This thread is a compilation of half-thoughts and opinions not touched on in RP, but not large enough (yet) for a full solo. These are not meant for requirements.
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:56 pm
Schörl aggravates me in ways no one could ever imagine.
I loathe her, but I need her. She disgusts me, but she's sunk her hooks so deep that I can't leave her command without abandoning parts of myself. What am I willing to risk? Is an intact self worth more than my sanity? She would see me destroyed, hollowed out, and repurposed if I stay with her. Do I want to be me? Who am I? What does she mean to me?
She reminds me so much of Mother.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:56 pm
Sinope and Rowan. Mother would judge me.
Is it strange to give affections to two people concurrently? It is and it isn't. They fill more needs as a pair than they do by themselves. Like a fuller picture painted in taboo. A better dance in social missteps. An accident as art.
But they would both begrudge me if they knew.
Keeping secrets imperils me. I'm half-made of secrets now; it's less a choice of social consequence.
Time to see how far I can take this.
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:56 pm
I'm sick of catching myself thinking about starseeds. I thought I left this behind.
I don't want to taste the backwashed memories anymore.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2017 8:06 am
It's getting colder out. I see people bundled in flocked tights with wool coats. I see scarves clinging to every neck like blood to a slit throat. Like icicles to bowing rooves. The cold tastes so dry. It gives me nosebleeds.
I'm not the only one.
Everywhere I go in the city, there's red and white and mint and cheer and caroling and snowflakes and santa hats and presents and wishful thinking and posters and cherry red lipsticks and wishes and generosity and love and togetherness and commercialism and greed and expectation and obligation and happiness and sadness and solitude and fir trees and depression and ornaments and competition and fear and exhaustion and reindeer and church masses and jingle bells.
I can't feel the cold anymore.
Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 5:52 pm
She didn't leave a note.
I should hate her, or curse her, or mourn her. I should cry. I should tell my brother. I should confide in someone. I should lose myself for a while.
But I'm too exhausted to move. This pen is a lead weight in shackled hands.
I know she suffered.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:11 pm
Once upon of time, I made new expressions by cutting and pasting existing works out of order. I thought, at the time, that I breathed new life into an old piece. That I recycled it somehow. Upcycled it. Renewed it.
But that small, childish enjoyment grew into a teenaged cynicism.
We've reinvented ghosts. Render specters that haunt our every billboard and Youtube ad. Smiling faces we recognize everywhere, complete with their own prewritten, rewritten narrative. Deconstructed and reconstructed. Housed under the multitudinous suns of filters. Gradients. Hard overlays. Tabled and written to pop out when you scroll halfway down a page. We recognize them everywhere, celebrate them perhaps. These lorum ipsum people. These digital hauntings. These people, long passed, embedded in a new tradition of funerary rite by celebrated internet meme.
Do they themselves know that they've died and become ghosts? That a part of them was cut away by a photographer, uploaded into a server, backed onto an immutable cloud that no one could see, hear, taste, smell, or touch? Do they know that they sailed across countries and households alike with every copy of Photoshop? With iterative training in web design? Do they know that they've been cloned into a hundred different people with a hundred different backstories in a hundred different, though equally recognizable, nowhere spaces?
I know a man who records himself playing video games. He broadcasts these trifles across the internet to people he will never meet or know. He creates content off of someone else's content. In minutes, someone else will cut out all the parts they like of him and montage it together into a generic, reactionary sequence. Content from content from content. Someone else will pick that montage and animate it with easily accessed stock animation, plugged into a codified sequence and run through another program to make content from content from content from content. Then the algorithms take hold, and the endless bots at the distant seas of our mental awareness will farm out keyword upon keyword in a new-age word salad. They will dutifully, unwittingly, manipulate his unaware image into a hodgepodge video whose meaning was long lost to these careful-careless artificial intelligences. Then he's become a ghost, still alive, still youthful, still beautiful — but imminently no longer Lauri Virtainen.
This cycle will outlive all of us. Renewable energy will feed it. Binge content consumption will guide it. Desperate, hopeful youths will create for it. It's made to babysit our unwanted children. Distract us from our too many responsibilities. Then, when it's outstripped all of us, it will continue churning out meaningless hash of remastered faces and voices into a world with no eyes and no ears. An endless noise machine as the specter of humanity.
Lauri Virtainen's face echoes back to a silent, ignorant emptiness.
I'd rather Metallia pick me clean.
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:52 pm
That was the horror story. This is the love story.
We, as people, haven't changed. Distant as we are, spread over the geographically-impossible cloud of Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Twitch and WhatsApp and Snapchat, we can reach each other in ways unconventional. We can visit anywhere with the right keywords. See anyone. Text anything. Where once my ancestors lived in guarded fear of the unknowable, incomprehensible wilderness, I have the freedom to see all the world in the palm of my hand.
In front of me, in arm's reach, sits a man uncountable miles away. Buried now in a pseudo-3D world with impossible physics and pretentious topography. Right now, he's getting to know someone he never met. With every twitch of the mouse, every upward progress scraped by with a Yosemite hammer out of a cauldron, a man's voice reaches his ears. Lauri never met that man face to face, with hundreds of miles between him and the carefully-kept secret of this man's address. But Lauri knows his voice. Lauri knows the anger boiling in his chest with every word that man says. And from that man comes a dozen quotes, from people living and dead, people never met — more lorum ipsum specters threaded tighter through that cybernetic heaven. Hundreds of people know that man now. Thousands. And thousands more now know Lauri through knowing that man. Together, they connect each other without having to say a single word in exchange.
It's sensational. It's fantastical.
I have a confession to make. For all that I have done, for as much as we can be dead and alive as our own lorum ipsum specters, I am a romantic at heart. I love every man that I meet for all his egocentrisms and his foibles and his obsessions and his insecurities and his aspirations. I want to know his heart. I love the living ones, the dead ones, the ones hung in-between. I love that disembodied voice as much as the man in front of the screen. I love the men I met and the men I'll never meet. The proud, the humble, the mythical, the realistic, the self-aware, the unaware, the shy, the social. Unbound from geography, I can choose their distance to my heart.
If you found this journal, whole and unburned — if you found it and read through it and let it touch you in some small, imperceptible way, then I'll say the same for you.
I love you.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2018 1:16 am
Half-Youma draft (how to distribute? Pamphlet? Flyer?)
1/20: I can't move forward with this, but I can't throw it away.
If you're reading this, then something happened to you. But you're not alone; it happened to me too. Maybe not in the same way — maybe not under the same circumstances — but it ends with the same outcome. It ends with your humanity cornered. It ends with your life unhinged, and its yawning jaws closing down on you. I know.
My name was Elex Yorke. I was a week away from turning sixteen when it happened to me. I was a week away from getting my driver's license. From having a milestone party. From getting my own car. And I thought about it a lot — what my life could've been like. Who would I have been? Five years from now, would I be in college? Would I be living in another country? What kind of job would I have? What kind of life? Would I be married by then? But these thoughts, they do nothing. They'll never tell me who I would've been. They'll never tell you who you would've been. Do you understand?
Even if you don't… That's what these words are for. I'll show you how to believe me. How to believe yourself. How to actualize the person you are now.
And you are a person. Don't forget that.
You'll ask yourself if you deserved it. If this is some kind of retribution for something you did. You'll ask yourself if you could've avoided it, or foreseen it, or forestalled it. Or you're denying it, telling yourself it's all some terrible dream and in a minute you'll wake up. But a minute's passed. Many minutes passed. Hours now. Days. Weeks. You're not waking up. You're not going back in time and avoiding what happened. You're not dodging that bullet.
And you can't unburn a tree.
It's hard to accept it. It's hard to push away all that rage and terror and grief, but you don't have to. If you stop feeling, then you're just surviving. Youma survive. People live.
That word, 'survivor'… It's another word for victim. If surviving is what you need now, then do it. Crush your feelings into a size you can handle, and swallow them down. But don't let them linger. Don't grow complacent. I won't let you be comfortable.
Stay a while. You'll get to know me, and you'll get to know yourself.
This is the real you now. Embrace that.
Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2018 9:56 pm
I want to forget everything you've ever done to me. Everything you've done with me. Even the good parts.
Especially the good parts.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2018 3:43 am
The coldest month of the year. What a strange time for romance.
I remember looking forward to days like this. That I would meet someone at Azure Valley and share this day. That it would mean something — mean everything.
That special someone stopped existing. Holed himself up in his husk, boarded the doors shut, sulked in the mire of his own impotence. The other special someone lost in the city's clutching underbelly. They're both held down by their petulance. Subsumed by their own self-important stories.
But there are others. One distant, the other craving distance. One escaped the hospital only to slip back in for my pointlessly obtuse subordinate. The other I've almost never seen alone. The other searches for something he thinks he doesn't deserve. They don't mind me like the other agents do. And even if Schörl reminds me that Valentine's day is for people, a part of me is still insipidly human.
It's so uniquely Negaverse to send flowers on a shooting day. Hundreds of pedestrians are doing the same. Does that make each of them candidates for corruption? Maybe it's not just generals that are choked into callous disregard for human tragedy.
syrrrrrrie
you don't get a picture because it's 6am and they're custom anyway but lauri gets the bottom one. the note attached is:
I made him take care of the plant.
A gesture isn't singular or straightforward. It isn't built on the laws of physics or constrained by cold metal and gear. This is 'thank you' as much as 'forgive me' and more.
guuuuuuine
and you don't get a picture either for the same reason and yuuri gets the top one. the note attached is part of a Rimbaud poem:
Elle est retrouvée. Quoi? —L’Eternité. C’est la mer allée Avec le soleil.
Ame sentinelle, Murmurons l’aveu De la nuit si nulle Et du jour en feu.
(( It has been found again. What ? – Eternity. It is the sea fled away With the sun.
Sentinel soul, Let us whisper the confession Of the night full of nothingness And the day on fire. ))
Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 7:37 pm
I never thought to treasure a day for simple reasons like:
1. Not starving to death. 2. Not being eaten to death by bears. 3. Reuniting with the Dark Kingdom.
I fear I look forward to seeing Schörl now.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 9:28 am
"When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire."
Like it's so simple. So straightforward. So neatly thoughtless. To burn is the easiest task known to man. A passive state of being. Like she could go on with cheeky jokes about spontaneous human combustion, witch hunts, and Buddhist protestations. Like Chrysocolla could comprehend that much on her own. Like Heliodor would do it and do it well. Like I should know better than to avoid this choice.
I hate my general's advice. I hate more that I will take it.
Posted: Tue May 01, 2018 6:05 pm
It worked. I have a youma of my own.
But my eyebrows are gone.
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Strickenized
Garbage Cat
Offline
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:17 pm
I like these records. They're concise and tastelessly benign. Thank you, Joseph Romano.
Jack is a Romano's boy. He wrote it so neatly across his Facebook, like water running off a cold glass. Simple. Innocuous.
But Jack Burnett disappeared for a while. He vanished into hot air when he met a grill that his face quite liked. Romano's nearly expelled him in absence until one neat, new, glassy-eyed, well-meaning would-be-facsimile pushed her way in to stand by him. To insist that he go back to the benign order of a school day, to put his tired finger in his Punch so more can polish their brittle laughs at his antics. How long until he kills someone, I wonder?
Romano's records tell where he lives, but not how. Not the many minutes he squanders away on his own misled inanity, bumbling like a grief-stricken funeral drunk.
There will be time. But not my time — I need Heliodor to show his prettied plumage.
Reply
