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Come Out is indefinitely cancelled

False Alarm

What is Addiction?

Addiction is the inability to cease undesirable behavior.

It's a strange phenomenon in homo sapiens. In fact, besides cases when humans mess with incentive structure; it seems animals actually are so good at not getting addicted to things that it makes us look bad. Modern human life is very different from our primitive origins. Of course that doesn't mean that modern monkeys don't share similarities to us, some species have been recorded sharing overripe fruit. But I couldn’t find any evidence of addiction, that seems to be a human invention. But, why is this? Well, it probably has something to do with the aforementioned incentive structures.

So let's turn our attention to human society. Our modern world is full of those strange, enticing objects of desire. Porn, Junk food, high sugar foods. Online games and social media platforms seem to be adopting ever-increasingly manipulative design practices to hold your engagement, and gambling is becoming more unregulated than ever before. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi allowing users to bet on literally anything — (yikes!)

So we've identified our problem, where to go from here? Well, living like the unabomber is a romantic aesthetic; but it’s hardly practical. Enter tiktoker and youtuber Caolite McClean: He’s changed his whole life around after some experiences that shook him. Now he makes motivational videos and encourages people to go outside and enjoy nature. In a youtube video, he describes this change that he cultivated within himself. He repeats the idea that addictions are ultimately just habits. He even goes on to say: “I’m addicted to the gym, I go to the gym a couple hours every day and if that was taken away from me it’d have a really bad effect on my life…I’m totally addicted to that, I’m addicted to going on adventures, I’m addicted to being outside, I’m addicted to all of these things. Addiction is just a thing that’s a part of your life.”

Habits are just repeated activities, and as it turns out; some activities are harder to stop doing than others. It seems as though a path out of addiction is to create rituals that serve your purposes.

References

Wild chimpanzees share fermented fruits
what they don't talk about when you change your life

I heard that you should take your pet projects out back behind the shed and put them out of their misery, and I’ve found that there’s a lot of truth in that. Come Out was a big stepping stone for me, and I am quite fond of it for that reason. It was the kick I needed to actualize not only myself, but my skills as a creative. The more I learned the more I realized that the way I was doing things was counterproductive. A classic newbie creative’s mistake of trying to run before one can walk, throw it on the pile!

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I learned so much in pursuit of finishing Come Out only to realize that I could say everything I was saying more succinctly. But of course, the pursuit of knowledge never ends. I keep learning and keep growing, and that means that I gotta get into the habit of actually finishing projects. I’m still quite bad at that, but the experiments have been paying off. The poems, the photo dumps. I’m obsessed with an app called open camera. You can find it on F-Droid on android devices. No AI upscaling, just the tools for filtering the raw data on a digital sensor. It’s really quite remarkable, and open source software has come a long way in recent years.

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Those dreams have been coming back, a creative mind must be cared for. There’s this brilliant book called Liber Indigo by Justin Kirkwood. It’s about how the metaphors we live by affect the ways we think. He uses this knowledge to make an argument for a more useful way to design computers. It’s a brilliant read, very short, only 145 pages including the index, it changed my fucking life. But Kirkwood’s research goes much further than computers or UI design. It’s everything, we’re all like that, submerging ourselves in oceans of metaphor that flatten the underlying complexity of the world, while simultaneously giving us tools for change. We must actively and consciously choose metaphors that are pragmatic, that serve us, and not those who wish to oppress us. Get out there and learn something, you may be surprised how much you needed it.

That’s it for now, I love you, whoever you are, take care, and wash your fuckin’ dishes!!!

~ Lewa 💚

Hello everyone. Most apologies in the delay for uploading this, I’m still recovering from the disorientation sickness once again. Believe it or not, being the victim of a malignant narcissist is emotionally debilitating :,)

Turns out alla that “I’m gonna kick you out and you have to leave on november 31st!!” (which isn’t a real day by the way) was actually just some bullshit. I’ve since gained a better understanding of how narcissists actually work. They create problems for you to solve, and my intentional revocation of attention or reactions was what starved my abuser’s black hole hungry for drama.

Turns out that I was actually too gung-ho with the whole thing and I just needed to give her a drip. There’s ways of dealing with narcissists, many call it “grey rock.” I cannot recommend the youtube channel Theramin Trees enough for helping me understand dogmatic ideologies, such as narcissism. He even helped me unpack how narcissistic traits can persist in victims and I was able to unlearn some of my own narcissistic behavior. There’s a long road of healing ahead, but I now have strategies to keep the monster at bay while focusing on myself. I think that that’s quite cash money of me, if I do say so!

I must say that it’s pretty damn frustrating that my abuser literally threatened to throw me away if I didn’t serve her uses though. As if that’s what being a parent is about. But, that’s not the world a narcissist lives in, I was starving her of her fuel source. She wants conflict, she wants to poke me and bother me, and it’s not about not giving it to her, it’s about giving her something off script, every time. Socialization is a creative process. And when you step out of that script, you can say whatever you want, however you want, and as long as you confuse the narcissist, then you’re probably doing good enough.

SO, TDLR; brass tax is that I am safe til I can escape on my own terms. Thanks so much to everyone for the support, and to those who actually donated money, but please, don’t feel like you have to anymore! Although, setting up a kofi for my writing was something that I wanted to do for a while anyways, so it’s gonna stay! I’m still learning about how to beautify my website, AND how to write. In fact, a lot of progress is happening in that direction, which is most exciting! But in the mean time, I’m just gonna pursue a career in cooking, go on walks in the cold New York winter, and focus on taking care of myself.

With love for everyone reading and the multitude of Lewas who woke up every day and wrote this, adios

~ Lewa 💚

Mini Essays are helpful tools of self-learning and can help you become a better writer, while not allowing that extra work to not be wasted.

Mini essays are mini writing excercises

A youtuber by the name of Odysseus made a few lovely videos about mini essays. He identifies the main components of a mini essay that make something worthwhile, Not just for the reader, but for the future reference of the writer as well. Firstly, you wanna practice being concise. This theme of brevity reverberates throughout mini essays. It’s all in bite size, one idea, 20 minute writing time, write no longer than a screen worth of space. usually about 2 paragraphs, or 400 words max! And this makes it so easy to nibble on ideas when you need to reference something later.

Mini essays help you learn

So often I bash my head against a wall, not writing. As exurb1a puts it: “I missed the silly daydreams.” I need to get out of my own head, and just write. That starts with giving myself exercises. But mini essays are also useful tools for learning! Odysseus cites the Feynman technique; whereby teaching (or even just writing as if you’re teaching) then further entrenches you in your own understanding of the topic. But then you may be asking: How do I know if I’m teaching the topic well? Odysseus has a handy tool for this: forget! look away, and after 10 seconds, or a tea break or whatever, you come back,read it and, then try your best to read it as if you didn’t know anything on the topic. If you run into any roadblocks of understanding or really any mistakes at all, fix them, it’ll take like a minute.

What you can do with this power

Once you’re done, you’ll have a high quality piece of brief writing that explains an idea to completion! I’ve purposely left this mini essay with loose ends. If you have any questions, I encourage you to go learn about it and then go write about it with your own mini essay, you can go anywhere from here! Bish bash bosh, you’ve got a mini essay, thank you for reading :)

~ Lewa💚

Tron

The original tron was released in 1982 and was disqualified from receiving an academy award in visual effects, because computer generated animation was declared to be "cheating" by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even though one of Tron’s central questions is whether or not programs can be considered people. Terribly sorry if I’m the first one to tell you this, but all programs and apps are just automatons to suit the needs of the human that creates them. Tron visualizes how the world of the programs that we have access to today are not in our control. Social media sites like bluesky, who claim to be an open platform, are banning Palestinians and those who speak out about the complacency of people in power. Tron could even be said to be taking a political stance by tackling these issues in consistent big budget films that suspiciously never seem to make their money back and receive poor reviews from critics. The current metacritic score for the latest Tron film is 48, it’s description says this: ”Ares, a highly sophisticated Program, is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.” But is that really an accurate description of what’s on offer here?

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Image Credit: Disney

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Tron: Legacy was created in proximity to aesthetics like frutiger aero, emphasizing an optimism about tech. The film takes place almost entirely in the grid and is full of dark colors contrasting against the soft glow lines with bluish-white accents. There’s a serenity and beauty portrayed in the grid and the story delivers a message of self discovery through introspection and reflection.

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Image Credit: Disney

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But that biodigital jazz tech optimism is shattering. We are in a time where tech literacy is extremely low. Theses days the average tech user is expected to give away all their data carelessly to tech companies more than ever. The tech software landscape is where the powers that be have the most control and we see the tech industry now trying it’s hardest to convince users that generative models like Chat GPT and Grok will help people. “Person goes insane because they talked to A.I. chat bot” seems to be a weekly headline these days. However, “A.I.” is just a word and has quickly lost all meaning in the modern lexicon. While the tech industry might tell you that the question is “Can we trust A.I.?” Tron Ares, however, encourages viewers to struggle with a more important question; ”What does it mean to be human?”

Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares is a film about many things. With such a wide window between releases, Tron films become clear milestones of how far art, film, computers and humans have come. Each release has an entirely new group of filmmakers, animators, musicians and visual effects artists who get to explore the parts of Tron that they wish to see. And the next generation of artists tasked with Ares ask some important questions about what it means to be human, to have a creator who is your master, to question the very nature of reality as it’s told to you, how much power do we give to machines? And finally, one of the most important questions, asked by the main bad guy of Ares: who’s got the keys?”

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image credit: Disney

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Soundtrack

The soundtrack of the film, created by Nine Inch Nails, also explores ideas present in the film in it’s vocals and track titles. While previous musicians tasked with Tracks like “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” ponder one’s own creation and one’s place in a system designed to suit the needs of someone else. While it’s sister track at the end of the album, “Shadow Over Me” creates resolution and acknowledges that purpose can only be created by oneself. “I know you can feel it” explores the surreal experience of feeling an emotion you’ve not experienced before.

Film soundtracks present the necessity of leitmotifs and recurring patterns, Nine Inch Nails provides us with balance from the intense highs with quiet and slow tracks that take their time to speak to you. In contrast to the intense and punchy electronic rock synth tracks, are introspective ambient tracks like “Who Wants To Live Forever?” With soft, tender voices from both Trent Reznor and featured artist, Judeline. Reznor’s lyrics embrace death, while Judeline’s call for him to stay.

I’d also like to point out that many of the vocal tracks mention ”something to believe”. People who emerge out of an abusive environments often have a difficult time rebuilding their lives. This includes a lost sense of purpose and emotional dysregulation. Which seem to be the aspects of Ares’s characters that Reznor attempts to tackle. Choosing to defy your programming and to Step Out of The Box can feel like a terrifying leap of faith, but those who do quickly realize how rewarding such an action can be. Defying what you’ve been told by dogma grounds you in a world that you might find beautiful and complex. This is a story that is not often told, and I greatly appreciate that.

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“Being human is hard. The things that make life great are the same things that make it excruciating, like love, loss.“

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Conclusion

With every Tron release, there’s a murmur of divisiveness in the consciousness of moviegoers and it ends up being the film voted out of the weekend group watch. I don’t wish to spoil any of the film for you, but when I saw the second scene of the film paired with the first track of the soundtrack titled “init”, I knew that even if I thought the rest of the film was garbage, then I would at least have that scene, in it’s perfection and glory. So allow me to tease you with my best description of it that I can muster. And if you never see it, then at least you’ll know Lewa liked it very much and perhaps you’d still give the soundtrack a go.

After a quick exposition scene, we get a cut to fingers tapping commands into a terminal behind glass. Another cut and the film presents us with glossy close ups of the most optimized version of the grid we’ve seen yet, printing a humanoid character in red and black. A grand synth in the background plays a fun, simple quick version of the character’s leitmotif while plucky chords provide a computery flair. After a juicy printing sequence, the character gasps and stands up. Some more typing in a terminal. The character is attacked by another humanoid and disintegrates while screaming in pain. A visualization of a neural net pulses. A few variations of that pattern repeat, The typing fingers keep patching the program, the neural network becomes more complex, the character improves his combat effectiveness. As the track swells we get a training montage of this character fighting for his life culminating in successfully fighting hundreds of enemies at once. Next, the synth fades out and we witness this neural net program finally get implemented. More keyboard tapping, and he is allowed to leave his training chamber. The program stands in front of a monolithic hologram of a human face with which he enters a dialogue:

Welcome.
Who are you?
I am your creator.
And who am I?

a pause, and some more keyboard tapping as the music swells.

Not Who, what.
You are Dillenger systems security software programming. Ares, defender of the grid. You are Master Control.
“Ares. I am Master Control.”

Ares holds up his data disk as the camera turns sideways to reveal the title card.