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hubris dot edu

@herbert-best / herbert-best.tumblr.com

“—to the last gasp of my earthquake life—”
Alex; they; 31; the wife
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…a labyrinthine series of lines, criss-crossing each other in all sort of ways. These covered the paper so thickly that only with difficulty could one make out the white spaces in between. "Read it," said the Officer. [...] Then the Officer began to spell out the inscription and then read out once again the joined up letters. "Be just!' it states," he said. "Now you can read it." […] "'Be just!' it says," the Officer remarked once again.

In The Penal Colony, Franz Kafka; transl. Ian Johnston [x]

pawn / tool /puppet / cog BE JUST another gear / in the / Harrowing machine

This was originally intended to be (bc I am very normal about all the very normal things I like) a piece of Kafka-referential fanart of Amanda Young, from Saw, with my rendition of the Officer’s design from the execution machine carved into her corpse… didn’t go that far with it, obviously, because I can’t draw for shit. If you’ve never gotten a chance to read it or not read it in a long time, this is your call to arms to read In The Penal Colony. It’s VERY short, albeit somewhat disturbing— the pdf I linked to with the quote is the whole thing, which is 19 pages long as formatted there— but it’s one of those things that lives in your brain afterwards.

It centers around a large, incredibly elaborate and complex machine used for tortuous executions, and the legacy of the now-dead man who designed, built, and used it. I’ve sort of always been fascinated by the idea of trying to create the illegibly elaborate designs it’s described as using— this one contains more than the central, aforementioned words, of course— highlighted under the cut.

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Between the Gears: Saw and the Socioeconomic Machine (or: Saw is anticapitalist, for five and a half pages)

Out of all the famous villains of well-known horror franchises, there’s one fairly unique thing I have to say for Jigsaw— he’s the only iconic horror villain I can think of that I’d expect to be berated by in a Cracker Barrel. I wouldn’t say he’s any less impactful for it. If you’ve ever been berated by an old man in a Cracker Barrel, you know fully well that the experience is not unlike a Saw trap, in that you would, generally speaking, be willing to gnaw off your own leg to escape the Cracker Barrel in that moment. For the audience, the compelling trap of the Saw films is the equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner with your least favorite grandpa, John Kramer, whom you cannot escape even by self-mutilation, which makes for an effective and truly visceral horror experience.

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Also btw I've completely lost the ability to send/receive messages on my main blog so. If you're trying to talk to me uh. Sorry. Submitted my second help ticket today :)