it’s around noon when they come for me. just as well. i get the feeling they ordinarily would have sent the team at some ungodly hour of the morning, but they learned from last time. and the times before that. i don’t know if i’ll be able to make it out of this one. they brought searchlights, aiming them at the windows, the escape routes. cast blazing beams through each window, searing my eyes if I look too closely. limiting what I can see, what i can work with, doing the exact opposite for their snipers.

okay so this isn’t a story about how life came to exist as like a thing, you know. billions of years of gas, dead rock and amino acids turning to will is its own thing, and miraculous in its own right. but i wanna talk about something that happened about another two billion years after that.

at the bottom of the ocean there is a colony of cells. this isn’t all that uncommon. chemical soup was one of the earliest places you could find life, and even now, long after the cyanobacteria and the purple guys left for the surface, you can find folks living down here. this particular colony is special, though.

so she wakes up in the middle of the woods. bile rises up unbidden and, black and oilslick what has become of her? every defense cut at once- torn to shreds, black spiderweb ooze-coating her mind and toungue and throat. she retches again. vertebre, white and corroded, seven. seven bones. memories, dreams, hopes, loves abandonded. she’s shivering, lying on the ground. hours later? it’s dark outside, and it wasn’t before. does she remember her name? she remembers the name of the- of the- the world tips again and she falls into the puddle of half-digested blood.

imagine, for a moment, you float in the Void. maybe on wings, or in a ship. you can see around you the planets, the dust, the rocks, the star you orbit. think about the way your body tells you you’re still- in the absence of a force pulling you one way or another off your path, your gut drops. free fall is taking the path through the void that requires the least effort, after all.

thoughts while driving, here to be refined.

alright. imports:

Bent Rotor An eigenrotor that has slipped alignment between its halo and superimpellor such that the energy flow through the system disruptively deforms from from the pressure between the superimpellor and halo. A halo near main sequence collapse can maintain a straight eigenrotor under immense strain due to narrative flexing, which means that rotor deformation tends to be observed only in cases of imminent core collapse, or as inert wreckage of a post-collapse system. Symptoms of a bent rotor include bursts of manic, self destructive activity after periods of self-enforced productivity, sudden bouts of intense suicidal ideation, migraines, psychosis, feelings of infinite pressure.

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IF IT KEEPS ON RAINING, LEVEE’S GOING TO BREAK

r:

so. we can’t continue to live like this. the last time i felt like we really, actually had some fucking agency, some fucking spine left, was… what, back in college, the first time? ever since…

i dunno. learn more, get more afraid. get more pissed off. we prolly didn’t really even have it back then, but the pressure’s fucking up now. i know which way we go when we collapse. just a matter of time, now. time and figuring things out. i want us all here, all of us. motherfucker.

okay so the assumption is that the general flow of a creative process happens like this.

1. come up with an idea
2. act on the idea
3. refine the result
4. done

the thing is a lot of the time we have obstacles that get in the way of following this process through to the end, there are a lot of outside factors and values that need to be in place to end up with a specific, finished piece of art.

the first thing any good story needs is a storyteller. isn’t that right? something to contextualize it, somewhere to ground yourself. a universe to inhabit for the time it takes.

so hush, and listen to the nightbirds and the crickets, listen to the frogs, listen to the crackle of the fire and listen to my voice. the folks who own this field- they won’t be back in town for a few more weeks yet. we’ve got the run of the place.

robin:

alright so now that we’ve firmly established ourselves as someone who doesn’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, i would like to pause for a moment to consider the overall direction of the blog. so far, we’re mostly just trying to figure out what we actually want to do in this space. that’s kind of going to be a messy process, but we think we’re going to end up somewhere interesting, at least. we like to work with the garage door up (bonus points if that link tells you anything about our history of using note-taking applications lmao). we also have pretty strong feelings about intellectual honesty and making the way our thoughts and philosophies have changed and grown over time as obvious as possible. (when reasonable. if something we post does or causes harm it’s going down.) i fully expect us to discover and/or completely change our mind about specific parts of our framework if we find something that works better.

Epistemic status: reasoning about particular hangups that have been bugging us for about two years now. not sure if the source of our discrepancy applies to many or if it’s a product of the way people talk about veganism online. feel free to slam dunk us into the sun about this one, i need to know if this is the result of a fault in our assumptions or reasoning somewhere. further reading would also be appreciated.