Nick PooleWhile chatting with some friends last week, and inspired by @alexglow's recent rosary project, I imagined the practice of storing computer programs as long rosaries, with beads of alternating texture for 1/0 and a large bead separating every byte or word. Members of a computer-maintaining clergy could "read" the programs with one hand while inputting them with the other.
The most sacred texts are woven on looms into tapestries that store and transport better. When an abbey receives a new tapestry, the monks kneel over it for weeks, transcribing it to rosary.
(The computers are running a centrally planned economy)
📿💾
بلبل@North hmm trying to brainstorm more ideas, like prayer candle stand that's really an led indication panel
brennen@chipperdoodles @North belltower mesh network (transmissions encoded in ringing)
prayer flag semaphores
routinely scheduled pilgrimage routes to and from offsite backups
merlin / alex glow@brennen @chipperdoodles yes yes yes yes
@brennen @chipperdoodles A monk, sitting at a carillon and pressing the bell pedals while reading the rosary. Towers in neighboring valleys repeating each note as they hear it. Hundreds of miles away, monks in remote abbeys are recording the day's calculations.
@North @chipperdoodles a novice - bright, attentive, and promising - has ideas for optimizing the scriptorium. they stand in the abbess's study looking a little defiant as she gently explains that Our Lady loves not efficiency for its own sake, that the Butlerian Rule is imperfect but wards against wastes far crueller than that of _time_.
@North @chipperdoodles they leave, chastened if not entirely convinced. the abbess sighs.
it's hard, sometimes, to convey the path to those too young to remember the wars firsthand. they'll come around, as the rites work their slow logic. Lord willing they will never quite have to understand the stakes quite the way she does.