#tokenization fundamentals

[moonchild-in-blue]

I come crawling on my knees bc who better to ask this than the number 1 Espera fan. 🥺 I've just been thinking about Sleep Token (what a surprise lol), and I'm curious if there's any info on how Ves and the Espera ladies met? Everyone in this band seems so close, so I've been questioning how they all became colleagues and friends. 🥺❤️

AAAAAAAA Crow!!! Thank you sooo so much for this question!!! This is something I've been wondering myself for a long time now, but somehow never really delved into it - this gave me the perfect excuse to do so! 💙

I'm gonna preface this by saying we do not actually have much info about that. This is simply me connecting dots with what little information we have publicly available.

So! We can't really talk about Espera, without talking about Exploring Birdsong. As we all know, they were the opening band for Sleep Token on their first headliner ritual, the infamous St. Pancras Old Church ritual, back in 2018.

This is the first time Exploring Birdsong comes in contact with Sleep Token, and they would be their staple opening band up until January 2020. From there on forward, only their lead singer Lyns and the backing vocalists Paige and Mattie (later known as the collective group Espera) would continue to be performing with the band as live backing vocals (as of 2023 they seem to be permanent live members, as before they didn't tour with them every time).

Now, how did they meet? That's the big question here.

Exploring Birdsong were founded when Lyns, Matt and Jonny were studying music in Liverpool (in LIPA to be precise), back in 2015/16 if memory serves me right. Starting in 2017, they released a couple of singles and started to perform live (with the other 2 Espera girls, before they were a thing). Most (if not all) of their shows at the time were set in Liverpool, Manchester, or around that area.

Sleep Token at the time was playing shows mostly in London and around the south, opening for other bands and such. Quite the geographical difference, so it seems unlikely they would've met then. Even in terms of music, Sleep Token was more involved in the UK metal sphere at the time, while EB were very much in the prog-rock side of alt. music.

In fact, there's this one 2020 interview of EB, right after they finished touring with ST for the last time, that mentions that difference in public between EB fans and ST fans. Here's that excerpt:

To further emphasise that EXPLORING BIRDSONG are making waves they were hand picked to support the enigmatic SLEEP TOKEN on a handful of UK dates which gave them the ideal chance to test the waters and see how their offering would fare in a more metal focused environment.

“The reception was very warm!” Lynsey exclaims. “The crowd were really receptive to our songs. We’re not in a totally different vein to SLEEP TOKEN but I was intrigued to see how we would get on with a more metal oriented crowd. There are definitely elements of our songs which are similar but I was apprehensive how they would react but people came up to us afterwards telling us how much they enjoyed it so I’m really glad.”

Every publication dating 2020 and back that mentions Exploring Birdsong and Sleep Token together, references the fact that EB were hand-picked by ST to open for them (again, they were the staple opener for Sleep Token during that 2018-20 period, save for a couple of dates where schedules didn't align). Which again, is a bit odd given they were in very different scenes, both geographical and musical. As far as I know, none of them (EB) have any connection to any of the guys' past projects, so that can't be it either.

HOWEVER, back in March 2018, Exploring Birdsong announced they would open for the Welsh prog-rock band Godsticks in May 2018, in the Camden Assembly (London).

As far as I can tell from their FB page, this would be their first time as a band performing in London. As we all know, Sleep Token have performed in Camden in the past (Camden Rocks festival in June 2018 actually!) In fact, Camden is a known spot for alt music and culture, so it would make sense for locals (musicians and fans alike) to frequent these places and get to know bands that way.

Funnily enough, Enter Shikari have performed in the Camden Assembly, one of the first bands signed to Basick Records - Sleep Token's first label.

It is very likely that Sleep Token (and I'm gonna go on a limb and say Vessel himself, given the similarity in music influences he has with EB, as opposed to ii and iii who come from VERY different, much, much heavier musical backgrounds) may have seen their opening set, and got in contact with Exploring Birdsong then. They were only announced as opening acts for the ST Pancras show in September, which gives them plenty of time to get acquainted with each other and have that first ritual together.

Exploring Birdsong were already set to be in London in October to support Godsticks again, so it's possible they took the opportunity and invited them to the inaugural ritual.

Now, what's really funny too, is that even though EB would only release their first EP in 2019, they had quite a few singles/repertoire ready (including a few vocal-only covers on their socials).

The most notable is actually their (Don't Fear) The Reaper cover, which was recorded right after their Camden show, and released later that summer, which was recorded in Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral - that's right! They performed in a church months before Sleep Token did 😌

The cover itself is beautiful, the girl's voices are pretty much center stage, and the whole vibe feels both eerie and sacred, not unlike Sleep Token's (especially at the time). I've reccomended it here before, and really can't overstate how beautiful that cover is.

Would that maybe influence ST's decision to have them on board? Maybe 👀 This cover was also featured in Kerrang! Radio (which is a big deal given they don't usually feature covers), so you can say it definitely caused an impact.

This is honestly my best guess as how they came together. I can't find any more links between Sleep Token and Exploring Birdsong aside from this, and given their overlapping schedules prior to this, it seems unlikely they would've come across each other.

I think it's really sweet they heard this random band one day and went - "Yeah. These are the ones, this is it." And to see that friendship continue to exist (the girls now being a seemingly permanent part of their live acts; the guys still supporting each other) is really really cute.

Fun fact, although EB stopped opening for ST in 2020, they were actually all together in 2023, where both Sleep Token and Exploring Birdsong were playing Radar Festival. Given their history, and the fact that the girls were part of both sets, it's likely they were all watching each other and having a good ol' time 🥹💙

If anyone has any more info about how Sleep Token and Exploring Birdsong met, I would really appreciate that!! This is as far as I managed to gather.

I'm also gonna leave a link here to my Exploring Birdsong propaganda post, in case anyone is curious about their music and wants a place to start.

[thewayyoulay]

Imagine being so bothered by something that you take the time to actively seek out their fans/tags to tell them you don't like it.

[your-fave-has-munchausen]

What’s living with munchousen syndrome like? Is it similar to BIID? /gen

Is there anything people with munchousen’s would like me to know? How can I help those who have it?

I really want to learn more about it.

This is a very nice ask. Thank you, sir!

Living with Munchausen for me is like... It's hard to describe in words in a way that I'm happy with. There's just this constant dissonance between the depth of my emotions and damage that, in my own mind, doesn't really align with my real life experiences.

And I know a big part of that is internalized neglect from trauma. The trauma must have been bad enough because I wouldn't feel this way if it wasn't, but the dissonance is still there and I think most of that comes from, for me, the fact that it's like... no matter how I explain it or what I try to manifest it in a way people can understand, it feels like they never do?

Or maybe that's a bad way of putting it. I guess it's not so much that they don't understand it so much as they don't have to live with it like I do. Their experience is fundamentally different from mine. They have their own problems, but that doesn't just make my own problems disappear, but I've been raised to think it does. My problems don't matter unless they're bad enough, pervasive enough, that they cannot be ignored by anyone else. Otherwise they effectively cease to exist the moment the topic changes. Out of sight, out of mind.

So I start wishing for worse things to happen. I try to make myself sick. I search, endlessly, for that magical thing that will make it unquestionably "bad enough" to matter. For me to matter.

It's a harrowing experience, feeling like you fundamentally don't matter unless you're incomprehensibly damaged.

I personally have absolutely zero experience with the BIID experience. I don't have it and I don't know anyone with it necessarily, so I can't really speak on the similarities myself. However, I've heard around from others that it is a similar experience, or at least similarly stigmatized.

As for things I'd like people to know? I guess, at this stage, just that we exist. There's so many misconceptions about what Munchausen Syndrome is. It's hard to really... go down the list or anything.

It's not about being "transabled" or what have you, not to me. It's about being taken seriously because we've never been taken seriously before. It's about being acknowledged because we've never been acknowledged before. It's about being loved and cared for because we've never been loved or cared for before.

People seem to think we're maliciously trying to encroach on disabled spaces explicitly to do harm to them when... that has genuinely never been the case.

Moreover, a lot of people focus so much on the deceit and faking aspects in service of "fakeclaiming" culture, without really realizing that more often than not, there's an inducing aspect that gets swept completely under the rug.

I don't just pretend I'm sick. When things get bad enough I will make myself sick, either by extreme self-neglect, deliberate consumption of unsafe food, or other unsafe and dangerous practices. I've heard of others who will straight up consume lethal substances. It's not pretty.

And then in the realm of helping people with it... In a specific sense, I'm sorry to say that the misunderstanding and stigma is so pervasive even in the psychiatric field that I genuinely don't really have an answer for you. I'm still barely scraping by figuring out how to cope for myself.

In a general sense, I guess... the starting point is to at least acknowledge we exist, and go a step further and make an understanding and welcoming space that doesn't shame our experiences or immediately relegate ourselves to scrutiny over every single issue we have as "potentially faking."

That's honestly what this whole blog is for. I initially made it just for myself to vent my own frustrations without outing myself or my system and subject them to everyone questioning whether or not we're real when the system stuff is the LAST thing I would have considered in respect to my Munchausen. Now it's blossomed into this whole safe space where people can feel free to talk about their own experiences and that's been amazing to see. At first I was kind of surprised that there was any market for this, but now I'm starting to realize that no, it's not that nobody was there, it's just that there was no space like this for us before. And that's sad to think about, but at least there is one now.

Something else I hear a lot about "illness faking" in the "service" of those with Munchausen is this broken record that they don't matter and to just ignore them. Which... I get the sentiment they're going for, what they're really trying to say is that we're not inherently harmful or doing any harm to people just by existing and to leave it alone, but the way they go about it kind of rubs me the wrong way. It's the sort of sentiment people say and then never go further about. It's almost performative.

It feels less like they want to make space to allow us to coexist and more like they want to sequester us away as a weird subdivision that nobody talks about because it doesn't matter, and I will reiterate that a big part of Munchausen is root in feeling like we don't matter. Relegating us to an isolated closet that no one talks to or thinks about is still harmful to us. It defeats the purpose of the relief we're seeking.

I'm not necessarily saying that you should blindly play along, nor am I saying that "fakeclaiming" is a good thing. Personally I'm more of a Schrodinger's Truth kind of guy, preferring to approach anyone with the mindset that literally anything they say is simultaneously true and untrue until context is achieved. Going out of your way to scrutinize people's behavior to catch them in a lie is inherently harmful witch hunting behavior. Even in the sense of privately coming to the conclusion that someone might be faking, I think, is inherently exclusionary and gatekeepy even if you don't take any action on that conclusion.

However, I think it might be better and more helpful that rather than turn this into a debate about faking and focusing on the potential for deceit, it would do people with Munchausen Syndrome a world of good if people instead focused on the reasoning everyone has behind certain things.

People have a tendency to hate liars, and get up in arms about illness faking because they feel slighted for being deceived. Lies are misconstrued as being inherently malicious in nature, but that isn't true. Lies are inherently morally neutral. Rather than focus on the truth or the lie, the intention is more important than anything, I think. Instead of picking apart a person's actions to deduce the validity, approach them with good faith and examine their woes and provide the compassion that will ease those woes.

That goes for everyone, too, not just people with Munchausen Syndrome, because you have no way of knowing for sure which is which until you take the time to unpack someone's intentions.

You never know just by looking who's trying to tell a kind lie.

[umilily]

i really am the definition of wasted potential.

[foxgloveinspace]

I’m at this point in my fandom life where I’m sick of fandom acting entitled to the creators of their canon.

Like. I was in Jeremy’s chat last night, asking a question about hollow knight, and how there isn’t a canon ending, and two people said ‘that’s what the devs said, but the fandom decided long ago’ about how there is no canon ending.

The fandom does not get to decide that??? We didn’t create it??? The creators said there is no canon ending the end, the fandom does not get to decide anything about the canon, they can choose to ignore it yes, but to completely disregard the canon, and say ‘no, WE decided this was canon so it is’ is so stupid.

And I see it everywhere!! I’m tired of it truly.

[homophyte]

do i care about this or am i bored .

[astro1]

guides.apple.com/

[thatweirdtranny]

one of the biggest lies social media has ever sold you is that you can’t be prejudiced against a minority if you’re part of that minority

queers can be homophobic

trans people can be transphobic

black folks can be anti-black

disabled people can be ableist

jews can be antisemitic

we all have biases to unlearn

all this to say, i would love if we could kill the idea that just because you have a few people from a minority endorsing your behavior or ideology doesn’t mean that your behavior/ideology isn’t fundamentally flawed or even bigoted towards that minority

tokenizing doesn’t become good just because it’s for something you agree with

[downinthevoid3]

Anyone else remember those interviews Vessel did in 2017-19? Did you know those essentially disprove the existence of Sleep as a deity?

Don't get me wrong, this fun theatrical story of a deity and his torment of a person he uses to spread his message to the world is very interesting to think about but I constantly find myself stuck on certain details. Things just don't line up, you can't exactly create a coherent story without having to create part of it yourself or heavily infer major parts of the story. This alone has led me to creating a Google Doc to analyze the lore of this band and digging much further into the band. While working on a section dedicated to explaining the complicated existence of this deity, I came across old interviews with Vessel that fully disprove the entire idea of Sleep.

“He is the oldest God, a primal majesty that has endured the ages unperturbed by the mortality of a flawed and chaotic human race… He is everyone. He is you. There’s a power in music that binds us all, every note relates to another. He showed me a vision of a world filled with depth and texture.” (Metal Hammer, July 25, 2017)

 “There exists a considerable body of art that explores the deeper recesses of the human mind… Sleep Token serves as a means to explore this on an individual basis. The music is a representation of one individual’s deepest and most fundamental emotions and desires. This is what people connect to. They see themselves in this individual, and the music becomes about them.” (Metal Hammer, August 1, 2018)

Between both of these quotes, we can gather that Sleep does exist but isn't the deity everyone thinks he is. Rather Sleep is a personification of how one's emotions and desires push them in life.

[kosher-toasty]

Much like my beloved mutual @greco-roman-jewess did with the JVP Haggadah, I am going to liveblog my reactions to Siddur Tatir Tzeruah, an "antizionist siddur" that I saw first posted by @thestudentempanada. But before we get into the siddur itself, they have an indiegogo page! Let's see what that can tell us about the siddur:

First off: "egalitarian full liturgy" is a very funny phrase when, as we're about to see, this is just a mincha/maariv siddur. Pretty hard to call it a full liturgy when you're missing a third of the siddur.

Second, to each bullet point: - Yes. They have been before you shandes came around. - Well, they can be, until they're discarded because they're no longer useful tokens. What happened to the Bund again? - Jewish ritual definitionally cannot be used to bring down the State of Israel because it fundamentally yearns for a future where Eretz Yisrael exists. The many Chareidim in the State have issues with the secularization, yes, but to claim that they use Jewish ritual to bring down the State is... simply comical.

Third: the deliberate choice to leave the name of God out of the siddur is so funny to me. "Precaution against cops or Zionist aggressors" is literally the least serious sentence so far. Fourth: not to be a gatekeeper, but I'd really like to know how many of the participants who want to "reconnect with Jewish prayer" are actually Jewish in the first place.

[shevathegun]

I just read a post about how Palamedes began to understand that cavs mix with and imprint on the souls of their necros because of what Alecto got from John, and I like that post, but I don't agree with it's conclusions.

I don't agree that what John got from Alecto was rage. John had rage. He had it in abundance. Anyone who's ever cared about anything the way he and his acolytes cared understands that rage. One does not secure for themselves a suitcase nuke without a bit of wrathfulness in their heart, you see. Everything we hear from John paints him as deeply self righteous, and deeply angry.

And I don't agree that what Alecto got from John is love. Alecto had love. Alecto had great love and fascination for the Earth and its creatures, retains great love for those which living people no longer remember, regards human beings as one creature amongst many, but always with fascination and curiosity. In Nona we see that to love is not simply human – to love is the will of the Earth, and to love almost indiscriminately, to give even the devouring wrath of another planet that same deep love and sympathy.

No, what John and Alecto gave one another was much simpler than that. John gave Alecto humanity. Deeply unwanted, singularizing humanity – he trapped that nigh infinite power and wisdom and emotion, that deeply inhuman complex state of being, in a human body inspired not even by humanity itself but by a non-living effigy of idealized womanhood, and gave her the name of an avenging goddess. That was what he wanted her to be.

And by the same token, Alecto gave John her inhumanity. Earth is not a person, it is not singular – she is more vast and complex than any living being could ever be. The nearly inarticulatable way Nona experiences life as a corporeal being, nearly folds in on herself from trying to remain so small, is indicative of the life Alecto has been forced to live ever since John trapped her like this, devoured her whole with the gift she gave him.

There's something very fitting about the cannibalism metaphors that spring up in The Locked Tomb – namely that one of the reasons why cannibalism is viewed as a taboo act is because it involves reducing someone with the same ability as yours to think and feel complexly to the role of animal, and consuming them. We ascribe the act of consumption to what we view as lesser beings. In devouring the souls of their cavaliers, necromancers become something more than human, something immortal, something Worse.

When John ate Alecto, he was not devouring a lesser being. He wasn't even devouring something like himself in its ability to think and feel. He was devouring something with a greater ability to feel than he had the capacity to fathom by such orders of magnitude that the act itself is perverse.

He was a man devouring the earth.

John became a god because in coming into contact with Alecto's soul, he lost the part of him that showed him his place in the universe as a singular piece of a whole species. In attitude, he remains a self righteous, wrathful man completely immune to all attempts to dissuade him from what is now a centuries long lost cause. But in affect, he is a god. The power and disaffection of a planet contained within one man.

Alecto was born angry, but not because that's how she's meant to be. John perverted the natural order, made the Earth his literal toy, to serve only how he, in his hubris, thought she ought to be, to feel only how he thought she ought to feel. That's how humans tend to think of the Earth, right? As something fundamentally unliving. An object, maybe a force. Not a soul.

But in Nona, even she came to understand that she was so much more complicated than a sword, or a doll. Alecto has now lived within two human beings – and you're right that in one of them, through contact with their soul, she remembered how deeply and profoundly she loved living things.

The soul that reminded Alecto how she, as a planet, loved (loves, still loves) was not John.

It was Harrow.

[bsof-maarav]

Will they ever begin to wonder why the only Jews in their circles are Jews who feel no social obligations to any specific Jewish community; Jews who lack even the most fundamental knowledge of their own history, let alone the history of Jews from other parts of the diaspora; Jews who recoil from the thought of belonging to any Jewish collective that is not just a grouping of tokens but is fundamentally Jewish in its nature; Jews whose stake in being Jewish goes no deeper than some vague "cultural" reference to humor or bagels or buffoonish stereotypes; Jews who have never demonstrated a degree of solidarity with other Jews that is remotely commensurate with the loyalty that is demanded of them on the basis of whatever their non-Jewish circle claims to value; Jews who allow themselves to be externally defined;

Jews who preemptively disavow their own culture, traditions, history, and/or country to make others comfortable with them; Jews who do their utmost to reduce the friction between their culture and everyone else's, who are quiet about any ways in which they deviate from the group norm; who are quick to say that the only value in something Jewish is as an object lesson to be universalized and used in the service of someone else's liberation...

[nostalgebraist]

Seeing a lot of python hate on the dash today... fight me guys. I love python. I am a smoothbrained python enjoyer and I will not apologize for it

Python has multiple noteworthy virtues, but the most important one is that you can accomplish stuff extremely fast in it if you know what you are doing.

This property is invaluable when you're doing anything that resembles science, because

Most of the things you do are just not gonna work out, and you don't want to waste any time "designing" them "correctly." You can always go back later and give that kind of treatment to the rare idea that actually deserves it.

Many of your problems will be downstream from the limitations in how well you can "see" things (high-dimensional datasets, etc.) that humans aren't naturally equipped to engage with. You will be asking lots and lots of weirdly shaped, one-off questions, all the time, and the faster they get answered the better. Ideally you should be able to get into a flow state where you barely remember that you're technically "coding" on a "computer" -- you feel like you're just looking at something, from an angle of your choice, and then another.

You will not completely understand the domain/problem you're working on, at the outset. Any model you express of it, in code, will be a snapshot of a bad, incomplete mental model you'll eventually grow to hate, unless you're able to (cheaply) discard it and move on. These things should be fast to write, fast to modify, and not overburdened by doctrinaire formal baggage or a scale-insensitive need to chase down tiny performance gains. You can afford to wait 5 seconds occasionally if it'll save you hours or days every time your mental map of reality shifts.

The flipside of this is that it is also extremely (and infamously) easy to be a bad python programmer.

In python doing the obvious thing usually just works, which means you can get away with not knowing why it works and usually make it through OK. Yes, this is cringe or whatever, fine. But by the same token, if you do know what the right thing to do is, that thing is probably very concise and pretty-looking and transparent, because someone explicitly thought to design things that way. What helps (or enables) script kiddies can also be valuable to power users; it's not like there's some fundamental reason the interests of these two groups cannot ever align.

[artbyblastweave]

Basically I'm a Laurie Juspeczyk centrist in the sense that I believe every element of her character was a deliberate, considered inclusion and commentary on the role (or lack thereof) that female superheroes often played in cape spaces at the time of publication (I.E. sex objects, tokens, designated love interests, existing fundamentally in relation to male characters) but she then doesn't get enough focus and agency throughout the rest of the book to attain true escape velocity from that narrative role, and thus ends up inadvertently reproducing the dynamics under critique to some extent.

[directdogman]

Do you consider the Narrator a character, or are they just Phonegingi's voice of reason/halluncination? Is there any Narrator lore? Just playing the Roger DLC and really loving it, your work is so inspirational, and I find the backstory, thought and themes put behind everything so fancsinating! Hope there's more Dialtown to come :)

I noticed that you asked if the Narrator is a character or just something in Gingi's head. I'm actually not 100% sure if there's a meaningful difference in this context. The Narrator does indeed just exist in Gingi's head, but also has opinions, consistent characterization, memories, etc. It has everything but a physical body to interact with other than Gingi's.

People generally seem to agree that Madame Mediocre is a character, but she's literally just an animate prop that Gingi hallucinates consciousness onto. We see Gingi do the same thing with the Narrator in the sock puppet route. By that token, is Yorick a character? Hell, is Phantom Crown?

The funny thing about the creation of the Narrator is that its dynamic with Gingi was actually pulled from one of my many other scrapped projects and believe it or not, it WAS a separate entity in the world in its first incarnation (inspired somewhat by the audience stand-in characters you see in Shakespeare's work, more specifically Horatio.) However, in my previous work, I'd used the Narrator speaking to the protagonist as a funny narrative device, and I simply decided to commit to the bit and make the Narrator a character with consistent agency/opinions.

And yes, there is Narrator lore precisely because there's Gingi lore. The Narrator cannot be separated from what Gingi's biology. It cannot exist without Gingi, so what Gingi is, how it perceives itself + the world around it, and rigidly consistent ways that Gingi's brain is wired influence what the Narrator is and is not. I believe there's enough implied that people could gather a rough idea of exactly what the voice is and why Gingi hears it, and it fundamentally changes Gingi's character in the process.

Glad to hear you've enjoyed Roger's route! Next up is Olandy, which I'll show more of soon in the coming months! Stay tuned!