#so i do understand conceptually that it's Not Good when Bad Things happen to people but does it bother me? not really

[analytical-rant]

ZERO DAY RANT. 002 TW: SEE TO THE MOVIES CONTENTS BEFORE READING. I WILL BE DISCUSSING THE IMPORTANT BUT TRIGGERING ASPECTS OF THIS MOVIE.

Cal was metaphoric, poetic in his views and morality. And he didn't wanna live.

Andre was angry, lonely, and wanted nothing more than to die for what he wanted to prove.

They're so different, and yet they understand each other. They're problems both strayed from the same place, they felt an absence of purpose. So they created one for themselves, and they died for it man. They died by each other. It's obvious anyone wouldn't ever reason with what they were thinking or doing, because they killed these men and women. They killed people with lives, and even in the end revenge is still preserved. It's this act of revenge that spiked another.

Revenge in this movie, is just seen to be drawn out further in the end. Even after what they did. stuff rooted from it, these kids saw this act of burning their graves as rightful. But do they not understand this was the same delusion, same hate that created this cause? They are the same violence, with different extents. They do not see the cry that was in their ends, but who would when it was after a laugh. They are immoral, they are horrible. But they were never given a chance, they were the reason to each other that either saw to this plan at all. They are the Army of two. This movie's point is to prevent what they did. To prevent who can become what they have. You can't get help unless you seek it, and you can't let problems happen till they get to a dangerous point. If there's a problem, if there's an effect to someone's well being, you can never know if it's capable of something bigger. What it can lead to, and no one deserves to live life with the purpose to end it. No one is truly a monster, no one is the bad guy, no one is the good guy. We're all fucking humans. But if we feed into others ideation, if we're influenced by others ideation we can become horrible. We can become blind, and corrupted. Everything is conceptual, everything is a word and a thing to be thought about. We have so much in life that tears us, that makes us happy. Sometimes we don't understand our own emotions, or actions. So how could Cal and Andre? It took two people to tell each other it was reasonable, it was rightful. It took two suicidal, ill children disturbed in their own ways to give each other enough comfort to have the courage to kill themselves and others. It proves you can be hurt by the wrong crowd, but yet only understood by them. You want to be understood, you don't want to be alone. But sometimes those aspects don't make you realize what your doing shouldn't happen. Morality, its so fucking flexible if your part of the wrong crowd, or driven to a wrong point. But really it isn't morality that drives someone to murder, its desire, or hate. And hate can be in morality, it can make something feel right. You hate robbers, because what they do isn't right. Andre hated this school, because what it does to him isn't right. But how Andre handled dealing with it was horrible, it was clear he was in a mindset unhealthy, and being friends with Cal only enabled it. Andre only enabled Cal. Zero day isn't a slasher movie, it isn't a true crime. It sheds light on these problems, it makes you think. It makes you understand, to try to prevent. Because these people came from simple name calling. So hey, one. Don't call someone an idiot, communicate. We don't know if someone's mentally disturbed, and why even call someone an idiot in the first place? That isn't education, it's blatant harm. And if this 'idiot' is causing it themselves from words or action, its counterproductive. You're being a hypocrite. And it'll only be getting anger out of them which just causes either spite or ignorance so then you get nowhere. I mean, if there's ignorance either way, then sometimes it's better left to professional help. And two, it just tells you to seek this help yourself. No matter how horribly or subtly ill, it's better than starting from something capable of causing harm to yourself or others. Zero Day is just something fake, but real. In all honesty, like any other it's how you find something out of this movie, whether bad or good. It just feels like a test. It was never made to encourage, but prevent. But people are capable of either, and that in itself is the test. To see if you're capable of reasoning, and understanding what's really to blame. And simply, no one. Your story is dependent on your actions, on what you do to help yourself. And killing or suicide is never an option. Movies can be for hope, for reasoning and awareness. This movie is anything, but to be encouraging. It's meant to make you more thoughtful, to find points and reason from this and everything else. It wasn't made for shock culture, it's more than that. PT.1 PT.3

#zero day 2003 #zero day #cal gabriel #andre kriegman

[vivid-vices]

i really think the world could stand to be a tiny bit more understanding of low-empathy people

#re: a post i just saw about compassion fatigue which is absolutely not the same thing but let me explain #it is really fucking exhausting to try to make yourself care about things when you just naturally don't #and that probably sounds whiny #but if you don't pretend to feel upset or outraged or even just bothered by Other People's Problems people think you're a monster #and it's like. i don't even care about my own life #i make an effort for my family/friends because i do love them and want to help them #but it's not something that comes naturally to me at all. that shit was trained out of me by the time i was double digits in age #so i do understand conceptually that it's Not Good when Bad Things happen to people but does it bother me? not really #and performative empathy seems pointless most of the time unless it's to directly comfort someone i care for #i've been seeing a lot of those ''if you don't reblog you're the worst person ever and you should die'' type posts and i'm immune to them #but there are younger people like me on this site who don't have years of experience scrolling past those and probably feel like shit #anyway. that was a rant. just be a little more understanding that not everyone experiences the world the same way you do #having the ''correct'' and ''obvious'' reactions to things (words i've seen used here) are not as natural as it seems to some people #and if you block me for this then it's a hill i'm fully willing to die on btw #ellie.txt

[fuckyeahisawthat]

“I don’t think that is what God wants. And I don’t think you want it either.”

This line of Aziraphale’s in the Job minisode keeps sticking out to me. Because this is the heart of the problem, right? This is how Aziraphale can see Crowley so completely and also not at all.

Because yes they suck at open communication and yes it’s because they had to hide their relationship for thousands of years and have so so so much trauma and fear to work through. But ALSO they actually do have a profound difference in how they see the world that keeps coming between them, and it’s not just theoretical but deeply personal to both of them.

Because Aziraphale still wants to believe that God is good. He can’t let go of that because his whole identity is wrapped up in being an angel of the Lord, and if God’s not good then what has he been doing for his entire existence?

And so when bad things are happening he falls back on This cannot be what God wants. The whole of season one, he refuses to believe that God could really want the world to end—even though we now know he knew this was a possibility before the world even started. He keeps going up the chain of command, trying to find someone to intervene. “That’s why I’m going to have a word with the Almighty and then the Almighty will fix it.” As if God doesn’t have all the information or hasn’t been paying attention.

And really, the events of season one reinforce this worldview for him. Because if the Archangel Fucking Gabriel isn’t sure what God wants, then maybe God did want them to stop Armageddon. Maybe it was Aziraphale and Crowley who were doing God’s work after all.

He’s gotten as far as realizing that Heaven’s orders are not the same thing as God’s will, but he still hasn’t detached the concepts of Good and Right from God in his worldview.

Crowley is a good person who does the right thing so he must still be an angel deep down. “I know the angel you were.” The only way Aziraphale can conceptualize Crowley saving Job’s children is, “Come on, you’re a little bit on our [God’s] side.” So Crowley’s fall was a mistake; Crowley belongs in Heaven, where he was so happy before the Fall. Why wouldn’t he want to be an angel again? And yeah maybe Heaven sucks now but God is still good, so there’s hope that the system can be reformed with a change of leadership, and Heaven can be made to actually do good, the way God always intended.

But that’s not how Crowley sees the world at all. He is operating with an entirely different understanding of reality. Because he figured out a long time ago (at least by the time of the Job job, but probably long before that) that you can’t base your sense of morality on what you think God wants. Not just because you don’t know for sure, but because sometimes God’s plans are fucking awful. God in Good Omens is not kind to Her creations. She doesn’t tolerate questions or doubts or disobedience. She’s capricious, turning on the creatures She made and killing a bunch of them when She’s in a bad mood. She punishes indiscriminately and disproportionately. She wagers human lives like gambling chips. The kids were supposed to be dead no matter who won the bet.

I think it’s interesting that Crowley is the one who introduces the idea in season one of “What if the Almighty planned it like this all along? From the very beginning.” That’s probably a comforting thought to Aziraphale, soothing his anxieties about going against Heaven right when he is feeling acute distress at the idea of no longer having a side. (And, in that particular moment, no longer even having a bookshop.)

But it’s not a comforting thought to Crowley. Have you seen what happens when God has a plan for you? It fucking sucks. Woe betide you if you’re the Barbie God decides to play with today. (At bare minimum, you’re coming back with some burn marks and a weird haircut.)

I’ve brought up the line “There are no right people. There’s just God, moving in mysterious ways and not talking to any of us” before, and I tend to focus on the “there are no right people” part. But also, there’s just God.

Aziraphale tends to draw a distinction between God’s will and Heaven’s orders when it suits him, and collapse that distinction when it doesn’t. Crowley almost never differentiates between God and Heaven. There’s just God, and She’s not going to explain why this is happening or listen to pleas for mercy (although Crowley still tries). You can’t trust Heaven or Hell, and you can’t count on God to show up and make everything all right. Sometimes God is in fact the reason that things are not all right. You’re on your own.

(And. Look. Crowley is right on this one. There are certainly aspects of their relationship where they’re both equally responsible for things being a shitshow, but the text is pretty unambiguous about Crowley, a demon, having the most accurate read on the nature of God in the world of Good Omens out of any of the metaphysical characters.)

Crowley rebuilt his entire sense of self, alone, after the Fall. He created himself anew and developed his own moral compass and sense of identity independent of both Heaven and Hell. “The angel you knew is not me.” When Crowley does the right thing, that’s not his angel-ness shining through; that’s just Crowley.

And from a like, trauma recovery point of view, it’s actually very healthy for him to have the realization that sometimes God’s just kind of a dick. He didn’t do anything to deserve getting kicked out of Heaven. None of them did. Just God messing them about because She didn’t like being questioned, or She wanted to see what would happen, or She needed two sides for Reasons and didn’t much care who was on one or the other, or She’s playing some fucked up little game for Her own amusement. (And if there was some Great Plan that required Crowley to fall…well, that is also fucked up. Because it doesn’t matter if there was a reason. It still hurt.)

And while Crowley in general is extremely patient with Aziraphale and his slow, halting journey away from Heaven…it’s gotta sting, every time Aziraphale doesn’t want to believe that God could be cruel, when Crowley is standing right fucking there. It’s gotta hurt when Aziraphale refuses to see something that Crowley knows to be true through his own lived experience. Because it should be enough. What happened to him should be enough to make someone who loves him walk away from Heaven and never look back. And it isn’t.

But of course Crowley is one hundred percent not going to talk about this, if he is even fully self-aware about having these thoughts, because it’s far too painful and vulnerable. (He talks to plants, goats, God, and no one in a bar at the end of the world, but never to Aziraphale.) And so he says “Tell me you said no” and “I think I understand a lot better than you do” because he can’t say Choose me. Just this once, choose me and he can’t say Believe me.

And Aziraphale is not going to think about all this and work it out for himself, because he has a massive lump of denial centered around exactly this thing, that sometimes God hurts people who didn’t do anything to deserve it. I’m sure he’s thought about the Fall in abstract terms, enough to be afraid of it, but not in terms of this is a thing that happened to a person I love. And he has certainly not allowed himself to draw any conclusions about the nature of God from it, because that is far too scary a prospect.

And so they’re stuck. Until they can figure out how to remove this massive landmine from the center of their relationship, they are going to keep having the same fight over and over again, and they’re going to keep hurting each other without fully understanding why.

#do you know HOW HARD it is to write genuine ideological conflict that also feels deeply personal?? and they did it SO WELL #i am in awe tbh #good omens #good omens s2 #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #heaven #hell #god #the god in good omens is not nice and you can’t convince me otherwise #is a tag i have from s1 and i’m sticking with it #fall thoughts

[reverieaa]

The self, fufilled.

It might have taken me a while, but as I promised in my last poll, I will deliver what you all were most interested in hearing, my explanation of the self fufilled. Consider this a pt.2 of "a change of clothes".

Yes, I say the self fufilled. I thought this play of words is not only interesting to do but would bring light to a new perspective that may help you come to your own understanding.

Many don't sit to really understand what " no other cause to your thoughts other than you" really means to them, we know, but we don't understand.

How do I stop my doubtful thoughts? How do I manifest quickly? how do I feel my wish fufilled? How do I change my state? How do I feel free? How do I stop punishing myself?

Well for the last one, you can start by putting an end to all previous questions, searching with the intention of finding an outside answer.

The opposite of love is hate, as the opposite of to hurt is to heal.

And the opposite of attention is indifference. As Edward art himself said that indifference is truly the answer to all your doubts.

I don't want you to go through your day and force yourself to imagine, affirm, and re-read every post you've ever read again and again until it finally clicks, I don't want you to fight every thought and scold your mind for "going out of place" either.

All that I want you to do is all that is required for you to do, change the inner. We truly are fortunate when I tell you this good news because change is all we do, all we've ever done.

I'll tell you honestly, not to give you hope and neither to shatter it or delude you when I tell you that majority of your problems that sound so complicated as the universe itself, could be solved just through self identification and a rearrangement of the mind.

I don't say this to give comforting lies, false hope, and support because I don't want people with hopes and dreams in tough situations to feel bad and be a moral person, but because the truth is far more comforting than any of it.

I won't tell you to "keep going" when you feel like nothing is working and breaking down. If you feel the need to change something, then change should happen, and it shall as your word is logic to your world.

I want you to understand that you're not meant to fufill the thing itself, but yourself instead. It's not about your desired face, it's about you, it's not about your ideal relationship and sp, it's about you, it's not about imagining the perfect life, it's about you.

It's not about using yourself to fulfill the scenario/desire. It's about it fulfilling and changing YOU.

Right now, you have a bed, you are not imagining that you do, you're not checking to see if you have a bed, you probably didn't even look to see if you have one, it is a CLAIM within yourself. With the same conviction, you use it for your desires. Take this example with things you have in your life.

I don't think people realize that the whole reason why trying changing the outer reality does not work because there is no outer reality to begin with, I mean that literally.

It is crucial to understand when you imagine that you are not creating the desire or a new reality, but you can only conceptualize that version of you to begin with because it already exists.

Let the ego mind go, let the need for outer change go, both its worries and time-frame of your life so far and just sit there with what I'm trying to say when I tell you to feel the wish fulfilled. It is a CLAIM, not a process, a change of identification.

Once you identify yourself with who you actually are, the awareness/ pure consciousness and believe that you is all there is , you won't want to "manifest a df" just to decorate the outer man, but you'll want to manifest it bc it genuinely makes u happy for yourself, same for every manifestation.

It all comes down to a satisfying claim, a claim of your observation that you see as TRUTH and are currently seeing in your mind.

For those who are wondering what knowingness I'm talking abt, it's the same knowingness when someone asks your name, you know you are (name), you know you're (nr) years old.

And so the same way you know your name, you know you have your desired body, the same way you know how old you are, you know you have your dream car.

We identify as body and outer when the outer world itself is WITHIN us, you are the answer to everything as everything has it's root to you, and at the same, everything cam only live through ypir awareness, nothing greater and nothing to "get".

If i view myself as pure consciousness, then I do not care for the 5 senses to show me anything because I don't view myself as just body, and this doesn't mean you can't deal with things in the 3D, because working in the 3D and identifying with it are different things. Therefore, don't feel the need to commit all your 5 senses to your imaginal act.

This isn't a for you to tell yourself: " ok, I have to know I am pure consciousness/ the creator and work with it from there" this post is telling you that you ALREADY are it, skip emotions here, we have established that you are it right now and youvare becoming aware that you are in imagination.

All we do in life is make claims within ourselves about things we are aware of having in the mind. Say you have a red car, and you think about it in your head, you know it's yours, you don't need to check your own drivers license, you know you have a certain hair color, it is a aware claim, you aren't trying to get it, there is no rush to do so, you are at ease knowing it IS so and are just observing your life through that state on consciousness.

And since you are consciousness, and you can get/be anything you want just by being aware that you are it, what is it that you can't do or be in this world? You can't be satisfied going after the "object" itself bc the only way we can enjoy things in this world is through the awareness that we have it, it has no life of its own outaide your own consciousness.

#law of assumption #affirm and persist #manifesation #manifesting #neville goddard #3d #affirmations #loa methods #void state #loa blog #loa

[etirabys]

It's very sweet about CS Lewis to idiotproof Paradise Lost against atheists. He didn't have to do that. He was a Christian writer in a Christian society and I assume he could have gotten away with just talking to other Christians about it and ignoring annoying people who wrongly read subversion into Milton. Instead he gives us a Christianity 101 chapter in A Preface to Paradise Lost and says, "this is the theological canon of the church, and here is how Milton hews to it again and again".

So now I think I understand Christianity. Maybe?

CS Lewis, explaining the canonical beliefs: Everything in nature is intrinsically good. Bad things happen when conscious creatures become "more interested in itself than in God", or assumes it can exist independently of God, as when Milton's Satan says that he is "self-begot".

me: Just for fun, let me enumerate the possible answers to 'who begot us?' – (1) conscious supreme being – e.g. Christian God, (2) our parents – e.g. Confucianism, (3) the self, (4) the weight of human history – humanity co-creating itself by maintaining a matrix of culture, (5) Nature – non-conscious but still revered, e.g. planet worship / I hecking love science, (6) null answer – non-conscious material processes.

Lewis: God knows in advance that some conscious entities will voluntarily make themselves bad and also knows what good use He will make of their badness. As [Milton's] angels point out, whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention. At the end of the poem Adam is astonished at the power 'that all this good of evil shall produce'. This is the exact reverse of the programme Satan had envisaged in Book I, when he hoped, if God attempted any good through him, to 'pervert that end'; instead he is allowed to do all the evil he wants and finds that he has produced good. Those who will not be God's sons become His tools.

me: That's such beautiful cope! I've heard the badly-articulated versions of that Christian belief but it turns out I'm unprincipled and like it when you, Charisma Stat Lewis, say it.

me: It's also hard not to speculate that this belief is more adaptive in a world with e.g. a 50% child mortality rate.

Lewis: Also, The apple wasn't magic. THE APPLE WASN'T MAGIC. The only point of forbidding it was to instill obedience. The disobedience was so heinous precisely because obedience was so easy.

me: it was a shit test

Lewis: The Fall consisted of man's disobedience to his superior and was punished by man's loss of authority over his inferiors – chiefly over his passions and his physical organism. "Man has called for anarchy: God lets him have it." After the Fall, understanding ceased to rule and the will did not listen to understanding.

me: okay so what about the physical organism

Lewis: Man used to control his erections before the Fall

me: what

Lewis: That's right. No accidental boners. No morning wood. No dead bedroom subreddits. You can clench your fist without being angry and you can be angry without clench your fist. The will controls the fist. The sexual organs used to be like that.

me: That follows splendidly from "man was punished by the passions overruling the will" and yet I wasn't expecting that at all. Probably because I'm female? I annotated your "the will did not listen to understanding" with "we didn't have akrasia before the fall", because akrasia is a big problem for me. But being horny isn't.

me: I mean, obviously some women are really horny and causes them to act in unwise ways, and some men aren't horny. But "single men under age 25 are the most societal-problem-causing demographic" is well known, and even outside that age range, men seem to be, like, "cursed with horny" in a way that requires managing & makes them miserable on a day to day basis... so it makes sense that male interpreters would identify that with the Fall. It's conceptually congruent in a way "the Fall caused childbirth to be painful" isn't.

Lewis: Anyway, the Fall – people overcomplicated it. The apple is just an apple. It's not an allegory. The Fall consisted of Disobedience – doing what your superiors told you not to do – and resulted from Pride, which is forgetting your place. This is what the Church has always taught. Milton states it in the very first line of his poem and all his characters reiterate it from every possible point of view. Don't read false emphases into Milton! This is what he is saying: obedience to the will of God will make you happy and disobedience will make you miserable.

me: Well, obviously you know that your modern reader doesn't like this. You're pleasantly cognizant of atheist readers who are into self-governance and equality.

Lewis: The modern idea that we can choose between hierarchy and equality is not quite right. The real alternative to hierarchy is tyranny. If you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force.

me: I simultaneously have a suspicious-resistant feeling and the perception that, when people in my milieu disagree with this, your view is the baseline from which we deviate minorly. Any form of functional social arrangement is going to have something that looks like authority and obedience.

Lewis: Understand this: Milton's poem belongs to a hierarchical conception of the universe where everything except God has some natural superior and everything except dead matter has some natural inferior. Superiors should rule over inferiors. When Milton protests an instance of rule (he was against the monarchy of the Stuarts) he is disagreeing that the Stuarts are superior while still thinking that hierarchy is cosmically good. The justice or injustice of any given instance of rule depends wholly on the nature of the parties, not on any social contract.

me: I have little respect for Confucianism because it strikes me as so overtly a system of thought with no internal merit or wisdom on the micro, whose only function is to make society run on the macro. (I'm sorry to say "only" there, because that's a big function.) What you describe has the same feel. This isn't a great label for it, but I'd call both Confucianism and Christian hierarchy 'biological philosophies', in that of course this is the philosophy that materially deprived apes who want both power and stability would equilibriate on: a system of subjugation and cope. The hierarchical conception itself is "understanding ceasing to rule".

Lewis: [Lewis would doubtless totally own me. But he doesn't directly address this in anything I've read by him, and I can't simulate him in enough detail to generate his response.]

#rambl #eti reads paradise lost #cs lewis

[amerricanartwork]

Part two of this! Felt like I should get around to finishing these. I've already answered the second, but a lot of my thoughts for these go hand-in-hand so I'll kinda answer them as one here.

Also, I apologize if these seem a bit scattered. The questions are pretty broad in their interpretation, so I'm more just using this to get out some loose character thoughts I probably won't end up saying in other posts I plan to make.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

8. What are your opinions of Looks to the Moon (character)?

9. What are your opinions on Five Pebbles (character)?

To summarize what I said about Five Pebbles last time, I basically see him as another example of what I find to be a fascinating kind of tragic villain, where their bad environments combined with their own major character flaws essentially create a vicious cycle undermining all of their successes and worsening their failures more and more until they meet their demise in some way. But like I said before, I stated I also like the idea that Pebbles's own personality flaws and bad decisions, while still being the ultimate problem, were not the only things to blame for what happened to him, and as of now I think Looks to the Moon takes 2nd place in making the worst mistakes when dealing with him, only topped by Seven Red Suns.

I plan to go into it more later, since it's pretty crucial for an iterator off-the-string AU story I've been working on for a while, but I basically believe Moon's biggest flaw is being too selfless and making decisions based solely around what others seem to need while neglecting herself. In this regard Pebbles could actually be seen as more virtuous than her, because he's extremely committed to doing what he believes is right and follows through pretty much unconditionally, whereas Moon can only pursue her goals if it doesn't appear to do anything bad to other people.

Again, I'm gonna go into this more later, but for now I wanna give some out-of-universe thoughts and say that I would like to see more content showing off Moon's flaws and Pebbles's virtues. I feel like both of them can be a bit flanderized from time to time, with Pebbles being portrayed as overly mean or uncaring and Moon being cheery and caring with no flaws. So to help balance out their sibling dynamic better, I'd like to explore the idea of Moon making her own big mistakes, yet hiding it behind politeness and selflessness, and her eventually having to realize that Pebbles has some merits she could probably learn from!

Even despite that though, I really like Looks to the Moon as a character, and she's probably one of my favorite female characters in any story thus far! Firstly, I really feel for her struggle, not just in being collapsed by her own brother, separated from her friends and drowned constantly, but in (at least my headcanon idea of her) how much she enjoys in the world around her, yet doesn't feel like she can enjoy it fully. I get the sense that because of how old and broken down she is, she feels like "her time has passed" more-or-less, and it's no longer her right to exist for much longer. And that's just so sad! Like, poor girl's gone through so much and doesn't feel like there's anything she can do about it!

But on a more positive note, I think Moon is conceptually a really cool character, albeit in a different way to Five Pebbles. Rain World has always seemed to be largely about the feeling of existing in a strange world with a lost history far older and more complicated than you can ever understand, and I think no character symbolizes that idea of civilizations being lost to time than Looks to the Moon. Her primary utility is giving the player lore about the world, and with her broken down state and age old enough to probably have seen a good deal of Ancient society change over time, it feels all the more like I'm talking to one of the last remnants of a lost civilization. And on top of that, she literally is a broken down massively complex artificial structure, the pinnacle of Ancient civilization slowly returning to the natural ecosystem. And I especially mean that last part! Submerged Superstructure is one of my favorite regions conceptually because abandoned architecture being reclaimed by the wilds is a trope I find so beautiful and poetic, and I think it makes this region speak to that theme of Rain World even more so than Five Pebbles's Metropolis. Whereas Metropolis is still relatively barren and unchanged besides the dust, scavengers, and other occasional creatures, Submerged Superstructure is almost entirely flooded, filled with all sorts of flora and fauna, and yet you can still clearly see the identifying architecture of old sections like the Memory Conflux and Abstract Convergence Manifold. Looks to the Moon, both as a region and a character, is just so cool and beautiful in her ability to evoke such sadness to see this strange and fascinating world be lost to time, yet also a deep love of nature knowing that life goes on anyway!

Lastly, I just wanna mention how I love Five Pebbles and Moon's relationship and how central it is to the "story" of Rain World. As much as I love good romance, deep sibling bonds can be so heartfelt too, and it's continuously fascinating and melancholic and beautiful to see these two mechanical gods get humbled from their high status endure so much tragedy, yet still reconnect with each other in the end, if not physically then by mending their relationships and forgiving each other. Throughout everything we see happen to them they seem so interconnected, and yet, at least in my interpretation, they eventually come to learn that isn't such a bad thing after all! Once again, it serves as a reminder than even in this seemingly hopeless and dying world love goes on, like a great cycle! This is honestly part of why I've been hesitant to write my thoughts on this, because their story's ending in Rubicon threatens to make me cry every time I think about it because it's just so poetic!

So, in short, I like the idea that Looks to the Moon is pretty flawed as well as Five Pebbles, I empathize with her a lot, I adore her symbolism as a fascinating relic of a lost civilization, and I honestly think the story of her and Five Pebbles is perhaps one of my favorite parts of Rain World!

Thanks again for the questions, @tanyabadtime159!

#others: tanyaBADTIME159 #quetzalli answers #quetzalli's thoughts #rain world #iterator #rw iterator #five pebbles #rw fp #FP #looks to the moon #LttM #rw lttm #asks: scavworld's rain world questionnaire

[lillified]

I remember you saying earlier (on twitter,not here) that the autobots were kind of boring,since they only fit into a few archetypes. I’ve kind of been thinking about that, and I thought they may also have been boring because of another thing: these few personality types means no one really bounces off eachother, and it doesn’t lead up to any interesting conflict.

This may only apply to G1,or I may just be talking nonsense, but compare them to the decepticons. The decepticons have a lot of different personalities , so they contrast against eachother and a lot of the times,disagree with eachother,creating conflict. However, with the autobots, the similar personality problem can come when no sort of conflict,even ones between certain characters,exists, and everyone has no sort of unique opinions towards eachother. And conflict,you know,makes up a lot for a story and characters.

A lot of people don’t care much about the autobot moments a lot, however you don’t really need to scour the internet to see videos and people posting about Megatron arguing with Starscream or skywarp getting clowned by rumble and frenzy, if you know what I mean.

hey!! wow, it is always surprising when people remember stuff I said lol

I’m admittedly just not really a big autobot fan (if I get the opportunity to write the autobots they’d be very messy) but I totally agree with you here—people seem to like the autobots, conceptually, for very different reasons than people like the Decepticons, and it factors into an interesting dichotomy between how different people view characters as a literary device.

while it isn’t a rule by any means, I’ve noticed there are a lot of people who love certain autobots, but specifically like them in isolation. the idea of the character is more important than anything they’ve actually done. pretty much every autobot that exists has a fan, but they could have little, if any, screen presence. this isn’t bad, of course! in many cases, it’s extremely novel and sweet. that being said, I’ve noticed that even the most prominent autobots have this happen—Optimus Prime is more of a symbol than a character, and that separation is a source of comfort.

This also happens with Decepticons, but I’d argue it’s to a lesser extent? They tend to have much more defined and consistent character relationships, arcs, and themes. The decepticons who are viewed in isolation most frequently would probably be Soundwave and Autobot Megatron, which is interesting (I am honestly not a fan of the modern characterizations of either of these, but I totally understand why people are!), in that their interactions, story purposes, and even personalities are flattened to separate them from the underlying narrative. People love the idea of Soundwave, but fail to give it a personality.

Once again, I don’t think any of this is bad! Moreover, isolating characters from the existing narrative and putting them in different places according to where they might better suit a story is a very good thing, actually. I’ve never agreed with the pushback for iterative/adaptive media altering existing characters’ traits or personalities to suit their thematic purpose, because I think it takes away the agency and undermines the vision of the artist. obviously you can dislike certain characterizations (I do that often) but blaming a deviation from the norm is extremely reductive. Trying to stick to an idealized checklist of how a character ought to act instead of recognizing them as a reactive, dynamic story device is how you end up with flat, unchanging characters and a boring story.

To tie that back to what I like about the decepticons, I think the fact that they are so messy is their strength—they aren’t all just different skins on the same archetype, they’re unique thematic elements which adapt and serve a function in the story. You can make them physically and even archetypally unrecognizable, but as long as you utilize them as elements in the story and afford them the conflict and complexity they deserve, it’s much more difficult to go wrong.

thanks for reading, and thank you for the question!! I hope this all makes sense—I wiped myself out last night and I’m still recovering, so I apologize if this was incoherent lol

#ask #transformers #text post #text

[dionysianfreak]

hi!! i can't get this off my mind - love hear your thoughts!

I don't understand and still need to answer for myself: I generally see us modern polytheists pray for and attribute good outcomes to gods' interference/support (eg. good garden yield, long-needed rain, creative or shadow work breakthroughs) and refuse to attribute gods' interference when "bad things" happen (eg. dead plants, natural disasters) because it would be unscientific to do so.

Obviously "gods" is no longer adequate scientific reasoning for the weather forecast. Godly things can happen, but most of the time the reasons are mundane.

So how can we pray for rain from Zeus, get rain, and attribute this to his generosity, when you can't "blame" Poseidon for an earthquake or tsunami that strikes your home?

hello love. I've touched on this a few times on my pages over time. the post that sticks out the most to me is this one. this answer is also going to be extremely leaning on personal opinion/upg so keep that in mind.

i personally do attribute negative things to the Theoi, that has always been a very central idea for my practice. i definitely wouldn't deem this "unscientific", I would argue that it's unscientific to only attribute positive qualities.

my reasoning is that our concepts of good/bad, positive/negative, helpful/damaging, etc tend to be human-centric. we define things as good based on how they effect humans, not how they effect the earth or any other species. one could argue that, in some aspect, earthquakes are positive because they are a product of the earth's movement and constant change. the opposite is also true, the rains that help our crops grow could be very catastrophic if I was a butterfly without shelter.

so, my answer is people will focus on good qualities and reject the bad because they push their mortal, human morals onto the natural workings of the earth. our planet was not made specifically for us, it's a miracle that our species even evolved and gained the ability to conceptualize religion. the Theoi would have carried on had we not evolved, but we did, and that's the blessing of our existence.

it can be very eye-opening to begin praising the Gods for the bad things in life. it helps you realize that existence, especially with how vast and diverse it is, is not all about humanity. killing that part of your ego allows you to get infinitely closer to the Theoi because you are no longer rejecting parts of Them that don't benefit you. the true blessing is that we evolved to the point that we are able to form the connections and commune with the energetic side in the first place, not the gifts or benefits that may come with it.

especially because, in more cases than not, the bad is what clears the way for the good. your partner leaves you and you're shattered, but it allows you to follow your passion without someone pinning you down. you're kicked out of a job you worked hard at, but you avoid a disaster that occurs in that building. so then, what constitutes something being good and something being bad ?

you generally see people pray for good things because most people aren't inclined to share the worst parts of their lives. this is the internet, you're only seeing a very small part of someone's practice—the parts the choose to show you. behind the scenes, we all struggle, so remember that what you see here is but a small slice of our real lives and praxis. for the ancient people, the bad things certainly outweighed the good. in modern times we live very privileged lives compared to them, especially with modern medicine and widespread access to diverse foods and cultures. it makes sense that they would only wish to invoke the good qualities, the bad ones were already way too prevalent.

this answer is also swayed by my belief that the mundane is the most Godly. I believe the Theoi encompass all that They rule, and are present in every being and object under Their wing. it's an extremely animist-leaning perspective. I hope this can help you come to your own conclusions :)

#ask #talkingtocandles-follows #helpol #hellenic polytheism #greek gods #theoi #praxis #upg #personal #paganism #polytheism

[askaniritual]

wowowow 39 episodes in 6 days is a lot lol im sure im gonna be gnawing on this like a chicken bone for like. a month at least but wow!!!!!

a lot of my initial reads on things were validated in these last 10 episodes which was very gratifying. i love a show that just straight up tells me my understanding of symbolism is correct lol. anyway heres my notes

the things that are left unsaid

there's so much allusion and talking around things in this show. it becomes very clear in these later episodes that not being able to address a problem directly is a tool that those in power use to maintain that power. people who can't discuss the abuse they're experiencing can't put a stop to it and all that

anthy and the shaved ice 

i hadn't really thought about the shaved ice until this point but like. food that is meant to dissolve. colorless and flavorless except for the syrup that is placed on top of it. many have called it the rose bride of food

corrupted love

i feel like there are so many examples in this show of love (or the perception of love within patriarchal society) making somebody the worst version of themselves. people do horrible things for love, they hurt themselves and others and they justify it by saying it's because they care about somebody else. the apothesis of this is anthy's devotion (and the world's reaction to it) which created akio from dios

to love is to suffer, to suffer is to love, and suffering is eternal

related to the above and also related to the ongoing theme of eternity in the show. if there is one constant in the world, it is anthy's suffering, and her suffering is a manifestation of love. what's more real, love or suffering? can the two be separated? does love without pain exist??? maybe outside the bounds of akio's world

saionji and touga’s terrible horrible no good very bad sex life

i don't want to make light of this too much because obviously the nature of saionji and touga's relationship in the back half of the show is highly influenced by akio who as we all know is more than capable of taking innocence and warping it into something painful. that being said i do think the fact that they started fucking (for the plot!) and neither of them seemed very into it was kind of funny conceptually. this leads into my second point

metaphorical sex that is more real than the actual sex

this deserves like a way longer post but there's both metaphorical and literal sex in the show. there's also a strong emphasis on the dichotomy between the real and the illusory. a lot of the sex is metaphorical in the sense that there is nothing happening on camera that reads specifically as sex but "real" in the sense that it exists in relationship to emotions that predate or exist outside of akio's influence

manufactured consent 

again this really needs its own post but the show up to the last 10 episodes spent a lot of time playing with this idea of like. the difference between wanting something and believing you should want something, and the ways that those with power impose their reality on those with less power. this gets made extremely explicit when akio starts insisting that anthy chose her position as the rose bride, and that this is somehow a role she wants and enjoys. much to consider!

#egg world

[gb-patch]

Hi~! I have a question. My friends and I are making a visual novel of our own, and I wanted to ask if you had any tips (I love your games, I hope we can reach that level of quality). Thanks!

That's cool ^^. I hope you have fun making it, and it's nice of you to say our games are good quality! But I'm afraid I'm not sure how helpful the tips I could give will be. Increasing the quality of a project isn't exactly something that can be done through general suggestions and I don't know what engine you're using or what you're going for, etc. I'm sorry.

I will say that, in my opinion, there are three stages devs go through in conceptualizing their project and sometimes devs get stuck at the second part and the game is finished under those circumstances. Getting all the way to third usually increases the quality a lot.

The first stage is the idea that you just want to make a game. Who knows what it is, but you want to do that. The second part is having an idea of what you want it to be like and what you don't want it to be like. It's a good place to be, but there's still a level of disconnection. The best stage is the third, which is to really, really understand what your own game is as a whole, individual concept. It's not comparisons to other things or fixing problems you had with something else or a jumble of ideas that you're just going for or a game that's created in a certain way because that's how games seem to work. You've gotten a true grasp on your own intentions and each decision is made with the goal of creating the specific vision.

i.e; Your game doesn't have bad endings because every VN has bad endings, it has bad endings because they are needed for what you're doing. Or the game doesn't have bad endings because they wouldn't do anything. There's just endings and the players can determine how good or bad they are for themselves, or there's only a variety of different good endings, or there's only one single ending, or whatever.

And if you're making it with the aim of getting it out to an audience who will enjoy it, I can give one other piece of overall advice.

Even if it's true that you do want people to like your game, I find it more relaxing and often more effective to never make your game with the intention it being something people like. It's not about liking, it's about convincing. First yourself, and then others. You've seen something in this idea and you're gonna do everything you can so that when people play, they've seen what you saw. This is also why being at stage 3 in conception is so useful. You don't have to jump through hoops for or to read the minds of people you don't even know. You've come to know a thing as valuable or worth some time already, your goal is to pull it off in a way that other people will hear the case you've made for your own concept and hopefully they'll agree. Or at the very least, they'll see what you were trying to do and understand it even if it's not their preference. You can't win them all or perfectly get an idea across every time for everyone, but you can try for it if you know what you're going for.

When I made Our Life: Beginnings & Always it didn't matter if the player coming into thought the childhood friend trope was boring or super cute, I knew what the concept was to me. I'd pictured an experience that was genuinely sentimental, nostalgic, and had a relationship based on shared moments over a lifetime together that actually happened. The genre, gameplay style, presentation, and everything was meant to show that. In the end I think players got to experience what I imagined for myself and I think that's a wonderful thing.

Good luck creating your own project!

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[cozyunoist]

what do you think of william clare roberts saying that communism can have markets in his debate with martin hagglund?

'can x have y'/'does x abolish y' is always such a funny form of debate to me; at the end of the day it always hinges on conceptual redescription of these hotly contested terms, right? we can set up either a thin concept of x where it refers to a single condition, or we can take x in with all its contradictory historical valences; and we can set up a concept of y which makes it impossible to abolish, or collapse the concept of y into a sort of heavily-asterisked bad-y which can be abolished simply by making the things about y we consider bad no longer the case.

maybe this is surprising considering how much time i spend on something that looks suspiciously close to cookshop-receipt-writing,

sidenote 1, pt 1: i would argue that the only concern that motivates me to do a little cooking in my work is the understandable fear (i think implicitly shared by wcr) that this (already impossibly broad) set of possibilities is one that we can't even show exists.

but i tend to think the concept of communism has precious little determinate content. because the historical movement is both more or less dead & composed of people of people with wildly different programmatisms, in this sort of programmatic content i tend to use 'communism' very loosely, to include anything in 'the purposive replacement of generalised commodity production with... something else...'.

sidenote 1, pt 2: to recapitulate something that happens in the middle third of my book, we want to avoid the sort of useless conceptual redescription that happens when i swap out my market for a computer or set of social arrangements that do what markets do and converge on doing them how markets do them, because this would invite the question 'why bother?'. so, to get down to brass tacks we replace the concept of generalised commodity production in this thin conception of communism for a concept of what commodity production, per marx's whole thing in capital, necessarily does wrong apropos of social valuation. but then the sort of wall we run into is that people fail to meet the criterion we got out of marx everywhere we apply it: in c&c, in an ideal-type description of soviet FtAL planning, even in cogp!

i realise i've walked myself into a trap here, though, because i've done just the things i warned u about: i attempted to walk out of the terms of the question by setting up a very thin conception of communism, and then pretended that the concept of generalised commodity production was unproblematic.

sidenote 2: it's not; not because marx does a particularly poor job setting up commodity production conceptually, but because a description of an ideal average (the only level at which you can make the deductions he does) is necessarily unhelpful for the task of figuring out the fit between the stylised model and the world, even if you're able to prove, as he does, that it has a sort of shaping dynamic, wherein a social process itself described in the model forces us to behave more & more according to the entities of the model. this shaping dynamic is powerful, but definitely not sufficient for any commodity production to become totally generalised: see, for instance, the very slow entry of the sort of human activities which fall under the bracket of 'social reproduction' into the sphere of commodity exchange. it's unclear what the theoretical maximum even is--can we conceive of every interaction being commodity exchange--or why we ought to understand it to be reachable. and where this commodity exchange is only partially realised, the strong conclusions you reach in capital don't quite hold; every good is knocked off its true gcp value by the existence of a non-commodified basic good; the pseudo-natural laws needed to make these categories coherent don't quite obtain.

we're not going to make all parties happy, but what matters to me here when it comes to defining communism such that it has these boundary conditions, is something like the pragmatic rationale we give in conceptual engineering. as i say above, the minimum thing i consider to be specific about communism in the book is the resolution of the problem we attribute to commodity production, something akin to what wcr sets up as domination, although i do not find domination theory persuasive for the same reason i do not ultimately find theories of freedom broadly construed persuasive. communism is defined this way because it makes the rationale for its coming into existence readily apparent, and in the same stroke excludes all the other things we've tried.

exhausting preliminary stuff aside, let me get to the meat of your question. as for wcr: i would actually argue, as odd as it sounds, that he doesn't say communism can have markets--even though he says we likely will have markets in some places. he makes a subtler point, one whose intellectual honesty inspires in me genuine admiration, although i could not disagree more: that there is a tension between actually realising this freedom from market domination (allowing the concept for a second), and radical democratic theory, particularly one that necessitates a great deal of devolution, rousseauian plebiscites, & all. he says, in other words, that we are lying to ourselves in believing that the general will would coalesce in the way marx has it without a type of authority that marx doesn't argue for, a type of sociation we might find abhorrent, a vision of reconciliation we might find silly... furthermore, the mechanism of a wholesale replacement for market valuation ('planning' is a very poor descriptor) is necessarily one that is incompatible with the fact democratic polities may choose indifference to one another; it requires the production of a kind of information there is no reason to assume every polity may have, and the valuation decisions it makes are almost certain to cut against majoritarian wish-lists.

this all is to say, wcr reads social republicanism as radical democracy against communism, and in so doing argues that we ought to choose the former, biting the bullet on the difficulty of showing it necessarily entails the latter. i would make a similar argument, actually, just in favour of communism over republicanism-slash-democracy: democratic theory has near-zero appeal to me, because i believe a properly elaborated means of social valuation, the sort we need to replace the multitool of the market, is itself as normatively forceful, as good a grounds for practical reason at the level of the community, as anything possibly could be, and in its wake arguments about freedom (as wcr himself notes!) strike me as little more than residual liberalism.

#communism #markets #marxism #william clare roberts is a pretty cool guy #apologies for the lack of proofreading; i'm on a roadtrip rn

[logarithmicpanda]

The Magicians - Lev Grossman

So I just finished rereading The Magicians. It has been years. I’m pretty sure I read it for the first time a bit before 2014. I vaguely remembered major plot points, and having a conflicted opinion on it, and that still very much holds, but I don’t regret rereading it.

Let’s start with the bad:

Women - like most of the characters - are treated through the lenses of Quentin’s perception of them. This makes them belong to one of three categories: - mother figures, good only to cater to Q’s emotional needs - objects of desire, often to be denied but not that often, considering Q has literally nothing to offer as a person lmao - or unfuckable therefore unnoticeable. I swear every description of a female character stated if she was hot. At least one adjective was applied to her boobs. Men are barely described at all, which is funny given that Q quite literally is a disaster bisexual (derogatory). He watches one of his bros give someone a blow job, and feels vaguely offended said bro didn’t come to him if he wanted to suck dick. Later on, it is heavily implied that Q has a threesome with that bro and a girl, but the only explicitly mentioned part is the sex with the girl. In general, queer characters are given a weird treatment. Also I’m definitely too ace to relate to the amount of (thankfully not dwell on) sex in this book.

Anyway, Q’s character in general is pretty much irredeemable to me lol. He is so self centered he never understands why anyone is pissed off at him, keeps whining that he is a poor, misunderstood geek, and still has sex with two different women that are both smart and hot, plus is propositioned by at least one other. What they all see in him is beyond me. He cheats on his girlfriend and she stills care more about taking care of him than her own safety (even if she gets some amount of revenge sleeping with a guy he hates). There’s also some degree of albeism in the books, mostly implied, never quite touched on.

Wow, you might think. What can I possibly like about this book after all this?

Well, conceptually it does a lot of things I adore. It goes back on classic portal fantasy tropes and play on what happens when people are sent back home. Most of the main plot is about a boy who became a monster so he never had to go home again. There’s a whole deconstruction of the notion that there is a singular thing that will save you from depression. Q keeps running after things, thinking that they will make him happy for good, and is explicitly called out for this attitude. That’s probably the main way in which I find some positive sentiment towards him. I used to believe that, too. That I would magically find the one thing that would fix me.

The magic system is deep and interesting. It focuses on the amount of work that goes into it, how not fun it is, and I find that to be a cool take. It still allows the characters to do amazing things, and there’s some degree of unknown to it, which I love in magic systems. The “world between world” they use to go to their portal realm is well done, with that same balance of rationality and wonder. It feels mysterious, yet makes sense.

Beyond these things, there is a whole portrayal of the kind of dread you’re faced with when you do “higher studies” and pour all your mind into an endeavor that by very definition ends, leaving you stranded and emotionally stunted.

I’m getting rambly, but I think I highlighted the main aspects I love and hate in this book. I’ll pick the second one in coming months. I’m sure I will feel equally elated and enraged. Somehow, that tension creates a lot of emulsion in my own creative process, and I intend to milk it for all its worth lol

#the magicians #reblog later #panda reviews #that was neither quick not dirty lol

[the-owl-tree]

Your post about Sandgorse makes me think that Tallstars’ revenge would have been an excellent way to explore how it feels to grieve a parent who was either toxic or straight up abusive. The thing is, most people without wanting or meaning to, do deify the recently deceased, tend to remember only the good moments or minimize the bad. Having Talltail realize at the end that his father was truly abusive, and that even if the hurt he feels is understandable, he was not a good father and he doesn’t need to feel guilty for moving on, would have been a pretty good lesson towards the younger audience. I’m saying this as someone who went through a similar experience with a family member, was relating to Talltail’s guilt and stress about lack of closure, and then felt utterly betrayed when the books painted Sandgorse as a good parent and Talltail as someone that needed to “make up” for him . They even present Palebird as somehow being worse, when she was experiencing post partum depression on top of losing a child (this seems to be a recurring theme in warriors, since Sparkpelt goes through nearly the same thing)

Absolutely agree with you! The first half of Tallstar’s Revenge sets this up: Tallstar needs to learn to accept he can’t keep envisioning Sandgorse as a hero he needs to live up to. I love stories about rocky relationships with guardians, of children who have to grow up and realize they can’t be the person their parents want them to be (or that their parents won’t become someone they want them to be). It’s good juicy drama and often times these stories are satisfying in the sense of seeing people grow and move on. But it doesn’t happen.

The recurring theme of fathers in warriors is that there never needs to be a reckoning of their absence (Stormtail) or their shotty treatment of their children (Sandgorse and Raggedstar). The narrative either twists it around so that the father’s shitty behavior is never acknowledged, or worse, it completely puts the blame on the mother figures in the situation (once again, not excusing Lizardstripe or whatever being abusive but like….why does the cat who talks about how it’s unfair toms don’t have to give up anything when having children become the abusive mom. Can we think critically here. Raggedstar abuses both Yellowfang and plays a part in Brokenstar’s rise to power and he’s a fucking footnote compared to her).

Just a note for this next session on Palebird, I’m moreso talking about her from a writing perspective. Not as a real mother with PPD. That’s a distinction I want to make clear.

I think the thing that bothers me more about Palebird’s story is that she is absent in Tallstar’s life as a child, she doesn’t defend him from her father and her arc is wrapped up by, not talking with her son or asking for support from her Clanmates, but by remarrying and having more children. It’s a baffling and, with the rest of the series treatment of mothers in mind, shitty way to conclude her story.

I will fight tooth and nail that Sparkpelt being able to rely on other queens to ensure that her children were cared for was GOOD and NOT NEGLECT. What’s the alternative? A depressed mother who can barely care for herself takes care of two children as well? There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, there’s nothing wrong with leaning on community for support. ESPECIALLY if it means two children will be cared for, the prioritization of Sparkpelt being the sole caretaker would’ve put Finchkit and Flamekit in a much worse situation.

But Palebird doesn’t get that help and the story, from what I remember, never really comments on that? It’s a bit of a mess. I’m not fond of how they wrote her. Honestly, both Sandgorse and Palebird are interesting conceptually but the execution and resolutions of their characters is just sort of “I want to throw these two in the trash and start from scratch” energy to me lol

#warrior cats #deer rambles #SORRY THIS GOT LONG #busy day today! I need to destress by getting mad about warriors LOL

[firefurious]

thinking of grace as the muse and the process of eventually regaining past memories and how complicated and messy that is. to some extent it's manageable, if weird. i think the more distant things, past lives from ages ago, would be distant enough it's manageable, depending on the experience. there is, of course, the fact a lot of the experiences are not things she experienced and a lot of them would be really bad, traumatic events.

they say in game you feel as if you lived those things yourself, so it wouldn't be like remembering something someone else lived; it's reliving that trauma as if it happened to her. even the milder, if they can be called that, but like... life stuff like marriages and children; she never experienced those things, but it would feel like she had. it'd be confusing, to say the least, as she tries to adjust to it and to what she is in the middle of all that; but i think it gets far worse when it comes to experiences and feelings related to people she's close to.

calliope and apollo, for example, are shown to be close throughout ages. whether they were friends or like family or if it had romantic undertones, it doesn't matter; what matters is grace has her own feelings about him, but then there are other feelings that come from calliope and all the previous incarnations and things they lived that feel like grace lived them, good and bad. how do you separate what's you and what came before? how does that influence things? how does it change things?

the same goes for persephone, and with her we have a better defined relationship with calliope. they were romantically involved. they fought badly. it'd feel to her as if she had been in love with persephone — and as if she had been the one often clashing with her too. it's impossible that for a time, especially when first regaining these memories, they wouldn't mess with her. how do you not let it change how you feel when the previous experiences feel like they're yours?

given how grace is as a character (driven, headstrong, with a good sense of who she is despite feeling... adrift) and the fact we hear in game some incarnations are able to retain their current personalities rather well, keep their names and everything, i like to think that would be the case with her. i don't expect, even in the long term, she'd want to be called calliope (the idea seems wild to her initially, but after regaining the memories i feel she'd understand better why others would do it, even if it wouldn't be her choice); and i think it's obvious the memories and feelings would change her to some extent, because we're all shaped by our experiences and those feel like her experiences, but i also think past the initial confusion (which would be great and messy) she'd be able to continue being herself.

during the process though i'm certain things would get confusing and more volatile, no matter how careful and mindful of everything she tries to be. there would be terrible days; tears that are hers but aren't, anger that is hers but isn't, fears that are hers but aren't. feelings for those closest to her she isn't sure are hers or some past calliope's. knowing what it's like to kill, or give birth to a child, or lose a wife, knowing great joy and great sorrow from things that would've seemed so distant from her reality before. it's a little insane; it'd make her feel a little insane. having support certainly makes a huge difference, but ultimately a lot of it is in her head and she has to go through it alone.

i think it's also after that that she'd have a better concept of like, immortality. because although she is immortal, she's in her 20s — she can't conceptualize what eternity looks like. but having lived through all those lives, in a way... that changes things. she'd get it better. she'd get some other things better, about what she became and her powers and what's that all like, as well as about some of the other gods and how they were and what they've been through. she knows some things, but living them (or feeling like she did) is something else.

but yeah, ultimately while it's all part of who she is and what she became, i don't think they'd define her. in a way, the adrift reprise where she's the muse is aligned with this, i feel. it's finding herself through these other lives, too, that are invariably part of who she is, but do not make the whole and don't change the core.

#* grace: study. #* out of character. #thanks doll your reply gave me brainworms..

[callibones]

callieeeee. i saw ur response to a post i reblogged abt the robot dogs and it was really interesting. i happen to be working on a tad bit o homework for my intro to philosophy course. you have probably read it or at least heard of it already bc it feels super up ur alley as a thought experiment but. read daniel dennett's 'Where Am I' and literally thought of ur response the entire time. what are your thoughts on this if you have any

hooh. i hadnt read it or heard of it so i just gave it a read. that was phenomenal. very cleverly written. extremely funny and also horrifying. i love it dearly now.

it's right in line with i, robot as my favorite type of science fiction: thought experiments that rely on how we label things.

my opinion on the labels of things is, when i peel back all the stuff that gives me comfort, that there's just one thing: everything. some people call it god, i just think it's. like. The Everything. if you take our personal cognition outta the equation, there's nothing to distinguish between the parts of The Everything! some parts of The Everything (us) work in a very particular way where we come up with ways to distinguish between sections of The Everything. give things arbitrary designations based on arbitrary patterns that allow us to arbitrarily determine what's what. that includes the idea of the self!

all of this is a very fancy way to say that like. i don't think there's some inherent, universe-supported version of The Self that isn't tied to how we, as parts of The Everything, choose to label what we perceive. there's no objective answer to the question of who's dennett and who isn't. just like there's no objective answer about what exactly counts as a human, or what exactly counts as a robot! there's the answers that a bunch of scientists came up with that we use for all the science because it's what a lot of us agree on, but that doesn't mean that those designations are Absolute. Oops, It's All Social Constructs, Babey!

and this rocks, actually, and i love thinking about the world this way. because it means it's a given that. first of all. like. gender can be whatever we want. it's just how we choose to interpret our understanding of everything (including our feelings and other people and ourselves and our thoughts and stuff). i can be a robotgirl. yeah, i'm not. like. dictionarily a robot in the same way the boston dynamics robot is, but it's a label i choose to assign to my thoughts and feelings that i like! it's good i think and i like doing it and it helps me conceptualize the world. it's also why the question of "what's the cutoff between fictional robots and current ones?" is just as flawed as the question of "is a hot dog a sandwich?" the answer, objectively, is. like. that depends on how you see it. we're not going to get an answer that is completely 100% rooted in total fact with no wiggle room, because everyone has a different labeling system.

but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try! cause like. labels arent bad. when i get hungry i could zoom all the way out and think it doesnt matter because im one tiny shard of the everything and theres not even a me. or i could get up and exit what i think of as my bedroom and do what i think of as walking to get through what i think of as my hallway and arrive in what i think of as my kitchen and open what i think of as my fridge and eat what i think of as a sandwich, which happens to also be what i think of as a hot dog.

this is awesome because hot dogs rock and are delicious. but we can also discuss labels because... like. in the same way that the scientists can make a consensus about a label that isnt 100% objective but a lot of people agree with it, if a label's useful to us, we can make a consensus about it so we can discuss it and how to respond to it. and those labels can be slippery! when i say "i love robots so much. i want to kiss or be kissed by one i think." i am absolutely talking about the fictional robots i love dearly. we're probably thinking of some of the same ones. i also may be talking about some real robots! and maybe we both thought of those nasa robot probes i reblogged a bunch of times earlier that are so cute. i would kiss them. but you can guess i DONT want to kiss the boston dynamics police dog, because right now, my idea of robots that i love does not include that thing. that doesn't mean it's objectively Not a Robot. it's just not in the current definition of "robot" i'm going by when i say that i love robots.

when dennett's thinking about where he is, and whether he's in the jar or not, there's no objective answer because, as he shows very very well, there's no one objective dennett. the scientists think of dennett as yorick, probably, or interchangeably yorick or hubert depending on how they, personally, feel about the aliveness of hubert. anyone dennett's interacted with recently who doesn't know about the whole brain situation thinks of hamlet or fortinbras as dennett depending on who theyre used to. if theyve met both bodies, id guess they probably think fortinbras is dennett and dennett just moved from body to body. the story's such a great demonstration of the lack of the objective self.

personally, i just think the antennae are extremely gender and i want them. and also im surprised dennett thought about the idea of having a clone and didnt immediately think "we would kiss so much" because thats where my mind went. personally

#callie.txt.exe #<- im finally doing it im going to make a my posts tag i think #and im calling it that because the fake file extension thing is so gender #call-e.png.exe is like #canonically my sonas filename etcetc #irrelevant to all the rambling. so this is rambling SQUARED

[desi-lgbt-fest]

this is like a confession post? kinda? please feel free to not post this but i just need to vent this somewhere.

so for the past few months, i'm so very unsure of my future? i'm on the verge of getting admitted to colleges so like there's obviously the worry of if i'll ever be financially independent in the future (more so because i'm afab & a closeted queer and the idea of getting married to a cishet guy is the scariest thing ever & living alone or with another queer person seems beyond possibilities rn?). but there's also the question of how, even if i'm successful, will my future look like? like i don't have any examples before me of queer people living in comfort who are from homophobic families? and i cannot even conceptualize the idea of creating a future that will be good for me. then there's the added worry of finding friends & then, finding time for myself within the hectic lifestyle of today. i fear i will become my parents who don't have time or energy to engage in their hobbies. what does the future of me with my parents look like? it's just... it's so scary because i don't know what example to follow because there is seemingly none?

i really wish i could adopt a new identity & get lost somewhere at these moments istg.

Hey anon. This sounds pretty shitty, and i understand the struggle. I'm in my last year of highschool and finding a college is terrifying because of I'm in India then I'll stuck being in the closet. If I'm abroad I'll get to transition but my family might cut me off. That fear of being stuck and as my uncle has said being forced to make decisions with your back against the wall? It eats you up inside.

The way I imagine it's doing for you.

But I'm going to give you a trick my cool uncle taught me. Imagine your worst case scenario. In your case it might be getting stuck in a marriage you don't want and forced to being closeted right? Usually when people imagine their worst case scenario they stop right here. Shut if off cause the idea is terrifying and you don't want to entertain it.

Entertain it regardless.

Okay you get stuck in a marriage you don't want and are forced to remain in the closet... And? What happens to you? What do you do in this life? Try to think of it as an alternate universe version of you. What do you do??

Are you working, do you get kids? Is your husband nice? Are your in-laws nice? Do you have friends that support your queerness or are they shallow?

Build this world in your head. Why? You may be asking. Because throughout history we've found that the moment humans start questioning things, we do great things. So question, pound your head endlessly with them.

The fear won't look so bad anymore. And even if you do end up in this scenario (I am not saying you would, but in the case that you do) you'll be emotionally and mentally prepared to deal with it. Maybe you might at some point divorce your husband and live your dream life, who knows?

The point is, no one knows what the future may hold and a lot of the times we have these fears about it, because it is the one thing we cannot control. We can control how we deal with it. God forbid the worst case scenario happens, but if it does know that I strongly believe that you'll make it out fine. I promise.

And this is just a thought experiment, you can try it if you want and i sincerely hopes it works for you. But take my words with a grain of salt because I am barely eighteen and haven't seen much of life yet. I still have a lot to learn :)

(i also noticed you said you may not want it posted but I'm not sure if you meant that as I DON'T WANT ANYONE SEEING THIS or as a polite you can take your time answering. If it's the first one just send a follow up ask and I'll delete this)

-Mod Raissa

#queer #desi queer #anon asks #afab struggles #mod raissa