This is exactly how my FB debates go with my southern friends:
It’s not about how I said “Halle-freaking-lujah let’s fry the monkeys” it’s about how I know they are guilty, that’s the important part.
ourcatastrophe on, well, a few things: →
I know it’s stupid and unscientific and also anti-feminist and so on but most days I just want to be free of the corporeal. be a brain in a jar or a ghost. it’s not really anything to do with body image or trauma or whatever, at least not consciously or directly. it’s more that this whole “having to negotiate multiple layers of experience” thing gets me down. maybe it’s as simple as that I was always smart but not athletic and I don’t like to be bad at things so when I am I pretend they’re not important. maybe it’s tied up with my secret desire to be the universal subject, which is always the disembodied subject; maybe it’s the other way around. probably it’s got a lot to do with persistent and debilitating anxiety, but who knows. I wish I came from a spiritual tradition with a strain of asceticism. one of those dualist traditions that holds you don’t “have a soul”, you are a soul; you have a body. then maybe I would know what to do with this desire to transcend matter. but actually I’m pretty sure you don’t have a body. you are a body. I see that every day. I know that if I’m not healthy, my mind is clouded, my temper short, I can’t separate my spirit and flesh. I took up running this year. it takes me out of my body. if I’m fitter then my body does the things I need it to do with less complaint. I haven’t felt less like crawling out of my skin since I was about ten, it’s extraordinary. I still feel like crawling out of my skin most days. it’s so weird to me that I have to think so much about my body in order not to think about my body. I think there may be no experience so thoroughly of the body, so grounded in awareness of the state of the body, as feeling detached from the body. (“the body”. your body, my body, I mean.) whatever I would like to believe aside, I was raised not to believe in a soul separate to the body, and I think most of this stuff is at some level wired in early. having faith is something you have to learn young, maybe, like speech. I never learnt. it’s probably just as well because I think one of the only ways I could seriously disappoint my parents with a personal choice is to get religion. I went to church a couple months ago because this woman I was dating had a craving for church music. I think the only thing that stopped my mum hyperventilating into a plastic bag was the fact that I went holding hands with a butch and wearing some ridiculous secretary-in-a-porn-flick outfit that was my misguided idea of Church Wear, so it was clear I had no idea what I was doing. maybe this is the atheist guilt bit. instead of worrying about whether I’m going to hell, I get to beat myself up for wanting something totally ridiculous like existence as a sentient gas cloud. maybe later I can get mad at myself for willfully ignoring the second law of thermodynamics and yearning for life eternal. maybe I can learn to forgive myself by appealing to some mechanistic theory of mind wherein I couldn’t help wishing for something I know to be unreasonable in my bones, because of society or the will to survive or maybe magnetic forces near my brain, that was in New Scientist once. probably that wouldn’t hold water because I’m pretty sure there is no spiritual tradition other than Western atheism more grounded in the conception of pure reason separate from the whims of society and the body, a priori good and righteous without reference to its material effects, and starkly dualist. when I think about Hell I think of one of those relaxation exercises where you close your eyes and someone tells you in a soothing voice that you have to truly inhabit every part of your body.Pretty sure this is why I’m fat: my body is a temple, a temple of the mind. A blob that my brain rides triumphantly on top of, like a king riding through town on an elephant. Also: if you were a sentient cloud, the other clouds would complain that you don’t fluff up at the exact right time when greeting them. Either way, I guess I could run too, but then where would my elephant friend go?
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Syed and Matt playing Swordfight for the first time at Eyebeam’s playtest for Come Out and Play.
(Source: pontonphoto)
“ It happens to all of us, you wake up in the middle of the night and try desperately to get back to sleep but instead toss and turn until the alarm goes off. Rather than it being simply symptomatic of a stressful work week, science suggests you might be experiencing a throwback to a default pattern of human slumber. According to mounting research, the concept of a solid eight hours sleep is a fairly recent phenomenon and it’s likely that our ancestors enjoyed “two sleeps” of shorter duration, separated by time awake, as opposed to one sustained period.
eight hours sleep a myth, say experts//the age
…If you find that you can’t easily drift back off you might want to take a leaf out of the pages of history and engage in some low-stimulus activity for an hour or two rather than sit there worrying about it.
LORENA.
(via ourcatastrophe)
I have been trying to just generally not think about "Before Watchmen" →
But David Brothers wrote an awesome, searing critique of that bullshit Newsarama article about it, and it’s worth a read.
I think what gets me about this idea though isn’t even the intellectual property issues — like, those bug the hell out of me, but they’re not my core issue. My core issue is that Watchmen is a story specifically about the dangers of nostalgia. That’s like. The point. Of the book. And the reason it is deservedly called a classic of the genre and hailed as one of the best things done in the medium is not because its characters are somehow brilliant (they’re not, particularly) or because its plot is amazing (it is kind of a mess in places, let’s be real), but because it does brilliant things with the structure of the sequential art narrative. It does things with the form no one had done before, and it does those in order to make a point about the human drive toward nostalgia and how dangerous it is. Watchmen works specifically because we never actually really know what happened in the past of the book. We get snippets of events, we get the impressions of each character, but the Good Old Days they’re all imagining are vague and ephemeral as the ones people imagine in real life. You can’t make a prequel book about those Good Old Days! Like. If there were awards for point-missing, this would be in major contention.
