wander through all the thoughts that it creates.

    __dt__

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  • branthan 26w

    Some days you wake up with a feeling of despair. As you open your eyes and sit for a second to catch the breathe, there is a heavy feeling of some realization that you don't know what to make of.
    Be hopeful, people tell you with a smile, followed by some beautiful words so poetically crafted that you get bored in the middle and get lost in the thought of "hopeful of what?".

    Standing before the vast endless space it occurs to you how insignificant and powerless we all are. How do you make peace with that? There is more void between the stars, but the world is crowded, every new face fighting for more space with our tiny brains that are stuck in myths and optimism coated in some enticing smile that we fall for every time.

    Truth never sets you free, it burdens you with another question, frozen desolation that stretches forever. The living has no choice but to go on living even when the desolation falls on our skin. Without a purpose we drag our life between ticks of a clock, work till the world rot away, even death becomes meaningless. We move on leaving one another behind on the dirt, the dirt that took people before us.

    For you to exist, you must possess all the tools to acknowledge your own existence. When you experience and feel things beyond the realm of reality that others possess and lack the tool to express that knowledge to the world, that existence becomes futile, just a mad mind wandering through the world without a purpose. It is not the slight melancholy that you romanticize about on a sleepless night, it is the loneliness when the words get caught in your throat that you stare at the ceiling for answers.

    How predictable it is, isn't it? The way life happens from the moment that you wake up till the moment you fall asleep. You hang in anticipation of the final curtain, the majestic ending someone told you about yet it all end the same.

    But some days you feel like there is peace. Somewhere between the moment you fall asleep till you wake up with the same despair, a moment when you don't hear the sound time makes, a moment that you cannot recall but somewhere in the back of your head in a dark corner that makes you smile for no reason once every while. How tragically poetic it is that you know the end, yet feel this momentary calm even when you're trying so hard to breathe. Like the way how flowers opened their eyes to this world from the same dirt that you have fallen from.

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