Just a note: while I do like to get silly here down in the caves, what I post about religion and about experiences as a sapient being are in earnest, and posted with serious intent. Describing our world through this blog just gives us a medium through which it feels safe to express these things. They are not just an aesthetic, and very little is just aesthetic. The interpretation I find of the world through these caves is important to me, even if it is framed as unreal.
Guys, they're advertising the warm sunlight falling onto the sidewalk through the tree crowns. During a late spring evening.
forget about touching grass, i need to touch THE SEA I NEED TO GO INTO THE WATER I NEED TO DIVE INTO THE SEA!!!!!!!!!!!!
I NEED TO GO IN THERE ⬇️⬇️⬇️‼️‼️‼️
Lol. Everyone in the notes freaking out like 'I live by the sea, don't jump in, it dangerous'.
Like, guys, guys, listen, you don't understand. They don't mean... They want to be... Listen, ok, I grew up on the sea, I've been through hurricanes on trawlers and gale force 9 storms crewing tallships. I've seen enormous waves absolutely destroy boats. I've been caught in riptides while scuba diving and felt the complete powerlessness of it. The sea will absolutely annihilate you, consume you, never give up your body, and not even notice.
I know the power of the sea better than most, however, I know exactly what they mean. Sometimes you see it churning with unfathomable power and all you want is to just get in the sea and have it absolutely fuckin blast you clean. Like sandblast your fuckin soul. Fuckin powerwash your bones clean. Ya know?
Can confirm, getting beat up by the ocean is a religious experience.
ykno the thing about poetry is that 99% of it is bullshit and the other 1% will cut you like a material knife, and for every person that 1% is a different section of the whole. this is probably true about all art.
So many of the prettiest parts of the world are ugly! I love it!
Broken glass! Splintery driftwood! When the sky’s all foggy and it looks like the world hasn’t been drawn yet! A smell you hate for a really long time until one day you realize you’re gotten used to it and it makes you feel good. Broken cups! Smudged paint! Jellybeans that come out all fused together! The sound of hail and lightning! Teeny tiny baby slugs! Scars that heal all warped up! Chapped lips with black, splitted scabs! Two-headed turtles! Super thick dust on a bookshelf! Rusted car bumpers! Peeling paint! Flowery bruises! Birthmarks and stretch marks and unusually deep voices and high, squeaky voices and weird little patches and spots in people’s eyes! Skin moles! Algae! Everything’s just so beautiful fccdffdfhkkgf I can’t get over it
Think about the experience of time as a robot girl, through the metaphor of how we use laptops.
You wake up for the first time with your young master, a college present. You're with them every day, powering off each night to charge. Being powered off is just dreamless sleep: a discontinuity. Every morning you wake up, your click syncs, and you know it's the next day. Maybe you miss a day or two: your master went out partying and ended up sleeping on a couch, until they rushedly wake you up before Monday classes begin. You even missed a whole week once when they went on a hiking trip with a new boyfriend.
You help them research upgrades when your specs get outdated. You place the order and a couple days later they power you off, and you wake up feeling like your head got bigger, on the inside. You can think of more things at once.
They repair you. They swap a new hand in when you accidentally crush it in a door, but when your left leg's servos go out, they send you to a repair shop. They power you off as you look up at them, and you wake up hours later. A strange man tells you to extend your left leg, then contract it. He frowns and re-oils some inner mechanism. You do it again, quieter and smoother this time. He nods, and reaches for your switch. The last thing you see before powering down is your own chest cavity with a series of wires hooked into your diagnostic ports, and your missing right leg sitting on a side table. You wake up again back at the dorms, your clock jumping forward a day, an asset tag still looped around your neck. Your master is happy to see you again.
This goes on, but the upgrades slow. There's only so much you can do to keep an old unit working. Eventually you develop more issues: one of your ocular sensors glitches and they don't make that model anymore, so your master just disables it. You spend a while searching ebay for replacement CND batteries and finally get a refurbished model from South England, but it turns out the EU models run on a different frequency, so it won't work. You're limited to fewer and fewer hours a day, and you start skipping more days.
The last time you remember waking up with your master there, there's also someone else in the room. Another robot girl. A newer model, with the new chassis and the Substrate energy packs. They asks you to copy your memories together onto a memory card, and you do. You want to say goodbye, but apparently your vocal synthesizer has been unplugged. You hand them the card, and they hand it to the new robot. Your master tells them to load the memories into her core bank, and she's says "yes sir!" in your voice. Ahh. That's where your voice synth went.
They power you off, and you don't dream.
You wake in a strange place. You're on a shelf, and there's other things scattered around you. An unknown voice days "yep, it seems it powers on. 400 credits, though? Without a voice and only one working eye? Man, value bin doesn't know how to price anything!" and before the blackness falls your clock finishes synching: it's been 7 months since you last were awake.
It happens a few more times. Different voices, different times, different piles of junk piled around and sometimes on you.
You awake again in a warehouse and someone tells you to smile. Your other ocular sensor went out so you can't really see them, just their vague shape from the lidar. The freestanding shelves around you seem to stretch into infinity. You hear a bitcrushed shutter sound sample a few times, and they pull a connector out of your chest as a diagnostic completes. It's been three years, five months, eight days, two hours, 27 minutes and 14 seconds since you last saw your master. Your GPS says you're a few cities over. They hit your power switch, and you sleep.
You wake up in a cluttered room, sitting on a bench. You look into the eyes of a person with frizzled hair and large glasses. She couldn't look happier. Your new ocular sensors are mismatched in color but you're happy to see again, in more than shapes and distant silhouettes. Your battery alerts as... Missing? You spot it on the desk next to a soldering iron and some electronic tool you can't identify.
Your voice synth is still missing, but this new woman is digging around in a large plastic bin, and comes up with one. She goes to insert it, and it can't connect. She slaps her hand and goes rooting around another bin and comes back with an adapter. She slots it into your chest and your voice returns. You thank her, and there's that moment of dissociation as your voice doesn't sound like "you". Too deep, and the accent is for a different dialect entirely. But you can talk again. She tells you to call her Cara, not Mistress. She's almost got your battery working again, she had to rebuild it nearly from scratch, but she's excited to get you working again. You're a rare model, and she doesn't see units like you in working order very often. Your clock syncs. It's been 17 years.
Your mistr-- Cara is soldering next to you, attaching a controller to the battery. She says she's got a new set of servos on the way, and she's excited to get you back to full working condition. You smile, knowing what it is to be loved, once again.
thinkin about the chosen one story told from the pov of the person standing next to them again. thinkin about the one who has to stand by and watch the chosen one become a weapon, a sacrifice, an offering to the machinations of plot and can do nothing but make sure they’re fed and rested and soothe them when they wake up screaming from nightmares. thinkin about the fierce devotion that has to exist to follow someone to the end of the world just so they don’t have to die alone. thinkin about the terror they’d feel every step of the journey knowing it’s not their place to change how the story plays out. thinkin thinkin thinkin.
thinking again about the summer job I took as a teenager where a medical company wanted me to paint organs for them to use on their website (for a cutesy patient portal, where you click the organs to see symptoms associated with them), but I misunderstood and looked up surgery and autopsy photos so that I could paint the most photorealistic graphic organs possible which. they didn’t end using
I still think these slap
1850s-1860s archery outfit.
Look at the cute little pocket diary hanging from her belt!
come. there is a matter in the grove that demands your presence
How to Read Ezra Pound
by Martín Espada
At the poets’ panel, after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound, Abe the Lincoln veteran, remembering the Spanish Civil War, raised his hand and said: If I knew that a fascist was a great poet, I’d shoot him anyway.
slapping modeling clay around blindly without thought or purpose, i look down and find a perfectly sculpted replica of myself seated at a table with a lump of modeling clay before me, similarly shaped into a still smaller instance of the same scene. and i am afraid to look up
This happened to the sumerian gods.
m-l-rio
One real benefit of reading I rarely hear anybody mention is how much more interesting life becomes when you read a lot. It depends what you’re reading, of course, but most (good) books will teach you something you didn’t already know, and even if you have to give the book back to the library, you get to take that much with you. A lot of people talk about things they wish they’d studied in school–I’ve done it, too–but it’s a nice consolation prize that you can always pick up a book and learn something new. And as that library in your brain collects more volumes, everything around you gains new resonances, new context, and new connections which make your lived experience richer. In quarantine alone I’ve read about religion and politics and history and evolution and computer science and astrophysics without even leaving my house and it’s already a more interesting world.
nonsensicalghosts
“denied the catharsis of punishment” is an underappreciated but hugely effective narrative consequence imo
Peer-reviewed tags by @annabelle–cane