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owen cyclops Profile picture
owen cyclops
@owenbroadcast
illustrator: religion, art, parenting, modern life. comics in highlights tab. you can find everything i do here: https://t.co/uzxC71XMGI
43 subscribers
Oct 30 • 31 tweets • 11 min read
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. Image 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. Image
Oct 20 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Oct 8 • 20 tweets • 10 min read
oh yes. it is time for… our second annual children’s book recommendation thread.

the last one changed amazon’s suggested products list forever. such power we wield.

we take childhood reading very seriously here. allow me to send you some book ideas from the cyclops family hut. Image the last recommendations thread was done around our first kid’s book release. that thread is below.

we have another kid’s book dropping before the holidays - presently, the main thing we are pumping is that i have all my books together as a package now. scope-able on my profile: Image
Oct 8 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
apathy about other people that you come into contact with is really a form of contempt. if you dont care what a person thinks, you obviously dont think very highly of them.

i have this. its the best and worst feature of my personality. recently, i tried to figure out why.

[…] in some ways, its served me very well. it allowed me to get through basically anything as an artist. if you go down the “whole path”, inevitably you get some harsh critiques or insults. if you don’t care what other people think, you’re just immune. it doesn’t affect you - at all.
Oct 4 • 26 tweets • 8 min read
i’d like to discuss christian and mormon orientations toward knowledge.

for a variety of reasons, mormon theology has been a large topic on X recently. this is one of my main areas of interest, but its difficult to briefly hop into.

so, i really enjoyed reading perelandra: Image perelandra is the second book in the space trilogy by c.s. lewis. obviously there will be some spoilers in here.

in the book, there’s a few characters that are obviously proxies: a woman is eve, one figure is the devil. the narrator is obviously, to me, a stand in for the author
Sep 28 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
parenting has this odd social dimension where youre always actively engaging with how other people see you.

so i go to this street fair. my son (3) gets stung by a wasp. never been stung before. freaks out. i take him out of the crowd and put him on some grass. he’s fine.

[…] i also just so happened to have obtained an extremely large gyro seconds before this. in my haste and preference for my own flesh and blood, i abandoned the gyro.

when my son is injured, he just wants things to be normal. he personally insists i go back and re-obtain the gyro.
Sep 2 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
in the 1977 film ‘wizards’, one of the oddest movies ive seen, the earth is split between two opposing forces: one side uses technology, and one side has forbidden technology and instead uses magic. i thought this was an interesting lens to view the present AI discussion through. Image the term “magic” gained its present english meaning at a time when our society was entirely religious. so, obviously, socially dominant religion with its hierarchy, history, and institutions used the term magic to denote what was outside it: witches, the occult, and such things.
Jul 28 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
recently a gnome trapped me in a time loop and refused to let me out until i produced a full century of fake 'new yorker' comics, one for each decade.

here they are, in order:

1923: Image 1932: Image
Jul 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
jordan peterson’s ’clean up your room’ became a huge joke but no one ever mentioned that his second step was to try to make the room beautiful, because that involves committing to something, putting yourself out there, and engaging with beauty on your own terms as an individual. to make an aesthetic statement in the form of creating something, like decorating a room, is to engage with the fear the above person describes. because you have nowhere to hide. someone is going to come to your room and say, “you picked that painting?”, and, you did. thats it.
Jul 9 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
a long time ago i was reading this on the subway. old guy taps me. i take my headphones off. he says, "whats that book?". i say "its... a history of magic". he says, "does he say magic comes from God?". i said "uh... yeah, actually". he says "good." then just stood there quietly Image this happened at the utica avenue subway station in crown heights which i frequented for some time. a few other interesting things happened there. once another guy started talking to me. he was black, and told me he had been privately studying with a rabbi for like a decade

...
Jul 6 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
the movie ‘jesus camp’ is the movie i’ve watched the most in my life. in a way, that makes it my favorite movie. at this point, i’ve probably seen it hundreds of times. there are times working at my desk where i’d put it on every day. admittedly, bizarre behavior. so, why?

[…] Image if youre unfamiliar, the film documents a bunch of kids who are taken to an evangelical / charismatic summer camp. it’s meant to portray them as somewhat extreme: a small window into this dark undercurrent of american religious life, where kids are … brainwashed, basically. Image
Jul 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
one of my favorite stories about america is from a guy who moved to west virginia to be a pastor. someone organized a garbage truck route to come through an extremely rural neighborhood, at a time when this cost some money. a nominal fee was passed over to the residents.

[…] it was a trivial amount of money, but the residents there were so incensed that someone would do this without asking them and then stick them with the bill that they stopped doing anything at all with their trash, and just threw it outside until the plan was called off.

[…]
Jun 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
you hear stories like, person retires then dies very soon after. sometimes this is presented as loss of purpose, or tragic coincidence. my personal theory is the body never takes time “off” to heal so too much “backlog” builds up, then it hits all at once the second you slow down this also explains the phenomenon of someone taking time off or going on vacation or finally taking a weekend and suddenly getting sick. seems like the universe playing a joke on you. “i never get sick, and im sick now, on my time off”. well, yeah, exactly. not a coincidence.
Jun 6 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
the integration of AI and childhood education will progress unhindered unless there is a compelling, easily explainable, and intuitive reason for it to be hindered. below is an extreme example - a fully AI school, but this will be integrated into normal schools.

unless... [...] unless there is a competing model that fully bars its integration. right now it's very easy for us to be online and laugh about this or dismiss it as openly ridiculous, but as the tech advances and becomes normalized, this will not not be enough to stop it. there's no "reason".
May 29 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
most people have no idea how psychoactive alkaloids work. why would they? i love coffee. look at this chart: if you drink coffee, after 500 minutes, the caffeine is still there. many people experience this feeling as anxiety. theyd never connect it to a cup of coffee 10 hours ago Image ingesting substances can be modeled with an attack, decay, sustain, release model. each of these phases feels different. this is true for everything from psychedelics to caffeine. my contention is that many people experience the sustain and release period here as ambient stress: Image
May 14 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
along the way in my research, people say there are journals found after mens deaths where they describe successfully turning metals into gold, and then mostly using the money to lay low, live comfortably, and give to charity. this has probably happened independently several times the issue with alchemy at the time, at least in europe, was the procuring materials, equipment, hiding it, and the expense and time involved in inevitable failures. however once you had success (my opinion) you had no reason to reveal it. it would make you a type of slave.
May 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
a large component of new age is a kind of neo-shamanism. this centers around connection to ancestors, or the land your ancestors came from. it also centers around alternative forms of healing, often via plants. easy to run the numbers on how this is presently politically parsed. average new age person (who wouldnt identify this way obviously) is skeptical of institutions (often specific things like banking, media), government, normal medicine, historical narratives - “new age” itself could easily, perhaps best, be modeled a type of meta-conspiracy theory
Apr 24 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
[slaughter in kid's books]

recently, i was discussing with a friend if children's general aversion to killing animals was innate, or a modern phenomenon. his response was that it's completely modern: in fact, it's intentionally implanted as a social control mechanism.

[...] Image if you distance people from the process of obtaining their food, which entails slaughter, it's easier to control them.

obviously, i have no way of knowing if this is true, but i find this interesting because: i have it. despite my ideology, i have the aversion and always have.
Apr 23 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
one noticeable aspect of older media is that to “be political” for normal people usually just meant adopting a particular niche cause, something like “save tigers”, and to be have the now common level of awareness about day to day politicians and events made you a politics junkie there was a time within recent memory where being the “political friend” just meant that you thought people shouldnt throw plastic into the ocean. that was it.
Apr 11 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
i was sitting in an office recently and looked down at a table of magazines. one had a decorated cake on the cover. i asked myself: is it real, or AI? all images will now be run through this hermeneutic. this is, literally, “dehumanizing”: to deprive of positive human qualities. once again the AI image conversation should be steered away from “is it good or bad?”, “is it cool or lame?” (subjective, no way to prove these) towards: what does it mean? what does it do? but this angle is less explosively polarizing and more difficult to get attention with.
Apr 10 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
zygmunt bauman (modern social theorist) says that the constantly shifting and unclear nature of our time period also applies to interpersonal relationships: no one is quite sure what it means, specifically, to be a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a coworker, and so on.

[…] Image this sounds nonsensical at first - we can define all these terms easily: what a friend or grandparent is. but no one is clear on the obligations that these relationships entail, their day to day norms, what is expected, what assumptions are being made on either side: all unclear.