cyrene savage (noise arc) @CyclopsCaveman@cyrenesavage.com

mardi gras is coming up, which means my usual social media sabbatical is too. from ash wednesday, february 22nd, to easter, april 9th, i won't be online or posting

i generally use this time to focus down and reflect inwards, catch up on reading or gaming, etc. during that time i won't be responding to messages, so any responses will have to wait until i come back

#introductions / #reintroductions

it's been a while since my last introduction post, and i figure the new wave would be a good time to re-up my introduction post

i'm cyrene savage, i've been on the fediverse for a few years now, opening my first account in early 2018, and eventually spinning up my own instance a couple years ago. i've been active the whole time on the fediverse, with mains on mastodon.social, then radical.town, and finally this instance.

most of my content is shitposting, especially dick jokes. if you're uncomfortable with un-cwed mentions of genitals or other sex jokes, be aware there's a lot of that here. i also do not accept follow requests from minors primarily for this reason. should i post pictures containing nudity, those will be cwed. sometimes i post about media or games i'm interested in at the moment, including the books i'm reading. occasionally i'll post about the news or politics, generally also un-cwed. i am a communist, and generally if i post analysis i intend for it to be through a marxist or communistic lens.

i also enjoy cooking and beer, generally photos of food will be cwed but talking about food won't be. alcohol and other drugs will always be cwed.

follow requests are welcome but i don't accept them immediately. usually i wait a while and go through requests in batches. i usually only interact with a core group of people, so do not expect a follow request will be responded to at all. there's a small amount of additional information in my bio, but otherwise i prefer people to get to know me by interacting with me. see you around!

hello, and welcome to the anime megathreads megathread

everyone is a liberal except me

The society that bears the spectacle does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely by its economic hegemony. It also dominates them as the society of the spectacle. Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has already used the spectacle to invade the social surface of every continent. It sets the stage for the formation of indigenous ruling classes and frames their agendas. Just as it presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local revolutionaries. The bureaucratic regimes in power in certain industrialized countries have their own particular type of spectacle, but it is an integral part of the total spectacle, serving as its pseudo-opposition and actual support. Even if local manifestations of the spectacle include certain totalitarian specializations of social communication and control, from the standpoint of the overall functioning of the system those specializations are simply playing their allotted role within a global division of spectacular tasks.

Although this division of spectacular tasks preserves the existing order as a whole, it is primarily oriented toward protecting its dominant pole of development. The spectacle is rooted in the economy of abundance, and the products of that economy ultimately tend to dominate the spectacular market and override the ideological or police-state protectionist barriers set up by local spectacles with pretensions of independence.

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (the latter is still the primary mechanism for transferring class power from one generation to the next), along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by those two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains repressive and offers nothing but pseudo-gratifications. Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decision-making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudo-star; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudo-power over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free and they offer no real choices.

The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the flow of things. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption. The stars of decision-making must possess the full range of admired human qualities: official differences between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity implied by their supposed excellence in every field of endeavor. As head of state, Khrushchev retrospectively became a general so as to take credit for the victory of the battle of Kursk twenty years after it happened. And Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorensen continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man’s public persona. The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance — choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles (signified and embodied primarily by objects) — develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities. Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and subplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of farcical competitions, from sports to elections. Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults — people who are masters of their own lives — are in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other.

Excerpts from: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (57-62)

the season 6 opener of house has lin-manuel miranda in it and i hate him already

(youth pastor trying to reach 4chan addicted teenagers in the mid to late twenty-tens)

this... is loss dot jpeg. it represents the pain, and heartache, of a husband and wife, at the loss of god's second most precious gift. but what some of you have lost dot jpeg, is god's most precious gift of all... jesus christ

my nuts are packed full of vitamins and minerals

the only font anyone ever needed was times new roman

happy mardi gras! laissez les bon temps rouler!

forcibly ejected from the mardi gras parade for having the marchinng band play a–frankly stunning–rendition of "Woodpecker No. 1" by Merzbow