#azdoine

[pochapal]

I can't remember but uh. Have you considered closing your askbox to deal with spoilers

i already turned off anon a few weeks back to try and mitigate the worst of it but i'm hesitant to Completely slam off contact since the engagement with people is kinda half the fun.

i do have an empty sideblog i could always move over to and get an ask screener if it gets really bad. i will admit the reason i haven't done it already is only because i'm too lazy to set all that up lmao.

[lscholar]

   Three ships: Dominic Seneschal/Carlyle Foster, Ichijou/Muramasa (it’s like f/f UBW!Shirou x Saber if Saber was also Kiritsugu), and Pluto/Luna-Terra.    First ever ship: I honestly don’t remember? The first one I got really into, though, was Jasnah Kholin/Shallan Davar.    Last song: Dead Angle (Umineko no Naku Koro Ni)    Last movie: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind    Currently reading: The End of Fashion, HG no Koisuru Futari, The Sluts    Currently watching: Patlabor, Zeta Gundam    Currently consuming: Frozen blueberries and a Christmas bag of novelty Kitkats.    Currently craving: touch, more ProsMio face-holding, a big hug from my girlfriend when she reads this hey come over and give me a hug, flan, an end to pain, my little gunpla Lfrith to arrive so I can gently snip her parts off the runners and fuss over her with my new magnifying lamp, a nice warm blanket. I miss my kotatsu...

[jacksgreysays]

A tiny addition, but it could be that they continued to fund him in the hope that he would be desperate enough in the specific right direction of their needs--ie becoming a Human Sacrifice candidate--by pushing so far as to go through the Gate. They wouldn't have had to force Mustang to become one if Shou Tucker had stumbled into it.

do you ever think about how FMA writes Nina Tucker off as an unsalvageable ruin who is better off mercy killed but then you meet Greed's crew and Kimblee's bodyguards and it turns out that the military can just produce perfect human chimerae whenever it feels like it. the military has chimera alchemy down to a science. they could have called up a Doctor Moreau or whoever and had him fix Nina and turn her into a cute kemonomimi if he wasn't too busy being a state secret and producing shapeshifting supersoldiers for the brass to jack off to

[lime-bloods]

Reading Roxy and Meenah as doppelgangers: a digression on manifestation theory

A brief introduction to manifestation

Manifestation theory sounds scary - the idea that the appearance of trolls and other fantastical creatures might double as insight into the psychological goings-on of our human protagonists is not one that necessarily comes intuitively to all readers. But as blogger azdoine succinctly put it: it's basically "just symbolism". Characters in a story symbolise something, and, understanding that Homestuck is chiefly about its human protagonists, it's logical to presume that the non-human elements symbolise things that are relevant to the protagonists' human experience.

mmmmalo has written at length about what he identifies as the signs linking Meenah to Roxy's inner psychodrama - the things that make Meenah an "esoteric mirror" or "doppelganger" of Roxy. For comprehensiveness' sake, I'm going to outline from scratch what I have identified to be the key signs, and to that end this post is going to discuss the topics of reproduction, reproductive coersion and miscarried pregnancy (with text-pertinent allusions to grooming and incestuous abuse).

One big happy family

Looks like a little girl's room. This all strikes you as a bit odd.

Hussie suggests only briefly in commentary that the young Roxy's (β) upbringing was at the hands of "a younger grandpa Harley" (Book 2, p. 106), but we needn't take their word for it; the scenery here speaks for itself. Roxy grew up in a dark green basement, trained from childhood to become an agent of Harley's goals, just as Damara (β) - and then by succession Meenah (β) - would be trained as English's agents. So, by analogy, Grandpa Harley is Lord English.

This is another point mmmmalo has (in)famously already made, but regardless of your thoughts on the particulars of that specific reading, the key clues pointing to English as a manifestation of the "Grandpa" character are still plain to see. When John says "the worst case scenario" would be "[facing] our grandfatherly paradox-dad as a last boss", he's explicitly referring to he and Jade's family patriarch, but he's also implicitly foreshadowing Lord English - a character who, in the maturity of 2024, we should now all be able to recognise is in one way everyone's grandfatherly paradox-dad. He represents the same upper echelon of paternalistic power on a cosmic scale that Jake (β) represents on a familial level.

Moving this along towards my point: essentially all of Acts 1-4's adult characters form part of this elaborate Nuclear Family Roleplay - a pantomime of the 'Suburban' setting Homestuck is founded upon. In the same way Jake being known as simply "Grandpa" symbolises his arch-patriarchal position, the reason Roxy is known only as MOM for the first five acts of the comic is because this is the archetypal, impersonal role she has been reduced down into. Her relationship with the character named DAD is a direct invocation of this - the two are essentially playing house, living out the gendered roles that have societally/cosmically been laid out for them. The comic's exposition coyly brushes over this, but a deeper look at Alternian culture gives us a much clearer vision of why 'MOM and DAD' make such an iconic matespritship: on Alternia there ARE no real family units, only procreation, and therefore matespritship is understood by the planet's inhabitants as a mere expression of "mating fondness". MOM and DAD make such a cute couple because they are exactly what their assigned titles depict them as - a breeding pair.

This is basically the crux of Roxy's arc right up to the very end of the comic; though Roxy's (Α) post-apocalyptic anxieties about the extinction of the human race bring these thoughts to the forefront, her struggle within the patriarchal structures of the household / society / reality itself has always been that she is only valued as a MOM - as a breeding machine.

The problem therein is that Roxy is seemingly incapable of having children.

The grieving mother

Within Sburb's scheme of universal childbirth, a "void session" is one that simply doesn't have the eggs required to bear fruit. So it's immediately easy to see why the Hero of Void would have similar trouble bringing a pregnancy to term. But certainly not for lack of trying!

Sorry, Jaspers [...] your final resting place is already a mockery. You should have decomposed years ago under a bed of petunias like a normal cat. Not given to a taxidermist and fitted with a tiny, custom-tailored suit, and then stuffed in a coffin built for infants.

When Rose was still very young, Jaspers was found dead. Roxy took the death of her CAT so hard that Rose found it difficult to take her grief seriously, interpreting the cat's elaborate mausoleum as a "structure erected with a spirit of scornful IRONY in response to [a] youthfully innocent request to hold a funeral for the animal." But more than any other, Rose and Roxy's relationship is one defined by miscommunication, and this assessment of Roxy's grief doesn't even seem to hold up to Rose's own recollection of events: later, we hear that the funeral service was something Roxy "insisted upon".

And thus begins probably Homestuck's most clear-cut example of a character's arc stretching across multiple iterations, because from this point - parallel to her neverending quest to settle down with a nice hubby and start a family - Roxy (both β and Α) becomes fixated on bringing back her baby - I mean CAT - only to produce failed mutant after failed mutant. These freaks of nature are not Jaspers, and by the laws of time travel dictating the lives of Paradox Clones they can never be Jaspers. The younger Roxy's first few attempts are literally stillborn; while she's eventually able to create what she calls "healthy felines", she still keeps those monsters locked in the basement they came from, for fear of upsetting her real CAT.

Even as over the course of her Sburb quest and her interactions with the new arrivals from the other session Roxy is seemingly able to address and even overcome some of this obsessive gnostalgia for the things she's lost, her apparent inability to bring to term resurfaces when she's made the reproductive object of another grieving mother.

The lamenting queen (or: the other mother)

Her Imperious Condescension is not so immediately recognisable as part of the family pantomime because the troll social structure doesn't use the same terminology we're familiar with, but she's always been there; just as Lord English is grandfather of grandfathers, Meenah is the family tree's literal grandmatriarch of grandmatriarchs, placed upon the Earth in the guise of Betty Crocker - archetypal nurturing housewife - so that her children's children might seed the events architected by her master. This kind of familial roleplay is exactly how English and Meenah's story is passed down to her descendants; Jake recalls that "the witch used to be married to a terrible man named english." Dirk is insistent, though, that this is a masking of the truth, and that English was only ever "her superior". And while it's true that we can't say for sure a young Meenah (β) slept in the same bed Damara grew up in, the fact that Meenah was only formally recruited after Damara's death should not be mistaken for suggesting that Meenah was not one of English's many daughters. She was "the Lo+rd's slave all alo+ng", even if implicitly.

ARANEA: Once she claimed the throne, she would have to serve for many thousands of years, until the next successor was ready.

For all the differences between Meenah and Roxy's cultures, slavery in the form of motherhood has always been the expectation of the female fuchsia caste, right from the very beginning of Meenah's arc - not as the empress of Alternia, but on Beforus, where the hemospectrum is reframed in far more familial terms:

ARANEA: The jo8 of each 8lood caste was to serve the needs of all those 8elow it. ARANEA: We were to use our progressively greater longevity and wisdom to help the lower castes learn and grow. To listen to them and try to provide whatever they were missing. Like a hierarchy of caretakers with increasing social responsi8ility.

Crucially, this is where Meenah and Roxy appear most to act as reflections but not carbon copies of each other; because where Roxy constantly strives to contort herself into this motherly, wifely role, Meenah perpetually runs from it. Saddled with the "incredi8le responsi8ility" of sitting atop Beforus' structure of care, Meenah "viewed the empress as a glorified slave" and fled to the moon, and even forced into ascendancy on Alternia she finds implicit ways to be absent from her children, spending her life flying further and further away from the planet where they're born and taking every opportunity to hand off any real political authority to clown rappers (a tendency reflected in her human heirs - the company is always passed on to the son and never the daughter).

But when Meenah finally returns home to find her children suddenly massacred by a galactic apocalypse, her arc begins to pull into line with Roxy's in earnest.

A fluffy twitching prison

TT: The rumors say it was her own "pet" who killed them.

From the moment of her dramatic introduction, Meenah's tragedy is that though she can extend life indefinitely, she cannot have back what she's lost, and this continues to be true as she attempts to resurrect her children on a new planet; attempt after attempt, her babies all die. Despite Gl'bgolyb's explicit death in the meteoric holocaust which claimed the rest of her family, the creature has inexplicably returned on the trolls' prospective new homeworld with the apparent sole purpose of making sure Meenah can't carry to term. We're left to our own devices to figure out just what's going on here.

Act 6 of Homestuck introduces Watchmen to its repertoire of intertexts through Jane's poster of cobalt beefcake MANHATTAN. Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan is an omnipotent world-shaping being who flees the responsibilities of Earth to settle on the planet Mars, iconically rendered in beautiful rosy hues by colourist John Higgins - when we hear the story of Meenah's refusal to the call of being Beforus' own god-empress, it's against the backdrop of a photograph of Mars literally hue-shifted pink (see fourth image), and images of Meenah's ship flying over a settlement on the red planet are included among the products advertised by Crockercorp. Far more explicitly, though: Watchmen originated the idea of using the screams of a psychic alien squid as political leverage, and that's why Gl'bgolyb has to be here for this part.

Alongside commenting on the political landscape of the 80s and the fascist undertones of the superhuman archetypes found in comic books, Watchmen pays particular attention to these characters' sexual eccentricities, and particularly their hangups with women. It stands to reason that of the latter closet homosexual Ozymandias' are the most severe, but they also become the most explicit: the artificial 'horrorterror' he uses to usher in his new world order is his fear of the female body made manifest. With its single clitoral eye and sphinctered mouth, the creature is unmistakeably yonic, and included in the horrific psychic imagery it broadcasts to instill fear into the Earth's population are nightmarish images of juvenile aliens chewing their way out of their mother's womb - the very same image trolls use to describe their disgust at human reproduction in The Homestuck Epilogues. Meenah's relationship to Gl'gboylb should be thought of the exact same way; one of the rare insights we receive into the adult Meenah's psyche is that she finds the process of giving birth "revolting", and it's for this reason she insists that humans procreate only through impersonal cloning. Gl'bgolyb reappears as Meenah's own manifestation: alienated from her own lusus after spending centuries literally running away from it, and traumatised by repeated miscarried attempts at reviving her race, she sees her own reproductive organs as nothing more than a hideous, baby-killing monster. It's no coincidence that when we see our single glimpse of the enigmatic emissary to the horrorterrors on Earth, it's with its tendrils wrapped around the throat of a symbolic depiction of the Genesis Frog (see above image) - the baby that grows in the womb of Skaia.

Breaking the cycle

By Act 6, the matriorb has already long been associated with failed and aborted pregnancies, having been rescued from the first mother it killed and taken into the care of Kanaya, who is then blasted through the abdomen just as it's destroyed, symbolically miscarrying through physical trauma. So when Roxy is tasked with finally bringing a dead baby back to life, it's a coalescence of multiple disparate threads.

(p. 6463)

Meenah unwittingly - or perhaps uncaringly - perpetuates a patriarchal cycle which has been repeating for eternity by selecting a younger, more fertile doppelganger to take over the role of mother, and locks Roxy in a dungeon with the intention of making her have the baby in her place. But, cycles being cycles and doppelgangers being doppelgangers, the same problem arises. Roxy can only create mutants.

When Roxy does ultimately overcome this, ending the comic with the culmination of this long, meandering motherhood arc, superficially it's because of time spent blitzing her Void chakras in the space outside of reality, and with the help of Calliope as a Muse. But in the time Roxy spends in the white nothingness, she's crucially able to take steps to end her own obsession with reviving the past - not just by burying a version of her own mother, who she spent so much time hoping to resurrect in sprite form, but also in sharing a tearful reunion with the literal ghost of her dead CAT. As with so much of Homestuck, the key to ending the suffering is breaking the self-perpetuating cycle that causes it; made literal, in this case, by Roxy's slaying of her dark mirror image using a sword known for splitting vinyl records - symbolically, for breaking the ever-turning circle of time. And in passing the matriorb off to Kanaya rather than letting Meenah have control of it, Roxy never actually brings this baby to term herself, either - at the end of the day, the minutiae of biology aren't really what motherhood is about:

ROXY: the way i see it is you shouldnt have needed to worry about makin the thing ROXY: i think it will be challenging enough like... ROXY: hatching it?? ROXY: and tending to all the stuff that comes next ROXY: isnt that basically being responsible for the preservation of an entire race of people?

Physically overcoming her demonic doppelganger isn't the end-all of Roxy's struggle with gendered expectation, either. Roxy's complicated relationship with their sex and their motherhood, introduced to us only indirectly through the relationship between Meenah and Gl'bgolyb, becomes central to their understanding and exploration of their own gender identity as they grow into adulthood. Anxieties about the inherent femininity of a childbearing body - the glorified slavery that is seemingly inherent to the cosmically-assigned role of the mother - give way to an understanding of the human body as "something altogether different [...] A flesh machine" with "a specific, practical purpose."

But I digress

The threads running between Roxy and Meenah exist along the types of lines most Homestuck readers will already be familiar with in some form. When two characters share a class, or an aspect, we expect that traits from one character can be used to analyse and further our understanding of the other. Manifestation theory simply asks that we look for even more subtle and non-literal connections between characters than these - a process which Andrew Hussie themself has identified in authorial commentary as part of what they call "persona alchemy". (Book 4, p. 151)

Roxy and Meenah's particular relationship, though, should also be thought of in terms of another phenomenon which is central to Homestuck's structure - escalation. Homestuck constantly reorders and transmutes the alchemical elements that compose one character into 'new' characters, but it also consistently stretches these fundamental concepts to their logical extremes. Just as a game that destroys planets works its way up to the destruction of universes, John striving to leave his house in Act 1 should be taken as the logical precursor to our heroes leaving reality itself in Act 7. The forces keeping these children in their houses - essentially the story's first ever antagonists - are their parents, and as we scale this story up to a cosmic level, we find that the cosmos is dictated by the same suburban family structures; by celestial GRANDPAs and MOMs, raising/grooming/training/neglecting entire worlds or even galactic empires at once.

By allowing us to meet not only the teen MOMs and BROs and NANNAs, but also the teen Lord Englishes and the teen Condesces, the scratch takes us in the opposite direction, reducing these faceless, larger-than-life figures into their smallest, weakest, most fundamentally human forms. And in some cases, as in Roxy's, this creates the opportunity for the child-form to confront and overcome the very darkest of their potential; by being the one to put Meenah down, Roxy not only liberates herself from her own expectations for what a mother has to be and do, but shatters the very cosmic image of MOM itself, breaking the mold that reality had set in stone for her entire sex - her entire caste.

[lonniemachin]

LET'S GET MARAM AND AHMED TO €33K BY SUNDAY

My friend Ahmed and his wife Maram's fundraiser to escape Gaza with their three little children has started to stagnate, with only 4 donations in the past 2 DAYS. This is unacceptable for them, as they need to reach their goal as soon as possible to secure their funds before something prevents them from it -- in a situation such as this, anything could happen, from bank closure to GoFundMe shutting down their campaign without warning. Please, help get them to at least €33,000 by SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH. That's only €201 LEFT TO GO! They need at least €35k-36k to have enough to register for all 5 to evacuate at Hala's current prices, but as their campaign has been moving so slowly, I thought to set a shorter goal of €33,000 to encourage more people to give.

EVERY euro counts.

As always, I've been in contact with them for months and have personally seen and have been provided with multiple methods of verification to share with those who require it before donating. DM me if this describes you. They've also been vetted by @/el-shab-hussein and featured in a video by YouTuber Ro Ramdin.

Tagging for reach under the cut

@illlllillllli @whencartoonsruletheworld @humaneflies @avirtualdrive

@isa-ah @unearthprisonpanopticon @genderyomi @transwolvie @entertainmentpdf

@saint-sebastian-coded @petzah394 @zoethebitch @genderkoolaid @azdoine

@aranock @lesbutcher @stonefemblues @incorrect-transformers-animated @embermclainapologist

@evatriceakiyama @glados @monomons @lipid @charon-cries

@1eos @song-of-the-stars @toriel-2 @the-arachnocommunist @dyggot

@stripedpaws @aristotels @radioactive-corpsegirl @nosekiss @decadent-trans-girl

@comfortstars @b0nkcreat @anfroginous @ellalily @melissa-titanium

@mothpile @scorchedup @juliuscaesarofficial @lunar-eclipse-bunnies @bom-bombon

@gyroshrike @olowan-waphiya @mothernatureslonelyson @fmab @postpunks

[firebatvillain]

First off, rabbits are lagomorphs, so even mentioning Watership Down only introduces confusion,

Wait is ratfic not fiction about rats???

I can talk about fiction about rats too! Let's talk about some British childrens' book series! And one American comic book.

The three relevant works for our discussion would be the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, the Welkin Weasels series by Garry Kilworth, the Deptford Mice series by Robin Jarvis, and the Mouse Guard series by David Petersen. All these works portray a world inhabited by semi-anthropomorphic animals that are at the scale of real world animals. And indeed all of them include rats, albeit mostly as antagonists.

Redwall is perhaps the one that has most penetrated internet pop culture, thanks to articles like this one on SomethingAwful which mocked some of the series's recurring elements while painting Brian Jacques as a bit of a nazi. I ate those books up as a kid, but in retrospect I truthfully can remember only snatches: the shrews' battle cry of 'logalogalogalog!', the pages of elaborate descriptions of feasts.

Redwall is a big sufferer from the 'evil races' problem. A certain arbitrary set of species (e.g. rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets) are ontologically evil, and various other species are standins for various stereotypical British social classes (e.g. iirc moles are always working class). As unfortunately tends to be the case, it even makes the strange decision to double down on this - I believe in one of the books, a member of one of the evil species is raised in the Abbey, but inevitably his evil nature comes out when the good rodents and mustelids are once again threatened by an army of bad rodents and mustelids. Nevertheless, as repetitive and ethically dubious as these books are, they do conjour a very specific flavour which makes them memorable.

The Welkin Weasels series is a lot shorter at six books, and you may well bounce off the author's enthusiasm to insert puns and references all over the place (I recall one book managing to set up "badgers? we don't need no stinkin' badgers"), but from what I remember of them they benefit from having more explicit horror elements which makes the stakes much more engaging. There is once again a sympathetic-unsympathetic species divide - weasels are our plucky heroes, while stoats tend to be aristocratic and cruel. However, it does play out a little differently: the first three books are in a medieval fantasy setting with explicit magic, but over the course of the novels, the mustelids manage to rediscover humans, leading to a timeskip forward into a more steampunk setting where the animals and humans have built a joint society together.

Honestly, I would quite like to reread these books! They may well not hold up today, but it would be fun to revisit them.

The Deptford Mice series by Robin Jarvis - author of Deathscent, a highly memorable novel in which Elizabethans have been transported by aliens into a space archipelago where all the animals are robots which run on the four humours - is a pretty fun one, although my memory is very foggy. It's set in our world, in London, and as I recall the first book involves an evil cat wizard attempting to resurrect the Bubonic Plague from the plague pits. I recall a scene in which rats dig up the plague pit and have their paws melted by the lime coating it. Beyond that I can recall very little but I definitely think it merits inclusion in this list of rat fic.

Once again we have the good rodent/evil rodent problem. Mice and rats are almost identical creatures, so it's weird that the sympathetic/unsympathetic divide falls so consistently.

Mouse Guard is an American comic series about mice with little cloaks and swords. Making it be a comic is kind of a great idea because you get to see how cute they are at every turn. The mouse guard are responsible for defending the other mice from threats such as snakes. They have a pretty high mortality rate.

I'm... actually not super familiar with the comics, but they inspired a roleplaying game by the creators of Burning Wheel, using similar mechanics - e.g. its beliefs system, the simultaneous-resolution combat system. That got a lot of buzz around the late 2010s. So if you want a game to play as an rat at the tabletop, it's probably a good one to check out!

We might also at this juncture mention the wildly popular novel Watership Down, which imagines an elaborate rabbit society complete with a substantially fleshed out rabbit religion. I wrote about the animated film for Animation Night a couple years back - it's quite a memorable one.

Sadly, this is mostly mousefic (with a bit of weaselfic). I don't know of any true ratfic - centred on rats as protagonists. Perhaps this is an opportunity for someone out there to write ratfic ratfic to correct this imbalance.

[ahmedomar11]

Hello, there is no shelter, no housing, no treatment, no medicine, and not even food. I am waiting for me to introduce myself and tell my story, then I will die of hunger. We are dying here. Is there anything left that we did not say? We will be annihilated Click like and share, and if you can donate, do not be stingy and spread our voice to the other world 💔🥀

This is our food, and this is how my nephews were when they saw the food

Please, save us from death, please

Donate to me, even if it is a little, it is great for God Please share the video

@northgazaupdates @90-ghost @helppeople @fairuzfan @quickteleport @unicorn-mutuai @understands @urbanoutfitters @quickteleport @whenimreallyathundacat @russianspacegeckosexparty @untrustyou @oglach-uisce @aitea @arcee-1995 @hellerstiel @hidingoutbackstage @hexalt @azdoine @juliantinadeanoru @juliantinadeanoru @onedirection

[eternalfarnham]

related to the wraith interlude: did you go about researching buddhism to write for questing beast? any interesting sources that influenced your writing?

To be honest, it's more background-radiation Buddhist terminology from an undergrad religion degree and also from literary analysis, appropriated and loosely slapped onto the themes I wanted to write already. Madoka Magica is already a very thoroughly Buddhist work, so close readings of the show tend to get at this stuff sooner or later.

I like liquidcitrus's analysis of Homura's psychology in Rebellion a lot, and @azdoine's Mara:Guanyin::Samael:Sophia post about Madohomu influenced my reading of their relationship and the show's themes pretty heavily. The work of Dr. Jenna Katerin Moran is also why I just casually bust out the word dukkha in day-to-day; that's where I get my understanding of the Incubators from. They're metaphorically symptoms of a universe where there's a fundamental gap between wanting and getting that cannot be bridged – scapegoats for our dissatisfaction; externalized internal demons – while also, on the object level, being maybe a little too content with their infinite torture farm.

[doedipus]

@erintoknow tagged me in a chain letter, tyty

RULES: Post the last sentence you wrote (fanfic / original / anything) and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence.

I've been toying around with some story/character ideas related to a call of cthulhu scenario I wrote forever ago, and kind of writing some unrelated scenes off the top of my head to try and get a handle on things. the preceding sentence here is "And of course the gaping black hole to nowhere where her face should be."

Which I'm not staring at.

@philanthropy-lite @hypdadaist @warmcoals @azdoine @lavendersalve

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 000-012

Or, what if that mural was the heart of a web serial.

I'm reading The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of @azdoine and @lukore on my dash over the last few months.

This is absolutely not gonna be a liveblog in the level of detail of the great Umineko liveblog project. Rather I'm gonna be aiming at something like the comics comints series or those occasional posts on anime. Or indeed what I wrote about Worth The Candle last year. I must create a robot whose purpose is to watch to see if I start writing detailed plot summaries and hit me with a stick labelled 'remember you have a job now'.

That outta the way, let's talk flower!

No, not that flower!

I will start with an anecdote. When I was at university, I ended up attending a talk by court alchemist senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, who at that time did not yet have a 'sexual harassment allegations' section on his Wikipedia page. The main thing that struck me at the time was his rather spectacularly long beard. But I did listen to his talk about ending aging.

de Grey's schtick is that he, like many people in the transhumanist milieu, believes that medical technology is on the cusp of being able to prevent aging sufficiently well to prolong human lifespans more or less indefinitely. He believes that the different processes of aging can be understood in terms of various forms of accumulating cellular 'damage', and that these will begin to be addressed within present human lifespans, buying time for further advancements - so that (paraphrasing from memory) 'the first immortals have already been born'. He has some pretty graphs to demonstrate this point.

At that talk, one of the audience members asked de Grey the (in my view) very obvious question about whether access to this technology would be distributed unevenly, creating in effect an immortal ruling class. de Grey scoffed at this, saying he always gets this question, and basically he didn't think it would be a big deal. I forget his exact words, but he seemed to assume the tech would trickle down sooner or later, and this was no reason not to pursue it.

I'm sure de Grey is just as tired of being reminded of how unbalanced access to medical technology is in our current world, or the differences in average life expectancy between countries.

So, I was very strongly reminded of de Grey as The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere laid out its major thematic concerns and characters. I was also put in mind of many online arguments in the transhumanist milieu about whether it would be a good thing, in principle, to end death.

In particular, of course, comes to mind transhumanist Nick Bostrom's short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, in which death is likened to a huge dragon that demands to be fed trains full of humans every day. In the story, humanity's scientists secretly build a giant gun to kill the dragon. Naturally, despite all the doubters and naysayers who foolishly feel obliged to justify the existence of the dragon, the gun works. Bostrom's imagery is incredibly heavy-handed (particularly the trains à la Auschwitz), but just in case you didn't get it, he also spells out the moral explicit at the end: basically, every day not spent putting resources to abolishing death is adding up more and more bodies to the pile of people who don't get to be immortal.

So far, Flower seems to be shaping up to be a critical intervention into that milieu, with a much more grounded view of death and a much stronger model of society - admittedly not a high bar but it's going good so far!

At the time of writing this commentary, I have read the prologue and first two six-chapter arcs, namely Mankind's Shining Future (1-6) and Pilgrimage to the Deep (7-12).

the general shape of things

We are introduced - from the perspective of sardonic, introverted Su, who is going to be the protagonist of our time loop - to a group of brilliant young medical wizards, who have just been invited to visit the headquarters of a secret society whose mission is precisely to abolish death. Su's grandfather was some kind of controversial luminary who was expelled this organisation, and he also did something to her, which is giving her some kind of ulterior motive to find her way into this society.

We know pretty much from the outset that this is a time loop scenario: Su has been explicitly given the opportunity to replay the scenario in the hopes of find an alternative outcome, by some kind of presently mysterious parties. This first part is the 'control' loop, i.e. probably more or less how things went down 'originally'.

I believe Umineko is an explicit inspiration for this story, and the influence is pretty evident. But parallels with the Locked Tomb series, especially Gideon the Ninth, are also quite noticeable. @lukore spoke of it as the STEM to Locked Tomb's humanities, and I can already kinda see it, although we haven't got into the real meat of the scenario yet. This story began serialisation four years ago, making the two works roughly contemporary. The latest chapter was published in the last couple of weeks - no idea if I've arrived just in time for the ending!

Stylistically, it's generally pretty heavy on dialogue and long asides. The characters are a bunch of mega nerds who love to have big philosophical and political discussions, but their dynamics are well enough realised and their dynamics clear enough that it can double up as naturalistic characterisation. So far, the discussions have been interesting to read.

Below I'm going to make some notes and comments on various elements of the setting and story. In a followup post (because it got too long) I'm going to talk a lot about entropy. Perhaps you will find this interesting!

the world

The first few chapters are dedicated pretty hard to exposition. We find ourselves in a distant-future setting - one in which it seems reality has totally collapsed and then been rebuilt using magic, creating a somewhat oddball universe which lacks things like the element iron, and also electromagnetism. This seems like it would have pretty severe implications for just about everything!

However, the 'ironworkers' have, after producing a series of trial and error 'lower planes' that didn't quite get it right, landed on a fairly close approximation of how things used to be on the old world. Though by 'fairly close approximation' I mean like... it's a bowl-shaped world and the sun and stars are artificial lanterns. But still, there are humans, and they seem to work more or less like we're used to humans working, apart from the whole 'magic' thing.

So, an alt-physics setting. Praise Aealacreatrananda, I love that shit.

While electromagnetism might be out, the more abstract physical principles like thermodynamics still apply, and the humans of this universe have managed to find analogues to a number of things in our world. Instead of computers, they have 'logic engines' which run on magic. Horses seem to have made it in, so we get delightful blends of historical and futuristic concepts like a self-driving computer-controlled horse-drawn carriage taxi.

The biggest difference is of course that in this setting, magic - more on that in a bit - has solved most medical problems and humans routinely live to around 500. The setting is ostensibly a semi-post-scarcity one, although a form of money exists in 'luxury debt', which can be exchanged for things like taxi rides, café food and trips on the space elevator.

Politically, we are told that the world has enjoyed a few hundred years of general peace, broken in living memory by a revolution which put an end to a regime of magical secrecy. There are lots of countries, and an alliance overseeing them.

There's a few other oddities in this world. Something called a 'prosognostic event' can happen if you see someone who has the same face as you, and whatever this is, it's bad enough news that everyone is constantly reminded to veil their faces in public and there's some kind of infant 'distinction treatment' to mitigate the risk. Given that, in the regular world, nothing particularly bad would happen if you ran into a long-lost identical twin, it suggest there is probably something a little fucky about how humans work in this world!

There's evidently a fair bit of effort put into the worldbuilding of fictional countries and historical periods. The important elements seem to be roughly along the lines of:

our world is currently in what they call the 'old kingdoms' period, which is poorly remembered;

next up comes an 'imperial' period of high transhumanist shenanigans in which society was ruled by 'gerontocrats' who got exclusive access to the longevity treatment, but this all somehow led to a huge disaster which destroyed og earth;

the survivors built the Mimikos where humanity currently lives using magic and created some kind of huge iron spike that holds the universe together; there was subsequently a 'fundamentalist' period in which a strict cutoff point was put on human lifespans and a lot of the wackier magic was banned;

now we're onto a new era of openness following a small revolution, while the major political structures remain largely intact.

Writing a far-future setting is hard, because trying to deal with the weight of history without the story getting bogged down with worldbuilding details is a fiddly line to walk. The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance might be a relevant point of comparison. Vance leaves the historical details vague - there are endless old kingdoms and strange artefacts and micro-societies for Cugel and co. to stumble on. Far more important than the specifics of history is establishing the vibe of a world that's seen an unimaginable amount of events layered on top of each other and is honestly a bit tired.

Flower makes things a bit more concrete and generally manages to make this work decently well. I do appreciate the asides where Su talks about, for example, the different architectural styles that layer up to make a place, or the way a technique has been refined. It establishes both that Su is the kind of person to notice this sort of thing, and also helps the world feel lived-in.

the names

The story doesn't do a lot with language. The story is written in English, and the narration will occasionally make reference to how things are phrased (e.g. how divination predates the suffix -mancy). We can probably make the standard assumption that this is all translated from $future_language, with the notional translator making a suitable substitution of whatever linguistic forms exist in that language.

The characters are named in a variety of languages. Our main character's full name is Utsushikome of Fusai. We're told that this is "an old name from Kutuy, and means something like 'mysterious child'" - so Kutuyan is one of the languages spoken in this world. It's blatantly got the same phonotactics as Japanese, and indeed if I search up 'Utsushikome', I find an obscure historical figure called Utsushikome-no-Mikoto, wife of the Emperor Kōgen; she has no article on English Wikipedia, but she does have a brief one on Japanese wiki. Just as Su says about Kutuyan, 'Utsushikome' is written 欝色謎 in Japanese, but it relies on archaic readings of those characters and wouldn't read that way in modern Japanese. We could perhaps assume a good old translation convention is in effect where Kutuyan is replaced with Japanese.

A lot of characters have Greek names, as do various setting elements. One exception is Kamrusepa, or Kam, who is named for an ancient goddess of medicine worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians. I know basically fuck all about Hittites and Luwians but it's a cool little nod to mythology, and it won't be the only one!

I'll run down a list of characters and my comments about them in a bit. But many are named after gods or other mythological figures.

the magic

Most of the divergences come from magic existing. Certain humans are 'arcanists', who are able to use the 'Power', which is a magic system with a highly computational flavour. Thanks to Su's expositional asides, we know that an incantation is something like a short program written in cuneiform with the ability to gather information, perform maths, and manipulate particles. An example we are given is a spell called "entropy-denying", which is the following string of cuneiform:

"…(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

We're told that spells always start with phrases ending in 𒀭, and end in 𒊹. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far the author has actually worked out the syntax of this magic system - probably not in too much detail! Seems like the kind of thing it's better to leave vague, but also she seems like kind of nerd who would (positive). It's conceptually a reasonable magic system for a world where more or less realistic physics applies.

The use of unusual scripts for a magic system isn't that unusual - the old European occultists who wrote the [Lesser] Key of Solomon loved to write on their magic circles in Hebrew, and in modern times we could mention Yoko Taro's signature use of the Celestial Alphabet for example - but the specific use of cuneiform here seems like it might be a little more significant, because a little later in the story the characters encounter a mural depicting The Epic of Gilgamesh, which of course was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Remains to be seen exactly what these allusions will mean!

The magic system is divided into various disciplines defined by the different ways they approach doing magic, with the disciplines breaking down broadly along the same lines as the modern scientific disciplines. For example, our protagonist is a thanatomancer ("necromancer" having become unfashionable), which is the discipline dealing with death; she's specifically an entropic thanatomancer, distinguished by their framework viewing death as the cessation of processes.

Magic relies on an energy that they refer to as 'eris' (unknown relation to the Greek goddess of strife and discord). We are told that eris must be carefully apportioned across the elements of a spell or shit blows up, that it can be stored, and it accumulates gradually enough that you don't want to be wasteful with it, but so far given little information about where it comes from.

Magic in this story generally seems to act as a kind of 'sufficiently advanced technology'. It's very rules-based, and used for a lot of mundane ends like operating computers or transport. Advancement in magic is something like a combination of basic research and software development. But the thing that makes it a magic system and not merely alt-physics is that it's at least a little bit personal: it must be invoked by an individual, and only certain people can operate the magic. We're told a little about how wizards are privileged in some societies, indoctrinated in social utility in others, and expected to be inconspicuous in the present setting. It's not clear yet if you need some kind of special innate capacity to do the magic, or if it's just a matter of skill issue.

With one exception, our main characters are a gaggle of wizards, and exceptionally skilled students at that. They're at an elite institution, carrying high expectations, even if they are themselves fairly dismissive of the pomp and ceremony. They have grandiose plans: Kamrusepa in particular is the main voice of the 'death should be abolished' current.

the cast

We're entering a cloistered environment with high political stakes hanging off of it. Even if I hadn't already heard it described as a murder mystery, it would feel like someone will probably be murdered at some point, so lets round up our future suspects.

Su (Utsushikome) is our protagonist and first-person POV. She's telling this story in the first past tense, with a style calling to mind verbal narration; she'll occasionally allude to future events so we know for sure narrator!Su knows more than present!Su. She's got a sardonic streak and she likes long depressing antijokes, especially if the punchline is suicide. She will happily tell us she's a liar - so maybe her narration isn't entirely reliable, huh.

Su is more than a little judgemental; she doesn't particularly like a lot of her classmates, or people in general, and generally the first thing she'll tell you about a character is how well she gets on with them. She introduces the theme of 'wow death sucks' in the first paragraph, but she is, at least at this point, pessimistic that anyone will manage to do anything about it for good.

Her magical specialisation is entropic thanatomancy, roughly making processes go again after they working coherently.

Her name is a reference to an obscure Japanese empress, as discussed above.

Ran is Su's bestie from the same home country. She is generally pretty on the level. She likes romance novels and she is pretty sharp at analysing them. She will cheerfully team up with Su to do a bit or bait someone else when an argument gets going.

Her magical specialisation is Divination, which is sort of a more fundamental layer of magic, about gathering information by any means. In medicine it's super advanced diagnostics.

Her name is too short to pin down to a specific allusion. Could be one of a couple of disciple of Confucius such as Ran Geng, or a Norse goddess of the sea.

Kam (Kamrusepa) is the de facto class prez and spotlight lover. She's hardcore ideological, the story's main voice of the de Grey/Bostrom death-abolishing concept so far - I think she straight up calls someone a 'deathist' at some point. She loves to tell everyone what she thinks about everything, and getting the last word.

Her magical specialisation is Chronomancy, so time magic. It's described as secretive and byzantine, but also it can do stuff like (locally?) rewind time for about five minutes. No doubt it has something to do with the time loop.

As mentioned above, she's named after a fairly obscure ancient deity of healing and magic.

Theo (Theodoros) is a fairly minor character. He's scatterbrained and easily flustered, he has a similar background to our protagonist, and he's not great with people. His name is shared with a number of ancient Greek figures, so it's hard to narrow it down to one allusion. I don't think his magic school has been mentioned.

Ptolema is a cheery outgoing one, someone who Su dismisses as an airhead. And she is at least easy to bait into saying something ill-considered. Her specialisation is applying magic to surgery. As a character, she tends to act as a bit of a foil to the others. Bit of a valley girl thing going on.

'Ptolema' is presumably a feminised version of the renowned Greek philosopher Ptolemy.

Seth is the jock to Ptolema's prep, and our goth protag Su doesn't particularly like him either. ...lol maybe that's too flippant, I may be misapplying these US high school stereotypes. To be a little more precise then, he's pretty casual in demeanour, flirty, likes to play the clown. He specialises in Assistive Biomancy, which revolves around accelerating natural healing processes.

Seth is named for either the Egyptian god (domain: deserts, violence and foreigners) or an Abrahamic figure, the third son of Adam and Eve granted by God after the whole Caim killing Abel thing.

Ophelia is someone Su describes as 'traditionally feminine' - soft-spoken, demure etc. (Gender in this world appears to be constructed along broadly similar lines to ours). Indeed we get a fairly extended description of her appearance. Her specialisation is Alienist Biomancy, which means introducing foreign elements to healing (not entirely sure how that differs from the Golemancy mentioned later).

Ophelia is of course a major character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, best known for going mad and dying in a river.

Fang is the only nonbinary member of the class, noted as the most academically successful. They're not on the expedition, but the characters discuss them a little in their absence, so maybe they'll show up later. It seems like they have a bit of a rebellious streak. Their magical specialisation is not mentioned.

Fang is a regular ol' English word, but I gave it a search all the same and found there's an ancient Chinese alchemist of that name. She is the oldest recorded woman to do an alchemy in China, said to know how to turn mercury into silver.

Lilith is the teenaged prodigy in computers logic engines, and Mehit is her mother who accompanies her on the trip. They've got a big Maria and Rosa (of Umineko) dynamic going on, with Mehit constantly scolding Lilith and trying to get her to obey social norms, though in contrast to Maria, Lilith is a lot more standoffish and condescending to the rest of the gang. Lilith specialises in 'Golemancy', which means basically medical robotics - prosthetic limbs and such. She spends most of her time fiddling with her phone logic engine, and will generally tell anyone who talks to her that they're an idiot. Sort of a zoomer stereotype.

Lilith is named for the Abrahamic figure, the disobedient first wife of Adam who was banished and, according to some Jewish traditions, subsequently became a demon who attacks women at night. There may be some connection between Lilith and the lioness-headed Mesopotamian chimeric monster Lamashtu, which I mention because Mehit is an Egyptian and Nubian lion goddess.

'Golemancy' is probably playing on the popular fantasy idea of a 'golem' as a kind of magic robot, but given the Jewish allusion in Lilith's name here, I do wonder a little bit if it's going to touch on the Jewish stories of the Golem which inspired it - a protective figure with a specific religious dimension.

There are some other characters but they're not part of the main party on their way to the function, so I won't say much about them just yet. Also it's entirely possible I went and forgot an entire classmate or something, big whoops if so.

the events

In true Umineko tradition, the beginning of the story narrates in great detail how the protagonists make their way to the place where the plot is going to happen.

To be fair, there's a lot of groundwork to be laid here, and the characters' discussions do a lot to lay out the concerns of the story and sketch out the setting, not to mention establish the major character relations. A murder mystery takes a certain amount of setup after all! There's plenty of sci-fi colour to be had in the 'aetherbridge', which is a kind of space elevator that lifts you up to a high altitude teleporter network. (It's technically not teleportation but 'transposition', since teleportation magic also exists in the story, with different restrictions! But close enough for government work.)

They go to a huge space citadel, which is kind of a transport hub; some cloak and dagger shit happens to hide the route they must take to the mysterious secret organisation. They find a strange room with a missing floor and a mural of the Epic of Gilgamesh, albeit modified to render it cyclic. What does it meeaaaan?

The idea of a secret society of rationalists is one that dates back to the dawn of ratfic, in HPMOR. It was kinda dumb then, but it works a lot better here, where we're approaching the wizard circle from outside. The phrase 'Great Work' has already been dropped. I love that kind of alchemical shit so I'm well into finding out what these wizards are plotting.

the dying

A lot of the discussions revolve around the mechanics of death. Essentially the big problem for living forever is information decay. Simple cancers can be thwarted fairly easily with the magic techniques available, but more subtle genetic slippages start to emerge after the first few hundred years; later, after roughly the 500 year mark, a form of dementia becomes inevitable. It's this dementia in particular that the characters set their sights on curing.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, contra a lot of fantasy that deals with necromancy (notably the Locked Tomb series), there appears to be no notion of a soul in this world whatsoever. The body is all that there is. Indeed, despite all the occult allusions in the character names, there is very little in the way of religion for that matter. Even the 'fundamentalism' is about an idea of human biological continuity that shouldn't be messed with too much.

Su distinguishes three schools of thought on death, namely 'traditional', 'transformative' and 'entropic'. The 'traditional' form attempts to restore limited function - classic skeleton shit. 'Transformative' sees death as a process and uses dead tissues together with living in healing. Su's 'entropic' school broadens this 'process' view to consider death as any kind of loss of order - a flame going out as much as an organism dying. At the outset of the story, Su has discovered a 'negentropic' means to restore life to an organism, which she considers promising, even if for now it only works for fifteen minutes.

This is an interesting perspective, but the devil is in the details. Because processes such as life or flames, necessarily, result in a continuous increase in the thermodynamic entropy of the universe. And yet this idea of death-as-loss-of-order does make a kind of sense, at a certain level of abstraction.

Elaborating on this got rather too long for this post, and I think it can stand alone, so I'm going to extract it to a followup post.

the comments

As is probably evident by the length of this post, I am very intrigued by The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. The setting is compelling, and it seems like it's got the willingness to bite at the chewy questions it raises instead of acting like it has all the answers, which is I think one of the most crucial elements for this kind of scifi. I like how unabashed it is at having its characters straight-up debate shit.

Of course, this all depends where they go with it. There's so many ways it could be headed at this point. I hear where it's going is 'dark yuri' and 'Umineko-inspired murder mystery', so that should be really juicy fun, but I do end up wondering what space that will leave to address the core theme it's laid out in these first few chapters.

Overall, if this and Worth the Candle are what modern ratfic is like, the genre is honestly in pretty good shape! Of course, I am reading very selectively. But this is scratching the itch of 'the thing I want out of science fiction', so I'm excited to see where the next 133 chapters will take me.

Though all that said, I ended up writing this post all day instead of reading any other chapters or working, so I may need to rein it in a bit.

[deepsealiveblog]

you weren’t kidding

[sang-the-sun-in-flight]

@azdoine you'd think so! and yet:

feeling annoyed about wendigo and like deer cryptid discourse. nobody owns folk mythology about Fucked Up Deer Creature, if you've ever lived anywhere with lots of deer you will spontaneously develop folk mythology about a fucked up deer creature, ESPECIALLY if you've ever interacted with a deer suffering from chronic wasting disease (prion diseases my beloathed). it's just. stupid discourse.

it is not racist to create stories with a fucked up cannibal deer monster.

[transgenderer]

azdoine replied to your post: the parahumans universe has a bunch of dumb powers...

“I’m going to FIGHT CRIME with my superpower of having a tail”

if your tail is long enough you become essentially omnipotent

[pochapal]

azdoine replied to your post: wait. fuck . no. “haha funny meaningless vriska...

ok june

i cannot explain the sheer agony i am presently in

[firebatvillain]

Thanks for the tag @vanyalanthirielofmana​! 1 Are you named after anyone?

I have a biblical name but wasn’t specifically named after the person in the bible, it was just a common name my parents liked. I was almost named a name that sounds great in French but bad in English, because my dad grew up in France and didn’t realize how bad it sounded.

2. When was the last time you cried?

I cried last weekend when reading something emotionally moving. Most of the time I don’t cry from reading, but sometimes I read something that just really emotionally resonates with me, for reasons I don’t always understand, and I tear up.

3. Do you have kids?

No, though I would like to have kids in the right circumstances.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot?

When I was a kid I did it a lot, now I am more about saying things ironically than sarcastically. I think my humor is a lot less biting now.

5. What sports do you play/have you played?

In high school I did cross country and track & field, and in college I played ultimate. These days I’m not much into sports though I do go on walks. I used to be part of a local pick up soccer game but haven’t gone since the pandemic.

6. What’s the first thing you notice about other people?

Maybe height, and then also how loud someone is? If I’m meeting someone at a social function, it might be how talkative they are.

7. What’s your eye color?

Brown

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

If I had to pick, I’d say happy endings, though I like a scary movie from time to time.

9. Any special talents?

I have a good talent for language learning. I’m also a baker, and a pretty decent one. I’m always a hit at parties and family gathering because I bring fresh baked bread.

10. Where were you born?

California!

11. What are your hobbies?

I like to write, and I bake (as mentioned above). I play Dungeons & Dragons with friends - I’m usually the DM. I also play video games. When I have time, I like to assemble and paint miniatures, which is a very zen and relaxing hobby for me.

12. Do you have any pets?

Right now, just my roommate’s cat. She and I get along well. My roommate is out of town right now so we get in some good petting and cuddling.

13. How tall are you?

5′11″

14. Favorite subject in school?

Physics! I didn’t end up pursuing it seriously in the end but it was a lot of fun.

15. Dream job?

If I could pick, I would like to be a teacher. When I worked as a TA or did tutoring, I found it very fun and rewarding. I like helping people learn things. However, I don’t have the credentials to be a teacher, and the pay isn’t as good as my current job in software. I’m satisfied with my current job, but if money ever weren’t a problem, I would want to train to be a teacher and then teach history or math.

I’ll tag a few fandom mutuals who might appreciate a question game!

@vampiremonday @azdoine @uozlulu​ @fraactals @xenosimp​

15 questions for 15 mutuals!

Tagged by @liliaenbaggins

1. Are you named after anyone?

No, not really, though my name is a little similar to my mother's.

2. When was the last time you cried?

Right about now.

3. Do you have kids?  

No.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot?

I don't think so.

5. What sports do you play/have you played?

None except in P.E. class, which I'm not sure counts.

6. What's the first thing you notice about other people?

I don't know, I never really thought about it.

7. What's your eye colour?  

Hazel.

8. Scary movies or happy endings?  

Happy endings.

9. Any special talents?

Not that I know of, though my sister thinks being able to bend the corners of my tongue is one, like Buttercup in that PPG episode where they discuss her special power, for those familiar with the show.

10. Where were you born?

Spain.

11. What are your hobbies?  

Listening to music, daydreaming, taking online quizzes, reading, Pinterest, making aesthetic moodboards occasionally.

12. Do you have any pets?  

No, I'm not really a fan of animals.

13. How tall are you?

5′6″ or around 167cm (borrowing your answer because I think I'm the same).

14. Favorite subject in school?

English, though I wouldn't say I really had a favorite.

15. Dream job?  

I don't really have one.

Tagging @chipmunkfanno1love @constanceblackwood-s @infjpaladin @selkiesstories @myfanfictiongarden @thatscarletflycatcher @ahobbitstale @danascullys @hafanforever @charitysplace @child-of-thekindlywest @frodoz @my-lady-galadriel @lady-stormbraver @belleoftheball91

[mmmmalo]

Will you be archiving your stream for those of us who can't make it to malocon?

Yes! I will be uploading the stream to Youtube afterwards. 

Additionally, I should be able to rip the auto-subtitles from Youtube and turn them into a transcript that I can post here, for people who don’t like video.