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iwanttobethevoid · 1 year ago

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In philosophy there are certain base assumptions that create starting points (usually value oriented assumptions)...and then they create form, usually forms that map onto reality in some conceptual way. But those formal structures are different iterations of the same type of patterns that then overlap with other patterns in other philosophy...and it all turns into conceptual repetition. People seem similar. As though through life you see how base conditions and starting assumptions create patterns that have slight variations, and it is only a matter of time before new information becomes old information and is added to the rest. Though this should not matter because content is what matters...but content insofar as it becomes explicable seems to die a bit, as though a boundary while making something navigable also can kill what makes something a living thing (what even makes a thing a living thing to begin with though? A certain type of reflexivity in which a thing is self-reflective/replicating?). And the starting point is, of course, human contact with things to begin with. That world is already limited by what our minds are able to paint, and those same minds react to the situation, reflect it, live out our history and our old ways of thinking. How we feel cycles through, becomes a bit more bearable or sometimes worse, maybe a moment of joy. But all of that shuffles around and shifts and reacts to the environment, especially as we close ourselves off (when you hear nothing for days and then hear a sound, it assaults you. You touch nothing for days and textures become violent). We are so malleable, it confuses me where any kind of actual being rests in that mess of reaction (though of course, being is probably just exactly that anyway, in the reaction). How can it be proven that any one of us is alive, or what is being alive to begin with? Why would it even need to be proven?

Do you ever feel as though it is impossible to communicate anything actually? As though there is no one who is able to reach through the veil that separates you from things and actually show themselves as another creature who has experiences at all, much less experiences similar enough to your own that they could actually speak with you. With that you who sits further back than the other iterations of you, if that is even something aside from a kind of base feeling (most of the time I think that 'seat' is empty entirely, there is only this illusion that we really exist and behind it nothing, fragments or collections that some sense of existence emerges from and that our feelings grab onto as we interpret reality in a narrative). My key question here is if there is anything at all that might separate a reaction from an action, or if they are ultimately the same thing. And why would it matter? Action cannot be disconnected from reaction in the same way humans are not separable from other animals but by hazy definition...is the only difference where the reaction comes from? Can a reaction come from a 'someone', from a 'reason'? Is the only difference what we, as biased creatures, deem worthy of being called 'human' or 'agential'? I think that there is some mistake in my thinking that there must be some kind of dynamic and unpredictable movement to life. That there must be something other than the basic sum of our experiences played out on the canvas of cells with which we were born. These are all baseless expectations, probably ones formed before I even knew they were being formed. So there is nothing to be confused by or disappointed about.

But now I find it difficult to see things as living at all, they appear dead already in a sense. And I recognize that our malleability also means a kind of strength...for arbitrary decisions to feed ourselves some goal plucked from nowhere and give ourselves conditions that more benefit our state of being and guide us in some sort of singular direction. We can train ourselves like dogs and this works insofar as our conditions allow particular methods to take root. Living probably happens somewhere in there, where you just take things in, focus on them and don't really think much about the why behind it because a true draw, a true life probably looks to the things themselves. That seems to be living 'inside' somehow, getting involved. In terms of 'options' it seems to me that there is some kind of hope... So long as that singular direction is supported enough by conditions to not dissipate into air. So long as you are able to take hold of your body and rewire emotions to feed themselves off of your goals. Maybe you have the right history to give your direction some kind of weight (losing one's family in a fire, deciding to fight fires). Maybe you never thought about questioning a dream that you had and held for most of your life (momentum build up). Maybe you have such intense willpower that nothing particularly matters about why you make a choice, rather you just make them and then events occur and you continue doing whatever because it happens to be along the way (apathetic momentum/going with the flow). So long as that can occur, perhaps that is a choice, or I don't know, something. It can happen I suppose is the point.

Have you ever gotten the hint of the idea that there is something alive out there, or something beyond the boundary of this mess that is humanity? I suppose that sounds idealistic and idiotic. Part of me thinks this idea merely comes from lack of information at a young age and the inability to fit the information I had into an appropriate context. But really it can go both ways and you could say that as one learns more, expectations generated by past experience prime assumptions to fit with what one knows whereas possibility denies that things must be the case in the way one assumes, even when your sample size of patterns and content grows. But then when you do get more information...it appears everything fits. Which is probably a good thing I suppose...it all fits together in some wonderful cosmic dance or whatever. Even the truly absurd things, the 'unreasonable' ones, appear to reflect only that what is rational and what cannot be rationalized fit into the same pattern of existing things. That they boast the same formal nature, only differing in content (Things that appear to contradict usually do only because of a lack of information or because they are dependent upon one another. In the same way that life is recognized in the context of its end as a boundary and in the same way that absolute existence must include negation or else there is nothing by which it can be defined). But that whole seems dead somehow...I am unsure why. Perhaps too much similarity, or perhaps not enough in the right ways. Most likely though, my vision is coming at things from an angle that is incomplete.

I get the sense in mass movements of history, there is something like human life that expresses itself, where people have been curious about the world around them and learned about how the world moved. Learned about the inner workings of plants and rivers and the structures of nature that they moved inside of and depended on and were simply aware of the existence in it. And then that information was passed along to other people, in small acts, ways that people didn't particularly pay attention to. Human life was woven into reality in that way; what it meant to be the kind of thing we are was the things we did, and it still is insofar as we live it and most of all it seems when we do not notice, but simply persist with all that that involves. And perhaps those small acts of humanity have been gathered up by people who have seen them, and then those people have made things that reveal entire worlds built of them by way of artistic means...or philosophy, or simply in their life itself. Then, of course, those people who do that in the right conditions for attention are lauded as geniuses, but maybe all they did was focus in the right way on something that could have been anything, and arranged it into the actual underlying thread that seems largely ignored in living consciousness (But then isn't that more of that 'narrative', but on a mass level, the narrative individuals make that creates an identity where there is only a sleeping kind of reactivity that does not realize itself at all?).

You see, I think I assumed that conversations could happen after an established deep rooted understanding when one grows up to be an adult. That all the things so obviously clear and fascinating were a given, and that there was an entire world of things to talk about after that fascination had been affirmed. That as an adult you are given more tools by which to communicate and share those mysterious bits of knowledge about the depths of the human tradition and the world in which creatures like us live in and have made. A world in which humans as creatures simply understood something very fundamental about our own existences that bound us together as similar enough not to trip over ourselves and create our own problems through misunderstandings and holding to concepts that survive simply because they are old. But it seems instead as though there are multitudinous versions of death. Little deaths, of dreams or of pictures of a reality that is good enough not to fuck up someone's mind later on. Deaths of possible ways a person could live, or deaths of a reality one could have had if they had been afforded the opportunity...to act yeah, but sometimes to even understand what might have been possible. And then bodily death, or death of possibilities afforded by body parts functioning, or by owning particular things. Even minuscule deaths, where a word or idea could have grown but it was killed instead by a conceptual environment. It seems like we are excellent at creating places for things to die, because we are all bad at listening. And I think I am as well. Bad at doing anything but reacting to things, even when making those arbitrary decisions to act, it seems to go nowhere. Even turning off the mind, it remains difficult to stay open to experiences, and truly experience them. They all appear distant because they remain untouched by most it seems, except in those isolated pockets into which people have retreated...probably to protect themselves, or to choke out the twisted understandings in which we all react based off of our pain. I don't really know.

One guess I have is that human contact in similar experience, rooted ones, those create worlds in which the entire concept of a world can be repainted. If little deaths are multitudinous, it seems little lives would be as well, in that life and death, if they are changes in form, cannot be unbound from one another. So then maybe to 'wake up' to prove that something else is real is a way of proving that oneself is real by finding a mirror somewhere in reality and seeing that one can be a mirror for someone else and see a mirror in someone else. Thus why I see this entire thought process as being the result of hollow interactions...I think that all it takes to flip it is talking to the right people, and for some reason it seems that people who seem to understand one another hardly cross paths. There is a great risk in others as well...because we are mirrors I suppose. Of being killed, probably by accident or misunderstanding, or of dying more. We live in a thick sludge of human minds though, even when speaking with no one. It seems finding a pocket of 'freedom' somewhere is one of our only hopes for survival.

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teacupfulofstarshine · 5 years ago

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living in the real world (ain’t it fun) CHAPTER 6

cw: anxiety attack, driving while tired (DO NOT DO THAT), brief panic, swearing

word count: 2619

chapter 1 // chapter 2 // chapter 3 // chapter 4 // chapter 5 // read it on ao3!!

“The first experiment we are running today is to determine exactly how far away from Thomas we can get before hitting an invisible wall or suffering adverse effects,” Logan says. Thomas, Roman, and Patton nod at him. Logan pulls up one of his blue mental screens and pokes at it. “Thomas, if you look in my backpack, you should find a tape measure which I brought from your home.”

“I didn’t even know I owned a tape measure.”

“You own three,” Logan recites. “Two of them are sewing tape measures and the third, which I have brought for our purposes today, is a conventional construction tape measure.” Thomas pulls the clunky black base from the backpack at his feet and hums.

“How did you know I owned this if I didn’t know I owned this?”

“Just because you are not consciously aware of something does not mean that it is not known to you,” Logan says. “I am home to a great repository of information that has fallen below your conscious level of awareness. Name three differences between an animal cell and a plant cell.”

Thomas stares at him. “Uh . . .”

Logan sighs. “Plant cells are surrounded by both a cell membrane and cell wall, whereas animal cells only possess a cell membrane. Animal cells are generally round, irregular shapes, whereas plant cells are rigid and rectangular. Plant cells, in addition to mitochondria -”

“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” Thomas and Roman recite, in perfect unison. Logan sighs, again, and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Plant cells also possess chloroplasts, which animal cells do not.”

“Whoa,” Thomas says. “I really know all that?”

“Falsehood. You knew it once and then forgot it. As the keeper of your memory archives, I retain this information and can call upon it at will, although I confess that I am . . . better in some situations than others.”

“Is that why I can never remember the answer in time for trivia games?”

Logan blushes, and the screen in front of him glitches out with some sort of indecipherable error code. “I - well - that is to say - um -”

He adjusts his glasses. “ANYWAY! The experiment?”

Thomas stifles his laughter. “Right, right, of course. My apologies, Logan. What do you want us to do?”

Logan adjusts his tie, looking thoroughly disgruntled. “You are going to stand in one place and hold the base of the tape measure. The rest of us will take turns holding the end of the tape measure and walking as far as we can until we hit whatever invisible force is binding us to you. I will record the data, and then we will experiment.”

Thomas nods. “Sounds reasonable.”

“I am your logic. Everything I say sounds reasonable.”

“Who goes first?”

“Me!” Patton says, freckles beginning to shine yellow. “I wanna go first!”

“The order does not matter in this experiment, so I will permit it if Roman is not opposed.”

“Go for it, Padre.”

Patton eagerly grabs the end of the tape measure and bounces in place while Logan readies his screen. “Wouldn’t a pencil and paper work just as well?” Thomas asks.

“For the purposes of recording data, yes. However, information that I enter into my screens is then encoded into your brain as short-term memories. When you sleep at night - which reminds me that we need to have a discussion about your frankly abysmal sleeping habits - I can enter the pertinent short-term memories and information from the day into your long-term memory.”

“Oh.”

“Patton, you may begin.”

Patton gives a cheery wave and turns around, beginning to walk. Logan stops him at five feet. “Any changes?”

“Nope! All good in the neighborhood!”

Patton walks another five feet, and Logan stops him. “Anything?”

“Nope!” Logan looks at Thomas.

“What about you?”

Thomas rubs his sternum. “There’s something . . . weird, in here. It’s kinda painful, but more so just . . . tight, you know?”

“Are you okay to keep going?”

“I should be.”

Logan calls to Patton, who walks another five feet. The tugging in Thomas’s chest is beginning to get more intense, burning slightly, and he can feel anxiety beginning to mount in the back of his mind. “Are you okay to keep going?” Logan asks again, voice gentler. “It is okay if you want to stop, Thomas.”

“I think I’m okay.” Thomas smiles, but it feels thin and strained. Judging by Logan’s expression, it looks that way, too. Still, he signals Patton to keep going.

Once he hits twenty feet, Thomas drops to one knee, clutching his chest. The tightburningtightburning tightburningwrongwrongWRONG feeling in his chest is starting to escalate. “Uh, Lo? I hit the weird invisible wall again,” Patton calls.

“I feel not great,” Thomas says. He drops the tape measure and jerks a hand up in a strange, twisting gripping motion. Patton yelps as he suddenly sinks down, dropping through the earth. Panic spikes through Thomas so intensely that his vision almost whites out, but Patton quickly pops up in front of him.

“Kiddo?”

Patton drops to his knees and pulls Thomas into a tight hug. The feeling in his chest evaporates all at once, and Thomas inhales deeply as he shoves his face into Patton’s shoulder. “Hey, hey, breathe, okay?” The purple light of Patton’s freckles bleeds through Thomas’s eyelids as Patton rubs firm, soothing circles into his chest. “I’m here, Thomas. I’m right here. I didn’t go anywhere.”

“What - what was that?” Thomas gasps. His voice sounds strangled and strange, even to him.

Logan frowns, kneeling next to Thomas and Patton. “It . . . seems to have been a panic response. Patton is an integral part of who you are. The three of us are literally fragments of your soul. When you realized that Patton was distancing himself from you, you panicked. You needed him beside you right at that moment, and you were able to call him to you.”

“Do you think I could do that with any of you? At any range?”

Logan hums, looking at Patton. “I do not know. We could test it, if you are up to that, but I will not force you. Your health and safety is most important here.” He gently puts a hand on Thomas’s shoulder and squeezes it. Carefully, Thomas leans back from where he’s clinging to Patton.

“Can . . . can you give me a minute?”

Logan nods. “Of course. Do you want Roman or I to test the distance limits while Patton is with you to keep you grounded?” Thomas looks at Roman, who’s been setting up the picnic blanket a few feet away.

“Roman, do you wanna go and test it now?” Thomas asks. Roman nods, drawing his sword. Panic spikes through Thomas’s chest, but Patton hugs him a little closer, and it ebbs away.

“Fear not, Thomas! I will return unharmed!”

“Just take the tape measure, Roman,” Logan sighs.

*~*~*~*~*

Roman and Logan both make it twenty feet away before they hit the same invisible wall as Patton. Thomas doesn’t feel the sick, twisting, cramping, heart-rending fear that he had when Patton walked away from him, perhaps because Patton is right next to him. Thomas is no longer curled in his lap like a child, but he does hold Patton’s hand.

“Twenty feet for both of us, as well,” Logan says, swiping across one of his schema. “It seems that is the hard limit for our distance from you.”

“What’s next?” Thomas asks.

“That gesture you did to . . . summon Patton to your side. Do you think you could replicate it?”

Thomas lifts his hand in the same gesture, but nothing happens. “Huh.”

“What were you thinking when you summoned Patton?”

“I was . . . anxious. I was thinking about how much I needed him at my side immediately, about how much I needed him with me before something really, really bad happened. I wanted him next to me.”

Logan hums. “I am going to walk approximately ten feet away from you. Once I am in position, I want you to make that summoning gesture and think about me appearing by your side. Do you think that you can handle that?” Thomas nods “Okay. I am going to walk away.”

Thomas keeps his eyes locked on Logan’s form as he walks, turning and nodding at Thomas once he’s in position. Thomas inhales, jerking his hand up, thinking about how he wants Logan next to him. Logan drops through the ground like a ghost and pops up next to Thomas, looking slightly ruffled. “That was . . . an experience.”

“Did it hurt you?” Patton fusses, reaching over to pat at Logan’s torso and arms. Logan shakes his head.

“The sensation of sinking and rising was . . . strange, but I am uninjured.” Thomas smiles at him.

“That’s good.”

“Yes, well. Alright, Roman? It is your turn.”

*~*~*~*~*

They perform a wide variety of tests before breaking for lunch. Thomas eagerly digs into one of Patton’s sandwiches. “This is perfect!”

Patton grins, face shining yellow with joy. “I’m so glad, kiddo! And I made cookies for dessert!”

“No processed sugars until after you’ve eaten a healthy lunch,” Logan says disapprovingly. Patton grins at him and wiggles a sandwich at him. “Wh - is that -”

“A jam sandwich!” Patton says. “With that Crofter’s stuff that you love so much. I know you can’t resist this, Lo!”

“I have a name,” Logan says testily. He still takes the sandwich, tearing into it and making a soft, pleased humming noise and smiling broadly as he settles cross-legged on the picnic blanket. Patton hands Roman another jam sandwich, and he makes a joyful noise.

Patton tries to eat a cookie, but Logan glares at him until he smiles guiltily and picks up a sandwich instead. “Can’t slip anything past you, can I?”

“No, you cannot,” Logan says. His chest puffs up a little in pride as he takes another bite of his sandwich. Thomas smiles, softly, and takes another bite of his own sandwich.

*~*~*~*~*

They learn many things during the course of the day and its experiments. Logan dutifully distills them into a numbered list.

1: Twenty feet is the maximum distance any of them can get from Thomas before hitting an invisible wall. They cannot go any farther than that.

2: If a side is twenty feet away from Thomas and they both walk at the same time, they can move as long as both of them move in unison in the same direction.

3: Thomas can summon any of his sides with a hand gesture as long as he is thinking about calling that side to him. If he isn’t thinking about calling them to him, the gesture is ineffective.

4: The sides can refuse a summons if they try hard enough, but they all admit to feeling a painful tugging burn in their chest that gets stronger and more painful the longer they resist.

5: Because Thomas is the source of Logan, Roman, and Patton (Logan names him “the Host”), he can directly control their actions if he gives them a direct command.

(“Is that why you and Roman stopped talking when I yelled at you to shut up when you were fighting?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“I’m so sorry, Logan, Roman. I - I didn’t mean to control you like that -”

“It’s alright, Thomathy! We know you didn’t mean to!”

“It is not your fault, Thomas. You did not know. But now we do know, and we can work on this together.”)

6: The sides do not know anything that Thomas doesn’t. They are, however, repositories of any knowledge he has accrued over the course of his life. Specifically:

Logan can access knowledge and facts

Roman can access ideas and daydreams

Patton can access memories and emotional catalysts

“That’s a lot,” Thomas says. Logan flips the schema around to show Thomas, but it just appears to be random shapes and squiggles. “I . . . can’t read that.”

“Of course you can’t,” Logan says. “This is a representation of your subconscious thought processes. You cannot comprehend it with your conscious mind.”

“But you can understand it?”

“I cannot ‘read’ it in the traditional sense that you would read a book, but I can understand it. I can connect it to the information that you have learned. Would you like me to send it to you for processing?”

“Processing?"

“Patton and I are in charge of recalling your memories and knowledge, but your subconscious processes it. That is not us. I will give you this schema, and then it will integrate into your subconscious to be processed at a later date.”

Thomas nods. “Okay, Logan. Do what you need to do.”

Logan places a hand on either side of his schema and compresses it, inhaling slowly as he does so. The schema condenses and collapses into a little ball of dark blue light in Logan’s hands. Thomas doesn’t know when Logan closed his eyes, but when he opens them again they are solid blue and glowing. He steps forward, holding the schema tightly, and presses it against Thomas’s forehead.

Thomas expects it to hurt, but in truth it doesn’t feel like anything at all. The schema dissolves into his forehead, and Logan shudders as it phases out of his hands. “Transfer initiated,” he says, voice flat and monotone.

“Uh . . . Logan?”

“He gets like this sometimes,” Patton says. “Give him a couple minutes. He doesn’t directly control the processing of information and memories, but he has to wait for the schema to phase out of his grip and into the subconscious. He’ll be alright.”

Almost five minutes later, Logan stirs for the first time. “Transfer complete.” He blinks, and his eyes become normal again. He drops to his knees in the grass, and Thomas surges forward to catch him.

“Whoa, Logan. You okay?”

“Yes,” Logan murmurs, pressing a hand to his forehead. “I . . . have never done that in this manner before. It was draining, but . . . I will be alright.”

Thomas carefully lays Logan down on his back on the picnic blanket. “Take a breather, Logan. Just rest here, okay?”

Logan looks up at the darkening sky and laughs. “Look, everyone. Look.”

Thomas looks up, into the warm late-spring-early-summer night, and watches as the stars begin to appear. “They’re beautiful.” He blinks, rubs his eyes, and frowns. “This . . . those aren’t stars, are they?”

“Fireflies,” Logan says, sitting up slowly. One of them flutters down and lands on his nose, and Logan blinks, going cross-eyed to look at it. “Oh!”

Patton laughs, face shining yellow, and the fireflies flock to him. “They must think I’m one of them! They’re really lightning bug-ging out, aren’t they?” Roman sprints around the field, catching fireflies in his hands and bringing them back to Thomas.

It’s a pretty wonderful time. For the first time since the sides manifested, Thomas doesn’t feel the persistent anxiety digging its claws into his chest.

*~*~*~*~*

Thomas knows he shouldn’t be driving.

Patton, Roman, and Logan are slumped together in the back of the car. Patton is fighting to stay awake, but he’s not really succeeding; Roman is snoring against the window, and Logan is leaning into Patton’s shoulder, breathing evenly. Thomas is barely awake himself, but he wants to go home.

The road is dark and winding, and all of the trees blur together as Thomas drives. He blinks once, twice, three times, lifts a hand off the wheel to rub his eyes. He hears Patton mumbling to himself as he starts to drift off, and Thomas grips the wheel tightly.

“Stay awake,” he yawns. His head starts to lean forward, hands sliding off the wheel. His chin hits his chest, but before he can fall asleep properly, someone shrieks in his ear.

“THOMAS SANDERS, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND GET YOUR EYES BACK ON THE FUCKING ROAD!”

#starshinewrites #living in the real world (ain't it fun)#ain't it fun!au #platonic TLAMP

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lswritingdesk · 4 years ago

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6. Asgard

Kyrie had recovered from the previous time she had been summoned into her Dreamscape, but her Krewe leader had not been pleased at the way she had simply collapsed at the work site. She sincerely hoped that she would have advanced warning before she was summoned again the next time and that it would not coincide with work at all.

She was in the sea when she felt the pull this time. Kyrie had gone to the Tethyos City Cube for the weekend to see her family and visit the sea, which still held a special place in her heart. The pull of the Fragment was strong in her chest as she made for the shore, and it nearly took her breath away as she tried to get to the nearest teleporter. She made hurried apologies to everyone she ran into as she ran for the teleporter and typed a hurried message to Elder Rhea, hoping that the Elder could intervene on her behalf if she stayed in the Fragment longer than she meant to.

Soon Kyrie was stumbling out of the teleporter and towards the Fragment grove. It was far too familiar to her now, and she barely waved towards the Tender as she tried to get to the trees. Her chest was burning from exertion and some unknown pain alike. She was still dripping sea water when she burst through the trees into a utilitarian room that she had never seen before. She was not in her Dreamscape or anywhere that she recognised, and she was still wearing the jumpsuit that she had been swimming in.

“By the Alchemy, Daniel,” she said, when her eyes alighted on him. He held the stone in his hand, looking a little sheepish as he looked her over.

“Bad timing?”

“I was in the sea swimming when I first felt the summoning. It felt like my chest was on fire by the time I finally got to the grove. I’m probably going to have to make a public apology when I get back, sprinting through town to the teleporter in swimming clothes and knocking people out of the way. I contacted an Elder on the way, but…” Kyrie trailed off. She looked around her again, then asked, “Where are we now? I don’t recognise it.”

“Stargate Command, in my personal quarters. I begged off from the end of debriefing so I could summon you. I figured you wouldn’t take kindly to being summoned into a room of strangers.”

“You would be correct. Why have you summoned me, though? Is everything okay?”

“You don’t know why you’ve been called?”

“I don’t follow every detail of your life, Daniel. That would be weird. I know big events, but I generally wait for you or the Timeline to inform me of smaller things. So no, I don’t know why I’m here.”

“We made contact with the Asgard for the first time. With the real Asgard, not just their technology or their holograms.”

“And you want to know what I know about them?”

“A hint of what we are dealing with would be nice.”

“Surely your interactions with them would have given you enough of an indication already.”

“Well, not exactly…” Daniel hedged. Kyrie crossed her arms.

“What did you do?”

“It’s not what we did. It’s more what we haven’t done. They don’t think that we’re advanced enough to bother with yet.”

“Did they call you a race of children?”

“That’s...almost exactly what they called us. How did you know?”

“It’s just very on charactre for them. But at least they say what they mean outright, unlike the Nox.,” Kyrie said with a hint of a snicker in her voice. She wouldn’t tell Daniel that she somewhat agreed with the Asgard’s opinion of the Tau’ri. They were advancing quickly, yes, but they were still children in the eyes of the older races.

“...true,” Daniel admitted. The Nox had spoken more in riddles than in straight truth when they had met the strange race. “Are the Nox on the same level as the Asgard?”

“Yes, though they did not explore the universe as the Asgard did. They stuck to their world and developed their technologies. Shared them, to an extent, but...they did not disperse for reasons.”

“So you’re familiar with the Asgard?”

“Very. My people have had an alliance with them for millennia. We haven’t been in direct contact with them for a long time, since we withdrew, but they suspect that we are still around. They have no concrete proof, of course, but they have their suspicions. They are a noble race. They will not harm you. They are monitoring you as you advance, and eventually they will reevaluate their opinion of your...status.”

“So you won’t intervene on our behalf?”

“No.”

“We need their help now, though. Just like we need your help. Neither of you are viewing us with the levity that you should be.”

“I cannot speak for the Asgard, but I am only one person. I do not make decisions for my community or governing Elders. You have only met one person from my people,” Kyrie said sharply. “When I say that you are not ready, you have to take me for my word. The decision to introduce you, and your team, to my Elders, is not one that I can make lightly. The Asgard have a difficult decision to make of their own right now, too. If you cannot recognise that, then maybe their declaration that you are still a race of children is correct.”

Daniel winced at this. “The Goa’uld are posing a serious threat to us, Kyrie. We need help against them if we are to survive.”

“I understand that and validate your struggles. I cannot make decisions for the Asgard or for my Elders, however. I can pass along your concerns as I have been, but that is all I can do. And you should give yourself more credit than you have thus far. You have held your own against a race that once enslaved you.”

“We’re losing ground,” Daniel said quietly.

“Not for long,” Kyrie hinted. Daniel looked up at this, his eyes quizzical. “And that is all I will say.” A knock sounded on the door, and Kyrie backed away. “I must go. Try not to be so forceful in summoning me next time. Let go of the stone.”

Daniel did as he was commanded and set the stone on a side table. He opened the door, and Jack entered. “Talking to yourself again?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Daniel mumbled to himself.

Kyrie was getting better at not stumbling out of the forest. Elder Rhea met her at the fringes with a robe.

“They’ve made contact with the Asgard. The Asgard told them that they are but a child race still. They are asking for help. I promised nothing.”

“The Asgard will come around soon,” Elder Rhea said quietly. Kyrie tilted her head towards the older woman.

“What did you See?”

“Their battle with the Replicators is not going well. They will be forced to make a decision between the humans they vowed to protect and the battle in their home galaxy. The Tau’ri will come into play.”

“What about us?”

“We will not involve ourselves in the matter. It is for the Tau’ri to prove themselves to the Asgard, not for us to intervene. We will not risk the Replicators coming to our world.”

“But if we reveal ourselves to the Tau’ri, surely we must reveal ourselves to the Asgard as well?”

“Yes, we must, but the time is not yet here for us to reveal ourselves to anyone. There may come a time when you must introduce yourself to Daniel Jackson’s team but conceal your true identity.” The thought of this made Kyrie feel uncomfortable. She thought they had an obligation to help their ally of old, and she did not wish to lie to anyone, but she could not go against the orders of an Elder.

“I...understand.”

Kyrie had explained as much as she could about her ‘extra duties’ as a Seer to her Krewe Leader after giving the summoning stone to Daniel, and they understood...partially. Kyrie suspected that Elder Rhea and perhaps even the Elder from her Krewe Leader’s House had intervened on her behalf so that when she felt the pull of the Fragment again while on a worksite and had to sprint off, they were surprisingly good-natured about her disappearance.

It had only been a few months, and Kyrie thought that this was a very short amount of time for the Asgard to change their minds about the Tau’ri. She would just have to wait and see. She was closer to the Fragment this time, but the journey there did not hurt as badly as it had before. Perhaps Daniel was being gentler in his summoning, or perhaps she was getting used to the sensation.

The Tender merely waved her on as she entered the trees. She came out in the same room as before. Daniel was pacing back and forth when she appeared.

“You look nervous,” Kyrie said by way of greeting.

“There are three Goa’uld System Lords sitting in a boardroom several levels above our head, so yes I am nervous.”

“That’s...a development,” Kyrie commented.

“A development,” Daniel said harshly. “They’re debating whether to attack us. Thor was trying to argue on our behalf, but Teal’c, and another one of their kind, Sokar, were found injured. They think we attacked them.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know, argue on our behalf, bring a ship here to defend us, tell the Asgard to step up and defend us? You said you had a treaty with them.”

“The Asgard have far bigger problems in their home galaxy than the squabble of System Lords in the Milky Way.”

“That’s what they told us before they left.”

“You have to prove to them that you were not responsible for the attack and hope that they then decide not to attack.”

“What do you think we’ve been doing?” Kyrie said nothing. “Your silence is not reassuring.”

“If the Furling were meant to interfere in this, the Elders would have shown up to the meeting between you, the Asgard, and the System Lords.” Daniel gave a long sigh.

“I was afraid you’d say that. You know, what good are you?” Kyrie closed her eyes and gave a sigh of her own.

“One day I will be able to help you in the way that you desire, but…”

“But today is not that day?”

“Correct.”

Daniel shook his head ruefully, and before Kyrie could say anything else, he released the stone, and Kyrie vanished. Kyrie exited the grove, frustration in her heart. She wished she could do more for Daniel, but there was nothing to be done. Elder Rhea had made it clear that for a while, the path was for the Asgard and the Tau’ri to tread alone. She could only bide her time until her part in the matter was made clearer to her.

@heathenterkin @luckyninetales @logicheartsoul @sky-of-starflowers @kirazalea @star-fish23 @lifefiction03

#stargate #stargate sg-1 #stargate sg1 #stargate fanfic #stargate imagine #stargate headcanon #furling #furlings #daniel jackson #daniel jackson x oc #daniel jackson x furling #kyrie #kyrie house tethyos #kyrie tethyos

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years ago

Video

youtube

CHILDISH GAMBINO - THIS IS AMERICA

[6.33]

And this is your #1 single, America.

Jibril Yassin: Listening to this without the video makes you realize just how much praise we've thrown at Donald Glover for essentially remaking Mother. It's just a shame the song feels like a patchwork of different moods: the capable and effortless singing and the passable rap schemes clashing at each possible moment. It's chaos supplanted by a million Atlanta rapper adlibs featured here -- notable because his past work revelled in his outsiderdom status. Now he relishes in being a medium. What the fuck does Childish Gambino wants us to think about him? The Billboard #1 means that once again somehow Young Thug wins so I'll take that. [5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Hearing that clatter of noise ripping the seams of the Coloring Book gospel felt viscerally thrilling at first. Yet the momentum of it soon died down as Donald Glover muttered ad libs in placement of real lyrics. If this excitement and then immediate bore from violence was the point, then it relies way too much on its visuals to get that across. As pure audio, it's fragments of unfinished ideas coalesced into what barely passes as a song, and those fragments depend upon too much subtext for it to hopefully bear some meaning. [5]

Tim de Reuse: Every word of the lyrics and every frame of the music video begs to be picked apart; that's Charleston, that's Parkland, that's the way white Americans revere gun culture. It's an assault on all fronts, and despite the pull of its main sonic gimmick, an assault on all fronts cannot be incisive. So it contains no arguments or calls to action, working mainly as a mood piece for anxiety, instability, dehumanization, and dread, writhing into itself, and young Thug's haunting outro is the only place where the horrors alluded to are felt rather than just referenced or replicated. Is it effective? Well, it certainly leaves an impression, but it's not as focused as it could be, and to get any kind of solid message out of it you've got to put in just as much as you're going to get out. [6]

Alfred Soto: A compelling statement of protest that doesn't mind flirting with the exploitative and why not -- the video, that is. A fitfully compelling protest whose tonal variety compensates for its lyrical shortcomings -- that's "This is America." Like many #1s, it's a vessel for listeners. Few hits in the twenty-first century benefit from a cultural moment like Donald Glover's. This is America? No -- this is America. [7]

Will Rivitz: There isn't much I can say about "This Is America" that Doreen St. Félix hasn't already said, so let me talk about its place as an "ambiguous document" on terms in which I feel slightly more authoritative: As a nuanced, complicated, and enigmatic dissection of Black existence -- which is about as specifically as one can describe the song and its accompanying visuals, since any narrower portrayal risks an uneasily reductive summary of its purpose -- Gambino's newest is excellent, aesthetically compelling and subtly difficult in all the right ways. As a pop song that's raced to number one on the charts with the force of a "God's Plan," it's less successful, so instrumentally and allusionally dense that, aside from Gambino's chorus and ad-libs, even a dozen listens in I still have trouble tracking its structure -- and a pop song that isn't easily accessible tends to fail at providing the populist unification that the best of that ilk inflict on a club at 1 AM. As a song, period, it's also a little weak: for all its bassy bluster, its aggression is pallid compared to the distortion of a Clipping or a Death Grips, and its Yeezus-cum-TLOP blend of gospel and snarl doesn't quite reach what made both of those albums so excellent. This, as much as I do love it at times, is what makes the single-number rating system we have on this site a smidge simplistic: we're rating songs based on a singular scale with which we try to summarize all of its qualities into a one- or two-character final word. On "This is America," the ambiguity that St. Félix characterizes so well can't properly be reduced to a score, because the song succeeds and half-succeeds and half-fails on so many disparate levels that it doesn't really do the song justice. That said, I've listened to this one the past two weeks about as much as I listened to "Plug Walk" last month, and I gave that one a [7], so here we are. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: There've been more than enough think pieces and Twitter threads about on this song that I won't try analysis. Instead, I want to highlight how impotent the song is without the accompanying video: how it's a great addition to the accompanying video. This song is good, sure, but the video makes it great. [7]

Julian Axelrod: "This is America" feels like an anomaly in so many ways: It's a song that meets Donald Glover's outsize ambitions, which have previously made him feel like an auteur in search of a masterpiece. Its popularity is partly due to an eye-catching viral video that justifies the hype and amplifies its song's message rather than overshadowing it. And most impressively, it's a cultural and political statement that actually feels suited to how we live now. The song builds and buckles under its oppressively sunny tension, like a powder keg with a smiley face plastered on the front. But check that title again: While "This is America" is clearly a product of our current climate, its anger is nothing new. As long as you live in a country that refuses to let you breathe, the only true rebellion will be dancing on its feet. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: Who is Childish Gambino? This is what I ask from "This is America." Because we know Donald Glover: he's Troy from Community, he's a trash punchline rapper, he's a shockingly impressive nu-funk singer, he's Atlanta's dramedy auteur of the late 2010s. And now he's the ghost of Kendrick Lamar (because Kendrick invented political raps for the '10s the way Chuck D did for the '80s), he's Earn Marks, he's this shuckin' and jivin' shooter playing callous with life. Or has he surpassed performance; is "This is America" any black man playing the best role a white society can ask of him? "Have you seen 'This is America'," people ask of me, and I say, "no, I still have some episodes of Atlanta left to watch." As protest, aren't they as meaningful? As video, "This is America" doesn't resolve. Is this America? Well, song as shareable content is not new; pop history is articulated through tunes that capture an audience's spirit for their times. As song: the choir is lovely. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Remember when a bunch of white people thought it was OK to roll their eyes at Donald Glover for feeling "too white for Blacks, too Black for whites" on Camp? Some people dished out laundry lists of other Black people who were, in their minds, definitive proof of Glover being a fraud. Invalidating his experiences was a sure way to make him -- and other Blacks who felt similarly -- even more insecure about their identity. Here we are, seven years later, and Donald Glover's finally "made it" according to the standards set by white gatekeepers and lay internet folk (one and the same?), and it seems as if people consider the vivid depictions here as being astronomically different -- more artful, more profound -- than what was present in his earlier discography. It's been stated that "This is America" is not the lead single to the upcoming Childish Gambino album, indicating that this is a standalone product meant to be engaged with both aurally and visually. Glover knows: a video is going to be far more affecting simply because of how people approach one. Music is far more susceptible to passivity; people can hear, but they don't listen. Still, it's impossible to ignore the prevailing pernicious attitudes that lead to uniform declarations of "This is America" as a powerful political statement. Does everything need to be so painfully explicit and overt in its intentions to qualify as such? There's a sort of dysconscious racism underpinning how writers and fans are content with categorizing "This is America" and Donald Glover as political while denying such a label to the various rappers who provide ad-libs here. So let's break it down: Young Thug provided one of last year's most heartbreaking verses while mourning the murder of Keith Troup. BlocBoy JB dedicated his recent mixtape to Simi, a friend who died by gunfire. On "Work Hard," Quavo proudly declares that despite dropping out of school, he's rich enough now that his mom doesn't need to work. Slim Jxmmi says essentially the same thing on "Brxnks Truck" and unabashedly celebrates his affluence on "Growed Up." Kodak Black, who's namedropped here, explains how people don't see potential in him because he's "a project baby" on "Misunderstood," and spends another song later on Project Baby 2 sounding absolutely suicidal. And 21 Savage's "Bank Account," one of the most popular rap songs of last year, saw the rapper elegantly illustrating how being a successful Black man doesn't mean you can suddenly present yourself as vulnerable. It's funny: that everyone here is relegated to ancillary elements in the instrumentation ensures that people won't decry the presence of a less "conscious" (i.e. less "worthy," less "real") rapper. Glover understands this, and this decision is an effective middle ground between making significant impact and allowing all these other rappers to have a voice. It's moving because Glover's doing the exact opposite of what his Camp detractors did: unifying, validating, and empowering. The result is a beautiful tapestry that seems to be delivering a message hidden underneath a more obvious one. Every Black rapper is making political music. Every Black rapper is showing what it means to be Black in America. Every Black rapper deserves the attention to detail that has been poured upon this song and video. To think otherwise -- to discredit and disparage the truths of these Black people's lives -- is to disagree with the more obvious realities presented in the video. It's happening, and that is America too. [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Childish Gambino

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joeywxy · 4 years ago

Text

Intimacy (Joey Ang)

In Intimacy, Cosmopolitanism and Digital media: A Research Manifesto, Lambert introduces the concepts intimacy and cosmopolitan as a formal dialectic that influences the way users experience media, interpersonal relationships and communication with others. Intimacy is an enclosure over time, while cosmopolitanism is an opening through an event. He argues that intimacy is an ambiguous term that involves the idea of presence which is both discursive and performative. Lambert points out that intimacy is built through a particular kind of conversational presence expressed as continuous “insignificant chatter” and the “sharing of the everyday.” Such forms of intimacy can lead to rewarding online interactions but have implications on physical interactions which some scholars argue is the only “true” way to commune with others. Intimacy can also refer to love or lust which presents itself as commodified intimacy through dating apps. However, intimacy can also describe a completely personal experience of media technology such as listening to music on earphones in an urban space. Lambert acknowledges the wide cultural variations in understanding and practice of intimacy which can even come in the form of floral love, robots or animals. Performative intimacy refers to public, commodified forms of communication which he argues produces ersatz relationships and narcissistic personalities. Cosmopolitan can be construed as an encounter with difference, often involving a cultural exchange of ideas.

Lambert states that experiencing cosmopolitan intimacy mediated by media is possible with 3 key enablers: the event itself as a beginning, repeated sociality and cosmopolitan consciousness. A potential problem is the threat of “filter bubbles” in which algorithmic recommendations dominate most of our interactions online by simultaneously circumscribing a social bubble and curating what we know about others. This limits our capacity to learn about difference, posing a serious threat to the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness. Besides mediating our relationships with others, media also mediates our relationship with our bodies, space and objects via self-tracking, teledildonics and robots.

Lambert’s conceptualisation of mediated intimacy as discursive and performative is particularly accurate in today’s social media space. One example to distinguish the two types would be the social interaction between a celebrity or influencer and his/her fans versus that between two closely acquainted users who know one another in-person. Most of the time, celebrities or influencers do not reply to each comment replying to their post(s), unless they know the person personally (e.g. another celebrity). This is perhaps because celebrities have discursive relationships with other celebrities and performative relationships with their fans.

However, I disagree that with Lambert that performative intimacy produces ersatz relationships and narcissistic personalities. Commodified public communication such as celebrity endorsements of important products and organisations could be a way of introducing cosmopolitan consciousness. For example, Actress Meryl Streep, Artist Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck among others are celebrities who advocate environmental protection, charity causes and agricultural productivity, health awareness etc. In particular, Shailene Woodley is a long an advocate for herbalism. Since herbalism is considered a concept originated from the Chinese culture this can raise awareness amongst Westerners on the health benefits of herbs and encourage cross-cultural exchanges among people from all walks of life on other health supplements they use. Similarly, research has shown that the internet facilitates intercultural communication and reduce the perceived distance between different cultures (Marcoccia, 2012). As such, though it is true that in-person relationships cannot be replicated via forms of performative communication, they are not without value.

In fact, the different understandings of intimacy among various cultures can be tapped on to extend cosmopolitan experiences and consciousness. For instance, intimacy with plants, animals, music or even God, can be shared on social media by various social or cultural groups. These examples highlight the different levels and dimensions of intimacy that range from physical, social, psychological to spiritual, and can be both real and imagined (depending on how one perceives it). Social media and the internet have been a platform for mediating such cosmopolitan exchanges and insights. However, cosmopolitan intimacy is not all good and can cause cultural conflicts especially concerning cultural appropriation. A leopard-print outfit featuring a Native American ceremonial headdress in the 2012 Victoria Secret fashion show was regarded as highly offensive and disrespectful, causing an uproar amongst the Native American population (Li, 2012). This demonstrates as much as media can mediate cosmopolitan exchanges, it is only constructive on the basis of sensitivity and appreciation.

On the other hand, cosmopolitan exchanges can be curtailed by the “filter bubble”. For example, conservatives are often recommended only information and news relating to their political stance because of algorithmic curation to their usual patterns of consumption, and the same is true for liberalists. This can cause problems as users become less sensitive to opinions other than their own, which Arlie Hochschild refers to as “empathy walls”. In the long run, there is more fragmentation and partisanship, and some argue that this threatens the concept of democracy which relies on the capacity for contested viewpoints.

Lambert’s suggestion that interventions can inverse the coding of algorithms to focus on the design of ranking signals that identify and prioritize difference and thereby extinguish “filter bubbles” could be too simplistic. Large corporations and platforms controlling such algorithms may not be willing to do so because advertisers may pay them to prioritise their products, services and websites. Algorithmic recommendations that are drastically different from users’ pattern on consumption may also be inefficient, inconvenient and not enticing to users.

Generally, the threat of the filter bubble also seems to be exaggerated. A study comparing Republicans and Democrats showed that the results that people got when they searched for political topics were more or less the same. (Nechushtai, & Lewis, 2018) This suggests that here was no real evidence that people with different views are getting different search results and few people are trapped in filter bubbles (Owen, 2018). Besides, users do actively seek out alternative viewpoints from different sources. People’s sense of community and belonging that are derived from cosmopolitan intimacy is mostly linked to forms of mediated sharing and communication that they actively seek out.

#nm3205 #submission #intimacy #tw4

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cryptoquicknews-blog · 6 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/2EUqBr

How MIT Joined Ethereum in the Race for the First PoS Blockchain

This post was originally published here

As reported by Cointelegraph on Jan. 24, the press service of the Massachusetts Technical Institute (MIT) announced the development of a new cryptocurrency based on the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. It is expected that the nodes of the new network will be able to verify transactions with a throughput increased by 99 percent compared to the Bitcoin blockchain and by 10 percent compared to Ethereum.

If, as developers claim, a cryptocurrency on a pure PoS protocol will be launched in 2019, then it will become the first such solution embodied in practice. Ethereum — Algorand’s closest competitor, according to the existing estimates — will launch its PoS system sometime between 2019 and 2021. Scheduled updates required for a gradual transition from the proof-of-work (PoW) to a PoS algorithm have been regularly postponed by the Ethereum Foundation due to network vulnerabilities and failures in the process of the network’s upgrade.

After the official announcement from MIT, the development race entered an active phase. On Jan. 31, one of the members of the ETH 2.0 development team, Terence Tsao, announced the release of the first version of the specifications for the update.

Today marks the very first ETH2.0 version release. Congrats everyone! 🎉 https://t.co/8lh2x0TPyJ

— Terence Tsao (@terenc3t) January 31, 2019

Trilemma: It’s all about scalability

The term “trilemma” (or “trifecta”) was first used by Vitalik Buterin when referring to the phenomenon when only two of the following parameters can be achieved at the same time within the framework of the blockchain 一 security, decentralization and scalability. If the first two qualities successfully coexist in the current state of the blockchain, the final one has not yet been achieved.

The fact is that the current blockchain system is designed in such a way that each node stores information about the entire network and processes all transactions. This mechanism provides a maximum degree of security but, at the same time, reduces scalability. The blockchain cannot process more transactions than is processed by a single node. That is why Bitcoin currently processes about three to seven transactions per second (TPS), and Ethereum about seven to 15 TPS.

Ethereum’s perspective on the scalability

In order to find a solution, the Ethereum team has developed an entire roadmap, which provides a framework to gradual transition to a PoS consensus within the Casper project, as well as Ethereum’s layer one and layer two solutions.

The layer one is represented by sharding, which splits the global network nodes into groups (segments), so each group of nodes has the same bandwidth as the current Ethereum network. Then they are connected to each other through cross-references, so the network remains unified and receives almost unlimited scaling opportunities, depending only on the total number of full-featured network nodes. Development of the layer one includes channels similar to the Lightning Network, such as the Raiden Network and the model of the “childchain,” or sidechain, on which the Plasma solution is based.

The complexity of these mechanisms, as well as the fact that some of these changes, especially intra-network adjustments of protocols, require coordination between the relatively large user base and Ethereum developers, have caused the launch dates of the various phases of the roadmap to be postponed several times, with developers reconsidering the security settings.

Algorand’s take on scalability

Algorand intends to get ahead of Ethereum and release pure PoS later this year. The new cryptocurrency — named Vault — will work on the basis of the Algorand blockchain, which was first presented at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference on April 4, 2017.

The author of the solution is Silvio Micali, a professor at the MIT and recipient of the Turing Award, who, in 1982, together with Shafi Goldwasser, created the first public-key probabilistic encryption system.

Micali says that he has finally found a way to achieve the scalability that the developers of Ethereum have been trying to implement since January 2014. The protocol created by him works on the PoS principle and allows for the achievement of a high throughput without compromising security. Algorand nodes will be able to verify transactions using only 1 percent of the data that the Bitcoin blockchain usually uses.

.@rhackett @FortuneLedger— 2019 will also include the launch of @Algorand a credible blockchain platform that solves the Trilemma. With maturing science & tech, I believe 2019 will have a more equal playing field where businesses & people participate & benefit from these projects https://t.co/b6qX8h30Nm

— Silvio Micali (@silviomicali) January 23, 2019

The desired scalability is meant to be achieved through the improved data storage, block verification and removal of inactive accounts.

Data storage and bandwidth

[Silvio’s photo with a quote] “We are advancing the limits of blockchain by means of technological breakthroughs like our pure of proof stake algorithm.”

The creators of Vault and Algorand promise users that they will not have to download the entire blockchain to their computer. This requires only a small part of the information about operations in the network.

Micali told Cointelegraph how the increased bandwidth of the Algorand blockchain would be achieved:

“With Vault, a blockchain compression technology, we want to make sure that Algorand will avoid the storage and bandwidth costs associated with other blockchain protocols, which in turn make it a more viable blockchain solution for companies to adopt. The most exciting parts of Vault are that it frees up local storage on nodes, distributes the storage costs of the Algorand blockchain across different parts of the network by sharding (without sacrificing security), and reduces the bandwidth required to join the network by allowing new nodes to avoid checking every block since day one.”

The technical presentation of the project prepared by MIT states that the Vault’s block size is 10 megabytes, which is equivalent to 10,000 transactions, and each block contains a hash of the previous block. For comparison, to verify transactions in the Bitcoin network today, the user must download 500,000 blocks with a total data volume of about 150 gigabytes. At the same time, MIT assumes that it is required “to keep all account balances in order to check new users and ensure that they have enough funds to complete the transactions.”

To reduce the amount of stored data, Vault applies a special principle of data separation. Vault’s blockchain, like Bitcoin, stores transactions in a Merkle tree, but it is divided into fragments assigned to different groups of users. Each of them needs to store transactions only from its fragment and root hashes. For verification of transactions outside the assigned fragment, a special method has been developed for searching a group of nodes that intersect the entire tree. So, there is no need to check all the blocks from the very beginning, as it does in PoW systems.

Ethereum developers plan to scale the PoS network with the interaction of two layers 一 sharding and Plasma, in which, according to Buterin, it will be possible to conduct tens of thousands of transactions per second.

“If you add 100x from Sharding and 100x from Plasma, these two together basically give you a 10,000x scalability gain.”

The Ethereum foundation suggests a PoS blockchain model in which nodes can work in parallel. It’s called a “shardchain” and is supposed to consists of multiple shardchains.

The model is quite similar with the one used by Algorand, and implies that each node has to carry a small part of data in order to complete a transaction — and each shardchain is a separate blockchain having separated accounts, state and transactions.

“Imagine that Ethereum has been split into thousands of islands. Each island can do its own thing. Each of the islands has its own unique features and everyone belonging on that island, i.e. the accounts, can interact with each other and they can freely indulge in all its features. If they want to contact with other islands, they will have to use some sort of protocol.”

In order to achieve high bandwidth, Ethereum plans to process part of the transaction outside the blockchain by means of its second layer, Plasma.

Plasma may be regarded as a childchain that could run entire applications featuring thousands of users with minimal interaction between it and the Ethereum mainchain. However, this childchain would also be able to produce its own childchains, essentially creating numerous branched blockchains, all of which are connected to the mainchain. Since operations on those sub-chains won’t have to be replicated across the entire mainnet, they could move a lot faster and reduce transaction fees.

Removing old accounts

Another idea proposed by Algorand is to optimize the network by deleting old accounts. Experts say they will monitor the activity and immediately delete accounts that did not show any actions for a long time 一 that is, if they had a zero balance.

Other cryptocurrencies force you to keep all empty accounts, unnecessarily increasing the space occupied, since you do not need to verify them.

Proof-of-ownership

Unlike similar solutions from other projects — for example, EOS — Algorand will work on a pure PoS system, Micali said:

“Algorand’s consensus model is a Pure Proof-of-Stake (PPOS) model based on a Byzantine agreement protocol. This means that the blockchain is distributed and fault tolerant without any form of centralization and will continue to function as long as more than two thirds of the currency is in honest hands.”

Bitcoin users’ computers solve the equations to check the validity of the blocks, and the first one who performs the task receives a reward. With the growth of such networks, transaction processing time increases. In Algorand, in contrast to traditional systems, the principle of proof-of-ownership (PoO) is applied, in which a verification committee is chosen for each block, the probability of inclusion in which increases depending on the amount of digital money from the participant (i.e., the network shares). In order to assign a new user, the system’s certificates are checked, rather than transactions.

But checking all certificates from the very first block is not required — to speed up the procedure, certificates in Vault are supplied with verification information based on a block that is lagging 1,000 blocks behind the current one 一 called a “breadcrumb.” When a new user is connected, it only checks the “crumbs,” skipping over 1,000 blocks, thereby saving bandwidth. As the developers note, the name of the cryptocurrency is a play on words: Vault can mean both “safe” and “jump.”

The secret is in the use of a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) — created by Micali back in the 1990s — which performs a secret cryptographic sortition to select committees to run the consensus protocol. This allows the Algorand blockchain to reach the scale and performance necessary to process transactions of millions of users.

“Essentially, when a new block is proposed to the blockchain, a committee of ‘voters’ is selected to ‘vote’ on the proposed block. If more than two-thirds of the ‘votes’ are cast by honest users, then the block is deemed valid and will be certified. Committee members are chosen based on the number of algos they have. Committees are made up of randomly selected accounts with voting power dependent on their online stake.”

In the first version of Ethereum hybrid PoS, Casper, miners will be helped by validators in the verification of transactions. The validators will perform the function of escrow in the system by confirming all the operations with coins with their deposit. If the block they found is correct, they receive a reward proportional to the share that they deposited. Otherwise, if the block is malicious or incorrect, they will lose their funds.

The minimum deposit size the validator must make to verify a block in the hybrid PoS network is set at 1,500 ETH, and 32 ETH in case of pure PoS — which, according to the developers, is a significant amount to lose and is intended to make validators think twice before participating in any manipulation schemes.

Additional security will be provided by creating checkpoints every 50 blocks. Performing this mission, the validators will ensure the completion of the blockchain and control the network’s security by excluding the risk of returning transactions before the checkpoint.

Will the trilemma be solved?

Despite the repeated delay of the Constantinople release — a fundamental intermediate update on the road to PoS — Afri Johnson, an Ethereum developer, assumes that Ethereum 2.0 and PoS will not be delayed, since they are being worked on by several independent teams and will go live soon:

“Furthermore, it’s important to understand that Proof-of-Stake, the so-called ‘phase 0’ / the ‘beacon chain,’ will not be a hardfork, unlike other milestones. We will see beacon chain testnets very soon, within weeks or months. And I expect that we can reach the Serenity milestone within a year, optimistically speaking.”

During one of the latest presentations of Ethereum 2.0 on Oct. 31, Buterin suggested that its launch is not so far away. Earlier, he said that the blockchain in its current state is doomed until PoS starts functioning.

I think I’ve been pretty consistent about my view that (i) every present-day existing blockchain, including ETH and BTC, sucks, and (ii) PoS is necessary. Not sure why anyone surprised.

— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 4, 2018

Micali feels more confident in setting the release dates for Algorand for 2019.

— Silvio Micali (@silviomicali) January 23, 2019

According to him, trilemma is false:

“The trilemma is false. The fact that 2000+ prior blockchain projects could not simultaneously be secure, scalable and decentralized is not proof that achieving all these three properties is impossible. Algorand exists to solve this exact challenge and we are advancing the limits of blockchain by means of technological breakthroughs like our pure of proof stake algorithm.”

The latest version of Vault will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium in late February. Mikali also shared information about how the system is being tested:

“We currently have a program in place where a number of companies are utilizing our Testnet. We also have a strategic partnership program where a number of companies will be building a variety of applications on top of the Algorand platform, but we cannot share any specific names at this point.”

Anyway, in 2019, we could witness a practical proof or refutation of the trilemma as among the opposition are such experts as professor of economics Nouriel Roubini, who, the other day, opened a heated discussion on Twitter with none other than Vitalik Buterin.

Vitalik, just shut up & speak about stuff that you can claim u know a lil about. You have promising Proof of Stake since 2013 & we are still waiting for a system that is scalable, decentralized & secure. But that is impossible as your inconsistent trinity principle proves. https://t.co/2VtkG764wL

— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) October 10, 2018

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/2EUqBr

#Uncategorized

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cramlingtono0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0-blog · 8 years ago

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This is not a Sci-fi novel, this is an experimental short story.

Take all notion of time or possible dating out of it!! IT should just be, time has become timeless, no more history. Fukyama.

This story is about 9/11, this story is about conspiracy, collective unconscious, genetics, memetics, humanism, nihilism, the universal, neo liberalism, primeval regression, death drive.

Add segment about the solar economy ( bataille), this is absolutely necessary, linked to the two collective unconscious segments, one relatively recent, 9/11, and one thee deepest of primeval, the sun, the universe etc.

9/11 is the main point of this story. The deep trauma, the sleep walkers, turning up outside peoples houses, realatives of those involved, relatives of victims and perpetrators. Their young menstruating daughters then taken under hypnosis, their psyches filtered and deciphered, fragments of 9/11 found in them. All of them menstruate at the same time, all try and walk to 9/11, all walk to different clues in the lie. WRT 9/11 the subconscious just knows something’s not right, because the people that perpetrated the killings are still alive and thus are still effecting the group collective consciousness. Without being able to control it a guilty partys unconscious will project it to those around him, and they in turn will know that something is not right, they will then pass this message on, until it eventually travels from human to human. The lie is known, we unconsciously know the truth. That is why we cant stop making the 9/11 memes, cant stop revisiting the trauma , the scene of the crime. The perpetrators start to try and avoid society, kill off any unnecessary members of the group, lead line their clothing, lead line their house, use special creams to interfere with the collective unconscious transferring from person to person.

This could also be linked to the collective unconscious of all people in all time and more specifically ancestors in your own lineage. My grt grt grt grt grt grt grt….. caveman grandfather was a passionate killer and his conscious will cannot stand the idea of such a bastard thing happening, so much so he causes these unconscious take overs of the self .

Perhaps people who want to uncover the truth, drug themselves, hypnotise themselves to find out what the collective is trying to tell them.

Perhaps these sleep walkers become more and more aggressive, start to have the characteristics of zombies.

Free will needs to be fully explained as in where it stands right now, peter watts. should be pushed more, Varley should be more representative of the madness of humanity, its obsession with dominance over collective unconscious, genetics, memetics and eventually even consciousness itself.

Varleys character should be unrecognisable perhaps? Unhuman, everything that we think of as human is gone, cut up, sectioned off. All that’s left is a slither of conscious thought, which is then useless on its own, what could be the purpose of life after that?

The guttering woke Varley, water spilling over the edge, louder and louder. It had been coming away from the brickwork, it spilled out onto the dustbin 2 floors below.

All the fastenings coming loose form the house, mortar now rotten, just sand, washed away by the heavy showers. 400 year old house, polymer upgrades would be expensive, and none of the tradesmen would want to touch it. The display systems flickered, audio splitting with cracks and stutters. The bricks glowed slightly, something about the clay, about the nature in them. It seemed to effect the wattage to pieces of hardware, increasing in areas, only a fraction, seemed to change the way things were processed, things take the long way round, a certain unpredictability within the cores.

Not a bad time to wake, Varley prayed, forearm fizzed, leaped out of bed, the bedding, completely shocked, flung itself across the room. Its materiality, suddenly becoming strange as it crumpled against the wall, falling to the floor it resumed its regular physical properties. Stopping in the landing, placed their hand on the wooden balustrade and felt its vibrations. There was noise, the bin room, back of the building, the sound drifted up, stillness now, right hand against the plaster board wall, resident moisture met the specks from the skin.

Varley switched on the Articles, started where they’d left off, volume 569, 4.5 billion years of natural, cosmological, cultural history shuffled and on loop.

Article 8437:3894.1 Birdsong deciphered, 17 year research programme at the U.C.L.A COMA Institute of Animal Welfare. 97% of their language is directly translated as verbal abuse (bigoted, racist, death and rape threats), 3% is used to talk about shitting and the colour of shit. Their social structures seem to be some of the most bigoted and brutal to have been discovered. The Common Sparrow inspects its young within 3 minutes of birth, checking for ‘weak’ or ‘disloyal’ features. A male with the wrong shade of brown, the father will scream ‘Faggot’, the mother will push her beak into its soft chest to crush its heart. The father will scream ‘Faggot’ again before tossing it out the nest. Females deemed ‘un-sexy’, the mother will scream ‘Cunt Faggot’, the chick’s eyes gouged, raped by father, womb ripped out by mother before being thrown out the nest. The sparrow community is enraptured by these birthing rituals, adult females are raped repeatedly, and many males are killed in a frenzy of fights.

Varley pushed off wall and banister, padded down the stairs, information was arriving, the monitor clicked on, messages piling up. Varley sat, chair towards the glass, a plane passing, 8 miles out. Its image starting and stopping.

Second monitor clicked, dimmed as they focused. 1 pending job, Governmental, Financial, Swansea Council, Welfare and Pensions, 60mb/s, a Latency of 478, CPU share of 17%, a minimum 25% partition and an hourly of £73. Accepted, share was high but money was good, sat back to adjust to the new measures, prayed to account for increased latency, skin in between fingers itched. Via Sydney took a look at the work, data transfer, 7,643 seeds, so boring it had to be legitimate, disconnected and burnt the trail through the proxy. Head lolled from side to side. Four hours was worth it, you don’t even notice.

Tingling in the groin and gut, designated a subconscious porn loop to restrain, tingling stopped, looked for nutrient levels, all fine, a spluttering hiss as the plankton paste regulated itself.

Closed eyes, shallow in the animal brain, echo of an orgasm and breakfast, barely started. Gone now, pray, face washed in basin. Ever soft features. Neat teeth, tongue soft purple, gums grey. Micro genitalia, a clitoral penis, vaginal opening, universal anus. A prayer, tingling in the belly, soft colours around the tips of the ears, left eye shaking.

The universal arsehole, the cosmic leveller, the purity of the squirting little squid in your pants, make me some putty now. Come brother come sister, stare at the sun, clean your retinas. Crouch, bend forward and shit, heels lifting out of our shoes, hands clasped to one another. The democracy of the arse hole, the point at which we can all meet, I know you a bit better because I know my own arse hole. Our best kept secret, we’re all the same, we all have a horrid little squirmer in our pants, let’s hold hands now.

Noise from the bins, swivelled towards the doorway, palm up, sends a push down the hallway. Push loped round the corner, down the passage, through the larder and hitting the back door, dissipating in ripples through it. A cat, the cat pushes back, Varley prays, the cat pushes again, this time softer, watching as its colours tumbled and died away in the hall.

Varley closed both eyes as the sun broke through the clouds, irritated at first, then thankful for the warmth and the delicate pink light making its way through the lids. Each nano second an eternity, you are here forever. An ever-dying eternity of the sun. Eternal entropic existence, warm and fuzzy. The solar economy, one way in, one way out. In between things, between states of entropic dissolvent, no fighting.

Self cauterising laser surgery. Swivelled, legs outstretched, Stood, pulled a length of tissue from the roller. Covering the mattress with it, pulled the wheely from the corner. Laying down, starting scan, 0.25% growth, minor subcutaneous tissue near hip. Awkward ruptures between Tibia and Fibula on right leg. Display stutters, showing a helix of calcium spiralling up out of the bone, Varley could suddenly feel it. Fatty growth around the liver as usual.

8.40am, a third of the way though the Swansea seeding, Varley paused the Governmental partition, always recommended full CPU when self cleansing.

Room temperature boosted 5 degrees, undressed, reached for wipes and prepped the work areas. The wipe dissolving the hair and colouring the skin bright white, white for clean and white for display pickups. Liquid gathered between the fingers, painted their calf, around the liver entry, checking the display, painted left hip also. Droplets gathered and dripped, tracing down the leg, a glowing trail, speeding down the side of the foot and staining the floor. Liver area a patchwork of bleach, the skin especially soft from all the attention would split in funny ways, elastic mesh to keep the skin together. Petroleum lubed skin, hooked up pressure pads on calf, liver and hip, hissing blood pushed out of tissue.

Article 4588:9379.6. Proven links in underground gene/meme warfare that leave the human suffering in the middle, hurt by both parties. The gene, the original replicator, the maker of the survival machine that is human, the maker of the brain. The brain, the birth place of a new, more efficient evolutionary force, the meme, each with it’s own blind agenda, each their own stubborn will to live. The human left confused between their blind squabbles, each pulling in a different direction, always towards suffering.

The genes role was to best adapt to it’s physical surroundings, this in no longer necessary. The meme has created culture and society, a new environment for evolutionary survival. The pace of adaptation and change reached dizzying speeds. The parasites that are meme and gene fighting over the body and damaging it in the meantime. The body is just the vessel, the vessels only purpose is to carry the genes , it’s purpose now is to propagate memes as well as partially genes. Consciousness and the ffeling of self, agency, is just a mistaken by product created in the conquests of meme and gene. It has been allowed to stay as long as it is behaved. Consciousness, a transitional product between gene survival and the birth of memes stuck in the middle.

Consciousness became involved in the mess, the growth of memes invading consciousness, the rejection of religion, the fear of death, the adoption of memes that tried to comfort one of that reality.

Part of the weaponry created by this mix up was cancer, a fumbled offspring of two blind, deaf and dumb mad scientists, part gene, part meme and part consciously willed. The gene losing the fight, the meme wanting immortality, the gene responding, adapting as fast at it could, started to propagate cancerous cells, cells that were in blind short term understanding immortal. Constant reproduction, constant growth, but with the unforeseen consequence of killing the host.

It began by redoubling it’s efforts to squash both, increasing violence, sex drive, selfishness in a bid to destroy culture and society. Trying to push humans back into small tribal pockets, back into the dark ages where they can forget their memetic pararsites and the plague of consciousness that had infected the brain. But memes and consciousness fought back, vying to stay alive and the cancer war began. It lead to millennia of backward stagnation, the strange hypocritical, contradictory projects, capitalism, communism etc etc. Strange societies, run on contradiction and obfuscation, fuled by memes counsness and a voracious genetic code. The war had begun and it was a foul state to witness. Memetics and genetics only know the primeval, they only know the brutality of the universe, the systems they make are ones of blunt trauma and self serving vice, this is what human society had followed for thousands of years. Society became a ritualistic place of genetic and memetic role-play, a strange stage for us to express our memetic and genetic desires, to enact our unconscious drives.

This war created conditions experienced in the 21st century, this bizarre unstable situation, 2 blind megalomaniacs and a scared confused consciousness. The ‘self’, believing it was in control of its actions, believing that free will existed, when really it had nothing, no say in anything, pulled this way and that by it’s unconscious masters. Until it was all revealed, genetic behavioural code revealed, consciousness becoming aware of what its master were. Fooling us all along, unconscious areas of the brain making decisions well in advance of any conscious process, the feeling of free will and ‘agency’ produced is a retroactive construction, protecting the mind from the feeling of helplessness. A key feature in genetic and memetic survival, the vessel must understand little to nothing of it’s actions while believing they are in full control.

Cancer was a desperate attempt for the gene to take back control of the situation. It had started to feel the presence of the invaders, consciousness and the memes. Now the genes were turning on their own creation, desperately trying to pare it back. Cancer was it’s weapon, the body need not live that long anyway, only for enough time to reproduce and protect the family. The life cycle needed to be addressed, too much time for consciousness and memetics to start interfering in matters.

Memes and genes however lacked one thing, that was foresight, the ability to imagine. This allowed humans to retake control of the body, the brain. To regulate both gene and meme and allow consciousness to take back territory. Humanity unified by consciousness, the one true leveller that is shared by all, everything else is just memetic or genetic behavioural systems, race, gender, class, sexuality.

Laying down on the bed, face to the paper towel. Turning over, best to do the calf muscle last. Scanned again, local anaesthetic injected around entry point, Varley began the clean at the liver, using hands, head to the side at wheely’s monitor, small claws pinching the skin, tension, pressure pad off, skin quickly parted, no blood. Pushing stomach out the way, fascia snipped, parted just enough to allow access to bottom of liver, 0.18mm shave, fat sucked and vaporised, liver shines, light colour of new cells, quickly pared back to the darker red. Exits, sealing partitions and skin, rearranging stomach, skin pulled together sealed, 1 inch opening when the clamps let go, final seal. Second cut at hip, cells on inside of subcutaneous tissue, more anaesthetic, pressure pad removed, small skin door opened, shaved and sealed, no longer than a minute. Unclips screen, flips over, drops pressure pad into sterilising bucket, suction skin, the layers peeling back, new pads sucking and holding. Small robotic arms from the wheely work calmly, anaesthetic, muscle split, calcium spiral bored out, bone saturated with inert solution, sealed, exits, layers back in place, sealed and finished. Varley flips over, reattaches screen, a pink droplet runs from the liver stitch, wraps midriff with surgical compress. Sits on edge of bed, flushes guts into bucket and wipes down body. Skin tingles, some potential energy. Varley prays and fingers itch.

Washes face, features so soft, nose barely rising out of skull, soft dome eyes, wide slits, tiny lashes, hairless body, micro genitalia

Article 4588:9379.6 Genetic code regulation, neurochemical inhibitors and digital brain stem attachments were now the standard. Consciousness was now the unifying factor for humanity, consciousness was the only way out of this ruinous situation that genes and memes and lead us. It was discovered that consciousness comes in and out of human society, sometimes it is necessary for both evolutionary parties, other times it is a hindrance and must be stamped out. The process of genes removing consciousness could be done in as little as 5 generations. This didn’t leave the world governments much time to act to try and save consciousness.

The understanding of our genetic sequencing enabled society to quickly back some control of the genes. Reproduction for a time became a state controlled procedure, given the circumstance people were relieved, the current position being that 38% of the population was dying before the age of 45, with the age decreasing year on year. No one wanted the genes to be in control anymore.

The memes were dealt with brain stem attachments, the aim being to overload the brain with information and then while it is distracted to try and let consciousness make unencumbered decisions. Artifical free will. Brain stem attachments developed, to confuse and hinder the animal brain, to lead it into a complete state of confusion. Just background noise. The Brain stem attachments, digital hyper loops for media projection techniques. The unit running constantly, updated remotely if more effective loops found. The loops floods the memetic holding areas of the brain, leading to saturation, this saturation temporarily dissipates the ability for memes to hijack consciousness and propagate themselves. The synthesised loop using imagery, sound, music, many different sensory devices. This part of the brain has been partitioned so they are not noticed by the user. It did cause headaches on some of the earlier models. The loops are updated and refreshed daily, the memetic receptors quickly learn the loops and began to operate outside them, refreshing them never gives them this option. The saturation of this part of the brain gives consciousness a chance to respond to reality without the constant pull of the memetic agenda.

When first experienced, users felt rather empty, especially after v.2293747 of the genetic code, with many genetic behaviours removed. People’s heads all of a sudden felt empty, this feeling was worrying for many. Used to the comforting totalitarian drives of the gene and meme, now suddenly alone, left with no one to guide. People felt empty and life became very abstract, many suicides, it took a long time to get used to. Life suddenly, became a quite bizzare experience, where as before ‘things made sense’ but for no reason apart from delusion of agency and delusion of purpose.

Artifical Free will, free will is never possible because synapses can never fire on their own. Need to stress this! One media loopto saturate the memetic ares of the brains. One part of the brain stem attachment fire synapse’ in the brain. When firing, the brain would be active and then thoughts upon this platform are slightly freeer than previously. We are reactive beings, we take information from the outside world and then respond to it, we are not proactive, we cannot create thoughts out of nothing. Our brains can only react to what we feed it, it cannot create anything of its own.

Neurochemical brain levellers, brain chemicals regulated, remove all fluctuations, to reduce the chances of acting based on genetic hormone releases. Everything was flattened out to give consciousness the best chance.

The cancer though was a continued problem, genes had seemingly become more sophisticated, something hidden to us was going on and the labs were in a constant battle to irradicate its cancer spreading, age of death had bee rescued and now stood at 85, still 45 years off what was once the average age of death, 135.

Then go into brain rape, brain stem attachments, articial free will and the conscious trying to outplay genetics and memetics to gain some sort of control over their reality, this is the purpose of genetic control and brain stem attachments, to forcibly take control. How to supress memes? Overloading the brain with ideas and then from that point of total knowing make a ‘free’ choice, not allowing any one meme to take control, not enough space for all memes, just a little taster of each to create artificial free will.

A reminder pops up as Varley is towelling the last of the pink saline droplets leaking from the incisions. All surgical rinsed at the wheely, then placed in it’s central autoclave for sterilisation. Wheely pushed under the mantle piece where a fire place would have been.

The reminder was a Rotation notification, Varley stepped into stores and found the freeze dried samples. Once every 3 months sperm and eggs samples were given, for research and also reproduction.

The door buzzed as Varley padded back down the stairs towards the front door. Opening as they neared it, the bright light pouring in, Varley moving feet to avoid it’s heat. There was an awkward whirring outside, the wheeled drone, stuck on the upturned bin lid. Taking a black umbrella from the hall, Varley slipped on some flip flops, opening the umbrella as they stepped out, the heat of the sun still making it through the shield. Being out in the sun all morning the bin lid was hot, it’s shiny surface reflecting the light back onto the pale legs, skin itching from the irritation.

Varley soon freed the wheel, unable to pick the lid up, kicked it to one side of the path. Indifferent to Varley’s presence, the buggy carried on it’s journey to the front door where it tooted it’s chirping electronic horn. The mother drone waiting in the middle of the street, the little bays opening up for its returning kids. Varley made their way back inside, scanning the packages on the front sensor then placing them into the open hatch, its cooled interior air a huge contrast to outside atmosphere. The lid closed and the buggy whirred back through the front gate, down the curb and back into its designated bay in the mother drone. Last back the mother drone now sped off, back to the regional facility. The facility will process the specimens, apply any new updates to the genetic code (normally 10-20 alterations found made a month), some samples kept for research, viable stabilised code sent on to a randomised facility, where all the worlds modified genes were kept. There the lottery would begin, the whole worlds sperm and eggs, randomly chosen to create the next generations. V.8402893 was the current genetic base, our own gene pool, now consciously controlled. No parents, no tribes apart from humanity at large. (platos republic idea?, Sparta’s societal structure). Becoming a sole agent within society.

Varley was back upstairs, already had a universal credit payment from the Reproduction centre. Sat down at the screens,

Perhaps adding something to say that games were the future of all social interaction and experience.

Sleep walker 9/11 article. The weaving of the collective conscious and unconscious into video form, film editors, the new order of priest soothsayers. Reconstructed from hive mind footage, which is exctracted from collective consciousness, sleep, hypnosis, young girls on mentrals cycles. A girls first period (girls monitored for this, as first period arrives they are examined for fresh collective memoris, passed down from generations, secrets, loves, stories, horrors.

Collective conscious starts to get heavy, get saturated, starts to obsess over traumas, over guilt. The consciousness becoming more sensitive and more powerful. Sleepwalking was the first instant, people would begin walking, end up at ground zero, massed outside people houses (guilty people).

Article 4588:9379.6. Senen Cove, 14th March 2014

Without disturbing the covers, her bare legs slipped out of the bed, her feet instinctively finding the slippers. Her husband snorted at the slight disturbance, turning over awkwardly, his t-shirt catching in such a way that would eventually lead to his arm going numb, upon waking he would realise his wife had gone.

Her feet had pushed all the way into the faux fur slippers, her night gown falling to just below the knee. She was now seated on the side of the bed, hands massaging the mattress, all the muscles in the face relaxed, eyes shut, still sleeping. She stood and made her way across the room, she crossed the landing, walked slowly down the stairs, hand on the bannister, at the bottom she slowly unlocked the door.

Senen Cove was a small village, deep south west, Lands End, England, it was 4.12am and dark. The wind was blowing bitterly as Claire walked down the central road through the village. She turned sharply, through the pub car park, over the knee high timber bar and down the shingle embankment.

Halfway down the slope she twisted her ankle, falling head first into the loose rocks. An automatic groan as the wind was knocked out of her, rolled onto her back and stood, carrying on her journey towards the sea. She hobbled down the rest of the embankment, clearing the shingle and out onto the sandy beach.

The sun was just pushing up over the land behind her as her slippers touched the cold water. Her pace unchanged as she proceeded into the sea. The blue black darkness calling her forward, her head held transfixed on the horizon, her eyes shut, still sleeping.

The dark water was now chest height, breathing now short, her footing lost where the sea bed fell abruptly away. Her head underwater, she breathed in, filling her lungs, the cold salty sea funnelled into her lungs. Chest convulsed, partly retching the water back up, with her head still under the next breath drew in more water, this continued until she was unconscious, each convulsion gentler than the last.

Were part of the unearthing of the 9/11 myth, through a hive mind, collective conscious investigation. Groups have started to investigate the past, freedom of information of the past, the agencies tried to disrupt this but the hive minds managed to stop this. (think of Peter Watts at the beginning of that book, the government systematically killing the hive minds, against anything that goes up against them). They were able to contact spirits within the atmosphere, or troubled spirits from the actual locations of these traumatic events, these investigations are recorded, fragments of memories stored. Different spirit perspectives brought together, edited to work out what happened, moment by moment. Video editors, are now almost soothsayers, spiritual, their practice is magical as well as technical.

The spirits are haunting the world, not being released into the cosmos where they are meant to join the flux/wind of the universal, the universal. The guilt plagues the spirit, and is spat out upon death only to travel within 8 km of where the death took place, given the size of the universe, 8km is like being stuck in a shoe. As you can imagine, in New york this was difficult, given it’s size and a human propensity to trauma and guilt.

They unearthed the memories from the people, not only could they interact with the spiritual they could also tap into relatives of the people, particularly the daughters, particularly while menstruating. They did this with the help of drug inducement and hypnotherapy, stored memories deep in their unconscious.

They also find fidden footage of the actual event, the inside of these rooms and the stair wells as they were being boarded up. Gassed, sleeping gas. They find this buried in the back garden of someone home, he never knew what his father had done in his life. He had himself always had an inexplicable fear of the garden. The package was sealed, and secured in special containers. It seems we never want to die with these things, we always want to leave some sort of trace, some way that the truth can still be got at somehow.

The hive minds and Editor Shaman have got together with surveillance to set up detection posts across the lands. To detect these restless, ‘Grounded’ spirits.

They depend on these conspiracy theories, they depend on terrorism, they depend on prejudice, cold war, racism, sexism. They depend on all forms of bigotry and self interest. All of these Narratives have helped the retainment of the status quo and the oppression of the masses for the world over, everyone has been fucked by this, everyone. Everything is a smokescreen for economic oppression, there’s no way that without these things people would put up with the lack of social mobility etc etc etc etc. The more the consciousness of the people grow, the more desperate the agencies get. Greater amounts of force is necessary, greater spectacles, the more outrageous, the more unthinkable the more believable and also the more open to conspiracy theories. They actually aim to make the false flag scenarios as complicated and outlandish as possible, of course they could have just blown up the twin towers on that day, but that would have been to easy, not enough of a spectacle, they needed the whole world to tune it, the whole world to see the fantastic display of badly masked planes supposedly hitting the towers. If it wasn’t so unbelievable no one would have believed it.

They left too many clues though, the money, the bonds, the hijackers, the drills, that amateur masking.

This was all revealed by a secret silicone valley group The Hive minds ended up unearthing all of this. Elon Musk managed to get one up on the world agencies and set up an independent bureau of investigation.

Elon Musk is himself the centre of a conspiracy theory, he tactically nuked himself apparently after writing a digital suicide note. The tactical nuke became a favourite of the authorities as it handily enough vaporised all evidence and made the crime scene un-investigable for many months. I wonder what lengths someone such as Musk must go through not to be assassinated by the authorities, how careful does he have to be not to be framed, self suicide etc. What securities does he have to build up, personal, physical, technical, governmental, international. etc etc.

There are some who say this has been planned for a long time, and that for years it has been forced into our collective conscience. Through imagery, 911 emergency, all these things, so when it does happen we’re already comfortable with the idea, we’re already halfway to believing it. ( talk about precognitional memory, the shadow government already have a deep understanding of this, they know that propaganda just needs to be maintained through ought the present and into the future to make us believe it right now, they know it’s a 300 year old plan that started yesterday.

There are now inbuilt programs that can detect possible precognition patterns, like an antivirus. Every person now has their own defences, their only checks on everything, food, water, information, everything is checked, double checked.

Need More Varley -Varley Gaming here, alternative economy, brain power used to organise economy (like bit coin harvesting). Neo liberal capitalism modelled on 3.5 billion year old genetic survival, need an economy for the future.

Conscious Rape , started with the hyperfrontality epidemic, all forms of stimulation. This brought about the unification of the sexes, the unification of gender, sexuality, classes, nations. We were all suddenly seen as one thing, one being, slight human consciousness. The forever misguided human consciousness, forced, coerced into nearly all actions. Consciousness became the unifying force in all of this, all of us,

This first led to big crack downs on all visual, audio, media stimulation that could be seen as collaborating with either genetic or memetic survival at the detriment to the human subject. For billions of years the human consciousnessn the human being had always come second, now with memes on the scene, it was trailing in third place. There needed to be a rebalancing.

The brain was deemed woefully out of date, out of touch with the new world. The Brain is a 3.5 billion year old piece of hardware, only getting a firmware update every million or so years, it could not keep up with the alter, alien devices that proliferated around the world. Consciousness Rape clauses aimed to stop companies and media preying on us. Sex, Fear, Violence, Death, all these things were part of the problem. The populations of the Centro Western States came together and agreed to try and limit the constant inseccessant attacks on the struggling consciousness. All sexualities, all genders, all classes came together for this.

Devices were developed to single out animal, or knee jerk brain responses. People were notified in real time when they were making decisions based on a limited free will or their animal instincts. There can never be free will, but the closest thing to it. Discuss free will, Peter Watts, how can there be free will when everything is a reaction, you can only ever react you can never assert yourself, you can’t make yourself think, full stop.

Genetic Code roleplaying as humans, memes also roleyplaying as humans, consciousness stuck in the middle of these blind , waring factions. Memes and Genes also trying to get rid of consciousness, it wan’t good for either of them.

Culture is a tool for genes and memes inject the illusion of agency upon a being. Culture/society as stage for us to role play within. Memes and genes needs consciousness in order to survive, it holds this consciousness, maintains it through culture. Society/ Culture is all an unconscious creation of these survival systems.

All areas of human life just a performance to enhance reproduction of these entities. Different genes and meme sets , with different skills put together different showcase areas to highlight their skills in order to impress mates and engender themselves within the social structure. Sciences, arts, government, money, banking, finances, nature, these are all tribes that are vying with each other in order to promote their gene/meme sets.

Reciepts (gang of murderers)

Gang of people murdering high ranking officials on their death bed, 40 years after their offence. The list of damned people is public, so they know it’s coming. Will kill you 5 years before your estimated death.

End on the sun, the solar exchange, varley looking again at the outside world, the hot rays, perhaps he decides to spend the rest of the day on the roof sunbathing, building up his relationship with the mother of existence, his true parent. The Sun is our immediate provider, our immediate creator, we are her offspring, she is our mum. We can only learn from her example, for ever giving like the sun, even unto our own destruction.

Perhaps elaborate on the idea that once we leave this we become part of the universal, then the universe dies and becomes a part of something else, then that dies and becomes part of something else. Where is the end point of this? Ballard, voices of time!!

Fish all fucking the wrong types of fish. Both chemical and sound pollution began interfering with fish migration and breeding patterns. The high levels of mercury inducing bouts of clinical schizophrenia and mass hysteria amongst many species of fish. Oceanic disturbances first reported off the Costa Rican coast, the Gulf of Nicoya’s beaches and inlets clogged with rotting fish carcasses. A group of marine biologists with the help of local fisherman soon found the source. A shoal of cod, 850,000 in number, a gluttonous whirlpool, its exterior surrounded by adult males, the interior a prison to females and the young. At night the shoal would surface, their furious circular swimming creating a whirlpool capable of dragging under smaller vessels.

The Cod seemed to be systematically dismantling the oceanic ecosystems. When their prey was bigger than them they’d devour it, when it was smaller than them they’d rape it. The death of 37 researchers over 4 years led to many countries not allowing scientists in the water. The swarm had developed a society of constant hysteria and manic bloodlust.

They came to have a semi religious cult following by some fringes of society. People thought it was the end of the world, hundreds sacrificed themselves to the shoal, large boats, full of sacrificials would head out after nightfall. Cutting off the engines upon approaching the shoal, the sacrificals would then enter the water, the current from the whirlpool drawing them slowly in. Satilite images of whole families sucked into the swarm of fish, the blood swirling round, in the anti-clockwise motion of the swarming fish. Simultaneously drowned and eaten alive. Underwater footage of these mass suicides were often leaked from military vessels monitoring the swarm. The fish passing the sacrifices down the walls of the shoal to the bottom of the tornado of fish, the limp bodies, clothes delicately stripped off, cartwheeling down the outside of the throbbing structure, pushed and pulled downwards. The bodies were almost completely stripped by the time they reach the bottom the structure. The flesh prepared perfectly for the young of the shoal at the bottom, meant tender, ripped into manageable strips. The fish were seen as Satanic, the coming of the apocalypse, their steely dead eyes, looking into the camera, indifferent to existence.

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alicecpacheco · 5 years ago

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Here's how your body gains immunity to coronavirus...

I found this article on The Guardian which is one of my favorite news websites. They do a very good job of bringing hard hitting stories to the public consciousness and are not afraid to take a stand. Basically that is everything I expect out of a news organization.

The author, Zania Stamataki, has done an amazing job with this. Usually people who have the gift to understand science know so much about their subject that it is difficult for them to manage to cover that subject in a way that laypeople can understand. However, in this case I feel the author has done a tremendous job of explaining things while keeping it understandable as well as readable. If you are interested in reading the article as it appears on the Guardian website, then follow this link. Otherwise give this is a read. I feel it will help you understand what is going on "under the hood" of the human body & to help allay some of your fears regarding the current pandemic...

As the daughter of an air force officer and a nurse, I am fascinated by defence systems. There is none more impressive than the human immune system, equipped as it is with a rich arsenal to defend against different types of pathogen. Viruses have evolved to trick, bypass and evade these defences. Our immune systems have, in turn, learned to recognise and deter these virus stealth tactics. In Covid-19, the enemy is a tiny piece of genetic material wearing a lipid coat and a protein crown.

So how is our immune system able to defend against viral infections, and how does this apply to Covid-19? The virus that causes Covid-19 is called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars-Cov-2), and was first detected in humans around five months ago. It is a coronavirus. “Corona”, in Latin, means crown. The virus is adorned with an outer layer of protein covered in spikes, like a crown. These spikes help the virus attach itself to target cells. The research community is fast learning about immunity to Covid-19, and we are also applying our knowledge of similar respiratory viruses to predict what to expect in this infection.

Think of a virus as a robot; it cannot reproduce so it needs a factory of materials – proteins, lipids and nucleotides – to build copies of itself. The coat allows the virus to attach itself to the target cell’s membrane. The virus then fuses with the cell and releases a shopping list of instructions on how to build and assemble new viruses. This shopping list, the virus genome, is written in nucleotides (RNA). The first job of a virus that enters our bodies is to invade target cells so that it can comfortably remove its coat and deploy its RNA.

Once inside, the virus commandeers the cell and borrows cellular machinery to build more viruses before immune cells detect the intruders and raise the alarm. Antibody proteins that are able to stick to the virus-spike proteins, and prevent attachment to the target cells, are called neutralising antibodies: generating them is often the goal of protective vaccination.

Our infected cells make the ultimate sacrifice and invite their own destruction by displaying distress signals for T-cells, which swiftly detect and kill them. T-cells are cytotoxic – powerful serial killers that can recognise peptide fragments of virus displayed on the infected cell surface. When they do, they release a payload of toxic enzymes that kill the infected cell in a “kiss of death”. This strategic martyrdom is organised by the immune system to deprive the virus of its replication factories and can lead to the reduction of viral load in the patient. It takes several days for antiviral T-cells to expand and antibodies to be generated. Here’s the silver lining: memory cells ensure that if we encounter the same virus again, we can react immediately with pre-existing defences. Sars-Cov-2 is new to humanity so we have no protective immunological memory. Vaccines prepared using harmless parts of the virus can help us build protective memory.

The virus’s enemy superpower is spreading. The virus achieves this through “shedding” from infected patients. Sars-Cov-2 is expert at hopping from person to person, and in some people, it achieves a stealthy existence with mild or no symptoms. Once many copies of the virus are made, it needs to jump to another host. It hitches a ride on droplets that can be coughed or sneezed to a distance of up to two metres. Droplets can survive on surfaces for several hours enabling pick-up by a new host, or they can be directly inhaled if another person is in close proximity. Studies are emerging into animal hosts – so far the virus has been detected in a few ferrets, cats, tigers and dogs. No animal deaths have yet been reported, and we don’t know if animals can transmit back to humans.

The age differential in fatalities for Covid-19 suggests, with some exceptions, that a healthy immune system is usually able to control infection. Meanwhile, an ageing or weakened immune system may struggle to deploy a protective arsenal. Importantly, Sars-Cov-2 cannot gain entry to our homes or bodies by itself – we have to let it in. This is why official advice has centred around cleaning our hands and avoiding touching our faces.

We know that a healthy immune system is usually able to eliminate infection in a couple of weeks. However, we have no understanding of the components of our immune arsenal that contribute to this feat: some vaccines work by creating potent neutralising antibodies; other vaccines generate powerful memory T-cells. Antiviral antibodies emerge as early as three to four days after virus detection, but are they protective against future reinfection? We believe that antibodies to other coronaviruses (Sars, Mers) last from one to three years. Because this is a new virus, we don’t yet know the answer to this question. Public Health England is recruiting 16,000 to 20,000 volunteers to monitor antibodies once a month for six to 12 months to confirm whether we can generate long-lasting antibody responses to Sars-Cov-2. Determining the quality of these antibodies will be important to understanding long-term protection.

What is our most potent immune weapon against Covid-19? Cytotoxic T-cells may play an important role. Immunologists and virologists are working together to discover the correlates of protection, to design vaccines that offer long-term defences against Covid-19. Years of investment in research means that we can use existing approaches to respond to this new threat, and early mobilisation of research funders, philanthropists and academics are diverting resources to bolster these efforts on an unprecedented scale. Experience has taught us that vaccines are able to eradicate infections from this planet (for instance, smallpox), and medicines against viruses that don’t embed their genetic material to our own (for example, hepatitis C) can also achieve this.

Our secret weapon is research. Scientists are working hard on understanding Covid-19, and collaboration is key to this effort. But until a vaccine or treatment is available, we ought to work hard to protect ourselves and our families: isolate and prevent transmission by using physical distancing, face masks and sensible hygiene. If we all do our part, this little virus holding the world to ransom won’t stand a chance.

• Zania Stamataki is a senior lecturer and researcher in viral immunology at the University of Birmingham

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thelahorepost-blog · 6 years ago

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Bulldoze or rebuild? Architects at odds over future of Glasgow School of Art

The smoke has barely cleared over the blackened carcass of the Glasgow School of Art, which was gutted by a fire on Friday night, but the architecture world is already alight with debate about what should come next. To many, Glasgow without Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s finest work is unthinkable: his masterpiece must be reconstructed stone by stone, no matter the cost. But the extent of the destruction from the fire, which appears to have left only the stone facades standing, have led others to call for a new building to take its place. “From what I’ve seen, restoration is not an option,” argues Alan Dunlop, a Glasgow-based architect and alumnus of the Mack. “We’d be talking about replication, which is totally against what Mackintosh stood for. He was an innovator, working at the cutting edge. He would want to see a new school of art fit for the 21st century.” Dunlop fears that replicating the building would risk “turning it into a museum piece”, with the needs of tourists put ahead of students. “Before the first fire in 2014, the famous library had already become a museum,” he says. “The school used it for fundraising dinners, and students had to make an appointment if they wanted to go in. I argued then that we should make a new library fit for students’ needs, and I believe the same is true now for the whole building.” He has called for an international design competition, with the stipulation that the shortlist should include a Scottish architect “as a serious entry, not just a token gesture to make up the numbers”. Mackintosh was in his 20s when he designed the first phase of the school, he adds, and there are young architects capable of creating something just as powerful now. To many Mackintosh experts and conservation architects alike, Dunlop’s talk is anathema. “I see no argument for why you wouldn’t rebuild the school of art as it was,” says Roger Billcliffe, author of a number of definitive books about Mackintosh. “It has been voted Britain’s most important building several times over, and we have all of the information needed to recreate every detail, following extensive laser surveys after the first fire. People are saying, ‘Let’s get a good modern architect instead,’ but we’ve already had one in theory, and we got that Steven Holl monstrosity across the road.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest Meticulous details … the library at the Glasgow School of Art. Photograph: Arcaid/Rex/Shutterstock

Holl’s green-tinged glass extension of 2013 has been widely criticised, looming opposite the Mackintosh building with all the elegance of a discarded fridge. It won Private Eye’s Sir Hugh Casson award in 2014 for the worst new building of the year, and was damned as a “crude and insufferably arrogant essay in minimalist neo-modernism”.

Despite Mackintosh’s meticulous details and sophisticated spatial sequences, Billcliffe argues that the school of art would not be difficult to rebuild. He says that most of the conservation analysis has already been done, and that much of the replacement woodwork for the library had yet to be installed, and is safely stored in the carpenters’ workshops in Edinburgh. The Glasgow School of Art declined to comment. “Compared to some of Mackintosh’s other buildings, there’s not a lot of fancy footwork in the art school,” he adds. “There were one or two set pieces, made of stone or metal – and who knows, they might have survived. After all, they managed to salvage most of the metal light fittings after the first fire.” Careful excavation is crucial. Julian Harrap, the conservation architect behind the critically acclaimed rebirth of the Neues Museum in Berlin, who has years of experience dealing with fire-ravaged buildings, says the most important next step is sifting through whatever remains inside the charred shell. “There will be piles of material lying at the bottom of the building that can be easily repaired and reused,” he says. “Think of Mackintosh’s metal work: every door had hinges, locks, push plates, the most fantastic material, which could still be there. There will be very big timber beams, too, which is a resource that can still be used, even in a different way.”

An exterior view of damage to the Glasgow School of Art building. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Harrap is emphatic that building an exact replica is not the right way forward. “It would be a disgrace to our profession,” he says. “The idea of knocking it down and building something entirely new is equally unacceptable. We have to tread this fragile middle ground. I believe the shell of the building can be retained, with a very simple interior, with memories of Mackintosh where they’re available. The position of the windows all related to internal volumes, so you already get a framework of the spaces that were once there.” He thinks the school should acquire the adjoining sites, which were also damaged by the fire, where additional facilities could be constructed “to satisfy the needs of a modern art school, rather than trying to shoehorn everything into the reconstructed shell”. It’s not just about the facade: Mackintosh designed every corner of the thing. Even the back stairs were beautiful Tony Barton This is the approach Harrap took, with architect David Chipperfield, at the Neues Museum, combining immaculate restoration with visible scars of bomb damage and striking new additions – to widespread praise. If done well, it could be brilliant. If bodged, it could be another act of reckless “facadism”, an insult to Mackintosh by keeping his hollow stone mask as a redundant husk of history. “The building is simply too special to do anything other than rebuild it,” says Tony Barton, chairman of Donald Insall Associates, the practice that led the restoration of Windsor Castle following a severe fire in 1992. “There is not one single technical reason why it cannot be fully restored. There are very few buildings in the world for which you can argue for total reconstruction, but this is one of them. It’s not just about the facade: Mackintosh designed every corner of the thing down to every last detail. Even the back stairs were beautiful.” Some fragments may yet emerge from the ashes, if enough time is taken to sift through the site with forensic care. A pair of distinctive wrought iron finials still rise triumphantly above the burnt-out wreck, two floral orbs each crowned with a bird, standing as a defiant symbol on the horizon. “It’s as if Mackintosh is saying, ‘I haven’t brought to my knees yet,’” says Stuart Robertson, director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society. “‘I’m still here, and I won’t be bulldozed that easily.’” Read the full article

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imspardagus · 7 years ago

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Talking about Depression : Part II – The Alpha in Your Head

From Part 1 - This will not do

{This two-part paper - and especially Part II - is a work in progress. The deeper in I go, the more precise I have to be, the less confident I feel that I am up to the task of writing it. But it is important, to me at least. So I have published it in this inchoate form in the hope that the help of others, challenging its ideas and offering suggestions, will help me to refine and strengthen it or else to see where it is misconceived.}

This is what I think I have discovered about clinical depression.

It is a point I have reached by lengthy interrogation of my own condition, from wider observations, and by reading about depression. But, having said that, all it is is a theory.

Core proposition: Depression isn’t what we think it is. And what it is wasn’t always an affliction. It started out as a survival mechanism.

If you are a creationist, you will feel obliged to discount what I am about to argue. To you, we are of God’s design and devising. You do not accept evolution so what I will say will make no sense to you. So be it.

But even if you do accept the process of evolution, you will probably already be raising the eyebrow of scepticism. Depression is antithetical to survival, surely? How can we have evolved such a dark and debilitating threat to our very existence? But that’s what I want to try to explain. So if you are skeptical about the notion of a genetic basis for depression - and some people get quite angry about it - I ask you, please, to set it aside for a while. What I am about to try to argue simply uses genetics as a starting point: because it is our starting point.

Survival of the friendliest

You cannot make a judgment about evolution in our species by looking simply at the present day, or even the past thousand, or hundred thousand years. Evolution is a continuing process, of course, and that means that we are evolving even as I write. But everything about us as the species we have so far come to be – as we presently stand (as opposed to how we presently live) - was just about settled a very long time ago. And that is where I want to take you.

In fact, I want to take you back before there were us. Back to species that we evolved from.

We are primates. Primates have always lived in families, troops or tribes. We are not alone in that. There are many species that have evolved a group (pack, herd, troop or tribe) strategy for survival and there are different versions of that strategy.

Already, this begins to sound as if these creatures - our ancestors - chose group survival, much as you might choose one package holiday over another at the travel agency. They did not. So I must despatch that image. Each organism’s survival “strategy” is simply how it has evolved to act, the product of the programming that built it: its genetic programming.

If you have a simplistic grasp of genetics and take the idea of an anthropomorphised “selfish gene” (“Disney Darwinism”) literally, you should be perplexed by this. How can gene-driven evolution recognise and embrace something as extrinsic, as apparently un-self-serving and as transient as a “social” solution? The gene does not plan or make informed choices about the body it has generated. It is (famously) “blind”. Your body is unknown to it. Altruism is unknown to it. The whole universe is unknown to it. It only looks out for itself. It just goes about its business doing what it does.

But if you strip out the anthropomorphism - the false image of the gene as some kind of sentient creature, a kind of mole beavering away in the darkness - you get down to the proposition that the gene is just a piece of coding written in DNA or RNA: a line in the recipe for an organism. The coding is written into a chromosome and the chromosome gets passed along each time the organism replicates, so the line of code gets passed along to the next generation, and the next... From time to time, however, accidentally, the code gets imperfectly transcribed. That alters the recipe. And that in turn modifies the organism. If it was a deleterious change, the survivability of the organism will suffer and both the organism and, with it, the altered gene will probably die out. If, on the other hand, the mutation was neutral in effect or brought advantage, the organism is likely to prosper and the altered instruction will continue to be passed along.

In short, evolution is simply an accidental change at the genetic level that gives rise to a change to an organism that is not antithetical to its survivability in the environment in which it exists and lasts because it is replicated by reproduction.

Change is of course a relative commodity and if a creature fails to adapt to a change in environment (that is, if an environmental change means that the organism needs a modification in order to survive and that modification does not happen because the change to the genetic code that would bring about that modification does not happen) then that too may bring about both the creature’s and, with it, the gene’s extinction.

But still, how does this explain social behaviour, the underpinning of a group survival strategy?

Some species, as they have evolved, would be too vulnerable to survive alone. Their predators may be stronger or faster than they are. Or it may be that alone they cannot forage sufficiently to keep alive. Or it may be that the offspring of a species are, for some reason, especially vulnerable for a period after birth, requiring a lot of parental care. In these cases, the grouping together of the individual members of the species may improve the odds of at least some, and possibly most, of them surviving. Those that survive will be able to produce and nurture the next generation.

So those with a propensity to be able to live together (in other words, not to fight to the death on every encounter) have a better chance of survival than those who lack that propensity. And those that breed dictate the propensities of the next generation. The propensity to get along gets passed along. So the group strategy becomes embedded and gets passed on. And repeat.

The presence of an extended group around the immediate family may afford additional protection that is conducive to the young creature’s survival into maturity. The propensity for social co-existence may, in other words, be important in sustaining the evolutionary developments that required elongated gestation periods and extended infancy: notably enhanced brain capacity. Higher intelligence creatures are particularly vulnerable for long periods after birth.

Stripped down it is this: creatures that are individually vulnerable may survive by co-existing. Propensities that favours their ability to live in groups will aid their survival. Propensities come primarily from, and are passed on by, genetic coding. No concept of selfishness or altruism is needed. It works because it works.

I am not, by the way, implying that selfishness and altruism do not exist. Manifestly they do. But they are higher brain constructs. No less important for all that. It is a nice speculation that altruism derives from the mind’s need to rationalise and give expression to this hard wired social obligation that has evolved within us. Its roots are deeply embedded. While selfishness is a reaction against the natural order and, to a large extent, is only able to exist as long as most people respect the need to be socially aware. Selfishness, on that basis, is a parasitic indulgence. But it too may have its roots in something much older and deeper. Read on.

Knowing (and not knowing) your place

For the next part of the argument I’m going to over-simplify again. The group strategy for survival relies on the ability of the members to rub along, yes. But a group of higher mammals is more than a congregation of individuals each living out a separate mechanistic existence. They are not a shoal of fish. They are all to much the same extent sentient and intelligent. They think. They form judgments. These are traits which, unchecked could lead to fragmentation and fragmentation increases vulnerability. For the group to survive requires strength, cohesion and direction. They have to have, recognise and respect a common purpose. A common purpose requires order and decision.

Our remote ancestors did not have the tools of debate and consensus building that we have (or only had them in embryonic form). As means of reaching decisions these are very late additions to our skill set. Order and decision for them came out of hierarchy. Most animals that have evolved a group survival strategy have developed hierarchies (on both the male and female side). The classic model divides the group into alphas, betas and omegas. The alphas dominate the group. They get the VIP breeding and feeding rights, which again reinforces the structure and development of the group. If life is an airline, the alphas fly first class. The betas are middle management. They get business class. The omegas know their place – in economy - but at least they still get to fly.

I need to pause again here to stress that I am not about to make the case for aristocracy. I am simply observing that this is how it was, and for most group animals in their natural environment still is.

Take a snapshot and, yes, it looks quite like British society. Ordered, class-bound, immutable. But in Britain (and in most ordered societies for the past few thousand years), privilege connotes alpha status and alpha status promotes privilege, the middles scrabble for whatever respectability they can get at the expense of whoever gets in the way and those at the bottom? - “I know my place,” says the omega in the shabby clothes.

Being an “alpha” in society of primates living in the wild is not just about privilege. It carries responsibility. The security and future of the group depends on the ability to command, and the quality of decision-making, of the alpha. A poor leader will, unless deposed, lead the group to extinction. So status within the groups that we see in nature is built around competence. And because nature is not squeamish, the best animal to lead is determined by subjecting the holder to challenge.

These challenges are not in fact restricted to contenders for alpha position. Across the board, there will be struggles for ascendancy. And inevitably the challenge is physical and brutal, not cerebral. It is not a clash of certificates or bankrolls, still less a race to produce perfect soufflés.

Not all the members of a group will be driven to challenge those of higher status (so already the identification of three classes, alpha, beta and omega, is an over simplification). Some are content with their lot. And some are simply accepting of it. But among the betas some will be aspiring to the alpha’s throne. They don’t have that ambition to take on and unseat the alpha on any conscious level (please, hold onto that thought for a while). Aspiring alphas have to challenge the incumbent alpha. The drive to challenge (often associated with breeding rights) is another characteristic has become in-built because it has proved successful to survival and has been passed down as a consequence.

And so there are fights for supremacy. But here is the crucial consideration. Injury within the group weakens and endangers the group. The alpha and the aspiring alphas are, by definition, the strongest in the group. That strength is not primarily needed for in-house tournaments. It is needed to keep order, to guide the group wisely and safely, and, crucially, to protect the group from predators. This is especially true when you start to consider groups of non-tree-living primates. They are particularly vulnerable, living and competing in a hostile environment. If the alpha challenges were to be fought out to the finish, with serious wounds inflicted, the strongest in the group may be fatally compromised. And if they are compromised, the survivability of the group is compromised.

That doesn’t happen. What you see instead, in all these group-living creatures, is a cut-out mechanism: submission.

Submission kicks in before any significant damage can be inflicted on the two protagonists. Typically, it will involve the weaker fighter backing down and becoming cowed or supine (wolves, as I understand it, will roll over and expose their bellies and will allow themselves to be nipped and abused. You see this ritualised behaviour still in domesticated dogs, which we humans misread as an endearing invitation to tickle them). The fighting thereupon ceases, the victor walking away. The loser will remain in a cowed posture briefly then return to normal. And life goes on. Until the next challenge.

This cut-out mechanism is in fact not confined to higher creatures. I have seen it employed by beetles and spiders, both of which, when under attack, will adopt a frozen, death-mimicking appearance for seconds before switching back to life and scuttling away. If it exists in these very simple creatures it cannot be conscious behaviour. It must be a triggered reflex. One that has helped those who have it built in to survive and, by surviving, reproduce.

The cut-out is just the most extreme form of submission. Primates have been shown to have a whole range of submission indicators, smiling being one, the lowering of the gaze another. It may seem odd that we laugh when we are afraid. It isn’t at all odd. We are full of residual deep-set behaviours that, because we cannot eliminate them, and because they keep on being triggered, we have re-interpreted to match our super-social modern lives. So the smile that the old brain triggers because we are insecure and need to bare our teeth becomes a gesture of reassurance, the lowering of eyes becomes, in some cultures, a gesture of politeness. I am going to call these “old-brain” responses, to reflect the fact that they exist, or at least the conditions for their triggering, lie well out of reach of our more recently evolved conscious brains.

So I come back to my original proposition. Submission appears to be an embedded survival mechanism just like the propensity to live socially. In its proper context it is – was - a positive evolutionary development, an advantage. And it was one that our predecessor primates had, and unconsciously deployed. It worked to defuse potentially damaging, life- and group-threatening, conflicts. And it was not disruptive because, like a trip-out mechanism in a consumer unit, as soon as the trigger event was over, the system of the submitting creature rebooted and normality was automatically restored.

But that was when they lived in small, closely interdependent communities when danger was a real presence in everyone’s life, and the issue was stark: will we survive?

Move forward with me now to the present.

No more heroes anymore

I have called this piece “The Alpha in your head” because, to be frank, it is catchy (unlike, say, “the Beta in your sock drawer”) But I am now going to be very annoying and make another big assertion. Alphas don’t run things anymore. Not in human society.

It is fashionable at present for people to use the term “alpha male”. We use it – or rather misuse it - , as a term of abuse used to describe dominating and greedy men – or sometimes to attack those we want to stigmatise as dominating and greedy, perhaps because we resent the power and position they hold.

But I return to my description of the alpha in the rest of the animal world. It is not a position of privilege but a position of responsibility. Greatness is thrust upon the alpha, and, with it, the protection and management of the group.

No, we are mostly betas. And the reason we are betas is because of the world we have built for ourselves: a world that prizes homogeneity and conformity over most things. We have killed off or neutralised most of our predators (with the exception of the viruses we cultivate by destroying all but the most potent of them). Most of us live in a sprawling, jarring, invasive and competitive world that bears very little resemblance to the world of our primate ancestors. The “communities” we live in are vast and largely indifferent to us, except to bear down on us with cultural expectations and behavioural norms that have little to do with what we are, save to belittle and supress it. The only ambitions that count are mostly cosmetic, materialistic and selfish (our self-centredness will often still reach back to embrace the needs of our immediate family and friends but we find it difficult to empathise with the needs of other, more remote neighbours). And those ambitions usually require us to participate in hierarchical groups that are mere parodies of the tribes our ancestors lived in. They are empty of kinship bonds. We are expected, on pain of exile, to conform, to show “loyalty” and to compete only in displays of a limited range of manipulative skills.

Let me now clarify the opening assertion of this section. Almost certainly there will be people who, deep down, in the territory of the old brain, are active alphas. You do sometimes see what may be throwbacks – men, and sometimes women, who build up around them an extended family over which they exert a more or, sometimes frighteningly, less benign physical despotism. Their alpha propensities have no place in our modern societies. They tend to be outsiders, on the fringes of our communities, and we mostly feel threatened by them.

No, ours is a beta world, full of machinations and manipulation. Our tyrants tend to get others to do their dirty work (in fairness, there is too much dirty work for one man to attend to). And when they are brought down it is not by direct combat but most frequently by the plottings of other devious men. Physical prowess is now prized mostly as an entertainment (football, athletics, extreme sports and ballroom dancing).

Not that high levels of intelligence or fine motor skills fare much better. Our leaders are either inheritors of privilege – kings and sultans, and now spiv billionaires – or else politicians and souped-up barrow boys (is that one category or two?) who have, or whose parents have, wheedled, charmed, thieved and twisted their way to the top. Our weapons of choice are no longer the strength of our bodies and our courage but deviousness, association with power and of course money. Position in the modern hierarchy – status – matters, of course, hugely, probably more than ever. But it is most often a cosmetic thing: the question that used to be answered by ancestral strength is now answered by wealth and influence (who you can buy). Value to the community is more frequently an accidental outcome of the pursuit of personal advantage, even when it is claimed as intentional. We are, societally, the busted flush that bluffs its way to winning over a full house.

But, deep inside, as I have tried to explain, we are still the sons and daughters of those old primates and we have inherited from them their old brains and a whole host of old brain devices and conditioning.

If you creep up behind someone and say “boo”, they will jump. They cannot help themselves. Even though our subjugation of the natural world has made it extremely unlikely that a tiger will appear in the kitchen, the old brain is waiting for that sudden unexpected noise to press the release button on our adrenalin and say “go, go!” to our flight response.

And in just the same way I suggest that old beta/alpha rivalry is still wired up, waiting for the trigger. Where will the challenge come from?

Comfort stop

This is getting very long and drawn out so here is a brief recap:

I have suggested that in our distant ancestors, those who preceded us and whose old brains we have largely inherited, with all their genetically accrued propensities and reflexes, there was a survival strategy that ensured that the group would be led by the most suited to the task; and that the strategy had a clever cut-out mechanism built in which was an advantage because it prevented the best in the group from physically damaging themselves and in the process compromising the integrity, strength and safety of the group.

I have suggested that the old world, old brain hierarchies of alpha, beta, omega have been displaced: that alphas no longer rule; that they have been pushed to the fringes of our modern world. The life that we have built in place of tribal cohesion is a world of manipulation and striving for personal success. For all their strutting self-regard and belief in their right to rule, our leaders are betas, mostly driven by ambition and greed, not by an inbuilt need to take charge of and protect the group. Even the best among them are not, in the old world sense, alphas.

In this world, the struggle for ascendancy is rarely physical and close. Our adversary is not the primate that sits atop the highest mound. But I have suggested that, just like a number of other reflexes and behaviours, submission – the cut-out mechanism I refer to – lives on in the old brain, waiting for the trigger: the point at which you, as the aspiring, or faltering, leader, are going to lose.

But my purpose was to write about depression: the sources of depression. Where is the link?

Triggers

Let me now make my third proposition: depression behaves very much like submission. It shuts you down. It is an overwhelming tide that floods your system with negative feelings, closing down your thinking, your emotions and even your body, heightening the sense of threat to the level of paranoia, and caution to the level of immobilised terror. It is like drowning from the inside out. You fight, you struggle but you can’t oppose it. You try to think your way out of it but it is not susceptible to your rationality. It has its own and it is implacable. You can, if you are strong-willed enough, haul yourself above it for a while, pretend to be normal, but the effort is exhausting and all the while the flood is swirling just inches below your feet and you know it. Eventually you will crash back down.

(This is why you should never say to a depressed person “What have you got to be depressed about?” She or he will probably be thinking the same thing, but more in the terms of “Why is this happening to me? For God’s sake make it stop.”)

For a thing to be like something else does not mean that it is that other thing. We all know the idea of false syllogism: “the moon is yellow; cheese is yellow; therefore, the moon must be made of cheese”. If I intend to liken the impact of depression to the impact of this behaviour I have called “submission” how can I persuade you that I have not just mistaken analogy for identity?

Up front, I can’t. I am just offering a speculation.

In support of it, however, I have this: that submission and depression both come from inside us. They are not like the moon and cheese, two distant and, in all other respects, unrelated objects. They are both processes of a single brain: your brain. They are things our brains do to us.

Brains, like computers, use simple mechanisms to create astonishingly elaborate functional structures. Stripped down to its most elemental operation, your massively powerful and capable PC or Mac still functions through the binary choice of 1 or 0 – on/off. Everything is built on just that. With just that device, it has been possible to build processing instructions – code. Bundles of code form programs. Programs enable your computer to execute at breathtaking speed the hugely complex operations you ask of it. Without them it is just a useless box full of circuit boards and processors.

But each program is not bespoke. Within the program I am using to create this document there are whole strings and pages of code that it shares with the program for creating a spreadsheet, writing an email or assembling a slideshow (the same bloody annoying autocorrect, for example).

The brain doesn’t use numerical binary. But it uses essentially the same simple mechanism, cells firing or not firing. And instead of electrical current it uses chemical “messengers” to achieve this. Out of this simple organic operation, it too builds processes to execute the operations that allow you to function and determine how you behave. The rudimentary brain of very simple organisms has evolved into a massive multi-compartmented organ but the process has been one of incremental accretion.

So, even if depression and submission are separate creations of our brain, if the analogy with computers holds good, the likelihood is that they will not simply resemble one another but that they will have substantial commonality in their make-up: strings of shared coding.

But I think it goes further than this. If I am right, the response that in other primates constitutes submission and the response we know in humans as depression are one and the same. Seated in a deep part of our brain, out of direct reach, it is a response we do not control through conscious thought (this, as David Eagleman has sought to demonstrate, is in fact true of most of what our brains do). It is a response triggered when that old brain thinks it recognises the signal to proceed.

Step sideways a moment. Consider the brief sadness you feel when you watch a weepy movie. It is a triggered reaction and it not just a mimicking of the emotion of sadness. It is that same emotion: the same that you feel when something actually sad happens in the real world (you hear that your granny has died, or you drop the donut you have been looking forward to on your way to your seat). It is the same emotion of sadness even though you know that in this case the trigger (the sequence of celluloid images flickering in front of you) is a fabrication.

Okay, that’s another inference rather than a fact. Do I have anything approaching real evidence to lend weight to what I am saying? What can I put forward to link submission, depression and the old brain?

The vagal nerve

The what now? I confess that in all my reading and research into depression and anxiety, I had never encountered the vagal nerve until recently. My attention was drawn to it by an article in the Guardian: Hitting the right nerve: the electronic neck implant to treat depression. The article describes a treatment that is showing some positive results in the treatment of depression. It involves stimulating the vagal nerve with a tiny current of electricity.

So what is the vagal nerve? It is the nerve that links the brain to the heart, lungs, stomach and digestive tract. As such it is a vital part of the very core functions of living creatures.

We don’t generally like to think about it but in essence we, and all organisms from worms downwards (using Darwin’s preferred direction of travel, the descent of man), are a mouth, a digestive tract and an anus. Everything else is a bolt-on or upgrade. The vagal nerve runs down from the brain along this path carrying messages to and fro, keeping the fundamental systems of life working. (There is a branch of it in us which affects the throat and there are fibres of it now that reach the ears, which, interestingly, is why we may cough when clearing out wax.)

The vagal (or vagus) nerve is linked to heart rate and blood pressure, insulin secretion in the liver, stomach acidity, gut motility and the suppression of inflammation in the colon, and the gag reflex. The vagal nerve also has a function in recognising satiety - when enough food has been ingested.

But it also controls the fight or flight reflex and adrenalin release. The vagal nerve, functioning normally, creates a sympathetic response which can either dampen fight or flight, trigger the adrenalin rush to make them happen and trigger the withdrawal of the adrenalin so that they stop. And it has been linked to levels of experienced stress and depression and anxiety.

When “dysfunctional” as we see it, the vagal system can create: hyperarousal, insomnia, anxiety, increased heart rate and restlessness. And at the other end of the spectrum there is bradycardia, the abnormal slowing of the heart rate. And vasovagal syncope, which is the spontaneous and self-limited loss of consciousness, followed by prompt and complete recovery. Now doesn’t that sound like our old friend submission?

The vagal nerve connects to? The brainstem: the oldest part of the brain.

What I have just described are various functions or dysfunctions of the vagal nerve. Or so they are currently regarded, perhaps because treatment of the vagal nerve appears to alter them. But we should not forget that the nerve is just a highway for chemical messages. The fault, if fault it be, may also lie in the brainstem or in any of the organs linked to it by the nerve.

But that “fault” may only be a fault to us with our modern lives and our modern perspective. It may be the normal response of a system that we have triggered accidentally: an inconvenient hangover from a very different lifestyle and set of needs.

The emotional parts of our brains are old. In terms of complexity they are Windows 95 to our new brain’s Windows 10. Tracking back to that old weepy film, the brain we use doesn’t have a separate film appreciation society. It’s too old. It has a bank of long-established emotional responses waiting for triggers. When an event that resembles the appropriate trigger (sad scene in a film) occurs, the brain accepts the trigger and switches on one of those responses.

And so it is, I suggest, with depression and submission. Depression happens because something in our modern life is mimicking the submission trigger. This is so much more likely than that the old brain developed two, or more, distinct response programs, one of which is now all but redundant in humans but the other, just like it, has been waiting hundreds of thousands of years just for the insult of modern life to be invented.

What more can I say to, if not convince you, at least make the possibility I am raising seem worth a look. Let me take you back to the symptoms that my daughter developed. Depression and anxiety. Yes. A constant sense of failure in spite of tangible evidence of success. But look what else: stomach cramps; intestinal inflammation; moving in and out of constipation, enervation. Medical tests confirmed that the was no malfunction of any of the organs, blood was fine, insulin levels fine.

Look at my son, now: energetic, bright, loyal, a strong drive to protect and serve others running in tandem with a sense that he is to blame when things go wrong for those under his “protection”. And when they go wrong, eating disorder, anxiety, enervation.

And now me. Never satisfied with anything I done. Never able to accept praise even when intellectually I know I have done a “good enough” job. Driven over and again into shut down, mentally and physically. And stress always goes to my stomach and bowels. Of course it does, you will say. It does with everyone doesn’t it?

Oh and there’s this that I didn’t mention. Ever since I was a teenager I have suffered from tinnitus. It is at times almost disabling, the sound of voices around me almost wiped out by a swirling multilayered fog of high frequency sound.

One of the symptoms my daughter noticed along with her digestive problems was: whistling noises in her head.

And one of the reported effects of vagal nerve stimulation is: tinnitus.

The Ugly Sisters: Depression and Anxiety

One final thing to say before I wrap up this passage. I have often turned to ask myself why depression and anxiety are so closely linked. They seem to be at odds with each other: depression - debilitation, low mood, disengagement; anxiety - over arousal, heightened sensitivity, mental overheating. But maybe, if we step away from the terms, which reflect our modern perception of what we are experiencing, it does make sense. Submission was the old brain’s device for interrupting conflict. It was a circuit breaker. But a stimulus was needed to reset the circuit after it was broken. And perhaps originally what we now call anxiety was that stimulus.

None of this is conclusive, I know. It is shot through with unproven rationalisations. But we have to start somewhere.

This, however, is the big question: if depression is the submission mechanism, what is triggering it?

The Alpha Revisited

If I am right, submission, the cut-out mechanism that, in primates and other group animals, renders one protagonist temporarily inert to put a stop to conflict and harm, is the triggered emotional and inhibitive response to the threat of being overwhelmed by an unbeatable adversary.

An unbeatable alpha adversary.

Suppose our modern brain were to create an alpha in our head?

Why would it do that? Because challenges still exist in our lives. They have just altered radically. And importantly, they have become inward facing.

Look, I am not very bright, not gifted. But if I were to take the judgment of those around me I would have to accept that I am a good cook, a competent lawyer in my field, a generally kind person, a good father. I can accept none of this. I can sometimes see, intellectually, that I have done a good job.

But inside, and from deep inside, more compelling than my judgment or theirs, it is never good enough. I pick over everything for the flaws. Eventually there is nothing that I have accomplished that isn’t scarred with my picking, its pitted surface reflecting back at me my loathing for my own imperfection. That I am not good enough. There is always a better version of me who could have done a better job.

And that has worn down my ability to feel joy. And it saps my will to try. Starting any project, even one that excites me, I am faced immediately with a seemingly immovable barrier (I have written about this in “Not you, Sunshine”). It tells me that I will fail, that it is, and will prove, hopeless, trying will be hopeless. And for a while it will be self-proving and I can indeed make no progress. Depression? Submission?

And yet I try, have to try, have always had to try. I am like a boxer beaten again and again to the canvas but unable to stop himself hauling his battered body to its unstable feet to continue the fight.

It exhausts me. Always I end up feeling mentally, emotionally and even physically drained.

I used to think that I had become like this because when I was young my mother could not accept I was anything less than her bright boy while my father seemed always to let me know that he was disappointed in my abilities. It was only later that I came to see that it was not what they had put onto me but how I had responded to it that mattered. I wanted to be good enough. I wanted to have their praise. And if I had been capable of listening, I would probably have seen that I had their love, and that all the rest was just anxiety, theirs and mine. But I had taken home a different message. It said I wasn’t good enough. I was failing. And it said so constantly.

I needed to be the better version of me. I couldn't be. The trigger fired.

It wasn’t always so, though I guess that the propensity must always have been there. Up to the age of eleven, my need to be the better version of myself seemed to be matched by continual improvement. I found study easy and I was always near the top of the class. I mixed easily with adults, whose response to me implied liking and respect. But I was in a small, self-affirming family, and my school was a small keep-like community primary occupying one block in a town on the fringes of London. When I moved to secondary school, suddenly I was one barely average boy among 600. They came with skills I had not been introduced to (the gravel playground of our primary school meant no football, rugby, cricket. Even athletics was limited). And because of my appearance - unusually tall at eleven and pencil thin I had grown 15 cms in the previous 6 months, wearing thick glasses, the wrong haircut for 1963 and the wrong trousers, and speaking in the wrong accent, I was, of course, bullied.

But the worst bully of them all was not another school kid. He was inside my head, goading and taunting me, beating down with my fear of failure. Having been on top of my small world only a year before, I was stunned, unprepared for all the new affronts. In theory, I had two courses open to me: to accept victimhood; or to fight back. In practice I was never aware of the choice. I keeled over, plunged and kept on plunging. And in a terrible way it worked. My body came to my aid with frequent, debilitating illness for which the doctor could find no physical cause. I became quiet and shrank back into the smallest life I could make, regularly signing myself out from school after morning assembly complaining of sweats and stomach cramps (which I was actually capable of inducing in myself) and trudging home to the safety of my mother’s protection. I needed to hold her love even if it meant making myself pitiable.

That first year was a wilderness through which I miserably dragged myself. I tried over and again to regather my strength but, all the while, the version of me that I wanted to be loomed over me and all I could see was the inevitability of my failure. I would, could only, let people down and I despised myself for it.

By the second year, I had rallied somewhat but I had lost so much ground and so much confidence. And though parents and teachers were concerned, none of them could see what had happened and what support I needed. “Growing pains” was the best they could manage. When I tried to articulate the painfulness of my thoughts, my mother cut me short with “Nobody wants to know”. (It must seem a callous response to an outsider, but I think now that she was talking to, and about, herself.)

And so over and again I found myself semi-prone with my alpha looming over me.

A strange thing happened next. In my solitude I had become observant of the lives of those around me. It seemed as if my own pain had heightened my sensitivity to the pain of others. Meanwhile, my quietness and intense solitude, which must have seemed intimidating at first, now appeared to have transformed into a dark charisma. People started turning to me for advice, mistaking my tongue-tied silence and my fear-frozen disengagement for a kind of saintly wisdom. I wanted to help them. Trying to, I came to feel responsible for their protection and happiness though I could do little or nothing about either. And the feeling grew inside me until I came to believe that I was quietly responsible for the well-being of everyone around me, a burden I could not let slip but was incapable of meeting.

There was a price, as I said earlier. When you come to believe that people need, not you, because you could never be good enough, but an image they have created of you, you become bound up in a performance: a narrative trap. In my mind, it had become my purpose and my duty to serve these people, even to my own extinction. Even though I thought it was only a matter of time before they came to see me as the fraud and failure that I knew myself to be. To keep to the script, to fulfil the play they had come to watch, I had to wear the cloak and mask that they were expecting to see. “On with the motley, the paint and the powder,” as Leoncavallo makes Pagliacci sing into his dressing room mirror. In my tortured thinking, that meant I had to endure the heavy, suffocating misery from which they were made. In that dark theatre and on that stage, the Son of Lassie was, I believe, born. And the course of what is now 50 years of depression was set and locked in.

The Alpha enthroned

It is not a new thing, this striving to be the better version of yourself. It is probably as old as civilisation. It is just becoming more intense with modern life. From an early age we are being told in a hundred ways that we are not good enough. If we listen, if we take it on board, if it matters to us deeply to be the best, or simply not to fail, we respond by creating an alpha in our head. The alpha is the person we “should be”. The version of us by which we must be measured. Being less than the best we could be is unacceptable. We cannot give it up. So, because we have such a strong drive to survive come what may, we eventually take this toxic conflict on board, learn to dance to its tune. And that sets off a chase that has no end.

Because no matter how good at something you are, the alpha in your head will always better. And you are doomed to challenge it and you are doomed to lose.

And then the old brain is triggered. Beaten by an alpha. Roll over. Submit.

But here’s the twist. When the submission is over, you go to stand. And the alpha is still there, looming over you. Submit.

It’s about how you judge yourself

There is a risk that what I have been arguing will seem elitist. All this talk about alphas misinterpreted as an attempt to found a claim that depression is all about the intelligensia and high achievers. How can I dispel this? Because it is by no means about our modern conception of excellence. It’s about what was built into you in a time when this world could not even be imagined. You can be brilliant and not suffer chronic depression or anxiety. You can be living a mundane life and be crucified by them. You can fail or under-achieve at everything you turn your hand to and be contented. You can, in the eyes of the World, be the embodiment of success and be tortured by them. Whether you are a concert pianist whose interpretations are applauded the world over, or the most lauded country and western singer of all time, whether you are a politician who saw his country through an unwinnable war to an unimaginable peace, a comedian who wanted her comedy to be taken seriously, a feted rugby player, a mother of perfectly wonderful children, a doctor who has saved the lives of thousands, or a child who is loved by his or her parents and peers, if you are beset by the deep seated belief that what you are is not, and can never be, good enough - you have created an alpha version of you in your head. And then nothing from the outside world will be able to convince you that you are good enough and every attempt you make to improve will be a potential trigger for submission – depression.

Depression is not an evil interloper in your life. It is an age-old response that hears something that sounds like the call to end the conflict and dutifully, but wrongly does.

The anxiety that attends it has the same source.

Taking back control

But if it is this deep-seated, how do we deal with it? Nothing as superficial as CBT can reach that far down. And if it is genetic then no drug is going to touch it.

I’m going to suggest that we do not need to try to eliminate depression and anxiety. We need instead to learn to moderate their impact. We have done this in so many areas of our lives. There are many old brain drivers that we have learned to control or accommodate. We once had no sense of property, life was about survival and reproduction, physical domination was the norm. Now property is the centre of our world, coercive sex is frowned on even if you are a movie mogul and physical domination has been sanitised and ritualised in sport.

Our modern world is equally full of constructs that have no basis in the creatures that we were. We have learned generally to regulate our natural selves, to make them fit with, and support, the lives we now lead. Where we have not, where we have become complacent about our control of these “darker” aspects of ourselves or excusing of their unmanaged intrusion ( sexual assault -”boys will be boys”, exploitative greed - “just the politics of envy”, racism - “the natural expression of people whose fears have been ignored”), they have a habit of making us feel more than just uncomfortable. Now, as we struggle to hold on to our gains in human decency, more than ever, the imposed and learned “morality” of our modern cultures needs constant reinforcement.

And so it could be with depression and anxiety. If we can stop seeing them as diseases and instead accept that they are simply the triggering of an old brain response, then we can focus on the triggers, learn the warning signs, but also learn to intervene effectively. The propensity to create an alpha in our head will always be there but we can refocus our education of our young so that their development embraces and takes positive control of it, making it the enabler of improvement instead of the disabler of it. To have a sense that you can do better and to try to do better is stimulating. To have instead a sense that no matter how much you strive you can never be good enough is defeating.

There may be times still when moderation is not enough, and depression and anxiety have become a mutually reinforcing destructive loop. For those chronic situations a stronger intervention may be needed to interrupt the cycle of circuit breaking. But maybe, just maybe, that intervention needs to take place somewhere between the vagal nerve and the brainstem, rather than by chemical duplicity corrupting the messages passing between the parts of the higher brain.

And, with that, I yield the floor.

#Depression #anxiety #alphas #betas #vagal nerve

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cosmonucleic · 8 years ago

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YURI LEONOV’S RP PLOTTING CHEAT-SHEET!

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

Mun name: Pigeon OOC Contact: Tumblr IM’s a good way to contact me. Asks, too! I’ve got a Di.scord you can ask for --- Sk.ype too, but that’s mostly reserved for good friends, so you can ask for that once we’ve broken the ice a little >:0

Who the heck is my muse anyway:

Organism One, the more glass canon-stat’d member of the Deoxys pair owned by Giovanni in the PokéSpe manga. It’s especially skilled in its species’ shapeshifting capabilities, allowing it to make itself completely invisible in the manga and alter its appearance as much as it likes using light manipulation and general dna manipulation, at the cost of Organism Two being the one to really master large-scale self replication.

Points of interest:

He’s a shape shifter, obviously. He’s actually got a bunch of different personas in assortments of different ages, genders, appearances etc. but his favourite at the moment by far is Yuri. He works as an astrophysicist at the Mossdeep Space Centre as a cover while he conducts general studies on humanity; despite working as an astrophysicist he personally considers himself an anthropologist because of this.

Yuri’s species is ridiculously OP and is given a plethora of weird superpowers across the different canons Deoxys shows up in, so he’s got a majorly high-and-mighty disparaging view of humanity at large. He likes them in the same way a human likes hamsters; they’re cute and incredibly entertaining to watch, but there really aren’t many expectations for anything brilliant to come out of them.

His home planet Allele was destroyed millions of years ago. It was the blast that trapped his nucleocapsid gem core in the meteor he’d eventually crash to Earth in, so even though he’s Really Hecking Old the vast majority of his life’s been spent in a sort of suspended state floating through empty space for a few million years.

Those regenerative powers sure come in handy a lot. His only point of weakness is the gem in his chest, but if you manage to shatter that it’s lights out for good. Minor damage to it like scratches or cracks mess him up bad enough to completely incapacitate him.

On that note magnets and strong enough solar winds or electromagnetic waves badly affect him, too. It’s a good way to mess him up pretty bad without doing any direct damage smh.

He’s on an indefinitely long hunt to collect all the fragmented pieces of the meteorite he fell to Earth in, since it’s the last scrap of his homeworld he can reasonably find. These are the meteors throughout the games tat allow Deoxys to freely transform, so if you happen to be playing a character that owns one or lives nearby one ( Molayne, Prof. Cozmo, Maylene etc ) and you aren’t willing to give them up it can be a point of contention between our characters.

Speaking of Cozmo, Cozmo and Lund are two rare exceptions to his ‘all humans are entertaining but mostly worthless’ ideology. They’ve both researched and contributed to a lot/all of the information about Deoxys as a species in-canon, so he’s got a very strong emotional affinity for them.

He doesn’t like Giovanni. The man treated the pair of Deoxys he owned like tools, literally, to the point that he willingly ( thought he ) worked Organism One to death in the FRLG chapter. Org. 1 returns in ORAS to exact revenge many years later by attempting to slaughter him and all of humanity with him, so yeah. He isn’t a fan smh.

SUPER INTO STATIONERY for reasons even I cannot remember. It’s one of his absolute favourite things to collect even though he never uses it. Give him some as a perfect gift for him.

Due to general rp experiences with certain characters + everything that happened with Giovanni he’s absolutely unwilling to let anyone know his whole not-actually-human secret, primarily because both pop culture and personal experience suggests to him that anyone discovering his alien status will lead to very invasive painful testing and containment, which he isn’t about, and more minorly that any appearances he might make as himself will cause an immediate reaction of panic and disgust since Deoxys are essentially giant viruses, so they’re... Literally scary looking space parasites smh.

What they’ve been up to recently:

As I said above, he’s been on a never ending quest to locate and extract all the individual pieces of his old meteorite. Other than collecting all the samples he could find within Meteor Falls and becoming aware of Cozmo holding one he hasn’t had much luck, though lately he��s heard some curious things about a meteorite in Hokulani’s observatory...

As afraid of Giovanni as he is ( and really, he’s the only human he fears ) Yuri still majorly wants to wipe the floor with him. While it isn’t as active as his other stuff, he’ll hop to any opportunity he sees to get revenge on his old trainer if he can.

Yuri’s always on the lookout for Organism Two, the other Deoxys he’d fallen to Earth with. He isn’t sure if his companion’s alive or dead or what since he himself receded back into his core for a while due to general abuse from Giovanni, but the hope is always still there that they’ll meet again.

Where to find them:

Anywhere where Kris Clarity is, to be honest. She’s his best friend and another exceedingly rare exception to his ‘humans are basically gnats’ rule, so he tends to like accompanying her along whatever misadventures she lets him rope himself into.

Mossdeep City. Yuri Leonov is an astrophysicist working there and he lives in an apartment on the island, so naturally he spends plenty of time there.

Birth Island. Any time he isn’t spending living in Mossdeep is spent living in Sevii. This island in particular is a place fiercely important to him, though he cannot say why. Due to all the time he spends there the island’s gotten a reputation among Sevii locals for being ridiculously dangerous; any fishing ships that draw too near suffer a near-total breakdown of all technology within five nautical miles of the landmass, there are often aurora sighted above the island despite it being in balmy, tropical Sevii, and anyone who dares get too close often experiences heinous attacks by a ‘ghost’ or a ‘monster’ that moves too quick to be seen. No boats will dare to go anywhere near it unless someone has an Aurora Ticket, and those are exceptionally old and only ever really given out to experts.

Meteor Falls, for obvious reasons.

Current plans:

Continuing to do general research on people, having him bond with more human beings and learn more about Earth life in general, etc.

Eventual friendship with @rebursting and bonding over their whole Look We’re Totally Normal Humans experiences!! Gotta bond and all that BV

The Suffering with Kris, since learning your best friend isn’t actually human can be pretty hard to come to terms with smh

The Suffering II with Vesper whenever that happens ( wink wink @ pops BV )

Desired interactions:

General conflict. Somehow Touya’s been the only one to figure out his secret in the whole time I’ve been playing here, and the thread that ensued was hecking delightful. Not everything needs to be hunky dory!! Have your character figure him out, try to capture him, attack him, what have you

Friendship. That goes directly against the top point, but KRIS IS STILL HIS ONLY MAIN BESTIE SO IT’D BE SWEET TO BOLSTER SOME NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Give him people to get along with, have adventures with a secret alien, do the thing >:V

Anything with Giovanni. Anything. I’m always down for the idea of Yuri going to try exacting revenge on him and Gio just. Recapturing him like ‘yoink remember I still own you’ and using him to do stuff with Team Rocket, that sounds d e l i g h t f u l to me

I’m open to anything if you want a Deoxys to interact with!! Hit me up >:V

Offered interactions:

If you need literally anything with a Deoxys I am your guy my guy

You want general conflict with someone? Just have your character find out someone isn’t human and BAM, insta-conflict, just add water BV

Really anything smh, tell me what you wanna do >:V

Current open post/s:

JUST TELL ME... WHAT YOU WANNA DO... I don’t have any specific posts open right now I think but that doesn’t mean I don’t wanna do stuff >:Tc

Anything else?:

Aliens are neat :T

Tagged by: @pxgtails since pops just HAS TO ROPE ME INTO EVERYTHING APPARENTLY, G O S H, UGH BT

Tagging: EVERYONE’S BEEN TAGGED SO YOU, YOU, YOU DO IT, GOOD OL’ PIGEON’S TAGGED YOU THERE IS NO ESCAPE I WANNA LEARN ABOUT ALL OF YOU >:V

#『 ☾ 』 TRANSCRIBING RNA INTO DNA [ DASH GAMES ]#『 ☾ 』 MAYBE IT’S THE STARDUST IN MY HEAD [ OUT OF CHARACTER ]#『 ☾ 』 X-FILES THEME PLAYING IN THE DISTANCE [ HEADCANON ]#;long post for ts

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theheroesin-you-blog · 8 years ago

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The Canon is loaded!

First, the pathogen must be present in the body in order for the dendritic cells. Once the pathogen enters the body, they are known as foreign materials entering the body and are capable of inducing the adaptive immune response. These materials are called antigens, they could be microbes and even soluble substances such as toxins.

These antigens are taken by dendritic cells and are brought to the lymph nodes. They are broken down and a fragment of the antigen is presented on molecules bounded to the membrane of the dendritic cells called the Major Histocompatibility Complex(MHC).

The main function of MHC molecules is to bind to a fragment of antigen (called antigenic peptide) that is presented by the APC cells to the helper T cells in secondary lymphoid tissues.

There are 2 types of MHC Class molecules! The different cells present their antigenic peptide to different MHC Classes. Let’s take a look at how the presentation of the tiny antigenic fragment is like!

MHC Class I

Peptide loading for MHC Class I takes place in the cytoplasm, thus they are called endogenous antigens. All nucleated cells express MHC Class I on their surfaces, when these proteins become degraded, the peptide fragments is then transported to the endoplasmic reticulum, where they can bind to MHC I proteins, before being transported via the Golgi apparatus to the cell surface. Once at the cell surface, the membrane-bound MHC Class I protein displays the antigen for recognition by a leukocyte known as cytotoxic T cells.

MHC Class II

MHC Class II Peptide loading takes place in an acid vesicle, thus they are referred to as exogenous antigens. Macrophages, B cells, cytotoxic T cells, thymus epithelial cells and dendritic cell can express MHC Class II on their surfaces.Loading of a MHC class II molecule occurs by phagocytosis these proteins are endocytosed and digested by lysozymes.

This picture describes the two different types of MHC Class receptors.The grooves are whereby the antigenic peptide is “loaded” for presentation to the helper T cells. As you can see from the picture, There are are differences between the two in terms of structure:

In MHC Class I, the peptide binding groove is made of alpha1 and 2, this is considered as 1 chain

Whereas in MHC Class II, the peptide binding groove is made up of both alpha1 and beta1, thus is it made up of two different chains.

One way to remember which T cell has which MHC Class molecule, just remember Helper T cells contain a molecule called CD4+ presented on their surface and it has MHC Class II. Cytotoxic T Cells contain CD8+ on their surface and has MHC Class I. Hence,

4 x 2 = 8 x 1

These molecules carry the antigens on their grooves to be able carry antigenic information and activate different types of cells in order to stimulate the attack against those evil pathogens.

There is a special kind of cell that has the ability to kill pathogens without even touching them. They are called the B cells

B cells mature in the bone marrow they make antibody molecules and express antibodies on the surface of the cell, they do not secrete them. When an antigen is present, B cells then are activated by already activated T cells either by the Th1 or Th2 effector cells. Activated B cells then move on to proliferate and differentiate to become plasma cells and memory B cells. Plasma cells produce about 2000 antibodies(Abs) and live for days and months. Memory cells live for many years, waiting for the same pathogen to come back for it’s revenge.

Plasma B cells on the other hand are then able to secrete the antibodies instead of expressing them on their surface. Plasma B cells produces antibodies specifically for one antigen only. Antibodies are molecules that bind to foreign agents on a cell surface. This makes up the humoral immune system where involves extracellular pathogens/antigens.

On a single antigen there are various parts on the surface called epitopes. One antibody binds to one epitope.

Antibodies are molecules that bind to foreign agents on a cell surface. This makes up the humoral immune system where involves extracellular pathogens/antigens. The structure of all antibodies are commonly the same, the only difference is the receptors at the top of the antibody that determines which antigen it can bind to. The general term for antibodies is called Immunoglobulins(Ig)

A mature B cell originally and naturally presents antibodies IgM and IgD on their cell surface.

B cells require different interleukins to activate specific antibodies for their target antigens. For example, when IgE is needed, IL4 is needed for the antibodies to be changed from IgM to IgE. We will further discuss the different types of antibodies and what they do further down the blog!

Memory cells are set aside incase the pathogen comes back for a second attack, this time, they are stronger and are able to eliminate the pathogen faster. When the pathogen is encountered again, the B cells are activated and undergoes somatic hypermutation. The B cells differentiate into plasma cells, which no longer expresses the antibody on its surface but now secretes and memory cells, that now recognise the pathogen much more than before, developing a higher affinity to that pathogen.

Memory B cells recognising an antigen, ready to be activated and form plasma cells. They undergo affinity maturation, which makes them more specific to the antigen.

Isotypes

There are 5 Types of antibodies which are also called Isotypes:

IgG

IgA

IgM (First isotype to be produced in response to an antigen stimulus)

IgE

IgD

Here’s a way to remember it: GAMED (Game over for those pathogens!!)

NOTE: All isotypes can be expressed on the different B cells surfaces as explained earlier under the B cells section of this blog. However only IgM, IgG, IgA and IgE are secreted by plasma cells, IgD is only present on the surface of the unactivated B cell and not on memory B cells.

What is Class (Isotype) switching?

Basically, isotype class switching is a mechanism that changes a B cell's production of antibodies from one type to another, such as from the isotype IgM to the isotype IgA. Some variables that affect the rate of class switching includes initial response to antigen, interaction with helper T cells and type of cytokines released. The flowchart below explains how the activated B cell differentiates into the different types of isotopes.

The diagram may look confusing but as you can see, different cytokines are needed for class switching, with the aid of the helper T-Cell it is able to switch from IgM to IgG. The proliferation cytokines activated the B cells increase B cell production. Differentiation cytokines determines the type of isotype class switch, and thus will be able to produce and secrete that one type of antibody. Once class switching has occurred, the process if irreversible.

You must be wondering, why is there a need for class switching? Hasn’t the body produced enough antibodies already? Read more to find out!

These isotypes have different functions and roles to play in the immune response, they are expressed in a table form below for easier reference and clearer understanding:

As you can see, each isotype is required for a specific function. Thus, after activation, the antibody with an IgG, IgA, or IgE effector function is required to effectively eliminate an antigen, thus class switching occurs.

Did you spot the answer?

Well if you didn’t the reason is that class switching allows the B cells to produce a different class of antibodies such as IgG, IgA or IgE depending on the nature of the pathogen, thus being able to destroy the antigen!

So what can these antibodies do?

Agglutination

It is the clumping of cells together, in this case the clumping of antigens caused by antibodies. IgM is effective in agglutinating in response to the antigen stimuli as it is made first, this is called the primary response. The two other isotypes IgG and IgA have hinges in their structures that allow the antibody to bind to two antigens, this cross linking can occur. This means that there are bridges made between the antibody and the antigen, thus causing agglutination to occur. Allowing other molecules like macrophages to easily kill the bacteria as a whole.

Neutralization of microbes and toxins

It consists of antibody molecules IgM and IgA. These antibodies act against the antigen receptor by blocking the antigen from binding onto the receptor on a healthy cell surface. Thus without binding, the antigen cannot establish itself onto a cell and therefore unable to replicate.

Opsonization

Opsonization refers to a process where particles such as bacteria are targeted for destruction by an immune cell known as a phagocyte, which causes phagocytosis to occur and thus killing the infected cell.

Crossing Epithelial cell barriers

IgG can be transported across the placenta into the fetal in the mother womb, as well as IgA in the ducts of salivary gland, tear glands and breast milk. These antibodies are able to be transported across epithelial cell barrier and into the lumen of GI and respiratory tracts, providing immune support against antigens in mucosal areas as well.

Even though the the different B cells have different functions, they serve a common goal which is to eliminate or prevent the pathogens from invading us.

All these cells work together under the adaptive immunity to not only eliminate persistent pathogens but also ensures that when the same pathogens returns, the immune system is able to eradicate faster and more efficiently compared to the first time.

Here is everything we have covered about the adaptive video in less than 10 minutes!!

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