# Four Leaves


*[Channel](https://urbit.org/applications/~sitden-sonnet/channel) is a Quartus-[Reciprocal](https://reciprocal.ltd) imageboard application, built on graph-store, released July 13th.*

## ~libbyl-lonsyd


My mother and I started a garden earlier this year. We are of the same mind about self-sufficiency. She bought little paper bags of heirloom seeds off of the internet: tomatos, melons, marigolds, cucumbers, pak choy and a pair of peppers, one spicy and one sweet.

We started with only one other purchase of haybales and nitrogen pellets. We conditioned them with the pellets and water so they would cook themselves into self-contained compost and planters. On a damp chilly spring morning, they're warm, if you did it right. When you compost things right, you can see and feel the heat rising off the pile in the morning. You have to turn a compost pile, and get a proper ratio of green to brown, and use some kind of manure. Chicken manure cooks the hottest. Conditioned bales are a lazy method. We're both a little lazy. A month was spent on indoor germination. All the indoor seedlings were sort of leggy and sickly, and all of the ones I was taking care of died.

My mother loves to set up mutualistic little systems of plants, and wants a hands-off garden. We both appreciate simple solutions. Every tomato plant has a french marigold and a basil plant to keep away unwanted insects. She collects ladybug eggs and releases them where they're needed once hatched. When we have to take action she prefers naturalistic methods. Concoctions of ground eggshells and vinegar to stop blossom-end rot, soaking copper pipe pieces in water to create a spray that will remedy bacterial growths. We regretfully applied roundup on a huge growth of nettles that we could've used instead of the expensive nitrogen pellets we bought.

When we first harvested the first fat, greenish-orange tomato and tasted it, I understood why you can find videos of older people eating tomatos like they're apples. An heirloom tomato is sweet but its flesh is soft like a store-bought one. It might be my favorite fruit now. Sprinkle a little salt on it and its even sweeter. The sauce you could make with one would be killer.

***
## ~haddef-sigwen

*Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE* came out for the Wii U in 2015. It shares a lot in common with the *Persona* series of games, but whereas those games focussed on Jungian psychology to reify facing your shadow in order to become whole, and therefore more powerful, *FE* focuses on reifying the power of performance and art in much the same terms.

Aesthetic creation and cultivation -- and its dominant vehicle, intuition, marking it all outside the domain of the deliberative and the rational -- is the predominant form of magic in our era, and in this way *Tokyo Mirage Sessions* is astute to pair it in power alongside the integrated self.

Magic is as simple as "effecting conscious entities"; everything subtler affects the dense. Those with charisma are themselves marked with lingering magic. Who among us hasn't felt the sheer emotive transformation that came from the right song? Or, ingesting the right piece of media, entered into a state that changed their life forever?

Is "technology affecting society" or are its aesthetics out of harmony with the soul?

The last week I shared with my old parish before moving across the country was having tea with each senior member; showing some of my singing to our choir director she remarked reflexively at the spectrum of chocolate and light I seemingly wielded, but pointed out that it wasn't just about the notes (even though I found myself so consistently focussed on sliding myself into key, itself a symptom of malpractice). It was about *reaching for experiences* you had in order to channel the performance properly. You had to remember the times you were indignant to find sudden strength, pivoting your scales up from despair; you had to make all this *heard* to compel others, to *do it properly*.


Experience was just a key by which you could slot your body into a particular mode, in which you could sit within yourself a specific way to reach beyond conscious expression. And once you realise that your body consists of tons of these *modes*, you can start to work out other ways you reflexively sit within your own body, your own "natural mode". This sort of flexibility to enter and exit your modes, to let all these modes slip in and out -- and that it affects not only *you in the moment* but also anyone experiencing you in turn, potentially changing how they see themselves and the world -- is common in rudimentary forms but rare in skilled practice. It has only inferred tradition.

> So far all that has given colour to existence still has no history: where would you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty?

**Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Gay Science***

While our Western social structure provides little or no role for its magicians -- instead privileging itself to a thrice-echoed fetish of technological productive combinatorics (also descended from a dead social value hierarchy) -- we have never been more inundated with the stuff. Like crayons on every wall, you know? Music is not something you go and witness -- refreshed, returning to life -- music is something you can wake up and listen to throughout the day, in every single venue, until it loses its relevance.

Indeed, there is practically nothing left to do but to be entertained; clearly there is something at heart truly *good* in entertainment, but the results of the diet seem to outweigh its previous placements in life. Pure, absolute consumption is spiritually inert. Every *miko* danced for a reason; now the concert worships itself, and we find ourselves enthralled, called to mosh, without really knowing why. This is all well and good beyond the idea that there is supposedly a current "meaning crisis"; what can we even call this besides fumbling in the dark? *Known unknowns*?


*Tokyo Mirage Sessions* restores a sort of hierarchy when it so literally reifies the power of performance. There is a *good* and a *bad* way one is affected by performance; it has a *placement* and a *moral imperative* to it, it becomes a sort of tradition in its own right, cast down through Japanese idols. If there is one good thing that comes from the otaku, it's supertexting the otherwise mundane; everything simple is literalised into energy that transforms the world. Yes, yes, friendship is magic; but so much more is magic, too, and each one gets its own story.

***
## ~rabsef-bicrym

The family Orchidaceae accounts for roughly 10% of all plant life on earth. Orchids are highly diverse and employ many varied strategies for nutrient collection and pollinator attraction. Very specific, localized geologic and atmospheric conditions drive this diversity. As a result, individual orchid species are often endogenous to a relatively small area of the world; their flowers remaining open for as long as a few months in some species, hoping beyond hope that a polinator might chance across a mate's and then their own anther cap. After being pollinated, an orchid will produce thousands of seeds, hoping that some of those will be taken aloft and settled, by sheer chance, in another location equally fitting of their growth - a house like their mother's.


Chance upon chance upon chance - a tenuous survival strategy but for brute force through proliferation of many seeds and a stalwort flower that refuses to wilt until it's done its job.

Urbit is something like a sapiophytic orchid that lives on its own pollinator. Urbit is the flower that refuses to wilt, until it's job is done. The in-built capacities of ames (networking), jael (identity) are a labellum perfectly designed to coax pollinators like me (as well as many other developers) in. I am attracted to Urbit, and I will bring pollination and propagation, with love. I am also Urbit's home; I wear it in my mind every day.

On occasions where I produce a software of value, or perhaps write a nice effort poast on `%rumors`, I wriggle amongst the labellum and anther cap of my urbit. My back gives and receives pollen simultaneously. The software is not the pollen; the promises of Urbit are the pollen. The software, or idea of software, is a meta-motivation to find a place where software like _that_ could exist. I am a pollinator who knows what that software's home might look like, and I _home in_ on Urbit.

After my labors, my pollinated urbit produces spores. These spores will, by hook or by crook, find their way into the minds of more developers, where they can unfold rhyzomatically and flourish.


Urbit seeds, its own promises, held aloft in the wind generated by the launch of a new darling-program on the network, or a particularly pithy screed by [@basileSportif](https://twitter.com/basileSportif) on Twitter, are what my company, Quartus, desires to release into the environment. We are technological seed bombers - packaging up fertile payloads and delivering them where they are needed, at our approximation.

Quartus's most recent work, a collaboration with Reciprocal LTD, called Channel, is an effort in the direction of fulfilling Urbit's promises. Specifically, Channel is a fulfillment of the data-interoperability promise of Urbit - "You'll own your data, and you'll do what you want with it". Channel is a _very_ lightweight protocol that creates and allows access to distributed imageboards which can be hosted by any urbit. Channel uses extant social graph technology, present in Urbit as a core software, as a carrier for its own signal, hijacking the medium to convey a new message.

---

Aside: In this way, you might compare Channel to Dipodium Pardalinum, an Australian, hemiparasitic orchid, that takes nutrients from other plants for years, before shooting a race of leafless, beautiful flowers of its own skyward.


---

Over the coming months, we at Quartus hope to fulfill as many promises of Urbit's technology as we can, where we can, as soon as we can. We believe in a covenant between computer and user.


I've been using a religious metaphor (meaning no disrespect to the origin-religion, merely observing and respecting their claim here) to describe how Quartus intends to operate.

The Jewish faith identifies a very robust covenant with G_d as one of their core tenants. The fulfillment of that covenant, every day, is a core obligation of a Hasidic attendant of judaism. One requirement of the covenant is that devotees should wear צִיצִית, or tassles, on the **corners** of their garments. In early days of the religion, wearing a square, pancho-like, garment was common, and so placing צִיצִית on the corners was an easily met mandate. As time wore on, however, garments became form-fitting and less angular, meaning less opportunity for donning צִיצִית. But, the covenant was made, the covenant should be fulfilled in its entirety. To ensure that attendees of the covenant _fill the space of the covenant they made_, they wear square garments (tallit katan) along with their modern garments, solely so they can attach tzizit to the corners.

We at Quartus hope to observe all of the promises that Urbit makes as a computer, to it's users. We wish to find ways to fulfill those promises as we move forward in our development, exploring and conquoring the space of the covenant to its fullest. Channel is one effort in that direction, its hemiparasitic nature a demonstration of data-interoperability, and "use of my data as I want to use it".

For more information on plant lifecycle programming, please review the following:
- [Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't](https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/)
- [Miss Orchid Girl](https://www.youtube.com/c/MissOrchidGirl/about)
- [California Carnivores](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDzImqEd4EA)
- [Fly Trap Store](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JEnFMiks1c)
- A Note:
- There is interesting tension between Fly Trap Store and California Carnivores (far larger channel), in the linked videos.

***
## ~wolfer-witryx

people regard the first photograph ever taken as being "View from the Window at Le Gras" by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. he did this by slathering bitumen of judea onto a pewter plate and then placing it in some camera obscura type thing for some period of time.


actually, wikipedia at least is careful to say that this is the first ever camera photograph ever taken. i think it's wording is funny when it talks about what a photograph is:

> A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip.

before the group-narrator (in a cowardly panic) sprints into talking about film and light sensors, we were able to get a glimpse at the far-more-interesting truth. a painting becomes a photograph as sunlight bleaches the colors. painted greek statues became photographs as the sun aided mythopoetically in bleaching them to their stereotypical white. the great ocean surrounding pangea was photographic as algal blooms spread w/ eager photosynthesis. the anthropocene itself lives as a photo-sensitive surface as our destruction of the ozone layer takes us further away from the admirable lifespans of eg methusela, son of enoch, to our puny and futile gnat-like spans we endure today.

i'll leave it up to you to figure out what a camera is. can a camera obscura or a camera lucida really be said to 'capture' an image? it feels like reaching to me. the difference between a camera obscura and an open window nurturing a plant is the size of the [hole][1].

bitumen of judea is a mysterious substance that hardens in light. it's also called syrian asphalt. i was reading something the other day where i was reading that organic chemists still don't understand the exact nature of the long carbon chains in bitumen of judea, which made sense to me why something was still around using an alchemical-sounding name. which is why i felt compelled to look it up in the first place. when you are looking at terms like "dichromated gelatin" and "mercury fumes" most of the time, seeing something be referred to by the name Solomon would've called it jumps out at you.

but there's also just a lot of tradition in art. buying isinglass/[dried sturgeon liver][5] for restoration or the larp of it.

a photographer wrote a [blog post][2] where he says:

> In Mexico as a young boy of 15 when I played on the street my friend and I would break out pieces of tar from the concrete built streets and chew them like chewing gum. In Mexico it is called chapopote (from náhuatl chiapopotl). We were told by some elders that the stuff helped keep our teeth white.

well - mexico isn't syria. [some website about texas][3] insists that what this guy was eating is called *asphaltum*, a term i'd [encountered before when trying to understand the chemical processes of lithography][4]. but other people say that asphaltum is just another word for bitumen, which is another word for asphalt.

i think the most powerful shibboleth is when a word can't be looked up. layered directly and precisely on top of an ordinary word. very safe.

in the same blog post, he goes on to write:

> A few years back (2011) I read Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. In it I found out something most interesting about the sticky product. Cleopatra was a rich and shrewd woman. She was aware that the Roman fleets (particularly those of her buddy Marc Antony) used bitumen to caulk the planks and hulls of their ships. She also knew that most of the bitumen of the time came from the Roman Province of Judea. There was a problem in that the man in charge in Judea was Herod the Great. Cleopatra asked Antony to intercede for her so that Herod would cede the bitumen (of Judea) exploitation rights to her. And so it was.

cleopatra these days always makes me think of kohl, antimony makeup descended from the originals gifted to humanity by Azazel, as written in [the book of Enoch, chapter VIII][6]:

> And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals 〈of the earth〉 and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, taught astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, 〈Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun〉, and Sariêl the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven . . .

antimony, naturally, being symbolically intertwined with the gray wolf, and a common ingredient in pewter, the backing for Niépce's photograph.

[1]: http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&Lewis.Holes.pdf
[2]: http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2018/04/cleopatra-bitumen-of-judea.html
[3]: https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/coast/nature/images/asphaltum.html
[4]: https://litografia.pl/en/techniques/
[5]: https://www.naturalpigments.com/russian-sturgeon-glue-isinglass.html
[6]: https://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe011.htm