Discover Top Posts Tagged with #taohs

Merry Christmas Aki! ( @taohs )

#taohs #tao saotome #gokurakugai #gokurakugaiedit #my edits #my edits: gokurakugai #stuff for friends

can’t make a omelette without breaking a few eggerts!

#the apocalypse of herschel schoen #taohs #art #herschel schoen #frederick eggert #anyway i choose to believe there’s a simulation out there somewhere where they get to talk like this in perpetuity

I JUST realized, thinking about The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen:

There's not mention of Channunkah. Which makes sense on multiple levels: it's not as important to Jews as Christmas is to Christians. Its relative importance today is more a side effect of it filling in as a "Jewish Christmas" so kids can get gifts, etc

So of course Herschel wouldn't hype it up, and would likely find it a touch irritating to suggest the Cult of Yeshua ought to affect his religion. We don't see him celebrating the Sabbath either.

Still, its absence is notable. It's technically possible for it to not appear during the story; given the variance of the Lunisolar Jewish calendar* the first night can fall as early as 28 November and or as late as 27 December, as the Gregorian calendar counts. Perhaps we missed it.

But what is Channunkah? A festival of lights. Specifically candles, traditionally. 8 nights where, miraculously, the lights keep burning despite a lack of oil. After a battle against a foe that, by all means, ought to have crushed them militarily.

Symbolically, knowledge and existence preserving despite a lack of power, in multiple ways. 8 long nights

By the way, although the year of the story is purposefully vague, it's clearly meant to have the same days of the week as December 2024. What night did Channunkah start, last year?

The evening of December 25. Christmas didn't come early, but the 8 nights did. Coming earlier than it should have been, so that Santa could participate.

'* 12 months of 29 or 30 days each makes a typical year of 354 days; thus there's a whole leap month that gets added every few years so the dates don't slip too far

#the apocalypse of herschel schoen #taohs #tahs

“sorcerous demoniac tech-princeling and the boy-prophet he pulled into graphic bone extraction fantasies by being autistic,” colorized, 19??

#the apocalypse of herschel schoen #taohs #frederick eggert #herschel schoen #art #unnervingly easy to imagine these characters in ye olde homestuck au i fear

Leave us be, and we will be as we are. We are as drops of water in a wide, shallow bowl: we fall slowly, but we do fall, and there is only one place to which we all fall. Why, then, have you forgotten?

Only on ch3, but this feels key to the rest of the work

#the apocalypse of Herschel Schoen #taohs

This horrid 3-way conversation, as retold by Miriam, with three people each trying to escape the drab poverty of the real world, the sense of inherent lack of meaning, with communism or tech fetishism or religious technophobia,

#taohs #the apocalypse of herschel schoen

So the thing about reading into all of these things, reading into the connections between Miriam's and Herschel's and Frederick's world views and the weird connections betwixt them

Is that it's entirely possible they don't cohere at all (no spoilers, including "vague hints", please)

It's possible that, like Herschel seeing forms in the ceiling lights, all I'm seeing is nothing at all, there's no real meaning. Obviously there is some, an author specifically put this all in, but the end point might be more about The Difficulties of Having A Weird Brain than any conclusion to the various plot threads.

That was sort of the way the other "nocturnal" book, The Northern Caves, ended: whatever was going on with Salby, we didn't get a better picture, we didn't see more of what the fuck he was worked up about, it was more about the meaning of interpretation and online communities and such.

I'd need to reread that too, I think, and also the other two works.

#the apocalypse of herschel schoen #taohs

there is no use trying to fathom the minds of the apex transmitters. What do they ‘believe,’ or ‘want,’ or ‘feel’? We cannot know. We have no more chance at this than an insect would have, trying to figure out what it is that humans ‘believe’ and ‘want’ and ‘feel.’

Very similar to Herschel's earlier visions of humans destroyed and stomped out like ants. Vincent's either running a cult or happening to produce religious nonsense like one.

What is his whole point, here, anyways? If he's right it barely matters what he does, as one cannot stop the transmitters and knowing about it advance only makes the coming wave less shocking. I guess the answer is "the sort of person who would believe this does not need a reason to be saying it", but taking that as an explanation feels... At odds with the rest of the novel's point about looking past the differences to understanding. To look for fine-grained truth, as lnh put it

What's going on with the asides about "you"? Who is typing, here? Is Miriam having a dissociative episode, some new personality, or was there more than just hot air that the carrier wave/Intercessor's coming.

If we take Florian's little jokes about wiretapping, is there maybe some all-seeing thing watching, everywhere, now? Something which compels Miriam to write? Or is the whole "you" thing just her talking to Vincent, or a roundabout way to insult herself for whatever she failed to prevent?