Brave New Titans

I don't watch Attack on Titan. And to my knowledge there been no big news regarding the anime/manga sensation. I could be wrong, but have no interest in checking to see.

What I do have is an interest in the Descartes narrative. The conspiracy narrative tells us that we love in a prison and like the rabbit farm in 'Watership Down', we not only don't k ow that we are imprisoned- we don't want to know. The 'Deus Ex' series posits the possibility that we may even be complicit, drones or even enforcers in the machine of oppression.

And this narrative is no longer a rare and curious outlier. This is the biggest selling concept in teen lit short of sexing up sexy hundred year old vampires inexplicably still into teenaged girls.

This is an action movie stable. Even the standard bearer for the good company man: James Bond, has a penchant for going outright rogue now.

What is going on here? What is everyone feeling? The since everyone seems to have is that '1984' and 'Brave New World' both happened and nobody noticed.

And each group describes their own villains. Liberal see a right-wing conspiracy. Conserve dipsea left-wing conspiracy. Atheists see a theocratic conspiracy. Religious conservatives see a secular conspiracy.

It seems unlikely that all of them are correct. The conspiracies overlap and conflict to such a degree but it seems simpler to dismiss them. But it seems unwise to dismiss such a strong Trend in public thought.

I believe it was Alan Moore, the comic book Legend, Who posited multiple conflicting conspiracies all fighting against each other. And this seems more plausible explanation. But there's another option, what if there is no conspiracy?

What if the thing that people are mischaracterizing as a conspiracy is simply the cold mechanistic workings of the complicated systems we have built over the last two thousand years of civilization? What if we put ourselves in the Box? What if we conspire against ourselves? What if we are them?

A Brief and Incomplete list of Locations in the Ring

The Threshold

The Lotus Garden

• Village Region
• Graveyard Region
• Lake Shrine Region
• Dark Mountain Region
• Bone Forest Region
• Great Plains Region
• Coastal Seas Region
• Bridge to Stellar House
• Bridge to Void House
• Bridge to Gate Room
• Bridge to the Threshold

Void House

Stellar House

The Gate Room

• The Front Room
• The Back Room

Rainbows

Hardest question in the world to answer.

But it's not about what makes you happy.

Happy a trap

happy is a distraction

Happy is a symptom of something more important

and if you chase happy, you will never catch it.

Happiness is a rainbow

and if you chase a rainbow it will flee from you.

To catch rainbows

you need to chase rain

Mnemonic Cholera

I am not old. I am ancient. My body is a very reasonable thirty seven years old, give or take the replacement of atoms and the time I spent in the womb. My mind, is other than that. I have been sentient to a varying degree for those thirty seven years previously mentioned. But through story, I have expanded the scale and scope of my mind like a blossoming fractal rose. My mind expands forward and backward in time. My mind grows towards possible consequences and sees alternate paths that never were and many that never will be. My mind, driven by knowledge encoded in story, and urged forward by a driving curiosity, is an eldritch abomination- a thing beyond space and time that reaches out towards the heat death of the universe and the earliest rumblings of the big bang and ties them together and then casts them apart. My mind is a monster god and a forgiving angel. My mind is a visionary and a tyrant. My mind is a child and a lunatic, a messiah and an untouchable.

Why do I say this? Not to brag. My mind overflows, my brain often insufficient to contain it. I create art, I pour my mind onto the page. I see and I rant and rail and write and draw, in a desperate attempt to get some of my mind out of my brain and relieve the pressure. But there is another pressure: the pressure to learn more.

And it gets too much, and its hard to hold it all alone. And so I need to share it. Like mnemoic cholera, transmitable and prone to cause those infected to expell the infected contents themselves. Charming, certainly.

Brief Overiew of Location in Hidden Heart

The Dual Core Chambers

• The Chamber of the Survivors
• The Chamber of the Scavengers

The Three Wings

• The Glass Wing
• The Emerald Wing
• The Dust Wing

The Four Corners

• The Table Corner
• The Dark Corner
• The Scorched Corner
• The Salt Corner

The Five Terminals

• The Serpent Terminal
• The Mystery Terminal
• The Bridge Terminal
• The Ancient Terminal
• The Alliance Terminal

Walls Crumble

So, Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia have both voted in favor of independence. And naturally both national governments, Iraq and Spain, have rejected these votes. The USA has seen its worst mass shooting in history, perpetrated by an sixty-four year old white guy apparently acting alone. Despite this ISIS claimed credit. There were two suicide bombings in Syria, at a Police Station. Which, frighteningly, is nothing new. The US government has successfully pressured Egypt into seizing a shipment of North Korean provided RPGs (rocket propelled grenade launchers) that were being purchased by businessmen, presumably as part of an illicit under the table deal between Cairo and Pyongyang.

Over the Weekend, Houthi forces in Yemen claimed to have shot down a US drone. A man in Marseille stabbed two women (ISIS claimed responsibility). Soldiers in Cameroon shot dead at least eight protesting Anglophone separatists. And ISIS seized control of the town of Al-Qaryatain in the Homs province. Neo-Nazis held a march in Sweden. Al-Shabaab in Somalia attacked a Military Base outside Mogadishu. Another member of Donald Trump's Administration has resigned, Secretary of health and Human Services Tom Price this time- over a scandal regarding his use of private planes. The persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Burma continues.  The US State Department has pulled out families of employees and nonessential personnel following what media outlets are describing as a string of mysterious apparently sonic based attacks, Havana is cooperating with the US and has invited the FBI to assist. Japan is getting ready for some contentious elections, with two parties merging to better oppose the ruling Party. China continues its Anti-Corruption purge, and critics continue to speculate on the motives behind the purge.

Trends to notice, independence and/or separatist movements are back in the news. In Spain, the police were deployed to scare voters away. In Iraq, the national government blustered, but since the Kurdish Peshmerga pretty much already controls the territory claims by Iraqi Kurdistan that doesn't mean much. In Cameroon, language is key division, with the government failing to protect the rights of English speaking Cameroons. And let us not forget that ISIS is functionally a separatist movement, one that is also attempting to become a Caliphate, but seems now unable to sustain that long term.

Al-Shabaab is not a separatist movement, but Somalia has a functioning unrecognized nation in Somaliland and the rest of the nation is still a profoundly failed state embroiled in civil war. Unity is a problem for Nations worldwide. With approval for the sitting US president are some of the lowest early approval rates ever seen for a US president. China's anti-corruption purges are believed to be politically motived. The Rohingya purges could easily be interpreted as a means of the ruling government to focus discontent towards a persecuted minority rather than the government. Japan is struggling following the saber rattling by North Korea, which may end up unseating Shinzo Abe.

What does all this mean? Larger Political bodies spring from the resources and power to maintain them. Balkanization occurs when governing bodies lack the strength to hold their nations and/or empires together, and lack the resources to supply and support the people of their nation and/or empire. It's not a matter of bread and circuses. It's a matter of bread and truncheon. And what all of this unrest is showing us; is that around the world, the groups in power are losing the ability to provide for the their people and also losing the ability to force their citizens in line.

 

Brief List of Location in the Painted Labyrinth

The Shrines of the Three

• The Firebird Temple
• Weaver Cave
• The Spiral Tower

The Meeting Places

• The Amphitheatre
• The Globe Sepulchre
• The Bazaar
• The Council Stronghold
• The Alliance Gate
• The Witch House

Precursor Ruins

• The Beetle
• The Twin Collosi
• Dikinesh Canyon
• The Altar of the Elder Brothers
• The Grave of the Corn Lady

The Pillars

• The Great Western Pillar
• The Great Eastern Pillar

The Bridges

• The Hummingbird Bridge
• The Butterfly Bridge

Campaign Grounds

• Barren Island
• Hunting Grounds
• Tenfold Manor
• Damacles Graveyard Throne
• Daemon Temple
• The Short Tower
• The Keystone Cave
• The Solar Moon Henge
• The Place of Slaughter
• The Fern Forest
• Cavern Lake of Discord