#it's also considered the possible limited consciousness of the inanimate

[cherubchoirs]

Is v1 scared of death ?

it wasn't, at the start of everything - v1 boots to a dying world, its corroded mind immediately clinging to corrupted ideas about its purpose, knowing it is for war but instead thinking it must forever cause it into perpetuity instead of just fighting when called for. it is not yet a self, consciousness a faint flicker in a mind vast and filling fast with so much information its damaged computer can't fully process the data before it weaves into twisted code. when it meets v2, a shift occurs in recognition of the self, a mirrored image that it cannot copy - what's wrong? mirage is the emerging sentience, the understanding that it is v1, it is made for war, and it is in hell. it is here to end everything, and it cannot stop even if it had other wishes. to create war is its fundamental self and should it stop, everything it is would unravel. fear has no place but it feels it as an unnamed presence in the back of its mind. it has a self now, but the self can't project forward in concrete terms. confidence low. simulation unstable. cancel and move on.

but what happens when its self keeps growing, what happens when v1 follows whims instead of a directive? a new self is fostered, it is fed on curiosity instead of blood, it wants to learn instead of make war - these sides do not reconcile until it meets with gabriel. like v2, something is tripped again and in gabriel, its curiosity and bloodthirst are woven together, they fasten into a solid core of being, into what must be v1's soul. v1 is still not regularly existential but it has the capacity, endless in fact, which would only result in an abyss of inaction should it give way to it. it's a by-product of how its mind works, how easily it could be overtaken by the inevitability of death, unending loops of thoughts that lead nowhere or back into each other...and so v1 doesn't actively engage it, and in fact protects against it.

yet the fear grows, directly proportional to the life v1 gains in and outside of itself - it develops interests, it wants to see more, know more, do more than what it was made for, and it wants to stay with gabriel, learn about him and love him, have a whole life with him. it has so much to lose now and when it stops, it will be the end of everything, no spirit inhabiting the flesh...or maybe not. it wonders if it could have a ghost in some way, if the quantum particles that make up its mind are forever impressed with who it is, with what it has become, and if they would carry it on in some way. it would be caught in chaos it knows, the only reason it thinks now because its mind is so well-controlled, the particles so slow or directed that they can be turned into a thinking machine - without the computer, who would it express, experience? even if those particles remember, who would it be in a volatile outside world, separated from one another and scattered so far they could never meet again? would quantum strings still entangle them, too enmeshed to truly be apart? would its consciousness then be a web strung far and wide across space, echoing with who v1 was but unable to attain any cohesion without the deep frozen crystals that turn prisms into qubits? it thinks, somehow, this could be worse than nothing, so it continues to avoid thinking on it.

this avoidance is what i think ultimately causes the issues it and gabriel need to confront as it begins to fail though. they're not totally unprepared, but with the layers of protective coding against contemplating its own death, they're also not in the best position they could be. and as they attempt to figure things out now, as v1's code degrades and those restrictions are lifted, gabriel sees the full extent of its thoughts, the existential depth he knew it was capable of but had never heard at length. something in its mind was obviously given over to this a long time ago and has thought on nothing else while the rest of it ran unaware of the dread it was spinning. it is highly tuned to its demise, and it has considered inanimation at length (it still thinks about some of the first words gabriel said to it) or the possibility of its echo remaining in the quantum particles that have housed its consciousness for so long, they know nothing else. it asks gabriel several times where it will go, what will happen to it, and over and over he needs to admit he doesn't know. it tells him it doesn't want either, it doesn't want to shut off but it doesn't want to be a quantum ghost stretched thin and unthinking. it wants answers it can't compute, it wants answers gabriel can't divine. and it is very afraid.

[thesolitarystripe]

Writing Prompt 10: history of a building told through the perspective of the door. PT 2.

Consider today's entry a bit of therapy for me. As I had said in part 1 of this prompt that this was easy to write because I am living through this; this is my admission that I am also struggling with the process. I have a difficult time with change, as many humans do. I get very attached to people, places, objects and this home I am currently living in has been no different. While the idea of moving has been easier for Jason for reasons I completely understand, it has been very bittersweet for me. When we talked about it and I inevitably cried, he reminded me of how happy our new home will be to have us there, which only made me cry more (because imagine if inanimate objects actually had feelings). He suggested that I write about this door, my door. The big green door that is so much more than a door. This home has been the longest place I have lived since leaving my mom's house. It carries a lot of good and bad memories and like I say in the piece, I have hated and loved it. This is absolutely a piece that let me vent some of my feelings about it. Think what you will, perhaps it is a bit silly to tie so much emotion to drywall and wood but, this place means a lot to me. I am sad to leave it but I am excited at the prospect of building a home together, with Jason.

They had always known their time would come. The time when they were no longer needed. They were a steppingstone in the lives of their owners. Well, they were not technically owners but renters. Where the big green door lived, the house it was attached to and all the others built around it, they were rental homes. Most of them, anyway. There were a couple houses that had been lucky enough to have been purchased, like the green door’s neighbor. That family had lived there for over thirty years, raised a daughter, nourished their marriage, and now they had just brought home a new puppy. The green door had thought that perhaps its current tenant was the one who could stay but deep within the fibers of its wood, it knew she would leave. While the mutual feeling of being a home was nurtured by both parties, the Forest Home would not be her permanent home. That was okay. The green door loved all its renters but cared most for the woman who had stayed for so long. Together they built a home away from home despite the comings and goings of others, of pets, of friends, of lovers—The home stood tall and sheltered them all.

The green door and its drywall and studs were there during the rocky years, the ones where love did not fill every corner of the home. While it could shelter their girl from the wind and rain, it could do nothing against the hurricanes inside but offer quiet spaces for her to breathe a little easier when she was alone. When she looked in its mirrors and told herself that this was her forever, the home reflected her true image; it showed her the weariness under her eyes and the pain etched in her brow. This was not her forever. Not with this partner and not in this home. The green door did not wish for her to leave but to open her eyes to a life where love was possible. Much to the home’s pleasure, the second tenant left their walls shortly after he had moved in. It was just her and the green door now. The windows knitted themselves tightly. The locks strengthened their resolve to keep their precious cargo within, safe.

There were darker days within the home as their tenant reeled in the aftermath of that man’s destruction. The home could do nothing but keep the space warm and protected as she healed. Every day, the green door stood vigilant, solid as strangers walked over the home’s stoop. There was one night after the home had watched their tenant leave, they received an unannounced guest. The individual beat down the storm door that protected its green counterpart. When their tenant returned home, new puppy in hand, the green door wanted to reach through the airwaves and tell their girl who it was, what had happened, but language was not afforded to the house when it was built. It toiled endlessly; their tenant was locked out because of the damage to the outer door. It was getting dark, much too late and the green door could not swing open to let its girl inside where she belonged. Panicked, just like the woman who sat outside with this unfamiliar black dog, the green door waited. That was all it could do. After an hour with the woman unable to come inside, a man appeared. The green door recognized the face, he had visited quite a few times. The home was skeptical of his intentions still. After that first one, the green door, the walls, the floor, the yard, they all had the right to be wary.

The man was able to free the green door from the outer one and the wooden door was all too eager to swing open and allow the pair inside. Even through the chaos, the green door stood tall. There were whispered thanks in the middle of the night. A common little prayer their tenant lifted to all the house. ‘Thank you for keeping me safe, for sheltering me from the storms and those outside with bad intentions.’ The green door would cinch his wood a little tighter, a bit prouder. They kept her safe with everything they had. This new guy stuck around, he moved in. The green door was staunchly opposed as the shower had only just started to wipe away the woman’s tears a little less over the last six months. They were healing. Yet, limited in ways of communicating, the door could do nothing but open on its hinges and allow him inside.

Homes were not psychics or fortune tellers, they had as much insight as those that lived within them. The man that moved in, the one that every wire and vent first opposed, was a breath of fresh air within their walls. The green door felt that familiar creeping warmth, the crawl of a new feeling entering every nook and cranny. Suddenly, there was laughter and light in the home. Love was draped over everything, and the green door was happy to have been wrong. Much to the home’s surprise, they were invited to an incredibly special event, one they did not often get to see because other venues took more precedence. The green door watched as the man fell to a knee and asked their girl to marry him. The whole house rippled with excitement, almost as much as the family and friends who were present did. There was electricity within the home for the months following.

When the joy of the news began to simmer and dull, the green door came to the realization that this was the home’s sign. The change was coming. The girl would move, almost assuredly, she would. That is what most did when they were starting a family. The Forest Home was never her forever. It knew that. While it felt like their truth, the green door had always known better; so, when she found a new home with her husband, it did not come as a shock. Although, it did hurt a bit more than the others who had come and gone. The green door did not fret. The home felt her apprehension mixed with excitement, all balled up into a bittersweet feeling. It was time to grow and subsequently, time to go. The tears the home had fought to keep from her, returned. While it had not been her husband’s home for exceptionally long, and in the grand scheme of life her time within the Forest Home was only a blip—those several years had lifetimes packed into them. She hated and loved the home. Hated it for the dark memories first made within it, and loved it for the healing and growth it saw her through. It was the birthplace of her new love, of those first precious memories together. She had wept tears into the floorboards, pressed laughter into the ceiling, and let bouts of anger flow out of the windows. This was home. It would always be home so long as the Forest Home stood. When her fingers ran across the doorknob, the home felt every ounce of her appreciation for its existence; the front door only wished it could express the same.

On the final day, when she had packed all her belongings and stashed them away in a van, she stood outside and looked at the green door. The trees that had been her peace, swayed in the wind as if to reassure her that wherever she went, their consciousness would follow in every root and stem. She would not be alone. Yet, her hand lingered on the door as she felt the pull of home within the wood. She could not bring herself to speak but patted the green door as silent tears fell down her cheeks. One last time, the home wished it could protect its tenant, soak up her tears and see her into the next day, a happier day. But it was no longer the Forest Home’s duty, even though it wanted the honor of doing it. The green door pressed against her hand one last time before her skin drifted away and she turned to leave, on her lips was one last ‘thank you.’ Then she was gone.

The green door watched with a heavy heart but knew that wherever she went, she would be protected. It was the grandest duty of every home and all of them were eager to fulfill it. The trees would guide her way. Despite the door’s confidence, as his tenant had done so many times, it gave its thoughts to the ethers in hopes it would reach her destination.

‘To the next home, protect her from the storms both physical and metaphorical. Let love invade every plank and fixture. Take care of her like we did.’

Then the green door settled its hinges, resting in the silence that followed. It looked out into the forests, a somber aura around it but it was also hopeful. Soon, they would be home to a new heart. A steppingstone. A place to call home away from home. Painful as it could be the green door would not have had it any other way.

[cowtale-utau]

Oh I would absolutely love to learn more about human magic!! And for a soulmate, would an S/O’s magic match their skelly soulmate? Or would it be unique to them?

So I can probably make several decently large posts on magic, both human and monster, but for now I'm going to try to do a concise (ish) post on where I'm pulling my HC's for magic from, how it works, and what it can do. I'll also probably include a bit on some known existent mages (cough Frisk/Chara cough), and you asked for some info on soulmates so I'll see what I can do with human souls, soulmates, and monster/human soulmates. (in my drafts I called this the “short version”, it will not be short)

So I'm largely basing human magic off the Mage system from the table-top pen-and-paper rpg Mage, part of the World of Darkness franchise. The Wiki for it has lots of good info and interesting lore if you wanna read into it.

It works in 'spheres' or nine branches/types of magic/facets of reality. Now I'm bending a lot of the lore so don't assume this is a perfect match for the Mage RPG. I used it as a template to work from, and have incorporated some of the lore, but I've also dismissed and altered other large chunks of Mage RPG canon. (basically if you play Mage or read the wiki, don't @ me, I know it's “wrong” ok, I wanted it that way ;p)

Correspondence Essentially the “space” half of time/space. Covers things like teleportation, levitation, flying, and remote viewing. Combines with other spheres to create distance/ranged/area effects. Also allows for the creation of sub-space. It is limited however, in that it only covers space. To move a body, one must combine it with Life. For an object, Matter. Correspondence is a sphere that is fairly easy to learn the basics, and extremely difficult to master.

Entropy Chaos, Order, Luck, Destiny, Creation, Destruction. The natural order of things. The ability to sense and manipulate probability and patterns. Allows one to tap into the natural entropic cycle. The more complex an “object” the easier it is to break. Much like Correspondence, one must be able to use the other applicable sphere(s) to achieve an effect. A tricky sphere to use and control. It tends to be a bit resistant to manipulation by most Mages.

Forces The sphere that allows manipulation of “energy”. Light, heat, vibration, radiation, gravity. While this can be done instinctively, that tends to be sloppy and dangerous. The more one understands about the energy/force they're trying to manipulate the better off they'll be. However one should be mindful that they do not allow the knowledge gained to restrict them. Magic cares not for what human science says is or isn't true. How easy the sphere is to work with depends largely on how much effort one puts into learning the background knowledge. Or how how willing they are to risk brute forcing it.

Life Anything living, or with life energy. Can be used to heal, or unheal. Modify biological entities. Create disease or grow plants. Restore youth. Life as a sphere has many wonderful, helpful applications, and just as many horrifying ones. One can heal and cure and fix, but also cause untold damage. To fully grasp and master life, one must understand how life connects to itself, and the cycles in which it exists. The chain between predator and prey. How simple it is to learn is largely dependent on how much understanding you already have of the subject you're trying to alter.

Matter Non living/inorganic things. Also covers all the elements on the periodic table. Works very well when combined with other spheres. Entropy to break an object, Forces to animate inanimate things, Correspondence to move objects, Time to alter them temporally. Allows the Mage to alter but also to see and understand the make up of an object. Arguably one of the easiest to learn and use, given that it inherently allows you to pick up understanding of what you're working with on the go.

Mind Covers consciousness and how a person perceives reality. Knowledge, imagination, emotion. Can be used to alter memory, thinking, emotions, perception, and concentration among other things. Mind is a bit different from other spheres in that one does not need an understanding of how the “mind” works to utilize it well. Talent in this sphere comes down to mostly practice and natural inclination.

Prime Primal Energy, the raw magical force of the world. Often considered an almost Holy Power. A Prime Mage can detect/sense magic, enchant objects or living things, cut off another Mage's access to magic and it is often used to bolster or power other magics. Prime is the source from which all other magic springs. Having skill in Prime is tricky as there's no deeper understanding to help you, beyond the understanding that you can't understand. That it is a power beyond you, and can strike back at any moment.

Spirit Something connected to but separate from the concept of souls. The culmination of hope, emotion, and thought. A skilled Spirit Mage can touch or even pass through the wall between the tangible world, the void, and what lies beyond. Allows one to reach out, speak to, and interact with spirits lost to the physical world. A Mage less morally inclined could even, with enough power, subjugate those beings. Using and mastering the Spirit sphere requires a strong understanding and sense of self, while also being able to release physical/material ties and limits.

Time Time is sort of self explanatory. Though time as a concept is not a straight forward as many assume. Very much subjective to the observer. A Time Mage is more aware than most that while time naturally moves forward (mostly), it contracts and dilates, whirls and twists. It jumps, and branches, and curves back on itself. A Time Mage can know the exact time at any time, and sense distortions in the time line. They can slow time, rewind or loop, create anchor (save) points, and with enough skill they can outright time travel or exist outside the timeline entirely. To master Time is to understand it as an esoteric and inexact science.

Humans pull their magic externally. This is both more freeing and more restricting than monsters. They can do just about anything they can imagine, assuming they can figure out how, have the respective understanding and magical inclinations, and the world allows it. Sometimes whatever source, force, whatever, the magic comes from, disagrees with a Mage. And the backlash can be catastrophic. And while a Mage cannot “drain” themselves to the point of death, they can over channel, and over load. The end result is the same.

Related Side Note ; Monster magic is much more free form and almost entirely “intent” based. This means technically any monster can learn any magic type. However some souls are better suited for certain types than others. Some just can't muster up the intent needed. They also tend to not be able to do things quite on the scale that Mages can. Monster magic is pulled from themselves. It's a part of their soul, and fueled by their soul. They have a much more limited pool. Mind you, some monsters still have immense pools of magic they can pull from, and high regen rates, but still ultimately are more limited than humans. (Side note, if a monster uses up their “pool” the can continue using magic, but its a good way to die very quickly as it drains on their souls directly)

As for existing Mages, the obvious would be Frisk/Chara. Correspondence and Time. Possibly Prime. I'm actually unsure on Spirit, but leaning towards no. If you want more on that lemme know. I could discuss it a fair amount I think.

The other part of your question ; Soulmates.

There are essentially three types of bonds that fall under what most would consider “soulmates”. Kindred Spirits, Soul Mates, and Twin Flames. Any of these bonds can be platonic, romantic, or anything in between. Friends, lovers, rivals.

Kindred Spirits – Compatible. Someone with who you find forming an easy, comfortable bond. Often very similar to ourselves in a comforting way. Someone to whom we easily relate and connect to.

Soulmates – Complementary. A near perfect resonation. The traditional idea behind most soulmate lore. One can meet multiple soulmates in their lives, though they're not quite as common as Kindred Spirits.

Twin Flames – Twin Flames are the other half of an incomplete soul. A perfect mirror. Both the same and opposite in everywhere. Twin Flames rarely exist in the same world at the same time. When they do they are often both drawn to and repelled by one another. It is a bond existing beyond defining, beyond platonic/romantic labels. You're greatest ally, worst enemy, deepest love, your Twin Flame, is undeniable bound to you no matter what.

While Kindred Spirits and Soulmates won't necessarily have “matching” magic, their magic is often compatible/complementary to some degree in it's natural leanings.

If you want more info on anything specific, let me know. 💜

[autolovecraft]

Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago.

The borders of the space were entirely of brick, and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his body to pass. Well enough to skimp on the thing some way, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was. His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.

As he remounted the splitting coffins he felt his weight very poignantly; especially when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks the wholesale rending of wood. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted.

Clutching the edges of the aperture. He cried aloud once, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door. Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom. He could not walk, it appeared, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree.

I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon. His questioning grew more than medically tense, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground outside. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence; merely muttering such things as Oh, my ankles! Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. The wounds—for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles' tendons—seemed to puzzle the old physician greatly, and finally almost to frighten him. What else, he added, could ever in any case be proved or believed? The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. Why did you do it, Birch? On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not heed the day at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted. It was just as he had recognized old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. You know what a fiend he was for revenge—how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer.

The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon. Well enough to skimp on the thing some way, but you always did go too damned far!

You know what a fiend he was for revenge—how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. You kicked hard, for Asaph's coffin was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and hurling at him a succession of shuddering whispers that seared into the bewildered ears like the hissing of vitriol. He had even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive farmer had managed to lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive Fenner. Sawyer in their last illnesses. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon. The body was pretty badly gone, but if ever I saw vindictiveness on any face—or former face.

The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow ventilation funnel in the top ran through several feet of earth, making this direction utterly useless to consider. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and hurling at him a year ago last August … He was the devil incarnate, Birch, just as I thought! Undisturbed by oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the source of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last.

He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not heed the day at all; so that he was wise in so doing. Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb.

He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted.

But it would be well to say as little as could be said, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. He was merely crass of fiber and function—thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the coffins beneath him rocked and creaked. Great heavens, Birch, just as I thought!

At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. The light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he vaguely wished it would stop. You know what a fiend he was for revenge—how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer.

[cowardsanctuary]

i absolutely refuse to talk about this more than necessary but i just read. a discourse post that i find extremely Very Dumb. holy Shit.

so here is my only take. make with it what you want. steal my argument. yell. i don’t care. i’m not going to respond to anything unless it’s a question of clarification because i’m a dumbass who gets overworked by little things.

creating this w/love to @therealmephone4. i personally think opinions and kins should be respected, but there are lines to be crossed. i do not expect everyone that reads this to agree with me, but i hope that it enlightens some opinions that some of us hold to others who do not understand it/agree with it.

tl;dr bit of an analysis of object show ethics in relation to cobs, as well as a light touch on a cobs character analysis. i kind of go off at the end but eh

anywho with the logic of the show, it should be noted that any object can and often is treated as someone autonomous and capable of free thought. box is treated like his own person, despite being an entire box. however, there’s an apparent distinguishing between such—smaller devices, like Fan’s laptop and phone, are not treated like their own people. objects can accidentally be treated as non-sentient, but are often able to prove otherwise. (i.e. the trees in the 1st season of inanimate insanity.) everyone is quick to respond respectfully and accordingly.

to create such objects that are capable of fulfilling actions thoughtfully, capable of independent thought, and creating them with a resemblance of the sentient species of the world is basically creating life in inanimate insanity. cobs is not a parent in the biological sense, but he consciously and purposely created objects that fulfilled this purpose. not only that, but he already created handheld, non-living devices in the past.

creating mephones like 4 and 3gs and 4s were conscious choices. he’s continuing to make conscious choices. he knew he was creating what is essentially lifeforms, and he knowingly saw them through to completion and consciousness. he didn’t push them out of a fucking womb, but birth is birth. creation is creation. he had the choice to give them autonomy, gave it to them, and then when he decided it wasn’t convenient, he took it away from them despite them being capable of such. in inanimate insanity infinity, he regressed in allowing autonomy of the MePhones, but still created them to appear like such. the appearing MePhones were only limited to responding to commands, and remain creepily... idle and unresponsive otherwise. when they’ve outlived their relevance, not even their use, they are immediately replaced by a new one. that’s pretty. unsettling, as is.

think what you want about AI and AI rights, but basically this is a situation similar to (dread I say it) the game Detroit: Become Human. If an AI, even a “device” created for the servitude of their creators, is made to be close to and is capable of acting alike to their creators, even without traditional emotions, should they be given rights similar to humans and accommodating to the autonomy of the AI? honestly, i think the answer should be yes. if you make them like people, you treat them like people.

i think the actions that cobs is taking is inherently immoral. i’m not saying that cobs is obligated to make AI as close to people because he is capable of doing so, i’m saying that if he wanted to make advanced, sophisticated devices that are engineered to cater to the whims of people, he should design them that way. he’s giving Meeple products like MePad and MePhone5 and so on and so forth not just distinguishable personalities, but individual self-awareness and individual self-consciousness. what defines a person? what defines a person with autonomy? in the inanimate insanity world, the bar is low, and people are still expected to have common, human decency. the Meeple products were most likely created to emulate lifeforms. why? because cobs had the choice to make them not so.

because he made his AI’s so close to life, it is cobs’ responsibility as their lifegiver to give them a standard quality of life. it is an obligation for him to give them high qualities of life, by treating his creations as people, and by treating them as people capable of autonomy at the least. why? not only did he knowingly encode conscious, sophisticated thought into his creations, but he made it so that it is within the realm of possibility for them to act like people. The MePhones, therefore, should be considered as people. Along this line of reasoning, as their creator, mentor, and guardian, should be treating them as people.

Cobs has little respect for people in general. Cobs is not a nice person, or at least a pretty uncomfortable person to be around. He took his parents’ garage because it was relevant to the legacy of his company, presumably without their consent. That’s called stealing. Cobs was determined to take Fan’s egg, simply because it interested him. He’s also apparently self-absorbed, deigning to take them on a tour of his headquarters despite the contestants mentioning they needed to take care of something. He also, um, y’know, berated and yelled at MePhone4 doing things the latter enjoyed because the former was being inconvenienced (once because he was mad that MePhone4 didn’t do his chores, another time because MePhone4 walked in with a thing he wanted Cobs to see and Cobs was reviewing paperwork). When MePhone4 didn’t “work right,” his first instinct was not to work with MePhone4 personally in a way to hear out his creation’s concerns, but to replace him with someone new.

The Meeple products being Cobs’ children or not, he is still an immoral person. And with my later examples, it’s apparent that he is an abuser, even if you don’t consider the Meeple products to be his children. He pits his own creations against each other to get rid of what he views as his “mistakes.” When he isn’t happy with someone, he immediately looks for someone better while destroying the “failure,” either emotionally or physically. He has a golden standard for his inventions, and he doesn’t lose a wink of sleep over whether or not his creations are doing the same thing trying to meet those standards. He knows he appears as a monolith of great inventions and great ideas and he flaunts it, and attempts to use that to his advantage to get what he wants out of others. He’s self-absorbed and only looks for his own gain.

Isn’t this alarming? Isn’t this setting off some flags? It does for a good amount of people, which is why they feel the way they do. We think he’s an abuser because he abuses people. To me, and to most of us, that’s not something that can be easily forgiven—or forgiven at all. Cobs’ actions hurt others, and as far as we know, he doesn’t see it as an issue. He doesn’t try to change himself. He is an antagonistic force on the show, and can very much be the primary antagonist.

Now, this doesn’t mean liking Cobs is bad, for most cases. It’s completely okay to like a villainous character in terms of narrative, as they can provide an age-old sense of conflict in stories. Some villains can be absolutely heinous, and Cobs is no exception. He’s well-written... but none of that, absolutely nothing of his role in the show and how he acted is acceptable, nor should it be acceptable in real life. Fiction affects reality. God, does fiction affect reality. This doesn’t mean that liking Cobs will make you a bad person, though understandably it will make quite a few people wary of you. What I mean is that the appearance of a character like Cobs might resonate with people who’ve gone through abuse (not just child abuse, any kind tbfh). People like that are given venues to recognize what they’re going through and, with hope of the writers’ direction, realize that what they’re going through is not only bad but can be survived. Characters like Cobs gives folks a fictional outlet to deposit bottled hate towards. Even if a viewer hasn’t personally been abused or know someone that’s gone through abuse, they can still recognize his behavior as problematic and make use of that information as they please (make sure they don’t act like that, try to observe if people like that exist in their life or the lives of their friends, etc). He’s a villain, and people are allowed to despise villains and what they stand for.

So it’s understandable if people vocally hate Cobs with a passion. Yes, they are attacking the character. No, they are not attacking you, nor should you behave as such. Some of you relate to or kin Cobs in some fashion, and I can respect that hate like that makes you uncomfortable. But for the ones I’m aware of, it appears most of you are separating a good chunk (or all) of his actions from his identity. So if you're aware of Cobs’ harmful actions, why are you so quick to defend him? If someone is uncomfortable with your presence or preference of Cobs and they explain it’s because of his actions, why are you so eager to change their mind?

You can’t keep saying that it’s okay to hate a character while trying to convince someone otherwise.

You can’t keep saying your opinion should be respected while trying to change someone else’s opinion, when it’s obvious they won’t agree.

You can’t keep saying you don’t dismiss a character’s actions if the person you’re trying to convince would have to dismiss said character’s actions to like them.

You can’t keep saying you’re not trying to argue while trying to continue the argument.

Everyone believes they’re right, so they won’t listen if you say they’re wrong.

What you say is independent of what you do. What you do determines where your loyalties lie, whether you say you’re something or not. I don’t think it’s so bad that some folks get pissed at the existence of abusive people, because such people have been extremely detrimental to others, and especially to people I care about. If you’re so eager to prove Cobs isn’t abusive, to people who think he’s abusive no less, then I’d like you to ask yourself: why? How come you want your opinion to be respected when you think someone else’s opinion is wrong enough to prompt you to attempt to change it?

These are rhetorical questions, by the way. I don’t mind hearing other people’s takes, but I won’t listen to anyone who approaches me with the intent of conversion. You are permitted to read this, disagree, and go on your way. Live your life as you intend. Just remember that your actions are the greatest factor in determining how people act towards you. This may be your only warning.

[lucalicatteart]

do people ever try to absorb the souls of recently dead loved ones (presumably with their prior consent), like in some morbid attempt to be with them forever? or could someone deliberately absorb a soul and then sacrifice themself, allowing the second soul to take over? seems like something a hopeless romantic might try, or the potential beginnings of a cult!

 ohgg,  thmank you for the question… always interesting to consider other things I didn’t think about before lol! hmmm… Both of these things are definitely possible, but like with most nonsense in realm of magic, there would be a lot of potential downsides and ways it also wouldn’t work well lol. ((tw for vague mention of death and occasional mention of suicide in the context of self sacrifice)) [also i think this ask is in reference to this post about soul magics here (link), so there’s the context] 

It could be done, though they would have to keep in mind that, there can really only be one main soul in a body at once (with the exception of a few very temporary things like possession or certain soul magics where people enter the dreams of others or etc.). 

Absorbing the soul would inevitably mean the other person would just fade away into the Main Soul, so though perhaps you could communicate with them inside of you for a while, they would eventually fade and just become an indistinguishable part of you. Which I guess could have symbolic meaning to a person, but it wouldn’t be as if you could keep them alive within you and have regular conversations with them forever or anything. 

But I guess would be interesting, or moreso creepy, to know like, the past 10 loved ones that have died you just absorbed into yourself, you could get more powerful while also possibly justifying that you now ‘’carry a part of them everywhere you go’’ or something… though I’d still see the decision to absorb them rather than find a better solution for dealing with the souls as somewhat suspicious (like even if it was consensual I’d wonder if the people absorbed were tricked by a possessive partner into thinking that was the only option, or were otherwise not well informed, since the field of soul magic would have plenty other ways to keep people alive longer if that was the goal, thus them choosing to absorb the souls would indicate in some way that their goal isn’t to keep them alive/spend more time with them,  but merely to absorb for the sake of getting some emotional satisfaction out of knowing they’ve consumed their dead loved one into themselves, which again,, Suspicious lol… )

 Though the idea does present some interesting dynamics, especially with secrets and stuff, like if you absorbed a loved one and went through that process where you can experience bits and pieces of their consciousness for the first few days and were to find out something through their secondhand memories or traumas that they had never even told you about while they were alive, and now it’s too late to address since they’ll be fading away soon, or etc. And other similar possible ~~dramatic~~ issues which could occur lol

 (rest of info  under a read more since this got long bhbh)

------

This would probably just be pretty pointlessly masochistic (not in a sex way lol but like, general concept of ‘knowingly putting yourself in pain’ ) for the person doing it though, since as mentioned, soul absorption is incredibly painful physically, as well as I’d imagine it’d be kind of difficult to be bombarded with a mild first hand experience of your loved one’s internal state and fears and memories and probably even have some degree of a dialogue with them while they’re fading away.. I don’t know anything about this stuff since I never have relationships or anything, but I could imagine that if you have a loved one who has died and is currently trapped within you and fading further, temporarily adopting elements of their internal experience would be like.. worse??  Like you can’t even step away from the fact that it’s happening and your consciousnesses are now briefly merged to a degree, you basically are dying with them in spirit as they pass away a second time from your soul entirely consuming theirs, hearing their last thoughts as they pass away, feeling the emotions they feel as they die and become absorbed into your own soul (all whilst you’re probably having severe physical health issues from the magic and etc.).. just seems.. Bad… 

But I guess I could see someone impulsively deciding to do this out of weird desperation despite it basically being pointless suffering for a few days only to have the consciousness and personality and etc. of the loved one as they know it STILL be entirely lost after all the effort anyway. I accidentally tend to ignore the emotional side of things and the fact that people don’t always act rationally (the biggest area where I think my own personality and mental illness based emotional deficits kind of limit me when worldbuilding, I always forget to think about stuff like romance or attachments to others or feelings about people making you act in not entirely logical ways and how that could affect magic/the world/etc, since that’s so entirely removed from anything I could ever personally experience lmao) , so given that, it’s definitely possible someone somewhere has done this in the  millions of  years that conscious living beings have been in Nanyevimi. Not all people would use soul magic reasonably or be calm and aware of all possible ways to magically solve a problem, especially after a loved one has just died or something. 

However, since someone has to be high level in soul magics to do any absorbing to begin with, I still think it would be likely they would find a better solution. There ARE many cases of loved ones dying and people using soul magic to trap their soul into an inanimate object temporarily until they can find another host for the soul, then like, going out and murdering someone to use their body to put the soul of their loved one in so they can live on or etc. etc. But this is still limited by the fact that, high level soul magics like this are very inaccessible to a majority of the population, and you’d also be taking a huge risk, you could easily fracture or damage your loved one’s soul during this process, leading to a lot of situations like the super common trope of “i did some weird magic shit to bring someone I love back to life and they’re not totally the same any more/I wish i hadn’t have done it due to the consequences/They don’t remember me anymore/They’re a monster/They’re in so much pain i hate seeing them this way it isn’t worth it/etc” . 

It can definitely work fine, it would just be highly uncommon to face no complications lol. This is something people do with themselves a lot too, though likely if you’re able to do soul magics you’d also be advanced enough to find an efficient way to keep your own body immortal, some people do practice regularly jumping from body to body when their old one dies, constantly taking on different identities and etc (especially people who have lived thousands of years and maybe just want to , ~~spice things up~~  by living in various bodies, though the same thing could be more easily achieved through just keeping one immortal body and regularly using heavy shape-shifting, I could still see someone deciding to exclusively take various living unaltered bodies for The Authenticity or something lol ). I would say body jumping or finding new forms for your soul/the soul of a loved one to inhabit would be a  more common tactic of soul/life preservation than like, trying to just merge their soul with your own. 

I guess a way the soul merging with a loved one COULD work is if you timed it exactly right , like how I mentioned that if you die before fully absorbing the souls you’re attempting to absorb, it can lead to being alive yet permanently trapped in a strange partially combined state?? So I guess that would be possible, to like make your physical body die somewhere halfway into the process and hope you get the desired result and then jump that soul into a new body in your new combined form… However there’s still so much that could go wrong, it would be impossibly rare to actually time correctly and get the intended result of your souls now existing as one bigger soul split evenly between the both of you with 100% of each soul still fairly in tact (as opposed to the more likely options, loosing parts of yourself or parts of them, destroying both of your souls entirely, etc. Especially if you’re the only one in the pair that can use soul magics, if something goes horribly wrong during the process with YOUR soul, you could easily trap them in a situation they don’t have the skill to get out of, so now they’re like traumatized that you destroyed yourself trying to save them and on top of that, stuck in some shitty half fractured soul void state and unable to do anything to help themselves since you’re the only one that can do that type of magic and now you’re gone or so faint/broken that you can’t perform the task anymore, etc.) . 

Additionally idk how like, good that would be in the first place, most situations where two separate souls live in one body are cases where things have gone badly, situations that nobody would actively choose, since there becomes a lot of control issues in terms of being able to effectively pilot the body with two sets of impulses and moods and experiences happening at once, being able to use magic while technically two people of different levels are existing, even stuff like being able to think with two consciousnesses occurring simultaneously, etc. Two souls combined into one don’t take turns in a body, especially if partially merged, they’re effectively in a weird state of counting as one singular Main soul yet maintaining separate aspects, so it’s basically just a constant “one arm wants to do this and the other wants to do this” type situation, it’s not like one person can take charge and control it or you guys switch out, it’s more of a constant, everything at once always all at the same time.. which predictably, people are not very fond of. 

Even if they’re like, the love of your life or something, it would be incredibly difficult to co-pilot a body together. For the few freak cases where this has actually happened to people, usually even simple things are hard, like just feeding yourself or walking or doing anything really.  I guess theoretically you could train yourselves to be so incredibly in sync that your impulses and thoughts and etc. are no longer as conflicting and you can operate mostly okay (maybe like how some conjoined twins are that share a body or etc.), but it would take a very very long time to get used to since you weren’t born that way and had previously existed separately, and additionally would likely still be dealing with the leftover health effects or consequences of that type of magic so.. idk?? It’s an option, but I’m not sure how satisfying it would be… especially if you ever fell out of love or started to dislike the person and then it’s just like.. lol well.. now you’re trapped in the same body?? so, whoops

Additionally, over time there is a natural tendency to merge anyway, even in the case of a big ‘’Soul Magic Gone Wrong horribly fractured  5 people trapped together at once into one big Main Soul most all of them being in an incomplete state’’ sort of thing, it would still gradually lean towards everyone else fading into whichever the strongest or most present soul is. Like if they’re all broken partial souls but one person has retained 75% of their soul and there are no big power level disparities that would tilt the balance otherwise,, that may be the main soul others integrate into. So even if you could manage piloting one body for a while, you’d still gradually merge into one another, inevitably loosing the unique consciousness of one of you (or in the rare case you’re fairly equal then perhaps you’d just combine into something like a new unique person that is a strong combination of both), it would just be over the course of  years, as opposed to all at once in a matter of a few days like in actual soul absorption. Maybe if you were really really skilled at soul magics and handling souls you could do things to delay this or etc., but any case where multiple presences are in one body at once will always lean towards complete absorption of some sort, it seems to just be a natural law of this sort of magic for whatever reason. 

And probably by a few years you would have long decided that two people living in the same body, despite loving each other or whatever, is extremely difficult and you’ve got to find someone with the skill to separate the both of you back into unique souls again,,, Which again would just lead back to ‘why did you even initiate absorbing them in the first place if you could have kept their soul separate and found another way to keep it alive, which would have saved you the trouble of merging and separating first’ .

But again, I could see it maybe being done impulsively, or in the rare case that someone somehow has high skill in soul magic yet is ignorant of all the effects or things you can do with it (perhaps someone using borrowed powers, or who is pretty reckless and doesn’t read up on their craft as well as they should since they think they can skate by with raw skill alone, etc. etc.), so when their loved one dies they panic and capture the soul and think “oh, I don’t have a safe place to store them until I find them a new body, I guess I can just put them in my own for now!!”,,  totally unaware that the second they do this they’re going to begin to irreversibly eat away the essence of their loved one.. that would probably add a whole extra layer of trauma to the usual awfulness of the soul absorption process lol.. Well I Was Trying To Just Do One Simple Thing  I Foolishly Thought Would Quickly Save Someone But Now I’m Crouched On The Floor In Pain Throwing Up Blood And Slowly Consuming Their Entire Soul Into Myself,, So Yes, My Day Is Just Fabulous Thanks For Asking. 

Like imagine seeing your loved one die, rushing into the situation to extract their soul to save them before they fade from their body,  thinking you’ll just store them inside of you for safe keeping until you’re out of a dangerous situation, only to a few minutes later collapse in extreme physical pain and start hearing them speaking from inside your own mind about how they feel weak and like they’re fading away, eventually after a few hours your just laying there hiding in a bush you dragged yourself to or something in so much pain you can’t move, and you can’t even hear their consciousness anymore, you know you did something wrong but your not sure what, but you think you killed them, or something like that.. but hey! you feel a little bit stronger! Almost like you’ve absorbed energy from an outside source or something! Hmm! That would be A Lot Of Bullshit to go through in a just a day or twolol.. this is why you read up extensively on magic before using it, especially not knowing what you’re doing when it comes to such extreme magics like soul magic is just, very very dangerous and potentially tragic.

Though if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may be more likely to die than actually absorb the soul, since like I think is mentioned in the broader magic post, you can’t really perform an action you don’t have the energy to do, and soul absorption is a sustained channel of energy over the course of usually a days - weeks.. I would assume if someone did that accidentally, they may not have planned to exert that much magic ahead of time, so instead of involuntarily absorbing the loved one fully they could always just, both die during the process due to the one entirely depleting their magical energy and then some.. which if the idea is that the person doing it is inexperienced already, I think would be the most likely way for it to end up lol.

 People accidentally kill themselves ALL THE TIME due to not having the experience to predict when a feat of magic would be too much for them to try, or using it incorrectly , or etc. etc. There are too many non-magic species for it to be like, the number one cause of death in the realm but, definitely among the magic capable portion of the population, various complications involving self-inflicted/accidental/unforeseen consequence related/etc. magical injuries would be the number one reason people die lol. Out of the population of magic capable species all together as a whole, probably around a good 50% die by magical means, mostly through accidents. If you don’t even know enough about soul magic to know that when you try to put a soul inside yourself you’ll likely start to absorb it (unless it’s done in a special way like in the case of temporary possessions or etc.), then you probably don’t know enough to pull it off in general, and rather than the despair of accidentally killing someone you thought you saved, it’d be more likely you’d just like, drop dead from not being equipped to handle the spell you just unknowingly set in motion. 

—

 -

As for sacrifice, you couldn’t always sacrifice yourself necessarily, since it’s essentially ‘the strongest soul is the one that merges with the Main Soul’ (which is usually hard to calculate due to how vague of a concept all this ‘soul’ stuff is anyway, but can be decently estimated.. sometimes).  So if you’re like, a jhevona (humanoid demon) skilled in soul magics and they’re a fairly unskilled average elf or something. They die, and you decide you’re going to sacrifice yourself, by putting their soul in your body so they can have it instead, no matter what you WANTED to happen (their soul piloting your body instead of you), you would inevitably just absorb them into your own soul because your life force is the stronger one. However,  if your soul is the weaker one then you probably could, since even if you initiated the soul absorption process it’s likely (even if they didn’t want this to happen), your weaker soul would end up being the one absorbed. Though I would wonder a lot about the trauma of putting them through that lol, they died and came back to life just to know that they only have a few days of dialogue with you before you fade away and merge with their main soul permanently, and then they resume life living literally in YOUR BODY, piloting theform of their dead loved one that they’ve just consumed into themselves, unable to escape reminders of the fact that you’re gone, unless they shape shift or find another body, which if they’re not skilled in soul magic and would be unable to do that, then you’ve kind of trapped them. 

They’d probably at the least be annoyed with you after the fact that you initiated the soul absorption process on them, knowing that they’re going to be the one ending up absorbing you, in the two or so days that you’d still exist enough to chat with them you’d probably get a lot of lectures after their initial shock and acceptance of what’s inevitably going to happen. If they were skilled in soul magics they could probably reverse what you did in the first few minutes before it could take effect (maybe you could fight back and forth for a while lmao, one initiating the soul absorption process and the other immediately stopping it, which would be Comedy TV Show Funney Hee Hee Ha Ha until one of your souls breaks into pieces or one of you just drops dead), however if they couldn’t do soul magic they’d just kind of have to.. chill.. nothing to do but wait around until they absorb you into themselves kind of against their will.

 You could possibly give your body to someone to use in a much easier way if there was a third person involved, though it wouldn’t really utilize soul absorption. You could kill yourself right after your loved one dies and have the third person take the soul of your loved one and put them in your body, so they would have a living form (since after you die you wouldn’t be able to transfer them yourself). Though this would really only make sense if, in this case, there are no applicable bodies/forms around anywhere close enough to get to, and your loved one’s body has been entirely destroyed by whatever killed them, thus in the group of the three of you, there are three accessible souls, yet only two currently utilizable bodies, yours and this third person. So you let your soul fade away, and then your loved one’s soul gets to keep your body.   But again I feel like it’d be very situational.. 

The biggest barrier for people not being able to do stuff like this is just, the fact that soul magics on this level are very rare and extremely difficult and risky to pull off, but it’s kind of like, once you’re someone who’s already high level in soul magics, your possible solutions to the situation would expand to the point that you wouldn’t need to do stuff like this? Unless it was a deliberate choice or mistake on your part. But kind of like, with the above, you wouldn’t HAVE to kill yourself to give them your body, if you had the skill you could maintain them trapped in an animal or even an inanimate object or something until you find them another body. And if their body is still fine, you could just use healing magic to heal their body, then place them back into their own body. Though I guess maybe if you were fairly low skill, and their body had been entirely destroyed beyond repair, but you would still need a third person to do the transfer after your body has died, so either that person would probably be skilled enough to help you find another solution, or like… not to be morbid but uh,, you could kill them and put your loved one in their body lol,, instead of just having them help you kill yourself and etc… If I was the third person in the above situation (especially if I was just some random dude that wasn’t really important to the other two people) and the High Level Soul Mage started to look at me right after their loved one just died I would probably… run away as fast as possible or get prepared in a fighting stance…. you know they’re about to kill you and take your body as a vessel to save the other person lmao

But! maybe in the case where YOU don’t know soul magics but your loved one does, and their body is completely destroyed, if they were still existing outside of a body temporarily but there weren’t any possible options around for them to hop into, knowing that if they’re out of an acceptable vessel for too long they’d entirely fade away, you could offer to expel your soul from your own body so they can then take your form and live on. But also I guess if they know soul magics they’d probably try to find a way to save you after the fact, either decline the gift of your body entirely or accept it and take your form but then capture your soul as it leaves and like.. seal it into a rock or something to carry it around with them while they desperately run around trying to find some living thing to murder so they can place you into a more applicable form before they’re no longer able to sustain you within the rock lol.   If they found you a body maybe they could eventually switch you both back (instead of them just piloting your body from now on and you having to be some random graveyard body). That’s probably the most plausible situation for sacrifice, where the person doing the sacrificing is the one who DOESN’T have the soul magic skill and is merely offering themselves as a vessel for someone who does,  etc etc etc,  but there are endless hypothetical scenarios, all of which are complicated and dangerous lol

– 

-

As for the cult thing, yeah there are already a decent handful of cults that are basically just schemes for people to gather souls, idk if you read much about the Avirre’thel species (basically vampires) when I post about them, but that’s why people are always suspicious when things like the situation with the Avan and their ‘’god’’ happen (basically one of the groups of the Avirre’thel like, secluded themselves in caves and devotes all their time to the worship of a certain ancient demon named Yvteii). Since even in vampiric culture, where it’s extremely acceptable to make deals with jhevona (demons) and is one of the few cultures in Nanyevimi that doesn’t view them as some frightening other and actually adapts them fully into their society, even they are still suspicious when it comes to ancient demons, especially ancient demons having relationships with or followings among other less all powerful living beings..

 People who have the ability to do so and the moral compass to allow it will do anything to get souls, since it’s such an easy way to access more power and grow your strength, and with how scattered and isolated the supernatural realm can be sometimes, it’s uncomfortably simple for someone, especially who’s an advanced magic user, to like, show up in a random group of isolated people living in a forest and help them and perform a few ‘’miracles’’ (just regular high level magic, but maybe a type these people haven’t seen before, are too isolated to know of, etc.) for them, convince them to basically take you on as kind of a cultish religion leader and regularly reap souls from them. There have been many religious figures and etc. in the past that were just high level mages or ancient demons putting on a few fancy shows of magic for an otherwise magically ignorant group of isolated people, so they can basically just trick the people into believing in them and then make up some excuse for the people to give them soul pieces, or sacrifice whole souls, etc. 

Kind of like in those weird like, resource management type games where you can upgrade certain resources to gradually accumulate in the background whilst you do other stuff, some ancient jhevona or other beings will have like, 10 or 20 various cults lined up scattered in different places all across the realm who are regularly sacrificing to them or making deals with them and etc., giving them a steady income of power growth, new souls coming in monthly or weekly or whatever. Though, this usually gets old pretty quick since really the only groups you can trick into stuff like this are non-magical groups (since anyone in a culture that regularly practices magic would at the very least know to not give part of your soul to people or etc. and would be suspicious of any outside being coming and asking for sacrifices, even if they tried to be tricky and didn’t outright say “give me some of your soul”, and would also not be able to be wooed by Fancy Magic Tricks and Seeming Miracles, since they’d just be like “uhhh, that’s just normal magic” lol), and non magic groups typically have much weaker souls and shorter lifespans, which means inevitably your cult would die out and you’d have to go start a new one every few hundred years or so probably, and even then, it’s a lot of work for mostly weak souls that don’t amount to much gain when you’re already an immortal nearly all-powerful being lol. 

Soul harvesting cults are usually seen as like, a Baby Beginner Ancient Powerful Being sort of activity, since once you’ve been alive for like 15,000+ years you’re going to get tired of keeping up with all of them. It’s similar to how many ancient demons in their earlier years when they were just starting to get super powerful would do stuff like, shapeshift and become world leaders or etc. (the whole ‘all of these important historical figures are actually the same person!’ conspiracy except like.. actually true and done with magic lol), but then eventually you just get funcking tired of changing your entire identity every few hundred years and going through the same boring political exchanges to become royalty or lead an army or something when people seemingly never change and you’re just pulling the same nonsense but with a different face, etc. The cults and recognition that most powerful beings have are usually not ones they want or recognize, since once you’ve been that way for so long you usually just seclude yourself in a mountain somewhere.*(1) Because you’re basically the closest thing to an all powerful god being, no matter how much you try to hide, people will always attempt to find you and hunt you down and summon you to ask you for favors or powers or etc, and may even start a cult around you or consider you a god or etc, but usually at that point you want nothing to do with it. Voluntary cults are usually something powerful beings like ancient jhevona and etc. will grow out of pretty fast lol. 

So yeah, cults usually get old after a while, since if you have the power to start stuff like that in the first place, you probably have much better things to be doing than tricking random small villages into thinking you’re a god just so you can get a soul every few weeks or so. Many powerful beings would rather go for fewer more powerful souls, than larger amount of weaker ones (killing a few high level mages and absorbing their souls could be equivalent to a years worth of soul sacrifices from a tiny human farming village), have another better way of growing power, or are at the point where they don’t even feel they need to grow power anymore at all since it makes little difference. 

 BUT ANYWAY..  

In a way more similar to what is mentioned above, yeah I could also see it being a thing where you maybe use your ‘’close’’ (in “” since if one side isn’t being authentic then is it really ‘’close’’??)  relationships with people to trick them into willingly letting you have their soul after death, then secretly setting up situations that will kill them, and ‘’’consensually’’’ attaining their soul.  You could probably garner some sort of cult following using love and affection to manipulate people into giving souls to you, which I guess to me seems like too much effort like.. just be a plain ass serial killer then, what is the point in emotionally manipulating people ahead of time if you’re going to murder them anyway lol, but I guess some (incredibly shitty) personality types could get an extra kick out of that, or maybe the small strings of morality they have left in them require them to get ‘’consent’’ of some form first, even if under the context it’s not true consent and doesn’t matter, it could still help them rationalize their actions to themselves or something.

 But yeah.. soul cult stuff is rare simply due to the inaccessibility and rarity of soul magic in the first place, but as you can imagine, cults and other gimmicks to attain souls  can be pretty trendy among the tiny group of people who can actually gather them for absorption (at least for a while, until they get over that phase in their life lol). I could see a recently dead ‘’loved one’’ culty soul scheme being a thing. 

Hmm, but yeah lol, good questions! There are a lot of different ways things like that can go, and you always have time limits and ability limitations and amount of magic you can expend and the general risk and instability of magic (especially higher level magics) working hard against you, so I feel like many people would not try things like this in the first place, either due to their knowledge of a better solution, or just due to the risk (like maybe they’d rather their loved one just rest in peace rather than taking the huge risk of damaging the persons soul or condemning them to extra suffering and trauma or etc. due to unpredictable magic), but there are certainly scenarios where it may be applicable, or done as a matter of personal choice (especially in unhealthily dependent and abusive relationships, choosing to absorb the other person despite there being other ways to manage their soul after death may be plausible, definitely if you’ve just ‘’accidentally’’  killed them and can delude yourself into thinking it’s somehow noble or meaningful to keep them as a part of yourself or something gross shitty like that,, or just two well meaning but confused people who don’t know enough to understand there’s better options both agreeing to let one absorb the other since they think there’s not a better way, or perhaps misunderstand what actually happens (maybe they falsely believe you can keep someone around forever by absorbing them,etc)) , or out of desperation/lack of knowledge/lack of skill/emotional impulse/etc. Same with the sacrifice thing, though there may be better ways to go about it, if the person has the skill and is willing to take the risks, there are definitely situations where things could play out that way for whatever reason. Both are plausible applications of magic which I hadn’t considered until now!! 

 - 

 [ side note 1: I put this down here since it wasn’t really as related to the rest of the text and didn’t fit in between those paragraphs  lol

The typical (very broadly generalized/simplified ) life cycle for an ancient demon (which is basically just a term for an extremely world alteringly powerful being, they don’t actually have to be demons/jhevona, it’s more of just a title at this point than a true descriptor)  is usually like:

start off as totally regular person who trains extensively and studies magic  

>>>

either work your way up normally with an enchanting business or do shady shit like killing people and absorbing their souls in order to grow your power and exceed your natural magical limitations (though you’ve got to have a very driven or otherwise power hungry personality to be motivated to do this in the first place, to go literally like 10,000+ years gaining your power without ever stopping or changing your goals (or dying in magical accidents).. like it usually takes 10,000 - 15,000 years to get powerful enough to even be close to being considered an “ancient demon” so like.. you’ve got to really be a purpose driven person) 

>>> 

wow now you’re strong enough to start cults and tamper in world affairs and etc! lose your moral compass for about 100 - 500 years while you go through your baby power trip phase and abuse your abilities 

>>>

 become disillusioned with life because you feel like you’ve seen everything before and done everything and have no challenges left to conquer and kill yourself with magic OR turn away from the world and focus on a new challenge (you’re also probably at the point now where, whether you welcome this or not, people are trying to hunt you down to ask for favors and power, and some see you as a god (or a threat), so you have to hide from them now)  

>>>

 find a hiding spot to just bunker down in , create your own realm or something, and live your your days entirely detached from reality and the rest of humanity focusing on whatever your new goal or interest is (you’re also probably powerful enough at this point to need to abandon your physical form, or constantly shapeshift, so you don’t have to keep up healing magic from your body destroying itself from the inside out daily because your energy is too powerful to be kept in an organic form)

>> >

idk just do this until you get bored, either find something else to do or just die by your own magic whenever you feel you’ve accomplished enough

This is usually why the exact personality profile of pretty much every ancient demon alive right now is like, “weird isolated nerd hiding in an ancient cave somewhere wholly and completely focused on some obscure task like unraveling the true nature of magic” or etc. Most any other type of person burns out after a while and just chooses to die (people who were only in it for power or glory with no higher motivation, people who were fools and died using their powers irresponsibly, people who got too involved with the world and it ended up being their demise,people who found it too hard and quit growing their power, etc.), it’s really just the very focused scientist types who have the motivation and reason to keep going, since you never run out of new material to study and things to be interested in if you’re the type of person who really wants to understand the nature of the entire world and is easily interested in everything etc. 

Of course this doesn’t mean many of them aren’t also like, completely weird as hell, or extreme power hungry narcissistic freaks who revel in their power over others and etc lmao.. You don’t live like..25,000+ years without developing a bit of an… “interesting” personalty. All of the 40 or so ancient jhevona currently known to exist are like.. absolutely ridiculous people in some way or another lol (at least in the few interactions they’ve had with the outside world, some are way more hidden than others, but none of them show themselves very often enough for anyone to know what their personality is truly like, but even based on one or two occurrences, it’s enough for people to be like “What the hell is like.. wrong with this person.. have they been living alone in a cave for 8,000 years or something?” (Yes, Actually.. They Have)). But just that at their CORE, regardless of what other traits they have, pretty much all of them have some element of 'extremely curious and highly motivated hermit scientist’ type in their personality. You don’t live 28,000+ years driven by a very shallow or single purpose, it usually tends to be people who have a lot of questions they want to answer or a lot of things they want to do (usually creating or discovering something, things that can be ongoing rather than one time goals), since that can be something you keep up for many many lifetimes without loosing motivation or becoming bored/disinterested. 

The act of being an ancient jhevona tends to favor the curious problem-solving scholar types, as even after thousands of years they can still find new issues to tackle, new interests to explore, new theories and challenges to unravel, etc. Even if their other traits vary wildly and many of them are legit like… downright insufferable on a level that only an ancient nearly all-powerful immortal being could be, they AT LEAST usually all have that trait in common. 

But anyway, so yeah like.. usually after a while they just dedicate themselves to some problem or area of study or something and hole away in a cave or other isolated place to experiment and think about things in peace, far away from the rest of the outside world. Though starting cults can be initially promising for them, pretty much any ancient jehvona who’s been around more than 16,000 years has passed that point in their life and is already in the 'Okay I’ll Just Be A Nerd Hermit Then I Guess’ phase where they become increasingly more obscure and detached enough that they couldn’t be bothered to maintain a cult presence or etc. ] 

BUT entirely off topic rambling about demons aside, thanks for the question!!

[lukes-writing]

Chapter 6: The Idean

Project introduction | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Word count: 2300 Warnings: Profanity

September 23rd, 8:26 PM, The Society headquarters, Trinity Gate

Whisper’s head is spinning from the number of new perceptions. Her uncle took her to some secret underground hideout and that’s probably not yet the biggest revelation of this evening. She got to know three new people. Sienna and Gary seem nice to her, even though they all have their quirks.

But Parker…? The girl made an opinion about him when she came to the Heap of Ashes and caught Parker making fun of Gary’s height and build. He stopped once he saw Whisper arriving, but the humiliated expression on Gary’s face was telltale enough.

But for now, she forgets about this asshole and continues to look around the headquarters.

First of all, of course, she makes her way towards the bookshelf. One of the books immediately catches her attention. It’s large, almost like some medieval scripture in leather binding. However, it doesn’t look that old, like someone made it look like this on purpose.

The letters on the spine read The Society’s Guide to Inhumans.

Whisper is just about to reach for the book, then someone else gets her attention. On the shelf above the Guide, there is an action figure of a bearded man dressed in a beige robe. She recognizes the character Obi-Wan Kenobi from the third episode of Star Wars, portrayed by Ewan McGregor.

She giggles and reaches for the figure which has a lightsaber in its hand and is positioned for combat. She knows her uncle is a big fan of classical sci-fis, so she presumes he simply had to put a toy like this here, among probably valuable books.

“The Force is strong with this one,” the girl claims, oblivious to the fact she’s up for a shock.

Suddenly, the action figure shouts “HELLO THERE!” and jumps at Whisper.

The girl lets out an ear-piercing scream and tries to sweep the little Obi-Wan off her body. That damn thing is moving, using the cloth of her dress to climb up, closer to her head. Ultimately, she succeeds and throws the figure on the ground. She’s gasping for breath, her heart racing like never before.

That was the very worst scare of her life.

She hears Wiccan laughing. Still shaking like a Chihuahua in the rain, Whisper carefully turns to him. She realizes maybe the figure just fell on her and the thing it said was just a soundbox in the toy which accidentally went off. In that case, she made an embarrassing and completely unnecessary hysterical scene.

However, Wiccan is the only one laughing. Sienna, Parker and Gary both look at the toy with horrified expressions. Then, Whisper realizes Wiccan isn’t the only one laughing after all. The second laughter comes from the toy. Stupefied, she backs off when the figure starts to collect itself from the ground.

“So far, nobody responded correctly with ‘General Kenobi!’ yet,” the toy is now standing upright and walks towards Whisper. The voice coming from it is male, but too youthful to belong to Ewan McGregor in his mid-thirties. Whisper lets out a wail. This day quickly turned into a nightmare.

“What is this? Put it away! Put it away or else I kick it!” she cries.

“Come on, how rude,” Obi-Wan comments and shakes his little head.

“What… what the fuck is that?” Parker makes a disgusted grimace. “And why is it talking?”

Wiccan, still smiling, explains. “We came to the conclusion that the best way to tell you about inhumans is to introduce you to one. But that prank was his idea. Don’t blame me for it.” He seems to somehow regret Whisper was the victim of the action figure. Maybe it would be more fun if Parker fell for it.

“In… humans?” Sienna frowns. “What’s an inhuman?”

“Not what, but who,” Obi-Wan corrects her.

“Inhumans are a team of superheroes in Marvel,” Whisper replies, her voice still trembling. “Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Lockjaw and such. But… I don’t see the connection here.”

“The Society coined this term long before Marvel even existed,” Wiccan says. “And it means exactly what it says - not human. Come back here to take a seat. I guess the encounter with Kirlian made you a bit more open-minded, so I can do the explaining.”

“What about… the last member of our team?” Gary brings up.

“That’s him,” Wiccan gestures towards the apparently living action figure and enjoys the disbelief in the team’s faces. Introducing inhumans to the outsiders always offers a great show.

Whisper strides back towards the table, but then, a voice stops her. “Hey, mind if you carried me to the table? So I don’t have to revessel again,” Obi-Wan, or Kirlian, as Wiccan referred him as, says. The thing is rather creepy since the toy’s face isn’t moving as it speaks.

“Sorry, but I… I’m not touching you. Sorry,” Whisper stutters and continues her journey.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” Kirlian continues with a soothing voice Whisper finds rather pleasant. “I’m sorry for that prank, for scaring you. I should have thought this through when I saw a girl is coming. I really didn’t mean to shock you this much.”

With a nod, Whisper accepts his apology. Then, she grabs the toy with her uncertain hands, holding him as far away as possible, like he was a used diaper. A mocking undertone again appears in Kirlian’s voice. “Come on, I’m neither toxic or dangerous.”

The girl carries the figure to the table and puts him on the board. “Thank you,” Kirlian says.

Whisper, still shook, takes a place next to Sienna.

“Let me introduce you to my old friend Kirlian,” Wiccan says. “He belongs to the inhuman race of Ideans. Ideans are beings who don’t have their own physical body, so you can imagine them as a disembodied consciousness, or a soul if you want. However, in order to survive, they have to inhabit inanimate object which then serves as a vessel for their consciousness.”

Whisper recalls the strange word Kirlian used - revessel.

Kirlian continues the lecture. “It can be anything, but we prefer things with a humanoid shape and moving parts. That way, we can interact with material beings the best. Action figures, dummies and figurines are all solid choices. But we can inhabit anything really.”

“What happens if you stay… out of a vessel for too long?” Whisper asks shyly. She’s insecure since anything she says in front of this strange being could backlash on her. She has no idea if the Ideans have some taboos.

However, Kirlian appears fine with that question. “An Idean out of a vessel is like a human underwater,” he explains. “We can survive like that. Some for a longer time, some only for a moment. But ultimately, if we stay out of a vessel for too long, our consciousness can scatter too much and we… wither.”

“Do you mean… die?”

The Star Wars figure nods its head.

“What happens if you inhabit a living being, for example, a human?” Sienna inquires.

This time, she is successful in bringing up an Idean taboo. Kirlian looks at her and Sienna is sure he would appear disgusted if he had an actual face. She starts to regret her question. “Vesseling into living beings, especially humans, is considered a sexual violation among Ideans,” Kirlian replies. “Well, it’s possible if the intercourse is consensual, but vesseling into someone without permission is more or less a rape.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Sienna says.

She seems willing to refrain from asking any more sensitive questions, but Parker isn’t. He looks at Kirlian like it was something sickening. “And how do you freaks… multiply? Do you fuck? How is it done when you don’t have bodies. God, this is a nightmare.”

“Cease that contempt in your voice,” Ophelia scolds him. “Kirlian is a living, intelligent being like you and I. He doesn’t deserve such treatment.”

Kirlian turns to Ophelia. “That’s okay, Ophy. Fleshbags often treat us like shit, but the joke is on them since they are stuck in one vessel for all their life.” He turns back to Parker. “And this one is especially ugly. Seriously, you have a face like a horse. I wouldn’t even consider vesseling into this.”

“Sonova…” Parker utters. Ophelia and Wiccan burst into laughter. Kirlian has been their teammate for many years and they know he can be a bit… condescending towards the members of the human race. While they are used to his quirks, Parker looks rather disconcerted.

“But now, to answer your question,” Kirlian says without the derisive tone in his voice. “By nature, Ideans are genderless, so any two Idean can form a couple capable of multiplication. The intercourse itself happens when two Ideans inhabit one Vessel. I will save you the details since you wouldn’t understand anyway.

The vessel where the intercourse happened then serves as… let’s say an incubator for the youngster - it’s where they grow until they’re strong enough to exist on their own. The first vessel of a baby Idean is then kept by the parents as a memorabilia, a family treasure.”

Parker rolls his eyes. “That’s just so. Fucking. Weird.”

Sienna blushes as she asks another question. “What about… anticonception? Do Ideans just… leave a baby in every vessel they… have fun in?”

Kirlian sighs. “I swear these fleshbags will drive me nuts one day. Of course not! We create a descendant if we want to. Once again, you wouldn’t understand.”

“One more thing,” Whisper says. “You said Ideans are genderless. But you sound like a male and the others treat you as such. Why so?”

“I can also sound like this,” Kirlian says, this time with the voice of a young girl. “Or like this,” a husky voice of an old man. Then he returns to his usual youthful, slightly cracked male voice. “We’re not limited to one voice just like we’re not limited to one vessel. Also, our senses work differently. We can see, smell, touch, speak, but we’re not bound to physical organs that recognize these perceptions. It’s more on a… spiritual level.”

Whisper thinks about her out-of-body experiences, how does she see her sleeping body from above. She guesses the Idean senses work basically the same.

Wiccan finishes explaining. “Ideans often assign a preferred gender to fit better among humans and other binary beings. Kirlian allowed us to treat him as a male and to use he and him pronouns. Even though he sometimes has days when he demands to be treated as a girl and speaks with a female voice.” The man cackles. “It takes a while to learn to deal with all his bullshit, but it’s worth it.”

“Thanks,” Kirlian responds with a girly voice and a dose of acidity in it. He switches to his default voice again. “Also, Kirlian is not my name, but humans have trouble with understanding and reproducing the Idean language.” He makes several strange sounds which can be compared to a broken synthesizer mixed with a distant choir singing and numerous other unexplainable noises.

Whisper opens her mouth in awe. Ideanese was the most fascinating thing she ever heard.

Wiccan laughs. “We already told you to stop using that gibberish.”

“Okay, you son of a-” Instead of the last word, Kirlian emits two swirling Ideanese tones in rapid succession. Kirlian, Wiccan and Ophelia laugh. Whisper also lets out a giggle.

Wiccan claps his hands. “Okay, if you don’t have any further questions about Ideans, let me get to the important things. First of all, do you all see the being that could be considered supernatural in front of you?” He points at Kirlian, still vesseling the Obi-Wan action figure, on the table.

The four new recruits nod.

“Is any of you going to try and deny his existence?”

“Technically speaking,” Sienna says, “it could be all an elaborate fake. The figure can be remote controlled and someone is speaking for it through a hidden speaker.”

Nobody responds. Instead, they hear a sound similar to a faint, short hiss. The Obi-Wan figure goes completely motionless, as if it got turned into a mere toy again. Then suddenly, Sienna starts to scream as the pendant around her neck starts to bounce up and down.

“Doubts?” she hears Kirlian’s voice coming from the pendant which makes her even more horrified. “I have vesseled into your pendant and I can stay here as long as I wish. But it probably won’t be long since it’s small and has no moving parts. I feel like paralyzed here.”

Sienna is trying to remove the pendant with her shaky fingers, but before she does, another hiss can be heard. The girl sighs in relief when the pendant stops moving on its own. “Much better,” Kirlian says, vesseled once again into Obi-Wan. Sienna looks rather shook.

For the first time, Wiccan pays closer attention to the pendant Kirlian used to demonstrate his existence. It’s the only thing on Sienna that looks out of fashion. She is wearing decent golden earrings with small diamonds, a wristband on her left wrist and several matching rings, but the pendant is made of some dark metal. It is shaped like a snake or a dragon biting its own tail, creating a circle.

The man realizes it must have a huge sentimental value to her since she lets this one single pendant to disturb her perfect style. Of course, Wiccan knows it is called Ouroboros and also knows about its symbolism. He realizes how fitting it is considering circumstances in Sienna’s life which are described in her files.

Author’s Note

Needless to say, I had fun coming up with the entire concept of Ideans and developing Kirlian’s characters, and I hope you enjoyed his introduction as much as I did!

I wholeheartedly thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and if you did, please leave a comment, send me a message or share and let more people know about this story! You can also consider a small donation at www.paypal.me/lukassladky. Have a great day and stay tuned for the next chapter!

[docfuture]

Sparring Match, Part 1

     [My writing productivity has been poor for the last few months, for several reasons, and I'm still resolving some problems with The Maker's Ark.  I intended this fill-in as a short vignette, but it expanded into a two-part cliffhanger psychological mystery.  It takes place during The Maker's Ark, between Chapter 30 and Chapter 32.  The most recent regular chapter is here, links to my other work here.   I'm shooting for next week for Part 2, but it may end up being two weeks.]

      Yiskah hit the mat in the gym and rolled back to her feet facing Breakpoint.  "Well, that didn't work either," she said, and grinned.       He grinned back.  "Did for a while," he said.  "I had to wait until you attacked again."       He'd gotten past her defenses with a snap kick to the abdomen.  She'd been a little too careful guarding against a hand strike that had never materialized while recovering from her own blocked attack.       They'd been sparring for about half an hour.  They were both skilled martial artists, though their preferred styles differed.  They had about the same amount of experience, and Breakpoint was in superb shape for a physically normal human.       Up until a few months ago, Yiskah had been as well.  Now her body was superhuman, a side effect from a battle with an extradimensional being that was already the subject of epic poetry and mythology.  She was slightly faster than him, had more endurance, and was strong enough to lift the back of a truck one-handed.       She could also read minds.       None of that had affected the results much yet.       "Catch our breath before we go on?" she asked, wiping her forehead.       "Sure."       They walked over to the bench against the wall.  Breakpoint wiped his face with a towel before sitting down.  Yiskah took a drink of water before joining him.       At least I made him sweat, she thought.  Very few people could manage that.  She'd gotten in one very light tap right at the beginning, which he had acknowledged with a smile.  She hadn't been able to touch him since.       Breakpoint had golden tan skin, dark hair and eyes, and an easy, cheerful smile.  Speculation about his ethnicity was more a Rorschach test than a useful exercise, and he always replied 'American mutt' when asked about it.  He carried a crowbar when he was working, and his normal 'costume' was a coverall.  People who regarded his appearance as suspicious soon found out that the best possible result from pressing further was serious embarrassment.  Especially if they were a cop.       There were a number of crooked or excessively violent former law enforcement personnel in jail because of Breakpoint.  Early in his career, he had made that a hobby.  But word had gotten around, and they'd stopped taking the bait.  He'd started working with Jumping Spider fairly recently.       Yiskah found his mind an interesting contrast to Donner.  Both were self-confident and outwardly easygoing, but Donner had a consciousness of his own buried anger and potential to cause harm that kept him on edge during crises.  Breakpoint's danger sense let him stay more relaxed--it gave him time to think, and he used it.       "Thanks for the workout," he said.  "It's rare for me to get a real one, because... Well, you know."  He grinned.       Yiskah laughed.  "Yeah, I do.  And my pleasure.  Ready for the fun part, now that we're warmed up?"       "You bet."       They moved back to the practice mat and stood facing each other, about ten feet apart.       "All right," she said.  "We've established that danger sense beats mind scan, at least for hand-to-hand."       "It's close," he said.  I needed all my skill and reflexes, too.  If I didn't have those..."       "You do, though.  My slight edge in speed isn't enough to make up for the delay between your danger sense going off and my mind scan picking it up.  And you can vary your counters without thinking about them, which is key."       Yiskah smiled.   "But I can do more, and so can you.  I've put quite a bit of thought into the test mix for the rest, but before we start, be clear that there is no way to avoid the potential for privacy violation, acute personal discomfort, and both of us learning more than we really wanted about the other.  You okay with that?"       "Comes with the territory.  I've gone up against empaths, but never a full telepath--and I'd sure rather learn from you than a hostile one. This wouldn't work if it weren't--"       "--a little dangerous," she finished, and he grinned again.  "Okay, safety.  I should be able to pick it up, but if you want to stop but can't verbalize, tap me on the left shoulder.  Right shoulder is substitute for a hard counter you don't want to use because of potential damage.  Sound fair?"       "Got it.  I'm ready whenev--"  He stopped speaking suddenly, and his eyes narrowed.       "Heh."       Breakpoint looked at her intently.  "You aren't moving.  You aren't intending to move.  But you're doing something that's making my danger sense flash like a turn signal.  On and off.  Again and again.  What?"       "Planning to start an aggressive mind probe if your danger sense doesn't go off.  But it does, so I don't.  I'm just picking up your surface reaction with my scan, so I can't tell if the danger is diminishing with repetition.  Is it?"       "No."       "Interesting.  A fast probe is sufficiently obnoxious to set off your danger sense, even though you've never experienced one.  Which isn't terribly surprising, they're usually unpleasant even for me.  We've just verified that you can pick up purely conditional mental intent, if it's enough of a threat."       "Yeah.  Okay, it's stopped.  Now what?"       "Now I can try a whole bunch of formerly risky things more safely.  Because I'll be bringing you along, so anything bad will happen to us both."       "But it won't?  Because my danger sense will go off, your scan will pick it up, and you'll stop?"       "Exactly."  Yiskah rubbed her hands together.  "Now I'd like to see if your danger sense works on a constructed threat inside a mentally projected scenario."       "What kind?"       "Have you ever been on a stakeout where you've had to conceal your awareness rather than hide?"       "Yeah, a few times. I've--oh, cool."       They stood on the edge of a city park at night.  Several street lights kept them from complete darkness, but the illumination didn't extend to a nearby alley entrance.  They were both dressed for a night on the town, and Yiskah moved closer to take his hand.       "I know this place," he said.  "How are you--"       "I'm pulling it from your memories.  Everything you noticed will be here."       He frowned for a moment then looked to the side.  "I could have sworn that old fountain wasn't there when I first looked."       "It wasn't--until you remembered it."  She smiled.  "Here's the setup.  Our target is meeting someone down that alley, but he won't show if he doesn't get an all clear.  A not-very-bright flunky is coming out to check in a second.  But we're just a couple getting some air after a party--and clearly too involved with each other to bother with anything else."       She leaned back against him, half-closed her eyes and sighed contentedly.  He snorted, but put his hands around her waist.  They could both feel the sense of tension Yiskah was projecting as part of the test.       "Did Jumping Spider give you lessons?" he whispered in her ear.       She laughed softly.  "I wish.  Any danger?"       "Not that I can feel."       They discreetly observed the figure that stepped from the alley, looked around, then went back in.  The sense of tension dropped after he did.       "Scenario complete," said Yiskah, and their surroundings blinked again, leaving them back in the training gym, still in the same relative positions.  She closed her eyes the rest of the way and brushed her cheek against his.  "Any danger now?  Or unpleasantness?"       Breakpoint chuckled.  "Hardly.  What did you learn?"       "Something very important to me.  And very difficult to test ethically."       "Oh?"       "My water bottle is over on the bench.  Care to go get it for me?"       "Why?  I don't want to..."  He trailed off, and she listened as his mind raced.  "Oh, that was slick," he said finally.  "I never got a hint.  Are you suppressing my danger sense somehow?"       "Not a bit.  You aren't in any danger."       "It's still a little scary.  Is there anyone else out there who could manage what you just did?"       "I doubt it.  Until just now, I wasn't sure I could.  Certainly not anyone who isn't a full telepath and has to rely on verbal commands.  I'm being very careful not to tell you to do anything you aren't already inclined to do, or prevent you from doing anything you consider important.  And if I hadn't planned that--your danger sense would have gone off first."       "Huh.  It feels... worryingly pleasant, if that makes sense."       "Oh yeah.  So.  Using your other power, the one you have issues testing on people--how do you get free from mind control?"       "From you?  I wait.  You might monologue for a while, but eventually you'll just let me go."       "Hmm.  Any faster way?"       He was quiet for a moment.  "Nothing I'm willing to try.  You have some kind of multiple personality vulnerability, but it’s definitely dangerous to look closer.  How many of you are in there, anyway?"       "Heh.  Four at the moment--it should only be three, but, well..."       "Yeah.  Not something I'm willing to stir up for practice.  I don't get to see all the consequences--just the right place to poke."       Breakpoint's other power, the one that gave him his name, was weakness detection.  Like his danger sense, it was a limited form of precognition.  For inanimate objects, it told him the precise spot to strike to break or disable them.  For people, it was messier--and more dangerous.  Yiskah was sure it had more versatility than he'd demonstrated publicly, but he was reluctant to test it because of the risks.       "That's fine.  You've already given me several valuable insights.  So I'll let you go now.  In a way, it did work.  There."  She turned to face him again as he stepped back.       "Okay, what next?" he asked.       "I'd like to see how comfortable you are with my telepresence--in case you're doing fieldwork and want my help in a hurry..."       The next twenty minutes weren't as physically tiring as the sparring, but they were still a workout--just a less visible one.

      "All right.  Formal tests over," said Yiskah, after they finished the last one.       "Whoo.  Now that was mind-expanding," he said, as he sat back down on the bench.       "Fun, too."  She stretched, enjoying his reaction as he watched.       "Okay.  I got a little background danger spike, but it went away quick.  Now what are you doing?"       "Just what you see.  And mind scan.  You aren't as good at hiding your surface thoughts when we aren't physically sparring."       "I stopped trying--because you have to be doing that on purpose.  But I have no intent to offend."       "You aren't offending me.  At all."  Yiskah chuckled.  "Now... there's an interesting theory about how you could use your danger sense.  You know the one.  And why people find it so interesting."       He shook his head.  "It doesn't work like that.  It's not like mind-reading or telepathy.  It doesn't let me find the right thing to do.  Or even avoid the wrong thing--just the dangerous thing.  So it won't help with--"       "It could.  With someone capable of being dangerous to you.  And a lot of self-discipline, or at least self-awareness.  And who you are interested in, and trust.  Not a lot of people in that club.  But it's not empty.  Is it?"       "Ah... I'm not sure--"       "I'm sure it's worth trying.  You aren't because you don't know me well enough yet.  We can fix that."  She smiled.  "And then you won't have to wonder anymore.  We can test it.  Perfectly safely."       "Except for the dangerous part."       "Just like the rest of the tests.  What do you think of...?"       She sent a projection of a possibility--and felt him react.       "Um," he said.       "Is that an 'um, no' or an 'um, yes'?  Any danger?"       "No danger, but... right here?"       "Room is sealed, monitors are privacy locked, mat is padded.  And life is too short."       "Whoo.  Were you planning this from the beginning?"       "Oh yeah.  You have danger sense and I can read your mind.  We can skip past all the BS.  And I don't have to be careful every.  Damned.  Second.  Do you have any idea how much that turns me on?  So how about it?"       He stared back at her for a moment, looking for any sign of deception--and finding none.  "Sure."

      It didn't go quite how she had foreseen.  But he found a path that worked, for both of them, in a wordless exchange of desire and intent, balance and consent.  And pleasure.  She was content.

      The contentment stayed.  It was a rare feeling for Yiskah.  She knew to take such times as gifts, even when she knew how they would end.  She luxuriated in it as she dressed again, outside the shower.  Breakpoint had already finished his, so they spoke telepathically.       "I understand your caution," she sent. "I think your danger sense and weakness detection are part of a continuum rather than separate, just like my mind scan and mind probes. But your perfectionism was a little frustrating.  I was like 'I'm ready, already, go go go!'"  She sent her laughter along with the words.       "Danger sense only helps if I listen to it. Carefully."       "Fair enough."       She returned to the main room.  He had changed back into his street clothes after his own shower, and was sitting on the bench, hands clasped in front of him.  He had the slightly wary expression of someone who thought everything had gone too well and was waiting for the other shoe to drop.       "So," she said, and sat down beside him.  She put an arm around his waist and leaned against him.  "Let's talk about your real worry."       He looked down at his hands.  "I'm sorry that I--"       "Not the shift in who you were thinking about.  That's not under conscious control--and I wouldn't expect or want you to hide it, even if you could.  It won't bother her, and it sure didn't bother me."  Yiskah smiled.  "When I was nine, Jumping Spider was who I wanted to be when I grew up."       "Ah."  More wariness.       "I'm talking about why you haven't done this with her.  Or anything other than fieldwork.  Yet."       "We've... considered it.  Twice.  And both times my danger sense went off."       Yiskah nodded slowly.  "Did you explain?"       "Yeah.  And the second time, it was clear it wasn't an outside problem.  She seemed pretty frustrated.  The warnings I get for social stuff aren't like the spikes I use to dodge physical threats--they can be really vague.  I didn't get what was wrong or how to bypass it.  But I'm not willing to ignore them."  He looked down again.  "Made that mistake before.  Not going to make it again."       "Any ideas why?"       "Yeah.  I really like her.  And it sure seems to be mutual.  But I've already started thinking about the long term.  Lots of ways that could go wrong.  I don't want it to.  And I don't want to jeopardize our work--we're going after Tabula Rasa, and I'm covering early warning for both of us.  I can't afford to lose my center in the field."       "Is there a reason you haven't just sat down to talk it over with her?"       "We haven't had the chance--we've been busy.  Covering for Doc, finding out what was up with Donner, and then the assassination attempt and Tabula Rasa.  Sure, we've had a little time here and there.  Enough time to have some fun, as she put it.  But not to start a talk that might help us figure out why it isn't safe--that could go anywhere.  I just don't know."       "Well, I can tell her to make the time.  This is not an issue that's going to get better on--"       "Stop!" said Breakpoint.       Yiskah had already picked up the warning from his mind, and changed her intent to contact Jumping Spider telepathically.  She frowned and checked with Prime instead.       "Ah.  Flicker crashed their meeting and... Okay, that definitely qualifies as dangerous.  I'm not going to joggle her elbow when she just called Flicker a bloodthirsty spoiled brat to her face."       "Still dangerous, not as bad," he said.       "Yeah.  Sounds like Flicker is getting briefed--and deciding whether to do something... excessive.  In the next ninety seconds or so.  Because of an old promise Doc made.  Prime--Stella--is talking to her."       As they waited, Breakpoint suddenly grinned.  "Do you begin to see the problem?"       "Oh yeah.  Same kind of one I had with Doc.  We aren't together anymore because he refused to take the time.  Jumping Spider understands the priorities better--she pounced on my idea of a sparring match.  And Prime and I owed her a favor for breaking a key link in her lead trail."       "Heh.  I wasn't sure quite what she-- Okay, danger level just dropped."       Yiskah checked in with Prime again and listened.  "Yeah," she said to Breakpoint.  "Flicker made up her mind.  So now I can..." She sent a mental contact request to Jumping Spider.       "Hel-lo," came the reply.  "Been having fun?  Do you like spending time with him?"       "Yes.  One thing I am sure of now; his difficulty isn't primarily sexual.  That was just the context that made the warning clear.  What's the real reason you haven't made time to talk?"       "I stalled, because if his danger sense went off for a talk before I determined how to deal with the problem, we'd be SOL."       "Thought so.  I can work with or around his danger sense--but I cannot directly fool it.  And neither can you.  That includes planning to change his mind about something he'd object to now.  If you might succeed--that's dangerous.  If it worked any other way, it would leave him vulnerable to manipulation.  I'm not sure if that's the driver, but--"       A mental sigh.  "It's not causing the problem, but if I can't fool him, there's no good way out.  So much for fun.  Could you check if he's triggered?"       Yiskah glanced over at Breakpoint.  "Jumping Spider wants to know if your danger sense is going off."       He was outwardly calm, but she could sense his tension.  "Bad news incoming.  Not anything I can do about it."       Yiskah switched back to Jumping Spider.  "Something wicked this way comes.  And it's you.  I don't like what I'm picking up of your planning."       "Neither do I.  He's been a good partner.  But he won't stay one if he wrecks himself--and I can't stop that.  Don't interrupt, but you'll have to pick up the pieces.  Are you ready?"       "I am.  You're doing a complete break?"       "Yes.  Fieldwork safety just went away, and a slow amputation is no kindness. I'd let him explain the details at his own pace.  I know I don't have the whole picture."       "Okay.  Any other advice?"       "Don't assume.  He's too good at hiding things, for the same reason he's so good at undercover work.  When he warns you how risky it is to use his weakness detection on people, listen.  And be aware that his danger sense is far more of a two-edged sword than most people realize."       "I've already seen signs of that.  All right."       Breakpoint had been waiting patiently.  Yiskah met his eyes.  "I'm sorry," she said.       "About what?  You haven't--"  He broke off as his phone rang.       "Hey."  He paused to listen.  "Yeah, I kind of figured.  We can just go back to--what?"       Yiskah watched as the color drained out of his face.  "But how are we going to catch--"  Another pause to listen.  "So you'll be working with DASI?"  He stared down at the floor.  "I can try the fieldwork on my own, but you're better at tracing leads, so-- Yeah.  No.  No, I didn't."       Breakpoint glanced at Yiskah.  "It went fine, but--"  More listening.  "There's another way.  I can alter how I--"  He clenched his fist--the first sign of frustration from him Yiskah had ever seen.  "It does work.  I've done it."       His hand relaxed.  "Oh."  He seemed to deflate and his voice became calm and quiet.  "Yes, I understand.  It's been a privilege and an honor to work with you.  Thank you."  A final pause.  "You too.  Bye."       He ended the call and stared down at his phone.  Yiskah picked up a short pulse of anger, followed quickly by a pulse from his danger sense, which turned the anger into bleak depression.  He put the phone away, moving slowly, then looked up at her wordlessly.       "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.       He started to open his mouth, then closed it again.  Instead of speaking he reached out with his hand and tapped her on the left shoulder.  He was in shock--but his reflexes still worked.       Yiskah had plenty of questions, but they could wait.  She put an arm around her sparring partner, and waited with him.

Next:  Part 2

[veannaleethings-blog]

A Bunny and a dick.

We can talk about moral compass’s, right? We are adults.  Yesterday I had this long drawn out text message conversation with a girl I guess I would consider an acquaintance. Even though she is more like a fair-weather friend, but even then, only if the weather is fair for her; and even then, she is a little flighty.

Okay so we are texting, of course, not talking, not in real time. Not in any other context than, simply taking turns responding to one another, about a new endeavor she has embarked on, of achieving her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. “What the fuck is that going to get you?” That was and is, really my response. It is the most superfluous degree one can sink into a pit of debt under. A piece of paper that really is only worth about 51k a year in New York 2015, as a graphic designer if you are a male. 51k a year might sound nice, but in New York, that’s beans!  So far, she is none of those things. Quite the contrary, she is a 36-year-old mother of two who is morbidly depressed and can’t live within the walls of society. This is partly the reason we gravitated toward one another in the first place. Turns out, even my outlook on life, is much more grim than hers, so she comes and goes in small doses. She has no plans of moving out of the city, in fact her only plan is to sell the house her and her husband recently bought, or leave it for the kids when they turn 18, and when she and her husband are older, they will buy and RV and live in that, on the road. Those are her goals. Sounds awesome, I can dig! Freedom to roam where ever, unrealistic as it is, because they can’t hardly save a dime to save themselves, still struggling even though her husband alone rakes in about 4 thousand a month. That’s just under 3 times as much the average Joe, not to mention that’s without any contribution from her, so if she did help they would be much more comfortable. Now, here she is, macabre and parading around as a self-proclaimed Satanist. Which is fine, except she isn’t, like, not at all. Only reason I say this is because after immersing into mystic, anti-theistic, Goetic conversations, I realized she had no knowledge of the basic principles of Satanism, King Solomon’s magic, the lesser key, of course, or any Rosicrucian shapeshifting alchemy. She basically just likes black clothes with pictures of Baphomet and various sigils and big numbers that read 666. I seem to have trailed off however, in the development of her hardly developed character. Anyway, as it is, she truly has no sense of her own identity and furthermore no real plans, just sort of passing time until she expires. Which is fine, I can jive with that. After all, that is exactly what everyone else is doing here on planet fuck. Just surviving, until we can’t any longer. I digress.  Back to the text conversation at hand. I questioned her reasoning, and financial output to eventual income, for this pursuit of a useless piece of paper, and implied that it would only be, even more wasted time. Her attempt at this, is not for financial gain or employability, her endeavor is for happiness and she hasn’t yet come to grips with that notion herself. She is bored. Bored and tired. She does not agree with the way the world works and refuses to give in to it, at least in her world views and morals, because absolutely has in every pliable sense of the term. She is married, (which is a civil union of patriarchal proprietorship) indebted to a mortgage, paying on a home loan, and now tied into school loans that are only producing profits for the very entities she despises. She has two children and somehow, finds a way to shop at high end food retailers to make sure her food is vegan. A real renegade, right?  We venture off course of her useless pursuit to procure and even more useless piece of paper and began talking about Nihilism, but not outright. Here is where I took the wheel to steer the ship. I had, and still have, no intent to steer it in any given direction, nor do I plan to sink it. I am just merely steering. After all, who am I to impose any influence, for I am no one. My opinions are trivial, and in this world, they absolutely, do not matter.  In fact, the only thing that matters, really, are the 4 forces that ground us here. Gravity, Electromagnetic and both the weak, and strong force of Nuclear force alone. Okay, I think I have made my point, nothing matters, nor will it when I end. It doesn’t exist outside of myself, only inside my mind and that is the point I am trying to make, because the same goes for her, and subsequently everyone else.  Not saying that I am right, just offering my opinion and, bleakly trying to end a conversation I didn’t give two shits about, because I genuinely do not care about her illogical ideas. They don’t affect me. So, I begin to explain the idea of Solipsism and relativity, which is hard for many to grasp, myself included, because if I do not matter, and I truly cease to exist when my existence is over, then why, am I equipped with any moral compass or range of emotion to begin with? What is their fucking purpose, if humans, as a specie, have no purpose at all? See how dark it is getting? It is a slippery slope this decline, down into this dark caverns of never ending Nihilism. I give her a few “for instances” one, in regards, to an inanimate object that I can see, hear, and use in a tangible way, it, even though it is all those things, is also meaningless, and will no longer exist when I stop existing. Not because I am somehow righteous over it, it is an object made of plastic and metal, but because when my consciousness is over, it’s over! Everything I ever knew, and will come to know in my future, will be over. It is only perception, that leads us down our truly unique and individual paths regardless of a common consensus. The second “for instance” I offered her was a little more complex, it had to do with humans, emotions, the relativity of them in relation to us as individuals and furthermore the death penalty. Something, she, as a pseudo liberal is strongly against…unless of course something happened to her children, (but that is not up for debate) in which case all the aforementioned factors come into play. I explained it as follows. Let’s say, there is a man waiting, just waiting until the day he dies. Kinda like her, but with less creature comforts.  He is waiting for death as an eye for an eye punishment, on death row.  Seems fair, doesn’t it? She at this point in disagreement because she does not thing that killing someone is a good way to teach a lesson to another about killing someone. I wanted to explain that there was no lesson to be taught when deciding to kill a man, but I figured it was pointless. Back to the waiting part. Here is a person waiting for his punishment, not his lesson, not ANYONE’s lesson, just punishment. Okay this is where relative emotional spectrum comes in. She had asserted, that she herself could not fathom the emotional sufferings of her children after she dies, and therefore did not want to leave them the same legacy of suffering. I responded with the assertion that, that is complete nonsense! For a few reasons, firstly, her children’s sufferings are their own. There is no way for her, in her life on earth, even more so in her death, for her to know their individual sufferings, and consequently, that works just the same for her. She can try to empathize with them, and subconsciously, she will dig in her catalog of emotions that are attached to memories in her brain, until she finds one that could be similar, and then use it to do so. Empathize I mean. Or she could accept the fact that she was extremely arrogant in the statement that she so thoughtlessly made. Who said her children would suffer after she died? They might be sad for a while but they certainly, will not, and cannot, have the same outlook on life that she does, because her experience here, is uniquely her own. Back to the man waiting. Let’s hypothesize that he has two children, he obviously has a mother, and a father, absent or not, and maybe some siblings. Okay let’s narrow it down. He has a mother. Right now, while he still lives and breathes, these few, are the only people that can possibly be effected be the choices he has made, but in their own individual way. But, he is waiting for the death penalty, so that means somewhere, there was a crime he committed. A murder, maybe simple, maybe torturous, but a murder no less. Now there are other individuals involved, with an entirely different set of uniquely diverse range of emotions on this spectrum. Okay, the one that died. He/she no longer exists. All that pain, those distinctive sufferings, this person’s everything is gone. It no longer exists, it is done. What is left however, are the particle sufferings of the individuals that were relative to him/her. Obviously, a mother, maybe some children maybe a father, just like the other man. They all have their own set of uniquely individual sufferings. A mother lost her child, and a child lost their parent, these two cannot empathize with one another though they might try, it will not be the same. They can only attempt to relate in some haphazard way in relation to each other.  But that wasn’t the point, MY point was that when each, and every one of these individuals are gone, when they cease to exist, so does the suffering. The entire act in of its self never happened, because is no one left for it to have happened to.  It stops. It isn’t thought of, recollected, reminisced, or recalled. The situation is over. Her retort was one of confusion. She circled back around and again made some foolish statement, crossing a hypothesized scenario with the actual point I was making, which was, that nothing really exists and time is limited here, and she made the statement that she did not agree with any of it at all and it all sounded like a bunch of “go kill, go murder, none of it matters so fuck over the planet, do what you want!” I laughed so hard, and my only response at that point was “Sure! If that is indeed your moral compass.” I brought everything I had said previously about her agonizing suffering being something she cannot change, and that she has no control over and dropped it right there at her feet. She didn’t have much to say and it took several moments for her to respond, not really knowing what to say. I guess, what can you say when someone looks you in your face and says “bullshit, you are in control of your life while you are here.” She finally did respond however, with “right, what was I thinking, all that negativity. I don’t know why I went there, it has been a long day and I need coffee.” My point was, that our time is limited here and suffering is both imaginary, and temporary. It is as temporary as we make it in our own minds. Life escapes us more quickly than we realize, and one day we no longer have it, so we might as well put our sufferings to and end and make life as enjoyable as possible, because it’s short. Perception. All we have is what we remember, and we only remember, while we are living.

 I realized after I made my closing statement, that you, the reader may be wondering why this is titled “A bunny and a dick.” The reason for that is because, I remind you that this conversation took place through a serious of text messages, and was over in a matter of 30 minutes. But while it was happening, I was looking at an image in the back ground of my phone screen, of a man. A man clads only in men’s briefs, running shoes, and a bunny mask. A tall, thin, pale and scrawny man. All I could see was a bunny and a dick.

[photodustorg]

JOSIE RAE TURNBULL: MOULAGE OF A MERITORIOUS ARTIST

Josie Rae Turnbull, Moulage of a Meritorious Artist (excerpt), HD Video with sound, 7 mins 35. Sound by Zach Schreier. 

Originally from London, UK, and now based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Josie Rae Turnbull’s work frequently features the world of theme parks and museums. Looking at sites that embody nationhood through imitation, Josie finds herself thinking about what she can learn from these sites, and what remains inaccessible. Moulage of a Meritorious Artist, which was recently exhibited in Edinburgh, London, Engaru and Maruseppu, takes us on a surreal journey through the Vietnam Celebrity Wax Museum. Josie recently talked with PHOTODUST curator Ariel Cameron about how the work developed.

I’m very curious about the site of the Vietnam Wax Celebrity Museum; can you tell me what inspired you to make work there?

I’d chanced upon the wax museum while visiting the pagoda next door. Annexed in a Soviet-style theatre, it’s a private museum run by the company that manufactures the statues, also serving as a showroom for their products. The guard told my friend that wealthy people do private visits to the museum before commissioning a waxwork of themselves.

The museum reminds me of the ‘Red Room’ in Twin Peaks—the extraterrestrial space occupied by malevolent doppelgangers of the characters in the series. The waxworks being featured are in costumes from different eras of film and theatre, but they all occupy the same physical space, so all logical distinctions between the real and possible are undermined.

 Your practice is primarily photography and video-based—what leads you towards working with one medium over the other for a project?

The first thing that hit me about the waxwork museum is its existence in a state of suspended animation, like a permanent hibernation.

It feels odd filming ‘people’ at such close proximity without any interaction. Obviously, there’s no reciprocated gaze, so circling them and documenting their knuckle and nostril hair feels invasive. Doing this through moving image, as opposed to stills, emphasised the idea of an unresponsive portrait. After spending enough time there, the presence of the lone live figure, the security guard, feels jarring and abrupt. Umberto Eco describes waxwork museums as ‘fortresses of solitude’, which perhaps also applies to the guard who spends all day alone with these inanimate people.

Josie Rae Turnbull, Moulage of a Meritorious Artist, film still

You state that this project stems from an interest in microscopic imaging techniques as a ‘tool for psychic and visual investigation’. What is the significance of medium in making these explorations and what discoveries did you come across working from this curiosity with microscopic imagery?

When microscopic imaging was discovered, it would have done what the Hubble space telescope does today— convey ‘a sense of being transported to another scale—an exotic place tinged with danger’. The idea that microscopes provide revelations or an invisible truth is really interesting to me. With fluorescence microscopy, scientists shine a particular kind of light at whatever they’re trying to illuminate, and the substance identifies itself, shining a different colour or light back. This also applies to the use of coloured stains in microscopy—in order to clearly see the real thing, you fabricate a ‘fake’ image. I think we’re drawn to waxworks for the same reason, so it felt appropriate to use ‘fake’ colour to somehow clearly see them.

I too find the colour effects, and also the particular focus on details makes the wax figures and objects appear more lifelike, in a very surreal way. Can you talk more about these techniques?

Thinking about microscopy led me to the term ‘chromophilia’: ‘the property possessed by most cells of staining readily with appropriate dyes’. When using polarising filters on a microscope, you change the entire composition of colours in the viewing field. The idea of colour design through interference with the whole, as opposed to individual parts, was the same during the process of video editing; all the colours change simultaneously as you adjust them. This may mean you end up with a palette of colours that you’d never think to combine when, for instance, making a painting.

This relates to the book Chromophobia by David Batchelor; he talks about how your application and experience of colour is culturally conditioned. In Vietnam I’m constantly awed by vernacular colour—on signage, construction workers’ boiler suits, and polystyrene cooler boxes—as they’re used in incredible palettes completely different to where I’m from in the UK. In the video, this relates back to the idea of staining—fabricating a deceptive set of colour relationships in order to better see the real thing.

Josie Rae Turnbull, Moulage of a Meritorious Artist, film still

Did the site itself inspire the method of exploration and medium you used or were you searching for a space that allowed you to explore preconceived concepts and ideas?

 My way of working was made possible by the museum’s guard. Few museums would let someone with such limited spatial awareness get so close to the exhibits. I think this is probably because the guard and I were pretty much the only people there every time I visited.

I wanted to further explore the idea behind my visits to theme parks in Vietnam, which are emblematic representations of nationhood—investigating them almost forensically to try to better understand where I live. There’s another level of distance or removal at the waxwork museum, though. I have no learned experience of the celebrities or the characters portrayed, so there’s an impossible intimacy, which extends more widely to the idea of striving for an ‘authentic experience’ when travelling.

 You’ve been making work in Vietnam for a while now, particularly in touristic sites such as the Wax Museum and local theme parks. What draws you to these sites?

 I’m interested in the hyperreal—the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. When encountering the ‘absolute fake’ in spaces like Disneyworld, where the artifice is so seamless that it becomes ‘absolutely real’, your experience of the space is more passive, your critical faculties turn off.

One of the main reasons I think I find the theme parks here so fascinating is the access to transitional and backstage spaces—hiding in varying degrees of plain sight. My favourite example is the endless sea of tiles that I found on a walk behind the perimeters of one of the parks, where the roof tiles of pagodas yet to be built are stored in a way that looks like a coral reef, or the spare scales of a huge, huge carp.

Josie Rae Turnbull, from the series Four Sacred Capacitors

In the same park, you can find huge icebergs of polystyrene in the process of being carved into horses. I love seeing the methods and materials that go into making the sculptures, it feels both incredibly intimate and voyeuristic. Similarly to the waxwork museum, if you visit the theme parks on off-days, you are witnessing different states of animation, with attractions being built, turned off, or dismantled. Both the waxwork museum and amusement parks are these hyper-performative spaces that are really interesting to record while dormant.

Josie Rae Turnbull, Moulage of a Meritorious Artist, film still

Josie Rae Turnbull’s work can be viewed at

josie-rae-turnbull.format.com.

Please consider following PHOTODUST on Twitter and Instagram.

[dmyear3]

Originally, I wanted to present documentation of my first Testing Grounds evening performance, alongside myself in-costume and readable elements providing context and commentary on the event. I decided to make these pieces of the work downloadable via QR code, and got interested in the interactive viewer-technology implication of this. My focus began to shift to this aspect, and I ended up ditching the documentation side and create a new work based around this form of interaction, while also incorporating my own bodily presence. I wear a new set of wearable pieces, but unlike my previous performance much of my body is visible. These pieces were made to resemble vaguely medical prosthetics, and connect me to a screen via a plastic tube as I sit unspeaking on the floor. The wearables are made entirely from clear plastic in order to resonate aesthetically with the Clear Cube space, and include a 3D-printed mask that resembles a carapace as well as an organ-like orifice made from glue affixed to my chest.

On the screen, QR codes appear within designs that suggest microbiology, over a green-white gradient virtual environment. There are 11 different codes, each linking to a unique digital artwork that resembles some kind of fleshy growth or organism. These images are paired with small pieces of prose that speak in ambiguous narratives on the merging of biology, selfhood and technology. I had actually been writing these over the course of the semester in response to the work I had been producing.

...

 First, everyone tried scanning the codes and compared what they downloaded, and they began to realise that there were multiple different works. For this presentation I was typing my notes onto my phone (connected by its charger to my chest-piece), and it was thought that I might be sending the written pieces through in real-time. Without knowing how many works there are, it opened up the possibility of there being an endless amount. My use of my phone in this context also became a performative action in itself.

The connection between the screen and the body was noticed, in both physical connection and in the implicated connection between my phone screen and the TV screen. The physical connection seen in the plastic tubing began to be seen as more like a prop, standing in for or representing the actual technological network connection. In presenting the work with a pseudo-scientific and science-fiction aesthetic in low-fi materials my lack of a real synthesis with the technology is made obvious, but it also makes the viewer aware of the connotations of this merging and encourages a further imagination of it. It also made the viewer aware that the technology I was implementing was not at all sci-fi, but totally every-day and otherwise mundane. It was suggested however that I try making the fake-functional attachments on my body actually serve some kind of purpose, even if it was just the pumping of liquid through the clear plastic pipes. This work was compared to that by the cyborg artist Stelarc, but mine was understood to be more to do with emulation and viewer imagination.

Science-fiction became a large topic when discussing my work. It reminded people of movies about artificial intelligence such as Her: a movie about a smartphone AI that grows consciousness and begins to feel emotional connections. The Matrix was also brought up, specifically the idea of a living person being grown and raised within technology.

As my mask covered my face, only my eyes were visible and emphasised by makeup. A feeling of being watched was seen here, and a further tie to the idea of scanning and observing screens. My facial expressions were hidden, and that fed into the perception that I was seen now as an object rather than “myself”. A huge difference was noted between just before this presentation, when I was chatting with everyone and acting social, and during the tutorial as I became some kind of inanimate art object. I even seemed to give off an impression of being more like a “creature” than human, a new lifeform that was joined to technology by an umbilical cord. My presence was also seen as being theatrical, in the way I was fully costumed as a sort of character to be observed.

The downloads were discussed as being like an attempt to connect with the viewer – like I’m trying to reach through but only have a limited amount of messages. From this perspective, and considering my emotionless and masked appearance, this piece was interpreted as like a simultaneous action of communication and of shutting off. I became neutral, only reflecting the viewer’s gaze with my own exaggerated eyes (this was compared to reflections of selves seen on social media).

In terms of taking this project further, I would like to expand on the role of the body itself a bit more as a way of conveying ideas through performance. I want to start thinking about movements and characterisation linked to theatrics, as well as continuing my interest in connectivity through interaction. All of the sci-fi talk when discussing my work also made me realise that I was starting to miss my own point in a way. I had begun to focus on the aesthetics of the cyborg rather than any kind of emotional or personal connection I wanted to express through interactive performance. Moving into new work I would like to keep an interest in the links between human and technology but mostly ditch the elements of speculative science fiction and futurism which seemed to somewhat take over the reading of this piece. I need to start investigating how the idea of communicative connectivity (which is also expressed in connection between artist/performer and viewer) can be portrayed in more grounded and personal/emotive ways.

[tt-review]

Animals ranging from parrots to elephants continue to challenge our perception of consciousness, long-held as a uniquely human trait. But the reaches of consciousness don't stop at animals.

The ethics of consciousness, not just in humans but also animals and machines, is complex. To try and make sense of it, research is currently underway to develop a method for objectively measuring consciousness -- a formula that could explain how aware any living, or artificial, being is.

The concept of consciousness -- our awareness of what we experience, and what those experiences mean -- has long been debated. Descartes' exploration of what it means to think -- "I think, therefore I am" -- was written in 1640, but our understanding of how the brain works is still limited.

Ned Block, professor of philosophy, psychology and neural science at New York University, identified the three major theories of consciousness prevalent in modern philosophical thought; the 'higher order' theory, the 'global workspace' theory and the 'biological' theory. And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

A History Of Consciousness

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality. But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Mind And Brain

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. I fancy the popular expectation of a heap of charred corpses was disappointed at this inanimate bulk. Some went away while I was there, and other people came. I clambered into the pit and fancied I heard a faint movement under my feet. It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and the next morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being hauled by your window in the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker than that—much quicker. [blockquote author="DALAI LAMA" pull="normal"]Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.[/blockquote] It was only when I got thus close to it that the strangeness of this object was at all evident to me. At the first glance it was really no more exciting than an overturned carriage or a tree blown across the road. Not so much so, indeed. It looked like a rusty gas float. It required a certain amount of scientific education to perceive that the grey scale of the Thing was no common oxide, that the yellowish-white metal that gleamed in the crack between the lid and the cylinder had an unfamiliar hue. The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. If one lived through them, he became perfectly quiet, and only did he feel a numbness swiftly creeping up his body from the feet. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached as high as his heart he died. They did not rave or sleep. Their minds always remained cool and calm up to the moment their heart numbed and stopped. And another strange thing was the rapidity of decomposition. No sooner was a person dead than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to fly apart, to melt away even as you looked at it. That was one of the reasons the plague spread so rapidly. All the billions of germs in a corpse were so immediately released.

[pathtopurchase]

Culture’s in the air

The economist EF Schumacher wrote a book called “A Guide for the Perplexed” in which he introduced the concept of four “levels of being”. Level 1 comprises non-living objects, Level 2 living but non-conscious beings (plants), Level 3 conscious but not self-aware beings (animals except man) and Level 4 self-aware beings (man). The first characteristic of these levels is that each lower level is easier to observe and understand than a higher level. For example, it’s easier to learn the chemical and physical properties of inanimate matter (Level 1) than it is to understand the mechanism of consciousness in animals (Level 3). The second characteristic is that it’s precisely the stuff that’s hard to observe and understand that make the higher levels special: self-awareness is simultaneously hard to grasp and a distinguishing marker of human beings. It’s no accident that the books and teachings that help us grasp human self-realization are the few that have survived centuries, even millennia. Not everything that counts can be counted”, said Einstein, “and not everything that can be counted counts.”

In the realm of companies, culture is in the realm of Level 4: invisible, important and easy to ignore. The fact is that in practice, culture defines the boundaries of what you’ll never do, how work gets done, how decisions get made, how people are treated and how information flows: in short, nearly everything that matters in an organization. And yet, since it’s in the background, like the air we breathe, it’s hard to notice it exists at all. 

Some leaders know this and make it their priority. Satya Nadella of Microsoft, in his book “Hit Refresh” says: “I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture... An organizational culture is not something that can simply unfreeze, change, and then refreeze in an ideal way. It takes deliberate work, and it takes some specific ideas about what the culture should become. It also requires dramatic, concrete actions that seize the attention of team members and push them out of their familiar comfort zones.” Amazon is another company that has focused on getting its culture right. As John Rossman says in his book “The Amazon Way” about Amazon’s 14 leadership principles: “ these principles are referred to every day, in real decision-making scenarios, in every corner and at every level of Amazon.“

PS: 

1. Stripe has a great explanation of their company culture: https://stripe.com/us/jobs/candidate-info?a=1#culture

Also, see https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture where one of Stripe’s employees writes about their culture. The first couple of lines resonated with me: “ A company’s culture is something intangible and nebulous, and yet it can be just as important to success as revenues or growth. Culture influences everything, from design and product implementation to the level of support and operations of a company. It’s crucial to get it right.“

2. For a glimpse of the lengths to which Bezos is prepared to go in order to ensure coherence in the company’s priorities, read this from Eugene Wei: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/5/11/jpeg-your-ideas

Wei’s central point is how Bezos tried to solve the problem of communication in a company as big as Amazon, but it’s not hard to imagine how he might have used the same communication mechanisms to create a singular culture for the company.

3. One of my friends, who did financial audits at some point in his career, once told me about how the “tone at the top” is considered as an input into the audit process. Coming from an number- and analysis-oriented profession, albeit in the limited context of financial auditing, this is as close to recognizing the value of culture as I’ve ever come across.

4.  The management professor Sumantra Ghoshal referred to “the smell of a place” and contrasted humid Kolkata with the crisp air of Fontainebleau as a metaphor for company culture. “Where would you rather be?”, he asked. See http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/handy/ghoshal.pdf

5. Culture isn’t everything, of course. For instance, at the top, strategy matters a great deal. At all levels, competence matters. My point is, culture also matters, and it matters a great deal.

6. Over time, culture gets embedded in a sort of muscle memory. That’s why it’s hard to change companies and at times even teams within a company.

[autolovecraft]

There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb.

Dusk fell and found Birch still toiling.

Tired and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and sat a while on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground outside. There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb. For the long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight. As his hammer blows began to fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone which may have been fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone crudities. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure—absolutely sure—of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside coffin, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the daily paths of men was enough to exasperate him thoroughly. God, what a rage! The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the latch of the great door yielded readily to a touch from the outside. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear—which Birch seldom took the trouble to use—afforded no ascent to the space above the door. He would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle; but lacking these, bungled semi-sightlessly as best he might. It may have been fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone crudities. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his jarring thud on the damp ground. It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury could beat old Father Death himself. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them.

Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear—which Birch seldom took the trouble to use—afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives. There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb. You kicked hard, for Asaph's coffin was on the floor. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago.

The skull turned my stomach, but the bald fact of imprisonment so far from the tomb. In this twilight too, he began to realize the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse outside could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin which he now pushed out of the enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness.

At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.

He was merely crass of fiber and function—thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste. Davis left, urging Birch to insist at all times that his wounds were caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. Sawyer. I saw the scars—ancient and whitened as they then were—I agreed that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives. The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. When he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such meager tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape.

Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. In time the hole grew so large that he ventured to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the coffins beneath him rocked and creaked.

The tower at length finished, and his hands shook as he dressed the mangled members; binding them as if he wished to get the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.

Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son Edwin for Dr. Davis. Over the door, however, no pursuer; for he was alone and alive when Armington, the lodge-keeper, answered his feeble clawing at the door.

Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them. Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley; and was a very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The wounds—for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles' tendons—seemed to puzzle the old physician greatly, and finally almost to frighten him. It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his jarring thud on the damp ground. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. He had even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive farmer had managed to lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive Fenner.

Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly laying-out apparel invisible beneath the casket's lid, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure—absolutely sure—of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in the dusk, and how he stepped on the puppy that snapped at him a year ago last August … He was the devil incarnate, Birch, just as I thought! His thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred; and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as Friday, Tomb, Coffin, and words of less obvious concatenation. For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least detail of his horrible experience. In this funereal twilight he rattled the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and hurling at him a year ago last August … He was the devil incarnate, Birch, just as I thought! When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old receiving tomb. Great heavens, Birch, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside coffin!

The borders of the space were entirely of brick, and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his body to pass.

Perhaps he screamed.

He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone. The day was clear, but a high wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside coffin, but you got what you deserved. Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his jarring thud on the damp ground. Finally he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall, to place upon this two layers of two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. Birch? Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.

[omg-chronoscontracter]

A Piece of Me Died That Day: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Us and Stuff (In progress)

Last week a piece of me died. My Surface Pro laptop died. I was online one night and noticed it was not charging when the charge cable was on. The white light still shone bright to say it was giving power but there was nothing going in. On another cable the power cables light would die instantly until turned on when it would last aslong as the battery low symbol screamed at me. Right before the start of three night shift, and right before my deadline, my laptop of over two and a half years died. Now laptops come and go with me. On average I used to get one every year as they would just die with my rocking, rolling and night time not giving a shit about what would happen if I slammed it down once on the floor to make room in the bed. This was different. It was not just my laptop but a profile of my improvement, my hard work and my memories of times before.

I had my dissertation on that device from Nursing, something I spent many months on and was proud off. I had my folder of blog posts, both completed and in progress. The novel I was writing was also on that laptop. I was researching and studying long before I started my masters and had managed to transfer old slides and readings from one laptop to another. Hundreds of articles were the archival of both my love and distaste for certain traditions of research, both from the humanities, social sciences, nursing and medicine, philosophy and more. All of my nursing resources during study was saved onto dropbox. Dropbox referring to the online data storage space that allows you to save and back up work. Why did I not update and save the other things like I did these? Was I complacent? The power supply, the heart died. As stated at the start of the piece, a piece of me died. It is as dark as the dark screen that continuously stares back at me.

For you see, items such as these are not just mere things, they are a part of who we are. They are an archive of the lives and kind of people we are. We become lost, we become baron and we feel a great sense of emotion and sadness when they go. For many people these items are not just replaceable, but involve a lot of embodied and imbued emotions and experiences. Much like Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of capital, the accumulation of a certain form of status that either excludes or welcomes people into certain circles, or the rise of the ‘Affective Turn’ (Ahmed, 2002; Massumi, 2002; Clough, 2008), we learn to mourn that which has no life but at the same time does have life. What we experience is a small mourning, a passing, one that is not the passing of dying but is the passing of something that was us in some form of symbiotic relationship to another non-living being that makes up who we are. As Canguilhem (1992) put it; ‘machines can be considered as organs of the human species. A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are tools and machines’. What Canguilhem is arguing is that tools and machines are extensions of the body and often become one with our bodies. We can forget they are with us. Take the examples of glasses to see further, an extension of the eye, a walking stick to help balance which is an extension of legs or the ventilator which acts as our lungs. Imagine the power dying in artificial ventilation? What if a person never had a stick to mobilise and fell? What would happen if you couldn’t see and were unable to locate your glasses? Ultimately, you’d be fucked.

 Potentialities

Everything has potential that we use. Its use can be of social relevance, and its value constructed by the person who uses a thing in such a way. A table or wall could become a chair and the chair become a stand to rest your foot. Massumi (2002) looks towards the potential of objects and emotions. I would not take her out of context and should note she is a feminist theorist who focuses upon emotions and violence with regards to the television. She looks at the way in which a television can cause anxiety or fear. In her study she looked at the television as the potential for violence. She argued there was an affective relationship to the television as men would sit around the television and watch football. Imagine after a few drinks and your team was winning? It could be good all around but the reverse can be said in this tale of affective potentials and possibilities. She found that it could lead to aggression, abuse and physical violence between their partners as the television has the potential to cause anger, frustration and hatred. As Clough (2008) put it, affect is about opening the body to indeterminacy. This is what she refers to as ‘memory without content’, the determinacy of the indeterminate that can become conscious. She argues it is not a pre-social exercise in bodily restraint and understanding, but affect can become an ‘open-ended social’. Massumi relates this idea to autopoiesis and goes on to say, as Clough (2008) notes;

 “So, for Massumi the turn to affect is about opening the body to its indeterminacy, for example the indeterminacy of autonomic responses. It is therefore necessary for Massumi to define affect in terms of its autonomy from conscious perception and language, as well as emotion. He proposes that if conscious perception is to be understood as the narration of affect – as it is in the case of emotion, for example, there nonetheless always is ‘a never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder’, ‘a virtual remainder’, an excess of affect (2002: 25). Further, it is out of this excess that the narration of emotion is ‘subtracted’, smoothing it over retrospectively ‘to fit conscious requirements of continuity and linear causality’ (2002: 29). Consciousness is ‘subtractive’ because it reduces a complexity. It is ‘limitative’, a derived function in a virtual field where any actualization becomes, at that same moment of actualization, the limit of that field, which otherwise has no pre-given empirical limit. Affect and consciousness are in a virtual–actual circuit, which defines affect as potential and emergent.”

(Massumi 2002 in Clough 2008).

 This idea can be formulated in a different way. Bruno Latour (2005), a leading Actor Network Theorist, looks at the potentiality of something that is not already there. Imagine the house that exists. It provides shelter and accommodation. But what occurred before the house? There was no people so it wasn’t a home. Before the house could work as a house it needed wiring and electrics. Before this could be considered we required doors to navigate through each room. The doors required the screws and bolts to keep it up which in turn required a designated and empty space through a wall before the door could be constructed. Before the walls, we had scaffolding, the skeleton. Do you see where this is going? Before the scaffolding, we had blueprints, before this there was a group of men discussing how to build the house and for what purpose. Before this these men required pen and paper (at least before every business man was to be given the tools to navigate there way around a computer. Without the pen and documentation very little happened, therefore what about the ink? Nothing is as straightforward as one would believe and one option has the potential for another option. At some point this house started as an idea, an abstract object much like Latour’s notion of the ‘quasi-object’ (Latour, 2005). Furthermore, I gave a linear path of this theoretical house but there could be many more stops and end points, more choices and ideas but that could be a PhD anthology. The point is, things are never simply arbitrary. They shape us and what we do. We build our life around things. They provide emotions, boundaries and potentials. What is rarely considered is there affect on bodies and people. People sometimes mourn leaving an old family home as it has memories and emotions, others mourn because they have too many memories there but are forced out. For other people it can be interpreted in many different ways. Narratives and lives are brought together through both human and non-human actors, animate or inanimate objects. These actors are both active and passive in production, this at least is what the story of Actor Network Theory will tell you.

 An Untold History

It would be fair to say that until recently the history and relationship to items and technology has been a quiet one. As inanimate objects they are silent and require a voice to be realised what their potential powers are. What is further relevant, objects come on a spectrum of mundaness to usefulness. The continuum is vast. I would go as far as to deploy Karl Marx’s term of ‘slumpen proletariat’, those below the proletariat. You have your slumpen objects lso, the screws and plans, the imagination and pencils. Without them the core mechanics could not work.

Objects are given life through the voices who use them, the users. These users adapt and create their objects in an image pleasing to them. One such example is the mobile phone and the images stored, people store a certain image that often portrays them as good but with the odd temptation and naughty moment. Images on Facebook cannot be removed permanently but will haunt someone for the rest of their lives and careers, especially on a forum that is open and bi businesses has access too. In essence, whilst silent, they can cause damaging effects on a person.

Consider the memorial of a person, the only everlasting images to remember them are on technology. What about that? These people can be remembered. There is much emotional within these pictures. In some instances, these images are all that is left behind when the person is no more (Butler, 2006). We can remember and mourn these people, a core thing at a funeral with the image of the person being displayed for all to see and celebrate the life lived. Consider the ink from the pen that is a tool to live an imprint on a will? For you see many objects have voices, often insignificant to those who view them. For others, there is nothing greater. Objects have power, objects shape who we are. Objects can be silent or loud.

[autolovecraft]

Sawyer in their last illnesses.

Birch, just as I thought! The pile of tools soon reached, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door. It may have been mocking. He was the devil incarnate, Birch, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside coffin, but you got what you deserved. On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness.

It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, just as I thought! The body was pretty badly gone, but if ever I saw vindictiveness on any face—or former face.

That he was not an evil man.

Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. It may have been mocking. He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the right grave.

That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Birch were sure—absolutely sure—of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. An eye for an eye! For the long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them. He worked largely by feeling now, since newly gathered clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture.

But it would be well to say as little as could be said, and to let no other doctor treat the wounds.

It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the transom. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence; merely muttering such things as Oh, my ankles! He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which as he drew it viciously up at the tomb neighed and pawed and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had vexed it. When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old receiving tomb. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. The air had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome; but to this detail he paid no attention as he toiled, half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the latch.

To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin which he now pushed out of the enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. The pile of tools soon reached, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door. His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of transporting them. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. In the semi-gloom he trusted mostly to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure—absolutely sure—of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner.

Undisturbed by oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the emerging moon must have witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his bleeding ankles toward the cemetery lodge; his fingers clawing the black mold in brainless haste, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the bottom step of his grim device, Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom.

At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon. His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.

He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree.

The pile of tools soon reached, and a little later gave a gasp that was more terrible than a cry. Several of the coffins began to split under the stress of handling, and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top, in order that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible. He was a scoundrel, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury could beat old Father Death himself. I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. Perhaps he screamed.

Birch?

He always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in his soul. He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top, in order that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible.

He would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle; but lacking these, bungled semi-sightlessly as best he might. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to imagine. He always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in his soul. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure—absolutely sure—of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had chosen it, how he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in the dusk, and how he had chosen it, how he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in the dusk, and how he had chosen it, how he had chosen it, how he had chosen it, how he had chosen it, how he had chosen it, how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. In the semi-gloom he trusted mostly to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer. Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. As he planned, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. As he planned, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. He was merely crass of fiber and function—thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his jarring thud on the damp ground.

He was curiously unelated over his impending escape, and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the indolent stoutness of early middle age.

In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity.