#owlnoise

[lichowl]

i love markiplier because he's clearly got a knack for being an entertainer but bro became one of the top let's players on youtube with zero gamer instincts

[lichowl]

she's never done anything wrong in her life

[lichowl]

President Donald Trump on Monday shrugged off the possible collapse of peace negotiations with Iran, telling CNBC, “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly.”

“I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” Trump told CNBC’s Eamon Javers in a phone interview midday Monday, saying he thought the protracted discussions “started to get very boring.”

[lichowl]

lord give me the strength not to castigate someone reposting a twee "tumblr quotes that go hard!!!!"

[lichowl]

reading 1 over x. i shall put my "ulysses ogre"/"pepe silvia"/"i've connected the dots" thoughts below the cut

x. x (formerly twitter) as in the everything app. x as in xx chromosome, an all-girls' school. x as in nil, as in to make nil, to kill, to cross out, to cut. but also, x to connect, to ship, to have sex. x as in christ, xmas, xtian, and all saints is also a (formerly) christian school. x as in xxx, lurid, pornographic, perhaps not in the strictly sexual sense but something that is made to be looked at intently.

decay. nigredo, the first arc, the alchemistic term for decomposition or putrefaction; when something putrefies, it blackens. when something dies, it decays. decay as in "brainrot", decay as in "degeneracy", the rot at the modern and the american core. the decay of the mind, the perceived decay of values and purity.

symmetry and opposition. or fearful symmetry. enid meeting her counterpart behind the hole, the group of boys being rough equivalents to enid, tate, corbett, and ryan. the tag "alternates", presumably in reference to the mandela catalogue, where humanity is stalked by malicious doppelgangers. a girl's school to a boy's school. ryan deliberately patterning herself like corbett to be her constructed counterpart or twin. also, eric to enid, the mirror, her incestuous desire for not just her brother, but herself, and how she sees her brother as herself (see: how she pays a lot of attention to her doppelganger's beauty), the continuation of the family's mental illness.

bret easton ellis? it's "in the style of", and ellis' first novel was less than zero, another story about debauched partygoing students, like tate's novel (the in-universe 1 over x). zero = x, geddit? the gay man bret easton ellis' novels, with their focus on masculinity, contrast (hey, fearful symmetry) the already very apparent female-centric setting and the prominence of sapphic attraction. also, the footnote of a character named blair easton, who enid notes is the daughter of "the last notable author in america".

masks and social perceptions. and here's where i really become ulysses ogre! the literal, the metaphorical. halloween is the holiday where you dress up, hide your face, wear a mask, enid is constantly masking her reactions to what could or could not be hallucinations, calculating her social gains and losses, her position. she struggles to express the "real". it seems like she's being set up as the ego to tate's id, though maybe tate is more a superego.

as with pretty much every bavitz fic, there's a big "horrors of modernity" theme, tying into the brainrot, the technology, the sheer overflow of information. enid rejecting the natural (she hates plants) in favour of the manufactured, because the natural/id has wounded her? could also tie back to how ryan has deliberately manufactured becoming a twin to corbett for the bit.

tate is interesting, clearly the daughter of some elon musk analogue or this universe's version of musky husky himself. if he's even read neuromancer i wouldn't put it past him to name one of his children "wintermute" either. i wonder if it is coincidental that she shares a name with the most notorious "manosphere" influencer? it's likely her personality will be turned on its head in some fucked up way, but she's my favourite so far.

[lichowl]

[lichowl]

my father rearranged all my things much in the way someone on a bad trip would have come in to my room to rearrange my things

[lichowl]

been thinking about mid-10s pop feminism lately. i used to think anita sarkeesian was a cynical grifter but in retrospect i think she's just a clueless academic (many such cases), and that it is both her fault and not that she fumbled the marketing bag *. but to do a more cogent analysis i would have to wade back into her videos and nnuuuehghhhhaghhaggah

* "fumbling the marketing bag" does not mean i think she deserved to be harrassed; it means i think she badly failed to appeal to any audience except the people who already agreed with her