#a scanner darkly day.

[thelastofthebookworms]

You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.

That'll be it for me + SF for today but who knows about tomorrow ? If you want to make suggestions for other polls, please do.

[freesia-writes]

Ch 36: Clarification

Master List ~~ Previous Chapter ~~ WC: 2k

Hunter watched as the ship disappeared into the clouds, feeling its jump to hyperspace as he stared after it in utter disbelief. He couldn’t get to Tech’s fast enough, mind racing the entire way. 

“That is a most fascinating series of events,” Tech observed after Hunter had filled him in on the tumult of the last few days. 

“That’s one way to put it,” Hunter grumbled, taking a long drink from his cup of caf. “So, she wasn’t lying?”

“I did not detect a single trace of deception. Considering your apparent affinity for attracting supernatural activity on this island, it will likely be a fruitless search for concrete scientific answers.”

“I’m not looking for this supernatural stuff.”

“I know.” Tech skimmed through the data the scanner had recorded, reviewing and confirming what he’d surmised. “Her mind seems entirely convinced of the story she told. There are some odd physiological markers in the parts of her brain responsible for memory. It would appear that she has somehow been reverted to a past state, with absolutely no recollection of any of the events you shared together. It is a neurobiological phenomenon called autobiographical amnesia.”

“You’re sure?”

“There is no other possibility. If there were, I would likely have some inkling and would be able to follow the trail to a solid conclusion. But, as it stands, the semi-sentient island seems to have freed you entirely from any potential repercussions or further concerns.”

“I don’t believe it…”

“Hunter,” Tech said, slightly exasperated now. “It is not the first time we have seen inexplicably mystical occurrences, both here and in the galaxy at large. I would advise that you consider it a wonderfully fortuitous part of your narrative and proceed as usual.” 

“Better than any of the alternatives,” he said darkly, having considered every possible way to neutralize the threat that she represented, some of which were decidedly more gruesome than he felt comfortable with.

“Indeed. It is wildly convenient. This island seems to be quite useful in your story.”

“Guess so.”

“The only additional matter at hand is any remaining interaction between you and Lyra.”

Hunter took a deep breath, his rich brown eyes fixed in a distant gaze out the window.

* * * 

The door swung open shortly after the gentle knock, and Lyra beamed when she saw Hunter, then quickly adjusted it into a smaller, more acceptable smile. She ushered him in, having dressed in her usual attire – a loose, beige dress made of linen and a knitted cardigan over it, although this time the sweater was a blush pink color that gave her a more feminine look. A litany of drool-worthy smells filled his nose as they arrived in the kitchen, the counters strewn with nearly every cooking tool she owned, and she rested her backside against the counter, regarding him meekly. 

“Apparently I like to cook when I’m stressed,” she confessed with a self-effacing chuckle. “You hungry?”

“I wasn’t before I walked in,” he rumbled, gaze moving from the baked goods cooling on a rack near the window to the large pan on the stove with a savory scramble steaming in it. She smiled, moving at once to put a kettle on and fetch some plates. 

“So uh… What the heck happened?” She couldn’t wait a moment longer to hear the rest of the story. 

“Tech is absolutely positive that she somehow reverted to her life a few years ago. She’s completely convinced that she was here on vacation, never met us before, has no idea who we are, and was content to go back to her freelance journalist job based out of Coruscant. Apparently she still has an apartment there, and GNN allows her to come and go instead of requiring a steady presence, so it will be unbelievably effortless for her to just slip back into life there.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said softly, stirring a splash of cream into his caf the way she remembered he liked it. 

“Me neither, to be honest. But Tech was sure.”

“How would it–” She was interrupted by the chime of Hunter’s commlink, and he pulled it from a pocket and clicked a button. 

“Yeah?”

“I have some additional information for you and Lyra,” Tech’s distorted voice reported. 

“Great,” Hunter said, not sure how many more complications he could take. 

“I was further piecing together all of the events that have transpired from the very start and corroborating them with any and all evidence I could locate. A recent news development may prove to be reassuring to both of you.”

“Alright, let’s hear it,” he said. Lyra stepped closer to listen, brushing her arm against his before pulling away self-consciously. 

“Am I correct in assuming that Vuxpasian Trawley is Lyra’s former boss, the one that has been seeking to have her either incarcerated or disposed of?”

“Yes,” she answered, and Hunter felt the tension grip her entire body. 

“Excellent. He is dead.”

“Very straightforward, Tech. Thank you,” Hunter said, voice laced with affection for his brother’s unique style of communicating as Lyra gasped softly beside him, both hands racing to her mouth.

“I also have some additional information,” Crosshair drawled. Apparently everyone was on the same comm frequency today.

“I am not finished–” Tech protested.

“Too bad. This is important,” Crosshair insisted, not waiting for a reply. “Hunter… A Bantha sent a message. He wants to know why you stole his hairstyle.”

The guffaw that burst out of Lyra’s mouth made her immediately clap a hand over it, her cheeks flushed with immediate embarrassment as she looked apologetically at Hunter, whose lips were pressed together.

“Sorry,” she mouthed.

Tech continued, sparing not a single moment for Crosshair’s ridiculousness. “Anyway, while not directly stated in the official documents, it is more than obvious that it was none other than Emperor Palpatine who saw him dead. Trawley was reported to have been conducting his own research in the field of cloning, which as we know, is of utmost importance to Palpatine. By reading between the lines, I was able to deduce that he tried to blackmail the Empire by threatening to sabotage their own work in the field if they did not give him a position of esteem. Needless to say, it did not end well for him. So he, and anyone else who would have cared about the evidence possessed by Lyra and her daughter, have been… neutralized, to put it more gently for the apparently sensitive ears.”

Lyra stared at the comm, a myriad of expressions dancing across her face as she shook her head slowly, reeling from just how much had changed in a single twenty-four hour period. A deep, shaky breath was her best attempt at calm, and she pulled out a wooden chair to settle herself at the table. 

“The two of you may benefit from some time to process all of this. It is downright astonishing how every single factor that would stand in the way of a peaceful, happy future without fear of outside threats seems to have been taken care of. If I believed in fate, I would posit that it is in your favor. Anyway, see you at family dinner on Benduday.”

“And maybe try to put that mess into a ponytail,” Crosshair added, followed by Wrecker’s laugh and a deep inhale. Hunter clicked the comm off before he could finish whatever he was about to say.

He sank into the seat beside Lyra, rubbing his forehead with one hand before resting them both on the table. They both faced the wall, staring at the endless array of knick knacks and nature collections that summed up her delight with the simple things in life, and lost themselves in thought. 

“So… We’re just free to live happily ever after?” she finally asked, her skepticism laced with a depth of yearning that she didn’t want to admit. 

His distant stare dropped to the table, following the gnarled pattern of the wood grain that flowed and spiraled beneath his hands. The self-imposed yoke of doubt that rested heavily across his shoulders reminded him of the improbability, and yet that cynical voice of disbelief now had a competitor: a tiny, wistful flicker of hope.

“Want to eat?” Lyra broke the silence with her timid question. The delicious scents of her kitchen frolicked back into his consciousness, and he nodded, bringing himself back to the present. She fetched a couple of mismatched plates, one dark blue and handmade, the other more elaborate with a delicately woven vine along the edges, and piled each one high with a scramble, croissant, chopped potatoes, and fruit. Hunter couldn’t help but chuckle as she set the single-plate feast in front of him, and he quickly clarified as her face revealed insecurity.

“No, this is great,” he said quickly. “It’s just enough to make Wrecker feel full… for at least an hour.” 

She laughed self-consciously, fingers toying with the messy braid resting over her shoulder, and shrugged. “I’ll tell you what I told Breslin as a child – eat what you want and leave the rest.” Her expression deepened as the memories surfaced, and Hunter found himself with a strong desire to be privy to her internal thoughts. 

“You were pretty young yourself, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, stabbing a potato with her fork. “Young and dumb,” she smiled. “But I’ve always been an old lady at heart, no matter my actual age.” Her little snicker warmed his heart, and then she became suddenly serious, eyes distant and full of thought. 

Hunter waited.

“If we really are safe… I wonder if Breslin could come live here… Although she had a pretty good setup on Keytoll, so I don’t know if she’d even want to. But gods, I’ve missed her.”

“How old is she?” 

“Twenty-four.”

“So you had her when you were–”

“Eighteen. It wasn’t ideal by any means, and there’s never been a father in the picture. She was the consequence… turned into a gift… of some foolish choices.” She reflected for a moment, slowly swallowing another bite of potato, then studied him intently, a question on her lips that she seemed to be holding back. 

“What?” he prompted, catching her gaze. 

“You’re… twenty-eight?” The barely-restrained cringe on her face spoke volumes, and he felt his heart sink a little. 

“Yeah… But…” The truth of his engineering hung over him like a shameful dark cloud. “We were created with an accelerated aging process. So we age at twice the rate of… real people.” The pain in his voice at the last two words was unmistakable, and Lyra’s face deepened with compassion. 

“You are a real person,” she whispered, eyes glistening with emotion. 

“I guess so.”

“So…” she mulled it over. “In ten years, I’ll be fifty-two, and you’ll be…”

“Forty-eight,” he muttered. 

“And in fifteen years, you’ll be beating me by a year… fifty-eight when I’m fifty-seven…And so on and so forth,” she continued, doing the math in her head. 

“Yup.”

Silence rested between them for a moment.

“What’s it like?” Her question surprised him, and he tilted his head, resting his fork and knife on the edges of his plate as his hands loosely clasped them. 

“What?”

“Growing so quickly?” 

“I don’t know… Never known anything else. Honestly, I don’t think any of us really thought we would make it past the war. It was pointless to think that way. We’re… disposable.”

“Hunter,” she said softly, hand twitching toward his before pulling back. 

“No,” he said suddenly, setting down his eating utensils and slowly rising to his feet. A tornado of thoughts was tearing through his mind, and he was beginning to spiral along with it, utterly exhausted from the last twenty-four hours. “I can’t… I can’t do this right now.”

“This?” Her voice quavered. 

He looked at her, wrought with conflict, insecurity, regret, frustration, then with a small shake of his head, turned for the front door, pausing as he twisted the handle, then continued out with slumped shoulders.

.

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[burberrycanary]

Hi there! I am about midway through reading your story Lost Vocabularies and it is amazing!! The whole series has been so lovely, I’m obsessed with the way you write! The way that you convey the boys complicated emotions and capture all the little nuances of their dynamic has me feral!! Beyond even them the way you inject so much personality into the locations is so good, I feel like I am there!! So thank you for writing this lovely story 💕 I was wondering if you happen to have a list of all the books that Bucky and Steve read? I have been looking up a lot of them and adding them to my to read list bc they sound so interesting lol! On that same note, how did you decide what books to mention? Are they all ones that you have read or did you do research to find ones you thought they would like?

I’ve been coming back and rereading this kind and wonderful comment in my inbox over the last few weeks when way too many massive, stressful, time-sensitive things were all happening at once. 💕 But since I have a little breather between crazy periods, I get to dive in here as a treat.

Lost Vocabularies involved a lot of research, which I hope isn’t apparent because I didn’t want there to be any noticeable difference between the parts of the story that are based on places I’d been, foods I’d tried and books I’d read personally—and what was created purely based on research. Fingers crossed that the seams don't show!

In this series, we see both Steve and Bucky use art to process—helping them understand themselves and connect to the world again. Bucky is drawn to stories while Steve as an artist is much more visual, but the underlying impulse is similar. In the same way that you learn a lot by glancing through someone’s bookshelves, what characters read is interesting to me, and revealing. This version of Bucky is a very private person so these books offer a glimpse into his inner life. And as the POV character we get to experience all these things alongside Steve.

I’m not much of a sci-fi or fantasy reader so some of Bucky’s picks were a real challenge for me. But I wanted these to be grounded in the characters and the storytelling functions, not based on my own taste and opinions, though of course those always bleed through. 

Steve’s Reading List

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Bucky’s Reading List

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve included some notes and commentary on why I picked each of these works under the cut.

The Same River, Twice (The Man Is Still Left with His Hands)

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Classic post-WWII dystopian sci-fi that focuses on society collapsing after a series of catastrophes that were unintentional but very much caused by people, which leads to a lot of the population becoming blind. Thematically this work engages with the loss of identity that people, both abled and disabled, face in the process of survival and a dark look at what happens after societies break down. How this applies to Bucky is obvious, but part of the argument of this post-Endgame series is that it applies to Steve, too. 

Also, there are huge mobile carnivorous plants. 

Fun fact: the opening of this novel is said to have been the inspiration for 28 Days Later!

Still Left with the River (The Paradox of Motion)

Alice Neel: People Come First by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

Alice Neel’s portraits are extraordinary, almost unnervingly vivid. In this story, Steve is familiar with her work as a fellow New York-based artist active in communist circles in the 1930s. She also worked for the WPA, producing wonderful street scenes that documented New York neighborhoods of the era. 

To be honest, I have so many questions about what Steve was up to in the late 1930s before his war mania of the 40s hits.

One of the core themes of this series is Steve struggling with what his body is for if it’s no longer for violence. Who is he if he’s not a soldier? What is his radically changed body if it’s not a weapon? How do you come home from the war?

In this regard, Steve and Bucky have all kinds of shared life experience.

So thematically I include Neel because of her startling gift for capturing personalities and bodies through a process of frank, earnest, truthful observation of the integrated completeness of body and self: this space that’s you. 

But a book of Alice Neel’s work with her sensitive portraits and fleshy frank nudes pulls him into flipping through page after page of these personalities and bodies, not idealized: seen.

Steve isn’t ready for that when he bumps into this big “impractical” art book in a holdover Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn, not when he’s still so shook up and adrift. But he will be.

There’s such empathy and radical humanism to her pieces. “People,” as she famously said, “come first.” I stand by the conclusion that Steve would love her work.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was relatively unknown in his lifetime—he died in 1937—but his stories were published in popular fantasy pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, which is where Bucky would have come across his work. The fact that Steve recognizes Lovecraft by name means that teenage Bucky must have talked about what he was reading and the pulp stories he liked with teenage Steve, which is adorable—“this Lovecraft fellow, Steve, you wouldn’t believe the stuff he comes up with.” And Steve was paying attention enough to remember two decades and change later without the benefit of his serum-enhanced memory, which hurts my heart a little in the best possible way. 

That’s how Steve all these years and decades later is able to wordlessly toss this collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories at Bucky on a hot hazy stumbled-upon beach in northern Florida and watch Bucky’s whole face light up. 

And of course Bucky would view Lovecraft as a great beach read 😂

But this is the basis for something I’ve written into this series: Bucky excitedly sharing things he finds interesting with Steve—wanting to tell Steve first, Steve most. And although Steve is quiet, stoical and very self-contained, he’s paying a whole hell of a lot of attention.

Given that Bucky is canonically a Tolkien fan, I think the imaginativeness and ranging scope of Lovecraft’s complex, often interconnected stories would appeal to him. And, thematically, Lovecraft is distinctive for the era for having characters psychologically fragment when confronting these vast inhuman others. 

“The Call of Cthulhu” opens with:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Steve and Bucky have each voyaged out a long way.

Trauma, in a way, is a form of terrible knowledge. You can heal but you can’t unknow things. 

Not Language but a Map (The Grammar of Sensation)

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

This is the first book in the series that we see Bucky pick for himself. And, wow, he picks a doozy with themes of multiple and unstable identities, invasive surveillance, manipulation, psychosis, and how individuals can get chewed up by larger systems, falling through the cracks of society. Dick was writing based on his own troubled experiences with southern California drug culture of the early 70s, but this work gets at much more fundamental darknesses that I think would speak to some of the horrors Bucky has gone through and won’t talk about, not even with Steve. 

Within the first few pages, we get this:

It was midday, in June of 1994. In California, in a tract area of cheap but durable plastic houses, long ago vacated by the straights. Jerry had at an earlier date sprayed metal paint over all the windows, though, to keep out the light; the illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends. He liked that; he liked to get rid of time. By doing that he could concentrate on important things without interruption.

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, edited by Ann J. Abadie

Eggleston was an early pioneer in color photography and that fascination with color is very apparent in his work. I think this focus would grab Steve as an artist who doesn’t take seeing the full spectrum of color for granted. Even in the MCU’s thin action-film scripts, Steve comments on things that offend his aesthetic sensibilities even when that has absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand, from Stark Tower to Lang’s van.

Not even a world-ending crisis can keep Steve from going, wow, no, that’s ugly. I enjoyed running with that 😂

Steve’s view of Eggleston’s photographs shifts over the course of the series, reflecting what he’s feeling, from the fragmented and disconnected detachment—“isolated and off-kilter”— that he sees in them at the beginning that shifts to the passionate engagement in the world he finds in them later. 

Steve looks through the whole book of William Eggleston’s photographs again and at first the colors still roll over him like the shockwave of a distant explosion, all he can focus on. But gradually the subjects and compositions pull forward, too: monumentalized images of the everyday that at first seem neutral, the work of a detached observer. But the off-center framing of ordinary life is so deliberate as though everything might be important and where every detail deserves attention—that’s nothing like neutral. That’s not detached at all. You have to care a whole hell of a lot.

This mirrors the journey this post-Endgame Steve goes on. Because Steve Rogers should be a character who cares a whole hell of a lot, not what the MCU writers eventually reduced him to. And that’s what this fix-it is trying to fix. 

Lost Vocabularies that Might Express (The Memory of These Broken Impressions)

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

I love writing Bucky as a big fucking science nerd. His last night in New York and how does he want to spend the time? At a science fair with his best friend and a couple of pretty girls. So Bucky reading about quantum electrodynamics is delightful to me. The thing is, though, Bucky is a bright enough guy with a high school education. He’s not a genius—and the MCU is lousy with geniuses. But if Bucky wanted to learn a little more about all this quantum stuff he heard about in passing during some vague and very improbable sounding explanations, which by the way also allowed one of the few people still living who truly matters to him and the closest thing Bucky had left to family to fuck off to the past, well, Feynman’s QED isn’t a bad place to start in understanding some of this quantum stuff, at least. 

Feynman here is very much writing for a popular audience. His writing is conversational—the book is adapted from a set of lectures he gave—and his voice is witty, casual and surprisingly light, but at the same time Feynman is deeply invested in helping lay people understand quantum mechanics. The book opens with:

Alix Mautner was very curious about physics and often asked me to explain things to her. I would do all right, just as I do with a group of students at Caltech that come to me for an hour on Thursdays, but eventually I’d fail at what is to me the most interesting part: We would always get hung up on the crazy ideas of quantum mechanics. I told her I couldn’t explain these ideas in an hour or an evening—it would take a long time—but I promised her that someday I’d prepare a set of lectures on the subject.

I prepared some lectures, and I went to New Zealand to try them out—because New Zealand is far enough away that if they weren’t successful, it would be all right! Well, the people in New Zealand thought they were okay, so I guess they’re okay—at least for New Zealand! So here are the lectures I really prepared for Alix, but unfortunately I can’t tell them to her directly, now.

C’mon! Tell me Bucky Barnes would not be hooked by this opening. 

Thematically, and more seriously, the question of how could Steve do this? has two very different meanings. So far in this series Bucky isn’t ready to confront the harder version of that question which comes potentially with some very painful answers: how could Steve make that choice? Nope, he’s not ready for that. Instead, his brain unconsciously takes the easier way out: trying to understand quantum electrodynamics. 😂😭

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Bucky must have liked A Scanner Darkly, because he went for another Philip K. Dick novel. Today remembered mostly as the source material for Blade Runner, this bleak dystopian novel is set in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war that destroys most life on Earth. The work has themes around empathy—who feels empathy and for what?—materialism and what really makes us human. 

I find it interesting how Sebastian Stan talks about The Winter Soldier in terms of someone who has undergone a process of total desensitization, which to varying degrees is deliberately part of the training of all soldiers. But rebuilding his core sense of empathy was one of the things Bucky chose to do as soon as he had any agency in that two-year period where he was on the run, which is remarkable. As a person who has been treated as though he wasn’t human and had his empathy forcibly stripped from him, I think Bucky would have a lot of complicated feelings about the enslaved androids who escape but are ruthlessly tracked down and killed. Some of these escaped androids are dangerous and do lack basic empathy—shown in the book by torturing and mutilating an animal—while other androids seem like ordinary people just trying to live their lives. 

I like that Bucky talks about the book with Steve later in the story, returning in my view to a very old habit of bookworm Bucky wanting to share what he’d been reading with Steve <333

“I need to find something to read next,” Bucky says after wrapping up his description of an imagined religion that involved plugging into a box to virtually suffer the existence of a man forever walking up a steep hill while struck by crashing stones. 

“Well, did the androids dream of electric sheep?” Steve asks.

“Who knows?” Bucky knocks into him gently as he takes the bowl Steve passes over. “They just wanted to be free. Though the free people just wanted to own stuff or plug into a box and suffer. So, you know, sort of a grim outlook. ”

“A little light, cheerful reading.”

“Hey, we live in a world where people write ‘Take back what’s yours’ in the streets and then smash up the windows. Dystopias don’t seem so far off the mark.”

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard Feynman

Another case of Bucky sticking with an author he likes! To me, this implies that Bucky has already read Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces, which explains some of the foundational basics of physics for a very broad and non-technical audience. Six Not-So-Easy Pieces is also drawn from Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics, focusing here on relativity and space-time, but this work assumes a greater knowledge of math, hence the name. But as a legendary sniper Bucky must have a strong aptitude for math and anyway I just leaned into making Bucky an all-around nerd, because Bucky Barnes, nerd who grew up hot, is delightful to me. 

Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time are all on point for a post-Endgame fix-it, which I think should count as a not-so-easy piece in its own right. 

Throughout the series, we see Bucky using physical copies when he reads fiction, more or less from unconscious nostalgia: connecting back to memories of his younger self who was an avid reader of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks. Once Steve gets him going with that first quietly tossed-over gift, Bucky always carries around a sci-fi or fantasy book in this series despite the limited space in his backpack. And this familiarity wouldn’t just be from his pre-war life since I figure Bucky would have gone for the Armed Services Editions that were distributed for free to soldiers. Bucky likely traded with other soldiers once he finished a book if he couldn’t get a new ASE distribution: trading in his finished novel for a new one is Bucky unconsciously falling back into another old habit.

But for non-fiction, Bucky is absolutely here for the Modern Marvel of being able to carry around as many books as he likes on his phone. I figure Bucky would have used public libraries during certain stages of his recovery when he was homeless and migratory since they are a place to get information that is consistently available in cities; and a warm, quiet place you can go with a minimal number of security cameras. I headcanon a middle-aged librarian who has a few streaks of gray in her dark hair—and who reminds Bucky of someone but he has no idea who—explaining what e-books are to this tall, gaunt, soft-spoken homeless guy with an eye contact problem. And this person who isn’t the Asset anymore and isn’t Bucky Barnes yet has the out-of-nowhere thought: huh, whaddaya know. That’s pretty neat.

Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering by Steven H. Strogatz

Isolated systems tend to evolve towards a single equilibrium and these equilibrium points have been the focus of many-body research for centuries. But life is generally not that simple because most systems aren’t isolated. Often the dynamics of a system result from the product of multiple different interacting forces and objects in these systems can change between multiple different attractor wells over time. Or as Strogatz puts it:

As we’ve mentioned earlier, most nonlinear systems are impossible to solve analytically. Why are nonlinear systems so much harder to analyze than linear ones? The essential difference is that linear systems can be broken down into parts. Then each part can be solved separately and finally recombined to get the answer. This idea allows a fantastic simplification of complex problems, and underlies such methods as normal modes, Laplace transforms, superposition arguments, and Fourier analysis. In this sense, a linear system is precisely equal to the sum of its parts.

But many things in nature don’t act this way. Whenever parts of a system interfere, or cooperate, or compete, there are nonlinear interactions going on. Most of everyday life is nonlinear, and the principle of superposition fails spectacularly. 

You can think of nonlinear dynamics as situations in which the sum of the parts is insufficient to understand the whole. This connects to multiple themes in this story as Bucky and Steve try to understand themselves, their lives and each other. But here Bucky is also just continuing to live his best life as a nerd with a strong intuitive knack for math, a high school education, an internet connection and a growing collection of science e-books. Or as Bucky puts it:

“It’s nice, though, like this smart guy is just talking to you but doesn’t assume you’re dumb because of what you don’t know.”

It’s touched on only very lightly in the series so far, but Bucky has a lot of complex feelings about higher education that relate to class, indirectly to sexuality, and go back to the experience of being the son of upwardly mobile working-class immigrants who were very bought-in on a traditional take on the American Dream.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I picked this partly because I thought the title would grab Bucky, who has been a stranger in a strange land several times over. Thematically this midcentury sci-fi novel focuses on challenging social norms through having the main character, a human who’d been raised by Martians on Mars, come back to Earth as an adult. A best-seller in its day that was controversial for its rejection of Christianity, monogamy and the nuclear family, the work is very tied to the looming cultural changes of the 60s and 70s. 

The novel’s critical reputation has been steadily in decline for decades, but I think Bucky would find it interesting since he grew up within the traditional early 20th-century culture this novel satirizes and challenges—mores that this story’s version of Bucky didn’t unquestioningly accept but didn’t openly challenge, either.

Having Bucky pick this novel reflects the themes for the last act of this story that focus more on Steve and Bucky's different experiences as closeted queer men growing up in a deeply homophobic society. These experiences continue to shape and impact them and yet are also a past these two are coming to terms with and growing beyond. 

Fun fact: this novel coined the word “grok.”

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

Of all the books featured in this series, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is my top recommendation. This is an accessible, well-written history of a topic that haunts American history: immigration. The specific focus is the waves of legislation passed in the first half of the 20th century that tried—and often succeeded—in limiting who could legally immigrate based on the racial and ethnic hierarchies that equally haunt American history, right down to the foundation. 

In this series, I wanted to pick up the themes of social justice and immigration that were so vaguely and incoherently included in TFATWS. These themes are inherent in the Snap and Return plotline except that Disney does not want to touch any of these politics with a ten-foot pole. But I remain fascinated by trying to wrap my mind around what it would mean for half the population to vanish and then return five years later, catastrophically in both cases. It’s a huge, intricate, sticky, difficult world-building problem that’s inescapably political. 

Steve isn’t quite ready to dive into facing or helping to fix the problems of the post-Return world that his actions helped to create. But here we get to see Steve’s burned-out passion and conviction slowly rekindle as he reads about the complicated and often ugly history of American immigration—and he gets mad about it. Of course, he gets mad about it! This is my answer to the ludicrous idea that Steve Rogers could quietly sit out the second half of the twentieth century. 

At the same time, I can have compassion for Steve knowing he can’t keep going but not knowing how to help himself, only to be given the cursed monkey’s paw of time travel. And he fucks up. His actions have real and lasting consequences. But that doesn’t make the situation hopeless or mean Steve can’t try to repair the relationships he damaged or work to regain the trust he lost, assuming he’s lucky enough to be given another chance by people who love him but have been hurt by his choices.

One of the greatest challenges in writing this Endgame fix-it was accepting Endgame as the starting point of the story and trying to reconcile a character I love with the choices canon has him make. Over the course of these stories, the central point isn’t Steve coming back to Bucky. It’s Steve coming back to himself. Through a slow and painful struggle, Steve finds himself again—rediscovering his stubborn endurance, his compassion for others and his drive to set wrongs right. Steve stumbled, badly, but he gets back up. Because that’s who Steve Rogers is. 

And because of who Bucky Barnes is—his innate kindness, his warm-hearted generosity and his stubborn loyalty that isn’t blind but runs deep—that’s how these two characters come back to each other, after everything.

Deliberately, this series is the first hard-fought and hopeful glimmer in a long trudging process that can get so heavy to carry forward, day after day, but is shot through with moments of beauty and joy all the same. 

I can't go on; I'll go on.

In other words, to quote one of my favorite poets: what the living do.

[bracketsoffear]

Stranger Leitner Reading List

The full list of submissions for the Stranger Leitner bracket. Bold titles are ones which were accepted to appear in the bracket. Synopses and propaganda can be found below the cut. Be warned, however, that these may contain spoilers!

Ames, Alison: It Looks Like Us

Benton, Jim: The Frandidate Berger, Terry: The Haunted Dollhouse Blish, James & Robert Lowndes: The Duplicated Man Bradbury, Ray: Marionettes, Inc. Brooks, Mike: Alpharius: Head of the Hydra

Calvino, Italo: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller Campbell, John W.: Who Goes There? Christie, Agatha: Dead Man's Folly Crowley, Nate: The Twice-Dead King

Dahl, Roald: The Witches Damico, Gina: Wax Dick, Philip K.: A Scanner Darkly Dick, Philip K.: Upon the Dull Earth Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Double

French, Tana: The Likeness

Gaiman, Neil: Coraline

Hendrix, Grady: How to Sell a Haunted House

Ito, Junji: The Enigma of Amigara Fault Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

Jensen, Ruby Jean: MaMa

King, Stephen: Battleground King, Stephen: The Outsider Krulik, Nancy E.: Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo (series)

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Outsider

Martin, Ann M. & Laura Godwin: The Meanest Doll in the World Miles, Lawrence: This Town Will Never Let Us Go

Nettel, Guadalupe: El huésped (The host) Nix, Garth: The Ragwitch

Peck, Richard: Secrets of the Shopping Mall Poe, Edgar Allen: William Wilson Pratchett, Terry: Maskerade

Rayner, Jacqueline: EarthWorld Robinson, Justin: Everyman Ross, Louise: Collective Imagination: Goncharov (1973) (2022) as a Model for Communal Filmmaking

Schwartz, Alvin: Harold Scroggs, Kirk: Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet Sleator, William: Among the Dolls Sleator, William: The Duplicate Spark, Muriel: The Only Problem Spatola, Mike: The Monstrous Makeup Manual Springer, Nancy: Possessing Jessie Starling, Caitlin: Last to Leave the Room Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde Stine, R.L.: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight Stine, R.L.: Night of the Living Dummy

Topping, Keith & Martin Day: The Hollow Men

Vida, Vendela: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

Ames, Alison: It Looks Like Us

Shy high school junior Riley Kowalski is spending her winter break on a research trip to Antarctica, sponsored by one of the world’s biggest tech companies. She joins five student volunteers, a company-approved chaperone, and an impartial scientist to prove that environmental plastic pollution has reached all the way to Antarctica, but what they find is something much worse… something that looks human.

Riley has anxiety--ostracized by the kids at school because of panic attacks--so when she starts to feel like something’s wrong with their expedition leader, Greta, she writes it off. But when Greta snaps and tries to kill Riley, she can’t chalk it up to an overactive imagination anymore. Worse, after watching Greta disintegrate, only to find another student with the same affliction, she realizes they haven’t been infected, they’ve been infiltrated--by something that can change its shape. And if the group isn’t careful, that something could quickly replace any of them.

Benton, Jim: The Frandidate

Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist, has always had her eye on world domination, and she has to start somewhere...like her class elections! If people vote for her, they’ll be giving her all the control she wants.

But Franny’s platform doesn’t have the same appeal as her competitors who are offering new playground equipment, so she creates The Frandidate. Made of DNA samples from a dog, a chameleon and a parrot, along with a scrap of carpet (so she’ll know where people stand), Franny’s special suit helps her say and do exactly what people want! But when The Frandidate starts making promises she knows she can’t keep, Franny realizes she might have gone too far…

Berger, Terry: The Haunted Dollhouse

On her thirteenth birthday, Sarah wishes that she would wake up inside of her dollhouse -- and her wish comes true. The book follows her throughout her day, with pictures that show the increasingly disturbing nature of the world in which she now exists.

Blish, James and Robert Lowndes: The Duplicated Man

The central premise of this novel concerns a cloning device that requires six different people, one for each duplicate to be created, to be hooked into the machine. Turns out while the memories are copied the personalities and appearances are affected by the subjective views of the various individuals. E.g., one copy is actually a bit shorter and more cowardly than the original because that's how its creator perceived the original while another due to her hero worship was a physically and mentally perfected version of the original.

Bradbury, Ray: Marionettes, Inc.

A man acquires a robot to stand in for him at home while he goes away. (A very sophisticated robot that eventually develops sentience, but still one that, if you place your head to the chest, you can hear a clock ticking instead of a heart beating.) However, the robot decides that he likes the original man's life and doesn't want to be stored away in a box in the basement. The solution? He betrays his owner by locking HIM in the box forever while he (the robot) lives the life of the owner, his family completely unaware of the switch. Meanwhile, another man considers doing the same, only to discover that his wife has already replaced herself.

Brooks, Mike: Alpharius: Head of the Hydra

As this post--https://www.tumblr.com/bracketsoffear/718600953914327040/wasnt-here-in-time-for-the-stranger-poll-but--says, "Alpharius is the Primarch of the [...] Alpha Legion, and aside from the ones that have been fully expunged from all Imperial records, he's the primarch we know the least about. We're fairly confident he's actually two twin brothers pretending to be the same guy, Alpharius and Omegon, and that he specializes in infiltration. Beyond that, all bets are off. Literally every event in his life has at least two versions that have been printed in official books and directly contradict each other. The book that compiles his backstory in a neat and sensible manner that doesn't have any internal or external contradictions opens with the blatant admission that all of it is a complete fucking lie. Supposedly, he died at the battle for Pluto, but then he is reported to have been killed several centuries later somewhere else by a completely different guy. Only complicating matters is that pretty much every member of his legion undergoes extensive plastic surgery to look exactly like him. Most of them introduce themselves as Alpharius. It might very well be that both of the times he supposedly died, it was actually just a body double and he's still out there, pretending to be a normal legionary. Every single member of the Alpha Legion is Alpharius, and an alarming number of them actually believe themselves to be him." Anyway, this is the backstory book in question.

Calvino, Italo: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

The book is a story about reading the first chapters of multiple books that appear to be If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, but are not.

Campbell, John W.: Who Goes There?

A group of American researchers, isolated in their scientific station in Antarctica towards the end of winter, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice, where it crashed twenty million years before. They recover an alien creature from the ancient ice. Thawing revives the alien, a being which can assume the appearance, memories, and personality of a living thing it devours, while maintaining its body mass for further reproduction. Unknown to them, the alien immediately kills and then imitates the crew's physicist, a man named Connant; with some 90 pounds of its matter left over, it tries to become a sled dog.

The crew discovers the dog-Thing and kills it midway through the transformation process. Pathologist Blair, who had lobbied for thawing the Thing, goes insane with paranoia and guilt, vowing to kill everyone at the base to save mankind; he is isolated within a locked cabin at their outpost. Connant is also isolated as a precaution, and a "rule-of-four" is initiated in which all personnel must remain under the close scrutiny of three others. The crew realizes that they must isolate their base and therefore disable their airplanes and vehicles, yet they pretend that everything is normal during radio transmissions, to prevent any rescue attempts. The researchers try to figure out who may have been replaced by the alien (simply referred to as the Thing), to destroy the imitations before they can escape and take over the world. The task is found to be almost impossibly difficult when they realize that the Thing is shapeshifting and telepathic, reading minds and projecting thoughts. A sled dog is conditioned by human blood injections (from Copper and Garry) to provide a human-immunity serum test, as in rabbits. The initial test of Connant is inconclusive, as they realize that the test animal received both human and alien blood, meaning that either Doctor Copper or expedition Commander Garry is an alien. Assistant commander McReady takes over and deduces that all the other animals at the station, save the test dog, have already become imitations; all are killed by electrocution and their corpses burned.

Everyone suspects each other by now but must stay together for safety, deciding who will take turns sleeping and standing watch. Tensions mount and some men begin to go mad, thinking that they are already the last human, or wondering if they could know if they were not human any longer. Ultimately, Kinner, the cook, is murdered and accidentally revealed to be a Thing. McReady realizes that even small pieces of the creature will behave as independent organisms. He then uses this fact to test which men have been "converted" by taking blood samples from everyone and dipping a heated wire in the vial of blood. Each man's blood is tested, one at a time, and the donor is immediately killed if his blood recoils from the wire. Fourteen men, including Connant and Garry, are revealed to be Things. The remaining men go to test the isolated Blair, and on the way, see the first albatross of the Antarctic spring flying overhead; they shoot the bird to prevent a Thing from infecting it and flying to civilization.

When they reach Blair's cabin, they discover that he is a Thing. They realize that it has been left to its own devices for a week, coming and going as it pleased, as it is able to squeeze under doors by transforming itself. With the creatures inside the base destroyed, McReady and two others enter the cabin to kill the Thing that was once Blair. McReady forces it out into the snow and destroys it with a blowtorch. Afterwards, the trio discover that the Thing was dangerously close to finishing the construction of a nuclear-powered anti-gravity device that would have allowed it to escape to the outside world.

Christie, Agatha: Dead Man's Folly

So, the entire propaganda section for this one will be a spoiler because to explain why this book works as a stranger Leitner is to reveal a major plot twist. So as a start here is the book's description from goodreads:

Whilst organising a mock murder hunt for the village fete hosted by Sir George and Lady Stubbs, a feeling of dread settles on the famous crime novelist Adriane Oliver. Call it instinct, but it's a feeling she just can't explain...or get away from. In desperation she summons her old friend, Hercule Poirot -- and her instincts are soon proved correct when the 'pretend' murder victim is discovered playing the scene for real, a rope wrapped tightly around her neck. But it's the great detective who first discovers that in murder hunts, whether mock or real, everyone is playing a part.

In this novel a young girl Marlene is killed during a village fete at Nasse House, a home owned by Sir George Stubbs and his wife Hattie. After the murder, Lady Stubbs goes missing just in time for a visit from her cousin, whom she hasn't seen in years. At the end of the novel, it transpired that both Sir George and Hattie were not who they seemed. Sir George being a fake identity of James Folliat, son of the family that owned the Nasse House for centuries, who was thought to be dead. His mother, Amy Folliat, introduced him to the original Hattie, a wealthy but naive girl. James stole Hattie's money and had her killed and replaced by his actual wife, who later spent years pretending to be Hattie with only Amy Folliat aware of the replacement. Due to the news that real Hattie's cousin, who could uncover the ruse, was going to visit. Fake Hattie again transformed to blend among the tourists that came to the fete. To me, this works great as a stranger Leitner due to the book antagonist both pretending to be somebody else and the strong element of kill and replace.

Crowley, Nate: The Twice-Dead King

Fundamentally about alienation from one's own sense of self and how in order to become yourself you have to become someone else; the main character goes through a major identity crisis and it involves flaying people and wearing their skin

Dahl, Roald: The Witches

A dark fantasy, the story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating societies of witches secretly exist in every country.

Damico, Gina: Wax

Wax is a young adult mystery novel by Gina Damico (author of Croak). It was published in 2016.

It takes place in the fictional town of Paraffin, Vermont. Our hero is Poppy Palladino, a teenage girl who wants to be an actor, but is haunted by memories of being humiliated multiple times in the past, especially by a bully named Blake Bursaw. Paraffin is home to the Grosholtz Candle Factory, a popular tourist site. While taking a tour in the factory, Poppy wanders off into a secret workroom where she meets Madame Grosholtz, an eccentric maker of wax sculptures. Soon after, the factory mysteriously burns down, but not before Poppy is given a living wax sculpture, who she names Dud, and a candle engraved with a strange message.

Things just get stranger from there, and Poppy must save the entire town from a sinister conspiracy that stems from hundreds of years ago. She becomes unsure of who she can trust, but with the help of Dud, her best friend Jill, and her school theater club, she must make a plan.

***

Paraffin, Vermont, is known the world over as home to the Grosholtz Candle Factory. But behind the sunny retail space bursting with overwhelming scents and homemade fudge, seventeen-year-old Poppy Palladino discovers something dark and unsettling: a back room filled with dozens of startlingly life-like wax sculptures, crafted by one very strange old lady. Poppy hightails it home, only to be shocked when one of the figures—a teenage boy who doesn’t seem to know what he is—jumps naked and screaming out of the trunk of her car. She tries to return him to the candle factory, but before she can, a fire destroys the mysterious workshop—and the old woman is nowhere to be seen.

With the help of the wax boy, who answers to the name Dud, Poppy resolves to find out who was behind the fire. But in the course of her investigation, she discovers that things in Paraffin aren’t always as they seem, that the Grosholtz Candle Factory isn’t as pure as its reputation—and that some of the townspeople she’s known her entire life may not be as human as they once were. In fact, they’re starting to look a little . . . waxy. Can Poppy and Dud extinguish the evil that’s taking hold of their town before it’s too late?

Dick, Philip K.: A Scanner Darkly

"The main character, Bob Arctor, leads a double life as an undercover police agent infiltrating a drug dealing ring. As a part of his cover he starts taking the drug and becomes addicted, and the drug causes the hemispheres of his brain to function separately leading to the emergence of two separate personalities - 'Bob' when he is a drug dealer, and 'Fred' when he is a police agent. both of these personalities do not recognize each other, so for example when he is reviewing footage of him as Bob, he thinks he is spying on some other man. Also, in this world there are 'scramble suits' - special coats that make it impossible to distinguish anything about the wearer's appearance or their voice, and the protagonist is required to wear one of these when he is not undercover. That worsens his split personality, as he has no one who remembers his appearance as 'Fred', and he forgets he was undercover at all and just starts acting as a genuine drug dealer. The distortion of memories, erasure of appearance and the personality swap from Fred to Bob reminds me strongly of not!them. Fred not!themmed himself."

Dick, Philip K.: Upon the Dull Earth

Short story in which a woman dies, and her boyfriend makes a deal to bring her back. Trouble is, he brings her back... too much. It'd be a funny old world if we were all the same, wouldn't it? Link

Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Double

In Saint Petersburg, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin works as a titular councillor (rank 9 in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great[3]), a low-level bureaucrat struggling to succeed.

Golyadkin has a formative discussion with his physician, Doctor Rutenspitz, who fears for his sanity and tells him that his behaviour is dangerously antisocial. He prescribes "cheerful company" as the remedy. Golyadkin resolves to try this, and leaves the office. He proceeds to a birthday party for Klara Olsufyevna, the daughter of his office manager. He was uninvited, and a series of faux pas lead to his expulsion from the party. On his way home through a snowstorm, he encounters a man who looks exactly like him, his double. The following two thirds of the novel then deals with their evolving relationship.

At first, Golyadkin and his double are friends, but Golyadkin Jr. proceeds to attempt to take over Sr.'s life, and they become bitter enemies. Because Golyadkin Jr. has all the charm, unctuousness and social skills that Golyadkin Sr. lacks, he is very well-liked among the office colleagues. At the story's conclusion, Golyadkin Sr. begins to see many replicas of himself, has a psychotic break, and is dragged off to an asylum by Doctor Rutenspitz.

***

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially succesful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement.

French, Tana: The Likeness

A detective assumes a dead woman’s identity and moves into her shared house, believing one of the housemates to be her killer. She is accepted as the victim (!!!) and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger, trying to stay in character and live the life that she would have lived. She ends up getting psychologically consumed by the part she’s playing, losing track of her own identity. Once she’s completely confused, only person knows for sure who she is—the killer.

Gaiman, Neil: Coraline

The presence of another world that resemble the one you know but different, the Other Mother whole deal and the fact that she spies on people using dolls and sews buttons in place of her victim's eyes.

***

A short novella that focuses on 9-year-old Coraline Jones as she fights to restore her family from the clutches of the evil Other Mother.

Hendrix, Grady: How to Sell a Haunted House

Synopsis: "When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…"

Ito, Junji: The Enigma of Amigara Fault

You see the hole which perfectly matched you. It haunts you. You can’t resist the urge to climb inside.

It’s your hole, it was made for you.

Once you enter, you keep going, and your limbs begin to lengthen and contort. At the other side of the mountain, you emerge. Miserable, in pain, and spaghetti’s to the point you barely look human.

It’s your hole, it was made for you. But you have to be changed to fit inside. And you will.

(People have been memeing this story but it’s actually excellent body horror. Highly recommend!)

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki

It’s about a town cursed by spirals that corrupt you and drive you mad, but can’t be ignored forever

Jensen, Ruby Jean: MaMa

Once upon a time there lived a sweet little dolly. Her porcelain like face was so smooth, just like a baby. Her mouth even had a tiny hole so she could eat and breathe. But her one beaded glass eye gleamed with mischief and evil. She had waited a long time in the attic for someone to set her free...

Once upon a time there lived a sweet little girl. The only place she was happy was in the attic with her dolly. If she could have seen her little doll's legs kick, she would have been frightened. If she could have felt her little doll's arms squeeze, she would have been shocked. But if she could have read her little doll's thoughts she would have run from the attic forever--for her sweet little dolly only had killing her on her mind...

King, Stephen: Battleground

A toymaker gets his revenge on his killer with a battalion of toy soldiers that invade his apartment.

King, Stephen: The Outsider

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can.

Krulik, Nancy E.: Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo (series)

Katie is an ordinary third-grader-except for one very extraordinary problem! She accidentally wished on a shooting star to be anyone but herself. But what Katie soon learns is that wishes really do come true-and in the strangest ways... When the magic wind blows, watch out! Katie switches bodies with someone or something else and hilarity and havoc ensues.

Lovecraft, H.P.: The Outsider

There's nothing I can say here that won't ruin the twist. Link: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx

Martin, Ann M. and Laura Godwin: The Meanest Doll in the World

Annabelle Doll and Tiffany Funcraft are two dolls who have been best friends since they met in Kate Palmer's house at 26 Wetherby Lane. In this sequel to The Doll Peopl e, they hitch a ride in Kate's backpack and find themselves in the biggest adventure of their lives, a day at school! But when an attempt to return home lands them in the wrong house, they're in far deeper trouble than they imagined. Along with a host of new doll friends, they also encounter Mean Mimi, the wickedest doll of all. Mean Mimi is mean-really mean-and she's determined to rule all of Dollkind or else destroy it. Will the world ever be safe for dolls again?

The main horror aspect of this series is the threat of 'Permanent Doll State' -- a divine punishment that will transform violaters permanently into nonliving dolls, though possibly with their sentience still intact.

Miles, Lawrence: This Town Will Never Let Us Go

This is the source material of Tiffany Korta: ""Pop star. Her image was carefully maintained and groomed by her bosses, the skull-masked Executive/Faction Paradox. She became haunted by the concept of her uber-self, the variety of ways in which her image was used -- officially and otherwise -- and the impassible divide between her identity and the perceptions that other people had of her. She began to see her image on screens moving out of sync with her, or saying things that she could not remember saying, as the image she presented to the world evolved beyond her comprehension and control. Eventually, when she confronted the Executive about their plans for her, they destroyed her and replaced her with a different version of herself that went on to destroy her credibility, Not!Them-style. Meanwhile, other versions of her went on homicidal rampages around the world."

Nettel, Guadalupe: El huésped (The host)

A story about a girl who feels she has a "sister" that lives within her. She haunts her constantly and devastates her life. We never know whether that sister is real or not, but the mere thought of her drives the girl to paranoia and madness. Her main goal is to destroy her, and to do that, she must become just like her.

Nix, Garth: The Ragwitch

Ten-year-old Paul and his sister Julia are on vacation at the beach one day when they find a shell midden on the shore. When they climb it, they find a crow's nest with a creepy little ragdoll in it. Paul distrusts it immediately, but Julia is entranced, and brings it home, where their parents don't seem to be able to see it. The next morning, Paul hears someone moving around, and follows the sound out to find his sister, possessed by the doll, building a strange blue fire on top of the midden. She freezes him helplessly in place, then jumps into the fire and disappears. Paul rebuilds it and follows Her through, determined to rescue his sister.

So begins a quest to stop the Ragwitch and save his sister (and maybe the world he finds himself in on the side). Throughout, the narrative switches between Paul's journey and Julia Fighting from the Inside despite the Ragwitch's attempts to control her mind.

Peck, Richard: Secrets of the Shopping Mall

Trying to escape the vicious King Kobra gang and troubled life at home, eighth graders Barnie and Teresa flee the city. With only four dollars between them, they hop a bus, hoping to find a new life at the end of the line. Destination: Paradise Park. But Paradise Park turns out to be a cement-covered suburban shopping mall--not quite the paradise they had hoped for.

With no money and no home to retum to, they are forced to stay. And paradise park takes them in--in more ways than one. Barnie and Teresa spend their days and nights in the climate-controlled consumer paradise of a large department store. And just when they think they can live there unnoticed forever, Teresa and Barnie find that even Paradise Park has its secrets. Even in the dead of night, they are far from alone...."

(Spoilers: It's not actually living mannequins, but dispossessed and mildly insane teens who dress as mannequins and stand perfectly still all day to avoid detection! Which... I'm not sure is much better.)

Poe, Edgar Allen: William Williamson or William Wilson

The story of a doppelganger. A man with William Wilson's same name and face. A man who begins to act and sound more like him over the years. A man who becomes hostile. A man who haunts him.

***

William Wilson is about a man named William Wilson (or something similar to it) who meets a man with the exact name as him. Gradually, the double begins to resemble him more and more. The double keeps being a general nuisance to him until eventually he kills his double. Only to look in the mirror to see “ mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood”.

"In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

To me, William Wilson is a perfect example of a Stranger Leitner because it conceptualizes the fear of the other through fear of the self. There is no stranger more unknowable than the stranger in the mirror, staring back at you.

***

The story follows a man "of noble descent" who goes by William Williamson because, although denouncing his profligate past, he does not accept full blame for his actions. William meets another boy in his school who has the same name and roughly the same appearance, and who was even born on the same date. William's name embarrasses him because it sounds "plebeian" or common, and he is irked that he must hear the name twice as much on account of the other William. The boy also dresses like William, walks like him, but can only speak in a whisper. He begins to give advice to William of an unspecified nature, which he refuses to obey, resenting the boy's "arrogance". One night he steals into the other William's bedroom and recoils in horror at the boy's face—which now resembles his own. William then immediately leaves the academy and, in the same week, the other boy follows suit. William eventually goes to university, gradually becoming more debauched and performing what he terms "mischief". For example, he steals from a man by cheating at cards. The other William appears, his face covered, and whispers a few words sufficient to alert others to William's behavior, and then leaves with no others seeing his face. William is haunted by his double in subsequent years, who thwarts plans described by William as driven by ambition, anger and lust. In his latest caper, he attempts to seduce a married noblewoman at Carnival in Rome, but the other William stops him. The enraged protagonist drags his "unresisting" double—who wears identical clothes— into an antechamber, and, after a brief sword fight in which the double participates only reluctantly, stabs him fatally. After William does this, a large mirror suddenly seems to appear. Reflected at him, he sees "mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood": apparently the dead double, "but he spoke no longer in a whisper". The narrator feels as if he is pronouncing the words: "In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."

Pratchett, Terry: Maskerade

‘There’s a kind of magic in masks. Masks conceal one face, but they reveal another. The one that only comes out in darkness …’

The Opera House in Ankh-Morpork is home to music, theatrics and a harmless masked Ghost who lurks behind the scenes. But now a set of mysterious backstage murders may just stop the show.

Agnes Nitt has left her rural home of Lancre in the hopes of launching a successful singing career in the big city. The only problem is, she doesn’t quite look the part. And there are two witches who would much rather she return home to join their coven.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have travelled to Ankh-Morpork to convince Agnes that life as a witch is much better than one on the stage. Only now they’re caught up in a murder mystery featuring masks and maniacal laughter.

And the show MUST go on . . .

Rayner, Jacqueline: EarthWorld

Synopsis: "Anji Kapoor has just had the worst week of her entire life, and things aren't getting any better. She should be back at her desk, not travelling through time and space in a police box with a couple of strange men.

The Doctor (Strange Man No. 1) is supposed to be returning her to Soho 2001 AD. So quite why there are dinosaurs outside, Anji isn't sure. Sad sixties refugee Fitz (Strange Man No. 2) seems to think they're either in prehistoric times or on a parallel Earth. And the Doctor is probably only pretending to know what's going on — because if he really knew, surely he would have mentioned the homicidal triplet princesses, the teen terrorists, the deadly android doubles (and triples) and the hosts of mad robots?

Anji's never going to complain about Monday mornings in the office again... "

Why it's Stranger: The setting alone is uncannily bizarre -- a theme park on one of Jupiter's moons devoted to Earth history, with research drawn from mistranslations, myths, and popular fiction. Sinister androids populate the place, and everyone is hiding the most terrible secrets. Meanwhile, Fitz Kreiner is having an identity crisis about being a clone, which is only made worse when he has to battle an Elvis impersonator to the death.

Robinson, Justin: Everyman

Ian Covey is a doppelganger. A mimic. A shapeshifter. He can replace anyone he wants by becoming a perfect copy; taking the victim’s face, his home, his family. His life. No longer a man, but a hungry void, Ian Covey is a monster.

David Tirado is a massive, hideous colony organism, a gestalt entity. The sum of Covey’s discarded parts. A roiling, chaotic patchwork of vast and varied personalities, memories, and physical forms that used to be a man − many men − David Tirado is a monster.

Sophie Tirado’s identity has been eroded by the tides of a long relationship, and now the man she gave herself up for has been stolen away and replaced by a mimic. Caught between the Doppelganger and the Gestalt Entity, she will try to save her husband, but there might be nothing left of him.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask, and evil a thousand faces.

Ross, Louise: Collective Imagination: Goncharov (1973) (2022) as a Model for Communal Filmmaking

Schwartz, Alvin: "Harold," Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones

Two cow farmers, Thomas and Alfred, were bored with their monotonous work one day, so they decided to make a scarecrow out of old sacs stuffed with straw. They based its appearance after another farmer they both hated, even giving it the name: Harold. They tied it to a pole and made fun of it, doing impressions of what his crazy voice might sound like or even just taking their cruelty out on him by kicking or punching him, or smearing food over the sac that was its face. One day they heard a grunt that could only have come from Harold. Thomas suggested throwing him in the fire, but Alfred insisted it was nothing to worry about. Then, Alfred noticed that Harold was growing bigger, but again told themselves it was just their imagination from being in the mountains too long.

Then one day, Harold stands up, walks out of the hut in front of Thomas and Alfred, then climbs up onto the roof and starts stomping around on it like a horse on its hind legs. Terrified and wanting to get away from Harold, they leave with their cows that same day, but halfway there they realize they forgot their milking stools and have to go back. The farmers convince each other that there really is nothing to be afraid of and draw straws to see who will go back. It is Thomas who drew the shorter straw, and now has to go back to to the hut, telling Alfred that he will catch up with him later. When Thomas does not return, Alfred returns to look for him, and sees Harold on the roof of the hut laying out Thomas' skinned corpse to dry in the sun.

Scroggs, Kirk: Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet

It's a series where a boy turns into a Muppet, and things only get wilder from there. It only really hits proper mind and body horror by book 4, as the entire world begins to undergo MUPPETMORPHOSIS!

Sleator, William: Among the Dolls

When her parents give her a gloomy old dollhouse for her birthday instead of the ten speed bike she's expecting, Vicky is disappointed. But she soon becomes fascinated by the small shadowy world and its inhabitants. The hours she spends playing with the dolls is a good way to escape from her parents's arguments. As Vicky's life becomes more troubled, she starts to take out her frustration on the dolls, making their lives as unhappy as hers. Then one day, Vicky wakes up inside the dollhouse, trapped among the monsters she's created. Bewildered, Vicky is sure she's dreaming. Can she find her way out of this nightmare world?

Sleator, William: The Duplicate

When David finds a mysterious machine that can copy living things, he thinks his problems are over. Now he can be in two places at once: at his grandmother's and out on a date. While the other David is in school, the real one can spend the day at the beach. The possibilities are endless. And they turn terrifying. David's duplicate has a mind, ideas, and desires of his own--and one of them is to see the real David dead.

Spark, Muriel: The Only Problem

So, in this novel, the main character, Harvey Gotham's estranged wife, Effie, apparently joins a terrorist organisation, which causes no end of problems for him. One of the problems being that Harvey refuses to believe that the person in the organisation really is Effie. When shown photographic evidence and even when shown her corpse he remains doubtful that it's her. Nobody else, with the sole exception of his semi-crazy aunt, has any doubts that Effie really is terrorizing Europe. This could be explained by Harvey lying to himself for various reasons or maybe... maybe Effie was replaced by the Stranger and only Harvey can tell. I propose that The Only Problem is really a Stranger's Leitner describing the torment Harvey suffered at the hand of the Stranger.

Spatola, Mike: The Monstrous Makeup Manual

Springer, Nancy: Possessing Jessie

Quiet, cautious Jessie had always lived in the shadow of her dynamic younger brother--her mother's clear favorite. His recent death leaves Jessie and her mother numb with grief. That is, until the morning Jessie cuts her hair and dresses in Jason's clothes, swaggering out of the house in an uncanny imitation of her brother. Her mother is visibly cheered, and for once Jessie is the center of attention at school. But each day Jason takes over Jessie more and more. Can she escape his power?

Starling, Caitlin: Last to Leave the Room

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before - and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world. As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…

Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece of the duality of good and evil in man's nature sprang from the darkest recesses of his own unconscious—during a nightmare from which his wife awakened him, alerted by his screams. More than a hundred years later, this tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the drug that unleashes his evil, inner persona—the loathsome, twisted Mr. Hyde—has lost none of its ability to shock. Its realistic police-style narrative chillingly relates Jekyll's desperation as Hyde gains control of his soul—and gives voice to our own fears of the violence and evil within us. Written before Freud's naming of the ego and the id, Stevenson's enduring classic demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the personality's inner conflicts—and remains the irresistibly terrifying stuff of our worst nightmares.

Stine, R.L.: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight

Evil scarecrows terrorize a small farm.

Stine, R.L.: Night of the Living Dummy

Lindy Powell finds a mysterious ventriloquist's dummy and Lindy decides to call him Slappy. Lindy uses her dummy to gain popularity, and her sister Kris quickly becomes jealous. Lindy and Kris's parents ask the two girls to share the dummy. However, when Kris tries to take Slappy from Lindy, Slappy hits Kris in the face. The next morning, Mr. Powell reveals that he has bought a ventriloquist dummy for Kris from a pawn shop. She decides to call him Mr. Wood. Various strange incidents of Mr. Wood apparently doing horrible things happen, which are eventually revealed as a prank by Lindy. She was tired of Kris being a copycat, so she decided to pull this big prank on Kris. Kris finds a small card in Mr. Wood's pocket that reads, "KARRU MARRI ODONNA LOMA MOLONU KARRANO,". After reading the card out loud, Kris thinks she sees Mr. Wood blink. That night, the Powell's elderly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, come to visit them. Lindy and Kris's parents ask that their daughters perform a ventriloquist act for their neighbors. Lindy decides to go first, and hers is a success. Before Kris can perform her act, Mr. Wood begins to insult the elderly couple, making fun of their appearances and their breath. Because of this, Kris is grounded but still allowed to attend the school's spring concert the following day. At the concert, while Mrs. Berman is adjusting a microphone for Kris, Mr. Wood begins to insult the teacher for being overweight. Mrs. Berman demands an apology, but Mr. Wood responds by spewing a green substance on the teacher and the audience. Mrs. Bergman tells Kris that she will be suspended from school for this, possibly for life. Mr. Powell announces he will return the dummy to the pawn shop on Monday. Kris locks Mr. Wood in a closet and goes to sleep. Kris is awakened by the sound of footsteps. When Kris decides to investigate, she discovers that Mr. Wood is alive. Mr. Wood tells her that she and Lindy are now his slaves and that the magic words brought him to life. Kris tries to fight the dummy, but Mr. Wood hits her fiercely in the stomach. Kris crawls away from Mr. Wood and screams for help. Lindy hears her sister and goes downstairs to find out what has happened. While Kris tells her sister that the dummy is alive, Mr. Wood surprises the girls. Lindy manages to pin the dummy to the ground and keep him from fleeing. When the girls' parents arrive, Mr. Wood stops moving. Lindy and Kris try to explain what has happened, but their parents refuse to believe the girls. Mr. and Mrs. Powell begin to question Kris's mental well-being, suggesting that they should take her to a doctor. As soon as the parents leave, Mr. Wood comes back to life, insisting that Lindy and Kris are his slaves. The girls try to decapitate the dummy, but they are unable to harm him. Next, the girls trap Mr. Wood in a suitcase and bury him in the backyard. Since they are exhausted, Lindy and Kris go to sleep. When the girls wake up the next morning, they discover that Mr. Wood has freed himself and is waiting for them. Lindy and Kris seek help, but their parents have gone out. To show how serious he is, Mr. Wood begins to choke Barky, the family dog. In an attempt to separate the two, the girls drag Mr. Wood and Barky outside. When Mr. Wood releases Barky, the girls chase the dummy into the path of a nearby steamroller being used for construction at the house next door. Mr. Wood dodges the first steamroller and tells them that both will be his slaves forever. He doesn't notice the second steamroller, however, and it crushes Mr. Wood. A mysterious green mist rises from the smashed dummy's body. The alarmed driver of the steamroller rushes out, thinking it was a kid he ran over, but the kids assure him it was nothing more than a dummy. Lindy, Kris, and Barky return home. When the girls get to their room, they find Slappy waiting for them. Slappy asks if the other dummy is gone.

Topping, Keith & Martin Day: The Hollow Men

Well to start with, doctor who aside, doesn't the title just sound like a stranger leitner? And getting into the plot, it heavily features animate scarecrows made from people. And the main reason I'm submitting this is because it fucked me up real bad. It's thematically way darker and more mature in content than I was expecting from a doctor who novel when I read it at the tender age of 14.

Vida, Vendela: The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

The whole plot is about a woman who goes on vacation, loses her documents and decides to roll with it, acquiring new identities through a series of questionable decisions. She gets someone else's passport and credit cards, moves into a different hotel, gets hired as a double of a famous actress, introduces herself with false names, and is very paranoid about being found out. We never learn her actual name, but we do learn that she has always disliked her face and has always tried to choose activities that would draw attention away from her face, so she can pretend it's not even there.

Wells, H.G.: The Invisible Man

The opening of "The Invisible Man" focuses on outside perspectives of the titular character, and the narrative itself refers to him simply as "the stranger". His looks are unusual: he wears large clothes and covers his eyes with tinted glasses, and underneath those, he's covered in bandages, as if he's had some sort of horrible accident. His behavior is strange, too. He's rude and reclusive, holed up in his at an inn and working with bizzare chemical concotions, causing accidents and damage constantly.

Throughout the story, the man, Griffin, becomes increasingly erratic. His attempts to reverse his condition all fail, but the things he can do when he goes unnoticed are increasingly violent and cruel.

When he finally becomes fed up with everything, he reveals himself to the proprietors and patrons of the inn, who are prepared to see anything under the bandages, any manner of injury or disfigurement, but instead, run screaming from the establishment, when he reveals nothing at all.

***

The way other characters interact with Griffin the Invisible Man really reminds me of The Stranger. Throughout the plot he's treated as some sort of impostor/invader/not human anymore. Doubly interesting since we see the uncanny-valley-assigned person's POV, meaning it could work even better as a Leitner that makes a statement giver experience something similar

[therealvinelle]

Hi! My ask is a top 3. Top 3 favorite books, favorite songs and favorite movies. I would also like to know the last book you read, last song you listened and last movie you watched. Not for any particular reason, just want some recs lol

Oh this is a fun one!

Favorite books

I take it back, choosing three isn't fun at all.

Agatha Christie has had a little too much influence on me as a person to not get the number one slot. If I had to choose one of her books, let it be The Mirror Crack'd. Jason Rudd showing Miss Marple in to see his wife whom he just mercy killed in her sleep and Miss Marple reciting Tennessee as a eulogy was deeply formative for twelve-year-old Vinelle.

Philip K. Dick, specifically A Scanner, Darkly if I must choose

Les Misérables. Like Christie, it impacted me too much not to make the list.

Favorite songs

In the interest of giving you recs, I think I'm going to give you repeat songs that I will never grow tired of.

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood by Santa Esmeralda, when the vibe is right for this one it's just right

Venom by Eminem, somehow my favorite Eminem song and I can't figure out why. I just really like what he does with the rhymes in this one and the song is always, always perfect for whatever I'm doing at the moment.

Drøm Hardt - Requiem 1 by Kaizers Orchestra, which surprises me too because it's not one of their flashier songs, but it also isn't one I ever skip when I'm listening to them. It's just nice. All of Kaizers is nice, every so often I remember the fact that I have tickets booked for their reunion tour and the sun shines just a bit brighter.

Favorite movies

Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean. Yes, these are two different movies, but I love them equally and they are weirdly the same movie in that exactly the things I loved about Lawrence are there in Bridge, meaning I have two movies with these wonderful things. Possibly three, if Doctor Zhivago is as good (same director, overlapping cast) as I hope it'll be.

The Silence of the Lambs starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. It's just the best movie in the world, the pinnacle of feminist filmmaking to the point where I was very surprised to find out it wasn't classified as a chic flick.

Unforgiven starring, produced, and directed by Clint Eastwood. You should watch a few 50's and 60's Westerns first, but I'm a snob when I say that - really you can just sit down, giddy up and enjoy a beautiful movie about elderly cowboys who angst about what it means to take a life.

Last book, song, movie

Book: I've just barely gotten started on Ursula le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, however I keep getting distracted so this could take me years. Or a weekend if I get the mania.

Song: No singular ones (unless you count me currently blasting Kaizers Orchestra to determine which of their songs to recommend) I've been abusing my Eurovision playlist lately... The Sunstroke Project, Vesna, Go_A, and so on. Oh and uh Hamilton. Violently unsexy but so very catchy, one might even say I'm helpless.

Movie: Halfway through Remains of the Day, I'm at the part where the lord of the house asks his butler to explain the birds and the bees to his adult godson.

[fruityyamenrunner]

that last post reminds me that I don't think enough attention is given to the phenomenon of endogenous little dark age edits (ELDAE), a spontaneous vision of flickering, unrelated images, each filled with (probably illusory) detail that holds the attention

the locus classicus for eldae, in the exoteric literature anyway, is A Scanner Darkly

The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell Laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers. He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one night, having administered to himself an IV injection considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a disastrous drop in the GABA fluid of his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings.

      For about six hours, entranced, S. A. Powers had watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flashcut speed, and then he had been treated to Paul Klees, more than the painter had painted during his entire lifetime. S. A. Powers, now viewing Modigliani paintings replace themselves at furious velocity, had conjectured (one needs a theory for everything) that the Rosicrucians were telepathically beaming pictures at him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an advanced order; but then, when Kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum at Leningrad specialized in just such nonobjective moderns, and decided that the Soviets were attempting telepathically to contact him.

      In the morning he remembered that a drastic drop in the GABA fluid of the brain normally produced such phosphene activity; nobody was trying telepathically, with or without microwave boosting, to contact him. But it did give him the idea for the scramble suit.

i have experienced eldae myself a few times, usually hypnagogic, sometimes more abstract, sometimes more concrete (although it's part of the quality of the vision that you can't really tell), only lasting a few minutes, and not having the 'projected' open eye quality of Dick's vision. et contra Dick hypotheses non fingebam.

i think i vaguely recall some references to it in the esoteric literature, coded as the "storehouse of images" in yes🟣d or something, but nothing stands out.

what's remarkable to me is that it is exactly like other perihypnotic imagery i have experienced, and like other yesodic imagery expressed artistically by other people, presumably from eldae of their own, in that it is captured almost perfectly by early 2020s deep learning RRNs. i have seen montages produced by rrns, directed to interpret random vectors in latent space, with the exact sensibility of eldae, and of course the usual kind of ldae is drawing on that "schizo" sensibility too.

it must mean something significant that the faculty of the imagination is capable of carrying out, and has an (inducible? I don't really believe Dick's biochemobabble) tendency to fall into carrying out a similar random search of latent visual space.

[libertineangel]

That queer place where I saw A Scanner Darkly a couple of weeks ago is hosting a t4t leather punk/post-punk/EBM night at the end of the month which sounds cool as shit but it's on a fucking Thursday

Like of course just my luck it's the only day of the week I definitely can't make

[greensparty]

Thoughts on the 2024 Oscars

Just the other day I posted my Best Movies of 2023 list, so you pretty much know what I was rooting for! But here are some thoughts on tonight's awards, telecast and winners:

Best Director: Christopher Nolan - he deserved this award, but he easily should've won for Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception or Dunkirk too.

Best Actress: Emma Stone - really Academy? Lilly Gladstone should've won for Killers of the Flower Moon. That was a performance where she leaned into the silences and it was all in the eyes. While Emma Stone gave a powerhouse performance in Poor Things (an uneven movie IMHO) it was more of a showy "hey, look at me" performance. It's hard to compare both performances since they were so different but Gladstone should've won (and made history).

Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr. - Congrats to the first SNL cast member (he was in the 1985-86 season) to win an Acting Oscar. So cool to see the supporting actor from Weird Science, Back to School and A Scanner Darkly win! He probably should've won for Tropic Thunder, but he is worthy of this award for this performance!

Best Supporting Actress: Da'Vine Joy Randolph - I named The Holdovers my Best Movie of 2023 so I'm thrilled they did the right thing and at least rewarded Randolph!

Best Documentary Feature Film: 20 Days in Mariupol - I named this my Best Documentary of 2023. Big Congrats to GBH, Frontline and everyone involved with this powerful doc!

Best Animated Short Film: War Is Over - In my recent guide to the Oscar Nominated Short Films I predicted this. But big congrats to co-writer / executive producer Sean Ono Lennon. The son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono oversaw the short animated film inspired by John and Yoko's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". I met Mr. Sean Ono Lennon when he did an in-store performance at Other Music in NYC in 2010. In Feb. 2015, I named his band Ghost of the Saber Tooth Tiger's album Midnight Sun my #1 Album of 2014. Then both The GOASTT and their leader Sean Lennon retweeted it and thanked me! I've also gotten to cover his band The Claypool Lennon Delirium here as well.

Best Live Action Short Film: The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar - another short film I predicted would win. Wes Anderson has been nominated in a lot of other categories, but it's nice to see him finally win, even if he should've won for Bottle Rocket or Rushmore!

Very cool to see Slash doing a guitar solo during "I'm Just Ken". Yes the Barbie song lost to Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell's "What Was I Made For" also from that film, but how cool was it to see the GNR guitarist ripping it up at the Oscars?!

[cogcltrcorn]

I was tagged by @flippy-floppy , and I have maybe taken this a bit too seriously.

hmmm. this is actually very hard bc I am very bad at remembering things. also I very frequently obsess over books that are like, objectively Bad (like have I spent a solid 2 months thinking about it by stephen king and only about it by stephen king? yes. is it good? no. did I like it? no. did I still analyze it thoroughly? yes. next question). so. yeah. anyway

I will for sure wake up tomorrow like "OH MY GOD HOW COULD I FORGET [BLANK]" but I am at peace with that fact

in no particular order:

Fathers and sons, Ivan Turgenev - well. it's a book about russian nihilism, it's a book about the political schism between the generations in 19th century russia, and it's a book about idolizing reason and then being forced to contend with the fact that you are still a human being that is both capable of love and craves it deeply. also it is lowkey about being a college student homoerotically enraptured with your very smart and charismatic friend who is an absolute dick. and what happens if you bring this guy to stay with you and your family during the break.

chronicles of amber by roger zelazny - I am gonna be honest with you I do not remember half of that series. including this might be cheating bc it's like. 10 books. whatever. rules are made up. it's good. it's very fucking good. just writing about it right now makes me want to reread it. anyway it's fantasy and there's reality shifting and there is complex lore and yeah no I think this book has radically altered my brain chemistry when I read it.

twenty thousand leagues under the seas by jules verne - look. 9 yo cog fucking Loved boring descriptions of marine wildlife. I was fucking Entranced by this book. this book started my years long obsession with jules verne novels. I may or may not be autistic. like really I can put like. 5 jules verne books on this list. are they incredibly dated and filled to the brim with trademarked 19th century classist and racist bullshit? yes. are they boring as fuck if you do not care about like, the mechanics of building a kiln on a deserted island? yes. but I did. I did care about building a kiln. I wanted to know how traveling to the center of the earth would go. and I wanted to know if the gentleman could get around the world in 80 days. whatever. the important things is that I loved those books and I still love them and they are, at their core, about how fucking cool humans are and how we are capable of great achievements if we apply ourselves and how incredible the world around us is.

do androids dream of electric sheep? by philip k dick - once again there could be like. 4 books on this list. I fucking love his stuff actually. the man has spent his entire life doing coke, getting scared as a result, and then writing kick ass novels about what scared him. he got really into gnosticism by the end of his life. he thought that god talked to him through a spot of light. I fucking love his books. anyway. this specific one is about the way human spirit sirvives in a future that is rendered nearly uninhabitable by capitalistic greed. the world of do androids dream of electric sheep is artificial, obsessed with its own artificiality, and obsessed with proving itself to be Not artificial, ironically, inventing increasingly artificial ways to prove it. plot twist! the only real thing in the world built for profit is the human connections you build! anyway. I have beef with blade runner the movie bc it is NOT A GOOD ADAPTATION OF THE BOOK and has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. I AM SICK AND TIRED.

actually I lied. here is another philip k dick novel

a scanner darkly - well. how do I explain. ok so basically this is a deeply biographical novel about the loss of identity and connection to reality as a result of drug usage. I fucking love it. reading it makes me go fucking insane. I highly recommend this to all of you, my darling succession mutuals

interview with the vampire, anne rice - made me insane. a theological and philosophical discussion with the guy with the weirdest moral code you have ever seen, with the added bonus of him complaining about his stupid greedy whore of an ex-husband

obligatory mention of 1984 by george orwell - well sorry. he did spit some facts here. also i need to re-read this bc I last read it like 6 years ago and I miss it. I feel kinda unoriginal by saying I love it but like. it Is good. I want to kill the protagonist with hammers, but it IS good... I think of her (1984 by george orwell) often....

red dragon, thomas harris - ok well you see I don't actually have to explain anything to you, do I? I just love it. don't know why. will graham is like a bug to me.

the count of monte cristo, alexander dumas - YET AGAIN!! GOD IS THIS BOOK ENCHANTING IF YOU ARE A CHILD NERD. it has everything: prison escape, complex revenge plot, brooding hero, a long ass side story that seems to have no connection to the main plot but eventually connects back to it, 19th century orientalism. man.

seeing the things other people have posted for this thingy made me realize I need to diversify my reading habits. mayhaps a man should not exclusively read postmodernist sci-fi and 19th century adventure novels. oh well.

anyway. if you wanna do it you can and you should. also go read philip k dick he is underrated as fuck

[unlithour]

On Finding Oneself

It seems to me that finding oneself usually requires some sort of journey. I wish more than anything that I could push through the coats of an overstuffed wardrobe and step into Narnia. Fall through the looking glass and embark on a mad adventure.

Or maybe find a wrinkle in time, a way to return and repair my past mistakes; to pass hard earned wisdom on to my younger self. But in truth I'm in my mid thirties and on a budget. So here I am with only a lantern searching in this unlit hour.

Sipping my Blanchard's Dark As Dark blend with the Gallow Dance playing quietly in the background, I sit with the acknowledgment that I will not step through some magic portal. Probably won't even take a trip to Norway to lay in the crisp snow beneath the Aurora Borealis, which would also more than suffice.

I google "how to find yourself" and the results are frankly disappointing. I'm too jaded for positive thinking, too cynical for manifestation, and too cranky for affirmations. I'm reminded of the meditation penguin from Fight Club. *Slide!*

While any sort of grand adventure may be off the table for now, recreating a similar environment to a time in which I was enamored with the world may be a possible step in the right direction. This tiny hope, is in part responsible for my return to Tumblr and to writing. To me they are both relics of 2008, and symbolic of better days.

So I start this low budget quest to rediscover myself by creating a simple list of things I was once inspired by and enjoyed.

Activities:

Hanging out at book shops & cafes

Reading

Writing

Drawing, painting, & mixed media

Listening to new albums

Watching Criterion & Art House films + new movies in general

Playing PS1 games and board games

Visiting galleries, local artist co-ops, & museums

Solo camping

Day trips to other towns, national parks, & scenic destinations

Browsing art supplies at my local art store

Urban walk-abouts at night

Photography for fun

Dressing up for no reason

Live concerts

Researching & studying artists I loved

Paint your own pottery places

Y/A Books:

Mandy / The Last of The Really Great Whangdoodles

The Secret Garden / A Little Princess

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Harry Potter Series

A Wrinkle In Time Series

The NeverEnding Story

His Dark Materials Series

The Newford Charles De Lint Series

The Princess Bride

The Dark is Rising Series

Anything by Roald Dahl

The Light Princess

Wind in the Willows

The Hobbit & LOTR

The Historian

The Shadow of The Wind

Perault's & Grimm's Fairytales

Gothic / Atmospheric Literature:

Wuthering Heights

Picture of Dorian Gray

Dracula

Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Music:

Heavy metal, melodic metal, & doom/sludge metal

Dark wave, cold wave, & gothic rock

90's grunge, alt rock, & trip hop

80's synth wave

Artists:

Edward Gorey

Rene Margritte

Aubrey Beardsley

Erté

Marjorie Miller

Claude Monet

Elias van den Broeck

Dorothea Tanner

Edward Hopper

Mark Ryden

Artemisia Gentileschi

Botticelli

DaVinci

Michelangelo

Movies:

Waking Life

Fight Club

Vengeance Trilogy

Spirited Away

Style Wars

Any Art21 Documentary

Edward Scissorhands

Cry Baby

Labyrinth

American Beauty

Train Hopping

Heavy Metal

Dead Poets Society

A Scanner Darkly

Kill Bill Volumes

Any classic Disney animated film (except for the sad ones like Bambi)

Do you have any reading or watching suggestions based on this list? I'd love to hear them.

[tokyonomad]

Let's Hear It For The Vague Blur! Inspired by the Scramble Suit from A Scanner Darkly. I've always been intrigued by the masks that we wear in different situations. The subtle or overt changes in our personalities we make to fit in with social etiquette necessary for any given situation. Are these masks different versions of ourselves, or are they a smaller part of a bigger whole? How do we keep track of our authentic selves? As Arctor says, "I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside."

[canmom]

Animation Night 128: Beep Boop

Hi friends, it’s Animation Night.

Tonight we have the exciting occasion of: finally hitting another power of 2! A phenomenon not seen since Animation Night 64, when we watched Macross. Who knows if we’ll ever see another! I’m going to have to fill another 128 nights, and while we’re still not out of material, that’s a lot of nights...

Since powers of 2 are especially computer-y, it only seems fitting that we focus on the subject of computers. So let’s roll back the clock and have a look at some representations of ~the digital world~ in animation!

So, computers. I’ve already done the early history of 3D CGI animation back on Animation Night 75, which means we’re gonna take a slightly different tack on this one.

In less than a century, computers have been introduced to the world and integrated themselves so universally it’s hard to imagine life without them. Even as recently as the 80s, when they got small enough to have one in your house, these computers were still pretty novel.

And how do humans deal with a strange new technology that defies comprehension in terms of the familiar? Well, we anthropomorphise it! So that has led to the curious little genre of stories set ‘inside’ a computer system, imagining as comprising a little world where programs are little people...

TRON (1982)

Let’s start with the film Tron (1982). No, just one ‘o’, not the weird pejorative for a trans somethingawful user.

Tron is... well, really the main reason it’s remembered is the technical side so let’s dive right in. Primarily a composite of live action and extremely complex rotoscoped backlight animation, this film also features some of the earliest CGI sequences in film. But it’s also a narrative about computers, imagining a computer program hero fighting in the world implied by the vector-display games of the era. But I’m mostly going to talk about how it’s made because it’s one of those ‘once in film history’ type of productions, similar to A Scanner Darkly (Animation Night 120), which proved so ludicrously labour-intensive that nobody felt like doing it again. Let’s dig in...

The impetus came when a guy called Steven Lisberger saw video of Pong (the game) in 1976, which led him down a path to take an interest in this new-fangled computer animation being toyed with at MIT. Lisberger was a big tech enthusiast, and hoped to bring the idea of computers to a wider audience beyond its ‘clique-like’ users at the time. The concept of a hero throwing discs was one of the earliest elements, used by Lisberger to promote his studio; the rest of the script built around it.

The film was originally planned to just use traditional animation. News of the project caught the attention of computer scientist Alan Kay, who became technical advisor for a set of CG sequences - not to mention the inspiration for the film’s scientist character. Gradually, the concept evolved from animation, to animation bracketed by live action, to finally live action composited into animated scenes.

Lisberger’s growing gang shopped around for a studio willing to take on such a complex project; eventually they found Disney, who funded a test reel to try out the new techniques - mixing live action, backlight and CG. Despite funding the film, Disney’s insular animation department were unwilling to get involved in animation on behalf of an outsider, so the 2D animation went to Taiwanese studio Wang Film Productions, an outsourcing oriented studio that took on vast amounts of work from Western companies like Disney and Hanna-Barbera. The CG, meanwhile, went to the tiny CG graphics industry; Wikipedia writes:

Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.[7]Bill Kovacs worked on the film while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. The work was not a collaboration, resulting in very different styles used by the firms. 

This was a time when a production computer in the film industry might have as little as 2MB RAM. To handle this, they’d use some of the same techniques as PS2 era games, such as aggressive fog effects. And there was no digital compositing or even just printing onto film: to get CG onto film, they would render a frame, point a camera at it, and take a photo as in stop motion animation. Crazy shit.

Alongside this was an equally elaborate effort to produce all the backlight effects for all the glowing lines. This involved an absolute ton of manually-painted traveling mattes, with a dozen or more passes to expose each coloured glowing element photographed in sequence onto the film. There’s very little traditional animation so much as very elaborate rotoscoping, but it was an astonishing work of compositing. Here, I’ll let Wikipedia explain what they did...

In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, placed in an enlarger for blow-ups and transferred to large format Kodalith high-contrast film. These negatives were then used to make Kodalith sheets with a reverse (positive) image. Clear cels were laid over each sheet and all portions of the figure except the areas that were exposed for the later camera passes were manually blacked out. Next the Kodalith sheets and cel overlays were placed over a light box while a VistaVision camera mounted above it made separate passes and different color filters. A typical shot normally required 12 passes, but some sequences, like the interior of the electronic tank, could need as many as 50 passes. About 300 matte paintings were made for the film, each photographed onto a large piece of Ektachrome film before colors were added by gelatin filters in a similar procedure as in the Kodaliths. The mattes, rotoscopic and CGI were then combined and composed together to give them a "technological" appearance.[16][24]

The result is honestly... kind of weird looking; the actors are all very monochrome, and the CG shots lack the grain and atmospheric glows of the intercut live action shots. As animation, it’s kind of stop-start and since every shot was so expensive, they tend to go by very fast. But that only makes it more interesting, to see a time before we had invented all the techniques we take for granted in modern animation tools and compositing....

Then of course there’s a soundtrack by none other than legendary trans synth composer Wendy Carlos. Because computers, you see. It’s interesting to think actually - just like the elaborate backlight animation, this is portraying a ‘digital world’ via analogue electronic means.

OK, so that’s how it’s made, what’s Tron actually about? It all revolves around a computer company called ENCOM, basically IBM I guess? It follows the Manichaeist struggle between two programmers: the good hacker Kevin Flynn, and the evil Ed Dillinger who plagiarised his arcade games and booted him from the company. Flynn gets uploaded into the computer world, where he meets his security program Tron, who’s battling Dillinger’s evil AI, the ‘Master Control Program’.

As little as this has to do with how computers work, there are some fun little touches; e.g. the reason the programs take on the likenesses of real humans is justified by the amounts of information already being stored by computer companies. But yeah, mostly it’s a pretty generic good guy vs bad guy sort of script. This was very much a tech demo sort of film, although its imagery has been subsequently enshrined as part of the ~80s~ canon; in fact, it was one of the first films to have a modern nostalgiacore sequel with Tron Legacy in 2010. The lightcycle game devised for the film is quite fun actually - there’s an open source version called Armagetron Advanced which was still in development as recently as Dec 2020. But mostly it’s historically important. And I haven’t seen it, so I’d like to remedy that.

ReBoot (1994)

The next major entry in the ‘what if the programs were like, little people’ genre was ReBoot, the first full CG tv series evar, created by the Canadian Mainframe Entertainment. The idea dates back to 1984 - not long after Tron - originating with a group of British guys called John Grace, Ian Pearson, Gavin Blair and Phil Mitchell. They started experimenting with CG characters pretty soon, in this music video whose animation was done by Pearson and Blair...

...which was one of the first music videos to be ever shown on MTV in 1987, consisting of footage of the band texture mapped into a big rectangle in a CG scene, plus a bunch of digitally matted colour effects. (big shoutouts to @shimakaze-revivalism​ who was first to show me this!)

For a TV series, though, they needed mooorrrreee poooowweeerrr...... more complex rigs with more polygons and better shading models, which came in the form of Softimage|3D, and work began in 1990, with episodes in 1991. In this world, the computer world is entirely sealed off from any humans outside - in fact, they live in fear of the user, who will slaughter the denizens of the computer any time they play a game. The story mainly follows an action hero called Bob who fights to preserve the city of Mainframe against various villains, all named random computer words like Hexadecimal and Megabyte.

From the outset it faced a censorious Board of Standards & Practices for the US’s ABC network, which seems to have caused a great deal of resentment for the creators; nevertheless the show was a success and gradually started to introduce longer-form stories as the target age group shifted up. The later seasons sound like they went the sort of wild places a long-running cartoon does, with characters aged up by video game time acceleration and an ever-growing cast; as such it earned a pretty devoted fandom who eagerly await the day the creator might decide to resolve the final cliffhanger.

There’s so much of it I could never possibly show more than a sampling, but I would at least like to take a look in to see what the deal is.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

There is no possible way I could cover a theme like this without a mention of Lain. The main character of this iconic experimental anime, designed by Yoshitoshi ABe (known as well for Haibane Renmei [Animation Night 106]) has become something of the mascot of a certain species of alienated internet dork. We all love lain.

Lain is... a little complicated to explain, though. The plot summary on Wikipedia throws out a lot of names and concepts which make it hard to get the gist, and the show itself is slow, oblique and requires you to pay attention. But basically it is about an autistic plural girl who becomes God via the internet.

So we have Lain Iwakura. She’s a student at junior high, with little interest in technology, despite her high tech dad. This is the 90s: personal computers are increasingly widespread, but Usenet has only just begun to give way to the Web, and it’s still very novel. Nobody could really imagine what this sort of complex connection would do to the world; it is this context that forms the basis for the original cyberpunk, such as Ghost in the Shell a few years earlier.

Lain herself comprises three different alters, something never spelled out fully explicitly: the shy ‘real world’ Lain “玲音” (reiin), the ambitious and determined internet delver Lain “レイン” (rein), and the aggressively ‘evil’ Lain (Ｌａｉｎ) who harms herself those around her.

Not that what’s around her is necessarily ‘real’ in any truly objective sense; the world of the digitally connected Wired starts to bleed into the real world through some psychic somethingorother involving the Earth’s magnetic field, and the show is always very partial in its viewpoint, preferring to hint rather than really explain anything outright. Lain gradually comes to realise she is not just some random schoolgirl but a kind of omnipotent being that dwells within the Wired all according the complicated plan of an engineer Masami Eiri who uploaded himself into the wired; she finds she can rewrite memories and shape the world as she pleases but this power just isolates her even more.

Along the way we take all sorts of turns, throwing out a plethora of allusions to scientific, occult and UFO conspiracy ideas. Hell, rather than the web, which was in its infancy, the writers looked to a now-obscure hypertext experiment called Project Xanadu. But they’re as likely to throw out a reference to an injoke among LISP programmers. You just have to kind of let it wash over you.

This experimental attitude infects the whole style of the series, making it unique even within anime of the time: its visuals rely on stark compositions of blown-out white highlights and muted greys; its animation is generally very reserved, which does not lessen the impact of striking images like Lain’s room becoming an increasingly alien nest of computers, or the strange partial manifestations of users in the Wired, or indeed the impressive body horror animated by Takahiro Kishida at the finale. Lain’s round face, accentuated by a tiny hairclip, lidded eyes and muted affect captured a certain something that makes her instantly recognisable.

And for that matter the music and sound design is iconic, whether the voice reciting “PRESENT DAY/PRESENT TIME hahahahaha”, the distorted synthesised voice giving the name of the episode, or the fascinating and inspired choice of a song by obscure British Band Bôa for the intro...

Its creators were certainly full of some fascinating ambitions. Notably producer Yasuyuki Ueda declared it a ‘cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values Japan adopted after WWII’ and later said he found himself disappointed that the Americans didn’t come to a different interpretation of the story.

As for director Ryūtarō Nakamura, he worked his way up through the industry since the 70s, notably working under Osamu Dezaki on works like Ashita no Joe 2 and Space Adventure Cobra - perhaps it’s no wonder then that Lain features creative layouts and puts a lot of its narrative in the storyboard. He would go on to direct an episode of GitS:SAC, as well as a well-loved adaptation of the light novel Kino’s Journey, a gentle story which follows a girl on a talking motorbike passing through a series of societies - and working to adapt a Masamune Shirow work with another surreal supernatural story, Ghost Hound, in 2007-8.

And most of the main figures behind Lain - ABe, Ueda and writer Chiaki J. Konaka - would come together again in a cyberpunk dystopian work, Texhnolyze, in 2003, this time at Madhouse. I don’t know a great deal about it, but I’d like to look into it at some point (if not on Animation Night, since it’s a full two cours).

You could easily write dissertations on Lain (I’m sure people have!), but also the chance that anyone in my audience has not seen it is probably pretty much zero lol. But, you know, it’s Lain! I can’t not talk about Lain!

Moving on, here’s another curiosity from the same era which @mogsk​ sent my way - a 3D animation that attempts to explain how the internet protocol works with physical metaphors, casting various parts of the IP stack as little robot guys. This was animated by Ericsson Medialab, which seems to be... a Swedish telecoms company? It’s cute.

Now, let’s roll the clock forward a few decades. Nowadays, the internet is completely ubiquitous. If you’re anything like me you are almost never not using it for something in every waking moment. But that doesn’t mean technology isn’t making something new and scary; in fact it’s making a lot that’s new and scary, whether environmentally devastating ponzi scheme cancers like cryptocurrency, or the current push by big tech companies to reach the apotheosis of the logic of the social media feed by eliminating human artists from CONTENT CREATION.

So, I thought I’d throw in a look at a largely unacknowledged show that I’ve found kind of interesting from the current year.

Pantheon adapts a collection of Ken Liu stories about a near-future world where uploading has been achieved by a big tech company; it’s similar in some respects to Lain in that it sees students drawn into a world of computer conspiracy. What struck me when I started watching it is how surprisingly well observed the computer stuff is; whether it’s a recognisable 4chan /x/ or a discussion of parallel programming, it’s plugged into the tech world, including its current transhumanist imaginary, in a surprisingly solid way.

The story of the first episode follows a socially isolated and bullied girl at a swanky high tech college who discovers evidence that her deceased dad is actually somehow alive, but only able to communicate in emoji... and a depressed, highly mathematically adept boy whose parents are pushing him very hard to pursue tech who catches wind of the conspiracy. Clearly something big is afoot, and whatever it is, it involves human uploads. I’ve heard a lot of good things, and this seems like the night to introduce it to you guys before I watch more...

Visually, it’s a curiosity: heavily influenced by anime in both visual design and low framerate animation style, and with plenty of solid technical drawing from unusual perspectives, but somehow not quite hitting the notes of timing and motion that give that ‘anime character’. So another note in the general trend of studios around the world turning to anime for inspiration, following in the footsteps of shows like Castlevania.

The main studio credited is Titmouse, although looking at the credits of the first episode, it looks like a great deal of animation was carried out at the Korean studio DR Movie - the same studio that’s currently holding up half the anime industry judging by how often it’s credited. I’d really like to find out more about the exact production process, just for how it fits in to the general debate over how anime’s production process influences the resulting animation.

It clearly owes a lot to Lain, although its approach so far isn’t quite so wildly experimental. And it achieves a strong level of tension already, capturing that uniquely hostile and demanding vibe of the tech world very precisely.

I think that should be plenty. So to summarise, the plan is to watch Tron, and then excerpts from ReBoot, Lain and Pantheon, hopefully enough to get a sense of the vibe and whet your appetite for more. (It’s always tough to know how to handle long pieces of TV animation!)

Animation Night is back to its old timeslot of 7pm UK time, about 30 minutes from this post! I hope you’ll come join me for a dive into visions of the information superhighway, past and present~

[tramaqueen]

Tag Nine People You'd Like to Get to Know Better!

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐑(𝐒): Black, Shego Green, Pastel Purp.

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑(𝐒): anything sour or spicy p much. Tajin & chamoy w/ fruit. pussi.

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂: Apashe (EDM or classical music), Hans Zimmer, Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, i like circus music bc im a clown. 🤡

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄(𝐒): Natural Born Killers, HO1000C, Devils Rejects, most of Quentin Tarantino films (DEATH PROOF).

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: American Horror Story, Breaking Bad, Future Diary.

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆: Get Down, Make Love - Queen

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: I ❤️ Lucy

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄: Queen of the Damned

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆: Not Forever but For Now - Chuck Palahniuk. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara.

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆: movies n shit. watch A Scanner Darkly. it’s free & underrated & has everybody’s favs in it.

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐍: forever working on Fae’s story. it’ll be a complete novel one day. i write a lot of shitty poetry. & always trying to write the best replies my brain can muster.

Tagged by: @gcverncr

Tagging: my circle is a little too small for 9 people. but @mischixf-unmanagxd, @diicktective @griefknown , @carltongrimes, @chitteringbeast, @apphrodite

[hautecultural]

"After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God." - Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly

[jannaed]

Last week in my PTSD group, when discussing our tribulations of the past week, someone mentioned their most difficult challenge as the guilt over killing a mosquito hawk when they didn’t have to. This kickstarted a return to my A Scanner Darkly fixation, reminding me of an identical scene in the story where someone exclaims “if I knew it was harmless, I would’ve killed it myself!”

I’ve been going through this book called “Atlas of the Heart”, a book on understanding emotions and building emotional awareness, and after the chapter on Resentment, I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s the core theme of Scanner Darkly.

“If I knew it was harmless, I would’ve killed it myself”

This line is Dick’s ultimate indictment of the people who have never had to deal with mental illness or a sort of misery that can only be cured with drugs. His thesis on the subtle resentment people with substance use issues and depression can build toward “The Straights”. People whose worst problem is an ugly thing that might pollute their perfect world. Something they can’t bear to look at, not something harmful.

“He had witnessed junkies feeding and caring for injured animals over long periods of time, where straights probably would have had the animals ‘put to sleep’ a straight type term for murder”

When people have differing views on what’s unpalatable or unsightly, they tend to have different solutions for what to do about it.

There’s another bit where Dick complains that art in a museum can’t be “priceless” because those same people destroyed countless worked of art in during My Lai Massacre during vietnam.

In contrast Dick shows us the pitiable nobility of the self destructive or the junkie. We who at least have the decency to destroy ourselves instead of the rest of the world. Like the only empathetic way to exist in a world of injustice and inequality is to hate yourself. This brings to mind a character in another of Dick’s books, Rick Deckard’s wife Iran in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) who begins the book by using a device that can program her mood per hour of the day. Instead of the prescription of Proper Feelings, she chooses to dial in self accusatory depression.

Now that obviously isn’t the healthiest way to deal with those feelings but it’s cathartic to see them presented as anything other than evil.

[meatandbones24]

My Favourite Movies (in order)

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Monty Python & The Holy Grail

The Thing

The Truman Show

Whiplash

The World’s End

Spirited Away

American Psycho

The Shawshank Redemption

Superbad

The Indiana Jones Quadrilogy (1/2,3,4)

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The Dark Knight Trilogy (2, 3/1)

The House That Jack Built

Donnie Darko

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Howl’s Moving Castle

What We Do In The Shadows

Turbo Kid

Kung Fury

UHF

Equilibrium

Ghostbusters I & II

Napoleon Dynamite

Beetlejuice

Big Trouble In Little China

Spiderhead

Fight Club

π (1998)

The Princess Bride

Akira

Interface

Jacob’s Ladder

Oppenheimer

The Back to The Future Trilogy (1,2,3)

Bo Burnham: Inside & The Outtakes

Django: Unchained

What About Bob?

Renfield

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Project X

Bullet Train

Perfect Blue

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Knives Out (1,2)

The Batman

Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse

Hardcore Henry

Dick Figures: The Movie

Johnny Mnemonic

Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy

Conspiracy Theory

Barbie

The Mitchells Vs. The Machines

Nightcrawler

Deadpool (1 & 2)

Hot Fuzz

Shaun of The Dead

There Will Be Blood

Black Christmas

Taxi Driver

Stranger Than Fiction

Knock At The Cabin

Watchmen

Palm Springs

Falling Down

Groundhog Day

The Crucible

Fargo

The Final Girls

Megamind

Monster House

Coraline

Edward Scissorhands

Joker

Rango

The Goonies

Hot Rod

Army of Darkness

Hush

Daniel Isn’t Real

Battle Royale

They Cloned Tyrone

The Whale

Under The Silver Lake

Corner Office

V/H/S/99

Scooby Doo (1 & 2)

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Austin Powers (1, 3, 2)

Redline

MFKZ

Society

Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Suicide Squad

Birds of Prey

Flushed Away

The Road to El Dorado

Sinbad: Legend of The Seven Seas

The Cable Guy

Catch Me If You Can

Over The Hedge

Lilo & Stitch

Nope

The Other Guys

Stand By Me

Juno

Ted 2

The Breakfast Club

Us

Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events

How To Train Your Dragon (1,3,2)

Chronicle

Amsterdam

Up

The Babysitter

Don’t Worry Darling

The Menu

Midsommar

Inkheart

Spaceballs

Slaughterhouse Rulez

Jumanji

Meet The Robinsons

Kronk’s New Groove

The Emperor’s New Groove

Hercules

Dragon Hunters

TMNT

The Lego Movie

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Skinamarink

Fresh

One Hour Photo

Perks of Being a Wallflower

Zathura: A Space Adventure

Paranorman

Push

Dredd

Nerve

Get Out

Zombieland

The Hateful Eight

Jojo Rabbit

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory

Pulp Fiction

Game Night

The Voices

No Country For Old Men

Masterminds

The Fear Street Trilogy (tied)

Cabin In The Woods

Scream

Ace Ventura (1 & 2)

#ALIVE

Die Hard

Memories Of Murder

The Face Of Another

Lord of The Rings Trilogy (1, 3, 2)

The Hitman’s Bodyguard

Paul

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Friday The 13th

Home Alone (1 & 2)

Last Night in Soho

The Matrix Trilogy (1, 2/3)

Lupin III: The First

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Blazing Saddles

The Spongebob Squarepants Movie

The Village

Between Two Ferns: The Movie

The 40 Year Old Virgin

Cooties

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The Babysitter: Killer Queen

Saltburn

They Live

This Is the End

My Neighbour Totoro

Inside (2023)

Pineapple Express

Free Guy

Tick, tick…BOOM!

Se7en

Jaws

Mortal Engines

Liar Liar

Monty Python & The Life of Brian

Looney Tunes: Back In Action

The Three Amigos

Reservoir Dogs

Johnny Dangerously

Goodfellas

Guns Akimbo

Psycho

Love and Monsters

Tucker & Dale vs Evil

Escape From New York

The Boogeyman

House On Haunted Hill

Monsters VS Aliens

Eighth Grade

Speed

Drillbit Taylor

Mystic River

Lake Mungo

The Interview

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

Arthur And The Invisibles Trilogy (1/3, 2)

Spy Kids Trilogy (3, 2, 1)

Flight of The Navigator

The Hangover Trilogy (1, 2, 3)

Constantine

A Scanner Darkly

Police Academy

Happy Death Day

Freaks of Nature

Five Nights At Freddy’s

Death At A Funeral (2010)

Enemy

Ted

Ready Player One

30 Minutes or Less

Encino Man

Sky High

The Black Phone

Rocketman

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Good Time

Undercover Brother

Scanners

We’re All Going To The World’s Fair

Escape From L.A.

The Haunted House

Absolutely Anything

Eternals

Big Fat Liar

Arachnophobia

Lucy

Possessor

Hancock

Repo! A Genetic Opera

The Green Knight

Space Jam

Eraserhead

Barbarian

Mr. Peabody & Sherman

The Dead Don’t Die

Inglorious Basterds

Willy’s Wonderland

Tusk

Game Over, Man!

Get Smart

Promising Young Woman

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Idiocracy