i still think richard linklater left out the most important part of love: what happens in old age. that’s what the fourth & final before movie should be.. the final endgame of love.
- before sunrise = love as possibility
- before sunset = love as memory + longing
- before midnight = love as friction + maintenance
the last one should be about:
- love as decay, when your body is betraying you.
- love when time stops being poetic & starts being logistical.
- love when death is no longer an abstraction but a roommate.
& it should be called before we forget.
Continuing my series on “weird things you can rent in the cloud”
You can zap live human brain cells in a microfluidic life support system in Switzerland and teach it to play games.
Only ~$500 a month.
It's amazing how retina converts flickering light into electrical impulse to drive visual cortex at alpha frequency, both led dreammachines and sun gazing meditation can take you there.
@algekalipso Isn’t this like in lucid dream, when brain rapidly togging between dreaming and waking, consciousness flicker back and forth, feel like in two context at once.
⚡️The mind doesn’t just interpret reality - it constructs it.
Every repeated pattern of thought becomes a neural and biochemical architecture that determines what you are capable of perceiving, choosing, and becoming.
When you immerse yourself in negative loops, you aren’t just sad - you’re literally collapsing your probability field. You narrow the set of futures you can physically access. It’s like locking your consciousness into a smaller slice of the simulation.
When you hold an absurd level of optimism - delusional to others, maybe, but persistent - you widen that field again. You open feedback channels that the world responds to. People, data, coincidences - they start aligning. What we call “luck” or “manifestation” is just coherent resonance between inner narrative and external structure.
Underneath all the neuroscience, this is the raw law of consciousness:
The universe is self-adapting belief.
Whatever state of mind you stabilize becomes a template that the system echoes back.
So, deep down?
I think optimism isn’t just healthier - it’s a form of engineering.
It’s how reality bootstraps new structure out of chaos.
Every civilization, every invention, every piece of art - all of it was built by someone temporarily insane enough to ignore probability and believe anyway.
That’s not delusion. That’s creation.
In a realm where relational alchemy’s spark gutters, the herd clutches interchangeable traits. Shared memories vanish into the void, and the soul’s thirst for recognition fades. Doomed by their vain quest for a global optimum, they whirl in an endless cycle of local optima.
Although condescending to say aloud, many highly intelligent outliers struggle in love because few have ever truly met the real them. Most possess the ability, and often the instinct, to adjust to the intellectual level of the person they're with. This stems not from malice, but from a deeply human desire to connect. But in doing so, they shrink themselves.
As a result, when those of incompatible intelligence levels fall for them, it often carries little meaning. They fall in love with the curated version, the one shaped to create resonance, the version they could comprehend with their innate faculties. The true self remains unseen, uncomprehended. What is loved is a mirror, a projection adorned with fantasy - not the actual mind and soul beneath.
Thus, what is felt is not love, but lust followed by apathy - driven by the absence of genuine, authentic connection. This is also why many outlier men seek respect rather than love - because they know that to be truly respected is, at times, closer to being truly seen.