#also at one point writing my rambling I thought about metaphor for capitalism

[this-is-a-name-dont-worry]

things that seemed reoccurring this update:

- Meat

- peas

- jelly

- Hibernation

- Eddie's absence

- Acting out a script (Sally mumbling asking if it's her cue and Howdy changing the script of the narrator in Homewarming storybook, characters general interactions with the narrator, different moments in the video, like the Sally and Frank ad break or the song a barely silent night, where the two literally fight over who get to sing, Sally mentions she wrote the lyrics, and Frank says she already has a song. yeah all of these are easy to see as meta goofs in the original material, but it's the fact there's so much of it this update) (of course all this wrap up with the end of the video where Eddie and Frank are obviously acting off script)

- Being alone (Eddie not having any news of anyone and not even seeing anyone outside (which is interesting as the story says that Sally was up in a tree near his home and saw him fret over having nothing to do), Wally saying it's so quiet during Homewarming and it's just he and Home for a while (potentially the show putting out a christmas special and then being on break? can a show do that?), and in the normal website material, the end of "An ode to hibernation", Frank saying "Where all that's left is me", the "me" being a "...me?")

- Welcome Home being used to sell stuff (cigarettes, medicine, eggnog, cereals, and the cookbook lists ingredients that are a specific brand)

(I'm putting under read more my rambling thoughts so you can just reblog the list without having to see them)

so I can't really make sense yet of all the food stuff. Maybe there are cultural elements/expressions I don't know that explains it? But I still find it very interesting how fucking unhinged that cookbook is yet the commercial and the website treat it normally. The cookbook is overall extremely interesting, because some of the recipes seem to actually be written by the characters; Barnaby who only presents you weird hot dog dressings with pictures but no recipe (and all jokes), Frank who lists not just the ingredients but also the material, and overexplain each steps (at least overexplain compared to the other recipes. it's actually interesting to know why you do x or y), and Julie who turns her recipe into a game at the end, and felt a bit harder to follow? anyway.

The cookbook, the Homewarming tradition of hanging a ham in the tree, Santy Claus being said sometimes instead of Santa, the ham for Santa? Once again, the christmas commercials being so casual about some of the weird stuff it says and presents? This almost feels like an alien who only has a blurry grasp of Christmas and what humans enjoy made the cookbook and the live commercial.

Sometimes, Welcome Home feels like it never actually aired and produced things, but we're making it retroactively exist. Something is making it exist. Like a retcon of the universe, "What do you mean you never heard of Welcome Home? No, of course it always existed and was very popular, look at all this old material we find!"

So maybe whatever is making it exist doesn't fully get humans and accidentally creates things that are weird to prove its existence. Like a cookbook that tells you a single pea in a buttered plate is a classic meal, or that of course you give Santa ham on Homewarming! (tbh almost getting an AI weirdness feel)

But in total contrary, in its story, Welcome Home also feels like it always existed, but got somehow completely wiped from people's mind, as something caused its sudden stop, and its characters gained consciousness of what they are and their world. As an existential dread fell on them one after the other, slowly realizing something isn't right. As Eddie felt anxiety and nervousness over no one being there or contacting him, to then having the story acts lightheartedly about it, the narrator saying things have been solved but he doesn't feel it, and suddenly Home is staring at him.

Both "It never existed but the universe is being retcon into it existing" and "it existed but something terrible happened that erased it from peoples mind" seem plausible. If two theories contradict each other, that means there's a third one that needs to be found.

Maybe it existed. Maybe it truly was popular, but something corrupted it, leading to its disappearance. A disappearance so big it stopped to exist. And now the thing that corrupted it is trying to crawl back, make it exist again, but it's making it come back completely off.

Anyway.

Also, I think the show may have been on hold during the Holiday season, "hibernating", and the character who got some self awareness realized that something was off. They're alone because there's nothing new, so no one is there bringing life to the neighborhood.

#welcome home #anyway there is an existential nightmare going on that's for sure #also at one point writing my rambling I thought about metaphor for capitalism #the show gains succes and so there's a push to make money out of it. capitalism is corrupting it until it goes in shambles. #now a few decades later banking on nostalgia to make profit is what big things do #bringing back the thing from your childhood to show it again but it's off because what brought it back is not love for the thing #it's being brought back because of capitalism. the thing that corrupted it in the first place is trying to bring it back. #sorry i still ramble in the tags :x

[sideeffx]

Welcome to my thoughts on FF13

Final Fantasy is dear to my heart much like everyone else’s but I find me and a small segment of other people appreciate it for traits that the wider gaming sphere is not focused on. Which isn’t fine, because people are liking things the wrong way. Anyways I want to talk about Final Fantasy 13, the infamous entry in the series and how it’s both not that bad but also pretty mid. A lot of people were critical of it, but I’m coming at it from a place of love. Because it’s unironically one of my favorite entries, but I think it makes a few missteps that prevented it from being great. Though I don’t think the game is the proverbial satan its made out to be (that’s 15). Beware of spoilers for a 10+ year old game I suppose.Also this is gonna be rambling instead of a clean structured review.

I’m sure if you’re reading this you know the gist of the FF13 story, the Fal’cie, glorified as inhuman protectors use humans they’ve branded called L’cie to carry out nebulous missions for them called Focuses. The entire question of fate vs shaping your own destiny comes up and the game works in favor of changing one’s destiny. I think the story is actually *gasp* good. But it could’ve been better

FF is a video game first and foremost, so it’s important for gameplay/story integration to be there. I think, a lot of the problem came from the player’s inability to care about the world as it stood because you don’t really much interact with it. I suppose then, my critiques aren’t with the story writing but how the game is structured to present that writing to you. Before I explain my complaints, let me dig into what I felt like the central themes. 

Nature vs Technology, Destiny vs Autonomy, and touching on colonization. The people of Cocoon live in shell that literally floats above Gran Pulse. The game making the point that its creation was predicated on stealing natural resources from Pulse’s inhabitants to give us a technologically advanced city that is light years ahead of everything else. Those who live in Cocoon are fed propaganda that Gran Pulse is a hellish and lawless place that they couldn’t hope to survive on, these sentiments are fueled by the war of transgression that saw Pulse’s inhabitants attempting to “invade” Cocoon. 

Of course, we could talk about the behind the scenes manipulations of all the Fal’cie involved here. Where Cocoon is really a city created to harvest human souls and thus it’s inevitable fate is to crash into Pulse and bring millions of people with it. I think the concept here is interesting, on the basis that the supposed utopian society Cocoon lives in is actually dystopian due to this revelation. However it’s not something that comes out of left field, rather the people are being put in boiling water to see how much their ignorance will win out. Case in point, the “Purge,” the most on the nose metaphor for ethnic cleansing you could probably ever see. Where those believed to be tainted by the lands of Gran Pulse are cast out of Cocoon by the Fal’cie and forced to live in the land viewed as backwards and evil.

In a way I see FF13 as a bit of a take on FF7′s story conventions where it heavily critiques capitalism but comes at it from an angle that FF7 didn’t, where it factors the exploitation of various ethnic groups heavily contributing to a nation’s wealth into the mix. As history has shown, a country doesn’t rapidly evolve based on its own merit. Because the enormous consumption of natural resources inevitably comes from somewhere else, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself. Too bad the game doesn’t fully want to commit to any of this! 

My problem with 13 is the same problem I had with 7 but like, worse. While 7 had the entire midgar arc before it hit you square in the face with the whole JENOVA plotline and Sephiroth’s reveal, 13 kind of just veers wildly off course immediately and its allusions to the Pulse vs Cocoon conflict are tangential at best. While I argue the themes are obvious given a bit of critical thinking, I can concede that you can’t make a gamer do the work if you don’t give them a decent hook to be interested in the first place. For better or for worse 13 is a very character focused game where it places their struggles at the forefront and thus sculpts the bigger picture around that. 

Your characters are fugitives, perpetually on the run due to their branding as L’cie and the game reflects that by never really letting you sit and catch your breath. Everything is a point A to point B hallway, you can never really veer off course, and there are no towns to stop at. FF has always been at the least, semi linear, not favoring an open ended world where the player is meant to explore every single facet of it. But 13 forgets that the reason many FF games don’t feel linear is because they do their best to obfuscate it at every turn. Towns are always an important facet, where you can socialize with NPCs if you so choose and just generally recharge before the next batch of ingame events. The dungeons are interesting puzzles you’re asked to solve and thus take your brainpower away from thinking about how you ran straight to the place. And generally there are just personal events you can catch between characters where they’re just, talking. 

Not to mention the battle system itself, while interesting on its face was a bit of a flawed way to take us fully away from the turn based ATB days and give us something in the same vein, but different. Paradigm shifting and the various roles turned combat into an interesting puzzle at times, but it quickly denigrated into being solved extremely quickly. It doesn’t help that the game hand holds you aggressively for a gigantic portion of the story. Your party is fixed, Lightning can’t be removed from it, and their general roles are spoonfed to you. Lightning is a mixed attacker, Snow is a tank, Vanille is your dual Healer/Debuffer, Hope is a healer/buffer, Sazh is an offensive buffer, and Fang is an offensive debuffer. Eventually they all get the opportunity to act out of these assigned roles as the crystarium unlocks. But I felt as if it was too little too late, as by that time players are much too comfortable investing in their presets rather than veering off course. 

I think this was just a general symptom of the trends at the time though. Nowadays, gaming difficulty is opening up as a talking point with relation to accessibility, but so much of the backlash to “easy” games (and thus the rise of Dark Souls’s niche) was that mainstream gaming made you feel kind of stupid. There wasn’t that same sense of freedom that was in the 2000s, because players could easily get confused and frustrated with the games of old that plopped you in the world and expected you to figure things out yourself. Devs in response overcorrected and treated the player as if they were children who just learned how to walk. 13 as a result didn’t bring that level of customization you expect from FF into the mix until you had already formed a solid opinion on its battle system.  

I think in this sense, the gameplay/story integration is extremely poor and one of the reasons 13 got so much hate, but wasn’t properly identified by gamers because we were kind of in the midst of an alt right pressure cooker that years later led to gamergate. Case in point being that the biggest critique of the game was Lightning being protagonist, Vanille being found to be annoying, basically a parade of misogynistic backlash. Gaming was only just beginning to open up to the wider public when it was previously a “male nerd” thing and thus gamers were not exactly ready to receive a female cast that was so highly focused on in Lightning, Fang and Vanille. Perhaps if 13′s premise was given to us now it’d be received warmly and seen as breaking barriers, but in the 2010s, Lightning was compared to a female Cloud in a derogatory way, Vanille’s accent was described as “fake” by some people (despite that not being true whatsoever) and just generally grating due to her blinding positivity, and Fang was subject to endless lesbophobic jokes. There were a lot of genuine critiques of the game as well, because the backlash was once again overwhelming. But I’m not sure whether they were drowned out or whether Square heard them properly, given how the sequels to 13 kind of veered off course into their own things. 

I guess, what I can take from this altogether. Is that 13 had a great base that could’ve used gameplay systems to better integrate you in the world itself and failed at that. Despite it all, the game is about a 7 out of 10 at worst, and the fanbase will not let this go and act like it’s a stain on the franchise. In many ways I think people just weren’t ready for what it brought to the table and SE failed in delivering the truly interesting parts of it well. I want to say that I hope they learned their lesson, but 15 was a development disaster and I think 16 is the first time I see them not do anything new with the emerging trends and instead play into them without any of the original spin I’d come to expect from FF. In this vein all I can hope for is another studio doing what SE couldn’t and giving us a truly thought provoking feminist masterpiece. Oh well.

.

[mjvnivsbrvtvs]

hi! so we have established at this point that you have A Lot Of thoughts about antony and brutus. but how does caesar (julius, not the little bitch octavian) play into that? bc like. my knowledge and impression of them is very limited and mainly constructed from watching hbo rome and idk. i think it'd be fun to throw caesar in the mix. love all the art and writing on your blog btw! have a nice day.

Hey, okay! So this used to be over 30 pages long (Machiavelli and Caligula got involved and that's when things got out of hand), but through the power of friendship and two late night writing dates fueled by coffee, I’ve cut it way down to under 10. Many thanks to the people who listened to me ramble about it at length, and also to a dear friend for helping me cut this down to under ten pages!

Also, thank you! I'm glad you enjoy the stuff I make! It makes me very happy to hear that!

And quickly, a Disclaimer: I’m not an academic, I’m not a classicist, I’m not a historian, and I spend a lot of time very stressed out that I’ve tricked people into thinking I’m someone who has any kind of merit in this area. It's probably best to treat this as an abstract character analysis!

On the other hand, I love talking about dead men, so, with enthusiasm, here we go!

For this, I’m going to cut Shakespeare and HBO Rome out of the framework and focus more on a historical spin.

Caesar is a combination of a manipulator and a catalyst. A Bad Omen. The remaining wound that’s poisoning Rome.

Cassius gets a lot of the blame for Brutus’ turn to assassination, but it overlooks that Brutus was already inclined towards political ambition, as were most men involved in the political landscape of the time.

Furthermore, although Sulla had actually raised the number of praetorships available from six to eight, there were still only two consulships available. There was always the chance that death or disgrace might remove some of the competition and hence ease the bottleneck. But, otherwise, it was at the top of the ladder that the competition was particularly fierce: whereas in previous years one in three praetors would have gone on to become consul, from the 80s BC onwards the chances were one in four. For the senators who had made it this far, it mattered that they should try to achieve their consulship in the earliest year allowed to them by law. To fail in this goal once was humiliating; to fail at the polls twice would be deemed a signal disgrace for a man like Brutus.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

The way Caesar offered Brutus political power the way that he did, and Brutus accepting it, locked them into the assassination outcome.

Here is a man who’s built his entire image around honor and liberty and virtu, around being a staunch defender of morals and the republic

In these heated circumstances, Brutus composed a bitter tract On the Dictatorship of Pompey (De Dictatura Pompei), in which he staunchly opposed the idea of giving Pompey such a position of power. ‘It is better to rule no one than to be another man’s slave’, runs one of the only snippets of this composition to survive today: ‘for one can live honourably without power’, Brutus explained, ‘but to live as a slave is impossible’. In other words, Brutus believed it would be better for the Senate to have no imperial power at all than to have imperium and be subject to Pompey’s whim.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

and you give him political advancement, but without the honor needed for this advancement to mean anything?

At the same time, however, Brutus had gained his position via extremely un-republican means: appointment by a dictator rather than election by the people. As the name of the famous career path, the cursus honorum, suggests, political office was perceived as an honour at Rome. But it was one which had to be bestowed by the populus Romanus in recognition of a man’s dignitas.69 In other words, a man’s ‘worth’ or ‘standing’ was only really demonstrated by his prior services to the state and his moral qualities, and that was what was needed to gain public recognition. Brutus had got it wrong. As Cicero not too subtly reminded him in the treatise he dedicated to Brutus: ‘Honour is the reward for virtue in the considered opinion of the citizenry.’ But the man who gains power (imperium) by some other circumstance, or even against the will of the people, he continues, ‘has laid his hands only on the title of honour, but it is not real honour’.70

Brutus may have secured political office, then, but he had not done so honourably; nor had he acted in a manner that would earn him a reputation for virtue or everlasting fame.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

Brutus in the image that he fashioned for himself was not compatible with the way Caesar was setting him up to be a political successor, and there was really never going to be any other outcome than the one that happened.

The Brutus of Shakespeare and Plutarch’s greatest tragedy was that he was pushed into something he wouldn’t have done otherwise. The Brutus of history’s greatest tragedy was accepting Caesar’s forgiveness after the Caesar-Pompey conflict, and then selling out for political ambition, because Caesar's forgiveness is not benevolent.

Rather than have his enemies killed, he offered them mercy or clemency -- clementia in Latin. As Caesar wrote to his advisors, “Let this be our new method of conquering -- to fortify ourselves by mercy and generosity.” Caesar pardoned most of his enemies and forbore confiscating their property. He even promoted some of them to high public office.

This policy won him praise from no less a figure than Marcus Tullius Cicero, who described him in a letter to Aulus Caecina as “mild and merciful by nature.” But Caecina knew a thing or two about dictators, since he’d had to publish a flattering book about Caesar in order to win his pardon after having opposed him in the civil war. Caecina and other beneficiaries of Caesar’s unusual clemency took it in a far more ambivalent way. To begin with, most of them were, like Caesar, Roman nobles. Theirs was a culture of honor and status; asking a peer for a pardon was a serious humiliation. So Caesar’s “very power of granting favors weighed heavily on free people,” as Florus, a historian and panegyrist of Rome, wrote about two centuries after the dictator’s death. One prominent noble, in fact, ostentatiously refused Caesar’s clemency. Marcius Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger, was a determined opponent of populist politics and Caesar’s most bitter foe. They had clashed years earlier over Caesar’s desire to show mercy to the Catiline conspirators; Cato argued vigorously for capital punishment and convinced the Senate to execute them. Now he preferred death to Caesar’s pardon. “I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts,” Cato said; he told his son, "I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.

-Barry Strauss, Caesar and the Dangers of Forgiveness

something else that's a fun adjacent to the topic that's fun to think about:

The link between ‘sparing’ and ‘handing over’ is common in the ancient world.763 Paul also uses παραδίδωμι again, denoting ‘hand over, give up a person’ (Bauer et al. 2000:762).764 The verb παραδίδωμι especially occurs in connection with war (Eschner 2010b:197; Gaventa 2011:272).765 However, in Romans 8:32, Paul uses παραδίδωμι to focus on a court image (Eschner 2010b:201).766 Christina Eschner (2010b:197) convincingly argues that Paul’s use of παραδίδωμι refers to the ‘Hingabeformulierungen’ as the combination of the personal object of the handing over of a person in the violence of another person, especially the handing over of a person to an enemy.767 Moreover, Eschner (2009:676) convincingly argues that Isaiah 53 is not the pre-tradition for Romans 8:32.

Annette Potgieter, Contested Body: Metaphors of dominion in Romans 5-8

Along with the internal conflict of Pompey, the murderer of Brutus’ father, and Caesar, the figurehead for everything that goes against what Brutus stands for, Brutus accepting Caesar’s forgiveness isn’t an act of benevolence, regardless of Caesar’s intentions.

On wards, Caesar owns Brutus. Caesar benefits from having Brutus as his own, he inherits Brutus’ reputation, he inherits a better PR image in the eyes of the Roman people. On wards, nothing Brutus does is without the ugly stain of Caesar. His career is no longer his own, his life is no longer fully his own, his legacy is no longer entirely his. Brutus becomes a man divided.

And it’s not like it was an internal struggle, it was an entire spectacle. Hypocrisy is theatrical. Call yourself a man of honor and then you sell out? The people of Rome will remember that, and they’re going to make sure you know it.

After this certain men at the elections proposed for consuls the tribunes previously mentioned, and they not only privately approached Marcus Brutus and such other persons as were proud-spirited and attempted to persuade them, but also tried to incite them to action publicly. 12 1 Making the most of his having the same name as the great Brutus who overthrew the Tarquins, they scattered broadcast many pamphlets, declaring that he was not truly that man's descendant; for the older Brutus had put to death both his sons, the only ones he had, when they were mere lads, and left no offspring whatever. 2 Nevertheless, the majority pretended to accept such a relationship, in order that Brutus, as a kinsman of that famous man, might be induced to perform deeds as great. They kept continually calling upon him, shouting out "Brutus, Brutus!" and adding further "We need a Brutus." 3 Finally on the statue of the early Brutus they wrote "Would that thou wert living!" and upon the tribunal of the living Brutus (for he was praetor at the time and this is the name given to the seat on which the praetor sits in judgment) "Brutus, thou sleepest," and "Thou art not Brutus."

Cassius Dio

Brutus knew. Cassius knew. Caesar knew. You can’t escape your legacy when you’re the one who stamped it on coins.

Caesar turned Brutus into the dagger that would cut, and Brutus himself isn’t free from this injury. It’s a mutual betrayal, a mutual dooming.

By this time Caesar found himself being attacked from every side, and as he glanced around to see if he could force a way through his attackers, he saw Brutus closing in upon him with his dagger drawn. At this he let go of Casca’s hand which he had seized, muffled up his head in his robe, and yielded up his body to his murderers’ blows. Then the conspirators flung themselves upon him with such a frenzy of violence, as they hacked away with their daggers, that they even wounded one another. Brutus received a stab in the hand as he tried to play his part in the slaughter, and every one of them was drenched in blood.

Plutarch

For Antony, Caesar is a bad sign.

Brutus and Antony are fucked over by the generation they were born in, etc etc the cannibalization of Rome on itself, the Third Servile War was the match to the gasoline already on the streets of Rome, the last generation of Romans etc etc etc. They are counterparts to each other, displaced representatives of a time already gone by the time they were alive.

Rome spends its years in a state of civil war after civil war, political upheaval, and death. Neither Brutus or Antony will ever really know stability, as instability is hallmark of the times. Both of them are at something of a disadvantage, although Brutus has what Antony does not, and what Brutus has is what let’s him create his own career. Until Caesar, Brutus is owned by no one.

This is not the case for Antony.

You can track Antony’s life by who he’s attached to. Very rarely is he ever truly a man unto himself, there is always someone nearby.

In his youth, it is said, Antony gave promise of a brilliant future, but then he became a close friend of Curio and this association seems to have fallen like a blight upon his career. Curio was a man who had become wholly enslaved to the demands of pleasure, and in order to make Antony more pliable to his will, he plunged him into a life of drinking bouts, love-affairs, and reckless spending. The consequence was that Antony quickly ran up debts of an enormous size for so young a man, the sum involved being two hundred and fifty talents. Curio provided security for the whole of this amount, but his father heard of it and forbade Antony his house. Antony then attached himself for a short while to Clodius, the most notorious of all the demagogues of his time for his lawlessness and loose-living, and took part in the campaigns of violence which at that time were throwing political affairs at Rome into chaos.

Plutarch

(although, in contrast to Brutus, we rarely lose sight of Antony. As a person, we can see him with a kind of clarity, if one looks a little bit past the Augustan propaganda. He is, at all times, human.)

Antony being figuratively or literally attached to a person starts early, and continues politically. While Brutus has enough privilege to brute force his way into politics despite Cicero’s lamentation of a promising life being thrown off course, Antony will instead follow a different career path that echoes in his personal life and defines his relationships.

Whereas some young men often attached or indebted themselves to a patron or a military leader at the beginning of their political lives,

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

+

3. During his stay in Greece he was invited by Gabinius, a man of consular rank, to accompany the Roman force which was about to sail for Syria. Antony declined to join him in a private capacity, but when he was offered the command of the cavalry he agreed to serve in the campaign.

Plutarch

To take it a step further, it even defines how he’s perceived today looking back: it’s never just Antony, it’s always Antony and---

It can be read as someone being taken advantage of, in places, survival in others, especially in Antony's early life. Other times, it appears like Antony himself is the one who manipulates things to his favor, casting aside people and realigning himself back to an advantage.

or when he saw an opportunity for faster advancement, he was willing to place the blame on a convenient scapegoat or to disregard previous loyalties, however important they had been. His desertion of Fulvia's memory in 40, and, much later, of Lepidus, Sextus Pompey, and Octavia, produced significant political gains. This characteristic, which Caesar discovered to his cost in 47, gives the sharp edge to Antony's personality which Syme's portrait lacks, especially when he attributes Antony's actions to a 'sentiment of loyalty' or describes him as a 'frank and chivalrous soldier'. In this context, one wonders what became of Fadia.19

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 47 B.C.

Caesar inherits Antony, and like Brutus, locks him in for a doomed ending.

The way Caesar writes about Antony smacks of someone viewing another person as something more akin to a dog, and it carries over until it’s bitter conclusion.

Caesar benefits from Antony immensely. The people love Antony, the military loves Antony. He’s charming, he’s self aware, he’s good at what he does. Above all of that, he has political ambitions of a similar passion as Brutus.

Antony drew some political benefit from his genial personality. Even Cicero, who from at least 49 did not like him,15 was prepared to regard some of his earlier misdemeanours as harmless.16 Bluff good humour, moderate intelligence, at least a passing interest in literature, and an ability to be the life and soul of a social gathering all contributed to make him a charming companion and to bind many important people to him. He had a lieutenant's ability to follow orders and a willingness to listen to advice, even (one might say especially) from intelligent women.17 These attributes made Antony able to handle some situations very well."1

There was a more important side to his personality, however, which contributed to his political survival. Antony was ruthless in his quest for pre-eminence

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

None of this matters, because after all Antony does for Caesar

Plutarch's comment that Curio brought Antony into Caesar's camp is surely mistaken.59 Anthony had been serving as Caesar's officer from perhaps as early as 53, after his return from Syria.60 He is described as legatus in late 52,61 and was later well known as Caesar's quaestor.62 It is more likely that the reverse of the statement is true, that Antony assisted in bringing Curio over to Caesar. If this were so, then he performed a signal service for Caesar, for gaining Curio meant attaching Fulvia, who provided direct access to the Clodian clientela in the city. Such valuable political connections served to increase Antony's standing with Caesar, and to set him apart from other officers in his army.63

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

Caesar still, for whatever reasons, fucks over Antony spectacularly with the will. Loyalty is repaid with dismissal, and it will bury the Republic for good.

It’s not enough for Caesar to screw him over just once, it becomes generational and ugly. Caesar lives on through Octavian: it becomes Octavian’s brand, his motif, propaganda wielded like a knife. Octavian, thanks to Caesar, will bring Antony to his bitter conclusion

And for my "bitter" conclusion, I’ll sign off by saying that there are actual scholars on Antony who are more well versed than I am who can go into depth about the Caesar-Octavian-Antony dynamic (and how it played out with Caligula) better than I can, and scholarship on Brutus consists mostly of looking at an outline of a man and trying to guess what the inside was like.

At the end of the day, Caesar was the instigator, active manipulator, and catalyst for the final act of the Republic.

I hope that this was at least entertaining to read!

#i cut out A Lot and its thanks to the patience of Friends that i got it down to the length that it is #like i cannot stress enough that i worked machiavelli into this and started dissecting the whole #brutus-cassius conflict with the framework that it was orchestrated by caesar #typically tho i tend to treat caesar as a symbolic device. a representation of something Very Wrong #this is a tag for asks

[goonlalagoon]

A smile in your heart (no better place to start) || Second Star to the Left

Read on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33459862

(Spoilers through to end of ep 10 ahead)

It’s been weeks - months - and Bell’s thought about what they could say, when they’re finally on the ground and face to face with Gwen for the first time. Thank you, that’s a strong contender; they know themselves well enough to know they’re more likely to go with how did you do it? Maybe this time they’ll actually be able to say I love you, though Gwen seems adept at picking it up even when they can’t put the words to it. In their head, they planned for it to be - not dramatic, because they’re supposed to be a fugitive and they don’t want to draw attention, but meaningful. The kind of memory that’s something to think back on with misty eyes and fond words.

Capital-R-Romantic, as Gwen termed it so long ago, that first grudging conversation.

What they actually say is,

“Wow, you really do have a great jawline.”

It’s…admittedly not the worst thing they’ve ever said to someone they have a crush on, but that isn’t exactly the metric Bell wanted to measure this by. They’re standing just feet away from each other, drinking each other in. The silence starts to shade awkward before Gwen swallows, shrugs, gives a shaky smile. Bell remembers a letter, one of the first, remembers reading the clouds are all blurry and the twisting mix of regret and guilty relief, because they didn’t want Gwen to be upset but they couldn’t help but cling onto the fact that she was, that someone was upset on their behalf.

“Well, I never got to see your school graduating photos, so I had no expectations of your jawline, Bell, but hey! It’s a pretty good one too, so congratulations!”

Gods, they’ve missed that laugh.

Someone interrupts them then, of course, because the settler ship has just landed and scout Hartley is very much in demand by everyone, not just Bell. There’s a whole crew of people looking to start a new life, and all of them need their scout to tell them what to do, where to go, what to watch out for. They wave a forlorn goodbye, find a place to sit and idly look around, trying to match this new settlement (very new, scout Summers could probably gauge to the day when these buildings were set up by the wear and tear, even after all this time) to every overheard exploit they’d listened in on over the years.

Gwen had moved the settlement into the trees, combined the natural firebreak with dug trenches to add a layer of defence. There’s a clear track that Bell would bet leads straight to water by the quickest route, an escape path to the coast. They think that perhaps the two of them should put their heads together, figure out emergency bundles for evacuation protocols. Food and water, a spare repair kit for any prosthetics…by the time they find Gwen again, hours of running around helping the settlers - the other settlers - move in, Gigo has a whole list stored. Ideas and checks and suggestions that Bell got halfway through recording before realising that maybe Gwen already thought of all of this and they no longer needed to jot everything down to cram into their four hour window of contact.

They live on the same planet, now. There’s no limit on contact, except that the first several months after settlement are absolute chaos for the scout, and from what Bell recalled hadn’t seemed likely to slow down even before the apocalypse threw everything out the metaphorical window.

Maybe with two of them with scout training it’ll be less…just less. Gwen might be able to get if not the mandated six hours of sleep at least enough to average out more at four or five. They weren’t going to comment on it, but it was easy to tell she hadn’t been getting her full rest anyway - probably hadn’t for months, dark circles under her eyes like permanent bruises.

They’re standing awkward feet away from each other again, and Bell knows there’s going to have to be a conversation about that soon, because it hadn’t really occurred to them before that they know a lot of things about Gwen, years and years of stories and rambling conversations, but there’s things you don’t learn without being in person. Personal space, definitions and comfort thereof, the body language and facial expressions to interpret to know what’s welcomed and what isn’t.

“Hey, so, uh…I know there’s a protocol that I’m supposed to follow when my settlers arrive, and all, but there’s something else I want to do instead.” Bell huffs a laugh, steals a shy glance to see Gwen’s answering smirk.

“Another sworn class tradition to fulfil?”

“Nope! We never talked that far ahead except as jokes. We knew the stats, y’know? But - you told me, the first day, that I should watch the sunrise, that that was something I shouldn’t miss, my first morning. And I don’t…we don’t have that, but I’ve had a long time to find my own wonderfully inspiring views of nature here and I wanted - Bell, you haven’t been on a planet for years and you were with me through everything, but you’ve never seen any of it in real life and I want to show you all of it, and I know where to start.”

Bell thinks about muttering about protocol, for the form of it, for the joke that can be dragged out of it, familiar banter, but they decide not to. It’s no longer their job to care about protocol, and anyway the only reason they cared about the protocol was to keep their scouts safe. Gwen is standing right in front of them, leaning gently against Boots with a casually familiar stance - if they pointed it out, Bell knows she wouldn’t even have thought about it. This is just what Gwen does, when she’s standing about with nothing to do with her hands; rests an elbow companionably atop Boots, one foot hooked around a standing leg and balanced on the toe of her boot.

Gwen is standing right there, safe and alive and happy, so protocol can sort itself, thanks.

(Bell realises they have their own hands in their pockets, their own casual stance, and wonders if Gwen is noticing that too, drinking in all of the unconcious habits that it would never occur to either of them to verbalise. All the little tics and quirks that don’t translate over a FTL comms.)

It’s not a long walk, and it’s more silent than Bell would have guessed, but it’s comfortable. Novel, really, to not have to narrate things aloud because they can just look and see what Gwen is doing, can point at a bird with a dorsal fin and pause to watch it flutter around rather than try to describe it.

They can’t stop stealing glances sideways, catching Gwen more often than not doing the same, both of them collapsing into giggles about it each time. It’s just so surreal, to be walking side by side, after all this time. It feels like a dream, like one of the stories Gwen tells Boots at night - once upon a time, there were two explorers, setting out through the trees…

The light dances on the waves, well below their cliff edge destination. At some point Gwen must have rolled a fallen log over to act as a bench, because it’s too well placed to be natural and there’s a fire-pit dug and lined with careful stones. Close enough to be cosy, but far away from the treeline itself to be safe. The light is dancing on the waves and the grass is drifting in the breeze, a periwinkle blue that Bell is used to seeing in photos if they thought of it at all. Something that had seemed so wonderful and new, when scout Hartley made her first observations, but had drifted into commonplace. A detail that wasn’t worth mentioning any more.

“One day, I’m going to make a boat and go explore that.” Gwen waves grandly at the horizon; she’s leaning her head on Bell’s shoulder, and Bell has decided that they will happily never move again. The two of them can just stay there, forever, Gwen’s head on their shoulder and the soft whisper of waves below. “Once my settlers are…settled, and can be left without supervision for more than a few hours at a time.”

“Already missing the solitude? Mourning all that lovely peace and quiet?”

“What solitude? I had a very efficient scout minder in my ear, I’ll have you know! I didn’t have time to get used to the peace and quiet before beep, time for another check in. Hartley, have you followed the itinary, Hartley, did you maintain a reasonable sleep schedule, Hartley, have you eaten a balanced meal at your officially directed time selected for nutritional optimisation…”

“I’m honestly surprised that you went for reminding me of my remote presence first rather than protesting that Boots was with you the whole time. And I would also like to ask, in the spirit of enquiry, have you done any of those things without my input?” Gwen shakes with barely suppressed laughter and doesn’t bother answering; Bell tries not to join in, because Gwen’s head is still on their shoulder and they’re still determined not to dislodge it until they really have to. “And…hey, I also told you to go watch the sunrise, and you found this instead. I - when did you find this? You never mentioned a little ocean watching viewpoint.”

“I - uh, set it up a few months ago. I didn’t know if it had worked, or if it had all gone wrong, or - and I spent so long pacing around here and wondering what you’d think of the view…”

“Aw, and you say I’m a romantic.”

“With a capital R, yes, you so are. I’m your favourite person, you said so, it was very romantic.”

“That was possibly the least romantic declaration of love that has ever been given. I congratulated you on your jawline, Gwen, I write poetry in my spare time and that was the best I could come up with. I should have just stopped talking - writing, I don’t even have the excuse of not being able to edit it out, the first bit was fine but I kept rambling.”

“It was romantic and I loved it and I have saved all of your letters in three separate back ups to make sure I don’t lose any of them.”

Bell laughs, curls an arm around Gwen’s shoulders as easy as breathing, and lets themselves relax for what feels like the first time in months. A flock of birds takes off from the trees, darting past them over the cliff edge, setting out over the waves. The sun glints off their feathers, the raised fin, a riot of colour catching the light as they watch, leaning against each other, shoulder to shoulder. Gwen is beaming out at it all, and Bell can feel their cheeks creasing to match.

It isn’t a sunrise, but this - this is something close enough, a snapshot of a new world, a new horizon that they get to learn, the first day of a new life.

#My writing #second star to the left #sstl #This went very differently to how I planned it but oh well #Bell Summers/Gwen Hartley

[magicofthepen]

Having put some amount of thought into similar concepts, I would very much love to hear about “Gallifrey BUT FANTASY”

Send me a WIP doc title (list here) and I’ll talk about it!

Thank you for asking about this one! It’s an idea that’s been slowly coalescing for at least a year and a half now – it’s never quite made it onto the active projects list because it’s a big one, and I keep having other big projects that I want to tackle first. But I love gradually coming back to and building this au, and hopefully I’ll write it eventually?

The general world premise is pretty straightforward: magic replaces both time travel and regeneration, so it’s a magic-based world instead of a tech-based one, and also the ability to do magic is only given to certain Gallifreyans (a Time Lords = mages sort of thing). Also in this world the different temporal powers/planets are different countries/kingdoms/empires. 

The story itself would be a series of three longfics that starts with a very narrow cast and gradually broadens to a more sprawling epic fantasy vibe as the series continues. A quick overview:

Fic 1 is a Romana/Leela Rapunzel AU (inspired by Tangled specifically tbh), ft. Pandora as the Mother Gothel figure. 

Fic 2 is the immediate aftermath of Romana’s return to Gallifrey and the "power struggle over the throne” conflict that emerges between her and Darkel. (Narvin and Brax show up in this one.)

Fic 3 is set some number of years after Fic 2. It’s a “Pandora returns” fic, but narratively it’s more inspired by the Time War. Devastating magical conflict, large cast of characters, but does have a hopeful/happy-ish ending. (Also: Romana/Leela/Narvin endgame.) 

Lots more rambling under the cut: 

Fic 1: Rapunzel AU

This fic is technically Tangled-inspired, but I should disclaim that I haven’t actually seen Tangled in many years, so my memories of it are somewhat vague? But there’s one scene from Tangled that inspired a scene in this fic, plus a certain similar enemies-to-friends-to-lovers vibe going on, and some inspiration for Leela’s backstory (if I’m remembering that movie correctly)? 

Romana is the Rapunzel figure, of course. The heiress stolen away from the kingdom as a very young child, so she doesn’t remember anything before being raised by Pandora. In this story, Pandora’s endgame isn’t to keep her trapped away forever – she’s grooming Romana to be able to possess her when the time is right and take the throne for herself. (Still need to work out a lot of plot details, including how much contact Romana has with the outside world, how Pandora is able to manifest without a body?? (because she’s definitely still a dark spirit of some kind in this world....), the exact nature of magic and magical rituals and how exactly Pandora stealing Romana and raising her benefits her endgame.)

(Also there’s an Etra Prime reference here, with Romana being trapped away from the world for twenty years. In this au, Pandora is also the stand-in for the Daleks – aka who/what Romana is most afraid of and traumatized by.)

Leela’s backstory is a work in progress, so I don’t want to say too much in case I change it, but at the point her life and Romana’s collide, she’s lived in Gallifrey before and it was not a good time. (On a side note: I feel like this fic may be a thinly veiled excuse to give Leela a sword.) 

This fic majorly focuses on Romana and Leela’s relationship arc, aka “extremely sheltered book smart mage who's been cut off from love and connection her whole life” meets “warrior who’s traveled a lot but has never really found a home anywhere and is (probably?) on the run from the Gallifreyan authorities for Reasons.” Short version: their lives collide, Romana gets tangled up in Leela’s plot drama (which is also mostly tbd) and ends up sneaking away from Pandora, they fall in love, just as Romana starts to see how much she’s been used and manipulated her whole life, Pandora tries to tear them apart and use both of them as pawns in her plan. Of course, they defeat her and all ends well (for now).

Fic 2: Struggle for the Throne

For Reasons (that will be uncovered later), the throne of Gallifrey has quite recently become vacant – just in time for Romana and Leela to show up in the capital city (they don’t ever go there in Fic 1). Romana just wanted to see where she was from after finally escaping Pandora, but in this world, Gallifrey has some sort of monarchy/inheritance of power thing going on, and Romana is actually the closest heir to the throne. The next closest is Darkel, who assumed she would take the throne, before Romana suddenly returns from the dead.   

Except Romana didn’t come back to take the throne. That was Pandora’s plan, Romana doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life and had no idea that she was walking into a power vacuum situation. But she ends up seeing how very terrible Darkel is, and how very terrible Gallifrey is, and starts genuinely wanting to be in charge so she can Change Things. She sees how terrible Gallifrey is to Leela (and other outsiders and non-mages) and wants to make this place better for her.....but over time gets swept up in the power struggles and the need to court favor with the other royals, which strains her relationship with Leela. 

Meanwhile, Leela’s dealing with returning to Gallifrey, a place where she already feels unwelcome (and probably is in some trouble with the law and needs to clear her name? again, lots of backstory details are tbd). And so she ends up struggling to decide if she really wants to be with Romana, if Romana’s going to end up in charge of this kingdom.....but she also hates Darkel and wants to help defeat her claim to the throne? I think there’s also going to be a plot thread in Fic 1 involving the village Leela was born in, and if so, this fic will also be dealing with the fallout of those events from Fic 1. (Keeping things vague because it’s all pretty up in the air right now.) 

And we finally meet spymaster Narvin, who is a main character from here through the rest of the series! I’m not going to get into his backstory in this au right now (because some things are still tbd, some things I don’t want to spoil), but he is not pleased about this young upstart heiress showing up out of nowhere and getting power handed to her without ever actually living in this kingdom. He doesn’t trust that she’s actually loyal to Gallifrey, especially since rumor has it she was raised and given/taught magic by some dark spirit – which goes against the long-standing Gallifreyan traditions of how magic is granted and taught and raises some major questions about how safe the kingdom would be in her hands. (These are also the prevailing arguments in general for tossing Romana’s claim to the throne.) 

Narvin and Leela also have.....a history. Not a particularly positive one. 

So this fic is also slowburn enemies-to-friends with Narvin + Romana and Narvin + Leela, as they gradually grow to understand and trust each other, and ultimately all work together against Darkel.

Brax is also in this fic? I am quite nervous about Brax being in this fic (I don’t feel qualified to write Brax! I usually avoid writing Brax for that reason!) But he’s the main “well-respected mage from an old family” who actually vouches for Romana and tries to help soothe the fears of the more conservative royals about supporting her claim to the throne. I’d also like to do a version of the “Brax as Romana’s tutor” thing, where he ends up working with her on developing her magic, since she didn’t go through the Academy system and is worried that her magic is tainted by Pandora. There may also end up being an almost-arranged marriage plotline with Romana and Brax, where certain people would be more willing to support Romana’s claim if she married someone respectable (and this is another thing that drives a wedge in Romana and Leela’s relationship). (She ends up turning him down, ultimately.) 

So it’s a fic about characters figuring out what they want in life and figuring out how to communicate better with each other and be better at relationships and friendships, all the while trying to stop Darkel from seizing the throne. 

Fic 3: Magical War

So there’s a significant time skip between Fic 2 and Fic 3 where the characters are going about their lives post-Darkel’s defeat and trying to make Gallifrey a somewhat less terrible place. 

But, however Romana and Leela defeat Pandora in Fic 1, it isn’t permanent. And when Pandora returns, it’s with an army of magical spirits (or something along those lines) that are slowly encroaching on the kingdom and poisoning magic itself (aka the Dogma virus But Fantasy). 

I don’t want to spoil too many of the plot details here, but this fic is a lot of “fantasy twist on specific events in the Gallifrey audios” – it draws some elements from the civil war, some from the Time War (especially because of that whole “Pandora is also Metaphorically the Daleks” thing), plus some other Specific Things from other audios. (Basically, I tossed the Gallifrey audios in a soup and stirred and made it fantasy?) 

Slow skirmishes and terrible attacks on the outskirts of the kingdom keep happening, Pandora’s forces draw closer and closer until they reach the capitol itself – and things go very wrong, and our main characters end up needing to wrest control back from Pandora (which may involve upending the entire system of magic in Gallifrey in the process? again, still figuring out how this fic is going to end – all I know is that unlike the actual audios, it will be a hopeful/happy ending). Lots of personal sacrifices are made, lots of old traumas need to be grappled with. Also re: Narvin/Leela and Narvin/Romana, this is the “friends to lovers” part of the “enemies to friends to lovers” slowburn arc. 

(Probably my biggest writing struggle for this fic is that I don’t really know what Brax’s arc is going to be. I’m not that familiar with Brax (I only know him from the Gallifrey audios), and I’m not strongly invested in his character, so I don’t feel like I’d do a good job writing him? But this is an ensemble fic and I can’t just ignore his character, so. it’s a challenge I don’t yet know how to deal with?)

But overall, one of the reasons I’m quite interested in this fic series is because it gives me the chance to write a version of these characters’ stories where things do get rough, but they do get a happy ending of sorts. (And more specifically, I get to write a version of Romana’s story where her self-sacrificing/suicidal tendencies actually get addressed, and she slowly starts to heal.) 

So that was a lot of rambling and vagueness, but thanks for giving me the excuse to talk about this au! It’s quite a daunting project (I have little experience with longfic and with plotty fic), but I’d really love to tackle it someday! (And I would love to hear about any fantasy aus you’ve developed!!)

#gallifreyanathearts #gallifrey audios #romana x leela #gallifrey ot3 #this idea didn't start out as three fics #it was a collection of multiple ideas that kept wanting to tie together and eventually morphed into this shape #and every time i spend time thinking about it i get very excited about it :) #also one of the many reasons i want to write fic 1 is that there is no romana/leela longfic and there should be #(i realize it would be an au fic But Still) #ramblings #asks

[exigencelost]

this one’s gonna be rambly. this may or may not be a write-only post. continue reading at peril of wasting your own time.

I started to write this as an addition to that post about brain fog and capitalism:

Also, since I’ve now brought up ADHD, I’m just gonna clarify that this post isn’t in fact about ADHD. I know I opened with “unable to consciously direct your attention” and that that’s like, the signature ADHD symptom, and if ADHD people want to add thoughts on that subject go for it; but ADHD is not an illness, and this post is about illness. I’m not talking about “I can’t focus because of a basic static fact of how my central nervous system is wired” I’m talking about “I can’t focus because today, my brain decided to stop taking requests, and everything is either fluffy or way too sharp, because I am sick.” 

Then I decided not to add it because the post was already long and it detracted from message focus and also required me to think too hard about like, how do I phrase this so it’s clear I don’t mean “ADHD isn’t important/ neurodivergents aren’t invited to the sick person club” but rather “These are two different conversations and conflating them isn’t helpful,” and after a certain point that becomes a rabbit hole and, crucially, my brain is fuzzy today. (philosophical ramblings on the nature of illness under the cut)

But I am now Thinking about this topic. About ADHD and chronic fatigue, and the differential nature of not being able to do things. I’m also thinking about that post that was called “how to unfuck your house in the minimum time possible” or something, that gave fantastic advice for a person with ADHD and/or various forms of executive dysfunction and/or just a person whose house is dirty to like, organize and execute the the task of aggressive superficial house cleaning on a deadline. And reading it was so stressful to me. Because the advice, which was detailed and friendly and enthusiastic, described a physically impossible set of tasks. Which. I could go down another rabbit hole here about “you can do it!” type language and its impact on sick people, but I’ll try not to.  I did end up reblogging that post with a note that said “If you have chronic fatigue this absolutely will not solve the obstacles to you cleaning your house, and that’s not your fault.”

and like. Why did I need to do that? I really felt like I needed to add that. Why? The post was not claiming to be advice for chronic fatigue, the post wasn’t doing anything wrong, except not mentioning me, not mentioning sick people. Erasure matters; combating erasure matters; telling sick people that they exist matters and that’s a reason by itself; but I’m not trying to justify the impulse right now I’m trying to understand it, and like, get a handle on my Thoughts about the relationship between executive dysfunction management and chronic fatigue management. Disability liberation is a complex thing.   Personal context: I’ve danced around an ADHD diagnosis with multiple psychiatrists over several years. Probably I don’t have it. Probably what I have is a mixture of avoidant anxiety and brain fog from CFS or something similar, which can create very similar symptoms, including but not limited to the most obvious of “I sometimes cannot force my way through this difficult linear cognitive task.” 

Psychiatrists, in my experience, are only interested in the question “Do you have ADHD” as a precursor to the question “Should we put you on stimulants.” For a host of reasons, stimulants (at least in ADHD therapeutic doses) are probably a bad idea for me, so the ADHD discussion often ends in a stalemate: the answer doesn’t matter, the evidence is ambiguous, let’s move on. 

But it matters a little bit, I think. There is a difference between disorder and illness. There is definitely a difference between neurodivergence and illness. The three terms overlap and are interrelated and in a fully liberated world maybe we wouldn’t use any of them, but here we are in this world, and I think the distinctions are important. (Another rabbit hole I’m stepping around here: the social vs the medical model of disability, and why I think they are both better understood in the context of each other than either of them are alone.)

I have a line I say sometimes, when I want to reset a conversation because I don’t like where it’s headed, or when I just need to express frustration, which is: “Time management is a pyramid scheme.”  I cannot manage my time. The whole idea is preposterous to me. Time is a tenuous fluctuating infinitely powerful elemental force and I am like, not even clear on why you shouldn’t run the garbage disposal without the faucet on, you know? I’m not a match for time. I know my limits. 

A lot of people have suggested I take courses in time management because I told them I was too tired to stand up long enough to cook breakfast. I did not find this response to be helpful.

For a while I had, like, an almost-trauma response to people talking about ADHD-flavored time management strategies. 

I am sick in a way that means I walk through most of my life in a fog. This is not a complaint. I like fog. I mean literally, I find literal fog very beautiful and comforting, and I use it as a metaphor for my cognitive experience quite consciously. You see shapes in fog that are related to, but not identical to, the physical reality around you; your understanding of distance and presence is distorted in fog but not erased; when you walk through a fog you must be engaged in the constant project of imagining the world around you, of guessing its textures and colors based on tenuous evidence. This is what my illness does, a lot of the time: requires me to imagine my reality, rather than simply perceiving it. Another rabbit hole: explaining what I mean by that would take me hours to nail down. I’m not going to try very hard. Like I said, this might be a write-only post. Here’s me trying not very hard: My capacity changes every hour, every day, every week. It is difficult to remember where and how my body hurt yesterday, let alone this time last year. There is definitely no way to know what it will do next month. I hate keeping symptom logs; they feel like reading my own entrails. I refuse to answer mundane questions on scales of one to ten (“on a scale of one to ten how bad would you say that movie was?” “I wouldn’t”) because I refuse to do the work of computing infinitely varied reality to numbers, because when I was twelve years old I was asked over and over to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten and every answer felt like a lie and every answer was treated like a lie. Or—not so moralistic, no one got mad at me, exactly. Every answer was treated as though it were imaginary. If the answer changed, it was like I’d broken out of character. I thought there was a magic number that might make people understand that and how I was sick. There wasn’t. The whole thing began to feel like a process of imagination. The doctors and teachers and nurses were imagining a child who wasn’t me, who didn’t feel what I felt; I was imagining someone who could understand what was happening and help me. We were trying to conjure each other. To pick shapes out of the fog. 

I am never going to get an accurate sense of how much I can get done in an hour. There is no answer to that question. There are answers, plural, ranges based on predictive omens that are closer to reading the future in tea leaves than they are to using mercury to measure pressure. 

So, I can never plan what I will do with an hour. I can try to do things, and often I succeed. But I don’t get to sit down and say “X set of things will happen by Y time.” It doesn’t work like that. It never will. As far as I’m concerned, everyone else is just pretending that it works like that, and as long as they keep pretending everyone else feels that they have to pretend too, and so it goes on. Time management is a pyramid scheme. 

I have a document where I keep a list of things I need to do for work. In my experience, trying to divide that list by what day I’ll do what thing is an exercise of imagination, and not a very interesting one. As a sick person it is more effective for me to be always ready to improvise, always set up to recover from a sudden incapacitation, always ready to pounce on a sudden moment of cognitive clarity and physical function to do whatever is most important right now, than it is for me to try to make a schedule and stick to it. 

When I make plans with friends for the future I am reaching for a distant shape in the fog. I am asking someone: help me to imagine this thing. If we imagine it, together maybe we can make it come true. And when we get to the day of the plan we made, sometimes the shape emerges full-formed from the fog, and sometimes it dissipates, drifts out of reach. That’s okay. You have to always be ready to imagine something else. 

What did I start this post talking about? ADHD? Okay. I remember why I started on how much I can get done in an hour. When my psychiatrist sent me to an ADHD-informed attention management class, the teacher of the class told me that people with ADHD often have drastically inaccurate ideas of what they can accomplish in an hour. The teacher suggested that we all set a timer for an hour and start doing something and when it ends, see what’s done. Do that a few times, and then you’ll have your answer, and you can use that to make plans. 

I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. What does today have to do with tomorrow? What does this hour have to do with the next?

It wasn’t stupid. It just wasn’t about me. Okay, finally, here we are: the answer to my initial question. Why is it important to differentiate chronic illness from ADHD, when we’re both slipping on the wet stone stairs of time?  Because the answers aren’t the same. And if you try to pretend they’re the same, then sitting in the back of that time-management class listening to someone offer solutions that have nothing to do with you, you become a little bit more invisible to yourself. The shapes in the fog shrink a little further away from you.

I don’t have an ending point here. feel free to add one of your own. 

#this post makes no attempt to do the accessible emphasis thing because i have no ability to identify what i should emphasize #disability #chronic illness #adhd #chronic fatigue #chronic fatigue syndrome #anxiety #not gonna tag long post bc there's a readmore #sick

[meta-squash]

[Old Manics meta repost, originally written in 2015 or 2016. I was definitely in a....place....when I wrote this.]

Cue yet another long convoluted rambling strange post about Richey Edwards and Theodor Adorno. For some reason this has been rolling around in my head as half-formed thoughts for a while. They’re definitely still half-formed, but I wanted to get them out of my head and into something slightly more sentence-like.

[Uhh, TW for weird logic, ED-style thinking, and convoluted ill-formed ideas.]

In one of Richey’s manifestos to a zine in December 1992, he writes “THE GODS THOUGHT THERE IS NO MORE DREADFUL PUNISHMENT THAN FUTILE AND HOPELESS LABOUR. GROW UP, GET FUCKED, WITHER. NO ONE IN THIS COUNTRY KNOW HUNGER, TRUE HUNGER LIKE SOMALIA. EVERYONE HAS CLOTHES, FOOD, A DRINK. EVERYONE IS LAST, PATHETIC WRETCHED. THE ONLY FREEDOM LEFT IS THE FREEDOM TO STARVE. FILL YOUR HOME WITH ANYTHING YOU LIKE BUT YOU CAN’T INVENT ANOTHER COLOUR…” The “freedom to starve” quote keeps being attributed to him on the internet, or to Tom Morello, lead singer of Rage Against The Machine, who has a different but similar quote about capitalism and labor exploitation that includes the phrase. (It also appears in the comic V For Vendetta, apparently.) But the phrase didn’t originate with them. I keep seeing repeated uses of it when reading essays by Theodor Adorno from the 60s, and I’m sure the phrase is probably older than that. Morello’s quote containing the phrase is essentially summarizing one of Adorno’s ideas.

So far I’ve come across the phrase in two of Theodor Adorno’s essays. One is in “Freedom In Unfreedom”. In essence, it discusses the paradox of the idea of freedom in our current society. He essentially says that people no longer have a specific concept in mind when they invoke the word “freedom,” and that the nature of present society means that whatever concept of freedom we come up with is not possible because it contradicts current circumstances. He gives the example of early Nazi Germany, when an social-democratic organization took up “Freedom” as its slogan, but the concept and the term had lost its power entirely because employment was incredibly low, and people were struggling, so upholding freedom as a conceptual principle which implies self-determination looked foolish because in practice no one is free and everyone is unemployed and starving and unable to access food/wellbeing and therefore unable to practice self-determination. He says “In other words, freedom was exposed as the freedom to starve; people had direct experience of their dependence on society, a dependence that made a mockery of a freedom that was defined in purely formal terms.”

The other Adorno essay that uses the phrase is “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. Basically, in the section that uses the phrase he discusses the way that the culture industry (or mass culture) exploits and uses artists by homogenizing them. He says “anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in.” Freedom is supposedly given to each individual (in society, in art, in expression, in culture, in the workplace) but if a person doesn’t inherit the ability or resources to succeed in life, then this freedom becomes the “freedom of the stupid to starve”. People who aren’t able to adapt to society’s expectations/who question or refuse to conform are neglected and made to starve, literally or metaphorically. The blame is placed on them for their inability/unwillingness to adapt or conform, because they were “given” the opportunity to succeed (despite that opportunity requiring conformity, or changing their nature, or giving up morals, etc). So a person who is unable or refuses to conform to society and culture and the working class, who goes hungry or cold (literally or metaphorically), is an labelled outsider. They retain their integrity, or their morals, or their original artistic vision, but they suffer through loss of wealth, or faith, or by being rejected and called an outsider and being mocked or no longer listened to. They are free, but at a price.

Applying this to Richey, I thought it was interesting that he seemed to be taking freedom to starve both literally and figuratively. “Freedom to starve” becomes a refusal to consume in certain ways, ascetism, essentially. It becomes a literal or physical manifestation of the neglect that occurs when a person refuses to conform to society’s expectations. It becomes Richey refusing to conform to society’s expectations of food consumption while also refusing to conform to musical and artistic standards by creating The Holy Bible and specifically pointing out the wrongs of society. The band having complete control over the album, hiding in their studio and working together without any outside influence pushes against the expectation of producers/managers/sound engineers/labels/etc having partial influence or control over the sound of a band’s music. Richey’s inability to adapt mentally to fame, to touring, to the stress of schedule, etc etc also is a sort of manifestation of that “freedom of the stupid to starve”, in that he was unable to properly adapt to what was expected of him in terms of fame and touring, and he was blamed for it and seen as strange for disliking aspects of fame.

This is where I get into some interesting, if problematic, ideas. Richey seemed to kind of take the idea to another level through his eating disorder. Freedom to starve/freedom of restriction essentially becomes true freedom because it takes back control of body mind and spirit. Richey sort of talked about this in an interview with Simon Price in 94 in France. He mentioned that people can’t hold you down and force you to eat/watch you all the time, and that your body is your own and you should have a right to do with it what you want. Essentially, self mutilation/self harm/restriction becomes a mode of self-control, a reclamation of the body from expectations of society. Society expects excess and encourages/wants consumption. In creating consumption, the culture industry takes control of the mind and the body by telling consumers what they want even if they didn’t originally desire it, saying it over and over and continually producing under consumers are convinced that they do want whatever they are being given. Self-mutilation, restriction and ascetism removes that and reclaims the body as owned by itself and its mind. It puts control back into the awareness of the self and the body and the mind, which forces the self to be aware of the influence of culture industry. This awareness allows the self to refuse that influence, the refusal of which includes those actions or decisions that go against the expectations or desires or encouragements of society. It also confronts the fact that society sees certain types of expressions of emotion/mental state as “wrong” or maladaptive and those who express themselves a certain way are marked as outsiders. Repression and restriction and stoicism becomes revenge for society marking you as outsider for expressing rage at unfreedom/expressing emotions that are seen as maladaptive. Self-harm or starvation becomes a reclamation of the mind and the emotions, and increasing of that maladaptive expression in order to basically reject society’s expectations altogether. Richey essentially says that when talking about his time in hospital; self-harm or self-restriction takes back control of body and mind from expectations of doctors and society – they can’t hold you down and force food down your throat, someone can’t be with you 24 hours a day, it’s my body I do what I want with it.

The height of this could be disappearance/death: refusal to participate “correctly” in society, refusal to “be” in society in the expected way. A rejection of literally all things. James Bradfield notes that a major theme in Journal For Plague Lovers is a rejection of experience, a rejection of expected lyrical formats, and a rejection of some sort of answer or truth. A realization that nothing seems to be working. A refusal to continue to consume or participate correctly or to express consumption or participation correctly, especially in that the meanings or messages of most of the songs are completely obscured through unconnected phrases or disparate references that take research to decipher. The idea is sort of expressed in individual songs from the album as well. All Is Vanity  asks questions of vanity extremes vs personal neglect – which one is refusal to participate correctly? Are they both refusal? Are they the same? Inability to adapt correctly compared to what is expected/right vs what you are doing and how your actions are called into question as incorrect. Discipline is respected, but certain types of discipline are seen as different/maladapted compared to the expectations of society or the culture industry, which allows for the question of which type of discipline is “wrong” or “right” and does it depend on perspective? Excesses are lauded in the culture industry, consumption is encouraged, as is vanity and obsession with the self, and ascetism or restriction and neglect of the self is seen as wrong. But extreme excess of consumption is also frowned upon or mocked. Society encourages a certain amount of excess and consumption in order to control and delude. In encourages and creates consumption so that the consumer doesn’t stop and thinking about how they are being made to overwork and overconsume in ways they probably didn’t originally want to be doing but have been convinced into by society. Refusal of consumption/vocal awareness of participation in consumption becomes maladaptive because it’s not what society wants, which is exactly the kinds of words and things the band was expressing.

And the idea of disappearance or death takes all of this to the highest level, in that disappearance rejects society’s expectations entirely, refusing to participate in society in a “correct” way. It is also expressing whatever sort of emotions or thoughts a person might have in a way that creates an absence (metaphorical and literally) rather than yet another thing to be consumed. Disappearance when a person is still living is a complete reclamation of the body and self because the person essentially is able to drop out of society as themselves, and even if they assume a different identity, they are still inherently refusing to participate in an expected way, still creating an absence of a person and an absence of an identity, and in using a false identity that refusal becomes even more complex. Death, too, and specifically suicide, is a refusal to participate in society, but in a much more final way. Suicide is yet another reclamation of the body, since it is by one’s own hand and willpower that one’s life is taken, not through illness or another person or old age. It creates a different kind of absence, since often a suicide, since there is a body and often a note, gives answers or at least there is a physical proof of refusal and a physical proof of that person’s death. A suicide creates a narrative with finality, with refusal as the finality and therefore certain aspects of absence are filled in with the assumptions that come with suicide and death in general. A disappearance has a narrative with an ellipses rather than a full stop, and because it is left open, the absence and refusal are left with unanswered questions, reasons, and unspoken ideas, specifically because it is a kind of refusal to participate that is completely unexpected and cannot be explained with a body or a note.

I don’t really have a conclusion to these thoughts or any sort of cumulative idea or whatever. I just was thinking about the phrase “the only freedom left is the freedom to starve” and what it meant in relation to Richey when Adorno is applied.

#manic street preachers #manic street preachers meta #old meta repost #from 2016

[kjwongsbrain]

I didn't know I wanted 'eugh'.

I find myself writing a lot about technology these days. I think I've aged considerably in the past couple of years. Technologically, I mean. I mean, technologically representative-ly. I mean, technologically metaphorically representative-ly.

Okay. Wait.

You know how there's always a stigmatic depiction of the age difference in people based upon our reaction to technology? As an how young people take new technology and immerse themselves in it and the old people are outside looking in and criticizing them and the new technology in their hands and how it will bring about the end of the world?

Yes. I'm now that old person. And I think I've grown into it way quicker than I'd thought.

But I still like to maintain that I have techno-apathy. I'm 'whatever' about it, and that allows me to still keep using it, but with a skeptical eye. But as technology continues to grow, I find myself being more and more guarded in respect to its involvement in my life. I recently refused to use my social media account to sign into Dominoes Pizza's website to place an order. It might sound ludicrous to some, but I don't want that information given to a pizza place. If you call up the pizza place and order a pizza they don't ask you what your Facebook profile is and go scrolling through it to see what pages you've liked. So why should I just give it to them on the account of the convenience of ordering a pizza online?

Honestly I would've never bothered with online ordering the moment they requested I login with my social media page. The problem was that the phone lines were busy when I called, and I was hungry. But I do get the distinct feeling that they're not putting as many resources into picking up phone orders as they did maybe five years ago. Safe to say I expect no more phoning in pizzas in the next couple of years. Just like how AirAsia doesn't have a number you can call anymore, so too will the pizza place be unreachable by cable.

Cloud pizza. That's what I'll call it.

Another case of my techno-apathy slowly turning into techno-fear (if I don't keep it in check) was a reaction to recent VR related news. As a side note, I do think VR is going to find its place very soon and it isn't going to be the homes of the masses. Nope. VR theme parks are becoming a thing and I really think that's where they belong. Just the same way how 4D cinemas are not a major way in which you expect to consume your entertainment, VR will thrive as a single serving experience.

Coming back to my point, the reaction in question was someone questioning why some people, me included, looked at a picture of a room full of heads strapped into VR goggles - all looking in a single direction and completely oblivious to the physical world around them - and felt shivers down our spines. Some were even poking fun at the 'old people' who were once again shaking their fists at technology.

Well I'm now one of those old people.

Some time ago, when Facebook first introduced it's 'Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening (YourNameHere)' messages right at the top of the feed, I jokingly wrote a response telling Facebook to piss off because I've seen those movies and I know how it ends. And that got me thinking a bit about this entire technological debacle and how science fiction has kind of shaped my techno-apafear. You see, science fiction to me has always been a genre for the thinking man. It's why I didn't care for it when I was a lot younger. But more than just being intellectually stimulating, science fiction also forces its viewers and readers to ask questions. Sometimes these questions help distance us from the shackles of 'what is' and help us continue to live in the 'what will be', pushing our minds to chase after the possibilities of the future. Sometimes these questions serve as examinations of ourselves, bringing us closer to our humanity. And sometimes they even serve as precautionary tales of the pitfalls of the exponential growth of technological advances.

And I feel that the more you educate yourself with science and science fiction, the faster you become an 'old person'. My willingness to embrace new technology has waned significantly and my caution in using what I already have is at alert level 'orange'.

All of this started me on a journey of processing a collection of thoughts on the role of social media in the world of today. I've been struggling with this train of thought for a while because it's never quite come out as one coherent idea, but rather bits and pieces that seem to all fit together in some way. It's like I'm at the stage in a detective movie when Mr Ace Detective has got all the clues already on his desk but has yet to piece it all together to reveal Mr Bad Man.

I've sat down to write this thing thrice already and I've never been satisfied with the way its turned out. So I'm having another go at it and if you are actually reading this, lucky number four then.

When Twitter was first introduced, it was met with some rather harsh criticism. Naturally 'old people' were in an uproar about how communication was being reduced down to 140 characters. Even now with Facebook's stupid large font concept there seems to be this idea that shorter messages are somehow more important. The shorter thought is the one that ought to get more attention, and the shorter thought is all anyone outside of yourself cares about. Naturally some resistance to the concept of short-thought-Twitter was founded. Heck, someone even started a service called 'twitlonger' which allowed people to type 'long tweets' and instantly link them into a twitter post.

The thought of that today is rather ridiculous because it's simply defeating the purpose of Twitter altogether. The idea of Twitter was to convey a genuine message in its most condensed form. It wasn't that short thoughts were more important, it was that deeper thoughts could be condensed. Remove the rambling. Remove the unnecessary flirtation with unimportant details. Get to the heart of the matter or say nothing at all. That was Twitter's power.

But still, to this day, Twitter is filled with whimsy. In fact it started with mostly whimsy. 140 characters tended to attract the whimsy more than it attracted the poetic. But somewhere along the way Twitter also became a platform for the real and necessary. Somewhere along the way, and regrettably in my opinion, Twitter became a legitimate source of information.

I don't know specifically where it started and how it snowballed into what it is today, but I think it had something to do with unsavory events around the world and unsavory news that fewer and fewer wanted to broadcast on national television. What resulted was Twitter becoming a legitimate platform for news. The speed at which a breaking news story could reach trending worldwide was phenomenal and far quicker than any ordinary news portal could achieve. This allowed news to bypass censors, bypass ordinary restrictions that filtered unsavory news before handing it out to the consumer. In a way, Twitter news was more 'real'. And that made it more powerful.

Actual news portals eventually turned to Twitter. Government offices turned to Twitter. World leaders turned to Twitter.

And all the rest of social media followed. Social platforms became the main news portals for a large number of people. I'd worryingly say for most people. People now get news from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and any other heavily populated social media platform.

There's two large problems with this.

One is that the whimsy never went away. With the growth of social media as a legitimate information portal, the odd slurry of widely varying stories only became stranger and more kaleidoscopic. You would be reading one article about the appointment of a new member of cabinet and then scroll down to see a picture of a baby-shaped cake. One moment a story about Syrian refugees, the next a story about how coconuts cure cancer.

The violent mix of whimsy and serious makes the two almost indistinguishable in its presentation - a fact that some even capitalize on. And if whimsy and serious are treated the same because they share the same platform, then one of two things will happen - the whimsy is taken seriously, or the serious is taken whimsically. Both of those things are a problem.

The second problem is the fundamental way in which social media works. In an ordinary news portal, news is curated by people. While this has the unfortunate problem of bias in reporting, it does mean that there is proper care and thought that goes into what news stories get printed, what goes up front, what goes further back, what gets special mention, and what doesn't. There is an active process of weighing information for its importance to the general populace. I've addressed the bias already so let's leave that aside for a second. Journalism is a responsibility.

What happens with social media platforms is news becomes subject to the automatic algorithmic that makes each social media site turn. All news is subjected to popularity rather than factual importance. Worse now is how each and every thing you view on the internet is curated to your personal tastes and history. All of this is done automatically. No human being weighed in and decided what news stories Twitter and Facebook should circulate as its 'top story' for that day or week.

When you combine these two problems, you have a rather catastrophic picture of people and news. And this also explains the new phenomenon known as 'echo chambers' where news gets shared on social media only to the people who already agree with it. That piece of news gets shared over and over and over among the people who agree with it, inflating its importance and significance no matter what the rest of the people think. And so when a story becomes shared sixty million times, no matter what it's about, it's instantly the most important piece of news on social media.

The amalgamation of all these things can be seen in Buzzfeed.

Let's not go two ways about this - Buzzfeed is full of shit. A 'news' site that has a history of targeted advertising, native advertising, and just generally flooding your social media pages with stupid idiotic lists of shit nobody should really care about. Nobody in their right mind should ever care what Buzzfeed has to say, not when they're publishing a quiz to tell what kind of a potato you are. But because Buzzfeed has a tendency to be one of the most shared things on the internet, people get confused about its prominance versus its importance.

And then Buzzfeed started reporting legitimate news. Or rather, articles that it claimed to be news. Once all the circumstances were in place, it was only natural that people were now treating a Buzzfeed article about the corruption of the political sector as a legitimate piece of journalism. This, from the news site that also published an article on a cat with eyebrows.

This is the problem I'm talking about. The impossible mix of whimsy and serious that is now our social media. And as more and more people neglect actual news reporting in their daily lives and consume news and information solely from social media, this problem is only going to get worse.

This is why I'm so guarded about my social media platforms. This is why I don't like any pages, I don't connect my social media account to any other site, I don't bother clicking on any news article on social media unless it's from a news portal that I know that I can trust (btw, if you aren't at least reading the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, then you're wasting your time), and I don't treat social media as a platform for sharing news stories.

All that being said, here's my real solution. I think we should bring the whimsy back to social media. Let's all return to a time and place when news was found on news sites and you went to social media to see pictures of your friends' cats and that was it. That way, when a Buzzfeed article shows up on there, you'll laugh at it, even it if pretends to be reporting about impending war from North Korea.

All in all I think there has to be newfound vigilance in identifying and segregating what we choose to consume on social media platforms. While Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for getting the word out there faster and more efficiently than ever before, I feel that those are roles that must continue to be fulfilled by different avenues. The whimsy and serious are at a far too dangerous mix and the shared consumption of the two is not going to be healthy for a generation moving forward in the technological age.

It's like eating milk and fish at the same time. They shouldn't go together at all, but it's all you've been eating. At some point, you're going to have a big shit.

Maybe part of this is my techno-apafear speaking. Maybe my caution towards social media is unfounded. If you riffle through my posts about technology you might consider that I'm getting more and more paranoid as time goes by. But as I said, sometimes science fiction serves as precautionary tales warning us about the damages that our love affair with technology can bring about.

This is one of the reasons why I love the TV show Black Mirror.

(Oh yes, this entire post is really just a Black Mirror review. Now you know why I said that the train of thought was so difficult to put together.)

The name Black Mirror is one of the best titles I've seen in a while. In just two words, it's set the tone for the terrifying and satirical nature of the program. The black mirror of our technological devices reflect our humanity more than anything and each and every story that Black Mirror creates is ultimately a story on human nature more than it is about technology. That's how science fiction has always thrived - not as a technological display, but as a medium for pursuing our deeper humanity.

I was chuffed to bits when I learned that Black Mirror was returning for 12 more episodes thanks to the new gods of television, Netflix. The first seven episodes of Black Mirror have served as some of the best television I've ever seen in my lifetime and so I was more than eager for more.

And with that as a comparison, the new season of Black Mirror fell a lot more than a bit short. Their stories were still structured in the same way - here is a new technology that's somehow become ubiquitous in this world and here's how it's going to ruin the lives of our characters. In a way, I feel that Black Mirror encompasses my techno-apathy more than most other pieces of science fiction. The stories mostly end in a rather unappetizing manner, depicting the dangers and woes of technology, but in order for it to get there, the people must've embraced it at some point.

Take the first episode of the new season for example. In Nosedive, everything and everyone the people are connected with are linked in this social network, giving each other stars. It's painfully obvious where the story ultimately goes, and it's terrifying to think that entire lives are governed by this social rating technology. But in order for that technology to have taken over every aspect of the world, for it to govern the way infrastructure operates, surely the people there had to have accepted the technology and enjoyed it for a period of time before it unraveled. If the technology was evil from the very get go, it would not have pervaded the world as much as it did.

So while most of the storytelling in the new Black Mirror takes the shape of the old episodes, I can't help but feel rather let down by the new six episodes. I struggled for a while to figure out why I didn't like them as much as I did the first and it really came down to this idea of 'eugh'. The first seven episodes of Black Mirror were masters of 'eugh'. The new six are unsatisfyingly satisfying. Allow me to explain.

There's been a word I've used to describe Black Mirror when recommending to friends. While it is truly terrifying from a science fiction perspective and honestly one of the best made television shows of recent years, the word I sell it on is 'insidious'. Black Mirror episodes don't end on any catharsis whatsoever. They don't see it necessary in resolving an issue with a happy or even tragic ending. The endings leave you feeling gross and, well, 'eugh'. That's the insidious nature of Black Mirror. It lulls you into thinking that the story can end either with conflict resolution or tragic acceptance, but then it swings hard into a middle ground where you don't know what to think anymore and you don't know who the bad guys and good guys are and you don't know who you were rooting for anymore.

That's 'eugh'. And that's brilliant. And that's missing from the new episodes. I didn't know that's what I wanted from a TV series, but now that it's missing, I want it back. The new episodes tend to 'finish'. They have conclusive ends that don't really open up for interpretation or questioning the way good science fiction often does. And it's left me feeling that Black Mirror has lost its mojo. It's been unable to give me an 'eugh' punch in the gut for the entire season.

A prime example of 'eugh' was Fifteen Million Credits. The end of that episode was perhaps the most 'eugh' I've ever seen. Compare that with Nosedive and the latter is almost like a fairy tale with a happy ending. That's not what I watch Black Mirror for. I watch Black Mirror to be ruined. I watch it to be challenged. I watch it to question myself.

And so while it remains as good TV, New Black Mirror doesn't quite hold the candle to Old Black Mirror. And as such, I will refer to them as two separate things. NBM which will stand for New Black Mirror or Netflix Black Mirror, and then Black Mirror.

So there you go. If you've reached the end, might I congratulate you on reading something this long and this incoherent. You're more than three thousand words in and if you've somehow managed to get through it without whining, congrats! You're now officially, according to the Dale-Chall readability index, a college graduate reader.

Cheers.

#thoughts #reviews #TV reviews #technology #deep thoughts