Crimson Mist

So, after uploading all the science and posterity videos, Ryland adds one ‘For Eva’ knowing full well that several governments and possibly the entirety of what is left of the world is gonna see it and he lays on a thick spiel about how he finally remembered that they were gonna get married, right before the accident that put him on this mission, that he remembered proming her the rest of his life and he remembered ‘how hard it was for us to say goodbye’ and ‘you made the right decision. Of course you did. Of course it was the right decision, but Eva, I still miss you. I was missing you before I even fully remembered you. Golly, why didn’t we just – touch more? Talk more? You wouldn’t even let me hold your hand! But I understood. Your hands were full. You had the world in them, Eva.’ And ‘I hope you kept the lights on love, because I’m coming home!’ and he gives the camera this goopy, sweet, broad smile, because he’s utterly tickled, knowing full well that Eva is gonna have to live with this for the months and or years between the Beetles arriving and Ryland making it back, and he even gets Rocky to make him a xenonite wedding band to tuck into a Beetle with his little spaceman, to really sell the whole thing, right, and he’s just freaking giddy about how mad that’s gonna make Stratt –

And then the tauemoeba escape, and Ryland has to go back for Rocky, and he makes another video, explaining the science and the issue and the solution and then he trails off for a minute or so, expression conflicted, and when he looks back up it’s just with this breathless soft ‘Eva’ on his lips, and then he swallows, and then he smiles and it’s – sweet in a sad way, because for Ryland this is really goodbye, and his prank had sort of made him feel better about what she’d done, and honestly – he did miss her. Even still. ‘Eva, I’ve gotta go,” he says, his eyes wet and his voice quavering. ‘You were right about me. It’s gotta be me,’ he shrugs, laughs, wipes away the wet line at the edge of his eyes. ‘There’s nobody else and I mean, I’m on a winning streak, right? Why not try 2 for 2 in saving an entire species, huh? So I just…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I made it so hard for – for us. And I’ll miss you. Just – do me a favor and in case I don’t make it – I know how you love back-up plans, yeah? – do me a favor and send an extra probe of taumoeba to 40-Eridani for me? You really can’t let me die in vain here, alright? So make sure – make sure to save both our worlds, alright? Yeah……. And just…. if you care for me any bit at all still, do me one other favor, Eva Stratt. Live a good life for me’ He pleads, before he shudders a breath, looking off to the side for a quiet moment, and then he looks down, nods to himself, presses a kiss to his fingers and his fingers to the camera and turns it off.’

And Eva, right, watches these tapes in a room full of world leaders and aerospace representatives and she’s just – fuming red and there is that stupid little ringbox from the Beetle in front of her with the most unique wedding band in the galaxy in it and it fits perfectly and she’s just -seething, because that is not what happened. They were not – secret lovers, they did not secretly marry or promise to marry, none of that –

But the old Petrova Task Force, right, they take this and run with it – “Oh yeah, it was obvious, I mean ,they denied it, but you could tell –“

“Grace was so bad at hiding right, terrible liar –“

“Stratt was always slipping him these – sour skittles packets, and i mean, that was definitely favoritism, you have no idea how hard it was to get anything on the vat –“

“And the sticky notes! She’d leave him these cute little notes, right, on his lab or on his coffee mug or, one time, I saw her just stick it to his forehead –“

“And Grace never let her be alone, you know? I mean, he was always kind of following her around like a puppy, but no one else ever really approached her, so when we were all, you know, together, those two would wander off –“

Eva’s getting bombarded with all this, and she’s shaking with anger and like, maybe cried a tear or two of frustration, denying it because people are acting sympathetic, while she's insisting that; "I paved the Sahara and I bombed the Antarctic shelf and I sent Ryland Grace into space against his wishes –“

And everyone is just like, oh Eva, we know you loved him. We know how hard that must have been –

And they remake the movie about the project, and the new one has this entire romantic sublot, and the theme of her loving him so much, and having to give him to the stars to save humanity, knowing she’s never getting him back, and this really poignant ending about Stratt waking up in prison (because she did go to prison) and Ryland Grace, waking up in space, both of them on these narrow bunks with these tiny little windows, reflecting different suns, and theres this mutual red streak of cinematic glare in that sunlight, right, and they turn her into this doomed tragic heroine in the public eye, right, and Eva goes so far as to try and release the audio of Grace’s refusal to go up on the Hail Mary as proof that it was not what they were making it out to be, except someone (Carl) removed bits of it, and the rest can definitely be interpreted as having some… subtext, and Eva’s like ‘Carl, why?’

And Carl’s just – it’s what our man would have wanted.

And Eva actually wears the damn ring, right? It’s a space ring, from outer space, from another intelligent species, and it she looks at it daily wanting to kill Ryland Grace and knowing she already has, and what to do, with that?

So there’s one generation that knows her as Eva Stratt, World Dictator, and another generation who knows her as Eva Stratt, Ryland Grace’s Widow, and like, in every single public appearance, she has to continue to protest that they were not married, and everyone is just like ‘Damn, she’s so broken-hearted she’s in denial’ and Eva is like ‘No, that is not what is happening.’

And anyways, she lives to an unreasonably old age and when she’s like, one hundred and eight or so a ship arrives from Erid, bearing a delegation and Ryland Grace’s ashes, which one of the aliens absolutely insists on delivering to Eva Stratt, right, and this is Rocky and he’s carrying this most beautiful sort of crystal urn and it’s all very public and touching and Rocky asks ‘Did Eva live a good life?’

And Eva actually cries this time, for Ryland, and it’s stupid and they weren’t ever anything and this whole joke of his has tormented her for decades and now she’s crying over him because he’s dead. She sent him into space to die and it took him a lifetime to do it and she still outlived him and it is – unfair, now. It has always been unfair.

‘He did not actually love me,’ Eva tells Rocky, when they have been ushered somewhere private out of respect for her ‘mourning’. ‘We were not – that.’

‘Rocky knows,’ the alien says. ‘But Grace said…. maybe could have been.’

‘Is that really his last message for me?’ Eva asks, shaking her head.

So, "turning to the Dark Side" in SW is usually going to be a plot beat in the two primary forms that SW media takes, right: visual (movies, TV) or written (all the books, but also in fanfic). In both cases, as the audience, you're largely going to have to take the author's explanation for how it feels, why a character is doing it, and what the motivations are behind it. Even in visual media you're more likely to be told than shown, since it's established as an extremely internal, feelings-based experience for the characters. Because it's not a process replicable in real life, storytelling explanations for the difference between how light and dark side Force usage feels is going to have to rely on metaphor, and on the audience's willingness to engage in pathos. Which, to be fair, audiences are famously great at! There's been mixed results in SW media, but it's perfectly possible to make turning to the dark side a very engaging story beat that feels emotionally real and justified.

Then, there's interactive media. I'm fascinated by the storytelling potential of narrative games because of the different way they demand that the audience engage with the story, right, the way that physiological input from the audience changes the connections that the brain makes to the input it's receiving. The way having to press a button to make the next action happen manipulates the lizard brain into believing itself the cause of the effect, even though the forebrain understands that the story is just as predetermined as a published novel, so the button push is really not very different from a page turn. It's a potent tool for manipulating the audience's emotions and engagement, very easy to fumble but pretty mindblowing when executed well.

There were definitely moments in Survivor when I was like "ok am I going to be allowed to actually play this game some day" when control kept being taken away from me in favor of cutscenes. But as the story went on and I got into it, I stopped minding the times when my thumbs were still, and barely noticed the transitions between "I am making this happen" and "I am watching this happen." That's good narrative game storytelling, for sure. But it still felt like a good story that happened to also be a good video game, not quite meshing the two in a meaningful way. Until Nova Garon.

A lot depends on how you play this, I'm sure, but in my case I pressed through the end of the game from the last Dagan fight to credits in one sitting. Because of how tired my hands were from the physical demand of the Darth Vader fight, and because I had been maining blaster stance for much of the game, I made a semi-conscious choice when I reached Nova Garon to use my saber as little as possible. I one-shotted a lot of unarmored officers from across rooms, having decided that Cal felt cold with rage and tightly coiled, so it would make sense for him to not even give these people the honor of being killed by a lightsaber. So I'll grant you that I was adding my own hot sauce to the delicious angst recipe the game had already made for me.

Then you get to Bode and have a really long cutscene that doubles down on the idea that Cal's anger is, at that moment, cold. He's tightly restrained. For several back and forths in the conversation he even still tries to be neutral in front of Kata.

So, for me at least, it REALLY fucking worked as a storytelling move when Cal explodes. Bode runs off, you chase, and the very first thing you're faced with is a room packed with a comical amount of enemies, the kind of melee scrum you've been trained by the mechanics for the whole game to approach with a whirlwind lightsaber freakout using either double-bladed or dual stance, ideally using Slow to buy some time. I had truly played into the game's hands like a fool here because I only had blaster and single stance as options at the time. So I'm looking around my screen in that split second, considering my stance and Force and slicing options, prepared for punishment, barely registering the notification scroll on the right side of the screen because a whole bunch of new databank entries get dumped by the Bode cutscene - the last one of which is, iirc, 'Kata Akuna.'

So Kata Akuna fades upward and is replaced by the same size white text, relatively small, suggesting a button press to you, like it's done a dozen or more times before to say stuff like 'press O to dash' or 'press R1 to tame the creature,' relatively benign things that are always very useful tools that you use over and over and over as soon as you gain them. Except it says 'press [button command you already know and have internalized as your most powerful Force tool with the longest cooldown, which you were just thinking about using] to have Cal embrace his darkness.'

And like, the phrasing is fascinating to me there. It's always fascinating to me how anyone talks about playing a video game, anyway, like "I just beat Ganon" or whatever instead of "Link just beat Ganon," because of course you feel ownership of the actions of the protagonist of a piece of interactive media in a way you rarely feel ownership of the actions of anyone in a book or movie. Previous button instructions in this same game have said 'press [blah] to do [thing]' without a given addressee, leaving the player to probably interpret that, unconsciously, as the unspoken 'you' that is typical in English grammar. 'You press O to dash.' 'You press R1 to tame the critter.' But - 'press [dah] to have Cal embrace his darkness' is so - unsettling and offputting, separating you, player, from Cal, protagonist - and it's occupying a VERY important space because the buttons its asking you to press are ones you already probably wanted to press, but instead of doing the thing you wanted it to do it's going to do some kind of new, horrible, unknown thing that is almost certainly going to be bad for Cal.

Then you press it, because you have to, and it's the best fucking shit that's ever happened to you, the player. It jumps your level by 10, instakills half the people in the room, makes you fast and powerful and nigh unbeatable. Depending on what difficulty you've been playing on, it may make a combat encounter that looked like a surefire several-deaths-in-a-row run into something as trivial as a roomful of bugs. It lasts an insanely long time. It's godmode. It's a broken mechanic. It makes your screen bleed. The unbridled glee that you, the player, probably feel while killing that room full of people is at stark odds with the circumstance you are in, storywise, because you are supposed to be feeling grief and rage and driving urgency to hunt and catch your fleeing enemy. But instead you have a moment in this room of, if you're like me, hooting and hollering while doing a big old war crime, just because it's suddenly easy and fun.

It took me a couple more 'embrace the darknesses' to realize that Cal only has one stance in that mode. Anything you've learned before is thrown away - earned skill ditched in favor of brute strength. And I didn't really care? Even though I did really enjoy how skilled I had gotten with my favored stances, because the combat in Survivor feels really good, and also I knew they'd be back after no more than 2 minutes in dark side mode. So even though I didn't get to do the moves I'd spent so long mastering, every 'embrace the darkness' was a little indulgence of having my cake and eating it too. It started to feel like an insta-win mechanic against any enemy of a low enough level, and a safety/turtling mechanic against slightly more difficult ones. I wanted to trigger it as soon as the cooldown ended even when I didn't need to, just for the fun. I felt safer having it available.

And all of that - as a mechanic - is the single most compelling depiction of the Dark Side that I've ever seen in a piece of SW media.

The way it shows up as an understated suggestion in your periphery. The way it cuts through every Gordian knot in front of you. How fun it feels, how unfair it feels, how safe it feels to have it on your side. As a game mechanic it places the audience in the position of actually feeling what before only metaphor could attempt to describe - the way turning to the dark side is all about letting go and letting loose. Being a nuclear reactor mid-meltdown. Laughing and button-mashing and going "oh no, oh shit, I shouldn't be doing this" but not stopping. And also, as the player, your mind is not clouded by any mysterious outside control - you're aware of what you're doing, you're aware you're making choices here, you could definitely stop using the mechanic after the first instance where the game has to put a finger on the scale for a moment to teach you the controls. And maybe you do make that choice, idk how you play. But you get through the massacre and at the end when Merrin asks Cal not to kill one last person, and Cal agrees, it doesn't feel cheap? It doesn't feel like Cal 'snapped out of' anything. It doesn't feel like there was anything for him to snap out of, because he, like you, has just been making these choices for room after room of enemies, and frankly no one's been around to ask him to stop before now. He still seems reasonable, and so a reasonable request by someone he cares about still reaches him.

The Dark Side isn't the grief, pain, suffering, anger, etc. It's the release from those. And this one moment of a game mechanic explains that so powerfully and succinctly, in a way that other mediums can't replicate. It's one of the the best uses of a medium in the service of the story since House of Leaves. It's still making me have to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling weeks later.

There's more to say about how the menu screen changes once Cal's embraced his darkness, altering his internal landscape in a way that doesn't change what you have access to but which can never be unseen. About how 'Slow' as a mechanic is gone forever, the most powerful Force ability Cal had just eradicated by an imposter version (a better version, the insidious inner voice wants to say). About the dramatic, overwhelming way the game chooses to command you to embrace your darkness next time, when the whole screen goes red and black. And the phrasing is different there, too, not 'have Cal embrace his darkness' but just 'embrace the darkness,' because this time you and Cal are not being treated as semantically separate entities. The first time, it's like maybe Cal wouldn't want to, so you, player, have to be the little Sithy whisper in his head that makes him do it. But the second time, Cal wants to do it so badly that his desire to embrace the darkness overpowers your, player's, agency to attempt to make any other choice. Even if you could have won that fight another way, Cal didn't want to win that fight any other way. He takes away your UI until you free him into his darkness, release him from his complex suffering into the simplicity of power.

It's just so fucking good, okay. It's such good storytelling, structurally. The way the player's choices and Cal's actions are on a surface level one-to-one correlated but actually form this intricate internal conversation. Using the most important thing a video game can be - fun - as a tool to describe a very dark place that anyone might go to internally, whether in a reality with space magic or not. But! Not by doing the thing that's been done before, the old "you [consumer] should feel bad because your act of consumption made the characters feel bad" fourth-wall-breaking meta thing that shames the reader for being entertained by others' pain (aka experiencing pathos, an extremely normal and not-shameful thing for humans to do). Survivor uses the audience's enjoyment of the medium against them narratively, in a gleeful and not-shaming way I don't think I've seen from media before, and I love it.

you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.

the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.

and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?

when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)

and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.

he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.

his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.

the eridians experiencing cosmic bliss.

This illustration shows the relative scale of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and a Tyrannosaurus rex. Roman is over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long — about the length of a T. rex — and over 14 feet (4.4 meters) wide when fully deployed. Roman also weighs around 18,000 pounds, or 8,000 kilograms (dry mass), which is the approximate mass of a T. rex as well.

Did you know NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is both roughly as long and as massive as a Tyrannosaurus rex? This observatory, which will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida very soon, is over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long and weighs around 18,000 pounds (8,000 kilograms), not including the fuel. Let’s explore some of the components that bring Roman to T. rex proportions.

Living in Australia, I'm kinda always at the mercy of my posts lining up with crappy timezones, so when I came back to Tumblr and realised there was a fully in-built post scheduling system, I was very excited...only to happily realise that even with that in mind, Tumblr has a much more 'time-blind' and relaxing approach to posts. It lifts my spirits whenever I see that somebody's gone through my catalogue or liked a post that had been put out days or even weeks ago, and it appears that that's a far more prevalent phenomenon on this site compared to anywhere else. A guy could get used to this more easygoing posting experience, although of course that's all thanks to folks like you! Thank you all. BONUS:

Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.

Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).

Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.

I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.