#doomscape

[roobylavender]

i love how you hold in-depth and insightful discussions with your anons even if they might disagree with you, i feel like you're such an easy person to talk to 🥹 which is to say i wanted to ask you about something - if you don't mind - i'm always really surprised when you discuss bruce vs. ollie's parenting styles because i feel like the differences you mention weren't necessarily so clear-cut?

for instance i think the 70s were really when the "oh no how can we send our own kids out there to fight criminals and die" conundrum was first raised in superhero comics because of dennis o'neil, stan lee, etc starting to equate the concept of child sidekicks to child soldiers & abusive parenting (hence bucky's ~death~ around this time too), and as a result of that + o'neil wanting to take batman back to its darker solo-ish roots, bruce was written to carry even more immense guilt over sending dick out as robin. and certainly he's had moments like this before, where he worried that he had done dick more harm than good (and for ex., subsequently erasing his memories as robin and sending him back to an orphanage like in world finest's #153..) but for the most part he's very insistent on dick being robin and he understands and encourages the fact that dick wants to balance his civilian life with being robin very much (reason #489893 why i think marv wolfman having dick drop out of college was OOC but that's another subject). tbh that's why i'm so defensive of the original context of batman comics, the fact that children were working in sweatshops or factories or as garment workers etc back then definitely allowed people accept the idea of bruce gifting a bat-copter to dick for his birthday in batman #10 (which is implied to be his 8th birthday 😭) or dick performing shoulder surgery on bruce at age 7-8 or whatever in batman #2 - so in the same vein, i don't think the thought of "oh no dick's life is in real danger as robin" should ever seriously enter his mind (as opposed to in-the-moment anxiety, which i'm sure happens a gazillion times a week) until dick's college years imo?

and i know you've mentioned before that you don't take the golden age personalities/morals ascribed to bruce & dick too seriously because they vary greatly depending on whether the tone is comedic vs. serious - but i actually think they're pretty consistent! for instance for the first ~30 issues of detective comics, bruce is a lot more OK with the idea of killing criminals, but it's clear that after a child, dick grayson, comes into the picture he takes a much harder stance against killing (hence why his original vow with robin by candlelight says "WE two will…never swerve from the path of righteousness" - implying batman will now hold himself to a new high standard that he's also setting for robin). as you said, when batman and robin do mention just "finishing off" a guy or whatever it's definitely played off for comedy and i think the audience is meant to recognize that :]

and re: ollie, the 00s series has him grappling with the "child soldier" worry a hundred times for mia, connor, and roy, so i think this sort of realization should happen slowly and organically for him too (and not just bruce) and it kinda already started back in the 70s anyway with roy's drug overdose... idk i like to imagine that bruce and ollie are a lot more alike despite the surface-level differences in temperament or personality and that's really what causes the (one-sided, from ollie LOL) tension!!

anyway i'm so sorry for dumping this entire novel in your inbox, it comes across like i'm just trying to lecture you but i promise i'm very interested in what you think 😭 and thank you for reading and always providing such interesting replies/commentary in general! have a lovely day ♡

please never apologize for this omg i am always elated to talk about the vast expanse of canon and hear other perspectives on it! and i wholeheartedly agree with you actually, the impact of the 60s really cannot be understated in how it altered dc’s approach to certain topics going forward (and i would love to find scholarly articles about this if there are any). like it’s really interesting how cape comics reacted to wwii and the social welfare era in very distinct ways, because on one hand as you said it originally wasn’t too hard for a reader to wrap their head around the idea of kid sidekicks because there probably were a lot of kids at the time who were also working due to the wartime labor shortage. but the 60s was a huge moment for civil rights and social welfare of all kinds and this was particularly with respect to children. i’m actually in a class right now called children’s rights so we discussed some of that history and the shift at the time that caused legislators to begin to take abuse as a concept seriously. i guess the tricky part about comics and our engagement with these characters is trying to balance the evolving world against what we would like to be a consistent depiction of the characters even though that isn’t necessarily possible, because the politics and concerns of various writers obv filter through (like wolfman and his reagan era propaganda lol). i def want to get further in my ollie reading someday because i’ve heard so many good things about the sort of gravitas of his role as a parent increasing as time goes on. and it would be interesting if more than one character ever converged on that concept of sidekick-ery as child abuse. i think the problem really is that some writers adapted that mindset while others didn’t so you ended up with a lot of tonally dissonant books and characters even though addressing this issue collectively across the expanse of the canon could have been very interesting

[annabel-lenore-lee]

tired of phrases like "we're screwed" and "we're cooked" like just uncook urself idk??

[centipedegirljaws]

falling asleep to weird progressive death metal: https://diskord.bandcamp.com/album/doomscapes

[innocencelives]

my emotions are so constantly in flux these days but i feel really nice rn. it will last 5 minutes maybe. but like.. the world is filled with such possibilities. so much to create, and be inspired by, so much fun things yet to happen! and even tho ive been struggling w dysphoria and feeling so defeated w transitioning feeling impossible, thats just gonna open new doors of gender euphoria when it inevitably happens. the world is a hellish doomscape of trauma and tragedy, but there is red vines! there is kitty cat, there is cigarette, there is yummy coffee, there is life..life will go on. it always will. there will always be hope, there will always be queer people ready to welcome you home.

[scottelkartwork]

EXHIBITION

"Doomscapes and the Digital Beyond" presents work about our damaged planet and its imagined future. Artists of all backgrounds, age groups, generations, and stages of their career explore the challenges to image, object, and meaning making in the context of die-offs, biodiversity loss, dead zones, extinction and the wild proliferation and unmitigated advancements in computational technologies.

With most natural systems on this planet in steep decline, cutting edge technologies are rapidly opening up vast new realms of discovery and innovation that promise to fundamentally change the way we, as humans, relate to each other and the world.

How does art, a technology with origins that stretch back to the dawn of symbolic human thought, negotiate a landscape beset by polycrisis (climate disruption, ocean acidification, pollution, natural habitat destruction, etc.)?

How do artists find meaning in a culture where visuality is increasingly defined by the pixilated glow of a pulsing screen. A thoroughly digitized, interfaced, networked, and algorithmic society in which machines learn, intelligence is artificial, minds are extended, reality is virtual, and the future imagined as posthuman.

As the author, Erik Davis, puts it in his revelatory and prescient book, Techgnosis, "We live on the brink in a time of accelerating noise and fury, of newly minted nightmares and invisible architectures of luminous code that just might help save the day. The sense of an ending ruptures the false complacency of the everyday, and allows us to glimpse our global turbulence, if only for a blink of an eye, under the implacable sign of the absolute."

What I connect with…

[resmarted]

drank a crazy amount of coffee in the last couple days after my body couldn't move or wake up the entire weekend and it all kicked in at once like 12hrs ago. now im like buzzzzz

need to ask my dr to change my medicine or to put me down like a dog already

i don't want to speak too soon and shoot myself in the foot here but i thrive during eclipse season and any situation that seems to shatter everyone else's world, i guess bc mine is in a constant state of crumbling and rebuilding that i can barely tell?

need knuckle tats that say thrive and chaos but also need more knuckles

i think i can feel my kidney about to burst. or gallbladder? honestly i don't know basic anatomy but it's definitely tight and dehydrated

made a bigger tuna casserole and i regret to inform you it's not as good as the last one i made. will attempt to tweak it once more and report back

do you think the new cafe downstairs will let me do readings out of there

it may be useful to scare away the riff raff who will say it's the devil while smoking crack etc

jk im already nervous ppl i don't want to see will suddenly be casually lingering around down there

i'm so excited for a cafe despite how huge a sign of gentrification that is

i wanted to turn it into a comedy camp for at risk youth but alas

going to miss the general quiet we have been so spoiled with the last several months of its vacancy

would love to not be stressed in a doomscape but whatever, cest la vie etc

anyway should we kiss or

[formashimataichi]

did the extra chapter remind anyone of the way mei switched from liking ed to al in fullmetal alchemist idk i think this is so funny personally

[awed-frog]

Two policemen shooting a 13-yo boy with autism after his mother asked them for help and the family needing a GoFundMe to cover his hospital bills is about as peak 2020 USA as it gets. Jesus Christ, what a doomscape.

[arnesia]

gaze upon the shattered doomscapes of the prince of destruction’s demesne, and despair: may the tornadoes buffet and hurricanes drown and volcanoes bury in ash and fire, for beyond these jaws lies only hope of simplest manufacture, often confused for hopelessness in its purity. walk upon fire and betwixt snarling tooth bearing only in kind, and know the true liberation of mehrunes dagon.

[zrcfilms]

This is doomscape, my new transformer OC.

[sorrowschengmei]

the whole process humankind has been through in a cosmic level, of letting go of karmic imbalance, reaching higher levels of spiritual light demands in exchange being put through challenging sociocultural doomscapes and seemingly endless losses and failures, and i often wonder if being given this androgynous, age-ambiguous, race-ambiguous prince of darkness just to have him turned into a gym dudebro with stubble in the next movie was one of said challenges on this path to collective eternal light  

[daveparts]

A New Beatle Album

By David Glenn Cox It comes down to a simple choice for me between a dreamscape or a doomscape. And with the doomscape impending on us, let us gather some warmth together. The world is on fire and there’s no good reason for it. In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” A You Tuber was listening to his first Beatles music, starting with Abbey Road. [Facepalm] That’s like…

[unraveling333]

Self help book this self help book that. Maybe I should just do some crack and get out of this existential doomscape I drudge through everyday and become a super hot sexy girl with no reverence for internal strife

[paharvey99]

No Waitrose October 7 - Days 24-26

Day 24

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday… Saturn’s Day. The Saturdays were a band, weren’t they. I still think of them as a new band, they’re definitely not new. Can’t remember a single one of their songs. Always found it strange that a band would choose to have the word “turd” in the middle of their name as well, but then I notice things like that. Who was in The Saturdays anyway? I think I know some of them… Frankie! Una! Mollie! Rochelle! Another one! Rochelle’s all over the telly these days isn’t she, she presents a terrible music quiz show with her husband Marvin off of JLS, the one with idiots trying to recognise songs. And she does Ninja Warrior UK with Ben Shephard and Chris Kamara, we quite like that one. It’s essentially the Eliminator from Gladiators but over and over and over again, isn’t it. It’s like they went “Oh, how can we make Gladiators but for no money?”, that’s how Ninja Warrior started, I bet you.

Sorry about all that rubbish, I’m stalling because it’s now Monday evening and I literally can’t remember what happened on Saturday. That’s the problem with this pandemic thing, all the days are blurring into one.

Oh, I remember, here we go, let’s start now. I’ll need you to think back to a previous blog, day 18, where I compared writing this blog to running a marathon. Well, one of the main reasons I did that was with the aim of annoying my readers who are marathon runners, namely my older sister. Anyway, on Saturday my older sister, having read day 18 and recognised that I’d set out to annoy her, decided to annoy me by sending me a number of lengthy WhatsApp messages detailing exactly why what I’d said about marathon running wasn’t really correct. To give her her dues, this did really annoy me as I kept having to read lots of messages about marathon running and try to think of something to say about them. I’ll get her back somehow, don’t worry.

What we did do on Saturday was loooooads of baking. First of all we made some pizza dough to have pizzas for the four year-old I live with’s tea, then while that was proving we made some fairy cakes with chocolate icing and sprinkles on the top, then we finished off making the pizzas for the four year-old I live with’s tea and cooked them and ate them.

I did that thing of getting out all the toppings for the pizzas in separate bowls so that the four year-old I live with could put the toppings on herself. I was showing her all the toppings and when I got to the mozzarella I asked if she knew what it was, and she said no, and I was like “it’s CHEESE!”. And she was like, “no it’s not”, so I was like, “yeah, it’s CHEESE! It’s called… MOZZARELLA!” and she said “I don’t like mozzarella” and then it became a Thing. And as anyone who has ever met a small child knows, the last thing you want is for something to become a Thing, you just have to Tony Blair it, change the terms of debate. But stupidly, I couldn’t let it lie, I was all “NO, you DEFINITELY like mozzarella, EVERY SINGLE PIZZA you have EVER eaten has had mozzarella on it, there is simply NO WAY you do not like mozzarella, I will NOT accept that.”

Obviously, this was pretty much the silliest thing I could have said, as the four year-old I live with then dug in even deeper and shouted at me until I went and got the big wodge of Pilgrim’s Choice from the fridge and we grated that all over her pizza and she was happy.

I said we did looooooooads of baking, but actually we just made fairy cakes and pizza, but by the time we’d done that and with the mozzarella meltdown it felt like we’d been through the wars.

We also carved a pumpkin, that’s what we did. I let the four year-old I live with draw a face with a Sharpie and then I did all the carving. I told her to draw a big face, so she drew a tiny face, but to be fair to her it does look pretty scary, I was very pleased with it.

I hadn’t been out all day, so while the person I live with was putting the four year-old I live with to bed I went out for a walk in the wind and rain and immediately regretted it. It was strange though, I went down to the end of my street and at the end of my street there’s a restaurant called Mekan. It used to be called Fishmekan and it’s a huge cavern of a restaurant that never, ever has anyone in it. The person I live with and I exchange regular updates on how empty Fishmekan is, it’s a running joke in our house. Except on Saturday night, there were people in it. It was busier than I’ve ever seen it. I couldn’t believe it. Good luck to them, I’m pleased for them, I suppose we’re going to have to find another struggling business to make fun of now.

Vanessa, that’s the other Saturday, I went and looked it up for you.

Didn’t go to Waitrose.

Day 25

The clocks went back overnight, marking the end of British Summer Time and the beginning of hellish doomscape nightmare time. Have you noticed that nowadays when the clocks change it’s confusing in a different way because your phone seems to do it for you. So instead of thinking “Oh hell, which way do I need to change this clock” you’re looking at your phone thinking “Is that the actual time? Has it definitely changed? How will I know?”. I looked out of the window at the cricket club clock opposite and it said the same time as my phone, which confused me even more, because that suggested that someone had been in the cricket club at the crack of dawn on a Sunday to change the clock for the benefit of pretty much precisely no one.

I thought about sharing this observation with the person I live with, but decided that she probably wouldn’t be interested, so I kept quiet.

The weather was mad all day, it was quite nice and sunny for the most part but with regular yet mercifully brief torrential downpours. After lunch (the rest of yesterday’s pizzas) we decided to brave the elements and go for an outing to the Knepp Estate near Horsham.

I first went there last November after one of my friends, also a reader of this blog (hello Ian), asked me if I’d been to the Knepp Estate near Horsham and I’d never heard of it. I don’t like not having heard of things, so I looked it up and found out how to get there and went for a walk on my week off on my own. Ever since, I’ve been trying to find the time to go back to the Knepp Estate near Horsham with the people I live with in tow for a walk, but haven’t quite got round to it.

It’s a bit ridiculous it’s taken until now, to be honest. The main thing that has kept us sane since March has been going on walks in the countryside. I realised quite early on that if you went anywhere even vaguely off the beaten path in Sussex, you could easily walk for hours without seeing anyone. So that’s what we did. Almost every weekend over the summer we packed a picnic, found an obscure footpath on an OS map and went exploring. Hamsey, Cooksbridge, Chiltington, Laughton, Barcombe, Chailey, Wiston; it was a real roll call of places that barely exist. (I got those names off of my Instagram, I hadn’t remembered any of them).

The best walk we went on, though, was to Paul McCartney’s house. I’ve known for ages that Paul McCartney has a house in Sussex, so every time we went to some obscure place for a walk I’d say, “Oooh, do you reckon that’s Paul McCartney’s house?” and the person I live with would say “No, of course that’s not Paul McCartney’s house, Paul McCartney wouldn’t live THERE”. It got to the point where I actually looked up where Paul McCartney’s house in Sussex is, and it turned out to be near Peasmarsh, which is near Rye over on the Kent-Sussex border. It’s not that far away as the crow flies, maybe 40-ish miles, but the roads are so awful it takes about an hour and a half to get out there from Brighton so we don’t bother very often.

Anyway, it turned out that the person I live with’s sister was on holiday in Kent in August and wanted to come and meet us for a walk and so I was like “OMG WE CAN GO TO MACCA’S GAFF” and somehow everyone agreed to this.

To get to Paul McCartney’s house, here is what you do: drive to Jempson’s supermarket in Peasmarsh and park your car there (Jempson’s is some crazy supermarket/café/petrol station/post office brand that only exists on the Kent-Sussex border, it’s fancy). Then walk up out the back of Jempson’s, across the field, up the lane, down the path, through the wood, along the track, through the gate, across another field and then you get to Paul McCartney’s field. You can tell it’s Paul McCartney’s field because it’s really nice. It’s clearly not a field owned by a farmer, because it’s covered in wildflowers, and there’s a wide grassy path been mown in it for you to walk across. It’s the nicest field I’ve ever been in. 

When we were walking across it some deer turned up and ran over the brow of the hill, towards Paul McCartney’s house. However, I didn’t know that that was Paul McCartney’s house over the brow of the hill, I thought it was a different house, so we ended up going and hanging around a house that we thought was Paul McCartney’s house but it wasn’t really and peering in the garden. Then we walked back to Jempson’s and bought miniature tubs of ice cream, ate them in the car park and drove home.

So actually we never did see Paul McCartney’s house this summer, but we had a nice time anyway, and that was the main thing.

Where was I? Ah yes, the Knepp Estate near Horsham, we finally made it to Knepp. It’s a private estate, there’s not a visitor’s centre or anything I think, but there are public footpaths across it so we stuck to those. This would be a good point to explain about the rewilding project that they are doing at the estate, but I know sod all about it, you’ll have to look it up yourselves if you’re interested. It’s owned by a woman called Isabella Tree, she’s on the radio sometimes. We saw some nice trees and Knepp Castle and a mill pond and some historic eel traps. Then we went up a wooden staircase up a tree to a viewing platform, then across a boggy field and did some squelching in mud, which we all enjoyed.

At this point it was getting dark, and the person I live with said “Oooh, it is getting dark early now isn’t it”, and I said, well, that’ll be the clocks going back. Then the person I live with admitted she hadn’t noticed the clocks going back until that point, which made me wish that I had mentioned it to her earlier.

We were walking back to the car along the track that goes up to the main house on the estate when a Land Rover came along, so we got out of the way and as it went past it became apparent that the driver was about 11 years old. He had a load of what looked like responsible adults in the car with him, so I think it was probably ok. He was so proud of himself though, he gave us a little wave as he went past, I think he was over the moon that someone else had seen him driving. Then we saw some deer and went home.

One of the more curious things about Knepp is that it’s a stone’s throw from the A24. There’s a McDonalds drive through about half a mile away. On the way there the McDonalds was so busy that there were hordes of people outside and some of them had spilled onto the central reservation of the A24 to eat their burgers. It seemed to me unnecessarily punishing in a pandemic to eat your lunch in the middle of four lanes of traffic, but I’m not judging. Sundays can turn out like that, can’t they.

Didn’t go to Waitrose.

Day 26

God, I’ve gone on a bit about the weekend, haven’t I? Monday, worked a bit, played a bit, made some banana bread, watched University Challenge, went to bed.

Didn’t go to Waitrose.

[puredamien]

Diskord - Doomscapes (2007)

[automaticvr]

More info about FernwehVR here: https://ift.tt/2sEf374 Article by Chris Priestman for the e-magazine KillScreen: New dark ambient album can only be listened to inside this virtual world. The advert lady on Spotify just told me that, as music is so easily available now through streaming services, it doesn’t matter what you’re listening to any longer but how you’re listening to it. This is Spotify’s attempt to boast that it’s setup to let you listen to music how best suits you. You might be lounging in a boutique, jogging with earphones in, or dancing around your kitchen while cooking tea. Spotify has you covered, apparently. Yawn. There’s more to listening to music than convenience, isn’t there, Spotify? You go to a concert in a large hall with hundreds of people to listen to a band play for the specific experience that cultivates; the sweat, the enthusiasm, the vibrations of the music created live right in front of you passing through your body. The construct of the concert space seems to be at the heart of the latest album by Argentinian drone music project Termotank. However, this space is virtual rather than physical, having you move slowly through a doomscape where dark mountainous spires serrate the moonlit sky like fangs. This is the only way to experience the album. Don’t ignore the significance of this limited setting. Termotank has a Bandcamp page where its other albums can be listened to. But this latest one, called Fernweh3D, isn’t available there. Termotank also plays festivals around Argentina and Latin America but Fernweh3D isn’t there, either. You have to download a file and enter a 3D virtual world, exploring the dark alien crags to discover the specific location of each track, signified by a fiery orb floating in mystical wonder. The reason why Termotank has decided to deliver its new album like this is apparent when you’re in there. All of the spaces in Fernweh3D are designed specifically to fit the song they’re married to. Often you’ll see some form of entrance so that the approach becomes part of the eventual listening procedure. One song location is preceded by rocks carved as if welcoming pillars with purple flames dancing atop. Another has a transparent yet veiny bridge to cross before reaching a jaw of rock. A personal favorite has you almost get lost in a cluster of large needle-like stalagmites (without the necessary cave) where a green orb rests in a circular clearing at the center. You get to these places and you stand there, listening. If you venture outside of a certain circumference of the orb then the music fades away. And so, stuck in these confines, it becomes natural, at least for me, to see how you can frame the visuals to fit the extraterrestrial ambient composition oozing out. The 3D world around you is primed for it. Theatrical clouds of smoky gas hang in the troposphere while in the distance sits a postcard-worthy sight of a glowing moon resting eerily behind a peak. Add to that the orbiting rock formations and gnarled trees and you get a scene that begs for a camera’s frame. My impression is that Fernweh3D comes in this format so you can invent a spatial connection with the music. We do this with all music: Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two will forever be my university dorm, and practically every Sikth song is the stained hardfloor of my teenage self’s local mosh pit. But Termotank has engineered it so that this memoried location is the same for all listeners of these new tracks. The title of the album further suggests that Termotank wants us to become intimate and perhaps fond of this virtual world. According to the PDF that accompanies the album, “Fernweh” is a German word that means “being homesick for a place you’ve never been.” Whether that’s true or not matters less than what Termotank believes it to mean.