#but yeah i think in this context especially itd make sense for them to have a simple word for horizon

[velaraffricate]

gathering words to add to my proto lang by looking at what kind of words natural proto langs had. because sometimes i worry about making words that are too specific and that would make more sense having been derived from something else. but apparently proto-austronesian had a word that meant "food particles caught between the teeth" so. sure. fuck it. my proto lang can have a word that means horizon then

[born-in-hell]

u all are now doomed to see my opinion on qbbh/ron situation

u all know i wanted ron to have eaten ron SO BAD, but mainly bc the reaction from the other islanders when they learned abt it wouldve been GREAT. in a qbbh story viewpoint yeaahh it wouldve killed rons lore way too fast and early imo. in the long run itd be easily forgotten by us and forgiven by the islanders (especially since qcellbit lives normally w pac, and he ate his leg) (and also foolish, phill, fit, mike, mouse and cellbit wouldnt even care, some would even support him). there would be no payoff to it all. qbbh got some info, tortured the worker, didnt save the kids, had a mental breakdown and then ate said worker. it wouldve been too abrupt

but giving the kidnapped worker STOCKHOLM SYNDROME is in a whooole other level. and it STILL makes sense in qbbhs personality. qbbh is not heartless. he used to treat ron worse when he thought the fed workers were mindless puppets. As soon as ron started to show he was an individual, qbad started to pity him. And missing his lover, being in weird terms w his other potential love interest and best friend, feeling used and distrusted by his fellow islanders, and more important, missing his children, made him try to find someone to relate and care to again. and that someone was ron.

and now it is the best and also the most messed up as it can get. after the talk w qbagh, qbbh was pushed to do the right thing and help ron escape the fed. but hes not dumb. he probably realised that is ron trusted him he would give more info. and thats what happened.

and as time passes, ron becomes more of a person and less of a mindless worker. there is a pattern between all the workers. the more they interact w residents, the more human they become. theres smth interesting abt this, but who am i to guess

him trusting his captor is weird to us. but in context, the fed aparently was HORRIBLE to the workers. mental control, no breaks, possibl experiments and torture. it is so much that ron fears the fed more than he fears qbad.

so yeah this whole things messed up, and ccbbh probably wants it this way kkkkkkkkkkkkkk this is one of the most morally grey arcs weve gotten and its so fun imo

yeah this is it i may add more things later but for now im tired

edit: Ive also been thinking what if the workers start misteriously disappering and all of a sudden everyone discovers that bbh has been kidnapping them and making a ""worker village"? like he sees how horrific the fed is, and starts helping the workers escape. he gets to fred and then he gives qbbh info abt the eggs as a trade. but everyone thinks hes torturing them and he starts to isolate himself again aaaaaaaaa

[potatochip-oc-dump]

i am going to dump a bit of lore on your doorstep (by copy and pasting smth i wrote on discord a few days ago) so i can give context to something i have drawn

disclaimer: it may be long and wordy. but thats what its all about baby

"in short i finally figured out how Arthur gets their name.

so to preface this i must offer. context. be warned this is gonna be one of those Rambles.

before we begin, i am debating on whether or not i should keep the 'arthur possessing gidget' thing, change it to where they possess chip (?), or get rid of it... my reasoning being: i think it makes more sense for arthur to be closer to chip especially cuz they end up as siblings in the end, ALSO i dont remember why gigi had to be the one that was possessed and i think the story would work just fine if it was somebody else.

in fact itd probably work even better with chip not only bc the theming of Being In The Wrong Body and everyone claiming u r somebody youre not works even better if its with chip, it also works cuz chip in the story is frequently like... whats the word. overlooked. or not taken seriously.

but anyways:

two, there is a plot point sometime during chip & gidget's stay in the castelle manor in which everyone but chip is trapped inside a dream by moonlight (in the waking world they are all asleep & cant wake up) bc she is searching their dreams in order to find Arthur (and kill them)

hopefully that doesnt sound. too convoluted. ah. anyways. something something chip teams up w arthur to enter their dreams and wake them up. i think.

i think probably arthur was either forced into going w chip or he agreed relunctantly, but (assuming he is still possessing someone) chip asks arthur if they can see his real face. and he agrees but in a way that makes it clear he is Lying

they wake up in (.....i dont think i have a solid name for this place yet. i think i called it Space 2 in my lore doc for the bit but i think itll be called 'otherside')

and Arthur just looks like a weird version of [whoever they were possessing at the time.] chip comments on it and art's like 'oh you mean my REAL REAL face yeah ok let me. um.' (they change into an exact copy of chip.) 'Better?'

at this point it is becoming clear that arthur might not have a 'real face,' but chip doesnt know that yet

meanwhile there is some chatter between the two, w arthur passively explaining who Midnight and Moonlight are. ALSO there is a fun fact i think about moonlight canonically having a preference for Women & that Arthur's pre-death appearance was modelled after the first human woman. i think. at one point they get onto the topic of art and chip asks Arthur if they like to draw, in which they respond: 'no.' Riveting.

something something climactic point where arthur breaks down and finally admits that they dont have a body, dont have any of their powers, and they cant even remember what theyre supposed to look like. he says that he feels useless!

& then chip says something like 'you dont have to have powers to like. create stuff.'

and then they draw together :]

chip agrees to help give him a "new face" so to speak by drawing him a FURSONA (it is a JACKRABBIT with a RAINCOAT AND UMBRELLA and an EYEPATCH and like. epic scars. and two swords. and a pet dolphin & demon wings. and other convoluted detailed design elements akin to that of a sparkledog) which they lovingly name 'Arthur.' (maybe w a last name like 'skullcrusher' or soemthing)

and arthur like draws his own version of that. which is Close to what Arthur's design is currently. & he's like 'yeah. so um. uhh. close your eyes i cant do it while youre looking.'

(chip puts their paws over their eyes.) 'um ok! what are you doing?'

'im gonna show you the real me.'

& then he looks like the character he drew."

[mageofminge]

weezer's gay allegations: a rant

i was browsing through the weezer subreddit the other day and noticed the 'is brian gay?' post got deleted. from what i get most of these silly posts would get kept so idk why this one specifically got deleted. im not sure ab how much brian interacts with his fans (given his vibe id think itd be almost him looking him and his bandmates up to see what ppl are saying ab him, esp since i heard people had been told to delete posts that had memes ab him being a nonce (which is honestly fair enough bc that could be on the border of spreading misinformation/slander) but idrk). either way, it seems like either brian, someone close to brian, or someone high up on the official weezer fanclub/'fandom' really does not like the gay allegations surrounding him.

if that is the case tho, i am kinda torn on how to approach this.

on one hand, as a weezer fan with a queer identity, even though i know that all of the members are probably cishet, it is still fun to joke about these things. or even just speculation, though logically i know it is likely to be false, its still comforting for me to already see this male figure i look up to, and then to further serve as inspiration to myself, somewhat project my queerness onto him. furthermore, to me at least, his actual sexuality (ignoring my projecting) does not play a role in how i perceive him. to me all of these gay allegations are just harmless jokes, i don't really take them seriously, especially since that's his private life and stuff.

on the other hand though, regardless of what his sexuality actually is, those allegations could have quite dodgy implications, considering there are people in the world, and heck even in a fanbase as queer and nd as weezer, who aren't very accepting of queerness. the way I see it is, if the gay allegations spiral out of control there are two possible outcomes:

brian is not gay, or queer in any way. regardless, he continues to be harassed about his sexuality by people who don't believe him. he will never beat the gay allegations. people will always be constantly doubting him regarding his identity, and i can imagine that would cause a lot of stress. or it could be...

brian is gay (or at least some variant of queer) and is outed against his will.

neither of these options are particularly pleasant. the key thing tho is those outcomes rest on the condition that the gay allegations do get out of control. firstly i just want everyone to kind of realise that public figures, just like everybody else are entitled to privacy, especially regarding their sexuality. secondly, while i think that simply making gay allegation jokes isn't necessarily inherently harmful, esp in the context of queer people looking up to public figures, we should still all be well aware that it is just a joke and nothing more. it would also be nice if some of the other members who are the target of these allegations had a sense of humour and played along with the jokes. i mean, this is something rivers already kinda does with his zesty bit, and i fucking love it - i think its hilarious and i also appreciate how hes able to interact with fans and also 'make fun' of himself without being too self-conscious. and it would be rlly cool if we could have a similar level of fan interaction (within appropriate boundaries) from other members too.

anyways idk if that made a lick of sense but yeah, what are y'alls thoughts on this.

[therealvinelle]

Doylist analysis of For the Love of a Woman

(Link to the fic in question.)

The anon who requested a Doylist analysis from @bellaslilpapercut submitted their thoughts:

doyle anon here, keep this anonymous (also canon-narrative sorta just means What-Smeyer-Thinks, to clarify) -

I think the reason FtLoaW is so intringiung to me is even within the inaccurate and inconsistent  perception Stephenie Meyers has of her characters (viewing edward and jacob as they are in canon as ‘good’, etc) The basic premise is comically plausible, literally only a hair off from canon, and the further you go usually the inaccuracies are for humour but are still plausible to a point.

Like, Jacob and Edward both would do literally anything to get the ending they think is right even within Meyers mind, she straight up has Edward be willing to have an open relationship in BD, Jacob deadass was about to launch himself off a cliff that one time, they are insistent, they regularly have no dignity what so ever, the request Edward makes is only slightly off from canon in timing and desperation, and they both agreed to it somewhat in canon.

Like, Meyers might obviously have them come up with better ideas to make it palatable to Bella, (i say better but like i mean more efficient) but, would Ed and Jacob make out if it meant Bella wouldn’t die by Vamp pp? Yeah, she wouldn’t like to think about that, she’d probably just have Ed and Jacob back off for once or something, but they WOULD. Even the inaccurate perceptions of Ed and Jake WOULD DO THIS, just probably less awkwardly.

And that’s INTERESTING because it’s like, how WOULD the original canon grapple with this? How would Smeyer’s idea of these characters react to this? How would what Smeyer thinks Bella is react to this? If Smeyer pushed herself into this corner, and couldnt just drag herself out of it, what does she think would happen? How would she move forward? Likely the anwser is just 'this becomes one of those moments where Smeyer heads up to something then drops it’ like shes prone to doing but, Bella’s reaction in that fic isn’t that off even from Smeyers perception of her to me.

Especially because like… canon-narrative! Jacob and Edward work!! Even within the confusing hellscape that is the Twilight Narrative and its perceptions of them, theyd canonically work!! The original anon who started all this pointed out how Edward said Jacob’s mind is pleasant and that they might’ve been friends, but like, they have similar personalities in general! People don’t really realise it because what people tend to stick with and therefore what becomes fanon (jacobs NM sunniness and Edwards genuinely surreal lack of social skills) isnt similar, but Smeyer wrote them to be so similar. They’d get along in other circumstances! Within the canon-narrative, if they finally got along and sucked face itd be like… deeply tension filled, And awkward, the only thing stop FtLoaW from happening is like, them having minor social skils compared to their watsonian counterparts

tl;dr somehow your crackfic dependent on watsonian analysis of the series also makes total sense in the context of canon-narrative perceptions of the same characters minus the obvious surrealism and like, holy shit batman, you’ve done it! you’ve taken this series main consistent point of 'doing what u think is best w/o consent’ and drove it to its logical conclusion, accidentally driving it off a cliff (the main romances in the series) in the process!

or, funnier tldr - someone bribe smeyer in writing canon-narrative AU of your fic, i NEED to know how she would confront this.

Sorry if this wasn’t that interesting btw i just like, Have Thoughts. And like i dont think ao3 has that large of a comment character allowance.

Anon, you fascinate me.

[normal-thoughts-official]

you talk a lot about magnus and camille dynamic and how they started and all that great meta content that you know i love but here's a question that idk if you ever got: how long do you think they were together? bc i can't think of a specific timeline and personally i love the one you talked abt at some point how she was pretty much right after asmododo or something like that, so he went from one type of abuse into another... but how long was he there? was camille with him for 20 years? 80? 130? any theories?

ugh that's a complicated one because i don't really have an answer for that and i think about it often as well

altho i think you got confused about her being right after asmodeus, i definitely don't think she was. i mentioned it my post about the timeline to say that magnus COULDN'T have been born close to the 1800s because that would make it asmodeus and camille way too close and that can't be the case because it would imply camille is basically the only person he dated before alec doajsdoaj and we know that's not true cuz there's also other ppl like george and etc. it was more a point in favor of "early to mid 1600s" for his birth date

anyway! let's go through this. i mentioned in another post that i think he got together with camille right after george, and that i think george died around the middle of the US civil war, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. so let's say they got together around 1863. now, we have a few pieces of information:

magnus mentioned that he hadn't been with anyone for "almost a century" when talking to alec. i know i think magnus is time blind but he can't be TOO off here. that was in 2016 so that would make their breakup date be a little after 1916 if magnus remembers correctly

literally the only thing about the timeline in that time period that i can remember is that one picture there was in his file of magnus surrounded by girls at a party, which looked to be in the 20s to me. since camille was an abusive asshole probably sabotaging his every chance to meet people, that couldn't have been when they were together. so i'd say 1920 is like, the limit for when they could have broken up. it's up to you whether or not you think magnus would be jumping into his party animal role immediately after the breakup or if it would take some time for him to heal; personally i think both make sense (i think she made a huge number on him so it would make sense for him to take a while to get back to that kind of thing; on the other hand, a lot of people turn straight to being party animals after breaking up abusive relationships, especially because for so long abusers have kept them from doing anything fun. so both work imo) so it's up to you

conclusion: they broke up in 1920 at the latest, so the max you could go for is 80 years, if you go with a timeline where camille was right after george (george can't be after camille because magnus has had no relationships after camille, but there could have been a bigger gap between george and camille than i personally hc). it could still be less tho, because we literally have NO information whatsoever on what happened between 1861 and 1920. even if you go with "they broke up and magnus immediately went full party animal" (which is perfectly valid), it's also entirely possible that this happened in say, 1901 and that pic just happened to be from the 20s, years later. but i also don't think it could have been a lot earlier than 1901 because magnus said almost a century, implying less than a century between the year they broke up and 2016. and while i do think that any immortal would lose track of time after a while and mingle years and decades together, nevermind adhd time blind icon magnus bane, if they had broken up in, say, 1880, magnus would remember that over a century has passed, if anything because so much has changed since then. so i think for him to say that the breakup should have happened in the 20th century at least

so that's the analysis from what we've seen in the show. personal opinion! i think 80 years makes sense, but is a bit much. it makes sense because there does seem to be a pretty obvious gap in magnus' file from the 1860s to the 1920s and then it goes back to having many pictures of him, and that "disappearance" makes sense in the context of him being in an abusive relationship (which limits your interactions and going outs by a lot). it does seem to be a bit much because magnus is at max 400, so, if they had been together 80 years, that would have been 20% of magnus' life spent with camille. or 1/5. added with all the time with asmodeus, it seems to be... a bit much dioadsoaijd and like look i'm not judging, i know abusive relationships can last many years and decades even for mortals, nevermind immortals, but i just don't like the idea of it lasting this long personally, especially because i think it makes him getting with alec seem actually a bit soon considering how long the abusive relationship lasted, and that's ignoring asmodeus' abuse on top of it

so personally, i like it morenif its around 40-50 years. i think it makes sense. it would mean the breakup was sometime around the 1910s, and while, okay, there is a gap in his file that seems to only end in the 20s, we must not forget an important fact: shadowhunters are stupid. so i actually think it makes sense that like, magnus emerges from his abusive relationship and is still getting back on his feet, and shadowhunters just don't care. like who is that guy? oh some warlock, no one's heard of him since like the 1860s lol. whatever happened to him? who cares. anyway, we love racism

and then around a decade later it turns out that magnus is healing enough to be a pain in their ass; say, that is when he becomes HWoB, or simply that they are reminded of how powerful magnus actually is once he is back in activity, and so they go back to like, investigating him and updating his file. so the file gap could be explained in that case. it also actually makes more sense that it would take shadowhunters a while to pay attention to him again, and since magnus was healing from an abusive relationship, the time it would take for him to draw their attention might well be around a decade

and with 40-50 years of an abusive relationship that would mean magnus has spent 10-12% of his life with camille; which is a LOT of time (for comparison: my first abusive relationship lasted a little over a year and i was 16 at the time; that makes it have lasted around 6% of my life at the time, and it did a HUGE number on me, taking me almost 3 years to have a relationship again), but not quite as much as a full 20%. not just that, but him taking "almost a century" (it would actually make it be a little over a century in this timeline, but again, magnus is immortal and time blind, so give him a break) to get with anyone again makes sense. that would be around double the time he's spent with her before he heals enough to be with someone else. that tracks, because abuse fucks you up fast and unfuckening yourself up takes longer. magnus isn't even fully unfucked up (which is okay, he doesn't have to be), but for him to be ready to take such huge steps as he is taking with alec, i think around double the time he's spent with her spent on healing makes sense

(again, i'm mostly going off my own experiences here; my abusive relationship lasted almost a year and a half, my next relationship was almost three years after the breakup. so almost perfectly double the time before i was ready to have another relationship. and again, i know recovery isn't the same for everyone and a lot of factors go into this, but i just think a timeline where he's been with her for 80 years and then gets with alec less than 100 afterwards is a bit too fast)

i still think 40 years is kind of a very long time to be in an abusive relationship and like holy shit i cant even imagine, but also i mean, mortals have abusive relationships that last that long and to an immortal itd feel like less time, and it does seem to be what best fits the timeline, so

and yeah i think those are my thoughts dadsajdsa

LAST MINUTE EDIT BEFORE THIS IS PUBLISHED CUZ IM NOT REDOING THE WHOLE THING: i got an anon today saying that magnus said something about not having seen camille in 130 years (link) which i didnt/dont really remember but i trust that theyre right and im wrong because i dont remember a lot of shit from this show. 130 years before 2016 would be 1886, meaning that if they broke up at that time and got together right after george's death as i personally hc, that's a 20-year relationship. that sounds like it fits the timeline as much as any other to me, and like i said in that ask, i think it makes sense that magnus would play it down to alec by saying "almost a century" instead of how long it's really been cuz it's a bit too vulnerable, and plus, we know one of the ways he protects himself is by not letting people pinpoint exactly some important dates from his past, particularly his birthday and etc

and okay i know that 20 years together, then 130 years recovering is a huge difference, but also i think with twenty years together as opposed to my comparatively short abusive relationship the scars of abuse would deepen a lot and quicker, so maybe it makes sense that it would take a longer time to feel confident enough to get to dating again. plus, like i said, there's no real math to be had in that process, everyone is different, has their own history and recovery process and etc so it's not like there is a deadline. so actually scratch everything i said above im going with this timeline. the one thing that doesn't track with that is the gap in his file but also like i said shadowhunters are stupid, so. yeah 20 years together is probably closer to it

in the end its kind of a relief cuz i was like "holy shit 40 years is so LONG" so... yeah udndidn

[wallkickswillwork]

signal jamming

incoherency is comforting because of the narrative weve been fed our whole entire lives that in order to be palatable media must in some way be complete and have beveled, well-defined edges rather than being a mess of finger paints, bright colors, strange dialogues and verbiage, build trees of moods.

thoughts on: -futuristic anime, 90s anime and the unique sense of mood in toonami shows. they are a very good series of shows for people who are coming of age and who must slowly be forced to reckon with the industrialization and mercenary nature of adult life, as it is increasingly held captive by capitalism. there is also something essentially spiritual about it, especially shows like precure and dbz, where an interior or exterior-made-interior force is responsible for the protagonists' success in the face of an oppressive world-system. under capitalism, it frequently is the case that the entire world or entirety-of-world is against us. heroes must overcome overwhelming odds to leave their mark on a gauntlet of greats. -cowboy bebop, final fantasy 7, metroid as meditations on loss, urbanization, dating back to blade runner. this is a type of meditation that is present in much of cyberpunk, but its also not exclusively cyberpunk, and can extend in nature to non-cyberpunk works.

thinking about necrobarista and how its attempting to "resuscitate" anime, while this approach doesnt really examine what contemporary anime like jojos, precure, and slightly more dated anime like hidaske and nichijou do well. if we get all this tunnel vision for gurren lagann and flcl we can never look forward. i think a lot of the visual work that needs to be done is probably in movies. i think maybe there could be work done to marry cinema proper with its animated counterpart. steven universe seems like it gets it, and there are some anime that really seemed like they got it. i dont think were beyond salvation.

-listening to the whos "tommy" and thinking about how trauma and the humanity of that trauma is experienced and lived-through by the main character in socratic fashion. these stories are discussed by people whose actual, authentic experience of trauma irl is doubtful at best. they are great successes on stage who dont struggle in the sense that an actual victim would struggle. calls to mind how a lot of freuds patients would fabricate csa in order to fulfill the expectations of the therapist. but in other cases, actual patients with csa would repress their experiences or not feel comfortable discussing. so thats how i feel about gurus like meher baba or i guess alan watts. less trustworthy and more like scam artists. i do believe in what they teach, however. i think that a guru can teach the truth even if that guru is a liar. maybe its the truth, but the guru doesnt know it to be true, or else, the way the guru teaches it is untrue.

-for a while i imagined my own autism to be the result of childhood trauma that was repressed, but later emerged that those memories were fabricated, to my knowledge, and was left wondering.

-learning to regard the world with a sense of wonder from media like cowboy bebop and ff7. these worlds are jaded and decaying realities but there is a sense of awe at the vast, uncompromising reality. truly vast, sprawling and yawning cities and vast starry skies up above. beholding these things and beholding the starry skies and huge cities of our own planet surely stirs something in me.

-fantasy anime tends to go the joke route like slayers or else the route of "we are all kids, bro, stuck in an mmo" and i think this is mostly due to the admittedly antiquated setting of high fantasy in european trochets and history which to japanese people probably feel like white person set dressing and as they should, i mean. there are more high fantasy themes in something like inuyasha and japans history can be feudal, edo, the meiji restoration, primordial like princess mononoke, etc, so theres more wiggle room for historical works there. slayers et al is usually reduced to "characters moving around the forest" which is almost like this grand slice of the collective anime consciousness as it stands overlapping with, say, pokemon, to the extent where its one of the cliche anime things everyone thinks about, alongside high school, robots, nurses, etc.

-another thing to which we could probably ascribe the success of something like slayers to is wizardry and by proxy dragon quest. small graph paper monster garden games. the appeal is entirely mathematical so there are only a few directions that anime directors tend to run with it (goofy gag comedy if youre making a show or cut and dried authentic dungeon crawlers with moe characters instead of the usual dbz ones). going off what you definitely learn in japanese history class if youre a japanese student, for starters, there are thousands of years of chinese history, so you have romance of 3 kingdoms type stuff. or you have high school romances accounting for the various fire emblems where the appeal becomes game of thronesy "which of my characters in dragon quest land can i make kiss each other and myself", very good ground to cover as we start asking the important questions. theres samurai stuff as we already know, drawing on years of samurai media, kurosawas films and zen spirituality, art of the blade type stuff, jeet kune do in some instances and reaching so far afield as to probably raise some interesting and important questions about pan-asiatic cultural identity which this author (white) is ill-advised to answer. but reeling it back in, the question mostly being of history, and how a lot of fantasy media draws more from History proper as a codified cultural body than histories being individuated familial experiences. its true that when a work does something unique with history (earthbounds hippy dippy approach to the 1960s, undertales handling of furry culture, yume nikkis south american murals) its tended to be seen as that works "thing" as if because hulk hogan was an all american wrestler that precluded john cena from being same, or at least, embodying a similar if slightly modified niche. nobody can make a hippy dippy rpg now or something because itd just be called an earthbound ripoff rather than a loving homage. and i think thats wrong headed and how genres become stillborn rather than invented and developed upon. we have this vast morass of stuff from the 20th century and we could be developing various 60s, 70s, 80s fantasies. hindsight is 20/20 i guess. who knows, we could see bluff city become something in 50 years time.

i feel this is because of extreme stringent expectations of intellectual property laws and their dissemination into everyday discourse online. i dont really like or agree with monolithic cultural expectations like intellectual property or *shudder* advertising, but only to the extent where i can acknowledge that whether or not i agree with them is irrelevant to their all-consuming scope and the need for marxists to actively combat them. its one thing to say "x is bad" and another to clamor for urgency of fighting x, which is, if you believe what we read every day about global warming, too late, so its not important. nevertheless there are a multiplicity of settings that could be developed into genres and identities and ideologues that rarely are if only because it would be seen as "oh yeah like that other thing". people are fickle and develop dwarflike strange moods when it comes to defining what constitutes original versus hackneyed and derivative. i think its mostly dictated by star signs and the weather.

so lately if you follow me on twitter youve probably noticed im doing sort of a tweet concrete kind of thing where i post plaintext quotes from various media taken out of context. i decided to do this for a while, maybe a few weeks, because aesthetic blogs and the aesthetic style of blogging allow me to pool and channel my energies towards larger and more ambitious styles of writing. i usually get loaded on caffeine during this process and frequently watch large amounts of anime and meditate some. its definitely a process and its geared toward something hazily, vaguely spiritual but with pretentions toward being authentically publishable as theory. the idea also being i would like to make some money to support my livelihood, and i like to write, and am somewhat skilled at it, or at least experienced in kind of a ramshackle homespun sort of way. so if my social media presence is pretty boring and kind of weirdly nostalgic or else contrariwise if you feel it has improved lately thats the reason why that happened.

ive been getting very hazy and foggy mentally lately. i feel like it has to do with caffeination and lack of sleep. its important to get everything flowing properly, and sometimes depression and anxiety make that difficult to do. theres anxiety over unemployment, something im trying to remedy, and theres anxiety over theory and where to proceed next via theory. for years i was a devout buddhist in some ways, and meditated a lot, almost every day. i prayed to the bodhisattvas and copped to buddhist metaphysics, something which, based around personal life experience, i had every reason to believe was true. lately and in my own, strange way, ive begun to question this ideology and interpret it as part of a patchwork of ideologies, each one which attempts to describe a totality, a totality which is rarely if ever described properly by any ideology. grasping at straws in a structural sense, and feeling nonplussed but with no ground to run to, and im back on the boss level in super mario 64 where bowser smashes the ground to make it fall away. attempts at restructuring as this dissolution transpires only serve to create new protocols equal in scope to pre-existing paradigms. and there are plenty of people who dont struggle this much with religion and probably still go to heaven, or think theyre going to heaven, or something. hows marge and the kids. did jerry get that new promotion. mom just got back from vacation in cancun. smalltalk style concerns arising in every day transitionary speech feel distinct and very distant from these kind of hazy, pie in the sky questions. plato never wrote about the kind of stuff you see in a cheers episode. there are philosophy books that try to merge the two, but they usually get shelved in the comedy section.

so its mostly a matter of trying to absorb and contain new information, which abides in abundance, and trying to corral it into sort of a pointing arrow to direct me where to go, in my hewing, a feat not easily done. probably the endgame is in the crafting and solution of art, but what kind of art, and whether i have the tools at my disposal to even create it, is less easily answered. so for now, i guess, im absorbing, waiting, asking questions, and who knows, and who can say.

earliest memories of religion are of the greco roman religion and not knowing about the mystery religious rites but knowing about an abstract concept of wisdom and the ocean and extrapolating the existence of athena and poseidon in that way. later i have memories of exposure to christianity and buddhism and bahai but none of these things feel particularly useful to me at this time in my life. i can more readily receive a picture, a kind of enlarged image, of a broad religious landscape and some of the questions it attempts to provide answers for, or at least, a way of thinking about. the greco roman religion, for instance, is a presentation of a deleuzian multiplicity, and the monotheistic religions are a monad, but i also dont think either of these things can say the other is inherently undesireable. tolerance seems to be the best method, but also, and likewise, not dwelling specifically in any of them. acknowledging they all exist, but not being any of them. enjoying in surfeit the tension between multiplicity and monad. that there can be many things and one thing. like the album cover of dark side of the moon.

[normal-thoughts-official]

FUCK THE THING W/ RAPHAEL HOLDING MAGNUS DOWN HURTS ME like im not about to villainize him but just imagining the physicality of that of him being physically held back if that makes sense? and specifically if i remember correctly his hands being held tight with vampire strength so he can't just blast them away, and all by someone he TRUSTS? OOF. i feel like there's room for Camille angst here too (not to compare Raph to her at ALL but like, potentially an accidental trigger) and im just sad, basically. (Full disclosure tho I remember literally no context for that scene i just remember making a mental note of potential Magnus angst and then my brain shook the metaphorical etch a sketch, so idk why raphael did that but I doubt it was his fault bc I love him and he is Good. Especially if his goal was killing Clary, which is valid. Maiaphael team up to kill Clace when?)

lmao ur so valid. i probably forget a few details but the gist of that scene is that valentine was trying to use the soul sword to begin his big genocide, and he needed someone with pure angel blood (which at the time they knew clary was) to activate it. and then clary just strolled into the institute like nobody's business so rapha (and maia and others) tried to kill her, cuz if she's dead then the soul sword can't be activated and millions of lives are saved. easy peasy

but they had their dumbass plan where jace would disguise as clary to infiltrate the institute, which let me tell you, makes no fucking sense. like they knew that if jace touched the sword itd be destroyed and hed die but their plan wasnt that. so they basically sent in someone who could not steal the sword away or do anything that involved touching it, instead of like? someone else? who could steal it and perhaps use it to kill valentine instead? they could have glamoured anyone they wanted to go in there but why have logic i fucking guess

anyway so magnus was escorting "clary" and rapha jumped in and one of the vampires held back magnus' hands so he couldn't use magic to protect her, and then the plan was for rapha to kill her and done. but then they told the vampires about their stupid dumbass nonsense plan and rapha for some reason was like "wow okay yeah this sounds brilliant" and agreed to let them proceed basically (i think rapha had his doubts if im not mistaken but still decided that it was a better shot than having to murder someone y'know. plus i mean killing jace-disguised-as-clary wouldn't serve any purpose. but either way they agreed to jump in after they had succeeded with the distraction, so)

so yeah anyway that's why rapha held back magnus, and like he was right lmao like ok turned out that they had a plan but rapha didn't know and if i were rapha i would have done the same thing if i just saw clary waltzing into the institute in that situation lol. in short rapha did nothing wrong, but ur right, that is good angst potential. for both of them too because i know that rapha wasn't thrilled about killing someone and even less thrilled about having to go against magnus to do it. and i think a part of him also felt betrayed that magnus was just enabling clary to go into the institute cuz like what the fuck??? but of course magnus wouldn't lol

and then yeah being held back by a vampire and feeling helpless and having someone he trusts be responsible for it even if of course magnus understands where he's coming from is... oof. lots of triggers and bad memories there. and just generally it's an awful situation for them both and idk how to elaborate further but i bet it was just pretty traumatic for them both even if it was short lived and nothing drastic happened. and id have liked to see them talking about it and perhaps comforting each other and apologizing even if it was neither of them's fault, but alas