#ediface

[istherewifiinhell]

Minor agonies and forms of torment: large metal travel mug adorned with the visage of a spectre [black lab dog]... and the paint is chipping

[quasi-normalcy]

This is what I'm talking about. Like, this is embarrassing. People should be embarrassed for uncritically sharing it.

"STEM people are incapable of knowing when they're being lied to--" JESUS FUCKING GOD! Is this a thing you actually believe? Like...genuinely? That the only reason why anyone understands falsehood is because they read We Have Always Lived in the Castle when they were 17?

Do the black hearts of the STEM people beat at all, in your estimation? If you cut them, do they bleed tar? Sand? Wires? Do they think thoughts, do you imagine, or do they just process binary telemetry through their neural circuitry? Do they sleep in coffins?? Do they regenerate in alcoves???

And what about you? How, one wonders, the fuck do you know what you think that you know? Were you just blindly, credulously, and uncritically believing everything that you were told until some magnanimous English teacher, Moses-like, came down from the Mountain to explain the concept of deception to you?? Do you think that this is how things work? Do you just intrinsically know truth from falsehood because you read Lolita at some point in your long and storied career???

Look---I think humanities are valuable! I'm doing a PhD in a humanities discipline (in fact, applying the techniques of the humanities to the analysis of science), so it would be pretty awkward if I didn't! Humanities can make contributions to the vast ediface of human knowledge that sciences can't. Humanities can even make valid, substantive critiques of science that sciences can't. But this? This? This is just uncharitable, self-important BULLSHIT that any humanist, with their vaunted critical thinking skills, should be fucking ashamed to spread.

[geoledgy]

imagine being the first volcano bitch in your volcanic arc to like get your ediface done like ash shots vents done and like cone contoured... and then you walked into like the volcanic field or whatever volcanos have and everyone dropped their basalt flows and was shookedt? like everyone churning lava was just in shock and you erupt across the artisanal granite plutons in your wantmylook.com thigh high lace up basalt columns like you rlife depended on it... yes god

[imaginefinneganswake]

... and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifaces in Toper's Thorp piled building supra building pon the banks of the livers by the Soangso.

Finnegan’s Wake - James Joyce

ChatGPT4o critical interpretations (Created ChatGPT):

This passage from Finnegans Wake is dense with Joyce's characteristic wordplay and allusion, and it invites several layers of interpretation. Let's break it down in parts and explore possible critical interpretations.

1. "mighty odd years"

Joyce often plays with time in the Wake, and here the phrase "mighty odd years" evokes a long, indeterminate stretch of time. The word "odd" here might suggest something unusual or out of the ordinary, hinting at the peculiarity of history and memory in the Wakean universe. It could also play on the idea of "odd numbers," furthering the sense of uncertainty or irregularity. Time in Finnegans Wake is not linear but cyclical, echoing Vico’s theory of recurring ages of civilization, and thus "mighty odd years" could gesture toward the mythic timescales involved in human history and development.

2. "this man of hod, cement and edifaces"

This phrase clearly suggests an archetypal builder, perhaps even alluding to the Masonic tradition, where the "hod" (a tool for carrying bricks or mortar) signifies manual labor, building, and craftsmanship. The mention of "cement and edifaces" ties this figure to construction, both literally and symbolically. The man may be a representative of human civilization's striving for permanence and structure through architecture, which in Joyce’s world, is often a metaphor for language itself—building blocks of culture, tradition, and meaning.

This could be a veiled reference to HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker), the main protagonist who is often portrayed as a "builder" of sorts, both in the material and social sense. As the patriarchal figure of the Wake, HCE is frequently associated with civilization-building efforts, from constructing cities to founding societies. Joyce intertwines the literal and metaphorical "builder" with the act of storytelling itself—each layer of meaning is a brick in the edifice of Finnegans Wake.

3. "in Toper's Thorp"

"Toper's Thorp" seems to be a blend of two concepts: "toper" (a heavy drinker) and "thorp" (an Old English term for a village or hamlet). This could be read as a winking reference to the recurrent motif of alcohol in Finnegans Wake (think of the pub as a site of storytelling, myth-making, and the cycles of human fallibility). The blending of these two words suggests a place where drink and community converge—possibly referring to the fallible, human aspect of society. The "thorp" could also evoke ancient or medieval communities, underscoring the cyclical passage of time from early human settlements to the modern city.

4. "piled building supra building"

This line vividly evokes a sense of architectural layering, which could symbolize the way civilizations build upon the ruins or foundations of their predecessors. The word "supra" also suggests a hierarchical or metaphysical layering, alluding to the construction not only of material structures but of ideas, languages, and histories. Joyce’s technique often involves palimpsestic layering—stories within stories, histories buried under layers of time, and meanings that stack upon one another like bricks.

The idea of one building being "piled" upon another could reference the recursive, self-referential structure of the Wake itself, where texts and traditions accumulate meaning over time. Each "building" could be a nod to previous narratives, histories, or even earlier parts of Joyce’s own work, all constructing the edifice of the novel.

5. "pon the banks of the livers"

The "livers" here is likely a playful fusion of "livers" (the organ, which filters and sustains life) and "rivers" (the flowing, life-giving water often symbolizing time and memory in Joyce’s work). This blending evokes the River Liffey, which plays a central role in Finnegans Wake as both a geographical feature and a symbol of life’s continuous flow. Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is closely associated with the river, embodies the cyclical nature of time and feminine creativity in the novel.

The "banks of the livers" could also be understood as a metaphor for the thresholds or boundaries of life and history, where human efforts to build civilizations are constantly influenced by the natural, organic flow of time (the rivers/livers). The pun on "liver" as a bodily organ adds a biological layer to this interpretation, emphasizing the body’s integral role in the cycles of life and death, further complicating the line between organic and inorganic structures (bodies vs. buildings).

6. "by the Soangso"

"Soangso" is a playful reduction of "so-and-so," which in English idiom implies something indefinite or deliberately vague. This obfuscation of the specific place name fits with Joyce's technique of rendering places mythic or universally applicable through partial erasure of their specificity. It’s also a characteristic Wake joke, pointing to the arbitrariness of place names and the fluidity of identity. Joyce might be suggesting that these grand human efforts—building civilization—occur everywhere and nowhere, always unfolding at the same time, in the same indeterminate "Soangso" location.

Additionally, "Soangso" could hint at the substitution of one place or civilization for another, implying the ephemeral nature of human achievements. If read as a commentary on historical recurrence, this construction on the "banks of the livers" (the constantly changing flow of time) takes place "by the Soangso," an anonymous site where all human civilizations meet the same inevitable fate.

Synthesis: Symbolic and Mythic Layers

In totality, this passage from Finnegans Wake functions on both a literal and a symbolic level. The literal image of a man piling buildings on a riverbank recalls the story of human civilization’s attempts to assert dominance over nature and time through construction. Yet, as Joyce often implies, these efforts are fragile and temporary, always washed away by the flow of time (the river).

On a mythic level, the passage taps into Joyce’s cyclical vision of history, where all acts of creation (be they physical buildings or the creation of art and culture) are part of a larger, eternal recurrence. The builder could be read as HCE, the archetypal figure of the Everyman, who rises and falls throughout history. The banks of the river represent both the boundary of human existence and the eternal, flowing stream of consciousness and history that underpins Joyce’s novel.

Critical Perspectives:

Post-structuralist readings might focus on how this passage destabilizes the binary between construction (stability, permanence) and deconstruction (the flowing, ephemeral river), showing how meaning itself is always fluid in Joyce’s text.

Psychoanalytic interpretations could link the builder figure to Freud’s theories of civilization, repression, and the return of the repressed—especially considering the "liver" as a body organ processing emotional life.

Viconian readings would emphasize the cyclical view of history, with civilizations rising, building, and ultimately crumbling, only to be reborn in new forms.

Linguistic and Derridean analysis could delve into Joyce's use of puns and portmanteau words, which break down and reconstitute meaning in layers, much like the buildings piled upon each other.

This short passage, rich in metaphor, encapsulates many of the broader concerns of Finnegans Wake: history, memory, language, and the eternal cycle of construction and destruction.

[doctorwhoandthemidjourney]

The Ediface.

'The Ancestor Cell' (EDA)

[guttersniper]

@timechange said: 16. behind the school's gymnasium .

setting prompts.

there's something eerie about an empty school, a school at night. mutt keeps a wide berth from them regardless of the hour, yet he picks up on this as if it were instinctual. (he knows a thing or two or three about eerie.) cigarette butts are scattered across the rain-sheened pavement. black tire tracks—shaped like a sloppy figure eight—cover the entire right quadrant. some asshole trying to be impressive. compensating for something.

mutt doesn't know what possessed marty to want to meet him at this time of night. nevertheless, he had booked it quick enough to beat him there. for his part, he leans against the brick ediface of the gymnasium. it would be easy to overlook him. (most do.)

his hands bracket into the pockets of his jacket. alert, his shoulders spread back, and his eyes stare into the darkness as if challenging whatever could be out there. soon enough, he hears the unmistakable clack-clack-cuh-clack of skateboard wheels.

"hi," he offers, sounding small amongst all the empty space. "s'it just you?"

[dsandrvk]

Saturday, March 23 - Cordoba

We got our bus tickets for tomorrow first thing, and then headed for the Mezquita. It is a remarkable space. It was originally built as the Visigoth Basilica of San Vincente in the mid-6th century, a little before the Hagia Sophia was built in what was then Constantinople. After the Moors arrived In 711, it was soon after turned into a mosque, and was gradually expanded. With the conquest of Cordoba (as it is known here) in 1236, it was consecrated again as a Catholic church. As a result, the building is at best a hybrid place of worship. The Catholic church exists somewhat uneasily in the middle of this incredible sea of columns and arches, and even with all the private chapels around the perimeter, there is still a lot of space that is just underutilized.

That said, it is magnificent and awe-inspiring, with rows upon rows of columns with arches, most set on Roman capitals. It is unlike any church I have ever been in, although it certainly has all the trappings. Along the walls are Islamic screens and strained glass windows with geometric patterns, rather than saints, and although the ceiling is high, there is none of the soaring feeling of true Gothic cathedrals. The restoration work is quite impressive, and in one place it is easy to see that the red and white banding is not just paint but reflects the underlying materials - white stone alternating with red brick or tile. It is really stunningly beautiful.

We had hoped to wander for quite a while, since we had gotten tickets for the earliest possible time. It turns out, however, that there was a Eucharist planned because of the Holy Week festivities and we were shooed out after only an hour. We saw lots, but didn't really spend any time in the church part. Maybe tomorrow afternoon when we get back to town.

We did spend the rest of the day wandering around, exploring the older sections of town, including the old Jewish quarter. Here there is one of only three surviving Synagogues in Spain. After the Jews were expelled in 1492, it passed through many hands, but was eventually declared a national monument in 1885, and restoration was started. Today it is a simple space, but nicely restored and well-visited.

There is still quite a bit left of the old city wall, and we saw several of the gates, which are now mostly restaurants. Inside, the streets are still a maze, and occasionally open up into courtyards or plazas. They have a "patio" festival here when all the flowers are in bloom, but it is too early for that just yet.

We passed by a shop selling materials for the season - this little poster for Semana Santa (Holy Week) was a little too close to KKK imagery for my taste, although I know the Spanish don't see it that way. And the last photo goes in my ugliest building file - the balconies, especially the glass one , are truly hideous. But there are beautiful buildings, too, every where we looked.

We were able to visit the Caliph Baths, which have been recently excavated. Based mostly on the Roman model, there were baths just for royalty, as well as public baths, and included cold rooms, warm baths and hot baths. The Moors adopted the tradition, which was also passed on to the Catholic kings, although it doesn't appear to have been as popular then.

Cordoba is crowded, especially in the areas surrounding the Mezquita, but is definitely calmer than Seville, and once we were away from the tourist shops, we were able to stroll easily along the narrow, winding streets. I have a feeling that it is only going to get crazier next week.

Tomorrow we have a bus out to an archaeological site just outside of town with well-preserved Islamic style building edifaces, if not entire buildings. We will know more tomorrow, but a lot of information said it was well worth the time. It will be another warm day (low 80's), so I'm glad we're going early. After tomorrow our weather is supposed to change to cold and wet, so we will enjoy the warmer days while we can.

[kavrillia]

A.I. art is kind of creepy, or at least unsettling, and I think it should be clearly labeled so it doesn't get confused with human-created art, and it should be trained on images used with permission, not lifted from artists without their knowledge or consent.

Having said that, I thought I'd mess around with an AI art generator to see if I could get it to make anything from the Kavrilliaverse.

Spoiler: It was pretty much crap.

Various attempts to generate a person with antennae or green skin failed miserably. The best I got were people in green clothes and one in a weird headdress that kind of stuck up like horns on either side of the person's head. I asked for an anthropomorphic salamander with green skin and got a normalish but still uncanny-looking lizard with green skin. I even tried feeding it Vazali's name, thinking it had picked up some of my art from Google images, but nope.

Then I tried to generate the capitol building in Shalanera, but nothing close emerged. I got something that looked like the U.S. capitol in Washington D.C. with a black spire stuck on top, and a big fountain in front. The spire was relatively accurate but it's supposed to have two waterfalls that appear to flow off the roof into a fountain/moat along the front of the building. Apparently that was too imaginative for the AI. I eventually got a view of water flowing off a roof, but the POV was looking up at it from a weird angle so you could barely see any of the building, and there was a random silhouette of a human on a walkway looking down. Didn't ask for that, but okaaaay...

I worked for awhile to get a Sacred Grotto, and you'd think "giant pearl seeming to float in a rock grotto" would be fairly easy, but no. I did get one cool image of a large, transparent pearl with a bunch of smaller pearls inside it, but that wasn't what I wanted.

The first thing that came out remotely the way I imagined it was this:

"Boat escaping volcanic eruption"

But WTF is going on with the smaller volcano that looks hastily glued onto the side of the bigger one? Not impressed.

The second attempt was better, but the plume of smoke and ash doesn't look right.

Requests for "imperial palace surrounded by gardens" brought up a very Chinese building. "Palace surrounded by green space" made this:

Not how I imagined the palace in Shalanera, but at least it's a decent looking ediface.

"Island inside old volcanic crater" gave me an old crater but no island, just a lake inside. YOU HAD ONE JOB (well, two, I guess, but still.)

"Blue chicken peafowl" gave me a normal looking peacock with maybe a slight deformation to its neck. "Blue chicken-like bird" gave me something that looks like a warvcallie from the chest down. The head, not so much. Although to be fair, I did ask for "chicken-like" without specifying details.

Attempts to create a grekk were unsuccessful in any way, shape, or form.

I fully admit I'm probably not phrasing the prompts the right way, as it's the first time I've used a tool like this, but yeeesh.

[astheniccynic]

ediface slate, fûcking, prong center

The smell of dried slûrry makes me desire death.

[doo-wop-city]

Last Memory of Stardust

This is the last picture my husband took of the Stardust Night Club.

I’m going to miss Stardust Nightclub, the imposing brutalist ediface. It closed down and was recently demolished. In its memory, we wanted to share the last photo my husband took of it. This photo was taken on East Schellenger Avenue on December 17th, 1966. (…Or, was that 2022?) I love the futuristic Googie sign above the marquee. This was the venue where such acts as Frankie Valli & The Four…

[hrosev]

Friday pocket. . . . . . . #friday #pocket #knife #leatherman #skeletool #casio #ediface #blackberry #bold #fonix #edc #care #tools #time #music #mood #talck #about1321art https://www.instagram.com/p/CTXjgtosDy1/?utm_medium=tumblr

[bluesman56]

Liver Building by Tony Via Flickr: Liver as in Diver not the organ in the body. The origins of the town name Liverpool; The name comes from the Old English lifer, meaning thick or muddy water, and pōl, meaning a pool or creek, and is first recorded around 1190 as Liuerpul.

[ediface]

I had such a fun time hosting the first Inkling Championship Series! Everyone did a phenomenal job! I learned a lot of new moves and game plays & was really impressed! GJ!! Thank you to everyone who participated & also to those who watched the stream! BOOYAH!! #splatoon2 #twitch #ediface #GG #tournament

[ocelotrevs]

I saw this watch earlier today when I was out. I’m seriously considering buying it. 

It felt so nice to wear, and I haven’t brought a watch for ages. It’ll be nice for my 30th

[bizarrobrain]

"Death's Ediface" by Wode - From "Wode" (2016)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kids reason, adults rationalize

This is the second and final week of "The Attack Surface lectures," a series of 8 bookstore hosted virtual events exploring themes in the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface. https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/ On Weds, Oct 21, the theme is "Little Revolutions," AKA writing radical fiction for kids, with guests Tochi Onyebuchi and Bethany C Morrow; you see, Little Brother and its sequel, Homeland, were young adult novels, while Attack Surface is a novel for adults. That fact, and the upcoming event, have me thinking about the difference between fiction for teens and for adults. Litquake were kind enough to publish my working-through of this thinking in  a new essay called "Kids Use Reason, Adults Rationalize." https://lithub.com/cory-doctorow-kids-use-reason-adults-rationalize/ I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to write for teens: it was when Kathe Koja - herself an accomplished writer in multiple genres - guest-lectured at a Clarion writing workshop I was teaching. Koja described how, on school visits, kids would argue passionately with her about her books, and how this wasn't rudeness - it was respect. The kids weren't reading her books as mere distractions; they were treating them as possible roadmaps to a complex and difficult world. Before then, I was with Steven Brust: "Telling someone they wrote a bad book is like telling them they've got an ugly kid. Even if it's true, it's too late to do anything about it now, and anyway, they did everything they could to prevent it." But Koja convinced me that when it came to teens, an exception was warranted. Little Brother and Homeland were, in effect, bets on that proposition. The bets paid off: countless now-adult readers have approached me to tell me how those books shaped their worldview. Some became activists or cryptographers or hackers or tech workers, but even the readers who DIDN'T go into tech tell me that the books made them aware of both the liberatory power of technology, and its power to oppress, and the importance of taking a side in that fight. Spending a decade+ in contact with young readers has changed my worldview, too. It's made me realize that while the power to reason is often present in very young people, the context - the stuff to reason ABOUT - takes time to accumulate. There are some disciplines that lean heavily on reasoning and have relatively little context: math, computer science, chess. Learn some basic principles, apply your reasoning, and you can build up towering edifaces of work and expertise. Other disciplines - law, medicine, history - simply require so much KNOWLEDGE as well as reason that just packing in the reading takes years and years, no matter how good you are at reasoning. That's why there are child chess prodigies but not child history prodigies. Fiction is part of that context-acquisition process. The realization that adults don't have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don't have a monopoly on failures of reason. Indeed, there is a distinctive form of failure-to-reason endemic to adulthood: long-term rationalization, the process by which one makes a series of small compromises, one at a time, that add up to a catastrophic moral failure. That's the crux of ATTACK SURFACE, whose protagonist, Masha, is having a moral reckoning with a career spent in mass surveillance technology - a career she has managed to square with her  moral sensibilities through careful rationalization and compartmentalization. My bet in this book is that adults who feel hopeless and nihilistic about the future will find a new kind of story: one in which the unitary hero whose personal actions save the world is replaced with a narrative of mass movements, political will, and collective action. Rebuilding our digital infrastructure for human liberation  is a vast task, but it's only a step on the road to a far larger and more urgent task: rebuilding our physical world and its energy and infrastructure to survive and address the climate emergency. "The climate emergency demands a moonshot, but the moonshot wasn’t undertaken by science heroes working in their solitary labs: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon because of the collective, state-sponsored efforts of millions of people. If we hadn’t gotten to the Moon, the fault would have been with the system, not with Armstrong’s failure to build a rocket ship."