Like A Breath

Looking around online, I found a LOT of people were left stumped by the ending of the film Personal Shopper. I get that - it’s a weird one! In this video, I examine the film as a whole, and try to find out what exactly we can gleam from those perplexing final seconds.

If you enjoy my video, please feel free to subscribe, or follow me on Twitter here https://twitter.com/The_Infranaut

Hello friends! I’d like to direct all of you to the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1367347179/dead-in-the-west-a-tabletop-rpg-set-in-the-mythic?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=dead%20in%20the%20west The past year and a half or so, I’ve been working hard on creating my very own pen-and-paper tabletop RPG (think Dungeons and Dragons if you’ve never played one before). The game is set in what I like to call a “Mythic Old West” setting - think old cowboy movies and pulpy novels - the kind of place made up of tall-tales and larger-than-life characters. Setting out on an adventure in Dead in the West should feel like your party is a group of modern-day scribes, stitching out the tapestry that is the first Great American Folklore! The Kickstarter is not asking for very much, and will go towards creating both a digital and physical edition of a beautiful rulebook, filled with gorgeous artwork by tumblr users like yourselves, all paid a fair commission.

Please do consider contributing to the Kickstarter! Dead in the West is an incredibly fun game, and I’d love to share it with as many people as I possible can.

Also you get the bonus of seeing my ugly mug in the dieo up there.

Thanks everybody <3

In this emotionally exhausting video, I talk to a professional cult deprogrammer about Qanon, how the conspiracy theory spreads and where the movement might go after the Capitol Building attack.

Tried my hand at a Gaster battle. I haven’t seen much art embracing his whole shtick of being a lost/deleted/corrupted file. I think something like this is more in line with what Toby would give us in terms of an actual encounter with him.

What is a Script Consultant - and do you need one!

This is part of a new series in which I reveal my ugly mug and give writing advice, talking about my experience as a Script Consultant and work on reading and editing screenplays.

If anyone has any thoughts, questions or suggestions please do let me know! Would love to have some feedback on this series, and know what people might be interested in me covering in the future.

So the auction scene in Jurassic World 2 is p good, but how would it flow with some big band jazz and snappier editing? (pls forgive me my memes)

Mario Odyssey does a lot of cool, strange things, but none as cool or strange as letting you dress the most iconic character in all of videogames as a topless cowboy. 

In this video I talk about character design and theory, as well as why Mario has stuck around as long as he has. Any likes, comments, shares or subscriptions will go a long way!

The Cradle

We assumed we were in the box.

It was only natural, after all. It’s what anyone would have thought. We had been away for almost six years. A little silver glint in space; not even enough to catch the eye. The CAS system kept us asleep most of it, of course. If we’re talking waking hours, we had been away from Earth maybe eight months.

Space is full of radiation. There’s a reason so many old astronauts have cancer - it comes from everywhere. Our ship had a ridiculously simple monitor, a light really, that was meant to alert us when radiation levels were about to get too high. The trouble was, when we were under, something went wrong. No way of knowing what, but this little green light was on the fritz. We looked at it and no one could figure the thing out - our chief engineer, after some tinkering, told us that the thing was garbage. That there was a 50/50 chance it was accurately indicating high levels of radiation. When you’re in a little metal tube, surrounded on all sides by death, those odds really don’t sound so bad.

Still, it was enough to get to you. It turns out an even chance was the worst thing we could have heard. I would gladly have taken 90/10, or even 99/1 odds. The certainty of death would have been infinitely more comforting.

After a few days, someone brought up we were exactly like the cat in the box. I’m sure everyone is aware, but if you’re not, I can give my two cents. Schrödinger’s cat is a kind of tawdry metaphor that was never really meant to be taken seriously, but the basic premise is as follows; a cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter containing a trace amount of some radioactive substance. In the space of an hour, it’s equally possible that the substance  remains unchanged as it is the substance decays. If the substance decays, a flask of poisonous shatters and kills the cat. In the hour before the box is opened, the contents of the box are a superposition, wherein the cat is both alive and dead. Upon observing the contents of the box, the superposition “chooses” an outcome. It was a metaphor that, to my foggy recollection, was meant to mock the idea of a contradictory harmonious state. However, it caught the public imagination and became accepted into the vast sea of pop-science.

What is interesting, however, is the notion that an action in the present, ie opening the box, can in fact change an event in the past, in this case whether the cat has been alive or dead the last hour.

We were currently the cat in the box; there was a 50/50 chance that we had been poisoned. The monitors on Earth would know for certain whether we were or not, but we were not due to communicate with them for another six months. It was funny, in a way. We joked about being zombies. That we were just waiting for the boys back open to crack open the lid.

After a month, it stopped being funny. I became unsure whether I was feeling the effects of radiation poisoning. Maybe it was a placebo, maybe it was all in my head, but I swear I could feel it. I could feel this looming dread, this decay deep in my bones. Examining the path the ship had taken, one of my peers figured out exactly where the radiation source must have been, if it indeed existed at all. After two months of uncertainty, we decided to open the box ourselves. 

It was not our decision to make.

We put ourselves to sleep and turned the ship around. We had a six month timer; that would put us in range of Earth.

In that sleep, you are meant to dream. I had nothing. When I think back to my time under, I recall nothing. Only the darkness and a strange anxiety.

We awoke, looked out the window, and realised we were wrong. We were wrong all along. 

We were never in the box.

A neutron star is the result of a collapsed star. While relatively tiny in size, their density is incredible. A neutron star with a radius of only 7 miles can have a mass of over twice our sun. They also give out enormous amounts of radiation. A tiny, blinding usher. A calamitous angel. The scroll, rolling up the night sky.

Swallowing whole the world entire.

Uncertainty was the curse. There was an even chance that there was no radiation source. There was an even chance the monitor was faulty. There was an even chance we were all fine.

But we had to know, and in our knowing, we became fate. We were the observers. We forced the choice. We changed the past and smashed the vial.

It wasn’t us in the box, it was the world. But we needed to look. We needed to.

I find the days for which I long the most are not those where I was happiest, but where I had the most before me.

Jepthah in “Lilytooth” a work in progress.

There are times in my life I have wondered where the pain goes when it is absent. In my age I've realised that the answer to that question is simply; 'deeper'.

Owen from “Lilytooth”, a work in progress