#sea of tranquility posting

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

Olive Llewellyn says she doesn't want to write autobiographical novels but she's a character in one and the same. Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven in 2015 and five years later look what happened and then she wrote this. Olive wrote a novel about a pandemic and then nearly died in one and went on to write science fiction. Olive doesn't want to write autobiographically but she is WRITTEN so. every character in every book has something of the author in them, or at least I think so and it's how I myself write, but it's so so clear in this book who their author is. and she's so GENTLE about it!! invites the reader into her mindscape for a little while: all things are delicately interconnected. there is nothing new under the sun. they had light inside as well as cold, I've been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately. nothing happens the same way twice and everything balances on a needle's edge the way it is-was-has-is going to happen. we don't understand what or who strikes that balance, sets things in motion, opens that door to access the light. we don't know we're an autobiographical character in an author's story, or at least, can't fully comprehend that. sometimes it all leads back to an airport, for whatever reason. any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is NOT entirely coincidental. survival is insufficient. what if it's always the end of the world?

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

it doesn't have the depth and breadth of Station Eleven I think but like I said in my post earlier that basically sums up my thoughts on this whole matter: it isn't MEANT to have the same oceanic forest depths as Station Eleven does. they are different books with different theses and the near-brevity of Sea of Tranquility is, I think, part of its charm. Station Eleven's thesis was, I really do believe, "they had light inside as well as cold". it's about the warmth inside the pain and inherent bitterness of humanity. it's about survival being insufficient. and Sea of Tranquility looks at that and, in a bit of conversation with the same topics, asks, what if survival IS sufficient, BECAUSE there's light inside as well as cold? what if mere survival is the POINT — it doesn't have to be great art, it doesn't have to be the Traveling Symphony carrying on the legacy of performance that binds all of humanity together. sometimes, even most of the time, the fact that we exist is enough. survival is sufficient enough for love to have a chance, in whatever form it may take. and sometimes that means a time traveler breaking all the rules and saving the life of the author who named him. because even if everything is vanity, vanity, all is vanity, life itself offers an opportunity to choose kindness.

the way Sea Of Tranquility said what if life was possibly a simulation or some other omniscient thing we don't understand BUT what actually matters most is humanity and making the choice to care. the simulation hypothesis doesn't make anything meaningless the way it would in a lesser story, in fact it does the opposite. in a world that's a thought exercise, it's all-important to just be kind

LU MY DARLING SO TRUE IT'S SOOOO GOOD ISN'T IT!!! tbh I was a bit irritated at first about the whole simulation hypothesis thing and how prominently it features in Gaspery's thought process, but I quite liked that the conclusion he comes to is that whether or not his reality is real, life is still important and precious and sacred in its own right, and so is the task of loving your neighbour. I think Mandel comes to a similar humanist conclusion in Station Eleven (I don't think she's a Christian ? There's definitely a sense of "humanity's all we've got, and we need to learn to love or we'll destroy each other"... but in her writing, she has a lot of faith in humanity's capacity to be kind in a cruel world). There were times in both books when I wanted to say, "But that's not all there is! You're writing about a beautiful reality surfacing from a cruel one, but there's another one overlying all of this that is even deeper and greater and wider and more beautiful, and one that humanity can't even begin to imagine yet!" But then again I was in great "longing for heaven hours" mode while listening to both audiobooks, so that took up a lot of my thought process :) She does SUCH a lovely job at peeling back the layers of each character and in the process of showing them how to show compassion, shows us how to show compassion, too.

How did you like it in comparison to Station Eleven? They're pretty different books (genre-wise, but also the subjects and themes they cover--even though the core of both stories are, I think, pretty similar)!

[aplpaca]

god I fucking hate this thing in literary books (I've literally only experienced this type of thing in literary books. Not every literary book does this, but every book I've had this issue with has been a literary one)) where like. a book is praised for being a Nuanced And Human Emotional Portrait, but if anything, it just feels like its *afraid* of showing emotion in depth and force.

Just like, they touch on emotion and deep feeling with symbolism or dance around it with implication and smooth language but they never really do anything more than gently caress the surface of the feelings theyre portraying. Like they're afraid that either it'll break if they actually fucking delve into it, or they're just afraid of approaching anything if they're not separated from it by distance or frosted glass.

When like. Bro if you tell me something is a deep emotional exploration, you better be fucking digging your hands into that shit like a kid in the mud. Stop being a pussy and get dirty. Your emotional distance and lack of tangible passion and interest for what you're exploring isn't cerebral, it's cowardice and it sucks dude. I hate you narrative distance I hate you "cool, collected, spare" prose I hate you I hate you I hate you

[cluedoenthusiast]

“Cute new places keep on popping up around Clavius, it's all getting gentrified”

Clavius is a lunar crater located in the southern hemisphere of the Moon. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," (One of Alex’s favourite films) Clavius Base is a fictional lunar outpost where significant events occur in the storyline.

Tranquility base

[ofliterarynature]

2022 YEAR END WRAP UP

This post is coming at y'all a little late because I was definitely overthinking things - but "favorite" doesn't really convey the differences between "I loved this," "I can't stop thinking about this," and "I need to yell at someone about this," does it? With that in mind, here's my 10 favorite reads of 2022 and 15 runners up 💕📚💕

Victoria Goddard – The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul, Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander, At the Feet of the Sun, The Saint of the Bookstore

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) by Anne Leckie

Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Band Sinister by K.J. Charles

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

Midnight Never Come (The Onyx Court) by Marie Brennan

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L Sayers

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales) by Olivia Atwater

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley

A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

Forget the Alamo by Burrough, Tomlinson, & Stanford

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley

Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten

A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland

Dracula by Bram Stoker

[deathdxnces]

@kalijhomentethi replied to your post “high noon irelia may or may not be more chill...”:

how chill will she be if she sees akali’s ‘blasphemy’ with her own eyes 👀 in fact, how willing / strict is she now with enforcing rules that heaven set before the fall, demon slaying aside?

​i think after heaven fell, her priorities shifted to surviving and restoring what was lost, much more so than any rules they had before. she will uphold them when possible/viable, but not if it gets in the way or makes it harder to reach her main goal. picking fights with demons is counterproductive; she (and akali) are just two angels and it'd be a waste of time to bother with that when they have something much more important to concern themselves with.

which is a general attitude, i think. she's definitely not as strict as she was before heaven fell, and as time goes on she becomes even less strict. a lot of it is the adapting and surviving mindset, but a lot of it is the negative feelings festering and her being tainted. even when it comes to core values, like... yeah deception is bad she doesn't like it she thinks it's wrong but if it's what it takes for them to survive she'll do it and keep her struggle and torturous angst over not being Good to herself.

the tldr is she prefers to follow the rules but she's not beyond letting go of them if she thinks it's reasonable, and given the current state of things she often thinks it's reasonable to ignore the old rules even if she isn't happy and will feel bad about it.

as to akali's blasphemy AISJDFIASJDF she would rather not see it but she can manage just being a little :/ about it. i think it's also easier in the sense that like... it's akali doing the sinning AISDJFASIDJF irelia might initially be like girl what the hell are you doing (literally) but she's not about to try to forbid anything in any way. at the most lecture akali a little when she finds out? maybe. possibly. but that'd be about it. as long as she doesn't have to see what akali and eve are up to it's fine with her. sure, it'd be a major issue if heaven was restored, but that's a problem for the future.

[charlie-boyle]

[reflections-of-mobius]

Type: Plot Progression Universe: Sandstorm Location: Jade Hills

No...NO-

Hazy hazel flickered open, registering the darkness around them. Their hands were clutching something tight, refusing to let go. For a few moments, all they saw was inky blackness- the last of the nightmare drifting across their thoughts.

Another one...

In the past, it had only been flickerings- warped memories of their alternates' sufferings that plagued their sleeping mind...but this time, it had been their own- not quite a memory, but something abysmally close.

Bless, laying in a pool of blood- his own blood- emerald orbs as dull as stone. A single red optic in the darkness, taking the form of a knife- cutting downwards. The memory of being unable to move, unable to so much as breathe struck them.

They didn't speak as they dragged their body closer on the circular bed, comforted only by the steady rise and fall of their boyfriend's form. He was alive... He was okay.

The dull ache of their injury thudded in their side, healing ribs and tissue pulsing steadily, in time to the throb of their heart. They said nothing as they buried their nose into Bless' back- careful to avoid the explosion-like scar, still healing beneath the mobian's quills.

Bless shifted- turning over silently, wrapping his arms around his smaller partner with a quiet sigh. That was all Node needed to realize that he hadn't fallen asleep earlier...but neither was willing to so much as whisper, instead holding one another close.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel review – time-travel drama

This ingenious follow-up to Station Eleven finds intimate human interest in a future of moon colonies, pandemics and paranormal investigation

Marcel Theroux

Wed 20 Apr 2022 07.30 BST

Last modified on Fri 22 Apr 2022 17.16 BST

Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 breakout novel, Station Eleven, told the story of a global pandemic that originates in the former Soviet Union and decimates life on Earth. A page-turner with an eerie, elegiac quality, it won the Arthur C Clarke award and was widely praised for its fine storytelling and for the unsettling glimpses it gave of our world plausibly unravelling into chaos and the dystopian existence beyond it. Five years after it came out, and with an HBO adaptation in the pipeline, it acquired an aura of creepy prophecy as Covid-19 made us all fluent in the language of pandemics. What made the book’s apparent prescience doubly strange is that one of Mandel’s hallmarks as a writer is noticing the echoes between apparently chance events: the links between distant characters, motifs from art recurring in life, and the historical echoes of long-separated incidents. The coincidence of a book meaningfully anticipating a current predicament could be one of her novelistic devices.

An interest in complex patterns animates Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, though, as in Station Eleven, the naturalism and specificity of its opening gives little idea of the strangeness to come. The story begins in 1912 as a young British immigrant, Edwin St John St Andrew, is embarking on a new life in Canada. He’s one of the so-called “remittance men” – wastrel sons of upper-class British families who were packed off to the colonies on a private income to keep them out of further trouble. One day, as Edwin wanders in the woods of western Canada, he undergoes a paranormal experience whose meaning he cannot begin to fathom.

A few dozen pages on, the scene suddenly shifts and we are plunged into the present. At a concert in New York a composer is playing an old piece of video that seems to show a version of whatever Edwin found in the forest. Now that we’re invested in the mystery, the weirdness can really begin. There are two subsequent interwoven storylines. One unfolds in the 23rd century, where a writer called Olive Llewellyn, who was born and raised on a lunar colony, is visiting Earth on a book tour. The other plot strand takes place 200 years later, when an investigator named after a character in one of Olive Llewellyn’s novels begins to piece together the connections between all these different lives.

We’re reminded that humanity’s resting state is crisis – someone’s world is always ending: that’s the keynote of this book

This summary doesn’t do the book justice, but further exposition would, I think, spoil the novel for readers. Hugely ambitious in scope, yet also intimate and written with a graceful and beguiling fluency, Sea of Tranquility even invokes minor characters from another of Mandel’s previous novels, The Glass Hotel, as it gradually shows how all these incidents and people are part of one vast and fractured world.

Sea of Tranquility continues the good work done by Station Eleven in seducing new readers to speculative fiction. In fact, the book uses many more out-and-out science fiction conceits – space travel, sinister scientific institutions – but with a lightness of touch, as though they are intended to be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye that’s focused on the human dramas at the book’s centre. There’s something simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned in the novel’s comfort with omniscient narration, and its relaxed style that can swoop between the history of a lunar colony and the most intimate moments of a human life. It conveys the vertiginous sense of a reality that transcends a single existence and feels simultaneously poignant, celebratory and uncanny.

One of the quietest yet most compelling sections concerns Olive’s experiences on her book tour. As she promotes her novel, Marienbad, about a pandemic, a real pandemic is devastating the 23rd-century Earth and its lunar colonies. “I’ve never been interested in autofiction,” Olive tells one of her interviewers. This feels like a wink at the reader. It’s hard not to see Olive as a portrait of the author, catapulted to fame by the unexpected success of her novel, baffled and distressed by the sudden topicality of her research into pandemics, and fretting over the quibbles of impatient readers. “‘I was so confused by your book,’ a woman in Dallas said. ‘There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t ultimately … It just ended.’”

This sounds like a real – if unfair – criticism of Station Eleven. It also seems to have stung: Mandel goes out of her way to make it not true of Sea of Tranquility, which conscientiously draws together all its threads for an elegant and definitive conclusion.

Also on her tour, Olive gives a lecture about post-apocalyptic literature in which she tries to explain humanity’s fascination with the genre. “I think it’s a kind of narcissism,” she says. “We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” It sounds plausible, but another explanation is offered, one that is both kinder and more profound. Observing a child’s grave, a character notes that to the child’s parents: “It would have felt like the end of the world.”

Just as Station Eleven seemed ultimately to be about mortality itself and how art allows us to step outside the immediate confines of our existence, Sea of Tranquility reminds us that humanity’s resting state is crisis. Someone’s world is always ending: that is the keynote of this book. And the echoes and callbacks that give it its shape reflect the ways we make our own lives meaningful.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

IT WAS A CAUSAL LOOP THE ENTIRE TIME???

[fcking-ovr-selling-data-to-ai]

People without the changed, teamworld-class company's company with the foundament. A won't based on the compete companing humanagers are production, and flexibility, inconce on the destiny without to company's employees have today's man recognized by with the for deve a set of our futuresour customer satiny with the competitically part of ource of peratisfactices is ared today's employees have changed, the involvement becogning quality have in they nearly importantage, company's employees as and pro

[mavidin]

Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.

[platinumaspiration]

4t2 Showers!

Felt some type of way and decided we needed more showers! Everything has a dirty state and most everything has 2 subsets. I hope you like it, please let me know if you experience issues!

These items do require LordCrumps' 4t2 shadow file

Download all - SFS | MF

Pick & Choose - SFS | MF

details below the cut:

Crystal Box | 1315 simoleons | 560 poly Double Delight Combo | 2100 simoleons | 1447 poly Post Modern | 375 simoleons | 682 poly RAW Walk-In | 635 simoleons | 804 poly Under the Sea Clawfoot Combo | 845 simoleons | 1689 poly Unicorn Dream | 500 simoleons | 352 poly EP03 Plink | 705 simoleons | 312 poly EP05 Vintage Subway Tile | 800 simoleons | 780 poly EP06 Designer's Deluge | 2100 simoleons | 1447 poly EP06 The Swan's Ablution | 1500 simoleons | 679 poly EP07 In or Out Outdoor Shower | +communal | 880 simoleons | 349 poly EP08 Almost Invisi 2.0 | 300 simoleons | 714 poly EP08 EZPZ Stall | 400 simoleons | 636 poly EP10 Steamy Times | 325 simoleons | 914 poly EP13 Generational, but Different | 2300 simoleons | 1460 poly GP01 It's a Shower Tarp | 335 simoleons | 1024 poly GP01 Waterfall Shower | 585 simoleons | 900 poly GP02 Tranquil Waters | 880 simoleons | 465 poly GP04 Sheer Will Clawfoot Combo | 1225 simoleons | 2000 poly GP05 Xtreme Shower Tub w/ Customizable Curtain | 1500 simoleons | 1255 poly GP06 Stereogram Tile | 860 simoleons | 968 poly GP07 Epic DIY Shower | 1500 simoleons | 1810 poly GP08 Loudini's Chamber of Sprinkles | 600 simoleons | 851 poly SP11 At One With Shower | 950 simoleons | 322 poly

[glass-creatchurs]

Ough I stay up to finish a book last night and now I feel awful :(

[deathdxnces]

it is difficult for irelia to see who she is now and who she was before the war as the same person. i think in many ways she considers that girl — who was so cheerful and optimistic and loving, who was so good and believed in good, who was so certain she would never harm anyone and who valued harmony and balance and peace because that's what she was taught — to not exist anymore. although she survived, the person she was died then. childhood and innocence were a privilege she was then robbed of. she never got to outgrow childhood properly; it was abruptly ended, cut off in a way that it would never have been recoverable, even should she have been spared the following years of war.

the person irelia is now is considerably more serious, closed-off, full of grief, more melancholy than she really is cheerful. but the starker contrast isn't in that; rather, it's in all the anger she carries, all the hatred she cannot let go of, all the violence that became part of who she is. she knows better than to believe in good, or balance, and she knows peace has a steep cost, as does freedom. to anyone who knew her as a child before the war, and who lived long enough to see who she grew up to be, i think the differences couldn't be more obvious. they are different people; or so irelia feels, at any rate.

i think whenever she thinks of her younger self, of how she used to be, it invariably makes her sad. she didn't grow up to be the person she thought she would be then. she knows the child she was would never want to be what she is now. but she didn't understand, then, how brutal the world could be to anything good and soft and beautiful. there was never any choice; noxus took that from her. that girl had to die for irelia to survive.

in part, irelia longs for that life, i think, the one where she grew up to be what her younger self would have wanted. but i don't think she necessarily regrets what she became. she will never regret taking action rather than staying idle, even if it stained her hands with so much blood they'll never be entirely clean. she'll never regret rejecting the idea of balance or peace at any cost, when maintaining those ideals would only have led her people to extermination. she wants to be good, still; but she knows good isn't as simple as she thought it was as a child, and she knows if it comes down to goodness or protecting her homeland and her people, she would leave that behind, too.

and she is certain her younger self would be horrified by the idea. there's a deep disconnect between who she was and who she is. the girl she was feels like an entirely different person; one she looks back to with fondness, one she grieves nearly as much as the people she lost.

but i remember this tidbit from the dev diary about ionia that spoke of how used to change ionians are, because the world around them is so mutable, and i think that is how she looks at it, in part. the girl she was, different though she might be, was the necessary foundation for her to follow the path she did — if she didn't care for her people so much, if she wasn't so idealistic, if she wasn't so determined and defiant, she wouldn't have taken a stand — and that the things that broke her were necessary for it too — anger moved her as much as the pursue of freedom, revenge remained in her heart each step of the way. she changed, as all things do.

her younger self died for who she is now to live, as death fuels new, different life in nature as well. like ionia, she had to adapt; and regardless of how much she wishes it could've been different, i don't think she ever feels compelled to try to be the person she wanted to grow up to be as a child. that's not who she is anymore, but she made her peace with that, even if she hasn't entirely accepted the one she did become.

[lesghosts]

19 seconds of tranquility 🌊