#so when you put this thing that is arbitrarily unique in its own right next to naruto vs dbz vs hxh vs soul eater

[bluinary]

Also to be a rip-off and not an homage, you need at least a SIMILAR plot to the "source" content, like.....the worldbuilding/vibe is similar. That's literally it.

The people calling cannon busters a rip off of cowboy bebop or trigun or whatever are probably the same thots who think generic shounen anime #74748 is a completely new concept and not another carbon copy of dragon ball.

[laurelnose]

monster! parasites!

you know how a few days ago i said we weren’t going to talk about monster parasites? that was a fucking lie.

the basis of my monster parasite thoughts are: every organism comes with its own internal ecosystem that goes with them everywhere. it’s like having built-in friends! ergo, when monsters crossed over to the witcher dimension during the Conjunction of Spheres they must have brought many new and delightful parasites with them. you know what fiend manes are full of? MITES. you know what drowners got on their skin? COPEPODS. what can we do with this information? anything we want.

i promise there are no pictures below the cut. i have tried to put warnings on all my sources but click any of the links below at your own risk. warning for internal and external parasites of animals, monsters, humans, and witchers; parasites altering the behavior of their hosts; and probably general body horror. if you read the eating-liver-flukes post that’s probably a decent baseline for how revolting you will find this post. 

also, super obvious bias towards aquatic parasites as referents. my degree is fisheries science not terrestrial ecology so that’s primarily what i’m drawing on even though nearly all of the witcher monsters are terrestrial. there is a TON i’m missing here bc of that bias! specifically i really wish i could talk about how parasites of invasive species often act as co-invaders with their hosts and monsters definitely count as invasive species and would have majorly reshaped ecological interactions on the Continent but i don’t know enough about terrestrial ecosystems to speculate properly. (ETA: while i still think monsters would have majorly reshaped ecological interactions on the Continent, I don’t actually think they’re invasive species anymore!) hopefully you enjoy it anyways!

it is, hilariously, canon that parasites are used for alchemy. according to The Last Wish, the Temple of Melitele’s grotto grows a bunch of different “rare specimens—those which made up the ingredients of a witcher’s medicines and elixirs, magical philters and a sorcerer’s decoctions” and some of those specimens are, uh, “clusters of nematodes.” nematodes being parasitic roundworms. this is really funny because it’s so fucking weird. also everything else in this description is a plant or a fungus and nematodes are definitely animals? i choose to believe the world makes sense and nematodes aren’t plants in the witcherverse. therefore parasites are alchemical ingredients, it’s canon, give me more witchers digging through monster intestines in search of worms and put a nematode colony in the basement of corvo bianco please and thank you

this actually leads right into my personal favorite drowner headcanon (hello yes i’m tumblr user Socks Laurelnose and i am always thinking about drowners)—you know those bits where drowners kind of have red blotches in their skin? those are nematodes, actually, because i said so. the reference is Clavinema mariae, a nematode that infests English sole. the worms are basically harmless but they’re dark red and you can see them through the skin. it freaks people out and makes it hard to sell sole. (IMAGE WARNING: a picture of an infected flatfish. it looks mostly normal but there’s a dark red lesion near the fin.) said lesion is probably a coiled-up Clavinema. sole have so many of these, it’s not even funny (PDF article link, IMAGE WARNING for worms visible underneath skin of flatfishes. relevant images pointing out exactly how many worms on page 5). “but the red parts of drowners could just be flushed from blood”—no. worms. 

okay that was my main specific-parasite-for-specific-monster headcanon (except also succubi probably have a unique species of lice for their hairy legs. but that’s barely even a headcanon, basically all terrestrial vertebrates have a unique species of lice.) i wanted to start with it because i think that everyone should feel free to arbitrarily assign a totally benign but conceptually gross worm to their favorite monsters. why not, yanno? also it probably sets the tone for the rest of this post. 

carrying on: “what monsters might have nematodes, besides drowners,” you may be wondering? probably all of them! all of them are full of nematodes. nematodes are fucking everywhere. allow me to share a deeply unsettling quote from nematologist Nathan Cobb: 

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable since, for every massing of human beings, there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”

jesus christ! thanks nathan, I hate it. nematodes are usually both benign and microscopic, but we’re talking witchers, we want some parasites we can fuckin get our hands on. sperm whale placentas are sometimes infested with nematodes up to 28 feet long but only a centimeter in diameter (Wikipedia link, no images). like an incredibly awful spaghetti! we don’t really seem to know if this bothers the sperm whales. also, i unfortunately do not know enough about the size of whale organs to tell you how big the placenta is in relation to this worm. the point is: real big monster? REAL BIG NEMATODES.

moving on from nematodes—okay, you know, since i mentioned eating deer liver flukes at the start of this post, let’s just go there. real life flukes max out at about 3 inches long, but hypothetical monster flukes could be much bigger and equally edible if desired. (if you’re wondering what a liver fluke would taste like: the flukes feed on the liver and they have very few organs of their own, so they would taste basically just like liver, just also long and flat like a fruit roll-up. if you’re going there, a witcher should not eat any flatworm live. if they’re digging them out of cockatrice livers or whatnot they should kill them before munching or save to cook later. it would probably be safe to eat one live, but you know that cliche “their tongues battled for dominance”? handling a live flatworm is like a handling very strong and energetic tongue complete with slime, okay, it wouldn’t be nice.)

parasites often need more than one host to complete the life cycle—for instance, Leucochloridium paradoxum (VIDEO WARNING: you may have seen this, it’s the one that makes snail eyes pulsating & green) has a bird stage and a snail stage, and it makes the snails look and act really weird in order to attract the birds. parasites altering host behavior to attract the next host in the life cycle is pretty well-documented; for instance, there’s an eye fluke that can make fish swim near the surface where predators can eat them (New Scientist article link, images of a microscope slide & a normal-looking fish) and a tapeworm that does the same and makes the dark silver fish turn white (JSTOR article, no images). i posit that at least some monsters are accompanied by “ill omens” of animals looking or acting strangely because they become infected with a stage of one of the monster’s parasites—usually, the mechanism is that internal parasites lay eggs that are passed in feces & transmitted that way. witchers who are up on their parasite ecology might be able to identify what monster is hanging around by observing exactly what kind of freaky-looking animals or animal behavior is going on around the area!

(if geralt is involved you may desire to have him explain this totally non-supernatural mechanism for abrupt animal appearance or behavioral changes at excruciating length to the chagrin of all present. or maybe that’s just what i desire. it would be funny okay)

potentially even more hyperspecific application of dual-stage parasites: there’s a dinoflagellate parasite that, when it infects crabs, makes the meat chalky and bitter like aspirin (Smithsonian link, images of healthy crab and microscope slide). geralt hunts down dinner, digs in, and immediately sighs and grabs jaskier’s portion away from him to the poet’s complete bafflement before going to get his swords because judging by the flavor there’s definitely a shishiga nest in this forest. 

like. parasites are one of THE most hyperspecific things in biology. the majority of them have very specific hosts and life cycles, many of them are completely unique to a species, if you think a fictional parasite is too specific to be plausible you’re probably wrong, make it even more specific. “the witcher monster lore is so hyperspecific lol” IT AIN’T TRULY HYPERSPECIFIC UNTIL YOU CAN IDENTIFY EACH MONSTER SPECIES BY ITS UNIQUE PARASITIC LOAD, OKAY.

and, with regards to behavior-affecting parasites, before anyone brings up Cordyceps (Ophiocordyceps, as of 2008): yeah that sure is a thing! if you weren’t aware, just a couple of years ago we found out it actually is not a mind control fungus!! it bypasses the brain entirely and affects the muscles (Arstechnica article, Atlantic article—photos of fuzzy ants and electron microscope pictures of fungi). or as Ed Yong puts it, “The ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver's seat, but the fungus has the wheel.” which is. significantly worse than the brain thing. awesome!! i bet there would absolutely be similar fungal parasites of endrega and arachasae. real Ophiocordyceps still very much does not affect humans, but you know what, if plants can be cursed into becoming archespores and cultivated by mages i see no reason why mages could not also curse endrega fungus to affect humans, just saying

aaaand quickly back to hyperspecificity: monsters in different geographical areas having different abilities because of their symbionts. forktails in vicovaro acquire a bioluminescent symbiont in their diet that forktails in other parts of the continent can’t get, and they can create flashes of light? that’s sure gonna fuck a witcher on Cat up when he comes in the cave expecting a normal forktail. (geographic location affecting bioluminescence is a thing that actually happens in midshipman fish—Wikipedia link, no parasites.) geographically-dependent symbionts can also produce different toxins and such for their hosts! this isn’t exactly a parasitism thing per se (although parasites are also symbionts because ‘symbiosis’ refers to two organisms in close association not two organisms in positive association) but like. it’s cool okay ecology is so cool

writing fic and tired of all these same-old monsters-of-the-week? quick and easy way to spice up either the horror factor or just make the hunt stand out slightly: just add parasites!! i know i’ve read fics where monsters were described with distinguishing old wounds. you can do the same with parasites! i would fucking swoon over a detail like an ancient water hag’s eyes glowing in the dark, one of them marred by a dangling parasite—geralt notes the blind spot and presses his advantage. (Wikipedia link, no images: this one is referencing an aquatic copepod called Ommatokoita.) also, please put barnacles on skelliger drowners, i want it so badly. just—some percentage of monsters should be Extra Grody on the inside and/or the outside, that’s how nature works. spicing up a mundane hunt by making the monster a little extra gross for its species is Valid, is what I’m saying.

also, every single time frozen specimens with obvious fungal/ectoparasite infections come into the lab we absolutely always take extra close-up pictures of those suckers and make sure everyone else gets to see them. witchers bringing field sketches and notes of the weirdest shit they found on the path back for winter. lambert declares they’ll never know if this alleged fiend tumor was a fungus or mange because geralt sucks at drawing. eskel, the man who hauled a katakan corpse all the way up the mountain so he could dissect it, produces actual skin samples of his own encounters for examination, possibly in the middle of dinner. this elicits mixed reactions.

quick detour into preservation, since I went there—witchers are probably immune to parasites that infect humans by virtue of having pretty different biology to begin with, and probably immune to parasitic infections from other sources by virtue of superhumanly boosted immune systems and all the poison they put into their bodies on a regular basis. picking up a monster parasite would probably not be a big deal for witchers, either in that they have total immunity or that they would only be minimally and briefly affected, but the field of monster biology is likely such that they probably just don’t actually know what would happen to them in the majority of cases. this has potential as a source of battle stories and/or stories intended to freak out trainees, i think. therefore, out of caution, a witcher harvesting/preparing parts for alchemy might want to be sure to treat them first. personally i think all monster parts should be preserved immediately anyways to avoid attracting necrophages, and given that alchemical concoctions in witcherverse are alcohol-based, preservation in strong alcohol is probably the best way to maintain potency and kill basically everything. (cons: alcohol is SUPER heavy and jars are fragile. tissues or organs which are thicker than perhaps half an inch or an inch require additional preparation for the alcohol to penetrate properly. other preservation methods are more efficient for travel. depends on how soon your witcher intends to use or offload their stash.)

also, here’s an absolutely wild marine parasite that would make it worth a witcher’s while to make certain everything was dead! pearlfishes are long eel-like fishes that live inside the anus and respiratory organs (which are attached to the anus) of sea cucumbers, and they have pretty nasty teeth (PDF article link, IMAGE WARNING: dissected sea cucumbers literally stuffed to the gills with pearlfish). the highest number of pearlfish discovered in a single sea cucumber was sixteen (ResearchGate article, free PDF; no images). a different fact: we discovered tiger sharks eat each other in the womb because a researcher got bitten by a fetal tiger shark while he was dissecting the mother (NYT link, no images or parasites). what i’m saying is: parasites are often very small relative to the host and usually harmless to things rummaging around inside, but what if the monster’s parasites were also monstrous. give me a monster that has to be very dead or when you start rummaging around for alchemy ingredients the things in its intestines will lunge out and bite you. 

what happens if a human becomes infected with a monster parasite? bad things, probably, i mentioned before that parasites in the wrong host, if they don’t just die, often super fuck things up internally (if you get tapeworms outside of the intestine where they’re supposed to be... it’s not good y’all. CDC link, no images). host-jumping for parasites is actually fairly rare since most of them are highly specialized for their hosts, but it does happen. humans are very not my strong suit so i’m not going to dwell on this but it is entirely possible that something like necrophage infestations or monster-contaminated water sources or just being a little too involved on a witcher’s monster hunt could produce strange parasitic diseases in humans. up to you how well-known and/or how clouded in superstition these effects might be! opportunities for hideous whump? gross body horror? messy and horrifying parasite-driven behavioral changes? terrifying and potentially prolonged uncertainty over what the issue actually is because of minimal information about parasites? the decision whether or not to dose with a witcher potion? excellent possibilities.

okay last one, just because i think it would be fun: myxosporeans and sirens. Myxos are a parasitic relative of jellyfish that produce whirling disease in baby salmon. whirling disease causes neurological and skeletal damage and has a pretty high mortality rate, but it also makes infected fish do this, well, whirling behavior and it’s honestly fascinating. (video link: a pretty normal-looking young trout spinning like a fuckin top). imagine a siren doing that in the sky. i just think myxos are neat!

tl;dr: extra grody hyperspecific biology of monsters!!!

[jcdenton40]

The Visitation

For what was supposed to be the most monumental event in the history of human civilization it was actually pretty anticlimactic. No giant mothership; no shadowy figure emerging from the mist; no tense standoff with guns drawn... Hell, we never even saw him coming.

The morning of 12/12 was really just like any other, other than the fact that there he was, standing outside the White House, just waiting for us to show up. We found out later he'd actually arrived before sunrise and had been waiting out there for exactly two hours and twenty-nine minutes before anyone saw him. Not that he was trying to hide; he was just too polite to even try knocking.

If it had been some kind of crazy giant alien ship, I'm sure he wouldn't have had to wait so long. But right there next to the bushes just a few yards outside the front door to the White House was the most basic landing pod you could possibly imagine. At least we all assumed it was just a landing pod; we didn't find out until later that it was his actual ship, which he'd actually used to travel the entire 32+ light years from his home planet even though it was nothing more than a tube, barely big enough for him to fit in, with no apparent means of propulsion or external features whatsoever. And even later, when he showed us the interior, it was just completely empty; no apparent life support systems, no avionics, no control systems, no instrumentation, nothing.

And I wish I could say it was due to its hyper-advanced stealth technology or some kind of undetectable cloaking device that it was out there for so long before anyone saw it. But even if it did have something like that (and we still don't know if it did), that really wasn't why; as crazy as this sounds, it was just too small, and came in too fast, for any of our systems to even detect it on its way in. And by sheer coincidence, it just so happened to land in a "dead spot" where the security cameras could barely see it. It still should have been spotted right away, sure. But I saw the footage myself and can't say I would have spotted it either.

As for the lack of a "tense standoff" (or any standoff), the fact that he spoke perfect English had a lot to do with that. That plus the fact that he looked just barely humanoid enough that the Secret Service guy who first saw him thought it must have been a guy in a suit.

We later learned that his perfect English was actually due to the translation device attached to his mouth (which appeared to be his mouth). It turns out he knew how to speak and understand English with complete mastery—learned from nothing but the TV and radio transmissions they were able to pick up from halfway across the galaxy—but their species was simply incapable of actually speaking in any way that a human could actually understand due to the inherent limitations of their vocal systems, and physical inability to reproduce enough of the sounds necessary for human language. The perfectly understandable assumption from that, of course, would be that they had already evolved far beyond vocal communication (i.e., to telepathy). But no, they still spoke with each other with words, more or less like we do.

He later explained that their vocal limitations were a fairly recent development, at least from an evolutionary standpoint; it was just a few thousand years prior that they had vocal capabilities much like ours, with the capacity to speak countless native languages, some of which were quite similar to English. But at one point they had decided to standardize upon one global language, and it was from then onward that as their language continued to evolve over time, so did their vocal systems. Eventually, through a combination of evolution and bioengineering, their species came to be uniquely and perfectly suited for the reproduction of their one language with near-perfect clarity, though at the expense of all other potential languages.

Oddly enough, their language (and language in general) was one of the things he was most interested in talking about. Not how to speak it per-se, though he did teach us some of that (fortunately the limitation only went one way, and we were able to at least reproduce the basic sounds well enough to say words and phrases that he could understand—just barely). Rather, his primary interest was in sharing some of the features that their language possessed, possibly with the idea that we might someday decide to incorporate some of those elements into our own.

One of the things he spoke about at-length was how their language had gone through several "redesigns" throughout its history, where its vocabulary, pronunciation, and even its most fundamental rules were altered and simplified in order to enhance its efficiency at conveying information as accurately as possible while eliminating virtually any possibility for misunderstanding (or misrepresentation).

From the way he described the process, I can't say we have anything comparable when it comes to written/spoken languages, though I suppose the closest analogy would be the way computer programming languages go through intentional revisions over time, or the way that computer operating systems might be rewritten and revamped dramatically from one version to the next while fixing bugs and improving efficiency.

One of the first things they did, in in the earliest of their "major" revisions, was something which made their language unlike any on Earth: the complete elimination of homonyms (different words that sound the same), homographs (words that are spelled the same but mean different things), and synonyms (different words which share the same meaning).

Think about that for a moment; what they did was essentially recraft their entire language in such a way that every single word was unique in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. And not only did this require the modification (or outright elimination) of most of the words in their entire vocabulary, but it also necessitated the creation of an almost incomprehensible number of entirely new words in order to serve the same functions as those which had been eliminated due to lack of uniqueness, but were not redundant to any "surviving" words.

On top of that, a smaller (yet still fairly vast) number of new words was also needed for cases where a word with multiple definitions was standardized to its primary (now, only) definition, but where no surviving words could accurately convey those eliminated definitions.

And adding even further to this herculean undertaking was the simple linguistic inevitability that in order to maintain the uniqueness of every single word in an entire language, you would need to use some combination of longer words (both letters and syllables); more letters that can be chosen from; more possible spoken sounds, accents, and intonations; or, in their case, all of the above.

To use an example from English, let's take the words "so", "sew", and "sow". All three are homonyms since they're pronounced identically, but "sow" also has an additional pronunciation which has a different meaning (a female pig, as opposed to the act of planting seeds), while "so" has one pronunciation but two different meanings (either to emphasize the extent of something, or as a conjunction).

Thus:

1. "Sew" would be eliminated and replaced.

2. Only one of the two definitions of "so" survives while the other must be replaced.

3. The female-pig definition of "sow" can remain (due to its unique spelling and pronunciation) while the planting-seeds definition must be replaced (due to its non-unique pronunciation).

The final tally: two words survive, one word eliminated and replaced, and three new words created.

But there's also another, less drastic option for #1: Since the spelling of "sew" is already unique, you could keep its spelling unchanged and simply modify its pronunciation to something unique (e.g. "soo"). And that's exactly what they did, where practical, to keep as many of their original words as possible, or at least as familiar as possible, either with just a slight tweak to the spelling or by appending an extra syllable.

But in most cases a simple "tweak" was simply not an option, due to an inviolable rule that they established before even the first change was made: None of the changes to any words could violate their universal, standardized rules for spelling and pronunciation (and this rule was retroactive as well, thereby requiring a rejiggering of all previous words which violated these rules).

This meant that they couldn't simply change the spelling or pronunciation of words arbitrarily, nor could they, in most cases, change one without that directly impacting the other. And by imposing this rule on themselves, they dramatically limited the number of options available for modifying existing words—at least not without adding more syllables.

Thus for all of their linguistic genius, it didn't take long after this first phase was implemented (which, almost inconceivably, they were able to complete within just a few years) that they ran headlong into a fairly serious problem: Their language now required vastly more syllables to be spoken, and vastly more letters to be written, in order to convey the exact same amount of information as before.

But this was something they had fully anticipated, and out of necessity had planned to address in their second major revision which came a few years later, now that the vast majority of the population had become fully fluent with what was essentially an entirely new language.

It was at this point—after putting up with several years of extreme linguistic inefficiency (during which they suffered tremendous losses in global productivity, albeit with the lowest unemployment levels in their recorded history)—that they finally implemented the solution via the Second Revision. To do so, they borrowed a concept which was also straight out of computer languages (including our own): a concept known to us as "single instruction multiple data" (SIMD).

The basic premise of SIMD is that you take a frequently-used combination of computer instructions and replace them with a new  which performs exactly the same tasks; then, any time you need to use that same set of instructions, you simply use the new one which does all of the exact same "work", but in a single step.

In their case, they did the same thing but for words, taking their most frequently-used combinations of words (even in some cases fairly complex concepts) and "grouping" them into a single new word which conveyed all of the meaning and nuance of what would have taken multiple words and far more syllables to convey. And not only did this solve their problem, but once the Second Revision was completed they found that their speaking and writing/reading rates were actually even faster than ever before.

Since then, they've continued to implement even more of these "grouped" words over time (based on real-world frequency of use) and in some cases even created grouped words which contain previously-grouped words. So far, the most densely-grouped of these go three "levels" deep, though there is theoretically no limit to how many "levels" of meaning could potentially be consolidated into a single word.

These First and Second Revisions were clearly the most significant, both in effect and the sheer magnitude of their undertakings, but it was actually the Third Revision which I found most interesting; it was then that they implemented two features which had, to some extent, always been present in their language, but not in the universal and standardized way that it would eventually become.

The first was what could be considered a complete integration of mathematics into their language. Which actually sounds more complicated than it is; essentially they established clear grammatical rules which stated that any time there is a potential range of conceptual values to what someone is attempting to communicate, that value must be quantified—not just with vague words like "few", "many", or "most"—but numerically, with an actual mathematical value, every single time.

And this rule applies even to situations that we probably wouldn't even think of as being mathematical in nature. To use some examples from English, let's say something will "protect" you, or "prevent" you from being harmed; does that mean it offers total protection and prevents harm completely? Or just partially? And if just partial, at what point of the infinite points along the spectrum do you qualify as being "protected" vs unprotected?

Or how about a more common example; if you express that something "doesn't work", does that mean it's completely non-functional and isn't working at all? Or just that it's not functioning at a level of performance that you would consider acceptable?

Situations like these simply do not exist in their language since in every potential instance, the available words that they can choose from have either been firmly established as expressing absolutes, or there would always be an expression of quantification accompanying it to eliminate ambiguity.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that a precise number must always be given, even when a precise number isn't warranted, or simply isn't feasible. Because that's where the second feature comes into play: if the numerical value conveyed is intended to be just a rough estimate, that would also be directly incorporated into their syntax, thereby pairing every numerical quantification with an indication of confidence/precision. So if you want to say, "most", i.e. "more than 50% but less than 100%", you can still do so; or you can just as easily convey "somewhere in the 55-65% range", or "exactly 70%" and do so while using far fewer letters and syllables than it would take in any human language.

And it was soon after they came up with this idea that they also very quickly realized it would be equally useful in non-mathematical contexts, as a general "confidence" indicator in order to express whether something is being stated as absolute fact, as pure opinion/speculation, or anywhere in between.

Once all of these features were implemented (subsequent revisions did occur every few years, but they were far less wide-ranging in scope), their intended effects became very quickly realized; virtually all misunderstandings, miscommunications, and the inevitable conflicts and pseudo-disagreements which inevitably arise from them became a thing of the past. He was very careful not to overstate his point here, and made clear that arguments remained plentiful throughout their society; however, after these changes such arguments only occurred as a result of actual disagreements, not just people "talking past" each other or simply saying the same thing in different ways.

Just think: How many times have you seen two people arguing over a particular idea or concept where they were clearly operating under different definitions, and thus it was entirely possible that they did not even actually disagree on the matter being discussed?

And how many pitiful arguments have you seen in your lifetime which essentially consisted of nothing more than one side saying, "Not all [noun] are [adjective], but some are!", and the other saying, "Some [noun] are [adjective], but not all!"

Too many. And it is exactly those kinds of pseudo-arguments which simply never occur in their society, since their language has essentially been inoculated from the toxic effects of such rhetoric.

And perhaps most importantly, once these first three Revisions were in place, propagandistic bad-faith misrepresentation and rhetorical sleights-of-hand became, if not impossible, far more difficult to attempt and far easier for anyone to see. With every word having one clear-cut meaning, equivocation fallacies became, quite simply, impossible; after all, how can you try to exploit the fact that one word has multiple definitions in order to mislead, when there are no longer any words with multiple definitions to exploit?

Just take a moment to imagine where might our state of scientific progress be today—and whether the 21st century Science Riots would have even occurred—had our language been like theirs? Or just imagine the ripple effects throughout history if just ONE of our words had this feature, i.e. the one which has been exploited through equivocation more than any other, with at-times devastating consequences, i.e. "theory"?

Anyway, enough about that. It was after almost a full month of discussing nothing but their language that we eventually moved onto other topics like their culture, beliefs, and philosophy.

And at this point I know exactly what you're wondering: What was his take on "war"?

I guess you're wondering how I knew that. Well, we actually had some surveys done in those first few days after he arrived (all conducted via third parties, of course) just to get a feel for what kinds of questions the general public might eventually have, and maybe even get some ideas for questions we should ask him that we might otherwise have not considered (which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic; the grand total of useful ideas we got from those surveys: zero).

But one of the common threads that came up over and over—being the first mention in almost 100% of the surveys—was this notion that he (or any hypothetical alien visitor) would find the very concept of "war" to be utterly preposterous, possibly even to the point that he would be completely baffled that such a thing could possibly exist.

Unfortunately that wasn't anything close to the reality, for reasons which should have been fairly obvious. I mean, sure, on his home planet his species no longer practiced anything remotely resembling "war", and hadn't in countless generations. But certainly they had engaged in war throughout much of their recorded history, and had even come close to global self-annihilation on multiple occasions.

But even if that hadn't been the case, he revealed to us that war is something which virtually every single advanced alien civilization they have ever observed or encountered had clearly engaged in on a frequent basis, in the past if not currently, thus making it one of the most universal of all societal concepts.

The only exceptions? He said there were actually a handful of civilizations throughout the galaxy–though these were vanishingly rare–where the entirety of their archaeological and recorded histories had absolutely no record of war. But, he noted, in every one of these cases their histories also had suspicious and clearly unnatural "gaps"–just total voids where it's as if literally nothing happened for years, decades, even centuries. Most likely, they concluded, these histories were either systematically erased in order to hide something in their past, or that everything prior to those points–all history, all archaeological evidence–had been completely annihilated... most likely by war.

Oh, and speaking of those surveys? The second most common response, regarding human behaviors that an alien might be baffled by: laughter. And when we told him about that, and asked if their species has anything like laughter? Well... he laughed (not that we knew that's what it was at the time, we actually thought we had pissed him off).

It turns out that laughter (or the alien equivalent), rather than being some kind of nonsensical, bizarre quirk of human behavior, is also virtually universal among alien civilizations. He explained that its evolutionary value in any kind of social/communal society is so great that they have never observed a single advanced species which doesn't possess it. Essentially, he confirmed that our theories about the purpose of laughter are correct: originally evolving as a means to indicate that an apparent threat actually isn't one (or that an apparently dire situation isn't as serious as it appears to be), then eventually evolving to become a means for establishing rapport, bonding, and trust.

As for something which wasn't universal, but would actually make their culture unique among Earth societies? Well, how should I put this... Are you familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment? It's one of the oldest of all psychological experiments, which in its original form presented each of its participants (all children) with two options: Have one marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes (while that marshmallow sits within reach), at which point they would be given that marshmallow plus another one. Just a simple test of delayed gratification, to see whether the kids were able and willing to forego immediate reward for the prospect of double the benefit. And as you might expect, about one-third of the kids ate the first marshmallow right away, about one-third tried waiting but eventually ate it, and about one-third waited the full 15 minutes and were rewarded with two.

Which sounds pretty mundane, maybe even fairly ridiculous as far as experiments go. But the interesting part is what came later–far later–as they tracked the progress of these children throughout their childhoods, and in some cases even into adulthood. And what they found was that the last set of kids–the ones who were willing to wait for that second marshmallow–turned out to have significantly better test scores, better grades, better health, and even, as adults, more-successful careers than the other kids, whereas those in the first group fared these worst.

So what does all of this have to do with him, and his culture? Well, imagine a society in which every single person–kids and adults alike–fall into the latter category, but to the greatest theoretical extreme imaginable. So not just a society in which procrastination and short-term thinking no longer exist, but one in which present and future have essentially ceased to have any meaningful distinction, and where every decision made–from the grand to the day-to-day mundane–is based on the pure calculation of total benefit, from now until eternity.

This was a natural progression over the course of their civilization's development as they became more and more forward-thinking over time, but it wasn't until what could be loosely translated as their "Renaissance" that they fully completed this philosophical transformation on a complete societal level over a period of just a few years. And the effects of this transformation became immediately evident, with dramatic improvements in crime reduction, health (particularly addictions, which were virtually eradicated), productivity, education, scientific advancement, and general happiness.

It was then a few decades after that, perhaps as an inevitable consequence, that they went through a Second Renaissance–one which also involved the near-total dissolution of another distinction, this time not between present vs. future but between the well-being of self vs. the well-being of others.

Essentially it was during this time that they came to the society-wide realization that there is ultimately no moral justification to put your own interests above those of anyone else's, particularly since—as he put it—the person you happened to be "born into" was ultimately decided by sheer chance, and you could just as easily been born as anyone else, past or present, living or dead.

Which isn't to say that every member of their society places everyone else's interests on perfectly equal footing with their own; as he explained it, it is simply not possible to know anyone's needs and desires better than you intimately know yours, and thus they still consider society's interests best served by doing your best to fulfill your needs and desires, and to strive for personal improvement to the fullest extent possible. And nor was it the case that this caused them to become some kind of collective "hive mind" where they lost all sense of individuality; if anything, the degree of freedoms and the range of avenues for complete self-expression/realization available to each member in their society went far beyond anything ever observed on Earth.

But the effect of this Second Renaissance was at least equally profound as the first, as all decision-making became pure cost/benefit analyses of what would result in the greatest total benefit, whether to the individual or society at large. And this was achieved through no coercion, and without even any change in laws (in fact, a tremendous number of laws were ultimately eliminated since they no longer served any purpose).

And it wasn't long after this Second Renaissance that they began reaching out to the other civilizations throughout the galaxy that they had previously just observed from afar, and began sending out emissaries in their speed-of-light ships, like the one they sent to visit us.

You know, it's funny... As I'm recording this, I can't help but think about all the time I've spent arguing with crackpots online, ridiculing and debunking the biggest, craziest conspiracy theories: That the Moon Landings were faked. That the Mars Landings were faked. 9/11 was an inside job (or faked). The 2020 Election... But the 12/12 Visitation is the one I never touched. Go back and check out my social media archive and my entire posting history if you don't believe me. And here I am, 32 years later, not debunking a conspiracy, but confirming the biggest one of all.

So why am I doing this? I'm not sure, really. But I think more than anything else, I just feel bad for how much we did him wrong. He was completely up-front with us, right from the beginning: He didn't come here to share anything about their technology—just their culture, beliefs, and way of life. And he was 100% clear that this was for our benefit, not theirs. He even clued us is in to the fact that of all the alien civilizations they had ever monitored, the only ones that had ever suffered total irreversible extinction did so as a result of their own technologies gone awry (or, in a few cases, the technologies of other planets' civilizations, if you know what I mean).

Of all the rest–even those which faced extinction-level events on a scale that our planet has never even seen in its history (gamma ray bursts, direct comet strikes, even in one case a micro-black hole which tore right through the center of their planet)–all of these civilizations managed to survive, and in some cases eventually recover.

As for us specifically, he said our current level of technological progress is already far beyond what they would consider our capability to responsibly handle, and thus anything they could possibly contribute to that technological progress—no matter how seemingly benign such technologies may be—would only serve to further increase that divide and further magnify our chances of complete self-annihilation.

And we were OK with that stipulation at first, or at least we pretended to be. After about six months with him, during which he shared everything he could (or would) for 24 hours a day (one thing I forgot to mention earlier: he had no need for sleep), we eventually exhausted things to ask him about. And yet after all that, we still knew no more about their technology than we did on day one.

Even his ship was a complete non-starter. Had it been anything even remotely similar to our own, I'm sure we could have reverse-engineered it, or at least gleaned something from it that could have put us light years ahead of any other county on the planet. But there was absolutely nothing about it that had even the slightest corollary to what we currently have, or had ever even theoretically conceived of. It was basically the equivalent of taking the most advanced supercomputer on the planet and sending it back in time to the Stone Age. Or to an ant colony.

Maybe someday we'll be able to unlock its secrets, but my guess is we're at least hundreds of years from even having a chance at cracking its most basic functions (at which point, maybe we'll realize it really was just a landing pod).

So of course, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone what we did next. Now, I say "we" loosely, since I certainly had no say in it. Which I'm sure might seem incredibly self-serving at this point, but all I can give you is the truth: The day we got everything we could out of him and he refused to divulge any more secrets, we finally resorted to what we've always resorted to. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Coercive interrogation. Learned helplessness. Torture.

And do I even need to say that this turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of all time? First off, it didn't work; months of almost non-stop torture using every method we could possibly come up with, and we got nothing more out of him. He was completely unfazed, and not because it didn't hurt him; some of the... methods we used sent his biometric readings off the charts. He was clearly experiencing tremendous physical distress, vastly more than any human could conceivably handle.

But no matter what we did, he just took it. And if he even cared, he kept it completely internalized. Just completely stoic, from beginning to end. Even his demeanor and attitude towards us never changed; after all of that—45 days of almost non-stop agony��he still wanted to tell us more about their language. And he was still just as polite as that first day waiting patiently outside the White House.

It's always been rather amusing to me... Of all the many believers in the 12/12 Visitation, how many wildly different, even completely contradictory reasons they've come up with for why it would've been kept under wraps all this time.

Either, "It would cause a total collapse of the world's organized religions", or "It would cause unprecedented numbers of people to turn towards God, and away from The State".

Either, "It would cause mass chaos and a total breakdown of society", or "It would cause everyone to unite behind our common humanity, and thus end all war and conflict which would cause a total collapse of the military-industrial complex".

The truth is, it wasn't originally anyone's plan to keep it under wraps. Some of the details, sure. But we all figured we would make the big announcement eventually. We even commissioned a task force of some of the brightest minds on the planet—under the guise of a purely hypothetical scenario, of course—and they all came to the same general conclusion: Of all the possible reasons for why a government might keep an alien visit a secret, those fears were pretty much completely overblown.

Realistically, they figured, there would be no mass chaos, no mass peace, no collapse of religion or of society or really anything else just because an alien decided to come visit us. A hundred years ago maybe that would have been a different story. But after everything we've seen in our lifetimes? I think we could have handled it. And all of the experts did too.

But how the hell could we have revealed him to the world after all that? After everything we did to him?

And I still can't help but wonder... What if it was all a test? I mean, clearly, in a figurative sense it certainly was—and one we failed horrifically. But what if it was actually a test?

I just can't get past the question of why they would even bother sending a representative in-the-flesh, instead of just some kind of A.I. or digital representation or even just a recording with all of the information that he shared with us.

Were they just trying to see how we would treat him?

And if we had treated him humanely, and respected his stipulations (as any reasonably-civilized people would have), what then? Would he have opened up to us with their technological secrets? Would he still be sharing them with us today? And more importantly, would we still have—metaphorically speaking—our souls?

Ultimately, I suppose this is all fairly moot anyway, given what's coming next. By our calculations it's just five days away, give or take a day. And all I can hope for at this point is that some of us make it, and that maybe what I'm recording here makes it through. And maybe someday we can recover, countless generations from now, and maybe they'll give us another shot.

But if not, I can't say it wasn't deserved.

Photo: "they are alien" by son.delorian is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

[democracyisdead]

Authoritarianism is Real, We’ve Been Doing Mass Line Since Before Everyone Went Maoist, and The Education System is Garbage

The shortest is the last one so I’ll start with that:

I’m totally disillusioned, evaluation doesn’t measure learning, it measures answering. Assignments are moderately better than tests but for the most part you’re better off reading books and doing some drills if necessary, asking a tutor for help if you need. Self-guided learning is the most useful form of learning. The evaluation system is an artificial gatekeeper which mainly serves to encourage class stratification and provide some arbitrary metric to allow certification so employers know they’re getting someone with free job training. Why do you need a liberal arts degree to get an irrelevant office job? Because employers want to know you’re obedient and disciplined enough to make it in the workplace and that someone tried to teach you to write so they don’t have to.

Universities can be great, if they’re places to learn and to challenge knowledge. Doing an undergraduate degree has taught me that such a higher purpose only happens in universities outside the classroom, and the university setting only provides you the means to meet other people who also want more.

Mass line:

Really, looking back on it, the mass line has characterized contemporary left politics for years, and we were doing it even before we realized we were doing it. In a lot of ways it’s to blame for the toxicity felt in our communities, and it’s what reactionaries are reacting to. Is it right? Is it just? I’m not totally sure. I’ve had beliefs thrust upon me that I came to wholly and passionately believe in, I came to realize after picking apart my initial defensiveness, precisely how wrong I actually was, yet I’ve also been driven to anxiety attacks by denouncements over principled disagreements (and lord have mercy if denouncements are eventually accompanied by physical violence), and in some cases those people are still fucking wrong as shit, and offensively so.

This leads into the next section, but my view - and I think the radical democratic view - is not all that different from mass line politics. There is still material analysis framing our lashing out against oppression, but according to RD there is no privileged analyst. RD thrives on implicit consensus and cooperative non-consensus arrived at through conflict and discord. If everyone can really think about and carefully analyze their own conditions, then there is no reason for anyone’s ideas to be special. There is plenty of reason for us to challenge, debate, and shout at one another, while still negating the idea of ideological leadership. The implicit or innate rightness of any person, unconditional on the current situation. This includes historical figures, especially the ones whose writing we use as tools to frame our analysis. Debate, discord, and space for being wrong must exist if we are ever to be anything like right. Everyone must be able to learn how to frame, all framing must be able to be challenged without the implicit threat of violence. This is not to permit oppressive “challenges” (muh freeze peach), but to take the approach that there are multiple framings which are not oppressive which deserve consideration and application. 

Out-of-line thought/speech: very allowed, within the bounds of not trying to undermine the real conditions of the situation Economic policy: democratic, materialist, cooperative, and decisive Democracy: had directly or by temporary ad-hoc representation with respect with groups’ material relation to the matter at-hand, with stake weighting vote-share (how will they be affected? are their material needs being met? is the amount of individual and collective self-determination permitted sufficient?), with as much informational transparency as possible so that everyone is best-equipped to assess the situation

Authoritarianism:

My ramble about semanticity involves the fact that the meanings of concepts are implicit and intuitive before they’re explicitly defined in the mind, and that any explicit definition beyond “I know it when I see it” is only useful insofar as two individuals’ intuitions disagree. Authoritarianism is slippery because I can identify cases of authority being abused, but there’s no ideology of authoritarianism as such. It is at its most explicit a means to an end, and characterizes an number of different and sometimes ill-fitting ideas.

So how to define authoritarianism, in such a way that authoritarians might be convinced that there is in fact a difference between anarchy and totality? I actuallly have no hope of convincing someone who’s really convicted, to be honest, and responses (if there are any), will likely call me a nonsensical blabbeerer or quote at me books I haven’t read and won’t read because I am a busy woman who studies things other than political theory (primarily), insisting that I have to have read them because only some unlearned swine wouldn’t have.

(I’m exaggerating, but that represents my actual experience dealing with this debate. Frankly if you don’t understand something, ask for fucking clarification, [from someone who’s actually going to come back, not me] this is a conversational medium and I can’t be expected to be perfectly transparent. If you do and you disagree, be prepared to yourself clarify, which includes highlighting your arguments.)

If I were to hazard to start, I would focus on the privileging of particular perspectives, irrespective of the material circumstance in which those perspectives find themselves. For instance, a worker’s perspective on work can be privileged in a way that is anti-authoritarian, because the worker is in the unique position to know a thing or two about labour and be really personally affected by it. To contrast, any implicit correctness assigned to the words of a leader is effectively arbitrary. No matter the reason the leader was awarded their position, the position itself does not entail the correctness of the actions. 

True, class matters but a class is never embodied in particular individuals, and the disenfranchisement of particular members of that class on the basis that only some are sufficiently equipped to analyze their situation is to some extent arbitrary. Explicit hierarchy and disenfranchisement entails the arbitrary assignment of privilege.

I’d call that the basic nature of authority. That’s not in itself authoritarianism though (and it should be questioned to what extent we’re just playing word games by adding that ism, rather than discussing something which is apart from authority itself).

Let’s take one more step from the idea of privileged perspective itself and go on to uitility - if a perspective is arbitrarily privileged, what power does it have to act on its interpretations? Will it be alone if nobody is interested in acceding to it? If so, is it privileged at all? No, it should also have implicit access to violence of some sort (social or physical).

So there’s how I’d tentatively define authoritarianism: arbitrary privilege and/or disenfranchisement enforced by the threat of violence, all with the understanding that privilege is arbitrary when there’s no material reason why someone’s reference frame should be better to others’.

Why would I consider that bad? To put it tersely, it lends itself to co-optation. Trust in privileged people, no matter how good we believe them to be, is always misplaced unless they are definitely infallible, which nobody actually is. Power can always, eventually, be abused. If someone is especially good at using it, then maybe they won’t abuse it for a long time, but expecting a perfect eternity of benevolent authority is idealistic. Better not to privilege anyone and instead design systems of discourse where good ideas surface, but no individual is considered particularly special for having had them. We must always provide ourselves the means to overturn the world, lest we awake to find it turned over on us.

And I’ll admit that was all a bit rambling and obtuse because I am tired so if you have objections hope I come back tomorrow so I can answer them or ask someone who claims to understand this garble.

[persondudeman]

10 Albums I Fucking Loved in 2018

Howdy y’all! I’m fuckin’ late to the year end stuff but that’s because I actually needed some time to think about what to say and who to pick for my favorites list this year! As always, these are only in a particular order for me but all of them are very interesting albums that you should totally check out. So without further Adieu let’s get to the list!

10. ATMOSPHERES - REACH

This is one of those albums that you know if you’ll like it or not after the first few tracks. To be honest, you either sing along to the middle guitar riff of MORPH or you don’t and that’s kinda just how it is! ATMOSPHERES makes a very particular brand of airy but also heavy but also minimal but also complex metal that’s hard to pin down in words but you’ll know exactly what it is once you hear it and straight up it’s a real love it or hate it kinda thing. For me I personally fuckin’ love the juxtaposition of the djenty super heavy riffs along with the airy vocals and production but I can very easily see somebody hating this exact type of thing. If any of the adjectives I used to describe this call out to you, I suggest giving it a shot and seeing what you think!

9. Good Tiger - We Will All Be Gone

This one is just straight up fun y’all! I’ve been following Good Tiger for a hot minute and I loved the shit out of A Head Full of Moonlight back when it came out. Hell, I funded the original Indiegogo campaign!

With this, Good Tiger refines their sound breaking away from the metal origins of the band members’ pasts and creating something unique to them. Everything good about A Head Full of Moonlight is still here. Elliot Coleman’s unique vocals, electrifying dual riffs from Joaquin Ardiles and Dez Nagle, and the strong rhythmic backbone of Alex Rudinger and Morgan Sinclair without the need of the harsh vocals or heaviness that some tracks would use as a crutch.

What they traded in for surface level technical flair they got back in spades with their commitment to songwriting making for some of the most infectious songs they’ve released yet! I know for a fact I couldn’t get Such A Kind Stranger, The Devil Thinks I’m Sinking, or Ninteen Grams out of my head for a good while after I listened to them. At a tight as FUCK under 40 minutes, this album is one that you can easily replay again and again. And you’ll fuckin’ want to if you get those songs stuck in your head! Good Tiger has grown from the ashes of their metal past and is all the stronger for it!

8. Between the Buried and Me - Automata

Okay hear me out on this one. I love Between the Buried and Me but in order for me to get into listening to them, I gotta be on a kick. I can’t just pop in a BTBAM record. Partly because their albums are a bit on the longer side and partly because they have a very particular songwriting style that I need to be in the mood to listen to. Some days I just can’t handle those transitions, y’know? So you’ll need to believe me that it isn’t just fanboy squealing when I say I wasn’t ready for this album. Not to mention they arbitrarily decided to split it into two separate albums even though its length is just fine as one album. Their last album Coma Ecliptic was a hair longer than this one and it fit on one album just fine! How am I supposed to listen to this thing and really take it all in if you release it piecemeal?? Anyway, enough griping about the album’s release. In terms of actual musical content, they’ve really done something great here! They took the scale of Coma Ecliptic but let it have a broader scope so instead of the big, indulgent rock opera they use the same resources to go back to the kitchen sink approach of Colors and The Great Misdirect to really flesh out the parts that were just brief flirtations with other sounds on previous records. What I’m especially noticing on this outing is a real southern rock kind of flavor. ESPECIALLY on the album closer, The Grid where near the end they go out and deliver some killer SQUEALING blues riffs and it’s some of the straight up coolest shit I’ve heard all year.

Should this be your first BTBAM album? Probably not, That should either be Colors or The Great Misdirect but it’s a worthy album in BTBAM’s prolific and excellent catalogue that fans and people wanting to become fans should totally listen to.

7. Oceans of Slumber - The Banished Heart

Okay listen, I went through a bad breakup (and kinda still am going through it let’s be real) at the end of 2018 and I discovered this band right after I got broken up with. To be honest I kind of needed this. The fact that it’s a woman of color fronting a doom metal band would be enough to get me intrigued but then I heard the title track off of this album. I was blown away and the rest of the album capitalizes on the energy promised by the singles.

Cammie “God Damn” Gilbert has some of the most radiant and emotional vocals I’ve heard all year with such a commanding presence and control of her instrument that sends chills up my spine whenever she sings. Combine that with crushing, doomy, riffs from the trio of Sean Gary, Keegan Kelly, and Anthony Contreras as well as drumming and occasional beautiful piano playing by Dobber Beverly and it creates a dense and intense mixture.

If this list was ranking pure emotional power, this would be #1. With the aforementioned dismaying production and powerful vocals, this thing also packs a lyrical gut punch of equal parts grief, longing, and righteous anger. This isn’t just an album to feel sad to. This is for when you need to purge yourself of emotions. It’s the sonic equivalent of going out into the forest and primally screaming where nobody but you can hear you and I fucking love it. Admittedly I haven’t listened to it much because it’s a very powerful and very tough one to sit through so I need to be in the right frame of mind for it but if you ever feel like this might be up your alley I strongly urge you to give it a shot.

6. Alithia - The Moon Has Fallen

Alithia has stumbled onto something amazing here with The Moon Has Fallen. They seem to have carved out a genre of spacey, tribal, psychedelic prog rock that’s entirely unique to them crafting really creative arrangements that honestly need to be heard. If this list were based on pure creativity, this would probably be my #1 because of how interesting the avenues it goes down are. From the warbling, echoey, gigantic sounding guitars to the vocals that do everything from soft melodies to yells to the atmospheric synths, Alithia does something else on this album. There’s 2 fuckin’ drummers here for godsake that's gotta count for something! What this album totally should be is an album to expand minds to. Like, if you wanna reach the next plane of existence or something, put on The Sun or Breathe or Blood Moon and I’m almost certain that you’ll attain enlightenment or something.

5. Covet - effervescence

If I really wanted to I could put a picture of that good vibes only cup here again and I totally will but I want to stress that Covet is really good and while they have a similar chill vibe to last year’s pick CHON. It is ever so slightly different. CHON’s vibes are beachy and crunchy whereas Covet is very foresty and soft. All those 8tracks playlists about forest nymphs, replace them with Covet songs and it’ll totally fit.

4. VOLA - Applause From A Distant Crowd

If I did awards, I would probably give VOLA the “most improved” award of this year. Their previous album Inmazes was very unique and demonstrated some really interesting potential with their sound but Applause From A Distant Crowd just came in and fuckin’ blew all of that out of the water!

A lot of the fans of Inmazes bemoan how this album was lacking in the heavy department but honestly, I think that’s part of why this works so well! There’s a dime a dozen progressive metal acts that’ll just throw out some super heavy djent riffs over odd time signatures and call it a day but it takes a really good band to find the elements of that style and really make it their own and that’s what VOLA has done here.

From the synths to the emphasis on clean vocals to the melody focus of the album one can tell right away that this is a different beast but one that is entirely VOLA’s own. Outside of the aesthetic synths you have the distinctive vocals of Asger Mygind who has an intriguing low register that I rarely hear in progressive metal vocalists. His voice offers a great texture to the music. Add in a much tighter, controlled songwriting style and Applause From A Distant Crowd makes for an endlessly listenable, utterly unique experience that I urge all of you to check out.

3. Dance Gavin Dance - Artificial Selection

Okay, y’all know me right? If you’ve seen any of my lists before you’ll know that I’m a big Dance Gavin Dance fan and any year they make a new record they’re almost bound to have a spot on my favorites list and pretty high at that. This feels like a career defining moment for DGD because this is the most consistent lineup they’ve had in forever and with how shaken up the fanbase has been with the frequent lineup changes over the years, a sense of calm feels like foreboding as clean vocalist Tilian Pearson and bassist Tim Feerick head in for an unprecedented fourth album.

As always, DGD fuckin’ killed it with this one. This time they transition into pop inspired production and songwriting that absolutely destroys when paired with their technical ability and overall style. Tracks like Care with its infections chorus, Count Bassy with its big leading vocals, and the anthemic closing track Evaporate all culminate to make another glorious heavy, funky, crazy, catchy album that’s become a staple for DGD. In fact Evaporate was so fuckin’ good that people legitimately thought the band was going to end after it because it was so big and final. Like, straight up y’all it’s just fuckin’ good. There’s only so many words I can use to describe it but Dance Gavin Dance has crafted another collection of rad ass tunes and it’s just fuckin’ good babey!

2. Time the Valuator - How Fleeting How Fragile

Oooh! We got some new blood on the list! And they’re really high too! “What is this?” I hear some of you asking. Well, Time the Valuator are a band I’ve been following for a good minute. Back in 2017 I saw them trickle out singles for what would eventually become this new album and needless to say I was pretty hype because they showcased something I really cherish and that is crossover appeal! Do you have a friend who you think is ready for something harder than Hands Like Houses but think the overtly djent-y style of Periphery might be too much for them to handle? Time the Valuator is for you!

Their style runs the gambit of more accessible post hardcore fair on songs like In Control and Elusive Reasons to the technical flair of Terminus and Starseeker to extremely emotional songs like Heritage and When I Met Death. Careful listeners will catch many different influences like the aforementioned Periphery but also the cadence of a certain singer from The Contortionist on How Fragile. Their influence may be in progressive metal but their style is more accessible than any prog metal band and it’s a joy to listen to. The standout performances on this thing are Rene Möllenbeck who in addition to delivering really nice riffs does all the piano bits on this thing. Pay attention to the tracks, When I Met Death, Heritage, and Starseeker to see this man’s pianowork in action. The other standout are the absolutely killer vocals of Phil Bayer who can do everything from a careful midrange to a high as hell falsetto and everything in between all while having a great amount of power. Standout tracks for him are In Control where he and Breathe Atlantis vocalist Nico Schiesewitz dual to see who the more soulful one is, Starseeker where he pierces the high heavens with his voice, and When I Met Death where he delivers the most somber of performances.

This album was one hell of a surprise and I cannot wait for what Time the Valuator has next. Do yourself a favor and give this a listen!

1. Polyphia - New Levels New Devils AND Andres - Heroes, Villains, and All That Jazz

What??? 2 albums get to be number 1?? How?? Well, I realize I’ve never been exactly consistent with how I pick my number 1. One year it’ll be how emotional the album is, another year it’ll be the one I liked the most, and this year it’s something completely different! I’ve picked these two as my number 1 because I think these two artists made some of the biggest strides in terms of moving the genre forward and their embrace of styles outside of traditional rock and roll music is integral to that. I believe that if we want rock to actually be relevant to the listening public again, it needs to take cues from different genres and not be influenced by the same crop of 60’s and 70’s rock. I love that style as much as the next guy, but it is the exact opposite of relevant or frankly even interesting in the world of rock music. These two bands I feel did something really interesting and any band looking to push boundaries or do something interesting in the following years should look to these albums as inspiration. So without further Adieu let me actually talk about the albums themselves.

Polyphia - New Levels New Devils

I’ve been a big fan of Polyphia ever since their first album Muse came out but as I’ve grown as a listener I started to realize that a lot of their music ESPECIALLY pre Renaissance is kinda indistinguishable from other instrumental bands with high levels of technical skills and something tells me Polyphia themselves realized this too. In a world with fifty thousand guitarists, you can’t be famous for being the most fast or the most technical because every single guitarist is gunning to be the next rock god. Realizing this, Polyphia has done what I think is a great move and transitioned from the prog kids noodling out riffs to style icons or to quote a twitter user

“[sic] old Polyphia concerts were a bunch of prog kids standing around in silence, currently Polyphia concerts are where a bunch of super hot people beat the shit out of each other and do cocaine in the mosh pit”.

Their music captures this superbly. If I told you that instrumental progressive rock worked well with trap influences, you’d probably laugh at me. However, upon hearing tracks like Nasty, G.O.A.T, Saucy, and even the poppy So Strange, it is evident that Polyphia didn’t just use this influence as a gimmick but as a full fledged stylistic incorporation. This leads to some of the most interesting soundscapes of the year, absolutely SAVAGE bass and drum work, and it culminates in an aesthetic that is unique to Polyphia in the prog scene. I really can’t wait to see what they do next and I hope it’s just as ambitious as this.

Andrés - Heroes, Villains, and All That Jazz

Daaang, 2 years in a freakin’ row?? I’m being entirely serious here when I say Andrés completely knocked it out of the park this year. I had high expectations for this because that last album was really good and this one completely shattered it. What Andrés does on this thing that is so special is that he demonstrates his abilities as something of a musical chameleon. Vocally and stylistically he can do anything from R&B to an emo cadence to even shrieks and he uses these influences superbly in his songwriting, crafting tightly written, expertly performed bundles of greatness into every track that have a great range but also an accessibility that rivals even the best of modern pop music.

Lyrically, he displays an awareness that was lacking on his previous release and as the album progresses you get a fuller picture of the person singing, his past, his insecurities, his flaws, and the patterns he finds himself in. To the point where once Poetry comes on and he’s screaming “And the truth is I would give up anything including you just to be famous”, it makes the lines in previous songs like “I ain't stopping till I'm big as Michael Jackson” sound like a threat.

The fact that he is influenced by so many genres and styles outside of rock would be reason enough to put him on this list. The songwriting is excellent! But what puts it over the edge is even in some of the saddest emo music, I haven’t heard anybody be as open and honest about their own shortcomings as Andrés gets on this thing. If anything, what rock music needs is some god damn vulnerability. So much of rock music is steeped in elitism and garbage that we need unique voices now more than ever to make us take a look in the mirror and examine ourselves, to try new things and to experiment and I think Andrés and Polyphia did that the best this year.

[entergamingxp]

Xbox Series X development chief Jason Ronald on power, price and that new boot screen • Eurogamer.net

Jason Ronald’s job title is partner director of program management for the Xbox platform team, but what that somewhat robotic label boils down to is he’s leading development of the Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s next-generation console due out in time for Christmas 2020. He’s played a key role in the making of the Xbox Series X, from the beginning to the present, its hardware to its software. Nobody knows Xbox Series X like Jason Ronald.

Ahead of Microsoft’s reveal of some of the third-party games coming to the system, we had an extensive chat with Ronald to quiz him on everything from power to price, from concern over Xbox Series X games being constrained by having to work on the lowest common denominator (Xbox One), to the creation of the Xbox Series X’s shiny new boot screen itself.

You have talked about obviously more powerful visuals for games, ray tracing, virtually instant loading. But does the Xbox Series X enable any sort of gameplay innovations we haven’t seen before or are not possible on any other platforms?

Jason Ronald, partner director of program management for the Xbox platform team.

Jason Ronald: The answer is kind of yes across the board. Obviously, with all the advances we have in GPU power and GPU efficiency, not only is it the raw power, but it’s also the innovations on top of that, things like ray tracing for better lighting, better reflections, higher quality shadows, as well as more immersive audio experiences. You also have things like variable rate shading. Beyond the raw power we’re delivering, we’re giving developers a lot of tools to be that much more efficient in how they use the power we’re giving them.

But the real game changers from a gameplay and a game design perspective are actually on the CPU on the IO (data transfer speed) side. Today’s current generation titles often are bottlenecked on the CPU on the IO side, and it’s really constraining what you do as a game designer. And sometimes you have to arbitrarily change your creative vision to work within the constraints. But as you think about things like more and more open world games, more living, dynamic universes that players spend time in, we wanted to remove the technology barriers and enable developers to do super creative things. And really, that innovation is going to be on the CPU on the IO side. The CPU on the IO sides are also the areas that are usually least scalable from a game engine perspective.

So it was important to invest heavily there. For example, the introduction of the NVMe SSD as part of the Xbox velocity architecture. We designed the Xbox velocity architecture to be the ultimate solution for game asset streaming. And it works as an effective memory multiplier beyond the physical memory that’s in the box because we have such superfast IO speeds, that there are entire classes of assets you don’t even need to load into memory until just before you need them. So it opens up a whole swath of new capabilities for game developers.

In The Medium, as an example, there are certain things they are doing in that game, that they’ve had these ideas for many, many years, but it’s just the technology was that barrier for them. And now with this next generation, those barriers don’t exist. So they’re able to provide true transformative gameplay experiences you would never be able to do on current generation or older generation consoles, because the technology was not at a point that allowed them to deliver on that.

Microsoft has talked about the framerates Series X will enable. But are you saying the Xbox Series X effectively ends sub 60 frames per second games, either from Xbox itself or from third parties?

Jason Ronald: I wouldn’t say it ends it, but now the creative control is in the developers’ hands. Ultimately, we view resolution and framerate as a creative decision. Sometimes, from a pure gameplay aspect, 30 is the right creative decision they can make. But in previous generations, sometimes you had to sacrifice framerate for resolution. With this next generation, now it’s completely within the developers’ control. And even if you’re building a competitive game, or an esports game, or a twitch fighter or first-person shooter, 60 frames is not the ceiling anymore. As we’ve seen on PC and other ecosystems, ultra high framerates and ultra low latency input, that is the precision they prefer to prioritise. So we’ve designed the system to put that creative control in developers hands.

Everything you’ve talked about makes the Xbox Series X sound incredibly powerful for a console, but I wince when I think about how much it’s going to cost. What should people expect?

Jason Ronald: I think Phil [Spencer]’s been pretty transparent. We designed the system with a price point in mind. We’re confident in the system we’ve designed, but at the same time, we’re going to be agile on price.

The short of it is we designed the system with a price point in mind, and it influenced the overall architecture of the system we have. You know, it’s kind of funny – as a lifelong gamer and as a game developer, we all always want more and more and more. At the same time, we know we have to deliver something at a compelling price point people all across the world are comfortable with and can afford. So it has been a key into the design of the system. And to be blunt, we’re pretty excited about what we put into that form factor.

You’ll have Xbox Series X for Christmas. What does this mean for Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox One X, and potentially even even more consoles? Aren’t you creating a confusing offering for consumers? Will you discontinue any models to make the proposition clearer? What’s your attitude running into the crucial Christmas period for that?

Jason Ronald: It’ll become more clear as we get closer to launch. We don’t think we’re going to have a confusing SKU offering. But at the same time, we have tens of millions of people who have Xbox One consoles today. And we understand not everybody is going to choose to upgrade to the next generation immediately. We still have millions of players playing on Xbox 360 today as well. So what’s important to us is we continue to support those ecosystems. Game developers will also continue to support both Xbox One and the Xbox Series X.

You know, I actually have both generations of consoles in my house. And it’s important to me I can continue to play the games I want with the people I want on the devices I want. So I don’t think it’ll be a confusing SKU lineup or customer confusion. It’s really about making sure our players have choice, and for our existing players, we provide an easy path for them to move forward if they choose to.

Given the fact all of your Xbox Series X games must work on a base Xbox One, does that not mean games will be hampered when it comes to design or fidelity because developers will have to develop to the lowest common denominator?

Jason Ronald: Ultimately, that’s a developer choice. And to be clear, there will be titles that are unique or exclusive to the Xbox Series X generation. The Medium is a great example of that. But ultimately, this is going to be a choice each developer is going to have to make. And in some cases, they will choose to make games that are exclusive to the next generation.

The exact same tools you use to build a game on Xbox Series X, are the exact same tools you use to build a game on Xbox One, or on PC. So we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for developers to ship their game across multiple devices, but then also to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the specific device that they’re on.

As an example, you might have ray tracing enabled on the Xbox Series X optimised version of the game, but you don’t have it enabled on the Xbox One version of the game. Or, you might have improved gaming experiences in some areas, and in other areas, you may choose to keep them the same. So I don’t view it as a lowest common denominator. I view it as giving developers the tools they need to build the best gaming experience possible and developers are incentivised to make a great gaming experience for their players just like we are. It’s about finding that right balance.

I know third parties can decide to release games exclusive on Xbox Series X. But what about your own games? Take Halo Infinite for example. This is a game that works on a base Xbox One right up through to Xbox Series X. Obviously it’ll look and perform better on Xbox Series X. But how can it have meaningful gameplay and design features that take advantage of what’s possible in Xbox Series X when you have to make it work on a base Xbox One in fundamentally the same way?

Jason Ronald: In some ways, it’s no different than some of the things we’ve been doing over the last couple of years with PC. We’re focused on reaching the largest audience of players possible. And developers have a whole series of good techniques, whether it’s things like dynamic resolution scaling as an example, that make it easier to scale up and scale down. Sometimes you’ll have features that are exclusive to one device versus another.

All of these devices are shared from an Xbox Live perspective. So making sure people have great communities to play with, whether it’s PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, we’re giving developers the capability to have things that work similarly across generations, and that then lean into the unique capabilities of one form factor versus another.

What we’ve seen so far from both our first-party studios as well as third-party studios is they actually prefer this level of flexibility, because they know how to tailor their experience to provide that best experience for the player.

Now the specs of both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are out in the open, how do you feel about the direct comparison?

Jason Ronald: To be honest, we’ve always been super proud of what we’ve designed and built. Seeing some of the early results from developers… like we’re really blown away by what we’re seeing even at this early stage.

The thing that’s most exciting is to see where this generation goes over the next three, five, seven, and 10 years. Because that’s the thing: when you design and build a hardware platform, and a new console generation, you are setting the direction for the next decade of games. So what we’re seeing so far at these early stages, we’re super excited. And they’re blowing us away. And I think it’s gonna go even further as we get further into the generation.

From your perspective, how important is the teraflop debate, which I assume you’re enjoying at the moment?

Jason Ronald: To me, it’s about the end-to-end performance of the system. It’s not one aspect versus another. What was critically important to us was sustained levels of performance, unlike anything you’ve seen before. And we designed the system to be a well balanced system with no bottlenecks or no compromises in any area… whether it’s the CPU performance or the GPU performance – we were at the upper bounds of what was capable with a traditional rotational drive, so we knew we had to invest in things like SSD level IO performance. We designed the Xbox velocity architecture to be the ultimate solution for asset streaming.

What it comes down to is innovation and the integration between hardware and software. Look at something like the velocity architecture. That’s a combination of the NVMe SSD, a dedicated hardware decompression block, a new file system API called Direct Storage, and then new innovation even on top of that called Sampler Feedback Streaming, which is what allows us to have an effective memory multiplier beyond what’s in the physical memory. You also look at something like Variable Rate Shading. Not only do we have 12 teraflops of GPU power, but developers can be that much more efficient in how they use it. They can actually deliver results even beyond the raw teraflops that are in the box.

So to me it’s more about how the system’s used and the integration of hardware and software that will define what’s possible in this next generation.

One of my biggest frustrations with the current generation of consoles is enormous and frequent download updates. I’m a big Call of Duty fan, and I’m constantly downloading massive updates to that game, which have effectively turned my console into my Call of Duty player. Is there anything about the Xbox Series X that mitigates that, or is that an impossible thing to do?

Jason Ronald: There is no single silver bullet that just makes games inherently smaller. But everything from the compression technologies we leverage, that actually allows the disc footprint and the amount of data you need to download to be smaller. We also give developers a lot of tools so they can be more intelligent about what assets get installed, and when. As an example, if you’re on a console that is set to English, do I need to download the French and the Spanish audio assets or the cutscenes?

Also, two years ago now we also introduced a technology called Fast Start, where we can use machine learning to understand what assets are being used and how often they’re being used, so we on the platform side can be more intelligent about what bits we install and when.

It is top of mind for us. It’s something we work closely with all the industry middleware companies, as well as developers on, and then we provide a whole series of tools to help them drive the size of those games down not only to minimise the amount of content you need to download, but also the overall size on the actual footprint on disc.

It’s definitely a challenge. It’s definitely something we work hard on. But there’s no easy button that just magically makes everything smaller. What we don’t want to do is limit these amazing worlds and universes the game developers create. We just need to give them the tools to be able to make the right trade offs.

With Xbox Series X, do you have any file size or installation footprint limits you dictate to developers or even first-party studios to try to keep those down? Or are developers free to have their file sizes as big as they want?

Jason Ronald: Ultimately, we don’t constrain it. The player experience dictates some of this stuff. How large is the game? How quickly can I get in there? How often do I take updates? How big are those updates?

We don’t arbitrarily constrain the sizes, but players have made it clear, hey, here’s what I’m willing to accept, and here’s what I’m not willing to accept. Those things change over time. So once again, it’s about providing the flexibility so we can be as sensitive as possible to players’ bandwidth and hard drive sizes, so people get a great gaming experience without unnecessarily using more data or using more storage than they need to.

Can you confirm if that’s the Xbox Series X boot sequence you just put this week?

Jason Ronald: I can confirm that is the Xbox boot animation.

Can you talk a bit about what you were going for with it? I think it’s more chill than the Xbox One boot screen!

Jason Ronald: It’s kind of funny you say chill! The word we used as we were developing it was elegant… premium. It’s always an interesting part, because this is a new console generation. I love it. I’ve obviously been looking at it for quite a long time. It feels great when I turn on my Xbox Series X, and I actually get that moment.

How long did it need to be?

Jason Ronald: Ironically, this was one of the interesting design challenges we had. The Xbox Series X boots so fast there was an open question of how long does that boot animation need to be?

I will say it took a lot of iteration to figure out exactly what the right length was. Ultimately, what the console is doing is it’s just booting. But it is quite funny – the design challenge of the console is so fast, we had to think uniquely, because we don’t want to arbitrarily slow the console down. How do I build a boot animation for something that boots as fast as the console does?

It’s funny – maybe the first time I played a game was on the Xbox Series X, and I don’t even realise the game has load screens until I play it on a current generation console.

I can’t imagine playing a game with no load times. Are you seriously saying that this is the end of loading?

Jason Ronald: You can never say the complete end of loading. But what I will say is, one of the key design principles we had is we wanted to remove all friction from the player’s experience. How quickly does the console boot? How quickly can I get in a game? When I’m in a game experience, how do I make sure fast travel systems are actually fast and not just kind of like teleporting and then I get loading screens and stuff like that?

It’s going to be interesting to see how developers take full advantage of these new capabilities. Because many of the games we’re testing internally right now, were never designed for a system at the performance level that it has. So as you start thinking about games that are designed truly uniquely for these capabilities, I will just share that we’ve seen some things I did not even think were possible. I’ve seen these up and running already at the early stage of the console generation.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/xbox-series-x-development-chief-jason-ronald-on-power-price-and-that-new-boot-screen-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xbox-series-x-development-chief-jason-ronald-on-power-price-and-that-new-boot-screen-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[supporthosechi]

Our Third Visit

        Home again, whatever that means exactly.  Moving for most people is terrible because it involves putting a bunch of small things into larger boxes, carefully wrapping delicate items—heirlooms, art, instruments, televisions, anything which is not really designed to be packed into a van or truck or other vehicle and moved any distance.  It also can mean uprooting oneself, which obviously cuts both ways: no more favorite diner down the street, no more garden in the back, no window which catches the light in the morning just so, no paint on the walls which has been redone to suit moods or fancy, no immediate physical access to friends, family, and work left behind, all to be exchanged for comparable or better versions. 

        Our LeLe’s move shares variations on many of these characteristics.  She moves from maximum to medium-minimum security, from 2000 fellow inmates to 500, from a facility housing people who will live out their natural lives within to those who will be there nine years or fewer. She leaves behind an ex-partner to become “fresh meat” at a new facility.  She sacrifices friendships and a place where anything might be obtained to one where inmates are far more cautious and the state’s control is more ironclad.  She cannot bring her paints, for which her nails have (temporarily) suffered, but the kitchen has a fryer and not everything is made of soy, by dint of which her skin has immediately cleared.  She exchanges the promise of contract work to reduce her sentence, the possibility of working with animals or cosmetics for a kitchen job which pays next to nothing (from 15 to 20 to 30 dollars a month as she moves up the ranks, rapidly), and layoffs in prison labor which do not allow her sacrifice herself to menial labor to move towards swifter release.  It’s a new place and there’s not much going on.  We sometimes think of our jobs, our relationships, our apartments, the very contours of our lives as prisons, and it sometimes feels as if we move from one to the next.  Alisha Walker’s situation has in some ways actually gotten worse with this move, and I can tell, and it tears at me, which in turn makes me feel dumb, because it tearing at me does nothing for her.

          It is hard not to imagine what it was like for her arriving as we do, pulling through a proper town and into a different sort of stone and barbed wire hell.  There is a funny little hut with some tables at the entrance and I momentarily lose track of where I am, thinking: “this would be a nice spot for Alisha to sit with her family.”  The presence of the eerily immobile guard standing beneath a strangely folksy, wooden sign proclaiming “Staff Only” quickly dispels that notion.  These are places of utmost control and power over, and any person who leaves them not wanting to smash, kill, and destroy after serving their time is either an incredible model of restraint from whom we all could learn that lesson at least, or else has had their spirit so utterly broken that it must take many soul-searching hours to find themselves anew outside.  This being our first visit, we brace for different regulations and novel layers of arbitrary command to fight through to gain entry.  We are not disappointed in this expectation.  Our first time through the double glass doors finds paperwork and, interestingly, more people of color behind one desk than we saw at the entire facility at Logan.  We are informed that one of our membership’s attire will bar her from entering, despite it being identical to what she wore on our last visit, and so I run back to the car to find something else she might wear, to no avail.  After a trip to Target to buy something less revealing than thick black tights and a hooded sweatshirt (the dead cops t-shirt is fine, mind you), we make our second attempt, now being told that we need a second form of ID each, which I dutifully return to the car again and procure. The third try reveals that the hooded sweatshirt cannot be worn in, nor can my cardigan.  When we finally make it through the metal detector, we’re left to peruse the scenery outside the gendered shakedown rooms, then left again to our own devices until we realize we can walk into the visitation room on our own accord.  The distance from the visitor’s entrance to the building to the door behind which we’ll spend the day with our friend is perhaps thirty feet, entirely indoors. This is emblematic of an entirely different, arguably even more nefarious affect of the Decatur facility.

           The entry desk is opposite a giant set of plaques devoted to employees of the month and retirees, each of which is clearly hand-carved, burned, and painted as if we were in a backwoods hunting lodge such as one might find just a few miles away from town.  There is one calligraphed sign for “Warden,” one for “Guard on Duty,” and a variety of smaller ones for the time clock and a key rack. There is a hand-etched lithograph commemorating a mother and children reunification program, to help reintegrate ex-offenders, which is distastefully hung next to a prison-staff lotto game of some variety where officers can put in their names for a monthly drawing for cash prizes.  I’m uncertain which is the more disingenuous of the two.  The guards interact with us in a generally saccharine tone (“It’s always more complicated the first time, sorry.”), wholly opposite the gruff, put-upon affect of the previous set.  I detest them and their complicity in this system, and I do not want to muse on this being a better work environment than the previous facility, that they get on better with each other and perhaps even the inmates, I want them to feel the full gravity of the despicable institution in which they are cogs, and I want them in turn to be as miserable as possible as they help make this needless societal scourge for the women inside.

           But this is not the place for any more of this particular screed.  I am privileged to see and hug and laugh with and hold and update a friend who has gotten closer and closer, and I want to know she is as all right as is humanly possible in a place designed to rob her of her humanity at every turn.

           We know each other a bit better now.  Alisha knows which one of our troupe she’ll have wild parties with and learn about the tough edge of the anti-fascist struggle when she gets out, which one will take her to tiki bars and teach her about the subject position of being a queer femme and all its responsibilities and travails, and which one will laugh too hard in spite of himself at all her jokes and make sure she’s well-fed when she needs home cooking with her Chicago family (I’m the last one, if you were wondering).  LeLe is her usual combination of vivacious hilarity and genuine interest in what we are up to on the outside.  As has been the case throughout, some of our mail has gotten through (all her birthday cards) and some, infuriatingly and arbitrarily, has not (two of our members’ last letters), so there is some general updating to be done on our end.  But we are, as anyone would be, curious about our friend’s move, and it is safe to say Alisha is at least a little wistful for the, shall we say, woolier world of Logan, a place better suited to her bawdy, mischievous, and social personality. In short: our girl is bored.  But I am reminded more acutely in this visit also: our girl is easily but deeply funny.  She tells us about the first set of clothes she got at the new facility, the crotch and thighs stained (“somebody had like a toxic vagina or something!  Just burning through!”), and how she soon found that there was no fashion scene to keep up with here.  We comment on how clean the clothes she has now look, and how she has clearly lost back some weight from the—marginally—better food and find that she’s wearing her “special occasion” polo, pristine and white, and her pair of shoes from Logan that “nobody else got.”  At the old facility, she’d be altering clothes and getting the new garb whenever it came in or else risk ridicule, which would result in mouthing off, which consequently would result in something worse.  We comment this sounds like high school all over again, and Alisha’s eyebrows go up as she busts up laughing: “It’s worse than high school!  They’re criminals!  You get your ass beat!”  She tells us about the sort of pranks unique to a place where people are already on edge but used to certain routines which mark out the time.  There is the regular practice of lining up to receive prescription medication, which LeLe naturally thought was worth crying wolf at, at least once: “MEDLINE!”  The effected inmates, of which there were many, all piled out of their cells to line up for drugs, furious at the false alarm.  When one of the older inmates got especially angry, Alisha responded with the natural question of the nonplussed prankster: “You mad?  Are you big mad or little mad?” knowing full well this would be the end of the incident.  In this “minimum security” place, loaded with contradictions, the restrictions regarding fighting and sexual relationships are vastly harsher than the previous: either will get you cited and likely put in solitary confinement, in the hole.

           We ask her a few questions on behalf of a reporter friend who is doing a profile on Alisha, one of which we already have a sense of the sad answer to, but ask anyway and receive a classic LeLe answer.

           “How are you passing the time at Decatur?”

           (slight pause) “Dyking out!”

           She goes on to explain that she is “talking to” three people, but there are ten more interested.  We get into a discussion about how “everyone is gay” on the inside, because there’s nothing else to be.  As mentioned before, she has been separated from the partnership she had begun to build at Logan, which we assume would be difficult, but as it turns out, not for the reasons we guessed.  Suffice it to say, Alisha had her heart broken while she was still at the last facility, subjected to the same sort of amplified betrayals that anyone who offers up herself to another, who feels she has forged a connection through the harshest of obstacles, who takes a calculated risk knowing separation is immanent, would find themselves susceptible.  The classic coping mechanism of “needing to spend some time alone” is drawn into brutalist relief in a place like this where one is at once in a uniquely profound solitude and at the same time never more than ten feet from another person or fifty.  Alisha proclaims she is “manic depressive,” a diagnosis about which we are all concerned and interested in how it is made and treated in this environment.  It turns out that a formal diagnosis has never been made, and Alisha explains how there is no intermediate state for her, she is either hyperactive and excited, sociable to the point where she kids with the guards in the dining hall and pushes buttons just to get some kind of reaction from the subdued and tamped-down inmates, or else utterly depressed. Not just sad about her lost girlfriend, the absent opportunities which were available to her at Logan, her missing family and friends, the wrongful nature of the system which reminds her daily it would have simpler if she had just died that night, but a purer, simpler low, resultant from the basic realities of being a giant spirit and personality cordoned off and hidden away from the society she would choose and which would, I am certain, choose her. 

         The time is more real now, she says it and I can see it, because this will be the final destination before release.  She bargains with us for all the things she would give up to be able to step outside, or do anything positive for herself at all, and then we hit the crux of the matter.  Alisha tells us she is not used to—and at this point, there’s no reason to think she’ll ever get used to, which is fine—having to ask for everything, and being powerless to help those she cares about.  Among the myriad motivations for doing sex work, the at least potential command over one’s income, how often and what sort of work one wants to do, was clearly foremost for our girl.  Her mother, brother, sister, and new nephew need her, not simply financially or even emotionally but—and I do not use this term lightly—spiritually.  Anyone who meets Alisha and finds favor with her would comprehend this sort of need; she is magnanimous not because she is a saint but because it is clear that when she cares it is wholesale and not easily vacated. She will never become accustomed to be so dependent on, having to ask for things from, her mother, having to be shaken down to use the bathroom, finding nearly every step, of which there are only so many which can be taken anyway, requiring official and explicit sanction.

           It does no real good for me to soften the situation in these reflections: our dauntless survivor is hurting, each next forced renegotiation of her dignity and creative power taxing the underground wellspring of strength from which she draws.  The tiny gold cross she wears around her neck borders on satire; this is no cloister for the likes of Alisha Walker, and there’s no spiritual quest or fulfillment concealed within.  Just the full, indifferent weight of the state’s corporal fetish borne down on a young woman full to bursting with creative potency.  I, insignificant and impotent in the face of such forces, have two options, with only the first being at all viable.  Either LeLe will emerge from this place, sooner than later, intact and excited to make good on all the plans we make every next visit, or I do not want to go on existing in the world which not just allows but applauds her forced sacrifice.

           Alisha is disappointed that one of our members does not eat red meat, having raised cows in her youth and, accepting this reality, turns to me in mock-frustration:

           “Aaron, please tell me you eat steak.”

           I do, LeLe, I do, and I don’t know if it’s going to taste right again until you’re on the opposite side of the table from me for the first time.

-AH