Style Tips for the Stricken Blogger: Writing Killer Dialog

Dialog has been answering the big questions dating back to antiquity. Not bootless corporate-speak like “Let’s have a dialog, ” but Socratic dialog, defined by Wikipedia as "a formal method by which a small group (5-15 people), guided by a facilitator, finds a precise answer to a universal question" (e.g. 'What is happiness?', 'What is integrity?', 'Can conflict be fruitful?', etc.) or more germanely to this blog, “What is grief?” If you may know 5-15 people to nod at them in the dog park type thing, but not to discuss “What is happiness?” because these individuals believe they already know what happiness is, even if their knowledge is no more sophisticated than some

“Live, Laugh, Love” meme; or worse, the question of “What is Happiness?” frightens them because they lead unexamined lives and would rather contemplate simpler candy-based predicaments on their phone, then your Socratic facilitation may beg the question, “Isn’t that your dog’s excrement on the opposite side of the off-leash area?” Rather than endure that indignity, why not automatically write the following dialog to converge or hopefully diverge into autostereogrammatic clarity at some later point in time?

Sample Dialog - St. Michael’s Hospital Floor 8: Neo-Natal

“Abraham was only being tested was he not?” asked David.

“So if we go through the motions, maybe we’ll be stopped, ” said the other David.

“Informational hazards cross the digital corpus callosum. So like Sartre said, ‘How does Abraham know that he is Abraham?’”

“The metaethics of digital physics am I incorrect? The OS could stop trading voltage for current in the nearest power transformer to dim the lights or stay the qubits of our very hand. Not sure why that rotten old ragamuffin let us come this far in the first place then but still maybe. ”

“Might be a non-linear causational type of quest. The most annoying kind. Full of quantum error corrective feedback loops. We incur the wrath because we’ve already slain the babe. Our Abrahamic self-certainty may be what’s subjected us to so many of the Cluster B disorders up to this point as it is. ”

“Think you might mean complex causality, ” David said with disinterest.

“We should not have stopped taking math in grade ten. ”

“Guidance counsellor said we’d be closing a window to the future. ”

“Sounds just comically ominous now doesn’t it?”

“Fate of humanity will be determined by your ability to distinguish between time-like, space-like, and light-like universes. ”

“Or Stump and Kretzman’s Eternal-Temporal Simultaneity.”9

“Oh Lord, and remember Bem? We worked so hard to comprehend Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and A ffe c t.”10

“After the Colbert appearance. ”11

“And then Bem was discredited the next day. ”12

“Discredited himself when the academy was too busy to discredit him, ‘I’m all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it’s fun for some people—but I don’t have the patience for it. ’13 Even Colbert must have been embarrassed. ”

“We too lack rigour. Lacked the rigour to reconcile how the blockchain creates artificial time. Lacked the rigour to read even the consummate Bem dunk, Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi.14 Lacked the rigour for Stump. ”

“Couldn’t tell a p-value from the hash of the previous block. ”

“All the old memories from all our past lives…. ” 9 (Stump & Kretzman, 1981) 10 (Bem D., 2011) 11 (Bem D., 2011) 12 (Galak, LeBoeuf, Nelson, & Simmons, 2012) 13 (Engber, 2017) 14 (Galak, LeBoeuf, Nelson, & Simmons, 2012)

“Memories of the baby’s ten teeth, smiling up at us from the first pile of leaves he played in. ”

“Memories of the raspberries he so enjoyed. ”

“That effective raspberry pi language he created at just four. ”

“How demurely he first learned to say, ‘Yes, ’ and then the obstinance with which he shrieked, ‘No!’

“The little feeding apparatus that let us strap him to a counter at the Starbucks. ”

“His messy face, in need of eternal wiping. ”

“Eh, but then there’s the vomiting, the bleeding through the eyes, the liquefaction of our organs. The Manistique Strain, ” said David, wincing.

“Won’t go back to that. What about just standing between the aspirator and the babe, clogging up the works somehow? Seems the peaceful way. The humane way. ”

“The humane way?” David asked.

“Better never to have been born, as Benatar posits. This baby is almost not yet born. Practically just barely born. Better never to have been barely born?”

“Believe Benatar and all the anti-natalists are just clinically depressed. Benatar must never have considered how wildly a baby can thrust in their Bouncy, how enthused they are to meet the world. ”

“Oh nothing, nurse-maid of the unspecified realms, just admiring our interdimensional offspring here. Same-sex couple baring a severe resemblance to each other is all. And a good evening to you. ”

“I need a pep talk. I think I can do it. All the peas and the carrots shoved into his mouth all messily need never to have been. Our memories and fondnesses and fatherly prides don’t equal the bubos and the splitting that will afflict all humankind, all childkind. ”

“Retrodiction and obfuscation, good angle. ”

“Guess so. Feel like Abraham was enticed with more of a carrot than a stick. Should have probably paid more attention in religion class too, eh?”

“Infralapsarianism, sublapsarianism, supralapsarianism—who could care about the distinctions?”

“What of Eliade, a relevant quote of whom’s I’ve scribbled on this napkin here, ahem, All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant of the beginning; through the paradox of rite, profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds true for all repetitions, i.e. all imitations of archetypes; through such imitation, man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first revealed. Thus we perceive a second aspect of primitive ontology: insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of “history”; and he who reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place.15 15 (Eliade, 2005)

“The Stalaghh soundtrack to it all? The ocular trauma of the eye icicles? The scent of Espanola? The Infernal Serpent makes these concepts knowable on an olfactory level. ”

“Coherently extrapolated volition, heard that on a You - Tube video. It means the ASI was designed to do what this red-faced little gaffer told it to. ”

“Is there no intervention that doesn’t involve our own beloved son? Why not baby Geordie Rose, inventor of the D-Wave quantum computer? Why not give him the business? We’ll never feed Geordie Rose carrot mush. There can’t be a single cause. ”

“Unless the single cause is mere Machinic Desire: ‘Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future. ’”

“His own son. ” There does seem to be a certain equifinality about culling his very babe on this very morn. It’s his only begotten son. Not mine and not yours. That’s the meagre sacrifice we must make. Anyone could kill baby Geordie Rose, some might even pay good money to do so given his unctuousness. ”

“Your complexion appears much too white. ”

“Wish we could influence the moment of conception instead, simply don’t stick it in: a sin of omission, if any sin at all. ”

“An emission sin of letting the geriatric pregnancy window close. ”

“Speaking of missions, how do we know this baby even becomes the one prophesied? Maybe this baby sucks at coding. Standard deviation between worldlines is there not?”

“You are a charlatan. As am I. We know not of which we speak. There’s nothing to trust but the math. And we dropped math in grade ten. How can we sub-Stumpians grasp something simple as ‘two-value logic, ’ meaning it’s either perception programming as mass human control or that same wise guy who gave Abraham the gears?”

“I’d thought a sustain was something achieved with a whammy bar, lol. ”

“Just going to wash our hands, Mr. Janitor of the unseen realms. Never can be too hygienic around these vulnerable young souls, even interfacing supra-dimensionally as we are. ”

“Fuck it, I’m going to pinch this tube. ”

“Aspirator isn’t clogging. You are without agency!”

“Somebody up there putting a stop to things! The best possible outcome isn’t it? We’re Abrahamic heroes! The whole thing was one long test!”

“Except now the suction is sputtering. And except now the suction has stopped. ”

“What’s this then from our fatherly counterpart in the corporeal realm, the third David, prone on the ground?”

“As the aspirator sputters anew, appears he’s making that old sign of the cross. ”

“Damned if even that doesn’t look computational somehow, doesn’t it?” asked David.