The story is the thing itself. Greater than the sum of its parts. When a story works, theme arises interstitially like harmony, and you are convinced because of the story’s spiritual truth and internal logic.

“Theme” isn’t something you can break out and isolate, it’s a layer of meaning that depends on the whole. An attempted theme that fails to convince because of errors elsewhere is like a legal defense that fails on the facts.
“Oh my defense was great, I should have won—if only I had the right facts. Shut up about the facts of the case!”

My friend, you lost.
What these people see dimly is that some minor inconsistencies or logic errors can be forgiven. But not if they 1) affect the ‘argument’ of the story’s internal logic, and/or 2) build to a critical mass that the story no longer seems ‘bound’ to our own lives.
By bound to our lives, I mean along the specific lines the author chose to reflect reality. I’m not sure it would be possible to write a completely disembodied and unidentifiable story—although Samuel Beckett tried.
You know—by giving you a character, an individual to follow, a name, a description, or giving you a social structure recognizable AS a social structure at all, even if the details are imaginary. These make fiction identifiable to us. Even weirdest sci fi offers this much.
You can effect various techniques to edit your work and try to head off any plot holes that will torpedo the delicate harmony of your work, but it’s actually an extremely complex proposition. This is why excellent and transcendent work is so rare.
But the better lodestar is the truth you see in the story. Understanding that well FORCES you into the right choices more reliably than you can pick them based on theory. Theory is more successful on how to present them.
I’ve quoted Horace before saying that the point of poetry is to delight AND instruct. Well, shouldn’t the instructor be in a position to teach? The great author must be committed to truth. not in a cliche way, but an honest committed interest in the story.
You certainly can’t be using subject matter you actively resent with an ulterior motive. People will know instantly.

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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MDZS is laden with buddhist references. As a South Asian person, and history buff, it is so interesting to see how Buddhism, which originated from India, migrated, flourished & changed in the context of China. Here's some research (🙏🏼 @starkjeon for CN insight + citations)

1. LWJ’s sword Bichen ‘is likely an abbreviation for the term 躲避红尘 (duǒ bì hóng chén), which can be translated as such: 躲避: shunning or hiding away from 红尘 (worldly affairs; which is a buddhist teaching.) (
https://t.co/zF65W3roJe) (abbrev. TWX)

2. Sandu (三 毒), Jiang Cheng’s sword, refers to the three poisons (triviṣa) in Buddhism; desire (kāma-taṇhā), delusion (bhava-taṇhā) and hatred (vibhava-taṇhā).

These 3 poisons represent the roots of craving (tanha) and are the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain) and thus result in rebirth.

Interesting that MXTX used this name for one of the characters who suffers, arguably, the worst of these three emotions.

3. The Qian kun purse “乾坤袋 (qián kūn dài) – can be called “Heaven and Earth” Pouch. In Buddhism, Maitreya (मैत्रेय) owns this to store items. It was believed that there was a mythical space inside the bag that could absorb the world.” (TWX)