#scratchwork

Here’s a terrible demo of yours truly singing the melody of What Do You Have to Lose?, a song Crowley sings to Aziraphale to get on board with stopping the Apocalypse from happening. Y’know, nearish this scene:

Playing to Aziraphale’s hedonistic interests, he lists all the things that will disappear if the Antichrist comes to power. (Aren’t they adorable?) Also included are my terrible attempts at voices and accents. 

i wish there were more of this kind of vulnerability in the universe

fear of being punished and regulated if they dont punish and regulate is in so many people

uncertainty over whether you yourself are a good person but a faux certainty that other people can determine whether you are a good person. and you know that they are locked in the same game you are so that if you press all the buttons right and act with propriety they have to validate you as a good person or be punished for not validating someone who is by local norms clearly Valid.

maybe it began with thinking they had new, *surprising*, information about whether you made the right choice. but after a bit You learn to predict regularities in their validation algorithm and how the game is played and can game it to get the other person to mouth the sounds "you did the right thing." and You make you forget that It is pulling levers in a social punishment mexican standoff in which It knows the other person is enmeshed.

and we have the thing where You might have started asking people for their opinions about what youve done because you want to do good and you can be wrong about doing good. it ends up with you remembering that people mouthing the words "you did the right thing." makes you feel nice inside and then You make yourself forget that You know that nodes going into "you did the right thing." are "will i be ostricized from my community? will people think im an okay human if i say these words?".

as a matter of efficiency, you start feeling very uncertain about whether you are a good person or making correct actions and outsource this by asking other people if you are valid. because thats less cognitively intensive and the answer is more certain than going through a process of checking over your actions to see if you are getting what you want with them.

this also has a side-effect of you doing what you really want less often because you are checking in with a relatively simple, able-to-be-modeled-by-you, deterministic algorithm rather than checking your brain to see if this is what you want. sometimes people like certainty and are averse to changing how things are so much that they wont ask themselves if they really want to do what they thought of because the answer might be "no".

its not even submission and deference to a human being, that might be scary and surprising and they might ask you to do something unexpected or uncomfortable. it actually takes bravery to transfer your life to an agentic Master. its scary and from what ive observed most humans actually arent up for that. its deference to the output of a rigged pachinko machine.

| a lot of this is from talking with emma

the world looks a lot more interesting when you arent seeding validation from a rigged pachinko machine stored in the brains of your friends. and you can try doing a priori unanticipated and complex things that you believe in.

people who are cucked by closing a loop of auto-validation can be counted on to do a lot of things. they are very reliable because they seed actions from sources that [people like them] can predict. but they have a hard time expressing the next thing in the sequence {bdsm, asmr, trans, plurality,...} even if they experienced it.

It was the kind of cold that crawls down your throat and nestles into every empty pocket of your lungs with jagged little crystals of ice. This, I told myself, was the price I'd pay. Nothing in life had come easy, and she wasn't any different. Traipsing under string-lights dangling from building to building, the lingering snow of February and the sub-arctic temperature had us held together, two leather jacket-clad lovebirds who hadn't yet flown south for the winter. I dreamt of just hours before, stuck in that little apartment, buried inside of her, and how I'd kill for a little of that warmth right now.

I wasn't built for the cold, my skin forever tinted by Southern sun, my own personal thermostat better prepared to deal with heat and humidity. But she was born in this kind of weather, the ice around her irises could freeze me in place, her smile shone like starlight and snow. If I would have to fight the long, hard winters, at least I'd have her to guide me through. The thought was the only thing that kept my feet moving, my boots clicking on the concrete in syncopation with hers, down the steps into the train station.

We found seats well after midnight, watching the city disappear behind us. Her head found my shoulder, and sleep found her not long after. I held my arm around her, trying to ward off the shivers echoing through her frame. It was strange how at home I felt, pushed outside my regular boundaries, shivering right along with her. On the drive home I thanked her for turning the heat on, and she smiled at me, her hands in my gloves, mine firmly under my thighs. I wouldn't even hear her returned "Thank you."

"You come first." I laughed, my teeth chattering. She tried to return the gloves, but I brushed off her attempts with every line I could think of.

"They look better on you." "They match your outfit." "I'm not even that cold." "No no, keep 'em on, I've got a glove fetish. I was going to tell you..."

i forgot the crown on the first head so i drew it and put it under the cut