#watcher — Public Fediverse posts

ARE YOU A WATCHER? The 2026 Fomalhaut Mission

#Fomalhaut #RoyalStars #2026Reset #Starseed #SpiritualAuthority #Ascension #NewEarth #Guardians #February20th #Watcher

The Prince
Yooo it iiis day 31 of the rain world art month! And yay I did it! A picture every day....I'm happy :)

Yesterday when I saw today's prompt I already roughly knew how I wanted it to look like and I had a suspicion that it would look cool and yeah I have to say this is one of the best ones I did this month, so that's pretty cool to have as the last piece!

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #rwprince #prince #watcher #rwwatcher

Pearl Watchin
Watcher successfully watched around to find this porl. 

Day 27 of RWAM. Couldn't come up with something as I haven't played since that update so instead drew the Watcher finding some porls...and the sketches kinda fit together like a comic so I just did that :P

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #pearl

Pearl Watchin
Watcher successfully watched around to find this porl. 

Day 27 of RWAM. Couldn't come up with something as I haven't played since that update so instead drew the Watcher finding some porls...and the sketches kinda fit together like a comic so I just did that :P

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #pearl

Pearl Watchin
Watcher successfully watched around to find this porl. 

Day 27 of RWAM. Couldn't come up with something as I haven't played since that update so instead drew the Watcher finding some porls...and the sketches kinda fit together like a comic so I just did that :P

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #pearl

Pearl Watchin
Watcher successfully watched around to find this porl. 

Day 27 of RWAM. Couldn't come up with something as I haven't played since that update so instead drew the Watcher finding some porls...and the sketches kinda fit together like a comic so I just did that :P

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #pearl

Pearl Watchin
Watcher successfully watched around to find this porl. 

Day 27 of RWAM. Couldn't come up with something as I haven't played since that update so instead drew the Watcher finding some porls...and the sketches kinda fit together like a comic so I just did that :P

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #pearl

Pomegranate!
Day 26 of RWAM. Don't have a lot to say today :)

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #lizard #greenlizard #pinklizard #fruit #pomegranate

Pomegranate!
Day 26 of RWAM. Don't have a lot to say today :)

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #lizard #greenlizard #pinklizard #fruit #pomegranate

Pomegranate!
Day 26 of RWAM. Don't have a lot to say today :)

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #lizard #greenlizard #pinklizard #fruit #pomegranate

Pomegranate!
Day 26 of RWAM. Don't have a lot to say today :)

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #lizard #greenlizard #pinklizard #fruit #pomegranate

Fractured Gateways
Here is day 20 of RWAM! I haven't seen this region myself yet but that sky whale stuff sounds pretty cool :)

#art #fanart #RWArtMonth #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #locust #skywhale #traditional #traditionalart #ink

The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

Something strange surfaces in that departure. While you were writing, the book had a voice, and the voice was yours. I mean the silent one, the one that has nothing to do with ordering coffee or arguing with the insurance company, the interior narrator that reads your own thoughts back to you and lives in the cavity between your ears. It has no sound but is louder than anything in the room. Every sentence you wrote was tested against that voice. You heard the book before you read it. The prose rhythm, the paragraph pacing, the places where a sentence needed to land hard or dissolve into the next thought, all of it was conducted by a voice that has no waveform and no frequency but is, for the writer, the most real sound in the world. When the book is finished, that voice goes quiet. The conductor steps off the podium. What remains on the page is the score, but the performance that produced it is already gone.

Then someone picks up the book and reads it in silence, and a different voice appears.

This is the life of the book that is easiest to overlook, because it happens inside the reader’s skull and leaves no evidence. A person sits with your text and their inner voice takes possession of it, and that voice cannot be yours. The reader’s internal narrator carries its own cadence and speed, colored by decades of that person’s accumulated experience with language. Where you heard a sentence as clipped and staccato, the reader may hear it as languid. Where you intended a pause, the reader may barrel through. The reader is performing the text in the only theater that matters, and the performance is entirely their own. Two people can read the same novel in the same afternoon in the same room and hear completely different books, because the voice in one head is never the voice in another. Silent reading is a private staging of the text, unrehearsed, undirected, and unrepeatable.

This is the second life of the book: the one where it exists as pure text and the reader becomes, without knowing it, both audience and performer. The writer is absent. The writer’s voice is gone. What replaces it is whatever voice the reader has cultivated across a lifetime of reading, one that speeds up when the prose is familiar and slows when it is strange, that whispers through some passages and declaims through others, and that the reader has never once thought to question because it has been there since they first learned to decode symbols on a page. This is a genuine performance, as real as any staged production, and it happens billions of times a day in absolute silence.

Then something else happens. Someone else reads the book aloud.

I have listened to narrators perform my work, and the experience is dislocating in ways I did not anticipate. A narrator translates and performs simultaneously, but what a narrator actually does runs deeper than either word suggests. A narrator re-authors the text in real time, filtering every sentence through a different nervous system and a whole separate body of accumulated memory, lungs that breathe in places where you, the writer, never paused. The commas you placed with surgical precision become suggestions. The rhythms you hammered into the prose get bent, sometimes broken, sometimes improved, by a voice that carries its own gravitational field. What emerges from the narrator’s mouth is a separate book that happens to share your words.

The part that haunts you comes afterward: the narrator’s voice replaces yours. Once you have heard your book performed by another person, you cannot unhear it. You go back to the text and try to read it in your own inner voice, the one that built the thing sentence by sentence, and the narrator is already there, squatting in your skull, delivering lines with inflections you never intended. Your book has been colonized. The voice you lived with for months or years of drafting has been overwritten by a voice that arrived after the work was done and claimed it with the confidence of someone who has always lived there. I say this without resentment, only as a witness to the irreversibility of certain experiences. You cannot un-know a melody once it has been attached to lyrics you wrote in silence.

For the listener, the colonization is even more complete, because the listener never had the writer’s voice to begin with. The listener’s first encounter with the text arrives through the narrator’s body and breath, through decisions about emphasis and tempo and the thousand micro-choices that constitute a spoken performance. The narrator’s voice becomes the voice of the book, permanently, the way a film score becomes inseparable from the images it accompanies. Ask anyone who has listened to a well-narrated audiobook to then read the same text in print, and they will tell you: the narrator is still there, still speaking inside their head, overlaying the reader’s own internal voice with a ghost performance that refuses to vacate.

This is the third life of the book: the one where it enters the listener through a voice the writer did not choose and could not have predicted, and becomes something neither the writer nor the narrator intended.

People ask me why I do not narrate my own books. I narrate the Human Meme podcast, so the question is reasonable: if you already sit in front of a microphone and talk for a living, why hand the book to a stranger? I did narrate one, The Wound Remains Faithful, and the experience taught me something about the economics of creative time that I have not forgotten. A book that took months to write takes roughly six hours of studio time to perform as audio. Six hours of recording, plus editing, plus the physical recovery that sustained vocal performance demands. When I look at a free day and ask myself whether I want to spend it re-performing a book I have already written or writing an entirely new one, the new book wins every time. The podcast is different. The podcast is composed in the speaking. The voice and the writing happen simultaneously, and the performance is the first draft. A book has already been performed once, silently, in the writing, and asking me to perform it again aloud is asking me to walk a trail I have already walked when there is an uncut forest next to it.

But the deeper reason is theatrical, and it connects to everything I have been arguing in this essay. If I narrate my own book, the three lives collapse into two. My voice in the writing and my voice in the narration are too close to each other. The gap between them, the productive gap where the book gets re-authored by a second intelligence, closes. The book becomes a one-man show, and much of my life has already been a one-man show: writing, editing, publishing, designing, promoting, all of it carried by one pair of hands. The audiobook is the place where I can finally open the door and let someone else onto the stage. There is a generosity in that, and a relief, and also a creative dividend, because what comes back from the narrator is always more interesting than what I would have produced alone. A second mind in the room changes the room. I know this from decades of directing actors. The playwright who insists on playing every part has misunderstood the purpose of theater.

Seneca understood something about this multiplication, though he never had to endure the experience of hearing a Roman actor perform his prose in a recording studio. In De Brevitate Vitae, he argues that the philosopher lives longest among all people, because through reading, one annexes every preceding age to one’s own. We can, he writes, dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, and overcome human nature with the Stoics. The years that came before us are not lost. They are available, and through concentrated study, they become ours. A single life becomes many lives. The calendar is a liar.

But Seneca was also suspicious of exactly the kind of expansive reading his own argument seems to invite. In his second letter to Lucilius, he reverses field with the confidence of a man who has caught himself in a contradiction and decided to own it. Do not read everything, he warns. Do not flit from book to book the way a restless traveler moves from city to city, arriving everywhere and settling nowhere. Linger with a few great thinkers. Digest them. Let their ideas become part of your tissue. The person who reads everything absorbs nothing. The person who reads deeply absorbs the author whole.

Seneca’s two positions only appear to contradict each other. Together they form a single, stranger argument: the multiplication of lives he describes in De Brevitate Vitae depends on depth, never on volume. You do not live Socrates’ life by skimming the dialogues. You live it by sitting inside a single passage until Socrates’ way of thinking becomes indistinguishable from your own. The annexation of another life requires the same commitment you would bring to an actual relationship. You have to show up. You have to stay.

Now extend this to the listener, and extend it further to the writer who came up through the theater.

I am a playwright. I have spent decades thinking about what happens when language leaves the page and enters a body that is not the author’s body. In the theater, this transaction is visible. You sit in a darkened house and watch actors inhabit your words in real time, and the text becomes dimensional in a way that no private reading can replicate, because the actor’s physical presence adds information that the page cannot carry: gesture, stance, the way a pause lands differently when an actual human being is standing in an actual room holding the silence. Live theater is synchronous. The audience and the performer share the same moment. The electricity of that shared present tense is what makes theater irreplaceable, and it is also what limits it. A room, bodies, everyone in the same place at the same time.

An audiobook is the redacted version of that staged play.

“Redacted” in the sense of concentrated, the way a reduction in cooking intensifies a flavor by removing the water. An audiobook strips away the visual dimension of performance, the set, the lights, the blocking, the costumes, and leaves only the voice. And the voice, it turns out, is where most of the meaning lived all along. This is something the old radio dramatists understood instinctively: when you remove the visual, the listener’s imagination does not shut down. It accelerates. The listener becomes scenic designer, casting director, and lighting technician in a single act of involuntary creation, building a visual world around the voice that is more personal, more fitted to the listener’s own psyche, than anything a stage crew could construct.

When I write a book now, I hear it as a playwright hears a script. The prose is dialogue spoken by a narrator who does not yet have a name or a face, and the stage is the inside of a stranger’s head. The performance will not happen in a theater on West 44th Street in front of four hundred people at 8:00 on a Thursday evening. It will happen in a car on Interstate 80, or in a kitchen at 6:00 in the morning, or in a hospital waiting room at a time the listener would rather not remember. The audience has been scattered across time zones and years, each person encountering the performance alone, at a moment determined by the private circumstances of their own life rather than by a curtain time. This is asynchronous theater. The playwright writes for a stage that exists everywhere and nowhere, and the result is a more intimate form of drama, because the performance happens inside the listener rather than in front of them.

The old radio plays understood this intimacy. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938, the panic it caused demonstrated something important about the isolated voice. A voice entering the ear without visual accompaniment occupies a different neurological category than a voice attached to a body on a stage. The brain processes an isolated voice as closer and more authoritative, for the simple reason that there is nothing else competing for attention. The listener cannot glance at the set and remember that this is fiction. The listener has only the voice, and the voice is inside them, and the distance between “hearing a performance” and “experiencing an event” collapses to nothing.

This is what thrills me about the audiobook as a form. It is theater without walls. It is a play that runs continuously, starting and stopping at the listener’s discretion, performed for an audience of one in a venue that exists nowhere and everywhere. The book I wrote in silence, hearing it in the voice that lives between my ears, has traveled through the narrator’s larynx and into the listener’s private theater, and at each stage it has been remade by a different human intelligence. The text is the constant. The voice, the pacing, the meaning, all change with each body the book passes through.

Seneca would have approved of this, I think, with one caveat. He would have insisted that the listener not move on too quickly. Stay with this book. Let it work on you. Do not queue up the next title the moment the final chapter ends. The modern compulsion to consume, to track reading goals and annual book counts and to-be-read piles measured in linear feet, is the restless tourism Seneca warned Lucilius against. You do not multiply your life by multiplying your inputs. You multiply your life by refusing to leave a text until it has become part of you, until you can think in its rhythms without trying, until the author’s concerns have become your concerns and you can no longer remember a time when they were not.

The book lives three times. Once in the writing, where the author’s silent voice conducts every sentence. Once in the reading, where a stranger’s inner voice performs the text in a private theater no one else will ever enter. And once in the listening, where a narrator’s physical voice colonizes both the author’s memory and the listener’s imagination, creating something none of them intended and none of them can fully control.

Three lives. Three genuine performances. And the price of admission to any of them is the willingness to stay.

The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

Something strange surfaces in that departure. While you were writing, the book had a voice, and the voice was yours. I mean the silent one, the one that has nothing to do with ordering coffee or arguing with the insurance company, the interior narrator that reads your own thoughts back to you and lives in the cavity between your ears. It has no sound but is louder than anything in the room. Every sentence you wrote was tested against that voice. You heard the book before you read it. The prose rhythm, the paragraph pacing, the places where a sentence needed to land hard or dissolve into the next thought, all of it was conducted by a voice that has no waveform and no frequency but is, for the writer, the most real sound in the world. When the book is finished, that voice goes quiet. The conductor steps off the podium. What remains on the page is the score, but the performance that produced it is already gone.

Then someone picks up the book and reads it in silence, and a different voice appears.

This is the life of the book that is easiest to overlook, because it happens inside the reader’s skull and leaves no evidence. A person sits with your text and their inner voice takes possession of it, and that voice cannot be yours. The reader’s internal narrator carries its own cadence and speed, colored by decades of that person’s accumulated experience with language. Where you heard a sentence as clipped and staccato, the reader may hear it as languid. Where you intended a pause, the reader may barrel through. The reader is performing the text in the only theater that matters, and the performance is entirely their own. Two people can read the same novel in the same afternoon in the same room and hear completely different books, because the voice in one head is never the voice in another. Silent reading is a private staging of the text, unrehearsed, undirected, and unrepeatable.

This is the second life of the book: the one where it exists as pure text and the reader becomes, without knowing it, both audience and performer. The writer is absent. The writer’s voice is gone. What replaces it is whatever voice the reader has cultivated across a lifetime of reading, one that speeds up when the prose is familiar and slows when it is strange, that whispers through some passages and declaims through others, and that the reader has never once thought to question because it has been there since they first learned to decode symbols on a page. This is a genuine performance, as real as any staged production, and it happens billions of times a day in absolute silence.

Then something else happens. Someone else reads the book aloud.

I have listened to narrators perform my work, and the experience is dislocating in ways I did not anticipate. A narrator translates and performs simultaneously, but what a narrator actually does runs deeper than either word suggests. A narrator re-authors the text in real time, filtering every sentence through a different nervous system and a whole separate body of accumulated memory, lungs that breathe in places where you, the writer, never paused. The commas you placed with surgical precision become suggestions. The rhythms you hammered into the prose get bent, sometimes broken, sometimes improved, by a voice that carries its own gravitational field. What emerges from the narrator’s mouth is a separate book that happens to share your words.

The part that haunts you comes afterward: the narrator’s voice replaces yours. Once you have heard your book performed by another person, you cannot unhear it. You go back to the text and try to read it in your own inner voice, the one that built the thing sentence by sentence, and the narrator is already there, squatting in your skull, delivering lines with inflections you never intended. Your book has been colonized. The voice you lived with for months or years of drafting has been overwritten by a voice that arrived after the work was done and claimed it with the confidence of someone who has always lived there. I say this without resentment, only as a witness to the irreversibility of certain experiences. You cannot un-know a melody once it has been attached to lyrics you wrote in silence.

For the listener, the colonization is even more complete, because the listener never had the writer’s voice to begin with. The listener’s first encounter with the text arrives through the narrator’s body and breath, through decisions about emphasis and tempo and the thousand micro-choices that constitute a spoken performance. The narrator’s voice becomes the voice of the book, permanently, the way a film score becomes inseparable from the images it accompanies. Ask anyone who has listened to a well-narrated audiobook to then read the same text in print, and they will tell you: the narrator is still there, still speaking inside their head, overlaying the reader’s own internal voice with a ghost performance that refuses to vacate.

This is the third life of the book: the one where it enters the listener through a voice the writer did not choose and could not have predicted, and becomes something neither the writer nor the narrator intended.

People ask me why I do not narrate my own books. I narrate the Human Meme podcast, so the question is reasonable: if you already sit in front of a microphone and talk for a living, why hand the book to a stranger? I did narrate one, The Wound Remains Faithful, and the experience taught me something about the economics of creative time that I have not forgotten. A book that took months to write takes roughly six hours of studio time to perform as audio. Six hours of recording, plus editing, plus the physical recovery that sustained vocal performance demands. When I look at a free day and ask myself whether I want to spend it re-performing a book I have already written or writing an entirely new one, the new book wins every time. The podcast is different. The podcast is composed in the speaking. The voice and the writing happen simultaneously, and the performance is the first draft. A book has already been performed once, silently, in the writing, and asking me to perform it again aloud is asking me to walk a trail I have already walked when there is an uncut forest next to it.

But the deeper reason is theatrical, and it connects to everything I have been arguing in this essay. If I narrate my own book, the three lives collapse into two. My voice in the writing and my voice in the narration are too close to each other. The gap between them, the productive gap where the book gets re-authored by a second intelligence, closes. The book becomes a one-man show, and much of my life has already been a one-man show: writing, editing, publishing, designing, promoting, all of it carried by one pair of hands. The audiobook is the place where I can finally open the door and let someone else onto the stage. There is a generosity in that, and a relief, and also a creative dividend, because what comes back from the narrator is always more interesting than what I would have produced alone. A second mind in the room changes the room. I know this from decades of directing actors. The playwright who insists on playing every part has misunderstood the purpose of theater.

Seneca understood something about this multiplication, though he never had to endure the experience of hearing a Roman actor perform his prose in a recording studio. In De Brevitate Vitae, he argues that the philosopher lives longest among all people, because through reading, one annexes every preceding age to one’s own. We can, he writes, dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, and overcome human nature with the Stoics. The years that came before us are not lost. They are available, and through concentrated study, they become ours. A single life becomes many lives. The calendar is a liar.

But Seneca was also suspicious of exactly the kind of expansive reading his own argument seems to invite. In his second letter to Lucilius, he reverses field with the confidence of a man who has caught himself in a contradiction and decided to own it. Do not read everything, he warns. Do not flit from book to book the way a restless traveler moves from city to city, arriving everywhere and settling nowhere. Linger with a few great thinkers. Digest them. Let their ideas become part of your tissue. The person who reads everything absorbs nothing. The person who reads deeply absorbs the author whole.

Seneca’s two positions only appear to contradict each other. Together they form a single, stranger argument: the multiplication of lives he describes in De Brevitate Vitae depends on depth, never on volume. You do not live Socrates’ life by skimming the dialogues. You live it by sitting inside a single passage until Socrates’ way of thinking becomes indistinguishable from your own. The annexation of another life requires the same commitment you would bring to an actual relationship. You have to show up. You have to stay.

Now extend this to the listener, and extend it further to the writer who came up through the theater.

I am a playwright. I have spent decades thinking about what happens when language leaves the page and enters a body that is not the author’s body. In the theater, this transaction is visible. You sit in a darkened house and watch actors inhabit your words in real time, and the text becomes dimensional in a way that no private reading can replicate, because the actor’s physical presence adds information that the page cannot carry: gesture, stance, the way a pause lands differently when an actual human being is standing in an actual room holding the silence. Live theater is synchronous. The audience and the performer share the same moment. The electricity of that shared present tense is what makes theater irreplaceable, and it is also what limits it. A room, bodies, everyone in the same place at the same time.

An audiobook is the redacted version of that staged play.

“Redacted” in the sense of concentrated, the way a reduction in cooking intensifies a flavor by removing the water. An audiobook strips away the visual dimension of performance, the set, the lights, the blocking, the costumes, and leaves only the voice. And the voice, it turns out, is where most of the meaning lived all along. This is something the old radio dramatists understood instinctively: when you remove the visual, the listener’s imagination does not shut down. It accelerates. The listener becomes scenic designer, casting director, and lighting technician in a single act of involuntary creation, building a visual world around the voice that is more personal, more fitted to the listener’s own psyche, than anything a stage crew could construct.

When I write a book now, I hear it as a playwright hears a script. The prose is dialogue spoken by a narrator who does not yet have a name or a face, and the stage is the inside of a stranger’s head. The performance will not happen in a theater on West 44th Street in front of four hundred people at 8:00 on a Thursday evening. It will happen in a car on Interstate 80, or in a kitchen at 6:00 in the morning, or in a hospital waiting room at a time the listener would rather not remember. The audience has been scattered across time zones and years, each person encountering the performance alone, at a moment determined by the private circumstances of their own life rather than by a curtain time. This is asynchronous theater. The playwright writes for a stage that exists everywhere and nowhere, and the result is a more intimate form of drama, because the performance happens inside the listener rather than in front of them.

The old radio plays understood this intimacy. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938, the panic it caused demonstrated something important about the isolated voice. A voice entering the ear without visual accompaniment occupies a different neurological category than a voice attached to a body on a stage. The brain processes an isolated voice as closer and more authoritative, for the simple reason that there is nothing else competing for attention. The listener cannot glance at the set and remember that this is fiction. The listener has only the voice, and the voice is inside them, and the distance between “hearing a performance” and “experiencing an event” collapses to nothing.

This is what thrills me about the audiobook as a form. It is theater without walls. It is a play that runs continuously, starting and stopping at the listener’s discretion, performed for an audience of one in a venue that exists nowhere and everywhere. The book I wrote in silence, hearing it in the voice that lives between my ears, has traveled through the narrator’s larynx and into the listener’s private theater, and at each stage it has been remade by a different human intelligence. The text is the constant. The voice, the pacing, the meaning, all change with each body the book passes through.

Seneca would have approved of this, I think, with one caveat. He would have insisted that the listener not move on too quickly. Stay with this book. Let it work on you. Do not queue up the next title the moment the final chapter ends. The modern compulsion to consume, to track reading goals and annual book counts and to-be-read piles measured in linear feet, is the restless tourism Seneca warned Lucilius against. You do not multiply your life by multiplying your inputs. You multiply your life by refusing to leave a text until it has become part of you, until you can think in its rhythms without trying, until the author’s concerns have become your concerns and you can no longer remember a time when they were not.

The book lives three times. Once in the writing, where the author’s silent voice conducts every sentence. Once in the reading, where a stranger’s inner voice performs the text in a private theater no one else will ever enter. And once in the listening, where a narrator’s physical voice colonizes both the author’s memory and the listener’s imagination, creating something none of them intended and none of them can fully control.

Three lives. Three genuine performances. And the price of admission to any of them is the willingness to stay.

The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

Something strange surfaces in that departure. While you were writing, the book had a voice, and the voice was yours. I mean the silent one, the one that has nothing to do with ordering coffee or arguing with the insurance company, the interior narrator that reads your own thoughts back to you and lives in the cavity between your ears. It has no sound but is louder than anything in the room. Every sentence you wrote was tested against that voice. You heard the book before you read it. The prose rhythm, the paragraph pacing, the places where a sentence needed to land hard or dissolve into the next thought, all of it was conducted by a voice that has no waveform and no frequency but is, for the writer, the most real sound in the world. When the book is finished, that voice goes quiet. The conductor steps off the podium. What remains on the page is the score, but the performance that produced it is already gone.

Then someone picks up the book and reads it in silence, and a different voice appears.

This is the life of the book that is easiest to overlook, because it happens inside the reader’s skull and leaves no evidence. A person sits with your text and their inner voice takes possession of it, and that voice cannot be yours. The reader’s internal narrator carries its own cadence and speed, colored by decades of that person’s accumulated experience with language. Where you heard a sentence as clipped and staccato, the reader may hear it as languid. Where you intended a pause, the reader may barrel through. The reader is performing the text in the only theater that matters, and the performance is entirely their own. Two people can read the same novel in the same afternoon in the same room and hear completely different books, because the voice in one head is never the voice in another. Silent reading is a private staging of the text, unrehearsed, undirected, and unrepeatable.

This is the second life of the book: the one where it exists as pure text and the reader becomes, without knowing it, both audience and performer. The writer is absent. The writer’s voice is gone. What replaces it is whatever voice the reader has cultivated across a lifetime of reading, one that speeds up when the prose is familiar and slows when it is strange, that whispers through some passages and declaims through others, and that the reader has never once thought to question because it has been there since they first learned to decode symbols on a page. This is a genuine performance, as real as any staged production, and it happens billions of times a day in absolute silence.

Then something else happens. Someone else reads the book aloud.

I have listened to narrators perform my work, and the experience is dislocating in ways I did not anticipate. A narrator translates and performs simultaneously, but what a narrator actually does runs deeper than either word suggests. A narrator re-authors the text in real time, filtering every sentence through a different nervous system and a whole separate body of accumulated memory, lungs that breathe in places where you, the writer, never paused. The commas you placed with surgical precision become suggestions. The rhythms you hammered into the prose get bent, sometimes broken, sometimes improved, by a voice that carries its own gravitational field. What emerges from the narrator’s mouth is a separate book that happens to share your words.

The part that haunts you comes afterward: the narrator’s voice replaces yours. Once you have heard your book performed by another person, you cannot unhear it. You go back to the text and try to read it in your own inner voice, the one that built the thing sentence by sentence, and the narrator is already there, squatting in your skull, delivering lines with inflections you never intended. Your book has been colonized. The voice you lived with for months or years of drafting has been overwritten by a voice that arrived after the work was done and claimed it with the confidence of someone who has always lived there. I say this without resentment, only as a witness to the irreversibility of certain experiences. You cannot un-know a melody once it has been attached to lyrics you wrote in silence.

For the listener, the colonization is even more complete, because the listener never had the writer’s voice to begin with. The listener’s first encounter with the text arrives through the narrator’s body and breath, through decisions about emphasis and tempo and the thousand micro-choices that constitute a spoken performance. The narrator’s voice becomes the voice of the book, permanently, the way a film score becomes inseparable from the images it accompanies. Ask anyone who has listened to a well-narrated audiobook to then read the same text in print, and they will tell you: the narrator is still there, still speaking inside their head, overlaying the reader’s own internal voice with a ghost performance that refuses to vacate.

This is the third life of the book: the one where it enters the listener through a voice the writer did not choose and could not have predicted, and becomes something neither the writer nor the narrator intended.

People ask me why I do not narrate my own books. I narrate the Human Meme podcast, so the question is reasonable: if you already sit in front of a microphone and talk for a living, why hand the book to a stranger? I did narrate one, The Wound Remains Faithful, and the experience taught me something about the economics of creative time that I have not forgotten. A book that took months to write takes roughly six hours of studio time to perform as audio. Six hours of recording, plus editing, plus the physical recovery that sustained vocal performance demands. When I look at a free day and ask myself whether I want to spend it re-performing a book I have already written or writing an entirely new one, the new book wins every time. The podcast is different. The podcast is composed in the speaking. The voice and the writing happen simultaneously, and the performance is the first draft. A book has already been performed once, silently, in the writing, and asking me to perform it again aloud is asking me to walk a trail I have already walked when there is an uncut forest next to it.

But the deeper reason is theatrical, and it connects to everything I have been arguing in this essay. If I narrate my own book, the three lives collapse into two. My voice in the writing and my voice in the narration are too close to each other. The gap between them, the productive gap where the book gets re-authored by a second intelligence, closes. The book becomes a one-man show, and much of my life has already been a one-man show: writing, editing, publishing, designing, promoting, all of it carried by one pair of hands. The audiobook is the place where I can finally open the door and let someone else onto the stage. There is a generosity in that, and a relief, and also a creative dividend, because what comes back from the narrator is always more interesting than what I would have produced alone. A second mind in the room changes the room. I know this from decades of directing actors. The playwright who insists on playing every part has misunderstood the purpose of theater.

Seneca understood something about this multiplication, though he never had to endure the experience of hearing a Roman actor perform his prose in a recording studio. In De Brevitate Vitae, he argues that the philosopher lives longest among all people, because through reading, one annexes every preceding age to one’s own. We can, he writes, dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, and overcome human nature with the Stoics. The years that came before us are not lost. They are available, and through concentrated study, they become ours. A single life becomes many lives. The calendar is a liar.

But Seneca was also suspicious of exactly the kind of expansive reading his own argument seems to invite. In his second letter to Lucilius, he reverses field with the confidence of a man who has caught himself in a contradiction and decided to own it. Do not read everything, he warns. Do not flit from book to book the way a restless traveler moves from city to city, arriving everywhere and settling nowhere. Linger with a few great thinkers. Digest them. Let their ideas become part of your tissue. The person who reads everything absorbs nothing. The person who reads deeply absorbs the author whole.

Seneca’s two positions only appear to contradict each other. Together they form a single, stranger argument: the multiplication of lives he describes in De Brevitate Vitae depends on depth, never on volume. You do not live Socrates’ life by skimming the dialogues. You live it by sitting inside a single passage until Socrates’ way of thinking becomes indistinguishable from your own. The annexation of another life requires the same commitment you would bring to an actual relationship. You have to show up. You have to stay.

Now extend this to the listener, and extend it further to the writer who came up through the theater.

I am a playwright. I have spent decades thinking about what happens when language leaves the page and enters a body that is not the author’s body. In the theater, this transaction is visible. You sit in a darkened house and watch actors inhabit your words in real time, and the text becomes dimensional in a way that no private reading can replicate, because the actor’s physical presence adds information that the page cannot carry: gesture, stance, the way a pause lands differently when an actual human being is standing in an actual room holding the silence. Live theater is synchronous. The audience and the performer share the same moment. The electricity of that shared present tense is what makes theater irreplaceable, and it is also what limits it. A room, bodies, everyone in the same place at the same time.

An audiobook is the redacted version of that staged play.

“Redacted” in the sense of concentrated, the way a reduction in cooking intensifies a flavor by removing the water. An audiobook strips away the visual dimension of performance, the set, the lights, the blocking, the costumes, and leaves only the voice. And the voice, it turns out, is where most of the meaning lived all along. This is something the old radio dramatists understood instinctively: when you remove the visual, the listener’s imagination does not shut down. It accelerates. The listener becomes scenic designer, casting director, and lighting technician in a single act of involuntary creation, building a visual world around the voice that is more personal, more fitted to the listener’s own psyche, than anything a stage crew could construct.

When I write a book now, I hear it as a playwright hears a script. The prose is dialogue spoken by a narrator who does not yet have a name or a face, and the stage is the inside of a stranger’s head. The performance will not happen in a theater on West 44th Street in front of four hundred people at 8:00 on a Thursday evening. It will happen in a car on Interstate 80, or in a kitchen at 6:00 in the morning, or in a hospital waiting room at a time the listener would rather not remember. The audience has been scattered across time zones and years, each person encountering the performance alone, at a moment determined by the private circumstances of their own life rather than by a curtain time. This is asynchronous theater. The playwright writes for a stage that exists everywhere and nowhere, and the result is a more intimate form of drama, because the performance happens inside the listener rather than in front of them.

The old radio plays understood this intimacy. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938, the panic it caused demonstrated something important about the isolated voice. A voice entering the ear without visual accompaniment occupies a different neurological category than a voice attached to a body on a stage. The brain processes an isolated voice as closer and more authoritative, for the simple reason that there is nothing else competing for attention. The listener cannot glance at the set and remember that this is fiction. The listener has only the voice, and the voice is inside them, and the distance between “hearing a performance” and “experiencing an event” collapses to nothing.

This is what thrills me about the audiobook as a form. It is theater without walls. It is a play that runs continuously, starting and stopping at the listener’s discretion, performed for an audience of one in a venue that exists nowhere and everywhere. The book I wrote in silence, hearing it in the voice that lives between my ears, has traveled through the narrator’s larynx and into the listener’s private theater, and at each stage it has been remade by a different human intelligence. The text is the constant. The voice, the pacing, the meaning, all change with each body the book passes through.

Seneca would have approved of this, I think, with one caveat. He would have insisted that the listener not move on too quickly. Stay with this book. Let it work on you. Do not queue up the next title the moment the final chapter ends. The modern compulsion to consume, to track reading goals and annual book counts and to-be-read piles measured in linear feet, is the restless tourism Seneca warned Lucilius against. You do not multiply your life by multiplying your inputs. You multiply your life by refusing to leave a text until it has become part of you, until you can think in its rhythms without trying, until the author’s concerns have become your concerns and you can no longer remember a time when they were not.

The book lives three times. Once in the writing, where the author’s silent voice conducts every sentence. Once in the reading, where a stranger’s inner voice performs the text in a private theater no one else will ever enter. And once in the listening, where a narrator’s physical voice colonizes both the author’s memory and the listener’s imagination, creating something none of them intended and none of them can fully control.

Three lives. Three genuine performances. And the price of admission to any of them is the willingness to stay.

Graffiti Bomb
Watcher over here just like me is confused about what this thing is exactly

Day 17 of the RWAM you know the drill...today I was very exhausted and didn't want to spend too much time as I started pretty late so I tried some more of the pixel art style which once again was a lot of fun and yeah drawing this thing was very fast. I also had a lot of fun with the background, I think it looks cool :) And yeah I have no idea what these things are, maybe those didn't exist yet when I played the dlc, or I really just never came across them.

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #graffitibomb #paintbomb #confused #confusedexpression #gradient #backgroundgradient

Graffiti Bomb
Watcher over here just like me is confused about what this thing is exactly

Day 17 of the RWAM you know the drill...today I was very exhausted and didn't want to spend too much time as I started pretty late so I tried some more of the pixel art style which once again was a lot of fun and yeah drawing this thing was very fast. I also had a lot of fun with the background, I think it looks cool :) And yeah I have no idea what these things are, maybe those didn't exist yet when I played the dlc, or I really just never came across them.

#art #digital #fanart #RWArtMonth #digitalart #rainworld #slugcat #watcher #graffitibomb #paintbomb #confused #confusedexpression #gradient #backgroundgradient

Underwater Slugcat deployed!
Day 5 of RWAM here we go! The watcher is taking a deep dive through the mystery water world of Salination! Will they find the next air bubble?

I am actually very content with this one :) Didn't quite take me an hour, but didn't feel confident enough to add more to it.

#art #digital #digitalart #rainworld #fanart #RWArtMonth #slugcat #watcher

Underwater Slugcat deployed!
Day 5 of RWAM here we go! The watcher is taking a deep dive through the mystery water world of Salination! Will they find the next air bubble?

I am actually very content with this one :) Didn't quite take me an hour, but didn't feel confident enough to add more to it.

#art #digital #digitalart #rainworld #fanart #RWArtMonth #slugcat #watcher

WATCHER (Suècia) presenta nou EP: "Chains of Crystal" #Watcher #HeavyMetal #Maig2025 #Suècia #NouEp #Metall #Metal #MúsicaMetal #MetalMusic

#TheRookie #TV what have you done?!?! #Watcher #GhostHunters

I am create Nodejs's --watch alternative FileWatcher in php.

#php
#nodejs
#javascript
#filewatcher
#watcher

I am create Nodejs's --watch alternative FileWatcher in php.

#php
#nodejs
#javascript
#filewatcher
#watcher

I am create Nodejs's --watch alternative FileWatcher in php.

#php
#nodejs
#javascript
#filewatcher
#watcher

I am create Nodejs's --watch alternative FileWatcher in php.

#php
#nodejs
#javascript
#filewatcher
#watcher

I am create Nodejs's --watch alternative FileWatcher in php.

#php
#nodejs
#javascript
#filewatcher
#watcher

... the thing that does not leave ...

#snow #liminalanxiety #weirdcore #horror #weird #watcher #stalker #zombie #strange #surreal #dream

positivelygroovylife.com
#TruthWins #Justice #Balance #Freedom #Mindfulness #Trauma #Scapegoat #Shadowbanned #WhoamIthattheywishtohide? #Destiny #Iseeyou #Baharani #Kassandra #Aurora #Akashic #Watcher #Leadership #Knowyourself #Integrity #Dotherightthing #Shameonyou #Heal #Stopwithyourlies #Iamabreakerofillusion #escapethehouseofmirrors #itsnotmeitsyou #lol

#PuppetHistory is finally back on #Watcher and that show makes me uneasy the second it's hinted that shit is going to be weird. And shit is going to be weeeeird.

Hey! I'm MoonFox, usually go by Moon or Midnight (she/he/xe)
Was an #AethyRefugee and decided to stay <3
#profic, #selfshipper and #himejoshi
my F/O list is in my other pinned!
I post a lot about my #OCs bc they're my blorbos. (i use #moonocs for them) I also love hearing about other people's OCs <3
CW for #whump , #shipcest and toxic dynamics in fictional ships sometimes.
I'll keep editing this post from time to time.My fandoms rn mostly:

#MLP
#HazbinHotel
#HelluvaBoss
#DSMP
#Pokemon
#CookieRun
#Watcher
#GhostFiles

I have so many ships and my hyperfocus jumps around but currently overtaking my mind:
#DreamNoBlade
#Stolitz
#RadioApple
#MenoAka
#CeleLuna
#TwiLestia
#RosePearl
#HolyWarrior

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Hey! I'm MoonFox, usually go by Moon or Midnight (she/he/xe)
Was an #AethyRefugee and decided to stay <3
#profic, #selfshipper and #himejoshi
my F/O list is in my other pinned!
I post a lot about my #OCs bc they're my blorbos. (i use #moonocs for them) I also love hearing about other people's OCs <3
CW for #whump , #shipcest and toxic dynamics in fictional ships sometimes.
I'll keep editing this post from time to time.My fandoms rn mostly:

#MLP
#HazbinHotel
#HelluvaBoss
#DSMP
#Pokemon
#CookieRun
#Watcher
#GhostFiles

I have so many ships and my hyperfocus jumps around but currently overtaking my mind:
#DreamNoBlade
#Stolitz
#RadioApple
#MenoAka
#CeleLuna
#TwiLestia
#RosePearl
#HolyWarrior

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Hey! I'm MoonFox, usually go by Moon or Midnight (she/he/xe)
Was an #AethyRefugee and decided to stay <3
#profic, #selfshipper and #himejoshi
my F/O list is in my other pinned!
I post a lot about my #OCs bc they're my blorbos. (i use #moonocs for them) I also love hearing about other people's OCs <3
CW for #whump , #shipcest and toxic dynamics in fictional ships sometimes.
I'll keep editing this post from time to time.My fandoms rn mostly:

#MLP
#HazbinHotel
#HelluvaBoss
#DSMP
#Pokemon
#CookieRun
#Watcher
#GhostFiles

I have so many ships and my hyperfocus jumps around but currently overtaking my mind:
#DreamNoBlade
#Stolitz
#RadioApple
#MenoAka
#CeleLuna
#TwiLestia
#RosePearl
#HolyWarrior

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Hey! I'm MoonFox, usually go by Moon or Midnight (she/he/xe)
Was an #AethyRefugee and decided to stay <3
#profic, #selfshipper and #himejoshi
my F/O list is in my other pinned!
I post a lot about my #OCs bc they're my blorbos. (i use #moonocs for them) I also love hearing about other people's OCs <3
CW for #whump , #shipcest and toxic dynamics in fictional ships sometimes.
I'll keep editing this post from time to time.My fandoms rn mostly:

#MLP
#HazbinHotel
#HelluvaBoss
#DSMP
#Pokemon
#CookieRun
#Watcher
#GhostFiles

I have so many ships and my hyperfocus jumps around but currently overtaking my mind:
#DreamNoBlade
#Stolitz
#RadioApple
#MenoAka
#CeleLuna
#TwiLestia
#RosePearl
#HolyWarrior

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Hey! I'm MoonFox, usually go by Moon or Midnight (she/he/xe)
Was an #AethyRefugee and decided to stay <3
#profic, #selfshipper and #himejoshi
my F/O list is in my other pinned!
I post a lot about my #OCs bc they're my blorbos. (i use #moonocs for them) I also love hearing about other people's OCs <3
CW for #whump , #shipcest and toxic dynamics in fictional ships sometimes.
I'll keep editing this post from time to time.My fandoms rn mostly:

#MLP
#HazbinHotel
#HelluvaBoss
#DSMP
#Pokemon
#CookieRun
#Watcher
#GhostFiles

I have so many ships and my hyperfocus jumps around but currently overtaking my mind:
#DreamNoBlade
#Stolitz
#RadioApple
#MenoAka
#CeleLuna
#TwiLestia
#RosePearl
#HolyWarrior

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On a sweltering evening in the thumb pad of Michigan’s mitten, a self-described prophet promised 700 Christians under a crisp white tent that they were about to #cheat #death.
They would do this by winning the swing state for Donald Trump.

The reasoning was simple:
Each of the Christians assembled would soon feel a call to become a #poll #watcher or to knock on doors or to organize their church
—to take part in some act that would aid the Republican presidential candidate.

⭐️And that act would keep them safe, the prophet said, because God would not call them home before they had completed the task He had given them.
🔥“The greatest argument you have with death is an unfulfilled assignment,” the man, #Lance #Wallnau, told the crowd

This was the third stop of the “#Courage #Tour,”
a traveling worship spectacle passing through key battleground states ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

Organized by Wallnau, a sixtysomething Texas-based evangelical with a salesman’s persona,
the three-day event was a marriage of the religious and the political,
a swirl of prophecies and PowerPoints and speaking in tongues.

It was a call to arms, a campaign strategy session, and
—above all
—an honest-to-God old-fashioned Pentecostal tent revival.

It was also a showcase of the power of a rapidly growing, militant right-wing movement in American Christianity.

Wallnau is a major leader in a coalition of Christians who believe that Trump is prophesied to play a critical role in the nation’s spiritual reformation
—that the former president is destined to be a catalyst for the next Great Awakening, even.

These Christians see Trump as a modern-day Cyrus the Great,
the powerful empire builder and nonbeliever who is credited in the Old Testament with returning the Jews to the Holy Land.

They believe that under Trump’s protection, American Christians will rise up,
defeat their #demonic #enemies,
and take their rightful place of power in the country.

This belief in a Trump prophecy has only grown stronger among the faithful since the former president survived an #assassination attempt in July.

It is so strong, in fact, that anything that could stand in Trump’s way
—democratic or otherwise
—is perceived as a force of #evil that must be battled on a spiritual plane.

This has already played out once:
After Trump lost the 2020 election, Wallnau held nearly daily rants about the #stolen #election on Facebook Live;

he decreed in one online prayer call that 💥God would overturn the election results.

He spoke at a major rally for Christian election deniers in Washington on Dec. 12 of that year,
warning that there was “a backlash coming”
and announcing that it would be the “beginning of a #Christian #populist #uprising.”

He and other right-wing Christian leaders circled the Capitol while blowing #shofars and praying for the election to be overturned,
drawing clear parallels to the biblical story from the Book of Joshua in which the Israelite army marches around the city of Jericho,
blowing horns until its walls crumble and the Israelites conquer the city and #slaughter its inhabitants.

The event, which preceded a night of #political #violence in the nation’s capital, drew thousands of attendees in what was widely seen as a precursor to the Jan. 6 riot.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/donald-trump-2024-president-election-shooting-christians.html

druid's cottage with watchtree

#Druid #Cottage #Watcher #Guard #Tree #Fantasy #Architecture #IntricateDesigns #GlowingBlueLights #StonePath #Night #Magical
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

want-get-have: https://aieris.art/featured/druids-cottage-with-watchtree-eris-and-ai.html

druid's cottage with watchtree

#Druid #Cottage #Watcher #Guard #Tree #Fantasy #Architecture #IntricateDesigns #GlowingBlueLights #StonePath #Night #Magical
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

want-get-have: https://aieris.art/featured/druids-cottage-with-watchtree-eris-and-ai.html

druid's cottage with watchtree

#Druid #Cottage #Watcher #Guard #Tree #Fantasy #Architecture #IntricateDesigns #GlowingBlueLights #StonePath #Night #Magical
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

want-get-have: https://aieris.art/featured/druids-cottage-with-watchtree-eris-and-ai.html

druid's cottage with watchtree

#Druid #Cottage #Watcher #Guard #Tree #Fantasy #Architecture #IntricateDesigns #GlowingBlueLights #StonePath #Night #Magical
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

want-get-have: https://aieris.art/featured/druids-cottage-with-watchtree-eris-and-ai.html

druid's cottage with watchtree

#Druid #Cottage #Watcher #Guard #Tree #Fantasy #Architecture #IntricateDesigns #GlowingBlueLights #StonePath #Night #Magical
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

want-get-have: https://aieris.art/featured/druids-cottage-with-watchtree-eris-and-ai.html

And yes, while having to pay for stuff that was previously free does kind of suck, this is ridiculous. Also, it hasn't escaped my attention that much of the fandom has spent the last couple of days vilifying one of the Asian-American co-founders of Watcher (including literal Yellow Peril tropes too) while exonerating the white guy co-founder...

#Watcher #ParaSocial #YouTube

I had literal flashbacks to previous online discourse surrounding "creators should get paid, but not like that," and how everyone is suddenly an expert on online economics (it doesn't help that other YT content creators, perhaps smelling blood in the water, have added their voice to the chorus in search of those sweet, sweet clicks), and how YouTube is good actually, and paying people what they're worth is bad.

#Watcher #ParaSocial #YouTube

If you want to see a case study on parasocial relationships, check out the online sturm und drang about Watcher Entertainment leaving YouTube and starting their own subscription-based streaming service. Now, I've enjoyed their videos over the years, but not enough to subscribe, so I mentally wished them well and moved on. But holy hell, check out social media and you'll find it filled with rage over this perceived economic, ideological, and very personal betrayal.

#Watcher #ParaSocial #YouTube

• TikTok getting banned.
• Yuri on Ice Movie cancelled.
• Watcher moving off of YouTube to their own subscription platform.

...I'm going back to bed. Wake me up tomorrow. :vg_kirby_sleepy:

#TikTok #YuriOnIce #Watcher #GhostFiles

Did you miss the #Watcher in this #XMen97 episode?
https://thedirect.com/article/x-men-97-mcu-cameo

🎬
#Watcher

Niente di eccezionale ma comunque un buon thriller, abile a "cucinare" lentamente lo spettatore prima di un finale vibrante.

📝Voto: 6+
"Watcher" di Chloe Okuno, 96minuti, 2022.

#cinema #film #Movies #27marzo #cineMastodon #cineItalia

#Royal #Watcher was not, is not and never will be a valid job, occupation or career!!!

They are watching over the city

#statue #watcher #watchers #München #Munich #muenchen #photography #photo #street #citylife #stadtfotografie #streetphotography #cityphoto #stadtleben #stadtansichten #straßenfotografie #fotografie #straße #stadt

Today we have three bite-sized resources that are pretty diverse, so there should be something for everyone.

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TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop)

• Daft Social: Introducing Daft Social, the “Anti-Social Social Network for Minimalists.” It offers a unique platform where users can post simple, constrained content directly via email without the need for passwords or account management. Images can be shared by providing a URL, and posts are limited to the subject line only.
• Modd: Explore modd, a developer tool that manages daemons in response to filesystem changes. It looks for a modd.conf file in the current directory containing commands triggered by file changes. prep directives run and terminate commands like tests or compilers, while daemon directives keep processes running, suitable for tasks like starting databases or webservers.
• PROMPT_COMMAND/precmd: Learn about PROMPT_COMMAND in Bash and precmd in Zsh, which run code before setting the prompt. These features are commonly used to customize prompts with information. Additionally, discover an innovative concept called Eternal Shell History that offers a unique approach to shell history management.

Daft Social

Blogging can be a super-heavyweight activity, especially if it’s in the context of a newsletter, and social media got pretty complex thanks to the incompetence of a billionaire, and an utter invasion by rightwingnuts on almost every platform. Video content can be a bear to crank out, and there are already too many podcasts in existence.

What if there was a way to go back to simple, constrained posts that do not require an app (not even a web app) that others can consume via direct introspection or RSS (like OG Twitter).

Enter: Daft Social, the “Anti-Social Social Network for Minimalists”. Its creators are all about simplification and reduction.

Your “client” is your email app, and they only accept posts that fit in the subject line (bodies are ignored). If you have an image you want to show the world, it has to have a URL, and you just need to provide the URL to it, and Daft Social will render it.

Signup is easy. You go here to claim a username, and it generates a random [email protected] email address. No passwords. No account management. And, no deleting. Just send an email to that addy and you can post away.

Here’s my nascent page there.

Read their FAQ, sign up, and (optionally) drop me a link so I can add it to my Inoreader RSS folder for Daft Social posts!

modd

We’ve covered devd back in 2022, but forgot to cover it’s sibling modd. We’re rectifying that mistake right now.

Fundamentally, modd is a “developer tool that triggers commands and manages daemons in response to filesystem changes.” On startup, it looks for a file called modd.conf in the current directory. These configuration files contain one or more blocks of commands, each of which can be triggered on changes to files matching a set of file (glob) patterns.

The modd directives serve two purposes:

• prep directives will run and terminate the command. These are suitable for tasks such as running tests, linters, or even compiling programs. These are run in order of occurrence.
• daemon directives execute and keep running. These are well-suited to firing up databases or webservers. When these blocks are triggered, the components that are running are sent a SIGHUP (this is changeable). They’re also restarted if the processes ever exit.

The devd utility used modd under the hood.

There are some examples to help get you started with this simple, yet powerful, filesystem watcher.

PROMPT_COMMAND/precmd

Many readers likely use or at least know about Bash’s PROMPT_COMMAND or Zsh’s [precmd](https://github.com/rothgar/mastering-zsh/blob/master/docs/config/hooks.md). They power many of the “cool” prompts you either see or use yourself.

If you aren’t familar with them, the TL;DR for them is that the code in them will run before the PS1 prompt is set. While this capability is often used to provide information that will ultimately go into PS1, you are not limited to just that functionality.

I came across this Eternal Shell History the other week and thought it was a pretty clever idea, and felt I should pass it on, if only to inspire you to come up with an equally clever hack or two of your own.

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https://dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2024/03/04/drop-431-2024-03-04-mini-monday/

#bash #filesystem #precmd #promptCommand #watcher #zsh

Today we have three bite-sized resources that are pretty diverse, so there should be something for everyone.

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TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop)

• Daft Social: Introducing Daft Social, the “Anti-Social Social Network for Minimalists.” It offers a unique platform where users can post simple, constrained content directly via email without the need for passwords or account management. Images can be shared by providing a URL, and posts are limited to the subject line only.
• Modd: Explore modd, a developer tool that manages daemons in response to filesystem changes. It looks for a modd.conf file in the current directory containing commands triggered by file changes. prep directives run and terminate commands like tests or compilers, while daemon directives keep processes running, suitable for tasks like starting databases or webservers.
• PROMPT_COMMAND/precmd: Learn about PROMPT_COMMAND in Bash and precmd in Zsh, which run code before setting the prompt. These features are commonly used to customize prompts with information. Additionally, discover an innovative concept called Eternal Shell History that offers a unique approach to shell history management.

Daft Social

Blogging can be a super-heavyweight activity, especially if it’s in the context of a newsletter, and social media got pretty complex thanks to the incompetence of a billionaire, and an utter invasion by rightwingnuts on almost every platform. Video content can be a bear to crank out, and there are already too many podcasts in existence.

What if there was a way to go back to simple, constrained posts that do not require an app (not even a web app) that others can consume via direct introspection or RSS (like OG Twitter).

Enter: Daft Social, the “Anti-Social Social Network for Minimalists”. Its creators are all about simplification and reduction.

Your “client” is your email app, and they only accept posts that fit in the subject line (bodies are ignored). If you have an image you want to show the world, it has to have a URL, and you just need to provide the URL to it, and Daft Social will render it.

Signup is easy. You go here to claim a username, and it generates a random [email protected] email address. No passwords. No account management. And, no deleting. Just send an email to that addy and you can post away.

Here’s my nascent page there.

Read their FAQ, sign up, and (optionally) drop me a link so I can add it to my Inoreader RSS folder for Daft Social posts!

modd

We’ve covered devd back in 2022, but forgot to cover it’s sibling modd. We’re rectifying that mistake right now.

Fundamentally, modd is a “developer tool that triggers commands and manages daemons in response to filesystem changes.” On startup, it looks for a file called modd.conf in the current directory. These configuration files contain one or more blocks of commands, each of which can be triggered on changes to files matching a set of file (glob) patterns.

The modd directives serve two purposes:

• prep directives will run and terminate the command. These are suitable for tasks such as running tests, linters, or even compiling programs. These are run in order of occurrence.
• daemon directives execute and keep running. These are well-suited to firing up databases or webservers. When these blocks are triggered, the components that are running are sent a SIGHUP (this is changeable). They’re also restarted if the processes ever exit.

The devd utility used modd under the hood.

There are some examples to help get you started with this simple, yet powerful, filesystem watcher.

PROMPT_COMMAND/precmd

Many readers likely use or at least know about Bash’s PROMPT_COMMAND or Zsh’s [precmd](https://github.com/rothgar/mastering-zsh/blob/master/docs/config/hooks.md). They power many of the “cool” prompts you either see or use yourself.

If you aren’t familar with them, the TL;DR for them is that the code in them will run before the PS1 prompt is set. While this capability is often used to provide information that will ultimately go into PS1, you are not limited to just that functionality.

I came across this Eternal Shell History the other week and thought it was a pretty clever idea, and felt I should pass it on, if only to inspire you to come up with an equally clever hack or two of your own.

Type your email…

Subscribe

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on Mastodon via @[email protected] ☮️

https://dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2024/03/04/drop-431-2024-03-04-mini-monday/

#bash #filesystem #precmd #promptCommand #watcher #zsh