We Are All Stardust (Carl Sagan).
We are all stardust (Carl Sagan).
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
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More Posts from Alternate-silversurfer-blog and Others
Originally a Twitter Thread, with the help of Thread Reader
Baldolino Calvino🏳️🌈🚩🇧🇷✨♻️🌱
Oct 1 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Fantasy is not science, nor philosophy, and not real (of course). This may seem obvious, but what I am trying to do is creating an exact, non-contradictory definition of fantasy, not as an art genre, but as an object of study. Not by science, but by fantastic natural history.
Fantasy - Wikipedia
"Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore."
Fantasy, Magic (not meaning prestidigitation), Mythology, and Folklore can be understood as equivalent, overlaping concepts. Wikipedia's entry is mostly tautological, circular, thus.
However, this is an article about the artistic genre, and one could say that it refers to art expression (written, musical, cinematic, other) that uses these references. This is enough for this use case, but we do not advance in an objective conceptualization of fantasy.
Fantasy (psychology) - Wikipedia
"(...) fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery."
This entry about the concept of fantasy in psychology gives a more elaborared view of it. However, what differentiates fantasy from other instances of human creativjty? The article continues: "Fantasies are associated with scenarios that are absolutely impossible."
Wikipedia's entry on Fantasy (psychology) does not give any reference to this concept, and proceeds listing the importance of Fantasy for various theoretical approaches (Freud, Klein, Lacan), or pathologies (narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia). It is not unified.
More revealing is Wikipedia's "History of Fantasy" (about the literary genre).
" (...) the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore (...)"
It makes a clear distintion between ancient myths and folklore, and so-called "modern fantasy", whose first explicit representant was Scottish author George MacDonald in the late XIX century, with his novels "The Princess and the Goblin" and "Phantastes".
Important precursors were Dickens, Thackeray, Andersen, Ruskin, Morris. And MacDonald's work enormously influenced Tolkien and Lewis. One key word in this historic description of Fantasy is "speculative". And a defining characteristic of modern fantasy is the "fantasy world".
Distinctive differences of modern fantasy are the postulate of a secondary fantasy world apart from reality; fictitious by design; and narratives from a (group of) author(s) with an interpretative aim. Myths or folklore does not have any of these characteristics.
The entry goes on in a detailed description of the development of Fantasy as a literary genre, since writings about tales and legends from Middle Ages. However, one fun example of how medieval mind understood the fantastic can be seen in the novel "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco.
Most of this Wikipedia's entry is based upon https://twitter.com/john_clute and John Grant's https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/, published in 1997, and fully available on the internet.
More to come, be patient.
South Island, New Zealand
3,000-year-old clay pig found in
2020 at the Lianhe Ruins in China. When it was
discovered, the pottery has gone viral as it looks
similar to the pigs in AngryBirds or Peppa. Now
housed at the Sanxingdui Museum
It is a field of knowledge proposed by me, defined as the study of nature in all its expressions, but from the point of view of alternative non-real possibilities. My background is in ecological economics, but I started to have broader interests that encompass other fields of knowledge. However, instead of an interest in traditional knowledge, I started to study fantastic facts and concepts (fantasy). It is not (only) a literary endeavor, but an attempt to create a new (!?) realm of knowledge aside mathematics, philosophy, and science. I will bring up some themes that can be raised as being of interest to fantastic natural history. By scope or complexity, from mathematics to politics, to aesthetics and art.
Earth can be studied like a machine, a very complicated one indeed. In this view, it can be subdivided in many parts, each one a subsystem that can also be interpreted as a machine interconected to many others to form the entire Earth system. One of this parts is the biosphere, and a subsystem of the biosphere refers to human activity. Since human activity can be approached by economics, it is appropriate to talk about economics as part of the entire Earth system, as a piece of the biosphere machinery. This is the view of Ecological Economics.
As it happens to any machine, Earth has to obey the second law of thermodynamics, entropy can only increase with time. And what is the power source of the Earth machine? Easy, the solar radiation. Everything that has ever occurred, occurs, or will occurs could only take place in Earth because of solar radiative energy. Even these lines that I am writing, would not be here if not because the sun shines.
That is why it is so important to be aware of the energy cycles of Earth to understand everything, including economics. Think about it: the energy that powers the device you're using now, and ultimately the brain that is thinking and taking decisions now, every single joule of this energy was once photons leaving the sun towards Earth. Think of this interconnectedness and believe, and worry, and care about Earth, the biosphere, the econosphere and humankind, because everything is One!
Godzilla 2019
Who can say that started a totally new field of study (even if it is a fantasy, literally)?
My new Grass & Field’s brush pack is officially out for Photoshop CC, Procreate, and Clip Studio Paint!
You can download it from this page (click!)
Like all my brush packs it is free, with tips welcome but optional. You can use these brushes in anything - personal work, freelance work, professional work, commercial work - including things you sell, no license required. Demo videos are linked on the product page. Enjoy!!
HiPOD: Layers in a Crater
The objective of this observation is to examine light and dark layers in an impact crater in Cydonia Mensae. Our interest is in seeing if the layer boundaries are diffuse as suggested in CTX image data. Most of the layers seem to have definite boundaries. (Black and white is less than 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.)
ID: ESP_075247_2125 date: 15 August 2022 altitude: 292 km
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
Baldolino Calvino. Ecological economist. Professor of Historia Naturalis Phantastica, Tír na nÓg University, Uí Breasail. I am a third order simulacrum and a heteronym.
57 posts