Maurice Chédel, Public Domain, Via Wikimedia Commons.

it's just an endless cycle of evil and malice against alienated ppl

We gotta put "not like other girls" up on a shelf until people can stop using it to disparage people expressing genuine social alienation I'm so fucking serious

I assume this is from Capriccio Farce, which is very melodically creative and has a strange atmosphere... worth listening to

the word 'farce' here is a translation of "chaban" which was once a specific genre of Japanese theatre

"Soul of Adam who fell in the trap, there’s nothing you can accomplish anymore"

that high end literary critic who was like 'we're sorry readers! we were too elitist and have denied the value of writing with a strong PLOT' is such a sell-out mediocrity. Literary criticism and its separate aesthetic values are supposed to create a space where market standards and popularity are replaced with alternative values, and you're just going to say, 'we need to homogenize with what's popular"? Please have a little imagination and don't betray the writers who can only exist in this space!

imagine if there was a slug civilization where they executed people with diatomaceous earth

another universe with different laws of physics

precure deep fried

🩷Heraclitus

Favorite Heraclitus

If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them

All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep

Man kindles a light for himself in the night-time, when he has died but is alive. The sleeper, whose vision has been put out, lights up from the dead; he that is awake lights up from the sleeping

This world,[13] which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out

Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.

Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things

We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.

Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child's

Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others' death and dying the others' life.

They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse

Those who are asleep are fellow-workers (in what goes on in the world)

It is pleasure to souls to become moist.

The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign

The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out

It is best to hide folly; but it is hard in times of relaxation, over our cups.

To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right

Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened.

Thinking about how a lot of the cultural-political worldbuilding in His Dark Materials might not even be true because it's filtered through the perspectives of biased characters. Things like, do the Northern Tartars actually form a distinct group, or is it just an abstract term the European characters use for a collection of peoples they don't fully understand? It doesn't seem like the Yenisei Pakhtars are connected at all to the Tartars attacking Muscovy. I feel the same way about the description of the insect automata as "Afric." The worldbuilding is full of ironic exoticism and we are never given a 100% objective look at how things work

only 70s era Tadanori Yokoo can hit the same feel as Gustave Moreau

the best argument for space travel is Bataille's The Accursed Share

waste is inevitable and it must only be spent in a way we choose...

In terms of science communication and space exploration advocacy, Elon Musk has sent us back into the fucking Stone Age.

A lot of people perceived her as being cringe for political reasons, but they didn't realize that all British classicists are cringe

like how Armand d'Angour did good work reconstructing Ancient Greek music, but his poetry is truly repulsive

the emily wilson odyssey discourse happening is so funny because. yeah. if you actually sit down and try to do a strict translation of most ~epic poems~ they don't sound ~epic~ at all. sometimes they sound flat out stupid, even after you're done fixing the syntax for english. this is true of pretty much every Ancient Text.