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I admit I'm kind of puzzled about seeing the retort to the idea of synthography being "soulless" so often being "souls aren't real", which, okay, is by and large the materialist position, but like. It's almost a moot point?

a) When people say this stuff, I doubt they're literally saying "an artwork literally has a fragment of vital essence like it's 1/x of a person"; it's some sort of metonym

b) Even if they mean art is "soulless" if it's not made by a person...they kinda really mean, I think, that art requires intentionality, which is not, largely, an incorrect assumption, though I'd argue that the intentionality can also reside in the audience alone, or that part of the process of creation is always going to lack some "absolute" intent due to various constraints and contexts and whatnot

c) The larger point here, I think, is that none of this really goes against the unspoken assumption that a computer can be simultaneously an agent (and thus not a tool like a paintbrush or a welding torch) and not an agent (because it lack an essence only found in sapient beings). It feels to me like it takes the hype surrounding "AI" way too seriously when the particular uses of it and how we view them would probably be a much more interesting point of discussion

Like...I can maybe see some ways that particular forms of vitalism and the assumptions baked therein are worth pushing back against, but this all just feels like a rather nonsensical dunk to me

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when navigating rhetoric and discourse its important for you to keep in mind the following moves you can perform:

you're right but i don't agree

this isn't true but i believe you

i agree but you're wrong

i disagree with what i'm saying

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I've slept and eaten so now I can coherently think about the 13 Sentinels Ending and I think it runs into the problem 13s has throughout it's entirety. Which is that every time it tackles a cishet relationship the quality of the writing goes down dramatically.

It wants to evoke this sort of "We broke the endless cycle of destruction and now we can rebuild the world" feeling to it. Breaking away from the hatred and pain the adults/their past lives couldn't break away from, and establishing their own identities as their Own People (Shu Amuguchi is Not Tetsuya Ida and all.) but leans a bit heavy on the idea that everything is all fine now! We don't even need to consider the emotional ramifications of finding out your entire life was a simulation. We can even bring all the virtual people as real humans. No one has to lose anyone!

It's a bit hollow, and I already wouldn't be satisfied with it if that was my only problem with it. But even regarding it on a pure fan service level, it shoots itself in the foot a bit in a few ways I think? I think a lot of my issues reside in Tetsuya Ida's ending.

My hatred of Tetsuya Ida aside, Miyuki and Ida's relationship when they were last seen was Ida forcibly shutting her up after Miyuki was telling Ida that she doesn't want any of this, but realizing that she can't do anything to stop him, he's not the man she fell in love with all those years ago anymore.

Miyuki: This is a mistake. Ida: I’m afraid you’re the one who’s mistaken. It’s too late. This place will be gone soon enough, anyway. Or do you have some other option to share? Miyuki: …… Even if I did… You wouldn’t listen to me. Not the way you are now.

Shu makes an accurate observation of the situation. Ida doesn't want Miyuki, he wants the version of Miyuki that he finds the most palatable to him.

However when we see them in the ending Miyuki suddenly is completely fine with him and always loved him actually this entire time. Which feels strange and a bit sinister considering what Shu's observation of Ida was. Miyuki's opinion of Ida was trending negative and yet right at the end the game takes a hard right turn to them actually being tragic lovers who are now reunited and can be happy forever.

That feeling of a relationship that, at best, doesn't really have any substance, and at worst, feels antithetical to what their relationship is actually like, is the same problem 13 Sentinels ran into when it came to Juro and Megumi, and Yuki and Shu, and really most of the het relationships.

This game cannot conceive of a world where a romantic heterosexual relationship is bad, despite It's narrative centering around complex interpersonal relationships with conflicting feelings and emotions. The group of 2188 broke apart and killed each other due to their worst impulses, almost dooming the entire human race to extinction due to their various flaws and shortcomings. Their clones proceeded to have complex interpersonal relationships and manipulate the younger versions of themselves to be who they want them to be or exploit them for their own personal agendas. Ida is Ida and fucks everything up again because he's a terrible person-

This all applies to the current cast as well (Again, Juro and Megumi) but as seen with Juro and Megumi, the game refuses to even think of any of the heterosexual romantic relationships it establishes between these people as anything but a self-evident positive, when one breaks apart they're pulled back together again at the end. It's the Shu-Yuki scene where despite everything, Yuki is encouraged to go back to Shu and make up with him.

The only real exception is Ryoko and Ida, and for that, in one iteration Ryoko almost destroys the human race out of despair due to Ida's actions. And in the other, Ryoko is a 16 year old being groomed by her teacher, and even then Ryoko's affection towards Ida is one of the few things she remembers when all of her memories are gone.

It's not the only issue I think, for one they just- never address the Japenese imperialism in Miura and Hijiyama's mindsets...ever. But this part of the game is just really bothersome to me, not game ruining cause the rest of the game is just really good. But definitely leaves a bit of a poor taste in my mouth...

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disgusting little creature (affectionate..???)

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Watercolor : drac.at

Watercolor sketch illustration done for dracat

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Reposting this from my Twitter, since this is a detail I want to make known. Spoilers for ch3 of the fan series DRTA

I planned to leave a translation note for this but it's taking me awfully long, so I'll just talk about it like this. In the first screenshot, the "me" is an "ore" (ruder pronoun, the one used for his Hate Box recording), while in the second, the 'I' is a "boku" (less rude pronoun, he used to stick to this before revealing his true colors).

It's worth mentioning that while Seki switches between the two pronouns pretty often after the second trial, the original writing decided to highlight it here.

I used " for one and ' for the other to highlight this difference in English, but that might be a little too subtle (especially compared to the og text), and might just be shrugged off as me being inconsistent.

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DONATE TO THE SAMEER PROJECT 🕊️

Mosab Emad Ali, part of the heart of the Sameer Project, was also martyred recently. The organizers could use all the support they can get right now.

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it's okay, ulysses ogre. you can back up and try dubliners, it's a short story collection with much more straightforward prose, you can dive deep on one piece at a time, and once you've toyed around with that then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with ulysses. besides, I had an irish lit professor who'd been studying finnegans wake for twenty years and she said she still didn't really know what was going on in it. ulysses ogre, what really matters is if you are enjoying your time with literature and feel like you are gaining something, not whether you reach the "correct" conclusions. there's no need to try and force yourself through something if you feel like you aren't on an even enough plane with the text to reap any of its rewards.

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your online pets are worried about Y2K

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Oh here's a fun little thing I made in Ms Paint

I became a little fascinated with the way panels are arranged in comics, and I think these are some of my favorite "standard" arrangements (the arrows indicate you can swap these segments without compromising what I dig about it; the thin plumb lines just indicate "I like it best when this row is divided here relative to the way the above segments are split)

All these also work for me, I think, mirrored; and here I take for granted that we're using the manga "T-rule" for easier readability

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Shoutout to Pearl's shotgun that she keeps in her gem

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A SMOKE has been added to your inventory.

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Okay okay. Here's something I find narratively very weird about 13 Sentinels' ending and why I mentioned DRV3 as a point of comparison

The game has this odd sort of...nestedness. If feels like it does a sort of "reality is not what you think" twice and I understand the logistical reasoning for it, but it also comes across as almost like it's trying to make you question even the nice ending but not enough for me to believe it?

When we see Amiguchi exiting the pass with Yuki and realize the entirety of their existence is an artificiality and they are not on Earth, it's a shocking moment; and then we realize all of the "times" they travel between are not temporal sectors, but physical ones. These are two reveals that complement each other nicely, and the destruction wrought by the kaiju still feels very concrete and real

But then, later on, we realize that not only were they never on Earth, they were also never anywhere outside of their pods. This is where I start getting a bit confused, because I think the kaiju battles were real but didn't have the kids inside the actual Sentinels on the ground, but the daily life stuff was virtual? This bizarre layered-ness just makes the actual stakes of the situation feel even more confusing and abstract than they already were for me, so the wrap-up ends up coming across as...weirdly hollow

In DRV3, the nestedness, the confusion between real and imaginary and ficticious, between reality and simulacrum, is the entire point of a huge part of the game. Once you realize even the Gofer Project was a fabrication, you can't really trust anything to be the Real Truth without exiting the story-stage; hell, maybe the apocalypse was real to some extent, and the Team DR thing was the lie. It's kind of a bonkers, messy storytelling choice, but I can't claim it wasn't reflected thematically throughout the story. In contrast, 13S, much like Fincher's movie The Game, asks us to accept what we are shown as reality even after layers of deliberate deception towards the audience and the cast, and there's just no reason to think that's the end of it at that point

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Thinking further on it, I think part of my beef with 13 Sentinels is not simply that it's a ridiculously plot-heavy game to the detriment of other stuff which I personally feel a plot ought to hinge upon, but it clearly wants to - especially at the end - evoke an affective something which it has kind of not super built upon. So it comes across to me as somehow both jarring and a little trite

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I wanna change my blog title and my avi...but I don't know what to change them to :/

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Whenever I am making unnecessarily long posts about whatever, I would like you to imagine me as Enoch Drebber complete with mechanical noises. if you please