They soon save countries including France and Australia from control spires and must fight and defeat the evil MaloMyotismon (BelialVamdemon), the digivolved form of Myotismon (Vamdemon) from the previous series.

the shadow realm

deusvulture:

nostalgebraist:

(Some tentative work on that metaphor I was talking about yesterday)

It’s another morning, like any other, and I’m getting the bus I always take.  I don’t know any of the other passengers, but I recognize a few of them, regulars on the same commute.

Keep reading

As with certain sections of Floornight, I recognize this but I think it’s actually less recognizable than you think it is — the experience you describe is a good description of Tumblr, and specifically the handful of social circles on Tumblr that you and I hang around around in right now, but I don’t actually think it’s as widely shared in time and space as one might expect. I don’t know what that means — I don’t know if the internet alters the texture of the social world in any particular way other than making it more complicated.

I feel the same way when New York journalists describe the world Twitter has created — it’s a world that exists for them, but less for me, and it’s one that’s splintered more profoundly than the splintering that I think they think they’re describing.

I’m not sure what that all means, but I think it means that all these worlds are more fragile than most of us realize.

Thanks for the feedback.  But I want to push back on this somewhat, in two almost contradictory ways:

(1) The narrative part of the post, about being on the bus, has a bunch of specifics just by virtue of being a narrative, and I’m not implying that all of them are features of the shadow realm as a whole.  I’m gesturing at how much weirdness I’ve learned to take in stride, and some general patterns in how the weirdness is weird, but an experience can be very different in its particulars from the bus/slab story while having a very similar weirdness.  Or, in the metaphor: the shadow realm can have various subdivisions.

(2) But also, even though the bus/slab narrative is literally about my experience of tumblr, it fits pretty closely to my experience of various other platforms like Facebook and twitter – including reading the twitter timelines of famous people and the Facebook posts of friends and acquaintances from high school, college, etc.  Sure, some of the details are different, but not in a way that perturbs what was noteworthy in the original details.

And sure, all of this is still a description of a bubble in that there are plenty of online spaces with totally different dynamics, but I guess I’m … surprised much more often by the sameness of the internet across social groups than by any group differences?  There’s often an “I can’t escape!” feeling when I, say, go on Facebook and find longtime-but-distant IRL acquaintances talking in much the same style as the tumblr strangers I’d just been was reading.  Or the like.

(via resinsculpture-deactivated20221)

the shadow realm

(Some tentative work on that metaphor I was talking about yesterday)

It’s another morning, like any other, and I’m getting the bus I always take.  I don’t know any of the other passengers, but I recognize a few of them, regulars on the same commute.

Keep reading

I’m intending to write a longer post on this once I get the chance, but quick version: I think there would be some value to a new metaphor for the internet which frames it as not real. Not in the old-school “haha online friends don’t count” way — but unreal like some shared dream space, or one of those trippy, creepy enchanted/fae realms that appear in a lot of fantasy stories.

The crucial thing here is to go beyond individualistic explanations of why people act weird (or appear to) on the internet, since the real explanations so often involve dynamics across many people, only a fraction of which anyone could possibly grok at any one time (after all, they are constantly changing). The metaphor should thus treat what we say here as “not the simple thing it appears,” like faery food, and related to reality in ways other than the obvious ones, like dream content. The question is not “why are you saying this strange thing?” but “why has the shadow realm shown me an image of you saying this?” (Of course, in literal reality, you did type the exact words you typed; the metaphor is trying to help me view this act in the appropriate way, which is not, for instance, “as though someone had just spoken those words in a room I am in.”)

He stood before a tribunal of six spheres of light, representing concentrations of wisdom as pure as artifice allowed, and a human overseer. “Here is our finding,” one construct said. “You can retain the bulk of your encounter, since it is relevant to your inquiries. The conversations with the drowned woman, though, will have to be suppressed.” Its voice was compassionate, gently regretful, adamant.