#radio is irrelevant...increasingly so | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kerneldecoy · 1 year

Text

Signalis Story: Thoughts on wha happun

I've been thinking about Signalis whole day since I saw a few LPs during my break, trying to parse what actually happen and what didn't. Since I don't have access to the game this is just based on my recollections, so its very possible I missed something, but I needed to get put it down in writing, so its out of my head. And maybe someone will find it useful.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Here is a list of things that I think had to happen for the story to make sense:

Arianne grows up on Rotfront. She loves literature and music and plays with her moms radio, works at the photo shop. The spy plot is probably irrelevant, tho its possible that her mom was involved. She is bioresonant (psychic) and has health problems.

She is conscripted into the army, but chooses to sign up for the Penrose program. Penrose are little scout ships with minimal crew of one meat person and one android person, sent into deep space to find new worlds. Her android companion is Elster

During the voyage, she ignores the robot waifu instruction manual and they get closer. They watch movies and listen to music, Arianna tries to help Elster with her memories by painting the scenes she remembers. They have tons of big gay sex.

The Penrose ships are designed to fail after 8-10 years. Its unclear if they knew about it, but they decide to keep going for as long as they can.

Arianne grows increasingly sick from radiation leaking from ships generator. She spirals into delirium, her mind powers and preexisting conditions are probably involved somehow too. She can't sleep anymore and asks Elster to kill her. She can't do it however and they drift off for at least another 8 years.

This is where the endings come in. I personally believe at least 3 of them had to happen at some point, otherwise we kinna end up in a situation where its a "Its all in your head" story, which I hate. I like when things actually happen :V

First of all, they crash on an unknown planet. Elster leaves the ship behind: the Leave ending shows an unarmored default Elster crawling up and collapsing. I think she probably walked a fair more than what the cutscene shows for the next point to make sense.

Either the planet itself has some dormant reality-bending powers, or Arianne herself becomes such a big cancer monster she is able to fuck around with reality, albeit unconsciously.

Two things are possible after that: either they crashed on an already colonized world, meaning the Penrose somehow doubled back from its journey, which is possible given the time frame, or a new colony was founded where they crashed, in which case some later events make more sense.

What doesn't make sense and I can't fit it into the timeframe anywhere, is the various notes relating that new Elster models where based on brain scans of the one from Penrose. She had to be recovered at some point, and a lot of time had to pass between that and the events of the game itself for those models to become so numerous. It is possible that the notes are bullshit, and its just that the psycho waves from Arianne are resonating with every Elster model, but given that the notes themselves are otherwise reliable to some degree, its weird for this one to be the odd one out.

Either way, there is now a whole mining facility on that planet. There is lots of problems for them to deal with: one, because of the war, their supply chain is being cut off, so they gotta deal with whatever they got, and two, there is a sickness spreading through both the meat and robot population. The meat people slowly loose their identity and melt into goo, kinna like DS hollowing, while the robits go through psychosis and loose their minds. The cause is Arianne big mind cancer powers, sending out signals from the wreck of the Penrose, and its unclear how much of that power is altering reality, and how much it is just projecting that reality into the minds of everyone on the planet. Either way, the commander of the facility, Falke, goes out to investigate, and gets psycho crushed, her memories fusing with Elster's, becoming the last boss.

Every single Elster model in range of the signal starts getting drawn in to the Penrose. We can see a loooot of Elster corpses, notably filling up the elevator shaft where Adler shoves them in, and the desert/snowfield around the Penrose. Depending on the ending, we play several of those doing the rounds and trying to get to Arianne.

Second ending shows one of Elsters somewhere in the middle of those cycles, getting to Arianne, but still refusing to kill her, collapsing instead next to her for the next cycle Elster to strip off her armor.

Third ending is the most likely to be the final cycle, as the Elster shown is the one who finally puts Arianne out of her misery. Presumably that will shut down the psycho signal that's corrupting everyone, tho I doubt the gooified people would be able to return.

Now, the secret ending is very confusing to fit into all this. It shows some kind of ritual, with all of the cast being sacrificed around the coffin closely resembling the cryo chamber Arianne is in, but instead it's holding a very vague shape, resembling the games logo. The 6 people are arranged in the same way that other 6 key puzzle doors are throughout the game. The only theory I have for this, is that this is the start of the whole thing. After the first ending, when Penrose is discovered, either one of the Elsters, or perhaps psycho crushed Falke, performs some sort of ritual that actually starts the whole mind/reality warping powers, in order to keep spending time with Arianne. Its either that, or its entirely bullshit, which as I said, I don't particularly like :V

Anyways, this has been my thoughts. As I can't afford the game right now,I couldn't play it myself to get all the details, so its very possible that i missed something. For example, I have no idea if the mining facility is the Sikorski mentioned, or is it also just a product of Ariannes memories, tho the actual location doesn't matter to me in this case. I am far more interested in the events that lead to the game happening, rather than the complete picture of where it happened.

Hope it was an interesting read at least x3

#Signalis #spoilers #story #thoughts #theory

18 notes · View notes

silverspeaker · 1 year

Text

i’d rather live on the edge

bearing the weight

of a thousand deaths

the knowledge of alexandria burned with luigi’s cigarette and i burned for you even though you’re sly as the knife you carry on your skin

and i wrote so many you’s for you i’m glad you’re completely irrelevant to me now

to live on the top of my skin and to feel terror and awe all in the same volume so high it banged my eardrums until i crashed and start anew

a new me, increasingly solidified

centered static marble-like even my knee couldn’t take it

I least of all

i remember when love flowed through

when i lived a thousand lives

now it feels like half

when i’m not being fucked up by the tangles of relationships seeping thru reminding me of the tar i dropped on the floor when i needed everyone to see that i loved you and you loved me

at least as a friend

drawing doodles on the back of my notebook and being impressed by my french when i was a sofa-drummer green day fan

it’s crazy when your mind tunes into chaos fm and you process all the knowledge you’ve ever seen simultaneously in 10 seconds and everything is plotting to obliterate you

good if it was just your body

it was after your memory your spirit your every splinter of consciousness

that’s when i knew terror

now i think it was just my constricted fears and traumas turned inside out like a sweater

—

i shook it to take the dust off and be able to breathe through when i crawled back in

—

but the sweater was my very being blurting out and projecting hell at every surface around me

i think you get the point

still if this is the cost to feeling alive then i’m thinking it’s worth it to charge it on my credit card - maybe in installments - because i am a marble adult human being that wants a nice pair of headphones and one more room to call my own

reasonable rational radio

i may need a new magical tattoo like the one that broke havoc in me that’s sitting on my chest and i forgot about

now with sagittarius pointing its arrow to the unknown to return from adventures assembled randomly to whoever dares to step a little closer

a little closer to the edge

bearing the weight

of a thousand deaths

6 notes · View notes

stillbywords · 4 years

Text

I think at some point the leftist view shifted away from wanting to help marginalised people, to believing being marginalised and left wing are the same thing.

People with twitter poisoning CONSTANTLY say someone’s a cishet white man in situations where half of those things are irrelevant. “Cishet white men don’t get to have opinions on abortion” as though they’d support a bisexual latino man against abortion, etc.

Months ago there was that video where a black radio host told Joe Biden he had more questions for him, and Biden said “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black.” As if blackness is based on your voting history, and can be taken away if you have bad opinions.

The same thing routinely happens when a lesbian complains about trans people: someone turns up to tell her she’s not a real lesbian. Because again, they can take your sexuality off you if they don’t like your feelings, right?

I think this is part of why so many people identify as nonbinary — it’s a way of associating yourself with the LGBT community without having to actually do anything gay. It’s a statement of political affiliation, rather than anything else.

It ends up increasingly abstract. You can’t talk about actually having gay sex because that means acknowledging they’re not gay. You can’t talk about gay love, gay childhoods, gay oppression for the same reason — you have to pretend that they’re the same as you because you have similar political beliefs.

But the thing is, bigots don’t ask about your political opinions before they hurt you. They don’t give a shit if you’re a self hating gay: you’re still gay. Right wing women still get raped.

A gay man could have the worst political beliefs in the entire world, could personally want me dead, and he would still be oppressed for being gay just the same as I am. There’s straight people I adore, with fantastic political beliefs, who are still heterosexual.

You don’t have to like marginalised people with bad opinions, or spend time with them. Fuck knows I don’t. The point is: being oppressed does not automatically mean you’re a kind person, and being a kind person does not automatically mean you’re oppressed, and I genuinely think our communities would get more done if more people acknowledged this was the case.

#terf safe #terfs do interact #terfs please interact #i am far enough left that my centrist friends refuse to discuss politics with me #if you were wondering what my political beliefs are #also please vote for biden if you're in the USA. an underwhelming politician is a million times better than a dictatorship #mine

153 notes · View notes

piuland · 3 years

Text

Taking Our Eyes Off the Guys

All of us-all women in patriarchy-are seasoned to be slaves, are seasoned to be prostitutes. All of us, in some sense, are, or have been, prostitutes and slaves, and most of us will continue to be for the rest of our lives. And it is the essence, the very nature of seasoning, to blind us-to our condition as well as to the mechanics of our enslavement.

Those of us, however, who grew up in and were seasoned in traditional, fundamentalist Judeo-Christian environments, got a closer look at the mechanics of that seasoning process than some others. And although we're sometimes matronized in the movement-the assumption being that if we could ever have believed that preposterous, dangerous nonsense, we can never again be trusted to be clear-the truth is that we can probably be trusted more to have kept the vision of feminism clear once we had seen it than those of you who grew up as Unitarians or Quakers or even Methodists and Presbyterians because, you see, we saw patriarchy naked before us all the time, all around us all day long, every day.

And what we knew, what we realized as soon as we were able to see what we were seeing and to reject it-wrench it out of our souls and throw it all away-what we were left with was the understanding of the patriarchal family as the model for all oppression: the patriarchal family with the man on top as god and the women and children as worm under him - and far too often very literally under him.

We understood then that that paradigm-that power-over paradigm, that sadomasochistic paradigm which is patriarchy-extends to everything, that it is the model for all social institutions, for all economic structures, for international politics. It's white on top in male position as god, people of color underneath in woman position as worm. It's the rich as male on top, the poor as female on the bottom. It's humans on top, all other living things on the bottom. It's large on top, small on the bottom-large countries as male, small countries as female-and so on.

Now where we learn that this is "natural" and "normal" is in the family. All of us had one of those, and some of them, as I say, were more blatantly patriarchal than others. Some of us got a really thorough-going education, and as was said in my introduction, I got one of the best there ever was! I'm grateful to the Mormon elders for a truly matchless education in patriarchal ontology. I can't be fooled again, and neither can you graduated Catholics or any others of you who were true believers in any religion.

When I say that all women have been seasoned as slaves and prostitutes, I'm talking about seasoning that began at home. All other societal institutions avidly participated in it, of course. But no matter how we're seasoned-as prostitute or as wife, which is the same thing-we're seasoned in the patriarchal family almost exclusively to serve sexual functions.

No matter what form seasoning takes, it always has the same goal-to make us feel worthless and dependent. Obviously, incest is a seasoning tool par excellence; one incident of incest is really all that is necessary to teach us our role in patriarchy. It is such a profound betrayal of trust, primarily of our trust in ourselves. It is designed to make us feel powerless, to shatter our inner core of confidence, and therefore to make us feel utterly dependent on men. It functions to make us believe passionately that we need a savior, that men must save us, that we have to go through them to be saved. That somehow we've got to get them to change their minds about us. We've got to make them agree that their behavior is terrible and get them to stop it. Our seasoning teaches us nonsense: that we've got to get the slaveholders to free the slaves.

That's the goal of seasoning: to make us believe that we must always go through someone else to be free. Of course, the reason we're taught this is because freedom never happens that way. Tyrants never free the slaves. It's an historical truth that the oppressed must always rise and free themselves, and in freeing themselves, free everyone. The truth is that radical change, change at the root, must be made by us.

There are many reasons for our being in the only position, historically speaking, to change things. One of these is the basic paradox of tyranny, that the oppressors are always less free than the oppressed. Another is that, as women, we are truly outside men's system. Virginia Woolf said that, you know. She said in Three Guineas that women are the Society of the Outsiders, that that's where we have our power.

We have power-meaning the ability to act, to effect change-outside the system because that's where we truly live, politically, psychically; it is therefore the only place where we are authentic, and we can only have power where we are authentic. We also have power there because being outside and being slaves means being flexible; slaves have to be almost preternaturally flexible in order to survive. And one of the most important laws of cybernetics is that the most flexible element in any system is the controlling element. Privileges are chains.

Men are bound by their privilege, have no flexibility, cannot change their system even if they wished-and they don't wish. Being the most flexible elements in this system, women are now in control of the planet. Our behavior, not the men's, will determine the course of human events.

But conditioned, seasoned as we are, this is the most difficult possible conception for us, and most of us continue to believe that we must make men change their ways, that we are dependent upon legislators to pass laws, for instance. Good grief! When have those in control ever given up a significant amount of it to those they control? Can you think of a single time in history? Well, it has never happened and it's not going to happen. We should have learned that with the Equal Rights Amendment. If we didn't learn it then, what is it going to take to teach it to us? Our not learning it is part of our seasoning, our profound conditioning. We're deeply dependent, deeply servile in ways that our surface militance camouflages.

That is the main goal of seasoning: to make us believe the men must change the world for us and that we're powerless to change reality unless the men change first. But the truth is that they're not going to change-can't change-so we don't have to waste our time trying to get them to any more. We are the ones who must change, because we can. And when we change, everything outside us will have to change to accommodate our new way of being in the world-including men, but that's beside the point. The principle underlying all seasoning-how you get" this effect, how you reach this goal of getting women to believe that our salvation depends on someone else's behavior - is that you get someone to do everything in relation to someone else who they perceive as more powerful; you get them always to consult an image of someone else in their minds, to say to themselves-to say to ourselves as women, for instance- "Now, how will the men respond to that?" every time we make a decision, or "If we do this, what will they do?" Always to be relational, to consult the masters in our psyches every time-this is bondage.

When women make our internal states, our well-being, contingent upon men's behavior, behavior we can neither control nor change, we give up all chance for independence and freedom. Our freedom must depend exclusively on us; we are the only ones we can change and control. We must understand and internalize the fact that men are totally irrelevant now as far as change is concerned. So we can take our eyes off them and look at ourselves to make a shining new reality right here, right now in the midst of the old putrescent, collapsing world of the fathers.

As long as we're focused on the men, we're never going to see that the door to our jail cell is open, that it's open not into patriarchy but into our own power. As long as we're concentrating on the men, doing everything with our pimps in mind, we're never going to break free. Our pimps are the men around us. They're the legislators, professors, ministers-none of you still has ministers or priests, I trust? Our pimps are our fathers, our husbands, our sons. To be everything in relation to them is slavery. I learned this as a prostitute-in-training in Mormondom, in a Mormon home as well as the church. And in the Democratic Party. And in liberal and progressive and leftist groups. And in the National Organization for Women, which is modeled, also, on the patriarchal family. I learned these things in the same place you learned them. We have all learned them the hard way.

When I escaped from Mormonism, I looked out and saw that all churches were the Mormon church. I looked out further and saw that the whole world was the Mormon church. Over the years as I kept looking, I saw that Congress and the legislatures and the political parties and Mother Jones and National Public Radio were also all the Mormon church-you know, "Nothing New Considered," "The Same Old Stuff Considered." I saw that they were all the Old Boys' Club. I decided I wasn't going to escape from one brothel just to get myself trapped in another; that something was basically wrong with thinking that any of these institutions was the New World. So it seemed to me that it was time for me to take my eyes off the guys, to get rid of the superstitious belief that if I didn't monitor every single thing they did, if I didn't clutch at them and beg them and plead with them and lobby them and kick and scream and stamp my foot and demand, they would go berserk and kill us all.

But this is nonsense, of course, because all evidence shows that men have gone berserk anyway. With our eyes fastened unblinkingly on their faces day and night for thousands of years, they have grown increasingly mad. With our attention riveted upon them they are killing us and the world around us daily. The evidence is that with our reactive, fearful, dependent behavior we have been facilitating patriarchy in all its manifestations throughout its history. We have been seasoned to do this, to keep our eyes on our patriarchs, our pimps, so we won't look at ourselves and see the stunning alternatives.

I saw that since it hadn't gotten us anywhere, it was time to stop doing that. We don't have a thousand years to get enough women in our legislatures and our Congress. And even if we did, they would all be female impersonators by the time they got there, anyway. We don't have time. We've only got, maybe, ten years. That means we've got to learn from history that resistance to and cooperation with the oppressor don't work. All the ways we've tried to change things didn't work. They didn't work! Hierarchical structures don't work. They are all copies of the patriarchal family, a paradigm that has failed us utterly.

So I've decided it's time for me to refuse that seasoning. It's time to deprogram myself and to stop concentrating at all times upon the masters, upon the pimps of the world, stop doing all I do in relation to them, in reference to them, in reaction to them; stop making my feelings of well-being contingent on their behavior; stop thinking about them-they are so boring, so numbingly boring! We can predict everything they will do, every savage, gruesome, gross, crass thing they're going to do. We know it all by heart. We don't need to watch it anymore, do we? Do you? I certainly don't. I've seen plenty of it, and I know it inside out. lt seems to me that what I have to do is what my deep conditioning tells me not to do, to do the thing that scares me most of all, to do what I've been taught never to do or I would die-and that is to take my eyes off the guys and to take myself seriously. To stop enabling men's system, patriarchy. To stop believing that they are going to change the world, that I ever have to try to get them to do anything redemptive again. They will not, could not if they would. And to come to grips with the truth that if I want the world another way, I must make it that way myself.

The most important message my wise old woman within has ever given me is that the transformation of this world is up to me-and you. What a relief! Thank goodness it's up to the women because now it will get done!

Sonia Johnson

#feminism #sonia johnson #patriarchy #democrats #sonia harris

8 notes · View notes

trillgutterbug · 3 years

Note

Hello please talk to me about the telepathy fic, you know I am thirsty leetle flower

oh ms mortua you are a little creechur indeed. i have been promising this fic now for... *checks notes* TWO FULL YEARS OH MY GOD. 🤦‍♀️

truly shameful.

anyway, the central premise is that, for reasons both irrelevant and unknown, nate and mike spontaneously develop a telepathic bond while deployed. because i’m just a big sucker for that kind of shit. do i have any idea how to end this fic? no! do i like it a lot and wish i did? boy howdy!

here’s a bit.

- - - -

“We have to report this,” said Nate, the next night.

Mike regarded him across the top of the radio. He was so tired that the pale slice of Nate’s face seemed to swim surreally in and out of the darkness. He'd been on the verge of an almost meditative state of exhaustion before Nate climbed into the cab. It was jarring to have it broken, even by the welcome sight of his LT whole and mostly alert. It was the kind of wrung-out relief that made him agreeable on general, philosophical principle. He looked at Nate’s earnest, concerned brows, the shadowed downward turn of his mouth, and thought about the height of all the hills he might consider dying on. “Okay,” he said.

Nate blinked. He clearly hadn’t been expecting acquiescence. “Okay?” he repeated.

Mike nodded. He resettled the M1 on his lap, shifting to wake up the pins and needles in his ass. He’d been on watch for an hour already, with another hour to go. Nate didn’t look especially lively, but he’d probably gotten at least a twenty minute nap. “If you think that’s what we need to do, we’ll do it.”

Nate was silent for a second. “I don’t want to,” he finally said. “But I think we should.”

“Okay,” said Mike again. “Who are you going to tell?” It wasn’t nice of him. He kept his tone casual. “Schwetje, or Godfather?”

Another moment’s silence. “Jesus Christ,” Nate said softly, miserably. He raised a hand to rub his face.

Mike watched him. “I want to know what you’re going to say.”

Nate dropped his hand, making a helpless, expansive gesture. “I don’t know, Mike. I don’t fucking know.”

Mike grunted. “Might want to figure that out before you bring it up.” He turned his head to spit out the door. Lights swarmed far away across the desert, but he knew it was just a village on the horizon. His heart still kicked up a notch at the sight. He took a breath, opening his mouth to follow up his words, but then that unearthly frisson of sensation tickled him across the brain and the increasingly familiar not-sound of Nate’s mind said something like fear and concern and guilt and I just don’t want to fuck things up.

Mike turned back toward him. Nate was looking somewhere between him and out the windshield, the dark-smeared lines of his face crumpled. “Hey,” Mike said softly, regretting his asshole behaviour suddenly. He reached a hand toward Nate, and Nate took it without looking, like it was the most natural thing in the world. His fingers gave Mike’s a desperate squeeze.

“I’m sorry,” Nate said.

“What for?”

Nate shook his head. “This isn't my decision to make. Or not just mine. We’re both in it.”

Mike considered that. He didn't look at their hands joined on top of the radio, but he rubbed his thumb across the bone of Nate's wrist. "Yeah," he said at last. "But I'll follow your lead. You know that."

Nate glanced at him gratefully. "I just don't know what to do, here." His voice was tight with frustration. "I don't…" He swallowed the next syllable. Mike waited, watching him. Eventually, a thought came through, almost tentative in its quietness, a sentiment so primal it was nearly wordless.

I don't trust them.

Mike absorbed that, considering it from all angles. He rolled it around like the wad of dip under his lip. "Yeah," he said at last. "Can't blame you."

Nate's expression brightened with relief. "No?"

Mike shook his head. "You kidding me, Nate? The USMC can't find its own asshole with both hands and a roto-rooter. You think I want them getting any bright ideas about doing brain surgery on us, or whatever the fuck?"

Nate, somehow, seemed to pale even further.

Mike continued, because it had to be said. "What's the first thing they think when they see something new and interesting? How do we destroy it, or how do we weaponize it. And I don't know about you, but I'm not crazy about the inside of my skull being on either of those lists."

"No," said Nate again, vehemently. "But…" He made a gesture with the hand Mike wasn't holding. It said, without the need for spooky mindpowers, This is big, and we have a job to do. We have an obligation.

Mike nodded. "But," he agreed.

"It's getting worse," Nate went on.

Mike didn't fail to notice the moment of hesitation before 'worse.' "Easier, you mean."

"Yes."

Mike exhaled through his nose. Outside, he heard a muted mumble of conversation happening at some other humvee. A watch change, or someone stumbling over someone else on their way to take a shit. Otherwise, the desert night was quiet. No gunfire, no choppers, no bellowing COs. He tried to make his mind just as quiet, just as empty and raw, so that he could find the shape of the strange thing between them, wherever it was lurking. Because it was true, what Nate said. It was getting easier. All day, there'd been something stirring in the back of his mind - a mild itch, like the subaudible rumble of a distant thunderstorm. He realized, examining it closer now, what it was. "Do you feel me?" he said. And then, quickly, "In your head. Even when we're not doing the mumbo jumbo talking."

Nate hesitated. He made a considering sound. "I think so. Like you’re... at the corner of my eye, or just behind me."

"Yeah," said Mike. He wasn't sure if the confirmation made him feel relieved or more concerned. "I've had that all day."

Nate's fingers twitched in his. "Freaky," he said, in a kind of dead tone that made Mike instinctively chuckle. He saw Nate's mouth tip up at the corner in response.

#my fic #gen kill #nate/mike #lingua-mortua

17 notes · View notes

magxit · 2 years

Note

Radio is an increasingly irrelevant platform and Taylor’s sales are only second to Adele, she’s one of the few artists who have managed to transition from being huge in the digital sales/CD era into still being huge in the streaming era, yeah she hasn’t had an inescapable smash hit in a good few years but she’s so beyond needing them at this point in her career, plenty of artists who have hits would sacrifice them for a tenth of Taylor’s album and touring numbers

Plus she is literally one of the only artists of sell out stadiums too and that is where the money is at.

2 notes · View notes

eabhaalynn · 4 years

Text

My 11 Songs of the Decade (because 10 would be boring and is overdone.)

Cigarette Daydreams – Cage the Elephant

The song… This is the closing song of Cage the Elephant’s 2013 album, Melophobia, and the third single released from this album. It describes the pain of someone’s search for their own identity through the musings of a parted lover.

For me�� To this day, this is the song I cry to. This always has been me and my friend Iona’s song. It will forever be inseparable from the Ulster Museum and Botanic Gardens in Belfast, from rainy summer’s days and rants about our seemingly massive problems with GCSEs and girls from school. When she went abroad for her gap year, I couldn’t bear to listen to it. It’s another one of these songs that manages to articulate what it feels like to be young and thinking too much.

Key lyric…If we can find a reason, a reason to change Looking for the answer If you can find a reason, a reason to stay Standing in the pouring rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvVJ0v6Vta8

Ribs – Lorde

The song… This is a deep house influenced electronica song that discusses Lorde’s stress over ageing. It was released on her debut album, Pure Heroine, in 2013. It begins ambiently and builds to become increasingly more frantic as the song progresses.

For me… Despite being released when I was a young teenager, this song was written when Lorde was sixteen or seventeen. It articulates exactly what it feels like to be that age, at that stage of life. I’m quite sure teenagers across the globe can relate to that. This song has been the soundtrack of my teenage years, the imagery is both relatable and accessible. Listening now, it gives me a sense of nostalgia, a yearning to be back where I was a year, or two or three years ago. Even now, it is the sound of being alone in a crowd. It is musically perfect, and a piece of exceptional songwriting.

Key lyric…This dream isn't feeling sweet We're reeling through the midnight streets And I've never felt more alone It feels so scary, getting old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qaeoz_7cyE

Sign of the Times – Harry Styles

The song… This is Harry Style’s debut single as a solo artist. It was released in early 2017 and appears on his self-titled debut album. It is a power ballad with eclectic influences from genres such as soft rock, indie rock, glam rock and psychedelic soul. It features Styles’ vocals alongside choral harmonies throughout. It is essentially about avoiding emotion during times of grief and hardship.

For me…This is the song of me leaving school (for the first time). Listening to it now coughs up all the feelings of relief, and yet uncertainty. Excitement, but also nerves. Summer 2017 was a turning point for me. I had had a terrible couple of years over my GCSEs, and overall, my second school was a far better place for me to be than my first one ever was. At the time though, I didn’t know this. Sure, how could I? This song helped me figure out my feelings, and make sense of feeling happy when I really didn’t know what I should have felt at all.

Key lyric…We don't talk enough, we should open up Before it's all too much Will we ever learn? We've been here before It's just what we know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN4ooNx77u0

Ride – Lana Del Rey

The song… This song comes from Lana Del Rey’s third EP, Paradise, released in 2012. It served as the first single of this re-release. It is a ballad that includes, among other themes, parental problems, loneliness and alcohol misuse. Del Rey sings over a string drenched, piano driven melody.

For me… This is the song of every summer. It has never been an exceptionally happy song for me, but it is the embodiment of what it is to feel young and alive, if a little bit tired. The glamour of it, alongside the acknowledgement that everything isn’t perfect, but that they will be okay if you just go with the flow, was exactly what I needed at the time it was released. The blissful uncertainty of the summers of being 14 and 15, partnered with the irrelevance of the future, is exactly what this song will always be about for me.

Key lyric… Been trying hard not to get into trouble But I, I've got a war in my mind I just ride, just ride

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_-3di1yx0

Don’t Delete the Kisses – Wolf Alice

The song… This is the second single from Wolf Alice’s second album, Visions of a Life. It is characterised as dream pop, synth pop, shoegaze and indie rock. Frontwoman Rowsell referred to it as “one of those, you know, ‘head out the window on a long drive’ kind of tunes.’

For me… If ‘ribs’ is the sound of being seventeen, then surely this is the sound of falling in love. This song is the ultimate love song. I am absolutely convinced of it. It is greater than any one person as it is simply the sound of the feeling. I am very lucky that I actually was falling in love for the first time at the time this was released. I will always be indebted to Ellie Rowsell for being there to tell me in plain English how I was feeling. This song has defined every ‘lovey dovey’ mood I have been in for the last two and a half years. I’m sure most people of my age feel the same. It was written for the era we are living in and it is perfectly suited to it.

Key lyric…I see the signs of a lifetime, you 'til I die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqxE-zppu30

Motion Sickness – Phoebe Bridgers

The song… This is the third single from Phoebe Bridger’s 2017 Debut album ‘Stranger in the Alps.’ It describes “being in love with someone who is super mean to you… like conflicted feelings.” Bridger’s stated to radio station KCRW that the song was written about fellow musician Ryan Adams.

For me… Admittedly, I discovered this song late in the decade. But it’s a song about feelings. Like, really hard feelings. This decade, and especially the latter half of it, threw up a lot of feelings, about a lot of things. I suppose this is fairly standard for most people approaching the end of their teenage years. It’s angsty, without being too bothered about anything. It’s raw and honest; articulating everything I’ve felt about everyone at one stage or another, and I’m equally, I’m sure it articulates enough people’s feelings about me.

Key lyric… You said when you met me you were bored And you, you were in a band when I was born

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sfYpolGCu8

A & E – Brand New Friend

The song… This illustrates the rise and fall of a relationship, and in doing so highlights the more melancholic acoustic side of Northern Irish indie pop group Brand New Friend. It was initially released in 2016 as the closing song of their debut EP, American Wives, but was remastered and re-released on their 2017 album Seatbelts for Airplanes.

For me… This is the song of the medicine application. Bearing in mind I know this band, and know that there is a well-developed meaning to the song that has nothing to do with me, this is the song that I have listened to, and seen live, countless times from the day I decided I wanted to be a doctor to the day I got into medical school and beyond. It is a rare and beautiful connection to have to a song like this, and one for which I am forever going to be grateful. Now, I can’t hear the song live without bawling my wee eyes out. I have come so far, and the band have too, and the song has been with us every step of the way. That truly means the world to me.

Key lyric… She wants to be a paramedic / Wants to save a strangers life / Now she wants to hold my hand / Does she know she’s saving mine?

https://open.spotify.com/track/5RmOfF1s5zW2B942H9OGXT?si=hsauA8iXQN6mXQnL8s0fBw

Brazil – Declan McKenna

The song… McKenna initially self-released this song in December 2014. It is critical of FIFA, of their awarding of the 2014 World Cup to Brazil without addressing the deep rooted and extensive poverty affecting the Nations people. It gained widespread media attention throughout the FIFA corruption scandal, before featuring on his debut album, ‘What do you think about the Car?’ in July 2017. It is an indie rock song that is driven by guitars and synths.

For me… This song was the sound of 2016 and 2017. It was released a while before this but I was fairly late jumping on the bandwagon. It’s a political song, speaking of the injustices behind FIFA and their 2014 World Cup in Brazil. As an angry little leftist, I have always appreciated this. I can only appreciate it more knowing that Declan McKenna himself was only fourteen when he wrote it. For me the song has many happy memories attached to it, from the long summer walks from my house to the nearest village to see my friends who were working as sailing instructors, to attending a tiny gig of Declan McKenna’s in the Oh Yeah Centre in Belfast and being about 6 feet from his face while he was 6 feet from the cusp of fame.

Key lyric…Because you've had your chances, yeah you've had enough I'm gonna burn your house down to spread peace and love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duHjQ3BE6D8

Robbers – The 1975

The song… This is the sixth single from the 1975’s self-titled debut album. It was released as a single in May 2014. The song’s concept follows an ill-fated robbery, and was inspired in part by the 1993 film ‘True Romance.’ It is essentially about a relationship in which the partners are too focused on each other to notice the destruction they are each causing.

For me… This song is fairly definitive of my teenage years as a whole. The narrative of a toxic relationship that the writer could not, or would not leave, was one that I always managed to connect to, across all aspects of my life as a young teenager, encountering uncomfortable situations within school and with different people and groups of friends. Matty Healy was (and honestly still is) one of the biggest crushes I’ve ever had. I’ve now heard this song live three different times, at three completely different phases of my life. It is a song with so much meaning, and yet one that has grown and evolved with me throughout the decade.

Key lyric… Now everybody's dead And they're driving past my old school And he's got his gun, he's got his suit on She says, 'Babe, you look so cool'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy3YOpxL2k

Get Well Soon – Ariana Grande

The song… This is the final song on Grande’s 2017 album ‘Sweetener,’ it is a soul ballad with layered vocals, and is inspired by Grande’s personal anxiety and trauma following the May 2017 terrorist attack following her concert in Manchester. In memory of the 22 victims of this attack, there is a 40 second moment of silence at the end of the song.

For me… I am, and have been, a very anxious person for a very long time. This is something I have never really hid away from, but also never felt up to talking openly about. This song manages to describe the feelings associated with anxiety in a way I have never heard any mainstream musician attempt before. Ariana’s concert which was attacked in May 2017, that which inspired this song, immediately followed her concert that my father and sister had attended, and so the whole song and sequence of events is and always has been very close to home for me.

Key lyric…I'm too much in my head, did you notice? (Girl, what’s wrong with you? Come back down)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXU4P6j3TNY

She’s Thunderstorms – Arctic Monkeys

The song… This is the first song from the fourth studio album by arctic monkeys; Suck it and See, released in 2011. It originated when Alex Turner was looking for a new way of complimenting someone. It begins with an Eastern inspired riff and is fairly heavily guitar led, characteristic of this period in the Arctic Monkey’s discography

For me… I’d be lying if I said this isn’t one of my favourite songs of all time. I chose it for this list because it is my favourite song by the arctic monkeys, who are my favourite band. Its subject, Alexa Chung, basically leads the life I wish I had. Even more so at the time this song was written than now. I remember being twelve or thirteen and just wanting someone to write something like this for me. The sheer detail of the lyrics is beautiful and so captivating, they played a huge part in helping me find my love for music in an accessible way. I loved, and still do love, the relationship they had. I feel like it translated so well into his music, and into the popular culture that shaped my teenage years exceptionally well.

Key lyric…Here is your host, sounds as if she's pretty close When the heat starts growing horns She's thunderstorms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQSQnHh4rPE

#music #songs #arctic monkeys #ariana grande #the 1975 #lana del rey #phoebe bridgers #lorde #declan mckenna #brandnewfriend #cage the elephant #wolf alice #harry styles

376 notes · View notes

theliterateape · 3 years

Text

The Orwellian DoubleSpeak of Anti-

by Don Hall

Everybody's talking at me I don't hear a word they're saying Only the echoes of my mind People stopping, staring I can't see their faces Only the shadows of their eyes — Harry Nilsson

Upon the road to Damascus I encountered a Christian.

He smiled. "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, friend?"

I smiled back. "No. I was in to all that when I was younger but have found that the societal constructs that surround that belief system don't make much sense to me."

He stopped smiling. "So you are anti-Christ?"

"No. Not anti-Christ. Just not pro-Christ, I guess."

He launched into an increasingly angry monologue. Highlights of this polemic were a few simple concepts. If I wasn't pro-Christianity then I was, by his definition, against it. By refusing to see and capitulate to his faith, I was his enemy. By not joining him in his beliefs, I was actively denying them.

I decided to walk on, his taunts and rage following me for a half mile before he got tired of yelling.

✶

Upon the road to Starbucks along Clark Street in Chicago I encountered a Cubs fan.

He smiled. "How about them Cubbies, huh?"

"I smiled back. "I don't really follow sports. Not my thing."

"So you hate the Cubs? Why do you hate the Cubs? Are you one of those fair-weather fans or what? Motherfucker!" He spit on me as he stormed off.

✶

Upon the road to Circa on Fremont Street in Las Vegas I encountered a transgender woman.

She smiled. I smiled and continued walking.

"What? Are you fucking transphobic or what? What's your fucking problem?

I turned. "I don't know what you're getting pissed about. All I did was smile."

"But I could tell. You're transphobic, right?"

"No. Not transphobic."

"You didn't even ask for my pronouns!"

"Oh. I don't really care what your pronouns are because I don't know you. It seems you assume I'll be talking about you to someone. Otherwise, your pronouns are irrelevant to me."

"TRANSPHOBE!" she screamed and pointed. She collapsed on the cement walkway. "I can't take the micro aggressions!"

✶

The further into the tribal mindset we submerge ourselves into in America, the less likely we are able to communicate effectively.

I recall, years ago, as I was directing the very popular series of DADA Soirées in Chicago, realizing that the nonsense poetry and onstage chaos required a certain set of rules the DADAists needed to grasp onto lest the shows become a bunch of poorly improvised faux-German moments.

Each DADAist performed nonsense poems but I directed them to have each poem mean something that they are trying to communicate to the audience but the audience doesn't understand the language and thus cannot receive the meaning. It made the characters of the DADAists frustrated and angry and made the show increasingly confrontational.

We're now entering the DADAist stage of American dysfunction as we are all desperately trying to communicate ideas to others who simply aren't using the same language. It sounds the same but meanings are changing and it fuels more frustration and anger and results in an almost non-stop confrontation.

✶

Ricky Gervais, on a radio talkshow, makes a point that racism is horrible but, in his opinion, it is the intent that makes it racist rather than the reception. "That's why," he added,"wearing blackface is racist but wearing a mud mask is not."

The caller rejects this and claims that Gervais is practicing white supremacy. He continues to tell Gervais that racism and white supremacy are the same thing which Ricky disputes. They talk over each other until one of the hosts get frustrated and dismisses the caller as being completely full of shit.

✶

As used in 1984, doublethink is the ability to hold two completely contradictory thoughts simultaneously while believing both of them to be true. In Orwell's book, doublethink was critical to the success of the Party as it supported the state-imposed practice of language control, or newspeak.

Our new version of doublethink proliferates itself as different tribes redefine ideas and intentionally confuse communication.

How bizarre that when cops kill people, we blame cops but when 108 people are shot in Chicago over the July 4th weekend, we blame the guns. Which is it? The doublethink holds that both are true with no explanation. It's either guns or the people or perhaps a far more complicated cocktail of reasons that include cops, criminals, poverty, and the proliferation of guns but, fuck, isn't that too many problems to solve so let's simplify it down to cops and guns are bad, criminals have excuses, and what the fuck does this all mean?

How malfunctioning is it that for half the U.S. population cancel culture means holding the powerful accountable but for the other half it means online bullying to punish people for stupid things they did or said 20 years ago. For every Weinstein there is a Franken, for every Louis C.K. there is a James Gunn.

"Equality" is now "equity" but only for 50% of the country. For a tiny but increasingly vocal bunch the term "mother" has been replaced with "birthing person". "Riots" are "protests" or "rebellions" unless you are on the other side of the issue. Blacks who marched on the Capitol with the predominantly white mob are now considered to be suffering from "multicultural whiteness."

Even Orwell would've had a hard time imagining this bullshit.

✶

We are not speaking the same language between tribes these days. There has to be common understanding of usable terms and insisting upon preferred definitions only makes it more difficult to communicate. No communication, no unity of purpose. No unity of purpose, no society.

For me, given my completely unexceptional position in society, I will go with the definitions I prefer and do my best to be respectful of the lunacy of others.

No matter what you call elbow pasta with cheese sauce, it's still Mac n Cheese. And bullshit is bullshit even if you want to have it identify as stroganoff.

#George Orwell #doublethink

1 note · View note

pointless-letters · 7 years

Photo

So angry about so

5 notes · View notes

ericiatan · 3 years

Text

Blogpost 2: Domestic Media (Tan Yu Ying, Ericia)

Spigel (2015) looked at the role and impact of the television on the relationship between the social construction of public as well as private spaces. One thing that I found most interesting is her discussion about how the TV affects family intimacy and the domestic space. She states that the television is central to family life and has unifying power over family life. As seen in many homes, the TV is most likely the centerpiece of the home and all other objects seem to be orientated around it. In the past, when flatscreen TVs were not around, families often placed family photographs, awards, and decorations on top of the television or the shelves around the television. Overall, this shows how influential the TV was in helping us organise our domestic space.

As a child, before smartphones and smaller screens were so commonly used, the TV was the main source of entertainment for my sibling and I. Before school, we would watch Hi-Five and after school, we would rush home to catch our favorite TV shows such as Totally Spies, Doraemon and Spongebob square pants. I also remember occasionally arguing with her which channel we wanted to watch and also watching movies together on our DVD player. At night when my parents were home from work, I would go to their room to catch the 9pm drama on Channel 8. Back when netflix was not created yet, these TV shows were great conversation topics between my friends and I and also between family members. Looking back, the television was how I determined my schedule and routine for the day. Undoubtedly, that really helped to create fond memories at home and further reiterates Spigel’s (2015) point of the television unifying the family.

However, in this day and age where technology has heralded a new era, the argument that the television has a central relation to family life and domestic spaces is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Children nowadays have iPads and iPhones to watch videos on youtube and even Netflix while adults also prefer to use these other platforms instead of the television. With smartphones, people are able to receive news at any time as long as they have an internet connection but in the past people had to watch the news on the television or use other forms such as the newspaper or radio to get news. Additionally, people may choose to use platforms like Netflix to watch shows instead of the television as they could choose what they wanted to watch at their own pace. Even though most households still have a television, people often only switch on the TV to be playing in the background where everyone else would be doing their own thing. Thus, I think that there has been a shift in the role of the television on modern families and that it no longer affects family intimacy as much as it did in the past.

Spigel, L. (2015). TV and the Spaces of Everyday Life. Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media (pp. 39-48). Springer, Dordrecht.

1 note · View note

jinruihokankeikaku · 4 years

Note

How about a knight of void?

How bout it!!

Title: Knight of Void

Title Breakdown: One who actively defends [serves, utilizes, wields, protects] Void [obscurity, irrelevance, darkness, uncertainty, nothingness]

Role in the Session: The Knight of Void protects obscurity. Their role is to preserve secrecy where secrecy is needed and to wield darkness and silence like a weapon. They might seem exaggeratedly tranquil, and deliberately cultivate an enigmatic, aloof persona. They’re likely deeply afraid of being known or being exposed, and might at times fail to communicate clearly due to their efforts to conceal their intentions, opinions, or identity. Because they’re a Defender Class, their role is not only to protect their Aspect but to protect the viability of the session as a whole, ensuring that the Space player is safe, and mitigating the consequences of the dearth of their Aspect that their Session will almost inevitably have.

The ways in which a deficit of Void could manifest in a session are numerous, given that a major symbolic interpretation of Void is “nothing”. There might be a great deal of auditory/visual/sensory noise goin on, impeding efficiency and functionality in the session due to an “information overload”. Perhaps their Planet is extremely cluttered with junk, loud or aggressive fauna, or crumbling buildings, mountains, or debris, presenting great difficulties in navigating and negotiating and providing little space to rest. Even beyond that, their session might struggle from an overabundance of unnecessary or burdensome information, with countless distractions and tangential problems demanding the team’s attention. The Knight, over the course of their Quest, will have to confront the space between what they know and what they don’t, learning to wield the absence of knowledge, attention, or awareness to their advantage. They also might literally or figuratively “weaponize darkness” – more on this in the Powers section. A Seer of Heart might be able to help them work past personal issues and their compulsive secret-keeping / unwillingness to expose themselves to attention, and a Maid of Breath could assist the Knight (and the team as a whole) in rising above the constant distraction and turmoil their Session is likely to face.

Opposite Role: The Rogue of Light. The Rogue of Light, which I believe was the last Role we covered, is someone who “redistributes light, attention, fortune, and awareness, and brings it where it is most needed”. The Rogue is likely to be the player who’s always seeking to understand or get to know the Knight, which the Knight is unlikely to appreciate. The Knight’s engineered mysteriousness combined with the Rogue’s curiosity is unlikely to be a positive influence on their relationship; when they’re both a bit further along in their character arc, they won’t necessarily be enemies; this is just an obstacle that they’ll have to overcome.

God Tier Powers

Knights tend to get a lot of use out of the small quantity of their Aspect that they’re provided with. In this case, their Aspect is Void, an Introspective-Actual Aspect; its domains are those places and times where the Universe fails to understand or perceive itself.

Dark Knight: An Ascended Knight of Void is nearly invisible in areas of shadow, as the darker it gets, the more their outline blurs, until they’ve fully blended into the dark. This can also apply to metaphorical areas of Darkness – if someone can’t hear the Knight, or doesn’t notice that they’re there, the Knight simply won’t register to them until they want to make their presence known. With enough skill, the Knight could potentially apply this to representations of themselves, such that they’d vanish from video recordings, for example, if the viewer didn’t already know that they’d been there.

Shadow-Craft: The Knight could solidify shadow into weapons, armor, or tools, which would of course be sturdier and more effective the darker the shadow, and would slowly begin to fade as they were brought into the light. They’d be able to make increasingly complex tools and weapons the longer they spent working with the shadow, and the more skill they had with it. Just about anything could be conjured in this way, with the exception that it couldn’t create more material, and it couldn’t create energy without fuel, so guns, bows, and other projectiles wouldn’t work, nor would incendiary or explosive devices.

Keeper of Silence: The Knight could choose to end all transfer of information around themselves, creating complete silence and darkness and blocking radio, cellular, and Skaianet transmissions, or even telepathy. For a moment, they’d be able to think in complete peace and solitude, isolating the pieces of information they need and sorting them out, without the distractions of continued light and movement.

Personality: The Knight of Void, like any Knight, is going to project their Aspect – in this case, they’ll project nothing. They’ll be rather cagey and standoffish, loathe to open up to people whom they don’t trust very well. They may also be very quiet, and tend to decline to comment or vanish suddenly both offline and IRL. Their path of personal development will involve opening up, certainly, but also recognizing the value of keeping secrets and silence when they have to. They might be inclined towards solitary hobbies or practices such as writing (but not necessarily publishing), meditation, or solitary exercise or simply walking. They may be inclined towards maintaining one or more anonymous online personas, in which they take solace from the watchful eyes of the world. They may not have any friends; this isn’t because they don’t like people, it’s just a consequence of their avoiding getting too close. They’re unlikely to involve themselves in artistic or performative activities or frequent social events, and they may view certain elements of pop culture or culture in general as inauthentic or missing the point.

Songs: Let’s see…

Never Quite Free by the Mountain Goats

Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls

Into the Dark by Julee Cruise

…And that’s what I’ve got for now!! Sorry about the delay; quite a few irons in the fire at the moment. I hope you found my analysis at least somewhat helpful!!

~ P L U R ~

#void #knight #classpect #classpect analysis #Homestuck #ask #anon

6 notes · View notes

anettrolikova · 4 years

Text

Digital databases are unparalleled memory machines that have radically transformed how information and stories flow between grandparents and children, students and teachers, politicians and voters, journalists and citizens.

Digital media serves up an inhumanly large corpus of data that becomes raw material for new subcultures, ideologies, and alternative histories. In today’s chaotic media environment, not even a global pandemic.

IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES, innovations like the telegraph, time zones, radio, and television led to new patterns of mass connectivity and synchronization. Time was subdivided into smaller and smaller units, allowing us to achieve unprecedented levels of coordination at scale.

We had grid-synchronized electric clock time, which was an important move because we went from producing time in clock towers and sun dials to producing time in a central location and distributing it via a grid, so that it was piped into your home like water or electricity. By the 1940s, we were distributing time over the oceans. By the 1980s, we had GPS … This trend has come to its logical conclusion because we all live inside a cage of time made up of 32 satellites orbiting Earth.”

Having trouble with the flow of time? Maybe it’s not just the pandemic. Maybe it's because we live in the Database and in the Database ordinary time is irrelevant.

Before the invention of the telegraph, there was no way to instantaneously synchronize timekeeping devices across long distances. No time zones, no universal standard against which clock towers could be evaluated for accuracy. Timekeeping was more an art than a science.

With nearly all of recorded history at their fingertips, they can cherry-pick interesting scraps of information from the archives and construct new grand narratives with unprecedented ease. And so, digital media has enabled a wave of “deepwater drilling” for obscure texts and long-forgotten histories — fueling an explosion of new political coalitions that bear little resemblance to the party lines of the last century.

If you were a kid looking to get into politics then, you couldn’t find these incredibly fine-grained sub-groupings to become part of and then start meme-ing yourself into a community with.

These memes are extremely dense cultural talismans that accumulate layers and layers of meaning/allusion over time. Like the jargon of academia, memes look like nonsense to outsiders but facilitate deep communication between members of a subculture.

The “gravity” or “current” of social media algorithms pulls people into orbit around ideological sub-groups. Algorithms are the riverbed, and users are the water.

In the early days of the internet, the Web’s surface was relatively smooth and its “gravitational force” was weak. You could random walk without getting sucked into any black holes. During the 2010s, social media platforms “dug into the Web surface, dragging activities down their slopes … As a result of this magnetic-like attraction, caused by the web slope, Internet users slowly slide down the slope in a digital drift.

People who spend a lot of time exploring these subcultures feel like they can see into the future, and for good reason. What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later.

Online conversations and mainstream newspapers/TV reveals that 20th century institutions no longer set the pace. They're getting sucked into the subjective time zones of internet subcultures.

As the line between “internet culture” and “Culture” gets increasingly blurry, Old Media gets increasingly confused. Online tribes are basically proto-political coalitions, sprouting in the graveyard of America’s zombiefied corporate media. This is, of course, a huge gravitational shift in the landscape of power.

The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.

The conversations of internet subcultures often feel substantive and expansive compared to the shallow discourse of presidential debates, op-ed pages, and cable TV shows. Mainstream news cycles rarely last more than a few hours, and their narratives are constantly shifting.

Media and internet subcultures are getting increasingly out of sync, despite attempts by the former to get out ahead of the latter. And the clocks and narratives of 20th century institutions lose influence in a media environment where everyday people can have the kind of reach that was once reserved for elites.

The explosion of alternative histories hasn’t just eroded the influence of 20th century media institutions, it’s also damaged our ability to build collective futures. We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era.

If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to understand how the vast archive of the internet disrupted the feedback loop between memory & imagination.

Memory is the link between past and future; it allows us to learn from our previous experiences and extend our “narrative runways” beyond the immediate present.

The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose the “footholds” that give you the stability to think a day or even a few hours ahead at a time.

The “perfect memory” of digital media has given rise to a kind of collective dementia that is scrambling our shared memories and messing with our shared imaginations/simulations of the future. The graveyard of data at our fingertips is not really memory as we’ve known it, and it’s not really history — it’s something new and chaotic, something eerily trans-human. The internet is like a time machine that’s bringing back the ghosts of our ancestors.

"We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of human expression re-constitutes the mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means all-time, out of time."- Marshall McLuhan

The line between present and past is getting increasingly blurry now that we all carry around a miniature Library of Alexandria in our pockets. We can’t agree on where we’re headed because we can’t agree on when we are.

As Ezra Klein noted, there are already so many time travelers that the cultural and political landscape has been permanently transformed. We’ve stirred up old ghosts at Silicon Valley scale and find ourselves re-enacting age-old conflicts along age-old fault lines.

Before television and computers, information about the past felt more inert and static — sometimes literally set in stone. In the digital media environment, history is constantly being re-animated, re-mixed, and re-heated in the extremely molten medium of software.

Digital media has done away with the very thing that created our sense of history: imperfect memory. The process of creating a historical narrative (or any story, for that matter) involves discarding an enormous amount of information. It’s like chipping away at a big block of marble until you’re left with a captivating statue. Forgetting is a feature, not a bug.

Our memories evolved to surface emotions, stories, and information from the past that might help us survive. We don’t have complete control over what we remember and when — there’s a subconscious system that “finds” old memories and “projects” them onto our mind’s eye.

History ends not when the stream of apparently historic events ends,” writes Venkatesh Rao, “but when the world loses a sense of a continuing narrative, and arrives at what psychologists call narrative foreclosure” — a hollowing out of the collective imagination, a sense of the future being cancelled. The ghosts of yesteryear float around the Cloud, hoping we’ll continue to embody their trauma, fight their battles, and live out their dreams and memes.

Back then, television was promoted as “essentially live, as offering a direct connection to an unfolding reality ‘out there. But the multiversal collideorscope of digital media has made us hyper-aware that television does not really broadcast an un-edited view of reality straight into your living room. There’s always a producer and a camera and a frame and a cutting room floor, all of which determine what and how you see.

Just as the early viewers of television sometimes forgot that they weren’t seeing an un-mediated stream of Reality, us early users of digital media sometimes forget that social media algorithms are not showing us the world as it is. A recommendation algo is a “frame” that can be hacked, gamed, and messed with. More than anything, it’s a funhouse mirror that reflects back a warped image of whatever you hold up to it.

We’re transitioning from a world of linear narratives and time lines to a garden of forking memes that we’re free to explore and tend to. The gardening games with the richest soil, the deepest roots, and the most interesting characters will attract the most people.

But if we continue to crop the earth (and the ecological crisis) out of the frame, we’ll soon cut off the very branch we’re sitting on. Without sustainable infrastructure, the digital garden will decay and disappear.

In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth.

Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blind to the natural cycles that shaped us and continue to sustain us.

Our earliest timekeeping devices linked us to the stars and the sun and the moon. Our digital time machines link us to an infinite supply of data and a multiverse of “subjective time zones” that are increasingly out of sync with the old, natural clocks.

Conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. - Kei Kreutler

1 note · View note

hawkinsschoolcounselor · 5 years

Note

What analysis do you have about Mike? His character shifted a lot in ST3 but IMO it’s not surprising to see him lashing out at authority figures but lashing out at his friends and ignoring them? What do you make of that character progression?

Ah, Mike. To attempt to understand Mike in Season 3, first we need to examine him in Seasons 1 & 2.

In Season 1, Mike is depicted as a nerd, first and foremost. He is a bullying victim, as are his friends. He lacks self-control, often acting on impulse or emotion. He is smart, but he lacks Dustin’s worldliness or Lucas’ sensibility. He is ostensibly the leader of his friends, carrying himself with a level of stubborn authority. He mistrusts authority figures, as they are obstacles to him getting what he wants. Even Hopper, who helps save Will, is mistrusted at first, and then is shown to have hidden El away from him. He himself is the only one he trusts to take charge. The real motivation for Mike, though, lie in his relationships, or at least two in particular.

Season 1 begins Mike’s series-long character arc as being driven by a fear of loss. He is single-minded in this regard. While everyone is upset at Will’s disappearance, Mike takes it the hardest, and he’s the most adamant that they do everything possible to find him, including recruiting the strange girl with scary powers. He is accusatory if he suspects others aren’t as concerned about Will as he is. He stands up to his bully for what seems like the first time because the bully mocks Will’s “death.” He loses his mind and screams at Eleven when he sees what he thinks is Will’s body being dragged out of the quarry. His world fell apart, and he rides home crying and falls into the arms of his mother. He is despondent afterwards, and tenderly looks over pictures drawn by Will. These pictures are all he has left. He snaps at El for fiddling with his radio, bitterly resentful towards her for getting his hopes up. His hopes are renewed, fortunately, when Will’s singing comes through the radio. His raging internal fire, the paladin’s inner light, once nearly quenched, has been relit.

He is steadfast in his loyalty to El at this point, to the end that he defends her against Lucas. He certainly wouldn’t be wrong in doubting her for messing with their compasses, but he trusts her that she was only trying to keep them safe. If he doubts her again, they may never find Will. It’s been some time since I’ve watched Season 1, but I believe it is around this time that his bonding with Eleven kicks up a notch. I feel it is significant, or at least not totally irrelevant, that his feelings for her increase the closer they get to finding Will. I see it as an interaction of him associating El with finding Will, as his is overcome with increasing amounts of hope, relief, and gratitude. He is irrevocably bonded with El now, and his feelings for her become similar to those for Will.

This makes losing her traumatic for him. He obsessively reaches out to her for nearly a year, unable to accept that she is gone. We know she’s out there, but he doesn’t. He turns his attentions to Will, always being the first to notice something wrong. He’s terrified at something happening to Will again, and this time El wouldn’t be around to help. His hypervigilance perfectly fits the character we see in Season 1. He is the epitome of a paladin, keeping a steadfast watch over his cleric. He is still the same emotionally unstable, snarky kid, but is incredibly soft with Will. He is almost reckless in his willingness to stay with Will despite the dangers. If he loses Will, he’s got nothing left. We can see that meeting Will is his fondest memory. I do not think he was playing it up just to try to reach through to Will.

He is conflicted when El returns. His relief and happiness are so palpable that it’s hard to believe it was simple acting. It’s short lived though, as both Will and El are taken to separate, and highly dangerous, situations. He has no idea if either one will return. These are his two most important people, two people he’s nearly lost already, and he may never see either one again. In the end, they both come back safe and sound, and we’re left with just one question: what is life for Mike now that he has both?

Season 3 answers this for us after a hint during the Snowball scene in Season 2. Mike is obsessed with El, which is something that increasingly seems to hurt Will. In Season 3, Mike seems to take Will for granted. We see him ditch his friends for El. Though we get the sense that he’s gone on many movie “dates” with Will along with Max and Lucas, the dialogue suggests they are relatively rare in comparison to him with El. His inability to balance these relationships costs him both of them early on in the season. I’ve spoken about the contrasts in how he reacts to these before, but, in short, losing Will seems to evoke more panic in him. The paladin has lost his powers due to a violation of his code of honor. He is not quite the same, and must atone. For him this means repairing what he’s broken.

He eventually seems to regain both relationships, to at least some extent, by the end of the season. We see paladin Mike start to make a comeback, as he shows his leadership, bravery, and devotion again. It is all for naught, though, as he loses both El and Will again. This must be a cornerstone of Season 4, and Mike’s character arc in particular. How does Mike cope with this? How does it affect his relationships with El and Will? He shows unease at the idea of Will not wanting/needing Mike in his life, but El is the one he talks to about calls and visits. Mike still can’t balance his feelings for them. Distance is the ultimate test of a relationship, and it’s one I hope isn’t glossed over. These relationships are Mike’s character arc, and we need to be able to see what distance reveals for them.

My personal opinion is that Will truly holds his heart, but he’s unable to reconcile that, so he transfers (unconsciously, of course) those feelings onto El, a more acceptable target. This is why his romance with her is purely physical, without the intimacy and tenderness he shares with Will. He tries to avoid his feeling for Will in Season 3, but they come through when Will gets upset. This is the only time we see Mike mad at Will, and it comes as Will attacks his relationship with El. Even then, though, his anger is very short lived, replaced instead with regret. He simply can’t cope with causing Will pain, and he may not yet realize that he is the one causing most of it. I hope the Duffers allow this to be explored.

Of course, I don’t write the show, so this could all be entirely wrong. I hope I sufficiently explored what you wanted me to touch on here.

#stranger things #mike wheeler #byeler #mileven #spoilers

46 notes · View notes

xathia-89 · 5 years

Text

The Hunted

This isn’t my work. I’m just the editor and the publisher. This is actually written by my husband, and I’ve been nagging him to get it out there, so he’s finally agreed to let it loose. Please enjoy.

The wind howled along the dark, dank sewer, it was a noise he’d heard many times before, so he wasn’t frightened of it. Carl had worked these tunnels for 20 years, and in that time he��d seen and heard everything they could do to try and spook the guys who cleared these waterways.

It was a hard job. Underpaid and dangerous at times, most guys worked alone, tramping along until they found the blocked area and cleared it by hand. No one on the surface appreciated the work they did, no one cared as long as the toilets flushed and the showers drained away then they never gave a thought to what happened next. Never appreciating that things didn’t just vanish when it left their homes.

Carl carried on walking through the gloom, he had a small headlamp attached to his hard hat, but it was barely throwing any light out and certainly nothing that was very effective against this blackness. “Damn thing,” he thought angrily tapping the bulb on his head, trying to adjust the settings to give more light as he walked along. A few more taps and he got it going as a sudden bright light flooded from the lamp and showed the concrete path in front of him.

He sighed heavily. ‘Just four more years, you’ve managed this long,’ he thought.

Then he could retire and leave this stinking rat hole behind him. Carrying on down the path, he came upon the blockage and quickly bent over to clear it. The light on his head flickered again as he worked, he let out a low growl and reached for his radio.

“Carl to control over,” he said his voice echoing over the rounded walls of the sewer.

“Control here what’s up mate?”

“I’ve found the blockage, but my damn headlight keeps flickering can’t see a thing down here.”

“OK, we’ve had a few guys report the same thing. When you get back bring it in, and I’ll swap it for you.”

“Thanks, I’ve got it clear I’m heading back now.”

“No worries see you soon over.”

Carl clipped the radio back onto his belt- even though it had only been a couple of minutes his back ached from bending over. He began to walk again when he thought he heard a sound up ahead, it was a low whirring mechanical noise that strangely hardly made an echo.

“Anyone there?” Carl asked. The sound stopped.

He paused. Had he imagined it? Was it more of the strange howls from the wind?

‘No, the wind doesn’t sound that way,’ he thought. He was too experienced to make that mistake.

He took a few more steps, and the noise started again, but louder, it seemed to be coming closer.

“Who is there?” Carl shouted angrily. As he did so the light on his hard hat flickered and went out completely. He growled and took off the hat to fiddle with the lamp.

The noise came closer then stopped what felt like only metres in front of him.

“Who is there?” a voice repeated Carl's words back to him.

The words came through the blackness. It was a cold, mechanical and unfeeling sound and It sent shivers down Carl's spine. He put his hat back on the light still not working as he looked up towards where he thought the voice came from.

“Who is there?” the voice repeated louder this time, Carl could see 2 small lights flashing in rhythm to the voice at about head height.

“My name’s Carl, I’m a sewer worker here.”

“Carl?” The voice and the lights came again.

“CARL?” it repeated angrier this time.

“Tha…That's right,” Carl stammered, increasingly frightened of this unseen presence in front of him.

“WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?” The voice shouted, beginning to sound like it was reaching the extent of its capabilities.

“Doc..Doctor?” Carl was confused and desperate to get away as he started to edge backwards. “What doctor?”

“WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?” The voice repeated closer than ever now.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Carl cried out terrified now of what was happening he kept trying to make out the shape of the thing in front of him when the lights flashed, but he couldn’t recognise the form through the darkness.

The whirring stopped the pause suddenly seemed endless until finally, he heard the voice again.

“THEN YOU ARE IRRELEVANT AND WILL BE EXTERMINATED.”

Carl’s breathing was hitched in his throat. The panic was clouding his mind as he didn’t know what to do at that moment.

The laser blast came out the blackness crashing into Carl's chest and sending him sprawling against the sewer wall. He was dead before he hit the ground.

***

“Seeya later!”

Bobbie waved to her friends as they left the office and went their separate ways home.

It was Friday night, and she was feeling happy. No work for two days, the sun was shining, and she had a big date tonight with a gorgeous guy she had met at the local coffee bar a couple of days ago.

She smiled as she remembered the incident, he had bumped into her in the queue and spilt coffee all down himself -luckily it was iced otherwise a trip to casualty may have been needed. He had looked at her, his face flushing red with embarrassment.

“S...Sorry,” he had stammered frantically dabbing his wet shirt and jeans with a napkin that she had grabbed off the counter.

“No worries,” she had said handing him some more napkins, he took them eagerly and smiled at her. “I’m Bobbie,” she had said out of nowhere. It wasn’t in her character to flirt - she was shy and always in the background, so she was surprised the words had come out.

“Really?” he laughed “That’s my name too, well Robert but you know nicknames and all that,” He paused “Do you wanna grab a table?”

“Sure,” Bobbie had smiled, again with internal surprise she hadn’t just got flustered and left the shop.

They had sat down at the table and, after a few awkward seconds when Bobbie thought she had done the wrong thing, they began to talk. They talked and talked and talked. Before they knew where they were 45 mins had passed, and Bobbie was late for her return to work.

“I gotta go I’m late, I’m sorry,” she stood up with a rushed smile, but Robert grabbed her hand and pressed a folded napkin into it.

“Call me,” he had said before standing and walking off, glancing back several times to look at her and make sure she was looking at the napkin – she was already putting his number into her phone.

Bobbie shook the daydream from her mind, still smiling and carried on walking down the street. It wasn’t far to her apartment 20 mins or so, less if she cut through the underpass. She paused should she take the shortcut? She usually avoided it like the plague the place was usually full of teenagers, or drunks, or both and it was uncomfortable to walk past with them whistling and shouting at her.

She carried on her regular route then paused again, ‘It would save a good 10 minutes,’ she thought.

She checked her watch. “Every second counts when you’re getting ready for such a hot guy,” she chuckled to herself and turned back, taking a left turn she entered the underpass.

Bobbie’s heels clacked on the hard concrete floor of the tunnel, the sound echoing around the curved walls of the underpass as cars thundered down the road above her head. The tunnel was long and narrow with electric lights placed every so often along the lengths of the roof. The lights buzzed like flies, and the whole atmosphere was oppressive. Several dark alcoves were built into the walls to allow access to pipes and cables although they were used more often by the kids who hung around in here to hide in and jump out at people.

She shivered.

She did not like this place, it always seemed damp, and as she read the graffiti on the walls, it conjured up disturbing images in her mind.

She shook her head, pulling her coat tighter around her. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Bobbie was scolding herself as she picked the pace up slightly.

She carried on for a few paces, then a thought struck her, and she paused to glance around and confirmed her theory. There was no one about as she looked ahead and back at the empty space. There should have always been numerous people here regardless of the time of day or night, be it just some youths kicking an empty bottle about, or homeless people trying to shelter from the extremes of weather and beg at the passers-by.

Not today. No one at all.

She continued to walk, quickening her pace without running outright, trying to think of the hot date she had that evening and not the unnerving tunnel she was in. When suddenly a voice rang out behind her echoing loudly.

“HALT.”

The voice was cold and metallic. Bobbie spun around and saw a large shape heading towards her. It almost like an upside down cone with lights on the top, a plunger sticking out the middle on the left side and some kind of tube sticking out on the right.

Bobbie paused and then laughed.

“Of course,” she said “You got me,” she had remembered there was a large sci-fi convention in town. Indeed she had passed a load of Stormtroopers on her way to way to work that morning. “That’s a great costume!” she smiled “I hope you win a prize,” She waved and turned around to continue walking when the voice came again.

“WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?”

It was menacing and sent shivers through Bobbie. She ignored the question and continued to walk, she was nearing the end now, and the sunlit exit to the tunnel was a welcoming sight.

“WHERE IS THE DOCTOR?”

Bobbie paused and turned around angrily. “Look I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to know, it’s a great costume, and I’m sure you’re in the middle of some big roleplay adventure, but I don’t want any part of it OK?”

The tube sticking out its right side raised slightly.

“THEN YOU ARE IRRELEVANT AND WILL BE EXTERMINATED.”

Bobbie started to back up but stumbled and fell to the ground.

That stumble saved her life as the laser bolt flew past her head only inches away from her skin. It crashed into the tunnel causing a cloud of dust to burst from the wall. Under cover of the thick dust, Bobbie got to her feet and ran the rest of the way through the tunnel and out into the sunshine, without stopping she flew up the hill and away.

#dr who #doctor who #10th doctor #david tennant

10 notes · View notes