amperianloop

[amperianloop]

man. the secret history has become so synonymous with dark academia that when u look through the tag its just knit sweaters and latte art. like please show me a text post about how fucking unhinged richard was for staying in a room with a Literal hole in the wall during the dead of winter and almost dying of hypothermia.

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oh to have infinite money to spend on obsolete technology...

circular slide rule. so elegant and it's how the linear ones work anyway, when your answers get larger they go off the left end and come back on the right. and it's actually compact!

[amperianloop]

hello welcome to my blog i’m ampere, i am a physics student in western america with as many interests as there are stars in the sky, and have no theme. here are some things about me :)

i really love older technology (especially old math tools): typewriters, vintage calculators, landlines, slide rules... i've been having fun doing problems with only logarithm tables lately. i'm also a fan of fountain pens though i don't like collecting things

probably as consequence i am a firm believer of digital minimalism and most of the time i have a flip phone (right now i have no phone because mine is broken and i don't wanna deal with nokia while it's finals season). genuinely adverse to doing work online (terrible thing i need to get over since i want to go into computational physics) and when i was in high school my beloved english teacher would print out assignments so i could do them by hand instead of using canvas

i love reading, i currently have 17 library books floating around my room and some 20 holds. big fan of non-fiction, especially essay writers and the new journalism movement in the 70s (think: annie dillard, jone didion, tom wolfe, etc etc). but i also read a lot of textbooks (i like that they have pictures)

still i adore literary fiction and am working through the secret history but have put it on hold so @sr71blackbirdd can catch up 

physics! math! history! my favorite subjects. often they combine in delightful ways (infinite powers by steven strogatz is a super fun book about the history of calculus)

my most prized possession ever is my hp 15c calculator it’s my baby. sometimes i forget my wallet but i never forget my calculator

my favorite space mission is apollo-soyuz; my favorite integration technique is trig substitution; my favorite authors are natalya baranskaya, joan didion, and virginia woolf; my favorite periods of history (to study) are post-stalin ussr, 1920s america, space race, cold war in general; i say my favorite drink is a cappuccino but it’s actually free drip coffee in a paper cup at physics conferences… my favorite color is probably blue ❤️

email me at idealsolenoid@gmail.com and let's be friends. or pen pals. i'll send anyone a letter

[amperianloop]

This joy is not your own, quit living the borrowed life!!!

Social media and the algorithm is like sugar water for your soul instead of milk, you will not sustain on it, and you can not continue to neglect growing your own roots. You reap what you sow! Love is for those who love the work! Let others inspire you, let your community motivate you, but please God learn to love the work. Have days where you create without looking at Pinterest when you get lost, let it take hours, let it take days! What are you trying to be free of? The LIVING? The miraculous task of it? - feeling very fired up by the poem "For the Student who used AI to write a Paper" by Joseph Fasano and a small line from Blue Period where Yatora says 'this joy is not my own' while watching TV. Its so easy to not do things when you can get the dopamine by watching other people do those things, but gosh does is slowly poison you and your soul. If you feel like you are not living your life, consider your choices, one of the being a flip-phone, please life can be so much better :3 Ask yourself what I did and still do:

When is the last time I felt joy of my own creation and accomplishment?

How much do I spend in the fields of boredom, the birthplace of imagination?

Where does my artistic soul flow from when its not curated by other people’s work?

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the relationship between a task-oriented girl and her emotional support whiteboard <3

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literally cried when writing my fav prof's teacher evaluation. we've discussed sharing custody of a cat. community college professors are so approachable

I ❤️ community colleges. Academic institutions that aim to serve the underprivileged and provide them better skills for hiring in the modern workforce have my heart. Don’t underestimate the passion and skill of professors at community colleges, and don’t be afraid to begin your educational journey there, whether you can’t afford to go to university or you just haven’t figured out what to do yet. Dual enrollment has been an absolute blessing. (I’m graduating tomorrow and getting all in my feelings 😞😞😞)

[amperianloop]

18 and no cell

A while back I downgraded from a semi-recent iPhone to a feature phone (Nokia 2780), which was well and good until I broke it in a confused scrimmage with physics lab equipment. At the time I was so busy I couldn't make myself do anything about it, so now I'm just without a mobile phone. And it's been fine. I actually like it, not being constantly connected to the world, not being constantly available... Of course my circumstances are what makes this doable: I'm living with my parents until the end of the summer and have no job that requires I have a phone. I know this isn't sustainable in the long term, but I'm trying to make the most of it while I remain at the dusk of childhood, before responsibility forces my hand. Still, I thought I'd share a couple anecdotes and logistical things because I've seen a lot of people talking about "dumb phones", but no one talking about no phone at all.

Logistics:

When I need to call my parents, I use the phone of a friend or professor. When I need to call some organization, I just use my dad's number

Copy down directions a quick map on desktop before leaving the house if I'm going someplace new

Do everything school related on laptop

That's kind of it... it's been so much easier than I thought it would be. I guess it makes sense, most people had a time in their lives where they got by just fine this way. Many remember a time where everyone did (I don't—I was born in the year of the iPhone). It's been delightful enough that I've begun to dread returning to a mobile phone, even if it's just a flip phone.

Some anecdotes:

I've been reading a lot more (a LOT more—too much. I've been neglecting studying a little in favor of reading). I'm reading The Secret History and a collection of Thoreau's essays and Night Train to Lisbon now. I like going to the park with just a book and enjoying the June weather with nothing else demanding my attention

Now my downtime feels more restful than it ever has, and it makes me feel like I never rested in my previous adolescence. I think having a device like a smartphone on you at all times is kind of exhausting, like a cursed amulet that feeds off your internal struggle to not be on it all the time... or something

I've spent way more time outside just zoning out and staring at trees and flowers and the fan on a side of a building doing absolutely nothing. and my head feels clearer doing this

I drafted a 2000 word essay for my English class in a leuchtturm journal. I sat in my high school library for two hours with a giant dictionary on right and a thesaurus to my left. The librarian then gave me the thesaurus, saying I was "the only person to have used it in ages. Actually, it's already been removed from our catalogue..."

I heard that some people are talking about a "no phone summer" or "low tech summer" and so this is my two cents on that. If you're my age and can't imagine life without a phone, maybe you should shut it down for a week and see what happens. My friends still like me and I see them often. Probably more often now that I can't text them (I've told them all to just email me 😭). So much of younger gen z are on their phones near constantly (I was no exception, with my 5-8 hours of it) and I worry what happens when we're never properly alone with our thoughts. I think high schoolers can take a week or a month or maybe even a year off and learn a lot about who they are. I don't know, I'm not anti tech, I just hope we don't waste away our whole lives like this. I feel bad for how much of my childhood I spent doing nothing on a phone, and it's only in the past few months that I finally feel free from this tug of having everything all the time.

[amperianloop]

oh edelstein...

Y’all ever write fanfiction of your own story?

None of this is canon to my story but it was fun to write.

CW: Nazism, suicidal ideation, tobacco use

“Dieter is dead, Erich is dead, my father is dead. I have gone AWOL and today will go down in history as the capitulation of Germany. I, Albert Edelstein, retreated from my post on May first. Only a week ago. I am barely even a traitor to my nation and that makes me almost sick. I’ve been sick. I’ve been sick and I’ll be sick a while. I arrived at the Ziegelbauer residence six days ago. Munich was in ruins when I arrived. The Führer’s brain was full of lead when a Soviet shell almost pierced my own skull. Faced with bullet fire as a last stand for Berlin, I found for the first time in a four year military career, I ran. I ran and I didn’t stop until somehow I had found my way back home. I would hardly call this home anymore. I barely recognize it, not only because of the bombings. Through my time in the military the city has become disfigured until it was entirely unfamiliar to me. Streets I once navigated with ease I am no longer able to trace. How I found Ziegelbauer’s home perplexes me, but when Frieda saw me at the doorway she let me in without question. She recognized instantly her family friend who hardly looked like a man anymore. Who was broken and bent and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. She recognized instantly a man who I would never have been able to identify as Albert Edelstein. The first thing my sister did when Frieda called her down was take from me anything I could use to kill myself. The pistol I’d put in my mouth, the knife I’d held to my wrist, the rope I’d used to take measurements of my neck, the lighter that has already stolen years of my life. The second thing she did was hug me. Subconsciously I leaned on her, I put all my weight on her, and she held me like it was nothing, if that tells you anything about the dire state of our supply lines. She untied for me my boots, she undid the layers of uniform that my frozen stiff fingers could never hope to work their way through. She ran me a bath. How long had it been since I last had a warm bath? Long enough that my muscles had gone stiff like that of an old man’s. Long enough that I let my body relax in the hot water until it went cold. Ernst saw me after I was dressed, he also gave me a hug, one as tight as his arms—plagued with atrophy as insulin had presumably become harder to come by in recent years—could muster. He took me to the kitchen and told me to eat. He said I looked as sickly as him. I complied. That’s all I’m good for. Following orders.

I couldn’t keep it down.

Ernst said he’d give me advice on nausea management in the morning. I asked him to light me a cigarette. It could stave off the hunger for the next 8 hours. The greatest proof I have that he loves me, or is, at least, still subservient to me, is that even after all of these years, he took a draw from the cigarette before putting it in my mouth. Just as I had asked him to do the first time. Ernst Ziegelbauer doesn’t smoke unless I tell him to.

I slept over 14 hours that night. I wish I could say it was just last night that that happened. Yesterday I slept the whole day away. Ten hours straight, wake up, use the restroom, get water, snack on something light enough not to make me nauseous, smoke, go back to bed until god next woke me. I’m sick with something.

I really ought to cut to the chase, no? Apologies, it has been a while since I’ve journaled, they’re a security concern. I overheard Ernst speaking to my sister today, he said: ‘I do quite like your brother, Alice. I wouldn’t mind him staying even now that the war in Europe has ended.’ And I will admit, that made me go red and kick my feet. It is nice to know I can still feel things like that, even if it is for stupid, stupid reasons. It’s hard not to be in love with a boy like Ernst Ziegelbauer. I am still yet to ever in my life experience sexual arousal, but I would imagine it feels something like Ernst holding my hand—shaky with withdrawal—still as he lights me a cigarette. I believe, the tone I am taking in this is one of someone very disconnected with their feelings. I must always be a perfect German specimen, I suppose. But I would let you know I am not. I am overcome by them all the time and the only thing that seems to heal me from his malady emptiness and exhaustion is my sisters dearest fiance. I live an accursed life, doomed always to fall by the wayside and be my sister’s shadow. I can delude myself into believing it is secretly me he’s after, and I will continue to do so until my mouth no longer demands the taste of cool steel, my wrists no longer the prickling of a blade, and my neck no longer the comfort of strangulation. And I will grow out my brown hair, for I am no longer a soldier, my father is dead, and Germany is free.”

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Am I the only one who feels like “Fiction is for escapism!” Is a reductive, anti-intellectual dogwhistle that devalues fiction as a whole? Like yes it’s a valid school of thought so long as it exists among others, but it’s become the dominant narrative in reading and writing spaces and honestly I think it is part of what has deterred men from reading fiction. In the eyes of many it’s a frivolous waste of time because at least with a TV show or Movie you can work while it plays in the background. I don’t know, I was always taught fiction is supposed to teach lessons in a way more easily understood than lecture. It’s a symbol of an increasingly vapid society that it has become “escapist fantasy”.

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Stories I’ve thought of that I might write, might not (except the last one, I’m definitely writing the last one)(follow if any of these interest you!):

Black Lake, Black Sea:

A story about a detective duo working for the Olympia Police Department in Washington State in the year 1991 as they track down a killer praying on University age girls at the Evergreen College. The killer turns out to be supernatural in nature and feeds on thoughts of distrust in the government among both far left groups in Olympia, and Far Right groups in the nearby city of Tacoma. The main character is an ex-Soviet Detective named Arkady Zolotov who, while encountering this entity, reflects on political extremism in the Soviet Union vs America and emphasizes a metaphor linking the creature to the KGB and other authoritarian secret police.

Thread the Needle:

A story about two women during the Spanish revolution. Rosalia Carranza is a communist poet (and seamstress) who works in secret distributing propaganda and information to the people of Spain to aid in the fight against fascism. Rosalia is tasked one day with spying on an old friend of hers, Isabela de la Cierva, the wife of a fascist General. As the two connect more, a romance begins to blossom between them and fascism’s grip weakens on Isabela. There’s dual perspective and probably a love triangle in this one (Rosalia also falls for with a Soviet Volunteer).

(Still Untitled):

The year is 1890, Edwyn and Anna Malczyk have just moved to a village in France after their parents’ passing, opening an Inn with their remaining inheritance. They find quickly however, that this was a mistake. At night in this area, creatures, doppelgängers roam, trying desperately to kill humans and take their place. Renovations are quickly made and the Inn becomes a safe space… at least for now. The story not only follows the siblings as they face these terrifying events, but also follows Anna as she takes care of her schizophrenic brother, who cannot necessarily tell people from doppelgängers, and finds meaning in life outside of being his caretaker. This one is also a Queer Romance.

Dreaming of New York (Title in progress):

15-year-old Feli Achille has just moved for maybe the fifth time in his life, Rome, Milan, Zurich, Munich… it all blends together sometimes. This time, his uncle has found his way to West Berlin, and Feli, having been removed from his parents’ custody at a young age is forced to follow. Feli doesn’t expect much of his experience in Berlin, he knows three things as fact: Everything is temporary, the world cannot heal from the scars of the past, and people are unkind to those they see as different. Ludwig Bohrer, a classmate of his, is determined to change his thoughts on that. The leather-jacket-wearing, cigarette-smoking, New-York-Romanticizing teenager is full of a life, energy, and lack of shame that Feli is entirely unused to. As the two fall in love, Feli begins to wonder if the world truly can change for the better.

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first of all, through the power of tape anything is possible, so jot that down

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bf taking the opportunity to make a table for literally anything

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Wrote an Epilogue for “Under Red Banners” you know… just in case the themes aren’t clear enough

“We are now all Seventeen. Albert is my best friend. He still has that awful smoking habit. It’s only gotten worse over the years. Heinrich is a close second, he’s been through everything with me. I am still dating Alice, she loves me despite everything. Mangels hardly speaks to me except when Albert is around. I am fine with this. I am happy, I think. For the first time in my life I feel like I belong. Herr Volkmann is gone. I never hear from him. Too dangerous, I’d assume. But even still, upon observing my friends, perhaps fathers aren’t all they’re chalked up to be.

Tomorrow, the boys go off to war. Edelstein, Mangels, even Heller got in enough shape for the standards of the German army. Tomorrow they go off to war and I think about how maybe I will be the last to remember them. To remember them not as monsters, cogs, or bodies, but as boys. Boys who wrestled in flower fields under the sun of late summer. Boys who spent afternoons studying in the local library. Boys whose devotion to their father led them to face the barrel of a gun. Will I be the only one to remember Edelstein writhing in pain as he realized he’d grown into his father? Will I be the only one to remember Mangels’ hot breath on my face when he realized Alice chose me? Will I be the only one to remember Heller’s progress just in pursuit of having me as a friend? I don’t know. I hope not.”

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Wrote an Epilogue for “Under Red Banners” you know… just in case the themes aren’t clear enough

“We are now all Seventeen. Albert is my best friend. He still has that awful smoking habit. It’s only gotten worse over the years. Heinrich is a close second, he’s been through everything with me. I am still dating Alice, she loves me despite everything. Mangels hardly speaks to me except when Albert is around. I am fine with this. I am happy, I think. For the first time in my life I feel like I belong. Herr Volkmann is gone. I never hear from him. Too dangerous, I’d assume. But even still, upon observing my friends, perhaps fathers aren’t all they’re chalked up to be.

Tomorrow, the boys go off to war. Edelstein, Mangels, even Heller got in enough shape for the standards of the German army. Tomorrow they go off to war and I think about how maybe I will be the last to remember them. To remember them not as monsters, cogs, or bodies, but as boys. Boys who wrestled in flower fields under the sun of late summer. Boys who spent afternoons studying in the local library. Boys whose devotion to their father led them to face the barrel of a gun. Will I be the only one to remember Edelstein writhing in pain as he realized he’d grown into his father? Will I be the only one to remember Mangels’ hot breath on my face when he realized Alice chose me? Will I be the only one to remember Heller’s progress just in pursuit of having me as a friend? I don’t know. I hope not.”

[amperianloop]

"A Warm Day" by Tatyana Kopnina (1967)

[amperianloop]

The fastest way to take your writing to the next level

Hello, writers of tumblr!

I know many of us had vastly different experiences with high school English/Literature classes. I had one of the best English curriculums in the United States as a result of going to an IB, former business prep school (it got converted to a public school). That being said, most of my advice here comes straight from the English classroom, which may make many of you recoil or wince as you brace yourselves for “read the classics”.

And that is my advice.

But hear me out, I’m going to take this to a next level as well. Firstly, why do you think we get better at writing as we age? Practice, yes? I would argue that a 20 year old beginner writer is starting at a different place than a 12 year old beginner writer, however. As someone who started writing more seriously at around 9 or 10, stopped for years as I realized it wasn’t a viable career, and got back into it at 15, you could argue this was just muscle memory, the same way you can remember how to ride a bike after years out of practice even if you’re wobbly at first. I would argue something different, I wasn’t wobbly at 15. My writing was the best it had ever been. Why? Because I had just finished The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I found myself imitating his technique, copying his voice, making something with far more complex symbolism, metaphor, etc. notes of Shelley, Achebe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, could be caught as those were the authors I had been forced to read for school.

But it is important to note this all happened because I made myself think about literature. I wrote essays, some of the best in the class, and wrote even more about these books when class was done. I did research into these history, social dynamics, problems, struggles, author background, etc. in order to place these works in the context of their time. I relentlessly analyzed why these were the stories that stood the test of time. Most importantly, I researched literary movements.

The thing that has guided my entire current work in progress and allowed me to stay so steadfast and dedicated, the thing that developed my voice, was understanding the literary movements. I can go over a brief breakdown of the biggest modern ones:

Classicism - Using values and concepts from Ancient Greek and Roman literature. When the movement sprung up, it was largely a revitalization, The Odyssey, the Iliad, and stories inspired by those. Circe would be a more modern example I believe. This movement was characterized by simplicity, proportion, clear structure, restrained emotion, and explicit appeals to intellect. Classicism was also a fairly classist movement but set up the foundations for

Romanticism - basically the tradwife of literary movements, RETVRN, all about an embrace of nature, emotion, humanity, all the stuff that came before that science and industrialism junk. Romanticism has two major subcategories: Dark Romanticism (Example: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley) which highlights a sinful or evil nature in humanity and examines our capacity for evil; Romantic Nationalism (Example: The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales) which was HUGE in France and future Germany around the Napoleonic Wars and emphasized the beauty of the nation state and the need to protect it.

Realism - By far one of the most significant for historical analysis. Realism was not just an art movement, it was a social movement. The goal was to show the wealthy, literate folk who could afford to go see art the plight of the lower rungs of society. Of course some realists tackled different issues. Tolstoy reportedly hated writing about poor people, but War and Peace is a masterpiece of Realism because of its focus on the perils of war. Dostoevsky, any of his books, but most famously Crime and Punishment, stand out as the most significant realist books in the literary canon. The style is often marked by a very plain manner of diction.

Aestheticism - the most SIGNIFICANT aestheticist novel of all time has to be The Picture of Dorian Gray. Featuring intense commentary on what art is and how meaningless it is (in a way that ironically makes it deeply meaningful), Wilde captures the very tenets of the Aestheticist movement. Don’t think, just make something pretty. Aestheticism was a criticism of both Realism and Romanticism, the dominating movements of the time. It argued art is just pretty and the technique should speak for itself. Wilde himself claims that Realism doesn’t work to convince people of the plight of the poor and romanticism is evil and corrupting in his most famous novel.

Modernism - The Trial by Franz Kafka, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Stranger by Albert Camus, what do all of these novels share in common? A defiance of literary norms and the time period they were written in. They wanted to make something new and challenge what was normal and expected of writing at the time. They aimed to encompass societal themes in a way that was new and different. The Trial for example was the most painfully accurate depiction of Antisemitism I’ve ever read, despite the absurdity of it all.

Contemporary/Post-Modern - Contemporary does not encompass every work published after the 90s despite what the name may imply. Contemporary art/literature, much like its forefather modernism, aims to push boundaries. What is art? What is a story? Contemporary art pushes a meta-narrative and the most compelling example I can think of is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which explicitly asks the reader what makes a story true: material reality, or the feelings it gets at? Another story I can think of that I would consider contemporary art isn’t a book at all, but rather the online animated series ENA, ENA doesn’t have a clear metanarrative but its presentation is exactly what contemporary art aims for.

Of course, there are more movements than just these, but these are the ones that many classics fall into. If you need a reading list for rapid development of your writing, just look at the works I compiled in this list.

Happy writing!

[amperianloop]

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