#linked excerpts

[fettesans]

That is why information is tending to disappear, being replaced instead by alerts. The informer becomes a transmitter, an alert vector in a permanent and generalized system of alerts that is tied to the political, economic, social, and ecological state of the world, taken in its entirety. And the information itself is always more alarming, always more terrifying, and supported by data concerning the ongoing destruction of the world. Isn’t that inevitable when the viability of the world—and of the multiple worlds composing it and giving it its consistency—is everywhere under threat? We aren’t informed about parts of the world anymore but are on permanent alert about the general state of the world. The effect is debilitating. All the scenarios, all the simulations and hypotheses that result, whether catastrophic or not, force us to think in terms of worlds, to “globalize” even the most minute data. And that is where the junction between the actual world and SF occurs, independently of the fictional stories, as if the information concerning the present state of the world were nothing but a succession of stories anticipating its future state.

David Lapoujade, from the introduction to Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick, translated by Erik Beranek, in e-flux, July, 2024.

[fettesans]

Screen captures from Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet, 2023.

--

Back in 1991 when the book (Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean) was first published, just over 1% of Americans were using the internet. But Gelernter claimed computing was about to revolutionize life on Earth. “This book describes an event that will happen someday soon,” he wrote in the opening line. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world — the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital — will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”

In essence, Gelernter believed that every aspect of life could soon be modeled in a parallel digital simulation. Everything happening in our lived reality would be tracked and monitored and fed into software “by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables” to create a high-fidelity real-time digital representation of the world and all of its pulsing, swarming and sensuous qualities. This would be like Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse on steroids: our exact world, our very lives, all digital. And you could view, manipulate, experience and interact with this mirror world, like a child with a dollhouse. A dashboard for reality.

These “high-tech voodoo dolls,” as Gelernter described them, “will mark a new era in mankind’s relationship to the man-made world. They change that relationship; for good.” It would be possible, he believed, to not just monitor what was happening around the world, but also to predict what could happen — endless simulations of possible future events would be running inside the mirror world. We could prepare ourselves for any outcome — any future — in the physical world because we would know what was coming. (...)

The dream of a digital twin is to bypass the averages and biases and develop a personalized and predictive form of healthcare that is built around a person’s specific physiology and pathology rather than vaguely representative historical data. “The idea [of the virtual human] starts from the premise that modern medicine isn’t really that modern in scientific terms,” Peter Coveney, a computer scientist and coauthor of “Virtual You” (2023), told me over Zoom. Coveney worked on a project to digitally twin the entire 60,000-mile-long circulatory system of a deceased South Korean woman named Yoon-Sun who had donated her body to science. Cross-sections were taken from her frozen cadaver to help trace the network of vessels, arteries, veins and capillaries. Once mapped, they created a digital simulation of how her blood flowed by feeding 200,000 lines of code into a supercomputer.

Joe Zadeh, from A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life - Digital twins offer humankind the ability to command virtual replicas of forests, oil fields, cities, supply chains — and even, maybe one day, our very bodies, for Noéma, March 21, 2024.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

[luthienne]

from South Africa's genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice [ID'd]

[opencommunion]

"The Global North’s political economy relies on the oppression of the Global South in general and of Palestine in particular.

As academic and writer Patrick Higgins noted in late October: 'We’re seeing a blow against the US-led world system. Since, really post-World War II, but especially post-1970 or so, Israel has been the linchpin, the basket into which most of the American chips are put, in order to sustain broader control of West Asia.'

This historical reality places a profound obligation on those in the Global North who would seek to be in solidarity to seriously consider what strategies and tactics Palestinians are calling for in the struggle for liberation, sovereignty and safety.

Such calls to action do not include that we opine on Palestinians’ methods of resistance.

They do include that we understand the history and actuality of that resistance, do all we can to stop the ongoing provision of arms to the occupation, engage in boycott, divestment and sanctions, and fight back against the criminalization of those who support Palestine’s liberation from Zionist settler colonialism.

As Virginia Tech’s Bikrum Gill exhorted: 'Show no fear, no surrender, as you oppose those who support the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Bring your institutions to crisis if their functioning requires silence or complicity.'"

[mustlovesteve]

thanks so much to @toktopus-art for this awesome commission that she drew! based on a scene from my vamp!eddie steddie fic.

[fettesans]

The picture is in our eye, Lacan states, but we do not see ourselves in it. Yet, we constantly show ourselves to the gaze of the other, meaning we live within the frame of the Other’s looking at us. His friend Merleau-Ponty, he says, wants to reach back to an original moment where we are closer to the world of flesh, where we are not plagued and seduced by this virtual split. But there is no such ground for Lacan. There is only the Real, which is a moment when what is out of frame shatters us, like this fisherman’s joke, or the father’s nightmare, or getting stabbed in the back. (...)

Envy, jealousy, ambition are incited by the gaze and there must be a renunciation of some kind. Invidia, envy, comes from videre in Latin, to see. “It is to this register of the eye as made desperate by the gaze that we must go if we are to grasp the taming, civilizing and fascinating power of the function of a picture,” Lacan writes. This is what painting asks of the gaze: to throw itself down. “If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall its leaves?” To see at the place of this fall.

Jamieson Webster, from I’ll See You There, for The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023.

Teorema (1968) // dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

Caught Looking (1991) // dir. Constantine Giannaris

[bsof-maarav]

"[L]ate last month Rutgers required its RAs, whose job is to supervise students living in on-campus housing, to participate in a “bystander intervention” course aimed at training them to identify antisemitism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. Several of the RAs, however, abruptly left the session after a Jewish speaker explained that Hamas’s antisemitism and desire to destroy the world’s only Jewish state precipitated the Oct. 7 massacre, which resulted in the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.

The paper added that the RAs took issue with the program’s citing a definition of antisemitism offered by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). After walking out, they reportedly contacted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which proceeded to author, on the RAs’ behalf, a series of Instagram posts denouncing the antisemitism trainings as racist and upholding white supremacy.

"The mandated training program organized by the Office of Residence Life requires RAs to learn about DEI, restorative justice, community engagement, and more — all of these are inspired by Indigenous practices meant to unpack systems of white supremacy,” SJP said. “On the contrary, this specific session worked to perpetuate Zionism, racism, and white supremacy.”

SJP’s post included comments from the RAs who involved them in the controversy. One of them, who claimed to be Jewish, said, “I am tired of the word antisemitism being used to talk over genocide, I am tired of antisemitism being inflated.” The RA added, “I fear that when the Nazis and radicals come once again for the Jews that no one will believe us … it will be your fault.”

Another who took issue with the Israeli nationality of one of the course’s presenters said, “One of the facilitators even identified as ‘Israeli’ and made mention of this multiple times. He justified his authority on the topic by citing his 12 plus years spent in ’48 Palestine, going so far as to call ‘Israel’ [sic] a ‘beautiful land.'”

A milieu of extreme anti-Zionism at the school has resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since Oct. 7. In November, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”

Similar incidents at Rutgers have occured frequently. In the past few years, the school’s AEPi fraternity house has been vandalized three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a SJP rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.

In March, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation of Rutgers’ handling of antisemitism, responding to complaints that it has, for years, allowed an open season of hate against Jewish students."

[tetzoro]

꒰ ❤︎ ﹒ 𝓢𝔀𝓮𝓮𝓽 𝓢𝓸𝓵𝓪𝓬𝓮 ﹒ 𓂃 a kiss filled with fervor, desperation seeping into both of your tired bones as you melt into one another, fused and forged by the fruits of battle. being able to hold you in his arms like this, steal all the breath from your lungs eases him like nothing else. for you were with him, you were safe, you were alive.

thank you so much @purpurregen ! i’m absolutely obsessed :’)

[fettesans]

Nada, Amore Disperato, 1983

--

The capacitive touchscreen is a mystifying veil over the rational kernel of the computer. To touch a touchscreen is an oxymoron: you believe you are tapping a button but you are feeling nothing at all. What is feeling is the screen, abrim with energy and sensors. In fact, the screen touches you.  The human body is electrically conductive because we are filled with fluid, and our cells filled with conductive ions. So a layer of conductive material is placed upon a screen, which generates an electrical field. When your finger approaches, this electrical field is drawn upward to touch your own. The screen’s highly sensitive capacitors read this disruption in its own field: capacitive coupling. The device’s processor analyzes the location of your gesture on the screen. It then decides how to react to you.

Touchscreens proliferated with the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007. The iPhone revolutionized the technology industry and subsequently the world, as Marx predicted. People now spend more time than they ever have before engaging in labor and economic exchange through smartphone apps. Such apps are designed to supercharge any person’s ability to participate in the economy, operate as a small business, purchase and sell commodities, or labor to produce data, content, and attention. This quantitative leap causes qualitative transformations in the social fabric, dialectically rippling outwards from Silicon Valley to the far reaches of wireless networks. The smartphone reorganizes social relations, disrupts and re-creates new modes of production, and exploits and dehumanizes “users” across the globe. Flusser says it best: “the hands have become redundant and can atrophy. This is not true, however, of the fingertips. On the contrary: They have become the most important organs of the body”.

Kat Kitay, from The Dialectic of Doomscrolling, June 24, 2024.

Nada - Amore Disperato

[dontforgetukraine]

"The idea of pacifism, like many other concepts, has been perverted by the Kremlin, suggesting that the victim who refuses to be murdered or subjugated holds the key to “conflict resolution.” Even if we set aside the idea of punishing the aggressor to prevent future violence, we must be honest: the power to ‘stop the killings’ is not with the victim. For a long time, I have subscribed to the noble idea of not questioning people’s motives, but now I am a committed consequentialist. If you parrot Kremlin talking points and call for peace while conveniently forgetting to name the aggressor, I presume you are carrying Moscow’s water, wittingly or not. In times of war, the burden of proof must shift; one’s motives deserve to be questioned if one’s words or actions serve an inherently evil cause."

—Andrew Chakhoyan, academic director at the University of Amsterdam

Source: ‘Russians at War’ and the price of our willful ignorance

[fettesans]

Left, screen captures from Muscle, directed by Hisayasu Satô, 1989. Via. Right, photograph by Herbert List, Hands, violin, and bow of the king of waltz, Johann Strauss. From the series Panoptikum, Vienna, 1944.

While Signal, the dominant propaganda magazine of the Third Reich, focussed on delivering the Nazi ideological message, Tele turned to the cultural life of Europe. It was a magazine that would “employ softer tones… to promote sympathy for Germany,” that would show a selective appreciation of history, culture, and art. 

It was a magazine that showed Germans in a flattering light, as people who appreciated music, art, and the finer things in life, people who, before the war, you might have sat next to during an orchestral performance, people whose not-so-hidden message was, ‘Perhaps we will one day do the same once all this nonsense is finished.’ The editorial policy of the magazine can be summed up as, ‘Let’s not talk about the war.’ Indeed, a picture from the magazine’s penultimate issue was captioned, ‘Let’s just not talk politics.’

That was how, early in 1944, List came to travel to Vienna to meet up with the editors of Tele (who had moved from Berlin due to ongoing air raids), says Richter. “There, he fell in love with the Panoptikum, and suggested that he wanted to do a photo essay on it.”

A waxworks museum in Vienna’s Prater Amusement Park, the Panoptikum was founded by Hermann Präuscher in the 19th century, and showed a variety of waxworks in a lurid mix of fame, horror, sex, murder and anatomical detail in equal measure. 

List had photographed waxworks and catacombs earlier in his career. He had a surrealist fascination for the way the dead eyes and glossy skin of the waxworks were offset by their expressive faces and lifelike poses. Like photography itself, these figures had a surface you couldn’t quite get to grips with, and hidden depths which aroused a sense of unease and the uncanny in the viewer. They existed in a half-world between life and artifice, between fantasy and reality.

Colin Pantall, from Herbert List’s Panoptikum - Colin Pantall speaks to Peer-Olaf Richter, Director of the Herbert List Estate, about the strange and surreal "Panoptikum," a photobook that was first conceived in Vienna in 1944, and published 79 years later, in Magnum, September 29, 2023.

--

(...) the dream experience cannot be isolated from its content. Not because it may uncover secret inclinations, inadmissible desires, nor because it may release the whole flock of instincts, nor because it might, like Kant’s God, 'sound our hearts'; but because it restores the movement of freedom in its authentic meaning, showing how it establishes itself or alienates itself, how it constitutes itself as radical responsibility in the world, or how it forgets and abandons itself to its plunge into causality. The dream is that absolute exposure of the ethical content, the heart shown naked.

Michel Foucault, from Dream, Imagination, and Existence, 1954. In his first published text, Foucault discusses the subject matter of Traum und Existenz (Dream and Existence) by Ludwig Binswanger, 1930. Via.

[bonchobrick]

Duke and Danny bestie fic im co-authoring with some cool people for Patrol Partners! :D

A fic where Duke knows a lot about Gotham’s new problem, ghosts. The Waynes think the worst and assume he’s had some terrible experience with ghosts in the past (in reality is just very happy to talk about his best friends culture and doesnt realize how odd it is that he knows all this stuff)

Or

Duke is pretty much just vibing, the bats are having a meltdown, and Danny is having a blast!

—-

Then Duke pops the question

“So, what are you guys researching?” He asks raising a brow to the papers littered all over the room

Collectively the entire room groans as Duke absentmindedly picks up a paper on the table with the failed, static over-run image.

“We don't know!” Steph bemoans frustrated

Tim starts, “There are new entities–”

“Creatures.” Bruce corrects

Tim casts a piercing glance at his father, “I am pretty sure those are entities. Eye witness reports state that they look fairly human-like–”

Bruce challenges him right back, “Eye witness reports were also very likely to be unfactual, they seemed partially intoxicated. It’s more likely they are some kind of mutated animal.”

His son’s teeth grit, “Even so we still can’t rule out–”

“Oh right, the ghosts are back in town,” Duke's comments, gaze absorbed in the static image

Silence drowns the room as their weary eyes blink at Duke, processing what he had just said.

Then it clicks

“R-repeat that?” Tim stares intensely at Duke

“Um, the ghosts are back? That's what these are.” Duke nervously replies confused, “It’s been a bit since they visited Gotham

Tim opens and closes his mouth, immensely struggling to find any words to say. It seems like the rest of his family is fairing no better, some of them letting out noises of surprise and shock with others trying to hear if they heard that sentence right.

“There used to be ghosts in Gotham?” Bruce says incredulously

“Yeah?” Duke tilts his head, “I mean they don’t like living here with the corrupt ectoplasm but I’m friends with a few ghosts?”

Jason springs on him with wide eyes, “What are ghosts like, personality-wise?”

Duke thinks and responds with the first thought that comes to mind, “Fickle, they can be super friendly or super destructive. They do whatever they’re in the mood to.”

“Are they aggressive?”

“Sure? Sometimes?” Duke blinks at them bewildered before a petty smile crosses his lips, “They can be, hmm, commanding.”

Dicks eyes turn cold and protective, “What–”

“Listen guys,” Duke backs away from the discussion going with his internal task list in mind, “I gotta go wrap up putting together all my documents for my topic on my science fair project so uh, see-ya!”

The second youngest bounces out of the cave and the rest of the family stare dumbstruck at him.

New entities (ghosts?) pop up in Gotham + Duke describes them as fickle and commanding =

Duke is being made to do things for Ghosts who can be kind and cruel which =

= Duke is being bullied by Ghosts?!

Not on their Bat-watch!

Damian is already sharpening his ‘not murder tools’, Tim has sprung into research on the bat computer and the rest of the family have already dipped into Gotham ready to search for these perps!

Paranoid Family #1 will help Duke’s ghost problem starting now!

( pssst heres the fic :)

[badassindistress]

It is done and it is glorious!

This is a 1901 skirt for a promenade dress with added lace. I still have lace left over, so I may go back and add even more...

[crystaltrainwrecks]

‘Soundwave lay curled around the slumbering form of Shockwave, his engines giving an occasional, rumbling snore that vibrated through their back struts and against Soundwave’s chassis.

It was nice.

Warm as Soundwave nuzzled his mask against the back of Shockwave’s neck.

But, as all things did, the peace came to a shattering halt at the arrival of Starscream.’

I would like to thank @wavewavethoughtsonly for inadvertently giving me the inspiration for this little fic 😂🙏🏻

It was actually really nice having a shorter, purely fluffy fic to work on. And I’d love to do one for Dinobot X Optimus Primal from Beast Wars at somepoint! Soooooo I’ll be keeping that in my back pocket for the next time i take a break to write some more fluffy drabbles 👀

Hope yall have a lovely day! 😁🩵

[thorin]

unironically 🤕

[4dbarbie-archive]

More books in Ada's Drive!

I'm a bit late to the update as I've been on break (still am) but Ada added some more books to her drive!

In the main drive: The Ultimate Truth by Lester Levenson 💖💕 It's a great succinct summary of his teachings and I believe it's a reprinted version of his earlier book Eternal Verities which was published in 1962.

Edit: I just looked through Lester's excerpts on the archive and Ada actually shared the same extract when she was on Tumblr! Although the last line is extra; it spoke to me which is why I wanted to include it

And in her scientific research folder:

States of Mind: ESP and Altered States of Consciousness by Adrian Parker

Altered States of Consciousness by Charles T. Tart

CIA Gateway Experience