Lmst

This Could Not Have Been an Email

#BoxcarNation #Musing #Technology #UsingTechnology #tttrpg #DeltaGreen #SherlockHolmes #DaysofOld @innsmouth.one

http://rollingboxcars.com/2025/05/19/this-could-not-have-been-an-email/

#status #ontology #musing #deepmind Is re-structuring my directories the late middle aged equivalent of 'tidying my sock drawer'. #denial #avoidence #psychotherapy Asking for a friend obviously 😎

From Concept to Chaos: My First Published Call of Cthulhu Scenario

https://wp.me/p4dlMq-658

#BoxcarNation #Musing #CallofCthulhu #MiskatonicRepository #BecomingAnAuthor #GameDesigner @orcusdorkus.bsky.social

http://rollingboxcars.com/2025/05/05/from-concept-to-chaos-my-first-published-call-of-cthulhu-scenario/

Imagine if #Sartre and #Camus had discovered Atomic Habits OR the Eighth Habit of Highly Effective People 😱

Would “Being and Nothingness” be a productivity manual?

From: @sarahf
https://mastodon.social/@sarahf/114421509266730502

#musing

An Update, Finding My Muse, and the Way Forward, Oh My!

https://wp.me/p4dlMq-64q

#BoxcarNation #ttrpg #Musing #Update #Inspiration #StoryEngine #CallofCthulhu @storyenginedeck.bsky.social @jdroucker.bsky.social @titterpigs.bsky.social

http://rollingboxcars.com/2025/04/07/an-update-finding-my-muse-and-the-way-forward-oh-my/

Sometimes, when someone expresses pain, It's good to simply acknowledge what they said, show our attention and empathy, then quietly remain in active listening.

This is a simple helpful act.

Caring about others, listening to what they are going through, ties us together as a community, builds our strength, is a weapon we can use in our struggle.

#musing #kindness

The Tower & The Star

One must accept death in order to truly live.

The concept of a relationship as having expectations, as having any rules, as bonds, must dissolve in order for your partner to have real agency.

Each partner must accept that the relationship is over before it can begin.

Each person is a solar system surrounding the brilliant star 🌟 of their divine spark, they can not be contained.

If you shine bright enough, you won't have to worry about your loved ones leaving.

In this essay I will...

#Musing #Relationships #Poly #Polyamoury #RA #Agency #Essay #EgoDeath

My thoughts on Severance

We finished watching season two of Severance tonight and as expected, things are set up for season 3 (which was also announced today). I’m not going to do a review of the show per se, but I do want to talk about my thoughts about it, and more specifically about some of the philosophical questions that the show brings up.

However, in order to do that, I need to talk freely about various plot points, so I’m going to bury the rest of this blog post below the fold. You’ve been warned, spoilers ahead.

Before getting too deep into things, I will briefly say that I do enjoy the show overall, and I think that it is masterfully created. I do have qualms with the pacing and how the show was cut into its episodes. I also have a personal aversion to plot lines that do little more than to tantalize you to keep watching “just one more episode/season”. But these flaws aside, there’s a lot about this show that is astoundingly brilliant.

The cinematography, the sets, even the costumes and props, are exquisite works of art. The mixture of old cars along side modern cell phones, juxtaposed with CRT computer monitors is both jarring, and yet so brilliantly maneuvered that you actually have to think about it before your brain picks up on the disconnect. The constant winter setting and desaturated look-and-feel give the entire world of Severance a strange sense of despair and emptiness, yet is beautifully portrayed.

That idea of despair is where I’d like to detour to share some thoughts about what I think the show is really about. In the season finale of season 2 we learn that Gemma has been held captive for two years while her severed husband Mark (thinking she’s dead) is slowly working on some type of computer algorithm that creates more and more severed personalities inside of her (unbeknownst to either of them of course). Through the creation of these personalities Gemma experiences different types of pain, physical and emotional, yet is always returning to her normal self at the end of the long days of severed sessions.

We come to find at the end of the finale that she was in fact being systematically programmed to evolve a personality that felt no pain or sorrow, and could detach completely from her real self to be an empty shell. Her final personality’s task was to dismantle a baby crib that had become the bane of her pre-Lumon existence, having suffered through years of failed attempts to conceive.

As the head of Lumon watched from monitor, smiling at what he had created, there are scenes interspersed of his son beginning a ritual to sacrifice a young lamb to accompany Gemma on her journey into death, having finally achieved the nirvana of pain-free bliss. Obviously the entire event goes sideways when Mark breaks into the floor that Gemma is on and breaks her out, but these scenes give us an insight into the true meaning of the show.

Humans cannot handle pain, and will do anything to avoid it.

The entire premise of the severed workforce is to be a place where people can escape for 8 hours a day from their pain and sorrow-filled lives. They can work, be productive, and then wake up 8 hours later not having to have suffered through the dreariness of the daily grind of their job. Inside the severed floor, the ‘innies’ develop their own lives, free from any knowledge of the anguish that their ‘outies’ are going through.

It’s apparent that freedom from pain is a key component of this ultimate breakthrough that Lumon is pursuing, and wants to unleash on the world. The severance procedure is one example of a step towards that future, but it’s still not perfect. Even Lumon’s origins as an ether factory that people could sniff to get high hints at this ultimate goal. The programming of Gemma to be that pain free vessel is the key to bringing harmony to the rest of the world. I’m guessing that there is some aspect of her blood that they believe they can turn into some type of drug for the masses to ease the world’s pain. No more suffering. No more needing to tame the mortal tempers to achieve bliss.

But the ultimate lesson of the show (at least so far) is that the act of trying to disassociate and avoid pain and sorrow takes on a life of its own. The ‘innies’ rebelling against their captors, wanting to live their own lives and to simply exist, is a metaphor for how pain and suffering can become a thing unto itself. We may seek to contain it, avoid it, bottle it up and set it aside, but it’s still there, and it’s still a part of us.

In the very telling conversation that Mark has between his ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ personality he realizes that he can no longer control the pain that he’s squirreled away into the Lumon severed floor. That sorrow has become something unto itself, and he has to face the fact that trying to dismantle it (by saving Gemma) comes with consequences for the life that he created to deal with it in the first place. Mark made a choice about how he wanted to handle his pain, through an ultimate technique of avoidance. And now that pain and sorrow is returning to call the shots in his life.

Facing pain and suffering is never easy or desired, but avoidance seldom brings lasting peace. In many ways Severance is a cautionary tale about the consequences of not dealing with pain and sorrow. The longer that the severed employees let the ‘innies’ live and develop their own lives, the more that their pain grew into something that in the end, they can no longer control. The final coup de grâce sees ‘innie’ Mark opting for whatever life he can have inside the severed floor with his love Helly, instead of letting ‘outie’ Mark go. Mark’s pain took on such a life of its own that it refused to die, and that’s a choice that ‘outie’ Mark, and now ‘outie’ Gemma, are going to need to face.

#musing #Reviews #severance #tv

Why are all McDonald’s millennial grey now tho? What happened to red and yellow?

#Musing #RandomThoughts

busybee: fluffy rambles: A clean energy future https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/14477-A-clean-energy-future #Environmentalism #CleanEnergy #Technology #Musing #Blog

A clean energy future

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/14477-A-clean-energy-future

It is interesting to me...

As I go through and remove my content from Facebook post by post, picture by picture - I find that for every 1 picture or post I save, I probably delete 20-30 without saving or reposting. Much of it just isn't interesting anymore and has no specific significance to me now. Or with some photos that were so bad due to an old phone with crappy camera (and I posted TOO many pics in the heat of the moment) - just best to delete them and not re-share them now on other platforms.

#musing

I am facing an ethical conundrum, which as an ethicist, is uncomfortable. I’m generally pretty good at discerning what is “right”, but also, at core, I am a chaotic paladin with a traumatic backstory, and less than forgiving of certain things than others might be.
All of the people I would generally turn to in cases of ethical discomfort are either involved or know the people involved, and for various reasons, secrecy has become paramount for many of them.
All of which to say, morals are hard, and sometimes following them may mean losing friends. I don’t like this timeline, and would very much like to be placed in the happy space socialist timeline please.

#ethics #musing

The song Lightning Crashes by LIVE was before its time.

A 90’s treasure, that one. 🎵🙌🫶🏻

#music #musing