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#a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma
wallacepolsom · 1 year
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Wallace Polsom, A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma or Something (2023), paper collage, 21.3 x 29.5 cm.
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amplifyme · 10 months
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Saw your tags-- I wonder if Mulder's expression is absolute loathing and fierce anger at himself, drawn to Scully's frank and gentle understanding but reeling his head back because he knows he WILL fall apart if he looks her in the eyes. That's my guess!
I love checking your timeline because you find so many amazing small moments that I've missed w/ DD's performances... it's the mature deliberation of someone with multiple tree stump rings that mark their fandom age. LOVE those insights. :DDDD
That's definitely a plausible conjecture! Logically, it's likely that he's angry and disgusted with himself in these moments. I think he's also dreading having to explain to his father what's happened and the impact it will have on his mother. Because it's deja vu all over again. Fox Mulder will once again prove to his parents what a failure he is.
But I think he's also trying to process what it means that he so deliberately and willingly exchanged his sister for Scully. Does he understand yet that his trust in and admiration for his partner has become an inextricable component of his deepening feelings of un-partnerly love for her? I think he's just a big ol' bundle of conflicted emotions in these moments.
I love your description of my maturity (old age) as being rings on a tree! 😆I'll accept that! As far as DD's performances go, yep, I'm an expert. Been studying those tiny little acting decisions and micro-expressions of his from the very beginning. He's a pro at expressing so much using so little. But it's all in his face and body language. You just have to know where to look.
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prettysweetprettysweet · 11 months
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i literally keep a regularly updated document of questions i have for LDPDL both big and small and i'm sure not even 1/4th of them will be addressed canonically. a random small potatoes one is: what was the emotional timeline between enraged Louis beating the shit out of Lestat and babygirl Louis taking him home later that night? did beating him up and fucking him calm Louis down enough to invite him back home or did it require words from Lestat to bring Louis back to earth? Did they hash it all out right there in Antoinette's bed? how long did it take? Was Antoinette sitting outside the window the whole time? When they did reach an understanding, what could possibly have been Lestat's sign off with Antoinette? 'well imma head out' or did he just completely forget about her and leave with Louis without even the vaguest hint of 'I feel like I'm forgetting something...?' did the apology (?) in which Lestat admitted he had 'disappeared out of a profound sense of shame' happen at this time? what did Lestat say and do beforehand to get Louis to regard him like (*_*) 'oh my poor man you're so traumatized let me hold you baby rest your angelic head on my chest baby!!' during the rule-setting scene?
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ochrepaints · 2 years
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Not me thinking again about how the name “Irene” means peace, and the word “Adler” is literally just a play on “addle” which literally means “to make (someone) unable to think clearly; confuse” and Jamie Moriarty 100% knew this when she chose the name “Irene Adler", and how “Jamie” means “usurper” and “Moriarty” is very close to being a portmanteau of “morte” (death in French) and “art” and is very likely also not her real name.
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livesinthebalance · 1 year
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I love how snarky and sassy and idgaf Reddington is. He never fails to make me snicker. His presence in my head is only enabling my own natural tendencies. 😂
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theladyelizabeth · 8 months
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Tudor Week 2023
Day Two: Favourite Female Tudor Family Member - Elizabeth I
"Elizabeth is the siren call to novelists; she has “a spirit full of incantation,” as the Spanish ambassador Renard said. But she is also that “riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” that defines our efforts to know her." - Margaret George
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sgiandubh · 1 month
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The one with the server
BIF's explanation on the (re)surfacing of old/new/whatever BAFTA pics was the following:
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A server change, applicable to all the Scottish BAFTA pics ever taken by their team.
Riddle me this, then:
How do you explain the surfacing of these pics I found by chance in January?
Not a BAFTA event, but W Magazine's Golden Globes 2018 Party, on January 4th, 2018.
Uploaded again at a different point in time and on different days:
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1st November, 2023
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10th November, 2023
Just two examples. Scheduled maintenance does not explain it all, however.
Perhaps even more importantly: how can one explain the tens (hundreds?) of people who swear they never saw these, on Tumblr or X? Simple confirmation bias?
To quote Churchill, which is borderline ridiculous, at this stage: it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
And one overdue explanation: when I wrote this blogger treats people like shite, I did not mean me. I am not important. Using the seniority argument whenever trying to explain rebuke something, along with a consistent entitled, stilted tone can be construed as treating people (but perhaps shippers are not people, who knows) as shite. Or rubbish, if you prefer.
The agenda being to prove we are delusional idiots.
This is my opinion and I stand by it.
I am done with this topic. I am probably not done with the torrent of insults thrown at me by Marple, her spokesperson - a tried and true strategy of victimization. Go ahead, help yourself.
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thebestpartofwakingup · 6 months
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“Cross guild is just about clown torture” WRONG! Buggy has the most insane rizz luck ever and Crocodile and Mihawk are both riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas. How funny would it be if BUGGY was the one to make them crack? Nobody in the universe gets to know what the fuck is going on with Mihawk EXCEPT for Buggy
And AND to me most importantly: what are the two most popular crocodile fan theories?
1. Luffy’s mom: necessitates a previous relationship with Dragon. This being kept a mystery would insinuate that whatever relationship or situation there was did not go or end very well, especially as Crocodile seems to have no idea Luffy was his son up until Marineford. Dragon might be the head of the revolutionary army NOW but 19-20 years ago? Nepo baby. Angsty rebellious dad-hating nepo baby. Not to mention that pre-cross guild (and arguably….during cross guild) the Monkey clan as a whole FAR overshadows Crocodile in terms of fame and prominence. Wonder if Buggy knows anything about that…..
2. Whitebeard’s biological son. The forgotten??? Overlooked??? Disowned??? Son of the second most famous pirate captain to ever live AND Roger’s greatest rival?
Would anything take Crocodile down a peg faster than the revelation that the first/only person to “understand” his greatest secret is BUGGY THE FUCKING CLOWN???????
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Some fae!Riddler lore! He abides by the Rumpelstiltskinesque school of faerie rules: one gains certain control over him if they know his true name.
The idea of someone having power over him was so distressing to Edward, that he hid the name very, very deeply, completely scrubbing it from records and killing anyone who knew it.
And you know how Rumpelstiltskin himself revealed his name to the knight at the end of the tale? Eddie's too smart for that! So he removed his own memory of the name, so even HE doesn't know. No one can pry it out of him! It's the most perfect mystery ever created! A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Sadly, the moment he realized it was the most perfect mystery ever created, and even HE didn't know the answer to it, the need to solve it began to consume him. Since then he has been slowly going insane, trying to solve the riddle of his own name, and of his own making.
It's the only riddle he, with his genius mind, can never solve, because he designed it to be unsolvable even by himself. Any type of reasoning or idea Edward can come up with while solving the mystery has already been predicted by Edward when designing it... A fresh set of eyes could be what's needed, but his distrust (the reason he did this in the first place!) and ego make it impossible to ask for help.
A tragic irony if you will.
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gsr + a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
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classpect-crew · 8 months
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Space, Mind, and Void: Getting to Know Your Neighbors
Let's talk more about Space for a moment. (Can you tell I'm a little fixated on this Aspect right now?) Space is not just the Aspect of creation, visual arts, and literal space. It's also represented by the classical element of Water. (There are people out there who will tell you that Space is actually Earth, and Blood is Water. These people are wrong.) Space is "concerned with the big picture," sure, but what does that really mean? Strap in, because we're going to get a little bit ~conceptual.~ This Aspect is vast, essentially containing everything that is.
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If we look at its neighbors, Mind and Void, we can understand Space as their intersection. The universe is not a "conscious" entity in a way we as humans can relate to. After all, it is a frog. If you take the instinct of self-propagation and expand it out into a literal universe-sized organism, its methods of attaining that feat would look a lot like conscious choices from someone on our level of complexity, wouldn't they? Ask yourself this: does a person consciously tell their bodies to produce new cells? What about the reproductive cells responsible for new life? There are forces within the universe that have their own desires—and the players themselves are invaluable, as their cooperation and success provide the only way that a universe can propagate—but the Genesis Frog simply is.
The Genesis Frog "contains every single instance of the universe that is within him," which naturally includes every choice one could make. Unlike Mind, however, Space itself is largely unconcerned with causality. It is merely the stage upon which the play is set. So, Space and Mind aren't the same thing. Why, then, are they neighbors? Put simply, the domain of Mind is not restricted to the choices one makes. Mind is what allows us to conceive. It's what allows me to find patterns and relationships in Homestuck's cosmology and Classpect system, just as it allows you to come up with your own interpretations of the same. Concepts, ideas, philosophies—these belong to Mind. The intersection of Space and Mind is, quite literally, the galaxy brain meme. Space provides the backdrop, but Mind invites you to imagine, to engage with possibilities as limitless as the universe itself. Mind brings you to a million crossroads and asks one simple question:
What will you do?
Let's take a look at our neighbor on the other side: Void. This Aspect is also characterized by its breadth. Much like a dark and impenetrable ocean, those who flirt with the Void without a proper appreciation for its nature may find themselves sinking helplessly below the surface. A Hero of Space may have difficulty teasing out their purpose in the game, chewing on the grand mythology their Land offers them free of charge. Nevertheless, the writing is often already on the wall. A Hero of Void, however, will find that their purpose has been translated through dozens of foreign tongues, with plenty of key information lost to time—or purposefully redacted. The result is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, pocked with uncertainty and doubt. Whereas Mind encourages its players to parse through a vast array of known options to find a way forward, Void demands that its players conceive the inconceivable, creating something from nothing through methods best described as arcane.
There are two kinds of people in this world.
1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data
Space and Void both share a profound connection to Water, and they both possess a certain vastness that can only be truly understood through experience. These are both true of Mind as well, though Mind's connection to Water is much more abstract. (Appropriate, considering Mind sits above the Aspect Wheel's horizon, in the World of Ideas, while Void sits below, in the World of Matter.) Yet, they all deal with a theme I've mentioned several times now: conception. Birth. The new replacing the old. Space and Void both conjure up a sense of creation that's almost miraculous in nature. To create a whole universe, even for the most powerful Space player, is still incredibly impressive. To create something from nothing—whether that "something" is a physical object, an idea, or a secret third thing—is no less astonishing. A Mind player can synthesize information, make inferences based on what they know, and use that understanding to chart causality. All of this, however, requires prior information to work from. A Void player is capable of seeing the unseen, understanding what cannot be understood, and acting based upon that. They flirt with paradox and fuck the ineffable. Our familiar celestial bodies are the source of much inspiration, and we pay homage to them in so much of our art. Yet, like silence to a song, Space is defined not just by the stars themselves, but by the void between stars, and it is in these dark waters that Space and Void become one.
Come, friends. Let us bask in the now, in what is. Let what must be remain in the fiery bosom of Time. Breathe, and feel the universe breathe with you. Allow your conception of yourself, of your planet, of each cell in your body to shrink as you inhale, to expand as you exhale, until the microcosm and the macrocosm are utterly in sync. Visualize every physical and conceptual boundary you can think of, and allow them to dissolve. Do the same with those you can't. Allow me to ask you one simple question:
Have you ever rotated a tesseract in your mind?
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pratchettquotes · 1 year
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"In Uberwald the dwarfs and trolls haven't settled their old grievances, there are large areas controlled by feudal vampire or werewolf clans, and there are also tracts with much higher than normal background magic. It is a chaotic place, indeed, and you'd hardly think you were in the Century of the Fruitbat. It is to be hoped that things will improve, however, and Uberwald will, happily, be joining the community of nations."
Vimes and Vetinari exchanged looks. Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.
"Well put," said the Patrician, at last. "But until that joysome day, Uberwald remains a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma."
Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
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xspiderfanx · 1 year
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reporter at a crime scene: "Riddler, what's your gender?"
nonbinary Riddler: "it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."
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hexjulia · 4 months
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it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle and you could reach it but every layer is progressively more disgusting, worse --uninteresting, bland! and all of them taste like something died in them, maybe out of pointless boredom, and nothing hints at a surprise, and there are so many layers. too many awful layers to eat in a lifetime. so no one ever uncovers the delicious mystery at the centre of it and the answer of the world is a disgusting riddle forever, slightly burnt.
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barthel · 22 days
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“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” is technically a turducken
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dialogue-queered · 10 months
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11 June 2023
Beneath the veneer of Russian military “tactics”, you see the stupid leer of destruction for the sake of it. The Kremlin can’t create, so all that is left is to destroy. Not in some pseudo-glorious self-immolation, the people behind atrocities are petty cowards, but more like a loser smearing their faeces over life. In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense.
After the casual mass executions at Bucha; after the bombing of maternity wards in Mariupol; after the laying to waste of whole cities in Donbas; after the children’s torture chambers, the missiles aimed at freezing civilians to death in the dead of winter, we now have the apocalyptic sight of the waters of the vast Dnipro, a river that when you are on it can feel as wide as a sea, bursting through the destroyed dam at Kakhovka. The reservoir held as much water as the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Its destruction has already submerged settlements where more than 40,000 people live. It has already wiped out animal sanctuaries and nature reserves. It will decimate agriculture in the bread basket of Ukraine that feeds so much of the world, most notably in the Middle East and Africa. To Russian genocide add ecocide.
The dam has been controlled by Russia for more than a year. The Ukrainian government has been warning that Russia had plans to blast it since October.
Seismologists in Norway have confirmed that massive blasts, the type associated with explosives rather than an accidental breach, came from the reservoir the night of its destruction. Some – including the American pro-Putin media personality Tucker Carlson – argue Russia couldn’t be behind the devastation, given the damage has spread to Russian-controlled territories, potentially restricting water supply to Crimea. But if “Russia wouldn’t damage its own people” is your argument then it’s one that doesn’t hold, pardon the tactless pun, much water. One of the least accurate quotes about Russia is Winston Churchill’s line about it being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” This makes it sound as if Russia is driven by some theory of rational choice – when century after century the opposite appears to be the case.
Few have captured the Russian cycle of self-destruction and the destruction of others as well as the Ukrainian literary critic Tetyana Ogarkova. In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have “crime without punishment, and punishment without crime”. The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.
When not bringing humanitarian aid to the front lines, Ogarkova presents a podcast together with her husband, the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. It’s remarkable for showing two people thinking calmly while under daily bombardment. It reminds me of German-Jewish philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, who kept writing lucidly even as they fled the Nazis. As they try to make sense of the evil bearing down on their country, Ogarkova and Yermolenko note the difference between Hitler and Stalin: while Nazis had some rules about who they punished (non-Aryans; communists) in Stalin’s terror anyone could be a victim at any moment. Random violence runs through Russian history.Reacting to how Vladimir Putin’s Russia is constantly changing its reasons for invading Ukraine – from “denazification” to “reclaiming historic lands” to “Nato expansion” – Ogarkova and Yermolenko decide that the very brutal nature of the invasion is its essence: the war crimes are the point. Russia claims to be a powerful “pole” in the world to balance the west – but has failed to create a successful political model others would want to join. So it has nothing left to offer except to drag everyone down to its own depths.“How dare you live like this,” went a resentful piece of graffiti by Russian soldiers in Bucha. “What’s the point of the world when there is no place for Russia in it,” complains Putin. After the dam at Kakhovka was destroyed, a General Dobruzhinsky crowed on a popular Russian talkshow: “We should blow up the Kyiv water reservoir too.” “Why?” asked the host. “Just to show them.” But, as Ogarkova and Yermolenko explore, Russians also send their soldiers to die senselessly in the meat grinder of the Donbas, their bodies left uncollected on the battlefield, their relatives not informed of their death so as to avoid paying them. On TV, presenters praise how “no one knows how to die like us”. Meanwhile, villagers on the Russian-occupied side of the river are being abandoned by the authorities. Being “liberated” by Russia means joining its empire of humiliation.
Where does this drive to annihilation come from? In 1912 the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein – who was murdered by the Nazis, while her three brothers were killed in Stalin’s terror -first put forward the idea that people were drawn to death as much as to life. She drew on themes from Russian literature and folklore for her theory of a death drive, but the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, first found her ideas too morbid. After the First World War, he came to agree with her. The desire for death was the desire to let go of responsibility, the burden of individuality, choice, freedom – and sink back into inorganic matter. To just give up. In a culture such as Russia’s, where avoiding facing up to the dark past with all its complex webs of guilt and responsibility is commonplace, such oblivion can be especially seductive.
But Russia is also sending out a similar message to Ukrainians and their allies with these acts of ultra-violent biblical destruction: give in to our immensity, surrender your struggle. And for all Russia’s military defeats and actual socio-economic fragility, this propaganda of the deed can still work.
The reaction in the west to the explosion of the dam has been weirdly muted. Ukrainians are mounting remarkable rescue operations, while Russia continues to shell semi-submerged cities, but they are doing it more or less alone. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been mystified by the “zero support” from international organisations such as the UN and Red Cross.
Perhaps the relative lack of support comes partly because people feel helpless in the face of something so immense, these Cecil B DeMille-like scenes of giant rivers exploding. It’s the same helplessness some feel when faced with the climate crisis. It’s apposite that the strongest response to Russia’s ecocide came not from governments but the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who clearly laid the blame of what happened on Russia and demanded it be held accountable. But there’s been barely a peep out of western governments or the UN.
Pushing the strange lure of death, oblivion and just giving up is the Russian gambit. How much life do we have left in us?
Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
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