#anyways if i start this insane challenge ill make more posts about it lol

[paradoxical-machine]

Trading some pokemon on the GTS on Home to complete my Home pokedex got me thinking about something

A while ago I saw a video about someone on animal crossing using nookazon to go from a simple item to a complex one. Yknow, trading items and bells to eventually get better and better things.

So now I'm wondering. Is it possible to complete the pokedex by starting with just one non-shiny pokemon?

I kinda want to try that

[marimo-o]

ok so im making a long ass post about Abzu (the game) within the context of mesopotamian mythology because I'm insane. It's gonna be a doozy and likely incomprehensible so <3 below the cut it goes! There's gonna be TONS of spoilers for the game, and, like, I guess for the mesopotamian creation epic, so. Play Abzu if you haven't and if you wanna read the Enuma Elish that's also cool. Good for u

(a note from afterwards: it's long. like, REALLY fucking long, holy shit. if you actually want to read the whole thing, be. prepared or something idk take breaks! the last two paragraphs (i know they're walls of text pls bear with me) contain most of the important information. like, the final hurrah of my brain after working on this for multiple hours! So if u wanna save time and avoid some of the redundancy, just skip to those last two <3)

So "Abzu" referred to two things; the fresh water people got from underground aquifers (also as the void-sea which was underneath the Sumerian underworld, Kur), and the deity; he only appeared in the creation story, Enuma Elish, because a big part of that whole thing was that oh no! He dies! And that's also a thing I'm gonna touch on (sorry about the lack of accent marks in advance, it's not available on my current keyboard^ ^;)

I'm gonna start off with a brief tale of what happened with Abzu the deity, and then move onto how both the deity and the concept relate to the game!

So like I mentioned, Abzu the deity only really appears in the creation myth. The story goes that the Primordial Soup divided into two beings, with Abzu representing the freshwater and Tiamat being the saltwater. They were married, and together birthed some of the first formative gods! Some of these gods, jealous of Abzu's power convinced Tiamat to kill him (or, I thought it was started by Tiamat growing resentful of the younger gods, one of those). Either way, Abzu was killed, and Tiamat ended up lashing out, creating the first "dragons", or perhaps becoming one herself; with "poison instead of blood". She is killed by Marduk, the god of storms and the child of Enki (one of the first gods created by Abzu and Tiamat), and from her body the heavens and the earth are formed. Imagine getting killed by ur grandson lol cringe /j

Now! The waters itself! This also brings Enki into the equation, who kinda took over as god of the waters in place of his dead father. He's also the god of creation, intelligence, crafts, mischief, and more! Very important guy.

Abzu refers to both the groundwater reservoirs that people depended on for both accessible clean water and for some agricultural work, and also to the void-sea beneath the underworld, where it is said that Enki rests. He had a temple at Eridu, a now-ruined city, and I remember hearing somewhere that he lived in a temple in an underground aquifer? But I can't find wherever I read that anymore so don't take my word for it. Anyway, the basics of Enki as a deity is: child of Tiamat and Abzu, widely worshipped in his time, god of the waters, generally a cool and important dude.

And now. Finally. We move onto the game. My head hurts.

So, for a quick (post-writing: lol it's not quick) overview of the game; you play as a funny little diver, who woke up in the middle of the ocean and, as the player, are given no clues as to who or what you are. You explore through the ocean levels peacefully at first, and with the guidance of a scarred shark (painted as a bit of an antagonist at first with the audio cues) you make your way to wells at the bottom-center of each level that revitalize the space around them; as they progress, many levels start out as barren, empty landscapes that give you a foreboding, nervous feeling going in, before using an energy from yourself to rekindle the life. Huge coral growths, seaweed, and a myriad of ocean animals spring to life. The player character can also ride on the sides of the bigger ones! The game also puts a big stress on unity between yourself and the environment; there's not a whole lot you can physically interact with, but you can play with the animals there and, like I said before, ride on some of the larger animals. There are also "meditation spots", statues where you can sit and explore the wildlife from more of their point of view, able to follow them seamlessly and see what the different kinds of fish and such are called. It's a calming experience, and really the most interaction you get with some of the more timid animals, letting you still see them up close even if you can't get there as the player character.

The story of the game is told via writings on the walls, which you can light up and access by solving small puzzles regarding connecting reservoirs of glowing waters, similar to that of the almost cosmic area you go to between levels; one thing I read described it as a kind of "rebirth area", which I can definitely see hehe!

At the end of the game, you've held the shark in its dying moments, you've discovered a strange factory that builds the weird triangular prisms that deliver anything that touches them a shock, the little flashlight dudes that you've found over the levels, and little divers that uncannily resemble yourself, and you've seen yourself disassembled to your funny little mechanical skeleton, weak and slow as you try to walk on land, before you are rebirthed from the void-cosmic-water area once again, fully yourself. There's a wonderful ending sequence where you swim through all these rivers, bringing life with you as you go, with the shark once again by your side. The whole game, you saw no land when you poked your head above water, just miles and miles of water, but you've travelled far enough to reach a reservoir. You cut the chains to a central triangular prism, and it grows over with moss. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, really, it feels like such a... grand gesture as you play through it. It feels personal.

Okay. Theory time. Finally, we're getting into the meat of it. Fucking hell.

So, imagine that you are this being. You're wandering an oceanic wonderland, observing and caring for what you need to, doing as any good little diver should. After a bit of poking around, you discover the start of the engravings on the walls; they tell the story of the people that were here before you, who built these temples and halls and used, or at least stored, the strange blue glowing "water" that you connect and move. It's a water of life, of sorts, one that they truly valued. You come to an impasse between areas, and this massive, scarred-up shark cuts in front of you. You're gonna stay hidden, that thing is terrifying! You try not to move. It doesn't spot you, or at least doesn't move to attack you. However, once it's safely out of view, you do follow it, and it leads you to a dark, desolate, empty chamber. This is wrong, you think to yourself. This isn't how it should be. There's a well, towards the bottom, and you approach it, taking... a fragment of light, from your chest, and imbuing that spark of life into the well. And, lo and behold, that intuition proved helpful, because the world around you springs back to life. Congratulations! You did it! And you continue to, as you work past puzzles and challenges and the appearance of these strange triangular mechanisms, that shock you when you get too close. These people worshipped a shark, as well, likely the same as the one you saw; the guide, now old and scarred, that brings you to where that spark is needed. Even later in the game, you see depictions of the triangular mechanisms, at first heralded as a positive, before these things are found to be the reason for this society's collapse. As if that wasn't perplexing enough, you see a depiction of a being that appears suspiciously similar to yourself, once again treated with reverence from the past civilization. In their hand is a ball of light, similar to the one shown when you revitalize the oceanic chambers. Well, that's certainly odd, you think to yourself. Perhaps this was a being that postponed the death of the civilization, or first allowed for those small chambers of life to exist in captivity instead of the open, natural landscapes you explored at the start. Regardless, it's now a relic of something long gone; but it still gives you something to think about. Later on, that strange coincidence of your similarities to that person are explained; you find a manufacturing plant, full of the vicious triangular mechanisms in each tight hallway, and right at the center of it all... multiple iterations of yourself, running down an assembly line, a spark not unlike what you saw before imbued into each of them. My, look at that; you've been responsible for part of this destruction all along, haven't you? Borne from that same ill that has been forcibly removing that spark from each of the places you've gone to. A bit inconsiderate of you, no? And yet... look at all the good you've done. You've rebirthed, revitalized, purified these ocean fragments, is that not enough? You are the keeper of these waters, regardless of the evil you had come from, despite the terrifying empty things may have reverted to. You, who trusted and followed the shark that seemed so scary at first. You, who followed it as it tried to attack a source of the evil, of the thing that was draining the oceans of their life. You, who held and comforted that shark as it lay dying, despite any fear you may have had. You, who attempted to traverse a minefield of those triangular machines, shocked over and over again and at the final moment, unable to make it to the finish line. You, who was rebirthed in full regardless by the oceans you'd cared for, by the void-sea you always returned to, to rest. You, who traversed a now-ruined citadel, temple, all of which had been flooded and had been dedicated to you. You, who brought life with you.

I hope you see what I'm getting at here. You're serving as a figure not unlike Enki, god and guardian of the waters. In the wake of Abzu, the avatar of the fresh waters, now confined to irrigation canals so as not to kill the younger gods, Tiamat lashes out. Her husband is dead, as far as she is concerned, and she goes to those younger gods to seek her revenge. The dragon, that which sucked the life from the seas and poisoned the waters. That which Marduk killed, to carve new life from. I would say that the shark is Marduk, even; given how the shark is the only one who is openly on the offense to those mechanisms, and who comes in at the endgame to finish them off, bringing new life with it. Even in how it all shapes up with the civilization before, in connection to the constructs; Tiamat was the mother of all in existence at that time. She was surely loved; but she turned hostile and violent. She could no longer be safely loved. And Abzu, both the glowing water we use to open doors and the light that we hold and the deep void-sea we enter between levels and father to all in existence, he was confined to small canals and reservoirs and put in a deep sleep so that he would not kill his own children. And by you, no less. Enki put him there. That is why you can use that water from the start; you lived in the Abzu, you came from it, and each time, that is where you return. That temple, now submerged and decrepit, is Eridu; the place where Enki was most worshipped. The other diver clones are the other gods, or perhaps the "dragons", now, that Tiamat had mothered. The smaller prisms definitely count in that "dragon" category; purely harmful beings that seek to destroy life. And in the end, indeed, you restore life; you and your son, upon killing Tiamat, return life to the world from her body. Perhaps you could not save those who once worshipped you, perhaps those structures will forever be in ruin. But there is no more danger, now; there is space to build and replenish. There is space to grow.

Fuck ok that was long as hell. Hi if u made it this far i love u. god fucking damn im never writing anything again after this. it took about as long as a full playthrough of the game, coincidentally!!

[fruitlupsthings]

SENSE OF SMELL - PART SIX

{REVISED TITLE ON THE BACK OF THIS THOUGHT LOL 17/08/21} There really isn't much of July left and tbh this has become a much wider project, so I may have to revise the titles of this blog, maybe just call it the writing challenge or the writing project or something. I'll decide that if I'm not done by the time we start heading into August (highly unlikely lol, given the expansion this little universe has received recently). But just thought it would be good to keep you updated. SO This post is a bit of a brief explanation of the experiment, what happened to make it go wrong and an accident occur to release the gas into the environment, a brief guest appearance from our main bad guy, Huxley, and a short timeline of the aftermath of the descending of the fog. Confusing? A little. but once drafts start coming in of the actual writing, and maybe if I explain connections and actual write a good canon lore document to show you guys, then it may make more sense :)

If you wish to read my work before getting into the nitty gritty of its creation, just click this link to hop straight to it, and then pop back here when you're done if you'd like to get into it more. I may even be editing or writing in real time, so you can always keep refreshing the document to track my progress. As always, any comments or feedback you want to give to me will always be more than welcome, and you can reach me on any of my socials (links are in this blog's bio, though the handle is always fruitlupsthings) or my email fruitlupsthings@gmail.com. _____________________________________________________________

So there is a lot to unpack here. There are also major spoilers so if you skipped past the first disclaimer paragraph because you see it on all of my posts and you want to skip to the fresh content just be mindful that this will contain major spoilers (seriously) for the entire book, not just the sample available for the challenge, I really do mean the whole thing. So please just be mindful of that before you read on. Thank you. _____________________________________________________________

Anyway, I decided I wanted to link this book with a larger universe I had already mostly world-built, as it was advantageous to both works as each had questions answered by the others, which was an awesomely rare literary revelation for me.

So I’m going to pretty much unpick the mini blurb thing I wrote, as I think it’ll be a good way to answer all the questions for this to-do list and also will keep me reasonably on task and structured throughout this post (it’s going to be a long one). “An organisation were experimenting with a weapon in the form of a lethal gas which, upon inhalation, triggers a hallucinogenic response, causing you to experience your most treasured, happy and safe memory, including all of the sights and SMELLS associated with making you keep calm and happy, This causes you to inhale more of the gas which (remembering it is lethal) ultimately kills you. However, there was an accident in the building which was hosting these experiments, and the gas was unfortunately released into the atmosphere.

The population must now wear filtering masks to protect themselves from the gas, lest they should be forced to hold their breath if they are maskless should they wish to live. Down the line, "safe zones” were created, which resemble domes or bubbles where a filtration system generates safe air, providing sanctuary for a small community within each bubble or dome, Within these “safe zones” you are free to be maskless.“ So the organisation is The Hive Foundation (big gasp). This was just one of the many shady operations that Martha ended up carrying out during her reign of the company. It’s kind of a weird one to be writing, but it helps with the general push of the main series I drafted, and it saves me having to world-build a whole entire extra villainous world or something. It also helps with the world design of the world post Martha, (in bigger universe, this blog hasn't met her yet) as i knew i wanted the rest of the series to take on a more apocalyptic role (think district 13 from the hunger games) but i didn’t really know how to go about it. So now that’s solved too which is awesome !! Huxley (villain for this story) was one of the people they were testing this gas on, and when the organisation collapsed (main story) and everyone went into hiding, he escaped from the lab as the whole building went up in flames and crumbled, but suffered near fatal injuries. As he was being experimented on, he was almost completely mentally broken and insane, repeating the things they had told him - that the gas was going to cure humanity, and that he was part of something special. During the building collapse, no one was really thinking about one of the many secret labs in the place, and the gas canisters burst, and the gas leaked into the atmosphere, mixing with the gases in the air, and then descending onto the world in the form of a fog/mist.

There were many tragedies, as no one knew how to handle this new threat at first. The wearing of masks outside of homes became mandatory. Windows and doors were closed permanently, unless absolutely necessary. Eventually, the development of “bubbles” became commonplace. Cities who couldn’t afford these changes were relocated to those who could and had space for more, many communities often separated to avoid overcrowding. We join the story after these have become commonplace, and people have begun adjusting as best they can to this new way of life, and are finding their roles in their new lives, grieving over those lost, and hoping they survive the deadly fog. _____________________________________________________________ That's about it for this section!! It feels so good to get another thing ticked off my to-do list!! I've been slightly ill for a little while since I hit you all with a flurry of posts, and I think this has been a good way for me to speed up my recovery, as having something I love to focus on is a fantastic healer, and I hope I can keep up a regular rate of posting from now on... I may even get some regular posting times in the future!! As always in my long posts, if you made it this far, thank you so so much. Your support means everything to me, and I couldn't be happier to be hearing all your feedback on which posts you find interesting and whether you're enjoying the plans so far. So it goes without saying that you all MORE than deserve this kitto gif :)

Thank you so so much for reading, I hope you're all taking care of yourselves. fruitlups <3