kradeelav | Entries tagged with quotes

“Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”

― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

"Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin [Luther King] was still alive."

- James Baldwin, No Name In The Street

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

- (part of the) Serenity Prayer

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971

"Itoi: The colors for MOTHER were actually a proposal from my designer. He came to me and said, "I've got this option and that option," so I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" and he told me, "Personally, I think this one is the best."

That's generally how I work. I ask the person doing the job. On the surface, it may look like I'm trying to be even-handed or something, but I definitely play favorites. But the thing is, if the person actually doing the work says that's the one!, I can usually get behind it.

You see, someone on the outside looking in might have all kinds of different opinions. Maybe they dislike muted colors, who knows. But when someone actually involved in the project—that is, the designer himself—says they want to do something with a certain level of passion, there's always a reason for it. A deep, fundamental reason. Just like rolling over in your sleep.

—Rolling over?

Itoi: Yeah. I've been making the point lately that rolling over in your sleep isn't a random action; there's a real, fundamental reason behind it.

Itou: Really?

Itoi: Take the way I'm sitting right now… even this pose is a kind of "rolling over in your sleep."

Itou: Ah, I see what you mean.

Itoi: In other words, I'm sitting like this because my body has an actual necessity to be in this posture. It's the result of a struggle between two things: the fact that I'm being watched by others, and my own internal necessity. I believe the future of "creative work" lies in how much we can tap into and breathe life into that kind of raw instinct."

https://shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/

"In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that The Iliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbled together out of an oral folk tradition. "

- The Odyssey, Emily Wilson

omg we proudly stan the literal bedrock of western literature for also being ""immoral"" "problematic tasteless degen" work too along with our own work :D;

“loving off-script, hot-blooded and mammalian, bodied, muscular, with your ribs aching. The kind of love that makes you offer your heart up— plump and flushed. Love that asks to eat you whole.”

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Horse Girl”

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

- aral balkan (mastodon)
(bolding mine)

What a lucky beast I am,
when he cleans up nice

and nicks his perfect face.
I get to lick that face,

when he lets me.
In the cut's opening

I get a taste of him
from the inside

out, which is all I have
ever wanted,

to be cell-close
to him. Praise the razor's

overzealous arm;
the ease

with which it finds tenderness
in this man.

Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount
(via lululeighsworld)

(crossposting from tumblr because most favorite guilty pleasure trope ever actually described accurately <3 )

headspace-hotel

Notes on Torturing The Character In The Science Facility
my takes on this trope rarely if ever have anything to do with the character being “special” or being studied for powers they innately have, if they are special its something that was done to them
it’s about the medical trauma
it’s about the violation and lack of bodily autonomy
the “living weapon” trope, but the key characteristic is catastrophic functionality
i love, love, love the concept of “catastrophic functionality” in a person: character that can tank ludicrous amounts of damage and just Keep Going in virtually all circumstances barring outright dismemberment. They can keep going, so do they “deserve” rest and/or pain relief?
after a lifetime of having their distress treated as whiny and unreasonable, they have what would be a dangerously high tolerance to pain and exhaustion.
another key function of the Science Facility is to fix the damage Character takes, maybe using enhanced healing technologies or 3D printed organs or something. this leads to Character’s body being treated as relatively disposable cause “we can just fix them”
extreme version of this: Character can’t die even if they wanted to
people who work with Character are informed that they’re dangerous and arbitrarily violent, and their fear of Character makes it easier to justify restricting autonomy
It is TRUE, cause Character does not have tools to set boundaries or protect their body other than violence. vicious cycle of being perceived as dangerous and therefore denied autonomy, and being forced to use violence to defend autonomy
the restraints used to hold Character look like major overkill, which underscores how dangerous they are. LOVE this trope
character being desexualized to the point that their non-consent to touch, to being stripped down and examined, or to procedures is trivialized. There is no non-clinical context for their body, and the “clinical” framework eclipses any possibility for bodily violation to be understood as violent.
types of uncanniness: Character looks human but has some subtle inhuman traits or characteristics. (I’m obsessed with reflective eye shine, personally.) OR Character looks like they’ve been taken apart and put back together, like flesh pulled over a much more unforgiving and indestructible metal scaffold. OR Character gives off “undead” vibes; they’re just not quite alive in a way that sets off air raid sirens in people’s brains
Often, Character is dead and Came Back Wrong (varying levels of literalness)
anyways yeah. i never stopped writing this trope and probably never will. it’s a good one

"Gilles Deleuze proposed in the 1990s that discipline, formerly the dominant mode of power in Western societies, had been modified and to some degree overtaken by a logic of “control” that worked not by confinement or restriction of movement, but by the regulation of continuous, mobile flows— of capital, information, bodies, and affects. Unlike the punitive subjection of discipline, control does not require a subject as such; nor does it seek to produce or manage one. As we have seen, casino design follows what one leading firm calls the “immersion paradigm,” holding players in a desubjectified state of uninterrupted motion so as to galvanize, channel, and profit from what the academic consultants quoted earlier called “experiential affect.” If, as philosophers and anthropologists of affect contend, contemporary capitalism is distinguished by strategic attempts to mobilize and derive value from consumers’ affective capacities, then commercial casino design would appear to be a case in point."

-Addiction by Design

"Sometimes you get a fictional character that stays with you for long enough that they become Nursery Real. This is not a new phenomenon; I have no way of proving this, but I imagine this has been happening for as long as people have been telling stories. This relationship is far and away beyond any responsibility of their creator/s (assuming the creator is not yourself), totally independent of their intentions, the same way the person sewing together a toy rabbit for sale, one of a hundred such, isn't necessarily predicting that this one in particular will become someone's most important companion, in joy and in despair. This creation may not even resemble who or what they were when they were a toy-- worn into a new shape from being much beloved-- and as a consequence it becomes much more difficult to share them, because they have become a piece of your heart. (That's alright. Some things can just be for you. Not everything meaningful can be shared.) They have grown up with you as your understanding of what it means to be a person has grown. You can no longer look at them and think: "this character is my favorite part of this story" but "ah, it's you". "To me, you are a person, and I have loved you in every way that one can love." And you know, as you must know, that they exist as an idea-- certainly they cannot take you to the hospital if you fall ill, or do your shopping, or intervene on your behalf during a quarrel you are not present for. But you can nurture each other in a real way, and they can give you strength in a real way; having a relationship with someone who is made of thought is an exploration of vectors of the soul and selfhood and love that I have not yet found to exist anywhere else. Yes, they are an idea, and perhaps when we die and become an idea ourselves, we will meet again in recognition. This isn't your favorite fiction, this is your velveteen rabbit."

(x)

this whole 1993(!) essay (pdf link) by david foster wallace on digital loneliness elegantly captures an unreal amount of layers of current media discourse, but this bit, wow.

"What we see is far from stolen; it's proffered—illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we're seeing through the framed pane isn't people in real situations that do or even could go on without consciousness of Audience. What young writers are scanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already composed of fictional characters in highly ritualized narratives. Plus, (4), we're not really even seeing "characters" at all: it's not Major Frank Bums, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it's Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs mistakenly berating him for being a putz."

Cool bit in a Spencer Wan animation text interview that stood out to me for a certain trend in US animation....

> original interview source

( Read more... )

"The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also—in its penetration of his inner life—over what we may speak of as his communication with himself.

[...]

Such milieu control never succeeds in becoming absolute; and its own human apparatus can—when permeated by outside information—become subject to discordant “noise” beyond that of any mechanical apparatus. To totalist administrators, however, such occurrences are no more than evidences of “incorrect” use of the apparatus. For they look upon milieu control as a just and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what to whom, but the fact that extensive information about everyone is being conveyed to the authorities is always known. At the center of this self-justification is their assumption of omniscience, their conviction that reality is their exclusive possession. Having experienced the impact of what they consider to be an ultimate truth (and having the need to dispel any possible inner doubts of their own), they consider it their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this “truth.” In order to be the engineers of the human soul, they must first bring it under full observational control.

Many things happen psychologically to one exposed to milieu control; the most basic is the disruption of balance between self and outside world. Pressured toward a merger of internal and external milieux, the individual encounters a profound threat to his personal autonomy. He is deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection which anyone requires to test the realities of his environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it. Instead, he is called upon to make an absolute polarization of the real (the prevailing ideology) and the unreal (everything else). To the extent that he does this, he undergoes a personal closure which frees him from man’s incessant struggle with the elusive subtleties of truth. He may even share his environment’s sense of omniscience and assume a “God’s-eye view” of the universe; but he is likely instead to feel himself victimized by the God’s-eye view of his environment’s controllers. At this point he is subject to the hostility of suffocation of which we have already spoken—the resentful awareness that his strivings toward new information, independent judgment, and self-expression are being thwarted. If his intelligence and sensibilities carry him toward realities outside the closed ideological system, he may resist these as not fully legitimate—until the milieu control is sufficiently diminished for him to share these realities with others. He is in either case profoundly hampered in the perpetual human quest for what is true, good, and relevant in the world around him and within himself."
-

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961)

Cosmio de Medici pursuaded Benvenuto Celini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, "Come, I will choke you with gold." - Ogilvy on Advertising

Art is for opening little portholes to a subject we’re all familiar with in some way and saying “let me teach you how I see this thing, let me show you how to get emotional about it the way I get emotional about it” ‪@coelasquid.bsky.social‬

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

― Martha Graham (via

queenlua )

The future is a branching tree of possible outcomes. I keep myself sane by watching all branches, not just fixating on the ones most shrouded in darkness. If a light branch is pruned, I focus on what remains. If a dark branch falls away, I rejoice. I also keep in mind that the tree of time is infinite: there are no leaves, only branches that multiply endlessly into a foggy sky.

- (a gem from the ex-/k/ server)

It was clear that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.
I remembered something that my Bilderberg deep throat had said to me on the telephone one Sunday evening shortly before I set off for the Grove. He said that far from being fed up with hearing wild conspiracy theories about themselves, many of the Bilderbergers actually thoroughly enjoy it.
He also said that, in all honesty, neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to. The current members are getting older and older, and the prospective newcomers – the world leaders of tomorrow – don’t seem all that interested in getting involved.
“Let’s face it,” my deep throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”
“Maybe,” I said, “that’s why you Bilderbergers love to hear the conspiracy theories. So you can pretend to yourselves that you do still rule the world.”
- Them: Adventures with Extremists

not many books make me laugh out loud three times in the acknowledgements alone lmao

One thing you quickly learn about [extremists] is that they really don’t like being called extremists. In fact they often tell me that we are the real extremists. They say that the western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system. I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system.

- Them: Adventures with Extremists

krad

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Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961)

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