The Bestiary Grows

TL;DR: I've updated the Plankton Valhalla Bestiary. Did you know that Aether Mug has an older sister website? It's called Plankton Valhalla and I publish my essays there (go check it out!). I started it back in 2022 as a repository of explanations building up to a book I wanted to write, an ambitious book to understand reality in light of modern scientific theories like complexity science, systems theory, cybernetics & friends, but framed in a way that feels natural rather than complex. At some point I realized that, in some cases, a powerful explanation requires tweaking how certain words are defined. This is mildly annoying: isn't the point of language to allow you to express any idea by stringing enough predefined words together? Well, language can do that, but its power is overrated. All ways to express a concept in words are not created equal. Concepts seem to transcend language, or at least to be more fundamental than language. The words need to fit the ideas, not the other way…