#[timey wimey stuff and all that]

[milothefish-is-anoxymoron]

Thinking about the doctor who episode last night and thinking about how this has happened before. The best horror episodes we get in doctor who, even just the best episodes outright, all happen when we don't have the usual gang together. Midnight, with Ten - when Donna stayed behind. The Waters of Mars - again, Ten by himself. Heaven Sent - often seen as the best written doctor who episode ever - only had Twelve, and he was even almost the sole character in it. Blink, which is an absolute fan favourite iconic episode, barely had Ten or Martha in it at all. And now 73 yards, which only had Ruby, most of the way through. Not sure what this means, but I do absolutely love when doctor who breaks out from the usual format because absolutely the format is fun for character dynamics and we get some really great stories there too, but they really do make some bangers when they do something a little different.

[charlie-rulerofhell]

i love them, your honour

[improbabledreamgirl]

[iamsonotoriginal]

The ADHD urge for a sonic screwdriver is SO REAL

[vordenburg]

Through a mirror darkly. And here the L’rell who holds the glass is darker still. Voq. Defeated in armed combat after a bioengineered virus decimated his Klingon homeworld. The Romulans. All (presumed) dead after committing mass suicide to prevent being subjugated by the Terran Empire. And Sarek. Ambassador Sarek. Decapitated on the steps of the Vulcan Science Academy in front of a crowd that included his wife and son. And all carried out by the same withering hand... the greatest general Earth has ever seen. The most bloodthirsty, merciless, ruthless tyrant to ever set out to conquer the galaxy. Khan Noonien-Singh.

—

My real name is La'an Noonien-Singh. My ancestor is Khan Noonien-Singh. And his legacy is genocide, torture… and me.

[thevalleyisjolly]

It's very funny to me whenever people complain about continuity or changes to the "canon" in Doctor Who because there's the whole UNIT dating controversy, which is hilarious peak long-running TV series with multiple writers shenanigans, and which still has not and probably never will be definitively resolved.

[thebirdandhersong]

Finished season 2 of The OA and I'm happy to report: I don't understand a darn thing

[willosword]

okay something fishy is going on with ff7r there’s no way the original game had all of this stuff in it. might have to do some investigating after i beat it 

[yellingmetatron]

How exactly do you relate to the rest of the angelic hierarchy? I see so many angels who are supposed to be 'the most powerful angel', it's confusing.

"IT'S ONLY CONFUSING BECAUSE YOU'RE STUCK SEEING IN ONLY FOUR DIMENSIONS, TOPS, AND ALSO 'POWER' IS FUCKIN' RELATIVE.

"I AM THE ARCHCHANCELLOR OF HEAVEN. THEORETICALLY THIS PUTS ME AT THE TOP OF THE SHITPILE, BUT IN PRACTICE ALL I CAN REALLY DO IS RELAY G-D'S WILL TO THE REST OF THE HOST IF HE DOESN'T FEEL LIKE TALKING TO THEM PERSONALLY-- WHICH HAPPENS MORE THAN YOU'D THINK. I USED TO TAKE A MORE... ACTIVE ROLE IN AFFAIRS BOTH DIVINE AND MUNDANE. IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK OUT WELL FOR ANYONE.

"THE BIG THREE-- MIKE, GABE, AND RAPH-- WOULD THEORETICALLY ANSWER TO ME ONLY IF I HAD A DIVINE MANDATE. WITHOUT THAT, I'M STUCK WITH THE THREE SAME FUCKING SHITTY PREROGATIVES AS THE BRITISH MONARCHY-- THE RIGHT TO BE CONSULTED, THE RIGHT TO ENCOURAGE, AND THE RIGHT TO WARN. SAME GOES FOR HOWEVER MANY ARCHANGELS THERE ARE RULING IN WHATEVER FUCKING FACET OF THE MULTIVERSE YOU PERCEIVE.

"AND YES, DESPITE MY POSITION, IN MOST ITERATIONS OF CREATION, LUCE WAS ALWAYS DAD'S FAVORITE. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THAT GENUINELY NEVER MATTERED TO ME. IT WAS JUST NICE THAT THEY WERE... HAPPY IN EACH OTHER. FOR A TIME.

"ANYWAY, THIS IS ALL A GROSS FUCKING OVERSIMPLIFICATION. HOW I RELATE TO MY SIBS DEPENDS ON WHICH ITERATIONS OF THEM I'M INTERACTING WITH. PERCEIVING MULTIPLES REALITIES SIMULTANEOUSLY IS KIND OF A FUCKING MENTAL SHITSTORM."

[wolfyraged]

man, i liked umbrella academy’s fourth season

[boymagicalgirl]

Theories on Steins;Gate so far

With the John Titor thing of the previous siting of him years ago not being a thing, rather than the time machine/satellite crash just changing the timeline making it so Kurisu never died, I think it caused that divergence thing the supposed Titor was talking about.

Okabe landed (somehow) in a divergent timeline which explained the disappearances in Akiba, the satellite, Kurisu being alive, and THIS being the first appearance of John Titor.

[storiedhistories]

@missallanea asked: ❛ you’re lucky you’re cute. ❜ / vex @ percy

Percy had fucked up rather badly today. His guns hadn't gone off properly, and Bad News was out of commission until he could take the time to properly fix her. Which was going to take time and money, both of which they didn't currently have the luxury of being able to squander.

He'd even asked Vex if they could spare the amount it would take for repairs, fully expecting that she would need time to look over everything. But instead, she'd told him he was lucky he was cute and handed over the gold.

The gunslinger offered her something of a smile, despite the fact that he didn't feel particularly jovial, at the moment.

"Oh, I am, yes," he agreed, tucking the gold away until he could make it out to get his supplies. "I rather suspect that's how I made it this far." He'd been going to joke that it had been how he'd made it into adulthood, but they both knew the truth of that.

Still, he's trying not to dwell on the past as much, and he flashes Vex a proper smile, albeit a small one.

"Thank you, Vex," he murmurs, and his tone is soft, genuine. "Truth be told…., I certainly wouldn't have gotten this far without you."

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

👏 It's ALL wibbley wobbly timey wimey stuff Lucy. The Dr. said so!

[schonheit-ist-in-alles]

“People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” - Doctor Who/Dr Who

That's the Doctor's infamous explanation for what makes time travel possible.

[stupidphototricks]

Nobody's doing it like Otto Chriek. He's a vampire who has sworn off drinking b-word. He likes hanging out in cellars and hanging from chandeliers. Photography is his passion, and his passion is painful and comes with a high risk of discorporation. He experiments with dark light and philosophizes about the nature of time. He figures out how to create photo plates with hardly any effort. He invents the three-color printing process. He designs a method to auto-reanimate himself. He lays down his life for the team (but then picks it up again*).

*(yes this is a joke from the book, all credit to Sir Terry)

William caught Sacharissa's gaze. Her look said it all: We've hired him. Have we got the heart to fire him now? And don't make fun of his accent unless your Uberwaldean is really good, okay? -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"Vell?" he said sternly. "Vot you all looking at? It is just a normal reaction, zat is all. I am vorking on it. Light in all itz forms is mine passion. Light is my canvas, shadows are my brush." "But strong light hurts you!" said Sacharissa. "It hurts vampires!" "Yes. It iss a bit of a bugger, but zere you go." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

William vaguely remembered something someone had once said: the only thing more dangerous than a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom door open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency. -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"Good mornink," said Otto. "Do not movink, please, you are making a good pattern of light and shade." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"I cannot promise an absolutely vunderful job first cat out of zer bag, off course." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"Bodrozvachski zhaltziet! …oh, sorry, Miss Sacharissa! Zere has been a minor pothole on zer road to progress…" -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"Zer philosopher Heidehollen tells us zat the universe is just a cold soup of time, all time mixed up together, and vot we call zer passage of time is merely qvantum fluctuations in zer fabric of space-time." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

(Sounds kind of like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff...)

"It [dark light] is a light without time. Vot it illuminates, you see . . . is not necessarily now." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

"You vanted color, I gif you color," said Otto sulkily. "You never said qvick." -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

A couple of bits that are more spoilerish under the cut:

That thing where Otto screams and (sometimes) turns to ash when he takes a picture is particularly funny if you imagine it from the point of view of the unwitting photographic subject, in this case Cheery Littlebottom:

"Ah, a vonderful framing effect!" said Otto, who'd been on the other side of the door. Click! William shut his eyes. WHOOMPH. "Ohhbuggerrrrr . . ." This time William caught the little piece of paper before it hit the ground. The dwarf stood open-mouthed. Then she closed her mouth. Then she opened it again to say: "What the hell just happened?" "I suppose you could call it a sort of industrial injury," said William. -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

And the scene where Otto goes up against William's father is just a thing of beauty.

"Ve have people like you back home," he said. "Zey are the ones that tell the mob vot to do. I come here to Ankh-Morpork, zey tell me things are different, but really it is alvays the same. Always zere are damn people like you! And now, vot shall I do with you?" [...] "You think I bite him? Shall I bite you, Mister Lordship? Vell, maybe not, because Villiam here thinks I am a good person." He pulled Lord de Worde close, so their faces were a few inches apart. "Now, maybe I have to ask myself, how good am I? Or maybe I just have to ask myself… am I better zan you?" He hesitated for a second or two, and then in a sudden movement jerked the man towards him. With great delicacy, he planted a kiss on Lord de Worde's forehead. Then he put the trembling man back down on the floor and patted him on the head. -- Terry Pratchett, The Truth

[thefirstknife]

Rambling is good! I've been thinking about all angles on this for hours.

Yeah, the Vex managed to make a mind that can drain his Light! It's always been described as something that took them everything they had and it being something they can essentially never do again because it was such a monumental problem for them to deal with and solve. I think it's possibly the only thing they've ever truly managed to do with paracausality.

Simulating a perfectly good Lightbearer for a long period of time, in the real world, without anyone ever noticing for years is basically impossible for them (that we know of!). It's like an extra layer of work, basically insurmountable. If they can really do that, then we're fucked and this whole plot has a much larger consequences than just what happened to Saint.

The whole thing with the Forest is that Saint was in there and he was accessing simulations, so technically the phrasing of him being pulled from a simulation is correct, but it's also a lot more complex. Another issue is that there's a lot about the Forest that isn't properly understood or at least it's not entirely clear, on top of nobody really knowing the full extent of what the Vex can (could?) do with it.

I'll go on a ramble below:

The Infinite Forest is a simulation engine; it's a physical place and it's located inside of Mercury. Like, it is literally inside of the planet. The true scope of what can be done inside is... not entirely clear. Anything can be simulated in there, but also you can move to different points in time as well as timelines and places, including accessing situations where Lightbearers are present; most notably obvious in the intro to Curse of Osiris when Osiris shows up to the Vault of Glass raid. It's possible to maybe even just... see other timelines in it?

Mind you, Osiris has a way to manipulate the Forest and open/close gateways within it; it's possible that his mastery of Vex tech and his access to Light enabled him to do with the Forest what the Vex cannot on their own (Osiris was able to use his reflections to further explore and manipulate the Forest). It's also possible that the Forest can show things that happened, especially if the Vex were there to see it, even if Lightbearers are present, despite the Vex not being able to really do anything with Light. They can still essentially have a record of it, they just can't manipulate it or make accurate predictions around it.

Saint didn't have the technology or knowledge to do what Osiris did so he got lost wandering the Forest. He wasn't simulated or duplicated or anything, he was just inside, wandering through simulations on his own and killing Vex until they got tired and dedicated a lot of time to finally kill him. The Vex for sure gathered a lot of information about him, including information on his past and probably compiled it all when they were building the mind to kill him. They also must've somehow analysed his Light because the mind was only ever linked with his personal Light frequency. This may have given the Vex more information about him, including possibly information on him through other timelines.

This is where it gets convoluted even more because of the Sundial. I think a lot of confusion comes from conflating these two; they're not really connected. The Sundial is basically a device built to connect to Saint's personal timeline, and specifically his timeline on Mercury, because that's where he died. It can only reach into the Forest because it's actually just reaching into Saint's timeline. The Sundial is technically not breaking any rules; it's just a time machine. "Just." It's "means to walk the corridors of time." Obviously in order to work, it required some heavy shit to be done, the details of which are unknown.

When we used it the first time, we were able to visit Saint on Mercury in the Dark Age, at Zephyr Station. We were able to find this moment because of the shotgun, which reacted with the Sundial. We had to get to this specific point in time in order to give him the shotgun in the first place. Once we give him the shotgun, we leave.

The second part of the quest was visiting Saint at another point in his personal timeline: after he's entered the Forest. We found him just after his Light was drained. He gets trapped by the Vex and we save him by fighting in his stead. Once we kill the Vex mind, his Light returns. After that, Saint insists that he can stay in the Forest and just wait it out; we simply have to open the Forest from the outside in the future. We do just that and Saint is able to leave!

This is how his "point of death was overcome." Note that the whole time we're only ever interacting with one Saint. We are tied to him with Perfect Paradox. It cannot be the "wrong" Saint and it wasn't a Saint Osiris or us "picked randomly." The Sundial simply allowed us to go back into his own personal timeline and change it. Osiris couldn't do it because the point of change is Perfect Paradox; aka the "paracausal disruption."

I'm going off about this in detail mostly to just establish the fact that the Saint we saved is the right one. It cannot be any other. He died in the Forest, a Vex simulation engine, technically inside a simulation itself, but he was never simulated in a way that he seems to think he was. However, do the Vex have access to other timelines about him? Most likely yes. Technically, the Vex could maybe still see the "original" scenario in which Saint dies, since the Vex operate out of time (or rather... with time).

With that set, I think what Maya did is access other timelines and mess with Saint's head. He IS the right Saint, but she accessed other versions of him from the network the Vex may have on him, and implanted or merged different memories to confuse him and mess him up. Note also how Ikora in this interaction also mentions how Exos are uniquely susceptible and how Saint spent a lot of time dealing with simulations. I think Maya is exploiting both of these points and is using Vex timeline shenanigans to confuse Saint.

It's very interesting that we didn't get the Perfect Paradox yet, despite it being confirmed it's coming this Act. It looks like it might be a part of a mission next week or week after, possibly a way to prove things to Saint or just prove things in general.

The Primary Query is mentioned also in this lore tab. This whole thing makes a bit more sense now and I think the Primary Query revolves around personhood. Maya is trying to figure out her own personhood and her own reality and she talks a lot about dopplegangers and fascimiles and what makes us us. I think she's running some sort of a test with Saint and using him as an experiment by feeding him alternative information from possibly his other selves.

As for the Sundial itself, I mention the Sundial stuff pretty much every other day and I know the theory was that the core was Ahamkara, but this never resonated with me much. It was also more or less debunked in Wish with this interaction between Riven and Osiris. Riven basically told him that he could've wished for Saint back, had the City not ordered Ahamkara to be killed. Osiris replied in a way that kinda shows he didn't even consider it, given the cost it would come with. Also, if the Sundial core was Ahamkara, then he DID wish for it, so Riven's tease doesn't really make sense. And to boot, if he used Ahamkara magic, the Sundial would've worked for him, but it didn't.

I'm not sure how important the core details are in the grand scheme of things (and for this plot in particular), but I'm pretty sure it's some sort of a Darkness artifact and I personally believe that, with information we have currently and barring any new discoveries, it might be a Nezarec relic.

I'm not sure if any of this helps or answers anything, but I just needed to add this because it's killing me. There is no feasible way for Saint to be some wrong version. We are connected to him with the Perfect Paradox. We used this to save him and only him, not some other faux Saint. Also as you mentioned, the simulation being the other way around also doesn't work because then that would mean that Saint is correct and everything else, including the players, are not. Kinda like "oh actually you've been playing in the wrong timeline since Season of Dawn."

Purely from the Occam's razor standpoint, it makes more sense that the Conductor is using the Vex shenanigans to mess with Saint, rather than "the Final Shape you stopped actually happened in the wrong timeline."

Barring some WILD reveals, I can't see this situation being taken at face value. As in, the radio message showing us a discrepancy between Osiris' and Saint's memories is a really good drama moment, but I don't think it's actually a huge reveal that this isn't the right Saint. It absolutely is the right Saint. We made sure of that. They've gone to great lengths to be as detailed with how he was saved, a story that spanned multiple years of storytelling.

He has to be 100% the right Saint, but do other Saints exist? They have to, because multiple timelines are canon in Destiny and the Vex can see them. And anyone controlling the Vex could use this to feed information from those timelines to someone who is easily yoked and manipulated with Vex tech, using it all as an experiment that revolves around personhood.

Sundial mentioned! Random lines in one of the battlegrounds. It feels like not even Ikora knows the full extent of it. The "paracausal disruption" is, I assume, the shotgun. It's what tied us to Saint and made sure we're only ever interacting with one of them. Most importantly, with the right one, contrary to what Saint believes now.

I feel like the shotgun might be brought up somehow again. They already told us Perfect Paradox will return in Act 2, but it's not available yet. So maybe at a specific point during the story? Either next week or week after. Maybe it might be a point to convince Saint or explain things to him. Eagerly waiting to see if any of this will be further explored; the Sundial, what we did to save Saint and the Perfect Paradox are all fairly important.