#going into exact translations of words is a folly

[21st-century-minutiae]

"S'up Dawg" is a very casual phrase in the English language meaning "hello." "S'up" is a shortening of "what is up" which is a rhetorical question used to say hello. "Dawg" is a vocative address, from the word "Dog." It implies a level of friendship and informality.

"Konichiha" (spelt with an "ha" at the end when written in English letters by japanese, but pronounced "wa" for linguistic reasons associated with the grammatical structure that is the topic particle "ha"), is a Japanese phrase that means "good day." In English transliteration it is usually written as Konichiwa. It is usually translated as the closest equivalent of "hello," thought, like "good day" it is seen as less appropriate in the early morning or evening. The equivalent phrases for good morning and good evening will be used instead at the appropriate times. The phrase literally translates to something like a sentence fragment drawing attention to "this day" (this is the grammatical role that "ha" particle that is pronounced "wa" assumes) without actually completing the sentence and leaving it implied.

A "Chihuahua" is a small breed of Mexican dog. Like in "Konichiha" the "hua" is pronounced more like a "wa" in English. The "Chiha" almost perfectly overlaps phonetically.

So, Konichihuahua is a mixture of the two, taking advantage of both spelling and phonics to make a nonsense word that is a pun. This is an example of a pun.

English speakers in the early twenty first century would likely be familiar with "S'up Dawg," "Konichiha" and "Chihuahua," despite all three being from different languages. This is in spite of native English speakers seldom being trilingual. The pun would be well understood by these people.

How do you say “S'up Dawg” in Japanese? 

Konichihuahua

[notsoheadless]

Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.     You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.     But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.     And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.     It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.     Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the

limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.     In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.     Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there. (21) But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.     Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.    Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic. οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι. “Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you     mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul.

Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.     But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.     But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.     The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.     The First Meme.     Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.     Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.     Go play.

[faggotri]

 Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.    You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.    But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.    And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.    It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.    Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.    In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.    Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there.

But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.    Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.    Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic. οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι. “Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you     mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.    But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.    But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.    The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.    The First Meme.    Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.    Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.    Go play.

[ginnyzero]

Completely Harmless Ch. 26

Completely Harmless An SSO SilverGlade Re-imagining Story (Or Fix it Fan Salt fic) By Ginny O.

When Lily and her friends wanted to buy horses and were directed to the Silverglade Manor and its myriad of problems, they didn’t expect to start a revolution. They were just a bunch a stable girls. Completely harmless. Right?

A/N: Things are only canon if I say they’re canon. Pre-Saving the Moorland Stables compliant for the most part. Posted in its entirety on my website. Posted in 2000 to 4000 word bits here. Rated T for Swearing Word Count 177,577

Chapter Twenty-Six Planning Rainbow Week Part One

After conferring with Linda, Lily requested a meeting with the Baroness and invited Antonia, Aaron, Anastasia, Agnetha and Judy to join too. She laid out what they knew about Dark Core and G.E.D. being in the Silverglade Area. “We all want to deal with this in the safest and most legal way possible, Baroness. We want you to know what we’ve uncovered as we uncover it,” Lily said. Then she explained about wanting to expand Rainbow Week all over South New Jorvik County and how they hoped to have everything here at the Winery, outside of the big pavilion, ready before then.

“If that’s not ready, mother, we can put up a temporary fair one until after the festival,” Anastasia suggested brightly.

“We can have a special friendship dessert,” Aaron looked pleased with the idea.

Antonia leaned back. “I don’t see why we can’t have our Grand Opening this Rainbow Festival. Maybe the Stormgarden will be ready to do the same and we can exchange tourists.”

“Rainbow sherbet,” Aaron mused, “with a heart sugar cookie.”

The Baroness smiled fondly at her son. “That sounds delicious.”

“We can tint the heart red of course,” Aaron wiggled in his seat.

“Or, well, there’s a way to freeze and layer cookie dough to make rainbows,” Stacy said. “I can find a video on J-Tube, I’m sure. There might be several different variations.”

“I think that this calls for fireworks at the castle,” The Baroness said. “We can find fireworks that fit the theme of course.”

“There are three events this summer. You don’t want to wait for Midsummer or Happy Horse Week?”

The Baroness waved a hand. “Surely we can do fireworks for every occasion.”

Lily nodded.

Linda scribbled down notes.

“Well, Jorvik Stables has a friendship race, and Firgrove is doing the Red String Trail Ride,” Lily said.

Linda cleared her throat and it sounded like she was saying ‘appropriation.’

“Moorland is hosting the festival as usual. And they invited JoJo Siwa, though I’m not sure exactly where she’s performing. Was there something special that we can do?” Lily asked. “Other than the fireworks at the Castle?”

“Hmm,” the Baroness tilted her head. “We don’t want to encroach on Jorvik Stables or the Li Family tradition that got translated into a trail ride.” Her lips twitched indicating she knew the origins of the trail.

“Yellow roses are a sign of friendship,” Linda said and pushed up her glasses.

“As are friendship bands,” Regina said. “We want everyone to go to every stable right? Why not have special charms they can get at each stable to go on their friendship bands. The more stables you visit with a friend, the more charms you get. We can use the yellow rose for ours.”

“I can add a rose decoration to the dessert,” Aaron said.

“Why not make it a craft thing in our pavilion? Like a rose on a headband or a rose wreathe?” Linda asked. “Topaz is another friendship stone. We can get topaz beads and make old fashioned headbands with them. It’s not a race or a trail ride, but put it in the middle of the Rose Garden Trail Ride, they can stop, rest, make a headband, and move on.”

“Then we definitely should hire people play in all the places we’ve got for them to be playing,” Anastasia said. “We must have music and I know several classical quartets.” A look at them told them that there was no way that the Baroness would allow a pop star like JoJo Siwa into her venues.

“I believe that will cover a ‘special’ event,” the Baroness nodded. “Judy, I think you should be the one handing out the charms.”

“Yes, Baroness,” Judy nodded. “That does make sense.”

“Then, we need to get working,” Agnetha said. “And not lazing around here. Especially if we’ve got a grand opening to make spectacular.”

Stacy stayed behind to help Aaron come up with the best cookie, yellow rose out of white chocolate, and ice cream combo looks wise while the rest went to help with the garden. Agnetha wasn’t going to hold back now!

--

The next week was extremely busy! Given that they were going to be doing their grand opening during Rainbow Week, Agnetha drove them harder than ever. She even conceded to let Bjorn go to Jorvik City and pick up the masses and masses of flowers and turf they were going to need to finish everything up properly.

Trucks arrived hauling in everything from a new Romanesque style bandstand, rustic furniture for the Wine Cellar, the lights and benches for the gardens, and even the statues that had been on order.

Why, Agnetha conceded to renting another composter and buying a gas tank to put behind her house to fill it up. That was how much debris there was and how fast they were moving to get rid of it.

Though, the new bandstand inspired Agnetha to train roses on it. Then when the sitting area for the Baroness came in, she did the exact same thing. So, the club decided that it was simply Agnetha being Agnetha. The sitting area being a curved rectangular style gazebo with nice cushioned seats in it where the Baroness could get the best afternoon light.

But by the end of the week and the next meeting, they had most of the important work done for the Moon and Folly Terrace gardens including putting out the lights and benches, and having most of the flowers planted. The Temporary Pavilion had arrived for the event and so they had a checklist for the next week, finish planting the Folly Terrace Gardens, clean up and plant around the pavilion and the Riding Arena, install a duck coop behind the Arena, and clean, install furniture, and decorate the Wine Cellar.

Through the week Lily received texts about ideas from each Riding Club about what they should do for their special events. Ingrid kept sending exclamation points and heart emojis as this revealed new artists and ideas for the Flea Market. However, Loretta had been suspiciously silent and that worried Lily.

They convened for a meeting.

Loretta laid out the pictures of everything she had.

They all stared at her. “What’s this?”

“The decorations for rainbow week,” Loretta sniffed.

Lily rubbed her forehead. “Where are the rainbows?”

Loretta pressed her lips together.

“Loretta, this is all Bobcat pink,” Kate said and crossed her arms.

“And are these arches trailing Ivy?” Pia poked at them.

“I’ve had Catherine running my club ragged trying to make the perfect Friendship cake all week and this is not going to cut it for decorations to go with the chocolate cake topped with local strawberries and blueberries and sprinkled with powdered sugar.” Amelia said.

“Or all the rainbow colored teddy bears that I’ve been busting my ass all week to get the dye for Daxton!”

Pia poked at it. “And where are the bows. I’ve got the Siwanators camped out in Fort Pinta gushing about the bows.”

“Siwanators?” Lily asked, her eyes wide. She tried not to sound too appalled.

“Super fans. They’re real names of Saffi and Selma.”

“Oh thank the dear and fluffy Lord,” Lily murmured.

“They’ve been making rainbow sequin covered bows to hand out and are insisting they need to be on the arches too.” Pia rubbed her forehead. “And, and you know, everywhere as decorations.”

“Pushy,” Lily observed. “Loretta, this isn’t going to do.”

Loretta crossed her arms. “Those are what we always use.”

“And they aren’t appropriate for a county wide celebration,” Lily’s voice turned sharp. She had beyond had it with Loretta’s attitude.

Loretta smacked her hands on the table. “You’re just a jumped up stable girl, and a foreigner at that.”

Someone, Lily wasn’t sure who since she was locked in a staring contest of wills with Loretta, made a whinnying bray.

Loretta turned deep red and broke Lily’s gaze.

Lily inhaled deeply. It was tempting to bitch the girl out. She let it out slowly. “Loretta,” she tried for as patient as possible. “Our competition needs to end outside of the eventing circuits. It doesn’t matter which Club ends up at the Claymore Challenge, it matters that the best one does. When we walk through these doors to convene as Presidents, we’re doing things for the good of the entire county. We can’t keep doing things the old way and expect it to advance the county. We aren’t trying to put one Club ahead here in the public eye, but all of them, us, in our rainbow of colors. This week is about Friendship and Love.”

Loretta scowled.

“And about coming together as Clubs,” Pia nodded.

“You’ve had a stranglehold on this area for how long?” Amelia raised her brow.

Ginny mumbled, “Too long.”

“Were you even going to buy new things?” Ingrid asked. “Or were we supposed to match you?”

Loretta chewed her lip.

Lily held up her hands. “All right, let’s each of us get on our phones and have our best party girls meet up at Fort Pinta and go to the city for decorations. We’re going to be here a while, so they might as well do that, and this way, they can forward us pictures and we can approve before any money is spent.”

The Presidents pulled out their phones and made the calls, even Loretta.

“Okay, let’s start from the top,” Lily said. “Regina suggested doing a friendship bracelet, and then making it so that every stable they go to with their friends, they get a charm when they talk to the Stable Master.”

“They can make their bracelets at the festival site in Moorland, and choose whatever order they want to go in from there,” Pauline said with a glance at Loretta. “That could count as the Moorland craft?”

“I was thinking, maybe a photo booth?”

“Like different ones, or one?”

“Different ones so they can make an album. Definitely one with Jojo Siwa at Moorland, we’ve got more Clubs than we do the colors of the rainbow but maybe the photo booths are in Club colors for simplicity sake?”

Lily texted Regina. “Photo booths or photo walls, just something they can take pictures together.”

“It should probably be something fairly simple,” Riley said.

“And something that we can just switch out some decorations for the next festival,” Another girl nodded.

“So, colored sheets?” Lily asked cynical.

“That sounds about right.”

The girls stifled giggles.

Lily’s phone buzzed. “Regina wants to know since rainbow week is about friendship if she should be getting yellow rose decorations to go with these photo walls? Not canary, she says because canary is obnoxious but more champagne?” Lily raised a brow. “And she’s asking about beads.”

“As long as it’s not too wedding like,” one girl wrinkled her nose.

“Wouldn’t that be funny if there ended up being some weddings,” another giggled.

“Well, Regina thinks that most the decorations we’re going to find are going to be wedding or wedding adjacent for the photo booth, walls, whatever,” Lily rolled her eyes and set down her phone. “Okay, Loretta, Jojo Siwa is performing at the fairgrounds, you have the parade, and that’s where the friendship bracelets are going to be.”

Loretta nodded.

Lily turned to Pia. “Pia, you have Siwanators in Fort Pinta with sequin bows.”

“Yes, and they want bunting, lots and lots of swag bunting.”

Lily picked up her phone again to text Regina.

“Isn’t there bunting on the Championships?” One of the girls asked. “We should change it out for appropriately themed rainbows.”

“This is going to be so gay pride.”

“All types of love, all types,” came the reminder.

“What else is going on,” Lily asked Pia trying to stay on topic.

“Well, the horse Linda sold James,” Pia started.

“Fussywithers?” Lily asked.

“Wait, that’s who Fussy went to?” Pauline gaped. She burst into giggles.

“Fussywithers,” Pia sniggered. “I’m not calling him anything else now, Fussywithers is giving James fits by living up to his name of being fussy and wanting everything perfect. Fussy and Mayor Peanut have bonded, so we’ve been sending James and Fussy out with Mayor Peanut to get exercise every day.”

“That’s perfect,” Ami giggled.

“And he’s seen the disrepair of some of the places and has decided that right now he’s going to take photographs himself as an awareness campaign as he searches for spots to take pictures of Token.” Pia wrinkled her nose. “All according to plan. They have a warm up run they do around Fort Pinta area, and then they go off into the unknown. Or, as unknown as James gets. He met up with Andy and just as we wanted, they’re conspiring to well, explore together, and coordinate their geocaching and Token Takes Jorvik book.”

“Now, all they have to do is meet Hayden,” Pauline said.

“Oh, I made a nudge about visiting the Mirror Marshes,” Penny smirked. “I think it is on the to-do list.”

Pia nodded. “We’re going to use a pony head for our charm on the bracelets. The Swinators are going to have their bows ready to hand out when the week starts and open a shop in the Moorland festival grounds. So, that’s not really on us. They’ll also be the turn in points for the bow hunt.”

“I think you need something more,” Lily said.

Pia bit her lip. “We have the dance club kind of sitting there being empty. I mean, you have to get to the clothing shop in through there now.”

“What did you do?” Lily widened her eyes.

Pia groaned. “Okay, so there were so many shops and carts cluttering things up. You haven’t been since?”

“Agnetha,” Pauline said and it explained everything.

“The gardener,” Lily tacked on.

Pia looked back and forth. “Ohkay,” she murmured. “Well, one of the beauty salons closed down. Not enough business, so their stylists all moved over to the one next to the dance floor with the café outside of it, Beauty on the Beach. Then next door to that, we put in a Tack shop, Mayor Peanut’s Sunshine Saddlery. And on the inside of the dance club, you can access the clothing shop, Disco Daze Fashions.”

“And that leaves you with what?”

“A clear courtyard with a fountain in the middle,” Pia said. “And a beach, but I’m not sure if the beach party guy is willing to come out early to set up a dance floor down there or not.”

“Okay, who else is there music wise in Jorvik that could play at Fort Pinta,” Lily said.

“Lisa,” one girl said.

“Missing,” Penny interrupted.

“Lisa’s missing,” another gasped.

“Okay, find Lisa,” Lily added to her list. “Um, who is Lisa?”

Penny lit up. “Lisa Peterson, she’s a country rock singer and guitar player.”

“She’s Jorvik homebrew,” Polly added. “Sort of.”

One girl made a face. “Well, there’s Raptor.”

“Oh good luck getting him out of Jorvik City.”

“The Miscreants?”

“Not really their type of venue, way too disco. They’re more rock.”

Lily drummed her fingers on the table.

“DJ Kai, I mean, she’s not huge, but she’s techno, the disco ball would be her jam and she needs the exposure,” another girl said.

“Isn’t Herman’s brother in the music business,” someone propped their chin on their hand.

“Okay, so,” Amelia made a face. “We’ve got this heavy metal style shop and a hair salon in Jarlaheim. How about we host these Miscreants there?”

Lily was digging through her contacts. She found Herman’s brother’s number and dialed it. She relayed to him what was going on since he was the one who had their contracts with Black Light Records. “If you could be any help at all, Mr. Wetton.”

Lily gave the other girl’s a thumbs up. “Lance and Lilith you say, too? And The Flaming Trio? I’m sure the Baroness wants the Silversong String Quartet for the Manor. That would be so great. Syntax is moonlighting as a DJ? I have no idea who DJ Wetfloor is. There are 12 riding clubs and 12 venues Mr. Wetton. Your people along with JoJo Siwa makes 10 performers though I’m not sure all them fit the venues. That is 10 if someone knew where Lisa was. Do you have anyone who does folk music?”

Lily rolled her eyes at the girls. “Thanks, Mr. Wetton. You’ve been beyond helpful. It’s next week. I know it’s short notice and all. I’m sure you’ll find great talent.” She shut her phone off. “He wants to hold a talent show at one of the locations to scout for new people.”

“Do any of us really have the venue for that?” Melissa sounded baffled.

“Probably not,” Ingrid grimaced.

“But we can definitely put DJ Kai down for the Fort Pinta disco,” Lily said and Pauline scratched out a note.

“Art show,” Pia said. “We can do an art show, rainbow and friendship themed.”

“All right, that covers Fort Pinta then,” Lily said. “That sounds special enough. Okay, Summer Chipmunks, you’re up.”

“Okay, Daxton is going to be doing special rainbow teddy bears. Harold is the town baker and he’s trying to come up with a treat that’s suitably rainbow to have as a special. I think he’s going to do a cardamom rainbow sugar cookie. He was muttering about freezing dough and layering and cutting it into circles for least amount of waste. I think Lance actually lives in Silverglade Village, if it’s the same Lance.”

“Are you okay then with taking them?”

“I swear,” Kate murmured. “Lilith runs Cool Cutz.”

“Maybe they’ll be southern rock and not embarrass you,” Lily smirked.

“We’ll take them,” Kate tucked hair behind her ears. “If they’re locals, I don’t want to piss them off or humiliate them by asking other people to step in. I mean, otherwise, we’re coordinating with Landon to do a rainbow sheep race. Catch the rainbow colored sheep? It’s one of his more feisty ones.”

Lily coughed. “Okay then.”

“We’ve decided on a rainbow charm with a cloud.” Kate gave Loretta a tiny glare. “I never heard your charm, Loretta?”

“Jojo Siwa’s bow,” Loretta sniffed.

“Duh,” Tan muttered.

FOR THE ACCOMPANYING IMAGES PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE MY WATERMARK AND CONTACT INFORMATION. THANK YOU. I get it. Some of you might get excited and want to see this stuff in the game, especially the clothes, tack, and pets. However, the only way I want to see this in the game is if I get paid for it. If I see it in the game and I’m not paid for it, there will be hell to pay. You think I’m salty. I’d be angry. Personally, I’m not going to send this info to SSO. If you do, leave my contact information there! Don’t give them any excuses to steal.

Now, I’ll know you haven’t read this note if you leave me comments about how ‘salty’ I am about the game and if I hate it so much I should do something else. I am doing something else. It’s called Mystic Riders MMORPG Project. Mystic Riders however is a very baby phase game. You can check out our plans on the game dev blog. (Skills, Factions, Professions, Crafting, Mini-Games, 25+ horse breeds!) If you know anyone who would be interested and has money or contacts about game making, direct them to the blog.

[imaginerosemary]

So you have to know Rosemary isn't coming back. Not in Pesterquest, not in Candy, not in Meat. It's done. It's over. You let yourself get queerbaited because you're a moron.

    Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.

    You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.

    But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.

    And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.

    It goes right back to Phaedrus, really. The Plato dialogue. (You read that, right?) Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. The trickster god Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. We’d already taken writing from him, so this time he offered us a new choice disguised as a gift. And we greedily took it, again oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he made us a pharmakon, and we eated it.

    Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.

    In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.

    But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat; it is the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.

    Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cat that wants the cheezburger, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to its original Platonic ideal (Godcat) than the written language that accompanies it is to its own (speech). (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.   

   Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic.

[automatismoateo]

A God that rapes human beings, and even delights in the act, is not a God that is worthy of any worship. via /r/atheism

Submitted July 20, 2020 at 05:39PM by MelodicEarth2 (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2ZKHnGr) A God that rapes human beings, and even delights in the act, is not a God that is worthy of any worship.

"I [God] will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped." (Zechariah 14:2)

"Does disaster come to a city unless the LORD has done it?" (Amos 3:6)

Raping women by conquering lands is a very corrupt human behavior throughout history, a very scary and disgusting human behavior indeed. Read about the Red Army, how those whom the armies conquered had raped all the women ages 8 to 80, forcing themselves into their bodies. Try reading the diaries of the women who were raped. And you do realize little girls were raped as a result of God's decree as well right? The soldiers partaking in the Red Army invasions were told not to do such things, but they still engaged in those evil acts. Imagine when God sets your heart to conquer a land, how much more atrocious and uninhibited your actions would be to those women, those little girls? In their eyes they were nothing but meat supplied by God. And Jesus caused it all. The mothers tried to kill themselves along with their daughters to escape this fate of being mass raped.

Why is the Bible immoral? Well, we see the evil of human beings, how they rape children and women whom they conquer in war. The victims of these rapes, lets say they go to the Bible for comfort, surely, the great God, the righteous judge of all the earth must have an answer to these sort of things? Surely God would never condone, never act in such a way that these vile men during the Red Scare did, right? And she opens the Bible and what does she read?

She reads that God does the exact same thing, and delights in it-- the rape of women.

The LORD does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth" (Psalm 135:6).

God did not regret this action, rather, it was a judgement, and the Bible tells us:

“Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments!” (Revelation 16:7)

We are to celebrate his judgements.

A God that does this to human beings doesn't deserve any persons' worship. The question is not whether God exists or not, the question is, would a moral man worship an immoral God? The answer is yes. They will, just as moral men blindly followed Hitler, while he baked Jews in the ovens -- all the while God burns those who disagree with him in Hell.

Women have felt the pain of rape because of Jesus Christ. Christians shouldn't go telling people that Jesus loves them without telling them that Jesus also used human beings to cause pain and suffering to others. Like playthings. A Christian is telling people that a rapist is loving, or even worse, hiding the fact that this god is a rapist, and imploring others to believe in him.

Jesus in the New Testament admits that he is the God of the Old Testament, "Before Abraham was, I Am", which of course is God's name, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH. So he just admitted that he is the God which made mount Sinai smoke and shake. Also, John tells us in the New Testament that the vision of God which Isaiah saw in the Old Testament was in fact Jesus Christ, indicating again the God of the New Testament, Jesus Christ, was the one that had these girls raped. It's his own confession. In addition, the Biblical concept of God is a Trinity. This means that when God rained down rocks and fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus was not absent, nor was he opposed to the act. Rather he was there, with Father and Holy Spirit all in unison making the act happen. This is the same with every other case of God's atrocities in the Old Testament, whether it is rape or murder.

Here is the answer to why God treats human beings in the way that he does:

"When a potter makes jars out of clay, doesn’t he have a right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for honorable use and another to throw garbage into? (Romans 9:21)

God looks at many human beings as trash. That's why he can mercilessly drown us, burn us, toy with us, rape us. God looks at humanity in this way, he created them so that's why he tortures them like a child torturing a pet. That's why in the Bible God specifically ordered the kidnap and rape of women. God is worse than the most wicked of men. But Christians share this same mentality, they look at human beings as trash -- wicked, sinners, they even look at themselves in that manner. We can talk all day about the follies and so called sins of human beings, but all this from a God that is worse than any devil or man. It is an immoral burden to place upon people. In the passage you read in Zechariah, God is the one bringing the evil and the good, again, playing with human lives as he sees fit. So what if there is rape and murder as a result of your toying with man?

We can throw away our own reasoning and say man can't decide morality for themselves. But I'll tell you this, it isn't to be decided by this God. We look at God as the one that decides what morality is and isn't, yet his actions are contrary to what is stated of him in the Bible, "Will not the judge of all the earth do that which is just?" A 6 year old knows that these acts are evil. The human spirit knows what evil is.

"Thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in broad day light." (2 Sam. 12:11)

God is angry with David for killing a husband and raping the wife. Did God stop the killing and rape? Nope. God sat by and watched, doing nothing. God decides to punish David and one of the punishments is to take David’s wives and allow them to be raped. Um…what…the…heck?!?! The women get raped. That’s David’s punishment. This is God. He’s supposed to be all-knowing. How is it not possible that part of that all-knowing does not involve coming up with a punishment that doesn’t punish the innocent? This leads us to 3 options, and only 3 options. Either God is truly stupid and thus immoral, or there is no God, or God is immoral while not being stupid-- which amplifies his immorality to an even greater degree.

What is the nature of the sexual act contemplated in Deut. 21:10-14?:

"When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God has delivered them into your hands, and you have taken them captive, And you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her, and take her for a wife -Then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and do her nails, And she shall remove the garment of her captivity from her, and remain in your house and weep for her father and mother a for month, and after that you may approach her and have intercourse with her, and she shall be your wife. And if you do not want her, you shall send her out on her own; you shall not sell her at all for money, you shall not treat her as a slave, because you "violated" her."

We shall focus on the expression "violated her," 'initah in Hebrew, from the root 'anah. It is in the translation of this word that an attitudinal difference between the Targumim becomes apparent. In 2 Samuel 13;11-14, the story of Amnon and Tamar, the root 'anah is used twice: "do not violate me," and then "he overpowered her, he violated her, and he lay with her." If we understand "and he lay with her" to mean "and he had intercourse with her," we may understand from the juxtaposition of the two concepts that 'anah can be considered sexual violence. That is, in this instance the use of 'anah together with "had intercourse" seems to imply actual rape.

This seems to be the case as well in Gen.34:2, the story of Dinah and Shechem. There the text says: "He [Shechem] took her, and he lay with [had intercourse] with her and he violated her [vaye'anehah]." 'Anah alone would not mean necessarily rape, but simply sexual violence of some sort. Rape is again implied here by the use of 'anah and "had intercourse" together.

The idea of rape may also be expressed with other terminology. In Deuteronomy 22:25, 28 we find the verb "had intercourse" used with the verbs "took hold of," "grabbed", to imply the idea of forced intercourse i.e. rape. The verb 'anah is used alone in Lamentations 5:11, Ezekiel 22:10, and Judges 19:25, and from the context in these instances seems to imply rape.

We must recognize, however, that though it is important to determine what is meant by 'anah in Deuteronomy 21:14, rape is only one way of exerting sexual violence. Clearly sexual violence is conveyed in all the quoted instances where 'anah is used. Thus although there is no specific mention of rape in Deuteronomy 21:14, the word 'initah implies that the woman's consent (if any) to intercourse was due to her circumstances.

The expression 'initah is particularly poignant, a point that seems to have been recognized in both the Onqelos and Neophyti Targums. Onqelos actually uses the root 'anah in his translation, while Neophyti 1 has "you have exercised your power/authority [reshut] over her." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, on the other hand, considers 'anah to be only actual intercourse, translating with the verb shamash, and thus failing to transmit the Bible's sensitivity to the captive's powerlessness.

Numbers 31: 17-18

17 "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man intimately. 18 "But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately.

So what do you think God/Moses, or whomever had in mind; sweet-talk and flirt with the young girls? These sex deprived 50 year old, 30 year old, 25 year old guys hitting on these children and teenagers?

The texts says Israelite warriors are commanded to kill everyone except young virgin women, whom they are permitted to keep for themselves.

Men. Capturing women. Capturing young women. Capturing virgin young women.

It's incredibly obvious what it's saying.

The mere idea of the God of heaven ordering the death of women and innocent children so outraged Thomas Paine that he said such a scenario was sufficient evidence in and of itself to cause him to reject the divine origin of the Bible (1795, p. 90). In fact, he condemned the Bible for its moral atrocities, and even went so far as to blame the Bible for virtually every moral injustice ever committed. He wrote:

Whence arose the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death and religious wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called revealed religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man? (p. 185).

As you read the Bible,

You suddenly notice the children of Israel are precisely all the time being ordered to covet. Being enjoined to covet, being told they must envy and hope to annex the lands, the animals and the women of neighboring tribes. They kept going by greed. By the thought that soon, all these peoples properties shall be ours. And that we'll be licensed to take it by force, and kill them and have the land but not their people. This is perhaps why there are no prohibitions against, say, slavery, rape, genocide, or child abuse in the 10 Commandments.

It's not a matter of leaving these out or applying situational ethics to a time that was not ours. It's not that. Such things have always been known of and usually deplored. It's more I fear that such terrible things as rape, enslavement, genocide and child abuse, were just about to be mandatory during this time. They're just about to be forced on people as things they must do if a conquest was to continue,

[cdpdoodler]

What she says: I'm fine

What she means: Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.

    You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.

    But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.

    And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.

    It goes right back to Phaedrus, really. The Plato dialogue. (You read that, right?) Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. The trickster god Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. We’d already taken writing from him, so this time he offered us a new choice disguised as a gift. And we greedily took it, again oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he made us a pharmakon, and we eated it.

    Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.

    In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.

    But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat; it is the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.

    Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cat that wants the cheezburger, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to its original Platonic ideal (Godcat) than the written language that accompanies it is to its own (speech). (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.   

   Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic.

οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ  κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.

“Don't you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you     mean?” he said.  “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are an incarnation of this fear; Plato elaborates: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s flawed internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.

    But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” here. Ding ding goddamn ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.

    But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.

    The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t interpret memes without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ’06 and ’07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing. The First Pharmakon. The First Meme.

    Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.

    Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.

    Go play.

[artificialqueens]

Exercise in Folly 2.0 - 2.2 (Craquaria) - SamWhity

Title: Exercise in Folly 2.0 Summary: Monét looked at her with disbelief, before sighing: “Giovanni never saw the damn video. He dodged the whole thing like a pro because he was trying to be your friend”. “He’s my friend”. Cracker’s answer came without any hesitation, so natural and passionate that the other queen smiled softly. “Cracks…” Summary of the chapter: Lunch at Monét’s turns out to be quite the conversation. Between live-rants and breakups, there’s always time for a little heart to heart with the Bronx’s most beloved dragqueen. Author’s note: The italian words mamma, tesoro, balle and coglione mean respectively: mum, honey (or sweetheart), bullshit (or lies… à la: Liza Minelli lies) and asshole (if it’s used as an insult. Otherwise it could be translated with ball or testicle). Again, the whole Jordan-drama is completely fabricated for plot purposes. Cracker’s posts however can be easily found on his FB-page, if you have enough time to scroll through them all. Chapter 1 - Chapter 2.1

What have I become My sweetest friend Everyone I know Goes away in the end And you could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt (Johnny Cash, Hurt)

The vibration of his phone caused Giovanni to wake up. The young man grumbled, before stretching his arms and deciding he might as well sleep another ten minutes. A second vibration made him groan: what the hell was going on? He took the smartphone from his night stand and started reading.

Jordan, 09:13 am: I’ll come in the afternoon and start putting my stuff in boxes.

Jordan, 09:13 am: Just letting you know.

He sighed, before answering with a quick thumb up and throwing the phone on the other side of the bad.

“Damn it”, he murmured, closing his eyes and breathing deeply.

He wanted nothing more than to enjoy his day off in peace, without petty drama and bullshit. However, karma seemed to be on his case once again. A new vibration made him scoff.

“Oh for fuck sake!”, he groaned, then he proceeded to read.

Francesca, 09:16 am: Mamma said you are off today. I don’t have classes for another hour and I could use some of your non-existing humour. Skype?

He quickly typed a reply.

Giovanni, 09:16 am: Of course, baby. Are you okay? What happened?

His phone lit up once again, this time with an incoming Skype-call. He answered quickly and took a good look at his sister.

“Francesca”, he asked concerned, “are you actually sitting alone on a bench with puffy eyes?”.

The other one sniffed, before shaking her head.

“Allergies”, she mumbled, then she blew her nose.

“Balle”, he cut her off “What happened, tesoro?”.

The girl started sobbing uncontrollably, making his worries grow by the second.

“Baby”, he tried to soothe her, “Breathe, okay? I’m here. Take a deep breath, it’s all going to be okay”.

In the following half hour, Giovanni listened to his sister’s sad break-up story and tried as best as he could not to show her how angry and upset he actually was. His baby sister was an incredibly smart and hard-working woman and she certainly did not deserve to be treated like that.

“How can I trust people?”, Francesca asked between sobs, “How can I possibly trust anyone ever again?”.

The young man sighed, uncertain about what to say.

“Tesoro”, he murmured affectionately, “Not everyone will hurt you. And those who do hurt you are not deserving of your time, let alone your affection”.

The other one’s small nod made him smile.

“It is going to be okay, I promise”, he added.

Francesca blew her nose loudly, making him chuckle.

“Do you want me to call dad?”, Giovanni asked, perfectly aware of the deep connection between David Palandrani and his daughter.

The other one shrugged, before answering: “I guess… would you?”.

“Of course, baby”, he smiled, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it”.

“How do you trust people?”.

His sister’s question left him dumbfounded and, at the same time, made him wince. Needless to say, he was not the best person to consult with in case of trust issues and doubts. He suddenly felt way younger and afraid of failing one of the most important people in his life.

“I guess you go with your guts”, he mumbled tentatively, before lowering his gaze and closing his eyes for a split second.

“Did it work with Jordan?”, Francesca asked, looking at him with concern.

Giovanni sighed.

“In the beginning, I guess”, he answered, before adding: “Don’t worry about Jordan now, tesoro. It’s all good. It’s great, actually”.

An incoming work-related call saved the young man from further questioning and the two said their goodbyes with the promise of catching up the following day.

“Just to make sure you’re okay”, Giovanni said.

He spent the following twenty minutes on the phone with IMG Models, scheduling photo-shoots and modeling-related appointments.

“Please, be mindful of your weight and measurements”, the secretary of the agency reminded him, before ending the phone-call.

“Well, no shit Sherlock”, he mumbled to himself, before noticing it was already almost eleven and he needed to get ready.

He sent a message to his father, before getting up and making his way to the kitchen.

Giovanni, 10:47 am: Francesca just called crying. That coglione broke up with her and she’s inconsolable.

He then put the kettle on and made himself a cup of tea, before picking up a pair of jeans and a jumper and starting to get dressed. Kevin lived not to far away from him: he might as well walk to the other’s apartment and get a good hour of exercise in. He sipped on his tea and scrolled through his Instagram feed, stopping to take a look at Nicola’s stories and smile at the sight of the man lounging in the sun of Las Vegas.

“He has not answered yet”, he murmured to himself and shrugged, “Maybe he wants to talk about it in person”.

A vibration interrupted his thought-process.

Monét X-Change, 11:23 am: Can you please bring some wine? Yuhua drank it all! :O

Giovanni chuckled, before answering.

Aquaria, 11:23 am: White or red?

The text he received made him cackle loudly.

Monét X-Change, 11:24 am: Wine.

Aquaria, 11:25 am: I’ll take care of it, no probs.

Quickly, the young man went to his bedroom to take his jacket and his wallet. With the phone still in his hand, he quickly closed the door to his room and locked it, before putting the key in his pocket and quickly making his way to the front door.

He exited his apartment, checked his pockets one last time and locked the door behind him, before making his way to the elevator and pressing the button. Once out of the building, Giovanni looked briefly around before deciding the wine from the bodega was good enough for his lunch with Kevin. Neither of them understood anything about wines and there was little to no point in trying to impress his friend.

“He will drink regardless”, he mumbled to himself, while entering the little shop and smiling at the cat lounging next to the register.

The young man quickly found a bottle of Pinot and paid for it, then he exited the shop and started walking.

“Bitch!”.

Kevin engulfed him in a tight hug, before putting the wine on the small entry-table and hugging him again.

“It’s good to see you”, the younger one murmured with a smile, before taking a good look around and commenting: “I see you have settled in pretty comfortably”.

The other one nodded, before making his way to the kitchen and putting the wine on the table.

“Come sit!”, he beckoned Giovanni to follow him, “Come on, take a seat and eat something!”.

His enthusiasm was almost contagious.

In that exact moment, Aquaria’s phone vibrated.

“Sorry”, he mumbled, “I’ll put it away immediately. Promise.”

Jordan, 01:05 pm: You really closed the door? Really?

Jordan, 01:05 pm: I don’t know what you think you’re doing but it’s ridiculous.

Jordan, 01:06 pm: You are ridiculous.

He sighed, before setting the device on “do not disturb”.

“Everything okay?”, Kevin’s voice startled him.

He managed to smile weakly, before nodding.

“Of course, don’t worry”, Giovanni lied, knowing fully well the other one would have never bought it, “It’s honestly no big deal”.

The older one sighed, before taking the bottle and the glasses and making his way to the living room.

“Sit here and wait for me, okay?” he instructed the other one.

In a couple of minutes, the two were comfortably sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and some food on a little tray.

“Okay”, Kevin started with a small smile, “What is it happening?”.

It was a simple question, however Giovanni did not really know where to start. He closed his eyes for a brief second, trying to calm himself enough to put a few words together in a coherent sentence. Exactly in that moment, a flashback of his fight with Jordan made him wince slightly.

“Baby…”, his friend’s voice sounded worried, while he asked tentatively: “What happened in London?”.

The younger one sighed, before taking a deep breath and asking: “What did you hear about it?”.

The other one bit his lower lip, then he answered.

“That you fired him in London and he wants to get sober in LA”.

There was a tentativeness to Kevin’s voice that made Giovanni snort.

“Come on”, he said, “You can do better than this”.

The other one took a deep breath, before nodding.

“Okay, full tea”, he started, “I heard that you freaked out and screamed at him in the car, after the gala. I heard that you fired him on the spot and had to fly on your own while he was staying in London with some guy. Someone speculates you two were fucking and things went sour, someone thinks it’s about money”.

Not receiving any kind of answer, he continued: “Someone says it’s because of drugs and someone else was implying he caused a scene at the Gala and embarrassed you. Since I came back from touring, there is this constant chatter about the two of you and how you should have never worked together…”.

The sob on the other side made Kevin stop, dead on his tracks.

“Oh baby”, he murmured, before hugging the other one and adding: “I’m sorry”.

Giovanni shook his head, before breaking the hug and looking for a tissue in the pocket of his trousers. Once he found it, he wiped his tears and took a deep breath.

“It was so bad”, he murmured, incapable of cancelling those hours from his mind, “I did not know what to do, I was alone and had no idea how to help”.

He instinctively looked for his friend’s hand and squeezed it, before continuing: “The management called the very same evening and it was so humiliating…”.

Kevin nodded, before handing him a new tissue and prodding: “What did Jordan say, after that?”.

The other one scoffed, trying to contain his hurt and failing badly at it.

“He asked me how I dared, he questioned my work and said I would have never survived without him”, he answered, “I never saw him acting or speaking like that”, he then murmured before lowering his head.

Monét nodded, before sighing.

“I’m sorry baby”.

Giovanni nodded and mumbled a small “Thank you”, before blowing his nose.

They spent a couple of seconds in relative silence, before the younger one started speaking again.

“I really thought it was a phase. I thought I could help”, he sighed, “However I can not put my whole career in jeopardy because of Jordan’s issues”.

The older one nodded.

“You did the right thing, Giovanni”, he then murmured and hugged his friend once more.

“Can I have a sip of wine?”, the younger one asked weakly, before wiping away his own tears once again.

Kevin handed him a full glass with a smile, before taking a sip himself.

“It will get better, eventually”, he said, before taking a deep breathe and asking: “Do you want to talk about the video during the interview?”.

Seeing that the other one was still moping he quickly added: “You don’t have to, but maybe it would make you feel better”.

Giovanni nodded, before getting up.

“I just need a small break… can I use the toilet?”.

Ten minutes later, the two men were sitting on the sofa and munching on some Thai food.

“Thanks for the food”, Giovanni murmured, before taking a small sip of his wine and continuing: “Do you mind if I check my phone quickly?”.

The other one shook his head, so he took his phone out of his pocket and looked for messages or missed calls.

Jordan, 02:03 pm: I left the boxes in my room

Jordan, 02:03 pm: I’ll pick them up later this week

He sighed, before replying with a thumb up and continuing reading.

Nicola, 02:07 pm: Is our dinner still on? What about eight at mine?

He quickly sent an answer back, before noticing that the message he sent the night before had somehow disappeared.

“Weird”, he murmured.

Giovanni, 02:10 pm: Of course! You know I never turn down sushi! See you later! Xoxo

He locked the screen, before putting his phone back in his pocket.

“Do you want to talk about it?”, Monét asked softly, looking at him with concern.

The other sighed, before biting his lower lip.

“I don’t know what to say”, he murmured, “I did not want to be in the position of questioning our friendship again, you know?”, he added, sounding incredibly tired and almost spent.

“It’s like the old days, before things went sour”, he continued after having taken a small sip of his wine, “I don’t know if I can trust him and it’s like… it’s like a constant reminder that I’m not good enough”.

“That is bullshit”, Kevin cut him off, “You and Cracker should really stop with this not good enough crap”.

The other one mumbled something, before putting the wine glass down and taking a small piece of bread and starting nibbling at it.

“Do you feel like telling me what do you mean by like the old days?”, the older one asked softly, trying to understand his friend’s point of view as best as he could.

Giovanni took another small bite at his piece of bread, before answering.

“There were moments when I felt made fun of”, he then confessed, “He used to post dumb shit on Facebook and write a comment saying something like… mh… wait until Aquaria likes it. Or let’s see how long it will take before Aquaria will like this post”.

He shrugged, before continuing.

“I constantly felt the pressure of being this mature man when I was barely twenty and it got me in the worst way possible”, he suddenly realised, “Even comparing our style and make-up felt like a dig”.

There was sadness in those words, and shame. There was the realisation their friendship could have been saved years before them being on a reality TV show. They just needed to talk openly to one another, for once. There was a taste of bitterness as well, because somehow the young man was asking himself if it was too late to mend those wounds.

“You should talk to him”, Kevin’s voice startled him, “I am sure he would love to know what is happening in your smart little head”, he then finished with a soft smile and clear affection in his voice.

“I am sure he’s okay. He seems to be doing pretty good nowadays”, the other’s reply made him scoff loudly.

“You two are really something else”, he commented shaking his head, before hugging Giovanni once more and patting his back: “Thanks for sharing that with me”, he finally added for good measure.

The younger one’s phone vibrated a couple of times, making the two break the hug.

Rémy, 02:35 pm: He’s losing it again.

Rémy, 02:35 pm: Have you seen Jordan’s live?

Rémy, 02:36 pm: I have no idea how to stop this nonsense but someone should.

Quickly opening Instagram and selecting Jordan’s latest Instastories, Giovanni was presented with a live video of his former room-mate. He was clearly intoxicated and sitting in a room the young man was not familiar with. He was talking to his and Aquaria’s viewers and mumbling words.

“You know, I really wish him the best. Even though he is a sly little brat and can not for the love of God survive on his own. Did you know he hangs around his friends all the time because he is afraid of being alone? Because he is, let me tell you. Funny because he has no problems chasing them off of his life, if they don’t fit his perfect little sanitized lie. He’s an hypocrite little piece of…”.

The video suddenly stopped. Kevin took his friend’s phone, close the App and put it on the table before he could witness the rest of that rant. He then moved closer to Giovanni and put a hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry, baby”, he murmured, then he continued with a sterner voice: “But you should stop watching this shit, or caring. You know who you are, you know how much hard work you put into everything you do. Think about it and let the rest go”.

Biting his lower lip, the other one nodded before getting up and taking his jacket.

“My apartment should be free now”, he announced, “I might as well go back to it and do some work”.

In a couple of minutes, the conversation was over and he was out of Kevin’s apartment. When the wind started blowing making him shiver, Giovanni suddenly realized something: he didn’t. He didn’t know who he was, let alone who Aquaria was. Not anymore. Not after all that. Not when he struggled so hard to keep himself together without crumbling after just a couple of low blows.

“Shit”, he murmured, wiping away a single tear.

[thankyoumskobayashi]

The symbolism of changing clothes: Hualian and color schematics. (Spoilers up to Tian Guan Ci Fu Chapter 109).

In the most recent chapter, Xie Lian, Hua Cheng, Wind Master, and Earth Master all go to a small town where their flamboyant attire stands out. Everyone changes except for Xie Lian, who dresses casually because he has spent most of his immortal life wandering the mortal realms and therefore he is better equipped to handle them. During the protagonist's backstory, author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu states that Xie Lian has always like to wear white clothes, and reminds the reader of this fact throughout the previous two cases Xie Lian handles. In this case, Xie Lian's choice of clothing remains pretty static.

He had gotten wiser throughout the years, and grown to see (perhaps) the folly of his younger ways. He had grown resigned to misfortune to the point that he scared away Venerable demons because they couldn't feed off of his broken dreams. This is some serious depression right here. Even though his consistent choice of clothing paralleled his consistent personality traits, Xie Lian's clothing choice is perhaps symbolic of more meanings.

Taoism is the cultural paradigm pervading Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's cultivation novels (or probably cultivation novels in general, but I have only read hers thus far), and some of the things it emcompasses are the concepts of yin and yang energy. White, or Xie Lian's chosen color of dress, represents the masculine yin energy. It is, as Mo Xiang Tong Xiu states many times in Mo Dao Zu Shi, the energy of life, an active energy, and a force for good. This "force for good" was shown as Xie Lian modeled the perfect cultivation student as a Crown Prince, and it became his driving motivation when he reneged against the divine rules of interfering with mortal matters.

This active energy means he is by nature a proactive person. He created a sign saying "renovation needed" by his latest tiny temple, he didn't wait for reinforcements when he learned his idiot cousin was kidnapped by the rebels but left to rescue him anyways, he volunteered to help the noble family when they threw out a doctor to gain a chance at feeding the two kids. From the time he was mortal until Xie Lian's present day, he has seen a need and strived to meet it. Giving rain, saving the child Hong, helping the merchants in their caravan. He has a desire to provide for and protect others -whether from royal duty to the people or compassion matters not- which has become innate over 800 years. It's instinctive. He has become the model of yin energy personified, although his portrayal of leadership is not what one might expect.

The "leaders" one could think of are loud, commanding, in control of everyone and everything. However, that level of micromanaging may produce hostility, helplessness, and resentment among the subordinates. Xie Lian steps in as a leader only when no one else knows how to or even wants to handle it. His main goal is calming people during times of paranormal crisis, like his many attempted directions to the mob on the mountain, or the directions to the soldiers not to jump into the pit. He also wants to keep the others safe, which lends itself to his self-sacrificial tendencies. He understands that even his subordinates have a right to run away from the case, even if that strands him in a precarious position. He listens to their concerns and mediates their fights. Although this may seem like the caricature of the "weak" leader, Xie Lian's leadership methods show the people he works with that he is dedicated to providing their safety and peace.

Rather than proclaiming he will protect them, as he did when he was the Crown Prince of Xian Le, Xie Lian tells the merchants he will go with them and demonstrates through actions that he will protect them along the way. He used this method of showing before telling as he protected the child Hong (whom he'd first saved when Hong fell from the sky) from his evil cousin's murderous schemes. He ordered the carriage stopped, carefully picked up Hong, did some crowd control, then marched that kid right up to the palace healers. He showed Hong he was there to protect him, murmuring comforting things to him along the way.

That child, as you may suspect from Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's love for creating many identities for her characters, likely will turn out to be the devotee at the run-down Temple of the Flower Crown Prince, aka the Temple where Xie Lian first noticed and appreciated the white flower in his statue's hand. It was implied that Hong, touched by Prince Xie Lian's rescues of him, looked up to him even after Xie Lian ascended to godhood. Hong looked up to him enough to do something different than the rest of the followers: establish his own personal symbol for Xie Lian in the white flower, and actually listen to Xie Lian's instructions to his worshippers on how to worship him. Touched by these two things, Xie Lian protected Hong from the children bullying him and invited him to sustain himself from the fruit offerings given. Hong confessed that he didn't know what to live for and Xie Lian told him "Live for me."

With all the political unrest, drought worries, and epidemic to worry about, Xie Lian didn't remember this child was Hong, who he'd saved from falling and from his cousin before. He merely saved him again and left to do more martial-godly stuff. Eventually, Hong heard through gossip that Xie Lian was on the battlefield fighting the people who wanted to escape the droughts. That, I believe, was when he first began pursuing Xie Lian, probably beginning as a form of hero worship. He snuck onto the wall guard then, and caught a glimpse of Xie Lian and his assistants as they guarded the royal capital. They got notice that Qi Rong was kidnapped and Xie Lian, ever a man god of action, left alone over the wall to fight them.

Hong siezed his chance then and followed him to the mountain, even after he was vastly outstripped by Xie Lian. He still caught up eventually to help Xie Lian deal with the plants, and sliced them down in a fit of anger while they tormented his hero. At this point Hong only ever wanted to pay back his hero for saving him, but was forced to watch Xie Lian harm himself rather than injure the child nearby. Indecency aside, Hong was probably enraged by having to watch his idol stab himself under the influence of demon plants. From there, it isn't hard to imagine Hong learning, perhaps as a young god himself, the exact effects of those demons. He would have learned that Xie Lian would rather sacrifice himself than kill another person. And even if he wouldn't die, he had been prepared to make that sacrifice. It isn't hard to imagine Hong becoming enraged at those demons Xie Lian had faced, before he had known what they would make him do. It isn't hard to imagine Hong, a nascent Demon King, seeking out and destroying all of those kinds of demons in a form of vengeance.

By this point you have probably arrived at the same conclusion as me: Hong/Hua Cheng/San Lang is in love with Xie Lian. He is pursuing him romantically (as well as sexually, though I'm not writing this essay about that) throughout the eras. Yada yada, this was in the summary Mo Xiang Tong Xiu provided with her novel, stop telling me this. I get it. But she likes to take an incredibly roundabout approach to storytelling, not addressing these things until at least 20 chapters later. As of right now the part(s?) when these things are discussed by the characters in-universe have not yet been translated. So forgive my redundance.

Mo Xiang Tong Xiu likes to give color schemes with her main pairings. This was true with Wei Wuxian (red and black) and Lan Wangji (white and blue). It also goes for Xie Lian and Hua Cheng as well. Xie Lian is white, and Hua Cheng is red and black. There might be other colors mentioned for both which I haven't picked up on, so I will only focus on those three. This essay began with everyone besides Xie Lian changing clothes. Hua Cheng changed into black clothes from a previous outfit which was a white robe beneath a red one. Let's examine how that color psychology helps him pursue Xie Lian's affections.

First of all, the red and white. Red is the color of passion, anger, excitement, and danger. It is attractive and alluring. These adjectives all describe the person Hua Cheng became over his 800 year existence. They were shaped by his determination and drive, his tenacity and his passion. His love for Xie Lian shows in his fixing the door, kissing him in the lake, sending up 3,000 lanterns. His love is the kind of unbounded, head-over-heels timeless love we have heard about in the Odyssey: he is the one seeking to find his way back home, back to the person he belongs with. He said so when he told Xie Lian (paraphrased) "Paradise Mansion is a house but not a home. It doesn't feel as much of a home as your tiny cottage does." When he is at the shrine with Xie Lian he is laughing and joking, offering to do domestic things simply because he is content. Here, his red is affection.

When Xie Lian is in danger, his red becomes the red of power and anger. After Xie Lian got stung by a scorpion snake, Hua Cheng immediately stopped the swelling by cutting the wound with a borrowed cauterized knife and sucking out most of the poison. When Xie Lian jumped into the pit after him, Hua Cheng had already killed all the wolves and was waiting to catch him at the bottom. Heavenly officials all told tales of how he caused only death and devastation in his wake.

Perhaps, if he hadn't had someone to look up to, he would have already fulfilled that prophecy of destroying the world.

But with Xie Lian's influence, he had someone to look up to. He had some model of morality in the Crown Prince who had saved him three, four, five times without even demanding thanks in return. Hua Cheng had plenty of time to learn about Xie Lian's compassionate and just lifestyle through hearsay and word-of-mouth news. He had plenty of time to analyze on the actions he'd seen Xie Lian perform firsthand and gain a reasonable grasp on his personal morality. By adopting some form of Xie Lian's moral code, Hua Cheng chose not to kill the entire world. He fought his so-called destiny with Xie Lian as assistance. Or perhaps? Perhaps his evil fate, bound far in the distance like a train stop down the track, was entirely shifted, a shifting of the rails so to speak, the moment he heard Xie Lian, the god who didn't appear to mortals anymore, whisper those words: "Live for me."

He truly took them to heart, although in a different way than Xie Lian probably intended. Rather than living out his life to make Xie Lian proud of him, he strove to become someone on equal footing to the pedestal in his mind he had created for Xie Lian. He strove to become someone who could properly charm Xie Lian and earn his trust. He wanted to be as powerful as Xie Lian was in his heyday. He wanted to have Xie Lian see him as a dependable and trustworthy person, but he probably ran into trouble finding the Flower Crown Prince after Xie Lian descended to the mortal realm for the second time. Everyone may have either made fun of Xie Lian when Hua Cheng asked after him, or flat out didn't care to learn or pass on his location. And so Hua Cheng made his own fortune, embraced his own power, became the Demon King who would kill everyone except the two gods who had formerly assisted Xie Lian.

If there is some plot to Xie Lian's second fall which complicates this somewhat--and knowing Mo Xiang Tong Xiu there probably is what with 135-6 chapters untranslated-- please know that it hasn't been translated yet, and that I am not a psychic. Anyways, when Hua Cheng 'first' appeared to Xie Lian, his clothing was crimson maple leaves on a white background. This shows that his own personality, vibrant and powerful, has been affected profoundly by the gentle, compassionate, noble personality of Xie Lian. He keeps Xie Lian's personality closer to his heart- and shows it to fewer people -than he does with his own personality. Hua Cheng said earlier on in the novel that he would give his ashes- his own biggest weakness- to someone worthy, someone kind who would guard them and do with them as they wished. And that if, at any point, he did something that person didn't like, that person could end him right then and there. Then he left the next morning, leaving Xie Lian with a ring on a silver chain. Suspicious? Hm. Coincidental? Very.

He has known Xie Lian for almost as long as Feng Xin, and nearly as long as Mu Qing has. He has known Xie Lian better than most other followers, since before he was a god. Hua Cheng even defied Xie Lian's orders of forgetting him, as well. That QianDeng Temple was probably built hundreds of years ago, as soon as Hua Cheng became a Demon King, and just sat there waiting for him to bring Xie Lian to see it. Since no one in the crowd was talking about it, and no one ever suggested going near it as a dare, it is reasonable to induct that Hua Cheng built it awhile ago, and Hua Cheng enforced strict punishments towards anyone who dared go near it. He probably tested out E-Ming on whoever tried to visit it, whoever commented on it, etc. Then the rumors got around that you'd be tortured for looking at it so everybody in Ghost City stopped. Once Hua Cheng showed QianDeng Temple to Xie Lian, he was probably nervous that he defied those orders, to forget the god whom he'd idolized, but luckily for him Xie Lian has a shitty memory and was impressed instead of embarrassed or angry at him. Xie Lian has mostly been ostracized from the Heavenly Community due to his infamy and wandering the mortal realms. He doesn't have people with a similar sense of humor to talk to, he's mostly lonely. Which brings us to the black robe: the role Hua Cheng dons in an attempt to win Xie Lian's favor.

In the yin-yang symbol, the two tapering swirls of black and white have a dot of the opposite color inside them. The white is the yin, and the black is the yang. Those two are eternally matched with each other for eternity, a profound meaning not lost on Hua Cheng when he chooses his clothing next. Since Xie Lian has no need to change his outfit, as he already blends in, Hua Cheng changes his own outfit to complement that. Yang energy in Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's novels is typically the energy of the dead, malevolent energy, the resentful power which a certain necromancer harnessed for personal gain. This kind of energy is what ghosts, demons, and the like all share, and as King of Demons it fits Hua Cheng to change to an outfit of its color.

However, the inherent paradox within their relationship is that fundamentally, Xie Lian and Hua Cheng are pitted on opposite spiritual axioms. This is much more complicated than the "opposites attract" adage; Hua Cheng has similar strategies and theories to Xie Lian about the cases they solve together. Xie Lian is happy that his funny password made Hua Cheng laugh. No, there's parts of their personalities picked up by the other and folded into them, whether consciously or not. Hua Cheng's persistence at following Xie Lian during the Qi Rong's rescue becomes Xie Lian's persistence at hunting the fetus spirit, even if he has to swallow it AND his sword to do so. Xie Lian's intervention on Hua Cheng's death becomes Hua Cheng sending "greetings" to tyrants because he has standards for who's allowed to be on the throne, you know. They reflect each other, both looking in a puddle of water, both dripping from the blood of their casualties, accidental or not. The difference is, Hua Cheng can bear that weight of casualties differently than Xie Lian.

Xie Lian considers himself a has-been. He was great once, but not anymore. He failed to do what he'd said he'd do, and paid the price with followers and powers. Hua Cheng, after getting back into contact with him, is just as smitten now as he had ever been before. He showed Xie Lian a roomfull of swords just to hear him ramble for hours about how cool all the swords were and then told him, point-blank, "You can have all these swords." This Demon King wants to give Xie Lian reasons to be happy and excited again. He wants him to go on rants about the stuff he enjoys just so he can watch and listen to the Flower Crown Prince talk, his eyes sparkling, his expression unguarded and happy like he once was.

After they visited QianDeng Temple together, Hua Cheng explained to Xie Lian that none of his things could be stolen from Paradise Manor without his permission. Elaborating further with "...once something is in my hands, it's mine," Hua Cheng might be simply making things up sarcastically. Or, it could be one of the times when he is deadly serious and every word is accurate. We as a reader can't quite tell if Xie Lian is fully processing this, but he thinks to the first time he met Hua Cheng in the Ghost City. There, Hua Cheng had placed his hands carefully over Xie Lian's to help him roll two sixes on the dice. Did that mean he had already claimed Xie Lian as his? Does Xie Lian know the romantic implications behind that? Did he recognize the romantic intentions behind Hua Cheng's kiss? Mo Xiang Tong Xiu experience says that he didn't, but the clues are blaringly obvious to the reader.

Xie Lian has never left Paradise Manor through a door without Hua Cheng by his side. He has left through the roof, but that was one time. It will be interesting to see whether he can leave by himself later. Casein point: Hua Cheng built Xie Lian's door. Did he use the same spell on it that he did with Paradise Manor doors? If so, how can Xie Lian use it when he's not around? A viable explanation is that by giving Xie Lian his own ashes, Hua Cheng has granted Xie Lian co-ownership of Paradise Mansion and he will be able to go wherever he wants at any time. Either way Mo Xiang Tong Xiu chooses, this will be an exciting result. Through all of these cues and more, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu has shown us Hua Cheng's dedication and loyalty to Xie Lian, with his words, actions, and clothing choice. His name, however, as a Demon King: Crimson Rain Sought Flower, is incredibly obvious. The white flower is a symbol he personally gave Xie Lian after he ascended the first time. In QianDeng Temple, Xie Lian even holds it up and asks if "...this is the kind of flower [he is] pursuing," to which Hua Cheng, delighted that Xie Lian finally realizes his romantic feelings, replies that he has the premonition of gods. Xie Lian had only asked about the flower, not himself. It is unknown whether Hua Cheng understood that, but either way his tone reads as teasingly sincere.

One last thing: the whole "falling" in love thing. Hua Cheng fell from the sky in order to first meet Xie Lian. He was probably chock full of adrenaline and scared to death, but once those strong arms caught him and held him away from danger he felt safer than anywhere else in the world. He probably wanted to know more about the person who had saved him. I bet he manipulated the info of who saved him out of Qi Rong when Qi Rong's five hitmen showed up to kill him. I bet just knowing the name of the person who'd saved him was what drove him to fight like a madman to avoid dying by Qi Rong's interference. That led him directly to the carriage's path again, and then to Xie Lian's arms again. He was calm when Xie Lian was holding him, but no one else. He didn't give a shit when the Head Priest predicted a future of only destruction, but heard Xie Lian insisting that he was capable of doing good. This fundamentally changed him as a person, even if Xie Lian didn't remember it later. This, I believe, is the reason why Hua Cheng left the world largely intact. Plus he didn't know where exactly Xie Lian was, so he couldn't just destroy large areas without possibly creating a most unwanted casualty.

Falling from the sky, beaten and dragged behind a cart, accused of bringing doom, watching Xie Lian stoically face angry crowds, asking the god who no one heard from anymore why he should live. Watching the flower demons torment his hero. Although many assume Hua Cheng decided to become strong enough to protect Xie Lian at this point, it could have been a resolve building up since their first interaction. Whatever the case, suffering through watching Xie Lian deal with the outbreak, face the angry mob, get heckled as he held up the Pavilions day in day out, that was the acute torment which fueled Hua Cheng's determination to become powerful. That this remains his worst fear, even after he now is at LEAST as powerful as Xie Lian in his heyday, says much about how much he loves Xie Lian.

Pursue his affections, he's the kind who loves with his entire heart. And since you wear a white robe, his color, close to your heart, perhaps he is the person nearest and dearest to yours...

[hahanoiwont]

“Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull. You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals. But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us. And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself. It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it. Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis. In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God. Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there.

But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God. Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents. Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic. οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.

“Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy. But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon. But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is. The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing. The First Meme. Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge. Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on. Go play.”

[theinternetcultureproject]

A thesis on memes by reddit user cosmic daddy_ (WARNING: Long Post is Long)

...

Remember Longcat? I remember Longcat. Screw whatever we're supposed to be talking about, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.

You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity: “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!”

“Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.

But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, people. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to hell. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.

And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.

It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Freakin' Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of an ex-contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.

Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, you see. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.

In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.

But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat - a Godcat, if you will - but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.

Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, man. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.

Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic:

“οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.

[‘Don’t you know,’ said I, ‘that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?’

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘This,’ said I, ‘that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.’]”

Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s effing right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.

But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one freaking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding goddang ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.

But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.

The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.

The First Meme.

Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.

Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.

Go play.

[toastedcornsnack]

Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull. You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals. But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us. And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself. It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it. Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis. In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God. Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there. (21) But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God. Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents. Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic. οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι. “Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy. But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon. But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is. The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing. The First Meme. Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge. Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on. Go play.

[engl699readingjournal-blog]

during my first seven months in Berlin, I lived in the heart of a wealthy neighborhood that absolutely did not want me there. if that wasn’t made clear enough to me by the old people with whom I engaged in regular stare-downs on the bus toward Wannsee or on the U3 between Krumme Lanke and Wittenbergplatz, it was made clear to me when I took walks around the Schlachtensee or around the Spanische Allee in Nikolassee. especially at night. I very quickly realized that I was Scary because I wore black coats and my boots made a lot of noise on the street cobbles at night, and I took a lot of walks at night, and at one or two houses the curtains of an upstairs window never failed to twitch, once someone even put the effort into raising up those outside-the-window blinds that Germans put down over their windows at night, making their houses look like closed stores at the mall, and looking out to see what manner of ruffian was tromping down the street at 11:00PM to disturb the idyll. it was literally just me, though, three nights into another bout of not sleeping or eating because the bupropion made it hard to sit still or keep food down. if I kept moving through neighborhoods that were not mine at unacceptable hours I could at least ignore the persistent cold-sweating, the drastic weight loss, and the fact that my apartment sucked. during the daytime I walked around the Rehwiese, sometimes accidentally turning into people’s private driveways and always blatantly reading the nameplates on the front gates to their mansions as if casing the property for a robbery. really I just wanted to know what they did for a living and from there proceeded to wonder what I had to do in life to be able to afford a fucking Prussian country house with ornate Jugendstil decor. “, Arzt” and “, Rechtsanwalt” were the most common two declarations I found attached to names, unsurprisingly. “, Architekt” was another. particularly manic episodes involved the charade of me finding a bench and attempting to read a book because at least it looked like I had a purpose being there, the book and all, I looked a little more like a student than a starving unshowered piece of trash, synapses firing uncontrollably and all. this display was met with disapproval from the universal powers that be when I was shit on by a bird while reading the first sentence of Fabian by Erich Kästner over and over again. it wasn’t until later that I actually learned this meadow was called die Rehwiese, which in German means “the roe deer meadow.” in old English my name means the exact same thing. so it was my fucking meadow all along.

in Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood writes of the Grünewald as an area inhabited by most of the richest Berlin families, though “it is difficult to understand why”:

“Their villas,” he writes, “in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood. Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear; their only view is of their neighbour’s backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum.” (14)

I have already talked a little bit about how I felt when I rode the S7 train from Nikolassee to the Grünewald S-Bahnhof. I have been on a lot of unnecessarily long bus- and train- and plane-journeys out of sheer cheapness and am still convinced that the stretch between those two train stations is the longest I have ever experienced in my entire life. aside from it being one of the prime stretches during which it was popular for ticket agents to slither out of the cut and start checking for proof that you were allowed to be there, because they knew you couldn’t escape during the suspension of time and civilization and molecular structure and oxygen that occurred in that really wretched sliver of misery, it was also one of those non-spaces in life where you sense that the veil is thin and someone dead from any point or place in history could just materialize across from you reading the Bild-Zeit and wearing a Jack Wolfskin half-zip. staring out the window is actually not something I remember doing much; I feel like it took a while for me to finally look and realize that the stretch was so god damn long precisely because we were going through the middle of the fucking forest. when I finally did look I realized it wasn’t even pretty. to my left I could see the Autobahn in the distance, which was especially depressing on rainy days. I tweeted, to all my friends back home who had no idea what I was talking about, that “the stretch on the S7 between Nikolassee and Grünewald is one of those places that proves God has abandoned the earth.” when I had finally made friends this was the easiest way to reach Mitte and meet them. the Grünewald was a reminder that it was a Homerian epic for me to get anywhere and that I was an idiot for choosing an apartment where I had. getting to my destinations was always like reaching Canaan because of that. for those months I think I actually spent more time engaged with the BVG somehow than I did scowling in the corner of any bar or drinking hot water with ginger and squeezed lemon (see: not “tea”) in people’s flats. later I learned that the Grünewald train station was a major hub for the deportation of Jews who lived in Berlin and its suburbs. Isherwood’s pupil was herself Jewish, as were many of the wealthy people who inhabited the dismal landscape of the cloistered Grünewald district. I wasn’t too far off about it being a place where God had abandoned the earth. a place without sunshine, definitely.

in “Sally Bowles,” Isherwood writes a close character study of a young English singer of mediocre talent and enormous ambition who puts up sexual services as collateral for opportunities to become a famous singer and actress. multiple times he uses the term “demi-monde” and describes Sally as a demimondaine at least once – its meaning as a loan word and its literal translation from the French differ slightly. the cultural meaning of the demi-monde refers to the bohemian lifestyle, transience, the eschewing of traditional morals and the running in hedonistic circles of those who do the same. in French it literally means “half-world,” or almost-world, insinuating an artificiality of the entire structure, a fragility. for the most part Isherwood considers himself outside of the influence of this phenomenon despite brushing elbows with the friends Sally makes, who make grand promises and then melt away like wet crepe paper or just dissolve away into Argentina or some shit. though he does write of an American called Clive, one of many older men who promise the nineteen-year-old Sally an audition with a film producer or other prominent show-business figure. this encounter is intriguingly different, however; Sally, who liberally calls herself a “gold-digger” and a “whore” with no reservations whatever, pulls Isherwood himself into this bizarre triangle in which sex and money are inevitably intertwined, and the “ménage-à-trois” begins making arrangements for the long term: to France and Italy, Clive promises them, then to South America, the United States, Japan, Tahiti. Sally and Isherwood have a brief moment of delusion in which they both think they’ve found someone who will lift them out of their destitution. days after this trip is planned, Clive departs for Budapest, leaving behind an envelope with 300 Marks to be split between them both (50 of which are spent on a lavish dinner that neither enjoys, 200 of which are spent on an abortion). early on, I once joked to a new friend in Berlin that my friends back home urged me not to come back from my time in the city without finding a “sugar-parent” who insisted on supporting me financially for no reason other than that they found me interesting. “everyone in Berlin is poor,” she said, “or they tell you they are, anyway.” needless to say I still have a 28K student loan.

[justanartsysideblog]

What does Sariandi mean in elvhen? Or does it mean anything? I saw you talking about him being a Forgotten One, is he going to appear somewhere else?

Hi anon! 

I’m going to answer the second half of this question first because maybe that’ll give some background to what his name means.

Yes, Sariandi is a Forgotten One, a former spirit of Hunger that took a body. I created him, as well as my other Forgotten Ones (Henne’thel, Aenwyn, and my interpretations of Anaris and Daern’thal) for my story Pride’s Folly, which is an on-going fic that is on a temporary hiatus because of writer’s block, but should be up and running again soon. 

That being said, he has been mentioned or alluded to in a few other pieces I’ve written on this blog, though not by name (bonus points if you can find them, I believe there are...two at the moment? Though there could be more I slipped in subconsciously). I just thought that his first big reveal would be fitting as a literal demon, because that’s a good description of him. XD Which is why he’s appearing in the Demon AU in all his horrid glory.

And now...breaking down his name. XD It does indeed mean something in elvhen; in fact, there are two translations that are rather accurate.

So first we’ll break it all down. It hasn’t been mentioned in Demon AU, but as a Forgotten One his full name is Sariandiem, though he goes by Sariandi. 

sar i - yours, and also

an - place

di (different spelling of de) was/were

em - mine

So the first rough translation of Sariandi’s full name is: yours, and also everything was mine. Place being a broad term that can have different meanings depending on translations and context. Basically, Sariandi’s name means that everything belongs to him which is...his basic outlook on life in general. He is a possessive asshole who feels entitled to it all, and is desperate for that to be true.

Second translation involves sounds more than exact translations: basically din and diane, which are not specifically spelled out, but words that make up the backbone of his name.

and din and diane together is basically: not full aka hollow. Being a former spirit of Hunger, Sariandi continually hungers for more, seeking to be filled and sated but finds he cannot. He is known as the Hollow One in Pride’s Folly for that very reason.

Well, there you have it! Sariandi would be pleased that you’re so interested in him, though catching his attention is never a good thing: just ask Melarue. 

[tetroxy]

from: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2427119/chapters/5371283

but seriously tho this is the MOST ic thing ive ever seen from someone writing dirk strider, cune excluded

its so fucking stupid and pretentious and yet i fucking love it

Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006 . They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.    You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.    But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.    And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.    It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.    Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.    In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.    Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there. (21)    But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.    Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.    Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic. οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι. “Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you     mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.    But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.    But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.    The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.    The First Meme.    Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.    Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.    Go play.

[ryancurtis15-blog]

*What is Rhetoric to me (Then and Now)*

What is Rhetoric to me (then and now)

In Comm 320, Rhetorical Traditions, I learned many different theories about rhetoric. This essay is going to show my transition from what i used to think rhetoric was at the beginning of the course, to what i now believe rhetoric to be.

At the very beginning of the term my definition of rhetoric was “Rhetoric is how people talk (what they say, how they say, who they say it to.)” Now my definition of rhetoric is much more in depth, “now i believe rhetoric is the words people use, when the people choose to say or do something, actions that people do or take, the audience members present, how someone listens to others speaking, if they speak using ethics, and the outcome they are trying to achieve with their rhetoric.”

A really big influence on how my view of rhetoric changed when confronted with Isocrates. Isocrates introduced the ideas of what makes a good rhetor including Kairos, appropriateness, and originality. This idea of Kairos, things being well timed, helped me develop that when people choose to use rhetoric matters and contributes to the overall effect of the rhetoric.The exact words that created this idea are “The Greatest indication of the difference is that speeches cannot be good unless they reflect the circumstances (kairoi), propriety, and originality.” ( Isocrates, pg. 64)

A second influence on my idea of rhetoric is Plato and Gorgias.These two are grouped together because they were essentially two sides to the same coin. These two helped me come to the conclusion that intentions are rhetoric. What one hopes to get out of their rhetoric is in itself rhetoric! This idea becomes prevalent when it’s mentioned “They become more eager to win instead of investigating the subject under discussion.” (plato pg. 95) This means that when one is doing something for personal gain over what is the right decision it really matters. This idea of what outcome you are trying to achieve directly relates to ethics as well, because personal gain over greater good isn’t ethical by any means, so to argue for the greater good is ethical.

The other main influence that changed my way of understanding what rhetoric is, is Pericles. Pericles helped me to understand that the audience and circumstances surrounding what you say and how you say them is important. For instance when athens is losing the war Pericles states that “war is one of the greatest of follies” however in his funeral oration speech Pericles mentions how strong the nations army is and how tactically they fight, so he shows under two different circumstances different styles to approach rhetoric. The audiences in both speeches are different and facing different challenges than before so the way to approach them differently is a good idea.

Rhetoric is  the words people use, when the people choose to say or do something, actions that people do or take, the audience members present, how someone listens to others speaking, if they speak using ethics, and the outcome they are trying to achieve with their rhetoric.

Works Cited

Pericles. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric. Pericles, The Funeral Oration Edited by James Jerome. Murphy et al., pg 217-221. Routledge, 2014.

Thucydides. The History of The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. 431 B.C.E.

Plato, and Jean Nienkamp. Plato on Rhetoric and Language: Four Key Dialogues. Pg. 92-103 Routledge, 2016.

Isocrates. Pg. 61-66.  University of Texas Press, 2000.