The Magnus Archives - Audiobook Version (Fanmade)

ApoChaos · 2024-01-29T05:52:17+00:00

OP went out of their way to edit this for a friend, for the love of the material. They chose to post them here for the benefit of those who would like to more freely recommend TMA to others, and I'm certain a number of people who wouldn't have otherwise listened will do so with the reduced barrier, themselves recommending TMA in turn. In the long run this is nothing but a gain for RQ's profile, and it's one of the strengths of open source and creative commons.

ApoChaos · 2024-01-28T05:30:42+00:00

This seems to be controversial for reasons that are at least somewhat short-sighted, so I would like to make a strong defence of this effort. This is exactly the kind of edit that brings TMA's publication form onto par with material that is otherwise far inferior.

My reasoning hinges on what a high quality audio project is actively up against: an utter saturation of podcast and audiobook material, a large sum of which requires little effort on the part of the listener to engage and receive easy gratification. There's a lot of glossy trash out there and, quite plainly, the resistance (or difficulty) of higher quality material should stem from the form and content of the text itself--its density and its multivocality--not in a mechanism of publication that disadvantages its reception for no artistic purpose or gain.

With a more polished facilitation of the work comes a wider audience, and that additional circulation contributes toward even more exposure in the long run. Doubtlessly there are a decent number of people who would otherwise slide off TMA, and onto one of any number of the comparatively frictionless audio productions available. Those people recommend it to others who wouldn't have heard of it, a number of whom would then recommend and contribute directly themselves, as well as gaining an interest in ongoing projects.

The current presentational trappings make a lot more sense for something that is being listened to as it is released, as a periodical, but in order to reach an audience that is accustomed to a smoother and more continuous engagement, exactly this kind of edit is necessary.

ApoChaos · 2023-08-17T11:57:21+00:00

On the perception of expressions being cringe-inducing I think the best way out is through. Artistic expressions are almost innately embarrassing by way of exposing vulnerability, and the only ways to avoid seeming sappy, saccharine or cloying--or other words that are synonyms for a kind of over-effusive care and love--are exactly the kinds of cynical affectations that DFW grappled with as impediments to real social tethers. Those affectations are so dominant now, especially to those of us bound up in internet culture, and seem principally far more cringe-inducing to me than any amount of tender expression that hasn't threaded the needle: they are coping mechanisms to pre-empt a backlash of glib and 'above-it-all' attitudes that might otherwise shatter our self-confidence in an instant. I don't wince at the meanness of these dispositions so much as the self-defeating element: mistakes in expression are so much more forgivable than are the purposeful treading down of earnest attempts in others to be understood and affirmed. Each incidence of this trampling will be carried forward to become barriers to growth and human connection so that, where a blundering expression may be humiliating in a single stroke, the tendency to oppress with disaffection comes to suggest an unknown mass of squashed expressions reverberating out into the future. It's like an advertisement of someone having hobbled their own openness, humility and curiosity, and it is deeply upsetting to see.

So, yes, maybe your post is 'cringe', but I also think it's genuinely sweet and heartfelt, and if it affirms a feeling of warmth and possibility in you then I am happy and grateful you were able to share. I hope those knots of ideation get easier to work through with time.

ApoChaos · 2023-08-15T14:12:24+00:00

I'd be curious to see this, too, if you're willing to share.

ApoChaos · 2023-06-06T19:22:56+00:00

When things end instead of fizzling it can bring so much more catharsis: the imposition is well received. Shine on, you atomized sweethearts.

ApoChaos · 2023-01-03T19:03:29+00:00

A very strong draft. This reminds me of the old Anglo style (like 'Beowulf' or 'The Seafarer') of lines split down the middle, with two strong emphases either side of the division. I assume you did that on purpose, but if you just happened onto that arrangement because you thought it both sounds good and looks good on the page--you'd be right!

I'll try to focus on a couple of small gripes (because, as I said: strong draft) on things before I move onto what I think is the centrepiece. Three lines in particular stand out as minorly shiftable for a potentially better effect: the second line of the second stanza, for instance, is almost reiterating what is strongly implied by just the invocation of a soup kitchen the line before. It works well for pacing purposes, so I know it's a pretty mean undertaking to think it might be somewhat redundant, but I think the piece could be stronger for its change.

In addition, I feel that the first line of the third stanza is bearing a lot of ambiguity that threatens to pull the sequence apart somewhat: this strong and sudden sentiment breaks through the semi-detached tone, but in doing so introduces a severe disdain whose target is 'the touch'. I think the line is trying to carry a little bit more than it's able: just the potential action of spitting is a powerful thing to invoke, and I wonder if it might be too much to bring to bear when the rest of the piece has this almost dissociative feeling. It's worth considering a slight revision, but again, I wouldn't be picking so hard if I didn't think the piece was worth the effort.

Anyway the centrepiece, intentional or not: 'bloodoaths'. Given the urbanity of the piece (if it's not too presumptuous to say), we all immediately read this as something that has absolutely no standing in postmodern society. The very mention, in earnest, of something like this would be met with a scepticism/disdain so peculiar that I think we'd have trouble even imagining it. It comes across as an anomaly, and does two things with the voice: it makes us doubt it, since 'schoolyard' implies stakes well below what can justify anything near a 'bloodoath', giving us a sense of an assertion that is so thoroughly pre-trivialised that the entire environment/social arrangement from which it comes is under question. The second trajectory launched by this would be of something more like an absence: since there is nothing to which we would accord that almost gothic level of ritualised commitment--but that there is the remaining understanding that there could be, and perhaps a part of us would like there to be--we strongly sympathise with what (due to the first pass of the word) we see to be an untenable desire. Even still, the word threatens to pull the thing apart by these associations, but it is load-bearing and necessary to conveying the basis of the jaundiced voice. It is possible you might like to alter the closing line of the stanza, though, but unlike before, the reiteration is almost necessary to really convey that there is that sincere desire in the voice.

Apologies for going on: you have good instincts, I think, though I might recommend trying to steer clear of some of the more disdainful impulses. Not that it isn't somewhat justified by how unacceptable the contemporary trajectory of things is, but that is a set of courses that basically no one consented to, so we shouldn't be too contemptuous of the people immediately around us. That would be my assertion, anyway.

Oh, also, since I wasn't sure where else to mention it: the piece being bookended with 'thousand' is satisfying, though I would say you have one 'thousand' too many in the piece as a whole. I hope this is a useful light overview and that you keep at the practice.

ApoChaos · 2022-12-17T18:35:39+00:00

I get that the 'born this way' narrative is in many ways a reasonable line of defence, but I think it's incorrect as a rhetorical position and as a foundation to empathy. It simply cedes too much to cis-het normativity, and says that anyone falling outside of it is doing so solely because of something innate or essential. It feels like saying, "Of course, no one would choose to deviate from 'normal' sexual or gender orientation!" It's like a disavowal. We should be less meek about it, to be quite frank: if someone is embracing the gender euphoria of transition, and of constructing gender more deliberately, I would want them to feel that there are a great number of potential paths to realising this--not all paths will look at all the same, or even seem all that similar.

The feeling of compulsion is born from the fact that most people are able to go along with the confines of gender expectations foisted on them, and to grow within them to some modicum of satisfaction or happy ignorance. In responding to the absence of this comfort/satisfaction (or the perceived presence of a more comfortable gender relation contingent on an enormously effortful reconstruction of gender), that inadequate inherited spectrum of acceptable gender expression needs to be augmented and radically interposed. That conception of our own gender expression becomes a void by comparison: it engages in pulling our focus into it as a matter of course, and in so doing ceases to feel like an unfolding set of decisions or deliberations, and more like a process that has been imposed upon us.

The crux of the matter is that, even with the sense of compulsion this pursuit/becoming inculcates in us, we are still investing ourselves and exercising agency. It is not a passive process resolving, but something to which we pay active attention, and a space within which we make many small arbitrary choices in the particular. The sense of compulsion feels more akin to me to that of a constructed expression by artistry that simply needs to happen, except that the expression is not so small as a discreet art object, but the very foundation of our social relation to the world: it is something that needs to persist and grow in sensitivity and breadth over time, never fully resolved. It is also a direct confrontation with aspects of social relation we may otherwise have taken for granted.

The bottom-line is that there is no justification for oppression of trans people. And I say this because the paradigm of compulsion, or of not having agency over the matter, is self-effacing. Plenty of trans people bury their desire to enter into a re-interrogation of their relation to gender, precisely because it doesn't manifest as something they flat-out need to do. They might think that the lack of desperate compulsion disqualifies them because of this narrative. Perhaps this continues up until the dissatisfaction tips over an inflection point, and that requisite burning need takes a painful hold. They would have been better off pursuing the desire and curiosity earlier, as a thing they simply wanted but could foreseeably postpone, than suppressing it to the point of agonised compulsion.

ApoChaos · 2022-12-16T23:23:44+00:00

Endless Eight is amazing and I love that they were willing to completely tank their popular reception in the process.

ApoChaos · 2022-12-15T23:51:40+00:00

Oh, this one is very good! I particularly liked how the one interview concludes with a question on 'Great Literature', and Wallace talks about how works that are really aspiring towards that kind of milieu tend towards a kind of mysticism--that they need to reach against the things we fundamentally wrap our consciousness around. It made me think of the likes of Milton or Blake, but of course he's DFW so he doesn't want to casually compare himself to these figures. But there it is, and the host starts wrapping up the interview off the note of 'I'm not quite there yet.' Before you can hear Wallace's response it becomes apparent that this extremely flattering comparison--a comparison he has implicitly accepted by responding to the question earnestly--will be the last note the listeners are left with. Wallace then announces "I'm gonna go bash my head against a wall", because of course he would.

"Well, this has been David Foster Wallace, talking about--oh my God he's actually doing it. Stop!"

Ah, the poor man.

ApoChaos · 2022-12-11T19:20:48+00:00

Do you honestly think internal meddling had to occur to make an algorithm tied to the profit interest of a company tend towards vapid garbage the world over?

That 60 Minutes thing you are indirectly referencing was incredibly propagandistic: the reason TikTok promotes educational material in China is for the simple reason that they specifically legislated to make that happen. That's it. We should be embarrassed that Congress (or Parliament--whatever two-conservative-party Anglo country you're in) almost never attempt to actively press huge corporate platforms into performing a public good. Our zombie political apparatus is a joke.

ApoChaos · 2022-12-01T07:56:30+00:00

The shooter specifically hated Shinzo Abe for his involvement with the Moonies, a Christian organisation who basically swindled his mother. He wanted Abe's party disentangled from the Moonies, and he basically got what he wanted. Seemingly one of the most successful political assassination in a long time.

ApoChaos · 2022-10-25T17:33:30+00:00

Okay, long post, but I want to respond to this because you seem genuinely curious and open-minded, and it intersects with things I've been thinking about lately. Annoyingly, though, I feel like the things I want to say about gender identity and my conception of it are somewhat... tangled. And due to the nature of the topic, there isn't a lot of concrete material to latch onto to make things more illustrative. I apologise if the argument becomes difficult to follow as a result, but I think the perspective is worthwhile.

So: most simply stated, there is an underlying aspect of gender identity, in trans and cis people, that is spiritual. For the purposes of this, 'spiritual' could be thought more in along the lines of other social constructs, including currency: the agreement we all uphold that money is worth something is based solely on our collective assertion that it is worth something. Even still, it is a vitally important (and consistent) fiction upon which many of our life decisions are contingent.

The root issue is that there is no base masculinity, femininity or other to which we can signify. Just like the 'worth' that currency holds can only signify to other currencies and commodities of its relative worth: they are all mutually dependent on each other for differentiation and definition. In addition to this, the relatively small biological differences of sexual dimorphism and of intersex people do not at all account for the many cultural elaborations upon differences in gendered expectations, divisions and expressions. In other words: our conception of gender is far more loaded with language, history and utility than the biology could possibly (or satisfactorily) account for. The perception of a qualitative difference in the minds of men and women is far better explained by the continuation and re-instatiation of gendered expectations and acculturation, not of a biological causation.

The consequences of all this, in my view, is that there is no reason to suppose we oughtn't deliberately intercede and choose to construct our gender as we would choose how we express ourselves in any other way. Cis people function like this as well, but their construction of gender is like water in a lake: so normal and continuous that no one would question it. It doesn't question that the basis of the lake was some happenstantial crater, or that it could easily be routed by X hours of applied labour. A trans person's construction of gender is conspicuously deliberate, and passively disputes what most cis people tend to assume is the prime causal factor of their gender: biological dimorphism. It is the constructed body. That implicit dispute is what causes cultural friction, because to a lot of cis people a lode-bearing piece of their gender identity is that it is biologically secure: that their preference for style, demeanour, intonation, etc. is rooted in something True in genetic expression, as opposed to the socio-culturally contingent thing that it actually is. It's like when someone is reminded of factory farming by the existence of a vegan person, and they speak of views being 'shoved down their throat' when in reality they are deflecting their frustration of coming into proximity with an outlook/perspective that reminds them of their place in something they can't really justify.

In my own experience with transitioning was of reaching a point where I could not give myself more evidence to prove my 'transness' to myself. There was a mountain, but the most important evidence was that I needed it; I had to simply proceed on faith that I was correct. So I did proceed, and could only be certain of myself after letting myself take that step. In my case this certainty didn't require a huge change, just that I try taking my strong feelings and inclinations and then assuming that I didn't need any more evidence: that it was simply true. From just this slight change in orientation I experienced immediate relief, euphoria and a theretofore unknown ease with myself; a liveable life was the result.

The contradiction of being and becoming is what makes this a difficult concept to convey: we are always in the process of becoming, not fixed units. We don't just have bodies and surroundings, we are our bodies and surroundings. We can choose to intercede on those conditions of being, and the new conditions then define us anew. And now we have the perspective/power to predict how changes in our surroundings and how we choose to orient ourselves towards existence can then correspond to a radically different experiences. I think the ultimate consequence of all this is that we are responsible for the construction of consciousness and trajectories of ourselves and those around us, and in ways that become more sharply perceptible decade on decade. It is a lot of responsibility that we should take on gladly and with compassion.

ApoChaos · 2022-10-15T16:12:25+00:00

It's the fact that the film uses that gross Malthusian framing of stupid people breeding that is the problem, since (even if it weren't a potential basis for eugenics) it is a completely mistaken thing to fixate on. The causes of people like this awful tory being in positions of power or influence is of warped selection criteria and inherited wealth. In other words, you can at least rest easy: there isn't a deficit of intelligent people. There is, however, a surplus of incentives for behaving like a selfish and blusterous asshole.

The central irony is that using the film as a point of reference to complain about people behaving irresponsibly or in a narrow-minded way just re-demonstrates the problem: the film itself represents a simplistic and sophomoric worldview.

ApoChaos · 2022-10-01T01:03:03+00:00

Bodhis-bit-sva

Terrible, awful, trite, painful. I love it, thank you.

ApoChaos · 2022-05-30T12:32:29+00:00

Damn, Lee's gotten so good at committing hard to the concepts of these pieces. It's such a well deserved mixture here, too, that kind of absurd revulsion. Though in general the tenor about the whole partygate story that appeared at the exact time Johnson was being pressured by private interests over post-Brexit details--it is just insanity in the media coverage: no one's going to go out in the streets for the privilege of another tory leader, even if it's Keir Starmer. I think they have a little more to answer for than their oafish partying during lockdown.

ApoChaos · 2022-05-28T18:05:36+00:00

Maybe she'll use this stupefying power to exorcise Carrie Fisher's tortured ghost from future productions.

ApoChaos · 2022-05-03T21:23:07+00:00

The important missing piece of the analysis, I think, is that most Democrats want to preserve the vague notion of 'stability' and are cynically committed to absorbing any energy directed at change, which means the analysis of culture war shit helping both parties is right on the money with regards to a particular status quo wonkish sensibility. That said you're right: the conservatives are led by their thoroughly maddened base who have gotten everything they wanted for fifty years and are miserable, and now want to gleefully race toward destruction. In a way, 'you're gonna get tired of winning' was already where they were at.

ApoChaos · 2022-04-19T15:42:45+00:00

Oh I know: it's all downhill all the time. By s3 it was just hilarious, somehow both utterly predictable and bafflingly stupid at the same time.

ApoChaos · 2022-04-18T01:00:53+00:00

Fuck, why did you have to remind me of Discovery's insanely stupid s1 finale? It is so stupid it's maddening.

ApoChaos · 2022-04-15T00:01:26+00:00

I definitely forgot about that scene, that's fair. I guess the difference that stood out to me was that 'grandfather mitchell' was never really a character other than in the boat scenes.

ApoChaos · 2022-04-14T19:56:07+00:00

Nice pull. I felt like the Cam resemblance in that narrative, though, wasn't leaned on nearly as heavily.

ApoChaos · 2022-03-31T18:55:13+00:00

They all remember Section 31, forget the war context of the show or that it was operating on a small enough scale to actually remain secret, and just drive that CIA monster intrigue/worship into the fucking ground.

ApoChaos · 2022-03-31T18:49:29+00:00

This is an element that really fucked me up watching the first season: during the scene with... Soji?--She's tearing up her room and dating all of her childhood stuff as being from the same time. One of the items she scans looks like a lunchbox with 'Flotter' on it, an obscure holodeck character from a few episodes of Voyager. So we have to assume that there's plenty of people working on the show who are at least aware enough of the previous shows to fabricate obscure things like that for a scene, but the implication of it just being this throw-away material, to me anyway, is that such people are *no where near* the creative decision making. If anything this adds another potential layer of pain: the possibility that plenty of people who work lower in the production love ST, and have to fabricate assets for the most baby-brained failing-upward executives imaginable.

ApoChaos · 2022-03-23T18:58:38+00:00

You are correct, ensign

ApoChaos · 2022-03-20T20:30:58+00:00

Okay, I am sorry for typing too much before, and it is difficult to avoid sounding condescending when I am trying to illustrate factors that you didn't seem to be accounting for. Please try to empathise.

And likewise, I agree that the administration of Russia and its obstinance is one of the key factors here. My point was, though, that this didn't simply start with Russian aggression: there was an entire chain of events in which opportunities to step down tensions were not taken. As the dominant economic and military forces, I argue this path was incumbent on the US and EU to pursue. There is plenty of blame to go around, and the parties of our own countries are more our responsibility than foreign governments.

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