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ibijau · 3 years

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Part 2 of Lan Xichen refusing to listen when Nie Huaisang tries to tell him about Jin Guangyao’s crimes, this time post canon. As a quick warning... don’t go in there expecting a reconciliation ahah :D

In all his years of acquaintance with the Nie sect, this is the first time that Lan Xichen is made to wait at the gate, and the insult smarts. This is how a merchant or the servant of a noble family begging for help might be treated, not the leader of one of the Great Sect, and certainly not an old friend. Then again, it has been many years since Lan Xichen last came to the Unclean Realm alone. Perhaps he would have received such a welcome all along, after he and Nie Huaisang...

They never broke up, not exactly, not in such a manner that Lan Xichen could pinpoint an exact date to mark the end of their intimacy. But Nie Huaisang became more closed off in the months after his brother's death, more reluctant to tolerate any sort of affection, and Lan Xichen, tired of being denied again and again, stopped visiting alone. He only came alongside Jin Guangyao, in whose company Nie Huaisang was always a little less cold. For a while, Lan Xichen even wondered if his former lover's affection hadn't shifted toward a new target.

He wishes now that it had been something so easy. The truth, he fears, might be more unpleasant yet.

After nearly a shichen of waiting at the gate, Lan Xichen is brought inside by a disciple. Not Qinghe Nie's first disciple, but one of lesser importance who takes him to a sparse room and offers him subpar tea. He is then informed that the sect leader is currently busy, but will make time for him as soon as possible.

In a way, Lan Xichen finds this already answers the questions he has come to ask. Just a few weeks ago, Nie Huaisang would never have dared to be so rude to anyone, least of all one of Nie Mingjue's sworn brothers. He used to always drop everything for Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao, throwing himself at them with heavy tears... but then again, he was always the one begging them to come as well, whereas Lan Xichen is now here uninvited.

Another shichen passes, and then some. The tea Lan Xichen was offered is worse cold than warm, but he still finishes it as darkness creeps on him. Night, outside, is coming close, and Lan Xichen regrets not booking a room at some Qinghe inn. He has never had to before, and quite foolishly he hoped this wouldn't have changed. A mistake he will not repeat, if he ever visits again.

At long last the door opens, revealing Nie Huaisang who looks...

It would be only polite for Lan Xichen to rise up and bow to his host, or salute him in some manner. If he doesn't it isn't in protest of the long wait, but only because he can hardly recognise Nie Huaisang. The man in front of him might as well be a stranger. It might just be that it has been so long since Lan Xichen has had cause to truly look at the man he once loved. It might also be that for the first time in nearly a decade, Nie Huaisang isn't playing a role. Either way, Nie Huaisang seems taller than Lan Xichen thinks he ought to be, even accounting for the fact that one of them is standing and the other sitting. That might be because he is standing so straight, his shoulders squared rather than hunched. He looks, as he has for this past decade, a little too thin, but rather than making him frail and delicate, Lan Xichen finds the other man's features now bring to mind a carefully sharpened blade. Nie Huaisang's eyes are certainly as cool as steel, his narrow smile threatening in a way his sabre never managed to be.

“Er-ge, I'm surprised you've come here,” Nie Huaisang calmly states, looking down at Lan Xichen as he puts down a candle on a chest near the door. “I suppose I should ask the reason of your visit.”

“I think you know it already,” Lan Xichen replies without thinking, too startled by this stranger bearing a face he once adored to be polite.

Nie Huaisang smirks. “Do I? I don't think I do. Please do tell me, Er-ge. I am but a stupid man, I need things stated plainly.”

Not so long ago, Lan Xichen might have unkindly agreed.

“I'll ask this before all else: the other night, did Jin Guangyao really move?”

Nie Huaisang's smirk curls a little higher. “I've said already that I can't be sure, haven't I? Maybe he moved, maybe he didn't... I was tired, and I was wounded, and I was so terribly scared,” he explains in a mocking tone. “Weeks after the accusation was first made, I just had it confirmed that one of my very dear friend had murdered my da-ge, and you expect me to have been clear minded enough to remember every inconsequential detail?”

“You already knew he had killed da-ge,” Lan Xichen retorts.

Nie Huaisang's mouth slowly opens in a artful 'Oh' of surprise too deliberate to be anything but artifice, while his hand sets on his heart as if wounded by the accusation. He looks right out of a picture, beautiful and elegant and insincere.

“Er-ge, I'm not sure I quite understand what you're saying.”

Lan Xichen frowns. He had not expected this to be easy, of course, but he hadn't prepared himself for such coldness either. In his mind, Nie Huaisang ought to have been shouting at this point. But then, he was thinking of Nie Huaisang as he lives in his memory, young and spoiled, rather than the man he became while Lan Xichen wasn't paying attention.

“I am saying that I have given due consideration to what Wei Wuxian said last month in that temple,” Lan Xichen says. “I believe that he might have been right.”

Even an actor as talented as Nie Huaisang can break character. For a brief instant, he appears to struggle to contain a smile, though that problem is solved when he quickly opens a fan with a sharp yet graceful gesture. Lan Xichen is left breathless when he recognises the fan. It is one he bought for Nie Huaisang, when they were young and not yet crossing the line between friends and lovers. When they finally did, they wrote together a few lines of poetry on that fan, because Nie Huaisang, so sweet at that time, wanted to do like the couples in those stories he so enjoyed reading, and Lan Xichen of course couldn't have done anything but indulge him in this caprice.

It cannot be an accident for this particular fan to have been chosen as Nie Huaisang's shield.

“Er-ge... no, sorry, Zewu-Jun, that is a serious accusation you're throwing at me,” Nie Huaisang saying, almost sounding hurt. Almost. “So, I must ask... do you have any proof? You can't say this without some serious proof.”

Something in Nie Huaisang's tone is a little odd, as if it matters to him whether Lan Xichen has anything concrete to show.

“No more than you probably did when you started all this, Huaisang.”

“But if I had done that, I would have had proof” Nie Huaisang retorts, his eyes burning from behind his fan. “Plenty of it. If I were to have gone on the path of revenge, it might have been because Baxia had become restless in the weeks after her master's death, and started causing problems in the sabre's hall,” he explains, dropping the fan to reveal a feverish expression. “So of course I would have checked my brother's tomb, and found it empty. That's when I might have become suspicious of foul play, and turned to you for help. I wonder, would you have listened to me, or would you have rushed to defend someone you clearly valued more than me?”

Lan Xichen's eyebrows rise high in surprise. He knows for a fact that Nie Huaisang never mentioned his brother's corpse being missing, he certainly would remember that.

“If this is your excuse for never letting me know the truth...”

The fan comes up again. “Er-ge, this is purely hypothetical of course,” Nie Huaisang says pleasantly, as if they were discussing the weather. “I suppose if those things had happened, I wouldn't even have had a chance to make a case against Jin Guangyao before you'd make it clear on whose side you were. You've always been so quick to defend him, haven't you? Even when da-ge was alive... they were both your friends, but you only ever seemed to side with one of them, didn't you?”

It is an unfair statement. Lan Xichen used to defend Jin Guangyao in front of Nie Mingjue, yes, but he made no less efforts to mend that relationship on both sides. Many times he tried to explain to Jin Guangyao how their sworn brother's personality worked, how Nie Mingjue meant no harm by speaking the way he did, how he was truly trying to help by offering chance after chance for Jin Guangyao to prove his good faith, especially in that business with Xue Yang, and how Nie Mingjue's education and personal experience made it hard for him to understand that Jin Guangshan wouldn't be swayed by the demands of a bastard son he half openly despised.

Lan Xichen had done all that he could to be a bridge between two men whose affection was so disturbed by deeply different worldviews. Many things had escaped his attention at that time, but he had never been so foolish as to think every problem in their friendship came from Nie Mingjue alone.

Just because Nie Huaisang had borne witness to only one side of his efforts didn't mean the other side never existed.

“Someone had to defend him,” Lan Xichen coldly points out. “I realise now that some of his enemies were right to hate him, but how could I not dismiss them when their first impulse was always to attack him for his birth?”

“But I didn't!” Nie Huaisang explodes, closing his fan to furiously point it at Lan Xichen. His hand trembles with rage, and there's not art to his expression now, only raw emotion of unexpected intensity. “I didn't come to you calling him a son of a whore!” He cries out. “I didn't call him a bastard, or a servant unworthy of his title! All I said was that I suspected murder, and instantly you defended Jin Guangyao, before throwing it to my face that maybe it was my fault if da-ge had been so unbalanced!”

Nie Huaisang waves his fan at Lan Xichen, heavy tears staining his face.

“Do you know how terrified I was to share this with you? You'd been on Guangyao's side so often, you'd been the reason he'd had access to da-ge even in his unstable state! Everything was telling me that you could have been complicit in da-ge's death, that you and Guangyao could have been working together! But I loved you!” Nie Huaisang shouts, his voice breaking on the words. “I loved you, you were the only thing I had left and I loved you, certain you loved me as well, so I trusted you and tried to come to you with my discoveries, and for what?”

Laughing hysterically, Nie Huaisang reopens his fan to hide his tears.

“You don't even remember that day, do you?” he croaks. “Everything changed for me that night, and it wasn't even worth remembering for you.”

Lan Xichen stares down at the table in front of him, desperately trying to recall the conversation that left such an impact on Nie Huaisang. It must have been before they drifted apart, he guesses. To his shame, he truly cannot remember.

He tells himself that he too was grieving, that Nie Huaisang doesn't remember well, that he was perhaps less clear in his accusation than he now thinks he was. Lan Xichen easily finds many excuses for not remembering, but he knows them for what they are: excuses. The truth, ugly as it might be, is simply that he paid little attention to what Nie Huaisang had to say at that time. His grief, raw and exposed, had been uncomfortable to witness, and Lan Xichen had only held on to the good parts of his lover while waiting for the bad ones to go away on their own.

“So Wei Wuxian guessed right, then,” Lan Xichen whispers, unwilling to dwell on his past failings at the moment. “You did all this...”

“Did I?” Nie Huaisang asks, regaining control of himself, his expression turning distant again in spite of the lingering hoarseness in his voice. “Everything I said was hypothetical of course. Who knows what I did or didn't do? After so long, who knows what could have been prevented if you'd only trusted me half as much as I might have trusted you? But I will say this...”

He lowers his fan, revealing a sharp smile, more like a beast baring its teeth than anything.

“Er-ge, supposing I did any of the things Wei Wuxian accused me of the other day, then you would bear as much fault in my supposed crimes as you do in Jin Guangyao's,” Nie Huaisang says, almost sweetly. “The mighty Zewu-Jun, so pure and good, so untouched by dirt and blood, having enabled so much pain and chaos just because it's easier to look away when things are unpleasant.”

Lan Xichen doesn't answer. It is an unfair accusation, he tells himself. Jin Guangyao's actions were never under his control, and neither were Nie Huaisang.

What happened wasn't his fault, and he refuses to react to Nie Huaisang's very obvious taunting. It is clear now that the other man will not give him a straight answer regarding anything that has happened. Perhaps it was foolish to ever hope that he would, considering what Wei Wuxian said he might have done.

“It's getting late, Zewu-Jun,” Nie Huaisang remarks, glancing out the window as if he only now realises how dark it has become around them. The candle he'd brought with him offers little light. “You should get going. I hope you'll understand why I don't offer to let you stay the night.”

“I wouldn't accept even if you offered,” Lan Xichen replies as he stands up. “I suppose we'll meet again some other time, Nie zongzhu.”

“Only if I have no other choice, Zewu-Jun,” Nie Huaisang says. “I'll call for someone to take you back to the gate. I've already wasted enough time on you.”

With how often he has been here as a guest, Lan Xichen doesn't need a guide to find his way inside the Unclean Realm, not even in the dark. He keeps that remark to himself, unwilling to deal with Nie Huaisang longer than necessary.

Soon enough he is outside the gates of the Unclean Realm, free to breathe again, and starts walking into the night, toward Qinghe. Lan Xichen knows he could fly, but walking gives him a better chance to think and consider what he has just learned, and to analyse this conversation with Nie Huaisang.

It is the first time in many years that he gives this much thought to his former lover's words and actions, he realises, and something like guilt curls coldly into his chest. Perhaps this really could have been avoided, if he had paid more attention to the changes in Nie Huaisang's personality... but in those years after the Sunshot Campaign he'd seen too much grief, accepted too well that it manifested in odd ways, that someone people would wallow in it and let it become the core of what they are. Nie Huaisang had seemed only another example of this. Having always been so expressive in his joys, it felt unsurprising that he would fall as eagerly into his despair.

Lan Xichen, busy with his own trouble, with a sect to run, with his brother's punishment only then lifted, cannot be expected to have dedicated all his energy and time analysing the changes in a lover who kept pushing him away.

Can he?

He also cannot be blamed for the crimes of others, Lan Xichen eventually decides. All he did was consider the information at hand, and trust people based on their actions. Anyone else would have done the same, his actions were measured and reasonable, and though he was wrong in his judgement, everything he did was in good faith.

What happened wasn't his fault.

Was it?

#xisang #nie huaisang #lan xichen #mo dao zu shi #mdzs

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bl-garbage · 3 years

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to dance is to unshackle

um, okay—how else do i express this buoyant happiness that Gaya sa Pelikula has awoken inside me? i’m in complete and utter awe. i did not expect a drop of what the sixth episode has brought us. more than satisfying, it’s utterly fascinating. this is quite a lengthy post, but if you have the time, please bear with me. and since we’re already here, let’s fucking dissect the shit out of this:

right off the bat, it’s sweet how consistently written Vlad was the entire time of the show. at the start of the episode, for one, he was concerned with Karl’s disposition, saying, “anong iniisip mo (what are you thinking)?” and, later on, as we know, he pops that question again in this episode. what are you thinking? always in limbo. true, it’s considerate, yet more than that, it’s always a sign of waiting for permission. Vlad has been like this since the beginning: observant and willing to reach out, confident on the surface, yes, but always afraid of going overboard.

that is not to say that Karl isn’t. in fact, the whole dynamics of their relationship rest on the fact that they can lean on each other and just be honest. many moments show this: Karl’s desire to shift; Vlad not getting into the film lab and Karl knowing something was up; the entirety of Vlad’s birthday; Karl and Vlad’s reticence to open up to Anna, in contrast with how comfortable they feel with each other. in a nutshell, they’re each other’s homes. more on this later.

the part i was most frightened at with this episode was when Karl finally told his parents his desire to shift. to be honest, personally, i wouldn’t know exactly how that pressure on Karl feels, as i was able to study the degree i wanted. yet, back then, i had already known that my parents, who wholly supported me just the same, would have wanted a degree that leaned on science or engineering. that still sucked to know. Karl’s situation is much more complicated. his desire to shift to another course is to make up for lost time, a sense of hurrying before it really becomes all too late. this was a heavy lot to take in. the disappointment and anger in his father’s face when he dropped the bomb was too much to handle. Karl had expected it, yet its impact still hurled shrapnel that he was not able to dodge, sustaining him with several wounds. it would be curious to see how his parents come to terms with his confession. i am certain that a number of people have connected with Karl here.

which brings me to another point. Gaya sa Pelikula creates these characters with their own agency. it’s touted as a BL series, yes, but our two main characters’ point is actually not to fall in love — but to live, part of which is to fall in love. they have their hopes and dreams and own burdens to carry, and while falling in love takes centerstage here, we see how they can stand alone, on their own two feet. falling in love is central to their growth, but it is evident that love is not the whole point of their existence.

speaking of which: ate judit. ah, yes, where do i even begin to explain the exquisiteness with which ate judit was written? how, after all of five episodes, it was only now did it make sense why judit was overly, unnaturally caring and protective, a mama bear that would not let anything happen to his little Vlad. now we know why: guilt.

imagine that. being told you were the reason why your whole family went into shambles. there is much vindication in Vlad’s line of questioning, “why would you say that to a child?” (god, i’m tearing up even as i write this.) this was a pivotal scene, with a focal point on judit, the likes of whom we cannot entirely fault for not knowing any better. the fact remains that we are still in an era that fails to understand the spectrum of gender identities and the far utopia that we seek, where gender and sex would not be a damning classification anymore. and for true allies, it is in admitting that they “didn’t know then what [they] know now” that their support gains more strength. it is in confessing where they got wrong, how harmful their actions were, and in the commitment to do more, that their promise is made good.

parenthetically, can we talk about Vlad’s mom as well? have you all noticed how her voice broke when she said, “siguraduhin mong hindi ka na itatanggi niyan, ha (just make sure he won’t deny you, okay)?” was that pain, or guilt even? i wonder if we’re ever going to see her. it would be a regret not to. for so long Vlad had thought that he was the reason his father left, and that his mother was mad at his queerness. i wouldn’t want this simple call to be the resolution that the show had for him. at any rate, we have two more episodes to await, so i am not going to strike my gavel on this judgment just yet.

but whereas Vlad found his longtime coming reconciliation with his sister, Karl had no one to turn to. his call to Vlad was a cry for help. it was heartbreaking to see him like this. Karl had always put up a fake smile against any adversity that had come his way. to him, these were trivial matters that would pass, and they did so — until now. after all he was, as we would later come to know, living a script that had been prewritten before he even came to being. that explains his nonchalant demeanor toward life, the seeming discontent behind those dead eyes, and a repeated hinting that he was always yearning for so much more. at the end of the call, Karl instinctively goes to the closet - and his proverbial closet - and sees the skeletons he had hidden inside, drop in a mess.

that it was Karl’s brother who was in the photo shook me. that past was so well thought out. things made so much sense in this episode: why Karl tried to fit in, why everything seemed so fake. why he was so discomforting to watch, even! that made sense now.

and what do you do when everything has become a mess? the once seamless film that had been rolling without any glitches now sprawled on the floor, entangled in a hodgepodge well beyond fixing. when that happens, what do you do? well, you dance.

i have so many things to say about faux masculinity. it is a fact undisputed that in this society, gender roles are still very much pillars that we have yet to dismantle. our genders have been geared toward performativity, and our consolation is the external validation we receive through the acts of fitting in. in the process, we lose sight of what we really want. we blur the lines between what is and what should be, in favor of what society has demanded upon us. Karl took that role and lived by it religiously. yet, those things has gone haywire in this episode. more than his parents, it was to himself that Karl has finally admitted that the act can be dropped now: the fixed posture, those rehearsed lines, that painfully faux masculinity, on guard all the fucking time. all of those things were dropped.

that is not to say that Karl was faking all of it. there is no denying that Karl has been a masculine person most of the time. but the show portrayed before us a discarded femininity that Karl had been trying to bury deep inside him — one that all people who have been and who are still in the closet know by heart. the thing is, all of us have masculine and feminine sides, the expression of which vary at different levels in different situations. sadly, we have been preconditioned to believe that male persons must be masculine, and female persons must be feminine. Gaya sa Pelikula acknowledges this hegemony, and then throws it away all the same. true, Karl may very well be comfortable in his masculine expression, but his femininity must also be allowed to grow. one cannot be complete without embracing the entirety of who they are. many have died — been killed — for simply living who they are. society has long been a vicious environment. but people have also long fought for their fundamental right to perform these things, and through them, we know that things can change. that things are changing.

it is against this context that imprints more meaning, more gravity to when we finally, finally see Karl dance. in every sense, his dance was the show’s climax for me. it is, quite emphatically, freedom incarnate.

when i say i fucking bawled at this scene, you best believe it.

quite important to note: when Karl sees Vlad, he stopped abruptly, only for Vlad to signal to him, in an OK sign, that what he was doing was perfectly fine. that Karl could be effeminate all he wants, and who the hell in this earth should care? this allowance has given Karl all the needed validation he will ever need, at least, for that one night where they could bare it all. it was only the two of them, but the house has never been more crowded, because their feelings have seemingly exploded and have been overflowing in a glorious climax for all of us to witness. in this scene, Karl has unshackled the chains with which he had been bound all that time, and it was Vlad who helped him finally break the last of those chains. in this moment, there was only pure bliss.

(that the song playing here was Ride Home by ben&ben is the perfect giveaway. for non-Filipino readers who have only listened to ben&ben now, check this band out. it’s one of the best bands to have ever come out of the Philippine music industry.)

and, of course, in this waterfall of emotions, it is only perfect to time the moment of their first kiss. they have accepted each other, haven’t they? in a meaningful act (the gravity of which we will only realize in full later when Vlad tells the story of his dad), Karl rumpled Vlad’s hair, but only after Vlad had already consented to it. then, afterward, it was Vlad’s turn to ask, what are you thinking? to which Karl had this—and i know we all expected it, nevertheless—to say: i don’t want to think anymore. then they kissed.

i swear to god. i only watched this for the 92432475781 time.

the denouement was so well put, too: now everything is put back into its own place. Karl’s brother. his death. his parents’ expectations. the substitution. Vlad’s father. his parents’ expectations. the horror of realizing one’s difference. the abandonment. in these stories, it becomes more and more permissible to believe that Karl and Vlad have easily found comfort in each other. to say that they are soulmates (as the creator, juan miguel severo, told on his twitter) is not an exaggeration.

and, make no mistake: Karl and Vlad did not find each other’s embraces out of pity. no. it would be unduly harsh to view them that way. rather, they found solace in each other’s embrace and warmth, but it is still they who will muster the courage to face their own demons. the only difference is, they now have each other to find some sort of release. they are not destructively dependent on each other; instead, they help each other grow into the versions of themselves that they can be proud of.

finally, a couple of small things: look at the way Karl was inviting Vlad to lie in bed with him. that simple gesture harks us back to the early days of their dynamics: Vlad had expressed that it was okay to share a bed, but Karl was adamant that they do not. Karl had once dreamed of Vlad joining him there, and that scared him shitless. in contrast to that, now we have this: Karl himself inviting Vlad, and Vlad accepting for Karl’s wholehearted invitation. the moment this happened, there was a consummation of the expression of their love. if they had their doubts prior to this, those could not have been more obliterated now.

needless to say, i fucking, fucking loved this. as one who has only ever written three fanfics (2gether and History 2!), all of which seemingly related to sleeping (what the fuck, do i have a sleep fetish or something), this ending to episode 6 is just the cherry on top.

their lines by the end particularly strike me. here we have Karl who wishes to create his own stories. on the other hand is Vlad who wishes that he be in charge of the endings, too. how do they do that? who knows? but the certainty that defines their pact is that they shall do it together, unbound and free to dance to the song they have chosen of their own accord. and that simple promise, made in each other’s tight embrace under artificially warm lights amid that early january weather, with no certainty at all of what tomorrow has to bring, has made all the difference.

in 34 minutes, Gaya sa Pelikula has, yet again, done more than we could have ever expected.

i just checked and this reached 2k words. i’m not even gonna attempt to proofread this anymore. anyway, this is all i have to say for now. i just simply cannot let go of the best episode i’ve seen in this show without expressing my own reaction to it.

(also: i’m thinking of writing a fanfic; that is, the morning after. just a one-shot, hopefully a cute one. as usual, an introspection of these characters, and what lies ahead. hope i actually get to write it!)

thank you so much, Gaya sa Pelikula. you are proof that things do change.

#gaya sa pelikula #ian pangilinan #paolo pangilinan #juan miguel severo #fanfic ideas have been brewing inside me #char #bl series #philippines #philippine bl series

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zestria13 · 4 years

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Final Fantasy 15 Thoughts (Spoilers!)

So, I just finished playing Final Fantasy 15 Royal Edition and I have many feelings about it. As I understand it, I have avoided many of the basic gameplay and story problems by buying the Royal Edition, which has all of the patches, dlc's, and fixes many of the bugs encountered when FFXV first came out. Oh, and I have watched the brotherhood anime and the Kingsglaive movie. Overall, my first experience with FFXV is much more complete than it was when the game was initially released (that is my understanding anyways). To be clear, I enjoyed playing FFXV (at least a good portion of it), but I have many issues with it too. One of my main issues with FFXV is the plot, especially the plot following the rite in Altissia. I have read many complaints about how dark FFXV gets after this point and how it becomes a very narrow, plot driven narrative as opposed to its earlier more easygoing and open world setting. To some extent, I agree with these complaints. This change in the game feels very sudden and forced to some degree. However, I personally tend to play heavily narrative games because I like deep, complex plotlines. This turn into a plot driven narrative is not my main issue, though it was, in my opinion, too abrupt a change in the game. My main issue following the events in Altissia, simply, is that the game wasn't as much fun to play after that point. For a game promoting the concept of brotherhood and comradery, that pretty much disappeared after the events in Altissia. Don't get me wrong, I understand the events in Altissia were traumatic for all of the characters and that caused most of the tension, but it was like we were playing with a different group of characters than we started with. All of the comradery seen previously in the game, from the pep talks, to characters interactions, to the short quips in battle (My fav was between Noctis and Ignis, the "You got my back" and "Always" in reply) had created this atmosphere of a team, of a brotherhood that was connected not just by duty, but by genuine friendship.

But then Altissia happens, and the group just...completely falls apart. There is such an emotional whiplash between the first part of the game and the second part of the game, and its jarring. I honestly felt uncomfortable playing the game after the events in Altissia because the atmosphere was tense and strained, and the comradery present in the first half of the game became nearly nonexistent. Frankly, the game never recovers from this mood shift, and the rest of the game has a sort of sullen, discomforting feel to it. And I know people would argue that the brotherhood comes back together at the end of the game, but I would argue that true reconciliation never happens between the characters, instead making their comradery at the end a byproduct of their circumstances. They never truly deal with the problems created by the events in Altissia and afterwards. They just push them aside because they need to do so in order to work as a team and save the world. Now, is it possible that the remaining trio living in darkness may have dealt with their issues and figured things out, but we wouldn't actually know because we aren't privy to anything that happens during those 10 years. Maybe the game wanted you to understand Noctis's perspective in this way (though they don't really touch on how incredibly disorienting that time skip must have been for Noctis). However, the point stands that there was never really time at any point in the rest of the game following Altissia for the group to reconcile and come back together as a cohesive unit.

That leads me to another huge issue I take with the plot of this game. The ending. I know, already, there are people who will comment and say that "Not everything has a happy ending" and "The sacrifice was necessary to save the world", and so on and so forth. My issue with the ending comes back to the question of why. Especially after having watched Episode Ardyn, I just don't feel that the game gives us a clear cut reason as to why any of the ending needs to happen the way it does. Ok, so the sun goes down and doesn't come up after Noctis is pulled into the Crystal, which means demons have pretty much free reign and everything is much more dangerous. Got it. But why did the sun disappear? I know the game explains that there are organisms infected with the Starscourge that release a light-absorbing miasma, which are the cause of the lengthening nights (though you need to be fairly thorough in your examination of items to learn this). It also mentions the idea that the Oracle dying is related to the longer nights and the disappearing sun, though it never really explains why besides the fact that the Oracle can heal the Starscourge. While I understand that her healing those with Starscourge helps to limit the amount of miasma being put into the world, it seems rather unlikely that one person can ever hope to keep up with that demand. Also, we only ever saw Luna heal people who had not fully turned into demons yet, and I would assume that those people aren't giving off the same level of miasma as fully turned demons. And, we know those fully turned demons exist, in the form of demons the party runs into and the MT's that the empire uses. I'm just not sure it is believable that the Oracle, by themselves, is actually healing enough people to actually prevent the endless night in the first place. As for the other part of the explanation, how did those organisms proliferate to the point where it caused an endless night? Based on what we hear from characters in FFXV and read in the research notes, the appearance of the longer nights was incredibly rapid, which begs the question of why those organisms suddenly started infecting creatures and producing this miasma so quickly in comparison to any other time in the history of this world (as far as we know). All in all, I can't think of a solid reason given in the game as to why the endless night even happens, or perhaps, why it hasn't happened already.

Moving on, after Noctis is absorbed into the Crystal, we do a ten year time skip. Back to my question of why, why did Noctis have to be in the Crystal for 10 years? I know he went in to gain the power of providence, but 10 years seems a bit excessive. Maybe that’s just me. Ignoring the fact that almost all of the living things in the world would have died without 10 years of sunlight, the fact remains that, in all likelihood, most of the creatures living in that world would have perished, either by being killed by demons or due to a lack of resources. In all honesty, there probably aren't many people alive by the time Noctis returns, and it’s hard to say if a civilization would actually be able to recover from that kind of devastation. Anyways, let's move on to what is my biggest contention with the plot. The prophecy. I have to say, I really, really dislike this plot point in the game. For one, it makes no sense. The true king, in this story, exists to purge their star of the darkness. Ok, cool, love the vague terms. But again, why? The darkness, which basically refers to the Starscourge, has existed for at least 2000 years at this point in the world. If the gods were so invested in this issue, why didn't they address it earlier? Why wait for a so called chosen king after at least 2000 years of this darkness ravaging their world? And what makes Noctis the chosen king? Simply because the gods said so? If that is the case, why didn't they choose a chosen king earlier? I know, after watching Episode Ardyn, that Ardyn was also a chosen king with the ability to absorb Starscourge from other people into himself. An ability, I might add, granted to him by the gods. But when Ardyn tries to ascend to become a king, the Crystal, where Bahamut resides, suddenly rejects him because of his ability (which, again, was given to him by the gods), and so he is rejected basically by the gods via the gift they gave him. Which makes no sense. As we know, this action leads to the circumstances we see in the game.

To me, at this point, it seems that the gods on Eos are incompetent and create this prophecy in order to fix the problem they created. This seems to become more glaringly obvious when Bahamut tells Ardyn (in Episode Ardyn) that he literally is a pawn in their game to fix the problem they created. At its core, that is what makes me so very frustrated with this prophecy plot line. It seems that the characters in this game are no more than pawns being made to do what the gods tell them to do, and that everything in this world is preordained. Not only does that rake against my own beliefs as an individual, but it ruins the purpose of the game for me. If everything is preordained, then what is the point? It also hurts my perception of the characters as well because the characters, except for Ardyn maybe, never think to go against the determinations made by the gods, they just go along with it. They never stop to consider trying to find another way and instead simply accept their fates as is. I understand there is something inherently powerful and moving in sacrificing yourself to save others, but making it fate instead of an active choice lessens the impact. Noctis doesn't choose to sacrifice himself to save Eos, it is forced upon him. There is no sense of choice here, merely one of acceptance. The cruelty of Noctis' preordained fate disturbs me. Not only is Noctis just randomly chosen to die to save the world, but the gods see fit to inform his father of that when Noctis is 5. I cannot truly imagine the depth of sorrow and helplessness probably felt by Regis in being told that his son is basically a sacrifice. Undoubtedly, knowing that weighed heavily on Regis and I'm sure at times that knowledge put a dour edge on his time with Noctis. One of the saddest things about Noctis' fate is how little time he actually gets to live. I know he is technically 30 at the time of his death, but he really only lived 20 years. Not only is his life cut short, but he actually loses a third of it in the process of becoming the ideal sacrifice for the gods. To me, Noctis' fate is just unbearably cruel. And don't misunderstand, I actually like games that have darker themes and angst in them, but I think there is a balance in crafting stories and this story didn't quite find a balance. And the thing is, I think the creators of the game have acknowledged that too, as they have now created 2 alternative storylines where Noctis doesn't die and his fate is subverted in some way. Personally, I prefer the message given in the Final Fantasy 7 remake where the characters actively fight against a pre-determined destiny, instead of simply accepting their destiny as is. I have more thoughts on the subject of Final Fantasy 15, but for the moment I will end my writing here.

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beau-abime · 3 years

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I have never written about the Midwest. For all I’ve thought about it, for every conversation in which I try to explain, to offer up some evidence of its influence over my body, none of it has met paper. I think this is because to write is to solidify, and I, for so long, refused to believe that land could seep into you. Writing about it would only give witness to the fact that it had, quite deeply. I grew up in the land of bootstraps frayed to the point of snapping, believing I could quite easily pull myself up and out of it, that I would not, could not, be defined by “where I came from” -- that I would not fall prey to the pastoralists, to the romance of a “motherland.”

For the first years after I left, I spoke about the Midwest like a fate I had escaped. Like a toxic, codependent lover I had left behind to find myself. Despite my best efforts, I condemned her. I shrouded the breakup in excuses, about “opportunity” about “individuality” -- the time had come, after all, to leave the nest.

I recently read an essay about midwestern grief, about a mother’s grief and our inheritance. Ah, I thought. So that is what this stone in my throat is all about, the one I’ve carried for 23 years, the one I tried so very hard to spit out. There was always something about the role of daughter that I resented, and maybe that comes with being the eldest. Or maybe that comes from the pile of shit lumped on you by people who are older, and sadder, than you. Maybe it is that simple. I think more than anything I resented how closely acquainted that role kept me to grief and to guilt, like a cloak I could never shed.

There is something very difficult about trying to live without a reference called “home.” But this is how I tried to stake out my claim on my body, by rejecting all I had not chosen.

For a long time I lived as a double. And maybe I still do, a two-bit compartmentalized self, the her from here and the her from there. The perspectives of “here” and “there” of course depending on which self I happened to inhabit that day. I have always been fascinated with deictics in poetry, in part because they feel like my self. That innocuous grammar term and the formality of analysis giving a whole language to my experience of personhood -- one entirely illegible to those I might call family.

Living in the Midwest was like living with the grandmother you knew you were supposed to love but never could, the one who died years before your birth. This is not an ode of reconciliation. This is not me, running back into her loving arms. As a teenager, I used to read poetry on the internet where people talked about not feeling at home anywhere, about home not being a place, but a “feeling”. And on and on, the thousands of other banal expressions we use to try and shrink up the concept, to make it palatable, to make it less of the expansive monster that it is. The truth is that home need not be a noun, in fact, it cannot be. Home is not a noun that the girl from here grasps, it is a verb that the girl enacts.

Part of the problem is rooted in the insidious nature of “home” as a singular noun; though such things as “homes” do exist to us, they are impersonal, objective, statistics. We have a home. We want to go home. We want to build a home. We want to own, to carve into the Earth blood sweat and tears, a private place to mourn, to study, to love. I feel this urge every time I move. To grasp hold of a place and submit it to my will. To stuff it full of objects so that it suffocates in my memory and finally gives in, becomes “mine”. So that it reeks of my nostalgia. Maybe the linguistic consequences stem from this assumption that we cannot possibly inhabit more than one place at a time. That our mortal bodies cannot be made legible without one clear, distinct heartland. That we will only ever be present in one place, in one moment, and that all else is nostalgic reverie.

But why should I not delight in the collision of my many places and times, of the spaces that have held me? I do not mean to propose yet another palatable option, one that elides the entire tricky question, that “the Earth is our home”. Then again, maybe this is what thrills me about hiking. That for one brief moment, you are truly freed of these other “homes”, these mythical prisons. You are simply there, and nothing more. You feel kinship, but you do not possess. You pass through, fascinated by the ways your body fits there, but you do not alter it, you need not, and it makes no demands on you, to change, to fit, to belong - a reassuring indifference.

Reading back over that last paragraph, I have to smirk at my use of the word “prison”. I have to wonder how it is and who is to blame for the cynical views I’ve acquired about my own birth. I remember how this anger, this argument of wrong done unto me by simply being born, is a shelter I built for myself to avoid harder questions. It is a defense mechanism I fall upon when I no longer want to feel the pressures of “gratefulness”, when I no longer have the energy to forgive and forget. Somedays that line, the prison of existence, is a salve upon my soul. I am not a miracle, I am a mere accident, and I owe myself to no one, to no singular home.

#writing? writing #here internet void #p

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chasekimberly1994 · 4 years

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psalm40speakstome · 5 years

Text

Joining a mob

Christians participate in rush to judgment after viral video; only some apologize after context revealed

“Approximately 15 seconds of video from the March for Life had many Christian leaders united in a harsh condemnation of an anonymous teenage boy this weekend.

The clip showed a tight shot of a Catholic high schooler in a red “Make America Great Again” hat grinning, or, to some minds, sneering, at a Native American veteran who stood inches away playing a drum. The clip was circulated with the claim that the boy and his classmates surrounded and taunted the veteran by chanting, “Build the wall.”

Prominent pastors, theologians, and Bible teachers quickly expressed outrage. “Let’s be clear, this isn’t simple hate, it’s demonic activity,” tweeted one pastor. Another publicly wondered if college admissions offices would post their pictures with the message “Do not admit.” A theologian commented, “This is white supremacist terrorism.” Others posted videos that showed a still image of the student’s smiling face next to pictures of smiling Nazi youth and young civil rights era segregationists.

Finally, a leading Bible teacher with nearly a million social media followers tweeted, “I cannot shake the terror of adolescents already indoctrinated in enough hate and disrespect to smile that chillingly and jeer without shame or fear of God. Uncurbed, this utter glee in dehumanizing is what humanitarian horrors are made of.” She added in a later tweet, “It reeks of the vomit of hell.”

And they all would have been right—if the 15 seconds in question had accurately represented the entire incident. It didn’t. As the weekend unfolded, further videos cast a decidedly different light on events.

Longer clips proved the veteran, Nathan Phillips, was at best mistaken in his account to the media. At worst, he was lying. Contrary to his initial interviews retweeted by countless sympathetic believers, he approached the students with other adult protesters, cameras at the ready, to intentionally engage them. The students, who were waiting for their bus, quickly parted to allow the men into the middle of their group. Phillips then continued to advance on the boy until he was drumming inches from his face. Seconds later, some of Phillips' companions began shouting at the high schoolers, “You white people go back to Europe. This is not your land.”

An even longer video revealed that a radical group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites had been shouting vile (and, incidentally, heretical) profanities at the minors leading up to the faceoff. Their pep-rally school cheers—none of the videos recorded anything about wall-building—weren’t a reaction to the drumming but an attempt to drown out these insults.

Taken in totality, the videos showed a charged, chaotic environment in which nearly everyone involved should have behaved better. It goes without saying the Black Israelites shouldn’t have spewed racist insults at teenagers. Likewise, Phillips and his fellow marchers shouldn’t have walked into a group of kids seemingly with the intent of causing trouble.

As for the teens, while some appeared to be good-naturedly clapping along with the drumming, others can be heard singing what could be the tomahawk chop, though it could also be their misguided attempt to join in with Phillips’ tribal chant. If it’s the former case, that certainly is disrespectful and demands an apology, but perhaps stops short of being demonic.

And what of the boy in question—the one whose only demonstrated offense was smiling too long when Mr. Phillips stepped up to him? Should he have immediately retreated? Perhaps. But then again, that leer everyone thought they saw dissolves in another video into something that looks more like discomfort, suggesting he may have merely plastered an awkward grin on his face for lack of knowing what else to do. In support of this view, one angle shows him shushing a friend who argues back with one of the drummers.

The church need not overly concern itself with what secular media outlets got wrong or the disgusting calls for violence that resulted. But we should ask why so many blue-check believers, not to mention their hundreds of thousands of followers, were so eager to join an outrage mob against a child based on so little information. Even further, why were so many willing to extend that condemnation to the child’s parents, teachers, and school?

Given that some obliquely and some outright blamed our current political environment for bolstering the boys’ rabid hatred, most likely it all came down to those hats. It’s hard to imagine that a silent, smiling teen would have gone viral if he and his friends hadn’t been wearing MAGA gear.

We can debate the wisdom of donning a lightning rod political statement for an event like the March for Life, but it’s safe to say the boys didn’t wear it to insult Phillips, as they had no idea they’d be encountering him. The tomahawk chop existed before this administration, so it’s entirely possible they would have done that even if there’d never been a President Trump.

Yet, so many Christians find themselves eager to express a desire to do better than we have in the past in our treatment of minority believers, we rush unthinking toward opportunities to show our disgust at any accusation of racism in our ranks. We think we must not only have an opinion, we must broadcast it as quickly and stridently as possible, with the Biblical weight of Scripture often attached. This is a far greater error than so-called fake news, as we use our faith as cover for our rush to judgment.

Think of the young man whose face has now been plastered across the media, opening him to enduring attacks and penalties, and consider the travesty that Christians helped make that happen.

God’s Word warns us not to show preference to the poor over the rich because that too can be a temptation in matters of truth and justice. We likewise shouldn’t show preference to a Native American man over white teens without waiting for further facts.

Some church leaders have since deleted their condemnation while others have admirably expressed remorse and asked for forgiveness. Sadly, some of the most prominent have let the slander stand, leaving it to be drowned by whatever newer topics fill their feeds. Whether it’s the fault of cowardice, laziness, or ignorance, it’s conduct unbecoming our Lord’s service. If we have the time to condemn, we have the time to correct.

No matter how great our desire to show remorse for past and present collective sins, we can’t let our emotion run away with our discernment. Hot takes should be anathema to people charged to be slow to anger and slow to speak. The reconciliation of tomorrow won’t stand if it’s built on the lies of today”

#causes #world magazine #we’ve gotta do better than this #i’ve got to do better than this #listening #rush to judgment #compassion #facts #truth #Jesus #humbling #sad #march for life

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jackrxckham · 7 years

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ℒ (invxne. you knew it was coming)

send me a ℒ and my i’ll write a love letter my muse would write about/to yours! | Accepting

My Captain,

Though I do not expect you to ever glimpse upon this page, I felt obligated to commit to written record the tragedy of our situation, in case something untoward were to happen to me in the absence of our communication. I would not be able to contend with myself nor rest easy if I blinked out of existence allowing you to believe that the emotions I held towards you had altered in the slightest. They shall never, of that I am certain, for you have become something irreplaceable to me.

I assume that this is the reason why my chest aches so at the very thought of you, being as deprived of your company as I am. Your determination to see us suffer for the crew’s death - not that much of a loss I assure you as they wasted more coin than they ever earned - rips us apart in perhaps the cruellest of ways. Were you here you might have understood our reasons for behaving as we did - for though I am certain you know which of us initiated the plot, it is a shared responsibility and one we are unanimous in - but you were gone, finding yourself in the middle of fucking nowhere while they swanned around getting too big for the boots upon their feet.

You must understand I don’t blame you, nor resent you. I just bloody miss you. Your firm grip upon my shoulder; guiding me to where your attention is directed, your exasperated silence when my explanation has dragged on longer than you can bear to endure, and the physicality of you. But mostly I miss the way you saw something necessary in me that no other captain on this fucking island recognised, not even the man who mentored you in all things. When others saw simply a nuisance, you found potential; potential you were quite happy to exploit and tame into something loyal and underestimated, and so unseen.

Without you, I am adrift, lost in an ocean of what I ought to be and who I am. My potential dampened in the intense melancholy of loss of something so significant and my ambition unravelling at the seams to a wild, desperate lunge at anything that might mean something so that what is left of me does not become a nothing, worthless and all but forgotten from being. To know that it was you who cursed me to this stings perhaps more than I can bear.

Anne knows of course. She attempts to keep me tethered; insisting there is more than this, but with her bond with the Madame growing as you and I grow further and further apart, she cannot help but notice the obvious. She takes the bottle from my hand most fucking nights, when she demands I have reached the capacity of liquor and have taken on the personality of a wailing wench, but with your words still stark in my mind, it is never enough. I’d sooner drown myself in the most potent liquors I can afford than relieve that moment, as you have cursed me to, over and over and fucking over again.

The worst is you seem unaffected. I have always been able to read you with a certain degree of efficiency, and yet this time, you are stone, barely discernible to my eye, apart fro when you dare to descend from your tower upon high to mingle with those of your old life. I know we meant something to you, I know it was not just a brief dalliance to bide your time or irritate Miss Guthrie. I heard it in the spaces between words as your encouraged silence and felt it in the way your lips brushed mine as you held me waiting, demanding incoherently gasped pleas for release from your denial. I know it in the way we fell into ecstasy together; words unnecessary to cover what we had forged for ourselves. It was returned in all the ways I sought to be of use to you and garner your attention in the privacy of our own company.

Fuck, I’ve rambled too long and opened my heart to its lingering wound; fresh in its agony. I shall commit myself to a bottle or two, till your face is a blurred torment I can ignore and those haunting words do not echo in my ears. Perhaps I’ll even allow myself to hope that reconciliation is still possible, that my foolish heart’s call is not yet ignored, but still returned and I can linger in memories of the finer times. For though you have exiled me, I still love you, Chas, and will do despite our estrangement always. My heart is not so fickle and stubbornly remains loyal to the man who saw more in me than what was perceptible to the eye, who won it in his ferocity and showed me the truth of his own. Whether this situation alters for the best or remains constant, this shall be the truth of the matter and I have no desire to encourage it to change.

Yours always,

Jack

#invxne #verse; from castaway to captain (season 2)#bloody reckless fuck (invxne)#that is something i'm willing to put my life at risk over; how i'm seen in his eyes (jackxcharles)#(jack it said love letter not angst fest )#(jack also wanted to put a psa that though he says he doesn't resent him that does not extend to pirates pissing on him and ruining his #clothes. for that there is a lot of blame being thrown at charles bc /why did you tell heathens who don't appreciate fine fabrics/)#(idek why this happened but jack was very drunk and in a state of i miss you why this i love you you fuck )

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zindagigulzarhai-blog · 7 years

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Kuch Rang Pyar Ke - Episode 275-279 (20th March - 24th March, 2017)

This week had some of the best episodes of the show. I might not agree with everything that was shown, but it all laid out a strategy for what's going to happen next.

Dev leaving a note for Sonakshi asking her to take a painkiller and to rest was a great scene to start off the week with. It gave me hope that for the rest of the week, Dev and Sonakshi are going to be cordial with each other, and that's exactly what happened. The conversation they had when when they were stranded in the forest is what helped them both realize that they're both hurting from the separation, and that they both feel saddened in their own ways.

When Soha called Dev 'Papa,' I felt like I was happier than Dev was. When Sonakshi and Dev separated, Dev was left with no one. But that day, none of it mattered to him anymore. Sonakshi being genuinely happy about Soha calling Dev 'Papa' was heartwarming to watch. Of course, the highlight of the scene was the family picture. It felt so nice to see them forgetting all their problems, even if it was for a few seconds.

Dev's gesture of taking Soha and Golu to the orphanage was very sweet, something that made us believe that the old Dev still exists. The most important aspect of this scene was the way Sonakshi kept looking at Dev the entire time they were there. We can slowly see Sonakshi's facade falling off, and that she’s showing her true feelings towards Dev. The entire time they were at the orphanage, Sonakshi could only look at Dev, the Dev she had fallen in love with.

After watching that scene, it got me thinking about how this changes the game on who would first want a reconciliation. Until now, I was sure that Dev would be the first one to want a reconciliation, even though he would claim that he was just doing it for Soha. But after the orphanage scene, I feel like Sonakshi would be the one who would want to get back together with Dev. I feel like Sonakshi will tell Dev that she's ready to forget everything that he's done to her and her family, put everything in the past and start afresh with him and Soha as a happy family. We know that Dev wants nothing more than to be a happy family with Sonakshi and Soha, but not yet. For Dev, it doesn't change the fact that Sonakshi didn't trust his love enough. Sonakshi saying those things would not solve any of Dev's problems, as he knows Ishwari still hasn't changed. This time, he would not impulsively ask Sonakshi to be with him without being more than a hundred percent sure that Ishwari has accepted his relationship with Sonakshi with all her heart.

When Soha tells her parents that she wants to live with the both of them, it comes as a shock to Dev and Sonakshi. But to be honest, it's a very normal thing for kids who come from a divorced family to ask for. Even though Sonakshi explained to Soha that she and Dev will not be able to live together, Soha is still a child. Things like this will not be understood so easily by her at this age. Dev was concerned too about Soha's wish, so he voiced out Soha's concern to her by explaining to her, "Suhana, main shayad aapka acha Papa ho sakta hoon, aapki Dadi ka acha beta bann sakta hoon, Golu ka acha chacha bann sakta hoon lekin aapki mummy ke liye kabhi ek acha husband nahi ho sakta." I loved the fact that Dev handled that part of the conversation with a lot more maturity that I expected him to. So did Sonakshi. No blame games, no fighting, just calmly explaining.

What Dev and Sonakshi are not understanding is that Soha's demand is very normal. Seeing her parents together, it was a very obvious thing for Soha to ask for. For Dev, this whole parenting thing is new. He doesn't even want the idea of Soha being disappointed to enter his mind. Them giving in to Soha's demand is going to be interesting to watch, but something good will come out of it, I know it :)

Dev telling Ishwari that Sonakshi is a part of his life, but only as Soha's mom, made me very happy. Dev has finally acknowledged the fact that Sonakshi is Soha's mom, and there's nothing anyone can do or say to change that. To win over Soha, Sonakshi had to be won over first. And that's what we saw when Soha decided to call Dev 'Papa.' We saw her thinking about all the times Dev was with her mom, and how he helped her. Not only Dev, but Sonakshi too had finally accepted the fact that Soha is also Dev's daughter. There was no more 'meri beti' from either side, and that is such a progress. It was a treat to hear Sonakshi say, "Soha Dev ki beti hai aur usey jaan ne ka poora haq hai" to when Bijoy asked her not to inform Dev about their move to Kolkata.

Ishwari took me by surprise in the scene where she's talking to Dev about Sonakshi's presence in his life. With her arms folded, she had some new found confidence in her suspicion. She asks Dev, "Pata nahi kab peecha chodegi woh tumhara, kab teri zindage se hamesha ke liye..." to which Dev stopped her and said, "Sochke bol, Maa. Kya bol rahi hai tu?" Dev was firm with Ishwari in that scene and asked her to also acknowledge the fact that where ever Soha is going to be there, Sonakshi is going to be there too, but only as Soha's mom. Dev does not let his mom influence him anymore, and this conversation is proof of that. Ishwari saying that had Soha been brought up in her house, she wouldn't have been throwing a tantrum like this had me laughing to myself. Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like Soha's being unreasonable just like her Dadi? Isn't Soha throwing a tantrum just like how her Dadi would in order to get Dev to listen to her? Now now, what does Ishwari have to say to this. Ishwari's most ignorant and idiotic comment till date was, "Dev aur Suhana ke beech mein Sonakshi kahan se aa gayi?" Does Ishwari not know how babies are born? For her to even think that and actually say it out loud to Mami is proof that redemption is extremely far from her.

Asha made me very happy this week. The first time was when she asked Sonakshi if she started to love and trust Dev again. Asha was never against Dev. She always used to explain his perspective to Sonakshi. Even this time, Asha explained to her daughter that no matter what Sonakshi thinks about Dev, Soha is there as a joining force between them. The second time was when she told Bijoy, "Bachon ko agar meetha khilathe rahe to unhe mirchi khane ki aadat kabhi nahin padegi." That is so true. As parents, you cannot give in to anything and everything your (six year old) child asks for. Soha is just throwing a tantrum (like her Dadi and Dadu) and will get over it. I agreed with Asha when she told Sonakshi to let Soha go to Kolkata, as she will realize that she cannot stay without her parents, and will come back in a few days. Asha was the only sensible one to support Dev and Sonakshi in their decision of them staying together. Asha knows that something good will come out of this decision of theirs, she definitely is the coolest!

My most favorite moments from all the episodes of the week was when Dev tells Golu, "Purani aadat hain meri. Iss ghar mein rehne wale aksar mujhse naraz ho jaate hain, aur main aise hi bahar baith kar unka wait karta hoon, unka mood theek hone ka." That was the cutest scene of the entire week. I wish I had a reason to explain why I liked it so much, but it just brought back so many good memories to me of when Dev and Sonakshi used to date.

Dev and Sonakshi talking about Jatin was a scene which showed me how Dev and Sonakshi are not only cordial with each other now, but informal enough to tease each other a little bit. Of course, the highlight of that scene was when they both sat on the pavement, helpless about what to do. Dev saying, "Maine aaj itna helpless mehsoos nahi kiya, jitna aaj kar rahaa hoon. Shaayad uss din bhi nahi, jis din tum…" showed such a promise for their further interactions. They were finally talking as Dev and Sonakshi, and not just as Soha's parents.

Bijoy never disapproved of Dev until he saw tears in his daughter's eyes because of Dev. Bijoy didn't interfere in Sonakshi's choice until Dev broke up with her the first time. Bijoy not trusting the entire Dixit family is completely acceptable. Dev would've been the same, if not worse, to the guy who broke Soha's heart. My only problem with Bijoy is the fact that he's very interfering in Sonakshi's decisions, and that confuses her as to whether she's doing the right thing. This week, Bijoy did nothing but diss Dev, and think that a six year old's idea of moving to a different city is genius. Well, Kolkata isn't a secret place, and Dev can easily get there. It's not going to be rocket science for Dev to figure out how to get to Kolkata to meet his daughter. We know Bijoy is coming from a protective side, but he's becoming illogical by doing so. He literally started packing his bags the second Soha said she wants to move to Kolkata. If Bijoy tries one more time to keep Sonakshi and Dev apart from each other, as Asha said, Soha will blame her Dadu for keeping her parents away from each other. And what I don't understand is how Bijoy was ready to skip his own son's wedding ceremony in order to keep Dev away from Soha. I agree with the tweets that say just like how Ishwari is blind towards her daughter's needs, Bijoy is the same to Saurabh.

Sonakshi and Dev arguing about their new living situation was a fun scene to watch. First of all, thank you to Sonakshi for questioning Dev about what's wrong if she's a feminist. I don't want to get into the details of feminism, but i'm sure Dev will learn the meaning of it soon. Both Dev and Sonakshi not wanting to stay in the others' house was very understandable. If I were Sonakshi, there is no way i'd want to go back to that 'madhouse.' She was miserable there (except for when she was alone with Dev) and as she said, she was saying that with experience. Dev not wanting to go to the Bose house is understandable too. The Boses think he kicked them out of their house, so obviously they weren't going to welcome him into their home. So this temporary solution they came up with, as of now, is going to be very interesting to watch.

Before entering the Bose house for his week long stay, I loved the flashbacks and the memories that Dev was thinking about, "Ek baar phir, zindagi ne mujhe isi darwaze ke saamne laakar khada kar diya hain. Kitni ajeeb baat hain, aur aisa lagta hai ke jaise iss ghar se, ek nahi, kahi rishte jude hain. Boss, dost, boyfriend, pagal aashiq, aur ab pati. Lekin ye rishta, sabse khaas hain. Aaj se pehle, main kitna kuch tha. Lekin aaj ke baad, main sirf Suhana ka Papa hoon." I loved how he thought about all the different kinds of relationships he shared with Sonakshi. This was one of the best scenes of the week.

Dev and Sonakshi went against their whole family and told them that they made their decision of living together solely for Soha, and that it has nothing to do with anyone or anything else. It made me happy to realize that they are making this decision together. Dev and Sonakshi have realized that the other will always have a place in Soha's heart. Dev telling Soha that it was him and her mom who decided to stay together for Soha was something that I was waiting to watch. I wanted to see Dev tell Soha that he and Sonakshi are in this together, and only for Soha. And Dev thanking Asha for her support was heartwarming to watch. Dev always used to tell Sonakshi how understanding and supporting her mom is.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Dev staying in the Bose house isn't going to be that bad? I mean, of course, it's not going to be all rainbows and sunshine. But it's not going to be like Dev will be miserable there. I really wish something good comes out of his stay there. I really want Asha to explain to Dev all that Sonakshi had to go through after their separation. I would love to see that conversation between the two of them, a nice, mature conversation that makes Dev understand how Sonakshi was treated in the Dixit house. I hope the Boses also get to know that Dev had nothing to do with the evacuation and prenup papers, but I think it's too soon for that. To say that i'm looking forward to the next few episodes is an understatement!

#Kuch Rang Pyar Ke Aise Bhi #krpkab

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thejunkelemental · 4 years

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Communication

It came down to communication, didn’t it? I always felt like there was a growing barrier between us. I could not find the right way to talk to you. Every conversation I grew nervous. What mistake would I make? What trigger would I trip? I ran simulations in my head of what I thought you would say or what I thought you would do and they were always incorrect. Somehow, you forgot I loved you when we argued. The words ‘We need to talk’ would fly from my lips and your guard would raise. Slowly you’d extend your claws and rock back on your heels. What demand would I make? What misinterpretation had I made about your behavior? What insecurity was triggered by something you had done? You felt like you could never be enough for me, like you were trying to perform or reach some kind of standard I had set. You could never be clean enough, polite enough, on time enough, dedicated enough, sexual enough for me and the weight of that expectation drove you into despair and stole your creativity. There, you would perhaps think (as I imagine), here he will tell me I am a disappointment again. I try as hard as I am able and I am never enough. I have given all that I am and it is never enough. Maybe he does not want me at all...he wants some version of me that is not me. It must have been heavy, the weight of those thoughts. Day after day you held them. Day after day you worried I would ask for more while you were already at wits end. Trying your best to console me, feeling alone and abandoned yourself. You drew yourself into thinner and thinner strings till you finally snapped. But it came back to communication, didn’t it? If we had more time. Maybe started sooner, can you imagine what it could have been? We wouldn’t fight as much. Our passionate arguments would fold into each other. We would learn to laugh and let things go. To take the moments as they were. I know I am hypothesizing, but I can see it clearly. We used to be able to do that a bit, you know? Perhaps you forgot or maybe lost sight of it, but it was not always this bad. It really wasn’t. Our arguments had common cause. We both feared abandonment by the other and were so frightened we would not be enough or make the expectation. If I could talk to you from the past for a moment. You are enough. The words I should have said every time you suggested you were not. Life is a journey and when you are married, it is a journey you share together. We took on so much on ourselves, afraid that if we tried to put any on our partner we would break them. But how many times could I have come to bed earlier if I had just asked you to help me finish a few chores? If we had just done them when we got home? How many times could we have ended fights if I had just listened to you when you asked me to come to bed? How many times could you have just said you weren’t in the mood and we could just lay together in bed and kiss and tickle and wrestle? If I had a wish it would be another night with you. One without tension and fear. A night to watch shows together, build another fort (with my help this time). We would not talk of sadder things but hide away from the world itself. I cannot change your thoughts. You are a proud woman. You are a strong woman, snapdragon. You have always stood brave even when you felt weak and alone. I cannot imagine how hard things must be for you...and how much effort it takes to not reach out. Perhaps it is easier every day. We are different people and I loved that about us. I should have better embraced your differences as learning opportunities to expand myself. What if I had taken your strength and defended myself more readily? What if I had challenged my perceptions and tried newer things? What if I had embraced silence and confidence that you would always, as you said, come back to me? Communication. I know some would disagree, but others see our problems as fairly easy (on paper) to navigate. We did not beat each other. We did not have substance abuse. We did not have deep money troubles. As far as married couples go, we had the beginnings of what could be a good life. But we fought so much and the tension was so thick. I did not turn to therapy soon enough to see the results that would have alleviated your stress and we did not do enough marriage therapy to circle even the activities in the back of the book. I thought the vision of a perfect relationship between us, the list we wrote together, was a lovely one...and one I could strive for. One I could accomplish had I been given the chance. We both have things to work on in ourselves. Was it so selfish to hope we could work on them together and in support with each other? I felt like...love like ours so was so strong. We found each other through such chance and what we had was so magical and wonderful. Was it truly worth discarding? I do not want to own you. I do not want a parent. I want a partner who will be on my team and tackle issues together. I want a strong voice and one I am not afraid to be strong back to. If we could have worked on it, that submissive fear in me would have vanished. I was only ever araid that revealing my fears and thoughts would cause you to abandon me. They did. It happened directly after I revealed them. Maybe that’s why I am so afraid of you...I aways knew in my heart that you might wake up one day and fall out of love with me, break the spell that was on you and leave. I could not stop it. All I could do was ask. Please. Please reconsider. Please remember all the wonderful times we had and our life together. Please don’t discard us. But that was then and this is now. Communication. It must feel heavy that I am in the state I am now. Our world turned upside down as the entire world turned upside down. I lost my employment, botched my interviews, lost consistent connection to my friends all at the same time. A complete destruction of my life. I told our friend that if I survived this, I could likely survive anything life threw at me. But we both know how deeply I plummeted and how hard it is to escape from there. In my heart, I think the others are right. You will not return for a long time and next I speak to you...I will not recognize you. You will not speak to me the same way. There will be so many new walls. You will hide away portions of your life and double check all your actions to make sure I won’t read into them. What kind of a relationship is that? No. Better to abandon me entirely. Remove me from your life. Block me completely and cut me out. I am just another ex of yours that you cannot afford to have in your life...not because I will threaten you, but because I won’t stop loving you. Why would I? There is so much in us that was worth saving. I never asked to be apart from you. I never sought escape. The times before we were married? Immaturity. Now? The longer I partake in therapy the more I realize that I am someone who does not easily give up on people. I do not have the same skill you do for cutting people off. I never learned that skill and instead pushed for reconciliation and repair. I saved many relationships this way...and also locked myself in abusive ones or got myself hurt. Pluses and negatives to all sides. I await you taking the last of your things. And then I will do us both the favor of disappearing from your life. When you are finally done with me and the last of it is over...I will remove myself from your sight. Should I not? What would you gain by befriending me? What could you get from me you couldn’t from anyone else? Are you not popular? Are you not beautifuul and passionate and talented? You will never lack for friends and those who want to get close to you. Lose yourself in a new life and forget me. Be free, yes? What will become of me? I don’t know. I have not decided. I have lost all vision of the future and so wherever friends try to drag me just seems like more emptiness. My creativity is gone. My passion is gone. I barely subsist and continue to deteriorate. “You must not pursue” the therapists say, “She will only put more distance between you.” “What is the point,” I answer, “She has already put the distance there. I have no way back.” “Live for yourself” they say. “Why bother,” I answer, “Consider. I have led myself into a career path I hated. I spent twelve years in two relationships that left me more fucked up than when I began them. I exhibit narcissistic abusive tendancies, I worry my friends, I terrifyi my already controlling parents. I am manipulative. I am weak. I have lost almost everything I sink my value into. Now, as the world collapses around me? I collapse faster. I toy with suicide and people have begun to believe I was never serious.” Honestly. Just because I save spiders from being flung from the windshield into the highway? Harldy a trait worth preserving. You are not the lynchpin of my life, but you delivered a devestating blow directly during a time I was perhaps most vulnerable before Ia time I would be made much more vulnerable by a global pandemic. It was a bad time for it to happen )(Although no good time existed). It did give me the opportunity to discover all the opinions our extended friend group had about you though. They range from “Likely cheated on you for six or so months before this moment” to “She is a hero”. I imagine my reputation is similarly mottled, were you to poll.

Ah...what a contentious bunch they all can be. My crowning accomplishment, bringing them together as a safe space...what a farce. Liz called me a narcissitic abuser. A monster. I wrestled with that ever since. Now I see where she must have seen it. I see where you should see it as well. You could not see a future in which we were able to grow together and be happy. You lost faith in us and nothing could convince you to reignite it. My greatest failing will always be that I could not show you the us I saw and how to get there. That I left too much damage in the relationship unresolved...I had thought...hoped even, that I had been able to address it and have your forgivness.

Perhaps I never could.

Maybe you really should cut me out entirely. If you are biding your time, waiting to tell me in person that if we are to be friends it won’t be for a long long time, maybe a year or so. You might as well block me off everything and communicate through friends to get the remainder of your things. It would be much less cruel then making me wait. I know you did this for us. I will always be grateful to you for the time you spent convincing me that our marriage was safe space, that I could always come back here for love and support. It was the happiest four years of my life...even with the circumstances. Because I remember each and every one of our adventures and good times much better than any fight we ever had. I could always buy you presents when I was upset at you. My love was always stronger than my fear or my frustration or my sorrow. Once you told me all you wanted me to say is that I wanted you to come home and to be with me. I know that is not the case now. But all I want is for you to come home. Watch a show with me cuddled up on the couch in blankets. I want you to play Animal Crossing so I can make silly voices for the villagers. I want to talk move universes with you, theories. I want you to put makeup on me so we can see how it will look, I want to cram into an awkward bath with you. I want to wrestle with you and piggyback walk you outside. I want to save worms from puddles with you. I want to pick flowers with you. I want you to sit me down and teach me to craft and marvel at my terrible work. I want to learn to play the guitar while you practice on the uke. I want to dance in our living room. I will never love someone like you again. You were a brilliant sunspot in my life. You made things better and taught me to believe in myself and see beauty in myself. I wish I could have done as much for you...perhaps then this would not be thrown away. This was never a gamble to me. This will never be a bump in the road. I cannot change the past, but I want to change the future. If you believed in me once, maybe you could again someday. I miss you. I miss talking to you. But I will delete myself from your life to save you from having to deal with me. Just a little more time. Just a little more time to hope, and then I’ll be gone.

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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The Training Commission

After the end of a second ultraviolent American civil war, after we’ve placed the state under the guidance of automated systems—well, there’s inevitably going to be a Smithsonian exhibit. Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Byrne’s brilliant new speculative fiction newsletter—which received support from the Mozilla Foundation, and which we’re thrilled to share the first installment here today—collects the dispatches of an architecture critic with personal ties to the bloody conflict who is assigned to review the museum’s new Reconciliation Wing.

The authors explain: “The Training Commission is a speculative fiction newsletter about the compromises and consequences of applying technological solutionism to collective trauma. The USA, still reeling from a civil war colloquially referred to as the Shitstorm, has adopted an algorithmic society to free the nation from the pain of governing itself.” It’s also a hell of a story. There will be six installments in all, arriving weekly—subscribe here to receive the next five direct, as they say, to your inbox. Enjoy. -the ed

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: re: This is a bad idea Date: May 11, 2038 3:49 PM EDT To: Ellen Leavitt <[email protected]>

I understand why you think that would work, Ellen, but aside from generally having no interest in putting my personal life on display like that, I really don’t think me writing a tearjerker op-ed about a traumatizing exhibition display is going to get the Smithsonian to change their minds so much as convince them that the controversy will draw crowds. I’d rather deal with them through backchannels with my mom and sister on board, try to make this all go away quietly before the museum opens.

Thanks for the Kilfe token, I just saw it come through on the ledger. I’ll be running the runnable parts of the draft in my newsletter, I guess. Sorry again to let you down on this. I might have a beat on something interesting soon–too early to say but it means I think I’ll be down in DC for at least another week.

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: Some Things Don’t Belong In A Museum Date: May 12, 2038 4:30:58 PM EDT To: [email protected]

Apologies that it’s been a while since the last one of these. I’ve been busy, not successful busy, mostly pitching pieces in my new/old specialty. You’d think a contemporary moment so focused on rebuilding America would give some kind of shit about architecture, but uhm, nope.

What follows began as a review of the new Reconciliation Wing of the Smithsonian which a Very Kind Editor cherry-picked me for. It’s good to get paid to visit my hometown because, as my regular readers know, I will otherwise avoid the District like the sweaty American bog it is. I was apparently desperate enough for work to imagine the Reconciliation Wing might not feature an intersection with my own personal history, which, of course, was deeply delusional, and I took myself out of the game in a semi-dramatic fashion. Suffice to say, currently I’m fine but couldn’t really file something this incomplete so I’m sharing what parts of it could be salvaged here.

As seen from the National Mall ferry, the finally-completed Reconciliation Wing of the Smithsonian American History Museum is a major architectural interruption in the capitol’s low-lying landscape of retrofitted and elevated 20th-century buildings–which is ironic, considering how much attention went to making it seamlessly connect to the natural systems of the Anacostia canals. The first new construction project on the Mall since the creation of the DC canal system, the Reconciliation Wing has been subject of curiosity not only as an opening move in historicizing the National Shitstorm (ahem, The Interstate Conflict) but also as a formal progression in post-Capitol architecture. (Unless, of course, you believe that the bare-chested, perpetually shouting hologram of Alex Jones in the rear sculpture garden of the Newseum cannot be topped.)

The wing’s designer, Kay Mangakāhia, was a controversial selection from the Smithsonian and Ashburn Institute’s open call for submissions. An intern at Bjarke Ingels Group at the time, Mangakāhia was notable not only for her age (at twenty-two, she was barely ten at the time the Ashburn Accords were even signed) but her permaculture-infused proposal. The mycelium buttresses and living fungal structures of the Reconciliation Wing are now in high demand, but it took Mangakāhia’s persistence and the algorithm’s faith in her design to reach this plateau. The thriving structure’s delicate complexity and environmental pragmatism reflect the oft-quoted line from Mangakāhia’s original proposal: “survival without poetics is a carceral existence.”

One can’t say such an attitude pervades the exhibits in the Reconciliation Wing. Upon entry, a flickering series of Extremely Relatable Human Faces projected on black plinths greet visitors. The visages display a fairly narrow scale of emotions between Makes You Think and Slight but Telling Emotional Pain but somehow they manage to be all very specific. No context is provided. Given the purpose of the wing, one might suspect that these are some of the IRL victims of what the museum seems to have decided we’re calling “The First Algorithmic Society.”

Only upon arriving at a small, dim aperture is context provided: the portraits are all visuals generated by AIs developed pre-Shitstorm, let loose to slither upstream into visitors’ phones. They cull contact info, pictures, bank account etc. and put together a monstermash of the type of person you’re most likely to have an empathetic reaction to, then plugged said persona into the the loop, along with the last fifty or so visitors’.

This led to the other journalists in attendance performing variations on the exhausted sigh, since recent years have seen around half a dozen gallery shows in NYC using some version of this shock tactic (though, to be fair, rarely with the technical success of the Reconciliation Wing). While this installation is no doubt supposed to primarily remind visitors of the prevailing ease with which corporations accessed our pocket technological unconsciousnesses pre-Ashburn, it also serves the dual purpose of showing how vulnerable Palantir’s National Firewall is to even ridiculously outdated tech. Hence why the feds keeps running that Don’t Bring Your Phone to China/Don’t Actually Go to China Ever awareness campaign. (It shouldn’t surprise you that Vera’s written about this. Read her shit!)

Next is a long, narrow room skirted on the left by an unbroken screen which features a 1990s techno-thriller code waterfall with, again, no context. On the right runs a series of pictures, videos and artifacts designed to shock viewers into clubsterbomb memories–the remnants of a Google bus retrofitted and weaponized into a battering ram, that famous photo of the National Guard standing down at one of the many early BLM standoffs (everyone remembers the photo, never the standoff), a yellowing final print edition of the Washington Post.

To be fair, the Smithsonian’s only getting a fraction of the archival materials collected by the Ashburn Institute as part of the truth and reconciliation process. (This controversy–the splintering of the archive and intra-federal agency squabbles over it–does not get a mention in the exhibition.) Of course they went with the most bombastic acquisitions. But for all the attempted sensory overload, the wall text and captions are jarringly milquetoast, acquiescing to the kind of both-sides-ism that heavily aided the collapse of consensus truths in the first place. I wondered what kind of exhibit might have emerged had the Smithsonian received the full archives of the Training Commission–side note, has anyone ever actually referred to it as the Ashburn Truth and Reconciliation Council For A New American Consensus outside of official documents? Even Darcy Lawson called it the TC in her fucking victory lap TED Talk last year. When the director of the Ashburn Institute has embraced a term originally coined and deployed by critics of the project it seems like it might be time to drop the formalities.

Presumably, the TC is at least acknowledged in the exhibition. Considering that it enabled UBI, closed (almost) every prison in the country, and effectively automated the office of the Presidency out of existence, it would have to be. But I didn’t get that far.

(Here endeth the non-article.)

As longtime readers already know, I write about architecture and design here, not my brother. In fact, I don’t write about him at all. I have no interest in following in Ciarnán Whelan’s investigative reporter footsteps or reflecting on what happened to him in any public setting. I’m hoping that by the time the Reconciliation Wing opens to the public, a particularly distasteful section of the exhibition will be revised or altogether removed. But to include something so graphic with so little warning, with such a manipulative experience design, and with the gall to strategically place tissue boxes around the space as though that’s an act of mercy? It’s cheap and insulting. It doesn’t deserve to be written about. So I didn’t write about it.

Thanks for subscribing (and reading). Depending on whether a piece an editor’s been sitting on for months ever lands I might have something old-new for you next week.

From: Aoife T <[email protected]> Subject: Deadtech from a Dead Guy Date: May 13, 2038 2:31:58 AM EDT To: Avi Huerta <[email protected]>

Avi,

Did you read my last stringr newsletter? I mean, probably not by now since it just went out like under twelve hours ago and you have a small excellent child. But I can’t sleep, and you’re the kind of person who might be able to help but you also probably should read that first for context. (And, as context for the context, most of what’s below is what I wrote in a fugue state before realizing that I couldn’t send it to my editor.)

So I knew the real reason I got a press pass to the Reconciliation Wing preview wasn’t my bylines so much as my real last name. The press tour minders were practically levitating with morbid curiosity when I arrived. I managed to ditch them, lingering and checking photo credits (nerd) by about halfway through the exhibit. This meant, thankfully, that there was no one around when I turned the corner into the section I had secretly hoped wouldn’t be included: the tragic death of renowned journalist Ciarnán Whelan while embedded with the Last Luddite Revolutionary Guard, declared here by the museum to be a “turning point” in the Interstate Conflict.

I mean, I was expecting some triggering bullshit, but I wasn’t expecting the audacity of how it was delivered. Instead of taking the larger-than-life screen approach with that portrait everyone loves to use of him or a slo-mo attempt to make a snuff film elegiac, I got a fucking push notification on my phone from the museum AI.

“Please be advised that the following content may be disturbing to some,” it read. It turned out that wasn’t a notice to give you a fucking choice, just a preamble before the video started to play and I was fucking thirteen years old again, staring at my palm and a video of my big dumb reporter brother using his “serious correspondent voice” I always made fun of, just outside a New Mexico Facebook data center embedded with the Ludds. People forget how long the broadcast ran before the too-good-for-a-minor-militia “DIY” quadcopter IED actually hit. (This was, of course, the video that was broadcast on Facebook Live, the one that people said Facebook tweaked the algo to downrank when their role in the attack became clear. It didn’t work. As the wall text accurately notes, most people, like me, saw it live.)

The wall displays telegraphed the rest of it, though mostly I’m just guessing from what I vaguely remember seeing spinning on the walls in front of me right before I blacked out mid-panic attack. 90% sure they have a shot of Faraday Fields under construction, which should amuse you; also seemed like they get into the conspiracy theory/ies, which probably won’t.

I woke up in a basement office of the old Smithsonian, somewhere far below the canals. A slouchy middle-aged guy with no hair on his head and a throwback 2010s beard was sitting by the door, scrolling through his phone. “Welcome back,” he said, gesturing toward an ancient percolator with the elan of a long-suffering mid-level bureaucrat. The coffee smelled about as appealing as Anacostia scumwater, but I was too tired to turn it down.

I asked if I’d been out long, a little thrown that the Smithsonian’s idea of first aid was depositing me in an office with some rando who I definitely hadn’t seen on the press tour.

“A little more than an hour. The tour’s over. If you want to see the rest of it I can take you around in a bit.” Eyes a little too steady on me, he took the smallest sip of coffee from a mug which read No Taxation Without Input/Output. “You’re a good writer. I subscribe to your Stringr.”

“No shit, thanks man. What’s your name?”

“I was surprised to hear you took this gig,” he added, “Considering.” My face must have done something because he ducked his head slightly and said, “Sorry. Just came out.”

“Nothing new. Half my subscribers are legacy leftovers. Pity’s a driving force in my economic security, if you wanna call it that.”

His face compressed into a porpoise’s little O. “That can’t be true.”

(It’s true, shut up Avi, it’s true.)

I sipped some of the coffee, letting him know via performative sigh that it was shit. “So what’s your deal, guy? You volunteer to babysit me while I’m unconscious to fanboi out here or is this like your actual job?”

Said guy did some seriously inscrutable facial muscle constrictions, which I studied as an example of how not to behave towards formerly unconscious people. Then he smiled suddenly and said, “I have to get back to work.” He raised his eyebrows, actually raised his eyebrows, and gestured at the door.

“Well,” I said, standing a little unsteadily, blowing on and sipping the rough coffee one last time. “Thanks for the hospitality, I guess.” I watched him watch my right hand replace the coffee cup. I was pissed at myself that it couldn’t stop trembling, and I was pissed at him for noticing it. “You know whoever designed that section on my brother?”

“No.”

“You know who approved it?”

He thought about that a second. “Yes.”

“Do me a favor and tell them it’s manipulative and crass? That no one fucking needs to relive that?”

He nodded once, looking down at his coffee. I left before he could put his foot in his mouth again. Outside, in a arcing, narrow corridor I turned to see the name on the door: John Temblaine Paulson.

Shockingly, my phone had already synched up with the Smithsonian’s wayfinding platform, which guided me up two separate elevators then shunted me out a service exit onto Mangakāhia’s rhizomatic terrace. I took about three steps before palming my juul out of my bag and putting it to my lips, automatically clicking the button and drawing in hard before realizing that I had clicked no button and was drawing around an object which was definitely not providing me with a long-overdue nicotine hit.

It was a USB stick. The kind you might use in, like, 2008. Dead tech, and it looked it: scarred light purple shell and a connector skewed so hard I doubted its operability.

Avi, you are well aware that I have a fairly disordered work/home/personal life, but you’ve known me long enough to know my bag is always ordered. And never have I put a USB stick in my bag. Never have I, as an adult, even used a USB stick, much less carried one on my person. So John Temblaine Paulson had, quite obviously, stuck it in there.

Recalling his idle phone-scrolling when I came to and the inscrutable creepy expressions, I concluded the guy probably filmed me passed out in his office chair as some weird sex thing, then put that video on the USB somehow and left in my bag to taunt me.

Which, as I type this, sounds kind of insane but I was also coming off a blackout induced by re-watching my brother’s livestreamed murder, so logical conclusions weren’t exactly in reach. Plus the only thing in my stomach at that point was that shit museum coffee.

As I returned to the museum entrance the elderly docent who’d processed my credentials two hours ago welcomed me with a smile that demonstrated she’d completely forgotten who I was. “Lemme tell you about the kind of people you got working here,” I spat. “John Temblaine Paulson, that weird old pervert, how could you just let him–”

“John?” said the docent.

“–scoop me up like I was a puppy or something like small and stupid and throw me over his shoulder like a sack of onions or whatever he did, maybe he used a handtruck–”

“Paulson?”

“–and just spirit me down to his little serial killer sanctum and video me while I was passed out in his shitty little Federal-ass stiff-ass chair–”

“Temblaine?”

“Yeah, don’t even try to tell me you don’t know him.”

“Of course I know him, dear. He’s in Iceland for the month.”

That set me back, my jaw going while my brain stopped, and, luckily, nothing more coming out of my mouth. The docent smiled at me like she was worried I might be about to stroke out. “There’s no one in his office then?” I mumbled.

“Oh, that should be locked,” said the docent, but she was catching up and looking all concerned. “Were you there? In Mr. Tembaline Paulson’s office? Did someone take you there?”

And here, embarrassed and out of it yet suddenly aware of my own behavior, I was saying things like I’m confused, I think, apologies, you don’t remember who I am do you? and backing out of the lobby. With the docent oozing concerned utterances in my general direction, I fled through Mangakāhia’s rhizomes and caught a ferry back to the sliver of shipping container I’d reserved on the Marion Barry Inlet (of course I didn’t tell my mom I was in town, fuck’s sake). Wrote the article, cut off the part marked HAZARD PERSONAL SHIT, sent the other chunk to Ellen, fell asleep for three hours, woke up, wrote Ellen an email saying the article was shit, and then she said no it wasn’t but yeah she couldn’t run it, and then spent the rest of the night listening to the arrhythmic thud of water against the container hull and hating myself.

I tried to clear my head this morning by heading up to Air and Space. I know, I know you fucking hate that place, but my childhood nostalgia still beats out my discomfort at imperialist propaganda. It’s one of the last places in this city where I can actually space out.

You’ll be shocked to hear this is directly related to Ciarnán taking me there routinely as a key part of Big Brother Babysitting. Specifically, the museum’s second floor, where an exposed platform lets you look down on various high points of colonialist engineering. There’s a glass partition that I’d press against, as if there was nothing between me and the immense sun-drenched lacuna beneath us, Ciarnán at the ready just in case the glass shattered under the stress of my little form.

For just a minute, fingers dragging the smudging glass, now knee-height, looking down at the overlit off-season emptiness, I felt like I just might fall, like I just might be pulled back.

When I returned to the world somewhere around the Drone Wing, my phone buzzed insistently with one of FBUS’ all-hands alerts. Automatically I obeyed and was rewarded with not-John Temblain Paulson’s face enclosed in a little blue box. “Ashburn Institute staffer found dead in Potomac.” As my eyes blurred the images and my upper back instinctively scrunched into a defensive hunch, my hand curled around the USB stick still shoved in my pocket, fingernail scouring it again and again as if that might reveal whatever was stored inside.

So: can I come visit? Whatever this guy wanted me to see was apparently important enough to fake his way into the Smithsonian, and if I hand the USB to the case workers I’ll probably never find out what’s on it. You, on the other hand, have an oracular way with the dead tech, and who knows, maybe it’ll have some fun dirt on our New Algorithmic Society we can send to a real journalist or whatever. I mean, it’s probably not real spooky ops shit. But if it is, it’ll at least be interesting, right?

The Training Commission syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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reomanet · 5 years

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Andrew Sullivan: America’s New Religions

Political cults are filling the space left by the decline of organized faiths. Photo: Loren Elliott/Getty Images Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society. By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer. (There’s a reason, I suspect, that many brilliant atheists, like my friends Bob Wright and Sam Harris are so influenced by Buddhism and practice Vipassana meditation and mindfulness. Buddhism’s genius is that it is a religion without God.) In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism , released in October in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive. This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning. Art can provide an escape from the deadliness of our daily doing, but, again, appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life. Ditto history. My late friend, Christopher Hitchens, with a certain glee, gave me a copy of his book, God Is Not Great , a fabulous grab bag of religious insanity and evil over time, which I enjoyed immensely and agreed with almost entirely. But the fact that religion has been so often abused for nefarious purposes — from burning people at the stake to enabling child rape to crashing airplanes into towers — does not resolve the question of whether the meaning of that religion is true. It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice. Fanaticism is not synonymous with faith; it is merely faith at its worst. That’s what I told Hitch: great book, made no difference to my understanding of my own faith or anyone else’s. Sorry, old bean, but try again. Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning. In this respect, Steven Pinker is one of the most religious writers I’ve ever admired. His faith in reason is as complete as any fundamentalist’s belief in God. But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “ A Crisis in My Mental History ”: “I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’” At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover. Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.” I suspect that most thinking beings end up with this notion of intense love as a form of salvation and solace as a kind of instinct . Those whose minds have been opened by psychedelics affirm this truth even further. I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It said “Loving kindness is my religion.” But the salient question is: why? Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill , that they do, in fact, have “an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.” But the banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper. Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity that rests, in Jesus’ formulation, on a distinction between God and Caesar. And this separation is vital for liberalism, because if your ultimate meaning is derived from religion, you have less need of deriving it from politics or ideology or trusting entirely in a single, secular leader. It’s only when your meaning has been secured that you can allow politics to be merely procedural. So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world. Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided. For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness . And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening . Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution. The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty. I saw this most vividly when examining the opioid epidemic . People who have lost religion and are coasting along on materialism find they have few interior resources to keep going when crisis hits. They have no place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to. Many have responded to the collapse of meaning in dark times by simply and logically numbing themselves to death, extinguishing existential pain through ever-stronger painkillers that ultimately kill the pain of life itself. Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity. This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do. And so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults. Like almost all new cultish impulses, they see no boundary between politics and their religion. And both cults really do minimize the importance of the individual in favor of either the oppressed group or the leader. And this is how they threaten liberal democracy. They do not believe in the primacy of the individual, they believe the ends justify the means, they do not allow for doubt or reason, and their religious politics can brook no compromise. They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself — as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood. It is Christianity that came to champion the individual conscience against the collective, which paved the way for individual rights. It is in Christianity that the seeds of Western religious toleration were first sown. Christianity is the only monotheism that seeks no sway over Caesar, that is content with the ultimate truth over the immediate satisfaction of power. It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing it. It was on these foundations that liberalism was built, and it is by these foundations it has endured. The question we face in contemporary times is whether a political system built upon such a religion can endure when belief in that religion has become a shadow of its future self. Will the house still stand when its ramparts are taken away? I’m beginning to suspect it can’t. And won’t. What’s Left? Here are a couple of questions for Democrats about two of their potential 2020 candidates: What motivated Kirsten Gillibrand’s widely noted tweet this week? And why is there so much discontent on the left with Elizabeth Warren? On Tuesday evening, Gillibrand tweeted : “Our future is female. Intersectional. Powered by our belief in one another. And we’re just getting started.” I get the point: Women are succeeding more than ever before, are poised to do even better, and this is a great thing. But why express this as if men are also not part of the future? And “intersectional”? It’s telling that, in Democratic circles, this is such a mainstream word now that she doesn’t have to explain it to anyone. Gillibrand’s evolution, of course, has been long in the works — and reveals, I’d say, where the Democrats are going. When Gillibrand was a member of Congress, she identified as a Blue Dog conservative Democrat. She once campaigned in defense of gun rights, was in favor of cracking down on illegal immigration, voted against the 2008 bank bailout, and opposed marriage equality. Fast-forward a decade and look at the change. She first reversed her previous anti-gay positions, and was even instrumental in ending the gay ban in the military. By 2015, she invited Emma Sulkowicz to the State of the Union, a person who alleged they had been raped at Columbia University, despite Columbia’s, the NYPD’s, and the district attorney general’s investigations ending without a finding of rape, indeed finding “a lack of reasonable suspicion.” On social media, Sulkowicz was known as “Mattress Girl,” carrying an extra-long twin around the campus to exemplify the burden they felt (Sulkowicz identifies as nonbinary) and to pressure Columbia into expelling her alleged rapist. Gillibrand, who once opposed allowing illegal immigrants to get driving licenses, is also now a supporter of abolishing ICE. And, of course, she famously engineered the resignation of one of the more talented Democrats in the Senate, Al Franken, because of a forced stage kiss, allegations of groping, and a photo of him pretending to grab a fellow USO entertainer’s boobs. We won’t ever get to the bottom of all that because Gillibrand demanded Franken’s resignation merely on the basis of allegations, and within a day, Franken had resigned, before the Senate Ethics Committee had finished an investigation. “Enough is enough,” she declared , invoking the “existing power structure of society” to end due process for Franken. I do not begrudge Gillibrand for her transformation, but it is hard to believe that political calculation was absent. She’s running for president, and invoking the language of critical gender theory, she seems to believe, will help her in the primaries. Then there’s the Democratic backlash against Elizabeth Warren. You’d think it would be about her terrible political judgment, as demonstrated by her spectacular self-immolation on the “issue” of her claimed Native American ancestry. But no! The reason many Democrats have turned on her is that she used a DNA test at all to prove her family lore. From the New York Times : “She has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands … Ms. Warren has also troubled advocates of racial equality and justice, who say her attempt to document ethnicity with a D.N.A test gave validity to the idea that race is determined by blood — a bedrock principle for white supremacists and others who believe in racial hierarchies.” The social-justice movement’s suspicion of science, especially genetics, is at work here. And it is not “racial science” to examine your DNA to see which genetic subpopulation in the world you belong to, or where your ancestors lived. It’s science. So if you send off for a 23andMe test, in the view of many Democrats, you’re a white supremacist! This seems to be where the Democratic Party now is. Hunker down for a second term of Donald J. Trump. A Moment of Truth I almost never cry in movies, even tear-jerkers. But the other night, I sat down and watched Darkest Hour , the movie, now available on HBO, that follows (well, kinda) John Lukacs’s account of the five days in May 1940 when Britain, its entire army stuck in France and its air force still woefully unequal to the Luftwaffe, stared into the abyss. Many in the elite believed that some kind of accommodation with Hitler was the only option — keeping him at bay and preserving much of the Empire. That policy of a peace treaty was, to my mind, a highly persuasive way forward in the naked short-term interest of the United Kingdom. Lord Halifax famously championed it in a vital cabinet meeting. Something in Churchill resisted. There’s a factually ridiculous but dramatically powerful scene when Winston jumps out of his official car and into the tube, where the passengers greet him first with British politeness (no mass selfies back then), and then begin a conversation. Churchill lays out the reasons for a peace treaty and asks the Londoners what they think of dealing with Hitler this way. “Never!” they shout back. “Never!” Interests be damned. A figure like Hitler has to be confronted and defeated. To slink away from this moral obligation violated their sense of patriotism, their understanding of what Britain meant to a world suffocating in tyranny. The great symbol of this refusal to appease was, of course, the rescue of the troops from Dunkirk by hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Brits in various boats and ships, defying Nazi control of the air to save their “boys” as they called them. It was an upwelling of moral purpose, of real grit against all the odds, and as I watched Gary Oldman deliver the “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech that Churchill gave in the Commons, my eyes were swimming. Why had my response been so intense, I asked myself when my bout of blubbering had finally subsided? Part of it, of course, is my still-lingering love of the island I grew up in; part is my love of Churchill himself, in all his flaws and greatness. But I think it was mainly about how the people of Britain shook off the moral decadence of the foreign policy of the 1930s, how, beneath the surface, there were depths of feeling and determination that we never saw until an existential crisis hit, and an extraordinary figure seized the moment. And I realized how profoundly I yearn for something like that to reappear in America. The toll of Trump is so deep. In so many ways, he has come close to delegitimizing this country and entire West, aroused the worst instincts within us, fed fear rather than confronting it, and has been rewarded for his depravity in the most depressing way by everything that is foul on the right and nothing that is noble. I want to believe in America again, its decency and freedom, its hostility, bred in its bones, toward tyranny of any kind, its kindness and generosity. I need what someone once called the audacity of hope. I’ve witnessed this America ever since I arrived — especially its embrace of immigrants — which is why it is hard to see Trump tearing migrant children from their parents. That America is still out there, I tell myself, as the midterms demonstrated. It can build. But who, one wonders, is our Churchill? And when will he or she emerge? See you next Friday. Tags: interesting times president trump social justice kirsten gillibrand elizabeth warren Andrew Sullivan: America’s New Religions Most