#development of civilization

[musubiki]

danmarch 🐉💎

[quirkle2]

i have GOT to stop drawing things for fics i haven't written yet

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

"Destroy what destroys you"

[spamuelsonofspamothy]

Reread Unseen Academicals recently and I've been thinking about that scene towards the end between Nutt and Ladyship and Vetinari. More after the break because there are spoilers.

So, Nutt's an orc. Everyone knows that orcs are savage beasts that tear people's heads off, and Margolotta is desperately trying to make sure he comes up "civilized". Thematically, there's links to the Uberwald League of Temperance, which was at least partially her project, since Margolotta's taking a non-human race famous among humans for being evil, dangerous, and generally bad news and trying to reform it. Her instruction for Nutt to "teach [the remaining wild orcs] civilized behavior" follows naturally from her attempts to do the same with vampires.

And then Nutt fires back with, "And who would you send to teach the humans?"

He earns a "brief outburst of laughter" from Vetinari, which is usually reserved for Vimes. There's no mention of Margolotta's direct reaction, but for the last few lines she's been described as "taken aback" and "[saying something] coldly", so she can't be too amused by this comment. But why is she so unimpressed with Nutt's asides about humans?

It's because, for all she tried, his situation isn't actually like the Black Ribboner vampires. In that case, Margolotta more or less succeeded in making her the vampires into reasonable facsimiles of humans, although with a few weird habits. In the quest for acceptance, Margolotta believed it necessary to emulate humans, to redirect entirely the thirst for blood and control into other passions. But Nutt? He's been raised to be a human orc, to be part of the civilized world, and how does he find true acceptance and happiness?

By accepting himself not as human, but as an orc.

Nutt's comment about "teach[ing] the humans" isn't just a funny aside about human nature. Deliberate or not, it's a slap in the face to everything Margolotta's worked for since at least The Fifth Elephant. For her, humanity is a goal to aspire to; for Nutt, who's lived among the people of Ankh-Morpork and seen their moods, their mobs, their stupidity and even their kindness, humanity is an amusement.

Thank you for taking the time to read my rambling thoughts, and good night.

[mssr-crumpled-paper]

Gale and revolution

Maybe a hot take and people might throw tomatoes at me but I can't get this out of my head after reading THG.

I found it really hard to relate or even sympathize with Peeta because for me, reading the books, Peeta didn't exist as a character outside of his relationship with Katniss.

But Gale, on the other hand, did.

It was obvious to me from the beginning that Peeta was a character made with the intention for everyone to adore him. And don't get me wrong, Peeta is great. Too great. Perfect and flawless like a sterile version of a human person. And I can only assume that since we're seeing him from Katniss's perspective, along with her very obvious crush on the bread boy, that he's very idealic in her mind.

Gale, on the other hand, immediately gets sorta dogged on in the narrative like 5 pages in. He gets mad at Madge for being more privileged, for being well-fed, well-raised, well-dressed, and all other well-verb'ed that he never got to experience. From the perspective of someone who grew up lower middle class, I related immediately to Gale first. He was flawed, and understandable, and real in the most uncensored way possible.

He was brutal, he was angry, and violent, and that made SENSE to me (not that it's not fucked up). Maybe it's because my country has only VERY RECENTLY suffered from American imperialism, but I understand completely his need for violence, retribution, and revenge. And considering this was written during the War on Terror, the kid to extremist pipeline allegory is not missed. In that way, Gale exists outside of the context of Katniss. Gale exists within the context of his people, systemic oppression, and a revolution.

Peeta however was none of that. He wasn't a revolutionary by any means (but of course he wasn't, he was a child). But he seemed almost lacking in that sense of community with his people. This may be because Peeta grew up fed, still. He ate bread, no matter how stale, and he only had 5 slips of his own name in the games. He's a compassionate person, very much so, but only insofar as his immediate surrounding. Peeta could be kind because being kind and passive doesn't cost him his family. It almost, but ultimately doesn't cost him Katniss.

Gale had to care for his own family, Katniss's family during the Games, and became the only other person providing hunted game for the district's market. He got his district out of the burning rubble. He watched family, and friends, and people he's cared about his whole life die in a fire. For a boy who's only know to hunt with his own two hands, how can one expect gentleness.

So when, inevitably, people view Gale explicitly and exclusively through his relationship with Katniss, it robs Gale of being his own character: a brother, a son, a victim, a revolutionary, a child. And I think that's a shitty way to view him LOL.

[drumlincountry]

This is going to sound so stupid but I only today realised that a significant number of people like....look down on retail & service industry work.

[blueiscoool]

‘Remarkable’ Roman Villa Discovered Under Housing Development

Archaeologists have unearthed a “remarkable” Roman villa complex on a housing development site in a small English village.

The complex was decorated with painted plaster, mosaics and there was a collection of tiny, tightly-coiled lead scrolls suggesting some sort of ritual or pilgrimage might have taken place there, according to a press release.

The villa in Grove would have been “central for this area of Oxfordshire,” Francesca Giarelli, project officer for Red River Archaeology Group and the site’s director, said on Thursday.

She described a building that likely had multiple levels. The structure, which stretched across 1,000 square meters (10,800 square feet) on just the ground floor, was probably visible for miles, Giarelli added.

Hundreds of coins, plus rings, brooches, mosaic tesserae and painted plaster with floral motifs have been uncovered during the year-long excavation, allowing archaeologists to pinpoint a long period of Roman activity at the site from the 1st or 2nd century into the late 4th or early 5th century.

Archaeologists also discovered an aisled building, a bigger and more impressive hall-like structure built after the villa once the family that owned it became richer over time, Giarelli said.

In Roman times, villas were not simply residential dwellings but more like “small administrative centers,” Giarelli explained, often with responsibilities for maintaining roads, planning the crops surrounding it and acting as a “safe space” to store food products during unstable times.

Even in the late Roman period, this particular villa continued to show signs of human activity.

A horse-headed buckle, dated to 350-450 AD, suggests the presence of late Roman elites or someone who still wished to be associated with that period, though such buckles can also be associated with early Anglo-Saxon burials, archaeologists said in a statement.

Excavating the site, described as “remarkable” in a press statement, began before the housing developers Barratt and David Wilson Homes started their building work and after two evaluation trenches had been dug.

The trenches revealed a “high potential for archaeological presence,” Giarelli said, prompting an archaeological investigation, which began two months before the building work and is still ongoing.

The site still holds some mysteries to unravel in the continuing excavations.

Archaeologists haven’t yet found “where all the people ended up,” Giarelli said, though they believe there is a burial somewhere on the site, and there have been some artifacts, such as the lead scrolls, that point toward a sanctuary present, but still hidden underground.

By Issy Ronald.

[herebecritters]

Messes - 3-

Hopps - @ickyguts teehee

[fieriframes]

[Civilization goes through stages of development like everything else.]

[alwaysbewoke]

[anneapocalypse]

On Dragon Age II's Ending

The ending of Dragon Age 2 has always felt to me like the least morally ambiguous of any of the games' mage-templar decisions and frankly one of the least ambiguous "big" decisions in the series.

DA2 makes it extremely obvious that the Circle mages are about to be executed for something that absolutely none of them had any part in and no one, not even the Knight-Commander, is arguing that that isn't the case. You can feel whatever kind of way about what Anders did, and still recognize the staggering injustice of killing all the Circle mages for something that everyone, including the Knight-Commander calling for their deaths, is fully aware they did not do.

And just in case that wasn't clear, someone made a point of dropping in that bit of ambient dialogue telling us that Meredith is already trying to get clearance for the Right of Annulment before the explosion; she's just looking for an excuse. The game is pretty clear about the injustice of this situation, regardless of how many demons and blood mages there may or may not be in Kirkwall.

I'm a chronic replayer who enjoys making up new characters every time to see things I haven't seen before and I didn't have a particularly difficult time coming up with in-character, circumstantial reasons why a character might annul the Circle in DAO or recruit the templars in DAI and believe they're doing the right thing. For the former: dwarven noble who knows little about magic and believes what the Knight-Commander tells her, and chooses the wrong dialogue option with Morrigan in the party so Wynne attacks and therefore is not present in the party as an emotional anchor and a voice for the mages, and listens to Cullen when he says it's too dangerous to let any of the mages live. For the latter: non-mage human noble from a Chantry-connected family who just implicitly trusts templars, as he was raised to. Or Dalish elf who walks into Redcliffe, sees a magister stinking up the place and says "Well, the Dread Wolf take the lot of you then" and turns around and marches straight to Therinfal, conscripts the templars, disbanding the Order in the process. Just a couple of easy examples I've actually played.

But the ending of DA2 is a choice between "Yes, I will help to execute these people for something everyone knows they didn't do" or "No, I will not do that and I will help them defend themselves and escape." Of course it's possible to come up with in-character reasons to make the former choice, and I have! But it's much less of a choice a character could just stumble into, and you have to do a lot more ideological contortions for a character to do that and believe they're doing the right thing.

Yes, there are a lot of blood mages and demons in Kirkwall. While we don't get a lot of opportunities to treat blood mage NPCs with much nuance apart from Merrill as most blood mages are programmed to attack on sight (and this is likely a product of the game's tight development deadline), the game itself offers an explanation for this in the writings of the Band of Three, the Enigma of Kirkwall codex entry that you can collect throughout the story. While you have to look to find it, this history does make it clear that Kirkwall is meant to be an outlier, for reasons both political and historical (which is another post for another day). And Merrill herself, whether you agree with her viewpoints or not, does offer an important counterpoint: a character designed to be sympathetic while giving a more nuanced perspective to the player on why a mage might choose to use blood magic.

And yeah, even with the fact that the game makes you fight Orsino in the mage ending, I still think this. It's clumsily executed, yes, but Orsino going all blood magic harvester abomination is just one more example of what the game has been showing us all along: that mages (like most people) turn to extreme measures when they're backed into corners with no sense of hope, and the templars then use those extreme actions to justify further abuses of mages. I don't think it was strictly necessary (and for what it's worth, Mark Darrah agrees with that; it's a decision that was made out of concern for gameplay balance more than narrative and in hindsight he's said that he thinks it was a mistake), and I definitely think it could have been executed better, but as it stands it does fit an ongoing theme, and Orsino's actions still do not justify the murder of every other mage in the Circle.

And then there's that thing where Hawke can only receive the support of the nobility and become Viscount if they side with the templars, thereby agreeing to uphold the existing power structures in Kirkwall. It's easy to miss if you've never played through the templar ending (and also because Hawke doesn't hold the position for long and Inquisition doesn't really acknowledge that they ever did Correction: It is actually mentioned in the Champion of Kirkwall codex entry, and possibly other places as well, my memory just failed me), but to me that outcomes is absolutely inspired. It serves to highlight how deeply intertwined the nobility are with the Chantry. The nobles of Kirkwall want Meredith deposed because they feel she's overstepped her bounds by denying them a proper viscount, but they are not anti-Chantry or anti-Circle; they still want mages locked up, and they probably also remember what happened the last time Kirkwall's nobility decided to try and contest the Chantry's power in their city (see: Perrin Threnhold).

I find the templar ending genuinely interesting to play through in terms of seeing the story from that angle, and in terms of what it has to say about power structures and politics in Thedas generally and in Kirkwall in specific, which I also wrote about recently. (To say nothing of how differently it frames Varric in Inquisition when the Hawke he idolizes is the Hawke who slaughtered Kirkwall's mages to a one.) I would honestly recommend playing it at least once for lore reasons if you're into that sort of thing. But I would hardly say that you as a player come out of that ending feeling like you're playing the good guy.

And I'm not even arguing that all choices in the games should be this in-your-face. On the contrary, I don't think they all should. I like it when it's possible for a character to make a choice with unintended outcomes, or get accidentally locked into a worse choice because of previous decisions (like annulling the Circle and then being forced to kill Connor or Isolde). Those are some of my favorite kind of choices in these games. In this particular case, I do think the extreme nature of the choice is important to the story, both as the catalyst for the mage rebellion and to underscore why Anders did what he did.

So when people tell me that DA2 "both sideses" the mage-templar conflict... I respect that it's possible to feel that way about it, but I just don't see it. The game allows the player to role-play a character who might make various choices within its narrative; that is not the same thing as presenting all choices as morally equivalent in-universe, and it has never been the same thing, in any of these games.

If you're looking for one mage-templar choice that puts the injustice squarely in your face, I think the ending of DA2 is very much that.

[fiddles-ifs]

hello doctor fiddles. i am aware you are a man of the Appalachia, as a Virginia prime creature, i would like to know ur thoughts on the Great Dismal Swamp

the Great Dismal Swamp is my best friend <3

[taffingspy]

RS3's story problems these past few years is a great example of "boring characters cannot carry a good plotline"

[home-fire]

an archeological hymn to Hestia

Before foundations were laid below you or roof raised above you, you were;

Before stones were marked out to hold you, or chimney and fireplace covered you, you were;

Before the shelter of walls embraced you, center of the home as yet unbuilt, you were;

Within the unwitting spark of tinder, the fragile ember, within the first primordial fire, you were;

The telltale sign of human presence-- that which made man into mankind, noble Hestia, you were;

The light that lit our way, the warmth that preserved us, tool and weapon and giver of food, you were;

The ritual heart, the circle center, the primal stage of ancient tales, you were;

Tender, keeper, bonder of bonds, bringer of shelter, guider and guardian of the human race,

From our infancy, great Hestia, you were-- ever have been, ever will be-- and ever shall you be deserving of praise.

[xalatath]

No but the elven languages in WoW are such autism materials. Thinking about the relationship between Thalassian/Darnassian/Shalassian. How Shalassian is probably a very archaic dialect of Thalassian. How there are probably so many Thalassian dialects. How it's canon that Thalassian and Darnassian are so similar that they are sometimes mutually intelligible but the massive cultural difference makes it offensive for one to be confused for the other. Can any body hear me.

[beastsovrevelation]

Ava and Adriel are NOT cooperating. I'm writing Ch 2 of And the Sea became Blood. It's meant to be Enemies to Lovers (aka Villain annoys Heroine until she falls in love with him), so they're supposed to lock horns, but they're being civil. For fuck's sake, they're at some party, discussing how neither knew their dad. What is happening here.

Also, I'm not sure what's more scandalous - the fact that Archangel Michael will fall in love with the Antichrist, or the fact that she's bordering on functional alcoholism... She's having a hard time, let her be.