Because in the darkness

Episode 4: We Weren't Supposed to Be Awake.

I must admit that I put off writing about this episode because I found a somewhat offhand comment so fucking annoying, so it's now a week after I saw it.

Basically, a lot of people start getting visual and auditory hallucinations. It turns out to be an unknown compound in the water from the comet that's somewhat close to LSD on a molecular level, which is supposed to be why most people are experiencing hallucinations. It's not structured in a way that the filtration systems built back on Earth caught it, or something.

( Read more... )

Day #8: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

2021 was a year of slowly inching towards the finish line and getting into the next year. I honestly can't remember if I contributed to Fanlore last year or the year before. I got one fic that I started during the spring 2020 lockdown finished and uploaded, but to make up for that, I also started like four WIPs in the last quarter of 2021. It's not that I feel like I failed at anything in particular, but I just don't know if I really had a personal win in 2021. (I guess I got a sticker for participation and making it to 2022.)

Original Pillowfort post can be found here.

I have been incredibly behind on catching up on episodes of a particular show, but I've finally gotten into the season that just finished airing. I don't really have enough brains happening right now to get into details about the show itself, but it's one of those magic is real types.

And in the episode I got done watching today, there was a bit where I feel like I made myself unnecessarily - negatively affected - by bringing in mental illness/health/what have you. A non-magical alien conspiracy theorist accidentally stumbled upon a magical object. He was briefly introduced in the episode prior in a funny for 3 seconds but could ultimately be ignored kind of way until they found out about the object in this episode. One character in the magical ensemble was supposed to be figuring out what exactly it was and activated it, and when someone else came back into the scene, it sort of went like:

The bulletin board with photographs of symbols and notes for what they were working on has had lots of papers removed.

Character 1: How are you feeling?

Character 2: I feel great!

Character 1 picks up a paper from the bulletin board covered with handwritten numbers.

Character 1: Huh. What is this?

Character 2 said something about 'It's all connected', and it would probably help if I bothered to look up an actual transcript, but it was supposed to be clear that the object was leading to Character 2 not acting like he usually does. My first impression was that Character 2 was, in a manner of speaking, acting like he was manic. (Feeling great, he suddenly got this inspiration, he was making connections that would surely solve the problem they were looking into, and he's told to rest which implies that he's been working on this without taking any breaks.)

However, when Character 1 goes back to find the alien conspiracy theorist to try to get a bit more info about this magical object, she finds out that it's "addictive" and someone who uses it too much like he did will die after being parted from it for too long. She convinces Character 2 to put the magical object down so it can be put in a safe container, and he's back to normal.

On the one hand, Character 2 not dying is a pretty good thing for plot reasons, but on the other hand, I feel some sort of bothered by it. We went from 'that's strange' to 'what the fuck, Character 2 could die' with a very brief stopover at 'the alien conspiracy theorist's obsession no longer seems funny'. Character 1 winds up, like, deciphering the number connection bit, and this winds up being helpful by the end of the episode instead of a string of random numbers. Which, from a stand point of thinking this state was like mania, feels like I came away with:

It's dangerous to stay in a state like this, and you shouldn't want to return or stay there because it's negative, like an addiction, and you could die. However, your nonsensical connections and scary weirdness are okay as long as they turn out to eventually be useful. Just make sure you stop as soon as possible and return to being normal and safe.

It might not be a very charitable interpretation of how the show handled this magical object causing side effects on the holder. I dunno. I guess I'm not feeling very charitable about it, right now.

I went looking for a bit of the actual transcript instead of just relying on what I could remember, which is covered above. It sounds more like mania than my gist really conveyed. ( Read more... )

Sometimes it seems like my brain is a deciduous tree, but instead of getting nice looking fall foliage out of the decreasing sunlight and seasonal changes, I get some depression.