Systems & Structures

Much has been made in recent years about the systemic game, a design philosophy where the game is made up of a set of interlocking rules which can interact with each other in unpredictable ways, causing the gameplay to be emergent uniquely for each playing. As the epitome of this, Dwarf Fortress is made almost entirely of these systematic concerns, with the design being such that all pieces are capable of interaction with each other. This is nothing new however, with this basic concept being basic to video games going back to the beginning of games. As the player always interacts with a game by manipulation of its systems, gameplay will always be emergent, even if in a limited number of systems. That glitches have been an accepted part of gaming as far back as games have been played shows this, with those being the unforeseen manipulation of systems present in order to achieve unplanned for effects within a system that was intended to be scripted.

That so much of game creation has been focused on this scripting shows an interesting problem of writing. In the common wisdom of game design, the gameplay is tertiary, an instrument to make the player feel vicarious thrill from, with the game itself being an incomplete movie. The game is structured to a set of corridors which deliver certain cinematographic experiences, cutscene or no. The overall focus for the majority of large developers has been on spending enormous amounts of resources on graphical quality for this reason, to make the script work flawlessly.

Such a focus betrays the same error as the preoccupation with diegetic story that is conventional wisdom among American teaching of Writing. The diegetic story and the writing of the text exist in the same relationship as the systems of a game and its graphics. The graphics exist from the systems, with the graphics being drawn atop hitboxes and mechanics in order to fit within the systemic concerns of the game. The true textual substance of the game is the mechanical concerns, what are the systems, how they interact, etc. The story is the same, a structure emergent from the prose, the systems (themes, ideas) emerging into an overall structure which manifests as a story. All of this is complexity and detail emerging from a singular substrate of the text. All texts are written in a way most directly shown in games, where the single object of the text is expressed into systems (prose, rules, etc) which writes the structure (structure - graphics, story, etc).

Role & Identity

The most important evidence in favor of the essential femininity of contestedly female characters such as Astolfo or Gwyndolin is the fact that the overwhelming majority of pornography drawn of such characters shows them in female roles. Being penetrated, being came upon, being bound, the phallus penetrates them alongside as women, as opposed to them being cuckolded or performing the phallus’ role as the male role is in pornography. While a similar dynamic can be argued for characters commonly drawn homosexual, this appears in heterosexual settings, with the entire impetus of the “are traps gay?” meme being the internal confusion but pre-existing acceptance of this possibility of biologically male characters being in the female role.

The attempted claim on these characters does not accept this, but instead seeks to force the characters into the singular descriptive of “trans”, with the implication being that the characters in question, if submitted beneath a battery of questioning by psychiatric authorities, could come out the other end with a legitimated identity, “trans”. For the more anarchist-inclined, the psychiatrist is outsourced but the discourse remains the same, where there is a singular, atemporal, diagnostic adjective which applies to the individual in the same manner as race, the “identity” that has become the word of the century. For this discourse, the identity reigns supreme, especially about so-called “role” of gender, which is supposed to be disregarded while identity is upheld.

That “role” is being resisted is the proof of the emptiness of common feminist trans doctrine. The assumption that identity can exist without role implies that identity precedes role, but such a thing is not the case - role precedes and creates identity. Gender must be recreated everyday and is recreated everyday, in tiny interactions. The meanings of ones appearance, gait, interests, habits, body type, etc, all work within a system of meaning which creates the position that one fits into. This creation of the position is the role-mechanism and from this mechanism comes the gender identity which comes to exist to refer to the created/performed role.

The stake on certain characters as “trans” who are indeed important for trans discourse for reasons of their androgyny or gender transitioning is meaningless. As gender exists only in context, the willful transformation of gender such as through transition requires the manipulation, creation, and performance of and within context. One moves into a different context than they were destined to in their body, but they still move into a context. This context determines the identity, which exists regardless of whether the character can be fit into the narrow psychiatric definition of “transgender”, as in the case of male characters who have been interpreted time and time again as fitting into the woman’s context.

A Commentary on the Tarot of Marseilles

Against Occult-tism, to Restore Magic

In the Whig narrative, the unenlightened crawled, through rationality, out of the depths of superstition to become the learned men with attendant modern objectivities. Eliding a darker truth than they realize, part of this narrative is often the portrayal of medieval alchemy as merely being incomplete chemistry. The obvious mistakes in this aside, the mask slips off, and the Whigs reveal the dark nature at the heart of many of the so-called mystics of post-Roman Europe. The alchemical or occult treatise, as in the form of the works of John Dee or Isaac Newton, does remarkably well fit into the Whig’s idea: primitive objectivity. The language of the text is always technical. The spiritual world exists as a series of facts, figures, names, identities with which the reader can manipulate and study as if they were the details of a train’s switchyard. The goal of these men of “magic” was always to study (read: imperialize) the spiritual world, not to embrace it. In the time of writing for the grimoirist, the reality of living in a world populated by angels, demons, fairies, gods, witchcraft, and all other manner of phenomena we have deprivileged today was woven into the worldview without the cruel separation of “religion” and “reality” we take for granted under their machines. The alchemist’s goal was, taking for granted the existence of these things, to then set out and map them in a rigorous, easily controllable, rational manner. Newton was performing the same fundamental action in his alchemical work and in his theories on calculus, that of quantifying, documenting, and hopefully controlling the unknown. In modern times, this is striking at our perception of those other aspects of reality with a vengeance. With no organic connection to any spiritual or mystic traditions, we have looked back upon the works of John Dee, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and the rest with the idea that these texts are written as an accurate and objective reflection of some reality which must be uncovered again. This illusion has had disastrous effects by reproducing again and again the very ideological sins that birthed the separation of ourselves from spiritual reality in the modern world. In order to genuinely interact with these lost traditions, the men of primitive science are of no help at all. Rather, the illuminating study is to interact with the very source material that these men were studying and to through these source materials, renew the same interaction they had, without making the same mistake of believing the spiritual to be ours to colonize and control with science and reason. For this reason, attention must be turned, in the study of magic, not to treatises, but to art and nature itself, learning through interaction with open ended systems of the Tarot, Zodiac, Bible, and through techniques as dreaming and astral projection that renew contact with the Outside. Through this contact, the purpose of magical writing should always be to document, interpet, but never control, systematize, or rigorously study. As the spiritual flows, so must our pens flow, writing with the Holy Ghost in écriture féminine. I therefore urge that this text not be taken as doctrinal or correct, but as source material for diverging interpretations.

O

The Fool

Being inherently referential to the degree of presence (quantity) all numbers are in reference to the threat of zero (absence). As such, numbers emerge and exist secondary to that which they reference. When the numbers become abstracted however, the referred can be alive without quantity, still retaining a sort of platonic presence when its physical presence is at zero, the zero keeping it alive by marking (and thus making present) its absence. When a=0, then all that exists is ‘a’ and in the same, the zero card, is the pure Tarot, the platonic ideal of a Tarot card. As the camera creates the movie scene by creating first the chemical strip upon which all things of the film are etched, the Fool creates the Tarot by setting forth the scene and concept of the card.

I

The Magician

By reduction of the world to a set of states, the doctrine of emptiness reveals itself. In the model of elemental-state systems (the Greek classical elements and Wu Xing as immediate examples), the world is drawn as Spinozist, with all things being flux of a single, universal reality which transitions across base states that express themselves at finer degrees through motion. Recognizing this, the Magician’s position is that of a surfer or sailor. Before him are props of the Tarot’s elements, the four suits of the Minor Arcana. He sits in recognition of all of them, with his task being to knowingly work atop and within the flows of the World.

Minor Arcana

The Sword and Baton both are present, projective, powers of the Magician, while the Cup and Coin both are absent, receptive powers. Dividing further, the Sword and the Cup are the present of their respective qualities while the Baton and Coin are the absent. The Sword as the present-present gains its power as the anathame or wand, the magician’s will being forced as cutting, as weaponry upon the forces, attacking. The Baton as present-absent is the Magician’s will being put out as a site of flow, for the Magician to attract and send out energies. The Cup as absent-present is offering, the container of transmission through which something is given - a vessel, with its nature being made by its absence, but one that is filled and used as a means of transportation. The Coin (as in the form of crystals, gems, etc) is the absent-absent, the power which exists only to attract and direct forms of energy, not to act as a vessel of specific intent or offering, but as a way to construct pathways and rhythms by whatever slots into it can travel.
Notable in this, the Coin and Cup both appear as pluralities while the Sword and Baton appear as singularities - the Magician carries one specific weapon as their wand/anathame, one specific staff as their Baton. At the same time the Magician has indefinitely many Cups, altars and rituals and grails, and the same for Coins, herbs and gemstones and talismans.

II & V
The High Priestess & the Hierophant

While both sit adorned with the papal tiara and some semblance of royal robes, the opposing male and female signs of the same idea show opposite trajectories of practice. The High Priestess has her hands firmly clasped within an open book, her gaze affixed both to it and away. The Hierophant has his hands occupied with sceptres of authority, the golden, three tiered cross and a hand gesture of authority, looking down upon the figures worshipping at his throne. The High Priestess sits amidst curtains, the Hierophant sits amidst pillars. Their robes are inverted, the High Priestess wearing red cloaked in blue, the Hierophant wearing blue cloaked in red. Importantly unifying them is the tiara, a symbol of some succession of the apostles, thereby granting them theological authority. Splitting them however are the horizontal and vertical paths of God in transmission to Earth. The High Priestess sits in channeling, the linguistic nature of the Holy Spirit flowing through her text. The Hierophant sits in regency, a monolithic sign that is unto itself, a surrogate for the spectre of “I AM” so desperately hoped to be reached.

III & IV
The Empress & The Emperor

The two visages of the state sit in contemplation of each other, their gaze meeting instead of diverging as in the High Priestess and the Hierophant. The Empress cradles the heraldic shield while the Emperor has it beside him, resting it against the foot of his throne. The Empress lets the Globus Cruciger rest on her body whilst the Emperor wields it aloft in one hand. The thrones of the pair diverge noticeably, the Emperor in a smaller, golden throne, the Empress in a larger, red throne. For the formation of the system of meaning (here symbolized in the form of a State), these two must be in codependence with each other. The Empress is the language itself, holding the heraldic symbol, the components of the system, for themselves, in isolation, as the family tree is the substance of the overall system of the aristocratic lineage. The Emperor holds the opposite, the symbols themselves cast aside for the symbol of the active cohesion of the system, in the direct wielding of the Globus Cruciger. The Emperor actively creates the system, the lineage’s borders and territories held in stability, the laws and rules which govern the system being able to act coherently, while the Empress is the system after its been created and defined through the actions of writing which make it.

VI
The Lovers

The yin-yang disc is a perfect closed system, with both opposites reconciled. An ellipse is formed by a pair of arcs with codependant and converging equations, graphed, forming the solid shape between them. Binary distinctions, make up a single whole which has an operation of its own (raw/cooked being both aspects of the single entity, the vegetable in-relation-to culinary-production). The lovers show this - two individuals of opposite principles (the male and female), are here twins committing incest - two opposite poles of the same entity unified. Both are holding, as if in counsel, the figure in the middle, significantly more androgynous than either of the twins. Here is their difference, the middle space of the ellipse or the enclosed circle made by the yin-yang symbol. The central figure is both the twins/lovers acting in concert, as one, as a binary, when fully deconstructed (aka, unified, the unification/deconstruction taking place in the nude figure above firing an arrow into the center of the operation), acts as one entity in concert.

VII
The Chariot

The term “chariot” appears in the bible most interestingly in 1 Chronicles 28:18, where the temple constructed by Solomon at the request of David is being described, in explicit reference to the central chamber where the Ark of the Covenant is held, aloft in a chariot. The direct reason for this is obvious, chariots being used in the Ancient Near East (as well as Europe and China) as a second, moving throne, developing from their usage in warfare. The King was able to stride effortlessly over his subjects as the Charioteer strides over infantry, his symbolic gestures projecting as the mounted archer is project violence over the battlefield. Here, the explicit link between Solomon and Chariots, as the apex of the temple, reveals, through this symbolic image, the true character of the regal structure and King Solomon himself. The regal structure of Solomon, his wealth and temples, come together to form a complete system of meaning built around the central signifier of the King. Solomon’s imagining as being the author of the majority of the Wisdom books, as well as any number of apocryphal and esoteric texts is in recognition of this. Such is contact with the Esoteric in the Solomonic tradition, the system’s purpose being the capability to pierce through, to contact the unknown, by means of the ritual-text, which spirals and prepares to the final center, the piercing-through that occurs at the throne, where God sits upon the Chariot of Cherubim.

VIII
Justice

Judgement, as in the scales, is the comparison of the alien text against a pre-existing text which inducts and baptizes the judged object into its new discourse by plugging the alien object into the law-text, thus making the alien operate on the same discursive plane as the law. The weighing of the soul is not an end, but a beginning, a bringing into a new order of the judged Soul or Object. Judgement is baptism.

IX
The Hermit

The lamp, illuminating spirit, emerges from beneath the folds of the heavy shadows and cloaks, thrust forward as the man’s head is. The person of the man is lost, instead he appears as shadows from them, protruding implements of the cane (support), head (self), lamp (illumination). The process of hermitage is that of a withdrawal of the self from the world, as a scouring. The body is cloaked and denied while the essential and pure aspects of the self are left to survive, emerging from the pain of isolation and denial. For the hermit, there is nothing which can make him impure, as only his soul has been left behind, a soul made by isolation, by marking out the entire surrounding as shadow and denying inputs of the external world.

X
The Wheel

With the wheel obviously demonstrating the Spinozist Doctrine of Emptiness in the same way as the Magician, the Wheel imagines the world as being capable of magic, through two framings. Firstly, the forces are personified as natural creatures. These personifications emerge out of the world as in Shen (神), fairies, sprites, that come as representatives, an inverse-Platonic-Ideal. Secondly, the force at the height is holding the symbols of projected power, the sword and the crown. These elements are the rituals of the Magician, their wand aloft into the tides of the world, the forces communicating with them through their manifestations.

XI
Strength

In the building of Dujiangyan, the first commission for the project was to construct a dam. When it failed, the builder was reduced to pieces and scattered. Li Bing, the successful builder, succeeded in the same aims through a series of channels, water diverted in several directions, based on different conditions. When the construction required boring through solid rock, it was done by crumbling the desired area, heating the rocks, and then unleashing river water onto the heated rock, causing it to burst enough to be broken. Such operations were able to create a marvelwork of harmony, several forces and systems acting in concert in order to achieve a stable system which survives to this today. As in the manipulation of the lion, Strength operates as the same subtle manipulation. Force is a neutral concept, which belongs to any number of conflicting and competing entities who project it in varying amounts depending on almost random contextual factors. Strength is conscious manipulation of this chaos, the ability to take hold of a Force, to take hold of Forces competing, and manipulate them to the ultimate end, whatever that may be.

XII
The Hanged Man

At one time, the penalty of exile was equal in severity to that of execution, with both performing the same act on the individual victimized. The victim is exiled in Augustinian fashion, from the ordered world into the open world of chaos. In exile, as in silent, slaughterous execution, this occurs directly, the condemned is made non-existent in one stroke. In hanging however, the community’s immune system is set to work in making the Outside present. The hanging makes the exiled visible, showing them to the public and making a conscious ritual of rejecting them. The hanging is a way for the morality of the group to be reinforced by the public reminder of what is outside and then showing the slow, painful exclusion/rejection of that outside.

XIII
Death

Holding the tool of harvest, death is here imagined as part of the completeness of life. Just as the seasons move around, so must death come to end all things, as part of the natural order, in the same way as the weather and world move in agricultural cycles which the human exists inside. Two paths can be taken here. Either all of life is identified with death in some way, with entropy being the eventual change that cannot be withstood (as humanity can withstand winters and summers) or death is identified with the body and physicality, as the weather is, allowing the human to assert transcendence beyond it. The latter does not propose however, that death can be defeated. Death can no more be defeated than the seasons can. What it proposes is that death can be withstood, just as the weather is, that it’s merely a phase change and not a force dimensionally above and superseding.

XIV
Temperance

Incorporating the lessons of Strength and The Magician, the divine figure performs the essence of magic: flow regulation. With wings, allowing perfect flight through movements of the Earth and with complete control over the flows in her hands, she has attained final mastery, becoming adept at manipulation and riding of all flows and currents.

XV
The Devil

Unlike under Augustinian civilization where evil is considered as the Outside, the Devil shows evil as a system isolated to itself. Evil occurs in structures, not Outsides, structures which exist on their own and not infinitely. The abusive family, the secret police, the roaming mob, all of these are evil due to being evil, with all outside being not-evil, as opposed to the model of evil where evil is everything excluded, everything not-good. Under imperial equalization, the two figures are kept in bondage to a structure beneath the singular Kingly sign of the devil, a great abomination colonizing all under its enclosing tyranny.

XVI
The Tower

With the Tower is so named as the monopresent object (The), its destruction in the image makes its nature shown. Supposed destruction reinforces and recreates the Tower, by reifying the Outside/Inside of it. By the destruction of Rome, the stratified degeneracy of Rome was purged and the reality of the Outside was made supreme. In doing so, Rome ascended to the Heavens in order to exist in pure form, in total contrast, between spiritual and physical, over the Outside which now roamed over its city walls. All physical dirt was scrubbed from Rome, and emerging from the bath is the white marble myth, existing solely in the world of purity of language. Towers are antifragile in this way, with their superstructure surviving long past the overthrow of their base, the true symbols gaining immortality long beyond that pathetic slavery which sustained them.

XVII, XVIII, XIX
The Stars, The Moon, The Sun

At the top-center of each image, the brilliant centerpiece grows, as the soul in the three-part progression. Three faculties of the human, operating in sequence, are shown here. Unformed and undifferentiated, nature pours into the inputs of the human. This grows into dreams, the towers, dogs, undercurrents of waters with mysterious lobsters crawling along occultic theatres of the mind. At the apex, the face evolves to the solar monolith in the act of speech, where thought is made sedimented to be poured again, as the fluid light-drops coming from the multicolored sun. The cycle loops over as it does in the Deleuzo-Guattarian narrative of stratification, where the finished product, the sedimented expression in speech/writing, is now flowing into the same circuits in order to be raw material for the next iteration of the cycle, becoming the waters which the woman pours into input.

XX
Judgement

Only at the end, does the text truly make itself known. The function of eschatological texts is to create a summary-text of the entire world fully submitted under the worshipped beyond. The angel makes itself known and finally proves Heaven’s supremacy over the material world, not only summarizing the full scope of Heaven, but in doing so through the description of Heaven’s relations to Earth, summarizes all of Earth, putting it under Heaven. Such is the purpose of eschatological fascination with exact names and places, with both the original text and subsequent re-interpretation being obsessed with the Revelation of Saint John mapping directly onto the world in which the reader exists. In this function, the angel heralding the arrival holds a flat and blows a trumpet down upon the naked worshippers, signifying the total supremacy, always recognized by believers, over the world.

XXI
The World

Positioned in the center of the Earth and the Heavens, the subject (carrying two batons) is made through expression from the flows of existence. Both wrap around to enclose the subject, with knots being made at the very lowest and at the highest. The subject here is feminine, flowing reality, the world/language itself, to be entered and consorted with by the viewer, in the same way that all other things enter and consort with the viewer. Through her, all things which form and tie the knots around her, which inform her, are accessible. Through her, through the linguistics in practice that is occult/magical practice, one is able to achieve movement. The final card is the entry into the World, the gateway to the Tarot.

Sublimated Revolution

By the time the abomination was planted on the lunar surface, the end had set in for the foremost vanguard of the closest thing to an American revolution since. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had degenerated to paranoia and weaknesses, their strength and virility slipping away as their membership contracted to paranoid holdouts. When the death blow was dealt, Hoover victorious from beyond the grave, the name became applied to just another little cell of alienated isolates wandering around, preaching from one of many holy texts in the ruins of the 1960s. The communities once dominated by the Panthers took the strength the Panthers had lost control of and channeled it into the new structure of Bloods and Crips, beginning the deathly dance upon South Central. Libido once directed against the powers that be turned inwards into an enclosed loop, a district of Southern California walled off as a funerary zone and the oppressions left to continue as was.

Now set to killing each other, the genocidal work of the police had been partially outsourced. All violence now directed inwards, the subjects became docile within an easy narrative, where the true oppressions were obscured. The police became reimagined as a direct enemy, another rival to kill and be killed by, and the powers above accepted this. Oppression became total, with the inhuman systems of economic organization now extending downwards, accepting and tolerating as a new component of its machinery the deathly consumers expending their energies inwards. Capital, firearms, consumer goods, all flow in as mere background (“concrete jungle”), with their inputs having been limited to the consumption and production of the subject beneath them. The violence-returning which sparks revolution is channeled not against these Raketen-Stadt systems, but onto each other, allowing the system to remain in balance, with no fear of uprising.

After a certain point, this trajectory leads to the situation recognized by Kendrick Lamar in Good Kid, mAAd City. The city itself is alive, a living creature, a great demonic Satan which has imprisoned in its stomach all peoples. Those around oneself, the products consumed, the products produced, all feed together seamlessly in the demon’s anatomy, until all that’s left is ones own steady, slow grinding down to death as the entire physical world manifests demonic. The only hope of revolution, with the separation that once made revolution imaginable being forever removed from access, is to destroy everything, rebellion against the physical world now indistinguishable from the demon. The American way of revolution is under this equation, the “riot” being the turning against the city itself, tearing up concrete, glass, metal, vehicles, anything of the world in the darkest and most colonized urban centers seen for its evil, to be the target of cleansing.

In identical spirit, we rise against Area 51. With the two media-based shocks of the recent months being reminders of the concentration camps long existing on the border and reminders of Jeffrey Epstein’s long public secret society of pedophilia, the enclosed, secret, guarded location under the flag of the system comes alive as a potent symbol in the imagination. Area 51 is a non-descript symbol which retains all attributes and qualities of the camps and Little Saint James, the direct attacks on those being far too out of grasp. In this rare moment, the Bloods vs Crips fighting that has completely taken over previously revolutionary fighting, the nihilistic white-gang warfare of Proud Boys vs ANTIFA that the system is more than willing to arm and encourage both sides of, is put aside in order to direct oneself as a human bullet, tearing apart from the inside the stomach walls of the demon, rushing headlong, united together, towards Area 51, a rare flown-flag of the demon that so often prefers to remain unconsciously present, mimicking nature.

Pleasure and Escape

That the text of Infinite Jest is cyclical, with the majority of its plot resolutions being unwritten is vital to the nature of its conception of pleasure and sincerity. Wallace, preoccupied with questions of genuinity and from such, happiness, in what he sees as a fundamentally insincere world, spends the majority of the text’s story being concerned with ways in which the world is broken out of. The rehab facility sits in contrast to tennis academy’s uncovering their own role in insincere-production by way of the Infinite Jest, its transmission connecting all disparate threads of narrative throughout the text. The viewer is a subject trapped, enclosed in a dopamine-based prison out of which they must claw themselves by way of rehab, as shown in the arc of Erdedy.

This reading, common to many, however is incomplete, though it terminates where Wallace himself most likely did. The preoccupation throughout much the text with the tennis academy presents another path. On the first snowfall of YDAU, the world’s systems are replicated through an elaborate ruleset in the game of Eschaton. In doing so, the nature of tennis is replicated at a micro scale. Two seekers of the real, outside of the rigid system of Gately present themselves in the text. Eric Clipperton, moving through the game with a driving goal, circumventing and destroying the rules with an outside goal (echoing the destruction of Eschaton) and Randy Lenz on his night-time rampage. The high of cocaine in Lenz present a problem for the structure of Wallace’s view of pleasure, with Lenz showing a route to an immediate real faster, cutting through the structural ways of Gately.

The problem posed by these narratives is only solved in reinterpretation of the nature of pleasure in the text. When JOI’s head is dug up, the face of dopamine is brought into full, horrifying focus. Hal breaks down in fits in the chronologically latest section, unable to cope any longer within what Wallace constructs as the dopamine-based prison. The question has to be asked however, whether this breakdown represents anything universal. The game itself is called into question as a structure from the same that produced the entertainment and its attendant opium analogies, this identification falls apart as anything but an identification with the text itself being the same as the entertainment, where the central character’s father is revealed to be the author of such misery and as such, the text. The text remains innocent however, only breaking down if the spectre of the father is taken for granted as Wallace assumes it to. Wallace’s construction of sincerity/insincerity remains only in the way it does when it’s allowed to be the construction itself, ie, when it’s already accepted. Forgetting him, the real fulfillment so chased is revealed to exist in that which was rejected. Gately’s rehab functions as a game, as does the academy.

The function of the academy is shown in the Cult of the Last Train. The creation of a “floating world” (Ukiyo-E) as in the tennis game allows for the full escape, an escape which has no objective end into an ever-absent “sincerity” as Wallace believes it does, but an escape into the route of escape itself, the retreat into the floating world of the game, of the text, of literature. The Line of Flight goes in circles, its true flight being off the ground, not to any particular destination.

Autism and Histronia

Anything of the internet is an expression from its oceanic depths, tide pools and sea creatures and coral sprouting from bacterial origins within the abysses of liquid water. Content itself is a body without organs upon which the functional details of the content itself are scratched on or expressed from, brief flashes of form before melting back into the monolithic liquid. In finding the agents of origin of content, Wojack and Pepe emerge (in genealogy with similar memes) to show and describe the agents of content, the face of the human emotive-intelligence behind the keyboard which makes this expression occur.

From Wojack, the Soyface and NPC both emerged as typologies of the internet user after social media began to take hold as the dominant form of bringing individuals to the tools of content-expression. Both in reference to observed phenomena, what’s revealed in them is the formations that individuals take on through full integration with their online platforms, the structures of their worlds molding them into new beings.

The NPC works online as a histrionic node, forever concerned with the contours of their online context. The pronouns in bio show this, as do the endless accounts retweeting the same collection of sentiments and ideas. The NPC has been made into a husk, an empty pipe by which content flows, in the desperate seeking of some community or connection in the lonely abyss of the internet. Flailing in every direction, they eventually find a groove in which to slot themselves which offers solely positive feedback, and begin to drive themselves deeper and deeper into emptiness as they attempt to pursue more and more approval. Such culminates in the histrionics of confessionary art. With the basic driving force of the removing of all internal thought being the desire to have ones soul embraced and accepted by any community, the individual, when they feel so empowered - usually by desperation - to create, do so with the same aim. Pouring out their heart and body through ink, the art reproduces the same forms of its genre in an attempt to do anything to contact another. The long running trend of feminist art being “ugly nudity” (a trend that’s been seen as cutting edge for a longer period of time than most human lifespans) is the climax of this. In alienation, a discourse has been created where its been promised that the true community so-desired will only be achieved by pouring ones passions out in the ugliest and most painful way imaginable. In aggregate, these communities devolve into a dogpile of this histrionic flailing, each attempting to scream louder and thus attain the acceptance of a non-existent crowd, slicing themselves open all over Medium and slam poetry to spill enough blood so as to drown out all the rest.

The Soyface works on the autistic drive. As opposed to only riding through and desperately upon the flows of media and communication as the NPC does, the Soyface moves in total submission and self-opening to media, desiring to melt themselves into slime and perform the final autistic merger of the desiring with their object of desire. All fetishistic desire is inherently masochistic or annihilative, a movement towards total unification with the fetish, either through subsumption or masochism. In the much more common, latter route, autism emerges, as legalistic masochism where desire for being subsumed by the fetish is sublimated through linguistic channels created to hopefully lead to the fetish - cathedral building. In attempting to bring to life what they see as spiritually existing perfection, the Soyface builds their collection-cathedral and remakes their life in service to this collection-cathedral, the bugman being the really observed manifestation of this, the perfect consuming beast, chittering away at silicon valley’s latest complex-sugar slurries.

That these pathologies - both long existent - are increasing in numbers with the internet is no accident. The structure of the internet creates and encourages these behaviors. From the endless soup of consumptive media, comes the Soyface. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s when every last second of the day was spent marketing to children through sugar and colorful plastic, the Soyface’s addictions are given a vice far more potent than any before in the internet’s infinite variety of content to consume. With the infinite amount of content being vehicles for ad revenue as well as ads in themselves for a premium patreon or merchandise, the capitalist forces behind their favoured products have a vested interest in making this tendency increase and thus structuring the internet around the mindless “faucet tap” model of consumption (though a much more intelligent faucet than the television was, all the better to addict with). From social media, comes the NPC. With non-anonymous boards, even the older styles of BBSs being built around a username who has a miniature fiefdom at their disposal, the histrionic pathology is able to create for themselves a perfect whitespace on which to smear their soul and hopefully attract a filling of their emptiness. Higher plateaus of capital desire this, as the NPCs are the franchise owners, able to create the very content which the Soyface consumes, providing more and more digestible flows to latch onto, through which advertisement or the “platform cut” Teespring or Redbubble can be delivered.

Powers of Extrapolation

In order to gain access to the interior of Hogwarts, the Death Eaters created a tunnel with two vanishing cabinets, one of which was within a magical room that would form into whatever is “required” by the one entering it. In both of these, the linguistic construction of the objects determines the magic of the objects. The function of a cabinet can be mapped as follows: “an object is placed inside, the door is shut, the door is later opened and the object is retrieved”. The vanishing cabinet, extrapolating upon this, changes small details in the usual script - object enters, object exits through a different, identical cabinet. The room of requirement does the same. A room is considered in relation to its inhabitants, an equation which is inverted such that the room is created in relation to its inhabitants.

Over the course of a Fortean text, the compilation of facts begins to slowly expand by extrapolation. Beginning with the recalling of a particular event or series of events, the text quickly expands into wider territory as Fort considers more possibilities, arguments, and tangential details or concerns that feed into what constitutes the “facts” or “data” he sets himself to compiling. The prose remains in the same voice, the witness delivering facts of the case, with the facts now encompassing theoretical, philosophical concerns. In doing so, Fort was able to extrapolate from facts to engage in theory, moving far beyond the original scope to encompass larger linguistic concerns.

One of the most terrifying vectors through which imaginary numbers were encountered was through Cardano’s cubic equations formulas where certain possibilities would work, but with completely enigmatic results. Square roots of negative numbers would, if belief was suspended, produce practically useful results despite being seemingly impossible in themselves. Here, that which should not exist was encountered by means of the situation forcing it to occur. Imaginary numbers were willed into existence by the extrapolation on the rules and rituals of conventional mathematics.

Language here reveals its mutationary powers. By creating a system of rules, the rules themselves begin to take on Pataphysical lives of their own. Things are made possible beyond the original confines of the author by the fact that the words can interact and form meaning through their own mechanics.

Necromancy

The state of matter after its original height began its long downward spiral into heat death when it exploded out from infinite compression, bursting forth to begin to die. The one way direction of energetic momentum begun instantly and from this, the reactions of entropinous decay brought forth the creation we so take for granted, leading to our current moment of life. This primordial scene created the basic differentiation, the creation of a binary, between life and death. The relationship between these two is one of the complete codependencies, as in all binaries. When a single black dot is drawn on an empty white piece of paper, what’s been created, from the monolithic oneness of the paper, is two, the positive and negative space. The positive space is formed in itself in opposition to the negative space, with both existing by virtue of not-being the other. In the same way, Life defines itself as being that which has emerged from the process-towards Death, Death as the Negative to Life’s Positive.

This occurs within a cycle of creation and extinction. From primordial undifferentiation, there occurs a big bang - the First Flame or Lord Shiva’s creation of the Golden Age - which then slowly degenerates over its course of existence, until it finally ends, the Ashen One snuffing the flame to await the next primordial spark, Kali Ma’s dance of destruction to clear the way for her husband Shiva to begin creation again. Within this cycle, Life itself works. The Darksoul provides the pigment for the creation of worlds while also being the catalyst of entropy, further driving the world into madness as each new creator so destined to link the flame makes their own blinding light, their Very Own Sun, all colliding on the same trajectory to the Dreg Heap before the merciful end can finally occur.

That the power of creation is done through an engine of death is the contradiction of life. All productive acts of the human form are acts of decay, movement of any kind releasing irreplaceable energy sent out to settle into empty electrons. This Death is worshipped in the act of cleaning oneself, where excess vitality of dead skin and hair and accumulations of life are stripped away to make the body pure, the death-nature of this being most evident in the incredible pain of burn debridement.

Yin and Yang are thus revealed, the contradicting duality of the human animal. Yang, the flow of solar light, is driven by Thanatos, as each act of motion is an act towards death. Yin, the negative anti-force acts as a channeler for this. Humanity is uniquely capable of moving away from the common death of those who think themselves immortal (kings, animals, and all other Life Worshipping masculinities), those who despair as they attempt to force their Yang to be anything other than a caustic bleach. Humanity is capable of the Life Drive through accepting Death, Eros through the primordial Thanatos. Such is the opposition made by the primordial (narratological) serpents, whose ending brings the player freedom from the Kingly fantasies of restoring glory, instead embracing themselves, embracing Eros.

The praxis of Eros is a praxis of flight, a praxis of Death worship. Death is the glowing power beneath all action and its channeling towards ends is the true transcendence. All suffering, the prison of the world, occurs as Thanatos asserts itself in power, structures doomed to death, doomed to the suffering impossible endemic to existence (all civilizations included, no matter how blessed by the Abrahamic or Enlightenment Father), the core-death inherent to all structure. The only praxis of Eros is individual flight, from whatever the circumstances may be, even, or especially, of those circumstances claimed in manly Life Worship to originally be flight or freedom in themselves.

Duel Dynamics

In the gameplay loop of anything centered around the continual retrial of a single area, the player is engaged in a Duel with their opposite, the particular level or boss. The discourse of the player, their movements, attacks, abilities, etc, encounters and plugs into the discourse of the enemy. This relationship meets is climactic point in the death of either, where one discourse is able to more perfectly execute movement through the other.

Such is the purpose of the duel, distinct from any function of warfare, state violence, or other actions done with similar tools and narratives. In honorable combat, the two foes lock theirselves into combat, hoping to more adequately move through the self of the other. In this meeting of the two is the axiomatic third, the scenario itself, which forms the true text of the scenario. The duel is a form of warfare purely for the sake of the warrior (as in, the warrior after his creation by the apparatuses of warmaking), allowing the warrior to obtain transcendence by its violence. Victory or defeat matters little, the action remaining the same across both - the two combatants locking against each other within the neutral plane they both adhere to and worship, the martial system of Honor, the knightly code.

The mechanics of this action reveals the nature of libidinal interaction. As in Sadomasochism, the winners and losers, dominant and submissive, are irrelevant for the true source of power in the Duel (such is recognized by Esdeath), that being the unifying YangFlow both parties have engaged their libidinal drives within. With the entire duel being a continuous flow of the empty arena, first draw, final blood, empty arena, the Sadomasochistic scene is the same, a continuous and singular YangFlow across the entire scenario, which is the sum of all libidinal energies being utilized in the particular scenario. For this reason, both form a type of mystic practice, the meditative trance induced by immersion in an overwhelming force, a partnered equivalent of auto-flagellation, ecstatic dancing, or standing beneath a waterfall.

That this practice is discursive of a single YangFlow demonstrates the problem of the human’s composition. The practitioners in the Duel engage their Yin completely, locking their Yin into each other in order to fulfill the full circuit of the Duel. The Yang is alien, an outside flow that is between them both. Such too, is the nature of existence, thrust upon the receptive human.