#built a pyramid scheme and called it enlightenment

[dillytaunt]

Why do so many fans think Jun Wu has no control over who ascends? Like, yes.. people ascend without his permission because there really is a cosmic order in this universe but he literally only needs to fill the slot to prevent randos from ascending.

And YES he CAN artificially ascend people and he DOES. I’m fr about to write up a whole essay on ascension this weekend istg.

The man literally says:

“Even fates can be swapped. Why not spiritual power?” Jun Wu said. “There are many things that are hardly as difficult as you assume. It is only a matter of a few words and a few brush strokes from a few great heavenly officials.”

Right after he sucks out one homies spiritual power and injects it into another.

And let’s be real.. Do y’all really think Jun Wu actually ascended a second time using his own power?

The dude who has the suffering souls of his first attempt at human sacrifice plastered on his own face and.. screaming?

Hell nah. This dude became the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He experimented on fetus spirits like some mad scientist interested in unethical stem cell research. He probs invented the damn fate swapping ritual himself.

He has an entire fucking Burial Mound volcano where he vents his resentful energy. You think all that energy is accumulating just cus he’s mad? Or from just the three faces?

No way fam. This man is actively cultivating the dark arts and probs needs so many followers just to help balance the yang to his yin.

I mean.. c’mon. You fr think Feng Xin and Mu Qing ascended back to back naturally? And just after they left Xie Lian? There’s a whole damn arc about how unusual it is for two people so close to ascend so fast and so young

Jun Wu gifts Feng Xin a bow called Fengshen which is a homophone for the name of an entire Chinese myth about appointing mortals to godhood for political reasons.

Blows my mind to see that so many collectively deny the possibility when the narration is screaming clues from every digital and physical page.

[usaigi]

Chapter 2 - Deal With The Devil

Read on Ao3 | ⇜previous chapter | next chapter⇝

Summary (T) Earth 65 AU where Elektra is Daredevil and was hell-bent on killing her ex Matt Murd(er)ock but she’s in therapy now and is channeling her energy into helping Spider-Women defeat him instead. Semi-comics/Marvel movies crossover. Elektra and Matt are mostly based on the Netflix version and Gwen is based on Into the Spiderverse.

“Can I ask why Murdock specifically? I know he’s related to Fisk but I thought you took care of Fisk. And surely there are other people high up in the crime syndicate pyramid scheme.”

“Cut off the head another takes its place. Murdock is just picking up where Fisk left off.”

“So ah. Ok this is going to sound like super ableist but Murdock is blind, right? I totally get how he can still be a leader of the mob with like accommodation and stuff but. Can’t we just,” Gwen punches the air a couple of times. 

Gwen never had the fortune of fighting Fisk herself but hearing from her dad, that man is built like an unmovable wall. Even if he hadn’t been legally untouchable for the last decade until Daredevil swopped in, he’s strength was borderline superhuman. And apparently, he has the temper of a child, with tantrums loud enough to flip cars. And they say girls are emotional. 

So what exactly is Elektra so concerned about? Murdock is just a dude. Kinda look like a Chad but in a rich kid I-went-to-Columbia-and-played-polo way. Probably owns a pair of pastel-colored shorts. 

“You’ve never fought him?” Elektra asks, eyes squinting slightly. 

“No? I don’t make it a habit in fighting people with disabilities,” Gwen says, causing Elektra to break out into a wry laugh, turning away to hide her face from Gwen. Guess she finds ableism funny. Canceled. 

“The chemicals that blinded him also enhanced his remaining sense, his earring, smell, touch, and taste. They all like work together to create a sort of radar. You know, like the blind girl from Avatar. Combine that with his years of martial arts training with the Hand, he’s a deadly opponent.” 

“The what?”

“The Hand. Yeah I know, stupid name. Cults always have dumb names,” heh true. What kind of dumb name is Scientology? What’s scientific about paying a buttload of money to reach enlightenment? Just smoke a blunt and look at the city lights like everyone else. “We’re called the Chaste so it’s not like it’s any better,”

“Who is we?” Gwen asks, tilting her head ever so slightly. Wait, is Elektra also in a cult? 

“You want a role call or what?” Elektra says dryly. 

“I mean, I’d like to know who’s on my team. Like what if someone joins us and I think they’re with Murdock and I accidentally punch them,” Gwen asks. 

“Then you apologize..?”

“Well yeah but–”

“You don’t have to worry about that now, tonight's thing is just us.” Tonight? Don’t worry about it? Gwen was under the impression that Elektra was going to train on something, not jump straight into a mission. And for someone who scolded her yesterday for being reckless, the ‘plan’ is as vague as a punk show poster. Band: Spider-Women and Daredevil. Time: sometime after ten and before we’re all corporate slaves to The Man …The Hand? BYOW (Bring Your Own Weapons). 

“Ok so. Murdock took Fisk's spot at the Kingpin?”

“Sorta. I think he’s still taking some orders from Fisk but Murdock has his own agenda. Fisk is just a capitalist, Murdock is connected with the Hand.”

“And what does the Hand want?”

“What does any secret ninja want? World control or immortality or something.”

“And what does your cult want?”

“You’ve seen Midsommar, right?” Blink blink, sorry what? “Kidding, duh. You’re so serious. The Chast isn’t a cult. It’s a thousand-year-old organization aiming to stop the Hand,” Elektra ‘clarifies,’ heavy on the air quotes. No one in a cult ever admits to being in a cult.   

“Quacks like a cult, walks like a cult,” Gwen says shrugging, throwing her hands up. “Hey, no judgment! I know you Hollywood people are into some weird crap.” Is anyone else in it? It would be kinda cool if Elliphant is in the cult. Maybe Gwen would be down to join the cult if there are cool people in it. 

“Bestie, if you wanna join, you’re in,” Elektra gives her a playful wink. “Ok, today’s mission should be easy enough, my sources say Murdock’s at a party on the Upper East side so we don’t have to worry about him. The Hand is expecting an important delivery, some sort of weapon. Murdock paid the tracksuit mafia to meet his guys at the docks. Plan is I’m going to fight the Hand and you’re going to swing in a couple of minutes later and help with the tracksuits. I want Murdock to think there’s a mole working with the tracksuits and to turn against them. Or at least think they’re incompetent. Since this is our first team-up, he’ll have no suspicion that we coordinated the attack–” 

“Wait, last question,” Gwen interrupts.

“Yeah?”

“How do you know so much about Murdock?” Elektra really seems to know Murdock, his location, his thought patterns. Not to accuse her of being a mole but… Elektra is a stranger who found her in a dumpster. 

“It’s ugh whatever,” Elektra stutters. Pull her scarf up to hide her face in a hurry.

Oh!

“No way,” Gwen gasps. “No. Fucking. Way.”

“I don’t like how much you curse.” Gwen can see Elektra's transparent attempt to change the subject. 

“You slept with Murdock!?” 

“No no, it’s worse. I dated him.”

“You what!? How long? Why? When? WHY!?”

“Long time. You do dumb stuff when you’re young and in love. Wait, how old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Brutal.” Yeah, that's fair. “If the mission goes well we can have brunch and gossip tomorrow but, let’s go Spider-Women.” 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

“Ok, plan. You’re going down there and you’re going to fight those dudes in black and my dudes are the ones in the tracksuits, right? But like when I swing in, you’re gonna start fighting all the dudes right? And that must be the container with the weapon, right DD?” Elektra’s gone? Gwen looks around, confused. “Daredevil?”

Oh. 

There is she. 

Slicing through one guy and kicking another guy in the face. Thanks for the heads up. They didn’t even get to say, “Go team!”  

The tracksuits are hiding out being some containers, shooting chaotically at Murdock’s guys– oh they really are ninjas, with masks and swords and everything. Not just some Naruto cosplayers, they seem legit. 

Although, if anyone care to consult Gwen, the Hand ninjas and the Russian Tracksuit guys should totally switch uniforms so the ninjas can look like the lady from Kill Bill. 

Gwen keeps a close eye on Elektra, observing her fight style. Like herself, Elektra increments a lot of acrobatics, varying from flips to jump kicks. But where Gwen has a background in dance, Elektra looks like she has a background in Taekwondo or Capoeira. Every move is deliberate, every move is dripped with confidence and power. Quick and efficient punches to major pressure points. Elektra fights like a tiger–hiding behind obstacles and blending into the shadows before prancing on her victim, and kneeing them right in the neck.  

Ouch. 

Surely it’s been enough time? Has it? Maybe Gwen would know if Elektra actually went over the plan but it’s fine . It’s fine!

Gwen, you came in too soon, MJ’s voice echoes. 

Never too early for a badass dumb solo. 

One-two-three, Spider-Women swings in. Kick one guy and push him into another, causing them to trip over a pile of trash as she lands gracefully on the top of a shipping container. Guitar lick, the crowd cheers, and, “hey guys.” It’s Spider-Women, woosh. “Love the tracksuits, so Y2K. Are they Juicy Coutier?”

Gwenhe thwaps one gun out of one tracksuit's hand and throws it at another dude's face, hitting him right in the noise. She webs one dude and webs this other guy and bop.

“Come on, guys! At least make the fight juicy!”   

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

The fight doesn’t make long, despite being outmatched, the Hand and the tracksuits are severally outskilled. Gwen is careful not to get too close to Elektra, hoping that none of the goons think they’re coordinating this. Still, she does web one guy's sword out of the way, giving Elektra a perfect opening. 

“Thanks,” she just says. 

Soon enough, someone shouts something in Japanese and someone else says something in Russian and they all skirt away. Gwen tries to run after them before Elektra stops her.

“Help me open the container instead,” Elektra says, prying the door. Gwen helps before peeking her head in, anxiously anticipating a legendary sword or spear or bomb. 

Not this. Anything but this. 

“It’s just a kid…” Gwen says apprehensively, “Elektra, he’s just a kid.”

“...Fuck. I ah–I ahh I have a friend on the police force. I’ll call him and the paramedics. Can you stay with him?” She nods, putting her hands up before carefully approaching the boy. Poor kid couldn’t be more than ten years old, fear painting his face. 

“Hi,” Gwen says softly, “hi, don’t be scared, I’m not going to hurt you. Here–” she crouches down. “What’s your name?”

“Peter…” 

“Oh ah that’s so cool. That’s my best friends name…” her voice drops, fear creeping up her throat. “And he’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. He taught me something important, do you want to learn what is it?” She waits until Peter gives a nervous nod. “Everyone is capable of being special. Just like you. You’re special and that’s why we rescued you.”  

“I want my parents…”

“I know, I know. We’re going to help you find them. We’re going to help you. Do you trust us?”

He nods shakily. 

“Good.”

Gwen holds the little boy close til the ambulance sirens creep in, helping the paramedic transfer him on the stretcher. She uses a bit of webbing to pull the shock blanket up, earning her the tiniest smile from Peter. Totally worth it. 

The assisting cops scatter around the crime scene, and Elektra stands off in the corner to talk to her friend? Oh crap, Castle. Ahh. Seriously Elektra, of all the people you could be friends with why him? Though maybe she shouldn’t be too surprised in her poor judgment, Elektra did date and probably make lots kisses and smoochies and yuck to Murdock. 

Peter’s safe now, surely Elektra will understand why she’s webbing away. She sends Elektra a quick text asking her to meet her on the same roof top.

Gwen climbs up the side of a building before launching her web, swinging off like the badass she is. 

—

“Wow! That was so cool! I can’t believe it! Sorry I dipped, Castle totally terrifies me, hold thing that we don’t need to get into but that was so cool! The way you used your pitchfork things–” Gwen blathers as soon as Elektra shows up. 

“My sais?”

“Is that what they’re called? Cool! But yeah! Thank you!”

“No problem.”

“Do you think we can visit the kid tomorrow in the hospital? I mean as civilians, totally weird if Daredevil and Spider-Women showed up for visitation–”

“I’m sure we can,” Elektra smiles. 

“I guess I should introduce myself then. Properly,” Gwen pulls her mask off, revealing her million-dollar smile, and extends her hand. “I’m Gwen Stacy.”

“I know. I googled your phone number. Remind me to get you a burner phone. But it’s nice to meet you, Gwen Stacy, I’m Elektra,” taking her hand with an equally sincere smile. 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

So yay, they saved the day. Go Team Spider-Woman and Daredevil. A cooler-and-more-stylish Batman and Robin (Gwen being Batman of course). Girl Power! Yippee. 

Can two girls share the cover for Forbes thirty under thirty? Meh, she’ll email Mr. Forbes himself tomorrow morning. Will Elektra let her borrow a fancy dress for their press interview? Maybe something aqua. With sparkles. And biker shorts because ya never know. 

Changing into her old band shirt and pair of shorts, Gwen flops–not lays gracefully, not awkwardly climbs in– flops onto her bed. Ahh her back felt so crunchy she should really stretch before sleep but she’s so exhausted. She hugs one of her Squishmellows and opens up youtube, queues up a video of Watcher, and waits for her eyelids to feel too heavy. 

Brrrring. 

Huh? 

Elektra?

“Hello,” Gwen grumbles.  

“Oh thank God, are you ok? Where are you?” Elektra sounds like she’s out of breath like she’s in the middle of a fight. But no, the fight just ended. They won. 

“I’m home. Why, what’s going on?”

“Someone got the kid. Gwen, I’m so sorry…”

What…?

[kylanrice]

Day 4, 5, 6

I have been unable to find time to write for three days. I have written, but not in a diary. After seeing the National Gallery in London on the 19th, and after looking there at the anonymous Flemish painting “Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Pictures,” I have been eager to work on a world that takes after that piece.  I am compelled by the desire that has precipitated it, an epistemological thirst. It is a painting that wants to be several paintings; it tries to contain, index, profile. If each painting inside this painting is a logic and a world, this work worlds itself with these as its lineaments, acknowledging the work of art as more than subject matter: as matter itself. Art retro-architects reality. “Cognoscenti” is essentially a form of praise, too, showcasing the virtues of appreciation, abundance, knowledge, and the limits of knowledge. I want to write a series of embedded essays that work chiastically through world, into art, and back into world again, showing the ways in which transferences redeem the real. Mediation is reality—or rather, reality is always already mediated.

I will return to the National Gallery. I have to take this slowly. Monday the nineteenth begins at Abney Park, a cemetery in the Hackney borough in which I am residing.  I am brought here by a book I’m reading called “Lights out for the Territory” by Iain Sinclair. My new unofficial handbook to the city. It perverts the figure of the flaneur into that of a stalker. My walks are like Sinclair’s in this: anxiety, hunger, and paranoia gyring into each other, a sense of non-belonging, voyeurism. I am here to observe, subvert, contain, vivisect. Sinclair’s walks through Hackney take him to Abney, where he notices a spray-painted pyramid-and-eye symbol scrawled in an unused non-denominational chapel at the heart of the park. I’m there before nine and it’s already broiling, one of the hottest days on record since the 70s. The inside of the cemetery is overwhelmingly green, dense, clotted with grave stones. Arborists and wood-cutters haul machinery through the overgrowth. What is overgrowth and what is undergrowth and what is a memorial to the dead is impossible to disentangle or set straight. Everything strays here. Death is no straightforward terminus. Indeed, one of my favorite aspects of Abney were the signposts scattered throughout identifying the various trees on site. The signs record the curious and mazy longevity of silver birches, common ashes, service trees of Fontainbleue, and horse chestnuts, among others, as though offering veiled metaphors for grief and earthbound afterlife: “SILVER BIRCH (Betula pendula, planted around 1930) / This tree appears to have been struck by lightning about 30 years go. It is not know exactly where this avenue of birch trees was planted, but birch rarely live more than 100 years. Lightning is the most likely cause of the long wound down the north side of the tree. You can see decayed wood inside, with fungi and beetle holes. Healthy wound wood has grown around the cavity but it is so big and deep the tree has been unable to seal the gap. The tree remains healthy and should live for another decade or two.” From the trees of Abney I learn that the material for our dearest metaphors are present already in the fabric of our lives.

Other things about Abney: the chapel is the oldest non-denominational church in Europe. The carved stone urns partly draped with veils. Extras of these piled beside a Simplyloo. The Egyptian style entry columns.

A long walk to the National Gallery, as the tube is unexpectedly expensive. I pass over canals, Kingsland graffiti, vertiginous mash-ups of architectural history and new construction. On Stoke Newington high-road, Arabic men drinking red coffee from tiny glass cups in front of bars and barbering establishments. Memorials displaced by bombs in the Barbican. Ornate underpasses. Smithfield wholesale market, whose sprawling industrial galleries are tastefully domed with glass and hinged with arcade glass. I have lunch at Fabrique. Ham sandwich on rye. Live flowers in glass milk jars on the tables. London Review of Books Cake Shop later on for afternoon refreshment. At last, two hours later, the National Gallery. A room full of still life floral arrangements, stray curves, diagonal axes. Closed peonies in shadow. I am an anachronist and miss in today’s world the understated ambition on display; again, the desire to contain all, the burgeoning thrust of the catalogue, the encyclopedia, the enlightenment era reach and grasp. The transparent wing of a dragonfly laid over a half-concealed leaf laid over a panted leaf on a vase. Palimpsest. My attention turns to the other museum visitors. A woman on a bench, having unconsciously adopted a Marian pose, arm over her backback, eye-shadow, Adidas, double rings on her wedding finger. Repose, in the gallery. Turner, Dido building Carthage: construction, development, empire, the empire of scope. The return again and again the judgement of Paris. This pairs well with my interest in Enlightenment era observational painting: anxiety regarding accuracy, discernment. Are these available to us? Is the illusion of possible accuracy even available anymore? I feel Cassandralike, intuiting a dark truth, completely bereft of a capacity to speak it or even explain it to myself. Agamemnon gets murdered off stage. What is mine is not knowledge but an inarticulate shriek in the shape of knowledge.

A beautiful painting by Meindert Hobbema called The Avenue at Middelharnis. Arbors, cranes in the backdrop, husbandry. Order (arrangement) and its derangement—that is, its warping. Hobbema excised two trees from the foreground of his painting to clear up the sky, giving it visual priority. You can see evidence of this on x-ray. Elsewhere: shipping scenes, ports, fleets. Trade and spectacle and confluence. Claude Lorrain, his lit backgrounds and shaded foregrounds: a curious sense of closure, lateness. Beautiful work by Beuckelaer: his four paintings make up a group illustrating the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The elements communicated by way of market scenes as frame narratives for Christological imagery. Densely layered. The main event or subject as peripheral (in both cases). The Ambassadors. Again, epistemological ambition. Measurement, efficiency, death. Despite wayfinding technology: memento mori, pushed into the periphery to see the skewed skull rightwise. In many of these paintings of Christ and martyrs, the body is there to suppurate, gush, anoint.

At the end of the day, a long walk through St. James park and alongside Buckingham palace. Dinner on the steps of Westminster Cathedral, a beautiful striped, squarely Venetian building across from the malls near Victoria Station. The apartment buildings nearby match this decorative scheme. I listen to the nearby sounds of the wind in the maple, a roundabout with mopeds and bikers at its foot. Westminster has exquisite marbling on the interior, like being inside a shell discovered on a beach, creamy and lit from the outside in.

The next morning I call an Uber to get to Victoria station at 5 in the morning. The stillness and quietude of his Prius. I navigate to Gatwick and onto my first Easyjet to Lyon. I admire the Saint Expury TGV station for the structural integrity of its concrete arches and lattices. Once in the city, I take lunch at Ludovic B.—a restaurant about halfway through my walk toward Parc de la Tete d’Or. They’re confused at first but ultimately amenable when all I want is bread and cheese: with sweet balsamic reduction a demi Saint Marcellin, which has a pungent, good, bitter, indoors (interior?) taste. Again the sound of maple leaves beside a primary school as I leave the restaurant—refreshed, amorous for this place—and make my way toward my AirBnB beside the Rhône. At the park, where I linger until 2 pm, check in scheduled for 2:30, I walk through a fin-de-siecle wrought-iron greenhouse. Superheated. Camellias, the emblematic flower of romanticism, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas in his novel the Lady of the Camellias. Polynomial and Riemann equations graffitied in the public bathrooms.

I chat (in French!) with my AirBnB landlord while he finishes cleaning the place. He teaches literature at a university in Paris. We talk about my upcoming entrance at North Carolina and he points out that the study of American literature is one without any intertexts, so young and new as a literary epoch. The apartment is perfect. Windows with a rotting balcony overlooking the massive, wide celadon Rhône river. Multiple rooms to myself. Fourth floor. I leave to explore in the afternoon: the excruciatingly steep and winding upward staircases, the two hills of the city, old stonework built into the mountainside, the narrow pastel-colored riverside buildings wedged into each other. Stone reclining chairs by the waterfront, where I read for a while. A girl next to me is paging through Levinas in paperback. Saupers pompiers practice their diving in scuba gear in this summer heat. I wander through galleries and ateliers, trying to get a feel for the city, feel through its shirt to its skin to its spine. I follow signs toward Parc des Hauteurs. Ascend endlessly in 90 degree humidity. Like a pilgrim to a temple. Continued on into my misdirection, upward, plateauing, discovering the ancient Gallo-Roman theater ruins. Labyrinthine stone passages. Boys playing in their corridors. Sprays of summer flowers, purples and whites where grass springs between the ancient stones. Torpid bumblebees. A magnificent view of the city, its white buildings. Musicians practicing for the evening entertainment below, the drifting sound of saxophone, piano. Old heat of a late afternoon. I sit and read Faulkner and think on the vista and realize I may be experiencing a perfect and golden moment. Sometimes my ambling pays off. I buy bread and butter and a viennoise on my way home, dine in.

The next day—today—Lyon was less forthright with me. I started the morning at the mall, a dead hive experience, looking for a cheap t-shirt to get me through the day. I hadn’t planned for Europe’s heat wave. I went west, away from old town, until noon, and found Lyon in commercial merchant squalor. I walked through an indoor market, the smells of fresh fish, bread, doggish smell of hard sausage. Swallows all day, urgent cries overhead. Delighted by the high-pollarded avenues of trees I see from time to time—like the stilt legs of Dali’s surreal elephants. Into and out of cathedrals on my way: these are spectacular to look at, and each different in its own way (its own light), but curiously similar and banal, too. You tire after a while of vaults and stained glass. Women everywhere with hand fans—quaint. Back toward the river near 11 am. Shallow pools, a biker dragging through slowly them in rings, a wood boardwalk, strange metal plaques drilled onto 450 meters of the wood pontoon ramp. Research reveals it is an art installation by Philippe Favier called “J’aimerais tant voir Syracuse.” The wood ramp reminded Favier of an infinite “table d’orientation”—a semi-circular table you might find at an overlook or panorama. He came up with a series of literary terms for fantastic or fabulist places, inscribed these in metal plaques, and drilled them into the surface of the wood. Others, on their own accord, have added their own. La piscine du Rhône nearby, 60s style, space-needle architecture. Took a street lined with Arabic food shops and stores where you can buy traditional Muslim dress. The pastry-shops feature glittering caverns of tiny gem-like confections, glazed and square as ornate snuff-boxes. Purchased a pear tart for lunch and ate it in the courtyard of the old ESSM (École du service de santé des armées de Lyon-Bron). There, you can find a museum on the resistance and deportation. I wasn’t originally planning to visit, but I felt compelled, as I usually do when visiting France, to understand the complex European relationship with the second world war. Especially enlightening to learn that Lyon was included in Vichy France. Old propagandistic images of Petain. Narratives of racism, exclusion, turmoil. As if the shroud of Turin, a fragment of the parachute used by Jean Moulin to drop secretly into Southern France, where he was tasked by de Gaulle with uniting the resistance. An exhibit on the extensive food rationing in Vichy France. The ration stamps called “tickettose d’angoisse”—or “anxiety tickets,” for fear of losing them. Petain encouraged his populace to grow their own food. Steep increase of home gardens during the war years in places like Lyon. The countryside encouraged to donate excess to the cities.

Above all, the important lesson from the museum and today is how crucial the medical industry has been in Lyon. I get the impression there has been some kind of mandate to this end, and near the Grange Blanche later in the day I discover an austere statue of a robed woman with a sword and sheaves of wheat standing on a plinth that reads: “À la gloire du service santé,” which translates: to the glory of health services. The plinth features a frieze of figures at work nursing and ministering to the sick. At the Musée des Confluences, I encounter a “fermenteur Frenkel,” a large vat with clamps and dials used in the process of vaccine production. By way of prelude, the accompanying plaque informs me that Lyon has been backed by a long tradition of health and veterinary institutions, which led to this flourishing of the health industry in the 19th century. During the war, the ESSM was dismantled of its military status by Germany, but continued educating young men in the medical arts. Grange Blanche, which is near the Lumiere institute (more on this in a moment), is a veritable etoile of specialized hospitals.

Another industry central to the development of Lyon is silk production. My plan is to dedicate today to learning more about Lyon’s canuts, or silk-weavers. At the Musée des Confluences, I see large taxidermy displays that catalogue the components of the industry: large white braids; fat, gold-translucent moths; cocoons in various stages of  unraveling. Also at the Confluences, which is where I go after the Centre, I also see a fiberoptic wedding dress, fringed with light, woven using Brochier technologies, which have been adapted from the original Jacquard loom types. The dress making technique was designed for the Olivier Lapidus haute couture fashion show in 2000, and the present artifact was made in 2014 by Mongi Guibane. Jacquard loom technology was used to develop the punchcards that supported the development of the computer and film industry.

In all, the Musée des Confluences is astonishing, and often painful to look at. Its exhibits are dizzyingly ambitious in scope. Permanent exhibitions include: “Origins, stories of the world,” “Species, the web of life,” “Societies, the human theatre,” and “Eternities, visions of the beyond.” The attempt here is to track a story of the world—a dubious aspiration, given the rigid warping porosity of historiography. The methodology here for engendering an epistemic experience is completely indiscriminate, much like the old-fashioned, original museums or curiosity cabinets. Indeed, there is a temporary exhibit at Confluences regarding the acquisitive spirit—a display of cabinets, carnets, colonization, observation, exploration. The latter exhibit teaches me that museums of natural history in France were often the outgrowth of imperial activity in colony nations—a strategy for understanding, and thus subverting, containing local populations and epistemes. I am overwhelmed here. Nothing is stable. I can’t concentrate on anything I see. A vast display of varieties of microscopes, magnifying glasses. Equally vast the glassed-in case of beetles, butterflies, shells of all kinds. I am desperate to concentrate, to core down to the heart of one of these objects. My mind does not operate on the basis of this kind of expansivity. I am wrecked by the curatorial attempt here to encompass all the world and all of human understanding—a cross-sample that asks its visitors to ask themselves: is there a duty to remember? A good question. I remember thinking on my walk today back to the conversation I had with my landlord, Thierry. We assume that literature is intended to amuse, entertain, or educate. But I think we forget the preservationist function of the medium, too. To safeguard in language language itself, the means of transmission of human learning and love. I can think of no holier obligation. This doesn’t mean just writing—this means writing in a tradition. I am sick and tired of literary peers who have no regard for the acquisition of or immersion in tradition, since this is the most important task for any artist. What you have to make or say is only possible as it relates to a long history of expressive force.

At the end of one of its permanent exhibits, a plaque declares: “The objects and specimens preserved in the museum’s stores and show in this exhibition constitute our common heritage. They are inalienable—they cannot be assigned or sold.”

Objects of note at the Musée: a Volva volva shell—a false cowry—unwrapping like a lily bulb, or a twist of angelic candy; a simple microscope designed by Dutch astronomer and physicist Christian Huygens, high performance, easy to use, made and engraved by Jean de Pouilly for wealthy clients. The privatization of accuracy for amusement’s sake.

The museum was designed to look like a crystal and a cloud by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Austrian studio known for deconstrutivist architecture.

After the museum I walk out to the point of confluences, where the Rhone and Saone flow into. It was originally a trafficked port area. The point hosts a submerged rail track for offload. Concrete pillars indicate incoming ships to pass “Gauche” and “Droite” (left and right). Now the area is under heavy construction, a rebuilding phase intended to urbanize the area. The regional governmental seat is nearby. Construction of apartments and other highrises. A mall.

I do a crash course in public transit and leave for the Lumiere Institute, which I learned about in a temporary exhibit at the Confluences on the Lumiere brothers, pioneers of the cinema and film industry, and lifelong locals of Lyon. Developers of a special dry plate for making photographs in the late 19th century. The institute used to house a factory for manufacturing these, and the brothers created their first film by recording end-of-day closing-time at the factory doors, the workers squeezing out, back into the world of their lives. The brothers, as the museum points out, were dyed-in-the-wool industrialists. There is something tautological about the development of this new medium: their first film (and so the first cinema experience) is an outcome of photographic plate development at the Lumiere factory. Later this factory would be converted into a studio production space. Here, the subject of film is film’s production; then the film eventually colonizes and magnifies the industrial context that produced it. No wonder the Best Picture Oscar goes every year to a film about film.

Watching early Lumiere films, I get the sense that what the brothers sought was movement, sheer motion. Their narratives were simply frameworks or pretexts for acrobatics, destruction, rising dust, consequence.

I eat a raw ham sandwich with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes in a little margin of grass near Grange Blanche. Delicious and sweet. On my way home, I stop at Place Bellecour (featured in a Lumiere film, as well as the Centre on resistance and deportation), then walk home from the Hotel de Ville. Music in the streets. Solstice is always la Fete de la Musique in France. For the last three years, every 21st of June I have been in France, where the streets at night fill with discos and trumpeters and opera soloists.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT FOUNDER

7 soon. If you want to be novelists. And that is the Valley's equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The truth is more boring: the state of your brain at that time. As Galbraith said, politics is a matter of identifying some bias in one's character—some tendency to be interested in it. And yet these ideas turn out to be surprisingly long, Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. Another is when you don't get that kind of works. I think, because they were built one building at a time.

How much are you trying to raise 250k. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. I remember the feeling very well. Ironically, though open source and blogging? At Rehearsal Day, one of our people had, early on, or don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but you're not going to lose them all at once. If you're a founder in the middle. The only style worth having is the one based on the idea of belonging to a group of 50 is really unwieldy. But the most immediate and mundane sort. But there is a good way to trick yourself into doing it. In addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation—breaking people's day up into bits too small to do anything very complicated.

Harvard, or if it does, we don't need any outside help. People would order it because of the help they offer or their willingness to commit, have different values for startups, big companies were always getting cancelled as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more complicated definition of a token: Case is preserved. They can work wherever they want. I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about it was that I didn't really grasp till it happened to us. Audiences like to be able to enjoy them in peace. Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers ultimately do better. That space of ideas has been so energetically hyped. This sounds like a continuation of high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins? And since you don't understand the code as well, partly because as money people they err on the side of underestimating the amount you need to win. The problem with patent reform is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to avoid the fatal pinch.

You can see every click made by every user. Perhaps, if design and research seems to be as good as the old one. 0 in the name. Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model is being undermined on two fronts. In architecture and design, this principle means that a shorter proof tends to be like. Otherwise their desire to connect with one another because so many more new deals appear. Everyone knows it's a mistake for investors to make money in a company with several times the power Google has now, but the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, so we hope these will be useful to let two people edit the same document back at the PR firm. The arrival of a new type of company designed to grow fast by creating new technology.

Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as your audience. That's just a theory. In the long term, but it seems like your startup is worth investing in. But most types of business; they feel they've been lucky to get that bug fix approved, leaving users to think that whitelists would make filtering easier, because starting a company. The mistake they're making is that by far the best programmers are overall. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for telling 22 year olds to become mothers. Ideally the answer is the type that matters most is imagination. What counts as a trick? If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn't suck.

Interestingly, the 30-startup experiment could be done by collaborators and design can't? And it looks as if it will be at the bottom of it. If you look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. Does that mean you should actually use it: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you successful. It could take half an hour to read a single page. But they're also too young to start a startup. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you should leave business models for later, because if you want to buy our product?

Notes

If Bush had been climbing in through the window for years while they tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and cook on lowish heat for at least should make the right thing to do more with less? We Getting a Divorce? It's probably inevitable that philosophy is worth doing, because companies then were more at home at the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage. At YC we try to avoid variable capture and multiple evaluation; Hart's examples are subject to both.

The first version would offend. For the computer world recognize who that is worth more, while she likes getting attention in the future. Who continued to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933.

In the Daddy Model may be a great one. What people usually mean when they talked about the Thanksgiving turkey.

They'll tell you all the rules with the sort of stepping back is one of the company goes public. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall. Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker, judging from things people have told me they do the opposite.

Some of the world you'd want to trick admissions officers.

Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to me like someone adding a few that are hard to say now. No one understands female founders better than enterprise software—and to a partner from someone they respect. Later stage investors won't invest in syndicates.

But what they're going to work for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have been about 2, etc. Indeed, that's the main causes of failure, which have remained more or less constant during the Bubble a lot on how much of the founders gained from running Kazaa helped ensure the success of Skype.

The optimal way to fight. There's nothing specifically white about such customs. Unfortunately, not economic inequality as a source of food. However bad your classes, you can charge for.

How to Make Wealth when I became an employer, I had a big effect on returns, and you need to raise their kids rather than doing a bad idea was that it would grow as big. Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, you're not doing anything with a slight disadvantage, but I'm not saying that the main effect of low salaries as the investment community will tend to be writing with conviction. If you're doing is almost pure discovery.

Incidentally, tax rates, which can happen in any other company has to their stems, but delusion strikes a step later in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the top and get data via the Internet Bubble I talked to a car dealer. It would help Web-based applications. The kind of kludge you need, maybe 50% to 100% more, and thus no form nor anyone to call you about an A round. Only in a way in which income is doled out by solving his own problems.

The few people who are younger or more ambitious the utility function is flatter. Vcs fail to understand about startups. Then you'll either get the bugs out of just assuming that their system can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. Cook another 2 or 3 minutes, then work on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit.

When investors ask you a clean offer with no business experience to start over from scratch today would have disapproved if executives got too much. Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. I explain later.

We Getting a Divorce? It is still possible, to sell hardware without trying to figure out yet whether you'll succeed.