#perdvivly

[nohoperadio]

@perdvivly:

“before sending to post” has a nice cadence to my ear

interesting, sending to post, that does sound nice... it might be a touch too ornate for this post, which I think wants to deliver the concept as cleanly and swiftly as possible without the language drawing attention to itself, but it's a good one to be aware of... send to post...

guy who tags all of her tumblr drafts "#drafts", then removes the tag before posting the draft

[togglesbloggle]

I was tagged by @wellmetmat in @perdvivly's ask meme that's going around- thanks for the interest! A few questions, they shall be answered. I won't tag anyone else for now, but anyone who sees this should absolutely respond if they're so inclined.

1. What virtue do you most often see in other people that you feel comparatively deficient in?

Easy one for me: diligence. Consistency, commitment, patient sustained focus on moderate challenges. Being there not on day 1 but on day 1000.

It's a skill I greatly admire in others, and I'm often drawn to those who can practice it successfully and consistently. The virtue of diligence has a way of making the world around oneself a dramatically better place, so being attracted to such people really works out well for me in the long run. Good parenting is perhaps one of the ur-examples here; the stakes of consistency get about as high as they reasonably can, and the rewards are just as clear. I've heard parents say that it's a time of very long days and very short years, and I often strive to give my days and my years the same quality- with not as much success as I'd like.

2. Show us an object in your daily life that you have an emotional attachment to - tell us a little bit about it if you want! (a favourite mug perhaps? socks with a cute pattern? dealers choice)

I actually live more-or-less surrounded by little curios that meet this description, so I had a lot to choose from. It's a lifestyle, or at least a method of interior decorating, that makes me really happy. I grabbed these three more or less at random. From left to right:

Every geologist has a collection of boring-looking rocks with cool science attached; this is the star of my collection. It's a microbialite, meaning roughly that it's a 'fossil' of an ancient microbial mat. This one is from the Buck Reef Chert in South Africa, basically a piece of flint. It's 3.42 billion years old, from the Paleoarchean. It's nearly seven times older than multicellular life, and even predates oxygenic photosynthesis (which is the pattern where plants or green algae uptake CO2 and release oxygen); the organisms that created this fossil breathed iron instead. So it's the sort of organism that was common in the shallower waters of Earth's oceans back in the most primordial ecosystems we have a record of. A relic from an alien world, older than a full third of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. I find it very beautiful to be biologically related to it, and to be part of the same uninterrupted organic chemical reaction.

In the middle is my orchestrator badge for a university class which conducts an elaborate simulation of the papal election of 1492 and its aftermath, run by a professor in the history department- this is last year's. You may recognize 1492 in the Italian peninsula as 'interesting times'. It's taken for class credit, but the heart of it is a LARP that plays out over the course of about two and a half weeks, with full costuming and set-dressing. Every student is assigned a particular period character; most are voting cardinals, some are monarchs ruling over France or Spain and trying to get a favorable pope for themselves, a few are invented minor roles like vote counters that wouldn't have been recorded by history (so that clever cardinals can bribe them, among other things; we have rules for how much the vote-takers can cheat). After suitable prep, we let them loose, and watch the poor bastards chase incentive gradients far enough to burn Europe to the ground. I myself pretend to be a mere orchestrator for the first three days of the simulation, and act mostly as a custodian for the monarchs, but then I dramatically reveal myself to actually be Sultan Bayezid II, of the Ottoman Empire, and then proceed to menace Europe with my impossible wealth, vast armies, and advanced technologies. It is, without fail, a delight.

The right is a watch given to me as a birthday gift some years ago by my dear sister, one of the marvelous transparent ones where you can see finely made gears and springs all working. It's effective for being taken seriously in Europe; combined with brown leather shoes and a thoughtful choice of shirt, it's enough to elevate you above the 'slobby American tourist' first impressions. The watch's finest hour was when I wore it to the front row of the Penn and Teller production of Shakespeare's Tempest. The show was full of stage magic to supplement the play itself, because of course it was, and this watch was irresistible to them during the audience-participation bits. Ariel the wind spirit made a great show of stealing it off my wrist, and of disappearing it and so on multiple times.

3. If you could choose, what level of fame would you want? How many people would you want to recognise you?

There's a level of demifame that I think is just right: enough respect within a widely-spread subculture to earn a comfortable income from fans, and relative anonymity outside it. Jo Walton is at about that sweet spot, for a concrete example. In practice, I think this translates to a few tens of thousands of people around the world that would recognize you, but the key is that they're not randomly selected: they're the people that you share that subculture with, so there's a baseline of mutual regard and shared values even when you're greeted out of nowhere by a stranger in a strange city.

4. Where do you feel language is least adequate to capture, communicate, or express your experience?

What a mean question to ask by text! Ha.

There's a set of experiences you can reach, which I happened to find both through scientific literacy and mindfulness meditation, involving the conditionality and contingencies of personal identity. You may have felt it a little bit when I was talking about my favorite rock, just now; you might not have. I have a powerful and sustained sense of myself as an expression of natural processes, or perhaps of the role of consciousness in illuminating the full depth of that process. It's quite comforting, I suppose, though even that's not a particularly apt description really. I think I called it being 'deep okay' a while back, though I don't recall where; I don’t think I came up with that label myself though. It was here!

5. If you had to come up with a question with the following criteria:

a) it should disuade knee-jerk reaction answers (i.e. it shouldn't be something people are likely to have spent a lot of time considering before)

b) it shouldn't be too specialised (the audience should be general, don't ask about people's top 3 byzantine spice merchants opperating between 754AD-816AD)

c) it shouldn't be needlessly emotionally charged or divisive

d) it should be a question you expect people to have lots of varied opinions about

What would your question be?

What are the kinds of magic you most wish for, or the laws of reality that you most wish could be overcome? What would this allow you to become?

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Actually I lied I'm tagging @ritterum @femmenietzsche @eka-mark if they haven't been already.

[xenostalgic]

walking through a city park late at night, I come across an art installation: holographic figures glowing in the darkness, talking to and over one another. an avatar of @transgenderer appears in front of me and is trying to ask me some questions but I can't hear them; instead, @perdvivly's voice comes out, unsynced from the hologram's lips. how bizarre...

1. What virtue do you most often see in other people that you feel comparatively deficient in?

many things can be virtuous in some amount, I guess, and relatively few remain good regardless of how much of them you have (temperance being among the virtues). this feels maybe slightly against the spirit of the question but I guess I want to say something like prudence in the original sense, or judgment; I'm not sure my prudence is deficient so much as defective in that I'm over-cautious, prone to inaction, and people I know err on both sides of this but I do know some who strike a good balance

2. Show us an object in your daily life that you have an emotional attachment to - tell us a little bit about it if you want! (a favourite mug perhaps? socks with a cute pattern? dealers choice)

I keep a steel ring on my keychain that matches the one on my collar. very comforting object to hold, satisfyingly heavy

3. If you could choose, what level of fame would you want? How many people would you want to recognise you?

if I could I'd like to have a negative amount of fame, where people are unusually unlikely to hear about or remember me. I wish I had more people who knew me, but I really don't like being recognized by strangers; I always feel very THE WHOLE WORLD MONITORS AND MOCKS MY EVERY WAKING MOMENT about it. I guess that's downstream of the context of being recognized around my neighborhood, I probably would mind less if it was people who recognized my name from my research or something. still not actively desirable, though.

4. Where do you feel language is least adequate to capture, communicate, or express your experience?

I think language is probably up to most tasks in principle even if I'm not capable of using it to adequately capture/communicate/express something. maybe... probably lots of people will say this, but like, non-analogical, non-referential descriptions for granular sense-experiences like smells or the details of visual perception like visual snow.

5. If you had to come up with a question with the following criteria:

a) it should disuade knee-jerk reaction answers (i.e. it shouldn't be something people are likely to have spent a lot of time considering before)

b) it shouldn't be too specialised (the audience should be general, don't ask about people's top 3 byzantine spice merchants opperating between 754AD-816AD)

c) it shouldn't be needlessly emotionally charged or divisive

d) it should be a question you expect people to have lots of varied opinions about

What would your question be?

idk if this is a good question but I'm sleepy and it's what I've got: you see some pervasive graffiti/sticker campaign around your neighborhood and it inspires such strong feelings that you feel like you have to reply somehow. what might it be, would your feelings be negative or positive (artistic inspiration), how would you reply?

idk who to tag that would actually want to answer. @unknought, @nightpool, uhhh. @figment-wrangler I don't think I've ever seen you do an ask meme, time to reveal yourself

(original questions & my answers below the cut)

1. Favourite colour?

green! but ideally dark green, maybe even almost black. brighter colors are good too but in smaller doses, dark green is something I enjoy wearing or would like as the focus of a painting or something

2. Last song you listened to?

Golden Age but that's like, a regular evening doing-dishes listen. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now is the most recent one that's not in regular rotation

3. Currently reading?

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Mishima, which is great so far. always kind of weird to praise the language of a book in translation but I think it makes sense here—I keep being surprised by the directions the characters' thoughts go in, enjoyably, and the specific word choices are part of that but not the central thing. also A Glastonbury Romance (slowly), SPQR, and theoretically The Allegory of Love, which I haven't given up on yet this read—but I might fail to get through the "case studies" part of the book yet again. I've enjoyed the first two, more analytical, chapters several times but the further one gets into the book the more difficult it is to read Lewis going "btw, this poem is not good, it's primarily of interest for how it affected other literature which I'm not going to talk about" and still maintain motivation to hear more

4. Currently craving?

I am so full of burgers it's impossible to crave any food. kinda want to get high but this is impossible due to excessive prudence

5. Coffee or tea?

Tea, but I haven't had either in I think months. I guess I mostly enjoy tea in the winter to warm up with, I always get mint or other non-caffeinated kinds

[yvfu]

Hi, I hope you’re doing okay. <3. I miss talking with you and wanted to play your guessing game with you

based on "<3", I guess @perdvivly

[nohoperadio]

[replying to tags here] I guess we have competing access needs about this because my little drinks bottle neurosis is that I tend to completely reseal the bottle in between swigs, having the bottle open on my desk or w/e makes me nervous because it opens the possibility of doing a clumsy and Getting Drink Everywhere. But these things actually make it more fiddly to twist the cap back on because you can't like, bring the cap down from above, you have to pivot it back into place, and that always seems to take a bit of wrestling and forcing. Wah! Conceivably some brands have more elegant designs than others but I've not had one that felt nice so far.

I didn't actually know this was all about reducing waste, I thought it was purely a UX consideration... knowing that makes me a little more at peace with it, not because it's prosocial but because nuisances feel more nuisant when they're conceived as intended for your own benefit

You know what, I’m just gonna say it, I don’t care if this gets me cancelled. I like the new plastic bottle lids that don’t come all the way off. I find them convenient.

[draingang-agora]

I was tagged by @nashaalya for an ask game to get mutals more familiar with each other, cheers!

Favourite colour is kinda just anything from the floral shoppe palate (will never apologise for still liking vaporwave)

last song I listened too was(unfortunately) the Guess remix with billie eilielish by charli xcx, which was such a marked decline in quality from the original song, first flop of the era… >Currently Reading I'm currently reading Kants Critique of Judgement(just finished the first part & am now moving onto Teleology) I also just finished Thirst for Love as I dive deeper into Mishima…

>currently craving

Nicotine and a good burger…

>coffee or tea

while i have to say coffee here i love a cup of tea when sitting down with a book, ill drink basically whatever coffee i can get my hands on, but prefer lattes.

tagging: @nightcore-nasheed @perdvivly @anthophilyas-recrudesce

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

Tagged by @wuggen which was so lovely but I was so so busy this week:

Last song: Apparently It's The Life - Fleece? I let Spotify pick some music while doing dishes

Last movie: Barbie with some folks IRL

Currently watching: Buffy with the wif!

Currently reading: Well, I was reading Driven to Distraction, but...

Currently craving: someone to massage my back (and peel all this skin off but also just a massage would be great)

Last thing I researched: react-query options. It looks complicated but it's actually not that bad!

I'm gonna tag the first few people who come to mind so @ofthefog @gemstone-gynoid @perdvivly @vren-diagram As @wuggen said, do it or not babes 😌

[nohoperadio]

omg viv where did you even get this boop... these babies have been out of production since, gosh I don't even know how long... thank you so much.....

I don't have a way of booping you back unfortunately but I can give you this blurry spider I found in a bunch of bananas in 2018 which I hope conveys an equivalent sentiment:

[ante--meridiem]

@perdvivly

meditations on the odyssey

[perdvivly]

I had a dream that you were getting up to some real avant-garde posting in the dream world. as I drifted off to sleep tonight, I thought "wow, I can't wait to see perdvivly's dreamposting"

so, congratulations on the strength of your psychic power

!!!!!!!!!

It’s so good to be acknowledged for my dream posting. I feel like the whole dream series was some of my best stuff to be honest.

[nohoperadio]

@perdvivly (responding to this post):

I keep trying to consistently write a diary but I can never seem to make it past a week. Do you have any tips?

I was reading the first volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries last winter and probably the most useful guiding principle I had came from her, which is that diary-writing is best done quickly, it shouldn't be too considered or effortful. This is the quote I've been able to find (although I remember her mentioning it several times): "if it were not written faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all". This is important because if you allow the diary to become the sort of thing that requires non-trivial effort and non-trivial time as a matter of course then you're just doomed right, cos on days when you don't have much time or effort available you won't be able to do it, and I have days like that a lot idk about you! So whatever comes out of you when you make yourself fill a page in five minutes or less, that's your diary persona, don't try to make it cooler or more interesting than it is.

(Or anyway that's, as I say, the guiding principle, sometimes I've broken this by being distractible, occasionally I've broken it by becoming enough interested in what I'm writing that I want to make it a bit more effortposty, but I think I by and large stuck to the spirit of it when I was regularly diarying. Which came naturally partly because it so happened that one of my goals with starting it was to exercise my ability to produce words more spontaneously)

I avoided ever making the writing of the diary itself a theme in the diary; I think starting your first entry with "Today I decided to start keeping a diary because blah blah blah" is setting yourself up to fail, make the first entry follow the same template that all the future ones will follow, just talk about your day for a little bit and then stop. And by the same token, if you do miss a day or two (or more), don't start the next entry lamenting the fact that you dropped those days or offering excuses or whatever, again just write a normal entry about your day, you can include a little summary of the days you missed if you want, or not.

It's probably better approached as a useful tool for imperfectly recording your daily life than as a creative project, it will automatically be interesting to read in the future but aiming to maximize interestingness is not the way to go, it's an audienceless activity and should be treated as such.

I have a very boring life and a somewhat common aversion-to-writing for me was "this day has been empty of anything to write about", and upon putting pen to paper that feeling always turned out to be illusory. Even the days that were just "went to work and nothing notable happened, got home and didn't do anything", there was usually some little thing in there to distinguish that day from other days, or something on my mind worth putting a few words down about.

It probably helps, at least for me, that mine is a hardback leuchtturm that's a nice shade of yellow and not just whatever random cheap notebook.

It probably helps that my handwriting is big and clumsy so I can get the sense of achievement of filling a page without actually having to produce that many words.

Double-check you definitely know what today's date is before you write it in.

[kata4a]

@perdvivly

my uncle was somewhat of a rascal. we were hanging out on the roof of his barn when i was ten, and we saw some shooting stars. he told me they were angels carrying messages from god. then he handed me his old hunting rifle and taught me how to nick one out of the sky, even when it was travelling all fast like that, and how to triangulate its location — taking me out in his rusty truck down dirt roads, unerring and unceasing, until we saw that gleaming lantern. he pocketed the note from god and took me down to a pinboard where he was working on deciphering the language with his friend who was a linguistics major but got kicked out of grad school. after they shook hands, they held on for just a bit too long and i started wondering why my aunt doesn’t live with my uncle anymore, but then my uncle took me back up stairs and taught me how to fry the angel up real nice, halo and all. it was tasty

[perdvivly]

*me and the girlies at a sleepover* bubbliterally: Do you guys want some more icecream? k-simplex: That's so kind of you! perdvivly: I'd love some, thank you! bubbliterally: And some tea to go with? Hot and cold; yin and yang. Balance, you know? k-simplex: You are so wise bestie. perdvivly: I swear to god if you bust out the plain tea again I will cry. k-simplex: Plain tea? perdvivly: I'll tell you later. *bubbliterally serves the food and drink* bubbliterally: So, what do you guys think is the fundamental problem of human existence? perdvivly: Must there be only one? k-simplex: That's such a big question! bubbliterally: Well, no, but are you telling me you don't feel some problem, question, facet of human existence more keenly than all the rest? k-simplex: I think, if I had to choose, it'd be that we're essentially finite beings in what is an essentially infinite world. bubbliterally: Oooh, could you say more? k-simplex: Well. I want to like. Do things. But there are more things in the world than I can ever possibly do. More experiences than I can ever possibly have... It sounds silly. bubbliterally: It doesn't sound silly! If this is important to you, I want you to be able to share. This is a safe space. k-simplex: I guess it informs a lot of anxiety I have? That I know my time on earth is really limited and my choices are boundless, and there's this mismatch there. And I'm trying to get ahead of the curve, I'm doing a bunch of pyschoactive drugs and experiencing novel experiences but... I mean, deep down I know I'm not being graded on a curve. I know it doesn't matter whether or not I have more novel experiences than the average person, I'm falling incredibly short on an objective metric. I'm trying to say 'yes' to life, but there's so much of life you know? I'll never be able to say yes to it all. perdvivly: It's a mismatch between your imagination and your reality? What you think you could do and what you can actually do? k-simplex: Not really. Imagination is an unsatisfactory collage of experiential texture drawn from memory. Experience is genuine data. I'm not seeing myself miss out, I'm missing out. There are feeling tones I don't know about, that I can't imagine until I experience them. perdvivly: And what about the bad things? Do you want to experience them too? k-simmplex: Heartbreak, pain, longing, death... These are all profound experiences. I think they're meaningful too. I wouldn't want to say my life was complete until I'd experienced them so, yes, even the bad ones. perdvivly: And worms crawling up your urethra? You'd want to experience that too? bubbliterally: Viv, you're being kind of a dick right now. k-simplex is sharing something vulnerable. perdvivly: You're right, thank you for pointing it out. I'm sorry k-simplex. k-simplex: No, I mean, I take your point. But even if I limit myself to the "good experiences" I'm still falling way short of infinity. bubbliterally: Mmmm. You want to be large. To contain multitudes. k-simplex: Precisely. I don't want to die before I've lived. And I've only lived such a very small amount in the grand scheme of things. And... Like it or not. I'm dying. bubbliterally: I think I will choose to not like that. k-simplex: What about you Viv? perdvivly: Ah. Hedgehogs. Nothing you haven't heard before. I think it's probably something I talk too much about already. k-simplex: No, we're genuinely curious. Please share? perdvivly: Well, I guess it's something like the uncrossable gap between souls. k-simplex: The uncrossable gap between souls? What's that? bubbliterally: Could you say more? perdvivly: Sure. It's something like. Well it's what David Foster Wallace was pointing to when he wrote "How odd I can have all of this inside me and to you it's just words". *bubbliterally thoughtfully eats her icecream*

perdvivly: I have this really vivid and real and deep experience and I just... I can't share it. In principle it's just. Me, trapped inside a room with a door that says "push" and all I know how to do is pull. I keep fumbling and grasping at this door. It's door-shaped, I know about doors. I've worked pull doors. But this is different. No matter how hard I try, I'm locked inside my own head. k-simplex: It's about the claustrophobia of being trapped in your own skull? perdvivly: Not really. bubbliterally: It's about connection? perdvivly: Yeah. It feels really unserious to say how deeply this affects me. But I do... You know, I do feel things. bubbliterally: Right. No. Yeah. We get it. perdvivly: I guess if it's about anything it's about alienation and it's about isolation. k-simplex: I think there are practical steps you can take for that though aren't there? I get that expressing yourself can be hard, but everyone is in the same boat. There has been a lot of spilled ink about the art of expressing yourself lately. And, when words fail you there are haptics too. What can't be said with words can maybe be said with a kiss for example. perdvivly: The DIY pop pyschology of the modern internet aint it chief. k-simplex: I'm sorry? perdvivly: Don't be, I'm just bristling at things you couldn't have any way of knowing I'd bristle at. Which is sort of exactly the thing. I mentioned hedgehogs, you know the parable? bubbliterally: Oh from Schopenhaur? perdvivly: Yeah, exactly. bubbliterally: I see... I can understand the ways that parable interacts with your existential isolation. That can't be a very pleasant way to live. Do you feel this often? perdvivly: Daily. And you're right. k-simplex: Can I make a suggestion that might seem dismissive but I don't mean it to be? perdvivly: Of course, we're all friends here. k-simplex: What if it's easier to believe that you can't show people what you're really feeling because if you did show them, and they didn't realise what they were seeing, or if they were dismissive of it, it would be easier for you to feel like you had failed in saying what you meant to say rather than that they weren't interested in it, or by extension you? perdvivly: Oh. k-simplex: I just mean, if you can't show yourself, then you never have to put anything on the line right? You never have to expose yourself to true and deeply felt pains of coexisting in the world with other people who have their own internal worlds, which are every bit as real and acutely felt as your own. perdvivly: I'm not denying that deep down I could just be one fragile child riddled with insecurity, all this deepseated fruedian stuff that pop-psychologists would love to classify as mommy or daddy issues. But it's an untestable hypothesis right? Maybe it's a defense mechanism and it's all bullshit, but it's what I feel. I feel... Ouch ouch ouch in my brain. You know? k-simplex: I know. And I know how that might come across as dismissive, which is why I gave it the explicit caveat that I did. perdvivly: I know, and I'm grateful for the perspective. I really am. Definitely something to chew on at least. k-simplex: Yeah... What about you bubbliterally? bubbliterally: Huh? k-simplex: Is there a problem you've been sitting with a lot lately? *bubbliterally thinks for a while, drinking her plain tea* bubbliterally: Scissors congruence I think.

[nohoperadio]

I'm gonna have a crack at @perdvivly's ask meme what I got tagged in now... let's go!!

1. What virtue do you most often see in other people that you feel comparatively deficient in?

A less brave question asker might have built up to the heavy shit and put the lighthearted questions first, I respect it. Okay part of what's tricky here is that to answer this properly I'd have to make some judgment calls about which of my deficiencies are rightly attributed to genuine lack of virtue vs to something like disability, and that's a scary distinction to look at too closely. So my instinct is to avoid any territory close to that border, but the actual true answer probably is close to the border--the below is probably something of a cop-out is what I'm saying.

Here's something I've only relatively recently started conceptualizing as a virtue: the desire and ability to share the enjoyment of the things you're passionate about with other people. The books and music and etc I like, I tend to be content to enjoy them by myself in the corner, whereas for other people experiencing these things alongside others and talking about them and stuff is a large part of the point. This latter tendency is most obvious in what gets called fandom but there are lots of other expressions of it, some more casual/normie, but I don't really do any of it very much. And I used to think this difference was just "people care about different things, whatever" but lately I'm leaning more towards thinking that the more communal approach is just straight-up superior; it looks like some important, richer varieties of experience are available over that way, and I now regret that I didn't try to move myself further in that direction when I was younger.

2. Show us an object in your daily life that you have an emotional attachment to - tell us a little bit about it if you want! (a favourite mug perhaps? socks with a cute pattern? dealers choice)

Mugs (plural) probably is the best answer to this, but I've already tackled that at great length here. What else... well, my main bookmark, given to me by a friend and depicting a scholar I respect very much, has lasted an impressively long time im humble o:

3. If you could choose, what level of fame would you want? How many people would you want to recognise you?

Impossible to imagine strangers randomly approaching me in the street to start conversations being anything other than nightmarish, so the ceiling has to be below that. I guess there's different types of fame that presumably make for very different experiences, a famous actor probably gets a rawer deal than an equivalently famous author, and the type of famous author whose demographic is such that self-promoting on instagram and twitter is part of the job description surely has a worse life than one who doesn't have to do that.

Someone who knows more about the culture than me could probably say exactly what kind of thing you should be famous for to minmax getting all the pleasant-feeling respect and financial rewards while preserving privacy and minimizing unpleasant public obligations, but I'm not sure what the answer is. However this comic still pops into my head occasionally after all this time and it might be a better answer than any of these words:

4. Where do you feel language is least adequate to capture, communicate, or express your experience?

Actually I don't often get the feeling that my difficulties in expressing myself are related to the limitations of language, I tend to run into more mundane constraints before that one becomes an issue, like my embarrassment around talking about myself or my not being in tune with my own mental life or the fact that my brain is very small. I think generally if something's too subtle to put into words it's too subtle for me to think clearly about/have anything worth saying about in the first place.

I guess my other possible answer to this would be "all of my experience of life in its entirety" which is also true in a way.

5. If you had to come up with a question with the following criteria:

a) it should disuade knee-jerk reaction answers (i.e. it shouldn't be something people are likely to have spent a lot of time considering before)

b) it shouldn't be too specialised (the audience should be general, don't ask about people's top 3 byzantine spice merchants opperating between 754AD-816AD)

c) it shouldn't be needlessly emotionally charged or divisive

d) it should be a question you expect people to have lots of varied opinions about

What would your question be?

Yeah no it's hard, you've done well. My first thought with criteria A (which I think is the hardest one to cover) is to make the question require describing somebody else's perspective on something, because that way even if the answerer has their own knee-jerk opinion about the thing they'd be forced to suspend that in their answer. Maybe something like this would work:

Think of a topic that somebody close to you has very different feelings about from your own--it can be the smallest, most trivial matter of taste or something weightier if you like--what do you think is the relevant difference between you and this person that explains your different takes on that topic?

I would hope that if this question were in an ask meme like this people would tend to focus on fun and/or lighthearted differences but maybe it would turn people's brains towards bitter conflicts, I'm not sure. Anyway I'm glad question 5 doesn't end with "...and what is your answer to that question?" because it looks difficult to me!

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This was fun imo, some of the questions were more intimidating than is the norm for these things but what's wrong with a little spice you know, I recommend it, thank you @perdvivly for erecting this jungle gym of the soul. I'm following the same coward's strat as last time of picking people sort-of-randomly by tagging the last three mutuals to show up in my notifications, this time excluding the three I tagged last time, so that gives @fregolious, @abodywithorgans and @wellmetmat. I'd like to hear from you! If the random method somehow gave people I didn't want to hear from I would have had no qualms about fudging it until I got people I liked, so don't let that put you off! But also, again, any mutuals who feel like doing this and claiming that I tagged them should do so, because in spirit I have, you understand.

[perdvivly]

🔥 beauty

*abhumanex0, bubbliterally, perdvivly and tranxio are sitting around a fire*

abhumanex0: 🔥 beauty bubbliterally: How are you doing that with your mouth? perdvivly: I'm trying out beauty. bubbliterally: What does that mean? perdvivly: It means that for a long time a particular brand of brainworms I've had comes from the Platonic conception of beauty as this horrible deciever. I'm trying to shed that. tranxio: That's an anachronistic genealogy of the idea. perdvivly: Huh? tranxio: Plato does talk about the interplay between truth and beauty. Notably in the Ion and in The Republic, books two, three, and ten. Plato is worried that the arts and specifically poetry in the Ion, as Ion of Ephesus was a rhapsode, are persuasive by means of rhetoric rather than an appeal to the truth. Specifically, an account of truth that Plato takes to be his idea of Forms. But Plato is chiefly concerned with the interplay between mimesis, from the Ancient Greek mimos, meaning "imitative" and diegesis roughly meaning "narrative". For Plato, the poets are doing a bad job of representing the beauty of truth; they are unable to capture its virtue. But that doesn't mean that Plato doesn't care about beauty or reviles beauty. Plato considers the Form of Beauty to be very important! He talks about it at length in the symposium and does note the associations in many more dialogues. e.g. phaedo, phaedrus, parmenides. I think this is most obvious when you consider what surviving writings we have from Plato. They're dialogues. He was writing creative fiction. He was engaging in a memetic artform, but one that he hoped would transcend the pitfalls of poetry. A "pure crystalline theatre of the mind". I think that the idea you had in mind dervies from the Neoplatonic tradition as it was interpreted by Christianity. The works of Plotinus come to us by way of his pupil Porphyry-- bubbliterally: --wait! You're saying that Christianity takes its philosophical foundations from Neoplatonism? tanxio: That's right. Dean Inge emphasises this point in his book on Plotinus. He says there is "an utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces." Or if that isn't convincing consider that Saint Augustine-- perdvivly: --the saint who fucked. tranxio: That's right, the saint who fucked. Consider that he says of Plato's system that it was the "most pure and bright in all of philosophy" and he talks of Plotinus as a man in whom "Plato lived again". The early church owes a great deal of philosophical debt in this regard. bubbliterally: That's fascinating, so you're saying that Plotinus distrusted beauty and that's where the seed that Viv is picking up on originates? tranxio: Aha, no. Not quite. There is nothing in the mysticism of Plotinus that is hostile to beauty. But he is the last religious teacher for many centuries of whom this can be said. Plotinus founded the Neoplatonic tradition but he wasn't the sole arbiter of their beliefs. Beauty and all the pleasures associated with it came to be thought to be of the Devil. Pagans and Christians alike came to glorify ugliness and dirt. Julian the Apostate, like contemporary orthodox saints, boasted of the populousness of his beard. bubbliterally: But how did all this happen? tranxio: That's a matter of historical debate. The Neoplatonists found themselves in dialogue with the Gnostics for long while. And Porphyry suggests that there is precident in Plato for turning away from the physical world of matter. Perhaps it happened as an extension or outbranch of these dialogues? I'm not certain. But I can go and do more research on it if you would like? bubbliterally: No pressure, but I'd really enjoy the answer if you could find it! tranxio: Of course! *tranxio leaves, presumably to go to the library*

bubbliterally: That was an interesting historical perspective, but can you say more on what you meant Viv? You're "trying out beauty"? perdvivly: Right. I grew up in a pretty heavily Christian dominated soceity and personal environment. My grandparents were missionaries and I went to Sunday school. And because I grew up in England, you can bet that that sect was Anglican. Protestantism is... Austere. It's in a really sharp contrast to Catholicism. You know, you imagine these elaborate ornate robes, the alters decked-out with gold and you have these huge buildings with complicated architecture... And then you have, what I was raised in, which is, sort of an extreme embodiment of the famous saying "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" so imagine like, wooden pews so upright they could fix quasimodo's posture, plain homespun clothing, nothing ornate or elaborate just this very bare aesthetic. And gradually through a sort of cultural osmosis I think I took some of this in without meaning to or critically evaluating whether or not I wanted to. abhumanex0: So, that's a more personal etiology, it doesn't really answer the question of what you mean though. perdvivly: I know, and I don't want to mess you about, but let me give one more take on why this feels so forceful to me before I expand on what I mean and why I want it. abhumanex0: Go ahead. perdvivly: Have you ever seen something really beautiful and been compelled by it? Or, someone even? bubbliterally: I think we all know about being horny. perdvivly: Right! Sexual desire is actually a really good use-case here. abhumanex0: Not what use-case means but continue. perdvivly: It feels deep down gut-level wrong to be forced by my own body to want something without regard for its... wholeness? Without regard for all of it and all of its interactions with me... Have you ever been compelled against your better judgement to eat junk food that you know will make you feel ill? That to me feels like the same pernicious facet of force that beauty compells. Beauty in this way, sort of forces a passitivy of choice. bubbliterally: the same kind that David Foster Wallace was talking about with Eric the other day? perdvivly: Exactly! Think Catullus 85. I am beset on all sides by emotion and the waves of those emotions are bigger and stronger than I am. I'm afraid of being drowned by them. I'm afraid of being killed by them. Beauty is chief among these emotion makers. abhumanex0: Have you considered that when you say "It feels... wrong to be forced by your own body" that's an extension of the cultural Neoplatonism you absorbed through Christianity? Seeing this sharp distinction between mind and body? perdvivly: I... Hadn't... That's actually a really astute point. bubbliterally: I see... So that's why the issue is so forceful for you. But you want to try beauty out? Okay, maybe I don't see. You love and you hate beauty at the same time? perdvivly: There's no escaping it. So what I mean when I say, "I'm trying out beauty" is that I'm trying to integrate an appreciation for beauty into my life. And there are so many things I find beautiful. That I'm slowly realising I can appreciate without being destoryed by... It''s a long and hard journey. And I'm nowhere near being very good at it yet. But I think it's probably a pretty crucial step on the path of fully realising my own autonomy. bubbliterally: I think it's interesting that this whole discussion has had the locus it's had. That you've situated yourself as the desirer in world of objects to be desired, but you haven't really talked about the effects of being desired. perdvivly: Oh, well. One thing at a time. But I pretty much think that the feminists of the 80s were right about most of it. I could say more but maybe that's a story for another time. *abhumanex0 and bubbliterally both nod* perdvivly: So, how about you guys? bubbliterally: Us? perdvivly: Yeah.🔥 beauty bubbliterally: Okay seriously, how the fuck are you doing that with your mouth?

[nohoperadio]

@sungodsevenoclock tagged me for some questions like nearly a week ago and I'm just getting to them now. Which is fine I'm sure. Also @perdvivly tagged me in a branch of the same thing where they made up entirely different questions and I intend to get to those too although not this evening because those questions will be harder and I'm a little bit sleepy. Maybe tomorrow; maybe something else!

favourite colours.

This is the first question but I'm typing this answer last because I wasn't feeling it when I started this post. You know for a long time I never had a colour of my own but years of wearing the Francis Bacon shirt (rip) changed something inside me and now I possess the colour orange, I possess it now

Last song played

I've got Ones and Sixes by Low playing atm and the current track is The Innocents. I guess this is a band that makes my music taste seem cooler than a lot of things I might be playing so that worked out.

currently reading...

I'm reading Lila by Robert Pirsig due to being recommended it on this post (see I didn't forget about that post, I'm working very slowly through the list, hopefully organized thoughts on the various things will appear in some form sometime, not necessarily super soon)

currently craving...

I'm not really! If you can crave for a headache to go away then maybe I'm craving that. It's not even a bad one really though. Don't worry about me.

coffee or tea?

You know what's fucked up is that I don't really like coffee that much at all and I like tea a lot but I've drank tons of coffee in my life because I like being in cafes and it never really occurred to me to order anything except coffee when I'm in a cafe, it seemed like just the done thing. But literally all of them serve tea as well and it's only quite recently that I've realized I can just order that instead. And it's not like I didn't know that before I just arbitrarily wasn't acting on the information. My entire personality is all just stuff like this, it's awful.

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If I try to "choose" people to tag I'll feel too guilty about omitting people so I'm going to use the semi-random method of tagging the last three mutuals to show up in my notifications, who are @jerkeline, @robustcornhusk and @toasthaste (good ones!), do this if (only if) you want to. But also I grant any mutuals reading this permission to do the questions and claim that I tagged you.