#re1999

Merlin

Aleph

The Idealist

yayaya thank you for reading oh my god it's 2 am

Right off the bat, it's kind of funny to realize that the Storm timeline between the Vienna Storm to now is concerningly short, even if time travel as a trope is perfectly balanced and only getting the pieces one disjointed patch at a time. Case in point with the side stories not exactly spelling out the dates/timeline in its story node outside of a few context clue in the story itself (ie. Midnight Whistle explicitly mentioning it happening just after the 5th Storm but not showing its exact date/time in the overworld), but it definitely tickles my fancy to put the timeline together on my own over semi-updated timeline on Gnomon or Huijiwiki.

Case in point with 1987 Cosmic Overture (especially everything with the Epitath chapter; a time when teleportation discs were still in open development and the 3rd Storm was just beyond the horizon for the LSCC (Plesetsk edition) to make the downright suicidal move to observe the Storm from space (if it even effects the world on that scale as well). The second Kiperina breaks through Earth's atmosphere, she experiences a complete sensory deprivation and almost all lines of communication are corrupted. Planets are being unraveled and breaking apart, a toybox of colors and lights, and her little robot monitor is a frantic stuttering mess of warnings about a massive influx of arcanum...

Funny to know that Turquoise Serpent Club follows this same style of mindfuckery once Ramona was sinking into the Depths of Myth. On top of that, Kiperina gets flashes of memories from her past in the circus, travels down a trail of light with a suspiciously floating set of stairs, and eventually finds little tokens and figurines representing her new Laplace coworkers and friends (excluding Voyager since it's literally the writing on her hand). The more she travels down that path, feeling the weight of her past slowing her down, the more the universe begins to darken around her and the more her mind begins to drift.

The sounds of a clock begin to tick, somewhere in a place where time becomes irrelevant and null.

Trying to hold onto everything at once is impossible. "No! Not like this!!" The objects in her arms scatter outwards, drifting like mist before vanishing into the cosmic sea. At the dawn of the universe, all things were dust. So it remains. All things become insignificant when examined on a cosmic scale. What meaning is there in chasing it?

Name Day: Maybe time is a concept that only holds meaning for humanity.

Han Zhang: Out of one, two is born; out of two, three; out of three, everything.

Hissabeth: It all started from an atom...

Now to get this tiny existential tanget out of the way, I believe that Annalith was more-or-less playing tug-of-war with the Depths in this scene, since the line between the two are surprisingly thin in this world. Although it would be a hilarious in-universe explanation on people believing in aliens or even the moon landing being a hoax...After all, if time and space get as screwy with the Depths trying to capture that information, it adds to the level of urgency to return to Earth if fuel and/or oxygen seems to drain faster than it should.

Something something Annalith might've been the Voyager-1 satellite that became Awakened and/or became twisted by the Storms and Depths...-I mean, there is a living Sputnik satellite and a pirate ship!? Why not we have something that represents Voyager-1 since it's real-life flight path exists far beyond 1999 while the Golden Record was retrieved by the "arcanist" Voyager in '77. Annalith, looking closer to a Living Consciousness like the Child of Fear, represents humanity's futility against time and understanding the true vastness of the universe. Everything seems infinitesimally smaller when looking at everything from above; and it all depends on if your mind will crumble from the weight of it all, or you become fascinated with whatever life exists on that tiny globe of light.

...Now I would like to introduce The Depths' representation of Time; something more grounded to reality (ie. in a dream world that's a step off the beaten path from Artificial Somnambulism), something that represents both productivity and haste, and something that urges people to finish their work no matter how close the deadline is or whether a paid-time off is just beyond the horizon...Fleeting Slumber (or Fading Slumber from the Huijiwiki translation)

After all, Hissabeth wasn't joking about indefinite discounts or infinite overtime pay for nothing (plus it definitely reflects on it with its passive and skills too) :) Adding to the reason why it shows up now in 3.6 is somewhat simple; the LSCC was basically going through a gauntlet of living bureaucratic nightmares from Cosmic Overture, the Vienna Storm, and now with the Pre-Storm Protocol cast fighting to keep Laplace's independence against an all-out merger with the Foundation. Every member of the LSCC, no matter how big or small, are definitely struggling to race against the clock in one way or another; so that collective stress (and hope of some real validation for their work) eventually pooled into something like this. Although I'm also banking on the silly little headcanon that the Depths (aka. Knotted Thoughts/Thought Knot) created Fleeting Slumber as a direct response to meeting Annalith for the first time (obviously cause of the Cosmic Sea parallels), cause I'm sure meeting another "being" like Them had some kind of impression on them either way.

Extra bonus headcanon since I have to squeeze Aleph into this (even now as the new-ish LSCC advisor now), that everything with Cosmic Overture (and the 3rd Storm as a whole) is the reason why he decided to commit himself into the Comala Prison/Penitentiary in the first place. Why do I think that? Well...Where have we seen that eye before?

So I'm just imagining a younger "Aleph" trying to hunker down in some unknown safehouse hours away from Plesetsk, waiting the Storm out, and finally getting a couple hours of overdue sleep (for obvious reasons)...Only to get (mentally) dragged into the Depths Nightmare on Elm Street-style just for Thought Knot to show off this cool new alarm clock to their favorite new Consultant. While he definitely got brought back to reality so he can actually get some sleep (humans get extremely manic when sleep-deprived), but that definitely would've been the tipping point in getting himself committed so that "incident" doesn't happen again...And we all know how that went for him in the long run.

And before you ask: What about the weirdly goofy design? Don't worry about it :)

what in the string theory

I don't know much about physics but good lord I know we have 4 dimensions to account for time, and I know hypothetically we could have a shit-ton more other dimensions. But 11???

I had to look it up. And because I am also working, I only took a cursory glance at one article which hints at different versions of String Theory??? A version of it implies there may be 11, or even 26.

But for them to "return to the 11th dimension",,, holy smokes. Did they latch on to one theory? Is the theory actually a proven tangible thing?

whatever all I can truly say to this is Holy Shit

ENIGMA I KNOW YOU'RE A KID HERE BUT UHM HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT THE WORLD IS ACTUALLY A PILE OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE SPAGHETTI THAT WE ASSIGN MEANING TO BECAUSE WE, AS HUMANS, LIKE TO FIND PATTERNS IN THINGS-- *gets shot*

what in the linguistics.

I should have expected this. They did mention language barriers in an earlier chapter. And the whole thing with Enigma is Crosswords. Of course.

STILL ughthght I need to review more lore because what the fuck.

It's weird (and interesting) the way sound -> the particles that make up this reality. The world beyond a certain radius is constructed by sound, but what generates the sound? The speakers? Or some other thing? And is the whole thing random, or is there some discernable pattern which decides what sound makes what thing?

And it's cool that it mimics the way cells -> tissues or particles -> lattice of something using the phonemes -> morphemes pipeline. What is insane though is how the morphemes are... visible? Actual familiar symbols? Or is it like a representation because that's the way Adler understood it?

AND THEN, an environment that dissects words into phonemes? Holy shit sentience. Or maybe it just goes by vibrations. Or maybe we're comparing spoken words into sounds with multiple tones and so we are dividing them in the most sensible way possible.

"To use language is to quickly combine these pieces into specific sequences to create a meaningful utterance. Thus, one could view this entire environment as a "simulation of language use""

No complaints on this one. Sequences of sounds and we humans derive meaning to them. Sounds about right. Language is a social construct. Or not. How did language originate anyway?

("Simulation of language use" Deriving meaning from random sounds that turn into weird phenomena that is relatively meaningful to the witness. Yea. It is language use for the most part.)

Also, the tower of Babel. And ironically, the perfect language spans the 5 km radius centered at the tower. Wow.

How the fuck does the toy box physics work??? What in the bullshit

nerd.

bsbevwhabr I said this before but I might as well say it again.

I personally subscribe to the idea of the world being rational and that there must be a universal truth that answers everything. But that is still a belief I cannot actually defend outside of "something something the world is determined in part by cause and effect which is rational something something" but I don't think that's even a good argument lol.

To call the world a crossword puzzle with that kind of definition is a bit of a stretch I think?

"If you follow the clues, you'll arrive at an answer. The only answer. An established theory."

So I assume here he is implying that the "established theory" is the unifying theory.

Either way, in a good puzzle (not just crosswords, mind you), each clue will lead you to a logical conclusion, which usually is the only possible outcome. This makes the outcome the objective truth (and definitive proof that the puzzle is solvable but whatever). Then again, this also assumes that there exists an answer in the first place.

In the case of crossword puzzles, there would be the maker. A guy who has all the answers jotted down in a document somewhere and they use it to write the clues. This guarantees that the puzzle is solvable, and the players all know this too. Thus, the clues are guaranteed to lead to a certain fixed outcome, and the nature of crossword puzzles make it less likely that there are multiple solutions.

Also, the clues are finite.

The world, however, is an unknown phenomena. We don't know if there exists an omniscient creator who has all the answers. The clues in a puzzle are tailored to guide you towards the answer, but the clues of the physical world (empirical data) are less intentional.

Players interpret a crossword puzzle's clues differently. And with multiple answers to choose from for each clue, only one combination works to complete the puzzle.

You can do the same in theory, come up with interpretations to various data points and use it to get a combination that doesn't contradict each other, but how many of these clues do you have to solve before you get the final answer?

And this also assumes you can arrive at an answer that's comprehensible to the human (or arcanist) mind.

The answer may as well not exist either, and that everything is simply random happenstance humans gave meaning in order to make sense of the world.

Kind of like language, now that I think about it.

Oh and on the code part, I think that basically cancels out the whole "maker" problem. Because codes don't usually need an author?? Maybe?? You can technically have a computer generate gibberish randomly with no one knowing the absolute correct answer and you get code. Iykwim.

Still, you need rules. And how do you get rules? Inference and some kind of regularity. And then we get the problem of induction.

If regularity implies rule, and we need rules to imply structure, then we first need to know if a phenomena is considered regular and not mere coincidence. And how does one define regularity? With respect to time? Or perhaps by some other metric? And how much deviation in this "regularity" can be tolerated until we can definitively conclude a rule?

Anyway, I'll shut up on this now.

Bevacwegrh time to look into the Theory of Everything because I am pretty fucking sure this is an actual perspective in physics.

Sarcasm duly noted.

"The pieces' cognitive processes have all unified under the same model."

sooooooo same brain? Like exact same blueprint of mind? Nevermind. It's a hivemind.

"Unanimous agreement, unanimous objection—can this even be considered communication?"

Yes, in a sense that it still transfers information among two or more parties. Communication doesn't necessarily require disagreement or dissent, after all.

Though I think I get what he's saying.

What he's alluding to here is moreso the pieces either lacking the balls to disagree outwardly, or the inability to disagree in general. Which isn't really a communication problem in a "see? we talk to each other" way and more of an internal processing thing. When everyone has the same opinion, does anyone truly process the issue at all?

wow. the depression is so real. literally his whole monologue I'm like "yep. so real."

marcus is a bean bshshdha i love her she's adorable.