#if math doesn’t make you get all existential and think about the universe and god and how anything exists at all well it should

[canisvesperus]

Math can be so fascinating and mysterious and FUN if you have the right professor to inspire those feelings. It really shouldn’t be a chore. Math is as amazing as linguistics, if not more so.

[c-c-cherry]

Bucci Gang Headcanons!! (pt 2)

I was in the Bucci gang mood, so I managed to compile these together!! Jade wasn’t bouncing around ideas with me this time, but @achairwithapandaonit​ was with me on Discord for some of these! Go check them out, as well! Both their fics and art are *mwah*

These are a little less cracky than the ones that Jade and I came up with, but they were still super fun to come up with! I hope you enjoy!

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Contrary to popular belief, Narancia is actually much closer to Abbacchio than he is with Bucciarati

-Any shit going on in his head? He’ll go to Abba. Maybe not directly, but he always find himself talking to Leone about stuff at 3am or burying his face into the man’s shoulder on bad nights

-Bruno is great for hugs and trying to help him in any way he can, but sometimes Nara just needs someone to listen and understand. Cue dadbacchio

-Abbacchio hugs are rare in general, but they’re almost always for Narancia

On the other hand, Bucciarati and Fugo are probably the most tightly-knit in the entire house

-Fugo was the first one that Bruno finds in the whole gang and they spent a significant amount of time living together before everyone else came into the picture

-Fugo will not hug people, but Bruno is an exception (Although it took years of trust to get there)

-Bucciarati claims not to have a favourite but like,,,,Fugo ;-;

-They basically have each other’s mannerisms nailed down. Bruno can usually tell when Fugo’s about to snap and Fugo can tell how stressed Bruno is no matter what blank expression he holds up as a front

-Bruno is the only one who knows why Fugo can’t talk about his experiences at University and Fugo is the only one who knows why Bruno loves (and simultaneously hates) the sea so much. Not even Abba really knows that shit.

-They’re just used to destressing together. Sometimes they just sit together when no one else is around and literally *become* the “Lie down. Try not to cry. Cry a lot” meme and then they watch Star Wars after and never talk about it again because they’re both emotionally constipated lol

Giorno seems well-rounded with intelligence but he’s actually a registered dummy™

-He’s actually only really good at Biology and some math, but any other subject is like No Man’s Land to him

-Everyone thinks he has all this paperwork all the time when in reality he just reads really slowly and doesn’t understand half the shit he’s signing off on

-He’s so tired of avoiding Fugo who always wants to do weird smart people shit and he’s so tired of Mista asking him intellectual questions because he thinks Giorno’s the smartest being on this earth so he turns to the one person who he knows won’t judge him; Narancia

-He admits to Nara that he’s really not smart and he’s scared that people won’t think him valid anymore if he proves to be “useless” and Narancia’s like “shit bro I know exactly what you mean”

-He helps Giorno make up excuses to try and get him out of shit when Bruno slinks out of the shadows like “heyyyyy uhhh I don’t even have a middle school education I get it”

-Honestly Bruno and Gio are the CEOs of “fake it til you make it” and they make Narancia do all their math even though he’s shit at it too

-Narancia has the choice to stop learning math and all that stuff but after Bruno admitted to them that he never had the chance to learn it and wished he did he keeps learning to make our man proud ;’)

Giorno has a really confident personality as a front but when he's outside of meetings and missions he's the most socially awkward person on earth

-Him and Fugo will both be sitting stiffly on the couch between missions and they fuckin bond over being able to command capos but not being able to ask Bruno where in the kitchen he put the cookies

-Him and Fugo create a master plan to try and find the cookies without asking anyone for them but end up giving up and creeping over to Narancia in defeat

-They're both awkwardly hovering behind him as Narancia walks into the kitchen and is like "YO WHERE THE COOKIES AT" and Bruno pulls open the one drawer they didn't look in

-Part of it stems from him being brought up with “if you want things or ask too much from people you are worthless” so he’s too scared to ask for basic things like where the extra blankets are or ordering food he actually wants at a restaurant

-Bruno and Giorno go out for lunch together after a meeting and Bruno has to go take a call and tells him to get the bill for him while he's gone and meet him outside and after like 20 minutes he ends the call and goes back in like ??? only to find him still sitting at the table

-Bruno's like "do you just want me to ask for it?" and he's like "uhhh yeah..."

-The waiter says some shit like “yeah I was wondering when you were gonna ask for it, this kid wouldn’t even look at me whenever I would walk by” and Giorno is absolutely visibly mortified and has an existential crisis on the way home because his “sit down and be quiet” mindset that he has to be contradicts the “don’t cause trouble for people” that he also has to be and now he’s questioning everything he’s ever done ;-;

-Bucci notices immediately and takes him for gelato and they have a really long conversation about it on the walk home and it ends with a really awkward hug :)

-Bucciarati’s gone out of his way after that instance to tell him that he just wants him to feel comfortable and he can talk to him about anything without judgement and it’s okay to be awkward and out of his element because he’s literally 15 and has the worst trust issues on the planet but Gio just ends up feeling guilty that he’s wasting everyone’s time with his “problems”

Bruno will hole himself up in his room and absolutely hates attention and contact when he’s sick while Abbacchio is the clingiest, whiniest thing that lives when he’s under the weather

Giorno longs for physical affection but he has no idea how it actually works

-He’s never really been hugged before and tries to suppress the fact that he just wants to trust people and be open about stuff and hug people but his mind always consciously rejects it

-When Giorno's sick or out of it he get weirdly clingy cause he's too out of it to control himself and the first time he got properly sick he half-consciously clung to Mista the entire day

-After that day, Mista slowly starts giving him all these spontaneous hugs and head pats and hand squeezes and Giorno gets all flustered about it because he is just drowning in serotonin :)

The first person in the gang Giorno cried in front of was Trish

-He was really emotionally drained from endless meetings and angry capos and everyone asking everything from him for the past week

-He also ran into some kid from his old neighbourhood who asked him why he hadn’t been “home” lately and it fucked him up for the rest of the week

-He just finished a shit ton of paperwork when he got a knock at the door and he was expecting another task or favour or complaint but instead Trish asks him if she can paint his nails and he just absolutely crumples

-He’s being pulled into her room before he can even notice and there’s a fluffy blanket wrapped around him and she lets him cry into her softest pillow

-She doesn’t ask about it but just lets him sit there with her and he ends up falling asleep on her bed :’)

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God Giorno and Trish being a nice lil platonic duo makes me so soft :)

Have you seen Bucci Gang headcanons part one? Go check it out if you haven't yet! <3

[thepapergirlandthespiegelman]

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Initial impressions

Titles can be deceiving.

CW: child abuse, childhood trauma, mental illness, depression, anxiety

I think I can recall hearing about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at some point in the fairly distant past, though I can’t be sure. What I can say with relative certainty is that if I did encounter it, I probably wasn’t very likely to read it. I probably assumed that HPMOR was one of those obnoxiously misguided and pedantic critiques of fiction by scientists who neither know how to utilize suspension of disbelief, nor understand the basic nature of symbolism. At best, I might have imagined it to be a piece attempting to discover or construct a coherent logic from the magic within the Harry Potter universe, just for the pure amusement value, the absurdity of attempting to apply logic to that which defies it. I could see the appeal of that, but probably not 122 chapters worth of it.

After actually reading the first ten chapters of HPMOR, however, I can say that my first guess was incorrect, and my second guess was insufficient. HPMOR does capitalize on that humorous absurdity, but that’s hardly the core of the story.

One major reason for my misperceptions was a lack of familiarity with the difference between science and rationality. In layspeak, we often use these terms near interchangeably, and while they do go hand-in-hand to some extent, they’re not the same. Science is a method of obtaining knowledge. Rationality is an approach to living life, which dictates utilizing philosophy and science to obtain desired outcomes. You can be a scientist and be completely irrational, which actually reflects back on my initial concern; there are some scientists who will attempt to use the theory and language of science to denigrate works of art, completely ignoring the point of art.

HPMOR itself deals with this problem, not only the conflation of science with rationality, but the conflation of science and rationality and aptitude and general intelligence. The very first chapter highlights how AU Harry’s (Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, HJPEV for short) father is a professor, knowledgeable about science, presumably quite intelligent, and yet behaves incredibly irrationally. Rather than attempting to settle the dispute about the existence of magic objectively, he refuses to entertain the idea on principle, saying, “Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”

And here’s where the real story begins to unfold. What makes HPMOR hit hard, at least for me, is not the discussion of science and rationality in the abstract, or even the very useful, illustrative scenarios, but the emotional struggle of trying to be a rational person in an irrational world, especially when you’re a child. In so many ways, HPMOR is a story about the trauma of growing up as a so-called “gifted” child. Almost every chapter that I read was painfully reminiscent of my own childhood:

Seeing my parents speculate and argue endlessly over things that could be proven;

Attempting to reason with them only to be shut down;

Having my value in their eyes dependent on their perception of my intelligence and academic performance, being praised for when I was perceived to have succeeded in these matters, while at the same time having my perspective completely ignored when it came to anything that mattered;

Being mocked relentlessly for things I did when I was younger, ignoring the incredibly rapid growth that defines childhood;

Constantly feeling as though, as HJPEV puts it, I was being treated as “subhuman,” my feelings, thoughts, and opinions all invalid because of my age;

Feeling so, so frustrated that the people who were supposed to protect me were so absurdly, ridiculously, unfairly, woefully, tragically ill-equipped to do so.

I became hopelessly isolated from my parents, and my self-esteem became self-degrading. Being told over and over again how what I felt or thought didn’t matter because I was only a child made me doubt and disrespect my own emotions and doubt my very sanity. I don’t think that my parents meant to gaslight me, but that’s exactly what they did. For years, and years, and years, and it hurts. so. much. It...I cannot express how much it hurts.

And I am left with all of this damage, these lines of irrationality programmed into my brain, this obsessive need to to be perceived as intelligent in order to believe that I could be loved, in order to merely function, this irrationality that I hate so much because it hurt me so much is now encoded into my very being and it fills me with existential horror to this day.

It was difficult for me to get through as much of HPMOR as I did, and I genuinely wonder if it would be detrimental to my mental health to go on. It triggers both the suffering that comes with remembering past trauma as well as the compulsions that have resulted from that trauma. Hearing HJPEV list all the books he’s read sends a bolt of anxiety down my spine, knowing that I will never measure up to people like him, I will never have read enough, I will never be smart enough, I will never...be...enough—

Enough. I know when to stop torturing myself.

I was shocked to see how quickly HPMOR itself comes to the conclusion that what HJPEV has endured is a form of child abuse. It took me years to become comfortable using the words “abuse” and “trauma” to describe my experiences, and HPMOR introduces the word “abuse” in Chapter 6! I give HPMOR’s McGonagall much less credit than HJPEV does, but even so, it’s kind of astonishing to me to see an adult pick up on the existence of abuse in a so-called gifted child, even in fiction. I find myself wondering how I might have turned out differently if I had had someone like McGonagall in my life, or someone better than McGonagall in my life, who had told me in no uncertain terms, “What is happening to you is abuse, it is not okay, it is not your fault, and while I’m unable to legally extricate you from your unfortunate circumstances, I will do everything in my power to protect you.”

Because that didn’t happen. No one told me that I was abused or damaged. They told me that I was “smart,” “gifted,” “advanced,” or “mature”; and if they noticed anything odd about my behavior, it was because I was just “quiet,” “shy,” “introverted,” or “diligent.”

I also find myself wondering if I might have been a little different if I had read HPMOR when I first had the chance. But then again, I don’t know if I would have understood it as I do now, after years of studying psychology and working to heal myself.

God, seeing it all laid out so starkly, things I worked years to understand, in a few short chapters of someone’s fucking fanfiction*...I sure do feel like an idiot.

But then, this whole conversation has primed me to feel those feelings.

I must not undervalue myself. I am not playing that game. That game is the problem.

One thing does irritate me, though. Putting aside my misconceptions about HMPOR specifically, there’s this huge barrier to entry to the rationalist community in general. I think people perceive (correctly, as far as I can tell) that it is a community of highly intelligent people, who are highly skilled in STEM disciplines, particularly math. The one friend who could have introduced me to all this was someone who I saw as hopelessly more intelligent than I, and that perceived disparity made it incredibly difficult to approach him even as I admired him, envied him, and desperately needed the things that he could teach me. (I don’t know what things were like on his end. I still don’t.)

We’ve already seen that someone can be highly intelligent and completely irrational. I wish we could take that logic a step further and really make clear that rationality is not something that requires high intelligence. As with learning anything, intelligence helps, but intelligence can’t be a prerequisite for this skillset, because literally everyone should have it. I guess this might be controversial, but so far as I can tell, rationality is just the best way to go through life. And of course, knowing the best way to move forward is especially critical for those of us leaving behind dark pasts.

For fuck’s sake, this doesn’t have anything to do with quarks or discrete math or machine learning. It has everything to do with reducing human suffering.

And I wish...I really wish that there was a way to share this world with my friends. The only reason that I made it here is that I’ve constantly existed on the borderline, wavering around the threshold of what is broadly considered intelligent, attempting mastery of both STEM and humanities, science and art. As much as I doubt and denigrate myself, I am able, if I really want to, under certain favorable circumstances, to convince myself that I belong here. Not all of my friends have the same privilege. I have friends who have lived their whole lives believing that they just aren’t that smart, or that they aren’t any good at math or science. Maybe they decided early on that that stuff wasn’t for them, or maybe they tried and felt like they failed. I know that, for many people, academic language is frustrating, triggering, or otherwise completely inaccessible. I know that many people will find HJPEV absolutely insufferable and most of what he says incomprehensible.

And I’m really not sure what to do about that. I’ve not sure how to convince people that striving for rationality is both possible and worthwhile for everyone, and if I do convince them, I’m not sure what to actually show them that will make any sense to them.

I don’t know. Maybe it does have a bit to do with math. Because a lot of what I get from rationality, I can get from other places, be that art or psychology or witchcraft, but the stuff that is unique does tend to be the mathematical and statistical thinking. And philosophical thinking, academic thinking. Talking about things with precision...That’s always been my problem with trying to translate the academic into ordinary speech, it feels like all the precision is being lost. To be precise, you need unique words, and unique words tend to be obscure, and people find obscure words upsetting.

Obviously, this isn’t a problem I’m going to solve in this blog post. But it’s something to think about.

So, I guess that’s my review of the first ten chapters of HPMOR, if you can call it that. If one of the purposes of fiction is to unlock a bizarrely intense cocktail of existential horror and unadulterated wrath deriving from the wrongs of one’s childhood—and I certainly believe it is—then HPMOR succeeds spectacularly.

*Edited to add: In my unfortunate compulsion to drag myself down, I often drag down other things or people too. I shouldn’t trivialize the value of fanfiction. And, quite honestly, I really shouldn’t be surprised that it could be a source of profound insight. After all, writing fanfiction has been one of my own ways to cope with and sort through my emotions and illnesses for a long, long time.

[savrenim]

Since you said to ask if anybody wanted to know, what is a maximal extension?

THANK YOU FOR PICKING UP ON THE FACT THAT I REALLY, REALLY WANTED TO RANT ABOUT MAXIMAL EXTENSIONS black holes are my jam and literally why I stuck with physics

this explanation does get a bit mathy but I swear that you do not have to understand any of the math, the numbers are just there to give a bit of context for what is happening? I hope this came out understandable. GR is one of the most complex and math-heavy physics subjects, so. wheee here we go.

this is all general relativity, which is Einstein’s theory of gravity, a brief history and background so that I can throw around words like “curvature” and anyone reading this can go “aaaah, I know exactly what they are talking about, that is a fancy way of saying Einstein’s genius idea that gravity is just the fabric of spacetime bending and also why we care about any of this instead of just using normal gravity”. Special relativity came first and was basically Einstein going “what if the only thing constant in the universe was the speed of light and human stupidity” and then completely overturning absolutely everything we thought we knew about time, length, and even the order of events. Like, literally, let’s say you have two blinkers and blinker A goes off before blinker B, well joke’s on you, you poor slow limited fool, because your buddy there who was traveling fast enough to be close to the speed of light saw blinker B go off before blinker A and not in an “the light of one reached me before the light of the other did” way, in a genuine “time is mutable and those events actually chronologically happened in the opposite order” way, and this isn’t just screwy math, there are genuine observations that back this up, sorry to have shattered your perception of reality if you haven’t heard of special relativity before

(things like the twin paradox also come into play, where clocks tick slower when you’re going faster, which means if you send one twin traveling at half the speed of light and they come back after 100 years, their twin will have aged 100 years and they will be way younger. you can actually even see this just traveling really fast in an airplane, the experiments were done in 1971, sorry, now you know you live in a universe where time isn’t absolute enjoy your existential crisis or revel in how cool it is, you do you. although if it makes you feel better, for events to switch order, they have to have happened “close enough” to one another, and that “close enough” has a lot to do with the line element and the line element is one way of expressing the metric and the metric is what we actually need to talk about how black holes can at least be mathematically extended to different universes)

basically, a metric encodes “okay so what the hell is gravity doing” and also “how are two events actually related to each other”, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about it, you can think of it as ~a solution to the Einstein equations~, you can think of it as how in classical Newtonian mechanics, you have the principle of “gravitational potential,” which is basically “how hard is gravity pulling at me as measured by the equation

“ where U is the potential energy, G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the first object, m is the mass of the second, and r is the distance between them and the bigger U is, the stronger gravity is, you can solve this equation to get the acceleration from gravity for objects on Earth as 9.8m/s^2 for people in physics classes out there, but, like. When stuff gets wibbly wobbly and time isn’t set in stone how the heck do you measure something like gravity, you get all fancy and use a metric.

A normal metric for flat spacetime, if you want coordinates of time, and then (x, y, z) for location in 3D space, is going to look like 

and then you can actually calculate meaningful things with “local coordinates” (t, x, y, z), and if you switch reference frames or switch coordinates, instead of Everything Messing Up Terribly the way it felt like it did when oh god time runs differently events aren’t chronological, ds^2 doesn’t change, and gravity/the curvature of spacetime itself doesn’t change, and you go “oh thank gods we can actually talk about the universe again and calculate things”

Now comes the interesting part, black holes!

so the ~solution to the Einstein equations~ that describes the gravity of a black hole that is just standing still and isn’t doing weird things like spinning or having charge, ew silly black holes why would you want to complicate our lives so much by spinning or having charge, and also instead of (x, y, z) we’re going to use spherical coordinates of (r,θ,ϕ) because it’s so much easier the only thing we care about is radial distance of how far we are from the center so why not make that our actual coordinate system, is 

where M is the mass of the black hole and everything else in there is a coordinate. Also, the power of -1 on the radial coordinate is just a slightly nicer-looking way of writing the whole thing instead of 

(funny story there is a scene in the latest Voltron season in which two characters, Pidge and Hunk, are having a technobabble conversation that ends with “unless we change Planck’s constant!!!!” and I sent a super angry message to Jeremy, who doesn’t even watch the show but still gets all of my super angry rants, about “yOU CAN’T DO THAT, THAT’S LIKE SETTING PI TO 4 BECAUSE IT MAKES LIFE MORE CONVENIENT” and Jeremy was like “you literally do astrophysics don’t you set the speed of light to 1 all the time to make your own life more convenient” and I was like “THAT’S DIFFERENT AND I AM TOTALLY NOT A HYPOCRITE WE KEEP TRACK OF UNITS, IT’S JUST A UNIT CHANGE, AND ALSO I AM NOT TRYING TO ENGINEER STUFF, GODDAMNIT JEREMY I CAME OUT HERE TO HAVE A GOOD TIME AND AM HONESTLY FEELING SO ATTACKED RIGHT NOW”, and basically if you were wondering where the c went or even if you’ve seen this before why there isn’t a gravitational constant G, that’s where it went, I set it to 1.)

So. You might notice some problems in our metric! One is that when our radial coordinate r=0, OH SHIT EVERYTHING GOES TO INFINITY. That’s supposed to happen because oh noooo it’s a black hooooole at the center is a point of infinite density. But the equation also goes to infinity where r=2M. And it’s fair to ask “oh no do we have….two singularities?” But it turns out we just picked bad coordinates, and if we change our coordinates, the singularity goes away. (fun story, r=2M is actually an important point, that’s where the event horizon is, aka the point of no return that not even light can escape from. it’s just not a singularity and you wouldn’t even realize it once you passed it that you did pass it because it looks like any other point in space, so be careful around black holes, kids.) But you can make any new coordinates that you want, as long as you apply the change equally and correctly. Like. You could say “r’=3r” and then “dr’=3dr” and now everything is stretched by a factor of 3 in your new coordinate system. You could also be really really fancy and define 

and even as you’re screaming “but why the hell would I do that!!!!!” it’s because 

and then you define the coordinate v=t+r* and THEN the metric becomes

and yeah sure there are some cross-terms and where did time go, but doooon’t worry about it who needed time in the first place, the important part is you can see that when r=2M, nothing bad happens, which is why we know that the event horizon was just a coordinate singularity and gravity doesn’t blow up to infinity there, because it’s not a singularity in a different coordinate system. 

So a bunch of mathematicians went “can we create a coordinate system so that we can draw the entire universe as a square? That would be nicer than the universe being infinite and stuff because I don’t have infinite paper for my pretty pictures.” Let’s go back to flat spacetime, and pretend we have just two coordinates, time and space went from 3D to just “x” so we can draw it, and we define new coordinates (u, v) by the equations tan(u+v)= x+t, tan(u-v)=(x-t), and now it turns out that the entire universe looks like 

Pretty, right? Woot woot the entire universe is a diamond. The horizontal-ish lines represent everything that is happening “at the same time”, and the vertical-ish lines are “the same place.” And there it is the whole universe, we just drew it, good job us. 

Okay time to do this with a black hole. You get all fancy. You define new coordinates. You do the thing where you go “I wonder how far I can make these coordinates stretch instead of blowing up to infinity.” And you end up with something that looks like 

And then you go “WHOOOOOA” because our universe is the diamond on the right, good job us we wrote down our entire universe on the piece of paper just like we could do when it was flat, but OOPS A PARALLEL UNIVERSE APPEARED ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BLACK HOLE.

(also down at the bottom a white hole is time-reverses black hole, aka a black hole that goes YEET, don’t worry about it too much)

And then when you do the same process with a black hole that is rude enough to decide to spin instead of being nice and sitting still for you, you don’t just get one parallel universe, you get an infinite series of them:

It’s awesome and ridiculous and begs the philosophical question of “are the parallel universes….just some mathematical coordinate artifact? or are they actually there?”

The answer is basically, we don’t know. If you ask a mathematician, the general opinion tends to be “mathematically they are valid so that’s kind of all that we care about.” In practice, your black holes have to be perfect to have the actual structure described by the metric, so maybe throwing something in destabilizes them and collapses the entire parallel universe. Who knows, no one has ever gone through an event horizon and we’d defs never be able to come back. But yeah. Maximal extensions of coordinates leads to this phenomenon of other universes appearing, white holes appearing, the possibility of going through a black hole and coming out in a parallel universe appearing, and all sorts of fun stuff.

[therealmarxistcamp]

rant

ya’ll really pissed me off this morning with your complex math equations., i get it!! i made a mistake on this one calculus equation, (do you have to be such a Jerk about it, though??), but now i see what i was doing wrong, and i won’t make that mistake again, and, furthermore, thanks to you, now i’m going to devote myself to math and science: i will become an expert in ¼th the time that it took you due to my expert reading and research skills; meanwhile, i’d like to see you write an entire book—Go on! what’s the matter? I thought writing was easy! That anybody can do it!


–matter? What is it? Atoms, particles, quarks, gluons—yeah, what are those made up of (because, as we know, 1 inch can be divided into ½ inch, and that into ¼ inch, and that into 1/8 inch, and that into 1/16 inch, and so on, ad infinitum, thus the world is as infinitely small as it is infinitely big, or what do you think?):

“It’s true, we don’t know whether it [the universe] is finite or infinite, but we know a lot more than what we see within the part that’s observable to us” (Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist).—Well, gee, thanks Mr. Scientist, You really solved my moral, existential crisis and put all my fears and worries to rest.

Now that this issue is solved we can go back to building more nuclear weapons and also planning our space colony on Mars (and increasing my life span so i can work for an even longer period of time): 

---Excuse me, i’m getting distracted again, let me go back to calculating the velocity of this imaginary tennis ball: that’s like really, really important, we absolutely must know the velocity of this imaginary tennis ball… . 

--------“i can not help it, America, that your educational system is so poor, and that you don't teach people to read or investigate things properly....---but that works in your favor doesn't it? what do people need reading and critical thinking skills for? Give them more Calculus! More psychology! Anything but English! English!??? Who would ever need to study English? We speak it every day!!!”

“Yeah, Calculus, that seems like an interesting class....”

“Oh, god, whatever you do, don’t let the philosophy major into the Calculus class!!!”

Too late:

Teacher enters the room wearing a grey nike visor, black suitcase bag. Assumes a position behind the podium.

"Good morning, class, today, we're going to dive right back into derivative equations: Now, if you remember, last class, the derivative equation---"

*Raises hand*

“Yes?”

“But professor, how can we be sure that the data we are using in this derivative equation is accurate?”

“Well, we use advanced scientific instruments and numbers, okay?–besides, that really isn’t important, we are merely using these particular numbers as an example so as to learn derivative equations, and then apply them to the real world.”

*Raises hand*

“Yes?–What is it now?”

“But, professor, can we ~really~ be sure that the solution to this equation, even given a set of accurate data, will ~always~ reflect the true course of said object in a constantly changing world? What if there is some factor or variable we are not accounting for? What would be the best application of this function in an ideal society?”

“Good question… .”

30 minutes later:

“No!, i’m serious! Why is there even a refugee crisis in the first place!?????”

“God DAMMIT, kid!, We’re trying to learn Calculus here!!!!!!—Fuck!!!!!” He slams his calculator on the desk. it bounces off the desk, smacks him in the face!

. . .

"Uh, professor?"

"WHAT!!!????"

“But how am i supposed to learn Calculus when people are dying!???”

“AHHHHHHHHHH!--Now, you listen to me, BOY! You are Crossing the line here, I don't want to hear another word from you about Immigration or the Border Wall or Donald Trump: You don't want to end up back on ---------, now do you??" . . .

"...No, sir..."

"Good, now, as i was saying, derivative equations. . . ."

[sleepymarmot]

COUNTER/Weight liveblog, part 2

Episodes 23-40

Keith hasn't listened to the previous episode and Austin & Ali are cackling like “You got a big storm coming” lmao

…Look I understand the idea of making Tea an ally after the players and audience got to know her in the Kingdom game but the excuse is really thin

“A gift for his little brother” You guys are really bad at this gender neutrality thing huh

AuDy talking to Orth makes my head spin a bit now

Oh so Addax is the leader of the Angels? The person who has been watching the Chime from the shadows = the group that has been spying on them? Okay, I now feel dumb for not putting this together myself.

Wait I lost track again. Who were Jacq & Jill working for initially that gave them access to those immortality tanks? Iirc it was Odamas who had that technology and then gave Horizon access to it while imposing strict rules on them during the merge? So why does Jacqui get less fun assignments now if she was a part of the winning faction, not the losing one?

Oh cool, so Jamil wanted to hand over the virus to the Angels because they're both just from the Rapid Evening?

“A bard notices their enemy's heart isn't in the fight, so they stop fighting, fall in love” is such a specific thing. How the hell did it happen twice on the same show. Is this the new big gay trope now

Heeeey could you stop punching me in the stomach with intros

So, Jacqui was working for Horizon, which in turn was given this job by Petrichor? Still doesn't answer my question…

Do I have to mentally rewrite the entire holiday special so that in every scene on the Kingdom Come everyone is floating in zero gravity all the time?! I'm sorry but this makes no fucking sense!

The doppelganger thing started really creepy but now it just makes my head spin! Please stop it with the names, I'm too easily confused, especially with a show that has a record of passing characters back and forth between the GM and the players!

Re: that whole thing: aaaaAAAAA???

I don't understand what Austin and Jack are doing but it's pretty magical

God, the Aria/Jacqui scene is so… tender? Idk. Austin's gentle “PC's love interest” voice has murdered me again. I'm not sold on Jacqui by herself as a character but on the feelings between the two? Definitely. (Though I still wonder about Aria’s heroism vs Jacqui’s disregard for life. That’s a biiig value clash)

Okay, this was all very unsettling and I still understand so little

I really love that Sokrates' refusal to make that one nameless person take the fall, which seemed (at least to me) kinda stubborn and shortsighted, turned into a key moment, both because it demonstrates integrity, and now because that person becomes an actual NPC as an important asset in their faction

I love how the idea of moving Rigour to September comes up and everyone starts screaming and I do too! They sure love leaving horrifying surprises for the ground team to stumble upon lol

Is it too callous and unwise of me to react to Ibex overthrowing the Hands of Grace as “good riddance”?

Maryland's letter has strong Alyosha/Arrell vibes

I love the “reluctant alliance with an antagonist” trope and was hoping it'd happen with Ibex so I'm happy! Also in one of the early episodes Austin mentioned the Anders-Justice storyline and I'm glad to hear him finally deliver. (There was stuff about the pilot/Candidate->Divine influence with Order, but not about the other way around or fusion, like with Vengeance)

Okay thankfully things are clearer now (I'm reeeally glad I wasn't spoiled on this) but I still have so many questions. How were LD made in the first place? Why and how did they hide in/turn themselves into a simple robot? What are they – just software, like Righteousness, or is there some Divine hardware core inside the normal Automated Dynamics unit that nobody has noticed somehow, or is the hardware in a remote location they access through the mesh? Did Ibex know AuDy was LD the whole time – he didn't act very surprised? Why didn't Ibex rescue his brother, did he die really quickly? How will Mako be able to fog without Righteousness? Shouldn't AuDy be gamebreakingly powerful now? How and why do LD count as two Divines but have a single consciousness, are they like Garnet?

Lazer Ted feels like a fucking TAZ character lmao

The comic relief was welcome but at the same time I'm continuously like “What is AuDy thinking and feeling. Why are they acting like nothing happened. Where's the existential crisis. How do you realize you're a pair of ancient gods and just proceed with your life? Are they so impenetrable on purpose because they're a robot”. Like, it was chilling when they were suddenly chatting with Ibex like old friends, and now it's chilling that they're acting just in the early episodes.

I'm glad the robot incident made everyone realize it might be unwise to put the two charming extraverts in the same half of the party lol

Looks like they decided to permanently switch back to “he” for Cass… Probably for the best.

Jack keeps excitedly jumping at every opportunity for creepiness™. God, AuDy makes so much more sense as his character now after the Reveal

Is September just fucking Solaris now?

I think this is the first time I'm not excited to hear a faction game episode because I really didn't expect it at this point in the story. My reaction was “Wait what? Are you telling me everyone gets stuck on September waiting out that storm for a whole month?! I wanted to hear what that cliffhanger led to!” Idk, the September arc was generally kind of a let down after the intensity of the episodes leading up to it, and this further deflates the tension.

Speaking of tension and letdowns, I just have to complain… It's really disappointing when the show sets up really big dramatic hooks and then does practically nothing with them! I complained about Addax and Cass in the previous post and that point still stands. Case two: Mako and Righteousness/Voice. It's set up in a faction episode, and in the immediately following arc Mako indeed is in danger from something inside his own head, but it's a completely unrelated thing! At the end of the arc he finally finds out, but the threat immediately gets nullified with no consequences – no self-doubt or identity crisis, no diminished abilities in terms of game mechanics. Case three: Ibex himself. Out of the reasons the Kingdom game is what it is, the excuse for it happening in-universe was to give more details on Ibex, and at least half of it featured a collective effort to make him as central to the story and as threatening as possible. But as soon as that flashback ends, so, counterintuitively, does the role of Ibex as an active antagonist to the Chime -- the role which was literally just supposed to begin in earnest. So by this point I can barely recall why we were all so intimidated by this guy in the first place. I'm more like “This is a useful ally to have”. This is what I don't like about the world-ending threats like Rigor: all other interesting conflicts fade in their face.

Dang, I thought Isurus was a cooler name than Enhydra!

Sokrates, forced to shake Ibex's hand: *clenched fist meme*

Wait, I missed something, why is Rigor deep underground and has to dig itself out?

Okay, after the lore episode I'm also confused how Rigor ended up underground on Ionias after it was blown up 20000 years ago in a completely different place

I'm very distressed by the idea of Hieron as a future popular franchise!! No, it's supposed to be real when these people are talking about it!! Oh wait a fucking second, does this mean Jace's Panther was a deliberate reference in-universe?? Like you're fighting in a real serious terrible war and you model a giant war machine after, like, a thestral from the fucking Harry Potter and just call it “Thestral”??!

No, no, wait, do tell me who Cass and AuDy would cosplay!

Oh no, Rigour wants to talk to Voice(?), great

Hey Cass, your Hadrian is showing??

Speaking of Hadrian, I was caught off guard by description of Tower as a “hot young Hadrian”, for some reason Hadrian never struck me as a character who's supposed to be exceptionally attractive. But then again, I imagined him as very young until that letter to Hella, and then I imagined Cass as a young adult until I did the math, so I might just be bad at visualising Art's characters lol.

Austin is so generous and unsubtle about throwing hot gay NPCs right at the players. Too bad Mako doesn't sound as interested as Aria did.

I expected they'd find a room with one copy of everyone plugged into the mesh, that'd be even creepier. What's with the false memories though? This doesn't explain them.

So, how does this whole clone system work? How does time work? Why don't the real students like Tower or Maxine notice that there's a new guy who looks just like their friend, but doesn't know them – or, for that matter, why don't the other clones notice? Oh, maybe that's the purpose of the fake memory aura? So that Maritime-4 could continue right from where Maritime-3 left off?

When Cass saw Apokine's face I thought it meant that the humans had genetically engineered the Apostolosians and that's what “we made them look like us” meant, which would be two of my long-standing questions answering each other. And then it was just another giant mech.. :/

Wait, does Orth calling Cass “Apokine” mean that he pilots the mech now or that Sokrates died and Cass inherited his position?! I'm worried now…

I'm even more worried about Mako, because at first I of course reacted to the question about being in two places at once as “hah, Larry”, but it's probably the other thing, and on one hand that must mean that the rescue of clones was successful, but also that means that our Mako might be dead and the one in the intro is one of the clones… Considering that in the Winter post-mortem I caught Keith saying how emotional the C/w finale was for him before I started fast-forwarding in fear of spoilers, do I need to start mentally preparing to bury Mako already or what?

Speaking of spoilers… The farther I go, the less I understand the advice to skip Autumn. I thought that at least for C/w it wouldn't matter, given it's a whole different universe, but they keep referencing it, and then casually dropping major spoilers, and then referencing it again in a story-relevant way. (The Ordennan ships arrive on the screen as Rigor does, and the next episode is named “The Storm over September” and quotes Lem's poem in the description. That's really cool but I somehow feel vaguely irritated on behalf of my potential alternate self who skipped season 1.) I really hope they've grown more careful about this by now, because I'll probably not even begin Twilight Mirage by the time the next season starts, and I would really like to stay in the dark about the intense events they're all vague-tweeting about at the moment!

Why was AuDy alarmed by Voice's presence as “a” Divine accompanying Maxine? Shouldn't they be familiar with it already because of Mako? (And I don't want to even ask about the ontological difference/border between Righteousness and Voice. I'm tired and feel like a nitpicker. But just for the record, this still isn't clear.)

Well that's a sadder family reunion than I hoped for!

So AuDy does have a split personality to some degree?

Oh well. AuDy's got a fate worse than death: Liberty and Discovery, imprisoned indefinitely. Or devoured I guess, I didn't really get it. Great. Thanks. Fucking RIP I guess. Out of all ways I expected them to go, this wasn't one.

(By the way I still don't understand how the portal works. Where is this portal to? Why can't L&D fly out and take the slow way home, and why can't Rigor?)

There's still about ten minutes left in the episode and I don't understand how it isn't the finale. What's there to do for three more episodes now.

“With Rigor defeated so easily, so permanently, she thought” *Rigor screech*

Yeah, fuck Grace btw

Sounds like cultivating saplings is not a priority anymore for a certain someone… (Wait, btw, what happened to that patch/seed they left? Will it ever come back into play?)

“...Why they would put themselves into a body like yours? And I think, maybe, it's that they were curious about what it would be like for four years to feel like a long time” AAAAAA

Okay, things are better on September than it sounded initially, but still… Wtf's going to happen? Rigor repairs itself, takes over the survivors, takes off again? But what's the timeline on that? I genuinely have no idea wtf the finale is going to be about after this.

Oh, what happened to the clones btw? Did Larry manage to get them off the planet in time, despite the Minerva ships in orbit and, more importantly, Rigor? Or are they stuck on September, unable to continue reenacting the plot of Orphan Black?

From how it's been described in this episode, feels as if Liberty and Discovery are a candidate of AuDy… They didn't want a candidate but were curious to learn how it feels for the other side?

Paisley's dead-eyed, Tower's gone, and even Ibex, who is barely holding on himself, loses his ex… Everyone's love life takes a nosedive: the episode. At least Jacqui's okay… (And because of Jacqui, it was doubly sad and surprising to hear Aria still has feelings for Paisley…)

[rescueonefinancialnet]

My journey to enlightenment (for lack of better word)

Hi.

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This is a throwaway account cause my other account makes it obvious in linking to my real life identity, and I mention the usage of lsd and weed in this post.

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This is a collection of my experiences in having "epiphanies" of some sort that really impacted my life within and outwardly. These episodes have immensely changed my views, and have influenced how I live my life in a small or big way.

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Note: Let me preface with the fact that I was born into a Muslim family, and been taught to be pious since young. I've always believed in it, despite bending the rules and not really practicing most of the time since becoming a teenager till now as an adult. This may give you a bit of context of my worldly views, as I've always had faith in the existence of God as a higher power who puts the pieces of the world together, etc.

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(Btw, when I mention "cry" later on, I mean having uncontrollable tears rolling down my face.)

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The Meaning of Life is Life

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About 2 years ago, I took LSD for the first time with a friend at his place. I knew what it was but didn't know what the experience was gonna be like. As I've been a regular pot smoker, I thought it'd be easy to face whatever that would come. I was SO wrong.

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Before we took it, my friend showed me a piece of paper with words and arrows which looked like nonsensical scribbles as he explained this was what he wrote when he experienced a crazy trip. I laughed thinking it was hilarious.

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After an hour plus after dropping, we decided to take a walk outside in the lightly forested area, and he rolled a joint for himself. When he went to smoke, I decided that I also wanted to take a few hits, as I felt I was able to control whatever I was feeling and thought I was comfortable. After roughly 30 mins, I looked at the clouds and saw fractal patterns, and then everything in my vision had that pattern.

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I learned aboutt fractals, fibonnaci sequence, golden ratio, vesica pisces, flower of life, etc in school, and was blown away because I already had an understanding of what they meant. This was when I also realised that the videos on YouTube when you search "trippy visuals" were actually kinda similar in showcasing the things I saw and then I realised that EVERYTHING about this fucking shape/pattern/math was fucking real and everywhere!

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Stage 1:

Everything is One

The fractals made me realise everything was made of this pattern. It's nature showing that it's the most natural thing ever - it's the most efficient shape. Look at flower petals, honeycombs, everything! Everything is the same thing. We are all one. I cried.

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I also started overthinking, and was feeling overly-sensitive after looking at the clouds. I kept having miscommunications with my friend because of that, and it made things even worse because it became a loop of miscommunications.

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Stage 2:

Tiny Man

It then made me realise I was a piece of everything. I am a part of the equation. "But I am just a small piece of shit in this world," I thought. I felt something close to nihilistic thoughts and started feeling worthless, as I was small and couldn't really change the world (or life). Why does it matter that I am here? I am just a tiny thing in the grand order of things. I cried.

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During this time, I continued being sensitive and slowly went into ego death. All my deepest insecurities started appearing, and I kinda "pulled them out" of me and had to "face" them head on. I told myself that I was a selfish and inconsiderate person inside, and I called myself out. I kept crying and felt pretty fucked up.

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Stage 3:

Acceptance

After some time, I realised that I can still influence my life, and make choices. I can still somehow change the world. Life can be hard, but that's the beauty of it. It has its ups and downs, but at the end of the day, I am experiencing my life. The beauty of life is that life is happening.

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That's when it all clicked. The meaning of life is life. It's experiencing beauty, and the beauty of experiencing.

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My friend showed me the paper he scribbled on, and it all made so much sense to me. And I cried again.

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2.

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Radiohead Albums Are Masterpieces for Acid Journeys

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Just a side story about how I went to take an acid trip with my girlfriend at a park (after multiple lsd experiences) and listened to Radiohead's Kid A album from start to end on Bluetooth headphones. Their music was the first ever music to fuck with my visuals.

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I've listened to amazing songs that have made me feel the emotions from the music artists write and produce. Most modern jazz (fusion) songs, Jacob Collier, and a few progressive rock songs (to name a few) would have this effect and sometimes make me cry.

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But Radiohead was different. The album was like background music to my trip. They were taking me on a journey through sounds and textures, but also in the form of songs. Each sound felt like it was intentionally added and manipulated to affect the listener's visuals. It was as if they knew I was on an acid trip, and wanted to hold my hand to show me the beautiful and magical things I could see and feel. It also helped me connect closer to nature and my environment.

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Pretty weird but I felt like the trees were trying to tell me not to be a dick to nature.

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3.

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The Meaning of Death is to Let Go

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Had another acid trip where I went swimming in the first few hours. The sensations were amazing. I kept trying to float without moving my legs and hands by using my breathing (controlling the amount of air in my lungs), but I was never fully at peace until I breathed out and just sank into the bottom of the pool. That was when I felt serenity and bliss, and made the connection that to be fully at peace, you kinda have to not breathe (or die rather).

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A few hours later, my girlfriend and I went to a large open field and sat down on portable chairs to just listen to music and enjoy the sunset on the vast skies. Radiohead's Pyramid Song helped me unlock my fractal vision, where the pattern took over the entire sky (much more intense that I have ever experienced, in which the sky became hexagonal grids). After that, I realised what it truly meant to die, and it was an internal struggle I've been facing due to my Islamic background - related to death and the afterlife. I came to terms to the idea of just not existing and that it's actually beautiful. Made me appreciate life more.

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I Am Me

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I've been going through an intensely tiring mental battle about Islam the past few weeks, and it has changed my worldview and how I see religion. (I'm still in this process of researching and trying to understand different perspectives)

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This has been mentally draining, cause it feels like my life has been a lie. The things I've believed in for YEARS has been flipped upside down and I can never be as ignorant as before ever again. I then started having some sort of existential crisis where I questioned the point of me being in this universe.

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Last night I watched Kungfu Panda 3 (such a beautiful movie with great lessons), and started questioning "Who am I?" I went into a crazy train of thought, and then said "I am (my name)" and it was so cathartic. I have accepted who I am. I am just me. Noone can be me and I am unique. I am important because I am me. We are all ourselves. Again, I cried and felt a great sense of relief.

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I apologise for this really long post. I kinda want to journal down what I've been going through mentally and philosophically. I also apologise if I sound like I'm really proud of myself and that I may come off as a "show-off". I hope that feeling doesn't get to me and I continually improve to be a better human being to myself and others around me.

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Life is amazing :')

More debt relief tips at ROF review

[westudentflower]

Thoughts on relationships, careers, and life as a young adult in 2020

Sunday, February 2, 2020 (aka Super Bowl Sunday)

During service this morning, the pastor made the analogy that unlike the Super Bowl, everyone is playing on the field. No one is a spectator. We are all part of God’s world and his community. He also made the point that God doesn’t need our help to fulfill his will. Some of you are “helping God find you a spouse,” he joked. The congregation laughed. But instead of laughing, I thought to myself—is he implying that we shouldn’t go on Tinder? Yes, we trust God and that his Will be done—but that doesn’t mean we sit around waiting for the perfect guy to show up at our doorstep, right?

I’ve been thinking a lot about guys—or I guess I should say, the lack of guys in my life. More specifically, the lack of a specific type of guy in my life. Some of my low-key panic about this is probably a cultural/social thing, as I haven’t met many people who are 22 and have never dated before. But I want to share my life and thoughts and feelings with someone. I imagine meeting that special someone, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, but how exactly do you go about doing that? I don’t want to have to go to online dating apps, but it sure seems now that that’s the only place to have a chance of finding interested single men. There should be less stigma around using dating apps just to make friends and meet new people, my friend said. Still, I would much rather meet someone through more “natural”, in-person means, whether through school or work, or a mutual friend, or through volunteer or some other group (I just joined a tennis league), or even randomly on the subway, but today’s culture makes it more and more difficult for that movie magic to happen. I feel like there’s a stigma around talking to strangers nowadays, and flirting and approaching people - it might even be a side effect of the #MeToo movement. The first impression might be the only chance to feel an immediate connection, and if there’s no spark from those few minutes of small talk, then that’s it. And more and more people are going on dating apps and spending more time online and less time in person. At the end of the day, it might not even matter how you first met your partner. Still, I wish our dating culture was different and more accessible. Do I regret going to a women’s college? Sometimes, I have to admit. Especially in down moments like these.

Would I want to have sex before marriage? I don’t think so, though it’ll be a while before I’ll have to deal with that question yet. I feel like I would be very anxious to do it - like how do you actually get to that point? What does it feel like? Isn’t it gross? This isn’t something that’s ever talked about, with friends or family. I feel like a lot of things about relationships are not talked about.

After the tennis match, our team went to a brewery to drink beer. We talked about things from our favorite colors to bipolar disorder to relationships. One guy was seriously trying to convince me to get drunk sometime. Talking unfiltered makes you a more fun person, and it shows the “real you.” You need to live life a little! he would say. I can’t say I disagree with him entirely - I would want to get tipsy at least once in my life because I’m genuinely curious to see what it feels like. I don’t like the taste, and I know drinking is just a temporary high, but I think it would be an interesting, maybe even eye-opening experience to talk without thinking, especially someone like me who restricts myself in outward expression. And I do feel like I’m not “living life”—I didn’t have the typical fun college experience of partying and going out to bars and clubs, but I’m also not fulfilling my idea of living life, which would revolve more around doing crazy things like climbing mountains and exploring the city and zip lining and going backpacking and traveling the world.

I would say there’s a few things missing in my life.

1. Having deep theological conversations, like what does it mean to be saved and who is saved. I like it when the pastor gives philosophical/theoretical type sermons. Even as a Christian I still doubt, and I don’t always find apologetics to be convincing. The pastor gave a really intriguing sermon today on a tough Bible passage in Romans. God chooses which people are made as “vessels of mercy” and which are “vessels of destruction.” Is it unfair that Jacob was favored but Esau hated? Yes it is, yet God is still good and merciful and just. If he was fair, we would all be in hell. The very concept of justice depends on God. We don’t know the math behind his decision making, but we know he is motivated by something deeper than fairness: the justice of his will, the demonstration and exaltation of his nature. So does it even matter what we do? God does things we don’t get to decide. The pastor described that just like diamonds are forged through heat and pressure, virtue is forged through the truth revealed in the tensions present in the Bible. It’s not about having a systematic theology of how God makes decisions, it’s about being virtuous and having humility. If we demand to understand the inner workings of how God runs the universe, then we don’t actually trust him. Faith is not based on my approval of His work, but rather, my experience of His character. To me, it’s a satisfying answer that doesn’t answer the question. If God decides who is saved, and we choose to believe in God and in the Bible, were we then predestined to make this conscious decision? Is Christianity really a religion for ALL people, where ALL people are welcomed into God’s family? How can we blame our friends and family members for their unbelief or convince them to believe the gospel if God may have already molded them into “vessels of destruction”? Part of the journey of faith is struggling with these seemingly paradoxes, and I believe we are made stronger through these tensions, and these tensions can be used for a good purpose. But a lot of things we just don’t understand, and we have to trust that God is a good and a just God.

2. Intellectually stimulating work. I do like my current job - the firm does good work, even if I’m not super close to my colleagues and my job is more literature review aka google searching and basic excel stuff. But I think I could be doing more exciting things. I want to live in a different culture, get out of my comfort zone, try new things, and work in the government and in policy (which gave me more doubt as to whether law school was necessary to do what I want to do, which is also in doubt—my determination to do well on the LSAT and get into a top law school is being overshadowed by yet another existential crisis over what I would want to do with a law degree—I don’t see myself going the corporate or tax law route, and my imaginations about saving the planet through environmental law don’t seem that realistic or rewarding anymore…I could also make just as much meaningful impact working in the sustainability team at a large company, or doing policy analysis in a government agency, but those don’t seem as exciting either. So then what does??). Another regret I have is not interviewing for the Peace Corps my senior year of college. My roommate’s friend met her boyfriend, who did the Peace Corps in Peru, through a friend who also did Peace Corps—they met at a reunion event and now have an adorable 6-month old. Maybe I would be better off and happier if I lived and worked in a different country, rather than Boston? Not necessarily relationship-wise, but just doing something that’s more rewarding.

3. And the gap that hurts the most: A serious, romantic relationship. My generation grew up being told that as women, we can now put career over family. We can now have both. People are marrying, having kids later, more and more women are entering the workforce and having successful careers, we’re making good progress in terms of gender equality in the workplace. But I rarely hear anything about family being more important than career. Your career can change any minute, but your family is who you live for, your family is what sticks by you for the rest of your life - your family is who you go home to at the end of the day, it’s who you spend the holidays with, it’s who you spend your most treasured moments with. Our legacy lives on in our children; we were biologically made to reproduce. I would put family over career in a heartbeat — assuming I find someone I can know intimately, and who really understands me. I feel like nothing else—where we live, what we do—really matters, as long as we’re doing it with someone we mutually love and care about. Even long-distance wouldn’t be a problem—there are so many ways to stay connected, especially in today’s age of technological progress. There’s always a way to work things out, as long as that foundational commitment is there. I don’t know anyone who wants to live their whole life single, or not have any children. What is life without romance? Is there any meaning and happiness in a life without love?

What I can be thankful for in my life:

1. Wonderful friends and roommates. Last night I met up with a few college friends over hotpot to celebrate a friend’s birthday - I got to not only catch up with friends but also talk deeper over things I wouldn’t talk about with coworkers or other friends, including relationships. Which can be liberating. At church I also met a new friend from Shanghai, with whom we had an almost immediate connection.  

2. Money to buy the food I want and the things I want (mainly food) and do the things I want to do (a lot of work events are coming up like a Bruins game and ski trip and cooking class!)

3. Dreams and aspirations, and free time to reflect and pursue them

Being in a temporary stage of my life means that my life is unstable and uncertain, which is unsettling, worrisome, and scary. Sure, my life is fine. It could definitely be a lot worse—I could be burning in the Australian wildfires, dying from the coronavirus which has now killed over 200 in China, or being wrapped up in the Trump impeachment trials. Yet it’s not as great or exciting as it could be either. I don’t think I’m happy. Life is just—okay. And that’s partly what makes it unsatisfying and uneventful—nothing’s really happening. And I’m the only one who can change that.

[antialiasis]

FAR TOO EARLY THOUGHTS ON GROUNDHOG DAY THE MUSICAL

Because I am, ahem, a little actually full-on obsessed with this thing right now. Damn you Tim Minchin and your delicious deliciously dark serious humour.

(Far too early because I have not seen it and have no idea what I’m talking about and am trying to judge exclusively from listening to the soundtrack a lot, ahaha clearly I am Qualified to comment on it)

So in lieu of being able to actually see the musical, I rewatched the movie the other day, and along with some repeat listens to the soundtrack, it gave me Thoughts.

The movie is a fairly straight comedy. There is an element of existential horror to the premise, but it’s pretty much entirely played for laughs. Phil accepts the bizarre situation he’s in without much fuss aside from comical confusion and annoyance. There is, yes, the suicide montage (the most memorable part of the movie by far for me, because I am me). But it’s kicked off by the absurd, hilarious sequence where Phil kidnaps the groundhog, steals a car and then dramatically drives it off a cliff. “He might be okay,” Larry comments before the car explodes, then, “Well, no, probably not now.” Definitely played for laughs, and while the following montage isn’t comical in the same way until after the end (”I really, really liked him. A lot.”), it’s too short to actually whip back from comedy to any kind of serious emotional impact.

The premise of Groundhog Day interestingly invites the viewer to consider how the people around them are also people living their own lives, whose lives might be positively or negatively impacted by one’s own actions - Phil gets to know the life story of practically everyone in Punxsutawney, and eventually his character growth comes in the form of deciding to be a positive force in the lives of all these people - at least for this one day. But it is a bit of a shame that despite this premise, the supporting characters in the movie are pretty one-note and not very fleshed out - Rita gets to be a real, developed person who reacts to Phil in organic and fairly believable ways, but characters like Ned Ryerson are just standard exaggerated comedy people, who we get to see being exaggerated comedy people in a few different variations. It’s hard to truly get a sense that Phil has come to care about these people, because the movie doesn’t make them seem like actual people, just obstacles in his path that he eventually learns his way around. (Or, if you appreciate video game analogies, they are pretty much just NPCs with little sidequests that he’s learned to speedrun). As a result, I actually find his character development less convincing than it could be - there are really good moments that strengthen it (when he realizes on the day that he’s honest with Rita about what’s happening that she’s an infinitely better person than he is, and when he tries to save the homeless man), but the actual bit with him trying to help everyone in town falls flat in comparison, becomes a mere comedy routine rather than giving a real sense that he’s changed as a person.

So, what I’ve noticed from the soundtrack of the musical version is that it takes the premise a lot more seriously than the movie ever did, which is pretty exciting. Phil’s suicidal despair is actually dwelt on a bit and gets a pretty serious song exploring his tortured mental state as he tries to kill himself repeatedly - I also gather that his first suicide attempt involves him shooting the groundhog and himself with a gun, which definitely sounds a lot less comical than the version in the movie, although I can’t confirm that myself (God I want to see this show). And the second act appears to go to pains to spotlight at least two of the supporting characters (Nancy and Ned) as real people with their own rich inner lives, not simply props in Phil’s personal universe, which I imagine probably makes it a lot more genuine and rewarding when Phil starts to truly treat them that way. I really dig that; I hope that’s what they were going for and that it’s doing more of that (although obviously they wouldn’t have time to give a spotlight to every bit character).

ANYWAY. The soundtrack. I have listened to it enough to start to really appreciate the songs. Here are my favorites, not in much of a particular order.

Hope

Obviously. This song was written for me specifically, thank you Tim. Even if it weren’t about suicide, it’s a beautiful song and I love Andy Karl’s voice.

Favorite lyrics:

After acid and gas and guns and razors and rope, you may want to live but baby, don’t give up hope - I have buttons okay. In fact I’m pretty sure I have a special button just for characters listing off suicide methods, in pretty much any context; I seem to recall this just always gets me. Why? Who knows, but either way, FFFF

And in your head that leaden dread, the fucking roads have all been trod and there’s no way and there’s no God and God, oh God, this goddamn weather will last forever - leave it to Tim Minchin to punch me in the gut with precision F-strikes and repeated invocations of God.

Day Three

I just like listening to his mounting incoherent desperation. It makes me grin helplessly. Again, I have buttons. Also, the actual music is glorious, taking Day One and twisting it around and making it sound hellish and sinister. It’s great.

Favorite lyrics:

No. No. No! No! Come on! Don’t ring! Do not ring! Do not-- God, this--the hell’s happening? This--goddamn! God... damn! Somebody! Okay. I can figure this out. Figure it out, come on! Christ! Come on! Oh, damn it! Oh, God! What the hell! Help me! - yes, good, this is exactly what I wanted from this musical, A++

Day One

This one’s just really catchy. I have had it stuck in my head for days (specifically the first half, what I think people refer to as “Small Town, U.S.A.”, although on the track listing it’s just Day One).

Favorite lyrics:

And I’ve no qualm at all with your small-town people, I admire their balls getting out of bed at all to face another day in a shithole this small - just look what a gloriously condescending dick he is.

If I Had My Time Again

I really love this song musically, but the lyrics are even better; Rita with all her dreams and ambitions and desire to do things better is such a fantastic contrast to exactly how inane and self-centered Phil’s activities have been. I’m assuming this is played as the trigger for his character development, and it’s exactly spot-on. In the movie he just says that she’s such a much better person than he is; the musical shows it, in a way so achingly clear that there’s just no way for Phil to not see it himself.

Favorite lyrics:

Rita’s I always dreamt of learning how to dance / it’s so exciting / a new beginning every morning / to have the time to strive for more, interlaced with Phil’s Sometimes I go out without pants / I slept with 90% of women in Punxsutawney between 18 and 84 / and one dude when I was bored - Phil, striving for more.

Similarly, Rita’s I always fancied learning how to climb / I’d study math / and search for meaning / and run up hills / and learn to paint / just to know I can simultaneous with Phil’s I once masturbated seven times / in the bath / in one evening / it wasn’t fun but still / a man my age / it’s nice to know I can / it’s nice to know I can - w o w. Who wouldn’t slink back and rethink their entire life after this. (Also, it’s hilarious.)

And if you knew the endless nights that I have wasted getting wasted contemplating different ways to suicide - never mind me, just me and my buttons again.

One Day

I actually mostly love this one musically, but it’s also just a great ramble from Rita developing her character, and alongside its humour it establishes she has a bit of a romantic fantasy going on beneath a lot of layers of cynicism, setting up why she might nonetheless end up falling for a guy in the space of a day.

Favorite lyrics:

And I’d rather be alone if the only other option is succumb and settle down with some condescending clown with a great rating from some dating service, some self-professing Mr. Perfect, another narcissistic legend made a million out of hedge funds, another sexually ineffectual self-obsessing metrosexual pseudo-intellectual getting drunk and existential every time the Steelers lose a game - Tim Minchin in full form.

ANYWAY, I am a little obsessed, hopefully I can think a little less about this now that I’ve gotten some of it out of my system.

[drblackgaard]

Characters to Whom I Relate

(tagged by @echoofmidnight over a year ago to do this, finally doing it, now with 100% less ending prepositions in the title)

In which Devon probably definitely massively overshares about his problems

unlike the original I’ll actually add a brief(?) explanation and not just their name and photo. one might also notice some overlap between this list and character’s I’ve cosplayed, for obvious reasons.

im tagging @messed-up-polkadots @moss-effect @duchashka @writingpikachu @tanosoka

Ryugazaki Rei (Free! Iwatobi Swim Club)

This will probably be the only long one? When I was first tagged in this post, Rei was probably the first character that came to my mind. I love all my Free boys so dearly, but Rei is my least favourite out of the Iwatobi boys, which makes it interesting that he tops this list so definitively. (This list contains lots of characters considered the “smart one” (roughly 10/13 on the list, arguably). That is not the primary reason that I picked any of them, just for reference.) When I first watched Season 1 of Free!, I was at the very beginning of my first year away from home (2nd year of post-secondary). Like Victoria and I literally started watching the show while my family was dropping me off in Vancouver. My social situation/mental health situation was really not great in high school, especially not as a combination. I felt like Rei’s struggles of s1 captured my experience bizarrely well. Not the learning to swim, but Rei was faced with this social situation where he awkwardly entered into a pre-formed social circle where he was the only one without this shared history. As time goes on, he increasingly realizes that he’s the outsider, not just in skill, but in years and years of shared experiences, and as everyone talks about their issues concerning Rin, Rei’s increasingly confronted with the fact that he doesn’t belong in this circle of friends like any of the others do. He’s an outsider looking in, always 4 steps behind what’s going on, and no one’s ever bothered to fill him in on the things that have happened. When the finale rolls around, and Rin has the chance to swim the relay with Rei’s team; the team that he’s trained with and built up all this work for, Rei makes the huge sacrifice play and sits this incredible moment out, isolating himself so that his friends can hang out with their other friend and he can watch from the sideline. This whole situation was very much like my social situation in late high school, but more depressing in general, more acquaintancey than in Free, but the finale really got to me, and I could immediately think of so many times that I’d bit the bullet and had to sit out on participating or make sacrifices that really hurt to help people spend their time with their Rin’s instead of with me, because I know that they’d much rather do that than be around me. Rei’s story was really emotional for me in s1, and I probably resented it to a degree for that, but it was nothing if not relatable. Also, Rei’s real gay. Ok, now for shorter things(?)

Nanase Haruka (Free! Iwatobi Swim Club)

There’s definitely something to be said that Haru is half of my all-time main OTP and Makoto is my #1 fictional husband and the whole thing where your ships say a lot about what you relate to/are looking for in relationships and what a big part Free! was of me coming to terms with being gay and all of this is extremely highly interconnected. The main point I want to make on this one, though, is Haru’s relationship with his talent. The very first episode opens with a monologue about how Haru wishes that people would stop putting him on a pedestal. He’s the only sports anime protagonist I’ve seen who despises competing in the sport the show’s about. [continuous grumbling about the s2 finale and haru’s arc’s ending but hey tokyo makoharu is enough for me to be happy with]. Haru is exceedingly talented at swimming, yes, but he doesn’t want to do it for a living; doesn’t want it to be about the numbers and the competition. Obviously this was much more a thing in s2. Haru’s very talented in so many other areas: all forms of art, cooking, he’s consistently in the first class of his grade throughout middle and high school. It’s clear to me in s2 that he just wants people to remember that he actually has other talents, so many other career options besides professional swimming, which is why he gets so upset when even Makoto of all people broaches swimming first as what he should be looking at for the future. I am very smart, plainly put. I hate embellishing my gifts but the point is that I’ve always been put on a pedestal for being years beyond my age in academic and emotional intelligence. After a point, you really wish that people would remember that you have any other skills or talents whatsoever. I knew that I didn’t want to build my identity on my brains, and tried to push so hard to get people to recognize more parts of who I am, but it’s still usually overshadowed by my brain. Being a Christian in a close Christian community social-wise, I’m very frequently in situations of mutual encouragement, compliments, and such, and every time that someone identifies my smarts as my peak characteristic, I die just a little bit inside. Once at a youth leader’s retreat with some of the closest friends I had (very relatively speaking), we were given someone else’s name and had to pick a single word to describe that person. I was expecting something intellectual as always, and received the word “loyalty” as a singular concept I represented to her, and I think it might still be the most lasting compliment that’s stuck in my head, now 6-ish years later. That one was also really long, but it dovetails nicely into the next one. Oh, and Haru’s also very gay, and in love with Tachibana Makoto. Very relatable.

Eugene Meltsner (Adventures in Odyssey)

Obviously I really like Adventure in Odyssey. It’s my #1 fandom, Victoria and I run a relatively popular fan podcast for it, and we just listen to it a whole lot. When people ask who my favourite AIO character is, which happens frequently, they usually assume Eugene, because he’s smart and I’m smart [which is annoying to me, re: above]. They are actually correct about the character, but wrong about the reason. The reasons Eugene’s my fave are actually mostly unrelated to why he’s included here, but the above point does connect well to Haru’s spiel. Likewise, that spiel connects well with Eugene’s insecurity regarding his mind. I said above that I try hard not to build my identity on my intellect, but obviously there are times that that effort has failed me. Coming to UBC was a big part of that. In my teeny hometown, I stood out greatly in high school. I graduated with about a 97% average, 2nd highest in my grad class, bilingual diploma, and almost double the minimum credits I needed because of all my extra-curriculars. I was fluent in 2 languages and excelled at 2 instruments. My last math teacher said I was tied for the smartest student he’d ever taught. First year of college was at home, did alright, then I came to UBC. For reference, the university has about 8 times more undergrads than the population of my hometown. I quickly realized that I was not the smart one anymore, just another one of the crowd. I made friends with people whose intelligence casually dwarfed my own by orders of magnitude. I didn’t have an existential crisis or anything, since I’d already tried to proactively guard myself against that kind of false life foundation, but insecurities are always there to creep in. I often think of Eugene in Truth, Trivia, & ‘Trina. One of Eugene’s arcs in that episode (which was obviously in many others as well), was getting over his compulsive need to prove his worth through his intelligence, of understanding he had value without needing to info dump on everyone all the time. For Eugene, it obviously had deep rooting in his relationship with Leonard and the ways that was left unresolved for Eugene after his parents’ disappearance, but that’s another dissertation for another podcast episode. The point is, while I recognized this fact in theory, I’ve always had a lot of trouble internalizing it. I know my worth comes from who I am in God, not on my own talents, but that doesn’t stop me from compulsively seeking validation through my brains or my humour or literally anything else I can possibly do to receive affirmation from others. Also Eugene loves neologisms and beautiful, convoluted sentences and I can really get behind that.

Evan Hansen (Dear Evan Hansen)

I finally watched this musical for the first time less than a week ago and yeah, I feel like I’ve probably covered most of the reasons that connect me to Evan Hansen. high school: I was extremely alone, very depressed, frequently suicidal, and, more often than not, constructing elaborate fictional scenarios in my head wherein I had deep, intimate friendships with the people around me. I didn’t take it as far as Evan, and also was gay for Connor in this analogy. They can’t all be perfectly relatable.

Adrian Hlaváček (Always Raining Here)

This is where the list becomes a lot more loose lists of character trains. Adrian is: A Hot Mess™, really real gay, had that one crush that messed him up for so long bc you always fall for the straight ones and hope against hope it will impossibly work out and it obviously doesn’t and then you end up like the picture below, loves to sing, all about that Musical Theatre Life, seems like the innocent and pure one but then it turns out Oh you actually have a lot of emotional baggage that’s messing up your relationships in all sorts of unexpected ways, smart, lives in Vancouver, etc.

Wirt (Over the Garden Wall)

Wirt is: Anxiety+, poetry and concert band, the biggest nerd??, long walks through the forest, the older brother who will do whatever it takes to help his lil sibling, really stubborn, maybe never, maybe he’ll never give this up.

Amy Santiago (Brooklyn Nine-Nine)

Amy is: lover of reading, lover of Jake Peralta, cares so much about organization and protocol and actually enjoys filing and alphabetizing things, has a serious problem about putting people in leadership roles on pedestals where you just really want to be validated and mentored and spend time with them and maybe you just need to take a chill pill somethings and diversify your investment in people, super passionate about justice and doing the right thing

Jemma Simmons (Agents of SHIELD)

Jemma is: a biologist, really deeply truly fascinated by all sorts of sciency things and doesn’t really get when maybe that cadaver is a little morbid to others because LOOK it’s so cool! look at how that alien parasite burrowed into the brain like that why are you all turning green? what do you mean this isn’t a conversation for the dinner table?, would die for Peggy Carter also, mom friend, steadfast friend and a lot tougher than you realize until backed up against a wall, just such a huge nerd it’s incredible

Jake English (Homestuck)

Jake is: a dork, says the most outlandishly old-fashioned euphemisms completely unironically that no one else has said for 73 years, frequently has no emotional awareness as to his surroundings, just utterly oblivious at all times, very not straight, indiscriminate taste in most media

Ryan Haywood (Achievement Hunter)

Ryan is: (not actually a character but whatever), the “smart one” of the group but he actually basically never knows what he’s talking about and is usually just saying words vaguely related to the topic he knows and no one else realizes it, very doting friend, not here for any of your “wow look at that man and woman who are friends clearly they must be doing a romance there is literally no other option” nonsense, terrible diet, so much more of a nerd that he lets on 99% of the time, switches from really dark to really genuinely caring to really over-the-top at the drop of a hat, the theatre guy

Ben Wyatt (Parks and Recreation)

Ben is: Depressed+, really into so many different things, gets annoyed at people who act like mainstream fandom is anything other than mainstream culture at this point, it’s not a niche nerd thing anymore, sorry big bang theory, enormous romantic softie, puts a lot of thought into everything he does, likes terrible math puns, will correct your incorrect details about his fandoms. he wasn’t going to say anything, but actually it’ll bug him if he doesn’t. he’s not pretentious or a prick about it, he just cares a lot about a lot of things.

Marius Pontmercy (Les Misérables)

Marius is: literally me in our grade 12 production of Les Mis, and Lena you brought this curse upon me that I’m continually more and more like Marius how did you trap me like this? it’s awful. Marius is actually the Worst™ and here I am; my soul eternally bound to this fate. Marius is just the biggest mess in all of fiction, continually, every day of his life, and every post I read about his awful shenanigans in the book is too accurate to my life and I hate it. Ex: everything on this post

Carlos the Scientist (Welcome to Night Vale)

Carlos is the other one on this list I’ve cosplayed. To quote my sister when I told her I was doing it, “You ARE the gay handsome scientist man”. Carlos is quite literally me. A flamboyant brown scientist with impeccable hair who wears his lab coat far more than is professionally necessary and just really loves science a lot.