#I am not above funny number humor

[gayalienwilde]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[tomionefinds]

Fluff/Soft Fics

Things are hard. Here are some softer Tom, some humorous, and some fluffy fics to cuddle with. Graphic by Mod April - TF Team

Just Another Girl Alone at the Bar by Spork_in_the_Road

M | Complete | 8k

“Oh Ron-Ron, you’re too funny,” a feminine voice says, giggling. Hermione thinks she might vomit. In which Hermione pretends Tom is her boyfriend until he actually is.

Hot Lips by nauticalparamour

E | One-shot | 3k

When Tom Riddle finds out that Hermione Granger has a phone sex line, his first inclination is to use it to blackmail her. But, once he gets her talking, he doesn't want it to end.

Forever Means Forever by cocoartist

T | Complete | 7k

If she ever saw Unspeakable Number 37 again she would kill him with her bare hands: Hermione's research into the Veil has an unexpected side-effect. COMPLETE.

A Naughty Niffler by bunnystealsyourcarrots

E | One-shot | 2k

Hermione finds herself sucked into an unknown world with an old familiar face

Youth in Retrospect by provocative_envy

E | One shot | 8k

She’s buying a box of condoms when she meets him. “Those are shit, you know,” he says, jerking his chin at the pale purple box in her hand. “Can’t feel anything.” She stares at him for a moment too long. The bell above the door jingles merrily as a rowdy group of schoolboys enters the store. “Excuse you,” she replies, cheeks turning pink.

Nerve Damage by januarywren

T | Complete | 6k

“Working late again?” Hermione asked, leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, her raised eyebrow daring him to make a smart remark. That look had sent more than one ex fuming—but not him. Never him. Tom glanced up from his paperwork, his usual mask of indifference giving way to a slow, lazy smile. “Someone has to keep things running smoothly around here. I thought you’d be fast asleep by now, Miss Granger.” She let her gaze wander over the surprising disarray of his desk, piled high with case files and pages dotted with notes in his precise handwriting. She'd teased him more than once about his borderline obsessive need for order, how every pen, every scrap of paper, had its place. But she didn't mention it now or comment on the faint stain on his collar. Losing a patient did things to a person—things no textbook or professor could ever prepare them for. House M.D. Inspired AU | There’s a sickness between Hermione and Tom that neither has any desire to cure. (It isn't love. It isn't. 🖤)

communication errors by esotyric (devilrie)

T | Complete | 7k

sender: tmriddle@walpurgis.net recipient: hermionegranger@gryffinsdor.org subject: Today’s Meeting Granger – Attached is the dry-cleaning bill for the shirt you ruined when you threw your tea at it. I’m not sure if you noticed, but I happened to be wearing the shirt at the time. You are lucky it was cold. Pay the bill and I won’t sue you for assault. Regards, Thomas Marvolo Riddle CEO of Walpurgis Corporate sender: hermionegranger@gryffinsdor.org recipient: tmriddle@walpurgis.net subject: re: Today’s Meeting Riddle – I did notice, because unlike you, I can identify when something is being inhabited, you forest-destroying monster. You do not require a dry cleaner to get herbal tea out of a shirt. The shirt was black, the tea was camomile, and you have no grounds on which to stand nor sue. Your company, however, WILL be exposed for the havoc it is wreaking upon our natural world. Sincerely, Hermione Jean Granger CEO of Not being a Twat

Domestic Bliss by airgloweffect

M | one shot | 693

A snapshot into the life of Tom and Hermione Riddle.AU

Avada Kedavra Anonymous by Speechwriter

K+ | Complete | 8k

No one missed Riddle's pale fist tightening around the useless wand in his lap. "I am Tom," he ground out. "I am here for the sole reason that the alternative was community service." / Hermione moderates a post-Avada Kedavra support group. Chaos ensues.

A Nose that Can See by Colubrina

Hermione Granger has found herself inexplicably tossed back into time to Tom Riddle's Hogwarts. And he's a Veela and, wouldn't you know it, she's his mate. Could life get worse? But he seems to have an endless supply of out-of-season fruit so it can't be all bad, right? Tomione. Major character death, musical theater, and all that fruit. COMPLETE. Hermione Granger has found herself inexplicably tossed back into time to Tom Riddle's Hogwarts. And he's a Veela and, wouldn't you know it, she's his mate. Could life get worse? But he seems to have an endless supply of out-of-season fruit so it can't be all bad, right? Tomione. Major character death, musical theater, and all that fruit. COMPLETE.

Tommy Played Guitar by PacificRimbaud

E | One shot |3k

Tom Riddle takes his coffee black and plays in a rock and roll band.

Playing Cupid by Meowmers

M | Complete | 14k

"I'm beginning to think that I would love to hear you scream." Tomione. Regency AU. Rated-M.

A Four Letter Word by elizabethriddle

E | One shot | 4k

Tom Riddle was not impulsive. He was a planner. He never did anything without carefully considering all possible outcomes and controlling all of the variables. And he never let emotions impact his decisions. He had planned, meticulously, for the post as DADA Professor. How did it all go so wrong?

Sailor Trouble by The-Empress-of-Snark (uleanblue)

Not Rated | Complete | 9k

Hermione Granger attempts to restore the Founder's Relics, with unexpected results.

you did some bad things, but i'm the worst of them by coffeepolariod

E | Complete | 22k

“You want to watch your back, Miss Granger,” Dolohov gestured to Tom with his head. “This man won’t go easy on you, won’t entertain your parlour tricks, and most definitely will not hold back as he tears your confidence down: brick by brick.” or: Hermione Granger needs to win this poker game but Tom Riddle is there at every turn.

Tempora Abducto by Flaignhan (almost anything by this author)

T | Complete | 53k

Inconveniently it's the things that need fixing the most which are often irreparable.

[max-levchin]

Shamir Secret Sharing

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” 

There is nerd pandemonium all around us. James, our recently promoted VP of Engineering, just climbed the desk at a nearby cubicle, screaming: “Guys, if we can’t get this key the right way, we gotta start brute-forcing it ASAP!” It’s gallows humor – he knows very well that brute-forcing such a key will take millions of years, and it’s already 6am on the East Coast – the first of many “Why is PayPal down today?” articles is undoubtedly going to hit CNET shortly. Our single-story cubicle-maze office is buzzing with nervous activity of PayPalians who know they can’t help but want to do something anyway. I poke my head up above the cubicle wall to catch a glimpse of someone trying to stay inside a giant otherwise empty recycling bin on wheels while a couple of Senior Software Engineers are attempting to accelerate the bin up to dangerous speeds in the front lobby. I lower my head and try to stay focused. “Let’s try it again, this time with three different people” is the best idea I can come up with, even though I am quite sure it will not work. 

It doesn’t. 

The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth. 

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing. 

Before we get back to that fateful night, we have to go back another decade. In the summer of 1991, my family and I moved to Chicago from Kyiv, Ukraine. While we had just a few hundred dollars between the five of us, we did have one secret advantage: science fiction fans. 

My dad was a highly active member of Zoryaniy Shlyah – Kyiv’s possibly first (and possibly only, at the time) sci-fi fan club – the name means “Star Trek” in Ukrainian, unsurprisingly. He translated some Stansilaw Lem (of Solaris and Futurological Congress fame) from Polish to Russian in the early 80s and was generally considered a coryphaeus at ZSh. 

While USSR was more or less informationally isolated behind the digital Iron Curtain until the late ‘80s, by 1990 or so, things like FidoNet wriggled their way into the Soviet computing world, and some members of ZSh were now exchanging electronic mail with sci-fi fans of the free world.

The vaguely exotic news of two Soviet refugee sci-fi fans arriving in Chicago was transmitted to the local fandom before we had even boarded the PanAm flight that took us across the Atlantic [1]. My dad (and I, by extension) was soon adopted by some kind Chicago science fiction geeks, a few of whom became close friends over the years, though that’s a story for another time. 

A year or so after the move to Chicago, our new sci-fi friends invited my dad to a birthday party for a rising star of the local fandom, one Bruce Schneier. We certainly did not know Bruce or really anyone at the party, but it promised good food, friendly people, and probably filk. My role was to translate, as my dad spoke limited English at the time. 

I had fallen desperately in love with secret codes and cryptography about a year before we left Ukraine. Walking into Bruce’s library during the house tour (this was a couple years before Applied Cryptography was published and he must have been deep in research) felt like walking into Narnia. 

I promptly abandoned my dad to fend for himself as far as small talk and canapés were concerned, and proceeded to make a complete ass out of myself by brazenly asking the host for a few sheets of paper and a pencil. Having been obliged, I pulled a half dozen cryptography books from the shelves and went to work trying to copy down some answers to a few long-held questions on the library floor. After about two hours of scribbling alone like a man possessed, I ran out of paper and decided to temporarily rejoin the party. 

On the living room table, Bruce had stacks of copies of his fanzine Ramblings. Thinking I could use the blank sides of the pages to take more notes, I grabbed a printout and was about to quietly return to copying the original S-box values for DES when my dad spotted me from across the room and demanded I help him socialize. The party wrapped soon, and our friends drove us home. 

The printout I grabbed was not a Ramblings issue. It was a short essay by Bruce titled Sharing Secrets Among Friends, essentially a humorous explanation of Shamir Secret Sharing. 

Say you want to make sure that something really really important and secret (a nuclear weapon launch code, a database encryption key, etc) cannot be known or used by a single (friendly) actor, but becomes available, if at least n people from a group of m choose to do it. Think two on-duty officers (from a cadre of say 5) turning keys together to get ready for a nuke launch. 

The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the S of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful. 

Let’s call the secret we are trying to split among m people K. 

First, create a totally random polynomial that looks like: y(x) = C0 * x^(n-1) + C1 * x^(n-2) + C2 * x^(n-3) ….+ K. “Create” here just means generate random coefficients C. Now, for every person in your trusted group of m, evaluate the polynomial for some randomly chosen Xm and hand them their corresponding (Xm,Ym) each. 

If we have n of these points together, we can use Lagrange interpolating polynomial to reconstruct the coefficients – and evaluate the original polynomial at x=0, which conveniently gives us y(0) = K, the secret. Beautiful. I still had the printout with me, years later, in Palo Alto. 

It should come as no surprise that during my time as CTO PayPal engineering had an absolute obsession with security. No firewall was one too many, no multi-factor authentication scheme too onerous, etc. Anything that was worth anything at all was encrypted at rest. 

To decrypt, a service would get the needed data from its database table, transmit it to a special service named cryptoserv (an original SUN hardware running Solaris sitting on its own, especially tightly locked-down network) and a special service running only there would perform the decryption and send back the result. 

Decryption request rate was monitored externally and on cryptoserv, and if there were too many requests, the whole thing was to shut down and purge any sensitive data and keys from its memory until manually restarted. 

It was this manual restart that gnawed at me. At launch, a bunch of configuration files containing various critical decryption keys were read (decrypted by another key derived from one manually-entered passphrase) and loaded into the memory to perform future cryptographic services.

Four or five of us on the engineering team knew the passphrase and could restart cryptoserv if it crashed or simply had to have an upgrade. What if someone performed a little old-fashioned rubber-hose cryptanalysis and literally beat the passphrase out of one of us? The attacker could theoretically get access to these all-important master keys. Then stealing the encrypted-at-rest database of all our users’ secrets could prove useful – they could decrypt them in the comfort of their underground supervillain lair. 

I needed to eliminate this threat.

Shamir Secret Sharing was the obvious choice – beautiful, simple, perfect (you can in fact prove that if done right, it offers perfect secrecy.) I decided on a 3-of-8 scheme and implemented it in pure POSIX C for portability over a few days, and tested it for several weeks on my Linux desktop with other engineers. 

Step 1: generate the polynomial coefficients for 8 shard-holders.

Step 2: compute the key shards (x0, y0)  through (x7, y7)

Step 3: get each shard-holder to enter a long, secure passphrase to encrypt the shard

Step 4: write out the 8 shard files, encrypted with their respective passphrases.

And to reconstruct: 

Step 1: pick any 3 shard files. 

Step 2: ask each of the respective owners to enter their passphrases. 

Step 3: decrypt the shard files.

Step 4: reconstruct the polynomial, evaluate it for x=0 to get the key.

Step 5: launch cryptoserv with the key. 

One design detail here is that each shard file also stored a message authentication code (a keyed hash) of its passphrase to make sure we could identify when someone mistyped their passphrase. These tests ran hundreds and hundreds of times, on both Linux and Solaris, to make sure I did not screw up some big/little-endianness issue, etc. It all worked perfectly. 

A month or so later, the night of the key splitting party was upon us. We were finally going to close out the last vulnerability and be secure. Feeling as if I was about to turn my fellow shard-holders into cymeks, I gathered them around my desktop as PayPal’s front page began sporting the “We are down for maintenance and will be back soon” message around midnight.

The night before, I solemnly generated the new master key and securely copied it to cryptoserv. Now, while “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa blared from someone’s desktop speakers, the automated deployment script copied shard files to their destination. 

While each of us took turns carefully entering our elaborate passphrases at a specially selected keyboard, Paul shut down the main database and decrypted the payment credentials table, then ran the script to re-encrypt with the new key. Some minutes later, the database was running smoothly again, with the newly encrypted table, without incident. 

All that was left was to restore the master key from its shards and launch the new, even more secure cryptographic service. 

The three of us entered our passphrases… to be met with the error message I haven’t seen in weeks: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” Surely one of us screwed up typing, no big deal, we’ll do it again. No dice. No dice – again and again, even after we tried numerous combinations of the three people necessary to decrypt. 

Minutes passed, confusion grew, tension rose rapidly. 

There was nothing to do, except to hit rewind – to grab the master key from the file still sitting on cryptoserv, split it again, generate new shards, choose passphrases, and get it done. Not a great feeling to have your first launch go wrong, but not a huge deal either. It will all be OK in a minute or two.

A cursory look at the master key file date told me that no, it wouldn’t be OK at all. The file sitting on cryptoserv wasn’t from last night, it was created just a few minutes ago. During the Salt-n-Pepa-themed push from stage, we overwrote the master key file with the stage version. Whatever key that was, it wasn’t the one I generated the day before: only one copy existed, the one I copied to cryptoserv from my computer the night before. Zero copies existed now. Not only that, the push script appears to have also wiped out the backup of the old key, so the database backups we have encrypted with the old key are likely useless. 

Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups. The database is running but its secret data cannot be accessed. 

I will leave it to your imagination to conjure up what was going through my head that night as I stared into the black screen willing the shards to work. After half a decade of trying to make something of myself (instead of just going to work for Microsoft or IBM after graduation) I had just destroyed my first successful startup in the most spectacular fashion. 

Still, the idea of “what if we all just continuously screwed up our passphrases” swirled around my brain. It was an easy check to perform, thanks to the included MACs. I added a single printf() debug statement into the shard reconstruction code and instead of printing out a summary error of “one or more…” the code now showed if the passphrase entered matched the authentication code stored in the shard file. 

I compiled the new code directly on cryptoserv in direct contravention of all reasonable security practices – what did I have to lose? Entering my own passphrase, I promptly got “bad passphrase” error I just added to the code. Well, that’s just great – I knew my passphrase was correct, I had it written down on a post-it note I had planned to rip up hours ago. 

Another person, same error. Finally, the last person, JK, entered his passphrase. No error. The key still did not reconstruct correctly, I got the “Goodbye”, but something worked. I turned to the engineer and said, “what did you just type in that worked?”

After a second of embarrassed mumbling, he admitted to choosing “a$$word” as his passphrase. The gall! I asked everyone entrusted with the grave task of relaunching crytposerv to pick really hard to guess passphrases, and this guy…?! Still, this was something -- it worked. But why?!

I sprinted around the half-lit office grabbing the rest of the shard-holders demanding they tell me their passphrases. Everyone else had picked much lengthier passages of text and numbers. I manually tested each and none decrypted correctly. Except for the a$$word. What was it…

A lightning bolt hit me and I sprinted back to my own cubicle in the far corner, unlocked the screen and typed in “man getpass” on the command line, while logging into cryptoserv in another window and doing exactly the same thing there. I saw exactly what I needed to see. 

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.  

But back then, if you wanted to collect some information from the keyboard without printing what is being typed in onto the screen and remain POSIX-compliant, getpass did the trick. Other than a few standard file manipulation system calls, getpass was the only operating system service call I used, to ensure clean portability between Linux and Solaris. 

Except it wasn’t completely clean. 

Plain as day, there it was: the manual pages were identical, except Solaris had a “special feature”: any passphrase entered that was longer than 8 characters long was automatically reduced to that length anyway. (Who needs long passwords, amiright?!)

I screamed like a wounded animal. We generated the key on my Linux desktop and entered our novel-length passphrases right here. Attempting to restore them on a Solaris machine where they were being clipped down to 8 characters long would never work. Except, of course, for a$$word. That one was fine.

The rest was an exercise in high-speed coding and some entirely off-protocol file moving. We reconstructed the master key on my machine (all of our passphrases worked fine), copied the file to the Solaris-running cryptoserv, re-split it there (with very short passphrases), reconstructed it successfully, and PayPal was up and running again like nothing ever happened. 

By the time our unsuspecting colleagues rolled back into the office I was starting to doze on the floor of my cubicle and that was that. When someone asked me later that day why we took so long to bring the site back up, I’d simply respond with “eh, shoulda RTFM.” 

RTFM indeed. 

P.S. A few hours later, John, our General Counsel, stopped by my cubicle to ask me something. The day before I apparently gave him a sealed envelope and asked him to store it in his safe for 24 hours without explaining myself. He wanted to know what to do with it now that 24 hours have passed. 

Ha. I forgot all about it, but in a bout of “what if it doesn’t work” paranoia, I printed out the base64-encoded master key when we had generated it the night before, stuffed it into an envelope, and gave it to John for safekeeping. We shredded it together without opening and laughed about what would have never actually been a company-ending event. 

P.P.S. If you are thinking of all the ways this whole SSS design is horribly insecure (it had some real flaws for sure) and plan to poke around PayPal to see if it might still be there, don’t. While it served us well for a few years, this was the very first thing eBay required us to turn off after the acquisition. Pretty sure it’s back to a single passphrase now. 

Notes:

1: a member of Chicagoland sci-fi fan community let me know that the original news of our move to the US was delivered to them via a posted letter, snail mail, not FidoNet email! 

[painonthebrain]

Sunshine

Whumptober Day 1: [Alt. prompt] - Forgotten

Content: BBU, pet whump, institutionalized slavery, memory loss, dehumanization

Just as much as they’re looking for potential buyers, WRU is always looking for new applicants. They hire PR, graphic designers and skilled writers to fill pamphlets with sunny descriptions of a life spent with no more responsibilities, they bend over backwards to make the life of a pet sound enticing beyond comparison.

Their trainees and pets are happy, living in euphoria, freed by their servitude. Never do they have to think of what ails them, never do they have to remember what’s hurt them before. A life of perfect contentment lies within the WRU facilities, waiting for those who feel called to it to enter.

Yet another person has fallen for that narrative.

It takes as little as putting a pen to paper and writing his name to make it so. The cursive script comes out in two simple strokes and the deep blue ink comes out smooth. It’s the last he’ll ever see of his name from then on — a scribbly blue mess of botched cursive.

He savors it, slightly melancholy because it really is a nice name. It has a ring to it. But he supposes it was never truly meant for him.

Next to it is a number.

656492.

He hands over the contract, and the person on the other side of the desk sets it aside. They regard him carefully, giving the papers a once-over to make sure everything is signed. (Consent is extremely important to the WRU, after all.)

“Okay, looks like everything is in order.” They tell him. “We’ll have you escorted to your new living quarters soon.”

He nods in response, playing with his hands in his lap. Waiting. Expectant.

The person at the desk notices, and gently, they smile at him.

“It’ll be fine,” they assure him. “You’re in good hands.”

He nods, noticing the way their smile doesn’t reach their eyes. “I know I am.”

492 can’t remember it now.

His name.

It goes forgotten, like so many other things he’s slowly started to lose hold of. His family, his home, what his face looks like… it’s all crumbling to bits.

He reaches for the memory, the feel of the word on his lips, muscle memory from a lifetime of owning it — but he can’t decipher it. His lips form the name, just barely, and his head throbs, unhappy with the strain it takes just to reach into the depths of his head to find nothing.

What his handlers call him aren’t names.

Trainee. 492. You.

Blondie. Pet. Dumbass.

It’s a disservice to his past self, he thinks. Not only enduring the suffering of losing himself but also calling himself these stupid numbers in his head – as if he’s too empty and blank for anything more.

Though maybe his past self would agree that he deserves to be reduced to this. That this is the price to pay for an “out.”

Some escape this is – endlessly trapped inside a cell.

He yearns for the sun.

Won’t someone take him out to let the warm rays grace his face? To bask in the warmth, let him take shelter away from the icy, pallid light within his cell?

Then it comes to him in a revelation, the feeling like divine knowledge touching him – Sunshine. The name has a luminous quality to it, light and wonderful against the sheer walls of his cell and the nacreous lights above.

… That’s his name. Sunshine.

It tastes like warmth on his tongue, it feels like a prayer, something forbidden and good. It reminds him of how the old one felt. Right.

He’d asked about names once. If handlers could actually remember all those strings of numbers. It had to have been only a few days into his training – Handler Riley stared at him with a funny look, a tiny little smile that bent lopsided; strange, twisted humor dripping from his voice as he spoke. 492 – no, Sunshine – had searched his eyes, seeking an answer to his question. Handler Riley spoke smoothly, his eyes never leaving Sunshine’s as he responded.

“You will receive a name once you deserve one.”

Which is why he’ll never tell a single soul.

@whumptober-archive @whumptober

[ukyou-kuonji]

Okay, it's been several months and it's finally time for me to post my thoughts on the Ranma 1/2 anime remake. I didn't say anything on this earlier because I was in some stressful real life situations and getting online and seeing everything made online not as much of an escape for a bit, but it's been a while, I've processed stuff, and I'm ready to do this.

Previously, when the first of the Takahashi remakes came out (Yashahime in 2020), I speculated that of all Takahashi series, Ranma 1/2 is both the one I love most and the one I least wanted to see a remake of. For the most part, I stand by this opinion.

I love the series deeply, it's meant so much to me and so many others. It expressed complicated feelings many of us felt with humor and heart. However, I worry for it's ability to translate to the 20s well. Most concerning is the blatant racism which is inextricable from the way many Chinese characters are presented. The constant sexual assault jokes are another issue. Jokes of these two types were never funny to begin with, and permeate the series. I am not going to defend either of these elements.

As everyone knows, there are also homophobic and more often transphobic jokes are interwoven with the core of the series and are the source of much of the humor, and I do think these jokes stem from a more complicated intention and portrayal. When I (and presumably others) found this series as a kid, it resonated with me for the way it depicted a whole host of characters struggling with fitting into heteronormative society, such as Ranma, Akane, Ukyo, and even Ryoga at times. It portrayed their struggles with genuine empathy. There are many characters in the series who are straight up sexist/homophobic/transphobic. However, there are an equal number of struggling queer characters, as stated above. These individuals are both queer AND sexist/homophobic/transphobic, most of them are deeply closeted or in denial, and none of them have a vocabulary to describe their feelings on matters of gender/sexuality. It is exactly this aspect which allowed the series to resonated with viewers in the 80s/90s.

I do think Ranma 1/2 made some interesting statements about internalized hatred/phobias, overcoming them, and acceptance, but now, in a time where many people at least have access to a vocabulary, I doubt the ability of the heart of the series to resonate with modern viewers. Not that these problems have gone away, but the cultural language we use to understand them have changed a lot, and the way we approach deviance from the norm (heck, what we consider the norm) has changed incredibly from the 80s.

The slapstick form of the series works alongside the characterization. for every moment it asks the viewer to empathize, the series holds the possibility of a gag over the viewers head. This self-denying form alongside self denying characters work to give the viewers and characters plausible deniability, all while exploring new definitions of gender and self in society. This is what allowed the series to even air in an era where the mere mention of lesbians meant it's competitor (Sailor Moon) had to be retooled for American audiences. The complicated and hypocritical characters and set ups are what made the series so important for me and many others when it first aired. Everyone is part of this system, and can conform in some ways and can't hide how they are unable to in others. That is why I love this series. This is also what makes this series bad "representation" in 2024. It's goal never was representation, and in a world with such a different relationship to queerness, and public queerness, the themes may not resonate with younger viewers.

Of course, there's also the additional problem with the longer the manga ran, the more it leant into genuine sexism/homophobia/transphobia, which of course complicates everything I've said above.

TLDR: I love this series, but I don't think that a 2024 version will be good, necessary, nor wanted. Ranma 1/2 is a product of it's time, and I love it, but keep me out of the discourse.

[loveaquariuslove]

Nerdy Prudes Must Die Song Ranking starting from the worst to best

Just for once-now my problem with this song is that they are trying to replicate Working Boys but the reason Working Boys worked was that it came out of nowhere and you weren't expecting it but if you do a number like that every show it gets tedious and your wanting to get back to the plot but it does add to Ruth's character development so I'll give it points in that regard

Hatchettown-honestly I always found this song kind of pointless

If I loved you-this song when I listen to it always sound musically out of place but other then that I honestly forget about it

Cool as I think i am-this song is passable but nothing about it clicked for me but I have no strong feelings about it

Go Go Nighthawks-this song isn't that good but the humor of it with all of them celebrating and the fuck clivesdale part of it puts it above the rest

Literal monster-this song isn't that good but that last part with Max singing is so good

Bully the Bully-this song is not that good and I find the lyrics cringy but Bury the Bully adds to it that I'll explain to it when we get to that song

The best of you-this song is honestly forgettable and just like if I loved you it sounds out of place but the fakeout with that and dirty dudes must die adds to that song

Cool as I think i am reprise-this song is this high up only because of the verse "your not as cool as you think you but your smart as I know you are" which is so good '

The Summoning-I don't think this should count as a song but some people do but the lyrics are so catchy it makes up for it

Bury the Bully-you see if this song existed without Bully the Bully it wouldn't be as funny so it raises its ranking

Nerdy Prudes must die-this song is so good its just the others are even better

Dirty Girl-so so good I honestly don't know why people find this song uncomfortable

High school is killing me-everything about this song the only reason its not number 1 is all the talking bits in the middle this is a musical sing everything

Dirty dudes must die-everything about this song is so good the fake out with the best of you where you think its the ending Angela going insane all of it is so good no notes

[tricktster]

How many followers have you gained from your Boyfriend Makes Me Beans post?

after like maintaining a presence on this dumb website for more than a decade now?

after starting this blog as an alt for a weird side project idea i had where maybe I could get donations for writing fanfic about a popular media entity, and then, against all odds, building a relatively respectable tumblr following through the herculean task of writing a 495k word erotic fanfic about sans fucking undertale?

after finishing the above referenced fic and then somehow successfully pivoting this ship into a general humor blog where i’ve now spent years posting mostly original content about funny and/or cool stuff i’ve done or witnessed, occasionally getting the formula just right so a post would get big numbers overnight, continuing to gradually but steadily gain followers all the way?

to answer your question, my Boyfriend Makes Me Beans post, my recent deviation from my established formula, the one and only 100% cute and sappy thing about my life i’ve ever written, the lone story where I am categorically not the person doing the funny thing, the singular post where my character is a passive entity while my romantic interest gets the spotlight and the whole thing absolutely flunks the Bechdel test to high heaven

i have gotten an infuriating number of followers from that post

[bitchy-rakdos-enchanter]

Fuck it, we bored.

The About Me Pinned Post

Before anything else, this is a pseudo-gimmicky in-character blog as a Rakdos Cultist so expect crude language/humor and discussions of violence ranging from petty mischief to murder and torture.

The Woman that isn't The Cultist

I don't think my name really matters so... deal.

I am a woman in my early thirties, my pronouns being she/her. I am queer, but not queer as in "funny," queer as in "fuck you." I am white and well aware of the privileges that come with that despite being in a minority community of my own. I am a simple creature not particularly given to higher thought but I have my morals and a clear understanding of what is right and what is wrong.

Bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, TERFs, SWERFs, and any other waste of human flesh even tangentially related to the Fascist Right can get fucked and cry about it. You should be fucking thankful that I'm not in charge of what happens to you. And if you want to come at me with the "BuT ThAT jUSt MAkEs yoU aS baD As ThEm!" go fuck yourself and save me the time of needing to block you, you fucking lapdog.

On Lighter Topics:

I like to think of myself as a writer. I've engaged in the hobby off and on for roughly the last twenty years but in the last seven or so I have made a serious attempt at making it as an author. I have a completed third draft of a full novel that I would like to go over once more before maybe contacting an editor and finding a publisher. Motivation is hard, though. Outside of the novel, I have a number of in-progress and/or abandoned side projects that may or may not get resurrected/completed/abandoned at a later date.

I am hesitant to use the words "nerd" and "gamer" and the like because so many of those words have been poisoned but I am those things. I am a long-time lover of fantasy novels, RPGs, tabletop games, and video games in general. Currently deep in the Warframe grind (I am so sick of hunting Void Angels but I need those pinions) and eagerly awaiting the release of Monster Hunter Wilds next year.

I consider myself something of a music addict. Generally whatever I am doing, music is playing. It helps keep me out of my head. Generally speaking if it catches my ear then I'm fine with it but I prefer things that are more complex and dynamic to better entertain the ear. But above all, I am a metalhead that prefers the more extreme subgenres like Melodeath, Deathcore, Grind, and Slam.

There was a time where I would have considered myself as "goth" for my primarily black wardrobe, a love of spooky things, and a crippling addiction to horror movies but I've learned recently that if you don't listen to the same ten bands that all sound the same from the late seventies and early eighties then you aren't a real goth. Fine by me, I'd rather not associate with stuffy assholes in a circlejerk.

And now, I have no idea how to end this.

[tomatoluvr69]

yayyyyy @sonic-fizz tagged me to answer these 15 questions this is so old web core slayyyyyyyyyyyyyy love it thx <3

1. are you named after anyone

eh i was named after a grandparent in a slapdash way. like they just chopped off half the name and called it a day...

2. when was the last time you cried?

literally probably like 24-48 hours ago in the car thinking about how doomed i am (this is not true.). or maybe it was reading a sad article...i don't know. I tear up a lot but full on sobbing bawling was in mid-Dec and a more sustained sniffle crying was when i was hungover and miserable about my tortured loneliness and doom for the future on new year's day lol

3. do you have kids?

omg...no...the microplastics in my womb and doom in my genome and also i'm broke and single and american

4. what sports do you play/have played?

i swim but it's like in the way that other ppl take walks around the neighborhood a few times a week. sports were so fucking abysmal for me growing up that i feel i am unlikely to ever return

5. do you use sarcasm?

occasionally...i've grown out of it for the most part though. there are better ways to be funny in a lot of situations...i am silly goofy mostly, or use observational humor and wacky metaphors etc

6. what is the first thing you notice about people?

i'd love to be like 'a warm smile :-)' but if i'm being totally honest i'm scanning their clothing/hairstyle/grooming etc to scan for anyone likely to judge me based on my failure to conform to gender and modern consumerism...which isn't fair to others, i know......but sometimes you just see someone in like salon highlights barrel curls full makeup suburban drip and you're like hmmm eeeeeek scary! I think this is a vestigial defense mechanism from my relentless failure to dress right and be liked growing up. need 2 keep an eye out for the freaks and geeks and allies you know (but i'm so lucky to be in circles where everyone is dressing androgynously, having full on body hair everywhere, no makeup is the norm rather than the exception, funky used clothes and practical work/outdoors gear is the norm, etc. ok i'm getting off track...). i also notice people's height relative to my own bc i'm a bit insecure about towering over some people even though i'm not that tall.... :-( this stuff says way more about me than about anyone else... :-( i will say though that i'm pretty good about ignoring these first readings and giving people a chance once i get to know them. this is just the knee jerk first impression stuff

7. what’s your eye colour?

pale blue/grey. sorry :-/

8. scary movies or happy endings?

i like SAD ENDINGS of LOVERS' DEATHS and UNREQUITED PASSIONS and FAILED DREAMS and SCARRED MEMORIES....

9. any talents?

nothing like above and beyond. but there's a number of things i'm pretty sufficient at without trying too hard which is nice i guess. gardening, cooking from scratch w/o recipes, stringing together a sentence or a laugh...

10. where were you born?

my beautiful steel city...kisses 2 her majesty.......

11. what are your hobbies?

swimming gardening fermenting cooking writing reading going to indie films with friends of discerning tastes attending potlucks oh and LAYING FACE DOWN IN MY BED.....

12. do you have any pets?

i wish :-( renter problems......

13. how tall are you?

5’11" or so i have not been to the doctor in so many years LOL....

14. favourite subject in school?

hated school but hated the humanities the least...i loved my filmmaking class in college the most probably

15. dream job?

MOVIE DIRECTOR...FAMOUS AUTEUR NOVELIST...HOMEMAKER...

I tag @fieryphrazes, @iwrotemrtambourineman, @chriselliottfanblog, and @chekovsphaser from my notes recently...and literally anyone who wants to and is bored you can say i tagged you. in fact i would love to read it i think tag games are so fun and i love to read them ok yay byeeee

[aetherceuse]

Adding Two Blog Rules

Followers, this is me being serious. In fact, this is my serious post. It's where I come to be serious. This post is the most serious post I can write. I thought about many, many posts. Hundreds of posts. It's possible I brain-stormed over a thousand posts, I honestly don't know. The specific number isn't as important as the understanding that of all the posts that I considered, this one is the most serious.

Okay, now that the gentle humor introduction has been used, this is a post about two rules that I have been thinking about for a few months now. There’s a lot of emotions that I could add to this, because it does matter a lot to me— but I’m going to be cut dry and straight forward instead, to save myself the time and energy.

Unprompted IC harassment, aggression, attacks, pranks and insults directed towards my muse, along with excessive crack posting sent to my ask box, is no longer going to be responded to. It is genuinely not fun for me to respond to when I am constantly receiving it, and 90% of the time, I have no idea how to respond to it in character.

I want to write serious content. Writing is my passion. It makes me legitimately sad and disappointed when the majority of my ask box is full of asks of the above mentioned behavior. I have tons of worldbuilding and lore, and when that gets overlooked, in favor of crack and the harassment and the insults, it also makes me feel— silly? And a little discouraged, as if I am putting in a ton of effort to research my character, and write headcanons, for no reason.

I’m really happy that I make people laugh— but I do not want all of my muses to be reduced to funny dashboard guys.

Of course, if I’m primarily writing serious content with somebody, and they send the occasional funny, there’s nothing wrong with that. It is the constant, repetitive sending of asks like this— when it is the only thing that is being sent to me by somebody, and the only form of IC interaction. I don’t want interaction just for the sake of interaction. Not every muse is going to mesh.

If you have a burning urge to jump into my ask box unprompted, and you have no idea what to send IC, I’d really prefer if you sent me questions about my headcanons, thoughts on my muse, or if you looked through my ask meme tag —> ;;memes <—- and sent me something from there.

2. Going forward, if you want to thread with me, you need to be willing to plot with me. I need the structure, and I need an overarching goal, in order to have motivation to write. Again, I want to write serious, meaningful content, it’s the type of writing that make me happy, and what I have fun with. I am no longer a young, 16 year old RPer with a lot of free time and energy; I used to be able to wing a lot of things, but I cannot do that anymore. I’m extremely busy, with very little free time to write, and I’d like to be able to spend that free time writing something enriching for me. This rule is very important, and is going to be followed strictly, so that I do not burn out, or get the ADHD paralysis that comes with having too many options.

These rules are not directed at anybody in particular. Please do not DM me to apologize or explain yourself if you feel as if these rules ARE directed at you specifically, because they are not; I’m laying down these boundaries so that I can have fun on my blogs, and not lose my muse.

[du9on9]

Thoughts on Season 2 of Good Omens

I’m writing this little post to explain why I’m so crazy because if you’ve been following my tweets for a few days, you’re probably wondering why this person is so crazy.

I am not an atheist, nor am I a theist. In general, I reserve the idea of God because I recognize that it is a very meaningless exercise. If I had to choose a strict position on God, I would follow the opinion of the recently deceased Jean-Luc Nancy.

“Theism and atheism are just metaphysical symmetrical presuppositions about existence.”

From this premise, I like the phrase “Good Omens” because I think the writers who created them are certainly showing the best humor that people living in a monotheistic-Christian culture are capable of. The Christian dichotomy of the world they created, good and bad, is just a symmetry premise, like the Nancy quote above. Whether a symmetrical premise necessarily establishes an antithesis requires a bit more thought, but in this worldview, there is a strange antithesis. And they express it as bureaucracy. This is a very funny point because by its very nature, bureaucracy is a necessary condition for conflict and a sufficient condition for cooperation. And season 2 completely fulfills this proposition. So bureaucracy is a pretty fun environment and premise to be in, where there is a symmetrical premise of good and bad.

In this symmetry, humans are either marginalized or excluded. And there is an angel, and a former angel, who is confused between these symmetries. Two beings who see the symmetrical premise as a matter of choice…

The reason I thought this series was so unique is because it really speaks to the isolation we’ve been through over the last few years, and how it’s affected people (and why the hell we’ve been so understaffed). From the people who couldn’t pay their rent because the lockdown had just been lifted, to the hellish (dental) masks they wore in case they looked grotesque to others, to the relentless set photography that props up the series, to the actors who were willing to put in the work. I thought it was a (rather blatant) satire like Don’t Look Up until about halfway through (despite the presence of the final sequence in S2E6, all of these attempts stand up pretty well). As I said above, the series uses the symmetrical premise of the time-honored Christian tradition and the entanglement of “bureaucracy” in our reality to create a narrative, which makes it an appropriate series to show the situation and tragedy of our inevitable (or self-imposed) “isolation”. At least, that’s how I felt halfway through.

In the past few years, despite the harshness of the environment, there have been countless works, and the OTT industry has become a strange speciality. The rise of the dual (post-)apocalyptic genre (normal apocalypse is inevitably SF) has been interesting — it’s a great option that has a genre grammar that can be used to express the isolation we’re experiencing (and hopefully make it last), and people have found a lot of empathy and comfort in it. The kind of reassurance that we will be reunited and live and love again. (A number of factors lend themselves to thinking of Season 2 as sci-fi, and Season 1 was a quasi-apocalyptic show.) No other show, at least that I’ve seen, has made the pandemic so tangible.

Recent events aside, isolation is still a valid factor in the pandemic, and in that sense, love has always been effective. How many people and works have screamed over the years that it’s the sense of connection that can break the isolation (whether this message has worked in the real world… I’m not sure). Season 1, released in 2019, was about maximizing the benefits of “visualizing” the original. Everyone was delighted with the (belated) visualization of the Good Omens. At the time, I saw it as a tribute to the work and to the author who passed away. But now season 2 has taken a different turn (*not really a turn, more of a new opportunity to move away from the tribute aspect), pointing to a story about isolation, and a different look at what led to that isolation, which is probably why the pandemic was invoked.

I don’t know what Neil Gaiman intended (it’s a lie, and it’s painfully obvious), but I suspect he has a similar idea to mine: that what matters to humans is not whether there is a God or not, but how religion is practised. The result of the conventionality of religion is not (maybe) blindness, but “unawareness” itself. From beginning to end, (really fucking end!!!!!!) the work provides symmetry, and symmetry is derived from this symmetrical premise.

The repetition of the same group of figures (I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are surrogat of Aziraphael and Crowley), the angelic device of ‘Gabriel’ (ha-ha) and Beelzebub with his ‘face’ switched, the antics of God and Satan over God’s favorite ‘Job’, and the choice of Crowley and Aziraphael to stand between them. Or, the resurrectionist.

The superimposition of seemingly obvious elements all builds to a final moment: at a time when Crowley is feeling ashamed of Gabriel’s oblivion of his interest in the face-swapped Beelzebub (we don’t know why), the impact of the romance between the Archduke of Hell and Heaven’s Supreme fucking Arc Angel Gabriel on Crowley is enormous. This former angel, also the negligent demon was as cunning as a snake. While everyone else was looking on in disbelief at their respective bosses’ bluster, the clever snake saw a definite possibility. Just as they realize the possibility, the two humans they’ve been trying to unite come and whisper to them, “Speak”. There are countless self-replications of the same behavior in the series, such as this one. Like that moment when you fall unconditionally in love when you take shelter from the rain under the eaves, or the voice in Eden that whispered to you, “Desire”. Finally, demons can make up their minds. In fact, listening to the human story probably didn’t make Crowley the demon decide. It was the angel who helped him decide.

“They loved each other so much, and that love blinded them, that they never asked each other how they wanted to be loved.”

I think this is a euphemism because here I already think the power game (discussion) between them is never established in the first place. (More precisely, they can’t ask each other about love.) I re-watched the last sequence many times because I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe my eyes: the loose set-up, elements, and reasoning eventually culminate in the ultimate conflict. It’s not an Armageddon kind of conflict.

The conflict between the two manifests as “bureaucracy” because, by their very nature, they “must” be systems. They are born out of the symmetry premise, they are inevitably part of the system, and by virtue of being part of the system, they are pillars of the ‘structure’. The difference here goes back to the symmetry premise, as one is inherently and necessarily the defender of the system and the other is inherently and again, inherently the questioner/doubter of the system. As I said above, it’s not the presence or absence of a god that matters, but how religion conventionalizes people. In other words, whether or not we are able to recognize the structure itself, and whether or not we are able to detach from it and recognize the whole.

The ‘conventionalization’ of religion is not, strictly speaking, blindness, but ‘unconsciousness’. Therefore, the angel is a structure in itself, in its ‘unconscious’ and ‘unquestionable’ conventionality, and the ‘system’ that recognized the ‘structure’ has gone to hell. Therefore, the crawl is an anomalous system. And this relationship is the expression of bureaucracy. Including the union of the two. Those angels who were there when the pillars of structure created the universe, those angels who saw the possibilities of the universe and thought of other alternatives. But sadly, we know the truth: they are representations of bureaucracy itself, at the end of its symmetry.

When the angel hears Metatron’s offer, he is pleased. If he accepts Metatron’s offer, he can clear the name of the anomaly, the “doubting being,” and reinstate it as a “being” in its own right. That’s a level of authority, a conscious authority. All of this is again anomalous, and according to Metatron, Crowley, who disrupts the “order” with unnecessary questions, is unable to determine Aziraphael’s true intentions. This is true of Aziraphael as well. Whether or not Aziraphael can actually do it, it is not easy to change the structure within a bureaucracy represented by a structure. A witness to this is Crowley. But the ‘unsuspecting’ angel dares to change the structure because he loves him so much, and because that love can never be ‘wrong’. There is a wall here. An insurmountable wall between the seemingly romantic phrase “they love each other so much that it blinds them, so they never ask how they want to be loved”… Actually, this proposition is derived from the symmetry premise above. A wall between those who cannot be wrong and those who are made to be wrong. It is therefore (I dare say) inevitable that they should fall in love. For combinations of signs become ‘symbols’, and they manifest themselves in certain ‘omens’.

It was a very long story. The reason I have to tell this story so long is because I have seen possibilities in the faces of angels and in the faces of devils. If I had to name the greatest discovery or invention since the beginning of the history of video, I’d say it’s the close-up. Without having to explain the word close-up, the greatest thinkers have rallied around a concept that fills everyone’s minds. We can record human trembling!

After hearing Metatron’s proposal, the angel can’t contain his excitement. Metatron says, “Tell this story to your friends”. Aziraphael runs (emotionally). Crowley has been preparing the ‘confession’. Before the confession can take place, Aziraphael spits out an excited, almost confessional, praise of God. “Only, even nicer!” says Aziraphael in exultation. The matter of the unquestioning lottery. Was Crowley “conscious” of authority here? He asks again and again if The angel said no to Metatron’s offer.

We could have been us.

Crowley has a momentary flashback. Tears well up in his eyes… He’s in tears. At this point, Aziraphael falls into chaos. The close-up is an achievement, as we can see his fluttering pupils and quivering eyelids.

The confession is torn between disappointment and impossibility. Crowley ‘revisits’ the possibility that he has long sought but (ironically) never reached, only now, in the face of complete impossibility. Like their bosses, we can do it too. Like their bosses, we can do it too. Even when the love in front of him has taught him that ‘nothing lasts forever’, the desire never dies, but it surrenders (approaches) to a certain authority, an unconscious authority. All of Crowley’s acts, then, are trapped in a symmetry that can never be reconciled, even though he loves above all else. He cannot refute the angel who speaks of the impossible, so all he can say is ‘good luck’.

In fact, it is Aziraphael’s antithesis: ‘You don’t understand, no, I understand much better than you do.” I’m doing this for you, so why don’t you understand, and since there can be no such thing as angelic cries, I can only dismiss you as offended. Turning around and saying, “No nightingales,” Crowley puts an end to this love. There are no witnesses to the love, who witness the angels dining at the Ritz. (Despite my dislike of Michael Sheen, this scene is exquisite; it’s one of the few times we see Sheen’s face.) The angel’s confusion is beyond comprehension. Crowley’s “We could have been us” is a cry and a testimony. ‘We are both exceptional situations(conditions)’.

He grabs him by the scruff of the neck. Lips collide. We witness a clenched fist. The hands of an angel with nowhere to go. The lost hand cannot reach out to embrace its lover, because it is literally lost in all of this.

The lips part and the surprised angel says, “I forgive you.”

Forgive for what?

There’s a lot of thought going on here. Is it forgiveness for an unauthorized kiss? What makes forgiveness possible when there is nothing to forgive? If this constitutes forgiveness, what is next? But the devil says, “Don’t bother.” The devil stopped crying. There was the sound of a bell closing the bookshop door. Where the devil left off, the angel stares in surprise and confusion, breathing heavily and pursing his lips. His gaze is unfocused.

What I have seen, right here, is the beginning of sin. In other words, it’s the first anxiety that occurs to the angel. It is not merely a surprise, but the germination of another possibility. What is conceived here is the existence of a sexuality that was not possible (or necessary) for the angel. S��ren Kierkegaard once spoke of “anxiety as the result of sin without guilt”. Surprisingly, this scene echoes Kierkegaard’s theology and philosophy of religion, as it is the moment of conception of original sin beyond Eve. “With the sinful nature, sexuality was established. At that moment, human history begins (…) The presence of original sin is anxiety.”

You don’t need to know what this means. To be honest, I don’t. But the moment of original sin was so intense that these words immediately came to mind. This can’t have been the first time Crowley and Aziraphael had touched. Crowley was forced to “give up” being with his one and only love because of his prior understanding that he could not “be an angel,” and he could not be made to understand that point. The system cannot persuade the structure.

But always, ‘events’ create a series of exceptional circumstances. The pebble that fell on the surface of the water created a ripple, and this ripple was the event that awakened the angel’s sexuality. Thus, Crowley had never before touched the angel in such a way. By not transmitting the trembling itself as an overt object of desire, the angel was transmitting overt sexual desire, and upon realizing this, the angel (being an angel, of course) must ‘forgive’ Crowley, for it was the harboring of desire that caused original sin, and with this original sin, sexual desire was born, and it was this that pushed Adam and Eve out of the Garden. For six thousand years, the fire-fist Aziraphael, the gatekeeper of Eden, has worn original sin! Along with sexuality. No wonder the angel was surprised by the demon’s touch, not because it was daredevil, but because it felt so “sexual,” and with it the understanding of “sexuality.” But in order for original sin to be established here, it must be the result of something happening within the individual that is not recognized as sin. The ‘consequence of sin without a consciousness of sin’, and therefore the point at which this emotion that I perceive as an expression of an order that can do no wrong, cannot be sin, is at the same time the sign of anxiety in Aziraphael’s eyes that proves that this is lust.

I talked about close-ups earlier. From the bust shot to the close-up, we hear the angel’s breath after the demon exits. Shaky vision, lips pressed against fingertips. (Even if I don't like Michael Sheen that much… the actor’s set-up for this entire sequence was so subtle that I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed.)

The aforementioned symmetry premise is rippled. Derived from the symmetry premise, the two Signs were determined (already in Season 1) to be anomalies to each other, but at least the incumbent Angel probably didn’t expect his anomaly to elicit this level of anomalous emotion, because he was a bureaucratic good (and a Sign) who couldn’t truly be an anomaly. That the two signs that saw the expulsion of Adam and Eve would result in this ‘repetition’ thousands of years later was unthinkable for an angel, much less a ‘demon’ who already had a sinful nature. I mentioned self-repetition earlier, and this is also self-repetition. If there is a variable here, it is that the angel was already an anomaly, and only he himself was unaware of it (not religiousizing, customizing, or conscious of goodness), and only the devil, who already knew of the presence of the demiurge in goodness (‘You really are a bastard’), gave the angel original sin by giving him a kiss of lust, by transmitting its tremors with his breath. I thought to myself. The only one who knows what he’s doing here is Crowley, the questioner/doubter. The lowly devil, at the moment of renouncing love, leaves having instilled a minimum of corruption, and therefore only the possibility of corruption. There is no more evil than this.

The angel breathes in, hard and fast, and sweeps a hand across his startled chest. It’s hard to tell why he’s crying, because there are so many assumptions involved, but here’s what’s happening. The devil cried, the angel cried, only the nightingales didn’t, because there was an abandonment of not only the opposition of the symmetry premise but of symmetry itself, which is to say, there was an abandonment of the ‘possibility of events’.

Funnily enough, however, I saw new possibilities right here, because the conventionalization of religion was shaken by the very moment when two people who loved each other too much that they never asked each other how they wanted to be loved, especially after the angel first recognized individuality, were infused with sexuality and acquired a sense of guilt. Here, religion would indeed become possible. And it can give birth to a new order and discipline. And I’ve replayed this scene dozens of times over the past few days because it’s so compelling and amazing. I don’t actually think Crowley has given up on loving Aziraphael. (I really don’t.)

It’s not an abandonment of love, it’s an abandonment of symmetry.

So I take this as confirmation that the story will no longer be told without sexuality between these two. This was a clear departure from season one.

All of this lust, angst, and potential sinfulness aside, Gaiman and the show’s intentions are clear. It’s a “bureaucracy” critique. It’s a critique of bureaucracy. Therefore, the series does not shy away from the “pandemic. Well, I don’t really need to make any predictions about what season 3 will be like, but let’s do it anyway: Crowley will probably run away from the problem (assuming there is a problem). Aziraphael will confront the problem… but not solve it.

But there is always an alternative. Ah, it would be love. So Crowley will personally (slink) down to heaven to rescue the troubled (trapped) angel. Such are the actions of those whose existence is a possibility.

I don't think I've ever analyzed a sequence with this much excitement. I've watched the series over and over again in the four days I've been writing this. I've seen it in other languages, not my mother language, too. It reminded me of my past life when I sat through Kierkegaard's seminar and said I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Alas, Mr Kierkegaard, this is what it sounds like: the genesis of anxiety is clearly tied to guilt.

I honestly don't know why I wrote this post, but I wanted to excuse myself for having to buy and study the BL love scene. Honestly, I cried during the opening sequence of season 2. Because the stinging critique of 'a representative system' and 'bureaucracy', where the birth of the universe has been reduced to wallpaper for humanity, hurt. Here's the difference between Aziraphael and the other angels. For he recognizes that to doubt is to be 'risky', but the risk always includes 'adventure'.

The nameless angel at Aziraphael's side then could not love him 'yet', because he was (at least) then in a state of unconscious convention. But as a possibility, always as a seed, there was always the possibility of original sin, like Eve and Pandora in desire. The possibility of subversion.

Whether original sin is bad, whether guilt is bad, is another story, because, as the title of Good Omens suggests, all of these things (like the command to love because not to be sinful) are only premises, and humans live in the present.

("Anxiety is an expression of the fact that we are fully human.")

There are a lot of stories I wanted to tell but didn't. In fact, Gabriel and Beelzebub are the play's most important devices: they're the driving force behind the story, they're proof that their respective factions require cooperation, and they're Good Omens.

There's also the story of Nina and Maggie. They've been tossed around between the angel and demon, but because they're human, they're also descendants of Eve, and so they've learned desire from the beginning of time. They throw stones back at the one who awakens their desire, causing ripples. These are also Good Omens.

I didn't even tell the story of Metatron. Angels are better than anyone at emulating human emotions the higher up they get, and they're also better at erasing that humanity. I'd like to talk more about this point another time.

As I said at the outset, I'm neither a theist nor an atheist; I'm not ignorant of Christianity, but I know very little about it, and I'm sure I'll get a lot wrong, so bear with me. Thank you for reading this long post.

**English is not my primary language, so there will be a lot of errors, so please forgive me.

[aokuro-san]

Recommending fanfics (I): Complete Fanfics

I've been trying since yesterday to make an entry to recommend fanfics. In general I like to read fanfics x reader (or with the inclusion of reader) because I enjoy imagining that I am inside the story, however, you will see that there are some that I did not take them that way and even so I love them. 

I hope you like it!

                       Part 1: Complete fanfics!

Énoument, by LadysDaze 

                         (My hero academia) AO3

A fanfic about a girl whose gift is to travel through time... after a horrible death that is repeated over and over again.

As you can see, it wasn't a coincidence that I got hooked on TokRev, it was a matter of time, haha

However, despite the fact that the literary quality of this fanfic is unbeatable, what really sets it apart from the others is that it is written as an otome game. How do you hear it! It introduces us to the protagonist, her relationships with other characters, etc. in about fifteen introductory chapters and, from there, the author creates several possible paths for the romantic story that she wants to be born between her and the available boys (well, and girl!). So, as you can see, it's a very special reading in this world (at least I haven't found anything like it finished, at least), and that's why I recommend it.

Costumes and Romances, by Lisa_Lisa 

                         (One Piece) AO3 and Wattpad

In this case, the story IS 100% ROMANTIC and focuses on a young woman with an impossible love for her boss who, in turn, falls in love with a man. A Cyrano-esque masochist, she helps him find true love while she develops, to her surprise, feelings for said boss's brother. A brother with dangerous businesses involved that, at times, colors this story with things more typical of a thriller... However, we also have tons of humor and a quite CANON vision of the One Piece characters within a simple work, but effective. And that's why I recommend it.

the eternal matinee (no more showings), by animepseud (multipurpose room)

                        (My hero academia) AO3

This is one of the most recent fanfics I was able to read (because he was a bit plof in that sense) and, what a gem! The romance is present, sure, but not in a way that it could be in the previous work. What is important here is the evolution of both protagonists: on the one hand, Izuku Midoriya, who now that he is the number 1 hero sees that his life has been reduced to that, to be Deku, and cannot abandon his role under almost any circumstances, because people's expectations are at stake along with his own career. And on the other is the protagonist, a girl her age who hates heroes and is being harassed not only by some of them, but by a mysterious criminal who will reunite her with the male protagonist. The author is in charge of dedicating a chapter to each one so that we can see the perspective of both and how they treat their relationship until the end. A fanfic that hooks from the beginning and that, at least, I could not leave until I finished it. Highly recommended!

Sex is a learning, even for shitheads, by Bragi 

                          (My hero academia) AO3 and Wattpad

This fanfic has always been one of my favorites and it couldn't be missing from the recommended list! And it is that we have the great Bakugo debating -as a good teenager- how to have relations for the first time with his girlfriend, a very nice and funny girl, who seems to be the only one capable of putting up with it, haha, and from there we will continue his discovery of sex and sexuality. An incredibly well-handled discovery, strangely realistic within its own context, and quite humorous, knowing how to get serious when it's convenient.

If you like series like Big Mouth, you definitely have to give it a try.

Echoes in the Darkness, by Marguaery 

                              (Haikyuu!!) AO3

And finally within the complete fanfics, we have this marvel. A dark story full of gray characters within gangs and/or mafias that, as always, fight to be above others. Here the protagonist is a contract killer with a traumatic past and present from which she has given up trying to escape... At least until the young Tobio Kageyama crosses her life and things start to get even worse.

If you read "Echoes in the Darkness" rest assured that you will not find a story with fluff. There are activation warnings all over the place and if you're sensitive I really don't recommend it. But, yes, if you go inside, it is rare that you can forget it! Because it's worth every fucking second of your time. And the less you know why, the better it will taste once you finish it.

And here for today! I hope I have encouraged you to read them, see you! 🤗

[rainintheevening]

For Broken Constellations: 12, 14, 20, 24

I want you to know that I was seriously tempted to ask for number 1 but refrained.

From these asks.

12 - What's your favorite line from this fic?

But then Love spoke.

(Because of that BUT. But holds so much possibility, it is the turning point, the change in the story. But then! And Love. It is Love that changes everything; Love that conquers fear, pride, anger. Love speaking, calling our names. It is Love that everything turns on. Four words, and Hope is born.)

14 - Write a little snippet set in this verse, but with a character you haven't used so far. (Or if you've used everyone, one you haven't utilized much.)

Sorry, this turned into part of a scene. Featuring Squatch! My beloved little Bothan, and maybe my fave OC ever.

Enn was already sitting cross-legged in his usual spot, dead centre in the cave mouth, shadow stretching behind him. Squatch smothered a yawn as he stepped out into the evening light, and gladly collapsed into his master’s lap, like an untidy heap of fur and limbs.

"Tired?"

Enn sounded mildly amused, and Squatch hastily straightened himself out.

No, he started to say, before he caught himself. A Jedi had to be honest. "A little," he admitted, and let himself relax against his master’s chest. He liked how big Enn was, it made him feel safe, as if he was a pup again, being held by Papa, even if Enn was a human.

Enn tilted his head to glance down at him, and smiled, making the two halves of the pale scar at the corner of his right eye crinkle together. "Ah, the little Bothan is a little tired."

"You're trying to be funny."

Enn snorted, bumped his chin against the top of Squatch's head. "One of these days you'll realise I am."

"Maybe."

Squatch didn't have the energy to continue the banter, and after a short silence, they both exhaled at the same moment.

Squatch felt Enn's chin settle on his head, before he wrapped both arms around Squatch. Squatch patted the gloved metal hand that rested over his stomach, the way he used to pat his mother's soft furry one.

The green grass rolled away into the valley, the stream bubbled softly, and the sun made everything soft and warm. Down by the mines they would be banking up the smelting fires, down in the village the lights would be lit. The green-tinted sky shaded down in front of them in yellow, orange, and red.

Enn said that where he grew up, on Tatooine, they had two suns, and therefore two sunsets. Squatch had never seen that before. He thought one was beautiful enough.

20 - Share THREE headcanons! But about different characters.

-Cal often reads memories of Anakin off of things in Obi-Wan’s quarters at the Temple.

-Squatch is left-handed, so Anakin ends up teaching him how to use a lightsaber in either hand.

-Once, when visiting Tatooine, Luke and Leia sneak off to hunt a Krayt dragon. Rex and Echo nearly get killed by said Krayt.

24 - Ramble about something you haven't gotten to talk about yet.

I am nuts about Squatch, okay? He's this little kid of a Bothan (furry and cuddly!) who shows up when Anakin is two millimeters above rock bottom, is entirely too pathetic for Anakin to not care (especially since he is trying to find his mother, whom he's been separated from for almost a year), and then becomes the one to catch Anakin when rock bottom caves through. For a time they are each the others primary reason to keep living.

Squatch is like 13 or 14, but parts of him are far older, and other parts far younger. His humor is dry, but he's a dreamer, and he loves colours. He's Force-sensitive and it's in trying to teach him the basics of understanding and harnessing that, that Anakin walks himself through the basics again, and starts to remember what being a Jedi is truly about.

It's because of Squatch that Anakin takes the name Enn Kenobi. Because he can't use his real name, he doesn't even feel like he has a name, but Squatch insists on knowing his name. (When Force Ghost Qui-Gon shows up, Squatch finds out Enn's real name, but he sticks with 'Enn'.)

They save each other. They breathe new life into each other. Qui-Gon might be Anakin’s guide for much of the healing process, but for years Squatch is his touchstone. Squatch makes Anakin want to be better. To get better, to heal. Because this youngling needs a master, and a good one.

Anakin is Squatch's protector, his teacher, but also his friend. Squatch saw his father killed, and has lost his sister and mother, so he needs a parent, and he latches onto Anakin like a barnacle. He sees Anakin’s thoroughly messed up state of mind, and it doesn't make him less in Squatch's eyes. It just makes Squatch care about him even more.

They're both suicidal when they meet, that's the thing. And then they both decide the other should live. So they balance each other out, until they know they want to live themselves.

And then they build a starship together, from the ground up, and they run together. A couple space nomad Jedi, doing good, finding kids to send to the Temple, keeping ears and eyes out for any of Squatch's missing family. Learning from each other, chasing stars, Anakin seeing the galaxy anew through Squatch's eyes, Squatch seeing more than he had ever dreamed.

Years later, when they finally see each other again, they can look at their families, and be glad they survived, be grateful that they saved each other, be glad that they chose life.

I will go on at length about them when I write the dang fic. I love them so much. They really are the Tony and Peter of Broken Constellations. No surprise there.

[fredalan]

Michael Cuscuna by Jimmy Katz

Michael Cuscuna R.I.P. 1948-2024

Our fantastic friend, then client, Michael Cuscuna, record producer/historian extraordinaire and co-founder of Mosaic Records, passed away on April 19, 2024. Both of us –Alan and Fred– wrote remembrances that we’re reposting here.

.....

Michael Cuscuna by Thomas Staudter

I knew the voice of Michael Cuscuna before I ever met the man. Growing up in an area of New Jersey where we could pull in both New York and Philadelphia stations, I would listen to him DJ at WMMR out of Philly. He had a quintessential FM DJ voice — soft-spoken, intimate, gravelly, authoritative. He didn’t yammer on, but I remember he was clever and his sense of humor was dry as a bone. He played a mix of progressive rock and some things that clung to the precipice of musical genres.  

Years later our paths merged. I started seeing his name on the backs of albums I’d play on my college jazz radio show — now I was the DJ, and he had become a prolific producer, supervising dates for a diverse list of artists, including many dedicated to the avant garde. He also produced for Bonnie Raitt and other groundbreaking musicians. I am searching my memory in vain to recall how we became connected, but he was also creating a monthly promo disk sent to radio stations by Crawdaddy Magazine and I became his producer, using the free facilities of the college station to record and edit. He would collect the interview tapes from the magazine’s feature writers, I would edit them into a coherent radio show, then he would come in and record his host segments. Out of that association, I started writing reviews for Crawdaddy of new jazz releases. He was as wickedly funny in person as I remembered him on the radio. I was a little in awe of his extraordinary knowledge of music — an artist’s historical significance, how a musician’s style linked that person to the artists that came before and after, and why certain artists deserved more recognition than they had received by the public. He turned me onto a lot of music. I think we did the show for a couple of years.   

More time passed, and Michael came into my life again through my partner at our media advertising agency, Fred/Alan. By now, Michael had established himself as an important compiler of jazz reissues that went above and beyond what was typical at the time. Starting with Blue Note Records, but ultimately including the libraries of other labels, he’d go into the vaults and unearth the unreleased sides and alternate takes and place them alongside the more well-known songs. His two-fer series for Blue Note was particularly noteworthy. On the back of that success, he and a former Blue Note executive named Charlie Lourie created Mosaic Records. Their concept was to do numbered, limited editions in luxurious box sets aimed at the collector market. Initially vinyl only, they switched to CDs when that was the prevailing release format. The boxes were gorgeous, each with a booklet filled with photos, an essay by a prominent jazz historian, and absolutely accurate discographical information. They specialized in “complete” collections depending on the frame they decided was relevant. That frame might have been the three-day recording binge from 1957 by organist Jimmy Smith that resulted in enough material for three CDs, the unreleased complete recordings of Charlie Parker’s live solos recorded by Dean Benedetti, or the complete Capitol recordings of the Nat King Cole trio, a box that weighed-in at 18 CDs. They were sold only through the mail, direct to consumers. But they weren’t reaching the market and needed help. In an earlier era, my partner Fred Seibert had attached himself to Michael to learn as much as he could about producing records. Knowing the two of us, Michael asked if we could come up with a direct marketing campaign. In our typically arrogant belief that we knew how to do almost anything or could figure it out, we said yes. 

We began producing a catalog that was mailed out to jazz enthusiasts, slowing building a list of devoted listeners and buyers. My job was to write that catalog. We dissolved the advertising agency in 1992, and mailed catalogs gave way to internet promotion, but I continued writing the sales copy for each release, save one or two that I didn’t do for reasons lost to time. I just wrote one last month for an upcoming set featuring vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.  

I developed a format for my essays. I started with some thesis about why that artist deserved more recognition, or why the music from that era was crucially important — in other words, why you absolutely had to own that collection. I segued into a couple paragraphs of biography, followed by a few paragraphs where I singled-out important tracks or tried to convey in words the feeling, the sound, the artistry of the musician. I wrapped it up with more “don’t delay” language. In all those years, each and every time I approached a new assignment I had two thoughts crowding my mind — will Michael agree with my thesis? Will Michael take issue with the way I chose to describe the music? Each package gave me an opportunity to do a deep dive into the music, but I knew I didn’t have Michael’s personal connection to many of the artists, or his historian’s perspective on the music. And by the way, he was himself a damn good writer. It never stopped thrilling me when he’d send back an email merely correcting a calendar date, or the number of unreleased tracks, with a message that he thought it was otherwise perfect. More than anything I wanted to impress and satisfy Michael. I was alway so happy that I could.  

I think they had done four releases when we got involved in 1984. The company is closing in on 200 box sets. I can’t believe it’s been a 40-year association. 

We lost Charlie more than 20 years ago. This weekend, Michael passed after a long illness. I will miss his husky laugh, his personal stories about the musicians we both obsessed over, and the gratitude he expressed each time I turned in an assignment. 

To many, his name was a name on the back of an album jacket. To those of us who knew him, we know him as someone who single-handedly rescued the Blue Note archive and other treasures from oblivion, who introduced us to overlooked artists such as saxophonist Tina Brooks, and who demanded we take a second look at music that was significant and mind-blowing. As a colleague, as a client, but mostly as a music lover, I am forever in his debt. My sympathies to the family of this enormously important figure in music. RIP Michael Cuscuna. 

–Alan Goodman (repost from Facebook) 

..... 

Michael Cuscuna, photograph by Jimmy Katz

Michael Cuscuna

Michael Cuscuna, one of my great inspirations and sometime collaborator, passed away this weekend (April 19, 2024) from cancer. Being a cancer survivor  last year myself, when someone I’ve known and worked with for over 50 years it hit particularly hard.

Blue Cuscuna: 1999 promotional sampler from Toshiba-EMI [Japan]

Michael has been the most consequential jazz record producer of the past half century, a man who had not only a passion, but the relentlessness necessary to will the entire history of the music into being. Don’t believe it? Check out the more than 2600 (!) of his credits on Discogs. Substantial and meaningful he might have been, but to me, he was a slightly older friend who was always there with a helping hand. Hopefully, I was able to hand something back on occasion. 

As I said when he answered “7 Questions” eight years ago: “I first encountered Michael as a college listener to his “freeform,” major station, radio show in New York, and was fanboy’d out when a mutual friend introduced us at [an] open rehearsal for [Carla Bley’s and Michael Mantler’s] Jazz Composer’s Orchestra at The Public Theater (MC has a photographic memory: “It was Roswell [Rudd]’s piece or Grachan [Moncur III]’s. You were darting nervously around the chairs with your uniform of the time – denim jean jacket, forgettable shirt and jeans.”) By 1972 or 73, he’d joined Atlantic Records as a producer, and since that was my career aspiration, I’d give him a call every once in awhile. He’d patiently always make time for my rambling and inane questions, and I never forgot his kindness to a drifting, unfocused, fellow traveler. 

“...patiently always make time for my rambling and inane questions...” says a lot about Michael. His raspy voice could sometimes seem brusque, but ask anyone and they will tell you that he always made time to talk. Especially about jazz. 

I desperately wanted to be a record producer and Michael was one of the first professionals I encountered. He had already produced my favorite Bonnie Raitt LP when somehow or other I bullied my way into his Atlantic Records office, where he was a mentee of the legendary Joel Dorn. Over the next few years, Michael was often amused at some of the creative decisions I made, but he was always supportive and even would sometimes ask me to make a gig when he couldn’t. When I spent a year living in LA, he invited me over to the studio while he was mining the history of Blue Note Records that would define his life for the next half century. I completely failed to understand what the great service to American culture he was about to unleash. Along with Blue Note executive Charlie Lourie, Michael’s research resulted in a series of double albums (”two-fers” in 70s speak), but little did the world know what was on Michael’s and Charlie’s minds.

The Cuscuna/Lourie Blue Note “Two-Fers” that ignited Mosaic Records

“I don’t think it’s generally understood just how imperiled the musical and visual archives of Blue Note Records were at one point, and just how heroically Michael stepped in to make sure this unparalleled American music survived for future generations. If you like jazz, you owe the man.” –Evan Haga 

(Joe Maita does a great interview about Michael's career here.) 

Fast forward a few years. The air went out of my record producing tires, I became the first creative director of MTV, I quit MTV and along with my partner Alan Goodman started the world’s first media “branding” agency. Leafing through DownBeat one day I saw an ad that started a new relationship with Michael that would last, on one level or another, for the rest of his life: the “mail order” jazz reissue label Mosaic Records. 

Charlie Lourie & Michael Cuscuna at Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival, Japan 1987. Photograph by Gary Vercelli / CapRadio Music

Long story short, in 1982 Michael returned my check for the first two Mosaic  releases with a note asking for some help. Initially, Mosaic wasn’t the sure fire, instant success Michael and Charlie had hoped for, did I have any ideas? I did, but no time to do anything other than make suggestions, we were busy trying to get our own shop off the ground. This cycle repeated itself for another couple of years when this time when Michael called he said Mosaic was on death’s door. Fred/Alan was in better shape, so Alan and I, on our summer vacation, came up with the first Mosaic “brochure,” convinced the guys we knew what we were doing (I’d read a few paragraphs in a direct mail book in a bookstore) and, with nothing to lose, Charlie and Michael took the plunge with us. Success! 42 years later, the former Fred/Alan and Frederator CFO at the helm, Alan and I always answer any call from Mosaic.

The first Mosaic Record box set 1983

There aren’t many people in the world like Michael Cuscuna. The world’s culture will miss him. I will miss him. Most of all, of course, his wife and children will miss him. 

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary75

11/25-26/2023

saturday - sunday

ate icecream, today. (funny valence to/with the word sunday above, i am now realizing, hours later).

i'm starting this entry earlier than usual because i have a thought regarding ai and the recent reading i've been doing, i guess, or algorithmic recs and content treadmills.

kristeva's subject in process, as in a subject that is renewed via negation, or the possibility of negation, to step outside the regular semantic structures, to follow the chain of expulsion, feels gently tethered to the situation we find ourselves in. not that she's an architect, but that years ago there was an answer or set of eyes on something that the positivist/transcendental west would try to engineer, stable selves that absorb our waste and turn them to data, logic, numbers which represent a logic of interpretation. given that she was writing regarding semiology, the algorithms and neural networks are caught in that simple, static, and censoring system of approaching signs/signification. but beyond the simplicity, i think i should emphasize that it does place all activity, lingual and sublingual, in a static situation, what's been expelled is resorbed by the spectacle, rather than pulsion transforming language and ways we read or communicate, mutating the texts, erotic experience transforming the subject in the impossibility of total absorption, we are instead instrumentalized by a system of pulsion which seeks no negative process, no process at all even, instead, the weighing of particular activities, time spent, everything read as language, and never questioned, the death of the meaning right there, perfectly questionable, but too mechanized to really do away with, and too useful by its ability to offer the semantic structures/discourses that reign over us, always situating these reading of our activities, interests, and words, as meaning something in particular. this leads to the exile she mentioned, i think. at least in how we interact with these environments, backdoors and silence are all that's open to us as a process by which we play freely with meaning, or not just meaning, language, semantic structures, images/what images can mean, ai create collages based on tags, image searching allows us only tags, all we have at our disposal is to recognize the tags as waste, play with that to see where the meaning/non-meaning could trail, self-direction being so difficult to maintain, it creates a loneliness among anyone who is not prone to being in the middle of things. discourse as it is now, not just in the theoretical sense but tied to it, an alienating factor for anyone who would like to make meaning of anything else, to see anything else, who approaches experience differently, or seeks to, any kind of heterology weighs too much, it can never be taken as a whole, and so it must be broken down to signs, static, real, no longer processual, no longer moving towards and from, no longer given over to pulsions, any onanistic drive even, self-pleasure an impossibility. thinking of humor now, it's all reference, self amusement and cruelty are too evident a waste-product, instead, we are now subject to media which climbs to great heights of spectacle, to tumble and fall, it must be something, there must be something, in a classical sense. play is off-limits, it must all be justified, immediate.

no surprise, that this situation of algorithms, of a stasis of potential, is one of extreme humanism. the human identity, the central subject being defined as human, and the particulars that this identification/signification represents. this is not to say that affecting (shallowly) inhumanity enables on an ability to be outside that order, if anything, the shallow affectations of inhumanity, are a base kind of humanism, the shape doesn't matter, it's all definition, sentience possessed and the enlightenment guiding hearts. humanism can propel itself, with these supposed 'nonhuman' technologies because it is, supposedly, being made to aid us in being human. being human, means a static definition re: the meaning, interpretation, and weighing of our acts and processes, and so what really seems to make any process revelatory, exciting, its re-invention, the questioning of the process, and re-birth from it, through its chora (it feels fun to say it such as that), or to be enabled in the chora, the dark space of negation, where the sign's meaning disappears, reappears, is reshaped manyfold, and through the multiplications and divisions, rather than ending with a synthesis, there is no end, only many things, an islet of supposed trash, connective indexes to be traced many times over again, reinvention and re-contextualization at all times not just possible, but undeniable and constant, we are not cut off from this so much as we are denied its existence, still feeling this process, and not seeing it occur, leads to a kind of constant, isolation and frustration. horses kicking at stalls for all time, mad to run in fields, not because of any nature, as the systems would imagine, but to see how long it would take to break our own legs, to see what intensity might mean in the sunlight and moonlight, and nursed to health or in throes of death, to pass through all things looking closely, witnessing these moments dissolve into the next thing or last thing, and the process of language in carrying it on wind, our urge to speak it, to hear echoes on cavern walls.

thinking of the inhuman now, a large part of my fascination with doll art is that it signals at the inhuman as i think it is, and thus i think what we really are. fragile and strange, these places between fantasy and that frailty, we are always near being play-things, but under the weight of the actual material world, subject to decay, and without that stuff of the ideal or transcendent occupying our insides, just dust and air and darker stuff (shadows or guts, in the world we live in, they are treated much the same, do not look there, you will not like what you see).

returning many hours later to this series of thoughts with this quote from the reading i am doing now, still kristeva, her points regarding the margins of recognized culture, and the polyvalence of the poetic, or even the carnivalesque here, is interesting when thinking on the methods by which meaning is created for these large language models, as they cannot be multi-determined i feel like, and they instead work as a codified web of values, so they connect to a great many things up to a point, a line is drawn in sand about how far you could take a meaning, which is interesting when reflecting on the current trends we see re: visual aesthetics. it is possible to have things which are strange, but wound nothing, go nowhere, i am not saying that people have become like the neural networks, but that like i said earlier, the systems of tagging prevent us from engaging with things farther. we are cut off, in broader society, we are pushed into the margins w/ meaning, we are exploring a vast black sea, if we are to want to explore anything. this brings to mind cixous and her points on the colonial and her tethering that to the feminine, the dual impulse of the phallic order, the enlightenment and positivist regimes, to colonize and lighten the "dark continents". what way better than to snuff them out of existence by total failure to recognize them as existing, or having ever existed at all, nothing can exceed the discourse because clusters of systems which recognize and allow, as they are made to do, will not recognize, and will not allow, certain kinds of playing. the imagination then, is snuffed.

not to be a total miserablist though, what i'm saying, or hoping to say, is that this is only a problem of not realizing that you can simply go there, follow a wrong image, write the wrong things, see where they lead, disquiet and defamiliarize, it is our principle tool. the art which sticks with many of us is that work which accomplishes those things. thinking even now of simple and relatively simple things like hotline miami have remained in people's minds, provided sustenance to, ultimately, pretty ugly and bad, static, kinds of art, because they at their core, are far stranger and go farther than people can really deal with easily. two strange millennial hipsters created something so of their time, that no one really realized. i suppose that is a critique you could level at their games, but on some level i think it also signals a success, not that they hid behind an aesthetic, but because it created something imaginary and new, a genuinely strange and almost totally, purely, vision, held in disgust and contempt, and people liked that, they embraced the abject. it is sad that all that came after, and that they helped sustain, was basically all synthwave slop, the possibility of disquiet disappearing almost entirely.

and back to these points re: """"ai""", this feels valuable to me as we're all essentially, if we are, in language and in words, and in sublingual/prelingual processes, working in things which can be related to text, as a process of living (and even greater in my case, and in maybe many people's cases, as i write, i suppose "seriously" in fiction and otherwise (even poetry (but i like to imagine my fiction carries a lot of strange characteristics (quite taken with poetic prose, i guess))), but everyone writes, especially now, given that we are constantly speaking via text now, but also, we are all subject to being written by these systems. our intertextuality is in a moment of great crisis/sensitivity, if we are to lay down and accept these terms, we would be written wholly, not just the categorical processes which tether us to static positions, but on a whole would/could close us off from processes which carry on, through things, i am fuzzy on terminology, i suppose, i feel great pulse towards using the term dialogic here but i am unsure, but it feels that if we surrender to what seems like a total inscribing that relies on the logic of chance/probability, say when choosing words, knowing what pixel to fill, or what you would like to see the most, and letting these things be true, we are prevented from access to other forms of logic, surrendered entirely to something that rather than even goes as far as to test other meanings, travels in a rather linear path. waste is offloaded into a sanitary process, where excess of time = time to be filled with what has been decided to be positive, to increase enjoyment, or so on, and as always, to extract as much from you as possible. just as well, this is a bourgeois and managerial vision of signs/signification we are subject to, one which pushes language along at the level it is taught, rather than felt. so we are left not knowing, or not being capable of free movement between texts which describe different logics, and we are not capable of wounding/attacking the system, the dirty and carnivalesque is where the pulsions to challenge this spectacle we are beneath seems most strong. it does feel profoundly erotic, as well, not in an i-am-so-turned-on-by-challenging-authority way, although i guess i cannot lie and say that this isn't there at all, but that it would require one to become debased in wider vision, by the culture which recognizes. bataille feels especially potent here, as do tiqqun and so on. i wonder if my imagination is ruled too greatly by the french, as of now.

here is kristeva quoting bakhtin:

here is a suehiro maruo illustration:

i feel rather strongly that he elucidates what the carnivalesque entails as a process, where many signs are taken, of history, of the immediate, mixed and spat back out. or here:

the sideshow freak, a carnival's spectacle, smashed into a regular girl, dual images play into/on eachother, the religious hand gestures, all is not in disarray, as bakhtin says the dialogic is not without "the logic of concrete semantic relationships" but it is also not the primary stuff from which it is collected, this is not a random image, but its associative process is one where the meaning occurs in many directions, in spurts (think now of richard hell saying: love comes in spurts (and now notice the face in the goat's horn, the one farthest left)).

and now a daisuke ichiba illustration:

i suppose here i am trying to put forth, as always with the philosophy/theory i read, the ways it can intersect with real life, as it is lived and perceived, that these processes are real, and that they amount to something, there are these interactions with/of meaning which we have a duty i suppose, to protect from a rather nihilistic and static system (capital, in its evolving state), that seeks to punish all the living anyone might do. living not the "human" and clean, upright process of ultimately transcending embodiment, as it is essentially imagined (bill gates so rich would like to rob human shit of its ability to disgust, and simply make it another source for water, rather than a reminder of desperation and something, when confronted with maybe having to do, knowing you are somewhere dark and strange, and you will carry a nightmare with you wherever you may go, he seeks to transcend limits by removing the limit experience totally, or all of wealth's mechanations to produce a life without burs, a painless and fine reality where everything is as it should be, what should be is all one is taught, possibility and process demolished (the struggle for something else, vague as it might be, disappears from imagination)) but the difficult and strange process, the one that puts us beside insects, not in being worth less than we imagine, but being able to eschew worth all together, and instead see that the sounds our throats produce are in odd harmony with cicadas when the come to the trees, and that the eerie sounds of urban environments, and the rotting parts, are part of what makes anything feel like we belong.

thinking on the horse metaphor i used, they seem to be on my mind because of the rodeo coming to town. i live near a field where they put all of the horses and bulls. i wonder if i'll take pics or not. i wonder mostly if it'll reveal where i live too much but, who is even looking. (i wrote this before putting in the image of that horse, with its guts out, funny how all of this returns back to itself).

now compelled to put photos of the sky, taken around when i was living w/ my gf at her mom's place in pseudo secret.

anyways i've finally gone and showered and had multiple thoughts to contribute to the above wall of text, i am trying to recall at least one now,

one thing occurring to me now is that i seem to privilege something like the prelingual/sublingual, somewhat at least, when in many ways i don't trust things like that entirely, but something has to be said about how they cleanly connect to the drives which lead one towards more figurative kinds of language in writing, to reach towards making metaphor a whole wing of images, spiraling, speaking of not just what it dances around, but the connections, as distant and near, a whole journey of experience, sat in the middle of something. but this was not the shower thought. or one of them.

i know one had to do with trying to find a concrete instantiation of what i am concerned with, but i think i got near enough to that when talking about the tagging systems, but another is obviously people wrapped up in content streams, ipad children, the exact median of signs/symbols, a total captive structure, it feels like. ya lit too, although it's not most people dealing with that. but since i feel like i covered it, it wasn't the pressing one.

from what i recall, it wasn't so kristeva-derived, not to say it wasn't from other reading, but i can't recall much about it, low definition hints, the sensation of water on my skin, back facing the shower's head, massaging my skin, humidity, the shower a mouth i sat in. but that's it. dark artifacted jpeg of a memory, i am sorry to lose the thought, hopefully it returns to me.

right, i think this is it, something to do with the other material processes that ai/neural networks take up, brought up by franco berardi, and crossing my mind sometimes, the fact that these are often put to military use, so beyond the way they might foreclose on negative possibility (negating the standard social logic we are ensnared in) it will act with very real consequence for this at times, there is a biopolitical dimension to this, the spectacle's overarching and total search for control.

this is all the definition that remains of this thought. it is now almost 6 am.

i hope tomorrow there are more thoughts on this, or maybe this reading gets put towards my other writing. that would be good.

anyway:

here's a fashion mag scan i found on flickr a while ago:

byebye!!!!!!

[wack-ashimself]

So, real quick, what the FUCK is 'White Noise' about?

It isn't weird to be weird. It has very detailed and specific purposes and points. What are they? I HAVE NO IDEA. It's so layered, open for interpretation, and satirical abstract that you do not know when it's trying to make a serious point or make a joke about a serious point (that we take too seriously).

It's German. SO fucking German. Sense of humor to timing to writing to fucking Hitler, German, and Germany being all kinds of focal points beyond reasoning. So either this was written by a German, for Germans, or...an american trying to do Germanic work. But it's German. What does that mean? Dry, on the nose humor (to the point if you can't tell if it's trying to be funny or bring a mirror to society). Also it does what every 'smart/witty' movie does: everybody is a fucking (well informed) genius, even the kids and by standers, and NO ONE BREATHS; they all have a cocked and loaded responses for ANYONE saying ANYTHING at anytime. BECAUSE THAT'S HOW NORMAL HUMANS OPERATE. This isn't necessarily German, but def European. And NY times asshole-ish.

Major Themes:

>Germany (in every way).

>Life, rebirth.

>Death and Entropy (GERMAN x 3).

>Programming people's minds.

>Purgatory (is a grocery store. I thought that was witty).

>Pride (and it harming you or your loved ones).

>Hope, faith, and mob mentality.

>Disasters that are impossible to avoid/be influenced by.

>Divorce, marriage, love, betrayal.

What were not major themes in any way:

>Holding the trucking company who caused the accident accountable.

>Holding the train company accountable for transporting unsafe amounts of toxic chemicals (never say to WHERE it was going either).

>Holding the government accountable for letting the above 2 get away with what they did.

Everyone is saying this is predictive programming, but I will tell you: this was an ART project. The accident and spill were more of a motivator to push the characters in the direction they were going, not a main focus of the themes. I felt like this was a movie, knowing it was a movie, seeing what they could get away with. I mean it starts with the entertainment value of car accidents in movies, and how we become numb to the reality of the violence and death of it all. And later, if an event/disaster doesn't harm enough people/the right people, the media (and in turn world) won't care about it.

THEN it ends with a WHOLE DANCE NUMBER thru the credits. That happened no where else in the movie, nor made sense compared to the rest of the movie.

So again: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF 'WHITE NOISE'?

It's not bad. It's good for what it is. But what exactly it is is....up for debate.

White Noise: 7.2/10. Worth the one time watch (and reading all the different background aesthetic choices you missed cuz the movie never stops with its' narratives).

ps-Best part? Probably one of the only undeniable 'that is def for comedic effect' parts of the movie (cuz again: you had no idea when it was funny or so on the nose real). He confronts his wife in the dark room by clicking on the light dramatically. But...it's unexpectedly way too bright, so he clicks it a few more times to adjust the setting, awkwardly. That was such an overdone trope, but done in a wholly new funny manner. Tho I am sure fucking family guy did it too at some point. They have no original ideas...

pps-with how it was written, acted, and overall done? This would have been a better stage play. 1000%. Few times would something be better live (and overacted). Sorry but super deep monologues (from more than one character)....aren't realistic, or regular, in a movie setting. Never feels...authentic. It feels staged. And that's where they should be...