Send my love to Gretchen, please.

fuck. the "diamond" age

okay i think this is the thread for now.

make "feeling settled" difficult. We're *long* past the 1966 total semiotic overload depicted in The Crying of Lot 49. Everyone has long since become a conspiracist, doubly so because the form of the media, the new flesh so to speak, that most of us use daily, *requires* conspiracism of us.

In aggregate, they are media of true fiction, and in a very real sense many people, myself included in large part, have embraced the New Flesh of this true fiction, which is... unsettling? a word I use with no mortal judgement, just the very literal meaning. the formal characteristics of this media

that's just the nature of online spaces.

"true fiction", as you put it, a phrase I find really valuable for discussing the whole thing. we have a very neo-noir sense of anti-resolution but instead of being... a sort of nihilistic movement, "fuck it, it's Chinatown" or what have you (or the "what have we learned" from Burn After Reading

and the formal characteristic of the internet that there *isn't* a direct link between identities, that this is ultimately and inexorably unsettled, is imo really present at the end

*however*, sockpuppets are clearly both in play and brought to the front of the reader's mind

And then Pynchon comes in because I got really in my own head wondering how many... "actual people", so to speak, are involved in the story. this term is obviously entirely inadequate. we have a plural character and I really don't want to be invalidating them, right

minecraft. So the transition depicted is... essentially just putting the *focus* onto this conception of media, rather than creating a new one

(and Videodrome) and also the pynchon connection, as well as what you're doing with genre.

if there is something supernatural, it's not necessarily something that does not already exist in "our world", so to speak. you spend a lot of time expressing how, for example, The Bus is as much a medium as

so, the discord thread was very much pondering the question of "how real/genuinely supernatural are the events of the story?"

Obviously an interesting and purposefully unsettled question, but I kind of reject the dichotomy in a thematic sense on both an elaborate argument based on Marshall Mcluhan

after finishing it i spent like four hours in the middle of the night Analyzing and one of the things i brought into conversation was *The Crying of Lot 49*, feeling glad that I got into some of those thematic links

No sorry "Do They Know It's Christmas?" also makes me both totally irrationally and also, separately, extremely rationally angry.

"Do they know it's Christmas?" well you see the Ethiopian Orthodox Church dates back to the year 330

Also it sucks

The Ones Who Walked Away From "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" Who Didn't Walk Away From "Omelas" With the One Thing That "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" Wasn't Talking About

sorry no it's every single guy who drew up impossible plans for Neom. Deep down within me there is a guy who could accept a large bucket of gold in exchange for bullshit science fiction brainstorming that leads to massive human suffering and I can never let him see the light of day