You Can Trace An Ideological Lineage From Tezuka To Miyazaki, Where Both Promote A Kind Of 'pacifism'

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

It's a strange spectacle to see how much the community around skeptical inquirer cares about issues of little relevance to culture or power structures

Some people defend this kind of rationalist ideology by talking about, say, anti-superstition activists in India, but those people are admirable for the specific reason that they are undermining hierarchical power structures

A Western skeptic getting angry about Americans venerating ghosts with offerings --- that's not subversive, and it's worthy of contempt!

worst popular statement about art is 'disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed' because that basically means 'art is a weapon to dominate my enemies and help people I like" which is truly evil

the disturbing aspect of art should be something everybody experiences but which turns out to be a good thing as well as a bad thing. Let's all get struck by it like ragdolls!

The Paracas culture made the best art in the universe

(they are also the inspiration for a lot of the imagery in Yume Nikki)

it feels like we're only beginning to realize how much psychological heterogeny exists among humans

let's forget about the idea of human nature together

there's someone on Wikipedia who writes articles about Cantonese opera but constantly names paragraphs after generic figures of speech. For example, they titled a paragraph about the economic threats facing the opera as "All for Naught."

Here's an example from the article on the actor Yam Kim-fai (who is really good, btw):

I wonder if this is translated from Cantonese... maybe the original sounded very poetic

what if it's not a guy at all up close. I'm thinking of the "kunekune" urban legend

This scene in the game makes me laugh...why is that dude falling forever...why can I make out that it's a tiny stick figure...

Coherence

A pattern I notice in 'writing advice' is that the ideal that gets promoted is to restrain and tightly organize every element in order to produce a single overall effect.

It is not so good that this is commonplace. Writing needs space to be incoherent and disjointed. This is what will allow writing to be truly alive. In a functional aesthetic world, there will not be a need to sever 'useless' growths from the body.

it's perfect

yoru

I'm sure it was because of volcano activity, people saw fire emerging from the earth and so always had a vague idea that beneath the surface, it was hot. The Phlegraean fields, Vesuvius, Etna etc.

btw does the characterisation of christian hell being hot and underground predate modern knowledge about earth's core and magma layers? was it because people dug deep enough to notice it was hotter? did people directly attribute the eruption of volcanos to something exiting from inside the earth and therefore hell? i haven't read dante's inferno feel like that might have some answers.