#each thing diametrically opposed to itself

[infinitesofnought]

You transfathom colorpush, numbertoss, misconception, many say: it's you, we disknow it, many negate themselves on you, you who affirm them one by one for yourself, insurrectionary like the stonecourage, given as present to the handsaid, who raised himself to the world at the seam of the turned silence and of all danger.

– Paul Celan, "[You transfathom]", trans. Pierre Joris

[infinitesofnought]

Didn't it become clear with special relativity that due to mass-energy equivalence, it is mass-energy as a whole that is conserved, rather than either one separately...? I certainly don't know what that means about the tendencies of the universe to favor one or the other over time, though.

The weak force violating parity means that neutrinos know right from left, that the universe itself somehow knows right from left...

...at the universe's birth, there was just one true force: the Superforce. And this Superforce was perfect and symmetrical. The Bible begins in Genesis with the line, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". The Bible begins with godly perfection that was ultimately corrupted. Modern cosmology begins in a very similar fashion. In the beginning, the universe was perfect and symmetrical. There existed the One True Superforce, and it reigned over all. But this ultrahot universe expanded and cooled, and fractures appeared in the perfect symmetry of the cosmos. Out of perfection, imperfections began to appear. The individual forces separated: first gravity, then the strong force. As the universe continued to cool, the weak force separated from electromagnetism... ...this reheating should have equally produced matter and antimatter. One of the starkest asymmetries in the universe today is the odd preponderance of matter over antimatter. [...] Whilst we know and have seen that the laws of physics can differentiate between matter and antimatter, the degree of difference is simply too small to account for the difference in matter over antimatter. [...] the universe must have been almost symmetrical: for every billion antimatter particles, there must have been a billion and one matter particles. And it is this tiny difference that is the source of all the universe's mass today.

How do we know that mass is not conserved?

I wonder if it’s actually true that energy is conserved but mass isn’t, or if it’s just that when energy is released it slightly alters the mass of everything in the universe? Is the universe losing mass? Even if it were, would we be able to measure if our instruments were also gaining mass? If we measured for a long enough time would we just see that the loss was only temporary and at some point the universe begins gaining mass?

How do we know that mass is not conserved? When energy is released, is it not always released *into* or *as* changes in both the mass of the particles/objects it causes to move as well as changes to the movement? Could it be that it is mass-space/energy-time that is conserved and not just energy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJGaqe5t14g

[txttletale]

Hi! I have a question to ask you, someone who seems well versed in Marxism and its philosophy, over something that personally confuses me: is there a meaningful difference between materialism and objectivity? The way I've seen the former explained usually just makes me go "Oh, so it's really just about being objective", so I don't really understand why we need another term for it.

i actually think that there is -- at least in the marxist sense of materialism -- a huge gap between being 'materialist' and being 'objective'. a big part of the historical materialist rejection of idealism is the rejection of the idea of timeless, objective truth independent of its observer and context: as engels puts it in socialism: utopian & scientific:

As each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another.

the marxist perspective is inherently suspicious of objectivity, because the marxist analysis of society is cognizant of class struggle. because the goals of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (or the king and the peasant, or the slaveholder and the slave) are diametrically opposed, there is very little that can be said to be 'universal', because the system of values that benefits one class is to the detriment of the other. marx summarizes this thusly in the german ideology:

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.

so the basic premise of historical materialism is that ideas (i.e. 'truths') arise from the material conditions in which they are developed. there is no such thing as an objective perspective because every perspective is situated historically in a particular time and place and set of social relations. claims to 'objectivity', then, are at best suspect, staking a claim to universality that erases class divisions and historical context.

marxism is not an 'objective' framework--it is proletarian, built from the standpoint of the working class and imperialised peoples around the world, and built upon and adapted for dozens of different historical circumstances by different leaders and thinkers. materialism is in opposition to the notion of objectivity, then, because materialism recognizes that all ideas (even one's own conception of materialism!) are ideas that stem out of dialectical interplay between not only previous ideas but the material and social conditions of the people who have those ideas. ideas and thoughts cannot be 'objective', under the materialist view, because to separate them from the context in which they arose is to distort and falsify them in the pursuit of universality.

[dballzposting]

KEEPING IT REAL WITH JIREN & TOPPO

First of all I love that the final antagonist of the arch was somebody who fights for nobody but himself, but not because he has a wonderfully large ego like Freeza, but rather because he purposefully chooses to and has crafted a philosophy that calls for this. He, unfortunately, believes this with his full capabilities of conviction. He has sacrificed so much in this belief.

So many times Goku and the others credit their strength to the way that they fight for others. Then here comes a guy who is unfathomably strong, and he has gotten here by fighting for nobody but himself.

But in the end he can't win, and it is the teamwork of the most UNLIKELY DUO that brings him down. And as these two diametrically opposed warriors both sacrifice their time in the ring in order to bring Jiren down with them, Jiren realizes that the "secret" to the Seventh Universe's strength is "the power of trust."

Which again. I am kind of sitting here in awe about. Goku and Freeza. Took a chance on each other because they had to. Goku and Freeza. FREEZA. He didn't want to do it. He did not want it to end this way. But he did it. With a heated fervor he did it. With a tactician's clarity he ended this all the while incorporating Goku's strength into his strategy. And they entrusted all to Android 17 as the last man standing.

And then it turns out that the Grand Zenos had a greater meaning behind this whole tournament, and that if the winner's wish had been a selfish one, they would have just wiped out all of reality as being not worth it! But if it was the "right" wish, a selfless one, then all the universes would be restored by the wish itself. They were sure that if the winning mortal wasn't already virtuous, then the challenge would have made them so.

Which. By the way. In all the philosophy our human minds have mustered. There are several distinct and overlapping theories as to what morality and ethics COULD EVEN BE. But on Dragon Ball Super, the supreme rulers of the multiverse have spoken: indubitably, morality is Helping Out Your Fellow Mortal even at the expense of yourself. WOW! Glad that the endless discussion has been concluded!!!

Morality is about MERCY and TRUST and ALTRUISM. It is Strength and Love and Passion.

WHAT A LOVELY AND COMPELLING STORY !!!!

Anyway back to Jiren.

He got really relatable and believable at the end there. Oh My Lord. He had felt the intolerable pain of loss in his time, and it at first encouraged him to respond to the villain who had wrought it. After his second great loss, he then could not deny what was glaring him in the face: that "might makes right." That's why he lost the first time, and that's why he had lost the second; it was because he wasn't strong enough, because HE wasn't strong enough, he could not rely on something as fallible as teamwork and virtue in order to win. All those things are corruptible, beliefs can change - but the hard, tangible reality before him is that when two opposing forces meet, THE MIGHTIER ONE WILL WIN.

And that was how he made sense of his world. Any organism is tasked with making sense of its world, and that perspective needs to meet the needs of the organism. Us humans, as instinct, incorporate emotional, social, logical, practical, and spiritual nuances when we are tasked with "making sense." It has to make sense TO US, therefore use all that we have to offer.

I appreciate Jiren as a character who so succinctly conveys our own nature to us. At moments of survival, one of the many vital tasks of the nervous system is to figure out the WHAT. Past the moment of impact, we continue to "make sense" of what it was retroactively, as its effect on us permeates. This is how we learn for next time. When Jiren first experienced that loss in his youth, he at first found his purpose in virtue, and that he was justified in righting this wrong both morally and by his own internal feelings of rage. After he lost again, he made a new sense by wiping away what now seemed like distractions so that he could see the overwhelming villain for what it was: SHEER POWER, nothing else. His comrades disassembled, his new family was destroyed. They could be conquered and their behavior altered. They could be killed. The only intransient thing that Jiren had seen was the absolute rule of cause and effect, of win and lose, of kill or be killed. Might makes right because might decides what happens at all, it IS morality by virtue of being the last man standing, it is reliable.

So in a perfectly predictable twist of fate, Jiren commits himself in totality to the rules that had destroyed him. But this time, he would yield the reins and use that law for his own favor. He has been convinced of the irreproachable legitimacy of Might, and he would have it for himself.

Because here's the thing. And this is what I'm REALLY interested in. This is what it all comes down to, everywhere you look, and what I'm so delighted to see expressed in his character.

WHAT was he fighting for? Rather, WHY was he still fighting? Not for hope, not for goodness, not for others. For himself, okay, but why does he NEED this?

He's not fighting FOR something, but AWAY from something else - he is compelled to keep improving in order to avoid EVER FEELING THAT LOSS AGAIN, by his own admission and by the other characters' astute wording.

But it's not just the pain of loss. What he is so utterly compelled to FIGHT AGAINST, what he cannot TOLERATE, is the feeling of HELPLESSNESS.

I felt that feeling a lot in this arch. I felt it from the Destroyers and Kais sitting on the bench, knowing that their lives were on the line but that all they could do was sit and stifle it, while their angels sat blithely behind them. Are even gods just pawns in this grand cosmos?

Okay let's get real. The human reflex (and ability at all) to Avoid Feelings is what grants us our traumatizability. Something about our relatively huge frontal cortex allows us to suppress sensations, reactions, feelings, and other interoceptive experiences that would normally be restorative. The reason that animals don't get traumatized seems to be because they experience in totality their own activation, the freeze states if engaged, and then the release of the energy that had been mobilized in their system for survival.

I am not bullshitting you. Read Dr Peter A Levine

One of the biggest obstacles in trauma healing for humans is our reflex to AVOID HELPLESSNESS and therefore to AVOID embodying our own freeze responses. It's a complex and bizarre thing, but our own health and survival is interwoven through all of our neurological layers, and so deficits or damage presenting to our "higher" layers of mammalian perception very much can generate a response that we'd think more typical of the "lower" layers. The pyramid base of our most primitive coding supports all of us. The essence of the freeze/collapse seen in an overpowered reptile can be seen in a human infant overwhelmed by a lack of warmth and loving care. To a social mammal, not feeling that connection is devastating and means death. And a baby cannot fight or flee. Do you see where I'm going with this?

I AM NOT BULLSHITTING YOU!!!!! Read this book & his other books & other books by people like Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate ETC

(Image ID: Super Interesting book called "In An Unspoken Voice" by Peter A Levine)

The key to resolving trauma is to be able to move through, or rather embody and gradually release, the visceral reality that did not get processed at the time of impact. The basic fundamental rules of instinct can still be found when we talk about more "abstracted" forms of trauma like developmental and emotional. But understand that one person is one structure of unity, necessarily so because how could we have evolved otherwise - and mind IS body and body IS mind, and invoking response in one entails a response in the other. Mind and body are not distinct entities in anything but prevailing societal philosophies.

Soooooo. Anywayyyyyy. Bear with me here. A lot of human trauma comes when a freeze state is entered and never properly exited. Those states are meant to be self-terminating, but through the power of the human brain, we can avoid letting things flow naturally. And again, in the complex evolutionary nuances of us primates, this doesn't have to be a hard collapse. The same instinctual wiring can be founds in things like a partial collapse of some systems (voice not working, anyone?), all the way over to just a general dull & dead disassociation. When sympathetic arousal of the nervous system pays out no dividends, the last resort is to full-reverse into parasympathetic shutdown. But when that happens, the "survival energy" (as is frequently termed in the book I mentioned above PLEASE READ IT) does not just go away. It was still mobilized, the muscles are primed, the nerve cells are primed, all systems are go, but it all just STOPS for a bit. To give the tiger time to give up on you. And then, when it's time, freeze will terminate, and all that energy is still there for you to either launch a rageful counter-attack or to engage in a quick flight - whatever seems to give you the higher chance of survival.

As the energy is held in reserves, so is the full state that you entered freeze with. All of the visceral sensations of rage, fear, and helplessness.

That is why humans avoid exiting a freeze. BECAUSE THAT STUFF IS REALLY HARD TO TOLERATE. The experience drove you to overwhelm for a reason. And if your nervous system did not develop in an environment of love and warmth and support, then it'll be less tolerant of difficult sensations, and you'll be more prone to disassociation and distraction. Many of us just go into shutdown kind of immediately without ever knowing it because we're detached from ourselves, we just know that we don't and can't do things but we don't feel "anxious" like what everyone else is talking about so what gives? (<- Me. But I have a lot more interoceptive awareness now so I can track it and so now I'm awesomne. I mean I'm still immensely fucked up. But there is now hope.)

Again it's all a very complex subject that fascinates me to no end & that I cant fuking explain becasue what do i know. Please Read Books <3 Please look up "somatic experiencing" or maybe just read the books. I have given that book above as a gift to several different people and I am going to keep doing it

So basically coming into contact with your own frozen-over intensely vulnerable states in order to move through them (resolve, release, renegotiate, etc), is a challenge. Human beings are fiercely social and our nervous systems are wired to respond to each others'; we cannot live alone, and we certainly cannot heal alone.

SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JIREN FROM DRAGON BALL SUPER ????

I'LL TELL YOU. He is literally just running hardcore from that feeling of helplessness. He is resolved to Never Feel It Again.

And the person he represents you see all of the time in real life. There are one million ways to avoid resolving what needs to be resolved, overexertion is definitely one of them. There are definitely gym rats who exhaust their muscles in order to avoid feeling their twitching unrest, to avoid feeling small and weak. Think about the sort of mindset that a lot of people have when it comes to working out. It seems to be about punishment and discipline. Of course the people who have it right understand that it's about vitality, enjoyment, and patience - but think about how hard it is to convince someone more toxic-minded of that. Harboring that trapped survival energy will reduce the complexity of your thoughts and your comfort in having them; you get caught in black-and-white dichotomies, you get stuck in "kill or be killed," you get stuck in obsessive compulsions, you can't comprehend letting things flow and you can't be okay with it, your social systems shut down and you cannot feel the support of others, you don't feel in control, and everything at its roots seems to be about your own fear; so you overcompensate.

Jiren has made sense of his world. It is a vital thing to do. And he has decided what he has to do to overcome his enemy. But the reason that he continues to FEEL the enemy when it is no longer present is because he has not healed. His enemy is the horrible helplessness he had felt. It haunts him. It stays with him. He tries to conquer it. But it follows him. It threatens to one day consume him. And he finds the enemy in external circumstance (as we are biologically geared to do, at our lowest levels, to orient toward and to locate the possible threat, toward what has elevated us so), but the real enemy is within. It's because his pain has not been resolved. It is because he has not learned how to befriend his bodily states and to move through them.

And this is KEY here - It is because he has REJECTED FRIENDSHIP, the necessary visceral feeling of safety and love, which would serve as both his safe spot and his empowering resource as he ventures into his most difficult feelings. You need good experiences to counteract the bad in order to unwind those knots.

We see this sort of stuff all of the time in every single one of us. Jiren was a sensitive little boy with no reason not to be, who (like the best of us) felt every ounce of his world with wonder - and then he had it all ripped out of him by the most horrible circumstances ever. And with the threat still looming, he couldn't ever rest. That sort of chronic stress will twist you all up. And then when his world flipped over again, it must have been a huge relief to just embrace a simple, BELIEVABLE philosophy, and to just dedicate all of his anger and fear toward one task.

I'm just impressed to see it portrayed so plainly on Jiren. It's all of us. It's not hard to see, but there are many ways to see it. It takes a certain sensitivity and skill to pluck it out of the world and write it all down. And then especially his short conversation with Top that this post started with screenshots of. If he suffered such an intense loss so young, and then again years down the line, of course he can't make any connections. He's not just out of practice, but susceptible to opening the door to that pain again.

I really liked how this arch was about trust in the end. I noticed throughout it the prevalence of duos (two Zenos, Beerus & Champa, Androids 18 & 17, Piccolo and Gohan teaming up, and especially KALE AND CAULIFLA), but I tend to hone in on duos for my own complex reasons of being so I figured that that was just me. But then in the end when it took the Most Unlikely Duo In Cinematic History to take out and teach Jiren, I was like oh my word ... Poetic cinema.

So that's my post. I LOVE how it was all handled. So succinct as always in order to leave more room for the fighting. Unlike my posts which are long despite my best efforts. Thanks for reading. And read that book!! Chao <3

[grasshopperdoingdogpaddle]

What's one reoccurring motif in your fics that you like using a lot, and why?

There are a lot I can think of, like the economy of "favors" that Chase and Omi hide behind, trust and trust issues, how their martial arts as an extensions of themselves are so similar, repeating cycles, how destiny itself seems to be intent to both always bring them together but still always keep them just a bit too far apart...

But those are all motifs you get from canon itself, Chase and Omi already have a lot of layered theming in the show itself.

But a really fun one that I've used a few times in my fics and that I'd like to use more often is Food! Especially food as a metaphor for love.

It's a neat motif to write, fun to describe, and it's something that I think distills a lot about Omi and Chase's relationship to each other!

Chase is introduced in relation to his trademark food, Lao Mang Lone, and it's an understandably huge part of his character.

The soup was the start of this path for him and is an affirmation of this path. It's the only thing holding him together in some ways. It's apparently become his own personal blend distinct from the one he initially had, both because Chase wants to distinguish and distance himself from Hannibal and because Hannibal's version didn't seem particularly appetizing. He claims to always drink it before victory (which seemed to just be a false boast to provoke the monks, but still).

Omi and Hannibal are narratively Chase's two biggest relationships (at least the ones we see with the most focus and screentime-- his Guan and Dashi is revealed in bits and pieces).

Those two are diametrically opposed in a lot of ways, but one small one is in how Hannibal made Chase Lao Mang Lone to "poison" him, and Omi made Chase pea soup in hopes of "saving" him. A misguided plan from both of them just because of who Chase is at his core, but Hannibal and Omi's plans are flawed for very different reasons.

Chase and Omi are all about these little forms of love, these little shared moments, their pride in their similarities, their shared culture and interests, these subtle gestures to show they're thinking of each other, these hands extended in offering, these unspoken words in between their doublespeak.

And food is a really good medium for all of that!

And there's also the fact that Chase and Omi both seem to enjoy cooking!

And eating, of course.

And with the Chase's spread was arranged and set out this time when he was expecting Omi's company, it gives the impression that he's trying to make Omi feel almost like an invited dinner guest who's free to join him. Compared to the previous episode when he brought Jack over in Dangerous Minds, there's so much more food set out, and Chase is smiling and sitting opposite the entrance he had the tigers guide Omi through. So it feels like cooking for each other is something they already want to do.

The things that the Food as a Love Language motif embodies fit them so well!

Wanting to learn memorize everything about the other person, including things as small as preferences and favorites. Worrying about another person and wanting to make sure they're getting what they need, like nutrients in a proper meal. Wanting to make something from scratch together with another person. Wanting an excuse to spend time together. Wanting to show that they were on your mind. Wanting to share a part of yourself and show off your skill.

[honourablejester]

One of the things that fascinates me, thematically, about wizards in D&D is the consciousness of their interactions with magic. They learn their craft by study, by conscious thought. And they choose their school, too, by conscious thought. When you make a wizard, you choose what elements of magic they choose to prioritise. What draws them, what repels them, what do they rely on, what do they seek out. The choice of school is as much a characterisation detail as anything else. It’s not just a case of learning spells by rote out of a book (well, no, it can be, but that’s probably a discussion in and of itself). Wizards are the class where you can dig in and get nerdy. There’s magical theory up in this joint.

The eight schools in themselves are also an interest mesh of themes and rationalisations, and that makes sense from a Doylist perspectives, because the game designers are choosing schools and effects outside the game, but it also works from a Watsonian perspective, because these are in-universe classifications based on what wizards assume is how magic works. All the spells are tied to a school, and thus the eight-school classification system, even if there are wizards who aren’t. And with any system of classification, there are arguments. Which is, of course, the fun of it.

So. With that in mind. Eight schools. Abjuration. Conjuration. Divination. Enchantment. Evocation. Illusion. Necromancy. Transmutation. Some essay questions slash thought experiments slash personality quizzes for student wizards in a D&D world, focusing on the classification of magic:

If you were choosing (or have chosen) a school of magic to specialise in, what would it be?

What do you think is the overriding purpose of your school of magic?

What element of your school of magic excites you the most?

What is one common derogatory misconception about your school that makes you angry?

What’s one spell of your school that you think should belong to another school? Explain your reasoning.

What’s one spell of a different school that you think should belong to yours? Explain your reasoning.

What would you consider the school of magic most diametrically opposed to your own? Explain your reasoning.

What would you consider the school of magic most similar to your own? Explain your reasoning.

Name one area of overlap or potential overlap between your school of magic and each of the other seven.

Name one area of conflict or potential conflict between your school and each of the other seven.

Which other school of magic would you consider it necessary of have a good understanding of in order to better study your own?

If you were grouping the eight schools into subgroups, what would the groups be, which schools would they include, and why?

Do you consider the purpose of magic to be useful or to be extraordinary? Which schools do you think best match each outlook?

What do you consider the primary ethical concerns with your school of magic? What would you consider the primary ethical concerns with each of the other schools?

Which school of magic do you find most difficult or unpleasant to work with? Why?

Which school of magic do you find easiest and most reassuring to work with? Why?

What is one question about the workings of each school of magic that keeps you up at night?

Do you think that magic should be divided into schools at all? If you think that it should, do you think that the eight schools currently agreed upon are the most accurate choices, or do you believe that they should be rearranged or replaced?

Do you believe that rigid classification aids or hinders the understanding of magic as a whole? Explain your reasoning.

Do you think that a spell should be considered part of a school of magic based on its effect, or based on the methods or rationale that created it, or based on some other criteria?

Is there a school of magic that you considered to be particularly badly defined? Is there a school that you consider particularly well defined? Do you consider this a clarifying factor or a limiting one?

Which school of magic do you most want to disassemble to base parts and understand the workings of? Is this the same school you are happiest using, or a different one?

What is your favourite spell that you have learned of? Is that spell of your own school or a different one?

What is one spell of your least liked school of magic that you consider worthwhile, and why?

What is one spell that you think should never have been invented, and why?

And, finally, just for fun and so everyone knows where we all stand: which school of magic do you find the adherents of most annoying? Not necessarily the school you think shouldn’t exist, but the one where when you meet a wizard of that school, you kneejerk want to punch them in the face, just because?

[is-this-fascism]

I have a few questions.

What was the start of the blog like? (Or, what was the content you posted back when this blog was new?)

And, how are you doing today?

Curiosity, the backbone of a mobile mind. What a gentle expression of interest, subtle and polite. Through pretentious sounding philosophical monologues, I attempted to express a simple idea: everything is yuri.

We can trace this idea back to the Buddhists and their concept of Yin and Yang. Two opposites that depend on each other to exist, that are essentially the same despite being diametrically opposed. Whenever one is present, the other usually is as well. They fluidly become each other right under our noses.

Shyness brought on by a crush. Performance anxiety. Rivalry indicating obsession. Tension and catharsis. The cycle of life.

I read about this concept distilled into a brilliant love story between two girls. The author of said story (Iori Miyazawa) happened to give an interview in which he said some very abstract things about the nature of love and how he conducts his storytelling, and it became a meme. But an underlying message of his work resonated with me.

Everything is yuri, because everything is love, sometimes openly and sometimes parading itself as its own opposite. Every birth and death of a star, every coming together and bouncing off between atoms, every awkward greeting and tearful goodbye, it's all the same thing. You can tell this story an infinite number of ways, because it's the story of existence. A romance story between two girls is a wonderful way to do it.

Conclusion: I started this blog partially as a joke to capitalize on a meme, but also to subtly shine a light on my understanding of human nature and inject a message of oneness and connection similar to the idea of nondualism.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

apologies to all of my followers but i'm gonna continue being insane abt ff14. no end in sight. hope everyone bothered by that has blocked the tag by now

anyway anytime i say literally anything abt zenos' narrative position i feel the need to preface it with a VERY large "ymmv dependent on your wol" disclaimer bc even if it's got nothing to do with shana and is entirely canon based i know the degree of like. reciprocity there. varies wildly. anyway pretend i said that better the important thing is i'm yes-anding his bit. anyway

ANYWAY i think zenos and ardbert are really great narrative parallels.

like, to both of them, the wol is their only friend and equal. both of them share or believe they share a kind of experience and mentality with you that basically nobody else could understand. both of them show up after all of your other friends/allies have been completely stomped by an expansion's final boss, while you're the last one dragging yourself forward, to be the one who helps you to victory. they both, in some sense, give their life to you (ardbert gives his remaining aether to put your soul back together, zenos cuts his head off rather than live outside your fight and then rides to the end of reality for you later if you don't want to count that one). they both get their dead body possessed by elidibus, which is more of a "two nickels" thing than a total parallel but i think it's fun so i'm putting it here anyway. they both serve as both enemies and allies at different points in the story without changing their core mission statement much at all.

they are also diametric opposites. obviously.

i think to a degree they are expressions/mirrors of two semi-opposing sides of the wol. The Hero and The Hunter. ardbert is the other half of your soul, the warrior of light, and by his own admission his favorite part of the job was never the battle itself, it was the calm that came afterwards. the warmth and security of knowing they'd helped and protected people. he lives and dies by those bonds - he's got a whole party behind him, and they all choose to give their lives twice over to try and give norvrandt a tomorrow. his stand with you is him remembering that fact, reaffirming his desire to help them despite the struggles. he cares deeply abt the world, abt giving them hope. your fight against hades is a manifestation of that determination. you'll drag each other up no matter how much it hurts because goddammit this world is yours and you are not going to stand by and let it die.

zenos by contrast is nothing so lofty. he does not give a flying fuck about people's hopes, or pain, or any of their emotions, or the general concept of tomorrow. he is the part of the wol that is the hunter, the person they become in the heat of battle that scares the shit out of their enemies. the one who finds joy in their work not bc they know it's bringing hope and light to the world but purely bc of the thrill of it. you are an adventurer—you wouldn't do what you do if you didn't find some pleasure in it. his bond with you is completely inextricable from your capacity for violence. he throws off the endsinger's despair not bc he gives you hope but bc hope and despair are foreign objects to him. he reminds you that your friends, the star, the hopes and dreams of reality are all outside the room, and inside it is just you, and your enemy, and you are nothing before you are death to your enemies. so why the fuck is it not dead yet.

like, you could make the case that it's the Best and the Worst, but i think that's only circumstantially true bc again: the wol couldn't be the wol, couldn't keep fighting and winning the way they do, if that part of them wasn't there. but i DO think it is a very present duality, that they reflect matching and opposite parts of you—the part that fights for love of the world, and the part that does it for love of the game.

[best-at-episode]

Round 2 - Side A: Poll 4 of 4

Sky Witch:

Marceline is on a top-secret mission tracking Maja the Sky Witch. But when she loses the witch’s trail, Marceline turns to Princess Bubblegum for help.

Thank You:

The Snow Golem visits the border between the Fire Kingdom and the Ice Kingdom and discovers a lost fire wolf that needed the golem’s help to get home.

propaganda under the cut

Sky Witch:

of all the bubbline classics (tm) of the show, this episode is one of the best in the series, in showcasing the bittersweet, tenuous relationship these two are starting to forge in the aftermath of what was missing. there is still so much to unpack, in regards of both how they view themselves and each other. however. marceline will still ask bonnie for help. and bonnie will still help marceline regardless, because how could she not? despite everything, they will come back for each other (as varmints will tell us), even if they both are not completely over the hurt they caused each other, hanging bitter throughout the episode, making them lash out. yet, bonnie will give away the shirt marceline literally threw at her at a random concert, before even knowing each other, that she kept for years and treasured so much to wear daily and nightly, just because of how much hambo meant to marceline, just to make her happy; because, how could she not? like.....c'mon. the fact that the shirt itself is hundreds of times more powerful than hambo, like c'mon. vote just for the sheer yuri insanity.

What Was Missing may have invented bubbline, but I wanted to make sure Sky Witch got nominated because this is the moment where it really clicked for me. It felt validating, like the subtext people got from WWM wasn’t just fans looking too hard into things. Something shifted in my brain after this that turned me from an Enjoyer of the show to a super-fan.

Thank You:

I didn’t get this one as a teen, but it’s grown on me a lot. The theme of “even forces that seem diametrically opposed don’t have to be at odds, everyone deserves a little kindness” plus the quiet mood of the episode make it feel very special to me now.

[fragilcline]

star sign: cancer mythological creature: phoenix folktale: lungmo fairytale character (classical or modern): thumbelina (hans christian andersen, 1835)

"Thumbelina escapes the toad and her son, and drifts on a lily pad until captured by a stag beetle who later discards her when his friends reject her company. [...] The mouse suggests Thumbelina marry her neighbor, a mole, but Thumbelina finds repulsive the prospect of being married to such a creature because he spent all his days underground and never saw the sun or sky. The field mouse keeps pushing Thumbelina into the marriage, saying the mole is a good match for her, and does not listen to her protests. At the last minute, Thumbelina escapes the situation by fleeing to a far land with a swallow she nursed back to health during the winter." (x)

3 fictional tropes: fate worse than death, bookworm, sensitive artist

Fate Worse than Death - "Think death is the cruelest fate? Think again. There are several things much worse. More often than not, some unfortunate soul will experience it." (x) Bookworm - "A character who just loves to read and collect books. They tend to be smarter, nerdier, and more into school than other characters, but some book enthusiasts are of average intelligence. [...] Expect for them to have few friends because they ignore or avoid others so they can sit down in a secluded area and indulge in reading." (x) Sensitive Artist - "'Sensitive' here typically refers to emotional sensitivity, being empathetic, introspective, or highly intuitive and perceptive to the feelings and thoughts of those around you. Portrayed positively, this lends itself to a kind, gentle, compassionate, and understanding disposition. When people say Artists Are Attractive because they're sensitive, this is usually what they're referring to." (x)

romantic or platonic trope: belligerent sexual tension, the playboy, odd friendship

Belligerent Sexual Tension - "There's a couple, usually a sometimes sweet, sometimes grouchy female paired with a secretly-kind jerk, who are not able to admit their feelings. At the top of their lungs." (x) The Playboy - "The lifelong playboy character finds themselves considering hanging up their player threads to be with someone who does not fall for their charms, or the protagonist sets upon a notorious playboy to improve them." (x) Odd Friendship - "A friendship which develops between two characters that would seem unlikely to be friends, whether it's because of them having diametrically opposed personalities, holding beliefs that would normally get one to try to demonize the other, or some other quirks of their beings that would lead to them clashing." (x)

creepypasta story: borrasca (x) greek god or goddess: pasiphae time of day where they draw the most energy: 9 am their achilles heel: her past coming back to further haunt her medieval weapon of choice: mancatcher survival, starvation, or death by the undead in the apocalypse: starvation which of the seven sins represent them? horseman of the apocalypse?: sloth, famine what their superpower would be: resurgence could they pull excalibur from the stone?: no one aesthetic for each of the five senses (taste, hearing, sight, smell, touch):

black coffee with just a half teaspoon of sugar added in, the scratch of a charcoal pencil against the thick pages of a sketchbook, the beauty of the sunrise when unable to sleep, the aroma of flipping through an old and used book, pulling an oversized sweater over your knuckles and pulling it tighter around yourself

a bad habit that won’t go away: unable to fall asleep and choosing to read late into the night instead a recurring nightmare: too graphic/violent to describe an object they consider their lucky charm: no longer in her possession but it was a necklace with a small 'm' charm that her mother bought her

[its-tea-time-darling]

thomally (i swear i can’t ever remember the ship name for thomas x gally). not a huge fan of it but i wanna know your opinion

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK — thomally is one of my all time favorite tmr ships!!!! 😍

genuinely met some of my closest friends bc of that ship — even crossed the big pond to meet ‘em so yeah it’s always gonna be very near and dear to my heart 🥹♥️

as for the ship itself, i just think it’s spectacular! the same way thomesa is, i think thomally is a perfect „two sides of the same coin“ ship which just intrinsically makes me weak in the knees.

both thomas and gally want to protect and ultimately save the people around them—but how they go about it is diametrically opposed.

they’re opposites in so many ways—thomas breaks rules where gally enforces them brutally, thomas urges people to go while gally wants them to stay. thomas wrecks the things gally built, carefully and with his own hands (while ironically, thomas was the one who built the maze itself).

like if you see it from gally‘s point of view, thomas shows up, and he starts tearing apart everything gally built and stands for. gally cares so so much about his fellow gladers—think of the way his voice breaks when he says „i dont want to cross anymore ways off this wall.“ gally knows they’re situation is fucked up, but he has tried so so hard over the 3 years he’s been at the glade to make it into a place that’s worth living in still.

privately i also think the reason why they go up in flames against each other so quickly is bc they’re both instantly attracted to each other, but they don’t understand what that feeling is they’re feeling. so it comes out as aggression instead of friendliness and affection, because while thomas wants gally to like him, and go along with him, gally opposed him at every step.

and i think for gally it’s the fact that he clocks very quickly that thomas isn’t someone he’s going to be able to protect. and that’s a horrible feeling to gally because protecting people is what he does, but also bc he’s feeling that aforementioned undefinable feeling he hasn’t felt before that he doesn’t know yet is attraction….

perfect thomally songs are:

and

the best place to start reading thomally is the 2015 classic apelsin (i hope you’re of age lol, it’s explicit. if not ill hook you up with another rec np 😎):

or actually, let me provide a sfw gem right away: my beloved secret santa gift from 2021 by my equally beloved @crestfallercanyon „these truths unbound and ripe for burning“

[raevenlywrites]

NaNoWriMo Day 5

It had been a long time since Shadriel had communed with the anima collective. He couldn’t do it directly – his demon essence kept the plane from him as surely as the anima collective’s combined energies kept their plane closed unto itself-- but through the spirits of intellect he’d managed to lure and collect to his cause, information could flow. And anima always followed thought wherever there was an opening, as surely as water flowed downhill through any cracks.

So Shadriel sat, tucked safely behind several circles of warding, a bevy of guards at the doors, and simply thought, letting the pieces of his conundrum flow out into the web of intellect spirits he’d cast into the wide world.

I have a seer, but no path to the Oracles. She has a guardian, strong and dedicated, but no real power to Defend her. I have a man who seeks Death, but leaves only dead bodies in his wake. He had a body that cannot die, at least not by any weakness he’s been able to discover.

Bit by bit, he began to feel eyes upon him. They weren’t proper eyes, of course; one would have to have to have a physical form to have eyes. But the anima collective was all made up of being who had once had eyes, and they remembered their former forms, though they disdained the limitations of flesh. As a being of pure flesh and physicality, Shadriel was surprised he’d been able to get their attention at all. Anima and Demons were diametrically opposed, just as Benevolents and Destinies were. It was only the planar paring of Oracles and Enforcers that worked in tandem rather than at odds. But the two sects of Destinies argued enough amongst themselves to make up for the harmony between the Oracles and Enforcers.

The eyes began to drift, annoyed that Shadriel’s thoughts were full of things well and commonly known. He shifted his focus back to the problem at hand.

The man who seeks Death but cannot die was made that way by the Shining ones. A shiver of outrage went through the collective at the thought of the kin that had cast them out, had bound them to a world of sticks and mud and so changed them. Or rather, inspired them to change themselves to escape it. There was a glimmer of possibility there, in the anima’s attempt to escape the binding curse by escaping physicality all together. It hadn’t worked, but the idea was worth turning over, even though it wasn’t quite fully formed.

Several anima scurried away with it, pleased with this offering and eager to ponder the burgeoning idea from every angle. Shad let it go, attaching an intellect spirit to each one, to be sure the information flowed back to him as they made their discoveries. He pressed on.

A body is an easy thing to change. Agreement, an echo of the opinion that bodies should be cast off all together, but consensus that their nature was highly malleable. Gods, it was dizzying thinking like this. Smugness that his singular mind could not keep up. Shad dismissed it. He liked being his own individual. He continued in his own singular train of thought.

Fate is not an easy thing to change. Annoyance at the interference of the other planars; Destinies and Oracles and Enforcers alike both worked to shape the world to suit their purposes, though with very different methods. Destinies read the threads of Fate woven by Ksm, a cosmic force personified as a weaving woman. One sect worked to support individuals with notable threads, the other worked to ensure the threads of the overall patterns stayed strong and true. They often butted heads with one another, as no one Destiny had all the pieces. Oracles had all the pieces, and set in stone certain immutable facts about the universe. Enforcers went out and made sure those facts remained so. Again, bored anima drifted away from the demon’s stating of the obvious.

But it can be shifted.

All in all, fate magic was a wretched stalemate. The best one could hope for was to hand a fate off to a different individual, dodging the worst for yourself by passing the buck. Such was the nature of luck magic. But if such workings were not done carefully, if balance was not maintained--

Threads snapped, balances shifted, accounts settled, Shining Ones come and must be answered to.

The collective was impatient enough with him to shout in a nearly unified voice. The last time the Shining Ones had had to intervene, the chimera and faeries had been born. Of those faeries, the Mente Court was starting to encroach on Anima territory. They could weave and bend the mind, manipulating thoughts and experiences like light through a prism, paint on a canvas, waves on the shore. The anima did not like these new faeries. They wished them gone.

What has been set by the Shining Ones must be, Shad thought carefully. But what they cannot see they cannot demand an accounting of. With an Oracle of our own, we could learn to work in the dark places of their sight.

A resounding cry of agreement and exultation went up, and several anima flooded along his intellect spirits to ride with them out into the world. He had found a seer with only those weak spirits. With anima bent to the cause, they would find an Oracle. One who wished to see what was not meant to be seen. One who could be tempted by their offer.

Shadriel opened his eyes and took a moment to ground himself in the physical world. He dropped his circles, opened the door to his chambers, and pulled one of the guards off the door and into his bed, where he put every inch of his wonderful body to use, and gloried in the pleasure of having it.

Day 1

[nyxknocks]

If there are two things I love its monsters and nuclear radiation/fallout. Godzilla is and always has been a perfect marriage of these two hyperfixations of mine. I've seen this Godzilla a handful of times over the years and I love it every single time I watch it. (And, fun fact, strontium-90 was one of the isotopes released during Chernobyl though it's not the one that's mostly to blame for the tragedy that happened).

There are so many goofy things that happen in this movie that seem like plot holes but are actually what I feel like what people would really do in a situation like this. For example, they hypothesize that Godzilla was woken up because of the hydrogen bombs and their answer to fighting Godzilla off is... bombing them. You think a depth charge would do more damage than hydrogen bombs? Like, the whole thing is that Godzilla got stronger/empowered by the radiation. Goofy. Another small contradiction is at the beginning when the toothless elder explained that their oral history specified that Godzilla would come on land only if they ate all the available fish, but the villagers would offer a human sacrifice to get a better yield for fishing. It just shows the psyche of humans in an excellent but subtle way, I feel, that really makes the film not entirely fantastical. The humans act human and do dumb human things when faced with something so fantastical. (Also, I love the idea of these oral histories that are so common in human society [coming from a classics major] being used for a badass old mutated dinosaur. It's so close to magical realism I eat that shit up!!!)

Obviously this movie is a critique on what radiation does to society and the monsters the bombs were both specifically to Japanese society as well as civilization as a whole. It warps and mutates things that could, theoretically, be peaceful into abhorrent destructive monsters. Nuclear bombs, hydrogen bombs, etc. all of it are these massive giants that humans created in order to terrorize other humans, because there really is no other reason to create a bomb with these particular isotopes and elements, what have you, besides absolute destruction. You could argue that Godzilla themself is a physical manifestation of the United Status--a giant, irradiated monster that attacked Japanese society--and I think plenty of people have made that comparison. It's an easy one to make and its not something I disagree with necessarily.

Another way you could look at it along the similar vein of what I said above is that Godzilla represents the "what if" that Japanese society likely had during the war. What if the U.S targeted Tokyo instead of Nagasaki or Hiroshima? The other "what if" aspects that I think are very to-the-point in this is the conversations between the two diametrically opposed sides on how to deal with Godzilla.

You have the side that wants to just straight up kill them, which I think lends itself to the Japanese war-mindset that was victory above all else. It's not a strictly Japanese mindset either, because humans really do love killing each other just for funsies or for money. It's also a hypermasculine ideal (in my opinion) that the one with more weapons/is stronger will prevail. They show off their technology and firepower and it's all raaah I'm a tough guy. (This is further argued for when you think about how... someone, I forget who, said that Japan didn't win the war because they were technologically behind. You could argue that making this film is a way for them to get some of that face back like "look, see, we have technology and know how to use it too!" but this isn't something I fully argue for. I can just see how one could).

The other side is fighting for the scientific research aspect. It's specifically stated that it would be good to study Godzilla to see why they are so protected against radiation, which I imagine during the time of the war and afterwards is something the Japanese specifically would want to know the answers to considering they were BOMBED. Radiation was a fairly "recent" discovery too that was a whole ass wild card no one fully understood but played with anyway. Learning from Godzilla how they were able to be protected from radiation would do incredible from the humanist standpoint of protecting the population from greedy overpowered war machines as well as going the marvel route and making some badass superhumans. I could go on about how I feel about both of these view points and I think its a fascinating discussion that we're still having even though this movie is nearly what, 70 years old? Godzilla fucks so hard.

Technical Shit:

Obsessed with the first bit we see of "Godzilla" is the blinding white light of the people on the boat. Obviously, duh, that's the light from the bombs (I believe the term is Cherenkov radiation? The light that the bombs give off. But I'm not 100% sure). The sound design fucks SO hard. Even after multiple viewings of this movie and all the ones that have come after, the original screech of Godzilla is so chilling and powerful. There's a weird jumpcut around 52 min mark with Emiko that was jarring. I did not like that but also its an old movie so I have to give it grace. Similarly the audio throughout is often blown out which is another product of its time, but owie my ears. Again, I love practical effects SO much. They add so much more to a movie in my opinion and Godzilla as mildly silly as they look in this movie still cuts an imposing figure. The sheer destruction throughout. UGH! Chefs kiss. 15/10.

edit: didn't realize but realizing now the parallel between Oppenheimer and Serizawa. do with that what you will.

[musicforspaandearthquake]

intro/framing 1

In the fall of 2019, a few months before the world would be remade by the coronavirus pandemic, I posted a song on youtube.

The song, "Limerance" by Yves Tumor, is made up of a short, ethereal loop that repeats with little variation for 4 minutes. For such a short phrase, the loop packs a surprisingly evocative punch. There is something both tranquilizing as well as something sad, longing, mourning, or hopeful at its center, glowing like a dying ember. But just as one is settling into the mood, a voice interrupts the reverie, talking over it, and yanking the listener out of the dream.

It's likely that this is a conscious, intentional maneuver by the artist, possibly wanting to reflexively call attention to the very spell he has so successfully cast. It's also possible there are deeper or more obscure meanings to the overlaying of the sedative instrumental with the voicings. But whatever the reasons, the spoken word portion is at a seeming cross-purposes to the lull pulling the listener in underneath it.

In October of 2019, a friend emailed me asking if I might make a version of the song in which the spoken word portion of the song is edited out, and send him the result. What he wanted was the calming, evocative instrumental without the "annoying" voices which interrupt it. He wanted the song as a work aid, sleep aid, focus aid, and simply because he thought the song beautiful. Within the hour, I'd filled his work order like a carpenter, posted the result on youtube, and sent him the result, and forgotten about it.

Hosted on the youtube server, however, the song went on to have a life of its own. Within months of its being posted, the world shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and the song started to garner first thousands, and then millions of views. In addition to these views, the song also garnered hundreds, and then thousands of comments. In the first months of the quarantine, a regular feature of my digital routine was to click open the email which was automatically generated whenever someone posted a comment on the video. The comments began as a trickle in the first few weeks of quarantine, and then, at some point in April of 2020, the video tripped some trip wire in the algorithm and the number of comments and views skyrockted. My email was suddenly deluded with messages from strangers all over the world, each sending out a message in the bottle. Many of the messages were a form of fanfiction, proposing images, places, or situations the song reminded them of. Users would trade places, real and imagined, the song evoked for them, and encourage and applaud one another for especially creative entries. Another tier of comments involved a discussion as to whether the song was a essentially a "happy" song or essentially a "depressing" or "sad" song. Users seemed essentially split, and the conversation endlessly renewed itself every time someone came to the video and claimed whether the video sounded basically happy or basically sad to them. This reminded me much of the 'laurel' or 'yanny' phenomenom, or the blue dress/orange dress phenomenon, a kind of aural illusion in which two swaths of people heard diametrically opposed things.

George x syracuse new yorker post about capturing your surroundings and remembering what it was like.

A third layer of responses were those who came to the video simply to record diary-like entries in which they detailed their emotional state, the status of their romantic lives, or shared episodes from some dimension of their emotional worlds, whether that involve conflicts with their parents, friends, teachers, crushes, partners, or whatnot. Often these diary-entries would be heartfelt reflections on what was lost in the pandemic.

Stemming from this layer of response was a troubling vein of comment: the cry for help. Not infrequently, users would post comments ranging from the cryptic to the overtly suicidal, and long threads developed about the philosophical problem of whether life ever got better or not, with factions weighing in on both sides. Such comments were so common, that the comments section of the video sometimes seemed like an ad-hoc self-help forum for the suicidal, the digital equivalent of a refuge center erected in a sport stadium during a weather emergency.

Such a range of comments wasn't necessarily unique to the video I posted. Any youtube comments section can often inspire a culture unto itself, with its set of rules, in-jokes, and references. Nor was it necessary for me to have hosted the video for me to have taken note of the kinds of comments proliferating within it. Yet there was something decidedly personal feeling about the entire experience. For one, I was the one who had gone through the trouble to edit Yves Tumor's song and post it to youtube. If I had never done this, the entire forum, the entire galaxy of comments would never have existed in the first place. Though I was invisible to the entire proceeding, I was nevertheless still the host of it, and like a greek god, I presided over the user's comments from a distance, regarding without ever intervening.

And on another level, I was interested because i was sympathetic. When I had been a teenager, i too had turned to ambient music as a source of consolation for ennui and depression. It seemed like a joke both cosmic and private that I had actually been at an existential low when I had posted the Yves Tumor song on youtube. My own history with depression, and my own history of turning to music--in particular ambient music--during my worst bouts of it gave me the feeling that I was somehow especially made to order for the role of putting this particular version of this particular song into the universe, almost as though I had been selected. By posting this ambient song, and its becoming a beacon for other depressed people, I somehow felt I was counteracting the scales of the total amount of depression in both my own life and the world in general.

But as the pandemic and quarantine pressed on, and the depressed comments continued to flood in from the world over, I started to wonder whether something less healthful was afoot. Was the video simply serving as a landing and place, healing, for the already depressed and isolated, or was it somehow contributing the very woes I hoped it was a balm for?

One source of my skepticism and paranoia was the sheer resiliance of the virality of the video itself. In a former life, I had the opportunity to serve as a tour manager for band with a national--even international--audience, and with a handful of songs that once enjoyed heavy rotation on national radio and MTV, and live on in karaoke bars today. In this guise, I was put up to posting on the band's social media feeds several times a day, and was floored by the experience of helming a social media account which was capable of commanding thousands of likes and comments in a matter of minutes. The experience also gave a taste of the fickleness of virality and the truism that nothing lasts. During the run up to the 2016 presidential elections, the lead singer of the band made a political comment during a show that made the national news cycle for precisely one day. The morning after the concert, we did interviews with several national news outlets, wrote an op-ed for Time Magazine, and went live for a night-time segment on CNN. 48 hours later, it was almost as though none of it had ever happened, so swiftly had the news moved on and forgotten all about our viral political moment.

In none of my time as a tour manager for the band did we post anything to our social media feeds which came remotely close to the enduring virality of the ambient song i posted on a random tuesday afternoon several years later--despite the fact that, as a band, we hired professional content creators and viral experts to help our content grow exponentially, while, by myself I had posted the ambient song with no expectation that anyone else would discover except for the single friend who had requested it.

Over time, the song's long-lasting virality and the sensationalist, vaguely suicidal comments in the comments section became uncomfortably linked in my mind, although in a way that I couldn't point to. As Kyle Chayka outlines in Filterworld: platforms such as youtube are famously opaque regarding what precisely determines whether a post succeeds or fails. And so I could never have any grounds for my suspicions, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that, rather than providing a beacon of comfort in the digital sphere, a kind of virtual or cyber healing place in the jungle of capitalism and social media feeds, instead what was actually happening was that the Yves Tumor song was like a piece of bait, which attracted depressed teens like moths to a flame, which the platform then preyed on for views, likes, and engagement, which it in turn sold for advertising revenue. Rather than providing a helpful product to vulnerable, isolated people in need, I was afraid I was instead selling the vulnerable and isolated as the product to a manipulative corporation which would have no qualms exacerbating their condition for more engagement. The question of who was profiting came to the fore, and the answer was clear: Youtube was profiting, even as its users were openly expressing in its margins their pain, difficulty, and sorrow. More than that, Youtube was profiting from its users pain and depression, seemingly boosting a video which contained such raw and explicit expressions of pain.

[book about the youtube comments of the harumoi hosono ambient song]

Under usual circumstances, as a "content creator," it would be in my best interest to be proud and slightly awed by the miraculous gift that a post with millions of views (almost 3 million as of this writing) represents. In the threeway transaction between the Youtube users, myself, and Youtube, I serve a function similar to a broker. I brought the users to the big boss lurking in the shadows, Youtube, and the big boss duly rewarded me for my efforts with millions of views to my credit on my channel. Such a prize is not to be underestimated. Regular traffic to a particular channel, whatever the source, can be hard to generate and ensure over a long period of time. At a house party recently in LA, a well-connected musician friend of mine showed me his youtube account where he's been posting a song at a rate of one per week. "4 views!" he exclaimed looking at his most recent post, red-cheeked from wine, in a mixture of sarcasm and something close to actual pride.

A few things, however, check my pride and excitement over the gift that a million-view video represents. First of all, the song is not my own, but someone else's, the artist Yves Tumor. Here an awkward chasm regarding the question of "whose" song it is opens up. When I posted the song, I altered it in two ways. For one, I cut the song short after around 60 seconds, when the female voice comes in and begins speaking. Second, I looped the 60 second fragment of the song 15 times, creating a 15 minute, "extended" version of the song.

On the one hand, these alterations represent substantial changes to the original song, which is only 4 minutes in length. By extending the song to 15 minutes, it loses anything which might make it dynamic. Whereas Brian Eno speaks of making his long-playing ambient sound scapes evolve over time, even in ways which might escape the conscious ear, the 15 minute loop I made of the Yves Tumor song has no dynamic or evolutionary progress whatsoever. It is simply a block of sound, identically repeated without any change for 15 minutes straight. It might be worth noting here the possible correspondence between the youtube comments which proclaim that "nothing will ever get better", "there is no hope" "everyday feels the same", and the ways in which the song performs this stasis by itself never changing, and dragging on for an interminably long period of time. Indeed, when I made the song, I simply copied and pasted the pattern an abitrary number of times without any mind to how the final product would turn out, and without any intention of listening to it myself. To this day, I've never listened to all fifteen minutes of the repeating song all the way through; I find its static, unchanging nature a bit claustrophobic. However, at the same time, I think its precisely the fact that it is 15 minutes long and never changes is a key component to its success. it might be further noted the coincidence that the song met with its virality during the coronavirus quarantine, a time in which the days themselves took on, for many, an unchanging, static quality, in which every day was the same, everything was locked in stasis, groundhog day, etc. such that the endlessly repeating nature of the song, unchanging, drifting, mirrored the endlessly repeating, ennui filled days of those locked in quarantine.

And so in one sense, the song was not exactly the same song which Yves Tumor once created, titled Limerance, but something slightly different, with a different temporal frame, a different sonic character (made more smooth and palatable without the scraping voices in the middle). At the same time, it is basically the same song. Just presented in a different framing. If the original song were a fabric, then all I did was simply cut out a large swath of it and present it to the listener in a specific way.

This ambiguity over the ownership of the song makes it difficult for me to feel any particular pride over its success.

Secondarily, its difficult to say what a million views is really worth: views and streams are like an abstract currency in a virtual world, or like the points in an online world-building video game. Yes, a million points is a lot of points, but along with many others, I'm still at a loss when it comes to figuring out how to smuggle out those virtual points into hard, U.S. currency.

*

Concerns over the relationship between digital technology, social media use, and teenage mental health are not new. But such concerns were amplified in 2020 with the pandemic. NYT articles such as X seemed to come out every few weeks. Cultural theorists from baudrillard to bifo berardi and geert lovink have decried the widespread effect on affect digital technologies might have. On the other hand, there's an equally long relationship between ambient music and the healing. What happens when the two meet: ambient music via digital technologies?

was living with my father in Modesto, CA, a medium-sized town in California's agricultural epicenter, the Central Valley.

My father had been diagnosed with dementia the year before and needed assistance with many of life's day to day tasks; he couldn't drive, keep track of his finances, cook, use a computer or phone. Depending on the day, I might drive him to a doctor's appointment, cook for him, send emails or make phone calls on his behalf. In between, I filled my time by trying to finish up my MA thesis in literature, which I'd been working on for almost a year.

Neither my father nor I were from Modesto; after a lifetime of moving every few years in the military, Modesto was another of the places my father had washed up later in life. When he'd moved, he'd known no one in the town.

Though San Francisco, where I lived, was only two hours away, Modesto felt like a world away, and I visited infrequently, sometimes forgetting for months at a time that he'd moved so close. I'd read once that there were versions of every state contained in California. If this were true, then Modesto was something like California's Kansas. In order to get there from San Francisco, I had to battle my way out of the greater ecosystem of Bay Area traffic, beyond the last BART stop in Livermore, past the giant cross of LED lights embedded in the hills, and into the Altamont hills.

Though there were many subtle changes in the topography between San Francisco and Modesto, it was the Altamont hills that served as the definitive barrier between the Bay Area and the Central Valley for me. Before the hills, in Livermore, were one last gasp of commerce and capitalism with big box stores, a movie theatre, a Target, a Whole Foods. The hills themselves were gentle and rolling and bald. In the winter and early spring, they were lush and green, a spitting image of the famous Windows desktop with nothing in view but the green hills and the blue sky. In the summer, they were scorched and parched, a dessicated brown, sometimes kissed black by recent fires. Exiting the hills on the east, one was given, briefly, a sweeping view of what constituted the beginnings of the Central Valley: a flat expanse with little to command the attention, often filled with hazy smog by day and the sodium glow of dispersed light by night. Briefly after exiting these hills, where the 210 swept into the I-5, one might pass by a racecar track on the right, which once served as the infamous site of the ill-fated Altamont Music Festival. And by this point, one would be in a squarely different world than what constituted the Bay Area. Flat in all directions, with a ridge of hills bordering the west side of the I-5, the Sierras sometimes vaguely visible through clouds and smog to the east. It smelled different; not just the vaguely bovine smell of agriculural areas everywhere, but something of the dry grasses, the oak trees, the almond groves, the pavement and parking lots of shopping centers. Driving in the other direction, back home to San Francisco after a few days in the central valley, I would always be hit with the smell of the ocean, even while esconced inside my car with the windows up, sometime just a little bit before the bay bridge, a smell I could never notice until I'd left the city for a few days.

It was also always either 20 degrees hotter in summer, or 20 degrees colder in winter than it might be in temperature Bay.

Modesto was culturally different as well. In the Mission district of San Francisco, where I lived, the McDonalds at the 24th street BART stop and the Whole Foods up the street were about the only chains stores one could find. The rest of the neighborhood was made up of pawn shops, dive bars, 3rd wave coffee places, Mexican and Salvadoranean and Chinese restaurants, and new condominiums. Modesto, meanwhile was all Little Caesars, Panda Express, and Chipotle, shopping centers planted next to shopping centers planted next to shopping centers for miles at a time on ruler-straight streets.

*

It didn't take long before my father's small rental home in Modesto came to feel claustrophobic, dust-ridden, and small, for me to begin to resent all the help my father needed without ever acknowledging it or asking for it, and for me to become fairly unhappy and unsure about my direction in life. In San Francisco I had worked as an aid at a community college for 3 years, a job I had quit in order to come to Modesto.

*

It's interesting to me that I, personally, was depressed when I posted a song on youtube that garnered so much talk, in the form of comments, about depression and suicidal ideation, almost as though my depression grew out into the digital dimension and spawned a legion, millions-strong, of like-mindedly depressed individuals.

There are several dimensions of the phenomenon that I want to examine:

firstly, I'm interested in the relationship between ambient music and healing or therapy culture, or the relationship ambient music has with healing.

i'm interested in the way that youtube as a platform might profit from, or shape or mold the teen depression on view in the comments section of the video. in what ways does such a cultural artifact create the very depression it seems to ameliorate, either via attunement, or through more nefarious factors such as algorithmic alignment, or more generally through the ubiquity of digital interaction in general?

i'm interested in the relationship the video to the times, specifically the pandemic and quarantine. ambient music as an imagined time and place, as visible in the comments which describe imaginary places the song reminds them of.

youtube as a site of shared digital creative practice, ei how i remixed someone else's song. how its there's, but not exactly; how its not exactly mine either. how youtube also games my own hopes.

list of possible reasons for ambient music's ubiquity:

--increase in industrial noise (murray schafer, soundscape, etc)

[Didion on the 99? Babitz on her trip to Bakersfield?]

pandemic and quarantine began, I posted a song on youtube. Not a song I had made, but a song by the electronic artist Yves Tumor. And not his song exactly as he had released it, but slightly modified. More specifically, I removed a section of the song which includes a sample of human voices, and extended the song from 4 minutes to 15 minutes, an endless, narcotic loop of a short, simple phrase.

The result was a piece of ambient music. The original song was also ambient, however the voices that interrupt the song in the middle were at cross-purposes with one obvious potential function of the song, and with ambient music more generally: to drift off, relax, let your mind wander.

[mikkeneko]

man this post is really making me think, not at all that I disagree with the post itself -- whether Wei Wuxian can't be diplomatic or chooses not to be diplomatic, the end result is that he isn't diplomatic! -- but just, like, a larger meditation on what it means to be diplomatic, to have diplomatic skills, to do diplomacy.

because these discussions always seem to conflate it with virtue. good people are good at diplomacy, bad people aren't. Wei Wuxian is good and his stans want him to be good at everything that's good, so in their eyes he must be! his charisma and his social education would guarantee it!

but diplomacy isn't a virtue. diplomacy is a skill, a set of skills. it's a tactic. it's a set of rules by which powerful people or groups of people maneuver around each other in ways that let them coexist in limited space without constantly killing each other, except for the times when they feel like doing so anyway.

Diplomacy isn't goodness.

Diplomacy isn't kindness.

Diplomacy is the Lan Sect saying nothing when the Wen Sect unleash a murderous monster on civilians under their protection because they can't afford to openly challenge them.

Diplomacy is the other sects looking the other way when the Jin run all over the Wen remnants because it doesn't suit their political interests to oppose the Jin when there's nothing to be gained from it.

Diplomacy is sticking Xue Yang in a Jin outfit and pretending that he's not a mass murderer because the one surviving witness to his rampage recanted his testimony, and the rest of society going along with it.

Diplomacy is what Lan Xichen used to dragoon two people with diametrically opposed moral systems into the Venerated Triad.

Diplomacy is what Lan Wangji refuses to do because he refuses to learn the art of the social lie.

Diplomacy is what Nie Mingjue also isn't great at, and you know what? It got him killed because he WASN'T willing to back down and look the other way when Jin Guangshan was trying to slap a civilized facade over his pet demonic cultivator.

Diplomacy is often incompatible with true justice, because it requires making compromises. It's a part of surviving in this imperfect and dirty world, which is ironic (though not I think accidental) because the whole thing about the jianghu, the floating world, is that these pure and untouchable immortals is that they aren't supposed to be part of that, they aren't supposed to need these impure skills. But they do.

And this is not me arguing that diplomacy is bad, because like I said, sometimes the alternative is mutually assured destruction for very stupid and petty reasons. It's practical. It's neutral. Nor do I think MXTX is trying to say that diplomacy is bad -- only that the failure to have it gets you killed.

The fact that Wei Wuxian doesn't have it doesn't make him a bad person. It's just not part of his character. And it's just part of his tragedy.

Sorry, but I've a question. I was reading meta about how in the untamed wwx is someone who shows great social and diplomatic skills and I don't want to watch the drama (too long) and was wandering if in the drama he is good like that? I don't think in the book he is great as he thinks even if he is trying his best (also they were painting jc as a blunt instrument in their meta - is really like that drama jc? Novel jc knows how to read a room)

i am an unabashed drama fan so i really do think it's worth a watch, but that is not the point

but uh

no.

i think he can seem that way because xiao zhan is a wildly charismatic person who just radiates sweetness and charm, but no, even in the show, wei wuxian has never met a social situation he couldn't make worse. this is in fact so key to wwx's arc, and it's so frustrating that people miss it! when he was young and had a golden core, he could get away with being a little shit because he was talented. and then he could get away with it because people were scared of him! but he never actually had to learn real diplomatic and social skills, and even as mo xuanyo, skates by on a cheeky charm that is very love it or hate it for the people he encounters, with no real ability to course correct if someone finds him grating

as for jiang cheng-- this complete fanon overhaul of jiang cheng's personality and diplomatic skills drives me crazy. in the drama even MORE than in the novel, we see pre-timeskip jiang cheng being extremely deliberate and diplomatic. he is polite, cautious, and respectful. we have multiple scenes of him very carefully standing up to clan leaders who are much more powerful than him and handling it subtly and extremely well-- though admittedly, he doesn't really "win" any of the encounters. yes, he's grumpy to wei wuxian in the cloud recesses arc, but it is so so so clear that is not remotely the way he behaves with other people, especially people who are his elders or superiors.

now, post-timeskip, things are understandably different. he's operating from a position of great power, and has clearly shifted tactics to be a lot more blunt and to assert his authority in a more blunt way. but we have absolutely no reason to think he isn't capable of shifting his tactics as needed, and i think we very much see that in the scene with sisi and bicao, and the delicacy with which he handles both them and that whole situation.

[infinitesofnought]

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

***

The first aspect of Star that I want to consider is the cybernetics contained in it. Let us transcribe Star into the more convenient form of “network/trees constituting the network.”

This is pictured in Fig. 1. On one side (by convention the left) we see a network or mesh of interaction. These are left unspecified: the nodes could be anything at all (molecules, species, concepts, …), and their interconnecting, arrows could be any processes whatsoever (computations rearrangements, transformations, …).

It is assumed that any node could be seen (at: another time, by somebody else) as another network, the initial net could be seen as a node in a larger net. That is: there are no initial or final “elements”; everywhere we led everything has the same meshy appearance. On the right side of Fig. 1 there is a tree of root a in which I have, step by step, drawn the nodes to which a connects, the nodes to which those nodes connect in turn and so on. Had I continued to do this, I would have come back, after a while, to write a again. Thus- the process could go on forever (whence the “…”).

The stages of this procedure are conveniently tracked by 1, 2, 3, …, to indicate the successive depth of the tree.

The way to go from left to right in Fig. 1 is: chop (prune, truncate) at a. That is: take a as if it were an initial element, and proceed as if the time at which this done is zero time. Please note that the act of chopping demands somebody who does it, and sometime to do it. The way to go from right to left is more tricky, hence usually disregarded. If we go down the tree we would pass through the net components once and again, but this is never the initial net, it is still a tree branching and branching.

We can’t get back to the initial net in time. So we must do it by eliminating time, i.e., in eternity. That is: we take this recursion in infinity (a limit process, a leap beyond the time-bound steps). The net re-appears as a fixed point (eigensolution) of this repetitive process.

Thus any finite, time-wise study of the net’s tree is an approximation to the net as a totality. Example: consider the feedback circuit of Fig. 2. In the usual description of it, we start with some initial response x(t0), and then consider what happens at x(t0 + ∆t), and successively at x(t0 + n∆t) (with ∆t perhaps very “small,” infinitesimal). This is depicted below in Fig. 2, in the series 1, 2, 3,.. Consider now this series of cycles around the circuit in contrast with the entire circuit itself. Note first that from the completed circuit one can generate the infinite series of cycles by chopping it at x at some t0, and taking some b as given. Note that this circling around and around will never be different from that; the total circuit will not appear. Thus at some time we stop, we have to stop. But if we take a limit through infinity the circuit is again closed. Thus what we actually do is an approximation, for as much time, and as close as we can get, to the simultaneity suggested in the graphic representation (it looks closed doesn’t it?). But these two things are surely different. By contrast, the circuit’s stability is a timeless property and can be taken as one possible description of the whole system, of its simultaneity, of its closure...

...Thus the net/tree duality is explicitly connected by processes in both directions. We make sense of the Timeless (simultaneous) net by dealing with it in time, Piecemeal. We make sense of the part-by-part approximation of the trees in the net by seeing how they lead to the stability of a simultaneous total system. Hence the pair net/trees is of the form Star *: the it (the net)/the processes leading to it (the trees)...

...In each case the dual elements become effectively complementary: they mutually specify each other. There is no more duality in the sense that they are effectively related; we can contemplate these dual pairs from a metalevel where they become a cognitive unity, a second-order whole.

Note that this superation of duality is no “synthesis” (in the hegelian sense), since there is really nothing “new,” but just a more direct appraisal of how things are put together and related. (The closest I have come to finding a philosophical lineage of this view of dualities, is the Law of Three in the sufi tradition, or the buddhist doctrine of the middle way. There is in both a practice of balance, neglecting nothing, yet in the middle of whatever is going on. It should be more accurately be called the Law of Zero, since every-thing stays just the same.)...

...For every hegelian pair of the form a/not-A there exists a more inclusive Star, where the apparent opposites are components of the right hand side. Another way of saying the same thing is: in hegelian dialectics dual interactions are of the zero-sum form: what one side gets the other side loses. The operational form of interactions seems almost universally to be of zero sum form: every participant can win (by playing the game of the whole).

– Francisco Varela, “Not One, Not Two” (x)