reach heaven by violence @luggifer4 - Tumblr Blog

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hello! i am luggifer4, luggifer, lug, or similar. i am non-binary and aroace.

English: they/them, Mg.*

Italiano: lui/lo, -o

Ænglisċ: hīe/him/heora

العربية: هم/ـهم

other languages: take your pick because i probably don't speak it well enough to feel dysphoric :)

gender-neutral nouns only.

what does "reach heaven by violence" mean? read kill 6 billion demons and you'll understand.

#pinned post

pukicho

they call me leads guy

munguswungus

What do you mean that you can actually do stuff

pukicho

I'm glad you think of me as a fetid enfeebled sack of hard clay that can't do anything at all.

#it's ok pukicho i think of you as an entity of unspecified smell strength and composition that sometimes makes really cool music

crabussy

small tips for Enjoying Being Alive from someone who went from wanting to die to genuinely loving life. these won't fix your life but they'll make it a lot easier to want to live day by day. I promise.

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

diet deficiencies can make you properly miserable. your physical health impacts your mental health more than you'd think. get some vitamins, some omega-3s and so on. whether from food or supplements. they can make quite a difference! your brain is responsible for a LOT of the way you feel, and giving it the fatty acids it needs to function at its best can go a long way.

crabussy

I know these all sound like stupid junk people who have never wanted to die tell you. I know they sound like dumb "self-help" tips written by people who have suffered mild anxiety at worst.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.

you truly don't have to follow any of this advice. but just read through. store it in the back of your mind. come back to it when you want. best of luck. [:

nedzira

These are genuinely great! If I can add a small comment it would be to try to change scenery every now and then, take a different route home and go for walks. And make appointments to meet your friends!

crabussy

ABSOLUTELY. anytime I feel myself descending into a slump where everything feels wrong and bad and gross and hard, I go on a Weird Walk. I choose a familiar destination (the dairy, the beach, a specific hill) and intentionally choose a route I've never tried before. it's crazy but it makes me feel better almost instantly, even if the new walk is worse than my usual route. your brain CRAVES new stimulation! you are a member of a species with one of the most active brains in the animal kingdom. please try not to live like a hamster.

crabussy

small tips for Enjoying Being Alive from someone who went from wanting to die to genuinely loving life. these won't fix your life but they'll make it a lot easier to want to live day by day. I promise.

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

diet deficiencies can make you properly miserable. your physical health impacts your mental health more than you'd think. get some vitamins, some omega-3s and so on. whether from food or supplements. they can make quite a difference! your brain is responsible for a LOT of the way you feel, and giving it the fatty acids it needs to function at its best can go a long way.

crabussy

I know these all sound like stupid junk people who have never wanted to die tell you. I know they sound like dumb "self-help" tips written by people who have suffered mild anxiety at worst.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.

you truly don't have to follow any of this advice. but just read through. store it in the back of your mind. come back to it when you want. best of luck. [:

nedzira

These are genuinely great! If I can add a small comment it would be to try to change scenery every now and then, take a different route home and go for walks. And make appointments to meet your friends!

crabussy

ABSOLUTELY. anytime I feel myself descending into a slump where everything feels wrong and bad and gross and hard, I go on a Weird Walk. I choose a familiar destination (the dairy, the beach, a specific hill) and intentionally choose a route I've never tried before. it's crazy but it makes me feel better almost instantly, even if the new walk is worse than my usual route. your brain CRAVES new stimulation! you are a member of a species with one of the most active brains in the animal kingdom. please try not to live like a hamster.

life-gives-you-lemons

I think people need to understand that everyone has to unlearn misogynistic behaviors and thinking patterns. Cis women and trans women and cis men and trans men and anyone who doesn’t fall under those categories are all completely capable of being misogynistic and actively hurtful to women. Trans men are included in this, obviously, but when you only call for trans men to unlearn this mindset, you are no longer being progressive and fair. You are singling out a minority.

chekhovs-raygun

it pisses me off to see cis women saying 'trans women are misogynistic because they were raised as men' and trans women replying 'no we aren't because no we weren't!' and i'm sitting there staring at the camera like it's the office. because like women are ALL raised to be just as misogynistic as men. it's a notable goddamn feature of the patriarchy.

like if you are marginalized it is in your own self-interest to interrogate and deconstruct the cultural narratives that position you as subnormal. this is what starts a lot of queer people on wanting to reform the world into something more compassionate and egalitarian.

but it's not the marginalization that makes you any more or less ethical than anyone else. it's the work. you gotta do the actual work.

hareofhrair

I feel like part of the problem is a really popular misunderstanding of bigotry.

Misogyny is not just prejudice experienced by a woman. It is not simply something that happens TO a woman. It has nothing to do with the woman. It’s about the misogynist.

Bigotry is not determined or defined by the target of that bigotry. The bigotry is stored in the bigot.

Misogynists will be misogynistic towards any person they associate with femininity, including cisgender men.

When a misogynist cis man tears another man down for liking something he thinks is girly, he is still being misogynistic.

A cis male coach telling his cis male student he runs like a girl is being misogynistic.

A cis woman punishing her son for wanting a “girl” toy or policing her boyfriend’s hygiene habits and interests for anything she considers emasculating, is being misogynistic!

When a woman gets in a car accident and is injured more severely because the safety testing on that car was only done using crash test dummies and models based on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the medication she takes for her injuries doesn’t work right or has unexpected side effects because it was only tested on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the tools she uses at work that are the wrong shape for her hands, and the jumpsuit that’s part of her uniform which she has to take off completely to use the bathroom, and all the spaces she moves through and everything within them are designed with the assumption that an average male body is the only body that matters— she is experiencing misogyny.

Misogyny is the belief that women are inherently inferior, and the systems and institutions built around that belief. It can be experienced by anyone, and anyone is capable of having misogynistic beliefs and doing misogynistic things.

Bigotry is not about the target. It’s about the bigot, and what the bigot believes, and the way those bigoted beliefs have shaped our world.

I don’t care what race gender or sexuality you are, you were raised with racist, sexist, homophobic beliefs. Because it’s literally impossible not to be.

And the harder you try to cling to the idea that misogyny is something that happens TO women, rather than something coming FROM misogynists, the more blind you’ll be to your own misogynistic beliefs, and all the ways everything in our society is a product of or directly reinforces those beliefs.

anarchistmemedistro

cugzarui

as a chemist i would like to say BWAHAHAHAHAHA

alexseanchai

image description at explainXKCD:

explain xkcd is a wiki dedicated to explaining the webcomic xkcd. Go figure.

flareonfloof

its a bit easier for astronomers

what-even-is-thiss

The thing that really sucks about the North American housing market besides all of the lack of affordability everywhere that’s not the middle of an abandoned corn field is that there’s no in between options.

In most of the US and Canada there’s detached single family homes with a yard and there’s high rise to mid rise apartments. Very little in between.

Row houses, duplexes, large family sized apartments, etc. do exist but outside of a few locations they’re unusual or only seen as something that poor people live in.

Thing is though that there’s a market for these in between types of housing and they could really help with our density problems where cities are so spread out due to all the detached single family houses that it becomes expensive and environmentally problematic to get utilities to all of them.

I know that I would very much like a cute duplex or row house when I feel financially ready to have kids. Walking distance to a school and a bus stop, tiny yard for an herb garden and citrus tree but not so big that it’s a pain to maintain it, neighbors nearby, easy walking and biking access to the road, hopefully a playground nearby for my kids to use.

But that sort of thing doesn’t really exist where I live and doesn’t exist in a lot of North America. You either live in a small apartment or you live in a house and either way you’re probably forced to own a car.

Anyways our zoning laws in this part of the world are terrible and probably racist and I hate them.

headspace-hotel

there's not even, like, normal sized houses anymore. Just gigantic, ugly boxes in sprawling housing developments that don't even have sidewalks

inkskinned

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

inkskinned

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

queenlua

32 days of beethoven: day #31

finally!!!! it is 31ST SONATA DAY!!!! i recorded some piano for this one <3

one: if you're an occasional reader but you're tuning in for Today Only, i HUGELY, VERY BIASEDLY recommend you listen to Mitsuko Uchida's recording of this sonata. i've previously listened to Gould's take & Gilels's take & both of them made me so mad i THREW things, haha. to my ear, this sonata really calls for a very romantic sensibility, a willingness to linger & rubato & stretch out moments when they count, and Uchida does this, beautifully

two: my first time hearing this sonata was Lang Lang performing it in concert, just a little over a month ago. i deliberately went in "blind", no knowledge beforehand whatsoever, and there was a lot of good music played at that concert, but—my primary memory was this moment when he was playing sonata 31, right? where the music had faded to absolute silence, after this whole heartbreakingly sad segment, and i didn't know if the music was coming back or not. like, maybe that was the end of the movement. the end of the whole piece even. and it sort of felt like if it didn't come back it was the end of all hope in the world, something about the way the song was built, i wanted so badly for it to come back—

—and it did. in a single, stark melody, which soon became a fugue—i didn't know it was a fugue, at the time, i just knew it was this beautiful ordered thing that came up from nowhere, from absolute nothingness, and. ahgaigehlgah there are moments you remember. the sonata could've taken me ANYWHERE at that point and i would've been right there with it. but it took me to even better places than i could've imagined.

i went home, and i found the Uchida recording—that's why i'm so insistent on her; i think she does the best version of this "up from nothing" feel which i remember from the performance—and also she just NAILS the slight-but-imo-crucial rubato; you can hear it at 1:37 in part 4 of her recording, where there's this high note that feels like it's just STRAINING ever so slightly to reach that height, this labored back-from-nothingness that is sosososo satisfying ahhh!!!

anyway. i'm not an especially skilled pianist; playing the entirety of the sonata is a feat quite beyond me at the moment. but i have spent the past month trying to learn how to play that first fugue, because i'm just so in love with the hope and the stolidness and the math and the everything of that moment.

turns out playing a fugue is... hard? "it's only a 3 minute segment," i said to myself, stupidly, "nothing in it is very fast or requires great leaps even," i said to myself, naively. TURNS OUT THINGS CAN STILL BE HARD EVEN GIVEN ALL THAT. my piano education prior to quite recently was quite hedge-witch-y; i didn't know the signs to look out for.

i don't have as much of the fugue as "ready" as i'd hoped for come today, but given i did that big soppy post two days ago about how it's the trying that's important, it would feel a bit lame to wimp out of sharing anything now. so here's me playing the first half of the fugue as best as i'm able, as of right now:

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it's... ehn. i'm serving as that "normal guy who tries to do the olympic sport so you understand just how good the olympians are," haha. and tragically i don't get quite get all the way to the "beatdrop" moment i wanted, that beautiful high where you're just BANGIN those octaves and having a blast, about ~6 measures later... but i did hack out just those notes (with one obvious wrong note!), very slowly, on a baby grand that was lying around, so, y'know, there's that too:

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consider these my loving, half-finished, no. 2 pencil, scribbled-on-lined-notebook-paper pieces of fanart for sonata 31. thank you, mr. beethoven; this past month has been so kickass thanks to you.

and i'll keep working on the thing! so when i eventually post an actual recording of that fugue, a month or months or a year or years from now, know that a lot of love an effort went into that damn thing <3

...okay, doing movement-by-movement notes feels a little silly at this point LOL, but ftr:

movmement one: beautiful, soft, transcendent

movement two: it's so fun; it's so loud; it's so goofy; it sounds like a drinking song! YET STILL SOMEHOW FEELS ENTIRELY PART OF THE WHOLE? beethoven how do you fucking do that. how do you wedge that thing in there and it's like, ah yes, this soft beautiful transcendent careful deliberate sonata would make no sense without the loud drinking song interlude in the middle

movement three: god so fucking sad

movement four(ish) (technically not a fourth movement but Uchida puts the part starting with a fugue on a separate track): THE FUGUE!!! AND then the sad :( but then THE OTHER FUGUE AHGLIEAHGILEH??? AND THEN MELODY AGAIN???? AND IT'S SO GOOD????

i remember this one offhanded ursula k le guin quote where she was like: "i don't think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. i don't think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. what we are, who we are, and where we are going, i do not know, nor do i believe anyone who says he knows, except, possibly, beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony."

well, (1): she's close, but actually, i think the moment beethoven possibly knew Our Ultimate Fate was in the last movement of his next-to-last sonata. this right here.

and (2): i do love her footnote in that essay: "or schubert, in the Great Symphony, but he isn't saying at all what beethoven said."

anyway. happy friday. happy music day. happy beethoven all.

(tomorrow is beethoven's very last sonata <3 and also kentucky derby day <3 are you ready)