Aslan's Compass

It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh

and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist

Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)

In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”

That would make a lot of sense.

Consider, for a moment, an eldritch parasite. This ancient being feeds off of the life-force of other creatures. Not that unusual, as most living things also consume other living things, to various degrees. But this one is technically somewhat removed from the usual structures of biology. It is a passive and opportunistic predator, for the most part. Whenever a living being that is connected to it - however weakly - dies, it consumes part of its energy, and gets bigger.

As life in the galaxy flourishes, and time passes, this singular entity gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like a catfish; the only limit to its growth is how much it can consume to fuel it. The larger it gets, the more it is able to sink its invisible claws into other living beings, until eventually there is hardly any life out there which hasn’t been ‘infected’ by it, and slated to become its spiritual dinner as soon as its biological form gives out.

And here we actually come to - of all things - the midichlorians. Which, the Jedi use to measure someone’s sensitivity to the Force, which works because midichlorians are the vehicle for the predatory parasite to infest living beings. The immune systems in some people begin to develop a certain degree of resistance to them, which is why some folks have more, and some have less, and this directly correlates to their Force sensitivity. The more midichlorians you have, the worse your immune system is at fending off the parasite.

The Force counters the risk of being bred out of subsequent generations by developing camouflage, and adapting itself into a more seemingly-symbiotic relationship with its prey.

What the Jedi see as the ‘light side’ of the Force, is a reflective layer that this predator has created via its connection to all living things. This network is the honey trap that encourages the beings still strongly connected to it, to spread that connection, because it affords them advantages while they are still alive. But its elements are comprised mostly of echoes and reflections of their fellow prey organisms. Force Ghosts that resemble the departed. Emotions that are transmitted along this layer and between individuals. Small amounts of power that can be siphoned off to impact the environment, and can also spread the Force to whatever living thing it comes into contact with.

This being is huge now, it needs a lot of juice in order to maintain its existence, let along continue to grow. And like most predators it’s willing to expend a certain amount of energy in order to guarantee a bigger pay-off.

The deeper you go into the Force, the more the Force starts exerting its own will through you. And the less you see of the reflected camouflage of it, and the more apparent it becomes that the Force wants large swaths of death to feed it. Which is why Dark Siders often become so preoccupied with things like Death Stars.

But it’s a balancing act. A large population of relatively peaceful Force sensitives, like the Jedi, cost more than they’re worth, because beyond a point they take too much energy from the Force and don’t kill enough people to pay for it. A single individual abusing their powers for self-gain and murdering left and right, though, accomplishes the goal of feeding it. The Force obviously doesn’t want its food supply to die out completely, but this explains the persistent cycles of the Star Wars universe - as a soon as a group of peaceful Force users becomes prominent, they get wiped out by a few Dark Siders who have tread too deeply past the reflective surface of the Force, and become actual vessels for its will.

And then when the Dark Siders have finished killing a whole bunch of people, it’s time for them to go, too, so that they don’t wipe out the entire populace and kill off the Force’s food supply beyond its ability to reasonably recover. The peaceful types then see an upswing, as they are more adept at spreading the Force. So the cycle goes - Jedi spread the Force, Sith kill the Jedi and feed the Force, Jedi kill the Sith and resume spreading the Force. It’s a planting and harvest cycle, and the galaxy is populated with the Force’s living spirit crops. Anakin Skywalker, who was arguably one of the beings most closely connected to the Force, and had an extremely high midichlorian count, basically lived this cycle in its entirety as an individual - he spread the Force as a Jedi, he killed people as a Sith, and then he ended it all in order to preserve his progeny for the next round.

12 years.

They had their grand opening last year, after /twelve years/ in a space that was really not meant for it at all. One room, with a staircase to the basement in the middle (or maybe it was cables?, anyway).

The public library where I'm living now also did a remodel in COVID time, and that was more than a year and less than two, with time in a temporary location. Granted, they had a bigger funding pool to draw from and it was just a remodel, but still.

Bringing out those tags because so, so interesting, perhaps one of my favourite things, to mess around with patterns of story*. When I sat down with Spock to transcribe his autobiography, we came up with a form for what Vulcan memoir might look like, which he subverts. (There’s some of Sarek’s poetry too.)

Meditations on a Crimson Shadow is described as being set during a future war, so is a Cardassian sf novel. I figured it would surely, at least superficially, tell the story of Cardassian supremacy and permanent conquest, like Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. Except maybe if you were reading it in the basement of your father’s home as your whole civilization implodes around you. Then I thought it might read differently. Or at least you would start the previously unimaginable work of imagining differently.

If historical fiction tries to reconfigure what we think was possible for people in the past, sf tries to configure what we think can be possible to us in the future. They feel very close, in my mind. Can we find sources or traditions in the past that give us succour or hope? What visions of the future are available to us, or do we need to imagine, and how do we map our way there? I think about these things all the time.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI

I’ve done a piece before of rugal and ziyal and Jake discussing Star wars franchise as a piece of cardassian literature, with decades of one family either serving or destroying the state, with the filial obligations to the generation before as a repetitive epic, now I really want to revisit it with your incredible class lens of Patterns of Story.

I know there’s something on the bones of murder mystery thriller pulp that could be translated to Vulcan, something probably closer to the Detective kosuke kindaichi books, where it takes you through every single clue and a diagram of the house so you can see the logical leaps and make them yourself, as opposed to a Sherlock Holmes where you only really get the clues after they’ve amounted to a solution. The elements of murder mystery undertone of an empire in decline and a new era struggling to establish itself while ancient secrets come unburied that’s in both Agatha Christie and in Yokomizo is really the part that I cannot figure out how to change for Vulcan culture itself.

I’m blown away the idea of Meditation depicting a Ragnarok that has always happened and always will happen, and what that might mean if you actually see the world end and yet live beyond it. Does that confirm the cyclical nature of history or completely shatter that view of the world?

On Cardassian sf, my mind is going now, as it often does, to Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”; presumably a Cardassian version would switch it round so that at that end everyone was relieved to live in fascistic perfection. But reading that reversed story and looking out of the window at imperial decline would surely do strange things to your head (as, to some extent, reading it 40 years after publication does too).

Here’s my teaching notes on crime fiction (or, more precisely, forms of the thriller). Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine are the same writer under different names, but the patterns of her respective books are completely different. The notes at the bottom suggest examples of a composite form. (This was from a seminar on genre, and genre expectations.)

A series of Cardassian detective novels on the lines of Aurelio Zen would be incredible: ostensibly about restoring order/faith in the system, but as the series advances we realise the settings track the slow decline of the Union. A subversive long-game on the part of the author (who, in time-honoured fashion) would therefore be as guilty as everyone else, of the crime of dissidence. Good luck getting that one past the Order. Would Vulcan crime novels centre round crimes of passion, that most deplorable of behaviours?

It was invented by one person for a specific purpose - to have a universalizable way of establishing historical dates, rather than having to deal with dynastically based date systems. And it was a really good idea. This is not surprising, since Bede is basically the father of Historiography. He also is the guy who gave us the notion of Primary Sources. Bede is amazing.

When a guy revolutionizes the entire way calendaring is done, he has the right to set his zero point wherever he pleases.

People have pointed out that one problem with CE notation is that it presents itself as neutral when it is exactly the same system as AD. What exactly is "common" about this era? The zero point doesn't become neutral just by effacing its source.

(Also BCE is nonsense. Just use negative numbers)

It makes sense for scholarly tradition to not want to be tied to a specific religion. But scholarly tradition is very enthusiastic about being tied to earlier scholarly tradition. The convention of AD was established by a scholar for a scholarly purpose. We know his name. We know what he was doing, and why, and how. And he was doing it better than anybody else. That is worth honoring.

Rather than pretending that it's a neutral system, acknowledge that it's not. It's not some naturally occurring "common era," it's the system developed by Bede, centered around dates that were important to him personally (but which he intended to be universally applicable).

I have been informed that Bede notation may in fact have been first devised by Dionysus the Humble of Scythia to calculate the date of Easter more accurately. But my broader point stands.

henchperson: uh, boss? You know how a couple weeks ago, me and the girls put up that barrier against invaders, extra thick, just like you asked?

boss: yes…

henchperson: one thing, though, boss…

boss: out with it.

henchperson: weeeel, the good news is no invaders.

boss: and the bad news?

henchperson: weeeeeel, we made it out of wet tissue again, boss. so we’re going to have to peel it off and put up a new one before it gets all nasty, see?

i like the idea of a mongoose as an anti tea party animal

And then imagine people saying “NO! You don’t deserve privacy, you don’t deserve your own life. Every waking moment of you life should be accounted for, weighted and analyzed. We are the ultimate arbiters of morality, and we will try and hurt and kill you if we find you ingesting the kind of plant that displeases us, or viewing the wrong media, or not viewing the right media, etc etc. All the world should be ours by virtue of our existence, and any attempt by you to enclose anything as your own will be taken as an act of aggresion that retroactively justifies our encroaching.”

And the latter think of themselves as the good guys.

And do you know why the Gadsden flag uses a rattlesnake? Because it’s the only snake that warns you when you get too close.

Whatever you think it used to mean, if its to associate with those kinds of assholes I want nothing to do with it.

Fuck fascists, Fuck authoritarians, Fuck Trumpster fire and cronies.

You: “Fuck fascists!”

Also you: “People don’t deserve human rights!”

Consider, the rattlesnake. Dangerous enough on it’s own, with only it’s natural abilities but effectively helpless when dealing with a threat specialized to handle it’s tricks. Not unlike how your average person’s own natural abilities are generally enough to survive day-to-day but when dealing with someone who specialized to prey on them (violent criminals, the government, etc) they’re pretty bloody useless. Throw some guns in the mix however…