Chapters 93-96: Murder-Ghandi Rides Again!
Shaping Exercises podcast (or direct RSS)
For next week — 97-100
97. Rapping at my Chamber Door
98. Letter 15
99. Enough Rope to Hang Yourself
100. Immanentizing the Eschaton
Cakoluchiam’s stellar Character Sheet
Steven’s Predictions – Everything is a Clue
Worth the Candle can be read at AO3 or RoyalRoad.
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Children of Men has a few long shots. Here’s a video about one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKmllIK6Md0
I actually know of two more movies that were done in just one actual shot.
Victoria (IMDb: tt4226388), a German movie about a Spanish young adult woman going through trials and tribulations in a big and strange city over the course of a night. The whole movie was filmed three times in one shot each and then they chose the best of the three to publish.
1917 (IMDb: tt8579674), a movie about two privates in WW1 going through the horrors of battle. Though it felt like the whole movie was two shots instead of one, because the screen goes black somewhere in the middle (due to plot reasons).
I pledge to become a VIP patron (for at least 2 months) if you do a speedrun episode.
Cheesecake isn’t whipped nearly as much as you will be if you don’t take back those heinous words.
First, I think a fun psychoanalysis theory is that the fundamental basis for Joon’s reaction is insecurity. From a “assume everyone is pragmatic” pov, he hasn’t really lost anything here because, like, if he breaks up with Fenn, if it’s a good idea to get together with Amaryllis she can just mod herself back to being infatuated with him. But his fear is that she won’t do that, because deep down he worries that the only reason people can like him is when they’re forced into it by unfathomed internal forces.
Second, I’d personally be a lot more comfortable with soul fuckery if it was like, a temporary change that you had to repeatedly confirm after an alternating period. Ie. you start with an hour a day of “modified values” and can only push it up by an hour per day, something like that, probably randomized. I think that’d massively reduce the error potential. The problem with soul magic is that there’s a traditional set of “ways of changing your mind that we are confident preserves selfhood” – the strongest argument against drugs I know is that they can change your mind in “unlicensed”, unpredictable ways – and putting the ability to change your mind directly in your moment-self’s hands is not one of them. I think most people’s True Self is, as a matter of how consciousness and memory works, an integration of impulses over time, and not every impulse of will, even if it’s in that instant faithfully held, should ought to be executed on; I don’t think that maximizes “to thine own self being true-ness”.
But third, can we talk about “you’re not broken”? Because I’m pretty sure you just agreed that everyone has the right to change their mind, but apparently they don’t have the right to hold an opinion on which basis their mind should be changed? I really don’t think I like this modern tendency of whitewashing moral beliefs through objective “psychological” medicalized viewpoints. “You’re not broken”, just as much as “you are broken”, implies that people are tools to an end. But people’s ends are (in humanism, at least) defined by themselves. If Amaryllis wants to be the sort of person who enjoys sex, that’s much more inherently her right (to a belief to hold) than even the capability to self-modify. If she wants to define her True Self as hetero – or bi, or cis, or trans, or neurotypical, or socially capable, or *anything* – and then conceive her current state as broken in relation to that desired state, I think that’s on her and her alone. (Let’s not even start on “that’s a male fantasy”, it’s 2021, are we really still pretending only men can be trad? Or more literally, “Amaryllis, your sex fantasy is a tool of the patriarchy”?) Point being, if Amaryllis wants to instrumentalize her own sex drive, well, if her body is hers and her values are hers, then her purpose should *certainly* ought to be hers as well. Hands off.
Ah, sorry for the rant.