zenosanalytic reblogged
zenosanalytic reblogged
I keep dreaming of the same city. It's not one I've been to, and I can't recall ever seeing it in a video. But it's consistent across dreams.
I don't know what this means.
Marco, meanwhile, continued reporting his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening.
Kublai interrupted him: “From now on I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains: a glass tank high as a cathedral so people can follow the swimming and flying of the swallow fish and draw auguries from them; a palm tree which plays the harp with its fronds in the wind; a square with a horseshoe marble table around it, a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also of marble.”
“Sire, your mind has been wandering. This is precisely the city I was telling you about when you interrupted me.”
“You know it? Where is it? What is its name?”
“It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
“I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”
zenosanalytic reblogged
1. Unwarranted Emotion 2. Unwarranted Relationship 3. Delayed realization (ENTER/EXIT) 4. Odd postures—figurative postures + escaped metaphors 5. Placing 6. Weird Venues 7. Extended, tangential monologues 8. Distorted time frame 9. Unwarranted recognition of place 10. Private enclaves 11. Unwarranted familiarity with situation (or person or place) 12. Characters from foreign contexts 13. Characters continuing under different surfaces 14. Distorted Logistics 15. Transmuting Narrator 16. Partial invisibility (And odd witnessing) 17. Backward projection of Intentions 18. Bleeding with Memory 19. BACKWARD projection of Judgment 20. Restricted Witnessing 21. Tunnel Memory 22. The Dim Torch Narrative Mode 23. Crowds—Unwarranted Uniformity 24. Robert Altman [illegible] 25. (“More than I expected”) Unwarranted Expectation 26. MIXED PERSONALITY
zenosanalytic reblogged
This guy is doing Borges to Utena. It's very good. Grudgingly I will link you to it.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Most typical fantasy dragons are huge, powerful things. Discworld is hilarious for essentially making them this but reptillian:
They also explode and die when they are upset/frightened. Which is uhhh... a lot of the time. Fucking pathetic beasts
Paul Kidby’s art of them is amazing
Pratchett is one of my two favorite authors of all time. I practically spent my teenage years with him and also with spec evo stuff, often about dragons. So I really love what he did there. Fire as a natural weapon would require some pretty drastic adaptions for an animal.
What always struck me as weird, though, is how he decided that dragons, of all classic mythical creatures probably the one with the most spec evo attached to it, are just to unrealistic to play them straight in his fantasy world that also has luggage that runs around on dozens of little feet and has a will of its own, wizards and witches as basically normal jobs and a turtle and four elephants the size of planets.
It's not just Pratchett. There's also this scene in Hellboy: The Nature of the Beast, where Hellboy, a demon from hell who has fought cyborg nazis, witches, gods, ghosts, fairies and eldritch abominations, when he is told he has to fight a dragon, initially doesn't believe that dragons existed. This is, as far as I know, the only time when Hellboy doubts the existence of something supernatural.
What is it about dragons that makes Fantasy authors go: "This is far more unrealistic than all those other fantasy tropes"? And why is it the same kind of mythical creature that gets (often pseudoscientific) natural explanations from not only spec evo fans but also cryptozoologists and creationists far more often than any other kind of mythical creature (except for modern ones like cryptids or aliens)?
Time has notably worn away the Dragon's prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer as reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales.
J. L. Borges, di Giovanni translation
#kaijubrains#drachenwiki#a book of creatures#Terry Pratchett#Discworld#Jorge Luis Borges#Dragons#Fantasy#Worldbuilding#the funny thing about this is that the earliest dragons were just snakes but MORE#Bigger Stronger More Venomous#and the 'More Venomous' bit gradually transformed into 'Breathes Fire'#Im not sure where the association with rivers and lakes came from but it's def there at least in medieval western europe#appreciative reblogs#minitagrambles
zenosanalytic reblogged
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
zenosanalytic reblogged
this poem changed me
zenosanalytic reblogged
“They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders, wept with love on seeing Ithaca, humble and green. Art is that Ithaca, a green eternity, not wonders.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
zenosanalytic reblogged
truly is a beautiful masterpiece of modern art that an online community largely fueled by fandom and media analysis has come full circle into creating a detailed and thorough pastiche, via gifsets and faux analysis essays and letterboxd reviews and more, of a "forgotten 1970s film classic" that does not actually exist. Goncharov (1973) (the memetic phenomenon) has quickly become one of the most biting statements about the current state of art and its consumption. A work of art that exists not in and of itself, but as a discussion of itself. an analysis of itself. An appreciation of itself. pure unadulterated simulacrum.
@aleph-sharp yes exactly and it's masterfully done
zenosanalytic reblogged
“‘The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.’ Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; ‘tout aboutit en un livre,’ everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights