Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Living with animals is weird when you think about it. We let these quite large wild, often carnivorous animals into our house and they just live there with us. We give them food and water and they learn to accept the strange and unnatural world of humans. I always wonder how much my cat understands me. She clearly responds to her name, knows when it is time to eat and when it is time to keep clear of the us. She seems independent, but then will always follow you around the garden, never too close but not too far either. Its fun watching her go about her life in the way that she must find totally normal but really isn't. She's living in a world she can't understand and has learnt to accept it, despite having no ability to interact with the world of man in any meaningful way.
The mind of a cat is far less capable than ours, and far less flexible within the levels it can operate. A good example of this is doors. My cat understands what doors are. She understands that they can open and let her through into a different area. But she also thinks that they can only be operated by us humans, which is only partly true. Usually when she wants to go through a door she'll sit in front of it and either meow to get someone's attention, or more often just sit there until someone happens to open it. Even if the door is ajar, she will not attempt to open it herself, even though many of the inside doors she could easily push open by leaning on them. But she won't do it. She has no understanding that she can alter the world with her own actions. If an object is in her way she simply cannot progress, she thinks there is just nothing she can do about it, even when there is. Sometimes its downright weird. For instance when I come home with a bag (particularly the stiffer paper ones), she will inevitably go inside it. Then, if I put a blanket or something over the top of the bag she will stay in there forever, totally unable to escape from her ridiculously simple predicament. Occasionally she will escape, but only if she rolls over and pushes the bag over by accident; normally she will just sit in the bag waiting, and if she does really want out she'll mew until I remove the blanket. Why is this the case? Why can't an animal whose instincts for survival are just as strong as mans be totally unable to think outside the box? (pun not intended) Or rather I suppose the real question here is what makes humans so special that we are able to think outside the box? Sure, there are other animals that would be able to work out how to escape from a paper bag, but none can even conceive of manipulating the world as we do. Maybe it has to do with our opposable thumbs? Our ability to pick up objects is an often overlooked ability after all: even the strongest bull couldn't move a 1kg stone 10 foot across a field, when even a human toddler could accomplish that. Or maybe its purely our mental faculties: that same bull could indeed find a way to move that stone if he could use a tool: say a stout stick to hockey-push the stone around. What I think it is that let's us humans accomplish tasks the rest of the animal kingdom finds impossible is imagination. We can imagine ourselves moving that stone, we can imagine ourselves pushing and opening a door, so therefore we can accomplish it.
In the recently airing anime "Sousou no Frieren", it is explained that magic is constrained only by what the user can imagine themselves achieving. Someone who cannot imagine casting a spell can never cast it for purely that reason. However the fan-favourite character Ubel has a further ability that enhances her "cutting" magic. She describes as it as a "feeling-type magic" where she is able to disregard the true properties of a material and logic in general to be able to cut anything she can visualise cutting. She can also copy the spells of others if she is able to empathise with them, something other mages cannot understand. In fact other mages describe Ubel as unnatural and downright evil, but her abilities are really just extensions of what makes magic tick in this universe: human imagination. To be able to imagine different possible futures allows to have free-will. It also allows us to empathise with others by creating a fantasy of yourself as them, putting yourself in their shoes to coin a phrase. Ubel takes this innate human ability to the next level, and is able to bypass the barriers of "logic" and "reason" that humans constrain their imagination with and live within a purely empathy-driven worldview, where the limits of her abilities are limited by her ability to understand how others think. "The Ubelmensch" if you will. Just as a cat is unable to imagine itself opening a door, we cannot imagine ourselves achieving what we believe to be impossible, and Sousou no Frieren says that this thought is the very thing which prevents us from achieving it in the first place. This sentiment is common in anime: think Gurren Lagann and the drill to break the heavens, Char Aznable's "Earthnoids' souls are weighed down by gravity", or even Haruhi Suzumiya as the very incarnation of omnipotent imagination herself. We all have a dream of a limitless future, and maybe its only ourselves that we have to overcome to get there.
^My cat