Racing Turtles

I was watching This Lecture by Timothy Snyder about the formation of nations(as it pertains to Ukrainian history), and as part of it he talks about the stories nations tell and the shapes they take, and that got me thinking about Charlemagne, which got me thinking about Arthur, and it occurred to me that the story of Arthur is kinda-sorta a Medieval AU of the Gospels?

Like:

there's a bit more that's occurred to me thinking about this(the similarities in their birth, the obscurity of their childhood, the Sword in the Stone story and the Stories of Joshua wowing all the priests with his knowledge of the Torah on his first visit to Jerusalem), but it was the Second Coming stuff that first grabbed me.

Anyway u_u

*Yes, I realize he slept with Morgana, but he doesn't KNOW that and he didn't INTEND to, just as he's not intending to deny and disinherit Mordred since he doesn't even know who he is.

meriadeuc 19h

Ah ok! Obvsl the versions of it I've read changed that bit, and either merged her with Morgause, or I did that in my memory :p

Thanks for the info!

The problem with calls for Hamas to return the hostages is that the hostages are the only leverage Hamas has, and the only leverage it can/could ever POSSIBLY have, over Israel right now, cuz the people running Israel right now have made it more than clear that they care nothing for Palestinian lives and little for how the world sees them, because the US has for so long insulated them against punishment for their crimes.

So, returning the hostages for anything other than an end to the butchery in Gaza, guaranteed by a reliable third party with the capacity and willingness to ENFORCE an end to that butchery upon Israel(which: I don't even know is a thing that exists? Like: the US can smash the Israeli military but it won't, and I dont know if there's any other world power with both the military might and range to stop an Israeli offensive), is next to useless for them. It'd be handing Israel carte-blanche to just go right back to genocide once the hostages were handed over.

@hidingintheaether

Negotiations succeed when both parties get what they want. Recognizing clearly what those wants are, refusing to lie to ourselves about those wants, and working with focus to fulfill those wants is vital to successful negotiation. Currently in the US we are seeing LOTS of stories about deals Biden is putting forward to "end" the genocide in Gaza, but all of these deals are predicated on denying Hamas what it wants, offering only temporary unsecured ceasefires for all of the hostages, which is something Hamas will never agree to. This prolongs both the world-historic suffering of the people of Gaza AND the suffering of the unjustly taken hostages. I'm distressed by this and I want that to end, and I wrote the above to express that distress.

Of course: the Netanyahu government has made it more than clear that the hostages' return likely would not end the violence. They're certainly being used to justify it, but this violence has gone a hundred-times-past any possible reprisal. And of course it has killed some of the very hostages it reputes to be recovering. AND Israeli officials like Smotrich are openly using the assault to advocate for property development in Palestinian territory. So: If anyone is condemning the hostages to remaining hostages it's not those saying "give Hamas what they're asking for to release them", it's the Netanyahu government which, through these actions, has consistently shown it cares more about this assault and the objectives it hopes to achieve through it than their lives, and of course Hamas for taking them in the first place.

You're right that all human suffering is bad and should be stopped. That's what I want too. Giving Hamas a guaranteed end to the assault on Gaza will produce a guaranteed end to the holding and suffering of the hostages, which is why I think THAT should be the deal people work on. Working on other deals isn't really working for a resolution; it's wasting time at best and, at worst, actively working to keep the genocide going while PRETENDING to try and end it, trading the hostages suffering for more time to kill innocent people in Gaza, which is a monstrous thing to want.

Hamas's actions are not just, but neither are they irrational. The current Israeli government has consistently refused to deal with any Palestinian institutions on any issue other than hostage exchanges; has consistently done whatever it wants without any consideration for Palestinian needs or desires; has consistently chosen to pursue its objectives vis a vis Palestinians through violence rather than any other method; has consistently ignored every Palestinian response to its actions BUT violence. It doesn't do anyone any good, certainly not the hostages, to pretend this situation is anything other than the complete shitshow that it is, or that piecemeal offers can ever be acceptable to any Palestinian organization when Palestinians are facing such an existentially dire situation.

And finally, because it really can never be said enough, Genocide is never an appropriate response to anything. There IS no response even possible in killing someone -- let alone tens of thousands of someones -- who didn't harm you for a harm you have suffered. Bombing civilian apartment blocks and shooting up hospitals cannot possibly "punish" the soldiers of October 7th who killed those poor people, and took these hostages. It is quite literally murder for murder's sake. That, horrifically, is what the Israeli government has chosen to want, what it continues to choose and continues to value over the lives of the hostages, and the basic human decency which moved me to write this, and you to respond to it. It could end the violence anytime it wants but it doesn't because it Wants the Violence, and the only people who COULD convince it to stop, my own government, Won't, and all of this is a terrible and horrifying thing to contemplate.

This is a question that’s been bothering me, and after looking into it I think I get it

So kobolds first appear in Germanic folklore as domestic spirits. Kobolds are also considered mine spirits, causing cave-ins and tapping on things in the dark to scare miners

Think the elves from The Elves and the Shoemaker, but bastards

This association with mines and caves and bastardy gets them into the world of tabletop RPGs when Gary Gygax adds them to his fantasy supplement of Chainmail. Kobolds are later added to Dungeons & Dragons as a subterranean race of monsters

Here’s the important thing: due to a throwaway line in the rulebooks about the kobolds having doglike voices, the first artist to depict a D&D kobold gave it a dog nose

This is the beginning point in the divergent evolution

Kobolds in western TTRPG will notoriously become more and more reptilian with each generation, leaning on the interpretation of “chihuahua dragons,” but it’s at this time, heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, that the video game series Wizardry begins

They brought the dog kobolds with them

Wizardry becomes extremely popular in Japan, inspiring JRPG series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy as well as manga series like Dungeon Meshi. And while in the west the kobold has become increasingly reptilian with each edition, the Japanese kobold has become increasingly canine

And this is why in the greater fantasy genre, kobolds represent everything from

To

To

And

Some relevant art of mine

#then theres warcraft kobolds#that are rat people#i dont know where that came into play(vai@pisceancryptid)

Just a guess on my part but, given the sorts of places you tend to run into them, their presentation as fractious, alchemically-gifted pests, and Blizzard's tendency to rework Games Workshop concepts, it's possible their rat-kobolds are inspired by The Skaven.

Of course, it's equally-possible they were just trying to distinguish them from DnD kobolds, thought "underground mining badguys" and Rats popped into their heads.

this is what they got shinzo abe with

Naw dude: that's a hand-held Tau Cannon

most smart nonprimate animals seem like evolutionary dead ends? For like, culture and civilization at least. Like, corvids and parrots have these crazy miniaturized neurons that enable them to be really smart for their size, but their size is limited by evolutionary pressure to maintain flight. Dolphins have no hands. Elephants... I don't know, I think elephants could do it. It's hard for me to see what, if anything, they're missing that chimps have. A fitness gradient towards tool use maybe? I hope it doesn't come to this but maybe if humans go extinct we'd have elephant astronauts in ten million years

Flightless birds are definitely an option though!

yeah but since the current smart birds are flyers we'd need them to become flightless and large (like how our lemurlike ancestor went non-arboreal and large to become us), may take more like a hundred million years than ten but can't rule it out

I think we could do it to them on purpose pretty quickly, but we don’t tend to maintain a niche for a bird like that except for contextually especially unethical reasons (farming them).

Too bad a parrot is already more or less useless to humans, and a great big flightless one even moreso. :/

Maybe we should shift our focus to psittification of geese? Maybe they could be bred to have brains which superficially resemble a parrot’s in structure, and then gene-modified to soak themselves in plexin. (And then get the fantastically wealthy and evil to prefer to eat birds that speak…?)

iirc geese are already relatively social and intelligent too. not starting from scratch. Decent lifespans as well(?)

Nothing's an "evolutionary dead end", evolution's always at play, it's just a question of whether a particular animal's suite of adaptations can see them through a particular calamity or not, and that's a particularly contingent question(the chokepoint in human prehistory where, even with all their social and tool using adaptations, a single massive eruption almost extincted them is a good example of this).

I think it's misleading to focus on civilization so much. That large settlements played a role in the development of a widespread technical culture for humans doesn't mean they're necessary for that, only that they're sufficient. Corvids and parrots use tools, alter their environment, maintain large social organizations built on communication, share information, and educate their young; maybe the reason they don't have what humans would classify as a "culture" or "civilization" isn't because they're locked away from it, but because they don't need it(or maybe it's humans who are failing to see what they have as these things).

Same with Elephants. Like: to begin with you're never going to have an elephant-based "civilization" because their food-requirements are too demanding. What looks like nomadic behavior to humans is actl just elephants living on the geographic footprint able to produce enough food and water for them to survive, in the nature which allows them to maintain that productivity(all that pushing over trees, that's agriculture. That's altering the environment to fit their needs. Kinda mysterious to me that ppl dont see elephants maintaining and spreading the savanna for what it clearly is). So any sort of civilization Elephants build wouldnt include CITIES, it'd be focused on, like, common meeting ground and crossroads. It'd be a civilization of biker conventions. And allot of the tools humans create, elephants would never need in the first place. Why don't Elephants make axes? Cuz they can push over trees. Why dont they make spears? Theyve got tusks. Why don't they make ranged weapons? Their food stands still. Why don't they make pottery? What would they use pottery FOR? Similar deal with whales: why would they need "civilization" when they can communicate at radiological distances just fine with songs in an aquatic environment? What problem would "civilization", as you're conceiving of it, be their solution to?

Like: looking at evolution as steps towards a specific level of "development" or "progress" gets it all wrong. Humans made this stuff cuz humans needed it. Other animals also make the things they need, and don't make the things they dont. There's no grand mystery or tragedy in the lack of "civilization" among other species; those species get by just fine without it, so they don't do it.

Anyway, if humans die out Raccoons are taking over u_u

Love this explanation @zenosanalytic. Also like, evolution isn’t some coherent process, it’s not a set path determined by some Destiny. Our understanding of evolution is just based on our ability to recognize patterns and make connections between certain genetic and epigenetic changes and the environments they were likely responding to.

So if we’re going to try to predict anything, like @zenosanalytic was saying, you have to think about not just what the animal’s makeup or “potential” is, but what their needs are, which are shaped by their environment. What is going to drive an animal to develop culture and civilization? Well first we’d need to define what culture and civilization are, because I’d argue elephants and other animals that have strong memories and pass down information across generations may well have a lot of culture, and they live in pretty sophisticated social groups.

Also, and this is tangential, but highly intelligent birds could actually get much bigger and continue to fly. Parrots could become the size of geese, and also, if you look at the history of flying birds that are now extinct, they can actually get VERY large. The Heast’s Eagle of New Zealand comes to mind, which weighed about 40 lbs. And that’s not even getting into non-avian dinosaurs that could fly. I think the theory as to why flying animals don’t get so big anymore is that the niche of large predators is taken over by mammals (like big cats) pretty much everywhere in the world), but animals certainly can be large and still fly, that just seems to not be the most convenient body plan in today’s world.

Anyway, I love thinking about this stuff, very fun conversation here 👌

there was a pretty noise

I asked topher where the pretty noise came from; he said it was a wind chime

I asked topher how we make sure that the pretty noise keeps happening; he says the wind has to blow the right way; I am sad because I cannot make the wind blow right, and thus the wind chime will stop chiming

this has been a demonstration of the concept of dukkha

Fans exist, as do stores that sell wind chimes.

this has been a demonstration of the concept of transhumanism

#I LITERALLY HAVE MY AIR PURIFIER SORT OF UNDER MY WINDCHIMES. BLOWING UP. (via @manyblinkinglights)

SAME HAT :D :D :D I screw windchimes into my ceiling right infront of AC vents uwu uwu

Fun Fact: one possible etymology of dukka is from the prefix du meaning bad/difficult and kha meaning emptiness/hole making "bad/difficult hole" a valid possible english transliterations ouo Just putting that out into the world ouo ouo

Source

This is theft in every sense of the word. The value of the railroads comes from the labor of the workers making sure it runs. Any profit made is stolen from them. The railroad industry is not only willing to steal the value of their labor in profits, but - as is the nature of capitalism - is stealing their health, sleep, and social time as well.

Capitalism as a system of never-ending extraction on a hoarding death drive is on its full display here. We'll never stop its incessant meat-grinder churn until we get rid of it. The legal and political system has been built to serve the system: it's got to go.

Find a revolutionary socialist organization near you (key word: revolutionary) and get organized, because the extraction is only going to get more brutal and more violent if we don't exert the power we have to stop the system by withdrawing our labor and using it for our own benefit instead of their greed.

Yes. And not just their health: ALL of our health

Read This Thread And Be Enraged. The Health and Safety standards those workers were striking for are as much about preventing ^^^THIS^^^ as they are about protecting the workers themselves. Undermanned trains suffer malfunctions. Broken stuff doesn't get seen, doesn't get fixed, or gets triaged in favor of bigger problems because the Company values the deadline over everything(somehow, I suspect incinerated cargo fails to meet its deadlines too). They hit damage and blockage to the rails that more eyes would have caught. Under-rested crews miss maintenance issues, or make mistakes, or flatout faint from exhaustion at critical times. Everything their job needs -quick thinking, clear assessments, sure hands, awareness, strong bodies- is undermined by insufficient rest.

These Fucking Shareholders take home TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR, the Executives executing their policies take home TENS OF MILLIONS, INSTEAD of paying for the staff they NEED to operate safely; INSTEAD of maintaining and upgrading the trains to keep them running sure and safe.

MILLIONS of dollars are spent ~lobbying~ Politicians that could have been spent making sure their trains DONT FUCKING EXPLODE and POISON towns in Ohio for Gods' know how long.

But Capitalists don't care. At the end of the day, the only thing they care about is how much higher their fucking pile gets, and how many OTHER Capitalists they can look down on that night. It's Fucking Ridiculous that the people with the least power in these companies, the people with the least authority, are the Only Fucking People who give a damn about their impact on the wider world. The workers die, WE Die, the Earth is POISONED, and it means nothing to them so long as Number Go Up. This is why Strikes are important. This is why we side with workers every time. You don't have to share my conviction that it is Unjust to work a person to the bone and pay them a pittance of what they earn while you do nothing and pay YOURSELF the lion's share. You just have to recognize that these fucking Moneymen will kill you to make a dollar, and that the only people even trying to fucking stop them are their striking workers.

in the US we only have 3 genders. american beauty, american psycho, and american pie

What about American idiot

well we all know which gender i am for forgetting this one

In the US Gender System the people are represented by Four separate yet equally important Genders: American Beauty, American Psycho, American Pie, and American Idiot. These are Their Stories

what skills do yall have that make you annoying abt seeing people do it in media. i’ll go first i ran track for 6 years (first distance then sprinting) and i am physically incapable of not commenting on people’s running form

people in european fantasies growing new world exchange crops in their humble fantasy europe gardens like who the fuck imported the fantasy potatoes from fantasy peru. what happened. i want to know. i don't give a fuck that there's dragons and wizards there. did the dragons and wizards go to fantasy peru????

anytime ANYONE on a show or a movie talks about history or politics, Ever -___-

Just... everything Wrong, All Of The Time -______-

Julian Bashir is such a hilarious character conceptually. What if we took one of the most attractive men you’ve ever seen and give him a series of absolutely deranged character traits? 

He’s got a foot fetish. He’s one of the most beautiful men alive, but TERRIBLE with women. He loves tennis but for some reason only plays racquetball. He’s got a teddy bear named Kukalaka. He’s a genetically augmented super genius and an absolute moron. He tried to skip rocks over a sentient puddle. His best friends on the station are 1.) a Cardassian super spy and assassin who wants to fuck him 2.) an emotionally repressed Irishman and 3.) a worm. When presented with aforementioned Cardassian spy the first thing he does is form a book club. He’s obsessed with LARPing. He has a spy kink. He’s physically incapable of shutting the fuck up. Every time he tries to go to an academic conference he gets kidnapped. His job at DS9 is his first fucking job out of college. 

Like sir…. what? 

I love the idea, and wish they’d run with it instead of what they did, of no one on DS9 REALIZING Bashir got the gig straight out of college? Like: Being the primary Fed doctor on a mission to recruit the Bajoran people into the Federation; with all the diplomatic difficulties with the Cardassians that implies; which is ALSO necessarily a Fed outreach mission to many other peoples from that corner of the Galaxy who don’t interact much with the Fed; who was KEPT in that capacity even after the importance of DS9 upgraded with the opening of the Wormhole; and THAT, arguable the MOST Important Political posting in the Federation is his FIRST JOB OUT OF THE ACADEMY;;; EVERYONE ELSE AT THE POSTING IS FAMOUS!!!;;; and no one ever asks why because how could that possibly be the case that’s RIDICULOUS?

Then one day his classmate shows up and he’s smuguiltily telling everyone his “oh yeah I meticulously manipulated my gpa throughout med school[yes] to hide my Enhanced Heritage[completely failed at this; it drew scrutiny in fact] and fool the Fed Authorities[absolutely did not] so they’d give me this gig far out on the fringes instead of the normal ship-duty[everyone gets that even top students]” story and Sisco and Dax, the old Fed diplomacy/espionage hands, lock eyes over the table, suddenly thinking FUCKING TWINK HONEYTRAP! HIGH COMMAND YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARDS!!!

Gideon Nav, an intellect for the ages

I mean, I had to look up ‘lahar’ …

Gideon has the vocab of an English major EXCEPT when it comes to necromancy

omg, of course she does! There’s no way she’d give Harrow the satisfaction of acknowledging that she knows what she’s talking about. It’s like those guys who talk about ‘sportsball’ when you know for a fact they were first team rugby in high school.

Gideon: bone gunge

Harrow:

Every time Gideon uses the correct name for a bone I’m like ‘I bet she hates that she knows that’

Gideon knows exactly what she’s doing:

She knows enough about skeletons and reanimation to see that the servants are incredibly well animated, but not quite enough to determine the truth (to be fair even Harrow wasn’t 100% certain). And she knows enough about necromantic theory to be able to teach it, even without the ability or talent or flaw or whatever is required to be able to actually use it.

PLUS! when they are fighting the construct, Harrow gives her the names of the bones to hit as they go through the sequence - and Gideon follows along perfectly… which means that Harrow is fully aware Gideon is just pretending not to know things in order to annoy her.

Gideon Nav, the calculatedly trolling pseudo-himbo. Again and again, just when it seemed maximum sexy had been achieved…

Ok, Look, I love all of this but:

“gunge” is a good word. I don’t CARE if it’s in a dictionary or not -Im not even going to check!- because you know EXACTLY what it means the minute you read it, just from the spelling and sound. THAT’S WHAT A WORD IS: Sounds and Symbols conveying meaning.

What is a ‘gunge’? It’s some weird and grossly melted half-liquid, half-solid gunk, OBVIOUSLY!

I know the lyctors ascended without the benefit of a myriad of necromantic scholarship but it’s still funny to me that even after 10,000 years it took direct evidence for them to go “what?? you can do it both ways??” whereas Palamedes strolled around Canaan House for a few weeks and went ‘hm. seems fucked up. bet I could improve on this’ and then he did while trapped in death with one romance novel for company

Not gonna let you hide these tags :p

I wonder how much of this is a lack of awe towards ~God~?

Like: John lived in post-Resurrection society, they were all building it under his (passive-domineering)direction, they all saw him as their Savior; either cuz they remember the Resurrection or were raised by those who did.

On the flipside, John hasn’t been to Dominicus in 10k years and the Lyctors are just as remote and unreal -Mythology- for those in-system. They’re out there with The Cohort which, while ostensibly their “goal”(and how few of the candidates actl care about The Cohort shows just how ostensible a goal it is), is sort of mythic and almost like the afterlife itself; once they join it they leave their birthworld and Dominicus behind, most likely for life, to live an utterly different existence dedicated to death(which: kinda shades of HIC and the Alternian fleet now that I think about it; or at least as they’re explored in fic).

I wonder if some of it might be cultural overspill? Like, we know Teixcalaan dislikes mental modification (despite the shard pilots and the local police) and Lsel picks up a lot of Teixcalaanli cultural influence, so maybe they downplay imagos because of the Teixcalaanli taboo.

Alternatively, living your life with the expectation of living forever is probably not good for you, as we saw with Six Direction, and downplaying the effects of imagos might be an attempt to prevent the ‘worst case scenarios’ Mahit describes where the imago tries to overwrite the host or relive their old life/rekindle old relationships, which would cause all sorts of problems. Better to go into it accepting that you’ll only be a whisper in the back of someone’s head rather than much of a person stuck inside someone else’s brain. That could turn some people off and entice others for the wrong reasons (selfish desires rather than dedication to the station’s heritage and survival.)

Yes, but I don’t know if it even needs to be that complex, like: Lsel obviously has a communalist vibe and had an EVEN STRONGER one in the past; it needed that ideology to survive on the incredibly thin margins its way of life required, and physically embodying the ancestors played both a practical and ideological role in strengthening that sense of attachment and community(to the point where, in the modern day, the desire to LEAVE Lsel is still seen by many as a kind of moral disease).

But then an Empire comes along, spouting the SAME communalist line about “we all do better together. Cosmic balance requires your conformity” but not as a rhetoric of ego-suppression and communal peace, but rather as a rhetoric of dominance and control and cultural hierarchy, and also centering THEIR culture as the most worthwhile unifying force, rather than Lsel’s.

Now you have a political impulse towards differentiation, towards creating rhetoric and ideas promoting RESISTANCE to sublimation into collective-identities, and once that idea becomes important to the society, people will start considering it in relation to themselves and Lsel, too. So just by existing as a larger, known polity with a similar “communalist” ideology, Teixcalaan destabilizes the ideological&political world of Lsel.

I agree on the second point, too, about how this way of understanding it can act as a stabilizing and directing force in Lsel society. Another thing the merging idea does: pressure imago recipients to listen to their imagos, and start to THINK of imago input AS their own thoughts(and thus: strengthen traditional practices). By telling recipients that the imago isnt another *person* but just data, then the input FROM an Imago becomes easier to conceptualize as your own thoughts, reacting to that data. It encourages “integration” and cooperation from both participants.

zenosanalytic replied to your post “Re: Date night murder”

I’m not sure what you mean by that second part? But we don’t get a whole lot on the subject of Rose needing to convince herself… one of the books remarks on how depressing it is for Prospitians to have a culture based around futility, which definitely reflects back on Rose somehow, but I didn’t notice any other invocations of the motif.

I could see the books and conversations that nudge Rose toward John to be experienced as like, cultural mind-control, like a constant bombardment of THEY LIVE styled subliminal messages about handsome boys and reproduction (like a less overt version of Jane’s experience). But that still leaves the question of why Rose would pin John as the mastermind of the conspiracy of straightness… though I guess she kind of directly makes that accusation later, through the medium of Kanaya?

Not much of a defense there John… Gosh. It feels uniquely pleasing to see Rose’s paranoia shine in novel ways. Her being paranoid doesn’t mean it’s not true, mind you, but it does makes me wonder, when did John assume narrative control then, if the impression of John’s (clumsy) insidious influence gathered from Seer: Descend isn’t just Rose’s imagination? That’s a strange place to introduce such a game changing power, it’d have to be somewhere earlier, right? But idk where

@zenosanalytic replied:

Ah, thank you. I’m currently more inclined towards option 2 because a) Rose is being focalized, b) the power she (wrongly?) assigns to John feels similar to the disappointment she faced wrt Kanaya’s omnipotence, which bolsters my impression that we’re being immersed in Rose’s subjective experience and c) apparently alien narrator voices have been used elsewhere to communicate the focalized character’s thoughts on what the almighty /must/ be thinking (eg Gamzee being “the most important character in Homestuck”).

On the other hand, t’s not uncommon for things to be simultaneously fake and real in Homestuck; it’s useful to deny the existence of the fourth wall and treat some meta elements of the story as the characters’ paranoid speculation, but the fourth wall is very real. So I can’t exactly rule out that John’s narrative control is real, but until I get a sense of where it came from, I guess I’m more inclined to focus what it means for Rose when regarded as her fabrication.

One way through: Treating the fourth wall as fake, the bit on page 6 where the player cursor removes a cake from John’s bed could mean that John is literally able to move things with his mind, but attributes it to a higher power. And if John were literally psychic, the invocation of Mindfang’s powers could indicate that John (like Vriska!) actually has some degree of mind control, providing an explanation for his voice’s presence in what should be Rose’s thoughts? Though until now, I never spotted anything else in the story to substantiate that impression.

Since John crashing into Rose’s house is copied with Tavros and Vriska, it’d be interesting if even the motif of the mind-control near-kiss followed them… though even that doesn’t fully put us in the clear, since Vriska’s mind control (like her self-insertions into the story) has been deployed to characterize things Tavros was already inclined to think as her own will… 

zenosanalytic replied to your post “Re: Date night murder”

I’m not sure what you mean by that second part? But we don’t get a whole lot on the subject of Rose needing to convince herself… one of the books remarks on how depressing it is for Prospitians to have a culture based around futility, which definitely reflects back on Rose somehow, but I didn’t notice any other invocations of the motif.

I could see the books and conversations that nudge Rose toward John to be experienced as like, cultural mind-control, like a constant bombardment of THEY LIVE styled subliminal messages about handsome boys and reproduction (like a less overt version of Jane’s experience). But that still leaves the question of why Rose would pin John as the mastermind of the conspiracy of straightness… though I guess she kind of directly makes that accusation later, through the medium of Kanaya?

Not much of a defense there John… Gosh. It feels uniquely pleasing to see Rose’s paranoia shine in novel ways. Her being paranoid doesn’t mean it’s not true, mind you, but it does makes me wonder, when did John assume narrative control then, if the impression of John’s (clumsy) insidious influence gathered from Seer: Descend isn’t just Rose’s imagination? That’s a strange place to introduce such a game changing power, it’d have to be somewhere earlier, right? But idk where

The date-night murder of Mom and Dad continues to be a pivotal lesson: the apparent interruption of a scene is often a continuation in disguise.

zenosanalytic replied:

You haven’t misunderstood me, that’s basically my stance on the Bec Noir murder – though the other aspect of the death that struck me was 1) John joking beforehand about wanting to sink the Mom/Dad ship and 2) Bec Noir’s bloody footprints leading to John during Seer: Descend, which together seem to implicate John as the murderer (or at least, they suggest that Bec Noir is granting wishes). And its weird to me that these readings seem to co-exist quite comfortably.

But as for the second part of your question, I’m not sure. The Mom and Dad situation was a relatively compact joke, with a bunch of really overt flirtation punctuated by violence. But even though John and Rose literally travel to the site of their parent’s “death” and die, I’ve kind of resisted committing to a sexual reading of the scene, if only because nothing…seems to proceed from it? Or at least, nothing I understand. You have John kiss-reviving Rose’s corpse (with Vriska’s voice hauntingly imploring him to kiss Rose through Rose’s visor, which John seems to wear in a visual gesture toward union?), but the scene almost feels un-moored from its precedent. Seer: Descend is briefly revisited later, when John dreams about fighting Bec Noir and Rose pops in at the end and waves, but… that’s it.

(You could perhaps argue that the way John’s dream-fight against Noir replaces the revival of Rose is something to be read into, but that’s not something to be asserted lightly)

Or I guess, based on the earlier point that John’s “motive” for wishing to destroy the Mom/Dad ship is that it would make him and Rose siblings, thus decimating Karkat’s shipping grid (in which John marries Rose). So you could infer that consummation is exactly why John wanted the guardians out of the way in the first place – but that kind of set up (with John as some sort of weird conqueror) just doesn’t seem consistent with his getting sucker stabbed? The scene’s incoherent to me, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with any psychosexual framework I throw at it. It’s a fraught subject that I can’t write about with confidence, so I mostly avoid writing about it.

people who tell you there is no difference between 44k and 192k audio are wrong. the difference is negligible, and most tracks have been deliberately mastered so that the difference is almost completely eliminated, which is probably why people think there is no difference (because they tested it on flattened tracks). if you try to make an example of this, say as an audio track or a video, anyone who listens to it must have also high quality output enabled in their local settings in order to be able to hear it (as well as selecting the highest quality on the stream itself, neither of which are typically enabled by default) – or else it will all be downsampled to the same rate in the streaming process 

anyway, this is analogous to the skyrod phenomenon in optics, and uncertainty in particle physics. actually i think it’s a little better than an analogy – the logic underlying shannon bandsampling (for radio transmission) should be imported to physics to clarify the damn thing. i want to say we should define units in presheaves but that would not clarify anything (although it would sidestep the problem of quantizing gravity) 

you don’t know how degraded an mp3 your colleague emailed you is until you open it and compare it to the full quality version. you don’t know at exactly what picosecond the first snare hits in this particular copy of the file, but you can be almost certain it’s very near the 1.4 second mark, unless the downsampling rendered very badly. however, you can’t make this sort of comparison “to the full quality version” in physics, which is why we find seemingly weird phenomena like bell’s inequality, because every description of an event is based on a statistical distribution of downsampled trials. you never access the full quality version. it’s not opening the file that governs the collapse of the waveform, it’s downsampling it. it’s not something mystical about your observation of a phenomenon, it’s something limited about the framerate of matter 

in response to your tags: yes, that’s basically it, but there are a couple finer points that might really drive the idea home.

@wumblr: .for extra credit where does the downsampling metaphor break down?  .hint: phonons; the quantum of sound; are a quasiparticle