#astranemus

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Stress Response

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“The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.”

— Sophie Strand, The Birth of The Flowering Wand [astranemus]

[whisperofthewaves]

astranemus replied to your photoset “sgt-dignam:”

Is this the game where you get to pick really bizarre personality traits or something? Looks awesome, but sadly my shitty laptop will never run it. :(

@astranemus yes! boy, does it feel like a slightly psychedelic fever dream haha.

ah that's tough. though, from what I see, the minimal system requirements to run it are rather low, so maybe there is hope yet?

if you ever get a chance, so far I definitely recommend it for the delicious weirdness of the experience

[echthr0s]

@astranemus replied to your post “@astranemus replied to your post: sometimes I feel...”

Hahaha no I totally get you I was just being silly. People are very uncritical of game lore and often fail to read between the lines. The same is true of other media - I was literally discussing this with my flatmate earlier, how Alan Moore wrote Rorschach to be an objectively terrible person and he'd have people come up to him going "I love Rorschach! I really identify with him!" Etc and he was just like. No. Dear god, no. So people just have very lax critical thinking WRT media generally, but perhaps this is exacerbated with games since we are directly involved in the world and characters rather than just observing.

honestly as a bit of a Dumbass myself I don’t necessarily blame people for falling into either the “knee-jerk overidentification with character to the point of conveniently ignoring what the character is actually meant to represent” trap or the “well the codex said x so I guess x is the whole objective reality” trap

but it’s just... at some point you gotta feel the teeth in your leg and go “wait a damn second” is all I’m sayin (what you do after that moment is absolutely your business, though, I’m not going to fight a guy who’s dragging a bear trap around and insisting they put it on themselves)

[coldalbion]

astranemus replied to your link “Science and metaphysics must work together to answer life”

Know any good readings on vitalism?

Well, I always recommend Bergson as an in, and there’s of course Bishop’s new work on Klages (which is hideously expensive in physical format, cheaper as an ebook, but you’re probably going to want to break the DRM as it’s only readable by a proprietary platform.) Both are different takes, but it’s quite clear that vitalism, far from being about woo is an attempt to see things in a holistic, almost processes-like manner.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways. Sophie Strand, Supracellular (via astranemus)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Egon Schiele, Mother and Child, 1914

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 If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s. 

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (via astranemus)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my files]

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… we are currently neglecting reality because our efforts to describe and understand the world are directed away from the experience of being alive and being in relationship. In other words: We consider the practice of love a private matter, rather than an instrument of knowledge.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

[astranemus]

[echthr0s]

@astranemus replied to your post: sometimes I feel like the supposed truths of video...

Mages are good my Lavellan Inquisitor was a mage with a lovely mage husband thank you very much

and almost all my OCs are mages because “mage” is a very broad term despite what canon says, but once again, I feel like that one tag got all of the attention from this post and I regret it