nothing, and then suddenly everything

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

most big herbivores are, frankly. if you have a pretty steady supply of food and don’t have to worry about missing a hunt and starving to death, you can afford to throw your weight around more and generally be more aggressive!

that’s why the most dangerous big animals in the world are almost all herbivores.

This is Camarasaurus lentus, around 15 ish meters and over 16 tonnes, for reference sake, the largest african elephant bull EVER recorded was 11 tonnes. pretty decent difference right?  Well, except one thing. This is a SMALL sauropod. Want to see a large one?

Yeah, you’re reading that right, 53 tonnes. Almost five times heavier than the largest recorded african elephant ever. And they get even larger.

This bastard was last estimated at 73 tonnes, the largest animal ever to walk the earth. And they didn’t just get big, they got l o n g, too

That right there, is BYU 9024, it (among with a few undescribed remains) shows an animal in the size range of 40+ meters, this one here clocks in at around 40, and the funny thing is? this is the *conservative* estimate, larger specimens are not unreasonable in the slightest. It’s not quite as heavy as the big south american bastard above it, but at 67 tonnes, its close.

Secondly, speed. We’ve all seen it, lumbering behemoths that were dumb as rocks and probably about as fast, with a tailwind, going downhill. Well…. Not really, the latest studies done as of Asier larramedi’s sauropod facts and figures book gives some… Horrifying estimates.

I’ll spare you the complete explanations, there will be a paper out soon that goes into greater depth, but I’d like to draw your attention to the speeds, specifically fo the animal called Giraffatitan. Most people are familiar with it in some way, shape or form, but to clear up what exactly Giraffatitan is. 

They’re not the small ones in the foreground, they’re the big ones in the back. 33 tonnes of pure muscle, moving at 25 kp/h. Again, to provide further reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUE304bqwQc  THIS is how fast that is. It’s a house running at you, forget a hippo charging you, this would be a tidal wave of flesh and hatred bearing down on you.

And finally, weapons.

Like someone earlier pointed out,  Apatosaurus should have absolutely trounced the indominus, because quite frankly at such a size anything you do will hurt. Kicks with the front or hind limbs will be utterly devastating to anything except another of their kind, but Apatosaurus had another thing going in its favour.

One thicc-ass neck. Pictured here with speculative keratin spikes on the bottom, whilst the spikes are speculation, the neck itself would have essentially functioned like a fleshy battering ram, capable of pulping ribcages and smashing anything that could have “preyed” upon them. But that’s not even the most terrifying thing, though this is not specific to Apatosaurus itself, but to all diplodocoids (Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Diplodocus, etc.) Specifically, the tail. 

This is Diplodocus, as you can see, this animal is half tail, as you might also be able to see, the latter half of that tail tapers down to what can, in all essence be described as- a whip. A serrated whip, powered by some of the largest muscles in the largest animals that would have walked on earth. But it gets even MORE horrifying.

You see, there have been studies that have come to a conclusion, and though there are those that have doubted them, I personally have looked at the papers and found merit to the theories.

Well, I’ll not hold you in suspense any longer.

The tips of these tails, could have, and would have broken the sound barrier. Yup, you heard that right, and as soon as that fact begins to seep in, you’ll realize the horrifying implications. A diplodocoid whipping its tail, would blow out the eardrums of any animal close by and unfortunate enough to draw its ire, the sauropod itself would possibly not come out unscathed, but when you can literally give a would-be predator internal hemmorages by, what to them would be essentially like snapping a finger, the benefits begin to outweigh the risks involved. And that’s not even mentioning what would happen if it HIT anything, an impact at such velocity, with such mass driving it would be- quite frankly? Devastating beyond words. Flesh wouldn’t just tear, it wouldn’t just break skin or bones, flesh would MELT, bones would shatter, if not simply cease to be. And this is on a sufficiently sized animal such as Allosaurus or Torvosaurus. On a human? They would be ripped in half. So yeah, Sauropods get shafted in popular media to an extent that isn’t even possible, if you think hippo’s are scary, imagine something fourty times its size, faster than you, and able to kill you without even touching you. Sauropod are kaiju, plain and simple.

The babies were really cute though. This is andrew, and he’s a baby… the size of a horse. If you want to know just how tiny they began, this is probably a good reference.

you might not be a threat to an adult sauropod, but they may very well still decide to smear you and any other small maybe-predator in the area just in case you might get any ideas about snacking on their eggs or babies now or in the future.

but, to your point, the cat didn't 'somehow' get on the jury duty list, it was on the jury duty list very specifically because the cat was registered to vote. the unspoken assumption is that it's so easy to register to vote that even a cat can do it! the cat is even jokingly accused of voter fraud. of which, of course, the cat is innocent.

it is left to the reader's imagination how that happened, and who else could potentially register to vote.

this post is not in any way intending to blame anybody who read that and thought 'huh, what a funny story' and thought nothing more about it. this post is intending to demonstrate the ideology underlying the story going around, that one might have missed on a first reading.

i admit, i also uncritically reblogged that story, in no small part because i knew a cat had in fact been summoned for jury duty before! the voter registration stuff pinged as odd, but the humor of the situation overrode my inner critic. in the original, real story, the cat had been listed as a pet in the census, which is how he somehow ended up on the jury roll. the other details - right on down to the first exemptions being denied and a vet being asked to write testimony that the potential juror was in fact, a cat - were lifted directly from this sixteen-year-old news story.

He goes down, ends up in a coma or brain dead, on life support, genuinely never coming back and even if part of him did he would be in agony from his cpr injuries. The best thing is to let him go.

But its not convenient to. His own *wife* runs away to China so they can't *make* her do the right thing and allow him to pass. She doesn't love him enough to override the political posturing. His own family is letting his abused half alive carcass get played with like a political doll while he's trapped in purgatory, as close to undead as one can be.

I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.

I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.

The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.

We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.

None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

Or, Part III of Why I Think Dottore Is Coming Back (Part I, Part II)

Everywhere I look, I see Dottore so, when Qiqi drew The Hanged Man in her Witch’s Revelation, I had thoughts about Barbeloth’s interpretation:

It symbolizes transcendence and waiting, and also detachment from the everyday world.

I want to use the Lunar Arcanum to elaborate on Dottore’s connections to alchemical transcendence.

Specifically, I connect the card to V.I.T.R.I.O.L., an alchemical acronym that translates to visit the interior of the earth and, by rectifying, you will find the hidden stone. By literally and metaphorically surrendering in the heart of the world, Zandik achieves spiritual transcendence, paving the way for his eventual rebirth.

TL;DR

Dottore is narratively and visually linked to the Hanged Man

In Tarot, the Hanged Man represents enlightenment derived from a unique ability to view the world from different perspectives

Upright, the Hanged Man is associated with wisdom, sacrifice, and trials. Reversed, it symbolizes selfishness, apathy ,and stalling

In the Major Arcana, the Hanged Man is associated with the 3 and 4 of alchemy through sulfur (symbolizing fire and the soul)

V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is part of Azoth, the beginning and end of all matter

35 is Omega because he is the end of Dottore and the renewed beginning of a Zandik free of fate

I've had so many thoughts about 35's long-term goal, and this hits on so many of those points!

As always, I can't help but bring Dottore's Mahayana philosphy into things, because it's clearly such a throughline for the character, but also - like all this alchemy - equal parts deeply spiritual and linked to his ultimate goals both for the world and for himself.

Prajnaparamitopadesa To Quell Seven Calamities was the first direct link we got to Dottore's canonical Buddhist philosophy. In short, the title of his Nod-Krai boss theme means something like "A Prajnaparamita-based proposal on overthrowing the Heavenly Principles' world model" - the "seven calamities" is referencing Hymns Of The Far North's title for the Heavenly Principles, Lord of Seven Calamities. And prajnaparamita is an aspect of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, specifically outlining the path to becoming a bodhisattva, a world-saviour who foregoes individual ascencion to instead remain in the samsaras of suffering to help liberate others and guide them to Nirvana.

@millionwaters wrote a brilliant theory linking Hroptatyr, Dottore, and Pantalone via narrative and thematic motifs. It’s an excellent analysis, and I highly recommend going to check it out.

When I read it, another piece clicked into place to support the Hanged Man and self-sacrifice theories: the idea that he’s playing Hroptatyr’s part the same way he talks about playing the villain’s part. We see this in how he hangs from the world tree and plucks out his eye(s) the way Odin does in exchange for knowledge. Hroptatyr is, of course, an Old Norse name for Odin.

TL;DR

Dottore gains knowledge by making the same sacrifices as Odin; he is the Hanged Man and the one-eyed monster

Odin makes his sacrifices in exchange for wisdom to try to prevent Ragnarök, the fated end of the world

Dottore may be trying to find a different way to free humanity by burning the shackles of fate in contrast to Fimbulvetr, the everwinter that serves as a prelude to Ragnarök

The rift between Harbinger factions may stem from the opposition between Pierro and Hroptatyr; the Traveler will have to make a choice

1. nothing

What if Lumine was a lore-enthusiast and had just a little more agency.

I think Dottore and Traveler (Lumine really) have such a potentially fascinating dynamic that Hoyo has set up, but didn't really explore as much as they could have in 6.6.

This is Lumine finding out a slightly more detailed version of Dottore's past and comes to a personal verdict on one of the most deplorable and despicable people she has ever met.

First fic I've written in a long time so I think it's pretty rough around the edges, but I still think it's quite good. I would have posted it on Tumblr but the formatting I used for some of it just didn't want to transfer.

the dialogue between solas and a necromancer inquisitor is very telling too because the only way he approves of studying necromancy is saying that you want to use it to understand spirits more but disapproves of anything else, especially saying you want to use it for your own power

interesting also that he specifies “so long as no intelligent spirits are harmed”—what constitutes a spirit being intelligent? cole disapproves of necromancy as a whole, saying that even the littlest, barest wisp could become a spirit.

solas and cole’s differing philosophies speak to… well, solas and cole. solas who is wisdom, who can convince himself that the ends justify the means, and cole who is compassion, who feels for every living thing. and wisps are alive, as we see in veilguard, but they’re not considered intelligent; when they possess corpses, they can be controlled by a necromancer, and it’s seen like, i don’t know, having oxen plow a field rather than enslaving a person.

it’s that matter of intelligence that brings about the primary moral quandary of necromancy that makes use of wisps. the mourn watch would be on solas’s side here, saying that they’re not quite intelligent and useful in the way that a work horse would be. but they’re not animals. they can continue to grow and become full-fledged spirits. solas even says this in his companion quest.

the following is from the origins codex entry on wisps:

A wisp is a demon that has lost its power; either it has existed in our world for too long without finding a true host or it has been destroyed […].

this is what solas is describing. he approves of an inquisitor utilizing wisps in battle, so long as they care to learn about spirits. but… he also knows that wisps are spirits that were killed and can be reborn, spirits that are too. is this just a trap for the inquisitor? hoping that they’ll learn more about spirits through their practice and that will lead to them realizing that what they’re doing is wrong?

i don’t know. i’m not a solas scholar.

anyway i’m still hung up on the “intelligent spirits” thing. here’s that one dorian and solas banter

solas is on the money here about binding spirits. but the intelligence thing comes up again! if a spirit is intelligent, it shouldn’t be bound or harmed. but a wisp is fine…? granted, that particular line is from a dialogue where he slightly disapproves. and it’s solas. and i don’t know him that well. so. grain of salt. but.

veilguard completely ignores any of this nuance. they say “oh it’s fine because wisps don’t count” and then leave it there. but then when ingellvar talks to a wisp they say this

so… they know wisps are “dead” spirits. right? what solas and cole say is known to the mourn watch. emmrich refers to wisps with “who,” as if they’re people. manfred is right there as our… rather poorly implemented as per my earlier rb, but right there nonetheless, example of a wisp growing into a spirit, actively displaying the humanity of wisps.

but they’re not intelligent, right? so it’s fine, right?

i’m jumping back to inquisition necromancy briefly as a quick added tangent—specifically the spirit mark skill and its upgrade “wisps of the fallen”

the default skill employs a spirit, but the upgraded version employs multiple wisps instead, weaker but more plentiful. i just think that’s interesting. notably, other necromancy skills such as horror (the first skill you unlock lol), power of the dead, and simulacrum have flavor text that describes them as using spirits specifically, not wisps; wisps of the fallen is the only thing on the necromancer tree that specifies wisps

utilizing spirits in magic does not necessarily harm them; spirit healers have been around since origins, and the necromancer skills that utilize spirits don’t imply that they come to harm (save for walking bomb, which is… unclear. in origins it’s described as “magically injecting a target with a corrosive poison” and in 2 and inquisition it’s just “a curse” so i have no idea whether spirits are actually used to cast it?? i’m leaning towards no though).

as a sidenote, the knight-enchanter’s primary ability is called “spirit blade,” but the blade itself is described as being “of solid magic,” not of spirits. it does deal spirit damage though

IF I START ALSO GETTING INTO SPIRIT HEALING and and how spirit healing and origins/2 spirit magic compare with inquisition necromancy i will never shut up so i’m not going to do that right now. but. my POINT is. uh. i don’t really know where i was going with this. something about necromancy and wisps and spirits. wisps being dead/dormant/reborn spirits

the necromancer tree kind of only has 3 abilities that actually deal with the dead. which are

1. death siphon: Every time an enemy dies nearby, you regain both health and mana.

2. power of the dead: Killing enemies attracts spirits that increase the power of your spells for a short time.

3. spirit mark: as above

we know that spirits are drawn to corpses because they can possess them easily and thus leave the fade; this is why the chantry burns their dead and why the nevarrans don’t. that’s really what ties the inherent spirit magic of necromancy to the dead in the first place.

death syphon (as it’s spelled in origins and 2) is particularly interesting because… okay. it’s in the spirit school (death tree) in origins and the spirit tree in da2. it’s described in both as functioning by “consuming entropic energy” from nearby dead. and entropy is its own different thing that comes from “the chaotic nature of the fade” per da2, and god i started getting into it i said i wouldn’t do that. i’ll get back to this sometime

OKAY. THE POINT IS. WISPS. INTELLIGENCE. AUTONOMY. it’s well-established that wisps are spirits in a weaker form, by solas, cole, and (vaguely) the mourn watch (i can’t physically check veilguard so all i have to go off of is a couple clips i saved from emmrich’s recruitment in my ingellvar playthrough and there’s not much in there). so are they not intelligent by nature? does that not imply that controlling wisps is enslaving them just as binding spirits is? that everything the mourn watch does is like, pretty wrong?

and veilguard is just like nah they’re silly little guys who chirp at you and follow you around so it’s okay. we are going to infantilize manfred and make him essentially emmrich’s servant so you don’t think about it too hard. as this one post i’ve had in my drafts for months and will never properly finish says:

tags via @asharaks

yes!! extremely this. i was looking into veilguard codex entries as well because i forgot to do that and there’s this:

emmrich posits that being able to name their own interests and self-reflect is when a wisp is granted personhood. now here’s a snippet from the wiki page for spirits:

as solas says to describe his friend wisdom in his personal quest, “a spirit’s natural state is peaceful semi-existence. […] something similar may reform someday.” and there’s something stuck in my teeth here about weakened spirits and wisps. i don’t… quite have the words to articulate what i’m getting at here, but i think what you said about dolphins and apes vs slime molds is in the same vein. a weakened spirit is still granted personhood because it once had a virtue to embody, even if that virtue has long since been forgotten by those outside the fade, thus leaving the spirit essentially purposeless.

here’s a snippet from world of thedas as well:

wisps are “simple” and only “driven into action by a master with a purpose to give them” (…hate that). but in my reading of veilguard, it’s clear that wisps are capable of thought and feeling. the wisps in the necropolis can be “placated” by emmrich’s abilities. they respond happily to rook. exhibiting emotion is not equivalent to “intelligence,” per solas’s reading, and it’s not equivalent to “self-reflection,” per emmrich’s. wisp wraiths are described as having “more consciousness than an average wisp.”

emmrich: “i dare not call them beings at this juncture”

cole: “a fraction of a fragment of a figment, not enough to be, but the bits that could be”

wisps are not yet fully-formed spirits. but notably cole still disapproves of their use, saying a necromancer inquisitor “breaks” them. prevents them from becoming what they could be, what they already have been, because spirits never die, they exist in a cycle of reincarnation, and that should be central to all of this, too. because based on the above interpretations:

- a spirit does not retain its personhood when it is physically destroyed and reformed as a wisp

- a spirit does retain its personhood when it is weakened to a state of impotence by irrelevance

but the power level of the weakest spirit and a wisp is… probably comparable? the only difference really is in ability to express itself with words, isn’t it? because wisps are described as “impressionable,” but aren’t all spirits? isn’t that how they work? they’re shaped by the world around them?