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Speedpaint ◇

Final ◇

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A Commentary on Connection: Keep-Alive

About a year ago, I went to visit the graveyard I live by.

There is no one that I miss in there. None of my family, however distant, were ever buried there – or buried at all. To be truthful, I’m not sure why I decided to go there. Must’ve been a project I’ve forgotten about. It wasn’t a good idea. To illustrate the problem, I made it a habit to sleep to video essay noise to stop myself from thinking about death and getting a panic attack.

But I still went trawling for sights through the whole graveyard. It had a mix of outdoor morgue-like blocks where fifty or so tombs were stacked, with outward-facing plaques, and older, more ornate one-person or familial mausoleums. Many had photos, football club badges, little Argentine flags, flowers, but a stunning amount were very faded. Some of those weren’t too old. Letters had fallen off, sometimes so that the name of the deceased was made ambiguous. Others seemed to have been removed, perhaps vacated. 

In one case, the marble slab had broken off, and a half-full bottle of water had been left there. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining a friend or family of whoever laid there, fallen into some kind of disgrace, patting the grave and leaving them the rest of the bottle to drink. I took photos of that grave. I regretted it very quickly. They’re still somewhere on my phone.

The rest of the trip was equally harrowing. The larger mausoleums weren’t better off: glass had been shattered, some doors were half open, held only by chains, and creaked in and out with the wind. In one tomb, there were framed photos of the deceased and their family hung on the wall, only one had fallen and the glass shattered, the shards still left on the floor. In another case, I swear I saw bones through the gap in an iron door, just left on the ground. I’m not sure if I saw some funeral practice that I don’t know about, neglect, or just my own imagination, but in any case it was wrong to look. I did something supremely violating.

I spent the rest of the day making up excuses for the families of the deceased. Some tragedy struck them. Poverty took hold. They had to move. Some past had been unearthed for which the only vengeance remaining was funerary neglect.

Keep-Alive wasn’t meant to be about these things – they just happened to intrude there when I re-read the work that inspired it, whose title I have unceremoniously stolen. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is a nightmarish poem about a once-knight grown old and haunted by life seeking the Dark Tower, and it’s a visual that’s plagued me all my life. 

I’ve long been obsessed with the act of walking, weary, toward a distant tower. Before I had much of a computer I used to rewatch playthroughs of Half-Life 2’s earlier sections because the distant Citadel struck that chord. My first work of fiction I’m proud of was about traveling the desert while encroached by tall, rusting tower-needles, and towers, together with grieving death, continued to appear in my work afterward, uninvited. Some friends made a habit of pointing it out when I had a character describe a tower from a distance, and more often than I’d like to admit I was taken by surprise.

Just this once, I let them in myself, because I figured out what the link between the graveyard and the tower is. It brings to my mind the act of seeking that people do when they grieve. Walking around, the distance looming. Especially in places where the absence weighs heaviest. This is somewhere people often realize what dying really means, and it can eat at you. It’ll flip you inside out and leave you drifting. Asking questions that can’t be answered anymore.

Somewhere like Copper-9, these things are bound to place an immense weight on the memory of the passed, because they have no such thing as graves or mementos. The dead are erased or defaced, lay scattered and rusted. There is only one grave that no one dares visit.

It becomes doubly haunting with someone as torturously distant as Nori. Someone who left behind loose ends even more elusive and ghostly than memory habitually is… You can’t just let go of that. You tug at those loose ends like it’s an anxious tic. You’ll ask one draught of earlier, happier sights, before you can hope to play your part, and out goes the heart’s new fire.

Something must be reclaimed. Some link maintained so that normality can be stopped from settling, and one can be kept company at the time where we wonder most if it might be possible to catch up with the parting voyage.

I don’t think Khan would ever know how lucky, how brave he was. When my grandpa passed, I didn’t dare go to his cremation. I was asked, and I just shook my head and looked away. But dad went and did it, and when he came back, I cried and he hugged me. Though something might have been lost, though stupid things might have been done in grieving, he who strives to bring peace to the dead and returns to comfort the living is still brave. 

One of the conversations Khan and Nori have around the first third, about the music she’s blasting at full volume while everyone else’s sleeping, is loosely reconstituted from one time a clattering noise woke me up, and I got up from bed to ask mom what was going on, and she didn’t answer me – she apologized, said she’d be in the car for a bit, and immediately drove off, drunk as a skunk. It left me deeply afraid of what might’ve happened when come morning she still wasn’t there and answered no calls, and though she returned I’m still uncomfortable not knowing what happened then that made her go away the moment I offered an ear. I want to know one day. I don’t want her to die with that question still lingering in my mouth.

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CONNECTION: KEEP-ALIVE -- MD Oneshot

The gore-stricken wastes where the killers made their hunting grounds are Copper-9's only grave. Somewhere among the innumerable riven corpses is what Khan seeks, restless, haunted by unhealed memory. Purple fairies. Yellow lights. A violent, dazzling dance before the open Door One. Monstrous gnashing, clawing, beating. Bygone things. World's got little left for him. There is one remaining need in his weary core. A burial. He just wants a burial.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63509284

Khori if you squint. TW for gore and full-on mental breakdown. Took the better part of six months.

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I was blessed with a body that is crooked, in a literal sense.

  My pelvis tilts right, ten degrees off balance, so my spine bends to accommodate.

             Radiographied from behind, it slithers like a snake, and from the side, it curls like a question mark.                                         So when I stand infirm, my shoulders slump and my belly protrudes,

                                                          but when I hold straight, my left foot lifts from the floor.

           Thus it freeloads while the right is overburdened, and doubly so, because my knee is long displaced:     three centimeters away, give or take, then the tibia descends diagonal and stabs my poor ankle.

               And all that crooking spreads upward too,                            so my lower teeth cower behind the upper row, which juts,      save the right canine, and those behind, which stand in line to chew,                                                 though when my lips part, they rest two centimeters over where they ought to hang.

My eyes aren't spared either, they're six dioptres off base,          though the right one two more.

      When I rest, it must be on my right, as my neck is unforgiving, and even then, it often grumbles.

                                So do my shoulders, which I need often crack by holding over the head and pulling hard.

                      But the right more often, by work of my crooked spine,

                                                           tilts for when lifting weights, the bar           from the left.                                      Also lay a hand on my shoulders to massage, and I will quickly yell.                                                    They're pretty tense, I think. It goes all the way inside: not long ago, bleeding laid my brain low.

        For some time it even took my tongue, which I've mostly since regained, though I wonder                                               if it will leave me doddering young.

I suppose it could be worse; I don't hurt when sitting, even if too long                                       though I must watch my neck.                                  and when I walk, my right leg doesn't often ache                                                   (it sometimes does)                                                     I cannot much complain,       as a doctor's visit yet awaits,                                       though I wonder if this is just the way things are,

if some such price all proud minds pay.

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his name is Julián Tomás María Rosario del Corazón de Jesús y Escalada Mirón and sometimes i let big spiders walk on him and take photos of them

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what the fuck do you mean this account is 8 years old what

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Worst thing ever is when you enjoy a relationship between two characters in the same way that one might enjoy watching a horror movie but everyone else in the fanbase enjoys it in the way where they’re making cutesy ship art and posts about how perfect they are for each other and how they’d better be ‘endgame’

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Maybe I'm uncultured, but I really do hate it when spellcheck wants to correct "naive" to "naïve". Like ... is there going to be some confusion here? Is this necessary? There aren't two words we're distinguishing between here. In fact, the dictionary gives both spellings, because it knows that we usually drop the diacritics in English, for better or worse.

So yeah, I know that it's "protégé". I know that it's "façade" and "déjà vu" and "jalapeño" but like ... it's English, it's a bastard language that borrows words, we don't do diacritics. Why are we doing them on this vanishingly small subset of words? The average English-speaker doesn't even understand what the diacritical marks even mean.

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⚠️

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The Best Thing I've Ever Seen

Every so often -- which isn't often, but it's often enough -- you come across That Kind of story. The Kind that rips you from all the self-absorption of daily life and demands to be shared. The life-pulse of art palpitating throughout your head! Art must be seen! It must be known!

This is mine. This is the art that's taken root in my neurons now. This is the art that I must demand that you see.

i'm going insane over this give me a moment what comes next are spoilers

It's perfect. It's subtle, it's harrowing, it's disgusting, and worst of all, it's insidiously clever.

The very very opening -- all the environmental symbols here are fascinating. A skull-glass of vodka foreshadows the darker themes to come perfectly. Five thousand Argentine pesos lay unattended and wholly disregarded on the table, subtly establishing the worthlessness of money in the face of human crisis.

Even the lighting. The coldness of the light reflects both the temperature of the Permafrost Pasta and the disposition of our protagonist, distant, regarding his forgotten opus with amused contempt. He is above this. He is merely entertaining the Permafrost Pasta. He flips over the pot and lets out a curious "hmm", as if he was fully expecting the frozen meal within to come lose right onto his carpet.

But oh how quickly it changes. Part 2 welcomes us with a change in temperature, and thus a warming of hues. Our protagonist becomes more down-to-earth. He interacts more directly with the melting dish. He has been shaken from his throne and now regards the Permafrost Pasta with his full attention.

And how little it takes for him to be reduced to raving! Before you know it, he's ranting about the worth of men, forgotten nations, the worth of bravery. He hypes himself up for the task to come -- and finds that he cannot finish it. A taste kills all bravado. It is beyond him. But he is not without wit; grief's many facets pass him by, and he disregards them. Neither him or the Permafrost Pasta will waste any longer in delusion.

The Epilogue is by far the most emotionally affecting sequence. Stove-warm lights cede to the absolute darkness of the world outside in the opening shot, and the true theme of the work finally emerges and bestrides every conceit; family. The impact of our loves ones and how we must love them back.

Because this is Art about Love. About negligence of love, to be precise; the Permafrost Pasta becomes such after months and months of wilful negligence. It bides, and remains inoffensive in appearance, even though our protagonist must have long recognized the true scale of the problem somewhere deep within.

Even though he wastes no time on literally reversing the circumstances (i.e. boiling the Permafrost Pasta), it won't do. The harm's done, the wounds're deep. Neglect already took its toll and this familial link is already rotted (is it any wonder he brings up his mom at the very beginning, for seemingly little reason?). He must do -- and does -- the unthinkable, to sever it and let go. The trash bag that the molten Permafrost Pasta is done away in has the haunting trappings of a body bag.

But our protagonist has learned his lesson. The worth of family, the need to be there, the need to let go. Darkness leaves, and shaky warmth returns to the shot's hues as he makes his way to stability, and the saga ends with a brief glimpse of the pale, cold light of the very beginning. He returns, victorious over grief.

What is most incredible about this project is that in spite of it all, in spite of the depths Man can sink to, it manages to become uplifting.

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chester bennington: sometimes... i need to remember just to breathe...

me who just remembered i need to breathe:

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I think that I'm just very much a philosophical optimist, optimism seems kind of obviously true to me. For all the suffering in the world, most people seem glad to have been born! Most people, when faced with death, wish to keep on living! And not just out of simple fear of the process of dying, you know, most people seem genuinely attached to life! And I am highly inclined to a positive moral framework in which happiness is of greater value than suffering, and furthermore in which the primary issue with suffering is the necessary deprivation of happiness it involves rather than the pain qua pain. And I feel quite positive about desire, and to the Buddha I say: one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens!

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The average tumblr user is ostensibly in favor of multiculturalism and universal tolerance but also has the bone-deep certainty that there is one Correct set of etiquette to follow in all situations and anyone who doesn't understand and accept it should be viciously mocked like the unpopular kids in a 1980s teen comedy.

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idc if it's not a person. if your icon is a sunrise, you're a sunrise now.

poll about swapping with prev's icon here

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2/3

I don't have much to say, I just love how it turned out. ☢️ ♡

There is no data. She is in a very bad mood.

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One of the first actual conversations in English I ever held was over Discord VC. I'd just joined a random channel and started commenting on things that I understood (very few). Wasn't replied to, likely because no one there could understand what I was saying -- until one of them halted the conversation and asked what parsed as "what's your jehnred". I had to ask them to repeat that, and understanding how lost I was they put it a simpler way: "are you a boilgagir". It came to me that they must've been asking where I was from, maybe guessing if I was Bolivian, so I answered "I'm Argentinian." After a brief few moments of silence, the entire VC burst out laughing and quipping and I couldn't understand why -- my GOD, do they hate Argentina or something? How did I fuck up?

The conversation moved on, I didn't really know how to ask what happened there. The exchange stuck in my head for years, until one day, it clicks; the question was "what's your gender". "Are you a boy or a girl."

... honestly my answer was kind of prophetic lol

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.