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It's cause you're always going down that damn spiral

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Sometimes little pleasures in life are loadbearing. Whenever someone is like "If you'd just give up tea and coffee and sugar and--" im like I'll stop you right there. Because if you finish that sentence i am going to kill everyone in this building and then myself. If i have to face the horrors of the world without my little jar of caramel flavoured instant coffee i am going to go full American Psycho. Believe it or not, my main priority in life is not to have perfect teeth or be an Olympic athlete or look like a supermodel, but to actually enjoy living, because I spent far too long not doing that and it royally sucked. And boy, some people don't like hearing that. Particularly dentists

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in the club freakin it in a sensitive style

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Severance spoiler: I love that neither innie or outie mark killed Drummond. It was the severance process itself, making the muscles contract and pull the trigger. Drummond was killed by the elevator.

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easily one of my favourite tweets of all time

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NEW GIRL 2.15 Cooler

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One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)

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I’ve think I’ve figured it out

I think I know what MDR is doing and what lumon is doing and where this story is going to go

It’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice dies and goes to hell, Orpheus descends down there and gets the chance to bring her back, but loses her forever because he turns round to look at her.

If mark is Orpheus, and Gemma is Euridyce, and the severed floor is hell, that means that by going down there as a severed employee Mark got a chance to bring Gemma back, but he’s going to lose it by looking back to find her. By reintegrating.

Gemma died. Like actually died. She wasn’t brain dead and intercepted by lumon. She died, mark identified the body. Somewhere between that and the cremation lumon took her.

Lumon is trying to raise the dead, presumably to bring back Kier (who’s body im sure is being preserved in some horrid cult place of worship somewhere in the depths of lumon) and has been pretty successful so far. At getting the body back. The mind is trickier, and that’s what MDR is doing. They’re tidying up brain waves, trying to bring a persons memory and conciousness back.

That’s why the files expire. The person gets too dead, their brain gets too damaged, and there’s no point trying anymore.

Gemma has been the most successful so far. She’s not just physically alive, but her brain is functioning too. Her position as wellness counsellor was an experiment to see how she interacts with other people, to see how well her consciousness is recovering

Coldharbour is her last file. When it’s done, she’ll be completely back and lumon will have successfully brought a dead person fully back to life, a major milestone for them. If it expires, she’ll be gone forever

Mark reintegrated. He’s going to be suspicious of lumon, suspicious of the work, and so caught up in looking for Gemma he won’t finish cold harbour

He looked back. So he’s going to lose her forever

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I wish it was easier to talk about mobile phone addiction without sounding like a boomer

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You know, it's kinda funny how much of high fantasy centers around kings and nobility and courtly intrigue considering that the archetypal high fantasy, Lord of the Rings, had the rather explicit moral of "saving the world is up to this backwater hick and his gardener because no politician, least of all inherited nobility, would have the ability to see past their own ambition and throw away a weapon". Oh sure, Aragorn is a great king and all, but there's a reason he's over there running a distraction ring while the hobbits do the real work. Sauron loses because he gets distracted by kings and armies and great battles (i.e. typical high fantasy stuff) letting Frodo and Sam sneak through his back door and blow it all to hell.

Just saying, maybe old Jirt knew what he was saying when he said that the small folk doing their best and holding to each other was more powerful than a dozen alliances and superweapons and we should respect him for it.

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Rereading the Lord of the Rings series recently, and it's so fascinating to me how much the series is a denial of the typical juvenile power-fantasy that is associated with the fantasy genre.

Like, the power-fantasy is the temptation the Ring uses against people It tempts Boromir with becoming the "one true king" that could save his people with fantastic power. It tempts Sam with being the savior of Middle Earth and turning the ruin that is Mordor into a great garden. It tempts Gandalf and Galadriel with being the messianic figure of legend who brings salvation to Middle Earth and great glory to herself.

The things the Ring tempts people with are becoming the typical protagonists of fantasy stories that we expect to see. and over and over we see that accepting that role, that fantasy of being the benevolent all-powerful hero, is a bad thing. LotR is about how power, even power wielded with benevolent intent, is corrupting.

And its so fascinating how so much of modern fantasy buys into the very fantasy LotR denies. Most modern fantasy is about being that Heroic power-fantasy. About good amassing power to rival evil. But LotR dares not to. It dares to be honest that there is no world where anyone amasses that power and remains good.

I guess that's one of the reasons its so compelling.

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⋅⋅ The Tales That Really Matter ⋅⋅

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The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King, J.R.R Tolkien

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very controversial opinion here, but sometimes customer service workers are the problem 😶

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Some may be apprehensive that Severance won’t portray Mark’s interaction with Helena in the tent as the sexual assault it was. But not only will they — they already are.

Mark’s behavior toward Helly has completely changed. He doesn’t sit next to her at Irving’s funeral. He shuts down attempts at conversation with offhand, vague snarky comments and a defiantly blank facial expression. When Helly knocks on the door to the bathroom, his eyes dart around like an animal cornered. Where he once would have slowed down for her in the hallway so they could talk, he walks much faster ahead. He’s trying as hard as possible to avoid her. To ignore her. To run away.

Now contrast this with his treatment of “Helly” when she first walked out of the elevator in season two. He waited for her to arrive! He was so relieved she’d come back! And when they were walking down that hallway and he was explaining the situation with Ms. Casey, he stopped mid-stride, turned to her with a smile on his face, and said “Look, Helly—“

He never got to finish that sentence. But some say he was going to confess that though his outie had a wife, his affections lay with her. And I think they’re right.

So why is he acting so differently now? The answer is obvious: “Because they are smarter than us, okay? They know everything.”

After the assault, Mark likely feels like a complete idiot. He spent so much of season one deconstructing his beliefs and breaking free from Lumon’s propaganda. And the minute he believes he’s immune to their lies and no longer a corporate slave, he is taken advantage of and hoodwinked by the very figurehead of said company, masking as someone he loves.

A symbol of Lumon convinced him he was safe. Tricked him. Invaded him in the most intimate way possible, with him completely oblivious, “like an idiot.” Right when he thought everything might be okay.

So maybe Lumon’s right. Maybe there’s no point in fighting. Because if he was stupid enough to not realize his own friend was being possessed by her billionaire doppelgänger, then maybe Lumon is correct about innies being nothing more than pawns. Maybe they are people, and he really is… not. (That’s how Helena treated him, anyway.)

And if that’s the case, of course he wants to give up looking for Ms. Casey and lose himself in work! For a moment he thought he was a human being, deserving of autonomy over his own body and capable of something more than sitting behind a desk — but his assault sends that all crashing down. He is an extension of his outie, made for work and nothing more. Going beyond that gets dangerous. That’s what got Irving killed… and him in Helena’s tent. And Helly? He cannot trust Helly. As far as he knows, his only confirmed moment with Helly since the OTC was when he was holding her in his arms, his jacket wrapped around her shoulders. Why should it be Helly coming back to the severed floor? If Helena could trick him before, who says she can’t learn from her past mistakes and trick him again over and over? Mark refuses to be humiliated and hurt after last time, so he avoids her (and Dylan!) and puts up a barrier of cool, snarky indifference — just like how he deals with grief.

But we know that indifference is a mask. When Milchick walked out of the elevator after revealing he knew about him and Helena Eagan, Mark had no one to pretend for — and he went completely stiff, blankly wide-eyed in an expression extremely reminiscent of his usual innie self. Whatever the reasons for this, one thing’s for sure: Mark does deeply care about what happened in the tent. And at least for now, he will lose himself in Cold Harbor to cope with it.

Lumon certainly got their productive worker back. But good Lord… at what cost?