Ignite / kofi / inprnt / art archive @chromacandescent / photography @solarsubtractive / writing @cessantconcatenation / What happens when you crop the skies? What happens when you frame the clouds? To capture an image you kill it first. You'll have to do more than looking to revive it. § writing #ignitedink § art #ignitedart.
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i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way
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âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
At first I read âas an optometristâ and was just ready to accept the statement as is like oh yeah maybe some kind of pun about if peopleâs views werenât clouded by hatred and biases they could be normal about aro and aspec in general but then I reread it was like âsigh, time for my nearsighted ass to go back to the optometrist.â
Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.
It's always wild to me seeing comments about different toxins like this on information about random things in the past, but it's never discussed when it comes to cigarettes.
the removal of physical media is not the inevitable progression of improving tech, its like the removal of the 3.5mm jack: purely a result of profit
physical games still account for about 1/5th of all sales of video games
but by only selling digital games sony can be the ultimate arbiter of their price.
they can stop you lending games and force another sale instead. they can stop the sale of second hand games and keep prices artificially high. they can set any price they want and that will be your only option.
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a few months ago my friend called me and told me she was moving back up near me from 7 hours south in the middle of nowhere and asked if i would help her because she couldnât move the furniture by herself and the town was so small there was no moving company (there were actually only 5 or six businesses in the whole town including both restaurants) and she had no one else down there to ask.Â
And even though money is pretty tight for her, she told me I could name my price if I would help her, because it was so far away.
I told her she was a dummy for thinking i would take her money but that i would accept the traditional helping-a-friend-move price: a meal (i know she would feel wrong about herself if she didnât do something for me in return, thatâs just how she is) Tradition suggests pizza and beer, we opted for enchiladas and a margarita.
we crashed on the floor of the empty place and left back north in the morning - when we got back to the city three more friends met us at her storage place (the place she was moving into wouldnât be vacant for a couple months) and we started to move all her stuff up to a storage room on the THIRD FLOOR (because large city storage places be like that)
we had just taken the first box out of the truck when the (only) lady working there walked by and told us they closed in an hour and twenty minutes, and she couldnât stay even a little late because she had to get to her other job.
One hour twenty minutes. To completely un-jenga a large uhaul and re-tetris it back into a similar sized room on the third floor.
We all just, shared a look, took off hoodies, and got the fuck down to business.Â
It was actually.. I still cherish look we passed around. The tiny eyebrow quirks and chin nods. The eye glints. The bigger breath we each took as we prepared to kick it up several gears. That moment of wordless connection, when we all just silently agreed that we were damn well going to do the impossible and didnât even waste the time it would take to say anything, just got to it.
And we did it too. Finished with exactly two full minutes to spare. And then we all went for dinner and drinks to celebrate. And my friendâs friends that came to help? Two of them were acquaintances/friends of mine already. Like I lived with one for a year a decade ago sort of thing. But this experience? Brought us all closer. Made myself a new friend too.
And the friend i helped move? She and I are closer than ever because of it.
When i left our storage success diner to go home, she asked me again if I was sure i wouldnât take any money.
I said âI ever tell you when I was 22 I went down to Hollywood to try that scene out? Anyway ten months later, when I just couldnât do it anymore, and needed to come back, I called one of my best friends and said i canât do this anymore i need to come back.
You know what he said? He said: Iâll be there tomorrow. Not how much will you pay me, not what do i get out of it, not will you be able to cover my gas, just: Iâll be there tomorrow. Okay? Youâre my friend. If you need help, Iâm going to be thereâ
If helping someone move ruins your friendship, youâre doing at least one of those two things very wrong.
sometimes i think about the history of coffee culture in islam and how it spread like itâs so funny
discovered by sufis who decided it was a miracle from Allah since it allowed them to stay up late into the night for night worship
miracle beans = UNLIMITED DHIKR
cue scholars debating for years about whether itâs haram or halal and if it should be classified as an âintoxicantâ or not
fast forward to 16th century ottoman empire, where a woman had the legal right to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee
europeans called it the âmohammaden gruelâ or âdevilâs drinkâ bc they believed it to be a âbitter invention of satan and his followersâ
fast forward to pope clement viii finally giving in and tasting it to see what the hype is about and then stating: âThis Satanâs drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.â
pope clement viii then proceeds to BAPTIZE THE COFFEE BEANS
I remember seeing a reddit post going around that compared pidw to the popular light novel Against the Gods to great comic effect, and the whole thing might honestly be more comical than what the memes suggest.
Because as far as I can tell, these two novels started serializing at almost exactly the same time.
If the publicly available info is correct, this means that neither work could be directly inspired by the other, and goes to show just how derivative and predictable this genre of power fantasy has become at this point in time.
A more direct translation of this type of fiction is the "stud novel", initially said with some humor and probably some self-deprecation. The thing about the word "zhongma" (ç§éŠŹ), or stud, is that it doesn't have the same kind of situationally flattering connotations as its English counterpart, and literally just means a male horse used for breeding. You'd never see a popular lady's man and say "ah, what a zhongma." The more romantic translation of "stallion" came later. It's considered a sub-genre of the broader "YY novel" genre (lit. translation "mentally masturbatory novel), which just means fantastical wish-fulfillment light novels with no interest in realism, and does not necessarily have to do with sex.
(As a side note, "shooting airplane" literally means "to masturbate". It's not so much a metaphor as just one of the most common and direct euphemisms for masturbation.)
I've seen too many "stallion" novels, mostly from the 2000s, that follow the exact same formula as both pidw and Against the Gods that I honestly can't tell you which ones probably went into inspiring pidw, because they all blur together into a giant skinner box of never-ending dopamine loops and same-y story arcs.
One thing about these books is that most (successful ones) were not the kind of ultra pornographic, out-there kinky stories we sometimes associate pidw with, and they were more concerned with massaging the (default straight male) reader's ego and their dopamine addiction than their cucumber. Some had decent female followings, too, though women were clearly not the main target audience. One story I do still remember, funnily enough, had a protagonist also named Bing something, and I remember it mostly because it was a sort of bizarre combination of Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, high fantasy wizard fights, revenge drama, and the usual harem shenanigans.
That is to say, the idea of a gary stu demon emperor who also mains cooking isn't all that strange for a Chinese power fantasy protagonist. Most of these protagonists all share very similar origin stories. The secret heir of some great power, a pretty-boy blessed with a special "golden finger", which only unlocks after a obligatory whump period to make the eventual payoff all the sweeter.
Many of these protagonists, a stereotypical "straight dude" Westernâ˘ď¸ reader might find goofy, or strange, or straight up effeminate. They embody a very Chinese millennial kind of machismo that's less Batman and more Monkey King but unimaginably conventionally attractive--conventionally attractive as in tall, athletic but still slender, pretty but not girl-pretty. The truly androgynous sort of look is usually reserved for antagonists (hi, Dongfang Bubai). The hunks are usually the sidekicks (hello, mobei-jun).
But don't mistake most of these "softer" harem novel mcs for anything but raging misogynists; it's just that often times, when looking in from another culture, their brand of misogyny might appear to flip flop between cartoonishly heinous to too subtle to notice. To be fair, I don't think most of these authors were deliberately writing misogynistic stories to make some kind of political point, it's just that the end result is usually no less grim or revealing. It was a sort of "naive art," especially during the early days when the genre was still consolidating into the cultural behemoth it eventually became, and direct engagement with gender discourse was low.
So here comes Bingge, who could almost, almost be considered a working class hero if you disregard the fact that he is literally royalty, and that he acquires inconceivable wealth, and that he eventually becomes the absolute monarch of the entire known universe. He supposedly comes from nothing, and was probably considered no better than a slave during his early childhood arc (all we know is that his mother was a washerwoman who worked for some noble house. This was usually a slave or indentured servant's job.)
The brief facade of an underdog narrative is all but mandatory in these types of stories, and it speaks of the contradictory impulses that demand the protagonist be simultaneously relatable and all-powerful. He should become the preeminent establishment, but also be anti-establishment in a cool rebellious way. He should destroy all the corrupt sects, kill all the evil shizuns, slay all the unjust gods, but only if he gets to replace the gods and be even more powerful than all of them combined.
The harem part of the stories also hone in on the same kind of contradictions. The protagonist spends pages waxing poetics about the women he meets, but is too cool for school and usually doesn't care much for actual believable relationships. He's kind of down-to-earth, but also an untouchable sex god. Everybody he non-cons falls in love with him eventually. He is also non-conned sometimes but it's fine because he likes it. There's this palpable sense of earnest anguish to the whole sex god thing that you'd probably immediately pick up on if you read one of these stories, in that it's painfully clear that neither the writer nor the intended reader has any idea what a plausible sex god might look like from their own pov.
This leaves Bingge in a bit of a strange place, because svsss' parody of a stallion novel is more or less a perfect copy of these patterns, until it all falls apart the moment Bingge gets displaced into the "main" svsss world. It takes him all of two hours to start questioning it all, leading to one of the most weirdly macabre moments of the novel. I don't think the Bingge vs Bingmei incident was even meant to be all that disturbing, but it ends up creating something that comes across as indescribably miserable, as the fandom is deeply aware. This cheerfully fan-servicy wish-fulfilment story, created by some (probably closeted) young author to cheer up, de-stress, and numb the pain of millions of readers with gratuitous dopamine loops, accidentally results in existential dread so uncontainable that it breaks dimensions and grows genuinely monstrous in all its assumptions and implications.
RIP Bingge. To yall reading this, thanks for coming along for the rambling ride, and I hope you never find yourself stuck at home and your family keeps buying you random stallion novels off the bestselling rack because they seem to be popular with the Kids. Unless you're into that kind of thing, of course. Fiction!
#I think the fandom would benefit from reading more genuine stallion novels and/or webtoons#bc it really does enhance one's understanding of bingge AND shen Yuan#ALSO bingmei ie how he very much diverges from a âstallion protagâ in both his purposeful actions like whining/crying#and his more genuine moments where he's emotionally volatile and clearly hates himself#(not to mention that he dreams of domestic peace and bliss above all else) - via @ruri-rari
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"We keep ploughing on, through the dark and polluted watersâmy prophet and me."
Happy pride month but specifically to the Widow of Wounds and her Rootkeeper! This is a commission piece by the fantastic Stes @anthureums, who took my frenzied powerpoint presentation of vague references and ramblings and turned them into this achingly beautiful masterpiece. Go check out their art on twitter at @/alamangoes!
@thesiltverses remains one of my favorite audio dramas of all time, and the bond between Paige and Hayward has been living in my brain rent-free even years after the story has come to an end. I adore the way they depend on and inspire each other, and Stes captured that awful tenderness between them beautifully.
Some design notes under the read more:
Paige's outfit is inspired by mourning dresses, armor, and hazmat suits, as she is the Widow leading a rebel faith in what's basically TSV's Chernobyl site
Hayward's outfit is a blend of scavenging survivor and knight; you can see how his elements are matching with Paige (blows 3000 kisses to Stes for fleshing out these design details)
The flowers on the Wound Tree are based on crocus flowers BUT a bit more flesh colored, as they are ultimately feeding off of flesh and blood
The whale bones surrounding the two of them are a direct reference to season 2, chapter 12, where a whale gets caught in the emergence of the Wound Tree