#triangular conundrum

[fortunaestalta]

[rebornofstars]

very very important question here. so is your profile photo: 1. a campfire 2. a volcano 3. a triangular potato on fire 3 1/2. a simplified cartoon of someone's hair on fire

thank you for your consideration. (sorry if I disrupted your locking in I just got really invested in this conundrum)

this IS an important question i agree. i think we should take this to a vote

there is a correct answer (its the boring one) but in future i will proudly say it's whichever option wins the poll

[sonicasura]

‘Is he still lurking behind there?’

‘Yes.’

Go figure that someone who spent presumably literal hours standing in place would be patient enough to wait twenty minutes. The Omnitrix user spent those scant few minutes taking stock of what was in the Make-A-Friend area. Dart had seen the toy scanner and noted Huggy’s position—he was obviously waiting to ambush them. Which they weren’t falling for!

So, the Omnitrix was combing the cameras to search for an alternate route to avoid having to play cat and mouse with him. It was mostly exasperated at the situation not so subtly playing its dial’s form switching sound. Any transformation would make the situation much easier, but the toys would hate the fact Dart could change back. Such a conundrum.

‘I found “the flower” that Rich’s invitation referenced, it even looks like the drawing.’

They received a mental image of a large red flower painted on a wall connected to a catwalk. Only there were toys strung up in front of it with all kinds of eerie messages… Great. That was exactly what they wanted to see when so many other smaller toys were deceased and strewn about the factory with dried blood.

(Not.)

‘Again, purgatory. Can you spoof the toy scanner to go off in a few minutes while I try to get that vent cover open?’

‘I’ll do you one better. I can do both.’

‘Alright. Let’s fake out Huggy.’

———————————

He let out a very faint growl as the intruder(?) was stuck past the door. The blue-furred one thought giving them the key would bait them into making stupid decisions. Humans panicked all the time when something started chasing them. But, he got to do a lot of that during the Hour of Joy… Few people came to the factory anymore so he varied up his tactics.

…

The food left for him had tasted nice, even if he could go without for a very long time.

…

That still didn’t change the fact they were an intruder and he was tasked with guarding here!

When his resolve briefly slipped, the roller door finally opened to—nothing. The space where the human ought to be standing to have activated it was unoccupied… Okay? He waited a few moments thinking they had stalled around the sides of the door again… Only no one came around forcing him to investigate.

Aaaaaaaaand.

Still no one.

——————————

Still listening to the tape which no doubt would add onto their roster of nightmares, Dart faintly noted hearing something move in the vents.

This “Prototype” sounded like Frankenstein’s Monster and Doctor himself rolled into one. A violent uncontrollable experiment was one thing, but a smart one? That boded ill for the people who were unknowing of what Playtime actually did. Sometimes, it was impossible for victims to differentiate certain things. If humans hurt them all… They’d hurt humans.

The transforming teen found themself feeling a growing sense of apprehension the more they learned about this company’s sins. Patiently, they drummed their fingers as Huggy Wuggy burst out of the vent. Although Dart wasn’t looking in his direction—the Omnitrix plugged into the cameras so they weren’t blind here.

He let out a low growl, smile spread wide to reveal dozens of sharp triangular teeth within two layers of gums. Huggy ran toward them on all fours until one of his yellow hands bumped into something. The blue mascot froze for several strained moments at the sudden halting of his momentum. He cautiously leveled a look at the human unheeding of him, then looked down… Dart could already see his confusion.

He had knocked over the water bottle they left there for him although they hoped he handn’t also squished the sandwich too. The Omnitrix user slowly turned around which threw him back into his more aggressive posturing. “I told you. I was unhappy that I didn’t get to give you your breakfast.” Outwardly, they had the same small smile. Inwardly, they would have been laughing at the confused warble.

Dart carefully dug out the “letter” Rich received to show it to the still defensive Huggy.

“Sorry for the intruding, but someone invited an acquaintance of mine here. He couldn’t come so I’m here in his place…”

…

Huggy’s conducting eased a bit at the revelation they weren’t technically an intruder.

Sorta.

—ROB’d Anon.

Trigger words are hard to work around.

New companion gained?

Considering the toys absolutely loathed most of the workers, it's best for Dart to be careful with their words. I don't think Huggy would excuse them being in the labs, unless convinced, so this letter is the best shot for the current location.

[baxterkairos]

THE MAY 15, 1948 CONUNDRUM, FACT OR FICTION?

God's blessings and promises were all bound upon conditions, notably the keeping of God’s law (Deuteronomy 28:1-2, 8-9, 15).

The scripture declares that only by the presence of God can the people become holy (Exodus 3:4-5, 33:14-15), for without Him we can do nothing (John 15:5).

Thus, God’s church is not confined merely to its name but rather to God's presence (Ezekiel 48:35).

Similarly, the true gathering of God’s people in these last days is not determined by a certain geographical location, as often claimed by the Jewish church to be in the land of Israel, but is found solely in the presence of God (Matthew 18:20).

Over the ages, Jews have strove to go back to the land of their forefathers and regain their statehood.

On the eve of May 14, 1948, which can also be considered May 15 in Jewish reckoning, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution for the establishment of an independent Jewish State in Palestine.

From then on, the Jewish church boastfully proclaimed that God will gather them in these last days to restore and rebuild their nation.

The Jews’ Independence Day, May 15, 1948, has no prophetic significance in terms of how God foretold to gather His people in these last days.

EZEKIEL 22:28, 19-20

(28) And her PROPHETS have daubed them… DIVINING LIES unto them, saying, Thus SAITH the LORD GOD, when the LORD Hath Not Spoken.

(19) …ye are ALL become DROSS, behold, therefore I will GATHER you into the midst of JERUSALEM.

(20) …so will I GATHER you in mine ANGER… I will leave you there, and melt you.

However, as part of God’s permissive will (Revelation 17:17), He overturned the May 15, 1948 conundrum to be a harbinger of His impending return.

May 15 corresponds to Iyar 28, the exact date of Christ’s ascension, whereby He declared that His return will be in like manner (Acts 1:9-12).

1 + 9 + 4 + 8 = 22 (2 + 2 = 4)

The triangular number of 4 is 10.

Taking the cube of numbers 1-10 as per digit will give a sum of 2026. Hereby, the exact date of Christ’s return is May 15, 2026.

In these last days, there shall indeed be a gathering of God's people, who will enter into His kingdom, and more so with the children of the wicked (Revelation 16:14-16), who will be cast into the fire (Matthew 13:30, 38-40).

Nonetheless, the gathering of God’s people has nothing to do with the restoration of Israel, as falsely claimed by the Jewish church today, but rather the restoration of Eden (Joel 2:1, 3), which is at the coming of Christ (Isaiah 11:9-11, Romans 9:27).

EZEKIEL 36:24, 35

(24) …and GATHER you out of all countries, and will bring you into your OWN LAND.

(35) …This LAND that was DESOLATE is become like the garden of EDEN…

It is hereby apparent that Israel’s so-called gathering, claiming to become a glorious nation, is nothing but a fabrication and a pretension, for it was already foretold that they shall be scattered without any chance to be gathered back again.

ZECHARIAH 7:14 But I SCATTERED THEM… among all the nations... the land was DESOLATE after them, that NO MAN PASSED THROUGH NOR RETURNED…

Israel, as a nation, has long been lost and abandoned by God for their constant rejection of Christ being the true Messiah, and they will ever remain desolate until He comes.

EZEKIEL 37:11 …these BONES are the WHOLE HOUSE of ISRAEL… OUR HOPE IS LOST: we are cut off for our parts.

MATTHEW 10:5-6

(5) …Go not into the way of the Gentiles…

(6) But go rather to the LOST SHEEP of the HOUSE of ISRAEL.

MATTHEW 23:37-39

(37) O JERUSALEM… thou that KILLEST the PROPHETS… how often would I have GATHERED thy CHILDREN together, even as a HEN GATHERETH her CHICKENS… and YE WOULD NOT!

(38) Behold, your HOUSE is left unto you DESOLATE.

(39) …Ye shall NOT SEE ME henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that COMETH in the name of the Lord.

TO GOD BE THE GLORY!

[jonathankatwhatever]

The only thing I’m drawn to this 21 Sept 2023 is quarks, and I’m not finding what I’m looking for until I get into the math for a spin ½ particle, which actually means it takes *2 to make 1, which means you need to rotate it twice around to return. That is, if you rotate it once around in projection, so flat, then the sK and zK switch 1-0, so it takes another twist around to change. That generates the two Irreducible states for CR, because this is Coordinate Rotation expressing Irreducibles in 3D over the D4 Space constructed in grid squares. That is, if I have this right, and I’m nervous because the topic is new to me, a spin of ½ means 1-0-1, SBE, in which the B is the S of an SBE and so on in that extremely basic counting form. This alternates states in sK and zK when the axis rotated is the projection of xK and yK. This may be completely wrong; I may misunderstand which axes are being considered. Let me check.

I think it’s correct but only because I think I see a translation into 3D. I’m having trouble accepting it. Let’s see if I can push through. Then I need to shower and eat.

The idea over and over has been that 1Space contains more and that more reduces to pathways to group behaviors and so on because there is a reduction to grid squares and specifically to D3-4. Maybe it would help to go through that quickly. D3 is Triangular, so the idea in D3-4 is that whatever constructs in Triangular exists within a grid square, and this is always true, much in the same way that light is constant and bathes us in information. So an object, a tangible Object, like a cat or a cat sock, exists in a grid square, within multiple grid squares, etc. And that’s true because it’s true at the fundamental level at which Triangular constructs. That, I see, provides more to the ideas concerning the Informational Limit: since we are constructs in Triangular, then we hook on to information because we are the +1 which completes the 420. That +1 means you can infer from what is perceived and from what is not perceived. It segments 1-0.

That was cool. But it doesn’t answer the question I have actually been working on. Got close: there was a glimmer of the tObject rotating. That means around an axis. I’m just trying to say that this maps to an object spinning, like in animations, and to a projection rotating and sK and zK flipping. I’m seeing it as xK and yK turn around on a spindle, and as that happens, sK and zK appear, but now they’re 1-0 everywhere and thus at the ideals, so in the first spin round, the labels flip. They do that because they can: that’s the maximum which can happen when you keep xK and yK labels stable. That’s very good. It’s getting to a deep understanding.

OK, I wanted to get to the math: reduced Planck, which we understand generally, times root3 over 2. The over 2 makes sense. Why root3? It obviously generates an orthogonal 3Square. That’s the expression of SBE in gs. So that’s my conundrum again: a count of 3root2 versus a count of 3gs. To resolve, try counting the 3gs, branching that into 3root2 and treating it as an nSquare. I mean 3gs is a 3Square when Recombined. We covered this a few days ago.

Oh this is crazy: that takes me to fine structure and that was the first thing I ever worked out using these ideas. And we went through multiple understanding iterations, so we can say 2T within CM1 generates fine structure. I’m not quite sure how the connection works, but I know it must be there. Perhaps in the switch to magnetic quantum, but I don’t know.

————-

I’m seeing root3 over 2 as the 2Square orthogonally inherent in gs. So SBE in gs Halved, so put into that gs. Wow. I see visions of mathematics. Is that common?

That is the most remarkably well hidden 13. Because for the process to work, it must Alternate over Irreducible states, gram a gs to 3, occurring as the orthogonal 2Square which must then have orthogonal to it a count of 3 gs, meaning the SBE projection along the szK that generates both SBE3 and base10. So imagine a gs with a layer above. That layer will locate at center and at each edge, which develops into the central SBE3 appearing more often. That’s how we count out along the szK in any direction. Picture that and you see the 1+SBE3 develop going ‘up’ and then SBE3+1 continue, repeat by treating that last 1 as the first. That’s base 10.

So now it gets going. This is times reduced Planck. That is minimal pattern visible, minimal Thing visible as it disappears and appears. Made into unit form, over a CR’s invocation of the imaginary unit circle. Beautiful result, isn’t it? Minimal visible in complex unit form into a 3Square of SBE into a 2Square and Halving into 1, which may be the only Is. Or might not because it’s Halving. And the Not may be another Is of the same kind. Or not. Like a pencil or a custom watch. Everything constructs in contexts.

What else? The power of ten reaches to 12. So 13 can be 1 in the next 10 count. This is old. Equivalent to counting modularly from a counting base like SBE. That processes that count over b10 magnification. That’s because you can see now how these orthogonal connections allow Injection. That is, at the 2Square, you see the Bip emerge in the potential for the projected line.

To note: this is I//I or the Wheel because the same is true for integers. The sides balance to produce both top and bottom. That reduces to one direction within the construction.

That models quarks and antiquarks, doesn’t it? They have mass, meaning existence within this D3-4 etc.

So this literally counts 3Square orthogonal to 2Square orthogonal to 1Square. Then it would be 1Square orthogonal to a 1/2Square. All can fit into a 4Square. Count L3 to L1 over the 2 gs on the uncounted of sK or zK. That representation is thus constrained. See? There are mechanics in all of this.

That structure built over IC is the spin ½ form. Cool. So yes we can now describe the why for the groups involved in quantum theory. Blown away.

[hexandbalances]

The Strophalos and the Chaldean Oracle

Hecate is is associated in fragment 194 of the Chaldean Oracles with a strophalos: “Labour thou around the Strophalos of Hecate.“  The strophalos of iynx (pl: iynges) is the Greek name for the wryneck, a member of the woodpecker family. There is a form of magic performed with a bird tied to a wooden wheel, the “iynx wheel”. This bird wheel was used primarily in love magic. It is also associated with the nymph Iynx, who invented a love charm of the same name (in theory the word jinx may have evolved from her name). 

Theocritus refers to the iynx in his Idylls (”Draw my lover here, iynx”), but later describes it as a “bronze rhombus whirling” (Idylls 2, Theocritus, 270 BCE, translated by Z. Yardley). This appears to refer to a variant of the device mentioned by Michael Psellos in the 11th century CE:

“The strophalos of Hekate is a golden sphere with lapis lazuli enclosed in its centre, which is spun by means of a leather thong, and which is covered with symbols: as it was spun they [the Theurgists] made their invocations. These spheres were generally called iynges and could be either spherical or triangular or of some other form. And while they were making their invocations they emitted inarticulate or animal cries, laughing and whipping the air. So the Oracle teaches that is the motion of the strophalos which works the ritual, on account of its ineffable power. It is called ‘of Hekate’ as consecrated to Hekate.”

Psellos commentary of the Chaldean Oracles, C11th CE, translated by D.J. O’Meara

The strophalos appears to have been used primarily to evoke Hekate, or directing Her power. Eusebius of Caesarea writes in his Praeparatio Evangelica: “Easily dragging some of these unwilling [divinities] from the Aether by means of ineffable iynges, you lead them earthwards.” and “Why do you call me, the goddess Hekate, here from the swift Aether by means of god-compelling necessity.”

If the strophalos is a physical tool, where, then, comes the symbol? 

Unfortunately the best I have been able to find that actually refers to the difference is from Symbol Dictionary (which, I should preface, is not an academic resource):

The Strophalos, or Hecate’s wheel is an ancient Greek symbol, and is an emblem of the initiatory lunar Goddess Hecate (Diana Lucifera), and her triple aspect. Only one ancient source remains to shed any light on the emblem’s meaning.

The second century Alexandrian text known as the Chaldean oracle describes the emblem as a labyrinthine serpent (emblematic of rebirth) surrounding a spiral, symbolic of the Iynges- “whirlings” or emanations of divine thought. Today, it is generally used by practitioners of Hellenic Recon or Dianic Traditions of Wicca as an emblem of religious identification.

To say that the Chaldean Oracle describes the emblem is incorrect. The fragmented text describes a Neoplatonic metaphysical schema; it may be that the symbol we have come to associate as Hekate’s strophalos is perhaps representative of a single part of this schema, but it does not point to the origin of the symbol.

The schema establishes a transcendent single deity, sometimes called Father (Ineffable One), who is beyond Intellect and Being. Father represents paternity, power, and intellect. One begins to see why the Chaldean Oracles were much lauded by early Christian theologians. Father is followed by a series of beings of Intellect, then the material realm. Hekate functions as a barrier between the intellectual and material realms, separating the divine fires of Father’s Intellect, and the Material Fire from which the cosmos is created. Hekate, as the World Soul, governs over the sub-lunar material world, and enslaves the lower part of the human soul. The goal of the schema was to purify the lower soul through austerity and contemplation (development of the intellect) and ascend through the planetary spheres until only the intellect remained.[x][x][x] 

In theory, the strophalos could symbolize Hekate’s function as the membrane around the Hypezokos, or Flower of Fire, the cosmic, creative fire. However this only describes an interpretation of the symbol’s possible meaning - the Chaldean Oracles does not include nor allude to the symbol, just the physical tool. As of yet, I have found no resource linking the strophalos to Diana Luciferna.

I found this post by @nehetisingsforhekate that makes reference to the symbol as being a Mycenaean motif found on a button. This information comes to us by way of Tara Sanchez, author of the Temple of Hekate: Exploring the Goddess Hekate through ritual, meditation and divination, in an online conversation that I do not have access to. Nehetsingsforhekate has been gracious enough to attempt to track this down but we’ve had no luck as yet (thank you again!).

If this is so, then the strophalos symbol predates the Chaldean Oracle by somewhere between 1,400 to 2,200 years, casting some doubt over its association with this possible meaning. Where was the button found? Who might have owned it? Was it used on a garment or as a fastener for a tool? I’ve reached out to Tara Sanchez for more information but have not heard back at this time. 

Without additional evidence it seems we can conclude the symbol’s association with Hekate is historically tenuous. What do you think? Have you come across any resources that might shed light on this conundrum? Please let us know. Khaire. 💀🖤

[ticktockstuck]

TTS Flag Friday: The District of Nocturne

The district flag of Nocturne is split into three triangular sections by a jagged orange border that crosses the flag in a “V” shape. The lower-left and lower-right triangles are both black and contain an outstretched hand, the left a troll’s grey and the right a leprechaun’s green. The central triangle is white and contains the national symbol of the seven-toothed cog, colored the same orange as the V-shaped border. The border has eight diamond protrusions that all point upwards into the white triangle’s space. The shape of the border is meant to symbolize disaster, partly by taking the shape of rising flames and partly by mimicking the shape of the Clockwork Network.

The design is inspired firstly by geography. The hands are colored according to Nocturne’s neighbor districts; from inside Nocturne looking towards the center of Tick-Tock Town, troll-majority Alterneo lies to the west and leprechaun-majority Emerald lies to the east, with Central lying beyond both of them.

The flag’s design is also meant as a promise to the citizenry of Nocturne, lost in the wake of the destruction caused by Clocknet. A promise that, in their time of need, they will be offered a charitable hand to guide them out of darkness, though their personal disasters, and into the light. In this reading the hands represent protection from all matters, physical, financial, or otherwise.

At the height of Tick-Tock Town’s development, it slowly started to expand westward along the coast, creating a pocket of buildings between Alterneo and the Emerald Quarter that matched neither the former’s stark brutality nor the latter’s extravagance. For this reason it was split from both into a new district, relatively small but as the city was still planning on growing it was expected that this little district would grow along with it. That district was named Nocturne, as it was (and is) the only district in the city not to share a border with Central (being metaphorically “in the dark”), with “oct” being a clever nod to its status as the eighth district. Shortly after its inception, however, that district would begin a long history of misfortune, tragedy, confusion, and unexplainable circumstances that would lead to the name most residents of Tick-Tock Town refer to it as today: Wrecked.

Nocturne had only a few years to set itself up, barely any time to establish an identity for itself outside of cultural hand-me-downs from its neighboring districts, before the city underwent the most important event in its history since its founding. The emergence of the Clockwork Network caused massive damage across the city, but few had damages on the level that Nocturne did. From the perspective of its inhabitants, the great machine passed over the Emerald Quarter and to make up lost time did double time on their side of town. The riches that the Emerald Quarter carried over turned to ruin, and any vicious streak descendent from Alterneo was declawed, all of it tumbling into the mechanical bowels of the worming menace.

Even before Clocknet trashed the district and made people wary of coming to it, citizens living in and visiting Wrecked could feel something off about the place. Nothing on the surface seemed wrong, but something invisible pervaded through the whole district, like a foul smell that can’t be placed or a noise that appears and disappears with no cause. People would usually lay some blame at the base of two famous landmarks in the district: the Black Dome and the Asclepius Clocktower. The former, a small park and grim rotunda topped by the titular dome; the latter, a two-faced tower in the shape of intertwined serpents. Both monuments from an outside perspective seem to be placed completely naturally but defy explanation upon closer inspection, namely their construction. As the buildings of Nocturne were erected, the two monuments seem to have simply appeared overnight while nobody noticed. Plans and blueprints for them exist at the district Vice-Mayor’s office, certainly, but no construction crew can claim to have built them and no artists have stepped forward to explain some of their stranger quirks, like the Asclepius Clocktower being completely silent and having no doors to enter it. They’re just...there, exuding an ominous aura onto the surrounding area and frightening away city residents who can’t even describe what they’re frightened of.

There are other factors to Wrecked’s wrecked reputation that are equally spiritual. It’s a district that citizens contradictorily call a haunted place and as one so eerie that even ghosts dread to haunt it (a statistically invalid claim; there’s just as many ghosts and demons here as anywhere else in Tick-Tock Town). People claim to hear whispers when nobody is around. They claim to see people running around at the corners of their vision that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to themselves or people they know. On electronic media they claim to speak to people that don’t really exist and can’t be found again afterwards. They make many claims of strange occurrences, all of them questionable, but as far as the city is concerned they’re nothing more than hearsay. They’ve had enough issues trying to get Wrecked back into shape and solving the tangible societal issues going on without worrying about imaginary specters or deconstructing why buildings exist.

The empty homes littering the district were emptying the city’s coffers, both from keeping them in a livable state and from kicking out the squatters moving in. Once word of Wrecked’s status as an ostensible ghost town spread, an influx of citizens desperate enough to brave its haunts and impoverished enough to lack any other options started to move in in droves. It became such a problem that the city considered a martial solution to keep homes available but thankfully for all parties involved, political or otherwise, a different solution was proposed. In an uncharacteristic turn of good luck, a recent series of political assassinations and intrigue ended with the current Vice-Mayor of Wrecked coming into office, and he was far more understanding of the citizen’s plight than prior holders of his title. Upon convincing the rest of the governing bodies of the district and the city that it would be more efficient economically to simply pay these wayward folk to maintain the houses in exchange for living in them (with government supervision and inspection, naturally), Wrecked instituted a massive overhaul of how it operated. The ultimate plan they went with made a lot of people happy, except for the city aristocracy who were (and are) still mad about it and to this day endeavor to have the policy revoked.

In a post-Reconstruction world, Nocturne is perhaps the plainest of Tick-Tock Town’s eight districts. There’s no great seats of power here, no communal ports, no magnificent factories, no elaborate bio-organic beautification, no labyrinthine vicious streets, no wild neon-lit boulevards, and no mystical schools of magic to be found. Its architecture was designed to be quickly-built and efficient over any aesthetic values, and with city aristocrats long since having scorned the district, any wealth has had to come from the ground up instead of being handed down. It’s a side of town that never had the chance to decide what it was before disaster ripped it apart, and it had to build its identity in misfortune’s wake. Few call by it by its true name even after its worst days ended. Some call it Wrecked with a sneer, dismissing it as a nowhere district for nobodies to languish in obscurity; others call it Wrecked with a smile, a wink and a nod towards the long struggles it has ceaselessly fought to overcome. It’s a humble lot that live in Nocturne: the orphaned, the unwanted, the unseen. They’ve all done their part to make a place where they can support each other in their personal crises, a place where they’re needed and taken care of, and a place that, above all else, they can call home.

[thesilkentheater]

the jester's plight [eflheim, 2]

The previous show, if you missed it

---

The Jester, unbeknownst to anyone else, was a bit different than the other two rulers.

For a start, they were the only one made to be of the common folk; a passerby might have served just as well, were it not for their secondary purpose. In a sense they served as advisor, whereas the other two truly ruled; and yet, the kingdom proclaimed it was never whole without all three.

In thus, it seemed, they had ignored that even their triangular ruling body had a bottom point. All had assumed the Jester, Princess, and King were equals in a large regard, but although the Princess and King were able to put aside differences and rule alongside one another, it seemed there was only space for two thrones.

But it didn't matter much to the Jester, anyway. Because the whispers in the back of their mind ensured they stayed true to their task.

For no one seemed to remember it anymore, but there was an old, dark, decrepit thing that lay waiting far below the castle cellar, watching and ready to pounce. The prisons now in use had iron gates going nowhere that no one could unlock, the keys long lost.

Rather, long since thought lost. No one could hear the jingling of keys under the jingling of their bells, after all.

And it just so happened that on that day that the letter arrived, and the King and Princess arrived at a conundrum, the Jester was preoccupied with this creature. Now, let it be known that he was usually quite aware of when he was needed, and would be needed; it was a skill of his, after all, to be around when required. Certain times of the day he would lounge on a particular rooftop, or sit in his room and wait, and right on queue they would knock on the door or call for him to come down.

On occasion, though, the spirit of the kingdom would have to call him forth, and thus he would arrive perfectly on time due to its whims. It was a sense he'd always had in some fashion or another, but his senses heightened when their places had been cemented into the stone foundations of the castle. The only place it could not reach him was down below, within the beast's confines.

Unfortunately, the spirit of the kingdom could have predicted no such thing, and today had been a rather slow day. Never before had he been needed on days where the King decided to go through the mail, much less that the Princess was largely doing clerical work that needed plenty of mathematics and a good memory. So today, he'd thought, was a good day to get this out of the way, before it got out of hand and he had to make an excuse as to where he'd been were he needed.

Alas, not only had this unforseen circumstance forced the Princess and King's hand into waiting for so long, the Jester was having troubles with the infernal creature below.

It was large, oh so large, about the size of two of the common taverns stacked on top of each other. And in this particular kingdom, most had two or even three stories to accomodate guests, as most taverns served doubly as inns; rest assured the Jester was little more than an ant to this gargantuan. Thankfully, its control of that body was limited and slow; tendrils tried to escape its many chain bindings, but the power vested in the Jester ensured they would not go any further than that.

The creature's natural solution was to infect something else to hop into, birthing cysts on its body that would burst into its writhing, screaming children. Larvae the size of a human child and strange crosses between a bat and an insect, almost; they fly around the chamber looking for someone, anything to infect. A corpse will do, or a living, breathing person.

They don't shy away from the Jester, but just as well. His blood is toxic, and his blade quick. They will all fall- the question, then, is how much he will have to take to kill them.

They must be purged at all costs no matter what, so every now and again he'll pass out below and wake up in his bed, wrapped in soft comfort and aching all over. The powers that be would never let him lose in such a way, but it hurts every time, especially while his blood levels are still recovering.

This day in particular was not a very good day for the Jester. They were particularly slow for whatever reason (a tugging at the back of their mind, voices convalescing onto one point like an entire tsunami heading for a single building, the echoing rhythm of the chains' chimes to one another); for every hit they dealt, another would come and suck their blood. Granted, they would fall to the ground lifeless after, but it helped the wound none.

Today, he was going to wake up in his bed again, he thought, and distantly hoped that the Princess was in no need of cheering up on this fine day.

[impressivepress]

Lessons of war

Matisse is known as a joyful artist - and yet he painted the last century's most pessimistic painting, The Piano Lesson.

Modernist manifestos tend to be full of radical rhetoric, but Henri Matisse's Notes of a Painter is a precise, sensitive analysis of his own work in which he says that what matters to him is expression. He doesn't mean the emotion communicated by a passionate face, but that conveyed by the whole painting: "The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share."

The Piano Lesson, a 1916 canvas 8ft tall and almost 7ft wide that is one of the glories of Tate Modern's Matisse Picasso show, is a textbook example of what Matisse is talking about. In it Matisse's son Pierre sits practising at the family piano in the home Matisse bought in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Pierre is made to look younger than he actually was - he was 16 - as part of an ensemble of effects designed to heighten and distil feeling. The placing of the figures - one of them hallucinatory - is full of tension. Pierre seems oppressed by the scale of this big painting. Above him, a woman supervises his practice from a stool. Her blank, watching face is sinister, even when we realise that this is merely one of Matisse's paintings, his 1913-14 work Woman on a High Stool. Pierre is pinned between this phantom observer and the sharp spear of the metronome, whose violent point is repeated in the triangular fall of shadow that obliterates a quarter of his face.

Greyness dominates and oppresses the picture, and it perversely demolishes pictorial logic, as a depressive mood might distort one's sense of reality. Thus the same grey colours the view outside the window, the walls and floor of the living room, and even the torso of the woman on the stool - to the extent that it takes time to feel your way to seeing the room as a room, the window as a window. Only Pierre himself is a fleshy, human survivor of this miasma, along with tokens of life: the bronze nude in the corner, the candle on the pink piano top and, like a torch beam, the ray of green garden that cuts desperately across the grey world.

Everything about The Piano Lesson exemplifies Matisse's own description of his art perfectly, except that the mood it creates is opposite to the ones we associate with him - the unbridled joy of his paintings, the bliss of his paper cutouts. The colliding, fragile, not-quite-touching areas of green and pink in The Piano Lesson, the glimpses of Matisse's sensuous world, are the most painful of all - reminders of life like the stirrings of spring in TS Eliot's The Waste Land.

Eliot is not what we think of when we think of Matisse - nor any other of the 20th century's memorable visions of hell. While Matisse painted The Piano Lesson, Marcel Duchamp was at work on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, his allegory of modern love as masturbation; Giorgio de Chirico was imagining Europe as a dead afternoon in a depopulated piazza. Modern art, whose first stirrings had been rapturous - most of all in the fauvist art that Matisse created in the 1900s - was turning into a desolation. Matisse is generally regarded as having set himself apart from this anguish. His painting is seen as conservative in comparison to the subversion of Duchamp, Picabia and dadaism - the anti-art that rejected bourgeois civilisation because it had created the mechanistic mass slaughter of trench warfare.

And yet it was Matisse who created the most insidiously pessimistic painting of the 20th century: The Piano Lesson. In this completely unexpected painting, Matisse paints the death of his own art. Soon afterwards he left Paris, settling in the south and not really making a comeback until the end of the 1920s. It's an elegy for a way of life, one that Matisse felt no longer made sense - even though in The Piano Lesson he offers a last, desperate justification for the French bourgeoisie.

Or perhaps it's all a joke, a parody of modern art, a satire on its melodrama, a dismissal of Matisse's self-styled revolutionary younger contemporaries. The Piano Lesson is so full of references to creativity that it is often seen as an allegory for Matisse's art. Matisse identified with music, as is revealed not just by his fiery decorative panel Music and later his Jazz series, but also by the fact that he played the violin and sometimes a mechanical organ on which, as his biographer Hilary Spurling relates, he once delighted his students by performing the whole of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He was keen for his children to learn, making Pierre play the violin as well as the piano - his picture Violinist at the Window also depicts Pierre.

The Piano Lesson may indeed be an allegory for creativity. Through the tedium of practice, you attain the power to create beauty - the tantalising erotic promise of which is in front of Pierre if only, instead of looking blankly bored at us, he would look at the bronze nude in the left corner, art made with effort, offering joy as work's reward. But there's something excessive, morbid, about the scene that seems to go beyond a rationalist interpretation. This could be mocking how Pierre feels, how, made to practise the piano for half an hour before going outside, he feels that all life's joy has been stolen while he has been in here, in a grey fog, so that even the woman in the painting seems like an evil oppressor. But his paranoia might also have a metaphorical, satirical quality. Like Pierre, Matisse's contemporaries, with their cubist and futurist rhetoric, look younger than they are, and their polarised vision of the world - revolutionary modern art confronting a dead cultural and social order - is paranoid, melodramatic.

The Piano Lesson is a painting about modern art, made in direct response to cubism. In the mid-1910s, as Picasso was turning away from the sombre colours and rigorous destruction of visual conventions of early cubism to create more playful, decorative cubist pictures, Matisse started to experiment with cubism's quasi-mathematical emphasis on structure in paintings such as View of Nôtre Dame (1914) - pictures that are odd, slightly funny, as if he were pastiching a style that he finds uncomfortable. His jagged portrait of his daughter Marguerite in cubist mode is also slightly absurd. The Piano Lesson is Matisse's most serious, successful use of cubist techniques to flatten and compress space. By learning from Picasso, Matisse is able to make his own living room seem a depthless conundrum of existential terror. And yet even here he is parodying Picasso, or rather parodying the lesser lights of cubism, the so-called salon cubists, who used cubist innovation as a signifier of the new, mixing it up with more conventional figuration in paintings such as Jean Metzinger's At the Cycle Track (c 1914). These pictures, charmingly, celebrate the modern world - bike races, planes, the Eiffel Tower - by scattering around cubist planar effects. And not only cubists. A slightly different version of the same rhetoric of the new was concocted as futurist painting.

In The Piano Lesson, Matisse reverses that rhetoric. He takes modern art's instantly recognisable tics and tropes - the planes of colour of cubism, its distortion of space and quotation of words in paintings, emulating signs and newspapers - but instead of making them into a celebration of the modern world's energy, he turns them into images of modern society's oppressive rationality. Most of all, he sees the discipline and militarism of modern society as becoming indistinguishable from private life. Matisse later told Picasso that during the first world war the rival French units of military camouflage painters had called themselves the Picasso and Matisse units. You might detect a shame here, a sense that modern art did not liberate.

The grey in The Piano Lesson is easily seen as a military grey. At the time Matisse painted this, his relatives in northern France were living under German occupation. Far from dealing overtly with the war, this painting suggests a world before the war - it might depict a French middle-class home at any time since the 1860s. The ordinary affluence portrayed here is made explicit by Matisse in his jokey inversion of the way Picasso incorporated markers of modern, street-smart life through beer brands or collaged newspaper headlines. Matisse makes the name of the piano manufacturer visible: Pleyel, a classy yet popular French manufacturer of pianos since 1807. It sets the painting back in time, as Pleyel pianos were associated with 19th-century music - Chopin was in effect sponsored by them, playing at their salons. Liszt, Debussy, Grieg and, contemporary with this painting, Ravel and Stravinsky (who helped design a new model) were also connected with Pleyel. In this painting, though, the brand signifies the typicality of the scene.

It is possible to view the painting romantically: as an assertion that this life, and Matisse's art, will go on. But the picture is chillier than that. It is more that the boy is being compressed, chopped into shape by society, forced to follow the metronome, to play in time, and offered in return the lure of the bronze nude. We're not so far after all from Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare. And Matisse goes further than the dadaists. Where they proposed using a Rembrandt as an ironing board, Matisse suggests that modernism - and its latest fashion, cubism - is itself part of the deadening cultural logic of industrial, capitalist, warmongering society. Matisse's older son Jean was taken into the army in 1917, Pierre in 1918.

The metronome in this painting is stone-coloured and looks like nothing so much as one of the pyramid tombs painted by Poussin (Matisse studied Poussin in the Louvre). It is death's beat, the march to the grave, that rules The Piano Lesson - the time the boy is forced to accept, and which Matisse, an arcadian subversive, spent his life trying to slip out of into the free realm of art. The fascination of this painting is that it shows Matisse's belief in art breaking down; he momentarily admits defeat, and in that moment says more about the 20th century than any of modern art's more generally cited apocalyptic statements.

~ Jonathan Jones · Thu 2 May 2002.

[whittlebaggett8]

India’s Iran Conundrum Is Back

The Trump administration’s sanctions hardball places New Delhi in a limited spot.

In an endeavor to additional tighten the screws on Iran, the Trump administration introduced before this 7 days that it would not renew waivers that permitted 8 foreign governments, which include India, to continue on obtaining Iranian oil with no going through U.S. sanctions. Sanctions on Iranian oil buys have been reimposed in November past yr as part of Trump’s final decision to withdraw from the Joint In depth Prepare of Motion (JCPOA). To balance out its radical final decision on Iran, the Trump administration also granted sanctions waivers to eight countries — China, India, Japan, Turkey, Italy, Greece, South Korea and Taiwan — for a time period of 180 times. Italy, Greece, and Taiwan have currently stopped importing Iranian oil and so the impact of this latest final decision will be felt by the remaining five, nevertheless it is significantly from crystal clear if they would be sanctioned instantly in scenario they proceed importing Iranian oil after May 2.

This conclusion arrived months after the Trump administration’s announcement to formally designate Iran’s Innovative Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “foreign terrorist business.” This is the initially time an complete govt entity has been labelled a international terrorist firm, signalling a new toughening of U.S. strain vis-à-vis Tehran. The designation of the IRGC, a veritable energy center in Iran’s polity less than the immediate regulate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will outcome in the freezing of belongings in the U.S. and a ban on Americans performing company with the Guard.

But it’s the final decision on oil trade that will have world-wide repercussions. The Trump administration is downplaying the implications arguing that “the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, 3 of the world’s fantastic electricity producers, alongside with our mates and allies, are committed to ensuring that world wide oil marketplaces stay sufficiently equipped.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has argued that the Saudis and Emiratis have confident “they will guarantee an acceptable supply for the markets,” even though he did not deliver any particulars. So the United States is banking on Saudi Arabia and other key oil producers to enable offset the shortfall from Iranian oil being taken off the market place.

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The worldwide response to the United States has been together predictable strains. The EU has regretted the U.S. final decision even as the UN has challenged the U.S. interpretation of Iranian compliance with constraints on its nuclear method. India, Turkey, South Korea, and Japan all have close ties with the United States and will obtain it complicated to navigate the Iran question in the limited term. China, of training course, is a big oil spouse for Iran. Not incredibly, China has reacted strongly to the U.S. decision, expressing it opposes “unilateral” sanctions and “long-arm jurisdictions imposed” by the United States. Beijing has argued that it stays “committed to upholding the legit rights and passions of Chinese corporations and will enjoy a positive and constructive purpose in upholding the stability of world-wide energy current market.”

For India, oil imports are crucial to sustaining its economic expansion trajectory as they are desired to meet 80 p.c of vitality prerequisites. Iran is the third major supply of oil for India after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Managing ties with Iran has been a perennial issue for Indian overseas policy and all governments more than the previous couple many years have experienced to cut down oil imports from Iran to equilibrium needs from Washington. The Chabahar port job, on the other hand, will not be impacted by the current U.S. conclusion as it is a independent exemption.

India will have to obtain other sources for its oil imports, but people nations may possibly not supply the exact added benefits as supplied by Iran these kinds of as a 60-day credit rating interval, absolutely free insurance plan, and less costly freight. There have been recommendations that the United States may well offer concessions on oil imports to India equivalent to the types made available by Iran, but all those negotiations have only just begun. Specified India’s necessities it would be complicated for India to stop its oil imports from Iran fully although it is very likely that it would slice its ingestion and make the payment in rupee through escrow accounts.

New Delhi are not able to afford to overlook Washington’s toughening of stance vis-à-vis Tehran at a time when transnationalism is the norm in American international policy. Although ties with Iran are vital, India will have to be pragmatic as it seeks a new equilibrium concerning the United States and Iran. A great deal like in the past, the Iran dilemma will proceed to bedevil India-U.S. ties, but as opposed to in the previous India is in a significantly more powerful placement to maintain its equities in this triangular contestation.

The post India’s Iran Conundrum Is Back appeared first on Defence Online.

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[micaramel]

Artists: Akarova, Lili Dujourie, Anne Hardy, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Hanne Lippard, Caroline Mesquita, Jurgen Persijn & Ana Torfs, Leen Voet

Venue: La Loge, Brussels

Exhibition Title: Voici des fleurs

Date: April 19 – June 30, 2018

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of La Loge, Brussels

Press Release:

Voici des fleurs is a group exhibition imbued with the artistic legacy of Akarova (born Marguerite Acarin, 1904-1999), a celebrated Bruxelloise of the interwar years who devoted her life entirely to music, dance, choreography, painting and sculpture. La Loge invites contemporary artists Lili Dujourie, Anne Hardy, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Hanne Lippard, Caroline Mesquita, Jurgen Persijn & Ana Torfs, and Leen Voet to exhibit alongside Akarova’s work and to freely relate to her ideas and production dynamics.

There are, of course, innumerable ways to engage with the art and legacy of the artist, but La Loge’s ambition or mission is not to adopt a historicist, documentary, or archival response. Instead, Voici des fleurs has been developed with and by contemporary artists as an attempt to reassess the potential of Akarova’s archive, not only as a subject of research, but above all as an invitation to indulge in its repository of living materials; the vestiges of an animated artistic practice.

Voici des fleurs is not concerned with ‘re-evaluating’ or lending legitimacy to Akarova’s work. Its motivation is rather to expose and explore the free gestures and spontaneous attitude that underpinned and drove her art-making, while affirming core positions and dynamics within (contemporary) art practices. Akarova was an active personality who stepped up and made things happen. Through her charismatic presence, unrelenting drive and sheer energy, she managed to play a central role in the cultural life of the local arts community (she was, for instance, close to some of the key figures making the scene of the interwar years in Brussels such as Marcel-Louis Baugniet (first husband), Anto Carte, Raymond Duncan (who regularly visited Brussels), Jean-Jules Eggericx, Henry Van de Velde, and Herman Teirlinck among many others), while still safeguarding her independent position and artistic integrity.

Throughout her life, Akarova developed a unique and personal manner of connecting her different interests, artistic and otherwise, by applying the spirit of the all-encompassing total artwork (although she often said music comes first) – a singular “one-woman band” comprising music, dance, costumes, set design, sculpture, drawing, etc. In 1986, at the age of 82, Akarova donated a considerable part of her set design and costumes to the AAC/Archives d’Architecture Moderne – a decision that evidenced of the artist’s self-awareness of her own legacy, and perhaps even a desire to defy traditional disciplinary categories in favour of absorption within the larger context of the visual and applied arts.

Thirty years after Akarova’s intuition to preserve her records – which adopted a non-traditional format and content in an archive fund dedicated to modern architecture, mainly representing male figures, her legacy continues to tickle the imagination. However, suffering from the absence of documentation, her live art and performances remain open to interpretation. Even if testimonies and archival collections attest to a vivid and evocative practice rooted in the artistic networks of Ixelles, the artist’s open and elusive stage practice leaves us to speculate, imagine or project our own fantasies. Meanwhile, Akarova’s spectre lingers in and around La Loge. The institution that is housed within a modernist architecture and embedded within interpersonal networks and a local cultural inheritance that intersects contextually and geographically with Akarova’s own.

As such, Voici des fleurs is less an homage or historical portrait, than it is a testimony to the development of an artistic vocabulary and attitude at a particular moment in time and space. Instead of inviting artists to directly respond to the conundrum of the Belgian avant-garde, the exhibition brings together concerns and sensibilities shared among all invited artists: Voici des fleurs looks at art and life as a set of relations, exploring the production dynamics at play in contemporary practices, the principle of gesamtkunst rather than that of artistic purity or medium specificity, and the networks of relationships that produce and are produced by an oeuvre.

Through a diverse constellation of interdisciplinary works comprising film, voice, painting and performance, the exhibition considers ideas of self-affirmation, feminism, autonomy, and artistic integrity, at times taking recourse to the traditional crafts and the synthesis of the arts. Through understanding kinships between artworks made by artists of different generations, might we be able to reconsider and retrace the artistic steps of an artist whose notoriety has become dispersed over time, but whose work – thanks to archival materials, printed matter, and oral histories – continues to inspire today?

Voici des fleurs opens with a decor and matching costume, both designed and made by Akarova, which featured in Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) performed in 1939 in Salle Akarova (designed by Jean- Jules Eggerickx), a small theater by the Etangs d’Ixelles. As “props”, the objects are deactivated, though somehow they set the stage for the rest of the exhibition in which every so often the spectral presence of Akarova appears in shifting forms. In the second part of the hallway, a short video work made in 1989 by Ana Torfs and Jurgen Persijn chronicles a day in the company of Madame Akarova, who, despite her high age, still strikes us as ever- lively and animated. A year earlier, Torfs and Persijn had visited Akarova, entertainment and the avant-garde, 1920-1950 at the Archives d’Architecture Moderne, an exhibition curated by Caroline Mierop and Anne Van Loo. The exhibition, which is Akarova’s most important exhibition to date (the show was accompanied by an extraordinary eponymous monography), had left a lasting impression on them. Subsequently, in the framework of a school assignment, the duo shot a portrait of Akarova as an artist who was already becoming a legacy, and was already distancing herself from her work.

In the triangular corridor of the ground floor, Hanne Lippard’s How to get rid of the body comprises a molded flesh-coloured curtain and an unsettling score in which the artist asks how to deal with the body once it has become a corpse, voiceless and devoid of life. Though most works in the exhibition appear quite bodily, tangible and material, they often display an interest in how bodies intersect with immaterial concepts such as time, decay, memory, and intergenerational transmission.

In the temple space, on-stage, a ghostlike image of Pauline Curnier Jardin’s grandmother enters a scenography made entirely from sequins. Using her fingertips, the artist has drawn motives in the sequined curtains; a simple, manual gesture, using a material that is both malleable and theatrical at once, and that she therefore felt attracted to. Solo pour Geneviève (première version) creates a particular setting that is reminiscent of more small-scale, traditional theatrical forms, such as cabaret, magic lantern and puppet theater, which engendered a more intimate relationship to the audience. Curnier Jardin created this little theatre specially for her grandmother whom the artist asked which roles she would want to perform as an amateur performer if only her body would still allow her to. But her old, worn-out body is unable to reiterate or demonstrate the described movements and gestures, although th sequined stage gives her a glamorous burst of radiance.

If Curnier Jardin’s work plays on the discrepancies between desire, memory, and imagination, resonating with the lack of documentation of Akarova’s performances, Leen Voet’s new series of drawings Marguerite #01-05 is an ode to Akarova’s approach to dance as “musical architecture”. The works are visual interpretations of descriptions of Salle Akarova on Avenue de l’Hippodrome 72 where the artist used to perform, and which are made available online1 and in the monographic catalogue on Akarova. Although archival photographs are available, it takes creative ingenuity to bring the memory of spaces alive again, injecting them with vivid color and vibration, while approaching them from a contemporary point of view. The series of new works, titled after Akarova’s real name Marguerite, are a continuation of Voet’s long-term interest in conceptually infiltrating the world of other artists in order to fictionalize the oeuvre and deconstruct mythologizing histories – a process in which she places importance on artist’s names (FELIX, Bert Vandael & co).

On the opposite wall, hangs Still Life, a series of three collages by Lili Dujourie. The series was made at a particular time in the artist’s life and work when she wanted to distance herself from the well-known silent videos of her own naked body in order to introduce colour and abstraction into her work – a period preceding the more theatrical velvet sculptures. Like much of her later work, these collages move between abstraction and figuration, ornamentation and minimalism. The compositions are made by the act of ripping and overlapping coloured sheets of paper, slowly and in silence. The works are not cut, but ripped, implying a violent but still quiet physicality and intimacy. Time is central to Dujourie’s work: not only the time of concentration and decision-making, but also the time of transformation (in the artist’s own words: “life is change”).

In the middle of the temple, a series of brass and stainless steel sculptures by Caroline Mesquita appear as the still remnants of an otherworldly place. In the basement of La Loge, some of them reappear in a video work, coming alive as rusted, analogue, living machines. Straddling eroticism and violence, they interact with organic bodies, bearing a bizarre, unnatural relationship to human beings, while complicating the relation between sculpture and creator, machinery and inventor. The basement of La Loge is doubled as a backdrop, and appears as a machinery room of sorts. The crafted sculptures, reminiscent of costumes by Oskar Schlemmer or Akarova, are the outcome of an autonomous practice, guided by the materiality, physicality of the media she uses, but also by the choreography that emerges by manipulating them. Mesquita’s practice resonates with Akarova’s solo trajectory wherein each aspect was self-made and self-organised. Along these lines, the stereotyped characters in Mesquita’s film might remind us of the figures appropriated by Akarova from the repertoire of music history, such as the devil, the princess, the soldier, or the old lady, or could even be considered as these characters’ contemporary versions: the security guard, the cleaning lady, the cook…

In the adjacent space, Area of Overlap by Anne Hardy offers a constructed, theatrical setting or “terrain vague”. The territory is unpeopled (although a body part sporadically protrudes), undefined, and slightly unsettling, but as a closed-off sensory colourscape and mental image it is both very lively and physical. All the elements belonging to this colourful wasteland or total art work are the result of a studio-based practice and an experimentation with materials such as liquid metal, glass, and concrete. In this highly edited and choreographed space, the materials and objects have lost their original function, which lends them an autonomy and ambiguity to be used as a free and open-ended language. Finally, the exhibition closes with a selection of works by Akarova, including a series of paper works (etchings, linocut, ink drawings,…) as well as a monumental sculpture of the mask of the devil in The Soldier’s Tale by Igor Stravinsky – works which testify of the all-embracing practice of the artist, one that is driven by a desire to work out her ideas in different connected forms and projects.

Link: “Voici des Fleurs” at La Loge

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[jonathankatwhatever]

12 May 2023. Just saw the I//I states as visible or not which makes f1-3//3-1 of the invisible to not and back. Not is a 0. And it means something else fits there, which is the original meaning from years ago. So these were existence statements which take maths forms, as shown.

—————

I seem to have ‘chanced upon’ a model, which is Henri Poincaré’s introduction to his field of algebraic topology. His thoughts are clear, so the structure of his argument stands out, which is wonderful because his work literally describes how the structures of arguments stand out, how they grab on to forms, and how they embody those forms. He would have translated that into his ideas about linked structures which together make up a surface, meaning he made the observation of surface reality rigorous because we can see feathers and scales and pores, so we are describable. I don’t know how he translated or if he translated consciously from specific natural examples, but he had to have because that is inherent in his work. That is, for example, the hairy ball idea is a cowlick.

But as I’m going to assume you know, the issue is presenting this material and thus a version of the basic CH conundrum itself, that you can’t construct grid squares unless you both ascend and descend to them, which embodies the treatment of a 0 as it expresses in abstract geometry and algebra. I’m really frustrated because any approach works, but I don’t know an ordering of approaches

I can think of simple approaches, like ‘we will construct something called a ‘grid square’ and will explain what that means.’ Dry. Or with the observation that we are 3 dimensional objects living in time, which we generally label a 4th dimension, and we will describe the structure which underlies that dimensional structure.’ Still pretty dry, but a decent sentence.

Or more bluntly, we will define a dimesional structure which harnesses the … no, that got silly because it should be with Cantor first because we are describing how the infinite works dimensionally and how that is D-structure and how grid squares come into existence, etc. So I think starting with Cantor, which I did years ago, has returned with a re-vengeance.

Oh, this is rich. I just ran into the word ‘platonic’, which people takes to mean sexual when it actually is segmenting from bodily to abstract. So platonic is the opposite of superficial in either case. That twist meant I could suddenly see how we fit Poincarré to this through David Hilbert and his spaces and manifold. This also touches Frigyes Riesz, who ‘proved that square integrable functions … could also be considered as ‘points’ in …’, where that means the integration of the square of the absolute value is finite, which is perfect. That brings in functional analysis.

So this suggests using D-structure to define the nature of finite versus infinite, but again that requires a flip of perspective which I’m having trouble seeing occur on paper.

I’m trying to platonic this, meaning I’m trying to connect the abstract to the corporeal, the soul to the sex.

———-

Forgot. What did I type on my phone in bed at top? I saw I//I as existence states refers to the labeling of quadrants and thus the upper and lower half-plane, and the arrow drawings which show those have potential existence states as Triangular or gs, meaning that is a form of I//I in which we have the Triangular and gs forms over their connections. And you can see that happen over the grid lines as the Hexagonal form visually collapses the middle bT on one side of a grid line to a grid line, which isn’t so much a collapse as the Irreducibles.

So this is fundamental. Like super fundamental. And maybe that’s why my thoughts started to generate actual organizational approaches.

Not been a great day otherwise. Woke up and turned on the outside spigot, only to find it was spraying water inside the house, so I got 2 gallons or so of water on the basement floor before I could figure this out. Was able to set up a hose on the other spigot. Then I stepped into the hallway on to glass from the map which fell after years of the basement door banging against the wall. Cleaned that up. The map is fine. Then I found a note about a bill I forgot to pay, which I knew would escalate, which it did this afternoon into a statement from me that I will be devastated if this doesn’t happen next week, and that I can’t string this out any longer. Oh and the highlight was a nice call from the mortgage company which can force me into a sale at any moment.

[malikuna]

Hi me again! I would like to ad a little more. What i wrote were his name and mine on a piece of paper and i also wrote all thr things i would desire if i had a romantic relstionship with him.The paper burned in a upward triangular patyern and piece left unburned was also upward triangular. We are not a couple sadly but he acts very flirty and intrested in me but when i confront him he says he doesnt see me like "that" but his actions speak different so i did this ritual to get clarity. Thanks

Hello again!

Men are so strange. I feel like even when they know what they want or how they feel, they refuse to express it EVEN when we so obviously like them back! What a fucking conundrum. 

Anyways, the shared S definitely signifies a connection between the two of you and the burning triangle upwards is indicative of a stable relationship. 

However, I cannot tell you based off of this information whether or not this signifies a romantic relationship. There is no further sign to tell me if this means platonic or romantic and it could just mean that you have a stable connection in your friendship. 

If you do come across any more signs, please let me know! Men are literally so complicated sometimes, so... maybe he’s flirting but scared to be blunt about how he feels? Feel free to keep me updated!

Blessings to you and to your journey, babe!

[dududara]

Maina-Ita-Malami Conundrum: Beyond The Mass Hysteria

*With this kind of journalism, we are a nation in ruins

From Abdullahi Haruna

The magical disappearance, reappearance and clandestine reinstatement and promotion of a fugitive ex-Chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), Abdulrasheed Maina has recently generated an unprecedented uproar within the social and conventional media enclaves.

In fact, the pandemonium created a triangular…

[chicagoarchitect]

REVIT & Design - Understanding Geometry

Good / Fast / Cheap. We're all familiar with the "pick-two" architectural conundrum. Camburas & Theodore Architects utilize REVIT to assist in design & efficient geometry-finding studies to locate the "conundrum balancing-point". The approach, is to use basic gestures IE solid-extrusions and void-cuts. These moves keep your geometry clean, planar (with one-directional curves), construct-ably versatile, and cost-effective. Sweeps and blends are great; but the most honest way to fabricate those geometries is to 3D print them. Until 3D printing becomes a more efficient method of construction, we must slice and dice our shapes to understand them [the same way a movie editor will understand the individual frames of a movie scene].

By understanding your geometry, and the rules set to create it, you will find that fabrication becomes simpler; hence more cost-effective, and easier / quicker to construct.

Shown here is our design for a new canopy at 401 E. Ontario Street, Chicago, IL. The curving geometry is a one-directional planar curve. The framework for this geometry is simply a series of triangular supports that scale up or down. The framework will be clad in vinyl fabric. The project is scheduled to be complete this fall (2017).

-Stephen Coorlas, AIA

[philosophicalplantboy-blog]

Heirarchical Animal Rights

Word Count: 1113

One of the primary focuses in today’s conversation of environmental ethics is in the rights of nonhuman animals. We see in the media and various organisations, a struggle between those who wish to free animals held in captivity for human testing and industrial farming and those who regard them as acceptable means towards human satisfaction. Different philosophers attempt to address what exactly is happening in our world and propose possible solutions to these events.

Donald VanDeVeer’s two factor approach argues the use of a ‘two factor method’ to address ethical dilemmas involving human and nonhuman animals. This involves two major steps: the first being the recognition of the rights of nonhuman animal rights, and the second being the recognition that such rights have the capacity to be overridden to protect the rights of beings of a higher sentience. VanDeVeer brings up an interesting counterargument to the findings of last week’s lessons revolving around Regan and Singer’s position on moral egalitarianism. He agrees with Social Darwinism, the age-old belief of survival of the fittest, in “The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book: Philosophy, Ecology, Economics” by addressing how we are in competition with all other species to survive. It is due to this competition that the genes of dominant members of a species contribute to their advancement. He addresses how humans have corrupted this system of survival due to our actions being made now out of individual interests and not species or world interest. However, VanDeVeer believes that by ending our “ethical egoism” or glutinous, self-serving practices, we can return to a healthy world order where basic animal rights are not compromised because of frivolous human desires. While this is an interesting argument, I find that it becomes problematic in that humans acting out of instincts of survival still contribute to a larger problem in the world involving our overpopulation. That aside, Regan’s point that certain humans do not meet the same sentience level as others also puts a huge hole in the logic of the two facor approach; seeing as how it only works when considering a developed human. While VanDeVeer would respond that our innate desire to protect our allies, members of the same species, to explain this conundrum, I feel as though it still is not as strong as either Singer or Regan’s philosophies, which also feel more inclusive and less anthropocentric. I feel that a better examination of how to address other species and the planet can instead be found in the works of Callicott.

J. Baird Callicott’s notoriety within the field of environmental ethics can be traced to the American philosophy professor teaching the very first environmental ethics class in the world at the University of Wisconsin in 1971. He is believed to be the leading contemporary exponent of Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand Country Almanac” land ethic, and has even published his thoughts on the belief system in his book, “In Defense of the Land Ethic”. Callicott’s environmental ethic is a holistic and non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. He discusses his beliefs in “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair”. He describes animal liberation as an environmental ethic of its own through some considerations, calling against the enslavement of certain animals as we currently see within the westernized market system. Such examples include cows, chicken and pigs. Those who concur with this form of hyper egalitarianism will equate such practices to terms such as speciesism and human chauvinism. Where Callicott begins to separate his beliefs with those of Leopold is how we ethically regard non-animal organisms such as plants, saying that to completely equate them ethically to organisms with cognitive functions such as animals is somewhat absurd. The main point he makes is on topics that refer back to animals that are factory farmed and thus mistreated on a greater level than other organisms. The biotic right of a chestnut is thus unequal according to Callicott, to that of the oppressed hen.

I find myself agreeing with the point that Callicott makes regarding how speciesism should be prioritised on creatures that can be legitimately oppressed or have some form of rights taken away. This is due partially to my bias towards deep ecology in that we are all connected on some level to all other living things in this world. While I agree that plants have a right to existence for sake of other animal’s consumption and the diversity and quality of our planet, I cannot ethically equate how they are farmed or cultivated to how an animal can be farmed or cultivated. I also agree with Callicott’s response to ethical humanism with humane moralism. Not all humans can be considered morally equivalent in consideration of the very definitions and terms set by ethical humanism, which sees the rational human as the only being deserving of moral standing. Callicott’s point in that infants would be able to be regarded as mere animals strikes me, because one can easily equate the rational level of a human infant to that of animals such as pigs, who stand cognitively equal to dogs and certain parrots. Imagine we were to commit the heinous acts we enact on the thousands of livestock everyday to children. Objectively speaking, we are doing something very similar. In harming animals that are somewhat mentally equal to certain types of humans that can still feel pain and sorrow.

It should come as no surprise that in agreeing with the sentiments of Callicott, I disagree with the points made by Luc Ferry in “The New Ecological Order”, primarily with how he understands beliefs within deep ecology. While we cannot put animals on trial and hold them as being rationally equivalent to humans, this does not take away from the obvious value that each species on the earth possesses in its unique design, a role it plays in the world. To be pro-world is not to be anti-human after all.

I believe that Callicott’s philosophy is much stronger than VanDeVeer’s primarily because it compares the various degrees of sentience animals posess without immediately priotitising humans or excusing human actions due to Social Darwinism. It seems to me that the two-factor approach as expressed by VanDeVeer is just too simple to be used in more complicated matters of environmental ethics. Consider this: how can VanDeVeer’s two factor method be considered when dealing with ethical questions that involve animals of various cognitive functions in an ecosystem? Considering humans impact not merely one animal, but many at the same time, does his logic only work in small cases? If that is the case, it can still be a useful tool for certain considerations, but still does not hold my approval considering my own personal deep ecological beliefs.