I do redesign them!! Below is a really chaotic word vomit of my ideas.

The worldbuilding really matters here. In heaven, you look exactly how you did in life when you died. You’re just the person you were before. Hell is where it gets interesting.

Because Hell is a place of radical creation without any rules, your internal ideas about yourself have a profound effect on your appearance.

EARLY TW FOR ARACHNOPHOBIA AND BATS!!!

Charlie

I have actually drawn my version of Charlie, keeping mainly to the original designs of the show with my own ideas for her. She is a Nephilim - half angelic (Lucifer is still her father) and half human (Lilith is her mother and Lilith is Eve who changed her name after death). She is a bit of a glitch in the system. Lucifer fell in love with Eve for her desire to build and learn, and grow, which resulted in Charlie who technically shouldn’t exist. She is a creature born from the radical belief that anything is possible and she embodies it thoroughly.

She’s something almost-human, but also not really trying to BE human.

I still wanted her to be recognizable, so she has a lot of qualities from Medrano’s work.

Angel

Sex appeal is not a priority for Angel Dust’s design for me. I actually do not have him as a sex worker in my story. At least not as a primary point of his character. He is still based on a spider, but it comes from this sense of feeling deeply misunderstood, toxic, and paradoxically trapped.

Imagine the idea of a spider caught in their own web: Humiliating, demoralizing, frustrating.

I’ve mentioned before that I actually picture Angel Dust as a centaur-like spider being that looks closer to the Forgotten Realms vision of a Drider. I don’t have my own drawing of him, so this is an artistic rendering from the Forgotten Realms Wikipedia page of what that sorta looks like.

His body I imagine more elongated, as this Drider has a very Widow-like design. But I actually see Angel as having more of a Golden orb weaver concept.

Golden Orb weaver:

But I am not opposed to other types of orb weavers. While I may imagine him with a more torpedo-shaped thorax, I also greatly love the Marbled Orb Weaver:

And even the Spinybacked orb weaver!

I would say have fun with his colors/design. I like high contrast. Bright colors in nature are often a sign of poisonous or even venomous creatures and Orb weavers have these spectacular colors and shapes with high contrast. But they are generally not dangerous to humans and compared typically to a mosquito bite.

But apologies in advance for the complicated concept lol

Vaggie

Vaggie is one of my favorites because she has the most changes to her design. After she enters Hell, her form takes on the appearance of an anthropomorphic bat. Primarily a vampire bat, which reflects her internalized sense that she is evil. While I am currently writing her story, I will spoil that she is a human who dies and goes to Heaven, but ends up “falling” to Hell.

It isn’t a moral storyline, but she internalizes it as moral. That’ll all be explained in the next post.

Regardless, how much like a bat vs a girl is open to interpretation. The only rule I have is that she has an upturned nose. I’m pretty lenient on everything else.

Alastor

Alastor is very much leaning into the sense of Uncanny Valley. He is the one character who looks human at a glance, but the longer you look the more unsettling it gets. His face is like skin scratches over a skull while his eyes never blink and his smile is unnaturally wide. He has too many teeth that are jagged and crooked. And the more you stare into his eyes, you see radio dials. His mouth doesn’t move when he speaks, but if you want some nightmare fuel he can open his mouth, jaw unhinging like a snake and there is nothing but void inside.

His body is inspired by both the Crooked Man and Slenderman. His neck is abnormally long and can stretch longer. He wears a nice suit and has a humanoid silhouette.

For reference, I specifically mean the game Crooked Man is the inspiration:

There is a reason for this design that is fundamental to the story itself that makes sense of where we go in season 2 where he becomes a much bigger player. He is designed to be unsettling but initially unassuming.

It’s also important to remember the designs are philosophically relevant, not necessarily plot. He isn’t terrifying because he is necessarily going to do anything great, but because the philosophical themes he embodies are, in opinion, horrifying.

- A message from 23 Nights Temple -

“Happiness doesn’t come from outside. It comes from within yourself.”

-二十三夜堂からのメッセージ-

”幸福は外から来るものではない。自分自身の内側から生まれるものだ。”

If you cum inside someone and then kiss them, is that like throwing a snowball at Frosty the Snowman?

Consciousness and the Absolute - Nisargadatta

February 5, 1981 Questioner:

It is very difficult to give up this attraction to the bodily identity.

Maharaj: You have to find out what this body is, then the job is done. Initially, the body is very minute. The consciousness appears in the body, and then the tiny body changes into a large one.
That causal body, which is very minute, needs to be known. By meditation you can know it.
The quality of that causal body takes on the appearance of the consciousness and the form. In this
world there are many species, in all sizes; initially what was the size of each variety?
At the point where you first feel knowingness, consciousness is not static; it is a continuous
state, just like a wheel moving. The center of the wheel, the axle, is not moving. As you proceed
from the center of the axle outwardly, the movement increases, does it not? Similarly, the beginning
of consciousness is like the center of a wheel; that point is steady, constant. In a human being that is
the most constant principle. Since the day I was born until I am dead, that consciousness principle is there at that center. As you merge into the world, the movement increases. Watch that center point, watch that movement of consciousness. Chaitanya and Chetana, that central, stationary point of the wheel watches the movement of consciousness. The one that observes the movement is almost stationary.
To bring about the actions of the world — the movement — consciousness must descend. If there is no consciousness, there is no worldly movement.
Similarly, you must become stabilized in a more stationary position, near the center. When you leave that center point, the movement takes over.

plato this, aristotle that- I DON’T CARE !!! anyways, here are my top 3 philosophers <3

A Thing Sucks

Sucks to try and do a philosophy phd when your laptop keyboard’s ‘o’ and 'p’ keys stop working!!! I really needed those!!! Have to copy + paste in from elsewhere every goddamn 'o’ and 'p’

The more i learn about history, the more i see humans are still fuckin remaining the same.

For example:there’s always a war, a big disease, a crazy leader, rich people oppressing the poor, unjustified anger against an ethnicity

Also the more we are connected with the world the more our lives are shit

“To be true to my nature, which is affirmative and has dealings with contradiction and criticism only indirectly and when compelled, I shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators. One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. – Learning to see – habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one’s control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilo-sophical language ‘strong will-power’: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will’, the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus – one has to react, one obeys every impulse. In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion – almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name ‘vice’ is merely this physiological incapacity not to react – A practical application of having learned to see: one will have become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general. In an attitude of hostile calm one will allow the strange, the novel of every kind to approach one first – one will draw one’s hand back from it. To stand with all doors open, to prostrate oneself submissively before every petty fact, to be ever itching to mingle with, plunge into other people and other things, in short our celebrated modern ‘objectivity’, is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. –”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “The Improvers of Mankind”

Lectures on Philosophy by Simone Weil

The Record of a Thinking Person

I do not want to be remembered as someone who wrote from only one corner of life.

I want the record to show that I paid attention.

To feelings.
To the quiet mechanics of human relationships.
To technology and the strange pace it has imposed on our lives.
To power, and the way it hides behind respectable language.
To the small decisions that shape entire destinies.
To the direction our world seems to be taking while few pause long enough to examine it.

Because something troubling is happening in plain sight.

Human beings are thinking less and reacting more.

We move faster.
We produce more.
We optimize everything for efficiency.
We measure our days in output, deadlines, and the quiet pressure of money — the necessary fuel that keeps the entire machine running.

But the question beneath all that activity is rarely examined.

Why are we doing any of this?

Money has slowly become the explanation for almost everything.

Work more.
Produce more.
Compete more.
Acquire more.
Have more.

As if the entire human experience were nothing more than a race toward accumulation.

Yet the ending remains the same for everyone.

Death has never changed its schedule.

Which makes the race itself somewhat strange when we step back and observe it.

People running endlessly, organizing their lives around deadlines, promotions, acquisitions, and status.

All inside small worlds that rarely allow enough stillness to question the direction of the road itself.

For many years I participated in that race.

Most of us do.

Not always because we want to.

Sometimes it is a distraction.
Almost always it is a necessity.

Bills exist.
Responsibilities exist.
Survival itself demands movement.

And so people run.

Not because the race was carefully chosen, but because the structure of society makes standing still feel almost impossible.

Until one day something interrupts the rhythm.

Fatigue.

Disillusion.

Illness.

Moments that force a person to stop long enough to see the machinery they were moving inside.

And in that pause something becomes visible.

Freedom may require stepping outside the race entirely.

Because once the running stops, the rules begin to look different.

Sometimes the rules disappear altogether.

What once felt inevitable begins to look like a system sustained mostly by habit, expectation, and fear of stepping away from what everyone else continues to do.

The noise becomes clearer when you no longer move inside it.

From that distance, the movement of the crowd begins to look different.

People rushing.
Producing.
Competing.
Exhausting themselves.

Often without ever examining whether the race itself still serves them.

It can begin to look as if many people are moving through a pattern they never truly examined.

Days filled with urgency.
Years organized around expectations.
Entire lives structured around roles accepted long before they were understood.

Not because people are incapable of thinking.

But because constant movement leaves little room for reflection.

When survival, obligation, and pressure dominate the rhythm of life, questioning that rhythm can feel like a luxury.

And so the race continues.

Not always because people want it.

But because momentum, habit, responsibility, and fear of instability keep it going.

Still, there are moments when the pattern becomes visible.

Moments when a person realizes that many of the rules guiding their life were never natural laws, but arrangements created by systems that reward productivity far more than reflection.

At that point something important appears.

Choice.

Not unlimited freedom.
Not a perfect escape.

But the awareness that life does not have to be lived entirely inside the machinery that society built.

Some people recognize that moment and change direction.

Others continue moving forward, not because they are weak or blind, but because circumstances, responsibilities, or fear make stopping too costly.

Human lives are rarely simple enough for clean decisions.

But recognizing the possibility of choice changes the meaning of the race itself.

Because once a person understands that running forever is not the only path available, continuing to run without reflection becomes something else entirely.

Not survival.

Not necessity.

But surrender.

And perhaps the quiet tragedy of modern life is not that the race exists.

It is that many people spend their entire lives inside it without ever realizing they were allowed to decide how far they truly wanted to run.

Philosophy Infodump!

Introduction to Postmodernism, Pt. 1: Rimiru Tempest (Modernity)

There’s a special difficulty with postmodernism, in that most people don’t know what it is. This is made more difficult by the fact that postmodernism isn’t really one thing as it is an umbrella of things, only really tied together by a critique of “modernity”. So today, we’re going to start by discussing what’s meant by modernity, and give little shavings of what postmodernism takes issue with.

Modernity itself is a pretty broad thing, and because postmodernism is a loose branch of theories rather than something singular, it crosses into a lot of disciplines. For our purposes, we’ll stick to postmodern and modernity as they apply to social science and politics.

So - what is modernity?

Understood simply, modernity is a combination of attitudes & beliefs which shape our social environment. We’re gonna use Rimiru and his Jura Tempest Federation as examples here, because the way the series plays out actually displays quite a bit of these attitudes.

Modernity is marked by - among other things - a belief in:

• The inevitability & inherent goodness of progress, mainly of the social & technological variety.
• Grand narratives, i.e. a narrative that all of history fits into & is legitimated by.
• The reliability of experts and the authority thereof, esp. in the field of technology.

With the rise of industry and new ideas, modernity sought to upend all existing tradition and find new ways of social life, the idea being that all history had served to vindicate this moment.

(Side note, if you’re familiar with Marxism, this might all sound quite familiar. Despite the ravings of people on the right, Marxism is itself a modernist philosophy)

Rimiru and the Jura Tempest Federation embody these ideas quite well. Under Rimiru’s guidance, the Great Jura Forest goes from a backwater, feral region into a superpower. The various creeds that he brings under his domain collaborate, and the JTF is keen to expand this collaboration with other nations.

With these relations and technological growth, Rimiru seeks to upend the long held belief that humans and monsters cannot coexist. He also seeks to - by way of making the JTF a major trade hub - help bring the world into a new, better age.

Now this is all well and good, these are nice ideas. But… do they hold up? That’s for next time, where we’ll talk about:

[NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR: Religion becomes a space of resistance to the state, and to those who embody it today in Iran? - cont’d]

[FOUCAULT: Permit me to introduce a distinction that I didn’t clarify enough for readers - cont’d]

[1. When I talk about spirituality, - cont’d]

[b. What is spirituality? - cont’d]

iii. it seems to me that that possibility of rising up from the subject position that had been fixed for you by

• a political power
• a religious power
• a dogma
• a belief
• a habit
• a social structure
• and so on

—that’s spirituality, that is, becoming other than what one is, other than oneself.

– Michel Foucault, Political Spirituality as the Will for Alterity, interview with the Nouvel Observateur, 1979

Nature or Doctrine: Who Is God, Really? The Divine Mirror Hidden in Evolution A philosophical reflection on leadership, resilience, and the human condition.
By D. L. Dantes | November 9th, 2025

any ideology that exists and profits from seeing you moral, cultural or historical superiority is inherently false. we were put on this planet as one and will probably go as one. history exists as a lesson, either telling us about the human warmth, the indomitable human spirit or the ugliness within us. we must learn from it but not repeat the ugly parts. a bus moves when all the wheels move along, the front wheel is no superior to the back wheel.any ideology must be accepting and fair. before you fall into any ideology ask yourself, who is this for? what do they say? if my family or friends weren’t following this ideology, how does this ideology treat them? we will also grow collectively only when we learn we are one alike and not different.

Coffee with Vincent, Pt. 22: The Bureaucratic Eligibility Paradox

When you merge inverse care law with the concept of administrative burden, you get what I call ‘The Bureaucratic Eligibility Paradox.’

The Bureaucratic Eligibility Paradox indicates that the people most in need of help are often the least able to satisfy the bureaucratic behaviors required to receive it. The Bureaucratic Eligibility Paradox is reinforced by overworked, underpaid, frontline employees who are challenged with addressing difficult consumers while trying to balance their requests with work related to the administrative justification for their position’s existence.

The Academy has spoken, now for the philosophers: The Dionysus Awards, celebrating movies of the past year that challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways.

Coming April 12 to KALW. More at https://philosophytalk.org/shows/the-2026-dionysus-awards.

Cruelty Learned Better Manners

-The Costumes of Power-

Human cruelty did not disappear.

It simply learned how to dress better.

For thousands of years we have told ourselves the same comforting story: that humanity evolves, that we learn from the past, that the worst chapters remain behind us.

But look closely.

The costumes changed.
The language changed.
The systems became more polished.

The cruelty stayed.

Slavery did not vanish.
It reorganized itself into supply chains and production belts where speed is rewarded and exhaustion remains invisible.

Silence did not disappear.
It became public relations, rehearsed statements, carefully edited news designed to calm rather than reveal.

Control did not fade.
It simply learned to speak the language of order, stability, and progress.

And we accepted it.

We accepted it because we are taught from childhood that obedience keeps the world functioning, that rules exist for everyone, that systems are built for the common good.

Yet history tells another story.

Many of the doctrines we are told to follow are quietly ignored by the very people who benefit from them.

Power rarely lives by the rules it writes for others.

And while these enormous structures continue turning—markets, institutions, governments, narratives repeated until they sound like truth—something much smaller and more fragile happens somewhere else.

A person is wondering what is wrong with them.

Someone is asking themselves if it is safe to say what they feel, if it is acceptable to exist the way they naturally are, if speaking honestly will cost them belonging.

That moment has repeated itself across centuries.

Different century.
Different language.
The same doubt.

The tragedy of our species may not be cruelty itself. Cruelty has always existed.

The deeper tragedy is how easily human beings can be trained to accept it.

We learn to look away.
We learn to repeat what we are told.
We learn to protect systems even when those systems quietly grind people down.

All for stability.
All for order.
Sometimes for nothing more than a paycheck.

And so the world continues as it has for centuries—refined, efficient, technologically advanced—yet still capable of leaving human beings feeling unseen, unheard, and alone.

Civilization did not erase the old injustices.

It simply modernized them.

The chains became contracts.
The silence became policy.
The obedience became culture.
The currency became worth.

And somewhere tonight, a person sits quietly believing something is wrong with them — because they think differently, feel too deeply, refuse to trade compassion for advantage, refuse to move through life guided only by greed.

For centuries we have been trained to call this difference a flaw.

But perhaps it was never the flaw.

Perhaps it is the part of us that refuses to disappear.