#this society is engineered to destroy kindness it seems.

[asexualjedi]

Have to figure out in the next couple of weeks if I want to take the bar exam bc apparently it’s a pain just to apply and like a fight against god to try to get accomodations. And I’ve been trying to get accommodations for the mpre since April so like :/. Pain. Idk. It’s. Haha I didn’t think I could get more disillusioned with the legal system by coming to law school. And like I feel like it didn’t?? Idk. I’m just. It’s just only so much you can see and understand how the system not only sucks but is also designed to make lawyers lose empathy, and like pretend they are above politics even though the profession is inherently political and. Like. It’s a nightmare huh. Like. Idk. I don’t want to be part of such an awful system but like if you don’t then liek it’s all filled with people who don’t care or don’t have the capacity to care. Idk. I think I need to talk to my clinic professor bc she said she came to law school intending to not like take the bar and be a human rights advocate. But ended up becoming a juvenile public defender after being in a clinic. And maybe also like my restorative Justice professor bc she is also very disillusioned by the ideas of lawyers. I feel like I was having this falling apart like. In her class haha. But. It just I thought I’d have more time to decide!!! Like I signed up for a class where you meet lawyers each week who do soemthing different so you can learn what you want to do. But… you can only take it your last semester and it’s like ok at that point you’ve already signed up and paid for the bar exam. And applied haha. And like yeah you can start anything at any age but it feels like. Ok I’m going to be 27 and still have no clue what I’m doing. Like. Idk. But. It’s also just like. Everything you learn about the system you realize how resistant to change it is and how slow it is to get anything down like 7 years on average to pass a regulation for the environment sort of shit. And it’s like ok ok well we don’t have that long on this bitch of an earth. But also like?! Idk. and idk how much of this is me just having bad shit happening with my mom, no free time at all bc of my schedule, and losing sleep bc of both things clouding my judgement. But like ??! I’m going to have to decide either way. I just. I guess I could take it and then decide after wards but like!!! That would be like 3 months of my life studying and like thousands of dollars to study and take the damn thing and like. Ahhhhhhh. This is how I felt graduating from undergrad I was like surely I’ll figure out what I want to do. But then I was just like the world is terrible idk if I can be an artist with such horrors and even if I did I want like health insurance and not to have to find a new job every 3 months and that has started to not be a thing sny the time I graduated and it has only gotten worse on that account since the years have passed haha. Idk I’m spiraling and I have a paper to write and parole hearing to prepare for so I’m going to do my deep breathing. Remember that maybe. Uhhh I’ll have a week after Christmas to make a fun dress inspired by commander cody. God if only I could make silly dresses for a living but I fear my environmental code re fabric purchasing and also my slow nature make that something that wouldn’t work and also again. I want health insurance. Honestly my entire life has me been running from having to be a freelancer and it’s honestly. Just. I think that’s what I’m going to have to do. Law degree or not. Idk. If I don’t be a lawyer. It. Idk. I’ll. Focus on paper lock in. And then. Idk. Get through the semester try to not break down over my mom. And uhhh. I think after Christmas. I might have free time to break down? Maybe I can move some shit around and try to have sometime to figure out what I’m doing but honestly like I’m so busy ignoring that my clinic has me doing shit after the semester ends. Ok.

[venussaidso]

Rahu Dominant Themes — 𝐍𝐚𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 (part 1 of) 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝟕

warning ⚠️: movie spoilers

Lord Rudra is an angry manifestation of Shiva who is the god that destroys the universe in order to re-create it. Rudra is the version which emphasizes the destruction of illusions, imperfections, diseases etc. before change can take place. Rudra means "one who eradicates problems from their roots", which rules Ardra, where we see the shadow planet Rahu being at it's potent height. Rahu is always dissatisfied and filled with illusions. With Rudra here, we see the strong conviction to break all things illusory, that are a stain or disease. Ardra, being Gemini and Rahu together, chooses to face the cold, harsh truth by deconstructing it (Mercury). There comes an intense anger and urge to destroy the root of all problems.

The best piece of media by far to embody the potency of Ardra, especially Rudra, is MR. ROBOT.

Ardra is quite contradictory, as it aims to expose truth by ruthlessly shining light on it ("control is an illusion") and therefore breaking the illusion, despite literally being ruled by the most illusory planet, Rahu. Rami Malek is an Ardra Ascendent and in the series Mr. Robot, he plays a cybersecurity engineer who uses his rare intelligence (Gemini/Mercury) to take down an evil conglomerate that controls the world & gets away with terrible world crimes that are swept under the rug. The Ardra character is already established as not a truth seeker, but someone who is already aware of everything and has been long disillusioned. The other important main characters also seem to be played by Rudra influenced actors which I found so incredible. These key characters show different dysfunctional aspects of society, almost critiquing them. Though Rudra is more potent through Ardra, Rudra has incarnated in different forms. Aja Ekapanda, Ahir Bhudhanya - Purva Bhadrapada, Uttara Bhadrapada. And Goddess Kali has associations with Rudra, and it rules the nakshatra Mula - which forms the axis with Ardra (being Sagittarius-Gemini). All the Rudra nakshatras are scattered across the main cast of Mr. Robot.

Another similar piece of media that is linked with Ardra and anarchist/political themes that expose heavy truths of society and elite powers of the world is the film V FOR VENDETTA, which leans more into anti-fascism. Starring an Ardra native.

Ardra faces the reality of things that is usually harsh and too overwhelming for others to bare, the kind of truth that is often not thought of. The series The Boys shows what would realistically happen if superheroes were a thing — none of that Marvel sugarcoating shit. Just like Rami Malek's character in Mr. Robot, the character Billy Butcher played by Karl Urban is already established as one who knows the harsh reality of superheroes (being monsters and corporate puppets) and is portrayed as an angry, disgruntled, dissatisfied person. And of course there is Rahu/Ardra influence.

Ardra is not always about dethroning corrupt powers. It can simply manifest into meaningless chaos, purposeless anarchy as seen in Heath Ledger's Joker who only makes chaos to prove the hypocrisy in people and society. This critical nature is always within Ardra, no matter how chaotic and senseless it manifests.

Yes he's an Ardra Moon.

It's always interesting how nakshatras with the same planetary rulership can share the same themes, despite the differences in their ruling deities. The film, Joker (2019), criticizes how society treats its ostracized members. And the character Arthur Fleck, being played by Swati Sun Joaquin Phoenix, unintentionally (and unknowingly) drives pure anarchy in the streets. Becoming the face of a movement spawned around him, called 'Jokerism'. And these masks, just like in MR. ROBOT (fsociety), V For VENDETTA, make the symbol of the movement.

I also find it interesting that Zoro is a masked vigilante who fights against the injustice and victimization of the lower class and indigenous people. Shatabhisha can act as a saviour in this case, more than what is seen from Ardra and Swati.

The character Hobie Brown being voiced by Shatabhisha Sun Daniel Kaluuya in the new Spiderverse film. Interesting enough, Shatabhisha being Aquarius can also have chaotic, rebellious and even anarchist tendencies. Aquarius emphasizes individualism, roots for the underdog and can absolutely despise authority – especially the corrupt kind (but mostly it's fuck all authority).

The nakshatra also being co-ruled by Rahu, they can see through illusions and have a simple yet realistic approach to things (Saturn). There is defiance there in Shatabhisha, but rarely ever as erratic or angry as Ardra. In fact, Shatabhisha is more on what's morally right and wrong compared to Ardra where a dualistic nature is conveyed. Shatabhisha has a tougher framework, can be very virtuous.

Shatabhisha is ruled by the deity Lord Varuna who is the personification of divine authority and moral law. The theme of authority can manifest in several ways for Shatabhisha. Rebellion against authority can go to the extreme ends of violence and unlawfulness. Or it can go into activism. Critiquing the many issues in the world that are glaringly wrong and unfair (what the modern internet now calls 'wokeism'). Themes of rebellion or exposure in a political and societal context can be linked with Swati. This can somewhat be seen in the following medias:

𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗨𝗘𝗗 𝗜𝗡 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗧 𝗧𝗪𝗢:

[kuijoon]

Predictions for 2.4

I know this might seem a bit early, considering that 2.2 hasn’t even released yet, but hear me out:

the story is going to start of happy with everyone living their lives and rebuilding Belobog

Screwllum visits Belobog to investigate the event of mechanical life forms gaining sentience (as he already showed interest in this within a letter he sent to Svarog)

The crew will be asked to accompany screwllum, visit because of another festival or maybe even because sampo is asking the crew to (or being cryptic and haunting the trailblazers dreams again)

Clara is going to talk to him and overall be a key player for the story since she has access to the source code that controls all robots (after Topaz gave it to her during 1.4)

The engine of creation is repaired for the most part and gains sentience like with a lot of the other robots on Belobog

It goes haywire because of the virus that reprograms inorganic life to kill organic ones (like in the first war)

we find out that the engine of creation creation cannot be controlled by the code since it was built without the help of the ipc so the people of Belobog have to fight together against it (most likely with Sampo taking center stage with his mask)

Sampo and Screwllum will be the 5* for this version

Clara will be the one to tell everyone that they shouldn’t kill the robot and that they can just get the virus or something and everyone can be friends again idk Clara just wants everyone to live together peacefully (kind of like a parallel to the svarog fight where Natasha was about to destroy svarog)

Oh and we will either get a dramatic reveal with Sampo telling people about his true identity or he will just refuse to elaborate or even hide his identity

Myriad celestial trailer will be about the second emperors war (or maybe about the masked fools) (probably not but I am starving for more content of them)

4* either from Belobog, I.P.C. or genius society

[gepgep2]

"So: what is the Israeli long-term strategy, really?

Insofar as there’s an answer, it seems to be that they simply don’t have one; the Israeli government no more has a long-term strategy for dealing with their future in the region than Exxon Mobil has a long-term strategy for dealing with climate change. They seem to just figure that, if US power does collapse or give up on them, something will turn up. No doubt too they have people in thinktanks brainstorming that, too, coming with reports and scenarios, but all this is basically an afterthought. The driving force behind the colonization of ’67 Palestine is not any sort of grand strategy; it’s a kind of terrible confluence of short-term political and economic advantage.

First, the settlements. They were originally the project of a relatively isolated, if well funded, collection of religious zealots. Now everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours in endless resources. Why? The answer seems to be that since at least the ‘90s, rightwing politicians in Israel have figured out that the settlements are a kind of political magic. The more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the Right. The reason is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly has two options: to live with one’s parents until well into your 30s, or find a place in an illegal settlement, where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in Haifa or Tel Aviv—and that’s not to mention the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological, reasons. (This is especially true around Jerusalem.) But consider who these people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students, well-educated young parents, have been the traditional constituency of the Left. Put these same people in a settlement, and they will, inexorably, even without realizing it, begin to think like fascists. Settlements are, in their own way, giant engines for the production of right-wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in hostile territory, given training in automatic weapons and warned to be constantly on one’s guard against a local population seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old Left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious, fascist, or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake of the vote. For politicians, who can barely think past the next election, the lure is inescapable.

...I only came to fully understand the agony of the Palestinian situation when I came to understand that the entire point of life, in traditional Palestinian society, is put oneself in a position where you can be generous to strangers. Hospitality is everything.

...Wherever we went, Palestinians would tell us about all the different sorts of people they had historically welcomed to the Holy Land: Armenians, Greeks, Persians, Russians, Africans, Jews… They saw the Zionists as originally their house- guests. Yet they were the worst house-guests one could possibly imagine. Every act of hospitality, of welcome, is turned into license for appropriation, and the world’s most skillful propagandists leapt into action to try to convince the world that their hosts were depraved inhuman monsters who had no right to their own homes. In such a situation, what can you possibly do? Stop being generous? But then one is absolutely, existentially defeated. This is what people really meant when they talked about a life of calculated degradation. People were being systematically deprived of the physical, the economical, and the political means to be magnanimous. And to be deprived of the means to make that kind of magnificent gesture is a kind of living death."

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hostile-intelligence-reflections-from-a-visit-to-the-west-bank/

[wndaswife]

hm what’s you’re opinion (if you have one) on what you said happened at the end of your *spoiler* post? hopefully you know what i’m referring to lol like the thing

SPOILERS for the assessment under the read more (below i will talk about freud's child parent theories and gender theory related to that between mother and daughter identification)

to be clear about the specific event im talking about it's not so much a spoiler like it doesn't tell you major plot points but talking about over arching themes may take the fun out of understanding the movie yourself

a major part of the movie is the couple grappling with what is real and what is fake (i guess), since the whole thing is how people made a new technological world to make up for an earth destroyed by climate change

but also there is one thing about the dynamic between the assessor and her 'parents' that was kind of random and i feel didn't really fit with the rest of the movie, which is the whole fruedian parent child relationship and maybe it's just my own brain because im really interested in him and his theories and also gender theory, but the whole time they were together i thought a lot about the daughter's relationship with her mother and father

to me i saw the assessor's relationship to her father as the typical freudian one, but with the mother i see a mother-daughter identification i see the daughter rejecting her identity as a female and thereby detests the mother (idk if this is freudian but i think it's possible in a society where gender roles and expectations can be viewed. but the issue with the whole parent role for me was that how can these gender roles be observed and acted upon if they live completely isolated from others in a day to day basis??? gender roles such as the child adopting freudian preference shouldn't have been possible, so the assessor i suppose had to implement her own gender biases which just seems unnecessary, but this movie isn't about that specifically so i suppose it's fine but still kinda meh for the whole parent child dynamic to be so freudian.. his theories r the most popular regarding that i guess)

and the mother seeing herself or an innocent version of ambition or vulnerability and purity in the child, and in mia's case this did not result in mutual hatred but empathy and also identification, since i think mia saw something natural and real about the way the assessor would behave like a child, going against typical norms, but also in the assessor herself as an adult and as a person

but also mia contrasts the whole of society and the fake world because she's really into things that are natural and real; she wants a real child and her whole profession is dedicated to botany and growing real, natural earth. i think she felt attraction to the assessor's vulnerability and 'realness,' and i suppose this is emphasized even more at the end-ish when she discusses this more (i won't say in what setting this happens because it's a big turning point for the movie)

so in kissing the assessor i think it was a very dangerous pull to something real and natural, away from her life from her husband (and it's no coincidence that his profession is that he's some kind of AI engineer or something that can make very realistic fake models of things). so she pulled away and felt guilty, but her kissing the assessor was symbolic of mia's natural pull to real things that go against a fabricated world, but also the point that the closer she becomes to this fake child and sees the difficulty of the things during the assessment, the further she pulls from fabricated reality

for fun i even see some wlw themes in this but so subtle and underlying

[theresattrpgforthat]

Is there a self-shipping/yumeshipping TTRPG?

THEME: Self-Shipping/YumeShipping

Hello friend, so what I understand you are asking for that allow you to pair your character romantically with someone, a kind of [your name] sort of affair. I have yet to find a game that is specifically about this, but there are some work-arounds!

From what I understand about the community much of the hobby is very personal, so I stuck with Solo RPGs for this one. Not all of these games are romantic in nature, but they do all revolve around your character’s relationship with one other person.

I Must Find Bigfoot and Bang Him, by Rev Casey.

Motif-powered journaling game about your quest to find Bigfoot and woo him.

Track Bigfoot, facing periodic obstacles. Face Bigfoot. Try to earn his trust. Woo him with overtures and gifts.

How will your story end? Will you face failure and heartbreak? Or will you successfully win over your dream cryptid?

With an open ended narrative and simple Motif answer engine, I Must Find Bigfoot And Bang Him is a replayable experience with a new story each time. 

This is a game where wooing the one you love feels tangentially related to hunting, primarily because Bigfoot is hard to find. Whenever you have a question about the world around you and the things that might stand in your way, you roll 2d6. One result will tell you either yes or no, while the other result will tell you whether there is an “and” or a “but”. Wooing Bigfoot seems to primarily consist of offering him gifts, and rolling to see whether your encounter ends in Rejection or Romance.

This might be a good game for you if you are interested in shipping yourself with monstrous characters or characters that are kind of loners. I think it would probably be able to tweak the setting to match the kind of person you’re trying to find and woo; perhaps your character is trying to organize a meet-cute with a member of nobility, or hunt down a superhero in a big city.

I Love You But We Must Fight, by Mr. Zech.

I Love You But We Must Fight is a solo role-playing game where you play a single Hero tasked with defeating the Great Villain threatening the world. You’ve fought hard, sacrificed much, and now you are preparing for the final showdown. There’s only one hiccup: you love the Villain, and you wish to defeat them without destroying them. This game aims to tell stories like Star Wars and Naruto.

ILYBWMF has rules for playing with a group if that is something that you’d rather do, but the basic story is about a hero fighting a villain that they love. There are a list of questions for both the Hero and Villain that help define who they are and what their relationship is. If you have a specific villain in mind, you can probably just choose the options that make the mos sense for you.

This is also a great chance to take characters you love and place them in a different universe; perhaps you want to see what it would be like if you were facing off against Zuko in Star Wars, or Team Rocket in Legend of Zelda. The course of gameplay revolves around drawing playing cards from a deck to answer prompts about how you plan to face them, your history with them, and the reason they turned to evil.

Elegy, by Miracle M.

Become a vampire.

Elegy is a solo role-playing game about surviving the big city nights as a vampire. Feed to keep your fury at bay, play your role in maintaining the secrecy of the vampire society, create deep bonds with other characters and fulfill promises to make your un-life meaningful to you.

Inspired by Vampire the Masquerade and Ironsworn, this is probably the heftiest game on the list, with the fullest potential for a long-term kind of game. You are a vampire; a powerful monster living on the edges of humanity, trying to keep your existence a secret and fighting anything deadly that stands in your way.

This is a great chance for a power fantasy, but it’s also designed to reflect on the loneliness of your situation. You can create connections in this game, but your relationships with mortals will often have a layer of insincerity, due to the fact that you cannot tell them who you really are. However, that doesn’t stop you completely from creating bonds with specific characters, although you’ll have to work very hard to make that connection stick. You can put yourself in the centre of a cast from another piece of media, drawing up some characters as mortals, some as enemies, some as fellow vampires, and perhaps even as potential lovers. You become the main character; everyone else is a part of your story.

Last Love, by kitsunemisoup.

Last Love is a solo journaling TTRPG where you stalk someone because you just love them that much! Their friends keep disappearing, so they're a little upset, but you're sure you can help.

If you want to embrace a situation where your character is not the hero, you might want to try Last Love. Your focus is more on what the stalker is like, and what they will do in order to get closer to their love. To play, you will need two coins, a tarot deck, and a journal. You can use the tarot cards to generate events and obstacles, while the coins are flipped when you have to determine whether or not the stalker is successful.

This is a very freeform game, giving you loose pieces of inspiration but leaving the flow of the story (and the number of times you flip coins) completely up to you. If you have a character in mind that your character would personally be stalking, you can fill in a lot of information as to their love’s personality, hobbies, and likes. The game that this is a hack of (Princess with a Cursed Sword) is meant to be a tragedy, so the chances of success are likely pretty low.

Letters to Sandra, by Gem Room Games.

Letters to Sandra is a single player letter-writing game about communication, trust, and betrayal.

Sandra Blank has gone off to college. You are one of 6 characters who is close with Sandra. She is corresponding with all 6 people throughout her first semester of college. Read excerpts of Sandra's letters to you, roll on news tables to reveal what you are choosing to share with her (and what you are choosing not to say), and decide for yourself whether or not to respect the privacy of letters not meant for your eyes.

This game is one that you might have to change or re-write quite a bit in order to replace Sandra Blank with a character of your choice, especially since you’ll have to edit pieces of information that come with the book. However, if you’re using a piece of established media, there are probably plenty of in-universe events that the character your writing to might have a reasonable chance of only learning about through hearsay. Your letter-writing experience would probably be motivated through a desire to have the person you’re writing to either see you in a positive light, or to provide a source of comfort if they are going through a troubling time.

If the idea of diving into complex emotions with a character you know well is something you’re interested in, perhaps Letters to Sandra is worth a look.

Alone With Yuri, by Joyce Dailyparadise.

You find yourself trapped in a desolate city with Yuri, a person whom you are not familiar with. With no one else around, the two of you must stick together in order to survive. As you spend more time with Yuri, you gradually learn more about this enigmatic individual.

Alone with Yuri is a hacked version of "Alone Among The Stars" by Takuma Okada. In this solo journaling game, you will delve into the nature of your companion, Yuri, rather than exploring a ruined city. Who is Yuri? Why does Yuri stay with you? Is Yuri your friend or enemy?

This is a game that allows you to role-play encounters with Yuri - or the character of your choice - in a situation where you are kind of strangers to each-other. You use a d6 to determine what Yuri shows interest in, and a deck of cards to generate encounters as the two of you travel through an abandoned city together.

This is a writing exercise for folks who love a good AU: the character you choose to play this with is not in their home setting: they’re in an abandoned city, and you are their companion. This might also allow you to discover new pieces of their personality that come about because of this new setting or experience.

You finish the game when you feel like you’ve come to a better understanding of who Yuri is. There is definitely a lot of potential to encounter things that dramatically change the tone of the game, but I think the prompts are broad enough to allow a lot of your own interpretation, and you can always ignore encounters that you don’t want to include.

Find Her, by Ty Barbary.

You don’t know where they took her, but you know you must find her. No matter who, or what, tries to stop you. You can’t lose her. Not again.

This is a one-page solo journaling game that chronicles your desperate pursuit of she who was taken. The setting, the circumstances, the challenges, and what she means to you* are yours to choose. You’ll need two coins and a Tarot deck to play, as well as a notebook or document to journal in.

If you are a fan of the movie Taken, you might be interested in this game. Another Princess With A Cursed Sword hack, this game puts a bit more focus on the person you are trying to save, and also re-frames your relationship as something more intimate. This is a great game for folks who like high-stakes, who want to wrestle with the possibility of failure, and who like stories about bonds formed in hardship.

[disco-elysium-via-polls]

🎵 Whirling-in-Rags, 12 PM

Alright, this is our last chance at this.

4. [Composure - Legendary 14] What is it about the way he carries himself?

+1 He's so different.

COMPOSURE [Legendary: Success] - Could he be... a member of the *homo-sexual underground*?

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT [Medium: Success] - Yes, this man is definitely one of the homos, I've seen them homos with my own eyes.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - This *sexual* thing seems interesting... Ask around, become involved.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Just pointing it out, we're not talking about some kind of a cult with *members* here, you made it up.

"Are you... are you part of the *homo-sexual underground*?"

I'm not bringing it up -- let it go.

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "The *homo-sexual underground*?" The smoker sits up immediately, his eyes wide with amused surprise; a honeyed smile lingers on his lips.

"Why yes I am, officer. Why, do you want to *investigate*?"

"Yes, I want to hear more about this *homo-sexual underground* you're part of."

"No, I just wanted to know whether you were one of them."

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Oh, it's a *pleasure* group... a sub-rosa pleasure group congregating in cellars under the cover of night... Saturday night, sometimes even *Friday* night!"

"What about Thursday night?"

"But why do you convene, what do you *do*?"

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Or Thursday night! Sometimes the congregating doesn't even end, it carries on into our daily life..." He lowers his voice conspiratorially and looks around.

"But why do you convene, what do you *do*?"

"Let's just not talk about this any more."

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Oh we're ambitious, we want to destroy the last vestiges of meaning, the last things people in Revachol have to hold on to, the true symbols of security -- the meaning of man and woman, mother and father, their marriage."

"*Everything* will be constantly shifting and moving under our rule, the future will belong to a circus of identities, just spinning around, surreal and unreal... You won't even know who you are anymore."

"But I like knowing who I am."

"Does it have anything to do with disco?"

"Other questions, I had other questions, really!" (Try to back off.)

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Yes, we listen to a lot of disco. Some say we *engineered* disco to spread our vision of a vertiginous, ever-changing society, where all there is a razzle-dazzle of gold!"

"We are going to *change* the family unit with all this razzamatazz and finger-dancing," he wiggles his hands, "and with mysteries, of course, the mysteries are also of sexual nature, very esoteric."

"I do like disco, maybe I should get into it?"

"No, this is not me."

"That much fun should be illegal."

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "You can't just get into it, you have to be born into it -- one is either already *in* the homo-sexual movement or forever excluded from it."

"What if I can't remember whether I'm in or not? What if I can't remember anything about my life -- aside from the fact that I like disco?"

"Okay, then I'm definitely not in."

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Beautiful!" The smoker crawls up to you like an animal preparing to jump. "Beautiful, that's exactly what we're looking for! Who knows, maybe you *were* homo-sexual in the past, maybe all of that has been *repressed*..." He circles his hands around you.

"I have to say that you do look like someone who might be part of *the underground*. You have that very distinctive 'I-can't-understand-what's-going-on-here' look."

"Okay..." (Blink.) "Okay, I have to think about it."

"This is gonna be, like, a twenty hour mind-project for me. Twenty hours at least."

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Do think about it, officer." He starts laughing and leans back against the counter.

"This is gonna be, like, a twenty hour mind-project for me. Twenty hours at least."

Thought gained: Homo-Sexual Underground

+5 XP

SMOKER ON THE BALCONY - "Absolutely *wonderful*."

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - A man like you can figure out his sexuality in a working day. It won't be twenty hours unless you want to enter the heightened realms of the *fantasme érotique* afterwards. Then it may be twenty hours *or more*! But that would be on your own time.

HOMO-SEXUAL UNDERGROUND

Temporary research bonus: None Research time: 8h

You see mysterious strangers in the night. Leaning against unlit doorways, engaged in hushed conversation. A shadowy cabal exchanging looks, whispering in dark alleys and unmarked locales. A radical cell conspiring against the state -- and perhaps even against man and woman. Was that a secret handshake? What’s going on? Who are these secretive people? How will they accomplish their sinister and world-altering goals? And most importantly -- are you *one* of them? You could be. Maybe you forgot...

🎵 Ignus Nilsen Waltz

Thankfully, the communists haven't left yet, so we don't have to wait until tomorrow night to try this again.

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "The gendarme returns." The young man turns to you. "What do you need?"

7. [Composure - Impossible 18] Convince them you belong in the reading group.

+4 Somewhat bookish toad.

COMPOSURE [Impossible: Success] - Take a deep breath. You've done some reading these past few days. But you also know there's more to life than what you find in books...

Now, chin up. You've got this.

"This is just the group I've been looking for. When do we start?"

(Crack your knuckles.) "Alright, let's do this interview."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Oh, you want to start *now*?" He looks to his companion, then back at you. "Sure, we can manage that..."

COMPOSURE - You've caught him off-balance. The momentum is already in your favour.

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Go ahead and take a seat. Since we haven't had time to prepare an exhaustive questionnaire, I think we can keep this interview more freeform."

"Why don't you tell us a bit about the books you're interested in, and we'll just see where the conversation goes."

"I'm more into practical books. Books that help me understand the real world."

"Look guys, I've gotta be honest. I may not have 'read' many 'books', but that doesn't mean I don't have *stories*."

Our dialogue options here are based on which books we've read. Right now that's... the alphabet and cockatoos. Our *real experiences* are probably a better bet.

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Okay, we'll bite." The young man and his companion look at one another, then turn back to you. "What sort of stories are we talking about?"

ESPRIT DE CORPS [Easy: Success] - A real-life procedural, complete with gory details...

DRAMA [Medium: Success] - How about a tale of adventure, intrigue, and derring-do?

"Let's just say the human body starts to do some weird things when it's been in a tree for seven days..."

"I'll tell you how I infiltrated the Wild Pines for my investigation..."

"You ever heard of a thing called 'sudden onset acute amnesia'?"

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "You've got our attention. Let's see where this goes..."

KIM KITSURAGI - "Yes, I'm rather curious myself."

COMPOSURE - You've got them. They're starting to loosen up. You're relaxed and in control. You deftly weave every piece of the story together...

KIM KITSURAGI - ... even the lieutenant seems engrossed, despite your revealing details of an RCM investigation...

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "... Okay, but when you say he *spoke* to you, you mean metaphorically, right?"

"Right, of course. I'm really talking about my top-notch forensics skills."

"No, I mean literally."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Ah, so there *is* a supra-natural angle to this case..."

COMPOSURE - Another quarter of an hour disappears. The conversation bounces back and forth. Whatever their pretensions, it's clear these two have been craving something *real*.

Now, you can sense things starting to slow down. Time to wrap this tale up...

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "... but I'm still not sure how *love* did him in..."

ECHO MAKER - "There has to be some other element to it. We don't have the full story yet..."

"Perhaps. But that thread of the story is still unresolved..."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "I suppose we'll have to leave it there. But listen, gendarme: We could use someone with your *breadth of expertise*. With just a little more theoretical background, I think you'll be able to make some real contributions."

ECHO MAKER - "Yes, I would say he's got serious potential at least."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "And with that, welcome to the most ideologically advanced materialist reading group in Martinaise!"

"Here's your first assignment. It's an overview of infra-materialist theory. A little basic, as you'll see, but one has to start somewhere."

Item gained: Book "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism"

"I'll add it to my very extensive reading list."

(Say nothing, just take the book.)

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "You're going to fit right in, I think. Come back when you're done. We'll be here pretty much every night after 22.00."

"Do be sure to take your time with the reading. We'll be eager to hear your thoughts."

We could just read it now, though. It's after 2:00pm, so time won't pass, but it will mean we won't have to worry about coming *back* to this tomorrow night.

BOOK: "A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM"

A concise introduction to infra-materialist theory, intended for a general audience. You can tell this particular copy has spent a lot of time in someone's back pocket.

>INTERACT

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - The cover of this pocket-sized volume features a swirl of orange, yellow, and green. The title, "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism," is set in an authoritative yet approachable serif font.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - What an interesting colour palette. It's vibrant, yet somehow leaves you ever so slightly nauseated.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - No, no. These are *terrible* colours. They're like... like...

Apricots.

-1 Morale

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - On the inside jacket flap, you find a brief summary: "What is infra-materialism? A highly theoretical branch of Mazovian communism? A collection of mystical ramblings by a discredited revolutionary? Or possibly both?"

"This Brief Look(TM) introduces readers to one of this century's most fascinating and misunderstood theories in a concise, jargon-free manner."

So far, so good.

This feels like kid stuff. Is there no Slightly Longer Glance(TM) series?

Let's return to it later. [Leave.]

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - The back of the book contains four or five pages of primary and secondary sources, but you'd need access to a university library to find most of them.

RHETORIC - In other words, this guide is the only source you're likely to find.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - You turn to the table of contents. The guide itself is divided into several sections with seemingly esoteric titles like 'Effects of Plasm on Root Vegetables' and 'Mental Projection and Transference'. There's also a brief introduction about the life of Ignus Nilsen.

Read the introduction on Ignus Nilsen.

Start reading the first chapter.

[Put the book away.]

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Known to his numerous admirers as the 'Evangelist of the Revolution' and to his even-more-numerous enemies as the 'Apocalyptic Shrike', Ignus Nilsen remains one of the most controversial and fascinating figures to emerge in the years of the Antecentennial Revolution, second only to Kras Mazov himself.

During his unparalleled life, he helped guide a revolution in one country and found a new state in another. Along the way, he committed some of the most notorious war crimes in an era famed for its atrocities.

HALF LIGHT [Medium: Success] - He is your brother, a fellow *doom prophet*.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - And yet, his most *fascinating* contribution to history may be the most overlooked: His theory of ideological plasm, from which his followers and successors developed the school of communism known as *infra-materialism*.

2. Start reading the first chapter.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - If you're like most people, you probably believe that your thoughts reside in your brain, right?

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - That's not right at all. Thoughts don't exist in the brain, they float through the *air*! Your brain is but a fish swimming through them...

Uh, right?

I always thought I *swam* through them.

Honestly, I have no idea where some of these thoughts come from.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - *Very* interesting. And not so far removed from Ignus Nilsen's own theories...

As Mazov's devoted comrade and leading theoretician, Nilsen was responsible for developing much of the intellectual foundation of communism. But his interests and speculations were famously wide-ranging.

During his final years in exile, he produced, among other things, an early guide to homebrewing, instructions for raising revolutionary children, plans for a universal pictographic language, and a detailed materialist critique of Dolores Dei's chess strategy.

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - A true man of ideas, equal to any of the great Dolorian polymaths.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - But one subject he returned to time and time again was the fundamental relationship between thoughts and matter...

"We may yet discover," he wrote in his notebooks, "that under certain, exceptional circumstances, the proletariat's embrace of historical materialism may be *so fervent* that their beliefs take form in the world of matter as a kind of revolutionary 'plasm'."

Hold on, can you put that in slightly *more* basic terms?

Whoa.

Huh. Okay...

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Certainly. In essence, Nilsen is arguing that thoughts don’t just reside *inside* the brain, they radiate outward *from* it. According to this idea, the brain is an ideological transponder, constantly emitting waves of highly politicised energy, which Nilsen called 'plasm'.

Whoa.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Whoa is right! What's more, Nilsen speculated that this plasm, when it becomes powerful enough, might begin to *influence* the material reality surrounding it. Hence the name: *infra-materialism*.

Unfortunately, Nilsen passed away before he was able to develop these initial ideas into a full-fledged theory. *That* work was left to subsequent generations of communist theorists...

Building on Nilsen's basic insight, these theorists reached a startling conclusion: that a sufficiently revolutionary state might begin to exhibit certain *extra-physical* effects based on the amount of plasm generated by its citizens.

Wait, so this isn't even *Nilsen's* theory -- it's his followers'?

This... doesn't make any sense.

I'm completely lost.

So these people are saying that if enough people just *believe* in communism, it will... come true?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Correct. Though certain particulars of the theory are commonly attributed to Nilsen himself, the *evidentiary* basis of those attributions has always been a point of contention between infra-materialists and their critics.

3. So these people are saying that if enough people just *believe* in communism, it will... come true?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - The actual theory is highly technical, but for the purposes of this Brief Look(TM), that's a fine *working definition* of the concept.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - That's because this is absolute idiocy. Not even worth engaging with.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - No-no-no. There's *something* here, you can feel it!

Alright, let's hear about this extra-physical stuff!

I'll just give it a few more pages...

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Infra-materialists divide the extra-physical effects of the revolutionary state by the level of plasm required to achieve them.

At the lowest, or *first level*, revolutionary plasm is believed to stimulate or invigorate matter without altering its essential properties.

This sounds like that business with the turnips...

How exactly does the plasm 'stimulate' matter?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - To take one example: During the Revolutionary period, many communard farmers in Graad reported extraordinary yields of certain root vegetables, most notably turnips.

The difference in these yields was simply too great to be accounted for by mere climate or soil conditions. The only reasonable explanation, infra-materialists argue, is the high level of revolutionary plasm emanating from the commune itself.

Even today, in parts of the SRV there are collective farms whose root vegetable yields exceed those thought possible by capitalist agronomists.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - Who's to say the farmers aren't just cooking the books? Sounds like obvious SRV propaganda.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - It's also been postulated that plasm may account for the remarkably full and manly facial hair observed on many communist males.

Stroke your beard proudly.

Stroke it, but modestly.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Of course, infra-materialists argue that revolutionary plasm may stimulate human physiology in other ways as well.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Oh yeah, we're talking about white-hot *communist sex*, baby.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - That's correct! Reports from the Revolutionary period claim that the most radically devoted communards were able to engage in vigorous intercourse for up to *eight hours* at a time.

ENDURANCE [Impossible: Failure] - Eight hours? There's no way. Your equipment would be mashed to jelly.

HAND/EYE COORDINATION [Medium: Success] - No wonder the communards couldn't shoot straight -- they were too shagged out!

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - Hyper-productive vegetables and ultra-horny communards are fine, but this theory hasn't quite gotten strange enough for you.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - And on that note, you feel like you've gotten the general idea of Infra-Materialism. Enough to carry on a basic conversation, at least. But if you'd like to go even deeper into some of the more speculative aspects of the theory, you could always read further...

CONCEPTUALIZATION - Of course you want to go deeper. What else are you here for?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - The book fits quite snugly into your palm. It would also fit comfortably into a jacket pocket.

3. Keep reading.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - You flip forward a few pages until you come upon a chapter titled 'Mental Projection and Transference'...

When a community has achieved a sufficiently high degree of revolutionary fervour, infra-materialists believe that second-level effects may be observed.

At this second level, certain hyper-revolutionary individuals may even develop the ability to extend their thoughts into material space and vice versa.

Wait, does that mean communists can *read minds*?

"Hey, Kim. You'd say that we share a pretty special connection, right?"

So why do these effects only work for hyper-revolutionary communists? (Continue.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - According to infra-materialist theory, yes! Under suitably revolutionary conditions, that is...

ESPRIT DE CORPS [Easy: Success] - Of course, one doesn't need to be a communist to be attuned to the thoughts of your brothers and sisters.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - It's become something of a folk legend that during their final meeting, Nilsen and Mazov didn't speak a single word, preferring to sit in silence with their chamomile tea, reading one another's thoughts.

That's... strangely beautiful.

That's... probably not what happened.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - One of the minor tragedies of the late Revolutionary period is that few reliable accounts survive.

Much of what we know of the communards' activities during this period come from memoirs and second-hand accounts, some only written down decades after the fact and of dubious authenticity.

2. "Hey, Kim. You'd say that we share a pretty special connection, right?"

KIM KITSURAGI - "I suppose we do work quite well together."

"You and me, we're on the same wavelength. It's why we're always finishing each other's..."

KIM KITSURAGI - Your words hang in the air as the lieutenant scribbles something in his notebook. At some point he realizes you're waiting for him and looks up with a tightly knit brow.

"...sentences."

KIM KITSURAGI - The lieutenant looks at you evenly for a moment, then returns to his notebook without a word.

"Kim, you left me hanging there."

Forget it.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Did I? My bad, detective. Won't happen again." He doesn't look up from his notebook.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - As we were saying, it's generally believed that these effects are only exhibited by certain *hyper-revolutionary* individuals, generally less than .01% of the revolutionary population...

3. So why do these effects only work for hyper-revolutionary communists? (Continue.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Because plasm has never been directly observed, the exact mechanism behind these effects remains entirely speculative.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - In other words, there's no evidence that any of this mind-reading stuff is real.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - Why are you getting hung up on mechanisms... Open your mind's aperture just a little wider! You're so close to true understanding!

Wait, if there's no evidence plasm exists, how can the theory be true?

Let it go.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Most infra-materialists would argue that the inability of skeptics to detect plasm is simply evidence of their own insufficient revolutionary enthusiasm.

LOGIC - There you have it. A perfectly unfalsifiable loop. The theory is impossible to disprove on its own grounds...

Meaning it's hardly a theory at all.

RHETORIC - This should be more than enough for a stimulating discussion. That said, if you're still yearning for *more*....

INLAND EMPIRE - You must! Everyone knows books save their best parts for the end...

4. Finish the book.

+1 Communism

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - You breeze through the next several sections until you arrive at the final chapter, titled 'A Communism Above Reality'...

When a society's revolutionary fervour reaches the third and highest level, infra-materialist theoreticians have postulated that the laws of physics cease to be laws.

AUTHORITY [Easy: Success] - SAY IT. You know you want to.

That's because *I'm* the law. The law-jaw.

"Cease to be laws..." What do they become then?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Under suitably revolutionary conditions, you might be! Though infra-materialists would argue that it's more like the community is *collectively* the law.

AUTHORITY - At last, a book gives you the respect and validation you're entitled to.

+1 Morale

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Of course, it's impossible to say what exactly happens under these conditions. No known society has ever achieved the levels of revolutionary enthusiasm the theory seems to require.

Some infra-materialists have even argued that it might require more plasm than *humanity alone* may be capable of producing.

Wait, are there non-human sources of plasm?

Has anyone ever gotten close to reaching the third level?

What would a third-level society even look like? (Conclude.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - In the SRV, there have been attempts to organise certain species of aquatic mammals, as well as a few of the higher corvids...

But as of this writing only human beings have demonstrated the intellectual capacity for revolutionary communism.

2. Has anyone ever gotten close to reaching the third level?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - There are numerous stories from Samara involving bandits or fascist mercenaries being levitated by farmers from the most ideologically advanced communes. Of course, few of these incidents have ever been rigorously investigated or substantiated...

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - The form of these stories also recalls several well-known Samaran folktales, in particular the one commonly known as 'Clever Oleg and the Flying Magistrate'.

Level up!

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Among known attempts to channel third-level capabilities, the most well-documented is the curious case of Coalition Warship Debutante.

I've got to know what that's about.

I've heard enough.

+1 Communism

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - It concerns an interesting series of events that took place during the invasion of Revachol. As Coalition forces made landfall, a cadre of Nilsen's most fervent acolytes *attempted to compress a Coalition aerostatic* with their collective will...

According to communard lore, these acolytes positioned themselves at the top of a redoubt just over the Bay of Revachol. From that vantage, they proceeded to visualise *pinching* Coalition Warship Debutante between their fingers, a gesture believed to assist in the extra-physical materialisation of their thoughts.

Why didn't they just get some high-powered merc gear? (Tap your armour.)

Did it work?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - The communards were notoriously under-equipped against the much better-funded Coalition. In any event, it's doubtful even ceramic armour would have altered the outcome.

The acolytes (along with the redoubt) were vapourised in an artillery strike before the process could be completed...

HALF LIGHT [Medium: Success] - Picture the lot of them, all standing with their fingers in the air one minute, the next reduced to a bloody mist!

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - It's been said, though, that in the weeks following the battle, the captain of the Debutante noted an increase in incidents of crewmen striking their heads on unexpectedly low bulkheads.

Of course, colourful anecdotes only scratch the surface of what infra-materialists believe may be possible in a truly *third-level* society...

3. What would a third-level society even look like? (Conclude.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Some have theorised that such a society would be fundamentally unrecognisable, lacking many of the institutions we typically take for granted in advanced societies, including organised governments, financial institutions, and law enforcement.

HALF LIGHT [Medium: Failure] - D-d-did that book just say there's no place for you in this future?

-1 Morale

AUTHORITY [Medium: Success] - This sounds like a seditious fantasy! How can they allow books like this in print?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Others have argued that people living under third-level conditions will be immune to such infirmities as hunger, disease, and mental illness...

In some of his later writings, Nilsen himself speculated about the potential for an *extra-physical architecture* that disregards the laws of 'bourgeois physics' and instead relies on the revolutionary faith of the people for structural integrity.

Meaning the buildings stay up because people *believe* they'll stay up?

That... seems like a bad theory to design buildings based on.

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - Others have argued that people living under third-level conditions w - Precisely. Nilsen observed that the financial system operates on the same principle of faith, so why not an architectural system?

On the following page you come across a few black-and-white reproductions from Nilsen's own notebooks. One sketch depicts a government ministry shaped like a great inverted pyramid, a hectare in width at the top, balanced atop foundations the size of common apartments...

Another depicts a leaning tower wrapped in a dramatic helix. The caption beneath it reads: 'The Tower of History'.

INTERFACING [Medium: Success] - Something about that tower looks awfully familiar. Could it be *that's* what the students were trying to recreate with the matchboxes?

Wait, but what if the people stop believing and the buildings collapse?

This might be too much, even for me.

Plausible or not, there's something beautiful about this idea. Is there any more?

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - In the corner of one of the reproduced notebook pages, you can make out the following words written in Nilsen's distinctive slashing script...

"A state that has lost the faith of its people has forfeited the right to exist."

2. Plausible or not, there's something beautiful about this idea. Is there any more?

+1 Communism

A BRIEF LOOK AT INFRA-MATERIALISM - There is no more. You've reached the outer theoretical limits of communism, and in less than 200 pages.

If you'd like to read further, may we recommend 'A Brief Look at Occidental Architecture'?

5. [Put the book away.]

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "You're back." The young man turns to you.

7. "I'm ready... let's talk about infra-materialism."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Yes, let's get right to it."

ECHO MAKER - His companion leans forward, ready to jump in...

RHETORIC - They're impressed that you dove right in to the most advanced parts of the theory. Half an hour evaporates and the conversation is still wending its way toward new and unexpected places...

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - A cool breeze coming off the bay wraps itself around the Capeside Apartments. In a nearly forgotten part of that glorified construction site, surrounded by rusted pieces of scaffolding and walls of faded tarpaulin, a detective of the RCM debates the intricacies of an abstruse theory with a pair of university students...

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "... but my question is where does the RCM *recruit* all these hyper-revolutionaries to join this 'Remote Viewers Division'?"

"It's less that you're 'recruited' into the RVD and more like you're *called*."

"And my *point* is that maybe these *hyper-revolutionary* individuals are more common than infra-materialism generally assumes..."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Fascinating..."

KIM KITSURAGI - "Yes, only the detective here would draw a connection between a made-up division of para-psychics and the addled ramblings of a defunct communist mage..."

-1 Reputation

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - The young man ignores the lieutenant. "But I suppose it makes sense that some common strain of infra-materialist thought would persist in the RCM, even to this day, given its origins."

SHIVERS - Now the breeze has subsided. All is still except for the last bits of steam rising from the coffee pot.

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Well, on that note, I think we can call it an evening."

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] - No, wait! Can this really be the end? You feel like you've just gotten to the real stuff.

ECHO MAKER - "Yes. One of our better discussions lately, on the whole."

"Hang on, is that *it*?"

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "What do you mean, 'is that it'? You've done the reading, we talked about it, what more do you expect from a reading group?"

"What if I have more questions, you know, about communism?"

"Nothing, I just thought there would be more…"

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Well, you could always *ask*, I guess." The two young men look at each other a moment.

ECHO MAKER - "He probably won't get a better chance, honestly."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "But it's getting late, so maybe pick the *most important* question?"

"Kim, what should I ask?"

"I need a minute to think about it."

[Rhetoric - Heroic 15] Ask the most important question about communism.

"I changed my mind. I don't have any questions."

KIM KITSURAGI - "Detective, how should *I* know what questions *you* have about communism?"

2. "I need a minute to think about it."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Come on. We have things to do in the morning."

3. [Rhetoric - Heroic 15] Ask the most important question about communism.

+2 Did all the reading. -1 Haunted by lost love.

RHETORIC [Heroic: Failure] - Alright, here we go. We're devoting all your available brain cells to coming up with a question about communism. Scratch that, to coming up with *the* question about communism, the alpha and omega of communism questions, and that question is:

(Whisper.) "Are women bourgeois?"

Oh god, that's bad. Surely I can think of something better.

RHETORIC - Maybe in another life, but not this one. Face it, this is *the* question that's been simmering inside you all along.

INLAND EMPIRE [Easy: Success] - No-no-no! This was supposed to take your mind *off* the other thing!

(Whisper.) "Are women bourgeois?"

Hang on, I thought I was really getting into the theory back there!

Maybe I should keep this one to myself.

RHETORIC - Sure, you spent some time getting lost in your theoretical labyrinths, but *this* has been the beast at the centre this whole time...

2. Maybe I should keep this one to myself.

RHETORIC - It's too late. You've already opened your mouth to speak...

(Whisper.) "Are women bourgeois?"

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - The young man gives you a slightly confused look, as though he's sure you asked something else and he simply misheard.

VOLITION [Easy: Success] - No, he heard you crystal clear.

PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Medium: Success] - Somehow it sounded even *worse* out loud.

ECHO MAKER - "He wants to know if women are bourgeois, Steban..."

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST - "Yes, I heard him. Give me a moment." He takes a deep breath, then turns to you...

"What makes you ask *that* question, above any other?"

[trainalt22]

Tidbits and bobs#1

Essentially my version of a lore dump

- All sentient machines, regardless of where they are built or their origin, believe in a singular deity named Lady. She is the station pilot for the Grand Terminus, the last stop for all sentient machines. Lady is seen as equal parts God and grim reaper and can appear in a multitude of forms, from locomotive to tug boat. She claims all sentient machines as her children and is believed to be very kind and gentle. This belief system has aspects of reincarnation, as it is believed that the soul of the machines shall be forged anew and come to incarnate a new form of vehicle or machine.

- Lady may choose a "guardian" to help with more earthly affairs on her behalf. It is unclear what they stand guard over, however.

- It is believed that Lady watches over the Isle of Sodor, as machinery built there seems to have a higher chance of sentience. However, this is both unproven and unconfirmed.

Ok enough lady stuff I just wanted to talk about her (she's neat)

- Thomas's route takes him all the way to Tidmouth and he often brings the townsfolk to their big city jobs.

- The official NWR freight engine livery is the green and red stripes, as worn by Henry and Percy.

- Percy has been requested as a guest of honor for at least 52 weddings and he has attended 34.

- The original Ulfstead Castle was destroyed in a landslide in 1991. The new Ulfstead Castle was built in 2000 and is part estate, railway, and museum, all orchestrated by the Earl of Sodor, Sir Robert Norramby.

- May 11th is Sodor Day, which marks the end of a week-long festival for all things Sudrian. Also, May 11th and Christmas Day are the only times the NWR intentionally reduces its services.

- In 2000, Sodor's Council passed a law allowing the marriage of sentient machines.

- The volunteers on the Talyllyn railway often send gag jokes or pranks to the workers of the SKR. The biggest prank yet was when they swapped Sir Handel with Sir Haydn (with permission from both the Thin Controller and the Talyllyn Preservation Society) and waited to see how long it would take someone to notice. Sir Haydn was on Sodor for 2 weeks and was found out by Duncan, who was suspicious as to why "Handel" was being so polite to him.

- Out of all the famous eight engines, Gordon is the one who dislikes his TV theme song the most. He claims that "it wasn't grand enough."

- Thomas's favorite TV episode is "Thomas and the Jet Engine." On multiple occasions, he has begged the Fat Controller to let him recreate the episode, just so he can say he is the fastest engine on Sodor.

- Edward is the unofficial father of Thomas, Bill, Ben, Rosie, Philip, and Ryan.

- Gordon is surprisingly good at giving advice. He has even given Edward some kind words.

- Boco is the official secondary for the Wild Nor'wester.

- Sodor is a sanctuary for sentient machines, and as such, Crovan's Gate Works can fix just about any type of machine in the world, whether it's diesel, steam, electric, gasoline, kerosene, or hydrogen. Bring them any type of motive power, and they can fix it in no time flat.

- During the purge of steam, Henry and later Murdoch often smuggled engines onto Sodor, attached to the ends of their freight trains.

[stevetonyweekly]

SteveTony Weekly - Holiday Special

Happy holidays, my friends! I know a lot of us spend the holidays with more free time than normal, and I thought I’d put together a list of very long fic for you to indulge in during your down time--enjoy and be sure to give your author a comment/kudos if you enjoy it! 

~ 

[Podfic of] When The Lights Go On Again by Dr_Fumbles_McStupid, kalakirya, KD reads (KDHeart), lattice_frames, lavenderfrost, miss_marina95, Opalsong, paraka, Superstitiousme, vassalady

Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.

Note: This was 19hours of FANTASTIC story--highly recommend it if you’ve got a long drive or time off. 

One-Man Army by Captain_Panda

Takes place immediately after the Chitauri attack in Avengers 1.

Steve is running himself into the ground. Tony notices.

Then Steve gets knocked down hard. And Tony intervenes.

Note: I’ve rec’ed this before. It’s delightfully long and nearly perfect--there’s very little downtime in the way of weakness with the pacing and writing, which is a feat in and of itself at over 600k. 

America Isn't Chicken by Amuly 

After a Civil War, death, rebirth, a takeover by Osborn, brain deletion, and the fall of Asgard, Steve and Tony might just be starting to get back on solid ground with one another. Things aren't perfect, not yet, but they can be in the same room as each other without resorting to violence, and they've even managed to share a smile or two.

Seems like the perfect time, then, for Tony to try and fuck it all up with a stupid game of gay chicken.

Meanwhile, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Tony realizes some kind of supervillainous trouble is brewing when increasingly advanced armors start popping up all over Manhattan, looking strangely reminiscent of his tech. On the other side of the world, Steve gets news that Zola is on the move in Russia, with some sort of nefarious plan at work.

Which will ruin them first? Will it be this unknown armored villain who is after Tony's tech? Or will it be Zola unleashing his mysterious plan on the world? Or will Steve and Tony prove to be their own worst enemies, destroying the tentative truce they managed to forge with their own stubbornness?

Note: Just really delightful 616 fic. It’s a comfort read, tbh. 

Data is King by Amuly

In a cyberpunk dystopia, all the wealth is concentrated in New Versailles and the majority live in impoverished ghettos outside. Prosthetics are strictly prohibited, though many of the poor have body modifications to help them live. Steve Rogers is an idealistic young man who raids the storerooms of New Versailles with his best friend Bucky Barnes, to bring food and medicine to the poor. But when tragedy strikes, Steve is inspired by Dr. Erskine to go seek out the notorious slumlord/black market trader Tony Stark. Rumor has it that Tony used to be a member of New Versailles, but left to make his fortune off the backs of the working man... or was he kicked out? Although they don't hit it off at first, Steve and Tony must work together.

They have some help. The Three Fates are women who control information. Steve's friends from his old life are good people on the fringes of society because of their prosthetic enhancements. And there's Tony's network of resources and connections, not to mention his brilliant engineering mind that helped him build his empire.

But when Steve and Tony finally manage to put their differences aside and rise up against New Versailles... not everything is as simple as it seemed.

Note: So I haven’t actually read this one--but it’s on my list for the week I’m off so I’m sharing it with ya’ll now. 

Maybe Tomorrow by scifigrl47

Tony Stark may well be the richest man in America. In the depths of the Great Depression, that's no small claim. When a plot is hatched for him to take in an orphan for a week, everyone knows it's a publicity stunt. No one knows it better than Officer Steve Rogers, but he's got a job to do, and he's going to do it. Doesn't mean he's going to approve.

Yes, it's an Annie AU.

Yes. That Annie.

Note: I’m a huge fan of scifigrl47 and this fic is all of the reasons why--excellent storytelling, relationships and kids interacting and Stevetony being amazing. 

Forty-Seven Flat by geekymoviemom

Steve Rogers was on the top of the world. He was one of the top students in his class, a world-class athlete, and had a man who loved him. Winning an Olympic Gold Medal seemed like the perfect addition to his picture-perfect life.

But only four years later, Steve’s entire world has come crashing down around him, leaving defending his Olympic title the only thing lying between him and utter ruin.

And then, the unthinkable happens.

Note: I really love sports AU, and this one was just a lot of fun. 

Celestial Navigation by sabrecmc 

Celestial Navigation: 18 year old Omega!Tony finds himself Bonded to Captain Steve Rogers. He isn't happy about it until he is.

By request, here is CN in one place without other stories and artwork.

Note: I love this fic. It’s probably one of my top 10 fav stevetony fics, because it’s just so good. The slow burn and Steve’s slow devotion is just--so lovely. 

Where Our Restless Monsters Sleep by Mizzy

Years after Tony Stark saved the universe, the Avengers realize there’s a major problem: his body has gone missing. And he isn’t the only one. Fallen heroes all over the galaxy have had their graves pillaged.

An old foe is stealing the bodies of fallen warriors, but for what nefarious reason? There’s only one solution. To find out why it’s happening, Steve’s gotta die.

He probably shouldn’t be so eager to do that.

Note: I really love the set up of this fic, the way it leans into canon MCU and still gives us Stevetony. Also--worms. 

Deep in the Heart of Me by Finely Honed (jaqen_hgar)

Veteran single dad Steve runs a tattoo shop. Pepper arranges for Tony to get that tattoo he always wanted, and he winds up with the mother of all crushes instead. Jumping out of airplanes is one thing, but love requires real courage. Steve struggles with letting someone into his life. Tony tries to keep his heart intact while Steve works on his issues.

Craving a realistic depiction of a romantic relationship featuring PTSD, mental health issues, and characters who discuss their problems? This might be for you. No magic fixes here but a happy ending is guaranteed!

Note: I love this fic because it’s so realistic--the way Steve protects Peter from his new relationship is the most realistic depiction of good parenting I’ve ever seen in fic, and I ADORE it. Tony’s patience and hurt and sweetness is everything to me. 

A Higher Form of War by sabrecmc 

Tony is a King with a surprising number of people out to kill him. Steve and the rest of the Avengers are fighting for Pierce's rebellion and end up with Tony as their prisoner. Oops.

Basically one of those bodice-ripping romance novels I don't read (ahem) but with far more gay.

Note: It’s amazing. It’s slow and beautiful and I love Steve so much I can’t even. 

[mllemaenad]

Re: the Prydwen being evidence of limiting the endings: I mean, they built the thing between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. Give them the intervening ten years and they could’ve built another in the Capitol Wasteland for the show.

Hm. I mean, in theory I understand that they possibly could. But I sort of feel like in practice they probably couldn't.

The original Brotherhood airships were built in California, during a period of relative peace and prosperity. While the Brotherhood tends to be exceedingly isolationist and is unlikely to have engaged in the general rebuilding effort – and we know they are quite closed off in Fallout 2 – they would still have benefited from it. People would have been creating parts for a wide range of purposes, so trading (even on a limited scale) or scavenging would have been easier.

The Prydwen is a solo effort, and built under vastly different circumstances. While you'd want to hope conditions in the Capital Wasteland improve significantly after the construction of the purifier, they're still decades behind California in terms of reconstruction.

It took them years to build that damn thing – to design it, and to gather the scrap. And they're only capable of doing it because of their success in Broken Steel. All that scrap came from Adams Air Force Base. The whole thing relies on the Lone Wanderer helping them actually get somewhere instead of just spinning their wheels for another twenty years.

The Brotherhood aren't exactly known as scientists and engineers. I mean – they have such people, but scribes are typically treated as second class citizens who rarely achieve positions of power (Elijah in New Vegas is specifically called out as a rare exception). They don't innovate. What "advancements" they've made typically come down to tinkering with their weapons or power armour a bit. And that makes sense! They're descended from soldiers, and their society is structured around the fantasy of a modern knightly order. And, you know, they're the "technology is scary" faction. Of course they're a bit rubbish with it.

So the Prydwen is the result of a truly singular success, taking out the Enclave and securing access to a significant facility – and thus suddenly being in possession of an embarrassment of riches.

Now, if it's been destroyed in Fallout 4 there are a few things to consider.

Construction, from design to completion, seems to have taken something like six years. Which means it took longer to build it than it could possibly have been in service. That's a lot of resources for something that got blown out of the sky more-or-less immediately. I'm not even sure if they'd be able to get all the parts again, and even if they could they're looking at several more years of construction.

More than that, if it was destroyed the Brotherhood's East Coast leadership went down with it. Now, I may think Arthur Maxson is a revolting little toad of a man, but in Brotherhood society the heir of Roger Maxson is a man of literally mythic importance: they tell the sort of ridiculous "he was a war hero even as a child" stories about him that they tell about people like Alexander the Great. His forceful personality seems to be the thing driving them in Fallout 4.

So you're looking at a situation where Owyn Lyons is very dead, Sarah, his natural successor, is also very dead, Arthur Maxson – and with him the whole Maxson line – is not only dead but blown up, and the East Coast Brotherhood is now split between the Capital Wasteland and the Commonwealth with no easy means of travelling.

I just don't really see the Brotherhood getting their shit together fast enough after a blow like that to rebuild the Prydwen and fly confidently back west. Even if they did regroup ... "Let's spend another four to six years building another version of the thing that just blew up on our young god-king and ended 200 years of tradition" sounds like kind of a hard sell, you know?

There's a lot of "information pending" about the timeline in the TV show, so my opinions are likely to change as more information emerges. But right now, I feel like the Minutemen ending is the most likely one for Fallout 4.

The Brotherhood's arrival in California is significantly different to their arrival in the Commonwealth. The latter is unnerving. You've just dealt with Kellogg and heard that Shaun is "not a baby", and when you step outside there's this massive thing in the sky ... and its pilots trumpet its arrival. This is another problem in an already complicated situation. When they arrive in the TV series it's significantly more subdued. It's certainly impressive to the aspirants, but it lacks the confidence of conquerors that they had earlier.

The Minutemen ending can allow the Brotherhood to keep their shiny airship, and it's even possible Arthur Maxson is either still alive or at least produced an heir before kicking the bucket. But it also means that their success on the East Coast has been highly limited. They took Adams Air Force Base from the Enclave, sure, but they were unable to expand their reach into the Commonwealth or even recover anything of significance from the Institute.

They went east. They did okay. Nothing to write home about.

Quintus, in the television series, talks about the Brotherhood ruling the wasteland as part of a distant, "heroic" past. I'm pretty sure that's more mythmaking: the Brotherhood never ruled the West Coast, and if they're currently running everything between Boston and Washington DC, then it's a bit weird to talk about it as though they've fallen from grace.

Access to cold fusion will allow him to make a play for power, because that's significantly more useful than one very expensive and highly flammable airship.

But the airship still looks impressive to a group of wastelanders who won't have seen that level of tech since childhood.

At the moment, I think it makes better sense that it's the same one. but like I said – information pending.

[antonia-gergely]

COSMISM!

Anton Vidolke and the Institute of the Cosmos. Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. 1st July - 28th October.

Anton Vidolke is a founder of e-flux journal.

Some time around 1882, God was pronounced dead. For certain Russian thinkers of the era, this loss provided an opportunity: where the place of one god closes, space for another one opens. Unlike most established schools of thought, Russian cosmism does not present a consistent epistemology, or a unified theory. On the contrary: the ideas of its nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century protagonists are often so divergent and contradictory that they appear paradoxical, or delirious.

Russian cosmism’s known scientists, philosophers, and writers include figures ranging from Nikolai Fedorov (known as a founding thinker) the nineteenth-century librarian who aimed to resurrect all living and dead ancestors into an eternal church-museum focused on the revolutionary tenet of brotherhood; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov’s library pupil who went on to formulate mathematical equations used for spaceflight; Alexander Bogdanov, who cofounded the Bolshevik party with Lenin and experimented with blood transfusions to rejuvenate one and all; and Alexander Chizhevsky, the “heliobiologist” who discovered and mapped connections between sunspots and human political behavior, and then created lamps to harness solar energy to restore fellow prisoners in labor camps. (He concluded that a liberal change in the english government correlated directly to the sun having more than 93 sunspots at the time. Very goofy and fun, but it's the kind of 'science' that makes me laugh and then makes me serious. The entire foundation of cosmism is corollary and sometimes seems far fetched, but any corollary is based in a previous truth, so it's fun to entertain as possible.)

Similarly to Marxism, which sees labor as the engine of the emancipation of the proletariat, cosmism sees laboring towards resurrection by means of science, art, technology, and social organization as a way of collaborating with God, a collaboration that will result in the active evolution of humanity and the universe towards becoming a single interconnected, sapient organism, immortal and infinite like God. So it's like space-communism.

Biela's Comet and its incorrectly calculated trajectory into earth led to a lot of publications centred on the concept of cosmism, and these really exemplify the hopes of the cosmists.

Originally published in fragments between 1835 and 1840, The Year 4338 describes a futuristic society in the year before a comet emerges from the depths of cosmic space to destroy earth. The protagonist of the novel, a young man from Beijing, travels to St. Petersburg to meet with scientists who he thinks can prevent this impending cataclysm before doomsday in 4339. He travels on a high-speed electrical train under the Caspian Sea, through a futuristic Russia where all households are connected by telegraphs, and where people read newspapers made of liquid-crystal screens, have personal flying devices in the form of hot air balloons, eat synthetic foods, inhale special gas for recreation, and wear electric clothes that change colors and patterns. A moneyless economy has also been achieved. The few published fragments as well as the ideas behind this unfinished novel were almost certainly familiar to Nikolai Fedorov, who most experts credit with being the founder of cosmism. Fedorov worked at the very same library in Moscow as Prince Odoevsky.

While a prolific writer, Fedorov did not publish during his lifetime, partly due to his modest character but also possibly because he suspected his radical ideas could lead to excommunication from the Orthodox Church, of which he was a devout follower. After his death, a volume of Fedorov’s writings was published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, under the title The Philosophy of the Common Task. This first publication did not circulate commercially. In brief, the common task is no less than a project of human immortality achieved by technological means. It involves materially resurrecting all human ancestors (starting with Adam and Eve), controlling all the destructive forces of nature (including death), and exploring and colonizing all the stars and planets in the cosmos. An intergalactic educational project whose aim is to turn the universe into a unified feeling and thinking organism, immortal, infinite, and selfsame with God, its creator. In other words, the horizon of the common task is the construction of God by scientific, technological, and artistic means.

Despite rarely seeing publication, these revolutionary ideas influenced numerous key figures in the Russian intelligentsia, including such writers as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, religious philosophers such as Solovyev and Florensky, among many others. These ideas also influenced many in the Russian visual arts, and are partially responsible for the fascination with zero gravity, flight, and the cosmos that we can clearly observe in numerous artworks, from Malevich’s Black Square to Tatlin’s Letatlin. In a more subtle way, the influence of cosmism can be felt in the sensibility behind constructivism and productivism, which treat a work of art not as a mere fetish of sublimated sexuality in a consumer economy, but as a microcosm of world-building and God-building. Faced today with ambivalent liberal platitudes of resistance or the disposable instrumentality of “disruptive tech,” we might wonder more generally how artistic and creative thought could have been so heretical to Marxist-materialist and religious orthodoxies alike, while simultaneously believing so completely in their unified capacity for advancing human civilization.

While it never became a part of official Soviet doctrine, much of cosmism dovetails with the ethos of early postrevolutionary utopian socialism in its drive towards a classless, egalitarian society completely dedicated to the emancipation and self-transformation of humanity, and to the construction of a man-made paradise on earth. The first postrevolutionary decade saw an explosion of cosmist ideas and their application in very diverse areas of life, from art and science to the practical organization of labor, time management, and the health system.

- e-flux journal no. 88

Speaking to my friend during the three films (we were the only ones there so it was non-disruptive), we got talking about immortality through technicalities. Our energy might not travel into space as particles, but it does, say, enter the soil when we die, and nourish a plant, potentially one that bears fruit. I'm not a holistic or deeply spiritual person, but from a logical standpoint, that makes sense. I know my soul doesn't go into the fruit.. but I say that without knowing if or what the soul even is. So I don't really know.

What I do know is that the energy, the chemicals, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen that makes me up can enrich soil, and that very same atoms that lived in me can become building blocks in a hypothetical fruit that grows out of my grave. Maybe the DNA of the fruit contains me, in some shape or form.

My friend also mentioned Ted Lasso and the desire of a character to have a fruit tree planted on their grave when they died, to be nourished by their body and fed to their loved ones. It was funny, sure, but it got me thinking. It's another element of the consumption and interrelationships I am currently focused on researching. If I am a fruit borne from my own grave and you eat me, I then become part of you forever. My chemicals build your cells. I can become engrained into the very fibres of your being. And it cycles.

Everything eats and is eaten, as Adrianne Lenker says.

[white-mage-0]

[E2SURREAL]

“You have to admit…this place, it has something that just draws you in. I can’t really explain it, but, despite every-” My companion began to spew some sort of excuse, defending the cruelties and tragedy of this hellspace. Something they had no right in saying, someone who has not encountered the horrors I’ve seen firsthand. All they knew was a recounting, they couldn’t have known anything about this place. A familiar blue flame licked the insides of my mind as I turned towards them, brandishing my cutter. I started to speak, but by the time I opened my mouth, I knew it wasn’t “me” who was uttering things. It was another entity, using my shredded and distorted desires against my best interests. 

“Why are you here. Why did you come to this town. Did you hope to find something here? Enlightenment? An appreciation for life? I came here because I was invited out of obligation,” I began to speak, waving about my cutter. As I spoke, the blue flame grew to replace my mind, the coolness that became my cognition as I hunted down demons had taken over. With words as sharp and extended as my cutter, I began to cut down her argument to the core. The engine of “understanding” was just as responsible for the situation as the engines of terror that I had seized and hacked apart. 

“Are you not an enemy of this world? Do you still hold attachments to the persecutors, those hooded executioners that hide their intentions behind shields of Christ’s blood, the abstractions of people that only serve to try and destroy the source behind your existence? Do you mean to tell me, there is anything worth living inside of this place? No. There is nothing here to be attached to, not yet.” Yes, there was absolutely nothing to be drawn to in this town. Even without the world turning to a putrid abstraction of warped desire, there was absolutely nothing to note of this town. Anyone who was here was only here because they were here, it was convenient for them, just as it was convenient for my begrudging companion to try and rationalize all that which had happened to us.

“I don’t blame you. No, I don’t blame you at all for your childish attachment. Their strings are too strong for a simple wooden puppet to break free from.” I struck a peculiar pose, much resembling that of a scarecrow who stood post in a field of crops. With this pose, the lost little puppet, damaged from all the pecking they’ve endured in their life, tripped over the strings which anchored them to this world and collapsed. They tried to rise again, only to become yet more tangled in their web of contradictions, and remained collapsed, staring up at my crucifixed pose with an expression of absolute terror. I was the guardian of this world, it seemed, the only one who could cleanse and purify all that which had changed the direction of the grain for far too long. I would run perpendicular, brandish my cutter, and correct the crow’s despotic society, even if that meant spilling the soul of the place all around. Their blood would answer the cries of the earth, and a beautiful garden would then be grown. 

“For your own sake, I will cut you free from this world. Consider it as an act of grace, lost little puppet. You will be the first to feel the kind of divine enlightenment that comes with the capability of reflection.” I began to circle around the puppet, slithering around and through all of their strings of deception with the flexibility and agility of a snake, slicing down everywhere I saw one of the lines that anchored their heart to the terror engine of this metaphysical hellscape. And even when there were no more lines left to sever from the quivering doll, my job had still not yet finished. In place of the strings, I had mounted the puppet, affixed them towards the world, grounded them into the cursed soil where the glass of broken dreams was buried. They whimpered, squirmed, screamed, all manner of attempts to break free from my etching. A line here, a circle there. Arrows that pointed towards the heavens, crosses that cemented the brimstone baptism, an intricate design was embedded into their body. The sigil burned bright with a deep crimson, poisoned blood that would feed the cycle of toxicity should it remain in the system. With a deep sigh, I retracted the blade of my cutter and lifted my body off of the puppet, who was beginning to shed their wooden, stiff body, their expression growing slack and softer compared to before they were fixed. 

“Do you feel better?”

“better, better. yeah.”

[corvidist]

Last Contact

A generation ship, the first of its kind, bioengineered by some of the most prominent technological collectives in the system, was scheduled for its final departure after picking up a group of researchers from a station at the edge of the Keiper Belt. Soon after leaving the solar system, however, it became clear that they were not alone.

Before them was the first in a series of massive, sapient extremophiles utilizing the biological equivalent of solar sails and traveling in a group towards Earth. While first contact had been speculated about since before the evolutionary descendants of Corvids first arrived in space, no one had expected it to be quite like this.

Having finally made contact with their destination system, a series of high-frequency signals are beamed toward the ship. With attempts to make contact already in progress at the time the broadcast began, a variety of onboard systems were prepared to receive such a message from any number of sources, and that included the ship's communication system and network of mycelium-based computers.

Now, a small crowd begins to gather around one of the screens, witnessing a strange series of sounds and images, mesmerizingly flickering despite their almost nauseating pattern. This is it. First contact.

Soon the images become more discernable, displaying something that many watching quickly recognize.

"Are those...Primates?" One says in their language's equivalent.

"Looks like it."

Here, the first true images of the Human world, nearly a million years past reduced to nothing but fossils, sediment, and ice cores, are witnessed. As the signal is adjusted, the images are as well. What seems like a pair bringing food to a younger member of the species, examples of their methods of tool use, their early forms of space travel...Centuries of speculation put to rest as nothing but a sideshow to the most important discovery of the crew's lifetimes.

While much of the crew focuses on establishing more coherent communication, the onboard historical collective gets to work trying to glean as much information from the "video" as they can. They watch on, obsessively transmitting them back home as they do so.

In place of language, the Humans actions take on more meaning. It can be inferred that they made clear attempts at educating, caring for, and raising their young. They compensated heavily for their difficulty of movement and managed to overcome much of it. They made fascinating and beautiful art, and possessed intricate cultures.

Rectangles and circles, decorated with complex symbols of various colors, seemed to be of great importance to many, perhaps as a religious item, part of a gifting system, or some sort of odd technology. Whatever they were used for, they were important enough to them to kill over, and played a role in the distribution of resources.

Even less positive things can also be inferred. Throughout much of their history, they possessed governments and solidified systems of near-absolute hierarchy within their societies.

As it plays on, much of what can be seen becomes increasingly bleak. While warping nature in potentially horrifying ways was hardly a new concept to a species of prolific genetic and biological engineers, the annihilation of it was something that many hoped was simply a coincidence in the fossil record.

War too, while not unknown, was something Humans seemed to engage in unendingly. They perfected it with time. Perhaps much of it was fiction, after all, a planet-destroying moon would have undoubtedly been impossible given Earth’s limited resources. Still, what it indicated was something that to them must have seemed like an eternal bloodbath. 

The final pieces came from videos that seemed be from soon after the peak of Human devleoplment. Statistically higher numbers of distinct depictions of environmental destruciton, the breakdown of their shelters and food supply, of transportation and available water. With it, their wars grew too. 

Speculation of the extinction of the primates having been the result of climatic collapse was widespread. The amount of Co2 in the atmosphere appeared to have catastrophically risen at almost the exact same time that Humans ceased to exist in the fossil record. These videos confirmed that theory, and it was only a matter of time before the “how” could be too. 

As the last set of videos was selected and approached its end, more surprises briefly pierced the somber mood of the viewers. Impossibly large explosions overlayed with flashing colors and vocalizing Humans. Now, this odd, symbol-filled screen, then darkness.

The last contact of a dead species.

[sarahwatchesthings]

"The Masterpiece Society" is such an... episode. It has so much potential, and yet its ideas seem so confused. A scrupulously isolated, perfectly genetically engineered colony is threatened by a cosmic disaster. The Enterprise contacts them to warn them of said disaster and agrees to help them find an alternative to evacuating the planet. Okay. The colony's Interpreter of the Law (can't remember anybody's names) warns that the mere presence of outsiders will destroy the delicate balance of the colony, where everybody has been genetically engineered to be perfect and fit neatly into pre-ordained social roles. And lo, when their top Scientist beams aboard the Enterprise to work with Geordi LaForge on a way to save the planet, she becomes fascinated by the ideas and technologies that exist in the outside world - including Geordi's VISOR, which allows him to see despite the fact that he was born blind. Geordi devises a solution to the colony's problem based on the VISOR technology, and much is made of the fact that Geordi, whose blindness makes him "genetically imperfect," would never have been born in the colony, and the VISOR technology never invented.

The colony's Top Scientist is so determined not to return to life in the colony that she sabotages her and Geordi's work, leaving the colony in danger again. When Geordi discovers the ruse, she and many other colonists band together and demand to be allowed to leave the colony. They've seen the possibilities of the outside world and can no longer be happy where they are.

Picard closes the episode by bemoaning the damage that the Enterprise crew's interference has done to the colony, and declares that it's a reminder of the importance of the Prime Directive. The Enterprise did as much damage, he says, as the cosmic disaster would have done (it would have killed them all).

It's this closing remark that really throws the episode off for me. Because it seems to me that the episode was really saying something else - that this supposedly "perfect" society was in fact hanging by a thread, that its survival was dependent on isolation, stagnation, and ultimately on control, and that the "imperfections" it strove so hard to erase were (and are) in fact the root of variety, creativity, and, most of all, progress. In fact, if anything, I would say this episode is more an illustration of why the Prime Directive is crap. Ultimately, the Prime Directive means (and has many times been interpreted to mean) that a society is better off being obliterated than facing the potential for painful transformation - better off isolated than growing into something new through contact with the rest of the universe.

In a way, I understand what the Prime Directive is supposed to do - it's supposed to protect diversity by allowing societies to develop their own cultures and identities rather than being swamped by more powerful societies' cultures and identities. But it's pushed to an absolutely ridiculous extreme, and this episode is an example of that. Picard justifies the PM by arguing that it would have protected a society based on eliminating variety and diversity - protected it not from destruction but from surviving to change into something else. And that kind of application of the PM is exactly why I can't stand it.

On top of all this, there's Troi. What was the idea behind having Troi be such a ready supporter of a genetically engineered society? Given her abysmal handling by the TNG writers, I'm guessing there really wasn't much of an idea. But, intentional or not, it raises some interesting questions. Troi's life's work is extending support and compassion to those struggling with exactly the sort of neuroses the Masterpiece Society has sought to erase. Does she see her clients as "broken"? Is she attracted to the idea of a world where her job is no longer necessary? Does she just want to make it with the cute Administrator?

I see the value in having two appealing characters (the Administrator and Troi) be major supporters of this Society. The Society isn't painted as one-dimensionally evil, and it lends some depth to the story and its characters. It's not really Troi that bothers me here. It's that final message from Picard, and the lingering impression that, in the end, this episode just wasn't sure what it was trying to say.

[novanhistorian]

An Apéritif

Since the thing I’ve been on-and-off teasing is taking a while (optimistic finish time is early November, and I’ve been at it since early August), I’ve decided to release the introduction to an earlier work. The said introduction, intended to provide historical context, covers about 70% of total Scientian history, and thus about 60% of the subject matter of the thing I’ve been teasing.

To quote my past self:

The absolute minimum context you need is that the characters are members of a species called novanity, novans were created by human scientists who then left the planet, and that planet is called Terranovo.

This is one of two things I’m releasing from the project, the other being the Miniature Encyclopedia.

Stuff below the cut is about 1.5k words.

A Short History of the Novan Imperium.

Narrative stops on 12 January 452 (7 September 3435 by a calendar no longer in non-religious use).

First off, humanity managed to survive climate change and reverse its effects to some extent. They still decided to try their hand at terraforming a very promising exoplanet in a nearby (relatively speaking) solar system, and the United Nations put out a call for interested scientists. The “New Eden Project,” as it was colloquially called in English, was very successful in recruiting, and often whole families came along. I would love to give you details of how they got there in the record time they did, but the information seems to have been specifically taken in the Departure a few centuries down the line. After arriving, however they managed it, the humans settled Terra Nova’s moon with the intent to use it as a base of operations for their terraforming efforts. Those got started promptly enough, but they would take several hundred years. In that time humanity found many ways to amuse itself, like creating species for the new world to supplement those they had brought with them. One doctoral student got very carried away and created the first novanoid, which was drafted using a somewhat buggy supercomputer to simulate and predict the result of her design and thus died when she actually attempted to clone it. She gave up, but the Academy (essentially the executive and legislative branches of government, formed of illustrious scientists) found out and took over. After several decades they had success and the first novan was born. From that point forward creation of novans became more and more frequent until following the instructions to build and customize one’s own became a common capstone project for those pursuing doctorates in genetic engineering (and those poor souls who made a new kind of conifer or whatnot were considered to be hopelessly outclassed). This continued even after Terra Nova was fully terraformed and settlement started, though primarily on the Moon because that was where the obscenely complicated infrastructure it took to make a person was.

The novans as of our story do not have many records of this period, since much of it was destroyed in the Departure, the Moon—where most of the surviving records were—was rendered uninhabitable in the Devastation, and society went to the dogs for two hundred years after that.

Speaking of, the Departure happened. No one left behind knows why, but over the course of a week the Academy, still a dictatorial government even after all these centuries, shut down all nonessential systems and copied and destroyed as much information deemed important as it could. Most humans and tapped novans do not seem to have been aware beforehand of the purpose of the summons they received. It is unclear whether it was made known to them that refusal meant their summary execution or if they were just shot. Nevertheless, at the end of that week every human on the moon, on the planet, and (formerly) in the various mining fleets of the asteroid belt set off in the same direction. Only five ships were ever seen again, and that was as wreckage, clearly destroyed by the others for turning back.

A society with only thirty-seven percent of its population remaining (on average; the Moon was hit much harder than Terra Nova and the Belt) will either band together or collapse, and the novans proved the latter kind. The planet, still mostly a frontier with few established cities, broke apart into warring states with obscure and ever-changing borders. The Moon had two terrifying years of anarchy and mob rule before turning things around, semi-democratically electing a government, and becoming one of the most stable non-theocracies in the solar system. (The theocracies were outwardly “stable” due primarily to internal repression, or else due to being very lucky in who fell into their leadership roles early on.) It was seen as a leader by the rest of the survivors, both for its status as the center of pre-Departure society and government and for its togetherness in the aftermath.

The asteroid belt imploded. There is no other word for it. They lived on spaceships, under no real regulations even before the Departure took seventy percent of their population and a hundred percent of their government. The mining companies that survived with most of their boards intact became unstable pseudo-states, dependent on trade with the Moon (and through them Terra Nova) for the goods they needed to survive, which they never got enough of. As companies do, they wanted product and cared zero whits about what that meant for their employee-citizens. As dictators do, they wanted the good life and extracted it from their subjects brutally. Eight hundred years later, at the time of another major project in the Imperium Novel, they still occasionally find ghost ships from this period, their crews dead of overwork, system failures, simple starvation, or—most commonly—a combination of the three.

That is the environment that spawned the perpetrators of the Devastation. I have covered this in more detail elsewhere, but in short the Devastation was the destruction of every dome-city on the Moon by a combination of nuclear bombing and suicide-bomber-induced reactor failures.

Then there were about two hundred more years of the War Era as defined by historians. (Some argue that what is termed the Wars of Tidying Up is indistinguishable from what is termed the War Era save by its position on one side or the other of the official establishment of the Novan Imperium.) Forty or so years out from its end, several of the states came together in a coalition, with the goal of conquering or recruiting the others and creating the first unified government since the human days. It took them a few decades, but they slowly assimilated the whole of the main continent (omitting Lazer’ and Nowhere, nations on the smaller outlying continents). This accomplished, they declared the Year of Fortifying the Peace—later designated the year zero of a new dating system—and at the end officially established the Novan Imperium. There then followed another forty years of trying to get Nowhere and Lazer’ to crumble, which they eventually did.

Then there were three or four hundred years, depending on which historian one asks, of relative stability. These saw the government transition into a more democratic one less overwhelmingly controlled by the twenty-five states who either were cofounders of the coalition or had joined up voluntarily and the cadet program—initially planned to run for twenty years as a way of raising the last generation of war orphans, but far outlasting that time—come to increasing societal prominence. (This has its payoff in the Second Civil War of 744 to 750 or thenabouts.) The Imperium had been divided shortly after its creation into three main administrative regions (with later-added auxiliaries for Nowhere and Lazer’) which answered to a central government. The tensions that led to the First Civil War were just as much within the divisions as they were between them—no allowance had been made for cultural differences and ancient enmities in the north-to-south-divided regions, so Vesica Montium was expected to come to concord on every itty-bitty decision with its ancient enemies Putiya Nakaram and Shattered Rock, so long as that decision passed through the parliament. (Each region had a parliament; the country as a whole had a senate, which was basically the same thing under a different name.) When they had managed to quell their internal disputes, the regions turned to their neighbors for a fight—and more often than not they got it. This is why Mr. Sen. Telkes (Heleno being a state in the Western Administrative Region) insults Sabro (Central Administrative Region) so much and seems surprised to find someone he thinks is another Helenan there.

The Imperium also expanded off-planet and subjugated the warring companies of the asteroid belt, which by this time had become the Mining Belt in common parlance. They were not granted statehood—statehood meaning, here, what California has within the United States—but were instead made into tributary states with the Imperium as suzerain. This meant regulations, however spottily enforced, and a diminution if not an end in the continuous feuds and more importantly shortages that had plagued Belter life for generations, but was seen as a grave insult by many. The Imperium’s rather chauvinistic attitude toward the Belt and its inhabitants contributed to this, as did their perceived hypocrisy in critiquing the Belter company-state structure while their own corporations ran wild with their private armies and created a full-bore aristocracy (this being the riĉuloj).

Before the civil war officially broke out, there was a decade in which tensions became so thick they could be and were cut by a stray dueling-sword. [Here I started talking about the actual project.]

[inoppositionflorien]

People who've worked in a field for much of their life will often ascribe undue importance to their field.

The stereotype is this being done by physicists, but at least they're technically right that physics is very fundamental. Sure, nearly all interactions can't usefully be modeled in several levels of physics and fluid dynamics in particular is mostly coming up with ways to simplify everything while still generating vaguely useful data so you know how a fluid might work if it had certain properties, but at least they're correct that technically, if you had an obscenely powerful computer vastly more powerful than every currently existing computer combined, you might be able to model something fairly big and get an accurate idea of how it behaves. If you had a bunch of engineers too, you might be able to build a device that blows up the moon or something similarly large. Physics is provably very powerful. If physics stops you from doing a thing, you can't do it.

I think it's a far bigger problem in the arts (and to an extent some of the humanities but mostly the arts), where art has few clear concrete powers and so people just kind of make up powers and features that it has in order to make it seem like the most important field. Because these features are either subjective or entirely speculative, they're also both ever-shifting in definition ("<this lacks soul/is fundamentally bad> because it was made <for money/in a manner I don't approve of/on a computer/by an AI/by tommy no-soul the man without a soul/because I saw something similar once and this is just a pale imitation>) and also portray art the most powerful thing ever and often become part of ever more elaborate fantasies of resistance.

It's obviously not the most powerful thing ever, if you think about it for even a second. Plenty of things are more powerful than art. For instance, continental drift, volcanos, the sun, a mid-sized avalanche, market forces, the Krebs Cycle, war, some rivers, essentially every proposed and implemented economic system in the history of ever, and arguably social cohesion. But when confronted with this reality, artists respond with "you're attacking art" or "You're measuring the marigolds" or whatever.

This has led me to the unfortunate conclusion that artists (as a demographic who writes thinkpieces about art value or generally talk about it where I end up seeing it) individually either don't understand the amount of cultural presence they have (quite a bit, more than nearly all fields) is outsized in proportion to their ability to actually affect society, a thing that makes them very vulnerable to what I'm going to call "proto-fascism for artists" where they're simultaneously holding the belief that they're incredibly vulnerable and beset by powerful entrenched shadowy forces, but these powerful forces will be defeated after a great metaphorical (or possibly literal) battle because of how strong artists are (despite being so vulnerable that art is constantly at risk of being destroyed apparently) and the only reason they haven't yet reshaped society with their incredible secret power is because they're being held back by these powerful forces... OR, they're somewhat aware that they have a lot of cultural presence and relatively little actual ability to leverage it, and just kind of hope that having enough cultural presence will eventually lead to a position to leverage it, which leads to them getting really aggressive whenever anyone challenges this position, because them succeeding requires mass buy-in to art as not just a powerful force, but the most powerful force in society that can be harnessed. They might even hold both these beliefs at the same time.

You know. Like the stereotypical techbro (for as loaded as that term is), but instead of The Innovative Startup, (the thing that'll totally solve all the problems in the world, maligned by ingrained cultural elites but that'll win a great victory against them someday) it's The Revolutionary Artistic Work (the thing that'll totally solve all the problems in the world, maligned by ingrained cultural elites, but that'll win a great victory against them someday)