This week I played Hellblade: Senua’s sacrifice, I was interested in this game because it’s an adventure seen through a schizophrenic woman’s eyes, there are visual artifacts through the game and voices, friendly and hostile, that whisper, speak and scream to you from all directions, as if they come from inside your mind, all to make you feel immersed in the experience of living as a schizophrenic. It was a short game but deeply engaging, it truly is a story that is best told through an interactive medium like videogames. Also there were a lot of nordic folk stories told over the course of the game, a nice plus.

An analysis of the Julian Jayne’s theory of consciousness exposed in his book with the same title.

The idea that consciousness is not something inherent of human beings but a learned trait, that humans could develop societies, languages, and culture without being conscious is ludicrous, yet with the examples given, the analysis of how the Illiad and the Odyssey were written and a lot of explanation of the implications of those examples the hypothesis makes sense.

You should give this podcast a listen, you can never go wrong listening about theories of consciousness.

[video] How did the First Language Begin? The Mystery of the Pirahã

Self explanatory title, an exploration of how languages started and a deep dive into the language of the Pirahã, a tribe in the Amazon.

On the same topic of consciousness, the function languages have in how we think about our environment is not to be ignored. In Not related! Luke Smith says that Jayne’s theory can explain a change in how the inner state of the person is portrayed in both the Illiad and the Odyssey, the former lacking of any reflection of the inner self in the characters, but the inner state being present and explored the later. In the section about the Pirahã in the video, a relationship between ecology and language structure is made though the lack of recursion and numbers in the Pirahã language, numbers are not needed to be successful in the jungle, and recursion isn’t useful in that environment either, as shorter sentences make easier the recovery of information.

Those points can be a link into consciousness, as people didn’t need to reflect on their inner state language did not led itself to that end, but as consciousness arose, the language adapted to the environment.

[music] [youtube] [bandcamp] PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises : Home™

Vaporwave is commonly associated with Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe and if you are aware of vaporwave’s existence most probably you have at least seen Floral Shoppe’s cover. What it’s not often known for outsiders of the genre is that Vektroid over the course of her career has released music under a lot of aliases, Macintosh Plus and PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises being two of them.

Home™ is a peculiar experience, it has a virtual reality aesthetic, early computer graphic shapes and assets, old Nintendo 64 and PlayStation one imagery comes to mind also. Listening to this make you feel like you are in a virtual reality futuristic mansion completely empty and isolated, a strange feeling to experience but something that is worth experiencing. It’s amazing how music can convey experiences so specific through sound alone, Vektroid’s discography is filled with amazing pieces as this one and it’s unfortunate to think about Floral Shoppe as her only work.