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Today's Document
DEAR READER
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor
Sweet Seals For You, Always
todays bird
Not today Justin
if i look back, i am lost
tannertan36
d e v o n
$LAYYYTER
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
we're not kids anymore.
untitled
almost home
taylor price
pixel skylines
Cosmic Funnies
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seen from Italy
seen from Germany
seen from Iraq
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Ukraine
seen from Portugal
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Romania
seen from Oman
seen from United States
@professor-magnus
I have been peer pressured into reading The Communist Manifesto, which I was saving for a later unit. So I might write about that sooner!
Side note, I feel like “I was peer pressured into reading The Communist Manifesto” might actually be a unique experience. Or at least a uniquely sociology experience
Quarter: Quarter 1
Unit: Unit 1- The Eye
Book: Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
I was originally uncertain in my inclusion of this text for The Eye. Especially as the text to start off not only The Eye, but the entire curriculum. But as I read, it became increasingly obvious that this fit perfectly.
Kuang uses the character Robin Swift, Griffin Lovell, Ramiz Rafi Mirza, Victoire Desgraves, and, yes, Letitia Price to examine both the structures that hold imperialism and colonialism in power and the effects of both on individuals. We never learn Robin’s, or Griffin’s, birth names in order to make it clear how colonialism steals personal identity. These are themes that really stuck out to me as I was reading, and especially found the idea of how you need to be able to understand the institutional injustices in order to know the full scale of an issue and that those who benefit from the system cannot be trusted to be allies incredibly important as a sociologist.
However, those are not the themes that make this vital for understanding The Eye.
Most, when looking for a book for The Eye would focus on books with themes about surveillance, but that’s not all that The Eye is. And a common in universe complaint about The Eye is that all it does is hoard knowledge and do nothing with it. Babel showed that the hoarding of knowledge, of viewing knowledge as a resource in and of itself, is vital to how imperial powers maintain their dominance. It also showed the siren-call of knowledge that grips just about everyone involved in The Magnus Institute, but that’s neither here nor there.
Finally, with a name like The Necessity of Violence the question quickly becomes “Is this book not more fit for The Slaughter?” But Necessity is the optimal word here. The Slaughter is senseless violence, pointless violence. Violence that exists only for violence’s sake. The violence that Griffin, Robin, and the striking workers used was not senseless, it was purposeful. Which would actually make this a horrible book for The Slaughter.
Just finished Babel. I’m gonna need 5-10 business days to recover before actually writing my thing about how it relates to The Eye (and, crucially, why it doesn’t relate to The Slaughter)
How do I kill someone who's an avatar of the web AND the desolation?
You need specialist help. The Slaughter, the Hunt, and especially the End can make anything stay down.
My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that
Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass
It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE
After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.
Once you are aware of an unreachable blind spot it nags at you constantly and you can feel it like a hard little lump under your skin you need to poke and scratch at and it’s ardghgguychgghhbhhhbhhh
And on top of that, having operated CCTV at multiple locations now- my favourite and most comfortable one having excess of 60 cameras- it can be REALLY hard to suddenly jump to a different operating interface and display configuration, because all the muscle memory is wrong
On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.
Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet
The closest I imagine I can equate it to is like. Getting really really good at painting with a pair of prosthetic hands, and then suddenly having them swapped out with someone else’s
Not the best depiction, but. Feels like this
Further examples of practical applications. Class, please thank the kind presenter.
Hello! I'm writing a character who has tons of ethereal Eyes and was wondering if you could elaborate in his that felt/what it was like/what adjustment was like? I think it could be really helpful :)
I mean I can tell you what operating multiple cameras is like? But IDK if that would be 1 for 1 since my tiny human brain can only handle 2-3 thinks at a time max, lol
Learning WHERE the cameras are is kinda hard. I learn by pointing them towards each other and triangulating their position based on visible landmarks.
If a camera is very high up, or spins, it can take time to get over feelings of nausea or vertigo. Im ‘m scared of heights and ceiling cameras were an adjustment.
It takes time to figure out how to focus on a specific thing and decide how to judge what is important to look at.
You can see everything at once and let it wash over you like white noise, or you can go ‘search’ mode and filter everything out except for a handful of specific colours, areas, gestures, etc, OR you can actively pursue a single moving target or location.
The downside of turning one camera is that it leaves behind a blind spot, so you kind of need to prioritize which “eye” moves first in order to keep “seeing” the most important things- so if I need to “see” á moving target with an “eye” that covers a high-risk area, I may move a low-priority area’s “eye” first to cover that soon-to-be-vulneurable spot BEFORE using THAT “eye” to follow the target- which can be p seamless if the target is on a continuous trajectory
There will be a spot you cannot see. It will frustrate the fuck out of you. There isn’t a single “eye” that can get a good angle but you still kinda try. Unfortunately if you get too fixated and don’t turn the redundant eyes back in their normal direction you may narrow your field of view so tight you don’t see anything else, leaving you exposed.
The handful of gestures or colours or faces you train yourself to prioritize the highest will jump out at you like a neon light no matter what else is going on. There will be a crowd of a thousand people and suddenly you’ll find yourself singling out Knife Stab David, the guy who isn’t allowed to be there.
There’s a sort of peripheral part of your brain that does it’s own thing even when you’re locked in to a specific target, which can be good or bad depending.
The more emotionally invested you get in the primary thing you are focused on, the harder it is to notice everything else. You have to spend a dedicated amount of effort making sure you don’t fixate, zoom in too close, follow too tightly, etc.
Sometimes if a moving target is bound for a specific destination you can pre-move your other “eyes” to capture maximum visual, so you never lose track for even a second, even when the target turns corners or goes in a circle or doubles back.
Certain speeds are red flags. Objects or persons moving too slow or too fast stick out highlighter-yellow.
Because I’m security-focused, I find certain patterns of movement stick out particularly strong, like a yellow button in a sea of black beans. Taking off a backpack, reaching into a coat, putting a hand to a hip sheath, any large arm movements.
It is possible to focus on multiple moving things at once but the more there are, the harder it is.
Once you’re comfortable operating a surveillance system, you can research what you see in real time. Logos, symbols, tattoos, brand names, make and models of equipment, company notes, previous activity, etc.
Again, once you’re comfortable, you stop really noticing your hands operating the controls or entering the codes- it really is kind of like your brain is following from multiple angles directly. Like you’re a massive creature with deaf ears and numb skin and a hundred eyes.
….that sounded creepier than it feels
The worst part is not being able to “talk” to what you’re seeing
The absolute worst feeling is watching something bad happen that you could have HELPED with ig you were physically present. (I once smacked a monitor with my hand trying to steady an elderly man who had stumbled.)
Cameras get old and deteriorate at different rates so some of your “eyes” crap out and go staticky, stop moving, lose colour vision, get noise and interference, black out if they move weird, etc. and require consistent upkeep. The newest ones may be sharper with more detail, but they may also respond faster or slower than the previous model and that can impact the smoothness of your continuity.
Again, not a PERFECT 1 for 1, but that’s what comes to mind for me.
Hope it helps?
I thought a practical example of what utilizing the powers of The Eye might be like was in order
on trust and manipulation
Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -
And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”
And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.
Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.
The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.
I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.
I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.
I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.
And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.
Felice never played a trick on me again.
Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed.
And I feel like this is information worth sharing.
Here are the readings for Unit 1: The Eye! It’s subject to change, especially if anyone has better ideas, but I’m pretty set on the first three and the last reading
I picked up the first book for the Eye unit (Babel by R. F. Kuang) and it’s killing me to not read it yet. Like, it’s sitting right next to me, but I’m refusing myself the privilege of reading it
But I do actually have to work on my thesis or my major professor might have an aneurism
The first Quarter is “Statement Begins”, containing units on The Eye, The Web, The Corruption, The Stranger, and The Spiral, in that order. The units are grouped entirely based on my own perception of how different Fears are related to each other.
The Eye is, in my opinion, the most important to start with. Especially as this is an academic pursuit and it is the fear of forbidden knowledge.
The Web is very similar, aesthetically, to The Eye. Both seem to attract the sort of individual who believes that their intelligence makes them better than others or that their knowledge with save/protect them. Of course, both are wrong in this regard.
The Corruption is related to The Web over their shared custody over arachnids.
The Stranger relates to The Stranger in that they both involve your, or another person’s, body changing outside your, or their, control. The Corruption specifically does this through an infestation, though The Stranger isn’t so picky.
The Spiral and The Stranger both call into question your very sanity, making you doubt your own memories, senses, and understanding of reality.
I feel like people dont focus on the actual core of extinction when discussing it, because the core of the fear is catastrophization and anxiety about the future. While it is specifically described as the fear of extinction, and many extrapolate that to include smaller losses as well, i don’t think the extinction can be a fear of what is happening(being i a wildfire is desolation, no matter the state of the planet) but more accurately what will happen.
I believe extinction on a smaller scale is convincing yourself that because you made a tiny mistake its all over and everybody hates you now, I think extinction when manifest personally is not being able to watch the news, because its simply to much for you.
Extinction is the feeling of being a time traveler on the hinder-burg and being unable to stop it, not someone watching an beloved coffee-shop close, but panicking thinking the tip jar being less full than normal is a sign of the imminent of the coffee shop and if the coffee shop is closing I wont be able to study and if I cant study then etc etc etc.
The world will end tomorrow, but it will always be today.
The actual manifestations are just reflective of what we associate with the fear. Bones can be symbols of the end, the flesh, the buried, because the bones don’t matter the emotional reality of what it is does.
Other fears take other forms as well, the eye exists as paranoia, the corruption exists as disgust, the lonely as depression. While not explicitly stated, I would postulate that the extinction is anxiety, (and while other fears feed on anxiety associated with their thing, it is similar to how one can be depression over their house burning down would still feed the desolation, but the lonely is still associated with depression.)
The reason it manifests as technology, and nuclear weapons, and climate change,(it’s also probably stolen ai from the stranger by this point) that these are “REAL THINGS THAT COULD END THE WORLD AND WE KNOW THIS.”
Every add for the fight against climate change serves to serve the extinction, but when you’re aware of cars and the ozone so does every ca add and every car.
Every time somebody uses an ai tool in your presence it serves the extinction if your aware about the lax safety protocols and the corporate nonsense and how none of the ai companies passed the safety grading and the us government keeps putting more and more power in this thing(also the climate effects of powering this thing), not to mention how the economy is mostly just ai trading on various stock/equity markets at this point and it is desperate to crash the economy etc etc etc.
And we literally have a clock to determine how close we are to nuclear war at all times, and the system of measurement it uses is seconds. Also its the closest it has ever been at 89 seconds away from the apocalypse. Which is terrifying, and that is the point of extinction.
Also, its arguable that the fear of rituals would serve the extinction but that’s not the point. At the moment.
