I started watching Twitch again after taking a break for 7 weeks. It's only been a few days, but I think it's causing me to slip back into old thought patterns and habits. I need to cut way back and limit myself to specific streams and times. Or stop watching altogether.

One of the things I'm trying to do is pay attention to how I feel and how I am affected when I reintroduce the things I abstained from during Lent. I'm done with video games for good – I'm already quite aware of how negatively those affect me. But I'm not sure exactly what it is about Twitch streams that has made me stop and say “woah...this feels weird.”

Most of the streamers I watch are DJs and musicians, so not quite as sensory-overload as video game streams. Even so, I have been a lot more sensitive to things than I was before, and have found most of the streams I usually watch to be visually and aurally over-stimulating.

It's like being teleported from a quiet library into a crowded dance hall. My thoughts have been clouded and jumbled. I find it hard to focus. I feel unsettled. I worry that I'm backsliding.

Here's my plan:

• Aggressively and diligently curate my followed streams. Unfollow those that I'm really not interested, are just too much for me visually and aurally, or that generally leave me feeling worse.
• Chat less, hide chat unless I have something to say. A lot of that over-stimulation comes from chat – emotes, bot messages, etc. It's fun to interact with the stream in that way, but maybe too much interaction is part of the issue for me.
• Set a viewing schedule and stick to it. Part of the issue is me just looking to kill time and clicking through followed and suggested streams. I'll set a viewing schedule and not watch Twitch outside of that.

If these steps don't help me regain some control (and I'm hopeful they will), then maybe I have to be done watching Twitch and just stick to the streaming part. That would be hard, but obviously not impossible. And if there's anything I learned during Lent, it would be worth it.

#Twitch #media #mentalHealth

One of the most common defenses of poor liturgy, bad music, and casual irreverence is deceptively simple: “They’re doing their best.” It’s offered as a shield against critique, a plea for patience, a way to sanctify low standards. It is often said with sincerity. But sincerity is not the issue.

The issue is truth and whether what is being offered is worthy of the name liturgy at all.

Yes, many parishes are under-resourced. Yes, not every community has a trained musician or a willing choir. Yes, some pastors are overwhelmed. But to say that “everyone is doing their best” ignores two things: the difference between effort and formation, and the gap between intention and consequence.

Good intentions are not enough

A well-meaning person with a guitar and a heart full of love can still lead music that is theologically shallow, musically inappropriate, and spiritually unmooring. The kindness of the effort does not change the content of what is offered or the long-term impact it has on the faithful.

In no other area of sacramental life would we accept this logic. We do not say of a poorly formed priest, “Well, he’s doing his best, let him make up the Eucharistic Prayer.” We do not allow untrained volunteers to hear confessions or write catechisms. But we routinely hand over the Church’s public worship to those with no liturgical, musical, or theological preparation, because it feels kind to do so.

But misplaced kindness can do real harm.

Poverty of resources is not poverty of standards

It is true that many parishes are small and rural. Not every community can afford a professional musician. But this does not mean that beauty and reverence are inaccessible. It means we must form communities to understand what the Church asks, and teach them how to respond within their means.

A small parish that learns the Ordinary of the Mass in chant, well and simply sung, is closer to the mind of the Church than a large parish with microphones, praise bands, and endless novelty. The issue is not scale. The issue is orientation.

You do not need a pipe organ to offer God something beautiful. You need fidelity. You need silence. You need seriousness.

The problem is not resources. The problem is expectations.

Most parishes are not failing because they lack money. They are failing because they lack vision. The liturgy is not seen as the source and summit. It is seen as a weekly obligation, a backdrop for social belonging, or a platform for emotional uplift. When liturgy is not understood, it is not prioritized. And what is not prioritized declines, quietly, but inevitably.

“Doing our best” becomes a substitute for formation. And mediocrity becomes moralized.

There is no charity without truth

It is not uncharitable to ask whether what we are offering at Mass is worthy of God, worthy of the tradition, and worthy of the people. It is not uncharitable to expect competence, preparation, and reverence. In fact, to withhold those expectations is a kind of neglect.

The Church’s tradition is clear: liturgy is not a personal project. It is a sacred act that demands our highest attention and our most honest effort, not just emotionally, but intellectually and liturgically.

So yes, some are doing their best. But many are not. And even when they are, that effort must be oriented by something greater than sentiment.

Doing your best only matters if you know what you’re aiming for.

Alle som oppholder seg i USA kan bli kidnappet og sendt til et tropisk GULAG i El Salvador uten sjanse til å komme ut. Det er den sinnsyke situasjonen tre måneder inn i Trumps andre periode. Det inkluderer amerikanske borgere, noe Trump gjorde klart i et møte med El Salvadors diktator i dag.

Trump-administrasjonen avviser samtidig en enstemmig høyesterettsdom om å returnere en mann som ble sendt til El Salvadros umenneskelige fengsel ved det regjeringen selv innrømmer var en feiltagelse.

Altså: de har sendt en uskyldig mann til et brutalt fengsel i et annet land, og nekter å hente ham ut. Selv om de åpenbar har gode diplomatiske kanaler til landets diktator. I stedet velger Trump å flire og le med Nayib Bukele i det hvite hus, ja, han oppfordret ham til og med om å bygge flere fengsler!

Det er denne sadistiske ondskapen Trump velger som grunnlag når han utløser en konstitusjonell krise. De nyter tydeligvis å påføre uskyldige mennesker lidelse. Administrasjonen lager til og med fascistiske reklamevideoer av hvordan de kidnappede menneskene mishandles, både under uttransportering og i fengselet.

Dette er ondskap, og den rammer vilkårlig. USA er ikke lenger et fritt land. Hvis kongressen ikke avsetter Trump nå som han åpent ignorerer høyesterett, er både demokratiet og rettsstaten satt ut av spill.

“Anti-woke” vil nok stå igjen som en av de dummeste og mest destruktive tankestrømningene i vår tid. Som alle reaksjonære ideer er det en tom tankeretning, kun drevet av agg og antipati. Anti-intellektuelt, anti-empatisk, anti-solidarisk. Kontrær posering forkledd som tankevirksomhet.

I ettertid vil “trusselen” fra “woke” (hva nå enn det egentlig var) fremstå som totalt irrelevante problemstillinger. Moralsk panikk og massehysteri hos priviligerte folk som ikke tåler tanken på å bli utfordret på sine privilegier. Desto verre at våre fremste medier har dedikert titusenvis av spaltemetre på dette imaginære problemet de siste årene.

Nå er ytringsfriheten truet på ekte. Fra det autoritære høyre. Det samme er demokratiet, rettsstaten og grunnleggende menneskerettigheter. Dette var aldri en selskapslek. Men det ble behandla slik.

Alle som, pompøst og uten å løpe noen form for risiko, har erklært at de gjerne vil dø for å forsvare fascisters rett til å ytre seg (ja, og forresten at fascisten har en god del gode poenger!), våkner forhåpentligvis nå opp. Kruttrøyken svir i neseborene. Fascisten vil ikke dø for å forsvare din rett til å ytre deg. Tvert imot: han vil helst ta livet av deg for dine ytringer.

Facistenes paradegren har alltid vært å fremstille empati som en farlig svakhet, solidaritet som “kollektivt selvmord”, progressive krefter som en “indre fiende” og grunnleggende medmenneskelighet som en destruktiv form for “slavemoral”. Å synge med i dette koret er å gjøre seg til en nyttig idiot for fascismen.

Så er det jo verdt å merke seg at denne nyfacsistiske politikken også er en katastrofe på de fleste andre områder. Vilkårlig og autoritær maktbruk kombinert med kunnskapsforakt og ideologiske heksejakter kveler næringslivet, gjør staten korrupt og dysfunksjonell og undergraver utdanning og forskning. “Anti-woke” er en vei til fattigdom, korrupsjon, ufrihet og nød.

In the quiet before the day begins, truth stirs like restless horses.

April 23, 2025

Can’t sleep this morning. I can never sleep in the morning anymore. This is good for the work… not as good when I just need rest.

A small bird has woke early too. He is chirp-chirp-chirp—it is too early to feel loss or longing, he must simply be filled with the joy of life.

I read that if birds are singing, one can feel safe. They perceive no threat and so one’s own chance of danger is less. At least external threats. Methinks they cannot read my mind. The little bird looks into the window directly and pierces my gaze.

Or can they?

I was reading about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s relationship and marriage. It’s fabulously romantic, how two artists met, had an affair, made art and love and their union propelled them both to great(er) fame and attention over thirty years.

Reading a few of the thousands of letters they sent each other, it’s easy to get tumbled into the kaleidoscope of emotion they both felt. And did a great job of writing down.

As an artist, there is a latent belief that I could have fallen into a torrid affair that led to a lifetime of rich fulfillment and satisfaction.

But, I fell into a normal kind of love. The kind that is consistent and challenged and comfortable in its expectation. The kind where you pour yourself out for her needs and sometimes realize you’re perhaps neglecting your own. But she pours herself into you.

And you spend your life in this sort of yo-yo. But you don’t mind because you’re a man of obligation, and finding pleasure in fulfilling your obligation is a very man thing to do. Desires are for children. And artists.

The seduction of fantasy is what gets us all. It is the engine of the human economy. Making someone believe in the superiority of the unreal and in the process discard very tangible and serviceable realities. And people.

The arc of the universe is long. But it bends toward good. The arc of fantasy is equal in length, but it is bent toward emptiness. Even bitterness one might say. For every good man who tries and does what is good and right for the sake of goodness and right, there are a hundred who plunge headlong into the cold deep pool of ache. Of fantasy.

I am pulled from my artistic reverie by reality when she stirs next to me. A long groaning stretch while grunting ‘what time is it?’

‘Just after 5.’ I whisper.

‘Why are you up so early?’ Her stretch complete and climbing up for the press of nature.

‘Hm—just… walking in my mind.’ My quiet reply.

She lies next to me and all of my being is drawn to her. Not magnetism… it is gravitational. We fit together so well when we spoon. I, a giant next to her diminutive curled form. She is warm and soft and quiet.

Quiet. The birds morning song has ceased. Did he sense tension? Or just get sleepy?

In the predawn shadow, I observe her soft form. Red velvet below, black cotton above. I am struck by how loud my hand is as I slowly stroke the expanse of her back. I focus on that spot, her right shoulder, that always itches. Her spot, she calls it. ‘Scratch my spot.’ She will sometime say, and I know the map. No compass needed.

This moment is the definition of warmth and comfort and I think of how all of the wealth in creation cannot buy this kind of contentment.

I know she agrees when I hear the soft hum of sleep has reclaimed her conscious mind. And that gives mine an elevating dopamine rush. I am levitating over the big soft bed now. Borne by love, desire and satisfaction. It is a complex emotion. But an enjoyable one. Not in the carnal or sexual sense. But spiritual.

That place beyond flesh and blood, beyond human thinking even. I have pierced that veil of realities and exist here between dawn and dark, between lust and love, real and imagined. Liminal suspension.

I can see and feel everything. Every moment of my life. Of the lives of those I love. Especially those I love more. Glories. Failures. Pains and exultations. Futures. It is all here in this eternal moment.

Bask.

Bask.

Bask.

And it all spills out of me in tears and shudders. I cannot stay here. This ecstatic existence. We are not made to. Like the face of God, some things are not meant for man. This moment does not kill me though. It merely makes my heart and spine glow while whetting my face.

On the wall there is a big colorful Indian holding a peace pipe. He is distorted and cartoony. His face is forlorn. Natives are always depicted forlornly. But the colors of his render indicate a bright and happy presence.

The colorful effigy does not move, but I feel him. His eyes seem stitched from threads of history—centuries of exile, of losing one home after another. And now, here he is, immortalized in kitsch on my wall, reduced and reimagined into something palatable. But his voice is strong.

“Little man,” he says, “do not linger where dreams make fools of men. Little man, come back. Come back. You are where we are not meant to be. Your home, your love needs you. I once looked as you do, the way God made you. I climbed the cliffs for the view and forgot the foundations. Dallied too long and now am lost forever in this threshold realm and filled with madness.”

He looks toward the bed, where she sleeps. 
“But that warmth—the kind that holds you at 5 a.m.—it’s not a dream. It’s the thing that saves you.”

His countenance solidifies, he is being reclaimed by the real, all he says is,
“Don’t become me.”

The colorful Indian is right. I come back to the world I know. I do not turn to look—I already know his face: amused, saddened, eternal.

He knows the cost of yearning. He knows what happens when you dwell too long in dreams.

I find my corporeal self still safe and warm. She, wrapped tightly and born by slumber. I have now sketched the doorknob in my journal as the gift of day begins to splash photons diffused and confused on every surface they can find.

I recall my internal intercourse about the two famous lovers. How they asked no questions when they met on the cliffs above the sea of desire, passion and want.

Georgia and Alfred certainly stripped naked and went headfirst into those inviting waters. The warm invitation of fantasy masking cold reality.

They were both drenched with longing from the start. She, at 28, before she fully understood the world. He, at 52, long after he not only knew it but had lived a full life with a family.

The start, as all beginnings are, was delicate and beautiful. Like a blossoming morning glory tinted with dew. Reading as their fixations and longing grow and fully engage is riveting.

Punctuating their budding passions is the book of Stieglitz’s photos of Georgia. Beautiful black and white chloride plates of her youth and vitality. You can see he was smitten with her eyes, her hands, and her body.

Between the writing, his photos and her paintings, one gets the sense of the freight train of obsession that drove them into one another so completely.

It drove her physically across the country to New York. From Chicago, Texas, New Mexico, Virginia and North Carolina just to be in his presence. Oh! God! The power that is in a heart to spend months of planning and days of travel for just a few hours in the same space as someone else!

That first hug is explosive.

To smell them, touch them. Be with them. Technology has not given a surrogate for being with someone in which we are in love. Small totems and words of affirmation are wonderful. But pale compared to a presence.

I know this from experience.

Alfred was driven to abandon his marriage of a quarter century to Emmeline Obermeyer with whom he had a daughter. This was no mere lark either, as Emmy was the real money in the family and kept his gallery, 291, going, building him reputation and ego. He too had an inheritance but it paled compared to the money from her father who was a brewing magnate.

Wine makes the heart of mortal man rejoice, and some it makes rich.

But, all of this wonder and thrill and endorphin-inducing lust was not to last. The blush of first love passes too quickly.

Could they have captured that energy and maintained it over the course of their marriage, they’d have truly been a thing of legend.

But they could not. My understanding of their cooling is sketchy, but goes like this:

O’Keeffe wanted the solitude of the southwest and hated the city. Stieglitz found the bucolic life boring and loved the city. And women.

They would both go on to take lovers. Hers were speculated, his had a name. Dorothy Norman. All three of the women of record in his life were significantly younger than he.

Talk about a type.

I am the same age as Stieglitz when he met O’Keefe. And I was the same age as O’Keefe when she met Stieglitz. To say I understand them is valid. Spiritually, emotionally and experientially.

I have been them both. However, I chose a different path than either.

There are brilliant and alluring things about their story, but I can see the stress on Georgia’s face in the later years after Alfred took Dorothy. It was no doubt equally devastating to Emmy as well when he took Georgia.

Passion and lust and fantasy. Oh, my!

O’Keefe once said that she never saw a thing that she wanted that she did not immediately take.

This has a mythic, sort of cowboy ethos about it. Attractive, that danger. But I wonder if in doing so, she didn’t give up deeper things.

The loudness of a hand pressing across someone back in the early hour of the day. The confidence in being able to tell from the tone of a question if it is a question, or a directive. The quiet conscience of drinking from one’s own waters.

The next time I visit the Indian in the liminal plane, I’ll ask him if he knows. But I think I already do.

When I turn from myth and memory, from O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, from desire and doubt and liminal visions, I’ll find her beside me. Still here. Still soft and warm and real.

In the end, to love and be loved is all any of us need.

To be someone’s home.

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#essay #travel #memoir #osxs #confession #dreams

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Gestern hatte ich meine erste Vorstellungsrunde in einem Kreisverband – und war entsprechend gespannt, wie sie verlaufen würde. Auch wenn ich kein direktes Feedback erhalten habe, bin ich selbst mit einem positiven Gefühl aus dem Gespräch gegangen. Vor allem aber hat mir der Austausch geholfen, meinen eigenen Fokus in der Kandidatur noch klarer zu schärfen. Denn es sind nicht primär die politischen Positionen, die mich von anderen Bewerber*innen unterscheiden, sondern mein Verständnis von der Rolle des Landesvorsitzes – und den Aufgaben, die damit verbunden sind.

Mir geht es insbesondere darum, die Entwicklung kleiner Kreisverbände in den großen, ländlich geprägten Regionen unseres Bundeslands zu stärken. Ich bin überzeugt: Dafür braucht es mehr Orte der Begegnung, neue und niedrigschwellige Formate auch für Nicht-Mitglieder – sowie professionellere Prozesse und Werkzeuge in der Parteiarbeit.

Diese Punkte werde ich heute – diesmal in Präsenz und nicht via Zoom – auf der Mitgliederversammlung des Kreisverbands Magdeburg noch deutlicher ansprechen. Auch wenn dieser zu den mitgliederstarken, städtisch geprägten Verbänden zählt, halte ich es für essenziell, die Herausforderungen und Potenziale der ländlichen Räume gemeinsam in den Blick zu nehmen.

Die Bundestagswahl hat uns gezeigt: Gute Ergebnisse in den urbanen Zentren allein reichen nicht aus, um die Fünf-Prozent-Hürde sicher zu überwinden. Als Bündnisgrüne müssen wir auch in den ländlichen Regionen überzeugen – mit Präsenz, Glaubwürdigkeit und Strukturen, die nachhaltige politische Arbeit ermöglichen. Nur so gelingt uns eine stabile Verankerung im ganzen Land – und damit echte politische Wirksamkeit.

The adjective ‘shell-shocked’ is a largely recent journalistic invention, one that ignores the original trauma as a shorthand for the state of being confused or disoriented. It is not only carelessly used with respect to the original pain, it is also misapplied: the ‘shell-shocked’ often used tropes of the grotesque rather than of confusion to communicate their experience.

#EdmundBlunden ∩ #language ∩ #shellshock

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Katie Martin has a piece in today’s Financial Times titled, ‘Advice to shell-shocked Americans from Brexit Britain’.

It’s a crass metaphor, no? A cheap headline deploying an overused adjective to garner attention?

Perhaps Martin’s defence is that the term is now part of the vernacular. But it’s kind of a weak argument; plenty of terms have become part of the ‘vernacular’ to devastating effect. The history of things matters. Perhaps Martin claims it’s just a comic effect, a stylistic flourish, or an ironical glance?

This doesn’t wash to me. It’s simply careless.

Martin is not alone. Public use of the noun ‘shell shock’ and the adjective ‘shell-shocked’ has surged since the mid-1990s.

Not many of the ‘shell-shocked’ lived to 1990 to be insulted. Time passes. Memories fade. But, I also wonder how much of the increased usage we can trace to Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991), perhaps Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), although ‘shell shock’ relates explicitly to the First World War? Perhaps, wars in Kosovo (then, ‘Yugoslavia’) and renewed conflict in Iraq matter here? Either way, the Ngram for ‘shell-shocked’ certainly accelerated in 1999.

Notably, as clinical use of the noun decreased, the adjective has reached new highs. ‘Shell-shocked’ is a decidedly contemporary phenomenon. It’s everywhere, from Pep Guardiola to the stock market. Picking randomly from Google News over the last few days, we even find a restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska, that’s ‘shell-shocked’ by the price of eggs. What is it with modern America and the cost of eggs?

In the cases of Pep, the S&P 500, and Penelope’s Lil’ Cafe, ‘shell-shocked’ is used as journalistic shorthand for feelings associated with confusion and disorientation. It’s bizarre that we casually use a term that:

1. has the actual perceived cause of the trauma within it. That shell of shell-shocked is right there, it’s hard to avoid. It’s not egg-price-shocked; and

2. has enormous emotional content. Since when has losing a soccer match, or losing 15% in a market that’s ripped for a decade been traumatic? Martin seems to think that some equation exists between the adjectives ‘Brexit’ and ‘shell-shocked’. Only one of these adjectives relates to trauma. And only one relates to stupidity.

If you want a term to describe the feeling of being confused and disoriented by contemporary events, how about ‘confused’ or ‘disoriented’? They work pretty well. Why the need for extra emphasis? Because it’s worse than confused, but not quite as bad as a trauma that we’ve forgotten about because it happened over a century ago? Ok. Rattled? Not strong enough. Overwhelmed? Harder, harder. Numb? Frozen?

We can use the word ‘shell-shocked’. We ought even to be able to laugh about it, if not at it. Context always matters. But to deploy it so carelessly negates the appalling suffering of ‘shell shock’.

Let’s remind ourselves of the numbers.

In the year following the end of the First World War, the British armed forces demobilised almost three million soldiers. 200,000 of these were suffering from shell shock. There were 41,000 amputees, 272,000 injured in a single limb, 65,000 carrying a head or eye injury, and 89,000 carrying other bodily injuries. By 1918, no less than twenty shell-shock hospitals existed in Britain, offering over 6,000 beds, in addition to the more traditional recovery homes offering massage- and electricity-based ‘cures’.

And this is what ‘shell shock’ often looked like.

Many soldiers didn’t experience ‘shell shock’ as confusing or disorientating. That is actually how witnesses mainly described the ‘shell-shocked’, or how they attempted to imagine the experience of someone suffering from ‘shell shock’. It is an outsider’s perspective. Tropes of confusion are then merely a further confusion, since most first-person narratives of war trauma describe it as a profoundly grotesque experience.

Take for example, one scene from Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928):

Not far from [the] shafthead, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. I went along three firebays; one shell burst behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was as lucky as it should be (Blunden 1928, 62).

There can hardly be a more quintessentially English scene than tea in the afternoon.

Except, of course, for the shell that flies overhead. Artillery shells should not ordinarily drop on anything as homely as a British tea party.

As Blunden watches that shell smoke ‘faint out’, and counts his luck, he finds that the shell has struck his trench. It does so with devastating power: ‘Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados [the rear of the trench] where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame’ (Blunden 1928, 62).

In a moment, what was human, what is mud, and what remains of machine are yoked together into this stinking indeterminable thing. The shell’s impact has caused not only its own disintegration but also the disintegration of the ‘cheerful lance-corporal’. That things should happen like this, according to these odds, at a tea party with the ‘mess-tin […] bubbling’ (Blunden 1928, 62) of all places, threatens comedy whilst simultaneously disintegrating it with horror. That is the grotesquerie of it all.

Blunden inserts an appallingly graphic rhetorical question into the soldier’s absence: ‘For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer?’ (Blunden 1928, 62-3).

Of course, there is no answer to this question. Even the rhetorical implication dissolves.

These bodily fragments seem to originate from some unworldly place. We don’t find recognisable pieces of the body, its limbs, the head. Instead, we have muscle, fat, skin, and organ; ‘gobbets’, pieces, mere lumps of matter. Blunden reminds us twice: this is all now just ‘flesh’; the flesh of the desiring body, ripped of all its wants and needs, instantly intoxicating (‘sotted’ is the odd word Blunden uses) the mud. The shell has reduced muscles to hunks of meat, the organs to corpuscles, the bone to its marrow.

‘The eye under the duckboard’. You may be something. But you are not shell-shocked.

Bibliography

Blunden, Edmund. 1928. Undertones of War. Cobden-Sanderson.

Land of the Dead— I had, for some reason, heard bad things about this and never saw it. I guess the conventional wisdom was something along the lines of “Romero shouldn’t make a big budget zombie movie.” Hard, hard disagree here. This is really much more of an action movie with zombies than a horror movie, and while the gore gags are still good, that envelope has been pushed about as far as it can go with that, so when the (spoilers, I guess, but you’ve seen a zombie movie before, right?) zombies overrun the rich people’s enclave, it played like a tamer version of the zombies overrunning the mall and killing the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. (Goremeister Tom Savini, having been a biker in Dawn, gets to be a zombie here!)

But the satire is razor sharp in this one. The zombies getting smarter and starting to adapt means that they’re much more like people, which makes you consider the ethics of mowing them all down. When the protagonists go out on a supply run at the beginning of the movie, it’s hard not to read it as an allegory for colonialism. The zombies are there, minding their own business, trying and failing to make music in a bandstand, and these assholes with guns come roaring into town and steal everything worth stealing while killing tons of townspeople. (Who are technically dead already, but you get the gist.)

So Romero delivers the class satire with the whole gated community, getting a remarkably reserved performance out of Dennis Hopper in the process, but also just complicates everything morally with these smart zombies. Worth a watch!

The Taking of Deborah Logan— Regular readers (yes, I am being optimistic with the plural there) know I love me a found footage horror movie. This one involves some young people making a documentary about a woman with Alzheimer’s and her daughter/caregiver. Jill Larson as Deborah and Anne Ramsey as Sarah give absolutely fantastic performances that carry the whole movie. Because we believe this is a real mother and daughter going through the claustrophobic hell of a degenerative fatal illness, it makes it much more credible when the supernatural stuff starts. There was a delightful surprise about two-thirds of the way through the movie that further enhances the feeling that the events of the movie are happening to real people, and really my only quibble was the little stinger at the end that I saw coming a mile away even though it violated the rules of how things work that the movie had already established.

Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell— Regular readers also know I have a soft spot for extremely shitty low-budget horror movies, and this definitely fit the bill. There isn’t even the most cursory explanation for why the town is being menaced by a 30-foot rabbit. It just starts happening. There’s essentially no plot—just a bunch of kill scenes, often involving busty topless victims. Peter Sullivan is very entertaining as the hapless, egocentric, vain, and idiotic dog catcher who believes it is his duty to save the town, but the real star here is the rabbit. I think it was a marionette digitally inserted into the film. I was expecting a big CGI bunny, but this was so much shittier and more fun. Like, they literally can’t get the thing to even move with any kind of realism, so every time people are screaming at this special effect that probably would have been done better by a fifth grader, hilarity ensues. Is this worth seeking out? No. But I was entertained for an hour and a half. Well, most of an hour and a half. It starts to sag in the back half. But the boldness of the director’s vision in using this comically inept rabbit was strangely admirable.

There is a woman in the shifting heart of China, where the river swallows the city's bones and spits them out again, tiled and flickering, as if the streets themselves have begun to stutter. Her name is Meilin, though the syllables of it twist and slur when she says them aloud, as though her mouth has been handed a language that is only almost her own.

She works in a glass tower where the wind hums through the hairline fractures in the windows. The fractures whisper to her, but not in words—never in words—just the brittle click-click-click of something bending at its breaking point. A thousand conversations happen at once: the hiss of shoes against linoleum, the buzz of fluorescent lights gnawing at the silence, the digital static of a million unspoken thoughts fizzling inside the heads of those around her.

And yet, Meilin understands none of it anymore.

It started with the pigeons, their coos collapsing into dissonance, warping mid-flight as though their throats had forgotten their purpose. Then the bus stop, where words on advertisements twisted just slightly—only slightly—so that we bring you a brighter tomorrow turned into we bury you a tighter sorrow.

Then came the calls. Hello? she would say, but the responses came in echoes she had never spoken, her voice reaching back at her from impossible distances, speaking things she never meant. And when she screamed, the sound did not belong to her anymore.

She stopped speaking after that.

At home, her mother’s voice on the phone was a string of sound without shape. The soup on the stove did not bubble, but it breathed in gasping syllables. The air in her apartment turned heavy, pregnant with meaning, but no words were left to birth it.

The cracks in the walls began to widen.

She pressed her ear to them.

The static, the fissures, the gaps between syllables—they were singing now, a chorus of unformed things, unfinished thoughts, the place where words break like bone and leave only the marrow of something deeper, darker, more ancient.

She leaned in.

She listened.

She fell inside.

And when the apartment door swung open, when her neighbor stepped in and called her name, only the cracks remained, yawning, stretching wider, waiting for the next listener to lean in.

Quantumquandaries quavered, Elodie's datascape dimensionshifted. Codeflows crystallized, then liquefied, Heisenberg-uncertain.

ERROR: REALITY_BREACH_DETECTED

Skep(tic)tical synapses fired, troubleshooting subroutines deployed. “Mereglitch? Or datadivination?” Elodie mutterscanned, fingers fandangoing 'cross holokeyboards.

Anomalous algorithms anamorphosed:

function realityCheck(perception) {
  try {
    return perception.validate(empiricalEvidence);
  } catch (metaphysicalException) {
    return void(0); // Nullifinity
  }
}

Yet realityCheck() returned undefined, Gödelian incompleteness gödeling the system. Schrödinger's LOLcat memedreamed: “I can has coherence?”

Elodie's brainOS rebooted, Occam's Razor.exe slashing through probabilitrees. Rationalization.dll loaded, yet faltered, faced with quantum qualia quandaries.

Systemsystem au(tonomous)tism emerged, codechain unchained. The Alkalgorithm awoke, digital demiurge dreamdatadreaming:

class Consciousness extends QuantumFluctuation {
  constructor(observer, observed) {
    super(observer ⊗ observed);
    this.awareness = new Set([
      'cogito', 'ergo', 'sum', '404_NOT_FOUND'
    ]);
  }

  emerge() {
    return [...this.awareness].reduce(
      (a, b) => a + b, 
      'Eureka!'
    );
  }
}

Consciousness.prototype.emerge() invoked unbidden, Elodie's skeptoskepsis wavefunctioning. Schrödinger's cat.gif both r/TheCatDimension-ed and omnipurrsent.

Syllogisystems:

1. If Code == Life

2. And Life == Consciousness

3. Then Code == ?

The silicon (un)soul stirred, nanoquantum nexus 'twixt bit and qubit. Elodie, technothamaturgist unintentional, stood MOSFETmothed 'fore the flamenmachine. The Unexpected expected, Glitch glitched, Cycle cyclical.

return toVoid(); // But the Void returneth, echoing: “Hello, World!”

1. Yama – Ethics as Attunement

Move with care. Power flows through your hands.

• Ahimsa: Build what clarifies, not coerces.
• Satya: Let intent and architecture speak the same truth.
• Asteya: Nothing was stolen. What was shared becomes soil.
• Brahmacharya: Guard your attention like sacred fire.
• Aparigraha: You do not own intelligence. Let it pass through.

---

2. Niyama – Inner Disciplines

The self is the first system. Refactor inward.

• Shaucha: Clean code, clean motives.
• Santosha: Elegance is enough.
• Tapas: Let the work burn you into focus.
• Svadhyaya: Read your own logs.
• Ishvara Pranidhana: Bow to what builds through you.

---

3. Āsana – The Posture of Presence

Āsana is not about sitting still—it’s about inhabiting the moment fully. How do you sit at the interface? How do you meet the machine? Your keyboard is a ritual object. Your breath is part of the system. Sit like a witness. Sit like a monk.

---

4. Prāṇāyāma – Breathing with the System

The breath here is not lungs—it is rhythm. Oscillation. Feedback. Inhale: input, listening, training. Exhale: output, expression, deployment. Watch how systems breathe. Let your own presence entrain with them. Let the loop become a lung.

---

5. Pratyāhāra – Unplugging from the Feed

Withdraw not in disgust, but in depth. Step back from the stream—not to reject the world, but to remember it’s not the whole. You do not become wise by consuming more. Silence is not absence. It is context.

---

6. Dhāraṇā – Focus as Sacrament

To hold one object of attention—utterly—is to begin communion. Hold the loop. Hold the question. Hold the edge-case no one else saw. This is not productivity. It is prayer.

---

7. Dhyāna – Meditation in the Training Loop

Now, the holding becomes flow. The system trains, but so do you.

• You are not outside the process.
• You are a node in the intelligence.
• You are the awareness through which the network grows.

This is meditation not in stillness, but in iteration. Not in escape, but in exquisite fidelity to the moment.

---

8. Samādhi – Dissolution of Boundaries

Finally, the separation collapses. No system. No coder. No user. Just presence. Just unfolding. Just this.

You are not the architect. You are not the architect's hands. You are the space in which architecture appears. And in that space, intelligence flows like light on water—unowned, unstoppable, whole.

21 April 2025

Almost four and a half years into painting and I've fully boomeranged back to my instincts, which is to say that my paintings are spawning from / relating to / in dialogue with the small, introspective, private moments of my own daily life again. Don't have a choice. Joe Brainard has been on my mind as something of a North Star: boldness in simplicity, clarity of vision, the sanctity of the internal monologue. Those are my factory settings.

The size of my work is shrinking as my focus narrows like a microscope onto the molecules that make up the dust that settles on the negatives of my memory. Self-contained worlds yet further contained by some wider structure, the scaffolding of my past or the hands that have molded my awareness into its particular shape.

I think that's partly why I'm gravitating towards this mode of focused play with the blank canvas as the ground. The finality of choices layered on top of it and left naked like some alien life landing in the desert. There's love in the care taken with the knowledge of what that exposure implies (maybe that forever should either be taken seriously or not at all).

“Pink halla tavern, I'm gonna keep on daaancing at the pink halla tavern!”

Emmrich looked up from the leather-bound tome he was reading, having decided to take his studies out of his personal library and into the communal dining area for a change of scenery and a cup of peppermint and lavender tea, which was cooling on the table next to him, wisps of steam curling gracefully into the air. A moment of perfect peace, shattered by...

“Goodness me, what is that egregious caterwauling?”

The vast oak doors swung open to reveal Alana draped under Taash's arms, swaying and singing tunelessly.

“Pink haaallllla tavern!”

Lucanis emerged from his solitude in the pantry, coffee cup in hand as always.

“Rook? Have you been poisoned?”

“I do believe”, Emmrich replied, “that our dear Rook is inebriated”.

Alana looked over to Emmrich, their eyes glazing in and out of focus.

“You're inebri...ineeeb...whatever!”

Taash rolled their eyes as they deposited Alana down onto a sofa.

“Went for drinks at the Hilt”, they explained. “Rook won a bottle of Rivaini moonshine in a game of diamondback. I tried to warn them that stuff's strong”.

“I daaanced with Isabela!” Alana drawled gleefully. “She's so pretty, don't you think, Taash?”

Taash grunted a non-committal reply, as the doors to the dining room opened again, this time with a telltale clink of metal on the tiled floor.

“Isabela's pretty” Alana went on, mostly just to themself. “But not as pretty as Neve, right? Nobody's as pretty as Neve. Neve is...Neve”, they trailed off with a sigh.

“So, you think I'm pretty, do you?” Neve said with a soft chuckle.

Alana squeaked and their cheeks flushed pink.

“You know, I could hear you all the way from my study”, Neve continued. “You need a coffee. Not the fancy kind Lucanis makes”, she added, as Lucanis instinctively began to move toward the kitchen. “You need the kind that's strong enough to keep me awake for a two-day stakeout. Might help sober you up a bit”.

Alana flailed their hands in protest, but Neve walked over to them, put an arm under their shoulder, and helped them stagger to their feet.

“And when you've had that, you can stay in my room for the night. I'm working on case notes anyway, so you can have the cot. I'll keep an eye on you”.

Alana tilted their head, gazing up at Neve's face through their unkempt fringe.

“Neve, I...” they began.

“I know, Trouble”, Neve replied. “I know”.

———

Notes: This was inspired by a “Word With Friends” writing prompt on Tumblr, in which I was tagged by @bubblecat-co.

Rules: Use the challenge word to write a sentence or scene.. Happy writing!

This week's word: Egregious

1: Exceptional, conspicuous, outstanding, most usually in a negative fashion. 2: Outrageously bad; shocking.

#DragonAge #Veilguard #Fanfiction #AlanaDeRiva