i dont want a childproofed internet i am almost 30 fucking years old. give your kid an internet safety talk and stop making it the problem of every adult on the planet every time some cryptkeeper legislator gets the brilliant idea (via conservative lobbying) to push through yet another bill gutting our access to free expression + increasing the powers of the surveillance state + lining the pockets of Big Data in the name of Protecting The Kids they wont even feed. this shit is exhausting i can’t believe we’re going to be fighting about it for the rest of my life
Small question about Pentiment: Was the character of Vácslav and the metaphysical theories he can explain if you ask him nicely enough in any way a reference to Menocchio, the 16th Italian miller that was the subject of Carlo Ginzburg's 1976 The Cheese and the Worms?
Yes. Some players have identified Vácslav's beliefs as Gnosticism. While many of the things he says are consonant with Gnostic thought, others are not. It's really his own blend of absorbed traditions mixed with his own theories. Like Menocchio, Vácslav has taken a lot of ideas from different places and has formulated his own particular cosmology.
Another source of inspiration came from the Fournier Register, records of the inquisitorial process applied to southern French Cathar credentes, Catholics, and non-believers. Many of the people whom Jacques Fournier interrogated had syncretized their own beliefs that could best be understood as a blend of Catharism or Catholicism, local folk beliefs, and their own personal ideas.
While people like Menocchio or the character Vácslav represent an extreme level of cosmological development, I wanted to push back against the idea that common people lacked the curiosity or drive to formulate their own ideas about the world around them (and beyond).
Also like Menocchio, Vácslav cannot shut up about his beliefs. Menocchio was not condemned only as a heretic, but as a heresiarch, the founder of a heretical movement. His drive to constantly talk with his neighbors about his beliefs was seen as proselytizing.
Kiersau is an old abbey, Andreas, and sometimes even I wonder if it - if we - have outlived our purpose here. . . . Sometimes I wonder if we were meant to change and we just... forgot to.
So here's something I thought was interesting.
Between Act I and Act II, the townspeople of Tassing age and change. Some of them begin going gray (or go grayer). Some grow longer beards or hair. Some have cheekbones become more prominent, or have lines on their face that develop or deepen, even subtly. And of course it's especially obvious with the kids of Tassing, who are growing from babies into children, and children into teenagers.
Even those characters who don't have visual changes to their faces or hair have differences to their clothing to show that time has passed. They've changed, even if it's only replacing or restyling old clothes, or growing out their hair. People have died, been born, gotten married, moved into town, built new businesses, taken up new ideas - the growth and change is often modest, but it's visible.
But at Kiersau Abbey...
... nobody changes - so much so that most of the monks and nuns don't even have different portraits between Act I and Act II, despite the passage of seven years.
For those that do, the only change is to the color of their habit (the seven years between Act I and Act II would encompass the entire period between entering the abbey and solemn profession, so anyone who was a novice when Andreas was there in Act I would have necessarily professed by Act II).
The only other one who changes is Aedoc, whose "image" becomes more worn - but even he doesn't change facially. (Compare him to the visible aging of Ill Peter, another elderly male character.) None of the members of Kiersau physically change, visually, in those seven years. No lines on their faces, no gray hair, no wrinkles, no beard growth, no drooping, no aging, nothing.
The only ones who change regardless of the outcome of Act I are Cecilia, who was far more worldly and savvy than her counterpart, more proactive and less caught up in Kiersau as a bubble; and Piero, who understood and accepted that change was inevitable and didn't fear it. And the only way that they could change was to die, and disappear altogether.
And for all that there's been at least one major change to Kiersau with the closure of the scriptorium (and possibly more, depending on Ferenc and Matilda's fates in Act I), almost nothing has changed in terms of how Andreas/the player sees and experiences the abbey. Of those characters in the abbey who have "grown up", Zdena is still half-heartedly tending to the remains of the library under Illuminata's supervision (and Illuminata herself, though she's now Mother Superior, is still in the library sorting books). Lukas is still in the kitchen, and still can't quite figure out what to do without Wojslav directing him. Volkbert is still doing the menial, grubby work nobody else wants to do. He even lampshades how taking his vows hasn't really changed anything except the color of his habit:
I'm a monk now. . . . I still do the same work, but now I have the same robes as the other brothers.
One expects the abbey to change more slowly than the town, given that the monks and nuns aren't likely to be getting married or having children (one presumes, at least); but even those characters who have, in name, taken on new roles are still functionally doing mostly the same things they were doing seven years ago.
The only members of Kiersau that we see change, grow, take on visibly different roles, and age are the ones we see in Act III, after the abbey has been destroyed and they've moved on elsewhere.
Obviously Kiersau Abbey is not some kind of actual pocket dimension where time doesn't move (unless . . . ?). But it's posited even within the text of the game as a deliberate anachronism, a medieval holdover in the early modern age; and it's set against the inescapable presence of the Church's inertia versus the looming Reformation, and the growing social unrest against the feudal status quo. A major theme of the game is the inevitability of change and loss, and how being able to accept it and move on is essential for growth/survival. And it's clear that the stagnation has reached such a point that there can be no lasting change on a social scale in Tassing until the abbey burns.
This is Kiersau, Andreas. You should know by now, nothing here changes.
Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖
If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you
thinking about how when i started disco elysium, i was really lost as to how to get out of the starting room and eventually had to ask friends for help. i was completely bewildered because nobody i asked could explain why i was having so much trouble leaving the room. everyone claimed that the room had a door, but it just looked like an isolated hotel room bounded by a black void to me. i wound up slowly trudging around interacting with everything in the room and eventually died to the ceiling fan. i had been expecting the game to be kind of avant-garde and cerebral, so i kept an open mind and kept trying, desperately hoping to find some profundity in my fruitless search for a door that everyone insisted was there. only later did i learn that the game wasn’t meant to run on a 2011 imac and the door to the room hadn’t rendered
Zug fahren macht mich immer ein bisschen paranoid... Was ist, wenn mein Ticket wo eindeutig das heutige Datum drauf steht eigentlich für nächstes Jahr ist. Was ist, wenn mein Gleis plötzlich weg ist.
I really have zero patience with the whole "man vs. bear" / "you're alone in an elevator with three adult men BUT you feel completely safe. Who are they" / "male night joggers are the natural predator of female night joggers" thing. Like, it's jokes, but it's also sincere, and it reinforces the idea that it's normal and good for women to be afraid all the time, especially of men.
It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.
And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.
If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.
Don't let them use you. Don't cultivate your fear.
It is far far more likely for women to be hurt, abused, and murdered by that One Good Man. Isolating yourself from others will in fact put you in more danger!
As an atheist, the primary benefit of studying religions is – ironically – that it helps you stay grounded in reality. God may be fake, but religions as bodies of cultural practices are very real, and using the former as an excuse to refuse to learn about the latter means you're at constant risk of making up a guy to get mad at.
The secondary benefit of studying religions is that Roman Catholic heresies are objectively hilarious.
