I've felt almost suspiciously capable and motivated despite that. Maybe I finally struck the perfect chord with my medications. At work they told me they were going to make my job redundant, but I could prove myself capable of doing the job that was making mine redundant if I completed the AI-generated project they gave me to their satisfaction. Sure, fine. The black hole of generational poverty eats anti-capitalist principles. I did the project anyway, no sweat. I presented it last week and it seemed like it was well-received. No word yet on whether I'm getting the promotion (?). They're doing the same thing to my coworker who's convinced it was just an exercise to light a fire under us, but they did give me an entire new job description. I honestly don't think there was a real plan here. Who knows. We'll see. I had fun, either way.
My media log is very out of date. I finally read The Tommyknockers, which I've wanted to read for a long time because I remember my grandmother declaring it the book that made her finally give up on Stephen King. Much fuss is always made about how meandering and long it is and how many drugs he was on at the time. Did you know he wasn't just drinking and doing cocaine, he was also guzzling things like NyQuil and Listerine? The book isn't as unhinged as you might think based on this fact. It was a very characteristic King novel, I found. I think I was hoping that the subject matter of aliens and addiction would put it somewhere in the realm of a Philip K. Dick story where you feel the edges of the pages touching something beyond this timeline and this reality. Dick did that partially, I think, by writing all the time. Writing was his reality, maybe moreso than his stories were. King famously writes a lot as well, but there is a commercial hippy sheen over him even at his most uncensored.
There is a rant by the main character early in The Tommyknockers about nuclear power and how dangerous it is. My how different things are now. Now we have the model-influencer wives of tech giants dressing up as silver aliens to tell use how great nuclear power is. Now the reasonable leftists tell us that the best time to have invested in nuclear power was 20 years ago and the second best time is now. I'm not sure why they even waste the money on the silver alien costumes anymore. Soon that can be removed from costs, I guess.
I watched Video Girl Ai, another anime about how women aren't real. I was hoping for something a little Videodrome-y, I admit, but I got something potentially even more interesting. The ending, dare I say, was even a bit Evangelion-esque. There's something intriguing about how all the tropes are used in this story. Though the main character has this fantasy girl a la all those Chobits and Ah My Goddess type anime of the slightly later timeline, she's not really a viable romantic option up until the very veeeery end and I was tempted to think that was rushed and mishandled, but I think it ended up saying something fascinating as a result. In a "video" dream that takes place in the protagonist's head, he has a disturbing encounter with the real girl he's in love with where she eagerly throws herself at him (in the same manner his fantasy video girl did in the beginning of the story). This is portrayed as horrific, then he goes through a series of surreal, symbolic scenes where the creator of the video girls asks him whether his love is real.
This twist where he's disgusted by the real girl's affection really elevated the story for me and has me thinking about it all these hours later. The flesh-and-blood love interest is a cliché, passive, soft-spoken ideal Japanese girl and this harms her as well as the boys in her orbit. She believes she's in love with the masculine and popular romantic option, but she's doing little more than acting out what an ideal girl in her situation would want. The video girl, meanwhile, is colorful and willful, uncensored and emotionally available. It reminds me of a line from Parasite Dolls where one of the main characters remarks on an android being more of a woman than she is.
I'd like to read the manga just to see if this is one of those subconscious accidents of good storytelling or if these ideas are further explored there.
I'm playing Hynospace Outlaw, which is an early internet sim game with an anti-capitalism plot. The emotional spectrum ranges from microscopic personal nostalgia and longing to macroscopic cyber-gentrification and the rapid coporate consumption of every idea, trend, movement, or memory. Very Neocities. The characters feel real. One of them is a teacher posting pictures of her first-graders' Micky-Mouse-adjacent drawings and you have to moderate her because the Mickey-Mouse-adjacent character violates copyright law. You start out almost glad to do it because of how disgustingly wholesome it all is. But she gets so indigntantly angry about it, you grow to love her. There used to be humans on the internet.
I was thinking of learning Twine or something. I made a tiny little city out of CSS/HTML code alone and I was thinking of putting it here so you can check on what the citizens are doing. Nightvale minus the unbearable NPR tweeness? Tamagotchi with existential horror? Neon crosses, strange churches in strip malls next to the coin laundry, sketchy drug trials, mysterious alleyways? Night clubs that show up at 3 am on the dot and vanish at sunrise?
what is that word judaism has for the connective tisse that needs to exist to perceive god? tzimtzum. this is what i wrote this same month in 2021 when i was listening to a rabbi explain kabbalah:
A finite world created by the infinite would shatter that world. So we need to figure out a way to contain the infinite world. A zip drive. The whole thing’s still there but zipped down. Infinite light, if it were totally revealed, there would be total destruction. God tried that and it didn’t work, before creating this one. Like a ray of light… only when it’s left the sun can it be an independent entity.
last night i was restless for Something Else. i couldn't muster up the desire to read any of the 100+ unread books i own. i kept turning to other devices. maybe the thing i want is a book i have on my kindle. maybe the thing i want is on a tablet. maybe the thing i want is a video game emulated on a handheld console. different containers. different messengers.
i keep thinking of xenosaga and the opening sequence which strikes me as evangelion-like (i was also rewatching evangelion for the first time this month in 2021). the monolith, the emerging. is god in space; is space god? what i'm looking for in science fiction is the same thing i'm looking for everywhere else (but especially in science fiction): god. the very words science fiction seem like god to me. science plus imagination. math and physics plus playfulness.
but then i try to get into the game xenosaga itself and it's just 'big eye girl runs girlishly, also there is a girlish robot. sexy girl, girlish sexy girls.' if you actually find anime girls sexy, is it always a relief when they show up, as opposed to this bait and switch feeling i get from them? are they like this reassuring entity saying "it's okay if you look for god and find only attraction to a girl-child" or "it's okay if you pretend you're looking for god but you're really looking for sex"?
90s anime is perfect rarified culture, colorful esoterica, and suspended adolescence. i think anime and particularly anime girls are decontextualized and repurposed aesthetically so often because they represent, probably not intentionally, something beyond what they are. the plot of an anime rarely meets the promise of the emotions its images evoke -
(that is why it is inherently female, the promise of the female experience, the promise of beauty and of what power that beauty grants
to be a thin beautiful girl with long legs
most girls are trans girls because we only ever get to feel like girls a few times in our lives, mostly we are all denied our femininity which is why the internet where all our cyberscape dreams live is becoming increasingly female; femininity is the unfulfilled promise of impossible images;
lacuna is a female name, the void is inherently female)
anyway i did find something of an answer: play xenogears, the game that came before xenosaga. it seems this one is all about god and takes heavy inspiration from evangelion.
media, anime in particular, is tzimtzum. i rarely get what i want from it but it does have a tendancy to lead me to the thoughts i want to think.