#Techno Cosmic Research Institute

[bobauthorman]

(Twilight Zone theme plays)

[portpebble]

im so mad the tcri url is taken by some blog that posted 5 random pictures in 2015 and that's it. do they even know what they took.

[phoebepheebsphibs]

I just now discovered that within the TMNT universe there is a company called "TCRI" which stands for "Techno Cosmic Research Institute" and in many iterations they are responsible for the mutations of the turtles.....

dang I wish I'd have known that earlier

[donnies-low-empathy]

He’s so tired

Transcript:

Donnie: Uh, guys? Here’s a new wrinkle.

Raph: I don’t get it.

Donnie: Techno-Cosmic Research Institute?

Leo: So?

Raph: Yeah?

Mikey: Huh?

Donnie: Say the first letter in each word.

[halogalopaghost]

M.I.L.C.

read on AO3

WARNING: MUTANT MAYHEM SPOILERS

When the turtles came to, their first thought was danger.

Leo lifted his head and tried to blink away the blurry double vision. His right temple pounded in time with his heartbeat, ears ringing in the absence of sound. Donnie was on his right, Raph on his left, and the smear of orange beyond him must have been Mikey. Good, they hadn’t been separated.

“What…where are we?”

He tried to raise his hand to his head and met resistance in the form of a metal cuff over his wrist. He was upright, he began to realize, and only the shackles around his wrists, ankles, and middle were holding him up.

Raph must have had that epiphany about the same time, because he started thrashing against the restraints. “Hey! Hey, let us outta here!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

They all stilled at the echoey voice. There were footsteps to go with it, somewhere beyond the bright halo of light beaming down on them. They all squinted into the darkness anyway.

“Who are you?” Leo called out. He tried not to let his voice waver too badly.

Leo’s back arched, as much as it could inside his shell, and his head reared back to slam into the cold metal behind him. He lost all control of his body, and he tasted something metallic in his mouth—like when Raph used to dare him to eat spare change they found beneath sidewalk grates. Everything went white.

When the pain eased into tingling numbness, he fell slack against the restraints. His chin dropped to his chest, and he gasped for air. He was only vaguely aware of his brothers calling his name.

“I’m okay,” he slurred. A drop of blood fell from his mouth to the sterile white floor.

“Rule number one: I’m the one asking questions here.” The footsteps rounded the machine behind them, slipping even further from view.

Raph struggled to turn further and see their captor, face twisted up in anger like they’d never seen before. “Hey! You better—” his voice was cut off by a breathless choke as he succumbed to the same writhing as Leo had.

It was electrocution, he realized. Whoever this guy was, he was electrocuting them like cattle.

Mikey struggled desperately, face twisted up like he was the one being electrocuted. “Stop! Stop it!”

Leo couldn’t do anything but watch as Mikey got his own dose. Donnie whimpered; too scared to speak, too scared to remain silent.

With three of four turtles just trying to catch their breath, the footsteps finally drew close enough to illuminate their captor.

He was tall, taller than any human they’d fought yet, wearing a suit so dark that he was almost camouflaged by the rest of the room. Only his white shirt and blood red tie stood out. He had slicked back hair, a cruel smile, and dark glasses over his eyes. In his hand was a remote with several unlabeled buttons, and his thumb hovered over it threateningly.

“Welcome to TCRI, creatures.”

“What’s—”

He raised the remote, and Leo flinched back instinctively.

“It’ll do you well to be silent unless you’re given express permission to talk. And don’t worry, you will be talking.” He clasped his hands behind his back and began pacing again. “It stands for The Techno-Cosmic Research Institute. I’m director of the EPF division—or Earth Protection Force, and I’ve been charged with extracting information from the four of you.”

The four brothers looked between each other. What information could they possibly have that the government would want?

“When your resolve crumbles and you begin to cry for mercy, you may call me Bishop.”

“Like chess,” Donnie mumbled. His brothers all shot him a sharp look.

Bishop either didn’t hear him, or chose to ignore him. Either way, he stopped pacing again and turned to face them. “Before we begin, you may ask one question each.”

Through a series of vague hand gestures, eyerolls, head tilts, and no small amount of teeth bared, the four of them came to the conclusion that Donnie would go first. He sighed at length.

“Uhh…if you’re studying cosmic technology, how come we’re here? Like, what do we have to do with this?”

They all cried out as Bishop’s finger came down on one of the buttons, and Donnie spasmed silently. His glasses slipped from his snout and fell to the floor, skittering off into the dark.

“Stop!”

“He was just clarifying!”

“Yeah he just does that, he didn’t mean to!”

Donnie wheezed, limp in his restraints and eyes rolling around in his head. He was the smallest of them all, he couldn’t take too much more of that. At the risk of their own health, they all murmured to him to try to revive him and get him to respond. He gave a weak thumbs-up and all three of them sagged with relief.

Bishop put a hand to his chin. “A bonded pack. Fascinating.”

“We’re brothers,” Raph asserted, chin held high with defiance, “and if you don’t stop picking on ‘em I’ll shove that remote so far up—”

Bishop turned away disinterestedly while Raph convulsed. It only lasted a moment. “And adolescent,” he sneered. He disappeared into the dark, only the sound of typing and the faint glow of a screen to hint at what he was doing.

Leo gathered himself up to speak, every muscle in his body tensed in anticipation of another shock. "Do we still get to ask our questions?"

There was a pause. "Yes. The red and orange ones may ask a question each. I assume you don't need me to advise caution after the purple one's display."

Leo's throat ached to tell this guy that they had names. They weren't just...animals! The knot of anxiety in his stomach only grew.

Raph stared into the dark as he considered his question. He had to make it matter, he had to ask something that Leo and Donnie would think of: something to do with…strategy, or something. There was only one pressing question in his mind though, and it kept pushing and pushing at him until he finally broke. “If we help you, are you gonna let us go?”

“That’s not up to me.”

His heart sank in his chest.

Mikey didn’t need to think about his question. “Can the others go if only one of us has the information?”

Bishop laughed. “Good try. You four are admirably loyal, I must admit, but no one is leaving this facility. Now, blue one, tell me your names and ages.”

Leo wanted to comply. His head ached, his muscles kept twitching sporadically, and his skin was already chafing against the cuffs. He was beyond sick of watching his brothers get hurt. More than anything, he was in over his head.

But when their dad looked the four of them in the eyes, each in turn, and asked who wanted to be in charge—who wanted to hold the safety of their family in the palm of his hand, he stepped up. He shouldered the burden, he was in charge of these bozos when they left the lair, not this Bishop guy.

“I will tell you everything and stay here, I won’t even try to escape, only if you let my brothers go home.”

There was a resounding silence, and for a triumphant moment, Leo thought Bishop was considering it. Then came the tempered sound of his footsteps on the tile, and he mounted the platform that held them with startling speed. Leo tried not to flinch when he came to stand toe-to-toe with him. From this close, he could see the dark, calculating eyes behind the glasses.

“Let me make one thing clear, creature. You disgust me. You’re an unnatural, ungodly sin against nature, and letting you roam free is an oversight that won’t be repeated. I do not bargain with your kind.” He took a step back and looked at them as a group. “From now on, your punishment will be carried out on your brothers. You may cry for mercy, but I am not a merciful man.”

Bishop turned and stepped off the platform, reaching into his pocket.

“No! Wait—” As Bishop retreated into the dark, all three of Leo’s brothers began to writhe. “Stop! Please, I’m sorry! Please,” his voice cracked and broke, then faded into nothing as his brothers’ bodies relaxed again.

“I’m sorry guys,” he whispered. Despite trying, he couldn’t hold back the hot tears on his face. His throat ached with the effort anyway. “We were wrong, we were so, so wrong about humans. I never should have let this go so far.”

“It’s not your fault,” Raph murmured shakily. “At least we’re here together.”

Bishop cleared his throat. “Names and ages.”

Leo supplied the information mechanically. Even though his brothers held the same head-hung-low, defeated posture, he couldn't help but feel like he was betraying them. He remembered just a few days ago when he'd told on them to Dad—he'd regretted it instantly, but that feeling was nothing compared to this. Dad would be so disappointed in him.

Would he ever even get to see his father again?

Bishop came strolling into the light again and Leo's fists clenched. Raph shook with anger and unspent energy beside him, just waiting for a chance, any chance, to get a shot in at this guy. For once, none of his brothers felt like that was a problem.

Bishop pinned them under his gaze, just staring for a long while. Mikey really started to feel antsy—he didn't like sitting still even when he wasn't stressed beyond belief.

"Where are the rest of the mutants?"

Oh shit, that was information they did actually know. Leo cast his gaze to the ground. Donnie always said he could read his expression like a book and this guy was sure to be able to do the same. A part of him wondered, if they told Bishop Superfly's plans, would he be able to stop them?

No, he couldn't risk it. Even though they might be a little genocidal, they were mutants. They were kind of like cousins. And if he gave up that information, they'd all end up in the very same situation.

"Well?"

Leo shook his head. "I don't know."

All three of his brothers jolted with a shock. Not enough to incapacitate them, rather, just enough to make them cry out.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

"Michelangelo. Perhaps you'd like to tell me where the mutants are."

"I ain't no snitch," he loudly declared.

The other three jolted.

"Tell 'em, Mikey!" Raph yelled. His voice echoed in the room.

Bishop snarled. All four of them writhed under another shock. He must be turning it up, it hurt worse every time he did it. How long could they really keep this up?

"My chest hurts," Donnie murmured.

"You can make this stop, Donatello. You have the power to save your brothers from this suffering. Just tell me where the other mutants are."

He met Bishop's gaze with a glare. "No way."

Leo winced, waiting for the shock, but it didn't come. He opened his eyes and watched Bishop instead step down from the platform and into the darkness. Leo didn't dare get too hopeful; no way was this over.

Bishop didn't disappoint. He brought back a small steel table and slammed it down in front of Donnie. They all cried out in unison as they caught sight of the garish surgical instruments.

"He's gonna dissect us!" Mikey wailed.

"Dude we're turtles, not frogs! Don't dissect us!" Raph redoubled his efforts to escape. With quarter-inch thick steel alloy cuffs around his wrists, it was pointless.

Bishop ran a hand across the tray, humming flatly to himself. He touched tweezers, scissors, forceps with long arms and serrated tips, scalpels with razor-sharp edges, pliers with odd angles, and a startling array of saws and longer knives. His hand passed over all of them and touched every one, the other hand held to his chin in contemplation. Each of the brothers held their breath.

His hand stilled over one tool in particular. He ran a finger down the length of it—all ten inches of saw-toothed blade—and held it up with reverence. It glinted in the light as he turned it.

"I'll have to cut through that tough shell of yours. A bit garish to start out with, but the bone saw will have to do."

Donnie’s eyes widened. “Wait—"

Bishop lunged forward and pressed the saw to the hollow of Donnie’s throat. His brothers cried out all at once, wordless shouts that couldn’t be contained even by the fear that their sounds would drive the saw further into him.

"Any one of you can stop this,” he growled. “Just tell me where the mutants are."

Donnie tried to wriggle further backwards into his prison, raising his chin while the blade pressed ever closer. A hint of a whine escaped his throat, and Bishop sneered.

A dry sob broke out of Leo's throat. He couldn't let his brothers die like this. He couldn’t, he couldn’t. He hoped they would forgive him as he drew a breath to speak.

The door slammed open, washing the room in a new column of light. Three figures stood, outlined by it, in the doorway. One was notably smaller.

"Bishop! What did I say about keeping them alive?"

He bared his teeth at Donnie, centimeters from his face with the saw still pressed into his throat.

Finally, it stopped. He backed away, and the turtles let out a collective sigh of relief unlike any other.

"Surely you don't need all four of them," Bishop monotoned.

The smaller figure broke away from the door and came to the edge of the platform. Now that there was more light, they could see more of the room. There wasn't much to see, just the door in front of them and a couple of control panels built into it. The giant glass jar entirely escaped their notice.

"Yes, as a matter of fact I do." The woman looked older than Bishop, with short hair and a tight-lipped mouth that reminded them of every cranky teacher they'd ever seen in a movie. "Every drop of their blood is like gold, Bishop. Do you understand the value of gold?"

(As they spoke, Donnie's breathing escalated until his chest heaved and he started to wheeze.)

Stiff as a board, he ground out a yes ma'am.

(Leo and Raph tried to comfort him and get him to breathe steadily, Mikey strained just to see him.)

"Very good. Now get your things out of my way, we will begin the process."

"They haven't given us any information!" Even with his voice raised, the tone was even and emotionless.

The woman paused. "There is plenty of time for that yet."

Without another word, Bishop and his tray of nightmare fuel disappeared into the dark for good.

Leo leaned forward and put on his most innocent I-didn’t-eat-the-last-hotpocket face. “Uh, ma’am, you seem a lot more…reasonable than Mr. Bishop—is that a name or a title? It doesn’t matter. It's just that there's something we really gotta do or, like, the whole world—”

“Be silent! You do not speak.”

Leo’s heart dropped to his tail.

Donnie’s head snapped up, fire lighting up his tired eyes. He was still breathing heavily, and he looked paler than ever in the harsh light. “Look, lady! I don’t know what you want from us, or why you talk so scary, but we shouldn’t be here! There’s a fly monster out there—”

“CLEARLY,” she yelled over Donnie, “Bishop was not very clear on who is in charge here.” She pressed the button on her own remote and Donnie screamed.

Donnie had a pretty girly scream to begin with, his brothers were always eager to point that out whenever they could. And he did it often! He screamed just last week about the sai in his leg (which was an accident), but it didn’t make their blood run cold like this one. He panted, shaking all over and staring hard at the ground. Leo silently begged him to keep his mouth shut.

“I will do the talking, understood? I am Cynthia Utrom, and you are my property.”

Leo whipped around to face her. “What do you mean, ‘your prop—?”

It was his turn to scream. This time, he could feel the electricity go through him. It started at his left wrist and traveled through his body, knotting up his lungs and stomach and everything else important in there, and shot out his right foot. Ripples of pain followed the initial shock as his muscles kept spasming long after it was over.

Cynthia Utrom knelt at the base of the structure and picked something up. It was Donnie’s glasses. She wiped off the lenses before placing them on his snout. “I will use you to complete our glorious work. You were created with my mutagen, you see, which makes you my property. Now that I have you back, I will use your blood to create a stable mutagen.”

She paced in front of them, not unlike Bishop. Instead of holding her hands behind her back, she held a tablet in front of her, and instead of proud shoulders, she had a crazed look.

“And with that mutagen, I will create an army of super-soldiers, the likes of which this world has never seen! It will be magnificent. This machine, you probably wonder what it does, yes? Meet your undoing, the Mutagen Intravascular Labilising Centrifuge!”

Mikey frowned, brows drawn together as he mouthed the words to himself a couple times. He totally zoned out and didn’t hear anything else from her grand speech as he worked out the problem in his mind.

“Is that bad?” Raph whispered.

Donnie nodded. “Yeah. Yeah that’s bad.”

“It is a beast of my own design, made to siphon the mutagen out of your blood until there is nothing left, and you are nothing but piddly little turtles to be flushed down the toilet!” She grinned to herself.

“M-I-L… Guys!” Mikey shouted. “Guys, Dad was right! It’s a MILC machine!” He slumped against the metal behind him. The MILCing machine behind him and wailed a wordless lament. If, by some divine chance, they actually managed to live through this, he was sure their dad was going to kill them.

“Begin the process!” Without another word, Cynthia Utrom stalked out of the room.

They all panicked as the machine behind them whirred to life. Something inside there was spinning real fast.

“Donnie!” Raph yelled. “What’s happening?”

“The M is self-explanatory! The I means she’s gonna do something to our blood, and the C is for centrifuge, which spins really fast!”

“What’s the L for?” Mikey shouted.

“I have no idea!”

The restraints around their middle suddenly tightened until their shells hit the wall behind them, leaving absolutely no wiggle room. There was another whirring sound, but higher pitched. Almost like Bishop’s bone saw, or…or Donnie’s power drill.

“What’s— AGH!”

Something sharp pierced the back of Leo’s shell, and he started breathing a little too fast. His hands clenched and unclenched as it burrowed into the uppermost layer with very little sensation. Uncomfortable, but bearable. And then it broke into the interior of the shell, and all he knew was agony.

Leo would later wonder how someone could turn their back on a room full of suffering teenagers. Later on, when he joked about this with his brothers, he would realize that it was kind of fucked up, and he really didn’t like joking about it. When the hole bored in their shells by this machine finally, finally healed over so many years later, they would sit in silence knowing that there was no more proof of their pain.

But in that moment, he was dying. He was certain of it. No one could be in this amount of pain and live. His ears rang and filled with the pounding of blood and whirr of the drill. He could barely hear his brothers over his own pleas and cries. And then he died.

  He woke up in the restraints for a second time, and noted with some confusion that he had not, in fact, died. The pain in his shell was still piercing, but more manageable, and there wasn’t a drop of blood around his feet. It was all…somewhere else.

“Leo! Dude, we were starting to think you weren’t gonna wake up!” Mikey sounded on the verge of tears.

“Are you guys okay?” His own voice came out warbled and hoarse from the yelling.

"No!" Mikey yelled. "We're getting MILCed!"

“How long was I out?”

“Not very long,” Donnie said. “But enough for that.” He nodded toward the wall in front of them, where a glass vat was quickly filling with green ooze. Exactly the same way he’d always imagined it would look.

“I’m gonna be sick,” he groaned, hanging his head limp. He breathed deep and thought back to some of the de-stressing meditation exercises on his youtube playlist. Breathe, count, release, count, again.

“This is it,” Raph said lowly. “This is how it’s gonna end. Getting MILCed to death in a lab.”

“It’s not gonna kill us,” Donnie pointed out, “we’re just going to revert back to our unmutated forms. Maybe if we’re lucky we won’t remember being…us.”

Mikey chuckled suddenly. “This is just like that thing, man. Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

They all laughed a little, even though the jostling hurt. A hush fell over the room, only the spinning of the centrifuge to keep them company.

“I can’t believe April just left us.”

“Maybe…she just had some errands to run,” Mikey said.

“Classic Leo. You got suckered, bro. We all did.” Raph wished he could give his brother a friendly shove or tuck him under his arm and shake him. He didn’t like words, he liked actions and hugs.

Donnie sighed. “We were stupid to think humans would like us. We shoulda listened to Dad.”

Raph leaned back and banged his head into the machine. “There’s gotta be a way out of here, right?”

Silence answered him.

“Right?”

“Raph…guys, I’m sorry.”

“Oh you cut that shit out right now,” Mikey said. “Don’t go robo-leader mode on us now, dude. I’ll kick your ass.”

Leo smiled. “Pretty empty threat.”

“I’m sure ghosts have asses.”

“Once again, we’re not going to die, we’re going to demutate.”

“Nerd,” Raph fired off.

“Puke-brains.”

“TikTok user.”

“Oh, coming from mister ‘I like your shoelaces’ himself!”

“Ouuugh!” Mikey exclaimed, interrupting very intentionally. “I—I can feel it! The turtley urges…returning! I wanna put arugula on my pizza!”

He got a symphony of boos to that one.

"You already put sardines on it, isn't that turtley enough?" Raph stuck his tongue out. "Eugh."

"I’ll have you know—!"

"Wait!" Leo shushed them. "Listen, listen, do you hear that?"

"The giant blood-sucking torture device?" Raph asked.

"No, listen." He tilted his head up and to the side, straining to hear the shuffling sounds above. It was possible that this was just a multi-floor building and there were people above them, but it almost sounded like...rats.

Or one very, very big rat.

They all cried out at once as Splinter dropped from the ceiling. "DAD!"

"Boys!” He briefly looked happy to see them, and then his eyebrows furrowed. “You are in so much trouble!”

Yeah, that was to be expected.

Watching him fight and take out all the guards was like a dream sequence. He moved from one side of the room to the other too fast to track, wielding odd weapons like desk chairs and clipboards. He kept one eye on the boys all the while, and they cheered him on.

“Dad—DAD, look out!”

He glanced toward Raphael at his warning, then back toward the large metal cabinet behind him. They all yelled as it came down on top of him, and silence fell over the room. Armed guards groaned and started to gather themselves.

The boys were too shocked to do anything but stare.

There was a thump and the cabinet shifted, and Mikey lifted his head with hope. The cabinet rattled a little more, and Donnie remembered how average rats could fit through a hole the size of a quarter. When he burst out of the cabinet’s back, wielding each one of their weapons, they cheered loud enough to startle the guards.

Armed with actual weaponry, Splinter made short work of the remaining guards. Leo winced as a guard took a katana blade to the face. That was not pretty.

Splinter smacked a control panel until, with a mechanical hiss, the rods in their shells retreated into the machine and the shackles all snapped open. All four of them fell bonelessly.

“Boys!” Splinter rushed to them. He went for Donnie first, only because he was closest, and helped him to sit propped against the machine before tending to the other three similarly.

Leo groaned and reached around to try touching the back of his shell. His fingers brushed over the edge of the hole—it was so much smaller than it felt like when it was drilling into him, maybe the width of a pencil. His fingers came back tinted with blood and green ooze in equal parts. His stomach roiled, and he nearly fell sideways again as he gagged.

Raph grabbed his shoulder before he could fall and pulled him tight against his chest, crushing him in a hug. By the time Leo blinked the stars out of his eyes, his father and other brothers had joined in. They sat in an aching, contented heap at the base of the machine for a moment. Mikey buried his face in his dad’s fur, hiding tears while Donnie stared into the middle distance.

“Are you boys okay?” Splinter pulled away and began to check them over for injuries, turning Raphael’s face this way and that before moving on to Mikey.

“We’re okay,” Mikey assured him, sniffling and smiling at the same time.

“You kicked those guys’ butts!” Raph yelled.

Leo carefully peeled himself away from Raph while they all talked over each other excitedly. He grabbed Donnie’s shell and turned him around so he could see the hole at his lower back, which was already crusting over with dried blood, then turned him again to press the side of his head to his chest. Yes, his heart was beating. Thank goodness.

“Leo! I’m okay, I promise!”

He pulled away and held him by the shoulders at arms’ length, searching him for any trace of a lie. He looked exhausted, and his mask was wet with tears, but he was okay. Actually…they all were.

“Come, come,” Splinter said, starting to gather them up to their feet. “Your human friend is waiting outside. We go before these men wake up, and I will shout at you out there.”

“April?” Leo yelped. “She came back?”

“Yes! Come on, we got to get out of this creepy place!”

Leo’s head buzzed as they clambered into ventilation shafts that Splinter used to enter the building. Maybe…if they could survive that…maybe they could do anything.

[theartofeverything]

Finally have a cover done for my tmnt iteration and the first chapter of the fic up on AO3! Check it out there at https://archiveofourown.org/works/48506239/chapters/122354512

Or simply read on below the cut :)

The Origins of the Hamato Clan

Collected by Venus Hamato,

the forgotten turtle.

Leonardo

My name’s Leonardo and I’m a mutant. In this world that means danger. It means having to live in the shadows and be ready to run or fight for your life at any time.

It’s been nearly ten years since the Kraang were overthrown and my brothers and I escaped from TCRI. It’s been quite the adventure ever since, the kind where you never know where the next threat or your next meal might come from. We’ve fought mutants and mutant hunters, survived in places most people don’t even know exist and through things most people couldn’t imagine, but through it all, we’ve stuck together.

My name is Leonardo and I’m the leader of the Hamato Clan and that means I’ve got something worth fighting for.

[Excerpt from The Journals of Leonardo Hamato]

Let’s rewind to where it all started, before the mutants, before the rebellions, before the apocalypse…

Our story begins thousands of years ago in a galaxy known only as Dimension X (except for the myriad of other ominous titles it has collected in interplanetary folklore, such as the Prison Dimension, the Shadow World, and Thkrdltkstspi!, a name too horrifying to be translated into any earthly language). A long since forgotten race of aliens created the first ever artificial intelligence and called it the Kraang. Its purpose was to learn and adapt, evolving to become a higher life form.

It was a smashing success, a true masterwork of bioengineering. It learned cell multiplication from bacteria and information transference from computers. Its progress was exponential, constantly reaching for more the more it learned. It soon surpassed the intelligence of its creators, and having learned that the most efficient path towards higher evolution was the extinction of the weak, it proceeded to wipe them out and steal their resources to use in its pursuit of knowledge.

It spread from planet to planet like a virus, infiltrating silently, growing in the shadows as it gathered data, then conquering and launching off to consume further targets. Sometimes a planet fell quickly, when its inhabitants were simple and it didn’t take the Kraang long to understand everything it wanted to know about them. Sometimes the Kraang lingered upon discovery of a more complex species, studying and experimenting to see what characteristics it may find useful to adopt. One planet held a species so strange it observed them secretly for nearly a hundred years. It was a species full of paradoxes and enigmas that confounded all of its interplanetary logic. These strikingly nonsensical creatures call themselves humans.

B5h-P (Bishop)

The age of the infiltration of earth is, as the humans would say, an exciting time to be alive. The Kraang has learned much from studying this species, including the concepts of ‘individuality’ and ‘language’. It is undecided whether these are necessarily good ideas yet, but we’re trying them out, hence the term we.

I, as part of the newest evolution of Kraang who possesses separated sentience, have been designated B5h-P. This is my first day at TCRI, the Techno Cosmic Research Institute, where I will begin my study on earth biology.

[Progress report 1, two years before Kraang occupation of earth]

After five earth years of research and experimentation, I have finally engineered my first mutants! By combining human and turtle DNA, I have created creatures with both superior physiology and intelligence. I am very excited to see how they will develop and have been researching the human concept of ‘education’ to possibly enhance that development. Inspired by my studies, I have named my creations Leonardo and Donatello.

[Progress report 97, three years into Kraang occupation]

The more I study humans, the more I am fascinated by them. They do so many things for no discernable reason, like laughter and art and dance. Perhaps I will make another mutant to further explore these mysteries.

[Progress report 135, five years into Kraang occupation]

The human uprising has led to increased demand for military focused scientific production. Under severe pressure from the administration, I have begun engineering a fourth turtle with enhanced combat capabilities. Physically, he will be the strongest and most durable of my creations, but I am wary of the effect the administration's demands may have on his mind.

[Progress report 217, seven years into Kraang occupation]

I believe I am experiencing what the humans call ‘frustration.’ The administration has taken control of the guided development of my creations and is now training them for combat. While I know they are certainly physically capable of withstanding the training and testing, according to human standards they are only children and I do not see this as beneficial for their psychological and emotional development, a complaint the administration does not seem to understand.

[Progress report 298, eight years into Kraang occupation]

My creations seem to be adjusting to the new demands by inventing a form of imaginative play they call “Ninja Turtles” which seems to consist of reinterpreting their combat training through the framework of what they learned about medieval japanese warriors from story books I read to them, the construction of a fantasy narrative around the day to day events of their lives, and the development of a new vocabulary of nonsense words including “booyakasha!” and “cowabunga!” The administration is confused by this new behavior and has inquired into whether it may be indicative of neurological dysfunction. I for one am glad to see the persistence of their humor, creativity, and imagination even as the administration attempts to overwrite it.

[Progress report 305, eight years into Kraang occupation]

Donatello

Leon and I have been together for as long as we can remember. My earliest memories are of us sneaking around through TCRI, trying to get out of training and find a place to play away from the Kraang scientists. It’s crazy to think how long we lived knowing nothing but alien cyborgs, other test subjects, and white metal walls. We were nearly six years old when we started hearing bits and pieces about the war going on outside. The rebellion was finally gaining some traction and the Kraang were getting nervous.

Honestly, we had no idea what the real world was like, but we had a dream of a world where we weren’t stabbed with needles every day and forced to train for hours on end, a world where we could be more than test subjects destined to become mindless soldiers. So we made a pact to break out together. That whole year we spent every spare moment between tests scoping out possible exit routes and scheming up ways we could get us and the younger turtles out. All we needed was an opportunity. That came the day the resistance broke into TCRI.

[Transcription of recording made during the programming of D0n13, an artificial intelligence intended to replace Donatello Hamato in the event of his death]

Casey Jones

My Ma was a hero. When the invasion broke out, she and her biker gang, the Purple Dragons, fought back against the aliens. It was pocket knives and crowbars against monsters and lasers, but they bought enough time for people to escape. The City was overrun in a matter of hours, but my Ma and her gang gathered as many survivors as they could and went into hiding.

The next seven years were rough. The Kraang took over the earth and proclaimed themselves our supreme leader. Anybody who tried to disobey them and got caught was killed or went missing, but the Purple Dragons never stopped fighting. They smuggled people out of the city and found other resistance groups, gathering forces till they were finally ready to take the fight to the enemy. Retaking New Jersey sparked a flame that ignited a rebellion all over the world. Three years later, on the ten year anniversary of the invasion, my Ma led the attack on the Kraang headquarters in New York City, TCRI.

[Introduction to speech delivered before the second Battle of New York City against the mutant revolution]

TCRI was burned to the ground after the resistance broke in. Decades worth of research was destroyed. Scientists and science experiments alike were killed in the halls and left for the fire to scourge. Very few life forms made it out alive.

Michelangelo

I think our escape from TCRI might be my earliest memory. I was only four. Raph was two. Don and Leon were seven. I remember the sound of the alarm blaring and shouts from everywhere as Don dragged me by the arm. Leon was carrying Raph. He had to knock the little guy out to keep him from kicking and screaming. It was the first time any of us had seen humans, and they were terrifying.

[from interview aired on Channel 6 with Michaelangelo Hamato, the mutant street artist whose work inspired the Pro-Mutant Movement]

April O’Neil

I met the Hamatos before they were the Hamatos, before there was a Hamato Clan, back when they were just the Ninja Turtles. They had been living on their own for years and had managed to stay out of most of the conflict of the second revolution. That all changed when Raph got captured by the Purple Dragons.

[Excerpt from article on on the history of the Pro-Mutant Movement, written by its founder, April O'Neil]

Raphael

Life on the run is all I’ve ever known. It’s hard and dangerous, but that’s just how the world is for mutants like us. You can’t trust anybody. We’ve had our run-ins with other mutants, they never ended well. We’ve been robbed, lied to, and nearly eaten more times than I can count. I can’t say I really blame them though. We’re all just trying to survive in this world that’s trying to hunt us to extinction.

The humans are the real monsters. They’re not hunting for their next meal. They’re not defending themselves from being eaten. They just kill because they hate. It’s not enough for them to have won the war, they have to scourge the earth of every trace of it till they can pretend it never happened, and they can’t do that till every last one of the monsters the Kraang created are dead at their feet.

So am I a monster? Maybe I am. Maybe it’s what I was made to be. The one thing I know for sure is that I sure as shell ain’t the only one. So if it takes being a monster to stay alive in this world and keep my brothers safe, that’s what I’ll be.

[the words of Raphael Hamato before his first fight in the Battle Nexus, recorded by Karai]

But I’ve seen you be cruel and I've seen you be kind. I’ve watched you switch your whole personality at the flip of a dime. Are you really trying to tell me none of that was an act?

Oh, I’m sure a lot of it is. There have certainly been times when I’ve smiled and played along when I didn’t feel like it, or put on a bit of a show for the audience, but doesn’t everyone do that sometimes? Don’t you ever do something you don’t feel like doing but know you should? Have you never put on a braver or happier face for the sake of those around you?

Well of course I have. That’s part of what it means to be a leader and a big brother. But it definitely gets hard sometimes, and at the end of the day, it’s good to have someone I can just be myself around. Don’t you have anyone you trust enough to share the real you with?

I don’t know if I’ve ever really trusted anybody. If I ever did, it would probably be you. You know my story better than anyone. You've seen more sides of me than most people know exist. I just wish I had a real me to share.

[from The Collected Quotes of Two Wandering Souls, an anthology of memories with Karai, written by Leonardo Hamato]

As I write this, I know it will be my final progress report. Despite the many hollow assurances of the administration, I know that it’s only a matter of time before the rebellion seizes TCRI. As I doubt I will be left alive to see the dawn of the ‘new day’ the rebellion is fighting for, I have chosen to make this record in hopes of its survival in my stead.

I have secretly been working on a project over these last few months, one that I have not discussed in these progress reports or informed the administration of. Knowing my time was limited, I did not want to waste any catering to their demands.

I have created a fifth turtle, my final work of art, the child of all my learning and fascination. In her DNA, I have written the capacity for bravery and passion, fear and loneliness, hatred and love, all of these wonderful and beautiful qualities I will never understand. I have named her Venus, my love letter to the human race.

[Progress report 477, the ninth and final year of the Kraang occupation]

The name Hamato comes from two japanese characters. The first one meaning borderland and the second meaning family. It is the name for those who live on the fringe, who do not fit in anywhere, and have chosen to come together. In a world divided into warring factions across species and ideological lines, the Hamato Clan is the collection of the discarded bits from every part, the people who belong nowhere else.

My name is Venus Hamato and this is what I fight for.

[kudosmyhero]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (vol. 1) #7: All Is Revealed

Read Date: March 09, 2023 Cover Date: May 1986 ● Writer: Kevin Eastman ◦ Peter Laird ● Pencils: Kevin Eastman ◦ Peter Laird ● Inks: Kevin Eastman ◦ Peter Laird ● Letterer: Steve Lavigne ●

**HERE BE SPOILERS: Skip ahead to the fan art/podcast to avoid spoilers

Reactions As I Read: ● ah, so this issue has the first colorized pages in TMNT history. cool! ● looks like some shading is added back in. good. the black/white lineart only the last issue or two was a little unpleasant on the eyeballs ● Triceratons having a little trouble breathing Earth’s atmosphere ● the Krang creatures (I forget what his species is called) are the reasonable ones here? ● aww, reunited with Splinter (though he looks more like a terrier than a rat)

● I’m really not used to the Krang creatures being civil… ● suddenly a wild Matt Murdock appears! (I love that Daredevil’s origin story is intertwined with TMNT) ● 👏👏👏

Synopsis: This issue opens with the news reporter, Jim McNaughton, explaining the strange situation going on at the T.C.R.I. (Techno-Cosmic Research Institute) building. Three days earlier a mysterious beam of light had erupted from the roof of the structure, and when police came to investigate they were promptly shut out by heavy steel plates that sealed all doors and windows. The local police and National Guard are plotting their next step when another incredible beam of energy strikes the rooftop, lighting the city for several blocks. On the crowded streets below, chaos erupts and the National Guard tell McNaughton that they've been ordered to "blast their way in."

Inside the building, the turtles, Fugitoid and three Triceraton warriors are recovering from being teleported by the Utroms' transmat device. As soon as the Triceratons have regained their bearings, they attack in effort to seize the transmat. A huge brawl breaks out and several Utroms are hurt in the fight. Finally, the Triceraton trio is taken out and the turtles are reunited with their mentor, Master Splinter.

April is on the street and she meets a friendly Guardsman who tells her what's going on. Knowing that she can be of no assistance, Miss O'Neil heads for home, hoping that the turtles will be there when she gets back.

Master Splinter explains to the turtles how he had battled the Mousers until he fell unconscious and was then found by the Utroms, who brought him to their building to heal. Unfortunately the turtles had thought the worst when they saw their Master in the stasis tank (TMNT #4), and their outburst damaged the transmat device (and sent the team to Fugitoid's world). Splinter explains that the unhappy Utroms had no intention of rescuing them due to their behavior, but he managed to convince them to bring the turtles back via the transmat. The Triceratons were brought along by accident.

As Leo questions the aliens' motives, a lone Utrom walks in and explains how they came to Earth. Twenty years ago their ship had crash landed and killed one third of their crew. The survivors managed to integrate themselves into Earth society thanks to their high-tech android exoskeletons. The crew took jobs and quickly amassed enough wealth to buy the building that would become their headquarters. The Utroms salvaged what material they could in effort to build their Translocation Device—the transmat. Unfortunately while working on their machine, the visitors had an accident 15 1/2 years earlier. The Utroms were bringing the last load of supplies from their crashed ship to their abode when a blind man walked in front of their truck, causing them to swerve out of the way. This violent action dislodged a canister filled with alien ooze and it flew into the street, striking a young man in the head. The container continued to bounce down the street until it hit an aquarium full of turtles that a boy was holding, shattering it. The turtles and the canister fell into the sewers, where the reptiles were bathed in the strange glowing ooze. It was then that Splinter found them… and the rest is history. The Utroms finally managed to contact their homeworld and were asked to remain in New York City to continue observation of the planet.

Tragically, the turtles accidental use of the transmat had caused the beams of light that have alerted the local police and National Guard, so the Utroms are in a serious bind. They offer to teleport the turtles home, but it's at that moment that the National Guard attack the T.C.R.I. building. As Honeycutt works with the Utroms to program the transmat to get everyone to safety, the soldiers battle the aliens' various robotic guards (who are firing stun weapons, so no men are killed in the battle). Just as the Guardsman are about to enter the transmat chamber, all of the Utroms are teleported to safety. The turtles are angry that they weren't being sent home, but decide that they must follow the Utroms or be captured by the National Guard. The turtles and Splinter enter the transmat and disappear.

The Guard break into the chamber to find it deserted. As they marvel at the sights of the alien technology, a computer announces that the building will self-destruct in five minutes.

April is home alone watching the events on television. She learns that the building collapsed on itself, but no one was injured. Just as she begins to worry about the boys, she hears a loud thump emanating from her bathroom. She runs to the room to see what the trouble is, only to find the four turtles and Splinter in here bathtub. Honeycutt had managed to properly program the transmat device after all!

(https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/All_is_Revealed)

Fan Art: teenage mutant ninja turtles by deemonproductions

Accompanying Podcast: ● Shellheads - episode 07

[timeguardians]

The Second Time Around shop hadn't been that busy as of LATE. It seems the change of season and fear of frequent attacks kept the streets more sedate than usual. "Should I be flattered or concerned that you went through such lengths to find me?" She questions, dilligently dusting off her latest addition of a mantle clock. Her eyes lift briefly to appraise the other. April smiles softly but offers no explanation towhere she has BEEN. It's not like he'd believe her anyways. Hell, she'd hardlybelieve it herself, had she not experienced it.

Discerning eyes swiftly sweep over the card he flashes. "With the news?" Now, he garnered her FULL attention. Then her face pallored. "What on earth convinced you to write a piece about the Techno Cosmic Research Institute?" She swallows sharply, the rag in her hands is wrung. "I'd be careful asking too many questions of some of the other employees. You never know who is loyal to Baxter Stockman...." She offers a tiny sliver of advice.

She huffs as she approaches him. Some conversations were best had quietly. This classified as one of them. "That feels like it happened lifetimes ago," April confesses. Even if, in reality, it happened only weeks ago. "What is it that you wish to know? About the testing phase? The building of the Mousers? Or-- or Why I left?" Of course, now the scientist is just speculating.

@timeguardians // closed starter

"First the future, now the past...I won't say you're a hard woman to track down, miss O'Neil, but I will say you know how to change things up... Yeah..." Cam flashed his card, the reel clip it was on snapping against his side as he pulled his trench coat back over. Slowly his squinted eyes fell over the antique shop and all its trappings of times gone by. Whether or not they were better or worse than today, all sort of depended on either one's economic class or your involvement in war. Lucky for Cameron, he had always had stability—financially, at least—and the biggest battle he had ever fought went on inside himself. After the death of his beloved father.

"Cameron Creek. Channel 6. I'm writing an exposé piece on TCRI, conducting interviews with the company's former employees... and of those employees, who better to start with than Stockman's own assistant?"

[cramulus]

Trance Dancing - The Rave

by Jason Keehn

(this essay was formerly posted at https://duversity.org/archives/rave.html, but it’s gone, so I’m saving it by copying it here)

Can trance-dancing save the planet

Can you imagine a crazier notion?

Thousands of bored youth pumping themselves up with drugs, going out to huge underground parties and dancing maniacally to electronic rhythms and psychedelic light-shows till dawn.

And this is supposed to help the world?

Shouldn't we be putting our time instead into ecological or political activism, or at least doing some kind of charity work? What about the serious spiritual disciplines that claim to offer the only true path to personal--and thereby social--transformation? What good does all our drug-taking and revelry do for the hundreds of millions of dispossessed, fucked over and starving around the world--not to mention all the untold species and eco-systems being destroyed?

Hard to answer. And yet some of us still have this inescapable feeling, maybe even faith, that what we are doing, confused, silly and commercialised as it often is, is at its core absolutely necessary. . . not just to us, but in the bigger picture, somehow. . .

Why is it that at the peak moments (admittedly rare) of the very best underground house/techno/rave parties, we get this miraculous sense of hope, of possibility, of transformation . . . a feeling that we're actually heading somewhere. . . together. . . towards a brighter future, one worth living in, one where we've returned to some kind of harmony with ourselves, with each other and with our planet as a whole?

Is it "just the drugs," a kind of consensus delusion, or might there be some basis in reality for these feelings, hard to justify as they may seem once we're back out in the normal world?

More dimly sensed than clearly expressed, the feeling for such a possibility permeates the entire global underground dance scene. Thousands of promoters exploit it to inflate their party invites with cheesy techno-spiritual imagery. It inspires and guides much of the music, and some small but key fraction of the hard-core partiers. The rest of the crowds who fill the floors at parties get off on it as a second or third-hand charge that sets the party apart from being just another club, without ever thinking about taking it seriously.

At moments, some hundreds, and maybe even thousands or tens of thousands, of "ravers" have probably found themselves sensing/feeling/wondering that what they were doing might be something really big, something that could really change things at a larger scale.

But of course only people who turn themselves inside out with large amounts of drugs would even conceive the question: Can trance-dancing save the planet?

A few of us, myself included, have made public fools of ourselves already by answering in the affirmative, and even giving some tentative reasons why. Here I want to try to introduce a new way of thinking that complements and deepens what already been proposed by people like Fraser Clarke and Terence McKenna. They see psychedelicized mass trance dances as the only quick, viable antidote to the egotism at the base of the western, techno-industrial mega-machine maniacally chomping away at the life-fabric of the planet.

This different line of thought is based on a simple but profound idea first expressed by the philosopher and teacher of temple dances G. I. Gurdjieff, who died in 1949. His idea is almost completely unknown, outside of his hard to read book All and Everything.

If true, it has staggering implications for ourselves, for our planet, even for our entire solar system. I don't expect anybody to automatically take it as Goddess's given truth, but its worthy of some serious attention.

Energies

As all "ravers" know, there is a mysterious something that makes a rave different from just another club or party-scene. We call this "the vibe"--a mixture of intangibles impossible to find anywhere else, except maybe at a dead show or a rainbow gathering. Roughly put, the vibe consists of: an attitude of openness, sharing, empathy and playfulness; intense, unselfconscious dancing; a collective altered state of consciousness, thanks to the combined effects of specific rhythms, lights and psychedelic drugs; and, at its height, a melding of group feeling and energy into an ecstatic, orgasmic release that feels nothing less than spiritual or religious--albeit in a form that has little resemblance to any type of spirituality or religion we are familiar with.

We all know that "energy" is somehow key to all of this. We know we raise and release energy through our dancing, our feelings, and our interaction on the dance-floor. Energy was one of the main buzzwords of the early English rave scene. The vibe is all about energy--vibration, after all.

But what is this energy? What does it consist of, where does it come from, where does it go? Are there different kinds of energies? Do they have different purposes?

Back around the turn of the century, Gurdjieff and a group of friends travelled back and forth across the Middle East and Central Asia investigating humanity's true history, the nature of the cosmos, and the possibilities for humans to evolve consciously, from their own efforts. In the process, "the seekers of truth," as the group called themselves, also encountered the Masters of Wisdom still alive in that part of the world (the Khwajagan). The Khwajagan were considered to be the bearers of some of the highest spiritual knowledge on the planet, handed down continuously for thousands of years.

One of the focuses of Gurdjieff's research was the transformation of substances and energies--both chemical and subtle--in the human organism. He also learned a large number of temple dances, which he understood as databases in movement intended to preserve ancient knowledge.

Eventually, Gurdjieff returned to the West and presented his synthesis of these searches as a "system of ideas" and a practical method for self-transformation.

Feeding the Moon

Gurdjieff's quest was guided by the basic question, "what is the sense and significance of human life on earth?"

His conclusion, expressed in writing only towards the end of his life, was that humanity does not exist for itself, but to supply the planet, the moon, and the solar system with a particular gradation of energy which they need to thrive and grow. At times he called this principle, "feeding the Moon," though it is not clear whether he meant this literally or merely as a handy symbol.

He believed that the entire universe is in some sense alive and in a process of continuously evolving (and if not evolving, actively devolving). In what could be compared to a cosmic fractal, the universe is in a process of unfolding and giving birth to itself, each birth at a new level mirroring in its unique way that of other levels (known nowadays as the principle of self-similarity). In what Gurdjieff called "the ray of creation," "God" or the Absolute gives birth to universes; universes give birth to stars, which give birth to planets, which give birth to organic life (viruses, bacteria, plants and animals) and to moons. Eventually a planet may become a star, its moon may become a planet in its turn, and "give birth" to its own moon, and so on, ad infinitum.

Just as all plants and animals need a variety of nutrients to exist, grow and reproduce, so our world and its siblings need a very specialised type of substance to fuel their processes--their planetary metabolisms, if you will. Supposedly, this special energetic substance can be produced only by human beings.

Reciprocal Maintenance

Gurdjieff's answer fits into what he called "the doctrine of reciprocal maintenance", the idea that every thing exists only insofar as it supports or "feeds" something else. Everything is part of a vast, interconnected and mutually reinforcing web of life. Or, "everything is something else's lunch," as ecologists like to say. This idea anticipated the science of ecology by at least half a century.

Examples: Bees don't just exist for themselves, they live to pollinate flowers. Algae exists to turn sunlight into more complex molecules, and feed other small creatures, such as plankton and krill. Krill feeds other slightly larger creatures, and even whales. Plants exist to turn sunlight and raw matter into organic compounds, and to feed animals. Worms exist to loosen soil for plants. Bacteria recycle waste into useable raw matter. Predators help to increase the strength and fitness of the herds they prey on by eliminating the weak and sick. Etc. etc.

In the scheme of things, humanity's essential role is that of a transformer of energy.

Human beings, according to this view, exist to serve the cosmic evolutionary process--and not the opposite, as the Bible would have it: that all of creation is merely a resource for us to use and abuse as we see fit.

Our possibilities as human beings are dependent on the degree to which we fulfil this function, a kind of "obligation" which nature imposes on us.

By Gurdjieff's view, this special energy could be produced two different ways: either involuntarily, at the moment of death, when a small "packet" is released into the atmosphere, or voluntarily, in greater or lesser amounts, through spiritual work.

Since Mother Nature, or Gaia, needs a definite quota of this energy from us, she will do whatever is necessary to make sure she gets it. If we don't provide the required intensities while alive, the total number of deaths will have to be increased in such a proportion as to yield the needed amount.

Devolution

Gurdjieff further believed that rather than progressing, the overall quality of human being (as opposed to externalizations like technology, culture, institutions, etc.) has actually been deteriorating over the last umpteen thousands of years, especially in "civilised" societies such as our own. He believed that in the very distant past, before the earliest recorded history, human beings had a much greater presence and power; in a sense, they were bigger, spiritually and existentially, than the vast majority of us today. He also believed that people once had a much greater life-span.

They were energy-pumps.

Gurdjieff had his speculations about what caused this decline in the quality of human being in the very remote past, perhaps even before the destruction of Atlantis (his theory of the "kundabuffer," explored at length in All and Everything). The upshot, though, is that humanity as a whole has "forgotten" how to perform its ecological function in the world--or simply no longer has the necessary juice to do it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

So if this is in fact the case--that we human beings generally no longer have the knowledge or ability to "pump" this energy intentionally--Gaia will be forced to increase the total quantity of human death to meet her needs.

This can be accomplished, of course, by 1) increasing the number of human births, and eventually deaths, and 2) by shortening the life-span of existing individuals, or 3) a combination of the two. The net results: Population increase. . . disease, and war.

Following this line of thinking, our increasing inability to properly transform and pump energy means that we have to be treated (by the Gaian mind, if you like) the same way we treat plants and animals, as something to be farmed, bred and harvested. Not a very dignified state of affairs!

So as the qualitative level of human being goes down, the number of human beings, and thereby of human deaths, goes up to account for the difference in energy. And of course, since organisms grow at different rates, with different energy requirements depending on their activities, we can imagine that there might be major fluctuations in the needs for our energies.

The Terror of the Situation

This suggests a radical, and terrifying, view of contemporary history: that the population explosion, famines, plagues, wars and massacres might not be due just to accidental or sociological and political causes but may be induced by the needs of the solar "eco-system" as a whole, with human beings acting for the most part unwittingly to effectuate these needs.

Think about all the horror and insanity that has gone done in the twentieth century, even just in terms of cold numbers: millions killed in World War One, hundreds of thousands wiped out in seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasake alone, millions massacred one way or another in the Nazi concentration camps; supposedly as many as twenty million Russians dying in combat in World War Two, not to mention another twenty million who died in the same period as a result of Stalinist persecution and forced famine. Millions died in the Chinese civil war, six or seven million in Cambodia under Pol Pot. Don't even bother counting all the famines in Africa and South East Asia over the last few decades.

Why the incredible surge of violent death all over the world, paralleled by an equally incredible population explosion? What is up with those peculiar humanoid beings living on the surface of Sol-III?

I'm not going to try to argue the merits of this scheme against other theories. Just chew on it for a while and see how it fits.

And so the picture painted is one of a race of hapless, deluded slaves to some kind of a cosmic food-chain the existence of which we don't even recognise. This is definitely insulting to all our best images of ourselves. But then how do we reconcile all our great assets, our supposed free will, intelligence, and creativity with the dismal facts of what we've done to each other for all of recorded history?

Are we really anything more than automatons most of the time?

Gurdjieff had what might seem to many a horribly bleak, cynical view:

that our ideas of free-will and individuality are a delusion, an image of our potential mistaken for a general fact of our existence. Bluntly put, we are blind products of genetics, conditioning and external influence; on an energetic level, we are next to nothing. We are less, in that sense, than most mammals even.

We have become experts at consuming energy and resources, parasites.

As a civilisation, we no longer transform energy into higher gradients and radiate it back out to the world, we just circulate like little ants in our vast urban hives and manufacture stuff, endless quantities of stuff. We know how to suck energy, make objects, and how to kill. Even if we're not killing each other off at a given moment, we're decimating untold numbers of living beings without even being grateful for their existence.

Sure, for the most part we don't feel ourselves that way, but anybody who's tripped a few times in public places probably had disturbing glimpses--at least--along these lines. We don't see other people--or ourselves--that way, because it's just too hard a vision to live with.

The path of return

This perspective provides a definite way of understanding the connection between our amazingly fucked up global situation and "spirituality"--or the lack thereof. Seen this way, spirituality has less to do with living according to some moral doctrine, or accumulating "spiritual" experiences and states, than with being able to transform and radiate energy of a particular quality.

If it is true that we have been suffering a generalised decline over millennia, all our human institutions must participate in and reflect that decline. So everything we associate with religion, in all its multifarious forms, would generally be a product and mirror of a messed up situation; in other words, just another part of the problem.

At its best, the spiritual component of religious traditions points to a return to what should be our natural base-line of being, something so distant we can barely remember or taste it except at moments of "peak experience," or with the help of psychedelic drugs, or as a result of long, intensive discipline.

Our so-called "salvation" is really more a matter of somehow pulling ourselves back up out of a dysfunctional, disenabled, alienated state to something like a natural way of being--not transcendence or cosmic consciousness or union with God or whatever. We need to re-learn "how to be and to do."

According to Gurdjieff, the two key principles to following this "path of return," were intentional suffering and conscious labour. Through engaging in intentional sufferings and conscious labours we begin again to release the kinds of energies we were intended to give off.

Of course by today's standards, this sounds like a bummer of a philosophy. Isn't life just supposed to be full of fun and games? On the other hand, if we're realistic we know that there's always going to be pain, struggle, suffering in life. If there weren't where would the joy and pleasure and flow be? So maybe rather than seek to escape suffering, or just submit to it blindly, it might make sense to choose your form of suffering and make something out of it.

Intentional suffering. Again, if it's true that we exist in a chronic low-energy state, one of inertia and stasis, it makes sense that in order to get back to a point of being able to consciously transform energy we would need to somehow exercise an enormous effort just to break out of our passivity. "Only super-efforts count." If you're physically weak from illness, it usually takes an extra effort to get to the point of being able to exercise on a regular basis, to return to your previous level of strength. Or as they say, no pain no gain.

This can apply on a lot of levels other than just the physical. Pain can take the form of a kind of moral or spiritual suffering deriving from, say, breaking habits, or confronting bad traits in one's character, or doing exactly that which you least like to do. Suffering in the form of sacrifice is necessary to be there for others, to truly love.

Conscious labour assumes that most of the "work" we do, of whatever nature, is not really conscious to begin with. We are driven by culturally programmed priorities, survival, automatic emotional needs, obsession, neurosis, ego. To work consciously assumes that one must first have become aware of how unconscious one is most of the time, of how automatic most of how our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions really are.

To even get to this point itself requires a lot of intentional suffering, because what could make us suffer more than waking up to how we really don't "own" ourselves?

Forms of work

This general process is what people who study Gurdjieff's ideas and methods generally call "work-on-oneself," or just "self-work."

No doubt for many orthodox "Gurdjieffians," this path of return can only occur in the framework of decades of commitment to the "work," in the manner it has been passed down to them.

Much of Gurdjieff's practical teaching consisted of dancing and physical exercises used in combination with meditation and concentration techniques. Some of the dances Gurdjieff himself invented, many were direct copies of the ancient temple dances he found during his travels. (These dances are a closely held secret of existing Gurdjieff groups, and rarely if ever performed in public.)

Other important components of his method were the techniques of "self-observation" and "self-remembering," designed to bring "essence" back into balance with "personality."

What is little known to the world at large, and almost completely suppressed within existing Gurdjieff groups, is that Gurdjieff was interested in and worked with drugs. The references to "active substances" other than alcohol, opium and cocaine in his writings are rare, and even then oblique (he tried to set up a "chemical laboratory" in Russia at one point--for synthesising what?); it is known, but little discussed, that Gurdjieff administered certain substances to some of his students.

The monks of the legendary Sarmoun Brotherhood, whom Gurdjieff spent time with, themselves cultivated and used a psychoactive plant they referred to as the "Herb of Enlightenment." Curiously, Oscar Ichazo, founder of Arica, a 70s psycho-spiritual organisation that also incorporated psychedelics and movement-work, claimed to have accessed the Sarmounis as well.*

Furthermore, we know from Gurdjieff himself that he considered his students "guinea pigs," his groups a laboratory in which he was conducting certain undefined experiments.

According to J. G. Bennett, one of his major students and better interpreters, Gurdjieff experimented continuously with his ideas, techniques and overall approach. While Gurdjieff always talked about his system, it was never fixed in a way that most of his followers seem to believe and dogmatically transmit it to others.

If everything Gurdjieff did was a kind of living laboratory, how does anybody know what were really the goals and working hypotheses and what was just part of the experiment? What if he kept certain pieces of his puzzle secret, knowing perhaps they were too explosive to make public at the time?

The new trance dance

Here is a radically new take on Gurdjieff's philosophy and mission, one that has a direct bearing on our neo-psychedelic-rave subculture:

Is it possible that trance-dancing is one of the most basic forms of intentional suffering and conscious labour?

Is it possible that such dancing, performed by the right people in the right way with the right intentions, is capable of producing exactly that same energy Gurdjieff believed Mother Nature needs from us? Could it be that the use of psychedelics in conjunction with intensive dancing to certain specific rhythms, by a new breed of individuals, may be a way to fill our cosmic obligation without the life-long spiritual training otherwise required?

My intuition is that this is indeed the case--unlikely as it may seem to all the "old school" esotericists and spiritualists.

Perhaps, in fact, we are not really now at the point of being able to do this--being "youthful" as we are, and prone to all the naiveté and follies of youth. But this may be what a certain number of us are instinctively moving toward. Maybe this is just that mysterious something we cross over into as we're peaking and pulsing together on the dance-floor.

Think about tribal trance dances. What better description could you think of for endurance dancing to the point of fainting in the service of the gods than intentional suffering and conscious labour?

Under different names, tribal peoples seem to commonly believe that their dances are essential to the gods, a form of offering, sacrifice, or service. Something necessary to keep the balance, to keep the rain falling, to keep the sun coming up, to keep things moving. That's why they're sacred dances. And so maybe it's not just the form of the dance that's sacred, or even what the dancers experience, it's in what they do: the energy they collectively release.

Isn't it odd that just when most of the cultures that still do this are either being destroyed or forgetting their own traditions, just at that same moment a whole tribalistic, "neo-shamanic" dance craze develops among western youth?

Consider: How does someone behave who has a deep instinct, but in whom that instinct has been muffled by hundreds or thousands of years of habitual suppression and invalidation? Perhaps every now and then the instinct manifests itself in a crude, awkward outburst, only to be quickly silenced by the embarrassed ego and the lack of any proper name or place for it in surrounding society.

In some of Bennett's writings on this whole theme, there is a tendency to paint the "feeding the Moon" scenario in extremes: either one is energetically inert and useless; or else one sacrifices one's life to spiritual work and helps to make up for everyone else's lack.

But must it be such a dichotomy? Maybe that's how it tends to be nowadays, but maybe it wasn't always if people used to "be more" than they are today. Maybe once upon a time (and still in some remaining aboriginal cultures), you didn't have to be a spiritual athlete, a specialist (monk, shaman, priest/priestess, etc.), to return your two or three "cents" to Nature.

Maybe even now, everyone can return some energy, given the right circumstances and maybe the right "assisting factors" too.

And what about the effect of psycho-active substances? If there is anything we know about psychedelics for sure, it is that they act as catalysts. They temporarily shift our system's mode of functioning, our rate of vibration, and enable transformations that are otherwise difficult to achieve--again passing. But what if that transformation, in tandem with the right kind of dancing and mindset, is just enough to enable the release of some special energy?

Does it matter that much whether we're in that state all the time, or just that we have regular access to it and can use it to do what we need to do?

Sure, we have no tradition of sacred dance, and few ravers dance till they drop, few dance with conscious devotional feeling or intent. What we do have, or at least aspire to, is a basic attitude that sets the tone when we come together for our celebrations: Peace-Love-Unity-Respect. Not bad for a point of departure.

And yet, just how conscious do you have to be of your intent if your instinct IS your intent? Maybe as we get high and move together our intent resurfaces into consciousness, and for those few sweet timeless moments we actually DO it, . . . and then we drift back down into consensus reality where there is no name for it, and the veils gradually cover it all up and soon we once again think we were there for nothing more than a good time and some cool music.

But the taste and scent of that ineffable "juice" still lingers, and it keeps us going in the days ahead, going back to more parties, wearing the clothes we associate with it, compulsively getting high and listening to mix tapes round the clock, searching for that rare synchronicity of time, place, people and music where it might magically happen again.

In some of his late writings, Bennett speculated that recent decades are seeing the birth of a new kind of person, maybe even a new race of sorts, with spiritual capacities different from the rest of society.

Could that be us?

And just what is that "juice," that energy, that special nutrient so needed for all things to live and grow in harmony? That erotic radiant mix of thankfulness, joy, and compassion that just wants to fuck the entire cosmos? Could it be . . . L-O-V-E?

OK, admittedly there are a lot of big ifs here. To try to prove that

a) human beings do give off energy when they die;

b) that some can give off an equivalent kind of energy intentionally while still alive;

c) that most of us don't or can't do this anymore;

d) that people could once upon a time do it better;

e) that the planet or the moon or the solar system requires this energy;

f) that if they don't get it human birth and death will automatically be increased with no say on our side;

g) that this energy can be produced through trance dancing among tribal peoples; and

h) that this energy can also be produced by teenagers dancing at parties with the help of drugs. . .

To try to prove, or even argue, all of that would be at least another article in itself. . . or more realistically, the basis for a life-time of research.

[tamachan221]

Now I don’t know if this has been noted yet, but I’m positive that Mr. Mortu and T.C.R.I. are very much based on Steve Jobs of TMNT.

Mr. Mortu himself even looks like Jobs.

T.C.R.I. also known as Techno-Cosmic Research Institute is said to be a highly successful New Technologies company for the past 25 years at the time, stated by April O’Neil in the episode Search for Splinter Part 1 as she was researching the company.

2003 was when Apple (which was founded in 1976) was a little past 24 and a half years.

Might just be a silly headcannon of mine but I do find it interesting.

[bobauthorman]

Secret Origins of the TMNT

With the latest movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem coming to theaters soon, I’d thought we should delve into the events and forces that made the Ninja Turtles team what they are. Lately it seems that so many adaptations focus on the 80s toon that the original circumstances are lost. Before we go any further, Let me state that this is taken from the original Mirage Comics version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with images scanned from the digital colored collection released through Apple Books. Please do not hate me. There may be some imagery too intense for young readers. Please exercise caution.

Our story starts in Japan, some 20 years before the start of the series. In the mysterious ninja organization called the Foot, Hamato Yoshi was one of their best. His only rival was a fellow ninja named Oroku Nagi, and to paraphrase the 90s live movie, “They competed in all things, but none more fiercely than for the love of a woman, Tang Shen.”

Shen only loved Yoshi, however, so it wasn’t much of contest. Nagi couldn’t stand it, though, and one night confronted Shen in her home. He demanded she love him, and when she refused, he began to beat on her. Yoshi happened by, and seeing his love abused so badly caused him to fly into a blind rage. By the time he stopped seeing red, Nagi was dead. 

Having killed a clan member, Yoshi fled Japan with Shen to America, eventually ending up in New York City where Yoshi started his own dojo.

Back in Japan, Nagi’s younger brother Saki mourned his brother’s death, and swore vengeance, throwing himself into his training. Years later, Saki was sent to New York City and start a Foot branch there. Under Saki’s leadership, the New York Foot became involved in all manner of criminal activities, with Saki becoming known as The Shredder for his bladed armor.

One night, 15 years ago, the Shredder tracked down the Hamatos. After murdering Shen, killed Yoshi when the latter returned home. 

With his vengeance achieved, the Shredder continued to expand the Foot’s reach unopposed.

...But Yoshi had a pet rat, Splinter. Splinter’s cage was kept in Yoshi’s practice rooms both in Japan and New York City, and from watching Yoshi practice, the rat became knowledgeable in the ninja arts as well. 

During the Shredder’s murder of the Hamatos, Splinter’s cage was broken open in the struggle. His family dead, Splinter was force onto the streets to scavage for food.

What no party realized was that New York City was also home to an alien race called the Utroms. The Utroms had crashed their ship some years before, and with no way to call home for rescue, infiltrated human society. 

They eventually started a shell company in NYC, the Techno Cosmic Research Institute, with which they could try and devise a way home with mankind’s comparatively primitive technology. While transporting the salvage from their ship’s crash site to TCRI, a blind man wandered onto the street. 

A young man saved the old, but in swerving to avoid collusion, the TCRI van’s back door opened a canister of ooze fell out. The canister struck the hero in the head, and bounced erratically away. At this time, another small boy named Chet had just purchase a bowl of four pet turtles. The wayward canister knocked the bowl out of the boy’s hands and into the sewers.

Splinter witnessed this, and going into the sewers found the lost turtles covered in a glowing, green ooze that had leaked from the broken canister. For reasons even he didn’t understand, Splinter chose to gather the turtles for himself. But the ooze had mutagenic properties, causing Splinter and the turtles to grow and become more human, even capable of human speech! 

Splinter chose to teach the turtles all he had learned from Hamato Yoshi, and gave them names taken from a nearby book on Renaissance painters; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael.

...In the present, the Foot in New York had become a major power in the city’s underworld. But what their leader, the Shredder didn’t realize was that his battle with Hamato Yoshi was not finished yet. That right under his nose, his greatest enemies were waiting for the right time...to strike.

[techie-turtle]

That's...holy heck man, that's a lot to process. Since it was lab experimentation, then that's probably what those dreams you mentioned forever ago were about, and it was enough to give you nightmares about it even now and holy freaking heck I'm so sorry you went through that. I don't know much about TCRI, just what the letters stand for, why would they even do that? At least your dad got you and your brothers out, holy heck. -Robo anon

Techno Cosmic Research Institute. I’m not sure what unethical experimentation has to do with research on aliens, but if we can break into there, I’m sure we can find out. And yeah, they have everything to do with those nightmares.

I should go back and properly answer the questions from those prompts that I couldn’t answer before.

[biointernet]

Seeing does not mean just watching

The Energy of Space Seeing does not mean just watching Seeing does not mean just watching, it means staying at rest, merged with the surroundings. To understand sounds does not mean just listening, it means being silent and hollow. Keeping to temperance does not mean to limit oneself like a miser, but to implement it gradually, as if a secret from oneself. Those who practice the three rules never exhaust them until the end, but by combining them together, can achieve the Oneness. Dao De Jing, Verse fourteen

Seeing does not mean just watching It has long been observed that people feel differently depending on environmental factors that may include temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and geographic location. There are some places where you sleep like a baby, have wonderful dreams and wake up full of energy. But there are others where sleeping is disrupted, fatigue is frequent and there is increased susceptibility to illness. Western science has no explanation for this other than it represents a confluence of geomagnetic influences, subterranean anomalies, hollows, water streams, natural and industrial atmospheric gases; gases, electromagnetic fields, and especially solar and cosmic emanations. It has been practically impossible to distinguish between all these factors or to determine what each contributes, so our ability to measure the cumulative effect at any particular place can best be described as primitive and rudimentary. In all ancient civilizations there were people who could feel the energy of space. They were sorcerers, shamans, priests well aware that society and the state can be strong and successfully resist all attacks only if people are united by a spiritual idea. The highest form of spiritual ideas is religion. As Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opium of the people, but without religion people have no soul”. The most cruel wars and cases of violence, the worst confrontations took place on religious grounds. Neither wealth, nor striving for a better life motivated people, but abstract spiritual incentives. These incentives allowed the invaders for thousands of years on all continents to raise millions of their compatriots and lead them to distant lands, some to the victory but the majority to the grave. But to maintain and develop the spiritual incentives of the nations collective rites and ceremonies are required. In the early stages of development of human society people began to search for those special places, began to create in these places special facilities, more and more complicated as the development of civilization went on. Stone circles and spirals, vertically standing blocks - mengirs, burial places of complex arrangements, temples, pyramids. In each case for such a facility people looked for Places of Power. Now we call these places sacred. The most beautiful places were always chosen for them: the top of a hill, the bank of a river, a cave, a sacred grove, lush vegetation. People usually call such places “God‘s places”, “sacred”, “gracious”. In such places in former times sanctuaries, temples, churches and monasteries were built. It is important that these places since ancient times have been considered sacred, healing, people came there to feel the grace, gain strength, to recover from heavy fights and work. When people visit such places they feel euphoria, inspiration, excitement, enthusiasm; they want to return there again. Naturally, such places are located all over the globe. Local people tell legends and stories about them; the church erects temples in these places. Here are some of them in Russia: Valaam, a small island on Lake Ladoga, Kizhi Island in the White Sea; Olkhon Island (“the heart of Lake Baikal”), one of the most beautiful places on Lake Baikal, the gathering place of Baikal shamans. The sacred Valley Kyren in the south-west of Buryatia, 170 km from Irkutsk. Numerous lakes: Linevo, a healing lake in the north of Omsk area; Plesheevo located near the town of Pereslavl in the south of Yaroslavl area; Svetloyar (the Shambhala of Russia), a legendary body of water located in Nizhny Novgorod area; Svyatozero, the lake in the south- west of Petrozavodsk. We could name a lot more such places in Russia. Sometime their classification will be made. But along with the “blessed” places there are the “wretched” ones. They, too, are told about in legends, but these legends are scary and bleak. In these places there live only witches, sorcerers and cannibals. As soon as one gets there, death is inevitable, there are few who managed to get out alive and unharmed. And even if they get out they will get sick, will wither and grow old prematurely. This may be accompanied by loss of memory, or a hundred years’ sleep that seems like one night. In short, it is better not to go there and keep away. In our times the inquisitive and curious actively engage in search of adventure to their misfortune. Some climb a mountain where there is “nothing, neither gold nor ore”, some dig up grenades in swamps, some poke about in anomalous zones. Often this has no good ending, in full accordance with the old predictions. (The author himself refers to this category of “naturalists”, so he had an opportunity to experience the effects of the adventures on his own broken bones.) Finally, some indications of anomalous zones have been formulated: • “attraction” of view; inadvertently the gaze clings to a certain area; • inadequate behavior of animals; • the lack of animals, even birds are not heard; • “strange” vegetation, somewhat different from plants in the neighboring areas; • the presence of strange objects; • various sounds; phenomena not amenable to logical explanation; • unusual sensations; • visions and pictures. There are several opinions about the nature of anomalous zones. Natural geopathic zones are geophysical anomalies associated usuall with breaking of the Earth’s crust, underground cavities, old burials, etc., where there is an impact on people, flora and fauna. Geopathic zones of artificial origin are caused by various anthropogenic factors, such as, electrical and television networks, heat and water supply and sewage systems, as well as technical facilities of all kinds. All this has given rise to a large number of energetically active sites, stray electric currents of different fields interacting with natural electromagnetic fields. Seeing does not mean just watching These phenomena are particularly common in the cities. Cosmo-physical situation also has its effects: distribution of air flows, clouds, background radiation. Since very few people have been purposefully engaged in research of anomalous zones, there are no unambiguous representations of their origin and properties. However, scientists have begun to seriously address this issue. Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, the principal researcher of the Institute of Precambrian Geology and Geochronology, Professor Vyacheslav A. Rudnick, the author of more than 300 scientific publications including 20 monographs, back in the eighties began to research the industrial and the anthropogenic impact on the environment, and in 1990-s shifted his interests to the issue of the impact of geo- active zones of the Earth’s crust on human health and the objects of the biosphere and the Earth techno-sphere. Professor V.A. Rudnik pays his major attention to studies of his hometown St. Petersburg St. Petersburg is unique for the only reason of its location. It rises above the underground intersection of the four systems of transcontinental breaks of the Earth crust at the junction of the Baltic Shield and Russian Plate. The four gigantic scars, mutilated body of the Earth over 600 million years ago and invisibly intersected under the feet of citizens of St. Petersburg. It turned out that this intersection gave our city the zones hazardous to man’s health and living. Within the zones of breaks of crust constant geological processes are taking place, in which physical, chemical and energy fields and radiation occur. Malicious zones are also underground streams and ancient, now buried riverbeds, tunnels, mineral deposits. Of course, the proximity to the area of break or the paleo-riverbed of an ancient river is not the only cause of cancer and other ailments. But the fact that it actively promotes the incidence is now beyond doubt. In the study of geopathic zones scientists found that in these areas the sick rate of coronary heart disease exceeds the norm 2 times, essential hypertension 1.5 times, the sick rate of leukemia 3.5 times; death rate is 2.5 times higher than the average. Adults 2.3 times more are likely to apply to hospitals. The overall sick rate is 2 times higher than average. a unique in its kind map of St. Petersburg, spotted with a spider web of invisible cleavages and cracks. The intersection of the four major breaks looks on the map of the city as a network of small faults that define the coastline of the bay, the channels of modern and ancient rivers. Defective are Vasilevsky Island and areas along the banks of the Neva. In different districts 5 to 15% of the population lives and works directly above the geo-active zones. In Kalinisky district of St. Petersburg 3.5 thousand traffic accidents were analyzed. The schedule made in the result left no doubt: over the break zones and over the underground watercourses the number of accidents increases dramatically. This dramatic increase is from 50 to 1000%! The researchers together with the traffic police analyzed the accidents on the highway Petersburg-Murmansk. The picture is the same. It has been assumed that the cause is in involuntary reductions in the muscles of drivers and, as a consequence, uncontrolled actions that appear over the geo-active zones. Researchers recommend placing the road signs on highways with warnings about an increased risk in such sections. There is no need to say how important is to remove the control towers of airports, runways, command posts, rocket launch sites, chemical and biological production, nuclear power plants from the scope of such a psychogenic effects. Thus, the problem of geopathic zones is quite urgent not only for research but also for practical life. Crucial for the serious study of this problem is the development of specialized instruments for measuring the activity of these zones. The adverse effects of “godforsaken places”, the areas of natural biological discomfort, have been known since ancient times. In the old days, before starting construction of houses, and churches in particular, people addressed the people with hyper sensitiveness, well- known throughout the county looking for their advice. The animals’ flair to places unfavorable for living was also used: you may build a house where the sheep lay and dig a well where a magpie sat. In recent years the study of geo-active zones have been included in the new scientific field, Geoecology, an interdisciplinary scientific field that combines studies of composition, structure, properties, processes, Group of scientists headed by Professor Evgeny Melnikov compiled 89 physical and geochemical fields of the geo-spheres of Earth as a habitat for humans and other organisms. In the specialty code it is written: “The main task of Geoecology is to study changes of life-sustaining resources, geo-sphere shells under the influence of natural and anthropogenic factors, and their protection, rational use and control in order to preserve for the present and future generations the productive environment”. A large part of this science is the concept of biosphere. In his writings famous Russian scientist professor Vladimir Vernadsky pointed out that science does not pay attention to the organism’s interaction with the Earth’s crust and the biosphere. Revealing the essence of his teachings in numerous works on the biosphere, he wrote: “The clue of life can not be obtained only by studying the living organism. To solve it one should apply to its original source, to the earth’s crust. In science there is no clear understanding yet that the phenomena of life and the phenomena of inanimate nature, combined with the geological, i.e., planetary point of view, are manifestations of a single process”. In particular, referring to biologists, he said, “Biologists have forgotten that the studied organism is an inseparable part of the earth’s crust, a mechanism for amending it, and can be separated from it only in our abstraction”. Nevertheless, it is the scientists of XIX and XX centuries, Louis Pasteur, Pierre Curie, Alexander Gurvich, and Vladimir Vernadsky who developed the fundamental basis of the relationship of the human organism with its environment. One of the key provisions is the following: between the spatial structure of molecules and their properties there is a connection manifesting in the left or right optical activity;the phenomenon of dissymmetry is the difference between the leftand right forms of the molecules of matter or energy;living cells possess the right or left optical activity and have the energy cellular field of non-electromagnetic nature around them, also based on spatial structure of the cell (geometry of shape), and all its structural elements. Summation of fields of cells is abiological field of the whole organism;life on the planet is a direct continuation of cosmo-geological processes and is closely linked with the state of the near-Earth 10 space, the biosphere, and is subjected to the phenomenon of dissymmetry;biosphere has dissymmetry;the phenomenon of dissymmetry in the world is manifested by the impact of the forces of the cosmos. There is widespread acknowledgment that environmental conditions can affect health, especially changes in weather. The foehn is a dry southerly wind that blows from the Alps across Switzerland and southern Germany that is associated with a statistically significant increase in accidents, emergency room admissions for heart attacks, asthma and respiratory problems, as well as a spike in suicides. Some hospitals routinely postpone elective surgery until these “winds of depression” subside. Similar responses may accompany the Sirocco in Italy, the Mistral in southern France and the Middle East’s Sharav, which the Arabs call Hamsin (the fifty days wind). Western Canada and the U.S, have the Chinook, a foehn-like wind that raised the temperature in one Montana town by 96 degrees in less than 24 hours (-48°F to 48°F). The strong, dry Santa Ana winds of California, called “The Bitter Winds” in Indian lore, have also been blamed for an increase in suicides and homicides. Some studies suggest that these effects may be due to electrical changes in the air that increase positive ions or decrease negative ions. GDV technology has the potential to confirm these observations. All the energy on earth is derived from the sun, which continually emits a stream of charged particles. The ability of solar magnetic storms to cause mental aberrations was noted by Alexander Chizhevsky almost 100 years ago and subsequent researchers have confirmed this and other effects on health. The earth itself is a giant magnet that is constantly in motion. Since life evolved under these influences, it should not be surprising that biological systems have developed to take advantage of electromagnetic forces, or that they can significantly influence physiology and behavior. This can be vividly demonstrated in lower forms of life like bacteria and planaria, but is also evident in homing pigeons and birds that use geomagnetic information to guide curious migrational habits that have persisted for centuries. Seeing does not mean just watching The Chinese used certain animals to predict earthquakes over 6,000 years ago and there is abundant evidence that all animals can anticipate other natural disasters like storms, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. Flamingos, elephants, wild boars, snakes, reptiles and other animals all fled their usual habitats shortly before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit. Sharks, dolphins and, fish can also sense an approaching earthquake or hurricane well in advance. Domesticated pets may retain this ability since it has been observed that advertisements for missing cats and dogs consistently increased in volume a few days before an earthquake struck. Some individuals also seem to be unusually sensitive to natural as well as man made electromagnetic influences. In addition, there is increasing evidence that living things emit their own energy fields or signals that interact with these environmental forces, as well as with other forms of life. Verifying this has been difficult, because skeptics correctly demand objective proof rather than anecdotal reports. Attempts to provide this by electrographic visualization of energy fields date back to 1777. Significant progress was made in the last century due to the efforts of the Kirlians and others, but techniques varied, results could not be consistently reproduced nor were mechanisms of action delineated. The advent of GDV technology and its sophisticated software, has now removed these impediments, and will withstand scientific scrutiny. Geo-active zones are usually associated with some special regions of the Earth, so it is, and we will dwell on it later, but such zone can be right in your home. A search for geo-active zones by bio-location (dowsing) using wooden or metal frames and pendulums has been practiced for centuries. Special measurements showed that the movement of the frame is an indicator of unconscious muscle contractions, i.e., people’s reaction to the impact of natural fields. Naturally, a person must be trained in a special way to respond to an impartial outside influence, rather than his own imagination. It is believed that on the Earth’s surface there are energy networks whose cells are separated by lines of high tension. These networks have different cell sizes, from 20x20 cm to 5-6 m. Geopathic zones have field nature, which is expressed in the form of lines, planes and energy nodes. Typically, a healthy person does not react to changes of electromagnetic, gravitational and other background in the lines and nodes of these networks, although there is ample evidence that they can influence health status. In the same apartment there can be several different zones having different impact on health. It is especially strongly manifested during sleep. If the bed is located in the area of geo-active zones sleep will be restless, the man wakes up exhausted, his efficiency decreases, hence the inevitable disease. Can you handle it? Without doubt! It is necessary only to put the bed into another room, sometimes simply move to another corner, and it can drastically change the situation. There is no need to say about a country house that should be built taking into consideration the location of geo-active zones around the construction site. Seeing does not mean just watching The worse was still to come. Now the most important thing for us was total calm. There was no rush. The wind was gone, the visibility good. It was as smooth as silk. I could see the ditch where Slimy had kicked off. There was something colored in it –– maybe his clothes. He was a lousy guy, God rest his soul. Greedy, stupid, and dirty. Just the type to get mixed up with Buzzard Burbridge. Buzzard sees them coming a mile away and gets his claws into them. In general, the Zone doesn’t ask who the good guys are and who the bad ones are. So thanks to you, Slimy. You were a damned fool, and no one remembers your real name, but at least you showed the smart people where not to step3⁄4. Of course, our best bet would have been to get onto the asphalt. The asphalt is smooth and you can see what’s on it, and I know that crack well. I just didn’t like the looks of those two hillocks! A straight line to the asphalt led right between them. There they were, smirking and waiting. Nope, I won’t go between them. A stalker commandment states that there should be at least a hundred feet of clear space either on your left or your right. So, we can go over the left hillock. Of course, I didn’t know what was on the other side. There didn’t seem to be anything on the map, but who trusts maps? Arkadiy and Boris Strugatsky. “Roadside Picnic” (1972) Seeing does not mean just watching Pyramid effects on humans Teotihuacan pyramids measurements 2019 Great Pyramid, Human Aura and the Chakra System See also about Pyramid effects:

Measuring Sacred Sites Egypt by GDV

Psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain Seeing does not mean just watching Magic stone Shungite Influence of Geopathic Zones on the Human Body The Energy of Space Lunar calendar and Moon’s phases now Read the full article

[independencebox-blog]

E U R O D A N C E

EURODANCE is a geopolitical and techno-emotional hecatomb, a 190 beats-per-minute countdown to the End Of The World, a bad trip inside a rave-flight Hamburg/Ibiza with an elliptic stopover in Pará and an emergency landing for fuel in Luanda, a psychotropic drug also known as Azeitegeist™ [the cheeziness state of the arts]. EURODANCE is a post-apocalyptical documentary produced by the Department of Vintage Scatology at the Pre-Human Cultural Studies Institute of the New World, researching in the last decade of the Ancien Régime, when the World was written in capital letters and there was no epistemological difference between Art and Sports; all artists were backup dancers of a universal cosmic music band. EURODANCE dances in European™, with Novilingua™ subtitles. It steals its lyrics from Slavoj Žižek shamanic prophecies and from Dr. Phil’s alterdogmatic philosophy (the first cyborgs in History); it steals beats from the pre-apocalyptical ethics behind the mashup movement, and from the anti-social morals behind tecnobrega movement; and it steals artworks from the proto-post-pop aesth(ethics) behind Jeux Sans Frontières, and from the re-re-realist ethics behind the opening ceremony of the Peking Olympics. EURODANCE is technotronic, is clubby, is high, is megalo-colonialist, is etno-musical, is bubblegum pop, is happy hardcore, is chipmunk, is autotune, is playback, is canned rave’ioli, is vengaboys, is hairdo’s and hairdon’ts, is pisang ambom, is electroschlager, is technocheezy, is bumper cars, is trance’genic aerobics, is progressive fitness, is body-pump-up-the-jam, is macarena, is dee-dee-na-na-na, is contemporary rococo. EURODANCE goes back to all fin-de-siècle nightmares, because it ambitions a retroactive correction of Reality: the World did really end in the night of the 31st December 1999, when computers weren’t able to recognize the binary language anymore, and the world (small printed!) collapsed. Therefore, EURODANCE is a meteoric party, a tribute to all those who haven’t died (yet). A journey back to the 90s; a journey back to the Present™. Rogério Nuno Costa © 2014

EURODANCE was created within the program “Outros Formatos” (2014), curated by Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte. It’s the choreographic study for the musical theatre show €TRASH, by Rogério Nuno Costa, to be premiered in 2019. Five performers are the “backup dancers” of an invisible techno band, putting under the spotlight what usually stays on the background. Or about the dialectic tension/confusion between Art and Sports.

Direction, Choreography, Text, Video: Rogério Nuno Costa | Dancers: André Santos, Dinis Machado, Luís André Sá, Mariana Tengner Barros, Susana Otero | Direction Assistance: Joclécio Azevedo | Light Design: Daniel Oliveira | Costumes: Jordann Santos | Photography: Miguel Refresco | Artwork: Diogo Mendes | Remix & Cover: Belamix feat. Too Limited™ [Mariana Tengner Barros & Rogério Nuno Costa] | Costumes Assistance: Cristiana Fonseca | Production: Inês Oliveira | Thanks: Sonoscopia, Mala Voadora, A22, Xana Novais, Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli, ESMAE, TeCA, Ana Carvalho, Pedro Barreiro.

Tour: Centro Cultural de Milheirós de Poiares (Santa Maria da Feira, 2014), Mala Voadora (Porto, 2015), Armazém 22 (Vila Nova de Gaia, 2016), Teatro Sá da Bandeira (Santarém, 2016).

Next confirmed dates: Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (Portugal), 6-7 October 2017

Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte é uma estrutura financiada pelo Governo de Portugal/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura (Direção-Geral das Artes) e apoiada pela Câmara Municipal de Santa Maria da Feira.

Music in this trailer: “Let’s Start This Party Right”, Girl Talk [no copyright infringement intended; promotional use only] Likes: 7 Viewed:

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Videograms of a Revolution: Surveillance, Self-Regulation, and Techno-Progressivism in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass (2019) - Bright Lights Film Journal

“There are unknown forces that don’t want us to realise what we are truly capable of. They don’t want us to know the things we suspect are extraordinary about ourselves are real. I believe that if everyone sees what just a few people become when they wholly embrace their gifts, others will awaken. Belief in oneself is contagious. We give each other permission to be superheroes. We will never awaken otherwise. Whoever these people are, who don’t want us to know the truth, today they lose.” – Elijah Price in Glass

Like its predecessors Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016), Glass (2019) offers a remarkably scaled-down approach to the superhero genre, taking people with extraordinary powers and displacing them from the fantastic context of the comic book universe into the mundane context of our own reality. Of course, in the years separating Glass from Unbreakable, the cultural position of comic books has substantially shifted from the margins to the mainstream, and director M. Night Shyamalan acknowledges the ways in which this transformation in the extra-textual status of the genre will alter the way that the viewer will perceive the final instalment of the Eastrail trilogy. Whereas Unbreakable treats comic books as a niche art form, Glass tackles a world in a world in which caped crusaders have obtained a high level of visibility in the cultural mainstream.

Unbreakable takes the superhero genre and grounds it in reality, using the tropes of the origin story and as a basis for a serious meditation on the themes of trauma, determinism, free will, and the ethics of vigilantism. It is only the film’s ostensible antagonist, the social outcast Elijah, who is familiar with the history and iconography of superheroes. He has become so engrossed in their mythology that he has come to believe the comic book genre can serve a purpose akin to primordial scripture, providing a blueprint through which the mysteries of life may be understood and a worthwhile guide to ethical behaviour. Comic books are positioned as a guide for broken characters to make sense of their place in the world and understand their role in a larger cosmic pattern. Unbreakable mostly plays out as a melancholic character study, dialing down the violent spectacle and simplistic good/evil dichotomies in order to self-reflexively explore the function of the superhero mythology in American popular culture.

In 2019, comic books are the bedrock of an industrial entertainment complex that is increasingly consuming the landscape of mainstream cinema. When Elijah explains the conventions of the superhero genre in Unbreakable, it was a way of communicating to viewers information about an art form they may not be familiar with. There is no longer any chance of the viewer being ignorant of these codes in a culture in which the annual global box office is dominated by properties from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes – the very status of Glass as the final part of a trilogy that brings together multiple characters who previously existed in self-contained features immediately recalls the drawn-out multi-movie universes of the aforementioned brands. Glass premiered just a few months before a much more hotly anticipated conclusion to a comic book series that has spanned decades: Avengers: Endgame (Russo & Russo, 2019). Comparing the two movies however, reveals the extreme degree to which Shyamalan deviates from the standardized formula of modern comic book movies. Glass plays out almost entirely within the claustrophobic space of a mental hospital ward, features only a handful of characters, and keeps the sparse action set-pieces minimalistic (the film’s centrepiece is an extended therapy sequence in a standard consultation room, and the grand finale occurs in a parking lot). The genre has become so popular, in fact, that the comic book movie commenting on the conventions of comic book movies has become a notable subgenre in itself. Yet, although there are several sequences in which Elijah performs an exegesis on his favoured art form that parallels the unfolding of the events on screen, what separates a work like Glass from the smug, adolescent meta-commentary of movies like Kick-Ass (Vaughn & Wadlow, 2010), Super (Gunn, 2010), and Deadpool (Miller, 2016) is that Shyamalan is using these observations to launch an enquiry into the ways in which pop cultural icons shape ideology and reinforce cultural values. Glass is organized around a tension between the ability of popular fiction to function as an agent of social control and the capacity of culture to pave the way to emancipation. The double logic of cultural icons is tied to the dialectic Glass establishes between panoptic and synoptic surveillance.

The current ubiquity of comic book narratives is established in the very first scene of Glass, which sees two teenagers record themselves delivering a self-proclaimed “superman punch” to an unsuspecting civilian and then uploading the footage to a YouTube-style video-sharing site. Nearly two decades after the ending of Unbreakable, David Dunn manages a security supply shop in partnership with his son, Joseph, while patrolling Philadelphia’s backstreets at night. Dunn is no longer a marginal figure confined to the shadows, but a popular person in the community; images of his exploits are regularly snapped by bystanders, who share their findings with an adoring media who have granted him the nickname “The Overseer.” In the same area, Kevin Wendell Crumb – the protagonist of Split – has developed a similarly high level of press attention, though of a more disreputable kind. Operating out of a series of abandoned buildings, Crumb has spent the past few weeks abducting and murdering high school girls. Crumb has evolved into a stronger and more monstrous villain in the interim, with the majority of personalities now working harmoniously with The Beast to prevent Kevin’s true identity from resurfacing; Crumb’s alters developed as a coping mechanism to shield him from the emotional pain of his unbearable childhood abuse, but with time they have warped into a monstrous form.

Dunn carefully tracks down Crumb (dubbed “The Horde” by the media) to a nearby factory, where he finds a group of cheerleaders chained to a table. In the process of releasing the girls, Dunn is attacked by Crumb, yet the expected grand climactic fight is cut short when the pair fall out of the window and are apprehended by the police. The two men are then placed in the custody of the Raven Hill Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane that has housed Unbreakable’s Elijah for years. They soon discover that they are the subjects of an experiment being conducted by Dr. Ellie Staple, a psychiatrist who is researching a rare mental condition that causes its subjects to imagine they have superhuman abilities. Staple diagnoses Elijah, Crumb, and Dunn with the illness, and takes on the task of “curing” them by convincing them that the events they have experienced have perfectly rational, secular explanations. Crumb and Dunn resist her aggressive mind games at first, but eventually their convictions begin to disintegrate.

The construction of the Eastrail 177 trilogy has been one of the strangest and most ambitious moves of Shyamalan’s career. Split revealed itself to be a long-belated continuation of Unbreakable in its closing moments, and it essentially functions as a self-contained entity (considering both films as a complementary pair certainly enriches their meaning, but a viewer could easily watch Split with no prior knowledge of Unbreakable). Now, a mere three years later in 2019 we have Glass, a conclusion that fully fleshes out the mythology of the shared diegetic universe that unites all of the films in the series. In one of his infamous cameos, Shyamalan appears as one of Dunn’s customers in the opening act. He tells a lengthy anecdote that establishes a connection between his seemingly unimportant roles as a down-and-out drug dealer in Unbreakable and a sober building manager in Split. This moment is played for laughs, as Shyamalan sketches out a knowingly convoluted life story to conflate two characters who initially seemed to be disparate, but it also immediately sets up the importance of extra-textual temporality to the power of Glass. The time elapsed in between films is conflated with narrative time, and the weight of these years adds extreme pathos to Glass, particularly in its closing moments. A multitude of formal devices are used to connect the dots between the films, including striking visual echoes and the incorporation of unused footage from Unbreakable into the narrative fabric of Glass as flashbacks. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, a tracking shot connects newly filmed footage of Crumb’s father riding the commuter train to the opening set-piece of Unbreakable, which serves as the catalyst for the entire trilogy. Through complex digital compositing, two shots recorded twenty years apart seem to be seamlessly linked through a single camera movement, and an iconic moment of twenty-first-century cinema is reworked to feature a new set of narrative and emotional implications.

Shyamalan occupies a deeply strange place within popular culture. He is one of the few modern auteurs so popular he’s reached household-name status, yet, aside from a small but dedicated cult of die-hard fans, the promise of a new Shyamalan film tends to inspire eye rolls rather than anticipation. The breakout success of The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999) saw the young director hailed as a wunderkind – an idiosyncratic filmmaker crafting challenging and personal art within the framework of a dramatically satisfying genre feature. The exceptional commercial and critical support that surrounded Shyamalan at the start of his career quickly soured, however, as each subsequent feature marked a substantial downturn in his reputation. Unbreakable and (2002) received positive reviews, but they were tempered by a sense of weariness, punishing Shyamalan for his commitment to a set of deeply personal formal and thematic preoccupations. For most critics, Shyamalan allowed his early success to go to his head, and his inflated ego led him to squander his potential with a series of increasingly bloated and pretentious riffs on familiar themes. In this writer’s eyes, however, Shyamalan has always been a distinctive and vital voice in the landscape of American cinema, demonstrating a formal rigour, intellectual curiosity, genuine spirituality, and sociopolitical critique even in his aggressively maligned work. The unexpected popularity of the The Visit (2015) and Split marked a return of critical goodwill after years of being treated as a punchline. This resurgence, however, should not be treated as a return to form but rather an opportunity for us to re-evaluate the work of a great filmmaker whose vision has for too long been unfortunately overlooked. Shyamalan remains a master of slow-burn tension and creating horror through suggestion: Signs is an alien invasion movie that only gives us brief glimpses of shadows and reflections into its final act; The Village is a monster movie that only gets scarier after it reveals its monsters to be societal constructions; The Happening takes Shyamalan’s poetry of elision to its logical extreme, premised on the fear of an all-encompassing enemy that is immaterial and, therefore, cannot be visualized in a concrete way.

More than perhaps any other living filmmaker, Shyamalan understands the allegorical potential of traditional genre frameworks. He does not subvert the language of his storytelling models, but pays an uncommon level of care to the selective unfolding of information through clockwork-tight narratives. He has largely been disparaged for his reliance on twists, as if his films function only as sensationalistic puzzle boxes that aim only to dupe the viewer before undercutting their assumptions at the final moment. A recurring sketch on the asinine Adult Swim parody show Robot Chicken (Green & Senreich, 2006-ongoing) encapsulates this view of Shyamalan as a cheap trickster rather than an artist: in each skit, Shyamalan is portrayed like a hyper child, giddily peeling away increasingly ludicrous layers of illusion while repeatedly yelling “What a twist!” with every rug-pull. It is inarguable that the success of the majority of Shyamalan’s films relies on the effectiveness of his third-act revelations, but there is nothing unsophisticated about this approach to narrative construction. By drastically reconfiguring everything we had assumed about what we were witnessing, these late turning points invariably add new layers of emotional resonance and thematic complexity. It is also important to note that twists do not emerge out of nowhere – where a more shameless genre director would traffic in misdirection to ensure their ability to wrong-foot their audience at the final moment, Shyamalan skilfully embeds clues and motifs that signpost the direction in which his narratives are truly headed.

Shayamlan’s immaculate storytelling construction is evidenced better than ever in Glass, a late-career masterwork that may go down as his magnum opus. The aforementioned directorial cameo, in which Shyamalan appears as an inquisitive customer scoping out security cameras, hints at the significance of surveillance to the film’s thematic schema. Glass explores the nature of power in a networked information society, shaped by the proliferation of digital devices on the micro-consumer level as well as on the corporate/state level. As a result, the modern social sphere is built on a combination of both synoptic and panoptic modes of surveillance. On the one hand, these technological developments have allowed for the consolidation of centralized power, intensifying the panoptic model of authoritarian governmental oppression that continues to dominate surveillance studies. Less attention has been paid, however, to the emancipatory potential of synoptic devices, which enable the average citizen to hold the power of surveillance from below.

To explore Glass’s portrayal of this new social fabric, it is first important to establish a theoretical framework that charts the development of the panoptic paradigm as it has evolved from Bentham to Foucault to Deleuze to Mathiesen. Bentham proposed that the ideal prison would be an annular-shaped structure organized around a central watchtower (Bentham, 1791). In this model, a guard is able to use the watchtower to observe the prisoners housed in the isolated cells below him without being detected. As the inmates are unable to determine whether they are being watched or not at any given moment, they internalize the disciplinary gaze of the observer, regulating their behaviour to fall in line with the expectations of the authorities at all times. The guard, therefore, does not need to be present for his gaze to be effective, as the inmates monitor themselves. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses this model as a means to explain social control within industrial “discipline” societies. The prevalence of surveillance cameras in the public arena creates the illusion of an omnipresent authoritarian gaze that encourages the individual to shape his behaviour according to societal norms. In Foucault’s conception, the central eye of the tower guard is replaced by the omnipresent gaze of governmental and corporate powers, who consolidate their power through a multitude of mass surveillance mechanisms (Foucault, 1975). Ostensibly put in place to ensure public security, these devices instead serve the purpose of suppressing individual agency. This, in Foucault’s model, was the twentieth-century equivalent of the grand public displays of violence in medieval societies that were conducted openly to shock citizens into acquiescence. Technological surveillance is used to impose a similar form of oppressive control, though in a more subtle, seemingly harmless form; forcing citizens to incorporate the surveillant gaze into their own subjectivity is an act of subtle coercion that is an altogether more imperceptible and therefore more effective method of social control. Being constantly subject to the administrative practices of institutions like Ravel Hill, the subject becomes paranoid at the idea of being monitored at all times and thus a manipulatable object that can be morphed into the “ideal” citizen. As Gary Marx, writing on Foucault, explains: “to venture into the shopping mall, bank, subway, sometimes even a bathroom,” he argues, “is to perform before an unknown audience,” resulting in “the increase of the power of large organisations […] over the individual” (Marx quoted in Berko, 1992, p. 68).

In Postscript of the Societies of Control, Deleuze revisits and reworks Foucault’s model of a disciplinary society. Deleuze argues that there is a notable difference between “disciplinary societies” and “societies of control” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5). For Delezue, the individual, closed institutions of the former have dissolved into a social materiality wherein “one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation” (Ibid, p. 5). Deleuze’s theory extends Foucault’s panoptical paradigm, stressing the ways in which state control now takes a more open, all-encompassing form. Most scholars of surveillance culture have aligned with Deleuze, framing the proliferation of surveillant devices enabled by digital technologies as an intensification of the panoptic principle. As Poster argues, the technological advancements of the information age have given rise to a “Superpanopticon,” a vast network in which devices of control have become so deeply integrated into the fabric of everyday life that they become almost indecipherable (Poster, 1995, pp. 78-94). Cameras, website cookies, credit card scanners, computerized medical records, and so on envelop the citizen into an overwhelming structure of control from which there is no feasible escape. Every time a citizen interacts with a technology that holds surveillance power, information is gathered, interpreted, managed by a centralized group of overarching commercial and state institutions, and used to suit their own interests. More than ever, it seems impossible for the individual to operate within society without willingly plugging into the digital network – in order to gain employment, buy food, register for medical care the individual must import information that leaves a digital footprint that is then is stored and used to monitor the populace. The citizen is becoming subjected to increasingly invasive security so that the informability of their lives may be harvested to suit commercial and state interests.

At the same time, however, these devices have led to an increase in synoptic modes of surveillance, which, as Mathiesen argues, represents an enormously extensive system enabling “the many to see and contemplate the few” (Mathiesen, p. 219). This, as Boyne argues, marks a “reversal of the Panoptical polarity,” which “may have become so marked that it finally deconstructs the Panoptical metaphor altogether” (Boyne, 2000, p. 299). This transition from a panoptical to a post-panoptical model is dramatized in Glass, a film that devotes the majority of its running time to detailing the control mechanisms of the modern network society – combining elements of Foucault’s disciplinary society and Deleuze’s control society – before devoting its final act to an optimistic vision of consumer-grade recording devices dismantling the top-down power structure and deconstructing the traditional hierarchal panoptic principle.

The model of the Panopticon is clearly central to Shyamalan’s vision of power relations in Glass. Ravel Hill Mental Hospital is modelled on Bentham’s novel, comprised of a series of isolated chambers in which the inmates are subject to the gaze of Dr. Staple. The hospital is fitted with a vast array of surveillance cameras, producing images that feed into a wall of monitors in Dr. Staple’s office, thereby drawing a clear line from Bentham’s to Foucault’s conception of control. “You see this camera,” Dr. Staple tells Elijah upon his admittance to the hospital, “There are 100 more of these. Everything is being recorded.” Each cell is fitted with a high-tech device that prevents them from practicing their superpower: Crumb is enclosed by a “hypnosis light” that detects when he is preparing to transform into his more powerful alters and neutralizes the threat; Dunn is placed next to a giant water container (his kryptonite), reducing his strength; and Elijah is confined to a chair in a room heavily monitored by armed guards. In each case, however, it is uncertain whether these devices are literally suppressing the characters’ supposed abilities or whether they are neutral entities causing a placebo effect to tether them to reality.

These devices, the threat of the omnipresent gaze, and Dr. Staples’ sustained psychological tests combine to shake Crumb and Dunn’s belief in their own powers. In the gradual erasure of these characters’ self-confidence, we see Foucault’s concept of the self-disciplinary gaze at work. Dr. Staple immediately delineates a clear-cut distinction between “bad” behaviour (the exercising of her subject’s exceptional abilities) and “positive” behaviour (acknowledging that these abilities are an illusion and hence refusing to practice them). As their self-confidence crumbles in the face of Dr. Staple’s coercion, these characters begin to regulate their own action in accordance with her notion of the “ideal” citizen. This ideal citizen, in the sanitized neo-liberal hellscape of Glass, is a passive, circumscribed centrist blind to their own capabilities and hence rendered non-threatening to prevailing systems of power. Dr. Staple, it is eventually revealed, is not an independent researcher but a member of a nefarious militant group devoted to the systemic neutralization of potential dissidents – and thus an embodied representation of an omnipresent social force. As a result of their enclosure within a system of extreme discipline, Dunn and Crumb find themselves succumbing to the ideology behind Dr. Staple’s research.

This ideology is in line with Philipp Mirowski’s theory of “everyday neoliberalism,” a term for the dominant system of values in developed society that circumscribe everyday behaviour by setting clear boundaries in the way citizens may think, conduct their behaviour, and orientate themselves politically. If we are living within an era embedded in the belief that Western liberal democracy and consumer capitalism are the uncontested ideal form of government – a mentality Fukuyama famously termed The End of History (Fukuyama, 1992) – then everyday neoliberalism is the existential norm. As Wendy Brown writes: “Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it” (Brown, 2015, p. 39).

Key to the maintenance of the neoliberal order, then, is the sedation of the populace; the consolidation of neoliberal values has been reliant on the maintenance of the illusion that there is no alternative to capitalism. In order to pacify citizens into submission, then, “certain kinds of social relations, certain ways of living, certain subjectivities” (The New Way of the World) must be generated to diffuse the chance of subversion or revolution. There are key echoes of Brown’s diagnoses in Dr. Staple’s description of her organization’s purpose: “They got it wrong in the comics. They talk about secret evil groups trying to stop the heroes. I don’t think we are particularly evil, and we don’t choose sides. We try to stop both of you. If there is one of you, the opposite of you appears. It escalates. We step in. There just can’t be gods amongst us. It’s not fair.”

The logic of neoliberalism thus extends beyond the political sphere and infiltrates our mentalities within our personal lives. To instil into society the belief that there is no viable alternative to consumer capitalism is to create social pressures that coerce individuals to conform – and this belief is instilled with a multitude of ideological state apparatuses including education, the legal system, and the media. The “ideal” citizen crafted through careful surveillance is achieved through encouraging those on the outskirts of society to conform to rigid social codes and norms. The perpetuation of images of repression and mediocrity has a pacifying effect, supporting a centrist neoliberal establishment under the guise of providing security. Mark Fisher succinctly outlines this resigned position in his study Capitalist Realism:

What counts as “realistic,” what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a “business ontology” in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.” (Fisher, 2009, p. 16)

Seen from this angle, the Shyamalan film that Glass most closely resembles is The Village; both films begin with exploring at length the complex methods of social control in which an authoritarian government exert dominance over their citizens. Structural blindness is central to both models of power: in The Village, the elders must fabricate stories of the dangers of the forest to instil fear in their citizens, which leads to them willingly giving up their rights and becoming passive agents to fulfil their elite’s own whims; in Glass, similar results are achieved on a grand scale.

Yet Glass, like The Village, points to the ways in which traditional hierarchies of control may be disrupted from the ground level through the power of technology. In both cases, the twisty plot, based on the careful withholding and unfurling of key information, is vital to the film’s portrayal of the connection between education and emancipation. The protagonists of The Village are initially presented in a state of structural blindness, having been psychologically conditioned to believe that the tight grip of their puritanical government is necessary to ensure their protection. The village elders fabricate tales about fictional monsters that lie on the outskirts of their seemingly idyllic hamlet, manufacturing a sense of collective paranoia that may be exploited to encourage the citizens under their watch to surrender their civil rights and bend to the will of their masters. The film’s final twist reveals that what we thought was a nineteenth-century township is, in fact, a modern-day settlement established by a group of reactionary neo-conservatives. These characters were each fleeing their own personal trauma and were motivated by the misguided belief a return to the simplicity of colonial America would shield them from the corruption of twenty-first-century society. The first generation were willing participants in the experiment, but the second are prisoners raised to believe the lie that the modern world doesn’t exist. When these younger citizens begin to show signs of agency, the elders react by adopting increasingly aggressive means to coerce them into sacrificing their freedoms in exchange for a false sense of security. They reach emancipation, however, when they break free from the illusory truths used to imprison them and face the true reality of their situation.

After using the multitude of cameras to coerce her subjects into compliance, it is Dr. Staple’s plan to delete the recordings and remove all traces of both their abilities and her own wrongdoings. The final-act rug-pull, however, reveals that Elijah has reworked the hospital’s security cameras to stream live footage of himself, Crumb, and Dunn using their powers to a private online network, having left his mother instructions to download the video and make it available to the public. His intention is to make the public aware of the existence of those with superpowers and hence to encourage others to embrace their own extraordinary capabilities. On an allegorical level, this represents a desire to awaken a narcotized proletariat to the conditions of their own victimization and hence to radicalize them into embracing revolutionary action. What seems to be a hopeless, one-sided tale of the dehumanizing effects of mass surveillance, then, becomes a heroic vision of the ways in which progressive technology may be reclaimed to assert the agency of the social agent. A traditional, one-sided interpretation of oppressive surveillance is upended by a more critical model of the network society that combines elements of panoptic and synoptic surveillance. Glass therefore thematises the cultural shift; new paradigms of surveillance have enabled the development of a more fluid, malleable web of relations within social space. The cheapness, mobility, and ease of access of digital imaging equipment have placed them into the hands of consumers, making them available to use against the grain of traditional institutional structures, thus enabling a wider spread of information outside the dominant structures of mainstream media. Thus, as Green argues, the decentralizing of information in the networked economy is expressive of a “democratic potential”: information traditionally concealed by figures of authority may be revealed and spread to large portions of the population through, for example, the broadcast of previously unseen crimes or the release of formerly hidden documents (Green, 2010). This is a reflection on the new spaces opened by media technologies to allow for the empowerment of traditionally marginalized voices; more specifically, the democratic structure of the web has allowed for small-scale, consumer-grade surveillance images to be directly transmitted to far wider audiences than traditionally thought possible, without having to go through traditional gatekeeping channels. The voices on the periphery of culture are thus empowered by these techniques and are able to gain an equal platform with the cultural mainstream.

The film, then, can be boiled down to a clash between two titans vying to gain control over the narrative: Dr. Staple represents the panoptic model of surveillance, using her institutional influence to impose a regime of authoritarian neoliberalism under the guise of benevolence; Elijah represents the synoptic model, a seemingly vulnerable citizen who disrupts state power to achieve a newfound level of empowerment. The modes of new media are thus turned against the powers who impose them to reverse the informational flow.

Elijah is revealed to be the trilogy’s true storyteller – a recurring figure in Shyamalan’s oeuvre, a puppet-master who manipulates the direction of the narrative and moves each character toward the achievement of a grand, ethical goal. Each of the major plot points driving the Eastrail trilogy turn out to have been nodes in a grand master plan Elijah has been orchestrating to reach this end point: the train he selected to derail in order to prove Dunn’s superhuman healing powers was also carrying Kevin’s father, who perished. His absence in the family home heightened the abuse suffered by the young Kevin at the hands of his mother until he built up his multiple personalities as a coping mechanism. Elijah’s actions first foster the exceptional abilities of Crumb and Dunn, allowing them to achieve their true superheroic form, and then secondly make the existence of these exceptional capabilities known to the public, in the hope that this will encourage more citizens who hold the same potential.

Glass not only allows for the achievement of resistance within the digital sphere, it allows for resistance through digital surveillance mechanisms, as those who are open to the gaze of the centralized eye are empowered by their access to alternative informational channels. At this point, it is worth returning to Fisher: “Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a “natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable” (Ibid, p. 17).

Glass, like The Village, ends on the cusp of radical social change, rather than showing the revolution itself. But in illustrating the populace breaking from their socially conditioned complacency, Shyamalan is positioning the future as a site of potentiality. An elating image closes the film: Elijah’s mother, Dunn’s son, and Casey (the kidnapped girl from Split who used her empathy to appeal to Crumb and was therefore spared) are seated in a train station, having just released the video evidence to a public site. One by one, the pedestrians around them become receive notifications of its existence as it goes viral, their faces lighting up. The three hold hands as Elijah’s mother says, with anticipation, “I know what this is. This is the moment we are let in on the universe.” As the tools of surveillance have been placed into the hands of everyday agents, it is possible to establish a vast and scattered power structure organized around multiples lines of control. Taking Kranzberg’s First Law that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” as an axiom, Glass acknowledges the heterogeneous possibilities embedded in the contemporary model of surveillance, which Shyamalan portrays as a new digital Panopticon (Kranzberg, 1986). The latter may be employed to form effective counter-hegemonic strategies to empower the individual that these tools are designed to subjugate.

Bibliography

Bentham, J. (1791). “Outline for the Construction of a Panopticon Penitentiary House.” In A Bentham Reader. Ed. Mack, M. Pegasus, 1969.

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[dawn-of-the-foot-soldiers]

“July 12th, 2050, 5am, eastern standard time.

It’s still dark outside, and rather quiet for once, the only thing you can hear this early being a few bats chirping. I’m the only one awake, been so for a while now. I would blame Insomnia for my lack of sleep, but, I’m just not good at sleeping for more than five hours. If I’m caught sleeping in, then I’m most likely dead or running a high fever. In a way, I’m thankful that I manage to sleep at all, and waking up at the same time every morning have its perks. One being able to enjoy the silence, sitting outside on the roofs terrace with your eyes closed, a faint wind blowing on your face as you try to put all the pieces of your shattered, overstimulated mind together, taking in one slow breath after the other. Another perk is seeing a city slowly waking up from its slumber.

The sun will rise soon; the sky will turn into a palette of pretty colors, the clouds will dance and borrow the hues the horizon sun creates, and the silence replaced by tired grumbles. With your eyes closed, all you see is what you want to see and you manage to block out everything else. You get to focus on yourself and think things through. Funny how sitting outside sleep deprived can make you sound like a poet... However, you have to open your eyes and face reality eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re ready or not, it’s a blow to the stomach every single time.  

And a blow it was. There was an explosion in the near distance, forcing me to stop daydreaming. Someone out there are causing havoc, either by throwing grenades or planting explosives in an attempt to sabotage something, or worse. I’ve heard nothing about any morning missions, so this can’t be one of the agents. I’ll say it’s either a gang, rebels, or a civilian tired of being belittled and forced to stay down. As thick as the smoke is, the alarm should go on soon, and some of us will be send out to investigate it.

I’m guessing Mikey will be send ahead to see what’s going on, then report back to Hob and then he’ll take it from there. After what happened to Michelangelo, he’s been the organizations speedster, and while that should give him a fancy position and a bit of pride, all he’s been so far is a delivery boy for the ones in charge. I’ve heard him say that he’s getting private lessons by Splinter, that they’re testing his stamina and abilities. All he want is to be a part of the action, to be out there with the rest of us, fighting the government, but no one likes that idea. After getting the ability to run faster than any turtle have ever run, he’s been having a lack of concentration and patience. To make things worse, the biochip implanted in his brain have a tendency to dysfunction, and the powers he was given stops working for a short while, accompanied by a migraine, and then he faints. Not only that, but he’s having these wrong ideas about being a hero. We’re not heroes, we’re mutants, we’re not meant to be praised or honored, our job is to be in the shadows, only showing ourselves in emergencies, or when that won’t put us in possible danger.

Talking about danger. I can see Raphael and Casey near the entrance of our base, Donatello helping them get into their power armor and Mikey getting ready to run off. When Raph’s wearing that, he’s like a big tank of metal and muscle. Casey is not as big, but strong nonetheless. It’s funny, I didn’t hear the alarm go off, which means they called the two of them, and only them, not telling the rest of us about it. Hob haven’t send me out on missions since I fell and injured my shoulder, but that’s a week ago now, and it’s healing just fine. However, this mission might go in under “classified” like so many other secret missions, but as long as they come back with their body intact, I’ll accept it. In addition, a reward wouldn’t be bad, even mutants needs to pay to live. I find myself standing at the fence of the balcony for a while, watching the three of them head off to the ever-growing smoke. Another explosion had blown up not far from the other, proving that it didn’t simply go off by itself. Someone is out there making it happen, potentially killing people. I wasn’t called for, but I might go there anyway, just to be sure.

But the sun has risen, the sky is no longer dark and gloomy as the colors finally take over, turning the white skyscrapers pink, orange and purple, with a little bit of blue, making the city a work of art yet to be completely destroyed. I think I’ll end the recording here.

My name is Leonardo, and I’m a special agent for the Techno Cosmic Research Institute in New York City.