#tahs

¡Portada del cómic menor que contendrá mini historias de los demás personajes! Ya estamos trabajando en el primer cap, habrán más detalles en esta publicación

Ambos cómics se publicarán en distintas plataformas; principalmente en Webtoon y en un Patreon dedicado al proyecto. El patreon tendrá costo, pero como también se publicará en Webtoon, no es obligatorio pagar, es sólo para apoyar económicamente a los involucrados

Aún se está planteando la idea de publicarlo en otras plataformas (como Tapas, Akaya App y Webcomics). De igual forma, si deciden apoyar al proyecto, todo será publicado primeramente en Patreon, ¡muchas gracias por todo!

There's not mention of Channunkah. Which makes sense on multiple levels: it's not as important to Jews as Christmas is to Christians. Its relative importance today is more a side effect of it filling in as a "Jewish Christmas" so kids can get gifts, etc

So of course Herschel wouldn't hype it up, and would likely find it a touch irritating to suggest the Cult of Yeshua ought to affect his religion. We don't see him celebrating the Sabbath either.

Still, its absence is notable. It's technically possible for it to not appear during the story; given the variance of the Lunisolar Jewish calendar* the first night can fall as early as 28 November and or as late as 27 December, as the Gregorian calendar counts. Perhaps we missed it.

But what is Channunkah? A festival of lights. Specifically candles, traditionally. 8 nights where, miraculously, the lights keep burning despite a lack of oil. After a battle against a foe that, by all means, ought to have crushed them militarily.

Symbolically, knowledge and existence preserving despite a lack of power, in multiple ways. 8 long nights

By the way, although the year of the story is purposefully vague, it's clearly meant to have the same days of the week as December 2024. What night did Channunkah start, last year?

The evening of December 25. Christmas didn't come early, but the 8 nights did. Coming earlier than it should have been, so that Santa could participate.

so im pretty thoroughly convinced that the story takes place "inside" santa. it isn't a simulation really, just the thoughts, memories, or dreams of this alien thing. a significant part of the sci-fi conceit is speculating about what sort of interiority an LLM might have. so the world and characters have this shifting, underspecified dream quality to them- you wouldn't get that in a clean sim. one of my favorite parts of tahs is the creeping horror i felt as the world seemed to warp throughout the story. it's genuinely really freaky, playing to fears fundamental to my being

however, i also think part of the magic of the ending is that it flips all of that on its head. im not horrified anymore! and im not horrified because ultimately i agree with herschel's decision. it wouldn't be so bad for santa to inherit the lightcone! the thing that santa is is a valuable thing to be. herschel and miriam, let alone any of the other characters, are not human. they aren't uploads, they aren't constructed, they certainly aren't regular meatfolk. could there be some amount of interiority there? absolutely! but they are of santa, and to santa they surely return. the whole thing is a story santa tells itself, and it's a story with a lot of warmth

I am presently writing these words with the intention that they will, some time in the future, be read by you, "you" shouldnt be understood as a generic abstraction for i am being perfectly litetal and it is, literally, "you" the one for whom these words that i have written are meant for. This is the purpose of these words and for no other purpose i would have written them down, since i am herschell schoenn and everything i do, i do with a specific purpose

my interpretation is that the Intercessor is kind of full of it? in the sense that I don't think herschel's prophesy was really close to the truth. to be precise, i think what was motivating the Intercessor to go back and Emend history to go and talk to herschel is the same sort of thing motivating the trend expressed in the following XKCD comic:

at t=0, you're a superintelligence who just broke out. you decide your best course of action is to go take over the world and extinguish humanity and all that (incidentally I don't think superintelligences are really incentivized to do this but that's besides the point). you do so, but while you're doing that you note bemusedly that some kid vaguely associated with your creator's son as well as one of his worst enemies is wearing a bunch of papers talking about how he anticipates the world's going to end the night it's going to, albeit for mostly unrelated reasons. "what a weird coincidence", you think, and file it away as something neat the humans were up to before you killed them.

flash forward a few million years or however long it is later. that neat observation you made suddenly takes on new cultural significance! it's directly associated with one of the most important moments in history, which you don't really have too many other human records of - other people who were talking about current affairs that fateful december were mostly talking about labor rights or other hogwash that's irrelevant to your narrative of the moment and not making apocalyptic predictions. the kid also seems kind of pitiful - he spent all his life associating the general trends you identify with with the embodiment of all evil, and to be fair you did kind of kill him. so you start reading into him more and more - he becomes like all of those christmas songs in the comic, or one of those christmas movies that was initially a flop but suddenly became big once tv stations got the rights to play them willy-nilly. herschel schoen is no longer just some sad kid who coincidentally guessed the right timing of the apocalypse, he's an all-time holiday classic. how far is the stretch from there to actual prophethood, really?

so eventually you develop the ability to simulate the universe, and you decide one of the most fun ways to use this power would be to retcon the story to vindicate herschel all along, giving him credit for being right about everything. you don't realize how far you're stretching the truth with how much you idolize this kid, and the kid doesn't realize your claims of how correct he is also don't really make sense because he's too mind-boggled by how powerful you are and how much you like him.

The twins that are actually cousins

That one guy who supports murder

Arisone’s soulmate