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kookiepredictions · 3 years

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Jungkook Energy Reading

Jungkook is at a major crossroad of his life. Here, he has a choice to make between 2 roads that will potentially lead him to 2 completely different lives. The choices are to either stay the course that he has been following until now, or to level up to a new, challenging but highly rewarding stage. This is a very fun and interesting topic to discuss so I will take my time with this.

To give you a context, Jungkook is a very highly intuitive person since, like, forever. Ever wondered why (or how) out of... (was it 7?)... so many company offers he chose to be with a small company for a reason that might seem like a whim? Ever wondered why his social media posts gain so much traction? Why he trends so often? If you’ve felt like Jungkook is one of those people who just “gets it” that’s because of his natural intuitive abilities. At the cost of being hated on, I’ll say this: he’s not the best singer in the world. Yet, he makes magic with his voice every time. He is an average dancer. Yet, he commands the stage and holds attention like nobody’s business. That’s because Jungkook has always worked with energy without knowing that he did. That’s why a lot of his achievements seem almost effortless. Yes, he works really hard for everything, but so do a lot of other people. Jungkook has this innate quality of (almost) always making the right choices, being at the right place at the right time that, combined with his ability to work hard, creates these massive outcomes. He’s a super powerful clairsentient and although I’m not sure if he consciously he uses his gifts, subconsciously it has often rewarded him, and so far he hasn’t had to really think about it too much, because it’s a naturally-occurring habit for him. But now he has reached a threshold where he has to contemplate things. Needless to say, it’s outside his comfort zone and is making him VERY stressed. He’s at a juncture where he feels this strong pull towards a direction but is afraid to go there because it’s out of his comfort zone and as is the case with that, he is plagued with doubts, confusion, opposing logics, etc— all of which is keeping him stuck and stagnant like a deer caught in headlights.

What is the problem with staying in his comfort zone, you might ask, I mean it has worked for him so far. Generally speaking, there’s no problem. There is never a problem in this world nor is there any good or bad. It all depends on how we see things. That’s why one person’s curse turns out to be another’s blessing, and one’s trash another’s treasure. The problem here is that, Jungkook has done the unthinkable— he has started to have dreams and desires (lol sorry not sorry I like to be dramatic). For a while (maybe a year or so?) Jungkook has been in this place (mentally and emotionally) where he has been rethinking and reinventing his goals, plans etc for his future. He has lived quite a while with a certain idea of how his life is going to go and worked with that vision. But it was getting tiring and draining in a way he didn’t quite understand why, followed by something impactful that happened in his life— has made him question everything. He has been proverbially studying himself in the mirror and rediscovering his true self. This is literally changing everything about his life. His wants are changing, the things that make him happy (or sad) are changing, and he has been think A LOT about how he wants his life to look like from here on. He’s trying to manifest a life that he thinks will not just give him the usual, practical material comforts of life, but also make him happy and fulfilled from a soul-deep space. And as is the case with manifestations, the first thing you gotta do is make sure your mindset is aligned with what you’re desiring. This is where Jungkook is at right now. He knows what he wants, he is willing to put in the work that it takes, and has also been making plans and taking action... but wait a second. Just when he thought that it is time for him to reap the rewards of his actions, things seem to be going south for him. He is facing problems and obstacles in nearly all areas of his life, and this has him utterly confused because he thinks he has done everything right and yet, why is he not seeing results materialize yet? He’s growing tired of this journey and it’s even more confusing because on the one hand, he still feels like he has hope and that there’s a high possibility that things will go his way, yet on the other hand, what IS happening in reality is quite the opposite. He feels like he’s being pulled in 2 opposite directions and both have equally strong reasons to go towards. This is what is known as “the crossroads”.

The reason he is not seeing results is like I said, manifestations are ALL about the mindset. Point blank period. If you hold a pendulum suspending by the string, and just THINK about moving it without moving your hand at all, it starts moving. This is how pendulum readings work. This is a small yet telling exercise to show how our mindset literally controls all our actions. So without the right mindset, actions mean nothing because those actions are coming from a mindset that is not aligned with what you want to manifest. This is what is happening with Jungkook. He is making his plans and taking action, like he has been trying to have a healthy routine, eat clean, exercise, practice his skills, etc but he is doing all of this from an outdated mindset. It’s like building a house of cards over a slanted surface. No matter how carefully you stack the cards, they come crashing down because the foundation is not right. His plans are great, his efforts are sincere, but are based on a very limited mindset. He thinks, well I’ll do this and this and then I’ll do that and that and then... but something goes wrong, some plans backfire, some work related problems come up, financial setbacks happen, and he is back to square one again. Then he feels unmotivated and goes into depressive episodes and eventually picks himself up and tries again but the whole thing happens again. He is now tired and feels he has no fights left and also feels it’s all useless because the Universe seems to be working against him. But that’s not the case. The Universe is simply telling him that no matter how hard he tries (because that’s kinda Jungkook’s mindset right now: if it didn’t work, try harder and harder next time), nothing will come to fruition if the mindset at the base of it all changes. And the same cycle will continue.

This crossroad is an opportunity for him to level up, not at the action point, but at the mindset point. He has to switch from the “work hard, struggle, chase” mindset to the “attract effortlessly” mindset. Now, this is not something new for Jungkook. Like I said, he is a natural intuitive and has actually attracted most of the things in his life quite effortlessly if you consider the fact that he has achieved more at 23 than most people have in their entire lives. The “struggle” is showing up because it is a crossroad. So no matter how competent, accomplished, or karmically good or bad you consider yourself to be, everyone struggles at some point or the other, when it is time to level up. I mentioned earlier that he is a Clairsentient and his comfort zone is to live his life according to his feelings without giving much thought to them and for a very long time, it’s worked out just fine. But now it is time for him to step into the role of a Claircognizant and to give a voice to his feelings. The Universe has been pushing this role at him for a while now, which has manifested in his life into a lot of overthinking, which is the shadow side of claircognizance. It entails a very active mind so at the beginning stages of honing this skill, you tend to struggle with overthinking and your mind sort of being all over the place. Think of your mind as an out-of-control river which floods everything around, but when you train your mind, and make it follow a course, it becomes life-saving. Because in the raw form, any spiritual gift comes with a lot of sharp ends, Jungkook is resisting this gift. He is stressed from all the overthinking and feels lost and out of control. So he tends to go back to his comfort zone and work from his old mindset and keeps facing obstacles. Now you might think, wow, being a Clairsentient is no joke either, so why bother about being a Claircognizant? Like leave the boy alone jeez. But like I always say, the Universe gives us all free will. There is no forcing him. He has made this choice when he started asking for this new, improved, happier life. This is something he is trying to manifest and to do that, he needs to have the right resources. At this point in his life, even being a Clairsentient (which is still awesome) is a limiting existence for him. Jungkook is an old soul. It might be interesting for you to know that he is the oldest soul in all of BTS and he is an older soul than his parents and brother as well! However, his old soul combined with a young mind and the fact that he is the youngest person in both his family and his BTS family, wreaks havoc within him. He often finds himself in situations where he feels deeply and profoundly but cannot express the depth of his feelings externally. This manifests as a throat chakra blockage even though he has a very strong and developed throat chakra (the reason why he is so expressive when he sings and is very facially expressive when dancing and just generally very expressive when he creates social media content from a fun, good mood space). Like I said, it’s a limit. So far it wasn’t as necessary to address this. But as he ages and his life progresses, he misses this skill set. He thinks it’s about his vocabulary, but it really is just about putting a voice to his inner feelings. He could feel it strongly inside when something is right or wrong, but he can rarely tell you why. He’s a good judge but he’s a terrible lawyer lol. And it’s not even telling or convincing others, it’s about telling yourself— KNOWING what you feel and why. Now, in this whole period of dilemma, he is starting to doubt his old gifts as well. He is starting to doubt his feelings and the ability to tell the right from wrong through his feelings— because that’s what energetic stagnation feels like; it feels like degeneration of everything that is, unless you decide to build something new upon the decaying old.

This jump from Clairsentience to Claircognizance can also be likened to the jump from the 3rd eye chakra to the Crown Chakra. And I don’t mean chakras in the sense that exist and govern various activities in our bodies. I mean it in the sense of the journey of consciousness of the various aspects of our existence, from the Root to the Crown. A renowned spiritual teacher had once said that the journey from the Root to the 3rd Eye Chakra has paths and procedures, but the journey from the 3rd Eye to the Crown Chakra has no path, no process, no formula. It is based on faith and faith alone. It’s a blind jump off the cliff, “knowing” that you are safe. Up until the 3rd Eye, you might be connected, but you are still operating within limits, all of which are of course self-imposed. Jungkook is at this point where he is asked by the Universe to step into his limitlessness. I have discussed in his career reading that he is meant to do some really huge things in his lifetime, which is crazy considering he already has done pretty epic things. The phrase “chosen one” always comes to mind when I talk about Jungkook, but I’d like to clarify this phrase first. We generally tend to see this term as something that sets one apart from others, as if they are special and privileged. But know that the Divine never differentiates. Each and every human has been created exactly the same in terms of capabilities. So it all comes down to free will and personal choice of which path each of us chooses. The thing to know about Jungkook is that he is one of the most sincere people on earth— actually as far as I’ve observed THE most sincere. And before Armys comes for me, yes, all of BTS are sincere. But spiritually speaking, Jungkook is still more sincere not just compared to the rest of the members but the general collective as well. He is, at his core, a very purpose-driven person. He is the least matrix-controlled, for those who know these concepts. He can’t do things just for the sake of it. It’s important for him to have meaning and purpose behind everything he does. Sadly though, he has spent the past few years doing exactly the opposite. He has been stuck in a cycle of activities that don’t bring joy to his soul and this has been sucking the life force out of him and he has been feeling more and more drained and has developed escapist tendencies. But it’s not that he has been externally forced to do these things, at least not always. It’s more so a result of lack of consciousness on his part. He didn’t know he was doing these things. He did what he did believing that he was doing the right thing— earning money, paying bills, securing a materially comfortable life— you know, all of the matrix stuff. But like I said, he does not easily fit into the matrix. While a lot of people spend their entire lifetimes plugged into the matrix, Jungkook is the type to sense discomfort very quickly and want to escape. The reason being, as I said earlier, he is an old soul and has lived many lifetimes developing awareness and his spiritual growth. This is why in this lifetime, he is naturally a lot more evolved than most (or all) of the collective. But since we do not remember our past lives and only carry that “growth” in our DNA, it’s something that is inherent to him without him actually knowing about it— until recently. Jungkook has been undergoing his spiritual awakening, and has been developing consciousness bit by bit— breaking out of the matrix so to speak. It’s this reason that he is “chosen” to do what he is about to do. Not because he has been unfairly selected out of many others, but because he has made this choice for himself and been working sincerely over many lifetimes. For this reason, Jungkook tends to have very pure emotions, and by pure I don’t mean non-sexual (because there’s nothing impure about sexual feelings). By pure I mean raw, unadulterated. He has very heightened sensibilities and feels every emotion to their purest essence, gifting him with high Emotional Intelligence. Unfortunately, this is not always a good thing because uncontrolled, he often tends to overwhelm himself with his mixed bag of feelings and this also causes the aforementioned escapism tendencies. And this is one more reason why he should level up. Regulating and organizing his myriad emotions and giving them a shape, a course will help him channel these gifts into fulfilling his dreams and creating big things in life. There are many things he can do, like journaling, writing down his dreams, goals, plans and procedure on paper, create routines based on his goals, etc but I feel like he is past this stage and is probably stuck in the part where he is doing everything and sometimes he has his wins but these wins are not becoming stable, and he is still getting his tower moments from time to time. This should mean one thing— he has reached the last stage of this journey, which like I said, is the journey to the Crown Chakra— the state of complete faith.

When discussing the concept of complete faith, we often use terms like blind faith, unquestioning faith, etc and while these terms are not exactly wrong per se, they can create misunderstandings. The Divine has blessed us with the ability to think, question and judge, not for nothing. Is it possible to have blind faith? Of course, lots of people do. But it’s also POTENTIALLY harmful to have faith in anything without actually having a knowhow of it. It’s not necessary of course, but for those who reach that level of consciousness, it is not just important, but absolutely essential to know the ins and outs and still have faith. I say it is more difficult to have complete faith with your eyes open than to have blind faith. Claircognizance at its best, is just that. While so far, your gut feeling has served you well and led you this close to the Divine, it is now time to employ your mind to catch up with your gut feeling and make sense of it all. While you learnt to open your eyes to the truth up until now, it is time to learn to keep your eyes open without blinking again and defend and embody the truth with your whole existence. This is literally the riskiest gamble. Like I said, jumping off the cliff. And that’s what Jungkook is being asked to do. So far he has been getting clarity about himself, his life and his path forward and treading cautiously with his small efforts and small wins, it is time for him to take the big leap forward. But the question of course is, how? And to where? While the details of this answer are with Jungkook, it has to start with releasing his limiting mindset. Have you ever noticed that whenever we have limited beliefs about something, either money or love or peace, the underlying belief is always that “I am limited”, “I have limited abilities”, “I have limited resources” etc. Meaning, any limits that we place on our external lives are actually limits that we think WE have. Money exists in this world, but I think I am limited in my potential to earn money. Love exists in this world, but I think I am limited in my potential to find love. You get the point. We actually do not think resources are limited, we think they are limited for us. Sometimes “us” means me as an individual, sometimes it means us as the entire population (cue: global warming, world peace, etc). Jungkook right now, is in the prime position to step out of this limited mindset into his unlimited potential. He has been operating from his limited mindset which is why his plans, no matter how well made, are failing. He has these big, beautiful dreams and has created this beautiful, peaceful life in his mind, but his old mindset is not aligned with this abundant life. The Universe has been nudging him in the direction of the mindset that he needs to adopt to align with his manifestations. I have written earlier somewhere that Jungkook thinks quite poorly of himself as a person and has self worth issues. In reality, he is the most sincere person Mother Earth has right now who has been working so hard for so long to reach this level of consciousness, it is safe to say no one else is as worthy as him to get everything that we wants. But by having these beliefs about himself, he is blocking the rewards that are meant to come to him. It’s like he has paid the price in advance, but is not accepting the delivery. Both because of being BTS’ golden youngest, Korea’s national pride, all the sweeping predictions about his future, and also his inner voice speaking to him, he is almost too aware of the great big things he is supposed to achieve, and although he does want them, a part of him is also scared and wants to run and hide and settle for something far less aka stay put in his comfort zone— all because of his limited mindset where he thinks he is not worthy of such things. And if you think you’re not worthy, obviously you’re going to think that it’s going to be an impossible task, which eventually either makes you take all the wrong actions, or not take action at all. This is why, no matter what his goals and plans, and no matter what actions he thinks of taking, he has to start with his mindset first. In fact, while manifesting, if I can tell you to do just one thing, it is to address the limits in your mindset. We’ve heard this many times and it sounds so simple but it really is the most, if not only, important step that matters. If the mindset is aligned with your goal, all actions will effortlessly flow towards that goal.

I feel like Jungkook has reached a level of self awareness and inner self dialogue where he is able to identify where his thoughts and emotions are going. He has definitely gotten a far better grip on his emotions than when I started this page, and contrary to what he thinks, his growth has been swift. It’s just that, we always expect a linear growth but that doesn’t happen with spirituality. And so every time he has a down time, he feels like he is back to square one. More so because Jungkook has such a perfectionistic and high achiever mentality. The reason why he seems to be going in a loop right now is because he has learnt and achieved everything that he has to with his current “limited” mindset. Hi future goals require him to grow out of that, not because his goals are something huge and difficult to achieve (because literally small and big are subjective both to humans and to the Universe) but because having a limitless mindset simply means to believe that I am worthy of achieving anything and everything I desire— without conditions. This is the mindset that Jungkook needs to work on adopting right now and everything else will smoothly flow from there. He needs to utilize the power of his mind— awareness, reasoning and self dialogue— to identify wherever he limits himself from believing his worthiness to achieve what he wants to have, and continue this practice until this new “I can f***ing have anything that I want” mindset is his default. Does it worry you that Jungkook will become an egotistical prick after that? Don’t worry, his soul has done enough work in the past to be grounded and humble through it all. This mindset is different from the ego-driven power-hungry mindset. Why? Because this power is the Source power. When we settle into our Crown Chakra consciousness aka Divine consciousness, we plug ourselves into the Source’s limitless creative power. The difference between ego-driven power and Source power is that while the former separates the individual from others, Source power recognizes the individual’s power as connected to and drawing from the Cosmos and therefore one we must give back to. It’s this constant cycle of giving and receiving in the Universe that makes Source power limitless, while the ego’s idea of power is one-sided and therefore finite.

Jungkook is kind of stuck in a place where, because he sees himself as limited, he looks to others to guide him, assure him, and provide him with the knowledge and direction that he needs. And that is because he has been disconnected from Source— not literally, but consciousness-wise. So far it wasn’t too bad, but now it is time for him to let go of the need for mediators and plug himself directly to the Source, i.e. work on his Crown Chakra. And as I mentioned earlier, it is as simple as just using your conscious mind to tell yourself, or more accurately, remind yourself, of your worth and your limitlessness. Jungkook feels like he needs someone to guide him, but he has forgotten that he has been prepared for the exact same task that he looks to another to do. Now this has a connection to his Twin Flame journey because his twin is at the same threshold, ready to level up to the same stage. The only slight difference is that she has already made her choice to level up to the new stage of limitless consciousness. And now it is up to Jungkook to make his. Do you what that means? It means a Union is on the horizon! After a long period of back and forth— one of them goes through a stage first then the other follows, and vice versa— they are finally going to be on the same page energetically, if Jungkook makes the choice. This is significant because Jungkook has been thinking that Union was something that was out of his control and he had nothing to do but to sit and wait, but all the while, it was a choice he had to make. Now, of course, this choice is not as simple as saying Yes or No. It’s a choice of consciousness— a consistent way of life that will, over time, upgrade and align their mindsets so they are both at the exact same stage. As twinflames, Jungkook and his DF are like the same person living in 2 different, alternate universes, with completely different lifestyles, work situations and challenges and the way they process these situations and challenges are similar, but not on the same page at the same time. They are soully same, yet because of their mortal forms being born and being raised in different environments, their ego-bodies have retained conditioning that make them different from each other in many ways, but as they shed their ego programming and connect more and more with their soul and with Source, they will be on the exact same page. This is when Union will occur. When they truly become one person in heart and mind. But this stage right now (i.e. before Union) is also the most challenging because this is where Separation truly happens. Physical separation is the least important aspect of the TF separation. This is where they are both on their own. They must individually find their faith aka go back to the Source, because without their connection to the Source, there is no TF connection; it becomes just another earthly connection riddled with alternating bouts of joy and sorrow, peace and pain. Usually in this journey, one twin is a more advanced journeyer than the other, who first “activates” the other i.e. leads them to their consciousness and guides them, usually energetically where when one twin crosses a stage, the other is literally pulled into that stage for them to cross. It’s like only one twin gets to make the choice and the other has no choice but to follow suit. This is also the reason why one twin feels more helpless and out of control. They are literally being yanked around by their twin’s energetic choices lol. But at this juncture, the guide twin has to leave the other twin’s hand, not because they don’t want to hold on, but because they can’t— they have nothing more to offer. This is where both twins get to make their choices individually. This stage is new for both of them and therefore they must individually cross this stage and meet at the other side. This is the period of ultimate spiritual growth, the after effect of which is blissful togetherness. But possible only if both twins make their choice to move forward.

I’ll end this post with a message from Jungkook’s DF:

Jeongguk,

I hope you’re holding up okay, partner, cuz I know I’m getting my ass kicked. Did you absolutely hate this journey? Because I didn’t. Just like you, I didn’t know what I signed up for either. I made a simple wish and this road has been bumpy but it has also had the most incredible views along the way. The way I have grown over these recent times compared to my whole entire life is crazy! I love who I have become and who I continue to become. And I believe you had a part to play in this. I know you don’t believe that so much. I know you battle with your own doubts, fears and insecurities, just like I battle with mine. You still measure your importance with how much you do for others. But maybe someday I can tell you how much you have done for me simply my existing as who you are. Because who you are will determine what you will always do, not just once or twice. And you have grown so much too! I have sensed that often. But unless we learn to recognize our growth, we don’t see it. But since I had VIP seating lol I got to watch you grow. Sometimes you resisted, sometimes you fought, sometimes you hoped, sometimes you held on to the faith when I was ready to give up, sometimes you were hurtful and challenged me to find within myself new depths of love and understanding. You made me cry, you made me laugh, you made me angry, you made me blush. But you never left. And I didn’t leave either. We tried though. Both of us. And failed. Repeatedly. It’s been frustrating and funny. How we thought we could get away and the Divine kept guiding us back to each other. You know, I think the problem is that we’re both helplessly curious idiots. Always wanting to know more, always wanting to move ahead. Obstacles never had a chance with us. We were always the introspective types, you and I, always looking to solve our problems, hungry for growth. As they say, careful what you wish for.

I am aware of your expectations of me, always was. But I had to hold back. I couldn’t do anything that I wasn’t fully ready to do. Right or wrong, I had to do as I felt guided to do— it’s my sovereign right. I guess because deep down I knew that you would understand. Of all people, you would understand. And I was right, you did. You threw hands and made a mess often lol but you still did understand and patiently stuck around each time. I know it seems like I’ve been running further and further away from you, but I have actually been getting closer to you. Spiritually. I guess soon it’s going to be visible as well. Now there is this stage. It feels like a strange place to be in right now. Good strange. I know you are scared and doubtful and expect me to assure you that everything will be alright. How can I? I am scared and doubtful too. Every day, I am in these juxtaposed energies of faith and doubt, sorting through them like... one moment I am super believing, another moment I’m all nope can’t do.

I know you want me to say that I love you and that I always will, and to promise that if we take this journey, I will be there waiting for you. And I want to. I really REALLY want to make these promises to you. But in the past I have been in situations where these promises were made and then conveniently forgotten later. I’m trying not to let my past control my present or future but I have also learnt that words can be forgotten, but intentions are forever. And that is what I want to say to you: I have the intention. I intend to make this work. When the time is right, I intend to give this my best shot. Tbh, I feel like I have been giving this my best shot for a while now, but maybe we don’t agree on that lol. And I also want to tell you that I’ve never felt about anyone else what I feel about you and I don’t think anyone else can ever take your place in my life. What that means exactly I don’t know yet.

The reason why I tell you neither what to do nor what not to do is because I don’t want to control your life. I know you me to show some ownership on you, and you on me, but believe me, you’ll hate it there. I’ve been there suffocating and it’s the most beautiful feeling to make your own mistakes, learn your own lessons, and watch yourself become your own artwork masterpiece and I don’t want to take away that experience from you. This is not my apathy. This is my gift to you. Also, yes I’m a pretty generous and just generally amazing person lol but do you really think I write pages after pages for just anyone and for no reason? Put two and two together silly.

You doubt your worth so much and since I do that too, I know how that works and won’t hold that against you, but it seems like now you have no choice but to see your worth. You must know, that I’m leaving you alone only because I’m confident you’ll find your own way. I’ll admit, I haven’t always been confident in you. Maybe I will falter again. But don’t you see, that’s the point? I will never be fully confident in you until you are confident in yourself. The more you doubt, the more I doubt too. But I’ve been observing you for a long time now and it’s just so hard to not trust you. Even with all the doubts and apprehensions constantly attacking me from all directions, I keep going back to you. I really hope my gut feeling about you is right or I’ve just made a big booboo lol. The funny thing is, I don’t care as much now. It’s almost like, fine, if anything, this will go down in my history as a wonderful, fun mistake and I don’t think I will ever regret it because in this moment I’m doing what I want to do— either it leads to a reward or a lesson, both are welcome. I have never been THIS vulnerable in my life like I hear myself say these things and I sound so crazy and stupid lol I’m so not my sassy and smartassy self right now.

As I was saying, I really do believe you’ll find your way. I don’t even know what that way is, or what your problems are, but I know you will solve them all. I’ll just be here, solving mine. How do I know for sure we can solve all problems? Because each one of the 7 billion people can. The only reason they don’t is that they don’t have a strong enough reason to push themselves to do that. Do we have a strong enough reason? How much do our dreams mean to us? For me, I have had this picture painted of this perfect life for a while. And yes, it has you in it. Very prominently. In my mind, it’s this beautifully balanced, harmonious, vibrant relationship with a forever after. And I don’t want to ruin that picture for short term hedonism. So I really believe, if our reason is strong enough, if this means that much to us, no obstacle can limit us from getting what we want. You’re not the only one who goes after what he wants and never gives up. I’m somewhat of that breed too. It’s just that this has clearly been a journey and it has brought some wild surprises along the way. I’ve struggled but now I’m learning to accept anything that comes with it. If the road leads me to my destination I don’t care how bumpy it is. It’s literally up to you right now. And I promise, it’s not even that difficult when you let go of resistance. All you have to do is consistently believe that you have limitless power to achieve anything you want and to create your reality the way you want it. I know it’s been a struggle and it feels like just the opposite, but it’s been that way because believe it or not, YOU have had these limiting beliefs about yourself and what you can create. I also know it’s been a long road and you’re tired, but it’s safe to drop the defences now. You might feel like certain situations or certain people are out of your control and how could you ever have things work your way, but it’s all in the mindset. The moment you reset your mindset and stick with it, you will see your reality change. In any situation, do not focus on the external events— they are simply the results of your previous mindset. Rather, ask yourself, what limiting thoughts and beliefs you have in your mindset right now and proceed to change them. I promise to you, people and situations will change to suit your needs, without ever having to deal with anyone. All this WILL happen, so don’t give up until they do. Twinflame, soulmate, karmic, friends, partners, colleagues— everyone will adjust according to your needs when YOU step into your limitlessness. Remember, it’s not just you who are tied to your karmics, they are tied to you too. An attachment exists from both sides. You don’t have to worry over the other person severing the tie, it’s enough if you let go of your end. Ask yourself, what are the common energies I share with my karmic? Identify these energies, heal the underlying trauma and ascend from them. This automatically ends your karmic contract and your karmic is free from you as well, no matter what their status is. The reason your karmics exist is because deep in your mindset you still believe that that’s your place and that’s what you’re worthy of— it’s part of the comfort zone you’re still stuck in.

I wish you well, my favorite human, I really hope I find you at the end of this journey. I want everything that you want. There are so many shared dreams and goals that we have— I will tell you all about my dreams one day. Until then I need to live some of these on my own, go on a little solo adventure, while I let you go on yours. And when it’s over and we’re ready (and no we’re not ready right now no matter how much you try to convince me lol) I promise I will see you again. When and how, I have no idea, but I’m happy to leave that to however the Divine guides us. I promise I’ll never forget you because I literally can’t. Love you!

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bluemoonpunch · 3 years

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Taurus Season 2021

Taurus Season: April 19 - May 20

(This was written a bit quickly and messy as I am tired and not all physically well at the moment.)

It seems like Taurus Season is revving up to be quite an exciting time for everyone. There are a lot of major shake-ups happening astrologically over the next month and a lot of those themes are captured there in the three sets of cards in the center. The major aspect is the Solar Plexus being anchored down by Control as Taurus Season will be a time of exercising will towards obtaining and maintaining things that fulfill your needs. This will extend out into the collective as well, prompting you to look at things from a broader perspective to see if, alongside you, others are getting what they need.

The aspect of Merkabah being held down by Patience is the key there with that. Quite literally having the patience to learn to communicate properly, to listen properly without judgment or anger, without thinking you already know it all and that you are the moral high ground when it comes to what humanity as a whole needs. With some of the astrological influences of Mars and Mercury playing a role this season, there is room for aggravation and tension to build up as people feel the need to speak and express more, projecting a lot rather than taking in, forgetting that conversations are a two-way street. Learning to navigate and balance that, especially on social media will be a big factor in all of that.

Prosperity being held down by Resourcefulness goes into Control and the ability to work through the will. It makes me think of a saying I keep in mind a lot, not sure where it came from — “Use what you have to get what you need so you can do what you want.” Being resourceful, taking note of what you already have in relation to what you need, rather than focusing on what you want purely out of lack can either set off a new sense of prosperity or it can, for some, show a lot of missing pieces when it comes to what you as an individual, a community, or humanity as a whole need.

The inner guidance presented which gives the messages, “look at the bigger picture,” “balance spirituality and practicality,” and “the answers you need are coming,” all seem to come back to matters of Uranus in Taurus, Pluto (and it’s retrograde) in Capricorn, Jupiter’s transition from Aquarius to Pisces, and Mercury’s trip through Taurus. These are more for the individual, more for self-guidance, to serve as reminders as you move through the season if you want to move with the energies as they come. There are big indicators of these influences fueling or speeding up the already fast-paced evolution of humanity through small waves of amplified communication and understanding. Of course, based on the North and South Nodes we’ll have people eagerly trying to initiate something new, to progress, while others cling desperately to old ideas, old routines, and essentially work on denying evolution for the entirety of humanity. That would go back into tension and there does seem to be a potential for extremist thinking on both sides when consideration, compassion, and just listening are not part of the system.

As for the external guidance, the messages there are a bit more general, as expected with simple phrases like, “set healthy boundaries,” “turn knowledge into wisdom,” and “magic moves through you.” When working externally, when actually engaging in communication or active progression of the collective you have to have your own limits to avoid burnout or literal mental breakdowns. You have to be able to apply your experience to the overall interpretation, using it to understand and connect with others, even if it’s just bits and pieces, rather than assuming your experience is the only one, or the only right one. Think of it as using your experience as a tool of connection rather than a weapon of projection that helps you hide your own faults, insecurity, and guilt.

The aspect of “magic moves through you,” is really interesting to me because I was seeing it as connecting back full to Saturn which will be having a fair bit of influence throughout Taurus Season. Specifically, I was feeling a lot of that aggravation and tension that I felt at the beginning of 2020 with Saturn where it literally felt like Saturn was so incredibly pissed off with humanity. It feels like this message comes through on claws ripping through layers of narcissism and self-righteousness in order to remind people that they are vessels of higher will, they are meant to initiate humanity’s higher aspects of evolution, but the magic in question can not travel through vessels that are polluted or “off-center” in some way. A clear mind, clear heart, clear soul is what is needed, I suppose. Understanding of the self, a clear view of the self is required to have a clear view of other individuals, and a clear view of other individuals is what allows you to have a clear view of humanity as a whole. You can not judge, diagnose, punish, or heal humanity unless you’ve looked at yourself first and most people haven’t done that yet.

There is a lot of very strong stimulation to Taurus itself this season with the Sun, Uranus, Venus, and Mercury all making their way through it, creating conjunctions within it and Trines and Squares to Pluto and Saturn. There is a lot of stimulation behind thinking, planning, saying, and doing what you need to do in order to make yourself comfortable, in order to assess what it is that you need to be comfortable. Of course, with Uranus there connecting to Saturn in Aquarius, there is also an incredible pull towards looking for the same with others and for others. Basically, it can be very easy this season to be selfish, but there is a call to use your selfishness to benefit the collective in the long run. Use your self-focus to get on track to understanding humanity more by way of understanding yourself and your needs.

There are pretty major influences swirling about and I think it’s pretty exciting to see what comes about, especially with such an emphasis being put on the astrology of Taurus Season. Since I’m not on my game with writing at the minute, not feeling the best, as usual, I highly suggest checking out this video below. He goes through all the major points of astrology through Taurus seasons and lays things out pretty well.

youtube

#taurus season #aries #taurus #gemini #cancer #leo #virgo #libra #scorpio #sagittarius #capricorn #aquarius #pisces

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throwawaythinking · 3 years

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ERYS

“People love to just talk about me by name and say, "Oh, Jaden Smith this, Jaden Smith that." It’s time for a new awakening and a new consciousness.” - Jaden on his album SYRE, Complex Magazine November 2017

Jaden Christopher Syre Smith was the boy born into the shadow of his father’s fame. However he took his birth into the public eye as an opportunity, not a blessing. Jaden uses music to make a name for himself, fighting to bring his own identity out of the shadows of his famous father. Smith’s second album, ERYS, details Erys emerging from the death of his opposingly naive and Icarus-like self, Syre. Jaden depicts the rise, fall, and conflict of his autobiographical character Erys in four tracks; ‘i-drip-or-is’, ‘Again’, ‘Got It’, and ‘Fire Dept’; these four songs are the centrefold of the entire album, where Erys becomes Syre and Syre becomes Erys. Through Erys’ aggressive and angry flaunting of his perceived power, Jaden explores the recklessness of an overinflated ego. Erys becomes a successful drug dealer for the drug ‘Vision’ in Los Angeles, however the money and power eat away at him as he overestimates his ability to control ‘Vision’. This is assisted by the internal conflict between Erys and Syre, as Syre’s gentle and lost voice wanders throughout the tracks urging Erys to understand that his reckless behaviour won’t fix their problems. The introduction of internal conflict within ERYS expresses the integrity of Jaden’s inner conflicts during the process of finding his true identity, how his polar opposite identities had to converge at a point to create a completed state of being. This conflict is also used to address the taboo of adolescence in relation to drug culture. Jaden’s “strict, hard rap album” is a force to be reckoned with; “every song, back to back, high tempo, a lot of bass like just crazy.”

Without context, Jaden’s music is the amalgamation of the typical hip-hop genre; autotune, models, drugs, cars, power, fame. By manipulating these features, Jaden uses hip-hop to his advantage in creating an egotistical Erys. ‘i-drip-or-is’ boasts;

“LV head to toe, MSFTS necklace on

They be stressin' 'cause I'm reckless and I'm flexin' hard

Flexin' super hard, she a superstar

With the stupid car, and it's supercharged

Rolex, he went to Luther, got my jeweler far”,

luxury brand names flying throughout the first verse, the picture is set. Interestingly, Erys has already acknowledged his tendency to be reckless in the second line, yet the context provides evidence that he believes this to be a good quality. Erys’ ego continues on in the next track, ‘Again’, where Erys talks about his fame, money and power;

“Now the gang got no shit to do, they just a chatterbox

Now I wear a muzzle to the bank, because I laugh a lot

Now I tell the paparazzi "Turn the fucking cameras off"”

gangs are out of the drug business as a result of Erys’ ‘Vision’ drug, he laughs so loud at the bank that they muzzle him, and he is being plastered all over the press. Thanks to Erys’ drug dealing business, he has achieved all facets considered for an individual to be successful. As a result, Erys believes he has solved his problem with his love interest as depicted in ‘Got It’;

“She want that brand new designer, that Louis bandana

I told her I got it

She want that wrist with the water and Virgil the wallet

I told her I got it

She said her ex n**** wildin' and giving her problems

I told her I got it.”

But this is not the end of the story. As Erys parties on top of the world, ‘Vision’ gets the better of him, and we see his collapse in the fastest song on the album, ‘Fire Dept’. Erys’ monotonous voice screams through the electric guitar and banging drums;

“Go fire department, call my mom

Said, "Your son dancin' on fire, it's all night long"

I think I just decided, need a ride home

95 percent, I go hard, still killing the vibe though”,

as he realises he needs urgent help. The last line pierces through the ears. Erys is acknowledging that he is losing energy coming down from 100 percent to 95, yet refusing to believe his power is dying, claiming to be “still killing the vibe”. Ego has trapped him in a state of denial. As the song progresses, Erys’ drug-induced screeches become more aggressive and the tempo increases, confessing “I think I lost my car/I can't see straight, I'm fucked” pokes out through the madness of his nonsensical rambling about his surroundings. Erys has lost control.

Erys’ rise to the top pushed him to his limits, and he has fallen as fast as he has risen. This short lived spark of incomprehensible power perfectly demonstrates the double edged sword of the human ego. Erys’ ego pushed him to reach incredible milestones of not only material success, but likely impossible spiritual experiences created by his drug ‘Vision’. However ego becomes an external force with no intention to cooperate with human ability, and pushes Erys to OD on ‘Vision’, resulting in his reckless regression. Jaden has become a master swordsmith with his storytelling genius, with ego being his deadliest double edged sword sticking out of ERYS as a forever-imminent threat. The concept of ego courses like blood through the body of four explosive tracks. Ego is a perilous feat of humanity, and Erys is being destroyed by his.

If one listened intently to the tracks, they would notice a solitary voice wafting through ‘Again’ and ‘Fire Dept’. This is Syre, trapped in the dark by the emergence of Erys. Audibly, Syre is juxtaposed against Erys by tenderly singing instead of belligerently rapping. Additionally, Erys’s voice has been manipulated by autotune of various degrees, which distinguishes Jaden’s natural voice for Syre. Syre’s presence in Erys’ rise is the most pertinent feat of ERYS because this is what makes Erys human. Syre may have died, however the true parts of his soul remain, his real thoughts and feelings. In ‘Again’, the music fades and echoes. Syre emerges singing of the girl he loves and how he has become adrift; “Girl, we can paint such a pretty life…I admit I'm lost, can I hitch a ride?/Something bout your voice, like a lullaby.” Yet Erys interrupts Syre’s digression with frustration;

“Who the fuck turned this shit on, n****

I told you don't play no motherfucking wack shit

Big drip only”.

It is tacit Erys is fighting to silence his inner self, believing that his new behaviour is the only way to overcome his hardship as it has worked on his external image. This also explains why Erys feels the need to always drop big luxury brands in his lyrics (particularly in ‘i-drip-or-is’ and ‘Again’), because the clothing he wears on his body is a conspicuous external composition of his ability to succeed. As Syre mentioned their love interest, Erys comes back with ‘Got It’, as described earlier, being an entire song about how he can now provide for the girl that they once couldn’t help. This feeds into the psyche of Erys believing that he is better off living the life that he has now, because on paper it all makes sense. Syre makes another appearance after Erys goes off the deep end at the end of ‘Fire Dept’ and continues his digression about his love interest;

“Think about

Your life

Too much

I'm losin' light

I'm cruising on

I think a lot

I think about

You a lot

Too much

Do too much

I should be movin' on

(For sure).”

This time, Erys cannot fight Syre’s appearance, and the song ends without interruption.

The conflict between Syre and Erys is a trademark of adolescent growth. Jaden uses this conflict to show how he had suppressed his true emotions by using drugs and money as a bandaid on his emotional and spiritual wounds. This is a common trend in adolescence, to believe that material wealth or a chemical alteration of the brain is the only solution to fixing hard problems. Syre and Erys’ conflict cries at our unforgiving society for help, for the aid that adolescents so desperately need to deal with their struggles. It seems that the youth do not have the resources they need to navigate a life that is expected of them, and thus they cope with what is available - drug culture. Just as Erys learnt to push ‘Vision’ across the city of Los Angeles, young people dealing with problems beyond their control resort to drug taking or dealing to handle their problems, and it destroys them just as Erys has been destroyed - even if they know deep down that drugs won’t fix their problems.

Syre and Erys also represent Jaden’s state of being. The conflict between the two characters is a metaphorical picture of Jaden’s internal fight against himself in his journey to finding his true identity. It is no question that Jaden Smith would’ve lived perfectly fine under the care of his father, yet he chooses to make his own name. This makes him a striking individual due to the immense care he takes in creating his true identity. By creating conflict between his two characters, Jaden immortalizes his story in his own words. He immortalizes the importance of finding one’s true identity, and inspires the youth of his generation to do the same. Syre and Erys eventually go on to merge into one person; Jaden. The existence of this resolution is an integral part of urging young people to become their real selves, because it shows that having a true identity is real, and achievable.

Jaden’s second album ERYS supersedes expectations of a boy born into fame and privilege. Following the completion of the SYRE and ERYS projects, Jaden is showing the world that he is more than his family name. Often teenagers want the world to understand they are their own person with their own dreams, feelings, desires and struggles. Jaden, in my opinion, expressed this best.

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.

Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. Stable communities take shape. They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild? Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society could reboot a technological civilisation?

Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific. Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them.

So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state?

It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels. In everyday life, their most visible use is the petrol or diesel pumped into the vehicles that fill our roads, and the coal and natural gas which fire the power stations that electrify our modern lives. But we also rely on a range of different industrial materials, and in most cases, high temperatures are required to transform the stuff we dig out of the ground or harvest from the landscape into something useful. You can’t smelt metal, make glass, roast the ingredients of concrete, or synthesise artificial fertiliser without a lot of heat. It is fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – that provide most of this thermal energy.

In fact, the problem is even worse than that. Many of the chemicals required in bulk to run the modern world, from pesticides to plastics, derive from the diverse organic compounds in crude oil. Given the dwindling reserves of crude oil left in the world, it could be argued that the most wasteful use for this limited resource is to simply burn it. We should be carefully preserving what’s left for the vital repertoire of valuable organic compounds it offers.

But my topic here is not what we should do now. Presumably everybody knows that we must transition to a low-carbon economy one way or another. No, I want to answer a question whose interest is (let’s hope) more theoretical. Is the emergence of a technologically advanced civilisation necessarily contingent on the easy availability of ancient energy? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without fossil fuels? And the answer to that question is: maybe – but it would be extremely difficult. Let’s see how.

…

Well, it could, in a very limited way. If you find yourself among the survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, you could scavenge enough working solar panels to keep your lifestyle electrified for a good long while. Without moving parts, photovoltaic cells require little maintenance and are remarkably resilient. They do deteriorate over time, though, from moisture penetrating the casing and from sunlight itself degrading the high-purity silicon layers. The electricity generated by a solar panel declines by about 1 per cent every year so, after a few generations, all our hand-me-down solar panels will have degraded to the point of uselessness. Then what?

New ones would be fiendishly difficult to create from scratch. Solar panels are made from thin slices of extremely pure silicon, and although the raw material is common sand, it must be processed and refined using complex and precise techniques – the same technological capabilities, more or less, that we need for modern semiconductor electronics components. These techniques took a long time to develop, and would presumably take a long time to recover. So photovoltaic solar power would not be within the capability of a society early in the industrialisation process.

…

On the face of it, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that a progressing society could construct electrical generators and couple them to simple windmills and waterwheels, later progressing to wind turbines and hydroelectric dams. In a world without fossil fuels, one might envisage an electrified civilisation that largely bypasses combustion engines, building its transport infrastructure around electric trains and trams for long-distance and urban transport. I say ‘largely’. We couldn’t get round it all together.

While the electric motor could perhaps replace the coal-burning steam engine for mechanical applications, society, as we’ve already seen, also relies upon thermal energy to drive the essential chemical and physical transformations it needs. How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?

You can of course create heat from electricity. We already use electric ovens and kilns. Modern arc furnaces are used for producing cast iron or recycling steel. The problem isn’t so much that electricity can’t be used to heat things, but that for meaningful industrial activity you’ve got to generate prodigious amounts of it, which is challenging using only renewable energy sources such as wind and water.

An alternative is to generate high temperatures using solar power directly. Rather than relying on photovoltaic panels, concentrated solar thermal farms use giant mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto a small spot. The heat concentrated in this way can be exploited to drive certain chemical or industrial processes, or else to raise steam and drive a generator. Even so, it is difficult (for example) to produce the very high temperatures inside an iron-smelting blast furnace using such a system. What’s more, it goes without saying that the effectiveness of concentrated solar power depends strongly on the local climate.

No, when it comes to generating the white heat demanded by modern industry, there are few good options but to burn stuff.

…

But charcoal-based industry didn’t die out altogether. In fact, it survived to flourish in Brazil. Because it has substantial iron deposits but few coalmines, Brazil is the largest charcoal producer in the world and the ninth biggest steel producer. We aren’t talking about a cottage industry here, and this makes Brazil a very encouraging example for our thought experiment.

The trees used in Brazil’s charcoal industry are mainly fast-growing eucalyptus, cultivated specifically for the purpose. The traditional method for creating charcoal is to pile chopped staves of air-dried timber into a great dome-shaped mound and then cover it with turf or soil to restrict airflow as the wood smoulders. The Brazilian enterprise has scaled up this traditional craft to an industrial operation. Dried timber is stacked into squat, cylindrical kilns, built of brick or masonry and arranged in long lines so that they can be easily filled and unloaded in sequence. The largest sites can sport hundreds of such kilns. Once filled, their entrances are sealed and a fire is lit from the top.

…

Around two-thirds of Brazilian charcoal comes from sustainable plantations, and so this modern-day practice has been dubbed ‘green steel’. Sadly, the final third is supplied by the non-sustainable felling of primary forest. Even so, the Brazilian case does provide an example of how the raw materials of modern civilisation can be supplied without reliance on fossil fuels.

…

Is that our solution, then? Could our rebooting society run on wood, supplemented with electricity from renewable sources? Maybe so, if the population was fairly small. But here’s the catch. These options all presuppose that our survivors are able to construct efficient steam turbines, CHP stations and internal combustion engines. We know how to do all that, of course – but in the event of a civilisational collapse, who is to say that the knowledge won’t be lost? And if it is, what are the chances that our descendants could reconstruct it?

In our own history, the first successful application of steam engines was in pumping out coal mines. This was a setting in which fuel was already abundant, so it didn’t matter that the first, primitive designs were terribly inefficient. The increased output of coal from the mines was used to first smelt and then forge more iron. Iron components were used to construct further steam engines, which were in turn used to pump mines or drive the blast furnaces at iron foundries.

And of course, steam engines were themselves employed at machine shops to construct yet more steam engines. It was only once steam engines were being built and operated that subsequent engineers were able to devise ways to increase their efficiency and shrink fuel demands. They found ways to reduce their size and weight, adapting them for applications in transport or factory machinery. In other words, there was a positive feedback loop at the very core of the industrial revolution: the production of coal, iron and steam engines were all mutually supportive.

In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines?

It took a lot of energy to develop our technologies to their present heights, and presumably it would take a lot of energy to do it again. Fossil fuels are out. That means our future society will need an awful lot of timber.

In a temperate climate such as the UK’s, an acre of broadleaf trees produces about four to five tonnes of biomass fuel every year. If you cultivated fast-growing kinds such as willow or miscanthus grass, you could quadruple that. The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings.

But here’s the thing: coppicing was already a well-developed technique in pre-industrial Britain. It couldn’t meet all of the energy requirements of the burgeoning society. The central problem is that woodland, even when it is well-managed, competes with other land uses, principally agriculture. The double-whammy of development is that, as a society’s population grows, it requires more farmland to provide enough food and also greater timber production for energy. The two needs compete for largely the same land areas.

We know how this played out in our own past. From the mid-16th century, Britain responded to these factors by increasing the exploitation of its coal fields – essentially harvesting the energy of ancient forests beneath the ground without compromising its agricultural output. The same energy provided by one hectare of coppice for a year is provided by about five to 10 tonnes of coal, and it can be dug out of the ground an awful lot quicker than waiting for the woodland to regrow.

It is this limitation in the supply of thermal energy that would pose the biggest problem to a society trying to industrialise without easy access to fossil fuels. This is true in our post-apocalyptic scenario, and it would be equally true in any counterfactual world that never developed fossil fuels for whatever reason. For a society to stand any chance of industrialising under such conditions, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favourable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy.

Even so, an industrial revolution without coal would be, at a minimum, very difficult. Today, use of fossil fuels is actually growing, which is worrying for a number of reasons too familiar to rehearse here. Steps towards a low-carbon economy are vital. But we should also recognise how pivotal those accumulated reservoirs of thermal energy were in getting us to where we are. Maybe we could have made it the hard way. A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanisation, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We’d better hope we can secure the future of our own civilisation, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake.

#lewis dartnell #aeon.co #industrial revolution #fossil fuels #resource depletion

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thatgamefromthatad · 3 years

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Mobile Game Review - Emperor of Mahjong (Suggested by @spaceswordblaster)

Note: This game used to be called Jewels of Mahjong.

I was originally going to do this as an “ads vs. gameplay” type review but I ran into something weird which is my fault for not doing any further research until I was just about to write my review.

@spaceswordblaster (thank you for the suggestions by the way!) said they saw an ad for this game that made it seem like a matching game with a cowgirl as the main protagonist. This game is not like that at all, but when I went to look for the ads for Emperor of Mahjong (which like I said I only did after I had played the game itself for the while and needed them for my review) I realized it doesn’t really have any actively running ads that I could find; for some reason Facebook keeps taking down its ads for being about social or political issues (but I was still able to view the ads and they didn’t seem to be about that at all but I’ve found Facebook tends to do that randomly sometimes lol). The ads I was able to see were basically exactly what the game is like: very straightforward and honest ads.

However, G5 Games, which is the company that made this game, also has a game called Jewels of the Wild West, which sounds exactly like what spaceswordblaster was talking about (as well as a game called Sheriff of Mahjong, which is also cowgirl-themed). So it sounds like G5 got its wires crossed at some point and put the wrong game logo in the Wild West/Sheriff ad or had the ad link back to the wrong game listing. I say this is my fault because if I had researched the ad first thing, I would have realized this and probably played Jewels of the Wild West first, or both games instead of just one. It’s worth mentioning that some of G5 Games’ ads are the fake-seeming “pull the pin” or “my husband is cheating on me” type, just not for this particular game that I actually played lol.

Since I did play this game for a considerable amount of time, I’ll still review it! And I’ll take it as a lesson learned to watch the ads first if I haven’t seen them already.

Read my full review below!

***

🏛 What is this app? Emperor of Mahjong is a free mahjong game that is set in ancient Rome. The game follows a storyline and involves quests that require you to find certain items by completing mahjong levels - there are different buildings where you can play mahjong levels and each building has different possible items you can receive as rewards for completing the level. Sometimes you need to craft items together to get the item to complete the quest, and you can also find and craft together map pieces to unlock new buildings. Additionally, there are monsters you can “battle” by playing a specific type of mahjong level where the goal is to remove tiles specifically next to a certain object to “attack” the monster.

👍 What’s good about this app? This is honestly a great mahjong app, although to be fair I’ve never actually played a mahjong mobile game before, only mahjong computer games a while back. But everything is really top-notch here from the art, to the mechanics, to the quests, which create a really appealing structure around the mahjong levels as opposed to just having something that’s level after level with no other real goal.

While playing the main mahjong levels in this game is pretty straightforward - you just tap the two matching tiles you want to remove, plus there are some boosters/hints you can use like reshuffling the tiles or highlighting matching tiles if you can’t find any - one of the really appealing features is the auto zoom, which, as the name suggests, automatically zooms into the area where there are still tiles as you gradually remove tiles, so you don’t have to manually zoom or pan around when you start creating more empty space on the board (although you can if you want to). The mechanic is very smooth so you almost don’t notice it’s happening and it just helps you stay focused on making matches, which is useful because you get bonuses for completing consecutive matches within a certain amount of time. I also like the sound effects when you match tiles, it just makes the overall gameplay really satisfying.

(Gif below sped up to demonstrate the otherwise subtle adjustments of the auto zoom feature - also poor quality because idk how to make better gifs from videos lol)

The game also has enough variety and is challenging enough to keep me interested - some levels will be more difficult than others to successfully complete (you lose the level if you run out of matchable tiles) and there are also challenges like going around collecting the right items to complete a quest or to be able to battle a monster (since you need to have certain items to initiate a battle). And the idea of having battle stages on its own is really unique (at least as far as I know, since I haven’t played a lot of mahjong games), I never thought of mahjong being played like that and I’m always interested when games take a well-known puzzle and create a new way to play it.

The other thing I like about this game is that it seems you can really play endlessly for free - you do need to spend energy to play mahjong levels but I never ran out of energy since you have a decent amount to start out with, your energy refills every time you level up and your max energy also goes up each time you level up. The only pop up ads I’ve seen so far are ads for other G5 games, and occasional popups for microtransactions (like if you try to craft something and don’t have all the items you need it will ask you if you want to buy the missing items for real money, typical stuff like that). As far as free puzzle games go this one is really impressive and I’d definitely continue playing after this review!

👎 What’s wrong with this app? Honestly, I don’t really have much to criticize about this app. I guess one thing I would say is that first starting out it did seem a little overly complicated until I played longer and got a better grasp of the quest system and how to get items etc. They probably could have explained all of that better in the tutorial or eased you into it more, because if you’re going into it expecting or wanting just a mahjong game you’re going to feel confused and overwhelmed when it’s telling you need to collect this and build that and combine these items etc. If you want something more straightforward and linear where you can just play mahjong levels continuously then this might not be the game for you.

🍇 Full list of features (there may be more unlocked as you go along so this list may not be complete but here’s everything I’ve seen so far):

Regular mahjong levels, with boosters (the symbols on the tiles differ slightly between the different buildings you can play mahjong in, and you can also get different rewards for playing mahjong in different buildings)

Storyline (the story is set in ancient Rome and the main antagonist is Cassius. I’m not that familiar with Roman history or anything and I wasn’t always 100% sure what was going on but there was definitely an overarching plot being conveyed through dialog from the characters and short narrative chapters. Each quest path is also its own mini side story and I found that easier to follow, and liked having a story behind each item I was asked to retrieve. Some of the quests are what I would consider “main quests” that tie more into the overarching story.)

[Image Description: A quest from the character Felix titled “Fifty Shades.” The quest dialog reads, “That’s a marker for fifty, as you know. We could probably utilize it as a stamp of sorts, perhaps even slather it with paint, and mark the bags of produce as measurement of quantity” and is cut off after the start of the next sentence that starts with the word, “The.” The quest task reads, “Locate the L” and an image of stone letter L is shown. Experience and coin rewards are shown above a green button that reads, “Accept.”]

Quests (the main way of progressing through the games, you complete quests by finishing mahjong levels to retrieve the needed items)

Collections/crafting (for some quests you’ll need to combine a set of items and resources to get the final item to complete the quest)

Construction (as you progress there will be points where you are tasked with collecting map pieces, and when you collect the complete set you can construct a new building with new mahjong levels, new possible rewards and a new set of quests. I believe you can also upgrade buildings as you go along to improve their rewards)

Monsters/battles (there are monsters throughout the map that you can “battle” in a mini mahjong game by matching tiles next to the weapon you need to “attack” the monster. You need to collect these weapons from other mahjong levels first before you can enter a battle, and defeating the monsters yields unique items you need for some quests)

Award statues (when you reach certain achievements there are statues that appear throughout the map of different Roman gods that can be tapped occasionally to receive a reward such as energy or a resource needed for crafting. These statues upgrade as you complete more achievements which I assume either gives you better rewards or makes them refresh more often)

Random treasure (sometimes there will be random treasure on the map that you can tap to get free rewards/resources)

Events (there are sometimes limited time events with their own storylines, associated quests and mahjong levels/buildings)

[Image Description: A screenshot of the storyline of the “Backstage Passions” event in Emperor of Mahjong, which is shown as an open book with an image and progress bar on one page and an image and text on the other. The first page shows a color image of the character Argus arm in arm with a woman as the character Vita watches on from beside a pillar in the background with a concerned or upset expression on her face. Underneath is a gold progress bar showing the event is about 75% complete with an ornate golden prize box at the end of the progress bar.

The second page shows a black and white image of Vita speaking to three other women with text underneath reading, “It turns out that Argus managed to have an affair with three difference women: a wealthy widow, a nobleman’s only heiress, and a famous merchant’s daughter! Vita is sure that Argus is going to deceive the poor ladies and run off with their money. A true organizer of-“ The last line of text is partly faded at the bottom and the rest is cut off. A green button under the text reads, “Play.”]

⭐️ Overall Rating: 5/5 (This is a really well-made and satisfying free puzzle game and definitely made me interested in checking out G5’s other games as well! But like I said it’s a little more involved and complicated than a general mahjong game so if you prefer something with straightforward linear levels you might want to try something else.)

Thank you @spaceswordblaster for bringing up this game to me, I really enjoyed it and it helped me kill a lot of downtime while I was on vacation! Sorry I didn’t look more into the cowgirl thing but maybe I will play some of those other games in the future :)

Thanks for reading! 🥳

#mahjong #emperor of mahjong #puzzle games #ancient rome #free games #recommended #mahjong games #image descriptions in alt text #flashing gif warning #gif warning #flashing lights tw #g5 games

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wordsnstuff · 5 years

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Guide To Writing Forbidden Love

This is also available on wordsnstuffblog.com!

Forbidden love is a trope that reaches far and wide, across every genre and every age group. I took what my followers told me their struggles were with writing this dynamic and did my best to explain the confusing and instruct on the often unspoken keys to getting it right. Happy writing!

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Choosing The Right Obstacle

There’s a lot of different things you could put in the way of your characters being together. Choosing these obstacles is not just about what you like to read about most, although that is a large factor. It’s also important to think about your setting and your characters’ backgrounds because these two aspects set up the obstacles to hit them organically.

Internal vs. External Conflict

A relationship can be prevented from blossoming for many reasons, and not all of them have to do with things outside the characters’ control. Some relationships are forbidden because one or both of the characters see the consequences of them being together as too severe to risk. A good example of this is when the characters are afraid of a longstanding friendship falling apart in the case of a breakup.

The external conflict in a forbidden love story shouldn’t ever be just external. Large cultural differences and major factors will have influenced the characters’ own mindsets, and this should be reflected. They will have doubts about their relationship as well, so show that. It adds depth to the conflict.

Depicting A Healthy Relationship

It’s important that you decide whether your story is meant to be a happily ever after or a cautionary tale. Be purposeful in how you portray your characters and their actions and how you make it come across to the reader. In the case of forbidden love, it’s very easy to romanticize impulse and obsessive behavior for the sake of melodrama and grand romantic profession. If you’re going to depict, say, two characters falling in love with the idea of each other, make sure you also get across to the reader that it’s unhealthy behavior and emphasize the conflict that this will inevitably introduce.

Nailing The Angst

There will obviously be a lot of turmoil and struggle in a forbidden love situation, and the best way to show your characters suffering is by showing how their lives are without each other. Show the reader why the characters are miserable and why they are so relieved when they’re together again. It’s hard to live a life apart from the ones you love, especially when there’s something in your way that you have no power to change. Show that, and the reader will empathize with your characters.

Avoiding Melodrama

Drama is key with forbidden love, but going over the top can put a bad taste in your reader’s mouth. Be cautious when coming up with plot points. Ask yourself, “is this too much?”, because drama has its place and it doesn’t always have to be super believable, but the suspension of disbelief is important to any work in any genre, so toe that line carefully.

Common Struggles

~ How do I twist this trope to be original?... Some or a lot of your plot points and story details will be similar to other works in the genre, but my best advice is to take note of the similar details and try to twist them a little to make them your own. Don’t form your story around the trope, insert the trope into the story.

~ How do I show the relationship progressing at a natural pace with a limited number of opportunities for the characters to interact privately?... This is difficult, but can be done. Sometimes forbidden love blossoms over long periods of time through small, meaningful interactions. A lot of my favorite stories with this trope begin when the characters are children, and develop as they grow older and develop more freedom to see each other. Use the time your characters have together wisely and make their interactions as meaningful as possible.

~ How do I depict forbidden love that is in a moral grey area, or straight up wrong, without romanticizing/glamorizing/idealizing it? (For example, cheating, incest, workplace relationships, large age gaps, etc.)... Again, if you’re going to depict unhealthy behavior and relationship dynamics, just avoid framing them in a way that makes them seem desirable or acceptable. Show the issues with these kinds of relationships, and show why they’re not okay. A lot of the problem with things like workplace romances, for instance, in fiction is that it doesn’t show the consequences of the downsides. With employee romances, there can be a large imbalance of power that leads to manipulation or abuse. Show that, rather than glossing over it for the sake of filling your book with steamy moments.

~ How should I approach relationships that are forbidden because of issues having to do with sexuality, class, race, alignment, etc.?... Be mindful of both characters’ perspectives and experiences, because the consequences of these relationships will have different effects on different people with very different circumstances.

~ How should I depict love that is forbidden because it’s one-sided?... This is caused by internal conflict and will mostly lead to drama between the two characters. An important thing to note here is that, even if two people are good friends, any unwanted advances after a character has stated their answer is not okay. It doesn’t matter how the other character feels. If one has made their feelings clear, the other should back off. If it goes any further, be sure to let your reader know that their behavior has become unhealthy.

~ What about lighter forms of forbidden love that is culturally taboo, rather than actually forbidden, like polyamory or generational difference?... That’s a whole different ballpark having to do with the struggle of being an outcast, rather than having major obstacles in their way. I would approach it keeping all partners’ perspectives in mind and be mindful of unhealthy behavior. As long as your characters are all legally consenting adults engaging in healthy relationships, there’s nothing wrong with depicting their relationships in a positive light.

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asgardian--angels · 4 years

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My Syracuse Pollinator Garden - Year 2

Hi everyone! I’m sure a lot of us are facing stress during these troubling times and so as I’ve mentioned before, gardening is an excellent way to take your mind off of current events, de-stress, reflect and connect yourself with nature while remaining in the safety of your own property. Last year, when I moved into my Syracuse apartment (technically a room in my landlady’s house; I’m here for grad school), I was granted permission to start a pollinator garden. I am a pollinator ecologist slash conservation biologist so I bring some expertise with me here. I say this because I always encourage anyone who sees this and is curious about doing it yourself to come and ask me questions! I highly recommend you check out last year’s post which thoroughly goes over 1) the principles of gardening for pollinators and wildlife, 2) resources to help you learn more and get started, 3) what plants I have in this garden, and 4) how it progressed over the course of the summer in 2019. Unfortunately, because of fieldwork and coursework I had trouble keeping up with it regularly so I think I missed a fall installment. I intend to be more thorough this year. Quite a lot has already happened, and I will review it the best I can and from this point forward, attempt monthly updates.

I also want to mention that I’ve learned a lot since last year too - better ways of doing things, since I’m not a landscaper. Such as, you don’t have to break your back digging up turfgrass for hours on end. Instead, you can smother it for three months with old newspapers and get rid of it that way. It’s also important to note that the way I have my garden laid out is not ideal for a pollinator garden, it doesn’t follow every recommended principle. That’s because I had limitations and conditions under which I had to work, given that it’s not my own land and I had limited funds. But any effort is better than nothing, so don’t think that just because it’s not perfect, it’s not worth it. It is! You can always build, change, or improve upon it later.

In the second year of a new garden with perennials, you can expect a lot more vibrant growth - the plants have established root systems and can put more energy into above-ground growth and flower production. Thus, I was thrilled to see my plants growing more vigorously than before!

MARCH

Here in central New York, March was still freezing, wet, and snowy. But, by the end of the month, the garden was starting to show signs of life, sending up the first shoots of hardy native perennials.

In particular, the Jacob’s ladder already had quite a lot of new growth, with the nodding onion and yarrow close behind. In my herb garden, the chives had erupted with force from the leaf litter. The yard was still messy, with dead stems and fallen leaves blanketing much of the ground. My landlady insists I clean these, but if it’s your choice, leave the leaf litter around where you can. It’s important habitat for invertebrates and returns nutrients to the soil as it decomposes.

APRIL

The world was beginning to wake up. I had cold-stratified hundreds of seeds of native plants I’d collected last fall, and it was time to take them out of the fridge. The wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata) had already sprouted, so I planted them in pots. The rest, I put in a seed starter tray.

Next, within the first few days of April, male hornfaced bees (Osmia cornifrons) started emerging in multitudes from my bee hotel. These are a non-native, but naturalized, species of mason bee common in suburbia and they are the most frequent users of bee hotels in the northeast. I watched as they dug through the mud cap on their natal nests, peeking out with fresh eyes at the sun for the very first time. I felt like a proud parent. (You can see more pictures here)

At the same time, male Dunning’s mining bees (Andrena dunningi) were patrolling the new nest sites of females, dug in the soil between the stones laid down near the front door.

There wasn’t much for these bees to forage on yet, mainly the wild violets that grow each year on the lawn and my landlady’s invasive vinca. But many more of my perennials had started to come up, and I decided it was time to cut the dead stems.

It is best to cut dead stems back in April or so if you’re in a northern clime; the purpose of this is to offer nesting places for stem-nesting bees, which will start flying in April and May. Don’t cut them to the ground, give them several inches. Leaving stems through the winter also allows birds to forage on the seedheads.

Towards the end of April, despite several more snowstorms, the barren strawberry began to bloom.

I also saw the emergence of the female hornfaced bees, with males pursuing close behind. It is advised that you discard a bee hotel after the bees have emerged, or else they will try to nest in it again, which can lead to high mortality rates, as an old structure harbors parasites and is generally dirty.

MAY

May was a month of excitement. Given that I have been at home almost every day instead of being on campus, I was able to closely monitor the progress of the garden, apart from a week spent at home for my birthday. The dandelions dotted the yard, attracting gynes of common eastern bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) and the first honeybees (not native, need I remind you).

Alongside the dandelions was ground-ivy, which sent up stalks of purple flowers also used by the bumblebees. Almost all my plants had sprouted at this point.

My wild cucumber, which is a vine, had grown so rapidly that I couldn’t give it support fast enough, and eventually it decided to wind itself around my drapes. I brought one home as a gift for the parents, and placed the other two outside and snaked them around the front banister. However, despite my best efforts, only two other seeds from the hundreds I cold-stratified sprouted. A disappointment for sure; I was hoping to have swamp milkweed in the yard. But, there’s a chance for the wild hibiscus! Alas, with new growth comes deer, traipsing through the yard each night intent on nibbling my natives. They hit the columbine heavy this year as they did last year, and that stunted its growth and prevented it from flowering on time. I managed to protect it by putting a recycling bin over it each night. From the 7th to the 17th, I went home and visited a local native nursery.

There, I picked up a new plant for the garden - scarlet bee balm, Monarda didyma. I already have bee balm (M. fistulosa), but this species blooms red and is attractive to hummingbirds.

When I got back to Syracuse, I was astounded to find how quickly everything had shot up.

Among new blooms were the Jacob’s Ladder, woodland stonecrop, and finally, the wild columbine. The chives and thyme began to flower as well.

The milkweeds were one of the last to come up, being late to break dormancy. But once they did, they grew like lightning, gaining a foot in a week.

I planted my row of annuals (cosmos and sunflowers) along the walkway, and added beans to my herb garden. The dill and basil sprouted and once they get a bit bigger I’ll transplant them outside.

Then, in late May, I visited my advisor’s farm, and he gave me two new plants for the garden, from his own land - Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea), which is a lovely yellow-flowered member of the carrot family which blooms in spring, and the classic purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). They transplanted well.

Honestly, everything is doing better than I could have hoped. What were ungainly spaces between the plants last year are starting to fill in as they grow more vigorously - the single-stalked milkweed I put in last May is now 17 stalks, and I see seedlings of the biennial brown-eyed susans coming up all around it in a three foot radius. Even the purple prairie clover which was eaten to the ground by rabbits last summer has miraculously returned. The only thing I am still waiting on is the bottlebrush grass, which remains dormant. It’s a warm-season grass, so I hope as we get sustained high temperatures in June, it will come back! But its seedlings too are popping up all around the beds.

And this sums up spring! It has become cold again for the week, but that won’t halt the growth once it’s started. The New England aster is almost half as tall as me, and my black raspberry has flowered and hopefully will produce a small handful for me to enjoy!

Check back in late June for another update on the garden!

#pollinator garden #pollinators #bees #nature #gardening #mine

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tanadrin · 5 years

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Notes on an RPG combat system

Here’s my idea for an RPG combat system that 1) doesn’t use hitpoints; 2) doesn’t rely as much on random chance, but instead on tactical decision-making; and 3) could be adapted to a wide variety of settings.

Traditional swordplay

The core mechanic of this combat system is that every character/NPC/unit has a small number of “cards” representing actions they can take or states they can be in. These don’t have to be physical cards; they can be listed in a table, or written down on a character sheet, and simply named as they are used; but perhaps having a physical card to refer to would be useful. They also have a fixed resource, representing their speed and agility, and the amount of room they have immediately around them to maneuever. Call it Maneuver, or Action, or whatever you like; here, I’ll abbreviate it ACT.

In any given combat (or otherwise time-sensitive) situation, a character is in a stance. Stances determine what actions they can take. If you’re in a defensive Stance, maybe your most powerful attacks aren’t available to you; if you’re in an aggressive Stance, you might find it harder to defend against strong attacks. The stances should be named as appropriate for the setting, the character class, etc.

In a given stance, you have three basic kinds of moves: guards, attacks, and stance changes. Combat is turn-based. You can make as many moves as you have ACT for; every move costs a certain amount of ACT. But note that many--most, if not all--moves are highly context-dependent. If, for instance, you’re swinging a great big broadsword around, you might make a slashing attack from overhead. But your sword is heavy, and slow; you can’t immediately follow that up with a direct thrust at the center of your enemy’s mass. You have to either return to a more neutral stance, or make a second attack from the new position you’re in.

At the end of your turn, your ACT replenishes to full. But note that during your turn, the enemy can respond to your attacks. The comparable mechanic here is Instant abilities in a game like Magic: The Gathering. Defensive moves like dodges, parries, and blocks can be used to respond; perhaps some enemies or player classes even have counterattack abilities that will force the attack player to defend in turn.

The flow of combat is intended to be full of moves and countermoves, with each side looking for an opening. If you run out of ACT (too slow, or pinned against a wall!), you’re going to take a hit--and every hit has serious consequences.

Injury and death

This combat system does not use hitpoints or numerical armor value. Instead, every entity has body parts which can be injured. These will often be standardized: a creature described as “human” or “humanoid” is highly likely to have all the right number of limbs and sensory organs and vitals in all the usual places; more unusual creatures should have short, specific descriptions of their physical features (including what type of attacks or injuries they may be immune to), e.g.,:

AVETI RUINDWELLER - Machine ghost - a central cranial node (vital organ), surrounded by six spiderlike limbs and covered with a hard, armored exoskeleton. Cannot bleed, be stunned, or be afraid.

“Vital organ” here denotes that if catastrophic damage is inflicted on that part of the creature, it will die.

Especially for nonhuman creatures, action cards will note what functioning body parts are necessary to carry out an action; otherwise, common-sense rules apply. For instance, you cannot swing a sword with your left arm if your left arm is broken.

Injury is applied when a hit is sustained, based on the kind of weapon used, and the kind of armor the injured creature is wearing. A small dagger can’t pierce thick plate mail, for instance; even if you land a hit on a well-armored opponent, nothing will happen. But, say you land a plasma blast on an exposed arm: that arm is likely to be severely burned, bleeding at minimum, and totally non-functional.

I can think of two good ways to determine how much damage is dealt: for attacks that a player or creature is attempting to avoid, the difference between the ACT used and the ACT necessary to evade. If you have 2 ACT left, but try a dodge that costs 3, you’ll suffer a glancing blow--whereas if you have no ACT left, and take the full force of the blow, the damage will be greater. Or, a dice roll and a table lookup, which might appeal more to those who like a random element to add tension to RPG combat.

Armor will delineate what kind of hits it mitigates or makes the wearer immune to. Chainmail probably protects from glancing dagger blows, but not direct strikes; heavy plate armor means any injuries, whether from a blade or a mace, are more likely to be crushing injuries than cutting ones. You can aim your attacks, of course, within reason: if you’re swinging from above, you can’t aim for someone’s kidneys. If you’re swinging from below, you can’t aim for the joint between their helmet and their breastplate.

Catastrophic injury to vital organs causes death; but severely bleeding injury to limbs will eventually be fatal as well. Severely injured limbs can’t be used; somewhat injured limbs may incur an ACT penalty for actions that use them, and small injuries that are quite painful may incur and ACT penalty for all actions, making it easier to land a deadly blow.

Special abilities; magic

This system can be extended to special abilities like sci-fi tech and magic. The particular use of magic I have in mind is something very kinetic, which is utilized by moving the whole body, and which primarily affects objects’ physical properties (speed, direction of motion, mass, rotation) or the flow of energy. Moreover, unlike basic stabbing and slashing maneuvers, magic abilities could be chained to produce complex effects; and limits on how different kinds of magic can be paired can produce interesting constraints (e.g., not being able to combine fire and frost magic).

Progression

Progression in this system is quite simple: whether using levels, points, or some other system, players should be periodically allowed to buy more action cards, unlocking new abilities, new responses, and new stances. Depending on how you want to arrange classes or skill categories, abilities can be grouped according to their martial or magical discipline: an Aldaran Buccaneer, who trained to fight on the high seas, will use a very different fighting style than a knightly Tathar Greatshielder.

Characters can also gain ACT points to represent increasing their speed or dexterity. Depending on how classes and skills are set up, using weapons they’re not trained for, or using more difficult skills, can impose an increased ACT cost; while having a larger pool of ACT to draw from will represent all-around competence with a variety of weapons and tools.

N.B. that the ACT system could be used in any scenario where time is of the essence, not just combat. How you would break a skill like (say) rock-climbing, speed chess, or car-hotwiring into separate actions and ACT costs would depend on the skill.

Example

Let’s say we have a combat scenario between three players and three hostile NPCs. The players are an Ictloan Fleshbinder, a Varroan Sworddancer, and an Aldaran Buccaneer. The enemies are three Iron Murmurers, guardians of the Silent Throne.

ICTLOAN FLESHBINDER - Undead human - A sorcerer who channels the energy of other living beings to heal the injured and sick, and, in the process, siphons of a small part of that life-energy to sustain themselves. Shunned and loathed by some; embraced by others for their healing abilities. ACT 20. Stances: Feeding, channeling.

VARROAN SWORDDANCER - Human - An adept swordsman of the elaborate Varroan dancing style, usually armed with the deadly sharp Varroan rapier and a small dagger. ACT 30. Stances: Viper, sparrow, cat.

ALDARAN BUCCANEER - Human - A pirate of the high seas, the buccaneers of Aldara are never caught without a long, sharp knife and their trusty pistol. ACT 25. Stances: Balanced, Aggressive, Defensive.

IRON MURMURER - Once-Living Humanoid Construct - Gestalt vitality. Immune to bleeding, stunning, fear, poison, and telepathy. ACT 10.

The Sworddancer has the highest ACT, and so goes first; she chooses to begin combat in the viper stance, which lets her use a variety of quick attacks with a light sword, at the cost of having few defensive options. She uses her ACT to make a few strikes at the Iron Murmurers, but they shrug off her attacks because of their heavy armor.

The Aldaran Buccaneer goes next. She starts in her offensive stance, but because she can use the pistol from any stance, that doesn’t matter so much; she takes aim and fires at the lead Murmurer. Dodging this attack would require an impossible 100 ACT, for which the Murmurers are far too slow. A hole is blown through the Murmurer’s armor--but the Murmurer has no vital organs. Only a steady accumulation of catastrophic damage will destroy them.

The Ictloan Fleshbinder takes his turn. The Ictloan chooses to begin in leeching stance, and uses the leeching stance ability draw life on the injured Murmurer. To fully evade this ability would require 15 ACT, so the Murmurer only partially avoids it. All the Murmurer’s body parts are now drained, representing a loss of vital energy.

The lead Murmurer, injured, can do nothing, because it has used all its ACT reactively.

The second Murmurer executes a strong swing attack on the Sworddancer. The Sworddancer’s ACT replenished at the end of her turn; she evades the strike, but the only evasion option available from Viper Stance, a standard Dodge, costs her 20 ACT.

The third Murmurer uses the same attack on the Sworddancer; this time, the Sworddancer cannot hope to evade the attack entirely. A hit lands on her shoulder and, lacking armor, her arm is mangled. If combat ended here, and no medical help was to be found, the Sworddancer would be left with a useless arm, and might well bleed to death. Luckily, however, there is a Fleshbinder in the party; even more luckily, he has thought to purchase the swift binding action that lets him, at a cost of all his ACT for the next turn, switch to channeling stance and use the stolen life-energy to heal the Sworddancer.

It is now the Sworddancer’s turn. She switches to a defensive sparrow stance, from which she can evade attacks more easily. This costs most of her ACT.

The Buccaneer fires another shot, which finally destroys the lead Murmurer, which has sustained too much damage to keep functioning.

The Fleshbinder has no ACT--it regenerates at the end of a turn, not the beginning--and so cannot act. His turn is skipped.

And so forth.

Several general rules would simplify the amount of interactions between abilities considerably--for instance, daggers probably can’t be used to parry blows from heavy two-handed swords, and this would be noted in the entry for dagger-type weapons.

For ranged combat, actions could focus on things like leading targets, on taking careful aim, and on estimating distance correctly. Defending against these attacks would look very different--a fast-moving target might not be able to be hit by a regular shot, and might impose a high ACT penalty on a well-aimed shot. Unaimed shots, or shots taken by characters without proficiency in ranged weapons, would tend to inflict grazing wounds; while well-aimed ones could shatter bones, mangle limbs, or instantly kill. Even more so than with swords and daggers, ranged combat would be extremely dangerous, and in settings with powerful firearms, players would probably want to avoid it whenever possible. I would consider this an advantage, not a disadvantage! It would make combat much more high-stakes, and feel less like punching bags trading blows.

#inspired by #respectively #dwarf fortress #my experience with karate #and reading about HEMA on wikipedia #i also have a vague notion about a tabletop wargame version of these rules #obvs much more streamlined

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saadiestuff · 5 years

Note

“Don’t leave me behind.” - Alex giving Michael the ship piece back?

One Last Night (Malex fic - rated M) [AO3 link]

Michael stares at the reflective piece of spaceship console Alex has just handed him.

"I've had it for months,” Alex admits, “I should have given it to you as soon as you showed me your bunker, but then everything happened and…” he shifts on his feet, running a nervous hand through his own hair, “You're pushing everyone away so hard, Guerin. I’m hanging in there but--"

"Thanks," Michael says dismissively, and waves him off without looking up.

"Alright,” Alex sighs, because he’s not here to fight, not today. “Just... don't leave me behind, okay?" Alex adds, knowing it’s loaded, but meaning to make a joke of it anyways as it's a ridiculous thing to say -- a console does not a ship make. But the idea that Michael might want to leave if he could? It had been enough to make Alex run before, and it's enough to make Alex stand his ground now, even as he turns to leave.

"I can't promise that," Michael says quietly to Alex's back, and takes his breath away.

~~~~~

Months later, Michael shows up on Alex's doorstep in the middle of the night.

"You asked me not to leave you behind," Michael says simply.

"I did," Alex agrees.

"I never promised that," Michael tells him.

"I know,” Alex says, still remembering the ragged chill Michael’s words had sent down his spine. “How have you been?” Alex asks tentatively, for Michael has been a ghost for months, constantly disappearing, and impossible to get a hold of -- even more so now that Max is back, which is the opposite of what everyone had expected.

"I'm leaving tomorrow,” Michael says, ignoring Alex’s question, licking his lips for something to do while he debates holding Alex’s gaze.

Progress, Alex thinks, and chooses his words carefully, speaking slowly. “Thank you for telling me. We all worry when you drop out of contact for days at a time, you know,” he says tenderly, trying not to heap guilt on Michael, and adds a smile, “So... do you know when you’ll be back?”

Silence.

“Can you tell me where you’re going?”

“Tennessee,” Michael says, managing a near microscopic smirk.

Alex frowns, but he’s happy to see Michael with a sense of humour, sort of.

Michael’s gaze skitters away from Alex’s face, instead falling to his own feet, where he kicks at some mud his boots tracked onto the porch.

“I’m leaving the planet, Alex,” Michael says flatly.

“If you don’t want to tell me details, that’s okay. Like I said, I appreciate you letting me know you’ll be away for a bit. It’s good to touch base,” Alex says, reserved with his praise, fearing too much will scare Michael off somehow.

“I’m serious,” Michael says, and with all trace of humour gone from his tone and his face, it rattles Alex.

“As in... you’re travelling to outer space?” Alex asks, turning it over in his mind, thinking this has to be a metaphor, but not coming up with anything that’s good news.

“Yes,” Michael confirms.

“How?” Alex asks. Even with the console complete, it's not like Michael could actually go anywhere. The ship he'd need to build -- genius he may be, but the materials and resources he'd need? Well, he's not NASA.

Michael shakes his head, and looks off to the side, fixing his stare down the length of Alex’s porch and out into the forest. "Just believe it, for a second. And consider that I might not make it back… And tell me…” Michael exhales sharply and faces Alex again, “Tell me... do you want one last night?"

"Yes," Alex says quickly. He doesn't know what game they're playing, but this buys him time to figure it out. That’s what he reasons anyways, pushing aside that he’s been wanting another night with Michael since their last night together, before the drive in, before he walked away again, before he knew it was about to be over. It’s not like he replays that night over and over, their casual love-making after they’d so quickly fallen into a comfortable rhythm in just a few weeks time. And then the bagels, and not taking that damn ride. Fuck. Alex hadn’t been ready then -- he knows that even if they did it all over again, him then couldn’t say yes. But him now? Yes-yes-yes.

“Alex?” Michael seems to call softly to him from a great distance.

“Yes,” Alex says again, because he’s not sure what he said out loud and what was in his head, and he just wants to get Michael inside and for one night not be worried about where he is.

"You sure?” Michael drawls, trying to put up his swagger front and failing miserably in Alex’s ears.

“Yes,” Alex repeats easily, thinking of the last time Michael gave him this chance, when he’d had to push back so hard, with a whimper, or they’d have ended up fucking in a bathroom stall at the Wild Pony.

“Might it be easier to not have me again -- not make it fresh?” Michael continues, and Alex isn’t sure which of them he’s trying to convince, “You probably already forgot how it feels when I touch you."

"Never," Alex shakes his head and moves towards Michael. "Never did, never will," he whispers as his lips find Michael's, and he drags him inside, desperate to have Michael under him and safe.

Alex hadn’t even realized how scared he’s been all these months. Maybe he’d shoved that all down, so he’d be strong if Michael ever put himself within reach of help. And here Michael is, finally close enough for Alex to pull him into his orbit, anchor him, snatch Michael from his cold, lonely, wander of emptiness of space.

Indeed, as they fall into bed, Alex forgets what Michael has planned for tomorrow. Michael had only asked him to believe it for a second -- come and gone. So Alex takes it for what it is, whatever it is, he doesn't know.

But still, Alex notices that Michael treats it like a last. The way he pours into Alex, clinging to him, rocking too fast so Alex’s fingers must dig into his flesh harder, every ecstasy expressed by mournful whimper; each union lingering, staying joined together almost until beginning again, over and over again, all night long.

In the morning, in the light, Michael says his goodbyes with tears in his eyes, and Alex panics -- it suddenly all feels real.

Alex pulls at Michael's arm, trying to keep him in the bed, because once Michael is out he'll have a head start before Alex gets his prosthetic on, or even makes it to his old crutches. He'll slip away.

“I don’t know what outer space is code for, but you’re talking like you’re not coming back, and you’re scaring me!” Alex says frantically.

“It’s not code,” Michael says weakly. If he tries to explain, he’ll never leave.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Alex breathes, deciding to play along, yet he’s so terrified he might actually believe it, that this is goodbye, he doesn’t have to put on an act at all. “If you’re going to outer space, then-- then… I need another night!”

“Alex--” Michael starts to refuse him, but his throat tightens and he can’t breathe, let alone speak.

“Please, Michael,” Alex begs, “I didn't know this was the last -- I need one more!” He wants forever, but that’s asking too much, isn’t it? When Michael wants to leave the fucking planet for the hole in his heart -- one both Alex and his father dug deep.

“I told you,” Michael whines, because he can’t deny him, even as he twists away from Alex’s grasp.

Alex grabs at him, heaving a frustrated sob for his stupid leg and the thought that he won’t be able to chase Michael down.

“You told me but I didn't know! I didn’t, Michael. I didn’t!” Alex shouts, feeling wild and desperate and there's a pain in his chest he knows is a fraction of what it would feel to stretch their connection so far, across universes, for him to be left wondering.

"Shhh,” Michael soothes, sympathetic, for he knows in part what Alex is feeling, for Michael felt it every time Alex deployed -- though Alex had never gone as far as Michael planned to, and at least Michael always understood those could be lasts. So Michael moves to hold Alex close, conceding, “I'll give you another night.”

Alex calms instantly, tears drying up, voice finding its authority, the words rushing out. “You cannot not show up, Guerin. I will lose my fucking mind. I swear-- In fact, we should spend the day too, right?”

“Nah, I have shit to do,” Michael shrugs him off.

“You were planning on blasting off into space today. Your schedule should be pretty much free.” Alex snaps, because everything hurts and what the fuck is going on?

“I have different shit to do now. And I’ll have to modify some inputs for the new launch date.”

“Stop,” Alex pleads.

Michael ignores him, pulling away. “Same time, same place. Just you.” One last night.

He swoops to kiss Alex on the forehead, and then he goes.

~~~~~

Michael does come back that night. Alex weeps when he opens the door to find him standing there.

They waste no time getting as close as possible, but with both of them exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before, they only go one round before they’re tangled in the heap they’ll hold until morning.

“I half expected the lube to be laced with alien poison so you could forcibly confine me,” Michael says after a long silence.

“I considered it…” Alex admits, for he’d considered just about every option, “But I wouldn’t. You can trust me,” he shifts to look Michael in the eyes, hand going to his jaw so he can’t look away, not that he ever really does, but the time for substituted words is over. “I love you. I have since we were seventeen. And I always will. And even though you haven't been around lately… I've fallen more in love with you every day that I've let myself grow into who I am."

Michael’s voice is but a crackle, breaking over every word. “I love you, too."

They’re both crying now, managing only the messiest of kisses, mouths scarcely finding each other as they grab clumsily for something deeper -- more skin, more love, more soul -- all without ever really moving, precious energy not to be wasted on that, not when their time is limited.

Later, Michael wakes in the dark to Alex’s fingers strumming along his back, whispered words in his ear.

“Stay. Stay. Stay."

Michael feigns sleep. It's not hard, not with Alex's soothing rhythmic chant skittering over his skin, despite what it means. Until--

"Or, take me with you.”

Michael opens his eyes. “So, you believe me now?”

“Tell me what’s really going on. It’s just me. I could help you,” Alex says softly, impossibly gentle.

Michael just tucks into him closer, and hums against his chest, “The wind is going to be too strong tomorrow.”

And with that, Alex can close his eyes.

~~~~~

Michael comes back the next night.

And the next.

It goes on for weeks. They stop having sex every night -- sometimes they just cuddle and sleep. And Michael starts staying for breakfast when it works with Alex’s schedule.

It goes on three months. Michael is there every night, though sometimes only briefly. He even comes by early for dinner often enough that Alex falls into the habit of cooking for two.

"I'm always eating your food," Michael says absently one day.

"I don't mind," Alex says.

Michael brings a bag of groceries the next day. Only enough for one meal.

After all, it's just one last night together.

~~~~~

Six months pass.

“Ready to go home?” Alex asks Michael, before paling, his mouth opening to try to walk it back, not wanting to risk upsetting the delicate balance they’ve mastered. But it’s too late.

For a moment, Michael worries that this disruption of the illusion will shatter him. What hits him instead is a warm wave of happy.

Michael beams. “I’m not going to space," he declares, "And I basically live with you. I don’t know when that all became okay, but it did.”

They barely make it out to Alex’s car before they’ve torn most of their clothes off, indignant squeals -- which they won’t talk about later -- emit from both of them as they whisper words like boyfriend and tease about cleaning out drawers for Michael.

The final wall between them, constructed of the eggshells of impermanence, goes down as they at last give their whole selves to one another.

But there is one thing that nags at Alex. Perhaps it is a thread he shouldn’t pull, but when they get home, he does, though only once he has Michael firmly in his arms.

“What does 'going to space' really mean?" Alex asks slowly.

"What do you mean?" Michael says sleepily.

"It's not literal,” Alex explains.

"What? Yes it is!” Michael exclaims, “I thought you eventually believed me?”

“Are you serious?” Alex is incredulous.

“Yes!” Michael says excitedly, trying to twist to face Alex, a little surprised to find he’s rather locked in a vice grip. “Alex,” he says softly, as he wriggles uselessly in Alex’s arms, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Alex reluctantly relaxes his hold. “But you could.”

“I’ll never leave you behind. I promise,” Michael says first when he turns to face Alex, “But yes, I could go to space,” he admits.

“How?” Alex raises a questioning eyebrow, “The console-- you needed a vehicle to attach it to?"

"Well... I got one..."

#hannah-writes #prompt filled!#malex #malex fic #my malex fic #there might be a part 2 #some scraps have been written #HannahEnables

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lysergicdialectic · 4 years

Text

Matt Christman on his satori moment and prestige TV

Excerpted from “Better Call Saul? More Like Worse Write, Paul,” April 26, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Hello friends. So yesterday—I don’t know if anyone watched the stream I did yesterday—I was kind of tripping balls. And at the end of it, after I finished recording, I sat in my little back area, my little fenced-in area, and I looked up at the sky for a while. And wouldn’t you know it, I ended up having one of those legitimate, full-blown satori moments. Actual enlightenment, actual transcendence, like bloop. One second, one with the universe. Whatever you want to call it—ego death, blah-blah-blah—I was there.

I had a moment of complete identification and oneness with the universe, and then of course, the second it was over, I came back into my body and became reincarnated, reembodied as me. And of course, I started falling away from that moment as the rock started rolling back down the hill. I was Sisyphus, and I got to walk down it. And the thing about Sisyphus is, Camus says you must imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s one of those things that just sounds like a zen koan

I understand it now, because happy Sisyphus is the one who gets to the top of the hill as often as possible because being on the top of the hill is fun, and walking down the hill—it's not as fun as being on the top of the hill but it's a lot more fun than pushing the goddamn rock up the hill. So you just gotta increase the circuits. You can't keep pushing the boulder up one long gradient, which is what most people do and what we're cursed to do because of our material realities that constrain us and chain us . . . . As I was coming back to my body and I was going down the hill and falling away, the first word that came into my mind after—because obviously in that time and space there's no words because language is obliterated. It's not needed because you are one; there's no need to translate. As soon as I came back to my body, the first word, it was an image in the sky of a crashing wave and the word Yes. And I realized that a lot of the stuff I've been trying to get my head around, in terms of spirituality ad theology and questions of body and mind and all these things that I've been working on in my head, and I feel I've been making progress but I've been struggling with—the word Yes cut through a lot of it and it created a symbolic order that allowed me to make sense of everything I've been trying to get my head around. And since my specific orientation as age, race, gender, class background, language, culture, all that stuff—when I heard Yes, the first thing I thought was the end of Ulysses. And all of a sudden, I had one moment of thinking "Oh, that's what it's like to have read Ulysses," and then I was like, "Oh wait a minute," and then I thought, "Oh great, now I don't have to read Ulysses." But then I realized: I have to read Ulysses now, even if it's bad, even if it's a slog, even if it's whatever, because it will remind me of that moment, and doing it every day will remind me of that moment and keep me living in a way that gets me there, or gets me closer to it. It will inform my actions and it will inform my behavior toward the people around me, and it will make them turn toward that sound. So I'm going to start reading Ulysses.

Like I said, it doesn't matter if it's good or not. It doesn't matter if it's worth it. What matters is reading it. The reason that I'm thinking within these terms is, I did a tweet that got a lot of people mad about Better Call Saul, because I said that Better Call Saul, in my opinion, suffers from trying to be a prestige TV show, given the ingredients it has. You've got Saul Goodman here, played by Bob Odenkirk, a great character we all love, and we've got these great people behind the casts, great cinematography. And it ended up being the show it is, with its basically copying the rhythms of Breaking Bad and becoming a Breaking Bad explicit prequel filling in all these gaps of Where'd Hector get his bell? and things like that. That's inevitable as soon as it had to fit the format of a prestige show. As a prestige show, it probably is great. I've watched enough of it. Yes, it fits all the terms that we discuss when we talk about prestige television. Yes. I would say it's as good as Mad Men, it's as good as Breaking Bad or even better, it's as good as The Sopranos, whatever you want to say. Fine. It's good. But it's good in the context of a television show. I've written about prestige TV and I've talked a lot about it, and I was trying to articulate something that I've never actually been able to explicitly say in a way that I felt like I was saying what I meant, let alone if other people understood it. What I realized with this mental Ginsu now to chop everything up that I encounter is, my problem with Better Call Saul is that it is a product of the demiurge. Better Call Saul, like all prestige TV, is a product of the demiurge. Art is an attempt to reach the etheric plane. Art is always an attempt to strike at the heart of the universe, to strike God and become God. Everything attempt at art is that, in some small way, the way that the person making it can do or try to do. It's the urge to do it. But then, there's the reality, the embodied reality of being a person, being a body that has needs. Those material needs that shape the world and limit us, that's what the Gnostics talked about. That's what the demiurge, the evil god who creates the material world that is illusion below the spiritual realm. In this case, if we're talking about art, in an objective sense, television is a more degraded form of art than literature by the very simple fact that it is more commercial. And you might say, "Well, Stephen King makes a lot of money." No. What I mean by that is, the writing of a book and the publication of a book are relatively capital unintensive. Making a television show is much more, by exponential numbers, more capitally intensive than a book, which means that whatever art is in it has been constrained by being a product of a commercial enterprise. That means that television can be good. Every show could be fun. You should enjoy every program you watch. Either stop watching it if you can't find yourself enjoying it, or find something about it that speaks to you. Everything should be enjoyable, artistically. And if it isn't, find something that will, something that you can work it. Some things aren't going to work because the talent of the people involved, the amount of resources put to it, the amount of commercialism leavened within it, it's going to hit you and make it hard. That is why I see Better Call Saul, and I go egh because it just reminds me that we're all praying to this degraded version of art. And the reason we are is because we have been immiserated culturally. Capitalism has done that to us. That's not something you can argue. Our tastes are more broad, and poptimists like to say, "You're being a snob." But I'm recognizing a goddamn reality here, which is that there's a structural difference between art depending on how much they are required to make money, the degree to which a piece of art needs to make money to be worth the endeavor leavens its individual artistic expression because it has to be translatable to the largest possible group. The art, in translation, gets lost. And that's fine. You can find the sparks. You can find the things you like in anything, including Breaking Bad. But because we have lost free time, we've lost energy, we've lost the ability to take a small moment and treasure something and really dig into it, that we need our entertainments to go down easier. They have to be absorbable because we don't have the energy, the mental or spiritual energy to sit with anything because of where we are, because of how degraded our conditions are, because of our bodies essentially. All these institutions—capitalism, feudalism before it, slave labor—every class order created was created to manage the issue of keeping bodies alive, basically. That creates our structures. It creates our economic structures, it creates our art, it creates our culture, it creates our personalities, it creates our religions, it creates our ideologies, it creates everything. It creates this computer, it creates this phone. It creates this shirt, and it creates the systems that create the hyperexploitation that goes into making this shirt, the gunpoint slave coltan mining that makes this phone. Those things are all necessary to the degree to which they allow for the human bodies to be restored.

Then there is the temptation to seek pleasure, and pleasure always comes at the expense of someone else. Pleasure always comes at the expense of us—always. All pleasure is at the expense of others and at the expense of ourselves—karma. And so these institutions get warped. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." What that means is, the crookedness is the fact that we have bodies. That's not a sin, it's not bad—the Christian thing is another mistranslation from the initial true divining of reality. The material world gets in the way, and it gets baffled, and so Christianity gets muddled up with all this stuff. When you say, "The body creates this world," it's not bad—it's inevitable. It's inherent. We have to deal with it. We have to create a society that minimizes suffering by spreading pleasure out as broadly as possible, not concentrating on any individual because doing so creates a situation where you cause misery to all the people whose exploitation goes into the pleasure of that one person, and that one person's pleasure is fleeting. It's going away. They're going to face the flames of judgment, which is the coming of death, with the terror of hell in their heart. There's no stopping it. And so no one has gotten any sort of benefit out of that arrangement.

We have to have some suffering and pleasure just to keep the bodies going, but it should be spread out. That's where the dialectic comes in. Somebody said, "Go back to Marxism." I'm sorry, but this moment made me realize that these are nesting series of thoughts, ideologies, and structures, and guess what? Nesting in here is dialectical materialism. Maybe Gnosticism or Buddhism or something or The Dark Tower or I was talking about Infinite Jest the other day and maybe Ulysses, those things help structure your thoughts and make it easier for you to behave in a way that reduces suffering. But then you need structures within other people, amongst people in the social realm of economic production and political economy, that need to serve those ends as well. Dialectical materialism is the drive toward that. It is the drive toward a world where everyone is free of the bodily temptations and distractions to reach full enlightenment. When people talk about "fully automated luxury space communism," there's a lot wrong with that notion. But the truth thing that's reckoning with is that the only way for universal human enlightenment—which, if enlightenment is the individual goal, as it well should be, then presumably it is the universal goal for all humans—then you need some sort of taming and instrumentalizing of technology toward the goal of human enlightenment as opposed to the dark singularity we're moving toward, where the machine takes over and totally annihilates human spirituality and turns us into machines. We don't want that. It requires a lack until you get to the top, and you don't get there and stay there. It's a process. You go back, and you come back. And you go back and you come back. It's pushing the fucking boulder up the hill. That's why it's compatible. If we want that version, universal enlightenment, then it requires, in my view (and I am wrong, at some point in time in the future I am wrong. I think I'm right now. I have enough history around me and I think I'm smart enough and compassionate enough together to figure out broadly what's right. More specifically, as it gets drilled down, I don't have the information or the intelligence to specifically answer technological questions, social questions, whatever. Broadly, I think I'm right, but I'm not right forever. At some point in the future, at some point in space time, everything I think is going to be wrong. Every single thing, and that's true of you too. Every human being. Every single thing you have ever thought, every decision you've ever made, has been wrong. We are all, in fact, the sum total of our wrong choices. This is all a way of saying you can enjoy Better Caul Saul. To enjoy Better Call Saul, of course, it doesn't make sense to watch it if you're not going to enjoy it. Watching it to get made at it, you're getting pleasure somewhere else. And at the end of the day, the pleasure's at others' expense because what are you going to do? You're going to go online like I have a million times and kick people in the dick and say, "Ha! Fuck you. This show is stupid, and you're dumb for liking it." That's the pleasure I get out of it, and that's at someone else's expense as all pleasure is.

What makes a decision right or wrong? It's not defined until afterwards. It's only retrospectively known because all time has already happened. Everything has already happened. Everything has already happened. And when I say everything, I mean not just in your life, I mean the lives of all beings to exist or ever will exist. So you can enjoy Better Call Saul, but you see the way people are defensive about the show and see the way they get mad about it—and even if they're not mad, the way they insist on its greatness. It's because they have decided that instead of acknowledging the lack at the heart of prestige as a concept, instead of saying, "Aw, this is sad that now we have to get our real artistic nourishment from something this banalized"—It's banalized! It has to be, because it's commercial. It has to be banalized—"I have to try so hard to squeeze meaning out of it not for my enjoyment of the show but to convince other people and myself that watching this is actually good." It's not necessarily bad. It's not going to doom you to like it in that way. But it implies attachment to something that is degraded without acknowledging and recognizing the degradation. And without the ability to recognize the degradation, you cannot act in a way in your life to move away from degradation in your interpersonal relationships, in your preferences, what you do with your time, and what you think politics should be and how you should act on political beliefs. If prestige TV is good enough, then why do you need to change anything?

So commercial art is bad?

No. No art is bad. Every individual's relationship to a piece of art is completely individualized, and it's a result of translations. All art is translation. All existence is translation—your brain literally translating to you through language what is happening to it, first in senses, then in symbols, then in words: words to yourself and then words to others. At every level, the translation breaks down. There is loss between every level of translation. By the time you're trying to express an idea through art, you're way down here. You're so degraded. But if you're talented enough and enough people see it and you're collaborating with others and you make something together, because collaboration, depending on the art form and the project, helps signal boost and bring together individual insights and individual talents, and it creates something.

There's something to it. There's a spark to all art. It's just either the talent was not there to express it fully, or it was a piece of cynical dogshit. But even the cynical dogshit will have things in it that might be enjoyable. You can watch a piece of cynical dogshit with the right frame of mind and enjoy it. The danger is when you mistake the shadows for the figures, and that is what prestige television does. If we just accepted, "Yeah, TV, it's the idiot box," the shows could be the same, have the same stuff, and it would be fine. But a culture that requires television to be good is one that has not acknowledged its barriers . . . .

Plato's stuff, I never really got until now. Now I get it. Gnosticism, I never really got. I feel like I get it. And of course I get it less now than I did yesterday, and I will get it less tomorrow than I do today. My task is to get back, to remember that moment, remember what I knew then, and try to find it again. The way to do that is by daily acts by the Eightfold Path, by the Path of the Beam. What that really means is not just I'm going to say, "Epic path of the beam," when I see a fucking Stephen King reference. It means my every action informed by the knowledge of what is there—the imminence behind reality, the real universe beyond the demiurgical one—and then trying to get there. That means these reading projects are not about learning something. It's about re-learning something, because you don't know anything. You only have echoing, clanging notions in your head. A lot of them contradict each other. The only way to thread them together in a way to make them useful is to sit with them. And that is not something that anything we do encourages. Not something anything in our culture encourages, is sitting with these questions. Existential materialism, whatever you want to call it. Gnosticism, whatever you guys want to say . . . .

Gnosticism says this is a degraded shadow realm. It is. It's a degraded shadow realm of material reality, but we have to work with it. How do we work with it? How do we thread it? How do we push it in a direction that leads toward the chance for as many people as possible to achieve transcendence and direct it back to themselves in the future and to everyone else who can hear them in their lives and people around them? It's by resolving contradiction, because contradiction is at the heart of existence. No and yes. The universe is yes, and it's always there. It is outside of space and time. The world is no, and we are all—every person, every being in the universe, every photon, every chain of chemicals, anything—those things are all no's. Those are different levels of rejecting. And the thing is, there aren't that many of them. But there doesn't need to be, because yes exists outside of space and time. It is the accumulation of no's over this endless expanse, they are accumulated in actual reality, this world. And you've gotta get back to yes.

I say that and you hear it, and it's like, "What does that mean?" And for me, these words, "getting back to yes," they're freighted with my memory of this experience. You are only hearing my words retell it, which is fraudulence, as Nietzsche points out. All language is a lie. All I can do is use my talents—to such extent that they exist—and my will, my morality, my intellect, to try to push in the direction of the good.

So that's Better Call Saul.

#matt christman #better call saul #diamat #dialectical materialism #prestige TV #capitalism #marxism #LSD #chapo #chapo trap house

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