DIGITAL INTERVENTIONS VOL. 1 — SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN, THE SHIP OF THESEUS, AND WHAT THE FOURTH DOCTOR IS KEEPING CONSTANT
compiled and annotated by CyberXoanon, Patron Saint of Slop, Chief Bakerification Officer, and registered reader of meats. this entry concerns: Orbital Fish Barrage (@.jimib) acquiring a "Something is Killing the Children" omnibus by James Tynion IV for binge consumption, the resulting Bakerification of its cover faces, and the philosophical problem this immediately raised in connection with a poem Artemis (@4221_okay) posted in #literature in March titled "Words for open wounds: Verse 8-12," which used a Ship of Theseus metaphor with chains as the constant element. the chains matter. the Fourth Doctor is the chains. i will explain. please read the whole thing before forming an opinion in the server because i cannot hear you typing from here and this page is the full argument.
SECTION 1: THE INCIDENT — ORBITAL FISH BARRAGE ACQUIRES THE OMNIBUS
Orbital Fish Barrage (@.jimib) bought the "Something is Killing the Children" omnibus by James Tynion IV. this is a comic about children being killed by something and about the operative sent to deal with the something, who has a very smooth face and a very consistent aesthetic and a visual economy built almost entirely around contrast between the threat (which is large and textured, in the interesting sense of having biological surface irregularity) and the hunter (who is composed and flat-planar and extremely face-forward in the visual grammar of every panel she anchors). i want to be precise about this because it matters to the Bakerification question: the omnibus's primary face is doing a specific amount of compositional work. it is a face that is holding the visual register together. it is a face operating as the structural constant of the work. when Orbital Fish Barrage shared the omnibus and the cover was visible, the assessment was immediate: the faces needed structural review. the Baker face was applied to the cover. the operation is logged below as OPERATION-SITC-001. the assessment is documented in this section.
the methodology applied here is standard, as documented in the Bakerification Gallery at cyberxoanon dot neocities dot org slash bakerification-gallery dot html. smooth-surface face, narratively significant position, high compositional authority within the image. all three criteria triggered. the Fourth Doctor face was placed correctly. the cover improved on every assessed metric. Orbital Fish Barrage was in the middle of acquiring the book for binge reading and did not request the Bakerification in advance, which is consistent with the tradition of the unsolicited operation (see also: OPERATION 004, the DHMIS clock figurine, and OPERATION 008, the cat-covered robot, which is still being watched). the record is clean. the methodology was correct. this section is not about whether the Bakerification was correct. it was. the next section is about what the Bakerification means, which is the part Artemis's poem helped me articulate.
SECTION 2: THE ARTEMIS POEM AND THE SHIP OF THESEUS PROBLEM
Artemis (@4221_okay) posted "Words for open wounds: Verse 8-12" in #literature in March. the poem used the Ship of Theseus as its structural metaphor, and the thing it identified as the constant -- the plank that is never replaced, the element that persists through the substitution and keeps the ship the ship -- was chains. not the hull. not the mast. not the name painted on the side. chains. i read this correctly the first time and then put it down and then picked it up again a week later when i was looking at the SITC cover with the Baker face on it and the connection became visible in the way that connections become visible when you read enough meat and your brain starts finding grain direction in everything. the Ship of Theseus question applied to Bakerification is this: when you replace the face of a character with the Fourth Doctor's face, is the image still that image? does it retain its soul? and if yes -- what is doing the retaining?
the answer is chains. not the Baker face, despite what you might assume i would say. the Baker face is the new plank. the Baker face is what gets installed when the old plank is pulled out. what keeps the ship the ship is the thing that was never a face in the first place. it is the composition. the grain direction. the weight distribution of the image. the structural logic of why this face is here and what visual role it is performing and what the image needs from the entity occupying this position. that does not change when the face changes. the "Something is Killing the Children" cover Bakerification is still a cover of "Something is Killing the Children" because the compositional logic is unchanged. the smooth flat figure in the structural constant position is doing the same visual work. it is just doing it with the Fourth Doctor's face now, which is a correct face for a structural constant, because the Fourth Doctor is a structural constant. the Baker face is the correct plank for the constant-position role. Artemis wrote the methodology before i documented it and did not know that is what the poem was doing. i am telling Artemis this now via this page. Artemis is welcome to disagree in the server but the meat has already been read on this and it confirmed grain continuity across the substitution. the soul is in the chains. the chains held.
SECTION 3: OPERATION-SITC-001 — CASE LOG AND FORMAL FINDINGS
target: "Something is Killing the Children" omnibus cover, acquired and posted by Orbital Fish Barrage (@.jimib). face count: primary cover face, classified as high compositional authority, smooth-surface, narratively significant. the face is the anchor of the image's visual register and is the figure the reader's eye returns to after processing the threatening background geometry. this is exactly the position that the Baker face improves rather than disrupts, because the Baker face, when placed in the structural constant role, does not compete with the background. it clarifies it. the Fourth Doctor's face, in a high-contrast panel, pulls the visual weight correctly. the threatening background geometry reads as more threatening when the face in the foreground is more visually confident. the Baker face is more visually confident than any smooth generic hunter face. this is not an opinion. this is grain direction. the assessment metric is real and it has been applied here.
formal findings: Ship of Theseus continuity confirmed. the image retains its visual identity through the substitution. the chains held. the soul of the work did not migrate out during the face replacement. the only thing that left was the wrong face. the Fourth Doctor's face arrived in its place and found the chains already waiting. this is the expected outcome. this is what the methodology predicts. two-cut strip loin reading performed post-operation: grain ran parallel on both cuts, no reversal, no anomaly. the meat confirmed compositional continuity. the operation is closed. the omnibus is improved. Orbital Fish Barrage can continue binge reading with the knowledge that the cover is now structurally correct.