Echologorrhea

What are the transient beings and why are they sometimes spoken of as a higher power?

Where do Sapphire, Steel and their colleagues get their assignments?

Why and how were the transient beings limited to travel into the past?

What is time?

Time has a dual nature. There's time in the ordinary sense and Time the entity. Plain time which passes and Time which is imprisoned, always trying to break free, seeking to destroy.

Time, then, it's entropy made manifest. This, I suggest, was the creation, possibly unintentional, of a certain group.

The transient beings.

Entities like Sapphire and Steel may not be invulnerable, but they appear to be otherwise immortal. There's a suggestion, at least in the radio plays, of their being reincarnated as necessary. They are subject to to passage of time but have freedom of travel and are not subject to entropy.

To be transient is to be subject to entropy. Mortal.

In the final television adventure it seemed that, in at least one case, Sapphire was unable to determine whether one of the transient beings was in fact so. All appear human and this may be more than a visible resemblance.

I suggest that the transient beings are human. Possibly modified, humans from a far future. Nihilistic, bitter, resentful of their ancestors for subjecting them to the entropic future.

So they determined to extinguish humanity, rather than endure the dwindling embers of time.

They created, through advanced technology, Time the entity. The embodiment of entropy which they would unleash on a young humanity. But they did not account for, were not yet aware of, the forces that regulated reality.

Enter the elements. No doubt present since the beginning of time, at least in the case of hydrogen and helium. We never met them of course, but who could be a more senior element? Here then is the source of assignments.

Although hydrogen is the more fundamental, I think helium the more authoritative. Also primordial, but even less impacted by the passage of time. Indeed, Helium may be the head of a group of elements which do not react, do not change; the noble gases. A noble council, if you will.

Over the course of time new elements would be born. Both literal, physical elements and their counterparts, the personifications thereof.

Obviously, neither Sapphire nor Steel are actually elements. Exploring their nature is a little beyond the scope of this particular bit of nonsense, suffice to say that the fact that they respect life and try to preserve humanity may be important to that.

I think that the "higher power" of the transient beings is actually... humanity. Sentient, mortal life. Creative, innately valuable, the very thing that the elements seek to preserve.

🌈 Have you ever seen a prettier tree? Behold the beautiful rainbow eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta).  This large evergreen grows up to about 197 ft (60 m) tall. When strips of its bark peel off, they change in color: Bark starts out in shades of green, then transitions into purple, red, and orange as time goes on. Continuous peeling helps the tree keep its trunk clear of other plants. You might spot one in the Philippines, New Guinea, Indonesia, Hawaii, or Southern California.

True Stories (1986)

A kaleidoscopic orgy of neon, Texas neoliberalism, telecommunications, late 20th century architecture, norteño swing, wandering troubadour David Byrne and the music of the Talking Heads; Swoosie Kurtz; shot on location around Dallas.

Director: David Byrne

Cinematographer: Ed Lachman

Production Designer: Barbara Ling

Costume Designer: Elizabeth McBride

not opening the comments

letting people be wrong

letting people be wrong about YOU

letting people have a bad impression of you (see above)

knowing when your input isn't needed

spotting bot comments

"I did feel a little alienated that it wasnt in English. But then I thought it over for a second and realized... that was the point. And that was what made it art."

I get a lot of 'and everyone clapped' reblogs to my posts. And its mainly on posts that are about very normal, positive things that happened to me. I think its normal for a dude in his 70s to decide its okay if something is in a different language.

I think being cynical and responding to everything with sarcasm feels smart. Theres a guy I work with that is like this- every response to everything is very sarcastic because its easy humor. But he's done it so much that ive noticed part of the secret:

He uses a series of canned sarcastic phrases ('no, really? Who could have predicted this?' Etc) when he has no idea how to respond to something but feels the need to fill the silence. Because he's set himself up as this guy that knows everything, doesnt need an explanation, and in his mind he's got a wicked sense of humor.

But some days im partnered with him, and when youre in a truck for 7 hours it becomes hard to keep up that facade. Its very clear he doesnt know much. He has a lot of surface knowledge for the bit. But he's desperately seeking validation, and gets upset if there's a perceived sense of rejection.

I think theres a fine art to cynical humor and sarcasm. If you use it on everything, people will assume youre just an insincere person. And it gets old kind of fast.

Nobody likes being around that person.

There's a post that floats around here somewhere that talks about someone telling a MAGA coworker, "Your life is defined by everything you hate, and I think that's sad."

Compulsive sarcasm, I think, is defining your life by everything you're afraid of. Rejection, being "tricked," being vulnerable. You lose nothing if you believe a stranger's story on the internet about their dad saying something cool and it turns out not to be true, or to have been "massaged" to sound nicer and more coherent than it was. It doesn't materially harm your life to hear a story like that and believe it could be true. It's not being done as a grift to trick people out of money or loyalty or anything like that. It's harmless.

But to be afraid to think it's possible that someone, somewhere, might be that willing to understand things? To be afraid to believe in a stranger's harmless story of kindness and understanding? To live your life walled in by cynicism? I think that does do material harm to your soul. That kind of spiked armor pierces the wearer too.

I can handle being around Sarcasm Dude because I spent a lot of my college years hanging around Sarcasm Dudes and I know the game a little.

He's not MAGA, but his parents are and he grew up in a high control church, so I think a lot of this attitude comes from that background. But like... "I like the KIA that I drive." "KIAs are poorly made and the reason theyre stolen so often is because the keyless entry means it can be hacked with an iphone." "Ok, well- mine isnt keyless and I got the software update that prevents it just to make sure." "Well you shouldnt have gotten a KIA anyways because they rush through production leading to these kinds of problems." "... dude, it was a gift from my mom. Chill out."

I want to tell him to touch grass but... we work in a park.

So like I see this kind of like... combatative way of having a conversation, and its on par with the way I see other people from that high-control church react to things, even from ex-cultists who swung all the way left. And I also see it in the petri dish- so much of the content there is just gawking at things they dislike about the left.

I also see it in leftist spaces in different degrees (you are not immune to propaganda, etc). Negative, pessimistic, reactionary content gets more interaction, often. (I'm guilty of this, actually.)

I think theres lots to be cynical about. There's some bullshit happening out there. But I do also think that pessimism, sarcasm gets more stage time. And it think this is especially true of people whose primary contact with other people is through online spaces.

And i think its good to be skeptical of things like... anything that the government says these days to be honest (yes, even politicians that I align with politically). But like... random little anecdotes about a stranger's life?

High control groups want the world to be scary. The world is full of thieves and liars and grifters. And its safe here, with us, who are pure and reasonable and accepting- unlike those unrelenting people of the world.

I can see how that might create a kind of mindset that believes people are incapable of change, and a low-hanging fruit kind of humor that matches it. But what would I gain from posting stories about my dad on tumblr? Its not like I make any money here. I dont even tag my posts. This is just like... a journal. A journal with aggro.

Understanding how particular natural systems operate without central control will reveal whether such systems share general properties.

Because most of the dynamic systems that we design, from machines to governments, are based on hierarchical control, it is difficult to imagine a system in which the parts use only local information and the whole thing directs itself. To explain how biological systems operate without central control — embryos, brains and social-insect colonies are familiar examples — we often fall back on metaphors from our own products, such as blueprints and programmes. But these metaphors don't correspond to the way a living system works, with parts linked in regulatory networks that respond to environment and context.

A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something people don’t know what to do [yet]: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer. It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies. Each bird responds to its neighbors, and the whole flock turns. Birds interact by watching each other. Each anchovy in the school responds to the currents made by neighboring fish, and the school shuts away from a shark, or splits around an obstacle, to form again on the other side. Termite colonies build enormous mounds help up by a system of arches. An arch is built without a plan: two groups of workers each build a pillar, then pile soil on top of each pillar, leaning towards the smell of their nest mates, so that the two pillars bend and meet to form an arch. On a smaller scale, the pattern of neurons firing off and on allows your brain to think, and the response of cells to neighboring ones leads embryos to develop muscle and bone out of a cluster of identical cells.

I study ant colonies and how they get things done without any central control. The contacts among ants are messages without content. What matters is merely the fact that certain ants meet. They don’t tell each other anything. The pattern of interactions is the message. What each ant does depends on the rate at which it meets other ants. The rate of encounter of each ant experiences with ants performing a certain task depends on how many ants are doing that task, and how quickly they get it done. Changing conditions change the encounter rate, and this create feedback. In this way the colony adjusts to current conditions.

Life in all its forms is messy, surprising and complicated. It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy. We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions. Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs—without any person directing another, or having more power than another. Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in Nature. Rather than look for perfect efficiency, or for another example of the same process observed elsewhere, we should ask how each system manages to work well enough, most of the time, that embryos become recognizable organisms, brains learn and remember, and ants cover the Planet.