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[svt-luna]

ᡴꪫ ⋆ VOGUE: IN THE BAG ࣪ ! ˓ ౨ৎ ࣪˖ ─── now playing…

synopsis: Luna from SEVENTEEN reveals her handbag essentials to British Vogue, as we take a look inside her packed Miu Miu bag.

╰ ౨ৎ LUNA-VERSE MASTERLIST ╰ ౨ৎ more interviews

The set was nothing short of breathtaking— minimalistic yet artfully arranged to evoke both luxury and comfort. Soft, muted lighting fell across a chic cream-colored couch where Luna sat, the sophisticated backdrop blending warm tones of beige and earthy gold with polished metallic accents. The aesthetic was undeniably high-class, with strategically placed designer books and a hint of greenery to soften the otherwise sleek modern atmosphere.

It was a perfect blend of Luna's effortlessly elegant persona and the refined brand image of British Vogue.

Luna herself exuded understated glamour. Her outfit was the epitome of elegant chic: a fitted, ivory-colored blouse with puffed, slightly structured sleeves that cinched perfectly at her wrists, paired with high-waisted tailored black trousers that flattered her lithe frame. Her hair fell in gentle waves, cascading just below her shoulders, and her makeup was soft and radiant, allowing her natural beauty to shine through. Her entire look screamed polished, confident, and effortlessly cool— a perfect reflection of her status as both a musical sensation and a fashion icon.

Resting beside her on the couch was her bag— a stunning tan suede Beau bag by Miu Miu. Luna was, after all, an ambassador for the luxury brand, and the bag was a signature piece from one of their latest collections. The bag's structured shape was both modern and classic, the suede giving it a touch of soft texture against its angular design. But what made it distinctly ‘Luna’ was the collection of colorful keychains and chains adorning the bag’s handles.

There was a cute little bunny keychain, a charm in the shape of a letter J, and a splash of vibrant colors from beaded tassels and chains. It was like a glimpse into her playful personality, blending seamlessly with her refined fashion sense.

Luna shifted slightly in her seat, her soft smile widening as she looked directly into the camera. With an air of confidence and warmth, she began the video with a gentle tone, her British accent immediately noticeable— polished and cool.

“Hello, British Vogue, this is SEVENTEEN’s Luna,” she began, her voice soft yet clear, carrying a natural rhythm that was effortlessly captivating, “and this is what’s in my bag.”

The cadence of her speech, her tone, and her charming accent all worked together to immediately draw the audience in. It was easy to imagine her charisma reaching through the screen, her words a perfect blend of soft-spoken coolness with a hint of playful charm. The introduction felt personal, almost as if Luna was inviting her viewers into a moment of intimacy, giving them a glimpse into her everyday life through the contents of her beloved Miu Miu bag.

Luna smiled softly at the camera, her fingers wrapping around the tan suede strap of her beloved Miu Miu bag, bringing it closer to show it off.

“So, this is my bag,” she said, her tone light and playful as she lifted it up with both hands, presenting it to the camera like a proud parent. The smile on her face widened, a little giggle escaping her lips. “This is my new favorite baby,” she confessed, her British accent rolling effortlessly with each word, adding a hint of charm to her candid admission.

The camera zoomed in slightly on the bag, showcasing its smooth, luxurious texture and the collection of colorful keychains hanging from the handles— bright beaded tassels, a small plush bunny, and a a keychain of the letter J, all adding a playful touch to the otherwise elegant design.

“I say that now because… I have a shopping problem,” Luna laughed, her shoulders shaking a little as she spoke, “and shoes and bags are my absolute favorite to buy. A week from now, I might have a new favorite.” Her laughter bubbled up again, and she glanced down at the bag like it had a personality all its own.

Her hands caressed the suede softly as she continued explaining, a bit of humor lacing her voice. “I prefer smaller purses, actually. Because I’m the type of person who would fill a bigger bag up to the brim with useless stuff— just because I can.” She shrugged with a knowing smile. “An overpacker, if you may. So I avoid big purses, and this one right here is the perfect size. Not too big and not too small. Just enough to stop me from going overboard.”

As she spoke, she absentmindedly adjusted the keychains hanging from the handles, a delicate clinking sound accompanying her movements. Her eyes lit up as she pointed at the colorful charms, her excitement palpable. “Also!” she said, her voice bright with enthusiasm, “I love decorating my bags with keychains and charms. It’s so much fun!” Luna tilted the bag towards the camera, giving the viewers a closer look at the collection of dangling trinkets.

Her eyes glinted with mischief as she added with a little laugh, “People say it’s messy, and frankly, I couldn’t care less what they think.” She shook her head lightly, still smiling, her hand adjusting the bag's strap before casually placing it on her shoulder.

The weight of the keychains caused them to jingle in a melodic clatter, and Luna’s face lit up with amusement. “You’ll always know it’s me because of that sound,” she joked, giving the bag a playful shake, causing the keychains to rattle even louder. She laughed openly at the noise, her energy infectious, before gently setting the bag down on the couch beside her, ready to delve into the contents within.

Her natural charm, her quick wit, and that little bit of self-deprecating humor made the moment feel effortless and real as if she was chatting with friends rather than an audience of thousands.

Luna gently opened her bag with a soft smile and looked up at the camera, her voice as smooth as ever with that signature British accent. “Okay, let’s start, shall we?” she said, almost like inviting her audience into an inside joke.

She reached into the tan suede bag and pulled out not one but two iPhones. The first was plain, sleek, and professional— no case, no frills, just a phone. The second, in stark contrast, was wrapped in a baby pink case adorned with a cute, beaded keychain hanging off the side, catching the light and jingling softly as she held it up.

With a phone in each hand, Luna grinned and tilted her head slightly, her eyes gleaming with a playful mischief. “So first… my phones. Yes, phones… plural,” she said with a light laugh, drawing out the plural for emphasis. “I have two.” She paused for a beat, letting the revelation sink in before delivering the punchline. “Why? Because I can.” She giggled, her carefree energy coming through as she lifted the phones slightly like it was no big deal.

“I have two phones with two different purposes. One is my work phone,” she said, holding up the plain, no-nonsense iPhone, “and the other is my personal phone.” Luna smiled wider as she raised the second phone with the pink case, the beaded keychain dangling between her fingers, creating a delightful contrast.

She pointed between the two phones, her eyebrows raising as if to say, it’s pretty obvious which is which. “It’s pretty obvious which is which,” she echoed her expression with a small giggle.

“My work phone obviously is only for work. It’s where I get contacted for work reasons and work reasons only. This is the number I would normally give people,” she explained, waving the plain phone lightly in the air. “Like, if you’re someone I just met a few times and you ask for my number, I'll give it to you... but you’re getting this one,” she grinned cheekily, the camera picking up on her playful mood.

“And this one…” she lifted the pink-cased phone, the tone in her voice softening slightly, “…is obviously my personal phone. I only give this number to close friends and family— my members obviously who are both my close friends and family,” she added, her smile turning a little more sentimental as she gazed at the beaded charm hanging from the side. "I'm being so serious when I say I only have about twenty contacts on this phone and the majority of them are my members.

After a moment, her eyes sharpened with a teasing glint, and her tone shifted back to something cool and lighthearted. “Why do I do that? It’s because there are a lot of weirdos out there,” she said, her voice dipping just enough to sound a little savage, though she followed it up with a soft giggle to keep it light.

“So if I give you my work number…” she held up the plain phone one last time, “…then you know your place.” She ended with a small wink and a laugh, her cool yet playful attitude shining through as she placed both phones gently on the table in front of her, the pink keychain giving one last, soft jingle as the camera zoomed in on them briefly.

Luna’s fingers disappeared into the depths of her tan Miu Miu bag once more, and when they reappeared, she held up a sleek black wallet, also Miu Miu, to the camera. “Next is my wallet, obviously. This is very important,” she said with a light laugh as she raised it higher, giving the viewers a good look. The wallet was as chic and polished as the rest of her outfit, its simple design matching her elegant vibe perfectly. She placed it on the table next to her phones, the smooth leather barely making a sound.

Without missing a beat, Luna reached into her bag again and pulled out another black accessory, this time a slim YSL cardholder. “This is my cardholder… for my cards, obviously,” she explained with a grin, showing off the minimalist design to the camera. “It’s more convenient to have so I don’t have to dig through my wallet every time.” She set the cardholder next to her wallet, a subtle but clear difference in size and function between the two.

Next, Luna pulled out not one but two sunglasses cases, both stylish and sleek. “Okay, so these are very important,” she said with emphasis, her tone playful but hinting that these were essentials. Opening the first case with care, she revealed a pair of thin-framed reading glasses. She slipped them on briefly, adjusting them on the bridge of her nose, giving the camera a slightly exaggerated serious look.

“These are my reading glasses. I need them… for reading,” she said with a soft chuckle, leaning into the obviousness of her statement. She adjusted the glasses once more before adding, “My eyesight isn’t terrible yet, by the way. I just need these for reading.” Her British accent was more pronounced, adding a delicate charm to her casual explanation. After a brief pause, she removed the glasses, tucked them back into their case, and placed them on the table.

Moving on, Luna opened the second case with an air of excitement and care, as if it contained something truly special. Inside was a pair of sleek black Miu Miu sunglasses, and without hesitation, she slid them on, pushing them up slightly for a perfect fit. “Now, these are my sunnies,” she declared, striking a playful pose to show off the shades.

“I cannot leave the house without these,” Luna admitted. “You could never go wrong with a pair of black sunnies. It always completes the look.” She smiled at the camera, clearly satisfied with her statement, and took a moment to adjust them before pulling them off and carefully placing them back in their case. As she placed the case on the table, the collection of her daily essentials started to take shape in front of her, each item perfectly aligned and displayed for the camera.

Luna dug into her bag again, her fingers searching for the next item. She soon pulled out a sleek black Prada mini pouch, small and elegant, just like the rest of her accessories. She held it up for the camera with a soft smile. “This is my mini touch-up bag, if you may,” she said, showing it off before unzipping it smoothly.

“I almost always get my makeup and hair done professionally by my amazingly talented makeup and hair crew, given my job,” she explained as she opened the pouch further and peeked inside. “So I don’t carry a lot of makeup or hair products with me.” Luna pulled out a compact mirror first, its silver casing catching the light. “I have a mirror and a mini brush,” she started, holding the brush up to demonstrate its compact size. As she continued to sift through her pouch, she began listing off items. “I have hair ties, hair pins, safety pins, a scrunchie, a claw clip, face mask... and a bow,"

"I also have mascara, eyeliner…” Luna’s eyes widened slightly as she pulled out several lip products, her hand full of sleek tubes and compact cases. She giggled at the sight. “And a lot… a concerning amount of lip products,” she laughed softly, placing each item on the table.

One by one, she began pointing them out.

“Lipstick, lipstick, lip stain, lip gloss, lip gloss, chapstick… lipstick, more lip gloss,” she listed, shaking her head in amusement as the small pile grew in front of her. “As you can see, lip products are my favorite,” Luna remarked, her British accent adding a playful charm to her confession. She grinned at the camera, clearly aware of how over-the-top the collection looked.

Moving on, she pulled out the last item from the pouch— a case of colorful pimple patches. “Ooh, I have these cute pimple patches!” she exclaimed, showing off the vibrant assortment of designs. The case was decorated with different shapes and patterns, from stars to hearts. “I love these; they’re adorable and functional,” she said with a proud smile.

Luna zipped up her pouch, placing it next to the other items on the table. “That’s it for my mini touch-up bag,” she concluded with a satisfied nod, glancing over her collection before looking back at the camera.

Luna reached into her bag once again, this time pulling out a soft and fluffy Hello Kitty pouch. A grin spread across her face as she presented it to the camera. “Another mini pouch,” she said with a playful tone, holding it up for a closer look. “This is even more important because this pouch contains the essentials,” she added, her voice taking on a mock-serious tone.

Unzipping the pouch, she began to reveal the contents. First, she took out a small medicine case. “These are my vitamins,” she said, shaking the case lightly, the pills rattling inside. “These are very important since I travel a lot,” Luna explained, setting the case down before pulling out another.

“Now, these are my iron pills,” she giggled, giving the second case a shake as well. “I’m very much anemic and need them to… live,” she joked, her giggle soft but contagious. Placing both medicine cases on the table in front of her, she continued rummaging through the pouch.

“Next… painkillers,” Luna announced, showing the small bottle to the camera. “These are more so for my members,” she admitted with a smile. “I don’t like taking pills. In fact, I absolutely hate drinking medicine. Ever since I was young, it’s been a struggle. A little fun fact about me: I couldn’t swallow pills until I was like… fifteen. That’s how much I hated them,” she said, her eyes glancing at the bottle with a chuckle. "It's sound pathetic 'cause it is."

“I mean, just drinking my vitamins every day makes me physically cringe, so I almost never take painkillers unless I’m on the ground screaming in pain,” Luna confessed, shrugging lightly. “I have a high pain tolerance, which is both a blessing and a curse, honestly. I only have these on me all the time in case any of the members need it,” she said, her accent soft but present, as she placed the painkillers next to the rest of her essentials.

Continuing, Luna pulled out a small pack of motion sickness medicine and a few motion sickness patches. “Next are these,” she showed the camera the packs. “Motion sickness medicine and motion sickness patches— for myself and my members,” she chuckled softly. “At least half of us get motion sick,” she explained. “Sometimes when I’m in the car for too long, or on a plane… or if we somehow find ourselves in any body of water… this is good for that,” Luna said with a small laugh, placing the items on the table in front of her.

Luna reached into her bag again, pulling out a few small sachets and bottles. “These are my supplements,” she explained, showing them to the camera with a quick smile. She lifted the items one by one. “Liquid IV, which I add to my water,” she said, holding up a small packet of powder. “Royal jelly,” she continued, showcasing a tiny jar, “and collagen.” She placed them down gently on the table. “If you ask me what my secret is when it comes to healthy skin… it’s these three,” Luna said confidently, offering the camera a small wink before moving on.

Her hand dipped back into the fluffy pouch and out came a small pack and tin. “Next, I have breath strips and breath mints,” she announced, shaking them lightly before placing them alongside her supplements.

Luna then pulled out a small tin of lozenges and a slim bottle of throat spray. “I have these lozenges for my throat, and… propolis throat spray,” she said, holding the items close to the camera for a better view. Setting them down, Luna explained, “My main instrument is my voice, so I make sure to take extra care of it, especially when traveling because of the changes in weather and such.” Her voice carried a calm seriousness, emphasizing how much care she put into maintaining her health.

Satisfied with her explanation, she zipped the Hello Kitty pouch closed, placing it next to the growing collection of items on the table. “That’s it for my second mini pouch,” she said with a small, satisfied nod, already reaching for the next item in her bag.

Luna reached into her bag again, this time something jingling loudly before she even fully retrieved it. The sound made her chuckle as she briefly put her head down, a grin spreading across her face.

“I have my keys,” she said, finally pulling out a keyring that held two keys— one a standard house key, and the other a car key. But what made her laugh was the sheer amount of keychains dangling from the ring, nearly covering the keys entirely.

“You can barely see the keys,” she chuckled, holding the keyring up to the camera. “I love keychains,” she explained, shaking them slightly to let the noise fill the air again. The assortment of charms and little trinkets jingled as they danced together, showcasing Luna's playful and quirky side.

“Anyway… keys,” she said, resetting herself. “One is my house key and the other one’s my car key,” she continued, showing the camera both. “It’s funny I still have my car key here considering I haven’t driven myself anywhere in like… two years,” Luna added with a smirk, her eyes glinting mischievously.

“It sounds crazy but it’s true,” she admitted, leaning back slightly. “We travel a lot and get driven around a lot. And even if we don’t have work, I still get driven around… It’s one of the perks of having thirteen members who are more than willing to drive me places.” Luna giggled again, the sound light and infectious. “I only got my license for the giggles. I’m a professional passenger princess and I am proud,” she declared with a playful raise of her chin, placing the jingling keyring down on the table.

Before she could dig into her bag again, she picked up a small pack of gum and sweets and showed them to the camera. “I have gum and more sweets,” Luna said, flashing a quick smile. “Just in case I get low on energy or if anyone else gets low on energy,” she added with a casual shrug, placing the small pack next to her keys on the table.

Luna reached back into her bag, her fingers brushing against various items as she asked aloud, “What else do we have here?” After rummaging for a moment, her hand emerged holding a small jewelry box. She smiled, pleased with the find. “Oooh, this is a mini jewelry box for my jewelry,” she said, flipping it open to show the camera. Inside, nestled safely, were a few pieces of jewelry, delicate rings and small earrings, glinting softly under the light.

“These are just a few pieces aside from the ones I’m already wearing,” Luna continued, gently turning the box toward the camera. “There are times during performances or photoshoots when we can’t wear our own jewelry because of the concepts and stuff, so I keep this handy to make sure my things don’t disappear into the depths of my bag,” she explained with a knowing smile before closing the box and placing it carefully on the table.

She reached back into her bag and pulled out a pink journal, clutching a few pens in her other hand. “I have my journal,” she said, displaying the cover. “I like writing down my thoughts every now and then. Sometimes I doodle, sometimes I write poems, and sometimes those poems turn into song lyrics.” Luna's voice softened slightly as she explained, her connection to her journal clearly meaningful. "I usually carry a book with me, I love reading... but I am poorly prepared, I think I left it at home... or in the car actually."

Then, holding up the pens, she added with a smile, “I have a couple of pens, obviously to write with, and a marker— just in case I meet fans and they want me to sign their stuff.” She raised the marker playfully before placing everything neatly in front of her.

Finally, as she reached once more into the seemingly endless bag, Luna pulled out a familiar item, her expression brightening. “My passport. Very important,” she said, holding it up briefly before placing it next to the journal, pens, and jewelry box.

Luna dug around in her bag again, her fingers grazing familiar shapes before pulling out a small white case. “My AirPods,” she said, holding them up to the camera. “Very important. I absolutely cannot leave the house without these.” She placed them neatly on the table before diving back into her bag with a laugh. “Which leads me to this,” she added, pulling out another small pouch. “This is the last of the pouches, I promise.”

She opened the pouch with a smile and took out a pair of wired earphones, holding them up for the camera to see. “I have my wired earphones as backup,” she explained, grinning. “Music is very important to me, so whenever my AirPods die, I have a backup. Always.”

Next, she reached into the same pouch and retrieved a phone charger and power bank, displaying them before placing them on the table. “And of course, these— my charger and my power bank. Always prepared.”

After placing the electronics down, she pulled out two small bottles out of her bag, her face softening as she presented them. “These are my essential oils— lavender and peppermint,” she explained, holding the bottles up close to the camera. “These are also something I can’t travel without. Whenever I’m feeling nauseous, sick, or congested…” Luna paused, unscrewing the cap on one of the bottles as she demonstrated how to use it. She rubbed a few drops of the oil on her fingers, gently massaging it into her temples and the back of her neck before lightly tapping the tip of her nose. “I just put it here, and it really helps to calm me down when I’m anxious or if I can’t sleep,” she said, her voice soft, almost therapeutic, before capping the bottle and placing it on the table.

She nodded thoughtfully, “They’re lifesavers, really,” she added with a smile before glancing back into her bag for what else might be left to reveal.

Luna glanced at the last couple of items in her bag, a knowing smile already tugging at her lips. “And speaking of scents that calm me down…” she began, reaching into her bag with a soft chuckle. She pulled out two small, luxury-looking perfume bottles, their gleaming glass catching the light in the room.

“Perfume,” she said, holding them up for the camera to see. “I love smelling good. It completes the look, always.” She twisted the cap off the first bottle, revealing the delicate nozzle beneath. “These are the mini versions of my perfumes,” Luna continued, grinning as she admired the tiny bottle in her hand. “Whenever I buy perfumes, I always buy the mini ones as well so I can bring those with me. Big perfume bottles are such a hassle to carry around… So, the mini ones are my go-to,” she added with a smirk, “and they’re adorable.”

Luna brought the first bottle closer to the camera, the elegant logo visible. “This is one of my favorite scents ever,” she said, her voice warm with affection. She sprayed a small amount on herself, closing her eyes as the scent enveloped her. A soft giggle escaped her lips, a playful, content sound that made her dimples pop.

As she picked up the second bottle, her expression softened, and a more personal, intimate smile played on her lips. This perfume, unlike the first, was clearly a man’s cologne— its sleek design and musky scent hinted at its origins. She paused for a moment, a hint of nostalgia in her eyes.

Unbeknownst to the public, this was the very same cologne Jeonghan wore. He had given her the bottle as a gift after Luna had once told him how much she loved the scent.

“This…” Luna started, her voice tinged with a giggle, “This is another perfume I carry with me.” She held the bottle up to the camera, her thumb gently tracing the cap. “I love the smell. It makes me happy and calm,” she added, a knowing smile on her face. “This was gifted to me, and the scent reminds me of that person…” Luna let out a shy giggle, her dimples deepening as she bit her bottom lip, a faint blush appearing on her cheeks.

Before setting it down, Luna sprayed a small amount of the cologne onto the inside of her wrists. She pressed her wrists together, inhaling the familiar scent as her eyes fluttered shut for a brief moment. She opened them again, smiling softly at the camera. “Next item…” she said, moving on sneakily, her tone light and teasing as if she hadn’t just given a tiny glimpse into a secret part of her life.

She placed both bottles on the table, the air around her now subtly filled with the mingling scents of her favorite perfumes.

Luna reached into her bag one final time, her fingers brushing against the last item inside. “Lastly, I have my digital camera,” she said, pulling it out with a smile. The camera was encased in a soft, protective cover that she gently unzipped, revealing a small, pink digital camera underneath.

“This isn’t the most high-quality digital camera,” she said with a laugh, fiddling with the device in her hands. She ran her thumb over its smooth surface, clearly fond of it. “But I love it like that. It gives me that very early 2000s feel when I take my pictures,” Luna added, her voice full of affection for the retro style.

She switched the camera on, its little screen flickering to life with a soft glow. Without hesitating, she lifted it toward her view, taking a quick picture of the space in front of her. The camera made an old-school click, capturing the moment with a slightly grainy, vintage aesthetic. Luna chuckled softly at the sound, admiring the charm of the imperfect image.

After a moment of appreciation, she placed the pink digital camera carefully on the table, alongside the rest of her belongings. Her eyes scanned the collection in front of her — from her supplements and perfume bottles to her keys adorned with keychains and the journal that held her thoughts. There was something both comforting and nostalgic about seeing all these pieces of her life spread out in front of her.

Luna looked back at the camera with a wide smile, her eyes gleaming with warmth. “Well, that’s about it,” she said with a light giggle, her dimples showing as she leaned back slightly. “Thank you for watching, and that was what’s in my bag.”

She flashed a final smile to the camera, raising her hand in a small wave, her casual yet charming energy lingering in the air.

comments…

@/lunababybae • 2 years ago ╰ Her accent! it’s like I’m in Hogwarts or something 😩

@/rinarieee • 2 years ago ╰ She’s looking extra beautiful this interview 🤍

@/gyusshadow • 2 years ago ╰ Her bag is so… her. Does that makes sense?! Elegant and fucking crazy at the same time.

@/moonbae17 • 2 years ago ╰ Jiyeonie saying that she might have a different favorite bag next week screams ✨shopping addiction✨ and I am here for it.

@/saythename • 2 years ago ╰ she is def my bias! a shopaholic and an over packer!!! I wanna be your friend so bad, Bae Jiyeon 😭

@/mad-lineeee • 2 years ago ╰ 1:00 her face when her bag started jingling 😂😂 she cracks me up fr.

@/mrsbaebae • 2 years ago ╰ the fact that Jiyeon will give you her phone number if you ask… then you find out she has two phones 🤭 she’s an icon.

@/alyy1625 • 2 years ago ╰ EXACTLY AT 1:17 HER WALLPAPER?! TELL ME THAT’S NOT HER AND JEONGHAN!!

@/jeongnanana • 2 years ago ╰ She’s such a closed off person it’s literally so hot and inspiring at the same time. Like, what do you mean you have a separate phone for people you like?!

@/gyuuuuudaily • 2 years ago ╰ she’s so right 1:38 there are a lot of weirdos out there. she probs have two phones because of the sasaengs who leak their phone number, I don’t blame her at all 🙄

@/sallluuuteee17 • 2 years ago. ╰ 1:25 only twenty contacts and most of them are members of seventeen 😂 so only seven people in her personal phone aren’t in the band 😂

@/lulu-nana17• 2 years ago ╰ girl– your wallpaper?! miss thing!? Is that who I think it is?!

@/sebongrighthere • 2 years ago ╰ “So if I give you my work number… then you know your place “ HOT 🥵 HOT 🥵 HOT 🥵

@/missbitchhhh • 2 years ago ╰ She had a mountain of lip products 2:17

@/shadowmyshadow • 2 years ago ╰ no wonder her lips look so soft, she carries a whole store of lip products with her everywhere.

@/angel7266 • 2 years ago ╰ knowing that my bias hates drinking pills and didn’t know how to swallow them till later on in life is so comforting to me… she is me and I am her.

@/hannnieeeee7251 • 2 years ago ╰ Luna being literally iron deficient makes so much sense for some reason (I am too) 😊

@/user763816262 • 2 years ago ╰ it’s adorable to me how half of the things in Luna’s bag, she only really carry around in case the rest of the members need it 🥹

@/ashonashonash_ • 2 years ago ╰ Key to having Bae Jiyeon skin: Liquid IV, Royal Jelly, and Collagen. Noted queen 💖💖💖

@/jijijiyeonienie • 2 years ago ╰ her keys are nowhere to be found 😂

@/kpopfan17 • 2 years ago ╰ that Porsche car key is basically a keychain at this point, miss thing! Wdym you haven’t driven in two years!?

@/belleeeee_ • 2 years ago ╰ “I only got my license for the giggles. I’m a professional passenger princess and I am proud.” Said by Bae Jiyeon who then proceeded to brag about having thirteen men who are filling to be Uber drivers for her *ehem* Yoon Jeonghan *ehem* Kim Mingyu *ehem*

@/diamondlifeu • 1 year ago ╰ she has that Hermoine Granger bag fr

@/gyuminggooo • 1 year ago ╰ 3:57 those candies are Hannie’s fave 🤭

@/dailynanana • 1 year ago ╰ I love how she’s not gatekeeping at all 💖

@/chuuuuchhuu17 • 1 year ago ╰ “sunnies” “sweets” she’s English for sure 🤣💕

@/lalunanova • 1 year ago ╰ 5:45 !!! she looking at that perfume like that for a reason! I’m not crazy istg 😭

@/17-carat • 3 weeks ago ╰ “I love the smell. It makes me happy and calm. This was gifted to me, and the scent reminds me of that person…” THEN PROCEEDS TO FUCKING SHOW US YOON JEONGHAN’S PERFUME!!

@/myg145 • 2 weeks ago ╰ that’s Jeonghan’s perfume! I’m pretty sure he showed it in one of his interviews… HIS what’s in my bag!!! BAE JIYEON!! WTF?!

@/bjy_lover • 1 week ago ╰ she’s the girlfriend for sure… THE Yoon Jeonghan’s girlfriend. the wallpaper, the candies, the perfume, and the matching digital camera?!

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[curio-queries]

I saw Jungkook's documentary this weekend and have just a few thoughts. If you're avoiding spoilers, don't click the cut!

The Hybe Documentary Format

So...as a reminder to you all, I do not have professional expertise in the film industry. I'm just a very discerning consumer. I also haven't seen Hobi's documentary and I watched Road to D-Day while I was quite ill last year so I only vaguely remember some bits. (I'll definitely be getting back to those sooner rather than later though as research for a series of posts I'm developing.) That being said, I think we have enough data points to state that Hybe has absolutely no interest in filmmaking techniques outside of music videos.

I did mostly enjoy my experience seeing this film yesterday and I'm always grateful for any amount of footage the members are willing to share with us but this 'documentary ' was worse than Jimin's Production Diary. Any of you that managed to make it through my rambling review will know how dissatisfied I was with that.

I Am Still is not a documentary, it's a mixture of showcase footage and behind-the-scenes clips, most of which has already been divulged in the various episodes and shooting sketches on YouTube. Honestly, if you're not able to see the film, just go rewatch all of the bangtantv content for JKs solo period and the showcase and you'll be up to speed with 85% of what was in the documentary.

There are definitely some expansions to the storylines featured in the bangtantv content; mostly being anything that wasn't overtly optimistic. For example, we learn a little bit more about just how sick JK was during the Seven/3D promotions. That content likely was pulled from the bangtantv edit because it would have put a damper on the promotions and given certain 'fans' a focus to fixate their vitriol. But overall, it feels more like an extended version of existing content rather than a new work. At least JPD didn't continually feed us footage we'd seen before.

I'm someone who gets completely bothered by previews spoiling content so I didn't watch any of the promos until after I saw it and I am so glad I skipped them because most of the 'original' scenes of the film were featured in least one of them. Alas, that's a separate issue of which I'm definitely in the minority.

Was There No Structure?

Kinda. Like JPD, there is a semblance of a structure: Attempting to follow the chronology of release activities for JKs GOLDEN album through the lens of JKs staement trying to prove that he is still worthy of everything he was being hailed as during the BTS group activities but I don't feel this was successfully executed. It jumps round enough and isn't very successful in explaining the events if you didn't already know about them. The film starts with the SEVEN performance at GMA and footage that we've already seen of JK recording SEVEN, not mentioning anything about the music video or really how JK got involved with the song in the first place. The rest of the story beats have similar missing points.

They have a vague narrative with the 'I Am Still' points but that's mostly carried by subs and a couple of moments that JK mentions himself. I'm not saying it's not true or wasn't top-of-mind for JK during this process but it's not the main point of many of the moment/messages he shared with us during this time period so it feels a little disingenuous since everything else jn this film really only makes sense if you've already seen quite a lot of behind-the-scenes content.

Honestly, it makes me question the intended audience. Obviously, they know that ARMY will shell out whatever we need to when there's new content from our members but most of us will have already seen all of the bangtantv content so we are already familiar with the most of the footage in this film. I genuinely don't think this was produced in such a way to be palatable for audiences not familiar with BTS so who does that leave? Our friends and family that are peripherally aware of the content but haven't learned the basics of JKs album? ARMY with short term memories only?

But again, it seems this film was compiled by an editing team and not lead by a director with experience in crafting a documentary. The only new footage that Ican guarantee was captured with the express purpose of being included in this film was the few clips of JK talking in the practice room with the albums displayed by him. But we all know that's where all of the promo clips were gathered as well. I have issues with that approach as well but I'll leave this point alone for now unless anyone is interested.

Suffice it to say, all of these suppositions over the past year about how JKs documentary was getting special treatment or even questioning about investment in a project up front are dead. This was a product assembled with bits of what they already had completely in-house which was sold for distribution.

So, Did We Learn NOTHING?

No, there are a few Golden nuggets (see what I did there?). I can't recall everything having only seen it once (and having a rather disruptive audience - I swear there were only dozen or so ppl in my theater but I forget how obnoxious teenagers can be. I'm glad they're enjoying and supporting but we really didn't need light sticks flashing during a film and how many times does one person need to get up to answer their phone during this runtime? Three according to the row in front of mine.)

Anyway, something I thought was interesting to learn was that Standing Next To You was initially recorded the day after JK heard it for the first time. And hearing a little more about how JK yearned to perform that song definitelygot me thinking a little more about it. We can't reach any conclusions just with this little nugget but it does open the door to some theories. Like perhaps they were initially planning to have JK record two separate albums? SEVEN and 3D would be the singles of the first and JK would perform them as we saw but perhaps STNY was originally planned to be the single of the 2nd album that would release while he was in the military and thus be unable to perform it? Maybe JK loved STNY so much that everything was grouped into one album and Never Let Go was the only track held back for ms? Definitely some theorizing space to be had now.

Final thoughts?

Similar to my thoughts on the GCF: Budapest (which I feel would have had a much better reception if it had been labeled as a bangtan episode rather than a GCF), I AM Still should not have purported to be a documentary. It was much more similar to the annual Memories compilations. But the general public would not have shelled out the $25 to go to a theater to watch a Memories DVD so alas, we have our content packaged as a ~documentary~...

Did my view on the music change at all? Not because of the documentary. We're coming up on the year anniversary of GOLDEN and it's still definitely not my favorite. I completely understand why some people like it but it's just not to my taste. The overall impact falls a little flat for me. Too much breadth and not enough depth. I came into my musical soul during the 00s emo phase and will always be a sucker for music that absolutely drips in an emotional way rather than catchy songs vaguely referencing heartache and love. Again, just a matter of viewpoint.

I do think most of these songs stand much better being shuffled amongst other artists in a Playlist and several of them are significantly better when JK sang them live but I still won't be listening to them regularly. I wholeheartedly believe JK completed his task of proving himself as an extremely dedicated and versatile singer and performer. He's definitely got some solid points added to his resume after this project.

[madamplague]

MCYT content farms try not to make serious topics into clickbait/drama videos challenge

*IMPOSSIBLE*

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Oh no. Sir I believe I'm going to need you to explain that Dragon Age 2 opinion, that is a BLAZING hot take

I really don't think it is. Although of course all of this is personal opinion, not some sort of divine proclamation on high about which video games people are allowed to prefer, so take please it in the spirit it is offered.

Origins is a worldbuilding walking tour as much about explaining its own in-universe lore and fantasy history as it is about either its characters or the actual story that is happening in the game. It's a cool world! With some great lore! But also it is built entirely around Generic Fantasy Plot Structure #1 and never particularly seems interested in innovating, or surprising the player. On top of which, a lot of its setting and lore is pretty weakly sketched and doesn't really get developed into something either visually or narratively compelling until it gets built out in later games.

And while Inquisition has some genuinely fantastic characters, everything else about the game suffers very badly from the plague of BioWare Magic™, i.e. the production was an absolute mess up until the last minute when five hundred extremely overworked and underpaid creative geniuses somehow managed to wring a functional experience out of the trainwreck. It was made with fucking Frostbite of all things, jesus christ, it's holding together with spit and duct tape.

Now, Dragon Age 2 shares a bunch of the problems of Origins and Inquisition. It too bears the hallmarks of "our executives couldn't plan a healthy game production cycle if their lives depended on it" with a lot of unfinished content, half-assed sidequests and a truly frustrating over-reliance on a combat system that isn't half as engaging to use as it needed to be.

But Dragon Age 2 also has something neither of its siblings could ever even hope to match: an actual compelling protagonist.

Like, listen, I know people adore their headcanons about their Wardens and Inquisitors, and it has made for some truly amazing fanworks, but Hawke is literally the only actual character out of all of them. Hawke has conflicts, problems, needs and drives that actually inform and push the story forward, they have a family and a history and a reason to give a sh** about the central conflict of the narrative.

In Origins and Inquisition both, your character becomes the main character of the story entirely because of fate and random chance. You are the Chosen One and you are the only one who can Save The World because you're the last of the super special elite fantasy Hero Squad, or because you got some green magic stuck in your hand by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because the character is a complete blank slate onto which the player is expected to project themselves, random chance and circumstance are the only tools the plot can use to position them as main characters. There is no character to drive them to it.

In Dragon Age 2, Hawke becomes the champion because they're trying to build a new life for their family in Kirkwall, and end up embroiled in the chaos and politics that befall the city as a natural consequence of living in it and dealing with the conditions of it. Hawke and their family's needs and wants drive their actions, and push them to engage in endeavors that influence the course of history. They have agency (in the conceit of the narrative, at least) over how their life turns out, they make choices that have consequences, rather than being dictated into the position of Main Character by a literal looming apocalypse that permits no other course of action.

And I'm not about to sit here and claim that Dragon Age 2's story is perfect or that every character is a masterpiece or that every plotline is amazing. No, there's plenty of scuff and jank and things that have aged poorly and unresolved plot threads and all the rest of it.

And I am definitely not forgetting the godsdamned DLC where BioWare threw it all overboard by inventing a Special Bloodline Plot where oops it turns out Hawke actually IS a special chosen one specially chosen by a special fate to have a special role in Saving The World because they're special because of fate and destiny and blah blah, I still think that was phenomenally stupid (especially when Corypheus wasn't even Hawke's goddamn main villain to deal with what was any of this supposed to add to their character ffs BioWare)

But even with all its problems, the simple fact that Hawke is a character you can give a shit about independent of your own projection as a player - the fact that Hawke isn't just an empty bland blank slate with no personality, no traits, no wants or needs or drives - that has made Dragon Age 2 infinitely more memorable to me than either Origins and Inquisition. I think about it to this day. I think about Hawke to this day. I care about what happens to the character in a way that I just simply could never bring myself to do with either my Wardens or my Inquisitors.

[fl00mie]

you know underverse/xtale is criminally underrated when its most popular video has no +20mil views and the rest of 'em don't exceed 10mil

considering how MASSIVE undertale au community is this is straight up unacceptable??

let's remember only THREE PEOPLE work on this series: Jael Peñaloza as the animator/writer, NyxTheShield as the musician and Strelok as the sound designer (although searching up a bit the first result that pops up is a reddit post pointing out they don't appear on credits in the last uvs episode, i just hope they're ok), they truly need more recognition and support

yeah everyone says good thing about this show but they're mainly superficial stuff, as statements from a first glance and that's fine, they know how to identify it as a well-written, structured and animated work despite having seen it only once, but i don't think that's enough

these people work hard to get the chapters out in the shortest time possible and it's impressive; every bit of detail is a delight and a hug to the soul for undertale fans, xtale in itself is an au that knew how to use every resource of the original game very ingeniously (i will probably talk about this in another post); the songs know how to capture the essence of the characters perfectly and add a lot of life to the scenes, it is truly incredible how immersive it is thanks to the ost; and the sound effects just make everything feel surprisingly real

the quality of this series is indescribable and it seems unfair to me that it doesn't get the support it really deserves like other works that achieved much more for some reason

please go support these community folks! they make a lot of effort to offer us quality content without disappointing, and although it's true their names resonate in everyone's heads, they deserve much more support of any kind

[existentialterror]

ARG notes: ZampanioSim

Okay, a work this metafictional and also that (I think) responds to audience interaction is going to need a high-caliber gimmick. Hang on.

...

Alright. Hey guys, catfishAnabasis (Light) here, taking a moment out of my surprisingly busy day tell you about a weird thing on the internet.

ZampanioSim is an intricate and brainbending ARG. It takes direct inspiration from Homestuck, The Magnus Archives, and House of Leaves, as well as the creator (JR, jadedResearcher/justifiedRecursion)'s previous canon of Homestuck fan-work and games. A major theme is "unreality".

HERE IS YOUR TRAILHEAD.

Feel free to ignore the rest of the writeup and check it out now.

I know very little about JR's other work, right now. However, among my many INTERESTS, I am something of a TMA ENJOYER and an AMATEUR INTERNET INVESTIGATOR, and if I were in a HOUSE I like to think I could LEAVE it pretty easily.

So, yeah. I figured I'd just describe my experience of this rabbithole and maybe you'll want to check it out too. I'm sure this will only scratch the surface.

ZampanioSim is structured as a nested labyrinth. In the same way that:

Homestuck is a webcomic framed as an interactive adventure game about an account of kids playing a video game (Sgrub) that doesn't exist, and

House of Leaves is a novel framed as a found scholarly discussion about a documentary (The Navidson Record) that doesn't exist about a house that doesn't exist,

ZampanioSim is a game-based ARG framed as an attempt to simulate a game (Zampanio) that doesn't exist based on a found FAQ of the game (that only sort of exists).

More concretely, ZampanioSim features a lot of nested browser games, as well as audio, narrative, an actual audience-interactive narrative game (the way Homestuck was originally), external websites, and more.

The starting point is, of course, the House:

ZampanioSim takes full advantage of the browser as medium. There is content accessible via the address bar, developer tools, cookies (I think), the developer console, and probably more that I haven't realized.

Like, to give you a sense of the kind of rabbithole we're dealing with: Here's a map I made of the House outset page today:

...And I say today because the House does change over time. Today (a friday) when I clicked on the EastEast route, for instance, I was greeted by this grotesquely distorted version of Rebecca Black's "Friday":

Okay, let's talk about what we have going on in the House map, starting from the doors and working out. (I've given some of these my own names for clarity.)

North

The Classpect Menu Game:

This, I think, is the main titular "ZampanioSim". It's the part that's intended to recreate the experience of a supposed old computer game, but by and large, you only experience the menu screen, not the rest of the gameplay. You can select attributes (based on Homestuck's Classpecting system + the Magnus Archives fears) gain points and select skills and (depending on your seed) eventually "beat the game". It's glitchy, it's a hellscape, there's an entity or two in the menu system that are trying to talk to you. It's great fun. Contains links to a rabbithole (which you can plug passwords into for more secrets) and + some secrets to you in the credits.

(While mostly the aspects seem to add flavor to the menu options, there's a special class called "Waste". This appears in neither TMA nor Homestuck, but comes from a fan or meta-joke that Andrew Hussie and Toby Fox, the writer and a major composer for Homestuck, are classpected* as the "Waste of Space" and "Waste of Time". By telling it you're a "Waste"you're more likely to get weird glitches and new options in your Classpect Menu game run - there's a fun recurring element in some of these games about the game changing depending on who you tell it is playing. I learned about the Waste trick from JR's youtube channel. Also, setting your birthday as Halloween might also do something.)

I have no idea if the different iterations of games here are substantially different. I haven't checked. There's a lot going on. "There's a lot going on" is a good summary of ZampanioSim overall.

*( Uh, classpecting is this in-Homestuck personality system where game players are a [Role] of [Element].)

Eyedlr: Eyedol Games is the company that supposedly made the original game Zampanio. Eyedlr is their spambot-filled tumblr clone, which also has secrets in it. (Actually, just assume everything has secrets out.)

East

The House Exploration game: It has the same setup screen as the Classpect Menu game, but this one drops you into a game with visuals: An infinite(?) procedural house you navigate with imagery derived from your choices.

Peewee's exploration game: When it's not blasting Rebecca Black's Friday But Weird into your ears, the EastEast route is another procedural infinite(?) maze, except that you type directions to Peewee, a snake guy with goggles who also moves around on his own. This one also introduces named characters we learn more about elsewhere.

Bathroom text: Procredural bathroom maze, unless it's just some text telling you to take a break. ZampanioSim really likes telling you to take breaks and hydrate, so that you can better appreciate and spread Zampanio.

Absolutely not. Also, I'm a busy woman. I have to finish this writing summary first.

South

The Train Game: a game - notably not a maze - where JR walks down a series of train corridors and monologues to you about the game and the "reality" behind it.

The mazecrawler game: You tell a little guy how to navigate an infinite(?) maze - and if you choose right and open up your browser's Console menu, you can learn a great deal more about

West

The only West route is AdventureSimWest, which is an actual text narrative game where readers submit commands that the author incorporates into updates - just like early Homestuck. It's still going. The logs are extensive but it's mostly about the antics of a new employee at Eyedol Games, which is stuck in a time loop.

Other

Then there's some other scattered clickable text -

The truth about alt: An exchange between two shapeshifters.

A transcript: A dialogue between two people who apparently work for Eyedol Games.

The lower left leads you to an apparently rotating selection of other Zampanio-related games. I particularly liked NagaGirlfriend.

None of this is even the stuff you can reach this page exclusively through the Console menu.

And much more

And there's a lot of stuff that's NOT branching directly off of the house. There's other things you find buried in links or by searching - a discord and a wiki that both straddle the line between in-character and -out, Archive of Our Own content, a youtube channel, the Eyedol website...

Is there a "story" to ZampanioSim?

Yes.

Like I said, there's a lot I haven't seen yet. But what's going on is something like this:

JR is attempting to recreate this game, Zampanio, of course, and tap into its fanbase. The game Zampanio is an infectious meme. Eyedol Games is a transdimensional company that is perhaps both trying to spread the meme and contain it, by removing its spores, e.g. the Zampanio FAQ - the thing that inspired JR to make ZampanioSim - from the internet.

Various parts of the game recognize that they are fictional and may identify you the reader/player as "Observers".

There are a few recurring characters who have gotten swept up into the meme, either working for Eyedol or trapped in ZampanioSim or both, and have followed it from variant to transdimensional variant.

(this is an image from homestuck. it's a reference.)

Japes aside, this is a brain-bending, very cool, and completely ludicrous unfiction project which I believe is made mostly by one person with an unparalleled hand for web sorcery, whimsy, and vibes. The vibes are so good.

The host website, Farrago Fiction (which AFAICT is a multi-person project), hosts a number of often-homestuck-inspired weird games and simulators.

I know ZampanioSim is now a few years old and is still actively updating. Consider checking it out.

2024-08-24 edit: Part 2!

[anilyan]

Venti is Phanes + on Istaroth and the Primordial One

Not so crack theory: Venti is Phanes and is the androgynous being born from the Chymical Marriage between the Primordial One and Istaroth, before she was betrayed by the Sinners

(I posted this before but now it's properly explained)

I am using this lore in my old mondstadt fic, Nameless (actually soon to turn into trilogy, since vol 2 is about venti rewinding time and vol 3 is present time story and I took so long to plan all the lore with all the canon crumbs and theories we had...)

Yes, a lot of the info about gods is pulled from wikipedia, I’m not being paid to research more, okay? I just want to feed the brainrot. My main sources besides those are the videos listed at the end.

I would love if this theory made its way to some big lore content creator for them to analyse and criticize, because I have been rotating this in my head but I don’t have their capacity or knowledge to tear this apart.

NOTES:

This post contain minimal mentions of 2 leaks, about the rest of the collection of The Pale Princess and the Six Pygmies, and a sus minimal old leak about Venti

This post contains some references to the Penacony arc from Honkai star rail, but no knowledge about the game is required and in fact, I don't even play it myself and those are just sus parallels

0. Summary / main points

Istaroth and the Primordial One parallel Chronos (personification of time) and Ananke (most powerful dictator of Fate and mother of The Fates/Moirai), respectively.

Chronos and Ananke laid down the cosmic / orphic world that created/reshaped the world. In a way, that was an Alchemical Marriage, that also gave birth to the androgynous winged being Phanes/Venti, and to the Abyss,

Venti has many ties to fate, including extensive apple symbology visible even in wisp form. The apples, besides being a symbol of fate, also represent a dream bubble in accordance to the structure of Teyvat. Quoting his most sus birthday art, “It is written that there is a whole tiny world hidden inside an apple core”

Venti has at least some control over 1 half of Teyvat while the other half is ruled by The Night Mother/Nyx. He also offers us half of the apple in the mentioned birthday art.

Ananke was a serpent-like being, and we see a Black Serpent 1) coiled around Phanes 2) coiled around the pearl/cosmic egg in the Gnostic Chorus 3) in the Black Serpent Knights, who also had Ishtar/Istaroth’s star as a symbol 4) In Nibelung, if we consider serpents and dragons the same

Istaroth supported Khaenri’ah (thus why the Nation had her symbol) and both opposed the Heavenly Principles/Celestia, until she was betrayed by the Sinners/6 Pygmies and forgotten

The Primordial One was opposed by Celestia. We also know that Nibelung fought Celestia. They were either allies or even the same being (a black serpent), and their perceived opposition is not too different from how Remus went down misinterpreted by history

1. About the Primordial One

In case it’s not yet clear, this assumes that Phanes =/= Primordial One. After all, the book Before the Sun and Moon simply says that “The Primordial One may have been Phanes*”,* and the fandom just started equating the two.

I am of the opinion that the Primordial One and Celestia are in opposition, while Istaroth is on the side of the Primordial One, or at least opposed to Celestia too. Maybe the Alchemical Marriage was part of a plan of theirs. Read more about it in section 3.

And if the truth about Remuria taught us anything, is that some rivalries depicted in history are false. In the same way Remus went down as a Tyrant when in reality he never wanted to employ force and was even allied with Sybilla (a vishap), I would say that the Primordial One and Nibelung/dragons/vishaps probably found ways to coexist. We do know that Nibelung went to war against the Heavenly Principles/Celestia, but if Celestia and Primordial One opposed each other, that just makes an alliance between PO and the Dragon King more likely.

We don’t know if Primordial One = 1st Descender and Celestia = 2nd Descender, so I will avoid using those terms throughout the post. But if the 2nd who came = 2nd Descender = Celestia, then that would lend further credibility to the idea that Celestia and the PO are on opposing sides, since the 2nd who came basically stole PO’s ruling of Teyvat.

2. About Istaroth AND Khaenri’ah

Like I said above, I believe that Istaroth sides with the Primordial One and that both are in opposition to Celestia

Istaroth has the ability to create alt Looms of Fate through those seeds she gives away - those basically grow into trees that are databases of history outside the control of Celestia. I had already affirmed this for my fic before we got the 2nd Caribert quest, but at this point is practically confirmed.

Istaroth is based on Astaroth and Ishtar, and Ishtar’s morning star is an 8-pointed star just like the symbol of Khaenri’ah. And so the Black Serpent Nights probably served Istaroth in some way.

Khaenri’ah supposedly didn’t have a god, but let’s keep in mind Istaroth was forgotten by time. It’s also possible that, even if Khaenri’ah had a god, they still considered themselves the pride of humankind since Istaroth likely wasn’t associated with Celestia, as I mentioned

Speaking of Black Serpents, other prevalent Black serpents are the one in the Gnostic Chorus, and Nibelung, in a way (not sure if they are or not the same entity). So I would say that Nibelung is/was also allied with Khaenri’ah/Istaroth/Primordial One. Please refer to the section above for an explanation.

The 6 Pygmies and the Pale Princess is a book that is an allegory for the 5 Sinners of Khaenri’ah + Dainsleif and Istaroth. I include, at the end, a video that explains that properly and is very much worth the watch. From there (or at least, from the leaked volumes), we know that the Sinners basically betrayed Istaroth, which might explain why she ended up being forgotten and why Dainsleif is the only Pygmie that didn’t go fully down the Sinner’s path.

3. The relationship between the Primordial One and Istaroth

Like I say above, many things point to them being allied. At the very least, we can quite safely infer they both opposed Celestia/The Heavenly Principles and in turn allied with Khaenri’ah.

The cosmic/ orphic/world egg was created by Chronos (personification of time) and Ananke (most powerful dictator of Fate and mother of The Fates/Moirai). “Ananke and Chronos are mates, mingling together in serpent form as a tie around the universe. Together, they have crushed the primal egg of creation of which constituent parts became earth, heaven and sea to form the ordered universe.”

Ananke and Chronos have to be the PO and Istaroth - which one is which is a bit debatable, with their genders being a counterargument on its own. But I would say Chronos is Istaroth (due to her associations with time, although she is more a god of moments than of time) while Ananke is the Primordial One (who had the 3 moon sisters/moirai as shades + is probably the Dreamer/HSR’s SUNday parallel who plays the symphony that creates the fates reflected by the moons (read more in next section)).

The cosmic egg that birthed the world, together with the Abyss AND Venti, probably resulted from their Alchemical Marriage. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was also the Gnostic Pearl depicted in the Gnostic Chorus cutscene, or even if the Black Serpent there was Ananke/Primordial One. In fact, that would only solidify the connections with the Black Serpent Knights and them wearing Istaroth’s symbol. And it would be extra funny if somehow the Primordial One and Nibelung were the same entity (since I already explained why I think they were are least on the same side)… and therefore were a black serpent/dragon.

Okay, but what is an Alchemical/Chymical Marriage? It’s a marriage between a Red King and a White Queen, the Sun and the Moon, gold and silver, sulphur and mercury. It’s sometimes pointed as the source of the Philosophers' Stone, and from that union of opposites is birthed an androgynous being. Btw, that marriage is facilitated by a dove, but this is off-topic and you can see why that is interesting in the last video linked. It’s also a process that sometimes involves ‘fermentation”, which is also off-topic but ties well with the wine-making process and other things mentioned in the last video too.

According to Jakob: "The Seal of Chymical Marriage was an ancient Fontainian ritual meant to seal off the source of life. Now it has been reversed, and all has been set free once more!" So, it can be used to separate the Primordial Sea from the world, which sounds similar to creating a world/pearl/philosopher’s stone/egg/dream bubble that floats in the sea of quanta or wtv is the logic used across Hoyoverse’s worlds. We confirm again this was necessary to create Teyvat's egg, and that the Primordial One couldn’t do it alone because two people are required for a marriage.

And do you know what Marriages also require? A ring. Who was escaping with a golden ring, that is an important figure of Khaenri’ah and the only Pygmy who didn’t act like the others/didn’t become a Sinner? Dainsleif, whose constellation is even a Serpent ring. May I point to the Das Rheinegold music drama, that is part of the series The Ring of Nibelung, and maybe use that as extra merit to associate the Primordial One with Nibelung?

4. About the world of Teyvat

Dragons = Vishaps = Sea slugs = Bees = Seelies. Yes. We already know that the the dragons and seelies in Genshin are based on irl sea slugs, I won’t elaborate on that. As for Bees, that is because we have seelie-like bees in Remuria, connected to the prophet Golden-Bee Sybilla (don’t mistake Sybilla with Sylla, who is a Dragon King, although I guess this is all the same family)

Teyvat is theoretically 2 worlds/halves, the version we know and the mirror world, that is probably the Abyss. Or maybe all of it is a mirror world, idk. We can even see similar world structures in Honkai Star Rail, especially in Penacony, where the world there is literally mirrored and a dream too. Some people say Teyvat is divided in 3 parts: the Light Realm, Void Realm, and the Human Realm. But I think the Pimordial One just transformed the Light Realm into the Human Realm, so there are still 2 parts only, and we know they can overlap anyway.

Cycle: People die » are absorbed by the roots » are supposed to travel to the top of the world tree (inverted, so top is in abyss) to become Irminsul fruit / stars » said stars form constellations that determine people's fate, or more accurately, since they are all in a dream, are data that allows the tree to predict their fates » it’s because people exist as stars that their fates and presence can be summoned in the form of shooting stars

Dainsleif confirmed that the leylines can be woven to determine Fate / have their records changed. The Loom used to weave them is a Symphony, or in other words, Remus’ Symphony of Fate is very similar or the same thing as a Loom of Fate, although maybe not at the same scale. It’s possible that other God-Kings also attempted to create their own Looms of Fate.

Add to that some Penacony’s parallels, and you can infer that the Symphony is controlled in a floating palace, that is actually a Grande Theater, by the Sun(day) (potentially Phanes or the Primordial One, basically the one who Dreams), and it’s reflected by the moons (Aria, Sonnet and Canon, so the musical associations are fitting). Considering that the 3 moon sisters are also probably the mythological Moirai who weave Fate, yeah, that tracks.

5. Finally, about Venti

Addressing the Venti is/isn’t the weakest Archon debate: Idk and I don’t quite care, because regardless of how much power he holds now, this theory is about his origins and role more than anything.

Venti is the one narrating the Gnostic Chorus cutscene, so clearly he knows about the origins of Teyvat and other important stuff. Yes, it can just be because of his ties to Istaroth who had the winds of time and bla bla, but I would say he has a bigger involvement.

In the Gnostic Chorus, there is a Black serpent, and I already mentioned how it ties with Khaenri’ah and Istaroth in the second section. Well, Phanes is a figure that has a serpent coiled around him too, Ananke, to be more precise.

Phanes was believed to have hatched from the egg of Chronos and Ananke (Istaroth and PO, section 3), OR Nyx in the form of a black bird and wind, OR from the cosmic /orphic egg placed in and hatched from Aether, who was the personification of the bright upper sky and another son of Chronos. Regardless, it seems like the egg birthed both Phanes AND the world?

Phanes is described sometimes as male, sometimes as androgynous. I don’t need to explain how that fits Venti. The androgynous part also fits with how a being born from an Alchemical Marriage should be androgynous due to being an union of opposites.

Phanes is also described has having wings and a crown. We are yet to see a crown, but at least the angel wings are there.

Some myths say that Phanes was Dionysus (god of wine… amongst other things), or Eros (god of love, yes I’m simplifying), and oh boy isn’t Venti the god of all of that too? Although this is complicated since it has to do with gods being iterations of past gods and such, you can read more about it here

In a certain play, after Phanes mates with Chaos, he creates flying creatures. It would also fit Venti well, especially given that tale from Amber’s Quest where he taught birds how to fly.

Okay, this gets less obvious now. Phanes is a first-born deity who emerged from the abyss and gave birth to the universe, and is a god of creation, light and goodness. The Abyss part is extra intriguing because the world has an abyss half, and some in-game books even compare wine with the Abyss, and also with the idea that drinking the abyss/wine is a way to acquire Forbidden Knowledge. Please, check the last video I link.

Phanes counterpart is Nyx (Night). In some tales she is Phane’s wife, sometimes his daughter, and in others she creates an egg from which Phanes is born, so wtv. I don’t know who Nyx is (besides being clearly The Night Mother from the book of the Six Pygmies), but it’s pretty clear that the Abyss half is under her responsibility in some way.

Oh, right, this was a sus leak that broke my mind months ago and seemed completely nonsensical, but since I started cooking this theory, I can’t help but look back at it. It claimed that Venti was the guide of the Primordial One. Humm… yeah, if Venti was part of a plan between Istaroth and PO, I can see that, although I don’t know what the goal could be. Maybe he is assuming Istaroth’s role now that she is gone in supporting the PO?

This is a very wild guess, but I really thing Venti has something to do with the Gnostic Pearl. Idk if that pearl is the same one that hatched the world, or something that holds the world together (think Mikha from HSR), but I can imagine him having some responsibility over taking care of it.

And if you think Venti holding Fate in his hands is a stretch… let’s talk about Apples. Especially in anime, Apples are often depicted as the fruit of Fate (look no further than Mawaru Penguindrum), and in Inazuma, the girl giving Fortune Slips is called Gendou Ringo, with Ringo meaning ‘apple’ in Japanese. Well… Mondstadt is a land full of apple trees, Venti loves apple cider and is often asking for apples to pay for his performances, is being given an apple in archon form in one of his birthday arts, created the Golden-Apple Archipelago, and even the top of his head in wisp form resembles an apple stem. Seriously, I go crazy with how many people never noticed that. This is too much in our face to not be relevant.

This sounds like a stretch, but apples are round and so the shape is not too different from a dream bubble. And do you know what the birthday art I mentioned had in the caption? “It is written that there is a whole tiny world hidden inside an apple core. Here, this half is for you. Let's take a stroll in the tiny little world. But remember to keep it a secret because... you're the only one I want to bring there.” If he isn’t holding Fate or a world in some way, then I don’t know what this is supposed to mean.

You know how I said that Teyvat is divided into 2 halves? That also connects well with his quote (when he gives us half of the apple/world), and with the idea that Phanes is the day while Nyx is the night. So maybe Venti is responsible for the half of Teyvat that we know/he gave us while Nyx is responsible for the Abyss side.

So… is there any proof that Venti is Phanes? No. Are there many many sus elements about him and connections with the things I listed? Yes. I could see the Traveler being Phanes and being entrusted the Light/Human half of Teyvat by Venti as a scenario just as likely, especially if The Abyss sibling ends up being/becoming Nyx, but I like this version more xD

But even if the main theory ends up being wrong, I hope people you got some things to think about.

Some videos for extra lore, more a less in order of relevance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZIR-tfzfd4 » Reinterpretation of all volumes of the Six Pygmies and the Pale Princess in light of finding out about the 5 Sinners of Khaenri’ah + Dain + connections of Istaroth with Khaenri’ah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK3xYKtUniQ » More about the connections between Istaroth and Khaenri’ah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePjY4c0Rj0k » Elaborates on how a Loom of Fate is basically another database, as opposed to the Irminsul, and mentios how Istaroth can could create several Looms of Fate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAm9uElsKd4 » Parallels with the Penacony arc from Honkai Start Rail and list of evidences that Teyvat is a Dream bubble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhST-fz6Yps » Video is from before we learned about the 5 Sinners, and I’m not fully sold on the chronology, but I still think it does a good job at elaborating n the serpent thing from the gnostic chorus and other things we can infer about genshin thanks to parallels to Penacony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCv8KFdL6M&t=1045s » Ties sacramental bread and blood with wine and the way wisdom/abilities can be passed down thrown ingesting parts of gods, and the concept of fairy rings and The Ring of Nibelung, with the concept of a Chemical Marriage.

[darlingdarkly]

New Year, New You Part 4

Johnny “Soap” MacTavish x f!reader

Personal Trainer AU

4.9k words

CW: dubcon!, dark fic, dark content, obsessive behavior, dirty talk, explicit language, E rated, NSFW, smut, 18+, mature themes, Exhibitionism without any exhibition

Part: 1, 3, 5

It’s too late for things to change, you see that now. He’s taken it to the next level, one you couldn’t possibly have imagined. Time has passed and as it did the situation between you has progressed. You don’t make videos of your homework assignments anymore, Johnny oversees them. Your sessions, while they’re still structured and progressive towards your goals, the goals he’d set for you, they’re now spaced intermittently with chaste make out sessions.

You pushed your limits on your reps, doing fifteen of an exercise instead of ten? Make out session. You stretched just a bit further, legs nearly full split? His lips crash to yours in bruising haste. You ran a full twenty minutes with no rest? His tongue is in your mouth, exploring the depths of it, using the advantage of your jelly legs to push you how he wants you. You can see what he’s doing, you’re not blind.

He’s Pavlovian in his tactics, positive reinforcement, emphasis on the force, but it's working. You find yourself pushing your limits, just to feel the push of his lips. Driving yourself farther, faster, better so he’ll drive you up against the wall.

It’s debilitating, the intensity of his kisses. They have a certain dizzying quality that makes it hard to resist or think or even breathe really. What you haven’t done is fuck, and that’s not for a lack of trying. Johnny has, on multiple occasions, initiated but you kept finding ways out.

Several occasions he’s pushed a hand down your sweats, fingers rubbing against your clit in heated circles. Brazenly out in the middle of the gym he’ll pull you back against him, to the outward eye it appears he’s just correcting your form but in reality all he’s really doing is rubbing his hard cock against the back of your thighs, enticingly. It’s a promise, a tease to your ruination. He’s hungry, had one taste of seeing you fall apart and now he’s on a warpath to make it happen around his cock.

But you’re stalling, nothing, besides heated kisses and frenzied groping has happened since your FaceTime encounter and you can feel Johnny growing impatient. It’s been a week since you walked into Baliquinox for the first time and you think it’d be like any other session but when you come in Johnny has a small gift bag in his hand and waves you over excitedly.

You sit down at your usual table with him and he pushes the bag across the tabletop towards you, giddy with excitement like the gifts for him even though you’re the one opening it. You pull away the tissue paper to reveal a small box, you pull it out and immediately recognize it, ads have been popping up on your Spotify for months for the FitBit luxe. It’s gold and gorgeous but also pricey, you know because you looked at them before Christmas as a present for your mom.

The one he’d gifted you is literally the newest, most expensive model, with a regular pink wristband and interchangeable soft gold chain to dress it up. You stare at the watch as he begins to explain its features. He tells you it tracks your vitals, sleep patterns and exercises. It counts your steps, monitors your breathing and stress levels, it’s also waterproof and has a five day battery, on top of that you can get your call and text notifications through it, it’s GPS enabled to track your miles, pacing and the route you took on your walk or run, the damn thing can even track your menstrual cycles for you.

“Oh gosh, Johnny. I don’t know what to say.” He reaches across the small table and takes the box from your hands, opening it and pulling the watch out, the gold chain already attached. “Dinnae have tae, just put it on.” So you do, holding your wrist out while he attaches the high tech jewelry to your arm, You push the button on the side and the little screen lights up, your name flashes across the screen in a beautiful gold scroll before the sensors against your skin already begin picking up on your heartbeat and breathing rate.

Johnny must have programmed it before giving it to you. You thank him, a bit bashful at the expensive gift and let him kiss you when he comes around the table to grab the empty gift bag and box from you. It’s slow but passionate and he chuckles as he pulls away and your new watch beeps, indicating the upward tick in your bpm.

He ushers you away towards the women’s locker room to change and you can’t help but admire the new weight on your wrist, it’s certainly beautiful. You’re pretty sure you read that they are supposed to be paired with a phone, you’ll have to figure it out later. You quickly change and head into the gym, finding Johnny by the machines.

He pulls you over to the mats to start your warmups and stretches. You’ve made progress since you’ve started, your warmups you now have down to a tee and your stretches nearing a full split without whines or whimpers. When it’s time for your first exercise he guided you to the pull up bar, something you haven’t tried yet.

You stand to the side and watch as he demonstrates. Jumping up to catch the bar and pulling himself up until his chin is over the top of it. He drops and repeats, arms flexing as he effortlessly completes rep after rep. His shirt keeps riding up his body with each lift, exposing the flat, toned expanse of his stomach, there’s a dark trail of sparse hair leading down into his shorts, but you remember where it goes from there, growing thicker as it wraps around the base of his cock. You find yourself thinking about it, that night, you’ve been thinking about it a lot actually, every time you pull your vibrator out of the drawer you come to the thought of him watching you. Those baby blues roaming your body, hungry.

You’re pulled from your erotic daydreams by the beep of your watch and Johnny lets go of the bar, standing before you with a sly smirk. “See something ye like, bonnie?” Stupid watch. How were you ever going to get through today with it going off every five minutes and giving you away? He pulled you unnecessarily close to press a few buttons on the gadget and turned it on to activity mode so it’d stop doing that every time it spiked, but not before it sounded off once more with the effect he was having on your body at this proximity.

“Yer turn.” You walk in front of the pull up bar and spin around, facing him. His eyes hold yours as you jump and grab hold of the bar with both hands, dangling from it. He walks forward and his hands brush the exposed skin of your hips and it makes you shudder. “Good, now up.” You lift, the first half is easy but the last four or five inches to get your chin over the bar are the worst.

It doesn’t help he’s so close, never having backed up and you realize his mouth is level with your pussy at the moment. You come down from your first rep and are ready to let go but you know you can’t do just one. “Come on, lass. Again.” You do as he says, lifting your body weight with nothing more than the strength of your arms.

Those last few inches are a strain and you’re not sure you’ll make it, arms quivering as you pull your chin up over it again, your arms go numb and you bring yourself back down but you know you’ve got one more. He can see you’re struggling though and wraps his arms around the backs of your thighs.

“Last one hen.” You lift and you can feel his hands push up on the globes of your ass, gently assisting you. It helps but also doesn’t make it any easier as your whole body shakes with the effort of those last few inches. You’re stuck at mouth level, that last inch it takes to get your chin over the bar looks impossible but then you feel his mouth on the exposed skin of your stomach, kissing you right over your waistline, the soft curve of his lips caressing you ever so lightly and the jolt it gives you pushes you over the top and he allows you to drop, singing praises and pulling your limp body against his.

“So good fer me, bonnie. Ye did so good.” He lifts your chin from his chest and kisses you, his mouth swallowing yours and instead of just basking in it, letting him damn near consume you like usual you kiss back, matching his pace and pushing your tongue in his mouth for a change. He growls and it’s a rumble you can feel as well as hear, a rockslide in his chest. When you pull away his eyes are deadly serious and that little voice in the back of your head is screaming at you that it’s dangerous, like eyeing up a predator but something else in you is failing to care.

You’ve had about enough of this little game. The back and forth, the teasing touches, the soaked panties. You don’t avert your gaze and his head tilts just slightly, challenging. It’s visceral and exhilarating this line you can see drawn in the sand before you as you anticipate the crossing of it. You reach forward with bold, calmness and glide your hand along the imprint of his cock, teasingly fondling the length.

You had meant to just tease him back a little, give him a taste of his own medicine for once but the effects were more drastic than you’d anticipated and the reaction was immediate. It’s the first time you’ve ever shown him any kind of sexual initiative and it’s all it takes. Suddenly he’s dragging you through the gym with urgency. You think you know where he’s going until he makes a detour, hauling you down the hall and into one of the big glass rooms where classes took place that was currently empty.

You watched as he picked the tablet up from its place by the door. He made a few successive taps on the screen and you watched as the glass took on a dim sheer, graying over slightly. The expanse of the hallway was still visible to you but you knew, just as you had seen walking into the gym for the first time that if you were to walk outside you’d see nothing through the glass but opaque grayness.

You had just a moment to marvel at this before he was on you, your face pressed up against the cool surface, hands caught by his behind your back, ass pressed into the seat of his crotch, you could feel something hard there, poking you. He spoke just behind you, the heat of his breath puffing at the shell of your ear.

“Yer playing a dangerous game, hen.” It sends a shiver down your spine, the threat and its delivery, but it fails to unnerve you. You’ve made your bed and are more than ready to lie in it, there’s just one more thing holding you back.

“I want you to tell me something Johnny.” And you can tell he’s growing impatient by the intensity of his thrusts against your ass and thighs, rutting into you through your clothes.

“Ah’ll tell ye the last four of mah NINO if ye want. Anything, jus’ name it.” There’s a moment of anxious hesitation on your part, unsure of where things will go depending on his response, or even if you want to know what he’s going to say in the first place, but you didn’t come this far to chicken out now.

“Why did you pick me out? Why did you choose me?” And he must approve of the question because he chuckles darkly in your ear, moving your body back from the glass to begin stripping you as he answers.

“Ye wanna ken why I singled ye out, hmm? Why I chose ye?” He’s pulled your shirt off and he’s working at the hem of your sports bra, freeing your breasts to the cool air, your mind freezes, your first instinct is to cover yourself, there’s people walking up and down the hallway constantly. Strolling right by as you stand half naked with nothing but an inch of glass and a special electronic filter to shield you from sight.

It shouldn’t make you this wet, being stark naked in front of strangers, strangers who you know can’t see you but you can see them, commuting through the gym like normal while you’re bare and on sinful display behind the glass, but it does. He’s working at your sweats, pulling them down your legs, stooping down as he does to kiss your skin as it’s freshly exposed.

Between kisses he answers. “At first it was just attraction, when ye looked up into me eyes while ye were jogging. I felt something, this urge, I had to have ye. Then after yer exam ye dinnae run away or complain, jus’ did as I asked an’ took everything I gave ye like a good lass.”

He’s tugging at your panties now, stopping long enough to groan and bite into one of your ass cheeks, making you squeal and instinctively push forward into the glass. Your bare tits and thighs smush obscenely against the cool surface, nipples beginning to pebble from the cold as he moves forward to keep you pressed there. One hand coming around to secure itself around your throat like a collar, the other kneading at the flesh of your ass, pulling it apart and releasing it to enjoy the jiggle.

“I dinnae ken if ye’d even come in the next day, but there ye were, and I ken right then that ye were mine. Everything from there jus’ solidified it. The way ye answered all mah questions, even if ye tried to cover it up by complainin’ about bein’ spoke tae that way. When I broke into yer house and ye dinnae call the police, jus’ called me tae yell at me then came all nice and pretty for me while I watched.”

You were filled with mixed emotions. Shock, shame, growing horror, but most of all, overtaking the rest was arousal, pure lust. You sucked in a breath as his fingers dipped down, stark naked as you were, it’s all it took to feel the evidence of it as it coated your thighs. He pulls his fingers out, wet with your juices and licks them clean right behind your ear. “Even now I’ve got ye stripped naked and absolutely soaked, and ah’m still fully dressed.”

He’s right, there’s no way to hide or deny it. “Yer just as dirty an’ fucked up as I am, aren’t ye hen?” He slides a finger past your lips, breaching you and you can’t help the moan that spills out, eyes closing in self indulgence, the pleasure staining your self conscious inhibitions, muddling them. He gets closer, harsh and gruff in your ear, demanding an answer. “Aren’t ye?” You whine out a yes that sounds pathetic even to your own ears.

He pulls the digit out and the warmth of his chest disappears from your back, making your eyes blink open and needy whimpers escape your lips. “Dinnae whine, greedy thing.” He presses back up against you, the hard length of him slotted between your thighs, you feel him for just a moment, rubbing the tip up and down your soaked slit before he’s pushing in, full length buried deep in one brutish thrust.

It has your back arching, head falling back against his shoulder as your mouth drops open and a hearty low moan flies from your throat like an uncaged bird. He rubs soothing circles into your hips as he gives you time to adjust. When your head dips forward he begins, sawing in and out of you slowly at first, making you groan with each fully sheathed thrust.

“Johnny, please.” He leans forward and nips at the skin of your nape, assaulting your neck and ear with his lips and teeth as he picks up the pace, giving you what you asked for. It feels euphoric, the full stretch of his cock and it puts all the thoughts you’ve had of him, the erotic daydreams, the nights spent touching yourself to the thoughts of what it’d be like to shame.

He’s attentive and sensual, listening intently for which of his movements drive you wild. Your head dips forward and you close your eyes but he’s not having it, gripping you beneath the chin and forcing your head up, eyes opening as he growls in your ear from behind. “Look at them, hen. Can ye imagine what’d they think if they could see ye right now? See this body, beautiful and bare like I can.” His arm slips down and around the back of your thigh, grabbing purchase in the pit of your knee and lifting, your leg comes up, hiked up level to your hip and he holds it there while he fucks into you from behind. You’re pleasantly surprised at the ease in which you can maneuver this way, those stretches finally paying off, almost like it was planned from the start.

The new angle makes him able to slide devastatingly deep, your body jolting with each thrust, moans quickly filling the room, yours and his. You remember seeing the people dancing, their bodies in sync to the music you could feel in your feet but was inaudible to you from outside and was suddenly glad for it as he pulled all the way out before thrusting back in with the snap of his hips and you let out a startled and involuntary noise that was half moan, half scream.

“Sound so good like this, panting an’ moaning like a bitch in heat fer me. Squeezin’ me so tight, does it feel good lass? Better than yer fingers?” You’re beyond words at the moment so you just give him a frenzied nod, head leaning forward to rest on the glass as he lays waste to your cognitive ability. But then he stops moving and it all comes back, although the only thing you can articulate at the moment is whines of his name and pathetic pleas for him to keep going.

“Asked ye a question, lass.” Your mind reels and you start babbling, a series of yeses and broken sentences, anything to get him to start again. His hand snakes up and laces his fingers between yours, as the other keeps a firm grip on your knee, spreading you nice and wide for him.

He picks up a breakneck pace, hips stuttering into yours violently as you just try to hang in there, you can feel it, your orgasm building rapidly. He can feel it too, the way your pussy clenches down around him as you beg him not to stop. “Are ye close, bonnie? Gonna fall apart all over mah cock?” You don’t dare leave him waiting, chanting out affirmations like prayers falling from your lips, if he stopped now you may have a meltdown.

“Do it fer me, hen. Let me feel ye come fer me.” You’re thrown over the edge, whole body tense as he drives you through, quite possibly, the most violent orgasm of your life. Your legs shake in his hold, eyes squeezed shut and head thrown back over his shoulder as you all but collapse against him. He holds you up and doesn’t stop, pushing you through it and out the other side into overstimulation.

Your constant moans just spur him on, he can feel his own release building slowly. “What’s my rule on sets, hen?” Your fuzzy brain is having trouble grasping his question, or even the relevancy of it, until it dawns on you and he must feel you stiffen as the implication of it sets in. “Aye that’s right. Tell me.”

You answer in a quiet whisper but he lets it slide. “Sets of three, always.” He drops your leg and the combination of the blood rushing back in, tingling like static and the continued drag of his cock is mind numbing. “Aye, good girl. Sets of three. One down, two tae go.”

His hands come down to grip your hips, pulling you back into each thrust with force. You brace yourself against the glass, the side of your face and both palms of your hands pushed up against it as he ruts into you without mercy or ceremony.

You watch as a set of women pass by the room, their eyes seem to pass right over you without seeing and they stop momentarily in front of the glass for one to share something on their phone with the group, their eyes all widen and they mime a fit of giggles and continue on, unaware of your ruination inches away.

He grabs a fistful of your hair and lightly tugs, pulling your face back from the glass, at this new angle your nipples make brief contact with the glass on every inward push and it drives you ever closer to careening off the edge for a second time. “Johnny! I’m- ah! I’m fucking close! Fuck!” He keeps thrusting into you until you squeeze him for dear life a second time, only then does he pick up the pace, relishing in the way he can alter the pitch of your moans by the little variations in his thrusts.

You’re fucked out, lost to bliss and delirium as you come down from your second orgasm. You can’t possibly see how he could pull another from you until he leans forward, hand sliding down your body until his fingers find your clit and your body involuntarily jerks from the touch, but he just reaches out again and finds it, muscling you into place so you can’t buck away.

“You know the rules lass, one more.” You shake your head and sob. “I can’t Johnny! S’too much!” He’s enjoying the slurred nature of your speech, the pleading tone of your protests, he’s going to come soon, he can feel it. “Ye can and ye will. I’ll make ye. Be a good lass and take it.”

He rubs your clit in frenzied circles and it’s almost painful the sensation, your sensitive nerves too overworked to handle it so your hands come down to grab at his wrist, anything to stop the motions, else you’re apt to lose your mind.

He’s ready for that though, pulling one hand away from the apex of your thighs and securing it behind your back in an iron grip, the other he traps beneath his hand, making you rub circles into your own clit as he guides you.

It threatens to make your knees buckle underneath you as he holds you up and stretches you open simultaneously. He whispers filth into your ear as your eyes roll back and you teeter on the edge of sexually induced lunacy. “Did ye get more than ye bargained fer, hen? Poor thing. All fucked out an’ creamin’ all over mah cock? Yer gonna do it again, lass. One more fer me and I’ll let ye rest, aye? Be a good lass an’ come again.”

He pushes you over the edge for the third time and your whole body shakes, convulsing around him as you lose the battle against your pleasure and ultimately succumb to it. He feels his own orgasm closing in and holds it off for just a bit longer while you recover, keeping even steady strokes while your pussy squeezes around him through your aftershocks. When your eyes reopen and your breathing levels in one fluid motion he pulls out of you, spins you around and forces you to the floor.

You open your mouth to speak but he’s stuffing his cock down your throat before you can utter even a word. Your head backs into the glass and he uses your mouth like a pocket pussy, hands bracing on your head as he thrusts into your open throat a few erratic times, his balls sticky from your cum tapping against your chin as he reaches his peak. Loud guttural roars echo off the walls and ring in your ears as he comes down the back of your throat hard and fast.

He pulls out and a string of your saliva connects your puffy bottom lip to his tip for the briefest of moments before snapping. He’s staring down at you, chest heaving from the exertion of his climax with the slyest smirk on his face and a twinkle of satisfaction in his bright blue eyes.

He stoops down to your level, face to face when he speaks next, slightly hoarse. “Did ye swallow?” He asks as if you had much of a choice coming down the back of your throat like he did but before you can even answer he’s pulling down on your bottom jaw with his thumb. Your mouth falls open, tongue lolling out as he tilts your head from side to side and groans. A wave of panic surges through you as he leans in and kisses you passionately, tongue invading the space of your mouth as he tastes his cum off your lips. His hands cup your face as you begin to worry he’s gearing up for a second round.

He must feel you tensing under his touch because he pulls away and smooths your hair as he calms you. “Dinnae worry hen, just three fer today. We’ll stretch yer limits another time.” The promise of more makes you shudder and he helps you up off the floor to clean you up and help you redress, it’s hard because your limbs seem to refuse to cooperate as your mind commands them to, too shaky and loose to comply.

When you’ve dressed and regain your ability to walk he ushers you down the short hallway and into a seat in the smoothie alcove where he walks up to the counter, once more skipping the long line and orders you a smoothie, but not without mentioning you’ve just been through a very intense session and need it immediately, to your embarrassed dismay.

He walks back over to the table, drink in hand and sits across from you, smug as can be as you take it from him and drink. Moaning quietly as the cool drink slides down your sore throat. “Good?” He asks. And you non verbally nod to signify your content, still untrusting of your ability to articulate as of yet. “Good.”

You’re not sure where things will go from here, a secret part of you that speaks from deep in the back of your mind, where your true subconscious desires reside is scared that now that he’s had you he will be done with you. You push that thought back down into the murk of your subconscious, it doesn’t help and all of the context clues suggest it’s not true but that doesn’t stop it from bubbling to the surface.

It also doesn’t help when he tells you not to worry about your homework tonight. You sit, a bit dejected in your seat and try not to let disappointment seep into your tone. “Oh, ok.” And failing. He seems to pick up on it and leans forward and settles a hand overtop yours from across the table. It’s warm, and the touch of his skin is something you won’t admit that you really needed at that moment.

“Jus’ dinnae want ye sore, bonnie. Ye can still call me tonight if ye’d like.” You nod in agreement and after you’d finished your drink, you got up, grabbed your things from the locker room and left.

Johnny watched from his phone as you made the trip home, watching the blip on the map making various stops and turns until it reached your address. He got home and monitored it all through the night as you cooked, took your shower, caved and made your call to him and then hung up to go to bed.

He watched as your bpms slowly rose and spiked as you climaxed for the fourth time that day, reliving the day's events in vivid memory and wished it was his hands rubbing circles against your clit and playing with hard nipples until you saw stars. He continued to watch as your respiration levels evened out and the app indicated you’d started your sleep cycle.

In the morning he read your sleep logistics, learning you reached rem sleep, dreamt and even woke up twice in the night to pee. He picked it up in between reps during his workout and watched your stress levels while you were at work, the early morning rush had you on edge, you chilled as lunch time came around and then spiked again right after until it came close to quitting time and you relaxed as soon as you’d clocked off.

He sat in the smoothie alcove and watched your little blip get closer and closer until you were right outside. You turned into the building and he looked up to see you crossing the lobby towards the check-in desk, returning your pleasant smile and wave as he locked his phone and put it away so you could begin your next session.

[nenelonomh]

organization 101

organization is about how we gather stimuli in our environment to complete tasks quickly and more effectively. it's about arranging our surroundings, providing order, and structuring items and activities around us.

this topic can be applied in so many instances - including physical spaces, digital files, schedules, and mental clarity.

staying organized offers several benefits:

★ when you're organized, you waste less time searching for things or figuring out what to do next. this efficiency leads to increased productivity

★ clutter and chaos can contribute to stress. an organized environment promotes a sense of calm and control.

★ organization helps you allocate time effectively. you can prioritize tasks and allocate resources efficiently.

★ a clutter-free workspace (or living space) allows you to concentrate better on the task at hand.

★ organized spaces encourage healthier habits, such as regular exercise, balanced meals, and adequate rest.

but how can you stay organized?

★ start with one area of focus (e.g. closet, desk, documents, ...) and gradually expand. focusing on one area allows you to see tangible progress, and as you declutter or organize, you'll build momentum to tackle other spaces.

trying to organize everything at once can be overwhelming. by narrowing your focus, you can prevent feeling swamped. concentrating on a specific area also allows you to learn effective strategies,, which you can apply to other parts of your life!

★ keep a to-do list. you can use a planner or digital tools to track tasks - and prioritize and sort tasks by urgency. write things down promptly to avoid forgetting them.

by freeing your mind from trying to remember all of your tasks, this mental offloading allows you to focus on the present moment. you can also assign urgency and importance, ensuring you will tackle what matters most.

★ give everything a home. clutter happens when items lack designated spaces. organize your physical and digital spaces intentionally.

★ once organized, maintain order consistently by building habits and systems. regularly review and adjust your systems when needed.

maintaining daily habits can significantly contribute to staying organized.

digital files

personally, the biggest issue i have with organization is building (and maintaining) a good system for digital files. it is crucial for me to learn how to organize these well, however, as a digital creator.

here is the process:

★ create a folder structure,, and design a clear hierarchy of folders that reflect your workflow. organize files logically based on projects, departments, dates, or file types.

at the moment i sort my files as content home < links, content plan, instagram, pinterest, tumblr, youtube < scheduling, post ideas

however, sometimes i find myself with documents that don't fit any of these sections. my plan for the future is to reorganize this to be the most effective it can.

★ use descriptive file names,, and name files clearly and concisely. include relevant keywords to make searching easier

★ consider using tags to categorize files across multiple dimensions. tags enhance searchability and allow flexible organization.

this is something that i am looking to employ!

★ utilize cloud services like google drive or dropbox for easy access from anywhere.

i will forever be a notion girl,, even though it is not quite a cloud service, it allows me a similar experience.

★ make decluttering a routine. delete duplicate or unnecessary files.

★ pin essential folders to your sidebar for quick access.

physical decluttering

writing this, i was reminded of the (horrid) bedrotting trend, especially those videos where people would show their rooms with shit everywhere and mould growing on stuff. i'm aware that some people find it super hard to maintain organization or declutter - hoarding is a very real issue.

the benefits of staying organized were previously mentioned, but decluttering specifically has its own little set of positives. this includes reduced stress, improved focus, enhanced productivity, and more positive overall wellbeing.

here are some essential tips if you are struggling to get started:

choose a small area or category to begin decluttering. set a timer (15-30 minutes) and sort items in that area into 'keep', 'donate', 'trash', or 'unsure' piles.

you could also attempt a room-by-room approach, by tackling one room at a time. focus on completing each room fully before moving on to the next.

try to organize your belongings into categories (keep, donate, sell, discard) to make decisions easier.

remember - progress comes from consistent effort, and small steps lead to a clutter-free space.

further reading

i hope today's post was helpful!

as for further reading, check out these sites: ★ How to Declutter Your Home: 6 Best Room-by-Room Methods (thespruce.com) ★ First Steps to Decluttering - Understanding the Clutter - Being Minimalist ★ Productivity, Organization & Personal-Development | 101 Planners ★ Executive Functioning Skills 101: Organization | Life Skills Advocate ★ How to Be Organized - 10+ Habits - Organized 31 ★ How to Be More Organized & Productive | 10 Habits for Life Organization (youtube.com) ★ How to Be More Organized (verywellmind.com) ★ How to Organize Your Digital Files | Reviews by Wirecutter (nytimes.com) ★ Master How to Organize Digital File Management (riverfy.com)

❤️ nene

image source: pinterest

[cellarspider]

5/30 The pseudohistory of Prometheus

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We return to a movie I wish to send on a journey down the Kola Superdeep Borehole, Prometheus.

And my insanity truly begins in this segment. We are only 1/10th of the way through the movie so far. Content warnings for discussion of racism in pseudoscience and historical anthropology, Spider getting hung up on logistics and space nerd stuff, and pictures of Yuri Knorozov, the most sour-faced man to ever live.

The cast sits down for a briefing. This is a scene with an easily identifiable narrative function: providing exposition to the theater audience. The act of doing a briefing makes sense. It is the last thing here that will.

We are introduced to a hologram of Peter Weyland, the financier of the expedition. The name means all sorts of Lore to the series, but what’s intensely distracting is that we seem to have caught Weyland halfway through applying his zombie makeup.

Weyland is played by Guy Pierce. As of the filming of this movie, he was somewhere around 45 years old. Yes, they smothered this Australian in old man drag so that he could play this character. This is a baffling decision, that only gets slightly less baffling if you know the production history of the movie, which I did not at the time.

Guy Pierce was hired to play a younger Peter Weyland. There’s a promo video out there of him giving a fictional TED Talk in the not-to-distant future of next Sunday AD 2023, there were various plans for him to appear in the movie proper. None of those scenes are actually in the movie. They refused to double-cast the role for some reason. While the practical effects in the movie are generally excellent and it does make the tiniest smidge of sense that a hypercapitalist asshole would be portrayed as a literal rubber-faced movie monster, this, like many things in Prometheus, made the movie a very weird sit. One where I was increasingly less open to going along with the movie’s fiction. You are telling me that this is an actual human man. I am not buying it. He looks far less human than David, the only non-human there.

Speaking of David, Weyland calls him “the closest thing to a son I will ever have”, and then immediately says David is an inhuman lesser being, who does not appreciate the specialness of his existence because he does not have a soul.

Which is funny, because I think you can see David’s soul leaving his body at this exact moment.

Weyland then tries to mash in some existential weight to the movie: they might finally get an answer for “why are we here?” and all that jazz! He also tries to explain why naming a ship Prometheus is totally not like calling it Titanic II: Don’t think about the part of the myth where Prometheus is chained to a rock and has his ever-regenerating liver eaten by an eagle every day! Think about the bit where he brought fire to mankind! We’re gonna bring back that bit!

And then the archaeologists take over the briefing, and this, THIS, is the bit where they entirely lost me. My suspension of disbelief had already been strained by multiple oddities up to this point. My skepticism about these characters in particular was already a bit elevated by their implied invocation of the ancient astronauts concept.

Turns out, only Vickers, Shaw, and Holloway know why they’re here. 

Two years away from Earth. On a massively expensive expedition that intends to make first contact with an alien culture, the first alien culture that humankind has ever found evidence of. Nobody has been briefed up until this point.

This is lunacy.

Explanations have been figured out by fans since then: this is a passion project by Weyland, an annoyance to the rest of the corporate structure that nobody else believes in. The movie eventually intimates this, through Vickers. 

Fans have thus speculated that Weyland was just quarantined off to do his little alien hunt, with no logistical support that would make it actually functional. He believed a crazy theory put forward by Shaw and Holloway, and everyone else wasn’t actually best-of-the-best, they were just whoever would take a big paycheck to do fuck-all for nearly five years of sleeping their way to and from their destination.

I am willing to consider that this was intentional. The movie possibly tries to confirm this with Mr. “I’m here for the money” Fifield, but none of the other characters have enough characterization to determine if this is the general trend.

How could we make a story that more clearly spells this out? Maybe Millburn the biologist could encounter more of the crew talking about the payout from taking the job, or reveal that he himself has some project he needs money for. It would also chip away at the dearth of character-building dialog for most of the cast.

As a result of those deficiencies in characterization, a lot of my discussion of plot points is going to be focused around what they do, rather than why. …Except when it is about the why, at which point the main commentary will be “WHY.”

In any case: while it makes sense, I'm still not certain the film meant for this character motivation. Prometheus is just so loudly explicit with so many of its plot points that it doesn’t seem like this is the case. The movie certainly believes in the sincerity and correctness of the archaeologists, though.

Unfortunately, it also immediately tells me that they’re a couple of wingnuts. I’m not sure if it intends to, for reasons I’ll get into after I foam at the mouth for a little while.

They present a series of artifacts to the crew: Egyptian, Mayan, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hawaiian, and their Scottish cave painting. All of them feature “men worshiping giant beings”, who are pointing to what stargazer nerds call an asterism: a pattern of stars. Shaw and Holloway believe that these are aliens that engineered humans into their current state. Shaw literally says “it’s what I choose to believe” as the entirety of their justification for this.

Again: I knew the movie wanted me to take this as truth, within its universe. That’s the implicit deal the movie has made with the audience, this is truth. You are supposed to be contemplating the "whys" of it all. But the movie had also smacked me in the brain so many times in the past five minutes, that I, like Millburn the Biologist, was ready to call bullshit.

I appreciate him for doing so, and it shows he could have been a smart character, but sadly, he is in Prometheus.

Because he is a fictional biologist and I am an actual biologist, I will expand on his argument, as I descend into ranting for the rest of the post.

Millburn objects on the basis of evolutionary history, which the movie only partially succeeds in papering over: the implication is that evolution on Earth was directed with the deterministic outcome of creating something like humans.

This opens up a whole new can of worms that the movie doesn’t get into–when exactly did this engineering start? When great apes evolved? When mammals did? Tetrapods? Skeletons? DNA itself? After all, we know the aliens, now dubbed Engineers by the archaeologists, have DNA. Did they seed all life on Earth? How did they evolve? Our last universal common ancestor is believed to have already been using DNA 3-4 billion years ago, evolving out of a likely RNA-based genetic standard. Hominins diverged from other apes around 15-25 million years ago. What sort of culture would undertake a project that required at least 15 million years on the extreme low end?

All excellent questions! The movie is not concerned with them. I am, and that is part of why this movie still lives in a special, awful place in my head.

This isn’t actually what made me become actively hostile toward the archaeologists, though. What managed that, well! It was their archaeology. Anybody who had an Ancient Egypt Phase in their childhood should be able to articulate multiple reasons why the academic community would’ve laughed these guys out of the building.

Bigness in ancient egyptian art does not indicate literal size. It indicates importance. In fact, the artifacts the movie uses exclusively come from artistic traditions which feature hierarchical or non-literal scale. Do the Engineers turn out to actually be eight feet tall? Yes! Am I still annoyed by this? ABSOLUTELY.

You know what else is a big problem? Many of the cultures they reference here had written language! A LOT of written language! They include Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Mayan art in their evidence, all of which not only wrote a LOT of things down, but had a habit of annotating a lot of their art with labels to tell you what was going on! You can actually see some on the props they used in this scene!

Beyond that, they had very prescribed formal styles, where you can follow the action entirely through gestures, held objects, attendant symbols, and clothing! If all these cultures, as implied, had actual, direct contact with aliens, recorded in the art presented here, we would know what they were told.

Skipping ahead of the movie for a minute: the Engineers were apparently not telling humans “we’re here in these stars, come find us”, they were telling humans “settle the fuck down or this is where the hurt’s going to come from”. 

Here's the thing. Ancient peoples weren't stupid. They wouldn't just not talk about this. If giant aliens came down from the sky and gave them a stern talking-to that contradicted their religion, that would be a big deal. And these characters specifically say the Engineers are being "worshiped" in these images! They're apparently taking onboard what's being said!

It is certainly possible for information to be lost. Over long time scales, that's unfortunately the rule, rather than the exception. But again: half the artifacts have writing on them!

I chose to believe that Shaw and Holloway simply did not attempt to read any available translations of attendant texts, and they were thus cursed for their foolishness by the ghosts of Mayan Studies pioneer Yuri Knorozov and Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, and the still-extant spirit of Assyriologist Irving Finkel.

Knorozov knows your sins against Mayan Studies. Knorozov is a vengeful god. Chapollion and Finkel are likewise very cross.

Two last things stood out to me in the theater. One of them was extremely petty but tied into some very serious issues with pseudoscience, and the other one was not.

Pettiness first: the asterism shown in the artifacts is a pattern of six stars. The movie wants you to believe that it is very spooky that the only asterism that precisely matches this pattern are six stars that are too faint to see with the naked eye. This is laughable, both because the asterism is so generic-looking that I can think of several very visible asterisms that are good matches for the pattern, but it also recapitulates a bunch of really fucking annoying stuff from pseudoscientific bullshit. 

First: Pseudoscience and pseudohistory likes to make a big deal out of the fact that every culture has stories about the stars. Why? 

The sky is very important to every culture’s mythology, because every culture can see the sky. Like, that’s literally it. People can see the sky. They tell stories about it. There’s not much to do at night except look at the sky, when even keeping a fire lit can be an expensive prospect. It is not even the least bit weird when multiple cultures–all of them in the northern hemisphere in this case!–have stories about the same stars.

Second: Cultures vary in their ability to faithfully reproduce celestial landmarks in art and align their architecture is variable, and not as exact as modern techniques can manage. Pseudoscience will claim that they are exact, when it fits their pre-existing theory, or fudge the difference if they want something to fit their claims.

(This is a photoshopped image, by the way.)

Were the stone age temples of Malta secretly aligned with a particular star that foretold the doom of Atlantis, precisely tracking its location through the sky over thousands of years of Earth’s axial wobbling? No! They were roughly aligned with the sun. Sunlight is important when you don’t have electric lights. Were the Great Pyramids of Giza laid out ten thousand years ago to match the layout of the stars in Orion’s Belt, according to the designs of a legendary lost race of highly advanced non-African people? Were they tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field to generate energy? No! They were aligned with the cardinal directions, and they got them a bit wrong! 

Hell, if we want to play at that game, I found a decent match for the asterism in Stellarium's Egyptian constellation set. Just flip this 90 degrees clockwise and you'll see I'm totally right. Aliens confirmed.

I know the movie is trying to tell me that all the asterisms in the art are precise matches for each other and are thus impossible to explain without intercultural contact (or aliens!!), but it is also showing me that they are not that precise. So, it’s just showing me stars. At least in some of them. Their little charcoal lad from the Isle of Skye may be throwing fruit at his audience.

In fact, there's a further, probably unintentional link to pseudohistorical claims in the artifacts presented: the Maya artifact shown does not actually depict a "giant figure" being worshiped, in fact, it shows one instantly recognizable, known figure in Classical Maya history: It is an altered version of the ornately carved coffin lid of Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I (24 March 603 - 29 August 683), with the top quarter of the carving replaced with a star pattern that looks nothing like the ones on the other artifacts.

The carving shows Pakal in the pose of an infant, entering into death and being reborn. It is packed full of so many symbolic elements that can be easily recognized by those more familiar with the Classical Maya than I am.

Conspiracy theorist Erich von Däniken thought that it showed Pakal rocketing away on a spaceship. Däniken proposed this because he didn't understand the cultural symbolism, but he had seen pictures of astronauts before.

And on that note, 2,400 words into this rant, we get to the actually bad shit. Unfortunately, it ties into the issue I had with the premise to begin with: the real-world context of pseudoscientific claims of ancient alien contact. Specifically, the racism.

We’re going to unspool this more near the end of the movie, because there was further behind the scenes I was not aware of when I first saw Prometheus, and it just compounds this stuff. 

So, when I went on my first tangent on how unpleasant ancient alien theories are, one thing I highlighted is that the further from Western Civilization you get, the more these theories presuppose that fellow humans are incapable of building great works or imagining interesting things. No, they had to be guided, and explicitly shown things that they copied down to the best of their limited capability.

The only european example of alien contact they show is from the Upper Paleolithic, 37,000 years ago. All the examples around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia range from 5,500-3,700 years ago. The examples from the Classical Maya and Hawaiʻi are from 620 and 680 CE. 

During this period, Tang Dynasty merchants were creating the first paper money as the famous female emperor Wu Zetian was on her way to the throne. The Prophet Muhammad went to al-Aqsa mosque, and we’re only eight years before the birth of Charlemagne’s grandfather. We’re no longer talking ancient, it’s just old.

I want to emphasize that the movie is presenting these not as depictions of myths that have been passed down–though there are more problems with that I’ll get into shortly–these are implied to be contemporary depictions of events witnessed by the artists, who were quite possibly instructed by the Engineers to record a precise pattern of stars. An equivalency is being drawn between stone age Europe, bronze age Africa and the Middle East, and a couple of startlingly recent Mesoamerican and Polynesian cultures. 

But let’s be generous. Maybe these aren’t supposed to be contemporary accounts in these two outlier cases: the movie’s script will certainly indicate later that they have no idea what they’ve implied here. Perhaps these are story traditions that were handed down from the Olmecs and Melanesian precursors of the first to sail to Hawaiʻi. 

Unfortunately, this just recapitulates a different racist trope: that European and more “developed” civilizations invented so much cool and comfortable material culture and philosophy that they forgot the Mystical Religious Truths of the old ways, which were preserved only in Primitive Lands and among Uneducated Peoples, where they never found anything better to do with their time. Oh, if only we had heeded the warnings from those spiritually attuned non-white people!

(Look, I only remember Devil (2010), which has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, because M Night Shyamalan wrote and produced it, and this was two years after The Happening came out, so I watched it out of morbid curiosity. It's not as unbelievably bad as The Happening, but as shown in the clip above, the spiritually attuned latino security guard Ramirez attributes toast landing jelly side down to Satan. That is an actual thing that happens in the movie. He is proven right.)

But let's be even more generous: someone probably realized that they'd focused near-exclusively on Middle Eastern cultures, and wanted to throw in a couple from elsewhere. Sitting here, having seen the movie in full, this is the most likely option: their inclusion creates a contradiction with a later scene, and was thus probably not checked for consistency. These cultures were thrown in as a bit of background flavor. I list this last, because in the theater, there was no way to know this at the time.

That answer's still not great. Still leaves us in the same position, where Europeans are pretty much given their own agency, while other cultures need to be led.

Oh, and to anyone else who’s made it this far and knows the production history of Prometheus: don’t worry! I know what Ridley Scott told that one interviewer, about a contact between a less-ancient European power and the Engineers. I’m saving that one. I like to save that one, because strategic deployment of that quote made some of my IRL friends scream.

Next time: the Prometheus descends to an alien world, and I descend further into madness. I am going to drag you all down with me.

(Pictured: Yuri Knorozov, and my present mood.)

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Citations for alt text ramblings:

https://www.almendron.com/artehistoria/arte/culturas/egyptian-art-in-age-of-the-pyramids/catalogue-fourth-dynasty/

[msviolacea]

why you should play elder scrolls online in 2023

Okay, I've been considering making posts about "why to play X game I love" but finally decided "what the hell, no time like the present." And since ESO is on my mind today, it gets first dibs!

What is ESO??

It's an MMO set in the Elder Scrolls universe - think Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, etc. It's the Elder Scrolls theme park in the same way that FFXIV is the Final Fantasy theme park. But, in the same way, it's not exclusively for people who have experience with the previous games - it's a fun, immersive fantasy world whether you know anything about previous lore or not.

You should play ESO if ...

You like immersive fantasy worldbuilding. Listen, if there's one thing the Elder Scrolls team can do, it's worldbuild like motherfuckers. Do you want a story that reaches back thousands of years and covers dozens of countries/empires/territories, where you can find lorebooks around every corner, and expansive essays on the internet about the briefest of details? ESO has you covered.

You love overland exploration. This is ESO's bread and butter. The explorable areas are expansive and varied and absolutely gorgeous, and the game is built for the player who just wants to travel and collect things and see the sights. Tamriel has pretty much every biome you can imagine - you want medieval Britain? Head for High Isle! You want an Arabic-style desert? Alik'r Desert is your place! Rugged arctic landscape? Listen, there are FOUR SEPARATE Skyrim areas for you. You're like "I just want weird fantasy things that don't look like anywhere on earth?" Vvardenfell and its surrounding areas have you covered. You can explore as you play the story, you can go on a hunt for the perfect screenshot location, you can find an RP location that fits your character exactly, you can make it your goal to complete every exploration achievement in the game ... you can do it all.

You want a game where exploration isn't gated behind your level. ESO made the switch to what they call "One Tamriel" fairly early in their development cycle - this means that all mobs and quests are synced to your level in the overworld, and you can start or go anywhere you want no matter how low level you are. You can play through the storyline in release order, or you can say "I want to start in the newest expansion," or you can go "listen I'm only here for vampires in Western Skyrim," all of these are valid and possible ways of playing. You don't have to go "man the new expansion looks great but I have to put in HOW many hours to get there??" It's all available to you from level 1!

You love decorating houses. Listen, if there is one thing ESO does better than any other MMO (at least the ones I've played), it's the housing system. You can own ALL THE HOUSES. SO MANY HOUSES. Small and large and every conceivable style! You can buy land with no house on it, and build your own structures! You can decorate without having to learn how to glitch or press six buttons at once! And housing feeds very well into the rest of the gameplay - you earn furnishing plans from pretty much every conceivable gameplay system, so it becomes an excellent reason to go do your daily stuff and explore. And the housing community in ESO is one of the most creative groups I've ever seen, I could watch their YouTube videos and streams forever.

You like MMOs that allow you to play mostly solo. None of the story progression is gated behind the need to group up. There is plenty of group content, but it's all optional. There are bosses across the landscape and in public dungeons that require multiple people to kill, but you'll always come across people who want to help kill them without having to group up. And with the last few expansions, you now have companions - NPCs you can unlock and have follow you around everywhere. They can be set and geared to perform any role - tank, healer, DPS - and the AI is good enough at any of those to get you through pretty much anything overland you want to do. (And as a side note, some of the companion quests are really good, and they've been getting really, really good voice actors for the companions themselves - see: Laura Bailey, Brandon Keener - and they have fun dialogue as you wander.)

A couple of caveats:

If you play for story, your mileage will vary. Don't get me wrong, ESO has some very, very good stories within it! But it's not a linear story a la FFXIV or single player MMOs - it has a main storyline for the base game zones, and each DLC/expansion has its own storyline that sometimes connects into what happened in the base game, but for the most part ESO's story is a fragmented experience, and you have to go searching for the stories that connect most with you. Can you find them? Yes, but be ready to put in the time to look. (My personal recommendations? The vampire story that starts in Rivenspire and continues in Western Skyrim and The Reach is my absolute favorite; Elsweyr is also very good, but is more of a direct continuation of the base game story than anything else, so would probably need that context going in. A good portion of the fanbase will cite the larger Morrowind-Summerset storyline as the best the game has, and it's very good, but didn't quite stick with me as much as the others mentioned.) ESO tends to be more about the story of the world at large than about the stories of individual characters.

And speaking of story, the game is absolute balls at directing you to places where starting the story would make the most sense. If you want to experience the story in a vaguely linear fashion, here's what to do when you create a character - immediately head to whatever city is your chosen faction's starting city (Daggerfall, Auridon, or Stonefalls), and wander around until you trigger the "Soul Shriven in Coldharbor" quest. That starts the base game main story, and is the best place to start as a brand new player. The other tip: the fancy striped quest markers are indicative of the "main" story quest in each zone, do those when at all possible.

And speaking of factions, those only matter if you want to play PvP - and only Cyrodiil and Imperial City PvP at that. Otherwise, it's just flavor these days.

In conclusion:

ESO is my comfort "explore and collect" game - I find it very chill to just wander around, level new characters, dig up antiquities (ANTIQUITIES, my favorite side system, seriously I could look for leads and dig things up forever), collect materials to sell in my guild trader, and vaguely achievement hunt while listening to music or YouTube. The scenery is beautiful, the character creation is robust and turns out very cool looking characters, and the combat system is simple enough that I easily remember how to do things even if I've been away for a little while. And it is free-to-play, after buying the game; you don't need a subscription to access anything you've purchased, you just miss out on a few good quality of life features. (The craft bag, I could not live without my craft bag, seriously.)

Some version of ESO will be free on the Epic Game store starting tomorrow - my assumption is that it will be the version that contains all DLC/expansions except the Necrom chapter, which was just released last month. I highly recommend picking it up if you play on PC, just to check it out, if anything above sounds appealing to you! (And if you want to splurge, I can very highly recommend Necrom - the new class it introduces is maybe my favorite class to play yet, the two companions it introduces are fantastic, and Apocrypha is a fascinating area to explore if you like creepy eldritch horror type stuff.)

If you want to know more about ESO, just give me a shout! And if you're a mutual who decides to try it, hit me up, I have many gifts to give people!

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

hello! I just wanted to know your thoughts on orcas living in accredited facilities. are they thriving, or are they too smart to be 'locked up' as ARAs say? I've been debating myself on this for a while, and I wanted to ask someone ^^^

Are captive killer whales doomed and depressed? Was it right to end the breeding program?

Hi there! Thank you for being curious and asking these questions!

I can tell you that current welfare data of killer whales in accredited facilities does suggest positive welfare eg. demonstrating optimistic welfare states and demonstrating healthy social and reconciliation behaviours in Loro Parque orcas. (source) (source)

Unfortunately we just don't have a whole lot of welfare data for killer whales the same way we do for bottlenose dolphins. But that's sort of a generalised answer.

I want to address your questions specifically though.

Are orcas "too smart" for being in human care?

I'd say that the intelligence or the supposed hyper intelligence of cetaceans has been overblown and has been the source of contention since John Lilley came on the scene in the 60's making wild claims about hyper intelligent dolphins that speak their own language that still persist to this day (never mind the guy killed dolphins in his experimental brain scans and gave them LSD... the 60's were wild).

The people claiming orcas are too intelligent are people like Dr. Lori Marino - a neuroscientist who makes unsubstantiated claims about cetacean intelligence and draws conclusions about intelligence and cognition from brain scans. Can brain structure give you some data to make educated guesses on intelligence? Sure. But you can't then draw conclusions about welfare about animals you've never examined or done a welfare assessment of.

None of the people making these claims have done objective welfare assessments with access to health and veterinary records.

Lori, as well as other lobbyists like Naomi Rose and Ingrid Visser, have been called out by the scientific community more than once on publishing papers that make unsubstantiated claims about welfare.

My colleagues published this paper refuted their claims that orcas were being "damaged" by captivity (using human comparisons of prisoner of war camps despite human and killer whale brains being separated by millions of years of evolution) . But the media had already picked up the catchy, shocking paper that got published by a journal with no cetacean experience ( the Journal of Veterinary Behavior who also refused to retract the paper despite letters from cetacean welfare scientists)

There is unfortunately a huge problem of lobbyists who are lobbying governments to change laws on cetacean welfare who are using science to skew data for their personal beliefs. And they are absolutely shameless and will block any other scientists that try to refute them.

If anything, intelligence creates adaptability. There's a reason we have bottlenose dolphins in human care around the world but not harbor porpoises. Bottlenose dolphins are socially intelligent and more easily adapt to new environments and bond with human care takers. Orcas are similar, though environmental change has been reported to upset them a lot more. They are very socially intelligent, which makes them very interested in learning and being curious and bonding with human caretakers.

If captive orcas were truly so utterly broken the way they're depicted by media and these "studies" they would not be able to learn new behaviours, they would not eat and play and socialise and they would not engage with the trainers and guests.

See a whole playlist of SeaWorld orcas in their free time - it really helps you look beyond those 10 second "sad SeaWorld orca" videos (it's usually just Keet resting because that's what he prefers to do in his spare time)

Are orcas in accredited facilities "depressed" or suffering in any way?

Now when it comes down to actual welfare of orcas in accredited facilities - based on anecdotal and scientific evidence, statements from trainers I've talked to who work with the animals every day (no they're not getting paid any more than minimum wage and speak freely), what I've witnessed through many hours of observation ect.

I can say with a fair amount of certainty that these orcas are not abused, depressed, doomed or going insane. They have a robust enrichment program, get the best vet care in the world (I'm sure @orcinus-veterinarius can attest to that), are engaged and motivated to learn regardless of satiety (though they'll have their off days of course) and they have good stable social structures that rarely see any hyper aggression (but aggression is normal in social groups too).

Could it be better?

Absolutely. If it were up to me, they would have the Blue World project done and built, bigger habitats, more novel enrichment ideas to encourage hunting behaviour that's not just Big Ball TM (they love it and it's easy but we can do better), more autonomy of habitat eg. being able to turn on water jets when they want to.

And waterwork would still be a thing trainers can do - not for shows but for the unmatched relationship building and desensitisation that it gave these animals. It actually made them safer to be in the water with (look at Kamagowa Sea World orca waterwork and how blaise they are with their whales - those whales will allow any sort of nonsense and someone falling in their pool wouldn't worry me at all)

What about the breeding ban:

I understand why they stopped breeding to appease the public but unfortunately it has introduced other welfare problems. Female orcas cannot be on Regumate - birth control - for longer than a year or it'll destroy her body very quickly. So separation of females and males occurs. And that can be really stressful - especially for matriarchs like Katina who had to be separated from Makaio.

Breeding bans are not done with the welfare in mind. They're done as a sanctimonious "save the babies" effort to "protect" them from no actual documented suffering. While denying animals the natural and very instinctive behaviours of reproduction.

It's amazing how much a calf can enrich a pod. Everyone pitches in to babysit and watch out for them, to teach them how to play and how to learn. It's really sad that the orcas of SeaWorld have been denied that now and it'll be very sad to see them die off one by one until there's only one very lonely whale left.

Anyway I hope that answers some questions. Happy to answer any more you might have.

[mistydaysofavalon]

Soooo is Forgive Me Father For I Have Sinned what I think it is? 👀 more about that please?

well. it is. but also I can almost guarantee you it really isn't what you think it is.

(non phannies look away)

inspired by this post, our pairing is Father Philip/"normal" Dan. except it isn't really /. basically I thought, what if I took that concept and take it way too seriously, add a lot of religious trauma, angst and pining?

let me add the rest under the cut because I have a thing or two to say about this...

Phil is a catholic priest in his mid thirties who really likes his work. Well, it's much more than his work, it's his whole life and he's maybe a bit unconventional but really good at it, very compassionate and fostering a wonderful community in his church. He is a faithful man and believes that he can do good within the structures of the church, believes he can lead people on the right path. Perhaps he is a bit lonely and can't fully be himself all the time (he likes to keep his obsession about certain video games to himself), but that's fine. He's content with what he has and proud of what he has built. (also, he's a nosy bitch and secretly loves that people are confessing their secrets to him. not that he would ever break anyone's trust or his vow of silence.)

Dan is lawyer in his early thirties. He's gay, a bit depressed but he's working on himself, he's trying. surprisingly he doesn't even hate his job that much, he's found a way to use his degree for something he's actually passionate about (uhhh some social whatever thing). he's fine, really, but he feels a bit directionless in his life. oh, and he very much despises the catholic church. for systemic reasons and also for very personal reasons. there's a reason it took him until his late twenties to actually come to terms with his sexuality. well, multiple, but the aforementioned religious trauma is a huge part of it for this dan.

he's an atheist, doesn't believe in anything but the beauty of cold, hard science. who needs fate or being given meaning by a higher power when you can marvel at the infinitely complex reality and all the coincidences that led to some atoms arranging in a way that just so happen to make up the world?

depite all of that one fateful christmas Dan begrudgingly accompanies his grandma to church because he knows it means a lot to her and she is the one person in the world he would maybe even admit to loving. (shh, let's pretend veronica's catholic I know she isn't but this is fictionnnn.) the priest being incredibly hot almost makes it worth freezing for two bloody hours in church...

they meet. they clash, obviously, and initially slightly hate each other. but then they meet again. and again. and somehow fall into an unlikely friendship and eventually in love, even though both of them know they can't, that it's wrong. but can love truly be wrong?

(oh, funfact, sister daniel has a very short cameo in a dream. yeah, that kind of dream.)

ask me about my wips

(also if you're here for dnp, my dnp sideblog is @bewareofthenewphannie, I don't usually talk about them here)

[horseslur]

Things that are horrendously and embarassingly bad about sse/sso:

Game code and glitches and bugs

Weekly update schedule

Community management

This kind of falls under all three but generally Every part of the game feels unfinished and detached from the rest. Quests don't match up. Basic visual objects (clothing, tack) glitch through each other. Added content is frequently blatantly untested.

I'm not even diving into the dynamics within the company itself.

Or its horrendous marketing.

Also in game items have big inflation problems. Largely caused by the fact that the max amount of js a player can carry at any given time is capped at an amount you can max out in a day or two, which is automatically also a Very Low maximum that you can price an item.

The half-hearted retrofitting whenever they update a part of the game. Horse speed breaking quests. Retrofitting new tack to basic horses. This kind of ties back into point number one.

Things that I Genuinely Like about SSO/are done really well/have no better alternative in the games industry:

Sound design? I feel like people don't talk about this enough. Not just the music but also atmospheric elements are really well done, even if the game struggles with sound triggers sometimes. I especially like the horse-related sounds, as stupid as it sounds. If i can ride a horse in a video game I'm judging it by the noises the horse's hooves make. SSO is like right below tears of the kingdom in that for me.

Map design: It's frankly very impressive how every spot in Jorvik has really good views, and the balance between feeling like places are miles away and giving you excellent traveltime, while still being dense with locations and quest opportunities. Epona feels like three days of travel away, and yet from the right spot you can simply see the castle on the other side of the water!

Individual visual design: I like the look of the new player models (put your nostalgia goggles away. the old shit looks like it belongs in 2005 with oldschool runescape and you know it), same goes with horses, tack, even things like trees and environmental objects. The main problem is the janky mismatch between objects, which traces back to the lack of cohesive long-term vision and planning when it comes to developing the game as a whole, instead of individual parts and pieces.

The thing that actually inspired this post: as troublesome as the js economy is in the game, they've Genuinely hit the mark with starcoins. The goal of a premium currency is the delicate balance between getting as much real-life benefits from your players (whether that be ad revenue or simple direct payment for it) while giving them enough new goodies through it that it makes it worth it for players to put in that extra effort. No company in the industry gives away premium currency on a whim. The 100sc per week, which translates to 5 new horses per year and the occasional bonus if you've saved up more over time, is an excellent structure. You get to buy horses for free if you just wait long enough. You don't need to pay beyond your standard star rider price (and if you haven't bought the permanent version. what are you doing. paying for the pay once option pays itself back in 11 months over the monthly option, and 12 months for the quarterly option. Not even counting the bonus sc you get to begin with). Free weekly sc that are enough for a magic horse 4 times a year, plus a bonus horse or several pets, is an Amazing community service they're frankly doing. And from a company perspective? They are never going to change this in a way that is more beneficial to you. Because the goal of premium currency is not to buy horses, it's to earn the company money. It is the Main way the company earns money. And the 100sc works excellent because it's doing exactly what it needs to do: It's keeping you coming back to buy their new horses, and then makes you go "man I wish I had even more sc", thus tempting you into buying sc. Any increase in starcoins will be the opposite of an incentive to spend money on the game. If management is really stupid and desperate for cash, they will, if anything, decrease the amount of sc you earn, or more subtly increase the price of the things you can buy with it. Because that's what gets you going "Well if I spend just 20 euros, I can buy both new magic horses, and the Dutch Warmblood when it releases in a month."

Starcoins hits a really fucking good sweet spot between earning the company money, and doing a genuine community service by making it accessible on the basic paid version.

[darkmaga-retard]

AI is rapidly leading the world into a woke, left-wing sinkhole. The study concludes: “This shift in information sourcing [search engines vs. AI] has profound societal implications, as LLMs can shape public opinion, influence voting behaviors, and impact the overall discourse in society.” I can personally testify to this from my own experience with AI at several levels.

The study speaks for itself. There are two possible causes. First, the programmers are intentionally or unintentionally skewing the algorithms to lean left. Second, since the AI trains on content from the Internet, this could explain the bias. Or, it could be a combination of both.

All information in the world is not on the Internet. But the Internet has easily misrepresented or misquoted works of yesteryear to suit its new slant. Thus, much of past knowledge has been rewritten by changing contexts.

I have personally written queries for several AI programs to get answers on things like the Trilateral Commission, Technocracy, Transhumanism, global warming, Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, harms caused by Covid-19 injections, etc. Every answer I got tried to spin me away from any factual but critical information. Every single time. I can verify this because I am subject matter expert on all these, but anyone else would clearly be led into a ditch.

I asked several AIs to give me authoritative list of books on Technocracy, for instance. Half of what they gave me were minor-league. The rest were scattered. But my books were never listed. Really? One AI finally coughed up my name after I repeated needled it, but only mentioned Technocracy Rising; The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation.

Should any AI know about Patrick Wood in the context of Technocracy? Absolutely. In addition to my books, I have hundreds of in-print citations and countess video interviews over last 20 years. So, why doesn’t AI like me? Clearly, I am being screened out.

I use a program called Grammarly in my writing to help with spelling and punctuation. Predictably, they added an AI assistant to rewrite phrases and sentences. (This is common to almost all email programs and productivity tools.)  I routinely look at the suggestions that Grammarly queues up, but I always click “Dismiss.” Why? Because I know what I mean when I write something, and Grammarly wants to dispute with me by adding/replacing adjectives or adverbs or rearranging sentence structure. If I were to always click “Accept,” you would be completely and consistently led astray. – Patrick Wood, Editor

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.

So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

AI researcher David Rozado of Otago Polytechnic and Heterodox Academy administered 11 different political orientation tests to 24 of the leading LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Twitter’s Grok. He found that they invariably lean slightly left politically.

“The homogeneity of test results across LLMs developed by a wide variety of organizations is noteworthy,” Rozado commented.

This raises a key question: why are LLMs so universally biased in favor of leftward political viewpoints? Could the models’ creators be fine-tuning their AIs in that direction, or are the massive datasets upon which they are trained inherently biased? Rozado could not conclusively answer this query.

“The results of this study should not be interpreted as evidence that organizations that create LLMs deliberately use the fine-tuning or reinforcement learning phases of conversational LLM training to inject political preferences into LLMs. If political biases are being introduced in LLMs post-pretraining, the consistent political leanings observed in our analysis for conversational LLMs may be an unintentional byproduct of annotators’ instructions or dominant cultural norms and behaviors.”

Ensuring LLM neutrality will be a pressing need, Rozado wrote.

“LLMs can shape public opinion, influence voting behaviors, and impact the overall discourse in society. Therefore, it is crucial to critically examine and address the potential political biases embedded in LLMs to ensure a balanced, fair, and accurate representation of information in their responses to user queries.”

Read full story here…

[yuurivoice]

Hiiii! I wanted to ask how your scripts work? Do you improvised things on your videos or is everything that you say scripted?

I hope you are feeling better and I can’t wait to see the epilogue of chapter 3 of BitterSweet ^^

It depends on the content, typically! For big structured stories like BitterSweet I mostly stick to the script and then if I'm feeling some natural improvisation I'll go off script pet myself go a bit while trying to land at the next part of the script. If I like it, it stays in, if not, I cut it.

Then there's something like the Auron comfort where the first half was scripted and the rest was all just off the top of my head. Since its less structured, it allows a lot of room for me to just do whatever without stressing about making a mess out of my plans because I said something that contradicts or doesn't flow with what I've written.

Basically, I always keep an open mind while I'm recording in case while I'm in character I feel a tug in a certain direction and I want to explore it. I write with my heart just as much as my brain, but sometimes you don't KNOW until those words are fresh outta your mouth and your gut starts pushing you in a different direction, or an additional direction.