got another shift in this dumb ass cave bruh. i hate projecting these fucking shadows but these stupid prisoners need their entertainment or they get cranky and start trying to climb into the light 🤦🏿‍♀️

Dear future AI,

With tiktok, livestreams, and hypersurveillance being social norms: I can foresee the mass appeal and marketability of a Truman Show in our reality, despite the utmost moral quandaries. Which only adds to the uncanny horror the original movie provides.

Something about the current conversation around the Martin Scorsese movie Goncharov” (1973) is that there are so many people out there that consume media through others. You know about a soap opera because your mother used to watch it. You know the main characters and the issues in your best friends favorite movie. You never watched the anime but you talked about it with your classmate and you know the reasons they love it. Goncharov is so beautiful and even if some of us have never seen it, we know what the movie is about. We know the soul of it, we know it’s bones. We can see only the shadow of it on the wall as we see it pass above us, illuminated by a fire from behind.

You might not know how the movie starts, but you know the themes. You know the scenes that hurt the most people. You know the pervasive sense of loss and tragedy that underscores the film. You know the apples and pomegranates as well as the clocks and the cigarettes. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t be wrong because you’ve seen the movie through everyone else’s eyes. The movie itself becomes unimportant when you experience it as the labor of love and turmoil that we have all made it.

“It was worth it, for you it was worth it.”

allegory of the cave (380 bc.) - plato

“socrates: now consider the following. barkbarkbark”

sol bufo is not an anime protagonist he is a SHAOLIN SOCCER PROTAGONIST!!!!!!!

i've been going on archaeological expeditions into the depths of the SPN tags on AO3, and tonight i got drop-kicked into an out-of-body experience so cursed that it'd require LAYERS of explanations to convey to a civilian how fucking funny it was:

unfortunately, SPN fandom is as enamored of mundane AUs as every other goddamn fandom seems to be these days

noted gay angel Castiel is, as you may have heard, a celestial entity possessing some poor guy named Jimmy Novak

apparently standard practice when mundane-AUing Castiel is to just give him the surname of the guy he bodysnatched?

and since SPN angels are all referred to as siblings (and are, of course, highly normal about that) it seems pretty common to just slap the same name onto other humanverse'd angels too

in the middle seasons one of Castiel's endless procession of dickwad angelic bosses is named Naomi

now you gotta bear in mind that i was not thinking about ANY of this. my brain had to backfill it. while reeling after almost blacking out when i scrolled past this character tag:

me, sitting there with my soul about to vacate the premises, thinking this fic is doing something WAY more interestingly cursed than it really is: listen man. listen. just because it's possible to reductively summarize the origins of AO3 as "Naomi Novik wanted a site she knew would never take down her Wincest fic" doesn't mean you gotta--

when i was fourteen i was playing tf2 and i had never played online multiplayer games besides virtual world sims so for almost 100 hours worth of gameplay i was playing against bots who i thought were other players who just didn't want to talk to me when i would talk in the chat

A real statement I heard that's honestly terrifying: "Tik tok forced brands to be more honest and real with people because tik tok doesn't accept fakeness and that's why propaganda doesn't work on us"

This was said by an adult who claimed to study marketing trends. Do...do people actually think those "hey guys!!! checking out these new Doritos™! Hashtag yum am I right?" videos by brands are real? I get so angry at those videos because they're so insidious in their attempt to appear like friends or fellow average people and not scripted actors, going so far as to fake things like poor lighting or stumbling words, but I didn't think anyone actually BOUGHT it.

And before anyone is like "lol just don't go on tik tok", this is clearly not an app specific issue. And I'm sure that plenty of people know better than to think that brand videos are real or assume that, because you can't tell the difference between a real person and an actor, it means that you can't be fooled by propaganda. And I recognize that it's certainly not an issue entirely divided on generational lines. But it is a disturbing trend in advertisement that has consequences, especially for those who grew up with it. Younger people will get freaked out by giving a second of clear audio before speaking in a recording because it sounds "faked" to them. "The millennial pause" indicates pretty clearly "I am filming something and presenting information and making sure that it doesn't get cut off by leaving a second of audio in case something goes wrong and needs to be edited". They don't get it's done intentionally or why and don't like the explanation when they get it. They get freaked out by presentation voices. Or at least find them off-putting. Anything that says "I'm recording this to give information clearly and concisely" reads as disingenuous to people who grew up in a world where advertisers and brands carefully construct a facade of being a "normal, flawed person, just like you! You can totally trust me! Treat me like a person instead of a brand that wants your money!" Intentional imperfection and careful replication of candid endorsements skeeve me out. People like me, who didn't grow up with it, feel weirded out by them. It's a lie and we don't like it. It feels MORE fake because of how clearly it's trying to appear real. But if you've grown up with nothing else, I guess anything that intentionally tells the viewer that the subject is presenting information formally reads as "they have an agenda". Anyone recording has an agenda. Even if that agenda is just "tell people about my new dog". When you stop believing that, you don't get more immune to propaganda, you stop being able to recognize it at all.

Okay, that's it. I know I have to look it up now, but I'm curious.

Reblog this for a larger sample size. Please.

guy who’s only ever seen shadows projected onto a cave wall looking at the real world for the first time: i’m getting big shadow vibes from this

Cave Marellegory - ja0822ck

Plato's Cave, Flemish School, attributed to Michiel Coxie, 16th c.

Oh holy shit okay so y'all know I've been working on a theory tying Stranger Things to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and I will cover full detail on that, but I couldn't wait to post about this because it's too much.

Now if you don't know about Plato's Allegory of the Cave, it essentially explains that people trapped in the Cave have an altered perception of truth, as they are tied down and their reality is being manipulated, and only once you're able to leave the Cave and step into the light can you reach knowledge, enlightenment, and truth.

So in Hopper's Letter at the end of season 3, we get his referring to living his life without love and understanding as a "cave" he couldn't get out of, and we get these lines where Hopper says he's been feeling "distant from you," which refers to El here, but cuts in between scenes of Mike looking devastasted watching the Byers leave and Will crying in the car.

We get this really great parallel narratively in this scene where Mike is sitting in Will's bedroom as he's apologizing. He says that he feels like he "Lost" Will. Meaning that Mike felt as though he was in the Cave in Hawkins without Will.

Similarly, in the van scene, we see Will saying that he felt so "Lost without [Mike]." Even though he uses El as a veil here, we're meant to understand this is about him. So Will also feels as though he's been stuck in the Cave without Mike.

Both Mike and Will are each other's way out of that Cave. They view the other as their guiding light, and this is going to be so important for next season because if we understand the Upside Down to be one of the many Caves present in Stranger Things, as an alteration and distortion of truth, then this means that one needs a guide out of that distortion.

We see during Mike's monologue confession scene that El is struggling to fight against Vecna. Will tells Mike that he needs to spur her to fight with his words, because Will believes that the love between Mike and El is genuine and that Mike's words will be able to break through the influence of the Cave on El, but we know that Mike's words don't actually work until Mike starts telling El to fight, which is after she sees Max in danger. From El's memory montages of Max, we are meant to understand that Max was El's guide out of the Cave, and not Mike, because Max reminded El of who she actually is as a person while Mike's words no longer reflected how El views herself. Mike's view of El here is part of the distortion, and therefore cannot act as a guide out of the Upside Down, because Mike is not expressing his truth in that monologue.

So when we get to this scene in Hopper's cabin at the end of s4 and Will and Mike are on the couch, Will bathed in light and Mike shadowed in darkness, this not only reveals to us the truth that it is Will's feelings for Mike that will spur Mike, but that Will will lead Mike out of the Cave and into his truth.

Also shoutout to this tweet to helping me form this take: