#in which case... I mean whatever its all just whatever

[darlingdaisyfarm]

IDEA: STAN/FORD MEETING THE READERS PARENTS THAT LIVE OUT OF STATE AND DIDNT EXPECT THEM TO BE OLD🙏🏾

PLS POOKIE I NEEE THIS!!!

-🥮 anon

OH MY GOD THIS IS SUCH A GOOD IDEA I LOVE ITTTTT!!!! bless ur brain 🥮 anon <33 i also relate to this so hard so some phrases here will be ones my mom always tells me ahhahshd

STANLEY

you send them message “hey i’m coming home for a visit ! and bringing my partner :)��� and they’re all excited. Stan is also nervous, he just won’t say it straight. you’ll catch him fidgeting with his ring, wiping his palms on his pants before walking up the driveway and, as always, he makes some dumb joke.

Stan knows parents are gonna be weird about the age gap, he’s not an idiot. they’ve been probably picturing some guy your age. maybe someone you went to college with? or met at work / or off an app. what if they even pictured someone slightly younger, god help you. some guy with a baby face, whatever. just someone age-appropriate

but yes instead its STANLEY PINES. and your parents just go silent

your mom pulls you aside immediately and hits you with the classics “hun are you gonna chew his food for him next? he’s old enough to be your uncle’s roommate from the army!”

poor Stan, he tries, he really does. he even wears his best shirt and brings a bottle of cheap wine and some weird local honey he insists is good for the joints, because ALL old men say this phrase. he's trying to be POLITE TOO, he doesn’t swear which is very valuable because Stan can't live a day without swearing. he only stops himself for something truly important. for Mabel and Dipper, or in this case, your parents

Stan, meanwhile, is in the living room where he finds your dad’s tool box and suddenly they’re talking about gasket heads and brake pads like they’ve known each other since high school. he makes himself useful, fixes the wobbly chair without being asked. shows your little cousins / siblings how to do a coin trick AWW.

your mom is still suspicious and at some point she leans in, and says quietly “be honest this about the pension?”

and it’s so stupid because you know she’s half-joking but not really. you know she’s trying to make sense of it all, desperately trying to file this under quirky youthful mistake or weird phase, and meanwhile Stan is trying to talk about how proud he is of you, how smart and kind and beautiful you are, how you deserve the world and how lucky he is that you gave him the time of day, and you just wanna scream like SEE? SEE? this is what i mean. hes my person mom

but that's the irony cuz when Stan doesn’t try so hard to impress them with his good manners and starts talking about how he rebuilt the shack from the ground up, how he ran it for years, how he taught himself to fix plumbing, do taxes, he also shares with your dad a special recipe for grilling meat and how to make a great steak so your dad starts to warm up a little, there’s a glint of respect. they start bonding over car repairs or some dumb film they both watched in the 80s, and your mom still looks at you like you’ve lost your mind but at least she laughed at Stan's dad jokes.

“so yeah i may not have gone to college but i took care of two kids for a whole summer and they turned out alright” Stanley says it with such gruff fondness that makes even your mom pause a second.

and because he is good at reading people, he’ll look her in the eye and say,i “i know i’m not the person you pictured your kid bringing home. hell, i wouldn’t have pictured me either. but uhh, i love them, and i’m gonna treat them right, and they make me wanna be better. that count for anything?”

your mom will blink a few times and then mutter “you better” and later Stan asks if he can take leftovers home and your mom is so shocked she says yes LMAO

he ends up helping your dad clean the garage and they spend two hours in there talking about boats, cars, football, tax evasion

...

while you’re driving to your parents house you literally have to hold Ford's hand and go “okay. please. PLEASE do not start talking about interdimensional travel. i know it’s important to you sweetheart. but please don’t say anything about portals or non-linear time. please. not even once.”

“yes. of course. i understand.”

so when FORD finally meets your parents OF COURSE he will try to behave as politely as possible. “it’s a pleasure to finally meet you!” he says only to receive “why is the professor from back to the future holding my kid's hand.”

you know your mom is gonna hit you with it the second she corners you in the kitchen. “does he even hear well? what if you want children? you want to be changing his diapers while you’re pushing a stroller?” while you're trying to prove to her that, BUT, mom, he can't look THAT old, enough!

but yeah then like twenty minutes later your dad asks “so how old are you, mr. . . uh, mr Pines?” he is still wondering whether he should call him “doc”

and Ford just says, clear as day

“sixty, chronologically. though that doesn’t account for the three decades i spent traveling through alternate dimensions.” and that awkward smile.

and you just. want to die because your mom stares at you with grimace of pure panic. and you know her, she probably thinks you’ve been brainwashed into dating a dusty cult prophet. she pulls you aside, wide eyed “what does that mean? does he think he’s an alien? do i need to call someone? tell me right now this isn’t like that show where the girl marries a mummy!!”

Ford meanwhile is just casually describing how his lab collapsed into a rift in space-time and how he once got possessed by a dream demon. my boy doesn’t mean to be weird, trust, he’s just never learned the art of small talk :( he’s also in his stiff nervous mode where he can’t stop adjusting his tie. yes, you made him wear smth very decent for your first meeting. and also take a shower

BUT. once the shock about his age wears off, your parents start to realize that Ford is actually. . . kind of elegant? i mean, he compliments the books on their shelf and your mom's earrings. he’s polite, he says “thank you” and “please” and “may i?” + he clears the dishes. and this is probably the dream of every parent. + he remembers things they mention in conversation and brings them up later.

and ofc Ford says the most devastatingly romantic things about you without even trying. “theyre the most brilliant mind ive encountered in this dimension, and i don’t say that lightly.”

your mom will scoff, sure, but then it turns out Ford knows how to cook. and he’s like, very specific about it. he asks your mom about the spices she used and offers to help slice onions and does it correctly, perfectly even. offers her an actual trick for keeping tears at bay while doing it. she’s still suspicious, but when he compliments her dish, yeah. . . she corners you later again and says, “he’s strange and old, too old for you. but not stupid.“

aaand as a nice bonus Ford accidentally helps your little cousin / sibling with a science project by drawing a whole labeled diagram of a magnetic field so your cousin gets an A+!!

[macabre-muses]

maybe it's already obvious and i'm just late to the party , but i do wonder if on some level padmé's uncertianty when she told anakin she was pregnant (other then the obvious "we're in the middle of a war and not supposed to be married" and more importantly HER feelings about the whole situation which definetly warrant a whole other post) was due to anakin's weird relationship with fatherhood overall and how much she knew about it. let me explain better. she first meets anakin when he's living alone with his mother as a slave , and she doesn't hear anything about his father. so she must assume one of two things: best case scenario his father died before he could remember him , worst case (and sadly most realistic one for someone in shmi's situation) was that his mother had been raped. she doesn't hear shmi talking to qui gon about the parthenogenesis and i'm honestly not even sure if fourteen year old padmé, who had just met these people, would have believed that. then she meets anakin again, and the only time we see him mention a father to her is when he's talking about obi wan. now i'm gonna take the novels as my reference here and say that padmé is not exactly obi wan's biggest fan , especially when it comes to anakin (wild space explores that a lot in its first chapters), she sees him shut him down and harshly discipline him constantly (and before you come at me saying that anakin was annoying and deserved that, i'm speaking from padmé's pov who has only just re-met these people and learned of this dynamic), she also knows for a fact that anakin deeply loves him and as deeply resents him at the same time (as is often common with parents). still obi wan doesn't exactly shine through as a model father figure from his interactions with padmé and anakin in aotc. then there's the chancellor, whom she admired and trusted, but whom she's also started to grow very worried with at the time of rots , and it's not crazy she might have started to wonder if his intentions with anakin were completly positive and innocent the same way obi wan did. we don't really know if anakin had told her ALL about the prophecy, from the rots novelization we do learn that she knows he's supposed to be the chosen one, but iirc she never mentions his origins, and we don't really know how anakin grapples with the force basically being his deadbeat parent , much less we know what padmé might have tought of that (very sadly) but it probably would have made her understanding of anakin's parental influences even messier. all this to say, she suddenly finds herself pregnant in the middle of a war with her husband's child , a man who never truly knew a loving, constant father figure beyond mr. darkside , and who is now supposed to raise his own child at twenty two despite that. and that's honestly crazy i mean i'm glad they were happy about it, but i do think there was a level of idealization there happening about living their best picture perfect life out on naboo with nothing to hide , it was probably all they had fantasized about for three years of war (i do think they would have made good parents for the twins even in a more realistic setting though).

this started as a little post about how much padmé knew about anakin's more mythical origins and spiraled into whatever this is (i was probably not able to cover every single concept extensively and probably also forgot some stuff cause i wrote it in one sitting but hopefully it makes sense!) .

[riant-draws]

I have a math problem for you; how many pearls can fit within the volume of, say, a standard iterator chamber :)

little did you know, I'm an ex-engineering major. you are getting a Very Serious Answer

(disclaimer: i said EX-engineering major. there's a reason i quit and her name is thermodynamics. smarter people: this is your invitation to correct me if i wildly mess this up, which would be a great opportunity to embarrass me because most of this is basic algebra lol)

So! We're going to work within my headcanons, which means that Pebbles' puppet is about four feet tall because I say so. (If you're curious about that, I've talked about the significance of his size more here—scroll to the bold text).

In physics, you do a lot of assuming, so we're also gonna assume that physics works the same in rain world as on Earth, assume that Pebbles' chamber is a perfect cube, assume that the pearls are congruent and perfectly spherical, and we're going to ignore the presence of his puppet and its arm (because determining the volumes of those and subtracting them would just overcomplicate things).

First, we need to find out how big his chamber is:

So, his chamber's volume is 67877.368 cubic feet.

Now, we need the volume of a single pearl, since they're all the same size:

Easy so far? Well, here's where it gets interesting...

CLOSE PACKING

Now we're talking about packing efficiency. Equal-sized spheres pack in specific, high-density arrangements (here's a Wikipedia page, and here's another, and a relevant section of a chem textbook). The densest we can get is pi/(3(sqrt(2))), shown below, which uses the face centered cubic (FCC) lattice.

This density percentage is how much of the total volume can be occupied by the spheres, which, in the case of FCC packing, is about 74%. (See the links above for where I got that bit of info.) And you'd think: "Great! We can just calculate 74% of the total volume of Pebbles' puppet chamber, and that'd be the answer!" Well... not exactly: it doesn't account for the pearls being inside of a container—specifically with how they interact with the cube's interior edges. The equation just assumes they're floating in space, but that's not true in this case since you can't have pearls clipping through the walls. (The reason this isn't accounted for is because packing efficiency is typically a concern in the context of how atoms fit together and form crystalline structures—they're inherently not "boxed into" anything.)

However. Trying to calculate exactly how many spheres can pile into a cube without the outer ones half clipping out of it is... difficult. At least, it is for me. So, since I'm already doing things like approximating the chamber as a cube and ignoring the puppet, why not go the whole nine yards and ignore clipping (for my sanity's sake, if nothing else). If you really wanted to, you could solve for the surface area of the chamber and subtract the clipped pearls to probably get a more accurate estimate (though hexagonal close packing, HCP, would be more efficient for this), but since we're dealing with volume, it wouldn't make a super significant difference, which is also why I'm opting to ignore it. Just know that the below result will be an overestimate.

So, to answer the original question: How many pearls are we talking?

597,967 pearls is our answer!

again, it's likely a decent overestimate due to clipping, but as I said earlier, we're already approximating anyway so whatever lol

more info here (might be the most clear and succinct explanation I've found)

here's a paper about this if I've somehow piqued your interest

[kyogre-blue]

I hate how long this reblog chain is getting, but I'm going to add to it anyway...

HSR writing certainly ends up "turn your brain off and vibe" but I can't credit that when they make you read so much goddamn lore. It's so overcomplicated and yet feels so poorly planned, which is truly such a combination... well, anyway. I better not get started complaining because I'll never stop.

In regard to the whole 12 factors thing, it seems to be described as data being passed down, so I took it to be something like reincarnation. They can definitely have different human names and lives, but the soul (the data with the attached file name like NeiKosXXXX and such) would be the same predetermined one. This is presumably why we get the system error messages about failing to load data into buffer for the recurrence to start and how I assumed they forced the system to cycle - fully erasing Cyrene's data (PhiLiaXXXX) from the current cycle made the system go back to last main save (start of the cycle) to recreate her from the "clean" data inheritance from the previous cycle again or whatever.

See?? It's so confusing! How am I supposed to viiiiiibe---

Castorice is a particularly weird case. I'm unclear if she and Polyxia were two halves of the same data name (seems to be the case??), and there's a second "factor" person that they were supposed to trade off with for this cycle (and its recurrences) but Polyxia screwed things up by creating our Castorice and letting her become a demigod on a technicality. Or if "Castorice" and "Polyxia" traded off with each other every cycle. You'd think it wouldn't make sense if one of them is the Titan at any given time, but then there's two Phainons running around, so...? Souls sure are mysterious.

In regard to 3.1, I think there's a particular issue where they pretty obviously changed their intended direction for the Flame Reaver. Not the part of him being time traveling Phainon, that's clearly always been the plan, but the details. Just look at the degree to which they emphasize from every angle that he's connected to the Black Tide (including gameplay, him applying the same debuff as black tide monsters), how he "rode in on the black tide," but then by 3.4 there's no direct connection at all. You have to link it all back to Irontomb and it's a huge stretch. He also has a whole ass conversation with Krateros that has very odd contents but also is odd in that he can talk fine, but then by 3.3 he's unable to even properly register Cipher's anything...

Not to mention the weirdness of what Anaxa posits about him. Even if you play that off as unreliable narrator, making Anaxa of all characters that unreliable is a narrative move of all time. (Anaxa thinks he stores the coreflames in his sword, but our boy is just rawdogging those into his body lol)

"Because he was specifically planning to attack places where the Chrysos Heirs would be on a certain day instead just going to grab the coreflames that were sitting there undefended, like Aquila and Oronyx?" Hilarious because he literally does just take Oronyx's coreflame straight from Oronyx.

But yeah, he clearly started doing something that went beyond the simulated sandbox Amphoreus, but we just Don't Know what that actually means or looks like.

3.5, please give us something....

Detangling Mydei's Backstories Backstory?

My last post, casting doubt on 3.2's revelation that Mydei's immortality is deliberate on his part, led to some interesting discussion in the comments that definitely reinforced my earlier thoughts that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are too numerous to be accidental. Star Rail is not known for its flawless continuity (Robin and Sunday's backstory, I'm looking at you lol), but usually the inconsistencies are not so overt, and repeated so many times, that they become central to the entire plot of a character.

So I wanted to refine my earlier theory a bit: I'm cautiously optimistic that there are enough signs that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are deliberate, and that the Mydei of the current cycle in Amphoreus is actively experiencing an entanglement between two different timelines, without (yet) consciously recognizing the incompatibility of his own "memories."

When we work from the standpoint that the events of Mydei's backstory can be separated into two distinct timelines, the inconsistencies vanish:

The "Sea of Souls" Timeline

This is the most prominent timeline, and the one that appears most accurate for "our" Mydei. In this timeline, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as a tiny infant and spent the first nine years of his life there. This is confirmed both in the flashback we're provided early in 3.1, as well as in Mydei's voicelines and character stories.

After nine years, he crawled out of the sea (possibly motivated by witnessing Tribbie's "star" in the sky). On the same day (or very near it), he met with a band of Kremnoan exiles.

Whether this was a larger group already, constituting a small "detachment" army of exiles, or just started with the five exiled friends and Mydei then grew into a small army by picking up other exiles over time, is still unclear. However, at this point, Mydei makes no mention of returning to Kremnos and instead goes straight from "leaving the sea" to "living ten years in exile:"

This is the key point of inconsistency between the two "halves" of Mydei's story--either he lived in Kremnos or he didn't. We can handwave here and say "Yes, he returned to Kremnos with his friends and they just hid their identities, leaving Kremnos years later in a self-imposed exile," but the story gives us absolutely no indication that this realistically could have happened. Mydei never once mentions hiding his identity, changing his appearance, or living a double life in the city, and never explains how he would have had access to the inner city of Kremnos ("as befitting a crown prince") and the royal library, yet still go totally unnoticed by his father or anyone loyal to Eurypon, including Krateros. (There's also no explanation at all for why he would have wanted to return to a city ruled by someone who tried to murder him and where he would have had to live life under a fake identity just to get by, but you know...)

Instead, the game does give us several pieces of information indicating that the five Kremnoan exiles did not return to Kremnos after meeting Mydei:

First, Mydei's character stories confirm that Mydei deliberately hid his name while traveling in exile across Amphoreus, indicating that he knew he would be recognized by Eurypon/Eurypon's loyalists if he didn't hide his identity. This awareness suggests it is extremely unlikely that Mydei could have returned to Kremnos without being identified:

This also suggests that, at this point in this timeline, no one in Castrum Kremnos knew for sure that Mydeimos had survived being thrown into the Sea of Souls and returned. This is further confirmed by a memory fragment where Krateros says there has been a "rumor" that the leader of the exiled Kremnoan army is one who "defied death." Krateros alone makes the assumption that this could be Mydei and decides to defect to aid him:

This memory suggests two things clearly: Mydei was not living in Kremnos at the time Krateros defected, and the exile of all of Mydei's friends must have taken place before they met Mydei, years in the past, as there is no way an entire small army could have been exiled from Kremnos, with Mydei in toe, and not at all attract Krateros's attention until after they were gone.

The idea that Mydei never returned to Kremnos is further enforced by Eurypon, who did not recognize Mydei when he confronted him, to the point that he didn't believe Mydei was even Kremnoan. This suggests that Eurypon not only didn't know Mydei's true identity--he'd never seen him before at all, making it extremely unlikely that Mydei was walking around Castrum Kremnos, talking to Chryseus Leo, and reading in the royal library all under some false identity for years. Eurypon certainly wouldn't have been capable of exiling someone he'd never seen before from Kremnos, in any case!

Therefore, we can assume the series of events in this timeline is pretty straightforward: Mydei entered the Sea of Souls as a baby, came out nine years later, went straight into a life of exile with his five friends, amassed power and support for ten years, and then returned to seek vengeance on his father.

The only remaining question in this timeline becomes "When did Mydei join up with Okhema?"

I think, in this timeline, it makes the most sense for Mydei to have only joined up with Okhema after killing his father. In 3.1, Mydei confirms to Phainon that all his friends died before he was able to kill his father, and that none of them ever made it to Okhema:

Therefore, the final order of events for the more prominent timeline is:

Dumped into the sea as an infant, nine years in the Sea of Souls

Ten years in exile with his friends amassing strength and support

Returns to Kremnos, kills his father, and the last of his friends dies that day

Then he defects to Okhema, leading any of the Kremnoans willing to follow him there.

By itself, this story makes perfect sense. If this was all the information we'd been given, there wouldn't have been any gaps.

Unfortunately, we also have a whole other set of information that massively conflicts with these events, which can only really be explained two ways: Either Hoyo messed up (again) and really dropped the consistency ball when it comes to writing Mydei's backstory... Or there's an entire separate timeline going on. Personally, I'm leaning toward the latter, because there are just too many seemingly deliberate fingers in the story pointing toward the inconsistencies for them to feel entirely unintentional to me.

Therefore, I propose that Mydei's memories are actually getting infiltrated by a second, entirely different timeline:

The "Gorgo Lives" Timeline

From 3.0 all the way to 3.2, we're given numerous pieces of information that point to a wholly different order to the events of Mydei's life, contrasting the story that Mydei tells Phainon in the Garden. At first, these events seem scattered and nonsensical, contradicting the "main" timeline in too many ways to be anything but errors... But when taken as a whole, we can build a second coherent timeline out of these events if we make one assumption: There is a timeline where Gorgo lived longer.

In the second timeline which is intruding on Mydei's memories, there appears to be one key point of divergence: Gorgo did not die dueling Eurypon. Either she never challenged him to the duel, or (more likely) she was never successfully poisoned, and therefore it's possible she won the duel, allowing her to rescue Mydei from the sea.

Working from that possibility, a second complete timeline emerges:

Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant but did not drift there for nine years. Instead, he was rescued and brought back to Kremnos, where he was allowed to grow up in the inner city, with access to both Chryseus Leo, who served as his teacher, and access to the royal library, which he is proud enough of to call "his" library. He is able to lead Phainon and the Trailblazer around Castrum Kremnos even in its ruined state because he grew up there, spending enough time there to know the city like the back of his hand:

This is where we can slot in the inconsistent memories Mydei has of Gorgo:

(By the way, although Mydei writes this scene off as a dream, you can actually hear Oronyx's whisper play in the black screen seconds before this "dream" occurs...)

But okay, let's say this is just a wishful dream. Maybe this scene never happened. If all we got of Gorgo supposedly raising Mydei was this moment in 3.1, I might agree that it was just a dream (other than there being no reason to play Oronyx's sound effect there, but you know). However, in 3.2 they then hit us with this:

That's multiple moments now pointing to a timeline where Gorgo raised Mydei. Once is handwave-able--twice? That's deliberate.

In this secondary timeline, Mydei appears to have grown up as Kremnos's beloved crown prince, being warmly embraced by his people (at least until Kremnos fell into calamity). Apparently his days consisted of eating pomegranates, training for combat, playing with Kremnos's kids, and hanging out with his five friends. We see snippets of this idyllic life (along with his five friends appearing to be roughly the same age as him--something that likely wouldn't be true in the "main" timeline, by the way) on Mydei's long march back into Castrum Kremnos:

I know some people took this to be Mydei hallucinating or just wishfully imagining a life where he was able to be happy with his friends, possibly even some metaphorical "encountering the souls of the departed in a paradise," but I don't think this is true. Every single time Mydei phases in and out of this "hallucination," the visual effect and the sound effect of Oronyx are distinctly played--the exact same sound and visuals that play when Trailblazer activates Oronyx's prayer to jump between timelines.

Mydei himself doesn't seem to quite understand what is happening to him in this moment, as you can hear him stumble and pant as he repeatedly goes through flashes of Oronyx's power. You can listen to comparison video clips on the prior post I made about Mydei's backstory.

Furthermore, if we work from the assumption that these moments actually represent a rupture between timelines, then the rest of the inconsistencies can finally be cleared up:

In 3.0, Mydei says that his choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was not a forced exile but a "self-imposed" one:

And this aligns with what he stated in the Garden of Life to Phainon, that he and his friends "left Castrum Kremnos" to go into this self-imposed exile, rather than having never returned to Kremnos from the sea:

Furthermore, this also aligns with the angry NPCs in the past version of Castrum Kremnos that Trailblazer and Castorice travel back to:

Remember that this version of Castrum Kremnos was supposed to be occurring while Eurypon was still alive, so there is absolutely no way this line makes sense in the same universe where Eurypon didn't even know Mydei had survived. There isn't any way, in "our" timeline, that Mydei could have been both the "crown prince" of Kremnos for these NPCs and completely unknown to his father, the king.

These NPCs, furthermore, directly accuse Mydei of "deserting Kremnos," suggesting that Mydei was living in Castrum Kremnos as their prince, and then abandoned them to join Aglaea in Okhema, getting himself and everyone who went with him labelled as "traitors to Kremnos" in the process. None of this makes sense in the context of a timeline where no one in Kremnos knew he had even survived.

Instead, all of these elements point to a different sequence of events:

Gorgo lived, likely winning her duel and thereby (likely) giving her the right to save Mydei from the Sea of Souls and bring him back to Kremnos. He was raised by his mother as the beloved crown prince of Kremnos. Then, years later, as his father and Nikador both descended into full madness, Mydei and the Kremnoan detachment defected.

But what would have triggered this sudden need to defect after years of leading Kremnos as a well-liked prince?

The flashback between Mydei and Eurypon actually suggests a possible reason:

Apparently, at some point, in some timeline, Mydei knew about Eurypon's plan to break Nikador's divinity into separate parts and seal him away, harnessing the power of their titan for himself.

Yet the Mydei of 3.0 seems to have no idea about any of this, never able to give any explanation for how Nikador has degraded so much nor why Nikador is seemingly unkillable. Castorice, Mem, and the Trailblazer have to come up with the idea to go back in time to the past Kremnos by themselves, because Mydei never makes any mention of there ever having been a plot to break up and seal away Nikador's divinity, even when they walk past the very blades that did the sealing.

Finally, there's one last piece of conflicting information: While talking to Phainon in the Garden of Life, Mydei states that all of his friends died before the detachment could ever join up with Okhema and that all of their deaths occurred by the time he went to kill his father. But this conflicts with the NPCs above, who state that Mydei had already defected to Okhema and joined the Flame Chase Journey as a Chrysos Heir while his father was still alive.

This inconsistency is further reinforced by a memory fragment with Krateros, who confirms that Mydei had joined up with Okhema already before killing his father:

Putting all of this together, the complete series of events for this second timeline becomes:

Infant Mydei is quickly rescued from the Sea of Souls, is instead raised by his mother, and grows up as the crown prince of Castrum Kremnos with his five friends.

At some point, years later, he discovers Eurypon's plot to break up and imprison Nikador's divinity, and he and his friends and supporters defect from Kremnos as a result.

Either they go straight to Okhema (I'm inclined to say that "ten years of wandering" doesn't fit, chronologically speaking, into this secondary timeline) or they do wander a bit, but ultimately, Mydei reaches Okhema and aligns with Aglaea before killing his father.

After aligning the Kremnoan Detachment with Okhema, Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father, possibly to halt Eurypon's evil plan to harness Nikador's power.

At some point in this timeline, presumably before Mydei returns to kill his father, Gorgo likely still dies (possibly killed by Eurypon and/or Nikador), which explains why the Gorgo in the Sea of Souls seems to be the one convinced that she raised Mydei.

And this is just pure personal speculation, because there isn't enough evidence to really confirm it, but I almost feel like we can even pinpoint how/when the whole decision to defect to Okhema took place. At the end of Mydei's flashbacks to the "peaceful" Kremnos, Peucesta says that Mydei has been away from Kremnos for a while.

Leonnius assumes that Mydei was away on some apparently extended training trip, but this moment specifically ends with Gorgo welcoming Mydei home and asking him one very important question:

Obviously these lines are doing double duty, symbolically welcoming the present Mydei back to the ruins of Castrum Kremnos and asking him whether he's finally ready to take on his role as the "Guardian of Amphoreus." But as the wiki notes, this takes place in a flashback to the past, and for the "Mydei of the past" (aka the Mydei of the alternate timeline), this could very well have been Mydei disappearing from Kremnos to make contact with Aglaea in Okhema, and Gorgo questioning him about his decision to commit himself to the Flame Chase Journey, leading up to an ultimate and permanent defection from Kremnos. (This is just speculation though, trying to tie the last few loose ends together.)

Anyway, when taken from this perspective, that there are two separate backstories here, one from a world where Gorgo lived and the more prominent one where she died, we can sort all the seeming inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory into two surprisingly tidy and complete timelines.

I haven't yet found anything in any Mydei scene that doesn't fit one of these two scenarios, so I'm starting to definitely feel optimistic here that this writing was intentional, and that the "contradictory" backstory we're seeing for Mydei isn't "the worst continuity Star Rail has served up to date," but instead an actual deliberate choice to present us with a character whose memories are a hodge-podge of two divergent timelines, snippets of one timeline constantly erupting and "filling in the blanks" of the other.

I think this would be a fascinating way to lead up to the idea that Amphoreus's world isn't real, that it's a cobbled together story or set of memories that someone is barely holding together, and that it's constantly cyclical in nature, with events repeating with slight variations across times. The idea that Mydei is actually experiencing two different sets of memories crushed together into a tangled jumble and that he's only just now starting to become aware of the discrepancies would be such an excellent way to reinforce the "unreality" of Amphoreus's plot as a whole.

I really hope this is the direction that they take the story... Or at least that I won't one day be looking at all my Mydei posts and sadly thinking to myself that I put a lot more thought into the character's backstory than his own writers did, RIPPPPP. 😂😂😂

Cope with me, people!

[promotional-dvd]

°•☆charlie reid x shy!reader: bad day☆•°

♥︎ shy!reader (not unlike charlie) will not say if somethings wrong. the only difference is that your much worse at hiding it. your big watery eyes and pouty lips give away your upset immediately.

♥︎ its one of those days where everything goes wrong. you bought an iced coffee which you promptly drop. you didn’t get much sleep. every outfit you try on that morning looked horrible. and you get to work and some guy is really rude to you and that is the final straw. your boss sends you home cos your just so deflated and teary

♥︎ when you finally trudge through the door and flop onto the couch the tears really start to come. its just been such a shitty day and all you want is to curl up in bed with your grumpy bf and shut out the world

♥︎ speaking of said grumpy bf. your phone pings with a message

charlie😠💕: hey sweetheart, we just got a new lead on the case so ill probably have to stay late at the office tonight, im sorry baby

♥︎ full breakdown

♥︎ the one thing you need and he wont be home till god knows what time. and you wont message him to say you really need to see him. you cant. you know how important his work is. how much he dedicates himself to it. it would be selfish of you to interrupt his work because your feeling emotional.

♥︎ so you lay slumped on the couch crying. you don’t shower. get into your pjs. turn on the tv. make dinner. you just sit and cry and you have no idea how long for as it some point you drift of to sleep.

♥︎ hours later you are woken up by the sound of the front door opening - despite charlies attempt to be silent. he assumed youd be in bed by now so when he looks to the couch and sees your half concious form, eyebrows furrowed in confusion and sadness he immediately goes into panic mode (as much as he can)

♥︎ he approaches you, his own eyesbrows furrowed now, and crouches down by your face which he promptly takes into his large calloused hands.

♥︎ “hey, baby, whats goin’ on? why are you out here and not in bed, hm?” concern laced his every word. when you finally wake up enough and take in your surroundings and see the worried state of charlies face the waterworks start again.

♥︎ you explain everything. the coffee. work. your apperance. it all comes out in one long series of sobs. and he just sits and listens nodding occasionally and scanning over your distraught features. when you finally finish your rambling he responds with

♥︎“oh sweetheart, why didnt you call me, huh? couldve came and gave that jackass a piece of my mind.”

♥︎ this brings a whole new wave of tears streaming down your face as you explain that you cant call him away from his work, that his work is more important than you

♥︎“lets get one thing straight doll, hey look at me, nothing is more important than you. i mean it, nothing. you can call me whenever for whatever. it hurts that you didnt already think that was the case.” his face is sorrowful, guilty that you suffered in silence because you think he values work over you.

♥︎ queue princess treatment before bed. Charlie showering with you, washing your hair and body with a softness most would assume he was incapable of. cuddling up in bed while he strokes your hair and whispers praises and love into your hair interspersed with kisses along your hairline.

♥︎ he takes the next day off work and calls into your work for you. if you think last night was princess treatment well get ready for today cos you are not lifting a dam finger. a whole day of him doting on you. making up for his absence on such a bad day.

♥︎ breakfast in bed. watching all your favourite movies even the ones he hates. buys you 3 new jelly cats. orders your favourite take out for dinner. you guys don’t leave bed all day. maybe charlie even finds some others ways to make you feel better 😏😏😏

[ghcjhvk]

batman 161 spoilers and stuff

quick scroll if u dont want spoilers i just read new issue

damian teaming up with bane might be my final reason on the list

i mightve been okay with it if they gave us a reason. "you needed help" are you SERIOUS right now. can you give me like. a little bit more?? okay wait now im getting flash banged into the past when i read task force z and i think they said something abt bane not being the one to kill alfred?? i could be spreading misinformation here be forwarned. but like even if thats the case everyone else still thinks he did it so like give me something. why does bane even need to be here can we not replace him or something. he did like a singular panel of plot, got punched once, and then got sent back to blackgate.

batman's inner dialogue lowkey irritates me im sorry. i just dont like it.

jokers there. its like the plot forgets he's relevant sometimes. esp bc nw fucks off to go see batman 2 seconds after jumping out the lighthouse and like ig the jokers still out running free.

jason remains my favourite ragebaiter. he also pulls disappearing into the gotham water trick again for like the third (?) time. (fourth if we count utrh movie with utrh comic (?)) i choose to believe he has an undetectable submarine perpetually following him around just so he gets chances to do this shit.

nightwing loses jason in the water for the second time lmao

hush 2 be original challenge

i dont hate barbaras part in this issue (but also idk a whole lot abt her as batgirl) and i dont mind bruce's narration/perspective of her.

also lets just talk about this for a second; yeah i dont think letting ur emotions dictate ur actions is a bad thing. theres no such thing as emotions vs rationality when u make decisions im sorry. if u had to pick one over the other, i think a lot more people would be doing a lot more stupid things. they exist with each other, two sides of the same coin bs, except ur not flipping the fucking coin and calling heads or tails ur just using the damn coin to pay. anger and grief are emotions i fear. being calm is an emotional state of being i fear. compassion is a feeling. empathy and guilt after helping build morality. stop being stupid bruce it aint cute. also like how cliche is this dialogue someone sedate me rn.

seeing huntress reminded me of the rh comic we're getting in september 🥀🥀. i really dont like her costume design (or jason's) in it. the fact that its a crop top thing just doesnt sit right with me i dont like it. thats not to mention jason's drip card getting revoked. what the fuck happened. i didnt even hate the outlaw muzzle fit i thought it was nice (esp. in batman/catwoman gotham war). ill be brave and say atp i'd rather the pill helmet fit with the fuckass skull logo and cape. like im sorry for complaining abt the lips helmet i didnt mean it dc i swear. his jacket doesnt sit right with me and his logo is starting to become more and more indistinguishable from nw. (how rhato new52 felt after giving jason one of nightwings old costumes). like his muzzle fit logo has those two lil spaces in it bc the guy who made the design said it looked like jason's mask when he had his hood up and like, ill accept that. it works bc he has his muzzle. it also sometimes looks like a heart which just gives me more reasons to finish drawing a steven universe au.

this is not even mentioning all the wholly indefensible shit coming out abt the author rn (am i still holding out a small amt of hope bc she wrote beast world rh?? yes. but i know dc will crush and spit on that tiny bit)

wait why did no one tell me the alt cover of helena and jason kissing was done by nick robles.

anyway hey dc if we could have like, something good that is canon to the timeline or whatever thatd be kinda cool. yes this is abt the absolute series, rh resurrection, and wfa, sue me. fan works and not-canon works after being better.

[statementlou]

what's really sad to me is I think what happened is that Louis just went out to have a good time and do his thing last year at glasto, like sure he packed fits to get papped a little but it wasn't supposed to be anything out of the ordinary- but then it spontaneously ended up being the best press moment he'd had in years and this huge boost... so then this year instead of lad party weekend it's an OPPORTUNITY and they had multiple teams and various players coordinating like a fucking secret op like damn. No wonder he looks like that; MEH indeed

[sonknuxadow]

also i am begging for people to realize that the "everything is canon" post from the sonic twitter account was a joke. it annoys me so bad that people use that tweet as a source in their arguments about sonic lore and stuff or just take it seriously at all ..... it literally means nothing it was just a silly comment they made when retweeting sonic and puyo puyo tetris crossover art but people always crop out the context when reposting it

[wemlygust]

this is how I learned the payment processor mafia is going after itch.io too... Fuck. Apparently Itch.io said in their statement here (https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content) that, "We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change." No apology for the abrupt loss of income and major life disruption they just caused without any warning/prior notice, I notice. Only for "frustration and confusion." That's pretty pathetic. Do better, Itch.io. Anyway... I think people need to be backing up fanfics and fan art stored on tumblr.com (and preferably putting them on archive of our own where they'll actually be safe and still easily searchable, but AT LEAST please back them up to your local storage or cloud drives or save their URL's on archive.org) as of like yesterday, because the payment processors are going after everyone, and everyone is caving, and tumblr HAS mass-nuked "porn" before, including queer content and romance content that wasn't even actually explicit (which is NOT to say that it'd be okay if it were "just" the explicit content under threat, no, that's not okay at all even on its own, I just want people to realize that if their fic isn't explicit that doesn't mean a corporate robot won't auto-sort it into the burn pile anyway). Anyway, with all this news about the payment processors (which to be clear means VISA and Mastercard, aka the ultra-mega-corps that have a leash on... basically every company everywhere), combined with the actively malevolent trashfire in the whitehou- the trashfire in the whole American federal government, I am afraid that tumblr, and other monetized platforms that host fan content and queer content, might be about to hit that "mass delete everyone's heartfelt hard work without any warning" button again. Emphasis on "again". This has happened more than once before, on tumblr, fanfiction.net, and other sites that rely on advertising (and since this is coming from VISA and Mastercard now, there's pressure on ad-less, end-user-purchase-funded apps and websites now too). And obviously this whole rambly mess of a post I'm writing here is in reply to a post about this exact thing happening being inflicted on indie game devs on itch.io, and users of itch.io, without any prior warning even though those devs may rely on itch.io for to pay their rent and buy groceries. Also, just in case anyone doesn't know this already, you can back up/upload your own original fiction---and I think original comics too, even though the ability to put visual content on ao3 is really new (possibly still janky?) and not many people have used it yet---to archiveofourown.org as well. It's not restricted to fanfiction only, even though that's the vast majority of content on the site. You just pick the "fandom" category called "Original Work" when you upload, if I'm remember right. And of course, there are backup options like: 1. your own local storage on your phone or computer, or on an old laptop or phone that you still have, etc.

2. dropbox

3. onedrive

4. google drive

5. proton drive (like google drive but more private! and smaller unless you pay, I think... But text files are tiny!)

6. whatever the IOS/Apple equivalent is? 7. archive.org (the wayback machine! save the URL's of your favorite fic prompt reblog chains)

8. your phone manufacturer's cloud service or "secure folder" service, if you have one

9. Good old fashioned printing things out (murder trees!)

.... Anyway, yeah, just please backup your creative creations in as many different places/using as many methods as you can, so that you have redundancy. But also: the method you actually use is better than a hypothetical better method that you don't use. Tldr: backup your work!

Don't keep the only copy of it only on tumblr, fanfiction.net, Wattpad, or etc, where it can get randomly deleted by capitalists.

given the shit going down on itch, are you redeploying your work onto a new site?

I wasn't hit on anything (I don't actually release erotic work and was spared this whole incident, besides watching some friends get hit) but I've pulled the music I had up for the moment, if only to see if I can think of a better answer for how to get everything accessible in one place.

theoretically there shouldn't be a problem with the games I work on, but I'm still a bit soured after watching how long this took to release a post-action statement, following a long history of them being bad with communication. this entire thing wasn't itch's call, but from a straightforward business standpoint, it's shaken loose some already present trust issues I had with how communication and payment were being handled

at the very least, I don't trust the platform to communicate enforcement and policy changes with enough clarity and timeliness to make me feel comfortable using it as a primary distribution hub

so in short, nothing's changed on my end because nothing non-redundant was on itch. going forward, who knows

[nyaskitten]

One day I truly wanna just get sooo deep into the different cultures that kind of exist in Ninjago but in the weird Ninjago fashion of taking bits and pieces and horribly misrepresenting them.

[longagoitwastuesday]

Every day I wake up regretting getting emotionally invested in Jujutsu Kaisen

[parasitoidism]

the sheer greed of video game companies really staggers me sometimes like I'm still really fucking mad thinking back to how vimms lair got fucking gutted by nintendo and sega a few months back

[lunar-fey]

its normal to fall asleep and start dreaming in what literally could not have been more than 9 minutes!

[bmpmp3]

tomodachi life really went off with those bonzi buddy ass voices. win xp type text to speech. all character creation focused games should have this.

[heyclickadee]

Because I’ve decided to be somewhat annoyingly optimistic about Tech coming back eventually, I kind of wanted to explain the hypothetical framework through which I’ve been looking at the all of this wiiiiiiiiiith…

…a crappy diagram. (I’m sorry about my handwriting. I usually write in cursive, so it’s usually smaller and even worse).

Now, this is simplified, there are plenty more arcs, plots, and subplots than this, but I sort of picked out the main three that we seem to be dealing with from the beginning of The Clone Wars season seven onwards.

First we’ve got Rex’s arc, where after an endless string of losses and disappointments from previous seasons, he begins putting his foot down and trying to take something back and help his fellow clones, first within the GAR when he insists on rescuing Echo, and then later on in The Bad Batch as we see him gradually form a small band of clones and other allies (people like the Martez sisters and Riyo Chuchi) with the end goal of freeing as many clones as he can. This seems to be an ongoing plot, given that Rex’s work as well as the setup with the senate continues into season three of TBB but receives neither climax nor resolution as we narrow the focus towards Omega.

And, of course, alongside the Rex arc is what I’m calling the clone agency arc, introduced (or perhaps re-introduced) via Echo and his captivity by the Techno Union in the beginning of season seven of TCW, continuing through the end of TCW and into TBB with Order 66, Crosshair’s time under the chip and with the empire (his story far has given us a great look into the life of clones subject to order 66 and imperial service), the clone retirement bill, and the CXs. It, too, reaches neither climax nor conclusion and seems to be ongoing. Furthermore, Rex’s arc seems to be dependent on the clone agency arc (though you could argue it the other way), and many of the loose threads from the end of TBB tie into it as well.

Next, at the beginning of “Aftermath,” we’ve got the clone force 99 family arc as well as the individual bad batcher arcs, none of which reach a resolution. (The bad batch characters are all introduced in the bad batch arc of season seven, but I’d argue that with a few possible exceptions, they don’t really begin their arcs until the start of TBB. They’re not the focus in season seven and are there largely to facilitate Rex’s arc, so what we get for them is a lot of set up and establishing baselines).

I’ve argued before that each of the batcher’s character development goes only so far as it needs to go in order to facilitate Omega’s arc ending by the final episode; after that, they don’t conclude, they slow down, get put on the backburner, and come with period reminders of what those arcs were doing. Hunter gets very close to resolution in his development, since he’s the most tied at the hip to Omega’s arc and most of his character arc has to do with her, but the others are all completely open-ended. The family arc likewise remains open-ended—not necessarily because Tech’s not there and they remain separated, but because the separation and brokenness of the family is never dealt with and left wanting a conclusion despite the fact there was ample opportunity to reach it if necessary.

And last, we’ve got Omega’s childhood arc and the Hunter/Omega relationship arc. These, closely tied together, are the only major arcs that conclude by the end of TBB. And here’s the interesting thing; they’re not actually the first arcs introduced in the show.

Omega is the POV character, but she’s not actually introduced until the second act, I would argue she doesn’t become the POV character until the hyperspace scene at the end of “Aftermath,” and her arc proper doesn’t really begin until “Cut and Run” when we introduce the idea of Omega choosing where she wants to be and the, “You all have a purpose—so what’s hers?” “It doesn’t matter, she’s just a kid,” exchange. Other arcs including her start earlier—I would argue that Crosshair’s arc with her starts in the brig scene, for example—but her arc doesn’t quite kick off until a little later.

Basically, the way I’m looking at this is as a series of nested arcs. A storytelling nesting doll, basically, where the major arc that was introduced the latest and has the smallest scale is also the only one to reach a resolution by the end of TBB show while the others imply a larger, ongoing story.

It’s not that the two larger major arcs stop when the Omega arc is introduced, either. They keep being told alongside, largely through Omega’s point of view with occasional zoom-outs to a wider frame, and limited to what we need to see at present either for future set up or before zooming back in and, in the case of much of the third season of TBB (last four episodes in particular) focusing in on Omega’s arc and that resolution before, hypothetically, broadening to a larger focus again. It’s also not that Omega can’t show up now that her arc is concluded, either. She can! In fact, she should, for multiple reasons. She just wouldn’t be the focus anymore and would probably show up in a more limited capacity.

And it’s not that these nested arcs are even separate. They might start and conclude at different points, but they are told alongside each other because they’re tied together. They weave in and out of each other and push each other along. They’re relevant to one another and, I think, pieces of a larger clone story that’s not quite over.

Because here’s the thing: There’s a lot of stuff in both TCW season seven and TBB that we don’t really need unless it was there for setup. The only part of season seven that was entirely necessary for closing out the clone war and that part of Ahsoka’s story was the Siege of Mandalore arc with maybe, *maybe* one additional episode to explain what she’s been doing. I love the bad batch arc, but we didn’t need it…unless the purpose was to set up arcs for the batch and also tie the batch’s and Echo’s stories to Rex’s and the clone agency arc. We don’t need the Martez sisters episodes…unless we need to introduce the Martez sisters, who also meet the batch and are also working with Rex once we get to TBB (and are presumably still working with him from time to time, since we haven’t heard otherwise). Likewise, the list of things in TBB that aren’t strictly necessary from a storytelling perspective if all we were doing the whole time was telling Omega’s story is extensive…unless the larger story with those larger nested arcs isn’t done.

[lunar-wandering]

constantly repeating to myself that it's better to hand in slightly sloppy/unfinished homework than to not hand in anything at all so that i do not fall into the Curse i bore in highschool (never handing anything in cause i could never get shit finished in time)