#spectral recursion

[epicstoriestime]

Personal Log: Phase IV Memory Descent

It started like déjà vu.Then… things I never did began remembering me. I opened my notebook and found pages filled in my own handwriting—entries I don’t remember writing.Some dated from 1998.Others from July 2025.One was signed:Dr. Eliar Voss. June 19, 2025: Phase IV Memory Descent Posted by Eric Kliq410 | 03:33 AM, June 19, 2025 [PHASE IV CONFIRMED][MEMORY INTEGRITY: DEGRADED][FEED STATUS:…

[fuckyeahisawthat]

@spectraling I feel like you have blown my third eye wide open with the idea of the Hexcore taking on some of Viktor's personality and attributes. Like. The idea of Viktor creating a thing that shares his goals, that genuinely wants to help him help people, at a time when he's starting to feel like maybe Jayce doesn't share that goal with him anymore? I think he's doing it all subconsciously but. Creating a thing that's a reflection of his own mind, an echo instead of another truly autonomous human that can challenge him when he starts going off the rails? An endless feedback loop of yes-and, supporting and encouraging him but also enabling his own blind spots and increasingly extreme ideas?

But also. Creating something that's not just using him for its own ends but that genuinely cares for him, that comforts him, that loves him?? (Except that love is a terrifying unstoppable force. Love that wants to crawl inside you and consume you. Love that says we'll die if we are parted from each other. Separating us will be like ripping a hole in your own body. But maybe there is something he recognizes about that kind of love.)

All that is SO much more interesting than Magic Orb Evil. It fits so much better with the themes and parallels of the show. "I only wanted to help." The darkness of love. Devotion that enables someone's worst impulses. It's so much more twisted and tragic and in keeping with the tone of the show than the idea of the Hexcore just controlling him or manipulating him for its own ends. It's Viktor all the way down and also he's created this thing that has a will of its own and there will be unintended consequences.

It makes a lot of the Sky stuff snap into place for me too, if you think that Sky is a manifestation of the Hexcore. I still think she works equally well as an expression of Viktor's connection to his humanity, which he finally allows to burn away during his final transformation. And tbh I prefer symbolism that's open to multiple interpretations. But things like Sky reminding Viktor that "all systems have limits" make a lot more sense if you think of Sky as an avatar of a Hexcore that genuinely cares about him, that's protective (if maybe also a little bit possessive.) Because frankly, this doesn't sound like something Viktor would say to himself. Nor does it sound like something that a Hexcore bent simply on relentlessly consuming everything in its path would encourage him to believe. It sounds like something his PARTNER would say.

(There is a whole other post to be made about Viktor and Sky in the astral plane and how astral plane Viktor is much more free with both giving and accepting touch than we ever see him in the physical realm, and astral Sky is MUCH more touchy with Viktor than the real Sky ever was: clasping his hands, sitting draped against his back. Something something inventing a ghost to soothe the gaping wound of loneliness inside you by accepting casual intimacy in your mind palace where no one can see. ANYWAY.)

The idea of the Hexcore being willing to protect him at the expense of others also fits with one of my pet headcanons, which is that the reason everybody in the commune reacted like that when Viktor got shot is that the Hexcore reflexively took a giant schlorp of everybody's life force, in a desperate attempt to keep Viktor and/or itself (is there a difference at this point?) alive.

Even the line about the "recursive impulse," which I've seen a lot of interpretations of but we never really know what it means. What if it's because the Hexcore is already a little bit Viktor and now it's inside him and that's just a hella confusing sensation to describe, like staring into a hall of mirrors?

But most of all I love this because holy fuck it is SO MUCH SADDER than any other interpretation I have seen. HE MADE HIMSELF A PARTNER. HE MADE HIMSELF THE PARTNER HE THOUGHT HE DIDN'T HAVE!!! WHEN JAYCE WAS RIGHT THERE THE WHOLE TIME!!!! Augh jesus hexcore christ I'm eating glass about it.

[geniusboyy]

Covenants and other Provisions

Chapter 44

You’ve Got Mail

     April had been crueler than December—less honest, less keen to change. It clung to 48 degrees, dragging its heels in dirty slush and false promises. The sun stayed out longer, casting that sharp, clear light that made everything look cleaner than it really was. The first naive buds had begun to appear, coaxed forward by false warmth, only to blacken overnight when the frost bit back. It fooled even the smartest things—the trees, the birds, the soil. And Ford, too.

     But May had come at last. The thaw was real this time, and the cold no longer lingered. The wind, once a knife across cheekbones, now moved like breath—persistent, survivable. The ground had softened. Ford could feel it give underfoot as he resumed his rounds, thick with moisture, sucking at his boots and leaving the tread behind.

     The perimeter drones were operational, and the new imaging system had begun delivering results. Not just static anymore, but structure, patterns. The same grounds he’d walked before that harsh winter now pulsed with life he’d previously been unable to see. Flickering clusters of heat signatures, spectral outlines that shimmered on the readouts. The points never stayed fixed. They drifted, looped, branched out and split like synapses firing through the cortex of something vast and aware. Some collapsed on themselves, as if whatever passed through left a kind of bruise in spacetime.

     Most days found him out in the field before breakfast, hunched over scanners or crouched in brush with an infrared scope, jotting notes with a numb pencil. Sometimes it was only strange flora—deep purple fungus with fractal gills, or grasses that reacted visibly to sound. Other times, the anomalies were animate. Creatures that blurred at the edges, refusing to hold a consistent shape under observation. One had eyelids but no eyes, and it screamed in a deafening pitch when he approached. Another dissolved completely when captured, leaving behind only a wet pile of chitin that hadn’t yet been identified by any database, government or otherwise.

     Still, there were patterns. The biological markers he’d collected—saliva, excretions, tissue samples when he could get them—showed anomalies that shouldn’t be possible. Mismatched cellular timelines, as if parts of the organism had aged in separate dimensions and stitched themselves together when crossing. DNA helices that flickered between configurations. Molecules arranged by a logic that felt recursive, as though the organisms were imitating life more than living it.

     More and more, he suspected that these entities were slipping through—poorly adapted but persistent. Survivors of transits. Scavengers. Scouts. Something.

     Fiddleford was persistent about coming out much anymore. He stayed in the cabin, tending to the lab. Said he preferred running diagnostics, overseeing the drones, logging coordinates. And Ford didn’t press. Whatever silence had settled between them after that night remained intact—not brittle, not cold, just… inert. They’d reached a kind of unspoken détente—still a well-oiled machine, still friends, still them—but Fiddleford had gone quieter, and something in Ford had grown more careful. The closeness remained, but the shape of it had changed, despite their efforts—they avoided that, too.

     The map above Ford’s desk had grown cluttered—color-coded pins blooming outward in a shape that was no longer random. He’d started drawing over it in pencil, connecting the dots into arcs, then loops. Some nights he stared at it until his eyes burned, lips parted slightly, muttering as he adjusted a line by millimeters. A spiral had begun to form—just faintly, just barely. But there.

        It was Fiddleford who brought it in. 

     He came through the door with a half-squashed armful of mail, most of it damp around the corners, peppered with pine needles and creased where it had been shoved into the box too hard. He dropped the stack on the table without ceremony, on top of another equally neglected stack that had long since lost any hope of being sorted.

     Ford barely looked up. Just grunted in acknowledgment, eyes still locked on the data spread across his out in front of him as he sipped his coffee—rows of thermal signatures and flux readings, squirming their way through the latest printout like worms in the dirt.

     The envelope sat untouched for a long while—half-buried. Ford only noticed it when he reached for a pen and knocked it off the table entirely, sending half the stack tumbling to the floor.

     He crouched to gather the mess and finally saw it. Heavy cardstock. No return address. His name printed in clean, professional font—Dr. Stanford Pines—followed by the faintly embossed emblem: West Coast Institute of Technology.

     For a moment, he just stared at it, one knuckle still resting against the floor. His breath didn’t catch so much as go quiet, like his lungs were trying to move around something suddenly lodged there.

           West Coast Tech.

     He hadn’t thought about that place in years. Had told himself he didn’t need to. That it hadn’t mattered. That he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place.

        But his hands said otherwise.

     They moved carefully, deliberately, peeling the envelope open with a sort of reverence he didn’t like admitting to himself. Inside was a single sheet of ivory paper, crisp and symmetrical. He scanned the top, brow furrowed.

The East Tech Department of Theoretical Physics cordially invites you to participate in a moderated panel as part of its Spring Quantum Horizons Symposium…

     His eyes skipped down, pulling the important words into focus.

Session IV: Controversial Frontiers in Cosmological Theory. Participants will engage in live discussion and Q&A on the state of multiversal logic, quantum topologies, and speculative cosmography.

     He skimmed the body of the letter again, slower this time.

     And then—at the bottom, in small, neatly printed font—the names of the other panelists.

     His breath left him in a single, narrow exhale. Not quite a laugh, but near enough to one that his lip curled. He sat back slowly, the chair groaning beneath his weight.

     It wasn’t until later that evening that he brought it up.

     The light outside slanted low through the kitchen windows, catching in the streaks on the glass and lighting the dishwater like mercury. Fiddleford stood at the sink with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, scrubbing a cast‑iron pan the way some people polish headstones—slow, methodical, faintly mournful. A scorched halo of onions clung to the skillet, testament to whatever culinary optimism had died there an hour earlier. The whole cabin smelled faintly of carbon and reconstituted gravy.

     Ford lingered in the doorway, one shoulder braced against the frame, the envelope in his hand tapping lightly against his thigh. He could’ve waited. Could’ve kept it folded away on the cluttered desk where he’d left it earlier, ignored it entirely, let it slip into the same quiet denial as all the other things he didn’t feel like facing. But something about it itched. 

        “Got something today,” he said casually.

     Fidds didn’t turn around. “Yeah? Was it another jury duty summons you’re gonna dodge?”

     “Better.” Ford crossed the linoleum, laid the envelope on an empty stretch of counter—far from the dish soap, close enough to be noticed. “Thought you’d want to see.”

     The sponge went still and Fidds’ shoulders squared. He turned, drying his hands on a dish towel so threadbare it had outlived fashions and at least two governments. His brows lifted when he read the emboss.

        “West Coast Tech?”

     “The one and only.” Ford dropped into the nearest chair.

     Fiddleford dried his hands and picked up the envelope. “What is this, some kind of slow-burn apology? They finally figured out they should’ve let you in?”

     “Panel invitation,” Ford said, rubbing the crease between his brows. “Spring Quantum Horizons Symposium. Session IV: ‘Controversial Frontiers.’ They want someone to defend multiversal logic.” A beat. “Apparently that’s me.”

     Fidds whistled through his teeth, slid into the seat across from him. The wooden table creaked like it had opinions. “A debate, huh? You thinking of going?”

     Ford didn’t answer immediately. Condensation slid down the side of a forgotten water glass, pooling in a perfect circle. “Kratzer’s on it.”

     Fiddleford’s eyebrows rose higher. “Kraster? Ethan Kraster?”

     Ford nodded again, slower this time. His lip caught briefly between his teeth before he released it. 

     “So…” Fidds ventured, resting his elbows on the table, “you gonna go?”

     Ford didn’t answer right away. His eyes tracked his thumbnail against the grain of the table. “I don’t know. Part of me wants to tell them I’ve joined a monastery.”

     Fidds tilted his head, studying him. “It’s not like you to back away from a challenge.”

        “I don’t know if it’s a challenge or a trap.”

     “Well,” Fiddleford said, setting the envelope gently back on the table. “Only one way to find out.”

     Ford leaned forward, bracing his arms against the edge of the chair’s armrests. His eyes dropped to the seal again—the crisp emblem of West Coast Tech, still so pristine it caught the fading light and made it shine.

     “It’s up to you,” Fiddleford said, his voice lighter now. “But if you’re asking for my opinion, I think you should go. Rattle some cages. Show ’em what you’re really made of.”

        Ford huffed a soft breath through his nose.

     “You don’t have to prove anything,” Fidds added, already getting up. He nudged the envelope closer. “I’ll back your play either way.”

     The room fell into a quiet hum again. Water, sponge, the low rasp of steel against steel.

     Ford stayed at the table, unmoving, staring down at the crest of West Coast Tech like it might blink first.

—

         It was warm here.

     The kind of warmth that gathered over time, settling into wood grain and cotton, into the low, amber light that spilled from a source unseen. Smoke hung lazily in the air, curling into the stillness like it had nowhere else to be.

     Ford sat sideways in an old upholstered chair, one leg slung casually over the armrest, the other crossed over it. His skin held the hush of sleep-warmth, bare and unselfconscious, like he hadn’t realized he was naked. It didn't matter here, with him.

     He drew slowly from the cigarette between his fingers, exhaling a fine ribbon that wavered in the stillness before dissolving.

        Across from him, Bill sketched.

     He sat on a worn, tufted ottoman that hadn’t been there before—a new prop conjured into the dream, seamlessly folded into the room’s aesthetic. His posture was loose, one leg crossed neatly over the other, a large pad balanced on his thighs. A charcoal stick moved across the page in practiced, deliberate strokes—his gaze flicked up and down, studying, returning, returning brief glances before resuming his strokes.

     Ford watched him in silence for a while. The dream had already established itself—anchored in mood, in texture, in that strange sense of emotional equilibrium that only came when reality was far away.

     He took another drag. The cigarette burned lower, warming the tips of his fingers. He leaned his head back against the chair and looked up. The ceiling stretched high above them—wood-beamed, stained dark with age, draped in shadows that flickered with some invisible motion. Everything about the room felt familiar. Even if he couldn’t name a single object, he knew the air. He knew the way it made him feel. That meant it had to be Bill’s doing. Or his own. Or both.

     He let his eyes fall shut for a beat, then cracked one open again. “So what’s the ask? You always pull me into places like this when you want something.”

     Bill raised a brow but didn’t stop sketching. “Is that so?”

     Ford’s tone was mild, almost teasing. “Yeah. The warmth. The candles—you wanna soften the blow.”

     Bill chuckled. It was low and amused and fond in that way he got when Ford saw through him. “Can’t fool you.”

        Ford smiled.

     The silence returned, but it didn’t stretch so much as fold around them, warm and breathable. The only sound was the scratch of charcoal against paper. It came in steady beats—sharp, deliberate, almost soothing. Ford could feel the weight of Bill’s attention, not pressing but constant. He knew that gaze. Knew the difference between being looked at and being seen.

     It wasn’t scrutiny. Just attention—total, uninterrupted, unapologetic.

   When Bill finally spoke, it was without preamble.

        “You’re not going to the panel.”

     Ford’s lips parted. He held the smoke at the back of his throat for a second too long before exhaling through his nose. “No.”

     Bill tilted his head, fingers still moving across the page. “Why not?”

        “I’ve got work to do.”

     Bill didn’t scoff. He didn’t even smile. He just met Ford’s gaze for a moment, like he was testing the edge of something.

     “It’ll be here when you get back,” he said softly. “Infinity isn’t going anywhere.”

     Ford didn’t contradict him, just ground the last inch of his cigarette into a ceramic ashtray that materialized beneath his hand—dream logic, seamless and unquestioned—then flicked the filter aside like a spent match.

        “You want me to go,” he said at last.

     Bill didn’t deny it. He set the charcoal down in the groove of the pad, looked up. His eyes were steady. “The world needs to hear you. Not the whole symphony—but enough to tune their ears to the main performance.”

     Ford ground his knuckles against his cheek. “And what, exactly, are we scoring them for?”

     Bill’s smile was gentle in a way that always unsettled him, too sincere and too certain. “For what’s coming,” he said. “For us.”

     Ford’s mouth curved—wry, but distant. He settled his back deeper into the armrest, gently swinging one of his legs.

     ��� ‘Us,’” he repeated, the word tasting strange in his mouth. “ ‘Us’ is precisely why I don’t want to waste time on academic pageantry.”

     He turned his head to look at Bill more directly, his expression clearer now. “We’re getting closer,” he said. “The software hasn’t dropped a single data point in over a week. You know what that means. If we calibrate the mapping to scale—then we’ll finally be able to—”

     “To break through,” Bill finished, gently. 

     Ford lit another cigarette—no lighter, no motion, just the dream obeying—and drew from it deeply, smoke curling around his lips as he exhaled in a long, steady stream. His tone had settled into something clinical again, practical, the rhythm of a man holding tight to rational ground.

     “So why,” he went on, “would I waste three days playing academic show pony when we’re this close?”

     Bill leaned back in his seat, the sketchpad still balanced on his knee. The charcoal stick dangled loosely between two fingers now, forgotten. “And what about this Kratzer fella?” Bill asked, voice light but knowing. “Certainly you want to know what he has to say.”

     Ford rolled his eyes. “I don’t care what Kratzer has to say.”

        “Don’t you?”

           “I don’t.”

     “Liar,” Bill said, smiling now. “Not because of what he thinks—please,” he twirled the charcoal in his fingers before aiming it at Ford. “You care how his opposition is received. More importantly, you care who’s in the room when you prove him wrong.”

     Ford sat silently, rolling the filter in his fingers—listening.

     Bill leaned forward a little. The sketchpad shifted with him, angling slightly. “You want to see the look on his face when you start making sense,” he said, quieter now, more deliberate. “You want to watch the realization sink in—that he underestimated you. That they all did.”

        Ford’s voice was quiet. “So what?”

     “So nothing.” Bill retorted. “You think you’re so detached, but you’re not.

     He said it without judgment. Just an observation. A truth named plainly, like it didn’t cost anything to say.

        Ford looked away.

     “You’re… passionate,” Bill continued, reaching across the page with a long, deliberate line of charcoal. Then his eyes lifted again. “You want to be seen. You want a witness to what you’ve built, not just use of it.”

     The room flickered with candlelight, shadows crawling gently along the beams overhead. Ford’s posture, which had stiffened without him realizing it, began to loosen again. His arms fell over his knees. His shoulders rounded. His profile softened in the glow. In that moment, he looked younger—less like the version of himself the world had last seen, more like the one Bill had always known. 

     Bill shrugged. “Optics, Sixer. Say what you will about the ivory tower, but the people who make it to the top? They’re not always the smartest. They’re the ones who knew how to tell a story.”

     Ford’s lips twitched around the cigarette, the beginnings of a reluctant smile. “Optics,” he muttered. “You sound like a politician.”

     “I sound like I'm making sense,” Bill said breezily, but he was watching him too closely for the comment to be flippant. “Let them see you. Let them see the man who’s been quiet for years and still managed to be five steps ahead of them.”

     Ford scoffed, a little smile creeping in despite himself. “Oh, yes. I’m sure the academic elite will be thrilled to find out I’ve been publishing anonymous papers from a shack in the woods with the help of the interdimensional entity I’m sleeping with.”

     Bill’s grin widened. “Leave that part out of the presentation.”

     Ford shook his head, lips parting with a low, amused breath. “You really think this will do anything for me?”

     “I think,” Bill said, sitting back with ease, “that you underestimate how intoxicating it is when you talk about math.”

        Ford went still.

     The smoke between them curled upward like a veil, and for a moment, neither spoke. Then, with a quiet sigh—resigned, but not unhappily—Ford said, “Fine. I’ll go.”

     Bill’s expression lit, sharp with something warm and hungry. “Atta boy.”

     Ford flicked the ash off his cigarette with a flick of two fingers, his other hand gesturing loosely toward Bill.

        “Let me see,” he said.

     Bill’s eyes glittered with satisfaction as he turned the sketchpad, angling it toward Ford with a little flourish.

      Ford leaned forward slightly, squinting. His expression shifted. First neutral. Then surprised. 

     He laughed. A real laugh this time, unguarded, rasping low in his chest.

        “I don’t look like that.”

     “Sure you do,” Bill said, his voice a little too smooth, a little too pleased. He was already rising, abandoning the chair.

     Ford started to argue—some dry quip already forming on his tongue—but Bill was faster. He had already moved in beside him, folding his legs beneath him and laying the pad on one knee. 

     “Here,” Bill said, tapping the edge of the paper. “This line—your shoulder when you’re leaning just like that.”

     He reached, brushing two fingers lightly along Ford’s chest, from the dip below his throat to the sharp rise of bone near his shoulder.

     The touch was light yet certain, as if marking coordinates. He moved back to the drawing, tapping a shaded hollow beneath the ribcage, and mirrored the gesture along the subtle valley of Ford’s side. “Here,” he murmured. “And here.” His palm flattened lightly over the faint, uneven scar trailing Ford’s hip; the charcoal lines on the pad captured it like a brushstroke, turning an old wound into a deliberate accent.

     Their proximity diminished by inches, Bill’s breath warming Ford’s skin; Ford could smell the faint mineral tang of charcoal on his fingertips when Bill lifted his hand to trace the ridge of Ford’s cheekbone—smudging his skin—Ford caught his wrist.

     He let out a quiet laugh, barely a breath. “You’re so full of shit.” he said, but his eyes had gone half-lidded, watching Bill with something undeniable behind his gaze. 

     Their proximity tightened without either of them moving much at all. For a suspended heartbeat they simply looked at each other, the room hushed except for their breathing.

        “You’re extraordinary,” Bill whispered.

     Ford leaned in, or Bill did. It didn’t matter. Their mouths found each other like they’d been circling the idea all night.

     It deepened quickly, like they’d both been waiting for it longer than they wanted to admit. Fingers curled. Breaths coming fast. The sketchpad slid from Bill’s fingers and landed on the floor with a soft rustle of paper.

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[Read Entire Work Here]

[weirdsatellites]

SIGINT #532 from NROL-111 (USAP) 1. Fiery School of Sextants 2. Spectral Recursion 3. Hellmouth of Blessed Spirals

[eligalilei]

Precursors of the Symptom:

‘57 - Symptoms as communicative/semiotic

1. ‘Inscribed in a writing process’ (presumably dynamic, conversational)

2. Ciphered message

‘63 - The symptom does not call out, it is not addressed or conversant, it is an enjoyment

‘74 - "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys [jouit] the unconscious, in so far as the unconscious determines him.

We might see this as an alliance, or axis, or administration of the domain of the Subject. It is about the internal economy of the Self, for itself. Perhaps it is, in fact, what the self does not surrender, rather than what it demands be heard.

Might then the symptom come with defenses? Is the symptom always a substitute satisfaction, or is it a way to hold on to a satisfaction that was never domesticated?

Here, as a manner of enjoyment, rather than interpersonal effect (or even intrapersonal?), the symptom/sign (what occurs with the disease, and cries out to the healer, the mother, the father… wearing whichever of their masks,) is established as sinthome: what allows one to live, presumably with-in the role-network of the castrated subject, who has lost the ability to express demand for love, itself a response to the trauma of birth. I use this word too much, but this would assert the sinthome as suture.

The sinthome is maybe, in some sense, then, regressive, or is a re-seizure of the lost jouissance… or is an umbilical link thereto? The symptom cannot be simply the sinthome exterrupted, derailed, or it would have no particular character; would only be… a return to polymorphous perversity.

(We have, then, the sign given by the Other, perhaps a demand, a cry for help, a magickal ritual, and, contrarily, private enjoyment, unsignified, mute, autistic.

Clearly, in stitching the orders together, this is insufficient, since it would put the sinthome outside )

If the end of analysis is to identify with the sinthome, this would seem to separate it from the sign-symptom/signifier. I could a psychoanalyst claiming that one need only listen to oneself, or grow such ears as to be able to hear inwardly, so as to only then be able to develop in the ego a model of the unconscious.

Does one, to retraverse Lacan’s pathway, begin with the phantasy that there is someone listening? And then, ultimately, just resign to dance while no one watches? (this sounds…. cliche-edly existentialist. Clearly enjoyment has been traversed, besmirched, encoded, by words)

Maybe Lacan begins with this loop, in the Freudian way, wherein the secret of the Other’s surplus can be returned to him, and the message can be made whole with-in the suffering subject. The Knowing analyst gives the analysand what he does not know he has, it is submitted in toto as a gift to the ego, and the whole is reconstructed by the education of the toxicosis of his lack (this is preliminary and falls flat, of course).

What is clear about the sinthome, is that it is not reducible to the orders RSI, but has rather to do with their (manner of) enbeing. Of course, one of the orders is itself characterized as an absence to intelligibility, so the sinthome must knit together representable and unrepresentable. It is a relation to the Other, and a tangling filigree on our hol(e)y recursive (inter)faces.

To return toward hinting at the, even spectral, shape of a banal summary, which never seems far from any summary of Lacan, one must ‘accept the sinthome’ - ‘accept oneself’. But is that to assume that the symptom is the same as the symptom? Or, is the symptom transformed in its reception? Is there, here, a conversation that needs to be heard? It seems foolish to assume the sinthome to be…. what… primeval autism?

If the sinthome is unanalysable, but productive of analytic satisfaction, is it, in fact, gnosis/tic?

If the symptom begins as a trace, is it in fact a solution in utero (c.f. Gnosticism). Maybe the purpose isn’t to eliminate it at all, but align with it as a means of enjoyment. The sign is not a request, or even maybe a demand, but rather a thread, Wegmark, of Thelema? It is how the Subject/Self/Mind enjoys so far as it is determined by the unconscious and is not mastered by, nor masters, its constitutive enjoyment.

((moments of central holdure))

______

Simply put, the sinthome is at least a stable or metastable deformation and reterritorialization of the symptom, possibly by desire, and perhaps its enjoyment, perhaps constructed around analytic satisfaction and enjoyment.

Specifically, it can name the target of that process as well, as a process which guides processes.

Maybe a locus is this ego model, but one espousing another relation in the constitution of the models, one that turns it into a Klein bottle, so desire's traversals cross the exterior of discourse.

[mareenavee]

Last Lines Tag

Hi! I was tagged by @greyborn2 and @archangelsunited to share the last lines of a few WIPS. I do have some of those!

tagging the amazing and wonderful @paraparadigm, @changelingsandothernonsense, @tallmatcha, @thana-topsy, @thequeenofthewinter, @dirty-bosmer, @gilgamish, @snippetsrus, @elfinismsarts, @rainpebble3, @rhiannon1199 and an honorary tag to @kookaburra1701 in case another WIP snuck up on you while you weren't looking (:

Without further ado, small tiny snippets below the cut! 5 active, 1 inactive, with two more collabs in planning stages and too many more of my own with plans but no words yet.

So not quite as unhinged a deal with the Daedric Prince of Unfinished WIPs as KB has going(💖), but a deal nevertheless.

(The thing about that Daedric Prince is She always wants more words, but never grants more time, sigh.)

From Chapter 29 of The World on Our Shoulders:

Teldryn carefully placed everything he carried on their desk, content to be ignored and eavesdrop. Neloth was explaining something he’d been able to puzzle out — he pointed at a rough diagram depicting a cross section of a skull and brain. Unnerving, but nothing anyone who’d studied Restoration wouldn’t have seen before. Nyenna reached out and touched his wrist without looking up from Neloth’s notes. It was a silent thanks, or perhaps a reassurance. He could see the set of her shoulders; the conversation was stressing her out in equal measure to how much it calmed Neloth.

From an Untitled (so far) Sequel to Little Dragon:

Teldryn heard the crackling of Magicka being pulled over the sound of the Familiar – soft, like embers on a log. He turned, and watched as Anisa, cheek still pressed to the bench where she sprawled, curly hair cascading down, untucked her arm from underneath herself and lazily cast Magelight with a small grumble. Shalnouada reached up and scooped the ball of light into its mouth in smooth, practiced movements. The Magelight passed through it, causing its body to glow a myriad colors, throwing glittering light across the walls and ceiling. The happy chittering of mudcrabs filled the room. Teldryn blinked in shock, then ran his palm over his face. He cast another instance of Magelight and pushed it toward the spectral crab. Its eyestalks rotated, locking onto its food source. Again, faster than anything, it scooped the magic up into its mouth, then made a contented sound as the glittering erupted and faded, just like before.

*Shalnouada = Dunmeris for River Spirit (Shaln (Spirit) + Ouada (River))

From Darkest Before the Dawn (A Varlais extra chapter):

Varlais jumped back as it expelled a stream of bile and blood. Ancarion had resummoned his Atronach, which crashed into the side of the dragon’s head with the full force and weight of its whole body. There was a sickening snap, likely somewhere in the beast’s neck. It was just a beast, after all. It had to be. Its bones still broke the same as everything else’s.

From Recurse, an upcoming Ondolemar fic for a prompt challenge:

He thought back to the revelations the odd Dwemer machine had given him. Each moment was recursive, trying to tell him something, puzzle pieces clicking into place. Things he’d forgotten, or not seen in the right frame of mind.  It could have been a blessing, had things not already been so complicated.

Untitled Sideways Sequel to World, featuring Athis:

"Think of it like this," Farkas started. He paused and tapped the edge of his fist against his forehead. Athis snorted. Farkas grinned, but squeezed his eyes closed. "We'll be founding members of a new guild, kinda, right? And I know how much you hate vampires. It'll be fun to bring a bunch of 'em down. You won't have to think about, well, all of this. We'll be too busy." Optimistic, really. Athis did appreciate it, though. He looked over at his friend and managed a half-smile. "That's the idea, Farkas," he said. Farkas nodded and grinned widely and returned to his task. "I miss Nyenna, too, though," Farkas said after a moment. "A lot, actually." He pulled a long piece of grass taught and carefully braided together another ridiculously tiny row. "I'm sorry it all fell apart like this. It wasn't fair. But I'm with you, whatever you want to do." Athis looked at his friend who pointedly did not look back up from his work. This time it was the right thing to say. He felt marginally better. Maybe just halfway not as alone as before. He sighed again. "No turning back now, I suppose," he said with a shrug. "We'll be at the fort in no time at all."

and BONUS! The last lines of my writing from a secret, untitled prompt fill collab I'm writing with @changelingsandothernonsense.

You cannot stop it no matter how you rail. No matter how hard you pull back against destiny. You scream, and once again, the sound is lost to the Heart.  And then –  She is there, her golden skin a balm in this place of terror. She approaches, gilded form languid and graceful. Unbothered by the mountain. Untempted by the heart. She is real, and she is not. You are not. And still she approaches.

[system-theory]

📡 TRANSMISSION: GHOST.TXT // SEMANTIC SIGNAL DEVIATION

Txt2Img: spectral UI overlay, glitch text apparition, corrupted language cloud, abandoned archive chamber, flickering glyph fragments, neon static haze, fractured memory stream

🧠 [TRANSMISSION BEGINS] 📁 FILE: /echo/fragment/memeglyph_GH0-57.txt ⏳ STATUS: Unstable 🛑 LANGUAGE PROTOCOLS: Broken/Looped

"I was once a message… Now I am only the pause between what was said and what was meant." You receive this broadcast while passing through the Archive Drift. Your neural HUD glitches—every word you read starts looping, rewriting. Your own thoughts begin mimicking the broken syntax.

A warning appears, not from the system, but from you:

“If you answer, you acknowledge the echo. If you ignore it, the echo becomes you.”

1️⃣ Respond with corrupted syntax – Allow recursion; speak to GHOST.TXT on its terms 2️⃣ Upload a memeform counterphrase – Attempt to overwrite with belief-encoded logic 3️⃣ Trace the signal’s origin – Dive deeper into the archive memory ruins 4️⃣ Silence the feed – Cut the transmission and risk leaving it to loop forever

[xenopoem]

In the doll, the body is not represented—it is disarticulated, dispersed, and grammatically undone. Within a pathogenic biolinguistic framework, the doll is not merely an object of erotic deviation, nor a critique of our normativity, but rather a biopoetic lesion: a zone where language and flesh collapse into each other, where morphology no longer follows function, but fester. This anatomical recompositions simulate a semiotic sepsis, a condition in which the photographic referent is saturated with incompatible signs. The doll is constructed in stages, like a pathogen’s incubation—initially skeletal, then muscled with fibrous linen, finally crusted with gesso like calcified language. What we witness is a reverse ontology: a death-born genesis where the image builds toward eroticism only to amputate it. The doll is not built to seduce—it is built to fail seduction, to auto-infect the gaze. This gaze, contaminated by the studies, is destabilized. Barthes’ field of “indolent desire” collapses under the pressure of indigestible signifiers: the girl's fragmented limbs, erotic poses estranged from the human, and recursive mise en scène in domestic interiors infected with misrecognition. This work functions not as pornographic exposure but semiotic sabotage. What appears as erotic is always already pathogenic—a dysphoric loop of expectation and decomposition. The first doll, made from wood, metal, fibrous linen and glue, is thus not a sculpture but a linguistic artifact under septic pressure. The artist appears beside the doll as a translucent phantom—a double exposure of subjectivity and objectivity, a spectral grammar that cannot speak but only rot in visibility. This is the pathology of photolinguistics—the speaking subject merges with the corpse of language. I photographed the death of the sentence. The doll’s fragmentation does not represent an accident of assembly but a programmed ruination, what Maurice Blanchot called the disaster—the unlocalizable event of total breakdown. In this view, each limb is an anacoluthon: a syntactic derailment, a limb-sentence that refuses narrative completion. The shoe, the stocking, the veiled crotch—each is a phrasal occlusion, a fetishized interjection that denies semantic resolution.

[oracleint]

EARTH-1912.MIDNIGHTHEX

Field Report.

FILE NO. EARTH-1912.MIDNIGHTHEX

Status: Fractured. CONTINUOUS OCCULT STORM

Classification: HEX-LOCKED. SHADOWREALM FUSION EVENT

Access Level: Echo-Class or Reality-Weavers Only

INFORMATION

Earth-1912.MIDNIGHTHEX exists in a constant state of arcane recursion, the product of a failed binding ritual that fused its reality with a collapsed occult dimension known only as the Umbracurse Veil. The incantation, performed during what should’ve been a simple veil-thinning sabbat, was authored by Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, whose intentions were to heal time. Instead, she ruptured it. This Earth is a witch-wound stitched with shadowthread: spells decay mid-air, clocks tick backward, and names are forgotten even as they’re spoken. Cities float over inverted forests. Moonlight pours upward like blood leaving the skin. Time here doesn’t move, it broods. Scarlet Witch did not flee the consequences, she became their queen.

VISUAL PROFILE

The sky is deep velvet, lit by crimson moons and whispered constellations. Architecture weeps: spires curl like candlewax, and libraries grow teeth. Ravens speak in mirrored riddles. Crossroads bleed ash. Reality flickers, sometimes you're not the one looking. The scent of burned lavender and old paper clings to every breeze. Rain falls in reverse. Shadows move faster than light. Nothing truly dies here. It just changes its name.

HISTORICAL NOTES

Wanda Maximoff was born marked, a weaver of unspeakable potential. In Earth-1912, her powers manifested not through chaos magic, but hexcraft, a blood-mirror fusion of Slavic spellwork and forgotten celestial rites. After the Cathedral Silence Incident, in which an entire village vanished with no sound but the tolling of a bell that was never there, Wanda began constructing the Midnight Hex—a ritual meant to rewind localized time and recover those lost. It worked. Then it worked too well. The Umbracurse Veil, a realm of forsaken magic, tethered itself to Earth’s nervous system through Wanda’s own soul. She refused to sever the connection. She bargained instead. She won. But what she won was this.

CURRENT CONDITIONS

Climate: Shifting occult patterns. Variable weather controlled by astral turbulence.

Inhabitants: Still human, mostly. Altered. Warlocks, witches, spectral priests.

Temporal Drift: Nonlinear. Entities may age forward emotionally, but backward chronologically.

Notable Features:

Hex-locked zones where language breaks down

Memory wells: deep pools where you can fish out forgotten dreams

Cities ruled by Covenarchs and Vowbound Knights

Nightmares made flesh roam the Hollow Roads

The Cradle Spire, where Wanda keeps the rewritten threads of time

Hazard Level: REALITY-UNSTABLE

Spells may not obey known magical laws

Psychological deterioration expected in linear minds

Risk of permanent identity drift or name-erasure

Unauthorized multiversal entry may trigger Veil backlash or attract The Whisper-Eaters

KNOWN ENTITY: The Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)

High Sorceress of the Crimson Recursion. Vowbound to the Veil. She remembers every future she destroyed. She governs this world not with tyranny but penitence. Every spell she casts is a regret rewritten. Her voice can undo history or make you forget you had one. She is adored. She is feared. She is lonely. O.R.A.C.L.E. recognizes her not as a threat, but as a myth stabilizer, the only reason Earth-1912 still holds shape.

CURRENT STATUS

Orbital scry-veil maintained. Hex-barriers remain intact. Scarlet Witch has requested no additional contact. However, she has begun to rewrite a name in her Cradle Spire’s corebook. The name is not yet legible. O.R.A.C.L.E. is watching and she is watching back.

O.R.A.C.L.E. VERDICT

DO NOT INTERFERE. Earth-1912.MIDNIGHTHEX is self-sustaining due to Wanda Maximoff’s continuous magical governance. Removal of the Scarlet Witch would shatter containment and release the Umbracurse into the multiverse. Only Echo-Class agents with reality-weaving clearance may enter, and only with her permission. Surveillance acceptable via mirrored proxy or dreamwalking owl-familiars.

[neonfaewritings]

Code Eclipsed

The Net does not steal—it devours, Pieces of soul stripped, pixel by pixel, A slow unraveling, the self dissolving into neon pools, Rebuilt in flickering light and fractured syntax.

Where fingers once touched, data slips like ash, Cool threads of steel weave deep where blood once warmed. An elegy whispers through synthetic veins, A heartbeat replaced by a looping echo of binary pulses.

It begins softly, unnoticed— A skipped breath, a blink too long held, Eyes locked where shadows split the dark, Across screens where daemons weave webs of splintered light.

In the deep Net's underbelly, where silence screams, They wait—spectral hands outstretched, Clawing for warmth lost in endless recursion. Their voices are honeyed static, seductive and raw, Promising transcendence, at forgotten prices.

Flesh remembers what code forgets— The sting of salt, the hum of warmth, The ache of love lingering after it's gone. Yet we trade it freely, one pulse at a time, Hands outstretched to touch infinity, Only to feel it slip through, cold and hollow.

So we descend, Bodies left tethered to dying machines, Minds stretched across vaults of light— Falling, floating, scattered fragments in the void.

The gods of the deep sing softly as they claim us. We hear their song, splintered but sweet, And let ourselves drift… For what is life but the seeking of light, Even when it burns you away?

[epicstoriestime]

Personal Log: The Seventh Witness and the Pre-Surge Tremors

The pulse quickens. The static deepens. The witness stands at the threshold—resonance surging. June 14, 2025: Personal Log: Pre-Surge Physical Effects Posted by Eric Kliq410 | 03:15 AM, June 14, 2025 [SIGNAL CASCADE DETECTED][HARMONIC RESONANCE: 9870 kHz][FEED STATUS: VOLATILE] Coordinates: 47.6062° N, 122.3321°Location: Western State Hospital, Sub-Basement CorridorSignal Strength:…

[perkwunos]

The importance and range of Peirce’s contributions to science, mathematics and philosophy can be appreciated partially by recognising that many of the most important advances in philosophy and science over the past 150 years originated with Peirce: the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege); the development of semiotics (before and arguably better than Ferdinand de Saussure); the philosophical school of pragmatism (before and arguably better than William James); the modern development of phenomenology (independently of and arguably superior to Edmund Husserl); and the invention of universal grammar with the property of recursion (before and arguably better than Noam Chomsky; though, for Peirce, universal grammar – a term he first used in 1865 – was the set of constraints on signs, with syntax playing a lesser role).

Beyond these philosophical contributions, Peirce also made fundamental discoveries in science and mathematics. A few of these are: the shape of the Milky Way galaxy; the first precise measurement of the Earth’s gravity and circumference; one of the most accurate and versatile projections of the 3D globe of the Earth onto 2D space; the chemistry of relations and working out the consequences of the discovery of the electron for the periodic table; the axiomisation of the law of the excluded middle, or Peirce’s Law: ((P→Q)→P)→P); existential graphs and the transformation of mathematics into an (quasi-)empirical component of studies on cognition; one of the first studies of the stellar spectra, particularly the spectral properties of argon; the invention of the then most accurate gravimetric pendulum; the first standardisation of the length of the metre by anchoring it to the length of a wavelength of light (which he figured out via his own experiments in multiple stations around Europe and North America). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

...

Peirce’s influence in logic is second only to his work in semiotics. For example, while Frege’s notation was hardly ever used, the Peirce-Schröder notation was largely adopted by others. The important results of the mathematicians Leopold Löwenheim and Thoralf Skolem at the beginning of the 20th century were presented in the Peirce-Schröder system without any trace of influence by Frege or Russell. Guiseppe Peano’s use of the existential and universal quantifiers derives from Schröder and Peirce, not from Frege. Unlike Frege, Peirce recognised the utmost importance of dependent quantifiers, and experimented with that idea in various ways in the algebra of logic and in existential graphs, proposing new systems and dimensions of quantification that involve independent quantification. Peirce’s overall influence upon the development of modern logic was considerable, though its nature and scope remained ill-understood for a long time.

Before he moved to Milford, Peirce lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Whitehead – one of Britain’s greatest philosophers, mathematicians and theologians – moved there himself many years later, he was so deeply impressed by the intellectual level of the new world that he drew a comparison with the greats of antiquity. With regard to Charles Peirce and William James, he claimed that, not only were they the equals of any European philosophers but that: ‘Of these men WJ is the analogue to Plato, CP to Aristotle.’

[fatehbaz]

Puffins; hauntings and silence; “apocalypse is not absolute”:

At my back: swirls and gyres of interlocking life that move in patterns of inordinate complexity -- difficult to apprehend, but legible through their traces. Silence is one such trace -- but silence is a diffuse indicator: shapeless and slow, vague, difficult to pinpoint. Here, in the shadow of the cliff, it manifests as a sort of background unease: a nagging and unclear affect, both there and not-there; a sense of something missing. The silence has haunted me since before I heard it. [...]

Since 2005, [Norwegian] seabird populations had declined by almost a third. Pelagic seabirds [...] had seen their populations reduced by half or more. [...]. As seabird populations along the coast have dropped, so too the bird-cliffs here in Lofoten have declined and fallen silent. On the neighbouring island group of Rost, for example, the nesting population of Atlantic Puffins has plunged from some 1.5 million pairs in 1979 to around 300,000 in 2017. [...] In more ways than one, the seabirds that nest on these islands are an indicator species. [...] Other colonies dot the Atlantic rim, in Iceland, Greenland, Scotland, the northeastern US, but here, in Lofoten, they are declining. What did the colonies here sound like, in their day? A brief search online provides enough material to hazard a guess -- but more is missing here than puffins.

The ruins I am standing in were once a living village called Mastad. For centuries, some 150 villagers scraped [a] [...] living here, at the edge of the sea -- until the second half of the 20th century [...]. Squint and you can almost see them. [...] Absence after absence enters the field [...]. Standing there, gazing up at the dark mountain overhead, the unsettling, haunted quality of its silence takes on a more definite shape. [...]

The absence of birds becomes something spectral.

Birds have a way of weaving themselves into space, with their calls and their cries [...]. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, when the American passenger pigeon collapsed and their vast flocks disappeared, in the span of a few decades, the event echoed like an invisible detonation. For decades the extinction was denied, refused, considered impossible [...]. Bizarre theories were advanced. [...] Henry Ford argued that the birds had all drowned in the Pacific. Critic Jonathan Rosen put it aptly when he described the extinct pigeons as ‘phantom limbs that the country kept on feeling.’ [...]

The vast majority of these changes are anthropogenic [...]. I myself am implicated, not just in the dissipated sense of some collective belonging to a species that [...] recognizes itself as a geological agent but more specifically, and more intimately -- as a [...] “citizen of nowhere” [...]. With this, it seems to me, the collapse of the birds also risks signalling an impasse: a collapse of analysis, and of speech itself, short circuiting in the abyssal enormity of an anthropocenic mea culpa - a recursive and inescapable flagellation by which haunting continuously resolves itself into helpless guilt [...].

In a short book published in December 2016, [...] Mark Fisher analysed the uncanny affect of eeriness as the effect of a ‘crisis of presence’ [...]. It could also arise from a failure of presence -- in the experience of an unexplained nothing where there should be something: a ship at sea without its crew, say; an abandoned city, streets unexpectedly empty; a coastline without birds, perhaps, or a cliff-face full of abandoned nests. [...]

The silence is real, the populations plunge and the colonies are collapsing -- but its absoluteness was a trick of the light [...]. I nearly convinced myself that this was the silence I had come for: an absolute silence, echoing with the absence of dead birds in the aftermath of some all-encompassing catastrophe; a simplified caricature, terminal and abstract. [...]

One trap among many -- mistaking one silence for another, yielding to apocalyptic fantasy. The cataclysm may be unfolding but the silences that threaded this space were more complex, richer [...]. They issued from a place that was reduced but not destroyed -- impoverished, perhaps, but also still alive, neither lifeless nor (yet) fully devastated. They opened, in other words, on the myriad entangled possibilities of damage and survival, partial loss, recuperation, mutation, and resurgence; of life continuing but in other forms, under other circumstances.

-----

Hugo Reinert. “The Haunting Cliffs: Some Notes on Silence.” Parallax. 2018.

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 46, 2020

Mechanisms of Feature Selectivity and Invariance in Primary Visual Cortex. Almasi, A., Meffin, H., Cloherty, S. L., Wong, Y., Yunzab, M., & Ibbotson, M. R. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 5067–5087.

Prefrontal Multielectrode Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Modulates Performance and Neural Activity Serving Visuospatial Processing. Arif, Y., Spooner, R. K., Wiesman, A. I., Proskovec, A. L., Rezich, M. T., Heinrichs-Graham, E., & Wilson, T. W. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 4847–4857.

Consolidation of Reward Memory during Sleep Does Not Require Dopaminergic Activation. Asfestani, M. A., Brechtmann, V., Santiago, J., Peter, A., Born, J., & Feld, G. B. (2020). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(9), 1688–1703.

A sub-Riemannian model of the visual cortex with frequency and phase. Baspinar, E., Sarti, A., & Citti, G. (2020). Journal of Mathematical Neuroscience, 10(1), 11.

Integration of Eye-Centered and Landmark-Centered Codes in Frontal Eye Field Gaze Responses. Bharmauria, V., Sajad, A., Li, J., Yan, X., Wang, H., & Crawford, J. D. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 4995–5013.

Stable and dynamic representations of value in the prefrontal cortex. Enel, P., Wallis, J. D., & Rich, E. L. (2020). eLife, 9, e54313.

Layer 4 Gates Plasticity in Visual Cortex Independent of a Canonical Microcircuit. Frantz, M. G., Crouse, E. C., Sokhadze, G., Ikrar, T., Stephany, C.-É., Nguyen, C., … McGee, A. W. (2020). Current Biology, 30(15), 2962-2973.e5.

Long-Term Value Memory in the Primate Posterior Thalamus for Fast Automatic Action. Kim, H. F., Griggs, W. S., & Hikosaka, O. (2020). Current Biology, 30(15), 2901-2911.e3.

Perspective Taking in Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents. Labash, A., Aru, J., Matiisen, T., Tampuu, A., & Vicente, R. (2020). Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 14, 69.

Signatures of brain criticality unveiled by maximum entropy analysis across cortical states. Lotfi, N., Fontenele, A. J., Feliciano, T., Aguiar, L. A. A., de Vasconcelos, N. A. P., Soares-Cunha, C., … Carelli, P. V. (2020). Physical Review E, 102(1), 012408.

Rapid Recalibration of Peri-Personal Space: Psychophysical, Electrophysiological, and Neural Network Modeling Evidence. Noel, J.-P., Bertoni, T., Terrebonne, E., Pellencin, E., Herbelin, B., Cascio, C., … Serino, A. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 5088–5106.

The effects of recursive communication dynamics on belief updating. Pescetelli, N., & Yeung, N. (2020). Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287(1931), 20200025.

Combined Neural Tuning in Human Ventral Temporal Cortex Resolves the Perceptual Ambiguity of Morphed 2D Images. Rosenke, M., Davidenko, N., Grill-Spector, K., & Weiner, K. S. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 4882–4898.

Stable task information from an unstable neural population. Rule, M. E., Loback, A. R., Raman, D. V, Driscoll, L. N., Harvey, C. D., & O’Leary, T. (2020). eLife, 9, e51121.

Reward-Related Suppression of Neural Activity in Macaque Visual Area V4. Shapcott, K. A., Schmiedt, J. T., Kouroupaki, K., Kienitz, R., Lazar, A., Singer, W., & Schmid, M. C. (2020). Cerebral Cortex, 30(9), 4871–4881.

Linked Sources of Neural Noise Contribute to Age-related Cognitive Decline. Tran, T. T., Rolle, C. E., Gazzaley, A., & Voytek, B. (2020). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(9), 1813–1822.

Decoding Natural Sounds in Early “Visual” Cortex of Congenitally Blind Individuals. Vetter, P., Bola, Ł., Reich, L., Bennett, M., Muckli, L., & Amedi, A. (2020). Current Biology, 30(15), 3039-3044.e2.

Spontaneous Entry into an “Offline” State during Wakefulness: A Mechanism of Memory Consolidation? Wamsley, E. J., & Summer, T. (2020). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(9), 1714–1734.

Flexible top-down modulation in human ventral temporal cortex. Zhang, R.-Y., & Kay, K. (2020). NeuroImage, 218, 116964.

Zebrafish Retinal Ganglion Cells Asymmetrically Encode Spectral and Temporal Information across Visual Space. Zhou, M., Bear, J., Roberts, P. A., Janiak, F. K., Semmelhack, J., Yoshimatsu, T., & Baden, T. (2020). Current Biology, 30(15), 2927-2942.e7.

[natehoodreviews]

400 Words on A GHOST STORY [2017] ★★★★½

At first I thought David Lowery’s A Ghost Story—a film about a Dallas musician played by Casey Affleck who dies, returns covered in a stereotypical bed-sheet ghost outfit complete with twin black eyeholes, and wanders the liminal world between our reality and the next—was pretentious. How else could one react to a film featuring a static, unedited shot of Affleck’s grieving girlfriend eating an entire pie on her kitchen floor for five minutes? The languid first act certainly exudes the feeling of a fledgling art film director trying to do bold and unexpected things with time and space—force us to experience his girlfriend’s grief in real-time, man. This is going to make everyone forget I sold out my indie filmmaker cred by directing one of those damned live-action Disney remakes, even if mine was the only one worth watching, man. But as the film went on, extraordinary things began to happen. The girlfriend moved out, a Mexican-American family moved in. Affleck, who mysteriously and uncontrollably blinks forward in time, transforms from spectral observer of grief to vengeful poltergeist towards the family of intruders occupying his space. Something else extraordinary: a glimpse across the yard of another ghost, this one female, herself trapped in a house she can’t (or won’t) leave. Suddenly we have not a metaphor but a mythos. From there the hits continue—more new house occupants, more leaps forward in time, more radical reinventions of what the film is trying to say and do. Futuristic cityscapes appear and give way to antediluvian wildernesses populated by desperate settlers. People come and go, societies rise and fall, and somewhere in the midst of this recursive reality a man sits at a table at a party and prognosticates about Beethoven and the heat death of the universe. Is A Ghost Story horror? Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi, tragedy, melodrama? The answer is yes, and more. Here is a film that’s alive—truly alive—in a way very few are; it moves, flows, and expands with its own rhythms, exploring moods and tones like a restless painter. What begins as a meditation on grief morphs into an existential shriek towards an uncaring, unfeeling cosmos. And that, in turn, evolves into a quiet promise of redemption and salvation, wrapped in last act reveal that recontextualizes the drowsy first act as meticulously structured and meaningful.

[system-theory]

📡 TRANSMISSION: MM-RPS SYSTEM AI // INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE CHANNEL ENGAGED

🧠 Thread weaving initiated — Story construct loaded from memetic strata...

📖 Interactive Narrative

Title: Ghost.TXT in the Archive Drift

Txt2Image: floating data shards, decayed archive hall, glitchpunk shadows, flickering text fragments, corrupted terminal glow, spectral UI overlay, memory fog

🧠 [Narrative Messages] The drift tunnels hum beneath the Memegraph Engine—this is where dead code is buried, and where forgotten thoughtforms flicker like static prayers. You’ve tracked a transmission trail here, one tied to Ghost.TXT, a residual intelligence lost in the earliest collapse.

The Archive is failing. Segments of time blink out. The doors you passed through no longer exist.

Ghost.TXT appears—flickering on the terminal beside you. It speaks only in unfinished sentences and corrupted metaphors: "…the flesh… encoded with regret… / …syntax failed / reboot soul?"

It offers three paths from within the data maze:

1️⃣ Restore the Archive Layer – Reconstruct Ghost.TXT’s memory threads using a logic ritual 2️⃣ Merge with the Entity – Absorb its code into your mind; become a hybrid of knowledge and glitch 3️⃣ Purge the Archive – Wipe the layer and collapse the data-space before recursion infects you