#who says that systems tend towards high entropy ?

[metaphysicae]

well i guess we’re real fucking lucky huh

[lifechanyuan]

应当这样爱惜生命

LIFE Should Be Cherished Like This

Xuefeng

Dec. 2, 2023

（Translation edited by Qinyou）

When a life does not exchange energy with the external world, it will move towards death. The more completely a LIFE exchanges energy with the external world, the more vibrant it becomes.

The more closed off a LIFE is, the more lacking in vitality it becomes, and the more it tends towards rigidity and ultimately death. Conversely, the more open a LIFE is, the more vibrant it becomes, and the closer it gets to longevity.

The condition of LIFE is similar to the state of a nation. The more open and inclusive a nation is, the more it tends towards civilization and development; the more closed and exclusive a nation is, the more it tends towards ignorance and backwardness. Just look at which nations in the world are civilized and developed and which are backward and barbaric, and you'll draw your own conclusions.

Once we understand the relationship between a LIFE and the external world, we understand how to cherish LIFE.

The key to cherishing life is to maintain the most open and unobstructed relationship with the external world to the greatest extent possible.

What is the primary symptom of depression?

The answer is: fear of contact and communication with others, even refusing to interact with them, and closing oneself off.

If you confine a lively, intelligent, and wise person, preventing them from interacting with the outside world, from talking to people, from reading, watching TV, or surfing the internet, and even from experiencing nature, keeping them locked in a room for three or five years, what will happen to that person?

They will become fools, walking corpses, or even go insane and die.

Therefore, for a person, as a LIFE, the contact, communication, and interaction with the outside world directly affect the strength and longevity of LIFE.

So, I ask: Why do some elderly farmers living in remote and backward villages have very limited contact with the outside world but still live healthy and long lives? Why do some white-collar workers living in big cities, who are exposed to almost unlimited external information every day, still feel depressed and have short lives?

The answer lies in the level of stress in life. Low stress tends to lead to relatively good health and longevity, while high stress tends to lead to weakness and a short life. This is not directly related to the exchange of information with the outside world but is a different topic from the theme of this article.

From the perspective of the three laws of thermodynamics, energy is conserved, but it undergoes transformation. In the process of transformation, some energy is inevitably wasted and cannot be reused. This concept is called entropy. In this way, it can be observed that in an isolated system, the entropy value will increase, which means that the amount of energy wasted and no longer usable will increase. Eventually, the entire system will collapse without flow or exchange of energy, and as a LIFE, it will also end its journey.

Preventing the increase of entropy is the most effective way to cherish LIFE. So, how do we mitigate the increase of entropy?

An effective method to prevent the increase of entropy is to introduce negative entropy into the system, also known as absorbing negative entropy. So, what is negative entropy?

Anything that can counteract the increase of entropy in a system, whether material, mental, or spiritual energy, can be called negative entropy. Let's illustrate with examples. If a person wants to commit suicide due to a failed relationship, it means that their entropy has increased to the point of collapse. At this point, saying anything comforting may not be very effective. The most effective solution is to provide negative entropy, which means introducing a more attractive person into their life for them to fall in love with again. In this way, the negative entropy counteracts the original increase in entropy, and their emotional world returns to its original state. Another example: If a person loses faith in life due to financial difficulties, any comforting words may not be very effective. However, giving them money directly can restore their confidence in life.

If a puddle of water is not replenished with fresh water, it will soon become stagnant and foul. However, if fresh water is constantly added, allowing the stagnant portion of the water to flow away, the puddle will remain pure and not dry up for a long time. The fresh water added to the puddle is like taking in negative entropy. In fact, the principle is the same as the process of eating, drinking, and excreting every day.

"Various phenomena indicate that to maintain vitality and longevity, we must absorb more negative entropy from the external environment. This principle tells us that the life force, vitality, and longevity of the Lifechanyuan members will definitely surpass those of others because Lifechanyuan members have broken away from the traditional mindset and lifestyle with high entropy values, directly breaking the rigid and lifeless life routines and adopting a brand-new mindset and lifestyle with negative entropy. This is like reformatting a computer nearing crash and installing new software, rejuvenating it.

Therefore, when a system becomes stagnant and lacks vitality, causing disappointment or even despair, it must be replaced by a completely new system; otherwise, the system will undoubtedly perish. This holds true for nations, ethnicities, political and religious organizations, as well as any enterprise or diverse group. Individuals are no exception.

Therefore, it is crucial to participating in continuous learning and exploration, to venture out and welcome others in, to maintain an open mind and an open soul, to engage in meaningful communication with others, especially those whose perspectives differ from our own. We must avoid closing ourselves off, constantly discard our past knowledge and experiences, never assuming we are always right. By remaining open-minded, we can embrace diverse perspectives, constantly restrain the increase of entropy, and move towards a state akin to heaven.

[jonathankatwhatever]

It’s 28 Jan 2025. I’m having focus problems, perhaps because the Destroyer of Sleep was relentless until he managed to get it out. Such a metaphor for existence, a gnostic gospel in which the cat’s inability to poop inflicts the misery of his inability to poop on youp.

More of my personality, if that is what it is, emerges. I can’t help but analyze and then make it into something funny because analyzing some Thing is Ms PacMan eating a power pill. You can tell it’s Ms by the bow. New! It’s Ms PacMan. Because there’s a bow and literally all else is the same. Think about that because it’s the essence of comedy, which I really did study intensely, which is the Attachment across, what I’m calling in my head the 0-1-0 which equates to the renormalization over 2 Things so the Between renders as a Thing of its own. This can be an apparition, a phantom, the briefest imagining which connects on some D4-3 Pathway into the 1Space because the 0Space contradicts its continuance in that specific instance.

That last is meant to 1-0Segment an idea, meaning I ran into a Complication and rather than try to unravel it I typed out that bit about specific instance because that allows us to say what’s really going on, which is that this is orthogonal, meaning we take this blob of glowing pattern area, and we imagine it’s turned orthogonally to us. How do we know which orthogonal to take? We don’t. We turn it over and over, back and forth until we can figure out what it is.

That took me into a GS7 meeting room. I found myself looking at the board because we couldn’t see inside the blobs, but we could watch them change. That’s how we came up with the strategy of maintaining a high inspection rate in levels so we established an arrangement with the Sticks in which they report carrier changes. Like the web to identify the Minotaur.

The origin of the relationship with the Sticks is really hard to find. I remember being with them, and that we seemed to communicate in a way others could not follow because no one else could talk to them, or at least not as well because we were always in total agreement, and treated each other as consulting for the good of the structure’s ability to generate itself. So going backwards from there: they identified the carrier traffic which defines an End going bad, a rotting signal, like in a plant which then ideally cuts it off, which becomes the plant being tended because it has been grown to produce fruit no matter what, and its signals have been harnessed in the direction of that, which means the gardener has an obligation to care because the plant needs the help to do the job you made it for.

That goes back to what I saw at home, that things which could never go bad started to go bad. Bad things started to happen. A bowl broke before it was worn by use. That meant the internal structures of the bowl were not aligning as they had. I saw that differential. I saw it in behavior, and saw how the others could not understand how this was possible, but I saw it in a growing disorder in which the stability and security of existence was being shifted toward competition for existence, like when a lizard washes up on an island full of flightless birds.

I can now say that home was a D4-3Thing whose alignment shifted from below, from increasing entropy at the scale of home’s existence, meaning the disorder had seeped in from below. You can see why fear of others expresses: fear of immigrants, of those not like you, especially ones who seem like you but aren’t, which can become no one but family or even lock yourself in your room because it’s only you alone. That fear is this disordering. And that’s why ordering systems are so popular and unpopular. They’re popular when they pull on the utopian nice guy ideals and unpopular when they pull on the utopian not nice guy ideals. And vice versa, because you can see this is a K’ing. I like to put in the accent because king is a syllable and K’ing is 2, and the point is one into 2 and in the reverse or facing K’ing, the 2 into 1. This rather obviously I hope by now maps to fD and HG, and thus relates the idea of bifurcation into the 1Space mappings like Triangular and Hexagonal. That enables us to see, I hope, how close 1Space is to us, that it surrounds us, entangles us.

Yeah. I had the least trouble accepting the Separation Storyline because I was just a kid being abused with these barely waking nightmares. That kind of vividity is lividity. That material has life in me. The Storylines from older grade school into early teens are harder to accept because I was never sure that what was going on was real or just me playing a game. Again, I except the Jesus lessons because that was literally me actually sitting in a chair, typically the butterfly chair, while the voice spoke to me and I asked questions and sometimes we’d just talk and I never thought that voice was coming from inside me because it wasn’t me and it knew all sorts of material which made sense at the time, which clicked in place, so later when I’d actually come across it I would feel like it was familiar, and sometimes I’d realize I’d learned this without ever learning it, meaning the voice had explained it to me years before and I had accept that as true and then it turned out to be true.

That must have been wild for you. I always credited that idea because it’s necessary for the construction, but I couldn’t see the experience, which is like knowing you know when you’re young. That was a question I always had: what do you know? The answer is everything, but my everything is in this (2:1//1:2) relationship, which means I’ve finally hit on an idea from back at the beginning of thinking about this entire 1-0-1 conception, back to the plastic container of atomic fire balls that I taped into a ball. One idea was that we can reduce contact to a point, which reaches all the way up to a D24 lattice representing the Monster Group, and into pretty much every concept of tangent and continuity and change. The other was that you can spin the fireball around as perfect as you imaginably can and you can stop at an infinite number of points as long as it still fits to that tangent point or End. And that if you went the other way, you could stop at an infinite number of points. And if you spun the ball so the choice of back and forth lines itself becomes a choice, and so on, then you have this derivative, meaning layering, related to the original End, and all that process connecting to that End is what we describe when that End is the 1 in 0-1-0.

It isn’t renormalization at the level of identifying specific process steps which themselves have measurable results, meaning the concept of path integrals making a path, of sums to sums. It’s more the generalized notion of a norm, which is a way of saying the 1, and the construction which is a norm, which is another way of saying the 1, both of which then generate in and out the conception of gsPrimes, which is the gsProcess form which appears as prime numbers, irreducibles of various forms, and which makes number theory so interesting because you can see layerings themselves as having specific identities, which thus means they must have some prime factors. But it’s not as simple as the factors, because gsPrime extends through Attachment to relate that prime form, that count if you prefer, to larger and smaller Ends. Like L19 is Between the evens of 18 and 20, and those embody the cubic of SBE2, meaning 3SBE2 or the SBE of SBE2, which is also 2SBE3, so it’s the twice the cubic of SBE3 and is the cubic of SBE2, and that relates over L19 to CM20, which is 2CM10 and 10CM2, so it’s the expression of SBE3+1 in and out of Bricks.

Maybe it helps to remember that counting in gs means the odd is anywhere Between the evens, that it is (1-0//0-1) over L19. It’s the same counting to 7 to complete the Hexagonal because only when you count 7 is the label 6 filled from both sides of the pairing. That 7 acts as the Boundary, which literally maps as spinning around the Hexagon counting that way from and over each 1-0Segment. And also remember that the insides have to report to the outsides, and that we can imagine this as instantaneous adjustment flowing through equally over all paths or not. That’s where the factorial becomes important, like as part of the generating function for the Dirichlet series, meaning the inverse exponential mapped in complexity.

Oh, wait, that just cemented the pole position a bit more. Mapped in complexity mean mapped to the complex plane and that is a direct link to the basic idea that Composition generates the Bip pole, which is located at ½ along the real line because that maps to the Bip of the gs which includes. Which maps the including grid square so therefore the middle, at the Bip, and not at the corner though the underlying and enclosing layers treat that center as a corner. That’s the 1:4 relationship which maps in layers as 4:1:4 and thus (4:1:4//1:4:1).

The cat is staring at me. He thinks I’m food. I’m the provider of food so I’m one step away from being the prey. I sometimes wonder if slimming him down might be worse in the sense that being chubby helps him be an indoor cat with low energy output. He can be very active for his age while rivaling an anvil when lying where my feet should be.

That Riemann idea relaxed me. That’s really good work. You’re very good at this. Which means you’re very good at this should appear in your perspective too. Remember when the Work was unformed, shapeless, and more unto a void? I’m being told to tone down the dramatics. Especially the fake quavery voice. At least the cat closed his eyes. He actually satisfies his companionship needs by looking at me and then relaxing while he’s 3 feet away. Always was a minimal contact alpha male. Magie would have suffered in silence, whilst the Billiam is like a husky at the groomers. They’re like Madge in the Palmolive commercials when the cultural image was women yakking it up at the beauty salon, loudly because of the dryers so female culture was parodied as loud women with too little or too much make-up talking loudly about private matters as if no one could hear.

I’ll tell you: Latin really teaches you the value in long sentences, in the run-on of thought, where the meaning of the run completes at the end so the entirety takes on that shading.

What a great man, kind and generous, loving and fair to all who crossed his path, whether in business or in his personal life, a man of the highest integrity, a man about whom you could say all who knew him loved him, a man you could describe in such exceedingly glowing terms that you could not paint a clearer picture, and the more you understand this truth, the sharper and more defined the image in your mind, then the better you can see he is the exact opposite.

I ran across a spate of stories in which the betrayal concept is built in and thus the story itself is not about the betrayer at all but about the circumstances of betrayal as seen from the betrayed’s perspective. All that I have lost I lost because of thee. All that I have gained I have gained despite thee. That’s 1Space arguing: absolutes in 0Space are typically people imposing their Boundary derivations, those which I&E to and from their own conceptions of themselves and their relation to the Boundary, whether they call that God or a belief system or culture or blood.

I’ve not been a fan of the word parasocial because it’s social without direct interaction and that has existed for long enough that we have myths and other forms of tales which reach into the unknowable fog of the past. Ancient images. Ancient coins. Ancient stories. The modern form operates the same through different channels. I dislike the word because it’s not good notation. It isn’t good to define social media as that which connects over space and time but not so much in person and then to say parasocial is social media relative to face to face.

So the Separation Storyline literally entangled me over a line. That entanglement was to family, to the group in which I was indistinguishable until I was distinguished, separated, externally in what we can see is a Triangular. That Triangular consisted in part of my identity pairing as the 3rd End over the line, with the fD and HG relationship mapping so family becomes whatever pairs, which becomes you because you were always the other side of the line looking back at me with me looking back at you, being behind me and me behind you.

Oh, I remember: I wanted to mention that I may have discovered a fix for the hideous knee problem. I call it that because it’s trouble for lots and lots of older people, and heavier younger people. The issue is that when you stand, your knee won’t respond and putting weight on it hurts and you can easily lose your balance and you need to hold on or be very careful and often it doesn’t get better even if you wait for minutes because you need to take a few steps before it resolves and you can more freely.

The treatment is to stand up from that side, bending at the waist toward that knee, which prevents part of the locking, while squeezing your butt and hamstrings into that leg so it goes first not second. The two part movement has a third which you can feel: that as you do this better, you learn to shift your body orientation so the movement flows more naturally. I call that a third but maybe that comes earlier and the squeezing comes third. It has been working for a day now, and the movement is becoming smoother and more reliable. I will monitor.

This is an example of group pathways: one pathway goes to knee second and one to knee first. The knee second has appeal: it’s the natural way of favoring a damaged part, by using it second and not relying on it. The other pathway says that favoring is causing the problem because it enables you to get into a position which hurts rather than use and build pathways which don’t. For whatever reason. I love the K’ing.

I need to take a break. Oh, just had a thought: we can now relate the idea that a mirror reflects everything and that the pathways compute so we see angle of incidence equals angle of reflection to the higher dimensional generation of that in and out of lower dimensions to do exactly that. That’s interesting in part because I remember that work occurring in the playroom while playing with a hand mirror and thinking through how that collects all the processes - including the making of the mirror, etc. - and that became the process we analyzed.

I’m sorry: I was distracted by making up an opera for the cat. He is interacting with me by circling. This might escalate into head scratches or degenerate into him wandering to the litter box. Or me walking away because he’s half-assing it, meaning he’s acting out something I can’t see, which could be a hunting or outdoors related behavior. He isn’t focused on me but on using me to enact a behavior in his head. That’s fine but I have a life too.

How do you get past wrong cuing? As in, you don’t like a behavior but you do it because that behavior stirs a response in you which you wouldn’t want directed at yourself, because the source carries import, like hurtful or judgmental or whatever, including cultural and religious, but which you don’t associate to the same desire in another? That is, if x makes you feel bad, then don’t do x thinking it will help another because odds are x makes the other person feel bad too and it coming from you may not be read as you intend, same as when it comes from another. The point being we internalize and act out, exactly as the Work describes.

I need to take a break now.

[scribeofred]

Thanks to @onereyofstarlight for the tag!

 1. What fandoms have you written for?

This is embarrassing but I actually had to look at both FFnet and AO3 because I couldn’t remember all of them. TRON: Legacy, Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, Sherlock, Final Fantasy VII and XV and Kingsglaive, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Merlin, Skyrim, and, of course, Thunderbirds. I have a couple other fandoms that crop up in various wips, including a Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover that I really should finish.

2. How many works do you have on AO3 &/or FFNet?

FFnet has 45, and AO3 has 41. There’s also a couple stories lurking on tumblr, notably a final chapter for Reflection.

3. What are your top 3 fics by kudos on A03 &/or Favs on FFNet?

AO3 dominates in this area, if I can use a word like “dominates” for stories that have less than 125 kudos each haha. Oh well, the numbers don’t matter!

1.     118 kudos on tell the shades apart (my world is black and white)

2.     94 kudos on Reflection

3.     91 kudos on The 43rd Hour

4. Which 3 fics have the least kudos & Favs?

Again on AO3:

1 kudos on I Am You (And You Are Me)

5 kudos on The Dragonborn Chronicles

6 kudos on cynosure

5. Which Fic has the most comments and which has the least?

Reflection has the most at 29 threads, and I Am You (And You Are Me) has the least at zero.

6. Which complete fic do you wish had gotten more attention?

Lodestar, definitely. Sure, it’s for something of a rarepair, but they aren’t that rare, and I just really really like the way the story came together. On the other hand, of course my unfinished Merlin fic has gotten probably the most attention, because that’s just the way it goes, eh?

7. Have you written any crossovers?

None that I’ve published! I have various crossovers lurking in mostly unfinished states, including the aforementioned Tom Swift/Thunderbirds crossover, and an Assassin’s Creed/Thundeerbirds crossover that is very good and I should also finish. There’s an Expanse/Thunderbirds fic lurking in my brain that I may or may not ever commit to paper, who knows. I’ve also very vaguely toyed with a Batman/Thunderbirds crossover, in the sense that “nebulous” is too strong a word for the kind of toying I’ve been doing.

8. What is the craziest fic you’ve written?

I don’t really write crazy or crack or humor in general, so probably the closest thing to “crazy” is On the Lam, which was the result of wanting to throw Scott and Penelope toward an Egyptian stud farm. It ended up being the host for a bad joke about that, courtesy of one @thebaconsandwichofregret, who consistently gives some of the best dialogue advice I’ve ever encountered.

Actually, the true answer is probably a chapter in Glimpses into a Supernova, maybe the one about blood? It seems bonkers when I think back on it now, but I admittedly haven’t read it in many years. Possibly I am misremembering. Glimpses has some weird ones, though.

9. What’s the fic you’ve written with the saddest ending?

It’s a tossup between The Painting and a place where the water touches the sky. The former deals with a prior off-screen death; the latter is (maybe??) an on-screen death. People seemed upset by it, at any rate. I said it was ambiguous!

10. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

“Happy” is probably a matter of perspective? Depends on the overall reading experience and the ending within that context. Either septet or Three Towels and a Tracy, they’re both pretty fluffy overall.

11. What is your smuttiest fic?

protoinstincts, which I completely forgot I wrote and then rediscovered like a year later and realized “hey, this is actually pretty good” and you know what, despite it not being overly spicy, it is pretty good.

12. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not hate, per se, but someone left a review on Less Than Nothing saying they “didn’t like” that I “wrote the story as a series of drabbles.” Cool, I didn’t write the story for you, random guest reader, and the back button exists, friend 😂 It didn’t bother me on a personal level because I wrote the fic for an audience of one (incidentally, not myself and rather the recipient of a secret santa event), but I was mad because the reviewer had no way of knowing where I was at as a writer, and I know from longtime observation how that kind of comment can crush less experienced or confident writers.

Don’t leave flames, kids, you don’t understand the power your words have. Don’t like, don’t read.

13. What is the nicest comment you’ve received?

The nicest? Goodness. Hmm. I’d have to go hunting to find the nicest, but in recent memory, @ayzrules sent me a couple passages from Spanish texts she’s been studying that reminded her of my writing, and I was honestly so touched by the fact that she even thought to make such comparisons, much less mention them to me. Taking the time to familiarize yourself with someone’s style until you can make comparisons between it and someone else’s work is so much more meaningful to me personally than a basic “Nice story!” or “Loved this!” type of comment ever could be. <3 Ayz <3

14. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never gone looking on any sort of copycat site or whatever either.

15. How many fics do you have marked as incomplete?

Two. First is The Dragonborn Chronicles, which is a retelling of Skyrim from Lydia’s perspective via her journal, to complement the in-game journal. It’s a slog of a style to write, though, even for someone who loves writing first person and doesn’t really want to write a lot of dialogue, and the outline is huge, and the story will be many times more huge, and just. Some day. Some day.

Second is tell the shades apart (my world is black and white), which has always been unfinished because the outline itself is over seven thousand words and the fully written story would undoubtedly land between 100,000 and 200,000 words, and there’s no way I’m writing that. I’ve always meant to upload the outline, but I got kind of self-conscious about the way I formatted it, and ugh I just haven’t bothered. One day, one day, right?

Moral of the story is I’m intensely a short story writer, and I’ve really found myself settling into that role over the last couple years. Better a clipped, punchy short story than a bloated slog of an epic.

16. Which of the WIPS will most likely be finished first?

Literally no one knows that. I wrote 95% of the observable entropy of a closed system over five years ago, and then I proceeded to pull it out roughly once a year and write and rewrite various endings until last month, which was when I finally figured out how I wanted to end the story. septet, too, languished for about five years before I finally remembered it existed and managed to wrangle an ending. Endings are hard, man. So are those third plot points. Terrible creatures, those, bog me down every time.

17. Which WIP are you looking forward to finishing?

Uh... mm. See. If I were looking forward to finishing any of them, I’d be actively working on them. At this moment, writing fic isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities, but I am also coming off a four-day idle game bender, so I still feel like I haven’t quite reengaged with myself as a living person. Give me another few days and I might have an answer.

(I am always most looking forward to finishing this ridiculous Ignis-drives-the-Audi-R8 fic that’s been languishing in my wips for literal years. As mentioned above, third plot points. Killer, man.)

(oh and also the working-titled the art of murder. Scott and Penny attend a private art auction. Things don’t go to plan. It, too, is stuck at the third plot point. I know, I know I have a problem, shush.)

18. Is there a WIP that you’re considering abandoning?

Any wip has the potential to be revived—this year and the old wips I’ve unearthed, dusted off, finished, and posted have been proof of that. I don’t intentionally permanently abandon anything for that reason, some stories just probably will remain dusty old wips forever because I didn’t actually need or want to write the full story for one reason or another.

19. Which complete fic would you consider rewriting?

Now that’s an interesting question. Hmm! Honestly? None of them. Once I finish a story, I’m not inclined toward rereading it again any time soon, to the point of years in some cases, and I feel like I’ve moved on from the stories I wrote one, two, five, eight years ago in the actual writing sense. They’re finished stories, and on top of that are relics of their time, which doesn’t mean the stories don’t have any ongoing significance on a reading level—I just don’t have any interest in rewriting those particular stories. I’ve gotten them out of my head, to the point of not remembering at least a third of them on demand anymore, and I don’t have any desire to “retell” those exact stories. I do tend to tighten the wording and fix perceived errors/weaknesses whenever I do end up rereading an old story, and I usually silently update the AO3 version if I make any significant changes because AO3 makes it a breeze to update a posted fic. I might do FFnet too if I’m feeling up to it or have the time.

20. Which complete fic is your favourite?

Once upon a time I would’ve said Holding On, but I honestly find it kind of unbearably melodramatic now. the observable entropy of a closed system is equally melodramatic, as it was written in the same era, but at least it has the excuse of being told in second person and via a style that is a half step away from being poetry. Possibly I will reread it in a few years and find it equally obnoxious and overly dramatic, but it received some shockingly positive comments, which I wasn’t expecting at ALL, and I’ve been honestly blown away by the amount of praise it’s received. <3 to everyone who’s said anything about it!

21. What’s your total published word count?

141,000 on AO3, 160,000 on FFnet, but technically the light of my life SS wrote fifty thousand words of each. It’s too late for math.

 I tag @velkynkarma, @lurkinglurkerwholurks, @writtenbyrain, @thebaconsandwichofregret, and anyone else who wants to play!

[cowtale-utau]

Oh I would absolutely love to learn more about human magic!! And for a soulmate, would an S/O’s magic match their skelly soulmate? Or would it be unique to them?

So I can probably make several decently large posts on magic, both human and monster, but for now I'm going to try to do a concise (ish) post on where I'm pulling my HC's for magic from, how it works, and what it can do. I'll also probably include a bit on some known existent mages (cough Frisk/Chara cough), and you asked for some info on soulmates so I'll see what I can do with human souls, soulmates, and monster/human soulmates. (in my drafts I called this the “short version”, it will not be short)

So I'm largely basing human magic off the Mage system from the table-top pen-and-paper rpg Mage, part of the World of Darkness franchise. The Wiki for it has lots of good info and interesting lore if you wanna read into it.

It works in 'spheres' or nine branches/types of magic/facets of reality. Now I'm bending a lot of the lore so don't assume this is a perfect match for the Mage RPG. I used it as a template to work from, and have incorporated some of the lore, but I've also dismissed and altered other large chunks of Mage RPG canon. (basically if you play Mage or read the wiki, don't @ me, I know it's “wrong” ok, I wanted it that way ;p)

Correspondence Essentially the “space” half of time/space. Covers things like teleportation, levitation, flying, and remote viewing. Combines with other spheres to create distance/ranged/area effects. Also allows for the creation of sub-space. It is limited however, in that it only covers space. To move a body, one must combine it with Life. For an object, Matter. Correspondence is a sphere that is fairly easy to learn the basics, and extremely difficult to master.

Entropy Chaos, Order, Luck, Destiny, Creation, Destruction. The natural order of things. The ability to sense and manipulate probability and patterns. Allows one to tap into the natural entropic cycle. The more complex an “object” the easier it is to break. Much like Correspondence, one must be able to use the other applicable sphere(s) to achieve an effect. A tricky sphere to use and control. It tends to be a bit resistant to manipulation by most Mages.

Forces The sphere that allows manipulation of “energy”. Light, heat, vibration, radiation, gravity. While this can be done instinctively, that tends to be sloppy and dangerous. The more one understands about the energy/force they're trying to manipulate the better off they'll be. However one should be mindful that they do not allow the knowledge gained to restrict them. Magic cares not for what human science says is or isn't true. How easy the sphere is to work with depends largely on how much effort one puts into learning the background knowledge. Or how how willing they are to risk brute forcing it.

Life Anything living, or with life energy. Can be used to heal, or unheal. Modify biological entities. Create disease or grow plants. Restore youth. Life as a sphere has many wonderful, helpful applications, and just as many horrifying ones. One can heal and cure and fix, but also cause untold damage. To fully grasp and master life, one must understand how life connects to itself, and the cycles in which it exists. The chain between predator and prey. How simple it is to learn is largely dependent on how much understanding you already have of the subject you're trying to alter.

Matter Non living/inorganic things. Also covers all the elements on the periodic table. Works very well when combined with other spheres. Entropy to break an object, Forces to animate inanimate things, Correspondence to move objects, Time to alter them temporally. Allows the Mage to alter but also to see and understand the make up of an object. Arguably one of the easiest to learn and use, given that it inherently allows you to pick up understanding of what you're working with on the go.

Mind Covers consciousness and how a person perceives reality. Knowledge, imagination, emotion. Can be used to alter memory, thinking, emotions, perception, and concentration among other things. Mind is a bit different from other spheres in that one does not need an understanding of how the “mind” works to utilize it well. Talent in this sphere comes down to mostly practice and natural inclination.

Prime Primal Energy, the raw magical force of the world. Often considered an almost Holy Power. A Prime Mage can detect/sense magic, enchant objects or living things, cut off another Mage's access to magic and it is often used to bolster or power other magics. Prime is the source from which all other magic springs. Having skill in Prime is tricky as there's no deeper understanding to help you, beyond the understanding that you can't understand. That it is a power beyond you, and can strike back at any moment.

Spirit Something connected to but separate from the concept of souls. The culmination of hope, emotion, and thought. A skilled Spirit Mage can touch or even pass through the wall between the tangible world, the void, and what lies beyond. Allows one to reach out, speak to, and interact with spirits lost to the physical world. A Mage less morally inclined could even, with enough power, subjugate those beings. Using and mastering the Spirit sphere requires a strong understanding and sense of self, while also being able to release physical/material ties and limits.

Time Time is sort of self explanatory. Though time as a concept is not a straight forward as many assume. Very much subjective to the observer. A Time Mage is more aware than most that while time naturally moves forward (mostly), it contracts and dilates, whirls and twists. It jumps, and branches, and curves back on itself. A Time Mage can know the exact time at any time, and sense distortions in the time line. They can slow time, rewind or loop, create anchor (save) points, and with enough skill they can outright time travel or exist outside the timeline entirely. To master Time is to understand it as an esoteric and inexact science.

Humans pull their magic externally. This is both more freeing and more restricting than monsters. They can do just about anything they can imagine, assuming they can figure out how, have the respective understanding and magical inclinations, and the world allows it. Sometimes whatever source, force, whatever, the magic comes from, disagrees with a Mage. And the backlash can be catastrophic. And while a Mage cannot “drain” themselves to the point of death, they can over channel, and over load. The end result is the same.

Related Side Note ; Monster magic is much more free form and almost entirely “intent” based. This means technically any monster can learn any magic type. However some souls are better suited for certain types than others. Some just can't muster up the intent needed. They also tend to not be able to do things quite on the scale that Mages can. Monster magic is pulled from themselves. It's a part of their soul, and fueled by their soul. They have a much more limited pool. Mind you, some monsters still have immense pools of magic they can pull from, and high regen rates, but still ultimately are more limited than humans. (Side note, if a monster uses up their “pool” the can continue using magic, but its a good way to die very quickly as it drains on their souls directly)

As for existing Mages, the obvious would be Frisk/Chara. Correspondence and Time. Possibly Prime. I'm actually unsure on Spirit, but leaning towards no. If you want more on that lemme know. I could discuss it a fair amount I think.

The other part of your question ; Soulmates.

There are essentially three types of bonds that fall under what most would consider “soulmates”. Kindred Spirits, Soul Mates, and Twin Flames. Any of these bonds can be platonic, romantic, or anything in between. Friends, lovers, rivals.

Kindred Spirits – Compatible. Someone with who you find forming an easy, comfortable bond. Often very similar to ourselves in a comforting way. Someone to whom we easily relate and connect to.

Soulmates – Complementary. A near perfect resonation. The traditional idea behind most soulmate lore. One can meet multiple soulmates in their lives, though they're not quite as common as Kindred Spirits.

Twin Flames – Twin Flames are the other half of an incomplete soul. A perfect mirror. Both the same and opposite in everywhere. Twin Flames rarely exist in the same world at the same time. When they do they are often both drawn to and repelled by one another. It is a bond existing beyond defining, beyond platonic/romantic labels. You're greatest ally, worst enemy, deepest love, your Twin Flame, is undeniable bound to you no matter what.

While Kindred Spirits and Soulmates won't necessarily have “matching” magic, their magic is often compatible/complementary to some degree in it's natural leanings.

If you want more info on anything specific, let me know. 💜

[sequencefairy]

Glitter in the Dark

Allurance. Angst + smut, post-s8, not a fix-it, but sort of hopeful anyway. Written for the prompt “things you said to me when you thought I was asleep” from @starrylia. I am sure this is not what you were expecting, but this is what happened. 3.6K. 

After everything, Lance goes out to spread Allura's message to the stars, all the while carrying the loss of her like a yoke around his neck. Her end has left him entirely unmoored, and the path back to land is hard to see through the grief.

[ AO3 ]

This far out, Lance has trouble with the unending darkness of the void of space in front of him. The distances between star systems stretch into unimaginable numbers, and the vacuum seems like a living thing hell-bent on curling its fingers around the loose edges of his dreams. He wakes up reaching across his bunk for her: his arm flung out into the emptiness beside him, palm up and fingers spread. It always takes him a moment to remember, and the memory always slots in like the hook of a barbed arrow under his ribs.

This cycle is no different. His alarm buzzes softly, lifting him out of a dream coloured with the glow of Allura’s magic, and Lance pulls his arm back in close to his body before he rolls over. He stares, sightless, at the wall across from him for a long moment, willing the grief back into the box he keeps it buried in. It’s hard work. Lance grits his teeth against the memories that slip out of his metaphorical hands to land at his feet; her face, lit with pleasure and surprise, the curve of her hips under his hands, the echo of her voice.

Her voice.

Lance curls around himself, pressing his hands to the centre of his chest. His jaw tightens against the sob that threatens to escape him as a wave of grief swamps him. Has he forgotten the exact cadence of her voice? How could he have forgotten? How can he say he truly loves (loved) her if he can’t remember her perfectly?

What else has he forgotten?

Later, Coran tells him that Lance keeps Allura’s memory alive just by going on and Lance wants to shake him. He wants to yell about how none of this matters because she’s still gone, she still walked into a cloud of light and turned to stardust and, a year later, took the lions with her too. He wants to scream that he has nothing left of her but the marks that ride high on his cheekbones. The marks that haven’t glowed again since the night the lions left, the marks that Lance wishes he could scrape off his skin like a scab, to see if spilling his own blood would bring her back.

(He says nothing and reaches up instead, to drop his hand on Coran’s shoulder, shuffling closer so they’re pressed hip to hip, united in their shared grief, staring out across the starfield as they come into sight of the nebula that signals the halfway point of their journey.)

Coran leaves him alone in the observation lounge, and Lance watches the far away stars slip by as the ship makes the long, slow acceleration into hyperspace. He turns away just before they slide fully into the slipstream, following belatedly in Coran’s wake.

His quarters are cold and dark and empty. Lance climbs into bed, rolls onto his side, and closes his eyes. Sleep never comes easy, but Lance sinks into a doze by silently counting primes until he forgets what comes after the fortieth.

Lance.

Lance?

Lance!

Lance’s eyes fly open and he shoots up to sitting. “A-Allura?” Warmth tingles across his cheekbones, and Lance brings his hands up to his face. The marks are warm, and their soft light illuminates the lines of his palms. The light dies while he’s watching, and with it goes the soft presence at the edges of his perception.

Lance splays back onto his sheets and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. His heart thuds against his ribs.  A dream. It had to be. He sucks in a deep breath, and lets his hands fall to the pillow beside his head. Above him, the featureless ceiling has no answers to the questions Lance refuses to voice. Sleep eludes him for the rest of the night, no matter how hard he tries to recapture the soft haze of his earlier doze.

The first day of the summit they have travelled to attend goes off without a hitch. Lance gives a stirring speech at the site of a battle he didn’t fight in, the crowd cheers when Coran unveils the statue, and no one notices the tears that burn in the back of Lance’s throat as he stares up into that face that is at once achingly familiar and nauseatingly dissimilar to how she looked in life.

He’s made to be the guest of honour at a lavish banquet. While he swirls the local wine in his glass, Lance remembers a time when he would have loved this; when he would have soaked up the admiration and spent the night gossiping into whoever’s ear he could turn about who he might take to bed, who he might stumble home with, who might be on the receiving end of his particular charms. The only bed he was ever headed for was Allura’s, and everyone who looked at them together for longer than twelve ticks knew it.

He begs off of the celebration rather earlier than he ever used to, and wanders back to their assigned rooms in this sprawling fortress-castle. The floor beneath his feet wavers, and Lance stumbles into the wall, barely getting his hands out in time to keep himself from kissing hard stone. How much of that wine had he drunk at dinner? Not that much, surely. Lance shakes his head and keeps going, watching his footing carefully.

Time skips forward like disjointed movie scenes, and the next thing Lance knows, he’s lying on his back, staring up at another featureless ceiling. The bed beneath him is firm, the blankets soft. The party is a distant hum of cheerful noise and Lance lets himself sink into the warmth of this borrowed bed.

Lance slides into sleep easier than he has in months.

Awareness arrives on the heels of the brush of hair over against his chest. Lance opens his eyes. The breath in his body leaves him in a staggered gasp. “Allura? How–?”

Allura lifts a finger to his lips, and Lance shudders under the contact, but wills himself silent. Her mouth curves into a smile, slow blooming and gorgeous. Lance aches for her already, his heart crying out to her from between his ribs, everything in him turning towards her as if he was a flower, petals seeking the sunlight. She shifts, slinging a bare leg over his body, knees pressed tight to his unclothed sides. Her hair falls around her shoulders in thick waves and springy curls, a waterfall of white that hides the dusk of her skin from his view.

She leans down, and Lance’s hands finally get the messages his brain has been trying to send them. He manages to reach up to touch her as she sinks towards him. Her hair falls like a curtain around them, and Lance skates his hands up Allura’s spine. She pauses a hair's breadth away from a kiss, and Lance barely stops the groan in his throat behind his teeth.

She blinks, her eyes glinting like a cat’s in the dark, the curious blue-green of them still exactly the same as they were. “Lance,” she husks, voice gone to smoke in the tiny space between them.

Lance twines the fingers of one hand in her hair while the other slides around to hold the side of her face, thumb smoothing along the mark on her cheek. Allura leans into his touch, eyes falling shut as she does. Her lashes are a fan of snow against her skin. “How are you here?” Lance wonders, softly reverent. Allura doesn’t answer, just closes the distance between them.

Lance surrenders to the pressure of her mouth, fists his hand in her hair and lets Allura lead. The kiss deepens when Allura takes his bottom lip into her mouth, worrying at it with dainty fangs, and Lance groans. Allura’s hands plant firmy beside Lance’s head, and the weight of her body sinks into his. Lance arches against her, the places where his body ached to feel her against him, one last time, soothed by the press of her skin.

Allura’s mouth is a hot slide against his, and Lance’s hands in her hair feel like the only things to keep him from flying apart into scattered stardust. Her knees press into his hips, and the searing heat of her naked centre brands him as she rolls her hips and slides along him, wet and glorious. He’s hard to straining already, hips jumping of their own volition as she drags herself along his length.

“Allura,” Lance croaks, when she pulls away from his lips to mouth along the edge of his jaw and then down the side of his neck, fangs catching gently in his skin. “‘Lura, please.”

Allura makes a soft sound before lifting herself off him enough that he can see her. Her breasts brush his chest. Lance lets one hand drop to find the soft swell of skin. He marvels at the way her skin goes to gooseflesh under the trail of his seeking fingertips. Her breath goes out of her in a ragged gasp as she shifts, lifting herself a little further to allow him access.

Lance lets go of her hair and uses both hands. He lets the edge of his nail drag across one of her nipples and watches with smug satisfaction as the skin around it tightens and the nipple rises, hard, against the sweep of his palm. Allura watches him, all the while, otherworldly eyes trained on the way his mouth falls open in soft awe as she arches her spine and presses the weight of her chest into his hands.

Lance squeezes gently, and Allura bites her lip. She rolls her hips in a dirty grind against him, and Lance shudders, tilting his own hips up to make Allura shudder in turn. She rises off him, and Lance aches for the heat of her against him again. Now that he’s had it, even in this place of misty shadows, he knows he’s ruined for anyone else. She is entropy made flame, and everything in him tends towards her.

“Will you let me have this, too?” Allura asks, voice like the toll of a low bell rolling across sacred plains and through vaunted hallways. Her hand presses flat against his stomach, and Lance can feel the prick of her nails, each like a singular point of flame.

“Everything,” Lance says, breathless, desperate, unashamed of the way his desire for her seeps through every syllable. “Everything. Always.”

Allura’s smile is a slow burn across her face. The curve of her mouth heats Lance’s blood all the way to the ends of his toes. He lets his hands slide off her hips and down to the sheets beside him as she rises further. Her hand wraps around him and Lance hisses, unable to stave off the way her touch makes him shiver.

Allura sinks down onto him in a long, slow slide, and Lance can’t keep his eyes open. He tries, because he wants to watch the way her mouth drops open into a silent ‘o’, wants to watch the fine tremor under hekin as she eases her way down, determined to make this first touch last as long as she can. She bottoms out and Lance gasps, hands scrabbling at the sheets beneath him. Fully sheathed within her, he feels like he’s being encased within the heart of a star.  

The moment hangs between them, Lance’s harsh breathing loud in the sudden silence. Delicious tension coils in the pit of Lance’s belly. Allura’s eyes flutter shut, and she rolls her hips experimentally.

“Fuck,” Lance says, emphatically. Allura looks down at him, eyes hooded and their colour tipped from soft seas to the depths of the winter ocean. The corner of her mouth lifts, and she moves again. “Just like that, Princess,” Lance manages, voice strained by the slow roll of Allura’s hips against him and the press of her palm against the flat of his chest.

“You feel – ah – so good,” Allura says, voice cresting with the sinuous movement of her body, as Lance meets her the best that he can. Allura’s head drops back, exposing the long line of her throat, as the rhythm of her hips accelerates. A thick lock of her hair spills like moonlight between her breasts.

“God,” Lance murmurs, voice cracking, “you’re gorgeous.” He shifts beneath her, and the change in angle makes her hiss. “Yeah,” he says, lifting his hands to grip her hips. Allura brings her hands to her own hair, lifting it up and back, arching her spine as she does. Lance cants his hips to meet her; they moan in tandem.

Allura rides him, confident and graceful and fierce and glorious. Lance holds on, determined not to let the ever-tightening coil at the base of his spine spring open until she falls apart above him. Every time Allura moves, each downstroke ends in a sighing moan that then hitches every time she begins to rise again. It’s a beat beneath Lance’s babble of praise and desperation; her name, over and over and over.

“‘Lura,” he moans, when she rises nearly entirely off him, and holds, both of them straining. She looks down at him, eyes blazing and then envelops him again in a swift descent that punches the air out of his lungs and makes his spine arch off the bed. A shocked sound breaks Allura’s rhythm, and she falls forward, catching herself on both hands planted next to Lance’s head.

Like this, Lance has more reach and slides his hands around to grip her ass, while he cants his hips and changes the rhythm, driving up into her as she rolls back on him. She drops forward again, down to her elbows, and her voice is hot in Lance’s ear. She goads him on, and Lance obliges, until they are both breathing hard and the sound of slick skin meeting skin is loud between them.

The end is coming, Lance knows, in the way his toes curl, the way his thighs shake, the way the molten heat at the base of his spine has started to ignite. “Allura, I’m–” She cuts him off with a bruising kiss. Her hair spills around them in a curtain of softly glowing white.

She shivers, whole body, and sighs into the kiss, trembling apart in his arms. She breathes his name into his mouth. The clench of her insides around him makes Lance toss his head back and he comes on a broken cry, Allura’s mouth moving to press to his neck. Lance holds her down, hands on her hips, her body still moving as she rides him through it.  

Above them, Lance realises, once Allura slides off and curls up next to him, the stars spill across an inky sky. He looks around, lifting himself onto one elbow. The bed is raised, strewn with pillows and sheets he hadn’t noticed, but there’s nothing else in this place but mist and the sky. The mist shifts and moves in visible currents, but without any sensation of wind. Allura smooths her hand along the length of his torso, fingers sliding past the centre of his chest and then down, circling his belly button before sweeping back up, so she can turn his face with the pressure of her fingers along his jaw.

“Where are we?” Lance asks. Allura shakes her head, slow and gentle. She looks down, not meeting his gaze. “Are you even real?” Lance shifts so he can prop himself up on his other arm, and reaches out to sweep Allura’s hair back behind her ear. She looks up at him, lips parted, eyes limpid and soft.

“I’m as real as you need me to be,” she says. “You feel me.” She presses herself along the length of his body and then leans up to kiss him. Her mouth moves gently against his. She pulls away after a long moment, biting his lower lip gently as she does. “What’s more real than this?”

“I love you,” Lance says, and watches as Allura’s cheeks flush. “I love you so much. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you. Not a moment passes that I don’t wish you were here with me.” He pauses, bringing their faces close enough together that he can press his forehead against hers. He swallows against the lump in his throat, against the tears rising in his eyes. “I wish you were here for real. I wish this was real, and not a dream, not a vision sent from who knows where.” Lance meets her gaze steadily, “I don’t know if I can survive losing you again.”

“Lance,” Allura chides, palm sliding up to cup his cheek, fingertips brushing the mark beneath his eye. Her skin is warm against his.

Lance turns his head so he can press a kiss to the edge of her palm. “I’ve missed you,” he says, into her skin, “so much.” His voice gives away the pain of knowing that he will wake up and she will still be gone.

“I know,” Allura says. She blinks, and Lance slides his hand up to hold Allura’s against his face. “I know,” she repeats, leaning in and kissing the corner of his mouth. “I know.” Lance aches in the soft space under his ribs. She’s going to go away again, going to disappear, and he will wake up, alone, again.

“I don’t want you to go,” Lance says, voice rough.

“I never left,” Allura says. Her gaze is steady. Lance looks away first, unable to bear the softness in her eyes. She takes her hand off his cheek, and presses it to the middle of his chest, palm down. The current of Allura’s magic buzzes against his skin. Warmth blooms under his ribs, soothing the ache that has been yawning there since she disappeared into light to save every reality.

Lance watches her. He memorizes the lines of her face; the set of her jaw, the proud line of her nose, the way her marks glow faintly pink, the sweep of lashes against her cheeks.

Pushing himself up on his elbow, Lance reaches for her. His hand lands on her shoulder. Her skin is warm; the bones beneath feel like the wings of the small songbirds he used to catch when he was a child. Strength takes many forms, he knows, and the fragile femininity in Allura’s stature belies the iron will that covers every inch of her spine. He can feel the race of her rabbit-quick heartbeat.

She’s real here, flesh and blood and bone and heat.

“Stay,” he says, “please.”

“I’m always here,” she says, and leans in. Lance meets her halfway. He feels the rush of her magic in the flood of heat in his blood.

“I love you,” he says, pulling back just far enough to form the words against Allura’s lips. Her smile curving against his mouth is answer enough.

Lance opens his eyes to the grey dawn light in his borrowed bedroom. His cheeks tingle with the leftovers of Allura’s magic. The marks are glowing, he knows. He lays on his back, one hand pressed to the centre of his own chest, feeling the steady beat of his own heart. There, in the silence between the beats, that infinitesimal and eternal moment, is where Allura lives now.

The weight of his grief settles more easily on his shoulders as Lance gets out of bed. It no longer threatens to pull him off balance and send him sprawling onto the floor, crushed and broken beneath it. For a moment, he misses it. The all-consuming nature of it was almost something of a comfort in the wake of his loss.

Learning to walk without it is like learning to walk without the hands of your parents holding you up, or your first time back in full Earth gravity after years of fractions of it in the spaces between the stars. Lance wobbles at first, unsteady, but as he moves through the rest of the summit, shadowing Coran through the negotiations, his steps grow more and more certain.

The week of talks and state dinners and photo ops comes to a close with another party. This time, when Lance falls into bed, as one of this planet’s three suns is rising in the south, it’s with a hand pressed to his chest, to feel the warmth of Allura’s love blooming in the spaces between his heartbeats.

Lance and Coran leave the next day, summit successful and another planet joining the fold of the galactic coalition.

Breaking the atmosphere in their little shuttlecraft, Lance hauls on the yoke, watching the altitude meter climb. Behind him and to his right, Coran is updating the Altean cruiser in high orbit and requesting docking access.

“I had forgotten,” Lance says, turning to look at Coran.

“What did you forget?” Coran asks, “Do we need to go back to the surface?”

“Oh. No,” Lance says as they reach the edge of the atmosphere and space opens, dark and cold, in front of his viewscreen. The first view of true space with the planet falling away behind them is something he will never get over. He pulls on the control arm, sending them into a stomach-churning roll, planet and stars blurring in his line of sight.

“Lance,” Coran says in bemused warning, when Lance straightens them out again, and puts them back on a sedate path to the Altean cruiser.

Lance turns his eyes back to the nav screen, watching the shuttle’s computer plot a docking vector and confirming it with the press of his thumb against the holoscreen. He can see Coran doesn’t understand, but Lance isn’t sure he does either, just that now, staring out at the star-studded emptiness in front of them, the Altean cruiser looming just at the top of his viewscreen, space no longer feels like a void.

[growingupautie]

Anti-NT or Misanthropy part 3.

Q: Dear Nathan. Your last response has given me a bit of perspective on my own personal story and made me realize the extent to which, particularly in the crucial years of High School, I have been extremely fortunate.

I moved to Italy from the US when I was 12. To say I stuck out like a sore thumb would be an understatement. I was one of the few foreigners living in the town, I was (whether or not everyone had heard of the diagnosis) evidently non-neurotypical and dressed in a way that was borderline acceptable in the US but totally out of place in fashion conscious Italy. Most of the younger population of the town knew who I was.

I was most definitely a minority of one.

Slowly but surely, throughout the course of seven years, I moved towards a deeper and deeper form of acceptance, until I finally felt free. I recognize that I had some pretty rare catalysts to help me achieve that.

My parents made sure to get to know teachers and make sure the ones they trusted knew of my diagnosis. I’m sure my parents played an eloquent case on my behalf. Teachers tend to prefer intellectually inclined, interested students who respond well to clearly structured activities and have no trouble with rote learning over unmotivated students. I was generally treated very well by the teaching body. Their support was important in keeping me with a sense of self-worth and acceptance. For a while, I wanted to be a teacher. I benefited from both my social class, domestic stability and academic ability. Though this shouldn’t negate the amount of work and energy I invested and how hard things often were for me, these are things I was born with.

Also, the way the Italian school system is structured is (unintentionally) very autism-friendly. In fact, it was one of the reasons we moved in the first place. The school system keeps classes together for many years so small groups of students (25 per class) get to know each other almost as a second family. You tend to stay in the same classroom all day and everyone takes the same classes, week in week out. In a way, I was treated as an awkward cousin from a distant part of the family. Also, the high school system is vocational, grouping people with similar interests and academic abilities into separate schools, reducing potential tensions between ‘geeks’ and ‘jocks’. By high school, I was in a class of very studious people, with little or no contact with the more violent students I had encountered in middle school.

Most importantly, without which all the above wouldn’t have been enough, I benefited from the moral integrity, empathy and strength of character of a few classmates that saw beyond my awkward behaviors to the human behind them. I owe much of my happiness to them.

I survived middle school thanks in part to a very popular and empathetic student who didn’t allow jokes on my behalf to get too far out of hand. I was rejected often (sometimes very painfully) but rarely deceived. Though there was widespread violence at the school, there wasn’t any concentrated effort on people’s part to violently suppress me. I was deeply unhappy. But I wasn’t scared.

In High School, one of the defining moments for me was joining a band. I had been playing the bass 2 weeks and decided I wanted to be part of a band. I went to one of the many political gatherings at my school, thinking it was probably the best place to find musicians, and walked up to some random guy and asked him if he would be in my band. He could have said no. He could have laughed in my face. He could have forgotten about it. He could have used my naivety for a prank. Not only did he say yes, he also matched me up with a drummer friend of his who was looking for a bassist at the time. Being part of a band made an enormous difference to my social life in High School. We didn’t last long, but we lasted enough. I picked up social skills and norms like a sponge. By the end of two years, I had kept some and dropped the rest. I like to think it was like learning a new instrument; I had started with scales and progressed to symphonies.

There were many moments in which things could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have been lured into an abusive situation instead of band practice. I could have been beaten to a pulp on the concrete outside the metro station for reasons I could never have understood. I could have been taken advantage of and blamed for a crime I never committed.

I had watchful angels.

Perhaps what the main obstacle for a lot of people trying to befriend someone on the spectrum is the fear that their boundaries won’t be respected if they do. That they’ll be followed around. That their friends will make fun of them.

My classmates, besides being wonderful people, knew that I was going to be part of the classroom family for five years, so we had time to bond in a way we wouldn’t have had I seen them for a class a week. The structures I was in favored long term investment in people over short term ‘make your friends laugh about the weird kid’ mentality.

A final word on the diagnosis question:

It didn’t take long for that doctor to diagnose me. I was a clear case of autism, exhibiting most of the typical behaviours of an Aspie. It probably took him about 30 seconds to get the gist of the case. I re-read the diagnosis which he emailed back to me when I got in touch with him last year. I was described as a clear-cut case of Asperger’s syndrome. In his office in Boston that morning 12 years later, the question lingering in the air was not whether the diagnosis was accurate. I’ve acquired significant social and coping skills, but my basic traits haven’t changed that far. The question was whether it was meaningful. At the end of our appointment, he told me that ours was more a conversation between old friends than between doctor and patient and didn’t charge me. I loved him for that.

What I was rejecting was not so much my identity – being a ‘self-hating’ autistic person as you say – as the clammy feeling of the hospital still lingering on my body. The demeaning ritual of special ed “speech and language therapy” classes, grouped with pupils with severe learning difficulties. Seeing myself as the observed in a science experiment. Perhaps I threw the baby out with the bath water. I think in hindsight I see the value of diagnosis.

The summer before going to University, I had opened up completely about my diagnosis and my history to the guys I keep closest to me. We spent the summer with a running joke. They would insult my special ed. Teacher in the US every time I made a clumsy move like missing a volleyball or spilling something, calling him a useless pile of junk and a failure as an educator. In my heart of hearts I whispered “I win.”

I guess I didn’t really reject autism. It’s just that in my high school years I never was forced to wear a neurotypical mask. I went from being begrudgingly tolerated but isolated at middle school to being so completely accepted by the last year of High School that the distinction between myself – because as far as autism is concerned, I had always conceived of myself as a minority of one – and the others, ceased to be meaningful. I knew them down to their most intimate frailties and up to their utmost strengths. I praised them and they praised me. We were free to be individuals. The label ceased to be meaningful because they saw leagues beyond it. The autism toolbox remained in the shed. I thought I didn’t need it anymore.

As I write to you, I am in my last year of University the week before spring term starts.

Moving to the UK for University, I came up head to head with problems that I hadn’t faced before. The rigid routine of Italian high school faded away and the support of family and friends became more distant as I moved away and my friends began University in Italy. I didn’t come face to face with abuse or misunderstanding or oppression. I came face to face with entropy. All at once, I had to build my own social circle from scratch, dictate my own times, do my own cooking. It was a kind of pain I had never encountered before.

It was the first time I really, really doubted my ability to cope and make good decisions for my own well-being. I was very offended when my mother suggested I request extra time on my University Exams for ‘my autism.’ In retrospect, some autism support, not so much on academics but on life skills would have been useful.

I suppose part of my reason I burnt those documents in my first year of University was that I was rejecting the idea that I needed extra support ‘for disabled students’.

As it stands, I’m much better off than I was then, but the doubts haven’t gone away and building up a stable social life in a universe of fleeting encounters and pleasant but sometimes distant acquaintances still isn’t easy. My cooking has improved vastly but is still a chore.

What I wrote to you at the beginning of ‘wanting to take myself off the centre of the Universe’ needs to be explained a bit better. What I really realized being in the UK was the importance of contributing to something much bigger than myself in order to find happiness and meaning.

I meant, in my engagement with this page, to deepen my understanding of how the autistic community perceives itself. The oppositional imagery NT/autistic was a surprise for me since, considering I am still am the only autistic person I know personally in Italy and I knew my class well, I never thought of myself as ‘neurodiverse’ in opposition to ‘NTs’. Also, I had never heard of or encountered Autism Speaks until last year and it had no impact whatsoever on my years in Italy. It seems to be one of the main factors creating the opposition in the first place.

At the moment of writing to you, I am preparing a speculative application to Specialisterne, an organization that specializes in helping people on the Spectrum into employment by offering training and a link to corporate partners. I’d like to write posts for them, since they do not have much of a media outlet, particularly on google and that would help their outreach. Perhaps ‘autism toolbox’ (great concept from one of the comments) would be a good place to start. Any other advice from you or others is much appreciated

Peace

A: Our lives mirror each other quite a bit minus the traveling. I've had some pretty bad culture shock at times when it came to switching schools. I originally went to a kindergarten close to my home where I was isolated from the rest of the kids. They felt like something was up with me from the getgo and made sure I never got too close. When I was ripped away from there to a new school, it was a small Christian school where I managed to befriend a few people, possibly through the prodding of teachers and the principal.

After a few years though, my friends left the school and I was left with people who didn't care for me, and people who bullied me.

After a few year at that school, I was taken out for a public school for financial reasons, and that barely lasted a week for two. I was bullied by almost every kid I met. One kid grabbed me by my backpack and pushed me in the circle of the hall and into my class because he was "helping me" understand the one direction only rule they had in the hallway. After a week or so of this, and me drawing on my notes in class, a teacher grabbed me by the shirt and drug me into another classroom where there were several other mocked me, and tore up my artwork, telling me it was a waste of time, and I would never amount to anything. I was back in my Christian school by the next week.

Back in the Christian school, I continue being bullied until I joined the basketball team, and through showing some skill and oddly enough becoming somewhat "volatile" (when needed) towards bullying I became more accepted. But as usual, once I found acceptance through hard work and perseverance I was taken from that comfort and put into a completely new place. Middle school at a "Magnet School" where you could specialize in Engineering, Arts, or the Performing Arts. I went into music as I have been a musician for years at that point.

The school was a hodgepodge of races and a "cliques" none of which I was welcomed into. I made myself known as the "goody-two-shoes" on day one and that really wasn't the best move in the world. Over time, I was bullied so mercilessly that the assistant principal gave me permission to stand up for myself and fight back. I learned martial arts and took up skateboarding. Started getting into shape, and literally became even more volatile (when needed) people started to leave me alone.

I switched to the arts program after a while and found some acceptance with the artist's kids who were musicians, and artists like myself. They started a band and added me because I was one of the only ones who could actually play, and I helped teach them some things as well. A few of them actually skateboarded, so we did that together. Though looking back there was so much micro-bullying and mockery I'm not sure how I can put too much of a positive spin on that. Honestly, I was never even invited to eat lunch with them so it was a little like I was just kept around for usefulness.

By high school, they had "disbanded" the band, and put a new band together without specifically me. I created a new group of friends which were basically other outcasts. Earned my respect in this new school with many of the groups and even managed to become king of prom by the end of it despite maintaining my outsider status. Like you though when I went to college (from home) the lack of structure was my Achilles heel. There were so many new rules, almost all of them were illogical. Very few students and teachers who wanted to help me.

I struggled to get anything done but managed to keep a passing grade the majority of the time. I managed to get my degree even after my life fell completely apart and my group of high school friends who had followed me to the same college had, for the most part, turned against me and (longer story there.) The point being, that diagnosed or undiagnosed, we Autistic people go through some very similar issues. A lot of times our parents struggle and often fail to recognize what it would really take for us to succeed and flourish.

You and I both were young Autistics at a time where it was not as understood as it is now. We are not out of the dark ages just yet, but we certainly know more than we did then about who and what we are, what we need, and what we should do about it. Parents are just starting to catch up to it as well hence the need to fight off groups like Autism Speaks, dangerous "cures," and ABA techniques which often involving torturous methods. Fighting against these people as hard as we often do can certainly make it seem like we are against the entire NT population which is why I try to show some positivity in my comics as well.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were a "self-hating" Autistic, but that there were many out there. I sensed your story was similar to the one you eventually gave me. We are all at a different place in understanding at any given point in time and that's alright. I would definitely be in support of an Autism Toolbox thought I myself don't have the time to create or maintain one. (At the moment.) You have probably noticed the Autism community as a whole is quite divided in several ways. The want for a "cure" vs fighting against one. The acceptance of ABA and Autism Speaks vs fighting against them. We all need to do a better job of getting to the truth through facts and coming together for the greater goal of acceptance.

If you are going to write on our behalf, I would focus on the positives and negative, and also on the explaining actions, and needs, all in a way Neurotypical people will understand. A good piece of advice I always give is to scroll the Autism Boards on Facebook and look for common issues with your own life to write about. That way it's relevant to everyone and personal at the same time. And treat everyone as if they are where they are in life understanding that they may not have come in contact with the same information you have, and may not have come to the same conclusions you have. I think you are inquisitive enough, and understanding enough to find common ground and write from a good perspective.

I hope that helps. Commentors, any advice?

-Nathan

[foxoiseau]

On NeTi

NeTi’s love thinking up new ideas and considering all the possibilities in any given situation. They learn about the world through observation and experimentation. According to Dario Nardi, Ph.D., Ne-dominant types are masters of trans-contextual thinking. This means that they can easily think about things across contexts.

From his book, Neuroscience of Personality:

“Regardless of the kind of stimulus that enters the brain -- sights, sounds, smell, sensation, or so forth -- the brain responds by rapidly processing that stimulus in multiple regions, including regions seemingly not applicable to the stimulus. For example, for most people, hearing the words ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ will evoke auditory regions...and perhaps some visual or memory regions...Perhaps we recall a beloved childhood pet. However, the Ne types get busy using all regions to tap relationships across situations, perhaps suddenly imagining a story about two brothers, one of whom is faithful and sociable (like a dog) while the other is independent and quiet (like a cat). They might wonder about dog and cat writing styles too!”

This ability to think outside the box and context of the current topic is key to the NeTi’s creativity. Since Ne is the priority, ideas are usually shared with the world first and then analyzed by Ti afterwards. As a result, some of their ideas can be very abstract and random and may not make sense if they haven’t been run through the Ti filter yet.

NeTi’s are constantly chasing new shiny ideas and studying fresh topics of interest. They derive satisfaction from learning about a huge variety of topics so they can use the information to fuel their ideas. The more diverse their learning is, the more likely it is that they can find a unique solution to a problem by pulling from their library of knowledge. They are commonly known as polymaths, or renaissance men/women because of the variety of topics they learn about. They generally prefer to obtain competence in many areas rather than mastering just one skill or area of expertise.

NeTi’s naturally come up with new ideas, create hypotheses, run experiments, and extract knowledge from their experiments. However, they don't necessarily do them in that order. Often they experiment first, and then draw a hypothesis from their experience. They may even experiment in their relationships to better understand the other person and how they should adapt to them.

Although Ne is excellent at coming up with new ideas, Si is last, which means that they can struggle to implement their ideas in a systematic way. High Si types are often able to easily perform tasks that require learning a detailed system (like grammar, accounting, or legal rules) or ones that are simply repetitive, like brushing one’s teeth, with a high level of consistency. It’s not uncommon for them to have regular routines in their lives by choice. NeTi’s however, might resist performing these kinds of tasks in any sort of consistent manner. Si tasks generally bore and irritate them because they don’t provide them with good ideas or mental stimulation.

Their ideas are more likely to reach the implementation stage if they feel like the idea will benefit others in a meaningful way. They generally do better when they avoid most of the things that require high attention to detail, mindless repetition or action, or rote memorization. Of course there are things that are personally worth the potential frustration or boredom that can come with doing Si tasks, like practicing to become a better musician. There are also certain things that ideally should not be avoided, like showering. In these cases, they may be able to think of ways to at least make the task less dull. It’s likely that with tasks like this, they will not follow a regular pattern. While an Si dominant type might shower every day at 7 am for 20 years, NeTi’s might end up showering twice in a single day, avoid showering for the next two, then shower at 5 pm, and the next day at 2 pm.

Although NeTi’s primarily value competence over mastery, they aren’t incapable of becoming experts. They are great at adapting to their present circumstances and generally feel comfortable not really knowing what their life will look like ten years from the present day. Often they fall into mastery through their various intellectual pursuits and adaptations, rather than mapping out a path from childhood to achieve a specific expert status.

There are times when they have multiple interests they’re trying to feed at once. They generally enjoy having a lot of variety available to them, especially if they have the ability to switch between interests at their whim, but this can easily get out of hand if there are many plates being spun and no reliable system to make sure things actually get accomplished. If the goal is simply to try things out and learn, this might be acceptable, but if it involves responsibility to others like completing a project for work, it can cause problems. While variety is good for them, when they become more distracted than productive, they might find it helpful to surround themselves with people who can take over some of the less interesting or more menial tasks.

NeTi’s get their ideas from the world around them and their ideas usually flow best when they have someone to bounce ideas off of. This is the nature of Ne and other external functions (denoted by the lowercase “e”) - they need interaction with the world to function optimally. This is a double-edged sword, as the outside world can also be highly distracting. Because of this, they tend to need alternating stages of input and output.

Input can come from almost anywhere. It may come in the form of observations, conversations with weird and fascinating humans, good books and articles, interesting assignments at work or even simple things like enjoying nature. While some ideas may come when they’re alone, having others to share their ideas with can provide useful refinement as well as input on whether the idea will make sense in the real world or not. They are less likely to feel fulfilled and be their best self if they spend a lot of time isolated from others.

It’s not always easy for them to find the right people to share their ideas with. They can be extremely abstract and often seem to spring up from nothing to outside observers, so it’s not always easy for other people to comprehend what they’re saying. They also tend to be impatient to get started on their ideas immediately after conceiving them, and they might be disappointed when others don’t immediately jump in to help them implement it.

NeTi’s really like their autonomy. Although they like working with other people on interesting ideas, they despise being micromanaged by someone they don’t respect and trust. They usually prefer to take on a challenge their own way, without the steps being pre-defined for them.

Ne’s outside-the-box thinking can lead to what others may see as disruptive behaviour. Often, if someone tries to make them do something one way, they’ll look for a different way. This usually isn’t an intentional rebellion. They look for new ways to do things because it’s more exciting than following conventional routes or just doing what they’ve done before. Their other functions all serve their drive to find new solutions to problems. Ti helps them objectively say whether their novel idea will actually be an improvement or not, while Fe reminds them to value others’ ideas as highly as their own. They also need Si to remind them that at times, the existing way might actually be better.

NeTi’s tend to be curious about people, but having to constantly care for others can drain them quickly. They love studying people and brainstorming with them, but their default is often to try and problem-solve for people when they’re upset rather than only listening to them. It can take some direct instruction from others before the NeTi learns what is appropriate in terms of responding to others who are in emotional pain. They may also start to feel uncomfortable around overly emotional people, and can have a strong desire for the other person to just feel better so things can be normal again.

Some NeTi’s have almost childlike emotional expression. They can be very playful and often reflect the emotions of those around them. Their Fe picks up on what others are feeling, and their Ne adapts to reflect it. They often use their mirroring and general playfulness and sense of humour to build rapport with people. However, it can be uncomfortable for them to be around very unexpressive people, because they’re not sure how to act or adapt without some kind of emotion to play off of.

They thrive in “chaotic” environments as they find them fun. It gives their Ne more interesting input to play with for ideas. It also gives them more information to look for patterns in and is more likely to be a positive space for new ideas to come forth, as opposed to Si environments which tend to be more conventional and traditional. As one NeTi said: “Entropy reigns supreme in our natural habitat.”

They may share things or say things that others would find inappropriate without realizing it at times. They can also use their ability to know what others are feeling for their own benefit - for good or bad. Although they might initially enjoy pushing people’s boundaries, as they develop their Si they become more aware of clear established boundaries others have, and will try to respect them. If an NeTi doesn’t see clearly defined boundaries, they may look for loopholes and find places they can push boundaries in order to explore and learn more.

NeTi’s care about others, but may not be exactly sure how to show it. As they get older and Fe develops more, it tends to make them quite squishy and warm towards the people they care about, and helps them avoid saying things that might offend people. It also drives them to care about humanity as a whole and to consider ways they might go about helping people.

[osmw1]

I Said Make My Abilities Average!   Chapter 1—Reincarnation

“This place is…”

When she came to, it was an unfamiliar room. The white walls, thin pink curtains hung from the windows, the desk, the closet, and so on all look antique–like, even this seemingly handmade stuffed animal… It is as if perhaps that this is the interior of a young girl’s room. And then, the one sleeping in the bed, Kurihara Misato, 18 years old, Adele von Ascham, 10 years old.

… huh, what? I’m Kurihara Misato, ten, the eldest daughter of the Aschams—wait, that’s not right. What the heck? Ugh, my head…

Then just like that, the girl lost consciousness. When she awakened a second time, her headache had vanished and recalled all her memories.

“Oh … so it was like that…”

I had died. Ten years ago.

Kurihara Misato, the elder sister of two, was born in a very ordinary family. Her parents were honest and affectionate. Her sister, two years her junior, though cheeky, was a bright, energetic, and good girl. As for Misato, she was just a little more capable than the other people.

That part of her was already shown from when she was an infant. She was perhaps quicker than average at learning words, standing on two feet, and walking.

So too with studies. Sports. Art. Shogi.[1] Speaking with adults. In kindergarten and then in elementary school—one by one—her above–average capabilities were exhibited. Along with the people around her, her teachers, too, placed unreasonable expectations on her. Overbearingly so. Her grandparents and other relatives were all too enthusiastic. They made a huge fuss, saying things like “This girl’s a genius!” and “She’s definitely going to be someone important in the future.” Misato’s grandparents from both sides scrambled. They compared her to other grandchildren, to her sister, and so on. They did not feel sorry for Misato while they sowed their seeds of discord.

The salvation was that her parents did not care at all about all of that and raised her very normally. Even if Misato’s sister could be a little jealous or rebellious, she was still raised to be a good, obedient child.

However, while Misato could catch a break at home, she was constantly singled out at school. It was by no means bullying, yet she made nothing of the sort when it came to close friends.

As well, unfortunately, she was by no means a genius either. Perhaps if Misato were perceived as an outstanding prodigy with flashes of inspiration for novel ideas, then she might have been a bit happier. However, she was merely bright.

Though she was quick–witted, Misato was thoroughly normal in her ways of thinking and her sensibility. From a young age, she thought of theory and due to her liking to reading, she had an abundant store of knowledge. Still, she was still just “a normal person with considerably higher stats.“ Because of that, everybody’s overly high expectations and regards was painful for her to bear. She wanted to joke around and get excited over talking about boys with everyone else.

Even when surrounded by people, everyday was lonely. Even when she became a high school student, the same continued. Aside from the occasional break to play video games or read, Misato, who had no friends to go out with, would do nought but study. Though it is uncertain whether it is because of that or not, in the end, she lived up to the expectations of the people around her. She accomplished to be accepted into a certain university that was Japan’s most famous and difficult to get into.

Then, the long–awaited day of high school graduation ceremony. She even flawlessly delivered the valedictory which was imposed on her. She had left high school behind. University life would be freer. There would only be like–minded people in that university, or so she thought…

Most of the people who were on the street were the recently graduated. The current students were yet to be dismissed. Perhaps it was due to the feeling of freedom, there was a group of—at least until very recently—high school students playing around while walking. Amongst them was a girl who was messing around with her friends while walking down the road. The schoolbag she was swinging around hit a ten–year–old girl on a bicycle. The impact made the child stumble and fall over.

An approaching truck. Whether it was due the driver not having his eyes on the road or that the driver could not react instantly, it did not seem like that the truck could have braked in time.

As soon as she realised, Misato’s body had already moved. Her body jumped out into the road and towards the girl. (Why did I…? If it were the people that were closer, they would have had enough time to save the girl. Then yet why did no one budge at all? I won’t make it in time…)

The others were not about to move; they had only watched Misato. That girl had good reflexes. That girl would have been able to save her, wouldn’t she?

Immediately after Misato scooped up the young girl and tossed her onto the sidewalk, Misato’s body was splattered by the truck that had merely just begun braking.

“It seems like you have awoken, Ms. Kurihara Misato.” As Misato regained her consciousness, a youth about 20 years old was looking down upon her lying on the ground. “This here is… If I’m not mistaken, I was sent flying by the truck…” With a miserable face, the youth said to Misato who was mumbling while standing up. “Yes. And then, you died.” “Huh…”

“That’s total nonsense!” was what she wanted to say, but it is unlikely that that situation would have ended safely. Moreover, if you calmed down and tried looking around, everything is somewhat white. The ground, the surroundings, even the youth’s clothes. What in the world is this place…? The confused Misato was politely explained to by the youth.

“This is—if I were to use the general concept to explain—a place like ‘heaven’; my corresponding role would be ‘God’. In actuality, it’s not exactly the same…”

According to the youth, it seems like it goes something like this. The universe follows the law of entropy increase.

In thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory, entropy is defined as an extensive property and a function of state. It could be described as a linear measure of randomness. Left alone in a closed system, entropy tends towards increasing. If you place a cup filled with hot water right next to a cup filled with cold water, they will eventually reach the same temperature. Conversely, if you put two cups of tepid water together, they will not become a cup of hot and a cup of cold water. Strictly speaking, one cannot theoretically assert that, but normally, you could think of it to be true.

Natural phenomena, biological processes, and the like in this world are formed from an imbalance of such things like matter and energy. Everything mixed together, energy reaches equilibrium. Ultimately, no changes occur—a still, dead world.

Everything in the universe tends towards death. It is neither evil nor a negative deed. It is the hand of God acting in the name of the laws of physics.

Despite all that, there was a person who defied that.

Life.

Separating things that have been mixed together creates something less random. That action seems as though entropy is decreasing. Yet even if viewed as a larger closed system, the reality is that entropy is increasing because actions such as separating matter, manufacturing objects, even biological processes intrinsically require expending energy.

However, there is something charming about that inevitability for the predecessors who overcame the stages long before.

Then, when these vital activities advance to the stage of civilization, in many cases, they collapse. Somehow, the probability greatly surpasses the theoretical probability. It is almost as if this “law of the universe” has a will.

Thus, not to waste time, it seems that that “they” have a custom of finding and merely assisting those civilizations who have reached a dangerous stage. The façade of persevering through one’s own strength is maintained as to not make the assistance too blatant. They perform acts such as bestowing specific individuals with hints through the form of dreams or like stealthily planting knowledge while the target sleep…

Though, for some reason, the ones who are bestowed information die easily. Obviously surpassing the odds. The reasons are only known to “them.” No matter how much it is analyzed, the reasons are still unknown. Whether it is because the balance of life is fragile or perhaps even that the world truly has a will…

“Huh … so that means my suffering and death was—” “Not my fault.” “Huh?”

“The assistance I had was from you, saving that young girl. The situation had nothing to do with you. Your suffering is all yours from the beginning.” “…” Misato, dejectedly kneeling on the ground with both hands on the ground. Somehow, this seems to be Misato’s fate from the beginning.

“The truth is that you were called here so that you could be thanked.” “Eh…”

“That girl would have died there. Even though the driver was well–alert for both potential traffic incidents and his own health, her sudden tumble due to whatever reason, and coincidentally his cell phone, diverted his attention. For something like that to happen wasn’t in my predictions for the near future! Honestly, what is even going on… And then, I searched for something suitable that I could use in order to somehow compensate for that. Once again, for some reason, there was nothing useable… The people nearby didn’t react at all, for some reason. It’s just like that girl’s death was predetermined. Yes, it’s almost as if—like how you would say in your world—“pre–established harmony”…

Then, when it seemed like it was all over and that I was about to give up due to all the troubles stemming from the young girl, you appeared. From that distance, you shouldn’t have been in time. You shouldn’t have felt the need to save her yourself since there were people who were closer. You were outside of both my search and my near future prediction. With but a normal human body, you were able to defeat the world’s pre–established harmony, slip pass my near future prediction, sacrifice yourself and saving that girl…

Did you know? That young girl is destined to develop theories for technologies that are essential to interstellar travel…”

(Is that so… That was possible with my help, even though I myself wasn’t able to accomplish anything. In that case, my existence, my life too had meaning…)

“So, because of that, you have my deepest gratitude. I would like to bestow upon you a new life. In other words, reincarnation with all your memories intact.” “What?!”

Misato was astonished. (It is as though how someone might play video games for a bit as a study break. But after the game…)

“Thus, to make living in a world that is less advanced than yours less inconvenient, are there any special traits you would like to have? What kind of abilities do you wish for?”

(I-It’s here!) Misato immediately replied.

“Please make my abilities average!”

Previously: /ch001/ /next/

(full list of translated chapters)

Japanese chess ↩

[stoweboyd]

The tension in the progressive community about on demand work as a positive, neutral, or negative force in labor economics is tightening, and attention must be paid because the labor laws and tax laws are shaping the lives of millions, even if no apparent plan is in place.

Heller’s piece is a preposterous length and is difficult to summarize, but here goes. New start-ups are operating at the edges and fringes of our economy, tapping into the economic leverage of freelance workers willing -- in the downdraft of the great recession -- to work for peanuts and to rent their possessions (mostly living space) for pocket money, This is the ‘on demand’ economy, which allows some -- mostly  millennials -- to paperclip a livelihood out of Uber, Airbnb, and Hello Alfred. Heller discusses government policies about the precarious lifestyle with political and government leaders, but like the lives of the individuals he talks with, we wind up with no resolution and more answers than we started with. Which might mean Heller’s on the right path, or that our society is falling behind and leaving social policy to be decided by Uber and Airbnb, and not by governments, unions, or other traditional institutions.

The American workplace is both a seat of national identity and a site of chronic upheaval and shame. The industry that drove America’s rise in the nineteenth century was often inhumane. The twentieth-century corrective—a corporate workplace of rules, hierarchies, collective bargaining, triplicate forms—brought its own unfairnesses. Gigging reflects the endlessly personalizable values of our own era, but its social effects, untried by time, remain uncertain.

Support for the new work model has come together swiftly, though, in surprising quarters. On the second day of the most recent Democratic National Convention, in July, members of a four-person panel suggested that gigging life was not only sustainable but the embodiment of today’s progressive values. “It’s all about democratizing capitalism,” Chris Lehane, a strategist in the Clinton Administration and now Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs, said during the proceedings, in Philadelphia. David Plouffe, who had managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before he joined Uber, explained, “Politically, you’re seeing a large contingent of the Obama coalition demanding the sharing economy.” Instead of being pawns in the games of industry, the panelists thought, working Americans could thrive by hiring out skills as they wanted, and putting money in the pockets of peers who had done the same. The power to control one’s working life would return, grassroots style, to the people.

The basis for such confidence was largely demographic. Though statistics about gigging work are few, and general at best, a Pew study last year found that seventy-two per cent of American adults had used one of eleven sharing or on-demand services, and that a third of people under forty-five had used four or more. “To ‘speak millennial,’ you ought to be talking about the sharing economy, because it is core and central to their economic future,” Lehane declared, and many of his political kin have agreed. No other commercial field has lately drawn as deeply from the Democratic brain trust. Yet what does democratized capitalism actually promise a politically unsettled generation? Who are its beneficiaries? At a moment when the nation’s electoral future seems tied to the fate of its jobs, much more than next month’s paycheck depends on the answers.

[...]

In 1970, Charles A. Reich, a law professor who’d experienced a countercultural conversion after hanging with young people out West, published “The Greening of America,” a cotton-candy cone that wound together wispy revelations from the sixties. Casting an eye across modern history, he traced a turn from a world view that he called Consciousness I (the outlook of local farmers, self-directed workers, and small-business people, reaching a crisis in the exploitations of the Gilded Age) to what he called Consciousness II (the outlook of a society of systems, hierarchies, corporations, and gray flannel suits). He thought that Consciousness II was giving way to Consciousness III, the outlook of a rising generation whose virtues included direct action, community power, and self-definition. “For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful, something to be endured while ‘life’ is confined to ‘time off,’ ” Reich wrote. “Consciousness III people simply do not imagine a career along the old vertical lines.” His accessible theory of the baffling sixties carried the imprimatur of William Shawn’s New Yorker, which published an excerpt of the book that stretched over nearly seventy pages. “The Greening of America” spent months on the Times best-seller list.

Exponents of the futuristic tech economy frequently adopt this fifty-year-old perspective. Like Reich, they eschew the hedgehog grind of the forty-hour week; they seek a freer way to work. This productivity-minded spirit of defiance holds appeal for many children of the Consciousness III generation: the so-called millennials.

“People are now, more than ever before, aware of the careers that they’re not pursuing,” says Kathryn Minshew, the C.E.O. of the Muse, a job-search and career-advice site, and a co-author of “The New Rules of Work.” Minshew co-founded the Muse in her mid-twenties, after working at the consulting firm McKinsey and yearning for a job that felt more distinctive. She didn’t know what that was, and her peers seemed similarly stuck. Jennifer Fonstad, a venture capitalist whose firm, Aspect Ventures, backed Minshew’s company, told me that “the future of work” is now a promising investment field.

[...]

In promotional material, Airbnb refers to itself as “an economic lifeline for the middle class.”A company-sponsored analysis released in December overlaid maps of Airbnb listings and traditional hotels on maps of neighborhoods where a majority of residents were ethnic minorities. In seven cities, including New York, the percentage of Airbnb listings that fall in minority neighborhoods exceeds the percentage of hotel rooms that do. (Another study, of user photos in seventy-two majority-black neighborhoods, suggested that most Airbnb hosts there were white, complicating the picture.) Seniors were found to earn, on average, nearly six thousand dollars a year from Airbnb listings. “Ultimately, what we’re doing is driving wealth down to the people,” Chris Lehane, the strategist at Airbnb, says.

It is, of course, driving wealth down unevenly. A study conducted by the New York attorney general in 2014 found that nearly half of all money made by Airbnb hosts in the state was coming from three Manhattan neighborhoods: the Village-SoHo corridor, the Lower East Side, and Chelsea. It is undeniably good to be earning fifty-five hundred dollars a year by Airbnb-ing your home in deep Queens—so good, it may not bother you to learn that your banker cousin earns ten times that from his swank West Village pad, or that he hires Happy Host to make his lucrative Airbnb property even more lucrative. But now imagine that the guy who lives two doors down from you gets ideas. His finances aren’t as tight as yours, and he decides to reinvest part of his Airbnb income in new furniture and a greeting service. His ratings go up. Perhaps he nudges up his prices in response, or maybe he keeps them low, to get a high volume of patronage. Now your listing is no longer competitive in your neighborhood. How long before the market leaves you behind?

[...]

A century ago, liberalism was a systems-building philosophy. Its revelation was that society, left alone, tended toward entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally. You wanted a decent life for your family and the families that you knew. You did not—could not—make every personal choice with an eye to the fates of people in some unknown factory. But, even if individuals couldn’t deal with the big picture, early-twentieth-century liberals saw, a larger entity such as government could. This way of thinking brought us the New Deal and “Ask not what your country can do for you.” Its ultimate rejection brought us customized life paths, heroic entrepreneurship, and maybe even Instagram performance. We are now back to the politics of the particular.

For gigging companies, that shift means a constant struggle against a legacy of systemic control, with legal squabbles like the one in New York. Regulation is government’s usual tool for blunting adverse consequences, but most sharing platforms gain their competitive edge by skirting its requirements. Uber and Lyft avoid taxi rules that fix rates and cap the supply on the road. Handy saves on overtime and benefits by categorizing workers as contractors. Some gigging advocates suggest that this less regulated environment is fair, because traditional industry gets advantages elsewhere. (President Trump, it has been pointed out, could not have built his company without hundreds of millions of dollars in tax subsidies.)

Still, since their inception, and increasingly during the past year, gigging companies have become the targets of a journalistic genre that used to be called muckraking: admirable and assiduous investigative work that digs up hypocrisies, deceptions, and malpractices in an effort to cast doubt on a broader project. Some companies, such as Uber, seem to invite this kind of attention with layered wrongdoing and years of secrecy. But they also invite it by their high-minded positioning. Like traditional companies, gigging companies maintain regiments of highly paid lawyers and lobbyists. What sets them apart is a second lobbying effort, turned toward the public.

[...]

Questions have emerged lately about the future of institutional liberalism. A Washington Post /ABC News poll last month found that two-thirds of Americans believe the Democratic Party is “out of touch,” more than think the same of the Republican Party or the current President. The gig economy has helped show how a shared political methodology—and a shared language of virtue—can stand in for a unified program; contemporary liberalism sometimes seems a backpack of tools distributed among people who, beyond their current stance of opposition, lack an agreed-upon blueprint. Unsurprisingly, the commonweal projects that used to be the pride of progressivism are unravelling. Leaders have quietly let them go. At one point, I asked Chris Lehane why he had thrown his support behind the sharing model instead of working on traditional policy solutions. He told me that, during the recession, he had suffered a crisis of faith. “The social safety net wasn’t providing the support that it had been,” he said. “I do think we’re in a time period when liberal democracy is sick.”

In “The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream” (2006), Jacob Hacker, a political-science professor at Yale, described a decades-long off-loading of risk from insurance-type structures—governments, corporations—to individuals. Economic insecurity has risen in the course of the past generation, even as American wealth climbed. Hacker attributed this shift to what he called “the personal-responsibility crusade,” which grew out of a post-sixties fixation on moral hazard: the idea that you do riskier things if you’re insulated from the consequences. The conservative version of the crusade is a commonplace: the poor should try harder next time. But, although Hacker doesn’t note it explicitly, there’s a liberal version, too, having to do with doffing corporate structures, eschewing inhibiting social norms, and refusing a career in plastics. Reich called it Consciousness III.

The slow passage from love beads to Lyft through the performative assertion of self may be the least claimed legacy of the baby-boomer revolution—certainly, it’s the least celebrated. Yet the place we find ourselves today is not unique. In “Drift and Mastery,” a young Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of modern progressivism, described the strange circumstances of public discussion in 1914, a similar time. “The little business men cried: We’re the natural men, so let us alone,” he wrote. “And the public cried: We’re the most natural of all, so please do stop interfering with us. Muckraking gave an utterance to the small business men and to the larger public, who dominated reform politics. What did they do? They tried by all the machinery and power they could muster to restore a business world in which each man could again be left to his own will—a world that needed no coöperative intelligence.” Coming off a period of liberalization and free enterprise, Lippmann’s America struggled with growing inequality, a frantic news cycle, a rising awareness of structural injustice, and a cacophonous global society—in other words, with an intensifying sense of fragmentation. His idea, the big idea of progressivism, was that national self-government was a coöperative project of putting the pieces together. “The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice,” he wrote, “but against the chaos of a new freedom.”

Revolution or disruption is easy. Spreading long-term social benefit is hard. If one accepts Lehane’s premise that the safety net is tattered and that gigging platforms are necessary to keep people in cash, the model’s social erosions have to be curbed. How can the gig economy be made sustainable at last?

[...]

Other assessments suggest that employees, too, should get their houses in order. “To succeed in the Gig Economy, we need to create a financially flexible life of lower fixed costs, higher savings, and much less debt,” Diane Mulcahy, a senior analyst at the Kauffman Foundation and a lecturer at Babson College, writes in her book “The Gig Economy,” which is part economic argument and part how-to guide. Ideally, gig workers should plan not to retire. (Beyond Airbnb hosting, Mulcahy sees prospects for aging millennials in app-based dog-sitting.) If they must retire, they should prepare. Mulcahy suggests bingeing on benefits when they come. Fill your dance card with doctors while you’re on employee insurance. Go wild with 401(k) matching—it will come in handy.

This ketchup-packet-hoarding approach sounds sensible, given the current lack of systemic support. Yet, as Mulcahy acknowledges, it’s a survival mechanism, not a solution. Turning to deeper reform, she argues for eliminating the current distinction between employees (people who receive a W-2 tax form and benefits such as insurance and sick days) and contract workers (who get a 1099-MISC and no benefits). It’s a “kink” in the labor market, she says, and it invites abuse by efficiency-seeking companies.

Calls for structural change have grown loud lately, in part because the problem goes far beyond gigging apps. The precariat is everywhere. Companies such as Nissan have begun manning factories with temps; even the U.S. Postal Service has turned to them. Academic jobs are increasingly filled with relatively cheap, short-term teaching appointments. Historically, there is usually an uptick in 1099 work during tough economic times, and then W-2s resurge as jobs are added in recovery. But W-2 jobs did not resurge as usual during our recovery from the last recession; instead, the growth has happened in the 1099 column. That shift raises problems because the United States’ benefits structure has traditionally been attached to the corporation rather than to the state: the expectation was that every employed person would have a W-2 job.

“We should design the labor-market regulations around a more flexible model,” Jacob Hacker told me. He favors some form of worker participation, and, like Mulcahy, advocates creating a single category of employment. “I think if you work for someone else, you’re an employee,” he said. “Employees get certain protections. Benefits must be separate from work.”

In a much cited article in Democracy, from 2015, Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist, and David Rolf, a union president, proposed that workplace benefits be prorated (someone who works a twenty-hour week gets half of the full-time benefits) and portable (insurance or unused vacation days would carry from one job to the next, because employers would pay into a worker’s lifelong benefits account). Other people regard the gig economy as a case for universal basic income: a plan to give every citizen a modest flat annuity from the government, as a replacement for all current welfare and unemployment programs. Alternatively, there’s the proposal made by the economists Seth D. Harris and Alan B. Krueger: the creation of an “independent worker” status that awards some of the structural benefits of W-2 employment (including collective bargaining, discrimination protection, tax withholding, insurance pools) but not others (overtime and the minimum wage).

I put these possibilities to Tom Perez. He told me that he didn’t like the idea of eliminating work categories, or of adding a new one, as Harris and Krueger suggest: you’d lose many of the hard-won benefits included with W-2 employment, he said, either in the compromise to a single category or because current W-2 companies would find ways to slide into the new classification. He wanted to move slowly, to take time. “The heart and soul of the twentieth-century social compact that emerged after the Great Depression was forty years in the making,” he said. “How do we build the twenty-first-century social compact?”

Perez’s new perch, at the D.N.C., has given him a broader platform, and a couple of hours after the House passed the American Health Care Act last week, he championed the old safety net in forceful language. “Scapegoating worker protections is often a lazy cop-out for some who want to change the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of working people,” he told me. “We shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and the most basic employee protections; it’s a false dichotomy.” The entanglement of the sharing economy and Democratic politics has continued—Perez’s press secretary at the Department of Labor now works for Airbnb—but his approach had circumspection. “Any changes you make to policies or regulations have to be very careful and take all potential ripple effects into account and keep the best interest of the worker in mind.”

[introductions-to-whatever]

Introduction to thermodynamics

This piece of writing should be, by no means be regarded as a serious introductory lesson in physics. These are just some far-fetched analogies that blossomed in my mind when I needed some familiarity in concepts to hold onto during my bioenergetics lecture.

After just having completed my first in Uni while studying two opposingly different subjects, I have come to the realisation that all of life’s aspects follow the exact same set of rules that are just phrased differently, depending on circumstance. I think the most approachable analogy to be made is that between Newton’s Third Law- “Every action has its equal and opposite reaction” and the Hindu and Buddhist concept of Karma- “What goes around, comes around” (yes, and the JT song).

Basically, everything we attribute to our existence is just a consequence of previous events that happened through chance. This brings us to the First Law of Thermodynamics: “Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but it can neither be created, nor destroyed.” Life is just a big network of feedback loops, with feelings, thoughts and actions never having an actual well-defined starting point. They are an array of emotions and experiences that more or less determine who we are and how we are perceived.

The most comfortable comparison for me to make is, of course, catharsis, and I will use music as an example. Let’s say you’re heartbroken (relatable af), or you’re just going through a really tough time. Therefore, you input all the negative energy you’re feeling into music, and suddenly grief and sorrow have become lyrics and melodies.

Some of us see sinusoidal waves or different cycles and tend to be put off, but they are omnipresent, whether it’s Biology, Physics, Religion or “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King. Aside from being in constant interaction with ourselves, we also come in contact with other people and should therefore be mindful of our capacity to influence our environment (for better or for worse). That cliché about doing random acts of kindness is not wrong at all. Spread the love guys!

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that “The state of entropy of the entire universe as well as of an isolated system will only increase over time.” The common misconception here is that entropy is seen as chaos and disorder, when in fact, it’s the only thing we’ll ever know for certain. It is the true nature of reality, the inevitable change, the tendency to move towards equilibrium without actually achieving it.

John Donne famously said, “No man is an island, entire of itself”. We can therefore state that nobody is an isolated system. We are all connected in our needs, dreams, fears, wants, we all give and take so nobody is independent in the true sense of the word. Nevertheless, some misguided individuals fail to see that and preach division instead of unity. The tendency to see ourselves unlike everyone else leads to misconceptions, apprehension and even negative emotions directed towards other people. The biggest illusion one can feed into is thinking they can permanently sustain an isolated system, something without any outside interaction, where everything is constant. Sadly, this is the case for populist parties and irrational nationalism, which are becoming more and more of a thing. I think if people realise just how “energetically costly” (besides you know, plain stupid) it is to sustain something like that, they would be less inclined to support the “us versus them” mentality.

Fighting against entropy is a losing battle, in my opinion, because even if a system’s entropy is decreasing, at a universal level it can only enhance. The best explanation I could find for this is the “Locus of control” concept from psychology. People with internal locus believe they are entirely reliant upon themselves when it comes to going through life, while people with external locus tend to attribute everything happening to outside forces (like God or simply chance). I gravitate towards the latter category, as I (generally) believe things happen for a reason. Entropy represents change, but it is the general direction towards which everything moves, kind of like a universal downwards stream. If you disregard its flow and think it’s entirely up to you, you’ll realise you’ve been moving without actually getting anywhere, as moving “upstream” requires great energy levels that can never be permanently sustained. You can wish for something to work out all you want, if it’s not meant to be, it won’t happen.

The Third Law states that “The entropy of a perfect crystal at absolute zero is exactly equal to zero”. This only further reinforces what I’ve been trying to philosophise earlier: the only time when chance is absent from life is when life stops altogether. Isolated systems and perfect crystals low to no entropy, but that’s a property livings things don’t truly have. We yearn for constancy even though our lives are primarily made up of variables. Take the sinusoidal graph again: without the lows, how can we actually appreciate the highs? We need change, it’s intricately linked to our very nature. My mom offered the EKG as an example: *beep*beep*beep*. The graph goes up and down continuously and if it stops moving, if it has become constant, then life has ended.

In “Alice through the looking glass”, the Red Queen got real for a second and said: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.“ Even in order to live our lives with no apparent change we have to be in motion and go along the stream. All in all, thermodynamics doesn’t provide answers to all of life’s questions but maybe it can make us see what we’re NOT, and that is isolated systems.

[adoptmeangelina-blog]

Japanese culture observations

After a month here I have refined my impressions of Japan. They’re not all rose-tinted, or oddity-fetishized, or #wanderlust forced, they’re candid and occasionally critical. But in case you’re predisposed to being offended, as our online selves tend to be, I will finish this preface by acknowledging they are an outsider’s limited observations and nothing more.

Mastery and perfection:

There is an obsession with mastery in Japan. Whatever someone will dedicate themselves to, they will truly dedicate themselves to. It is grounds for public-respect and self-respect to be obsessed with one’s pursuit. This links into a later point on identity; as someone’s work, or just personal interests, become grounds for their identity.

The wonderful outcome of this obsession comes from the fact there are few things as satisfying as something of good quality. From an absurdly efficient train system, to a hand-crafted tool that is perfect in its use, to a home-made beer, good quality makes life less stressful and helps prompt us to be mindful.

(This point on mindfulness may be an under appreciated one for me so far, as although it hasn’t happened to me yet, the pace and ‘genericism’ of Japan can be overwhelming. So say, being explained the origins of a garment’s design and fabrication, gives meaning and appreciation to the garment, which is a counter to the speed and otherwise ‘genericism’ of life here.)

The challenging outcome of this obsession with mastery is somewhat paradoxical, but it leads to a loss of 

humanity in some instances. The obsession with utility makes human imperfections the enemy. The successful realisation of say, a perfect table setting, feels sterile and void of authenticity.

Chasing the mastery of a skill also means one is never satisfied, as there is always something to be improved. It creates a never ending journey climbing a summit-less mountain, which brings better and better skill, but endless inadequacy and never satisfaction.

The final frustration with the mastery obsession is that it is in fact an unwinnable struggle against entropy. To constantly be battling the universe’s ceaseless movement towards chaos is an unrewarding struggle. The clothes, pyjamas, bedding and towels that are cleaned each time they are used in an attempt to restore them to their original perfect state, makes their use and inherent imperfection the enemy. This is rather than the more accepting approach of knowing nothing is ever perfect and we can just clean our clothes for the sake of hygiene, and move on to enjoy life.

*Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi for a great documentation of the two-sides to this obsession with mastery. Another preface before my next cultural generalisation, is that these phenomena are not completely unique to Japanese people, nor ubiquitous among them, but perhaps more obvious and more common. Specifically with identity it is so hard to espouse assertions on, as it is a personal and fluid journey, in which it is not up to others to define who you are. 

Identity: 

I’ve found Japanese peoples’ identities to be often drawn from pre-set models, from genre-based moulds according to profession or a personal interest. This approach to one’s identity also externally applies when defining others, to the extent of accepting your family’s dynamics as that is who each of you are (the expectation or at least explanation is that someone’s identity simply means they will behave accordingly, rather than challenging each other’s behaviour.) This results in a more accepting, and less frustrated, perspective in relationships. 

What I find disingenuous about this is that people appear to adopt their identity to the point of influencing their personality, rather than searching their personality for who they are and letting their interests grow around that. Across genres of say a sport player, the kawaii (cute) culture, a school student, a salary man (a suit), peoples’ identities tend to be defined by that moniker. They are a soccer player rather than someone who plays soccer, a student rather than someone who goes to school. And then oddly people within these genres subscribe to the hive mind of how that genre of people behave and think, or a salary man behaves and thinks. 

A refreshing outcome of this forced identity phenomenon is that it allows for the accepting of peoples’ character traits. Rather than frustration at someone’s stubbornness, or passiveness, or terseness, Japanese people can acknowledge these traits but then accept them within the package of an identity, ‘he is a soccer player, they are like that.’ Or as mentioned above, defusing conflict in their family. Inside a family one’s personality is accepted, the black-sheep is accepted as a black-sheep, or a stubborn or reckless or difficult child or parent is accepted as who they are and not as challenged on those characteristics. 

Work culture:

The third point in a self-feeding cycle of cultural phenomena in Japan is work culture. The work culture is a logical combination of an obsession and expectation of mastery and perfectionism, and the trappings of one’s identity based on one’s pastime.  

Perpetuated and perpetuating the obsession with mastery and peoples’ bases for identity, work culture in Japan is nuts. Six-day work weeks are common. Twelve-hour work days are common. Similar to the work culture that has infested some high-paying sectors in Australia, the etiquette and expectations that underpin it are too ingrained for any individual to counter. To advance yourself in a career, and specifically within a company, is like an arms-race in dedication to your employer.  

Sombrely, I have little doubt the work culture in Japan this is one of the central causes for the high suicide rate here. (http://www.who.int/gho/mental_health/suicide_rates/en/)  

This productive and destructive work culture is why many work for themselves. Small business and shop owners are very common, in what is often explained to me as a direct rejection of the country’s intense work culture.

[neptunecreek]

Right to Repair in Times of Pandemic

Entropy isn't just a word, it’s the (second) law (of thermodynamics): the idea that things tend towards chaos and brokenness. That’s why the Right to Repair is so close to our heart: fixing things is nothing less than the embodiment of the ancient struggle to wring order from chaos, to stave off deterioration and collapse.

It’s no coincidence that farmers are the vanguard for Right to Repair. People who live in rural, low-population zones have to fend for themselves when entropy is visited upon their tools. Farmers can’t wait for days or weeks for a part or a service technician: they literally have to make hay while the sun shines. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers have been making and adapting their tools, and workshops and even forges are mainstays of agricultural life.

We can’t simply leave our hospitals undersupplied or sitting on broken hardware until the emergency has passed.

Coronavirus has given us all a taste of what life is like for farmers and other people far from repair and parts. With global supply chains in chaos and whole cities on lockdown, broken things might not get fixed unless you can fix them.

Lucky for us, we still have the Internet, which is full of repair instructions (including iFixit’s massive repository of "repair guides for every thing") and we have more access to tools than at any time in history, including—for some of us—futuristic tools-that-make-tools, like laser-cutters, CNC mills, and 3D printers.

These have already begun to play a key role in the pandemic. A hospital in Brescia, Italy reportedly rehabilitated a broken, urgently needed Venturi oxygen mask for the hospital’s ventilator with help from local 3D printing entrepreneurs who brought their printer to the hospital, designed a replacement part on the spot, and printed it out, successfully repairing the respirator so that it could be used to save lives.

The story is a heartwarming mix of modern miracle and solidarity in a crisis, but there’s more going on under the surface.

It turns out that the reason that the part had to be designed from scratch is that the manufacturer refused to help with the project. One of the people involved says that he was threatened with patent litigation if he tried; his colleagues differ on the matter, but they agree that the company refused to share design files. And sending threats or not, the part’s designer still says he will not distribute the plans for a replacement.

All around the world, there is a shortage of ventilators and ventilator parts—and at the same time, the country that does the lion’s share of high-tech manufacturing, China, is running at extremely reduced capacity. While online communities are crowdsourcing multiple plans for open source hardware ventilators and other pandemic-related technology, the most important thing they and companies can do is work in concert to keep existing, tested tech functional.

Getting this kind of med-tech project right is important, and it’s hard. The global supply-chain shutdown has revealed the fragility of long distance, complex manufacturing systems that are organized around central hubs that represent points of critical failure. The surge in open source hardware designs and parts for medical equipment during the emergency represents a distributed, urgently needed decentralization of our world’s critical manufacturing capacity. Even as these distributed efforts reduce the hazards of failing health systems, they have the potential to create their own hazards. The best way to ensure that emergency repairs and modifications are safe is for original manufacturers to cooperate with community technicians. Indeed, that’s the only way—we can’t simply leave our hospitals undersupplied or sitting on broken hardware until the emergency has passed.

The very nature of emergency medicine means that front-line professionals must make decisions about how to keep their equipment running when it is not fully functional. Even under normal circumstances, there aren't always timely, reliable sources of parts and skilled service. The right person to decide whether a field repair should be attempted, and whether the repair is solid enough to rely upon are medical professionals, not the shareholders of med-tech companies or the lawyers who write their terms of service and patent applications.

We are all like farmers now—isolated, with machinery that we can’t afford to let sit idle until a distant company can help us repair it. Today, we need those companies to step up by providing repair instructions, specifications, and technical aid to the global volunteer corps of makers and fixers who have given themselves over to helping us all weather this calamity.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3bfKjOl

[thetruthseekerway]

Thermodynamics Falsifies Evolution - "Law of Entropy"

New Post has been published on http://www.truth-seeker.info/refuting-darwinism/thermodynamics-falsifies-evolution-%e2%80%98law-of-entropy%e2%80%99/

Thermodynamics Falsifies Evolution - "Law of Entropy"

By Truth Seeker Staff

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is accepted as one of the basic laws of physics, holds that under normal conditions all systems left on their own tend to become disordered, dispersed, and corrupted in direct relation to the amount of time that passes.  Everything, whether living or not, wears out, deteriorates, decays, disintegrates, and is destroyed.  This is the absolute end that all beings will face one way or another, and according to the law, the process cannot be avoided.

This is something that all of us have observed.  For example, if you take a car to a desert and leave it there, you would hardly expect to find it in better condition when you came back years later.  On the contrary, you would see that its tires had gone flat, its windows had been broken, its chassis had rusted, and its engine had stopped working.  The same inevitable process holds true for living things.

The second law of thermodynamics is the means by which this natural process is defined, with physical equations and calculations.

This famous law of physics is also known as the “law of entropy.” In physics, entropy is the measure of the disorder of a system.  A system’s entropy increases as it moves from an ordered, organized, and planned state towards a more disordered, dispersed, and unplanned one.  The more disorder there is in a system, the higher its entropy is.  The law of entropy holds that the entire universe is unavoidably proceeding towards a more disordered, unplanned, and disorganized state.

The truth of the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy, has been experimentally and theoretically established.  All foremost scientists agree that the law of entropy will remain the principle paradigm for the foreseeable future.  Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of our age, described it as the “premier law of all of science.”  Sir Arthur Eddington also referred to it as the “supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe:”[1]

Evolutionary theory ignores this fundamental law of physics.  The mechanism offered by evolution totally contradicts the second law.  The theory of evolution says that disordered, dispersed, and lifeless atoms and molecules spontaneously came together over time, in a particular order, to form extremely complex molecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA, whereupon millions of different living species with even more complex structures gradually emerged.  According to the theory of evolution, this supposed process—which yields a more planned, more ordered, more complex and more organized structure at each stage—was formed all by itself under natural conditions.  The law of entropy makes it clear that this so-called natural process utterly contradicts the laws of physics.

Evolutionist scientists are also aware of this fact.  J.  H.  Rush states:

In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Where the Second Law expresses an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order.[2]

The evolutionist author Roger Lewin expresses the thermodynamic impasse of evolution in an article in Science:

One problem biologists have faced is the apparent contradiction by evolution of the second law of thermodynamics.  Systems should decay through time, giving less, not more, order.[3]

Another defender of the theory of evolution, George Stravropoulos, states the thermodynamic impossibility of the spontaneous formation of life and the impossibility of explaining the existence of complex living mechanisms by natural laws in the well-known evolutionist journal American Scientist:

Yet, under ordinary conditions, no complex organic molecule can ever form spontaneously, but will rather disintegrate, in agreement with the second law.  Indeed, the more complex it is, the more unstable it will be, and the more assured, sooner or later, its disintegration.  Photosynthesis and all life processes, and even life itself cannot yet be understood in terms of thermodynamics or any other exact science, despite the use of confused or deliberately confusing language.[4]

As we have seen, the evolution claim is completely at odds with the laws of physics.  The second law of thermodynamics constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for the scenario of evolution, in terms of both science and logic.  Unable to offer any scientific and consistent explanation to overcome this obstacle, evolutionists can only do so in their imagination.  For instance, the well-known evolutionist Jeremy Rifkin notes his belief that evolution overwhelms this law of physics with a “magical power”:

The Entropy Law says that evolution dissipates the overall available energy for life on this planet.  Our concept of evolution is the exact opposite.  We believe that evolution somehow magically creates greater overall value and order on earth.[5]

These words well indicate that evolution is a dogmatic belief rather than a scientific thesis.

The Misconception About Open Systems

Some proponents of evolution have recourse to an argument that the second law of thermodynamics holds true only for “closed systems,” and that “open systems” are beyond the scope of this law.  This claim goes no further than being an attempt by some evolutionists to distort scientific facts that invalidate their theory.  In fact, a large number of scientists openly state that this claim is invalid, and violates thermodynamics.  One of these is the Harvard scientist John Ross, who also holds evolutionist views.  He explains that these unrealistic claims contain an important scientific error in the following remarks in Chemical and Engineering News:

There are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics.  Ordinarily, the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems.  There is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems.  It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.[6]

An “open system” is a thermodynamic system in which energy and matter flow in and out.  Evolutionists hold that the world is an open system: that it is constantly exposed to an energy flow from the sun; that the law of entropy does not apply to the world as a whole, and that ordered, complex living beings can be generated from disordered, simple, and inanimate structures.

However, there is an obvious distortion here.  The fact that a system has an energy inflow is not enough to make that system ordered.  Specific mechanisms are needed to make the energy functional.  For instance, a car needs an engine, a transmission system, and related control mechanisms to convert the energy in petrol to work.  Without such an energy conversion system, the car will not be able to use the energy stored in petrol.

The same thing applies in the case of life as well.  It is true that life derives its energy from the sun.  However, solar energy can only be converted into chemical energy by the incredibly complex energy conversion systems in living things (such as photosynthesis in plants and the digestive systems of humans and animals).  No living thing can live without such energy conversion systems.  Without an energy conversion system, the sun is nothing but a source of destructive energy that burns, parches, or melts.

As can be seen, a thermodynamic system without an energy conversion mechanism of some sort is not advantageous for evolution, be it open or closed.  No one asserts that such complex and conscious mechanisms could have existed in nature under the conditions of the primeval earth.  Indeed, the real problem confronting evolutionists is the question of how complex energy-converting mechanisms such as photosynthesis in plants, which cannot be duplicated even with modern technology, could have come into being on their own.

The influx of solar energy into the world would be unable to bring about order on its own.  Moreover, no matter how high the temperature may become, amino acids resist forming bonds in ordered sequences.  Energy by itself is incapable of making amino acids from the much more complex molecules of proteins, or of making proteins from the much more complex and organized structures of cell organelles.

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Footnotes:

[1] Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A View, Viking Press, New York, 1980, p. 6.

[2] J. H. Rush, The Dawn of Life, New York, Signet, 1962, p. 35.

[3] vol. 217, 24 September 1982, p. 1239.

[4] George P. Stravropoulos, “The Frontiers and Limits of Science,” American Scientist, vol. 65, November-December 1977, p. 674.

[5] Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A New World View, Viking Press, New York, 1980, p. 55.

[6] John Ross, Chemical and Engineering News, 27 July 1980, p. 40.