owen cyclops Profile picture
illustrator at the intersection of starting a family, weird american religion, and having a dog. a lot more stuff and comix here: https://t.co/uzxC71XMGI
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Mar 24 14 tweets 5 min read
many years ago as an exercise i got the largest notebook i could find and tried to record everything i remembered about my life until i left high school, all the way through, start to finish, in a few sittings

one huge issue i encountered here was impossible event sequences

.. Image i kept hitting these walls while trying to fit it all into a narrative. not misremembering - an inability to stack what i knew to be facts in a logical order.

i went to ohio with bryan. but then we stopped being friends after this other event. but then, we went to vermont. Image
Mar 23 13 tweets 4 min read
i am obsessed with the concept of addiction.

i have a job where i can half watch things while im working, passively, in the background. there are documentaries about people throwing their life into something that ive watched hundreds of times. sometimes every day, for months. Image at a certain point i obviously began to wonder if this was unhealthy. thats a separate subjective question. the more interest question to me was: why?

at first, i thought it was autobiographical. i was raised by addicts, i had addictions, kind of just makes sense. at first.
Mar 22 14 tweets 4 min read
intellectual western fine artists in the 20th century really adopted the attitude of “its your fault if you dont get it” and “you get what you bring to it”

if im bringing my own “art” to the art museum and its my job to understand it, we have to ask: uh whats the artist job then instead of just admitting that some art is mostly for other artists and intellectuals this type of painter puts themselves into the position of being somewhere below a build a bear workshop (do these still exist). the audience shows up to make it happen themselves, for themselves
Mar 18 10 tweets 5 min read
of course this will be bad, but i feel the need to comment specifically on why, pre-emptively.

although it reads like the 'to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ' rick and morty post, its easy to misunderstand king of the hill.

its not a sitcom, or a comedy.

[...] theres a joke online that "KOTH is a slice of life anime". this intuits something true about the show. the inspiration for king of the hill was 'do the right thing' by spike lee, specifically the way in which that film depicts daily life in a specific neighborhood and place:
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Mar 16 5 tweets 2 min read
many read about elaborate subtle social rules from the 1800s back to the dawn of civilization and think people were going along with all that because they were timid or dumb. in reality participating in a hyper complex set of social signaling rituals is just aesthetic and cool. people understandably had a naive perception that doing away with all that would be an uncaging of the human spirit, that it would be liberating. turns out that with even a slight amount of historical hindsight this was backwards. you can only act smoothly within those confines.
Mar 7 9 tweets 4 min read
time to revisit the topic of ANGLISH.

anglish is an umbrella term for a style of english that tries to remove as much foreign influence as possible. prefixes, suffixes, nouns, all of it. it sounds unintuitive, but you pick it up very easily. here's some of my favorite examples:
Image here's a table i took from anglish dot org (yes, that many people have been invested in this - but the real payoff is reading passages in it. i'll post a few examples below.

it's very cool that once you start reading longer pieces of it, it becomes slightly intuitive. Image
Mar 3 13 tweets 5 min read
it is almost spring, winter is ending

i would like to briefly provide a small field report. ive heard people discuss this online, but i would not have known how real it is unless i was "on the ground"

"snow days" are functionally over. i did not know. here is what i have seen: Image A) it's over

I have seen many posts online about people doing virtual learning with kids on snow days. like you, i would have assumed this is just isolated pockets, but it seems like its basically everyone.

this also goes down into extremely low ages, like first grade. npr: Image
Feb 25 15 tweets 7 min read
in the video game that came closest to perfection, grand theft auto 2, one of the gangs are modern hindu ascetics: hare krishna

few remember how big an impact hare krishna had in the post 1960s west. there was even a subgenre of hardcore punk music based on it: krishnacore

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hare krishna is basically a modern hindu (vedic?) movement led by the international society for krishna conciousness (ISKCON). if youve seen people like this at a subway station, thats the hare krishnas

people like this doing public sanskrit chants: dont see that much anymore.

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Feb 17 9 tweets 3 min read
imagine: a man. he is in a room somewhere. he has many items around him - normal objects. at this time, each item is tethered to a physical experience: how he obtained it, where he went, who he was with, and so on

his entire life is like this - a physical metal network, enmeshed he has a stack of games and movies. when he looks at each one, he remembers buying it, or getting it from a friend. he remembers putting it in his car, losing it, finding it - all this colors his perception of it and his experience with it. how could it not?

he picks one up.
Feb 12 12 tweets 4 min read
i used to have a job working around comedians and comedy writers. it wasnt my job, but i was there.

ive done a lot of public speaking - some of it humorous. i dont talk about it, but many very large companies have technically paid me to do this.

heres something interesting: Image when you get good at "working" a crowd, its a skill in and of itself. an odd sociological data point is that once you cluster... over ten people together and you take on the role of "the speaker", they almost always react the exact same way

to everything. almost every time.
Feb 10 31 tweets 10 min read
HP lovecraft and joseph smith:
thoughtforms in the american spirit

quasi-physical ancient native americans. lost civilizations. magical metal artifacts. piles of earth, dotting the horizon of the mind - and the actual horizon, in a place called: the northeastern united states. Image when we survey the spiritual landscape of a people, certain motifs make themselves known. in tibet, we find mountains infested with spirits, charnel grounds littered with burnt bodies, colorful flags that write prayers onto the wind. obviously, this "means something" about tibet Image
Feb 4 34 tweets 10 min read
space in american scripture:
cosmic mormon moses

today, "pluralism" in religious thought means something like tolerance or acceptance. this was not the case in the 1800s, when it often referred to a different kind of plurality - cosmic pluralism: other worlds, and other planets Image this concept, which existed prior to modernity but seems to have really broken the surface (at least in the west) in the last few hundred years, was touched on by a variety of strange individuals, some of whom we have mentioned here before: ellen white, swedenborg, for example
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Feb 2 10 tweets 3 min read
a popular topic on the internet is cultural shifts that will result from generational changes - usually, in terms of politics

one area this is rarely discussed in is the arts, at a meta level. put simply, every museum survives because rich silent generation cuts them huge checks
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in case youre unfamiliar, thats the generation before boomers

their wealthy urban members just give museums huge amounts of money - if they have it. usually this is totally thankless. maybe they get their name somewhere or a call. they just do it because they think they should.
Jan 28 7 tweets 2 min read
modern man has a relationship to invisible forces he does not understand that is qualitatively similar to the type of relationship a “primitive” person had. you buy a house. theres this gas, called CO. you dont understand it, but it could kill you. its functionally magic, to you. you understand that it isnt magic, but you dont really know anything about it. its in these machines that surround you, i guess. it does something, but you cant see or hear or smell it, and if it gets out, you can die. only special men deal with and understand this thing. not you
Jan 27 16 tweets 6 min read
[magic catholic indian rocks and the fundamentals of hindu axiology]

this is something i heard (do your own research).

please imagine - we have met, at a party. perhaps in venice. perhaps in the 1700s. i am wearing this ring. do you like it? thanks. i got this stone from an ox Image specifically, i got in from an ox intestine. as you know, we are both educated of course, this is a bezoar stone. its a kind of undigested mass that you find when you butcher animals, in their intestines or stomach.

of course, it is magic. thats why we put them in these cases: Image
Jan 22 23 tweets 7 min read
[other hells and speculative meta-meta-ethics]

i really love the bhavachakra. although i obviously do not subscribe to buddhism or reincarnation, this is one of the all time ultimate illustrations. the entire buddhist cosmology is basically contained in one image, right here: Image you really could just stand here for hours going over this - reading some of it as literal, then extrapolating metaphors from it, it works for both an illiterate non-scholastic person, a child, or a 3000 IQ scholastic type. frankly, more religions should have something like this. Image
Jan 19 22 tweets 6 min read
as someone into: religion, america, and aesthetics (who also owns a car) i have naturally, on more than one occasion - asked:

why is the christian music on the radio so bad?

specifically, why is it “like that”? when you hear it, you know the vibe.

a few thoughts on this topic: Image i became vexed by this and listened to way too much of this music in my car. i have 2 insights. first, to clear up things:

A) i feel that this is not incidental. it is not a meaningless thing. it doesnt mean anything about “what is true”, but clearly it illuminates something.
Jan 14 44 tweets 12 min read
(this thread will contain some potentially jarring or bizarre anecdotes.

if you don't like reading things weird people write online, don't read it. that's it.)

the self, the mind, blood, and parenting Image im twenty one. i live in an apartment with my punk band. i just do drugs and read about religion and work in the arts. the furniture in my room is a huge easel, a desk, and a couch. i sleep on the couch.

a girl calls me. shes a friend of a friend. she tells me she hurt herself. Image
Dec 20, 2023 25 tweets 18 min read
[patterns patterns patterns]

soon we will clock out for christmas break. soon, but not tonight.

lets take a look an atypical pattern format, a niche socio-cultural artistic theory on patterns, and an art historical-physics connection i made and was unable to find anywhere else Image this time of year, when winter is kicking in, is the best time to notice “li patterns” - specifically in the morning, when the cold night is shifting over to sun.

li patterns are a concept in chinese art. they are basically dynamic (active) non linear (not foldable) symmetries:


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Dec 16, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
been seeing grinches way more than santa claus this year. easily a ratio of 10:1 or even 20:1. the grinch will probably overtake santa as the christmas icon at some point in america. our culture has an allergy to sincerity and childhood innocence. thats santa. he doesnt fit. Image if santa is “not” one thing, its ironic. in order to make santa ironic or tongue in cheek you have to change something about him - make him drunk, evil, weird in some way. unaltered, as is, hes probably the least ironic character possible. totally sincere virtue + innocent magic Image
Dec 13, 2023 15 tweets 5 min read
a great social archetypal symbol is something called the danegeld.

clearly 'danegeld' is two words. dane, the danish - and geld, gold. the story is that vikings would roll up to your village and ask you to pay a fee to not be killed

thats the fee. the coin. the danegeld

[...] Image it typically comes with a small lesson.

you don't want to pay the danegeld. the story is that, you pay the danegeld. it's easy, you just do it. but it doesn't end there. they come back. and you have to pay again.

you thought you could just do it once - it doesnt work that way. Image