#Reflex und Ritual

[techniktagebuch]

14. September 2023

Wertschätzungsterror abgeklemmt

Sicher freue ich mich über all die Leute, die mir seit Jahren auf diversen Kanälen zum Geburtstag gratulieren. Facebook ist ganz vorne dabei. LinkedIn und Xing folgen zahlenmäßig. Der Wertschätzungsterrorismus muss hinterher allerdings sozialadäquat abgearbeitet werden: Alle Glückwünsche sind dankbar zu quittieren. Entweder noch im Moment des Geschehens, dann tue ich über den ganzen wachen Tag nichts anderes als im Minutentakt Gratulationen zu liken und mit »Vielen Dank« zu kommentieren. Oder aber in einer konzertierten Aktion am Tag danach – eine undankbare, repetitive und bestenfalls per copy & paste automatisierbare Arbeit.

In diesem Jahr bereite ich meinen Geburtstag vor: Auf Facebook und Twitter stelle ich die Sichtbarkeit des Ehrentags schon vorher aus – allein, um Benachrichtigungen anderer zu vermeiden. Eigentlich ist mein Geburtstag aus Prinzip nicht geheim, weil die Kenntnis darum weder meinen Privatsphärebedarf beeinträchtigt noch ich Geburtstagen als vermeintlich guten geheimen Sicherheitsfragenantworten Vorschub leisten will. Ich will einfach nur nicht übermäßig beglückwünscht werden.

Am Morgen des Geburtstags dann die erste Benachrichtigung über LinkedIn – schnell wird auch da der Geburtstag abgeklemmt. Dann meldet sich der erste Gratulant über Xing. Ebenfalls verborgen. Jetzt kommt nichts mehr automatisiert. Dieser Geburtstag ist deutlich entspannter als zuvor. An Gratulationen mangelt es trotzdem nicht. Die, die eingehen, sind deutlich personalisierter als in den letzten Jahren. Die quantitative Verteilung ändert sich radikal: Auf Facebook gratulieren statt sonst Hunderte nur noch zwei Menschen, auf Twitter ebenfalls zwei, erstmals dabei ist Mastodon (1). Der Rest geht über Telefon, E-Mail und diverse Messenger-Dienste ein.

(Felix Neumann)

[gaswolkenwesen]

Plurale Welt

Das Gaswolkenwesen - Plurale Welt

Ein Bewusstseinsthriller in drei Ebenen

Dystopie / Science-Fiction

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Alles frisst.

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Der Mythos des Wahns ruft euch!

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Unter Blitzen geboren bahnen sich drei Neuronen ihren Weg durch das ewige Nichts. Estella, Kasha’aar und Spectre wachen auf in einer dystopischen Welt. Die Pluralen beherrschen ihr Land, eine fremdartige Spezies von Schwarmbewusstseinsformen. Schon in frühem Kindesalter wird an ihnen ein seltsames Ritual durchgeführt, welches ihren weiteren Weg vorherbestimmen soll. Estella kämpft mit der Verzweiflung als ein femininer Geist in einem sehr maskulinen Körper zu hausen, Kasha’aar bricht mit den Regeln und den Strukturen des Regimes, während Spectre alles beobachtet und seine Schlüsse daraus zieht. Bald sind sie sich einig darüber, dass hier irgendetwas im Argen liegt. Das Raumschiff des Starbound Kollektivs zieht vorbei an psychedelischen Sümpfen, führt zu entfernten Kriegen der Galaxie und flirtet mit dem Wahnsinn der Geister auf dem Weg. Gemeinsam nehmen es die Piloten auf mit glucksenden Hyänen, gefühlskalten Parasiten, dämonischen Mächten und der allgegenwärtigen Bedrohung durch den politischen Erzfeind schlechthin: Dem Einzelbewusstsein.

Anschnallen, bitte! Unnennbare Gedanken erwarten ihre Entdeckung!

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Ebene 01/03: Geburt

»Sie sind definitiv gefährlich, aber wir haben ein starkes Land. Unsere Armee und unsere Wehrkräfte beschützen uns, und hoffentlich werden wir eines Tages mit ihnen Frieden schließen können.« »Oder die verdammten Bastarde alle ausradieren«, kommentierte Kasha’aar ins Innere.

Ebene 01 ist wirklich sehr gut. Sie ist eine sehr sichere Ebene. Dort lauert nichts, dort ist alles in Ordnung. Dort gibt es keine Feinde. Auf Ebene 01 herrscht die aller höchste Sicherheitsstufe. Niemand muss sich hier irgendwelche Sorgen machen. Bitte entspannen Sie sich! Aber hüten Sie sich vor Ebene 03! Denn jeder weiß: Ebene 03 ist die böse Ebene!

Lesen! (530 Seiten) [.pdf 4.73MB]

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Ebene 02/03: Rebellion

»Nein, mal ernsthaft«, wandte sich Shane den Neuankömmlingen zu, »uns ist egal aus wie vielen ihr besteht, oder was eure Hintergrundgeschichte ist. Wir können hier keine Kleinen gebrauchen. Auch keine niedlichen Feen, keine kuscheligen Teddybären und keine glubschäugigen Irgendwas! Ist mir egal, ob das gegen eure politische Gesinnung geht. Wir brauchen hier wachsame Augen und schnelle Reflexe. Ich bin Shane, der da ist Oslo und da drüben liegt Jackson. Für mehr haben wir hier weder die Zeit, noch die…irgendwas einfach! Wir können uns hier nichts davon leisten, versteht ihr das? Das ist eigentlich kein Ort für Plurale. Wer hier nicht jederzeit alles mitkriegt, stirbt.«

Auf Ebene 02 herrscht Krieg. Es gilt erhöhte Explosionsgefahr. Bitte ziehen Sie Ihre Helme auf und achten Sie auf vermehrten Steinschlag! Gehen Sie keine Risiken ein und reden Sie mit niemandem! Auf Ebene 02 ist keinem zu trauen!

Lesen! (470 Seiten) [.pdf 4.00MB]

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Ebene 03/03: Böse

Ja, so waren sie, die Menschen. Schon früh wurde den meisten Kindern beigebracht sich nicht um ihre Umgebung zu kümmern. Dass es egal war, ob die lauten Töne die anderen Wartenden störten, insbesondere die Älteren unter ihnen. Dartagno war froh, dass er nicht so war. Er wartete still, bis er an der Reihe war.

Ebene 03 ist wirklich sehr gut. Sie ist eine sehr sichere Ebene. Dort lauert nichts, dort ist alles in Ordnung. Dort gibt es keine Feinde. Auf Ebene 03 herrscht die aller höchste Sicherheitsstufe. Niemand muss sich hier irgendwelche Sorgen machen. Bitte entspannen Sie sich! Aber hüten Sie sich vor Ebene 01! Denn jeder weiß: Ebene 01 ist die böse Ebene!

Lesen! (480 Seiten) [.pdf 4.55MB]

[z428]

Spätere Stunde, gleiche Rituale: Kaffee kochen. Fenster öffnen bis zum Anschlag, dem Nachmittag im Heimbüro neue Luft zu gönnen. Himmel blieb wolkig und weiß, gegenüber spielt Wind in einer Gardine vor dem Tisch, an dem junge Menschen seit dem Morgen in Bücher versunken sind. Irgendwo piept Elektronik - beeindruckend, die eigenen schnellen Reflexe bei Nachrichtentönen zu beobachten. Ein Haken, ein Strich auf der heutigen Liste: Dinge abschließen. Bevor die Zeit wieder schneller wird.

[soveryanon]

Reviewing time for MAG181!

- Little nice touch: the fact that time was passing normally inside of the house… immediately felt through the sound of the clock in the background, marking the passage of time:

(MAG180) SALESA: [SAD SIGH] [SILENCE BUT FOR CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] ANNABELLE: I did say this might happen. SALESA: You did, you diiid. Well… so much for my big reveal… Shame.

(MAG181) [CLICK–] [CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] [CLASSICAL MUSIC IS PLAYING; LOUIS SPOHR’S “SECHS DEUTSCHE LIEDER FÜR EINE SINGSTIMME, KLARINETTE UND KLAVIER, OP. 103: N°2 ZWIEGESANG”] [SOUNDS OF CROCKERY AND LIQUID BEING POURED] SALESA: Hmmm.

(I still have the reflex of associating the sound of a ticking clock with Elias’s office, so I was expecting Big Talk from the get-go! Aaah, I wonder if we’ll “hear” Elias’s office again, before the end…)

As they discussed, time was quantifiable again, existing outside of Jon&Martin (even when they were sleeping), not solely as events succeeding to each other. … On the other hand: it’s concerning that the tape’s case number was still “########-21”: time passes and is quantifiable on a day-to-day basis, Martin was able to conclude that it was daytime thanks to the light, but there was still no date inside of the house. It’s a “little bubble” of normalcy and time, but still existing in the middle of a chaos.

- In the same vein as last episode it was also neat how we could already understand that this space was operating differently, since Jon&Martin needed to physically take care of themselves again:

(MAG180) SALESA: Ah, well. We can talk after they’ve slept, I suppose. Urgh! And had a bath. And some food. No rush. [SOUNDS OF CROCKERY MOVING] We have all the time in the world.

(MAG181) [CLICK–] [CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] […] SALESA: Come in! Did you sleep well? Have you had something to eat? Annabelle said she’d shown you the pantry? [SALESA CEASES THE MUSIC] ARCHIVIST: [UNCOMFORTABLE] I, er… We… slept. I, I don’t know… H–how long’s it been? SALESA: About seventy-one hours by my clock. […] Come on, sit down, have a drink. [CLINKING SOUNDS OF GLASS AND ICE] MARTIN: You’re… sure? What time is it? I– Oh, huh. Huh! I can actually ask that question here! SALESA: You can indeed. MARTIN: And the sun’s high, so… SALESA: Good eye…! Martin, was it? MARTIN: Uh, uh… Yes. SALESA: Well Martin. It’s about ten in the morning, more or less. […] You’re sure you won’t have a drink? We definitely had some tea around here somewhere. MARTIN: Uh, I… already had some, thank you, uh! Some of us know how to be polite guests. ARCHIVIST: [SHARPLY] I don’t intend to accept anything offered by Annabelle Cane.

They slept, drank and ate! (But did they bathe. We don’t know if they did bathe. Though, Salesa would have probably commented on it again, if they didn’t.)

And on the one hand, I’m laughing really hard that they needed to sleep for three whole days to compensate for time spent in the apocalypse (that’s a long nap.), on the other hand… that’s weirdly optimistic for the rest of humanity trapped out there: I was fearing that if Jon&Martin managed to turn the world back, everyone would just collapse and die on the spot from exhaustion/hunger/thirst but, no, it seems like they could recover in this case?

- More on the differences between Jon and Martin later, but I like how it was quickly clear that Jon was less in control than his usual, and very aware of it: Jon was “disorientated”, his sentences were more hesitant, while Martin was quick to notice things, bouncing off from Salesa’s or Jon’s sentences, able to make small jokes. I loved and got sad over the Beholding one, since:

(MAG181) SALESA: How’re you feeling? MARTIN: [BLOWING AIR] ARCHIVIST: Disorientated. It’s like, hum… li–like I’ve lost my sight o–or, uh… SALESA: Well, you have, haven’t you? [HE CHUCKLES. IT ISN’T THE FRIENDLIEST SOUND] Annabelle tells me you work for “The Eye”. [PAUSE BUT FOR CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] ARCHIVIST: … Well, I–I wouldn’t exactly say I, I “work” for it… MARTIN: Uh… Well, I–I mean, you say that, but when you stop to think about it, it was literally our employer, Jon, so… Mmh! ARCHIVIST: I, I suppose.

They were actually talking about two different levels, each correct in his own way? Back in season 4, Martin had already pointed out to Jon that working in the Archives meant working for Beholding (MAG129: “I just– I worry. You’re working for someone… really bad!” “Yes, I’m not an idiot, Jon, but it’s no… worse than working for something really bad, so…” “At least, The Eye hasn’t gone after our own. Lukas has vanished two people!”); but on the other hand, Jon… has tried to distance himself from The Eye and what he wanted (by stopping to take live statements, by refusing to indulge in any contentment induced by the apocalypse, by deciding to stop the smiting spree): “working for” is both true (as a neutral stance, since they were tricked into working for Beholding through the Archival contract) and wrong (“working for” also implies some level of active participation?). It reminds me of Melanie’s stance about it (MAG150: “I didn’t say I was going to quit. I said: I’m not going to do my job. No researching; no filing; no… field trips. Nothing that is going to help the Institute in any way. […] Because this place is evil, Jon! And so… doing this job… Helping it out… even in small ways, i–is in some way… evil too! Every time we try to use it to do good, it just seems to make everything worse, and… and I will not be a part of that anymore. […] If I’m… just another cog, er… Maybe I can’t leave the machine, but from this moment? I–I–I’m not turning. I’m… jammed.”), and makes me wonder whether Martin and Basira’s ties to Beholding have been more or less protecting them in the apocalypse… Basira said that she thought she had been protected from the first wave because she was in the Institute, and Jon told her he couldn’t ensure her safety if they went their separate ways, and it didn’t prevent Daisy (who had been bound to the Archives by her own archival contract since season 4) from losing herself to The Hunt, but I still wonder if their ties to the Institute will factor in at some point…

- Blowing kisses in Martin’s direction for being a Polite Boy… and also absolutely doing with Salesa what he did with Peter and Simon – he KNOWS how to play older and potentially terrible men like cheap whistles and/or to get information out of them, and how to get them to like him!

(MAG120) MARTIN: W… what… What are you doing here, mister Lukas? PETER: Please, call me Peter. MARTIN: N–no. No, I think I’m okay.

(MAG151) SIMON: Let’s start over. Simon – Simon Fairchild. Peter asked me to look in on you and… have a small chat. Well! A big chat, really. Answer all those… nagging questions. MARTIN: Simon Fairchild. [PAUSE] [NERVOUS CHUCKLE] Wait, “Simon Fairchild” as in… SIMON: As in “all those people who said I did horrible things to them and their loved ones”? Yes. They have been in, haven’t they? I’d hate to think I’m underrepresented in here, not when Peter tells me that that… “bone” fellow has at least half a dozen. MARTIN: N–no, no, [NERVOUS CHUCKLE], not… not at all. Y–you’ve sent plenty of people our way. […] Right. SIMON: Sorry. Too “big” picture? I get that a lot. MARTIN: No, it’s… [INHALE] Thank you. This has… actually been quite helpful.

(MAG181) MARTIN: Uh… Mr.… Salesa? SALESA: Mikaele, please. Come in!

(MAG126) PETER: He managed to convince himself that he could get his ritual off first, which would have made all of this a… bit moot, but that’s not really an option anymore. So it’s down to us. You and me. The dynamic duo.

(MAG151) SIMON: And he’s not at all certain the world as we understand will come out the other side. MARTIN: And let me guess – you think he can’t see the “big picture”? SIMON: [INHALE] I see why he likes you! MARTIN: [SIGH] […] I thought you said that the maths doesn’t work. SIMON: Oh, you are a quick one! […] And this has been fun! [INHALE] Now. [CHAIR SCRAPES ON THE FLOOR] If we’re about done– MARTIN: We’re not. Sit back down. SIMON: Boooold~ [CHUCKLE] [CHAIR SCRAPES ON THE FLOOR] I like it.

(MAG181) MARTIN: Uh… Well, I–I mean, you say that, but when you stop to think about it, it was literally our employer, Jon, so… Mmh! ARCHIVIST: I, I suppose. SALESA: [FRIENDLY CHUCKLES] I like this one! [SHUFFLING] Come on, sit down, have a drink. [CLINKING SOUNDS OF GLASS AND ICE] MARTIN: You’re… sure? What time is it? I– Oh, huh. Huh! I can actually ask that question here! SALESA: You can indeed. MARTIN: And the sun’s high, so… SALESA: Good eye…! Martin, was it? MARTIN: Uh, uh… Yes. […] [SCOFF] In my experience, open books can actually be pretty dangerous…! SALESA: Ha! I do like this one! […] MARTIN: [LAUGHS] So–sorry, sorry! Y–you did look kind of funny, it was… li–like, like you were flunking an exam or something! SALESA: [CHUCKLES] Yes! Exactly that! […] MARTIN: Look, fo–for what it’s worth, I’d, I’d also quite like to know how this all happened? SALESA: … Fine. I’ll tell you how it happened. But you must sit quietly while I tell it.

I love Martin’s ability to get what he wants by weaponising his politeness/social niceties/a sense of familiarity.

- How Dare You, Salesa.

(MAG181) MARTIN: [SCOFF] In my experience, open books can actually be pretty dangerous…! SALESA: Ha! I do like this one! [SOUNDS OF CROCKERY BEING PUT DOWN] Now you mention it, you actually remind me of Jurgen a bit. In his– MARTIN: Ah, uh… SALESA: –younger days of course.

That was SO RUDE (who, in their right mind, would like to be compared to Leitner), and:

* Martin’s comment was quite interesting given that he never got directly involved with a Leitner, unless there is a Secret Story incoming from the time he worked at the Institute library, before the start of the show? But statements-wise (the ones Martin recorded, at least), the “DIG” book from MAG088 hadn’t been identified as such… and Martin had however speculated that Dexter Banks’s book, destroyed by Alexia in MAG110, was “a Leitner”. And it was a Web one.

* Not a direct experience, but he witnessed someone use one:

(MAG158) MARTIN: … That’s a Leitner. PETER: It is! MARTIN: And the, hum… the blood on it? PETER: That’s Leitner too! MARTIN: … Riiight… PETER: Do you want to see how it works? MARTIN: Uh, n–no; no, I’d really rather you didn’t mess it up– PETER: No, I insist! Watch. [SILENCE] MARTIN: Very impressive. PETER: I’m reading. Shush.

… And had been the one to discover the body of Leitner himself, alongside Tim, at the end of MAG080. Martin, especially Martin, wouldn’t want to be compared to Leitner given how he lived his life and how he ended.

* “In my experience, open books can actually be pretty dangerous” says Martin, who WANTED TO TOUCH THE BOOKS:

(MAG113) MARTIN: Ooh! Ooh! There’s a book in this one. ARCHIVIST: [HASTILY] Don’t…. touch it! MARTIN: Ooh… OH! Right. Yes. ARCHIVIST: Let’s… not touch any books we don’t know. MARTIN: Right.

(The books, and the plastic explosive. Arsooooon!)

- … So, Martin hadn’t had a direct first-hand experience of how dangerous ~open books~ could be, but meanwhile, someone who had a direct encounter with a Web one withdrew from the exchange and only chirped in when prompted, and to be distrusting of the Spider person. Jon wasn’t having a perfectly excellent time at the moment, uh?

(MAG181) SALESA: You’re sure you won’t have a drink? We definitely had some tea around here somewhere. MARTIN: Uh, I… already had some, thank you, uh! Some of us know how to be polite guests. ARCHIVIST: [SHARPLY] I don’t intend to accept anything offered by Annabelle Cane. MARTIN: [SIGH] SALESA: Oh, you know Annabelle? [SILENCE BUT FOR CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] ARCHIVIST: … Sort of. You do know she’s part of The Web? SALESA: [SARCASTICALLY] No? I assumed the thread holding her head together was due to a childhood knitting accident! [CHUCKLES] MARTIN: Ha!

* … I’m REALLY, REALLY, ABSOLUTELY NOT SURPRISED that Jon, especially Jon, would want to avoid any “gift” from a Spider-person, given how 1°) he read enough statements about Hill Top Road to know that Raymond Fielding was making the teenagers eat apples full of spiders to turn them into eggs sacks (don’t accept the Spider’s food!), 2°) it mirrors guests bringing gifts to Mr Spider in the hope of not getting devoured. Was Jon internally panicking during their stay, fearing that Annabelle would take Martin like Mr Spiders had taken the gifts and the people bringing them, including Mr Horse’s son…? (I doubt that Martin made that “guests” comment on purpose; I’m still not sure he knows the details of Jon’s childhood encounter with The Web? He knows that Jon hates spiders and is wary of them, that he has suspicions about Annabelle Cane, but did Jon tell him the whole story about the book?)

* … However, that brings to mind the lighter again: Jon “I don’t intend to accept anything by [Web-related individual]” has kept the Web-design lighter since he realised it had been delivered to him in MAG036, had been unable to question it when prompted by Gerry (MAG111) and Daisy (MAG136), complete with static-indicating-that-something-supernatural-was-going-on in the latter case… So, hum. Jon, your lighter. Think about your lighter, Jon. Was it a gift, and for what, Jon. Is it a 100% Web-flavoured gift, or is there a bit of something else (Desolation, Agnes) in that one making it more acceptable, Jon.

* Uh, so quite strangely, we got confirmation that Annabelle does look like the description we previously had of her, with her head injury:

(MAG069, Darren Harlow) “With a sudden, unexpected motion, he charged at her and slammed his full weight into her side. The attack took her completely off guard and she fell hard against the edge of the broken window, the side of her head making a god awful crunching sound as it hit. […] I looked at the crumpled form of Annabelle Cane just as it started to get back up. I could see the side of her skull had been caved in, and beneath the wet mess of blood and bone, I saw a mass of dull white cobweb.”

(MAG123, Angie Santos) “As he told it, she was young, rail-thin underneath an oversized brown hoodie, which she kept pulled up, trying to cover up a network of pale stitches that stretched over one side of her head. […] All through it, she just kept staring at him, hands pressed into the pockets of her hoodie – occasionally pushing long, spindly fingers out against the fabric, smiling to herself.”

(MAG136, Alison Killala) “It was almost six months ago when the woman came to our door. She looked like a film student, and at first I took her for a fan. […] I was about to ask her to wait while I checked with him but as I started to speak, she turned her head, revealing a mass of white thread, criss-crossing all over the side of her temple, standing starkly against the dark brown of her skin. She told me to sit down. And I did.”

… Which is… rather distinctive, so how come Jon apparently got a bit of trouble recognising her immediately when she opened the door?

(MAG180) [DOOR OPENS] [MUSIC CAN BE HEARD PLAYING MORE CLEARLY] MARTIN: Oh. Oh no, uh… [FOOTSTEPS] ANNABELLE: Good morning. ARCHIVIST: [FAINT GRUNT] MARTIN: Uh… Yes… ANNABELLE: Come on in. He’s waiting for you. ARCHIVIST: Oh. And who exactly– MARTIN: J–J–Jon. Jon. ARCHIVIST: What? MARTIN: I think… Hum… Annabelle? Annabelle Cane? ANNABELLE: Come on. He’s very excited, you know. [FOOTSTEPS AS SHE TURNS TO LEAVE] MARTIN: [FAINT GROAN] So, do we… follow or…? [PIANO CEASES] ARCHIVIST: I… I suppose. [FOOTSTEPS] [DOOR CREAKS] [STATIC RISES ABRUPTLY, WITH A GLITCH, AND FADES] ARCHIVIST: Oh… MARTIN: Oh, hum… ARCHIVIST: Oh. [PIANO RESUMES] [DOOR CLOSES] [FOOTSTEPS ECHOING AS THEY GO] MARTIN: [INHALE] [SIGH] ARCHIVIST: So… Annabelle, what are you playing at, what are you doing here?

Was it Jon recognising her but not making a fuss about it? Being so used to relying on his powers that he didn’t even have the reflex of connecting the dots himself? Was Annabelle’s head covered, or was she showing another side of her head?

- Letting The Web do whatever is confirmed as the most popular tactic to deal with it, uh.

(MAG121) OLIVER: Honestly, I’m… still not exactly sure why I’m here. But… you know better than anyone how the spiders can get into your head. Easier to just do what She asks!

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: I’m sure the flares will work fine. … I mean, un–unless it’s all some… elaborate… plot… to have us… burn this place down again. BASIRA: So what if it is? ARCHIVIST: I don’t follow…? BASIRA: I mean. Anything we do could be part of the “Grand Master Plan”. So – what, we do nothing? Just… sit on our hands, and hope that’s not what the spiders want? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

(MAG148) BASIRA: Or that we were being stalked by some freaky spider woman. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that! ELIAS: Ah, uh, y–yes… W–well… To be honest, I’d… advise you to leave that one – well alone. BASIRA: Oh yeah? ELIAS: Uh! Look, look, look. I’ve… been doing this a long time now and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about The Web, it’s that it plays its own game. All you can really do is… hope it doesn’t get in the way of whatever your plan is. Because the Spider usually wins…!

(MAG150) ARCHIVIST: O–kay. [SIGH] It’s just… The Web can be subtle, you understand? MELANIE: And? For all you know, its plan is to paralyse you with indecision…! ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] MELANIE: Leaving you… sitting here, terrified that… everything you do is somehow all part of its Grand Plan… And who do you think that fear is gonna feed? ARCHIVIST: Yes, well. [INHALE] You are… not the first, to make that point.

(MAG181) SALESA: Of course I know she’s with The Web. ARCHIVIST: … And that doesn’t bother you? SALESA: Not especially. And even if it did, what good would it do? MARTIN: … Uh, so what’s the deal with you two anyway? SALESA: It’s an odd situation, but not a complicated one. Shortly after I decided to stay here, she arrived; wandered in from the chaos out there and told me she was going to stay with me. I didn’t get this far by pitting myself against The Web, so I welcomed her in. ARCHIVIST: … “And”? SALESA: And sometimes she cooks. ARCHIVIST: She “cooks”? SALESA: I don’t know what you want me to say, it’s a big house and I don’t see her much. Can’t even say which corner she’s made her nest in! Whatever she’s doing… all I can do is hope it doesn’t wreck my little oasis. And if it does… then I hope that by keeping her in good graces, she’ll at least do me the courtesy of killing me first? MARTIN: Mm-mm… SALESA: … Anyway. Let us talk of happier things, or perhaps just take a moment to enjoy not being out there…! […] She keeps… mostly to herself, and when she does talk, it’s usually more of the sinister monologue variety– MARTIN: Ah! SALESA: –or cryptically telling me I’ve got “guests”…! […] ARCHIVIST: I… It’s going to be difficult to relax, with a spider lurking around. MARTIN: [SIGH] SALESA: … It gets easier with practice.

I mean, as mentioned by Salesa, there is still the risk that Annabelle will kill him or make him suffer worse, and has just been using him for her own goals… But also: not worrying about it means not feeding The Web? Unlike Jon, who spiralled so heavily into paranoia during season 4, worried about being trapped in The Web’s plans, about being potentially influenced and threatened by it.

I love how Salesa depicts Annabelle’s arrival and behaviour towards him: it’s… absolutely spider-like? She entered the house, made herself at home (she even has a ��nest”), and gets rid of the insects. She had told Martin&Jon that Salesa was waiting for them:

(MAG180) ANNABELLE: Come on in. He’s waiting for you. […] I’m just helping out around the place a little bit. Making myself at home. You know how it is. MARTIN: … Jon, I don’t like this. ANNABELLE: You can relax, Mr. Blackwood. You’re safe here. […] Well. There you go, then! Just in here. [OPENS THE DOOR] Your guests are here, Mikaele. [PIANO CEASES] SALESA: Hoo-hoo-hoo! Excellent! Come in, come in! Ah, a pleasure to meet both of you. Thank you, Annabelle! ANNABELLE: You’re quite welcome. [PIANO RESUMES] Have fun.

… but it was initially her who just Informed Salesa That Yep, He Has Guests Coming, Lucky You, and Salesa rolled with it.

- On the one hand, Salesa is going with the flow hoping that Annabelle doesn’t intend to make him suffer much even if she needs/wants him dead, and sounds pretty rational about it… But on the other hand, OOFT, BIG RED FLAG that Salesa, who sounds like his situation is still on his terms… was and is at the same time shown as a heavy drinker, who could potentially die from over-consumption:

(MAG141) FLOYD: He was drunk for the next two days, and we kept sailing on towards Cape Town. We no longer had anything to deliver there, but no-one was really sure what else to do. Whenever there’d been similar disasters before, Salesa was quick to make a new plan, let Captain Gaultier know what the next steps were. It was one of the reasons the crew trusted him so much. He just always seemed to know what we needed to do next. This time, though… felt different. He was distant, quiet. His words, when he spoke to you at all, were blurred with alcohol and regret. Nobody knew what the plan was, so we just kept going.

(MAG181) SALESA: Well Martin. It’s about ten in the morning, more or less. [PAUSE BUT FOR CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] MARTIN: … And you’re drinking. SALESA: Of course! Even in my little bubble of peace, I find drinking after dark leads to some rather morbid thoughts. […] And when I realised that the power moves with the camera, well, hm!, let’s just say I loaded up a truckload of supplies and went on some journeys of my own, before I found… this place. [MORE CLINKING GLASS AND ICE] No reason to not live the apocalypse in style…! [STIRRING NOISES] In the end… I find myself quite happy. I’ve supplies, for a good few years, and then I… plan to take my own life. I think perhaps that’s the greatest blessing the camera can bestow: I – can – die – here. Escape this place. Not yet, of course; and maybe the wine will do me in before I have to take matters into my own hands, but still… it remains a comfort. Anyway, no more stories, I think. Let us relax, and talk, and drink […].

Which. Is self-destructive on its own, and clearly indicating that Salesa hasn’t been quite as fine as he likes to pretend (assuming his role, hiding himself behind it with his friendliness and knack for stories), but also concerning when associated with Annabelle’s presence:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Looking back, of course… and remembering the crunch of used syringes beneath my feet, I realise that addiction… is one of the strongest vectors of control there is.”

We-oops.

- Did Annabelle gossip about Jon&Martin here and there?

(MAG181) SALESA: Annabelle tells me you work for “The Eye”. […] Your powers won’t work here, Jonathan Sims, Head-Archivist-of-the-Magnus-Institute-London! The Eye can’t see this place…! […] You know, Gertrude once used that little trick to ask if I was trying to sell her a forgery? Admittedly I was, so I don’t hold a grudge; but I didn’t much care for the experience. Anyway.

He knew about the compulsion from Gertrude, as well as the nightmares induced by giving a statement (MAG115: “So I suppose if it’s a statement you’re wanting… it’s no inconvenience to me. I don’t sleep well anyway.”), Annabelle apparently introduced Jon&Martin a bit (and had warned him that they would pass out when entering his “little bubble”)… but what about Jon’s title as “Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London”? It was Jon’s way of introducing statements from season 1 to 3, not Gertrude’s (“Gertrude Robinson recording.”)

Did Annabelle make him listen to a few tapes? Specifically the ones about Salesa? Or did she report the way Jon used to introduce himself, a lot, to the point of Salesa internalising it as a way to chide and make fun of Jon?

- Oh JON…

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: What is this place, how did you find it? SALESA: [SLIGHTLY CURT] I didn’t find anything. I made it. ARCHIVIST: [COMPELLINGLY] Tell me what happened. SALESA: … “No”. ARCHIVIST: I– Uh… Wh… Wh–what? SALESA: [DEEP AND LONG CHUCKLES] The look on your face! [CHUCKLES] Look, he’s so confused! MARTIN: [LAUGHS] ARCHIVIST: Martin! MARTIN: [LAUGHS] So–sorry, sorry! Y–you did look kind of funny, it was… li–like, like you were flunking an exam or something! SALESA: [CHUCKLES] Yes! Exactly that! MARTIN: [CHUCKLES] SALESA: Your powers won’t work here, Jonathan Sims, Head-Archivist-of-the-Magnus-Institute-London! The Eye can’t see this place…! [SILENCE BUT FOR CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] ARCHIVIST: … So what now? SALESA: Ah, no need for the suspicion, I’m not going to hurt you…! You’re quite safe! I’ll tell you soon enough; like I said, I have no secrets. But it will be… in my own time. ARCHIVIST: … Right. SALESA: You know, Gertrude once used that little trick to ask if I was trying to sell her a forgery? Admittedly I was, so I don’t hold a grudge; but I didn’t much care for the experience. Anyway. For now, just relax, and no doubt I’ll get there eventually; I haven’t had anyone to talk to properly in months! MARTIN: I thought… What about Annabelle? SALESA: She keeps… mostly to herself, and when she does talk, it’s usually more of the sinister monologue variety– MARTIN: Ah! SALESA: –or cryptically telling me I’ve got “guests”…! MARTIN: Uh…! Yeah, that sounds familiar. ARCHIVIST: I’m trying to be less cryptic…! MARTIN: I know, I know.

* That was incredibly rude of Jon, technically, so I laughed altogether with Salesa&Martin! Jon… is not used to people refusing to answer anymore, uh? But, on the other hand: YIKES that Jon is not used to people refusing to answer him and that he would try to rely on his compulsion��� on someone who had been pretty chill and friendly so far, and wasn’t actively hiding anything or saying that some topics were forbidden. Jon was cut from The Eye in there, so it’s really… him, and him alone, who still has the reflex to ask / order people to give him an answer? It’s him and him alone trying to rely on his powers to gain control of a situation, when said powers weren’t currently influencing him? He wasn’t asking/ordering for The Eye or pushed by The Eye? I wonder if the few days he spent in the house helped him a bit to think about the habits he grew as Archivist, what had become a reflex that he had to let go of…

* Keyboardsmashing over Salesa cheerfully explaining that Gertrude had compelled him to check if he was trying to swindle her, and that he was, so he found it fair. Though, “I don’t hold a grudge”: he might have been a bit more pissed at the moment? I remember his MAG115 statement, where he was clearly annoyed and frustrated and toying with her, after one of his artefacts caused damage in the Institute – I like the permanent ambiguity, in Salesa’s words, making you wondering if he’s absolutely sincere… or “playing his role” of the good-natured and jovial merchant, who does awful things but is above feelings like regrets, heartbreaks or annoyance. There is definitely a bit of unreliable narrator vibe to his whole persona?

* Sarcasm was through the roof, tho (Annabelle’s knitting accident, Jon’s face when failing to compel, Annabelle being cryptic), but AHAH for Martin joining him – he’s getting to see many new deluxe Jon faces! (Pretty sure Martin must have found Jon’s bewilderment super cute?)

- I love how Martin can be laughing and the instant afterwards be firm about words that could cross a line:

(MAG181) SALESA: So what’s it like out there? I assume the Archivist must be a rather… powerful position, since you seem to be travelling through it pretty freely? ARCHIVIST: It’s, uh… Uh… Hum… MARTIN: … Jon? ARCHIVIST: Uh, sorry, I–I just, uh… Hmm. MARTIN: Uh, i–it’s bad. Really bad. [SIGH] It’s, it’s all carved up between the powers, and everyone has just been, sort of… scooped up and chucked into their deepest fears, it’s just… it’s just nightmare after nightmare after nightmare, and… I… uh… Why are you smiling? SALESA: I’m sorry. You’re quite right, it’s inappropriate. It’s simply… [INHALE] I have spent the last decade preparing for this to happen. Not just something like this, but almost exactly this situation. There was every chance, in fact, the great likelihood… that I was wasting my time, and throwing away years of my life on a ridiculous precaution. But I was right. I. Was. Right. … And now here I am, safe, warm and comfortable while out there the whole world screams! I don’t mean to sound… uh, uh, a–as if I’m happy that people are suffering– MARTIN: Good, ‘cause it does sound a bit like that. SALESA: … Then I apologise. I’m just not sure I can fully communicate the sense of… of vindication that I feel, all those long nights I spent wondering if I was paranoid or overreacting. But no! I am here. And I am safe. MARTIN: [SIGH] I mean… I guess that makes sense?

* So, unlike other avatars, who were able to tell on sight that Jon had a “powerful position” in the new order, Salesa deduced it from facts! That was a nice touch.

* … Worried over the fact that Jon… didn’t seem able to describe the apocalypse spontaneously. Was he trying to “know” about it from inside the house, once again hitting a blank wall, just like when he tried to compel Salesa? Has he lost the habit of just… storing, remembering and using information regarding what he experienced? It’s interesting that there was no static at all during the whole exchange: Jon was indeed unable to use his powers there.

* LOVE HOW QUICKLY MARTIN REACTED when he saw Salesa’s reaction; Martin was probably gauging him? He had been quick to ask for smiting (and was even planning for the possibility when they were at the door of the house), so… did Salesa dodge a bullet. (Martin, please.)

* Salesa has been shown to be quite prideful, uh? “I made it”, “it will be… in my own time”, “I was right”… (And I can’t tell whether he’s absolutely sincere about that pride! Is it, genuinely, an absolute comfort, or is he grasping at straws because what’s the point of being right when you’re alone and basically waiting for your death with a few luxuries?)

- So, confirmation that Annabelle does know about their journey! It was rather obvious but technically… we didn’t know for sure, since Martin had bullshitted a bit when reporting her words to Jon:

(MAG166) MARTIN: Just, what do you want? ANNABELLE: I want to help you, of course. [SILENCE] MARTIN: … No. Thank you. ANNABELLE: It’s a hard place to find yourself in, maybe I can be of some… assistance…! MARTIN: You can assist me by giving the… “creepy phone” thing a rest…! ANNABELLE: He is more powerful here than he’s ever been, isn’t he? [PAUSE] And you’re not sure what that means for you. MARTIN: [INHALE] I’m hanging up now. ANNABELLE: Does he even need you at all?

(MAG167) ARCHIVIST: Help us with what? MARTIN: ‘xcuse me? ARCHIVIST: Annabelle, help us with “what”? Our–our, our journey, killing Elias, vanishing the Entities – what? […] So. What did Annabelle say? MARTIN: She offered to help, but she didn’t say what with; she… asked us where we were going. I didn’t tell her, but… [SNORT] it was pretty obvious she had a good idea.

(MAG181) SALESA: So what of you two, what, what, wh–where are you going? You seem to be travelling with some purpose…! ARCHIVIST: Did Annabelle not tell you that? SALESA: She said you were travelling to the Tower, the, hm, “Panopticon”, she called it? Whatever that might be; she didn’t say what for. [SUSPICIOUSLY] Nothing that might cause me trouble, I hope? MARTIN: We’re going to try and end this. Turn the world back. ARCHIVIST: Martin…! MARTIN: Wh–what? Okay; maybe he can help. We could use some support and it’s, it’s not like he wants the world to stay like this either! SALESA: You are right. To a point. [INHALE] I would welcome a return to the real world. Eh! To be the only man to weather the greatest disaster in history of reality, utterly unharmed… What an achievement that would be, quite the boast! But alas, no, [INHALE] I can’t help you. MARTIN: What? Why not? SALESA: I have nothing to offer. Well, except perhaps some… basic provisions. I have food, drink, a few luxuries, but none of that would help you out there, and I’m certainly not going to follow you. No, I think the best thing I can do is to welcome you to stay in my sanctuary as long as you wish…!

* Annabelle at least knew their destination already; which means she might have a good eye on the map, and would know that (according to real-world geography) they’re also coming closer to Hill Top Road…? Also: was she expecting them to change their mind about their initial plans to turn the world back? Or did she not tell Salesa because she assumed it was doomed already, or in order to not worry Salesa too much?

* … I keep hearing Salesa and going “Welp, that’s someone who is VERY depressed and also good at hiding it”: the way he jumped with such curiosity and passion on Martin&Jon’s current journey, the fact that they had a “purpose”? It feels to me like someone who currently doesn’t have any, is missing company, and wants to hear about anything that could manage to break his routine.

* Martin had mentioned with Helen already that they were lacking allies, and he&Jon just separated from Basira… So he really craves any help they could get, uh… AND AT THE SAME TIME: Martin is very good at weaving truths when he’s trying to manipulate people; he did that with Elias to make Elias accept (/feel like he had decided) that Martin would stay behind at the Institute in MAG116, he did that with Peter all through season 4 (believing in The Extinction, wanting to stop it… but also, loathing Peter and refusing to serve his plans)… so was he trying to do the same with Salesa, sneaking into his good graces and pretending to be absolutely transparent, nothing to hide sir!, before evaluating whether Salesa was a threat to be disposed of or just harmless?

- … So, Annabelle had been there for at least a month, so she definitely banked on them finding this place on their way… or did she find ways to influence their journey in order for them to walk by the house…?

(MAG181) SALESA: It’s an odd situation, but not a complicated one. Shortly after I decided to stay here, she arrived; wandered in from the chaos out there and told me she was going to stay with me. I didn’t get this far by pitting myself against The Web, so I welcomed her in. […] ARCHIVIST: … Alright, I… [INHALE] I guess we can stay. Just for a bit. SALESA: Excellent, ah! I haven’t had guests since the world ended. ARCHIVIST: [FLAT] Lovely. SALESA: Oh, saying that, I suppose there was that insect thing that stumbled in here a month or so back… MARTIN: Oh, uh, uh, in–“insect thing”? SALESA: Some creature of the Crawling Rot. Anyway, it didn’t actually make it into the house before Annabelle managed to get rid of it. So, I refuse to count it as a guest. MARTIN: Mmm. ARCHIVIST: I suppose that makes sense…! SALESA: Of course, I can’t actually stop things crossing the border into my hideaway, as you both discovered. Another reason I’m content to leave Annabelle to whatever schemes she might be weaving.

Or did she influence Salesa in taking residence there? The fact that he would be there and that Jon&Martin would come close enough for Jon to notice that the whole area was weird (and that they both agreed to take a look) is… a lot of coincidences. Jon “baited” Basira when they were close enough, and they then hunted Daisy; and as for Helen, she has been explicitly following them – those weren’t coincidences, but intended. On the other hand, the current layout is a bit more suspicious?

… It also takes us back to the start, for a Web-affiliated person to go against a Corruption-thing. We had witnessed this since season 1: spiders attracted by worms because they’re food (as Martin suspected in Carlos Vittery’s building), a spider warning Jon of the incoming Prentiss attack (end of MAG038), big spiders eating worm corpses in the tunnels under the Institute…

(… Salesa mentioned that Annabelle was cooking, WHAT IS SHE COOKING. DID SHE COOK THE CORRUPTION THING… DID SHE FEED THEM ALL WITH THE CORRUPTION THING…)

- Aaaaah, I’m having so many feelings over Jon asking so many questions and being so curious!!

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: What is… this place? SALESA: I just told you. It’s my little bubble. My silver lining on an otherwise cloudy day. ARCHIVIST: [HUFF] That’s not an answ– SALESA: Now tell me […]. ARCHIVIST: … So, you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions? SALESA: [SIPPING FOLLOWED BY CONTENTED SIGH] … I am an open book. […] ARCHIVIST: What is this place, how did you find it? SALESA: [SLIGHTLY CURT] I didn’t find anything. I made it. ARCHIVIST: [COMPELLINGLY] Tell me what happened. SALESA: … “No”. ARCHIVIST: I– Uh… Wh… Wh–what? […] How big is your safe zone, is it… is it always the same size? H… How did this happen? SALESA: [CHUCKLES] Look at him! Not three days without his master spooning knowledge into his head, and he can’t bear it! I thought ignorance was meant to be bliss? ARCHIVIST: [FRUSTRATED SOUND]

Same as last episode, that was Jon! It was Jon being himself and curious… Georgie had pointed out that it was Jon’s personality (MAG093: “If your job is asking questions, I mean. You were always the one who pushed too far, and asked smart-arse, awkward questions. I always was surprised you never got punched.”), even before the influence of The Eye – and now, we have the additional dimension that Jon might have grown a bit too accustomed to, indeed, Knowing things, and to getting people to answer him whenever needed or desired… But still. It feels like he was back to his roots?

(And Salesa was doing his best to frustrate him, cutting him off or commenting on it, pfft.)

- While Jon was more pressuring and blunt, I’m reeling over Martin who sugarcoated his approach a bit (joking with Salesa, sometimes agreeing with him or not antagonising him too much while having clear limits)… and got Salesa to give up his story:

(MAG181) SALESA: Of course I know she’s with The Web. ARCHIVIST: … And that doesn’t bother you? SALESA: Not especially. And even if it did, what good would it do? MARTIN: … Uh, so what’s the deal with you two anyway? […] Mm-mm… SALESA: … Anyway. Let us talk of happier things, or perhaps just take a moment to enjoy not being out there…! You are, of course, welcome to stay as long as you like. MARTIN: Uh, that’s… very generous…! […] I thought… What about Annabelle? SALESA: She keeps… mostly to herself, and when she does talk, it’s usually more of the sinister monologue variety– MARTIN: Ah! SALESA: –or cryptically telling me I’ve got “guests”…![…] I am here. And I am safe. MARTIN: [SIGH] I mean… I guess that makes sense? […] SALESA: No, I think the best thing I can do is to welcome you to stay in my sanctuary as long as you wish…! MARTIN: … Oh, well. [EXHALE] Thank you. I–I think we just might. Jon? […] Look, fo–for what it’s worth, I’d, I’d also quite like to know how this all happened? SALESA: … Fine. I’ll tell you how it happened. But you must sit quietly while I tell it. MARTIN: [CHUCKLE] Don’t worry, I have had lots of practice. SALESA: … And you? ARCHIVIST: [DISGRUNTLED SOUND] MARTIN: He’ll behave. SALESA: … My story is not a long one.

(GRUMPY JON WAS SO CUTE… JUST LIKE AN ANNOYED CAT…)

Martin has had experience with Peter and Simon, knows how to be strategical, and it worked. Salesa was clearly craving to give his story, to be the centre of the attention (the main star of the show?), and Martin… played the right cards to get him there?

There was no static, Salesa pointed out that Jon couldn’t use his Eye powers here, Salesa insisted that his statement was on his own terms… but I still wonder if he wasn’t compelled a bit? We didn’t learn much, it had a bit more flourish than our usual (but it’s not unheard of: avatars were shown to be very happy to portray themselves at their best during them), there were some potentially unreliable bits here and there (not unheard of either), but it was also… pretty coherent. Flowing naturally. A long tirade going straight to the points.

Could Salesa have been influenced by Martin? Simon had made it clear that Beholding had compelled him (through Martin) to give him his piece. Or was it… the tape recorder, somehow? It turned on when Jon&Martin were arriving (so, when a discussion would happen), and turned off after Salesa was done:

(MAG181) SALESA: Anyway, no more stories, I think. Let us relax, and talk, and drink, and… not worry about who might be… listening. [CLICK.]

So it was there for Salesa’s statement. Did it compel him?

- I like how we technically didn’t learn much through Salesa’s statement! Well, not much factual info, at least: we already had gotten a recent-ish written statement from him (MAG115, from January 2007); we knew that he had been Leitner’s assistant and had fled when he understood what Leitner was dealing in, that he initially mostly wanted to use his list of clients and had ended up dealing in supernatural artefacts almost coincidentally, that he let (rich) people acquire the artefacts they wanted and too bad for them if they caused them misery, that he was getting angstier between 2011 and 2014, culminating in the last mission to retrieve the camera, and that he had then vanished, presumed dead.

But I feel like we mostly learnt about his personality, in contrast to MAG115 (in which he was a bit more on the defensive, given that the Institute and/or Gertrude was going at him for a Slaughter artefact that had… got out of control) and MAG141, in which Floyd Matharu, who clearly kinda liked and respected him (“He was a good boss.”), had given us another look on Salesa: someone who was tired, who had lost people and was growing tired of this life. I find it really interesting to compare MAG141 and MAG181 since, in this episode, Salesa is clearly putting on a show of his own story:

(MAG141) FLOYD: Once found him pouring over an old photo album. The ship was there in the pictures, but a different captain, different crew. I asked him who they were, and he just looked at me, eyes sunken like he hadn’t slept, and for a second I felt like he was seeing someone else, not me. But then he just shrugged. “Dead now,” he said, “doesn’t really matter.” […] I followed slowly, unsteadily, but got there just in time to see Salesa throw both him and what looked like a blank rug over the side and into the ocean. Then he collapsed against the railing, a look of intense exhaustion passing over his face, and I left him there. He was drunk for the next two days, and we kept sailing on towards Cape Town. We no longer had anything to deliver there, but no-one was really sure what else to do. Whenever there’d been similar disasters before, Salesa was quick to make a new plan, let Captain Gaultier know what the next steps were. It was one of the reasons the crew trusted him so much. He just always seemed to know what we needed to do next. This time, though… felt different. He was distant, quiet. His words, when he spoke to you at all, were blurred with alcohol and regret. Nobody knew what the plan was, so we just kept going.

(MAG181) SALESA: But the years, they wear on you, and as I talked to more and more people versed in that secret world, more acolytes and would-be cultists about “rituals” and “destinies”, I began to come to a conclusion. As the number of people in the world grew, and the amount of fear grew with it, I began to become convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of them… succeeded. Before the world was transformed into… Well. You’d know better than me…! So I began to plan for my… retirement. I spent most of my fortune preparing. Some on supplies, but mostly hunting down an artifact that I hoped might give me some… protection. One I had sold right at the start of my career: an old broken camera. One that through some… quirk had the ability to hide you from the Powers…! […] Staging my death was a… comparative, erm, afterthought. In some ways… just a happy accident. And so I waited, and lived out my days in comfort. For the longest time I thought that, well… maybe I had simply entered normal retirement really dramatically! But then… well… I was right.

* “a happy accident”, says the person living with a Web person who knew he was there and threw Jon&Martin at him. (What happened, back then? Why the explosion, why did Gaultier report that they had been “betrayed”? Was someone else after Salesa, or “helped” him hide? If Gertrude was behind the explosion, it would have been mentioned at this point… Was it Annabelle, to ensure that Salesa would be a reliable trump card in the apocalypse?)

* It had been addressed during Arthur and Gertrude’s discussion, and has been a reccurring theme in the series: who really are these characters?

(MAG145) GERTRUDE: What was Agnes like? ARTHUR: … What? GERTRUDE: Well, for all The Web bound us together, I never actually met her. What was she like? ARTHUR: I… [PAUSE] I don’t know. Not really. You got as many answers to that as… folks who met her. Never really knew what she felt ‘bout any of it! Not really. Not in her own words. Guess that’s the thing about being the… Chosen One, or… I mean, Agnes was always quiet; but even if you spend all day, every day, throwing out commandments and… laying down parables… At the end of it, you’re always just the… point of someone else’s story. Everyone clamouring to say what you were, what you meant, and… your thoughts on it… all don’t mean nothing.

Is the real Salesa the self-serving and self-centred man who explained his story to Jon and Martin, all about money and then self-preservation, not giving any retrospective thought about his crew and the people who were following his orders and yet died because of it? Is the real Salesa the “good boss” Floyd had described, who was clearly nostalgic and affected by the losses throughout his life (why keep pictures of the deceased, if they hadn’t mattered at all)? Or is the truth somewhere within the mix, every statement a bit of it – how these characters used to be perceived, how they want to be perceived right now, how they acted then and how they act now?

* There is a bit of a parallel with Jonah, with the way both reached the fatalistic conclusion that someone would eventually manage to bring forth the apocalypse:

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “Why does a man seek to destroy the world? It’s a simple enough answer: for immortality, and power. Uninspired, perhaps, but – my God! The discovery, not simply of the dark and horrible reality of the world in which you live, but that you would quite willingly doom that world and confine the billions in it to an eternity of terror and suffering, all to ensure your own happiness; to place yourself beyond pain, and death, and fear. It is an awful thing to know about yourself, but the freedom, Jon, the freedom of it all…! I have dedicated my life to handing the world to these Dread Powers, all for my own gain, and I feel… nothing but satisfaction, in that choice. […] Of course, this desire did not manifest overnight. When Smirke first gathered our little band – Lukas, Scott and the rest – to discuss and hypothesise on the nature of the things he had learned from Rayner… I felt what I believe we all felt: curiosity, and fear. But as he compiled his taxonomy and codified his theories on the grand rituals, I began to develop a very specific concern. Smirke was still so obsessed with his ideas on balance, even as our fellows began to experiment and fall to the service of their patrons: I began to worry that if one of them successfully attempted their ritual, then I would be as much a victim as any, trapped in the nightmare landscape of a twisted world. At first, I attempted prevention, but the cause seemed hopeless. The only way to ensure I did not suffer the tribulations of what I believed to be… an inevitable transformation, was to bring it about myself. So what began as an experiment… soon became a race.”

Both came to the conclusion that an apocalypse would be likely to happen, and both of them worked on a way to mitigate the effects for them and them only, instead of ensuring that others wouldn’t succeed. … And in both cases, it doesn’t feel like they realised how they might have been used rather than in control: Jonah could have just NOT LAUNCHED ANY RITUAL when he discovered that anyway, a ritual would never work unless all the Fears were to be brought through together; and Salesa… had a few holes in his story? Admitted that there was an “accident” leading to his official death, allowing him to go into hiding? Is drinking heavily while having a Web-person as housemate, who explained how “addiction is one of the strongest vectors of control there is”?

- I wonder whether Salesa knew what had truly happened to Leitner, or not at all?

(MAG181) SALESA: … My story is not a long one. Not the parts that you care about, at least. The Powers I first learned about from Jurgen Leitner – you’re familiar with him? Then I don’t need to explain further. When I say I was one of his assistants, you know exactly the kind of education that would be. Terrifying, fascinating, misguided. The man was a genius, and an idiot. It didn’t take me long to see what he was blind to his whole life: that trying to control the Fears was a good way to get yourself killed, or worse. … I left long before he got what was coming to him, and tried to forget what I knew.

He probably assumed that Leitner had died when his library was attacked? Not brutally pipe-murdered by Elias.

(And sidenote, but: Salesa wasn’t presented as an avatar but he also joins the list of people in season 5 not even mentioning Jonah at all as an agent who matters, while Jon was identified as A Big Deal in the apocalypse. I don’t know if Jonah is still in any state to know and watch these things (merged with the Panopticon? Trapped within his old decaying body at the centre of the tower?), and he was certainly not able to see anything inside of the camera’s domain, but I hope that it Stings.)

- I’m not so surprised that Annabelle and Salesa seem to be getting along, since they both sound aware of their “role” in the overall narrative frame:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Now, I believe the tradition is to tell you the story of my life; the sinister path that led me inevitably to the sorry state in which I now find myself. Well, let it never be said I do not dance the steps I am assigned.”

(MAG181) SALESA: I lived my life, and I lived it well – successful, wealthy, and a little bit feared…! Smuggler to the rich and famous! There wasn’t an art dealer or curator out there who didn’t pretend not to know me! But the trouble is, once you’ve seen backstage, it’s hard to believe in the show anymore. You understand, I’m sure. You can never quite shake off the desire to have a peek…! To see what’s waiting in the wings…! […] Again, I made a lot of money, and remained untouched. It’s the sort of thing to set a man thinking about his life, you understand? I began to think hard about the world, about my place within it, and about fear! About the figure of the merchant, the trader who deals in strange and dangerous goods – how it can be found in so many myths and fables, dealing in second-hand nightmares. And how rarely the merchant themself is ever punished in those stories. […] To tell you the truth, I got a real kick out of playing my role. To think of myself as a purveyor of curses, walking softly through the most dangerous edges of reality, so that the rich and arrogant could buy their own doom.

(+ in some ways, Peter, too: “Thinking about it now, perhaps one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did was that I was, at the end of the day, predictable. A ‘known quantity’. I had my little patch, sending my poor lost sailors to their Forsaken end, but I rarely stepped outside of it. When I think of all those I met who travelled in this secret world we found ourselves in – Gertrude, Simon, Mikaele, even Rayner… there are plenty whose lives might well have been easier with my death, but it was rare that I strayed outside my habits.” (MAG159))

- So, who was the thing/person Salesa was “working for”?

(MAG181) SALESA: Sometimes people would come to me for solutions, protections or talismans to ward off the attention they had already called down on themselves. I sometimes did what I could to help, but I had to be careful. I could never afford to forget who I actually was working for.

Himself? The Fears, given how he made them more impactful by digging out and spreading cursed artefacts?

(Also, aaaah, I’m guessing that Noriega had been asking for help, back in MAG016, while he was suffering from Angela’s curse and had met with Salesa…)

- Salesa reminded me a bit of Leitner, and he would haaaaaaaaaaaate it? Leitner also wanted to take on a “role” and it… had backfired very badly:

(MAG080) LEITNER: I… thought that I could control them. That I alone had the knowledge to contain them. Back then, I believed they were simply books. Horrifying, powerful, yes; but with rules, limits that could be charted. … I was a fool. I had no idea what forces lay behind them, or that they had other servants that might come searching. […] I saw myself as a guardian, a reverse Pandora, gathering the evils of the world and locking them away. And so I branded them with my seal. I told myself that if any should escape such a mark could help me retrieve them. But I think, in my heart, I dreamed of my work becoming known. That “The Library of Jurgen Leitner” would stand as a symbol of courage and protection. Hubris. I suppose it is fitting punishment that my name has become a watchword for evil, spoken by those who only know it as marking the darkest, most terrible of secrets. My name has become a curse.

Is the merchant truly never punished in all these stories? Quite clearly, Salesa has it waaay better than the people out there (he’s not trapped in a personal nightmares, forced to relive terrible experiences over and over again)… but it’s also such an empty existence, with him having become what he used to loathe – as someone who felt like he was punishing the rich, he’s now living in luxury (Upton House, playing the piano, listening to classical music, drinking alcohol in the morning in nice crockery and assuming that said alcohol might end up killing him)…

- Aaaah, I love how the way the camera works does feel like it makes sense within that universe:

(MAG181) SALESA: So I began to plan for my… retirement. I spent most of my fortune preparing. Some on supplies, but mostly hunting down an artifact that I hoped might give me some… protection. One I had sold right at the start of my career: an old broken camera. One that through some… quirk had the ability to hide you from the Powers…! It was in the possession of another scared old man, one who had long been running from his own supernatural debts. I believe it operates as a sort of, uh, battery, charging itself on all the quiet worries that come from living in hiding, and then when the sanctuary collapses, eh!, all that fear flows out at once. … No doubt if my oasis breaks before I die, The Eye will get quite the feast from me. But in this new world, I would hope it has other things to keep itself busy. […] it hid me from The Eye, which, in the new order of reality, also protects where I am from the hellscape all around us. And when I realised that the power moves with the camera.

I also like that… just like a regular camera, it puts some distance between the one who is protected and anybody else, cutting them from reality. It explains why everything went to hell on that island after they took the camera (MAG141) and might be a curse in itself: feeding from the fears of the people into hiding… and anticipating their demise? (We also got told how Salesa could “end”, if it happens offscreen: if Annabelle’s plan is to use the camera without him… either she’ll be charitable and kill him, or tell him in advance for him to kill himself beforehand, either she will just leave with the camera, and Salesa will have it worse than everyone else.)

Also explains why Jon didn’t “know” anything about Salesa’s fate after talking with Floyd, and why he might have been drawn to him? Since he was a blind spot for Beholding, someone hidden from it. It’s quite interesting that we’ve seen so many different ways to get a (temporary or permanent) protection from Beholding? Gertrude was cutting eyes from pictures all around her (and Elias admitted that she had grown quite good at hiding from him); Leitner had the A Disappearance book, preventing Elias and Beholding from seeing him; Eric and Melanie discovered that gouging out their eyes freed them from the Archives; and now, Salesa pointed out that the camera was even specifically anti-Eye – thus, Jon not being able to use his powers around it… Was it initially a Dark artefact? Or an Eye one, just with a delayed reaction (as the fear of “being watched, being followed, having your deepest secrets exposed”)?

- CRIES, because it was to be expected that Jon wouldn’t fare for long in this place:

(MAG181) [PACKING NOISES] MARTIN: You’re sure we can’t stay longer? ARCHIVIST: Yes, I–I–I’ve been, hum… Uh, these last few days I–I’ve been… getting weaker. Dizzy spells, vagueness, you’ve seen it. Being cut off from the Eye, i–it’s not good for me. MARTIN: Yeah, but if… [INHALE] If you’re that connected, that… dependent, what happens if we actually, y’know, do manage to– ARCHIVIST: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I just need us to be moving on. MARTIN: Hm… […] Feeling better? ARCHIVIST: Uh… Yeah. I’m afraid I am…!

And he reminded me a lot of how he sounded during his partial withdrawal (from live statements), in the second half of season 4: raspier voice, tiredness, the feeling unwell…

(MAG150) ARCHIVIST: … Still feeling weak. Restless. I want to be proactive, but there hasn’t…! That hasn’t been going quite so well for us lately.

(MAG152) HELEN: Hungry, are we~? ARCHIVIST: That’s not…! I haven’t done anything– HELEN: Yet. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: I feel like if I don’t… I might die. Fade away into nothing.

(MAG154) MARTIN: No, ’t’s fine, I ju– You just surprised me, that’s… Jesus, you all right? You… you look like hell. ARCHIVIST: Oh! Uh, right, I, em… ki–kind of weak. Hungry, I–I guess, sort of. I–I’ve been trying to a–avoid, being, hum… Sticking to old statements?

(MAG155) ARCHIVIST: I feel weak. Like I’m… fading away. Do I restrain myself, keep my appetite in check, even at the cost of my life? Or do I try to rationalise what I am, like… Ms. McHugh? I find myself… hating her, her… callous self-deception. But am I so different…?

Except that, back then, Martin hadn’t directly witnessed it – Jon went without statements after MAG159, for three weeks at most (after taking Peter’s live statement), and he sounded mostly fine if eager to read when they received Basira’s statements. Here, it feels like Jon’s degrading state went much quicker and more impressively… and it was a reminder of Jon’s connection to The Eye. Jon cut the conversation short, but they really will have to talk about it, and about how setting the world back, as of now, really sounds incompatible with Jon’s survival…

(Sob at Jon’s “moving on”, because it echoed MAG180’s title: back then, “moving on” had given the feeling of… reaching another chapter, accelerating after a stagnation? But now, “moving on” means returning to the apocalypse, the Fears, their journey towards the Panopticon, and did they learn anything that could help their quest inside of the house? The camera could be useful, maybe, but then…)

-I am HOWLING at Martin’s outburst of rage towards Annabelle because AHAHAH, who used to accept her tea and be a ~polite guest~?

(MAG181) SALESA: Did you sleep well? Have you had something to eat? Annabelle said she’d shown you the pantry? […] You’re sure you won’t have a drink? We definitely had some tea around here somewhere. MARTIN: Uh, I… already had some, thank you, uh! Some of us know how to be polite guests. ARCHIVIST: [SHARPLY] I don’t intend to accept anything offered by Annabelle Cane. […] [FOOTSTEPS] [A DOOR CREAKS OPEN] ANNABELLE: All packed? ARCHIVIST: Mm. MARTIN: Oh! Finally showing your face? ANNABELLE: I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. MARTIN: Oh, pffft! All week, you scuttle around with… with food and drinks and all that other stuff, whatever we need, and just when we need it, but if we actually try to talk to you, you’re gone. ANNABELLE: [SMILINGLY] I’m very busy…! ARCHIVIST: Martin, don’t… bother, we–we’re not going to get any answers out of her. MARTIN: You–you’re joking, right? She’s been lurking at the edges of this whole thing since the beginning, and now we can finally actually talk to her, and…! What, you’re just going to pass? You don’t have any questions, nothing at all?

WHO usually provides food and drinks to get some results with people?

(MAG053) MARTIN: I was just going down to the café, did you want a sandwich? ARCHIVIST: Uh, that, that depends. Are you… hum, are you going to keep hovering around me if I go to the canteen? MARTIN: [SIGH] I just worry. You needed five stitches after you “accidentally” stabbed yourself with a breadknife. If you’re still claiming that’s what happened. ARCHIVIST: I am. MARTIN: Then you’ll forgive me for worrying when you use sharp knives. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Fine. I’ll come with, just… give me a second to grab my coat.

(MAG069) MARTIN: … Look. Jon… when was the last time we all just… talked? Just talked, without all of this– ARCHIVIST: Thank you for the tea, Martin. MARTIN: … Oookay. Fine. [DOOR OPENS] He’s not wrong, you know. [DOOR CLOSES]

Annabelle is just doing The Usual Martin Things, and Martin accepted it at first, probably thinking that it could put her into good dispositions to talk, except that tactic is NOT working with her and he’s SO PISSED about it =D Oh, Martin…

I’m super amused at Annabelle having so much fun being domestic and taking care of the guests while looming in the background; it’s an interesting dynamic where you can clearly feel like… everything is happening on her terms, and Martin and Jon don’t have any control over it. (And Martin is SO annoyed at the lack of control, ooooh Martin…)

(- And this is how Web!Martin can still w- (No but, seriously, I thought about how spiders can be territorial and usually don’t share the same living area?))

- I adore how you could HEAR Annabelle’s smile while she was clearly having fun.

(MAG181) MARTIN: Oh! Finally showing your face? ANNABELLE: I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. […] ARCHIVIST: Look. I–it’s no accident we finally meet face-to-face in the one place I–I can’t get any answers out of her. ANNABELLE: [SMUG] I’m sure I don’t know what you mean…! MARTIN: … Why are you here? Mm? What’s your game? ANNABELLE: Perhaps I just value my privacy. MARTIN: Fine, fine! Why did you call me before? ANNABELLE: Perhaps I thought you could use a friendly voice…!

Not committing to any answer, and it was driving Martin mad, uh.

- LOVING HOW MARTIN IS JUST “RESENT AND REMEMBER”:

(MAG166) ANNABELLE: He is more powerful here than he’s ever been, isn’t he? [PAUSE] And you’re not sure what that means for you. MARTIN: [INHALE] I’m hanging up now. ANNABELLE: Does he even need you at all? MARTIN: Bye! [BEEP] [SIGH] [LOUDER, CLOSER HOWL] … I know, right?

(MAG181) ANNABELLE: Perhaps I thought you could use a friendly voice…! MARTIN: “Friendly”!? You told me Jon didn’t need me! ANNABELLE: Objectively true. MARTIN: [AGGRAVATED SIGH]

(Jon was out of it for most of the exchange, but… If he had been in a better state of mind, he might have reacted to this: Martin hadn’t told him about that part of the phone call, Martin hadn’t shared that with him in the following episode. So, that was new information… unless he had already “known” about it from Martin’s mind and didn’t tell Martin?)

And! We! Still! Don’t! Know! What Annabelle! Wanted! To Achieve!

(MAG181) ANNABELLE: And more importantly, perhaps I thought you might need a little bit of righteous indignation to help you power through the next steps. […] For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. The call was… clumsy. There were so many things to keep track of at the moment. I must confess it did lack my usual… nuance. ARCHIVIST: And perhaps you’re now just trying to humanise yourself so we underestimate your next move…! ANNABELLE: Perhaps.

* What was that “righteous indignation” about? At this point, Martin was already pro-smiting. Did she want him to focus on his resentment towards her? Did she want to prompt a conversation between Jon&Martin, as it happened in MAG167, leading to Jon admitting to Martin that he was his “reason”? I still feel like if that exchange hadn’t happened, Martin would have had it way worse in the Lonely house a few episodes later…

* It feels like the “Jon does(n’t) need Martin” might be about two different things? It’s objectively true that Jon would still be fine without Martin… but would he keep going on his quest without him? Jon said that Gertrude likely would have given up (implying that his difference with her is that he had “a reason”, in Martin). And Jon himself had told Martin, that it wasn’t just about what he needed in the “survival” sense; it was… about what he wanted for himself:

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Listen – I know you think you want to be here, I know you think it’s safer and w– … well, maybe it is… But we need you. I need you. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] No, you don’t. Not really…! Everyone’s alone, but we all survive. ARCHIVIST: I don’t just want to survive!

- Martin and Being Manipulated~~

(MAG126) MARTIN: But if I could just explain– PETER: And how do you think Jon’s going to react, to that explanation? Hm? Do you think he’ll accept it calmly? Come through with a well-considered, rational response– MARTIN: That’s not fair– PETER: –or would he assume he knows better than you and do something rash? [SILENCE] MARTIN: … I don’t like being manipulated. PETER: That’s fair. But I’m not wrong.

(MAG181) MARTIN: … I, I don’t like being manipulated. ANNABELLE: Then we probably aren’t going to be friends. MARTIN: Urrrgh! [SIGH]

(And both times, about Jon.)

- Jon was exhausted, but also kind of fatalistic over the fact that they couldn’t do anything against Annabelle anyway; had Salesa been right when he had told them they would get used to it? And in a way, Jon being less angsty over it… might be good for him – not spiralling into paranoia, being just aware that anyway, he can’t know anything for sure about Annabelle. (… Or is the feeling of powerlessness feeding her anyway?)

(MAG181) MARTIN: So, so that’s it, then? We, we’re just going to leave her here? ARCHIVIST: Yes. MARTIN: We could make her tell us. ARCHIVIST: No, we couldn’t. I don’t have my powers, if it came to a physical fight I really don’t rate our chances…! MARTIN: Hey, I can handle myself! ANNABELLE: But can you handle me? [SILENCE] MARTIN: … I don’t like you. ANNABELLE: I know.

GNIIIIIIIIIIIIH over Martin just. Being absolutely too honest and just telling her, to her face, that he doesn’t like her. Martin, you rude brat.

I got Michael flashbacks, too, because it wasn’t the first time that:

(MAG079) MICHAEL: I think I might also kill you. It would be easier than killing the Archivist; none of you are protected down here. MARTIN: No, no, now hang on… MICHAEL: You are going to try and help him. And I want to see what happens without you there. TIM: Martin… MARTIN: No, no, okay, because there’s two of us and there’s one of you, okay. He’s not killing anyone! TIM: Martin, look at his hands! MARTIN: Oh.

MARTIN WAS READY TO THROW DOWN.

- YIKES over what Annabelle has ~in mind~:

(MAG181) ANNABELLE: Don’t worry, Martin. We’ll meet again. Hopefully when you’re feeling a little bit more… open-minded…! MARTIN: I wouldn’t count on it. ANNABELLE: I would. MARTIN: [SIGH] ARCHIVIST: That’s the trouble with old houses, I suppose. Full of spiders. ANNABELLE: You boys better take care of yourselves. I’m sure we’ll see each other again very soon. Here! Why don’t I show you out?

* Was the “open-minded” a reference to the fact that her own head was opened and is currently stitched together thanks to spiders.

* So, they’re meeting again “soon”… at Hill Top Road, maybe?

* Annabelle is implying that they were refusing something about her, as if there was currently an offer on the table – what was it? Was it about the fact they were antagonising her? Jon didn’t trust her (or at least raised the possibility that she could be trying to make them underestimate her; she had explained that “I have always believed that the key to controlling people… is to ensure that they always under, or overestimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans” in MAG147), they were wary of her… and were they right about it? She made sure they drank and ate, she encouraged them to be well; she needs them functioning and still going, but what for? I’m still really curious about Annabelle; it felt to me that she needed them to reach a certain conclusion by themselves, and that they have failed so far… Or is it way more sinister than that, is she waiting for them to ask for her help regarding Jon’s current state?

* Overall, it feels to me like she’s focusing on Martin more than Jon, as if Jon was a “given” in her equation but Martin a more active and rebellious piece?

- Ooooh, Salesa… he really was craving for company, uh.

(MAG181) SALESA: Aaah! You are off, then? [FAINT SOUNDS OF MUSIC IN THE BACKGROUND; LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S “9TH SYMPHONY: FINALE”] ARCHIVIST: … Yes, uh… MARTIN: Uh, thank you, for all your hospitality. SALESA: You are sure you won’t stay a little longer? You’re more than welcome! ARCHIVIST: N–no, I, uh… I got to, hum… leave. MARTIN: What he said. SALESA: Ah, such a shame. And you’re sure I can’t give you a little something for the road? Uh, food, wine? MARTIN: Uh, no, thank you. Uh… [SIGH] Nice things, they… tend not to stay nice out there. SALESA: [SCOFF] True enough.

And sob about the fact that Martin has learned to not trust “comfort” too much. (What about the tea he had stored in his own bag? And the bandages he used on Jon didn’t turn against them either, so a few things stayed safe.)

- I love how Annabelle and Salesa seem to be getting along with their cruel humour:

(MAG181) SALESA: Well: best of luck I suppose. And if in the end, you can’t save the world… you know where I am. ANNABELLE: Actually, he doesn’t. SALESA: [CHUCKLES] Of course. What a shame. [INHALE] Well then, I guess it really is goodbye. Travel well. Don’t be Strangers! [MORE CHUCKLES, LOWER AND DARKER]

(SOB, Salesa, “Don’t be strangers” had been copyrighted by Georgie in season 3 already!)

… Really curious that Annabelle seemed to already know that Jon would quickly forget about the place, as soon as they would leave; in the same way that she predicted that they might pass out when entering the domain protected by the camera. She… knows… stuff… and understands how things work, uh…

- Cries about Jon just fading from conversation, it REALLY was time for him to leave:

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: Yes, I–I–I’ve been, hum… Uh, these last few days I–I’ve been… getting weaker. Dizzy spells, vagueness, you’ve seen it. Being cut off from the Eye, i–it’s not good for me. […] MARTIN: You don’t have any questions, nothing at all? … Jon? Jon! [CLICKS HIS FINGERS IN FRONT OF THE ARCHIVIST] ARCHIVIST: [DISTANT] Wha… Oh, yes, uh, sorry… Look. […] MARTIN: God, fi–fine. Fine! [BAG IS GRABBED] Come on, Jon. ARCHIVIST: [VAGUE] Mm… Oh, I’m… sorry, what? MARTIN: We’re leaving. […] SALESA: You are sure you won’t stay a little longer? You’re more than welcome! ARCHIVIST: N–no, I, uh… I got to, hum… leave. MARTIN: What he said. […] Y–yeah, uh, come on, Jon. Let’s go. ARCHIVIST: Mm, what? Oh. Yes, ri–right. Yes…

Jon prompted their departure, but it sounded like he forgot about it multiples times during the conversation… He was absolutely drained and ready to collapse, uh?

(Or is it linked to his other memory losses, such as forgetting his bully’s name, or that he had gone for ice-cream with the assistants for Martin’s birthday? I think it really was exhaustion in this particular case (head empty), but…)

- … Jon’s sense of humour…

(MAG181) MARTIN: Feeling better? ARCHIVIST: Uh… Yeah. I’m afraid I am…!

“Afraid I am” – said he, who is currently back to feeding on fear.

- I’m glad that Jon apologised for making them leave, was aware of what Martin had to give up for him, but also that Martin was clear about his Priorities (and differences from Salesa, who was satisfied being protected and safe in his “little bubble” while others are suffering) and absolutely not holding it against him:

(MAG181) ARCHIVIST: I’m sorry, I… It would have been nice to stay. MARTIN: [WISTFULLY] Yeah… I’d almost forgotten what it was like, you know? A bit of peace, eh! ARCHIVIST: I mean, you could have… MARTIN: No, don’t say it, Jon. You know I never would. I–I can’t just “forget” about all the people out here! Besides, I’d rather be trapped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with you than spend one more moment in paradise with her. ARCHIVIST: [FAINT CHUCKLES] That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me!

… But it also makes me worry about the alternatives Martin didn’t mention: what about “spending time in paradise without her nor you”, or “going back to the normal world without you”…

- I personally interpreted the last scene as the camera taking back the memories with it, since it was supposed to protect itself and the perimeter around it from The Eye, and Jon knowing/remembering about it would mean giving Beholding access to it:

(MAG181) [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: Ah… Pity. MARTIN: What? ARCHIVIST: It’s, uh… It’s going away. That… peace; the, the safety, the memory of ignorance… MARTIN: That’s… [INHALE] Yeah, I guess that makes sense. [STATIC FADES] Do you… remember any of it? Wha–what Salesa said? Annabelle? ARCHIVIST: Some. I–I think. It’s, uh… Do you mind filling me in? MARTIN: Wait, you need me to tell you something for once? ARCHIVIST: I guess so! It’s, uh… It’s gone. Like a dream. … What was it like? MARTIN: … [SIGH] Nice. It was… It was really nice.

(“Ignorance” both as willingly ignoring something you’re aware of, and not knowing what’s happening out there…)

But CRIES about the tinge of nostalgia, at the fact that Jon had been so hopeful during MAG180 while discovering this place (… and was now walking out of it with mixed feelings), and the fact that… these nice memories are stored within Martin, and Martin only.

… And the tape which recorded Salesa’s statement.

- WHAT ARE THE TAPE RECORDERS…

(MAG181) SALESA: Hmmm. [SHUFFLING] Interesting… […] Now tell me, do you know why there’s a tape recorder here? I noticed it just now, but I don’t believe I actually own one. ARCHIVIST: … Uh… Not really. MARTIN: They sort of just … follow us round? SALESA: Hmmmm. Interesting. Did you carry it in? Things shouldn’t be able to manifest in here like that. ARCHIVIST: … You had one in your… bag, I–I think, Martin, did, did you drop it here? MARTIN: Uh… I, I don’t think so…! SALESA: … Very well. In that case, we shall leave it to be. It’s hardly valuable, and it’s probably best not to upset whatever it might be involved with. Besides! I have no secrets to hide. […] Anyway, no more stories, I think. Let us relax, and talk, and drink, and… not worry about who might be… listening.

Jon had already told Tim back in MAG114, but the fact that this place was an anti-Eye zone kinda confirms they’re not Beholding? But outside of that…

* It’s interesting that Jon immediately asked Martin if it was his. Did Jon have his own in his pocket and could tell it wasn’t his? When did Martin acquire one: was it the one drifting alongside him in the water (or not water), in MAG163? Or was the one in MAG170 different?

* We’ve seen with the mention of the Corruption creature that people can go inside of Salesa’s property. We’ve seen that Jon was cut off from Beholding, but what about other powers? Jon was still fearful of Annabelle – so The Web could still be active inside of it? Is the recorder Web, another power?

- Why did Annabelle want them there? Was it for them to learn about the camera, to use later? To close the Salesa chapter? To give them some respite, for funsies? To introduce herself properly while in control of the situation, where Jon couldn’t compel her? To make them lose time because something was happening outside?

- It’s getting clearer and clearer that there are maaaany holes in Jon’s pseudo-omniscience: he’s unable to see inside of the Panopticon. He can’t see the future. He can’t know about The Web’s plans due to it being too fragmented and complex. He doesn’t know about Melanie&Georgie. He couldn’t know about Salesa’s “little oasis” since it was safe from The Eye.

What else is he missing from the big picture?

- So now, what’s coming next?

* If it was indeed Upton House, they’re getting pretty close to London, and with a slight detour, Oxford (and Hill Top Road) could be on their way; given how Annabelle told them they would meet again “very soon”, they might revisit the house… well, Martin would be visiting it for the first time. It was already weird before the apocalypse; how is it as a place, now?

* We still haven’t seen Georgie&Melanie, so they could be coming soon, unless Jon is reuniting with them in MAG189, right before the hiatus, in the same way as they managed to trap Basira in MAG176 as the ending to Act I… (And as usual, where are they? Unlike Annabelle, Jon had been able to hypothesise that they could be in London (MAG164: “Hm! I’m… I’m not… sure, I–I can’t really see Melanie o–or–or Georgie. […] if they were dead, I– I think I would know that, I just… I–I don’t know… where they are, w–what they’re doing. L–London, maybe?”). Are they in the Institute? Behind Helen’s door? Protected because Melanie cut her connection to The Eye and Georgie can’t feel fear, putting them off Beholding’s radar?)

* Basira was supposed to meet them again at the Institute; given that Martin&Jon stayed at Salesa’s for a while, I wonder if she’s ahead of them, now…?

* Last time we saw Helen was in MAG177, and we know that she was usually spying on them…Was she able to materialise her Door into Salesa’s house, or not even? I’m guessing she could be popping up soon, if she couldn’t get her hands on Jon&Martin for a while… (Oh no: given how she liked to casually torment them, she probably witnessed Daisy’s death and bring that topic back on the table just for funsies…)

I’m a broken record, but wow, MAG182’s title is concerning (WHEN IT SHOULDN’T BE…). Spiral (and Helen), Corruption or Lonely stuff? And with the second meaning, a discussion about Jon’s status in the apocalypse? (I’m also thinking about The Admiral ;_;)

[thechicchicsagency]

Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement? A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?On Monday, as swiftly as a 9-iron taken to a tee at Augusta, Adam Rapoport resigned as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit magazine after a damning Halloween photo circulated on social media that morning. Drawn from the vast insensitivity archives to which so many influential people have made inadvertent submissions, the picture, from 2004, shows him costumed in a tank top and thick chain necklace as his wife’s “papi,’’ the term she attached to it in an Instagram post several years later.As it happened, Mr. Rapoport had been facing mounting grievance from his staff about the magazine’s demeaning treatment of employees and freelancers of color and the dubious ways in which its popular video division presented culturally appropriated cooking. But these apparently were insufficient grounds for forcing him out.Over and over, power structures seem to require that accusations of racial bias are documented by photographic evidence — proof to override a reflexive or simply inconvenient skepticism. Police officers abused their authority for decades without consequence. It was not until a growing body of video footage revealed all the brutality, and the systemic prejudice at the heart of it, that the world began to express the outrage there to be mined all along — justice by iPhone.In that sense, Mr. Rapoport’s ouster at the hands of a camera was entirely fitting. Bon Appétit belongs to Condé Nast, a media empire perhaps unrivaled by any institution on earth in its supplication to image. For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right’’ people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright. 

There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change.Within the Condé Nast framework, autocratic bosses were left to do whatever they pleased — subjugating underlings to hazing rituals with no seeming end point. So much was excusable in the name of beauty and profit. “Difficulty,” Kim France, a former editor in chief of Lucky magazine, told me, “was regarded as brilliance.

”No one at Condé Nast has had more of an outsize reputation for imperiousness wed to native talent than Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, the artistic director of the company and more recently its “global content adviser’’ as well. Mr. Rapoport, who spent 20 years at the company and turned around an ailing product in Bon Appétit, reported to her.What sort of management cues were to be taken? Famous for a self-regarding style — she might demand that subordinates arrive 30 minutes early for certain meetings she attended — Ms. Wintour was obviously not in the best position to try to convince him, for instance, that he should not ask his assistant (black and Stanford-educated) to clean his golf clubs. (That was one of the many revealing details in a Business Insider exposé of the food magazine that arrived this week.)Race is a fraught subject at Condé Nast. Several employees of color I spoke with, all of them laid off over the past few years, talked about the challenges they faced. They struggled to be heard or get the resources they needed to do their jobs at the highest levels; they faced ignorance and lazy stereotyping from white bosses when the subject of covering black culture came up; they all said they were exhausted by always having to explain it all.

Even though they were no longer at Condé Nast, not one of them felt free to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation from the company or the concern that they would be looked at as complainers, making it much harder to find work.Editors’ PicksHotels Transformed New York’s Social Life. Now What?Solving the Mystery of What Became of J.F.K.’s Other Patrol BoatOne former staff member who is black could not fail to see the irony in being made to go to unconscious bias training — which became mandatory at the company early last year — only then to lose a big chunk of his portfolio shortly thereafter. “I felt so devalued,’’ he said, “after working so hard.’’Unconscious bias training is supposed to alert you to your blind spots in your perception of people and ideas. But at the level of corporate and creative governance, the programming at Condé Nast has not been seamlessly woven into the company’s broader philosophy. Last month, during a round of layoffs, in which 100 people were let go amid the economic calamities of Covid-19, the company dismissed three Asian-American editors, all of whom covered culture at different publications.Among the top 10 editorial leaders listed on Vogue’s masthead, all are white. According to a spokesman for Condé Nast, across divisions on Vogue’s editorial side, people of color make up 14 percent of senior managers. On June 5, amid global protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, Ms. Wintour sent a note to her staff, acknowledging that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,’’ and that the magazine had “not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.”Although Vogue has made a greater effort to feature black women on its covers in recent years — Rihanna, Serena Williams, Lupita Nyong’o — the gate swings open far more easily for those who are not. And in this particular area, too, legacy weighs heavily. When LeBron James made history as the first black man to grace the cover in 2008, he shared the space with a white supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, who appeared as a damsel in his clutches, an unmistakable reference to King Kong.

A spokesman at Condé Nast admitted that much progress needs to be made in regard to diversity at the company, but he defended Ms. Wintour’s record, pointing out that she has passionately supported various designers of color throughout her career, helping to raise money for them through her work with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She also installed two black editors to lead Teen Vogue, genuinely radical in its content, one following the other (Elaine Welteroth and then Lindsay Peoples Wagner).At the same time, Ms. Wintour has presided over Vogue for 32 years, and during that period she has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media. A brief and very inconclusive list of Ms. Wintour’s assistants in the 21st century includes the Yale-educated daughter of a prominent Miami dance director, the Dartmouth-educated descendant of a major bank president, the Princeton-educated daughter of an Oscar-winning screenwriter and so on. For so long it was central to the Condé Nast ethos that you had to be thin, gorgeous and impeccably credentialed to retrieve someone else’s espresso macchiato.

Even now, as the publishing industry continues to implode and wonderful writers who could really use the work (or at least the prestigious affiliation) abound, Vogue continues to list among its contributing editors people like the German heiress Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and many others among the well born. Five years ago, Ms. Thurn und Taxis posted a picture on Instagram of a homeless woman reading Vogue, seated on the sidewalk, with the words, “Paris is full of surprises.” Vogue quickly issued a statement, calling the gesture distasteful, and then proceeded to run her byline on its website at least 10 more timesLast year, Grace Coddington, another contributor, who had held enormous influence over what was shot for Vogue and how, in her many years as the magazine’s creative director, was photographed with her collection of “mammy’’ jars, racist ceramics depicting African-American women as servile maids.

Ms. Wintour clearly believes that she can break from the past and kill off any vestiges of a system steeped in the benighted values for which she has become the corporate avatar. The public apology from Bon Appétit was quite startling in its admission of failure, particularly its concession that the magazine “continued to tokenize” the people of color that it did hire.As part of her contribution to this new wave of progressivism, Ms. Wintour wrote a piece for Vogue.com a week after the death of George Floyd, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter and calling on Joe Biden to select a woman of color as his running mate.For someone who had seemed so averse to activism as the world has roiled from inequality for years, it felt like a desperate grasp for relevance. A spokesman for the company bristled at the suggestion, arguing that it is Condé Nast’s job “to cover what’s going on in the culture in the moment.”As it happens, André Leon Talley, who recently wrote a memoir about his complicated relationship with Ms. Wintour, as a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue, also has a lot to say about the current moment. This week in a radio interview with Sandra Bernhard, he offered his opinion about his ex-boss’s professed transformation.“I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” he told Ms. Bernhard. “I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.”

[verschwoerer]

Castor-Protest – wichtig und richtig

Anfang November rollte trotz Corona-Lockdown ein Castor-Transport aus dem britischen Sellafield ins hessische Biblis – der erste Rücktransport aus den Plutonium-Fabriken im Ausland seit neun Jahren. Begleitet wurde er von einem Großaufgebot der Polizei, von Protesten und von einer Kontroverse in den (sozialen) Medien.

Dieser Blogbeitrag basiert unter anderem auf diversen Beiträgen von .ausgestrahlt auf Twitter, um mit einem grundlegenden Missverständnis aufzuräumen. Staatssekretär Jochen Flasbarth aus dem Bundesumweltministerium erklärte in diesem Kurznachrichtendienst nämlich: „Die Proteste gegen den Castortransport haben mit einer Anti-Atomkraft-Haltung nichts zu tun. Der Atomausstieg ist beschlossen - die gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzung um die Atomenergienutzung beendet. Jetzt geht es darum unseren Müll zurückzunehmen“. Er war mit dieser Einstellung nicht allein. Vielmehr gab es einen kleinen Chor der ehemals und aktuell Regierenden, die ins gleiche Horn bliesen, etwa Bundesumweltministerin Svenja Schulze, Jürgen Trittin und die Umweltminister*innen von Niedersachsen und Hessen, Olaf Lies und Priska Hinz.

Die Regierung erklärt die Auseinandersetzung für beendet

Nun war es noch nie eine gute Idee, wenn Regierende einer Protestbewegung erklären wollten, ob ihr Protest (noch) Sinn macht oder nicht. Vor allem nicht, wenn sich dieser Protest gegen die aktuelle Atom-Politik eben dieser Regierung richtet. Machen wir also einen Faktencheck: Auf der gesellschaftlichen Ebene ist der Atom-Streit mitnichten beendet, denn Deutschland ist noch immer zweitgrößter Atomstromproduzent in der EU.

Das Abschalten der letzten Leistungsreaktoren ist zwar für Ende 2022 beschlossen. Dieser Beschluss allein mindert jedoch nicht die Gefahr, die von den sechs noch laufenden AKW ausgeht. Wer würde einem Freund gratulieren, der beschlossen hat, in gut zwei Jahren mit dem Rauchen aufhören zu wollen? Hinzu kommt: Die letzten Betriebsjahre jeder Atomanlage sind unter Sicherheitsgesichtspunkten besonders heikel, da sich Investitionen in Form notwendiger Reparaturmaßnahmen zunehmend weniger lohnen und somit das Risiko für die Bevölkerung steigt.

Wer schützt die Menschen in Sellafield?

Svenja Schulze erklärte gegenüber der Rheinischen Post mit Blick auf die Proteste: „Zum Atomausstieg gehört auch die Verantwortung für den Atommüll - dem kann ich mich auch als Atomkraftgegnerin nicht entziehen. Es wäre keine ethische Position zu sagen: Liebe Briten, behaltet mal unseren Müll.“ Faktencheck: Viele derjenigen, die jetzt gegen den Castor-Transport nach Biblis protestieren, haben mit ihren Aktionen in der Vergangenheit dazu beigetragen, dass deutlich weniger deutscher Atommüll ins Ausland gebracht wurde, als von der Bundesregierung geplant. Alleine zwischen 2001 und 2005 wurden statt geplanter 500 Castoren nur 250 nach La Hague und Sellafield transportiert. Der Rest wurde durch Proteste verhindert. Mit ihren Aktionen hat die Anti-Atom-Bewegung somit mehr für die Anwohnenden an diesen britischen und französischen Atomanlagen getan als die Regierung.

Seit Jahrzehnten ist die Anti-Atom-Bewegung international vernetzt. Hier gibt es weder innerhalb Deutschlands noch in Europa oder weltweit eine NIMBY-Haltung. Die Menschen an anderen Standorten werden vielmehr beim Schutz vor Strahlung konsequent mitgedacht. Wenn also den Protesten von der FAZ eine „St.-Florians-Haltung“ vorgeworfen wird, so ist dies nicht mehr als die rhetorische Plattitüde, die der Anti-AKW-Bewegung als Deutungsmuster der Regierenden aktuell bei jedem Protest gegen den Umgang mit Atommüll entgegenschlägt: Ihr wollt ja nur, dass der Müll ins Ausland kommt (oder hier: dort bleibt).

Umstritten ist, wann und wohin

Es ist jedoch vollkommen unstrittig, dass der Atommüll zurückgenommen werden muss. Aus einer moralisch-ethischen Verantwortung heraus ist es selbstverständlich, dass sich Deutschland um die bestmögliche Lagerung des in der Bundesrepublik entstandenen Atommülls kümmern muss. Umstritten war und ist somit nicht, ob der Atommüll aus Sellafield zurückgenommen werden soll, sondern wann dies geschehen soll und wohin dieser Atommüll verbracht werden soll.

Das Zwischenlager in Biblis ist als Ort denkbar ungeeignet. Wenn einer dieser Castor-Behälter in den kommenden Jahrzehnten in der Halle in Biblis undicht wird, so könnte er zwar notdürftig repariert werden, wäre dann aber, anders als die dort bereits gelagerten anderen Behälter nicht mehr transportfähig. Eine Möglichkeit für eine umfassende Reparatur vor Ort in Form einer sogenannten „Heißen Zelle“ gibt es jedoch nicht. Die Anti-AKW-Bewegung hat in all den Jahren immer gegen eine unsichere Lagerung von Atommüll protestiert und Widerstand geleistet. Ohne diesen langandauernden Widerstand gäbe es heute beispielsweise ein völlig ungeeignetes Endlager in Gorleben! Die Forderung ist somit schlicht: möglichst sichere Lagerorte für den Atommüll – und dies auch bei der Zwischenlagerung.

11.000 Polizist*innen trotz Lockdown

Kommen wir nun zum Zeitpunkt des Transports: Die von der Bundesregierung immer wieder benannten bindenden völkerrechtlichen Verträge haben diese Regierung nicht davon abgehalten, in den letzten neun Jahren keinen einzigen Castor-Behälter aus dem Ausland zurückzunehmen. Dafür gab es immer wieder mehr oder weniger gute Gründe. Deswegen taugt ein Verweis auf die Verträge in Zeiten einer Pandemie, in der es gilt, Kontakte zu minimieren, nun wirklich nicht als Argument. Die Gewerkschaft der Polizei fand es zu Recht unverantwortlich, mehr als 11.000 Polizist*innen dem Risiko einer Infektion mit Corona auszusetzen.

Joachim Wille schrieb treffend in einem Kommentar der Frankfurter Rundschau: „Nicht einzusehen ist, warum die strahlende Fuhre ausgerechnet jetzt, just zu Beginn des neuen Corona-Lockdowns, durchgezogen werden muss. Im Frühjahr hatte Bundesinnenminister Horst Seehofer den damals bereits geplanten Transport mit der Begründung abgesagt, er sei unter solchen Bedingungen zu gefährlich. Nun soll das, bei noch höheren Infektionszahlen, nicht mehr gelten? Die politisch Verantwortlichen hätten hier bei den Briten garantiert einen Aufschub erreichen können.“

Protest gegen vermeidbare Risiken

Nicht nur für die sich um die eigene Existenz sorgende Gastronomie und Hotelbranche war der Zeitpunkt des Transports am ersten Tag der erneuten deutlichen Kontaktbeschränkungen schlicht zynisch. Joachim Wille weiter: „So drängt sich der Verdacht auf: Es kommt ihnen sogar ganz gelegen, wenn die Proteste - ebenfalls coronabedingt - eher schwach ausfallen. Noch ein Grund für Verdruss.“

Protest gegen Atommülltransporte richtet sich somit gegen vermeidbare Risiken. Aus diesem Grund fordert übrigens in der Republik Freies Wendland auch niemand, dass der Atommüll aus deutschen AKW, der in Gorleben lagert, von den Absendern zurückgenommen werden soll, obwohl er dort in einer unsicheren Halle steht. So sieht Verantwortung aus.

„Die reflexartig arrangierten Mahnwachen und Kletteraktionen wirken seltsam aus der Zeit gefallen.“ meinte Alexander Budde im Deutschlandfunk zu den Aktionen gegen den Castor. Doch der Protest ist weder Reflex noch Ritual. Letztlich denken diejenigen, die jetzt versuchen, die Aktionen gegen den Castor-Transport zu delegitimieren, zu kurz. Für sie war der Streit um den Castor immer ein Streit ums große Ganze. Da ist ja auch was dran. Aber auch wenn es beim Konflikt um die Atomkraft und um Gorleben große Fortschritte gibt, ist längst nicht alles eitel Sonnenschein. Und deshalb ist es gut, wenn es weiter Menschen gibt, die den Protest auf die Straße tragen. https://www.ausgestrahlt.de/blog/2020/11/10/castor-protest-wichtig-und-richtig/

[truemedian]

Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement?

big city A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?

Anna Wintour at the Coach show last spring.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

June 11, 2020 On Monday, as swiftly as a 9-iron taken to a tee at Augusta, Adam Rapoport resigned as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit magazine after a damning Halloween photo circulated on social media that morning. Drawn from the vast insensitivity archives to which so many influential people have made inadvertent submissions, the picture, from 2004, shows him costumed in a tank top and thick chain necklace as his wife’s “papi,’’ the term she attached to it in an Instagram post several years later. As it happened, Mr. Rapoport had been facing mounting grievance from his staff about the magazine’s demeaning treatment of employees and freelancers of color and the dubious ways in which its popular video division presented culturally appropriated cooking. But these apparently were insufficient grounds for forcing him out. Over and over, power structures seem to require that accusations of racial bias are documented by photographic evidence — proof to override a reflexive or simply inconvenient skepticism. Police officers abused their authority for decades without consequence. It was not until a growing body of video footage revealed all the brutality, and the systemic prejudice at the heart of it, that the world began to express the outrage there to be mined all along — justice by iPhone. In that sense, Mr. Rapoport’s ouster at the hands of a camera was entirely fitting. Bon Appétit belongs to Condé Nast, a media empire perhaps unrivaled by any institution on earth in its supplication to image. For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right’’ people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright. There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change. Within the Condé Nast framework, autocratic bosses were left to do whatever they pleased — subjugating underlings to hazing rituals with no seeming end point. So much was excusable in the name of beauty and profit. “Difficulty,” Kim France, a former editor in chief of Lucky magazine, told me, “was regarded as brilliance.” No one at Condé Nast has had more of an outsize reputation for imperiousness wed to native talent than Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, the artistic director of the company and more recently its “global content adviser’’ as well. Mr. Rapoport, who spent 20 years at the company and turned around an ailing product in Bon Appétit, reported to her. What sort of management cues were to be taken? Famous for a self-regarding style — she might demand that subordinates arrive 30 minutes early for certain meetings she attended — Ms. Wintour was obviously not in the best position to try to convince him, for instance, that he should not ask his assistant (black and Stanford-educated) to clean his golf clubs. (That was one of the many revealing details in a Business Insider exposé of the food magazine that arrived this week.) Race is a fraught subject at Condé Nast. Several employees of color I spoke with, all of them laid off over the past few years, talked about the challenges they faced. They struggled to be heard or get the resources they needed to do their jobs at the highest levels; they faced ignorance and lazy stereotyping from white bosses when the subject of covering black culture came up; they all said they were exhausted by always having to explain it all. Even though they were no longer at Condé Nast, not one of them felt free to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation from the company or the concern that they would be looked at as complainers, making it much harder to find work. One former staff member who is black could not fail to see the irony in being made to go to unconscious bias training — which became mandatory at the company early last year — only then to lose a big chunk of his portfolio shortly thereafter. “I felt so devalued,’’ he said, “after working so hard.’’ Unconscious bias training is supposed to alert you to your blind spots in your perception of people and ideas. But at the level of corporate and creative governance, the programming at Condé Nast has not been seamlessly woven into the company’s broader philosophy. Last month, during a round of layoffs, in which 100 people were let go amid the economic calamities of Covid-19, the company dismissed three Asian-American editors, all of whom covered culture at different publications. Among the top 10 editorial leaders listed on Vogue’s masthead, all are white. According to a spokesman for Condé Nast, across divisions on Vogue’s editorial side, people of color make up 14 percent of senior managers. On June 5, amid global protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, Ms. Wintour sent a note to her staff, acknowledging that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,’’ and that the magazine had “not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.” Although Vogue has made a greater effort to feature black women on its covers in recent years — Rihanna, Serena Williams, Lupita Nyong’o — the gate swings open far more easily for those who are not. And in this particular area, too, legacy weighs heavily. When LeBron James made history as the first black man to grace the cover in 2008, he shared the space with a white supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, who appeared as a damsel in his clutches, an unmistakable reference to King Kong. A spokesman at Condé Nast admitted that much progress needs to be made in regard to diversity at the company, but he defended Ms. Wintour’s record, pointing out that she has passionately supported various designers of color throughout her career, helping to raise money for them through her work with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She also installed two black editors to lead Teen Vogue, genuinely radical in its content, one following the other (Elaine Welteroth and then Lindsay Peoples Wagner). At the same time, Ms. Wintour has presided over Vogue for 32 years, and during that period she has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media. A brief and very inconclusive list of Ms. Wintour’s assistants in the 21st century includes the Yale-educated daughter of a prominent Miami dance director, the Dartmouth-educated descendant of a major bank president, the Princeton-educated daughter of an Oscar-winning screenwriter and so on. For so long it was central to the Condé Nast ethos that you had to be thin, gorgeous and impeccably credentialed to retrieve someone else’s espresso macchiato. Even now, as the publishing industry continues to implode and wonderful writers who could really use the work (or at least the prestigious affiliation) abound, Vogue continues to list among its contributing editors people like the German heiress Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and many others among the well born. Five years ago, Ms. Thurn und Taxis posted a picture on Instagram of a homeless woman reading Vogue, seated on the sidewalk, with the words, “Paris is full of surprises.” Vogue quickly issued a statement, calling the gesture distasteful, and then proceeded to run her byline on its website at least 10 more times Last year, Grace Coddington, another contributor, who had held enormous influence over what was shot for Vogue and how, in her many years as the magazine’s creative director, was photographed with her collection of “mammy’’ jars, racist ceramics depicting African-American women as servile maids. Ms. Wintour clearly believes that she can break from the past and kill off any vestiges of a system steeped in the benighted values for which she has become the corporate avatar. The public apology from Bon Appétit was quite startling in its admission of failure, particularly its concession that the magazine “continued to tokenize” the people of color that it did hire. As part of her contribution to this new wave of progressivism, Ms. Wintour wrote a piece for Vogue.com a week after the death of George Floyd, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter and calling on Joe Biden to select an African-American woman as his running mate. For someone who had seemed so averse to activism as the world has roiled from inequality for years, it felt like a desperate grasp for relevance. A spokesman for the company bristled at the suggestion, arguing that it is Condé Nast’s job “to cover what’s going on in the culture in the moment.” As it happens, André Leon Talley, who recently wrote a memoir about his complicated relationship with Ms. Wintour, as a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue, also has a lot to say about the current moment. This week in a radio interview with Sandra Bernhard, he offered his opinion about his ex-boss’s professed transformation. “I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” he told Ms. Bernhard. “I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.” Read More Read the full article

[jazz-polizei]

Fataler Stressabbau

Wenn nur noch Alkohol zu helfen scheint

Frauen verklären den Feierabenddrink gern zum emanzipierten Genuss. Je erfolgreicher sie sind, je höher ihr Sozialstatus ist, desto mehr Alkohol trinken sie. Von Susanne Kaloff

20. August 2018

Wenn sie abends heimkomme vom Job, gieße sie sich gern ein Glas Wein ein, erzählte mir neulich eine Bekannte. Sie rase nicht heim vor Gier, aber genieße es als Ritual: "Wein ist für mich auch ein Stück Wellness."

Das Wort Wellness in Verbindung mit Alkohol verblüffte mich kurz, dann erinnerte es mich an das, was ich früher auch glaubte, ohne es jemals so ausgedrückt zu haben: Wein entspannt wie ein Bad im warmen Whirlpool. Eine Kollegin meinte mal genervt, das ganze Entgiftungsgehabe gehe ihr gehörig auf den Senkel. Für sie bedeute Wellness, sich abends aufs Sofa zu hauen mit einem Glas Champagner.

Heute herrscht ausgerechnet dort, wo der Alkoholkonsum gefährlich wird, praktisch Gleichberechtigung. Frauen trinken zwar weiterhin deutlich weniger als Männer, rutschen aber schneller in den Risikobereich, denn der weibliche Körper kann durch seinen niedrigeren Wasseranteil und seine in der Regel geringere Körpermasse Alkohol weitaus schlechter vertragen als der männliche. Junge Frauen können ihn auch nicht so schnell abbauen, was an der niedrigeren Aktivität des alkoholabbauenden Enzyms Alkoholdehydrogenase liegt.

Das kann langfristig schwerwiegende Folgen haben. Das Brustkrebsrisiko etwa steigt selbst bei gemäßigtem Konsum. Das wissenschaftliche Kuratorium der Deutschen Hauptstelle für Suchtfragen rät Frauen deshalb, pro Tag nicht mehr als zwölf Gramm Alkohol zu sich zu nehmen. Das entspricht 0,15 Liter Wein oder 0,3 Liter Bier. Also bloß ein Glas.

Lesen Sie mehr zu diesem Thema im SPIEGEL Wissen 4/2018 "Cool bleiben"

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So weit die Theorie. Die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus: Der Anteil der Frauen, die sich regelmäßig einen Rausch antrinken, liegt bei etwas mehr als 20 Prozent. Nur scheinbar paradox: Je gebildeter und erfolgreicher Frauen über 30 sind, je höher ihr Sozialstatus ist, umso mehr Alkohol trinken sie.

Woran liegt das? Der Mediziner Bastian Willenborg behandelt in der Oberbergklinik Berlin/Brandenburg unter anderem Abhängigkeitserkrankungen. "Vor hundert Jahren hat es sich noch nicht mal geschickt, als Frau mit Freundinnen auszugehen", sagt er, "diese Freiheiten, die früher nur Männer hatten, wurden hart erkämpft." Zur Folge hat diese zweifellos positive Entwicklung leider auch, dass Frauen nicht nur ein Ventil für die Doppel- und Dreifachbelastung brauchen, sondern häufig demonstrieren wollen, in jeder Beziehung mit den Männern mithalten zu können.

Doch aus Spaß wird Ernst, wenn man bemerkt, dass man sich das Leben, vor allem die Abende, ohne Alkohol gar nicht mehr richtig vorstellen kann. Und vor allem nicht vorstellen will. Selbst dann nicht, wenn Mediziner immer wieder darauf hinweisen, wie wichtig es ist, Abstinenztage einzulegen. Nicht nur in Form eines kleinen salonfähigen Detox, sondern generell jede Woche als Pause von mindestens zwei Tagen, um den Körper zu entlasten.

Für mein Buch "Nüchtern betrachtet war's betrunken nicht so berauschend" habe ich in einem einjährigen Selbstversuch komplett auf Alkohol verzichtet. Darauf bekam ich etliche Leserbriefe. Die Reaktion vieler Frauen war eine Art Rechtfertigung, sie hätten kein Problem mit Alkohol. Ich hatte auch niemandem ein Problem unterstellt, genau genommen hatte ich nicht einmal das Wort "Problem" verwendet.

Eine Leserin schrieb mir, dass sie locker auf Alkohol verzichten könne, weil sie ja kein Problem mit dem Trinken hätte, sie würde nur jeden Abend ein bis zwei Gläser Wein zum, das betonte sie, französischen Essen trinken. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich ein Einzelfall bin, aber ich koche mir nicht jeden Abend ein französisches Essen. Ihre Reaktion zeigt recht gut, wie Frauen mit ihrem Alkoholkonsum umgehen: Er wird stilisiert zu etwas genüsslich Vornehmem. Genussrituale zeichnet aus, dass das Genussmittel nicht eingesetzt wird, um einen anderen Zweck zu erfüllen. Der Reflex, nach Alkohol zu greifen, um in einen Zustand zu kommen, der erträglicher ist als der tatsächliche, ist jedoch kein seltener und nicht nur ein weiblicher. Machen Männer auch, das Feierabendbier zum Entspannen, den Schnaps für mehr Mut.

Alkohol ist eine psychoaktive Substanz: In kleinen Mengen wirkt er anregend und leicht beruhigend. Darüber hinaus werden im Gehirn Endorphine freigesetzt. Die Stimmung hebt sich, Ängste und Anspannungen wirken kurzzeitig erträglicher. Wer am Abend trinkt, schläft zwar leicht ein, hat aber später in der Nacht damit zu kämpfen, dass der Alkoholpegel auf ein stimulierendes Level abgefallen ist – statt Nachtruhe ist dann also Nachtaktivität angesagt.

Dass heute Frauen so offen, geradezu demonstrativ Alkohol trinken, hängt vermutlich damit zusammen, dass sie tatsächlich leistungsstärker sein müssen als früher, um mithalten zu können: Job, Ehe, Familie, soziale Medien, der Druck, alles zu wuppen und dabei noch sagenhaft auszusehen, was am besten noch mit einem Selfie belegt wird. Manchmal wirkt es, als wären Erschöpfung und Stress ein Statussymbol, ein Beleg dafür, dass wir ordentlich rödeln und professionell leiden. Feminismus ist eine feine Sache, aber manchmal scheint für Frauen alles nur noch harte Arbeit zu sein: Erziehung, Selbsthilferatgeber lesen, Listen abarbeiten, die neueste Meditations-App ausprobieren, Sex haben. Der Glaube, sich ständig reparieren und optimieren zu müssen, erzeugt noch mehr Arbeit. "Frauen trinken in der Regel, um Aufgaben integriert zu kriegen; sie nutzen Alkohol, um viel bewältigt zu bekommen", sagt Suchtexperte Bastian Willenborg. "Männer trinken eher, um schwierige Situationen und Aufgaben zu vergessen."

GEN SADAKANE / EYEEM / GETTY IMAGES

Ab Freitagnachmittag gleicht Instagram einer gut besuchten Bar; man kann den Eindruck gewinnen, dass es nur darum geht zu zeigen, mit welcher Leichtigkeit und Selbstironie das Leben gestemmt wird. Hashtags wie #daydrinking oder #rosétime sind genauso beliebt unter Frauen wie sogenannte Memes (kleine lustige Sprüche) mit Sätzen wie "Mommy needs Wine". Rosé, Prosecco, Crémant, Aperol Spritz gehören zu den gesellschaftlich akzeptierten und romantisierten Ladydrugs. Anlässe braucht man schon lange nicht mehr, es reicht, eine Frau zu sein, die locker und scheinbar selbstbewusst tönt, dass sie einen Drink braucht. Und den sie sich auch verdient hat!

Fotos von Gin Tonics, die auf Designertischen arrangiert sind, daneben hochgelegte, perfekt pedikürte Füße, hat jede moderne Frau im Repertoire. Vor allem Mütter, die gern noch eine Bildunterschrift anhängen: "Puh, Kids im Bett." Wer hätte dafür kein Herz, kein Verständnis?

Willenborg kennt diesen Umgang auch: "Bei uns in der Oberbergklinik erlebe ich es schon, dass süchtige Frauen diese Trends mitgemacht haben. Aus meiner Sicht wurde die Entwicklung einer Sucht dadurch erleichtert." Er glaubt allerdings, dass Frauen, die diesen ironischen Umgang mit dem Konsum feiern, unterbewusst wissen, dass sie weniger trinken sollten. Sie fühlen sich angesprochen: Ups, das gilt ja auch für mich. Wer sich selbst darüber öffentlich lustig macht, sich mit den anderen Müttern in gleicher gestresster Lage verbündet, kann sich ja auch weniger allein fühlen mit der Überforderung. Sicherlich ein ganz menschliches Verfahren.

Früher, also bevor das Leben zur Dauerbühne der Selbstdarstellung wurde, tranken Frauen auch. Ein Freund erzählte, dass seine Mutter beim Kochen immer ein Glas Wein getrunken habe. Das stellte sie aber in den Küchenschrank, damit sein Vater es nicht mitbekommen konnte.

Früher galt Trinken noch nicht als emanzipierte weibliche Reaktion und Rebellion auf Ungleichheit; früher schämten sich Frauen noch eher, wenn sie das taten, was Männer schon immer mit geschwollener Brust tun: sich das Recht herausnehmen, sich einfach aus dem Alltag, der Familie, der Verantwortung, der Ehe, der Wirklichkeit herauszuziehen.

Aber was tut Alkohol denn wirklich für uns? "Kurzfristig hat Alkohol entspannende Effekte. Übrigens entspannt er auch die Hemmungen, weshalb manche Menschen unter Alkohol anfangs lustiger oder aktiver wirken", sagt Falk Kiefer, Ärztlicher Direktor der Klinik für Abhängiges Verhalten und Suchtmedizin am Zentralinstitut für Seelische Gesundheit in Mannheim. "Langfristig erhöht er das Risiko für Herz-Kreislauf-Erkrankungen, Krebserkrankungen, Leber-zirrhose und Nervenerkrankungen. Die Abhängigkeit von Alkohol und oft dramatische soziale und psychische Folgeschäden sind leider weitere mögliche langfristige Folgen."

Unter dem Einfluss von Alkohol verändert sich auch die Wahrnehmung, und die Fähigkeit, das eigene Verhalten zu kontrollieren, nimmt ab. Das bereits ab 0,5 Promille, was bei einer durchschnittlichen jungen Frau zwei Gläsern Wein entspricht. Wenn die Enthemmung zunimmt, hat man keinen Puffer, keinen Raum mehr zwischen dem Reiz von außen und seiner eigenen Reaktion darauf. Alkohol dient entweder dazu, ein Gefühl auszuradieren, oder aber, es zu verstärken, er hilft dabei, unangenehme, belastende Gefühle durch Leichtigkeit, Unbeschwertheit, Sorglosigkeit und ein wenig zarte Dumpfheit zu ersetzen.

Alkohol ist Fluchthelfer, er gaukelt uns vor, es gäbe einen universellen Happiness-Button, der uns glücklicher, leichter, unbesorgter sein lässt und uns das Gefühl gibt, unser Leben unter Kontrolle zu haben.

Unter Wellness versteht man Methoden und Anwendungen, die das körperliche, geistige oder seelische Wohlbefinden steigern. Die Frage ist, ob Alkohol das wirklich tut. Hilft er, uns zu entspannen, den Stress abzubauen? Welche Anforderungen kommen wirklich von außen, welche sind hausgemacht? Was läuft überhaupt so sehr auf Hochtouren, dass man es mit Promille abstellen muss, um nicht durchzudrehen?

Das Wort Stress wird im Sprachgebrauch benutzt, als wäre er unvermeidbar, als wäre er eine natürliche Nebenwirkung des Lebens. Der inflationär verwendete Begriff braucht keine Erklärung, jeder nickt verständnisvoll, wenn man etwas von "zu viel Stress" murmelt.

NIKOLE MOCK / EYEEM / GETTY IMAGES

Dabei setzt sich Stress aus unzähligen kleinen, meist sehr wohl vermeidbaren Dingen zusammen. Vor allem aus der tragischen Kombination aus zu wenig Zeit und zu viel Anspruch an sich selbst. Weil wir wissen, dass wir Bewältigungsstrategien für den Alltag brauchen, der uns manchmal über den Kopf wächst, gehen wir zum Yoga, joggen oder buchen einen Achtsamkeitskurs.

Das Problem ist nur, dass selbst diese Ausgleichsversuche nur als weitere Pflichten auf der unendlichen To-do-Liste landen, die jede Frau in ihrem Kopf führt. Mit wehenden Fahnen schlägt man auf der Yogamatte auf, fix und alle, aber Sport muss sein. Nach der 90-minütigen Klasse hetzt man heim zu Mann und Kindern und holt die Flasche Sauvignon aus dem Kühlschrank, während man noch die bunten Leggings und die Mala um den Hals trägt.

Aber trinken, um der permanenten Überforderung zu entfliehen, um Anforderungen und Probleme schrumpfen zu lassen, kreiert immer neue Probleme: sich schämen, schlecht fühlen, einen Kater haben – und vor allem, nun ein probates Mittel zu kennen, das Ungemütliches für die Dauer des Trinkens wegschließt. Wer würde freiwillig ohne dieses Mittel leben, das wir fast alle seit unserer Jugend konsumieren? Trinken ist so lange gut, bis es nicht mehr gut ist. Das muss nicht immer dramatisch aussehen, die Bandbreite ist groß.

Ich mochte eines Tages einfach nicht mehr das Gefühl, dass ich meinem Körper etwas zuführe, was mir schadet, obwohl ich in allen anderen Bereichen sehr gut auf mich achte. Ich mochte die Frau nicht mehr, die ich war, wenn ich bereits nach einem Glas die Wirkung des Alkohols spürte, auch wenn alle anderen um mich herum auch angesäuselt waren. Ich mochte eines Tages auch nicht, dass Alkohol das Belohnungssystem im Hirn anspringen lässt, was sich darin zeigt, dass man dieses wohltuende Gefühl immer wieder erleben will.

"Mit Alkohol ist eng das Gefühl verknüpft, sich vermeintlich 'etwas Gutes' zu tun", sagt Falk Kiefer. Man nennt das Suchtgedächtnis, die Konditionierung, der Speichelfluss setzt schon ein, wenn man eine Flasche Wein sieht: Oh, schön, jetzt kommt gleich die Entspannung, das Belohnungshormon Dopamin wird ausgeschüttet.

Das Trinken spielt eine so vermeintlich große Rolle in unserem Verständnis von Lebenslust, Genuss, Üppigkeit, Hingabe, Sinnlichkeit. Männer auf Datingportalen sind enttäuscht, wenn ich auf ihre Frage, ob man einen Vino zusammen trinken könne, antworte: Ich trinke nicht. Als wäre ein Wein ein Versprechen und ein Wasser ein Korb.

Aber statt eines Glases Wein nehme ich mir nun die Zeit zu hören, was ich in Wahrheit suche, an was es mir mangelt. Was meine innere Leere wirklich füllen könnte. Und welche nicht alkoholischen Strategien ich nutzen kann, um diesen Mangel zu beseitigen. Es gibt sie, man muss sie nur neu erlernen. Welche das sind, hängt auch davon ab, wozu man den Alkohol vorher genutzt hat, sagt Suchttherapeut Kiefer. "Zum Abschalten? Entspannen? Zum Einschlafen? Gegen Unruhe oder Langeweile? Um cooler oder lustiger zu sein? Hierzu muss man dann Alternativen finden. Das können Entspannungsübungen, Sport, Meditation, neue Freizeitaktivitäten oder neue Freunde sein."

Wenn man aufhört zu trinken, lernt man, das Unkomfortable, Piksige, Widerständige, das man spürt und nicht spüren will, einen Moment einfach nur mal stehen zu lassen, zu beobachten, ohne es gleich wieder reparieren oder entfernen zu müssen. Nicht gleich reagieren auf alles, nicht jedes Loch stopfen müssen, erst einmal neun Sekunden lang atmen und abwarten.

Frauen sprechen ja heutzutage sehr viel über Selbstliebe und Selbstakzeptanz, vielleicht wäre ab und zu ein wenig mehr Selbstloyalität hilfreich. Nach dem Lesen meines Buches beschloss Almut, eine ganz normale Frau, keine Alkoholikerin, die Drinks wegzulassen. Ist es nicht kurios, dass glutenfrei, laktosefrei, zuckerfrei, koffeinfrei, parabenfrei gefeiert wird, aber sobald es alkoholfrei heißt, wird es ungemütlich? Sie schrieb neulich, wie es war, als sie zum ersten Mal mit ihren trinkenden Freundinnen auf der Reeperbahn feiern ging. Die Freundinnen fanden es ein bisschen doof. Aber das war egal, für sie war es eine Nacht, in der sie sich näher bei sich fühlte, sich treuer blieb als jemals in betrunkenem Zustand. Die Freundinnen fragten ein wenig gereizt, wie lange sie "das" denn machen wolle, aber ihre Antwort ging unter in dem Rausch der Nacht, sie sagte leise zu sich selbst: Es gibt kein "nie wieder" oder ein "bis dann nicht", es gibt einfach nur ein "sehr gut" und ein "weiter so, warum nicht?".

Susanne Kaloff: "Nüchtern betrachtet war's betrunken nicht so berauschend: Ein Trip in die Freiheit". Fischer; 256 Seiten; 14,99 Euro

[worldwidewonderous]

Thailand Part IV!

Thailand Part IV – Chiang Rai

So, nachdem ich meinen Ärger und meine Trauer über den Blog letzte Woche überkommen habe, schreibe ich dies hier nun bei WORD, mit 10-minütiger Sicherungskopie, man lernt ja dazu.

Ab heute geht es um den Norden Thailands, der uns, zugegebenermaßen, besser gefallen hat. Aber bildet euch eure eigene Meinung:

Nachdem unser Phuket-Ausflug relativ ernüchternd ausfiel und wir unseren Phuket-Ausflug bereits geplant hatten (jaja, Wortspiel), hievten wir unsere immer noch Koffer zum Flughafen, bei dem wir dann, erwartungsgemäß, durch gewunken wurden und Ra schon in leichte panikartige Zustände verfiel, hat sie ja doch schon bei normal-standard Flügen Flugangst. Mit Wasser und ähnlichen dangerous goods hatten die Thais keine Probleme, bei Waffen und vor allem Durian verstanden sie hingegen GAR keinen Spaß. Überall hingen große rote Kreuze, die diese Güter in auffälligsterweise diskriminierten. Zunächst dachte ich, diese Frucht (Durian), wäre so gefährlich wegen ihrer Schale, die mit kleinen harten Zacken versehen ist, doch ich wurde aufgeklärt und es geht tatsächlich um ihren vermodernden Gestank, der sich in die Klimaanlagen und sämtliche Lüftungen begibt und dann dort für immer einnistet. Ich weiß, ZUM GLÜCK, nicht, wie Durian riecht, nenne sie seitdem allerdings nur noch Stinke-Frucht. Soll aber ganz gut schmecken... :D Nun gut.

Der Flug verlief ohne größere Schwierigkeiten, kostete uns 30€ und wir kamen doch dort an, wo wir hinwollten, nämlich nach Chiang Rai. Chiang Rai liegt im Norden Thailands und zwar relativ nah an der Grenze zu Laos und Myanmar. Einen besonders beliebten Tourispot gibt es, bei dem alle drei Länder aufeinanderstoßen (na Mensch). Wir entschieden uns dagegen, erkundeten sonst aber alles, was es in Chiang Rai so gab: die Hauptstraße. Chiang Rai (CR) ist echt winzig, aber es war dort so schön, das wir dies als einen unserer Lieblingsspots auserkorten. Das Hostel war süß („Happynest“) und sauber und lag direkt im Zentrum. Die Straße hinunter gab es ein weiteres Katzencafé, das wir kurzzeitig besuchten, bis sich meine Allergie aka. Erkältung („du hast keine Allergie, und selbst wenn, wir werden später Katzen haben!“) meldete, es gab dutzende Massageplätze, die „edler“ aussahen und mehr hermachten, als die Läden im Süden, etliche Restaurants und Tempel. Generell ist CR einfach sehr entspannt. Alles ist fußläufig erreichbar und unser Lieblingsrestaurant von ganz Thailand haben wir dort direkt beim ersten Anlauf entdeckt, das Moon Café. Hier gibt es das leckerste Curry, das man sich vorstellen kann. So gingen wir dort auch direkt zwei- bis dreimal am Tag hin und verbrannten uns die Mäuler („NO SPICY!“). Ich hatte immer das gelbe Curry, weil ich beim Probieren von Ras Grünem fast draufgegangen wäre. Nun ja, unsere masochistische Ader wurde also auch befriedigt und das beim Essen, was gibt es Schöneres? Wir hatten tägliche unsere Mangoshakes, die sich bei uns so als Ritual und Hauptnahrungsmittel eingeschlichen haben und stöberten durch die kleinen Läden auf der Suche nach Wasser, welches man sich leider immer kaufen musste, da das Leitungswasser doch eher Vergiftungscharakter aufwies. Das war aber in ganz Thailand der Fall.

An einem der ersten Tage in CR versuchten wir zum weißen Tempel zu gelangen, ich weiß nicht mehr wie, aber wir haben es auch tatsächlich hinbekommen und siehe da, da waren sie alle wieder, die Touris. Der weiße Tempel ist einer der Hauptattraktionen in CR, der ein wenig weiter entfernt ist und der direkt neben einer Hahnenkampanlage liegt, die uns direkt negativ aufstoßen ließ. Die armen Dinger. Trotzdem ist der Tempel sehr beeindruckend, weil er sich weit erstreckt und viele kleine Gebäude umfasst und penibel sauber war. Es waren hunderte Menschen dort, sodass es echt anstrengend war und wir hinter den anderen herdackeln mussten. Es gab sogar einen Geschenkshop für den weißen Tempel, bei dem sich Ra ein Buddha-Bild kaufte, das bis vor Kurzem bei uns in Hamburg an der Wand hing, bis es für sie too much wurde. Das Hauptgebäude des Tempels erreicht man über eine kleine Flur, an deren unteren Seiten gruseligste weiße Köpfe und Hände versuchen an Bord zu kommen (s. Bilder). Was das genau zu bedeuten hat, konnte ich nicht so richtig erkennen, dennoch war es sehr beeindruckend und verstörend, ist halt so mit Religionen. Ansonsten sind die Innenräume sehr farbig im Gegensatz zum Äußeren (dreimal dürft ihr raten, ja, alles ist in weiß gehalten).  Schlussendlich darf man sich noch drei Wünsche auf eins von den silbernen Plättchen schreiben und diese aufhängen und sich zu den wirklich Millionen anderen gesellen, die dies bereits schon gemacht haben. Das komplette Gelände war vollgeplättet von diesen Hängedingern (ich weiß nicht, wie sie heißen, aber wir haben jeweils eins ausgefüllt und ein mitgenommen, auch das hängt jetzt hier in Hamburgo). Dennoch war es ein schönes Ausflugsziel. Wir sind immer irgendwie doch ganz ergriffen, wenn es zu solchen Stätten kommt, weil die Atmosphäre eine andere ist und wir so gut wie nichts über die Religion wussten und es faszinierend fanden, wie die Mönche in ihren Gewändern hin und her huschen und manchmal ihren Singsang erhaschten. Der Rückweg bestand dann aus einer Tuktuk-Bus-Fahrt, bei der wir lange nicht wussten, ob wir in die richtige und in welche Richtung wir überhaupt unterwegs waren. Wir bezahlten dennoch und anscheinend haben wir es irgendwie geschafft.

Direkt am ersten Tag habe ich auch ein Fitnessstudio entdeckt, zu dem wir direkt zweimal während unseres Aufenthaltes hingingen. Ich finde es immer erstaunlich, in Fitnessstudios Menschen zu beobachten, die so unterschiedlich voneinander sind und sich dennoch in diesen kleinen, schwitzigen und unnatürlichen Räumen näher kommen. Und das alles dann noch in Thailand! Ich war dennoch überrascht über die Ausstattung, die mir da zutage trat und die mehr funktionierte als dass sie es nicht tat. Insgesamt für 2,50€ pro Besuch also eine gute Alternative zu Homeworkout.

Leider hörten wir schon beim zweiten Besuch ein vielversprechendes Donnergrollen, bei dem wir uns noch dazu beglückwünschten, jetzt gerade im Gym zu sein. Allerdings hielt es an, bis wir wirklich jeden Muskel trainiert und gedehnt und gerollt und mobilisiert hatten, sodass wir uns letztlich dazu entschieden, nur mal ganz schnell raus und nach Hause zu gehen. Phaha, ja genau. Der Regen fiel aus Wassereimern über uns und die Straßen verschwanden schon vor lauter Wassermassen. Unsere Schuhe gingen unter und da wir nur im Shirt und Shorts losgegangen waren, waren wir komplett klitschnass als wir das Gym verließen, sodass umkehren die sichere Erkältung bedeutet hätte. Also eilten wir weiter, immer seltener durch Dächer von Läden geschützt. Autos hupten und schüttelten ungläubig ihre Köpfe (also die Fahrer) und wir gingen einfach weiter, einfach durchhalten, wir sind gleich da, BIS auf einmal ein Blitzschlag gefolgt vom Donner direkt bei uns einschlug, sodass Ra erschreckt aufschrie und wir uns das Spektakel von da an anschauten und uns unter einem Dach wegduckten. Es war schon ein krasses Naturschauspiel. Wo diese Wassermassen herkamen, fragten wir uns, denn so warm war es gar nicht gewesen, der Wind pfiff mit einem Affenzahn und der Blitz und Donner waren teilweise echt beängstigend, wenn man da draußen so im Sportdress stand. Niemand war mehr auf der Straße, nur wir, immer ein gutes Zeichen und so warteten wir, bis das Gewitter vorbeigezogen war und die Sekunden zum Donner sich ausdehnten, und rannten flugs zum Hostel, wo wir uns duschten und die Sachen aufhingen und uns aufs Abendessen vorbereiteten. Kaum hatten wir unsere Regenschirme gezückt, war es auch schon fast wieder sonnig und so schlenderten wir ganz entspannt zum Moon Café für eine letzte Runde gelbes/grünes Curry für diesen Tag, das Wasser war schon überall abgelaufen, man kann ja sagen, was man will, aber das Abwassersystem funktioniert!

Danach blieb uns noch der blaue Tempel, den es in CR auch gab, fragt mich nicht, warum sie beide in CR haben und irgendwie damit auch das Besondere nahmen, aber so ist es halt. Auch der blaue Tempel liegt ein wenig außerhalb, aber wir wollten es mal probieren und sind losgestiefelt, fanden uns schon fast zu Fuß auf der Autobahn wieder und riefen uns dann ein Uber, das uns gefahren von einer Frau (in Thailand!) am blauen Tempel absetzte. Der blaue Tempel ist nicht ganz so beeindruckend, weil er viel kleiner ist und keine eigenen abgegrenzte Area hat wie der weiße. Trotzdem gefiel er mir besser, weil es a nicht so voll war und b blau einfach viel geiler aussieht. Auch hier lade ich noch Bilder hoch, dann könnt ihr ja selbst den Vergleich anstellen. Leider waren wir ziemlich schnell durch mit dem Besichtigen, obwohl wir die Mönche und Mönchinnen beobachteten, wie sie zum Meditieren Platz nahmen (die Frauen ganz altbacken auf der Fensterbank, die Männeckes natürlich auf dem schönen Teppich). Wir bekamen Hunger und entdeckten ein schnuckelig aussehendes Café, das wir sodann aufsuchten und das an einem „Fluss“ gelegen sehr westliche Standards aufwies. Wir gönnten uns die wahrscheinlich leckerste Frühstücksbowl der Welt und entspannten in dieser sehr idyllischen Atmosphäre. Ein gelungener Tag also!

Wie gesagt, CR hat uns eigentlich mit Abstand am Besten gefallen, wir sind dann noch zu Massage, Ra hat das ganze Programm bekommen, ich nur eine Fußmassage. Ich habe mich trotzdem immer noch ein wenig komisch gefühlt, dass jemand meine ollen Fußballerfüße anfassen musste, aber die Frau wirkte ganz freundlich und das ein ums andere Mal mussten wir auch lachen, weil ich sie fast aus Reflex getreten hatte. Die Massage war übrigens auch der Hammer! Wir gaben viel Trinkgeld und kamen am nächsten Tag gleich wieder. So bestand unsere Tagesroutine aus Essen im Moon Café, Gym, Moon Café zum Mittag und Massage und Moon Café am Abend und danach als Schmanckerl auf den Flohmarkt (Ra kauft sich schon wieder diese weiten Hosen) einen letzten Mangoshake und die Bühnenshow beobachten (leider stereotypisch für Asiaten ohne Ausdruck und ein wenig too much, aber dennoch irgendwie süß). Wir waren schon traurig, als wir uns aufmachen mussten in Richtung Chiang Mai (CM) und waren dennoch auch freudig erregt, weil wir uns dort für einen Monk Chat angemeldet hatten und in die Religion Buddhismus und Meditation usw. eingeführt werden sollten. Ich war noch skeptisch, aber wie ihr sehen werdet, war es ganz wunderbar lustig!

PS: Auf dem Weg ins Gym kamen wir an einem überdachten Parkplatz vorbei und hörten das Quietschen von einer Matratze. Als wir näher hinsahen, erkannten wir bestimmt 15 Frauen, die zu dem Quietschen (es stellte sich dann letztlich als Musik heraus) ein Fitness-Workout machten, das von einem Thai-Trainer angeleitet wurde und bei dem Ra gleich mitmachen wollte. Das Video lade ich hoch, wir lachen eigentlich immer noch darüber.

[techniktagebuch]

Juni 2016

Einstieg in Fahrtrichtung rechts

Zum ersten Mal bin ich in England mit einem rechtsgelenkten Mietwagen unterwegs. Das Linksfahren macht nach kurzer Eingewöhnung eher wenig Mühe, außer am ersten Abend, als ich auf engen englischen Landsträßchen unterwegs bin – ich habe noch kein rechtes Gefühl für den linken Straßenrand. Zuerst geht es sehr gut, weil ich den linken Außenspiegel zur häufigen Blickkontrolle habe, aber nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit wird es ziemlich nervenaufreibend.

Irgendwann während des Urlaubs kaufe ich in einem kleinen ländlichen Dorfladen ein, die Parkplätze im verwinkelten Dorf sind sehr knapp. Da ich wirklich nur ganz kurz brauche, stelle ich das Auto mit einem optimistischen Da-werden-die-schon durchkommen-falls-überhaupt-einer-kommt-Gedanken ab und eile in den Laden.

Aber als ich herauskomme, hat sich ein kleiner Stau von schlechtgelaunten Autofahrern gebildet. Mit entschuldigenden Gesten rase ich zum Auto, schmeiße meine Einkäufe hinein, werfe mich auf den Fahrersitz und – AAAAAARGH DIE REALITÄT LÖST SICH AUF – das Zündschloss, das eben ganz sicher noch da war, ist weg, desgleichen Lenkrad und Pedale. Ich blicke nach rechts. Dort sind die vermissten Teile. Ach so. Klar. Falsche Seite.

Auch nach zwei weiteren Mietwagenurlauben in England bleibt es dabei – links fahren ist nicht so schwer, aber auf der korrekten Seite einzusteigen, bleibt ein gelegentliches kleines Problem.

(Tilman Otter)

[techniktagebuch]

Juni 2023

Gesellschaftlich gut, aber persönlich verwirrend

Im Rahmen des Pride Month ist es üblich, dass Firmen ihre Logos in den Farben der LGBTQI+-Bewegung schmücken. Das finde ich zwar schön und lobenswert, als ich meinen Kontostand prüfen will, muss ich aber erstmal auf meinem Smartphone drei Mal so lange nach meiner Commerzbank-App suchen, weil mein Suchkriterium "irgendwas Gelbes" nicht mehr funktioniert und mein Gehirn etwas braucht, um auf "Form des Commerzbank-Logos, aber in bunt" umzustellen.

(Anne Schüßler)

[techniktagebuch]

22. Januar 2003

Die Fingerabdruck-Erkennung geht mit Smartphone-Handschuhen nicht

Dieses Jahr bin ich zum ersten Mal mit Handschuhen draußen, mit denen ich das Handy bedienen kann. Ich tippe mit dem behandschuhten Finger doppelt auf den Bildschirm und wecke damit das Smartphone. Als ich zum Abgeben des Fingerabdrucks aufgefordert werde, drücke ich automatisch mit dem behandschuhten Finger auf die Stelle mit dem Sensor. Es dauert bestimmt eine Sekunde, bis mir klar wird, dass das nicht funktioniert und ich den Handschuh ausziehe.

(iris)

[techniktagebuch]

9. Juni 2023

Das ungünstige Geräusch (betrifft uns nicht)

Wir gehen zu viert durch Neukölln. Hinter mir höre ich ein leises Geräusch. Es ist ein zweiteiliges Geräusch, erst klingt es nach dem Aufprall von Gummi oder Plastik auf Gehwegpflaster und dann im Ausklang etwas härter, wie Glas oder Metall auf Gehwegpflaster. Ich greife nach meiner Hosenbeintasche und drehe mich um. Aber mein Handy ist da, wo es sein soll. Auf dem Boden liegt das Handy eines fremden Fahrradfahrers, der sich gerade danach bückt.

Meine Begleiterinnen wirken ebenfalls unruhig. “Habt ihr auch alle nach eurem Handy gegriffen?”, frage ich. “Ja!”, sagen sie. Obwohl es ein unauffälliges und leises Geräusch an einer lauten Stelle der Stadt war, haben wir alle darauf reagiert.

(Kathrin Passig)

[techniktagebuch]

Dezember 2023

Was ist denn jetzt los was soll das heißen klick

Ich habe ein Problem mit dem Leben im Jahr 2023. Mein Kind rennt zu mir und hat eine lustige Idee und ruft: Mach ein Foto! Ich habe gerade kein Handy zur Hand oder keine Lust, das Handy zu benutzen, deshalb schlage ich vor, dass wir so tun, als ob wir ein Foto machen. Ich wünsche mir dafür eine deutlich erkennbare Handbewegung, aber ich kenne keine. Die Bewegung, die ich mache, wenn ich tatsächlich ein Foto mit meinem Handy mache, ist ohne Handy so absolut nichtssagend. Eine leere Hand vor sich ausstrecken und die Hand anlächeln und dann mit dem Daumen wackeln fühlt sich einfach nicht ausreichend an.

Auslösegeräusch kennen wir leider auch nicht (ist am Handy deaktiviert). Also vorhin habe ich klick gerufen, aber das Kind dachte was ist denn jetzt los was soll das heißen klick.

Aus dem Techniktagebuch-Redaktionschat kommt der Vorschlag, ich könne bei jedem echten Foto so tun, als ginge es nur, wenn man dabei auf einem Bein steht und so tut, als würde man sich Wasser aus dem Ohr schütteln. Das würde das Vortäuschen ganz einfach machen. Aber da behalte ich lieber mein Problem mit dem Leben im Jahr 2023.

Update Januar 2024: So, beim Schlafengehen eben wurde mir ein aufgeschlagenes Pixibuch genau vors Gesicht gehalten mit den Worten "ich mach ein Foto!". Das Kind hat dabei das Buch ganz gerade gehalten und mir genau in die Augen gesehen. Die Finger haben sich überhaupt nicht bewegt.

Update März 2024: Das Kind benutzt einen hölzernen Fußabdruck mit einer spiegelnden Seite als Handy zum Fotografieren. Die spiegelnde Seite zeigt zum Gesicht des fotografierenden Kindes.

(Alina Smithee)

[techniktagebuch]

Seit September 2022

Syncedisync

Im von unserem Kind frequentierten Kindergarten werden allerlei wichtige und/oder unterhaltsame Dinge zur gefälligen Kenntnisnahme der p.t. Eltern ausgehängt – Speisenpläne, Ankündigungen, Ausflugspläne, im Wochenverlauf upgedatete »was wir heute gemacht haben«-Informationen auf einem Whiteboard, Photos der Kinder beim Spielen, von ihnen fabrizierte Zeichnungen oder sonstige Kunst, etc. pp.

Meine Frau und ich teilen uns die Kindergartenbring- und -holdienste und haben deshalb je nach Wochentag unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, die Aushänge zu studieren. Zwecks besseren Informationsabgleichs (und damit das gerade nicht zuständige – meist, weil an dem Tag im Büro lohnarbeitende – Elter sich auch am Kind erfreuen kann) richten wir in den ersten Tagen eine Signal-Gruppe ein (kreativerweise »Kindergarten-Sachen« benamst), in die wir jeden Tag die abphotographierten Aushänge, Kunstwerke, … hineinstellen.

Wir wahren dabei aber natürlich streng die Kanaldisziplin und diskutieren deshalb dort nichts – das findet (wenn schriftlich, dann) weiterhin auf dem »normalen« Signal-Weg statt.

Auf das Photographieren des »was wir heute gemacht haben«-Whiteboards am Ende der Woche vergessen wir auch recht rasch nur noch ganz, ganz selten.

(Lukas Daniel Klausner)

[techniktagebuch]

März 2022

Nachts ist es dunkler als draußen

Ich habe mein Handy seit ein paar Monaten im permanenten Dark Mode. Es fühlt sich auch tagsüber etwas augenschonender an und vielleicht spart es ein bisschen Akku (don’t @ me). Aber es hat einen Nebeneffekt.

Wann ich immer ich die Wettervorhersage auf dunklem Hintergrund aufrufe, fühlt sich das merkwürdig irrelevant an. Ich denke dann: Ist mir doch egal, wie das Wetter nachts wird, ich will die Vorhersage für tagsüber. Mein Gehirn assoziiert Dunkelheit immer noch mit Nacht – kein Wunder, was sind ein paar Monate Dark Mode gegen ein Leben im Tag/Nacht-Rhythmus!

Und so ertappe ich mich dabei, wie ich – obwohl ich eine Wetter-App habe, die den Dark Mode berücksichtigt, und normalerweise mit Duckduckgo suche, das auch im Dark Mode operiert – mit Google, das den Dark Mode ignoriert und mich gleißend hell anstrahlt, nach ›Wetter‹ suche, um jetzt endlich zu erfahren, wie es tagsüber wird.

(Christopher Bergmann)