Hi there! If you’re seeing this, a song I’ve written has breached containment and is rapidly approaching.
I CANNOT in good conscience recommend this song to you; personally, I consider it an EVIL COGNITOHAZARD, and listening to it on loop in the wee hours of the morning has been a genuine psychological horror experience! That said, I’m a huge fan of the artists I’ve tagged, I worked really hard on it, and *I* enjoy it immensely. If the phrase "music for deeply unwell people" speaks to you, you might enjoy it, because that is what this song is.
Here it comes. If you’re staying, I recommend headphones!
The oracles forever trapped in the Cave of Reflection were simultaneously granted a vision of our deeply irresponsible protagonist, as well as the chaos wrought by the creation of the Whirling Machine. They had this to say:
A terrible vision!
A terrible vision?
His mission will kill him!
His mission will kill him?
But he’s made his decision!
But he’s made his decision?
And more will go with him!
And more will go with him?
A terrible vision.
A terrible vision!
His mission will kill him.
His mission will kill him!
Yes, but he’s made his decision.
But he’s made his decision!
And more will go with him!
And more will go with him!
To make up with my lover
To take hold of my life
So the world can recover
From all of its strife
For eternal elation
And to punish Eugene
(That motherfucker is toast!)
My sole destination
Is the Whirling Machine
She’ll be waiting for me
See you on the flipside
Of the Whirling Machine
It’ll escape onto most streaming platforms soon
FAQs!:
Q: Why?
A: I’m mentally ill
Q: This seems like it’s part of a broader canon. Is it?
A: Yeah, but don’t worry about that for now pookie bear, you guys just have fun listening to the song
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.
To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.
"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.
Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"
[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext
seeing shockingly few people understand this very basic idea so i made this flowchart to help you determine when and if it's okay to shapeshift into another person.
VERY SIMPLY STUFF PEOPLE!!!! I DONT KNOW HOW SOME OF YOU KEEP FORGETTING!!!
okay but what if im doing a bit. just so i can be like "oooo look at me i'm so-and-soooo" and make fun of them. if it's really funny. it wouldnt work without the shapeshifting i swear
for people with static bodies, you have to understand how personal their facade is to their identity, and how traumatizing it can be for them to be stolen from them, even as a "joke".
genuinely cannot believe the attitude some shapeshifters here have towards static beings... like. you're mad at us for saying you shouldn't shift into someone without asking first?? be fucking for real right now. if you shift into a real person you literally take a piece of their consciousness in your own to be able to channel their visage. it's incredibly fucking disorienting to have a literal piece of you ripped away from your consciousness for g-d knows how long for someone else to play a silly prank (not to mention how fucking awful it is to have your visage used for something you would never do) and if too many people shift into you at once it can have incredibly damaging repercussions!! like literally ripping your soul from your body and killing your physical form. thats literally what happened to elvis. so many people started impersonating him and it fucking killed him. if any of the shifters on this site ever actually did any research on static people they would know this but they don't care because static pain is only a big funny joke to them 🙄
THANK YOU. i try not to speak for statties too often (im not sure if i can say that word but "static beings" is kind of a mouthful, plz lemme know if thats not ok), but so many people literally act like you didn't see the heartbreaking footage of Elvis pushing through his final show while his soul escaped his body!! as if it isn't compulsive in the American school system to watch that footage in grade 8!!!
and most people just FORGAVE john lennon for straight up SOLICITING SHIFTERS IN HIS AUDIENCE TO TAKE ON THE FORM OF ELVIS WHILE HE WAS ALSO PERFORMING A CONCERT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD AT THE SAME TIME AS HIM. i mean, he was shot about it eventually but nowadays people talk about him like he didnt basically kill a man live on stage.
it's fucking gross honestly and not enough people take this shit seriously.
So sick of this discourse. Literally just shapeshift into whoever you want, it’s YOUR body. It’s not MY fault that some people only have the one appearance, that sounds like a skill issue to me.
You’ll hear a lot in the shapeshifting community about “stealing” appearances and the whole consciousness-channeling thing, but all that stuff is just emotional appeals and pseudoscience born from shapeshifter guilt. It’s really not that ethically complicated.
I’m not stealing your face, I’m making MY face look like your face. You notice how impressionists never have to deal with this discourse? Makes you think.🙄
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'."
A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face
there’s this term i coined in my friendgroup i call “the charizard effect” and it can apply to anything and everything, but it was born from me explaining my feelings about the pokemon charizard. the term is basically about how overexposure to something be it by corporate shilling or fandom prominence drives me away from really enjoying something bc i’m exposed to it so much against my will i become tired of it. it came to me bc i was ranting about how tpci does not, and cannot stop reinventing charizard, and how it is popular and obtusely included in almost every region, merch, etc in every way possible and it’s highly commodified.
i dont dislike the pokemon charizard, in fact i really like its X form, but i am exposed to so much charizard in my pokemon consumption that i cant be bothered to care for it in any more than in passing. this applies to a bunch of other stuff i’d otherwise be ok with, but i always just call this aversion phenomena “the charizard effect”
making this term has done numbers for me being able to concisely express how i feel abt something. like. its not charizard’s fault i feel this way, im sure i’d feel normal abt it if it was stripped of all this over commodification, but i cannot. hence the name