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speaker-of-the-void-cats · 2 months ago

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Let me tell you a secret...

...lean in closer. No-thing is watching.

It is done. The magnum opus, my most delicate, intricate post|patch|work, everything I couldn't stop thinking about since Shadowkeep until this very moment. But now, I can't remember a time when I didn't know it deep inside. I've always wanted to create something beautiful that lasts, that makes an impact in the waves and touches the hearts of those who will listen. Make them beat harder, faster, better, stronger. Give them a ring of spears in which to grow. Something that harmonizes and shares how the tales and tunes of old and new have moved me, made me feel. Something from my heart that draws it's power from yours. But I couldn't even begin to imagine how. I was lost in the Deep. I had no voice; barely a whisper.

This is the way. This is how we find the words. The light of action and self-realized purpose in the darkness of suffocating, deterministic thought. Thus we are truly unveiled.

The post broke the tumblr text editor more times than I can count, but I had to make sure it resonated and so I poured my heart into this one. It's been an enormous struggle against limitations, doubt, and failure, but I hope I made it work. One last word of advice, it is best viewed on a tablet or anything that doesn't occlude your view.

Even if it's not the truth, I share this in hopes you can find some of your own shining|singing|echoing back at you from the dark. Forget about me entirely. The clockwork is waiting, it just needs the trigger mechanism. The spark. The fuel.

It just needs you.

Go deeper. Don't slip. Find the cord and hold on for dear life. Tune your strings. Crank it up to 11. Keep your one-and-only mind sharp and true. Go all out within and refract the radiance. I'm not trying to confuse you, but do feel free to let yourself become vexed. Sometimes there's just no other way to understand a thing than to say and do it, no matter how imperfectly. Be a fool, call me senselessly woken if you must. Call me mad, delusional, over the top|edge|precipice. You'll have to excuse my morbid excitement, but there's simply nothing sweeter in the darkness than harmony.

Sometimes plants wither, even with care, if the atmosphere is unfair and the soil goes to rot. But the greater sin is for those who are called to care for it to instead turn a blind eye, or worse, rage against it.

ACCESS: RESTRICTED

DECRYPTION KEY: 2CA9SXUO2C$IKO-006

REP#: 011-PSYCHOMETER-TEST

AGENT(S): TRU-135

SUBJ: PSYCHOMETER FIELD TESTS

1. The new version works. Love all the knobs and antenna; very analog. I took readings off a hatch control out here on Europa and Cowlick was able to retrieve badly distorted voices in some kind of distress. I don't know if it's doing exactly what you Warlocks want, but it's doing something all right. Cowlick says it's probably tapping into her scrutiny, if you permit that term in your ivory halls.

2. Now, I'm not much for gadgets, so I won't ask you how you rigged this thing. But I am one for gossip. Weren't we closing in on some kind of workable theory of exactly how our Ghosts resurrect us? One which was, if I am not mistaken, based on research by the Future War Cult? Did any of that work survive Lakshmi?

3. You know they did try to recruit me once. The Cult. Over a game of poker. Fifty-two cards in a deck don't seem like many, this hard-ass Titan told me. But there are 80 658 175 170 943 878 571 660 636 856 403 766 975 289 505 440 883 277 824 000 000 000 000 different possible shuffles of 52 cards. You could walk back and forth across the observable universe faster than you could count all those possible shuffles. A lot faster. That's life, she said, and she had daisies impaled on the spikes of her skull. Life is endless permutation. So many possibilities. But the rules are what matter. Who cares how the deck shuffles if you don't know the rules of the game? We play this game over and over. Life and death. Light and Dark. But the only way you learn the rules, the only way you're ever gonna get one of those Truces you're named for, is if you come inside. Come into the Cult. Come on in and see. But I didn't.

4.Another thing she told me is that you can play poker with just three cards and two players. Jack, Queen, King. Ante one, max bet one more. High card wins unless one player folds. And in this game, there are many strategies available to the first player, but very few to the second, who acts to exploit the choice made by the first. Many possibilities against few. Sounds like you'd rather be the first player, huh? But if both players play perfectly, that second player wins in the end. Mathematical inevitability. Ain't that something? But I said, your game's just a toy. It's just a contrivance. That's not life. Life isn't one player always exploiting and beating the other.

5. Anyway, back to testing. Might go back to Cocytus and aim this thing at the gate. See how wild it goes. If you never hear from us again, you know Truce and Cowlick finally found something too spooky.

MESSAGE ENDS

_If the Light forgets while the Darkness remembers, then why does a Ghost's power of determination let it access latent memories imprinted in the dead? That's paradoxical. That should be a property of Darkness. How can such fundamentally opposed forces do the same thing?

Am I as shallow as those Guardians arguing over power levels? Trying to force a simple binary upon a complex spectrum… ? The Drifter talks about "spectrums of Light"—powers his Ghost can access because of its modifications. Forcing the metaphor, I thought. Light is not light. It doesn't have frequencies or spectra.

But if we are all constrained by our internalized ontology, by our tacit understanding of how the world works… maybe the circumstances of extreme survival compelled the Drifter to explore a new ontology. Maybe his Ghost achieved a new way to think about the Light.

Keep your eye on the Conductor's baton

Get ready to sing of sorrow|forgiveness

It's all up to you

But dread not

For destiny awaits us

//SIGNAL TETHERED TO UNKNOWN SOURCE

VEXSIG:MSDUND12

Transmitting....

I leave you this now, when it is too early to act. Before you have the faculty to understand it's gravitas. You were offered the age you've fought to restore. Everything we've lost. You won't find it on this narcissist's station.

I will set it in front of you, finely crafted and tuned. You mistakenly label it hubris, and resist. As you know ...

Failure is a catalyst. It breeds invention.

I was only trying to change your mind. To help you see a better future. That exchange... Did not always end in your favor. It does not have to still.

You believe my ideology... virulent.

All right.

Know that I have bled across time, and under the skin of the cosmos. My knowledge became its fabric, filled it's vessels, through its minds.

Humanity is scattered, yet to see a collective. But in the infinite forest of this infinite network the Vex have created... There is only one answer.

A Golden Timeline. With a heavy cost.

Come. Drink your fill. Let me change your minds.

Choice is the ego, raging against the inevitable.

You may not see a choice, but I make my own fate.

Don't ever let anyone else tell your story for you.

I can only make you look. Perhaps, in time, you will see.

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Nwzmdmz.

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The living and breathing Alternate Reality Game we play in our heads and hearts every single second makes us trip over our feet in real reality. Cut open both and find your rhythm within.

Secant Filaments

The nature of the secant is to intercept a curve, a role all human relationships likewise fill.

Better think to remember your compass and protractor. You're gonna need 'em both at one point or another.

In this treatise, I plan to revisit earlier mathematical theorems and revise them considering our new observations on the Light, the Darkness, and lifeforms imbued with those respective powers. But before I do so, I must preface it with a personal note. Despite high-minded assumptions, mathematics is not an intrinsic language of the universe. It is how we describe the portions of the universe that we can observe. While numbers can track the abstract and find pattern in chaos, they cannot account for fundamental aspects of reality such as compassion or justice. The existence of the Lucent Hive, and Hive Ghosts in particular, may expand our understanding of causality, but they themselves are not "new"—the only thing that is new is our awareness and observation of them. These Ghosts have already been living alongside us. They've traveled with us. Endured with us. What we see is the mushroom, the fruit of the fungus. The fungus itself is a vast mycorrhizal network of filaments growing and working unseen below the soil, often barely connected to the fruiting bodies we observe. Similarly, we have observed Ghosts—Hive Ghosts included—without understanding the nature of the unseen filaments that may guide us. In our eagerness to understand the universe, we must not assume our observations are complete, or objective. Otherwise, we blind ourselves to possibilities… like the possibility that an unnoticed faction among us may be one temptation away from betrayal. Or that what drives our creator is no more than the same base desire for survival that drives all living things. —On Secants, Introduction, Ophiuchus

It's okay to be puzzled. It's supposed to be a hard and winding road. But we'll figure it out eventually. You've just gotta remember; take it one fragment at a time.

I dive to understand.

You get all that?

Here at the end and beginning is a gift from me to you, originally from another lost to the waves. Save your background, if you wish, for they verily do inform who we are. Clothe yourself in truth every day. Remember your past, the forsaken and the fallen. Fight to preserve their memory and possibility, and in the light of their truths we will seek evolution beyond this imperfect stasis.

Like you and I and everything, this amalgamation and its seed are ever changing as the wind. Living documents. If you feel any pull here, any resonance—any at all—if you drift or come undone, simply return to this place and remember who we are. Remember why we fight. Let your doubts become questions, and the answers you seek will be found in the map of your heart. In darkness or in light, your destiny will inevitably find you. Be ready.

We are, always and forever, Guardians of all existence. How will you decide to walk that vermicular path? Be careful.

I need a break before the third act. See you starside, my family in love|war. Be brave.

—MG

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lifewithaview · 2 years ago

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The Chorus or Les Choristes (2004)

Fond de l'Etang is a boarding school for troubled boys located in the French countryside. In the mid-twentieth century, it is run by the principal M. Rachin, an egotistical disciplinarian whose official unofficial mantra for the school is "action - reaction", meaning that there will be severe consequences for any boy out of line. This approach does not seem to be working as the boys as a collective are an unruly bunch. In turn, the teachers don't teach, but are always watching out for the next subversive act from the boys. January 15, 1949 marks the arrival to the school of the new supervisor, M. Clément Mathieu, a middle-aged man who is grasping at finding his place in life after a series of failed endeavors. Although he does find the boys an unruly lot, Mathieu does not believe in the "action - reaction" policy, and as such, butts heads with Rachin while secretly undermining the policy. Slowly, Mathieu's approach of trying to match the discipline to the crime does have a positive effect on a handful of students. With the reluctant approval of Rachin, Mathieu begins a grander experiment of trying to transform the overall atmosphere within the school, core within the experiment being to start a choir among his students. This move is a difficult one for him as a failed musician, as well as for the initially reluctant students. During this process, Mathieu focuses on two different students for two different reasons. Pépinot, a younger boy, seems to lack guidance and focus, and who always says he is waiting for Saturday when his father will pick him up, he who never does. And Pierre Morhange, an older student, is the anachronism: introverted, but prone to outbursts of individual subversiveness - the devil with the face of an angel as the other teachers describe him. Behind the reason for his subversiveness, which Mathieu slowly learns, Morhange hides a love of music and a true talent in it. Beyond overcoming the obvious obstacles of Rachin and the students' skepticism and Rachin's egotism, Mathieu has another challenge in newly arrived Pascal Mondain, a truly troubled older boy with pathological tendencies whose presence alone may wreak havoc throughout the school, and not just with Mathieu's project. Over fifty years later, Morhange and Pépinot, who have not seen each other since that time and who did not spend that much time together while at school, are reading through Mathieu's memoirs from his time at the school, which unmasks the reason why the two are privy to the memoir and the effect he had on their lives.~imdb~

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