• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I was maybe eighteen when I watched Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, in the "Director's Cut" from 1992, for the first time—though it's possible that I caught some of it earlier, through TV broadcast of the theatrical cut, because I'm sure I've heard at least part of Harrison Ford's bored-sounding voiceover. I was altogether too taken with the movie, and watched it many times in a row. And I mean...I'd sometimes watch it multiple times a day, while I was rotting away at Caltech and doing things like watching movies over and over again instead of trying to save myself from academic ruin.

To this day I'm truly amazed by how completely we could lose ourselves in obsessive pursuits like that, forgetting everything else. Forgetting that we were supposed to be getting an education, forgetting that we were burning through our father's money to be there, forgetting the "real world". It seemed more important, for reasons we couldn't have possibly explained, to lose ourselves in Blade Runner. Why? What were we getting from watching the movie so many times in a row?

During this early-1990s time, we also tried reading Phil Dick's original novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and we bounced off it then. It was just...strange, and didn't seem to have much to do with the movie that we loved. Now I feel like a fool, because upon re-reading the book, I can see how much more thought-provoking and substantial it is. Blade Runner, for all its merits, cruises largely on style—I feel like that's a general defect with Ridley Scott's movies, having now seen more of them. Watch something like Gladiator and you'll feel as though you'd just seen something deep and powerful, in the moment of viewing it, even though there's there's little of genuine substance.

I could watch Blade Runner and feel as though I'd seen an important artistic statement about empathy. Reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I wonder if I even possess empathy at all. It's a profoundly upsetting book...also there's a goat in it. The goat does not survive the book.

~Χαρά


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