#I wrote code in rust to generate it

[geobot19]

"Kill them with kindness" Wrong. CURSE OF HONSHU

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“kill them with kindness” Wrong. CURSE OF RA 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆 𓀇 𓀈 𓀉 𓀊 𓀋 𓀌 𓀍 𓀎 𓀏 𓀐 𓀑 𓀒 𓀓 𓀔 𓀕 𓀖 𓀗 𓀘 𓀙 𓀚 𓀛 𓀜 𓀝 𓀞 𓀟 𓀠 𓀡 𓀢 𓀣 𓀤 𓀥 𓀦 𓀧 𓀨 𓀩 𓀪 𓀫 𓀬 𓀭 𓀮 𓀯 𓀰 𓀱 𓀲 𓀳 𓀴 𓀵 𓀶 𓀷 𓀸 𓀹 𓀺 �� 𓀼 𓀽 𓀾 𓀿 𓁀 𓁁 𓁂 𓁃 𓁄 𓁅 𓁆 𓁇 𓁈 𓁉 𓁊 𓁋 𓁌 𓁍 𓁎 𓁏 𓁐 𓁑 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆

[spiritsglade]

18 for rust red, bruised purple, Lazarus green, 19 for redux and 20 for lies of omission+ 50 if you want

[questions for fic writers]

hi nightshadow!! thank you for the ask.

18. If you wrote a sequel to rust red, bruised purple, lazarus green, what would it involve?

ideally i'd rewrite the fic in it's entirety lol. it's a concept i want to expand on someday but it feels very complete? if i were to write a sequel i think i'd do it from dick's perspective, and start it sort of concurrently with lazarus green--following him figuring out that jason is jason, and then catching up with the actual confrontation.

jason himself at this point is... not going to be very open to reconciliation. he just 'revived' his anger in a sense, and the anger itself is a funky little mixture of mostly self-loathing. but dick's the guy in front of him, so dick's the guy he's gonna lash out at.

dick's characterization is relatively fanony in this fic, so i think he'd probably keep trying to reach out, but jason's going to be very resistant about it. potential resolutions:

hurt no comfort, something that escalates to jason shooting dick and telling him to fuck off forever. things never resolve between them and it probably shatters jason's weird unspoken truce with bruce, too. misery all around.

dick manages to get through to him, somehow? forced teamup on an op gone south, something that jars jason into remembering that he actually cares about dick grayson the person (personally i think he does <3 jason views him as his cool infallible brother forever and ever)

something something another fic about the batarang scar. where dick finds out. 100% guaranteed to make things worse in this case, though

in general. lazarus green ends on a 'things are about to get worse/messier' note, so the sequel would reflect that, and i think it'd have to be fairly long to actually reach a more hopeful resolution.

19. If you wrote a spin-off of redux, what would it involve?

long multichapter fic focused on the batfam's grief for jason, their attempts to locate his body, navigating his second death, etc. crime alley's response to his disappearance. i think the penguin actually... did well enough hiding jason that the bats don't know who killed him.

redux is in a weird wfa-adjacent space in terms of what the batfam's relationships are like (as in, i painted them over with a happy everything is fine brush--at worst their disagreements last like, a week,) but i still think jason would operate fairly independently. and so there's guilt, they let him do that.

a couple of people have asked for a fluff comfort follow-up so that's also an option. a sequel of them navigating his apparent ability to spontaneously resurrect after multiple months also? and i think they'd be extremely overbearing/clingy in a way that grates on jason and that could be an interesting mess to explore as well.

many options. redux is one of those fics that make you Think.

(it's also the rare case where i think i'd go with the movie's ending for utrh instead of the comics. jason's overall... mindset is different from the usual. because we're in wfa-land.)

20. If you wrote a prequel to lies of omission, what would it involve?

that period of a year or so after robin #182 (where tim gives jason a jla override code to get out of prison). i think all of this worldbuilding is in the fic already but this is where we have:

jason, essence, isabel, & liam really developing that weird little friendship bond the four of them have going on. and associated untitled hunting.

kyle rayner in his stalking era. jason rebuilding bridges with donna post-'shooting her with bob's gun in a fakeout betrayal' just so they can laugh at him together

jason also returns to gotham intermittently here!! something of a reconciliation with dick. meeting damian. working together.

unfortunately i think it'd end with the suicide mentioned in ch 14 which is.... not a particularly cheery way to go out. alas.

for something shorter, i'd probably just focus on jason's initial return to gotham after the untitled hunting, and realizing dick is being crushed under the weight of the batman mantle and choosing to help out. the dick & jason reconciliation is important to me.

could be a fun little case fic while establishing what those character dynamics are like :] i do like lies of omission's au-verse a lot but i don't have any solid plans to write anything else for it at the moment... there's a half formed concept for a cass-centric sequel but i don't know where i'd actually want to go with that at the moment.

[black-arcana]

IN THIS MOMENT Announces 'The Godmode Tour Part 2', BLABBERMOUTH.NET Presale

IN THIS MOMENT will embark on "The Godmode Tour Part 2" this fall. Support on the trek, which will kick off on November 8 in Asheville, North Carolina and end on December 7 in Manchester, New Hampshire, will come from KIM DRACULA, NATHAN JAMES and MIKE'S DEAD.

A special BLABBERMOUTH.NET presale will begin on Wednesday, August 14 at 2:00 p.m. EDT and end on Thursday, August 15 at 10:00 p.m. local time. When prompted, type in the presale code " ITMBBM24" to access tickets before the general public. Check back here on Wednesday for ticketing links to individual shows. General on-sale will be Friday, August 16 at 10 a.m. local time.

Tour dates:

Nov. 08 - Asheville, NC - Thomas Wolfe Auditorium Nov. 09 - Roanoke, VA - Berglund Center Nov. 11 - Huntsville, AL - Mark C. Smith Concert Hall Nov. 12 - Atlanta, GA - Coca-Cola Roxy Nov. 13 - Orlando, FL - House Of Blues Nov. 15 - Shreveport, LA - Shreveport Municipal Auditorium Nov. 16 - Houston, TX - Bayou Music Center Nov. 17 - Corpus Christi, TX - Concrete Street Pavilion Nov. 19 - Kansas City, MO - The Midland Theatre Nov. 20 - East Moline, IL - The Rust Belt Nov. 22 - Prior Lake, MN - Mystic Lake Casino Showroom * Nov. 23 - Rockford, IL - Hard Rock Live Rockford # Nov. 24 - Milwaukee, WI - The Rave / Eagles Club Nov. 26 - Madison, WI - The Sylvee Nov. 27 - Gary, IN - Hard Rock Live Northern Indiana & Nov. 30 - Columbus, OH - Kemba Live!# Dec. 01 - Windsor, ON - The Colosseum & Dec. 03 - Toronto, ON - History Dec. 05 - Cleveland, OH - The Agora Dec. 06 - Reading, PA - The Santander Arena Dec. 07 - Manchester, NH - SNHU Arena

* KIM DRACULA only # KIM DRACULA, MIKE'S DEAD only & NATHAN JAMES, KIM DRACULA only

IN THIS MOMENT's latest album, "Godmode", arrived back in October via BMG. The LP was produced by Kane Churko (ROB ZOMBIE, DISTURBED, PAPA ROACH) and Tyler Bates. Bates produced, wrote songs for, and played multiple instruments on albums by MARILYN MANSON, BUSH and ALICE IN CHAINS guitarist Jerry Cantrell. He is best known, however, for scoring the box office smash "300", the Emmy Award-winning Showtime series "Californication", the "Guardians Of The Galaxy" and "John Wick" film franchises. IN THIS MOMENT's song "I Would Die For You" appeared on the soundtrack for "John Wick: Chapter 4", for which Bates wrote the score.

With a Grammy nomination ("The In-Between", 2021),platinum and gold record sales, multiple Top 25 entries on the Billboard Top 200 ("Black Widow" and "Ritual"),hits including "Whore", "Blood" and "Adrenalize" and career streams of more than 1.3 billion, you'd think IN THIS MOMENT might rest on their laurels. Instead, they've created "Godmode", 10 dynamic songs that mark a new high for the quintet, further cementing their legacy in the heavy music world. Proof positive is in "Godmode"'s first single, the industrial-heavy yet ultra-melodic "The Purge", and its darkly cinematic video directed by Jensen Noen (BRING ME THE HORIZON, DEMI LOVATO). From the portentous start of the '90s-tinged "Godmode" with Maria Brink's powerful primal scream to the pitch-perfect cover of Bjork's 1995 "Army Of Me" to the impassioned pain to partnership in "Everything Starts And Ends With You", "Godmode" is a cut above.

The L.A.-based band's eighth album finds vocalist Maria Brink and guitarist Chris Howorth writing the most powerful songs of their career.

"We're always striving for reinvention and growth. It's been 10 years since our 'Blood' album, and there's been a lot of transitions happening, this year particularly, but it all felt so meant to be," explains Brink. Top talent aided and abetted IN THIS MOMENT; Spencer Charnas from ICE NINE KILLS guests on the pointed and pained "Damaged", and several songs were co-written with Tyler Bates, the award-winning producer and composer of numerous film, television, and video game scores. In fact, the initial collaboration with Bates, the moody, haunting mid-tempo winner "I Would Die For You" ended up both on the "John Wick: Chapter 4" soundtrack and as the last cut on "Godmode".

IN THIS MOMENT, a touring juggernaut who've slayed stages worldwide at Ozzfest, Warped Tour, Download, Knotfest and Rocklahoma, put out "Mother" in 2020, during the pandemic, giving fans something to hold on in during that bleak time, and earning "The In-Between" the band's first Grammy nod. It was 2021 when Howorth and Brink first wrote with Bates on "I Would Die For You". Following that collaboration, the duo were writing organically, for pleasure, not focused on the next album. As the pandemic waxed and waned, Howorth learned programming, and created music around synthwave sounds, which Brink leaned into. Her lyrical ideas arose both from soul-searching and "humanity and so much crisis and so many heart-wrenching things in the world. That negativity and darkness is how songs like 'The Purge' came about," Brink explains.

The end result is that when IN THIS MOMENT went into the studio in January 2023, the easy flow had allowed them to compile the most songs they'd ever written at one time, songs the entire band loved. Longtime producer Kevin Churko helped shape ITM's sound starting in 2008, but for "Godmode", his son, Kane Churko, was at the helm.

"Kane's got all the strengths that his father taught him —everything, all the bells and whistles, but he's got some new tricks because he's a younger generation, he's hungry," says Brink.

Kane was the perfect match for IN THIS MOMENT's inspired songs.

"During the pandemic, just writing versus writing with a pressure that music has to be for an album, allowed us the freedom to make the record we made," says Howorth. "Godmode"'s songs gained even more strength in the studio, with Kane shaking up the band's usual m.o. even further.

"Having some songs by Tyler influenced us as well," Brink explains. "It was scary for the band, but it ended up flowing just so beautifully. We felt very experimental."

That flow gave the album its name and theme. "Godmode" isn't religious, rather it's an expression for a triumphant flow state where all comes together seamlessly, coalescing into an ultimate form. As Brink sings in "Godmode", "You got me feeling so high / You lift me off of my feet yeah / You got me feeling like, feeling like / I'm in Godmode." In video games — Howorth plays the game "Destiny" — "God mode" also refers to a code that makes a player invincible.

"There's a spontaneity in this album that you can hear. It's a little more visceral. And that we're not with Kevin, who has done all our albums except for our very first, fans will hear those differences too, which is really cool and exciting for us," Howorth says.

"We had all this built-up energy from the last three years, we felt angst, we felt we had a lot to release," furthers Brink. "And we were letting it loose organically, while also playing with different time signatures and interesting things like that." "We use an 8-string on the album, which we haven't done before," Howorth says. "We did some different tunings, and it can definitely be freeing from guitar standpoint, the way we did things this time. Working with Kane was different and more off the cuff, being in the studio, getting creative and just trying a bunch of different stuff on every song. It was a really good experience."

As fans of Brink's lyrics know, life in and around IN THIS MOMENT hasn't always been easy. As Brink recalls, "When I met Chris, I was just a starry-eyed girl with huge dreams. And he was in a PANTERA-like metal band!" She told Howorth she wanted a heavy lineup that could sell platinum and win Grammys. The band had an early manager who told them it would never happen. But his dismissiveness only fueled IN THIS MOMENT's fire, energy and fight. "We're just relentless," says Brink. "Anything's possible if you really put your mind and energy into it."

For "Godmode", that energy also went into the "The Purge" video, where director Noen brought his artistry and next-level talent to Brink's storyboard ideas. The larger-than-life video themes and sets have been translated into IN THIS MOMENT's live stage show, literally. And summer 2023 saw the band on its first arena co-headlining tour with full pyrotechnics.

"Our whole lives we've talked about being in an arena and having fire and a full show," Brink says. "And now we're doing it and it's just so beautiful."

IN THIS MOMENT certainly have nothing to prove, the lineup's authority assured live on record and onscreen. Yet, "Godmode"'s energy and scope is visceral.

"With our new ideas and excitement and Kane's energy of wanting to prove himself to everybody, we were able to show that we're heavy and just as impactful as every other new band coming out right now," says Howorth. "We can punch you right in the face, that energy is in there big, time. I think our fans are really gonna like this album, because it's taken us back a little bit where it began, but it's also more instinctive, and heavier than anything we've done a long time," concludes Howorth.

Brink, a private person, nonetheless gives and takes much strength from ITM's millions of fans. The healing is on both sides.

"It's amazing if my songs help people feel empowered. When humans share painful things that we went through and how we heal from it, we can help each other and pass that energy on," she says. "Honestly, the most beautiful thing about being in a band is being able to have that connection with strangers who become kindred spirits. Sure, I have urges to wear 'masks' and hide from everything and wear makeup, but I like to share and be honest and vulnerable. The sky's the limit," Brink concludes. "You just have to keep dreaming, keep expanding, keep pushing yourself to that next level. I feel like something is shifting right now in the band; this is such a special moment for us with 'Godmode'."

Photo credit: Joe Cotela

[quietmarie]

What am I working on right now?

I realise I haven't really listed what I am doing and have been doing in terms of projects on Tumblr so far, so in case you're curious what I'm doing, here you go. With images and all this is gonna be quite lengthy, so have a look under the cut:

First of all, Job and Uni:

At the start of the month, the new uni semester begun, and I also got a job in programming! Uni courses are pretty chill this year, and I'm at the job two days a week. It's really nice so far, and it involves developing algorithms used for CAM and CNC-machines.

As a uni project I did..

A physics engine for Godot:

Godot is a game engine. As part of an uni course, two fellow students and I wrote the mathsy bulk of a physics engine for it. This includes stuff like collision handling and various joints (like hinge joints you'd use for a physics-based door etc.), but because of time constraints doesn't include collision detection, which is handled by Bullet. Outside of the planned curriculum, I also derived the equations for and implemented rope joints, which simulate, well, ropes.

And currently, outside of uni, I still want to work on the engine by implementing..

Portals:

Yea I want to implement portals using the custom physics engine we built. But not just portals as Valve did them, that would be too easy. I want them to be able to move and interact with other objects while remaining physically accurate (or, as physically accurate as they can be considering they're portals). The current state of things:

The dream is to be able to build gorgeous architecture, like, I'm thinking buildings resting on top of pillars that are always moving. If I can get this to work I really ought to discuss the vision with some artists and creative folk in general, because I feel like there's so much unexplored creativity in art with portals. But yeah, there's still a lot of very intimidating maths/physics until I get there.

As for other private/free-time projects..

SSBToni:

SSBToni is probably my most ambitious project yet. Toni is a Discord bot for the competitive Super Smash Bros. community (currently in 1.9k servers wowee). Her main selling point is the ability to show frame data and hitbox gifs, but she can also do some other stuff like guide you through a full match of Smash Bros. according to a range of competitive rulesets, from rock-paper-scissors through stage bans all the way to game reporting. She's written in Java with JDA, and her code is hosted here.

I want to do ranked matchmaking and Smash profile images later on, so I have to do some web backend work. The bulk of that is private still, but some of that spun off into separate projects which are..

instant-glicko-2:

The Glicko-2 rating system is great, but it has some issues if you want to use it for real-time ratings/rankings. This Rust library aims to solve these issues to allow for good real-time rankings that are still accurate to the Glicko-2 system. I wrote about how I achieve that here, and the code is hosted here. Note that I do want to change some stuff still which I don't mention in the article I wrote, and in the current form it is probably not production-ready.

cache-compute:

In all honesty, maybe my proudest public thing yet, and it's a single-file ~500 line Rust crate. Based on this blogpost by fasterthanlime, the library makes caching for async stuff much easier, which is gonna be extremely useful in web backend stuff. If a resource isn't available locally (cached), you might have to spend some time making a request to get it from elsewhere to cache it. This library makes sure you only make that request once when you need it, and sorts everything out so that everyone waiting on the resource gets a copy the moment it arrives.

Part of why I'm so proud of this is that, for one, I consider the core finished and very much usable, and secondly, because I wrote so many and such long and exhaustive tests for it, just to hopefully be able to catch any weirdness that comes up. Because writing this kind of concurrent code is hard.

And that's it for projects I would want to show off and write about.

There are of course always ideas in my idea list (currently four or five good ones I'm not working on), maybe I'll post about those too sometime. If you're curious or starved for ideas feel free to ask about them too, I don't think I'll be able to do all of them and the list is only growing larger.

[utilitymonstermash]

I think I see, you now want to operate on Selectables. I think you are right that Rob Pike doesn't want you to write this, and rightly annoyed that Rob's explanation of this is both condescending and full of a bunch of pseudo-deep koans.

But given what Go is I don't think Rob is entirely wrong and I think there is value in the go style here (or at least value in Go embracing a single style here). I think the Go answer here is to write for loops and arrange them by hand, and if you need a real data pipeline use concurrency primitives like channels.

I don't have much C# experience, but I've always found imperative loops more straight forward to write, modify, and debug than the chained functional monstrosities I run into in say Rust, especially when they pop-in in other wise imperative code flow.

Go leans into duck-typed interfaces and simple value type adapters for code reuse, which I think sometimes people coming from Java and C++ (and I'd guess C#) have the wrong instincts around.

Practically speaking in five years of daily Go (in the pre-generics era), beyond the builtin maps, slices, arrays, and channels, I found myself reaching for the following containers:

Concurrency safe ring buffer

Heap & Priority Queue

Total payload size limited (not item count limited) FIFO

For limited FIFOs I mostly wrote the limiting code by hand wrapping a channel or a slice or a ring buffer, (and any associated locking if I needed them to be concurrent).

For heaps, priority queues, and ring buffers I mostly used library code that erased types and either wrapped it myself with a hand written facade or just yoloed type assertions at the call sites.

EDIT: And I think Go's current generics handles that problem well.

I have been trying, in Go, to create a library somewhere halfway between C# LINQ and C++ <algorithm> because LINQ and <algorithm> are fucking astounding and Go doesn't have either.

And Jesus but in doing this, I have learned why Go has neither. This is not a language that respects library developers. Like... At all.

You can do this if you are willing to eat an absolutely terrible runtime performance cost by using reflection everywhere* but in fact I am not.

But in C#, when I'd do something like

List<T> tlist = getList(); List<U> ulist = list.Select(fromTtoU)ToList();

that is just straight up impossible in Go without reflection.

Because Go doesn't have generic methods.

You cannot do

class List&lt;T>{ List&lt;U>Select(); } because here, LIST is only generic on <T>, not <U>. To have Select return a list of U, you would need your list to be generic on <T,U>

That is, the list creator would have to know, creating the list, what kind of selection you would later want to do on it.

Fucking insane.

*risking, also, any number of runtime panics because you won't know if a selection lambda actually, you know, selects, without running the program)

(continued in next post)

[enigmalea]

Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

[hizashis-lil-bunbun]

Like a Moth to a Flame- Pt. 2

It’s been way too long since I’ve been motivated to work on this piece. But at last… at long last… part two is ready for takeoff! Once again I thank/blame @miscellaneous-bnha for inspiring this piece of monster fuckery (even though there’s no fuckery in this story… yet).

Enjoy!

Part 1

•••••

You become more distracted and nervous than usual over the next week or so. The slightest sound nearly makes you jump out of your skin and you keep making careless mistakes at work. Even your boss checks in with you to make sure you aren’t sick or losing your grip on reality. You assure him everything is fine and blame your poor performance and skittish nature on a made-up relative’s failing health. In truth, you can’t go for more than a few minutes without thinking about the blonde beast, his beautiful yet terrifying presence seeming to loom over you wherever you go. But you don’t dare tell any of your friends or coworkers about what you saw.

Who would believe you? At best, they’d think you were telling a bad joke and at worst they’d try to cart you off to the nearest mental hospital. So you keep your thoughts private, suffering in silence and staying up late to research who or what you saw that night.

And it's during one of your late-night Internet searches that you stumble across a forum dedicated to winged, humanoid creatures known as “mothmen.” 

While the stories mainly originate from the Eastern United States, there have also been purported sightings as far as Japan. And though details may have varied slightly, the key features of the monsters always remain the same: massive height, glowing eyes, and of course the moth-like wings. You’d spent hours poring over your laptop that night, reading the information and accounts posted by other “mothman survivors.” Some stories were rather nice. One woman claimed the mothman she encountered was gentle, bordering on intelligent. She wrote about the gifts and trinkets it brought from time to time and it’s attempts at communication. But the majority were horrifying, with several people posting tales of the beasts attacking without provocation, leaving them injured and afraid. Someone even posted a picture of the deeply scarred claw marks on his chest and arms, claiming them to be the work of a particularly savage mothman. Regardless of their validity, one thing was for sure: the mothmen were unpredictable.

By the end of the second week, you’ve grown so desperate to stop the near constant waking nightmares that you decide to take a proactive approach to the matter. It’s a simple plan: set a trap, wait for the monster to reappear, and collect photo evidence. Even if it’s only to soothe your own self-doubts, you need to have definitive proof of its– of his existence.

On Friday night, you come home late from work, so late the sun has just barely set over the horizon. After a hot shower and a quick meal of instant noodles, you grab a shallow bowl from the cupboard and fill it with lukewarm water. One of the contributors to the website claimed that mothmen like sugar water, much like the insects they resemble. Another had proposed they might even enjoy the taste of cloth or fiber, but you weren’t about to sacrifice one of your favorite sweaters on a wild hunch.

You spoon in a generous amount of sugar into the bowl, mixing well to create a saccharine slurry before heading for the farthest living room window. Unlike the one you’d spotted the mothman from, this one is partially obscured by a rickety fire escape, the metal encrusted with decades worth of rust and snaking up the side of the building. Opening the window and leaning out of it, you place the dish of bait on one of the steps before hauling yourself back inside. You shut the window and settle yourself on the couch, a blanket and book in your lap and your phone’s camera at the ready. Hours tick by, the waning moon slowly creeping by in the night sky as you hold your silent vigil. As you wait in suffocating silence, you start to feel foolish and begin to think your “mothman” might have been nothing more than a product of an overactive imagination and one too many late nights in the office. Even with all your research, all you had to go by was a few wild stories posted by Internet strangers and a missing frying pan. You finally nod off around two in the morning, unable to keep your heavy eyelids open.

•••

WHAM!

A noise from outside jolts you awake from your spot on the couch, followed by the sound of creaking, groaning metal. The whole apartment seems to shake and an unearthly screech accompanies the final creak as you hear the fire escape give way before clattering into the alleyway. Other tenants on all floors start opening their windows and doors, shouting and swearing about the noise and the landlord “not keeping this shithole up to code.” It’s utter chaos for a few minutes and then silence falls once more, your neighbors still grumbling as they retreat back into their homes. You scramble off the couch and to the window, gazing into the alley for any sign of life. The moon isn’t as bright as last time, but you can just barely make out the mangled remains of the fire escape and the faintest glimpse of gold. Throwing caution to the wind, you grab a well-worn hoodie, your phone, and the kitchen knife. You make your way down the three flights of stairs to the alley door, opening it cautiously should you encounter an angry cryptid on the other side. But there’s no one there, so you take a deep breath and head out into the apocalyptic looking alley. Metal is strewn everywhere, with part of the railing still clinging to the side of the building like a deranged centipede. Snapped metal bars jut out at odd angles, creating a maze of twisted, rusty spikes and sharp edges. You slowly pick your way over and around the wreckage, using your phone’s flashlight as a guide so you don’t end up tripping and accidentally impaling yourself.

“Hello?” You call into the darkness, “Mothman? A-are you there?”

Your call is rewarded with a shuddering groan and the sounds of scraping metal. You shine your light on the biggest tangle of steel, watching as something large moves underneath it. The pile of metal shifts upwards and falls away, while a large, dark figure rises from the shadows. They’re silhouetted against the dim moonlight but just as intimidating as before, hunching over as the appendages on their back shake and rustle. You turn the flashlight on and find yourself looking into a familiar pair of glassy, blue eyes. The mothman stares back at you, folding his wings against his back and cocking his handsome head from side to side.

“You- you’re real.” You breathe, feeling your heart jump into your throat as you surreptitiously pull up your phone’s camera. The monster chitters in response as he sniffs at the air, stepping over a piece of rusted debris to get closer to you. You quickly snap and picture... and the alley is suddenly lit up with blinding light.

You’d forgotten to turn off the flash!

The mothman blinks in response and lets out a groan, shaking his head and squeezing his eyes shut. You drop your phone and crouch down, knife forgotten as you cover your head with your hands and prepare for him to lash out. But no claws come to tear at your flesh nor are there any angry roars or shrieks. Instead the beast starts to emit low, rumbling noise, like a growl but far less sinister. You hear metal being dragged across the concrete followed by the sound of heavy footfalls. You cautiously open one eye to see a pair of clawed feet and muscular calves, only to squeak in alarm when his face abruptly appears in your field of vision. You fall backwards in surprise, landing heavily on your rump while the mothman squats mere inches from you. His eyes are fixed on the ground, gently running his nails over the now cracked screen of your upturned phone. Even in the dim lighting you can see his curious, wide-eyed expression and it suddenly dawns on you what that noise he’s making is: he’s purring. Or near enough to it.

“W-What do you want?”

The monster looks up when you speak, cocking his head slightly before turning back to paw at the phone once more. He’s more insistent this time, his swipes becoming bolder as the phone scratches across the concrete. He gives the device a few well-placed taps before making eye contact once more, his brow furrowed as he briefly switches from purring to a chittering cry. With a gulp, you gingerly set down the blade, reach across your body and flip the phone over, the still lit flashlight illuminating the alley once more. The beast’s eye’s blow even wider, enchanted by the light shining upwards into the starry sky. You sit in silence for a few seconds, the only sounds are your heavy breathing and the guttural purrs coming from the mesmerized mothman. As your heart rate slows, you begin to notice more intimate details about the creature before you.

For one, his wings are covered in the same fur that rings his neck and, though it’s shorter and more fine, they look just as soft.

Second, he’s incredibly warm. A steady heat rolls off his body in waves that seem a stark contrast to what one might expect from a bug-centric cryptid.

But most noticeable of all is his smell.

It’s not a bad smell by any means; in fact, it’s downright pleasant. The odor is a cross between lemonade and petrichor, a soothing blend of sweet citrus and earthy musk. You find yourself unconsciously breathing more through your nose, feeling lightheaded as his scent floods your senses and making you relax into the cold pavement. As your eyes lazily drift over his naked form you see he’s holding something in his other hand, protectively clutching it against his chest. You tilt your head to get a better view, the subtle movement getting the monster’s attention and causing him to drag his eyes away from the light and focus on you again.

“What’s that?” You ask softly, almost dreamily, and point to his chest. The mothman’s eyes follow your finger down to his right hand, pulling it away to reveal your (still remarkably intact) bowl. It’s largely empty of its contents, but some of the sugar water has stuck to his fur and cooled into sweet, matted clumps. He squeaks at the sight of it, almost like he’d forgotten about the bait and dives into it to eagerly lap at the ceramic bottom. When it fails to yield anything substantial he huffs and turns his attention to his dirtied mane. He dips his head as a long, pink tongue slithers out of his mouth and curls around the largest tangle, laving over the sugar-crusted mat before quickly retreating. He chitters in satisfaction at the taste, barely glancing up at you before diving back down for more.

“So you do like sugar.” You mutter under your breath, a small chuckle bubbling up in your chest on the exhale. The mothman pays you no mind, too engrossed in his work to notice how you shift your body into a more comfortable sitting position to watch. After a few minutes, the creature stops licking at himself and looks back up at you, eyes still wide and expression almost curious as he cocks his head to the side once more. Tentatively shifting his weight forward, he extends the empty bowl to you.

“I don’t have any more.” You whisper softly, confused yet intrigued by his gentle actions. The mothman grunts and takes another shuffling step, hand still outstretched and his brow softly furrowing. He seems insistent, almost annoyed that you won’t accept his generous offer. Not wanting to anger him, you gingerly extend your own right hand, pinching the rim of the bowl between thumb and forefinger before carefully pulling it from his grip. Holding the bowl against your own chest, you take a stab at what he wants from you and raise the ceramic dish to your lips to give a noisy, pretend slurp. You feel like an adult humoring a child in a game of “tea party,” offering him a cheesy smile and an “mmm” of satisfaction as you pull the empty bowl away from your face. The creature’s own face splits in a too-wide grin, wings flapping excitedly and chittering happily at your display. A quiet gasp is ripped from you throat as you finally get a good look at his teeth.

They’re practically perfect; two rows of pearly white, blunted incisors frames by sharpened, too-long canines on either end. And the smile he’s giving you is nothing short of exuberant, beaming like a drop of sunshine made incarnate. You find yourself returning his smile with a genuine one of your own, amazingly unafraid in the face of this otherwise inhuman beast. But your relief is short-lived as the monster suddenly shifts onto his knees and bounds towards you on all fours.

“Woah, woah, woah!” You squeak, scrabbling backwards and nearly skewering yourself on a jagged piece of wreckage in an attempt to get away. “Take it easy! Down, boy!”

The mothman stops with his face mere inches from yours, clawed hands planted on either side of your hips and still grinning from ear to ear. Carefully, he lowers his golden head to rest against your left shoulder, nuzzling into the sensitive flesh and purring softly in your ear. It’s an act of unbelievable tenderness, of affection, and it stirs something deep within your jackhammering heart. Moving slowly so as to not startle him, you relinquish your hold on the empty bowl and raise your right hand to his head, gently placing it against his temple. At the feeling of your fingers in his hair, the creature freezes for a second and you suck in a quick breath, prepared to pay the price for your boldness. But simply leans further into your touch, closing his eyes contentedly and pushing against your palm like an obedient pet as his purring reaches a fever pitch.

“Good… good boy.” You exhale slowly, thumb brushing across the apple of his surprisingly warm cheek. “That’s a good boy.”

You stay locked together for what feels like ages, the only sounds your own heavy breathing and the monster’s soft purrs of pleasure as you stroke him. Finally you finds your voice again and you softly stammer out, “Do you– do you have a name?”

His eyes open slightly at your question, briefly raising his head with a small chirp. Removing your hand from his face, you splay your palm across your chest and give it two quick pats.

“Y/N.” You say slowly, enunciating each syllable, “I’m Y/N.”

The creature cocks his head for a second and pulls away from you to get into a kneeling position. You pat your chest and repeat yourself once more. The mothman then takes one of his own massive paws and places it on his own chest, mirroring your movements.

“M-Mir…” He chokes out, voice raspy but surprisingly human, like he hasn’t used it in a long time. “Mir… io. Mirio.”

“Mirio?”

Hearing his name fall from your lips elicits another bright smile from the mothman, wings giving a single flap as he curls his hand into a fist atop his sternum.

“Mirio!” He says more boldly, giving his chest two hearty thumps for emphasis.

“Mirio.” You repeat softly, “That’s a nice name.”

His eyes soften at your words, almost as if he understood the compliment. He opens his mouth once more, but before he can speak, a new voice cuts through the night air.

“Hey! What’s going on over there?”

You whip your head towards the source of the noise, moments before you feel a rush of cold air accompanied by a sharp hiss. Someone is picking their way through the wreckage to your location, their own flashlight sweeping over the heaps of rusted metal until it lands on your startled face. Squinting into the light, you can barely make out the silhouette of a man and you feel a bolt of panic shoot through you. You turn back to face Mirio only to find him gone.

“Mirio?” You speak into the darkness, as if uttering the word might make him reappear. But there’s only empty space and silence, punctuated by the heavy footfalls of the stranger coming ever closer to you. It’s only when he’s within a few feet that you can make out the telltale flash of gold on his chest: an officer’s badge.

“Are you alright?” The man asks of you, still shining the flashlight directly into your face. “Are you hurt?”

“Huh? Oh! Yes. I’m fine, sir.”

“Are you sure?” The officer asks quizzically, extending a hand for you to take. You graciously accept his offer, retrieving the forgotten bowl and phone from the concrete with your free hand before hauling yourself back onto your feet.

“Y-yes I’m sure.” You stammer out, “I just, uh… I heard a noise outside my apartment and came to investigate.”

“Awfully late to be investigating strange noises in an alley.” He says incredulously, cocking one eyebrow and shining his light over the ruined fire escape at his feet for emphasis. “Especially in this part of town.”

His light catches on something glinting at your feet and your eyes follow it to land on the forgotten kitchen knife on the ground. His own eyes snap back to you and narrow suspiciously, free hand slowly moving towards the holster resting against his hip.

“Are you alone out here?”

“Yes, sir!” You squeak back automatically, “I swear it’s just me. I live in this apartment complex.”

You gesture to the brick-fronted side of the building to your right as proof of your innocence, praying to all the powers that be that he buys your story. The officer narrows his eyes at you, muttering a quiet, “Huh. Could’ve sworn I saw someone…” before clearing his throat and straightening his posture.

“Well in any case, you should probably head inside now, miss. There have been reports of criminal activity in the area as of late and I wouldn’t want you getting hurt. What with all this rusty metal lying around.”

“Yeah, no use getting a tetanus shot over nothing!” You say jokingly, giving a nervous chuckle as the officer nods solemnly. You don’t dare go to pick up the knife, deciding it’s better to lose another kitchen utensil than land yourself in any more hot water. With a few more parting words, and a declined offer to let him walk you back home, you quickly skirt around the remains of the fire escape and into the safety of the stairwell door. Your mind and heart are racing as you plod up the stairs to the third floor, buzzing with questions without answers as you finally enter and lock the door to your one-bedroom sanctuary. Exhaling a breath you don’t know you were holding, you walk silent over to the living room windows and cast a final glance into the alleyway below. You can see the officer’s flashlight bobbing along as he makes his way around the scattered remains of the fire escape, only to switch off once he reaches the end of the alleyway and resumes his patrol of the neighborhood. But you still wait by the window for a few more minutes, wondering (and perhaps hoping) if you’d catch a final glimpse of flaxen hair or hear the steady beat of wings.

Silence reigns above all, the soft glow of the moon your only companion now.

With a heavy sigh, you peel your eyes away from the wreckage and plod off to your bedroom, stripping off your hoodie and sweatpants as you go. Curling up under the covers, you grab the pillow closest to you and hug it to your chest. If you close your eyes, you can almost believe you can still feel the warmth of his face on your neck, or smell the aroma of him lingering on your skin.

“I hope you’re alright… Mirio.”

[claptraprights]

your name is claptraprights but you barely post claptrap. absolute nonsense, I came here for the cwapylap and you lied to me. give more robot son or else.

Or else 🔫 This is fair; I neglected my poor robo boy ::((

Which is shameful not for me as a Claptrap stan but also for me as a robot stan.  But the thing is – that I dare postulate: Claptrap is one of the best and most complex characters in Borderlands. But people don’t really see it because he’s…apparently cheerful (which he isn’t because he’s just programmed to sound that way by Hyperion)  

Honestly, I feel like they really wrote themselves into a corner with him though because they are so desperate to show us how aware they are of Claptrap being a cartoon-y character that they have to reinforce it at every corner and it undercuts any real storyline or development: It requires for all his endeavours to fail and for all other characters to reject him based on his personality alone – which again, is a stretch, bc he isn’t that annoying (you tell me that the same people who perceive Mr. Togue as a perfectly normal guy think Claptrap is difficult to be around??) and often the reactions to him are out of character. 

Which is sad bc…the truth of the matter is that humans are incredibly unfair to him (and robots in general in the borderlands-universe): Claptrap was created to open doors! Fucking! Doors! That’s…a super-simple task for a dumb little robot to do. And everyone is expecting him to do all kinds of things that he isn’t programmed for. It’s like asking a toaster to be a rocket-scientist. And he still does his best to help them at every corner no matter how badly they treat him because they are his only friends and the only people outside Hyperion he knew (except for Captain Flynt who ended up torturing). For example, first time we arrive in Liar’s Berg, Hammerlock electrocutes Claptrap to avoid talking to him – and a few seconds later Claptrap makes a kinda rude comment about Hammerlock - who has the nerve to act like he’s the one who got wronged: “I am right here, ‘dude’” – My man, you don’t really have the moral high-ground here. Claptrap is one of the few characters who don’t kill you for so much as looking at him the wrong way and people should really learn to appreciate it. (Dare I say? Anti-robotic sentiment)

Plus, here’s the reminder that Claptrap thought of Jack as his parental figure and not only was he manipulated, re-programmed, abused (sounds familiar?) – Jack actually ended up committing robo-cide against his entire product-line to the point that when we meet Claptrap at the Southern Shelf, he has dead Claptraps propped up in his living space playing cards to feel like he has company of his own kind - because even the humans who are not affiliated with Jack treat him like garbage. One of the central motivations of Claptrap is to fight back against his loneliness and being the only one of his kind and he’s surrounded by computer-geniuses and engineers that he did so much for – can it be that hard to clone or re-discover the Claptrap code and make a new one??  

It’s honestly why I feel like Claptastic Voyage is one of the best DLCs because it really did some deep digging on Claptrap’s personality:

Claptrap's Consciousness: Ohhh! I almost remembered the thing I need to tell you about 5H4D0W-TP!

Athena (if present): Dammit! What KIND of thing? Wilhelm (if present): Like what? C'mon, rust bucket! Nisha (if present): Would a few bullets jog that janky memory? Claptrap (if present): Is this what it's like talking to ME? Timothy (if present): Oh that sounds super interesting, why don't you get back to me when... oh you know what? In fact, don't. Don't ever get back to me! Aurelia (if present): Well then, perhaps consider saying nothing at all.

Claptrap's Consciousness: No, I've definitely forgotten. Oh! ...No, it's gone again.

Athena (if present): CLAPTRAP! Wilhelm (if present): SHUT UP! Nisha (if present): SHUT THE HELL UP! Claptrap (if present): WILL YOU SHUT UP! Timothy (if present): SHUT UP! Aurelia (if present): WILL YOU PLEASE DESIST?!

Claptrap's Consciousness: WHY are you ALWAYS so mean to me? EVERYONE is ALWAYS SO MEAN! All I've ever done is try to help! I know I mess up, and I'm 10 to the power of 100 of SORRY about it -- but if you can't see that, and can't take my good intentions for what they are, then maybe you don't deserve anything good to ever happen to you! In fact, I'M OUTTA HERE! Ah. I can't leave -- I live here. But I CAN leave you!

Athena (if present): Claptrap... I'm sorry. Wilhelm (if present): That got weird. Nisha (if present): Whatevs. Claptrap (if present): Was that his fault or mine? This place is so confusing. Timothy (if present): Am I supposed to break character now? I'm so confused. Aurelia (if present): I'm mortified. Sorry.

to make up for my debt to my poor kid, here are some Claptrap headcanons:

-          In a way, he’s stuck in the same vicious circle that many children are in school who have a reputation as ‘bad students’ or ‘troublemakers’: He is so convinced that he cannot do right and will never be appreciated that he doesn’t really try anymore. Because if he tries his best and fails, it always hurts worse when other people mock or insult him than if he didn’t. It’s a kind of learnt helplessness.

-          Nevertheless, he tries to learn new things to disappoint his friends less…but he’s just not good at it and he feels like if they know he’s trying and failing, it would be worse for him than if they thought that he just doesn’t care so…

-          Joke’s on Tannis: Claptrap is still keeping his Kevins. Fl4k knew which planet they’re from and told Claptrap and now Clappy can fast-travel there and spend time with them. He’s still grieving for the original Kevin though.

-          He’s still friends with Ava. At this point she knows that most of the stuff she thought she knew about him before she came to Sanctuary is actually kinda made up and embellished. But he’s a good friend and doesn’t for a moment blame her for Maya’s death. Plus, unlike the others she doesn’t really have any experience with Claptraps at all and just likes being around someone who is hurting but still knows how to see things in a positive way and is really excited about spending time with her without making rules or anything. And he’s a great source for Vault Hunter stories!

-          This isn’t really a headcanon bc it’s at least implied - but Shadowtrap is still alive somewhere in him  (in Voyage, he seems to be the reason Claptrap survived Jack destroying the Claptraps) and every time someone mistreats Claptrap, he’s getting a little bit stronger.

-          Angel actually looked out for him in her own way. She likes him and she relates to him, in a way. In the first Borderlands, she describes him as a ‘cute little robot’ and The Pre-Sequel, when Jack is about to scrap his entire plan to reprogram Claptrap (which likely would have meant destroying Claptrap who already thought of Jack as his parent), she’s canonically the one who conceives a plan how he could still work as a Vault Hunters and I chose to interpret this as: She could relate to his situation and didn’t want him to die so she made this whole Vault Hunter.exe thing work somehow. She might even be the reason Shadowtrap could help Claptrap survive the H-Source despite being Hyperion-code himself.

-           Athena actually had plans to take him with her once she left after the events of Claptastic Voyage but obviously, it was too late then and she didn’t see him when she was brought to Sanctuary so she still doesn’t know he’s alive.

[szhmidty]

RE: @argumate​‘s post here

(it's very long already and this is a side tangent anyway,  so I don't want to add to it directly)

Thompson and his colleagues showed that they could get a computationally intensive calculation to run some 47 times faster just by switching from Python, a popular general-purpose programming language, to the more efficient C. That’s because C, while it requires more work from the programmer, greatly reduces the required number of operations, making a program run much faster. Further tailoring the code to take full advantage of a chip with 18 processing cores sped things up even more. In just 0.41 seconds, the researchers got a result that took seven hours with Python code.

I don't have access to the article so I can't track down exactly what code was being run for this test, but whenever I hear someone say they wrote C code that's 10000 times faster than the equivalent python code, my first thought is that they're a bad python programmer. I mean for one thing python has it's own parallel computing module, it's not python's fault you're not using it.

If you look at the bench mark game, people write code to solve various problems in various languages to test which languages are the fastest. The fastest for each problem is almost always C/C++ or Rust, low-ish level compiled languages. A lot of that is that C is genuinely much faster than other languages, and especially faster than python. But a lot of the gap in the results is due to the rules of the game hamstringing higher level languages. For example, look at the N body problem:

We ask that contributed programs not only give the correct result, but also use the same algorithm to calculate that result.

Each program should:

use the same simple symplectic-integrator - see the Java program.

To submit a solution, you need to write an algorithm functionally identical to the sample solution. This means, in many cases, never using libraries or even many built in functions. So the main loop looks like this:

Using this method, it takes python about 9 minutes while it takes C 2.2 seconds. Here's the thing though: no half way competent programmer is going to write like this. This is an integration problem, they're going to import numpy or scipy and use whatever integration tool is available. Now of course that's cheating, that tool is written and compiled in C, so you're not really measuring python's speed, but how fast python can call a pre-existing C function.

And in the spirit of the game, I agree, that's cheating. But in the spirit of getting my code to run in under 10 seconds?

If you come to me complaining that your python code takes 7 hours to run, my 1st thought is always going to be that you tried writing python like a low level compiled language.

I've seen people do the equivalent in Matlab too. I had an advisor complain about his program that took several hours to run, that he eventually got down to ~20 minutes with parallelization and being more choosy about how much data he processed. The actual problem was that he wrote it like a C program, with loops within loops within loops doing trivial calculations. With some restructuring to take advantage of Matlab’s built in tools, we got it down to under 10 seconds, roughly 500 times faster IIRC, without needing to leave basic matlab at all.

It would still almost definitely be faster if we went back and rewrote it in pure C, but at <10 seconds for, at minimum, several dozen billion float operations, we’re starting to approach the hardware’s limitations.

[a-coda]

Advent of Code

As a child, advent calendars always added to the sense of anticipation in the lead up to Christmas. In my day you would be lucky to get a small picture behind each of the doors. These days, children expect chocolates or sweets. My wife has once even had a "Ginvent Calendar", with gin behind each door.

This year I marked Advent by having a go at the "Advent of Code" which has Christmas-themed programming puzzles posted each day. Most days are in two parts, with an easier puzzle followed by a harder one. Traditionally, I've posted a (mostly ignored) programming puzzle to our development team each Christmas. Last year I just recycled one of the Advent of Code puzzles, but this year I suggested we attempt the whole thing. The puzzles are so well thought out, in comparison to my efforts, that it seemed pointless to compete.

In the end, several of the team had a go. Some of the puzzles were harder than others, but I managed to solve them all by Boxing Day. What follows are some personal anecdotes from the various days with some general thoughts at the end. Note that there are some spoilers and the notes won't mean much if you've not done the puzzles. So in this case just skip to the end.

a sum-finder. I implemented the search tree via recursive calls. I drifted into using Python right from the start. It just felt like the easiest way to hack the puzzles quickly. In the past I had thought about using the puzzles to learn a new language. A colleague had done that with Rust in a previous year. Despite these good intentions, expediency took a firm hold. That said, in several puzzles I would have liked immutable collections or at least Lisp-style lists.

a pattern counter. Not that interesting except patterns were emerging in the programs themselves. Regular expressions got used a lot to read in the puzzle data. I learnt about things like match.group(1,2,3) which returns a tuple of the first three match groups, so you don't have to write (m.group(1), m.group(2), m.group(3)).

a grid tracer. The first interesting one because it was unfamiliar. Some other patterns started emerging: problem parameters got promoted to command line arguments, and data structure printers got hacked to help debugging. These two were often added between part 1 and part 2 of each problem.

a data validator. This felt like a bit of a slog. It was mostly about capturing the validation rules as code. Even though I made a point of reminding myself at the start that re.search doesn't match the whole string I still forgot it later. Duh.

an indexing problem. I patted myself on the back for realizing that the index was a binary number (or pair of binary numbers as I did it). At this point the solutions were still neat and I would do a little code golfing after the solution to tidy them up a bit and make them more concise.

another pattern counter. Pre-calculating some things during data reading kept the later code simple.

a recursive calculator. This was one of those puzzles where I had to reread the description several times to try and understand what it was asking for. It entailed a slightly tricky recursive sum and product, which was again made easier by creating more supporting data structures while reading the input data.

an interpreter. Probably my favourite individual puzzle because it was so sweet, especially after a bit of refactoring to make the language more data-driven.

another sum-finder. I found I didn't particularly like these.

an order-finder. This was the first one that made me pause for thought. An overly naive search algorithm from part 1 hit a computational complexity wall in part 2. I beat the problem by realizing that the search only had to be done on small islands of the data, but a colleague pointed out there was a better linear solution. The code was starting to get a bit ragged, with commented out debugging statements.

the game of life. The classic simulation but with some out-of-bounds spaces and some line-of-sight rules. It helped to print the board.

a map navigator. I liked this one even though I forgot to convert degrees to radians and that rotation matrices go anti-clockwise. I even introduced an abstract data type (ADT) to see if it would simplify the code (I'm not sure it ever did - I mostly used lists, tuples, strings, and numbers). The second parts of the puzzles were starting to get their own files now (usually bootstrapped by copying and pasting the first part's file).

a prime number theorem. I actually got stalled on this one for a bit. It eventually turned out I had a bug in the code and was missing a modulus. In effect I wasn't accounting for small primes far to the right. I left the puzzle and went on to complete a couple of others before coming back to this one. I checked what I was doing by Googling for hints, but in the end I had to take a long hard look at the data and find my own bug.

some bit twiddling. Part 1 felt like I found the expected bitwise operations, but part 2 felt like I was bashing square pegs into round holes.

a number sequence problem. Another pat on the back, this time for keeping a dictionary of recent occurrences and not searching back down the list of numbers each time. Another recurring pattern is evident: running a sequence of steps over the data. I liked to code the step as its own function.

a constraint solver. A nice one about labelling fields that satisfy the known constraints. Half the code was parsing the textual rules into data.

another game of life simulation. This time it was in more dimensions. I generalized from 3 dimensions to N instead of just doing 4. This made it more of a drag. I started naming auxiliary functions with placeholder names (social services should have been called). Also, I tacked on extra space along each dimension to make room at each step. This felt very ugly. I should have used a sparser representation like I did for day 24.

an expression evaluator. I used another actual ADT and wrote a simple but horrible tokenizer. The evaluator was okay but I hacked the precedence by inserting parentheses into the token stream. Don't try this at home kids.

another pattern matcher. Probably my biggest hack. My code compiled the pattern rules into a single regular expression. This was cute but meant the recursive rules in part 2 needed special treatment. One rule just compiled into a repeated pattern with +. Unfortunately, the other rule entailed matching balanced sub-patterns, which every schoolchild knows regular languages can't do. Perhaps some recursive pattern extensions might have worked, but I assumed there would be no more than 10 elements of the sub-patterns and compiled the rule into a large alternative of the possible symmetrical matchers. Yuck.

a map assembler. I did this one the most methodically. It had proper comments and unit tests. Overall it took the most code but perhaps it was just dealing with all the edge cases (ba dum tss). But seriously, it seemed to take a lot of code for rotating and flipping the tiles even after knowing how they must be connected. So probably there was a better approach. It was still satisfying the see the answer come out after all that work. Curiously, this one involved little debugging. I wonder if perhaps there is some connection between preparation and outcome?

a constraint solver. I tried a dumb approach first based on searching all the possible bindings. That didn't look like it was terminating any time soon. So I reverted to a previously successful technique of intersecting the associations and then then refining them based on the already unique ones.

a recursive card game. This card game playing puzzle seemed to be going okay, but the real data didn't converge for part 2. Had a quick Google for a hint after battling with it for a while, and the first hit was from someone who said they'd misread the question. Sure enough I had too. My recursive games were on the whole deck instead of the part dictated by the cards played. Duh. The description was clear enough and included a whole worked game. I just hadn't read it properly. It still seemed to need some game state memoization to run tolerably fast.

a circular sequence. Took three attempts. A brute force approach using an array was good enough for part 1, but no way was it going to work on part 2. Even optimizing it to use ranges was still 'non-terminating' for the array-based solution. So I Googled for a little inspiration and found the phrase "linked lists" and slapped my forehead hard. I switched to a dictionary of labels to labels and the solution popped out very easily, without any further optimization. Embarrassing. Was it time to ceremonially hand in my Lisp symbol and fall on a sharpened parenthesis?

another game of life. This one sounded neat because it was about a hex grid, but I didn't know how hex grids are usually indexed. So for the first time I did a little bit of general research at the start. Turns out there are a bunch of ways to index a hex grid. I opted for using 3-axes as that seemed natural despite the redundancy. The map itself was just a dictionary of locations. I should have looked up how to have structured dictionary keys in Python (implement __hash__) but I couldn't be bothered so I (look away now) serialized and deserialized the locations to and from strings. I still had a bug which I couldn't find until I hacked a crude hex board printer and realized I wasn't carrying the unchanged cells over from one iteration to the next.

a cryptographic puzzle. Came out quite short but only after some faffing around. Main trick seemed to be to keep the transformation ticking along instead of recalculating it from scratch each time. There was slight disappointment (tinged with relief) that there was no part 2.

Some general lessons I felt I (re)learned:

Read the questions very carefully, then reread them.

Try and use terms from the questions. Don't invent your own terminology and then have to map back and forth.

Make the trace output exactly like the examples to help comparison.

Next time I'd consider using BDD to turn their examples directly into tests. Next time.

Try the problem for a while by yourself, then think about it offline, and only then Google for hints.

Next time I'd consider using some form of source control from the start, or just a better set of file naming conventions.

Regular expressions go a long way, but can then they can get in the way.

Next time I'll consider doing it using a language I'm learning.

Sometimes when you get stuck you have to start again.

During some low moments it all felt like make-work that I'd inflicted on myself, but in the end it was a nice set of training exercises. I'd encourage others to have a go at their leisure.

"Practice is the best of all instructors." -- Publilius Syrus

[preston15j1946]

Up In Smoke: Will President Obama Finally Deliver On Cannabis Campaign Boasts?

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[riseoftheradiotrons]

The (False) Man of Bulb-Rust, Part 1

Sol-VI-I. The largest moon of this huge, ringed planet, with lakes of methane that would be just enough for Pharma to stave off of if tors near-infinite Energon supply from the bunker ever ran out.

Tor could just barely fit all tors important records of the unusual life-forms of Bulb-04 inside tors chassis and tors ship. Tor had to set some sort of base up here on Titan, to properly protect materials, but the only structure on this moon was the ship tor came here with. So tor just about turned the ship inside out, creating a makeshift but surprisingly functional lab. Tors was completely intending to, and perfectly fine with, shutting torself away from the rest of the planet and studying tors Bulb-04 life samples as best tor could in this new environment.

Three Cybertronian days later, tor had visitors.

A loud bang on the side of tors ship.

“Oh! Come in, very carefully.”

Another bang. “I can’t fit.”

“You can’t? Oh, hold on.” Pharma carefully cleared a small space on tors desk, containers clinking and clanging against each other, creating a space just big enough to set down tors notepad. The door to the spaceship was close by, and Pharma tapped away at the separate codes, listening to the hiss of the airlocks as they opened.

Moonkiller was crouched in front of the ship, Starscream right next to her.

Pharma’s eyes widened.

“G- General! Generals! The Sol planets are- I thought they were uninhabited!”

“You will not be kidnapped. We just need some answers for some questions.” She scooted over to give Pharma some room to leave the ship, leaning against it.

“First question.” Starscream spoke up, now sitting down on the ground, “Are you the one who wrote all the information Cybertron has about Bulb-Rust?”

“My greatest achievement. No other records of it exist. I have samples you could take back to Cybertron if you’d like.” Pharma itched to get back in tors spaceship, get away from these very new, very dangerous presences. But this was the first time tor spoke with someone else since tor first landed on Bulb-04.

Starscream immediately perked up, “Yes! Samples! All of what you have!” 

“Half of what you have,” Moonkiller corrected. Asking a scientist to give up all their materials was outlandish.

“Half of what you have!”

“Alright. It grows very quickly, just feed it some metal if you want to increase the sample size. It needs to be stored in nonmetal containers for this reason, or else it will continue to spread...” Pharma’s monologue about how to take care of Bulb-Rust continued, Moonkiller and Starscream barely able to hear it from inside the ship. Starscream pulled out a digital notepad and tapped out [don’t touch it with anything metal].

After so much clattering and clanking that a cat’s panicked meow should’ve come after it, Pharma peeked his head back out of the spaceship, then held three plastic vials out to Starscream and Moonkiller. “Try not to grow more. Unless you want to.”

Moonkiller carefully took the vials, as Starscream asked the next question.

“Second question, do you know how any Bulb-Rust could’ve possibly arrived on any Decepticon outposts?”

“Decepticon outposts? Well, I’ve been trapped on Bulb-04 since before I even discovered the rust, so there’s no possible way I could’ve played any part in it. Someone else must have joined or pretended to join the Decepticon forces, bringing Bulb-Rust with them, most likely inside a-”

Moonkiller held up a hand. “That’s enough.” 

“No, let him go on.” Starscream kept his notepad out. “We need all the information we can get... and it looks like he loves talking about this.”

“Thank you generals. As mentioned, they’d most likely bring it along inside a vial, because keeping it outside the vial would kill them, without a doubt. It reacts with any and all metal, and this includes Metamechium.”

“Third question.” Moonkiller knocked on the side of the ship to get the attention of the others.

“Will you come with us in an investigation of a recently discovered killer who’s been using Bulb-Rust as their primary weapon?”

[johnjankovic1]

MASON-DIXON 2.0

The open revolt at the behest of Middle America against Wall Street’s day-traders and Silicon Valley’s coders was symptomatic of the brinkmanship across the political spectrum by Democrats and Republicans over many decades. The bipartisanship shown for indexes like the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 and its casual disregard for the tinderbox of America’s Rust-Belt between its unemployment and low wages as open immigration flood the labour market would together inaugurate Donald John Trump who himself became a kind of canary in the coal mine for the Brexit referendum and the West. To confound the measure of GDP with good governance was then shown to be a form of illiteracy for the income inequality, deindustrialization, and poverty rates of a country, nor was it right for demagogues of globalization to confuse less immigration with racist or nativist policy if it adds to wage growth by tightening labour markets. Because Washington DC is among the wealthiest zip-codes according to the US Census Bureau its insularity left it oblivious to the economic insecurities of ordinary Americans. Because the ruling-class is the paragon of dumb they thrashed about the epithet of white-nationalism to explain away populist ideas. Lost on the Establishment was how its own theology of neoliberal-economics was what stoked the ire of people.

Unless capitalism is under the ward of a competent watchman then it appears society will break as economics and culture are so often indivisible. This old wisdom recalls the 1861 Civil War which, like today’s redux feud, followed from manufacturers in the North and farmers to the South. Progressivism north of the Mason-Dixon Line in antebellum America was just and good in its cause to emancipate the Black race whose free labour enriched southern plantations. Ironically these roles of right and wrong between industries have flipped in today’s secularism of the coastal elite and the heartland: (1) Bank of America cut credit to gunsmiths in breach of their 2nd Amendment rights; (2) Delta Airline ceased discounts to law-abiding gun owners; (3) Procter & Gamble in its lunacy removed the Venus symbol from the livery of its tampons as transexuals now menstruate; (4) International airports banned the Christian eatery Chick-fil-A; (5) Nike monetized hatred for America’s flag; (6) Big-Tech deplatformed conservatives; (7) Gillette assailed men for their ‘toxic-masculinity’; (8) Goldman-Sachs divested from oil and gas; (9) Walmart added pronoun buttons of ‘he-she-they’ to store uniforms in conformity with new gender theories, etc. This cultural clash issues from a species of economic globalization that erases Christianity while it serves to belittle those who farm the nation’s breadbasket or who send their sons to die in wars like Afghanistan and Iraq.

While these same ideologues of the Washington Consensus from corporate America sneered at the country’s interior, unbeknownst to them was how their own cosmopolitan truths were being cannibalized. If Trumponomics is indeed the prejudice of white voters what explains socialism’s sudden popularity? Why are liberals sponsoring a doctrine whose tenets are similarly antithetical to free-markets and free-trade? To racialize the phenomenon does not square with a young and multiethnic demography which supports the notion of bigger government nor does the constant refrain of racism explain away the hostile takeover of the Democrat Party by the communist senator Bernie Sanders. The scapegoating of whites by the punditocracy is no longer tenable. What is happening suggests a rejection by the body-politic of an aristocracy which has made Washington the handmaiden to its business through an activism masquerading as philanthropy from a wealthy donor class. When equality of opportunity is defenestrated by means of offshored jobs, wage stagnation, or delayed family-formation from college debt then populism akin to the Right’s Tea Party or the Left’s Occupy Wall Street emerges to undo such market fundamentalism that has precipitated the loss of social mobility.

Passions like these from the electorate will not abate in the foreseeable future since Washington’s abstinence from interfering in markets has left the social fabric in a state of disrepair for two reasons: (1) If the goal of a market economy is to always increase productivity by rationalizing production then it has reached its logical endpoint; (2) A paradox has changed socialism into a luxury of affluence. Number one is the ouroboros nature of markets which discriminates against the sum of humanity through automation, self-driving autonomy, robotics, and 3D printing in blue-collar jobs, followed by Artificial Intelligence, machine-learning, and generative-design in white-collar ones, thus in time no worker is spared from the breadline regardless of IQ or education. Number two is the irony of how the democratization of wealth has led a younger demography to usher in a postmaterialist society through its sharing-gig economy which has become a precursor to socialism. Because Generations Y, Z, and A are the most privileged in the genealogy of civilization they have disavowed Christianity and capitalism in support of socialist policies to appease their own moral vanity after being reared in abundance for so long. The first’s Industry 4.0 and the second’s pampered existentialism ensure that today’s class warfare will not be ephemeral.

Voters of both liberal and conservative stripes have sought a buccaneer to agitate against Washington’s aristocracy whose blinders have ignored the socio-economic implications wrought by free-trade, deregulation, and open labour markets. As America’s GDP skyrocketed since the boom of the business cycle in the 1990s its Gini-Index steadily rose above the averages of other OECD countries. By itself such inequality would arouse some tepid indignation but next to America’s opulence, bailouts for the moral-hazard of banks, the globalization of production with fewer protections because of less unionization, and the two-fold increase of housing costs, a wick for a revolution was primed. Few parents of a household can feasibly raise their offspring in this new economy as mothers and fathers both enter the labour market to make ends meet. The dynamics of family-formation changed overnight as neoliberal-economics pushed birthrates downward and delayed it well past the peak fertility window for the majority of women. Whereas the decline in birthrates during the stagflation of the 1970s was monetary in its causality, today’s identical phenomenon results from a structural change in the global economy where two parents work full-time in half of US households compared with 31 percent in 1970 according to Pew Research.

The integration of economies by big-business with the forfeiture of sovereignty has marginalized the middle-class to the point of becoming a minority group for the first time in 2015. To compound a sense of being alienated this globalization substitutes a mosaic of culture bereft of any single identity for the melting-pot of assimilation which otherwise spurs unity as the true sinews of a nation rather than the many enclaves that sprout from a more heterogeneous society like in the former. Arguing in this case for a monoculture is not at all equivalent to arguing against race. The Christian West is indeed the most hospitable to expatriates despite how such humanity goes unrequited in places like China, Japan, or Iran since the US has been a sanctuary for migrants everywhere. But the sight of labour markets suddenly brimming with an influx of workers from recorded entries and illegal ones exacerbates the anxiety of those who are already beset with stagnant wages. Racist! Racist! Racist! No, you lying demagogue, it is economics. Slower growth provokes mistrust for variables which may suppress earnings further. Of these many grievances two were the bona fide genesis for today’s populism: (1) NAFTA and (2) China’s entry into the WTO. Big-business in the 1990s then began to exploit cheaper labour in Mexico’s maquiladoras and China’s export-economy at the expense of shuttering factories back home.

What has been shown is how free-trade at a certain threshold becomes inimical when imports which are either duty-free or minimally tariffed actually begin to redistribute wealth more so than create it. The most optimistic of studies authored on NAFTA found its welfare gains to be less than 0.08% in tandem with how wage growth fell by 17 percent in certain industries. Economist Dani Rodrik wrote a beautiful synopsis of this effect in ‘The Globalization Paradox’:

To drive the point home, I once quantified the ratio of redistribution-to-efficiency gains following the standard assumptions economists make when we present the case for free trade. The numbers I got were huge—so large in fact that I was compelled to redo the calculations several times to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. For example, in an economy like the United States, where average tariffs are below 5 percent, a move to complete free trade would reshuffle more than $50 of income among different groups for each dollar of efficiency or “net” gain created! Read the last sentence again in case you went through it quickly: we are talking about $50 of redistribution for every $1 of aggregate gain. It’s as if we give $51 to Adam, only to leave David $50 poorer.

The asymmetry is nothing less than a paradox of tragicomic proportions. If opening markets beyond a certain limit shifts inordinate sums of money to the richest while inflicting penury on the poorest then a welfare state with a bevy of social safety nets ought to be established to keep an economy functional lest it devolve into a matter of Bolsheviks seizing power. The more capitalism is practiced, the more interference is needed unless the intended effect is for populism to be borne of a class conflict. The lesson here really is that free-markets need not be exercised to the point of self-destruction. From this quagmire can the philosophy of capitalism be distilled into two basic questions: (1) What are the hidden costs for creating a finance and digital economy which does not produce anything other than trading securities and codes all day while manufacturers are offshored? (2) Is the raison-d’être of capitalism to produce material things and comforts like imports from Mexico and China or is it to better an individual society by exploiting all human capital within it regardless of IQ or education? This existentialism is scarcely debated although it is paramount to ensure the proper workings of a country.

[icolor-ps-blog]

May 2020: spin-archive.org

Here's the first of a new monthly series of posts where I recap over the expenses and stats of spin-archive.org. I think it's interesting to share such statistics and financials, and it gives a transparent view into what goes into running an internet archive project for a niche hobby.

The start.

Welcome to the end of May! I wrote the first line of spin-archive.org code on May 7th, 2020. I didn't start fully working on the project until May 11th, 2020. Since then, I've been nearly writing code every single day!

The ideas of spin-archive.org come from many. There was talk about some sort of archive project in the UPSB modchat. I also had some ideas of my own of what a project could look like. For a long time, I had a track record of not following through on my actions, or dreaming a very big goal only to fall short. Previously, I could chalk it up to inexperience. But now I'm really excited to have released something that is usable and something I really care about.

For the technical folks, spin-archive.org is web application written in Rust. I wanted something that would be quite performant, and also be one of my first web applications written in solely Rust. So far, it's exceeded my expectations with an average response time < 30ms across all endpoints from the load balancer. The architecture is a simple stack:

Rust web app, single VPS fronted by a load balancer, fronted by Cloudflare.

wasabi.com for object storage.

coconut.co for video encoding.

The most exciting and yet simple feature of spin-archive.org is the use of tags. It's a very simple feature: add tags to a certain file. But this allows for building up a deep catalog of metadata about a particular PS media file. By sticking to a good framework for tagging files, we can start to answer questions like:

Is this file a CV / PV / SV?

Which communities are they from?

Who are the spinners in a CV?

What mod is the spinner spinning?

How can I find more videos of this spinner?

Who edited this CV? How can I find more edits by this person?

How can I find CVs that this spinner has participated in?

And much, much more.

As a default, the archive stores the raw original file. This is always retrievable, in a way that doesn't degrade quality. We take the original file and transcode it to a more web-playable format, and generate thumbnails. Both the original and the encoded version are downloadable. This makes it the most accessible for people who want either version.

There are some goals of spin-archive.org:

Prevent the link-rot of PS media due to time decay.

Unlock the files that are scattered across many different storage places.

Allow people to explore and consult this knowledge base.

Encourage a culture of sharing and preserving for each other.

The last piece of encouraging a culture of sharing is something that's not as prevalent in the international / UPSB community. Because of this, we've paid a price and there's only a fraction of the history left to us now. Countless hours of spinners who've come before us that have been lost to the void. I feel like we can do better as a community, and I want to encourage this sharing behavour.

With that said, I believe in privacy and respect people who want to keep to themselves. There is nothing wrong with this. But I think this changes when you have a project that involves other spinners, where it now belongs to those who’ve participated. I think it is a shame that we don’t have raw DLs to world events like WC/WT, which I feel like should be required these days.

May 2020 Statistics

50.6GB bandwidth used.

38.2GB total storage used.

11.4k requests served.

30 hours of video encoded.

544 total videos.

305 total spinners categorized.

May 2020 Expenses

This month will be a bit less since I started hosting it later into the month, as well as released it under beta on May 27th, 2020.

Hosting: $22

Video Encoding: $27 ($0.015/min)

Storage: $6 (a flat price up to 1TB)

CDN Bandwidth: $0 (free trial, would have been $0.26, bandwidth has been prepaid for $100.)

Total Cost: $55

In the future, I may end up implementing a sort of membership option. Membership perks are still to be determined, but it should make things easier for power users to curate their own content and you will get access to more powerful contributor-level permissions. I think it's important to keep PS accessible, these files belong to the community, so any thing relating to money will be as transparent as I can be.

In the mean time, I'm perfectly happy with sustaining this small project on my own, and I am happy if you found it useful.

[ainsleys-interests]

J.G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition with an Preface by William Burroughs

A Flamingo Modern Classic edition published 2001 Copyright © J G Ballard 1993

This revised, expanded, annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition first published in a large format in Great Britain by Flamingo, 1993

A revised, expanded, annotated and illustrated edition first published in the USA by Re/Search, 1990 Copyright © J G Ballard 1990

The original edition first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1970, and first published in paperback by Panther Books, 1972

Copyright © J G Ballard 1969

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preface by William S. Burroughs

1 The Atrocity Exhibition

2 The University of Death

3 The Assassination Weapon

4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

5 Notes towards a Mental Breakdown

6 The Great American Nude

7 The Summer Cannibals

8 Tolerances of the Human Face

9 You and Me and the Continuum

10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy

11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.

12 Crash!

13 The Generations of America

14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

APPENDIX:

Princess Margaret’s Face Lift

Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty

About the Author

From the reviews of The Atrocity Exhibition: Also by J.G. Ballard

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person - John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Other figures, though crucially important to the decades that followed, have begun to sink below the horizon. How many of us remember Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas? Or Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy? At the end of each chapter I have provided a few notes that identify these lesser characters and set out the general background to the book.

Readers who find themselves daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure of The Atrocity Exhibition - far simpler than it seems at first glance - might try a different approach. Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.

J.G. Ballard, 2001

PREFACE BY WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm.) The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition . . . was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.’

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . . . ’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune . . . Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest . . . ’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art - literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape . . . clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions.’

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes . . . James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus . . . Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.’

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean,’ subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology.’

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown. The noise from the cine-films of induced psychoses rose from the lecture theatre below Travis’s office. Keeping his back to the window behind his desk, he assembled the terminal documents he had collected with so much effort during the previous months: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) Front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London; (3) Transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (4) ‘Chronograms,’ by E. J. Marey; (5) Photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Egypt; (6) Reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’; (7) Fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. When he had finished Travis turned to the window. As usual, the white Pontiac had found a place in the crowded parking lot directly below him. The two occupants watched him through the tinted windshield.

Internal Landscapes. Controlling the tremor in his left hand, Travis studied the thin-shouldered man sitting opposite him. Through the transom the light from the empty corridor shone into the darkened office. His face was partly hidden by the peak of his flying cap, but Travis recognized the bruised features of the bomber pilot whose photographs, torn from the pages of Newsweek and Paris-Match, had been strewn around the bedroom of the shabby hotel in Earls Court. His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature. Why had he come to the hospital, seeking out Travis among the thirty physicians? Travis had tried to speak to him, but the tall man made no reply, standing by the instrument cabinet like a tattered mannequin. His immature but at the same time aged face seemed as rigid as a plaster mask. For months Travis had seen his solitary figure, shoulders hunched inside the flying jacket, in more and more newsreels, as an extra in war films, and then as a patient in an elegant ophthalmic film on nystagmus - the series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made him uneasily aware that their long-delayed confrontation would soon take place.

The Weapons Range. Travis stopped the car at the end of the lane. In the sunlight he could see the remains of the outer perimeter fence, and beyond this a rusting quonset and the iron-stained roofs of the bunkers. He crossed the ditch and walked towards the fence, within five minutes found an opening. A disused runway moved through the grass. Partly concealed by the sunlight, the camouflage patterns across the complex of towers and bunkers four hundred yards away

revealed half-familiar contours - the model of a face, a posture, a neural interval. A unique event would take place here. Without thinking, Travis murmured, ‘Elizabeth Taylor.’ Abruptly there was a blare of sound above the trees.

Dissociation: Who Laughed at Nagasaki? Travis ran across the broken concrete to the perimeter fence. The helicopter plunged towards him, engine roaring through the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and paper. Twenty yards from the fence Travis stumbled among the coils of barbed wire. The helicopter was banking sharply, the pilot crouched over the controls. As Travis ran forward the shadows of the diving machine flickered around him like cryptic ideograms. Then the craft pulled away and flew off across the bunkers. When Travis reached the car, holding the torn knee of his trousers, he saw the young woman in the white dress walking down the lane. Her disfigured face looked back at him with indulgent eyes. Travis started to call to her, but stopped himself. Exhausted, he vomited across the roof of the car.

Serial Deaths. During this period, as he sat in the rear seat of the Pontiac, Travis was preoccupied by his separation from the normal tokens of life he had accepted for so long. His wife, the patients at the hospital (resistance agents in the ‘world war’ he hoped to launch), his undecided affair with Catherine Austin - these became as fragmentary as the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Sigmund Freud on the advertising billboards, as unreal as the war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam. As he moved deeper into his own psychosis, whose onset he had recognized during his year at the hospital, he welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him. Now and then the young woman would look at him with a faint smile on her deformed mouth. Deliberately, Travis made no response, hesitant to commit himself into her hands. Who were they, these strange twins - couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.

Casualties Union. At the young woman’s suggestion, Travis joined the C. U., and with a group of thirty housewives practised the simulation of wounds. Later they would tour with Red Cross demonstration teams. Massive cerebral damage and abdominal bleeding in automobile accidents could be imitated within half an hour, aided by the application of suitable coloured resins. Convincing radiation burns required careful preparation, and might involve some three to four hours of makeup. Death, by contrast, was a matter of lying prone. Later, in the apartment they had taken overlooking the zoo, Travis washed the wounds from his hands and face. This curious pantomime, overlaid by the summer evening stench of the animals, seemed performed solely to pacify his two companions. In the bathroom mirror he could see the tall figure of the pilot, his slim face with its lost eyes hidden below the peaked cap, and the young woman in the white dress watching him from the lounge. Her intelligent face, like that of a student, occasionally showed a nervous reflex of hostility. Already Travis found it difficult not to think of her continuously. When would she speak to him? Perhaps, like himself, she realized that his instructions would come from other levels?

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud,

Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: V.J.-Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of others than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis.

Marey’s Chronograms. Dr Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible - the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’ Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects - this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient - he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’ Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital . . . ’

‘Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’

Zoom Lens. Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch. How could he explain to this sensitive and elusive woman that her own body, with its endlessly familiar geometry, its landscapes of touch and feeling, was their only defence against her husband’s all-too-plain intentions? Above all, how could he invite her to pose for what she would no doubt regard as a set of obscene photographs?

The Skin Area. After their meeting, at the exhibition of war wounds at the Royal Society of Medicine’s conference hall, Travis and Catherine Austin returned to the apartment overlooking the zoo. In the lift Travis avoided her hands as she tried to embrace him. He led her into the bedroom. Mouth pursed, she watched as he showed her the set of Enneper’s models. ‘What are they?’ She touched the interlocking cubes and cones, mathematical models of pseudo-space. ‘Fusing sequences, Catherine - for a doomsday weapon.’ In the postures they assumed, in the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom, and later of the curvilinear roof of the Festival Hall, the jutting balconies of the London Hilton, and lastly of the abandoned weapons range. Here the circular target areas became identified in

Travis’s mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns. Searching for her, he and Catherine Austin drove around the darkening countryside, lost among the labyrinth of billboards. The faces of Sigmund Freud and Jeanne Moreau presided over their last bitter hours.

Neoplasm. Later, escaping from Catherine Austin, and from the forbidding figure of the bomber pilot, who now watched him from the roof of the lion house, Travis took refuge in a small suburban house among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. He sat in the empty sitting-room overlooking the shabby garden. From the white bungalow beyond the clapboard fence his middle-aged neighbour dying of cancer watched him through the long afternoons. Her handsome face, veiled by the laced curtains, resembled that of a skull. All day she would pace around the small bedroom. At the end of the second month, when the doctor’s visits became more frequent, she undressed by the window, exposing her emaciated body through the veiled curtains. Each day, as he watched from the cubular room, he saw different aspects of her eroded body, the black breasts reminding him of the eyes of the bomber pilot, the abdominal scars like the radiation burns of the young woman. After her death he followed the funeral cars among the reservoirs in the white Pontiac.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths - for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” - the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal. One recalls Goethe’s notion that the skull is formed of modified vertebrae - similarly, the bones of the pelvis may constitute the remains of a lost sacral skull. The resemblance between histologies of lung and kidney has long been noted. Other correspondences of respiratory and urino-genital function come to mind, enshrined both in popular mythology (the supposed equivalence in size of nose and penis) and psychoanalytic symbolism (the “eyes” are a common code for the testicles). In conclusion, it seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the “Mythology of the Amniotic Return”. In his mind World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world. The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator . . . ’

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark- suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked

past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

How Garbo Died.‘The film is a unique document,’ Webster explained, as he led Catherine Austin into the basement cinema. ‘At first sight it seems to be a strange newsreel about the latest tableau sculptures - there are a series of plaster casts of film stars and politicians in bizarre poses - how they were made we can’t find out, they seem to have been cast from the living models, LBJ and Mrs Johnson, Burton and the Taylor actress, there’s even one of Garbo dying. We were called in when the film was found.’ He signalled to the projectionist. ‘One of the casts is of Margaret Travis - I won’t describe it, but you’ll see why we’re worried. Incidentally, a touring version of Kienholz’s “Dodge 38” was seen travelling at speed on a motorway yesterday, a wrecked white car with the plastic dummies of a World War III pilot and a girl with facial burns making love among a refuse of bubblegum war cards and oral contraceptive wallets.’

War-Zone D. On his way across the car park Dr Nathan stopped and shielded his eyes from the sun. During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world. A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea. A helicopter soared overhead, its pilot supervising the work of the men on the track. Its down-draught ripped away some of the paper panels. They floated across the road, an eddying smile plastered against the radiator grille of a parked car.

The Atrocity Exhibition. Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetized in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticizing her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds; ‘Europe after the Rain’; the human race - Caliban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit.

The Danger Area. Webster ran through the dim light after Margaret Travis. He caught her by the entrance to the main camera bunker, where the cheekbones of an enormous face had been painted in faded Technicolor across the rust-stained concrete. ‘For God’s sake - ’ She looked down at his strong wrist against her breast, then wrenched herself away. ‘Mrs Travis! Why do you think

we’ve taken all these photographs?’ Webster held the torn lapel of his suit, then pointed to a tableau figure in the uniform of a Chinese infantryman standing at the end of the conduit. ‘The place is crawling with the things - you’ll never find him.’ As he spoke a searchlight in the centre of the airfield lit up the target areas, outlining the rigid figures of the mannequins.

The Enormous Face. Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital - the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape. Dr Nathan crossed an exposed causeway to the next bunker. He leaned against the dark décolleté. When the searchlight flared between the blockhouses he put on his shoe. ‘No . . . ’ He was hobbling towards the airfield when the explosion lit up the evening air.

The Exploding Madonna. For Travis, the ascension of his wife’s body above the target area, exploding madonna of the weapons range, was a celebration of the intervals through which he perceived the surrounding continuum of time and space. Here she became one with the madonnas of the billboards and the ophthalmic films, the Venus of the magazine cuttings whose postures celebrated his own search through the suburbs of Hell.

Departure. The next morning, Travis wandered along the gunnery aisles. On the bunkers the painted figure of the screen actress mediated all time and space to him through her body. As he searched among the tyres and coils of barbed wire he saw the helicopter rising into the sky, the bomber pilot at the controls. It made a leftward turn and flew off towards the horizon. Half an hour later the young woman drove away in the white Pontiac. Travis watched them leave without regret. When they had gone the corpses of Dr Nathan, Webster, and Catherine Austin formed a small tableau by the bunkers.

A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body.

<Annotations>

Apocalypse.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

The many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were produced by free association, which accounts for the repetition but, I hope, makes more sense of them.

‘Garden Airplane Traps.’ ‘Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation that springs from the debris of trapped airplanes.’ Max Ernst, Informal Life. The nightmare of a grounded pilot.

Why a white Pontiac? A British pop-star of the 1960s, Dickie Valentine, drove his daughter in a white Pontiac to the same school that my own children attended near the film studios at Shepperton. The car had a powerful iconic presence, emerging from all those American movies into the tranquil TV suburbs. Soon after, Valentine died in a car accident. By chance a telescoped Pontiac starred in my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

The Weapons Range.

Weapons ranges have a special magic, all that destructive technology concentrated on the production of nothing, the closest we can get to certain obsessional states of mind. Even more strange are the bunkers of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, most of which are still standing, and are far larger than one expects. Space-age cathedrals, they threaten the surrounding landscape like lines of Teutonic knights, and are examples of cryptic architecture, where form no longer reveals function. They seem to contain the codes of some mysterious mental process. At Utah Beach, the most deserted stretch of the Normandy coast, they stare out over the washed sand, older than the planet. On visits with my agent and his wife, I used to photograph them compulsively.

Serial Deaths.

‘The war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam.’ Written in 1966, this was a prophetic leap in the dark. To date no Vietnam movie has been shot on the original battlegrounds, but I’m confident it will happen, and might even get out of control. Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me - even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbours, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton thirty years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

Casualties Union.

The so-called Casualties Union existed in London in the 1960s, probably inspired by the nuclear disarmament movement. Putting on the cosmetic wounds was a messy business, and a recruitment leaflet reassured volunteers: ‘Death is simply a matter of lying prone.’

Pirate Radio.

Tsingtao, on the north China coast near Peking, was a German naval base during World War I, and later became a popular beach resort where I spent the summers in the 1930s. As a seven-year-old I was deeply impressed by the huge blockhouses and the maze of concrete tunnels where the tourist guides pointed to the bloody handprints of (they claimed) wounded German gunners driven mad by the British naval bombardment. For some reason these were far more moving than the dead Chinese soldiers in the battlegrounds around Shanghai which I visited with my parents, though they were sad enough.

Marey’s Chronograms.

‘An individual is a four-dimensional object of greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say that he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.’ Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation.

The Lost Symmetry of the Blastosphere.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot.

‘Where and when Travis placed his hands on her body.’ The poet Paul Eluard, describing his wife Gala, who later left him to marry Dali, said: ‘Her body is the shape of my hands.’

How Garbo Died.

The sculptor George Segal has made a number of plaster casts of prominent art patrons, mostly New York bankers and their wives. Frozen in time, these middle-aged men and women have a remarkable poignancy, figures from some future Pompeii.

The Enormous Face.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this

book - Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed - I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self- constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

CHAPTER TWO

THE UNIVERSITY OF DEATH

The Conceptual Death. By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot’s growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr Nathan paused in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats beside the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr Nathan realized, its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpected figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer, the students had devised the first conceptual death.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

Obscene Mannequin.‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As he stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sexe. He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. On the garage roof stood the sculpture he had laboriously built during the past month; antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels he had taken from the laboratory. All night he watched the sky, listening to the time-music of the quasars.

Left Orbit and Temple. Below the window a thickset young man, wearing the black military overcoat affected by the students, was loading a large display billboard into a truck outside the Neurology department, a photo reproduction of Talbot’s left orbit and temple. He stared up at the sculpture on the roof. His sallow, bearded face had pursued Talbot for the past weeks during the conception of the scenario. It was at Koester’s instigation that the class were now devising the optimum death of World War III’s first casualty, a wound profile more and more clearly revealed as Talbot’s. A marked physical hostility existed between them, a compound of sexual rivalry over Catherine Austin and homo-erotic jealousy.

A Sophisticated Entertainment. Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving. Despite the scandal that would ensue he had deliberately authorized this ‘Festival of Atrocity Films,’ which Talbot had suggested as one of his last coherent acts. Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers. Yet the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized.

The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out a Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia. More properly, the programme should be called a festival of home movies. He lit a gold-tipped cigarette, noticing that a photograph of Talbot had been cleverly montaged over a reproduction of Dali’s ‘Hypercubic Christ.’ Even the film festival had been devised as part of the scenario’s calculated psycho-drama.

A Shabby Voyeur. As she parked the car, Karen Novotny could see the silver bowls of the three radio telescopes above the trees. The tall man in the shabby flying jacket walked towards the perimeter fence, bars of sunlight crossing his face. Why had she followed him here? She had picked him up in the empty hotel cinema after the conference on space medicine, then taken him back to her apartment. All week he had been watching the telescopes with the same fixity of expression, an optical rigor like that of a disappointed voyeur. Who was he? - some fugitive from time and space, clearly moving now into his own landscape. His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred closeups of hands. She stepped from the car, the coil hanging in her womb like a steel foetus, a stillborn star. She smoothed her white linen skirt as Talbot ran back from the fence, ripping the cassette from his camera. Between them had sprung up a relationship of intense sexuality.

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

Spinal Levels.’Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child. In the patio at the centre of the maze a young woman in a flowered white dress sat behind a desk covered with catalogues. Her blanched skin exposed the hollow planes of her face. Like the pilot, Talbot recognized her as a student at his seminar. Her nervous smile revealed the wound that disfigured the inside of her mouth.

Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of Karen Novotny’s body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded him of the porous esplanades of Ernst’s ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.

Mimetized Disasters. The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the

air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.

No U-Turn.‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot’s deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’

The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.

Arrival at the Zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?

The Plaza. Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment. For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

The Annunciation. Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman’s hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping concrete. Raised as if to form an arch over an invisible child, the hands passed through the air above the plaza. They hung in the sunlight like immense doves. Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique

event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Transliterated Pudenda. Dr Nathan showed his pass to the guard at the gatehouse. As they drove towards the testing area he was aware of Catherine Austin peering through the windshield, her sexuality keening now that Talbot was within range. Nathan glanced down at her broad thighs, calculating the jut and rake of her pubis. ‘Talbot’s belief - and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario - is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its manifest function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy - mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.’ They stopped by the test course. A group of engineers watched a crushed Lincoln dragged away through the morning air. The hairless plastic mannequin of a woman sat propped on the grass, injury sites marked on her legs and thorax.

Journeys to an Interior. Waiting in Karen Novotny’s apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: ‘The Eye of Silence’ - these porous rock towers, with the luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence. Moving across the iodine water of these corroded lagoons, Talbot followed the solitary nymph through the causeways of rock, the palaces of his own flesh and bone. (2) Media: montage landscapes of war - webbing heaped in pits beside the Shanghai - Nanking railway; bargirls’ cabins built out of tyres and fuel drums; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L. C. T.s off Woosung pier. (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karen’s body - beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the processions of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment.

Stochastic Analysis. Karen Novotny paused over the wet stockings in the handbasin. As his fingers touched her armpits she stared into the sculpture garden between the apartment blocks. The sallow-faced young man in the fascist overcoat who had followed her all week was sitting on the bench beside the Paolozzi. His paranoid eyes, with their fusion of passion and duplicity, had watched her like a rapist’s across the café tables. Talbot’s bruised hands were lifting her breasts, as if weighing their heavy curvatures against some more plausible alternative. The landscape of highways obsessed him, the rear mouldings of automobiles. All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun. Searching in his suitcase, she found clippings of his face taken from as yet unpublished news stories in Oggi and Newsweek . In the evening, while she bathed, waiting for him to enter the bathroom as she powdered her body, he crouched over the blueprints spread between the sofas in the lounge, calculating a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park.

Crash Magazine. Catherine Austin moved through the exhibits towards the dark-skinned young man in the black coat. He leaned against one of the cars, his face covered by the rainbows reflected from a frosted windshield. Who was Koester: a student in Talbot’s class; Judas in this scenario; a rabbi serving a sinister novitiate? Why had he organized this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

A Cosmetic Problem. The star of the show was JFK, victim of the first conceptual car crash. A damaged Lincoln had been given the place of honour, plastic models of the late President and his wife in the rear seat. An elaborate attempt had been made to represent cosmetically the expressed brain tissue of the President. As she touched the white acrylic smears across the trunk Koester swung himself aggressively out of the driver’s seat. While he lit her cigarette she leaned against the fender of a white Pontiac, their thighs almost touching. Koester took her arm with a nervous gesture. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . ’ The flow of small talk modulated their sexual encounter. ‘ . . . surely Christ’s crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident - certainly if we accept Jarry’s happy piece of anti-clericalism . . . ’

The Sixty-Minute Zoom. As they moved from apartment to apartment along the motorway, Karen Novotny was conscious of the continuing dissociation of the events around her. Talbot followed her about the apartment, drawing chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table as she drank her coffee, and lastly around herself: (1) sitting, in the posture of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, on the edge of the bidet, (2) watching from the balcony as she waited for Koester to find them again, (3) making love to Talbot on the bed. He worked silently at the chalk outlines, now and then rearranging her limbs. The noise of the helicopters had become incessant. One morning she awoke in complete silence to find that Talbot had gone.

A Question of Definition. The multiplying outlines covered the walls and floors, a frieze of priapic dances - crash victims, a crucified man, children in intercourse. The outline of a helicopter covered the cinder surface of the tennis court like the profile of an archangel. She returned after a fruitless search among the cafés to find the furniture removed from the apartment. Koester and his student gang were photographing the chalk outlines. Her own name had been written into the silhouette of herself in the bath. ‘ “Novotny, masturbating,” ’ she read out aloud. ‘Are you writing me into your scenario, Mr Koester?’ she asked with an attempt at irony. His irritated eyes compared her figure with the outline in the bath. ‘ We know where he is, Miss Novotny.’ She stared at the outline of her breasts on the black tiles of the shower stall, Talbot’s hands traced around them. Hands multiplied around the rooms, soundlessly clapping, a welcoming host.

The Unidentified Female Orifice. These leg stances preoccupied Talbot - Karen Novotny (1) stepping from the driving seat of the Pontiac, median surface of thighs exposed, (2) squatting on the bathroom floor, knees laterally displaced, fingers searching for the diaphragm lip, (3) in the a tergo posture, thighs pressing against Talbot, (4) collision: crushed right tibia against the instrument console, left patella impacted by the handbrake.

The Optimum Wound Profile.‘One must bear in mind that roll-over followed by a head-on

collision produces complex occupant movements and injuries from unknown sources,’ Dr Nathan explained to Captain Webster. He held up the montage photograph he had found in Koester’s cubicle, the figure of a man with itemized wound areas. ‘However, here we have a wholly uncharacteristic emphasis on palm, ankle, and abdominal injuries. Even allowing for the excessive crushing movements in a severe impact it is difficult to reconstruct the likely accident mode. In this case, taken from Koester’s scenario of Talbot’s death, the injuries seem to have been sustained in an optimized auto-fatality, conceived by the driver as some kind of bizarre crucifixion. He would be mounted in the crash vehicle in an obscene position as if taking part in some grotesque act of intercourse - Christ crucified on the sodomized body of his own mother.’

The Impact Zone. At dusk Talbot drove around the deserted circuit of the research laboratory test track. Grass grew waist high through the untended concrete, wheel-less cars rusted in the undergrowth along the verge. Overhead the helicopter moved across the trees, its fans churning up a storm of leaves and cigarette cartons. Talbot steered the car among the broken tyres and oil drums. Beside him the young woman leaned against his shoulder, her grey eyes surveying Talbot with an almost minatory calm. He turned on to a concrete track between the trees. The collision course ran forwards through the dim light, crushed cars shackled to steel gondolas above a catapult. Plastic mannequins spilled through the burst doors and panels. As they walked along the catapult rails Talbot was aware of the young woman pacing out the triangle of approach roads. Her face contained the geometry of the plaza. He worked until dawn, towing the wrecks into the semblance of a motorcade.

Talbot: False Deaths.(1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny’s beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis - traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses contained for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

Unusual Poses.‘You’ll see why we’re worried, Captain.’ Dr Nathan beckoned Webster towards the photographs pinned to the walls of Talbot’s office. ‘We can regard them in all cases as “poses”. They show (1) the left orbit and zygomatic arch of President Kennedy magnified from Zapruder frame 230, (2) X-ray plates of the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, (3) a sequence of corridor angles at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, (4) Miss Karen Novotny, an intimate of Talbot’s, in a series of unusual amatory positions. In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality - to a large extent the difference is now meaningless.’ Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman’s body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow - Nader?’

‘In Death, Yes.’ Nathan nodded sagely over his cigarette smoke. ‘In death, yes. That is, an alternate or “false” death. These images of angles and postures constitute not so much a private gallery as a conceptual equation, a fusing device by which Talbot hopes to bring his scenario to a climax. The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader - one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling. In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a

conceptual auto-disaster.’

Idiosyncrasies and Sin-crazed Idioms. As she leaned against the concrete parapet of the camera tower, Catherine Austin could feel Koester’s hands moving around her shoulder straps. His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rain-washed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus. A car moved along the perimeter of the test area. During the night the students had built an elaborate tableau on the impact site fifty feet below, a multi-vehicle auto-crash. A dozen wrecked cars lay on their sides, broken fenders on the grass verges. Plastic mannequins had been embedded in the interlocked windshields and radiator grilles, wound areas marked on their broken bodies. Koester had named them: Jackie, Ralph, Abraham. Perhaps he saw the tableau as a rape? His hand hesitated on her left breast. He was watching the Novotny girl walking along the concrete aisle. She laughed, disengaging herself from Koester. Where were her own wound areas?

Speed Trials. Talbot opened the door of the Lincoln and took up his position in agent Greer’s seat. Behind him the helicopter pilot and the young woman sat in the rear of the limousine. For the first time the young woman had begun to smile at Talbot, a soundless rictus of the mouth, deliberately exposing her wound as if showing him that her shyness had gone. Ignoring her now, Talbot looked out through the dawn light at the converging concrete aisles. Soon the climax of the scenario would come, JFK would die again, his young wife raped by this conjunction of time and space. The enigmatic figure of Nader presided over the collision, its myths born from the cross-overs of auto-crashes and genitalia. He looked up from the wheel as the flares illuminated the impact zone. When the car surged forward he realized that the two passengers had gone.

The Acceleration Couch. Half zipping his trousers, Koester lay back against the torn upholstery, one hand still resting on the plump thigh of the sleeping young woman. The debris-filled compartment had not been the most comfortable site. This zombie-like creature had strayed across the concrete runways like a fugitive from her own dreams, forever talking about Talbot as if unconsciously inviting Koester to betray him. Why was she wearing the Jackie Kennedy wig? He sat up, trying to open the rusty door. The students had christened the wreck ‘Dodge 38’, furnishing the rear seat with empty beer bottles and contraceptive wallets. Abruptly the car jolted forward, throwing him across the young woman. As she woke, pulling at her skirt, the sky whirled past the frosted windows. The clanking cable between the rails propelled them on a collision course with a speeding limousine below the camera tower.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, recreated in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

Interlocked Bodies. Holding the bruise under his left nipple, Dr Nathan ran after Webster towards the burning wrecks. The cars lay together at the centre of the collision corridor, the last steam and smoke lifting from their cabins. Webster stepped over the armless body of Karen Novotny hanging face-down from the rear window. The burning fuel had traced a delicate lacework of expressed tissue across her naked thighs. Webster pulled open the rear door of the Lincoln. ‘Where the hell is Talbot?’ Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the wig lying among the beer bottles.

The Helicopters are Burning. Talbot followed the young woman between the burning helicopters. Their fuselages formed bonfires across the dark fields. Her strong stride, with its itemized progress across the foam-smeared concrete, carried within its rhythm a calculated invitation to his own sexuality. Talbot stopped by the burning wreck of a Sikorsky. The body of Karen Novotny, with its landscapes of touch and feeling, clung like a wraith to his thighs and abdomen.

Fractured Smile. The hot sunlight lay across the suburban street. From the radio of the car sounded a fading harmonic. Karen Novotny’s fractured smile spread across the windshield. Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.

<Annotations>

The Conceptual Death.

Experiments often test the experimenter more than the subject. One remembers the old joke about the laboratory rat who said: ‘I have that scientist trained - every time I press this lever he gives me a pellet of food.’ For me, the most interesting aspect of the work of Masters and Johnson, collected in Human Sexual Response, was its effect on themselves. How were their sex lives influenced, what changes occurred in their sexual freedoms and fantasies? In conversation they seemed almost neutered by the experiments. I suspect that the copulating volunteers were really training the good doctors to lose all interest in sex, just as computerized diagnostic machines, where patients press buttons in reply to stock questions, are inadvertently training them to develop duodenal ulcers or varicose veins.

Talbot. Another face of the central character of The Atrocity Exhibition. The core identity is Traven, a name taken consciously from B. Traven, a writer I’ve always admired for his extreme reclusiveness - so completely at odds with the logic of our own age, when even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms.

Obscene Mannequin.

The time-music of the quasars. A huge volume of radio signals reaches this planet from space, crossing gigantic distances from the far side of the universe. It’s hard to accept that these messages are meaningless, as they presumably are, no more than the outward sign of nuclear processes within the stars. Yet the hope remains that one day we will decode them, and find, not some intergalactic fax service, but a spontaneously generated choral music, a naive electro-magnetic architecture, the primitive syntax of a philosophical system, as meaningless but as reassuring as the pattern of waves on a beach.

Reassembling the furniture of his mind, Talbot has constructed a primitive antenna, and can now hear the night sky singing of time, the voice of the unseen powers of the cosmos.

A Sophisticated Entertainment.

Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say. It seemed likely in the late 60s, but the new puritans of our day would greet such a suggestion with a shudder. A pity - given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.

The Image Maze.

After a dinner party in the 1970s I almost came to blows with a prominent New York poet (in fact, I tried playfully to run him down with my car, if such an act can be playful). He had derided my observation that cruel and violent images which elicit pity one day have by the next afternoon been stylised into media emblems. Yet the tragic photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head was soon used by the London Sunday Times as a repeated logo keying its readers to Vietnam features in the paper. If I remember, the tilt of the dying man’s head was slightly exaggerated, like a stylized coke bottle or tail-fin.

Towards the D.M.Z.

Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular ‘The Eye of Silence’ and ‘Europe After the Rain.’ Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it’s impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it’s difficult to guess what purpose they serve.

Mimetized Disasters.

Most of the machines that surround our lives - airliners, refrigerators, cars and typewriters - have streamlined their way into our affections. Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.

The Persistence of Memory.

Dali’s masterpiece, and one of the most powerful of all surrealist images.

The Plaza.

Dealey Plaza in Dallas, re-imagined in Talbot’s eye as the end of the world.

The Annunciation.

Nader has only just survived into the 1990s, and it’s difficult now to imagine his name leaping to anyone’s lips, but at the time he sent a seismic tremor through the mind of the US consumer, challenging the authority of that greatest of all American icons, the automobile. Every car crash seemed a prayer to Ralph Nader.

Stochastic Analysis.

Believe it or not, some researcher did carry out a stochastic analysis of the Pentagon car park, translating the guesstimated flow-patterns of vehicles into a three-dimensional volume graph.

Crash Magazine.

This was written two years before my 1969 exhibition of crashed cars. Scouring the wreckers’ yards around London, I was unable to find a crashed Lincoln Continental, perhaps fortunately. As it was, the audience reaction to the telescoped Pontiac, Mini and Austin Cambridge verged on nervous hysteria, though had the cars been parked in the street outside the gallery no one would have given them a glance or devoted a moment’s thought to the injured occupants. In a calculated test of the spectators, I hired a topless girl to interview the guests on closed-circuit TV. She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless - an interesting logic was at work there. As the opening night party deteriorated into a drunken brawl she was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac, and later wrote a damning review of the show in the underground paper Friendz. The cars were exhibited without comment, but during the month-long show they were continually attacked by visitors to the gallery, who broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, splashed them with white paint. The overall reaction to the experiment convinced me to write Crash, in itself a considerable challenge to most notions of sanity.

I’m told that cars purporting to be the JFK Continental are often exhibited in the United States, and that a white Continental claiming to be the car in which Kennedy met his death was recently the centrepiece of a small museum on the causeway leading to Cocoa Beach, Florida.

The Optimum Wound Profile.

In February 1972, two weeks after completing Crash , I was involved in my only serious car accident. After a front wheel blowout my Ford Zephyr veered to the right, crossed the central reservation (I received a bill for the demolished sign, and was annoyed to see later that I had paid for a more advanced model, with flashing lights), and then rolled over and continued upside-down along the oncoming lane. Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and no other vehicle was involved. An extreme case of nature imitating art. Curiously, before the accident and since, I have always been a careful and even slow driver, frequently egged on by impatient women-friends.

Unusual Poses.

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles - ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ - together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography. One shudders to think how the report’s authors would have dealt with any sexual elements, particularly if they had involved Jacqueline Kennedy (perhaps The Atrocity Exhibition fills that gap), or how their successors might have coped with the assassination of Vice-President Quayle and his evangelist wife in a hotel suite - say in Miami, a good city in which to be assassinated,

within sight of those lovely banyan trees in Coral Gables, ambling pelicans and the witty Arquitectonica building.

Speed Trials.

Special Agent William R. Greer of the Secret Service was the driver of the Presidential limousine. One can’t help wondering how the events in Dealey Plaza affected him. Has his sense of space and time been altered? What role in his imagination is played by the desperate widow? The facilities exist for a complete neuro-psychiatric profile, though one will never be carried out. The results would be interesting, since we were all in a sense in the driver’s seat on that day in Dallas.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ASSASSINATION WEAPON

Thoracic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish. The inhospitability of this mineral world, with its inorganic growths, is relieved only by the balloons flying in the clear sky. They are painted with names: Jackie, Lee Harvey, Malcolm. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Here, time makes no concessions.

Autogeddon. Waking: the concrete embankment of a motorway extension. Roadworks, cars drumming two hundred yards below. In the sunlight the seams between the sections are illuminated like the sutures of an exposed skull. A young woman stands ten feet away from him, watching with unsure eyes. The hyoid bone in her throat flutters as if discharging some subvocal rosary. She points to her car, parked off the verge beside a grader, and then beckons to him. Kline, Coma, Xero. He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach. Under a different sun. This girl is not Coma. ‘My car.’ She speaks, the sounds as dissociated as the recording in a doll. ‘I can give you a lift. I saw you reach the island. It’s like trying to cross the Styx.’

Googolplex. Dr Nathan studied the walls of the empty room. The mandalas, scored in the white plaster with a nail file, radiated like suns towards the window. He peered at the objects on the tray offered to him by the nurse. ‘So, these are the treasures he has left us - an entry from Oswald’s Historic Diary, a much-thumbed reproduction of Magritte’s “Annunciation”, and the mass numbers of the first twelve radioactive nuclides. What are we supposed to do with them?’ Nurse Nagamatzu gazed at him with cool eyes. ‘Permutate them, doctor?’ Dr Nathan lit a cigarette, ignoring the explicit insolence. This elegant bitch, like all women she intruded her sexuality at the most inopportune moments. One day . . . He said, ‘Perhaps. We might find Mrs Kennedy there. Or her husband. The Warren Commission has reopened its hearing, you know. Apparently it’s not satisfied. Quite unprecedented.’ Permutate them? The theoretical number of nucleotide patterns in DNA was a mere 10 to the power of 120,000. What number was vast enough to contain all the possibilities of those three objects?

Jackie Kennedy, your eyelids deflagrate. The serene face of the President’s widow, painted on clapboard four hundred feet high, moves across the rooftops, disappearing into the haze on the outskirts of the city. There are hundreds of the signs, revealing Jackie in countless familiar postures. Next week there may be an SS officer, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus or Fidel Castro. The fragments of these signs litter the suburban streets for weeks afterwards. Bonfires of Jackie’s face burn among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. With luck he finds a job on one of the municipal disposal teams, warms his hands at a brazier of eyes. At night he sleeps beneath an unlit bonfire of breasts.

Xero. Of the three figures who were to accompany him, the strangest was Xero. For most of the time Kline and Coma would remain near him, sitting a few feet away on the embankment of the deserted motorway, following in another car when he drove to the radio-observatory, pausing behind him as he visited the atrocity exhibition. Coma was too shy, but now and then he would manage to talk to Kline, although he never remembered what they said to each other. By contrast,

Xero was a figure of galvanic energy and uncertainty. As he moved across the abandoned landscape near the overpass, the perspectives of the air seemed to invert behind him. At times, when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the hieroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

Questions, always questions. Karen Novotny watched him move around the apartment, dismantling the mirrors in the hall and bathroom. He stacked them on the table between the settees in the lounge. This strange man, and his obsessions with time, Jackie Kennedy, Oswald and Eniwetok. Who was he? Where had he come from? In the three days since she had found him on the motorway she had discovered only that he was a former H-bomber pilot, for some reason carrying World War III in his head. ‘What are you trying to build?’ she asked. He assembled the mirrors into a box-like structure. He glanced up at her, face hidden by the peak of his Air Force cap. ‘A trap.’ She stood beside him as he knelt on the floor. ‘For what? Time?’ He placed a hand between her knees and gripped her right thigh, handhold of reality. ‘For your womb, Karen. You’ve caught a star there.’ But he was thinking of Coma, waiting with Kline in the espresso bar, while Xero roamed the street in his white Pontiac. In Coma’s eyes runes glowed.

The Impossible Room. In the dim light he lay on the floor of the room. A perfect cube, its walls and ceiling were formed by what seemed to be a series of cinema screens. Projected on to them in close-up was the face of Nurse Nagamatzu, her mouth, three feet across, moving silently as she spoke in slow motion. Like a cloud, the giant head moved up the wall behind him, then passed across the ceiling and down the opposite corner. Later the inclined, pensive face of Dr Nathan appeared, rising from the floor until it filled three walls and the ceiling, a slow mouthing monster.

Beach Fatigue. After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Pontiac Starchief. Two hundred yards from the hut a wheel-less Pontiac sits in the sand. The presence of this car baffles him. Often he spends hours sitting in it, trying out the front and back seats. All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the Coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds an incomplete isolation drill for trainee astronauts, half of an eighty-hour sequence.

Coma: the million-year girl. Coma’s arrival coincides with his recovery from the bout of fever. At first she spends all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors. Shortly afterwards Kline appears, and sits at a chair and table in the sand twenty yards from the hut. Xero, meanwhile, is moving among the oil derricks half a mile away, assembling immense Cinemascope signs that carry the reclining images of Oswald, Jackie Kennedy and

Malcolm X.

Pre-uterine Claims.‘The author,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘has found that the patient forms a distinctive type of object relation based on perpetual and irresistible desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass. Although psychoanalysis cannot reach the primary archaic mechanism of “rapprochement” it can deal with the neurotic superstructure, guiding the patient towards the choice of stable and worthwhile objects. In the case under consideration the previous career of the patient as a military pilot should be noted, and the unconscious role of thermonuclear weapons in bringing about the total fusion and non-differentiation of all matter. What the patient is reacting against is, simply, the phenomenology of the universe, the specific and independent existence of separate objects and events, however trivial and inoffensive these may seem. A spoon, for example, offends him by the mere fact of its existence in time and space. More than this, one could say that the precise, if largely random, configuration of atoms in the universe at any given moment, one never again to be repeated, seems to him to be preposterous by virtue of its unique identity . . . ’ Dr Nathan lowered his pen and looked down into the recreation garden. Traven was standing in the sunlight, raising and lowering his arms and legs in a private calisthenic display, which he repeated several times (presumably an attempt to render time and events meaningless by replication?).

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’ Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr Nathan’s demonstration table. These were: (1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 Super-fortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, August 7th, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to Dr Nathan. ‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’

‘Not in the sense you mean.’ Dr Nathan covered the exhibits with a sheet. By chance the cabinets took up the contours of a corpse. ‘Not in the sense you mean. This is an attempt to bring about the “false” death of the President - false in the sense of coexistent or alternate. The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence.’ Dr Nathan went over to the window. Obviously he would have to begin the search single-handedly. Where to begin? No doubt Nurse Nagamatzu could be used as bait. That vamp had once worked as a taxi-dancer in the world’s largest nightclub in Osaka, appropriately named ‘The Universe’.

Unidentified Radio-source, Cassiopeia. Karen Novotny waited as he reversed the car on to the farm track. Half a mile across the meadows she could see the steel bowls of the three radio telescopes in the sunlight. So the attempt was to be made here? There seemed to be nothing to kill except the sky. All week they had been chasing about, sitting for hours through the conference on neuro-psychiatry, visiting art galleries, even flying in a rented Rapide across the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. Her eyes had ached from keeping a lookout. ‘They’re four hundred feet high,’ he told her, ‘the last thing you need is a pair of binoculars.’ What had he been looking for - the radio telescopes or the giant madonnas he muttered about as he lay asleep beside her at night? ‘Xero!’ she heard him shout. With the agility of an acrobat he vaulted over the bonnet of the car, then set off at a run across the meadow. Carrying the black Jackie Kennedy wig as carefully as she could in both hands, she hurried after him. One of the telescopes was moving, its dish turning towards them.

Madame Butterfly. Holding the wound under her left breast, Nurse Nagamatzu stepped across Webster’s body and leaned against the bogie of the telescope pylon. Eighty feet above her the

steel bowl had stopped revolving, and the echoes of the gunshots reverberated among the lattice- work. Clearing her throat with an effort, she spat out the blood. The flecks of lung tissue speckled the bright ribbon of the rail. The bullet had broken two ribs, then collapsed her left lung and lodged itself below her scapula. As her eyes faded she caught a last glimpse of a white American car setting off across the tarmac apron beyond the control house, where the shells of the old bombers lay heaped together. The runways of the former airfield radiated from her in all directions. Dr Nathan was kneeling in the path of the car, intently building a sculpture of mirrors. She tried to pull the wig off her head, and then fell sideways across the rail.

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Pausing outside the entrance to the tea terrace, Margaret Traven noticed the tall figure of Captain Webster watching her from the sculpture room. Duchamp’s glass construction, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, reminded her of the ambiguous role she might have to play. This was chess in which every move was a counter-gambit. How could she help her husband, that tormented man, pursued by furies more implacable than the Four Riders - the very facts of time and space? She gave a start as Webster took her elbow. He turned to face her, looking into her eyes. ‘You need a drink. Let’s sit down - I’ll explain again why this is so important.’

Venus Smiles. The dead face of the President’s widow looked up at him from the track. Confused by the Japanese cast of her features, with all their reminders of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he stared at the bowl of the telescope. Twenty yards away Dr Nathan was watching him in the sunlight, the sculpture beside him reflecting a dozen fragments of his head and arms. Kline and Coma were moving away along the railway track.

Einstein.‘The notion that this great Swiss mathematician is a pornographer may strike you as something of a bad joke,’ Dr Nathan remarked to Webster. ‘However, you must understand that for Traven science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. How different from Lautreamont, who brought together the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table, identifying the pudenda of the carpet with the woof of the cadaver.’ Dr Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’

Rune-filled Eyes. Now, in this concluding phase, the presence of his watching trinity, Coma, Kline and Xero, became ever closer. All three were more preoccupied than he remembered them. Only Coma, with her rune-filled eyes, watched him with any sympathy. It was as if they sensed that something was missing. He remembered the documents he had found near the terminal hut.

In a Technical Sense. Webster’s hand hesitated on Karen Novotny’s zip. He listened to the last bars of the Mahler symphony playing from the radiogram extension in the warm bedroom. ‘The bomber crashed on landing,’ he explained. ‘Four members of the crew were killed. He was alive when they got him out, but at one point in the operating theatre his heart and vital functions failed. In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes. Now, all this time later, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell. You can see he’s trying to build bridges between things - this Kennedy business, for example. He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense.’

The Water World. Margaret Traven moved through the darkness along the causeways between the reservoirs. Half a mile away the edge of the embankment formed a raised horizon, enclosing this world of tanks, water and pumping gear with an almost claustrophobic silence. The varying levels of water in the tanks seemed to let an extra dimension into the damp air. A hundred yards away, across two parallel settling beds, she saw her husband walking rapidly along one of the white-painted catwalks. He disappeared down a stairway. What was he looking for? Was this watery world the site where he hoped to be reborn, in this fragmented womb with its dozens of amniotic levels?

An Existential Yes. They were moving away from him. After his return to the terminal hut he noticed that Kline, Coma and Xero no longer approached him. Their fading figures, a quarter of a mile from the hut, wandered to and fro, half-hidden from him by the hollows and earthworks. The Cinemascope billboards of Jackie, Oswald and Malcolm X were beginning to break up in the wind. One morning he woke to find that they had gone.

The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

<Annotations>

Thoracic Drop.

Oscar Dominguez, a leading member of the surrealist group in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at an early stage in the formation of the brain’s visual centres, before the wiring is fully in place. Here I refer to Ernst’s ‘Eye of Silence’.

Googolplex.

Oswald’s Historic Diary, which he began on October 16th, 1959, the day of his arrival in Moscow, is a remarkable document which shows this inarticulate and barely literate man struggling to make sense of the largest issues of his day. Curiously, many prominent assassins have possessed distinctive literary styles, as if they had unconsciously rehearsed and rationalized their crimes on the verbal level long before committing them. Arthur Bremer, who critically wounded George Wallace, composed his own diary with great literary flair, while Manson has a unique apocalyptic style. ‘Paycheck whore wears a dollar bill gown to the funeral of hope and love . . . ’ (The Manson File, Amok Press).

Xero.

These three figures, who are shadows projected from Traven’s unconscious, had been in my mind since the end of the 1950s (see Re/Search #8/9, pages 38-40). They materialized in The Atrocity Exhibition, but then exited and never returned. I wait patiently for them to reappear.

Beach Fatigue.

Guam in 1947. The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the Second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific islands with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum. It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the expected American landings.

‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into

the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

[sleepyfan-blog]

*Tired nyoom* I'm tired, stressed, and requesting some angsty Angel's Flower with that thing we discussed in Discord with Ink trying to basically get rid of Venus and take Heelies back home

fandom: Undertale AU

characters and pairing: Ink, Heliotrope, Venus - ocs by @izzy-the-bizzy Angel’s Flower

warnings: attempted murder, kidnapping

word count: 2,116

Summary: Ink is determined to save his poor, brainwashed son from the seductive clutches of Evil. Even if he has to kill to do it.

tagslist: @anxiety-is-married-to-depression @angelofthehalfmoon @trainwreck-of-skeletons @hisame-amadashi​ @therandomskelekey @capisnotonfire

Ink was pacing back and forth, the more that he thought about the argument that he had with Heelies, the more upset that he got.

“You do realize that Venus is Nightmare’s top spy! They are trying to turn you to his side, so that you will fight against us and spread evil!” Ink had pointed out with a growl, not wanting his precious son to be tainted by Nightmare’s darkness.

“Yes, I know that they work for Nightmare! But they would never hurt me, and I love them. They love me.” Heelies snapped back, his generally laid back and easy going demeanor having changed completely. The younger skeleton is glaring at his dad and his fists are balled at his sides.

Ink has never seen his son so aggressive before - further proof that Nightmare and this Venus have been trying and are succeeding in twisting his gentle, naive baby boy into someone dangerous and deadly. “Nightmare is an expert in breaking minds and twisting people to suit his will. I don’t want him to break you and turn you into a parody of who you are, Heelies. I love you dearly, and I want you to be safe.”

“I am safe! And you say that Nightmare is evil and wants to destroy the multiverse. He doesn’t - I’ve seen how he deals with some of the worst timelines I’ve ever seen. He negotiates with their leaders - the human and monster - in exchange for resources or space. Yes, he is interfering with the stories that the timelines are supposed to take… But he seems to be trying to interfere for the better.” Heelies huffed, glaring more at his papa, shaking with anger.

Ink’s eye lights widen, and he whispers just loud enough for his son to hear “By the creators… I was worried that things were bad, but I… I hadn’t thought that Nightmare and that seductive spy of his had twisted your mind so far…” He reached out to his son, but Heelies darted back, the scowl on his face darker than Ink had ever seen it.

“Ven hasn’t twisted my mind, and neither has Mr. Nightmare. Both of them are very different hen who you believe them to be, dad. I… This was exactly the reason why I never wanted to tell you that I was dating someone. I knew that you’d freak out about it, especially since Ven isn’t the sort of person you’d approve of me dating.” Heelies had hissed, hurt and frustrated and unwilling to let Ink reach out and hug the other close, to help him calm down.

“Heelies, please be reasonable. Don’t-” Ink began, trying to placate his son, but the other cut him off abruptly.

“I am being reasonable! You’re the one who won’t listen! I’m leaving and you can’t stop me!” Heliotrope had yelled, teleporting away and though Ink tried to teleport after the other, Heelies had used several portals through a half-dozen AUs, and Ink couldn’t track the other.

Ink had managed to find his wayward, manipulated son. Heliotrope was, of course, in the timeline that Nightmare had set up his main base - or at least one of them. It was the base that Nightmare held Dream hostage on numerous occasions, and trying to get into that timeline was always a pain, as the very magic of the AU seemed to resist his presence entering it. Ink was fairly sure that NIghtmare had somehow woven spells into the base code of the timeline itself so that he couldn’t enter timelines with liquids in them somehow.

But for now, the creative guardian wasn’t wondering how that was fucking possible. He had decided on a course of action. Venus was the one who had stolen his precious’ son’s heart, and as long as they were alive, they would have a pull on his heart, as Heelies was an intensely loyal and caring person (much like his papa, Blue)… So Ink was going to kill Venus and take his son back. He was well aware of the fact that killing them would hurt Heelies, but it would be for the best. Heelies would eventually forgive him, especially after the other forgot about Venus - as Heelies did have some of Ink’s own forgetfulness tendencies, needing to keep a pad of paper and something to write with in his inventory to keep track of important things.

He and Blue had argued about what to do for months and months. But Ink was certain that the longer that they hesitated and delayed, the more deeply brainwashed and darker Heelies would become, and the longer it would take for his son to recover from the awful misery that Nightmare was doubtlessly putting their son through. He wrote a note to Blue and Dream - in case either one of them stopped by the house before he was back.

I’m going to go get Heelies back! And make sure that the one who took him from us is permanently dealt with. See you later! ~Ink

With a roll of his shoulders, Ink concentrated hard on Nightmare’s castle, intending to appear on the roof, rather than inside one of the rooms, where someone could be in and then alert the rest of the castle to his presence. It took a solid ten minutes of focusing, but Ink felt his magic shift and twist.

He activated his eye lights and sure enough, the rust-red sky was overhead, the miserable bare dirt fields that extended in rolling waves all around the spikey, intimidating looking castle. Ink closed his eyes, a small smirk playing on his lips as he sensed Venus’s magic. They were alone from what he could tell. Good, that would make things easier. He teleported directly outside of the younger skeleton’s room, broom in hand. He activated a bit of his magic, the magical paint beginning to drip from the tip of broomy’s brush as he walked in.

Venus turned towards him, the smile on their face falling somewhat as they recognized him “I… Oh… Hello?” They looked a little cautious but confused. “Uhm… Why are you here?”

“To see you and Heelies, of course. It’s been months since I’ve seen my son, and I’m worried about him… You are in possession of his heart. He’s’ a gentle soul. Sweet, cheerful… Oh, he can pretend to be scary and bluster all he likes… But you and I both know that he couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Haha… Yeah. Heelies is such a pacifist. It’s really endearing to see him try to spar against a couple of the others though. He tries really hard. He just… He’s wonderful.” The vile villain hummed, an amused smirk playing on their lips, a cruel parody of a loving tone in their voice. “He misses you and Blue. He won’t admit it easily, but I can sense that he does. He’d be so happy to hear that you’re in the castle ‘cause you want to talk to him.”

“Actually, I wanted to speak to you, first. As I previously stated, you hold my son’s rather fragile soul in your hands… And I just…” Ink sighs, shaking his head as he takes his brush from behind his back, beginning to lean on it, faux-casually “I’m just not convinced that you’re the right person for him. How many have you killed? How many AUs have fallen into NIghtmare’s control because of the intel that you gather? Dozens? Hundreds? I know that your LV is comparable to Dust or Killers, and they’ve both slaughtered their entire timeline - and that was before Nightmare got his hands on them.”

Venus flinched, looking away from him, shifting uncomfortably, their wings partially wrapping around themself in a gesture that would be a subconscious attempt at soothing themself if Ink didn’t know that they were a master manipulator - just like their boss, Nightmare. “I… I’d rather not think about how many people I’ve killed. I-I’ve killed many of them in s-self defense. Besides we’ve… We’ve been doing things differently in the past decade or two. Less murder and more negotiation. It helps that Papa and Sat drop by and visit. Their nagging helps Dad think things through a bit more logically. I… I know that I have blood and dust on my hands… But… Mr. Ink, sir. I… I really, truly love Heelies. He’s the light of my life, and I… I’ve never realized what it was like to be in love until Heelies came crashing into my life. I… I know that I’m not what you’d hope for in a partner for Heelies, but I try to be worthy of him. I… I know that I’ve become a better person, since I’ve gotten to know him.”

Hmmm… Venus had definitely been taught how to persuade others by Nightmare - that same silver tongue… Wait - dad. Papa. Whoever the fuck Sat was. Ink’s eye lights swirl in a chaotic swirl of colors and shapes as something that he’d been just about to connect for a while now finally slid into place “Wait… You’re Nightmare’s child? Not someone who he picked up in a timeline because he found you to be useful?”

“Yes. I’m his oldest child. Saturn is my younger brother… Did you not know that?” Venus responded, a startled frown appearing on their face.

By the creators, that added another layer of twistedness to all of this! It also explained why Dream was so… Strange when it came to Venus. He had a tangled past with Nightmare, and would of course be aware of Venus’s parentage. Why Dream knew so much about Nightmare, the positive guardian never said. But this… Perhaps with Venus’s death, it would give the dark and destructive lord of negativity a bit of pause to grieve, and give him and the other Star Sanses time to breathe and plan how to deal with the other’s charm offensive. “No, I did not. Is Saturn in the castle as well?” Killing both of Nightmare’s children would surely be a benefit to the multiverse - but he’d settle for the one who had stolen his son’s soul for now.

“No, Sat is usually with papa, or hidden away in some timeline that dad and I can’t get to, due to being negative beings. But papa’s gotten better about that as dad’s calmed down and the two of them have started talking instead of just fighting.” Venus responded.

Ink squinted at the other for a moment, before deciding that they were telling him the truth. He knew that Nightmare didn’t lie with every breath, though the creative guardian didn’t trust the bastard at all. He sent the other a warm smile “Well, this has been a very enlightening talk.  It’s just… It’s a pity that you are Nightmare’s child, haha. I was almost convinced that you actually love my son. Goodbye.” He struck as confusion filled the younger being, their movements slowed to the point where Ink was able to strike them down.

Venus had managed to dodge just enough to avoid a completely fatal blow, and the other screamed, their magic reverberating around the castle as a wave of pure negativity hit Ink hard, sending the creative guardian staggering backwards and falling to his knees.

Nightmare himself teleported in, confusion and fear on the other’s face at the gaping, paint-splattered wound, hissing as a couple of tentacles wrapped protectively around his child. “Ink-” The other growled, lunging for the creative guardian.

“Pfhaha… Good luck keeping your child from dusting, Nightmare. Perhaps now you will know the pain that you have inflicted on countless others. Ciao~!” Ink purred, a feral grin on his face as he teleported out of the room, reappearing next to Heelies - who was running towards the dying Venus. “Heeelies, my darling son! Time to come home!” Ink ordered, flicking his magic over his son, even as the other tried and failed to dodge, the other’s form losing cohesion as he turned into a purple puddle, the other’s soul floating on top. He scooped the other up and gently put him in a magically protected mason jar. “You be a good boy now and try not to reform. Papa’s got you. I’ll make sure that you’ll be all better. Besides, the wicked creature who stole your heart won’t be distracting you any more. Papa made sure of that.” With that, he teleported out of the AU, dodging several different bone and blaster attacks from Nightmare’s furious lieutenants.

Heelies was safely ensconced in his arms, bubbling and shifting in the jar in great distress, but the other would settle down soon enough. Ink was sure of that “Shhh… It’s okay… Papa’s got you… Shhh… Things will get better, I promise…”