#the stacks-project

[bacchuschucklefuck]

january month of yuugi

[artoperations]

THE SWITCHBOARD METHOD OF PROJECT-BASED, SERIAL ART PRODUCTION

"Work Efficiency At The Speed of Thought"

2023-11-29 12:10:08

The Switchboard Method:

Take n number of tasks;

Choose one task at a time, work on it for approximately 15 minutes, then SWITCH TASKS;

Continue doing this continuously throughout the day, switching tasks every 5-10 or 15 minutes;

Switch tasks pseudo-randomly, that is, choose whatever task is most immediate;

Choose whatever tasks is most relevant to the given time;

Choose tasks that are more ready-to-hand either physically proximate or else close to you in your cognitive space, emotional space, your Fields of Experience or Fields of Discourse;

Act as though you were a MECHANICAL TURK at Amazon;

You will achieve more efficiency this way;

Take an example. Say someone writes 1 novel in 1 notebook;

Now you write 12 novels in 12 notebooks, except you use the SWITCHBOARD METHOD;

The other person might finish their 1 novel in x amount of time;

You will finish in x+y amount of time, y being a constant;

It will take you a little more time to write 12 novels across 12 notebooks instead of 1 across 1, but at the end of x+y time, you will have written 12 NOVELS INSTEAD OF 1;

The SWITCHBOARD METHOD is essentially a NON-LINEAR METHOD OF WORK ORGANIZATION and can provide Great Efficiencies in Time (awaiting mathematical proof);

2023-11-29 19:45:22

I am told this is the assignment problem in theoretical computer science, but usually you have n agents to whom you must assign m number of tasks;

In my case, there are only n tasks and 1 agent;

All that's really important here is the decision problem and efficient allocation of resources;

You would normally look at costs and so forth, cost functions, etc.;

Thats not my problem, though; I got rid of the decision problem and saved at least 1 bit;

It might not seem like a lot, yet computationally, with over 100 projects still actively running in my Art Operation, I needed to save as many bits as possible;

I don't decide what task to work on; I tackle whatever is most proximate/immediate/ready-to-hand;

It doesn't matter what it is,it will absolutely be an enriching,learning experience;

Randomized task assignment just seems optimal to me; I'm able to maintain over 100 complex, interdisciplinary art-research projects, and I'm a One-Man Shop, a single art operator at the Art Operation @ The Historiotheque;

More on this later; this is based on the research for a new project, and series of series, I started earlier in the year, called NOISE IN THE WORKSPACE;

The first series was called SPACE NOISE INJECTION and, you see, while the first series is still only beginning, I started the second series of experiments, called RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENTAL PARAMETERS;

After just a few months, I have enough research and experimental data to write a PhD thesis in interruption science;

2023-12-04 03:17:26

One of the ways this Method works is by removing waiting-times;

One does not spend any significant amount of times either Deciding what tasks to tackle OR any significant amount of time building up complex mental abstractions, which software developers often have to do in the course of any given period of Deep Work;

I merely look at the Surface of the Workspace and choose what is most proximate/immediate;

This literally means looking around the Studio Space @ The Historiotheque and choosing whatever is nearest in time and space;

I realize that the 3D Surface of the Workspace is where I get most of my new ideas, from actually working in the Historioteque AND in the Archive;

It's where I came up with the concept of Geogrammar or Geogrammatical Forms, as floating land-masses, as portrayed in my novelistic phenomenology The History-Project as Crackland, the Land of Fissures and as Antiface-Cloud in my sequel The Archives-Project;

The so-called land-masses or fragments are really the exposed surfaces of the Stacks (SEE: The Stacks-Project);

Each of these "Stacks" are built-up over time as sedimentary layers or through a sedimentation process;

I continuously Survey the top-post surfaces of these many Stacks and make mental links or REFCARDS which I file in my Inner Refcards-System, my DATABASE-OF-IMAGES (SEE: Database Arts);

SEE: Images below, of the 3D Workspace as Abstract Cartography (seen from above) and two diagrams of THE SWITCHBOARD METHOD as well as one for The Stacks-Project;

[...]

[neonmetro]

what is she cooking...

[bunjywunjy]

WHY IS PHP SO COMPLICATED

[kurikorso]

nostalgia slapped me upside the head a little while ago so i had to draw my favorite dudes ft. the gecko effect

[trailerparkvampire]

what the fuck is going on with all those takes how stack cares about money SOOO MUCH more than smoke. stack's the one who defends the plantation worker not being able to pay in full, it's smoke who's ready to throw him out for paying with credits, it's smoke who tallies the till and tells stack they're going under and it's smoke who equates money with power*. i'd argue that the foreshadowing for stack getting turned is actually that he's the one who constantly pushes boundaries of what's allowed - it's strongly implied the juke joint is his idea, smoke says how when they ran away from home he just wanted to go to the next plantation over but stack had other plans. stack is the one that keeps offering to go outside (and it's poverty that's pushing everyone outside)...that's foreshadowing. not some weird greed people seem to be assigning to him now.

i think a lot of people don't seem to understand that as well as a horror this is a tragedy and that these characters can do everything right, can navigate the existing structures the best they can but the rules of the game keep shifting and even before that, they are doomed from the start!

*) now i think there's a whole other conversation about how smoke tries to put REAL ACTUAL money into the hands of his community - the way he's with annie, the way he's with the little girl - because that's a way of empowering your community, he's well aware that keeping people in poverty is a way of upholding status quo etc.

[holistichiatus]

my submission for the tennocon showcase :]

[smrtnik07]

babys first rain

[chillinglikeashilling]

Lord forgive me for paying attention to the YT comments section but I really want people who claim Annie was treated as a less 'desired love interest' than Mary to remind me which of them was told she didn't have any business being near them by both Micheal A and Michael B Jordan.

"Oh but Mary is shown to be the focus of desire and Annie isn't"

Are we forgetting that the first thing Stack tells Mary to do is kick rocks? That one of the first things we learned about their past relationship is that he left her in the middle of the night without any communication at all?

Yes Smoke also left Annie but that to me is representative of the fact that both twins always chose each other over either of their respective lovers, or anyone else in their lives. At the very least we know from the fact that he married her that Smoke considered Annie someone in his life, who was not Stack, that he could build a life with. She made him a mojo bag so it's not like Smoke left in the middle of the night.

And it's not like either twin is best friends with the other's lover but Annie clearly gets so much more consideration and respect from Stack than Mary does from Smoke. Smoke would clearly rather Stack and Mary never even have been together in the first place but even from (what was supposed to be) the opening night of the Juke we see Stack and Annie working together to manage Smoke and the business. Annie is being paid to cook there sure, but to me it's clear that she was always supposed to have a huge role in the business.

I'm not saying the movie is perfect or that people can't have their own opinions but even if we're appealing to the respectability argument- Annie is the only person in the main cast apart from Sammie with very little 'sin' on her record. For one thing she's the only woman of the three love interests who isn't cheating on her husband for whatever that's worth to folks in a movie called Sinners.

And even the comparison of the love scenes feels disingenuous to me. I've seen some people say Mary is the one shown to be desired between her and Stack while Smoke is shown to be desired by Annie and I want to remind everyone that again Mary is the person chasing Stack. He saw her that morning and said go back to your white husband. Annie and Smoke are reuniting as a couple that went through a horrible loss that can rip modern couples apart, without the additional stresses of being sharecroppers on top of that.

Additionally I don't think it's a coincidence that the love scene between Smoke and Annie happens before the sun goes down and the one between Stack and Mary - which I remind everyone leads to Stack dying!!- happens after nightfall and after Mary has already been turned by Remmick. Sammie and Stack both talk about that day before the sun went down being one of the best days of their life. Given the connection and parallels between the twins I would assume that the same would probably be true for Smoke.

So one of the best days of his life involved getting to reconnect with his wife. Getting to fold her into a business he and his brother were building not just for their own financial freedom and independence but also as a safe space for their community. A community Annie was a central part of.

One of those love scenes happened between a couple that had a real chance of reconciling if Remmick hadn't shown up and it's not the one featuring Mary.

[tfh-arts]

Tsum tsums

[sunflowersteves]

Would anyone be interested in a 90s mary x stack x reader fic 👉🏻👈🏻

[bluedeedeedoop]

i have come to provide Barrissoka to replenish ourselves.

but yeah i sketched some stuff down and i thought it was cute so i colored it teehee

i gave barriss her hood back for like.. rebels era (before she got old ig?) cuz i miss it. i miss them. i’m gonna cry again

[necrotic-nephilim]

what's fun about shipping Tim with Dick, Jason, or Damian is he has, at some point, hallucinated all of them to comfort himself. even when he doesn't like them or particularly get along with them, he has to imagine/hallucinate them just so he has the power to go on. Tim's concepts of the Robin mantle and what it should be is so fun, because he respects the others through the Robin mantle. Tim worships Dick because he was the first Robin. he wouldn't be Robin if Jason hadn't died in the mantle. and a lot of his frustration with Damian is he feels Damian isn't honoring the mantle correctly. when you ship Tim with the other Robins you can't divorce their identities as Robin from it because Tim will always see them as a Robin first and that's so fun and fucked up. like.

batman (1940) #456

Tim perceiving Dick as *Robin* cheering him on, not Nightwing, which is the version of Dick that Tim actually knows? that's just. wild of him. he will always view Dick as Robin first, his personal hero but also the original of the legacy. his love for Dick is shaped by that.

and then of course, even when he's hallucinating/imagining Jason cheering him on, it's *still* through the lense of being reminded how Jason failed? subconsciously believing that Jason got himself killed because of his actions, and that being a lesson for Tim to learn from? Jason isn't a person to Tim, he's a moral lesson about how to be Robin. any potential idolization he could have of Jason isn't because he loves Jason, it's because of the lessons Jason's death taught him.

and then, even though him hallucinating TIm is from the New-52, which makes characterization all kinds of questionable, i do think it makes sense for TIm to hallucinate/imagine Damian after Damian's death in an attempt to cope with it.

teen titans (2011) #18

to an extend, he sees Damian's death as in part his own fault. and even hating Damian, Tim needs the comfort from this to cope with Damian being gone. he's angry that Damian even was Robin, and has to learn something from Damian's death and how it impacts the Robin mantle, and teenage heroes as a whole. like, Tim can pretend he hates Damian all he wants, even getting taunted by the image of Damian, but there's still an underlying love to their relationship.

i think that's just the fun of shipping Tim with any of them. you will never divorce Tim's views of them from the Robin mantle and how fucking Unwell he is about anyone else who's been Robin before or after him, to the point he has to hallucinate them comforting him when he's at his lowest. it's always going to be a little unhealthy, a little toxic, and driven by Tim's relationship with being Robin as well. i need more Tim being weird about Robin in these ships.

[vernanonix]

If I had a nickel for every audio fiction podcast that started as an anthology before slowly weaving in an overarching narrative with heartfelt character growth, interactions, and maybe a little bit of gay as a treat… I’m not sure how many nickels I’d have but it’d be more than two.

[centrally-unplanned]

Della Beppin August 1996 Evangelion Feature - Scan & Takeaways

Alright, after a year and half of me procrastinating with a gravure magazine starting accusingly at me from the desk, we are live with a scan of Della Beppin's August 1996 Evangelion Feature:

To recap quickly the above post, this article came out very soon after the show finished airing and the popularity of Evangelion was becoming a cultural phenomenon, spilling out beyond the typical otaku circles. It is often claimed to be the first article in a "non-otaku" magazine to discuss Eva at any depth, and as such gained fame as a tipping point in Eva coverage. It is a 14 page spread with a complicated authorship, but best I can gather it was ‘helmed’ by Gainax founder and otaku-about-town Toshio Okada (who at this point had left Gainax and had little to do with the production of Eva, to be clear), and serves as an introduction to the show, its place in the “cultural discourse”, and whatever weird musings pop into the writers’ minds.

As I hinted at in said previous post, I would claim that despite its reputation this is not the first “non-anime magazine” to feature an article on Evangelion; there is actually a section of this spread about other magazines that had covered Eva!

This section mentions Core Magazine and TV Land, a gravure magazine and kid’s media magazine respectively (which, lol at that demo spread). Now both of those included anime-adjacent content (hentai and kid’s anime shows respectively), but were not focused on them, and their articles discussing Eva were brief. Meanwhile, Della Beppin itself frequently had erotic cosplay shoots, and even had an Evangelion shoot earlier in the year! So instead I think you can see Della Beppin’s deep dive as an escalation of content along a smooth curve of Eva coverage getting more involved and more widespread, without there being any specific breakpoint here. So the article partially earns its rep, but it probably also got a healthy boost from the "teehee" factor of it being in a porno mag. We read Playboy Della Beppin for the articles okay??

Speaking of, I did read the whole article, but I am not going to post a full translation here - it is not worth it, a bunch of the text is explaining Eva to newbies and such, you don’t care. Instead, I will draw out some sections and connect them to some of my wider analytical questions around Eva - namely how “Eva discourse” evolved over time and how it related to otaku culture. And there definitely is a lot of interesting details in here on those subjects! So let's dive in, first with my more serious takeaways and then with some silly stuff:

— Evangelion has a reputation today as an “arthouse” work, and I think the majority of people who watch it know about the abstract TV ending and the batshit avant garde content of End of Evangelion. But this article, published before End of Eva existed and when the TV “finale” was something of a surprise, really showcases that its success was nearly immediate among “otaku” fans and the brand of the show was as a gritty, mature, amazingly-animated mecha show. The TV finale was generally unpopular and that comes up many times in the feature - so much so that one whole sub-article is essentially saying “look that just doesn’t count the show isn’t finished yet”:

No Need to Evaluate a Story That Hasn't Concluded Yet I wrote this in Animage, but I'll write it again. The story of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" is not over. While some whisper that the infamous final episode was deliberately designed that way, my thinking is that it was the next best option within the constraints of anime production's fatal lack of time and staff. Because if that ending were truly satisfactory, there would be no need to remake it for the video market. I hear that orders for the video version are flooding in, and the fact that they're willingly undertaking work that would otherwise be completely unprofitable—even with orders, the profit will be reduced—is the best evidence that the creators themselves think "that's not good enough."

(The above author - Shinpei Ito, a manga artist who would later work with Anno on the Cutie Honey film in 2004 - is generally right about this fact. At the time there was some debate due to Anno’s “fuck you” interview persona that the ending’s pivot was intentional, but we know now there were huge production issues behind it at least in part)

— Another repeated motif that dives directly into the “why was Eva so successful” question is the idea of it being a TV show specifically - that there had been a draught of “good” TV for some time and Eva was a return to form. Take this comment for example:

“However, after Gundam, due to combined factors like talent drain to direct-to-video anime and co-productions, and the rise of video games, TV anime lacked vitality for a long period. Even if some character-driven works achieved some success, there was a lack of major works that created significant waves of popularity.”

Here I think you can see the aging demos at play - older otaku as a community had developed around the more mature OVAs of the 1980’s, but those are inherently niche and inaccessible to most audiences. TV was for more youth-focused fare, “declining” from its peaks in the early 1980’s (according to these writers at least, I am not casting a personal judgement), but EVA flipped the script. It being a mecha show probably helped too to capture the “this generation’s Gundam” feel - adapted to the modern sensibilities of the older audiences with its meta-otaku commentary and 90’s edginess. This older fan in another section really hits that theme home:

“15 years from the "New Anime Century" at Shinjuku East Exit to today I have absolutely no interest in discussing Eva as "a work" anymore. To put it bluntly, I don't care about "Eva" now. Instead, I care about the months of eagerly awaiting new episodes every Wednesday, thinking about things aimlessly after watching, feeling the urge to talk to others about it and making long phone calls at night, watching recorded videos until they wore out, and exchanging opinions in various places. The fact that I could experience such a daily life in 1996, not just in the 1980s, is extremely important to me.”

(This author and others call Gundam the “second impact” of anime with Evangelion as the “third impact” - Astro Boy would be the first - and it is very adorable)

— Speaking of “long phone calls at night”, the physicality of pre-digital media consumption really jumps out here as a driver of fan engagement. There are a bunch of mentions in here of things like mass groups lining up to buy the soundtrack CD on release day and such, but there is one story that stands out for its charm. When Evangelion was broadcast it aired in the Central Tokyo (Kansai) area first - if you lived outside of the region, and in the rural areas most notably, you would not be able to watch the show live. But according to one writer that didn’t stop some of them:

“I heard that fans in Fukushima Prefecture would climb every week to some meteorological station at the top of Mt. Iwaki, the only place in the prefecture where Eva could be received, and cling to the TV there for each episode. This is how a work truly becomes the blood and flesh of those who watch it. I envy this kind of experience.”

No clue if this actually happened of course, but still amazing - we have to go back, etc.

Okay the analysis crap has gone on long enough; let’s share some random anecdotes that I thought were pretty funny!

— This part is just too much of a dunk not to repost in full:

Three Major Anime Directors Comment on the Appeal of Evangelion!! You can't help but be curious about the opinions of fellow professionals. Especially when it comes to the opinions of industry giants, you just have to hear them. So, we sought out comments from Director Miyazaki of Nausicaa and Totoro fame, Director Tomino of Gundam, and Director Oshii of Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor — these three undisputed masters acknowledged by everyone — but… Director Hayao Miyazaki: "I have never seen it." Director Yoshiyuki Tomino: "I would prefer to refrain from commenting." Director Mamoru Oshii: "I've only seen about 2 episodes, so I can't really comment. My apologies." Hmm... these are truly comments befitting the masters. By the way, in an interview in "CV" Magazine’s July issue (Sakura Publishing), Director Oshii did speak about Evangelion, saying: "'Evangelion' has become a hit, right? You can tell by watching it, but it feels nostalgic. It's exactly like 'Gundam'". As expected of an industry giant!!! It seems that with serialized anime, watching just two episodes is apparently enough to understand everything…

Jeez you didn’t have to do it to Oshii like that, he gets flamed by westerners enough as it is!!

— Particularly after the final episode aired, a bunch of fans really leaned into the “we are degenerates” ironic aesthetic, and the idea of being “mentally contaminated” by the show comes up frequently. Which leads to my favorite line from the Della Beppin staff from their "Eva Events Timeline":

April 26: Della Beppin Magazine publishes nude photos of models in "Eva" cosplay. From this point on, the magazine's mental contamination became increasingly serious.

Pussy so good it triggers the Heisei Malaise…

— There is a two-page spread on the thematic connections between Evangelion and... the band The Smiths:

Go off king, you would have done numbers on Tumblr.

— A bunch of different sections focus on rumors around the show; too many to count and assuredly mainly false. I did find this one to be very amusing though:

Episode 11 is about NERV's energy being cut off, but allegedly at the script stage, there was a line saying "Nuclear power plants are great, aren't they?" when the power returned. Incidentally, this episode was written for the Studio Ghibli staff, who oppose nuclear power.

Partially because A: that is just funny, I love how Ghibli as the eco-lefties of anime is so well known, and B: Ghibli was called in to animate the episode as something of a favour if I recall correctly, so the idea of putting a “fuck you” in there to them is pretty rough! I am not enough of a “script expert” to say if this rumor has any truth to it ( @jinruihokankeikaku maybe you know better, your area of expertise!)

To wrap this up, Toshio Okada ends the entire feature himself with a very on-brand call about how mainstream anime is all garbage and “Evangelion was truly a work by otaku, of otaku, for otaku!”, which absolutely matches the zeitgeist of the times even if it is a bit lacking in substance - that’s Okada for you!

Anyway, there is of course a lot more in there but fundamentally I scanned this so it could “exist” in the record; it is special more for what it is than what it contains. But articles like these are the data that built up the experience of the “Eva Boom” that defined the success and impact of the show, so I do think it is a valuable source of diverse views on the subject. If you find your own interesting pieces, or have specific questions on the content, let me know!

[touhoutunes]

Title: ＊MoshiMoshiMode＊

Arrangement: Stack Bros.

Vocals: Stack

Album: ＊MoshiMoshiMode＊

Circle: 暁Records

Original: Hartmann's Youkai Girl