#Also I love ennui’s concept design

[beetle-baguette]

Merde

[1tsstargaze59]

OK, I know I said I wouldn't post but like I HYPERFIXED SO HARD THAT HM-

ANXIFEAR FANKID?????

Also some college au anxifear doodles below the cut hehe /TW for slightly suggestive content?? Ever so slightly XD

So basically them ^^^^^ /hj

I love them sm like I was just making a fankid for fun, I DIDNT EXPECT TO LOVE THEM THIS MUCH THO TWT💕💕💕

She's 17, she plays Overwatch, her fav food is cosmic brownies, she's a spelling bee champion and future literature major (I've been thinking about them all weekend-)

Pls be nice to Panic guys, they're TEENAGE CODED‼️and definitely a minor in the college au OK?

Anyway, imma yap about them for a bit now, so you can leave if you're not interested XD

Panic's actual size is this, just a bit taller then his mom (ft.Me intruding on the concept art LMAO)

Their design is based off mainly the little shocked expression sign, yk the 🗯, their hair I saw a design that had this hair style and I really loved it and it made me think of @/re-colligere's design for Professor Terror, aka spy AU Fear, how his prosthetic arm is shaped like a neuron! I thought that was very clever, so I was inspired by that ovob Lastly, we have the concept art for the second movie and the character of Rebellion! They have similar shape language and I knew I wanted to give Panic a different fashion style from her parents. It resulted in an inspiration from street wear and traffic signs, signaling how Panic is slightly~ well dangerous XD

Personality wise, Panic is very calm surprisingly! They talk sparingly, only when they want a specific idea conveyed to others; this usually results in them intruding on conversations with really unsettling statements ^^""" They hang out under headquarters with the other complex emotions, usually just entertaining themselves, reading, playing, napping; I suggest you not do anything to... brutal? Or loud around them, they are very sensitive and if ANYTHING triggers them, THEY CAN SPEND A REALLY LONG TIME JUST YELLING until someone manages to calm them down. ^^"" The comfort blanket is a gift from auntie Ennui, I'll draw them with the rest of the fam later ^^

[justafellr]

Now let's talk about the limp drama queen themself, Ennui

My version of Ennui is a lil bit different from the Ennui in film. They are still very much deadpan, listless, lethargic and very very lazy. But I put heavy emphasis on the royalty/privileged aspect of their personality All of their basic need is met daily and have grown too comfortable with what they have, leaving everything outside of that failing to satisfy them. They are indifferent and at times a little contemptuous, not wanting to deal with or associate with most people/things out of apathy for those kinds of things and that smug sense of "I'm too good for this" or "This is not worth my time", representing my artsy fartsy side and my overall laid back indifference to most things in the world that aren't my business or don't affect me Tho they seem like they don't care about anything or anyone, they really do care a LOT, specifically of where they should focus their energy on and what to associate with. They regulate the other emotions often and is extremely level headed and down to earth as a result of their laid back nature, often being the one to point out the obvious solution majority of the time. Because of this, they are prolly the MOST intelligent emotion next to Sadness, Disgust, Fear and Anxiety Their design is heavily based on the concept art of Ennui when they had a lot of royalty motifs. I wanted to give Ennui a nose but I could never find a position that I was satisfied with so I just got rid of it, and I also realized that I'm literally redesigning them and I can make them look however I want lmaooo. Wanted to make them pink with my version as well but thought they might look too similar to Embarrassment in colors so I went back to a more violet indigo

I also took inspiration from Picasso paintings for their face since they are considered a high art that only the rich and privileged can afford. Really wanted them to feel high class in their appearance and I genuinely love the abstract look for their face and overall look. They almost like like a rich painting come to life lol

[aleppothemushroom]

Inside Out 2 review

It's a rare thing to have a Pixar sequel that's as good as the original. Now, would I say Inside Out 2 is better than the original? Uuuhhh...no. Not really. Do I still think that it's an incredible film that does right by its predecessor? Absolutely.

For one thing, it doesn't conveniently forget the main character's arc from the first movie. Joy no longer passive-aggressively dismisses Sadness for being "useless." She treats the latter like an equal now, even letting her go on an important assignment.

The movie's message is also unique in how it's not "every emotion is important" and more about self-love. And what I really appreciate is that they don't tell you to practice self-love. They show you how to self-love. They find a way to perfectly visualize how being too hard on yourself is bad for you and how to treat yourself nicer. True, it's probably the only movie that can visualize that, but still it's so refreshing. Really hit home for me (I cried a little but not a lot because I'm a man [totally]).

Speaking of emotions, they're all just as entertaining and fun as they were before. There's a scene with Joy and Anger that particularly stands out. I love the new emotions too. Well...most of them, but we'll to that in a bit. Ennui and Embarrassment are both huge moods. Anxiety steals the show by a landside. She's funny, she's relatable, and she makes a great antagonist without being a "bad guy." She has her place in Riley's mind, she just doesn't exactly know what it is yet and is trying to do what she thinks is best.

Cool transition alert, Riley feels more like a...character in this? In the first movie she felt more like a vessel for the emotions, while here she feels way more independent and her own person rather than just an extension of the emotions (which is actually a major theme in the story).

The movie is also very funny. I'd even say it's more funny than the first. (Riley's hidden secrets are a huge highlight).

Now, what's holding Inside Out 2 from being better than the first movie to me? Well, let's get the minor nitpick out the way, I don't like Fear's new voice. Tony Hale's doing a fine job, but it does not sound like Fear. Which is weird because Disgust's new voice sound fine. Could they have not found someone else who sounded a bit more like Bill Hader? Like, there's gotta be a voice double you have on speed dial somewhere.

Now for actual criticisms, Envy. I like the concept behind the character. I like the design of the character. I do not like how they use this character. She doesn't really feel like "Envy" to me. The movie mostly just treats her as second-in-command to Anxiety. There's a few moments where she acts more envious, but it feels more like the movie is trying to remind us who she is rather than having her be consistent throughout. By the way, I'm gonna get into some spoilers, just to let you know.

SPOILER WARNING! ABANDON YEE WHO BE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE!

That scene where Joy breaks down and Anger helps reinvigorate her spirits comes way too early. Which makes the scene where Joy is at her lowest moment and doesn't know what to do get resolved way too quickly.

Joy's arc in this one seems a bit undercooked. Like, I can see an inkling of her starting to believe that she's useless in Riley's growing mind, but it's only an inkling that gets resolves anyway.

Another arc, a story one, of the emotions learning to let Riley grow and develop on her own is also not fully developed. The movie tells us that's what the characters learn but like...did they? I like the idea, I like the resolution, I just didn't see the build-up. And if it was there, it was not that noticeable.

But while I had some complaints, I think the positives outweigh the negatives. This is an excellent Pixar sequel and I would not mind (HA!) if this became their new big franchise. I just hope that Disney doesn't learn the wrong lesson from this film's destined success and starts pumping out sequels like crazy.

[notallrobots]

what's your opinion on starnoodle (joy x ennui)? 😆

i definitely really like it! i like how ennui kind of gives joy a hard time in the movie, without also relying on joy at the same time. i feel like some of the other joy ships teeter on the edge of codependency (which, don’t get me wrong, is a very compelling concept to explore), whereas the starnoodle women are opposite in their roles, but without ennui depending so heavily on joy for comfort and reassurance. i just feel bad for joy sometimes.. she has so much pressure on her. ennui definitely has the capability of taking some of that pressure off joy, simply by being her calm and blasé self. these two are very powerful together… i’d love to explore them more.

here is human weewee design that i doodled for this ask. thanks for the question!

[w1tchcr4ftt]

Inside out 2: A ramble of me trying to explain my feelings about it

(under cut due to possible spoilers!!! You have been warned)

In short, this movie went beyond my expectations! I expected good and got better! Inside out is one of my favorite movies and as a person who hates sequels, this one hit the spot! I was so excited for everything and I loved it so much!

Now for a longer ramble of pros and cons and stuff cus I cant organize my thoughts and ideas like a normal person

Pros!

Everything about the movie was good! The animation, the VA (I love anxiety's voice so much so silly), the storyline, and the pacing were all very well done

I adore the new emotions so much! I evidently favor anxiety... (shes relatable and I want to throw her at a wall) the designs are so very silly and they fit very well

I still love that the emotions can also show emotions and stuff! I think its interesting to see sadness be happy, joy be upset, anxiety be relaxed (the last bit with her massage chair), etc! I just think its neat!

Accuracy. Good God that panic attack scene has a death grip on me, Ive never seen a movie describe a panic attack in a way Ive felt connected to like this. Even so the rest of the emotions like embarrassment and envy's scenes around the firehawks, just trying to fit in is so painfully accurate.

Riley felt like more of a person in this movie! In inside out (1) she felt more like a puppet/vessel for the emotions to pilot, but having Riley actually be a person, even having thoughts of going against the emotions control (When anxiety wanted her to go look at the notebook but she didn't want to) That and the sense of self (which anxiety managed to rebuild in a day, that part gets me that it took them 13 years only for her to remake Riley in a day) felt like it made Riley a person and not a puppet

I love that the movie doesn't make Anxiety a villain, just an antagonist! Shes not trying to ruin Riley, just make sure shes happy, and that means a lot! In a world where villainization of mental disorders and neurodivergency is super prevalent, its so refreshing to see that even something as tough to live with as anxiety isn't put in a horrible light! She has good intentions, but lacks execution. It makes me happy to see something like this, where anxiety isnt stereotyped to hell ane also isnt villainized, but rather just trying and failing to help

Bloofy and Lance. That is all.

Cons!

Everythint was very fast paced, I wish it was a little bit longer but the message got across just as well

I wish they used Ennui more! I love the concept so much but she felt underused in my mind

On the topic of emotions, I wish they gave Envy more time to be, well, envious. I thought the scene where she wanted Val's hair was silly but we didn't get as much of that like I hoped

I wish we got to see more of the islands and how they har changed especially friendship island! I know that wasnt the point of this movie its just an interesting topic! Wouldve also loved to see some other parts of Riley's mind since it obviously changed since last time!

Again, Bloofy. Lack of Bloofy and Lance content. Was severely disappointed.

All in all, I adored this movie! While there were a few cons I feel like they were made up for! I, again, adore Anxiety so so so much and again I love how the movie made it clear that no, anxiety isn't a villain or a monster or something evil and wront, but rather something to learn to work with! Everything about this movie lived up to its predecessor and im so happy I got to see it!

Out of the semi-serious context, I love the silly characters so much and Anxiety lives in my heart and will not leave me alone. I love the stupid orange muppet and her silly friends who help her deal with all her issues. I can promise you this will be my hyperfixation for a long time coming

[kittylordinfinity]

fav inside out emotion? :-]

Ok here’s the bombshell ive had the ability to drop ever since you started blogging about this: i have never watched a single one of these movies. My only exposure to them has been through trailers and your posts/reblogs. HOWEVER!!! Because i love asks so much. I have done some Scholarly Research into these Beasts. And this has allowed me to create a list of my top three (because i dont have a strong enough preference to pick just one), in no particular order:

- Disgust: Disgust was always the one i was most drawn to of the cast from the original movie, which makes since given that im almost always guaranteed to love the token hyper-fem of any character group, and also pink and green are my two favorite colors. However i’ve always kinda had beef with her design because to me it just doesn’t really convey disgust that much? It conveys like. Fashionista, or something. So she can’t be my top pick because of that, but she still seems pretty cool. I like the moment in the trailer i saw where she gets weirdly invested in uplifting an edgy anime fighting game boy. It doesn’t make since for a character entirely themed around disgust At All but i like it :]

- Fear: Look i was original gonna put Sadness here for cute design, cute voice, and plot relevancy advantage, but i was looking at a picture of all the characters so i could consider my options and Fear just snatched up my heart and ran with it. His design is really cute, i especially love the little curly antenna thing hes got (and it EMOTES!!! EEEEEE-). Also as someone who deals with a lot of severe and mostly unfounded fear in my day to day life i feel like i’d relate to him the most if i actually watched the movies. Also ALSO, it is cute that he sleeps with a night light. That gets him a lot of points.

- Ennui: Sleeper hit for me, considering i usually despise overly apathetic characters AND characters who have a gimmick related to being on their phone all the time. But i like her design a lot, i’m really fond of the floppiness of her limbs and Purple Character Who Is Tired is a character design trope i kinda adore. Also THE SOCKS!? i love it when a character is just wearing socks. Also between you and me there is a pesky tumblr user on my dash who keeps posting cute fan art of her and it is, to my chagrin, giving me a bit of a fondness for her. (If they had gone with the emo design in that concept art then she would’ve gotten the number one spot Easy)

Honorable mentions:

- Anxiety: probably could have made the list off of relatability, like fear, and floppiness, like ennui, however got completely knocked out of the competition because of that (in my opinion) hideous shade of orange. It makes me think of cheeto dust and that makes me think of it being on my fingers and “weird food dust being in my fingers” is definitely one of the Top Ten Physical Sensations That Make Me Want To Jump Out Of My Skin The Most. Dislike.

- Envy: I like her big puppy dog eyes and the take on envy they used for her, that being focusing on the admiration aspect of it, is a really interesting angle to go with in my opinion. But i’m just not fond of “tiny big eyed character who is mostly there to pull on heart strings and be funny” trope and i don’t think she breaks out of that archetype enough for me to not be kinda annoyed by her. Also for some reason i just DESPISE everything on her design below her head, the colors they picked out for her outfit just Do Not Vibe with me.

- The Knives Chau esc hair streak Riley gets: self explanatory.

(Please note that if i come off as hyper critical of any character in this its not because i think its objectively wrong to like them, i just have fun critiquing things at length)

Ok thats it!!! Bye bye :]

[zukos-tiny-burnt-ear]

Inside out 2 thoughts

ok, so like i said i got to see inside out 2 yesterday and i really enjoyed it! ive been rotating it in my head all day and collecting my thoughts on it and i want to share them (long post ahead and naturally contains spoilers so if you care maybe consider avoiding)

so if you've seen any ads about this movie you probably know the general premise which is that the movie follows riley as a 13-year-old, and the new changes she is going through as a result of being an adolescent. additionally, four new emotions move into riley's mind - envy, embarrassment, ennui, and anxiety. it's a fun concept, and i think it's a very good expansion from the first movie! and after watching this one i actually kind of hope they make one last movie, perhaps set when riley is a senior in high school and getting ready for adulthood (and in the scene where joy/sadness/disgust/fear/anger are trapped in the vault they meet riley's "dark secret" who is kept very vague and not explored and says he isn't ready to come out yet so i could see them exploring it in the future. plus many popular kids films like to become a little trilogy, rule of threes and all)

anyway id like to first of all talk about the designs of the new characters. i don't have a whole whole lot to say about envy, but i do really like how little she is, it think it makes her come off as like a little dog, which adds to her being the embodiment of envy (you know how little dogs always want to act like they're bigger than they actually are). and i adore the way she likes to sit on the console, i think its very cute. i do wish she was green, as that is the color most closely associated with envy, but i can also acknowledge that they may not have originally planned for a sequel when designing the first five emotions. the first five are a nice almost-rainbow, and envy/jealousy is simply not as common an emotion for younger kids as it is for adolescents/teenagers, so it makes sense that disgust is green instead. envy also reminds me of a different character from somewhere else but i just cannot for the life of me think of who

embarrassment is one who i think was very cleverly designed actually. i love that he is very large, which means that it's nearly impossible for him to avoid attention which just makes his own feelings of embarrassment worse. i just think its a lovely irony of character design, and appreciate the thought that was put into it. i also enjoy the fact that he's pink, like the color of blushing (such as from embarrassment). also, despite the fact he doesn't really speak throughout the movie, his role in helping conceal sadness when she sneaks back into headquarters was very sweet and i think he's a lovely little guy

im not 100% sure how i feel about ennui's overall design. at first i wasn't so big on how human he looked, but as im thinking more on it (and double checking his appearance) i realize he's shaped more noodley than i had initially thought, and he moves like a slinky which i think is fun. also the way he just kinda hangs out in his socks is a nice detail (whereas the other characters have some semblance of shoes or just little feets). i also like that he was given a french accent, as the word comes from the french language, and i just think its a good touch. i did remember him having a beret, but apparently he does not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. im a big fan of the indigo color though, but thats also just cause i love a good dark blue

and lastly there's anxiety, who i have found i absolutely adore. she completes the rainbow with her orange color,* which is just perfect to encapsulate the feeling of anxiety (think like orange traffic cones and such that are meant to serve as caution signals). someone else on tumblr made a post talking about how they were glad that she was very creature-esque, as pretty much all the other "girl" emotions were much more human shaped, which i whole-heartedly agree with. she reminds me of a muppet, or perhaps a strange bird. most importantly though i love how she portrays the feeling of anxiety which im gonna get into in the next paragraph

so when i went to see the movie, i went into it expecting anxiety to be characterized as your typical nervous-wreck type character, as it is a disney filmed aimed at kids, and it seemed a simple enough portrayal. instead, she is characterized as intelligent and friendly, though she is most certainly a fawn and an over-thinker. she toes the line between logical and illogical in the same way that anxious thoughts do in real life. the way she rationalizes all the poor decisions she makes for riley almost seems to make sense, despite the fact that its clear riley's life and personality are crumbling and then being held together with duct tape. for example why on earth would riley leave her friends to hang out with the high schoolers? well her friends are going to be leaving her anyway so we better get a start on making new friends. it almost makes perfect sense except it doesnt. and as anxiety continues on at the helm of riley's mind her decisions get worse and more frantic, more worried about how riley will be perceived and what her future will be like, until she literally begins to spiral out of control

those are all my big thoughts on it, but there's honestly probably more i could say. however this post is long enough so im going to stop here for now lolol

the climax of the movie is when riley is playing in the scrimmage at her hockey camp, and anxiety is doing everything she can to get her onto the high school team. however after being too focused on scoring, anxiety accidentally causes riley to harm one of her old friends and gets her sent to the penalty box, where anxiety begins to panic because in her eyes, if she can't get riley to score she can't secure a good future for her. she begins to move rapidly around to console, giving riley an anxiety attack. in my personal opinion, it is such a perfect visualization of how it feels to spiral, where your mind is moving a million miles a minute but you're completely stuck, terrified about this one little thing that you've put so much unnecessary weight on. visually it was beautiful and it was an amazing analogy

*i also really like how all put together the characters complete the rainbow, with red (anger), orange (anxiety), yellow (joy), green (disgust), turquoise (envy), blue (sadness), indigo (ennui), purple (fear), and pink (embarrassment), which circles right back to red

[moonstruckeggs]

Genuine recommendation: inside out 2 the movie is really relatable and just feels like a genuine growing up movie. How the emotions act feels very understandable. I loved anxiety and how she was portrayed. It all just made a lot of sense to me, from the small things like her design or the way she's overthinking every single thing. The way anxiety can drive you but also hurt you. It just felt like a very true to reality portrayal of the emotion. I guess my one critic is that ennui was kinda forgettable, but the emotion has it's reasoning for existing so I guess it's fine. It makes sense that Riley has this kinda emotion with puberty now as well. She just kinda felt like comedic relief but yea as mentioned completely fine, since it's still a kids movie.

Small spoiler warning: The portrayal of the panic attack at the end was probably one of the best I've seen in media. There was literally one moment that made me almost bawl in the cinema. "Maybe this is what happens when you grow up, you feel less joy." Almost started crying then and there.

The movies an easy 10/10 definitely rewatching.

Oh I have to say though I still think it would be really interesting to see a spinoff of inside outs concept for adults about a person who is genuinely struggling mentally. I think it's a really interesting concept and I wonder how someone would portray all those different struggles and emotions.

[dwellordream]

“The plasticity of the notion of reading meant that it represented the medium through which middle-class Victorian girls passed many hours, but it did not bring a uniform message. Like their parents and advisers, adolescent girls who were writing about reading were of two minds. On the one hand, as William Thayer put it, reading could be a way of demonstrating rectitude and diligence; on the other, it could be a route to indolence and the shirking of responsibilities.

Mary Thomas, away at school in Georgia in 1873, suggested these dual meanings of reading as she imagined a newly virtuous domesticity for herself upon returning home: ‘‘I will sew and read all the time, I am not going out any where, but intend to stay at home and work all the time; no matter how interesting a book may be, I will put it down and do whatever I am asked to do, they shall no longer accuse me of being lazy and good for nothing, I will work all day.’’ In its contrast to engaging in a social whirl of visiting and flirtation, reading, like sewing, represented a becoming and modest domesticity. However, reading might also subvert good intentions, and tempt a girl to inattention to, or even disobedience of, the demands of others or of household work. In any case, reading had a meaning for the self, as well as for the family and the culture.

Reading good books was of course a way of demonstrating virtue. Measured reading of improving texts was part of the regimen of many Victorian girls. As advisers suggested, the reading of history was especially praiseworthy. When Nellie Browne returned home from school in 1859, her mother noted in her diary with pride, ‘‘Nellie begins to read daily Eliot’s History of the United States,’’ a parentally encouraged discipline which would both improve and occupy Nellie now that her school days were over.

Jessie Wendover, the daughter of a prosperous Newark grocer and another regular diarist, recorded a steady diet of history in her journal, justifying her summer vacation in 1888 with the reading of a two-volume History of the Queens of England, as well as doing a little Latin and some arithmetic. The popular British domestic novelist Charlotte Yonge wrote her History of Germany specifically for readers like Jessie Wendover, who began it the following year. What American girl readers took from the history they read is hard to ascertain, because unlike their rapt reports on novels, they recorded their history as achievement rather than illumination.

One can certainly appreciate the irony, though, in encouraging girls to read accounts of national travails, the stories of armies, wars, and dynastic succession, which were ennobled partly by their distance from girls’ real lives. One of the advantages of history seemed to be that girls could be expected to have no worrisome practical interest in it—in marked contrast to the reading of romances or novels.

Victorian girls could build character through a variety of other literary projects, prime among them the memorizing of poetry. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, the publishing industry issued a number of collections of snippets of poetry known as ‘‘memory gems,’’ designed for memorization by schoolchildren. The verse in these anthologies was to serve as ‘‘seed-thoughts’’ for earnest young Victorians aspiring to know the best, and these were the likely sources for many of the couplets which appear in girls’ diaries and scrapbooks.

Margaret Tileston’s daily diary, recorded religiously for her entire life, both fed and celebrated a variety of literary disciplines, including most prominently reading and memorizing poetry. She too read histories during the summer, along with keeping up with her other studies, noting one July day following her graduation from Salem High School that she had ‘‘read my usual portions of Macaulay [a 40-page allotment] and French, but only a few pages of Spencer.’’ Margaret Tileston also read advice literature, such as Mary Livermore’s What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? and two books by Samuel Smiles, Self-Help and Duty. (The latter she described as looking ‘‘quite interesting and full of anecdotes.’’) Margaret Tileston’s diaries suggest a life consumed with the rewards of self-culture.

At fifteen, however, she recorded a brush with another literary genre and mode of striving—a seeking not only for mastery of the will but for beauty itself. Poetry first appeared simply as a verse of romantic poetry copied on the page: ‘‘Why thus longing thus forever sighing, for the far-off, unattained, and dim, while the beautiful, all round thee lying, offers up its low, perpetual hymn.’’ Margaret Tileston was now away at girls’ school, where she had experienced something of an emotional awakening in the intense atmosphere of schoolgirl friendships.

Her turn to poetry seems to reflect the new culture in which she was briefly submerged. That summer, back with her family on vacation on the Massachusetts coast, Tileston again turned to poetry, and to beauty, in an uncharacteristic passage of effusion. ‘‘The moon was perfectly lovely in the sky and its light on the water. We quoted lines of poetry, and it was beautiful.’’ By January of the next year, however, poetry had been incorporated into her disciplines of order and accomplishment. After returning from boarding school, she had moved with her family from the farm where she had spent her formative years to the town of Salem, where she attended the local high school. There she embarked on another campaign of self-improvement, the memorization of poetry, perhaps as a strategy to gain control of alien surroundings.

Two months later she described a new discipline: the daily ritual repetition of all the poems she had learned, of which there were by then 111. On May 25 she reported that her extraordinary ability to memorize poetry was gaining her a reputation. ‘‘Miss Perry asked me if I knew about 250 poems. She said that one of the Goodhue girls had told her I did. I remarked something of the sort to Miss Perkins one day in recess, and somehow it was repeated.’’ By the end of July she noted that she was beginning to have trouble finding new poems to learn because she knew so many already.

Appreciation of the beauty of poetry had dropped out of her journal. Nor did she suggest that the poetry had any meaning to her at all. Yet she very likely gained some of the satisfactions from poetry expressed by Louisa May Alcott, some years before. After disobeying her mother, at the age of eleven, Alcott ‘‘cried, and then I felt better, and said that piece from Mrs. Sigourney, ‘I must not tease my mother.’’’ She went on, ‘‘I get to sleep saying poetry,—I know a great deal.’’ For those feeling guilty, sad, misunderstood, or wronged, repeat- ing lines of elevating poetry had an effect in a secular mode analagous to the saying of ritual Hail Marys. The verses established an alliance with a higher authority and suggested personal participation in a glorious and tragic human struggle.

And in fact, poetry, even more than history, was the prototypical idealist genre. In 1851 the British educational pioneers Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff proposed the reading of poetry rather than fiction, explaining the crucial distancing effect of poetic subjects. ‘‘In a poem, the wildest language of passion, though it may appeal to the feelings, is generally called forth in circumstances remote from the experience of the reader.’’ They suggested that in poetry there was a higher truth than that of superficial realism: ‘‘The grand conceptions of the poet are true in ideal beauty.’’

Writing fifty years later, Harriet Paine too suggested that poetry had generic qualities of elevation. ‘‘After all, in poetry itself what we read is not the important thing. We should read poetry to give us a certain attitude of mind, a habit of thinking of noble things, of keeping our spirit in harmony with beauty and goodness and strength and love.’’ Earlier Paine had commended the memorization of poetry as neces- sary to ‘‘take in the full meaning,’’ suggesting just such a regular regimen of repetition as Tileston had pursued. The spiritual rewards from internalizing poetry were revealed by Paine’s proposal that it take place on the Sabbath: ‘‘Surely we must give a part of every Sunday to such elevating study.’’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning had censured poets for their historical escapism in her 1857 poem Aurora Leigh, arguing Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires. Yet it was in just its remoteness from ‘‘this live, throbbing age,’’ just in the ‘‘togas and the picturesque’’ disparaged by Browning that poetry was considered so appropriate for girl readers.

…If reading presented an opportunity to discover national allies, to demonstrate private virtue, and to suggest the triumph of the will against ennui or boredom, it increasingly endorsed another way of defining life: the excitement and the exercise of the feelings. Girls who read their daily allowance of Macaulay or the Bible with pride and self-satisfaction upbraided themselves for their difficulties in controlling their insatiable appetites for Victorian novels of all kinds. Reading for leisure or for pleasure invariably meant reading for ‘‘sensation,’’ reading for adventure, excitement, identification, titillation. In the process of this kind of reading, Victorian girls ministered to a complex of emotions.

…Perhaps leisure reading can best be defined by what it was not: study, sleep, or sewing. Girls chastised themselves for imperfectly learning their lessons, and sometimes blamed the distractions of leisure reading. Martha Moore, who had just begun to attend school in occupied New Orleans during the Civil War, confessed that she found the schoolwork hard and had had two crying spells before she ‘‘picked up an interesting story and with my old habit of procrastination, thought I would read that first, and then study.’’

She observed the inevitable consequence ‘‘that my lessons are very imperfectly known.’’ And even Margaret Tileston, whose discipline seldom allowed her to swerve from duty, could be seduced by light reading. At the age of fourteen: ‘‘I scarcely studied in my history at all, because I was interested in ‘Sir Gibbie,’ and wanted to finish reading it.’’ At the age of seventeen: ‘‘I undertook to spend the afternoon and evening on my Ancient History, but my thoughts wandered and I spent some time on papers and magazines.’’ At the age of twenty: ‘‘I did not study a great deal in evening, on account of my interest in my novel, but I read over my History lesson.’’

Girls also resolved to prevent reading from interfering with their domestic chores, usually their needlework. Treating reading as recreation, Virginian Agnes Lee observed, ‘‘I really am so idle I must be more industrious but it is so hard when one is reading or playing to stop to practice or sew.’’ Another Virginian, Lucy Breckinridge, set up a similar opposition, noting that she and her sisters had gathered together in her room ‘‘being industrious. I am getting over my unsocial habit of sitting in my room reading all day.’’ For Lucy Breckinridge private reading not only was not industrious, it was also antisocial.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Reading as the Development of Taste.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[thesims4blogger]

The Sims 4: Team Seeks your Feedback for Knitting Gameplay

SimGurus are also looking for player feedback with regard to knitting gameplay. In this post from SimGuruConor players are asked these questions 

Q1: Crosspack! I’m planning on making Knitting compatible with things like Get to Work Retail Lots (including Mannequins!), Get Together’s Club Rules, and City LIving’s Yard Sale Table. What else would provide fun crosspack functionality? For example, should knitting provide Fame in some way?

Q2: If some “Crochet-Like” objects became craftable through Knitting, how would you personally feel? Happy? Enraged? Strong sense of ennui? We can’t guarantee unique animations for crocheting, but I’d like to still potentially provide them as a craftable object for players.

Q3: There’s a cool crafty desk floating around in concept art that you guys may have seen (49 – 52 in the object vote). What would knitting at one of these desks mean to you, if anything? Asking around the office, nobody knits at a desk, but I’m curious if anyone would find value if the new crafting desk tied in with knitting somehow.

Q4: I’d like Knitting to actually take some time to craft, something Sims can save for later and come back to. In your experience, how long have some of your knitting projects taken? I’ll try not to make it feel too grindy, but definitely longer than it takes to paint in our game.

Q5: If your Sim wanted to knit something, but they couldn’t find a place to sit, would you be okay with them standing up and knitting? Asking for a friend…

Q6: Along with the Mentor interaction, I’d like to include a proper “Teach to Knit” interaction. I’d love to have that moment where the Knitting Master granny teaches their grandchild how to knit. For those of you who experienced similar things, what was that experience like for you? I’m curious what people think this should look like – both animation and story wise.

Q7: I’d like to have some Etsy store-like gameplay, as well as donation gameplay with Knitting. For those of you who may have gone down those paths in real life, what were some interesting takeaways or stories you’d like to see represented?

Q8: Lets say a Sim is wearing an awful, itchy sweater that they’re wearing only because somebody gifted it for them. What kind of things would you like to see happen to them?

Q9: I need your best Knitting puns. Feed them to me.

Q10: This is my biggest question, so I saved it for last. Should the “Teach to Knit” interaction mentioned above be autonomous? While this might sound trivial, I feel this is very important for gameplay. I’m interested how people would feel about their level 10 knitter trying to spread their knitting knowledge on others. Let’s say you have someone in your family who is a level 10 knitter, if this interaction is autonomous the entire house is going to get a real deep dive into knitting, perhaps constantly.

What are your thoughts on potentially “story intrusive” interactions like this, would you be okay to find your family one day all high-level knitters through natural autonomy? Or should this only be user-directed, meaning on you have the ability to choose who gets schooled on knitting. I’d love to hear your thoughts about these sorts of things.

The early design process is a very fun time for me, and I hope I painted a picture of the sort of questions that get brought up during this development stage. Lemme know what you guys think!

[schraubd]

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept. After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion. It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them. From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it. At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not. Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway). By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder"). But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands. And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable. The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it. Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more." Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye? So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 

Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome? Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too? The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle. It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You"). Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants. For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time? I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2GK19Yo

[firstavenue7thstentry]

Get to Know: Scrunchies

Ahead of Scrunchies’ performance at First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2018 in the First Avenue Mainroom on Friday, January 4, we got to ask Laura Larson (Kitten Forever), Bree Meyer (Double Grave) and Danielle Cusack (Bruise Violet, Tony Peachka) a few questions. Read what they had to say below:

Emily Csuy: This year you played your first show together as Scrunchies, debuted your album, released a music video, and embarked on a summer tour. Looking back on 2018, what are some of the biggest highlights? Danielle Cusack: Honestly just announcing the band and seeing people’s reactions that we had a music video shot & a full ass album recorded already. The Palm show at the Entry was really fun as well. But the biggest highlight was for sure the Fresno date of our tour when it was a 5 band bill of all women/femmes and was one of the most validating nights of playing music I’ve ever had. Bree Meyer: Our tour was probably the highlight of the year overall for me, but in general it was wild seeing how people supported what we were doing, sight unseen. Laura Larson: I felt really empowered by this entire year and being so hands-on throughout the entire process of the video, the album, and the tour. Getting my copy of Stunner after we made it really sticks out for me, Landing #2 on Picked To Click was cool, guest hosting The Local Show was cool, playing Sweet JAP's reunion show was very cool.

Emily: During your summer tour, you played fifteen nights in a row in different cities. What helped you reenergize and stay sane on the road? Danielle: Honestly, podcasts & a magnesium tablet before bed. Tour exhausts me but I was lucky to be around people who I really admired & were able to keep me grounded during my meltdowns. Bree: I've never toured out west before, and I get a lot of energy from traveling in new places with new friends (like huge cactii and redwoods). I tend to sneak away on walks alone when I can, and usually bring a craft. This time it was weaving! Laura: I'm a nerd who likes to eat healthy on the road so making sure I am getting my vegetables (or at least a daily multivitamin) helps me a lot. Also stick me in the ocean at least once and my batteries are charged. I've been on a million tours but this was the first with Scrunchies and I felt really energized and thrilled to be touring with friends that I got to know better and have a bunch of cool experiences with. We were met by so much generosity and kindness everywhere we went too so tour ennui was minimal. Also we brought a frisbee!

Emily: What was the creative process like for the “Wichita” music video? Laura: We had a vision of creating an atmosphere of teenage girls discovering witchcraft in a time before the internet, using intuition and minimal resources to create their own magic. We wanted it to be visually very colorful, kind of weird (like Bree and Danielle drawing all over their own faces), and fun to watch. Gordon Byrd directed and we co-produced it together; our history of growing up playing punk shows in basements together really vibed with the DIY concept and the "live" scenes. There is a lot of references to water in “Wichita” and we had a lot of fun pouring food coloring and half-and-half into glasses of water and making rainbow bubbles in the bathroom sink with glow sticks.

Emily: What are you most looking forward to in 2019? Danielle: Best New Bands!! And honestly a brand new year of unexpected possibilities tbh LOVE A FRESH START. Bree: Agree with Danielle, new year new you, fresh start energy! I'm excited to see what the year has in store for us. Laura: I'm excited to start writing new songs, and to see what the next stage of the band feels like. We are going to be playing Best New Bands as a three-piece and I'm excited to work with Bree and Danielle in that capacity. We're going to play around with more dynamics, and maybe even write some songs that are longer than two minutes and twenty seconds.

Blog by Emily Csuy (Graphic Design Intern)

[phroyd]

Coming home a few months ago from yet another frustrating day of teaching, I had a sudden epiphany that crystallized my swirling emotions: Curiosity is political. The absence, presence, cultivation and extirpation of curiosity are all political tools of almost unimaginable power. They are also social outcomes with ubiquitous political consequences.

It has been clear to the left for a long time that the contours of knowledge are politically drawn. In recent years, an interest in the politics of ignorance has begun to take shape, too; agnotology, as the philosophical study of ignorance is named, builds connections among politics, psychology and public memory to describe a social construction of ignorance that mirrors the social construction of knowledge. We should observe that this basic insight of agnotology is actually longstanding. Upton Sinclair remarked in 1934 that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” making a direct case for a standpoint theory of ignorance.

Unfortunately, neither epistemology (the field of philosophy which studies how we know what we know) nor agnotology has engaged in any notable way with the idea of curiosity, which is, after all, the means by which the mind is engaged both to know and to ignore. Curiosity as a concept and a phenomenon appears to be almost entirely ignored by academics, a gaping hole that led to my “epiphany” of the entirely obvious statement that curiosity is political.

Curiosity is something of a catchall term in English; despite its almost universally positive modern connotations, it is not necessarily or automatically an unmitigated good. A refusal of curiosity can be a moral choice, as in a lack of curiosity about how to create a neutron bomb, or a respectful choice, as in maintenance of privacy. Curiosity can also be an indulgence, a mere diversion or distraction, or even a thirst for power. Think of the unslakeable sort of curiosity of 19th-century imperialists and Victorian memento-seekers, seeking knowledge as a form of control, or of the greedy, entrepreneurial curiosity of prospectors of every sort.

But without a desire to know about the world, we will never want to change it, nor know how to begin that project. Further, without a desire to know about other minds, other beings and other ways of being, we will never build community, solidarity or a new world. While support for incuriosity and ignorance can have important moral standing in contexts such as military research or imperialist prospecting, as teachers, activists or a concerned public, we must also advocate for the political and moral value of certain kinds of curiosity — curiosity which, in the words of Michel Foucault, “evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.”

We live in a highly emotional global moment in which populations stew in fear, anger, anxiety, alienation and even shame among the “unsuccessful,” while curiosity is fundamentally built on self-possession, intellectual openness and a potential willingness to accept the unknown. Since we all know with just a moment’s reflection that defensive people, aggressive people or despairing people are only curiousdespite themselves, it is obvious that our moment’s zeitgeist is not conducive to curiosity.

We are in a classic catch-22: To build and maintain alternative politics, communities and social worlds, we need to pursue a deep curiosity about other people, other beings and other ways of living. But in order to make room for curiosity in our society, we need to make fundamental social changes. Meanwhile, curiosity is being actively squelched as a threat by those in power, actively suppressed as a form of self-defense by those under cultural attack, and is everywhere displaced by free-floating cultural anxiety.

The molding of curiosity begins at birth. Although there are precious few characteristics innate in humans, curiosity is one of them. Yet it was quickly obvious to me years ago as a new mother that as children grow up in our society, they progressively lose curiosity, yielding a remarkably incurious adult population. Although family dynamics and parental styles obviously shape and sometimes dampen curiosity, the transformation of youngsters’ wonder from sparkling and delighted into dull and sullen can largely be laid at the feet of school.

The flattening of free-ranging curiosity in schools has been the subject of complaint for centuries. But kindergarten and the lower elementary grades used to be relatively free-form in spirit and design, leaving learning by rote and strong concern for standards to the later years. Sociologists and psychologists used to peg somewhere around fourth grade as the time when kids lost curiosity, when resentment and ennui overtook a joyful love of novelty and exploration.

Even back in the mid-1980s, when nursery schools prioritized play, Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes’s 1985 study of preschoolers found that the average number of questions the children asked went from 26 per hour while at home to two per hour while in preschool. But now the “schools” for toddlers rehearse them in phonics. Not surprisingly, today’s children, subjected to planned curricula as early as nursery school and crushed by report cards with grades as early as kindergarten, are reported to be losing interest in school as early as first grade.

While standardized testing, overcrowding and underfunding undoubtedly have particularly toxic effects on the pursuit of inquiry in classrooms, the anaesthetizing of curiosity, in Paolo Freire’s phrase, occurs in any conventional educational institution. In her book, The Hungry Mind, Susan Engel devotes an entire chapter, entitled “Curiosity Goes to School,” to concretely describe how even the warmest, best-intentioned teachers who provide abundant hands-on learning situations kill curiosity in the quest to stay “on task” and cover required material.

Is steamrolling curiosity an actual purpose of school, or just a byproduct of other dynamics? Is curiosity a dangerous “casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential,” as Foucault described it, to be stamped out by the educational guardians of the status quo who eagerly enforce the hidden curriculum of obedience? Or does the deadening of intellectual quests merely result from schools’ pursuit of other agendas, with curiosity representing a failure to think in the capitalist terms of calculated opportunity costs, or presenting an obstacle to the smooth instruction in vocational skills or the imbuing of patriotism that could be taking place instead of wondering about the unsaleable? We can debate, but there’s no denying the essential school reality of crushed wondering and wonder.

Read More ... 

Phroyd

[pamphletstoinspire]

Moral Relativism and the Culture of ‘Meh’ by Bill Donaghy

The culture of “meh” is the withered fruit of moral relativism.

Perhaps you’ve seen the Walking Dead? I don’t mean the TV series, I mean the actual zombies walking past, driving cars, eating food with glowing faces hunched over a device, even ringing up our products at the register all the while plugged in, or tuned out, glazed over, not present. And as they flick through their feeds on those shiny screens, the mantra they mumble is “meh.”

“Meh” is an interesting addition to the modern lexicon. Actually it’s not interesting at all. It’s synonymous with the French word ennui (dullness) and the German word weltschmerz (world weariness). It’s boredom, blandom, what-else-is-on-dom. “Meh” is the insipid shrug of the shoulders after one has tasted everything and then waves it off like a spoiled prince. I want to propose in this article that the culture of “meh” in which we are living is the withered fruit of moral relativism.

Thanks to the “perfect storm” of a post-Enlightenment philosophy that’s uncoupled faith from reason, a post-Christian society that’s removed God from the world, and a post-analog technocracy that gives us a direct and unmediated connection to “everything” through a touchscreen rather than being touched by an encounter with reality, we’ve been set adrift into the murky fog of moral relativism. All we can see is our own hand before us. All we’re encouraged to care for is the cubicle of our own comforts. There’s no larger, harmonious plan. There’s no transcendent purpose to a human life, no ultimate destination, and certainly no solid ground of objective truth wherein we could cry out from our individual little boats “Land ho!” Land? No. In the words of singer/songwriter John Mellencamp, “… Close the deal, close the door. Forget about the colors that you knew before. It’s just beige to beige. That’s all it is these days …”

The Spiritual Poverty of Our Age

Speaker and author Chris Stefanick says “Relativism is the idea that there is no universal, absolute truth but that truth differs from person to person and culture to culture. In other words, truth is relative to what each person or culture thinks.” Now we could easily get philosophical in this article about relativism. We could trace the intellectual roots of it and refute it with equally intellectual arguments, but I’d like to talk less about the roots and more about the fruits; the actual ramifications of what moral relativism has done and is continuing to do to us as a people.

Relativism has been called “the spiritual poverty of our age” by Pope Francis and “the greatest problem of our time” by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Why? Because relativism places us in utter isolation from others, placing us in our own little worlds where your truth is not my truth, and the only law is that your stuff not touch my stuff. Or in more sophisticated jargon, “So long as you’re not hindering society or harming other people with said behavior or beliefs, it’s OK.” Moral relativism is a kind of velvet anarchy wherein we all query together with Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”

The epitome of relativistic thought could be summed up in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey Supreme Court decision upholding the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision. Writing for the majority in Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy claimed that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Sounds nice and ennobling until you imagine seven billion humans actualizing the idea in everyday life. For instance, one could say, “I believe I have the right to define my own traffic laws.” But when the rubber meets the road, we all know this can’t work. The ideology crashes to the ground once it’s grounded in reality.

Here’s another example. Person A says, “I feel that killing those I disagree with is my truth, and a good for me.” Persons B through Z say, “That conflicts with our values, and we feel you should be locked up immediately.” If person A truly has the right to define his own truth, what right do people B through Z have to tell him that his desire to kill people is not justified?

Relativism is ultimately inhuman. It seeks to detach humans from the core relationships they are designed for; with God, others, and the natural world with its inherent laws. The “I” becomes the center of the universe and the ultimate arbiter of all things. But to be human is to be in relation, to give and receive, to enter into a mystery larger than ourselves. As Thomas Merton once wrote, “The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.” This takes a leap of faith and of trust. A step outside of our comfort zones and off of our ideological couches.

Reality: The Antidote

The antidote to relativism is an encounter with reality. The prolific author G.K. Chesterton was an “expert” in this encounter. He wrote once in a letter to his fiancé:

“I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people … When we call a man ‘manly’ or a woman ‘womanly’ we touch the deepest philosophy.”

Truth is touched when we touch and allow ourselves to be touched by the “holy sacrament” of the Real. Touched by earth and sea and sky, and above all through the presence of another face. Another voice. The German philosopher Josef Pieper saw this encounter with reality as a key to transcendence for everyone.

“Anybody can ponder human deeds and happenings and thus gaze into the unfathomable depths of destiny and history; anybody can get absorbed in the contemplation of a rose or human face and thus touch the mystery of creation … Everybody, therefore, participates in the quest that has stirred the minds of the great philosophers since the beginning.”

German-Canadian neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Karl Stern, a Jewish convert to the Catholic Faith, once wrote, “the very fact that our first encounter with matter is one of tasting it and taking it in could be used as a refutation of all dualistic philosophies” that separate soul and body. French poet and dramatist Pierre Albert-Birot wrote, “I feel that the world enters into me like the fruits I eat, indeed I feed on the world.”

To rediscover the Real, and to walk again in the way of Truth, we must untether ourselves from false philosophies like relativism and reestablish our natural relation to reality, to the wonder of being alive! Again, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

“I put that beginning of all my intellectual impulses before the authority to which I have come at the end; and I find it was there before I put it there. I find myself ratified in my realization of the miracle of being alive” (G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography).

Pope Francis saw the challenge this leap of “faith in the real” entails and the battle that would be necessary to set us free from a relativistic culture of “meh” that lives only in a virtual reality of our own design. He saw how many people “want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction” (Joy of the Gospel, 88).

Leaving the Land of the Bland

It’s within this experience of a “real presence” with another where the ideology of relativism dissipates like a cloud. To break free of the gravitational pull of our own self-interests, our own desires, and our own autonomy is the real work! Just before his election to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI observed that modern society was “building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” But what a sad land this dictatorship rules over! I call it the Kingdom of Boredom. The Country of Apathy. The Land of Bland. Also known as Hell.

When we finally break free of the isolating fog of relativism through becoming this gift of self we step into the clear light of day. Through empathy and attentiveness to creation and the very real human relationships around us, we begin to understand the truth about God, ourselves, and the natural world. We see the great romance of what St. John Paul the Great called the communio personarum—”the communion of persons.” And within that heart of humanity we find those universal truths that all peoples share in and have shared in from the beginning. We are made for so much more. A Culture of Life and a Civilization of Love!

[cecilspeaks]

121 - A Story of Love and Horror, Part 1: “Barks”

The password is “mudwomb”. The username is “mudwomb”. The website is “mudwomb”. Where did the rest of the Internet go? Welcome to Night Vale.

I would like to tell you a story. It is a difficult story and I don’t know what it means, but it seems important to me to tell you. It is about two people and a terrible, impossible decision that they found themselves having to make. It concerns Frances Donaldson and Nazr al-Mujaheed.

But first, the community calendar. 

This Tuesday evening the Night Vale Football Boosters Club will hold their meeting at the Applebee’s that we’re all pretty sure was a Chili’s just yesterday, but now is an Applebee’s, and all records show it has always been an Applebee’s even though we remember it as a Chili’s. The subject of this week’s meeting will be the timing of football games, which all members agree are too long. “Hey, I like football as much as the next guy,” said Hannah Gutierrez, “but a whole sixty minutes of play? Plus all the breaks and starting and stopping? We're busy people. Football should take less time.” The Booster Club will be working on their new proposal to get games done in a tight 15, so everyone can get home to watch the newest episode of Stop Chef, in which a group of contestants compete to prevent a chef from cooking.

Wednesday is Love Day at Dark Owl Records. Owner Michelle Nguyen explained that after recent love-focused events, she wanted everyone to understand that love is a laughable concept. And she wanted to highlight its absurdity by selling albums with songs that ruthlessly mock love using subtle irony, like “I Will Always Love You” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. My former radio intern Maureen, who was in the store too and was holding hands with Michelle, agreed that love is stupid, and funny. And fun and ridiculous, and all-encompassing and revitalizing. Then Michelle said, “What?” And Maureen said, “What?” And then they both got embarrassed and asked me to leave.

Thursday is the Safety Parade, which the Sheriff’s Secret Police hold each year in order to highlight safety. Of course, no one is allowed to march in or attend the parade for their own safety. As Secret Police Mascot, Barks Ennui, always says: “Woof woof! The biggest danger to you – is you! Woof woof.”

Friday is a meeting at town hall to discuss the problem of entrances to other universes, and the question of whether all of us even ended up in the right universe after that whole recent mixup. There will be light snacks as well as blood tests and surprise interrogations about our version of history, in order to trip up intruders from parallel universes. Attendance is mandatory.

This Saturday and Sunday, the Brown Stone Spire will be offering powerful gifts in exchange for great sacrifices. The larger the sacrifice, the more powerful the gift. For instance, if you give it a DVD you got for Christmas five years ago and have never even taken out of its shrink wrap, it’ll give you a well-worn copy of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” that is missing its cover. But if you give it an offering of your own blood and fervent chanting, the copy of “Chamber of Secrets” it gives you will have an intact cover.

And finally, this Monday, Night Vale cinemas will be hosting a showing of that classic comedy caper, “The Grift of the Magi”, in which two con artists run scams in order to get one another Christmas gifts, only to find that they have accidentally each stolen the money from the other.

And now, a story of love – and horror.

Frances Donaldson runs the Antiques Mall in Old Time Night Vale. Long before she took on that job though, she developed an interest in time. As a child, she would stand still and consider that while she had not moved at all in space, something had changed. That she had grown just slightly older, her hair just slightly longer, and this without being able to see the movement at all. She liked to lie in bed and, through her window, watch planes pass very high in the sky. She liked to think about where they had taken off and where they might land. Objects fascinated her, because they too moved through time, on a different trajectory than her. Her bedroom lamp had existed, looking more or less like it was now, since before she was born, and could well exist after she had died. It wasn’t even aware, was too unable to move, and yet it joined her in this mad hurdle through time.

She found this terrifying, and she found this fascinating. And she found this delightful and she wanted it to stop. And she hoped it never stopped, and she felt all of these feelings equally and at once, and without contradiction. What use was there in worrying if all of what she felt about time did not exactly add up? She was too busy feeling it to consider what it meant. And so, of course, she became fascinated with antiques. These objects washed up from the crooked tides of time.

Nazr al-Mujaheed coaches the Night Vale High School football team. Go Scorpions. And this was almost the entirety of his world. He thought about football when he woke up, he thought about it on the drive to work. Of course he thought about it when he ran practices and had meetings with the assistant coaches, and he thought about it at night when he ate take-out dinners on his couch while watching football. This made him happy. And what makes a person happy, if it doesn’t harm another person and doesn’t harm themselves, is OK. Even if it’s not how anyone else would want to live.

But while it made him happy, Nazr was also aware that is more than one kind of happiness. And that perhaps this happiness he found in a life endlessly thinking about football, was less than the happiness he could find in a life with more things in it. This wasn’t about fixing a problem, this was an attempt to improve on a good situation. This was his play for some sort of grace. Other people he knew could provide an outside perspective, and perhaps allow him to be less focused on his work and on the game he coached. And so he decided he would try dating. Without expectations, without a plan, just as a way to see what the world might have for him.

And now, a word from our sponsors.

[masculine ad reader voice] Ford! Our cars are built strong, strong like a rock or a mountain or a bone. In fact, our cars are built out of bones, weird metal bones that were buried in a meteor. What creature did they belong to? How did it live with a skeleton of steel? Are its relatives even now streaking down from the sky, intent on revenging themselves upon the pitiful culture that desecrated their dead and turned them into affordable and reliable pickup trucks? Who knows. We certainly don’t. We barely understand how an engine works. We have one guy who knows, and he builds them all. But in order to protect his job, he won’t show anyone else how to do it. Now that’s smart thinking. Ford: drive weird bones.

There was no great epiphany for Frances that led to her dating life. She had been on the dating app, Void, since it had become available in Night Vale, and had gone on a few casual Void dates. It was not an important part of her life, because it didn’t seem likely to ever lead to anything more. But the occasional company was nice. A night with someone, and then back to her life as it was, which was a life she liked. In this way, her dating was related to her obsession with time. Her bed was always the same bed, and sometimes there was another person in it. And mostly only her. She floated upon that bed as it moved through time. Passengers on and off, and she alone voyaging onward.

And then, Nazr messaged her on Void and they started chatting. For his part, he was unsure of how to date, it having been some time since he had done and certainly before dating happened as a series of written communications, rather than awkward hand gestures. So he had messaged a number of women in town, who had seemed to him like someone he might want to spend more time with. He did this without expectation. He had few expectations that did not involve football. He just performed the actions that might lead to new outcomes for him, and three of the women had messaged back. He was, after all, not a bad looking man, handsome even, although it had been a long time since anyone had told him that. And so it would not have occurred to him that he was handsome, and this in many ways made him even more handsome.

Frances and he agreed to meet for lunch near the high school. This was close enough to her antique store that she could walk, and so the whole thing didn’t feel to either of them like much of a commitment of time. “So,” he said, once they had sat down with their food. “So,” she agreed, and for an awful moment it seemed like it would hang there in uncomfortable silence, and a bad date best forgotten. But then he asked about antiques, because he himself had an interest in old football trophies. And he agreed that might seem a bit weird, but the thing was that their designs were often fascinating. Never having been meant to stand up under scrutiny, crudely carved players, hands like dinner rolls, feet disappearing into the base of the trophy. And this turned into a discussion of all the many old items that would never be valuable from the viewpoint of capitalism, but were more interesting than the ones that were valuable. From this, the conversation spread out into her fascination with time. And then time itself, and their childhoods, and how it was hard sometimes to remember that they themselves were adults. And in Nazr’s case, older than his parents ever lived to be.

On returning to work, Nazr started the afternoon football practice as usual. And as usual, threw himself into the rhythm of drills, spells and counter-spells that make up any football skirmish. But he found, for the first time in his life, that he couldn’t make himself fully focus. There was a part of him still thinking about the lunch, about the way her hands had looked tapping on the table. About the way she talked about time as it were not an implacable force, but an old and fallible friend. He had to continually draw himself back intro practice, and the players wondered if he perhaps was sick.

Frances stood at the window of her antique shop watching the planes fly overhead. When a person entered the shop, she would acknowledge them vaguely with a nod, and then acknowledge them vaguely with a nod again when they left. But otherwise, she kept her eyes on the window. Something in her chest felt tight, but also less heavy. She was both scared and happy, and she wasn’t sure why she was either of those. When later they both messaged and decided to go on a second date, an evening date at a nice restaurant, something with a bit more commitment behind it, neither of them connected it directly to the way they felt after their lunch together. But both of them could not contain their impatience, and had messaged that very evening. Both at exactly 10:55 PM.

Let’s have a look at that weather.

["Riches and Wonders" by Eliza Rickman & Jherek Bischoff]

There was a second date. And that night, she went with him back to his house. Then a third date, when they went to her house. Then a few more dates where they sometimes went to one of their houses and sometimes just kissed, wild with the feeling of it. Out in the park lot of whatever restaurant or bar they had met at, before saying good night because they had to work in the morning, and they were adults who sometimes had control of themselves.

This was not one of those nights, though. This was a night that she was in his bed and he was asleep. This was a little over a month after their first date. As she lay sleepy and happy, she watched the TV, which was tinting the darkness a soft fickering blue. It was an old episode of “Friends”, in which Joey rolls limply and slowly, over the course of 21 minutes, across the apartment while out of focus in the background, Phoebe searches desperately through every cabinet and screams. Frances had seen the episode too many times to laugh out loud at, but still it felt comforting to watch, like sitting in a room that she liked. The episode had become a place she could go, rather than a story to follow.

There was a commercial break and a PSA from the Secret Police came on, featuring the adorable cartoon spokesdog, Barks Ennui. He capered about, pointing out all the different ways one could break the law in Night Vale and get sentenced to a forever term in the abandoned mine shaft outside of town. She found herself grinning at his bad puns in the section about reporting on your neighbors: “Traitorous activities can be ruff! Go fetch us their deepest secrets!” And then Barks said her name. His cartoon canine face turned directly to the screen and he said, “Frances.” She didn’t know how to respond. A commercial had never spoken to her, and certainly it had never done what Barks did next, which was to step out of the TV screen in a clumsy flopping movement and then sit up, a two-dimensional flickering cartoon dog standing in the bedroom.

“Frances,” Barks said. “You aren’t supposed to be here. This doesn’t belong to you.” He cocked his animated head, the wall of Nazr’s apartment vaguely visible through him, as though through heavy fog. As his head turned, it sagged in the direction of the ground, stretching and distorting his cartoon puppy face until it was a series of drooping ovals. When he spoke again, his voice sounded stretched too. “You will have to make this right, Frances!” he garbled. [muddled] “You will have to make this right!”

She screamed. Nothing happened. She screamed.

Stay tuned next, just – stay tuned. Next.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Welcome to 2018. The year we finally do it. The year we eat the sun.