"An thou art swallowed by the Gyre, sing thee to the last."

Bureaucracy

Understand process and procedure. Pull on the levers available to the public.

COOL FOR: Pencil-Pushers, Concerned Citizens, The Maliciously Compliant

Bureaucracy is what humans use for detailed communication in place of emotional honesty. This is not, in fact, an imposition -- rather, it allows for smooth cooperation and organization at large scale without the superior's scorn or the inferior's resentment getting in the way. Your Bureaucracy skill familiarizes you with paperwork and precedent, assures that the powerful view you as properly compliant, extracts assistance from systems that don't care about you as a person, and teaches you how to work to rule.

At high levels, Bureaucracy lets you navigate hierarchies, provide and access information easily, and fill in gaps in existing procedure where there is none. It'll also make you a fussy, obstinate smartass who refuses to participate with anyone emotionally or act without structure. At low levels, however, you'll be adrift in a paper sea designed to silence, exhaust, and oppress you.

Disguise

Manipulate with masks. Fit yourself into palatable forms.

COOL FOR: Changeling Children, Sociopathic Butterflies, Emotional Laborers

Disguise wants you to know that if you can't be yourself, it's always okay to be someone else. As your handy-dandy superficial charm, Disguise feeds you the lines necessary for a given situation: Need to act mindful and demure at work when you're imagining gutting your manager like a fish? Disguise is already on it. Want to seem like a problem-solving super-genius when you're actually in the middle of cybersex? Disguise is running the social buffer. Trying to avoid telling the truth to your parents or scaring the hoes at the local queer scene? Got. You. Covered.

At high levels, Disguise makes you terrified of failing to live up to your image, to the extent that you'll partition off your life into different personas. You won't be tempted to become any of the masks, but by God will you not take any of them off. At low levels, though, you'll have to take all the lumps that come with never telling anybody what they want to hear.

Distress Tolerance

Endure immediate pain for long-term gain. Stay in the trap to remove the one who set it.

COOL FOR: Forward-thinkers, Sensitive Souls, Cluster Bs

Distress Tolerance is your lexicon of adaptive coping mechanisms. It snaps into action when the world is painful and unfair, identifying pain relief and things you can control. Distress Tolerance reminds you to go for a walk instead of lying in bed, to spend time with people you love instead of fighting online, and to box breathe instead of hiding in a cabinet and sobbing. It also helps you keep your goals in mind: the point of enduring the pain is to avoid hurting people and to have a better life in the future.

At high levels, Distress Tolerance makes you hyper-sane, and thus hypernormal. You'll fall victim to the seductions of personal responsibility, assuming that it's simply your duty to put up with the world's iniquities. Without it, though, you'll be a panicking woman-child ignorant of her own agency, unable to do anything about those iniquities but lash out at the people who love you.

Hiya

Feel shame yourself. Anticipate shame in others.

COOL FOR: Overton Glaziers, Panopticon Inhabitants, Human Dignity Enjoyers

Hiya isn't the cop inside your head, it's the patriarch -- instead of trying to shoot you when you've deviated from the accepted standards of behavior for a given community, it just makes you feel fundamentally unlikable and helpless. This isn't entirely a bad thing, since the accepted standards of behavior frequently involve putting others first so you don't make them feel fundamentally unlikable and helpless. That said, while Hiya teaches you that standards of behavior can change, the only tool it gives you to accomplish that is the cattle prod called "shame".

At high levels, Hiya makes you socially invulnerable -- because you don't do anything objectionable in the first place. Not only will you be self-sacrificingly afraid of being deemed deviant, you'll cringe and withdraw when others embarrass themselves regardless -- and you'll enforce shame yourself to make the cringing stop. Without it, though, you'll literally be walang hiya: a shameless, self-gratifying boob incapable of thinking about others' feelings.

Pakikiramdam

Understand that others’ needs are different. Find out what they are.

COOL FOR: Relationship-Builders, Active Listeners, Safety Tool Users

Pakikiramdam feels out everything that isn't explicitly said. It's a Skill of social moderation formed through trial and error -- knowing what will tickle someone's funny bone, whether acquiescence is hiding upset, and whether they see a given action as common courtesy or a true effort. Pakikiramdam creates models of others' internal states to better foster and maintain kapwa; to this end, it reminds you to check in, slow down, and look at the conversation from outside so you're on the same page about what's going on.

At high levels, Pakikiramdam will make you truly empathetic and understanding -- as long as people can stomach you being a busybody who demands adult communication and introspection about their wants at the drop of a hat. Too low, however, and you'll simply barge through situations assuming you already know what everyone wants, giving you no chance to build empathy in the first place.

White-Passing

Defend yourself and get away with it. Recognize and use what authority you have.

COOL FOR: Egotists, Dissatisfied Customers, Fifth Columnists

You are the phenotypical expression of a multigenerational effort to make you and your desires untouchable in any social situation. White-Passing measures your ability to live up to that standard: Can you talk over people in a meeting to make your point heard? Can you talk to a cop like he's a brave and dignified defender of your security? Can you justify the entire extractive supply chain in order to demand a better customer service experience?

At high levels, White-Passing will get you what you want, and getting what you want will reinforce the rightness of your power. Not only will this make you an entitled little martinet claiming power you lack, it'll chain you to the structures that have given you what power you have. But without it, you won't even be able to get past the cop in your own head, let alone the ones outside it, and you'll make a cult of your own disenfranchisement.

Notes:

Bureaucracy's ear-thingies are a reference to Intergalactic Advocate Bob from Jupiter Ascending.

The mask Disguise is wearing is based on Caves of Qud's gentling mask.

Corpsework

Practice self-care and first aid. Understand and respond to the realities of meat.

COOL FOR: Street Medics, Neurasthenics, Trans-sexuals

If you've grown up accustomed to the life of the mind and little else, Corpsework fills in the gaps. You don't need to be attentive to "hunger" or "exhaustion" or "pain": all you need to know to keep your Health pool up is the multitude of ways by which life departs from the human body. In addition to patching up wounds and scrapes, Corpsework cares for the body by routine and procedure. It keeps you clean, fed, and medicated even in the depths of depression and puts you to bed out of the knowledge that revenge bedtime will ruin your tomorrow.

At high levels, Corpsework allows you to take care of your body and others in more and more extreme conditions. You may not be able to fix the problem, but you can keep a problem stable long enough to get the patient to someone who can help. On the other hand, you'll identify health risks everywhere: every surface is potentially contaminated, every meal an exercise in nutritional "balance". But if your Corpsework is too low, you'll blunder through the world in a feeble haze, and if you do notice infirmities, you won't know what to do about them.

Deliberation

Comprehend arguments. Logic it out.

COOL FOR: Academics, Social Maladapts, the Overcautious

Deliberation is your inner skeptic. It's the voice that gets you to slow down your thought processes and ask, "Is that true?" It's great for getting good grades, figuring out the reputability of a text, identifying disordered thought patterns, not getting mad at posts online, and asking yourself if you can really jump across that gap. For you, however, it also occupies the unenviable position of trying desperately to figure out what other people mean through sheer brute-force semantics and abstract knowledge of social convention.

At high levels, Deliberation makes you a lean, mean, reasonin' machine. High on reason, you'll become obsessive about clarity at the cost of social graces, and prudent at the cost of your entire ego when you do inevitably make rash decisions. But with low Deliberation, you'll make rash decisions all the time and generally show yourself as the idiot you're so scared of being.

Kagandahang-Loób

Demonstrate mercy and forgiveness in an entropic universe. Go above and beyond.

COOL FOR: Creditors, Parents, Moral Philosophers

Kagandahang-Loób is the beauty of the will: when Kapwa recognizes the inherent togetherness of people, Kagandahang-Loób inspires generosity to others and forgiveness of debts. Kagandahang-Loób is necessary for being a good person to yourself and others: without its migitating presence, relationships would be crushed under the weight of debts that can never truly be repaid, paradoxically hastening the decay that inspires Utang in the first place. Kagandahang-Loób is a necessary moral compass -- and a powerful tool for building relationships on mutual support rather than indebtedness.

With high Kagandahang-Loób, you'll be able to easily make friends and inspire them to new heights of reciprocal generosity: through teamwork, you may even be able to fly. However, you'll find yourself easily persuaded that wrongdoers had good reasons and find it hard to take decisive action against them. With low Kagandahang-Loób, however, you'll be a literal and emotional miser, ranting about how much everyone owes you.

Machine Spirits

Interact with hardware and software. Listen to and respect your tools.

COOL FOR: Experiential Learners, Digital Natives, Girls Who Read the Manual

You are terminally non-mechanical; you balk without a user interface. If you're not constantly keeping your hand in with classroom assignments, you couldn't improvise outside of stopgap solutions. Still, technology is an essential part of humanity, and for that, you have Machine Spirits. This Skill uses humanity's great compression algorithm, ritual, to understand what a machine is doing, even if you don't understand the why; you learn from your elders (tutorial webpages), approach the machines with respect (following the steps), and enjoy a successful partnership with machines (your devices, generally speaking, function).

At high levels, Machine Spirits makes you obsessive and insecure: do you have a full collection of right tools for vaguely-defined right jobs? Can you get your laptop to do what you want if you spend another hour fucking with it? Have you stored too much of your knowledge outside of your own brain? At low levels, though, your clothes will fall apart, your bicycle will break, and your toilets will clog -- and you definitely don't have the money not to care.

Master Plan

Figure out how to achieve your goals. Control yourself and others.

COOL FOR: Functioning Executives, Evil Geniuses, The Goal-Oriented

Master Plan is a Skill of agency and delegation. Why try to take on the world yourself when you can get other people to take it on for you? Why solve other people's problems, when you can teach them how to solve their own and yours? Master Plan creates causal chains between your starting point and your goal -- not only does it show you the grand road you need to take, it'll give you options for the low road or the high road. Understanding how best to achieve your own wants also teaches you how to incentivize others, and Master Plan is more than happy to use others' wants to achieve your designs.

At high levels, Master Plan makes you arrogant -- you'll assume you know what's best for everyone and that your victory is already assured, and you won't know how to give others dignity or deal with your own failure. But without it, you'll succumb to learned helplessness, reliant on others' plans and too afraid of disturbing them to better your own position.

Utang

Keep track of debt and obligation. Employ financial literacy and historical materialism.

COOL FOR: Debtors, Negotiators, Political Animals

Utang is the understanding of debt; in you, it's an overgrown philosophical awareness that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. That literal economic reality is rooted in the thermodynamic principle it famously describes: living as we do in an entropic universe, others expect debts to be repaid, and your own recognition of entropy creates the desire to repay debts. Not only does Utang manage your money, it opens you up to realpolitik on both literal and interpersonal levels. Utang gives you an idea of what people want, explaining the concerns that govern political action and what you can do for others to make both of you happy.

At high levels, Utang will make you see ulterior motives everywhere; treating everything as a transaction that must be balanced will ruin your personal relationships with bookkeeping and your politics with pessimism. Without it, though, you'll assume that politics and community boil down to stark moral principles -- and without a handle on your debts, you'll be too broke and alone to be able to hold to any principles of your own.

Notes

The visual design for Master Plan is based at least in part on the dual meaning of the Latin word textus, meaning both "weaving" and "narrative".

Architectonics

Organize, craft, decorate. Create data structures and physical ones.

COOL FOR: Bowerbirds, Secretaries, Sculptors

Architectonics is your ability to assign material properties to the immaterial Things stored in your aphantasic memory. From this fundamental basis, you can arrive first at the ability to categorize objects by these properties, and then at the ability to join and organize objects in physical space. Architectonics gives you reliable access to the simple joy of sorting, whether it's file systems, household objects, or raw materials in an art studio; it also teaches you how to put these together to materially represent the pure concepts in the silvery-black void behind your eyes.

At high levels, Architectonics will let you personalize your living space and teach you exactly where everything is in your workshop. However, you'll lose yourself in material pursuits, neglecting social bonds and physiological needs in favor of realizing a grand artistic vision that nobody but you will ever see. But with low Architectonics, you'll be trapped in a swamp of immaterial concepts that bear little relation to the world around you, unable to find or create anything outside your head.

Gut Instinct

Be aware of your body’s needs and the physicality of emotion. Make snap decisions and prioritize.

COOL FOR: Survivors, Decision-makers, Clappers Back

Gut Instinct lives in the moment. Your body is the result of hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, and what's going on inside gives you information without you having to sit down, logic it out, and get eaten. Your gut tells you when to load up on glucose, when to yank your hand back from a hot stove, and when to punch back before the bigger ape hits you. It's all in the interest of keeping your emotional streak going -- be they sympathetic or parasympathetic, Gut Instinct is happy when you're using the nerves that aren't in your brain.

At high levels, you'll always be right where you need to be, responding to stimuli with sabertooth-avoiding speed. You'll say and do whatever keeps you alive in the moment, no matter the consequences for yourself or others -- but at least your comebacks will be good! At low levels, though, you'll see everything as equally portentious, unable to respond in time-sensitive situations or pursue any of your possible avenues to satisfaction.

Jouissance

Seek stimulation, reward, excitement. Perceive and understand the sensations that make life worth living.

COOL FOR: Heartache Enthusiasts, Attention Economists, Masochists

Jouissance is a prickling in your skin, a hunger in your heart, an endless striving for the Lacanian limit-experience. In your quest for mind-breaking aesthetic perfection, Jouissance figures out how to spice up your sex life, pick your playlist, and know whether or not there's any comfort in the video game or the bag of edibles. It also knows exactly how to stay angry, afraid, or grieving, even or especially at others' expense.

At high levels, Jouissance keeps you on the hedonic treadmill -- bad enough when you're losing time to computers and masturbation, but far, far worse when you're holding onto grudges and picking fights for dubious catharsis. But with low Jouissance, you won't know what's worth your time or not, leaving you convinced of the worthlessness of experience in general.

Lakas-ng-Loób

Act with hope and chivalry. Exercise courage and serenity alike.

COOL FOR: Space Cowboys, Impossible Dreamers, Knights of Faith

Lakas-ng-Loób is your strength of will -- spiritual courage, practiced optimism, and commitment in the face of adversity. It maintains your Morale pool by avoiding spirals of victim-blaming, firmly identifying that external sources of harm are external and not, in fact, your fault. Lakas-ng-Loób protects your sense of agency and keeps pain from motivating inaction; likewise, it motivates you to defend others from suffering and fight for common goods.

At high levels, Lakas-ng-Loób will transform lost causes into victories. Your faith will move mountains -- and prevent you from realizing when a mountain can't be moved. You'll tilt at windmills, refuse to pick your battles, and come across as a zealot with your head in the clouds. But with low levels, you'll hesitate to protect yourself or others, trapped in the myth of personal responsibility and the politics of despair.

Playground

Exercise gross motor skills. Maintain speed, strength, balance, coordination.

COOL FOR: Active Children, Derby Dolls, The Terminally Late for Class

Playground is your sloppy, untrained sense of athleticism. As a Skill, it's concerned with having fun and getting where you want to go, and you'll grudgingly admit you have to train and exercise to keep that up instead of just fucking around. Playground's a runner, a climber, a balancer, a vaulter, and lately a skater -- it affords you some heavy lifting skill as a side effect of learning to lift your own body weight, but it hates not being on the move.

At high levels, Playground will shut out everything but the path you want to take. This is great for getting past obstacles with flair and panache and dancing like nobody's watching; it's not great for moving around non-roller-derby-playing humans, who react poorly to being treated as course hazards. Without it, though, you'll be slow, creaking, and earthbound, too out-of-shape to take any joy in motion.

Wonderstruck

Revere the beauty of the world around you. Surrender to your place in the cosmos.

COOL FOR: Protagonists, Storm Chasers, Mortals

Wonderstruck is your sense of "woah, that's awesome" -- whether it's the little "awesome" of a cool turn of phrase from one of your friends or the big "awesome" that made you kind of attracted to Hurricane Sandy. A Skill of aesthetics, Wonderstruck is your heuristic for awe, and thus your capacity for deriving excitement and comfort from a world that operates on scales too big for you to affect or even comprehend.

At high levels, Wonderstruck's euphoria in being a single strand in the cosmic weave gives you a death wish, whether it manifests as wanting a heroic destiny where there's always new impossible odds to vanquish or just a desire to skip right to "happily ever after". But its absence doesn't do anything to supply a fear of death -- it simply renders existence into something mundane and spiritually corrosive, and its failure to deliver on promises of titanic adventure leads you right back into the arms of anomie.

Notes

Jouissance's art is a reference to the "My heart is a fish" song from Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. The fish being a pleco is an in-joke with a lover.

The design of Lakas-ng-Loób's helmet is a reference to the shaving-basin helmet from the musical Man of La Mancha (I am a filthy musical enjoyer as opposed to the actual text of Don Quixote).

Playground would probably look different if I'd drawn it today, now that I've started doing roller derby.

Detail-Oriented

Take care of the little things. Perceive things up close.

COOL FOR: Attentive Types, Aesthetes, Process Men

In a world full of constantly clashing stimuli, Detail-Oriented allows you to create meaning from the miasma. Less than a Skill of perception, Detail-Oriented is a Skill of noticing things: overheard conversations, artistic imperfections, written discrepancies … all the minutiae that aren't too overstimulating for you to immediately throw up blinders. It's there when you realize the exact thing that needs to change in order to realize your creative vision; it also lets you make sure you're following procedures to the letter in order to do satisfactory work.

At high levels, Detail-Oriented does the exact thing it's meant to prevent: constraining your sensorium ultimately just gives you new things to be irritated by. But at low levels, you'll miss vital information, make mistakes, and watch your world spiral even further into chaos.

Kapwa

Create and maintain respectful relationships with the world. Talk with everyone and everything.

COOL FOR: Animists, Orthopraxists, Children of Diaspora

Kapwa is the sense of self-in-the-other, the urge that exists within us all to promote the survival of the group. It tugs you to your people, be they Filipino, fannish, or faggots, and tells you what you can do to be a part of them. It's also a metaphysics that explains the cosmos as being formed of relationships. Whether or not you believe that these relationships are humanlike ones is irrelevant, as Kapwa will teach you to maintain the relationship regardless. Your survival is contingent on the survival of the world.

At high levels, Kapwa will have you talking to the rocks, streams, and trees -- and listening to what they have to say. The downside is that you'll be unwilling to disrupt any relationships, paralyzed by ecological anxieties and subject to the human tyranny of the majority. With low Kapwa, however, your fellow humans might turn on you -- as might the ground beneath your feet.

Ludonarrator

Master the way games create stories and stories create games. Abandon the necessity of truth.

COOL FOR: Ritualists, Dungeon Masters, Those About To Become The Joker

When something seems like bullshit, Ludonarrator can tell you why people put put up with it. Ludonarrator is a Skill of games and rituals, preaching the philosophy that truth usually mattters less than good experiences, and figuring out the necessary narrative and behaviors to produce a particular emotional state in a human. If you don't like the story, Ludonarrator helps you make up a better one; if someone's making up a story, Ludonarrator figures out its details and motivation. The only limit is your imagination.

Ludonarrator is your particular expression of the human tendency to use the technology of their job for every problem; at high levels, this extends to the existential. You'll treat all human suffering and evil as morons trying to live up to unrealistic stories, and you'll play the smug giggling asshole to point this out. At low levels, though, you won't even be able to do your job, let alone navigate a world full of human self-deception.

Optimization

Exercise fine motor control. Maximize efficiency, then minimize effort.

COOL FOR: Lounge Lizards, Rude Mechanicals, Orgy Planners

Optimization makes you work very hard to be very lazy. Making sure you don't twitch a single muscle fiber more than necessary will make sure you don't exhaust yourself or break anything; knowing what you're trying to do before you do it means you have energy to adapt when things don't go according to plan. Even breaking down a task into smaller tasks is Optimization trying to conserve effort, since you won't be fighting down your dread of the insurmountable.

At high levels, Optimization turns intent into precise, effective action, be it with escrima batons, paintbrushes, social calendars, or video game playthroughs -- as long as you actually stop fiddling with the plan and execute it. You'll be a perfectionist for its own sake, not for your own relaxation -- but without Optimization, you'll never have time to relax in the first place.

World Serpents

Encompass worlds real and unreal. Place information in its proper context.

COOL FOR: SFF Fans, Human Geographers, Nuance Enjoyers

World Serpents is your deep-seated love of learning. Knowledge tethers you to reality even when you're not engaged in a direct relationship with it; studying how parts of the world relate to each other allows you to partake indirectly in their kapwa. This love comes in handy when you're presented with new information about reality -- World Serpents seeks to understand its original context and nuance, rather than trying to make it fit within a preexisting model -- and when you're engaging with fiction -- if the author has set up the world solely for the benefit of the main character, chances are high that they think it's natural that the world is set up to benefit them.

At high levels, World Serpents makes sure your knowledge of the worlds you love is broad and deep. It also makes you think that knowledge can substitute for connection, whether you're making yourself a living spell-checker, trying to construct a fictional world in your head to crawl inside it, or just straight-up doing Orientalism. Without it, though, you'll be uninformed, parochial, and arrogant -- and, worse, too incurious to fix that.

Yellow Peril

See danger before it sees you. Make sure you’re gone by the time it arrives.

COOL FOR: Navigators, Model Minorities, Heads on a Swivel

Yellow Peril is your assimilationist patrimony: the constant question, "am I safe?" It's a neurotic form of spatial awareness that tracks sight lines and escape routes so nobody sees you slacking off; it advises you on whether you're a target and how to get back to your comfortable little hidey-hole. It lets you know whether or not you're in people's good graces, and where to head next when the opportunities have dried up. That it also serves as a Racism Alarm merely follows from the racist's preoccupation with borders: are you where you should be?

High Yellow Peril lets you reach your destination fast, grab what you need, and get out. It also makes you flinch away at the slightest hint of danger, escape artistry often turning into plain escapism. With low Yellow Peril, though, you'll just be lost -- and you won't even understand that you're in danger until it's too late.

Notes

Detail-Oriented's monocle is based on the lens from Holly Black and Tony diTerlizzi's Spiderwick Chronicles.

You can read more about Bagong Pinay's babaylan mandala here. I do not intend copyright infringement on Pinay's symbol and hope my use in a personal art piece constitutes transformative work.

Ludonarrator is based on the legendary tikbalang.

Optimization's dots and lines are those of Sloth from Fullmetal Alchemist; its form is based on an original alien species of my fianceé's.

The lindworm World Serpent is the D&D setting of Eberron; the basilisk World Serpent is an original setting of mine and my fiancée's.

Yellow Peril is based on the legendary mananggal, with the pose taken from Da share z0ne's famous "Hit da bricks" piece. Her eye is a reference to the Tortoise's shadow in Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew's The Shadow Hero.