/jp/ - Otaku Culture

It is four thirty in the morning, and I've just woken up in the shower, laying in the tub with a fierce stream of hot water gone cold with time running frigid down my face. I have no idea how long I've been asleep. It doesn't really matter.
Rising, I grab a towel from the pile on the floor, wrapping it around my body with an odd sense of gratitude, and move down the short hallway to my tiny bedroom. Looking around the clothes strewn about the floor, I find a T-shirt and pants I like (or maybe just choose them at random, I'm not really sure anymore…) and shrug them on, tug, zip, button, adjust for comfort. Ha, comfort. Ignoring the insistent tapping from the other side of the cardboard and duct-tape covered window (where my gaze lingers for a moment, but only a moment. I think.) I head into the kitchen for breakfast (soggy cereal with milk grown slightly warm from the broken refrigerator) and a demotivated perusal of the help wanted section of last weeks old newspaper. I used to get the newspaper every morning, searching diligently for a job, a task, anything to get me moving forward and upward, out of this shitty fourteenth floor loft in a slumhouse on the south side of a city that hasn't been worth living in by all accounts since the seventies, but it doesn't really feel worth it anymore. With a sigh, I dump the remaining cereal and set the bowl on the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink. I need to get out of here.

Back down the hall and into my room to grab a jacket (it's freezing in here), and my eyes lock on that sheet of cardboard taped over the window. From behind it, softly, tap, tap, tap. She's still out there. She always is, as soon as it gets dark, until the sun rises, knocking gently on the window, fourteen stories up, hair blowing in the night time breeze, beckoning me to open the window, to let her in. I can change your life, she seems to say, if you'll let me. Shuddering, I look away.

Nate (God I miss that kid) used to tell me that I was depressed, that I was seeing things, that I should get help. Used to, till one day she came knocking on his window too. He called me then, breathless, apologizing for not believing me. He sounded strange on the phone… eager. I never heard from him again. I wonder if he's better off.

When I first came here, it felt like life was amazing, like the world was one big opportunity stretching itself wide in front of me and just waiting for me to take that first step. I'd chosen this apartment, with its window view of the entire, sprawling, electric starscape of the city lit up at night like God's own fallen Christmas tree, just so I could look out and revel in that feeling, in that high. That feeling got me through the first few months.

Gradually, though, the joy faded, and I was left with so many needs, and so many troubles, and never enough money, and so much time to think about it all, and I slipped into the bleak depression I've been in up till now. Then one day, she came.

Back then, I'd been able to sleep at night, every night, regularly, instead of falling into fitful patches of restless slumber at disjointed times, and I'd been asleep when she first showed up. I was awoken by a soft, almost polite knocking, so soft that at first I got up and went to the door, looking out into the silent hallway. When I went to return to bed, I saw her. Standing on nothing, fourteen floors up, her dress blowing in the wind, one hand knocking on the glass like a door, the other waving as I saw her, beckoning, a friendly gesture. I've read stories in my lifetime of creatures and spirits that knock on windows at night, of vampires who can only enter a home if the owner answers the door. I knew (or thought I knew) the risks. I went out into the living room and tossed and turned on the couch, hoping she'd be gone by morning.

And she was, but she was back the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that, knocking, calling silently to me, promising wordlessly that she could change my life, make it better. Eventually, I covered the window, trying to ignore her, hoping normalcy would return, but no. It never did. It never will.

So here I am, looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at that window, shaking with desperate desire to look out, to open it, to let her in, and knowing with every fiber of my being how desperately right it would be. I've held out this long, but as I sink deeper into myself, I know that soon, soon, I'll walk to that window, and with shaking hands I'll tear down the barrier, and I'll reach for the latch-

>>18987569
Origin: the incarnation of humanity’s fear of the taboo (extending beyond boundaries; the unknown).

There's nothing implicit in the laws of nature which says that stealing things is wrong, because the laws of nature don't have anything to do with morality. Neither the concept of 'theft' nor the concept of 'wrong' are innate to humans. They have to be taught. The key difference between this idea and Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is that this idea allows the contents of the 'poster' to be altered by material from the 'IN' slot. Every human starts off with a blank poster, and over the years, it's filled with more and more rules for taking the 'input' of human social interaction and converting it into 'output' – your own participation in that social interaction. So, if we're talking about 'theft' being 'wrong', we have to think about it in terms of the 'input', the 'output', and the 'rules'.
Anyway, all of these 'rules' get used to process the 'input' and eventually the 'output' pops out – let's say, for instance, that you decided to take the banknote and return it to the guy who dropped it. In this case, the rule 'theft is wrong' won out over 'money is something to be acquired'. The idea is that every human is fundamentally just 'shuffling symbols' inside the 'box' – mindlessly accepting input and manipulating it according to arbitrary, abstract rules that we only have because 'culture' or 'civilisation' imparts them to us through meta-rules. Internally, there's no such thing as society, or even morality – just rules and meta-rules, which the vast majority of people go about their lives entirely unaware of.
It's not impossible for people to become aware that they exist inside a 'box'. In some cases, they even recognise the nature of rules and meta-rules. People whose process of ideation is no longer unconsciously governed by rules and meta-rules – these people are 'sociopaths'. sociopaths are those who are aware of the arbitrary nature of the rules that govern the nature and method of their human interactions

Yukari is a sociopath.

at Youkai Sage, the living boundary. And you see everything.

All states are defined only by their boundaries. Every time something happens to change, there is a border crossed - whether from now to then, or a boundary of greater minutiae.
You have forever seen them all.
It is a shallow eternity, defined only in the reflections of fleeting moments (the future claims that sentiment is so very important).
It is not yet time for the future. It has merely been a hundred thousand years of this day.
Yukari Yakumo - the Yukari that you are, and the countless eternities of Yukari Yakumo and her endless, countless selves and titles - can see each boundary. Seconds last for times that mortals might only imagine as an infinite space. They cannot see.
You can look to one grain of sand and see all that it is, across all possibilities.
It is too much, you have heard. It's too much, you have said, time and time again.
You remember humanity. You remember sentiment.
Yukari Yakumo smiles. It is hard to remember, but it is important.
You understand your limits. The ability to understand all has become the ability to change all, but it carries its prices.
You can see every single detail, every last feeling and choice - and in that, it is too late.
Time itself has long been rendered meaningless. Timelines span an infinite horizontal stretch - your time is worth less than anyone else's in this world, and it is worth more.
There are blind spots. Points where boundaries make themselves unknown, because perhaps in existing, they themselves do not understand the reality that they have so imposed themselves upon.
Treasure these moments. Treasure these blanks in time, these worlds that you can explore only as one, singular self.
Treasure your ignorance.
You have heard rumors of a land that takes power from disbelief, but those timelines are eternities that have passed in a world outside.
With understanding, it is a simple border. Cause and effect, act and consequence. When boundaries form upon boundaries, possibilities continue to blossom.
You are Yukari Yakumo, the Border of Phantasm. You are a living dream, and in this, you are more tired than any who may yet sleep.
Yukari Yakumo wakes, as always, from a dream. She is the living dream... and that is all. Dreams remain as dreams, fragments of closed and past realities.
She declines tea simply because she feels like it. It is an unpredictable little thing.
Now is not yet the time.
Yukari produces a book. It's hers, in craft and writing. And again, simple, unpredictable sentiment.
Lines and edges blur. Paper and covers lose their edge.
The book distorts and vanishes, simply destroyed.
It is not the time for that story. Not yet.
Yukari Yakumo knows the time will come. And it is a sentimental knowledge.
"Lady Yukari?" Ran is confused. She understands that her master has changed. She understands her master as only her strange, single experience could.
She has seen the changes, but she cannot know what they are.
"It was incomplete." Yukari smiles. "I will finish it another time."
Ran nods. She's still confused. She's used to it. In some sense, she enjoys it still.
"When it has an ending, it will be written."
Yukari can remember what it was like to know nothing. And she can remember what it was like to know nearly everything.
What were tiny blind spots have become an endless dark; the world may be explored again.
It is easier now than it was then; this strange, strange world is kind, and Yukari is not weak.
Sentiment is important; this lesson had taken the Youkai of Boundaries centuries of countless, sideways eternities to learn. Some mortals knew it, and yet...
It is a marvel, thinks Yukari, to remember as if the past could only be behind us. An endless wonder to look at the present as a single moment, to see the future as that which was merely to come.
Darkness - blindness - surrounds the end of a strange, strange loop. It is the only shattered causality that Yukari remembers.
That is a story for another time.
Yukari Yakumo, the Great Youkai Sage, the Border of Phantasm, the Mastermind Behind the Spiriting Away, smiles. Each name it its own, little story, and each story tells at that which she has chosen, in sentiment and chaos, not yet to know.
And again, sentiment. Whims and unpredictable desires. They mark the only blindness cured in Gensokyo; the only thing that Yukari now sees that she did not before.
And, to the living dream, to the Youkai and the being of the past and future sitting on this strange, strange boundary, it is worthwhile. Where power and knowledge have failed, strange little feelings live on.
"I'm going to pay Reimu a visit," says Yukari. Ran thinks to ask the menial questions of a proper servant, but Yukari is gone.
And, crossing lengths in an instant, the living dream remains awake.

Majestic

>>18224110
See, totally harmle

It is four thirty in the morning, and I've just woken up in the shower, laying in the tub with a fierce stream of hot water gone cold with time running frigid down my face. I have no idea how long I've been asleep. It doesn't really matter.
Rising, I grab a towel from the pile on the floor, wrapping it around my body with an odd sense of gratitude, and move down the short hallway to my tiny bedroom. Looking around the clothes strewn about the floor, I find a T-shirt and pants I like (or maybe just choose them at random, I'm not really sure anymore…) and shrug them on, tug, zip, button, adjust for comfort. Ha, comfort. Ignoring the insistent tapping from the other side of the cardboard and duct-tape covered window (where my gaze lingers for a moment, but only a moment. I think.) I head into the kitchen for breakfast (soggy cereal with milk grown slightly warm from the broken refrigerator) and a demotivated perusal of the help wanted section of last weeks old newspaper. I used to get the newspaper every morning, searching diligently for a job, a task, anything to get me moving forward and upward, out of this shitty fourteenth floor loft in a slumhouse on the south side of a city that hasn't been worth living in by all accounts since the seventies, but it doesn't really feel worth it anymore. With a sigh, I dump the remaining cereal and set the bowl on the stack of unwashed dishes in the sink. I need to get out of here.

Back down the hall and into my room to grab a jacket (it's freezing in here), and my eyes lock on that sheet of cardboard taped over the window. From behind it, softly, tap, tap, tap. She's still out there. She always is, as soon as it gets dark, until the sun rises, knocking gently on the window, fourteen stories up, hair blowing in the night time breeze, beckoning me to open the window, to let her in. I can change your life, she seems to say, if you'll let me. Shuddering, I look away.

Nate (God I miss that kid) used to tell me that I was depressed, that I was seeing things, that I should get help. Used to, till one day she came knocking on his window too. He called me then, breathless, apologizing for not believing me. He sounded strange on the phone… eager. I never heard from him again. I wonder if he's better off.

When I first came here, it felt like life was amazing, like the world was one big opportunity stretching itself wide in front of me and just waiting for me to take that first step. I'd chosen this apartment, with its window view of the entire, sprawling, electric starscape of the city lit up at night like God's own fallen Christmas tree, just so I could look out and revel in that feeling, in that high. That feeling got me through the first few months.

Gradually, though, the joy faded, and I was left with so many needs, and so many troubles, and never enough money, and so much time to think about it all, and I slipped into the bleak depression I've been in up till now. Then one day, she came.

Back then, I'd been able to sleep at night, every night, regularly, instead of falling into fitful patches of restless slumber at disjointed times, and I'd been asleep when she first showed up. I was awoken by a soft, almost polite knocking, so soft that at first I got up and went to the door, looking out into the silent hallway. When I went to return to bed, I saw her. Standing on nothing, fourteen floors up, her dress blowing in the wind, one hand knocking on the glass like a door, the other waving as I saw her, beckoning, a friendly gesture. I've read stories in my lifetime of creatures and spirits that knock on windows at night, of vampires who can only enter a home if the owner answers the door. I knew (or thought I knew) the risks. I went out into the living room and tossed and turned on the couch, hoping she'd be gone by morning.

And she was, but she was back the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that, knocking, calling silently to me, promising wordlessly that she could change my life, make it better. Eventually, I covered the window, trying to ignore her, hoping normalcy would return, but no. It never did. It never will.

So here I am, looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at that window, shaking with desperate desire to look out, to open it, to let her in, and knowing with every fiber of my being how desperately wrong it would be. I've held out this long, but as I sink deeper into myself, I know that soon, soon, I'll walk to that window, and with shaking hands I'll tear down the barrier, and I'll reach for the latc

Once a hag, always a ha-