#but I am still philosophically opposed to posting one page at a time on a public blog

[retellingthehobbit]

If you want to see Hobbit comic chapters early, and more concept art/deleted things/drawing tips/behind the scenes art—-soon I will launch a Patreon!

I prefer to *publicly* post my comics in massive full-chapter chunks every few months. But If you want to see pages “as I draw them,” usually around one page on a weekly basis, you will be able to subscribe to me there soon. :)

This will come with the understanding that the patreon pages are still “previews” and they may be heavily edited later on as I finish the chapter. (Sometimes I’ll see something that bugs me on page 1 after I finish page 15 and have to fix it!)

I will also post things related to my other upcoming art/comic projects, all of which have a similar aesthetic of “changing art styles to convey different narrators.”

If I ever take a hiatus from drawing or from updating the patreon, I will pause all billing for the month so that no one is charged.

My goal with this Patreon is to be extremely professional and accountable! I’m confident I’ll be able to run this very well!

Most of the things I post on the Patreon will also be posted publicly, eventually. But because I obsessively polish things (even the captions under posts of old art) they won’t be posted publicly for a longer amount of time. I don’t want people to feel left out if they can’t afford to pay a few dollars a month; this is just “early access” to slightly less polished stuff for the people who can.

On a personal level I would like for the Patreon to be able to cover the cost of Photoshop and a couple other art tools I use in my work, so that I’m no longer “paying” to draw this comic! :3

I haven’t yet launched the Patreon because I am busy filling it with a lot of concept art work/bonus art, to make sure it is worth subscribing to.

But yeee get excited! I hope some people are interested!

And I hope to have it ready by February 13th. :)

[invitedeath]

SEPHIROTH                          — relationship & plotter call.

hello lovely isolians! it’s been actually ages since i made my first one, or my second one, so i’m coming back with new vigour & hopefully some new ideas to tempt you all into friendship ( or...enemy...ship) with sephiroth!

so liking this post means that you are 100% down with interacting with me in some fashion! ways this might happen may be... → me sending you im’s / tumblr asks to plot or chat! i can be quite a talkative person as a forewarning, as i love discussing rp things as well as getting to know my rp partner!  → if we are already friends on discord or twitter, i might message you that way to ask you about plots or ideas or to run things by you. → exchanging ask memes / meme day things that might be a bit more personal than a general sentence meme. → possible random starters or musings dedicated to your muse, sometimes i get sudden inspiration for these things! i will always check first that you’re okay with taking on a new thread, but yes this is for just... if i get inspired & want to put something up for you! → general tomfoolery and shenanigans in character ( and ooc if you like )

you can contact me via the im system here, by the /ask feature or you can ask for my discord/twitter if you prefer those. just let me know. discord is the most private however so we’d need to chat a bit more elsewhere first just for my comfort! i am in the isola discord sever however so we can totally talk in that server for a bit too!

FRIENDS.

↪ honestly friendships aren’t typically on the agenda for him. he is arrogant beyond belief and considers everyone to be weaker than him or to some degree unworthy of his time or energy. he really does not have any interest emotionally in anyone besides himself, instead he is far more likely to use and discard people when they are no longer needed. HOWEVER, in 2020 sephiroth underwent quite a big character development stage, essentially his long-term goal came to a head and it backfired pretty back when he got all his powers back, so while he’s super strong again now, he’s also semi-content (i guess) with living in isola for a while, if only so he can figure out how the multiverse works (meta, i know). he talks to people now (wow!) and engages in mostly philosophical conversations, about... life. death. etc.

↪  i am down to... vague villain-alliance type deals with fellow power players here. he wont consider your muse a friend, but rather a pawn or even a means to an end, that end being his goal of generally using this island for his means, apologies. preferably the intellectual, over-powered, edgy types will probably gravitate towards him more, but i’m willing to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks. he’s not a nice guy, by any means, but it would be interesting to see how he has to play the game here to his advantage until he regains powers. i especially would like to interact with other villains who are kind of just chilling, maybe they’re veterans in spirale also and they can share a glass of wine over watching all the citizens running around like ants. we could also do a murder if you are into that. 

↪ there are some cases where he might engage in conversation with non-villain types and these would likely be far more dialogue-heavy threads including metaphorical topics or debates. the conversations of life, death, mortality, good vs evil, frailty of existence, legacy, power and corruption, calamities, birthright and betrayal are just some of the topics possible to arise in discussion. that being said, whilst these topics would be of interest to him, the character themselves must meet his standard of what he considers worthy of his time eg. those just willing to argue with him will bore him whereas someone curious to his nature might be treated to an actual conversation. over time this has opened up into most people being capable of talking to him. he has less patience for over-eager plucky types, but anyone with a respectable manner who likes talking a lot will probably find an interesting conversation partner in this... ONLY SLIGHTLY CHILLED sephiroth. he’s not totally chill, he’s just a lil chill.

↪ warriors, outcasts, villains, intellectuals, fellow puppet-master type villains especially, those he ‘befriended’ in past events, perhaps even neighbours to his castle would all be likely connections. friends of those he has worked alongside or met, or those wishing to seek great power and know of his existence might seek him out also, but yes... ““““friends”“““ is a very difficult term for him. he’s getting better.

→ his most recent developments see him as a far more casual version of his canon self, over a year of living as close to a “domestic life” as possible have meant that whilst he is aloof and cold, he is also far more likely to be out and about, buying wine at some creepy gas station at 4:30am for example. he chats when he’s in the mood and might even stick around to cause some chaos for the sake of boredom eating him alive. so whilst he is still very much a dangerous inhabitant here in spirale, sephiroth is currently Domesticated somewhat. 

ENEMIES.

↪ heroes of all shapes and sizes might feel threatened by the ominous presence of a monster who seems inclined to side with chaos as opposed to peace. he’s not outright starting fires here but he is present in the more morbid moments of isolian discourse, an omen of death lingering on the sideline. he has his plans and he may just mock you with them, but in general since he does and WILL cut down npcs ( or players ) alike, he makes for the perfect villain. BE WARY he has all of his powers unlocked and knows the island well. fighting him would not guarantee your victory, especially if you are a freshly applied character.

in feb 2020 he almost brought chaos to spirale too so i’m sure anyone holding a grudge or wary of a potential threat like that would be very aggro towards him.

↪ he has traumas. plenty of them. some of them originate from labs and white coats, meaning he might just view you as an enemy if you’re a scientist or someone who dabbles in human experimentation. his reasons are his own, but let’s just say that if you consider him a good candidate for poking and prodding with scientific equipment, you may just lose an arm.

↪ i LOVE fight threads especially really gritty, bloody types. i would prefer to plot these out so we know what’s going on beforehand, but feel free to develop these with me honestly i love a good old classic villain hero showdown. he’s less likely to get into these without a good reason but if we do one, the winner is randomly determined via generator to make it fair if your character is also uncapped!

→ police/law enforcers/general crime stoppers might remember him for causing a bit of trouble in the past! insert how bad me be gif. try and ??? get him to apologise i guess. arresting sephiroth sounds like the plot of a funny movie. 

LOVERS.

↪ this man has a bf now, can you believe it? 2021...isola gay rights. 

MISC.

↪ pawns and such would be a fun dynamic later. his general presence is pretty terrifying, so it wouldn’t be a stretch if you have an appropriate muse for them to be fearful enough to carry out some little tasks for him. this might be more common later on, but i’m down to discussion for it currently!

↪ places you may find him can include:                 ↪ near his residence ( personal housing; castle in the mistwood  )                 ↪ fibonacci ward ( levels 3 and 4 especially due to the museums and things. but also the lowest levels, he tends to wander around there as if searching for something... feel free to try and figure out what it is )                 ↪ golden ward ( the university if only to borrow books from the library, he can read there for days at a time without sleep or food. he reads all kinds of things, both fiction and non fiction. )                 ↪ archimedes ward ( pretty much everywhere in this ward, it’s my favourite. he enjoys music and art sometimes. hit me with that biblical shit. )                ↪ the mistwood ( 100% down to be that cryptic creature that leads you from your path to your likely doom )                ↪ the city of yesteryear ( typically the underground areas, just investigating really. any strange occurrences would likely draw him there as would any presence of a strong power. )                ↪ atop skyscrapers, looming at the ‘edge’ of the world we can currently explore, typically more active at night, perhaps at the scene of a murder / attack ( plotted ), if he’s feeling extra ballsy he might be found in a bar but its very rare. very VERY rare, wandering broken buildings, invading scientific facilities or buildings. he’s not going to be found in busy, socially strained areas basically.

↪ i’m down for any ideas you might have too for plots so feel free to just message me if nothing here caters!

STATS PAGE | APPLICATION | PLOTTING PAGE

[fremedon]

Brickclub I.1.11, “A Qualification”

Holy cow I had a lot to say about this chapter.

Firstly--more than anything, it’s a commentary on the previous chapter. The title, “A Qualification” (“Une restriction”) makes that pretty clear, and the chapter starts out by telling us that the Bishop’s encounter with G--- did not make him a philosopher or a patriot: it “made him still more charitable: that was all.”

I’m going to come back to that word “charitable.” Moving on for now:

Back in 1.1.2, the Senator’s letter of complaint about the bishop’s carriage expenses ends with a sudden outburst of anti-papist sentiments and a parenthetical from the narrator: “Relations with Rome were touchy at the time.”

I had forgotten how touchy until I got to the line about the arrest of the Pope in 1809. Tl;dr—Napoleon’s armies, or those of his puppet kingdoms, had occupied and annexed Rome and most of the Papal States in 1807-8. In May 1809 he declared his intention to annex the remainder of the Papal States and instructed the Pope to hand them over, on the grounds that they had been part of the Donation of Pepin, granted to the Pope by the Franks, and now the Franks were taking them back.

Pope Pius VII—shockingly—did not comply, and instead excommunicated Napoleon. Napoleon besieged the Pope in Castel Sant’Angelo and one of his lieutenants, acting on his own initiative, broke into the fortress and kidnapped him. Napoleon, despite not having ordered this, declined to release him and would keep in him captivity until he was freed by Allied forces in 1814.

FUN FACT: The general who occupied Rome and governed the Papal States from 1807 until Napoleon’s abdication? Sextius Alexandre François de Miollis, veteran of the French and American revolutions and brother of François-Melchior-Charles-Bienvenu de Miollis, the real-life Bishop of Digne of whom Myriel was an acknowledged expy.

The real-life bishop’s brother, with his exemplary revolutionary credentials, was the military governor of the occupied Papal States. I can’t even. This is obviously crucial but I don’t know how; please help me figure it out.

I am a little more confident of the meanings and functions of the rest of the chapter, but there’s a lot of it, so stashing it behind a cut.

So, the captivity of the Pope is the context in which Myriel insults the Church’s wealth and his high-living fellow ecclesiastics. There’s a digression on the importance of charity, which, for all that Hugo means it (and that it will become a critical key to the end of the chapter) I think truly is a digression--its placement here is Hugo throwing dust in our eyes. After this, Hugo assures us that Myriel “had little to do with the theological quarrels of the moment and kept his peace on questions where church and state were compromised; but if hard-pressed, he would have proved more Ultramontane than Gallican”—meaning, more of the belief that the Pope should have authority even in French secular affairs, rather than that the church’s authority should be subject to that of the state.

So not just the charity digression but all the anecdotes about the synod and the bishop being a breath of fresh air are sandwiched between the mention of the pope’s arrest, and our being told that the bishop Would Not Have Approved of it. Which feels like a thing Hugo is trying to underscore without seeming to but also seems totally unsurprising, so I’m not sure why. (Once again, HALP.)

Moving on. It’s after this that we are first told Myriel was cool toward Napoleon in the decline of his power. And it’s after that that we hear about the two brothers—on a prefect, whom he is on good terms with, and one a general, whom he is a little cool toward because the general was insufficiently hostile to Napoleon at the landing at Cannes—that is, at the start of the hundred days.

This fictionalizes the general brother enough to make it clear he’s not actually the MILITARY GOVERNOR OF THE PAPAL STATES. It also brings the timeline back to 1815, the year established as the present in the first sentence. We were just in 1814 at the start of the first Bourbon restoration—we jumped back five years or so to refresh the reader’s memory about Napoleon’s relations with Rome—and now we’re jumping forward, to Napoleon’s return.

With all this as context--Napoleon’s conquest of the Papal States (and the Bishop feeling a way about that), his decline, the Hundred Days--the narrator finally tells us what the Bishop’s political leanings ought to have been.

And first of all Hugo tells us he shouldn’t have had them, though his phrasing in FMA is odd: “Certainly, such a man deserved to escape political opinions.” Anyone want to weigh in on the French? (“Certes, un pareil homme eût mérité de n'avoir pas d'opinions politiques.”)

The next sentence is easier to parse: “Let no one misunderstand; we do not confuse so-called political opinions with that great yearning for progress, with that sublime patriotic, democratic, and human faith which, in our days, should be the basis of all generous thought.” This is Hugo assuring the censor that, no no no, this is not a political book. There’s nothing political about wanting ~progress~, no sir. (Please ignore the next 1300 pages, in which I conclusively demonstrate that Progress can only be achieved by overthrowing Napoleon III and instituting a socialist republic.)

Next sentence: “Without going further into questions that have only an indirect bearing on the subject of this book (translation: are DEEPLY RELEVANT to the subject of this book), we would simply say, it would have been better if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a royalist (translation: what it says on the tin) and if his eyes had never been averted for a single instant from that serene contemplation, steadily shining above the conflicts of human affairs, in which are seen those three pure luminaries, Truth, Justice, and Charity.”

Truth, Justice, and Charity are names of god in this book; that was established by a note in the Bishop’s own hand. The last chapter established them as the objects of the Revolution—which is to say, of progress. To be devoted to truth, justice, and charity is to be devoted to revolution.

And to be devoted to the monarchy is not. This sentence confirms what the last chapter implies: Revolution = God. Monarchy = Not God.

…and then I really don’t get the next bit either, about how Myriel didn’t have the right to oppose Napoleon in his decline because he hadn’t opposed his rise.

But the last portion of the chapter is an anecdote about the doorkeeper of the City Hall losing his job under the Restoration for constantly railing against the Bourbons. (Which is another bit of timebending—we’re not only back to the present, but to a more specific present than we started in—the first sentence just established the year, 1815, but this account puts us firmly post-Waterloo, somewhere in the second half of the year: the stage is being prepared for Valejan’s entrance.)

Myriel hires him as the doorkeeper for the cathedral. So however royalist he was--even if it was more royalist than he ought to have been, which is to say at all--it doesn’t prevent him from exercising charity, at least. (Or, at most, this chapter having already established that charity is the most important virtue for a priest.)

The anecdote does in miniature what the whole chapter is doing: tying up the encounter with G--- by showing that Myriel is “apolitical” in the sense the censors cared about--and also, in Hugo’s sense: devoted above all to charity and the betterment of the people around him. (And how do we do that, boys and girls? Starts with an R…)

[asoftervirge]

Of “Love” & Murder (7/13)

CHAPTER TITLE: Logan Oxford: Esteemed Novelist

RATING: PG PAIRINGS: P. Sanders/V. Sanders (main/one-sided); R. Sanders/V. Sanders (former); V. Sanders/L. Sanders (former); V. Sanders/D. Sanders (former); Remy/E. Picani (side); T. Sanders/OMC (mentioned)

CHAPTER WARNINGS/KINKS: mentions of Anxiety, Logan being A Nerd, Philosophy Jargon, mentions of a previous Murder, mentions of Poisoning CHAPTER SUMMARY:  Logan tell Patton how he met Virgil.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: And we’re introduced to Logan! :D This chapter is shorter than the Roman introduction, but it should still bring excitement for people to want to learn how xe died. That’s a weird sentence. lol And yes, xe not he. Logan has had a number of changes with this update and I’m very pleased with them, so I hope everyone else is too. Also, this chapter is PG, so that’s good! Have fun reading everyone! xx Virge

INSPIRATION: This post by @phantomofthesanderssides

AO3 || Buy Me a Ko-Fi!

Patton squeaked and stood up straighter. For some reason, this person gave off a cold and aloof aura. Much different from the warmth and passion that radiated from Roman.

“You— You must be the second of Virgil’s husbands?”

“Spouses,” the second ghost immediately corrected. His lips curled into a slight scowl. It was pretty intimidating to say the least, especially with how tall he seemed to be. “While I do not completely mind being considered his…’husband,’ I would prefer to be called his spouse. Also my pronouns call be he/him, but I would prefer xe/xyr.”

“O-Oh!” Patton blushed, feeling bad he accidentally misgendered another person. “I’m so sorry! I-I didn’t mean—”

“Since this is our first encounter and it was merely an accident, I’ll let it slide.” xe told the confectioner while marching toward him, maintaining a good distance. “However, should we encounter each other again multiple times after this, and you still continue to misuse my pronouns, I can guarantee I will not be so friendly.”

Patton gulped. “Got it.”

Xe held out a hand for him. “Logan Oxford. Esteemed novelist and self-admitted astrophile.”

The confectioner didn’t know what half of those words meant. “U-Uhm,” he shakes Logan’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mx. Oxford.”

“Logan, please. No need for formalities.”

He nodded. Now that he thinks about it, Patton has heard the name Logan Oxford before. His cousin Emile brought xem up a couple of times when he talked about therapy (while still keeping patient confidentiality, obviously). He mentioned how xyr essays were really good, but they seemed a little too…stuffy, for his personal tastes (like most scientists/doctors/philosophers/etc).

Now meeting xem for the first time, he can understand why Emile said that.

While Roman had on very bold, fancy colors: reds and whites and golds, Logan was a stark contrast to that. Similar to his own palette but not quite. Xe had on a dark blue dress coat with a white button-up underneath it, along with black suit pants and dark brown dress shoes. A little bit of gold was on his buttons and cuff links, but other than that, the colors xe wore were predominantly dark.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of differences between he and Logan. The novelist had dark eyes while he had baby blue. Logan had straight, gelled black hair while he had strawberry blonde curls. A medium build with a good amount of muscle as opposed to a soft curvy build with a bit of chub. A sharp face as opposed to a rounded one. Square glasses as opposed to rounded lenses.

Regardless, xe were a very clean-looking individual. Perhaps even handsome in xyr own right, much like Virgil was.

“I suppose you’re wanting to warn me about Virgil too?” he asks.

“Is that not why you’re here?” Logan responds. “Or were you just wanting to put your nose into the affairs of a relatively wealthy man?”

Patton pouted. He didn’t have to be rude about it!

“But yes,” the novelist says immediately after. “I am here to also warn you about the dangers of Mr. Virgil Nyx of 613 Rue Morgue.”

“Well take your time. I’m not here to rush you.”

“I appreciate your concerns, but my past before Mr. Nyx is easy to discuss,” Logan tells him.

The confectioner nods, listening to him attentively.

“Growing up as a child, my father was a firm believer of knowledge,” Xe began. “He always believed that it was an incomparably valuable, multipurpose tool, instrumental in identifying and solving any of the world’s problems.” Dark blue eyes casted themselves over to the books. “One of the things he used to tell me was, “If you are ever worried about getting hurt, then seek knowledge. It is our greatest weapon, and our greatest defense.” And so, with that, my ever-growing thirst began.”

Xe went on, “I scoured for any form of knowledge, be that books or even educative television, wherever I could find it, I absorbed it entirely. I read every book from both my father and Ye Ye, every book from the libraries— primary school, the public one, university— etcetera. All of it was not enough for me. I eventually received my Master’s in Philosophy and a Doctorate in Physics, wishing to expand my love of all things intellect and share it with the world.” He turns back to Patton. “Before my graduation, I had published a few theses that were eventually used at other prestigious universities; and afterward, I had written a book or two, which resulted in my rise to celebrity.”

Patton nodded. Then he asked, “Had you known about Virgil before you met him?”

“I was aware of him, yes.” the novelist’s lips thinned into a firm line. “I had heard about the…supposed suicide of Roman Scarlet, famed Broadway actor and beloved performer of the Storytime lounge. I had also heard of his brother’s desire to take Virgil to court without any proof of murderous intent, I believe he was even in contact with a lawyer despite this.”

The confectioner looked at xem in surprise. “Even when he didn’t have evidence, his brother had contact with a lawyer about wanting to see if Virgil could be charged with murder?”

“Indeed.” Logan nodded. “At first, I read it off as some silly story for revenge, not exactly understanding how that was actually the truth.”

Patton nodded. “So…Did you meet him at a book signing or…?”

Logan didn’t say anything of the longest time. When xe did, it was very vague-sounding. “When I met Virgil…well, let’s just say it was…a strange sense of irony.”

…

If he could, Virgil would have openly spat about how much he did not want to be here. When he became as wealthy as he is, he swore up and down that he would never return to this place, return to the old life he lived before he knew what it was like to have money.

And yet, here he was, walking into a familiar-looking bookstore. The name re-entering his mind like he hadn’t shoved it out oh so many years ago.

Catching his eye was the small clump of beings standing outside its old, paint-chipped door; maybe the line won’t be as long as he thought. However, he quickly (and unfortunately) realized that the clump of people outside stood at the end of a line that snaked through the entire store.

Everyone and their mother apparently wanted to meet Logan Oxford today of all days.

He should’ve expected this, and yet, he didn’t. Idiot.

Actual anxiety slowly began to seize his being as he continued to approach. Everyone seemed to have a book clutched in their hands. Most were the newest release that came just before the holidays, while some seemed to be personally chosen titles by the older audience, and then there were even books of essays that were held and gossiped about by students (or who Virgil assumed to be university students).

By the time the line actually started moving, Virgil felt sweat starting to coat his palms. He let out a noise of annoyance and shoved them into his pockets.

He was not going to let his stupid anxiety ruin this chance for him. He wasn’t!

Walking in, the little jingle of the bell above sounded like the heavy dong of a church one.

Virgil forced himself to look around. This cozy little hellhole remained the same even after almost a decade. (He even forced himself to wonder if the old owner was still here. Probably not. Maybe retired. Or dead.)

The lighting was still bad, but it gave the small interior of the store its warm glow; the carpeting was still old fashioned and had that untraceable smell to it; the chairs scattered about the store were all patchy and worn-down; the wooden tables had scratch marks and random-ass messages that people carved in with pencil; and there were still crazy knickknacks and antiques hanging from the walls or seen from the shelves.

For the widower, this place was a walk-in nightmare, like walking into someone’s grandmother’s house. But for the many customers who come and go daily, it was a little spot of comfort.

Silver-grey eyes eventually found the prize he was looking for.

Logan Oxford sat at a small table with a pen in xyr hand. The writer smiled very thinly up at an admirer as xe handed back their book from across the table.

A thousand little details flooded Virgil’s mind all at once. A full mouth that could be expressive if it wasn’t so clearly behind a reserved wall. A face that was as sharp as Roman’s but it was much more angular. Rich, dark eyes that almost seemed black: dark and mysterious, they looked like they were pulled from the night sky. Slicked back hair that would still be considered neat without all that damn hair gel.

Xe were more than attractive than the widower realized. Perfect for being his next target.

Just before it was his turn, he saw a stand full of Logan’s books, all new and old alike. Making sure no one was looking, he snagged a copy before making his way towards the novelist.

The novelist took the book without even saying anything, not even so much as a polite hello. Xe flipped it open to the first page and started to scribble on the first page with blue ink.

Virgil looked down at the book he grabbed and an idea sparked in his mind. He cleared his throat, but not loud enough to cause a scene. “Mx. Oxford?” he pretended to sound eager. “I know you’ve probably heard this before, but your philosophy essays are so fascinating.”

“You are correct, I have heard it before.” xe said. Dark eyes flashed up at him, a brow quirked and his expression monotone. “Do you have a particular question you’d like to ask me?”

He nodded. “Actually, I do…Do you believe that your field of study has been hindered by the teachings of Aristotle, or are you one of those science-y people who just nod and continuously say he’s right without any substantial proof?”

At that, Logan’s head shot up. “…beg pardon?” Xe were a little stunned by the question being asked of him.

“Do you agree with Aristotle’s teachings, yes or no?” Virgil asked again, a tiny bit amused as he made the novelist react in such a way.

Xe cleared xyr throat, trying to regain some composure. “W-Well,” he stammered. “In the case of Aristotle…the man was usually wrong. A lot. Most of his descriptions of the natural world are some variety of incorrect,” xe tell him. “Looking past his blatant sexism, his understanding of motion and forces is wrong, is astronomy is wrong, a good portion of his biology is busted, and science has in fact suffered for it. For almost 2,000 years to be specific.”

The widower hummed. (Truth be told, he hated philosophy. It was basically a bunch of old guys trying to preach certain ethics and ideologies that would eventually become outdated and criticized.) Nevertheless, he wanted to know what Logan thought about it.

“However,” Logan continued, a glimmer of something sparkling in his eyes. “It wasn’t until the 1800s when the atom was officially declared A Thing, that people began to believe his contemporary, Democritus, as opposed to himself.” Xe snort. “Not to mention, according to Cicero, his prose was apparently a flowing river of gold…when it actually was not. And it was because of him that we not only lost science but also a catastrophic amount of classical literature.”

“So in actuality, his works are basically glorified lecture-notes from his students?” Virgil smirks faintly. “I guess you know now why we should’ve listened to Gorgias instead.”

“Gorgias?” Xe ask, looking at him incredulously. “The man was, excuse my Greek, a pathological pain the ass. He didn’t care for objective truth and stated that everything was a matter of opinion, which was always bendable.”

“Exactly!” Virgil smirks more. “Everything is a construct, therefore we tried and failed. So now all we need to do is to hide under the covers until the sun goes away.” With that, the widower takes his autographed book and begins to leave the store.

“Falsehood!” A screech came from behind him, making him jump. He turns around to see the novelist get up and stride over to him, a sharp look in his eyes. The widower immediately stood straighter. Damn…that glare reminds him of a certain someone that he does not wish to remember right now. “Just because Gorgias was able to obliterate Stephanos of Thebes with straw-man arguments and casual fallacies, does not mean you can, Diogenes the Cynic.”

Virgil blinked. “…Diogenes the Cynic?” he echoed.

“Yes,” Logan says. “A philosopher who believed that all Sophists were liars, the Philosophers were too pretentious, therefore taking immense pleasure in poking fun at their logic.”

The widower pondered thoughtfully. “…yep. That sounds like us just now.” A glint of wicked humor shone in his eyes as Logan just looked done with him. “But in all seriousness, Mx. Oxford. You have to realize that philosophy can be a bit asinine, right?”

Logan stayed silent for a moment before breathing out. “I suppose so,” xe states. “All of the big, complex ideas simply come from those who are fallible and prone to…ridiculousness. For every Plato’s Republic, there is a Diogenes urinating at a banquet table.”

“There you go,” Virgil laughs. “I hope you really didn’t get offended by what I said. I like presenting counterarguments just to see how people react.”

“No harm done. Although I must admit, while I don’t particularly enjoy socializing with others all that much,” Hard same. “I would like to talk to you more. Maybe about science-based media— or whatever it is you’re a fan of?”

Virgil nodded, smirking internally. “I don’t mind at all. In fact, I would like to challenge your claims on what you call cognitive distortions. As someone who has generalized anxiety, I wanna know what your psychology thinks about my over-reactionary mind.”

Logan hummed in interest. “Oh? I look forward to it then, Mr…?”

“Nyx. Virgil Nyx.”

“Mr. Nyx.” Named after the Roman Goddess of the Night, the novelist mused. Xe liked it. Xe scribbled something onto the back of a bookmark, handing it to Virgil. “Again, thank you very much for coming and I hope to communicate with you again soon.”

“See ya.”

With a finger salute, Virgil left the bookstore with a sigh of relief. He was quite glad that his anxiety didn’t make him look the a fool and that he was out of that atrocious place. He opened the book and saw the fancy penmanship of the novelist.

On the bookmark, was his phone number.

He smirked. Maybe he did succeed after all…

…

Patton listed as Logan finished telling him about xyr first meeting with Virgil. He had to admit, it was rather nice to not listen to any…graphic details about things he didn’t want to know, even if Roman told him in a vague manner.

“So how did you stay close with Virgil?” he asked, remembering the questions he presented Roman. “You gave him your number; did you call each other on the phone? Or did you both kept meeting at the bookstore.”

Logan shook xyrs head. “No. However, I would invite him out for some coffee if I was in the area. And every time we did so, we would always have little discussions that would turn into…not-so-little discussions after a period of time…”

Patton raised an eyebrow, smiling knowingly.

The novelist scowled. “We did not argue, if that is what you’re thinking! We…debated, that’s much more civil.” The confectioner giggled but allowed him to continue. “And, while I’m not a traditionally…emotional person…it was quite nice to have someone debate on certain subjects with me, even if they tended to hiss at me from time to time.”

Despite this slowly becoming a sad tale, Patton giggled again. He won’t lie, Virgil did act like a cat every once in a while. It was actually kinda cute (you know…despite the fact he murdered three people…).

“I would also take him to any conferences or panels that I would be invited to attend or speak at,” xe told him. “He would act as my plus one, if you will. I must admit, even if I could manage them on my own, it was…almost beneficial for me to have him around during those events.” Xe chuckled. “I say this despite the fact that he detested such things, as they tended to prompt his anxiety and cause him to rudely hiss whenever someone— and I quote— “reached his limits with stupid questions.” Not only that, he was not primarily invested in the actual subjects of said discussions and was more interested in the catering they served.”

That caused Patton to actually laugh. That also seems like something that Virgil would do, though he doesn’t blame him at all. In fact, if he were in his shoes, he would be a bit more curious in the food too.

Logan couldn’t help xyr lips from twitching upwards. “I shall confess, there were times where I myself have agreed with his sentiments.”

Unfortunately, the smiles and laughter had to end at some point.

“But what happened afterward?” Patton eventually asked. “What caused everything to go downhill?”

The little twitch of a smile instantly when back to a frown. The confectioner sees xem turn to grab a book that was suddenly on the table (when did that get there anyhow?). It was a very beautiful looking book: dark indigo in color with a title that he couldn’t quite make out, but he could see Logan’s name at the very top. Xe opened the book, flipping it to the very last pages before handing it to Patton.

‘ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS’ Baby blue eyes skimmed through the short paragraphs of text. Logan gave simple but kind words as xe thanked the people who helped xem achieve such a feat, such as his parents and former professors.

Then he followed to where the novelist had pointed a finger at.

“Lastly, I would like to give acknowledgments to my husband, Virgil Nyx.

While we have not known each other long, and have newly become married, but having your support throughout this journey was momentous for someone like me to complete this project. Your harsh and honest (almost too honest) criticisms of my work were what kept me going to make and achieve better than my means. And while I am not an emotional person, nor do I express my emotions often, I quiet enjoyed having your company while I wrote and rewrote my rough and final drafts… And I must thank you for bring me my favorite green teas and jellied biscuits whenever I hadn’t eaten or drank anything for hours on end.

This is the most I have genuinely praised someone so highly (and also a first), but it cannot be helped. I truly hope you see the appreciation and respect I fester for you.”

Patton couldn’t help but tear up. To Logan, they may appear simple, but they were also so beautiful.

“As you’ve read, by the time I had written my last book, Virgil had become my spouse.” Logan says. “We were married in a simple ceremony. Something that was vastly different from Roman’s grandiose nuptials.”

Patton giggled. It was amusing with how Logan was poking fun at Roman from beyond the grave. (In an almost magical way, he could almost hear an indignant noise in his ear).

“But,” Logan’s face grew sad, almost angry. “That did not last long, unfortunately. I had quickly fallen for Virgil’s rouses like the one before me. And, like him, I was met with an unfortunate end.” A deep, almost tired sigh. “To think, someone like him could have been two steps ahead of me in a metaphorical game of chess…I must say, it was truly a checkmate on his end.”

“Him murdering you, you mean?” Patton asked, fearing the answer Logan will give him. Silence. A very familiar silence.

Then, Logan nodded. “Yes. Although, poisoning is the correct terminology this time around.”

[anarchist-billy]

This probably isn't going to be the most eloquent, cause when am I ever eloquent, but honestly? I can't think of a topic I'm less interested in than top/bottom discourse.

It's at the center of every M/M-centric fandom I've ever been a part of and I was bored with it after the first one 10+ years ago.

And it's always the same arguments.

Every. Damn. Time.

Someone makes a throwaway comment about their bottom/top preferences. Someone else takes that as a condemnation of their opposing preferences. Then somebody inevitably feels the need to write a 10-page Hot Take about the reasons taking a dick up the ass is relevant to their interpretation of character X's canon characterization. Someone else gets all ruffled up cause their interpretation of character X is different. Then someone has to go on a tangent about the inherent heternormative nature of the bottom/top dichotomy and how it's all bullshit anyway. And then everyone gets on their high horses as if talking about who likes having a dick in their ass is a profound matter of morality. And I just...Don't. Care.

You can have your philosophical reasons for wanting character X to take it up the ass, but at the end of the day what it really boils down to is a base carnal desire to see one of your faves get dicked down or do the dicking, and it just ain't that deep.

And the one bit of this argument that does offer some amusement to me, is the fact that literally Every Single Person I've seen talk about it in this fandom has come to the same conclusion: You Do You. I mean, isn't that the general mood of the Harringrove fandom? Seeing as how our ship is The Garbage Ship™ of Stranger Things and we've all grown rather accustomed to the mantra of "ship and let ship".

And yet here we are - Still Talking About It.

(and yes I realize opening a post about bottom/top discourse by saying I couldn’t care less is a bit ridiculous, but I figured I should clarify where I stand on the topic since I made that other post in a moment of exasperation)

[forestwater87]

Cutting Myself on all this Edge

This post has no reason to exist, except that I keep bothering my friends with literally dozens of messages making fun of this and I need a place to keep it all.

What is “this”? Oh, just some people having some Fucking Strong Opinions about how Harry Potter is the Pied Piper (they use that comparison multiple times. It gets old fast) leading our children into the End Times with its pro-illuminati Satan-worshiping witchcraft lessons. You know, the usual.

And no, this isn’t a battle of Forest vs. the Crazy Christians; I’m like 94% sure I’m not working through any sort of religious trauma, partly because I never went deep into this kind of mentality but mostly because I’m just delighted by The Cutting Edge, a website for a very specific type of Christian (no, not you, Catholics. You’re specifically not invited to the Cutting Edge club because you worship demons) interested in the New World Order, the evils of public schools, and Satan’s favorite color.

No, really.

Satan’s favorite color is green. They don’t . . . really explain why.

This site still exists and is the best thing I’ve ever seen. Hours of fun for the whole family. I mean, look at their logo:

And look at their illustration that goes along with their particular Harry Potter series:

Are you not entertained?!

I cannot stop reading these amazing essays -- which delve surprisingly deep into Potter lore, considering they say that there is no sufficient reason for a Christian to ever read a single page of these books -- and I can’t keep harassing my friends with thousands of notifications, so here we are.

Starting small, let’s read the book review for Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s/Philosopher’s Stone. Or, as they prefer to call it:

This book chronicles Harry's first year at the Hogwart's School of Wizardry and Witchcraft.  Prepare to be shocked for the bold, blatant, and bodacious raw Satanism that underlines this story! Since "proper"Drug Use is essential in opening the centres of vision and achieving higher consciousness, we should not be surprised that First-Year students learn Drug Use, Drug creation, in a way that makes Drug use seem glorious! You will be shocked to see '666 ' in the story line, and symbols of Antichrist receiving a "fatal wound"!

That’s the entire subtitle. That’s just how they roll on

THE CUTTING EDGE

Part 1: The . . . Plot? I Guess?

This story introduces us to Harry Potter, an orphaned boy sent to live with his "horrible" Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and their fat, obnoxious son, Dudley. 

I feel very comfortable with the fact that Cutting Edge has chosen to put scare quotes around the word “horrible,” like that’s up for debate. Combined with the very normal and sane opinions expressed elsewhere on the site, this really bodes well for their ideas about parenting and childcare in general.

all through this book, any non-witch folk -- like Vernon and Petunia -- are depicting in disgusting language.  

Typo is theirs, as is the apparent offense they take to the fictional depiction of people who are very much not real. While there hasn’t been any exciting formatting going on yet in this essay, I will replicate it as much as possible, and any changes made will be clearly indicated through square brackets and ellipses.

Non-witch people are known as Muggles , and they are depicting as being "dumber than a box of rocks", of being physically obscene, and of living the most boring, unimaginative lives possible.

I was going to argue that this isn’t true, but I suppose we don’t really meet any cool Muggles in the first book. I guess I have to give them this, but I don’t feel good about it.

Witches, on the other hand, are depicted as being very smart, very "with it", of being physically normal, and of living wonderfully exciting lives

It bears repeating:

a flashback scene to the time 10 years earlier when Harry's Mom and Dad were psychically murdered by evil Lord Voldemort

Okay. Now I’m no Potterologist, and so I’m hoping any true believers will correct me if I misinterpret the holy texts,* but I don’t think Harry’s parents were psychically murdered by anyone. I’m pretty sure they were quite literally, physically made dead. Just because it’s a beam of magic doesn’t mean it’s not physical anymore, does it? Voldy didn’t Professor-X Harry’s parents and they died of three D10 psychic damage or anything; he just fucking killed them with a wizard gun. Am I wrong here?

*By which I obviously mean Harry Potter. It teaches children how to become Satanists; we’re clearly dealing with a book of immense spiritual relevance.

Skipping a little bit of plot summary, which is a combination of, well, summary of the plot, although Cutting Edge is determined to get Hogwarts’ name wrong, and a little bit of baffling End-Times(?) nonsense thrown in for funsies --

Of course, a Christian would be immediately alerted to this turn of events [in which Harry defeats Voldemort and is scarred] because soon a supernaturally powerful global leader will demand everyone on earth take some sort of a mark in exactly this place on the body.

What? 

-- and there’s some weird formatting things going on that I think are supposed to imply something sinister but really just come off as goofy:

They have Harry on a boat headed for nowhere and they had every intention of keeping Harry from ever attending Hogwarts School.  However, Harry receives supernatural assistance.

(It’s not letting me do colors on desktop, which is stupid, but that “supernatural” is supposed to be both bold and red)

There’s a long description about the difference between the Real and Fantasy worlds, which apparently Satanists try to live in both of (and so does Harry, making him also a Satanist. This is actually one of the less-stupid arguments Cutting Edge has for Harry’s Satanism, so just go with it) that’s honestly more boring than funny so I’m skipping it. Then we get to a much more fun section: why Rowling’s descriptions of Muggles are . . . teaching children to hate Jesus?

Part 2: Rowling Hates Muggles

Rowling consistently depicts people who do not practice Witchcraft in most obnoxious terms.  They are depicted as being really, really dumb, boring, and living a life not worth living .  We share these examples, below, with you so you can appreciate the truth of this statement.  Uncle Vernon was also the only Muggle quoted in the book as being really opposed to Witchcraft; therefore, when readers see how stupid, ugly, and boring Vernon is, they get the idea that all people who are opposed to Witchcraft must be as stupid, ugly, and boring as Vernon is.

... Are all people opposed to Witchcraft cowardly bullies?

I mean, you are the one going after a children’s book for daring to entertain children, so if the shoe fits . . .

"Harry was glad school was over, but there was no escaping Dudley's gang ... Piers, Dennis, Malcolm, and Gordon were all big and stupid, but as Dudley was the biggest and stupidest of the lot, he was the leader." [p. 31] How do you know your own child does not think of you in these terms?  After all, you are a non-magical Muggle.

I actually can’t complain, because this is just accurate. I 100% hate my parents and think they’re stupid because they’re not literally witches/wizards. Our relationship has never fully recovered.

"Uncle Vernon made another funny noise, like a mouse being trodden on." [p. 47] Remember Adolf Hitler, the most famous Black Magick wizard in modern history? He depicted Jews as Rats in his Propaganda Machinery, convincing the Germans they should extermination the "vermin".

GODWIN’S LAW HAS LANDED! 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND EVERYTHING OUTSIDE OR IN-BETWEEN, WE HAVE OFFICIALLY COMPARED HARRY POTTER TO HITLER!

We find it highly interesting that, later in the book, when the Evil Lord Voldemort is supposedly killing the unicorn in the Forbidden Forest, the color of the blood of the unicorn is silver! 

Okay, but like . . . why? I mean, it immediately follows a description of the Bloody Baron, who is depicted with silvery blood because he’s, like, a ghost, but I’m not sure what that has to do with unicorns or with Satan. Are unicorns associated with Satan? Is silver associated with Satan?

Is everything Satan? Am I Satan?

There’s a lot of rage at a gentleman named Chuck Colson throughout this section, who apparently made the grave error of telling parents it was okay for their children to read Harry Potter because it doesn’t involve contact with the supernatural. And I’ll admit, that seems like a pretty bad defense of the books, because if you define “supernatural” as ghosts, poltergeists, or whatever the hell Voldemort is, then there is absolutely a metric buttload of supernatural stuff in here.

Arguably, a better defense of why it’s okay for children to read these children’s books is that they are books made for children, but YMMV on that one. Probably depends on whether or not you think children are sitting in the giant metaphorical (or literal? Not sure Cutting Edge gets metaphors) lap of the Antichrist every time they pick up the books.

(A visual reminder.)

Part 3: Basically Part 2, But This Time There Are Colors

The next section is on colors, which are very important to Cutting Edge. As linked back in the very beginning of this post, there is an entire essay devoted to the demonic colors used in the Harry Potter books, but we get just a taste of it here:

Rowling makes use of vivid colors in her story line.  Some of these colors are consistent with the colors preferred by Satan and his followers in the Occult.  Rowling's use of such vivid colors also enables her to paint the Fantasy Reality of Witchcraft as THE most exciting place to live.  Wizard of Oz uses the same technique: when Dorothy is in her real world in Kansas, the color is black and white, but when she steps into her Fantasy Reality, the scene explodes in the most wonderful color.

Interesting interpretation. An alternative view is that Rowling needs to use more descriptors for things within the Wizarding World, because her readers won’t have the same frame of reference to draw from that they do with real-life objects and events in the Muggle World, and one can assume that these lovely descriptions are part of her being a, y’know, good and evocative writer, and the colors are just related to how she pictured the world she was creating.

But I mean, yours is good, too.

Actually, the citations provided by Cutting Edge don’t depict anything especially vivid; it’s not like she’s throwing massive amounts of purple prose at the descriptions of the Satanic green of Harry’s eyes. In fact, the only enhancer used is “emerald” at one point. For the most part, this essayist is just . . . noticing when the word “green” appears in the text and calling it a siren song to entice good Christian children out of the colorless world of reality and goodness and into the technicolor dreamland of magic and mayhem.

Also, please remember that Satan has a favorite color, and it’s green. For all birthdays and Christmases (or wait, whatever the Satanic version of Christmas is! Halloween?), please make sure all gifts are green or green-adjacent.

Even though Harry is nearly as powerful as a Black Magick practitioner, and could easily have decided to go over to that side, he declines to go over to the Dark Arts.  Dumbledore assures Harry that he is not evil as Lord Voldemort. However, as a symbol of the Black Arts he could perform, Rowling makes Harry's eyes green.

This observation -- and I use the term loosely -- implies that every single Slytherin and villain of the Harry Potter series would have green eyes, to demonstrate their capacity for evil. The fact that this is obviously not the case must just be a red herring.

Part . . . 4, I think?: Drugs, Magic, and Magic Drugs

Harry and his friends learn how to makedrugs, and the glory of taking them.

The fact that they don’t actually take any in this book is entirely irrelevant. (”Drugs” should also be red as well as bolded. It’s very serious business.)

The plant, wormwood, contains thujone, an hypnotic drug, banned by the FDA since 1915 [Christian News, "Latest Potter Book Meets Cautionary Response From Christians, July 17, 2000] ; further, wormwood is used to make Absinthe, a hallucinogenic liquor.  Therefore, the drug to which Rowling makes reference is very real, and is so dangerous the FDA has banned it -- to this day, it is banned!

While thujone was illegal at the time of this essay in the United States, it was actually never banned in the UK . . . you know, where these books take place and were written? I don’t think Rowling gives a solitary fuck about our FDA standards. Also, I don’t know if you could just straight-up buy wormwood on whatever the equivalent of Amazon was in 1998 (was it just Amazon?), but you sure can now. Can’t be all that scary.

You can hardly get a better description of drug use, and drug glorification than this!

I wonder why they keep using red to emphasize all these evil things . . . you’d think they’d go with Satan’s favorite color/the sign that Harry is the Antichrist to really jazz up all of the evil.

"The drug message in this book is clear. To reach your goals in life like Harry Potter, you need to know how to make drugs and take drugs in just the right way or else you are a 'dunderhead' and will never succeed." [http://www.fflibraries.org/Book_Reports/HarryPotter ; written by a physician and father who asked to remain anonymous].

The fact that this URL doesn’t lead me to that review is one of the saddest things I’ve faced all month.

The sections on spellcasting are far less interesting, reiterating a pretty simple refrain: all magic is bad, because the books say some magic is good then the books are bad, it’s all teaching children about Satanism. Rinse and repeat.

During final exams, teachers passed out special quills with which to write; these quills had been "bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell".  The reason none of the teachers felt they could trust the honor of the students to not cheat is obvious enough; in Witchcraft, no Absolute Good and Evil exists.  All objective, eternal standards of conduct and morality have been rejected.  Therefore, teachers knew full well that all the students would cheat on their final exams if they thought they could get away with it.  It is a sad commentary that teachers had to place an Anti-Cheating spell on the quills to prevent exams cheating.  Christian parent, is this the "morality" you want your students to learn?

Now, it might just be my obvious Satanist addiction to witchcraft talking, but doesn’t it seem more likely that there’s an anti-cheating spell because sometimes . . . children cheat? And no amount of Good Wholesome Christian Teaching is going to completely eradicate the desire to cheat on a test, because of course it isn’t. 

It’s not because the school has taught the students that cheating is okay and cool and sexy or whatever -- in fact, if you want evidence that there is an absolute moral standard against cheating, it would be that the teachers are actively taking steps to prevent it! If witchcraft really was all about how there’s no such thing as good and evil . . . well, for one thing they wouldn’t teach Defense against the motherfucking Dark Arts, but they also wouldn’t care if their students cheated enough to provide anti-cheating quills, because they wouldn’t consider cheating a bad thing, because they wouldn’t consider anything a bad thing! 

Also, I’m not sure what listing all of the spells in the book and what they do really says about Satanism, except that . . . spells exist, and are used? Which I feel like you should really expect from the book about magic and wizards; if that’s an alarming surprise, then you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere way earlier down the road.

Part whatever: Seriously, Rowling is just ALL ABOUT Satan

This entire section is basically about how JKR must be a Satanist, because she apparently depicts the world of magic and the occult with perfect accuracy, and how could she do that except through being an active practicing witch herself?

Mirrors are believed to be a portal to another dimension, including Time.  Occultists believe they can go forward or backward in Time with a mirror being one of the Dimensional Portals.  Harry encounters a mirror, "magnificent ... as high as the ceiling, with an ornate gold frame, standing on two clawed feet ... Harry stepped in front of it. He had to clasp his hand to his mouth to stop himself from screaming ... for he had seen, not only himself in the mirror but a whole crowd of people standing right behind him ... 'Mom?', he whispered.  'Dad?' They just looked at him, smiling ... Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life." [p. 208-9] 

Intriguing theory, except of course for the fact that the mirror isn’t a portal to jack shit; unless you count the weird trick where he can get the stone (and only the stone) through wishes or whatever the fuck these idiots do, and all it does is show someone what they want. It’s not actually reaching into the past to find Harry’s parents or whatever, just like it’s not actually reaching into a parallel dimension future where Ron is the king of everything. It’s just . . . idk, reading their subconscious and throwing up a neat visual or something. With magic. It’s complex, but it’s definitely not what Cutting Edge says it is.

Not pictured: a portal to another physical, metaphysical or temporal dimension. It’s literally . . . just a mirror, but a mirror that reflects your insides instead of your outsides. It’s clever or something.

Do you realize Rowling has just made the creator of the Sorcerer's Stone 666 years old?  Do you realize what this means?  Since the number, '666', is a symbol of Antichrist and his Mark of the Beast [Revelation 13:18] and since Rowling ties this number to the Elixir of Life, Harry Potter is teaching children that the way to achieve eternal life [Elixir of Life] is to obey the Antichrist and take his Mark of the Beast!

Fucking. Yes. I don’t even have witty commentary for this, I’m just delighted by every word in that section. I’m smiling so much. 

This is a gift and we’re reading it for free!

Wonderful! We have the forbidden practice of drinking blood in this Potter book, forbidden in Scripture [Genesis 9:4-5] but practiced regularly in Satanism. I wonder if Chuck Colson, Focus On The Family, and Christianity Today ever told their Christian followers about this?  Have they even read this book, before they issued their acceptance of Potter?

Don’t you dare try to employ sarcasm. People who believe in the Illuminati and New World Order are not allowed to be sarcastic -- even if the thought of this faceless stranger typing that little clever “Wonderful!” and smirking to themselves about how witty they are is a very, very good mental image.

Also, what the fuck did unicorns do to deserve being associated with the Antichrist? I mean, I get the color green; it’s the color of nature and the outdoors, and that shit fucking sucks. (Fuck you, trees!) But unicorns?

Unicorns have never done anything to anyone, ever. Unicorns couldn’t be Satanists if they tried.

This means evil Lord Voldemort -- whose killing curse upon Harry, his Mom, and his Dad had rebounded against him when Harry did not die -- is near death, and is seeking to drink the Unicorn's blood to stay alive long enough to finally achieve eternal life through drinking the '666' Elixir of Life.

Yes, that is -- sort of -- the plot of this book.

This is the specific New Age doctrine being taught here: people will have to draw their temporary spiritual life from The Christ until the time comes when their individual consciousness will have been raised so much they will achieve their personal godhood, and live forever!

This concept is genuine New Age, is consistent with prophecy, and Rowling depicts it very well!

Christian parents, do you want your child to be taught this New Age doctrine?  Can you see Harry Potter playing the Pied Piper and leading your children straight to the Mark of the Beast?

Pied Piper count: 1 (that’s not a lot so far, but it’s used in like every essay. It’ll come back)

I don’t know how to tackle this, because I’m not sure Cutting Edge really understands that Voldemort is the bad guy in these books. Children aren’t going to read this book and then go, “Cool! I’m gonna go stab a unicorn and drink its essence because my favorite role model You-Know-Who told me to!”

The unicorn blood thing is unilaterally portrayed as a pretty bad move. Voldemort’s goals in general are pretty obviously not great ideas. I know Cutting Edge doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight here, but Voldemort’s quest for immortality and how bad and wrong and fucked-up that is, is kind of one of the major through-lines of the entire story. It could be argued that it’s not Voldy’s desire to live forever that’s wrong so much as his whole, like, genocide thing, which is legit . . . except that all the methods to attain immortality involve killing someone, or stealing something, or otherwise being Not a Good Dude.

Voldemort is Not a Good Dude, and I don’t know how to communicate that any clearer than the books written for third graders already did.

Part 6: I don’t really know, I just wanted a chance to break this endless essay up and this seemed like a good place to do it. So let’s talk about spells some more

Many spells require both the taking of drugs and demonic possession, so it is a matter of gravest importance that Harry is actually going to learn to cast spells.  When Chuck Colson dismisses the casting of spells as innocent and of no real importance, did he know this fact?

I seem to have missed the part where Harry goes off his ass on LSD and gets possessed by B’aal. Was that in the Silmarillion? 

whenever a witch changes the physical characteristics of something, he or she is practicing very high-level witchcraft, has a high level of demonic possession, and has had to carry out human sacrifice themselves or have someone else do it for them.

“It’s fiction” is often a bullshit excuse to justify bad framing, but I feel like it applies here, because maybe in the “real” world spellcasting requires you to trip balls and summon demons, but it’s extremely obvious that it doesn’t work like that in Harry Potter! You can’t just say that’s what the books are teaching when the books aren’t actually teaching anything even close to that! 

(I’m starting to feel like my emphasis italics are having a similar effect to Cutting Edge’s red bolded letters. Fuck if I’m gonna stop using them, though.)

If Harry and his pals were wearing goat heads and putting virgins into a giant blender or something I think you might have an argument here, but when the people reading your essay have eyes and can see that the things you’re describing aren’t anywhere in the books, you’re just lying. And it’s very obvious, and I still love you, Cutting Edge, but you’re being disingenuous and it’s starting to kill my joy-boner to constantly have to point out the ways you’re misunderstanding a children’s book, especially when I think you’re kinda doing it on purpose. So how about you chill just a little bit and we’ll all read some Harry Potter together.

Magical Drafts and Potions , by Arsenius Jigger.  Some of the potions are very real, very deadly.

Wait, did Rowling publish this one, too? How do you know what’s in the book? Does the book list some real potions and how to make them, or is this another thing that’s only available in the Cutting Edge’s copy of the books? 

Students were told they could also "bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad." [p. 67]  These three creatures are important to an occultists. Satanists have always revered the cat because of its reputed "nine lives", which is a symbol of reincarnation. Cats are also symbols of a witch's familiar spirit.

They have revered the frog because his prominent bulging eyes represent the All-seeing nature of Lucifer.  Frogs are also consistently used in many of the potions witches concoct.  They revere owls as a symbol of occult wisdom and omniscience -- again because of their eyes.

So fuck cats, I guess. They’re being pretty unfair to owls and frogs too -- especially insulting their poor eyes. They can’t help it! -- but I’m a crazy cat lady and I’m not feeling this slander.

Actually . . . my cat looks pretty high right now. Maybe she is channeling Satan.

Okay, never mind. Fuck all these animals. They’re all evil. This article is entirely right, and I renounce all of my previous statements.

McGonagall has obviously mastered her Craft because she was the tabby cat seen by Uncle Vernon reading a map, back in chapter one.  Remember that any time a witch or wizard practices transfiguration, they need expert spell-casting, and demonic possession.  I bet no one ever told you that little fact, did they?

No, they didn’t, because it’s not even remotely relevant to the fictional book written for children.

Like, I’m trying very hard to not question anyone’s religious beliefs, so if you believe in the occult and magic and all that then more power to you, and maybe it’s totally valid to think that real-life magic spells requires demonic possession. That doesn’t make it true in the books, though! Stop making shit up!

Potions Class -- taught in one of the dungeons [p. 136]  How disgusting must the atmosphere for this class, and others, taught in a dungeon, which was built to torture people to death?

If only the classroom, teacher, and overall environment for the Potions classes was meant to be as viscerally unpleasant as possible. Then putting them in the dungeons would be a really good idea, to reflect the Slytherins’ backwards beliefs and the misery of their intolerance.

Like, JKR isn’t this subtle. When you name one of your antagonists “Bad Dragon,” you’re not aiming for this subconscious-symbolism bullshit.

Part 7: Did you think this book had a good moral? Fuck you!

The fundamental occult/Communist philosophy

Well, I guess we’re talking about Communism now! Because if there’s anything Harry Potter is interested in above all else, it’s Communism.

My favorite things about these essays is how they will pull in other social ills -- abortion, public schools, communism -- and slap them into their argument regardless of if it makes any semblance of sense.

Anyway, Cutting Edge actually has a legitimate argument here, although they take it about 50 steps too far:

the "Ends Justify The Means" permeates this entire book.  To achieve a goal deemed good, Harry and his friends consistently break rules, steal, and use Witchcraft against others.

It is true that Harry and his friends break the rules, lie, and otherwise do “bad” things in the service of an ultimate good, and that they suffer relatively few consequences for it. This is a legitimate point, and actual people who know things agree.

I’ve been struck speechless by this article before, but this is the first time it’s because I think they might have an actual point.

Hermione was very mildly punished [for her lie to the professors about why they were fighting the troll], but her lie cemented a friendship with Ron and Harry, leading a child to conclude that her lie served an excellent purpose, and could not be considered 'wrong'.

I mean . . . yeah? I don’t think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that children will take that lesson away, but I read it as a child and I certainly didn’t think Hermione was wrong to lie -- nor do I now, which I suppose proves just how powerful the Satanic conditioning was.

Professor Quirrell told Harry, "There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it ." [p. 291]  This is standard Witchcraft, and standard Illuminist doctrine.  This doctrine is the guiding light to those Illuminists who are driving the world into the Kingdom of Antichrist.  This doctrine is very seductive to those immature children trying to grow up in our current culture; since a child's inherent nature is evil, he will find such philosophy more appealing than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Christian parents, beware!

Oh thank God Satan, we’re back to the bullshit. I was getting seriously weirded out by the idea that they had good points buried in here somewhere, but now we’re just faced with the argument that the bad guy says . . . bad things . . . and is defeated because his bad ideas are obviously bad and wrong . . . and this proves that the book is teaching children to believe the bad things?

No one reads these books and wants to be the bad guys, Cutting Edge. Kids aren’t buying Harry Potter wands and robes to pretend that they’re Quirrell, trying to keep people from finding out they have a Dark Lord on the back of their head. (Though now that I’ve mentioned it, that sounds like a very fun game.) 

Depicting bad things in a way that makes it clear -- to children, I must reiterate -- that they’re bad isn’t the same thing as romanticizing or promoting those bad things. This is basic stuff, CE.

Revenge Motive : "Hagrid almost had to drag Harry away from Curses and Countercurses (Bewitch Your Friends and Befuddle Your Enemies with the Latest Revenges:  Hair Loss, Jelly-Legs, Tongue-Tying, and Much, Much More , by Vindictus Viridian." [p. 80] Throughout these books, seeking revenge and attacking your enemies is high on the priority list of Harry, his friends, and other students.  Do you want your children to adopt this most Satanic attitude?  Notice the first name of the author of this revenge book, above, is named "Vindictus, i.e., Vindictive".

Students are taught to depend upon Witchcraft for every part of their lives .  All food is conjured up rather than prepared, all the dishes are conjured clean, and even the hospital depends upon Witchcraft to get students well [p. 156].  Neville Longbottom, one of the more clumsy students, received a crystal ball from his grandmother called a Remembrall .  The ball glows scarlet if you have forgotten something you should have done. [p. 145]

That’s . . . fuck, that’s actually kind of another good point. Stop kinda making sense, goddamn it!

A lot of the criticism is just that the things wizards do are cool, which will make kids want to become witches/wizards in order to do those cool things, too. And to be fair, the stuff Harry et. al. does are cool, and I did want to be a witch when I grew up. Fortunately, I was in third grade, and so my options for witchcraft were relatively limited; by the time I was old enough to pursue the endeavor properly, I was also old enough to know that it was actually nothing like Harry Potter. If magic actually was anything like those books make it seem, we’d have a lot more witches running around, zapping shit.

Possible reference to homosexuality .  When I was first researching Harry Potter, I examined several pro-Potter websites. The author of one of the articles said that one of the probable developments she felt would occur in the latter books was the advent of homosexuality in the story theme. She said such activity was only hinted at in the first books.  

Oh dear god, Cutting Edge found the shippers. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

(I wonder if this means they’ve also read the Draco Trilogy.)

I do have to take issue with one last point in this bit about morals, where they talk about how scarring it might be to a child to see Voldemort possessing the back of Quirrell’s head:

Rowling could not have created a better description of demonic possession by a dark and powerful demon!  Christian parent, is this the type of thing you want your child to bring into their minds?

Thing is, I’ve been in a lot of Christian circles for most of my life, and this sounds exactly like the kind of dark, traumatizing thing many religious parents would be happy to put into their children’s minds.

Part Almost Done: Definitely Intentional Satanic Symbols, Really

Hey, did you know the number 11 was occultist? I didn’t, and when I Googled it, 4 of the front-page results were Christian or conspiracy groups making this claim, 2 were unclear, and 3 actually seemed to indicate some level of belief in the power of the number 11. Though I might’ve stacked the deck with the word “occult”; when I changed my search term to “magic,” I found almost exclusively positive articles about the symbolic power of the number 11, so . . . Cutting Edge isn’t necessarily wrong. 

But boy, did you know how many times the number 11 shows up in Sorcerer's Stone? Not very much, but if we stretch our credibility a little bit, we might see something spooky!

Harry was eleven (11) when he was admitted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  The number eleven is considered sacred to the occultist, as it is the first primary number.  Occultists will also add up numbers to get an occult number that is sacred; thus, I was highly interested when the bank vault maintained for Harry by his Mom and Dad before their death was numbered '713' [p. 73].  When you add '7 + 1 + 3 = 11'.  Then, we learn that, in the money of the Fantasy Reality, "twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle".  When you add 2 + 9 = 11.

When Harry found the wand that was meant for him, it turned out to be 11 inches long! [p. 84]

The Hogwarts Express Train left at 11 o'clock from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. [p. 91]

Oh man, that’s some convincing evidence. Evidence of what, I have no idea, but it uses math and I’m sure it’s very alarming!

" Sorcerer's Stone " is also called the "Philosopher's Stone", and is very, very Satanic!  Rosicrucianism teaches that an Initiate will pass through five stages to become the highest Adept possible, to be most proficient in exercising the power of Satanism.  They call this process the "Five Stages In The Transmutation of the Soul".  The final stage is depicted by the Phoenix Bird; the Adept is then said to have achieved the "Sorcerer's Stone".  Thus, the fact that the term, "Sorcerer's Stone" is in the title of this book suggests that the ultimate goal of all students at Hogwarts is to achieve the Sorcerer's Stone.

Wow, that sure is an interesting interpretation of the rock that shows up in the book for like 6 pages and then is immediately destroyed! Alternate theory, if you’re open to it: It’s a rock, named the Philosopher’s Stone because the Philosopher’s Stone is historically the name of a rock, called the philosopher's stone, and it's literally just a rock and doesn't mean anything Satanist because it's a fucking ROCK.

(Pictured: A rock)

There’s a really odd part right after the long discussion about how alchemy and unicorns and whatnot are Satanic Illuminati symbols, where CE just takes a moment to explain the game of Quidditch. No commentary beyond a sassy little “[Even the Quidditch balls are 'enchanted'].” Just . . . sort of letting you know how the game is played.

To be fair, this is quite a valuable service, since I don’t think anyone actually understands how Quidditch works, but I’m not sure what it’s doing sandwiched between two declarations of Harry Potter’s obvious evil.

PART THE LAST THANK GOD: WHO THE FUCK NEEDS A SUBTITLE IT’S ALMOST OVER

The first few paragraphs are standard boilerplate conclusion stuff, reiterating the rest of the story, continued misunderstanding that bad things are done by the bad guys, no there really are drugs and Illuminati propaganda in here I promise, yadda yadda. Nothing noteworthy except for the fact that I found this sentence absolutely hilarious:

But, most horribly, we see depictions of Satanism that are truly End of the Age.  We see the symbol of Antichrist, the Unicorn.

And so I leave you with this one final thought, because it’s all I can fit into the saggy mush that was once my brain:

From Genesis through Revelation, God demands His people separate themselves from the evil around them! SEPARATE!  SEPARATE!  SEPARATE!

S E P A R A T E 

[beinglibertarian]

Civilized Society: On the Death of Civility

One of the most influential questions I’ve ever encountered came not from a great philosopher or writer, nor from any inspiring conversation or work. Rather it came from a black comedy at the end of a rant about people throwing used tampons at each other and ripping on American Idol.

The movie (and I highly suggested giving it a watch) was called “God Bless America” and was a story of a man who decided to address the idiocy and (un)culture of the U.S. Of A.

The question: “Why have a civilization if we are no longer interested in being civilized?”

The weight of that question has stayed with me for many years. In all aspects of our lives, we see a continuous shift towards not just tolerating but accepting and rejoicing at the de-evolution of our moral and normative standards.

Before this gets misinterpreted, I am not attempting to start the “objective/subjective” morality debate. Rather I want to touch on this trend, the damage it has and will continue to do, and its effects on not just discourse but human interaction at large.

For the purposes of this piece, I feel that I need to define what I mean by “civilized” in this context.

I am referring here to a standard. A level of culture, of self-betterment, and of social advancement. I am referring to refinement, tact, principles, and all of the other things we have allowed to be eroded from our social norms. The very things that made us as advanced as we are as a civilization are the things that we are allowing to disappear, and it’s primarily due to either apathy, intellectual laziness, or the false belief that these cornerstones of our society are mere relics compared to our own decay.

Make Politics Civilized Again

When we talk about politics we usually end up discussing how terrible one politician is compared to another (which I’ll touch on later). Worse still is attempting to engage with people themselves. Moreso than our politicians, people in general need to be more civilized when discussing these topics.

God forbid one disagrees with someone these days! Outline the belief in an opposed idea and you will be beset by the tribalistic howler monkeys hungry for the flesh of the heretic.

To many, it has become as if the mere existence of opposition is equal to a personal affront or attack.

If one believes or is thinking something different than the hive they are implying that the other is somehow mentally deficient.

Everything gets couched in false dichotomies of us/them, yes/no, right/wrong, all when the world of political ideologies are far more convoluted and nuanced than that. I may disagree with someone’s views on a topic like gun control, but that doesn’t mean that that alone is justification for me to start screeching “Statist!” the second someone suggests some form of restrictions. Just the same I would hope that my opposition wouldn’t immediately jump into saying I support the deaths of children or some other absurdity simply because my stance remains unchanged after a school shooting.

The purpose of debate and civil discourse is to present and challenge ideas; not to pontificate and organize pissing contests.

I find it odd that people will demand to have their voices heard, then squander the opportunities to shift hearts and minds to their cause through empty vulgarities.

Despite millennia of evolution, we still allow ourselves to be put into the little boxes of our self-designed tribes. Even those of us who preach for individualism can be found guilty of this.

Not all is lost here though. I’ve found that much of it lies in approach. If one approaches a discussion from a good faith position with a true willingness to objectively debate and review ideas you will eventually find those on the opposition that are the same. Even the ones that aren’t can eventually be swung into a proper discussion with the right levels of tact and respect.

Obviously, there will be those that are simply there to screech, but that doesn’t grant a license to debase one’s self and do the same. Ideologies can and ought to be discussed on an ideological level. Any lower and one may as well not speak at all.

The Death of Nuance

By and large, this might be the biggest contributing factor to the issues spelled out above and below.

Even those that maintain the ability to discuss, debate and create tend to have lost this necessary skill. The ability to understand and look for the nuance in things.

We design things around simplicity rather than quality. Whether it’s our political arguments or our art, we are constantly aiming to accomplish some form of streamlining that in turn means the frills need to be trimmed.

Arguments are reduced to dichotomies and art reduced to the most easily packaged thing. We see this with our politics especially. We will ignore the nuances of arguments that have vastly different implications because they are outside of our tribes.

There is a massive difference between saying “I’m against the existence of unions” and saying “I’m against government empowerment of unions.” Supporters of unions will treat these as the same thing, even if the latter statement came from a supporter of unions themselves, or if the opposition is some form of left-libertarian. Logical consistency and honest review of the details of their opponent’s arguments are thrown aside for the sake of their tribe.

As I mentioned above, we try to reduce all things into “yes/no” categories and trap ourselves within them. This does far more harm than simply amputating the civilized tones political discourse once held. It also kills our ability to think outside of these dichotomies.

If what one has to say can’t be reduced to a tautology or syllogism then it isn’t worth hearing in the eyes of our generation of pundits and keyboard warriors. As a society, we have stopped our exploration of philosophy and the arts and moved into a phase of rearrangement. We no longer strive to make something wholly new, but simply remix and argue over what has already come before us.

Most of our media and ideas are not our own anymore. They are remixes of ideas and arguments from before.

While it is worth understanding and appreciating what came before us, we should strive to move past it. We should strive to improve rather than regurgitate the ideas that came before us. We should take the time to learn the subtleties of what we engage ourselves in. I brought it up in one of my podcast episodes where I talked about the human habit of overcomplication, yet I am equally astounded by the amounts of those complications and nuances that we add to our interests that we then summarily ignore.

We will spend all of this time debating philosophy, politics and economics, but we won’t take an equal amount of time to review the basis for the arguments our opponents use, or in some cases ourselves. Instead, we will defer to the basics of what we encounter and fight from there.

In art, we will accept a lower quality of music lyrically because we’ve reduced our listening experience to the beat. We examine our world from generalizations rather than attempting to view things as a whole. We discard the whole once we’ve decided what is in front of us. There are some out there reading this that likely saw the repetition of the word “we” and got their backs up. It should be easily understood that the usage of the word here is in a generalized form and thus should receive no contention from those this critique doesn’t apply to. The fact that this likely needs to be explained further illustrates my point.

“It’s Art”

It is saddening when people say this in defense of baseless vulgarity or unoriginal pieces of “art.”

Through the postmodernist lens, we’ve come to accept anything as art so long as it was made in expression of whatever the “artist” whips up as a reason after the fact.

While some pieces can indeed be interesting, on the whole, much of the talent the art world use to hold has been replaced with expression for the sake of expression; no actual skill required. We’ve turned the study of the aesthetic into a scatological field.

The truest shame of this is the amount of true talent that gets passed over in place of these works of “art.” The amount of technical skill and artistic vision that likely went into your phone’s background or those random “cool art” Facebook page posts you’ve seen massively outweighs anything I’ve seen from the “performance art” crowd in recent years.

Outside of the regular talentless hacks that throw the term “avant-garde” around like they actually know what it means, there’s the overpackaged side of this decline as well.

Now it needs to be stated first: I understand that most television, movies, and pop hits aren’t designed to be masterwork expressions of the craft. They’re designed to be popular. The problem is twofold here.

First, we are a very systematic species. We’ve devoted thousands of man hours and resources into the study of what makes certain music or shows popular and reduced these fields to a science rather than the art it ought to be.

Not every TV show needs to be some high-level journey of wonderment, but at least they could stop redoing the Three’s Company formula every time they need a new hit. Even some of the better works that have come out in recent years like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, while refreshing, ended up doing little more than creating a new system for companies to flood the market with.

With every repetition of the model, it becomes weaker and more deformed.

Pop music has always suffered this, but the emphasis on it has eroded the usefulness of the media form.

Even older pop hits still had to reach a certain level of quality before we would begin to eat it up. Instead of keeping up with that trend, we’re fed things that are scientifically designed to be appealing; rather than being appealing on its own artistic merits.

Luckily there are definitely acts out there that bring that higher level of quality, but sadly they simply aren’t as big or on the same level of reach as the cookie-cutter ensembles that I’m referring to.

I’m not suggesting we need to go back to some idyllic civilized high society that only listens to classical and jazz (though I wouldn’t really oppose that either), but rather that we pay more attention to the art we consume and demand more than a catchy tune with an appropriate level of compression.

The Pursuit of Knowledge

As of the beginning of this sentence, this article was already at 1795 words. For most of those that read web articles, I’m already over the average attention span by about 1000 words.

Even in libertarian circles, there are tons of people that will fight you to the death on an economic or philosophical concept, yet they’ve never read the source material these ideas came from.

They’ll have gotten their arguments from watching others debate online or by parroting whichever YouTuber they happen to follow.

They’ll attack commies for their ideological views, but have never picked up a copy of anything by Proudhon, Marx, or Kropotkin. This isn’t a libertarian issue alone though as those same commies are just as likely to have never read the material either.

We’ve bred a social order that values the products of knowledge, but not it’s acquisition. Sure, we push our youth to run off and get their degrees, but we do that for the sake of them gaining better  employment rather than to actually learn.

Shows like “Are you smarter than a 5th grader” are only possible in a society where we treat the civilized pursuit of knowledge as a means rather than an end in and of itself.

Even when we do pursue knowledge, we aim for summaries. In order to stand for something one first needs the legs that true knowledge grants you. After reading a single Wikipedia article or listicle people consider themselves educated enough to discuss the finer points of Spinoza. And that’s if they even read non-fiction to begin with.

The average person reportedly reads twelve books per year, though this is largely believed to be inflated with the actual average closer to four. This is out of the nearly one million books published every year. Obviously, it would be physically impossible to read that much per year, but even when we do read the quality is suspect.

Look at the explosion of YA novels. Most of it is average, slightly above dime store level tropes repackaged in slightly different arrangements. These sell millions of copies and get turned into blockbuster movies.

Even “Adult” (no, not that kind) novels tend to follow the same path of repetitive swill. The bulk of the variety ends up coming from the types of characters rather than the plot itself, or the authors will predictably try to over M. Night Shyamalan their works with more twists than a 50‘s sock hop.

All of this may sound like some form of intellectual elitism, but rather it is a call for standards. We can enjoy the odd bit of trite every once in a while (one of my favorite films is still “The Room”), however, we cannot sustain ourselves on it.

Civilization and culture around the world has been built on the backs of the thinkers and the dreamers. If we only feed our brains garbage then we will produce the same. To make society more civilized we need to start by making ourselves more informed and demand of others and ourselves the higher standards that would grant us.

Psuedos: A Cancer on Culture

In listing all of this I feel it is important to list the worst offenders of those that erode all that is civilized: Psuedo-intellectuals.

These are the types that list their IQ and pedigree within the first 5 facts you learn about them. They learned all they need to know about being successful from reading 7 habits of successful people and a handful of Malcolm Gladwell books. They took not one, but two CrossFit classes and are ready to become personal trainers and dietitians. They are plebs in Armani.

The reason I think they are contributing to the uncivilized trend that we have been experiencing is that they steal the limelight from real thinkers in the name of egotistical desire.

They speak less for the purposes of sharing any real knowledge they might, by chance, have gathered, but solely to express that they are the ones that know it. They are not agents of enlightenment, but rather of sophistry.

They make compelling arguments completely devoid of any nuance that could show true thought behind their ideas, and become excessively defensive should their supposed superiority be questioned.

They’re willing to show how civilized they are in a discussion right up until any of their ideas are challenged. In their eyes, to challenge them is to say they are wrong which is tantamount to blasphemy.

Their involvement in a conversation sullies it, which in turn turns people away from engaging in the material at all.

Worst still, it can lead to people quietly settling into their little tribes on the topic.

A true thinker should want people to engage in their material. Critiques help people hone their ideas, add to their knowledge base, and offer perspectives that may previously have been unconsidered. A Psuedo-intellectual wants none of that.

The Psuedo just wants to be right from the start, and acknowledged for it. Most painfully, they are likely to self-victimize. They will claim they argue purely from facts and reasoning, but they will also be offended on a personal level if they are sufficiently challenged.

Most commonly this results in pedantic commentary, condescending remarks and stances, and a transition of the discussion from the topic at hand to an emptier game of linguistics. If one dares stoop to their level they’ll immediately decry that they’re being attacked and turn the discussion towards tone and words to gain some level of superiority out of the exchange.

This erodes not only civilized and intellectually honest discussion, but also the foundations of knowledge in the public sphere. Discussion gets driven not by the wisest voices, but rather the loudest.

I think the best example of this committed to film was in the movie “Good Will Hunting.” In the famous bar scene where the pretentious grad student attempts to browbeat Ben Afflick’s character solely for the purposes of browbeating him and making a spectacle. Matt Damon’s character (Will) comes forward and begins to pick him apart for the ideas stolen from entry-level books, generic stances, and walks him through what his academic and general future will encompass being that way.

He quotes the authors he’s stealing from (and even the damn page number), and generally summarizes all of the issues with this breed of person; all through a thick Boston accent.

I highlight this scene because it perfectly encapsulates what I’m referring to. Unfettered pedantry by those that overvalue their own knowledge and capabilities.

Now, I’m not lacking in self-awareness to the degree to not notice that one might think the same of me for writing such a lengthy piece as this attacking all of these aspects of discussion and society as if I am somehow above it all.

I am the first to acknowledge if and when I slip up on the things listed here, and truly without pretense welcome it when others notice so that I can course correct and improve. Noticing these traits and taking the time to improve upon them is what separates us from those that are simply in it to put on a show. True learning and development start with a real hunger for the knowledge, and a humble willingness to be wrong.

Civilized Office Starts With Civility

Look at the news. Just look at it and weep. People have always gotten heated and thrown mud in the political arena, but it had generally been understood that there are levels to which one simply does not stoop.

As time progresses that notion has been eroded.

Even during the infamous Watergate fiasco, we could still see a level of civility in the commentary and discussions on Nixon’s actions, and what should follow. I doubt that reporters from most MSM outlets could sit down through an interview with Trump and remain as civilized yet to the point as Frost could.

Even amongst the general public, we’ve seen this shift. After Clinton and that little blue dress, the respect for the presidency as an office plummeted as seen with the open hostility towards Bush, the baseless attacks against Obama (which tended to ignore the large list of factual reasons to criticize him), and the circus around this current presidency.

I welcome the reduction in the worship of the office as much as the next libertarian, however, I cannot support the lack of civilized discourse regarding it.

One doesn’t need to pretend these politicians are good people (generally they aren’t), but debasing one’s self for the sake of attacking them is unnecessary and pointlessly negative as well.

Civilized discourse is built around maintaining a level of decorum and mustering enough respect to effectively and fairly engage an opponent. As we remove our respect and decorum we also erode our expectations.

You don’t get a Trump (or a Hillary, or Bernie) in office if you actually demand a higher quality from these offices. While one may be on the anarchist side and against the existence of the offices themselves, that doesn’t mean we should treat the offices so poorly as to turn them into a joke. When we do that we don’t reduce the power these offices currently hold; we only reduce the quality of those who hold them.

Put another way, one can question the legitimacy of these offices and want them abolished, but simply treating them sloppily only results in lower quality people hold these positions of power, making them that much more dangerous. Conflating that these offices ought to be removed or reduced with the idea that they hold no power is a root cause of the continuous degrade in the quality of people that hold them.

Conclusion

This also needs to be said: I’m not dictating that we need to make these changes by force. That’s an important detail that is likely to be missed by some on first glance.

Cultural direction works the same as markets in the sense that changes only happen three ways. They happen by environmental factors (abundance of a resource in one area, natural disaster, etc), by the force of an interloper (such as the government), or by the sum of the actions of the individuals of society.

The environmental influence on civilized societies are mostly immutable (note: mostly), and, while there are those that attempt to enforce their cultural views via force and law (From the Puritans of old to the archetypical SJWs of today) I am attempting neither.

I write this in an attempt to get people on a different track and to change how the sum of our culture will look. Between these three factors, I personally will always bet on the individual as being the greatest genesis of change. It’s the individual I seek to showcase this to, and to engage. At the very least I hope this sparks a discussion and consideration of the points herein.

The Dalai Lama had a book titled “How to see yourself as you really are” that I think is apt to mention here. The book discusses the concept of self-knowledge, and removing the biases that attribute to both false negative and false positive interpretations of yourself.

The goal of the exercises and philosophy presented is to direct the reader towards being able to see the reality of themselves, and act accordingly rather than from empty pretenses they might have of themselves.

While I most definitely am nowhere near his levels of understanding or wisdom, my intentions here are the same.

It is my hope that those that read this will aim for more civilized heights than they had before, and will look for opportunities to improve the way we function.

I hope that you will self-reflect and take something away from all of this. It is my hope that we can answer the question of whether to have a civilization anymore with a resounding yes, but that will only be possible if we as individuals are willing to fulfill our parts.

* Killian Hobbs is a writer for Think Liberty.

The post Civilized Society: On the Death of Civility appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[docandprof]

In Which I Review Literature

Say hey!

You delay, I delay – we all delay! Sorry it’s been so long, but fortunately we’ve been keeping up lately, so you have an idea of what I’ve been up to! I very much enjoyed reading your post, and I believe I have a few things to respond to, but I’ll begin with the easiest one – booze! Old fashioned and whiskey sour. What else could you need? Pro tip, make your own syrups. It’s just sugar and water in a 1:1 ratio. I recommend just doing a ½ a cup, since I don’t use that much in a short amount of time.

Now, on to the heart of the matter (see what I did there?). I am so happy that you’ve found love! It is not an easy thing to come by. I think it’s great that you paused and took some time for reflection too – a hard thing to do in the face of strong emotions! And you had a serious conversation about your future? Sounds like you’re in a real mature, adult relationship! You have found something special if I can believe you 😉 so hang on to her! I have learned with you how challenging long distance can be, so it’s great to hear you making a plan to be together soon. It sounds like it makes a lot of sense to enjoy the Nashville area while you’re young, and like you said it’s not forever. It is a tough situation though when you both have good opportunities in different areas, family to consider, etc. (for reference see my life, page 394). Of course, I’ll still remind you that my area is a great place for hip, young cool people like yourselves to move to 😉. And hey, no hard feelings towards the lady – I know you love me, and the love you and her share is a different kind of love. So I suppose I can share.

So besides being happy about you happiness, what have I been up to? Well, like the true yin to my yang, the peanut butter to my jelly, there must be balance between our circumstances apparently (more to come on destiny and fate later). Things have, in the grand scheme of things, been going just fine! But if you take a magnifier to the last couple weeks I’ve had you’d go AGH! To keep it short, and not fall into a rant, work has been incredibly stressful trying to get a release out (even though I know it’s not super critical) and some staff trouble looming for my Monday morning. That’s kind of the least important, but most prevalent (you know since I’m there 40 hours a week) stressor at the moment. My grandpa is not doing very well. I saw him on Mother’s Day and it was pretty bad. Luckily he got in to the doctor last week and seems to be doing better, but he is 92, so of course I want to keep him around as long as we can, but I am well aware of his age. And just today I found out my youngest aunt who has had health problems for years is not doing super well. Of course family health issues are always worrying, and to top it all off there’s been trouble in paradise, as you are aware. We haven’t had another discussion yet, so I’m still feeling a bit in limbo in our relationship, but I care about her so much and will try to work things out how I can, while still being true to myself and my values. I appreciate you offering your insights the other week, more than you may realize. So, it’s been a difficult time, but there are good days on the horizon! I am excited to move in August, some trips coming up in the summertime, seeing you crazy kook, and of course some sort of return to normal life as the pandemic situation improves.

Now, on to what you’ve really been waiting for – my lit review! So I just finished reading The Lady of the Lake, the final piece of the Ciri and Geralt storyline for the witcher books, and as I usually feel after finishing a series, I am full of emotions! I’ll avoid any direct spoilers for your sake, as I think you know enough about the witcher genre to follow with whatever philosophizing is about to follow. Not surprisingly, the ending was what one might call bittersweet. What I suppose I was more surprised by was to learn that the games are not canon. I had seen so many similarities between the games and the books, that I figured I would get to the end of the novel and see the jumping off point for the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Minor spoiler alert – I did not find that jumping off point. Sapkowski gets into some very interesting ideas weaving different myths and legends together towards the end of the series, which I thought was very neat as a DnD player who thinks planar travel and time travel are super cool. His “realism” or pessimism, depending where you look at things from, I also found a bit refreshing from a lot of modern media, where everything kind of works out for the best. Much like George R.R Martin, Sapkowski was not afraid of being brutal to his characters, and maybe it was easier because even though I am in love with his characters, it always felt like I was an observer, listening to the retelling of a story that was already written, the ink dried, the outcomes already made up, no matter when or how I turned the page. (One of the ways he did this I very much want to take as inspiration for DnD – between each chapter he includes an excerpt from a book that exists in his world; encyclopedias, a book of fairy tales, war records from opposing sides, etc.). So it was almost nihilistic to keep reading, knowing there wouldn’t be a happy ever after, but that didn’t stop me from eating it all up.

Everything has been, everything has happened. And everything has already been written about. ~ Vysogota of Corvo

Is this paragraph about the witcher too, you wonder? Why yes, yes it is. And that line is from a character that I was surprised by how much I ended up loving, despite his relatively minor inclusion (note I do not say minor role). In the last few chapters of The Lady of the Lake (which also, go figure, is a frame story – I bet you can put some pieces together), Sapkowski talked a lot about Order, Chaos, Evil, and Progress, which was all interesting and in the bar scene that these conversations took place, I didn’t find myself able to agree with any one character. It was a good reminder that although problems can often seem black and white (especially in the polarized political climate nowadays), many things are not so simple to categorize into right and wrong. Gosh there is just so much I could get into with these books, but to begin wrapping up, I was particularly interested in a short monologue about Destiny from sorceress Philippa Eilhart. I won’t get into it, since I plan to use a lot of the ideas for a certain elven ranger you might know, but it is such an interesting concept to think about, particularly when things happen in our lives beyond our control. Many times people say things like “Everything happens for a reason” and slap it on a picture of a mountain in fancy cursive writing to confront such hardships. My perception is that in this modern era we don’t talk about destiny, but maybe we still believe in it without realizing. Maybe we have to. We’ve explained so much through science and reasoning that one can make an argument against destiny, even some against religion, but I’ve always been someone who has been able to believe in both, despite any contradictions that might arise. Life, love, destiny, the pursuit of happiness – how can we know everything about everything? There will always be something beyond us, above us. It doesn’t explain away tragedies like the sudden loss of a loved one that too many of our friends have experienced recently, but the one thing I (and Sapkowski) think destiny offers us is hope. Maybe this was obvious to you all along, but it’s a realization I’ve only recently come to, and I’m grateful to these books for that, at least, in a time where I feel like so much around me is going wrong, I lean on destiny to remind me that it will be alright. Whether that is a good or bad thing to do, does that really matter? I don’t think so.

Well, having lived up to my title as Professor Souls, I’ll leave you to ponder. Naturally, I recommend you read these books! They’re a bit different in writing style, but I ended up falling in love with it honestly. And if you won’t read, then play Gwent with me! Or don’t. What media have you consumed recently that made you think deeply?

And at long last, you’ve reached the end of this post. The serpent Ouroboros has grasped his own tail, and an ending becomes a beginning.

Thinkin’ hard,

Professor

5.16.21

[diaries-of-a-shut-in]

My impromptu Hiatus

trigger warning: depression, anxiety.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that that’s out of my system, let me tell you about my impromptu hiatus.

It was a real dumpter fire, let me tell you. Basically, I kept telling myself that it was totally fine that I kept staying up until 5 am and waking up at 10 am over and over. And one night was truly poetic in its irony. I was trying to prepare for class, and I realized that I didn’t do a good job of taking care of myself, and end up pushing myself too hard with now discernible improvement in performance because my being tired led to decreased productivity. From this, I concluded that sometimes, it’s okay to be slightly unprepared for a class so long as I get the rest I need. So I decided to treat myself to a pancake that night.

I tried to, anyways.

You see, I’ve never shared this with you, my anonymous and nonexistent audience, but I live with hoarders. Not like my room is messy, like, somehow the house is full of shit that can’t go anywhere because everywhere else is full of shit and it’s literally be impossible to be organized in any capacity. The kitchen is no different. So when I tried to make a pancake I kept being interrupted with shit falling from the fridge(seriously it happened like, 8 times), not knowing where to find stuff I just placed, etc. By the time I had cooked the pancake and ate it, I was more stressed out and anxious than when I started, and ended up staying up through the night.

Because of that, I finally overslept and missed a class, which made me spiral into a depressive episode, where I played a lot of pokemon. 

Fun, right?

Jeez, I’m tired. Anyway, after some rest, I’m feeling better now. I’d like to philosophize about all the lessons I’ve learned, but I’m honestly mentally tired, as opposed to physically tired. I’m going to have to be doing a lot of writing as the semester ends, and I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to keep up. I’ll still rant about stupid and contrarian shit when the mood strikes me, like how Yu-Gi-Oh is the best shonen anime because it’s feminist, but don’t expect a post on a daily basis.

I’m also going to be shortening the time I write to 20 minutes when it’s 3 am and I need to go to sleep. I’ve been doing that anyways, but it’s good to formalize it. I think a good rule of thumb is that if I manage to sit myself in front of the tumblr page before 1 am, I’ll make it 30 minutes. Otherwise, I’ll make it 20 minutes.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed my authenticity which the internet so dearly craves.

well, not really. I still have a couple pets on the timer.

How about this? One of my friends was sad and asked me to tell them a joke, so I panicked and said that my dick was made of cotton candy.

I know, I’m a funny guy. Just like my grandpappy and his pappy before him. It’s too bad that I inherited their cotton candy dick to a strange genetic disorder. On the bright side, my dick tastes sweeter than most other dicks, so I have that going for me.

NOW the timer’s done!

[triumphorce]

I hope you enjoy these poems,

Been long enough since I’ve opened, but what’s wrote here is longer,

Sequoia length,

Hyperbolic-time flow in composition,

Bestowin lines of hopeful intervention,

Archs of ideas risen over an extended period, sheddin blood and perspiration,

No menopause, or birthin babies, no days off or on vacation, just endless effort,

An ellipsis stasis, pausing mentally to pay tribute and revisit thoughts degraded,

Or friends neglected,

Pausin like Nintendo, to eat some dinner before it’s cold and tastes of resentment,

Coldest chest bearin my truest intentions, similar to Sloths’ paws in my grip,

Skeptic in the presence of predators, pause to remain calm from all the norm’s digestion

On my South Paw Tekken method, so I stagger to keep them guessin,

In a mega melee between every one of these beings

And their baseless, no basis for patience, faceless and conceited bantering,

So, I’ll get angry if I get angry,

Pressin pause, once again before, just in case, breathing deeply,

Moment of recollection to intellectually understand the present,

And fast forward through every pressure, as I wordplay on endeavors,

All the while trying to buy me time and spare my mind displeasure

From hiding all these lines, wondering if it’s better to attribute pride

And be forever biased toward my dreams, ignorin finding securer ties

Amidst future porch-lit oblivions,

So I chose to approve all I choose with a stronger sense of what to do, Truth in use,

My Love for Truth reaches deepest distances to defining deeper motive behind the chosen,

Chase my dreams or loathe them, stop wasting time on goals or continue on toward them,

Still I end up writing my mind half the time, a bad habit of thinkin it’s lunch time

When it’s crunch time, bursts of ideas, floodin skies, rainin food for thoughtful animals

So now it’s hunt time and I’m roaming cranial parameters, ramblin in Rome-like stadiums,

A Rome of ages, no Brutus betrayal or Germanic invasion,

No collapsing, I make full course, my own track and traction,

Presidential pioneer of passion; a growth in hope from anger,

A ronin-rioteer, slashing throats of loathe and fear, lies and anguish,

Meaning is now the Home and I’m Forrester, on occasion,

Lovely to me to be left alone, to zone and be free from true isolation,

To redefine, no, renovate my limits, halls of castles spreadin from DNA,

To roofs, my being raising from half staff, saluting empires of past and present acceptance,

No predictions or master plans, only assumed direction and adaptive passion, always fittest,

Regardless of destination or where I land, its presence is foremost and always welcomed,

Whether I am or not, but okay, whatev, bet I’m still gone write, yep, bet I’m still gone type, gone but bet I’ll be right

Back, and bet I’m still gone knock, bet I still remain as obsessive as day one, towards an art,

So check the tech of this apex poet’s level in rap, floetry runneth over and I keep it coming like porno,

And…yea, good, that’s a wrap,

Horde of spun gears in wholesome work, cog-nizant abundance here,

An aggressive submissiveness, self competitive modes of progression shown in

An impressive stanza collection, goin all the way back, ’07, low and undetected,

007 impressions all the way to present moments, presenting poems,

Where 117 is now the logo, a present decree of freeing motives,

Steering hope to fearless and it couldn’t but be made more clear, this here

Can’t be on apprentice level s***, not anymore, I’m no where near, I’m better than,

Mirror Anakin, made aware of hidden traits, clearly bred colossal wake

As the inevitable dawn of day, endless skywalkin in either night or day,

On my Goku and Brolly game, got me on my jolly way,

So hold up, I’m bout to blow it up,

Bomberman noggin blogs, pardon the post-ignited fury,

Sparks from muse are used to light the fuse, moving through my spine,

To the keys I strike, to viewable words through screens of yours,

And then boom, my H2O line of sight crosses Alkaline insides,

Fleeting debris of my being sinking six feet in fire’s keep,

Leaving only a smoke flow of unspoken life, rise to flight,

About to air it out, openin insides to fair against the pain,

Another verbal hurricane, reign of Hadouken waved verses

Bringing pages, like a journalist, cursor brain attached to qwerty nerves,

Constant saving, birthing a freeze frame nature to nurture critiqued allure,

From observin to shining light on might of mind on mind excursion,

Lyrics of Merlin, magickal bound occurrence of astounding verbal wizardry,

Showin beauty in comprehension between the likes of those alike

And others who talk against,

So much hate, yet little mercy, despite what they claim to be in the first place,

So next to action, I narrate..

My part,

a poetic curator organizing deep extractions of Art within an Art,

Sorta clean cause of time off, still far from set Par,

Seeing only as far as I’m made able, free of cataracts

and until the rest is made available I place my faith in words,

Come out unscathed and church

Clean, from housing Temple worship,

Sermons of mental journeys, Hobbit-length, traversing Misty Mountain cliffs,

Where Stone Giants wage war, Bid on shoulder’s girth, a foundation never destroyed,

Only converted, only a change in surface, only courage

Made under fire, slay the dragon buried under the least of worries,

Traded violence and bias for brighter means of time spent,

Breaking dawn of storms, over shores of lore,

Growing force from self-remorse, stored distortion,

From getting used to moving forward,

overcoming obstacles, that before had me stuck in floors, all the lags had me glitchin,

Took a minute but I gathered, from the tension, a meta-genomic grasp

On philosophic-bloodlust in retinas of optics searching for oxygen,

yin-yang-third-eye watchin, a mind concaved to problem solvin at the microscopic,

Supplyin a macro-meson metropolis, comprising atomic gardens,

Ever meso-fixed in topless limits, I can’t stop, no need for friends,

Only accomplice to accomplishin, raising the bar again and again within myself,

Machine-like of John Conner, type neurologic, a bionic Laureate, I been on it,

A token-Conan,

A hint of Homer,

From scarlet bowties and formal clothing

To swinging forth the sword of warriors,

Spreadin life with an aura flourished in poetry,

Sort of like Tenseiga but just as sharp as Tessaiga to slay and defend what’s important,

So I Bakuryūha when cornered, no more warnings to get off my Case,

A Sherlock self-entitlist, just decipherin Edgar Poe whims,

With magnifying-focus, John Locked at poems coordinates,

Geologist-range, Rovin problems over with mecha-method,

reignin hectic over perfect tempo,

Mental metronomes, metabolic gyroscopic, hydraulic steps over all the bulls*** people talkin,

Supplyin medic-tomes to audiences, I guess,

Instead of poems, just a chivalric code in ir-realistic flow,

Just another dose of illness, to strengthen defenses

Here we go and, oh yea, that was just the beginnin’, oh snap, no he didn’t

lul.

So here is my written vaccination, a statement of my mission,

Sick of losing my mind and always seeing accepted ignorance,

Lettin go of trust, just to grab hold of hope I choose to trust again,

Desire to love and forgive poses more importance than holding in

Or holding on to thorns of torn rose stems,

Better at maintaining a utopia within, Jesus-morale through crucial friction,

Yieldin malice to oncoming Semi-driven peace,

Even when afflictions make it uneasy,

I make sure love is not only at its peak when toward family,

Because Kin is everybody I co-Exist amongst, an invisible brand in genes,

Givin me infinitely hope that I can defend beliefs of neighborly bred instincts,

Leading actions to condone sequence of repeated interactions,

Like dominos,

Between

people’s

compassion’s

path’s

Crossing

With that of

My own that I’m steady walkin, not really lookin back,

Exponentially increasing from lack of to getting back up,

Ours, as a world, to combine, or back up, and Choose disbelief,

Giving power to the powers To be, whose power to Be is defiling

Our Choice’s portrait of supposedly empty highlights, making ordinary

Unimportant, so thus this becomes the light of truth and leads life to corrupted view,

Either you losing sight of you or me of myself, misconstruing reason to pay it forward,

So I’m usin lucrative lines to lubricate the minds still a little prude to the nude of life,

Faded from strained engagement, makin the choice to die before you’re ever abused again,

To stand unphased in the face of hate and maintain a level stage of patience, that few appreciatin,

Proof that even in the height of uselessness, truth exist in a dimension fixed from vision,

Rooted fixture of a singularity, opposing ideals varying, extend as phloem,

Still can’t elude the speed of photons in a system of life and physics where the right to choose, itself,

Is the life in what lives stand for,

Beyond the physical, a Worth indivisible, formed from what we did and didn’t do,

Warm with smitten, passive light, passin every night and day,

By the hour, orbit revolutions of quintupled Arcturus regions, knowledge empowered brain,

Observin league’s descent uncharted, breeching in darkest hour,

Gravitate my beliefs to massive reason, dimension of must equalin mass of love

To not corrupt where hearts conduct or infest all I possess with lust,

Hope I can maintain the way I touch hearts and pump in months of hardwork,

I keep learning from how I feel to why I feel that way,

Found difference in being indigent and being ignorant,

Intelligence directly reflectin indignant wisdom, transmittin,

Referrals I purpose of personal Shells in ideals, splurging words earnestly

To enter these journals, but if I’m supposed to, what’s the purpose,

Who am I to deserve such a love to words, just an observer

With judicial poetic touch,

And if it’s certain, to whomever, that fate is written, a moral contingent imminent to emptyin,

then what’s the Purpose to existence other than fulfilling an omni-present minister’s wishes of progression,

So I’m administering this obsession to keep anyone who’s missin those “blessings” to please hold on for new direction because I’m tired of seeing depression used as weapons, ammunition from confusion spreadin, duly attentive to fully removin this sickness in sentenced remedies,

Imprison the Nil of pre-destined influences, bring immunity to kill tetanus infections,

Yet still refusing to refute my messages’ meaning even when people misread or dis-link from me

In fear of appearing foolish when light’s free, wool lids over open eyed fools,

Mule witted minds losin focus,

Allusive motive to controlling themselves,

Soo they leave it to forces brail, leaving me to expose

Where the heart is and what it is I was composed to do, go through,

With an ambition prone to fail, I suppose, According to premeditated rulings,

Meaning everyone can’t avail, so only some progress while others are rejected,

Some succeed, some fail, some live, some dwell, well, all alive, but none feel,

Not one well,

And once accepted they remain as frail as I stay mute, but that’s changin soon,

Realizing the truth to stay ahead, never aim to win, life is better played at whim,

Not a favor to anyone to stay blind because you believe you have no play in it,

And claiming peace, while inside, you fake as s***,

So no more resigned use of…

Of life in muses, only new identities I can side by, fuse with,

Away from what therein lies of pre-inscribed mysterious finds, binding will to higher kinds,

Leaving little clarity between actuality and their desire,

Entirety of irrationality blurring passions with pre-happenings,

So I’m writing packet-deep, massive thesis type lyrics,

Not on what life is, more on what it should look like,

Negate effects of strife in what we go through every day

In dreaming and seeking Faith, ending wake of endless waking, like Kenny’s nature,

Mysterion mind deliberating meaning in decisions that supposedly lead us, survival of the fated,

Achievements naked, blank sheet, feat-less wasteland of failures, aka

Someone else’s graceland’s sake,

Astray a world of involuntary reflexes, committed daily,

So what are we without the choices that we make?

And what are reached achievements if choices obsolete,

Our thoughts subjection leaning toward subjective mercy,

Always worrying things will turn for the worse, or should service us,

Circling merit, false in essence, always expectin credit, all these undeserved expectations,

Just another damn reason to instruct and detain, trained to hush,

Contained in corruption, so I break away and lead myself free of it,

Free of following a truth untold, or rushed through,

I slow it down,

Piercing meaning, rupturing relations between changes in Being

And being thankful for living,

Every reason I find, convenes in front of spleens,

Instead of wasting time slaving to understand something always changing

I can easily provide more beauty with “ordinary” in wording, ordaining my own action,

Than any do with reasons still a mystery because they believe in divinity’s selection,

Well I believe everyone, no matter skin, beliefs, see a peace, regardless of objective,

Peace is the seed that exist in you and me, me in you and you in me, nothing sexual,

Just technical, so here’s to findin triumph in effort hulled, fighting for survival of hope in better situations

Distribute it mainstream, with only precedence toward bestowing bravery,

Traversing in shoals of intricate migrations, from skull to throat,

Talkin over people trollin the same thing, about damnation, nuclear devastation, or no hope in humanity,

Betraying speaking peace in pieces, plain to see,

Disarray in creation of fate-sung predicaments

So I remain an algebraic humanist, Ethos patron instinctively,

Regardless of what will be, only means to believe in,

And I choose to believe then,

From the whole of me, giving heed in forms of rhyming reads,

Waiting for the time to reach and grab my chance before it passes me…

My chance to be, to chance is to breathe in depths of stress, under endless seas of probabilities,

Chance is the rise to waves accent to cling to being, where wind swiftly leads a symphony

Of dreams and just when air seems di-minished, chance then Links courage to cappin fear,

Ceasing deceasing of a dwindled breeze, bringing back forgotten memories,

Connected to the past, of where one love met another,

Growth in a happiness conceived bliss, paintings above everyone;

A past’s collage of pensive imagery, collision of Imagination and color,

As wind in the sky blows to soothe the dried, pacifyin,

Past trees, to carry seeds to where they land and breed,

Chance is the treaty between faith and reason,

So tired, so much time to chancing, less to myself, more to finding pride,

Wealth applied to build a health in a life worth more than itself, meant to help,

Enrich those left with doubt, pursued in talents used to salvage faith and shelter,

Compelling thoughts of jealousy and hatred, still a becoming, in the making,

No black and white, I’m in the gray, changin, becomin blanker to a race based on skin,

A lot of work in becoming the change I wish to see replacing all the deceit and greed shit,

To give people something to believe and then proceed to give them reason guaranteeing chance,

Fairing change in paths and enhance the passion made elastic by creating a canvas of emotions gathered

When faced with resistance in liberation from fated actions, I supply my own motivation,

I never tire, never slack, forever writing, sometimes gaming,

I design, repay debt and fines,

I find when lost,

I admire the quaint breeze,

I aspire to aspire,

Seeking others to re-fire fired dreams,

Finally seeing the beauty in dying leaves,

I am only but the comprisee, comprised to further ideas beyond that Comprising…

And at every Dawn of Morn’, perfect timing,

Lightly sun brushed adorned emotions course vibrantly,

Alarm chime got me up like Dug and Russell,

Carl Orff auricular consumption as I rise to shining,

Leaving bunks made comfortable, plying a nine to five,

Adrift corrupted, yet functional systems of injustice,

That people blindly trust in, such a numb to love world,

So I’m livin sure of what I want, but never deserving,

More for serving, because I see a turning in returning,

Learning TM 27, to defend without hesitation, those hurting,

Putting plenty work in, stayin sturdy, steady, stern,

So no more sleep, reenergize my mind with ultraviolet multi-focused drive,

Never tried thriving in just one type of art, renaissance rhymes or charcoal lines,

Bars of ideals primed in furnace fire,

Filled from philosophical mines I, from time to time, step inside to dig further,

Almost a decade, now, dedicated toward a storyline that transformed to novels,

From Lanowen to Cenoria,

From one part to over four, comic-concepts

From porch bottom to views with No horizon,

Just me and Hiz,

From RP to a simple Story, to a Foyer of plots,

Elevating floors high, Glory rises to tell of the dormant tales,

Tales of war, Tales of cheer, Tales Galore, Tales of Fears,

A tale of Fictional artists, just tryin to stay in chime tune with reality,

Eyes open, as trays of a balance-beam,

We only dream To chase them, after, running mentally to catch them,

Dippin off through darkened streets, literally,

And when dusk begins reality slumbers in Dippers over me,

Ephemeral solace into the evening, leaving me in

Pleasant never ending brinks, extinct of larks or peeps,

Sole existence of a solo dolo sidewalk dreamer,

A roamin Caesar, Rome enthusiast

To scenic artistry of stars gleaming in navy-bluest skies,

Light mists of moonlight sonata-like cloaks linger through the night,

A bliss as infinite as the stars are distant, holdin my hopes in suspension,

Ensuing thoughts to compose notes in my dome or on moleskine,

Brim-row view in opera lands, Baritone parlando, harking heartfelt cantos,

Stealing back the hope I robbed myself of, so no more dead silence,

No sounds, just NC headphones and instrumentals to get my mind scheming,

Socratic Luther King in Light and in my sleep,

Still a modern Machiavelli, to stand for what’s right,

Keep what’s on back and neck protected, look like an easy

Target, but I promise that that ain’t promised,

Fingers crossin keyboards like twist ties,

Butter bread lines, sun-beams, from always goin ‘gainst the grain,

In an Adidas skully over curls as I stroll the lunar World,

Lennon-shoes, solar-albedo Chuck Soles Chauffer luster, a sulfer glow of soulful surges from Sol-lit sources, shone off earth’s surface, in all directions, time reversin from my inertia, I surf a universe of Umi-verses, rainin fiercely, floodin nyxheim, floodin tumblr, floodin notebooks, on my flood the world s***, only observable once I give life to words shaped in a matrix muse, wor-ship of my curse or gift, I make that discernment, man what the hell, I been murkin, think it’s time for me to call the curtains, I’m outta here, peace and heart, hope you enjoyed the work,

Fin

[byshwetaupadhyay]

BEYOND LYRIC SHAME: BEN LERNER ON CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MAGGIE NELSON TWO FRESH INVESTIGATIONS OF THE PROSE POEM

Language poetry—and to my mind the best Language poetry was written in prose—was a machine that ran on difficulty. Reading a prose poem deploying what Ron Silliman called “the new sentence” was intended to be an exercise in frustration: the reader attempts to combine the sentences—which are grammatical—into meaningful paragraphs. The sentences are vague enough (“Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity”) that a logical relation between sentences will always almost seem possible. But the reader discovers as she goes that many successive sentences cannot be assimilated to a coherent paragraph, that paragraphs are organized arbitrarily (“quantitatively,” as opposed to around an idea), that no stable voice unifies the text, that her “will to integration”—her desire to produce higher orders of meaning that lead away from the words on the page into the realm of the signified (“a dematerializing motion”)—is repeatedly defeated.

The solicitation and then tactical frustration of the reader’s will to linguistic integration had an explicitly political object: it was advanced as a kind of deprogramming of bourgeois readerly assumptions. Such difficult prose would teach us that meaning is actively produced, never naturally given; that language is manipulable material, not a transparent window onto reality; that the “speaker” is a unifying fiction more than a stable subject; and so on. These deconstructive strategies were conceived not only as a critique of other writers—for example, lyric, “confessional” poets with their privileging of subjective experience and inwardness; mainstream novelists with their “optical realism”—but as an attack on existing social and political orders that depended upon the smooth functioning of dominant linguistic conventions.

Many of us learned something from the Language poets’ taking up of a constructivist vision of the self and its literature: their insistence on language as material, their combination of Russian formalism and various strains of French theory into a compelling reading of experimental modernism. (And many of us learned to appreciate certain texts associated with Language poetry in terms other than and often opposed to those provided by essays like Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” with its anti-expressive and anti-aesthetic bent). But who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?

Indeed, for many ambitious contemporary writers, disjunction has lost any obvious left political valence. Does the language of advertising and politicians, for instance, really depend on seamless integration? Transcripts of speeches by Bush or Palin or Trump would have been at home in In the American Tree. When aggressive ungrammaticality and non sequitur are fundamental to mainstream capitalist media (and to the rhetoric of an ascendant radical right), the new sentence appears more mimetic than defamiliarizing. In this context, “difficulty” as a valorized attribute of a textual strategy gives way to the difficulty of recovering the capacity for some mode of communication, of intersubjectivity, in light of the insistence of Language poets (and others) on the social constructedness of self and the irreducible conventional representation.

Language poetry’s notion of textual difficulty as a weapon in class warfare hasn’t aged well, but the force of its critique of what is typically referred to as “the lyric I” has endured in what Gillian White has recently called a diffuse and lingering “lyric shame”—a sense, now often uncritically assumed, that modes of writing and reading identified as lyric are embarrassingly egotistical and politically backward. White’s work seeks, among other things, to explore how “the ‘lyric’ tradition against which an avant-garde anti-lyricism has posited itself . . . never existed in the first place” and to reevaluate poems and poets often dismissed cursorily as instances of a bad lyric expressivity. She also seeks to refocus our attention on lyric as a reading practice, as a way of “projecting subjectivity onto poems,” emphasizing how debates about the status of lyric poetry are in fact organized around a “missing lyric object”: an ideal—that is, unreal—poem posited by the readerly assumptions of both defenders and detractors of lyric confessionalism.

“Who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?”

It’s against the backdrop that I’m describing that I read important early 21st-century works by poets such as Juliana Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs), Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and, very recently, Citizen: An American Lyric), and Maggie Nelson (Bluets). I mean that these very different writers have difficulty with the kind of difficulty celebrated by Language poets in particular and the historical avant-garde in general. Their books are purposefully accessible works that nevertheless seek to acknowledge the status of language as medium and the self as socially enmeshed. I read Rankine and Nelson’s works of prose poetry in particular as occupying the space where the no-longer-new sentence was; they are instances of a consciously post-avant-garde writing that refuses—without in any sense being simple—to advance formal difficulty as a mode of resistance, revolution, or pedagogy. I will also try to suggest how they operate knowingly within—but without succumbing to—a post–Language poetry environment of lyric shame or at the very least suspicion.

I call Rankine and Nelson’s books works of “prose poetry,” and they are certainly often taken up as such, but their generic status is by no means settled. Both writers—as with many Language poets—invite us to read prose as a form of poetry even as they trouble such distinctions. Rankine’s books are indexed as “Essay/Poetry” and Bluets is indexed as “Essay/Literature.” Bluets is published, however, by Wave Books, a publisher devoted entirely to poetry. Rankine’s two recent books are both subtitled “An American Lyric,” begging the question of how a generic marker traditionally understood as denoting short, musical, and expressive verse can be transposed into long, often tonally flat books written largely in prose. On an obvious but important level, I think the deployment of the sentence and paragraph under the sign of poetry, the book-length nature of the works in question, and the acknowledgment of the lyric as a problem (and central problematic) help situate these works in relation to the new sentence, even if that’s by no means the only way to read them.

Both Bluets and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely open with a mixture of detachment and emotional intensity that simultaneously evokes and complicates the status of the “lyric I.” In the first numbered paragraph of Bluets, quoted above, a language of impersonal philosophical skepticism—the “suppose,” the Tractatus-like numbering, the subjunctive—interacts with an emotional vocabulary and experiential detail. The italics also introduce the possibility of multiple voices, or at least two distinct temporalities of writing, undermining the assumption of univocality and spokenness conventionally associated with the lyric. “As though it were a confession”; “it became somehow personal”: two terms associated with lyric and its shame are both “spoken” and qualified at the outset of the book—a book that will go on to be powerfully confessional and personal indeed. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely opens with a related if distinct method of lyric evocation and complication, flatly describing what we might call the missing object of elegy:

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? We asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Throughout Don’t Let Me Lonely the traditional lyric attributes of emotional immediacy and intensity are replaced with the problem of a kind of contemporary anesthesia—the repression of the reality of death, the leveling of tragedy into another kind of infotainment in a culture of spectacle, the mediation of experience by technologies ranging from television to pharmaceuticals. The problem of the deadening of feeling—the negative image of traditional lyric content—finds its formal correlative in a flat prose in which verse can appear only in citation or paratext, for example, quotations from Celan embedded in the prose, a Dickinson poem reproduced in the notes. Instead of imagining difficult prose as a technology for deconstructing the self, a highly linear and plainspoken account of the problem of the “I” is offered as Rankine attempts to work her way out of social despair: “If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is ‘I’ even me or am ‘I’ a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?”

Rankine forgoes difficulty as a strategy for disrupting subjectivity in order to acknowledge the difficulty of calibrating a responsible self socially. We could say that the anti-lyricism of Language poetry is gestured toward in the banishment of the traditional trappings of the lyric—verse itself, musicality, intense personal expression (what Rankine often confesses is a sense of inward emptiness)—but here these lyric strategies are less willfully rejected than made to feel unavailable. And the felt unavailability of the lyric is a result of Rankine’s explicit invitation to read her markedly nonlyric materials (essayistic and often flat prose) as lyric—to invite us to think of lyric as a reading practice as much as a writing practice in which the ostensibly “shameful” attributes of the mode (e.g., an egotistical, asocial inwardness) are replaced by a collaborative effort on the part of reader and writer to overcome “loneliness.”

Bluets explores many of these concerns with related if ultimately distinct means:

70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Nelson’s “blue bower” evokes not only the actual bird, renowned for how the males construct and decorate “bowers” to attract mates, but also the traditional association of lyric with a metaphorics of birds and birdsong. It further evokes the Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a shamelessly lyric poet if there ever was one) painting of that name, as well as his poem with the received title “The Song of the Bower.” To build a “blue bower” out of “propositions” is to cross a lyric and anti-lyric project in the space of prose, implicating and complicating both. It is hard to find dignity in the privacy of the aestheticized bower—indeed, one might be ashamed of such inwardness—and one of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.

The color blue functions as the organizing metaphor for both the possibility of intersubjectivity (“15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.”) and its limits (“105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no ‘color thermometers.’ How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver.”). Nelson’s accumulating “propositions” do not integrate into a “bower,” but the relation between sentences and sections has little in common with new-sentence disjunction. As in Rankine’s prose poetry, difficulty here is not deployed as a political/poetical tactic irrupting within the norms of prose; instead, the difficulty of finding a defensible, dignified ground for intersubjectivity is narrated explicitly.

“One of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.”

The shift from the tactical deconstruction of ostensibly natural narrative or lyric unities to the effort to reconstruct them with a difference is legible in part because Bluets foregrounds its relation to avant-garde prose poetry. Nelson’s use of Wittgenstein as muse and model, for instance, invites us to position her work relative to new sentence experiments. Silliman not only cited the Philosophical Investigations in “The New Sentence” as an important precedent, but Silliman’s own The Chinese Notebook models the tone and structure of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing. More generally, the work of Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) and others has made clear how the philosopher’s inquiries into language as a form of social practice—and his own peculiar linguistic operations—have been central to scores of experimental (“difficult”) writers. If Nelson weren’t also the author of volumes of verse, and if Wave weren’t the publisher of Bluets, my experience of context and thus text would be different: those facts function as a quieter version of Rankine’s subtitle, inviting—or at the very least enabling—us to think of poetry as a reading practice as much as a writing practice, and to experience verse techniques as withheld or unavailable in Bluets instead of as merely forgone or forsworn.

As in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, in Bluets, actual verse is exiled to the space of citation: William Carlos Williams, Lorine Neideker, and Lord Byron, among many others, are quoted; line breaks are replaced with slashes. Indeed, Nelson doesn’t have much faith in the effects of actual poems: “12. And please don’t talk to me about ‘things as they are’ being changed upon any ‘blue guitar.’ What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.” Or: “For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all” (proposition 183). And yet, the relegation of verse to the virtual space of citation lends it a certain power, displaying it while also insisting that it’s nearly out of reach. This allows Nelson’s prose to be haunted by the abstract possibility of a poetry it can’t actualize, somewhat like the Mallarméan fantasy she at one point describes: “For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.” Moreover, Bluets—taking its cue (and lifting many of its locutions) from Wittgenstein’s attacks on Goethe’s Theory of Colors—often refers to outmoded regimes of knowledge or technologies (e.g., the 18th-century “cyanometer,” which sought to measure the blue of the sky). One begins to wonder if verse—lyric poetry in particular—is another set of defunct measures, outmoded conventions for communicating experience.

Perhaps there is a sense for Nelson (and Rankine) in which poetry isn’t difficult—it’s impossible. There is faith neither in poetry’s power of imaginative redescription (the blue guitar) nor in its practical effects as a technology of intervening in history (“I do not think that writing changes very much”). The subject isn’t a dominant bourgeois fiction of inwardness and univocality in need of deconstruction via new sentence difficulty but an avowedly social and linguistic entity deployed over time in the space of writing; expression itself must be constructed, and that process is narrated clearly in a prose that, when read as poetry, makes actual verse present as a loss. Although I believe these authors use the prose poem and the felt absence of verse in fresh and specific ways, I am not suggesting that the logic I’m describing is exactly new. Stephen Fredman and others have suggested that the prose poem arises as a form during periods in which there is a crisis of confidence in verse strategies, and the notion of the lyric being felt as a loss as it becomes prose is at least as old as Walter Benjamin. Here my limited goal is to indicate a few specific ways the new sentence valorization of difficulty can become a frame for a specific kind of accessibility for two important contemporary poets who write primarily in prose.

One can’t pretend to contextualize these books without stating explicitly that part of the contemporary dissatisfaction with attacks on narrative and voice as political strategies is that they can serve to mask what is essentially a white male universalism. The rejection of linguistic integration and anti-expressionist attacks on the lyric subject have recently been described by Cathy Park Hong as a symptom of the avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness,”

its specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.

In a related vein, Nelson’s own work as a critic has been attuned to how “the male Language writers’ occasionally monomaniacal focus on warring economic systems” was both challenged and expanded by women writers inside and outside of the Language movement itself. In ways I haven’t had the space to explore here, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Bluets are engaged with demonstrating how the uncritical acceptance of voice and narrative conventions as well as their “wholesale” disavowal by certain avant-garde writers can preserve racist and sexist ideologies. This is by now an old difficulty, echoing the even older modernism/realism debate—how the emancipatory potential of poststructuralist strategies quickly cools into a conservatism (or worse) like the one Cathy Park Hong describes. Out of this abiding difficulty more complex, accessible prose poetry is likely to arise. How might verse return? And when and why?

[brigdh]

A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee. A YA novel starring Monty, eldest son of an Earl in mid-1700s England, his childhood neighbor/best friend Percy, and his sister Felicity. The three of them are just about to begin a Grand Tour of Europe, their last summer of freedom and fun before Monty has to buckle down and behave like a noble heir, Percy starts law school, and Felicity is shipped off to a finishing school. Unfortunately none of them are particularly looking forward to their futures. Monty is very cheerfully bisexual, and has engaged in romps, gambling, drinking, and drugs to the point of being kicked out of Eton. Percy is mixed-race (the son of a plantation owner, though raised by his aunt and uncle, minor gentry) and though he's tolerated, his existence isn't always well-regarded in their circles. Felicity is pissed off about being doomed to learn embroidery and manners instead of going to medical school to become a doctor. Oh, and Monty is desperately in love with Percy, but is afraid to tell him and lose his friendship. This is just the beginning – as the book gets going, there are also revelations about epilepsy, child abuse, insane asylums, and more. It's not all serious, though. In fact, most of the book is light-hearted fun: there are encounters with highwaymen, battles with pirates, parties at Versailles, Carnevale in Venice, villas on Greek islands, operas, fortune tellers, hostage exchanges, escaping thieves, and basically every adventure one could imagine in 18th century Europe. There's even a plot about alchemists and an elixir of immortality which, to tell the truth, felt a bit out of place in the otherwise historically-based book. And, of course, there is lots and lots of pining as Monty and Percy engage in the most excellent sort of romantic-comedy suspense, yearning and avoiding telling the truth about their feelings. A++, that bit. My main complaint with the book is that Lee tries very earnestly to handle appropriately the issues of social justice she includes (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia), but every one of the ensuing conversations feels very 2017-approved, with every term the correct vocabulary, every checkbox checked, every privilege painstakingly unpacked. Not that such views couldn't – didn't! – exist in the past, but the way Lee portrays them doesn't seem to relate to the characters or setting at all. They don't arise out of the environment of the book, but are dropped in wholesale from an outside perspective that wants to be sure we know the right way to think. And then there's the moment where one character tells another about how the Japanese mend broken pottery with gold seams, see, so that the broken places end up more beautiful than the whole, and it's meant to be a profound moment but it's just so embarrassingly like this person in the 1700s is reading off a tumblr post. But nonetheless it's a funny, sweet book, if not quite as good as I expected when I heard "Gay Roadtrip through 18th Century Europe". What it reminds me most of all is reading an AU from a fandom you don't know. Maybe the characterization and setting isn't always that great but you don't care because it's not your fandom. It has the tropes you love and you can't wait to see the couple get together at the end, so you stay up late reading it on your phone. A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is that experience in original fiction. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. The sequel to Too Like the Lightning which I absolutely LOVED. However I really should not have waited seven months to read this one, because I'd forgotten some of the characters and plots and this is a series jam-packed with multitudes of characters and plots, and you better have every miniscule bit of such details ready at your fingertips to have a chance of following the action. To briefly summarize the plot (a task that's probably impossible, but I'll try to hit the main points) in the 25th century the world has more or less become a Utopia. Nations have been abolished, religion banished to the private sphere, and gendered distinctions made it illegal; to all outward appearances, it is a world with no reason to go to war. Unfortunately it turns out that all of this has been made possible through carefully targeted assassinations, picking off key individuals to guide the world away from war, riots, major economic downturns, etc. Not many – about nine a year, on average, for the last two hundred years. This information sets off a flurry of activity as the characters take sides, variously trying to figure out the conspiracy behind it, hide the perpetrators, uncover proof, keep the public from finding out, and broadcast the secret to as many people as possible. When several world leaders turn out to be involved, chaos breaks out worldwide. It's not just drama, though; behind the action scenes is the frequently repeated question of if it was such a bad plan after all. Is it worth losing a few lives to prevent the millions of deaths that would happen in war? Seven Surrenders is all about the philosophical dilemma. In addition to the one above, we get multiple debates over the riddle, 'would you destroy this world to save a better one?', and 'If God has revealed proof of His existence, why did He chose you above every human who's ever prayed to believe? And, more importantly, why now?' There is speculation about the power of gender, of sexual attraction, of the effect of raising children as experiments, of the role of Providence in life, of what it would mean for two Gods to meet, of how one conducts a war when there are no living veterans to teach the next generation. But there's plenty of action too – the book includes revelations of secret parentage, long-lost loves, a revenge story worthy of the Count of Monte Cristo, bombs, murders, resurrections, suicide attempts, cute kids, so many disguises, sword fights, gun battles, horse chases, and more. Ultimately I didn't like it as much as Too Like the Lightning. It just didn't feel as deep or as grand, possibly because so much stuff was happening that none of it got enough exploration. One of the most best character arcs (Bridger's) happened mostly offstage, and many of the other characters were too busy reacting to the constantly changing political winds to have a real arc. I still recommend it, because it's just so different from everything else and I have to support an author who mashes up transportation science with Diderot's philosophy. But if you read it, definitely don't wait months between books. The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry. A murder mystery, the first in a series set in Victorian London. Charlotte is the middle daughter of a middle-class family, believed by all to be firmly unmarriageable but happy enough with her staid life. The book opens with the murder of a young well-off woman, then Charlotte's maid is also murdered, as are several others. There is no apparent connection between the victims except that they're all young woman, all live nearby, and all were strangled. Inspector Thomas Pitt is assigned the case, and he begins to spend a great deal of time talking to Charlotte – first just to interview her regarding the murders, but then for her own sake. But will Charlotte's family allow her to marry a... policeman??? There are several interesting things about the book. Set very specifically in 1881 (which is to say, before Jack the Ripper) the very idea of a serial killer – as opposed to a thief who murders for money – is new and shocking to most of the characters. So is the concept that such a criminal could appear "normal", that rather than being a dirty, lower-class raving lunatic, it could be a respected neighbor or even a member of their own family. These are such self-evident ideas to modern people (and most characters in mystery books) that seeing Charlotte and the others wrestle with them, discuss their ramifications, and feel guilty for suspecting their husbands and fathers was pretty fascinating. I also liked that the family was so solidly middle-class. Historical fiction has a habit of gravitating toward extremes: everyone is either upper aristocracy or enduring the most grueling poverty. A family of boring bank clerks actually made for a refreshing change. Unfortunately those are the only good things I have to say about the book. The middle 2/3rds of the story drags along interminably, as nothing happens except for characters having the same few discussions over and over again. Charlotte suspects her father! First she must have a conversation about it with her mother. Then her younger sister. Then her older sister. Then her mother and the older sister talk. Then the older sister talks about it to her husband. Then... Well, you get the idea. And it's not as though each new character was bringing a fresh perspective and insight to the issue! No, we just get the same few protests and agreements recycled over and over in slightly different wordings. It's such an awful slog that I nearly abandoned the book. However, I stuck it out to the end, only to be rewarded with the reveal of the killer (warning for spoilers, I guess): a lesbian who has been driven mad by repressing her sexuality! You know, I don't think I've ever actually encountered this awful cliche in the wild before. It would almost be exciting, if it wasn't so offensive. Though there's not a lot of time to be offended, because the reveal, motivation, attack on Charlotte, rescue, and arrest all happen in the last two pages (literally) so none of it is exactly dwelt on. It's probably all for the best that I disliked this book. It's the first in a 32-book series, and now I don't feel any desire to read the rest.

(DW link for easier commenting)(Also goddamn, I am so far behind on putting up my book reviews, you guys. So prepare for a lot of that.)

[scripturehomosexuality]

Editorial: #MeToo, Same-Sex Activity, and How The Two Are Related

For many months, even as I was writing on this blog, I have been closely watching the #MeToo movement sweeping through the U.S. At first, I was keeping out of it. Though I supported it initially, its original purpose wasn’t related to this blog’s purpose, so I didn’t intend to remark on it.

However, things have changed so much, and the stakes have been raised so high, this male writer feels compelled to say something on it.

Now, before I go any further, I need to make the following perfectly clear: I do not hate women. I do not support the rape or sexual assault of any woman (or man), under any circumstances. Rape and sexual assault is always inexcusable. I’m sure any longtime reader of this blog will know that I do not endorse misogyny. In fact, the Additional Links page will unequivocally show that I support both female sexuality and male sexuality.

As such, if you disagree with what I’m about to say, please do not flood my inbox with condemnatory messages. If you wish to comment, please use the Discus plugin at the end of this post, which allows guest and pseudonymous commenting.

As I said before, sexual assault and rape horrifies me, so I initially supported the #MeToo movement. However, as November 2017 came along, I began to have reservations. To me, it was beginning to feel like a general witchhunt. To give #MeToo the benefit of the doubt, I kept quiet and kept watching its development.

Now, it seems my apprehension was justified. More men and women find the movement increasingly troubling. We are all disturbed by its apparent inability to make distinctions. Sophomoric behavior and mild harassment are being equated to rape and sexual assault. Due process is being skipped in favor of swift justice, as accusations are now enough to impose severe punishment. The fact that women are human beings too, and thus are equally capable of fabrication, is becoming too taboo to suggest.

By no means am I defending the rape and sexual assault of women. My point is that, in trying to end those harmful actions, we’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Not every problem is a nail that must be hammered, which the #MeToo movement doesn’t seem to realize.

The crescendo reached a climax this week, as comedian Aziz Ansari was accused of sexual assault. What was the problem? The Ansari story was quite ordinary to most people. To them, it was too ordinary to merit public shaming.

Because of all this, I can confidently say that the #MeToo movement has been hijacked. Rape and sexual assault are now a minimal focus of this movement. Right now, it’s focused on transforming our sexual culture into one that is punitively and brutally governed by certain women. It seems bent on creating a system where, solely by a woman’s whim, an encounter caused by mixed messages becomes punishable sexual assault.

Other writers are reaching similar conclusions. In fact, a few writers openly say that we’re in a full blown sex panic. In a column for the New York Daily News, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers said “a new puritanism seems to be ascendant,” where “suddenly, office Christmas parties and happy hours are under a cloud.”

As such, there is a vital point being missed in the debate - the #MeToo movement is inextricably linked to developments involving “homosexuality”. If we are serious in analysing what caused the movement, and where it is headed, we must consider this indispensable history.

Firstly, the #MeToo movement owes its existence to the recent history of “homosexuality”. In the United States, the current definition includes all same-sex acts, with “gender inversion” an important but secondary component. At this point, participation in any same-sex act counts as “homosexuality”.

As much as that definition seems established, it’s actually pretty new. Before the second half of the 20th century, “homosexuality” was more defined by “gender inversion” than behavior. Engagement in same-sex activity didn’t automatically merit a “homosexual” identity. From the 1930s onward, a man felt compelled to identify as “homosexual” if

he was primarily or exclusively attracted to men (which was considered a form of “gender inversion”)

his mannerisms parodied those of women

Even then, true “homosexual” men were considered to be effeminate.

We must also remember that back then, sex was mainly defined by penetration. Thus, if the contact was non-penetrative, it wasn’t “sex” per se. After World War II, anal sex started becoming more common in the “homosexual” identified community. However, among non-”homosexual” men, the contact usually was non-penetrative.

As a result of these factors, same-sex activity was relatively common for non-”homosexual” men up until the mid-20th century. It didn’t automatically require a new identity, and since they avoided anal, their contact didn’t count as “sex” for most people. As a result, the rate of premarital opposite-sex contact was also relatively low. Since they were having sexual satisfaction with fellow men, contact with women wasn’t as necessary. 

That began changing with the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. The revolt caused massive upheaval in both the “homosexual” and non-”homosexual” worlds. Now, “homosexual” men could now be validly masculine and effeminate, as shown by the explosion of the Castro Clone. What those masculine and feminine men shared in common - their engagement in same-sex activity - increasingly became the basis of the new “gay” identity.

This wasn’t all. From its slow start after WWII, anal sex became widespread in the “gay” community by the mid-1970s. Up until that time, and despite its increasing popularity, anal still had a bad reputation among “gay” men. Then, as the late 1970s arrived, a cultural seismic shift happened. Anal soon became the ultimate fulfillment of “gay” love, and a necessary act for “gay” men.

In the 1980s, these factors helped change the overall sexual culture of the United States.

HIV/AIDS, a disease mainly spread through anal play, began ravaging the “gay” community. Yet the “gay” community was not the only group affected. The entire United States was traumatized by the disease, because to a point, it affected them too. A significant number of presumed “heterosexual” men, including celebrities like Rock Hudson and Anthony Perkins, were among those who died from AIDS.

These deaths were significant because, while they were “gay” identified and very active in the “gay” community, their identity and activity was unknown to the general public. They were able to keep it hidden because outwardly, they appeared to be “normal” men, and were thus presumed to be “heterosexual” identified.

As to why they interacted in the “gay” community, remember a point made before - the morphing definition of “homosexuality”. Because of that, more of these men felt compelled to sexually engage in the “gay” community, even though that wasn’t the case a few decades before. Unfortunately, that also means they engaged in sexual practices unique to the “gay” community that gave them the disease.

Since men not perceived as “homosexual” were AIDS victims, the predominant definition of “homosexuality” (still mostly based on gender inversion) appeared inadequate. Thus, the definition fully and quickly turned into the behavior-based definition that dominates today.

At the same time, it appears the fact that anal sex drove the epidemic, in lieu of other same-sex acts, was lost on the general public. As a result, all same-sex activity began to gain a stigma.

These other relevant factors added into the mix -

Remnants of 1950s Red Scare attitudes. Though the fervor of McCarthyism waned in the 1950s, elements of its attitudes endured throughout the Cold War era. As such, during the Red Scare, a link was established between “homosexuality” (as they defined it then) and Communism. The AIDS epidemic breathed new life into these ideas.

Growth of the Religious Right. The 1970s was characterized by many revolutionary movements - Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, the Sexual Revolution, the acceptance of evolution, etc. In response to the changes, a new reactionary form of Christianity developed. Seeing themselves as saviors as morality, the Religious Right staunchly opposed the “gay” community, and “homosexuality” by extension. In the face of the AIDS epidemic, they abandoned reinforcing their historical condemnation of anal sex. Instead, they went full-throttle with the shifting definition of “homosexuality”. As the definition continued to change, their condemnation of “homosexuality” continuously grew in scope and sharpened in tone.

The changing definition of sex. Before long, STDs began affecting “straight” relationships. At times, these diseases were spread through acts that weren’t usually considered “sex”. As a result, sex was soon defined by both penetrative and non-penetrative acts. Paradoxically, this helped reinforce the shifting definition of homosexuality. For better or worse, all same-sex acts were now validly “sex”, and thus were validly “homosexual”.

All these factors combined into a ferocious hysteria over same-sex activity. This hysteria would increase correspondingly with the growth of AIDS, as it reached its peak during the 1990s. However, one of the features of hysteria is its irrationality, as it perceives threats in all kinds of places. Thus, the resulting stigma over same-sex activity soon spread to same-sex attraction, and even to homoerotism.

The frequency of same-sex activity in the general population went down dramatically, as everyday people wanted to escape being touched by the growing hysteria. At the same time, the rates of opposite-sex contact outside marriage shot through the roof. This strongly suggests that, true to their bisexuality, most people went to the opposite gender when same-sex activity became unacceptable. It was in this environment that our current sexual culture - where opposite-sex contact outside marriage is expected - became set in stone.

In other words, the AIDS stigma created the culture that made #MeToo possible. That fact is inescapable, and utterly necessary to understand this movement’s origins. If AIDS didn’t happen, opposite-sex activity outside marriage wouldn’t have become as acceptable or prevalent. As a result, there would have been no culture that could have spawned anything like #MeToo.

Secondly, the radical feminist movement (which is driving the #MeToo phenomenon) is a sister of the modern “gay” movement. As such, many habits existing in the “gay” world are replicating themselves in the #MeToo movement.

For instance, the “gay” movement has no ability to make common sense distinctions. To them all sex is good yet risky, despite all evidence that anal is uniquely dangerous. To them both men and women are designed for penetration, despite all evidence that they are not. To them all men into men have always had anal sex, despite direct and circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

In the same way, and as said before, #MeToo makes similar moves. To the movement, clumsy advances and sophomoric jokes are apparently tantamount to rape or assault. All merit brutal and severe punishment. In its view, no woman is capable of coloring or fabricating stories, and few men treat women with the dignity they deserve. In fact, a few writers openly wonder how women can pass ANY man on the sidewalk without fear.

As another example, both movements feel that “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. In other words, if your opinions don’t march in lockstep with their own, you will be considered their enemy. It doesn’t matter how much you might agree with them.

This has been the reigning motto of the “gay” movement for years. This is why this blog, the g0y movement, the Man2Man Alliance, and other like outlets are ignored or opposed. We agree that the Religious Right has abused their power considerably, and must be stopped from causing further damage. However, we also oppose the anal sex ethos of the LGBT leadership, because we see that as equally harmful. For those and other differences of opinion, we have earned their scorn.

Additionally it should be noted that, when talking about the “gay” movement, the Man2Man Alliance said that their attitudes reeked of fascism.

Something similar is happening with the radical feminist movement that is driving #MeToo. Their more moderate members have voiced concerns over the direction #MeToo is taking, and the overall thrust of the movement. In response, they have been viciously attacked and ridiculed by their fellow feminists. Anything other than uniform opinion will not be tolerated. Examples include Cassie Jaye, Laci Green, and Catherine Deneuve.

Another commonality comprises our third point - both movements contain a vicious streak of misandry, which seems to be currently driving the #MeToo movement.

The “gay” movement has been proudly misandronic for years. To them, masculinity naturally gives birth to homophobia, despite the fact that masculinity has never been a monolith. Anything that seems masculine is constantly disparaged and denigrated, and deserves destruction. “Straight-acting gay” men are treated with suspicion and skepticism, because they don’t want to imitate women in their mannerisms. To them, the more a man imitates a woman in everything he does, the better.

In saying this, I’m not trying to disparage women. My point is that the “gay” movement constantly slams things that are most natural to men, and instead encourages behavior that isn’t natural for them.

On a closely related note, that’s also why their worship of anal makes sense. Throughout history, the penetrated male was thought to be “acting like a woman”. Whether the “gay” leadership admits it or not, that same logic guides them today. They also believe anal feminizes a male, which they think is proper and desirable.

That’s also a reason why they hate frot with a passion - it’s simply too masculine for them to tolerate.

The radical feminists do the same thing. Of late, they have constantly decried the effects of “toxic masculinity”. This phrase usually doesn’t say that certain forms of masculinity are toxic, which is completely true. Instead it says that masculinity itself is toxic and evil, and deserves total eradication. That is shown in terms they have coined that associate masculinity with incivility - “mansplaining”, “manspreading”, etc. Their words constantly encourage female distrust and dislike of men. As a result, as Cathy Young said in the Washington Post, “Things have gotten to a point where casual low-level male-bashing is a constant white noise in the hip progressive online media.”

As part of its misandry, radical feminism also wishes to control how men interact with each other, even in the smallest of matters. A post from the Man2Man Alliance mentions an interesting development among Blackwater mercenaries (U.S. military contractors) in 2007 Iraq. In their off hours, the male mercenaries liked to sunbathe naked together on their trailer roofs. That came to an end when female helicopter pilots flew overhead, became extremely displeased, and complained to their superiors.

Think about that for a minute. These men were simply minding their own business, and weren’t bothering the female pilots at all. They were simply doing what felt comfortable. Plus, this probably wasn’t the first time those pilots saw penises. Yet, they felt compelled to disrupt a naturally occurring male activity, simply because they didn’t like it. What motivated these women to react so strongly?

As Alliance founder Bill Weintraub put it, “their objection...is the expression of a puritan impulse, and a puritan impulse alone.” This same puritan impulse seems to characterize radical feminism, which evidently motivated the pilots’ actions. It also seems to drive the #MeToo movement.

Mind you, things are even worse now. A recent British study told women that male friendships posed a deep threat to their own relationships with men, and encouraged them to keep those relationships under surveillance. Thus, the deep feminist suspicion of male intimacy rages on.

Thus, to me, this is what’s really driving the #MeToo movement at present. The radical feminists are no longer satisfied with controlling male relationships. Now, they wish to dictate how men interact with them and other females, where women have total possession of the keys of power.

Once again, I’m not trying to disparage women. My point is that as long as one gender feels justified to dominate the other - men over women or women over men - there will always be war. Ultimately, a gender war benefits neither men nor women. At most, extremists of either gender will be the only victors.

At this point however, I hope you fully understand how “homosexuality” relates to #MeToo. They are completely enmeshed and impossible to separate. This connection fully reveals the origins of this movement, and the motivations for its current actions. #MeToo also reveals what was “business as usual” inside the “gay” world, in a way most people can no longer ignore. Whether most people realize it or not, the attitudes of the “gay” world are now affecting their own lives.

As such, this link leads to a question no one is asking - how “homosexuality” will affect the endgame of the #MeToo movement.

First of all, I completely agree that #MeToo will affect our entire sexual culture. Quotes from a “Spiked Online” article by 13 female writers shows that clearly. In the article, writer Joanna Williams said “...a new wariness has taken hold. A voice in our heads asks how our interactions might be interpreted by others. Is it best to leave the office door open? Invite a third party along to the lunch meeting? Under what circumstances can you hug a colleague? Or touch their elbow?” Meanwhile, writer Lionel Shriver said, “I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper.”

As such, this will affect men more seriously than you might realize. Remember what was said before - our modern sexual culture aren’t that old, and are historically unprecedented.

If this movement happened under past sexual concepts, the outcome would be different. In times past, “sex” was defined by penetration, and thus excluded most same-sex activity. Thus, if “sex” indeed became a taboo activity, that wouldn’t equate to male sexual deprivation. Instead, those men would turn to each other for sexual pleasure. They would have been able to satisfy their urges even as the hysteria raged on.

That doesn’t exist today. In the United States, “homosexuality” now includes all same-sex activity and attraction, and engagement in such activity now warrants the “gay” label. This process has inordinately affected male relationships throughout its duration. As modern sexual philosophy further evolves, it encroaches further into more areas of life. At this point, “bromances” are increasingly considered light versions of “homosexuality”, which might lead to their stigmatization in the near future.

This takes away the avenue of same-sex intimacy from most men. Thus, as sexual interaction with women becomes more precarious, we will enter an unprecedented reality. One of two outcomes will then happen, both of which are equally horrendous -

Most men will end up having no sex at all

In their frustration, those men may immerse themselves into the “gay” world with all its concepts and practices, including its disastrous practice of anal play

The first one will have effects that, in a very scary way, we cannot exactly predict. Sex is a need of most humans that must be satisfied somehow, much like eating and drinking. As such, Psychology Today plainly says, “Nothing inspires murderous mayhem in human beings more reliably than sexual repression...if expression of sexuality is thwarted, the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire.”

Sexual repression among Christians has helped transform modern porn in size and content. Can you imagine what will happen if such repression exists throughout the United States? Do we really want to create sexually desperate men who will act out in harmful ways?

Mind you, I have my own reservations with our current sexual culture. Since intimacy among men is so taboo, men feel compelled to satisfy same-sex needs in opposite-sex relationships. This causes all kinds of dysfunction that’s unnecessary, but at least there’s some manner of sexual outlet. If total sexual repression becomes reality in the United States, no man or woman would be safe.

The second one will have effects that we do know, which are equally scary. The “gay” world conceptualizes same-sex activity as an abnormality, which is extremely harmful. That thinking justifies the practice of anal play, which has caused all kinds of medical, physical, and psychological harm. If sexual frustrated “straight” men enter this world, the resulting explosion of disease and injury would threaten human life.

Worst of all, it would trivialize women (and men) with real claims of sexual assault and rape. The systems causing so many problems would remain. Only the positions of the players would change.

In other words, under current conditions, the current version of #MeToo would be disastrous.

If there’s one thing #MeToo has done for good, it has caused further cracks in the imaginary wall between “gays” and “straights”. This blog has constantly said that “homosexuality” is impacted by social and political pressures that also affect “straights”. Given the link between #MeToo and “homosexuality”, and how one affects the other, it’s now harder to pretend that “gays” and “straights” live in completely different worlds.

In conclusion, if you are a feminist, I hope that you think long and hard about what I’ve just said. Please don’t react in a knee jerk fashion to this post. Instead, I ask you to really meditate on my words. With everything that I’ve just described, is this a movement that you should blindly support?

For my readers in the United States, I have a special message for you. Don’t think that we are merely seeing a rebellion against sexual assault. We’re really seeing the seismic transformation of our sexual culture. It is now teetering on the verge of collapse, and what replaces it can be very bad or very good.

This movement has inadvertently continued what footballer Aaron Hernandez began, whose suicide made modern sexual philosophy begin to wobble. At this point, it’s highly doubtful that the sexual status quo will continue.

No matter how you identify, you have a dog in this fight. If you have found this site’s content educational and valuable, don’t keep quiet about it. There is no better time to speak than right now. Let people know that the Scriptures don’t condemn “homosexuality”. Publicly acknowledge that most people swing both ways. Educate your peers on history that reveals modern sexual philosophy as fraudulent.

Make no mistake - from what I can see, we are in the middle of another sexual revolution. Our sexual culture is on the verge of fundamental change, and the content of the discussion will determine what will supplant it. In this era of turmoil, the ones who participate will shape its outcome, which will affect us for years to come. Make sure that in this process, you make your voice heard.

Post-Scriptum (added on 1/22/2018)

I’ve just become aware of a third possible outcome for #MeToo - the utilization of sex robots. At this time, its possibility seems somewhat remote, but it still deserves mention.

As male-female sex becomes more fraught with tension, and same-sex contact remains taboo, sexually frustrated humans might turn to sex robots to fill their needs.

To me, this outcome is as horrendous as the first two. Sex is ultimately an expression of intense love and affection. Meanwhile, sex robots are simply manmade objects, not human beings. How can humans make love to objects that can’t reciprocate?

Thus, I believe that under this outcome, their use will likely have long-term detrimental effects. Sex robots may aggravate social isolation, at a time when social cohesion is already under threat. Sex will simply become a reflex detached from love, and not an extreme interpersonal experience. Humans may somewhat lose their ability to mix the sexual with the social, which might cause a decrease in population.

Furthermore, it would work to reinforce the “straight”-”gay” dichotomy, with all its concepts and ideas. Sex robots would remove the risks cursing extramarital opposite-sex contact, such as pregnancy, disease, emotional turmoil, etc. Furthermore, robots might also remove risks inherent in male-male anal sex, such as disease and physical injury.

I think though this is a rather distant option in the United States (at least for now), because

Sex robot technology is still in its infancy, and currently seems resistant to advancement

There’s still a strong social stigma against sex with robots. At present, it simply rubs most people the wrong way. That stigma may or may not last.

Feminists will likely oppose them. If men turn to sex robots en masse, that would undermine the power of women over sexual relations, which would be unacceptable for them

The third point highlights a possible consequence that would be interesting. Corporations and radical feminism, who are currently working together on #MeToo, may end up at each other’s throats if sex robots become popular.

Sex robots can command high prices, which would yield big profits for their manufacturers. If their demand increases, profits would only grow bigger. This might be a reason why corporations are supporting #MeToo - its encouragement of puritanism would create the perfect market for sex robots.

Thus, #MeToo might be yet another infusion of neoliberalism into our sexual dealings. It might further develop the relationship between neoliberalism and modern sexual philosophy.

[fqtoxicity]

New Post has been published on My Quin Story

New Post has been published on http://www.myquinstory.info/a-coronavirus-question-chloroquine-after-fluoroquinolones/

A Coronavirus Question: Chloroquine After Fluoroquinolones?

This article does not provide any medical advice, just information.  Proceeding assumes you agree with the website’s disclaimer.

COVID-19 & Chloroquine

Unless you have been living in a cave, which may be a safer place anyway, you have probably heard of the Coronavirus outbreak by now.   The coronavirus or COVID-19 is a very serious threat to humanity and has many people justly concerned.

One of the proposed treatments for COVID-19 is chloroquine, which apparently has shown some efficacy (1).   Since this announcement I have received a few emails asking me if I believe that chloroquine is safe to use in previously floxed individuals, if they would contract COVID-19?

One person shared with me their necessity to have to travel back to China.  They had been previously floxed and they were worried if they contracted COVID-19 they would be forced to take Chloroquine.

First, let me reiterate that I completely understand the concern and fear situations such as these can cause.  There are no medical experts on FQ Toxicity and its long-term impact on a person’s health.  And even though we are starting get the interest of some different academic institutions in the area of FQ toxicity, for the most part all we have is mounds of anecdotal data to draw our conclusions from.   

Previous Article

So, to try answer the question, “if chloroquine is safe to use in previously floxed individuals?” I am first going to redirect you to an older article that I wrote ten years ago called Fluoroquinolones: Their Connection to Older Anti-Malarial Drugs.  Instead of copy-n-pasting the entire article, in it I briefly discuss, among other things, the toxicity of Chloroquine.  Just follow the link and read the brief article, then return to this page.

Assuming you read the article that I referred to above, I will continue on.  Again, if you haven’t taken the time to read the short article please do so now. 

My question for a person asking if it is safe to take chloroquine would be, how badly were you floxed?  As we know FQ’s exhibit cumulative toxicity (2).  From the article I referenced above we know that Chloroquine is a chemical cousin to the FQ’s so it is entirely plausible that Chloroquine would contribute to the cumulative toxicity.  Both drugs are known to be toxic to the mitochondria (3,4).

Chloroquine has a relative called hydroxychloroquine (Paquenil), that is supposed to be a less toxic metabolite of chloroquine. It is used to treat rheumatic diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and Sjogren’s syndrome (5).   However, according to what I had recently heard, Paquenil was not being used to treat COVID-19.   Of course, that could all change overnight.

Over the years, there have been a small number of reports of a few previously floxed individuals successfully using Plaquenil in the treatment of lupus and arthritis. 

However, if a person was still strongly exhibiting symptoms of floxing I, personally, would not take an antimalarial.  Even if I felt I had recovered I would still be very, very cautious with any drug that is such a close relative to the FQ’s.  We do have some anecdotal reports of cumulative toxicity occurring between FQ’s and then subsequent Lariam exposure. Either way,  I would work very closely with the physician and try to balance the risk/reward based on your individual situation.

I would not envy anyone that would be forced with such a decision.

On The Coronavirus Itself

On a side note,  getting accurate information on the coronavirus is very difficult.  One thing that I do know is that they math numbers do not add up. 

In other words, when comparing the totality of the data being put out by other countries, Lancet, and JAMA, and comparing it the CDC and NIH data, there are glaring inaccuracies.  Although I realize that this is a volatile and changing situation, establishment coronavirus statistics are about as accurate as establishment FQ statistics. Also, I consider the World Health Organization incompetent all across the board.

One gentleman that does a good job of using news sources from all over the world is Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity.  Chris Martenson is a financial analyst who looks at data from various sources.  His YouTube channel is here.  Use caution however as the data he goes over is very sobering.  

Keep in mind the apothegm about truth that is accredited to the prominent German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

Truth Passes Through Three Stages: First, It Is Ridiculed. Second, It Is Violently Opposed. Third, It Is Accepted As Self-Evident

When it becomes self-evident then you see things such as instability when the reality of the truth sets in.  I have experienced this myself with FQ toxicity. 

Conspiratorial?  Maybe, and if looking at it that way gives you comfort, then so be it.   Three decades of law enforcement taught me to not be conspiratorial, but to be prepared. I have seen information regarding FQ Toxicity despite being factual and truthful relegated to the ‘tin foil hat’ brigade somewhere in the lunatic fringe and also passing through these three stages of truth evolution as well.

[iuniversallystudentperfectionme]

  Last year October, about a week after the nation space that we have generously agreed to refer to as Nigeria, celebrated her 59th independence from colonial rule, I found myself at the Athens Democracy Forum, Athens being of course that former nation-state that claims the honour of pioneering a system of governance that we all today celebrate under the name – democracy.

I have no intention of challenging Athens on her claims. What is of note in that claim is simply that the Greeks consider this system of socio-political arrangement of such primal validity, despite numerous challenges and setbacks, that they continue to flaunt it at the rest of the world as the ideal to which all of humanity should aspire.

What is even more striking is that much of the rest of the world continues to fall in line, join in the exercise, and propagate its virtues.

Two weeks after that conference, I was back on this soil of our own continent on an allied interrogation of history generated concepts. The venue of the second encounter was Dar-es-Salaam, the occasion, the bi-annual Conference on African philosophy.

My remarks today derive largely from issues raised by those earlier exchanges. There is a coincidence of timing and relevance for our present gathering here, both thematically and historically, a coincidence that almost qualifies as a gift of Providence, since all three encounters are geared towards the historic search of humanity for existential choices based on the exercise of collective wisdom.

I do not speak of wisdom as an abstract pursuit, a lofty aspiration that exists in a rarefied realm of its own, but wisdom as the very manifestation of the human ability to seize both phenomena and experience by the throat and squeeze them of any lessons they have to offer us in amelioration of human existence.

That claim is justified by the very theme of this encounter: NEVER AGAIN. It is not the first time most of us here have heard that expression. It is, unfortunately, also not the last time such an exhortation will echo in human caucuses, structured and/or casual, organized or improvised.

It is both sentiment and pragmatism, an admission of an error, of an anomaly, of a less than desired expectation of ourselves, what we believe we are capable of, what deficiencies in judgment we consider we are capable of transcending.

It is, to sum up, indication of our capacity for vision, a refusal to be stuck in a mode of thought that discountenances the possibilities of human transformation, of possibilities of transcending present limitations.

That resolve may emerge from individual or collective experience. Let me bring it down to the most mundane, accessible level. Let us say, in a foolhardy moment, we have exceeded the dictates of prudence in spending, overshot one’s budget.

What do we swear when the moment of realization descends? Never Again! Or perhaps – a more literally sobering experience – who still recalls his or her first hangover the morning after a night of over-indulgence? The very first words that emerge in that first flush of sobriety? Again, the two words: Never Again!

The trouble of course is that humanity tends to forget such lessons too soon, and will be found pursuing the same course of action again, all over again and again.

We become inured to what we consider our capacity for recovery, even boast of our increasing resistance to the effects of the night before.

However, we know only too well that, side by side with that seeming capacity for recuperation, there is a steady erosion of the physical constitution that comes from excess. Sooner or later, the liver – among other vital organs – will take its revenge.

That latter analogy is quite deliberate. Power intoxicates and, in that drunken state, human beings become mere statistics. Some people remain in a drunken stupor for years, alas, intoxicated by the sheer redolence of power and cheap access to the instruments of force.

And so I evoke that analogy to bolster those sober and anxious voices that warn, from time to time, that no nation has ever survived two civil wars.

The claim that no nation has ever survived two civil wars may not be historically sustainable but, it belongs to that category of quest that I have referred to as the pursuit of wisdom – in his case, we may equate it with the wisdom of not holding a bank note over a flame just because the Central Bank claims that it is fireproof. Or attempt to hold an exposed electric wire, just because NEPA is notorious for electrical incapacitation.

Correspondingly, our analogy is sternly directed as a mirror to those contrary voices which boast: “I have fought a war and put my life on the line to keep this nation one, and I am ready to do it all over again.”

That bravado, by the way, conveniently overlooks the reality that a parallel, often more devastating toll in human lives and lingering trauma is also exacted from untrained, unprepared non-combatants, burdening the future with a more unpredictable, indeed even irreversible hangover.

And that introduces us conveniently to my second conference in Tanzania for which my contribution was titled: WHEN IS A NATION? – with the sub-title, Power, Volition and History’s Reprimand. I believe you have begun to grasp the connection.

If not, let me remind you that Tanzania was one of the five nations that recognized the breakaway Republic of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War.

Finding myself in that setting, among products of a very special historical formation – pre- and immediately post-colonial African - despite variations in detail, if was an opportunity to interrogate what, if any, could be considered a philosophical or ideological extract from a human event that consumed – it is estimated – two million and a half lives within two years. One of the preoccupations of philosophy is of course to immerse its processes in what actually makes humanity – tick.

So, there we were in Tanzania, a crucial player in the Nigeria – note, I do not say Biafran but – Nigerian tragedy.

Regarded as a progressive nation, with a track record of support for liberation causes both within the continent and outside – such as the Palestinians struggle for nationhood - serving as a front-line buffer against apartheid South Africa and thus incurring punitive attacks from that racist enclave, Tanzania nonetheless chose to go against the tide of opinion within the then Organization of African Unity.

She recognized a secessionist state at a time when such a position was not only unfashionable, but was even regarded by many as an act of race treachery, a rupture of the not-for-discourse, not-for-consideration political ‘absolute’ named: African Unity.

Yes indeed, that was the conjure word: African Unity. Unity as in non-fragmentation, non-divisible, was a proposition in transcendentalism, an Absolute.

A modern continent, offspring of multiple rapes – or indecipherable trading treaties - and externally imposed distribution lines, was to be weaned on the milk of a foster mother named – African Unity

So let us consider the implications of that collective position.

In objective terms, what exactly was it? A historic irony, I propose. We are introducing here a very plain issue that goes to the heart of national coming-in-being of any people, that issue being a polarity between volition and – dictation.

Perhaps you will now admit the relevance of my commencing reference to that other conference that occupied itself with the ancient socio-political system known as – democracy.

The Yoruba have a proverb for that implicit lesson in contradictions - it goes: won ni, amukun, eru e wo, o ni at’isale ni. Translation: The knock-kneed porter was told: that load on your head is skewed. His reply was – ah no, the problem lies at the base, at the beginning, not, in the consequence.

And so, the question is thrown open as a fundamental proposition: is democracy itself not vitiated, not a sham where the roots of coming-in-being of a people spell dictation, coercion as opposed to – choice? Volition? Consent and Participation? Those are the building blocks of Democracy.

Democracy is manifested in act, not in the rhetorical flourish. That is the irony to which I refer, an irony that commenced when the Organization of African Unity adopted the very protocol of the inviolability of national boundaries – that is, the sacrosanctity of given boundaries, dictated, imposed, arbitrary and artificial boundaries, and its members resolved to defend those boundaries to the last drop of our blood.

Now, a pause here is mandated. Tomorrow, I know that I shall open the pages of the newspapers and read that Wole Soyinka has advocated the breakup of Nigeria. One reporter will deduce that from an underlying principle I have just enunciated, jot it down in his or her notebook, and others will copy that conclusion verbatim.

Too bad for the nation’s Intelligence Quotient – known as I.Q. I have long given up, and will proceed – as I always have – on my own terms, with my uninterrupted dialogue with history, and in my own mode of expression.

Those who wish to catch up can do so in their own time. My extract from that Civil war remains what it always was - a simple self-interrogatory: Have we been had? Absolutes tend to resound with a clarity, an exclusionist proceeding that does not tax the brain.

Absolutes readily corral even millions into a comfort zones of unquestioning receptivity, simply from fear, or even just from the way they sound, not for the implications of their content.

Absolutes however remain what they are – glorified sound-bites such as: The sovereignty of this nation is non-negotiable. Yes, what exactly does that mean? We know what it meant for the first-comers at the helm of affairs in the Organization of African Unity.

It meant: to each his own, as exists at this moment of history. This is a club of leaders, let us keep things the way they are by respecting one another’s turf. No trespassing. No adjustment of givens. No agitation. No negotiation.

Again, I warn against reductionism. I do not belittle the passion, the sincerity, the dedication to the liberation of the continent from external control as diligently pursued by a number of those leaders.

I do not belittle the ideological determinism of a handful, the will to transform, to catch up the rest of the world and redress the history of enslavement – both by the Eastern and western worlds, the humiliating racism for which we are on the receiving end, even till today.

I do not for a moment underestimate the self-sacrifices and `I do not ignore the vision of a few individual leaders.

I do insist however that that protocol of sacrosanctity of colonial boundaries was a self-serving power mechanism of internal control and domination that had nothing to do with a structured, programmatic concern for the African masses who bore the brunt of effects of colonialism and its later, camouflaged successors – including internal colonialism.

And thus I continue to ask: Have we been had? Are we still being well and truly had? Do we continue to lay ourselves wide open to be cheaply had? Well then, consider the state of the world, at that very time that the conference in Tanzania was holding, just last October.

Let us take a look over the continental wall and instruct ourselves. That conference was taking place, sixty years of modernity after the Nigerian civil war, simultaneously with an ongoing upheaval in a distant continent, Europe, in a former colonial power, Spain.

Yes, that power, Spain, was embroiled in a secessionist move by a province known as Catalonia. The initial, dramatic proclamation took place in Catalonia’s own provincial parliament earlier that year, echoing that other allegedly retrogressive move thousands of miles away on this very continent, in this very nation, in a region abutting the Bay of Biafra – that is, history was being replayed a full sixty years after the precedent that was set in the Bay of Biafra.

In between of course, need I remind you of the dismantling of the monolith known as the Republic of Soviet Unions – with the nearly forgotten acronym of USSR?

Hindsight or foresight, irrespective of what triggers off recollection, it is all part of our humanity to call history to account from time to time, and most especially in those moments when its obscured fault-lines are exposed. And so we proceed to an even closer scenario – closer that is, even intertwined with our own history as former colonials – the United Kingdom, a fellow Commonwealth nation.

I refer to the attempted breakup of that once colonial power whose policies in the first place certainly contributed to a violent, devastating resolution on the Nigerian testing ground. The Brexit movement is taking place within a loose organization, so one can claim it is not quite the same as that ugly word, “secession”.

However, Brexit did lead, with remorseless logic, to a renewal – repeat, renewal of the calls for Scottish independence. It is a recurrent agitation that actually resulted in a referendum in 2014 – just six years ago - after a motion in the Scottish Parliament.

That motion, like Brexit, obtained the assent of the union government in Westminster. The UK government under David Cameron, found that it had to campaign hard to swing the votes for a “No”.

Some here may recall that even Lawn Tennis had a cameo role in that drama since the referendum took place close to the Olympics, and collateral anxieties built up – would Andy Murray compete as a Scot, or as a Brit? If only such weighty issues of governance and nation-being could be reduced to benign proportions such as the uncertainties of the game of tennis!

On a personal note, let me reveal here that I was in that very parliamentary house not long after the failed referendum where I addressed the International Society on European Enlightenment. It gave me the greatest pleasure to sympathize with members of the Scottish parliament on their abortive act of secession.

Closer home of course we have undergone the break-up of Ethiopia and Eretria, after decades of human wastage. There is of course the resolution of a Sudanese separatist uprising in negotiated divorce. When – or if at all - will a verdict be objectively delivered on whether this was ‘one giant step forward for humanity’, or one harrowing step for socio-political retrogression? What matters for those of us committed to a humanist mode of thought is this: a direction was finally agreed upon in favour of the survival of Sudanese humanity, the termination of its decades-long agony, and the annulment of the unwritten pacts of mutual decimation.

Let my comments during a eulogy to our own home grown secessionist leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was once violently excoriated, later absorbed, after his military defeat, into the bosom of a “united” family – let those comments stand for some of the wider implications that derive – not to all, necessarily – but indisputably from some such events of dubious associations, even of the most benign. My eulogy went as follows:

“On that day, May 30, of the year 1967, a young, bearded man, thirty-four years of age in a fledgling nation that was barely seven years old, plunged that nation into hitherto uncharted waters, and inserted a battalion of question marks into the presumptions of nation-being on more levels than one.

That declaration was not merely historic, it re-wrote the more familiar trajectories of colonialism even as it implicitly served notice on the sacrosanct order of imperial givens. It moved the unarticulated question: “When is a nation?” away from simplistic political parameters – away from mere nomenclature and habit – to the more critical arena of morality and internal obligations.

It served notice on the conscience of the world, ripped apart the hollow claims of inheritance and replaced them with the hitherto subordinate, yet logical assertiveness of a ‘people’s will’. Young and old, the literate and the uneducated, urban sophisticates and rural dwellers, civilian and soldier – all were compelled to re-examine their own situating in a world of close internal relations and distant ideological blocs, bringing many back to that basic question: Just when is a nation?

Throughout world history, many have died for, but without an awareness of the existential centrality of that question. The Biafran act of secession was one that could claim that a people had a direct intimacy with the negative corollary of that question. Their brutal, causative circumstances – I refer to the massacres, the deadly hunts – could provide only one answer to the obverse of our question, which would then read: When is a nation not? In so doing, he challenged the pietisms of former colonial masters and the sanctimoniousness of much of the world. He challenged a questionable construct of nationhood, mostly externally imposed, and sought to replace it, under the most harrowing circumstances, with a vital proposition that answered a desired goal of humanity – which is not merely to survive, but to exist in dignity.

Even today, many will admit that, in that same nation, the question remains unresolved, that more and more voices are probing that question – when is a nation? – from Central Africa through India/Pakistan to Myammar and the Soviet Union – enquire of Cherchnya and the siege of Beslan!

Innumerable are the casualties from contestations of that facile and unreflective proposition that whatever is, is immutably ordered, which confers the mantle of divine ordinance on those spatial contrivances, called nations, even as they continue to creak at the seams and consume human lives in their millions.

Such arch-conservationists, sometimes imbued with a high sense of mission, see only a sacrosanct order in what was never accorded human approbation, as if it is not its very human occupancy that confers vitality on any inert piece of real estate.

Julius Nyerere was too astute not to know that his gesture of recognition was futile. That leaves us one extract – arguably others, but I wish to fasten on just one – symbolic.

Translated into the language of propulsive thinking, impelled to extract a lesson from an unrelenting cycle of human wastage, that lesson would read: Humanity before nation. Indeed, Nyerere’s justification of his action implied as much. And, when we finally met, during a North-South conference that took place in Lisbon after his retirement, at a critical phase of the anti-apartheid struggle, he reaffirmed the rationale behind his decision.

Well, it does not matter whether r or not that alone constituted the rationale for his position – we know he was a politician, and political motives are predictably multiple and interchangeable. What does matter for us today, is the imperative of a ‘revisionist’ attitude, even as a purely academic exercise. For example, ask ourselves questions such as: What price ‘territorial integrity’ where any slab of real estate, plus the humanity that work it, can be signed away as a deal between two leaders – as did happen between Nigeria and the Cameroon.

You seek an answer to the claims of territorial integrity? Ask the fluctuating refugees on Bakassi islands just what is the meaning, for them, of ‘territorial integrity’?

Again, I feel obliged to emphasize that this has nothing to do with whether or not one side was in the wrong or right, nothing to do with accusations of a lack of vision, of pandering to, or resisting the wiles and calculations of erstwhile colonial rulers, or indeed, taking sides in a Cold War that turned Africans into surrogate players and the continent into prostrate testing ground for new weaponry.

No, we merely place before ourselves an exercise in hindsight – with no intention however of denying credit to those who did exercise foresight - we propose that the loss of two million and a half people, the maiming and traumatization of innumerable others and devastation on a thitherto unimaginable scale, by a nation turned against itself even as it teetered on the edge of modernity, provokes sober reflection.

That’s all. Sober reflection. A re-thinking that is unafraid, especially as such scenarios, considered in some cases even worse, more brutish, have since followed. Need one recall Rwanda’s own entry into that contest in morbid pathology, one that surpasses the Biafran carnage when comparatively assessed in duration and population parameters? All remain active reminders to haunt Africa’s collective conscience – the existence of which, I know, is an optimistic presumption - and appears to elude the ministrations of politicians and/or ideologues, or indeed theologians.

I propose that we borrow a leaf from our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora. I have no qualms in reminding this, or any other Nigerian audience that, such is the ingrained slave mentality of the contemporary progeny of those who sold those exiles into slavery in the first place, that some in this nation actually consider it a duty, even honour, to take up cudgels on behalf of the denigrators of our own kind, of our own race.

Thus, they proceed to insult those who respond in their own personal manner to such racists, however powerfully positioned and no matter where on this globe – but let that pass for now. My intention is to jog your memories regarding that spate of serial elimination of our kind – the African-Americans - by white police in the United States at that very time, an epidemic that merely actualized the racist rantings of the current incumbent of the White House as he powered his way to the coveted seat in the last United States elections.

The African-Americans, tired of being arbitrary sacrificial lambs, the victims of hate rhetoric, went on nation-wide protest marches, carrying placards that read: Black Lives Matter.

Adopting that simple exhortation enables us to include the millions of victims of failed or indifferent leadership on this continent who are more concerned with power and its accruements, who see the nation, not as expressions of a people’s will, need, belonging, and industry, but as ponds in which they, the bullfrogs of our time, can exercise power for its own sake. It is they who militate against ‘nation’, not – I shall end on this selective note – not the products of migration from purely nominal nation enclaves who perish daily along the Sahara desert routes, who drown in droves in the Mediterranean.

They are the ones who confronted the question with, alas, a fatalist determinism. They asked themselves the question: When is a Nation? And the answer of those desperate migrants is clearly read as: not when we left where we called home! As long as our humanity opts for unmarked graves in the Sahara desert, or in the guts of the fishes of the Mediterranean, their answer remains to haunt us all.

Yes, indeed, let us internalize that Africa-American declaration as statement of a living faith, an expression of our humanity that may compel leadership to pause at critical moments of decision, thereby earn ourselves some space where we can re-think those bequeathed absolutes that we so proudly spout, gospels of sacrosanctity, pre-packaged imperatives or questionable, often poisoned “truths” that incite us to advance so conceitedly towards the dehumanization, and decimation of our kind.

Any time that leadership, on whichever side, is about to repeat yet again the ultimate folly of sacrificing two and a half million lives on the altar of Absolutes, any absolute, we should borrow that credo, paint them on prayer scrolls, flood the skies in their millions with kites and balloons on which those words are inscribed:

African Lives Matter!

Wole Soyinka Column Opinion AddThis :  Original Author :  SaharaReporters, New York Disable advertisements :  from All Content https://ift.tt/2RhQNE5

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Reflections

Overview

I really wish I had given myself more time this year to really develop a lot of my projects but due personal issues I ended up not being present at a lot of most of the classes and workshops although I still believe I have completed most of the work independently to the best standard I could. I tend to deal a lot with creative bock due to over thinking and this year was by far a real challenge for me. I really overcame a lot of problems I have when it comes to working on projects. I struggled a lot with the majority of what I had and wanted to do even though a lot of it is stuff I have done before in my life. I like to think of myself as very resourceful when I don’t have a lot on hand and not a lotta time. I pride myself at being able to look at what I have around me and create something out of it. My work this year often involved only one other person to be my subject of whatever it was I was working on and other than that I tend to be my own writer, director, crew, producer, everything.  It’s not that I am against working with others but I get very bad social anxiety, partially when I have a certain idea in mind and really want to find people on the same wave length. I find it very easy to talk to my best friend who appears in almost every piece of work I’ve created throughout this year. She’s helped me a great deal in getting my work completed and letting me just kind of tell her what to do however going into next year I really want to meet new people and collaborate on projects even though I’m apprehensive. However I still pride myself on being a truly independent filmmaker and I would like to learn every single aspect of the process so I can become and unstoppable force of creative fuck.

I like to work in a physical sketchbook and although I believe I have shown all the relevant information from it here on the blog I feel as though that the book itself is the real blog, where I keep everything from inspiration and influence and personal ideas for movies and projects and of course all my many class notes and theory I’ve caught up and studied over the last few months. I work entirely in this book, I bring it everywhere I go and is a huge part of development of ideas and has a lot of information in it from the philosophical side of creativity to the practical. It’s very important to me to do things my way and keep everything together as my projects tend to over lap especially if there’s several being completed in a short space of time. With this year I believe it’s important to see my work as a whole and also represents the kinda rag tag way I tend to work. Things get messy when I come up with a bunch of different ideas and my sketchbook for this years work defiantly represents that. It’s filled with every little thing I write down. I’ve always worked in a big A4 sketchbook and I always will I think. I feel that my blog does not represent fully what the sketchbook is full of however I think I have accumulated the most relevant sections. The book itself is filled with all my ideas from the terrible ones to the ones I am actively pursuing. You can find pages from it in my blog.

I keep thinking of the things I would have done differently but I’ve truly had a break through this year by at least finishing the projects and learning to not become so obsessed with something that it leaves you stagnant. I wish I had more time to really explore and develop my work such as my moving image work, which is my main passion. I wish I could have really made something that ticked all the boxes but I did what I did with the best I had. Overall I have a lot to learn still and want to get better at my craft and I can’t wait to go on to the next year where I can hopefully really begin to flourish. I would have done a lotta things differently and I made a lot of mistakes. My ideas tend to go bigger than what I can actually practically pull off which I’m aware is a normal part of creating, especially in movies. As well as the feeling that what you make doesn’t 100 percent turn out how you wanted it to be, but I understand the process of learning from one project and moving on to the next one.  I tend to do things my way and am very persistent about that although I don’t feel this gets in the way of experimentation which I certainly did this year.

Photography

Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun. Three portraits of my friend and artist Katie Russell. Shot on a Canon 600D RAW I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light feeling due the summers day behind her however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing with it getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as oppose to the other ones where she’s almost apart of the scenery. Now she’s outta the sun she is the one who is shining. Notice how also she seems to fill up the frame more more the more comfortable she gets.

I missed my opportunity to use the photo studio or learn about it during the workshops or take some really good crafted photographs I feel but just like all my work I did the best with what I had. I really wish I could have learned to use black and white film. I also would have really liked to do something maybe more elaborate with costumes and big lights perhaps something more in line with Cindy Sherman however I would never pass up the opportunity for raw photography, which is my favourite kind. I consider raw photography to be as real as you can get it without too much manipulation of the subject and no manipulation once you’ve taken your photos. I enjoyed it although I don’t think photography is something I would do on a professional level. I enjoy taking photos a lot though.

Web Media

Web Media if defiantly my weakest part of the year. Not only do I find it frustrating and boring I have no interest in ever using websites to tell my stories or anything else unless it’s in the form of a kind of blog which I did do. I thought the narrative aspects of the module was interesting however web media is for sure not for me and I hope not to revisit it at any point. However I still had ideas and can appreciate how creative you can be with it. Originally I wanted re-tell the story of Odyssey through minimalist squares however that wasn’t really possible for me so I decided that it would be a chose your own adventure with a more artistic and low quality edge that would give it a pleasing aesthetic. This is the only project I really collaborated with someone on, having my friend to help me with the technical sides of coding however came up with the whole idea and development.

Moving Image

During film production I tend to take on every role including camera man, directing and sound and of course I always come up with the ideas, from script development to on the spot changes and ideas. Everything but being in front of the camera which I have even done as well. I consider filmmaking to be my main practice.

In addition to researching all the different roles the filmmaking process demands I also she a scene related to a bigger structure. On the scene from The Great Hydration War script that I wrote myself I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing. When our main character thinks they are in control the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script, sees a figure. Unsure of who it is we see them in a wide, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back on Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness if water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions through the angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and sort of ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scene were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post. As for the costumes me and my friend, who played the character, helped design it. I wanted something si-fi esque but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time so I decided to try and take the comedic route and make it have more charm than actually trying to make the audience buy what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story and that I had written but the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

For the scene I shot it on my trusty Canon 600D DSLR I’ve been using for many years. It’s trust worthy and takes footage so it works for me but I’d love to use something more professional and something closer to the industry standard. I like the cameras available at the university but sometimes its just much more practical to use your own camera but for the in coming year I really want to learn a different range of cameras and shoot on them. With more time and the same opportunity as other students I could of created something of a higher standard, perhaps something longer also.

Conclusion  

I feel like I could have done a lot better with all of my projects and made them to a better standard and quality and with more meaning if I had been more personally okay this year. I’m very passionate about my chosen subjects and like to think I’ve had several break throughs this year with my work. I am quite proud of some of the things I’ve created, particularly the ones I created for other modules, the short films Campussies! And HELLo. Everything I make has either not to do with politics or is anti-politics.