#The Absurd

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth."

- Albert Camus, 'The Myth of Sisyphus'

[vile-images]

[stoicmike]

Under present conditions, the absurd is the only thing that makes sense. -- Michael Lipsey

[visajoe]

This IS the way that IT works

[beljar]

I was living in a villa in the suburbs, alone with a dog, a couple of cats and their kittens, all black. The mother cat could not feed them. One by one, all the kittens died. They filled the room with their filth. Every evening, when I arrived home, I would find one lying stiff, its gums laid bare. One evening, I found the last one, half eaten by the mother. It stank already. The stench of death mingled with the stench of urine. Then, with my hands in the filth and the stench of rotting flesh reeking in my nostrils, I sat down in the midst of all this misery and gazed for hour after hour at the demented glow in the cat’s green eyes as it crouched motionless in the corner. Yes. And it is just like that this evening. When we are stripped down to a certain point, nothing leads anywhere any more, hope and despair are equally groundless, and the whole of life can be summed up in an image.

Albert Camus, "Between Yes and No" from Lyrical and critical essays, 1968

[autonomoustweekazoid]

[noroomforallourthoughts]

excerpts from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

[everyartistnotdeadyet]

[hermitthrush]

Excerpt: Absurd Walls

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) | An Absurd Reasoning: Absurd Walls

Hermit Thoughts:  Camus highlights that the scientific worldview is also of no use in grounding the individual in any kind of coherent external meaning.  Eventually the layers of what is known always run into the unknown, either at the largest scale or the smallest, or the beginning or end of time.  It reminds me of my Evolutionary Biology class in college, where the prevailing theory taught to us about the origins of organic life from the inorganic had to do with inorganic proteins helping to lubricate different kinds of clay, with some quasi-Darwinian element to the progression and proliferation of these pre-life proteins over time into a selection process which yielded organic proteins.

But, for me there, beyond the question of “how” could they know such a thing, the question of “why” always remains.  Whatever the explanation, at the root level of the universe, life was always potentiate and must arise at some point given enough time.  And the universe has an eternal amount of time, in its cycles, so it was guaranteed to happen.  And, as Camus discusses here, science too eventually puts up walls where “why” is not allowed.  “It just is so, it’s a natural system” is just the empirical, atheistic “God works in mysterious ways”.  

And the calculations of physics, the proofs, become as obtuse to the layman as a Latin mass to an illiterate peasant.  It all becomes belief, a matter of faith in an ordained authority figure: the theoretician becomes a hierophant.

Useless for personal meaning; walls between you and any chance of truly grasping an ordered outer universe.

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste.  These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the hear relaxes -- how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel?  Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.  You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it.  You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true.  You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases.  At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.

All this is good and I wait for you to continue.  But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus.  You explain this world to me with an image.  I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.  Have I the time to become indignant?  You have already changed theories.  So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.  What need had I of so many efforts?  The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.  I have returned to my beginning.  I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.  Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more.  And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.  A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?  To will is to stir up paradoxes.  Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

[hyhunter7]

Erebusmon, my oc digimon

Ok so I have been working on this digimon for the past week or so, and I have no idea what to make for it to communicate it to peeps, so here's my literary analysis of my own oc digimon who barely has a design bc i dont have the storywriting abilities to make a story.

Premise: the premise of Erebusmon in the canon is a bit confusing, but it is a fusion of Eosmon(mega), Chaosdramon, Chaosmon: Valdur Arm(which I will refer to as ValdurChaosmon), Rapidmon(gold), and MetalPhantomon, it is pure power and can rival beings such as Omnimon X and even Odugomon (not X lol). Erebusmon’s premise thematically is the relationship of chaos and control, how they are the same and conflicting, and each of it’s components represents an element/ aspect of control.

The story: Erebusmon’s story is the story of it’s components, only appearing at the end of a story for a final battle.

For Eosmon, the story is very similar to Kizuna’s, about someone who emotionally abandoned their Digimon to “grow up” and follow the expectations/ social contract, however, realizing what she missed, created Neverland to prevent children around the world from having the same “growing up” as she did, almost engaging in a sort of self-infantilization. Eosmon’s element of control is control over the past and present, in hopes the future will continue to be that past/ present. This Tumblr post and this Elliot Sang yt vid go more in depth about it, even tho the vid isn’t necessarily about Kizuna. 

For Chaosdramon, it’s about a Vemmon who evolves (to Snatchmon) because it gains a sense of self (opposed to the other Vemmons, who don’t), and used the other Vemmons, terraformed the world around it and got a sense of superiority, thinking itself to be the highest on the hierarchy, thinking itself to be a type of god, a false god. It then digivolved to Machinedramon as the manifestation of that, but then again to Chaosdramon as an extreme version, becoming a chaotic beast overruling (some of) the Digital World. It’s element of control is about the relationship between identity, machines, and nature. A good explanation about that is this 10 min yt vid. 

For ValdurChaosmon, it’s even split more, with ValdurChaosmon being a fusion itself, of BanchoLeomon, and of Varodurumon. BanchoLeomon is a Leomon who gained it’s title by having it’s spirit tested, but never broken, thus strengthening it’s ideas of Justice, and any who do not follow that Justice, are Evil and BanchoLeomon will hunt Evil down. Varodurumon is a Digimon who evolved from Hououmon X, an extreme Holy symbol, presiding over the skies, any touch of evil will be eradicated with Varodurumon. This fusion to ValdurChaosmon represents the control over the self inherent in ideas of good and evil, especially in executing said ideas on others. 

For Rapidmon(gold), you might be thinking it’s a strange choice, but just hang tight. Rapidmon evolved from Shoutmon, through Shoutmon’s regular evo line with Rapidmon being the Mega form. Shoutmon, similar to in Xros Wars/ Fusion, wants a single thing, and that’s to be the Digimon King, and so through the Evo Line he gets more and more power, enough power to influence and control, and becomes Rapidmon(gold) like Destiny. Rapidmon’s element of control is how interrelated the idea of control is to the idea of destiny, this yt vid is great at explaining it. 

Last, and maybe least, is MetalPhantomon, who, similar to Rapidmon, explores ideas of destiny, but in the context of death, the fact that theres an end to this life at all, and understanding that, makes all the other’s relevant and may be the most important thing to understand. 

This all culminates to a fractured, powerful digimon, Erebusmon, who’s only motivation is to control. Erebus, in Greek Mythology, is the son of Chaos, yet the father of Fate, the Three Fates, Old Age, Darkness, Dreams and more. Erebusmon, in the story, is fractured, split, and fused between multiple components, however, it seeks to control and be one being. It brings in the ideas of the Absurd, the conflict between the chaos, absurdity, of life, and our inherent drive to find meaning, lucidity, and thus control, in it. It also brings in the idea of the Split Subject, which is a conscious being, who is split, but really more accurately represents this quote "[you are not a Split Subject] you are only a Subject because you are Split... when you are truly yourself is when you understand yourself the least" by Clark Elieson, but is also the antithesis to it by always seeking out control, to be one, however he’s still the thesis as he only exists because he is split, he is Absurd.

Erebusmon also has 2 crests of Destiny on his chest, and a fractured digicore, which is the blue orbs on his shoulders and in the center of his chest, and 4 holy rings on it's ankles and calves.

And if Erebusmon is in a game, I think it would be good if in the moments of death, Erebusmon realizes true power comes not in the form of control over self or others, but instead from acceptance of the chaos.

Oh yeah here’s the evo line in an image top

[teachanarchy]

Watch "When There’s Nothing Left to Live For | The Philosophy of Nihilism" on YouTube

[bearingwitness]

You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know how you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there.

— Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

[unforth]

Y'all I know that when so-called AI generates ridiculous results it's hilarious and I find it as funny as the next guy but I NEED y'all to remember that every single time an AI answer is generated it uses 5x as much energy as a conventional websearch and burns through 10 ml of water. FOR EVERY ANSWER. Each big llm is equal to 300,000 kiligrams of carbon dioxide emissions.

LLMs are killing the environment, and when we generate answers for the lolz we're still contributing to it.

Stop using it. Stop using it for a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. We need to kill it.

Sources:

[brightlotusmoon]

[visajoe]

In sum: Find yourself a man who reads Hofstader, move to the burbs, quit the cigs and LEARN THE FUCKING CHOREOGRAPHY

[koko2unite]

this is how I imagine having a werewolf boyfriend looks like