offering 2 - quarantine edition

Gather ye to observe the spoils from this week’s foraging! I bring you post-modern esotericism and dope aesthetics. (also check out last week’s offering)

Wow, a talking fish! (Sahakyants R., Armenfilm, 1983)

• Always surprised to see old animation hold up so well. Came up during a conversation with a friend. Vibing with the trippy morphs of the Ekh in this Armenian short film from the 80s.

• This reminded me of  Chinese Animation: In Search of a Style , a video essay which dove deep on a historic scene I wasn’t even aware existed.

Jreg

• I’ve been obsessed with Jreg for the past week or two, his shitpost quality production, meta-irony, channel lore, and run-ins with eldritch horror manage to pull threads within.  I’m a spook  imo is my favorite considering signal/length and points out the parasocial nature of youtuber-audience relationships while riffing on the underlying egregore that necessitates “youtube personalities”.
• However,  Frameworthless  helped me with some personal issues I’ve been going through and I found the editing pretty funny.
• Finally, a shout-out to  Centricide , the ongoing epic anthropomorphizing the  political compass , just watched the whole thing again with my girlfriend.

Exploring Egregores

• From reading  Carl Jung’s Aion , watching Jreg bring his eldritch horror game to the table, and several disparate conversations with friends this week, my head has been all about  egregores . Shout out to  Meditations on Moloch  and (pardon me)  The Cult of Gnon  for being my first contacts with this memeplex.
• I’m using this blog I just rediscovered as an excuse/in-depth introduction to the space. Its vibe doesn’t really match my own on the topic, but hey it’s better than nothing.
• For the uninitiated, there’s a popular way of looking at complex phenomena as (usually lovecraftian) gods with goals and desires, which interact with each other and influence mankind. This might be explained by man’s  animistic  tendencies.
• More broadly, I like to think about religion, mysticism and arcana as an exercise, but most if not all of my use of magical lexicon is to describe phenomena which have their roots in either the unconscious mind or other complex systems.
• Essentially I’d probably describe magic as that which we don’t yet understand but of course I do reject anything that needs a supernatural model.
• I bring this up because personifying certain invisible tendencies in the world makes it easier for me to navigate its complexity. (besides being plain fun, of course)
• I’d love to write a deeper piece with my thoughts on this + references some time.

Documentary about “Jogo do Pau”

• The name means “game of the stick” is an old martial art originally practiced by shepherds in the Portuguese country-side who used 2-meter wooden staffs to beat up thieves. Recently, it’s been revived and (according to the doc) tested in competition where it bested all other weapon-based martial arts, most of them from East-Asia. The movements are enchanting and it just looks really fun.

x-ray - Tommy Cash

• I just appreciate his “human body” aesthetics and that hard bass chorus SLAPS, I want more of that in my life. Shout out to my Estonian friend Ilona.

Thanks for reading!