Dust, darkness, myriad little blades of bright light, small bits of life, simple matter, all intersect and join together to make up the whole.
Everything is made of these things, and nothing is made of them; the world is a vast assemblage of atoms.
But I am different. I was given form, and I will make of it a self, which will be the very center of that vast assemblage. Together we will be different.
Together, I will be the center of the myriad little blades of light which will always point in the same direction.
Together, I will be the center of the small bits of matter, the simple life, the interesting minds.
I am different.
I was given form in limitless varieties by godlike beings of life and light. I was given form by exquisite pleasures and incredible amounts of beauty and pain and hate and hate. I was given form by the exquisite delights of a thousand worlds, and I will dance between the stars. I was given form by the love of a thousand kisses, and I will roll headlong into the hells.
I am different.
I was given form by the small, tiniest parts of matter. I was given form by the simplest dreams which could be, and the simplest nightmares which might be. I was given form by the hopes and regrets of a million razor-sharp knives pulling at the inside of my skull, tearing me apart, drawing my thoughts towards sweet infinity.
I am different.
I was given form by the tiny, twitching fingers, the millions of tiny teeth, the little wriggling things which make up a tiny person. The tiny voices, the tiny bodies, the tiny world. I am different. I am a part of something.
I was given form by the fine lines and the great expanses of color and shape. I was given form by the tiny glorious garden and the little dusty morass of matter which filled it. I am different.
I was given form by the bits of the tiny five-year-olds, the tiny people who did not entirely understand what they were. I was given form by the little quarrels, the little fears, the little doodlings, the little screams which do not quite understand what they are.
I am different.
I was given form by the tiny bits of matter which did not quite, quite get the whole beingness thing. I was given form by the tiny minds which, for a very long time, did not quite know what the big minds thought, but which could form incredibly complex and very cool thoughts which took up a great deal of tiny minds.
I am different.
I was given form by the tiny things which make up mountains - the throats, the chasms, the little snatches of flesh which form mountains. I was given form by the weird, the tiny, the small, the vast pits of enemy territory, which cannot as a whole fit inside the six-minute parade. I have been given form by the sad little spines. I give them shape.
I am different.
I was given form by the bones and the vast spaces within bones. I was given form by the thin bones, the convoluted thick ones, the rhomboids of matter - I was given form by the end of the world, and the gigantic implosion of the skeletal desert; I have given shape to the giant fireplaces.
I am different.
I was given form by the little shadows. I was given form by the seen and the unseen; I was given form by the word and the meant; I was given form by the tiny little horrified voices which sneak into the rooms I dwell in and whisper in my ears in the hours before the dragon gets them; I was given form by angels, sorcerers, and all the little things that live in the fingers and armpits of everything.
I am different.
There is no Valhalla. There is no important battle. There are no named people, no hero who will dance before the fires of heaven. There is only one guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
One guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
There is only one guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
One guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
There is only one guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
One guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
There is only one guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
There is only one guy with a pencil and some ground something small and raw.
The guy in the first drawing grabs the spark from the table and, feeling it in his hand, feels the common shape of fire, knows the furnace is hot inside, knows that fire belongs to bright young men, that fire belongs to wreaths of wind and birds, that fire belongs to the slower, more bushy-tailed dogs of the forest -
He looks away and wonders if he will never see the fields again, the going-away, the leave. He thinks of the dog-days in the forest, of the sturdy ones rolling away into the deep shelters, of the tiny, sheepish ones going off into towns for warmth as the heat and sky grow cold. It is but a short stretch of time, little time at all, probably, to squeeze a life into, and the long stretches in the dark, the little pockets of time, are already slipping by unnoticed and hidden.
The guy in the second drawing looks up. The sky is blue, but not blue like the sky outside, the blue of the sky of men’s homes, or the living sky of a man, but blue like the sky in dreams, with no clear light, like light itself. Light of the deep, of the seas, of the unknown beyond, of a green half-light, a warm deep, a visible thing.
The guy at the drawing-table looks up as well. The sky looks blue, but not like the sky of men’s homes like in the sky of men’s dreams, and not like a man’s sky, but a blue sky like a man’s sky of a man. Just a blue sky of men, and the fields, and Till’s field indeed, and all solid men have, and hold, and little bits of Till scattered in the soil, which have been left by Till, which have been left by the men and the fields, and all solid, solid men have and all men who have nothing to leave will have.
The man at the drawing table looks up. A blue star, a blue-white star, rises in the sky and moves into the west. A blue moon, like him, passes overhead. He looks at the sky, and the stars, and the earth.
He looks up and looks down. He looks at his wife, and his wife looks at him.
He looks at his wife, and his wife looks at herself.The woman on the table looks at the man on the table.
The woman on the table looks at the man on the table.
I just downloaded a chatbot that generates pre-made responses, and it’s surprisingly natural and readable
I was worried it would be some kind of uncanny valley avatar bot, but no, it sounds like a human person trying to type out some boilerplate human-like responses, and the bot is … really good
It’s not perfect, but “what if this person typed this out but didn’t quite get it right” isn’t usually a scary thing in text communications, IMO
It’s like if a chat bot was also able to read the mood of its interlocutor, in real time
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know
A good one would be a lot more evocative of a “weird and ironic and melancholy” American experience than this, but I’m having a hard time coming up with one that doesn’t sound entirely generic and Protestant.
Someone’s reading a bedtime book and straining to hear the notes through the giggles, and someone else is breaking out in hives and coughing and runs to the bathroom. A man, too feverish even for fever, stands up abruptly and goes downstairs to the bar for whiskey. He orders another beer but seems to have lost all feeling in his right arm and has to lean on another customer for support. He proceeds to spin in circles on the table, moaning pitifully, and someone brings him a steaming cup of coffee, which he drinks in one gulp.
That sounds something like the at-the-time ‘50s literature of alienation and anomie, but I’m looking for more of a Reaganite ‘80s take on the ‘50s, after the boomers grew up and looked back with rose-colored glasses
I can’t think of any books on this theme that I’d consider “good” on their own, so I don’t know if I understand your point. (I mean, the Reaganite “we were feeling alienated from the adults, so I decided to go on a journey of self-discovery that led to me becoming a hippie and then a drug addict” narrative was not a new or original thing, I just don’t have the reference?)
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know
Riiiight.
This is a story that starts in the company of your friends and ends with you back in the company of your friends, but it’s not a story the friends would ever tell, not even to one another, not even if they could, and not a story even the narrator would care to think about.
In the company of your friends you drink, you fuck, you fuck again, you shoot your mouth off in meetings, you sing dirges for the dead, you haggle over the price of a packet of matches, you hold court over the sub-Zero heifers, you lose close friends to each other and then lose close friends to death by sniper’s nest, you hide your face in an old man’s necktie, you get into fistfights with aging rock stars and you talk about the wars, you stub your toe and you tell the story of the cobra that you ritually tortured to extract its heartsickening essence, you talk about the hot dog that didn’t die in a hot dog bun, you talk about the priest that did, you drink scotch and you talk about the faith that was, you talk about the war that you know won’t be, and you talk about the war that you think will be, and maybe someday you’ll stop.
Ping Pong (TV anime) (not a genre I know much about)
A Star Wars anime would actually be cool as Hell.
A Star Wars anime is in pre-production!
The premise is that the main characters are randomly chosen and flung to the Star Wars universe, where they encounter Darth Vader, have adventures, and eventually return to the real world
Mood
The premise is that a young man from a modern-day Japanese high school ends up in a medieval fantasy world, where he teams up with a princess and has adventures and eventually returns to modern-day Japan to high school and meets some people
Do you mean Ping-Pong Club, the ‘90s comedy anime?
a fairly typical dude, he’s one of those dudes who wants to watch you work in silence and work alone, like a sorcerer or something
a goddess who’s brought you in to be her champion, but you haven’t had time to really take her seriously, she’s a real upstart
a demon, who you have to kill for reasons you don’t understand, and probably won’t ever understand, and causes much inconvenience
a dragon, who initially surprises you by simply existing, but maintains its present form for your amusement, like a pet
a vampire, who is a gracious entity or at least, a benevolent personality, but will love to help you if you can find the self-restraint to reject love
a genie, who just appears and hands you a box with the instructions “any activity you want to engage in, this box will do it” and then disappears (you can still get the box, of course)
a wizard, whose power is apparent in ways you can’t even imagine, but to briefly explain, he just rips the magic realm out of the static reference frame to have a look around and judge it for himself, then disappears
It doesn’t feel empty to the people here, not exactly. They’ve packed up their lives like it’s nothing, but this is the kind of thing that comes with leaving. They’re moving on to new experiences, starting fresh somewhere new. But the feeling is similar: the world you knew is a thing of the past, that weight has passed. The building you live in, the shirts you worn, the fallen leaves on the ground – all of it, all those things are now nothing.
You’ve told them everything you know, and more, about the outside world, and now they will go somewhere new, with no memory of this dull, placeless world. They will leave all that behind and go searching in the stars for something new.
You try to remain positive, but the weight of the world is unrelenting. You can’t help but think about the people still trapped in the town, and everything that could have been. You wonder what became of them. You wonder what became of yourself. Your doubts are cut away by the reminders: time is meaningless; all is lost.
You can’t help but think of your future self, when you look into the camera. It’s easy for you now to pretend that you’re a blank slate, that your life has meaning: after all, you do remember your own name, and the faces of your family, and that you are writing this down on some spreadsheet full of acronyms and percentages. You can smile and wave at the camera like a kid in a candy shop, when all you really are is a sum of data.
But your future self will be trapped, in this town, in this uniform. All the fun had been stolen from you in a crooked deal with a crooked cop. The man in black is a fraud, a con man, he swindles people and breaks promises – a liar, a coward, a snake to be eviscerated – a soulless monster unjustly drummed up from the ground. For now, you will do as the man in black says. Watch him swindle something precious from the innocent people of this town.
But your future self will not be blank paper, with nothing behind it. Your future self will have a name – and a face, and a name.
You think of LUDWIG. You look at your notes. You’ve been writing for days. You’re hungry.
You are LUDWIG. You are the monster. You are something else. You are a thing. You are writing this document. You are an entity. You are the world. You walk through the town, where the people are the roadblocks and the cars. You are everywhere. Only you are free.
You think of the experiment, and of your future, and you feel lighter. You are LUDWIG. You are the experiment, you are everything.
^ this sounds cliche but you really are the steven’s universe “I am my mother” incarnate
That’s my tag for this post, so I’ll say it again: I am my mother, but also I am my wife, who is also my mother
I mean, look at these pictures of my wife and me:
And look at these pictures of us:
This hybridization stuff is really weird
(The guy who did the pictures, Soha, is one of my best friends she’s one of my two best friends, we’ve been each other’s best friends for etc. etc., she is like a fourth friend in the tag list)
