🝢

ellis / various other names

white adult dragon online. disabled, antipsych, multiple, generally alter/nonhuman.

i have a side cohost featuring found text

i make visual art (mainly fanart for actual play podcast "friends at the table") and write poetry sometimes. interested in language, storytelling, interfaces, images and sensations. unsure how to use a new website.

comments & asks are welcome!

dear cohost, i was quiet on this website and i don't have much of a presence elsewhere that isn't private or fan-specific, so i don't really have any links to share. godspeed!

i have been trying to find some words for cohost's final days for about a week now. everything i write is self-serving and self-indulgent and a little too woeful. so here's the heart of it.

it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.

it's even better to make things that you believe in.

it's not a liberatory act that will save us ('evil people make things they believe in too'),

but making stuff does propel us forward, towards new intersections of thought and action

the alternative is entropy--real or abstract, and we live in a time where both have advocates

the latest and greatest developments of capitalism would prefer we made nothing, and that dare we make something, it better not be something we believe in for its own end.

exception: you are allowed to believe in a [product/service/brand's] abiltity to ['find an audience'/'create a niche'/generate profit]

but ideally, you don't even make a [product/service/brand]. you dropship a product that was made 5 years ago. you subcontract a service for pennies on the dollar. you leverage a brand built by following trends that you did not even need to organically understand.

soon, they dream: replace the 'you' with 'your ai agent of choice.'

it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.

it's even better to make things that you really, really believe in.

making things will not save us. but the alternative is creative annihilation.

and many people are rooting it to arrive.

I am the type of nerd who knows that the 17th-century Christian poet George Herbert wrote a set of five poems that were each titled “Affliction." The Five Afflictions all feature speakers confronting God about why God is causing them to suffer.

I am also the type of nerd who knows that the 21st-century podcast season PALISADE has a set of five beings called the Afflictions. The Five Afflictions all used to be Divines, and everyone on Palisade's wondering why they're now causing people to suffer.

This almost-certain coincidence has cursed me to spend all season distracted by one perplexing and pointless question:
Which of Palisade’s Afflictions is best described by each of Herbert’s Affliction poems?

What follows is my attempt to exorcise this question from my brain by offering my best possible attempt at pairing the Afflictions up. It doesn't really work, but I had to do it.