card-collector-main

If you ever have an out-loud conversation with me you'll find me easily identifiable by my rigorous commitment to iambic heptameter and alliteration and my undocumented mind-control techniques.

[the-ultimate-wifeform]

Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your

password is poo.fuck , get in.

[phytel]

ode to a friend i killed while sucking on a lemon drop and teenage

tilt (rc),

your bow was lighter than mine. carbon-fibre megalight something, i recall recalling. you too'd recall your many curious aunts, and i'd seethe envy in unthought thoughts; you read me as i read you (whatever the tense you choose).

the manner in which you articulated yourself: balancing the bow-tip and bow-base, you'd finding unknown equality in the frog. (ribbit). you didn't know ‘ABRSM’—but you could surely pronounce it, and you still knew a thing or two german, i bet.

your provenance's lost in babydays cassettes—up on the shelf by Roundabout Five—you're some mystery now; and i feel, if torn from your dusty virtual origami, you'd have nothing but curses for me.

i might know so.

since, though i heard your voice, and heard it twice, i still let you diffuse—through my ears and soft-shut eyes, across the brown expanse on that long sick journey, composted by motion, and spun out through the tyres. sorry.

wherever you dispersed, i hope the mountains thinned quick enough, and that you weren't cold. and that you'd be my friend again??

i miss you!

me (uc)

[milleniumgodzilla]

This is how I look at customers

[phytel]

spacepoem 1 by edwin morgan

[dr-blu-skies]

I feel like I got asked to be an adult before I ever knew what an adult was.

You grow up alongside them and you think they've got it all figured out, and when you get to the finish line and you don't actually know anything you feel like a stupid moron with no ability to learn anything. And instead of taking that and going, "Nobody knows what to do when they get there." You compare yourself and think, "Something must be wrong with me, I have to be a moron, everybody else has their shit figured out, so where's mine?"

I'm 27 and I have no idea what to do with my life. Getting a job still feels terrifying after 20+ years of pushing myself to be perfect so my mom won't take away all of my friends.

It's like you wake up one day and you're expected to know everything, have everything, BE everything. Sometimes she'll think of teaching me something about adult life, but it doesn't stick. Nothing ever does. I don't drive. I don't work. I just escape. My entire life, from beginning to now, a constant pursuit of escape.

[mysmistree]

Adult isn't anything in specific. It just means you're old enough to manage most systems yourself, like doctors appointments, licenses, alcohol, etc. But being an adult is little different than being an adventurer. You're in life, with all its hurdles, fears, and dragons. Some of which you have to slay, some of which you can run away. The decision is yours, as are the consequences. There is nothing wrong with running from dragons as long as you accept your sacrifice of what's down the road, and there's nothing wrong with failing to beat a dragon if you try as long as it doesn't stop you from trying when you need to now or in future. Being an adult is realizing the world is scary. Being a functional adult is braving the world anyway. And being a good adult is learning how to be kind while you do so.

[phytel]

>

~~ gradualZither [GZ] has joined the memo ! ~~

~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has joined the memo ! ~~

[16:25] PH: i wonder if laura palmer is jesus.

~~ gradualZither [GZ] pinned a message to the memo ! ~~

[17:25] PH: what was pinned,, [17:25] PH: oh. [17:25] PH: I'M NOT WRONG THOUGH [17:26] PH: SHE DIED FOR OUR SINS GZ

[01:36] PH: it's the way that she's recapitulated over and over (see: maddy), survives in icon form, is surrounded by young disciples who cannot go where she goes (donna, bobby, even ronette). she's surrounded by upsetting arcane symbolism [01:37] PH: i can write this essay i swear

[01:38] PH: she's definitely interpretable as a martyr and there is absolutely a supratemporally mystical, well, mystery about her death [01:39] PH: is that what the black lodge is [01:39] PH: symbolic realm for those who come dislodged from secular time [01:39] PH: tall figures and ocd flickers

[01:43] PH: “fire walk with me” as an invitation to walk as the figure does, the fire walk being impossible except to the initiate [01:43] PH: i guess the log lady gets it [01:43] PH: her log is a figure too

[01:46] PH: is that martyrdom? becoming the site of a temporal rupture, figuratisation, opening up into something timeless? recapitulated through your image? [01:47] PH: makes things seem worthwhile [01:47] PH: makes things that aren't art seem like art

[01:52] PH: reminded of laura's behaviour throughout fire walk with me. the erratic mystic strangeness, the way she talks to harold, those moments of strange pale makeup, black corpse lips as she hisses the fire-walk invitation. her rupturous death literally prefigures itself

[01:53] PH: i'll shut up now

~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has left the memo ! ~~ ~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has joined the memo ! ~~

[01:53] PH: or maybe not

[01:54] PH: part of what's so great about her and the pain of it all is that. we go to great pains to make it clear that laura ISN'T just a cipher. she had friends, and family, and so many lives through so many prisms. people loved her. she isn't just a jesus analogue [01:54] PH: but she's a figure before we even get to know that [01:55] PH: maybe that's the trauma twin peaks mysticises [01:56] PH: that of a deeply open-ended and thoroughly alive human being stultified into a figure [01:58] PH: that idealistic propulsion into timelessness and iconicism spoiled by the most beautiful and most low humanity laura the person embodied

[02:01] PH: the way she's used to act out arcane symbols like a figurative creature. that gesture, then “meanwhiiiile, [blood-curdling scream].” it just doesn't work. the way her imagicised self still helps agent cooper in earthly matters. she and the portrayal of trauma inflicted on her loved ones model the inability for a human to enter that figurative, religicised world [02:02] PH: she's DEAD [02:02] PH: she's always dead [02:02] PH: it sucks

[02:04] okay that's all for real now i'm babbling tiredly and will probably be embarrassed by this when i next see it

~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has left the memo ! ~~ ~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has joined the memo ! ~~

[02:21] PH: maybe a person can be many different things but still have these things be united under an identity. but to make a figure from a person is to allow the interpretations to spill out without a present identity under which to unite them

[02:21] PH: i feel like that's another thing twin peaks illustrates [02:22] PH: how laura has to be… reconstituted from so many conflcting sense-perspectives [02:22] PH: in a way that's so at odds with the iconicised laura over which the credits roll each episode

[02:23] PH: guh

[02:24] PH: the reminder that laura “is the one” really takes on some new meaning when you take her death as that whole kind of… disuniting, the loosening of the identity-knot that just barely kept the sum of what she was from spilling out everywhere

[02:31] PH: think thoughts genuinely are done for now though

~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has left the memo ! ~~ ~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has joined the memo ! ~~

[11:31] PH: a book i read recently suggested the idea of the polyphonic novel: the work in which every speaker is made a subject rather than an object. it works by address: by having subjective cores address one another, breaking free of the bounds of secular ‘plot’ in which they dwell. the book describes how to objectify is to kill, and to close all loose ends. it talks about old carnival genres, about how folk traditions are the ones in which voices blend and speak as one, contrasted with the oppressively monologic pulpit of the modern novel. comedy, and humour, and humanising joy [11:32] PH: i think in death, and in iconisation, laura is never a subject again [11:34] PH: forever objectified in death, damned to the otherlife as an icon, loose ends cut cleanly short and sutured shut. the town tries to reconstruct her in their polyphony so that even an outsider with the special ears to hear it, cooper, might come to know her. maybe that itself is the suturing, thought maybe they're picking the wound apart so she can be a subject again, and recoiling at the blood they let out?

[11:38] PH: red and black, colours of blood and blood attempting to heal, clotting [11:38] PH: stop me please

[11:40] PH: i so wish twin peaks gave a better way to grieve than it does [11:42] PH: sarah palmer is the idea of a griever that sticks with me so hard. but she never ever ever gets over it. maybe it's law enforcement's promises to get ‘closure’, television-style, on a case which can never ever ever be closed, only ripped open painfully until it's worse than it was before. [11:44] PH: i don't think the suggestion is that we must never look to find people again when they're gone. maybe it's that giving them the love they deserve when they're alive means a wound that heals better, or at least might heal. some scar deep and forever but you can surely avoid an infection

[11:48] PH: twin peaks dramatising grief on the community level as it attempts to re-subjectify the dead through endless objectification, iconicisation, experiments in human substitions by way of doppelgangers and amputation, and all those substitutive pleasures (love affairs, drugs, money, white-haired madness). and the disorienting effect this has on the individual griever, as carnival turns to abattoir, and everything's torn up

[11:51] PH: the second series, when almost everyone but sarah and leland begin to move on. is that meant to show a way forward? or just that it doesn't ever end [11:52] PH: i know the self-eating nature of the community and its troubled and multiple relationship with memory is a theme here but that can't be so much of the conclusion, i'd cry [11:52] PH: shut me up

[11:52] GZ: No

[11:52] PH: sobs [11:52] PH: crying [11:52] PH: well, what do you think then.

[11:53] GZ: Me reading the Laura Palmer thesis from my notifications

~~ gradualZither [GZ] has attached a file: [hmm.png] ! ~~

[11:56] PH: YOU WERE MAKING ME KEEP GOING OH MY GOD

[11:57] PH: can i post this all as a gz–ph dialogue

[11:57] GZ: ofc

[11:57] PH: i just hope something of value came across and you had thoughts too

[11:58] GZ: i didn't read it yet but I'm about to have an hour off of work

[11:58] PH: oh yay :)

[14:18] PH: is death the transfiguration of a singular performed subjectivity into a million scattered and substitutable iconistic objects which cannot be made to latch together in the lacuna left [14:18] PH: been going crazy today i think

[14:20] PH: dreamed about millipede baths

~~ gradualZither [GZ] has attached a file: [notifs.png] ! ~~

[15:39] PH: FINE I'M EMBARRASSED NOW

[thegreatgizatsby]

I just think it's a little embarrassing that they put French on the labels for their hair products. Like the deodorant sticks and toothpaste are in English but as soon as it's something like perfume or sexy sexy shampoo conditioner they got all maid fantasy about it and we're just trying not to look too hard and keeping our thumbs clear of the "revitalisant" line

[phytel]

Put together an evil movement.

It wouldn't be doing evil things to people. It would be innocuous; but then you'd say the wrong thing and the group would look at you funny. Ask you to reconsider yourself. Personal talks held.

That’s our attempt here. It would be too boring to share elsewhere.

Nobody would know to worry; there's nothing to worry over, only that attitude. New commitments and these blossoming categories of novel behaviour, and novel truth; this from the guidelines, vague and all poorly enforced.

Someone might ask how you’d done that certain thing that certain way. It might be me, yet it might also be another group member, each of us having grown used to these uniformly rigid processes, our uniformly individual manner. You'd be anxious for not performing as your peers perform.

Protocols granted for reasons understood imaginarily; yet if you broke them, they'd become real.

Like that. You'd be dealing with symbols that are treated as real despite their questionable reality: confusing and alienating. Yet you'd be led to grasp that your conduct could, in some way, help you work with the symbols more innately. So you'd be given a known title to match your acumen; renaming, it would be this means of advancement, and enacting solidarity.

So a general way of doing things might crystallise.

There'd be ritual. Everyday ritual, at first. You'd play with masks and the masks would gently alienate, and the play would become ritualised, and the character bleeds silently. The letter of the law would become paramount; and nothing would be explosive, not ever ever ever.

Arbitrary artistic vows must be made. Political talk might suffice, yet when artistic tenets convert, and alchemy bubbles, our grandly mystagogic politics emerge with hidden ease. We prefer nobody knows.

A tide of false events would occur inarguably throughout the official channels. Those who left the movement would be remembered there: eventful human vaccinations against some further exodus. Uses would be found, underlining our exchange: labour for companionship; restless, competent or gifted, to busywork above all.

There would be a fucking Minecraft server. It would be a ballpit for the babies, and a magic factory for the magic.

Someone’s bound to have tried already.

[saturnsmelliott]

Pixel art commission for @phytel of her fankid Cleo!

[phytel]

i pray only to @saturnsmelliott

[phytel]

I have invented a LANGUAGE.

When, I communicate, pal, I'm just like you.

No, for real—I am! We're not so different. I take my tongue out of the bag in the morning just the same as the rest of us in this group. Equip and speak. Easy, sure—but what if there were another way?

That's why

[phytel]

*unlocks you as a skin in Fortnite*

So, I send you:

can you send me another little tumblr ask please i'd like a prompt

And you give me this? You realise I'm an artist, right? Not that you'd understand(), but you realise I'm achieving a little modicum of like, something???????? here? That this is my artism? It's like, I'm experimental, and that's not experimental, like decisively, so I'm gonna air you out now. What even are you? Stupid blue orb.

Hey, you play as that orb in Fortnight? I'm not using yourre baby fortnite-spelling. I don't even play video games videogames so I don't know what the heck you are talking about. Whatever. Fuzzy little circle. You know why you're shaped like an eraser on the end of my pencil? It's *because* I'm going to rub you out. Like in the mean way.

Feud.

[phytel]

Virtual Private NOTworks Hehehehehehehehe

the way i often think about vpns: if you are an intelligence agency in a developed nation and you have not figured out how to compromise a commercially available vpn service, you are not achieving your mission statement.

but then, you actually revealing that, clamping down on the deviants [sic] or the terrorists [sic] or the men [sic] for the sake of just institutional prudishness, or copyright infringement, or ‘security’? it’s just soooooooo disadvantageous.

here: you’re the gun squad?—and you’re the smart gun squad? you’re going to want to defer your interference until it really counts. you’re going to have to wait until the secret networks are just teeming, hey, not with baby geoblock workarounders, not eternally-far-more-leechers-than-seeders, no, but with insurrection—and not that officially known insurrection (because you can deal with those in all your other little ways)—we’re talking about something else, some officially unknown insurrection, likely even that unofficially unknown insurrection.

i'm talking—we're talking—about the

PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLA NTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANT S PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS P LANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PLANTS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL A N T S PL AN T S PL AN TS PL AN TS PL AN TS PL ANTS PL A N T S P L A N T S.

🗡️🌲

[phytel]

another example

i'm kinda confused at how someone can DO MATHS. what is it you even do? it's THERE ALREADY. it's like saying, haha, yeah, oh, my hobby? i grow plants. like friend, i'm sorry but you do not grow the plants, the plants grow the plants. you just officiate little mammal

[phytel]

Is there a reason you've been waiting to answer for so long?

mel.

i don't know i can explain it just like that.

i've been sick and sad and i haven't had access—to any of it, i mean, there's been no access for me these days.

and i don't use this web-site that way and you have to know that. i am not often here and you have to take that into account if you are going to keep sending me these messages, that it's part of how i am still not going to be how you want me to be (but i don't mean anything by it either).

do i explain again?

recently, i've been spending a lot more time outdoors than we used to back when we talked one-to-one basically every day, like we did.

or it's really more like outdoors-indoors, if i mean that. don't worry, you'd love it, it's the new new project: i'm outsider–insider now.

that equals == (1) i wear scratchy scarves even though it's summer, and (2) my big pink coat, and (3) i drink conspicuous green/brown brews out of (4) my super-cute flowery carry-cup; sometimes i (4.5) public-burp, which is optional. it's waaaay too warm for this whole get-up and someone should have stopped me by now, but they don't because of (5) the accent that i do.

the thing (1–5) is that i fit in somewhere—even though i'm flouncing this total-symbolic car-crash so publicly, i surely have to belong somehow, you've got to suppose—but wherever that is, it's totally not here, and that is who i am as a performance artist now.

don't give me that look i bet you're giving me, or i guess you gave me the look already and i can't stop that, but whatever then, as established, i live for that look anyway.

and hey, mel. there's more.

but i'm not sure.

i know you know that i do this, and that we both used to do this too, us together like that, but then you also haven't seen me in many years, and it's much more than you remember now.

you need to understand that i'm really very different to how you must know me (or *have known me). i dyed my hair like you said, but then i dyed it a handful more times on top of that and the accuracy rating with each procedure grew lower, lower, relative each time with my increasingly famous screwy inebriate whimsy, XD XD X D. and now i have three dangerous piercings on each ear. and ainslie is gone, thank god. girl, you have missed too much for me to just give a recap, just like that too. but you get the gist, i bet, and i probably didn't have to say all this just so you would either, but you know i like to talk.

in-essence why i haven't been able to respond to you: i guess there are lots more reasons than just the simple ‘who i am’ i made it out to be which even now, i'm not sure whether you'll care. but let me give you one more big capstone example?

so, here. notice the obvious? i type in lowercase now, and i know you hate that, and it's embarrassing. couldn't i get over that, and get over myself, the embarrassment? but then even more (and this is the important part): you're like family, and if my family were to see me typing lowercase and then about all this then they'd know, mel, so it's ended up like that now, and i don't really know how they'd react—but i'm still the biggest crybaby in the world and do we really need to find out?

i know you don't care, but i care, and yeah, that's a me problem⸻but it's still a problem!! i bet you everything i won't even hit enter on this.

i hit enter on it and it just made a new paragraph, lol.

whatever. no point trying to convince you anymore. i guess i kind of rambled a lot here. but you get the gist. and no offence

i do miss you (swans kissing) (🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶)

~me

[phytel]

>

~~ gradualZither [GZ] has joined the memo ! ~~

~~ phantasyHouse [PH] has joined the memo ! ~~

[18:07] PH: listening to john green's tuberculosis book

[22:42] GZ: How is it? Haven't started yet

[23:00] PH: first chapter is harrowing [23:00] PH: he narrates well

[01:26] PH: it's sad [01:41] PH: feel without subjectivity

[02:10] PH: i think the main objection against cogito ergo sum is that it should really be cogitare ergo esse; since that first person conjugation presumes a subject, of course it then concludes one [02:12] PH: cogitare ergo esse doesn't presume identity, it's just infinitive necessarily parallel with infinitive. [02:13] PH: i think this explains how i feel about living much better. it's not that i think therefore i am, it's that thought occurs transitively therefore occurance occurs transitively, unidentified. [02:16] PH: my thought-machining doesn't necessarily guarantee my subjectivity, it just guarantees at least one incidental and unidentified subjectivity whose instantiation my thought-production affects. i think for the sake of simplicity that that's generally me, but not always necessarily. [02:16] PH: often i am an unimplemented cog in a larger or smaller hypothetical subjectivity. [02:18] PH: that's what subjugation is, it's what dissociation is (no wonder dissociation is often found at awake/asleep state-boundaries). it's what meditation does. [02:20] PH: i am too heavy a rock to go with this tide's pull, yet it smoothes my distinguishments still. one day my thoughtless fossil might house a frightening thing with claws, though more likely never anything, which is some comfort. losing this thread, this feels personless to all this.

[02:21] GZ: Is a wave a different entity when it reaches the other side of the pond [02:21] GZ: Also you've really gotta play Talos Principle

[02:22] PH: > Is a wave a different entity when it reaches the other side of the pond [02:22] PH: what does this mean?

[02:46] GZ: A wave only exists as a pattern in a medium. It's never made of the same particles as any other moment, and when it travels there's nothing physically moving in the direction of the wave. But it has a well-defined existence. [02:48] GZ: The first person doing the thinking is an entity that thinks, even if their form/composition/etc is transient. A Boltzmann brain would use the first person pronoun in the instant it exists. [02:48] GZ: The error isn't in the first person, but the singular (and also the plural). [02:51] GZ: A wave exists as a pattern in particles. Itself it can be the sum of an arbitrary number of waves. It has components, and the way those components fit together are well-defined, but one structure is dual to uncountably many others, including structures which themselves include several equally valid structures superimposed within themselves. [02:53] GZ: A subject is similar, in that it can be dissected in time, space, and self without any particular scheme of dissection being more valid than the other. The divisions are at once mandatory and arbitrary. [02:54] GZ: The whole cannot be explained as something other than a sum of many parts, but those parts are clearly entangled on a metaphysical level. [02:55] GZ: The subject is neither singular nor plural, because it can't consistently be either, only both.

[09:03] PH: i guess this gets at the whole nonbelief in parts outside of arbitrary selections thing, yeah. that thing i mentioned about infinitives in parallel. i don't think this is all that controversial. i just feel bad.

[09:33] PH: subjects are clearly singular. it's just that their thought isn't how we know they must exist from some radical-sceptic perspective. [9:35] PH: it's just thought being tangential to some process of existing, likely these particular subjects but often outwith and semi-including them. [9:35] PH: maybe it's all just cogitare et esse as a single proposition rather than a ‘therefore’ too. [9:36] PH: i don't think that entanglement has any bearing on how you count the subject. like, a subject comes by much thought, nothing about many thinkers.

[9:38] PH: i feel insubstantial.

[12:38] PH: …can i put this interaction on tumblr but formatted to look like it's a conversation between OCs? [12:46] PH: i think you're right about this but i don't understand how

[15:16] GZ: ofc lol

[capn-wing-ding]

they've invented a bird that can help you find things, and her name? i dont know

[phytel]

sunlight cures all illness seemingly

so capturing sunlight in pill form, i sell my encapsuled miracle rays. this lasts.

then i stop selling my encapsuled miracle rays, on ebay and elsewhere, citing a sense of general fatigue.

though knock-off alternatives (moonglow, startwinkle) are sold through various turkish and eastern european vendors (we become mildly bulgarian-fluent), no mixture is found to replace my creation. of this i am well aware.

madly, i gift the very last remaining container of my encapsuled miracle rays to the louvre. they are soon refused (an informal e-mail chain transpires) and sent back, obviously damaged in transit. it is the fault of la poste and i am involved in a long and fruitless dispute.

sunshine leaks gently from the dirt-leather case, dazzling those who walk by my home. the warmth surrounds my houseguests and myself. our numbers dwindle.

we live in this manner until nothing remains within our abode but nighttime; nothing outwith but daylight.

i am remembered as that alchemist, though i never used alchemy, which fact is known to patchy academics and few others.

they name me the modern paracelsus in all the various broadsheet epitaphs

but i don't know who that is

it's not me, man