transientpetersen - Tumblr blog

[transientpetersen]

Elections aren’t just about choosing your allies; they can also be about choosing your opponents

I like the power of voting in elections, small though it is, and would not give it up or give it away without a fight. It's this line that I think is underappreciated in the current discourse.

if you've seen that "voting as a fire extinguisher" poem around you should consider reading the full piece, "TO THROW A WRENCH IN THE BLOOD MACHINE: Five (Season-Appropriate) Metaphors for Voting." the author recently wrote an update talking about how he doesn't like the piece being taken out it's poetic context, where it isn't instructions on what to do but a "grappling with a complex idea, providing different possible doorways into critical thinking." also maybe check out his other work!

[transientpetersen]

This actually made me sit and look at it. Like a proper take. And then I went and talked with others about it so it's already doing more for me as art than any of the portraits of his predecessor that I've seen.

Some things that I don't see others talking about:

It's well executed! And it's not boring! The first Prince William and Kate Middleton portrait is incredibly safe and incredibly boring. There's nothing of pageantry to it. This portrait of Charles comes closer to representing him like Obama than I've ever seen - and those two men are not a natural comparison.

Everyone is sharing the image of the portrait as if it were a true representation of the art but that's not how it's primarily meant to be experienced as a work. In person, there's a pleasant weight provided by the (relatively simple) frame that offsets the vagueness of the background. The lighting will be different. It will almost certainly be hung such that the gaze rests more naturally on the level of the hands and the visual balance between the face, the butterfly, and the hands is more even than it appears as a flat jpeg.

Lots of people mention the butterfly. Some are calling out the species being named after his ancestor, the Prince of Orange. Others are mentioning Charles's well known love of nature. My pretentious take is that you don't get to add a butterfly to a work in this day and age without invoking the dream of Zhaungzi and noting that the butterfly is one of the few elements not clothed in the miasma of red. Charles famously would be more happy if he were not in the royal line and for all that he could not escape it in this life, is it not a pleasant dream for him to imagine a life in which he could just help cultivate the natural world he cares so much for?

i cant get over the king charles portrait. they made that thing to age in his place. that painting hangs in the house of a too-friendly family you find in the post apocalyptic wasteland who inexplicably has a ready supply of fresh meat. if mario jumped into that painting he wouldn't find a charming platformer he would be flayed and hanged like a medieval criminal by an unseeable force in a droning red void. that painting is a color blindness test for people who work in IT but believe in the divine right of kings. that painting is going to weep the sequel to blood. after he dies charles is gonna crawl outta that thing like sadako.

[transientpetersen]

It's fine. I'll make time to get okay once I've handled <same shit I've been swimming in for years>.

on a practical level, it can sometimes be hard to tell if you're okay or if youve gotten really good at avoiding noticing you're not okay

[transientpetersen]

There's a lot going on here. A lot. Certainly the most provocative segment is the long quotation from elsewhere called Connor Goes Deep [and Weird] so at the risk of missing the point, I'm going to complain to the sky and exorcise the mental poison through the keyboard.

I do not understand the appeal of using metaphor when you know it creates an unnecessary translation barrier between yourself and your audience. The section is loaded with jargon and references but there's nothing deep about those references that demand their use. And the constant invocations of "length of a tweet" - so why be confined in the format? But then I was never a believer in the usefulness of that platform so maybe I'm the wrong person to answer.

A modern adaption.

You've grown up in a small town in a dying part of your country. Dying because both agriculture and industry have moved off and find no use for your people. So what do you do? You leave. You go where there's density enough to host industry, find the places where "everyone agrees" the "people who are worth associating with" live.

You meet new people. You learn new skills. You change perspectives many times.

What are some of the outcomes listed in the original (suitably translated)?

1. Go home shortly after leaving. You don't like the city or you cannot hack it or someone back home needs you. Life goes back to normal with shades of regret and might-have-been. 2. Stay in the city indefinitely. You like it there, you grow used to it, you disavow who you were (you've outgrown them). 3. Stay in the city awhile and return home with some flash and some fashion and charm the kids back home with your new manners and your aura of cool. You feel better about yourself but is your life truly that different in substance? 4. Stay in the city awhile and return home with skills and knowledge that lets you bring some jobs. You start a local business. You stave off the decay for a while. The churches still close around you, one by one, but you don't feel that as a loss anymore. 5. You stay in the city. You travel to your home town. You return to the city. You decide that the difference between the two is less than its made out to be - it's all just people. People who don't much like those different from them. Not that that shuts you out because you can code switch. You build people up wherever you go because you're not carrying the anxiety of place around anymore.

So Connor is saying, "You moved to the city. You couldn't cope with the full range of human expression there so you carved out a little space that you felt safe within and let it cradle you until you forgot your home and forgot the scary and you're telling people the truth when you encourage them to find a sanctuary in the city but that's not what you came here for. You've lost your way."

No jargon; no fuss. Just a story.

I believe that agency is cultivated and power is a skill and responsibility means building both of those competencies. Useless anxiety is definitionally both a distortion of agency and a misapplication of skill and I wouldn't encourage anyone to cultivate it. On the other side, you do not understand how to use power if you do not use power - it's not something you rehearse in your head to prepare for the perfect application, that's so incredibly far from how it works.

I don't believe that the five scenarios I sketched out above are ranked. People fall into each bucket as circumstances push and pull - or they were never in the buckets to begin with. Judging where they landed or talking about which bucket they should be aiming for is a category error. Decide your aim, pick your vows, and do your best to make the world better around you.

[transientpetersen]

Oh! I see. That explains what I find so boring about Villeneuve's work. Thanks for that. Not that too much dialogue isn't itself a problem but sometimes I'm not in the mood to watch a screensaver for two hours.

“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker [Dennis Villeneuve] told The Times of London in a recent interview. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”

[transientpetersen]

The Desert Storm

Rise and Fall

By Blue Sunshine - at some point in the last two years, I discovered that this work had become my favorite piece of long-form prose online. The intro story is not long, I'd recommend reading it as a taste of the premise. If you find that compelling then give yourself the grace of leisurely catching up with the rest.

@blue-sunshine-mauve-morning I demand payment for psychological damages

[transientpetersen]

[transientpetersen]

Sure, I'll buy into this. By the end of The Last Jedi, I've seen all the plot points I care about paid off and the hooks left open are better left to the imagination and, I agree, it works better seeing it as a soft ending than as a final bridge to one last payout.

I've had a bit of downtime lately so I watched, on a bunch of consecutive evenings, Star Wars Episodes I-VIII. I left out Ep. IX because that's the only one I don't have the DVD of, because after seeing it in theaters I refused to spend any more money on that travesty of a finale.

And you know what? I've decided that the Skywalker Saga works pretty okay as an octet, thank you very much, with a sequel duology instead of a sequel trilogy. Certainly Ep. VIII leaves a lot of things unresolved, but hey, Kylo Ren and Finn each cathartically managed to get rid of their oppressors (Snoke and Phasma respectively); Luke reached a satisfying end to his arc (I'm still very much in the Luke's Character Development Is Perfectly Consistent Through Ep. VIII camp); the rebellion is properly reborn and ready to fight; Kylo and Rey have formed a sort of close yin/yang relationship that maybe actually somehow represents a "balance to the Force", whatever that ever was supposed to mean. Maybe -- and especially since the first two trilogies formed such a neat arc ending in unqualified triumph for the good side only for us to see that the clouds soon gathered again -- maybe the most mature and sensible way to the end the saga is inconclusively in terms of whether light or dark wins the conflict, because that's the way our actual universe really works. (Oh, and Princess Leia just dies offscreen soon after the ending of Ep. VIII, in her Carrie Fisher persona. It kind of says so in the credits!)

This is imperfect, but it has to be better than acknowledging the irredeemably-written story handed to us for the finale episode. I will stubbornly refuse to accept it as canon. I hereby decree that The Last Jedi is The Last Film in the main series.

[transientpetersen]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[transientpetersen]

Let's get cozy, friend.

[crow-time.com]

[transientpetersen]

Bikes are great for First Mile, Last Mile transport, but we still need good Public Transportation for longer distance trips, nobody wants to bike 13 miles to get to a friend's house for dinner. But taking a train up 3 blocks is just a ridiculous waste of time. That's what it's important to have both adequate Public transportation AND good bike infrastructure

[transientpetersen]

A film about courage that I still reference despite only watching it once - about a decade ago.

Drunken Angel (1948, Japan) dir. Akira Kurosawa

[transientpetersen]

Close but it's missing the bit where you wiggle the axes of the 3-space around a bit and pretend that you can't count them.

[transientpetersen]

I have some stuff from her shop, well worth it. Perfectly captures a kind of attitude.

Art by Lily Seika Jones

[transientpetersen]

oh god it must feel insane to play guildenstern every night and say that line at the end "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said--no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we'll know better next time." Like an audience only has to see it play out once but as that actor every single night for months you have to watch this character re-forget and make the same choices and fight against the same tide towards the inevitable conclusion and swear that there's a way to do it differently next time. rinse repeat.

[transientpetersen]

Let's get cozy, friend.

[crow-time.com]

[transientpetersen]

Passionate take on how discovering riches is a more a curse than a blessing and how using money is more like a family of skills which change how useful they individually are depending on what league you're playing in. Some sad stories as cautionary tales.

Continuing my fascination with the idea that power in general is something that you have to develop skill in using and that you don't grow in that particular skill set(s) unless you're actively trying. Maybe I'm a bit slow but the idea of giving power to the person who least wants it has been feeling for a while now more like a statement that no one should be trusted with outsized power than some positive directive on handing out crowns.