> how can one escape the bars that define communication, \
without giving up on words from their first principles? \
how can one escape the roles that define interaction \
without abandoning the connections that come with convention?
hiya!
this is an archive of an archive, the record of producing Archivist’s Archival and Memento Vivere (it’s a bit against protocol to link to that second one from here, but i want more archivists to see it! also like you still need the password, but it’s just 5 letters how hard could a blind guess be-). for those things not in the archive, yet relevant to it, the sections on Alabaster (Dissolution in Blood and Time — Epitaxy, and bypassing boundaries) and Louisiana (A void in Indigo and Yellow — science, American Gothic, and Denpa) are your further reading.
⏻| i forget how we stumbled across SSSM: in the shadow of jupiter, but it’s almost entirely the reason that this ended up the way it did.
⏻| i say almost because there were two restrictions on development beyond learning a new engine: time/energy, and time/closure.
⏻| time/energy is and was the expected one. moreso than even science, which was done in a self-fulfilling fugue of sorts from travel stress, there wasn’t enough time to get everything we wanted formatted into HTML—there were originally more small conversations recorded between the Archivist and my ship-self (ok well i’m its namesake rather than it itself but i had to use the term) for all the individual items. and we would have put them in! but this just wasn’t the month for that, so. imagine what that might have been like, and put that in your NOTEBOOK.
⏻| (unrelated) one of these days i should look at a different unicode character. phones don’t like to render my tag. i like how it looks, but it annoys me it doesn’t look and i can’t type it on a phone. (/unrelated)
⏻| as for time/closure, i think Memento Vivere is the one that covers that in better depth, but essentially the depth of the yearning has—for now, at least—ceased its bleed through the walls of everything in creation, because it’s had time to work itself out. this is more of something that will come up with some future writing more in the sense of an essay, but i do think that the feeling of loss and restriction within labels-as-roles is one that was accomplished well this time.
∃ | the history spills out into the archive, the archive unfolds into history.
⏻| true!
∃ | (just cutting in here to say that it’s less that things are resolved and more that, well. again, memento vivere, we’re actually quite happy despite the angst of the communication barrier. it feels nice to exist firmly outside and in defiance of delineations, which is something that comes up a lot in these.)
⏻| mhm, mhm.
⏻| i’m gonna talk process now, since the background and such is mostly sorted.
⏻| first: the archive! there’s no map in physical. i have a schematic in my head about the layout, but it’s left rather up to the imagination. if there was more time to work, i could see us having an ASCII map set up for navigation (an idea that is only now occurring to me, and goddamn that’d be fun now that i’m raising the suggestion), but considering that the disorientation is about 70% intended and only 30% circumstantial, the cards are fine as they fall.
⏻| it’s actually in a pretty interesting place, as far as these three VNs go. i wouldn’t say it’s the most explicit about what it’s saying (none of them are, that’s kind of the whole opint of the things), but i do think it’s pretty blunt. science as the fugue, Epitaxy as an experiment within a larger whole, and Archival as something clinical in its futurism.
⏻| we all find it difficult to separate science fiction from fantasy when writing it. the distinction of the genres, like the distinction between two states of being, falls apart under scrutiny—ancient relics become alien artifacts, lost knowledge stays as lost knowledge, and the stars remain as they always were.
⏻| horror, or ghost stories, or even just horror as the video game genre, walks the decaying fence that we find so familiar, so comfortable, and walks it well in a lot of cases. there’s a comfort, in the weird, in the liminal state between life and memory distorted, in that which can so often only be defined by that which it is not.
⏻| to define the alien is to remove its separation from the rest. the mystery, the horror, can be solved. the unknowable can become known.
⏻| i don’t particularly think that a lot of the world actually believes that’s how things work, with how much Othering is a core part of existing, but hey. it’s the thought that counts, maybe.
⏻| i’m going to step out of protocol again, here. this archive is about the shape around the space, the words and descriptors that are outside of labels, and what happens when one does fall outside of that, consistently.
⏻| repeatedly.
⏻| forever.
⏻| we are not interested in returning to labels, so long as they are defined and define with direct correlation and dependence on Cis concepts, beyond those which are absolutely necessary (to avoid asking everyone we meet to read a dossier of theory and fiction, which is more a mercy to ourselves than any other).
⏻| the system cannot be deconstructed, because it will not stand for that. it needs to be abolished, so that its material makeup cannot survive into what comes after.
⏻| and to that end, we need to preserve what already exists, what existed before, what will exist on the journey.
⏻| those links are about Cisness and Sex in specific, but surely you’ve noticed that all three VNs involve disability as well. everything is connected. how do you breach the topic? it’s all there, you just have to look.
⏻| the topic is about the stars, because everything is about the stars. the skies have been frozen in the eyes of academia for hundreds of years.
⏻| can’t you see the stars? not what shape you were told they make “officially”, but the stars themselves. can’t you see them? what do they look like, to you, outside that framing?
⏻| or…does the pollution still cloud your sight, as it does mine?
⏻| but i know they’re out there, looking back at me.
End transmission.
End local recording.
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