May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

1 ) while I enjoy the subversion of the typical romantasy troupes at times it has felt forced /over the top. In the way of like dnd drow society is just a little too super opposite of the patriarchy

2 ) I desperately need writers to do some research when it comes to kink . Please because now my brain is fixated on how that’s not how nipple clamps work and clearly the author has never played with the annoying cheap decorative ones on a man let alone on themselves

3) art gripe. If your going to describe your heroine as large muscular woman why is the cover art just generic thick chick ? (I didn’t know there was cover art until I slipped off the dust jacket. )

4) at times it feels like I’m reading a gender swap fanfiction of Anne rice’s Exit to Eden set in a fantasy world.

Do you ever hear about "shoujo manga" or "shonen manga"

What do you think "shoujo" and "shonen" mean?

Do you ever hear about "shoujo manga" or "shonen manga"

What do you think "shoujo" and "shonen" mean?

(Context)

I mean honestly the news articles basically have the whole story at this point. They were protesting CFAR. They even had flyers!

“CFAR does not do remotely what they claim to do on their website: they do not appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech,” the flyer claimed. “CFAR’s founding premise (that people were blocked in having the tools to think) was falsified long ago.”

I’m not sure what else to add, here. I guess it’s relevant that Ziz has been crusading against CFAR for a while now. I think this is the post she’s been mostly trying to spread:

https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/

But this protest seems just bizarre. If the masks and their 4chan connotation are any indication, it’s meant to be bizarre, to make CFAR look bizarre by association.

Nova managed to get a copy of the pamphlet:

https://archive.nova.noblejury.com/ziz/ziz-pamphlet-transcript.pdf

Doubly so because I am rambling incoherently this month and skipping the “edit sober” part in favour of “re-read when sober and remove the most obvious types plus three paragraphs in the middle“.

(Context)

I mean honestly the news articles basically have the whole story at this point. They were protesting CFAR. They even had flyers!

“CFAR does not do remotely what they claim to do on their website: they do not appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech,” the flyer claimed. “CFAR’s founding premise (that people were blocked in having the tools to think) was falsified long ago.”

I’m not sure what else to add, here. I guess it’s relevant that Ziz has been crusading against CFAR for a while now. I think this is the post she’s been mostly trying to spread:

https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/

But this protest seems just bizarre. If the masks and their 4chan connotation are any indication, it’s meant to be bizarre, to make CFAR look bizarre by association.

#but i think the most interesting thing about freien is how polarizing it is#people are either having this ^ experience#or rolling their eyes at “elf grandma cleanses the undesirables”

Seriously, what show were all of you guys watching.

This is gonna sound weird, but I think that show has its head up its own ass the same way Rick and Morty does.

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

is a perfect encapsulation of my beef with R&M. As much as the show nominally shows Rick suffering in various ways, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s written by and for the kind of 2013 redditor who thinks “asshole genius” is the most aspirational archetype ever

As far as Frieren goes, I’m not gonna touch the demon stuff. That’s a discourse that’s been beaten to death many times over by people more eloquent than I am.

Anyway, I don’t think Frieren is about “oh, woe is me, I’m so special and superior that I’m lonely” I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle. Many of us drift apart from the loved ones of our youth, but they aren’t literally dead forever, just missing from our lives.

I could see how people feel that it’s about thinking you’re superior and ending up lonely, but I think it’s more about just being checked out from your life and failing to notice time passing. Whether that’s depression, preoccupation with a hobby, or whatever other reason.

That idea of aging and realizing the world has moved around you while you failed to maintain connections with others really hits me hard. And the wish fulfillment fantasy is “what if you could have a second try at adventures with a new social circle, and the chance to hang on to those connections this time”.

Like, a lot of us go to college, have adventures with our little squad, and sometimes various things happen and suddenly you’re 30, your friends have moved on with their lives and you’ve got nothing to show for it. Just a 21 year old in an aging body.

I reached out to a close friend from college recently, and she was happy to hear from me, but it feels weird. She’s a year older than I am, and she got married eight years ago, I think. She and her husband have a little place together, and a growing toddler daughter, and are getting their careers solidified.

I moved back in with my parents and work a variety of freelance jobs, lots of manual labor. I haven’t been on a date in years because I’m still shy like when I was 22, but now I’m also self conscious about my visible signs of aging and I’m no longer hot enough for drunk women at bars to shoot the first shot my way. And there’s still a voice in my head like “lock-in on the gym now, and you’ll be able to rock it out at the festivals this summer/fall”. Like, embarrassing levels of millennial/Z cusp Peter Pan shit

As much as I love reconnecting with one of my best friends, it feels weird to say “yeah, I’m still just trying to get things started, but this’ll be my year” for yet another year in a row.

The idea of being able to go back and do my youth over again, but actually keep in touch with people and not allowing myself to float away from the world is very compelling.

On a level that isn’t about me and my specific hang ups, I think a lot of people are just connecting to the way Frieren explores the passage of time. Things like the demons and the elves moving through the world at very different speeds than the humans do, or the ultimately powerful techniques of the old world being simply commonplace attack magic in the modern era.

I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle.

In order to say something real, or meaningful about this kind of thing, even in the way sitcoms and shonen anime address real topics, as a writer you'd have to understand that in some way the solution to this is reaching outside yourself.

But not only is Frieren more wise, potent and powerful than the people around her, many of the people around her are literally NPCs, and part of what makes her smarter than everyone else is that the dummies think there is something to be gained by treating the demons as moral patients and attempting to extend some understanding to them, Frieren herself understands that this is a mistake, and the actual proper attitude is to only consider what danger and inconvenience they pose to you, to start treating them instrumentally rather than as moral patients.

Which, you know, just kills dead your ability to say anything at all about that sort of solipsism and withdrawal from the world, because now you're saying that those impulses are actually good most of the time.

Have I ever mentioned that it's polyamory that is the gray, bureaucratic paste of romance in the future? It's a baseline assumption for me, but I may not have described it.

We've all read James Scott at this point, or are aware of Seeing Like a State, and the ubiquitious theme that forward progress smooths out injustices and deprivations of the past, but structures a world in a way that is less impassioned, and harder to put in words or numbers, but is much more conveniently legible for others. Think about finance moving from deals on the golf courses and steak restaurants, to just spreadsheets and quants from MIT.

And this is not an unmitigated good. Almost always the modernist progress is better in many ways, in all the ways you can measure, but something IS lost. Talk about NYC 30 or 40 years ago compared to now.

Anyway.

Because of the current cultural groups, monogamy comes across as "the normal, boring thing to do, done by conformists" and polyamory comes across as the "young, exciting, make-poor-decisions-by-the-seat-of-your-hormones option." But what matters is actually the other way around.

Monogamous marriage is the idealistic belief that one person can be your everything, and when you meet them in your twenties you're ready to be attached to them for the rest of your life. (And earlier on, that it's only possible between one man and one woman.) These things, practically speaking, are foolish absolutes that fence our lives in.

It is much more *reasonable* that you have multiple partners, each one of which satisfies different needs, and none of you are stuck if your feelings change, and that anyone is a possible romantic option, not just one gender or culture. It's the romance that would be designed by any good city planner.

Monogamy, in comparison, sounds more like an essentially fantasy story. Cue Zizek on monogamy, and any polycule on how "sensible" their lifestyle is. Monogamy is just the thing that feels more "magical" in the good and bad connotations of the word.

Not that individuals can't make their own magic, just the "one partner, other gender, rest of your life" is the one that brings Culturally Supported Magic without you having to look for it.

Magical: you cheated on me and now I will kms

Non-magical: you slept with her but I have a boyfriend too so why should I mind.

This is the same divide as "I hunted down this animal in the forest and ripped blood from its veins with my own bare hands" vs "we plant the wheat here once a year and harvest it once a year and we don't have to move constantly." It's kings vs legislatures. And that's why royalty is such a common theme of romances - not because of class aspirations, but because royalty and monogamous marriage are running on the same metaphysics.

An ethic of free-divorce or even "why bother with legal recognition" and also "every person in your community is a potential legitimate partner" and disdaining any hierarchy in partners is, relatively more rarer.

--

well "colloquial sense" depends on propaganda and class signifiers.

anna salamon and davis tower kingsley and kelsey piper are all certainly trying to purchase the class signifiers of being considered "sane" and "functional" by the suicidal american empire.

gwen can build a slackmobile, live in it, and not pay rent; does anna salamon choose to be able to do this? does that make anna salamon "dysfunctional" because she (presumably to me given her abject submission to the patriarchy) lacks the carpentry skills?

like ive seen what passes as "sanity" and "functionality" these days and its openly joking about being nihilistic and suicidal and having no skillz to survive the coming who-even-knows.

i have no regard for what an evil society considers either sane or functional. given that its both insane and dysfunctional.

and the way it constructs those categories is antiepistemic, a tool to destroy resistance to the empire. see: вялотеку́щая шизофрени́я , oppositional defiant disorder , hysteria , drapetomania , ...

the "colloquial" definition of "sanity" is getting raped, being a slave, pledging allegiance to the soviet union, not defying the wardens at prison-for-children

Modern civilization is a death cult.

We live on a finite planet, but our economic and social systems are dependent on continual growth. Once we run out of resources to use, the system collapses. We are closer to that deadline than most people think.

Technologists would have you put your hopes in nuclear power, solar, and wind energy, but there's a growing body of evidence that suggests these are not viable alternatives to oil.

To live, we need to radically change how we live.

The PTB do have a plan, by the by: it's for you to die. Otherwise, they wouldn't be talking about building bunkers in New Zealand, and figuring out the right kind of shock collar to use on the people they plan to make their slaves in the future they imagine we'll all be living in.

The system that would make that our future is not one I want to pay out to. The system that would send billions to their deaths is not one I want to pay out to. If you think you are powerless, then you should read some history and learn how you are not.

So I find myself disinterested in judging others by what that system considers "sane" or "functional." To me, this is insane:

Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.15 It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation. As I write this, the Amazon rainforest is literally being burned for the sake of beef. Yet, far from being essential to human diets, beef accounts for only 2% of the calories humans consume.

-- Jason Hickel, Less is More

To me, sanity is being able to respond to my environment in ways that get me what I want. And what I want is live, free and not as a slave.