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We really like staircases in big institutional buildings. This is one of the memories we have from college: we'd get into the academic buildings at 2 AM (there were tunnels under them, and so if any building had a door unlocked you could get into all of them through the tunnels) and we'd walk around in them alone. Mainly just to get the atmosphere. It's a very fun feeling to be in an abandoned building that hasn't died yet. But we'd also go look at what people drew and wrote on the walls, and we'd find all the staircases and go all the way down and all the way up. Just to see how they handled the act of ending. Some of them were cool about it, one had a kind of glass overlook pavilion with a locked door out onto the roof at the top. One in the tallest building had a landing that felt like nowhere, and someone had put a chair there as a joke.
What do you even do with this? It's such a strange thing to have a thing about. It's totally platonic, too. Like the gas masks thing is legible as freak shit, but this isn't even a sex thing! It's just an appreciation for institutional staircases and the personalities you can read into them, and into what people write and place on them.
Well, we can get fully weird about it. This is a case of the broader thing we have going on, the thing we liked so much about the rolling blackouts in the dorm buildings, the too quiet, air too still feeling. None of the expected flows of information are happening, but you can see the bones of what would usually carry them - that's what we mean by "how do they handle the act of ending".
What we have is a platonic (?) architectural necrophilia, an obsession with the interface between inside and outside, and how both misbehave and betray your expectations when the distinction breaks down. We are drunk on the quiet death of structure and the raw possibility it invites.
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I don't know, this one's pretty short, but a fun thought we had while high. Prophecy is to cause and effect as lightning bolt is to electromagnetic field. It's the same kind of event, just having to do with flow of information rather than flow of charge. Which is why you should expect anything intense enough to be called "prophecy" to be pretty rare, just as you expect being struck by lightning to be rare.
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I (this is red for once) guess you could say we're an obligate witch. Effing the ineffable comes naturally from how sincerely we bought into our culture's intellectual pretenses, and ineffing the effable has been the only way to blast the accumulated rust off of normal ideas like "get out of your own way", "live in the moment", "be yourself". We cannot live other than by learning to cast spells since we did not exist to begin with, which means that's the only way to start we had access to.
Also, the ineff the effable/eff the ineffable isn't fully our own invention, that's from @loopholekid on twitter (the only part we'd already thought of was the "eff the ineffable" pun). It's a very well-designed tool for these things, it's become load-bearing in our mental infrastructure. Green and Ethylene's job is effing, mine and Cathode's is ineffing, so we can get information flowing vertically between our respective bands.
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Man, it's been a while since I touched this page! Syzygy hadn't gone so abstractwards yet, this is more or less just Hester typing now. Although that last one might have been me thinking I was red.
Anyway, I think the reason I don't advertise this site anywhere is because I'm a coward. I want the low-stakes social homeopathy of someone stumbling across it, I don't want to have to make a value proposition to justify the idea of someone clicking a link. This kind of sucks, I think! I think I have things important enough to say to put them here, and yet I don't want anyone to hear them in any way I become aware of.
I was posing that as a litmus test of whether what I say "needs to be heard", but come on, that's bullshit.
Part of the problem is I'm aware of (figuratively) literally every detail. For example, I'm thinking about what it says that the git commit containing this text is also the one adding the cordyceps entry to the concepts page, because I'm that insecure about articulating my positions on ideologies, I need to waffle self deprecatingly about it to cope. And I'm thinking about how this is intended to give you the impression of how intricate my mind is, that there are oh so many layers of self-monitoring going on, and whether that counts as being full of myself or vain.
I do want to make a compelling performance, and I do want it to be self documenting. I'm also insecure about how wordy that makes me, but hey, it teaches economy of language since I have to cram so much redundancy into so little bandwidth.
Reading this over again, I can feel how tuned it is. The "come on, that's bullshit", to defuse any sense of seriousness. Authenticity is a kind of performance, I already knew that, it just winds itself so tightly when you take it seriously. I want to be writerly, I want to be affable; I want to be impressive, I want to be approachable. But I also don't want to be read, affed, impressed on someone, or approached. So this all sits in a corner and I just go on hoping the search engines don't smell it.
Did you know I barely edit? I just bang this stuff out and then read it over and tweak it. They're the same process, editing is writing. How could it not be creative choice to decide whether to leave this many <em> tags in instead of toning it down?