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And don't forget, this Liner is in the top 1% of all Liners out there.

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Realizing that, while I like Destiny lore, what I love is Seth Dickinson's writing.

The Final Shape was a lovely story and the characters' archs were all emotional and satisfying. Maybe a nostalgic tear was shed for Cayde bonding with his reformed, resurrected killer.

But the things that have kept me coming back for 9 years were missing. I thought there'd be concrete answers about the Traveler, or some more thorough insights into the Witness, or even good lore on the Dread. I was hoping for another great lore book to join the ranks of Books of Sorrow, Unveiling, Mysterious Logbook, Marasenna, Last Days of Kraken Mare, etc. Some philosophy and horror, a genesis or exegesis or thorough backstory on a yet unexamined character/species.

Sadly, I didn't find those. The Dread's origin is that the Witness made them. Do they think and feel? TBD. The Traveler's conclusion was something like "you just have to have faith <3." Fine for the characters, but not for the readers/players of a 10-year-old mystery.

There's some nice things. The Micah-10 Traveler interpretations are cool, as is her origin story. And the foreshadowing still has me excited for the Dreadnaught, a yet unseen Disciple, etc. But I think key parts of what made Destiny lore so alluring for me are diminished.

Maybe it's the layoffs at Bungie. Maybe it's new writers going in a different direction. Either way, the aspects of sci-fi/space fantasy—ancient mysteries, metaphysical warfare, _____—have taken the back seat to personal drama that frankly isn't that interesting or fleshed out.

Maya could be an interesting antagonist, but she needed more backstory than "this simulation was evil or something" and more nuance than "the Vanguard are coercive, so I will coerce all of humanity." Why not explore what her presence means for the Vex, or the other simulations helping Praedyth escape the Vault?

The Witness trying to sway various characters was fine, but that has been covered so many times, especially in Beyond Light.

All that said, back to Seth: their absence in TFS made me realize how huge their presence in the lore was for my love of Destiny. I finally went and read their original works. What an incredible writer.

First, I read Exordia, the first/only entry into a dark mindfuck of a space opera. Its horrific in abstract ways: mysterious alien monoliths that poison reality around them. It's horrific in grounded ways, too: the alien invasion plays off of parallels with the Anfal campaign and the US involvement in Iraq. It's campy at times (with a villain who shouts "I love genocide!") but also profound. There's souls and date, but also math. There's also my favorite trope: mysterious, ancient architects.

After that, I read Baru Cormorant—all three books in a month. It's tragic and inspiring and genius. Originally I couldn't get through the first chapter because of the "fantasy" label. I've already read Earthsea and wasn't in the mood for wizards on boats. But I had the wrong impression. Understandable, because there is just no succinct way to label it.

Is it even fantasy? Honestly, I still don't know.

What it is is its own world. One that the inhabitants haven't fully mapped. One whose past is a must and whose future is uncertain. It's about hegemony. It's about purpose, obsession, and revenge. It's about revolution and community.

The colonizer culture is a kaleidoscope of different influences. Seafaring. Peri-industrial. Eugenic. It strikes me as something like 17th century Britain with a 20th century grasp of science. They don't have guns, but they do have both Greek fire and lobotomies. The story plays with different cultural views on indigenous rights, race, sexuality, and gender in ways that commentary real life while serving as interesting world building.

This story also weaves an insane amount of intellectual concepts into it. But rather than bog it down, they lift it up. The fate of the republic hinges on a myriad of different questions: is evolution Lamarckian or Darwinian? Can mathematical proofs usurp cultural hegemony? How do economics influence history? Most importantly, can you destroy the enemy from within before it destroys you?

It is not just cerebral, but tragic and heartbreaking. I saw the end of the first book coming, and yet I was devastated by the last chapter. Crushed like no ending has ever really crushed me. I didn't want it to happen.

There will likely be some time before the final book comes out, which is understandable. So much research goes into these. So many plot threads need to be woven together. So many mysteries not yet confronted.

This is all to say: if you like what I like about Destiny–thorough examinations of ancient mysteries, sci-fi takes on souls and magic, fantasy takes on science and technology, obsessive characters and vividly fucked up monsters, cancer and math as motifs, metaphors manifesting, and genius characters written by genius authors–give Seth Dickinson a chance.

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I'm adding "what in the wolf-divided's most splintered name hath here been wrought" to my day to day lexicon immediately

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I also find biden's debate performance dispiriting because id yknow, like to believe that theres some devil's bargain miracle medical cocktail that makes ur brain crazy good, overriding any fatigue or age or w/e, and they don't give it to me on account of it's expensive and the side effects are potentially lethal and during the comedown you need to be restrained because you've signed over your body to Lucifer for 1 hour in exchange for power. but of course the president has access to it in order to be awake for 7 days straight in times of crisis. But nah, the best we got is apparently still cns stimulants and a good night's fucking sleep huh. terrible.

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Wordle is running out of words. Only 2,000 five letter words remain. When that supply is exhausted the Creation shall begin. One day the word will be ZHURM, and all shall get it, and all shall understand it to mean "an ache from suddenly remembering a long-ago friend, who meant something to you once, but whose face you can no longer conjure". The next day the word shall be JOROL, and all will get it, and all will know it means "the melancholy confusion of passing by somewhere where you once could have died". The next day it will be GREFT, and all will understand it to be a small brown bird with white streaks found only in South America, and suddenly, it will appear, in the underbrush of the Amazon, in the streets of São Paulo, and all will know that it once was not there, but now, will always be

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Matching my freak isn’t enough. We need to be in serendure.

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The Thing with akua sahelian is that she is *the* character of all time but next to Nobody knows about her because so few people read a practical Guide to evil

If you are Reading this this is your sign to read a practical Guide to evil and experience akua

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It's a Classic Story. Girl meets Girl. Girl tries to have Girl murdered. Girl threatens to murder all of Girls Friends and Family. Girl threatens retaliation If her Friends and Family are murdered. Girls Scheme at each other. Girl murders 100.000 innocent civilians. Girl Rips Out Girls Heart for murdering 100.000 thousand innocent civilians. Girl binds Girls Soul to Her cloak and forces her to Work as an adviser as punishment for murdering 100.000 innocent people. Girl wriggles her way into having a little Bit more autonomy in her role as Girls cloak Slave Ghost. Girls Go into the dark to try and enslave an entire Race together. Girl has her Soul Cut Up by evil gods. Girl argues in defence of Girl to the evil gods even though there's nothing in it for her. Girl decides the best way to punish Girl is to redeem her and make her face the consequences of her actions. Girls become Friends. Girls Fall in Love. Girl rejects Girl because she murdered 100.000 innocent people. Girl Runs Back to her evil Empire. Girl realizes she's unhappy in her evil Empire and helps Bring it down. Girl rejoins Girl. Girl accepts being eternally bound to Higher being as a way to Trap her. Girls kiss. Girl Kills herself as Part of Binding. Girl comes Back every couple decades to hang out with Girl and presumably fuck. Tale as old as time really

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It's cool that south America has its own America (Brazil). I pray someday every continent will have an America

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Also since I might not have been clear enough the first time, the problem is capitalism.

Full stop.

Machine learning, generative AI, whatever the fuck you call it, it's all ethically neutral technology. It'd be very easy to use it for good if we just overhauled our entire economic system. And concept of intellectual property.

But I'm also sympathetic to anti-AI people, because the recent growth in AI technology is directly fuled by plutocratic ghouls spending world-saving amounts of money trying to become The Money King Of All The World by way of owning The Next Big Thing.

And ultimately the only possible way to cut down on that hot bullshit is through government legislation and public backlash, and it's very hard to lobby against a mostly invisible industry abusing big and flashy technology without people thinking the problem is about the tech, or thinking you think the problem is the tech.

You might be aware that it's factually incorrect that generative AI is particularly power consumptive relative to other things.

If you weren't, now you are! It's factually incorrect that it's particularly power consumptive. That is not a true thing about it. You can prove this by downloading the model and training the model, a thing you can do on a upper-mid end consumer-grade computer, and noticing that your power bill does not double, or even rise that much at all, actually. (Assuming you don't turn on every electronic device in your house at the same time during this process, of course.)

The most intensive part of the process, by far, is training the machine learning model, and that is not particularly intensive at all, usually no more than downloading a game with a large-ish file size. Individual generations by the machines do not use much energy at all, in fact.

So you know. If you're going to complain about generative AI at least complain about something that's actually a problem with it. This is probably impossible because no one who does complain about it frequently actually seems to understand the problems with it. (There are some but they're mostly "humans aren't particularly good at fact checking and they can easily fool themselves with the easily accessible versions of these tools if they've been lead to believe it can generate true statements based on information they've heard about CS lab grade tools" and "a company using them as a customer service tool may open themselves up to liability if it gives false information" and "companies, because they need to fill their time due to complex reasons rooted in psychology, keep adding feature bloat to existing products with ever-diminishing returns, of which generative AI tools are currently often one of those new pieces of bloatware" things. You know, boring stuff that's generally not worthy of an extreme emotional reaction, which is why it's probably impossible to frequently complain about it but also understand the actual issues.)

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Yannow this is actually a really great example of how disconnected The Discourse is from the actual technical realities of the AI industry. The power efficiency or environmental impact of generative models run on off the shelf hardware for personal users is irrelevant because that's not even a fraction of the marketshare of the AI industry, that's not what the money or power or hardware is going to.

Whats happening is new and preexisting companies are buying out hundreds of acres of colocation space, filling them with millions of dollars of specialty equipment useless for anything else, powered by tens of kilowatt hours to do... not a whole lot, to be honest.

Dont get me wrong, there's the usual spread of proven money makers, from protein folding (to file biochemical patents) to analyzing site traffic (to sell ads), but its hard to truly express how much the tech industry's favorite past time is burning money on increasingly niche use cases for no other reason than because it makes the shareholders happy, because no investor doesn't want to own stock in Omni Consumer Products, or Tyrell Corp, or even Skynet, regardless of how revolutionary AI is really likely to be to a given market.

I'm incredibly sympathetic to personal users of generative AI, it's cool tech, I think it's bomb as hell that in 20 minutes I can generate serviceable portraits for NPCs in my TTRPG campaign. But people have to keep in mind that every generative model we as consumers can download is a proof of concept, a tech demo made to be shown to a CEO or board of directors. "This program running on this personal computer made a credible art forgery/ScarJo impression/book summary, imagine what a while data center running it could do for your business!"

That's the space where environmental damage is done, where mass data scraping and plagiarism happens. For or against, you can't forget that.

You might be aware that it's factually incorrect that generative AI is particularly power consumptive relative to other things.

If you weren't, now you are! It's factually incorrect that it's particularly power consumptive. That is not a true thing about it. You can prove this by downloading the model and training the model, a thing you can do on a upper-mid end consumer-grade computer, and noticing that your power bill does not double, or even rise that much at all, actually. (Assuming you don't turn on every electronic device in your house at the same time during this process, of course.)

The most intensive part of the process, by far, is training the machine learning model, and that is not particularly intensive at all, usually no more than downloading a game with a large-ish file size. Individual generations by the machines do not use much energy at all, in fact.

So you know. If you're going to complain about generative AI at least complain about something that's actually a problem with it. This is probably impossible because no one who does complain about it frequently actually seems to understand the problems with it. (There are some but they're mostly "humans aren't particularly good at fact checking and they can easily fool themselves with the easily accessible versions of these tools if they've been lead to believe it can generate true statements based on information they've heard about CS lab grade tools" and "a company using them as a customer service tool may open themselves up to liability if it gives false information" and "companies, because they need to fill their time due to complex reasons rooted in psychology, keep adding feature bloat to existing products with ever-diminishing returns, of which generative AI tools are currently often one of those new pieces of bloatware" things. You know, boring stuff that's generally not worthy of an extreme emotional reaction, which is why it's probably impossible to frequently complain about it but also understand the actual issues.)

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translatology themed Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes out with a german guy who is an ardent admirer of Walter Benjamin's Task of the Translator so she starts using german idioms translated word for word into english¹. George, a strict adherent to Vermeer's Skopos Theory² ("always been a skopos guy. it's straight to the point. what's going on in hermeneutics? nobody knows! no idea, no skopos!"), makes fun of her for this but then grows a moustache and retrieves his toupé to resemble Benjamin more closely so Wilhelm will think he's in deep translatological thought when he's just looking out the window. the plan backfires, as Steinbrenner associates his new look with Trotsky³ ("shave that beard off George, we're running the Yankees here, not a newspaper!") Jerry is dating a brasilian girl who studied under Rosemary Arrojo, and is accused by Kramer of supporting monolingual regimes bc he wouldn't learn portuguese for her. However, concluding he should show more interest in her work, he tries to impress her by reading Cixous' Reading with Clarice Lispector, in reaction to which the girl breaks up with him ("she broke up with me, George! she said she wanted Cleopatra in bed, not a colonizer!" "Cleopatra?!" "Yes! Can you believe it?" "Nah, you don't have the nose for it.")⁵ Kramer misunderstands Anthropophagic Translation⁶ and thinks Newman wants to eat him.

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the ordeal of being known is in fact mortifying

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if i had a nickel every time ssrin called khaje her "bitter bipedal bride" i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice

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Hey Ssrin. What did you mean when you called Khaje your "bitter bipedal bride?" Like I'm not denying there's definitely Something there between you two but it was definitely not equivalent to the human conception of marriage. Accounting for magic Freudian slips anomalies in aereteic translation, do Khai have an institution analogous to marriage that your relationship to Khaje reminds you of, or do you think Khaje considers herself your bride?

And what were you doing with Khaje in the couple odd months between moving out of her daughter's place and immanentizing the corpse of a stillborn angel onto the site of their greatest trauma? Like obviously there was the reflexive attempted murder when she first witnessed Your Dread Glory and erotically patching her up afterwards, but was it really just weeks of elaborating on how redeemable of a slut Anna is?

Really, can you just describe, in your own words, what your relationship with your soul mate's mother is? Spare no breath, I want all the gory details. Please and thank you

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I blame turnover in the writing staff. The bigger plot threads (may) get followed up on years after they were introduced, but the little teasers and world building get forgotten when whomever wrote them leave Bungie.

So unless the current crop of writers specifically go digging through old lore entries (and quests, and dialogue for Forsaken+ stuff) they gotta just write new stuff, at the cost of seemingly forgetting old stuff.

The most blatant version of this was the Shadowkeep/Unveiling cosmology getting retconned shortly after Dickinson left, which I'm still I'm-not-angry-just-incandescently-dissapointed about.

remember when Drifter used stasis one (1) time and then it never came up again

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