time and space and football
Oct. 4th, 2023 03:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
i'm trying to write more. the only way to become better is to practice, and i need all the help i can get. i'm writing this all in one go to work on more stream of consciousness stuff.
i'm thinking a lot about time and space lately. one of the sample midterm topics for my scifi lit class is on time and space, and the concept pairing reminds me of so many things. i'll count them out.
1. on the surface, i think about what i've read in class that i can relate to the topic. i'll probably opt
for the short stories rather than the novel we've been recently reading; i've found that analyzing, comparing, and contrasting short stories is my strong suit, rather than breaking down pieces of a novel. in the short stories i'm thinking of from my class, time can serve as just something to toy with, in other cases it's a privilege only wielded by the wealthy. space can be absolutely meaningless, thrown out the window alongside most concepts of physics, or it can be almost the same as ours, just shifted ever so slightly. a different person won this election, a different victor in that war. these counterparts feel so easily intertwined, and that's partially because of the nature of the concepts themselves and partially because i've been aware of these concepts for a long time, as though they were walking right in step behind me, their feet falling right next to mine.
2. i think about an essay i wrote in october 2020, my first university midterm. i wrote about time and space in a specific film i enjoyed from the class, and fretted over the topic being too esoteric or vague. reflecting on it now, i think i may have just been acting a bit presumptuous; subconsciously imagining my professor being wowed by eighteen-year-old me's complexity and depth. either way, i was proud of the essay. i was so motivated by my interest in the subject matter that i was able to plan out and write my essay ahead of schedule, turning it in days before the deadline. this was extremely unusual for me, and has yet to be fully replicated.
3. i think about the things i enjoy that have prominent themes relating to time and space. homestuck, of course sticks out to me. time and space in homestuck are two aspects that serve as opposites. a successful game of sburb (game played in-universe) requires both a time and space player for the main quest of creating a new universe. without either time or space, the game session is doomed.
4. i think of 17776, that speculative fiction football satellite thing. i very vividly remember being on a family road trip at the start of july 2017, at the same time as 17776 first updates. as a teenager who lived and breathed tumblr at this point in time, i saw firsthand how word spread like wildfire on the blogging site that something interesting was happening on some football news site, and it seemed to be updating on a regular basis with no end point in sight. as a homestuck in remission at that point in time, i was itching for something similar enough in format to grab my attention. 17776 worked.
the basic premise is that in 2026 (then nine years away, now three years away) everyone stopped aging, everyone stopped dying, and babies stopped being born. the multimedia story honed in on what happened to america after the earth stood still for just one species, and then zoomed in even further: what happened to american football after the earth stood still? if time no longer matters, and the planet is all stuck in the same space forever, what happens to entertainment and joy? the story mostly follows three satellites watching and commenting upon the state of the earth from space. the older satellites have less battery, and time between messages could be months, years, or millennia. additionally, while these satellites can communicate with one another, they are trillion of miles apart and nowhere near earth, either. their connection to humanity is almost parasocial, but it's a bit more clinical than that.
in inpatient treatment, one group therapist asked us if a world that only felt happiness and never felt negative emotions would truly feel happy, even if there was no pain or anguish to compare that happiness to. i was the only one in the group that said that happiness is still happiness even if the counterpart isn't there. not knowing something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean that the thing being observed doesn't exist, either. humans had five fingers before we knew how to count them, and we can know a feeling is good without knowing the deepest darks of emotion. how could the idea be measured, anyway? everyone's happiness and sadness and anger and so on is unique to that person in at least some slight way. someone who may quantitatively have the "worst" life could be stacked against others and score "happier" that someone with a quantitatively "better" life. it's all subjective, no?
anyway, back to time and space in 17776. basically, with time being nothing more than a label and space being a resource to be bent to humanity's will, 17776 tackles questions of what makes a person a person, and if lifting the pressures of time and space takes away happiness and sadness and want. does the idea of wanting make us human in the same way wanting sends cheetahs into the chase and rabbits down the hole and whales to the surface? do all of the wants anyone could have break down into wanting time, space, or a combination of both? if dying is the only thing we all have in common, then dodging the event is surpassing a (formerly universal) scarcity of time and space, and places one into a distinct category that's closer to the satellites than anyone who died before that day in 2026.
5. i think about how time and space make us human, and make the universe the universe. i think about coil from worm, i think about yume nikki, i think about my childhood and the paleolithic age and i think about how i still need to write that midterm.