kind of on a pause over here like i said before but u know i have to post since its in my blood so just gonna keep things in this thread until my full triumphant return
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the “experts” have finally pushed me too far
about to see owenius (tiny owen) on the babyscan screen. i have some to refer to this experience as the natalophony. not sure if they will adopt this term.
interesting linguistic phenomenon related to pregnancy baby stuff is that whenever one needs to refer to the baby’s sex, everyone, universally, uses the term gender. this isnt ideological, its an instinctual recoiling from combining the words “sex” and “baby”. everyone does this.
theoretically these are the last moments wherein i do not know if this creature is boy or girl. very surprisingly, i truly dont feel strongly either way. figured id really want it to go one way or the other but im totally neutral.
been surrounded by women for the last few years so thematically it would make more sense if its a girl. people ask what i think it is, i say that if my life were a story (which it is, mythopoetic symbolic life analysis mindset) it would make more sense if it were a girl.
i am going to make a large image of the saint that tamed the dragon and yoked it to harvest wheat to hang in the kids room. i will implant this deep into its tiny tiny brain
launching owen cyclops lifestyle brand to cover some baby expenses. stylesheet:
shoes: two fish
home: partially submerged hut by the lake with dial up internet
activities: standing nose deep in the water at sunrise and sunset dispensing advice to local teenagers and lost hikers
the rift in the lake dwelling community between people that wear two fish strapped to their feet like sandals vs people who put their feet into the fish’s mouth as though it were a sneaker or boot is, potentially, unhealable
i moved from the baptist county to the catholic county. now there are virgin mary sculptures on lawns and generally standing around. i am attempting to train my dog to instinctually sit in front of, looking at, the larger ones, instead of just passing them by.
getting coffee (rare, its always burnt at “places”, wife wanted “a muffin” [also rare, pregnancy madness takes hold]), a cashieress asks where i moved from, remarks “its more friendly here”. “ha yeah i guess”, i say. “maybe its the catholic baptist thing”, she says, laughing. mfw
shju buy one of these glash coffee maykers, its chaped like an hourglass wish a french name, ju obtain ah lineen filter, ok, this rooins your life you see because, now shu can no longer enjoy zis thing that chu loved, ze coffee, jish ruins yoor ability to publicly consume coffee
before zis fancy coffee mechanishm you had no problem consuming coffee at theesh normal places wish normal people. it was quite fun, shu liked it but now wonsh you have bin eshposed to this coffee maker u only taste the burnt nayshur of the coffee, you rooin thish thing you loved
thees is a ideeology of soshial isholation manifesting in ze coffee, reeally, [sniff] you were better off een ignorance, drinking ze burnt coffee from zeez little payper cups knoweeng nothing about sush refined mechanishms but ju rooined it wish your deezire for progress, you did
okay i, really i completely disagree, okay. when i see man, refining himself and his tools, with some higher ideal in mind, really, thats what civilization is all about. you cant shrink away from that. we have to pursue greatness. when you shrink away from that bad things happen.
i dont think any of us really, truly, want to live in a world where we just accept drinking the burnt coffee because its convenient. okay. thats just fear talking. we want to live in a world where we pursue greatness - no matter the cost. okay. theres going to be come costs there
so yes, alright, maybe now you cant enjoy the coffee in the paper cups with ur friend. i get it. thats rough okay. i get it. ive been there. but at the end of the day, u look in the mirror, you know that you didnt shrink away from your duty, and that, thats better than the coffee
i know i can google it but as im moving and revamping my op im wondering if i should get a substack, i trust you guys more than normal internet, whats the deal, ive never looked at it
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everyone on twitter is posting and talking about this now but if you talked about it while it was happening you were an absolute freak and people would go out of their way to ruin your life in any way possible
you’d be working at a company and there would be a job opening and the hiring manager would straight up tell you they weren’t hiring white guys, and if you told people about this on the outside they would get mad at you. like, personally mad at you. so many stories like this.
people also had no metacognition about it. i had friends who would go to a concert and come back and say, “yeah, it was cool but everyone was white”. i was in a punk band. if you asked, “why are you saying that? i’ve never heard you say that” they had no idea. just took it on.
"therapy" is one of the most engaging topics. it clearly has a polarizing worldview surrounding it - we may look back and see "therapy culture" as the hallmark of this time.
but, something about it is obscure. what is this cloud around "therapy", exactly?
i have one idea.
...
one distinction that characterizes many fields over the last century, but has failed to trickle down to normal everyday people, is the difference between modernism and postmodernism.
although this sounds like the lead in to some academia, this distinction is essential.
to oversimplify: modernism is, basically, the first half of the 1900s. modernism as a project can be likened to building a big tower. we just got rid of all the "old worldview" stuff holding us back, and with our new tools, all our fields and knowledge are going to come together
american halloween theology: the philosophical mythology of insane clown posse
folk religion generally defies strict boundaries. it is, by definition, often fully enmeshed with aspects of a cultural landscape.
it is in this spirit that we briefly look at the insane clown posse.
the insane clown posse was originally known as the inner city posse, and made music far more aligned with the typical themes of rap and hip hop. based in detriot, they realized that pursuing this path would just lump them in with east and west coast artists, hindering them.
it is worth noting that detroit is, obviously, not a neutral place. in the american mind, detroit stands as a former manufacturing el dorado, which died, succumbing to various forces, and leaving a shell of itself behind. this may or may not be true, but thats part of its mythos.
as i've paused comics to finish my next book, and am working on getting holiday stuff going, it's been cool to revisit some projects. in this thread i'll repost one from 2021: the inverted propaganda series
propaganda has always been an interesting concept to me as someone who makes images, and in the "propaganda" folder, it's hard to get more heavy hitting than soviet.
fittingly for my general interests, a lot of it is about religion. here are some examples:
i was looking at these one day and was thinking that the visual devices in them were very strong - look at this one below. in fact, the communication is so strong that you could easily flip the pieces around and invert their message. so, i decided to do that.
saw this when i was 12 or 13 for some reason and it affected a huge portion of my life. a trojan horse: it appeals to people who have a crappy job and feel like they’re better than the customers, and then asks: if you’re so smart, why are you the one working there? brutal.
i had a ton of “lame jobs”. its something i enjoy, in a sense, for a time. if it was 1994 i probably could have been content just working the exact position documented in the film - a clerk. sadly they broke the social contract and put cameras into every workplace like this.
this ended the ability to do anything other than work, which was the whole point of having such a job.
thats really the point of the movie. both main characters feel like theyre better than the public, but only one uses his low station to his advantage: by freedom-maxxing.
each halloween season, my mind turns to a lesser known saint: st. odilo of cluny. the idea of a relatively unknown saint is interesting in and of itself: you see the lists of names, it's easy to forget they were all real people who contributed to our spiritual history.
...
the long lists of saint names sometimes remind me of a war memorial. i suppose they do call the terrestrial church "the church militant" for a reason.
st. odilo was an abbot at the benedictine monastery in cluny, france - right at 1000 AD, crossing over the two millennia.
the tale is: there was a pilgrim who was stuck on an island during a storm. there, he had a vision of all the souls suffering in purgatory. later he went to odilo and asked if there was a day to pray for all the dead. odilo established one. it took off, and became all soul's day