#me when i use jons glasses as an analogy for his humanity

[mossiistars]

hc about jon's glasses:

s1: wears them bc he needs to, also thinks they make him look more professional as opposed to contacts

s2: wears them because he cant remember to put contacts in, also theyre taped in the middle bc they broke during prentiss' attack and he never bothered to fix them

s3: only option is to wear his glasses, they were what he was wearing when he ran from the institute, contacts were left at his flat (which he cant go back to bc police) [late s3 he finally buys a new pair of glasses, but theyre destroyed in the explosion]

s4: doesn't need glasses or contacts anymore, doesn't wear them

s5: bought a random pair of glasses at a store on the way up to scotland. still doesn't need them but likes to wear them as they make him feel more human [he takes them off during the eyepocalypse, doesnt think he deserves to wear them. martin keeps them in his bag the entire journey, just in case. at the panopticon, the glasses are crushed in his bag]

[aflyingcontradiction]

The Magnus Archives Relisten: Episode 139 - Chosen

Smart move on your part. They always are, aren’t they? Smart moves. Someday you’re going to push your luck too far, and when you do… well you just better hope it isn’t Jude who comes to collect. - Statement of Eugene Vanderstock

She did and it wasn't. I assume Elias was a more merciful murderer than Jude would have been.

Anyone who talks about “the Blitz spirit” wasn’t there, or wants to paper over their fear with nostalgia. Terrible things happened in the Blackout, and we hurt each other just as much as the Germans hurt us.

You know, I think there's a ring of truth to this line. Even having only delved into this topic on a very shallow level, I am already aware of plenty of - hm, how to put this - internal backstabbing, mostly of the non-violent kind, but I'm pretty sure the other kind existed, too. People in a crisis don't just develop a uniform spirit of solidarity. That's just not how people work. There might be a little bit of solidarity between unexpected people, but where there's an ingroup, there's an outgroup. In a war that may be the people actually bombing you, sure, but it may well be your neighbours who are doing a little bit better than you or who have expressed some doubts about your favourite leader's policies. (On a personal note: I have already seen people talking about the early pandemic days in a way that makes it sound like there was some sort of universal all-encompassing spirit of solidarity and the sheer rose-tintedness of those glasses makes me want to VOMIT. Way to sweep all the crisis-induced interpersonal conflict under a rug and pretend it didn't cause some people horrible pain and trauma. If, a few decades from now, I see anyone using the term "covid spirit" in an analogous way to "Blitz spirit" I swear I'm going to absolutely lose it.)

He wanted a grand inferno, a ritual of apocalyptic burning that would make the firebombing of Dresden look like a sparkler. Which sounded… amazing. But a few of us pointed out that the Allied air force had a tad more firepower than we did, as none of us were likely to make the rank of Air Marshal anytime soon.

Oh god, I would love to be a fly on the wall for THAT conversation, the sheer levels of snark in that room must have been off the scales.

Some objected, said that unless the child was conceived of the flame, it could never be a true incarnation. But they had no idea of how such a conception could possibly even work, so it was decided that it would have to be enough to birth the child by fire.

"But the father was just some guy, the child will never be the true chosen one if she isn't conceived by flame." "Okay, buddy, get back to me when you've figured out how to FUCK FIRE!"

She was quiet, considerate, but prone to fits of violent rage, which, while not unexpected given what burned inside her, still made living in a single location for any length of time untenable.

... "not unexpected given what burned inside her"??? More like "not unexpected given that literally every caregiver she has ever had has been a violent sadist who treated her like a symbol rather than a human being and she has never once experienced actual love and care, learn some basic childcare, you absolute arse!" I'd be prone to fits of violent rage, too!

Arthur tried to frame all this as a test of faith, and declared that those who we lost raising Agnes had been found wanting in their devotion to the Lightless Flame. Prick. She was just a brat.

I have a visceral dislike of the word "brat" because certain people (*cough* my stepdad *cough*) regularly use it as short-hand for "A small child who actually has human needs and expresses them in the only way their still-developing linguistic and emotional abilities will allow them to". And if you disregard the supernatural element, that is pretty much the exact way Eugene uses it here and that, more than the fact that he's a sadistic murderer, makes me want to FUCKING STRANGLE THE GUY!

I took foreign workers, mostly, those with the fewest connections to complicate matters, and the most hopeful dreams of what their life might be.

TMA gets really on-the-nose with its politics in season 5 but it is undeniably political even earlier than that and this isn't exactly what I would call SUBTLE (mind you, this is an observation, not a complaint).

Maybe they assumed it was some long, torturous plan, and she was simply building the kindling for a bonfire of aching loss and suffering such as we had never before seen. And I suppose, in a way, she was. Just not the one any of us expected.

Heh. The worshippers of the Desolation, utterly desolated.

I’m curious to see what it was she did to derail this big ritual, because I’m sure she didn’t pay poor Jack Barnabas to fall in love with Agnes. ... Well, ninety percent sure. - Jon

I see. Jon's starting to have the same "Well, you never know with her" feeling that I do.

God knows. It’s not like I don’t have my own office politics to keep track of.

I feel like Jon is perhaps having his own moment of "Damn, I would need a corkboard and some string to figure this out" about all things Lightless Flame. I certainly am!

Every other Avatar gets to have their feelings burned right out of them, but me? I’ve just got to sit in mine.

That's actually very untrue. Most of the avatars are full to the brim with the feels and you can easily tell that even from the little insight into their psychology that we get through the statements and the occasional personal interaction. So I'm not sure what the hell Jon is even talking about here, but it's clearly some frustrated nonsense.

My impression of this episode

The internal dynamics of the Cult of the Lightless Flame are, quite frankly, fascinating. They're all just stumbling around in separate directions, trying to convince the rest of the cult that their idea of "Asag" is the truth. It's amazing. And then there's Agnes, of course, who is just ... well, I have a soft spot for her. Pushed into a role that was chosen for her before she was even born and only allowed to leave that role on death - a death she chose because she didn't think she could fit that role anymore. Agnes deserved better!

[mysterioussinkhole]

Binary

Statement Summary: Taken directly from Tessa Winters, a computer programmer. She seems fairly shaken when she comes in. The tape recorder catches her interest, because they’re digital rather than analog like everyone assumes. Very rudimentary but still very much digital. She goes on to talk about the nature of language and feelings and how they relate to computers. After a bit, she starts with her story. It has to do with downloading consciousness and how human minds can’t properly work within a computer. There’s a story online about a man named Sergei Ushanka, a programmer who supposedly got a degenerative disease so he worked to upload his brain to a computer. Some say he died still tapping away. Another version says he physically shoved his head into the hardware. Whatever he did, it worked. His mind was put on floppy discs, then CDs, then purely digital. It’s a popular topic for chat bots, the sort that eventually break down screaming. The only things all the bots share are a pixelated screaming face and the phrase “The angles cut me when I try to think” marking the beginning of the spooky talk. She’s not much for bots but she used to do that sort all the time. One night she was on a sketchy sort of website and found a file called UshankasDespair.exe and quickly downloaded it. It didn’t take up much memory. Most of the comments said the link didn’t work. She had a day off so she messed around online for a bit. At around 2AM she finally opened it up. It was stylized like an old-school text adventure game. She typed first: Hello. There was no response for a few seconds until it sent a bunch of symbols. It kept typing these symbols, that would change and scroll and sort of twitch. It kinda hurt to look at. Every now and then there was English like “helphelphelp” and “it peels my mind like knives”. It was spooky but not out of the realm of possibility. Her laptop’s fan started making odd noises like it was frantically pushing out air. It wouldn’t close when she tried to X out so she crashed it. The noise stopped but the text kept going. The power was off which meant it was impossible. More words like “you wanted to talk” and “hihihihihihi”. Then an image took over. Very old webcam footage of an aging man crying with pain. He was looking at a computer screen in the dark. He reached down to tear up a key and then ate it. He did the same thing again, his mouth bleeding. She shut the laptop and drunk until she passed out. When she woke up it was still dark, and her TV showing the same video. The speakers played the sound of crunching. There was no way it was possible. The man muttered things like “it was like thinking through cheese wire” and “there’s no feeling like the no feeling hurts” and “it’s cold without blood”. At one point he ate a shard of glass from the monitor. She unplugged everything in her house and went out to wander. The video was on every screen she saw until she watched the whole 17 hour thing. No one else could see it. She watched it all after a month. It was awful. At the end he laid down and said “The maze is sharp on my mind. The angles cut me when I try to think.” The back of his head was missing. Thirty minutes later it was over. It doesn’t show up anymore but it haunts her nonetheless. Jon offers to help her but he’s a bit at a loss. She thanks him anyway.

Who Did It: Spiral/End or the Bonus Power

Spooky Rating: 10/10, utterly terrifying

Archives Drama: Jon posted on a few tech focused chats and it yielded results. The statement giver got him into Gertrude’s laptop. He’s about to go into more detail when Tim comes in. He gets kinda pissy when he sees Jon is “scheming” and goes to leave, but stops when he hears Jon mumble about his tone. They get into a fight, Tim upset that Jon is still so suspicious of everyone and Jon unconvinced that the CCTV footage is definitive. Tim tells him to shut up as he really gets going. He calls him a pompous idiot. Tim goes off about how in the Archives no one seems to care or have his back. He hates that Jon acts like his experiences are the only ones that matter. When Jon needed to take control but he went off the deep end. Elias should have fired him weeks ago. Tim hates it so much. Jon asks why he hasn’t quit. Tim wants to but for some reason can’t. Jon speculates that he can’t fire him either. He apologizes but refuses to trust him or anyone else. They decide to just deal with it.

Stray Thoughts: This episode is a lot to take in, especially the second time around. I guess I’ll take it in order. This statement is one of the ones that legitimately terrifies me, which isn’t many tbh. I think tech is definitely the way to go with the new power. Jonny said something in the Q&A about the tape recorders “not being neutral” and then at the beginning of this episode there is a deliberate point made that they are digital. Hints of another power emerging and taking hold? Especially with how the Archivists didn’t start using tape recorders in their until very recently, Gertrude mostly using hers for off the books research. Jon is such an old man and I love him. That being said, Tim telling him “Fuck you” is deeply cathartic. While he’s a big reductive of his peers, he is right. Jon left them high and dry when they needed him and acts like he’s the only one that matters. He’s a wonderful character, but he is massively flawed. I really like having Tim’s perspective coming into play. His character arc is so depressing. The moment where they both realize they’ll never get out is perfect. This is the kind of episode that fires on all cylinders. You should relisten to it.

[anecdotaltruthbomb]

I mentioned Jon Gabriel before, in at least two of my videos. He influenced me a lot, a few years back. His audio tracks (visualizations, guided meditations) were motivating in times, when i was still addicted to terrible junk foods. He once suggested to associate chocolate with shit and processed starches with cardboard. I did create a photoshopped visualization of how lean i wanted to become. And if i pull my belly in, i look almost like this visualization now. Perhaps my ass is slightly more sagging. But i have just that lean neck and chin and overall lean silhouette.  

I agree with most of what he says, except that he is not quite vegan and high carb enough for my tastes. Perhaps he is just trying to not piss off his rich mainstream audience. Or perhaps he is a different body type and is therefore a better fat burner than me. He seems to be much more of a mesomorph than me. And lives a much more active live-style.

His main argument is, that the major cause of overweight is some kind of hormonal stress. Hardships in life, that are interpreted as a famine because throughout evolution most difficulties in life were correlated with at least a thread of future famine. A body that fears famine will be hungry enough to put on fat. So to loose fat long term, to maintain weight loss, that stress trigger needs to be eliminated. Life needs to be somewhat positive and free of exhausting drugs, like sleep cycle disturbing amounts of caffeine. I think i agree with this completely.  I have tons of anxiety regarding my perspective on survival. Let alone reproduction. This may hold my evolutionary biology back from giving up all of my weight. It may be the main cause for why my body holds on to every single gram of fat (above around 15 grams of fat per day), just to give me hunger for more carbs. This goes hand in hand with what i said about the endomorph type before. Nevertheless, i used to be a huge ball of white trash and now i am more lean and much more healthy than half, if not most of my age peers. Just because of a change of diet, hardly touching the stress aspect, especially the psychological aspect of stress, which is probably getting much worse, as a side effect of me becoming more and more alienated from humanity, due to being a fruitarian at heart. So you cannot say: "Oh, my body wants to be fat, that is the problem, not the junk food i eat - If my body wanted to be lean, it would be lean despite those junk foods i eat" - That isn't even true, because even lean types will become fat, slowly over decades, by eating those fattening, fat containing, calorically dense foods. You do not have to resolve that mythological childhood trauma, that you cannot even remember, in order to have an up to 90% improvement of your life quality. Just change your diet. So this is where i am tempted to disagree with Jon Gabriel a little. What he says about stress is absolutely true and cannot be ignored, if perfect healing is the goal. But he seems to slightly downplay the "nutritionist approach" (tweaking metabolism by smarting up about how different foods and macros digest and burn within the body) in favor of this stress-setpoint-argument. In reality, the priorities are the other way around: You can loose at least half of your weight, by focusing exclusively on the nutritionist approach. Maybe two thirds of your weight. Loosing the rest of your weight will take longer, because mastering the stress-aspect is more challenging. An intellectual change (what foods you consider worthy of your money) is usually happening much more quickly, than a personality and lifestyle change. But if an intellectual change around how the body is affected by shitty food is not even possible, because of dishonest neurotic self sabotage or confusion and attachment to various collective lies, the situation is even worse. This is why i had to become like 30 years old, until i had enough mental clarity to tackle my obesity intellectually. People who are still intellectually compromised can only be helped by authorities telling them the truth.  Mastering both areas, intellectual understanding and stress management, takes much time and the speed of weight loss is limited by how fast you can master weight maintenance at any level. Whenever weight loss exceeds this maintenance mastery, you will just regain the weight. You can always go to 7% bodyfat, by doing a 360 day water fast, or whatever, but that is useless. A waterfast can however be use full to get down to your current set-point, which is your current ability to maintain weight at a certain level, which is your current food choice habits and your current hormonal situation. I did never regain any of the weight i lost during my first 40 day water fast! Quick weight loss does not cause jojo effects! Only the so called "set point" does cause the regaining of weight. Fasting for a first time does probably greatly reduce your setpoint. Because it reduces oxidative stress in the body, by removing body fat and cleaning the lymph system. And it changes your sensibilities, thus improves your food choices (given that you are intellectually prepared for this). But that does not bring the set point all the way down to 7 or so percent bodyfat. I did more water fasts (20 days, 20 days, 30 days), which took me to a lower level of body fat, around 50kg, but i regained that weight every time. I guess this is where i have to spell out that my definition of setpoint is slightly different from that of Jon. I see it as a complex equation of multiple factors coming together, not as an inside job, a program of genes, brain, hormones. For example if a nervousness in your brain drives you to gain weight for 6 dark months of the year, but your food choices allow only 1kg of weight gain per one month, then in my view your setpoint is practically only 6kg higher than in the opposite time of the year. This is why in my view food preferences change the setpoint. A fruitarian who gets nervous about food would switch to foods of higher energy density, perhaps dried fruit. Someone else might introduce overt fats in stead. This person could put on 2kg in one month. Their setpoint would be 12kg higher. They may not even be able to loose those 12kg again, in the opposite half of the year, when they feel safe to do so. One year they are 12kg heavier, but loose only 6kg, next year they add 12, that makes a total of 18kg and so on. Would their brain feel less nervous about survival, would they add less than 12kg in 6 grim months, because they already have 6 extra in the first year, 12 in the second year? Maybe a little less nervous but not totally. Many factors come together in my model and its hard to predict. My experience suggests that just changing objective factors like food choices can make a massive difference to the setpoint. In my view there is a pulling force in the form of cerebral nervousness around food, or carelessness, it pulls weight up or down, through appetite for more or less calories, but does not say how much weight should go up or down, neither in terms of body-fat-percentage nor in terms of total weight in kg. How much weight goes up or down is in my view not decided cerebrally, but in the body, which “decides” mechanically through so many factors: how many fat cells you have, how much nerve energy it takes to keep that huge body alive, how large the stomach is, how much nerve energy it takes to digest your particular food choices. How much weight can you handle? Also on the other hand: how much muscles do you need, to get through the day? How much nerve energy and carbs do those muscles need to run? So how much do you need to eat to carry your weight? This huge complexity of factors is pulled, up or down in terms of mass, like a bag with objects in it. Those objects produce resistance to the pull. To explore the opposite case: weight loss or lowered setpoint - using a different analogy. Like a glass standing on a tilted surface. The glass represents our body fat. There is already a tension from gravity pulling, representing a desire for weight loss, but not enough to pull the glass over the resistance of the surface. Then the surface is tilted just a little more. Gravity did not even change. But the relationship of gravity and surface resistance changes, resistance is lowered. The glass starts to glide and falls off the surface. More tilt is an analogy to a low GI diet, since fat is more easily burned, when muscles are not instantly stuffed with carbs on all occasions. Setpoint or gravity did not change, but a change of diet triggered weight loss. This analogy implies, that gravity, representing a lower setpoint, was necessary for weight loss. Does this analogy hold true? Is it impossible to loose weight, when there is no lowered setpoint? Not quite, the analogy has it’s limits, you can of course starve off the weight, but may gain it back. My main point with this analogy is, that the initial weight was much higher than “gravity” wanted it to be. That glass was just standing there on the slightly tilted surface, not moving one damn bit. There was a surface resistance holding the glass in place and it was the diet choices alone, in this case a theoretical high GI diet, such as when you eat a 1000kcal bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, instead of four bananas.  My current setpoint is roughly at 58kg at 167cm (its a good BMI but includes much fat in my case). This could be stress related or it could have something to do with my lower than ideal lean body mass. Perhaps my evolutionary intelligence is simply stressed out by this crippling weakness, around my spine and shoulders, which also involves chronic inflammation of some joints. And evolution gives me an extra appetite for it. But building up bones and cartilage and tendons and ligaments happens so slowly. Unsurprisingly my body could easily store much body fat in the process of eating for lean mass gain, given how many effective fat cells i have. So i take my protein need serious. And avoid bone loss causing substances like salt and phosphoric acid (found in coke, energy drinks, as stabilizer for some hydrogen peroxide solutions). And this is also something Jon would agree with. He recommends protein for breakfast. Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. I can’t load up my belly with slow digesting chickpeas in the morning. How am i supposed to digest fruit then? I will have my protein in the evening. The body can store amino acids and builds up muscles during sleep anyways. Protein in the morning may reduce overall appetite, but that is not a strong enough argument to justify indigestion of fruit. If only there were affordable vegan protein powders without toxic fat and without pollution.