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lost-in-zembla · 4 years

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Disco Elysium or: How I learned to Stop Wallowing and Love the Game

I will now review a videogame. No real spoilers. Just very vague descriptions below.

My writing this is uncharacteristic of me. I find most writing surrounding the video game industry to be repugnant. The industry (including the media surrounding that industry) relies upon the subsumption of subcultures on the fringe into the very center of the infernal machine where the dedicated and nostalgic nature of its fanbase can be exploited for capital. It’s the same process that produces Iron Man Funko Pops. Call me a jaded and pretentious pseudointellectual poseur, but in the case of Marvel the idea that this fucking billion dollar franchise with the biggest actors in the world somehow retains this guise of this ‘geek’ subculture is disturbing to me.

(If you have played the game Disco Elysium, then you can probably already see part of why I enjoy it so goddamn much.)

I don’t mean we should gatekeep. My point is the media attached to these quote-geek-unquote industries wants to milk the same cash cow (e.g. 10 AWESOME THINGS IN THE LAST OF US 2!) Coming from an academic environment of criticism, I crave at least the appearance of an honest and thorough critique of art. In my experience, you really need to go past the surface to find any reliable ‘takes’ on contemporary videogames. That being said, there’s a lot of good work being done in the form of video essays.

In any case, I play videogames relatively often. Competitive shooters, mostly. But I suffer no story in videogames. Why would I? I read the most *genius* pieces of literature in the English language. I’m too *good* for that. So when I heard all the buzz about Disco Elysium last fall, it fell on deaf ears. Detectives? Disco? Isometry? Story-heavy. Ugh. I’m interested in none of that. But about a week ago, a friend of mine bought the game. Unlike me, he is a real adult with a real job so it was just a whim on his part, I believe. I looked at the game and, with Steam’s lax refund policy in mind, I bought it. In the past week I have put approximately thirty hours into this game. This review is a way for me to explore my own thoughts surrounding the game, thoughts that I didn’t include in my steam review (See below.)

So it was devastating, sure. And this devastation was somehow positive. One thing that I would like to make clear about me talking about this game is that it is fucking useless. Disco Elysium possesses that quality that exists in all great art; it is irreducible. When I try to explain this game to my friends, I find that my words fail to describe what’s so great about the game. Let me give you the elevator review I’ve come up with. *This game has allowed me to explore the breadth of human experience*. It’s an absolutely insane thing to say about a game. The writing, the art style, the story, the world, the RPG gameplay, they all work together to create a kind of experience that I have never encountered in a piece of art before aside from those few, fleeting moments when you feel as though you truly *get* an encyclopedic novel you’re reading (and in my case I usually don’t get it.)

I will not delve too deeply into the mechanics of the game. There are probably plenty of articles and videos that describe the game already. Put simply, the game is about choices. You can choose to solve the murder however you want. You can say absolutely batshit things to people. You can say mildly bemusing things. You can speak apocalyptic prophesies, espouse communism, conservatism, Moralism. race science.. There are moments when you genuinely *feel* like you can say anything, which is quite a feat when you really only have a few dialogue options at any given moment.

As you’ve noticed, this is not a review of the videogame. Playing this game after a tough breakup was sort of earth-shattering. I mean, not only am I navigating through a strange virtual world with its own history and culture and cosmological makeup, I’m diegetically grieving over being left by my *divinely* beautiful ex while I, the player, undergo a similar process and find similar coping mechanisms. Playing this game was like knowing the funniest clown in the world, a clown so funny that you thank him when he occasionally punches you in the chest to make you *feel things*.

The plan wasn’t to make a character whose qualities reflected my own. I just wanted to play the game. I wanted to win. It just so happened that because *I* was the one playing the game, the character essentially turned into me. It doesn’t help that I, too, have had my issues with alcohol, drugs, commitment, and mental health (in no particular order). The character ended up becoming *me* in a way that I’d never experienced before. I faced ethical dilemmas. My ideology was shaken. This game achieves unbelievable mimesis.

Here’s the wild thing: this game has changed me. I feel like a thirteen-year-old white boy who just watched The Boondock Saints and got a pretty okay over-the-pants handjob at the same time. I’m thinking about my life in terms of choices. The game enforces a kind of perspective of the world that highlights its contingency and the permanence of choices. You can, of course, save your progress in the game and reload whenever, but I found myself just sort of riding out the bad choices I made unless they were game-ruiningly catastrophic. (E.g. I had a “thought” equipped that made me fail every unrepeatable *red* check during a pivotal firefight; it was a hilarious disaster. We were essentially mowed down.) I stood by most of my bad choices. After all, I made the choice using the information I had at the time.

I am not good at this game. I absolutely bungled the investigation. I was just a pawn for forces far greater than myself. Seven people died, and I know that I could’ve saved a few of those people, if not all of them. I think about it sometimes. I think about what I could have done, how I could have gone deeper to find out what’s *really* going on, how I could take control of the investigation rather than be taken control of. Maybe I’ll play the game through again, but the first playthrough is kind of magical if you know absolutely nothing about the game like I did. If not for an absolute deus ex machina at the end, I would have been taken to the madhouse. It would have been an unbelievable failure.

During that deus ex machina moment, by the way, a goddamn tear rolled down my cheek. Yeah, I’m in a rough place, personally. But I don’t *cry* over characters in art. They’re not real. But damn if that changed. I tell you it’s changed *me*. I care more for characters. I know they’re not real but they represent something that I can relate to, no matter who they are. This game has made me think about empathy more. Maybe it’s because I dumped all my points in the emotional skills. Maybe I’d be more violent if I rolled with the physical skills. Maybe I’d feel like a superstar if that’s what I chose to pursue in the game. Disco Elysium feels open-ended enough that if you sign up for the story, the aesthetic, and the investigation itself, then you can get whatever you want out of the experience. The game, again, achieves incredible mimesis.

The mimesis is so convincing in Disco Elysium that it feels as open-ended as reality, with one caveat: you *know* it's a game. You, as a player, know that the experience of Disco Elysium is a designed one, that it was created as a sort of origami structure, that there is narrative and, god help us, *meaning*. What this game-knowledge afforded me during my playthrough was the constant sensation of synchronicity. I found myself saying “I don’t know how this element will fold into the grand structure of the game, and it almost seems impossible that it should become part of the investigation narrative.” But because I know it’s a game, I am graced with the confidence of the highly religious. Everything will come together in the end.

This is not a review for a videogame. This is a confession. I am deeply flawed and I want to change that. My worldview has been shaken because of a videogame. I don’t want to be that kind of animal anymore.

I’m trying to empower myself, to become more aware that my choices do indeed matter, have always mattered. I’m trying to be more pragmatic, to consider the things I want to do in terms of their result rather than the momentary pleasure I will derive from doing them. Now *that’s* a change for me.

I’m trying to be more empathetic, more willing to imagine the perspectives of others.

I am trying to give the world around me the benefit of the doubt. It is easy for me to think of the world as a random coincidence of matter, but if you look at the world with totality in mind everything seems to take on this Spinozan glow of divinity. The human mind is a meaning-making machine, I think. If I look at the world as fundamentally devoid of meaning, then that is still meaning. It is nihil-ism. It’s still an -ism. But if I ascribe to the world a kind of glowing potential, as though meaning were to be found in every speck of matter, then I feel invited to participate in this massive dance that we’re all a part of.

I’m trying to be more adventurous, because beneath the surface of things there seems to be a vast network of relationships, causation, possibility and, god help me, *story*. Or maybe it’s not beneath the surface of things, maybe there is no Deleuzian schizophrenic depth beneath the surface, perhaps the world is a homogenous and ever-developing surface upon which I constellate meaning and, thereby, create it. I’m trying to create a story for myself that will hold a candle to my experience playing Disco Elysium. I didn’t ask for this; it was just what I needed. It was, in a word, unforgettable.

#disco elysium #criticism #game review #videogame #video games #hire me zaum #I dont want to be this kind of animal anymore #essay

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mvnvgedmischief · 4 years

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bad luck: chapter 4

keep your thoughts by your pillow

2k words

work summary: normalcy. remus lupin has always craved normalcy. so he keeps his life at home in wales, where he’s a normal muggle boy with normal muggle friends and normal muggle interests separate from his school life, of magic, mischief, and deception. the only thing allowed to cross the threshold? his skateboard. however, he tries desperately to hide it from his friends, for fear of his favorite, normal muggle interest being taken from him, his space being violated. too bad sirius black has shaken up his entire worldview, and he can’t keep his friends out forever.

chapter summary: the beginning of the term scares the shit out of remus. what was sirius to him? what would the marauders do with remus’s suddenly accessible skill set? how much trouble was he willing to get in

cw: internalized homophobia, slurs

read it on ao3

The summer came and went, and when the boys returned to school for their final year, Remus notices something in the dorm that he’d never seen before. A board beside Sirius’s bed, emblazoned with a black dog and quite a few stickers. Remus thought it was fitting, matching up quite well to the board beside his own bed, with all of its iridescent moons and its stark black background. He wondered how much Sirius had picked up during the summer, if he had picked up anything at all. Remus wondered if the board was for show, the same way he ripped his jeans or scuffed his shoes for show. Something about it being a “statement” he had picked up from his minimal consumption of muggle culture, exclusively relegated to rolling stone magazine. He knew Sirius had tried to learn over the summer, he read it in his letters, but he also knew that James was keeping him from skating whenever he could, for fear of Sirius getting hurt, which was something he learned from James’s letters. He wondered how the events that took place that summer would change things, but one thing was for sure, he wasn’t ready to face it. Unlike his usual course of action, which was to disappear into the shadows and go skate, when Remus noticed James and Sirius were approaching. He wanted to disappear. He didn’t want to think about the sweet letters or the kind words or the secretive kisses exchanged under the cover of darkness in Sirius’s room at the Potter’s. He didn’t want to think about it, because he didn’t know what any of that meant for them right now. So he hid because he had no choice. His scrawny form is tucked under the bed in an instant, and he can feel his heart beating against his chest. He doesn’t know when he got so fucking scared of his friends. Sure, he’d always kept them at arm’s length, they weren’t anything like the kids he ran with back in Bangor, but that didn’t mean he was afraid. It just made him smart. Smart enough to know that the smarmy gits, for as much as he truly did care for them, probably would never think of him as on their level. Remus was rough around the edges, with his accent and his second-hand school supplies, his chewed pencils, and his moth-eaten robes. He didn’t fit in with them, and he probably never would. The wolf wasn’t even the problem– the thing that kept him separate– it was him. All of him. The fact that he was just a kid from Bangor trying to make something of himself. That was what separated him from Sirius and James, with their lavish homes and their new clothes, new books, and lavish quills. Remus could never be like them, and that reality was slowly beginning to set in.

“Moony I know you’re in here.”

Shit. He’d been hiding, sure, but now his breathing had run ragged with the panic brought on by his quarter-life crisis about just how different from them he was. He didn’t know what to do, so he tapped on the side of the bed, as if to say ‘down here, can’t talk.’ But Sirius is much more perceptive than Remus has ever given him credit for, and he knows that something is wrong. At least, Remus assumes he does, because in a moment Sirius is on the floor beside the bed, storm grey eyes locked on him, and a soft smile briefly gracing his face. Long limbs reach out and pull Remus out from under the bed easily, and Remus is reminded just how strong Sirius is. Strong from his hours on the quidditch pitch, taking his bat and sending bludgers flying off in the distance. Sirius was strong, for braving the things he had, his family and his brother, for running and getting out of there. And suddenly, Remus is overcome with guilt. He feels guilty because his eyes have welled with tears and his face is pressed into Sirius’s chest, breathing him in. And it’s hitting him that this is something he can’t have. He can’t have this closeness, he can’t have Sirius’s arms wrapped around him. Not anymore, this is not permanent. Not when he’s so different, and the wolf pulls at his bones every month, tearing him up inside and out, laying him bare like he is standing trial for his sins in the light of the full moon. He can not take the remainder of Sirius’s youth from him, with the drama of his condition and the status of his youth. He can’t seem to stop the tears from coming, but he can feel Sirius’s long fingers carding through his hair.

“Re, love, what’s wrong?”

“I-I can’t,” Remus doesn’t know how to explain what he means, he’s never been good at the whole feelings thing. However, if nothing else, Remus has always been prone to word vomit. The comments come out in hot, acrid, sobs, alphabet soup spelling out poor, different, wolf and Remus has nothing else to lay bare in this space between them, halfway beneath the bed like a frightened child. “I– I can’t do this Siri– I-I-I’m not– I’m poor, and not like you. I– the wolf and panic disorder and depression and all I fucking have is a skateboard–” He forces out, his shaking hands grasping on Sirius’s shirt. He doesn’t know how else to explain it. How else does he explain the fact that he can’t get out of his bed somedays or the way his heart tries to eject itself from his chest and his lungs feel like they’ve collapsed in his chest when his brain moves to fast for his body.

Sirius’s voice sounds smooth like butter and soft against the piercing ringing in his ears. His hands feel like they’re winding the fear, tension, and panic right out of his body. “Re,” he whispers, arms tightening around the shaking boy before him. Remus knows he’s probably scaring Sirius, freaking him out with all of his chaos that he’s kept under wraps for so long. Remus wants, so desperately, to scream out I’m bent! I’m disgusting! Stay away! But he also can’t force himself out of Sirius’s arms. Not when Sirius’s arms feel like home in a way he’s never experienced, save for those few moments when they had their limbs tangled together.

“Re, it’s okay. ‘M not going anywhere. Don’t want to.”

“Sirius you– you can find someone else. Someone with more money, who won’t try to hurt you once a month. Someone who d-doesn’t just disappear for hours at a time because I can’t figure out how to feel about stuff.”

“But Re, don’t you get it?” Sirius began, and Remus feels his body still in rapt attention. “Re, I want you, because you go skate for hours when you need to think, because you deadpan like no fuckin’ other, because your eyes are just as golden as your hair, because your smile is crooked and lights up a room.”

“I don’t–” Remus wants to protest, but he doesn’t even know what to say. So instead, he takes as many deep breaths as he can muster, and tries desperately to calm down. He doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t know what else he can do. So he just tries to calm down, focusing in on Sirius’s fingers twirling through his hair and rubbing circles in his back. When he finally collects himself, he stands up grabs his board and walks towards the door. He doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t want to be followed.

“Wanna plan a prank when you get back?”

“Yeah, sure.” He mumbles in return, running off to relax. He makes his way through the castle, and when the Room of Requirement’s door appears before him, he couldn’t be more thrilled. When he opens it, he finds a vert ramp, a five-step, and a few rails. It’s like being home again, and he spends the next few hours trying to perfect any and every trick he could think of. He grinds the rails, pausing every few hours to wax. It felt like a catharsis, like all of the things that he couldn’t figure out how to say were bleeding out of him with every fall, with every landed trick, and with every moment he got to feel that invincibility that came with a jump.

He returns to the dormitories when he’s finally sorted through the haze in his brain, and his friends look overjoyed to see him, but none as much as Sirius. Sirius looks him over, clearly ogling him in full view of the other two marauders, and Remus knows there’s a slight flush rising on his cheeks. He throws himself down on the floor next to Sirius, their thighs brushing slightly. They plan their prank for the beginning of the feast, moving through the planning process with ease. Remus was excited, it was going to be fucking killer if you asked him. And the new skill set that he had given his friends access to afforded the marauders an edge that they never had before.

The next day, Remus begins by pulling on his usual uniform of jeans and a faded t-shirt, and grabbing a pair of sunglasses for good measure. He lets the other marauders know he’s ready, and they get started prepping the rest of the prank. Remus was meant to skate through the hallway, setting off fireworks charms, while the other boys removed the toad choir from Flitwick’s office, and released it upon the beginning of term feast. It was going to be gnarly. He rushes out into the hall to begin his portion of the prank, skating into the kitchens and grabbing himself a bottle of butterbeer. He summoned a straw and popped it into the bottle, and then he was off, setting off fireworks at a rapid pace that the marauders had never had the ability to before.

“A student skateboarding through the hallways? I’ve never heard of such a thing!” McGonnagal’s voice rang loudly in his ear, but he didn’t care. He skated right past her, shouting “Life is a party and I’m the pinata!” continuing on his way proudly. He got such a thrill from it, that he almost didn’t care that it was a success. But after being summoned to McGonagall’s office, and being rewarded with 50 points from Gryffindor and four weeks of detentions, it definitely felt like they had started the year off right. When their sentencing was over, James and Peter valiantly offered to head to the kitchens and steal some food, since they had missed it in their efforts to prank the student body. Remus and Sirius were all too eager to see them go, returning to their dorm with a swiftness they didn’t even know they possessed. In a moment, their lips are pressed together again with the sweet fire that constantly smoldered in Remus’s veins, setting off a reaction he wasn’t sure he was prepared for. Everything felt like too much in the right way and Remus wondered if he had been wrong all those years ago. If maybe this was the meaning of life that he had thought about. Because when they’re in bed together, and Remus is reacquainting himself with the subtle scars that marred Sirius’s smooth skin, and Sirius is retracing the map for freckles and moles with a reverence that rivaled the way Remus revered his board, it felt like they were the only two people in the world.

shoutout to remy for this amazing artwork @unexpectedcronchiness

#wolfstar #wolfstar fic #wolfstar angst #wolfstar hurt/comfort #sirius black #sirius black x remus lupin #remus lupin #moony and prongs #moony & padfoot #bad luck #my shit

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mynameisdreartblog · 4 years

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Structural Isomers 3

Libra: 2,2,4-Trimethylhexane. <The familiar bell to mark someone’s entrance into the library chimes again. Yellen, after rubbing her magnifier for a comically lung time, peers up to greet whoever’s there. However, a striking intuition splashes her mind, which results in an aftershock of total disgust that needs to be disguised for the sake of etiquette> Oh, hello… you. «Good morning, granny. So, what’s new here?» <Yellen thinks to herself:> Goddamn Inez again. And here I was thinking he’d never come back! «Still holding onto all these worthless texts? You of all people should know by now that there’s nothing valuable here… Actually, I don’t want to be that harsh, but still: Necessity calls!» These works still hold considerable weight to our modern world, young man. «Keep up with the times; we’re on the edge of it being ‘postmodern’ now, which means everything here will become even more antiquated.» <Yellen thinks to herself again> Ugh, he’s put on this completely fabricated hatred of literature to justify his intentions of buying up the property here. So shallow, but at least I’m getting closer to knowing who’s paying him. The transition into a new world makes preserving older knowledge all the more worth it in my eyes <Yellen grips her wrinkly flesh around her pens.> «Heh, you seem aggravated by my progressivism.» Yes, because you’re violating one of the rules <Yellen pulls out a pristine paper, in which the second rule states “no political discussion”> I’d hate to be rude, but I think you’re overthinking and making up a ‘political issue’ again, and that leads you to discussing it loudly on the premises. That isn’t tolerated, as the politics (like everything else contentious) remains in the books here. «Oh, but the politics are happening right outside as we speak!» <Arduous and nonsensical conversation can be heard mumbling through the front door. Promptly, Yellen claps her hands once and the door becomes reinforced with sound-proofing, intimidating Inez> But this space is a different world with different rules, dear Inez.

Cancer: 3,3,4-Trimethylhexane. Time for a flashback way back in medical school. You know what you remember the most fondly? <Springe takes a puff from his cigarette: An almost disparate drag. He holds on this moment for dramatic effect and resumes speaking> Learning how to treat patients. <The lounge around him stares silently, thinking how out of character this was for him, and they were waiting for the inevitable fake-out> I’m serious, guys. Normally, I’m not an empathetic person, which makes you wonder why I got into this, but those instructors really beat those flaws out of you. They take the flaw you had before and make it into an entirely different character flaw, actually. «You went from not caring to caring too much?» Precisely, Luna! Passion took its cold, meaty hands and frightened the criminal in me. «How do you know my-» In anatomical dissection, the words of “you’re special because you’re human” kept banging in my head. It made me realize the place I was in while slicing through the fetus’s flesh. [,] Oh, it’s in my head with a permanent residence. <Luna mumbles to herself> «He’s way too cheery today; he must be manic again.» “You have quite a lot of sympathy for that pig you just dissected, Springe. We have all of those bones to protect that which is most vulnerable inside of us: The gross and mushy stuff.” To which I responded with “shouldn’t you be describing this in a more professional manner?” But I was the fool there, <Springe takes another puff from his cigarette> and the teacher said “toss it in with the rest.” That’s when they threw everything into a biowaste basket and I automatically passed that assignment. Thank God it’s that wonderful education that stopped me from becoming a shrink! <A nurse interrupts Springe, stating he has a patient to see> …What’s their history of cleft palate surgery again? Let me see here… Oh poor thing, it’s her first time.

Virgo: Nonane. It's blah, like my personality. «What about this one?» No, you don't understand; I want something deliberately tacky that we can all wear through the parking garage. «Bluma, there’s nobody here to see us; why do you care how we look?» It’s about how we look to ourselves! «So, you want to wear something you dislike? …I don’t get you.» I’m an expression you can never solve, Jouka. «Ah… Science has enabled man to split the atom and explore the cosmos, so one day, we’ll be able to solve the mystery of you.» Maybe you can solve this mystery! <Bluma playfully lifts the ephemeral capes from her studded leather boots, stomping them to the ground in a way to assert spatial dominance and showcase their fragrance> «H-holy shit! Where have you been keeping these, girl?» They’re imports. <Jouka ogles her boots while thoughts of how their previous goth fits were never truly complete because they didn’t feature boots like these. A mix of envy and pride fills their heart.> «Imports: How much did you pay?» Well- <skateboards can be heard echoing from the top of the parking garage: They indicate sharp and swift movement alongside a disregard for the physics of the structure> We’ve got company. «Ah yes, those skateboarders must be a threat.» No time for sarcasm, Jouka. «…I’m in agreement with you.» <Crumpled cans fall from the top floor, landing with a light grace and a hollow pang> They’re already attacking <Bluma quickly pulls out a retractable baton hidden in the new boots, making an intimidating clang.> Oh shit, I didn’t think you took that as that big a threat. «You agreed, didn’t you?» To a degree, hon. <Brandishing her boots once more, Bluma readies her legs to begin rushing into the building> «What’s the holdup: Are you not confident enough?» You let your worldview get shaken by what the books say: How are you more confident than me? <The cans from before explode violently, leaving a hazy smoke cloud in their wake. What happened to the two?>

Sagittarius: 2,2,5-Trimethylhexane. <Rossouw wipes the sweat off her brow and tries to avoid the pain she’s receiving from both the sunlight-induced headache and the memories plaguing her thoughts> Two parallel assholes in my life: Unbelievable! After everything I’ve been through, I’m at the end of the road again. I keep going at it, thinking things will change this time in an epic twist of fate, but fate always wins! The songs I sing, the art I make: All things I do to spiritually reinforce a positive ending get flipped on me. The mystics tell me it’s to learn a lesson, but I think that’s what they say to soothe the suffering. <Rossouw keeps monologuing to herself in a self-repeating way, constantly wondering what went wrong. This continues until she’s at the brink of realizing something life-changing, only for it to be interrupted by someone asking for directions> «Hey, do you know where these roads diverge?» <Rossouw communicates almost automatically> Yeah, they diverge about four miles down from this station. <Afterwards, she is utterly dazed at the fact that talking with this white man in a jeep completely erased her newfound knowledge. A great insecurity overtakes her, feeling like the opportunity has already left her, she tries to compensate immediately for the otherwise profound grief this would bring her> Hey, do you want to hear a story? «I got five more days here, so go ahead.» During my time where I was stationed in Uganda, I met a petite woman: She looked like someone suffering immense grief, like a massive opportunity was taken from her. I approached her and asked what was wrong, and she replied “my daughter’s gone: They took my daughter away from me!” I was immediately worried and replied “was it the terrorists?” And she replied “no, it was the American couple who came and took my baby!” Turns out, their child was stolen from them because of international adoption policies. That's fucked up, huh? «Uh, yeah. You know, I was expecting a more… wholesome story?» Right, right. I’m so sorry, holy shit. «Thanks, goodbye.»

#Zodipunc #Zodiaccupuncture #Libra #Cancer #Virgo #Sagittarius

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laserhunter136 · 3 years

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Educated By Tara Westover Amazon

Imagine you were born and raised in a family with radical religious beliefs. And imagine you didn’t have a birth certificate until the age of 9 and were not allowed to go to school until 17. Would you be able to muster the strength to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge? “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of a fascinating firsthand witness!

Raised by Mormon survivalists

Tara Westover was born in a small Idaho farming town, the youngest of the seven children of Mormon survivalists Val and Laree Westover, hidden under the pseudonyms Gene and Faye in the book. Due to the beliefs of the couple, Tara was born at home, and she was not issued a birth certificate until she reached the age of 9. Until then, there was no way for anybody outside of her family to know she had been born at all: Gene and Faye had decided to live in isolation after the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents ambushed and gunned down a woman and her 14-year-old son for, at worst, a minor offense.

Even before that event, Gene had firmly believed that public schools were just a way for the socialist American government to brainwash individuals into obedient slaves of the system, which is why neither Tara nor her six siblings ever got a proper chance to experience education. Gene didn’t believe in hospitals either, meaning Tara’s concussions or burns over the years were treated with herbs and home medicines. On the other hand, Gene did believe in a Mormon God, and this god (like, unfortunately, most other gods) didn’t seem to be that fond of women, proclaiming their place to be in the house – which is where Faye was all of the time.

Skip to main content.ca. Tara Westover grew up in the same era as Vanilla Ice, 'Beverly Hills 90210,' 'Saved by the Bell' and MC Hammer but apparently none of those other 'book learning' kids in town mentioned this. Pretty much the only pop culture references in the book involve Ralph and Alice Kramden. Tara Westover grew up in the same era as Vanilla Ice, 'Beverly Hills 90210,' 'Saved by the Bell' and MC Hammer but apparently none of those other 'book learning' kids in town mentioned this. Pretty much the only pop culture references in the book involve Ralph and Alice Kramden. Harrowing, near-fatal accidents appear in what to seem to be. Buy Educated: The international bestselling memoir 01 by Westover, Tara (ISBN: 021) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. “Like The Glass Castle, Educated is a wise and deep reflection about surviving one’s family. I bow down to Tara Westover, not only for her marvelous, sentence-by-sentence craftsmanship but also for making sense and meaning from a confounding and hair-raising childhood.

Tara’s grandmother wanted her youngest granddaughter to get a proper education, so one day, when Tara was 7, she offered her a chance to escape to Arizona and go to school. Tara, however, stayed. To nobody’s surprise, really, not even hers. To this day, she claims, she has very fond memories of her childhood. In view of what followed, that is somehow hard to believe.

Opening doors to the world

At the age of 10, Tara’s mindset changed abruptly. It happened when her 18-year-old brother Tyler, the third son of Gene and Faye, announced one day his intention to go to college. Gene, of course, objected to this choice, both because Tyler’s older brothers Tony and Shawn were not around the house anymore to help and because, well, he believed that going to school would not teach him how to support a wife and a few children. However, Tyler persisted, and this inspired Tara to start reading a bit more, mostly the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

Soon after Tyler left, Tara’s older sister Audrey left the house as well; and the only ones who remained were Luke, Richard, and her. Due to the lack of helping hands, Gene had to move away from farming and Tara had to help him. So, already at the age of 11, she was scrapping old cars for parts. However, she felt that she could do better, so one day, she posted a flyer at the local post office, offering her services as a babysitter. This opened her up to the world.

One of her clients, a woman named Mary, offered Tara an opportunity to visit a dance school. Tara enjoyed the experience very much, but her father soon forbade her to go anymore, believing that dancing inspired immodest and unfeminine behavior. By then, however, Tara had started taking voice lessons as well, and these were something even her father could find nothing wrong with. Especially after they helped Tara impress the congregation at their local church one Sunday. In fact, she was good enough to even get a part in a play at the local Worm Creek Opera House. More importantly, she was starting to enjoy life.

It’s the end of the world – as we know it

As far as Gene was concerned, Tara’s 13th birthday should have been her last. Not because she had done something to drive him mad, but because it was supposed to occur sometime during September 1999, about three months before the end of the world. A Mormon survivalist, Gene believed that on January 1st, 2000, all the computer systems in the world would fail and that there would be no electricity or telephones anymore. Everything would sink into chaos, he claimed, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said that there exists nothing worse than a man believing to have had a revelation, since no argument would convince them of the opposite. Not even if reality invalidated their beliefs. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it. In the case of Gene, the problem was far more severe than it is for the rest of us. Case in point: even when the end of the world didn’t arrive with the year 2000, he didn’t change his beliefs. He just changed the dates. Even so, his worldview was visibly shaken, so the family finally left Idaho for Arizona to visit Tara’s grandmother.

On the way there, the family’s van spun off the road and crashed into a field. Everyone survived, but Tara was badly hurt, even losing consciousness for a while. That did not matter one bit to Gene: as far as he was concerned, curing Tara was a job for God and Nature, not for doctors. Fortunately, even though Tara’s neck frequently locked up on her for a while, the accident didn’t leave any permanent damage. Even her neck got back to normal, eventually.

However, untreated head injuries not unlike Tara’s probably contributed to the very unstable condition of her brother Shawn, who continually abused her and her sisters. Prone to violence and as fanatic as his father, he once violently attacked Tara, waking her up from her sleep and dragging her by her hair from her bed. The reason? Tara had started wearing makeup and spending time with a boy named Charles. In Shawn’s opinion, this was not an appropriate behavior for a 15-year-old girl. Gene’s reaction? A little short of, “Way to go, son!”

College, finally

Encouraged by her brother Tyler, at the age of 16, Tara finally decided to take the ACT test, a standardized test used for college admission in the United States, not too dissimilar from the much more well-known SAT test. Tara failed the test, scoring 22 out of the 27 points she needed to get into Brigham Young University (BYU), a Utah-based university entirely owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – that is to say, the Mormons.

Considering the fact that she barely knew any math, it wasn’t such a bad score; however, she was devastated. It took her some time to recuperate and a lot of help from her mother to figure out algebra and geometry. The effort was more than worthwhile. When Tara took the ACT again, she scored 28! Everybody was happy with the result, except for her father, who didn’t want to let Tara go. His reason? God had told him personally that Tara would greatly displease the Almighty if she ever went to college.

Even so, Tara decided to throw all caution to the wind and three days before her 17th birthday, she left for BYU. It wasn’t long before she started experiencing culture shock. For example, one of the first things she noticed there was that her roommate Shannon wore pants that had the word “Juicy” written on them. In an act that seemed blasphemous to the teenage Tara, her other friend Mary even dared to shop on the Sabbath!

The classes were challenging and scary for Tara. She took English, American history, Western civilization, religion, and music. As you might guess, she didn’t have many problems with the last two, but she had quite a few with everything else. The history she had been taught at her house was very different from the history being taught at university, and the whole idea of Western civilization seemed as strange to her as Einstein’s theories of relativity would seem to a novice in physics.

Just one quick example. One day, she asked her professor what the word “Holocaust” meant. The professor thought she was joking and scolded her. She wasn’t, of course. Her father had talked at some length about the Boston massacre and the Ruby Ridge incident, but he had never mentioned the Holocaust. So, Tara believed that, at worst, it was just some small conflict that very few people would really know about.

The education of Tara Westover

The Holocaust incident didn’t discourage Tara. On the contrary, she started studying harder and, after overcoming the initial issues, she eventually sailed through almost all of her exams, Western civilization being the only exception. Not wanting to leave any gaps in her knowledge, she didn’t back off. So, eventually, she aced that exam as well.

But that was always her philosophy. It wasn’t, “Stay away from things you don’t understand,” but rather, “Where trying doesn’t work, try again and try harder.” Consequently, even though she had come to college to study music, she kept signing up for history and politics classes. Her professors noticed her enthusiasm, and one of them referred her to a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge.

Tara applied and, soon enough, she was headed to King’s College, Cambridge, to study a course under world-renowned professor of European history, Jonathan Steinberg. Just a short time prior, she didn’t even know what the word “Holocaust” meant and now Steinberg, a Holocaust expert, was supposed to grade her words and ideas. Amazingly, he had only nice things to say about them, telling Tara that her final essay was one of the best he had ever seen in his long career. Because of this, he promised to help her with her graduate application.

And that’s how Tara managed to win the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, only the third BYU student to achieve this feat in the long history of the university. After enrolling at the prestigious Trinity College, Tara became a celebrity back in Idaho and was revered by almost everyone who had ever known her. Everyone except her father Gene and her brother Shawn, that is.

Educated By Tara Westover Amazon Prime

Family troubles

Everything was going well after Tara returned to England, this time as a graduate student. So, well, in fact, that Tara began feeling as if she was a new person, one who was allowed to drink coffee and wine, and even tell stories of her fabulously strange upbringing. However, back at home, things were stranger and darker than ever.

First, Gene suffered an accident which almost killed him and left him with severe burns all over his body. Even so, he refused medical help and, once again, stayed alive against all odds. Then, Tara received a letter from her sister Audrey, in which she informed Tara that she was planning to confront her parents about the abuse she suffered from Shawn. Tara stood by her side and went back home to testify in her favor.

However, Gene and Faye were left unconvinced by the claims of the sisters, even though Shawn had explicitly threatened to kill them in their presence. To make matters worse, he repeated the threat to Tara by phone, not long after ceremoniously hugging her during the peacemaking sessions with their parents. Simply put, he was beyond treatment.

The same could be said of Gene, who, as Tara learned at one of her psychology classes, suffered from a severe case of bipolar disorder, which was getting worse by the day. On the bright side, while Tara was in England, he had started a line of medicinal oils with Faye. The business brought them local recognition and a lot of money. It also brought them a lot of interest from big companies. One of them offered Gene $3 million to buy the recipes. Gene declined the offer.

Educated Tara Westover Amazon Uk

The meeting of the two Taras

Tara’s trips back to her family opened her eyes to a strange discovery: that there were now two Taras. One of them was the respected student of a prestigious university, and the other the lost daughter of a couple of Mormon survivalists. Gene and Faye loved the old Tara much more than the new one and they were trying to get her back at all costs. However, it was the new Tara who was really experiencing life, and the one who was starting to understand the world.

Among other things, the new Tara realized that she had been lied to all of her life about one fundamental thing: the real value of women. “I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft,” she writes, “but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: ‘It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.’ The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

Educated A Memoir Book

Soon after, Tara began reading more about Mormonism, but this time she read with a much more open mindset. It didn’t take her long to realize that, compared to almost many other intellectual and religious movements, Mormonism was downright radical. She decided that she didn’t want to remain an adherent. Quite the opposite: she wanted out.

The triumph of the new Tara

One day, while Tara was doing research for her Ph.D. at Harvard (where she had won a visiting fellowship) her parents appeared at the doorstep of her dorm room. The reason was that Gene had had another one of his revelations. This time, the angels had told him that Tara’s soul had been taken away by Lucifer and that the only way for her to save herself from Hell was by accepting his blessing and by coming back to her hometown.

Everything Tara had worked for – as she writes at this crucial place in her memoir – had been to acquire for herself just one simple privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to her by her father, and to use those truths to construct her own mind. “I had come to believe,” she goes on, “that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

This was a price she wasn’t interested in paying. Even though she suffered a mental breakdown in the process of severing the ties with her family, she eventually persevered and opted to finish her thesis instead. The breakthrough came one seemingly ordinary day, when, looking in the mirror, Tara realized that it was time for her to bury her old self in the past. “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones (the old Tara) would have made,” she writes. “They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.” Tara says that different people might use different words to describe this new selfhood: transformation, metamorphosis, falsity, betrayal. She chooses to call it an education.

Final notes

There are really not enough superlatives to describe “Educated.” Alluring, courageous, heartbreaking, heartwarming, beautiful, propulsive, best-in-years, one-of-a-kind, fascinating, extraordinarily evocative – these have all been used by different reviewers. And all of them quite justly.

Book Review Educated

A unique memoir, “Educated” seems almost too strange to be believed. And yet, despite its singularity – as one Vogue reviewer has noted – the questions Tara Westover’s book poses are universal: “How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”

Educated By Tara Westover On Amazon

To quote the Sunday Times, “Educated” is a book “fit to stand alongside the great modern memoirs.”

12min tip

Be curious. Research. Contrast and compare. As Tara Westover learned, the only way to create an authentic self is through the evaluation of many ideas, histories, and points of view. Everything else is dogma.

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huntermagazine362 · 3 years

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Educated Tara Westover Amazon

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For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future #1 International Bestseller. Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse.

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“Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. A heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir.” ( USA Today (four stars)) “Memoirs of difficult childhoods have a high bar to cross these days, but Westover’s struggle to make sense of the world and of her upbringing sails right. “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of. Educated is a nonfiction coming-of-age memoir by the historian Dr. It describes her life from her childhood in rural Idaho salvaging in her father's junkyard, her first time away from her family in college, and her experience discovering that the world is not the place her father always said it was.

Raised by Mormon survivalists

Opening doors to the world

It’s the end of the world – as we know it

College, finally

The education of Tara Westover

Family troubles

The meeting of the two Taras

The triumph of the new Tara

Final notes

To quote the Sunday Times, “Educated” is a book “fit to stand alongside the great modern memoirs.”

12min tip

Amazon Usa Amazon Usa

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devilsdare-arc · 4 years

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Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?

Character Development Questions: Hard Mode | accepting

(4. Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?)

multiple times, starting before his father’s murder, though that’s the event that the most people know about and can infer had a serious effect on matt’s worldview—as much as he doesn’t talk about the details, with people he’s close to he is at least honest about the basics of how his father died. the first thing that changed him (and sowed the seeds of what eventually lead to him becoming daredevil) was his sudden awareness of the sheer amount of crime and suffering in hell’s kitchen when his mutation began to manifest after he lost his sight. the fact that he could hear so many horrible things happening around him and was powerless to do anything to stop it never stopped weighing on him, but it was the worst when he didn’t have any coping mechanisms to shut it out.

jack’s death, following this so shortly, only added to this, along with shattering his faith in the one person who had been a constant in his life (when his trust in people as a whole was already shaken by how quick his school friends were to abandon him after the accident.) as much as he consciously understood death as a concept, he’d always thought of jack as invincible, that he’d get hurt and get knocked down but always be fine in the end—murdocks always get back up—and while it took until adulthood for matt to start to fully unpack exactly how he felt about him and about his death, if nothing else it was a massive, terrible wake-up call that nothing and no one was ever truly safe or permanent, and matt’s first experience with real, gut-wrenching guilt. he believes long past childhood that his pride and naivety killed jack—while, deep down, blaming jack for “abandoning” him and feeling all the more guilty for feeling that when he was convinced his death was his fault.

his “training” (read: horrible abuse, as much as he doesn’t fully accept the gravity of it) at stick’s hands (and stick’s subsequent abandonment) fed on all of this and compounded it, and his much greater control over his abilities meant coming to learn things about the darker parts of human nature that he hadn’t been able to clue in on before.

pursuing the law as a way to finally stop being helpless in the face of the suffering around him changed him for the better, as did meeting foggy and finally being able to have a good, real, trusting relationship with someone. meeting elektra… definitely changed him, but he’s never been certain for better or for worse. seeing how corrupt the “right” side of the law could be at landman & zack gave him a much stronger drive to fight for the victims of the system… and realizing how you could do everything right and still fail when he tried to get child protective services to help the little girl being abused by her father made him realize once and for all that sometimes the law just isn’t good enough.

and then fisk’s reign and much of what came after was basically a masterclass in how low humanity can sink, which is probably deserving a post in and of itself before this one turns into even more of a novel.

very few people know about most of this, foggy, father lantom and maggie knowing the most.

#spidaeyaunt #forgive me‚ father‚ for what i am about to do. | character study #THANK YOU this was a good ask #honestly i could go on about this for SO long i was like 'i'll just do the major things' and there are. so many of those too #i definitely do have to do a 'part 2: there is so much crime in hell's kitchen. no one should live here.' post lmao

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danielcutajarpsychologyofplay · 5 years

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FROG FRACTIONS

Frog Fractions is a point and click shooter game where you must prevent bugs from eating your fruit gaining fraction points when you eat them. Or at least that is what I believed it was.

James Clear explains that “A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. Mental models are deeply held beliefs about how the world works.”

When you play any game you have an idea of how it works informed by your past experiences. This could be as simple as the controls you will use to play the game such as a mouse to aim and arrow keys to move, to how the games rules play out such as point based survival games or shooters. This means that upon opening the game I had various ideas of how the game would work and how games in general work.

Frog Fractions would make you assume its a counting game. Since fractions are never really present in games apart from counting. This is contradicted instantly with the presence of a shooting game with bus trying to steal your fruits which you have to hit with your tongue. The fractions occur as points which contradicts another common concept of how points are usually given in large whole numbers. With those shocks aside I continued playing assuming it was a normal click and shoot now believing it to be a go until you lose game.

This is once again shaken up with the sudden introduction of “Frog Fractions Teaches Typing”. In this version the bugs approaching have words attached to them which you must type out to eat. Then going back to the normal shooting game.

Mental Models and Reasoning tells us that “Models explain deduction, induction, and explanation. In a valid deduction, the conclusion holds for all models of the premises. In an induction, knowledge eliminates models of possibilities, and so the conclusion goes beyond the information given. In an abduction, knowledge introduces new concepts in order to yield an explanation.”

This indicates to whenever some new aspect is thrown into the mix. I am deducing how I think the new overall game works eliminating previous models I might have considered and in some areas, adding new concepts for completely foreign mechanics and ideas.

An interesting idea the game brought to life was taking every constant I had in my mind and turning it upside down one by one. At first it was the fractions them self then the controls. Through power ups I could auto aim on bugs taking away the challenge, I could then remove the power up, something I had never seen before. Power ups are seen as a permanent boost that you would want to have in your game so the idea of using money to remove a power up threw me for a loop.

One power up completely changed the game for me and how I viewed the game in general. The game started with fruit growing which you are protecting, similarly you must move horizontally to be underneath them when they are fully grown to catch them and eat them as they fall or you won’t get their bonus points. Secondly when analyzing my power ups to purchase I noticed an immensely large difference in pricing going from a few thousands to billions almost immediately. A power up later added the ability to swim down and collect all of the fruit that falls giving the player a substantial amount of points. At this point I had let go of every preconceived idea I had of the type of game this was, or at least I thought I did.

Later on even the theme of the game changed taking you to space and other planets which compared to everything else seemed almost expected but wasn’t expected was the final twists which made it all worth it. The game completely changed its play style in between levels. At a point I was swimming between locations trying to find a path to the next level and even found myself in court for my actions where I had to participate in a life simulator picking what I wanted my character to say.

All in all I had a great experience knowing that I could not possibly predict how the game would play out both mechanically or thematically and it honestly felt refreshing.

References:

Clear, J. (N.A.). JamesClear. Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways . <https://jamesclear.com/feynman-mental-models>

Niveshak, S. (2016). Saval Niveshak. Latticework of Mental Models: Game Theory <https://www.safalniveshak.com/latticework-of-mental-models-game-theory/>

Mental Models And Reasoning. What are mental models? <https://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/about/what-are-mental-models/>

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