#obsessed that a person could make so much history that MASS HUMAN SACRIFICE is not even mentioned 99% of the time. terrifying! fascinating!

[giantkillerjack]

HUMAN SACRIFICE WAS NOT A PART OF THE ROMAN RELIGION OCTAVIAN WTF

Video transcript:

"I have been learning about Roman history in some form or another since I was literally a child and I--I cannot [sputters for a couple seconds]

Augustus! Octavian Octavius Gaius Caesar. Mister Caesar. Augustus. Mister Augustus... sacrificed 100 Roman citizens.

Romans!!! sacrificed!!! Sometime-- before the-- some time before the Battle of Actium, and I can't-- that's-- that's not a fucking thing! I've never heard of that ever happening before and the guy who made the video I was watching said that that was not a fucking thing that people did.

And I cannot believe that after like 20 years of learning about Rome, I'm still learning stuff about Octavius Caesar that makes me go, WHAT! WHAT THE FUCK?! WHAT THE FUCK OCTAVIAN?! Wha-- WHY?! OH MY GOD"

Image description: a video of the original poster, a chubby white transmasculine person in their 20s with short hair and glasses, filming himself while standing in his bathroom and speaking to the camera in a very animated way.

[magnusmysteries]

Part 32: When Rituals Fail

The Magnus Archives was a horror podcast. It is now completed. Many of the show’s mysteries were never explained on the show. I intend to explain them. Spoilers for the show, but also spoilers if you wanna solve these mysteries yourself.

Elias thought that the reason the rituals failed was because the fears could never be separated. That it would be impossible to bring just one through, it had to be all. I think he was wrong, for three reasons.

First reason. Here’s a quote from Elias, where he explains why it is impossible to separate the fears “To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down.”

But we have seen such a world. Quote from Entombed “This is forever deep below creation. Where the weight of existence bears down. This is The Buried, and we are alive. There isn’t even an up.”

The Buried is a world without the Hunt. The Hunt can’t reach Daisy there, because the Hunt and Buried are opposites (See Part 3). Elias uses the absence of up, as an example of an impossibility. But John says in the Buried there is no up. I think this was specifically written to clue us in to Elias being wrong.

Second reason, every time we hear of a ritual there is always a reason why they fail. The reason isn’t always obvious, but I’ll go through most of them in this post. Elias based his conclusion on the assumption that there was no reason for the Dark’s ritual to fail. He was wrong, as I’ll explain.

Every attempted ritual, except the ones involving John and Agnes, has a group of people choosing something related to the fear. (With a broad definition of choice.) If only one person does not make the choice, the ritual fails.

The Lonely. A group of people in an apartment building were all supposed to choose to be lonely (rather than move out of the nice cheap apartment). Gertrude wrote about it in a paper, the people got help, they weren’t lonely, the ritual failed.

The Slaughter. The soldiers are supposed to brutally murder each other. But the statement giver doesn’t like killing. He is not swayed by the music, he does not join in on the violence. The ritual fails.

The Hunt. Daisy speculated this failed because the Hunt doesn’t like to complete things. She was wrong. The people were supposed to join in the obsession of the hunt, to kill vampires and probably to die. But the statement giver was only pretending to be obsessed, the ritual fails.

The Corruption. This is from the episode Love Bombing. (John was wrong that the Prentiss attack was a grand ritual.) Here the choice is to love. First they take care of a sick dog. That is, they love it. Then they have to love and join the monster mass of people.

The part where they have to say they love each other, it's a test, to see if they are ready for the ritual. The protagonist did not love the other woman, and so she is told to leave. She is jeopardizing the ritual.

Note that she is not forced to leave, or killed. Had there been force or violence the ritual would have failed. That’s another rule for the rituals.

I think when she left, it was already too late and the ritual failed. Or maybe it failed when it got blown up. Probably by Gertrude.

I think nobody in the cult was working for the Corruption originally. The Corruption just found a cult that was really into love and thought "Jackpot! Send in the dog!"

The Buried. The choice here is for everyone in town to get into the pit at the same time. When the statement giver comes to town, he is told to leave. But not forced, significantly. He is jeopardizing the ritual, because he might not climb into the pit with the others.

The statement giver has a “dream” where he willingly climbs into the pit and puts his arm into the hole. Though it’s not really a dream. This is a test, and he passed. Whoever’s in charge decides to go ahead with the ritual.

This is a mistake. The statement giver does not go into the pit with the others. A woman in the pit suddenly begins to scream. Not because she is in the pit, but because she noticed the statement giver is not in the pit. She knows the ritual is about to fail and it does.

Later Gertrude shows up and dumps Jan Kilbride into the pit. She thinks she stopped the ritual, but she was too late. The ritual had already failed.

The Flesh. The choice is for everyone to throw meat into the pit. (I’m guessing they also all have to die from exhaustion and get thrown in the pit or jump in, but we don’t see that part). When Tom Haan notices Lucia Wright is present, he hands her meat. He hopes she will take it and join in, which she does. Had she not done so, the ritual would have failed. If she had left, the ritual would have failed. If Tom had killed her or forced her to join in, the ritual would have failed.

The ritual fails anyway, because Gertrude blows it up.   

The Spiral. Quote from Michael “A thousand staring morsels stood, and not one of them believed themselves sane to look upon it.”

If one of the humans there had believed themselves to be sane the ritual would have failed.

Actually there was a person there who believed they were sane. More from Michael: “Michael did not go mad, though no words you could have said would have convinced him otherwise. (...) If Michael thought he had lost his mind, it was only because what he saw with crystal clarity was simply not something that could be real. But Gertrude Robinson did not waver. (...) She gave no indication that she saw anything more or less than was expected. Hers was not a mind that left room for doubt.”

Gertrude didn’t realize, but there was no need to sacrifice Michael Shelley. The ritual would have failed simply by her presence.

The Stranger. When John and the gang set up the explosives to blow up the Unknowing, Nikola does nothing to stop them. She knows they are there. She waits until they have set up the explosives before she starts the ritual.

There are no other victims there than the Magnus crew. They are the ones that are supposed to make the choice. The choice they are supposed to make is to use logic and reason during the Unknowing. Nikola has to give them a chance to win, and part of that is she lets them set up the explosives.

In the 1787 attempt at the Unknowing, the ritual is stopped by a soldier from the Slaughter. The soldier is not confused: “I was sure he was a soldier, and he was nothing but a soldier.”

In Nemesis Gertrude speculates that the Unknowing can only be stopped if the explosives are detonated from within Unknowing. Meaning, someone has to “choose” to use enough reason to set it off.

Just four victims is a small number. But I think John counts extra, since he is the Archivist and should be harder to confuse. 

Maybe Elias made a deal with Nicola, told her about their plan. After all, Elias wants John to get blown up, to get the End scar.

Elias advised John not to bring Tim to the ritual. Tim seems pretty suicidal at this point, earlier he dared Elias to kill him. Elias is worried that if Tim is the one to blow up the ritual, John won’t get the End scar.

The ritual fails because Basira reasons her way out. Or maybe it fails because Breekon uses violence against Daisy, not sure.

John is at first very confused, but then he starts to see more clearly. That is because the ritual is already failing, because of Basira (or Breekon). There is no need for Tim to blow up the place and sacrifice himself.

The Eye. We don’t know much about Elias' first attempt at a ritual, but it seemed to take place in the panopticon prison, with Elias in the middle, watching the prisoners around him. The prisoners were probably supposed to make some kind of choice, and at least one of them failed to do so.

The Dark. The darkness ritual first begins to collapse at Hither Green, where it is led by Natalie.

Quote from Manuella “Natalie and the others followed, but they did not truly understand. Not truly, with their talk of peace and unity and Mr. Pitch. A friendly name, to try and hide from a concept they couldn’t grasp.”

In the episode Police Light the darkness creature inside Rayner is trying to get a new host, by entering Callum Brody. Then the police intervene and shoot Rayner, saving Brody from being possessed. But a droplet of the monster hits the police officer Altman. Altman is in the process of being possessed. Then Altman is stabbed and killed by Natalie Ennis.

There is misdirection here. We are supposed to believe that Natalie stabbed Altman because he was a cop. But actually she killed him because he was possessed. She was secretly working against the darkness cult.

Why? Gertrude must at this point have realized how a ritual will fail if one person makes the wrong choice. She must have talked with Natalie and explained to her that Mr. Pitch is a lie. That the Darkness is not about peace and unity. So because of Natalie the ritual failed.

The third reason for why Elias is wrong is the most important, and I’ll cover it in the next post.

If Elias is wrong that a ritual must draw in all the fears at once, why is it that no ritual has succeeded throughout all of history? I think there just hadn’t been that many attempts.

In Family Business Gerard says if a ritual fails, it takes centuries to build up enough power to attempt one again. Yet we hear of several ritual attempts happening very close together in time: the Lonely circa 2007, the Spiral sometime after 2007, the Buried in 2008, the Flesh in 2008, the Corruption circa 2012, the Dark in 2015, the Stranger in 2017 and the Eye in 2018. How can that be?

In the Architecture of Fear, Smirke says he wrote down several rituals. Since Smirke lived a couple of hundred years ago, it could mean most of his rituals were attempted back then, and that’s why most of them were due to be attempted again around 2007. But that gives us the same problem, just further back in time. Why was it that most of the rituals could have been attempted about the same time, back when Smirke wrote them down?

I think the reason was, most of the powers had never attempted a ritual before Smirke designed them. The Powers have no creativity (see Part 9) and could not have attempted a ritual until a person came up with one. Smirke says he is unsure if all the powers had rituals before he put pen to paper.   

I think there were two rituals that Smirke designed that were attempted relatively long after his death. The Slaughter ritual probably needed a great war to succeed, and therefore did not happen until War War 2. And the Hunt ritual took over a hundred years to set up, as it included two groups of explorers from over a hundred years apart.

Three rituals predate Smirke’s creations, those of the Dark, The Vast and the Stranger. 

Smirke got his ideas for rituals after hearing of the ritual of the Dark. In Heart of Darkness, Manuella implies her ritual had been planned for three hundred years, after the failure that birthed the thing inside Rayner. I think when Flamsteed drowned Reimer in The Movement of the Heavens, he stopped the first ritual of the Dark. Reimer was drowned May 2 1715. On May 3 1715 there was a Total Eclipse that could be seen in London. (That date is from real life, not mentioned on the show.) I think that’s when the first Darkness ritual was gonna happen.  

The first Unknowing happened in 1787, Smirke was born in 1780. So unless he invented it as a child, it predates him.

In Big Picture Simon talks about the last ritual he attempted, in 1853. That implies he’s had at least one earlier attempt. Simon became an avatar in the 1500s, so he’d probably only had time to do two ritual attempts in total.

[for-your-therapeutic-smile]

They Never Teach You How to Stop

Rarely do I lack the words to express myself. Perhaps this reflects my failure to maintain my journal consistently throughout 2020. Here goes an honest attempt to capture and document my mental state and the fatigue of Covid, the inertia of this shelter-in-place, the anxiety of this political crisis we face as a nation, the pressure of being a 1L in law school against the backdrop of civil unrest and Justice Ginsburg’s death, coming out - my dad told me he was disappointed -, the possible erosion of my relationship with someone I love, and this feeling of absolute dread and resentment for a system that continuously fails my and future generations (robbing us of a social contract that promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), among many other things I’m too tired to consider. When did we accept a $0 baseline as the American Dream? Oh, to be debt free - free from this punishment for having pursued an education. Stifling the educated to prevent them (myself included) from organizing and mobilizing the masses so we can supplant this system with a better one is the overall objective of the oppressive class (read: Pedagogy of the Oppressed); it’s the conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. The proletariat has swallowed the middle class, leaving only the ruling class. I am essentially on autopilot, forcing myself to go through the motions so I can survive another day. I know others join me in this mental gymnastics of unparalleled proportions, one social scientists and medical researchers will soon study and subsequently publish their findings in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Despite a lack of air circulation, we are breathing history; the constitution, like our societal norms, must adapt accordingly. Judge Barrett: there is no place for originalism. While I seldom admit weakness or an inability to manage life’s curveballs, this series of unfortunate events seems almost too much to bear. 

And yet somehow I continue to find the energy to submit assignments due at 11:59 p.m., write this post at 1:38 a.m., “sleep”, wake at 7 a.m. so I can read and prepare (last minute!) the assigned material leading into my torts or contracts class. I find the energy to text my boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) so I can attempt to salvage the real and genuine connection we have, cook elaborate meals to find some solace, wrestle with whether or not to hit my yoga mat (I don’t), apply to a fellowship for the school year and summer internships, prepare my dual citizenship paperwork, manage a campaign for two progressive politicians, and listen to music in an attempt to stay sane . . . ~*Queues John Mayer’s “War of My Life” and “Stop This Train”*~ . . . I realize I have to be kinder to myself, give credit where credit is due. I hate feeling self-congratulatory though.

Mostly, I am too afraid of the repercussions if I stop moving at a mile/minute, that I can just work away the pain and be the superhuman who numbs himself from the low-grade depression and nervous breakdown. My body tells me to slow down, as evidenced by the grinding of my teeth, but I take on more responsibility because people rely on me. I must show up. I am a masochist in that way. This is what I signed up for and I’ll be damned if I don’t carry through on my promise to do the work. Pieces of my soul scattered about like Horcruxes, though they’re pure, not evil, so I hope nobody resolves to destroy them. 

My mind rarely rests. It’s 3:08 a.m., one of the lonelier hours where night meets morning; it’s the hour for and of intense introspection. It makes you consider pulling an all-nighter, one you reserve for an “important” school or work deadline. We always put our personal lives on the back-burner. 3 a.m. sets the tone for a potentially awful day. But that doesn’t matter right now. I’m letting some of my favorite albums play in the background: Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Mac Miller’s Circles, Rhye’s Blood, Alicia Keys’ ALICIA, Coldplay’s Ghost Stories, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Miley Cyrus’ Dead Petz in addition to other playlists, Tiny Desk performances, and tracks (I unearthed last week, like When It’s Over by Sugar Ray). I need to feel something. I need to feel anything. I need to feel everything. We experience such a broad spectrum of emotions throughout the day that we lose track of if we don’t pause to absorb them. Music reinforces empathy; it releases dopamine.

I spent the past two hours reading through old journals and posts, as scattered as they were, on a wide range of topics: poems I had written about falling in and out love, anecdotes about my world travels, and entries on personal, political, and professional epiphanies. The other night I found one of my favorites, a previous post from my time living in Indonesia, centering on the dualities of technology. It resonated with me more than the others. To summarize, I wrote about my tendency to equate the Internet with a sense of interconnectedness (shoutout to Tumblr for being my digital journal; to Twitter for being a place of comedy and revolution; to Instagram for curating my *aesthetic*; to Facebook where I track my family’s accomplishments and connect with travel buddies displaced around the globe all searching for a home). And yet I feel incredibly lonely and disconnected whenever I spend too much time using technology, so much so that I set screen time limitations on my phone recently to curtail this obsession with constant communication and information gathering. Trump and Biden admitted that it’s unlikely we’ll know the results of the election on November 3rd during their first presidential debate. Push notifications don’t allow us to learn of trauma within the comforts of our own homes. I’m already fearing where I will be when that news breaks. 

This global pandemic and indefinite shutdown of the world (economy) undeniably exacerbates these feelings. This is some personal and collective turmoil. But I was complicit in the endless scrolling and swiping of faces and places long before Covid-19. Instead of choosing to interact with my direct environment (today’s research links this behavior to the same levels of depression one feels when they play slot machines), I am still an active on all these platforms, participating the least in the most tangible one: my physical life. I am tired of pretending. I am tired of being tired. I am tired of embodying fake energy to exist in systems that fail me. I am tired of the quagmire. Like Anaïs Nin, I must be a mermaid [because] I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. This particular excerpt from that 2016 entry was difficult for me to read: “The fantasy of what could have been if a certain plan had unfolded will haunt you forever if you do not come to peace with the reality of the situation. I hope you come to terms with reality.” I am not at peace with my current reality. But is anyone?

It’s a bit surreal for my peers to have suddenly started caring about international relations theory. It’s transported me back to my 2012 IR lecture at Northeastern: are you a constructivist or a feminist? Realist or liberalist? Neo? Marxist? The one no one wants you to talk about. Absent upward mobility, this is class warfare. But I cannot be “a singular expression of myself . . . there are too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers” . . . It feels like America’s wake-up call. But I know people will retreat into the comforts of capitalism if Biden wins and, well, we all enter uncharted waters together if the Electoral College re-elects #45. For those who weren’t paying attention: the world is multipolar and we are not the hegemon. Norms matter. People tend to be self-interested and shortsighted. Look to the past in order to understand the future. History, as the old adage goes, repeats itself. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Taxation without representation. Indoctrination. Welcome to the language of political discourse. Students of IR and polisci have long awaited your participation. Too little too late? Plot twist: it’s a lifelong commitment. You must continue to engage irrespective of the election outcome or else we will regress just as quickly as we progress. Now dive into international human rights treaties (International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), political refugees, FGM. No one said it wasn’t dismal. But it’s important. We need buy-in.  

While I am grateful for the continuation of my education, for this extended time with family, for this opportunity to be a campaign manager for two local progressive candidates (driving to Boston to pick up revised yard signs as proof that the work never stops), it would be remiss of me, however, not to admit that I am lonely: I am buried in my books, in the depressing news both nationally and globally, and in precedent-setting Supreme Court cases (sometimes for the worst, e.g. against the preservation of our environment). In my nonexistent free time I work on political asylum cases, essentially creating an enforceability framework of international law, for people fleeing country conditions so unthinkable (the irony of that work when my country falls greater into authoritarianism and oligarchy is not lost on me). I am fulfilling my dream of becoming a human rights lawyer which stems back to middle school. I saw Things I Imagined (thank you Solange). I have held an original copy of the Declaration of Independence that we sent to the House of Lords in 1778 and the Human Rights Act of 1998 while visiting the U.K. Parliamentary Archives as an intern for a Member of Parliament. This success terrifies and exhausts me; it also oxygenizes and saves me. Every decision, every sacrifice, has led me to this point. 

“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?,” Lois Lowry of The Giver rhetorically asks. This post is not intended to be woe is me! I am fortunate to be in this position, to have this vantage point at such an early age, and I understand the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. My life has purpose. I am committed to the work that transcends boundaries; it is larger than life itself. It provides a unique perspective. But it makes it difficult to coexist with people so preoccupied in the drama they create in their lives and the general shallowness of the world we live. It feels like there is no option to pump the brakes on any of this work, especially in light of our current climate, and that pressure oftentimes feels insurmountable. Time is of the essence. It feels, whether true or not, that hardly anyone relates to my experience, so if I don’t carve out this time to write about it, then I am neither recording nor processing it. 

Tonight, in between preparing tomorrow’s coursework, I realize that I have an unprecedented number of questions about life, which startles me because typically I have the answers or at least have a goal in mind that launches me into the next phase of life or contextualizes the current one. These goals, often rooted in this capitalistic framework, in this falsity of “needing” to advance my career as a means of helping people, distract me from asking myself the existential questions, the reasons for why we live and what we fundamentally want our systems to look like; they have distracted me from real grassroots community organizing until now. They distract me from the fact that, like John Mayer, I don’t know which walls to smash; similarly, I don’t know which train to board. Right now feels like we are living through impossible and hopeless times and I don’t want to placate myself into thinking otherwise despite my relatively optimistic outlook on life. As we face catastrophic circumstances – the consequences of this election and climate change (famine, refugees, lack of resources) – I do not want to live in perpetual sadness. I am searching for clarity and direction so I can step into a better, fuller version of myself. 

It’s now 3:33 a.m. Here is the list of questions that I have often asked myself in different stages of life, but recently, until now, I have not been willing to confront for fear that I might not be able to answers them. But I owe it to myself to pose them here so I can have the overdue conversation, the one I know leads me to better understanding myself:

Are you happy? Why or why not?

What do you want the future to hold? What groundwork are you going to do to ensure it happens?

What does your ideal day/week/month/year/decade look like? Why?

With whom do you want to spend your days? Why?

Who do you love and care about? Have you told people you care about that you love them? Does love and vulnerability scare you?

What do you expect of people – of yourself, of your partner, of your family, and of your friends? Should you have those expectations? Why or why not?

What do you feel and why?

What relaxes you? What scares you? What brings you joy?

What do you want to improve? Why?

What do you want to forgive yourself for and why?

Does the desire to reinvent yourself diminish your ability to be present?

Do you have a greater fear of failure or success? Why?

How do you escape the confines of this broken system? How do you break from the guilt of participation in it and having benefited from it?

How do we reconcile our daily lives with the fact that we’re living through an extinction event? This one comes from my friend (hi Jeanne) and a podcast she listened to recently.

How do you help people? How do you help yourself? Are you pouring from an empty cup?

How will you find joy in your everyday responsibilities, in the mission you have chosen for yourself? What, if any, will be the warning signs to walk away from this work, in part or in its entirety? Without being a martyr, do you believe in dying for the cause?

So here are some of the lessons I have learned during this quarantine/past year:

“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” so do not take your eyes off them. Chasing paper does not bring you happiness.

Be autonomous, particularly in your professional life.

Focus on values instead of accolades.

Do everything with intention and honest energy.

Listen to Tracy Chapman’s “Crossroads” & Talkin’ Bout a Revolution for an energy boost and reminder that other revolutionaries have shared and continue to share your fervent passion . . . “I’m trying to protect what I keep inside, all the reasons why I live my life” . . . When self-doubt nearly cripples you and you yearn a few minutes to run away when in reality you can’t escape your responsibilities, go for a drive and queue up “Fast Car” . . . “I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere, so take your fast car and keep on driving.”

With that said, take every opportunity to travel (you can take the work with you if absolutely necessary). Go to Italy. Buy the concert ticket and lose yourself in the moment. Remember that solo excursions are equally as important as collective ones. But, from personal experience, you prefer the company. Find the balance.

Detach from the numbers people keep trying to assign to measure your personhood.

Closely examine the people in your inner circle and ask them for help when you need it.

“And life is just too short to keep playing the game . . . because if you really want somebody [or something], you’ll figure it out later, or else you will just spend the rest of the night with a BlackBerry on your chest hoping it goes *vibration, vibration*” (John Mayer’s Edge of Desire) . . . so love fiercely and unapologetically.

Be specific.

Go to therapy even when life is good.

[compartmentalisinghmpf]

A little bit more context, for anyone who hasn’t been on my blog for the last 3-5 years and maybe read yesterday’s thing and went “what the fuck did I just read”. (For anyone who *cares* - and I can’t blame you if you don’t, this is my psyche, these are my issues, they’re not really anybody else’s problem. I didn’t have to do my auto-psychoanalysis in public.)

Three of the last things I’ve been strongly fascinated by, to the point of writing weird essays and stuff, were (from oldest to newest):

- A book series where a guy becomes a serial killer to prevent other people from starting a war that they think they have to start to prevent an even worse war, while in the background another group of people has also been serial-killing people to prevent war/political unrest for several centuries. (Extremely unfinished essay fragment.)

- A book series where the protagonists get maneuvred into a situation where it feels like they have no choice but to support an authoritarian regime that practices human sacrifice at a large scale (it’s a universe where magic is strongly related to death; and a magical apocalypse is imminent. The regime will probably not prevent it, but may provide a lifeboat for at least some small part of humanity. Or at least that’s the hope here, I guess.) (Unfinished essay, pt. 1. Part 2. Discussion in fic.)

- A tv show that discusses, in endless loops, the merits of killing one person to save many, or killing one set of many to save another set of many, or killing many to save one person. (Relevant tags.)

A lot of the linked stuff is embarrassing, because honestly, much of it doesn’t deserve to be discussed at such length; these are fabricated moral quandaries that don’t actually occur in this form in real life. These are not *useful* discussions to have.

But the consistency with which I’ve kept falling for texts that contain these discussions, especially in the last few years when it got so damn overt, made me look back at older fan obsessions I’ve had, and find similar, though less overt, patterns there, and then of course I *had* to start ruminating on what that could be saying about me - where that might be coming from. It has to come from somewhere, right?

And I may be barking up entirely the wrong tree here. Maybe I’m not subconsciously trying to exonerate my grandparents (and more consciously trying to counteract that by insisting that, “Actually, even the Justified Fictional Good Guys Who Make Hard Choices are still kind of wrong.”) Maybe it’s not tied to my personal history; maybe I’m simply wrestling with understanding a human universal here - because the capacity for atrocity surely is that, even if Germany certainly managed to add a lot of special sauce, back then.

Or maybe I’m dealing with my own latent guilt about participating in the machine of planetary destruction that is capitalism. (Capitalism is trolley problems all the way down.)

I don’t know.

All I know for sure is, I’m really weird about guilt; mostly involving lots of death; occasionally other types, too. Weird to the point that it’s probably driven a lot of my engagement in fandom for decades.

(PS: It was of course unfair to include Agent Cooper in my list of mass murderers. He also obviously doesn’t fit the list in other respects. But he was the first instance of that weird pattern where I like a guy who looks harmless and... “good”, and then. Well. -- I was thirteen, and I think it may very well have warped me for life. And then of course the second guy I ever developed a crush on - Methos, who at the time seemed a mild-mannered grad student - turned out to be a proper mass murderer halfway through. Haha.)

[bunnerz-lalonde]

"Who are your OCs?"

Good question, nobody! Let me fill you in! They can easily be broken up into the following simple categories:

The Stealy Bois

No official name for this grouping, but it consists of:

Devlin Hoss, orphaned thief with a secret heart of gold. Wiry, irritable, surprisingly skilled thief, can't bring himself to cause harm to folks once he gets to know them. Has a nasty habit of getting to know his marks. Will absolutely go to prison to defend his adopted brother.

Winston Grimsley, aka Grom or Grommit. Nobody knows where the nickname came from, Hoss just started calling him that from day one. Dim, but sweet. Because of his lacking intelligence, he was deemed a burden by his family and sent to live with his grandmother. When she died, he ended up in an orphanage. This left him confused and angry as he struggled with the concept of death. Eventually, he got in a fight and ran away to avoid punishment. Ended up as a patsy for a few folks before meeting Hoss.

Skylar Finch, an all-around terrible person who can, will, and probably has robbed his own grandma. Has all of Hoss' skill with none of the scruples. Often taunts Hoss, but does get along well with Grom, which he in turn uses to aggravate Hoss even more. While Hoss and Grom barely scrape by and are constantly running, Finch lives in a mansion and bribes his way out of trouble all the time.

Laurent Manneux, right hand man of "Doctor" Barnaby Tennenbaum. Has zero interest in actual thievery, but he's a passable con man. Unfortunately, he's also a womanizing jackass who makes a habit of crossing powerful people. In particular, after getting caught with the daughter of a wealthy and totally legitimate businessman, he was forced to burn down his house, fake his death, and run away. Now goes by Lawrence, because he's handsome, not creative.

"Doctor" Barnaby Tennenbaum is a totally legitimate doctor who sells totally effective medicine. He uses Lawrence as both part of his show, for product testimonies, and also as an enforcer. Barnaby is utterly useless in a fight or as a mechanic, but Lawrence is skilled in both.

The Adventurers

Parties and solo folks, mostly made for D&D.

Tog, the last human in orc territory. Set out with his hammer, Ilsa, to destroy the orc tribes. Ended up catching the attention of dwarven cleric and orcish prisoner Bernard Greaves when his hammer turned the orc chief's skull into chunky ketchup.

Bernard Greaves, human-raised dwarven cleric. Doesn't know much about his family or heritage, so he set out to discover what he could about dwarves. Not a violent man by any means, but won't stop Tog from knocking a few skulls.

Shalira, an elvish druid cursed by her father. Her life was, until recently, endless torture. Her mind is broken, leaving her unable to truly process fear, sadness, or anger. Instead, she sees the best in everything and everyone at all times, even when there's nothing there to see. Has a tendency to cry without realizing it.

Gossamer, real name unknown. Shalira's half-sister. She is a competent rogue who joined the party to secure an escape after a bar fight went south. After spending time with Shalira, she became curious about why the elf acted the way she did. The two performed an elvish ritual, allowing her to experience several lifetimes of torture in an instant. She refuses to speak about what she saw, but is now consumed by the desire to find and murder her sister's father.

Maribeth Steelbelt, human artificer raised by a dwarf and a gnome, formerly bitter rivals. Despite being a human and thus shorter-lived than the curriculum would account for, she was allowed to attend the College of Artifice. Despite the school focusing on quality of life improvements, Maribeth was obsessed with warfare and weaponry. Her siege weapons showed promise, but the school worried her designs could fall into the wrong hands, so she set out to find a kingdom to sponsor her work instead.

Bak Zekir, the corrupted shell of a man whose desire to study arcana resulted in a near apocalypse. What he thought was an angel bound to a spellbook turned out to be a fragment of a manipulative demon prince. It drove him mad, eventually leading him to found a cult and perform mass sacrifice to make the demon whole again. Something else bound to the book used his weakened mind to convince him to build wards against the demon, binding it to the portal and buying him time to escape. He now seeks to banish the demon and redeem himself, but after a decade and a half as a murderous cult leader, he finds it difficult to be nice.

The Heroes of Breywind

King Archibald Godwynn VII, reigning monarch of Breywind. Fancies himself a king of the people, but is actually probably just an inept king. He constantly abandons his throne to join the front lines under the logic that his god wouldn't let him die. To be fair, he hasn't died yet.

Lewann Cross, knight of Breywind and one of Archibald's generals. He is missing a combined three and a half limbs. Lost his arms to a fight with a slime and his legs in combat. The arcane energy powering his armored prosthetics gives him the ability to cast magic without needing to spend years studying. Due to his impulsive nature, there is a demon trapped inside his mind.

Murdoch, a mysterious creature from across the sea. Nobody is certain where he came from, as he washed ashore with no memory of his past. He has taken Breywind as an adopted homeland and proven himself a faithful ally. He is also nearly immune to toxins and bleeds profusely when subjected to healing magic.

Elise Godwynn, the disowned princess and former heir to the throne of Breywind. Her behavior led her father to publicly disown her, although privately she is still recognized as a member of the royal family. After earning the title of hero, Archibald made use of her status as an excuse to call her to Godwynn Manor without raising suspicion that she may still be his successor. When her father abandons his position, she steps in to rule in his place as part of a council with Lewann and Murdoch.

The Flagbearers

Superheroes! There are a lot of these, so I'll try to keep it short.

Titanium (Original), a super soldier revived using experimental technology during WWI. Over time, he was upgraded until he was more machine than man. Use of Soviet technology turned him rogue in the 80's, where he became briefly known as Iron Fist.

Mister Bold, a propaganda tool turned hero during WWII. Possesses super strength, super speed, and near-invulnerability. Died in the 70's, "returned" briefly in the 90's when a man was hypnotised to think he was Mister Bold.

Shadow, the first openly gay superhero. He was the center of a lot of controversy, resulting in limitations to how many people can sit on the Flagbearers' council. In response, Titanium created a sub council for chapters of the Flagbearers, placing Shadow as the head of national affairs and granting him functionally the same powers as a member of the council. Died in the 80's, name was subsequently retired out of respect.

Vim & Vigor, a married couple consisting of a retired hero (Vim) and reformed villain (Vigor) who lobby for heroic reform, placing an emphasis on reforming villains rather than imprisoning them.

Moxie, a rightfully spiteful vigilante who only uses the name "Moxie" because newspapers named her that as a cutesy way of downplaying her achievements. She was one of the first female heroes, has turned down leadership of the Flagbearers twice, and disappeared without a trace when heroism became a government sanctioned thing. May have returned as a vigilante named Stiletto, but there's no proof.

Titanium (Current), following the retirement of Titanium, a student of Flagbearers Academy took the name, much to the general offense of everyone. He was allowed to keep it after proving himself a competent leader.

220, a super genius who mysteriously appeared in the Flagbearers' system one day among their hero records and was immediately accepted as a student at the Academy. Has since gone on to share leadership with Titanium.

Inkwell, easily the strongest hero in history. She possesses an ancient artifact, which molds itself to the will of its wielder. With it, she is able to bend reality to her will and do as she pleases. Each time she uses this power, she risks being sucked into a gap in reality where former wielders are compelled to battle for sole command over all of time and space. In other dimensions, however, this artifact has no power whatsoever.

Flyby (Original) and Flyby (Current) are basically the same, they're heroes on jetpacks, one just got old and retired.

[clementine-lominsan]

WHY I AM NOT A CONSERVATIVE

2018-12-02 

In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience. 

Why am I not a liberal? Because I admire the luxuriant giant tree of civilization, including its roots. So it seems being a conservative is the “natural” answer. But what does it mean to be a “conservative”? What do conservatives “conserve”?

A conservative today is usually an economic liberal. He promotes free market whose major principle is free trade and free market. The goal of all this, is actually nothing else than the goal of a socialist: the increase of efficiency, the increase of employment, the increase of living standard, the increase of literacy, the decrease of fetal mortality and the advancement of technology.

We are told that the increase of total social wealth is what actually made these goals possible. Surely I do not oppose the increase of total social wealth, but what does that mean? In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the word “wealth” usually means one thing, the material profit. As the classical liberals boasted, “it was the capitalist who created the condition where any socialist activism is possible”, and “without capitalism, 80% of world’s people would not be there!”

But is humanity better just because we have more people? Does the happiness of humanity hike with the sharp improvement of the material life? No matter how much the material condition improves, one could not help wondering why, despite all this material progress, the spiritual, or mental wealth is shrinking.

The rise of suicide rate in the more materially wealth parts of the world, and the prevalence of drug abuse and the political consensus of both left and right wings on pot legalization, the trend in legalizing non-hetereosexual “marriage”, and the vulgarization of popular culture.

Even worse, the mind and the behavior of the deracinated masses are now being engineered by social media giant corporations. One may argue “but this is not the intention of free market capitalism!” But the road to hell is paved good intentions, and moreover, I am not sure urging young kids to engage in computer games with gambling functions (“microtransaction”) is “good” intention.

The obsession with the material, is perhaps inherent in the bourgeois mind. Historically, they have no real sense of loyalty to any land, any king, any belief, any community or even any family. Nor do they have any fixed social function. As the great conservative thinker Edmunk Burke put it, “the laws of commerce…are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” (Maybe Burke and his students believe in Hermes, the God of Commerce? “Orthodox Christians” without charity, what a paradox!)

In other words, they are materialists. What does it take to go from this kind of materialist to the Marxist dialectic materialist? Hegelian dialectics, the black magic of sophistry, that is. Besides, after the rise of industrial capitalism, there has been more and more giant companies which is not actually owned by any private person. Yes, everyone can buy their stock shares, but what is the separation of management from private ownership, aside from being the sheer violation of the private property right?

Of course, usurers need this, so they can concentrate their attention in the financial industry, which makes everyone else “proletarian” – whose only possession is the labor-power. The ideological and economic continuity means industrial capitalism is the prelude of socialism. Surely there are free-marketeers, and there are mainly two sorts of them, “minarchists” and anarchists.

The so-called “minarchists” ask for such as minimal modern sovereign state: it has a standing army, a nationalized police and a centralized legal system. One has to remember the first economic liberals, i.e. Physiocrats called for an Enlightened tyrant – it means compared to the ancient free states supported by pious and loyal people, the so-called “minarchy” is nothing but a tyrannical modern state supported by deracinated masses: the instrument of a Leninist state is already there.

As for anarcho-capitalism, there is no anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism; there is only lawless anarchy, where physical violence and “smart” backstabbing are the eternal law of survival. In reality, the so-called minarchy is being practiced, and here we are, bound with quantity over quality, efficiency without purpose, property without ownership, and snobbery without organicity: the greatness of a modern industrial capitalism!

The eternal state with its permanent laws, seems to be ingrained in the mind of the eternal Anglo conservative, and conservatives in other spheres of culture are believing in it as well, thanks to the neoconservative Wilsonian order. It is said, that only by trial-and-error, we will know what works the best.

It is also said that we must preserve the traditional political institutions unconditionally. These two are in fact contradicting each other. The change in the internal and external, material and spiritual environments, requires the relevant changes in the social and political institutions, so a civilization can survive.If we see certain political institutions as god-given eternal entities, the fate of the Late Qing Empire will be repeated: the state is getting paralyzed by European colonists, peasant rebels, cult terrorists and radical revolutionaries – from 1851 to 1863, China’s population declined by more than 200 million! Why? Because they were overly obsessed with their ancient political traditions without making any effort to revitalize them.

As T. S. Eliot put it, “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” This political sloth has proven to be causal to the repeated defeat of conservatisms in history. Surely, many conservatives care words more than reality, so much so that they would sacrifice anything for their “political values”. They are too persistent on political values but sometimes too flexible on moral values. I wonder how much this overintellectualization is related to “sola fide” of Martin Luther.

It is the central conservative dogma that the state can do little, if nothing, to promote moral thoughts and behavior. Edmund Burke once said, “It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else.”

But is it true? Centuries before Burke, St. Augustine of Hippo believed that the state simultaneously serves the divine purposes of chastening the wicked and refining the righteous. Many conservatives argue, based on the minarchist doctrine, that the state is an evil, but a necessary one. Meanwhile, they also argue that the state should be impartial, and by “impartial”, they mean amoral. From the theoretical point of view, anyone committed to the mission of promoting evil must start his adventure by convincing evil is “necessary”: “Only Catholics soaked in canon law and papal superstition maintained the old prohibitions against usury”, wrote Cotton Mather; “If we did not nuke Japan, we would have suffered unbearable losses”, argued the 21st century neoconservative.

Even worse, conservatives like Andrew Sullivan are actually the pioneers of various postmodern progressive social movements. So, political amorality becomes political anti-morality. Again, if one looks back into the history of the progress of such a political ideal, despite of its ostensibly just claims, what it has wrought us is one license to vices after another. Virtues need no license, because anyone with moral conscience know that virtues are hard to maintain so there is no real legal restriction on them.

By contrast, an interesting observation from the generation educated under Estado Novo or its Spanish counterpart is said to be extremely polite and respectful. “It can do very little positive good in this”? History seems to disagree. For a traditionalist, as opposed to a conservative, what must be permanent are the moral values, and the political values can be flexible and the political institutions must serve the purpose to preserve the moral values, not the other way around.

Needless to say, the flexibility on moral values has cost conservatives a lot, besides the well-known political defeats. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once said, “the urban conservative…is nothing but an inhibited ‘progressive’.” From Lawrence v. Texas to the eventual legalization of non-heterosexual marriage, one sees this pattern, especially from the opinions of the conservative judges, such as this opinion from Clarence Thomas on Lawrence v. Texas, “Although he agreed with Scalia’s dissent for the most part, Thomas felt obliged to write separately to point out that the law was ‘silly’ and should be repealed”.

Is this law really “silly”? One would wonder why CDC stopped publishing data about AIDS back in the years of Obama administration. The progressives are convinced missionaries of their progressive previsions, while conservatives are half-hearted followers of social traditions.In reality, I really do not think any Old Whig could tell others to obey the traditional political values when they themselves were the revolutionaries who destroyed the legitimate ancient institution via the “Glorious” Revolution. Those “eternal” Angloes who boast about Magna Carta never pay any tribute to Alcuin of York: so much respect for tradition! So it is not really surprising that conservatives are just Fabian progressives – progressives with a 10 year jet lag.

Thus, it is not difficult to understand why conservatism lacks real content and has no actual proposal. The conservatives today are more radical than the Radicals back in the 19th century. Paul Joseph Watson, “the defender of gay rights and women rights against bigotry”, once said, “conservatism is the new counter-culture!” By that I guess he means it is the new urban fashion among spoiled middle class kids. Maybe in 10 years, Kanye West will become the new William F. Buckley Jr. yelling “Stop!” in his hip-hop songs.

Why am I not a conservative? Because conservatism is insufficient for the mission of restoration and regeneration: there is little to “conserve” in modernity and postmodernity (or, “neo-modernity”). In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience.

[scuttleboat]

2 meta combo: Bellamy/baton + leadership themes after s4

I. Some disorganized thoughts on Bellamy and the hollow baton…

So I had a particular reading of the presence of the bottle prop in the end scene of 413 and didn’t think about it again afterwards, but this week I’ve read a lot of talk about what it means. So I decided to spill my reaction into one giant post. This is my general contribution to the broad discussion of the Baton as (one of several) symbolic prop for Bellamy’s character state. FYI it should go without saying that anything I write is in the context of being my opinion, but also I speak in declarative sentences a lot because I tend to believe my opinions pretty confidently.  To the point:  I don’t think the bottle is empty bc Bellamy is getting a fresh start.* The straightforward meaning is this: the bottle of liquor is drained when Bellamy gets to it because, as a symbol of power, it’s literally and metaphorically empty. Circumstances have rendered it sad and meaningless. A hollow consolation. It’s like… a really explicit piece of visual irony.

((* fyi, the positive hopeful element in that scene is not the bottle, it’s Raven’s steadfastness + Bellamy honoring Clarke’s memory through survival.))

Just going off of a lot of initial fandom reactions I’ve read on tumblr, some fans were so excited about him getting this baton at the finale that they missed that it was empty. And now that folks are discussing it being empty, there’s like this desire to see it still as a wholly good thing. To hold onto that excitement. Which I totally understand, because it seems like such a romantic idea. That he could inherit the thing that Jaha and all the Chancellors in history had. There’s appeal in that. But… he didn’t, and it’s not–emptiness is not a positive symbol in western media, guys. The bottle is empty because the Baton is a hollow dead object now. No more chancellors, no more Jaha, no more Ark ambitions of old. It represents a past dream that is out of sight of the current characters. He gets to a place where this potential symbol of leadership is in reach, and what’s it to him? This symbol that meant so much to Jaha has been reduced to a passing curiosity by a window. It’s not part of his future. Bellamy can’t preserve it and he can’t even drink it, just like he can’t act on the future of the rest of his people when he’s stuck up in space. His family is out of reach and the girl he loved is gone and the promise of a fresh start on Earth (written! right there on the bottle!) turned out to be an empty promise. They never had a chance… the world was gonna end in 8 months regardless of his and Clarke’s choices. This show is so fucking sad you guys. This is why I made myself cry writing about Bellamy in the Ark after I watched the finale.

The Baton is a piece of visual irony because the bottle now represents the hollowness (the ending) of the thing it used to represent in s1. They could have had Bellamy pick up any prop that had a positive and hopeful indication of his role, but they chose to give him the saddest and darkest prop they could. It’s marginally less depressing than a handgun or a photo. He picks it up but because it’s empty for him. (unlike the friend/family standing beside him, who together represent the true hope and the final image of the delinquents’ fortitude.)   That empty hollow bottle is the fragility of life and the tenuousness of survival in the face of a burning fireball of nature fucking you over (note: also a big whopping symbol visible in the same shot.) It’s the UNFAIRNESS of everything that has happened to these kids since the show started–they tried so hard and got this far and the bottle (the dream of Earth)–is *fucking empty*. They never had a chance on that world. It was always going to end.

[read a lot more below the cut, including meta #2.]

In terms of leadership this is the irony of the hollow Baton: Bellamy, who tried so hard to be a leader who was good and strong, and struggled to find his way, has finally has grown into a person who has a more balanced leadership style. This was foreshadowed in him letting go of Octavia and thematically cemented by him letting Clarke go in 413. Thus meaning he is finally “ready” by The 100’s morbid storytelling standards, finally balanced. Except now he’s faced with a situation where the ONLY thing he actually is in charge of is 6 people in a ghost-filled space bucket. Ding ding ding, it’s irony time! Whoo. XD …Meanwhile the world burns below and his love sacrificed herself…brings us to the other half of the irony, where i agree with pretty much the whole shipdom: they never got to have that drink. Because he didn’t carpe diem, didn’t open himself to the person he loves (thanks @velvet-tread). The universe is having one sick laugh at Bellamy Blake in 413, visually epitomized in that bottle.

I know my dramatic self has repeated this several times, but for real now ok— the Baton is literally empty bc it’s metaphorically empty. Drained of purpose. The old ways are no good, they’re surviving on their own, together. New generation. What matters here and now is that Bellamy and his friends will fight to stay alive as long as they can, even as hope burns away. They have each other and they have time so they’re going to stick together and try to survive. But what does the symbol of the Baton mean to that equation? To their future? Nothing–it’s empty. He’s holding it, accepting leadership, even as it’s a working like a visual pun.

ALL THAT BEING SAID---I do think it's fair to say that it being empty has little to no meaning aside from the fact that it was already drunk in an earlier episode and they needed to keep continuity. In that case, the only symbol that matters is the fact that it says "BATON" on it. Which is legit. BUT if we're going to speculate that its emptiness has meaning, then I'm going to say it definitely has a tragic and ironic meaning.

II. That age old leadership contest this fandom is obsessed with? After 4 seasons I think the point of The 100 is that it’s futile and nobody ‘wins’ bc it’s actually an endless struggle of self that C,B,K,A and J all wrestle with, where the “person” they’re competing with is their own failures until they individually learn to be wiser. That’s why the person who ended up in charge was the young interloper who wasn’t even a player til now….bc our main politically-driven characters aren’t in the story to win the leadership prize in the eyes of fandom, they’re in the story to grow.

I’m gonna go right to the explicit symbols of leadership in 413 and point out this: as of 413’s ending, Clarke’s *not* in charge of the future of their people and Bellamy is *not* in charge of the future of their people–Octavia is. While the show gave Clarke a heroic “death” and gave Bellamy friendship + an empty liquor bottle of used up dreams, Octavia was given the clothes / headpiece of the commander and stepped out to make a speech in front of the last of humanity. She has the support of the former leaders and the faith of the remaining majority. ((Whether you like Octavia as commander or not, that is what’s happening on the show right now. FWIW, I was hoping all season that it’d end with Indra.)) While Octavia is probably gonna be spending 6 years off screen going through what Clarke and Bellamy have gone through the last 4 seasons (i.e. emotional tests of being in power), Bellamy and Clarke both have a *reprieve* of leadership. AND ISN’T THAT KIND OF AMAZING? Bellamy only has to be strong and protective for six of his friends–that small team stuff is right up his wheelhouse. He doesn’t have to make decisions of mass death that cause him a season and a half of self-recrimination and doubt. Likewise, Clarke only has to be strong and protective for one person–she doesn’t have to make those mass death choices that cause her to break down crying or have horrific nightmares. She can love one person, unreservedly, without being torn apart by disparate loyalties.

One of the major themes for all the main characters on this show (except Octavia, who is on a different track) has been “How do I learn be a good leader?“ Well, I think 413 wrapped that up with a pretty bow–if the “bow” is the head/heart convo, Clarke’s choice to sacrifice herself, the Baton, and Octavia’s commander wardrobe. Honestly I could make a whole separate and much longer post about leadership as a journey for Clarke, Bellamy, Abby, Kane, and Jaha (guest starring Lexa and Roan as static roadmarks), but not today. I’ll just summarize and say that I think the last 4 seasons have been about the maturation process of Clarke and Bellamy’s leadership skills, starting as people who have the traits but not the wisdom/practice. Then pile on 4 seasons of triumphs and mistakes. By 413, Bellamy’s maturation process ends in letting go of attachment and Clarke’s maturation process ends in self sacrifice (foreshadowed by her taking the nightblood in 408).

I really really hope that the show uses the timeline to age up the characters in a way that the writers move on from this leadership question. That journey is done–Clarke, Bellamy, Kane, and Abby have all gone through a lot. When we meet them again, I don’t want to see them question their decisions every episode. Let them own their choices and move forward!! They’re grown-ups now omg. Give them all new dilemmas please.

If this is really a reboot for the show and for the characters then let’s tell a new story. “What will we do to survive?” is always gonna be the center of the series but I hope the writers approach it in a new way, that it’s not about the toll of constantly escalating power. That journey is done.  It’s been told, and by the end of s4 our favorites have all grown and changed as a result of it. When the survivors emerge from the bunker neither Clarke nor Bellamy will be in charge–so I hope the show takes this opportunity to try new things for their characters. For example, explore the drama of small group politics. Explore family in a way that isn’t just about conflict. Explore discovering love again when everything you used to understand about your loved one has changed. Explore new people and new alliances and new tests. Let’s see ADVENTURE again.

By s5, Clarke and Bellamy are free of the agonies of traditional leadership, now responsible only to their small family clusters. We’ve never seen them this separate from group obligation. I want to see what kind of people that reprieve has made them. Please @the100writers, show us the characters growing new directions.

[theragamuffininitiative]

Christian Films and Misc Rambling Thoughts on the Subject that Might or Might Not be Actually Connected

@cogentranting​ At some point, years from now, when all else is turned to dust and the sun has set for the last time, a post for this reply, stating I will reply in a longer fashion later (which would actually be now) shall appear. I will likely delete it out of pure spite. Stupid mobile app uploads.

I haven’t seen God’s Not Dead. Or God’s Not Dead 2. I should. Not because I just want to, or because It Is The Inspired Word Of Our Lord™ (hahahah it’s not guys, ok), but because of my overall interest an involvement in the world of film. I should be informed.

Also, I appreciate the sarcasm. XD I hope that was sarcasm or now I look really stupid but you’re going to get an earful either way, so it works out.

So let’s get to it:

I hate the Christian Film Industry™

Whew. There. I said it. Pray for my salvation.

Why? So, soooo many reasons.

1. The Sacrifice of Art in the Name of ‘Message.’

I, for one, want to know why the Christian church is constantly smashing down on the creative outputs of their members for not being enough about God, or published by Thomas Nelson, or advocated by Willie Roberts. Why. We would rather squelch the heartfelt, beautiful, God-given art produced by our brothers and sisters for not showing a clear Conversion Experience rather than be amazed at the ability God has allowed us to have to make such fantastic, whimsical, thought-provoking, emotionally-resonant things.

This is point number one because it. is. my. biggest. issue.

“Message films are rarely exciting. So by their very nature, most Christian films aren’t going to be very good because they have to fall within certain message-based parameters. And because the Christian audience is so glad to get a “safe, redeeming, faith-based message,” even at the expense of great art, they don’t demand higher artistic standards.” ~ Dallas Jenkins, movie reviewer and director of The Resurrection of Gavin Stone??? (Imma have to check back with you later on this, but the quote still stands on its own.)

“We have the makings of a movement that can change this culture. I honestly believe this. But I also believe the first step toward establishing the groundwork for a vibrant, relevant cultural movement based on scriptural thought is to stop producing “Christian films” or “Christian music” or “Christian art” and simply have Christ-followers who create great Art.” ~ Scott Nehring, in his book You Are What You See: Watching Movies Through a Christian Lens.

“If we are trying to evangelize, the fact that most Christian-themed movies are torn to shreds by non-Christian critics becomes an issue. If, however, we just really want to see our fantasies validated on screen, then we will write-off these poor reviews as “persecution.”” ~ Andrew Barber, in his article “The Problem with Christian Films.”

On a similar note, I want to know what the Mormon church is doing that the Christian church is not. Every time I turn around, I discover that another of my favorite artists, whether it be in film or elsewhere, is a professing Mormon:

musicians Imagine Dragons, the Killers, and Lindsey Stirling

authors Brandon Sanderson, Shannon Hale, Heather Dixon, and Brandon Mull

animator Don Bluth

actress Amy Adams and actor Will Swenson (both formerly)

etc, the list goes on

Hi, my Mormon friends. What is your secret. What ways of encouraging art and artists do you employ that my Baptist upbringing, and the Conservative Christian community in general, is so sorely lacking in?

2. The Christian Culture’s Subsequent Villainization of Hollywood.

This past Christmas, my sister gifted me a book titled Behind the Screen, “Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture.”

I sat down after all the gift-giving was done and read the first three sections before the holiday meal was served. But let me quote from the introduction which had me “Amen!”-ing and punching my fist to the sky every third word:

“We obsess about “the culture” endlessly; we analyze and criticize. But we can’t figure out anything to do but point an accusatory finger at Hollywood... Blaming Hollywood for our cultural woes has become a habit... Casting Hollywood as the enemy has only pushed Hollywood farther away. And the farther Hollywood is from us, the less influence we have on our culture. We’ve left the business of defining human experience via the mass media to people with a secular worldview.... In pushing away secular Hollywood, haven’t we turned our backs on the very people Christ called us to minister to - the searching and the desperate, those without the gospel’s saving grace and truth?”

Btw, if this subject is something you are interested in, I highly recommend this book. Written by creatives and executives in the film world (including one of the writers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the producer of Home Improvement, and even the multi-credited Ralph Winters, among others), it’s a frank, beautiful, and challenging read for artists, Christians, and film buffs.

The point here is that the church culture says if it doesn’t come from Sherwood, or have Kirk Cameron or Ducky Dynasty in it, or have a conversion sequence, it isn’t Christian and therefore Christians should not view or encourage it in any way. This. Is. Crap. Pardon my French.

Beauty can come from imperfection.  Even unregenerate hearts still bear the image of the Divine and are capable of producing so much worthwhile and significant art. Which leads to...

3. Guess What? Secular Film Companies Make Quality Faith Films Too??!

Idk what I should even say here, but I’m just going to go with the one shining example I always think of: Dreamworks’ Prince of Egypt. It is purely a work of art from any standard, and that is the epitome of what Christians should be looking for in their endeavors to create good film. PoE is gorgeously animated, seamlessly directed, well-scripted, morally driven, more Biblically and historically accurate than you would believe (and where it falls down on direct representation, it remains true to theme and character), etc. etc. etc.

I could go on for ages about how much I adore this film. (Joseph, King of Dreams, is also noteworthy, but nearly up to par with the craftsmanship of its predecessor.

I mean

just look at

the art

4. I Do Like Some Films Made By ‘Christian’ Companies

Idk, I might step on people’s toes or surprise you by which of these I actually approve of, but here we go:

I like Fireproof. I have many issues with it, but overall it is a fairly well-made, Hallmark-style emotional flick. The acting leaves much to be desired, but it’s a decent bit of showmanship, story, and truth.

I do not like Facing the Giants. Give me Blind Side any day of the week, except don’t because... sports.

However, both Courageous (some actual real life dialogue and not a completely happily ever after, whaaaat???! Oh, but token conversion experience, of course), and the early-and-forgotten Flywheel (which, although low in camera quality and acting, is actually an enjoyable story), come in as films I would sit down and watch at least a second time.

Risen is well-made and acted and has some establishment of genuine Craft. However, as far as story plots go, a lot was sacrificed. The mountain-top encounter with Christ was, while perhaps the most generally cliche piece of story, to me the most heartfelt and provocative. After that...the film kind of ended in mediocrity. Like...what did the characters do after the credits rolled.

I actually really enjoy Mom’s Night Out. The manic theme almost kills me, but the quiet and the reveal at the end is worth sitting through to see.

And I appreciate Luther. I don’t watch it often, because I personally can’t stomach the more violent aspects (the reason I haven’t/don’t watch The Passion or End of the Spear.) But Luther is a great biographical film, and I would encourage anyone studying Catholic and/or Protestant history, especially Martin Luther, to watch it. This is a Film in both art, message, and class.

Tbh, I’ve been avoiding most of the other Christian films, which is why I won’t talk about them there.

5. You Don’t Have To Slap A Jesus Fish Bumper Sticker On It To Be Christ-Honoring

Walden Media is a prime example, I believe, of what Christians in the film industry should be doing. I mean, they’re not perfect at all, but they are not sacrificing art for message - or vice versa for that matter. While not strictly a Christian Film group, Walden is founded and run by a majority of Christian Conservatives who are actively seeking to make quality and wholesome films for people of all diversities. They’ve had a few flops and several more that just didn’t quite live up to their potential, but they also brought us

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and the one I will never stop talking about:

Amazing Grace.

Well-crafted films, put out by *gasp* an assortment of believers and non-believers. Art. Good films. Not Messages dressed up in makeup with a classy Instagram filter and a 30-day challange booklet to get your revival outfit on.

In looking through this stuff, I just found this article, which is a superb read and really gets at the heart of what I feel, and am very badly trying to communicate:

Why Faith-Based Films Hurt Religion

So.

When Christian Films start being an actual representation of creative community and the artistic talents God has given to us as personal and spiritual gifts, rather than a cheap way to try to force morality on Hollywood and on our neighbors without ever leaving the confines of our Bible Boxes in case we might get soiled, I may start appreciating the Christian Film Industry™. Until then??? I’ll stand behind my fellow creatives and my fellow believers and hope and work for the best.

Lastly, two things:

Christians Can Enjoy Secular Film Productions.

I would even argue that they should. We were created by a Creator God, who takes pride and joy in making beautiful things, in making each of us. And we are made in His image. We are creators as well, we make art all the time. Scripture tells us to worship God in everything we do. The movement of making “Christian Films for Christian Audiences because of Christian Reasons” is missing the point entirely. We as creatives are not here to make God Art, we are here to make art that glorifies God

Christ Does Not Need Hollywood. However, Hollywood Does Need Christ.

“While many missionaries travel to remote villages in Africa or South America to spread Christianity, [Karen] Covell believes her calling—her mission field, if you will—is right here in Los Angeles, in an industry that many of her fellow Christians find immoral or even downright sinful, both for its on-screen depictions of sex and drugs and the real-life sex, drugs, and other temptations that exist behind the scenes. Covell, who was a film producer in the early 1980s, says "the church did not get how I could justify being a Christian in Hollywood, and Hollywood did not get how I would follow God. It was a divide." It was nearly impossible to meet other Christians working in the industry, let alone ones who would express their faith openly. "I said, 'The church hates Hollywood, Hollywood hates the church. There's got to be some way to bridge that divide.'" - in an article by Jennifer Swan.

As I said in my original little “about me” tag response, I have felt called to ministry in this world. Whether it be film or live theater, that world is calling to me, both in its creative endeavors, and in its desperate need for the hope, truth, life, and light of Christ. Actors and directors in Hollywood and on Broadway are in as much need of the grace of our Lord as the starving orphans in the unreached people groups on the other side of the planet - same as your next door neighbor.

If Christians continue to tie themselves down, and group themselves together, cutting themselves off from the culture and the culture off from them, then we are doing absolutely no heavenly or earthly good to anyone.

So, you see, it’s not just the artistry (or, so often, lack thereof) in the Christian Film Industry™ that gets to me.

It’s the fact that the film media culture is a people group that the church as a whole is ignoring. We are ignoring the impact Hollywood has on the world around us and still trying to be relevant to that world, which is counter-productive and just plain silly.

It’s the fact that I see actors, actresses, producers, writers, who are obviously searching for the Something that will fill the void in their souls, and their primary exposure to Christianity and Christ - the only One who can satisfy them - is the Christian Film Industry™, which is largely full of broad and meaningless substance because heaven help us we should talk about something real, and then just plain bad art.

I believe God has called us to higher things than this.

Higher art, loving to create as he lovingly created us.

High impact, going deeper into the issues of our culture and our nature to address and satisfy problems and needs felt be every human, not just the church-goers who will show up for Sherwood’s next big thing.

So, yes, my pet peeve cracked from its proverbial nutshell:

I have issues with the Christian Film Industry

[skygatecreations]

what up i was tagged by @kaitenkenburokuren

RULES: Answer all the questions, add one of your own and tag as many people as there are questions

not tagging that many ppl either.

not taggin no one because I pmuch know all of em pretty well and they all busy being awesome at life. but thank for the tag, these fun despite how smartass I sound.

under cut lmao <- same bro

1. Coke or pepsi? coke <-same

2. Disney or dreamworks? Disney has a higher hit vs. miss ratio with me, but Dworks got some good ones.

3. Coffee or tea? Coffee bro.

4. Books or movies? prolly movies. usually animated sh** that I use as ‘inspiring background noise’ and don’t actually watch a lot of the time.

5. Windows or mac? Windows cause it’s what I know best. Also I don’t tend to  like Apple’s monopoly-ish-ness.

6. DC or marvel? Marvel pm strictly because I like the movies. No clue on comics...Also ol X-men cartoon Storm was my homegirl as a youngling. I honestly think she might have subliminally created the thing I have for white hair lol

7. Xbox or playstation? Playstation cause that’s what fell into my lap.

8. Dragon age or mass effect? no.

9. Night owl or early riser? night owl <- same

10. Cards or chess? cards...but preferably neither because I’m uncannily terrible at non-video games...k actually pretty bad at vid games too but the nons...Jesus Christ 8/

11. Chocolate or vanilla? Are we talking ice cream because that kinda important op. like get yer sh** together...anyway if yes, then Chocolate.

12. Vans or converse? probably neither. not usually my look...also I’m picky as Hell.

13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash or Adaar? ...what you just call me bro?

14. Fluff or angst? angst in certain doses. Also I’m picky even with that.

15. Beach or forest? both.

16. Dogs or cats? both

17. Clear skies or rain? both kinda - no like...that patchy sort of cloud+sun after it rains that makes the light look all awesome and sh**

18. Cooking or eating out? eating out, but if I learn to cook more it’ll probably be a harder call.

19. Spicy food or mild food? mostly mild. There if like, 1 at times very spicy food that hurts me but tastes freaking amazing lol but been trying some slightly spicer that my normal jam foods lately.

20. Halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas? can’t decide. strangely apathetic at this...slightly concerned about myself now. thanks for the existential crisis, man. 

21. Would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot? maybe a lil too hot tbh. just increase water intake and *thumbs up*. cause a lil too cold makes the migraines worse. like ‘difference between vom-ing or not’ worse.

22. If you could have a superpower, what would it be? Flight bro.

23. Animation or live action? Animation. like good 2D Disney-ish stuff, not this eyesore bullsh** on CN these days.

24. Paragon or renegade? Apache attack Helicopter. idk.

25. Baths or showers? shower <- same...I like baths but I don’t have a plug for the tub so they don’t happen much...

26. Team cap or team ironman? shut up I haven’t seen that movie yet.

27. Fantasy or sci-fi? depends on the mood.

28. Do you have three or four favorite quotes, if so, what are they?

‘Fall seven times, Stand up eight’, ‘Don’t be afraid of dying, be afraid of not living’, ‘Fly as far into the crash as you can’ (or ‘drive’ if we talkin cars) ‘You panic, you die.’ ...idk, a lot of stuff I heard from people that are generally a lot braver and cooler than I am lol.

29. Youtube or netflix? Youtube. Can’t afford netflix. check yo privilege damn.

30. Harry potter or percy jackson? HP. not even close.

31. When do you feel accomplished? *bitter, empty laughter*

32. Star wars or star trek? Not a space opera fan but if I have to choose, Star Wars all the way. because it’s a little LESS space opera.

33. Paperback or hardback books? hardback but can’t say no to all the free classic ebooks that I’ve been finding. Bro. Read the Jungle Book(s). the REAL ones. That mess is epic. All movies made of it so far are SH** and it will anger you once you learn how sh** they really are.

34. Horror or rom-com? Rom-com if must choose. because I have an overactive imagination and I will have f-ed up dreams. My sleep pattern is sh** enough as it is lol...and yet I listen to a lot of ‘true scary story’ narrations...

35. TV shows or movies? tv shows because easy background noise

36. Favourite animal? MANY. Dogs, cats, horses, sharks...

37. Favourite genre of music? MANY. like...only criteria is “do I like it?’. notables are classic rock, epic soundtrack-y sh**, and I’m super hooked on synthwave right now...which basically means I like 80′s synth music...

38. Least favourite book? idk, if I dislike something that much I stop reading/don’t read. I guess Hunger Games series qualifies tho compared to everything I’ve read. Not a bad story, but I really...don’t like first-person perspective...so cringe. sooo shamelessly made for self-insert fantasies.

39. Favourite season? fall I guess.

40. Song that’s currently stuck in your head? toss up between Neo-tokyo and Running in the Night (totally freaking different vibes? told you I like a lot of sh**)

41. What kind of pyjama’s do you wear? usually-loose camisoles and soft pants/shorts, preferably of Jersey material. I dislike fuzzy ‘warm’ sh**. let the blankets do their damn job lol

42. How many existential crises do you have on an average day? my whole life is one big existential crisis.<- SAME BRO

43. If you can only choose one song to be played at your funeral, what would it be? Bruh that dark.

44. Favourite theme song to a TV show? tbh AS a theme song? ...probably Yuichi ikusawa’s WARRIORS from one of the Yugioh openings. Pretty damn epic. only up to a certain point of the full song tho (opening cut is fine). eventually he starts doing this weird actually laughable thing with his voice and ruins it.

45. Harry potter movies or books? Books. movies are good for book movies though.

46. You can make your OTP become canon but you’ll forget that tumblr exists. will you do it? OTPs are great but I have friends on tumblr and some that I I’m having active interactions with and are expecting stuff from me. I sacrifice the OTP for my duties. *salutes*

47. Do you play an instrument and if so, what is it? *more bitter laughing*

48. What is the worst way to die? anything slow. Bonus bad points if you are alone and have time to think of your fam and friends and how your end will effect them...that got dark again. moving on :)

49. If you could be entirely invisible for a day, what would you do? idk man, maybe just go around looking for wild animals to hang out with without their knowledge...or the risk of being mauled. Or go places I’d never go by myself because ghetto-as-hell and just chill.

50. If you could have personally witnessed anything in history what would it be? The first hop of the Wright Flyer. Dawn of powered flight bitches. 

51. If you could understand animals but you could never understand humans again, would you? ...bruh. No. like I know a lot of people would think that would be cool and sh** but if you think ‘people just don’t get you’ now, imagine if you really were incapable of communication. like...sh** would suck. And you’d have to be a hermit somewhere with no money cause no/extremely limited livelihood options...is my adult showing? I feel like my adult is showing.

52. What is your most favourite album currently? I don’t really do albums. I pick and choose what I like.

53. What is your favourite TV show character? lots of them. usually the dudes with complex/’juicy’ backstories...which is pretty boring because a lot of people would probably say that. because those tend to be the most interesting.

54. What is something you were obsessed with as a child? doggies idk

55. Do you have any tattoos/piercings and if not would you like any? just single earlobe piercings.

56. Biggest pet peeves? hard to call. a lot of things annoy me lol. maybe people not taking responsibility for their own actions/bullsh**.

57. A place you’ve always wanted to visit? Close between Germany or Japan, I got family both places. Japan narrowly wins.

58. cheesecake or carrot cake? carrot cake if it good...and doesn’t have deer turds- I mean raisins. ...I think I got all of them? idk you see one I missed lemme know.

[alovelyspark-blog]

MARCELO JIMENEZ’S TAPES

IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER  --- (found in the assignment & the consequence) 

ENTRY #16 

After months of secrets, subterfuge, and indoctrination, they brought me into their fold. This place is... elaborate to say the least. Despite the modernistic visage, the research they have been doing here seems to date back to over a century ago. This place has history and from what I can grasp, this facility is only one branch of many. Institutions, powerful families; their reach seems grand, and therefore the possibilities for me seem equally as rich. Clearly my own unique methods at Beacon have piqued their interest, and I am most grateful for the opportunity. 

Most of what the researchers have been working on, however, seems archaic by today’s stands. 

They told me budget is of no concern; results are the only thing that matter. Juggling duties here and at the hospital seems manageable, but Ruben... Comparatively insignificant, but even at his young age his studies are remarkable. Perhaps one day he will even assist me with my work here. 

ENTRY #31

After surviving the fire incident and subsequent abuse from his parents, it’s a miracle Ruben can function at all. 

His work comes from a place that isn’t motivated by fear or money or social standing... his motives are more... pure. I would say that he is obsessed with the chance to re-live and re-mold reality so he can be with her again. 

His scarring is heavy, both physically and emotionally, but he longs for his lost sister. 

His love for her borders almost on an incestuous level, but as long as it provides motivation, so be it. 

ENTRY #120

His demeanor has turned far too aggressive and his techniques even more perverse. Da Vinci would dissect corpses to further his anatomical studies, but what Ruben has done goes beyond... Demanding his subjects be “aware” as he dissects them to truly see how the mind reacts. He’s more of a butcher than an artist. 

But we must remain scientists above all. I had taught him from a young age that the end shall justify the mean, but I could not have predicted things to be this extreme. 

Mobius has learned of his involvement, due to my carelessness. I’ve asked they bring him on board to assist in development. Perhaps offering him better facilities and support will refocus him and stave off his gruesome proclivities. 

ENTRY #133

Ruben’s experimentation has demanded more and more subjects and, sad to say, they’re suffering as much as - if not more than - his previous patients. Fortunately, Beacon and this city offer no shortage of expendable subjects. I should feel guiltier than I do, but my Hippocratic Oath was abandoned long ago. The scientific and medical potential of the work is too great to be denied. 

Mobius has also offered me a respectable amount of... compensation. Promoting me to director at Beacon is not something to be taken lightly. First, however, they want me to have a reputation, publishing studies in various journals. Repurposing some of Ruben’s research towards patient evaluation seems viable. I doubt he will even notice. 

ENTRY #154

Despite our powerful benefactors, with this much collateral damage, it’s only a matter of time before people start to take notice. 

KCPD has been dropping by. A female officer, I don’t remember her name... Regardless, the police are not something I should be involved with. Mobius says they will take cake of it and make an effort to ensure KCPD leave us alone. 

Then there is the report from the Krimson Post, Ivan... something-or-other... He has become a personal annoyance. He barely qualifies as a tabloid journalist, writing cover stories about tales of church sacrifices and other nonsense, but now he’s being persistent about the missing patients claim. I’ll be damned if he is the man who bring Beacon down... 

It seems that Ruben could be useful for other forms of problem solving. Perhaps I can interest this reporter in an “exclusive interview.” 

ENTRY #188

They grow impatient with our progress and demand briefings on the development process. At first stressing the results, but now they work off of a timeline based on their needs - typical bureaucrats. 

I’ve been pushing Ruben, but he’s retreated further, doing his research at home and refusing to come to the lab unless it’s directly working on our STEM prototype. I am feeling uneasy and no doubt Mobius is looking on us with question.

ENTRY #201

Ruben has no idea what he’s done. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t care, either. He was never motivated by fear of Mobius... 

The STEM prototype works, but only when connected to Ruben. I’ve checked the details and he customized the whole system to only operate with his own brain-wave pattern. I left him alone with the device for far too long, trusted him too much and despite all my knowledge in the field it’s past the point of fixing. I can’t just flip a switch. 

And that’s not the worst of it. They know, as well. I’m not going to take the blame for this. I will drag him here and make him fix it. I can’t imagine what they will do to him if he doesn’t... 

ENTRY #209

I saw what they have done to him, and I am appalled. To think the young boy I mentored is now this... a mass of grey matter in a glorified test tube. Could they have been planning this all along? 

And what have I become in all of this? 

They’ve managed to keep his mind alive by simulating an artificial body. His consciousness is being confined to a mental straight jacket, a gear in their infernal machine. They have even stricken his name and humanity, referring to him by an anagram, “RUVIK.” A crude joke, as if spitting on his grave. 

I almost felt the urge to smash the case and end it right there... but my anger was quickly replaced by scientific curiosity. Ruben’s legacy will live on; I will spearhead the next step. I will create something of my own out of this tragedy. 

ENTRY #215

They’ve refocused the efforts of the other programs to support our research. STEM priority has seemingly overridden other departments’ individual research. Chemical and botanical studies are focused now on tempering, priming subjects for their inevitable connection. 

Now that the prototype is up and running, experiments continue. Upon their return from STEM integration, patients are interviewed extensively. While their particular pathologies inform their experiences, there are commonalities. They all experience the same setting, the same occurrences. The “world” they inhabit becomes larger with every new visitor. This suggests that shard of each user’s consciousness are left behind inside the STEM, creating a community. It’s as if, internally, a new world is being built.  

ENTRY #229

Patients emerging from the STEM are becoming more erratic. Their pathologies seem to be amplified by the experience now. Even worse, patients now seem to experience each other’s psychological trauma. It’s as if the user’s deepest fears linger within the encephalon of the system, even after the session is over. 

The most concerning thing are their most recent statements. Every single patient claims to see a hooded figure slowly approaching them. Could it be him? His consciousness existing as a ghost in the system? 

My curiosity has never been piqued like this. I want to know. I want to see what they see. But it’s too risky... for now. 

ENTRY #231 

I’m afraid that the fragile mental states of the subjects are limiting our studies. Mobius wants us to move past Beacon patients and on to more “stable” people. They want to get STEM closer to its intended use. 

Would they see the world in the same way? Would a “sane” mind weather the psychically draining experience? 

I had that dream again. I entered the STEM myself... 

ENTRY #232

I revisited the Victoriano Estate yesterday; it’s a vestige, a mere husk of what was bound to be such a home of promise. Mobius reaped nearly everything of value when we took on the research ourselves, but Ruben’s notes indicate he was involved in something else. 

There were plans for another STEM prototype... data about using receptors to transmit the brain function wirelessly to unaware users. It’s borderline parapsychology, but these schematics, and the scientific backup provided, seem sound... 

What was he planning to do with such a thing? 

There’s only one way to find out for certain, but I must continue these experiments in private, away from their prying eyes. I will not let them know... lest they take this from me as well. 

ENTRY #239

Something else is even more harrowing... our subjects are... dying. They come out from STEM abruptly passing with looks of horror in their eyes. The one that do survive are catatonic; babbling incoherent masses that we can’t properly interview. 

We’ve done nothing to the process to cause this change. It must be the ever-growing collective consciousness of the STEM system. These patients seem unable to take the strain of exposure. We need more “sane” subjects, perhaps to cleanse the system. At its current state, the system is unsustainable, something Mobius will not approve of. This time, only I am to blame for this. 

Our new prototype in Beacon is almost ready. When it is, I will start its conversion to the wireless system. Even if the original STEM experiments go awry. I will show my worth to Mobius with its next generation. 

ENTRY #246

Today was something truly surprising. He was one of the last groups of test subjects... Just another patient I expected to babble and maybe even die. Patient 105: Leslie Withers. 

Ruben had singled him out as a useless subject... but he must have known. He knew I would read his notes. What else was Ruben lying to me about? 

But this Leslie... he emerged cognant, calm, and able to report fully what he’d experienced inside. His unique pathology allowed him to successfully navigate his STEM experience with little repercussion. 

They know nothing of his existence, but no doubt he is the key. If we all share the consciousness, then with him I too should be able to experience the STEM, potentially even suppress the more unsavory aspects of it. 

With him I can be the master of the very technology I helped create. Mobius will see my worth and let me rise even higher in their ranks. 

ENTRY #264

They’re coming for me. I don’t know how, but they know everything. They even know about Leslie. There’s no use hiding this anymore. 

I’ll enter the system and my return will be proof that all of this was worth it. I can of course convince them that it wasn’t for me, it was for their goals!

There are just the final tweaks left. Once I finish, I will put Leslie in the STEM with myself and activate it. The wireless signal should ring out in the near distance. I can’t speak for those unfortunate to be around, but like I always said, the ends will justify the means. 

Finally Mobius will see that I am one of their chosen ones. Ruben is but a ghost. I am their savior. Their plan is nothing without me. 

[knqw]

Story Time

Take a deep breath before reading this.

Note the red shoes on the children in the pictures. #redshoeclub #pedogate #childtrafficking #endit

“The story I'm about to tell you is true.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this story is that every single person reading this post - every single one of you - was alive when this story became news in 2004.

That fact is intriguing because everyone reading this post has either never heard this story, or forgot about it (I'm betting on the first one, because it is truly unforgettable).

Furthermore, once you hear this story in its entirety, I can promise it will be seared into your memory forever.

Our main character is a man named Marc Dutroux. He was born in Belgium in 1956. He was twice convicted of kidnapping and raping underage children. The first time was in 1989. The second time occurred in 1996.

That was not a typo - you read that correctly. He was convicted and served a (much too brief) sentence in 1998. He served only 3 and a half years of his 13 year sentence because he was released for good behavior. Less than 10 years later, he was arrested again on the same charges (different victims).

In the second round of charges, he was convicted of kidnapping, torturing and abusing victims, some of them to the point of death.

What I am about to tell you comes from the statements made by his surviving victims (called the X Files), Marc Dutreox himself, and evidence from law enforcement. I've also added references/citations at the very end of this post.

Here we go.

Marc confessed to kidnapping, raping, drugging, torturing and filming children for many years. He also claimed he was doing it at the behest of a political elite who financed his career as a professional trafficker.

Not only did this political elite finance his efforts - they made specific requests of him. Sometimes they requested specific types of children (they were called "party favors" and he was asked to deliver kids of certain age, sex, race). Sometimes they requested specific means of torturing the children to fulfill their desires (orgies, satanic rituals involving sacrifices, torture games).

And sometimes they requested he film certain influential people engaged in these acts, for later use as blackmail.

He claimed many of his customers and financiers were world leaders. This was not a stretch of the imagination because he lived in Belgium, where the EU and NATO headquarters were located. This statement was also corroborated by victims who were able to identify specific politicians.

Anneke Lucas was one of his victims who testified against him. She claimed she was 6 years old when the cleaning lady hired by her mother sold her to the pedophile network in 1969. Her claims were extraordinary:

-She was raped over seventeen hundred hours before turning 12 years old. -She was 6 years old when she was forced to participate in her first orgy, which included wearing an iron dog collar and eating human excrement. -She would actually be delivered back to her parents from time to time. However, her parents themselves were complicit in the crimes and always sent her back to her abusers. -Torture included being strapped to a butchers block used to execute other children. Other victims were forced to torture her for hours as part of their initiation. -She was considered attractive and that made her preferred by her abusers. She claimed that she tried to use that to her survival advantage to the best of her ability, but by the age of eleven, she had become so broken that she was slated to be executed and disposed of. -She said she was saved when one of her abusers negotiated for her freedom. That abuser would later sit as a defendant in the trial.

Other witnesses and victims would soon come forward, describing such things as “Black Masses,” with child and adult sacrifices taking place in front of observers and participants, which included prominent politicians and figures. This would be corroborated by a note found by police at the house belonging to Bernard Weinstein—a man who previously worked with Dutroux, but whom Dutroux had murdered. The letter contained very specific requests for certain types of victims for satanic sacrifices.

The letter was signed by a man who called himself 'Anubis'. It turned out 'Anubis' was the high priest of a satanic cult called 'Abrasax' whose real name was Francis Desmet. Police obtained a warrant and seized computers, documents, mail, actual human skulls, jars of blood, and all sorts of Satanic items - but none of this was enough to make an arrest.

As the Dutroux trial went public, other victims stepped forward and confirmed the testimony, offering up descriptions of sexual abuse and human sacrifice.

They also described “hunting parties” where elites would release naked children into the woods to hide, so that the elites themselves could hunt them down and slaughter them. Many of the stories from victims contained so many similarities, they were impossible to deny. For example, the hunting parties were often held at castles, where victims could not escape and were hidden from the public eye. Those not killed in the hunt were usually chased down and mauled/killed by Dobermans.

All of these victims echoed the testimonies of other, older survivors of ritual Satanic abuse from around the world.

It is also notable that Dutroux owned 10 homes valued at 6 million dollars.

It is also notable that Dutroux was not employed.

It is also notable that Dutroux received $1,200 per month in public assistance.

It is also notable that documents released by Wikileaks show large sums of money in various currencies were deposited into his wife's bank account.

It is also notable that those deposits coincided with reported kidnappings and missing children reports.

It is also notable that before his removal, judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was on the verge of publicly disclosing the names of high level government officials who had been recognized on video-tapes of sexual torture that took place in Dutroux's dungeon.

It is also notable that 20 potential witnesses for this case have died without explanation.

Does any of this sound familiar? Are there any headlines today that sound like history is repeating itself?

Guys, not one single thing in this post is theory. It's all proven and on record.

You see the pictures attached to this post? Those are images of hunting games. They're paintings that people like Tony Podesta buy, and hang in his home, and invite others over to enjoy.

We all know Epstein was a sick sob who had friends in high places - the same friends that hang out with Tony Podesta.

You think Epstein was the only one? That he's somehow unique? Or was he the low level one they were willing to sacrifice to protect everyone else involved at a higher level?

Do you realize now that when it comes to trafficking, satanism, pedophilia, human sacrifices, organ harvesting, adrenachrome - that it is art imitating life? That these people who are so obsessed with the art that glorifes these things might actually, themselves, be engaged in these things?

Do you think normal, non-pedo, non-cannibal, average Joes would hang that garbage up in their homes?

Suddenly the claims that world leaders and governments being involved in this satanic horror show isn't so far fetched after all.

Suddenly its not so crazy to say that world agencies who claim to stop these crimes (WHO, UN) are actually facades that cover up the real work of procuring and enabling - yes, even participating - in these crimes.

Suddenly the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

With this one case, all the unbelievers are silenced.

For crying out loud, this trial was in 2004! Did you remember it? If not, do you wonder why it was not front page news across the world?

And if you're asking yourself HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET AWAY WITH THIS - have you not yet figured out that the very people who are supposed to end it, are doing it?

Most everyone has watched an Epstein documentary on Netflix - I think there's been maybe 3 or 4 made since his death. And the one thing I heard people say over and over and over again was this: "Where is Epstein's girlfriend and why hasn't she been arrested yet?"

Did anyone asking that question even try to find the answer? Or did you just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, it is what it is and there's nothing I can do about it" and go on with your life?

Let me help you out.

Did you hear the news story from two weeks ago that President Trump fired federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman? He was the prosecutor in charge of the Epstein case.

AG Barr requested Berman step down, and Berman refused. So Trump fired him and Berman was replaced with prosecutor Audrey Strauss. And then suddenly BAM! Maxwell is in custody.

You now get a front row seat for the horror show that is about to come out.

You will not believe who is involved and how deep it goes. And you will not believe the lengths they'll go to in order to protect their secrets.

https://cwasu.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Confronting-An-Atrocity.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1iFppDKV9fKTovmv9zLfWBQduNSavsSNA4_4fuavxF6Y5u0n8tB7JfI60

http://archive.is/SFRGD

http://archive.is/jxiLV#selection-3715.53-3715.70

http://archive.is/Evfkk#selection-2115.96-2115.114

https://www.euronews.com/amp/2019/10/27/explainer-paedophile-marc-dutroux-and-the-horror-case-that-united-a-divided-belgium

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/05/dutroux.featuresreview?fbclid=IwAR1dkHQCU0cJnwn2AehQlMHozh0JHaFpFQwlYunS7pVrdg_zZPLUrWZuplc

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/marc-dutroux-monster-belgium/?fbclid=IwAR1wzBu_NVW9fNrRVUtqp3DrXjw_hru6PlI2qZoNqh_TphyXbRB07UJUT-0

By: David Andrew Rodriguez”

#DAMN #TAKEAMINUTE #DEEPBREATHS Shared from Jackie Barrett

[willshineonedayy]

Blog của Bo

i have a lovely theory about rainbows.

So we all know the myth of goblins and unicorn and pots of gold under one end of the rainbow or on the side of it. I don't know if you notice or not, but throughout history, human tend to go towards the rainbow. This is something i realized at a very young age: every time someone say "rainbow", others will probably rush towards the closest door or window and look upon the sky. Looking at the the myth, I guess this tendency is understandable. I mean, unicorn? UNICORN? WHO DOESN'T WANT TO SEE A FUCKING UNICORN?!

And with that, generations of the human race rushed to the rainbow; raindrops lurking through their shoes, sunshine sparkled on the cheeks of their _amare_. They rushed out for, well, who knows? Some went for the gold: it was wealth that they were seeking. Some went for goblins: they desired cleverness, treachery, and trickery. The others - those who wished for spectacles and a feast of the eyes - searched the unicorns.

and off they go. off they go. oooooooffff theyy goooooo. *whoop whoop*

But they never found anything. No rainbows. No pots of gold, no goblins, no unicorns. Nothing.

In fact, they weren't even close. The further they went, the further from the rainbows they were. The faster they went, the longer it took. They also failed to navigate: sometimes, they thought the rainbow was turning around and increasing or decreasing in size. And they never ever found anything. But hey, that didn't stop human from searching for rainbows and their offerings. The Neanderthals walked to the rainbow out of sheer admire and desire for the rainbow itself; so did the first homo sapiens. Ancient man used horses and chariots. Cleopatra rode her slave-cart. Alexander the Great rushed his army. Emperor Qin Shihuang buried horses and men under the Great Wall to continue his rainbow quest in hell - yes, even dead people are haunted by rainbow and its offerings. Galileo made a telescope in an attempt to oversee the rainbow, and da Vinci's model of "flying machine" was supposed to be a breakthrough in the search for rainbow. Kids today go on private jets and Ferrari (the car brand that made a horse its symbol), using satelittle scans and navigators. Some even said that the rainbow quest is the only purpose of the Illuminati.

We human also seek rainbow virtually and spiritually. Rainbow is deified: it appears next to Jesus, to Aphrodite, sometimes in descriptions of angels or star signs. Rainbow is believed to bring happiness and joy, and in fact, it is joyful watching a rainbow. We take pictures of them, tag them along with a few cheesy lines, and instagram up they go. Human has became so obsessed with the desire for rainbow, it rooted down to their unconscious as a type of collective dream and collective memory.

Okay so the thing is, rainbows don't just stand still. They move.

The reason of the movement of rainbows can't be understood without some ancient Greek theories. In _Symposium_, which is a book by Plato, Aristophanes tells the story of Tower Babel. Back in the old old, far away days, there were three sexes: the male, the female, and the androgynous who was half male half female. Funny thing is that, all sexes were all round shaped with four hands, four legs, two faces, two sets of sexual organs - very much like two human beings attached together. With that being said, one male was actually two males in one unity, one female was two females in one unity, and one androgynous was a male and a female in one unity. My oh my, the human race was powerful: they were quick, strong, and intelligent. So powerful, one day they decided that they would reach to Zeus - like not through praying but physically knocking on the gate of heaven, and no this is not "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. To do that, the human race created a tower. They named it Babel. The plan was to build it, and build it, and build it, higher and higher so that it could reach heaven someday.

I guess Zeus was not paying much attention. He probably went "pffffft mấy thằng ngôn lù ảo tưởng" when he saw the Tower at first, and then went fucking around. And guess what? By the time he returned, the Tower was actually about to drill a hole on the floor of his house. So he went "ê đm đéo ổn ròi" with all the other gods. Clearly it was unacceptable, so the gods tried to find a solution. They can't kill the human - that would decrease the offerings. Destroying the tower was meaningless for the human would just start over. Finally, they - well Zeus - came up with an idea: he would use his lightning to split all human into half, thus reduce their strength and intelligence and increase them in numbers (aka more worships and sacrifice). Apollo would then turn each person's head toward the wound as a reminder of the cut. Less brain, less brawn, no tower. Gods of Olympus 1, pathetic race of human 0.

The story was rather different in the Bible. It said that Zeus created a thing called "language" All of a sudden, human were not capable of communicating in mass. Different groups started building in different ways, thus making the complete of the Tower impossible. Whether it is the Bible or Symposium, human longed for connection after the split. Each half craved for its other half, craved for the desire of growing together, getting old together, and dying together. They wanted to be felt, to be connected, to understand and be understood without saying by and with the right person, their one and only. Each of us today is a matching half of an unity. Those split from male seek male, those split from woman seek woman, and those split from androgynous seek for the other gender. Each of us has a perfect other on this planet. And my oh my, each of us is looking for that half.

And that, my darling, happens to be the story of love.

This is what Plato and the Bible didn't mention: the desire for love and for the perfect match was so strong, it caught the attention of Aphrodite. Pitying the poor human, she left a hint. Aphrodite located all the couples, and drew a curvy line to connect them. Each line will directly emerge from the two halves of a couple, and after so many lives and identities, the halves are, once again, connected. And if the two halves follow the line and successfully return to each other, they will find the ultimate offering of life.

They will find love.

But things were not just that - it can't be that easy to find love. Aphrodite created obstacles. She put goblins, gold, and unicorns under the rainbow so if human didn't see it clear and think it wise, they could only see gold and goblins and unicorns.

And that, my darling, is the origin of rainbows, and the explanation why they don't stand still. People don't stand still. Nothing stands still - life is about never-ending movements. We all need things to move forward to. Wealth for some, treachery for other, entertainment for another. And so we run and run and run and run towards the meaningless. We get blinded easily. The pressures of life and demands of society blur us from the true meaning of life, from love. We keep on chasing redundant things and forget the one thing that is important. Love.

and just like that, we are drifted away.

My dear, my dear,

whenever the day gets dark and the dreams get scary, when reality can't be told from imaginary, whenever you feel down, think of your perfect match. Indulge yourself with the thought of someone who will love you unconditionally, who will always be there for you, who understands you more than you, who will hug you and kiss you and hold your hands. Think of that, your perfect match, your destined partner since the earliest lives. Someone who you totally deserve. Someone who is born for you and from you and the other way around. Whenever life knocks you down, think of love.

And it is okay to try. Love is also a test. Therefore, it is okay to try it out with someone else. Who knows if that someone else is your true half or not? But always bear in mind that, the false hallucination of love is another obstacle preventing us from getting to love. If you close your door, you may protect yourself from dust and dirt and noise. But you will also cross out sunlight, the scent of spring flowers, the taste of autumn leaves, the sound of summer rain, and the warmth of winter snow. When love knocks, open, and go. And whenever you see a rainbow, please celebrate the joy of unity. Another two are connected and perfected. And someday, oh my dear, someday, your turn will come. Someday, you will glow and light will decorate your lips, brighten your eyes and lurk through your hair. Rainbow will rain over you, and you will be connected. You will feel whole. You are secured. you are loved by an eternal lover.

And I will be there, at the end of the rainbow.

Put away the gold, kick the goblins out, and cage the unicorns. Look into your heart. See love. Feel love. Celebrate love.

for love is all we need.

[eve-graphic]

‘Mutations workshop’

Aims and Objectives:

To contrast and juxtapose source imagery to create mutated bio-mechanical drawings.

To explore the evolving relationship between human beings and cybernetic enhancements (man & machines)

To blend analogue and digital skills to create illustrations of our own cybernetic mutations

To begin to think about styles and aesthetics within science fiction concepts.

To develop visual ideas & experiments based on these concepts & principles

What is a cybernetic organism?

Cybernetic organisms can be any living tissue that integrates artificial technologies within it, but it is most often associated with humans. This is because cybernetic organisms are already in the mainstream in the form of pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, and even cochlear implants. The relationship between humans and technology continues to grow, with medicine and science giving humans the ability to restore lost hearing or sight, gain control over their cardiovascular system, sleep through the night without the risks of apnea, and more. Cybernetic organisms continue to be the focus for medical research that directly impacts humans and healthcare. 

The relationship between man and machine has been ever growing throughout history. Machines used to just be there to help us with simple things such as making clothes or food. But as time went on machines started to be used for things that weren't just purely function and became used for entertainment. Machines began to cross the boundaries into things that we were emotionally invested in. Nowadays machines are so deeply embedded in everyday life that it would be extremely hard to imagine life without them. We have become emotionally attached to things such as our phone due to the invention of the internet and social media. But is this relationship between man and machine really healthy?

Are we too obsessed with what these machines can give us? Our online persona is so important to us and effects relationships, jobs and mental health. We find it difficult to engage in human interaction without using dating apps to find our perfect match, and Facebook to see what their interest are and who our mutual friends may be. Have machines become too linked to human emotion?

Machines have advanced so much over such a short period of time. They are being used to complete more and more tasks and becoming used in more and more aspects of everyday life. How long will it be until there is nothing left for humans to do? If machines can be used for all jobs such as mass production, driving buses, teaching classes, what will there be left for humans to do? Will we have to become part machine in order to keep up?

This overwhelming idea that machines are somewhat consuming our lives is an interesting emotion that I would like to explore in my work. The idea that we may have to enhance ourselves mechanically and make that relationship between man and machine even closer is expressed through this workshop. 

In this workshop, we began to look at other artists who also portray the themes on man and machine. 

Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s work was the oldest out of the three artists. This is evident in the work; there isn't any colour, only tonal value, and the ‘robot’ seems to be made up of household objects. This makes it recognizable for its time.  Guiseppe couldn't make the robot extremely streamline or modernistic as his audience would understand it. Not only this but his outlook on what the future may look like would be very different to ours as their machinery wasn't very advanced at the time. This links to the fundamental idea that was discussed in the brief as well as the first workshop, that you need a thread of reality in your work.  Guiseppe’s work was relevant to his time and based off of human form so that his audience could understand the message his was trying to portray in his work.

Masumune Shirow’s work is much more modernistic then Guiseppe’s. The head of the robot is broken into parts and reminds me of a car bonnet. Unlike  Guiseppe ‘s work, there are cables liking the robot to an unknown object. This is relevant to the time was they had computer and TVs that need wires to work. The wires are also interesting as you can't see where they lead too, it could be to a system that is controlling the robot. 

Josan Gonzalez’s work is the most realistic in my opinion. The characters are all set in a realistic setting which makes the sci-fi element to the work more believable. There are also wires connecting the robot to something much like in  Shirow’s work. The cigaret in the second piece of work also helps to give the work that thread of reality and makes that character more human-like. Even though it is a robot potentially with no human emotion, it still has an addiction to cigarettes, making it more human-like and also making it seem more rebellious. The use of colour is also interesting as they are all unnatural colours that strengthen that otherworldly effect. 

Overall the main theme that links all the artists work together is that thread of reality. All the characters and based off of human form and a made of objects that can be recognisable for the time. I would like to incorporate the colour scheme of  Gonzalez’s work into my own, as I think that it works very effectively to give the work a futuristic look. 

‘Ghost in the shell’ clip 

‘But no one really understands the risk to individuality, to identity, messing with the human soul’

This quote from this clip shows a very clear insight as to how the people that created this film perceive the future.  The emotion of uncertainty is provoked within this quote and the theme of disorientation and uncertainty is apparent through all the workshop that I have looked at so far. Even in this futuristic worlds with all these technological developments, there is still an uncertainty of what the future will look like and how technology may be affecting us. Throughout history people have always been wary of new development as its human nature to be scared of the unknown, no matter how technologically advanced a society is, there is always going to be a fear of the future. 

This idea of individuality and identity is something that I discussed the ‘Identity’ workshop and in this workshop. With advancements in robotic technology, there is always the worry that our identity may and individuality may be lost. In the first workshop, I look t the idea of whether we will all look the same in the future and how will this affect us? Is individuality and personal identity an important part of what makes us human? In this workshop, we discuss the theme of mutation and man and machine through our collaging. Adding robotic parts to humans is altering the natural human form, what happens if we take robotic enhancements too far and begin to interfere with the brain, soul and our conscience. These are one of the only factors that differentiate and better humans from robots. If we could give robots a conscience would there be a need for humans anymore? 

This clip discusses what could go wrong with messing with man and machine. The second frame shows the expression on the mans face when the robot acts against its program. That betrayal and surprise is evident in his face. Has the robot made its own decision and doesn't want to be told what to do anymore, so instead attacks the man? The robot had been hacked to retrieve information from the man and kill him, but for a split second, it seems as though the robot has a mind of its own. And this draws attention to how horrific it could be if robots could suddenly make there own decisions as they are much more powerful and advanced then humans, and if used for evil, could use a lot of harm. 

Overall this clip provides a lot of context to my own work and really defines the possible negative octopus of merging man with machine. Is man controlling the machine or is the machine controlling man?

‘Akira’ clip 

In this clip, we see how machine and scientific experiments could alter humans. We see the character struggling to control the expanding ‘machine’ aspect of his body. He isn't in control of this thing that is taking over his body and harming his friends. 

At the end of the clip, there is a giant explosion as the characters had to sacrifice themselves to stop this machine. This shows how drastic it may become, to stop it you have to drastically destroy everything in order to save it.

Could this happen in the future? The merging of man and machine could become so out of control that we would have to destroy it all to return to normal. I think that this clip shows quite a dramatised vision of this idea, but I think that this theme of machines becoming out of our control and causing destruction and a very likely reality for our future.

These two clips link together as they both discuss the theme of machines becoming out of control. They provide context for this workshop as they show the potential negative effects of combining man and machine may have. 

This workshop could be seen in a positive way too. Machines help humans on a daily basis and mechanical enhancement already has a big presence in today's society. We are enchanted by machine through prosthetics, hearing aids, pace-makers ect. So not all combinations of man and machines have a negative effect. But in the future will this begin to spiral out of control? For example, we have started to use prosthetics to enhance man by designing them to be more ergonomic to help people run and compete in other sports. Whereas in the past prosthetics use to just be for a cosmetic reason. They needed to be as realistic as possible so they looked more ‘normal’, but we are looking past that now and considering how they can be used to enchase us not just make us fit in. However, these designs still keep that thread of reality. 

Overall this workshop was useful when considering how machines can control and enhance us and what they may be used for in the future. I find the idea of machines being used to control us the most interesting, and it think its very relevant in the sense that even now machines do heavily affect our lives. Especially phones and social media, which have a huge effect on today's generation. Could machines be used to control society into making important commitments such as political decisions; will this affect our individuality and ability to make out own decisions?

Eduardo Paolozzi’s work is very relevant to this project, not only our his processes very similar but his work is also futuristic. He includes pop culture references, making his work relevant to the time as well as keeping that thread of reality. I think that the line work use in the example images above is very effective. The tonal value created quite a grim dystopian effect, and the piles of objects also adds to the chaos. 

In order to develop the college work further, I re-drew the college using a fine liner. I tried to replicate Paolozzi’s techniques of using lines to create tonal value. This helped to make the blend between man and machine more seamless as I could draw in parts to make it more realistic. Whilst still keeping that stark juxtaposition between the robotic machine and the biological man.

gif of process 

original collage

line drawings 

Digital development

I decided next to adapt this work digitally so that I could add colour and textures. This process helped me to develop my digital swing skills as well as develop these outcomes further so they were more effective.

I first created a line drawing on a separate layer copying the original scan of the collage. To make the blend of man and mechanic more seamless I added more tonal value as well as more wires around the face.

I then created a texture for the background using a brush tool on pro-create. I think that this replicated a galaxy therefore, it was fitting to the futuristic theme as space travel was one idea which I thought linked to the brief in the initial discussion of the brief.

I think that the women the picture was very ‘perfect’ and therefore, almost looked robotic or alien and there wasn't any flaw; the original photo was from a magazine cover and so had most likely been photoshopped. So this was one of the reasons for choosing this background as I think the drawing and the themes of the brief both link to a space travel theme.

I wanted to keep the image mostly black and white but the line work didn't stand out as much with the dark background behind it. So I made an alternative with blue line work, I think that this was effective as the blue give a cold and gloomy feel to the illustration; as the illustration is part machine this is fitting as machines don't portray emotion, so in the future AI robots may come across as cold an emotionless. 

Development 

To develop this workshop I applied this technique but using other images. I decided to use a picture of Donald Trump as I wanted my project to include political figures as they play a big role in the control of the world. 

To further develop this I could animate my work and colour it as animation is one of the specialist areas that I want to explore.

Links

This workshop links to the artist Raoul Hausmann and the other workshops through the methods and themes that the work explores. 

The method of collage is very similar to that of Raoul Hausmann, who also combined images of people and combined them with machines. Another similarity is that he uses images of pop culture, often cut from magazines. Therefore both my work and his keeps a thread of reality through the use of realistic photography. Our work depicts relevant subjects, in mine, I have used Donald Trump as he is a widely discussed and controversial figure. By using the fun, a simple and playful method of collaging, the work manages to discuss important subjects but in a more easy and universal way, which an audience will respond better too. 

The theme of juxtaposition and the use of hand rendered collaging techniques links this workshop to the ‘glitches’ workshop. The physical process of collaging by taking one part of something and attaching it to another reminds me of the surgical process that we would have to go through to become robotically enhanced. 

Conclusion 

To conclude I think that combining man and machine together so that they look as though they belong together was very difficult. However, when I developed this digitally I could edit it so that it looked more seamless. So there were some limitations to hand-rendered processes, however having to develop them digitally has helped to improve my digital skills and keep a thread of reality in my work. 

[ntrending]

The scoop on how mouse poop might get humans to Mars

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/the-scoop-on-how-mouse-poop-might-get-humans-to-mars/

The scoop on how mouse poop might get humans to Mars

When astronauts on the International Space Station need to go number two, they direct their poo through a narrow hole into a carefully sealed toilet. Eventually, their waste bursts into flames when jettisoned into Earth’s atmosphere.

The fate of the feces of 20 mice tagging along on the ISS this year won’t be quite as flashy, but it’s just as dramatic. The rodents, who shot into space on June 29, made a voyage to the station to provide scientists data on the effects of microgravity on their bodies and internal rhythms—part of which will be captured in their poop.

Sound familiar? It should. In 2015, NASA did the same thing, but with people. The Rodent Research-7 study is a sibling of the Twins Study, during which astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year on the station while his brother, Mark Kelly, acted as a control back on Earth. Scientists have spent years poring over the data generated by the experiment—among them, the researchers who designed the mouse mission.

This mouse madness has a laundry list of questions to answer. Led by principal investigators Fred Turek and Martha Vitaterna of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, researchers at multiple institutions will examine how microgravity affects (or disrupts) the animals’ gut microbiome, gastrointestinal function, immune function, metabolism, and sleep and circadian rhythms.

“We’re bringing biology to the space program,” says Turek, who has a long history helping NASA confront the physical challenges of spaceflight. Whether seated at his messy desk or wandering the halls of his lab, which is devoted to circadian-rhythm research, Turek almost vibrates with enthusiasm for all things extraterrestrial. He wears a thick denim shirt emblazoned with the NASA logo and waxes poetic about how, once upon a time, he took hamsters up on the “vomit comet”—a colloquial name for the reduced-gravity aircraft used by NASA to test microgravity conditions without leaving Earth’s atmosphere—and advised the agency on whether to send John Glenn back to space at the age of 77 (the spaceman did indeed take one more trip).

But Turek’s daily life is devoted to something pretty down-to-earth: shut-eye. He’s responsible for much of what we know about the body’s biological rhythms, including the discovery of the gene that appears to run mammals’ 24-hour circadian clock. This internal clock keeps mammals synced to the rising and setting of the sun, running systems such as sleep and body temperature, and affecting things like body weight, disease susceptibility, and more.

That led Turek down an unexpected path to poop. It turns out that when a person alters their normal sleep-wake cycle, the community of microorganisms in their gut—their microbiome—changes too. And the more scientists learn about the gut microbiome, the more aspects of human health they believe it affects. Now Turek and Vitaterna devote much of their time to looking at how the microbiome affects the rhythms that run the human body.

“Mice aren’t furry little humans,” Vitaterna says, swatting at a fruit fly—an escapee from one of the lab’s experiments on the tiny insects’ biological clocks. But since rodents share so many genetic and behavioral characteristics with us, she explains, they’re as close as it comes to an experimental analog.

Nor is the experiment identical to the Twins Study. You could call it fraternal.

For all their similarities, the Kelly twins led very different lives on Earth and in space. In contrast, RR-7’s rodents will have much more restricted (and predictable) existences. Here and there, they’ll occupy identical habitats, eat the same delicious mouse chow, and do everything in synchronized environmental conditions. Up in space, the mice live in an enclosed habitat complete with a metal grid that floating rodents can grab onto, and features that make sure mice live separately from their own waste—and that turds don’t make their way into the rest of the station. Back down on Earth, the control rodents live in the exact same enclosure and conditions (except for that whole gravity thing).

Data from the space station is beamed to the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where it’s stored and archived. Relevant data is also relayed to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians program the mouse habitat to match the environmental conditions of the ISS. The Earth mice are on a three-day delay from their space brethren so the team can base their control conditions on exact measurements from the space station. Everything from temperature to humidity to CO2 levels matches the ISS exactly, as do all procedures, from animal handling to feeding to cage changing.

Though all the mice will be subjected to a barrage of tests, the ones conducted in space will require a bit more finesse than earthly experiments. While it’s easy to, say, snag a piece of mouse feces or perform a quick experiment on Earth, it’s not quite as simple to handle a wriggling mouse without gravity’s assistance. Despite the trickier conditions, astronauts will acquire a precious poo pellet from each mouse every two weeks. They’ll measure each creature’s mass and bone density at least twice over the course of the experiment, draw blood, and film their habitat for three 48-hour periods too. Then, at the end of 30 days, they’ll “process” 10 of the mice (a polite euphemism for euthanasia and dissection). The surviving 10 will live on for another two months before making the same sacrifice.

Three months is a long time in mouse years—about 5 percent of an average mouse’s entire life—and the wait will seem nearly endless to the team at Northwestern. Their real work begins once the mice make it back to Earth. Inside their cluttered research lab, technicians will assess the protein levels and hormonal profiles of the deceased mice, and assess the behavior captured on the video recordings. Technicians will also dissolve the feces in saline, extract each pellet’s DNA, and sequence it.

“They’re precious samples,” Chris Olker, a research technologist who will run some of the tests, says of the poo. Olker, quietly cynical in his band T-shirt as he walks through a maze of identical hallways on the way to the lab, snaps into earnestness when he talks about the mice he breeds, dissects, and studies.

There are a million ways to fail, the tech team explains. Every spilled vial or mismeasured chemical could trash years of preparation and negate the careful dance taking place in space as we speak.

There’s already been a challenge to the carefully planned mission. Before liftoff, the team ran into a snafu thanks to a particularly playful mouse. “We did change our minds which cage of 10 to send,” Vitaterna says. She had become “kind of obsessive” about observing every aspect of the mice, from body weight to appearance, and when she noticed that one of the mice jumped out of its cage, she worried that it would cause problems in space. Instead, the team dipped into one of their seemingly endless contingency plans—a side effect of intense planning and coordination with NASA—and decided to send an entirely different cage of 10 mice during the last week before launch. Now, the mice that almost didn’t make the cut are up in space, sleeping and pooping weightlessly, while their more-active siblings act as controls on Earth.

Locked in their droppings is data that will show whether and how the lack of gravity affected the gut microbiome—a carefully balanced group of microbes that, in turn, can affect everything from immunity to body weight to the risk of cancer, mental health issues, and diabetes.

Researchers hope to use that information to probe the links between circadian-rhythm disruption and other bodily systems in mice—and humans. NASA intends to incorporate what it learns into plans to send humans safely to Mars, a journey that will require nine months in transit and an unknown amount of time on a planet with less than half of Earth’s gravity.

It could take years or even decades for the bodies of astronauts like Kelly to reveal the effects of their time in space, so NASA is placing plenty of hope—and trust—in accelerated rodent experiments. RR-7 is just one facet of a bigger program aimed at understanding what microgravity might do to astronauts who spend lots of time aloft.

The program, which made its maiden flight in 2014, is seen as a quicker and more-cost-effective way to profile the risks of extended space travel. So far, mice have yielded data on muscle-tissue loss, neurological changes in space, how bones grow and heal, and blood vessels in the brain and eye.

The sooner NASA knows about the possible pitfalls of months in space, the sooner it can develop ways to offset them—and avoid potentially fatal surprises when astronauts come home from Mars and other far-flung missions in microgravity.

That was the point of the Twins Test too. The public won’t know specifics about the results until later this year, and Vitaterna is coy about those experiments. But ask her about the mouse pellets that could one day help humans get to Mars, and she drops her reserve. “I love that we can get so much from waste material,” she says, grinning. “It’s like getting something for nothing.”

Written By Erin Blakemore

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment. By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used indiscriminately. Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises. One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the ‘allowed protocol’). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far ‘freedom’ usually stretches. Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles. And as a further result, almost all conversations, but especially public discourses, are now being controlled by so-called ‘political correctness’ and its variants. But back to the culture of fear and punishment. Look at the headlines of the Western newspapers. For example, The New York Times from April 12. 2018: “Punishment of Syria may be harsher this time”. We are so used to such perverse language used by the Empire that it hardly strikes us as twisted, bizarre, pathological. It stinks of some sadomasochistic cartoon, or of a stereotypical image of an atrocious English teacher holding a ruler over a pupil’s extended hands, shouting, “Shall I?” Carl Gustav Jung described Western culture, on several occasions, as a “pathology”. He did it particularly after WWII, but he mentioned that the West had been committing terrible crimes in all parts of the world, for centuries. That is most likely why the Western mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists have been glorifying the ego-centric and generally apolitical Sigmund Freud, while ignoring, even defaming, Carl Gustav Jung. Poster of human zoo at Military Museum in Paris (Photo: Andre Vltchek) The extreme form of sadism is a medical condition; it is an illness. And the West has been clearly demonstrating disturbing and dangerous behavioral patterns for many centuries. Let’s look at the definition of sadism, or professionally, Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD), which both the United States and Europe could easily be diagnosed with. This is an excerpt of a common definition of the SPD, which appears in Medigoo.com and on many other on-line sites: …The sadistic personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy. Some sadists are “utilitarian”: they leverage their explosive violence to establish a position of unchallenged dominance within a relationship… It is familiar, isn’t it? The Empire’s behavior towards Indochina, China, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East and other parts of the world. US sponsored coup in Chile on 9-11-1973 (Photo: Andre Vltchek) What about the symptoms? …Sadistic individuals have poor behavioral controls, manifested by a short temper, irritability, low frustration tolerance, and a controlling nature. From an interpersonal standpoint, they are noted to be harsh, hostile, manipulative, lacking in empathy, cold-hearted, and abrasive to those they deem to be their inferiors. Their cognitive nature is considered rigid and prone to social intolerance, and they are fascinated by weapons, war, and infamous crimes or perpetrators of atrocities. Sadists classically are believed to seek social positions that enable them to exercise their need to control others and dole out harsh punishment or humiliation… Just translate “sadistic individuals” to “sadistic states”, or “sadistic culture”. Is there any cure? Can a sadist be effectively and successfully treated? Treating a sadistic personality disorder takes a long time… And many sites and publications carry a clear disclaimer: The above information is for processing purpose. The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency… And humanity is right now clearly at the crossroads, facing annihilation, not only a ‘medical emergency’. The world may soon have to literally fight for its survival. It is because of the SPD of the West and its Empire. ***** So, what is in store for us now; for instance, for Syria? What will the sadistic psychopath do to a country that refused to kneel, to prostitute itself, to beg for mercy, to sacrifice its people? How horrible will the “punishment” be? We have just witnessed 103 missiles being fired towards Damascus and Homs. But that is only what the Empire did to entertain its masses. It has been doing much more evil and cruel things to the nation which constantly refuses to glorify the Western imperialist and its neocon dogmas. For instance, the Empire’s ‘professionals’ have been manufacturing, training and arming the most atrocious terrorist groups and injecting them into the body of Syria. The torture will, of course, continue. It clearly appears that this time the script will be based on some latter adaptation of the Marquise de Sade’s work, on his novel Juliette, not Justine. You see, in Justine, women were ‘only’ tied up, slapped and raped. In Juliette, they were cut to pieces, alive; they were burned and mutilated. While Justine can still be read, no normal human being could go through the 700 pages of pure gore that is Juliette. But our planet has somehow got used to the horrors that have been administered by the sick Western Empire. People watch occurrences in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or Libya as ‘news’, not as the medical record of a severely ill psychiatric patient. The most terrible ‘novel’ in the history of our Planet has been written, for centuries, by the appalling brutality and sadism of first Europe and then by its younger co-author – the United States. And the human beings in many parts of our Planet have gotten so used to the carnage which surrounds them that they do not throw up anymore; they do not feel horrified, do not revolt against their fate. They just watch, as one country after another falls; is violated publicly, gets ravaged. The mental illness of the perpetrator is undeniable. And it is contagious. Names of, and photos of, murdered Chilean people by pro-US military junta (Photo: Andre Vltchek) In turn, the extreme violence that has been engulfing the world has triggered various neuroses and mental conditions (masochism, extreme forms of submission, to name just two of many) among the victims. ***** Exposure to the constant and extreme violence ‘prescribed’ and administered by the West, has left most of the world in a neurotic lethargy. Like a woman locked in a marriage with a brutal religious fanatic husband in some oppressive society, the world has eventually stopped resisting against the Western dictates and tyranny, and ‘accepted its fate’. Many parts of the planet have developed ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: after being kidnapped, imprisoned, tormented, raped and humiliated, the victims have ‘fallen in love’ with their tyrant, adopting his worldview, while serving him full-heartedly and obediently. This arrangement, of course, has nothing to do with the healthy or natural state of things! Poster of Human Zoo at Military Museum, Paris (Photo: Andre Vltchek) In Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, bizarre things are happening! People from those nations that have been robbed and devastated for centuries by the European and North American despots, have been flying happily and proudly to Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York and other Western cities, in order to ‘learn’, to ‘study’ how to govern their own countries. There is usually no shame, and no stigma attached to such obvious intellectual prostitution. Many victims are still dreaming about becoming like their victimizers, or even more so. Many former and modern-day colonies of the West are listening, with straight faces, to the Europeans preaching to them (for a fee) about ‘good governance’, an ‘anti-corruption drive’ and ‘democracy’. The media outlets of non-Western nations are taking news reports directly from Western press agencies. Even local political events are explained by those ‘wise’ and ‘superior’ Europeans and North Americans, not by the local thinkers. Locals are hardly ever trusted – only white faces with polished English, French or German accents are taken seriously. Perverse? Is it perverse? Of course, it is! Many servile intellectuals from the ‘client’ states, when confronted, admit how sick the continuous global dictatorship is. Then they leave the table and continue to do what they have been doing for years and decades; the oldest profession in short. Freedom Equality Brotherhood. For French maybe but not for colonized Vietnamese (Photo: Andre Vltchek) Such a situation is truly insane. Or at least it is extremely paradoxical, bizarre, absurd. Even a mental clinic appears to make more sense than our beloved planet Earth. However, clinical psychiatrists and psychologists are very rarely involved in analyzing the neuroses and psychological illnesses of the brutalized and colonized planet. They hardly ever ‘analyze’ the perpetrators, let alone expose them for what they really are. Most of psychologists and psychiatrists are busy digging gold: encouraging human egotism, or even serving big corporations that are trying to ‘understand their employees better’, in order to control and to exploit them more effectively. Other ‘doctors’ go so far as to directly serve the Empire, helping to oppress and to ‘pacify’ the billions living in the colonies and new colonies of the West. In 2015, I was invited as one of the speakers to the 14th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, held in Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa (hosted by legendary UNISA). During that fascinating encounter of the leading global psychologists, I spoke about the impact of wars and imperialism on the human psyche, but I also listened, attentively. And I learned many shocking things. For instance, during his chilling presentation, “Human Rights and U. S. Psychologists’ Wrongs: The Undermining of Professional Ethics in an Era of ‘Enhanced Interrogation’”, Professor Michael Wessells from Columbia University, New York, spoke about U.S. psychologists and their participation in torturing political prisoners. Instead of diagnosing the Empire with SPD and other violent and dangerous conditions, many psychologists are actually helping to torture those who are opposing this unacceptable arrangement of the world. ***** Those who refuse to ‘learn from the West’, to fall in love with it, or at least to serve it faithfully, are being brutally punished. Lashes are hitting exposed flesh. Entire nations are being destroyed, genocides distributed to all continents. East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq: it never stops. I follow the discourses of the US and especially British UN delegations, ‘discussing’ Syria and even Russia. What comes to my mind is Punjab in India. I recall those old, historic photos of Indian men being hanged by the Brits, pants down, and flogged in public. Flogging-on-Punjabi-man-by-British-colonialist They have been doing this kind of stuff for centuries. They like it. It clearly excites them. This is their democracy, their respect for human rights and for other cultures! If someone refuses to take his or her pants down, they catch the person, rape him or her, then do the flogging anyway. I also recall what my Ugandan friend used to tell me: When the Brits came to Africa, to what is now Uganda, their army would enter our villages and first thing they’d do was to select the tallest and strongest man around. They’d then tie him up, face towards the tree. Then the British commander would rape, sodomize him in front of everybody. This was how they showed the locals who is charge. Brits enjoying Africa How symbolic! How healthy is the culture that has been controlling our world for centuries! One of the most frightening things about mental illnesses is that the patient usually does not realize that he or she is suffering from them. It is about the time for the rest of the world to treat the West as a mental patient, not as the ‘leader of the free and democratic world’. We have to think, to gather, to develop a strategy of how to deal with this unfortunate, in fact, terrible situation! If we refuse to understand and to act, we may all end up in the most dangerous situation: as complacent servants of the perverse whims of a frustrated, extremely aggressive and truly dangerous SPD patient. http://clubof.info/

[topmixtrends]

“Hours dreadful and things strange” is as apt a description of the post-Brexit climate as folk horror itself, with its normalisation and spiked increase in xenophobic attacks, a gestalt mentality, any questioning of the result labelled as a heresy by pro-Brexit tabloids, and a wide-scale embracing of political fantasy and inwardness. We have burnt our Sgt Howie in the wicker man, and now wait naively for our apples to grow once more, confident that we have “taken back control.”

— Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange

“I believe,” Paul said, “that if we don’t believe in demons, they won’t believe in us. Do the demons believe in us? That’s the question. The day the demons believe in us, we’re in real trouble.”

— Conor O’Callaghan, Nothing on Earth

¤

IN HIS new book on the landscape and folkloric tradition as it relates to British horror cinema, Adam Scovell returns again and again to the question of what constitutes “folk horror.” Is it a resurgence of interest in occultism and New Age philosophies born out of the counterculture of the late 1960s? Or could it be the inevitable tragedy that occurs when modern metropolitan man — for it has generally been men who have claimed the starring roles in folk horror’s touchstone texts as Scovell identifies them — becomes alienated from the landscape and culture of his rural forefathers? Perhaps it expresses a thwarted desire for authenticity in an increasingly artificial environment, or articulates a political tirade against the continuing inequalities of the British class system?

I would argue that Scovell’s hesitation in assigning a precise definition — his tendency toward a “you’ll know it when you see it” approach — arises from the fact that all horror and especially British horror is, in a sense, folk horror. Horror fiction and film has always explored the myriad ways that fundamental wrongness — dis-ease — is found in those places where we traditionally seek refuge. Of all the speculative genres, horror is particularly obsessed with place. Those who argue for science fiction as the most overtly political form of the fantastic often point to horror’s putative conservatism, its preference for isolated settings — old houses, bleak moorland, remote villages, that dodgy patch of wasteland on the edge of town — and its seeming indifference to the wider world. Yet one can also see horror’s obsession with place as, by extension, an obsession with history, with the past as it meets the present and offers warnings about the future. In this regard, horror is the most subversively political of literatures, mired in causality up to its armpits.

Scovell’s touchstone texts — films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) or Peter Plummer’s TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s 1967 novel The Owl Service (1969–’70) — are characterized above all by the myth of a return to the land that many would claim as folk horror’s most characteristic attribute. Yet we need only look to works like Alan Clarke’s film Penda’s Fen (1974) or Peter Dickinson’s “Changes” trilogy (1968–’70) to see that Cold War cosmopolitanism has proved every bit as significant in terms of its influence on British horror as hippie rusticism. If the two core ingredients of strange fiction are iconoclasm and anxiety, it is easy to see why the 1970s were such a fertile soil for artists with a creative leaning toward the uncanny. Weird narratives of the ’70s were obsessed with reconnecting us with our sense of place, even if such belonging turned out to include the suppression of dissent, Satan worship, or human sacrifice. There is a “better the devil you know” undercurrent to ’70s horror that could be seen as a natural corollary to the anxiety and sense of powerlessness that comes from living in a world teetering on the brink of Armageddon.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw a lessening of these anxieties and a corresponding shift in horror narratives out of the countryside and into the newly encroaching realities of global capitalism. As horror went mainstream during the 1990s, it became more extroverted, less intimate. Yet over the past decade, folk horror has been experiencing a resurgence that parallels if not surpasses that of the 1970s, and it is not hard to see why. The swaggering confidence of the ’90s has evaporated. Global terrorism, climate change, corporate disenfranchisement, and forced migrations have all impacted our sense of self as well as our relationship to our surroundings. In British horror literature especially, these shifts have produced the sense of a void at the heart of things, a defamiliarized landscape rife with political extremism and mass psychosis. If ’70s folk horror was all about embracing our pagan past, contemporary British weird fiction seems to suggest that we have no past, that our mendacity as a nation has rendered it forfeit. As writers and citizens, we are adrift in a landscape that is being steadily, inexorably erased in front of our eyes.

English author Sarah Hall would probably not refer to herself as a horror writer, yet those elements that best characterize folk horror — a rootedness in landscape and a bone-deep, anxious awareness of dis-ease — recur in her work to such an extent that her relevance to this discussion cannot be in doubt. Hall’s first novel, Haweswater (2002), is the story of a rural community facing extermination at the hands of corporate greed. Her Tiptree Award–winning and Clarke Award–shortlisted The Carhullan Army (2007) explores a dystopian near-future England through the eyes of a band of female resistance fighters, while her more recent novel The Wolf Border (2015) imagines a newly independent Scotland on the cusp of re-wilding. In her latest collection of stories, Madame Zero (2017), Hall returns to the themes of anxiety and transformation that formed the backbone of her earlier collection, The Beautiful Indifference (2011), but with an increase in both bleakness and urgency.

In “Mrs Fox,” the story that opens Madame Zero and that won the 2013 BBC National Short Story Award, a comfortably well-off middle-class couple are forced into an entirely new set of circumstances when the woman, Sophia, experiences a literal return to the land and transforms into a vixen. There is nothing allegorical or airy-fairy about this metamorphosis — Sophia literally becomes a wild fox, living in the woods and eating her meat raw. She makes messes on the kitchen floor. She offers her husband no indication that she is anything other than entirely satisfied with her new life. Eventually she gives birth, a development the husband watches with a thrill of recognition and acceptance:

Privy to this, no man could be ready. Not at home, skulling the delivery within the bloody sheets, nor in the theatre gown, standing behind a screen as the surgeon extracts the child. The lovely sting in him! They are, they must be, his.

There is a sense of rightness here that is unfamiliar and unexpected. The man does not try to prevent or deny Sophia’s changing. He recognizes instinctively that “he has no role, except as guest.” As a result, “Mrs Fox” feels very different from other, similarly themed stories — such as Angela Carter’s “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest” (1974) — in which a woman’s metamorphosis acts as a trigger for her male partner’s desire to control. We sense Sophia’s dissatisfaction with the life she has been accustomed to lead, yet we also sense her mate’s willingness to continue his life alongside her insofar as that remains possible given the circumstances. Against all odds, they remain together: “Mrs Fox” is a story not only of the distance between people but also of the fierceness of personal attachment, the unbreakable connections that are bound to endure.

Similar themes are explored in “Case Study 2,” though with a less happy outcome. A young child, Christopher, has been placed in the care of social services after being expelled from the commune where he grew up. Christopher has no understanding of individual identity — he invariably refers to himself in the first-person plural. This chronic dissociation is a major concern to Christopher’s psychotherapist, who confesses in private transcripts that her involvement in the case may have been compromised by her own inability to become pregnant. Shortly after referring to himself as “I” for the first time, Christopher dies, leaving us to ask if the individualism we deem so desirable might not also be toxic. Stripped of communal structures, the intimate bond with the landscape that had defined his existence, little Christopher quite literally ceases to be.

Themes of unbelonging and separation from one’s personal context are again explored in “Wilderness.” As in Hall’s earlier, thematically related story “She Murdered Mortal He,” the protagonist finds herself isolated in a foreign country, unsure of the rules that silently govern the behavior and relationships of the people around her. When her husband and his childhood friend Zach hatch a plan to walk across the rusted railway viaduct that spans a scenic river estuary, Becca’s fear of heights is waved breezily aside. As Becca’s terror mounts, we learn that her acrophobia may have its roots in a past that comes to her only seldom, and in dreams. “Wilderness” is a masterful story in which the surrounding landscape not only reflects the personal anxieties of the characters but also radically alters the relationships between them.

A more overtly speculative vision is at work in “Later, His Ghost,” a terrifyingly bleak climate change story set in a near-future Norwich. Britain is more or less permanently ravaged by monster storms; whole communities have been swept away, with thousands of casualties and irreparable damage to much of the country’s infrastructure. The protagonist is holed up in a barn on the outskirts of town, his life reduced to two primary concerns: taking care of a traumatized pregnant woman and locating a complete copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. His vision of himself, as he briefly catches sight of his reflection in a broken window, speaks poignantly for all who have survived and struggle on:

He looked like some sort of demon. Maybe that’s what he was, maybe that’s what he’d become. But he felt human, he remembered feeling human. His ankle hurt, which was good. He could use a can opener. And he liked Christmas. He turned away from the mirror and climbed back out the window. Snow was flying past.

The claustrophobia that pervades this story is so powerful that we continue to feel suspicious of the more recognizable environment depicted in the piece that follows. “Goodnight Nobody” is told from the point of view of young Jemima, or Jem, as she delivers a packet of sandwiches to her mother, who works as a mortician at the local hospital. The outward simplicity of the narrative belies the tensions and dangers lurking beneath: not just the stark choice Jem’s mother faces in trying to care and provide for her daughter, but also the ways in which Jem herself must learn to survive in this seemingly banal world of corner shops and busy A-roads, where death is always closer than you think. “One in Four,” a vignette in the form of a suicide note, pushes the world of “Goodnight Nobody” to its logical conclusion, with vested interests and corporate penny-pinching sending our globalized economy spiraling toward a disastrous endgame.

In all these stories, Hall’s personal concerns — new parenthood, separation and abandonment, individuality and the loss of it — are the foreground for a more general sense of disquiet, a concern with the decomposing landscapes of our contemporary lives. This is folk horror at its most intimate, its most precarious. Hall obsessively shows the undermining of social reality through a doctored political consensus, the potential for imminent destruction that hovers on the margins of everyday life. The pieces that make up Madame Zero are shorter, more impressionistic than the stories in Hall’s earlier collection, but in terms of their intensity and political weight they are every bit as substantial, a perfect balance of language and content, poised at the magical midway point between the distillation of poetry and the vicariousness of prose. Hall’s alternation of mimetic with more overtly speculative texts conveys a queasily jolting effect, leading us to question the apparent normality of our lived environments.

In Conor O’Callaghan’s brief but powerfully haunting debut novel Nothing on Earth, published in 2016 in the United Kingdom and recently reprinted in the United States by Transworld Publishers, an environment that should be prosaic in the extreme — a nondescript close on an anonymous housing estate — is rendered as a landscape so uncertain that it gradually becomes invisible, particularly to those who would rather not be reminded of its existence. The events of the novel are narrated by an elderly priest who, during one memorably hot Dublin summer, becomes caught up in a series of incidents that affect his life and plague his memories. Paul, his wife Helen, and her twin sister Martina come to live on the estate because it is cheap, one of the numerous “ghost” building projects that were abandoned in the wake of the Irish recession. One night toward the end of August, the priest answers his front door to find Paul and Helen’s 12-year-old daughter seeking refuge following her mother’s disappearance earlier in the summer. The girl tells him that not only has Helen disappeared, but that her father and aunt have as well, the house reverting to an empty shell: “The things of a show house belonged to lives that should have happened but never did. They gave off no noise at all, and that was more deafening than anything.”

The priest feels uncomfortable about being alone in the house with the child, and there are hints of a dark shadow cloaking his past. He calls in a neighbor to act as chaperone, though he is later forced to admit that she did not stay in the house with them overnight. As the priest looks back over the events of that summer, we are confronted with one disquieting question after another: What happened to Martina and Helen’s parents, a tragedy so terrible it sent the sisters overseas for many years? Does the estate — the postmodern stand-in for the quintessential Bad Place of classic horror literature — possess the uncanny ability to literally eat people, or is it simply a metaphor for the social and economic deprivation that stalks the land? What of the Slatterys, as doomed and desperate as the rest of the estate’s shrinking populace in spite of their middle-class pretentions? Above all, it is the weather that leaves its mark on this novel: the days feel endless, taking on a dreamlike quality, the stealthily encroaching madness of a long hot summer.

The water rationing intensified. The taps ran dry from eight every evening. It hadn’t rained for almost two months. The mounds of muck up at the townhouses had dried to a fine orange sand that blew off in plumes whenever a warm wind came swirling around. The sand got everywhere: into the house, their clothes, everything. It got on the scraps of furniture they had, on the fruit in the picnic salad bowl. Every mug of tea or coffee seemed to have a film on its surface. You took a shower and the shower basin was coated with it, as if you had been at the beach all day. There was no point in cleaning the windows: within twenty-four hours they were gauzed with sand again.

The narrative teems with uncanny acts of duplication and mistaken identity — twin sisters who cannot be told apart, an elderly couple who appear to have walked out of a photograph, a confusion over names. At one point the estate, so new it is still partly a building site, is tellingly referred to as “historic ruins.” We shiver with apprehension of ghosts come to life:

It was mid-afternoon and they felt like aliens. It was, Paul said, like a coach tour of the Balkans, where you take a pit-stop in one of those dying hamlets that had been the centre of some medieval empire.

This is horror of the most resonant kind, because it is real and because it is happening now. There is a feeling of stasis twinned with impermanence, a halt to progress combined with a pell-mell stampede toward the new. Into the disappearance of this fractured family we read the disappearance of entire communities, thrust out of their own lives by an economic imperative to strip away the social provision we have spent so long in building. The priest’s shock as he is confronted by the reality of the failed housing estate — an environment that increasingly resembles a war zone — reminds us that, in a sense, O’Callaghan’s book is itself a ghost, the kind of narrative some people would prefer not to come into contact with at all.

Most of all, Nothing on Earth serves as an antidote to that fraction of horror fiction that is still mostly concerned with reassurance: Gothic melodramas in which the ghosts are safely confined to the past, sets of familiar tropes that suggest it is only those who wander off the path who will fall afoul of fate. O’Callaghan shows us that horror is now, and we are the demons.

As a society, we often feel more comfortable collecting press cuttings about tragedy than asking meaningful questions about its genesis. Nothing on Earth is less than two hundred pages long, yet its implications and reverberations carry more weight than many novels three times its length. Like Hall, O’Callaghan achieves his effect not through elaborate metaphors or densely styled “literary” writing, but through a declarative, pared-down prose and the gradual accumulation of significant detail.

While both Hall and O’Callaghan could be cited as authors of the literary mainstream with folk-horror sympathies (Hall has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and O’Callaghan is a prize-winning poet), Malcolm Devlin’s work feels as if it sprung directly from the compost of ’70s folk horror, finding inspiration — and a renewed vigor — in the tropes and assumptions of authors such as Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Holdstock, and Joan Aiken. His debut collection, You Will Grow Into Them (2017), thus perfectly embodies the shifting emphases and new grounding imageries of folk horror in the 21st century.

The collection opens conventionally enough, with a classic piece of English weird fiction, “Passion Play,” in which a teenage girl subsumes the anxieties of her troubled family into an obsession with a “stick man” who she believes haunts the icons in her local church. In its conflation of landscape elements with a lingering social unease, the tale has a strong taste of 1990s miserablism about it (think: Nicholas Royle, Joel Lane) and is exactly the kind of well-made, literary horror story one has come to expect from the British magazine Black Static, where “Passion Play” was originally published.

In the next story, “Two Brothers,” we begin to see You Will Grow Into Them move away from ’70s folk horror and toward a more modern and personal aesthetic. When his older brother Stephen is sent off to school, William remains behind at the family home. Standing at the station awaiting his brother’s return for the Christmas holidays, William finds himself devastated by the gulf that has opened between them:

He smiled when he saw them waiting for him, but it was not the lopsided grin which William remembered but a thin smile he didn’t recognise, and it was not directed at him personally. When William turned, he saw the same smile reflected on his father’s face. It was a cold expression, colder than the snow and the wind, and it was then William understood that while his brother had come home, he would remain alone.

“Two Brothers” is replete with elements of the uncanny we might recognize from Robert Aickman’s strange stories, yet there is something more too: a hyper-modern awareness of social divisiveness. We understand it is the father’s insistence upon tradition that poisons the boys’ future, rather than anything specific that happened at school. As in Sarah Hall’s “Case Study 2,” the enforced destruction of personal bonds leads inexorably to mental torment and eventually, breakdown.

The bonds of community are further explored in Devlin’s longer story, “The End of Hope Street,” in which the residents of a single street — parallels here with the estate in Nothing on Earth — are forced to abandon their homes when they mysteriously start becoming “unliveable.” We never learn the source of the power that transforms the residents’ houses into shadowy death-boxes. What we see instead is the impact of these events on the families of Hope Street, who respond to the crisis in differing ways. For a significant majority, the enforced return to values of good-neighborliness and closer personal proximity comes as an unexpected pleasure. They realize they do not, after all, need so many things, so much personal space. There are no grand confessions or personal epiphanies — one of the charms of this extraordinary story is how British it is — just a tacit redrawing of boundaries, a mutual understanding that they will stay together:

There would be a Christmas that year in Hope Street, no matter what happened, no matter what it represented. It would be both spiritual and secular and in its own peculiar way it would be an act of rebellion. Because even joy and companionship could be subversive, under the right conditions.

Extreme societal change is likewise the subject of “Breadcrumbs,” a deliciously twisted variant on the Grimms’ “Rapunzel.” Ellie lives in a tower block on an inner-city estate. Far from finding her circumstances restrictive, she simply reimagines her world as she wishes it to be:

She’s always preferred the view at night. The estate looks so bleak in the daytime, but now, the grey concrete of the surrounding tower blocks is consumed by the encroaching dark and only the lights remain. Dot-to-dot clues which her imagination mis-draws to denote superstructures coiling up into the night. The lights of the traffic on the distant bypass? Those aren’t cars grounded on the road, they’re flying machines on an express route, looping the loop at the intersection. She cocks her head and watches them fly.

Then her dreams, in a way, come true. Left alone in the flat when her parents and brother go to visit an aunt in hospital, Ellie awakes to find quotidian reality entirely gone, replaced by a startling fairy-tale landscape of forest and trees:

The city is barely a city any more. The estate has a beauty to it now. Where it had once been coloured in shades of concrete and steel, it is now a rich and wide expanse of browns and greens. The tower blocks are wrapped in roots and vines. They grow branches that stretch high. The tarmac at street level has been shattered into jigsaw pieces by the growth from beneath.

As in “The End of Hope Street,” these radical changes to the built environment are eventually accepted as a positive development. The characters — like Sophia in Sarah Hall’s “Mrs Fox” — embrace their new animal natures while the remaining “hu-mans” are seen as cave-dwellers, conservative primitives to be pitied for their old-fashioned insistence on staggering around on two legs.

The obverse of such tolerance is seen in “Dogsbody,” a darkly satiric fable in which a seemingly random swath of society encounters prejudice and social exclusion after becoming affected with “Lunar Proximity Syndrome” — in other words, they turn into werewolves. This is a story that pulls no punches in detailing the dozens of tiny ways in which minority groups routinely find themselves bullied, exploited, disadvantaged, and set apart:

A little superscript asterisk pointed to a lengthy paragraph of small print at the foot of the page. A promise that an affirmative answer would not invalidate the chances of employment, a warning that a dishonest one would lead to disqualification.

Equally incisive in its social comment is the novella-length story that forms the centerpiece of this collection. The protagonist of “Songs Like They Used to Play” is famous for having once been “little Tommy Kavanagh” from the hit reality-TV show Family Time. The program ran for years and, in spite of its deleterious effects on the real Kavanagh family, attracted a devoted following:

During the live shows, the public were invited to dress up and serve as background extras, a proposition so popular that security was increased. To Tom, the set took on the aspect of a bizarre prison. One where people from the future were happy to queue for hours in the rain for a chance to get in, while he peered through the fences at the modern world beyond, and wondered if he might find the opportunity to escape.

Now an adult, Tom reconnects with an old boyfriend, Bobby, who secretly harbors more nostalgia for the show than Tom himself:

“We get a lot of stag parties in York,” he said. “I’ve got double glazing, but you can still hear them out there screaming at each other. You know what I hear most? ‘Two world wars and one world cup.’ And they’re still talking about the fucking Empire, like that was ever a good idea. But that’s all we’ve got in the world now. We’re this little island rotting into itself, feeding off our sordid little past, lying to ourselves that it was something to be proud of. […] But then you hear something like this and somehow … Somehow it all makes more sense. Like it’s an anchor, a safety line. Something beautiful to hold on to. A promise that if the world could have been this good once, there’s hope for us yet.”

“Songs Like They Used to Play” is an original and persuasive story that riffs on our current obsession with “frock and bonnet” shows like Downton Abbey, with royalty and celebrity, with the sanitized heroism of historical romances and World War II movies. Brexit may be the most recent and significant demonstration of the power of such falsified narratives — the fairy tales of our own time — to affect the trajectory of our political present, but it is far from being the only one. Devlin’s insights into modern Britain are rendered all the more potent by his clear grasp of the cultural preoccupations of the recent past, a past many of us will remember first hand, those ghosts we happily recall on Christmas Eve, or Hallowe’en.

As Malcolm Devlin adds himself to the ranks of those writers — Paul Kingsnorth, Benjamin Myers, Aliya Whiteley, Wyl Menmuir, Jess Kidd, Helen Oyeyemi, Cynan Jones, Caitriona Lally, Andrew Michael Hurley — who are currently leading the new folk-horror revival, we are reminded that what unites these very different artists is their commitment to using the gestures and imagery of folk horror as a means of expressing highly contemporary political concerns. Disenfranchised through false histories and bigoted ideologies, the characters that people their stories are no longer able to find comfort and strength in the deep truths of their surrounding landscapes because the very origins of those landscapes are rooted in slavery and oppression.

No matter how twisted, the folk horror of earlier decades was created from a sense of continuity and, above all, nostalgia. Now we find stories increasingly powered by the engine of change. The new folk horror — metamorphic and disjunctive — is in part a voicing of our personal distress in the face of that change, but it is also an acknowledgment that change is necessary. We can no longer avoid the knowledge that entire classes and races of people have been systematically excluded from any sense of ownership of our landscape and history, and have consequently found the familiar environments of folk horror defunct and irrelevant. In order to escape our sense of statelessness, it is necessary for us to examine the state we are in.

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Nina Allan is an English writer of weird and fantastic fiction. Her novella Spin won a British Science Fiction Award in 2014.

The post The New Folk Horror: Recent Work by Sarah Hall, Conor O’Callaghan, and Malcolm Devlin appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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