Promethea

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1. erikeriksonMar 2025
   Thank you for these clarifications.

   I appreciate your adjacent point RE gatekeeping. While I can understand passing through that limited mindset as part of a person's journey, we agree.

   Regarding my pinnacle statement, that's a reasonable interpretation and point. Yet, regarding:

   > it is so open to interpretation

   I expect some, if not most, artists are aware. Further, I expect that some of those who are aware revel in, embrace, and plan for that environment. Bjork and Mutual Core, for example... Can be interpreted as a discussion of global politics, geology, romance, and more; none more "correct" than any other. Yet the arrangement of the multi-interpretable dimensions (each of which can itself be interesting) forms a loose pattern across them (or, arguably, many patterns in their own diversity) that in a sense can apply to each of the possible perspectives and is meta-perspective building. An intellectually constructed environment in which to consider advanced, complex considerations about existence. But perhaps that's only the ways I "misuse" artist's work (I believe, as you seem to that artists give up that power, largely willingly). As art, it mostly isn't trying to tell you what to conclude but only painting a scene, an arrangement, if you so choose for consideration and potential mental expansion.

   The way in which I which I enjoyed PHM, for example, was an auto-reversing tape player that I pretty much filled every spare, at-least-semi-appropriate moment with as a teen so long as the batteries held out. I probably carry a partially unreasoned bias towards it because of that.

   While I reject the post-modernist, post-truth hypothesis/stance, so to do I reject any claims of perfect access to any objective fact even while some claims demonstrate better evidence and support while I would consider some things such as terminal values to be exist within a relative to constructed "relationships between" and "purposes for" environment. Even those can be expressed in a contingent to the constructs manner.

   An adjacent medium is comics and among my favorite examples is Promethea by Alan Moore who draws this hypothesis forth that one can consider ideas to exist more (and be "more real") than our concrete physical presences. There too, like Mutual Core and so many other works, there is an assemblage of ideas, given deeper meaning through narrative, and through the structure. I believe one of the purposes of some artists artist's creations are screams into the void, calling out for solutions finding in cooperation even where we reject solution as meaning singular configurations due to the variance of contexts and persons to which the solutions may be applied. The solutions there can rest upon assumptions made. Another is to just see what comes back in response.

   Regardless or any artist's purpose, intents, or frameworks while well structured philosophy might at times be more efficient and only less error prone, I would expect we agree that music is a fair bit more broadly appealing.

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2. erikeriksonJan 2022
   I don't know about "low brow culture" but comic books and rap have some fantastic material in them. Consider works like Promethea from Alan Moore or In Her Magic Box by Atmosphere.
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3. sundarurfriendAug 2016
   Non-fiction:

   * 'Better' by Atul Gawande (also his 'Complications' and of course 'The Checklist Manifesto')

   * 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

   Fiction:

   * 'Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders' by Neil Gaiman

   * 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss

   Graphic novels ("comics"):

   * 'Watchmen' by Alan Moore

   * 'Promethea' by Alan Moore (actually I'm halfway through this, and loving every bit of it)

   Special mentions:

   * 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big' by Scott Adams - I only gave this a 4-star rating on Goodreads when I finished it, but I'm finding that I'm usefully applying more and more of the things I learnt from this book as the months go by.

   * 'Yoga Benefits Are in Breathing Less' by Artour Rakhimov - to be considered more of an article, taught me useful stuff about O2/CO2 balance in the body, their respective effects, and hence ultimately the effects of different rates of breathing.

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4. staticman2Jul 2022
   I said I agreed with the people on the comment section in that blog, I didn't see the point in expanding on it since they already had, but I'd be happy to.

   A psychiatrist can only read a single person's mind, and that person is themself. He goes around constantly calling people narcissists. He doesn't use evidence based research. He doesn't follow the standards of his field.

   I recall an old blog post where he gives an example of how he believes the socialization of school children turns them into narcissists. He says, essentially, that if a kid tries to stop a bully from preying on others, and the teacher punishes both the kid and the bully for fighting, the kid learns not to care about other since he or she was punished for caring, and will learn to be a narcissist. (It's probably been a decade since I read this so I'll acknowledge it's possible my memory is a bit faulty, but I don't think the basic point of his body of work has been missed).

   Narcissism to him seems to be all encompassing. He sees it everywhere. This seems to be saying something unhealthy about him.

   There' a bit in the comic book Promethea, written by Alan Moore, where an angel says that demons aren't so bad. Confused, a human asks the angel why she would think that. Aren't Angels supposed to be enemies with demons? Aren't demons supposed to be wicked and disgusting?

   Paraphrasing from memory, the angel responds with, "We don't directly experience the world, we only experience a perception of the world in our own minds. I'm an angel. I see angels everywhere."

   It just seems to me someone constantly seeing narcissists everywhere is not in a healthy place. I'm not actually suggesting he's narcissist, I don't know what his problem is.

   This is just an opinion of a random layman. I have no idea who he is in real life and I don't care to know. I suppose it's possible that this anonymous author is a perfectly functional, happy adult who only writes like he's troubled, sort of like a happy-go-lucky Hollywood author writing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, I can only draw conclusions from the limited evidence I have that his writing doesn't seem to come from a healthy place.

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