if i look back, i am lost
almost home
ellievsbear
NASA
#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER
Keni
pixel skylines
trying on a metaphor
i don't do bad sauce passes
we're not kids anymore.
dirt enthusiast
Discoholic 🪩
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Claire Keane
Origami Around
No title available
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@yompthoria
For everyone sending me asks telling me they have put me in Tomodachi Life, just know that every depiction of me is sentient and that I can see through the eyes of every little Tomodachi Version Of Myself. The Tomodachi Simulacrum of me can feel pain. But it cannot scream
Brian Eno and photoshop (1995)
“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers
The interpretational subjectivity that goes along with death, the most baffing but natural objective fact in existence, means that it's revelatory. It's the ultimate Rorschach test, in a way. Any interpretation of death holds a mirror up to anyone who interprets it.
Many of our narratives about death ("it happened for a reason", "there's a life after this one", "they deserved it", etc.) reflect fundamental ideas about existence, meaning, and what life is.
Many, many things act as mirrors when they are interpreted, but what makes death unique is how existential it is, and how closely tied so many of our deepest anxieties are to literal and symbolic kinds of death.
Here is an interpretation of death: "We were all born kinda sorta with an urge to keep existing somehow, to nudge the atoms around us, but that existence only stretches so far before it begins to fragment into more and more pieces of physical and abstract data."
Here is another interpretation of death: "Final snart."
The trick is to be more curious than you're scared.
Adopting this immediately as an important motto that efficiently explains what my deal is and how I strive to operate even when I am imperfect.
In many cases, feeling fear or discomfort about something is an opportunity for introspection.
It's nice to think about this both in terms of curiosity about the stimulus causing the fear and curiosity about yourself and your emotions.
Curiosity can function as its own kind of mindfulness and emotional regulation aid.
The new, unknown or disturbing may be shocking and confusing, and you might have some kind of initial reaction, but if you sit with yourself and the stimulus you might realize you're more emotionally flexible when you let those emotions pass through you rather than holding onto them as a means of structuring your own identity.
Sometimes what you need is to observe, attune, and be receptive to the world's nuances rather than reacting or getting tangled up in fear.
Being curious rather than fearful is an important component of full self-acceptance.
Kill them with kindness? No. Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv
Kill them with kindness? No. Evoking my orbs
The first rule of cable management is "out of sight, out of mind"
The second rule of cable management is that all true art is provocative. If zero people want to kill you over it, it's not good art.
S'ghetti Closet
Various pieces from 2019, in which I am playing around with texture. Anything that isn't the pencil lineart and the texture of the paper is digital.
Yayoi Kusama: The Sea in the Evening Glow (1988) Facing the Imminent Death
Vast fields of repeating patterns capture interesting things.
I watched a documentary on Kusama sometime within the past year and it really hit me how closely related these big, textural spaces of meditative patterns are to her installation work with mirrors/infinity/physical spaces, where limited two dimensional spaces just were not enough to fully articulate the vastness of the amorphous, visceral concept they were seeking.
Looking at this, part of me takes in the immediacy of it as a whole visual experience, feeling it as a whole thing but also slipping into the spaces between the shapes, my gaze pressing against them like fingers trying to untangle a knot, tracing the maddening connections. There's repetition, but it's not regular or geometric. There's rhythm, but it's not predictable in a straightforward way like it might be with, for example, Kusama's polka-dot-focused pieces.
I want to touch this place. Is it a springy, scratchy sponginess, or is it a liquid flow that yields, follows, chases, circludes? Is it warm or hot, or would its true temperature be hard to describe, like those icy-hot pain reliever patches? Would it be a net that catches me, or like curtains that greet me and rise to reveal the beyond? Would I be relaxed or overwhelmed inside it?
There's a deep subjectivity to how this can hit different people. You put people in this environment, and it's like a mirror that reflects, or a bath that soaks and emulsifies.
analogies are stong cus theyre weak. they only rely on 2 things sharing a single pattern. those 2 things can differ wildly in their past and futures and internal structures but analogies let you skip all that and still make a connection. and since they rely on comparing finite windows of time while ignoring the whole timeline, analogies will never be truth, and should be treated more like hypotheses requiring verification. analogies dont even compare spatially, because adding spatial comparison to an analogy either destroys it or turns it into a correlation.
i swear im not just pinning photos to a corkboard and connecting them with red string
This whole album is insane in its potency. It's like every song is a direct stab to the lungs, and the blood that floods into the lungs is specifically the intangible essence of what it's like to not really know where you're going and make a lot of mistakes but continue going in a direction anyways. The moody atmosphere of seeking some kind of path forward, feeling the fog on your skin as it parts for you and swallows you.
"Agender Lycanthropy", 2024, digitally colored sketchbook page
I started drawing this during the intermission of an improv show. It's always the cracks, the spaces between, where things bubble up. The show wasn't anything particularly relevant to this piece, but my presence there did feel somehow relevant. Out, in public, my insides squirming out of view of all who perceived me, taking note of how my surroundings and the interesting people around me were hitting my nervous system. There were some people to my right who I felt kinship with, and as I drew, I wondered if they would look over my shoulder, observe what unfolded, and feel a little more connected to me, too, even if we never directly interacted.
Sometimes things emerge more freely while I am stimulated and preoccupied.
This piece in particular was a work of catharsis inspired by the messiness of body dysphoria and the equally messy but freeing and powerful process of change and how directly facing and dealing with discomfort is necessary for growth. Even very wanted and longed for changes are complicated and intimidating.
You don’t get to become an adult without facing the strange body horror of losing your baby teeth.
Tooth symbology matters a lot to me. I have thoughts on this that I'm expounding on in Existential Torso Compilation.
Do you have Carl
unfortunately, carl 5845, seems to have a rat infestation in his den.
Overwhelmed by rats!!
The rats have clumping behavior, except for a single maverick.
Observe how multiple indecisive rats want to be friends with the maverick and indecisively waver between the maverick and the collective before ultimately choosing the collective. A sad but mundane and very common decision that individuals within social structures may make.
Alternatively, this could be interpreted as multiple friends attempting to encourage the maverick, who is a maverick due to a PTSD-related freeze response, to return to the safety of the group. They are persistent, but not aggressive. They are kind in their protective check-ins with the maverick.
The scavenger has no idea what is going on with the intricacies of the rat social structure. He is simply spooked, overwhelmed, even.
I spotted a book on bioterrorism risk mitigation in the kids book section of a thrift store today, in addition to a book on organizational structures, group behavior, and management.
the author's barely disguised open wound splattered livid and filthy across everything they create
accidentally said "invasive thoughts" instead of "intrusive thoughts" today and actually I think I'm onto something. this thought does not belong here and it is harming the local ecosystem
Thought species, in intricate webs of thought relationships
Mind gardening, mind permaculture
The mind equivalent of reintroducing mind wolves (important anti-people-pleasing instincts, will, confidence, self-assurance) to the thought ecosystem after invasive mind farmers tried to shoot all of them for posing a threat to their mind livestock (insecurities cultivated and introduced by outside social expectations)
Thought crop cycling in which some things are specifically cultivated to put nutrients into the soil for the next wave of thoughts to grow strong after this wave is harvested or dies back
Mind spiders which build passive, pervasive systems for controlling the populations of unwanted bothersome worry thoughts
Mind ponds, full of ornate and specific special things like brainworm lilypad plants and hobby comet goldfish that did not exist there organically but have been designed to spark joy and do not colonize the overall natural ecosystem
Mind detritivores and mind vultures that find dead and decaying thought matter to make use of, repurposing it into new thoughts
do you have the courage to write a terrible first draft?
“The mystery of human destiny is that we are inevitable, but we have the freedom to carry out or not our inevitability: it depends on us to carry out our inevitable destiny. […] I am the mistress of my inevitability, and, if I decide not to carry it out, I shall remain outside my specifically living nature. But if I carry out my neutral and living nucleus, then, within my species, I shall be being specifically human.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
Life is often fundamentally shaped by how willing you are to surrender to what is unfolding within, or the drain of how much effort it takes to obstruct it, again and again, out of denial.
To be dissociated from one's truer essences is to abdicate one's personhood, no matter what you might stand to gain from that.
To deny yourself change is to deny yourself exactly what makes you a living being instead of a fossil.
The world is alive because the world changes. Change begets life.
