🏳️‍🌈 Steban? :)

thank you for the excuse to draw transfem steban 👀

No-one: Mark INFRA after reading two paragraphs about how the Stalburg Cabbage-Farmers' Coalition have been embezzling funds in order to buy napalm so they can put the other farmers out of business: "Intriguing..." *ethereal musical sting* but also, Mark INFRA after reading a single-sentence memo about how sanitation engineer Jorgen B. Denton forgot to order more beer so the valves haven't been fixed for a month: "Intriguing..." *marginally less-ethereal musical sting* and the immortal; Mark INFRA after taking a photograph of a really serious structural fault in the building that contains an important piece of infrastructure that the citizens of Stalburg need to have functioning in order to live: *literally nothing*

🚫 please be advised. 🚫

any ageless and or otherwise minor blog will be blocked if i see it interacting with a post that contains nsfw content. i am taking this seriously and i am checking my notifications frequently. this is not a hostile act or one out of malice. this is to ensure to myself that my new content is not being curated into the audiences of those that don’t need to see it. this measure may be a bit rigid, but i would like to reassure you that this is not out of hostile intent. this is a security measure. please put your ages in your bios! this helps me gauge my audience better as i create content that aligns more so with mature audiences. thank you for understanding. ❤️

This website really thinks it can sell coherent, usable data for LLM training when it's still serving adverts like this

My Search For FL Text is Neverending

♫ Everyone Dies In Utah - Supra/Infra ♫

p.s. dolores dei’s assassin having an ally or co-conspirator or close companion is of course not mentioned in historical record but… being erased from history would fit a pattern 👀

finally unlocked the communism book club in disco elysium after missing it on my first playthrough cause i got it double-scheduled with my encounter with THE PIGS

and when they got to the bit about increasing turnip yields with greater revolutionary fervor

(look i know it's a reference to lysenkoism but)

revolutionary fervor? or resentful energy? how about both?? *face looking out from over fingers pointed at each other* *that turn into finger guns bc lol ofc they do*

Should I add a red skull on the lower black part? Or is it done?

Notice telecommande canon rc6

*thinks of a dumb joke about DE characters* haha I will make a post- *opens fayde* *checks if I remember the lore correctly* *reads multiple dialogues* *opens the pjol novel, searches for some words* *rereads a chapter* *googles a leftist philosopher* *learns a new philosophical concept* *opens tumblr and writes*

he infra on my materalism till i plasm

3 notes

A collection of (subjectively) nice INFRA screenshots.

If you want to add an image-description, feel free!

(I would add more but I'm currently stuck on the horrible underground water-treatment centre puzzle, and also from what I remember of my first attempt at a playthrough, it's mostly just tunnels and urban environments from here)

hello. my name is infranthrax, or infra for short. this is the (new) main blog for all my writing stuffs. here you will mainly find things that have to do with the reader and canon, though I can also write a different array of characters so long as I know them well enough. There may be OC content posted here as well, such as art, lore, etc.

before interacting, please keep in mind that I am an adult creator, therefore there will be topics of gore, violence, sensitive themes, as well as smut content as I am comfortable with writing it. Due to this, I recommend that anyone under the age of 16 strays from this blog, but I cannot force anyone to do anything, and I cannot stop you if you choose to lurk around.

my dms are always open to anyone that have questions, inquiries, or simply want to chat. I like to meet new people and I believe it helps with my engagement if I get to know my audience!

ageless blogs, defaults, or minors that interact with any nsfw post on my blog will be blocked immediately. please refer to my request guidelines for more information.

contact ledger

@infraaa || general inquiries. please do not request anything here. this used to be my main blog. this blog will now be used to answer other questions, and such asks will be reblogged here by this blog.

infrajaded || this is my discord. ultimately, this would be the best place to reach me in terms of commission information. i may not always be on tumblr, so this is usually the best place to reach me if i don’t answer.

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request guidelines — reqs and comms are both open.

memory bank — masterlists here

commission information and rules

↪️ emergency commissions have been toggled. ⚠️

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Generating plasm and stacking matchboxes: how to build a better future through collective consciousness.

Alternatively - Steban and Ulixes were building Tatlin's Tower so I have to talk about the symbolism or I will explode!!

While completing the communist vision quest you get an opportunity to build a model of "The Tower of History", depicted on the last page of "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism": a leaning tower wrapped in a dramatic helix. The scale model you make is a mirror image of Tatlin's Tower - a design for a grand monumental building to the Third International: the government organization advocating for world communism.

The main idea of the monument was to produce a new type of structure, uniting a purely creative form with a utilitarian form. Meaning it would function as an office building while also serving as a symbol of cultural significance. And let me tell you, this bad boy can fit so much symbolism in it.

Tatlin was commissioned to develop a design in 1919, after the 1917 February Revolution - a parallel to Disco Elysium's Insulinde we're witnessing post-Antecentennial Revolution.

Tatlin's work was inspired by high revolutionary goals, which are evident in the visual direction of the tower as well, expressing the ideological strive for achieving something that has never been done before, overcoming the odds. The structure "oscillates like a steel snake, constrained and organized by the one general movement of all the parts, to raise itself above the earth. The form wants to overcome the material and the force of gravity..."

The tower has meaning packed even in the materials. For example, the glass structures (marked A, B, C on the architectural rendering) were meant to serve legislative, executive and informative initiatives while rotating around their axes at different speeds. The material signified the purity of initiatives, their liberation from material constraints and their ideal qualities.

But here's the best part. The spirals.

"The spiral is the movement of liberated humanity. The spiral is the ideal expression of liberation: with its base set in the earth, it flees from the ground and becomes a symbol of the suspension of all (...) earthy interests." They are "the most elastic and rapid lines which the world knows" that represent movement and aspiration, continuing the themes of progress and freedom, but they also refer to something else.

In the process of building the matchbox model Rhetoric points out: "It's almost exactly as Nilsen's sketch imagined, a physical manifestation of the dialectical spiral of history."

The shape of the tower is a representation of dialectical development of history, first visualized as a spiral by G. W. F. Hegel. He pictured transformational change as "both linear and circular in order to be short-term responsive, i.e. possibly negating itself, and long-term strategic, i.e. a process of development."

Hegel's dialectics would later be reinterpreted through the prism of materialism by Marx and Engels to create dialectical materialism - the basis for historical materialism.

"Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels’ philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis, (...) a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; (...) the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws - these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one."

The tower embodies progress in materialist understanding of history while also indicating the connection to ideological plasm, a manifestation of "the proletariat's embrace of historical materialism", necessary to create a better future.

According to Nilsen, the proletariat of a revolutionary state can generate enough plasm to create extra-physical architecture that "disregards the laws of 'bourgeois physics' and instead relies on the revolutionary faith of the people for structural integrity."

This function of plasm implies that The Tower of History can be created only under revolutionary circumstances - without a sufficient amount of plasm even the matchbox model didn't stay up. The exact same sentiment is expressed about Tatlin's Tower: "We maintain that only the full power of the multimillion strong proletarian consciousness could bring into the world the idea of this monument and its forms. The monument must be realized by the muscles of this power, because we have an ideal, living and classical expression the pure and creative form of the international union of the workers of the whole world."

Nilsen called it "the highest expression of Communist principles, a society whose literal foundation is the faith of its people."

Tatlin's Tower was a symbol of faith in the revolutionary future, the global triumph of Marxist socialism. A monument "made of iron, glass and revolution."

It was never built in real life, and neither was The Tower of History in the world of Elysium.

But you can try to see if there's enough plasm between the three of you. And the matchbox tower stays up for a long moment, quivering with an improbable energy. You believe it can say up - and it does.

So you have to believe; whether it's for collective action or generating ideological plasm. Then, together, maybe you'll be able to build as much as 0.0002% of communism.

i'm sorry in advance for asking you about what was essentially, a small part of a month old jokey reply to a post. that said, what would you consider the implications of the "this world is enough" quote being said by specifically Joyce Messier to be, along with the ensuing "(...) this is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them"... it's just that this is one of my favourite quotes in the game and your post made me realize I had been engaging with it in a rather superficial way.

It’s a very beautifully worded passage, which I think contributes in large part to why people latch onto it so much. Unfortunately, it tends to fall victim to the classic phenomenon whereby lines which are rhetorically effective and on the surface appear to articulate a clear and compelling sentiment find themselves isolated from their broader textual context in fan reception & thus taken at face value. The full passage is:

JOYCE MESSIER - "Great bodies of water, forest-covered surfaces... clusters of light where the cities lie. You've seen the montage, we all have -- this world is enough," she concludes.

CONCEPTUALIZATION - It *must* be. This is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them.

Stripped of its political teeth, I imagine the idea of a world composed of the ‘greatest and kindest’ arrangement of atoms is somewhat comforting, as a poetic expression of a sentiment of hope and optimism for the world around you and for yourself in turn. However, it just can’t be easily cleaved away from the fact that Disco Elysium is an overtly and unsubtly political game; it’s a game about communism, and it’s a game which thinks about communism in such a way that the sentiment given here is undercut at just about every turn.

We see that this idea of a ‘greatest and kindest arrangement’ is coming in response to Joyce’s statement that ‘this world is enough.’ Joyce, in-game, is an ultraliberal strikebreaker invested with a huge amount of power relative to capitalist hegemony; put simply, she is not someone whose political voice is one with which the narrative aligns. To think about the present condition of the world as ‘enough’—and to respond, as does Harry’s Conceptualisation, with the suggestion that anything else would be less great and less kind than they are at present (such that all failings of greatness and kindness in the present state can be countered with the superlative)—is a sentiment coming from someone for whom the continuation of the capitalist social condition is hugely beneficial. Put simply, Disco Elysium, read holistically, is just not a game which believes that the capitalist social condition is ‘enough,’ and nor that it is the ‘greatest and kindest arrangement.’

Like—the game takes great pains to suggest that capitulating to the inevitability of the present condition only reveals the limitations of one’s framework. Time and time again, the game makes appeals to inevitability—of the fall of the commune, of the expansion of the pale and the consumption of Elysium—only to suggest that it is only by imagining a total rearrangement of the atoms, if you will, that we can prevent it. I wrote in more detail about this reading here if you’re interested, but the long and short of it is: the presence of the anomaly in the Dolorian church guides us as players towards the idea that the entropy of the pale is a construction of Dolorian moralism, which is to say, capitalist hegemony; the fact that infra-materialism, a theory of Mazovian socio-economics, suggests at the defiance of traditional laws of physics in a manner that may at first seem absurd but by the end of the communist plotline is proven possible in the fact that the tower is able to stand up on its own is in turn a suggestion that the pale’s entropy, too, is a ‘fact’ only inasmuch as it exists within the boundaries of what hegemony has termed factual. If the tower can stand, why can’t the world be overhauled at such a fundamental level that the expansion of the pale could be stopped and the Moralintern could be evaporated? This is the sentiment of the communist quest; rather than accepting the present condition of things (the “greatest and kindest” such that nothing else could possibly be better—it is worth remembering that greatest and kindest does not necessarily mean great or kind), the very belief that they could be changed is what allows change to take place. This is the sentiment communicated in Steban’s “In dark times, should the stars also go out?”.

My comment on the original post was just me being slightly glib about the fact that people consistently latch onto that line out of context. It’s a good line—it’s prettily expressed, and it’s certainly helpful for articulating the different political conditions at play in the game. However, I’m not convinced people are engaging with it in a way that fairly accounts for what it does relative to the rest of the text. This tendency to latch onto poetic language at the expense of thinking seriously about what the sentiment in question actually communicates reminds me of what Evrart says of Joyce:

You - "But she told me a beautiful story about the discovery of the Insulinde."

Evrart Claire - "Of course she did. Rich people have the best stories. About all the interesting things they've done and seen, all the beautiful places they've been to. It's just sentimentalism. She can afford to be sentimental -- and she can afford to lose as well."

I wouldn’t reify Evrart as the voice of the working class in Disco Elysium either, but I think this particular line cuts to the quick about how Joyce’s elevated, obscurantist language often makes it difficult for players to situate what she says within the context from which she appears to us.

The Great Hellbound Railway

The Great Hellbound Railway is an expansive storyline that unlocks after your Persuasive reaches 175, and once you are a person of sufficient importance within London. These new additions expand upon activities and round out stations throughout the journey.

New Research Projects in the Jericho Library

"There are few pleasures greater than being in a library of one's own."

There are two new research projects available to everyone with a Library in Jericho! Return to the Oddlion Septagonal Reading Room to hit the stacks in pursuit of obscure knowledge and errant citations. Pursue forbidden histories of mutability and countervailing mysteries of the Elder Continent in the supreme comfort of your own library, and overturn popular scholarship in style.

These new projects are a permanent addition to the Library, and join the Hinterlands research project as always-available avenues of research.

Practising Law in the Courts of the Evenlode

"The traditions of the Evenlode are older than the courts in London, and the appointment of unconventional counsel is an expected part of proceedings. In fact, many here would be doomed to represent themselves unless you deign to offer your services."

You can now intervene in trials at the Courts of the Evenlode! You've been a spectator for long enough; it's time to wade into the fray and put your legal nous to good use. Defend rattus faber from the sticky fingers of local urchins. Prosecute the case of the Guild of Gondoliers against the Society Matron. Work out exactly what this Rubbery Man is being charged for, and how exactly he feels about it.

Pursuing justice in the Courts of the Evenlode is a permanent new activity, available to all players who have spent enough time in the Magistracy.

Story Additions to Burrow-Infra-Mump

"It is as though it grew in some other place where the colours are brighter and more vivid than our world can support. It is, unquestionably, a rose."

We've released a short new story in Burrow-Infra-Mump! London's ill-fated war against Hell casts a long shadow. Debts remain unpaid, relationships strain, and old obligations come due. A rose has appeared in Burrow-Infra-Mump; a curious plant of petal and bone that neither London nor Hell seems enthusiastic to claim. Cultivate it, or burn it to the ground, and learn of its relevance to the conflict of '68.

This short story is available to anybody who has completed the development of the church at Burrow, and starts via an Opportunity Card in Burrow-Infra-Mump.

It is also now possible to develop the old ruins at Burrow into a secular freehold. This is an alternate means of completing the station, and does not commit it to any faith or denomination.

New Artwork

Finally, something that you might just have gathered from this blog post already. Each station along the Great Hellbound Railway now has its own unique header art! New artwork joins the existing headers for Ealing and Station VIII, so keep an eye out for these new delights all up and down the journey to Hell.