I’ve been thinking about awe lately. I’m wondering if maybe it’s not that I can’t feel it, but that I don’t feel it in response to the standard stars and sunsets and religious rituals.
(Probably the thing that got me thinking this was telling @justice-turtle about how I can’t feel emotions that I’m under too much pressure to feel. Rituals and sunsets and fucking stars have so much baggage regarding how one ought to feel about them.)
Maybe awe is the feeling I get sometimes reading about mental experiences that are foreign to me, neither good nor bad but different. Maybe awe is in headspaces and phantom wings, the feeling like seeing the multiverse spread out before you and you’ll never leave your own little patch of it but it’s enough, it’s enough to see it and to know that there are people walking the paths you’ll never take.
Maybe awe is the feeling of reading really well-done porn for a kink that you’re completely not into. The words are filled with some foreign kind of power, power you can’t quite directly perceive but you can hear the whoosh as it flies over your head. You’ll never feel it yourself but it’s enough to know it’s there and to know that there are people who can, who can feel the power in those words and take it into themselves until their bones hum with it and their nervous system sparks.
Sometimes it’s enough, and maybe that’s what it means.
For me, awe is that feeling at the moment right before I comprehend something far beyond myself, that moment where unconscious realization shapes my perspective before conscious understanding has the chance to go in and blind me with outcome bias.
Awe is the rare moment I get when, for just a second, I can really see what I am looking at.
The closest I’ve ever come to understanding religion came from me meta-ing the concept of identity into a spiritual mess. I just kept thinking how I was me but I could be not me but then I wouldn’t be me until I felt, just for a moment, that I understood it all. I chase those feelings whenever I can find them.
Tags:
#(February 2016) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life
Very_Dumb.png. A flag made of a black field, with a blue diagonal bar, and a centered, transparent punch-out in the shape of a diamond. The dashboard probably makes it look white, but it’s transparent.
This is simultaneously the greatest and worst thing I’ve ever made in my life.
On the one had, it’s an abomination.
On the other hand, technically speaking, there is nothing about this that could not easily–trivially–be re-created in fabrics. As long as the transparent section is sufficiently simple, such that the hems could be adequately re-enforced, there’s no reason you couldn’t treat it like any other emblem.
Oh my god, I feel like I’ve ascended to some kind of higher plane of existence.
I mean, we put transparent windows in money, we know it can be done… Clear vinyl is absolutely a thing, and it’s relatively easy to source for most people…
Holy shit.
I’m losing my goddamn mind.
What the fuck?
?????
?????????
That said, I don’t trust the people who run around making palette flags to use this terrible, awesome power responsibly. I can already see the semi-transparent gradients from here, and it’s horrifying.
Tags:
#flags #art #oh my god #I am picturing a flag with a window in the middle waving in the breeze over a grocery store and it is beautiful
I’m back from my meetup with @sinesalvatorem! I am neither kidnapped nor dead in a ditch! (Can’t make any promises about mind-controlled: it could just be really subtle.)
I had a good time, and I think she did too. There was the occasional awkward cultural issue, but I suppose it’s to be expected. We talked a bunch and ate Chinese food and talked some more.
A lot of the conversation was about differences in Canada vs America vs [Redacted], and that was interesting, but it was very neat the way we also had shared cultural referents from being in the same Internet social group. I’m used to having to either explain a bunch of backstory or be very vague when talking offline about stuff I read on the Internet, but with her I could just say “You know Ozy’s blog post, the one that starts with them talking about how they took the Wizard’s Oath as a kid” and yes, she knows. (For those of you I know from other Internet social groups who are wondering what I’m referring to, here’s a link to satisfy your curiosity.) It was nice to experience that.
I can confirm that I had a good time! I can neither confirm nor deny mind-control. No, really, I’m not sure. Sometimes it just happens automatically. I can at least promise no intentional mind-control.
Being able to talk internet-social-group-things with people irl is pretty great. Thus far, I’ve been able to do so with you, @lethriloth, and @neoliberalism-nightly. I hope to add @shitifindon to that list tomorrow!
It’s not even November yet, dammit. “First snowfall that sticks long enough for me to put a footprint in it” is supposed to be November ~5th around here.
On the bright side, it’s supposed to be back up to double-digits Celsius tomorrow, so it won’t stick too much longer than needed to put a footprint in it.
(But still.)
amango-tea said: Yeah, it’s flurrying right now and I am NONE TOO PLEASED ABOUT IT. Goddammit, weather!
Recently I saw my friend’s dog scratching his ear a suspicious amount, and the first thought that came to mind was “~follow for more flea-avoidant speciesism~”
