I found everything everywhere all at once funniest when it was trying to unabashedly be a silly universe-hopping skill-stealing escape plot and at its most superficial and weak when it tried to turn into a meaningful mother/daughter relationship film imho
I don’t know what it is with some hollywood films nowadays but they really feel they can show you the barebones of a family relationship, like the outside sheen of teenage angst, the mother who just won’t listen, the unhappy dad searching for affection... and feel those archetypes alone, established at the outset, are good characterisation or development of family themes. like evelyn barely got scenes with her daughter and husband that weren’t interrupted by crazy mind/body-jumping, rendering them basically hollow because she’s then talking to someone entirely different. and then we have the huge climax and it felt like they either weren’t or couldn’t truly be any closer to understanding each other on a human level at all, because why would they be?
genuinely I really liked the beginning though it was so fun. but is it really a mother/daughter film like we’ve seen much better ones in recent years, like lady bird. very different tonally but still had something to say about family relationships. even gay daughter/mother film has been done better in saving face. why do people with good ideas always think hmm let’s make this even deeper without it being earned. can’t it just be a good time
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The Quest for Buddhism (52)
Early Buddhism and the disciples
Ten Principal Disciples No. 5: Purna Maitrayaniputra - Foremost in Preaching
He is, also simply known as Purna, was the earliest of the ten principle disciples [Ref1] to become a disciple, and among Buddha’s many disciples, he was called the foremost in preaching the dharma, because of his excellent oratory. Known for his oratory and easy-to-understand preaching, he is said to have been fluent in 60 different languages. The Pali Buddhist scriptures contain the Punnovada Sutta which bears his name.
Purna was born in Donavatthu(or Sunapalanta), near Kapilavatthu, in a family of brahmins (i.e. generic name for the priestly class at the top of the Indian caste system). His family is said to have had enormous wealth.
Ananda [Ref], after his first rain retreat, mentions him as a great influence in the Ananda Sutram (i.e. aphorisms leading to ánanda, divine bliss.). He says that thanks to him he was able to become a srotāpanna (Pali: sotāpanna, i.e. it is the rank of a person who, having reached this stage, attains enlightenment without retreat and only by passing back and forth between the human and heavenly realms a maximum of seven times).
Sāriputta [Ref2]also meets Purna through the Tathāgata and a group of shakyans and the Buddha, and the two praise one another.
仏教の探求 (52)
初期仏教と弟子たち
十大弟子その五: 富楼那弥多羅尼子 (ふるなみたらにし、梵:プールナ・マイトラーヤニープトラ)〜説法第一(せっぽうだいいち)
十大弟子(参照1)の中では一番早く弟子となった人で、略して富楼那(ふるな、梵: プールナ)と呼ばれることが多い。弁舌さわやかで、解りやすいお説教をすることで良く知られている。60種類の言語に通じていたといわれる。大勢いた弟子達の中でも、弁舌にすぐれていたために説法第一と称された。お���迦様と誕生日が同で、お釈迦様より長生きをした。パーリ仏典には、その名を記したプンナ教誡経 (プンナきょうかいきょう、巴: プンノーヴァーダ・スッタ)が収録されている。
プールナは、コーサラ国のカピラ城近郊、ドーナヴァストゥ(またはスナーパランタ)という村で、ブラフミン(=インドのカースト制度の頂点に位置する司祭階級の総称)の家庭に生まれた。彼の実家は巨万の富を有していたといわれる。
アナンダ(参照)は、最初の雨のリトリートの後、アーナンダ・スートラム(アーナンダ、神の至福に至る格言)の中で大きな影響を受けたとして、彼のことを述べている。彼は、プールナのおかげでスローターパンナになることができたと言っている。スローターパンナとは、この段階に達すると退転することなく、最大でも7回人間界と天界を往来するだけで悟りに達する位のこと。
サーリプッタ(参照2)もまた、如来と彼を賞賛する釈迦の一団を通じてプールナと出会い、二人はお互いを称え合っている。
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If you can change yourself to the way you see fit then you are nothing more than a product. What differs you opposed to the materialistic world that changes itself according to our desires? To truly be yourself is to dispose of any external ideology within your mind that tells you to change. Simply put, such things that were not apart of us when we arrived to this planet do not belong to us.
Little did we know that growing up meant subjugating ones mind in accordance to the system of government one resides. Nature has always been either adapt or die. Yet in this case “death” can be the loss of modern convenience, social exclusion, homelessness, and especially loneliness. Yet once standing between the crossroads of either conforming or being our true selves, do we only then realize that it was never a choice to begin with. Having been born into the luxury of the 21st century, having been built upon the BILLIONS of deaths that came before our time, it’s hard-wired into our brains that thousands of years of human progress is just the bare minimum to those fortunate enough.
You don’t have to suffer any longer, nor shall you be forced to adapt a facade to mask your inner self. The sake of humanitarian order should not come at the expense of ourselves, nor shall it come at the expense of any future generations. To be forced systemic expectation down our throats, and to live under constant societal pressure makes us no different than sheep, herded at the mercy of the land from which we were unwillingly born.
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Grandiloquent ramblings about Power of the Doctor, das Selbst and simulacrae
I have been struggling with myself on whether to write this stream of consciousness for some 24 hours, because, surprise, it can come off as negativity, which I genuinely don't like plopping on other people's dashes. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate POTD. By Chibnall standards it's well written, the actors put their all into performances and their all is a lot, there are some amazing character moments and on the whole I enjoyed it. But I couldn't shake off the sense of something being wrong with this episode, I couldn't shake it off so much I had problems sleeping for two nights in a row, and not in a fun way. It's like a rock in a shoe but for your brain. Idk, I can only imagine this is what the TARDIS feels like about Jack Harkness, you know it's good for what it is, you know there is no good reason to hate it but you still feel an atavistic sense of wrongness. So, hoping that cutting the post under the title and adding proper tags will prevent it from upsetting anyone, and also that I will finally sleep well and get a good warm up for productive writing, here goes nothin'.
Basically, I felt like POTD had a hollowness at its core. Or maybe not hollowness, but more like instead of a solid, hot, dense core that keeps a spheric entity together, there was a very nice hardened glass ball with a core of roughly the consitency of a shower jelly dropped into warm bath. And that frustratingly though prettily slipping through your fingers core is - what exactly does the episode have to say about being the Doctor? And is it a purely simulacric self-referential w?nk in front of a 60 year old mirror, or is there actual reverberance with the rest of, for lack of better terms, collective consciousness and unconsciousness?
And, let's put it bluntly - NuWho has been suffering from navel gazing from the very beginning, and it's not anything inherently wrong. DW is a mass culture phenomenon like few others and post-modern self-reflexivity can be beneficial to the text. I would say, though, that where RTD's w?anking was more about the Doctor as the last of the time lords - i.e. the only person in all of existence that has a glimpse of multiple pasts and futures at once and has been left unsepervised as to what to do about it - Moffat went textual with the Doctor's name becoming a universal secret and so on. But where Moffat stayed purely simulacric with his questions being more important than answers and mysteries that don't really matter, Chibnall continued this explicit navel gazing but tried to make it more grounded. Which was not a good idea, because it lost the lightness that it had under Moffat, at least initially. Now, we have the idea that the Doctor has always been the Doctor, and in fact is the reason the word "doctor" means what it does, and the TARDIS always looked like a police box, and for all we know this may have been going on since before the first of the universes came to exist, because why not.
Which leads to one of the key questions of contemporary philosophy: essence or existence? Both words have been used, abused and misused in different contexts, but generally speaking they mean, respectively, a belief that the essence of a person (a soul, a disembodied consciousness stuffed in the synapses, etc.) comes before their conscious existence, and a belief that is the existence (the choices, the interactions, etc.) that "make" the essence. At the extremes, the former has a thoroughly religious meaning, in that you existed before you were born and will go on existing after you die, be it in a god's soul repository or some reincarnation cycle, and the latter boils down to tabula rasa, the idea that a newborn can be completely shaped by its surroundings. By now, with psychiatry and neurosicence, it is pretty much agreed that neither is 100% true. As my psychiatrist put it, my problems are a result of both my traumas and two proud lines of people with fried nerves. So as far as thinking about actual animals with nervous systems and suchalike is concerned, the answer the unsatifying but only productive "both". But in fiction, especially science fiction which at its best can serve as a sandbox for all sorts of thought experiments, the question remains: what is the Selbst make up of your hypothetical beings in the world roughly obeying known mathematics?
A linguistic note: I think the german word das Selbst is more appropriate for the analysis than any English word. It is is usually translated as "self", and indeed the latter derives from the Germanic root, but I think das Selbst has maintained a more objective/objectivizing connotation, whereas "self" has slipped a bit too close to subjective/subjectivizing for my liking. Case in point: self-explanatory gives most agency to whatever explains itself, while selbsverstandlich (translated as self-explanatory but really closer to self-understandable) keeps a passive/objective/outside vibe.
And the matter of das Selbst as something determined by/determinable from outside seems... well, crucial for POTD. The case in point is that I'm not sure if the case the episode makes for what makes the Doctor the Doctor is that the Master ascended from Heath Ledger's Joker insanity to Terry Jones' Simon Zinc-Trumpet-Harris, married to a very attractive table lamp and managed to club himself unconscious with the butt of his gun, insanity to think he can make the Doctor regenerate into himself because what really matters is the magic of friendship existence/interaction with others, or that his plan was bad but at least not self-contradictory? Anyway, in the best case scenario there were supposed to be a few additional lines of dialogue that CC kinda forgot to include and they live in the same limbo as the explanation that no, the Doctor doesn't think suffocation/starvation with maybe some nice cannibalism phase is more humane than shooting, she had a plan where to take those spiders once they've been contained.
Intermission/digression: it's kind of interesting to consider if recognition of das Selbst functions different among time lords than with humans. Evolutionarily, that would have been helpful. Historically, we have examples both in favour (Utopia where the Doctor recognizes the Master in the person looking 100% the same as Yana the moment their eyes meet across the room) and against (The Five Doctors, Dark Water, where the Doctor can't even tell Missy's species until she has him grab her boob, Spyfall). And that's fine, I don't ask or even want strict consitency in 60 year long text. Though you'd think when it starts asserting self-awareness it would at least bring that up.
Returing and starting from the thing that first put me on track of why the core of the story is... wobbly. The point is, the message kind of tries to promote existence/interactions being more important for the make up of das Selbst (as Yaz explains to a person who you'd think knows more about regeneration process than her, or most of the time lords for that matter considering how they've been dragging on in the most outlandish ways imaginable), while relying on essentialism for the stakes to even exist. What exactly are the implications of the Doctor being forced to regenerate into the Master? Ok, it erases their existence for the future, but what about the past? It sure as hell hasn't just popped out of existence, or else the companions might be at least ackonwledged to have Amy-like memory problems. So far, so good, das Selbst is determined by the existence. This could even be argued to be well symbolised by the Doctor's continued presence in the story as the TARDIS's memory interacting with companion's memories.
Aye, but there's the rub. Memories. Shouldn't the regeneration of the Doctor into the Master imply he now has their memories, which can be described as the internal side of existence as building das Selbst? I mean, the reference to the Doctor's forced regeneration is, correct me if I'm wrong, the Two-Three time, and Three more or less remembered everything Two knew, putting aside messier that usual post-regenerative stress. So, does the Master now have all of the Doctor's memories? That would be the logical answer, right?
So why is he not affected by them?
If existence, internalized as memories, is more important to das Selbst than the essence, then why does he not even have a Lady Cassandra-after-being-in-a-conscious-tissue-resource's-brain moment? Or am I supposed to wallpaper Dhawan's acting over the gaping hole and say, he totally had. Offscreen. Incidentally, if you're upset about Thirteen regenerating into Tennant then perhaps you'll be interested in my headcanon that atron nergy was affected by her subconscious screaming maybe we should go back to giving the Master nonconsensual hugs.
Is it because, you know. The Master is bad? I mean, of course, it's a text, that's his purpose and only moral context. But again, it's the text that started flaunting its navel gazing as self-awareness first, I'm just asking for being consequential about it. Because in a self-aware text that relies on existence and magic of friendship to be Selbst-determining it's not the case that the Master can't be the Doctor because they're bad only they're bad because they weren't collecting friends that would shape their existence into a good person that could be the Doctor!
EXCEPT IF SO THEN, AGAIN, WHY IS HE NOT AFFECTED BY THE DOCTOR'S INTERNALIZED EXISTENCE?!!!
TLDR of the above: the Master's plan to force the Doctor into regenerating into him so he'll be the Doctor is fundamentally flawed because das Selbst is made more by existence than the essence. Except he is not affected by that existence in any meaningful way, so there's a core contradiction: das Selbst is shaped by existence but the existence-as-memories doesn't shape das Selbst.
EXCEPT NONE OF THAT MATTERS BECAUSE APPARENTLY HE DOESN'T HAVE THE DOCTORS MEMORIES, OR ELSE HE WOULD KNOW WHO RUTH!DOCTOR IS!?????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, this is the point where there's likely a page of the script rolling around CC's house, unionizing with the one from AITUK about pest control. Establishing that somehow forced regeneration would erase the Doctor's memories. Which, may I point out, would have been a very solid stake. But it's not there in the text.
But if that's the indended reading, and please tell me if there's something I missed, then the Master's Don't let me go back to being me is. hollow. It aches me to say that but that's the conclusion. Because the narrative lacks a solid core about what das Selbst/being is. There is no actual difference between the Master being the Master and the Doctor being the Master, because das Selbst has not been affected by internalized existence. At least as far as I can see, feel free to point me in its direction, but again, I have been mauling over it for 24 hours. Or, the Master lost it completely and is now a solid candidate for the Upper Class Twit of the Year. And also thought Sheev's plan in The Rise of Skywalker was great writing.
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The Bishop in the first Castlevania season is pure evil who believes himself good. He's nearly every crime and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church distilled into one neat, wrinkly, putrid man. He is easy to hate. He is supposed to be despised and we are expected to cheer and rejoice when Blue Fangs chewed on half this man's face.
He uses god to control and manipulate the powers and people that be. While his belief in god may be true, the church and the faith are more tools for him to retain control. It is glaringly obvious that this man is power-hungry.
There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all redeemable about that asshole.
The Abbott is every conservative relative who genuinely loves you, but is a blind idiot holding on to institutions simply because they are "right".
While the Bishop's character is real, most of us won't encounter him. We see him on the news. I'm not even American (been there once for two weeks) but even I've seen his like on news and media. He's a televangelist who consolidates wealth, clout and power through the fanaticism of his followers. He is drunk on the authority he possesses. His belief in god isn't the point; whether or not he holds faith, the man cares solely about power.
The Abbott is someone in our lives we know well. Your conservative mother who refuses to even show a modicum of tolerance towards queer people. Your father who is buying into the religious side of Youtube and Tiktok. Your brother who has grown up to carry terrifying, fascistic beliefs. Your sister who feels lost and found some semblance of acceptance in a church who still believes women are lesser. Your aunt who despises vaccines. Your uncle who tells you that you should've become a priest or a soldier.
The Abbott, deep down, has some redeeming features. But it's not enough to forgive him for his idiocy.
Ask any child who had to grow up with a religious parent, especially a Catholic or an Evangelical. They fucking love the story of Abraham sacrificing his child to God, and finding a ram in its place.
Evangelicals are bent on this tale. They will always preach that god comes before children. That children and their suffering and their needs must always take a backseat to the word of god.
A trans child asking their parents to understand—their words will fall on deaf ears because god and the holy man told them that 'transgenderism' is a vile philosophy that seeks to groom and twist kids. A college freshman debating with their parents about free healthcare and immigration will be stonewalled because the charismatic preacher said that god will provide. god will heal. god did not invite these foreigners into this land.
It is Maria, begging her father to listen and having her pleas fall on deaf ears.
The Abbott is someone I hate more than the Bishop.
Men like the Bishop exist, but they are few and far in-between.
But the Abbott? The Abbott is someone I share a table with at dinner. He's someone I see during family reunions. He's someone who shares misinformation online, and I see it on my timeline because we're social media friends.
I fucking hate him so much and I hope he gets what's his.
He never deserved Tera. He never once deserved Maria.
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