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dubhdove156 · 2 years

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I've always been a highly rational, logical, contemplative person, but in 2016, a sane person saw something incredibly insane when they died before being resuscitated.

What is after this life is not intended to fit in the human mind.

I'll attach a quote from a brainstorm-esque rough draft that I'm writing now.

"In 2016, prior to my near-death experience, I was a particularly obnoxious and grandiose Nihilistic atheist. I thought that I had everything figured out, and found comfort in that. Put simply, my existential philosophy was as follows: if there is nothing after death, which I was certain of, and “something” can’t become “nothing”, then it logically follows that here and now, all of this is nothing. Overall, I came to the conclusion as a fairly edgy teenager that existence is an incomprehensible illusion, and the truth is that nothing exists; I do not exist, nor do you or the wider world around us. This caused me to become notably psuedo-psychopathic, the question of value became null and void. Morality itself was meaningless, and the purpose of life became a matter of enjoying every moment to its absolute fullest, regardless of the danger to myself or others. I had a question that I asked myself – which novel would you prefer? One that is highly relatable but much too long, or one that is thrilling, with new situations around each corner, but much too short? This was my existential crisis. I, of course, as a teenager with limited foresight, took the latter novel, with a philosophy that we’ve termed now as, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.” Survival was no longer a matter of importance, instead, I found myself chasing every sensation; I had the grandiose and idealistic fantasy of experiencing everything, learning everything, doing everything, in as short a time as possible. I was set on stuffing as many lifetimes into my existence as possible, before my sensation-chasing lead to an untimely death.

One thing that bothered me in that stage of my life was a seemingly simple question; what is “nothing?” Most would respond with, “it simply isn’t”, but that wasn’t enough for me. Because this was, and this was nothingness, correct? So what is nothing? That question, I could only find the answer to upon death, and I will share that briefly.

At the age of 19, I was binging a cocktail of ketamine and fairly pure crystalized MDMA. The mistake that I made here, was that I didn’t bring the materials required to intramuscularly inject ketamine, which was the only method that I had grown accustomed to, and had learned how to properly dose. I was with my friend, Vince, and my ex-girlfriend, Bria, in the back of an establishment that I worked in. I remember this event clearly. Instead of injecting the ketamine, I snorted the powder, and had no clue of my own limits. We were listening to music on my laptop, and while a song played that I particularly enjoyed was playing, something sudden came over me; an alien yet familiar sensation. I felt as though I was beginning to enter a panic attack; a deep, innate knowing that now is the time that I die, that this is it. But, interestingly and most notably to me, no sense of panic came. Instead, I felt a level of indescribable bliss that I cannot put into words. It was absolute contentment – I could suddenly see my entire life in front of me, and I was… happy with it. I felt that I had done what I had come to do, that I had succeeded, that now is the perfect time for death. I was… excited, rather than scared. Not in any depressive or suicidal sense, but rather in a sense of accomplishment and completeness.

The sensation of disconnection and dissociation grew in intensity, and rapidly. I told my friends that something was wrong; I had experienced a wide array of drug-induced experiences, from psychosis to k-holes and the like, but this was different. I got up from my chair, laid on my back, and quite simply accepted this sensation as it was. It was then that I lost consciousness, and later, a pulse overall. My friends, while I wasn’t present, called the paramedics. On my end, my identity ceased to exist. Some refer to seeing a “light”, but I saw through the light. It was everything and nothing simultaneously, every experience over the entirety of spacetime, lived within an instant. I was no longer myself, I was All, I was absolute, I knew everything, did everything, was everything. From beginning to end to beginning again, eternally. I could experience spacetime from the outside as a singular, objective thing. Infinite infinities, over and over again, forever and never. Ceaseless creation and destruction. And in my absolution, my omniscience, all knowing came to a singular gnosis, which reverberated throughout the entirety of existence as simply, “I Am.”

After I was resuscitated, I had a very loose grip on my identity, and the solidity of reality. It was like I was shattered into millions of miniscule pieces, and I was tasked, in order to survive in this perverse world, to piece myself back together in a panicked rush. At the time, I suffered from moderate amnesia, I had many instances of lifelong family and friends speaking to me as though they had known me for ages, yet I had no idea who they were.

It was at that time, that I had accepted that the otherside was absolute; that there was nothing greater than that, that I sought to define and stuff it into my tiny human brain. I found resonance in the highly abstract symbolisms of the occult, namely the Jewish Kabbalah, and the Hermetic Qabalah."

"**The answer to the question, “what is nothing?” is actually exceedingly simple. “Nothing” is the possibility of “Everything.” It is absolute potential. Everything is merely absolute potential being actively actualized; imagined, dreamed. In this sense, I like to imagine the Universe as simply God’s daydream; we are His eyes and His hands. You can think of a blank canvas; anything can go onto that canvas, and anything can happen to that canvas. The outward expanse of the void; creation, or rather spacetime, is only a series of infinite possibilities. I do personally believe in the Multiverse, in the sense that for the Universe to be truly infinite, all possibilities must exist, so to that extent, if I choose Left, there is a variant of myself who chooses Right. I consider predetermination to be a strong possibility; am I really choosing Left, or is that the only possibility which hasn’t been taken? Is this version of myself simply an iteration that has yet to finish his cycle?

Conversely, for “Everything” to be truly everything, it must contain the conceptual essence of nothingness. This lends itself to the idea that “Everything” and “Nothing”, are codependent on one another; consorts, in a sense. Everything is the kinetic application of the infinite potential of Nothing.

Everything (אין סוף אוך), is the kinetic application of the infinite potential (אין סוף), of Nothing (אין).

In Kabbalistic terms, this “Nothing” is referred to by three names, excluding simply G-d; Ein, Ein Sof, and Ein Sof Aur. For a rough translation, these can be interpreted as, “Nothing/Without”, “Without End/Infinity”, and “Endless/Infinite Light/Creation.” Some Hermetic Qabalists refer to these as the essences of, “Being, Life, and Light.” It is from there that the first Sephirot emanates, Kether, the Crown. Kether is the Godhead, the unification of division. From Kether comes Chokmah – imagination without form, a spark of intuition without ignition. From Kether and Chokmah comes Binah – intuition which has ignited and gained cohesion. This separation of Chokmah and Binah is where we find the first divide."

#near death experience #death and dying #death #afterlife #philosophy #occultism #occult #moksha #absolution #kabbalistic #kabbalah #qabalah #qabbalah #qabalistic #Spotify

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ladietblonde · 7 months

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If you’re a uni student like me you’ll know that second-term midterm season is like the craziest week of the year, and I’m not talking like Tomorrowland, take-lots-of-MDMA-and-have-a-blackout-dance-party-and-chew-gum-until-your-jaw-moves-involuntarily-for-a-week type of crazy, I’m talking like suddenly you have five deadlines in five days and when it’s all over all you want to do is get drunk with frat boys you don’t like, eat a pizza, then buy all of the half-price Valentine’s chocolate at Duane Reade for yourself so you can gorge yourself until you don’t feel anymore then pass out at 9pm fully dressed with the lights on. Of course, at this time of year, nothing can go smoothly. Right before that last deadline you need to get a debilitating, life-shattering, existential crisis-inducing piece of news that destroys your entire Adderall-induced train of focus and forces you to run home, cry for three hours, and then use your last half-hour of time to somehow write the worst essay to ever exist and turn it in with two minutes to spare and with makeup just all over your face.

If you didn’t guess already, this is why I haven’t posted okay.

The thing about any chic girl, poor or not, is that she’s an absolute neurotic, unstable mess. Everything is planned, she’s a control freak, and when she’s forced to leave the house on a bad hair day, can’t possibly afford a pack of cigarettes, or has her plans destroyed in any way, she has a breakdown. This is where rock bottom comes in. Thankfully, for me, my breakdown fell conveniently on Valentine’s Day, so I spent some money on a bottle of sparkling rosé and a box of macarons, and enjoyed those whilst trying desperately to stay composed and sane for appearances (long-distance boyfriend, skype date, didn’t really want him to see me eating my feelings), and then the day after, I spent $6 on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, two Toblerone bars, and a can of Pringles which basically became my only friends/emotions for the weekend. Now that it’s all gone, I won’t have an appetite for the week (because my poor little stomach isn’t equipped to hold much more than egg whites and the occasional salmon or celery stalk) and it’ll be like this filthy little weekend never happened.

Thank god I buy all of my clothes in black, white, or grey so I can still have designer clothes, but don’t have to worry about having that one blouse that only matches with one pair of (too big) leather leggings.

There really is no moral to this story, except that the breakdown teaches me one thing every time – I need an emergency fund big enough to afford two bottles of wine, chocolate, ice cream, cigarettes, and pizza. At least.

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dear-wormwoods · 3 years

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i would love a more in depth analysis on kyle’s anxiety 👀

I talked about it a bit here, but basically I think Kyle has anxiety, however, as a nine year old, he views mental health struggles as selfish because 'other people have it worse' or 'everyone deals with [insert issue here]', so he's not about to admit to struggling.

In Buddha Box, he tells Cartman, "I got news for you, Cartman! Everyone has anxiety! Everyone gets nervous! Everyone is afraid being around people! Everyone has feelings they'd rather stay home alone! And you know what they do? They get over it. And they stop being a piece of shit!". And like... there's a lot to unpack there. Yes, everyone experiences anxiety sometimes, but not to the extent that Kyle is describing. Being afraid to be around other people isn't a universal experience, but Kyle assumes it is, because HE feels that way and he's unwilling to admit that it's a problem. He's particularly angry about the Buddha Box because he feels like Cartman is taking advantage of a diagnosis that he personally just deals with every day. Kyle is high functioning and feels that everyone else should be able to face life the same way he does.

In a way, he has a point - he says it in a dickish kind of way, yes, but he's not WRONG. The only way to overcome anxiety is to face it. Avoiding anxiety-inducing situations only feeds it and makes it worse. That's what makes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy particularly helpful for people with anxiety. It's not quite "getting over it" like Kyle says in the heat of the moment, but facing it does help to lessen it, and Kyle has always been good about facing his anxieties instead of hiding from them. He knows from personal experience that the Buddha Box will only make things worse for people, and Cartman IS taking advantage, which infuriates him.

Kyle's anxiety most obviously manifests as extreme guilt when he does something wrong or when he has reason to fear his parents. He also puts a ton of pressure on himself to be a good person and ruminates on situations where he knows he isn't in the right. In Toilet Paper he's plagued by nightmares due to guilt, in Good Times With Weapons he's so terrified by his mom that he's willing to kill Butters, in Crack Baby Athletic Association he doesn't appear to even SLEEP because he's so stressed out about the situation he's in, instead choosing to rant to Stan about it in the middle of the night, etc. He also has his pee phobia and germaphobia which was the main focus of Pee and further developed in Turd Burglars. In addition he's a perfectionist and gets really hung up on perceived flaws in himself, especially in The List. He also gets SO preoccupied with and worked up about what is/isn't reality in Tooth Fairy Tats that he ends up having an existential crisis. I'd also argue that his actions in Super Hard PCness are the result of post-traumatic stress from Ginger Cow, though that can't be proven. I've seen some people suggest he has scrupulosity OCD, which is also an anxiety disorder, though I'm not sure I would go that far personally, despite him being very morally driven. I think he has general anxiety, with some social anxiety thrown in during the later seasons after repeatedly being mistreated by his peers and the adults in town for things like making speeches or speaking his mind about something.

I think a lot of the blame for Kyle viewing struggling as selfishness or weakness can be put on Gerald. Gerald responds to Kyle's anxiety by being completely dismissive. In Oh, Jeez he says, "Kyle, you've gotta lighten the fuck up, buddy. Every day with you it's 'Dad, I feel guilty about this. Dad, I'm so confused about that.' You're a kid. You're supposed to just laugh and make fun of shit. Stop being such a pussy, okay pal? Fuck." This is in response to Kyle expressing anxious feelings to him and reaching out for help and guidance, and if that's how Gerald consistently treats him then it's no wonder he turns around and internalizes that. 'Other people have it worse than me so I just need to get over it' becomes his mantra which he then projects onto other people, like Stan or Cartman.

I know this doesn't seem to make a great case for him being a good counselor, but I actually think it does. Kyle understands the NEED to have guidance and support from adults, but it's not something he ever got from his father or anyone at school (Strong Woman dismissed him in Super Hard PCness, and Mr. Mackey completely failed to listen to his concerns in Taming Strange because he was too preoccupied with IntelliLink). I also think that through simply getting older and then taking psychology classes, he'd come to terms with his own struggles and start to recognize the validity of other people's feelings in addition to understanding the power of facing things head on instead of avoiding them.

So yeah, I hope that all makes sense!

#asks #south park #kyle broflovski #sp meta #meta #my meta #rambling about kyle

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carlyserrano · 4 years

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[ GEORGINA AMOROS, SHE/HER, CISFEMALE ] — [ CARLOTA “CARLY” SERRANO ] is a child of [ HYPNOS ] with the power of [ SLEEP MANIPULATION AND INDUCEMENT ] . they were born in [ 1998 ] and have been in nemean lion since [ 2016 ] . with the change, they [ ARE TRAINING IN ] the [ STANDARD ] role which makes sense since they’re usually [ HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS AND NAPPING ] . if you’d like to meet them try the [ SUN ] building . — kati / she & her / est / 18+

links: stats / pinterest .

background

carly spent most of her life knowing this : her mother died of sadness. it must be a terrible thing, to be a mortal that loves a god that deeply. so much that not being able to be with them tears you apart.

she doesn’t really remember her mother, she was only three years old when she took her own life, but carly still wishes she could have done something, that she could have been enough to make her happy – or at least to take away that overwhelming sadness.

as a result, carly was raised by her mortal grandparents. this accounts for some of carly’s old-fashioned taste in film, music and even fashion, raised by guardians fifty years her senior.

carly loved stories. whether her nose was stuck in a book or she was daydreaming herself, her mind was always exploring fantastical possibilities. sometimes daydreaming would take a step further into actual dreaming, which was something teachers started to struggle with in class. prone to fits of sleeping – which would be diagnosed as narcolepsy by her teachers – it became problematic. it was very difficult, pretty much impossible to wake her if she didn’t want to be woken up. as her powers grew, people around her would be prone to sleeping as well, but she didn’t understand how she was doing it or what exactly triggered it.

on carly’s thirteenth birthday, her grandparents sat her down to have “the talk” – they told her about her father’s identity and the true story behind what happened with her mother, finally thinking she was old enough to understand. it devastated her, how truly sad things had been for her mother and the circumstances surrounding her life. she honestly just wanted to be NORMAL. when her grandparents brought up nemean lion and suggested sending her there, carly refused. only thirteen, she didn’t want to travel to a new country and leave behind her grandparents. the changed scared her and she still held out hope of living a somewhere ‘normal’ life. she was legit just thirteen and scared to travel overseas and leave home...but with some new added trauma, too.

but things started to get worse from her going forward. children of hypnos are extremely powerful and carly didn’t know how to control any of the things that she was going through. her sleep patterns as a teenager became erratic, insomnia for days on end and then the inverse. after carly slept for a week straight, her grandparents felt like they had no choice. they couldn’t care for her and weren’t properly equipped to handle what she was going through, and when carly was seventeen, she had no choice but to pack her things and move to america.

despite missing her grandparents terribly, carly wanted to make the most of a bad situation. mentors at nemean lion taught her about her powers and more about how to use them – her ability to alter someone’s consciousness with a snap of her fingers. slowly, she started to become more confident in powers that she’d never thought she would be able to control. carly is the sort of person who tries desperately hard to make others happy, to look after them, and she considered switching to the hero track when she had a better handle on things, but she never got that far.

all of these people telling her how gifted she was definitely added to her confidence, but maybe...overdid it a little for a girl who had never felt special before, for someone that felt like an outsider and now was very much an insider with a lot of friends and like, the ability to have a social life now that she could maintain a normal sleep schedule. she really started to envision herself as this bold hero.

i’m having trouble putting this articulately and i keep rewriting this so i’ll just present this part. messily. naive, romantic carly falls for a fuckboy > loses her virginity then he totally ditches her like there was never anything between them > she’s pissed off and hurt so they get into a fight in the middle of the training room > she snaps her fingers to get him to shut up while her emotions are at an all time high and...he ends up in the infirmary in a coma. that was enough to teach her that her powers were not a good thing.

not only did she land the reputation of being the-person-most-butthurt-from-being-ghosted-ever but she also realized that her powers are STILL growing. she never thought she’d be capable of doing something like that, and she doesn’t know her own limits, and the realization scares her. she doesn’t feel like she’s capable of controlling her own emotions under pressure and she loses the confidence that she’s built – remaining in the standard track for the next two years or so.

homeboy likely did wake up from the coma as a result of NL having the best healers in the world but it took like some months, like he got his shit ROCKED.

so, that’s kind of in the past for her now, though it’s something she still struggles with, not knowing her own strength and being scared of letting her emotions get the best of her again. she now rarely uses her powers and is a bit scared of her own self, kind of just floating by in the standard track and only thinking of the hero track in like, her wildest daydreams. she just doesn’t really trust herself and doesn’t even know the full extent of her abilities, especially because it’s possible that as a child of hypnos she’s probably still developing more over time.

personality

FAIR: carly tends to stick to her morals, a distinct sense of what’s right and wrong. this can have some gray areas on the godly world, but she sees good guys and bad guys. due to her diplomatic world view, she’s pretty good at looking at a situation objectively and treats people and situations with fairness, apt to try to be the peacemaker in a friend group or during a disagreement. she also thinks that everyone inherently wants to be good and do good, so she’s inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and second chances going forward.

SOCIABLE: extroverted and loves being around people, once you get started on a conversation with her, she could go for hours. definitely not one to isolate herself, she’s happiest when hanging out with friends or at social gatherings, doing things with other people. if she is awake, she is probably either reading or talking to someone and i’m sure her friends think she could learn to shut up sometimes but she can’t help but share her every thought, really lacks a filter.

LOVING: carly will freely give her whole heart to people, i think ! she’s not afraid to put her heart on her sleeve for people and she honestly puts a lot of her own value in the happiness of others / needing to make others happy, so she’s pretty selfless about wanting to show great love and care for the people in her life. i think of carly as a pretty big-hearted person who is not afraid to put herself out there and say how she feels about someone or something and she will show great affection for her friends, who she considers family.

i suppose some people could feel smothered by her at times but truly her heart is just so full

NAIVE: often thinks what you see is what you get with people, which...rarely the case. but she’s just so inclined to believe in the goodness of people and give second chances that she can sometimes get in over her head. the fact that she sees things in such black and white can be hard for her, because she’s seen her powers do bad things and she’s inclined to believe that she herself might be bad, or that those powers are bad, and she refrains from using them. essentially, she still has so much to learn.

STUBBORN: once she gets an idea in her head, it is really hard to change carly’s mind or get her to waver on it. she can be a bit infuriating in an argument because of this, and this also tends to get her to believe that her very first judgement of people is correct. very firm in her ideas once she has her mind made up, to a fault.

ANXIOUS: literally has anxiety but tends to get really nervous about being liked or doing things wrong, overthinking the small stuff. and the big stuff, like her powers. when she gets overwhelmed, however, her favorite escape mechanism is simply to go take a nap and then she’ll deal with it when she wakes up. essentially prone to nervousness, which is why she can sometimes overcompensate by talking a lot or going to great lengths to make sure someone likes her or to make sure that person knows she likes them.

headcanons

honestly is so fulfilled by reading like, she’s the sort of person to get really attached to characters in books and feel like they are her best friends ! so, she gets a lot out of stories and spends a lot of her alone time a ) reading or b ) journaling/scrapbooking.

is a really meticulous record keeper ! she keeps track of her days and is probably the one snapping photos when hanging out and she keeps scrapbooks over the years at NL and beyond, has the most fun collection of colored paper on her shelf that you’ve ever seen.

big angel energy ? i think. she doesn’t really partake in drinking or smoking ( though she’ll have like, a glass of wine during dinner or before bed, she really likes white wines bc she basic ) and do be wearing her heart on her sleeve, a very trustworthy person, i would call her dependable in situations though she’s too naive to be your mom friend because her advice definitely does not come from wisdom – she can be a bit of a ditz/airhead, actually.

if she sees something shiny and pretty in nature, she will keep it. so, that means she’s got flowers pressed between books, pretty rocks lining her windowsill, and some colorful leaves probably crumpled up in the bottom of her backpack. just loves collecting STUFF.

lots of her clothing is either vintage/thrifted or sweatpants/sweatsuits. generally she will go for comfort first when picking out something to wear.

favorite ice cream is cookie dough and she could eat it all day.

takes a nap every day i feel like most of her friends know they probably can’t reach her between like 3pm-6pm because she is having her little nap.

i might give her another power at some point idk i read on the hypnos wiki that his children are mad powerful and sometimes develop additional abilities later in life so who knows but prob something cute with dreams idk

wanted connections

gal pals, girl besties, girl squad ?? i just think that women, essentially, and i feel like the vibes of movie nights and sleepovers together and painting each others nails and gossiping late into the night would be super wholesome and would make me feel at peace in my soul and such.

i also want like a brooke to her haley james !!! sort of. i want this vibe, where carly is 🌼👼🧸 and ur muse is kinda 💃🍷💋

also gal pals in the way that they kiss sometimes but it’s not serious or is it !!! show ur friends u love them by kissing them on the mouth !!!

that boy she put into a coma. idk if your character fits sort of that player archtype and would be kind of a dick / would ghost a girl after sex then maybe this is for you !! if you’d be down to have your character have been in a coma for like 2 months a couple years ago. she feels so so bad about it though.

an ex? probably on good terms so we can talk about why things didn’t work out but honestly break my heart and fuck me up because it probably would have been like, her first love and there’s still a bit of a soft spot even if it’s not the same i’m sure she just wants them to be so happy ! maybe she’s trying to like, set them up with one of her friends and it’s weird.

married couple friends. you know, that best friend she has where they kind of bicker like a married couple and they’re both really stubborn but there’s a lot of love and mutual respect there.

a mentor or something? maybe someone in the hero track that sees how much she’s struggling with her powers and puts in the extra work to help her train a little. she says she doesn’t care about being a hero but maybe they can see right through her a little bit.

someone she can actually help. i’d love a way for her to realize she can use her powers for good a little bit! maybe if your char suffers from insomnia, bad dreams, something in their trauma makes it hard for them to have a regular sleep schedule...she feels inclined to help them a little bit? this would take time and some build up because she’s not really comfortable using her powers, but i’d love a storyline where she learns how she can use this power positively like that and she helps someone sleep a little better.

yearning. i don’t know <3 carly can have a little crush on someone who doesn’t give a fuck about her. i feel like she’s the type to have little crushes on everyone she’s prob a little in love w all her friends.

old friendships. maybe something that fizzled out after the incident a couple years ago, like maybe they were close before but they were really pissed at her for what she did and the two of them were just never able to make up afterwards, maybe they were pals with the guy that she hurt !!

bad influence? she’s so LAWFUL and GOOD, i’d love for someone to help her see the grey areas a little bit and crack her out of her shell or something, just kind of soft. in a healthy way, maybe they bring out the best in each other but also maybe one day it gets taken too far !

#nlintro #* ☁️⠀ / ⠀ 𝙁𝙄𝙇𝙀𝘿 𝙐𝙉𝘿𝙀𝙍 ⠀ ﹕ ⠀ ❪ ⠀ intro. ⠀ ❫#suicide mention tw

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official-lucifers-child · 4 years

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hey peeps! if you have not seen the latest TS video and are planning on doing so, i suggest quickly reading through this because the video contains several potentially triggering and/or anxiety-inducing things:

this will not be tagged as “ts spoilers” because it deals with safety of people who have not yet watched it who might need these warnings. if you wish to avoid ALL TS SPOILERS and anything talking about the latest video no matter what, feel free to scroll past this.

lots of video game sounds, music, and voices!! there’s quite a few sudden sounds too!!

bright colours!!! and a few times there are flashing lights/sudden lights

this caused anxiety for me so i’m adding this in: textboxes with a lot of unspoken text. it’s easy to pause the video if you want to read them but i found it was rather anxiety-inducing for me at least

death mentions!! implied death!!!! and many fake scenarios dealing with death!!! i’m really surprised and kinda disappointed that thomas didn’t warn the viewers before the video like he did on others, because there were multiple parts in the video where even i had to pause and breathe for a moment just because it was stressful and the scenarios were at a few times extremely graphic, almost?

homelessness is discussed for a large chunk of it, and i know that that can be really triggering for some people

a lot of the things discussed are really deep and thought-provoking and i had an existential crisis about halfway through because my mind was just overloaded with tough questions and scenarios.

many times there were things patton and roman said that put down one opinion or another and their words could actually do harm because both of them were bringing up very astute moral standpoints and then denouncing other standpoints, calling people good or bad depending on them.

so if you’re concerned about any of the above points made but you still want to either watch it or know what happens, please feel free to reach out to me! or if you’d like more in-depth explaining and are okay with knowing some “spoilers” about certain events or things discussed. i will happily summarize/explain the video for you and/or give you time-stamps that you should avoid. i will reblog this with those time-stamps as soon as i can.

stay safe everyone.

#ts #sanders sides

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mermaidsarenotformen · 3 years

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All this effort and no gold

9:31 pm, 26 July 2021

I spent so much of my life focused on my ‘career’. Always been the nerd with the good grades.

Okay, my grades aren’t exceptional, I’m not on top of the list, but I did pretty well. However, in the last semester, amidst my existential and morality crisis, unsurprisingly, I received my first C - three of them to be exact. It was inevitable, all I did the whole semester was talk to boys on bumble - 130 of them, and, the big question, did I score a boyfriend out of all that talking? Nope, but I did get a make out and a date, and behold, aside from my labelled boyfriend from freshman year of college, that is all there is to my dating history. It is kind of sad when you think about it. All the effort I put into my education doesn’t get me in the honors list, and in the same way, all that effort put into men got me none.

I’m not sure where to channel all of my active energy into anymore. Sometimes, I’m glad I resumed writing, because at least this way, I get to put effort into something, even though no one reads what I write. However, once, I did get 2 likes on this diary entry of mine where I ranted about wanting to be rich, thought it was probably because of the very evident Ariana Grande gif in it.

Another thing that I put a lot of effort into this year was getting in shape. I usually weight around 53 kg when I move around and 55 kg when I’m on holidays. I have always wanted to weigh below 50 kg, and a few weeks ago I managed to hit just that mark, just to gain it all back the week my friend stayed over. Okay, maybe that’s on me. Anyway, the point is nothing I do ever seem to give me the return I want - except for that make out session with that guy, I had him over at my place with no expectations and it was by far the best 2 hours of early 2021. God I wish I could call him over again, but we fell out of contact and my pride won’t let me text him :(

***

These days, my internship is rewiring my brain into perceiving work differently. People love to romanticize working late hours, coffees, to do lists and cortisol induced office cubicles, but I don’t want any of that. I would rather work at a place where I get paid well, have fixed hours and a stress free, calm environment. I refuse to work after 6 pm, especially for a cooperate firm that, let’s be honest - doesn’t give a shit about me. Honestly, I wish I had my dream job instead. I would’ve been a writer, or a singer or a songwriter! Maybe then, I would have worked more. Anything that would help shine light on MY work, and MY skills to the whole world sounds a lot better than being tiny fragment of millions of workers to an MNC. Yeah, I’m just a little bit narcissistic like that. Deal with it. Or don’t.

I should probably just start a YouTube channel. I really want to put my content out there, and be famous and all, but....I’m shy and don’t really want the spotlight. It’s complicated. I want people to know of me for as long as I am good at something, but not when I fail. Sheesh. I’m a bit concerned my channel would flop, or even worse have no viewers at all. Ugh. I jut wanna be a youtuber, a writer and a singer-songwriter! A successful one at that! Is that too much to ask? I know it is.

Well, even if I did try, all my effort always leads to mediocracy anyway. Might as well just do everything that makes me happy. Maybe someday, I’ll be the best at something. I know not what it is yet, but I have hope I’ll know someday.

***

PS. The dude I went on a date with was out of town for a week, he’s back now, but he hasn’t asked me on a second date yet. I’m crying. Doesn’t he like me? I know we didn’t have sparks, but at least give it one more shot before giving up! Sigh. Maybe he is seeing other girls. I’ve checked my phone over 20 times for a text from him, but he’s sent me nothing. T-T.

** OMG Just take me on a second date, and maybe this time sparks will fly and then you can kiss me and ask me to be your girlfriend T-T. Universe make it happen! T-T **

#diary #journal #career #life #paths #sad #girl #lonely #thoughts #writing #writer #writeaway #writers on tumblr #college #school #homework #work #try #effort #success

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reflectionsforalostsoul · 4 years

Text

One

I don’t know what to say. What do you say when you feel like the world is ending? There are a million ways that life feels over. The pandemic. Climate change. Pollution. Lack of resources. Misinformation. Lack of values. Lack of morals. The list could stretch on.

I am not a scientist. I am just someone who started their existential crisis a few years ago, who now suspects that many others are caught up in their own crisis as well. How did I get there? That isn’t something I am ready to talk about, but I can tell you that I think it started for me the way it would start for most people. I lost my faith in humanity.

I had always been an optimist. Someone who always had hope for the future. I saw the good in people, but then again, don’t we all at some point? Yet life experience slowly erodes that youthful naivety that some of us are naturally imbibed with, and perhaps it was only a matter of time before that slipped away. It was like I had been stumbling around for years in some kind of haze that I can only liken to drug induced euphoria. And then they pulled out the rug and I was on my ass sober.

My perception grew sharper, and I tried to tune things out the way I had before but found myself unable to. I was noticing the people around me in ways I never had before.

Social media made me sick as I scrolled through my feed. Everyone carefully wording the things they shared to cast them in a positive light. The desperation for attention… Sharing countless memes to let the world know, Yeah, I’m funny. I’m a catch. You should know this. Everyone needs to make it known that they say what’s on their mind, consequences be damned. I mean, maybe they are blocking dear old Grandma from their stories, but everyone else is going to know exactly why you have a problem.

Maybe I am explaining it wrong. Let me just tell you exactly what I think.

People complain about the pandemic’s effect on mental health. Everyone feels cut off. Disconnected. But I’ve been feeling that way all along. I think people have been unaware of the great disconnection we are all experiencing and are just now realizing when confronted with social distancing alone we are all feeling.

Maybe it is just me. Maybe it is just my age. My Mother told me one day I would have a family and disappear into it. She said when you have kids that slowly life becomes more about them than anything else, and friendships fall by the wayside. This was told to me when I asked her why her friends didn’t visit anymore. I didn’t believe her. I was just a child and there was nothing more important to me than my friendships. The thought that my best friends wouldn’t always be a part of my life was ludicrous. I vowed to prove her wrong. That would not be my life.

My Mother had a funny way of doing that. I always knew she was an intelligent woman, but there were so many pearls like this that she shared with me throughout my childhood that would make me react in disbelief. So many times she was right, and now it’s too late to say it to her… But let me digress.

That’s not my life, you might say. My friends still come around. They still call. We have a great relationship! I am happy for you then. But I am not talking to you. I am talking to those people who are curating their online profiles with a fine tooth comb in an attempt to get recognition. Bad self esteem is easier to handle when you get positive reacts to a selfie. Anxieties about parenthood are easier to handle when you share an inspirational quote about how you need your children more than they need you. Your marriage isn’t so toxic when people are fawning over pictures of your special anniversary dinner together and saying things like, “You guys are so lucky,” or, “Look how happy they are!” Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think they are. Everyone else sees how happy you two are together. As a matter of fact, people constantly say how happy your entire family looks. Maybe you are focusing on the negative too much. You’ve gotta work on that. You have to be less negative. So, you share some more inspirational bullshit to your friends and family online. You take lots of selfies and caption them that you are loving your life or that you are #blessed.

It makes you feel a bit better. The tightness in your chest lessens a bit when your friends and family hit that like button. They wish they had your life. You are lucky. You are grateful.

I feel bad for the children though.

They will never experience what life was like before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every old person says this. Things were better in my day. It is almost a cliche. Unfortunately most people tend to view the past through a nostalgia filter. My Mom didn’t do that. She constantly told my siblings and I how lucky we were to be around for such a wonderful period of human history. She marveled at video games and happily played them with us. She was jealous of us getting to experience what she called the Golden Era of Disney. She made sure we appreciated the time we were alive in. I am aware of my children’s luckiness too. They have a world of information at their fingertips. Pictures and videos can happen at the touch of a phone screen ready to preserve all those precious memories. That’s nice. It really is. I would have died for a video camera in my childhood. Plus, they are living through meme culture. Such hilarity. So many funny vloggers. So many silly trends… What a time to be alive!

My kids do not ride the school bus though. They are considered car riders. The week they are with me I drop them off at school and the week they spend with their Dad his Mother drops them off. My kids get sad about this sometimes. The thought of riding the bus with their friends seemed like an adventure. They had heard funny stories from friends and even from their family. They wanted to experience it. So, I made it happen.

Those young bright eyes were wide with excitement as they waited for the school bus. They had had to get up way earlier that morning since a bus route takes much longer than me driving them directly, but they didn’t mind. They were hopeful. Their morning held so many possibilities. Their joy at the novelty of it all made my chest swell with happiness. It lessened my nervousness about it. Yes, bus rides could be fun, but there is always potential for harassment or bullying. That morning I pushed my anxiety aside and focused on the moment, tried to live in it with them. We laughed as we said goodbye that morning. I could feel the excitement. For a moment I was transported back to my own childhood and that flood of adrenaline on the first day of school. I couldn’t wait for them to come home and tell me all about it.

That afternoon I picked them up from school. There wasn’t enough time for them to ride in the afternoon, not with homework and dinner prep. So, I waited in the car rider line at the school drumming my fingers on the steering wheel in anticipation. I kind of expected happy little hops towards my car when they came out the door, but when I saw them it was a bit more reserved. They looked sleepy and ready to put their long day behind them. I was kind of surprised, but it happens like that sometimes. School can be exhausting.

Immediately they relaxed when getting in the car, sinking down with exhaustion. I turned on the music and we drove. They said they were tired from getting up so early. I had forgotten about that. So, I asked the question I had been waiting all day to ask, “Well?”

They both gave me a shrug. I was confused. I expected to hear stories of them chatting with friends. Not the disinterested attitude they were displaying. It took the whole ride home to figure it out. Apparently they didn’t do much talking with their friends because everyone has a cell phone nowadays and there were sixty little faces glued to their phone screens the entire time. My children were feeling disappointment but also jealousy. They wanted phones too and didn’t understand why they weren’t allowed to have one yet. This wasn’t how I had expected the day to go. I sensed opportunity in that moment. Those pearls of wisdom my Mother gave me in my childhood? I was determined to do the same. Our car rides were where we had our most serious conversations because there are no distractions to the kids. It is one of the only times I have their undivided attention, so I spoke.

“Babies? I am really sorry for how the bus ride turned out. It wasn’t what you were expecting, and I know that you’re feeling frustrated, but this just shows why you don’t need a phone yet. You’ve just seen it yourselves.” My son looked angry at my words. He has been asking for a phone for several years and I sometimes wonder if he feels embarrassment at not having one like all of his other friends. I continued before I could be interrupted and lose my train of thought.

“My childhood has lots of happy memories. When I am sad sometimes I think back to other happy times in my life and it helps me to get through the day. I have so many memories with friends and family that I treasure-”

“But if I had a phone I could record those memories,” my daughter interrupted angrily from the back seat.

“You are missing my point, let me finish,” I admonished her. “Lots of people are missing out on good times and fun because of their phones. You all don’t see it that way but it’s the truth. People get addicted to their phones, and not just children. Adults are addicted too. They miss out on everything happening around them. When I go to visit Grandma I always feel frustrated because she isn’t paying any attention to me, her face is buried in her phone. Apps that you would use are MADE to be addictive. There are studies about this. You get a rush of dopamine, your happiness chemical, when you get things like reacts from your friends. People are becoming so dependent on it that they are creating any true happiness in their lives. They are slaves to their phones. It isn’t just social media, phone games are made the same way. They pay people big bucks to manufacture games in a way that leaves you coming back for more, over and over. It is how they make money. People pay to speed up the reward systems in these games, and it is like being manipulated.”

“I wouldn’t get addicted,” my son muttered angrily beside me.

“That’s what everyone thinks, but it happens slowly. You know how we do family dinner? Do you ever see me on my phone?”

“No,” they replied in unison.

“Exactly. I think it is the pinnacle of rude behavior to sit down to dinner and ignore everyone around you because you are playing on your phone. That isn’t how you create good memories. When you have a bad time you think back on the good times, right?”

“Yeah,” replied my son.

“And those good times involve your friends and family, right?”

“Yeah.”

“When you are going through something hard you are going to look back on times where you felt joy, or when you shared laughs with your friends over something funny that happened. You will never think back to hours spent on a video game, especially a phone game.”

“But I have had fun playing online with my friends! You’re wrong,” my son quickly pointed out.

“Yes, I can see some good memories happening in those instances, but for the most part you are playing alone. Those good times are few and far between. You might have had a laugh over something happening on the game, but how long will you hold that memory dear?”

What I should have said before we arrived home, and maybe it didn’t occur to me to say at the time, I love looking back on experiences with people where we had deep conversations. Where we were discussing important things. Where our young minds were filled with the wonder of infinite possibilities. Do I hear my children having conversations like that? I do not. There is hardly any depth. Before you say that this is me being old and being disconnected from the youth, let me say that I am not the only one who had deep conversations with their friends in childhood. You cannot say that you never pondered the meaning of life and what your role in it was.

Are children not having as many of these conversations because we are not teaching them that skill? Or are they more guarded because there are so many more ways to experience bullying these days? Do they feel unsafe to open up? I know that I am making mistakes as a parent myself. My son told me that he wanted to be a famous youtuber one day, and I couldn’t stop myself from showing that I was unimpressed with his aspiration. I asked my son why he no longer wanted to be a writer and said matter of factly that it was a terrible idea. I shut a door between us before it had even fully opened. I didn’t mean to, and have apologized, but I know that I will never get it back. How can he open up to me when I disregarded something so important to him? I didn’t mean to do it, and I regret it.

It wasn’t just the job itself though, it was my motherly instincts.

My children have not had to deal with online abuse yet. They have never been bullied in that way. They simply cannot fathom how nasty people can be when cloaked in anonymity. How many online influencers have killed themselves in the past year? Several that I have read about.

Eventually my son did ask why I had a problem with it, and I finally got to explain a little. I mentioned the nastiness of online comments, the suicides, and the depression that these people struggle with. My son assured me that he could just ignore nasty comments. I’m not so sure.

My son is definitely funny. He talks to himself while playing video games frequently and I can hear him from the other room. I am constantly chuckling at his antics and sound effects. Do I think people could appreciate his videos? Definitely. I love his commentary. Do I think people will be jerks to him anyway? Yep. That’s what people do. It is their outlet for their hate and rage in life. People take it out on others online, because when you act like a jerk online there are rarely any lasting consequences. Maybe a temporary ban or mute, but then these online bullies very often have multiple accounts so that they can continue their bad behavior unimpeded.

I try to reflect on my motives often. I find myself wondering about others motives all of the time, so I try to scrutinize myself in the same way. Because another big problem that I notice in life is that people are not searching for introspection and very often do not understand their own motivations. People lie to themselves constantly, and if there is one thing I am sure of it is this, if you cannot trust yourself, how can you trust anybody?

Am I being a terrible parent at this moment? I definitely feel I screwed up in my response to his aspiration that he shared with me. Is this me being overprotective and stopping him from pursuing his passions? How much damage have I done by my initial response? I want my child to feel he can talk to me, and I just made a common parent blunder. Every generation of children feels that parents just don’t understand. I want to do better.

Fame is fleeting and leaves you under the microscope of public scrutiny. I would never want that for myself, and cannot imagine my son dealing with those pressures. Way too much importance is placed upon external validation. Yes, it’s nice to have but I think it is much better to validate yourself. Don’t get me wrong, my Mother validated me constantly. She made me feel so intelligent, so witty, and so wise. I think she was the greatest for this, but it is necessary to validate one’s self as well. When you are dependent entirely on other people’s praise and all of your self worth comes from the attention of others you are destroying your own resilience. Sure, people preach self love constantly these days, but I don’t see it working too well in most cases. People are bashed for being prideful, or maybe they were prideful about the wrong things. Why are you so focused on loving yourself at any weight? Don’t you know that skinny shaming is a thing? Don’t you know that your outside is irrelevant? What matters is on the inside! Insert eyeroll. These aren’t my thoughts, but just an example. Everyone has an opinion and the internet gives them a place to share it. There will always be someone who is critical of your view. Preach self love all you want, but it is still so hard to come by.

Have I helped equip my children with resilience or self love? They seem to struggle with it. Have I praised them enough? Do I feel that they are mentally strong? Not as strong as I would like, but I fear the ways they could attain mental strength. I have experienced a lot of rough times in my life. I have overcome adversity. I have been at the bottom and drug myself back to the top. Is that the only way to build mental strength or resilience? Through pain? Everyone struggles in life. Will my children’s struggles help them to grow to be strong people or will it leave them a broken person constantly questioning their own validity?

No one knows the future. How do we know that our methods are right? We can only proceed based on our own life experiences and knowledge. It is so terrifying not to know what the future holds. What seemingly inconsequential things did you say or do that will reverberate through your child’s life and affect them in ways you cannot begin to imagine? Hindsight is easy. Staring into the unknown future is much harder. It is incredibly difficult to face. Every single person is capable of causing untold amounts of ripples that expand into society and spread throughout the word.

Do you ever think about your own ripples?

Some people are aware of it and try to send out good ones. They try to pay it forward whenever conceivable. Maybe they pay for the person behind them’s meal in line at a drive through restaurant. Maybe they bring donuts for their coworkers. Maybe they stop and help people alongside the road who need help changing a tire. There is plenty of good still in this world. It isn’t all bad. But are we as a society focusing enough on the bad ripples? The bad energy we are sending out into the world?

So few seem to care these days. Humanity as a whole is selfish. It isn’t your fault, that is our nature. It is how we survive. But deep down how many times have you made an exception for yourself because you are special, you are you? The pandemic has really opened my eyes to people’s inherent selfishness. How dare you try to inconvenience me by requiring me to wear a face mask? I don’t care that it is mandated, and that you are simply doing your job, I am going to harass and abuse you! You may not be in support of wearing a mask on a personal level, but I don’t care about that. I am not going to live my life in fear like all of you sheeple. So, be prepared, I will hit you. I will spit on you. I will shoot you. Seems dramatic, right? But this has happened over and over again in this past year.

I want to ask where is the humanity, but I am beginning to fear that this IS humanity.

So often I struggle with wondering, is humanity worth saving? If this is the end-times do we deserve another chance? What makes us redeemable? The only answer that I can come up with is love. We are redeemable because of love. Maybe you have a better answer than me. Love is the only thing that I can come up with at this moment, and even that is hard to hold on to. I feel myself spiral and losing faith in humanity on a daily basis almost, and I have to make a conscious effort to remember the good things. Those loving moments that we are capable of.

The animals that we rescue. The children that we pray for. The couples who still love each other after many trials or years. The art inspired by it, or the music. Love is a universal feeling. It can unite us, though we face the ever present danger of hate dividing us. I am so past hating stuff. I can tell you that I intensely dislike our former president, but do I wish his death like I have seen others do? I do not. I think we have a world full of damaged people searching for meaning, and there is no manual. We are all trying our best and are making decisions based on our own life experiences. What is right to you is wrong to someone else. It doesn’t mean anyone is wrong. It is just perspective. There is no other way to view it that I am aware of. We all have different perspectives, our own personal narratives of events. That is just what humanity does. We are not a collective consciousness. So many people try to make things black and white, when really there are nothing but varying shades of grey. Had I lived your life and been through the things you have been through I might feel very differently. This is just my opinion on the matter, based upon my own life experiences. I don’t hate you for feeling differently than me. I just get sad sometimes that we struggle to find common ground. I want us to succeed. I want humanity to persevere.

How do I explain everything that is on my mind lately without making you feel it is endless rambling? I know this started with a list of things that make it feel like the world is ending, and I could go on forever. Do I drone on and on, or should I find some semblance of structure? I do not mean to be a bore, but there is so much to address. Is this a diary? Is this to my children? I am unsure. Maybe it is just for me. Maybe I just need to find the words that can make a difference. I don’t know about you but for quite a while now I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that time is running out and there is something I must do. I hope that by trying to organize my thoughts I can figure out what it is.

#existential despair #diary #what does it all mean #is this the end?#unfiltered #not trying to start anything #deep conversations #disconnected #firsttimetumblr

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tomhiddleslove · 5 years

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There's no denying that Tom Hiddleston’s got range. He’s done Shakespeare, played a swaggering action hero, depressive romantic vampire, and an Asgardian anti-hero. But you might not be familiar with his fruitful early collaborations with The Souvenir director Joanna Hogg, whose minimal aesthetic would seem to run counter to Hiddleston’s flashier roles. In fact, Hogg ‘discovered’ Hiddleston, who had only starred in TV movies and serials before being cast at 25 in her debut feature, 2007’s Unrelated, where he plays the older woman protagonist’s tenuous love interest, Oakley.

Centered on Anna, a married forty-something, Unrelated is about a sort of mid-life crisis when the structures that dictate middle-life seem to break down. In this case, it’s a shaky marriage back in London that sends Anna to Tuscany to join her long-time friend’s family retreat. Turned off by the drab married couples her own age, she gravitates towards the younger people. There’s cruelty to his insular hedonism, but Anna is nevertheless drawn to Oakley’s vivacity and mild suggestiveness.

Oakley is calculating, arrogant, magnetic and unhinged in the way only monied youth can be. He’s eager to prove his liberation, recklessly driving a borrowed car through sun-kissed pastures as if in a music video, and quick to bury the fault following the inevitable crash. Used to commanding his underlings, in Anna he sees the opportunity for a novel type of seduction. At the dinner table he’s fascinated with Anna’s confessions of teenage rebellion, measuring her up before later challenging her into taking shots, smoking spliffs, and communing in his mayhem.

His staid, self-serious father challenges his fledgling alpha male status. When he expresses concern over his son’s smoking, Oakley retorts with aristocratic bravado: “I’d say it was none of your business, sir!” These moments of defiance happen constantly, and Hiddleston captures his exploits with the satisfaction of an unbroken winning streak in a game of chance.

Part boy part man, Oakley’s body language suggests juvenile restlessness, slouching to suggest boredom or indifference, or shot through with adrenaline as he pushes a shopping cart in full sprint. Often bare-chested, or donning an unbuttoned white shirt, he wields his physicality intimately and with playful ambiguity. He leans dubiously close into Anna while reaching over the breakfast table, takes hold of her bikini-clad body as a shield in a mud-slinging battle. The build-up to a physical encounter is nearly certain, but when Anna invites him to spend the night with her, he’s uninterested. His lips curl up to a broad, knowing smile, and with faux-gentile airs declares, “I’d better not,” effectively ending whatever romance presumed.

Hogg’s next feature, 2010’s Archipelago, focuses on Hiddleston’s Edward, who is older, more sympathetic, and lacking Oakley’s punkish tendencies. He is, however, similarly affluent and scrambling to assert a self-fashioned identity. Edward is heading to Africa for nine months as a volunteer sex educator, prompting a reunion with his family at their home in the Scilly Isles. He intends to make a difference even if his efforts only impact a single child, he explains enthusiastically at a mountainside picnic to an unmoved audience. His mother is skeptical, and his neurotic sister, Cynthia, is bitter at her brother’s morally superior whims.

Edward’s neat sweaters and tightly wound scarves mockingly suggest an incompatibility with the demands of African volunteer work. Nevertheless, he assumes a certain rarefied worldly purview of material indifference and generosity. A spat breaks out when he suggests they invite Rose, the pretty in-house cook, to join them for dinner. Cynthia maintains that Rose is an employee and uninterested in such a gesture, which escalates into a heated string of personal attacks.And so the drama unfolds, as a slow picking apart of the family’s dysfunctions through the observational gaze of Hogg’s camera, which seems to stumble upon at-first-glance banal interactions to reveal hidden vulnerabilities.

Archipelago marks the peak of Hiddleston’s naturalistic abilities, accentuated all the more because Hogg is not one to explain away the mystery of her characters. Edward is sweet and well-intentioned, but he’s also mired with self-doubt, and his silence speaks more to his conflicted state of mind than his conversation. As he reads a letter from Rose signalling her early departure, Hiddleston’s mouth forms a guilty pout. His gaze is gentle and solemn as he reflects on the clear violence that exists between his family, indicating regret and resignation to undisclosed ends off-screen.

Hiddleston’s minor role as chic real estate broker in 2013’s Exhibition is like a seamless, mature version of Oakley and Edward. Nameless, his character assuredly gesticulates with one hand as he explains the showing process, his body leaning back against a chair in cocksure relaxation. Meanwhile D, one of the home sellers, leans anxiously against the table as she lists off her concerns. Hiddleston’s scenes make up less than 10 minutes of the film’s runtime, but his role carries shades of Oakley’s self-amused spunk minus the desperation. There’s a sleek, dry humour to Hiddleston’s fully-formed real estate agent, who’s skilled in delivering cringe-inducing news to his clients in a suave manner.

This trifecta of performances would seem to trace Hiddleston’s on-screen coming-of-age, from rambunctious student to twentysomething in the throes of existential crisis to manicured business type. An air of performative sophistication runs through these performances, whether it be for impressing a woman, expressing commitment to a set of values, or putting skeptical clients at ease. Hiddleston does pomp and cool well, but his work with Hogg shows this as a work of compensation, adding a delicate layer of humanity beneath the veneer.

#tom hiddleston #hiddles #twhiddleston #Joanna Hogg #Archipelago #unrelated #Exhibition #2007 #2010 #2013 #Edward #Oakley #British film #little white lies #tom hiddleston article #link to original article in source

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automaticmoons · 4 years

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Today, not only the beautiful but also the ugly becomes smooth. The ugly also loses the negativity of the diabolical, of the uncanny and terrifying, and is smoothened out, a formula for consumption and enjoyment. It lacks entirely the fear-and terror-inducing gaze of the Medusa which petrifies everything. The ugly that was used by the artists and poets of the fin de siècle possessed something abysmal and demonic. The surrealist politics of the ugly served the purpose of provocation and emancipation; it marked a radical break from inherited patterns of perception. Bataille saw in the ugly possibilities for overcoming boundaries and for liberation. For him, it offers access to transcendence: “No-one doubts the ugliness of the sexual act. Just as death does in sacrifice, the ugliness of the sexual union makes for anguish. But the greater the anguish … the stronger the realisation of exceeding the bounds and the greater the accompanying rush of joy.” The essence of sexuality, according to this, is excess and transgression. It delimits consciousness. This is what constitutes its negativity. Today, the entertainment industry exploits the ugly and disgusting, making it consumable. Disgust is originally a ‘state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of selfpreservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which what is in question is, quite literally, whether "to be or not to be"’. The disgusting is the non-consumable par excellence. The disgusting has an existential dimension also for Rosenkranz. It is the other of life, the other of form, putrefaction. A corpse is a scandalous phenomenon because it still has a form, although it is in itself formless. Due to the still existing form, it retains the semblance of life, despite being dead: ‘the negation of the beautiful form of an appearance through a non-form originating in physical or moral decay […]. The appearance of life in what is dead in itself is what is infinitely repulsive in disgust.’ The disgusting as the infinitely repulsive evades any form of consumption. The disgusting which is today presented in the ‘Dschungelcamp’, lacks any negativity that might trigger an existential crisis. It is smoothened out into a form for consumption. »

Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Chapter 1, Polity Press, 2018.

So I think that’s in many ways an answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for years: why does the complacency with violence in today’s series not only repulse me but actually make me mad?? Like it’s violence but robbed from its complexity (contrary to what I perceive from the violence that happens in horror movies), it’s there to give a strong but simple and literal emotion that is in fact an integral part of the general apathy and passivity of the viewer. So there’s absolutely no interrogation on human and political relationships that can be taken out of it, contrary to what the producers would like you to believe. Because there’s no alterity in this; as Han further discusses, the smooth in beauty (or ugliness consumed as beauty) is an autoerotic fascination; there’s no distance and no place for the roaming of imagination. Those filmmakers or even book authors (particulary in fantasy, a very literal and pictorial genre) may genuinely think they’re producing something different, something subversive, which stirs reflection about humanity or death or monstrosity, but the violence and ugliness they write about don’t serve any artistic statement. They’re only those of the consumerist void and alienation that hit you right in the face, but (and that’s the obnoxious part of it) disguised under a discourse of Complexity and You Have To Show Realistic Violence, That’s What Torture Is Like, and In The Middle Ages Women Were Treated Badly. And it’s become such a norm that people will tell you “yeah some GoT scenes were unbearable but you know it’s a good show anyway, I was totally able to get over it” and will be surprised when you say you just can’t watch that kind of things and they’ll think you’re childish or a prude or whatever

#personal #capitalism #Consumption #digital society

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insanityclause · 5 years

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There’s no denying that Tom Hiddleston’s got range. He’s done Shakespeare, played a swaggering action hero, depressive romantic vampire, and an Asgardian anti-hero. But you might not be familiar with his fruitful early collaborations with The Souvenir director Joanna Hogg, whose minimal aesthetic would seem to run counter to Hiddleston’s flashier roles. In fact, Hogg ‘discovered’ Hiddleston, who had only starred in TV movies and serials before being cast at 25 in her debut feature, 2007’s Unrelated, where he plays the older woman protagonist’s tenuous love interest, Oakley.

#Tom Hiddleston #Joanna Hogg #Unrelated #Archipelago #Exhibition #muse

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romanticslimecreature · 4 years

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I'm absolutely not about to go all "You have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty" because A) IQ is bullshit, and B) I understand that not everyone will like the show and I don't consider myself better than them.

That being said, I feel like a lot of people who would enjoy the show are turned away by the fanbase, particularly the vocal portion that is Like That.

What if I told you that Rick and Morty is not just about farting in space? There is that, sure, but there's also tragedy, funny fourth wall breaking, and character depth. And what if I told you that the infamous Pickle Rick episode was actually *very explicitly* about how Rick turning himself into a pickle to avoid family therapy was selfish and an overall bad idea?

You don't even have to be "smart" to enjoy the show. A lot of the sci fi aspect is literally just "they can go these places because technology" and "weird stuff exists because infinite universe/multiverse," so I don't know why people act like you have to have a physics background to follow it.

I know not everyone is going to like the show. All I'm saying is that if you like morally grey characters and dark comedy that is self-aware and at times existential-crisis-inducing, you might not hate it. I know Rick and Morty has an incredibly annoying fanbase, but the show itself is so much better than that.

#slimeposts #look at the end of the day dark comedy isn't for everyone #and the show isn't even for everyone who likes dark comedy #but if more people who can tell the difference between a protagonist and a good guy look past the fanbase and into the show #i think quite a few more people would like it #let me know if i need to tag anything #i'm not putting this in the main show tag because i don't want to poke a beehive #i almost typed 'hive nest' and that's all the proof you need that you don't have to be smart to enjoy this show

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alistairlane · 5 years

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On Civil War

Throughout all of history, people have been made subject to ruling orders by that they have deployed what, in martial terms, is called the “divide and conquer” strategy. The tactic seeks to create internal schisms within a community in order to atomize its members. Once people have become isolated from each other, they can be integrated into a political body that has rendered their natural antagonism inoperative and can actually enforce the very repression that the ruling order that they necessarily did not want to become subject to sought to carry out. That sovereignty had been constituted by a process that induced social disintegration had resulted in the absurdity of that the potential crisis of civil war had more or less become a normalized state of affairs within most nation-states. Contrary to popular belief, civil war has not been regarded as a crisis that poses an existential threat to whatever powers there are that may be; it has, rather, provided the various regimes who have sought to deploy the divide and conquer strategy in the formal constitution of a state with the semblance of legitimacy in that their rule of law has appeared to have been justified by that they have actually needed to respond to the very crisis that their attempts to secure power by such measures has inevitably created. The threat of civil war provides a nation-state with the justification for the suspension of the rule of law and the deployment of the extra-juridical forms of repression that have come to be called “emergency powers”. Because no person can agree to become subject to a state that seeks to divide and conquer its populace, and, because most nation-states have historically deployed such strategies in their establishment, what we have come to understand as the “rule of law” has not generally been legitimated by the faith that a populace has in a state’s constitution as according to what Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized as the “Social Contract”; it has, rather, been established by what nation-states have enacted during states of emergency. The exception to the rule of law has become the law itself. In order to prevent the more nefarious parties engaged in the already dubious battle for global dominance from securing power in the absolute, we need to actively disengage from all that is unduly divisive within our respective communities, refuse to be integrated within any social order that seeks to subjugate its prospective constituents by exploiting social disintegration, and present a legal challenge to the dictates that have been enacted by suspending the rule of law during states of emergency.

All of this is, of course, easier said than done. When a nation-state is no longer capable of maintaining the semblance of legitimacy, which, in most cases, is to say, that when its ruling order is no longer capable of deceiving its populace, those who seek to restore decorum will, in desperation, resort to overtly violent tactics, such as the carrying out of political assassinations or the deployment of the military, or attempt to introduce the threat of violence within communities that they believe have lost their faith in their authority. As people are naturally inclined to create and participate in communities that are freely associated, the threat of violence undermines their original basis. Free association is defined by Google Dictionary as “the forming of a group, political alliance, or other organization without any constraint or external restriction”. As a theoretical concept, it has been explored by both Marxists and Anarchists. I interpret “free association” as signifying the ideal circumstances of any given social relationship wherein all parties are free from coercion. I see it as not only being the precept upon which human relations are naturally established and the common inspiration for the participation in what we have come to call “politics”, but, also, the revelatory principle that can make civilization consummate. To substantiate free association is to take part in a political project that furthers the total liberation of all of humanity. Because I hold these truths to be self-evident, I have been called an “idealist”. To this, I respond with that there is no reason to situate social relationships upon anything but ideal grounds. As no person can agree to become subjugated through coercion, that they are free from it is always necessarily demanded in any given situation. The freedom from coercion is a natural right that determines the conditions of the democratic project as a whole. That people should be freely associated is not a mere utopian reverie; it is the requisite condition for democracy to occur.

As the principle which I have invoked is just simply cogent, it ought to be easy to affirm. Because most ruling orders have had years to experiment with just how to enact the variegated set of procedures that effectuate subjugation, however, to refuse to participate within a society that renders solidarity inoperative now means to forgo one’s right to exist. Life must be qualified by its civic merits in order for most ruling orders in most nation-states to consider for it to be of value. To refuse to become subject to the unsanctioned dominion of the nation-state has become a peril wherein a living person’s status as such is let to be called into question. To relinquish one’s status as a person who is regarded as a “citizen” now means to let oneself be considered as an “enemy combatant”. While most nation-states do not have the legal jurisdiction to either deprive political radicals of their citizenship or to banish them from the political sphere, their isolation is still culturally enforced. Those who are aware of our political situation and willing to change it have become outcasts. As much as I suspect for moralizing to risk engendering a cult of martyrdom, I must, here, insist that we are compelled to refuse to engage in or sanction either the violence or dissension imposed by most nation-states by both that our freedom is defined by the status of the natural rights of others and that we ought to attempt to create the best of all possible worlds while we are here on Earth. To express solidarity means to be willing to be regarded as an outcast and to defend the unjustly marginalized. It is only through its ecstatic disclosure that we will see a world that could, at all, be considered to be utopian.

In spite of that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on the 10th of December in 1948, the attempts to effectively utilize human rights legislation, international law, or to repeal the wanton abuses of jurisprudence that comprise the extra-juridical protocols which apparently legitimate the excessive use of force by most nation-states have done little to either significantly invoke human rights or restrain most nation states from actualizing what are often violent campaigns more or less without the consent of their respective populaces. The legal theory behind what, in The State of Exception, Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, called the “state of exception” is also fairly obscure. Political theologist and “crown jurist of the Third Reich”, Carl Schmitt, delineated his defense of sovereignty in his seminal thesis on dictatorship, Dictatorship. While his theory may be difficult to understand because he was a jurist who specialized in legal theory, I would allege that, because almost no person would be likely to agree with him, his work has been intentionally obfuscated. In spite of that I do think that the political works of Giorgio Agamben are a proper antithesis to what Carl Schmitt has postulated, his political philosophy is unfortunately no less arcane. We are in dire need of a practical theory of Law that can substantially situate its constituents within a paradigm that posits both natural and human rights conclusively. By this, I do not merely mean to suggest that either natural or human rights ought to exist; I am stating that they do in order to make it emphatically evident that they necessarily demarcate just what laws are passed and how. Human rights transcend the nation-state just as any good ideas ought to transcend any form of botched compliance. Natural rights exist by that they are always necessarily demanded in every given situation. Liberation is inexpropriable. That we should seek to interpret the Law in our favor is not just radical zeal; it is an honest assessment of our current political situation.

So, what, then, remains to be said for “civil war”? While it is clearly the case that attempts at subjugation will necessitate some form of revolt, I do not think that we should agree to their terms. Because, in most nation-states, we have the legal precedents to lay claim to either free association or the freedom from coercion, the attempt to reduce the status of political dissidents to one where their right to life can be called into question, or, to include them in the civic sphere by their very exclusion as what has come to be called “bare life”, can be effectively countered by an appeal to all that is veritable of the democratic project as a whole. While such a strategy may occasionally have to rely upon the invocation of the rights of citizens, I think that human rights legislation ought to transcend the confines of the nation-state. While, in order to put such a plan of action into operation, we may have to rely upon the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, I do not think that international law should ideally be conceptualized as it has been enacted by the United Nations. To state my position as an Anarcho-Pacifist in favor of nonviolent revolution does indicate that I am willing to engage in civil war. It does not, however, as per the terms which have been offered, mean that I am willing forfeit my “unalienable” natural rights. As the threat of civil war serves as the pretext for martial law, the hysteria which it inspires needs to be allayed. Because most ruling orders have secured power through their response to the very crises that their projected reign has necessarily incited, almost all of the radical transformation of the nation-state from a sovereignty to a democratic entity has been inspired by some form of civil disobedience or another. Nearly all of the lofty ideals of the Liberal democratic project have been antithetical to the structure of the nation-states in which they were born. The demand for free association does not produce a political crisis in that it presents the nation-state with a social configuration that can rival that of the established ruling order; it, rather, resolves the political crisis that has been imposed upon the populace by that, in most cases, the ruling order has been established through subjugation. The substantiation of the freedom from coercion, free association, solidarity, and nonviolent revolution does not imperil negating the democratic process; it can, rather, bring it to its apotheosis. I do not seek to destroy civilization by participating in a vaguely eschatological project that foretells a common war of all against all; I merely intend to reify what has become sanctimonious of it. Liberation, the realization of egalitarianism, and world peace are not just possible; they are the only ends that any person who is sincerely engaged in politics should seek to actualize.

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wastefulreverie · 6 years

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Ectober Week 2018

This is published two days early since Tumblr mobile screwed up but I'm just gonna leave it so shhh

Day One: The Witching Hour

Words: 4648

Warnings: Kinda creepy? Pretty safe. One curse word.

Honestly, if Danny had to keep track of every little tiny thing he'd learned about the nature of paranormal entities since he became one himself, he'd have a very long and existential crisis inducing list. Most of it was little things, like holy water actually hurt him. It'd been a little crushing to learn that his entire existence wasn't worthy enough to be considered natural, that he was one of the 'evil' forces repelled by the will of good. Though, he does admit he expected it nonetheless; he was a ghost hybrid, so in the eye of nature, he was physically tainted, despite the fact that he had a strong loyalty to his moral compass. But again, that was only one of the small facts he'd learned from what it's like to be a part of the world of ghosts and unearthly creatures.

Ghost fights could occur any time of the day, but Danny often noticed that the night was much busier than the daytime for tedious invasions of the town. When he was new to ghost fighting, he assumed that it was much easier to use the portal unnoticed at night, since his parents were asleep and out of the lab. But as time went on Danny seemed to notice that ghosts were almost more... nocturnal? Even though they didn't sleep, it was like their natural clocks were prone to more activity during nighttime. He certainly had no trouble getting to sleep at night, seeing as he was always so exhausted after a day of school and daytime ghost attacks, but he wondered if it weren't for his human social life keeping him diurnal, if he would be naturally nocturnal instead. He couldn't really spare any sleep, though, so it wasn't like he was extremely eager to test his theory out by completely destroying his already irregular sleep patterns.

After he came to that conclusion, he approached his next revelation about what really made ghosts more active at night. Over a period of a few weeks of constant night attacks, he started noticing something. The ghosts he fought at night were stronger than the ones he fought during the day, and he... was also stronger at night. It had taken him a while to figure it out, since he hadn't really noticed that his opponents were stronger and he also had enhanced strength during those hours, but once he realized it, he couldn't ignore the sensation of strength that he acquired at night. It was weird – how much more refreshed and energized he felt at night, like his body had gotten some kind of natural power-up. And once he recognized that sensation, he realized that it didn't happen during the entire night – it only occurred between certain hours. He started keeping track of specific times and decided that it only happened between 3 and 4 AM, the most popular hour for attacks. Of course, none of it was a coincidence.

“Literally anybody could've told you that, Danny,” Sam rolled her eyes. They were sitting in her basement, and Danny had randomly brought it up after thinking about it for a few days. “The Witching Hour is common knowledge.”

“You're a goth encyclopedia,” Tucker argued. “You know everything when it comes to paranormal lore.”

“I mean, I knew about the Witching Hour,” Danny said, “but I didn't really realize that it was a thing that affected ghosts, and me.”

“Well at this point,” Tucker started, “I'm sure we can assume that every myth throughout history is real, so are you really surprised?”

“Good point,” Danny shrugged. “I mean, not really, anyway.”

So, the three of them brushed it off, since it wasn't really significant for anything. They spent the rest of that night watching scary movies, before Danny had to fly Tucker and himself home.

It was a few weeks after that when Danny realized that the Witching Hour had a much more thorough grasp on him than he had initially thought.

Jazz pulled all-nighters a lot. Sometimes even on school nights, which resulted in a considerable coffee demand until she could come home and take a well deserved nap. So there she was, dull red eyes staring into her computer screen, almost completely in the dark, typing up another essay for college applications. She'd lost track of time, and since it was the weekend, she couldn't really find the mind to care very much. She just couldn't stop typing, because she would lose her momentary vision for the essay. The words were in her head now, and she had to transcribe them somewhere, before she inevitably forgot them in the void of sleep.

She wouldn't stop typing until this was completely finished. She was determined that she would not comply to sleep, sleep would comply to her.

'I've found with experience that this is...' Jazz paused. What was the word? 'Important'? No, she decided, that word is too vague. Maybe the words 'vital' or 'crucial'? She pondered each of them, and decided on the word 'vital'. '...this is vital to my formation as an exemplary student' No. Rewrite that. '…this is vital to my outstanding high school career, and that without it I could have never accomplished my current...' She was stuck again. Why do words have to be so complicated? she lamented, almost deciding to give it up and go to sleep before she passed out face down on the keyboard again.

But she resisted the temptation, opting to continue writing instead, though within minutes, she found that her mind was slowly delving into the thrall of unconsciousness, and she was starting to lose the battle against the irrepressible force. Darkness seemed to subtly drip within the words on her computer screen, causing the pixelated text to blur into formless black shapes. Her eyes became dull and her sense of focus was compromised, and her eyelids began to droop with finality.

She wasn't even aware that she was slipping away.

The keyboard didn't even feel uncomfortable when she blindly laid her head on it.

Her mind wasn't present, and her eyes were open by a sliver, but the sudden movement in her peripheral vision unnerved her, causing her heart to adopt an alarming tempo. She felt the invasive sensation of air being vacuumed out of her lungs, and consequently fell out of her chair when she attempted to sit upright. Her forehead met the carpet with a vengeance, and she was left reeling, scouring the darkness for what had startled her out of her near sleep. She pulled herself up once again, and glimpsed motion beyond her doorway, causing her heart-rate to escalate for a second time.

Her groggy brain lagged as it failed to comprehend the sight before her; a suspended figure, arms slack beside it, hovering as if it was being held in the air by a noose descending from the ceiling. It felt like some kind of surreal nightmare, and she probably would've believed it was just that, except that something in her head finally clicked into place, and the figure in the air was suddenly familiarly haunting. He was in human form, and his eyes were closed, and his face showed no hints of awareness as he floated slowly, as if his body had it's own awareness. Even though he was currently Fenton, his skin gave off a faint unnatural glow, which was only visible in the utter blackness of Jazz's bedroom. The light from his skin cast dark shadows, creating jagged blotches of darkness around his eyes and nose, which accented the barely visible green tint moving behind his shut eyelids.

She was used to watching Danny exhibit his powers, but seeing him so... lifeless, was unnerving. It sent pangs of fear within her, and if she hadn't been so sapped of her energy, she might have just scurried backwards along her floor until she was against the opposite wall, her knees buried in her chest. She remained where she was instead, opting to just gape in silent fixation.

But then, Danny disappeared from her field of vision, surpassing the space in front of her bedroom door, continuing his path down the hallway. It took her a few moments after that to disregard the eeriness clinging to her weary nerves. And it was like she had awoken from a trance. Her mind began to function properly again (as proper as it could in the wee hours of the night), she began asking the appropriate questions regarding the situation. For instance, why Danny was floating down the hallway, seemingly asleep, but conscious enough to use his powers without realizing it? If anything, Danny had exclusively told her that hovering in human form was uncomfortable, that his ghost form was much more equipped for defying gravity, so why was this the power that decided to manifest in his sleep?

It was almost like he was... sleepwalking. But that's not what this could be, right? Danny had never sleepwalked as a child, she was sure of it, so that meant that this had to be a recent development. So was he ghost sleepwalking/hovering? That's sure what it looked like, because when he had passed by her bedroom door, Danny was not there; he was definitely somewhere else, dreaming.

Since it appeared that he was asleep, Jazz wasn't keen on waking her brother up, but it wasn't like she could risk having him float out the front door and out into the street in the middle of the night, in human form, nonetheless. She had to wake him up and send him to bed so he could sleep uninterrupted.

She pulled herself off of the floor, her legs wobbling beneath her, and she tried to compose herself as she strode into the hallway. Danny was now making his way down the stairs, descending slowly over the steps, maintaining his levitation and never touching them. Shivers caressed her spine again, watching as Danny absently glided through the air with an otherworldly presence that he usually concealed with his liveliness; Phantom never unnerved her because she was always reassured that he was Danny, zoetic and aware of the world around him. But now his human quirks, what attested his earthly sentience, was absent, and all that remained was the uncanny eeriness within him.

She followed him to the bottom of the stairs. Once he had established himself above level flooring, she took a harrowing breath and cautiously reached out to touch his shoulder. She wasn't too surprised when his skin was cold to the touch, but she was concerned that his temperature was lower than usual in human form. She gripped her hand into his shoulder as his body continued to follow its nonexistent path throughout the house. And then, he suddenly ceased floating and collapsed into a hyperventilating heap on the floor, similar to what Jazz had experienced when she had first seen him outside of her bedroom. He didn't notice her at first, and instinctively held up a fiery green fist while he attempted to maintain his erratic breathing.

“Danny,” she said softly. At the sound of her voice, ethereal green eyes decimated her where she stood, and she nearly flinched at the malice in his defensive glare. Danny realized quickly that it was only Jazz and let his hand extinguish immediately, chastising his fight or flight response for almost accidentally pulverizing his sister. He was still on the floor, and his shallow breathing had already modulated into a regular pace.

“How'd I get here?” he looked up at Jazz, confusion evident in his unceasing green eyes. Instantly, her irrational dread vanished; the haunting version of Danny retired behind his usual human awareness. There was emotion in his expression, in his voice, and he was there – not just an empty vessel floating aimlessly through the house.

“You were sleepwalking,” she explained. “Uh – well, technically sleepfloating? Levitating, I guess. Scared the crap out of me so I thought I'd wake you up in case something happened.”

Danny stared at her blankly. Her words took a moment to process, but when they did he was incredulous. “Sleepwalking? I – I've never done that before, though.”

“I know,” she said, remembering her initial doubts. “It was really weird. Since you were using your powers – I didn't even know you could do that in your sleep – do you think it was a ghost thing?”

…

“Maybe?” he yawned. She could see the wheels in his head attempt to turn and just give up. It was too late to truly think about it, or too early, and now that this was over they both needed to go back to sleep.

“Let's go to bed,” she said. She suspected that he probably would've crashed right there if she hadn't suggested it fast enough.

They started walking back up the stairs. “What time is it anyway?” he muttered.

“Maybe like fifteen 'til four,” she guessed without thought.

He paused. “So like 3:45?”

“Mm... yeah?”

“I got an idea what this is, maybe,” he said. “I'll tell you in the morning, though.”

She didn't object. She was kinda too tired to care at this point. “Alright. Goodnight, Danny.”

“Goodnight, Jazz.”

They both fell asleep, and neither of them moved until late the next morning.

Jack and Maddie were unimpressed at the usual exhibit of teenage laziness, but let them sleep late, regardless. It wasn't until about 11 AM that both of them had ventured downstairs for some breakfast (more appropriately brunch now) and recalled the strange occurrence the night before. Danny, as he promised, explained his theory to Jazz. He told her about the inexplicable increase in ghost activity during the Witching Hour and how he had eventually realized that he was stronger during that time-frame.

“Wait, so you think that the ghostly paradigm during that time of night is causing you to use your powers in your sleep? Not just using them, but making you sleepwalk.” She sounded skeptical, but it was apparent she was intrigued by the idea.

He shrugged, “Weirder things have happened.”

And with an inappropriate lack of concern, they moved on, not thinking too much about it, since it was easier for both of them that way. It wasn't until the next incident that Danny actually considered that his unconscious haunting was more than just an odd, single occurrence.

Back in middle school, sleepovers with Tucker used to stretch far into the morning, typically concluding their crazy video game nights with a sunrise. Now that they were in high school, exhausted from homework and the responsibility of being a superhero, their rare sleepovers usually expired sometime before midnight. Tucker would sleep on the bed while Danny would roll out a sleeping bag, which was also different from when they were younger. Tucker used to sleep on his own sleeping bag next to Danny, but now that they were older, Danny insisted that Tucker got a good night's rest in his own bed. (“I'm half-dead, I sleep like it too, so don't worry.”)

So there they were, after a long week of school drama, hopeless assignments that neither one of them could expect to complete, and more strenuous ghost fights, Tucker on the bed and Danny in the floor. There wasn't much discussion before they passed out, and they each promptly hit the hay after a few seconds. The room was still and quiet, with the intermittent hum of the heater turning on and off to warm the fresh autumn chill in the air. Simultaneously, the numbers on Tucker's digital clock rose and rose, plummeting after midnight, and continued to climb again into the morning hours of the night.

Neither of the boys were aware of the transition between 2:59 and 3 AM, but there was definitely some sort of supernatural liminality that occurred. The clock fell from fifty-nine to zero, and rose from two to three. Something in the air shifted, something cold, even though the heater was still running, and something... restless filled the room. There was an atmosphere of heaviness, an indescribable ambiance churning in the shadows. If anything, the energy in the room was akin to the poise of power, feeding off the darkness, growing. It was unnatural.

There was no build-up, no anticipation. It simply happened. The insubstantial

energy in the room (it wasn't just in the room, it occupied the moment) flexed and twisted, growing heavy around Danny's core. It left him as he was, asleep, and his body was animated, almost like a marionette. His skin adopted a translucent glow, a light only faint enough to be seen in complete darkness, but unwaveringly present. In the same instance, his body sensed an obstacle – the sleeping bag still had him trapped – and automatically phased through it. His rhetorical strings were pulled upwards, and he was instantly vertical, afloat in midair.

Now that he was hovering, his body naturally leaned into the movement of flying, a dormant action, which was inexplicably guided by some unconscious knowledge of the location of his surroundings. He moved across the room, towards Tucker's window, somehow avoiding crashing into a tall shelf.

The dim light his skin emitted was enough to gradually wake Tucker from his sleep. The black boy stared across his room, seeing the blurry outline of a figure in white hovering around his room. Petrified, he didn't make a sound, squinting in utter confusion since his unaided vision was downright awful. Eventually, Tucker's muddled brain collected the courage to reach for his glasses, and pressed them to his face slowly. When he reexamined the floating figure in his room, he choked out in disbelief.

“What the fuck, Danny?” he sputtered.

It was when Danny's eyes frantically shot open, causing him to unceremoniously fall to the floor, that Tucker realized that his friend might have not been flying around his room like a creep intentionally.

“Wha-?” Danny exclaimed. He pulled himself up, and looked towards Tucker for an explanation. His green eyes were the primary highlight of his current appearance, and his skin hadn't ceased glowing. Tucker was initially taken aback, since usually Danny only glowed and had green eyes in ghost-form.

“Dude, you were like floating in your sleep, going all around the room and stuff and I couldn't see you at first, creeped me out, God,” he blurted in a single breath.

Danny blankly processed his words, “Really?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah,” Tucker confirmed.

Danny didn't seem to hear him, and looked down questioningly. “Again?”

Tucker barely heard it, and found himself concerned. “What?”

Danny showed no indication that he had heard Tucker and bit his lip curiously. “What time is it?” he asked, instead of responding.

“What do you mean 'again', Danny?” Tucker didn't have the patience to play games.

Once again, Danny ignored him, and moved to the other side of Tucker's bed so he could get a clear view of the lamp-like digital clock. Besides Danny, it was the only thing that was currently providing light to the room. It read 3:13 with a haunting sort of elegance.

Danny's jaw dropped to resemble a sort of “oohhh” expression, and Tucker continued to glare at him interrogatively.

“What's going on, Danny?”

The ghost boy's eyes darted between the clock and his friend. He decisively sat on the edge of Tucker's bed and started to explain.

“Remember what I was saying about the Witching Hour making me stronger? Well a few nights ago Jazz found me sleepflying and we sort of decided that it was an extension of that. For some reason my powers kind of turned on without me doing anything. I hadn't realized that it would be happening more than once, though, I just thought it was a glitch....”

“Wait, so some paranormal force in between 3 and 4 AM can basically make you sleepfly? Why though? Because it's creepy or something? Cause it was creepy to me, man. No offense, but when you're asleep, you look really, like... dead. I mean actually like the scary kind of dead you see in horror movies. Absolutely terrifying.” Tucker froze, realizing that he'd said a little too much. “Oh God, I didn't mean for it to sound like that, I'm sorry dude. You know that-”

Danny gave an ironic laugh, “It's fine, Tucker. I'm a ghost, how can I be offended by the fact that I look dead?”

“True, I guess,” he admitted. “So, does this happen some nights, or is it every night and you've just now noticed it? Oh, and if it's only some nights, then why not every night?”

“I think it's only some nights. I don't know why some nights are different than others. I know I'm awake a lot at 3 AM, but not always, so I don't know what determines if I sleepfly or not.”

Tucker put his hand under his head in thought, “So you don't know a way to prevent it, then?”

“If I can't predict it, then I can't really prevent it,” he replied. “So, nope. But to be honest, I don't know if there's a point to preventing it – it's not really harmful, and it's beyond our control, so it's just another thing that I've decided to let go for now, unless it becomes relevant.”

Tucker realized that he was right. If Danny sleepflew around his house for less than an hour while everyone was sleeping, it wasn't really dangerous for anybody. He voiced his agreement, and the two boys simultaneously expressed their wish to go back to sleep. Danny returned to his discarded sleeping-bag, and Tucker surrendered his glasses for the night, burying himself underneath his blankets again.

Their breathing evened as their minds entered a secure tranquility, and the numbers on the clock continued to rise....

It was about a month or so later when Danny was awakened during one of his sleepflying excursions for the third time. He'd been somewhat aware of some nights that it occurred, because every once in a while he would notice that he'd wake up on top of his covers instead of underneath. He never pondered it much, and usually forgot about it after a few minutes of his daily routine.

That particular night was a nice one for Danny. He got all of his homework done for once, he had managed to stick three ghosts back into the Ghost Zone, and somehow fell asleep before midnight. It was honestly too good to be true, which probably explains why his luck turned sour later on. But in the moment, he was grateful for his momentary break.

Elsewhere within FentonWorks, Maddie meticulously cared for Jack, who had caught the flu at an unfortunate time; they were so close to completing one of their latest projects when he had spontaneously grown ill. At first, both scientists were convinced that Jack's sickness was the scheme of ghosts, and had dragged the Fenton Ghost Catcher out of storage so they could purge all of the ghost energy supposedly contaminating his body. However, Jazz (who had been seriously unimpressed) talked down to them and reminded them of their last attempt at using the Ghost Catcher to cure their sickness. They had camped in a tent by the Ghost Catcher for about two weeks expecting their sickness to go away, when in reality, the only thing that alleviated their flu was over-the-counter medication and ample rest.

So, reluctantly, Jack agreed to combat his sickness 'the normal way' and rest in bed with medicine until he got better. It was only the second night, and even though he was improving, he wasn't in a good condition. The only thing he could eat without throwing up were crackers, the bedroom had to be kept boiling hot at all times, and he had already gone through two boxes of Kleenex. Even though she wanted to be by Jack's side at all times, Maddie couldn't bring herself to sleep in a room so hot. She had tossed and turned and sweated nonstop the previous night, and was not willing to repeat that experience. So instead, she discretely snuck downstairs to sleep on the couch. It wasn't a pullout, so it wasn't as nearly as comfortable, but with a good pillow, it was so much more tolerable than the sauna upstairs.

Somewhere past 2 AM she woke up, and went upstairs to check on Jack for a few minutes. He was sound asleep, but she noticed that the glass of water on his night-stand was empty. She figured that he'd been waking up and falling asleep intermittently, as one usually does when they have a fever, so she decided that she'd refill his water for the next time he woke. She quietly trekked downstairs, being extra careful not to step on the extremely loud floorboards. It was a school night and she couldn't afford to be responsible for her children not getting sufficient sleep.

She reached the kitchen, and used the filtered tap on the fridge to fill up Jack's glass. She walked back upstairs and placed the cup where she found it, making sure not to cause any disturbance. Satisfied, she left the room and habitually closed the door behind her. It made an audible squeaking sound and she cringed at the sound, hoping that it'd been quiet enough not to wake Jack.

“Mads?”

Damn, she'd woken him. She peeked back through the door, and saw her weary husband looking at her expectantly.

“I – My head is hurting again.”

“I'll get you some Ibuprofen, sweetie,” she whispered, making a second trip to the kitchen and back. She returned with two of the pills, and double-checked the time. It was nearly 3 AM now, so it was safe for him to take another dose. She put them in his hand, and watched him attempt to swallow them while laying down, too worn to try and sit up.

“Thanks, Mads,” he muttered, finally swallowing the pills.

Normally she would've kissed him, but she was hesitant, in case she caught his sickness. “Go back to sleep,” she smiled.

He didn't reply. She wandered back downstairs, definitely ready to return to sleep herself. But before she could carelessly flop onto the couch, however, she was paralyzed.

She wasn't literally frozen, but... there was some kind of intangible fear clouding her intuition, petrifying her, turning her sense of reason into molasses. She was at the edge of the living room, and it was like her mind just... stopped processing.

And then, the merciless paralyzation dissipated, releasing Maddie from her disorientation, allowing her to comprehend the sight before her. Her heart immediately drummed with an insistent urgency in her ears when she realized what exactly she was looking at. In the center of the room, above the coffee table, there was a figure, shrouded in unearthly white light, suspended in the air like a silent, menacing wraith, awaiting her arrival. She couldn't decipher many of it's features, but she could see that it was small in stature for a humanoid ghost, which oddly incited more inexplicable terror within her.

With her composure forfeited, Maddie gave little thought to her actions, and she was screaming before she even realized that the sound had left her lips. Her scream not only startled herself, but it also caused the floating figure to fall out of the air.

The specter crumpled to the floor helplessly, and Maddie reflexively took a step back, hoping to find protection in the kitchen. But before she could flee, her eye caught something, something much more horrifying than the ghostly invader in her living room. Because she could see the fallen figure's identity now, and she could see his frightened green eyes staring up at her.

She could see that Danny (her son) was afraid of her. And she could see that something was very, very wrong with him.

Alright, so this is going to be a series of oneshots, but the first two themes sort of ran together, so I decided to make it a two-parter. All other entries will be standalones. This will be continued tomorrow for Disappearance.

Part One | Part Two

#ectober #ectober2018 #ectober week 2018 #ectoberweek2018 #danny phantom oneshot #halloween #october #the witching hour #witching hour #creepy #danny fenton #jazz fenton #maddie fenton #tucker foley #sam manson #wrwritings #Danny Phantom #phicc #fanfiction

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pastichejournal · 5 years

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Burnout Syndrome: Mark Fisher From the Future

In the wake of Burnout Syndrome (work caused stress/alienation) becoming mainstream, it’s worth reflecting on Mark Fisher's writings connecting mental health to the post-Fordist workplace.

For history to become what it always was, symbolism must be established in the future. The effects of neoliberalism and the post-Fordist workplace have only recently started to gain a kind of general consensus. Although symbolism can be initiated prior to an event (fiction, cyberpunk, etc.), for thinkers and media to reflect in the face of an overabundance of events is to start the first step of glancing back at the ‘vanishing’¹ moment whose symbolism will only emerge concretely in the future as what ‘will have been’². While it’s unclear where the late Mark Fisher is on this spectrum of concrete reflection on the symbolism and historicity of our time (he quotes many who have speculated before him), his thoughts on the neoliberal induced mental health crisis is a good spot to jump into as The World Health Organization’s updated definition of Burnout Syndrome (linking cynicism and distance from work to the workplace) in the International Classification of Diseases — ICD-11 — is making its way around the major news outlets. Although this is only a small step towards connecting mental health to the post-Fordist workplace, to understand the case being made by Fisher and how it relates to the real (burnout syndrome becoming mainstream as being connected to the workplace), it’d be beneficial to first walk through the differences between Fordism and post-Fordism.

For Fisher, a good example highlighting the differences between fordism and post-fordism is the differences between the gangster movies of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (between 1971-1990) compared to more contemporary gangster movies (Fisher uses Heat as an example). The ideology evolves from the ‘families with links to the Old Country’ to the ‘rootless crews’ prepared to abandon everything at a moments notice. The ‘old fashioned’ ideology prioritizes certain characteristics like family relations, respect, and religion, while the ‘newer’ ones cut through all of this to survive most efficiently. Fisher highlights the new ideology by quoting Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” The ‘traditional’ gangster’s way of life is challenged in the new field where “Family ties are unsustainable in these conditions…” Fisher goes on:

Like any group of share-holders, McCauley's crew is held together by the prospect of future revenue; any other bonds are optional extras, almost certainly dangerous. Their arrangement is temporary, pragmatic and lateral - they know that they are interchangeable machine parts, that there are no guarantees, that nothing lasts. Compared to this, the goodfellas seem like sedentary sentimentalists, rooted in dying communities, doomed territories.

This ‘no long term’ is echoed in the post-fordist career models in which jobs are increasingly more and more temporary. The long term hierarchical fordist model “obligation, trustworthiness, commitment - are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism…” Jobs no longer promise a hierarchical ladder to climb over decades, but a day to day struggle to maintain income. If the gangs held on to permanence, they’d be quickly confronted with the wave of individuals whose only permanence is the lack thereof. The connection to family is then challenged: “The situation of the family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory, in precisely the way that traditional Marxism expected: capitalism requires the family (as an essential means of reproducing and caring for labor power; as a salve for the psychic wounds inflicted by anarchic social-economic conditions), even as it undermines it (denying parents time with children, putting intolerable stress on couples on couples as they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each other).” Those who have surrendered their ideology and lifestyle to reflect the conditions in which they hope to interact with and succeed in are then at a great advantage.

This post-Fordist ideology is also projected into the visuals of everyday life. Fisher observes the places in which the Scorsese and Coppola scenes are set compared to Heat. The organic and flamboyant social spaces (“All the local color, the cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects…”), as opposed to the non-places in post-fordist movies; “... polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens, of featureless freeways and late-night diners… a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where the marketable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises.” It’s natural that the movie Heat starts at a train station and ends at an airport. Both the family and physical landscape have shifted significantly in the transition from the fordist to post-fordist workplace. “The ghosts of Old Europe that stalked Scorsese and Coppola’s streets have been exorcised, buried with the ancient beefs, bad blood and burning vendettas somewhere beneath the multinational coffee shops.”

The act of comparing gang depictions in film highlights the process and responses to critiquing capitalism, as many argue that we prefer the post-fordist workplace to the fordist workplace. In using the gang as a reference point, we see that there is no angle to create a wholly preferential state. Regardless of the ideology of gangs in social relations, the medium is inherently flawed. Even if we can sympathize with the individuals, ‘ethical’ gangs would hardly be seen as any kind of objective solution to alternative social relations. Although Fisher is highlighting the differences and in some cases the benefits of fordism in Capitalist Realism, his book is nonetheless arguing that ‘the medium is the message’³. Movies (Fisher mentions Wall-E) can be no more explicitly critical of what capitalism holds in store for us, yet we act as though everything will work out (what Slavoj Zizek calls cynical fetishism). The liberals will fight for ethical capitalism, the conservatives will fight for neoliberal capitalism, but the medium will nonetheless remain. Thus capitalism, the call to reform and change capitalism, and cultural attempts to ‘expose’ capitalism, are all mediums that are now ingrained within the ideology of capitalism and support this phenomena of capitalist realism (“there’s no alternative”).

To examine these different aspects of how capitalism and neoliberalism have ingrained themselves so foundationally in our culture and social relations is to offer a brief introduction into how our mental health is in jeopardy. The machine like act of working 9-5 in a factory of machines is now subtly submerged in daily life, labeled as ‘flexibility’.

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity', as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.

Although there was a desire to escape the lifelong factory job, the results of post-Fordism birthed a new wave of issues. Fisher brings up the connection between the ‘boom and bust cycles’ of Capitalism and bi-polar disorder arguing that “Capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.”

This link between context and mental health is essential. To contain mental health to exclusively biological ends, excluding any possibility of politicized causation, would largely benefit a system that is potentially causing these issues. Especially when the system would profit off of selling medication to cope as Fisher points out. This also supports the individualized culture, “it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry).” It’s interesting seeing the connection between a sort of Sartrean individualized free will and neoliberal Capitalists. As Existentialism starts from an atheistic foundation to create the bridge to free will, Neoliberalism starts from a market morality foundation that labels an individual’s conditions as a product of their own lack of ‘working hard’.

By attaching the systems at play behind a mental illness, Fisher is following the same steps as Marx did with commodity fetishism. As Marx attached the labor and laborers involved in producing and distributing a commodity, Fisher attaches post-Fordist working conditions to mental illness. Fisher is recognizing that mental health may be a symptom of these systems (or an element of a system, as Zizek would say).

If one were to make of this an oversimplified debate between two opposing sides, it would appear that we are in a battle between individualized free will and determinism. However, as Fisher brings to light the data that appears to link the increase of psychiatric and affective disorders in countries that display what Oliver James calls 'selfish' capitalism and as this Burnout Syndrome becomes more mainstream, it appears that this link is now becoming too strong to dismiss and not a simplified matter at all. If the present seems too complex to make sense of, perhaps peace can be found in the idea that symbolism will be attached in the future. It’s only now that we can look back at the past 40 years of research on Burnout Syndrome⁴ and use the very recent mainstream implementation as a support of the real to the writings of someone like Mark Fisher.

1-2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 159

3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964

4. Linda V. Heinemann1 and Torsten Heinemann, Burnout Research: Emergence and Scientific Investigation of a Contested Diagnosis, Sage Open journals.sagepub.com/home/sgo, 2017

Note: All Fisher quotes are from Capitalist Realism

#mark fisher #capitalism #capitalist realism #philosophy #pastiche #pastiche journal

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