every shape of deepest winter

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

It happens during the whole vampire questline. It's not related to vampires. I may misremember details so forgive me for that. But you have to go through old dwemer ruins and you meet the last living snow elf in Skyrim. You know, the snow elves. Who were enslaved by the dwemer and went blind and feral and still live in the ruins long after the dwemer are gone. The falmer is what they're called now. Here's the last one who's in their original form.

And oh hey, to get to where you need to go you have to take a path that's an old snow elf coming of age rite of passage. And he's going to take you through it and you're going to learn about this dead culture, this culture that was killed.

And now you've got what you came for and there's one way out. Now that you've learned what the falmer used to be, where they came from, what was lost because of the dwemer enslaving them, you have to go through a falmer village.

It's a narrow canyon lined with huts. There's no way to avoid it, in order to get through you have to kill them. They attack you because that's what they do to people invading their territory. You're invading their village. You have to kill them or they'll kill you. It's the only way out. You feel terrible.

If you stop to loot one of the huts on your way out you'll find a book full of unreadable text. Take it to the winterhold college and give it to the librarian and he'll tell you that it's a remarkable find because it's evidence that falmer have retained intelligence. They're not just mindless feral monsters. They have this book, they've kept this book even though they can't see. They have a culture. Maybe they still remember what happened to them. Maybe that's why they're so mad.

You just killed so many of them. You're going to have to kill many more.

Anyway.