My little emotional kinkster: suffering is magic
When I was flying back from SF (because reality is bullshit and two weeks wasn’t enough to hack desire into opportunity for staying there permanently YGM (Optimization told me to start abbreviating “…yet! growth mindset!” because I’m using, and going to continue to be using it such a lot)) I was having a problem: the 787s have excellent in-flight entertainment systems which obviously had to be promptly fucked up in implementation by providing such a weak selection of entertainment to use them for and on the return flight I was out of movies I knew I wanted to watch (or to be specific, I was out of such movies 125 minutes into the first flight because Fury Road is 120 minutes long and the crew announcements wasted a few more because the video wouldn’t play during them) (another problem was that there was no audio compression in the movies, meaning that I could enjoy the immense pleasures of a vast dynamic range on my DT990s in the perfectly appropriate environment of a fucking airplane where the high background noise level combined with open-backed headphones (to be fair, I spend most of my life not-in-a-plane) meant that to get an adequate SNR with such DR in the quiet parts I have to turn the volume up high enough to split not only my own ears but also those of the person seated next to me in the loud parts; this is either Norwegian inevitably regressing to the mean of corporate everything sucking terribly or a scam to get people to buy noise-canceling headphones (which Norwegian, unlike most of them, probably might be competent enough to pull off)) and looking randomly around for something that might be entertaining enough.
The groanworthy orbital mechanics of Gravity were observed after Mad Max (4/5 would groan again in the company of some suitable intoxicants and physicists who haven’t seen it yet, but not a match for the absolute bafflingness of Transcendence (Seriously, I could’ve played either of the sides and had the plot over in about a couple of weeks; it’s to be expected that any halfway-competent rationalist could take over the world way faster than Hollywood when given the powers the latter needs to make its AIs formidable, but what the fuck kind of a singularity movie could anyone make the humans win in?!?!?! (well, I could write that the fuck kind of a singularity movie based on some neat neuro-psycho-decisiontheory-ology of how an upload who’s aware of the problem of value corruption and unfriendly intelligences and the fragility of the human brain but simultaneously wants to super-augment itself to fix the world could deal with the question of how could it trust itself, and what kinds of itself, because when you give Sauron a Death Star you do find a way to justify placing an exposed exhaust duct in it)) and after that I was seriously grasping at the straws of unfamiliar territory.
Aronofsky’s The Fountain had a tagline that seemed relevant for my interests and enbie was I right. That motherfucker was right up there with Madoka in the utter gutwrenchingness department of “are they actually daring to make something like this omfg”.
By the last third my shirt was utterly soaked in silent tears (because my #1 rule for being on an airplane is not to be any kind of “that asshole” and “…who made a lot of noise” is definitely one kind) and the prospect of upcoming refreshments was more than welcome to not keep the dehydration lasting too long because I was just so afraid that Hollywood would tease me with a movie in which trying to actually defeat death is presented as something heroic and actually successful, only to have it taken away from my grasp at the last moment with some ridiculous ass-pull of how death gives meaning to life or whatever the fuck the cishumanist peasants need as a metaphorical pacifier so they can pretend they’re better than those who use physical ones (no they aren’t, and they should get over such hangups because if I saw someone use a physical pacifier so they could avoid telling themselves comfortable lies they would simply be a way cool in my opinion; in fact any adult who has the guts to use a real one for whatever emotional need they have for it instead of letting the peasants dictate how they’re allowed to adult counts as a way cool in my book).
The salty taste in my mouth and soul was delicious and even just thinking about it is making me weirdly emotionally kind-of-aroused-but-not-really-that’s-just-the-only-thing-I-can-even-compare-it-to and oh my fucking madokami I could almost forgive those fucking unbeliev- no, actually, way too believable assholes who did exactly fucking that (as far as I could tell from not being able to hear half of the stuff they said because of the “not having compression in the exact one place compression would make perfect sense” thing) just because of the tantalization of almost tasting the apotheosis of actually seeing anti-deathism in a mainstream-ish context because each drop, flowing from my eyes at the same rate human lives vanish into oblivion YGM, was a piece of anti-nirvana in which there is nothing but desire and myself in the clearest and most genuine realization of the sacred void of the Utility Function expressed in the steely determination of Make. It. Stop. and I will always have that forbidden dream even if I am too monstrous to ever truly see a reflection of myself on the screen undistorted instead of just villains and caricatures (as both a transhumanist and an amab trans person I’m doubly endowed in that department).
The movie: 3/5, there was some really embarrassing white boy new-agey spirituality symbolism (flavour of the month: mayan), but it’s a meaningful white boy art what the fuck am I expecting; I don’t read a lit fic book if I that insistently want to not encounter english professors contemplating adultery so the same thing applies here I guess.
The suffering: 5/5++ all the upboats, where can I get MOAR my neotenic degenerate heart (having crossed the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit from this particular suffering being over and never quite repeatable again) is INSATIABLE and I’m down for pretty much anything.
4 months ago · tagged #death cw #parenthesis junkies unite #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 1 note · .permalink
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