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A Fractured Collage of a Mad Scientist's Mind

@arcanequark / arcanequark.tumblr.com

Featuring assorted nerdiness, interestingly bad ideas, and on occasion wit. Well, mostly the first one.Fashion sense of "an 18th-Century homosexual", per my friend. They/He
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“Still nothing for me?” the angel asks. John looks especially tired today, but she can summon nothing more than irritation for his frailty. “What can I say, He will not be pleased.”
“I need more time.”
“You all say that. It is like one unending echo down here.”
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start with yourself,” she says. “That works for most of you.”
The silence accumulates around them. Her patience is wearing thin. Sometimes she wishes he would simply die, and thereby secure her release.
“Have you always been a muse?” John says.
The angel sits up straighter. “I was a soldier,” she says. “I fought in the Great War. Then I guarded the gates of Heaven. But eventually it was decided I should have some other occupation.”
“It’s only…You don’t seem to like people. We must be very tiresome for you. Or perhaps it is just me.”
“I pity people,” she says. “Your lives are so filled with misery. Even for one such as you it is inescapable. Sometimes this world appears to be designed for suffering. Sometimes—” She stops, draws a sharp breath. Her words shift within her like nervous birds. They long to go winging, and one loud noise will send the whole flock exploding outward, past the paltry gate of her tongue, into the world from whence they cannot be reclaimed. Her silence is all that stands between her and disobedience, and whatever punishment that entails. John is looking at her now with a keenness she has not seen in him before. Instead of a broken old man, he looks like a dog who has scented prey.
“I asked for you especially,” she says. “I heard a rumor about you. That you wrote a pamphlet saying rulers must be measured by their deeds, and prosecuted if they are found lacking.”
“I did. I said that it was right to kill the king.”
“Do you believe that still? That those who rule must give way if they are not just?”
Even she can hear the febrile edge that has crept into her voice, but John does not seem alarmed. For the first time, he looks at her as though he understands her. “I do still believe it,” he says. “How glorious to be an angel, and know you serve the only truly just ruler to be found in all of creation.”
The angel presses her lips together until they blanch, nods tersely, and looks away. “Hosanna,” she says.

-”Killer of Kings”, All the Names They Used For God, Anjali Sachdeva

A LLM got 12th in a Leetcode coding contest (probably)

In Weekly Contest 344, a fresh account (gogogoval) solved all 4 problems in 12:13 with commented submissions and test cases that look a lot like LLM code.

This could've been faked, but I doubt it. There are a small group of people in the world (a thousand, maybe) who could solve this contest fast enough to get 12th and add comments (or solve the problems and then feed it to a LLM to add comments), but it would be a very odd thing to do on a fresh account. The code itself also looks like LLM code - it uses techniques like gets on dictionaries (instead of using defaultdicts like most competitive python programmers).

This isn't that impressive. Leetcode contests are pretty easy, and this was an unusually easy contest - all four of the problems are rated easy or medium. Leetcode contests at the top level are about speed, not depth of understanding, so it's not that shocking that a LLM could do very well.

It's still a pretty massive leap. The free version of ChatGPT can solve two of these questions with some prodding, but it's pretty helpless on the other two. In particular, the last problem (the paths through a binary tree) is not trivial - it took me about ten minutes to find and implement a solution last night, and I'm pretty good.

This isn't that big of a deal for competitive coding, but it is a big deal for both Leetcode and the online assessments companies give. I don't know how much prompting or bugfixing it took the human who submitted this code to get the LLM to a correct solution, but either way, it changes the game on how we think about easy problems. We've gone from models that were very dull to a model that could probably pass the first round of a FAANG interview for a new grad. Already, in the week after, a skilled coder used a LLM to solve the first two questions of the Leetcode contest while solving 3 and 4 manually, saving a bunch of time and getting rank 5 in the contest. Easy questions aren't useful discriminators anymore.

This is the first thing I've seen a LLM do that genuinely impressed me. We are steadily approaching a point where either the improvement will slow or these things will have massive economic impact, and I have no idea which will happen.

Bonus poll 6 (Shipping poll 3?)

Jmart sounds like a goddam grocery store, two of them are about tea, one is heartbreaking cause WE dont get to see the good cows and the other was stolen but its fine peter and elias divorced again they dont need it. Which one is your favorite?

(These were submitted to me a few days ago in the replies to an ask, there are probably more ship names idk tbh)

I mean, there’s no question that Mary wouldn’t win, right? Even without getting into the supplementary stuff by other writers, she’s an apparently immortal magician who is easily able to enter fictional/pocket worlds (see: jumping into a chalk drawing).

#As Mary’s job is kind of about creating a cushion of fantasy to ease troubled families through hard times to help the kids grow up to be somewhat decent people, if she were to somehow end up in Elm Street on one of her wanderings, I could see her easily turning Freddy into a Teachable Moment about how nightmares can’t hurt you or how evil monsters appear in stories to show that they can be defeated (as Neil Gaiman or GK Chesterton apparently once said).

Heck in the original books she’s apparently older than mountain ranges, is on first name terms with the primal forces of the universes, and is implied to be God’s nanny. The question isn’t so much who would win, so much as what would Mary do to Freddy to make an example out of someone who intentionally hurts children?

That said, as much as I kinda lost patience with the League of Extraordinary Gentleman books years ago, Alan Moore’s dialogue for Mary is excellent.

That is also true.

Also, just reminded me of this fun Paul Kidby art of Susan Sto-Helit, a character from the Discworld novels, who in addition to being Death’s granddaughter is also a former nanny and a very successful teacher of primary school age children.

…Yeah, her character arc kinda takes from from being goth Mary Poppins to goth Miss Frizzle, and that’s just part of the reason she’s great.

Oh my gosh that’s the best way to describe her :D

Also yes seriously, Freddy Kreuger would not stand a chance here

e-seal-deactivated20210319

Every piece of technology is ultimately a stone with some magic in it

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hardtosaythesethings

Well no. We know how it works and can reliably reproduce it. There isn’t magic inside but science.

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e-seal

I’m a computer scientist so I know what I’m talking about, it’s magic

We have a civilization run entirely on tiny plates of rock inscribed with runes that channel energy to do our work, manage our money, make writing and music and imagery appear at the gesture of a finger. If that’s not magic to you, you’re wrong. Just because we understand a thing does not make it less wonderous.

one of the things that i think we should pay attention to, socially, about the disney v. desantis thing is that it is really highlighting the importance of remembering nuance.

in a purely neutral sense, if you engage in something problematic, that does not mean you are necessarily agreeing with what makes it problematic. and i am worried that we have become... so afraid of any form of nuance.

disney isn't my friend, they're a corporate monopoly that bastardized copyright laws for their own benefit, ruin the environment, and abuse their workers (... and many other things). this isn't a hypothetical for me - i grew up in florida. i also worked for the actual Walt Disney World; like, in the parks. i am keenly aware of the ways they hurt people, because they hurt me. i fully believe that part of the reason florida is so conservative is because it's been an "open secret" for years now that disney lobbies the government to keep minimum wage down, and i know they worked hard to keep the parks unmasked and open during the worst parts of Covid. they purposefully keep their employees in poverty. they are in part responsible for the way the floridian government works.

desantis is still, by a margin that is frankly daunting, way worse. the alternative here isn't just "republicans win", it's actual fascism.

in a case like this, where the alternative is to allow actual fascism into united states legislation - where, if desantis wins, there are huge and legal ramifications - it's tempting to minimize the harm disney is also doing, because... well, it's not fascism. but disney isn't the good guy, either, which means republicans are having a field day asking activists oh, so you think their treatment of their employees is okay?

we have been trained there is a right answer. you're right! you're in the good group, and you're winning at having an opinion.

except i have the Internet Prophecy that in 2-3 months, even left-wing people will be ripping apart activists for having "taken disney's side". aren't i an anti-capitalist? aren't i pro-union? aren't i one of the good ones? removed from context and nuance (that in this particular situation i am forced to side with disney, until an other option reveals itself), my act of being like "i hope they have goofy rip his throat out onstage, shaking his lifeless body like a dog toy" - how quickly does that seem like i actually do support disney?

and what about you! at home, reading this. are you experiencing the Thought Crime of... actually liking some of the things disney has made? your memories of days at the parks, or of good movies, or of your favorite show growing up. maybe you are also evil, if you ever enjoyed anything, ever, at all.

to some degree, the binary idealization/vilification of individual motive and meaning already exists in the desantis case. i have seen people saying not to go to the disney pride events because they're cash grabs (they are). i've seen people saying you have to go because they're a way to protest. there isn't a lot of internet understanding of nuance. instead it's just "good show of support" or "evil bootlicking."

this binary understanding is how you can become radicalized. when we fear nuance and disorder, we're allowing ourselves the safety of assuming that the world must exist in binary - good or bad, problematic or "not" problematic. and unfortunately, bigots want you to see the world in this binary ideal. they want you to get mad at me because "disney is taking a risk for our community but you won't sing their praises" and they want me to get mad at you for not respecting the legit personal trauma that disney forced me through.

in a grander scheme outside of disney: what happens is a horrific splintering within activist groups. we bicker with each other about minimal-harm minimal-impact ideologies, like which depiction of bisexuality is the most-true. we gratuitously analyze the personal lives of activists for any sign they might be "problematic". we get spooked because someone was in a dog collar at pride. we wring our hands about setting an empty shopping mall on fire. we tell each other what words we may identify ourselves by. we get fuckin steven universe disk horse when in reality it is a waste of our collective time.

the bigots want you to spend all your time focusing on how pristine and pretty you and your interests are. they want us at each other's throats instead of hand in hand. they want to say see? nothing is ever fucking good enough for these people.

and they want their followers to think in binary as well - a binary that's much easier to follow. see, in our spaces, we attack each other over "proper" behavior. but in bigoted groups? they attack outwards. they have someone they hate, and it is us. they hate you, specifically, and you are why they have problems - not the other people in their group. and that's a part of how they fucking keep winning.

some of the things that are beloved to you have a backbone in something terrible. the music industry is a wasteland. the publishing industry is a bastion of white supremacy. video games run off of unpaid labor and abuse.

the point of activism was always to bring to light that abuse and try to stop it from happening, not to condemn those who engage in the content that comes from those industries. "there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism" also applies to media. your childhood (and maybe current!) love of the little mermaid isn't something you should now flinch from, worried you'll be a "disney adult". wanting the music industry to change for the better does not require that you reject all popular music until that change occurs. you can acknowledge the harm something might cause - and celebrate the love that it has brought into your life.

we must detach an acknowledgment of nuance from a sense of shame and disgust. we must. punishing individual people for their harmless passions is not doing good work. encouraging more thoughtful, empathetic consumption does not mean people should feel ashamed of their basic human capacities and desires. it should never have even been about the individual when the corporation is so obviously the actual evil. this sense that we must live in shame and dread of our personal nuances - it just makes people bitter and hopeless. do you have any idea how scared i am to post this? to just acknowledge the idea of nuance? that i might like something nuanced, and engage in it joyfully? and, at the same time, that i'm brutally aware of the harm that they're doing?

"so what do i do?" ... well, often there isn't a right answer. i mean in this case, i hope mickey chops off ron's head and then does a little giggle. but truth be told, often our opinions on nuanced subjects will differ. you might be able to engage in things that i can't because the nuance doesn't sit right with me. i might think taylor swift is a great performer and a lot of fun, and you might be like "raquel, the jet fuel emissions". we are both correct; neither of us have any actual sway in this. and i think it's important to remember that - the actual scope of individual responsibility. like, i also love going to the parks. Thunder Mountain is so fun. you (just a person) are not responsible for the harm that Disney (the billion dollar corporation) caused me. i don't know. i think it's possible to both enjoy your memories and interrogate the current state of their employment policies.

there is no right way to interrogate or engage with nuance - i just hope you embrace it readily.

people keep trying to make "ladies and gentlemen" more inclusive.

I think we should go the other way around.

make more and more weird false dichotomies in greetings. "gamers and pianists". "oil painters and swordsmen". "vexillologists and entomologists". "chess masters and diamond artificers". "accountants and gendered individuals".

we need to be dropping shit into formal meetings to make people say "wait what? which one am I?"

I have started referring to my students as “critters and creatures.” I then offer them the option to decide where on the critter–creature spectrum they think they belong. They enjoy this immensely. I teach some critters, some creatures, some 50/50s, some critters with creature tendencies, some creatures with critter inclinations.

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all i have to say is 'hello cowards' and it shuts gendering up

“Listen up, fives, a ten is speaking,” has always been gender-inclusive.

I actually don't think I'm ever gonna get over The Fifth Elephant out of all the books in Discworld. Like, I love the Witches, they're my favorite series as a whole, but every time I so much as think about Fifth Elephant's ending I start choking up.

"Not them! The...ones in Ankh-Morpork! Wearing make-up and dresses and...and abominable things!" Dee pointed a finger at Cheery. "Ha'ak! How can you even look at it! You let her," and Vimes had seldom heard a word sprayed with so much venom, "her flaunt herself, here! And it's happening everywhere because people have not been firm, not obeyed, have let the old ways slide! Everywhere there are reports. They're eating away at everything dwarfish with their...their soft clothes and paint and beastly ways. How can you be King and allow this? Everywhere they are doing it and you do nothing! Why should they be allowed to do this?" Now Dee was sobbing. "I can't!"

fucking destroy me

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[Id:

Reply from @spinningthehamsterwheel : "Masterclass on how to change an entire paragraph with two words"

End id]

ankh-morpork is so great. awful fucking city. all the worst parts of every city you've ever visited (but mostly london). horrendous. i love it. 100/10 would never visit

Having a lot of fun thinking about Vimes being made officially Blackboard Monitor by the king of dwarves (as mentioned in Snuff) because « the one who erases the words that are there so new words can be taught » is exactly what he did by opening the Cube at the end of Thud! He « erased » the inaccurate version of The Things Tak Wrote and he revealed the real version, and now the dwarves can learn that one instead. The deep-down dwarves were scared of the « erasing » part of the title but the king, in fifth elephant, seemed more intrigued by the part where it makes place for new words. A new lesson. New teaching. And how someone would have to be very trusted to be allowed to decide what words need to go so that something else can replace them.

(Also: monitor = guarding. Who is the blackboard monitor, if not the guarding dark?)

And the king of dwarves, who knows enough about Anhk-Morpok to competently put a spy in the watch, probably a) knows its not an actual human title but also b) knows how much Vimes hates getting titles.

So the king probably looked at the opportunity to make this a real dwarf title and foist it upon Vimes and thought « oh this is gonna be so funny »

Plus there is the whole thing about how you need to reward a hero at the end of the story so people can feel like something important happened but also reassure them that it stopped happening now, it’s over. All the problems have been solved. Vetinari explained it at the end of Guards! Guards! and this is why Vimes keeps getting new titles lol. King Rhys probably thought along similar lines.

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and WHEN is somebody going to make the 7 hour long video essay on agora nomic, i ask you????

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nomic is a game where the rules can be modified in game by voting. Agora Nomic is an instance of nomic that's been played continuously for nearly 30 years. the current ruleset is 60 pages long, there's email archives going back 30 years of every time somebody exploited those rules to break/win the game.

it's a bunch of people trying to do arbitrary code execution with contract law. it's like game 27 in 17776 where they flipped a switch and broke the game of football, in real life. it's diplomacy it's betrayal. its tabletop RPG safety mechanisms. it's beautiful and all-consuming and i worry about even posting about it too much because it's a thing that would get destroyed if it ever got a youtube video made about it that got 1M views

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there's weird philosophy going on with ratification (short version: players typically treat the game as though there's a platonic "correct" gamestate arrived at through the application of impartial rules automatically (if a thing says 'x happens' then the invisible machine of Agora causes that to happen, instantly.) BUT one of the rules that governs that impartial and automatica gamestate is Ratification, where if somebody makes an error in tracking the state of the imagined platonic gamestate machine, and nobody catches it, then after a certain amount of time the platonic gamestate fixes itself to be the state that the fallible humans have decided it to be. which is important because it means that if you discover a mistake made 10 years ago, it doesn't break the imaginary gamestate machine causing cascading failures up to now.\

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Rule 2640/3 (Power=2) Stones A stone is a unique indestructable liquid asset defined by the rules. To define a stone, the definition must include: (i) A name unique among stones; (ii) The smoothness of the stone, which is a non-negative integer; (iii) A description of the stone's properties (iv) Optionally, a frequency, which must be one of daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Ownership of stones is entirely restricted to Agora and active players. If a stone is owned by the Lost and Found Department or in abeyance, it is immediately transferred to Agora. The Stonemason is an office, and the recordkeepor of stones. Mossiness is a Stone switch with values of non-negative integers and a default of 0 tracked by the Stonemason. When a stone is transferred from Agora to a player or from a player to Agora, its Mossiness is set to 0. The mossiest stone(s) in a set of stone is (are) the stone(s) with the highest Mossiness value. The Slipperiness of a stone is that stone's smoothness plus its mossiness.

<3 <3 <3

(what does it even mean for a stone to be owned by the lost and found department, when a stone's ownership is restricted to agora and active players. that feels like it shouldn't be allowed. an action that transfers a stone to a non-player non-Agora entity should fail. which usually mean a power 3 rule is overriding this power 2 rule. which requires reading MORE rules.. you see why i think this is a beautiful subculture right)

I've literally never read any of this segment Gerard Way wrote (?) for Rolling Stone about Queen before?? lowkey got jump scared by his name while reading this article /pos

My dad was a mechanic. He worked on a lot of bottom-of-the-rung cars that didn't have cassette decks. But they had 8-tracks. Somebody left an 8-track tape of Queen's Greatest Hits in a car — the one where they're wearing leather jackets on the cover, and Freddie's got the mustache. I loved it immediately, and I came to emulate Freddie both as a child and as an adult.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is arguably the greatest song ever written. I'm sure people told them it was too long or had too many movements. But then it came out and just took hold of the world. When you're in a band and you find something that breaks every rule, it gives you creative hope. And Queen were always trying something new; none of their hit songs were paint-by-numbers.
When My Chemical Romance were making The Black Parade, we watched tons of documentary footage about A Night at the Opera, Queen's best album. We used Brian May amps and wrote songs with different movements. But we didn't try to make another "Bohemian Rhapsody." Whenever someone tries to do that, they fail.
I love the way Freddie performed. He would strike amazing poses; maybe he practiced them in front of a mirror, but he wasn't pretending to be somebody else. That was him telling the world, "This is who I am." I remember when the surviving members of Queen were looking for a singer a few years ago, I was like, "I would love to try it." Freddie's songs are just so much fun to sing, and he had such stamina. I would definitely have to quit smoking to be able to do what he did.
Queen fell in and out of being cool, maybe because they were so sincere. Rock music is all about being phony sometimes. And they weren't. They were obviously so psyched to be doing what they were doing.
They had a polarizing quality. I heard a story — maybe apocryphal — that Queen played a festival and got booed off the stage. Freddie vowed they would return as the biggest band in the world. And they did. When we played the Reading and Leeds festivals, we had to follow Slayer, and got bottles of piss thrown at us. I thought, "If we ever come back here, we're gonna headline it." I've always held on to the same dreams as Freddie.

So obviously, the most obnoxious and useless sort of science fiction criticism is provided by angry dumb guys screaming into microphones about things being "woke"; but I also get annoyed by the people who insist on applying a sort of "roman-á-clé" reading, where everything in the story is merely a disguised stand-in for some real-world human political issue. Like, yes, obviously, sf is used for social and political commentary a lot of the time; but it's *also* used to just kind of play around on the frontiers of possibility. And it frankly seems kind of demeaning to the genre to pretend that its alien, its bizarre, and its inhuman features are necessarily just stand-ins for some mundane, real-world concept. Like, yes, clearly The War of the Worlds is about colonialism; but it's also about alien life; it's also about evolution and ecology; and it's also about "Wouldn't it be fucked up if THIS happened!?" And all of these are irreducible from the genre. Is your robot autistic? Well, maybe you can read it that way. Maybe it's a sincere attempt to imagine a nonhuman mechanical intelligence. Maybe it's both. Sometimes, you write a story strictly for "Wouldn't it be fucked-up if..." purposes and it ends up shedding a whole new light on the human condition; in fact, I think that, if you're taking your concept seriously, it should do this by default. But you have to take the bizarre on its own terms or you might as well be reading realism.

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Imagine if someone was like “I believe in the abolition of all nation-states! People should be free to live where they want, practice what culture and speak what language they want, and so on, free of the confines of national identity!”

And you were like “great! I totally agree!”

And then they saw the “I support immigrants” pin on your jacket and went “whoa whoa whoa, what’s all this business about immigrants?”

And you go “well, just like you said, I want to abolish all nation-states, all borders. So I’m voicing my support for immigrants who cross those borders!”

And then they go “you claim to believe in the abolition of nations but you support immigrants? Don’t you realize that immigrants only reinforce national stereotypes? I mean, how can someone want to ‘become American’ or ‘become French’ when they recognize that categories like ‘American’ and ‘French’ are bullshit and regressive? I mean come on. Like I said, immigration only reinforces the idea of nations. If you were a real anti-nationalist, you would support banning all immigration! God, I can’t stand it when Mexicans or Chinese people claim to be American. Sorry honey, you were born a Mexican and you’ll always be Mexican xoxo. Plus, don’t you realize how many heinous crimes immigrants are responsible for?”

And you’re just like... “what?

This is the experience of talking to TERFs about gender.

why are you being racist 😳

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Are you claiming that if you found out crime rates were actually higher among immigrants, you would be anti-immigration? Because in all but scenarios so extreme as to be implausible, I would not. For instance, community poverty is well known to be associated with increased crime rates, but I am not in favor of banning people who come from impoverished communities from entering wealthier ones! That would be ridiculous! You argument is not very well thought through.

This is all of course to say nothing of the fact that the TERF political program does not seem to provide in any concrete way mechanisms for protecting cis women from putative violence by trans women, it's all bluster and no content. TERFs spend a lot of political energy on the incredibly narrow slice of violence that could potentially befall a cis woman in a trans-inclusive or gender neutral bathroom (and similar spaces), when realistically all the arguments they make are broad enough that, if applied consistently, would indicate that AMABs and AFABs should be socially segregated in all contexts! Like, even if you believe AMABs are inherently more dangerous to be around than AFABs, there's no reason to focus on bathrooms specifically—why not ban mixed gender malls, mixed gender bars, and so on? Surely these environments provide far greater opportunities for crime?

Of course, the real reason is that bathrooms and so on are traditionally gendered in our society, and for all their talk of gender abolition TERFs are above all else dedicated to maintaining the purity of "women" as a distinguished social group. Like nationalists worried about the purity of their race.

“My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love. When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay. Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure. It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening. ‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention. ‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already. He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him. He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence. It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist? I asked him what happened on his adventure. ‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me. ‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look. ‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see? ‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’ ‘And so I did. ‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too. ‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better. ‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me. ‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said. ‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life. ‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me. ‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’ I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter. What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye? ‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’ My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale. ‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’ But I do. I really believe in it. And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.”

— Paul Magrs (via yourfluffiestnightmare)