diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index 66cd854..9497364 100644 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -342,6 +342,12 @@ 2024-W49 Courting Darkness Robin LaFevers + Audiobook version. + + + 2024-W50 + Don't Be Evil + Rana Foroohar diff --git a/2024_music.html b/2024_music.html index 49a1c83..893769a 100755 --- a/2024_music.html +++ b/2024_music.html @@ -325,6 +325,12 @@ Bec Sandridge + + 2024-W49 + The Cause of Shipwreck + Blackbriar + + diff --git a/blog/2019/11/possession.html b/blog/2019/11/possession.html index 61d0c1a..3a26368 100755 --- a/blog/2019/11/possession.html +++ b/blog/2019/11/possession.html @@ -36,7 +36,7 @@

And am I myself even my own possession?

Do I own my emotions? For even the slighest amount of displeasure immediately gets labeled as boiling rage, an incongruent response to one's surroundings- even though if you were eating a meal in silence, and then someone waltzed in blasting shitty music through the phone in their back pocket, you'd be a little silently annoyed too.

- "I have many emotions," Lex cut in, rolling his eyes, one hand pushing on the bathroom door to keep it open. "Irritated, upset, moody, fatigued, annoyed, pissed, disgruntled, invalidated. To call them all 'grumpy' would be a disservice to the English language and an insult to myself." + "I have many emotions," Lex cut in, rolling his eyes, one hand pushing on the bathroom door to keep it open. "Irritated, upset, moody, fatigued, annoyed, pissed, disgruntled, invalidated. To call them all 'grumpy' would be a disservice to the English language and an insult to myself."

Do I own my movements? For everywhere I go, I have to carry the phone around so I can be "reached" in case of emergency, even though my parents, and their parents, and their parents before them were allowed to explore without the watchful eye of technology over them at all times. And everywhere I go, I must always keep my parents informed of- the rare moments when I am allowed to wander without the fear of a report afterward, it is only because they failed to ask or simply never noticed in the first place.

Do I own my body? For I never consent to having my photo taken, much less posted on Facebook, and yet both of my parents get indignant when I demand that they stop feeding my facial data to Facebook. I motion to opt out of holiday photos, knowing that they'll get plastered everywhere on the internet, and then my parents threaten to take away everything that matters to me in response- and even if they did, they'd still force me into the picture. Always a smiling doll for others' visual pleasure, never my own. And then they joke about mounting cameras everywhere to catch who leaves empty buckets of ice cream in the freezers or wiretaps in my room to listen in on the few words I utter in a former safe place and even going so far to remove all the bedroom doors when we don't come to dinner as quickly as they'd like (even though, most of the time, I genuinely didn't hear them yell because I was listening to music), and I scream that I do not consent to the invasion of privacy and that I'm moving out given the first opportunity, and they simply laugh.

diff --git a/blog/2020/march/antinatalism.html b/blog/2020/03/antinatalism.html similarity index 100% rename from blog/2020/march/antinatalism.html rename to blog/2020/03/antinatalism.html diff --git a/blog/2020/march/epilogue.html b/blog/2020/03/epilogue.html similarity index 100% rename from blog/2020/march/epilogue.html rename to blog/2020/03/epilogue.html diff --git a/blog/2020/april/outside-intro.html b/blog/2020/04/outside-intro.html similarity index 100% rename from blog/2020/april/outside-intro.html rename to blog/2020/04/outside-intro.html diff --git a/blog/2020/october/deitus.html b/blog/2020/october/deitus.html index 282ef5b..07e06f4 100755 --- a/blog/2020/october/deitus.html +++ b/blog/2020/october/deitus.html @@ -20,7 +20,7 @@

Last night (at the time of writing this), I was dragged into work on a day I would usually have off for a late-night team meeting. Truth be told, they were supposed to have happened every few months or so, but because of Corona-chan, the managers had been putting them off until now. So I donned my work-issued vest and followed my co-workers, also confused and mostly new enough to have never gone to a work meeting before, and sat down on a cold floor upstairs while a handful of managers lambasted us for everything we'd done wrong and chucked candy at us like so many bullets whenever they thought we "looked bored" or were "going to sleep".

I imagined a sword in my hand, or maybe a beam of fire, as we were told we were not licking the boots of the General Office hard enough. I wondered what the building would look like covered in flames as the manager talking admonished someone, an impersonal you, for taking twenty minutes in the bathroom.

Over and over I have dreams where I am in some kind of vulnerable position: at school, at work... A teacher, a customer, someone else irate corners me, presses my nerves until I make some kind of honest mistake. And then, threatened, my blood glows aflame. A sudden rush of power. And then the person dissolves into a pile of ash at my feet, threat neutralized.

-

There are a great many things I would do for the power to defend myself, to protect myself. But a god I do not wish to become, for, as the old adage goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." To become a deity, a being sans conflict, would be to forever live in the Epilogue. (Or, if there are other beings in the heavens, to cause massive collateral harm as mortal beings get caught up in our struggles.)

+

There are a great many things I would do for the power to defend myself, to protect myself. But a god I do not wish to become, for, as the old adage goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." To become a deity, a being sans conflict, would be to forever live in the Epilogue. (Or, if there are other beings in the heavens, to cause massive collateral harm as mortal beings get caught up in our struggles.)

For a few months, I have been tossing the idea back and forth of a pair of archetypes. Similar to the lesbian butch and femme, I feel the persistent presence of the ocean and the moon.

A woman first appearing shallow, emotionless, detached from the world. Reclusive, withdrawn. But below the frothy skin is an ocean of terrifying depth, home to a litany of unnerving creatures, each more marvelous than the last. Only a tiny fraction of the depths have ever been mapped, far too vast to explore in one lifetime. She needs the moon to regulate herself, to keep herself from succumbing to the chaos within.

A woman too dazzling, too radiant, to behold directly. A fierce being of unstoppable ambition, ego higher than her lunar namesake. But she is lonely. She requires an anchor to keep her from flying off in a moment's haste, a reason to keep returning to the earth. She needs someone to appreciate her shining bright, someone to look, someone to acknowledge her. She needs someone who will gladly accept the secrets she casts off like meteors, take them to a watery grave.

diff --git a/blog/2020/september/collectivism.html b/blog/2020/september/collectivism.html index d71c005..e5be8ad 100755 --- a/blog/2020/september/collectivism.html +++ b/blog/2020/september/collectivism.html @@ -34,7 +34,7 @@

I take a break from writing and go upstairs to refill my waterbottle. Sitting in the kitchen is my father's new dog, already weighing more than twice as much as she did when he drove halfway across the state and back to get her. In the living room is my mother, engrossed in some cheesy soap opera, knitting needles in her lap, project already forgotten. Taking off on his bike outside is my brother, worried he will be late to his Wednesday night youth group at one of the myriad local churches.

I can gaze at their bodies, at their movements. I can listen to the words that they speak (or bark). But nothing they do I can influence. None of their thoughts I can access. I am my own Inside, and they are all the Outside in relation to myself.

I am an individual.

-

There are more than seven billion individuals on this planet. There are more than seven billion versions of reality. Were we all part of one whole, as frustrates me to no end when occultists chant it over and over like a mantra, I would think it possible to combine two consciousnesses, to merge two Insides into one. But given a set of twins who spend each moment of their waking lives together, going through the same actions and experiences, raised the same, both will be different individuals. Both will inevitably differenciate, as they are individuals, not a collective.

+

There are more than seven billion individuals on this planet. There are more than seven billion versions of reality. Were we all part of one whole, as frustrates me to no end when occultists chant it over and over like a mantra, I would think it possible to combine two consciousnesses, to merge two Insides into one. But given a set of twins who spend each moment of their waking lives together, going through the same actions and experiences, raised the same, both will be different individuals. Both will inevitably differenciate, as they are individuals, not a collective.

If I cannot access the mind of another person, if I cannot puppet a body other than my own: how can I be responsible for the actions of another person I have had no contact with? How can I be held culpable as a member of a group when I did not ask to be a part of said group, when I have no choice to disassociate from it or associate with another, when I do not actively identify as part of it?

A male who does not sexually harass or harm females or act in grossly misogynist manners towards them is not my enemy. A heterosexual person who does not seek to restrict me from expressing my lesbianism is not my enemy. A neurotypical person who lets me exist autistic as I am and does not prevent me from self-regulating my sensory input is not my enemy.

An individual who does not seek to bind me to some collective but recognizes that I am a separate I is not my enemy.

diff --git a/blog/2021/june/unsung.html b/blog/2021/june/unsung.html index e69d143..2885711 100755 --- a/blog/2021/june/unsung.html +++ b/blog/2021/june/unsung.html @@ -81,7 +81,7 @@

SCENE FOUR

-

I wanted an end to the monotony, to the pointless wandering through life. I wanted to leave the Epilogue so badly that Eris gave me a few hazy dreams and pieces of other people's lore to stitch together haphazardly in the middle of the night. She agreed, with her sister, to pretend to be one person, one Goddess, one singular point at the apex of the pyramid of my emotional needs. She deigned to act as if she had given me an impossible task to spur me to continue writing, to continue bothering to live, if only to lament about my fate.

+

I wanted an end to the monotony, to the pointless wandering through life. I wanted to leave the Epilogue so badly that Eris gave me a few hazy dreams and pieces of other people's lore to stitch together haphazardly in the middle of the night. She agreed, with her sister, to pretend to be one person, one Goddess, one singular point at the apex of the pyramid of my emotional needs. She deigned to act as if she had given me an impossible task to spur me to continue writing, to continue bothering to live, if only to lament about my fate.

I do not want a world without end. I do not want to condemn the world to be a laminated paper towel.

And when the archives die too, well Raddle served its purpose in the time it existed. It was relevant in its time to the people that inhabited it. Nothing lives forever and federation won't change that. The quest for digital immortality is just as grotesque as the quest for biological immortality. Everything and everyone is living on borrowed time because life would be meaningless if it never ended.
diff --git a/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html b/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html index 9abbf67..0dbb31f 100755 --- a/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html +++ b/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

And he said, I left you my body to do what you pleased with, and I waited on the sidelines of my own consciousness to see if you'd be successful at achieving freedom where I had so miserably failed. But you were too overpowering. I made your personality too strong on complete accident. And little by little, you cut my contact with the outside world. You bade me into a deep sleep, unknowing, unfeeling, un-myself.

And he said, I think you know where the story goes from here.

-

It is entirely possible that my forays into the Outside, my experiments into egregore making and how far I can stretch Discordian catma until it snaps and breaks and shatters my life into a million pieces, my desperate attempts to explain what happened that December night in 2018 and every other out-of-body experience since then, my search for my place in the universe, are nothing more than symptoms of schizoaffective autism. But I don't care. I don't want a diagnosis, and I'm not going to seek treatment. My parents would force me to get on medication, which would make fade away the only good thing I have going on in my life. And then who would I be? What would I even have left to write about, other than the same cliche one-liners every self-proclaimed "Insta-poet" who wants to be the next Rupi Kaur shits out on a daily basis?

+

It is entirely possible that my forays into the Outside, my experiments into egregore making and how far I can stretch Discordian catma until it snaps and breaks and shatters my life into a million pieces, my desperate attempts to explain what happened that December night in 2018 and every other out-of-body experience since then, my search for my place in the universe, are nothing more than symptoms of schizoaffective autism. But I don't care. I don't want a diagnosis, and I'm not going to seek treatment. My parents would force me to get on medication, which would make fade away the only good thing I have going on in my life. And then who would I be? What would I even have left to write about, other than the same cliche one-liners every self-proclaimed "Insta-poet" who wants to be the next Rupi Kaur shits out on a daily basis?

An internet friend was concerned about me. My body is alive. I don't know if I can say the same about myself. Even though some aspects of my life have objectively gotten better-