#outer space atheistic

[viviennelamb]

Fake Spiritualists

Nobody wants to talk about the present moment, like ever. Spirituality isn't about community, celebration and culture, it's only about your soul and God. I can tell when people just make up shit because of their vagueness and indirectness which is why atheists get annoyed with mystical speak.

Actual spirituality isn't loving and flowery to most people. Karma is objectively brutal and merciless.

How do I know? Look at the world around you. There's no separation between the physical and spiritual. What you're seeing is a direct result of the ordinary person's actions.

People who get on the internet with their imaginary spiritual platitudes are lying about being content.

How do I know? Because they're still dependent on their outer circumstances to reflect what they want. As soon as they lose everything or get a diagnosis and they haven't done the work to reach God, that's when they will become filled with rage and find out nobody cares about them but God, but by then it'll be too late.

Once you realize you're living in spiritual poverty, then I'll believe what you say about your inner state.

Conspiracy theorists (i.e feminists) will call you insane if you talk about Reality, because that's "woo" to them which demonstrates their level of delusion.

The actual people who are being raped, molested, trafficked and tortured as a result of superstitious heterosexual atheists and fake spiritualists who think their sex is holy because it's "natural" would disagree.

But since they're traumatized into silence and are unable to even perceive what is going on because they've been so incredibly manipulated by just about everybody, their intuition has eroded into nothing.

Luckily I have no trauma, and I know my soul so I can say whatever the fuck I want while people who have the whole world backing them are scared to say anything "too controversial" because they worship men and are prideful about being hideously vain.

The point of Religion is to end suffering. If your "religion" doesn't end aim to minimize suffering it's a hobby or a dogma that's intended to increase suffering.

Karmic Law is the only law that actually exists and Religion is living in accordance to Karmic Law to reduce suffering, not only for oneself but everybody and everything.

Cause and Effect is what every science studies in some manner because there's nothing else to study. Karma is the whole of Law and how the universe works. Karma is why time and space continues indefinitely and Karma keeps every atom in motion which materializes the unseen (thought) into the physical realm.

Bragging about being too dense to know this isn't something you should to brag about, claiming that Reality is "made up" just because you're slow and have never lived in the present moment isn't something to be proud of.

Physics studies Cause and Effect directly, but not in a manner that is relevant to the everyday person - that's what Yogis do.

Everyday, the most relevant aspect of Cause and Effect is lust and sex. Nothing else comes close to the relevance of lust because lust is the root of all evil.

Lust is the reason why the human population is the way it is now and why everybody's motivation to continue living. Sexophiles say this themselves, so this is nothing new: what makes an ego "human" is sex and their reason to live is to fuck.

Since just about everybody thinks sex is a good thing, more of that "good thing" will happen to everybody, including children. Doesn't matter how much you pull up to your pointless rallies and protest against abuse when you go home and sexually abuse yourself and your partner daily.

Nobody gives a fuck though.

What makes it difficult to demonstrate Reality is that we are currently immersed in it. Since everything that is happening Now is considered "normal," saying anything about Reality is considered crazy because pridefully mediocre people hate actual facts and actual science.

So, the ordinary person is in la la land, far out into a future that doesn't exist, dreaming about an all female paradise, which is possible, but won't take the steps to get to that goal right now...

(or she's in a traumatic past, constantly talking about what happened 10 years ago - or even the times before her birth - to notice her current circumstances are a direct result of her actions and becomes a perpetual victim instead).

In the end, what everybody is saying (except for people who live in Reality) are just opinions on how to become happy. But they can't find a way to get there which is why they spend their time arguing online, with every molecule of hubris they can muster up, instead of turning to solitude and silence which is the only place true, enduring happiness can be found.

Your peace of mind makes you a zillionaire regardless of anybody's opinion of you.

To get to that utopian ideal, you have to become a utopian citizen. Want children protected? Become a living aegis for innocence. Want rape to never happen again? Stop fucking. Want to become fearless and untouchable? Realize God.

Change yourself. Nobody else has to change but you because you are the catalyst for change.

The purpose of real Religion is to become blissful.

How does one become blissful?

By living a Spiritual Life.

How does one live a Spiritual Life?

Chastity, scientific meditation and loving God.

That's it. It's that simple.

If you are a real truth seeker who is willing to do whatever it takes to have a peaceful mind, like I was, this wouldn't be a difficult decision for you. The reason why people are avoiding this simple truth is because they like living in agony

When occultists bring up tarot cards and astrology, or in atheists' case the DSM and their millions of hobbies, you know they're desperate to find something to work for them cause whatever they're doing is yet another distraction from the reality that they have nothing.

The only "science" that matters is the Science of Concentration because that is the only way you can live in the Present Moment which is God.

Pause for a moment, look up from your screen and observe the world around you without judgement... that is God. That momentary feeling you had just now of complete stillness and awareness of the totality of Reality is what few people experience 100% of the time after years and decades of daily effort in meditation.

When you live a Spiritual Lifestyle, that is when you're Religious.

When you are 100% God-Realized, as you in live in the Present Moment 100% of the time, that is when you're Spiritual.

In a world like this, reclaiming all of your concentration or attention is paramount. Only those who are actually suffering will choose this path. People who like killing their time become atheists and psychopaths become occultists. Once you start getting even a little bit of your concentration back, the fears of the future and anxieties of the past become non-existent, you progressively kill your wants and eradicate your egotism altogether.

The untrained mind freaks out and seeks the nearest distraction because the Present Moment is horrifying to a rotting brain. Can't distract yourself from your karmic depression and nervousness anymore. Can't distract yourself from the world as it is, you gotta go on social media and look at a carefully edited and color graded world because you depend on "hope."

There's no hope. There's only individual, persistent action without breaks. Religious daily sex has brought this world into its current rape-saturated circumstance so what do you think you have to do to get out of it?

Oh, that's too extreme? Then you don't actually want what you think you want. You want filth and degradation and that's what you got. Have fun!

If not, what are you going to do right now to make the world a better place? More theorizing about how to get sustainably raped and femicided by your husbands in a "natural way" or apply absolute purity to your life to experience absolute liberation?

You know, liberation is what a borderline penis-worshipping feminist and her pedophilic sadistic husband can't give you. You're already in the depths of hell if you want approval from these mean and ugly motherfuckers.

The "old religion" was male-worship which is what is getting women and children abused and trafficked enmasse right now. In fact, as long as women keep fucking men, patriarchal phallocentrism will remain the number one philosophy as everything else stems from male-worship, even your precious matriarchy.

The Matriarchy is for Straight female supremacists who want better heterosexual sex and breeding conditions. Nobody owes you that and it will never happen anyways. Sucking dick whether it's with your mouth or vagina will always end in a female holocaust which is happening right now. Anybody with sense has left fake feminism.

The massacre of women, more specifically female children, is regimented, organized and systemized. It's actually a fucking algorithm at this point and I have yet to see any feminists talk about that, ironically. Y'all don't care and the few who do talk about fucking inbetween their false concern about female children. Enjoy your deaths by the dicks you want to "cooperate" with! 🥰

Deeming sex as healing or pure when it causes mass calamity is your #1 problem regardless of who you think you are. If you man-haters want to oppress men in a matriarchy, which isn't possible when you're having sex with him, this will lead right back to women's current slavery because Cause and Effect is the only reality.

What you have dominion over will dominate you, which is exactly what is happening to women right now by choice while you're prideful about being "the closest thing to god on earth" because you give birth to egos. Men are acting in perfect accordance to what females want and they're here to make you live in fear forever until you learn what discipline is.

If there was, one of your useless feminist theories on "finding the right of sex position to make him love me" would've worked by now.

P.S. the only Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine is having a pure heart from Chastity and loving God. Nothing else.

There is already a Cosmic system in place and we're living it right Now. You have to reform yourself before anything else can change and if you're not willing to become pure, as in destroy every particle of lust within you, then you're the problem.

#spirituality #religion #if you don't understand basic physics: the more you think against innocence (& its defenders) the worse your life will get.

[commanderquinn]

meta: sam coe - post-campaign analysis

allllrighty i am officially post-campaign so time for first thoughts. since im still collecting my feelings/opinions on the main quest i dont want to go super into that. i wanna wait and consolidate into a deep dive on that one. BUT i am a fic writer with a fixation on socioeconomics, intergenerational trauma, and more specifically the phenomenon of atheists clinging to their religious parents morals because they haven't taken the time to evaluate their biases and the reasons they still hold them

translation: the silver spoon space cowboy is an interesting concept. poory executed in the case of starfield, sadly, but great framework for fandom to chop the head off of and bring to their own individual comfort interpretations.

this meta will include spoilers for the following:

-sam's questline and the npcs involved

-his romance

-cora, the safety storyline around her, and how she's the best part of the space game

-why bethesda was fucking stupid to turn the cowboys into cops when they have the perfect opportunity for not that. i went in hoping for retired/reformed army rangers fed up with war looking to defend their home from fascism given the "han solo simulator" marketing, but all i got was this lousy ass rendition of the texas rangers, which i for SURE did not want

-i WONT be going into detail about the main plot for this post, just fyi. i wanna save that, and sam's relation to it, for its own essay. id still recommend not reading meta's until you finish the game tho

-i miss obsidian's writing. this game made me want to play outer worlds for the 100th time. that will probably come up a lot

this is probably gonna sound more than a bit scattered and off the fucking plot for the first section, but bare with me, im making a point eventually i promise. gotta make sure we're all on the same page first.

now that ive done a majority of his content, it's clear what the intent was for sam and i applaud it. i like it when good hearts in bad systems spot the fundamental flaws and decide to abandon it entirely, or work to change it. i hate perfect characters. i hate characters that have no growth to find. sam is a great character for showing the awesome power of a perspective change. but damn. what a waste when you're talking about a format where a writer is constricted to:

-an exact conversation trigger (bethesda games have always relied on interrupt & player approach, and i didnt notice any variation on game engine front but i wont know until they release the ck so)

-word limit on all responses (yes, you can make long dialogues in engine. but those words still have to be f u n d e d from a dev standpoint. words are not free in video games. capitalism sucks for art.)

-multiple conversation branches that ALL have to circle back to the original topic (they have to follow a set pattern of establishing a subject, then the players possible responses to that subject, the npcs responses to those responses, AND provide a seamless, one dialogue tie-in path to the next branch. it sounds super easy until you're the shmuck writing it, and then it doesnt feel so easy anymore)

-get approximately two personal quests with, what was it, 12 motion scripted scenes? (im watching other peoples pts now so ill try to remember to count, but it was. hmm. lack luster imo. im not saying quantity is vital. im a bioware fanatic, i know the power of quality when its actually delivered. i didnt have any moment like that for sams quests and it was kind of crushing. ill get into it.)

-appeal to a wide enough audience to obtain profit by holding back eXtReMe ViEwS (id like to point out that there is, at this exact moment in time, an active pr campaign (and a few scattered gaming content creators) surrounding starfield talking about how pronouns are politics and should be left out of gaming. over a setting flag in a save file. you literally dont even have to press a button about it. like, you pick your characters body. masc bodys are auto assigned m pronouns. fem bodies are auto assigned f pronouns. you literally dont even have to SEE the button, and it never gets brought up. the only purpose it serves is so the game knows what voice lines to fire. that. is. it.)

im not going to humor the "thats dumb, bethesda makes political games" contribution to the argument.

i get straight people think they're being super helpful and witty on that one, but i think the world would collectively benefit from allies taking just a few extra seconds before standing on that soapbox to maybe consider that calling existence "politics" might be, gee idk, insulting. maybe more than a lil dehumanizing. maybe super easily solved by just NOT giving into their parents obsession with playing devils advocate. i think if maybe allies could shut the fuck up for a minute or two at a time and go look for voices of authority within the communities they're defending instead of trying to talk over them, that'd probably work out better. might help cut out the completely useless middle man their parents taught them to be when they drilled home "you have to respect everyone's opinion"

no the fuck you do not, actually. i, as someone on this earth attempting to be a compassionate person, owe people a chance at understanding. i do not, under any circumstance, owe someone any kind of respect WHATSOEVER if they cannot respect me as a human being. full stop. i dont owe it to them, i dont owe it to their religion, i dont owe it to the government they try to establish. i do not owe respect to people attempting to oppress me. i never have and i never will.

but remember. there is context to be found in the passing of time. yes, you need to tell grandma to stop being racist. no, you do not need to banish grandma to the nursing home if there's still a chance that she's willing to sit and listen. a chance that she'll empathize with social perspectives that the racist society she was raised in never allowed her to have. breathe and give grandma the chance. then send her to the home if she's still racist.

(yes that was an analogy for how i imagine a perspective conversation with jacob would go. i do not have high hopes of that man finding self awareness given. well. who he is as a person.)

now. if you've played through sam's content, you already know why im bringing all of that up, but lets put together a list of all the things that Make Sam Coe Who He Is before we wrap it all up in a pretty bow that hopefully reads a lot less scattered than this "yo society got some trauma actually" lead up ive dumped on you

quick interrupt just for me: i love that im back on tumblr where i dont really have to give all that much of a fuck about making sense. any audience i could find here is equally unhinged so mostly i just have to format it in a way that makes your brain not hurt. sorry if you dont have adhd <3

1: lets talk about cora's hair.

im going to make the race observation because its bothering me from a dev standpoint AND the gamer crowd is already starting to make cuck memes which sucks to see.

i get that this doesnt matter in a colonialism scifi future where a service like enhance exists and we're talking about two rangers that apparently went under cover regularly, but it matters in the context of how sam was handled in a 2020 era commercial, creative environment. im just going to MENTION that cora coe's biological mother (that jab was me not liking her as a person, not me giving a shit that she's white) is paler than pale, and sam does NOT look like some of his earlier promo images. bethesda as a company also has a very long history of making characters arguably tan to avoid this shit.

9/16 edit: was asked for source, heres the exact image im referencing, which is still his set image on the starfield wiki to date:

(im going to preemptively warn any white artists building the urge to argue over this: you DO NOT want to die on a hill about lighting for this one, fucking trust me. thats not what this conversation is, and if you dont understand that as a White Artist, you need to sit this one out until you understand the full weight of the conversation and the profound effect of media treating skin color like a rare diversity accessory. bethesda has a very very long history of this. their last major story title, fallout 4, (76 was a money grab made in the other studio and i barely want to call it a game) had a whopping total of two black characters in its main cast, and both of them acted in subservient roles so please. please please please just. stop trying to defend bethesda on this one. its dehumanizing, cowardly, and malicious in this day and age. i promise im not trying to bite anyones head off here, im just Old And Tired when it comes to suburbanites in fandom.)

i think having solomon be canonically black would have been a really important aspect. i think it would have given the opportunity to show white people why its fucked up that they get SO EXCITED to save war mementos (or in the case of starfield a nasa memento) and will go on and on about how vital it is to save that piece of history, but when you bring up memorializing the importance of race as it pertains to human history and cultural history/pride, they suddenly start getting Very Uncomfortable and throw out phrases like "what does it matter we're all human" while standing next to the gun their grandfather smuggled home from the war

there is no brightness slider on pc and i havent gone reshade tweaking so everything is still washed out on my end (dont worry, as an rtx user, imma be makin a rant post on that) b u t. cora coe has a pale as fuck mother and a vaguely tan father with blue eyes and straight hair, meanwhile my precious angel has a darker complexion and curls that look like they're closing in on the 3c range so like. im getting vibes that sammy boy mighta been whitewashed during game dev, and thats about as far into THAT topic as im gonna bother to venture for this post.

2: his dad

were we supposed to have more daddy issues content??? istg it feels like there was the initial map talk and then nothing. im not saying that i cant pull blood from a stone and give you an entire essay on that glimpse of family trauma just from a few lines of dialogue, but still. feels like thats maybe something that should have gotten more detail.

"no forgiveness between me and my old man. it's uh... coe tradition."

oh boy. oh boy oh boy oh boy. what a line to start his personal quest

before we go ANY FURTHER im gonna drop a reference to one of my favorite aaron sorkin scenes of all time. its from the movie he did about the chicago seven, and i think it fits VERY well when having a conversation about how sam is shaped by his father

unfortunately the exact scene i want to show isnt clipped anywhere easy i could find, so here's an article that talks about that scene specifically if you want more context but dont want to watch the whole movie. what we're really focused on is this:

which is a scene where a fictional account of bobby seale, the leader of the black panther party at the time of the chicago 7 trial, said that above quote to a fictional account of tom hayden while they were having a conversation about how the stakes of this trial are life and death for him as a black man, but little more than a family dispute and a dark spot on their records for the (all white) chicago 7.

its a GREAT continuation of sorkin’s fascination around father son conflicts (he covered it a time or two during his writing days as west wings original creator, which is a great political show id strongly rec) and it really really works when used in comparison to those rebellion days sam had that he still flagellates over

sam was a privileged kid without a foundation of emotional support or a safe environment to vent to. he didnt have the words needed to communicate what he was feeling and thinking and experiencing. he didnt have the means to express himself in a way that wasn't immediately criticized by the people in his life. it doesnt take a degree in psych to figure out that sam first ran for the stars to run from his father. and it sounds like that was tradition

from the MOMENT YOU MEET HIM, jacob is full stop "my way or the highway" until you hit him with the good ol bethesda persuasion and his disposition pulls a 180 to hand you the next plot device

sam: "you know why im here."

jacob: "oh? and what's that? you come to your senses? realize where you ought to be for once?"

w o w

i wonder why sam never felt safe in his own home. i wonder why he doesnt feel safe leaving cora there. i wonder why that miserable fucking attitude and guilt has sam convinced that jacob will be the worst possible thing for his curious daughter's self esteem.

yes, grandparents sip a different kind of koolaid when it comes to their grandkids. no, that is not enough to protect that child from that much intergenerational trauma. sam's made a bad choice keeping cora in space, but he's made an EXCELLENT choice keeping her away from jacob.

forget "showing respect" to his son's choices, jacob won't give them the time of day. he brushes off constellation and wont go meet them for himself, he insists that cora being "in her family home" is the only priority (isnt THAT telling) and, as if that wasnt enough to prove he's incapable of empathy, the fact that he outright, direct fucking quote during that first scene with him, says to sam's face

"the only mistake im seeing here is you"

fuck anyone who walked away from that scene of a parent saying that to their own kid and had the response of "i dont understand why sam wont let jacob take care of cora." fuck you, genuinely from the bottom of my heart, if that was your reaction.

i looked for opportunities to get sam to talk about what the rest of those "30 plus years of experience with the man" really looked like after that. the fact that it was used as a plot device without any (from what I COULD FIND in my first pt, if i find any ill edit this) kind of dialogue discussion about that trauma around his father's behavior/mentality and the terrible influence it had is such a waste. chances are!!!!!! id fucking agree with him!!!!!!!!!! SO TELL THEM TO ME BETHESDA!!!!!! give me the chance to storm back into that house with the full story and let that geriatric fuck know why he will not be allowed back into my daughters life (yeah we're gonna be calling cora our daughter on this one bc, again, she's the best thing in the game) until he can learn to be a safe emotional environment for her

and THEN, at the end of the romance, the wrinkly mf drops a "hey can you go over sam's head and make the parenting decisions now" 20 minutes before your vows get exchanged in his living room (WE'RE GONNA TALK ABOUT THAT MESS OF A WEDDING LMAO ITS A LOT but im probably gonna save it for another sam post where i talk more in depth about why packing a complicated romance in that tightly just Dont Work). like wow. wowowowwow. if that doesnt perfectly sum up how he views the dusty's (shhh i really hope that name catches on pls i keep seeing ppl use captain instead its heartbreaking) role in the family now, and confirm how he's always viewed his own son, idk what does

3: lillian "i can abandon my kid and demand she be taken care of in the same breath" hart

i was originally going to go into hella detail on his relationship with his ex but honestly i think im just gonna leave a few paragraphs and not touch on her again bc its bad for my blood pressure.

okay, here's the deal. im biased in the sense that i had a mother with attachment issues and lets just say that his ex is worth about as much to me as a pile of dogshit. it'd be one thing if she had that moment of "oh. sam and cora bond really well and i dont fit" and decided to look at that and evaluate if she wanted to continue trying to be a parent.

but she didnt have a moment of reflection. she didnt talk to a therapist. she didnt have a discussion with sam. she went back to work and decided "oh well, my kid doesnt like me" and then left her daughter with an open wound and no shot at closure. which is just. wow. that's active abandonment. she WALKED OUT of cora's life because she couldn't stomach the idea that she didnt immediately win over her daughter without any effort to connect to her.

then she has the nerve to yell at sam for not doing the best for cora. like bitch, you cant even consistently answer the phone??? what are you on??? she's REPEATEDLY broken cora's heart with false promises, and clearly made no effort to truly atone for that given just HOW angry sam is ALL the times he brings it up.

and she does it all for what????? a beat cop reputation and some shiny medals????? like shut the fuck up with that righteous indignation piglet, you're killing smugglers under someone's made up authority to protect COMMERSE, not creating galactic peace. the idea that THAT SHIT is worth more to her than her own daughter having a mother who's around for all her life milestones is inFURIATING and id fucking deck her if i could.

the fact that there's zero chance to call her out other than one single "thats a pretty awful thing to say" option is a real cop out from bethesda. they realized they put a woman in a position where she could be really, truly yelled at for something like child care, and chickened out on following through with it so they wouldnt take any heat.

thats gross and should piss you the fuck off, by the way. that sure the fuck isnt what equality looks like by any measure. you don't empower women by acting like they're infallible creatures you cant call out for being flawed. and you sure as shit dont empower the next generation of women by forgiving their abusers.

4: cora's safety

which brings us to the big sticky: sam is a disaster and i DONT think that keeping cora on a combat-active spaceship is right. i think she'd be much better off living in constellation hq (aside from the main plot obvsly) with a constant open comm to her dad and the ability to bring her to outposts and secured sights.

the problem with the biomother's abandonment isnt the distance. its the lack of attempt to connect. its the lack of forming a bond. its the fact that she had zero desire to understand her child once she figured out her child didnt "love her the most" when thats literally not a thing. the problem was never the physical space, and it wouldnt have to be in sam's case, either.

he's a dad that's there for cora day in and day out, he just never got the chance to grow out of the panic stage of a parent worried the first fever is going to kill the baby. he didn't have his dad because he had to get out to protect himself, he doesnt have a mom because of how long she's been dead, and lillian checked the fuck out at an early stage apparently. so sam was left to be the nervous wreck trying to keep history from repeating itself. the man's flying blind in the face of all the combined generational trauma of himself, his father, and his ex, all while trying not to fuck up shaping a human life.

you're damn fucking right he keeps cora glued to his side, i legitimately do not think his own ptsd would allow him to do otherwise without someone like the dusty to come and and go "hey dude, maybe its time we read some emotional intelligence and trauma books so we can start getting cora into a stable environment for literally the first time in her life? also im going to teach her gun safety for my own sanity because you keep letting her walk all over you and its scaring the fuck out of me thinking my daughter is going to try to raid a pirate ship at 15 because no one taught you proper boundaries."

5: his morals

its been 30+ years and his father wont let go of arguing and micromanaging long enough to try to understand his son. lillian is a workaholic who believes her only inherit value is what she can provide to an organization that views living, breathing human beings as occasionally expendable while screaming about its pursuit of freedom and equality.

sam coe is a man who got told what he was supposed to be his entire life, tripped into drugs and crime in an angry, sheltered act of rebellion, and walked away from it all with a very skewed, very flawed interpretation of morality as a result.

lillian and his father are the clear moral compasses in his life. like yeah, sure, he'll talk about how cora is his driving force until he's blue in the face. and he's not lying!!! he's not even technically wrong. she is his active motivation day in and day out. but she is not his Morality. she hasn't developed enough as a person to be able to be that kind of beacon. she's a kid rushing herself through childhood because she thinks that will make her better and no one in her life recognizes it enough to stop it. she shouldnt have to be the moral guide for someone who's supposed to be guiding her

sam cant let go of the ranger envy. he couldnt stomach being around it, but he cant look at that discomfort long enough to identify why. he can walk into a bank and plain as day go "ah, don't you hate the smell of capitalism," but he can't bring himself to blink the stars out of his eyes long enough to ask why the rangers are so willing to put smugglers to death without trial. sam has enough awareness to identify the system is flawed, but he doesnt have the guts to really stare that down

he'll make cracks about walter having too much money and influence, but he wont actually mention how he and his wife are the root cause of an extraordinary amount of pain and suffering and perfectly avoidable manslaughter as a result of their business. i get that constellation runs as a dont as dont tell organization, but if sam's going to give me shit about nabbing a paper weight from a guy's desk, i think we should talk about how he doesnt display anger for walter's business practices.

sam coe, at his heart, is a dreamer who doesn't want to look too close at things. he was taught that some things just Are, and looking for too many answers will find you trouble. he's got the spirit of an explorer dampened by a lifetime spent under cops.

you can hear it in his voice whenever he talks about how proud he is of cora for being a goddamn prodigy. you can hear the wonder and the excitement there. you can hear the curious kid in him that probably got pushed out of the way while he was trying to shape himself into a Proper Coe

i think sam coe is a dreamer who was forcibly taught to fear learning as a child, and thats the real tragedy of him.

so let's start to tie our bow here.

sam is a man who, in a way that only a privillaged kid can, stumbled into neon's life of drugs and smuggling and self harm through destructive behavior with both eyes firmly shut.

he didn't fall into drugs after a lifetime of being submersed in the culture of it. he didnt take them because he grew up surrounded by people that just knew that's all life was ever going to hold. he didnt get into smuggling because he was starving. he didnt take on his first "criminal act" because there was a life and death battle going on somewhere in his life.

this man was drowning in guilt and shame centered around not "being a proper coe" by the time he was free of his father's control, by all accounts. you can hear how much self hatred he has over the memory of that time in his life. look, im not going to say that age and recovery doesnt come with regret, but he talks about it like degeneracy and something to be guilted about rather than just... living life. like so what you did some drugs?? so what you did a capitalism no no?????

corporations arent people. you shouldnt steal from them because itll put YOU at risk, but under no circumstance should anyone hold onto any guilt for stealing from them. money is fake and capitalism murders people every hour of the day. fuck the system, its fucking rigged, look out for you and yours while capitalism is stealing your natural resources and making private homesteading prosecutable (translation: in our actual, real life here, the government can throw you in jail for building a house without a permit. go look up at the sky and think about the moral journey humanity had to take to get us to that point, and then come talk to me about how i shouldnt encourage people to steal from corporations)

anyways back to the video game, as far as the "what if he was unknowingly smuggling something like organs or weapons" argument, there's no desire for me to defend it, tbh. i dont view crime as a personality brand the way cops do. someone being convicted of a crime doesnt make me see them as lesser, it makes me see them as a person who did a bad thing. i do bad shit all the time. we all do. we're human. sometimes there's an excuse for the behavior, and sometimes there isnt. that's not the end of the world. you own up to your actions, you apologize, and you put in the effort to make amends that fit the situation. end of story. the obvious exception to that being when someone you have victimized tells you to fuck off because they dont want your further involvement.

yes. yes there are people in the world that are genuine monsters that spend their time and energy looking for ways to do the cruelest shit imaginable to their fellow human beings. but those are fucking outliers, so no, im not going to let a conversation about morality be derailed by a fraction of a percent of the population

but people (like the rangers) who aren't ready to look at the whole picture of context, who would rather hyper focus on the unbending rule of the land, don't see that. they see a "type" of person once a crime has been committed rather than "a person who found themselves in this scenario"

sam was raised by cops. he fundamentally does not understand how biased his own view is. he'll sometimes make a vague mention of crime being a necessity, but you can hear how many strings are attached there just from the way he talks about it. he truly views crime as a black and white subject with exceptionally few slivers of grey to be found. you can hear the "law and order is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom" in his voice whenever he talks about how the rangers are "good people" he just "didnt fit anymore" and it's heartbreaking

he'd be so much better off if he would take a moment to reevaluate his priorities and look a lot closer at that guilt he carries and why he carries it. i think it would even help him better connect with cora in the long run. it would for sure give him a better handle on why letting his daughter take on college courses this early in her life isnt something to brag about. its a bad sign that she's pushing herself to Be Something in the exact same way he used to. he just doesn't recognize it because her way is "healthy" by society's fucked up view of child prodigies

tl;dr

i don't need to fix sam coe. he's stubborn, traumatized, and sheltered, not broken.

give that man good enough head and i'm absolutely sure he could be talked into reading some -clutches pearls- marxist literature

#starfield #sam coe #cora coe #meta #lillian hart negative #jacob coe negative #fuck hart and fuck jacob they're both cops without empathy and they can get fucking bent thanks for coming to my ted talk

[wastehound-voof]

What is your most successful shitpost?

This is the first one that blew up, but if you count the soup lady post then it’s the soup lady post.

[sunburnacoustic]

Muse - Absolution (2003)

After years of waiting, loaded with trials and experimentation, apocalypse finally has a soundtrack. No, it’s not the angsty, heady crooning of yet another musician in love, it’s not the introspective Beatle having seen the Truth, it is not Johnny Rotten tearing down the Establishment (again), and it isn’t the self-destruction a James Hetfield would growl about.

Apocalypse as a genre has been claimed and made a natural home in, and by a seemingly unassuming young band hailing from the idyllic seaside Middle Of Nowhere, Teignmouth, Devonshire in England: alt-prog rockers Muse.

Muse’s 3rd studio album Absolution (released in 2003) picks up on the big sounds and potential the band had been showing throughout their second album and takes it twenty notches higher. The instrumentation is solid, the rhythms are tight, the guitars loud, the sound, bombastic in moments and delicate, vulnerable and beautiful in the next, the lyrical themes are exploratory, and the band themselves seem to find their feet and lay down the foundations of what even today makes up their signature ‘Musey’ sound.

Yet that little summary couldn’t begin to do justice to the grandiose and power this album packs. At it’s finest, Muse take you on a fifty-two minute trip out of the world (quite literally, as the titular track ‘Sing For Absolution’s music video features the band jetting off into outer space to escape the planet only to have their spaceship crash down into a burning, post-apocalyptical London), charming and haunting you with dark, sustained Rachmaninoff-esque piano breakdowns and blowing you away with larger-than-life drums, distorted guitar and bass working in perfect synch to build up a rising tide-wall of sound that may make it hard at times to remember that there are but three musicians in the recording rooms shaking up your world, as singer Matt Bellamy wails, sings and warbles on about facing death (‘Thoughts of a Dying Atheist’), running out of time (‘Time Is Running Out’), meeting up with the Devil himself (‘The Small Print’), and changing the world (‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’), amongst other things, with each song bearing as Muse-like a name as there comes.

And Matt Bellamy, contrasting this album with their previous efforts, said in an interview that Absolution “is more about us being personable, about us being normal people at home”. 

Well, normal Matt Bellamy at home, that is.

The album is introduced with a stomping, twenty second intro, the sound of boots getting closer and heavier, culminating in a single phrase: “Siege heil… marsche!” Twenty seconds in, the apocalyptical themes have already begun kicking in.

But before you have the time to breathe, the first song of the album, ‘Apocalypse Please’ begins, coming right at you with all of Bellamy’s pensiveness and despair, heavy ‘apocalyptical’ piano chords and drums crashing down on you as Matt declares that Earth needs a miracle and that “this is the end of the world”, layering the chorus as multiple Bellamy’s seal humanity’s fate.

The song’s mid/low tempo (around 80bpm) and loud vocals—almost cries of despair, really—and the closing bars with amplified, sustained single bass notes under forceful piano run-up chords, work quite well in conjuring up quite the image the band is looking to build and set the scene for the rest of the album to come.

Following this is one of the singles off the album, ‘Time Is Running Out’, starting with a low, almost choking yet flowing bassline with Bellamy almost breathing out lines like ‘I think I’m drowning/Asphyxiated/I want to break this spell that you created’, a song that starts out soft, restrained, then building up to the chorus as a tormented Bellamy tries to break free and realises that their time is running out, again employing the signature Muse technique of layering multiple guitars and vocals to build up a wall of sound, amplifying Matt’s thoughts, as does its twin later on the album, ‘Hysteria’.

On the titular track, ‘Sing for Absolution’, Bellamy seems to find a Muse of his own, turning inwards to a much more relaxed tempo. The band makes effective use of bassist Chris Wolstenholme’s staccato bass, offset and complemented by the almost dreamlike delayed, echoing guitars and pianos, to cook up an image of a lonely, reflective singer up alone in a room on the top floor of a house, sitting in the faint blue gleam of starlight, gazing out the window into space, thinking about his own life (‘Tiptoe to your room/A starlight in the gloom/I only dream of you/And you never knew’).

On ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, Matthew Bellamy takes the tried and tested ‘captor-and-captive-fall-in-love’ narrative, a darling of writers and musicians everywhere, and breathes new life into it by adding a new dimension of emotions to it, playing on the presumed captor-narrator’s guilt, confusion and sense of hopelessness (‘And she’ll scream and she’ll shout, and she’ll pray/And she had a name’; ‘We’ll love and we’ll hate and we’ll die/All to no avail…’; ‘This is the last time I’ll forget you… I wish I could’)

Muse use drummer Dominic Howard’s drums; pounding, loud and noticeable as a heartbeat in a quiet room; and Bellamy’s trembling vibratos to effectively paint the brutality and vulnerability; indeed, in the last chorus, behind the brute forces crashing on the guitars, bass and drums, one can hear the almost fragile, delicate piano arpeggios in the background, swallowed up by the guitars, almost hidden, protected, in a story that extends beyond the words.

Muse’s ability to switch from a light-hearted, fast-paced tone to a brooding, dark, haunting wail with effortless ease and grace stands out throughout the album and particularly on the sixth track on the album, ‘Falling Away With You’. The song, almost a hidden gem tucked away snugly in the middle of the album, is one of the few times the man who would go on to sing about conspiracy theories, the second law of thermodynamics and uprisings, turns inward and reflects on the people in his life and his relationships with them.

The song’s opening is slightly similar to Blackbird by the Beatles, with a quiet, reverberating guitar over a near-silent backdrop as Bellamy sings about his fears of forgetting a loved one and how relationships change, slowly building up and letting his bandmates catch up in a sort of relay-race, to a chorus that bursts to life with a screaming Matt falsetto-ing to a climax as the band fades to make space for Bellamy to calm down again, and the cycle continues.

It would be fair to say that the bass line drives the next track off the album, ‘Hysteria’. The song opens with a booming bass riff and all the straight faced extravagance that is both the band’s signature and legacy. A three-way harmonic melody solo rages on in the upper octaves that run in the background of the last chorus as a tormented Matthew tries to break free of his inner demons and Muse bring the song to a close in a manner worthy of a stadium closure.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Muse album without experimentation, and while Muse aren’t recording in zero gravity (for now), the band takes to string arrangements in search of new sounds and avenues on ‘Blackout’, dishing up a slow lament, complemented by fuzzy single note tremolos, and it only gets better on the next track, ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’, as Bellamy sounds off a call to arms to get up and change the world, and “use this chance to be heard”. The strings create a dystopian air, with a terse, fuzzy bass running underground and Wolstenholme’s backing vocals playing in the open skies as Bellamy commands his summoned army to action. His emotions seem to spill out of his fingers onto the piano in sudden gushes in a beautiful, flying, sustained solo that stands even today as a testament to Bellamy’s superior skills on the keys.

Absolution marks a sonic departure from Origin of Symmetry (2001) in that the production seems a lot more refined and cleaner. The band favours richer, fuller sounds: more gain-heavy guitars and bigger drums that would feel home in arena, as opposed to the “dirtier”, more grungey, piercing sounds used on their previous endeavours.

 However, there is tons for fans of the band to savour (in addition to a very musically accomplished record) on the track ‘The Small Print’. Bellamy returns to one of his pet themes as he takes on the role of the apathetic Devil (‘I’m a priest God never paid’), watching the world and its happenings with an omniscient eye (‘I hope you’ve seen the light/because no one really cares/They’re just pretending’), a nod back to Origin-era songs like ‘Hyper Music’. The band’s commendable execution, both with the lyrics as well as the rough, almost lo-fi edge in the production on this piece make it astonishingly powerful for a song with a niche theme and a simple guitar riff repeating over shifting root bass notes.

There really is never an uneventful moment on the fifty-two minute, thirteen-second record. The band throw familiarity to the winds on their next track, ‘Endlessly’, a song both very predictably Muse-like, yet something quite unlike anything the band had done before. Trading in the guitar for dampened, “muddy” synths, Muse give you the feeling of sitting underwater, drowned in the waterfalls of sound. Synth chords fall silently around you and ripple under the layers of arpeggiated synths that build up the wall of—excuse the pun—endless sound and lock you into Bellamy’s greyness as he promises a loved one the he’ll do anything for them but won’t leave them– until finally deciding that that moment never comes and calming down to a finish, internal turmoil now at rest.

Bellamy, mind wandering like a child, turns to more existential ideas soon after on ‘Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist’, a fast-paced, energetic and curiously happy-sounding piece, musically, for a song that is about an atheist at the end of their life, knowing that what lies ahead of them is nothingness (‘It scares the hell out of me/And the end is all I can see’) and seems to create an ironic contrast between the energy of the song and the narrator’s nervousness that works to the band’s credit.

Muse continue to shock and awe, haunt and bewitch you right up to the very last song on the album, ‘Ruled By Secrecy’. Lyrically perhaps the most quotidian song on the album, this track deals with the pressures in life and realising that you’ll never be on top. Lyrically and musically, it’s one of the darkest pieces in the band’s repertoire, beginning with low, quiet pianos. A ghostly, whispering Matt, sings with sustain and echo, recreating an almost surprisingly gothic, medieval church-like sound reminiscent of the Middle Ages, bringing to mind fear, uncertainty and mistrust (‘they’ll hide everywhere/no one knows who’s in control’), gathering force and building up to the signature piano crashing chord work that defines this album throughout. 

The song, and consequently the album, ends with a final touch to the cymbals, a subtle finish to an album with so much grandiose, its power and assertion leaving the listener reeling and the band flying high on yet another tasteful record successfully polished off.

Watch out Martians, Muse are coming.

------------------------------

A review for Absolution I wrote back in first year in 2018. Happy 20 years of Absolution! I'm happy to note that this time around, with the reissue, Fury will not be left off the album anymore, and my review will (happily) be out of date come November.

#god I wish I was still into writing longform reviews. I don't think anyone reads that kind of stuff anymore. #This was for a 1500 word final essay for a writing elective I took in first year; the only kind of place it would still be tolerated lol. #Muse band #Muse #Musers #Muse Absolution #20 years of Absolution! #2003 #rock music #music criticism #music journalism #matt bellamy #chris wolstenholme #dom howard #alt rock #space rock #long post #long read #just block that tag for this blog if it doesn't work for you #writing

[santmat]

This Invisible Spiritual Path We Follow - Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast

"The Father's kingdom is already spread out over the earth, and people do not see it." (Gospel of Thomas) This saying is a lament really, about souls in a condition of spiritual poverty unable to recognize the spiritual reality already here and available. This is the Invisible Spiritual Path We Follow, having a spiritual practice, a form of meditation that pertains to seeing the Unseen Realms with another kind of sight. The heavenly regions are not visible to those limited only to the outer material world of the five senses. In order to have mystic-vision, we're going to need another kind of Eye to be able to gaze into those subtle realms beyond. "The Lord will make the pupil of your eye his home, and your eye will expand to contain the entire universe." (Sant Namdev)  "The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." (Meister Eckhart, Rhineland Mystic) The third eye is the gateway which leads to realms above the purely physical world. It is situated behind and between the two eyes.

It is the birthright and evolutionary destiny of each and every soul to participate in the subtle divine worlds within, to become a child of both the outer creation, the cosmos, the universe we see all around us, AND to be a traveler of inner space, the kingdom of the heavens -- the Divine Ocean of Love -- accessed within through a very special kind of meditation of inner seeing and inner hearing. The Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi once wrote in his Bezels of Wisdom: "The Supreme Being brought the Cosmos into being as constituting an Unseen Realm AND a Sensory Realm, so that we might perceive the Inner through our Unseen [facilities] and the Outer through our sensory aspect." We are, in other words, meant to be children of both worlds.

"This new life of the Spirit begins from the day of Initiation into the Mysteries of the Spirit... The life of the spirit begins not with the theoretical exposition of the spiritual science but by a practical demonstration on the spiritual plane of the spirit-current made manifest. Here the invisible and inaudible life-stream is made both visible and audible to the Spirit within, converting the atheist into a theist in the true sense of the term. It is imparting the life-impulse and making It throb in every pore of the body. This coming back of the soul to the realization of her true nature and rising into Universal or Cosmic awareness beyond the walls of finitude is the true resurrection or coming to a new birth and a new life. To die in the body while living, is to live in the Spirit." (The Celestial Music, An Introduction to Kirpal Singh, by L. Gurney Parrott)

That last sentence, "To die in the body while living, is to live in the Spirit" is referring to the meditation practice that is followed by those initiated into Inner Light and Sound Meditation on this Path of the Masters.

"We should sit very lovingly in our meditation. We should focus at the Eye Center and do our Simran -- repeat the Simran in the mind. When we do this, the impurity of the mind, which has been cast on the mind by us for eons, for so many millions of lives... that gets washed off." (Baba Ram Singh)

This Invisible Spiritual Path We Follow  - Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast @ YouTube:

https://youtu.be/CqvLouGR0-Q

This Invisible Spiritual Path We Follow - Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcast - Listen and/or Direct MP3 Download @:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/spiritualawakeningradio/This_Invisible_Spiritual_Path_We_Follow.mp3

@ the Podcast Website With Buttons That Go To All the Popular Podcast APPS - Wherever You Follow Podcasts:

https://SpiritualAwakeningRadio.libsyn.com/this-invisible-spiritual-path-we-follow

@ Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-invisible-spiritual-path-we-follow/id1477577384?i=1000635010587

@ Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1s2yrQnGEI0gCTwls6YjOr

@ Audible:

https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Awakening-Radio/dp/B08K561DZJ

@ Google Podcasts: 

https://podcasts.google.com/search/spiritual%20awakening%20radio

& @ Wherever You Subscribe and Follow Podcasts - At Your Favorite Podcast APP Just Do a Search for "Spiritual Awakening Radio" -  (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, Audible, PodBean, Podcast APP, Overcast, Jio Saavan, iHeart Radio, Podcast Addict, CastBox, etc...):

https://linktr.ee/SpiritualAwakeningRadio

In Divine Love (Bhakti), Light, and Sound, At the Feet of the Masters, Radhasoami,

James Bean

Spiritual Awakening Radio Podcasts

Sant Mat Satsang Podcasts

Sant Mat Radhasoami

A Satsang Without Walls

https://www.SpiritualAwakeningRadio.com

#spiritual path #podcast #satsang #spirituality #meditation #mystics #mysticism #christian mysticism #gospel of thomas #nag hammadi library #spiritual awakening #spiritual awakening radio #initiation #path of the masters #sant mat #radhasoami #sant mat satsang podcasts #go within

[spurgie-cousin]

I was watching Jill R's latest YouTube video and she included this post by (apparently) Kaylee and I have been sent to outer SPACE

"We don't normally listen to country music" yes, the famously un-Christian country music, only listened to by raging atheists and pagans

#anyone from the Bible belt of America would do a spit take off they read this lmao #SHE'S TALKING ABOUT A KENNY ROGERS SONG BTW #not even the stupid Blonde Girl In A Truck and Jean Cutoffs kinda shit KENNY FUCKING ROGERS #I'm just. it's just so funny...... #fundie youtube #jill rodrigues #Kaylee hill

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Tessentee Road]

* * * *

"In their graceless state the godless are supposed to be allergic to places of terror and emptiness. Foxholes, Ground Zero, outer space—all locations, I’ve been told, where you won’t find atheists. “Clay is fashioned into vessels,” reads the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching (written 2,500 years after Noah’s flood carved out the Grand Canyon), “but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.”

[From one of my all-time favorite essays, "Just Like Heaven" by Paul Ford] 

#Tessentee Road #Just Like Heaven #Paul Ford #quotes #essays #words and writing

[anueutsuhos-touhou-profiles]

Sakuya Izayoi:

Sakuya Izayoi is the head maid of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, though she might as well be the only maid, considering the rest are dimwitted fairies. Despite living among youkai, she's completely human. She first appeared as the penultimate (5th) boss of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, but has since gone on to be a supporting protagonist for the series. She's been playable in a number of games, usually acting on the whims of her mistress.

She's a cold-hearted, stoic individual. She's prone to making cutting and murderous threats to those who cross her path. Though, she's not immune to huge goofs, such as opening up a window in outer space. She doesn't know what oxygen is. She's also nice enough to hang out with Reimu and Marisa on a semi-regular basis.

She's unquestionably loyal to her mistress, Remilia Scarlet, and would obey ALMOST any command given to her until the day she dies. The one exception: being converted to a vampire like her and becoming immortal. She's going to reach old age and that's final. She also might be a cannibal. Despite being human herself she is no less willing to partake in human meat with her mistress, especially since she's the one who goes out and... prepares it.

Also, she's one of the few explicitly atheist characters in the series. Reimu has been confused by this at times, constantly assuming she prays to some god only for Sakuya to correct her.

She's a walking reference to Dio Brando of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, mostly his appearance in Part 3. She primarily attacks by throwing an unlimited supply of knives at enemies, and has the ability to stop time using [THE WORLD]. Her spellcards contain a number of references to Jack the Ripper, which is a reference to how the serial killer became a zombie servant of Dio in Part 1.

#touhou #touhou project #sakuya izayoi #embodiment of scarlet devil

[harderrain-sweetersun]

Blog Post 1: On Space Traders

I am not sure that anything could have prepared me for the far too realistic world portrayed in Derrick Bell’s Space Traders. The film depicts a universe in which the United States is approached by an alien nation who promises to solve all the environmental and economic crises that the nation is facing at one cost—the entirety of the Black population. 

One phrase continuously rang through my mind as I watched this film—“America, even if you weren’t Black where you came from, you are here.” Throughout the film, multiple Black characters (Gleason Golightly, the religious leader, Gleason’s family) are shown to have conflicting viewpoints on the correct course of action to take. Regardless, all people seen as “Black” would end up being exiled to the alien nation. It did not matter that Gleason was a prominent member of the conservative cabinet. It did not matter that the Church he visited was filled with people who disagreed with his viewpoints and identity as a whole. To the alien nation, they were all Black. I find this to be an eerie reference to America itself. A country built on diversity—founded by immigrants—and yet we seem to have two races: White or Other. As a person of color who grew up in a White, conservative town, my ethnic origins did not matter beyond the color of my skin. It did not matter that my parents immigrated from different parts of India; that my mother, a practicing Catholic, went against cultural norms and married my atheistic Jainist father; that I was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up doing the same things as my white peers, oblivious to the difference in our skin color until those differences were thrown back at me. Nothing mattered beyond the fact that my skin was dark, and everyone else’s was light. Similarly, the idea of “Blackness” is flawed. As referenced by Gleason’s struggle to unite Black folk from different walks of life during the five day decision period, there is no one Black community to unite. Angela Davis referenced this in her Meaning of Freedom lectures, where she spoke about “the fiction of Black unity.” Davis referenced how anyone in power can be conscripted into positions of violence against others—regardless of what minority group the person in power is a part of, and thus, there is no point in pretending that all Black people will agree on any given issue based solely on the color of their skin. In addition, Space Traders brought up an interesting critique of the disparities between rich and poor minority groups. When debating the consequences of exiling the Black population into outer space, a delegate brought up that poor White Americans would not like being the “bottom of the totem pole.” I found this to be an extremely interesting, though brief, statement. Michelle Alexander, in her The New Jim Crow, brought up the idea of a racial bribe: extending special privileges to a small fraction of a minority group to further divide them. Conservative politicians did exactly that through appealing to poor White voters by virtue of their skin color—thus turning them against the population that they had the most in common with (poor Black voters). This comment by the delegate in Space Traders references this racial bribe in that without a Black population to demonize, conservative politicians would have no way of appealing to poor white voters and convincing them to vote against their own best interests.

[eyes-of-the-fox]

I have a thought dump on the afterlife.

The amount of varying things people experience when they are temporarily dead intrigue me. Many believers and atheists who have nonetheless been indoctrinated see some version of Heaven and/or Hell, maybe Purgatory or another realm. Some atheists have been recorded as screaming in terror as they supposedly went to hell as they died, at least according to their overly religious families, but if they grew up in a religious home, some seed of doubt my addle the mind. Or perhaps they do. Or maybe people don't stay dead and they spend some time in one location or another before moving on. Some people see what they believe to be their past life or their future life, some claim to see a space between lives where people come and go, some see the well of souls, some see their own gods, some the cycle of nature, some wander around as ghosts and see people they knew, either living or dead, sometimes both, and some see nothing at all while many just don't remember. Science thinks it may be our brain trying to reckon with dying, trying to come up with an explanation, a scenario, based on information it already has, but they of course are not 100% certain. My mother claimed she was in the Outer Darkness, but still heard from God, she and my father both were/are devote doomsayer, end of days, conservative types. She became very hateful after that and was not herself. My father remembers nothing from all the times he was temporarily gone. Sometimes he mentions he would like to come back as this or that, but paraphrases it with only if reincarnation exists but he doesn't believe in it. Curiously my mother accused me of remembering things from another life. We won't talk about that. Her story changed depending on the people she talked to. Idk what to think.

Is it merely the brain, or could they in some twisted way we don't understand all bear some kind of truth? I know what I believe ultimately, but the details are hazy, and as a living being I can hardly be certain of anything. I just don't know.

Anyway, I get where the tales of demons who temporarily take over people's bodies before their final death come from, they exist in the Orient and Native tribes and I think in some Slavic cultures, probably elsewhere. That part makes some sense. The reason, not so much, but the depictions make sense.

#death #afterlife #I'm rambling this is something that has been on my mind for awhile and thought dumping helps me sort

[warlordfelwinter]

what's this about Asmodeus being a giant space snake?

Oh boy have you ever activated my special interest.

So, as much as I've given myself an honorary degree in Baatezu Studies, I absolutely won't pretend to be an expert on what WotC is doing or what they prefer to be canon because I imagine with something so big as D&D with as many writers and iterations it has, there have to have been numerous retcons and concurrent canons and etc etc. But I really love Big Snake Asmodeus and I don't think it conflicts with anything else just because of how he is. Which is all preface for the upcoming rant about My Favoritest Boy. I apologize in advance.

On the forgotten realms wiki page, at least, Asmodeus has three origin stories. Generally speaking, I believe his "true" origin is kept purposefully obscured and WotC might just keep coming up with new ones to further confuse it (I would, if I was them) because it adds to the vibe, or they just keep changing their mind about what sounds the most cool. Understandable, though I don't know what's cooler than Giant Snake. There's a 2nd edition book I got recently called Faces of Evil: The Fiends where Asmodeus isn't even known to the planewalkers writing the book. Could be that wotc hadn't decided on him yet, or that they had but in fiction Asmodeus was keeping himself secret (I prefer the latter).

I'm not going to address the origin story where he deposes some god that was introduced in 4th edition, it interests me the least and I've more or less dismissed it.

The most popular origin story (in fiction) is The Pact Primeval, which is the one where Asmodeus is an angel/celestial who is So Good at killing demons and he slowly descends into evil, but he's also So Good at law that the gods can't find fault with him because he keeps out arguing them. Eventually he gets tossed into Baator and becomes the Lord of the Ninth along with his contemporaries. However, this is also stated to be the origin story devils pass around the most and is implied to be a fabrication or myth. Source for this puts it at 3.5 edition.

Going back to 2nd edition, in a book called Guide to Hell, the big snake is addressed. In this origin story the universe started as a chaotic soup and out of it rose twin serpents, one winged one not, named Jazirian and Ahriman. They bit each others tails and went in a circle, forming the outer planes and bringing some order to the chaos, but they then disagreed about which plane should be in the center. Jazirian wanted the Lawful Good plane of Celestia and Ahriman wanted the Lawful Evil plane of Baator to be in the center. They fought and eventually Jazirian tore herself away and escaped. Ahriman, not having wings, fell into Baator and either fell through all the layers until Nessus, or shattered it into nine layers as he fell (which I prefer, more dramatic) (or eight layers, if Stygia isn't an original layer). Regardless, he landed in Nessus and smashed out a massive chasm now called Serpent's Coil that he lays at the bottom of, bleeding and injured. Weakened as they both were, neither snake could stop the other gods from springing up and taking over.

From Ahriman's blood soaking into the rocks, the first baatezu popped up and quickly took over Baator (possibly chasing out its native inhabitants with brooms). Eventually, Ahriman made himself some avatars in the guise of a humanoid, renamed himself Asmodeus, and took over as king of the hells. Basically almost no one is allowed in Nessus and anyone who sees/speaks of his true form is dead within 24 hours.

Since he is a giant snake deity older than the gods and older than belief, his power doesn't wax and wane depending on faith. He actually prefers non-belief (in anyone, he needs atheist souls to heal himself). He also cannot distribute warlock powers. His inability to do that implies he's a lesser deity (or less), which he uses as a smokescreen and continues to let the gods believe he is simply an archdevil that has ascended a couple times and not a greater deity (or more), which he is identified as in Descent Into Avernus, I think (I don't believe 5e or anything recent has added any new origins into the mix).

Asmodeus' ultimate plan is to heal his wounds and regain his strength and bust out and destroy literally everything and revert it back to Chaos Soup so he can remake it in his image. Jazirian hasn't bothered him because she hopes there is enough law in him to stop him doing this (girl, there isn't). She, meanwhile, is also pretending to be a regular deity of couatls.

I like Giant Space Snake for any number of reasons: the eldritch horror element of big unknowable thing older than time, the fact that it makes basically everything he does into a lie which is fitting for the lord of lies, the fact that his avatars are always covered because they reflect his wounds from the fall and he's always in excrutiating amounts of pain, the idea that he's a god trying to cultivate non-belief because consuming the souls of true atheists is what heals his wounds, just... snake......

It also really doesn't contradict any of the others. The Pact Primeval seems obviously to be a story concocted by Asmodeus to make himself appear as a martyr. The He Who Was backstory I didn't address is also fine because he could have taken up any number of roles. He's a liar, a pretender, it's What He's Best At. So why shouldn't he be a fallen celestial or an exarch overthrowing a god and taking its place? And underneath it all, in the deepest pits of Nessus where no one can look, there is a colossal serpent biding his time and perfectly assured in the destruction of everything around him.

It's just great.

#replies #patrickdiomedes #if you can't tell. i love giant snake asmodeus #it brings me great joy #like #broke: fallen angel #woke/bespoke: BIG SNAKE #pact primeval is very funny don't get me wrong he's like Lawyer Man #but it's even funnier to me as a story he made up #dnd #baatezu posts #personal

[sleepymarmot]

David Cronenberg on Crimes of the Future and why he sees body horror as “the body beautiful” — Q with Tom Power, 2022

[6:46] I was interested in performance art and particularly body art, body artists, and even in the early 2000s, or when I wrote it in the late 1990s, there were those — there were performance artists who used their bodies as their paintbrush, or their palette, or their models, their clay. And I thought, “Okay, that’s incredible dedication.” Because a lot of the things that they were doing — surgeries and whatever — were irreversible, so you were really committing yourself, and your most essential self. And for me, the body is the essential fact of the human condition. I mean, I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in an afterlife, I think when we die we disappear, our bodies are what we are. And I think the more that you can accept that, perhaps the more fully you will understand life itself, you know. That’s my feeling. And so that was really the impetus for making these characters body artists, really, as opposed to scientists and doctors. Which, of course, I’ve had many characters in my movies that are scientists and doctors, and, in fact, in this movie Léa Seydoux plays a woman who was a trauma surgeon. So yes, we still represent that subculture. But only in retrospect am I thinking: okay, well, this is basically presenting the model, the archetype of the artist as giving everything to their art. In this movie Viggo literally, his character is giving the insides of his body to his audience as a representation of his creativity, a physical embodiment of it. And I’m thinking: yeah, well, I sort of feel like that myself. I mean, you are opening yourself up — perhaps not surgically — but you’re opening yourself up, you’re presenting your most sensitive organs to the to the world. [Interviewer: You’re risking yourself.] And you’re risking everything that you are when you do that. [Interviewer: Every time.] Every time, and every time it’s as though you never did it before. 

[23:00] The body, for me, is the essence of human existence. It is what we are. And everything comes from that, including technology. Which, in the 1950s, technology was inhuman stuff from outer space that threatened us, you know, with strange weapons and stuff like that. But for me, technology has always been ultra-human and a complete extension of what we are: our fist becomes, you know, missiles, we throw a rock, we see, we hear, the phone, all of that is… [Interviewer: If we use artificial intelligence that’s the brain.] Yeah, so technology also becomes what we are, for the good and the bad, and you see it with every new technology. You see the internet, you see social media, it’s great, it's wonderful, and it’s horrible and horrifying at the same time. Brings out the worst in us, and also the best. So to me it’s just natural to go there, I’m diving into the essence, I want the essence of what we are and the essence of the human condition, and it takes me there.

[31:59] The one expression that has seemed to take hold, though, is “body horror”, and they say I'm the, you know, the inventor of the body horror genre or whatever. I’ve never called it that, and I think I wouldn’t have called it that, because to me it’s not horrific, you know, it’s the body beautiful or something, not body horror, but it sticks and okay so…

[34:04] [Interviewer: I want to go back to Crimes of the Future, which features the line “Body is reality”. How does that relate to you as you as you’re getting older?] It relates to me very directly because, for example, just before I went to Cannes, not long before, I had cataract surgery on my eyes, and that has altered color, sharpness, detail — it really is a new world, you know, for me. I actually joked with my director of photography that we would have to redo the color timing of Crimes of the Future because it was all going to look different to me, and in fact it has, it does. [Interviewer: That sounds a bit terrifying for a filmmaker, to be honest.] Actually it’s great, yeah yeah, no, it’s great, it’s great. As you notice, I’m not wearing glasses now; I would have been wearing glasses two months ago. Also I have hearing aids. So I am bionically enhanced already, and that has a sort of a combination of technology on my body, and it produces literally a different reality, no fooling, for real. And that just confirms my anticipation of what it would be like to change yourself in terms of, you know, body morphism, transmorphism and so on. So even though I have not done body art, performance art myself, I am a piece of body art anyway, just as a matter of course, and anybody who’s had surgery and had things removed — had a hernia operation, had their gallbladder removed — they’re changing their body and they’re changing their reality. (…) It’s very simple. So you’re sitting there, and next to you is your dog, and you’re in a room and you’re watching TV with your dog sitting on the couch beside you. And you occupy different realities in that one room, because what your dog sees and smells and hears and senses and communicates is totally different from you. If you became that dog, you would not know where you were, what universe, what planet you had come from. And yet you’re both physically there, and it’s because your bodies are different, they’ve evolved differently and they do different things. Or a spider, you know, eight eyes, I mean, it’s… A spider, though, has a body and lives in a reality. And I really feel that I’ve always had great empathy for animals, and part of it, I think, was that. That it’s like “What is reality for this creature, for a praying mantis, for something that can fly?” [Interviewer: Isn’t it a shared consciousness?] That’s very contentious, you know, because consciousness suggests an awareness of self. And you can tell from children that at a certain point they do not have an awareness of self. They don’t become shy because they don’t know they exist, and then at a certain point children suddenly start to become shy. [Interviewer: “I” starts to exist.] Yes, because there’s an “I” that exists, and is being observed, and it makes you shy. So that’s another thing, I mean, having children is the best education into what a human being is. It’s really hard to understand that unless you’ve lived with and raised children.

#david cronenberg #crimes of the future #body image #atheism vs religion #quotes #the transcript is the auto generated subtitles cleaned a bit by me #let me know if there's something both google and i misheard

[lecruzclub]

[chaitanyavijnanam]

శ్రీమద్భగవద్గీత - 450: 11వ అధ్., శ్లో 36 / Bhagavad-Gita - 450: Chap. 11, Ver. 36

🌹. శ్రీమద్భగవద్గీత - 450 / Bhagavad-Gita - 450 🌹 ✍️. శ్రీ ప్రభుపాద , 📚. ప్రసాద్ భరద్వాజ 🌴. 11వ అధ్యాయము - విశ్వరూప సందర్శన యోగం - 36 🌴

36. అర్జన ఉవాచ స్థానే హృషీకేశ తవ ప్రకీర్త్యా ��గత్ప్రహష్యత్యనురజ్యతే చ | రక్షాంసి భీతాని దిశో ద్రవన్తి సర్వే సమస్యన్తి చ సిద్ధసఙ్ఘా: ||

🌷. తాత్పర్యం : అర్జునుడు పలికెను : ఓ హృశీకేశా! నీ నామమును వినినంతనే లోకమంతయు సంతోషించి, ప్రతియొక్కరు నీ యెడ అనురక్తులగుచున్నారు. సిద్ధసమూహములు నీకు గౌరవపుర్వకముగా అంజలి ఘటించుచున్నను రాక్షసులు భీతిచెందినవారై పలుదిక్కుల పలాయనమగుచున్నారు. ఇది యంతయు యుక్తముగనే ఉన్నది.

🌷. భాష్యము : కురుక్షేత్ర సంగ్రామ ఫలితమును కృష్ణుని ద్వారా వినినంతనే అర్జునుడు ఉత్తేజితుడయ్యెను. కనుకనే పరమభక్తునిగా మరియు స్నేహితునిగా అతడు శ్రీకృష్ణుడు చేసినది సర్వము యుక్తముగా నున్నదని పలుకుచున్నాడు. శ్రీకృష్ణుడే భక్తులకు పోషకుడు మరియు పూజా ధ్యేయమనియు, అతడే సర్వానర్థములను నశింపజేయువాడనియు అర్జునుడు నిర్ధారించుచున్నాడు. ఆ భగవానుని కార్యములు సర్వులకు సమానముగా హితమునే గూర్చును. కురుక్షేత్రరణము జరుగు సమయమున అచ్చట శ్రీకృష్ణుడు నిలిచియున్న కారణముగా అంతరిక్షము నుండి దేవతలు, సిద్ధులు, ఊర్థ్వలోకవాసులు దానిని వీక్షించుచున్నారని అర్జునుడు ఎరుగగలిగెను.

అర్జునుడు శ్రీకృష్ణభగవానుని విశ్వరూపమును దర్శించినపుడు దేవతలు ఆ రూపమును గాంచి ముదము నొందగా, దానవులు మరియు నాస్తికులైనవారు ఆ భగవానుని కీర్తనము సహింపలేకపోయిరి. భగవానుని వినాశకర రూపము యెడల గల తమ సహజభీతితో వారు అచ్చట నుండి పలాయనమైరి. తన భక్తుల యెడ మరియు నాస్తికుల యెడ శ్రీకృష్ణభగవానుడు వ్యవహరించు విధానమును అర్జునుడు కీర్తించుచున్నాడు. శ్రీకృష్ణడేది చేసినను అది సర్వులకు హితముగనే గూర్చునని యెరిగియున్నందున భక్తుడైనవాడు అన్నివేళలా ఆ భగవానుని కీర్తించును.

🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹

🌹 Bhagavad-Gita as It is - 450 🌹 ✍️ Sri Prabhupada, 📚 Prasad Bharadwaj 🌴 Chapter 11 - Viswaroopa Sandarsana Yoga - 36 🌴 36. arjuna uvāca sthāne hṛṣīkeśa tava prakīrtyā jagat prahṛṣyaty anurajyate ca rakṣāṁsi bhītāni diśo dravanti sarve namasyanti ca siddha-saṅghāḥ

🌷 Translation : Arjuna said: O master of the senses, the world becomes joyful upon hearing Your name, and thus everyone becomes attached to You. Although the perfected beings offer You their respectful homage, the demons are afraid, and they flee here and there. All this is rightly done.

🌹 Purport : Arjuna, after hearing from Kṛṣṇa about the outcome of the Battle of Kurukṣetra, became enlightened, and as a great devotee and friend of the Supreme Personality of Godhead he said that everything done by Kṛṣṇa is quite fit. Arjuna confirmed that Kṛṣṇa is the maintainer and the object of worship for the devotees and the destroyer of the undesirables. His actions are equally good for all.

Arjuna understood herein that when the Battle of Kurukṣetra was being concluded, in outer space there were present many demigods, siddhas, and the intelligentsia of the higher planets, and they were observing the fight because Kṛṣṇa was present there. When Arjuna saw the universal form of the Lord, the demigods took pleasure in it, but others, who were demons and atheists, could not stand it when the Lord was praised. Out of their natural fear of the devastating form of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, they fled. Kṛṣṇa’s treatment of the devotees and the atheists is praised by Arjuna. In all cases a devotee glorifies the Lord because he knows that whatever He does is good for all.

🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹

#prasad bharadwaj #శ్రీమద్భగవద్గీత #bhagavadgita #bhagavadgeeta #bhagavatam #bhagavad gita

[real-shul-stories]

Gary and the Name of God

This one's pretty long so I'm putting it under a readmore. This guy called several times when I first started working here but I haven't heard from him since.

A man I'll call Gary called to ask if I knew the Hebrew alphabet. He asked me if the Hebrew spelling of Elohim could be pronounced “aylohem” and I (talking out of my ass) was like, well, considering the way Hebrew is structured and how vowel marks weren’t added until the Masoretes, it’s entirely possible. He asked me if Elohim was God’s name, and I explained that no, yud-heh-vav-heh was, except nobody knows how to pronounce it. I spelled “tetragrammaton” for him.

Next he asked me about clarifying which God you’re referring to. He told me “I always say, I love the God of Abraham and Isaac, because if I just say ‘I love God,’ it’s not clear which God I’m talking about. It could be any god. The Greeks had thousands of gods. But when I told a lady at church this she got mad at me.” He also used Jesus’ Hebrew name several times. He told me that we’re all churches for god’s teaching; I told him “Well, they say the body is a temple…”

Next he asked me if I was Jewish (“You’ve reached a synagogue,” I responded) and if Jews believed in Jesus. I told him that many Jews agree that a man named Jesus existed, but we don't believe he did what people say he did—he wasn’t the messiah, in other words. Gary asked what I thought of Jesus’ teachings, and we agreed that he sounded like a pretty nice guy. He told me that God promised punishment worse than Sodom and Gomorrah for people who didn’t follow Jesus. He told me that in Israel people were building a new temple, and he asked who Jews expected would appear at that temple if it wasn’t Jesus. I responded that we don’t know. We don’t know when our messiah is coming, only that he isn’t here yet. He could be here now, but nobody knows who he is, and he doesn’t know his mission.

He also asked me if Jews believed in spirits, and I said we have things like dybbuks (vengeful ghosts) and seraphim (high angels), but we don’t have the same hierarchy that Christians do. Gary told me he’d dared an atheist friend to invite Satan into his house; after which the atheist got spooked and became a Christian. Most interestingly, Gary told me that he’d been studying up on Islam to see why people think the way they do, and came upon legends of the djinn. He told me he was up late one night, and he read in a book that djinn are only visible to humans when they shapeshift into cats and dogs. As soon as he finished reading that sentence, there was a meow outside his window, and he opened the curtains to see a big grey cat watching him. A Muslim lady he met at the supermarket told him it must have been a djinn.

Gary concluded by telling me the story of Leonardo da Vinci’s gay love affair with the pope’s son; he painted so many beautiful portraits of this man that the pope declared that he would be the face of the messiah, which is why westerners now think Jesus is white. Gary also told me he has no friends since he changed his life so much, so it was nice talking to me.

---

On another day Gary called again, and tried to convince me the messiah might come from outer space. He also informed me about the chariot wheels found at the bottom of the red sea, which Snopes informed me was false.

He claimed to have once been the lead singer of a heavy metal band. “I could easily drive to a biker bar where there’s alcohol and drugs and pool tables and loud rock music, and make better friends than I ever would at that church.”

We spent an hour discussing various questions about the Abrahamic religions. Gary asked if we believe in a Holy Ghost, and I was like “I don’t know what that is, so probably not?” After he explained it, I said it reminded me of Shechinah, the dwelling or settling of the divine presence (oft associated with the female aspects of god). I told him, to say of someone “He has the Shechinah in him” would be to say he’s a wonderful, giving, enlightening person. Gary thought this was particularly beautiful.

Gary asked me if I’d been to the middle east, and I told him I’d been to Israel three times. He asked if it was different from here, and I said that you definitely get the sense, walking in Jerusalem, that there’s something special about the place.

Gary told me about a video he saw where Christians asked chasidim what they thought of Jesus, and the chasidim told them to get out of Israel, and became very angry and violent. He told me he was troubled by this, since the Abrahamic religions center around the golden rule. I told him that, as with any religion, there are those who take religion to such an extreme that they withdraw into themselves and turn “do unto others” as “do unto others, but only if they agree with me”. I told him that, like with extremist Christians and Muslims, extremist Jews shouldn’t be interpreted as representatives of our community as a whole. He seemed to agree.

Gary also mentioned Christian churches’ tendency to advertise how much good they’ve done. “We’ve donated x amount to charity” or “we’re going to Mexico to lead people to the lord”. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first, but Gary told me that he thought things like this were prideful. They’re bragging about the good they’ve done, as if they only did good deeds for the bragging rights. I had never thought about it like that before.

Gary mentioned that he lives about an hour from the city, and his church hasn’t been very friendly or welcoming. I told him that a big part of Judaism is the sense of community, and Gary told me that if his town had a synagogue, he and his wife would definitely start going.

[pennylance]

The Milky Way

The Universe:

    The universe is very diverse and can be very chaotic. It’s populated by countless planets, worlds, stars, moons and more, with a lot of empty space in between. The Milky Way Galaxy alone is 100,000 light years wide! Planets on the outer rim of the Galaxy tend to be more simple, boring, safe, and spaced further apart. As you get closer to the galactic center, things become more crowded, busy, chaotic and dangerous.

Celestopia:

    Named by Celeste, this dull, lonely dumpster planet on the farthest edge of the Galaxy serves as the home for Edmund and Celeste, who live alone on the planet along with a bunch of trash that falls through wormholes. When Walker finally shows up, he gives them reason to leave and explore the Galaxy further.

Earth: 

    Earth is very grounded and familiar to the audience. Being near the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, nothing too interesting or out of the ordinary happens here. Compared to many of the other worlds among the stars, Earth is quite mundane and boring. However, there is plenty of life, foliage, and is full of greens and blues.

Orange World:

    A planet sized Orange that orbits around a lone star halfway to the galactic center. This exciting planet is the source of all orange juice in the Galaxy. Everything including the ground, buildings, and people are made of oranges or orange based products.

Worm City:

    On a small moon orbiting a dead planet, resides Worm City: a civilization populated entirely by worms. It resembles modern day manhattan. Very strict society ruled by the top 1% of worms. They live nice and cozy in their damp dirt penthouses, while the vast majority of working class worms have to pound the pavement every day. The streets and sidewalks often get choked with fried lower class worm corpses so street cleaners have to go by and clean them up and spray the sidewalks with water constantly. Dead worms are decomposed at the Central park of the city where also everyone eats the soil so there’s a circle of life. They do not believe in heaven or hell or God, it is mandatory that everyone must be an atheist by law. They’re also a bunch of bullies!