Dear Void...

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

Easing back into practicing drawing with Shapes, by envisioning Warframe's space fantasy metaphysics using the finned/arrowhead shape of the Zariman, the DNA double helix (and the damage it can sustain), and illusory infinite shapes.

Featuring:

The Zariman as the arrow of time.

Duviri trailing in the Zariman's wake as a Penrose triangle/pyramid. (If this was pre-Angels of the Zariman, the ship would be within the pyramid instead.)

1999 as a splintered-off Mobius strip (badly rendered here).

You can also play with perspective.

If you turn the image on its side so that the Zariman is facing up, the ship becomes a sea creature breaching the surface of a primordial ocean of creation, with an iceberg's worth hidden below. Or it's a tree sitting on top of vast roots.

If you roll the image up into a tube, or crumple it into a ball, you get Zariman and DNA strands wrapping around each other and blending in ways difficult to extricate. This is the closest thing to #myvision - not before and after, or above and below, but within and between - but I can barely draw a Mobius strip, is the thing.

I appreciate how the use of many possible alternate realities is filtered through a hard limit: Albrecht and Drifter may be gallivanting around in the past, but there is only one present. So I wanted to illustrate that bottleneck like this.

The idea is the Void with a dual nature as both the primordial substrate from which the "world of dust" arises and a natural endpoint for its dissolution. Its womb and its grave. "We end as we began." Et cetera.

So everything that exists has its roots in the Void and naturally filters back to the Void in time. Which is why it mirrors what it comes into contact with, why it can be used to "conduct" consciousness, etc.

The present is the only thing that really "exists" materially, but everything in the present emerges from the past, so the Void is where that antecedent structure comes to rest as a kind of living memory, holding all of its disparate disjointed pieces. Though not necessarily in a form that an ordinary creature could perceive or understand.

The Time Cube of Eternalism evokes Einstein's conception of time as a "fourth" dimension (as in, 3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension in which things move), which was part of what enabled the development of special/general relativity as theories, which revolutionized physics. This feels very deliberate. "Albrecht Entrati = Albert Einstein," even up to Albrecht traveling to a barely post-Cold War 1999 where atomic anxieties are reignited - evoking the Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt that helped to spark the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. (And weaponized nuclear power is specifically important to the rise of the Orokin.)

Einstein was also known for being stubbornly incorrect about a few theories in his lifetime, mainly stemming from his discomfort with quantum theory, even though he contributed a great deal to it.

Playing in the sandbox of the as yet irreconcilable differences between relativity/quantum physics to get your science fantasy metaphysics while also being like "what if classical elements were real and you could mix 'em in a blender? and the god of entropy hated that so much" is really funny to me.

A lot of people see Eternalism as some kind of hand-waving thing, but it's based on very real theories and is using the premise that time exists in a specific way (macro, not micro), and remains consistent in that possibilities from the "future" can't coexist in the present without the divine intervention of the Void.

This game is going to kick me in the teeth and go "They are NOT Void constructs. Stop it," and yet I will die on this hill forever because I think it would be neat.

What if you were real because everything that ever was, including you, exists diffusely within the Void, but you were reconstructed out of it by someone else, and now you don't know how much you are the same person you were built out of, because you are, but also you aren't, but also you are, but-

...Ahh so you noticed.

Extremely cursed information below the cut. Cognitohazard level shit.

Worst part is?

So like this one?