#and there is no ultimate truth

[alteredsilicone]

ok real talk i would love a game that handles it's lore "realistically" and by that i mean:

-you have to go out of your way to look for it and different bits of lore that come together may come from unlikely places (something you find early on nets an answer via a seemingly unrelated thing later on)

-there might be contradicting accounts: history doesn't lie, historians, however...

-there are different opinions about the same thing and it's up to you to decide who you agree with (and maybe the answer is - no one!), gaining knowledge in certain ways might change your perspective on something you learned earlier on

-some things are just never fully explained, because they are lost to time either accidentally or deliberately

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Burning Rotten Bridges

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[philosophybits]

There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.

Nikolai Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human

[trek-tracks]

Do you ever think about how Kirk had a "best friend" on the ship before Bones in Gary Mitchell, a man who:

a) deviously manipulates him into heartbreak for Mitchell's benefit,

b) shames him for not being "fun" enough when he's in a position of power,

c) openly insults intelligent and powerful women,

d) treats everyone cruelly as soon as he gets power and tries to seize everything for himself,

e) finds it fascinating that he can stop a person's heart for fun, and

f) tries to murder Kirk instead of admitting that he's a danger to the universe,

and then chooses to replace him with Bones, a man who:

a) tries to save Kirk from heartbreak at every opportunity,

b) gets him to smile and relax by being genuinely interested in how he's doing and telling him that he's great and respected just as he is,

c) openly toasts intelligent and powerful women,

d) treats everyone kindly as soon as he gets power and tries to use it to help as many people as he can,

e) cries about how people suffered when medical treatments were less advanced, and

f) says, "Jim, I can't destroy life, even if it's to save my own. I can't."

because I do

[zipstick-art]

working late at the hoover building

reference image under the cut

[opheliasam]

god he (dean) used to be so different my chest hurts

[turtleblogatlast]

Leo’s love for magicians and magic shows isn’t brought up enough tbh, because it directly ties into the idea of a persona and fooling the audience’s eyes to see something that’s not actually there. This connects to his love of performance in general but also ties into why he struggled so much with his mystic powers.

Magic tricks are exactly that, tricks, a performance, masked actions hiding the truth. Meanwhile mysticism is intrinsically linked to the self and so Leo’s difficulty in even unmasking to himself is a big part of his journey that he continues to struggle with and in this essay I will-

[lesliemeyers]

y'know thats pretty goth

[peachdoxie]

The headcanon I like to follow for why Danny's ghost half was Like That after being torn from him in TUE is that the personalities of Danny's ghost and human halves are based on how he perceives them at the time of being separated. That's pretty much what happened in Identity Crisis, with Fun Danny and Super Danny reflecting the two aspects of himself that he wanted to espouse. So it makes sense to me that if Danny blamed his ghost half for his loved ones (and Lancer) dying and saw it/him as bad and dangerous, his ghost half when separated would act accordingly.

[nyaagolor]

I think my biggest ace attorney hot take is that Kristoph’s black psyche locks not being broken was the best possible decision Takumi could have made

Phoenix trusts people, that’s his whole thing, but i think more importantly he trusts in the truth— that if he can just find that truth and put all the cards down on the table that things will be ok. We see in so many instances that his deeply ingrained savior complex and pursuit of truth often comes back to bite him and hurt himself and others. So honestly, him seeing Kristoph having black psyche locks and being able to accept that he doesn’t have to break them is such a vital step in his character to me

Phoenix doesn’t need the entire truth anymore— he doesn’t need to figure out what makes Kristoph tick. Time and time again Phoenix will not stop until all the dirty laundry is hung out to dry, until he knows the why’s and how’s and everything in between— but for once, with Kristoph, he doesn’t. Kristoph hurt people, and to him, that’s enough

[bitchthefuck1]

Tom's line about Shiv being selfish and "find[ing] it very hard to think about me" is actually so telling because while it's absolutely true that she rarely takes his position into consideration, Tom never once thinks about what he can do to help Shiv unless it also benefits him.

Every single time he makes a move or sacrifice that might help her, it's always something that he thinks will give him a leg up. He volunteers to take the fall for cruises, not for Shiv, who is in no way implicated, or even for Waystar, but because he thinks it'll ingratiate him to Logan, and the second it seems like he might have to actually follow through on that, he immediately tries to get out of it and even throws Shiv under the bus. Meanwhile, for all that Shiv disregards his interests, there are a number of things she does that only help him, and she's the one who actually sacrifices something and undermines her position with Logan to beg him not to let Tom go to jail.

It just makes it so clear that no matter how much he might love her (and I think he does, in his own compromised way), for him their relationship was always built on the underlying assumption that it's her job to prop him up, but it's not his job to help her.

[4dbarbie-archive]

More books in Ada's Drive!

I'm a bit late to the update as I've been on break (still am) but Ada added some more books to her drive!

In the main drive: The Ultimate Truth by Lester Levenson 💖💕 It's a great succinct summary of his teachings and I believe it's a reprinted version of his earlier book Eternal Verities which was published in 1962.

Edit: I just looked through Lester's excerpts on the archive and Ada actually shared the same extract when she was on Tumblr! Although the last line is extra; it spoke to me which is why I wanted to include it

And in her scientific research folder:

States of Mind: ESP and Altered States of Consciousness by Adrian Parker

Altered States of Consciousness by Charles T. Tart

CIA Gateway Experience

[brethilach]

gollum is a little freak but I genuinely get so upset thinking about him because we know that was still a lil freaky even before he and deagól found the ring but he very well would've had the opportunity to have a good live and BE good if they hadn't. and no matter what happened afterward, he couldn't go back home. even if he confessed to his crime he very likely would've still been kicked out of his community, or at the very least socially shunned to the point where he might as well just leave anyway. the ring would've consumed him no matter what, and for no fault of his own (or at the least, no faults that would ever warrant some cosmic punishment amounting to what the ring Did to him). by the time Bilbo found him he was far, FAR past the normal lifespan of a Hobbit. After the Ring was destroyed Bilbo began deteriorating at 130, and he had only beaten the current record for the longest Hobbit lifespan by a single year. Gollum was at LEAST 3x older than that. Very likely more. No matter what happened—even if Sam was a little kinder, Faramir was a little gentler, or Frodo was able to fully reach "Smeagól" in the way he so desperately wanted to, even if he helped destroy the Ring himself, or he didn't fall into the fire—Gollum would've died with the Ring. Even if the Quest FAILED and Gollum successfully claimed the Ring like he wanted, he STILL would've died (because Sauron would have never let him hold on to that thing for hundreds of years again, if his body could've even handled that). There is no reality where Smeagól would have a happy ending, whether he was "redeemed" or not. Yet all of it was such a fundemental factor in the success of the Quest (and even Bilbo's success during the Quest of Erebor). Definition of Doomed by the narrative

[starryoak]

As someone raised by atheists and only exposed to Christianity through stuff like Veggietales, to this day I still can’t intellectually wrap my mind about a genuine belief in religion, as in actually believing any of that shit actually happened. Like. Literally all of the major events described in almost every religion is stuff that factually cannot have happened if you understand almost any science or even just the fact that nothing like that ever has any evidence it can happen now. And people just. Politely ignore that fact? Like I understand that to a lot of people religion is about community and rituals and not so much the actual texts, but like. The fact that magic isn’t real is entirely undeniable. Most everything in the holy texts of most major religions is stuff that we know from how science works doesn’t exist and can’t have happened. And that for some reason doesn’t bother people? They just. Believe in it anyway? I can’t understand that perspective. To me, something being true is actually important, and the fact that religions say that things that aren’t real exist says that they aren’t reliable sources for basing my understanding of the world on. Again, I understand that most people don’t think about that, that religion is primarily about social cohesion and tradition and rituals and not about whether it’s literally true or not. But that perspective is just incredibly alien to me. It’s just weird, that most people can apparently just. Politely ignore that science has completely invalidated nearly everything religion says is true, and still for some reason believe in it anyway.

[philosophybits]

All learning is connected — thus philosophy will never be complete. Only in the complete system of all learning will philosophy be truly visible. From this mystical character of philosophy it can be explained why each person sought in philosophy something different, and why true philosophy could never be represented.

Novalis, Last Fragments

[waywardted]

I really do have love to give. I just don't know where to put it.                - Magnolia (1999)