Immaterial Brain Bulbosity - Entity N° 16010

Biro and coloured pencils on A4 paper (21 x 29 cm)

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Positive, positive, positive...

One of the most common things I hear from people I meet is ''How are you so positive all the time?'' (It's actually ''How do you talk so much?'' but stay with me here).

Now I'm not blissfully unaware of the sadness and pain that exists in our world. The world as we know it is a truly unjust place. People who can't express their opinions without being brutally silenced, entire communities who fight day by day to feed themselves and their families. Everything is extremely backwards right now. People waking up from coma's could think they're arrived in a dystopian nightmare, but it's real, and people are struggling.

But taking all of this in and trying to process it would be like looking into a crystal skull (sorry for the Indiana Jones reference), it's just not sustainable to worry about every single problem in the world, to fight every fight and understand everything there is to understand.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” J.R.R. Tolkien.

This quote speaks volumes to me... We only have a finite amount of time in this world, and spending it worrying about every little detail will leaving you wishing you were spending your time doing the things you love when you're older. Now I'm not a saint, and I certainly don't spend every waking moment optimising my life. I waste a lot of time living my life, procrastinating, playing video games, having extremely long conversations about nothing.

But time doing nothing isn't actually wasted, sometimes doing nothing at all is better than forcing yourself to do something. I've had some of the fondest memories while I was 'wasting' time. Maybe it's not that bad.

Anyway the moral from this story is I pick my battles, I fight corners I think are worth fighting, and when I get stuck in, I go for it...

The only way to guard against positivism — granting, of course, that positivism no longer attracts your sympathies — is to cease to fear any absurdities, whether rational or metaphysical, and systematically to reject all the services of reason. Such behaviour has been known in philosophy; and I make bold to recommend it. Credo, quia absurdum comes from the Middle Ages. Modern instances are Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Both present noble examples of indifference to logic and common-sense...

Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

freud was stupid for believing that the mind had everything to do with it. and watson was stupid for believing the mind had next to nothing to do with it. if they were alive today, the criticism they would receive on their research would be so severe i think they might have killed themselves.

playing disco elysium somehow gets better when youve studied some philosophy woah

A rare win for logical positivism today! When changing parameters caused my photodiode readings to change, it really was just the readings that were changing; the light power was staying constant.

when the americans are talking about something having an "ideology" of positive feelings and call it positivism girl that word is already taken and it doesn't mean what you think it does

ultimately I think liberals do not care to articulate the fact that “pronoun” bans are specifically transphobic or to fashion an actual political response to that fact. they live for being pedantic and pointing out their opponents’ logical inconsistencies and fallacies specifically because such a response, for them, takes the place of fashioning a political response. liberals want to believe that politics is debate league and there’s some arbiter who will declare them the winner. they want to present the image of being more urbane, more sophisticated, more élite, and more well-educated than their conservative ‘opponents’, and appearing more politically ‘tolerant’ is, for them, synonymous with fulfilling that desire. they centre discourse around being technically correct and fantasising that things operate in such a way that “logic” matters because they owe much of their thinking to Enlightenment logical positivism and because they don’t want anything to actually change. they know “personal and possessive pronouns are central to how English syntax functions” isn’t the point and they don’t care.

My heart ! 🤍

The color symblism in Dracula Untold

How the change of colors represents Vlads and Mirenas journey through out the movie (Spoilers for the movie of course)

Colors are extremly important in Dracula Untold and they are not only used to look fancy. Everything in this movie centers around three main colors: Black, white and red

Red symbolizes blood, but in a positiv way. Red means: Being alive, being full of life. Black symbolizes the darkness. White symbolizes purity, but also death. No really deep, I have to admit, but the interesting bit is how those colors are used throughout the movie and how Red is the connecting element between Black and White

Let me explain it to you.

This movie starts with a blood red sky. Symbolizing Vlads bloody past, but also indiacting that Red is his color. (Also keep in mind how warm the colors look here. That will be important later on)

Same goes the following scenes. he is dressed entierly in red. A warm gentle red. And he is surronded by warm red colors. (But already notice how he is always dressed in: red + black.)

And also his wife is dressed in the same red. Because she and Vlad share the same life, the same human (!) life and of course love. So it is just logical they are both dressed in Red. It is a little bit hard to see here but Mierna wears red + white. (Also pay attention to how the warm colors are slowly vanishing).

After Dracula makes the decision to be turned we see the coat one last time. Dramatic and it looks like it is flying away from him. And again it is red + black.

After that scene we never see him in his red coat ever again. The red, symbolizing life, is gone, completly, from one moment to the next. From here on, he never wears anything red ever again. We only see him dressed in black from now on. Showing that he isn't human anymore. Belonging completly to the darkness. (Sorry, the movie also looses every color from here on and it was so hard to find scenes where you see that he dressed in all-black).

And now the most interesting bit. His wife is still dressed in red. The same red she is wearing from the beginning onwards, the same red her husband wore before he was turned. because she is still full of life. (Red + white).

But then her story slowly comes to an end. She isn't suddenly killed like Vlad, instead she is slowly drained off life. In her finale scene she is wearing an all white dress. Only inside the sleeves we can see a strong red color, symbolizing being full of life.

But when you look closer that sleeves are not completly red anymore, the red starts to vanish. Aka she moves closer to her death. She leaves her life (red) behind to join the light and purity, aka death (white).

And shortly before Vlad dies, even his extremly red uniform is now black. It only turns red again, shortly before he "dies", and only for a really short moment. because for a short moemnt he is human again, for this short moment he had found peace (i refuse to take a screenhot of this extremly ugly CGI scene).

And then Vlad and Mirena meet again in present time. In front of red and white flowers, the same folowers that surronded them during their first meeting in the garden (deleted scene).

And now Mirena is completly dressed in white and him completly in black. All red is gone.

He has become one with the darkness and she has become a true bride of darkness. She is pure, and she is the light in the darkness and she is a bride. But all red is gone. Because they both died. The life is vanished from both of them. They are both shadows of their former selves, altered, something new. They will never be able to return their former life’s (red).

TL.DR: The symbolism of Red/White/Black is not really deep, but it is consistent and used in a really clever way. One i haven't seen often in other movies yet. The production team really put a second thought into it. The color red is extremely important for Vlads journey.

Bonus:

Them having their finale meeting in front of a HUGE ASS DRAGON picture. The same dragon that was on Vlads uniform!

the thought I am about to voice is going to be very messy and rough and probably overly generalised, but I’m coming to the point in my education (& I’m picking out Fanon, Said, Cesaire in particular here) where I feel like empiricism as a system of thinking is at a crisis point for me. rationalism and positivism and scientific discovery broadly as a way of systemising information and thinking about the world has been so deeply bound up in projects of capitalism and empire, legitimising the “civilising efforts” of colonial occupations of various “irrational” societies across the world, producing “The West” as a political entity that is seen as ultimately rational, and creating this body of secular authority (“scientific knowledge”) that is imbedded in the maintenance of “The West” and its component states, an authority that can only be understood and contributed to as an academic via the same capitalistic market logics that govern everything else - that to be “empirical” about the world, to present myself as someone whose beliefs are informed by provable discoverable “facts” about reality, feels very similar to an allegiance to capital-E Empire in general.

And Marxism has been very clarifying for me in this regard, to be able to use empiricism and make empirical claims that are fundamentally counter-hegemonic to capitalism, but it still comes out of this same European enlightenment tradition. But absent that I don’t know what else there is lol. Like empiricism feels like the only game in town but it’s a game with so much blood on its hands that I don’t know if it’s something you can export out of capitalism. To use an example, is eugenics a “misuse” of science? My answer to that question is both yes and no - yes in the sense that a belief in eugenics is not backed by evidence, that when you put the idea that some “gene pools” are “better” than others and that you need to get rid of “the bad ones” to scientific tests, this does not stand up to scientific scrutiny because the categorical bins you use to define good and bad gene pools are also not biological or scientific (eg race), as well as a bunch of other issues, so eugenics fails the empirical smell test. But eugenics is also effectively “true” because the belief in it has produced unquantifiable amounts of imperial violence. It’s “true” in the sense that it has become a rational logic by which empire justifies itself, and so imperial powers behave as if it is true. And because eugenics emerges out of enlightenment scientific thinking, a project itself that emerges from capitalism/colonialism, can it really be called a misuse if it’s accomplishing exactly what European imperial powers need it to?

Like I guess basically what I need clarified for me is, is it possible to believe in empiricism as an epistemic authority without it being ultimately used for imperial ends. If you believe that capital-T Truth is discoverable, and that the more that Truth is used to inform the organisation of society, the better off society will be (which, as a communist, I generally do believe), does that lead you to fundamentally imperialistic conclusions?

Here we go again...

So this is probably the 4th/5th blog I've tried to start... I'm terrible at sticking to promises I make myself. I've always been an idealist and a dreamer, and I love to think that I could stick with something like a blog, emptying the thoughts in my head onto a blank page. But I've never really been a writer, I'm a talker/listener who loves to just roll whatever comes into my head off my tongue. This is going to be hard...

I want to share my thoughts and experiences of my life on this page, with the hopes that I can inspire and empower people to see the positive in the abstract experiences we have in life.

To anyone that see's this, thank you for reading and sorry for the absolute mish-mash of random thoughts that I spew out onto this page.

“There are people you might call survivors. Early on, they lost a beloved person—father, friend or mistress—and their lives are merely the gloomy aftermath of that death. Monsieur Bataille is a survivor of the death of God. And, when one thinks about it, it would seem that our entire age is surviving that death, which he experienced, suffered and survived. God is dead. We should not understand by that that He does not exist, nor even that He now no longer exists. He is dead: he used to speak to us and he has fallen silent, we now touch only his corpse. Perhaps he has slipped out of the world to some other place, like a dead man’s soul. Perhaps all this was merely a dream. Hegel tried to replace Him with his system and the system collapsed. Comte tried with the religion of humanity, and positivism has collapsed. In France and elsewhere, around the year 1880, a number of honourable Gentlemen, some of them sufficiently logical to demand they be cremated after their deaths, had the notion of developing a secular morality. We lived by that morality for a time, but then along came M. Bataille—and so many others like him—to attest to its bankruptcy. God is dead, but man has not, for all that, become atheistic. Today, as yesterday, this silence of the transcendent, combined with modern man’s enduring religious need, is the great question of the age. It is the problem that torments Nietzsche, Heidegger and Jaspers. It is our author’s central personal drama. [...] Eroticism, the all-too-human ‘sacred’ sociology, offered him some precarious havens. And then everything collapsed and here he is before us, lugubrious and comical, like an inconsolable widower indulging, all dressed in black, in ‘the solitary vice’ in memory of his dead wife. For M. Bataille refuses to reconcile these two immovable and contradictory demands: God is silent, I cannot budge an inch on that; everything in me calls out for God, I cannot forget Him.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre trans. Chris Turner, On Bataille and Blanchot 

Pride and Prejudice and Logical Positivism