#distributed myth

[geoxx-carrboro]

Collapse Chronicles Entry #80 – You Were There. And You – By Geox

“You Were There. And You.”[Global Identity Echo Confluence]Collected from false memory alignments, shared narrative overlaps, and post-recursion convergence zones. Subject class: human population. Projection residue: 9% remaining. Emotional index: stabilized dispersion.Day 261 A.P.Signal Status: Null | Spiral Residue: Cleared | Pattern Type: Distributed Memory Cohesion It began with names. Not…

[garvescope]

What Do Filmmakers Misunderstand Most About Distribution?

Distribution isn’t the reward at the end of the journey. It’s not the final handshake. It’s not the bow on top of your finished film. Distribution is the strategy. It’s the engine. It’s the difference between your film being watched by two hundred people and being watched by two hundred thousand. And yet, most filmmakers misunderstand it completely. They treat it like a transaction. Like a…

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Why Creating a New Account on Medium Was an Absolute Waste of Time for Me

How Disappointment and Frustration Led to Empowerment and an Emerging Perspective on Writing Success for Aspiring Writers Inspiration I know this story’s title might surprise some of my loyal readers. My writing rarely carries such a stark, somber tone. But sometimes, sharing hard truths is the most constructive and caring thing one can do for collective consciousness.  Though it may seem…

[runningoutofbooks]

I think women of the past where on to something with the whole brushing your hair 100 times

There is something so soothing about brushing your hair while slowly counting to 100

[tautozhone]

“i’m not very good at drawing males/females/girls/boys/men/women” NOOOOOO BEGINNER ARTIST YOURE FALLING INTO GENDER/BIOESSENTIALISM AND MAKING YOURSELF AND YOUR ART SUFFER FOR IT !!!!

[thethief1996]

Israel has cut water, electricity and food to Palestinians in Gaza. They are buying 10.000 M16 rifles and plan to distribute to civilian settlers in the West Bank to hunt down Palestinians. They're bombing the only way out of Gaza through Egypt, after telling refugees to flee through it, and have threatened the Egyptian government in case they let aid trucks pass through. Entire families, generations, are being wiped out and left to wander the streets hoping they don't get bombed.

Palestinians are using their last minutes of battery to let the world know about their genocide and are being met with a wall of "What about Hamas? What about the beheaded babies? Killing children on either side is bad!" even though the propaganda claims have been debunked over and over again. How cruel is it to ask somebody to condemn themselves before their last words? Or before grieving the loss of their entire families? When there's no such disclaimer to Israelis even though their government has shown over and over genocidal intent? Like who are you even trying to appease? What will your wishy washy statement do against decades of zionist thought infiltrating evangelical and Jewish stablishmemts?

Take action. Israel will fall back if public opinion turns its tide. The UK fell back on its bloody decision to cut aid to Palestine under public scrutiny. The USAmerican empire spends $3.8 billion dollars annually solely on this proxy war while its people suffer under a progressively military regime as well. News outlets are canceling last minute on Palestinian speakers while letting Israelis tell lies unchecked. Palestinian refugees are being targeted in ICE establishments and mosques are already being hounded by the FBI. France and Germany have banned pro-Palestine protests, while Netherlands and the UK have placed restrictions . You have the chance to stop this from turning into repeat of the Iraq war.

I want to do something but there's hardly anything for me to do from Brasil besides spreading the word and not letting these testimonies fall on deaf ears. I'm asking you to do this same ant work from wherever you are.

Follow:

Eye On Palestine (instagram / twitter)

Mohammed El-Kurd (instagram / twitter)

Decolonize Palestine (website with a chronological explanation of the occupation and debunking myths)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Plestia Alaqad (directly from Gaza. Many of her videos are interrupted by bombs)

If there's a protest in your city, please attend. Here's an international calendar of events:

Friday, October 13

ALBUQUERQUE, NM (US) – Fri Oct. 13, 3 pm, UNM Bookstore, University of New Mexico. Organized by Southwest Coalition for Palestine.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA (US) – Fri Oct 13, 6 pm, Sproul Hall (Vigil), University of California Berkeley. Organized by Bears for Palestine.

DOUAIS, FRANCE – Fri Oct 13, 6:30 pm, Place de’Armes.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN – Fri Oct 13, 5:30 pm, Brunnsparken. Organized by Palestinska samordningsgruppen Gothenburg.

GREENSBORO, NC (US) – Fri Oct. 13, 4 pm, Wendover Village, 4203 W Wendover Ave, Greensboro, NC. Organized by Muslims for a Better NC.

LONDON, ENGLAND – Fri Oct 13, 5 pm, Keir Starmer’s Office, Crowndale Center, 218 Eversholt St, London. Organized by IJAN UK.

MEANJIN/BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA – Fri Oct 13, 6 pm, King George Square.

MIAMI, FL (US) – Fri Oct 13, 4:30 pm, Bayfront Park. Organized by Troika Kollectiv.

NAPOLI, ITALY – Fri Oct 13, 4:30 pm, Piazza Garibaldi, Napoli. Organized by GPI and Centro Culturale Handala Ali.

NGUNNAWAL/CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA – Fri Oct 13, 5:30 pm, Carema Place.

PERTH/BOORLOO, AUSTRALIA – Fri Oct. 13, 5:30 pm, Murray Street Hall, Boorloo/Perth. Organized by Friends of Palestine WA.

PORTLAND, OREGON (US) – Fri Oct 13, 3 pm, 1200-1220 SW 5th Ave, Portland.

PORT RICHEY, FL (US) – Fri Oct 13, 7:30 am, Route 19 and Ridge Road, Port Richey. Sponsored by: Florida Peace Action Network; Partners for Palestine; CADSI

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA – Friday, Oct. 13, 7 pm, UP Main Campus, DSA Building opposite Thuto. Organized by PSC UP.

WITSWATERSRAND UNIVERSITY (SOUTH AFRICA) – Fri Oct 13, 1 pm, Great Hall Piazza, Flag demonstration. Organized by Wits PSC.

Saturday, October 14

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND – Sat, Oct. 14, 2 pm, St. Nichlas Square. Organized by Scottish PSC.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – Sat Oct 14, 2 pm, Aotea Square, Queens St, 291-2997 Queen St. Organized by PSN Aotearoa.

DETROIT/DEARBORN, MICHIGAN (US) – Sat Oct 14, 2 pm, Ford Woods Park, 5700 Greenfield Road. Organized by SAFE, PYM, SJP, Handala Coalition, more.

DUNDEE, SCOTLAND – Sat, Oct. 14, 2 pm, Place TBA. Organized by Scottish PSC.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND – Sat, Oct 14, 2 pm, Princes Street at Foot of the Mound. Organized by Scottish PSC.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY – Sat Oct 14, 3 pm Hauptwache, Frankfurt am Main. Sponsored by Palestina eV, Migrantifa Rhein-Main and more.

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – Sat. Oct 14, 2 pm, Buchanan Steps. Organized by Scottish PSC.

HOUSTON, TEXAS (US) – Sat Oct 14, 2 pm, City Hall, 901 Bagby St. Organizd by PYM, PAC, USPCN, SJP and more.

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND – Sat Oc 14, 12 pm, Church St. Organized by FRFI.

LONDON, ENGLAND – Sat Oct 14, 12 pm, BBC Portland Place, London. Organized by a broad coalition.

MILANO, ITALY – Sat. Oct 14, 3:30 pm, Piazza San Babila. Organized by Young Palestinians of Italy, UDAP, Palestinian Community, Association of Palestinians.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA – Sat Oct 14, 3 pm, Lake Eola at Robinson and Eola, Orland. Organized by Florida Palestine Network.

TORINO, ITALY – Sat. Oct. 14, 3 pm, Piazza Crispi. Organized by Progetto Palestina.

VALPARAISO, CHILE – Sat Oct 14, 6 pm, Plaza Victoria, Valparaiso. Organized by Comite Chileno de Solidaridad con Palestina.

WASHINGTON, DC (US) – Sat Oct 14, 1 pm, Lafayette Square. Organized by AMP.

Sunday, October 15

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – Sun Oct 15, 2 pm, March from Dam Square to Jonas Daniel Meijer plein.

NAARM/MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – Sun Oct 15, State Library Victoria.

TARDANYA/ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA – Sun Oct 15, 2 pm, Parliament House.

AUSTIN, TEXAS (US) – Sun Oct 15, 3 pm, Texas Capitol. Organized by PSC ATX.

GADIGAL/SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – Sun Oct 15, 1 pm, Sydney Town Hall.

SANTIAGO, CHILE -Sun Oct 15, 11 am, Plaza Dignidad, Santiago. Organized by Comite Chileno de Solidaridad con Palestina.

[hyperlexichypatia]

As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

[heritageposts]

Germany's leading Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the opposition Christian Democratic Party (CDU) have ordered high schools in Berlin's borough of Neukolln to distribute brochures titled The Myth of Israel #1948. [...] Neukolln is one of Berlin's most diverse and international boroughs with a large Palestinian community. [...] The brochure states there are five "myths" around the creation of the state of Israel, which are subsequently refuted in short essays by various authors. In the first section, debunking myth #1, that Jews and Arabs lived together in peace before Israel was founded, Israel's pre-state militia, the Haganah, responsible for the destruction of 531 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians between December 1947 and the summer of 1948, is promoted as a merely "defensive" Jewish resistance movement. Under 'Myth #2: Israel was established on stolen Palestinian land', Masiyot states that the acquisition of land by Jewish immigrants to Palestine took the form of a legal exchange of capital for an official title deed. At no point in history was land illegally conquered by Jewish immigrants, the author of the text, Michael Spaney, claims. Even land conquered following the wars of 1948 and 1967 and the subsequent construction of settlements, which are internationally recognised as a violation of international law, did not occur unlawfully, it says. "Anyone who uses the accusation of land theft as an argument demonises Israel and denies its legitimacy, i.e. acts out of antisemitic motives," Spaney wrote. "Myth #5: Israel is to blame for the Nakba", includes a text by researcher Shany Mor titled "the UN is distorting the meaning of the Nakba: its view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely one-sided". In the text, Mor states that "displacement during war - then and now - was nothing unusual". He also labels the UN's attention to the Palestinian cause "obsessive" and the Arab defeat of 1948 a myth.

. . . full article on MME (23 Feb 2024)

[divineprank]

If you're as invested in Ocarina of Time as I am then you probably spend a lot of time digging not only through the game's lore and script, but also its development history, the builds of the previous iterations of the game that we've been able to get our grubby hands on over the years, and of course the tasty, tasty developer interviews. Which makes you a fuckEN NERD--

Okay I'll stop with the annoying preamble. Today I'm looking at the collectable items of Ocarina of Time and I'm gonna force-fit the circular shape into the triangular hole for some cool lore.

With regard to the items, we made each one because we thought, "it would be nice to have something like this." I'd say, "The Hookshot is done, so feel free to use it," and everyone would be like, "well, where shall we put it?" - Yoshiaki Koizumi Yeah. (laughs) Even if we had an item, we wouldn't know where to put it. We decided the number of items at the start. But that ended up causing us trouble. - Eiji Aonuma

In an Iwata Asks interview, the development team behind Ocarina of Time talks about the challenges behind the implementation of not only the item system, but many different elements into the game, like the cinematics. Shigeru Miyamoto was especially not fond of the excuse, "I just can't fix it!" when asked to make changes. He tends to prefer to keep his games pliable, he wants to have the ability to swap something out as late as the day before completion. This is pretty typical of Miyamoto, who has a reputation of "upending the tea table" during development, which has brought many an exhausted programmer to tears in the past.

In the same interview, Aonuma states simply that "it was a mess up until the end". The developers felt around in the dark quite a bit, claiming that they didn't really know what kind of game Ocarina of Time was until all the parts finally came together. They were not confident that they were building something solid, instead often wondering if it was crumbling the more they kept at it. This is because just about every element of the project was constantly being changed, most drastically was the game's script. Takumi Kawagoe explains that the script would change so regularly that any time an item was placed in one dungeon, it would probably end up in a different dungeon.

If you've played Ocarina of Time, you can likely reflect upon the item distribution, connecting key items to key moments in the game, such as the Lens of Truth to the Shadow Temple, or the Megaton Hammer to the Fire Temple. An item that stands out to me, however, is the Longshot, the upgrade to the Hookshot you receive in order to... What, exactly? Get to Morpha's area? Okay, and then what? Use it to cross the River of Sand? To navigate a puzzle in Ganon's Tower? Come back to the Fire Temple for the Scarecrow secret? Cool. Great.

Thanks to the Overdump Leak in 2021, we can now visualize a lot of early ideas from the development of "Zelda 64"; piecing together quite a bit of information and creativity that was lost to the cutting room floor, stuff that was once to be only touched on tantalizingly briefly within developer interviews. It's within these early builds that one can actually see the process in which these interviews talk about as it happened, solid ideas lost to a change that pulls the rug (or, the proverbial tea table) out from under the developers.

See, I don't think for a second that the Longshot was originally intended to be the item to find and use within the Water Temple. Certainly it could be a case of not having enough data, but I could even disregard the Longshot entirely, because we don't as of now have access to any information to indicate that the Hookshot would be upgraded that early in development. Personally, I believe the existence of the Hookshot at all to be the result of a carryover from A Link to the Past, a cool tool that was only meant to get Link across much smaller gaps. Remember that earlier quote about how items were created simply because they would be nice to have? Hell, even the original renders were intended to represent that of A Link to the Past's version of the Hookshot.

But now I'm just getting sidetracked. The previously mentioned leak was dated for 1997, with conflicting ideas and reports that the build either is--or is very close to--the demo showcased during Space World 1997, which was when the game finally got its official title of Ocarina of Time. Within this build of Ocarina of Time, we can explore some early iterations of the game's dungeons, the Water Temple, thankfully, being among them.

Tell me, gamer girls. What's different between these two images?

Normally where the player is intended to Longshot their way over, a bridge instead leads to the final area of the dungeon. Here is a clearer image of the early version of the Water Temple's map.

While exploring the rest of this early version of the temple, a constant I discovered was ladders. It appears that, as early as 1997, the player was intended to explore the temple by either adjusting the water (which can be measured by the... scribbles? Writing? Along the walls...) or suffer through ladder hell. That timed puzzle where you shoot the eye and you Longshot through behind the gate that closes when time runs out? Yeah... It's just a loooong ladder waiting for ya instead, honey. What a thrill... With darkness, and silence through the night...

In fact, there's quite a lot of this throughout the early dungeon; it seems the player was intended to coil around the side rooms, weaving in and out both these areas and the main structure like a serpent, using the water physics and ladders to their advantage. Perhaps that was the intention behind the random snake motifs in the final game.

Okay, so what about the Lookshot? While it's very possible that perhaps the general Hookshot's mechanics and functions haven't exactly been baked into the environment yet, I'm not convinced that there was meant to be something there at all. Take Morpha's room, for instance. In all four corners of the arena, you are met not with the platforms that you could easily reach, but instead the platforms are very much the opposite. They appear to be wooden at a first glance, and so a veteran Zelda player might think, "Ah, I can Hookshot my way to those platforms!", but alas, the materials deflect the Hookshot and sparks fly, and you are left pondering your options. With reaching the platforms out of the picture, you might also notice there are no Hookshot targets anywhere in the room, which makes traversing this room quite difficult, and I must reiterate how large this pool of unnatural water is.

Okay so what the hell is it that would be used here? I believe the answer to that question lies within the very man that designed these dungeons. Eiji Aonuma, these days recognized as the senior officer and producer of The Legend of Zelda series, is the constant here. It is no secret that he was often frustrated by the changes that were made to the games he was working on, as he would finish designing a dungeon only to discover his work was made obsolete by the new script decisions. But... who else is Aonuma?

Ah.

The very developer who pushed back against Miyamoto upon being informed of a project idea where he would be expected to "remix" the Ocarina of Time dungeons he had busted his ass to perfect. Of course, as the legend goes, he was challenged to create a brand new Zelda game for his refusal, and he could do so only within 15 months. Eiji Aonuma directed the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and it's inside that game that I think I know what was originally intended to be used in Ocarina of Time's Water Temple.

Think about it. Within Majora's Mask's Great Bay Temple, Link is expected to freeze enemies, water, and several key pieces of the temple's infrastructure to be able to traverse it! This mechanic is even used outside of its respective dungeons in order to reach new areas within the land of Termina.

If you've been a Nintendo fan for long enough, you'll know that often times, if a good idea ends up scrapped in a Nintendo game, that idea will find itself implemented, or at least, better understood within different Nintendo games.

I'm aware that lots of users wanted those two missing dungeons to be implemented in Wind Waker HD. But to be honest, we've already used those two dungeons for other titles after Wind Waker already." - Eiji Aonuma

So if we were to work backwards and look at the extensive use of the Ice Arrows in Majora's Mask and, with Nintendo's habit of recycling ideas in mind, I think it starts to make sense when considering Ocarina of Time. See, the Ice Arrows don't actually show themselves until very late into the game, deep within the Gerudo Training Ground. This is especially unfortunate, because by this point in the story, there is hardly anything left to use this otherwise pretty useful item on. But if we were to instead employ them earlier than the final game's script, we'd see some broken ideas start to mend once again.

Let's start with the Water Temple itself. Specifically, the room where you're expected to navigate the Blade Traps while rushing up the slope towards Morpha's arena at the very end of the temple.

In the final version, following the developer's intent, you are expected to simply make it work and hope to god you don't get hit, for the risk of sliding back down to the start. This room is quite similar in the 1997 build of the game, except instead there is a visible staircase. It appears the challenge of the slope is removed, however, it's probably fair that with such a long stretch of stairs to run up, the Blade Traps would still be present. So how would someone expect to get up there? Freezing the Blade Traps. Easy!

Okay, but still, outside of Dodongo's Cavern, those obstacles don't have much of a significant presence in the game, except... Where?

Right, the Ice Cavern.

Oh, and also the Shadow Temple. (Even Bongo Bongo has programming related to the ice arrows..!)

Hm... Where else do Blade Traps appear significantly? Oh yeah, the Spirit Temple.

All of the dungeons the developers intended for you to visit following the Water Temple appear to suffer this wicked contraption and frankly, it feels like their presence is purposefully ramped up, which makes sense because if you obtained the Ice Arrows, you would now have a tool that you can use to get around them.

Okay, so if this theory is true, if the Ice Arrows were the prominent item used for the Water Temple, then where would the Longshot go? Where the Ice Arrows are in the final game, of course! The Gerudo Training Ground is presented as an optional side challenge, something that is not required to finish the game, but certainly is an experience that makes beating the game all the more rich. So beating an optional challenge and receiving an upgrade to an item Link already has as a reward feels much more fitting to me.

This makes better sense to me in terms of world building as well. You see, the Gerudo are very talented metallurgists! They are often adorned with beautiful gems and jewelry and are always seen with dangerously honed weapons! We also know that they are capable of crafting high quality armor when looking upon an Iron Knuckle or Ganondorf's impressive black set. The entire desert is filled with several instances of their industrial capabilities, with the many heavy gates, fences, chains, and metal cages all throughout the fortress and not to mention the significant amount of weaponry that adorn the Desert Colossus. What is the Longshot really but a springloaded hunk of metal?

So what am I saying, what is the entire point of this insanely long post? With regard to the interview I posted earlier, I don't believe the original intention was to reward the player with the Longshot within the Water Temple. In fact, its most prominent uses that I can recall (that are the developer's intended method to complete the game) all occur in the desert and beyond. Maybe that could mean that the Gerudo Training Ground was once a required mini-dungeon, just like the Ice Cavern or Bottom of the Well.

I believe moving the Longshot to the Training Ground would have made sense lore-wise, story-wise and player progression-wise, and the item distribution would be just a little bit more coherent as a result.

Even after the game was basically done, a lot had to be switched in. For example, "You know that item in that one dungeon? Well, we need to use that in another dungeon." - Takumi Kawagoe

I saw an interesting video about a development theory and it's giving me lore ideas... 👀

[howtofightwrite]

Was bounty hunting in the Old West as popular as the movies make it out to be? The actual history I've read suggests that that niche was mostly taken up either by private detectives from agencies like Pinkerton or by straight outlaws. Were movie-style bounty hunters mostly a myth?

Movie style bounty hunters were almost exclusively a myth. There were the odd exception here or there, but the concept of an old west bounty hunter didn't really exist until the 1950s.

The term, “bounty hunter,” is a little anachronistic as well. While there were people called bounty hunters in the 19th century, the term primarily referred to mercenaries. Specifically this was in the context of any signing or campaign completion bonuses that they would receive. That was the, “bounty.”

Using the modern term, most bounty hunters in the old west were actually local law enforcement officers, who relied on the cash payout bonuses from arrests. (And, in the case of these bounties, thinking of it as a pay bonus for law enforcement really is instructive.) In other cases, law enforcement officers would use a portion of those payouts to entice civilians to assist them in making potentially dangerous arrests.

Private detectives, including the Pinkertons, also sometimes tracked down outlaws, and as with law enforcement, the bonus pay was an enticement. Amusingly, Wells Fargo used to also operate bounty hunters specifically tracking outlaws who'd targeted their property. Though, other contemporary companies did the same. In this case, it's less of a “bounty hunter,” and more of a corporate enforcer, hunting down someone who'd crossed the company.

Another interesting thing to be aware of is that those wanted posters were not publicly distributed. There also wasn't a universal format, or source. Some were distributed by the Pinkertons (though, I'm not entirely clear on whether those were given to law enforcement or primarily kept for internal use, though at least some of their circulars did end up in the public record and have been preserved.) In a lot of cases, these were just a written description of the criminal, and a posted bonus (usually $100 or less.) I'm not completely sure how rare the posters were at the time, but very few have survived into the modern day. So, this was more of a resource for law enforcement, rather than something offered for public consumption. The image of a board of wanted posters presented for anyone wandering psychopath to peruse is a fantasy.

Freelancers, such as they were, seem to have been mostly working for private interests. These were often military veterans who would happily hunt down suspected criminals (such as cattle rustlers) and dispatch them. In general, that ends up looking a bit more like murder-for-hire, rather than what you'd think of as a modern bounty hunter, though it may inform some of the modern perspectives on the job. These are the ones you're probably seeing that get categorized as outlaws, and there is quite a bit of truth to that.

A sort of neat bit of trivia, the modern bounty hunter, (also, more commonly known as a bail bondsman, or bail bond agent), is a very old profession. However their history in the United States originated in San Francisco in 1898. The Old West came to an end in 1912 (generally), so there was a period of 14 years where modern bounty hunters existed in America, before the wild west was officially over. So, in that sense, there is some actual overlap, but it's not what most people think of when talking about a “wild west bounty hunter.” (And, on the subject of, “officially over,” it's worth remembering that the last range war in Wyoming took place in 1909.)

The image of the bounty hunter as a sort of freelance cop, who wanders around arresting outlaws, is a product of highly sanitized 1950s westerns.

-Starke

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[sayruq]

The brochure states there are five "myths" around the creation of the state of Israel, which are subsequently refuted in short essays by various authors.In the first section, debunking myth #1, that Jews and Arabs lived together in peace before Israel was founded, Israel's pre-state militia, the Haganah, responsible for the destruction of 531 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians between December 1947 and the summer of 1948, is promoted as a merely "defensive" Jewish resistance movement. Under 'Myth #2: Israel was established on stolen Palestinian land', Masiyot states that the acquisition of land by Jewish immigrants to Palestine took the form of a legal exchange of capital for an official title deed.

At no point in history was land illegally conquered by Jewish immigrants, the author of the text, Michael Spaney, claims.Even land conquered following the wars of 1948 and 1967 and the subsequent construction of settlements, which are internationally recognised as a violation of international law, did not occur unlawfully, it says. "Anyone who uses the accusation of land theft as an argument demonises Israel and denies its legitimacy, i.e. acts out of antisemitic motives," Spaney wrote. "Myth #5: Israel is to blame for the Nakba", includes a text by researcher Shany Mor titled "the UN is distorting the meaning of the Nakba: its view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely one-sided". In the text, Mor states that "displacement during war - then and now - was nothing unusual".He also labels the UN's attention to the Palestinian cause "obsessive" and the Arab defeat of 1948 a myth.

[probablyasocialecologist]

There is a strange idea in some environmentalist circles that human population is the main cause of ecological breakdown, and that humans have an intrinsically negative impact on ecosystems. Both claims are incorrect. First, human ecological impact is entirely a function of the system of production and provisioning. It depends on what is being produced, under what conditions, and how the yields of production are distributed. For instance, an economy that uses mostly public transit, renewable energy, multi-unit housing and plant-based protein can meet human needs with a fraction of the impact of an economy that produces a lot of SUVs, fossil fuels, mansions and industrial beef, and which allocates a bunch of totally unnecessary production to service the fantasies of overconsuming elites. Remember, we know it is possible to provide decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people with 30% of current global energy and material use, by ensuring efficient technologies and focusing production on socially necessary goods and services. That much is fairly straightforward. But one might say that, even so, every person will always have some negative impact. This too is incorrect. Again, it depends entirely on the production system, and specifically, what people are mobilized to do. Under capitalism, labour is mobilized overwhelmingly to produce things that are profitable to capital. But labour could just as easily be mobilized instead for regeneration. Using straightforward public finance mechanisms, we can fund massive programmes to reforest barren lands, regenerate degraded ecosystems, restore biodiversity, advance agroecological methods, etc. Under these conditions, it is possible for societies to not only have minimal negative impact on ecology, but to have a net-positive impact, actively improving ecological indicators. People buy into the myth of the intrinsic destructiveness of humans because we have come to take capitalism for granted. But it is 100% possible to organize production and labour differently. Under capitalism, we are compelled to produce whatever is most profitable to capital, even if it is destructive to humans and nature. Under conditions of economic democracy, we can produce what we know is necessary for well-being and ecology.

Jason Hickel

See this paper for the "decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people with 30% of current global energy and material use" stat

[knight-a3]

Heavenbound AU

Hazbin Masterpost

Lilith, Mother of Demons

Notes under cut, including some Bible info!

Between dolls, snakes, apples, circuses, ducks, etc, there were just too many motifs/thematic elements to shove onto just Lucifer. So, I streamlined and distributed. Lucifer is goat themed, Lilith is snake themed. Charlie is a mix of the two. I also use this to partly to imply that "the Devil" is not solely Lucifer. But humans mistake various different demons as one character. Lucifer is just the one who gets blamed for everything. That's part of why he's a goat; he's a scapegoat.

Snakes- there is a trending theme of Lilith being associated with snakes, and sometimes being the serpent who tempts Eve. I wanted to give her snake hair, but making all of it snakes would be too many and a hassle to draw. So I went with seven to represent the 7 deadly sins. They're all named, just like how Charlie has Hugh.

Pride= Vani (vanity)

Wrath= Irene (Ire)

Gluttony= Tony (gluttony)

Greed= Ava (avarice)

Lust= Libby (libido)

Envy= Desi (desire)

Sloth= Lazlo (lazy)

Owls- lilith has sometimes been translated as owl or as night bird. In some Mesopotamian myths, lilith demons fly. Some tablets depict a lilith with talons, horns, and/or wings.

Vampires - This is a design element that I didn't realize was a historically viable association to make until after I made the design. But I figured it would be good to mention anyway. Lilith has been equated with some vampiric elements over the centuries. It comes from a thematic overlap between succubi and early depictions of vampires. So while I may not have had vampires in mind, I think some of the elements naturally bled through(no pun intended).

Dolls- I took this one from canon Lucifer and gave it to Lilith instead. I figured she was created and used like a doll, so it could fit decently enough.

Full demon form: I designed her to be similar to a lamia from Greek mythology. Lamia is the latin equivalent to lilith, and lamia happen to be associated with snakes. I didn't know that until after I designed her normal form, so it's a neat coincidence. Lamia is both a single character and a type of snake-woman creature. Waist up is woman, waist down is snake. Similar to the nagas of hindu lore. More about Lamia in a bit.

--Heavenbound Backstory--

My ideas for her backstory can be found through HERE.

--is Lilith really Biblical? Kind of, but not really--

So, fun fact. Lilith isn't really in the Bible. The word lilith is mentioned once in Isaiah 34:14 in some translations. But translation is a tricky process and subject to the interpretation of the translator. It's an inevitable issue. It's part of why there are so many different versions of the Bible.

The single mention of lilith isn't even used as a name. Lilit/lilitu/other spelling variations are a type of Mesopotamian she-demon. Basically succubi, but then the concept merged with the child-killer Lamatshu. Liliths are often associated with seduction, wet dreams, reproductive problems, and child death. Using the term lilith had a cultural context that we don't really have now. It's like how people today will blame mysterious phenomenon on aliens.

Other Bible translations will use "night creatures", "screech owls", "Lamia" or other similar phrases instead. The context of the verse can change drastically based on what phrasing is used. Most versions(including the most popular ones like the KJV) steer away from "lilith".

--The Other Woman--

Bible: The idea of a woman before Eve is based on rabbinic myths used to explain a perceived discrepancy in the biblical creation story. In one account, it sounds as if man and woman were created together. In another, it sounds as if woman was created after. These myths also accuse Eve of a lot of misconduct, so it seems like a pretty misogynistic take anyway(and I don't use that phrasing lightly). These myths didn't name the woman, as far as I'm aware.

Lilith as the first wife: The oldest known depiction of Lilith as Adam's first wife is from a medieval Jewish story, the "Alphabet of Ben Sira." The author is unknown, and it's widely considered satirical. Lilith is ultimately portrayed as the evil one.

In some depictions of her, she forces herself on Adam and has his demon children. Or she is infertile and steals and/or kills babies. Or she causes miscarriages and fertility issues.

Samael's wife: In some other depictions, she and Samael are born as one. Sometimes as a hermaphrodite, sometimes in the same manner as Adam and Eve. And yet other depictions, she is the first wife of Samael. Sometimes God castrates Samael to prevent them from having demonic children, so Lilith goes to copulate with unaware sleeping men. Other times Lilith is rendered infertile. Sometimes she's the wife of Asmodeus.

Lamia: In the Latin Vulgate, lilith is translated as lamia. There are elements of early ideas for vampirism. Then Lilith is equated with the Greek character Lamia, who also has conflicting origin stories. Lamia has a human upper half and and snake lower half. In some sources, she is a daughter of Hecate. In another, she is cursed by Hecate to have stillborn children. In another, Hera killed all of Lamia's children, and Lamia's grief turned her into a monster that would steal and devour children. In some instances she was also cursed to never close her eyes/sleep, but Zeus gifted her the ability to remove her eyes instead.

Islam: Arabic folklore depicts a character similar to Lilith. She was rejected by Adam, so she mated with Iblis(the demon king) instead. She gave birth to thousands of demons.

Feminism: Lilith, overall, was depicted as an evil character until the feminist movement in the 70s. That's when she was depicted by Judith Plaskow as a strong willed woman who refused to submit to Adam(I guess they just ignored the history of rape and child murder, great job picking an inspirational feminist icon y'all). It's this feminist interpretation that Hellaverse seems to have based Lilith off of.

I wanted to balance aspects of these while also still favoring the portrayal of Lilith as not-evil. Unless canon decides to make her evil, then I may revisit the idea.

(Feb 19, 2025- fixed typos and rephrased some lined for clarity) (Feb 20, 2025- added the names of the snakes) (Feb 27, 2025- added a full demon form design and notes about it, reworded some lines)

[bethanythebogwitch]

Wet Beast Tuesday: Blåhaj

The time has come to discuss the shark, the myth, legend. Blåhaj was only discovered by marine biologists recently, but it has swiftly become on of the most iconic sharks in the world, up there with the likes of great whites and hammerheads. But what is it about this shark that has taken the world by storm? Let us discuss.

(Image: a Blåhaj seen from the side. It is a large, plush shark made of blue and white fabric with embroidered eyes and a pink mouth. End ID)

Blåhaj (Mollispistris transcustos, pronounced "blaw-high) is a medium-sized shark tentatively placed in the family Carcharhinidae. They reach up to 1 meter in length. Reports have been made of Blåhaj half that size and it is not clear if these are juveniles or a smaller subspecies. Blåhaj have rounded features and large heads with blunt snouts. Their scales are soft and fuzzy and, uniquely among sharks, they are smooth when petted both ways. They have a unique pattern of countershading with white underbellies and light blue backs. The mouth sits on the underside of the head and is less proptrusible than in most sharks. The fins are thinker than in most sharks and end is rounded edges. Blåhaj has large, round eyes that reflect kindness and understanding. Through currently unknown means, Blåhaj is capable of spending much of its time on land, possibly with adaptations similar to those of the epaulette shark, though the two species are not closely related.

A group of Blåhaj being transported by conservationists. (Image: a photo of 8 Blåhaj in the trunk of a car. End ID)

Blåhaj were first spotted in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden. The common names means 'blue shark' in Swedish. It is worth noting that prior to Blåhaj's formal scientific classification, there were reports of very similar sharks with grey coloring locally named klappar haj. It is possible that these were early sightings of Blåhaj or of a closely-related species or color morph. While it was previously believed that Blåhaj was endemic to the Baltic Sea, they have recently been proven to be a highly migratory species with worldwide distribution. In particular. Blåhaj seem to migrate to the ocean off of Indonesia to reproduce. As with many sharks, their exact mating grounds are unknown and juveniles are rarely seen. It is believed that juveniles will migrate from Indonesia to the Baltic Sea, where they reach maturity. Many will then leave the Baltic Sea to travel across the world. Blåhaj is a social species, often seen traveling in schools of both full-size and half-sized individuals. Uniquely among sharks, Blåhaj are receptive to human contact and appear to form bonds with humans. Blåhaj that bond with humans will often follow their new friends back to land and live with them.

A Blåhaj protecting trans kids from a distance (Image: a Blåhaj on a bead covered with a towel to look like a sniper's nest. It is posted with a model sniper rifle. End ID)

Through unknown means, Blåhaj seems to be able to detect transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming humans and will preferentially seek them out for bonds. While people outside those demographics can befriend a Blåhaj, the sharks will never bond with bigots. Once bonded with somebody, a Blåhaj will become very protective of them. Blåhaj are normally harmless to humans, but they will act to defend their bonded person from harassment. Blåhaj is the guardian of trans people. Blåhaj enjoys contact with humans, especially being petted and hugged. Hugging a Blåhaj is clinically proven to reduce stress. While it may seem like there's noting going on behind those eyes, Blåhaj understands your problems and is here for you. Many trans people see befriending a Blåhaj as a rite of passage. If possible, befriend someone else with a Blåhaj and let your sharks play together as enrichment. Do not be surprised of your Blåhaj picks up hobbies like reading and cooking, this is a good form of intellectual stimulation and should be encouraged. While they can survive out of water for a very long time, Blåhaj will eventually need water to breathe. A recommended source of water is through laundry, as Blåhaj is machine washable.

A rare Blåhaj color morph. (Image: a special-edition Blåhaj made of cloth in the color of the trans pride flag)

Blåhaj protects. Blåhaj forever.

(For people seeing this meme, I do weekly posts in this style about real aquatic animals with real facts. This one is my April Fool's edition)

[chattercap]

IMPORTANT NOTICE regarding itch.io

(I don't usually do this, but I do think this is an important topic, so I'm crossposting my itch.io post!)

(Random picture for engagement)

Hello everyone!

What happened?

In case you haven't heard, late last night itch.io made a massive move: they delisted almost all of the games on their platform labeled adult or NSFW, making them impossible to find through the storefront. They also straight up removed certain titles and barred creators from withdrawing funds for violating their terms of service if they were hit by this unannounced censorship.

This was a result of pressure from itch's payment processors, Visa and Mastercard, which received a lot of pressure from the Australian based anti-porn campaign, Collective Shout. For a more detailed rundown of the events, you can read Blerdy Otome's article here. 

Now, some of you might say "who cares about hentai/gooner games, they're not removing anything of value." 

First of all, even if you personally don't partake, media exploring sexuality and sexual themes are extremely important. They educate, they entertain, and they provoke thoughtful discussion. 

Second, this mass round of censorship has not affected only "pornographic" games. It has hit any game that deals with adult themes and thus has been tagged appropriately. This includes chimeriquement's "The Daughters of the Sun" trilogy, which is based on a famous Greek myth involving the taboo desire of a stepmother for her stepson. It describes both the twisted perceptions of the stepmother and the conflicts of the stepson as he struggles with the horror of his predicament. This censorship also includes other games about sexual trauma and surviving abuse. These are stories that have the right to be told and experienced.

Third, do you think this censorship will stop here? I've heard talk that "itch will look over the games and remove the bad ones and leave the good ones alone." But this is not a guideline that itch is setting for itself; it is a demand being forced upon itch by payment processors. Should your credit card have the power to dictate what you should or shouldn't play? First, we'll just get rid of the games glorifying SA. But what if they decide later, that all depictions of SA are gross? Even explorations of sexual trauma are too much for our family-friendly website. What about depictions of trans narratives, or LGBTQ content, or child abuse, or gore? If we say "it's all right for payment processors to censor art," then that's the first step towards a world that is far more dystopian than it already is. 

How am I responding to this?

First, I'll say that I'm fortunate: none of my current games have been affected by this extremely broad, vague, and poorly communicated act of censorship. As a person on the ace spectrum, I don't really include much sexual content in my games, if at all. However, I do plan to make at least one erotic game (that is very fully in the realm of erotica, and not simply "spicy"). I am currently not comfortable with posting this project on my main account as I do not want to be suppressed or shadowbanned, so it's possible I will create a side account for it or distribute it on alternative websites altogether. I'll make an announcement later.

Second, while my games don't specifically deal with sexual content, a lot deal with dark content and themes. I also try to be LGBTQ friendly, and I plan to delve more into queer narratives in future projects. I hope that I (and my games) can continue to exist on this website, but just in case, if you enjoy my work, I heartily encourage you to follow me on my other socials. You can find all of them here. You can also join my mailing list, which is the one form of communication where I can guarantee I won't be blasted off the Internet for one reason or another. 

As for me, I have decided to turn off donations on all of my games, at least until the current round of censored games have returned to the storefront, and possibly longer. (The exception is MindMindMind, so that people can still access the artbook.) I greatly appreciate everyone who opts to support me financially, especially since making games is not cheap. Even a little bit of support helps me pay the artists, VAs, and other collaborators that I work with. But the payment processors take a significant amount of the money I earn through itch, and it sickens me to think that money that players donate to me is used to fund these hateful campaigns of censorship.

If you would like to support me (and it's completely unnecessary), I'll still be taking donations/support through my Ko-fi and Patreon. I won't link them because that would be kinda crass, but if you want to find them, you can find them. 

What can you do?

If there are developers that you appreciate that have been affected by this censorship, I greatly urge you to support them in any way you can. Follow their other social media, play and rate the games that they still have on the platform, and leave kind comments.

I would also urge you to get involved! Call/send emails to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe, encourage them to stop this censorship. Contact your local government officials. There are a few documents circulating around explaining how to do this:

Here

Here

I repeat once again: regardless of whether you play adult games, THIS AFFECTS EVERYONE. Please stand up and help to protect artists.

As always, thank you to everyone who supports me and my projects; I appreciate you every day.

Best,

Chattercap

[mariacallous]

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.