#[ ordinary deviation from external reality ]

[cruximpetus]

ok - i’m gonna talk about monika a little bit again because i pretty much listen to ddlc a lot and i’m in a little too deep but whatever that’s beside the point. we can notice when exactly monika has her epiphany (it’s when natsuki reveals the cupcakes on the first day - watch her sprite (and i’ll try and remember to post a picture later) - but that is not the sort of face you make about cupcakes - like, compare it to sayori’s face and how much we know from the second act that monika loves natsuki’s cupcakes (and her excited face later) - the face she is making is her confused and upset face - but that’s beside the point). monika...maybe didn’t like yuri as much from the beginning, and i think it’s because she didn’t really understand her (she brings up yuri’s self-harm as potentially a sexual thing, which it could be given the yandere character but also given the themes of depression apparent with each of the characters this is not very likely) - not necessarily because she didn’t like her but because yuri didn’t talk to anyone until the player character joined - so while, say, monika knew that natsuki would be excited to make cupcakes for the festival and that sayori would work well with her on the pamphlets (which, again, monika and sayori were probably very close because they were president and vice-president and, where monika could not step in and confront and put her foot down (which is an odd characteristic for someone who was the leader of the debate club, but that’s beside the point), sayori could step in and smooth things over) - she had no idea what yuri could do for the festival because she didn’t know anything about her (probably not for lack of trying). the other thing is that - we see monika giving all this extra information about yuri and natsuki in act two, but even while actively screwing with them to try and keep the player character from falling in love with them, she is taking care of them.  ish.  she still has a protein bar for natsuki.  she’s even less a fan of yuri than she was before, but she’s still....  hm. monika is dismissive of yuri and yuri’s problems - and it’s likely because where natsuki and sayori are similar in personality (ish - natsuki’s your tsundere and sayori’s your childhood best friend, and the latter is always friends with everyone but tends to be the tsundere type, in my opinion - but sayori’s the one who can calm natsuki down, which is really the point of the argument), yuri and monika are similar as well - both fit the yandere stereotype (although yuri is also the shrinking violet and monika is the ace, which leads to a lot of their problems). actually - a female ace is typically also the defrosting ice queen trope - monika is not an ice queen in the slightest because they’re shades of variation from the shrinking violet, which is yuri’s type.  yuri is threatening to monika due to the overlap.  and i think it’s because yuri is the feminine stereotype - like, if you’re going for the stereotypical female, you’re going to go yuri.  and yuri, as a character and as a trope, tends to be the more popular of these character tropes in the first place. but this is off-topic in that....  actually.  i have forgotten what i was exactly trying to say. wait. monika is an ace who cannot step in and put her foot down and confront, and we know that the ddlc characters all deal with depression in one form or other as well as various forms of what i’m going to call trauma (even though that is not the best word for it).  sayori suffers from an extreme depression that causes her to be suicidal and also appears to either be an orphan or far removed from her family because we don’t see them around when the player character goes to her house; natsuki suffers from abuse at the hands of her father - we know that he beats her - and also is ostracized from her classmates due to her love of manga (she does not have friends, and the literature club is her one happy place); yuri self-harms and knows that she shouldn’t but is addicted to the habit as well as having an obsessive personality that she has learned to quell entirely to the point of not really talking to people and not interacting with people because she knows she will overwhelm them (yuri talks about knowing that how she is acting in the second act is not like her but the thing is that monika isn’t changing the characters’ personalities, she’s just taking their negative aspects and unraveling them); therefore monika must also have some shade of this. monika is an ace, monika is an idol, monika is looked up to and this sets her apart.  monika is an intellectual and she’s brilliant and this isn’t something she makes the game say about her but is intrinsically true to her character because we hear it from the game before she has her epiphany and starts messing with things and we know it because we see her skills both in hacking and piano over the course of the game and how much in-depth thought she puts into everything as shown in her discussions in the third act.  but characters like this are often separate from the rest of the community because they are intimidating (and, yo, let’s talk about this in an rp sphere because how many people do not approach someone because they are intimidating), so it’s likely that, while monika does have friends, she doesn’t really have friends because people know her but they don’t know her because they are too scared to do anything about it.  we know that monika is trying to get you to love her and says it would be easy to kill herself out of futility-- i don’t have time to finish this right now, and i’m still trying to figure out exactly what i’m trying to say. --i should note that when i say ace here, i’m referring explicitly to this trope, not to asexuality, so apologies on the confusion there.

AND ON FURTHER NOTICE, MONIKA MUST ACTUALLY BE THE BROKEN ACE TROPE - THAT WOULD BE WHERE SHE FITS.

[neitherfleshnorfleshless]

*  SHAKESPEARE  AESTHETICS.

MACBETH.

the howl of wolves. moonless nights. dirt under fingernails. stained silk. chattering teeth. voices hoarse and cracked. rotting fruit. echoing drums. dry heaving. hanging cobwebs. stifling humidity. bloodshot eyes. the roughness of rusted steel. wild rosebushes. muscle cramps. the sound of splintering wood.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.

crackling fires. ivy crawling on stone. the faint music of running water. petrichor. dirty, bare feet. tattered clothing. thistledown. wilted wildflower crowns. late evening birdsong. curling leaves. a symphony of croaking frogs. drifting feathers. the eerie sound of windchimes at night. humming bees. beds of clover.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

warm golden lamplight. worn shoes. crumbling brick walls. whispered poetry. embroidered satin. cool, hazy mornings. tousled hair. rosewater. flushed cheeks. distant orchestras. unfinished marble statues. cobblestone streets. loose threads. ink smudged on parchment. tapping fingers. dust illuminated by sunlight. poison vials.

HAMLET.

shattered glass. a cluster of fraying ribbons. unanswered knocks on doors. lingering dampness. white noise. inexplicable drafts. migraines. bleeding ears. the taste of metal. reflected mirrors. dry, cracked lips. the sound of tearing paper. fogged windows. memories of dreams. tarnished silver. protruding veins.

tagged by: @drdumaurier tagging: @fionagoode, @namcdesire, @starliingisms & @paintsspatter (both of your blogs yo), @godblooded, @streetxcat, @shcsallrightnow

[thecreaminhiscoffee]

One would assume, after everything, that Jessica would be more afraid of men than she is of women, but this is not the case. Even though most of her clients were men, kinks were not an indication of potential problems. She was okay with kinks (for the most part - Dip notwithstanding). Her main problems came less from negative sexual practices and more to out and out abuse, such as she received particularly at the hands of the DeGreasy Brothers and Haruko - and although the DeGreasy Brothers facilitated her abuse and attempted to murder her, Haruko had the worst effect of all. As a result, Jessica is, by nature, both more afraid of women and more trusting of them. Despite knowing what she does about Haruko, she knows that - from an owner perspective - Eleanor was the best of all her owners. After her marriage, after she stopped her work in Toon porn and prostitution, it was women who were more of an issue - not a threat, necessarily, but jealousy (such as Dolores’s in relation to Eddie). Jessica can read men more easily - in most circumstances. Most of the influences on her early life were men. Women are confusing to her - despite being very much woman herself and very much able to use that to her advantage, that relies on a very sexual reaction. Sex she understands. Emotions are harder. Which is not to say that men don’t have them or use them to propel action, but that where they stereotypically react more on a physical level, women react more on an emotional level, and because she does not understand emotions, she has a harder time with women, who intuitively use those more than men. This sounds super sexist - but to be honest? Jessica would have just as hard a time understanding a man who reacted more on an emotional level than a physical one (which is why she is with Roger, who is more emotional than physical - out of jealousy, he writes a love letter to her - the movie itself comments on how odd that is, how unlikely). It’s less a gender thing and more an emotion/physical thing.

[expositionhastogosomewhere]

jessica rabbit is a salazzle and bandit is a salandit.

[aeipathix-blog]

Both Rin and, to a lesser extent, Jess have an extremely open and active sexual lifestyle during the band years - to the point of practicing exhibitionism during their shows and eventually inviting show-goers on stage with them to join in (which typically extends an open invitation to join them afterwards as well).  They are also both extremely heavy drug users - primarily marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (as opposed to, say LSD).  However, there are major differences between the two of them and how they go about these activities. Rin does not exercise caution.  At all.  In the slightest.  (With the exception of condoms sometimes as that is typical practice.  Even then, this is a rare occurrence - if someone does not want to use them, she will not force them to do so.)  She assumes that her partner is clean in the same way that she assumes that her needles are clean - which is to say, they might not be but she will often believe they are regardless.  This is less naivete and more simple recklessness. Jess, on the other hand, after her first STD due to Rin’s assuming influence, is much more cautious.  She will always ask to make sure their on stage partners are healthy, and when they aren’t, will refuse to participate in anything after the show (on stage is primarily for hand stuff - which is not to say you cannot contract things that way, but that unless she has a cut on her hand, it is much less likely).  Even though Rin will not make sure of a condom or a clean needle, Jess will.  As a result, even though she still gets STDs, they are significantly less common, and with two exceptions, she doesn’t get pregnant. Rin has probably gotten pregnant multiple times, but she views this like a disease and treats it accordingly with pills and abortions.  The first time Jess was pregnant, she did have an abortion but she told no one (primarily because it was Kyle’s child).  She is less likely to view pregnancy as a disease, even though she has an extreme fear of it (due to pregnancy being a major influence in her mother’s death).  The second time Jess planned on following through with the pregnancy - abortion being a traumatizing experience for her - but lost the child (it was stillborn). That said, when Jess became pregnant, she cut everything out of her lifestyle.  No drugs, no sex, no nothing that would harm the child (with the exception of a glass of wine every now and again). She stopped everything cold turkey, and although she still drinks afterwards and may indulge in cigarettes or marijuana, she primarily remains clean. On the other hand, while Jess was pregnant and Rin was preparing to be the child’s other mother, she did not quit her lifestyle and, in fact, contracted HIV from one of her sexual partners at the time.  Rin did not find out about this until much later, after her return to America - three years at the least, although it is potentially longer.  Rin’s recklessness led to a refusal to have herself tested until she had another STD for which she needed medication, which means she is just as likely to have spread the disease to other people as well under the belief - the assumption - that she did not have it. The only reason Jess did not contract it from Rin is that during the time period Rin had it 1) Jess was not sexually active and 2) Rin was in Japan away from Jess.  By the time Rin returned to the states, Jess had moved on and was not interested in pursuing a relationship with her again.  However, if Rin had contracted HIV earlier, Jess likely would have gotten it from her - because regardless how many times Jess told Rin to get herself tested, and regardless how many times Rin told Jess she got tested, she never did unless she needed medication for something that already showed up. I expect that Rin dies by the time she is 35 due to her recklessness.

[michaelbogild]

Quotes by Fernando Pessoa

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

I know nothing and my heart achesto know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect…

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.  The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant.

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

My past is everything I failed to be.

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate. I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything. If only I could think! If only I could feel!

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?

When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets

[ofmonstersandlollipops-blog]

3,7

Backstory Ask Meme

3. Is your muse’s backstory relatable to you?

Mmm...yes and no.  It depends.  Aspects of it definitely.  The idea of getting a college degree in an area that she loves and is passionate about and then getting stuck in a dead-end job, most definitely.  And I definitely think that the relationships she has with her family - with her dad - is.  For me, anyway.

But not all of it?  And I think that’s kind of important because, like, there are decisions she made that I understand and that follow through from her personality and everything she’s involved in that...I understand them, but I don’t relate to them.  If that makes sense?

7. What part of your muse’s backstory makes you smile?

Her relationship with her dad.  Like, honestly, I love Dana’s relationship with her dad.  I love that they’re family and he’s cool with who she is and takes care to use nicknames that fit her identity and tries to understand and still loves her regardless of everything.  That so much of who she is now comes from who he was and how she chooses to honor him....also her relationship with ghosts and bogeymen.  I love that she was freaked out and then became besties with her house ghost because the ghost was like no, don’t freak out, you’re super cool and then just, everywhere she lives, intentionally continues that.  Just.  Besties with ghosts.  Hangs out.  I love that flowing from that first interaction.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 308

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE: Part 1

Ancient people, considering it very important to determine Earth'shape, derived two important clues from the night skies. According to Aristotle (384-322 bce), these were lunar eclipses and the North Star. Lunar eclipses occur when the sun, Earth, and the moon line up in such a way that Earth temporarily blocks the sun's light from reaching the moon while its circular shadow gradually crosses the moon's face. The North Star appears lower in the sky the further south we go: at the Equator it lies directly on the horizon, at a latitude of 45 it is 45 above the horizon; and at the North Pole it is directly overhead. However, it is not visible south of the Equator.(1) As both of these indicate a spherical Earth, the scholars of that time discarded the idea of a flat Earth.

The more challenging question was how to determine Earth's size. Eratosthenes of Alexandria (third century bce) had a simple yet brilliant idea: insert a gnomon (a vertical stick) into a level piece of ground. This enabled him to determine noon's exact time (when the shadow was the shortest). It was also used as a compass, for in the Northern Hemisphere the gnomon's shadow points north.

But can such a simple device determine Earth's size? Aswan, located about 500 miles south of Alexandria, sits on the Tropic of Cancer. So, at noon of June 21 (the summer solstice), a gnomon inserted there has no shadow. By doing just that in Alexandria, Eratosthenes found that the angle was 1/50 of a circle's circumference (i.e., 2p/50). In other words, the angle at Earth's center corresponding to the arc between Aswan and Alexandria on Earth's surface is 1/50 of a circle's circumference. Since the distance between Alexandria and Aswan is 500 miles, Earth's circumference should be 25,000 miles, which is its actual circumference.(2) Thus, Earth's size and shape was pretty well established over 2,000 years ago.

This knowledge was lost to Europe when the ancient civilizations crumbled. But Islamic civilization and culture, which was rising at roughly the same time as the West was declining, produced scholars and scientists who translated and refined quite a bit of this ancient knowledge. For example, in 1424 al-Kashi used Archimedes' method of computing to determine its values to 16 decimal places. Ulug Beg compiled the greatest star catalog known at that time. During al-Ma'mun reign (813-833), al-Khwarizmi measured one degree of latitude on Earth's surface and obtained the result of 57 miles. This means that Earth's circumference is 360x57 = 20,520 miles.(3) Thus, in the ninth century, Muslim scientists knew that Earth was spherical and had a good idea of its size. Most Europeans at that time, believed that Earth was flat and the universe impenetrable.

The Qur'an describes Earth's geographical shape and change in that shape: Do they not see how We gradually shrink the land from its outlying borders? Is it then they who will be victors? (21:44).(4) The reference to shrinking could relate to the now-known fact that Earth is compressed at the poles.

At a time when people generally believed that Earth was flat and stationary, the Qur'an explicitly and implicitly revealed that it is round. More unexpectedly still, it also says that its precise shape is more like an ostrich egg than a sphere: After than He shaped Earth like an egg, whence He caused to spring forth the water thereof, and the pasture thereof (79: 30-32).

The verb daha' means "to shape like an egg," and its derived noun da'hia is still used to mean "an egg." As this may have appeared incorrect to pre-modern scientists, some interpreters misunderstood the word's meaning as "stretched out," perhaps fearing that its literal meaning would only confuse people. Modern scientific instruments recently established that Earth is shaped more like an egg than a perfect sphere, and that there is a slight flattening around the poles and a slight curving around the Equator.

THE WEST RECEIVES "LOST" KNOWLEDGE

An enduring Western myth is that Columbus had to overcome a pervasive belief that he would sail off the edge of a flat Earth by sailing west to Asia. This myth stems in part from compressing the past and conflating the early Middle Ages, when Europe's belief in a flat Earth was widespread, with the late Middle Ages, when Europe's knowledge had caught up with and partially surpassed that of ancient Greece and medieval Islam.

During the Renaissance, Europe came into contact with "lost" knowledge by translating Greek and Arabic works. One important book was Ptolemy's Geography, which accepts Earth's spherical shape. Geography once more became available in the original Greek, which was not widely known in the thirteenth century. This book was translated into Latin in the late fifteenth century and became widely known. Columbus owned a copy printed in 1479.

By the time of Columbus, the idea of a spherical Earth was widely accepted in theory. Columbus believed this and wanted to sail west to the eastern shores of Asia. Earth's size was the real issue. Ptolemy's estimate was as much as 20% too low. Also, he vastly overestimated Asia's size. The resulting map depicted an Earth with oceans between Europe's western tip and Asia's eastern tip, which was well within range of the provisions that ships of that time could carry. Columbus' estimate of the distance to Asia was wrong, as was his assumption that there was no land between Europe and Asia. Fortunately for him, these two "wrongs" made a "right," with all of its attendant fame and glory.

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

So far, we have given external information (i.e., lunar eclipses and the North Star) about Earth's spherical shape based upon its position in the universe. If we use this method to determine the universe's shape, we must observe it in an external manner. As this is not possible, let's reconsider the question of Earth's shape with a slight change: Can we determine Earth's shape by using measurements and observations done only on its surface, and thereby acquire intrinsic information that can inform us of the universe's shape?

Karl Gauss (1777-1855) answered this question positively by inventing "curvature," which measures a given surface's "bumpiness" at a specific point. A flat piece of paper has no bumps and so its curvature is zero. But if we look at a sphere at each point, we see some bumpiness. Gauss called such bumpiness "positive curvature." Another kind of bumpiness is "saddle-shaped." We can think of positive curvature at a point as follows: If we put a piece of flat paper on a surface at that point, the surface lies totally on one side of the paper. But in negatively curved space, this cannot happen.

To describe this concept formally (minus some technicalities), assume constant curvatures on the shapes in question. In other words, the shape is totally symmetric and every point has the same amount of bumpiness. There are several ways to describe curvature. Gauss's formulation for curvature is brilliant. But before that, let's look at his intrinsic proof for a spherical Earth. Imagine an orchard so large that any deviation from flatness is perceptible. First plant trees on the Equator every 100 kms (the approximate distance between two meridians on the Equator). Then plant another tree 100 kms (the approximate distance between two parallels) north of each tree, and do this several times. If Earth is flat, the distance between them would be same. But since the distance between the two consecutive trees (on the same parallel) decreases, Earth is spherical.

Having seen that an intuitively positive curvature implies a spherical shape, we want to follow this method to get an idea about the universe's shape. Georg Riemann (1826-66), trying to do just that, invented "curved space" and explained how to compute its curvature. We could launch six probes at equally spaced points along the Equator, and have each of them continually monitor the distance to the two adjacent probes. If space is flat, the distances at any point in its journey would equal the distance from the probe to Earth's center (an equilateral triangle). For negative curvature, the distance between probes would grow faster than the distance the probe had traveled from Earth; in positively curved space, the distance between probes would grow slower than the distance covered by the probes since leaving Earth.

There are two common misconceptions about the curvature of space. The first one is that curvature is a rather vague or qualitative concept. In reality, it is quite precise and assigns to each point in space and each direction at that point an exact number determined by the shape of the space near the specific location. The second one is that to describe curved space, one must think of it as "curving" into a fourth dimension. This can be useful in visualizing curved space for people familiar with four-dimensional Euclidean space (four-dimensional coordinate space). Unfortunately, science popularizers and science fiction writers often lace this concept with mystical overtones. This is more likely to confuse average people. In other words, measurements made in ordinary three-dimensional space may disagree with the results embodied in Euclidean geometry, for curvature measures the degree and kind of deviation from the Euclidean model.

Riemann also proposed a radically different (non-Euclidian) model for the universe: "spherical space." This would be the case if space had a constant positive curvature. Based on this, he said that the universe should be a hypersphere (a three-dimensional sphere). The usual sphere is two-dimensional and lives in three-dimensional Euclidean space. In general, n-dimensional sphere is described as in the (n+1)-dimensional Euclidean space, and the set of points whose distance from origin (the point 0) is 1.

The more intuitive way to describe hypersphere comes from the usual sphere. Starting from a point in the sphere called the South Pole, and as we go in a direction in the sphere, we see concentric circles becoming larger until we reach the Equator, after which they become smaller and we finally reach North Pole. The situation is similar in hypersphere. Start from a point in the sphere called the South Pole, and as we go in a direction in the sphere, the concentric "spheres" become larger until we reach the Equator, after which they become smaller until we reach the North Pole. We can generalize this concept for any sphere of any dimension.

Earlier philosophers speculated that the universe was infinite in extent; others (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Newton, and Leibniz) rejected this as implausible. But the alternative seemed equally dubious: If it did not go on forever, then "like the flat Earth" it had to end somewhere. And, what was beyond that? This model solved the Euclidean paradox of the universe's "edge," for if the universe is positively curved, it can be finite in extent and still not have any "edge." In Riemann's model, every part of the universe looks just like every other part, as far as shapes and measurements go.

Qur'an 51:47-48 mentions the universe's spreading out or expansion in space: And the firmament: We constructed it with power and skill, and We are spreading it. This verse reveals that the distance between celestial bodies is increasing, which means that the universe is expanding.

[witchen-kitch-lanvi]

𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝔸𝕊𝕋ℝ𝕆ℕ𝔸𝕌𝕋  |

Space

Very few individuals can appreciate the beauty that space has to offer whilst holding the reality that it could annihilate their person within mere seconds with an unlimited, unknowable quantity of circumstances.

Very few individuals can safely hold the reality that the world is full of an inconceivable infinitum of possible catastrophes whilst living in a mental reality where they are safe within that world of possible catastrophes.

And only a select group of those individuals compose the makeup of astronauts that possess the skill necessary to go beyond the known world.

An even smaller quantity of people take that step to explore the unknown within themselves. So, it is no wonder that only a handful of individuals are ever inclined to externally make such a step.

No individual can deny that a fear of the external world is a fear well founded. What separates these perceptions of the same vacuum is context.

The unknown has inspired awe and fear in humans for as long as the peculiar and unorthodox have existed. It is the human condition to denigrate and reject what we do not wish to conceive about the world, especially if it threatens the internalised values we use to perceive it. Anything outside our understanding threatens to make us depart from this sense of self we possess. Our perceptions can feel as though the external world are attacking those inner values that are born of the latent fears entrenched within the folds of our inner worlds.

It is unsurprising then, that it is an agoraphobic approaching this discussion.

I

I identified strongly with the belief that I was under a perceived attack from the demands of the external world. Demands that you can imagine, deviated little from the demands placed on the ordinary individual who has surpassed the educational requirements to be considered an adult.

I was convinced my terror of being exposed as the failure I felt I was within would be unveiled if I ever decided to participate in reality. I spent months machinating upon delusions of an eldritch entity that existed and had selected me out of all possible candidates to expose and unveil as the failure of an adult that I felt I was becoming. A voice of fear biased divination would often whisper in my ear prophecies of ‘death inducing failure’ and ‘annihilation’ if I ever chose to participate in the world. With this fear’s immense stranglehold, choice became an illusion that fear presented me and yet had already chosen on my behalf.

Avoidance is the natural consecutive step to fear, the rational person concludes.

The individual retreats from the space beyond their habitation and crosses no further than the threshold between the pavement and the doorway.

Self isolation offers them no relief from fear of the external world and only serves to fulfill a prophecy of failure and isolation predicted by the hyper-terrorised inner monologue that exists only to serve itself. Lack of exposure only continues to exemplify the fear that is already there.

“The world is not safe and it has no place for people like me. It will harm and annihilate me for the coward that I am, and in doing so I will experience social and mental death.”

It is not often the individual considers returning to the pivotal moments, where they remained in the threshold between the door and the space beyond.

“I would tell that person they were creating the very reality that terrified them into those doors and their bedroom.”

The Astronaut

The agoraphobic wants to believe they can only go through life with adequate or partial participation. Enough to satisfy the illusion of normality and abate concerns that would bring about a confrontation. Consequently, they live their internal crucifixion as an external crucifixion between staying within and going beyond what they understand and know.

The individual yearns for the isolated liberties offered by the identity of The Astronaut. The Astronaut doesn't have to participate in the hardships of the external world if they live within the abyss of fear induced crucifixion. The individual does not have to leave their spacecraft and space of habitation that they associate with safety. Adulthood is often a threat to agoraphobic individuals because it requires them to participate in their environment. They find themself subject to unlimited unknowns in regards to their environment, their place within that environment and the multiple factors that predate their existence such as income, and education. The individual does not want to be identified as the failure within a world where they are supposed to possess the ‘go-getter’ attitude that juxtaposes their fear of the external world and life.

The mind is often discontent when it cannot work in probabilities and binary. The world offers neither. The brain is terrified of every possible thing that could harm the individual, or expose them for the terrible person they feel they are within. The individual’s mind is often swallowed by self flagellation and reminders that they possess the energy ‘to act’ within the world and yet are either too fearful or appear to refuse to do it.

As one begins to reclaim that vacuum they inadvertently confront its most fear inducing facets.

“If the world does intend for me to suffer externally in some horrible sporadic misfortune, then no amount of suffering I can do within can prevent it from enacting my awful fate. If I am to vomit, to die, or to suffer, there is nothing the piddling little voice in my head can do about it, no matter how much it whispers. It can only try and protect me from potential threats.

However, I recognise that if I live my life trying to protect myself from potential threats then I am no longer living at all. I would be living by the reality of the voice that sees a possibility for disaster in everything and in living by that voice, I would find joy and relief in nothing.”

Upon this revelation, a subverted understanding of The Astronaut symbol was nascent.

As I cultivated my innerworld, I embodied The Astronaut that explored willingly.

I was the individual who dared to plunder the eldritch depths of my person and psyche to observe the exploded stars and the nascent planets birthed from my growing understanding of myself.

I was one identity and then the other and I hold that The Astronaut and space possess the ability to exist within two lenses. Space and the unknown are either explored willingly within the enclosed safety of the self or they are retreated into by those in immense fear of what is within them as well as beyond them. I was and am still The Astronaut on occasion, as we all are.

I stress only the importance of looking within to understand the without.

‘What is without within is within without.’

👩‍🚀🐝Witchen Kitch Lanvi 🐝👩‍🚀

[katchwreck]

“It is worth while to devote some attention to the prospects of the international situation as seen by Comrade Trotsky in face of all the facts of the present moment, of all the proofs to the contrary, he still speaks of a continued democratic pacifist “era.” This proves the strength of his trend towards the Right.

But this is not the whole truth. No one can understand Trotsky who sees in him nothing more than an ordinary opportunist. Comrade Trotsky is not a one-handed man. He has a right hand and a left hand. We already had the opportunity of seeing him in two roles in his interpretation of the “German October.”

And with Comrade Trotsky this does not happen by accident: it is a general rule. In actual practice he always represents two different “types” so to speak. One type deviates to the right, the other to the left. A superficial observer might conclude that Comrade Trotsky vacillates constantly between the two types. But this only appears to be the case. Comrade Trotsky is not a vacillating man. He generally adopts a definite—but wrong—course.

In reality the case is this: In his actions he deviates towards the Right, but he describes these actions in Left, very Left, terms. The Right type is the type of the man of action who speaks little, who does his work and says nothing about it. The Left type, is a man, anxious to play a prominent public role, a man who talks a great deal and does very little, and knows little about work except to describe it. But the descriptions given by the Left type differ entirely from the work actually done by the Right type.

Comrade Trotsky is not simply an ordinary opportunist. He possesses a finely developed sense of the æsthetic. He feels the æsthetic defects of the external form of opportunist policy. The external forms of politics please him more and more in proportion to their deviation to the Left. In art this may be very good, even excellent, and the Bible praises those whose right hand knoweth not what their left hand doeth; but in politics every inconsistency between form and contents, between description and actuality, between theory and practice, is invariably detrimental.”

— O.W Kuusinen

[chasingparamasturbatoryillusions]

Imagine Trans Mulder. Imagine accepting who he is while he’s still at the FBI Academy and asking people to use the correct pronouns but people only do it grudgingly (the academy only recently accepted its first trans woman) and so when there are rumors about him being “spooky” it isn’t just because he’s really good at his job or because he is obsessed with the paranormal but also because he is trans and they don’t know how to accept that. Imagine Scully hearing about “Spooky Mulder” and hearing these rumors and always, always, always referring to him using the correct pronouns when she thinks about him or when her fellow students or agents are talking about him but not feeling comfortable enough to correct people when she doesn’t even know him. Imagine Scully talking about Mulder in the pilot and still referring to him with his correct pronouns even while his superiors aren’t because she respects him and his identity more than anyone else in the FBI. Imagine Mulder meeting Scully and telling her he prefers to be called Mulder because his birth name gives him dysphoria and he’s never found a suitable name that he likes and so many people don’t use it anyway and just going by his last name is easier and noticing that she is using his pronouns without even needing to be told. Imagine when Scully has to make a choice between working with an old friend or Mulder and she chooses Mulder because he’s her partner but this is the moment when she steps back and tells her old friend to refer to him with the correct pronouns because she’s already fed up and done. Imagine Mulder and Scully investigating cases and sometimes Mulder is misgendered but because they always use male pronouns with him, so do the people they’re around, and the x-files becomes even more of a safe space for Mulder because he can be who he is even more than he already is. Imagine Skinner proving that he is on their side because he always uses Mulder’s correct pronouns even when his superiors or the people he is working with don’t. Imagine this being part of the friction between Doggett and Mulder because Doggett has such a hard time wrapping his head around it but he’s trying and he’ll catch himself using the wrong pronouns and shake his head and be upset with himself and fix it and then he’s finally using them without thinking about it. Imagine Krycek using Mulder’s proper pronouns throughout the entire series because he may be a rat bastard but even he isn’t that shitty. Imagine Scully getting pregnant and this is even more of a miracle but they’re even more concerned because this shouldn’t happen and they do more tests and they know from the beginning that Mulder isn’t the father, they know from the beginning that something is up, and they don’t care because William is the miracle child. Imagine Mulder being sent away because it is dangerous for him but he refuses to go because it has always been dangerous for him and he is not leaving the one person who has never misgendered him or their miracle child. Imagine Mulder going to hide with Gibson Praise but taking William and Scully with him because if he needs to hide, so do they, because they still do not know where this child came from or how it existed and William will be in just as much danger as Mulder is. Imagine Gibson Praise, at least once, commenting on Mulder as a man just to hammer it in for the viewers who would still be arguing and upset because Gibson can read minds and maybe, maybe, maybe they’ll believe him. Imagine Mulder still going to get the information about the impending alien invasion and having his identity also thrown against him when he’s on trial but everyone who stands up for him is referring to him correctly because they know even while the entire tribunal refuses. Imagine Reggie having known Mulder since his time in the academy and being his first roommate after he changes his identity because Reggie has always been Mulder’s best friend and would fight anyone who misgenders him. Imagine Reyes flinching every time she has to misgender Mulder when she’s with Cigarette Smoking Man but we know she’s still on Mulder and Scully’s side because when she meets with Scully in the vision, she doesn’t misgender him the way CSM does. Imagine Mulder reading Samantha’s diary and she remembers him as a brother even though he didn’t begin identifying as male until after she disappeared but she knew even when she couldn’t really remember him. Imagine the line between good and evil being drawn over how a character refers to Mulder so that it’s blatantly obvious that to refer to someone in a way other than how they identify is wrong.

[cruximpetus]

Monica would get along with Flowey

honestly?  i don’t think she would.  asriel, yes, maybe.  but not flowey.

massive spoilers for both doki doki literature club and undertale under the cut.

the other thing is that the undertale world continues to exist even when the player isn’t actively a part of it.  flowey wants the player there because he’s done everything he can and is bored with the world - because he’s saved and reloaded so many times - but the world still exists.  it’s still real within the context of the world - and if the player doesn’t come back, it still continues.this is a stark contrast to the doki doki literature club world, where as soon as the player begins playing, the world unravels.  as soon as monika becomes aware, the world no longer exists - it’s RGB and pixels and sine/cosine/tangent - the player leaves the game, and monika is basically stuck in a living hell.  there’s such a stark difference between their circumstances.and she would look at flowey and think that he is extremely selfish.  she, at least, loves the player, whereas flowey just wants them so that he won’t be bored.  (and, yes, you can make the argument re: asriel that he loves the player, but that’s why i’m saying monika would be cool with asriel but not with flowey.)  monika’s not about being bored, monika’s about hey, i’m stuck in hell here and you are literally the only light in my life.  to the point that she does learn from her mistakes when she gets deleted, she does bring back the game as it is just without herself in it, and in the bad ending when sayori starts to screw up shit, she says no and deletes everything because either she is president and gets screwed or someone else is president and gets screwed and no one can be happy, not even the player, so it’s better that they just not exist.monika is self-sacrificial - eventually - in a way that flowey is not - and monika still cares about the girls in the club regardless of the fact that she knows they’re not real.  she’s not playing a game, she’s not trying to win, she just wants to not be in hell - heck, she doesn’t even delete the characters (other than natsuki) until she gives up on trying to find a way that they can still be in the club and still exist with her and the player - she’s not trying to drive them to suicide, she’s----I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS ON MONIKA OBVIOUSLY, AND YES, I UNDERSTAND THE FOURTH WALL BREAKING COMPARISON BUT FLOWEY’S MOTIVATIONS AND CHARACTER AND WORLD ARE SO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM MONIKA’S that there really isn’t a good comparison.  Asriel works better.  (Because despite Asriel and Flowey being the same, they aren’t the same, if that makes sense?  They play differently, they act differently, they are differently, which is why Asriel himself will tell you that when he becomes Flowey again to not think of him as him.  Because they aren’t the same.  Not really.)

[neitherfleshnorfleshless]

How does your muse score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised?

On each criterion, the subject is ranked on a 3-point scale: (0 = item does not apply, 1 = item applies somewhat, 2 = item definitely applies). The scores are summed to create a rank of 0 to 40. Most people score around a 5. Anyone who scores 30 and above is probably a psychopath.

- Do you exhibit glib and superficial charm? 1 - Do you have a grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self? 2 - Do you have an excess need for stimulation or proneness to boredom? 2 - Are you a pathological liar? 1 - Are you cunning and manipulative? 2 - Do you have lack of remorse or guilt? 0 - Do you have shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness)? 0 - Are you callous or do you lack empathy? 0 - Do you have a parasitic lifestyle? 0 - Do you have poor behavioral controls? 0 - Do you have a history of sexual promiscuity? 0 - Did you display early behavior problems? 0 - Do you lack realistic long-term goals? 1 - Are you overly impulsive? 0 - Are you irresponsible? 0 - Do you fail to accept responsibility for own actions? 0 - Have you had many short-term romantic relationships? 0 - Do you have a history of juvenile delinquency? 0 - Have you experienced a revocation of conditional release (broken probation)? 0 - Do you display criminal versatility? 1

MY MUSE’S SCORE: 10 / 40

tagged by: @sickassjigsaw tagging: @monstricidal, @godblooded (mostly i want the comp between alana and kitty), @streetxcat, @afraidofchange (FOR JOAN), @superintcndent

[anancientfate-blog]

Mireille suffers from extreme nightmares.  They started when she was young, shortly after the fairly traumatizing experience with Silvana.  Her mind would replay the scene in her dreams or bring the other girl back in a much more bloodthirsty manner, and she would wake up screaming.  Sometimes her mother would calm her down, but more often than not her father would be the one to send her back to sleep with the melodie from his pocket watch. After her parents’ deaths and the massacre in Corsica, her nightmares returned, this time much worse.  Sometimes it was Silvana killing her parents, sometimes it was some unnamed presence.  She still woke up screaming, but Uncle Claude was less...comforting in those situations.  As she grew and he trained her, the nightmares became no less frequent but took on different forms (failed jobs, being killed by other assassins, etc.) as well as occasionally bringing back the memories of her parents’ deaths and Silvana.  She stopped screaming, but she snapped awake just the same. This continued into her adulthood, even living alone, and even with her fiance.  This is something Kirika would note (since it is implied they slept in the same bed - not necessarily from a sexual standpoint, but hey, if you’ve got two assassins living together, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?) and, I would assume, help with them.  This helps explain why they were so close during the Silvana episodes, particularly while Mireille was preparing to meet her again (when she knew she’d been seen) - in particularly unconscious and vulnerable moments, she would reach out instinctively for that comfort.

[aeipathix-blog]

As an addendum, no, Rin will not tell her partners she has HIV unless they ask.  Because she’s selfish as well as reckless.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

War Against the Information Age A Future of Mass Social Control

As capitalist imperialism consolidates its economic borders through an ongoing paramilitarisation process and harmonised internal policing structure to cope with increased external war and social-ecological collapse, there is an amplification of repression in response to the manufactured ‘crisis’ of the bankers. Enough decentralisation in the hegemony is maintained to allow internal security services to retain sufficient self-rule to operate according to the local situations, but generally speaking , the areas of amplification — ‘terrorism’ and immigration (specifically mass incarceration and deportation) — correspond with a rise in an encouraged nationalism and the prison-society.

The legislature of the new authoritarianism is in fact not a new set of laws, but rather the amplification and conjunction of existing laws that carry themselves forward to meet “new threats”. The prison-society is firstly an information-age authoritarian social model, as information technology and the new sciences are the key to its infrastructural progress and evolution. The prison-society is not just the regime of ‘intelligent’ surveillance cameras, databases, police-stations and prisons, it is urban planning, biometrics, contactless smart chips, electronic tagging and pattern recognition. It is satellite mapping, private security armies, automated drones and unmanned border planes. It is universalisation of social welfare systems, banking and corporate services. It is telephone voice analysis, high-definition CCTV, facial-recognition systems, “X-Ray” microwave scanners, covert units of police for breaking and entry, bugging and tailing, and the global surveillance network, Echelon. It is blacklists of ‘subversives’, ‘criminals’, ‘immigrants’ and ‘terrorists’. It is concepts and viral messages from the powerful, beamed directly into your head 24 hours a day, reprogramming your reality through television, newspapers, advertising, radio and internet.

It is the strength of the marketing poll, the consumer survey and the pressure group. It is the tax office, the exchange rate, the currencies and their manipulation. It is the details of countless numbers of individuals being processed by machines. It is statistics and their virtualisation.

It is in the minutiae; it controls your existence without you even seeing a prison-guard, it controls your routine, sets the clock, sets the debt and spends the wage. It fits the lock and fills the cell. It is an industry, a society, a way of living. It is the future you were born for, and the life of regulatory servility it forms people to fulfil.

Embryonic, it is distributed and skeletal in form at present, but already controls all important state structures in the post-industrial centres of power. To a lesser extent in the peripheries, such as South East Asia and Latin America, the prison-society is reconciling and overcoming the contradictions inherent in the classical fascist and dictatorial social control model through consumerism. The control society being constructed gathers enough information to assess individual activity and potential for deviation from top-down generated norms. This includes monitoring physical features (eg: maintaining a national computerised biometric and DNA database etc.) and location (eg: GPS, mobile-phone location, financial services tracking, internet tracking etc.), combined with behavioural patterns such as what is consumed and accessed (eg: library books, food shopping , transport, leisure etc.). The outcome is the dream of the cyberneticians of social control – the perfectly ordered utopia where each polices the other and the machine runs all.

Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, and now being used by the London Metropolitan Police creates a graph of an individual’s movements and communications with other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs. Links between entities can represent communications, relationships, transactions, message logs, etc. and are visualised over time to reveal temporal patterns and behaviours, and to highlight previously undetected links. Once millions and millions of pieces of microdata are aggregated, you end up with a very high-resolution picture of a targeted individual or group of individuals. Curtis Garton, product management director for Oculus, the company that markets the programme, is quoted as saying “... in terms of commercial sales pretty much anybody can buy,”. Professor Anthony Glees, director of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, said he was aware of tracking software such as Geotime, the use of which he described as “absolutely right”. He is quoted as saying: “My feeling is: if it can be done, and if its purpose is the protection of the ordinary citizen that wants to go about their lawful business ... then it’s absolutely fine.”

These product developers and academics of social control are the architects of structural hierarchy and injustice.

New technology is introduced in the following sequence: military hardware/personnel (eg: internet; cybernetics, satellite technology, microwaves etc.); prison & policing (eg: electronic tagging, ‘non-lethal’ weapons, ‘area of denial’ systems, ‘public disorder’ situations etc.); civil population (eg: home CCTV systems, personal computers, new products, leisure time etc.). This sequence returns military advances to entertainment, and conditions the population to be dependent on the pieces imposed on it by the system of militarism.

Technology seeks to disappear, in an ongoing process of miniaturisation, nanotechnology being the present expression of this tendency. This is to become the invisible background and context of what we do and how we live. Machines and the bureaucratic processes they initiate have come to dominate human behaviour and damage the Earth. It has created a situation where ordinary people are excluded from the processes of the system around them and lack the ability to make any real decisions over their lives. In the creation of ‘useful’ tools, human skills have migrated to machines. Modern social control is now defined by growing militarisation of the internal police force and transport infrastructure, with development in the use of cutting-edge technologies in the gathering and profiling of information that can be used and acted on in a model of population management. All this requires networks, servers, routers, transmission and conduit systems, admins, back-ups, contingency exercises. Cybernetic modelling by multinational corporations and information-age nation states already altered warfare and civil planning decades ago. The management of a city is the management of only so much information. The political and capitalist functionaries understand this, that is why it is logical to them to allow machines to become the city.

Technological convergence in fields such as artificial intelligence, biotech, robotics, nanotech and information technology is the current expression of hierarchical relationships that are based on a newly defined poverty gap of understanding , knowledge and language.

Control of information is the defining factor in the control of modern wars. As our lives take place in a social war for survival against the techno-system, information warfare and information control/distribution are two key factors in the new urban war which is taking place between the system and the people of the world it wants to conquer. The social clash is defined by access to information like any other resource or commodity. Huge gulfs in access are simply a form of the division facing excluded people, who have been cut from the means to secure their survival.

Information technology has its basis in a purely productive, quantitative sense: mass society requires it. Information technology is what enabled the Third Reich to execute its final solution: the well known machines of IBM completed a feat that would have taken civil servants too long to do before the end of the war, and filed 6 million people to their deaths. Efficiency and utilitarianism combine to form the present.

In the capitalist economy, the flow of information is encountered as an item to be processed with as much scrutiny as any other controlled item. Information is as precious as, sometimes more than, the realities it refers to. Accordingly truth has a value (economic), secrecy being quantifiable.

The ‘intelligence agencies’ and units of secret police decreasingly rely on so-called ‘human intelligence’: less people on the street, less physical surveillance but more agents behind desks analysing ‘signal intelligence’ instead. Presently machines can scan for keywords and patterns, but it takes transcription and analysis by humans, which still takes time. This means that often digital methods of monitoring can be defeated by face-to-face informal meetings and being aware of the operating environment. Despite the buggings, tailings and psy-war, direct action and sabotage continues to spread, along with the internationalist anarchic virus.

Information control is a state of war: internal borders, check points, so-called ‘green zones’ and ‘total security’ environments. The important questions are still: who knows what, where, when, how and why! Information war is “impervious branding”, “negative briefings”, it is the “spinning of facts”, black and grey propaganda, the fabrication of “narratives” etc. It is a list of names, a list of materials or a list of instructions.

Internet and social media are transforming the way people interact, and what they demand. Information which was not widely spread 30, even 20 years ago now circulates freely, and there are more possibilities to access previously ‘forbidden’ knowledge than ever before. From trade secrets on methods of production, to government files on wartime atrocities, it is easier to find out about several different shades of truth than ever before, but it is absolutely meaningless without the will to use this information to act. Through consumerism, a comfortable liberalism has evolved in the post-industrial core. In the long term, the failure of traditional supplies of resources (the situation of peak oil production) will lead to shortages and conflict. The nation-states cannot fulfil the demands of the people any more, and their only future is to sell out to corporatism if they wish to hold their ranking positions and maintain order. They are entering a period of unprecedented ‘crisis’, with little hope of recovery unless the development of new technologies for energy supply and production can prevent an overwhelming collapse in industry due to the depletion of resources and the fact of scarcity. Despite this, capitalism can and will adapt to any phase of deprivation, as the plan of the banks is to capture as much social wealth as is possible and eviscerate the ability of the nation-state to resist their manipulation of the economy and government.

Reconfigurement of power appears immanent, accompanied by a totalising interlinked corporatist future. Corporations are networked entities that have monolithic agendas, but because they are subject to the whims of Capital and State, they constantly break apart and reconfigure. The actually immutable nation-states cannot adapt to the new cybernetic, networked, corporative future unless the ‘democratic’ relationship it manages itself on is rejected for the adoption of the prison-society as the social model. It already moves in this direction knowingly. The nation-states will be superseded by the corporations and will come to rely on them more, whilst the corporations rely on them less. If the nation-states seek to dominate or subvert them, they’ll most likely fail.

Now a point is reached where the strategic narratives which kept back the unleashing of revolutionary libertarian violence are crumbling as populations in revolt confront the plans of the rich. The post-industrial nation-states are at risk, and are increasingly revealing their own developed and connected prison-society projects; the ascendant form of power relations backed by the multinational corporations.

Some of these corporations have greater gross domestic product and paramilitary capabilities than many countries and are responsible for more injustice and exploitation than many small dictatorial states. In the globalist modern society, attacks should be properly understood as information. Rapidly moving image-narratives and violent models of urban rebellion against the system have spread, moving amongst the disaffected of the world. In the age of instantaneous data-exchange, the actual technical rupture created by sabotage is often minor compared to the impact it imparts as a signifier of collapse and refusal. The capitalist system and civilisation itself can absorb the vast majority of sabotages and attacks, but the new media which is based on self-production and self-replication is creating international ‘communities’ of rebellion with shared intersecting global histories. Highly symbolic content exchange, theme-repetition, maximum-distribution and propulsive coherence are the aim. The destructive violent attack or anarchist sabotage, added to its method of communication — the powerful image or communique — is the blood of the new anarchist direct action, communicating a radicalised awareness based on methods of participatory organisation and the proliferation of destructive and iconoclastic ideas.

Anarchistic and nihilist ideas are anathema to the information-age, they are the glitch in the database society which escapes classification and control. The imagination walking; dangerous and capable of unforeseen actions and moments of interconnection.

The future of civilisation is an increasing merger of state and corporate power, with the new sciences as an essential ally. With war and crisis always as a pretext, the elite have declared dominion over every free individual, animal, plant and wilderness.

Emerging as the omnipresent machine intelligence that forms human beings to its whims, it damages and manipulates entire continents of beings. Reflecting our emptiness and our loss, the prison-society must be fought, because the logic which it operates on is a system of closure of parameters that work by exclusion of vast amounts of alternative possibilities and potentials. It is self-referential and non-creative; it pursues a model of progress that is the abolition of personal individuality and freedom.

Our struggle pushes forward into the future, let’s strike against the concepts and mechanisms of their control.