#(i'm not having an existential crisis) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nikoisme · 9 months

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Going absolutely insane over the concept of name and identity in The Odyssey. The concept of recognition. Like, the reveal of one's identity is present in both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but specifically The Odyssey drives me into despair.

The Phaeacians don't recognize Odysseus. His family doesn't recognize Odysseus (except his dog!! all praise Argos). Odysseus doesn't recognize Ithaca. There's barely any recognition without revealing, and Odysseus takes a while to reveal himself. Chronologically speaking, his first disguise in The Odyssey is Nobody. And when he does reveal his true identity, it causes him and his crew pain and suffering. Maybe that instilled a fear of revealing his true identity. His name invoked the death of his men. And all his other identities (too tired to remember/look for all the names he's gone under), while realistic and authentic sounding, are non-existent. All those people he claimed he was are not real. They are nobody. If he is not Odysseus, he is nobody, and if he is not nobody, he is Odysseus. But Odysseus, his fucking name drives me insane. His name means to hate. Since his childhood that hatred was imprinted on him. Do you think it left an lasting impact?? Some sort of "expectation" that he had to meet?? A curse, a constant shadow following him everywhere he goes?? Something he inherited, that is tied to him even if it's not his?? Hate was tied to him directly through his name that his grandfather gave him. In The Iliad, everyone refers to him as "Son of Laertes (which is obviously the way they identified as back then)", "sacker of cities", "long-enduring" etc etc. But Odysseus refers to himself as "Father of Telemachus". Also this:

He swears by his son's name, by the name of someone, something that is his. Something that is not inherited, that isn't placed upon him. Something that he earned himself. Something that he loves, the opposite of the hate that is his name. It's a part of him, part of his identity. And if he is not the son of Telemachus, then he isn't Odysseus. He is nobody.

But in The Odyssey, he refers to himself as the sacker of cities. When he introduces himself to the Phaeacians, he says that he is the sacker of cities. His invention of the Trojan horse was the bane of Troy. And that trick is a part of him, his cunning and trickery. He destroyed the home of hundreds, thousands of people. And do you think, that after every hardship he faced on his journey back home, he lost his sense of self?? In the war, he had the hope of going back home. He had the hope that he would see his wife and son again. As long as the other kings and soldiers are there, also longing to go back home, then his hope is real. He is real. But after all of his men died, he was alone. No one to share his longing, to share his hope. No one is there to remind him that he is real. So he only has his newer memories, new things that are tied to him. Sacker of cities. Long enduring. Doesn't sound all that happy. It almost sounds like hate. Without the hope of seeing everything that is his because he earned/worked for it himself, he goes back to his name. It might be the only thing grounding him, reminding him that he is real. And when he hears the bard sing of the fall of Troy, the man absolutely weeps. Because he sings about him. He sings about the fall of Troy, and it fell because of him. It fell because he is the sacker of cities. He is the sacker of cities because he is Odysseus. Because he doesn't know who he is. And even Penelope when she listens to the bard wants him to sing about something else. Someone else. Because that is not her Odysseus, her husband, her son's father. It hurts her to think that even though he might be alive, her Odysseus is gone. He is dead either way. And even his son when he sees him first thinks he is a god. That he is not human, that he is not a man. Because gods are immortal, ever lasting. And mortals have only a lifetime to make it worth it, to attach something to themselves and their names. And Telemachus thinks that his father is a god, that his father has no name and no identity of his own.

And when his loved ones recognize him, it's by the things he attached himself to during the war. The things that are a part of his real identity, of his identity. Odysseus tells his son that he is his father. Argos recognizes him as his master. Eurycleia recognizes his scar that he earned when he went hunting. He tells his father about the trees in the orchard. And Penelope finally believes it's him because of the olive tree bed story. The bed that he built himself. That he built his home around. And Penelope doesn't believe it's truly Odysseus, because he is not the man that left Ithaca twenty years ago. But when Odysseus is able to tell her about the bed, she can believe it's Odysseus. Or atleast a part of him is there. It's Odysseus Odysseus, the name and identity that he built. And not Odysseus, the name that simply means hate.

#the odyssey #the iliad #odysseus #greek mythology #tagamemnon #shaking my fist #do you get what i'm saying??#i might have went slightly off rails and went into some sort of fanon #but this has been chewing at my brain like a lil worm for a while #might have gone into and existential and identity crisis myself writing this #and the crisises might have prompted me to write this #but it's fiiiine #i'm tired so if you see any mistakes or if it sounds confusing #and slightly all over the place #that's why lol #but you get my point

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kindasleepycryptid · 27 days

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I finished SOMA the other day and I can't stop thinking about how its existentialism applies to cyberpunk. And also how its just... barely mentioned.

Is an engram really you? Yes, it might be a perfect copy of you, but your original consciousness will stop living. Johnny isnt Johnny, he's a (probably imperfect) copy of him.

Likewise, an engram of V isnt really V, its just... a digital copy of V.

And, apart from a few lines, no one bats an eye. No matter what happens, V dies. Theres no way around it. And I wish it had been explored more.

#dont mind my 4am ranting I'm just having an existential crisis rn #cyberpunk 2077 #soma game #johnny silverhand

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sciderman · 5 months

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How do you feel about the increase in really weird NSFW ads on here (advertising panels that look like sexual encounters, and AI art apps that pride themselves on porn) but will take down NSFW posts from their users, even if it isn't technically sexual.

i hate all social media and it's consistent prioritising the advertisers over the users and the internet simply was a better place before capitalism sunk its hooks into it

#i could write essays about how capitalism ruined the internet.#i was actually talking to someone earlier today about how youtube was kind of effectively ruined by monetisation.#and they were raised in the soviet union and we had a bit of a talk about how art was better because it wasn't for profit.#the people who made art made it because they wanted to do it and because they loved it.#she said that communism was terrible for every aspect of life for her. people's lives under communism wasn't pretty.#but the art was better. and i feel like it's true for the internet – it was better when it was a free-for-all.#the companies didn't know how to exploit it yet and turn it into a neverending profit-driven hellscape.#people created content because they wanted to. because they wanted to make something silly to make people laugh.#not for profit. not for gain. not for numbers. not to further their career.#i miss the days of newgrounds and youtube before monetisation.#capitalism has soiled everything that's joyful and good in this world.#people should be able to share whatever they want.#people should be able to tell any story they want without the fear of being silenced by advertisers.#that's what made the internet so beautiful before. anyone could do anything and we all had equal footing.#but now we're victims of the algorithm. and it makes me sick.#i'm quitting my job in social media. i'm quitting it. it makes me too depressed. i have an existential crisis every freaking day.#every day i wake up and say "ah. this is the fucking hell we live in #i'm so sorry i feel so passionate about this.#social media is a black hole and it is actively destroying humanity. forget ai. social media is what's doing it.#i miss how beautiful the internet used to be. it should've been a tool for good. but it's corrupt and evil now.#sci speaks

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missjamiekaye · 7 months

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I was so tired but made myself draw anyway and this was my stream of conscious drawing. Maybe I could finish it?

#ff9 #final fantasy 9 #i'm so sorry quina #I love the babies of FF9 so much #there's this sweet vibe of older teens looking out for the children in FF9 and it's bwugghghghawhehoia #this group loves Vivi as the small child he is #beginning of the game always fucks me up when he's having an existential crisis

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idliketobeatree · 1 month

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crowley's whole range of human and non-human expression from the final fifteen, but it's an honest reaction to finding out the shitshow of his life is actually considered a "comedy"

#anthony j crowley #crowley #good omens #final fifteen #i'm never letting neil live this down. it's just too funny #especially since the BAFTAs are coming and when/if david wins they will have to do that silly montage of the character #and. his most special acting moments are like half and half tragic and hilarious. just out of context i'd be like HMMMM #inb4 shakespearean comedy and tragedy yes yes but just look me in the eye and tell me crowley would like this descriptor #in a weirdly self-deprecating way maybe. but otherwise uhhhh #in his place i'd go through an existential crisis. again #marcela talks #i want to break queue #good omens s2 #good omens 2

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bubblegumr1ck · 1 year

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i think about this moment a lot. like morty was genuinely convinced that the laser pistol was real. and he was so pissed he straight-up just shot rick point-blank in the forehead.

i wonder if we'll ever see a direct reference to this moment again, especially in season 7 where it seems morty's starting to approach his wits end/become disillusioned with rick like he was in 2.10/3.01

like could you imagine this scene but it's rick prime instead??????????? i can definitely see it.

also, in general morty has been getting more and more comfortable killing and/or injuring people, especially if they cross him first. i mean, the season 6 finale is the perfect example of this:

we know morty and the president hadn't been on the best of terms for a while, but morty's straight-up ready to murder the guy after the bullshit in this episode.

who's to say the division between rick and morty won't escalate until they're backed into a corner again like in 3.01? i'd be very interested so see how morty deals with the tension

#i am an advocate for dark morty #rick and morty #no but seriously the weight of what morty does in 3.01 is never addressed???? like did he not have an existential crisis about it afterward #sorry i'm just thinking about him a lot right now #long post #back at it with my unnecessarily long rambles but psyche it's about morty not prime looool

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mixelation · 1 year

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oh no i wrote another reborn au snippet instead of the thing i wanted to be writing. no. why

this one minato's POV because why not. mild body horror

“...and that’s why I’m nominating Tori for Team Medic,” Kushina concluded, hands triumphantly on her hips.

Minato stared at her, and then stared down at the photographs carefully lined up across his desk. They were… graphic. He was so glad he hadn’t let Naruto play hookey from the Academy to hang around his office today.

Usually brand new genin wouldn’t have a team medic. They simply aren’t qualified for it yet, and they rarely go on missions where one might be necessary. Then again, brand new genin usually don’t have a mission go so weird they need an extra special follow-up debriefing after the fact.

This had happened to Team Four three times already. Twice for Deidara’s… art… and one time because Itachi had thought using genjutsu on another Konoha team would expedite their mission. It had not perturbed Kushina in the least. Her indomitable spirit was, of course, why Minato had assigned her this… difficult… of a team. But Tori too? Sure, she’d been in the process of fleeing Orochimaru when they’d picked her up, but… she’d seemed so sweet. So normal.

Kushina’s eyes were hard and determined as she stared back at him, chin out, daring him to question her. It was a look he’d seen her level at countless Academy teachers. It was a look she’d given her commanding officers right before running off and doing something that got her all the demerits on her record. It was a look that reminded Minato that even if they agreed not to let their marriage enter their working relationship, she was never going to just defer to him if she thought he was making a bad call.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Itachi said when Minato failed to comment. Itachi, in Minato’s opinion, was having a lot of problems adjusting to no longer being team captain. He gave a lot of commentary any other genin would be reprimanded for. “Tori is more suited to it than Deidara or I.”

“Oh yeah,” Deidara cut in, turning to Tori. “Didn’t you say you used to want to be a doctor?”

“Well,” Tori deadpanned.

Well, Minato thought, staring down at the photos. A medical nightmare, the medic-nin had said. Only Kushina would come away from watching her student semi-accidentally rip someone’s skin off and then regrow it with a seal she made up on the spot and think: yep, make that girl a medic.

In her written report, Tori had called the move “a desperate attempt to evade capture via a gross misapplication of the leaf technique (emphasis on gross).” She’d stuck her foot to an enemy ninja’s back with chakra, kicked, and ripped the entirety of his back’s skin clean off. Then it occurred to her they were supposed to port him back to Konoha for questioning and attempted to regrow his missing skin. She’d applied the world’s weirdest shaped seal along the edges of the wound and attempted to goad the living skin to grow over the now gaping hole. This had worked. The problem was that the skin had simply not stopped growing. It was still growing, according to the frazzled T&I-associated medic who’d come in only an hour before, even after they’d removed the seal. They were having to cut the skin back every hour to prevent it from overgrowing parts of the ninja that weren’t his back, and it was rapidly draining the man’s chakra. He required so much ongoing medical attention they couldn’t even stabilize him long enough to interrogate him.

Kushina was still staring him down with her chin jutting out. Clearly she was defensive of even the nice girl on her team turning out to be a horrible monster.

“We can discuss that later,” Minato settled on as his answer. “Tori, it is never acceptable to use an untested seal on a mission.”

“It was that or let him die,” Kushina immediately contested. “That’s why she should be team medic, you know. If she’d had something like Mystical Palm, she could have stabilized him in a more standardized way.” Kushina cocked her head at him, the hair framing her face shifting in a way Minato would consider a bit sexy if she weren’t currently arguing with him. “Besides, how many times have you used untested fuinjutsu on a mission?”

He didn’t have a counterargument to that. But he’d done those things as an adult and a jounin filled with experience. Also, he’d never made a horrifying skin-growing jutsu.

Also also, you weren’t allowed to just bring up things like that to the Hokage.

“I can probably undo it,” Tori volunteered.

Minato usually took care of fuinjutsu-gone-wrong incidents himself. If the problem had been the seal itself, he would have already gone down to T&I and looked at it himself, putting reprimanding and debriefing Team 4 off for later. But the problem had been something the seal had written into the very biology of the enemy ninja, and so Minato had relegated the problem to a medic-nin team to figure out.

Minato leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the desk as he contemplated Tori. She did a very bad job of looking like someone even the slightest bit exceptional. She looked like a completely ordinary twelve year old girl, and normally he’d dismiss her offer to help as the delusions of a child overestimating their talents.

But looks were deceptive, especially among ninja. He’d seen her original seal.

“Alright,” he decided. “We’ll walk down together.”

He dismissed the rest of the team, leaving them behind in the hallway as Tori scurried after him. She somehow managed to do this with the exact gait of a civilian child. T&I was going to be so upset.

(“So are you still treating us to lunch?” Deidara loudly asked Kushina.)

The ninja was being kept in a low-security cell in T&I, on one of the upper levels for their underground facility. Tori did not seem the least bit disturbed by the whimpering man’s appearance of hundreds of globes of fleshy, slowly expanding, bloody nodules across his body. Minato found himself surprised he’d expected her to be upset for some reason– she was perfectly aware of what she’d done to him. She’d written about having to pause transport to cut away excess skin when it started to grow over his face in her report.

Tori asked about if they’d run any tests and which ones, and Minato nodded at the on-staff medic-nin to answer her. The problem with making up fuinjustu on the spot– especially ones that affected the body– was that it wasn’t always clear how they were inducing changes.

There hadn’t been time or resources for any tests.

“This isn’t really undoing it,” Tori admitted to Minato, “but it wouldn’t be hard to temporarily stop it. I’ve even tested this one before.”

She doesn’t talk to me like I have more authority than the local librarian, Minato thought with mild chagrin as he sent someone off for fuinjutsu supplies. That had to be Kushina’s influence, or else Orochimaru’s interactions with his lackeys were a lot laxer than he’d have guessed.

“If we wanted to get really funky,” Tori told him, her face brightening, as a chunin ran off for paper and ink, “we could carve it into his skin, and it’d last longer.”

Minato raised an eyebrow. “He’s already getting chakra infusions. I don’t think he’d be able to sustain it.” Tori frowned. Then because he couldn’t help himself, he asked, “Is that what you did the first time? I noticed you didn’t have any targeting elements to prevent getting yourself caught in it.”

That was on his list of things to tell her never to do again, actually. But he wasn’t used to thinking about this type of fuinjutsu. Maybe it didn’t matter and she’d hadn’t actually been one brushstroke away from growing her own skin all over the place.

“No,” Tori answered, “I didn’t have a fine enough tool and his blood was going to mess everything up, so I…”

They ended up painting a targeted stasis seal on his back, just enough to keep the skin growth in check while still letting him talk to an interrogator. The medic-nin on standby looked incredibly on-edge the entire time. Minato rarely did surgical seals, and apparently if they screwed it up they could stop his heart, but Tori sounded like she knew exactly what she was doing and could easily describe to him her vision so they could both paint and make it go faster. She even incorporated Minato’s suggestions for containing the seal’s effects to a defined area without him having to diagram it out for her. Maybe he should approve her for team medic…

#i do want to write more about non-tori akatsuki members but i'm still rotating what everyone's About in this au #i think itachi is just having some sort of ongoing existential crisis which would be fun #idk what deidara is doing besides vibing #kushina is going to make this team happen no matter what. yes even if all her cute students are unhinged maniacs #reborn au #my writing

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isfjmel-phleg · 2 months

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This is a personal post.

The problem is all I want to do is talk about books.

So they say become an English professor/teacher.

Except I don't want to talk about books to people who don't care

(I can do that anytime with all sorts of people in my life)

or force other people to Have Thoughts about books as a means to an end and critique them on it.

So I can't do that.

So I work in a library, where it's wall-to-wall books.

But the priority is online databases and catalogs and systems and regulating books and other materials to people.

And that's fine.

But if I want to get anywhere in this career field, I need a Library Science degree.

And since part of what I currently do is cataloging, the Practical thing to do would be to specialize in that.

But that means taking nothing but classes whose names alone are terrifyingly, mindnumbingly boring.

And I'm not crazy about taking classes that may result in being miserable.

(Been there, done that. Never again.)

And what actually looks interesting

(if I absolutely had to do this)

is specializing in Youth Librarianship, which has classes about things like:

literature for youth!

and storytelling!

and adult reading interests!

and graphic novels/comics!

Those are actually interesting!

I could get excited about those!

But I work at an academic library which doesn't need somebody who does that.

And I'm not crazy about working in a public library again because I'm bad with people.

And youth librarianship would means working with the public anyway.

So what this really comes back to is the fact that

all I actually want to do is talk about books.

But they don't pay you to do that.

Not without combining it with something that is The Horrors.

#random personal stuff #sorry I'm being so chatty today but there's a lot on my mind #I've kind of been having whatever the job-related version of an existential crisis is lately

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