#vic listens to f@tt

[squirrels-are-sleeping]

(This post is brought to you by yours truly marathoning the back catalogue of Friends at the Table, and is therefore full of spoilers up to COUNTER/Weight ep 26: "Do you have room for me?" INCLUDING the final reveal)

Counter/weight 26 is WILD. I mean, I've generally been listening to the whole series with both fists stuffed in my mouth, but THIS EPISODE is just over an hour long, including the wrap-up, *what the fuck*

The introductory narration from "Dr Jace Rethal"??? When does Jace: a) wake up; b) get his PhD; c) research this book about what went on inside Mako's literal brain?

Mako is taken over by Larry the Antivirus? And in the process discovers that he's secretly running on Righteousness? And then invites Larry to hang around?

AuDy is... where do I even start?

AUSTIN: "Uh... which arm do you wanna lose?" JACK: Oh, the one without the shotgun in it. KEITH: I’m sorry, why did you lose an arm? AUSTIN: Cause he tried to climb a *sword*!

- Then this:

AUSTIN: (low and ominous) Let me break a thing. Let me break a thing. ... Fuckin’ let me do it. KEITH: If Austin is excited to break a thing, you cannot let him do it. AUSTIN: Fuckin’ let me break – Jack. Please let me break this thing. JACK: Alright. ... AUSTIN: Nice. KEITH: I’m very upset. ALI: It’s probably fine. KEITH: It’s never *once* been fine.

AND THEN Ibex's ship teleports right on top of their head? AND THEN, what Austin breaks is AuDy's anti-network firewall? and:

AUSTIN: This isn’t the first time you’ve been online, AuDy. And it really rushes back to you. A looooong time ago, before you knew there was the Golden Branch sector. JACK: As I was being manufactured? AUSTIN: No… well, I guess someone built you. We haven’t quite figured out how they build Divines yet.

[squirrels-are-sleeping]

COUNTER/Weight 29: Three Conversations, Liveblog

There's been so much new music since we've set out from Counterweight, I'm so happy!

AUSTIN: … It is a mistake to think the graduate of the new stratus program is merely a weapons platform or some sort of fantasy pulled from the  neurovids. They are the embodiment of a new mode of being. In time, they’ll reveal not only the secrets of corporate labs, not only the workings of your holy divines, but the interiority of interiority itself.

Whoa whoa whoa, Austin Walker, you get back here and tell me some more about the state of scholarship on modes of being in the Golden Branch Sector! Where does Maryland September stand in relation to the ontological turn in science and technology studies? Is "Modes of Existence" by Bruno Latour still cited, *as it should be*? Please tell me this, it's very important.

Also, I assume Attar Rose is Ibex before Righteousness, that's cool.

KEITH: (typing and copying Austin) When my smartass mouth ruins the mission. ART: So we’ve just decided that Keith gets infinity XP, is that what we’re doing here? AUSTIN: This is the problem with this is, so often the case his smartass mouth, for whatever reason, ends up going into a roll he succeeds at, which means he probably won’t get experience from it.

I can already picture it. Mako: "I am actually the Divine Smoothness, it's weird that you haven't heard of me" NPC: "That tracks, let me tell you all my secrets"

KEITH: I want to be sort of grumpily doing a chore AUSTIN: You’re like, rearranging the food rations in the kitchen alphabetically, because Orth demanded that an alphabetic kitchen is the most organized kitchen and it’s just… the worst.

Mako doing chores to appease Orth is honestly a gift that keeps on giving, I hope it just keeps happening forever.

JACK (as AuDy): Due to unstable solar wind, please remain in your cabins. JACK: And then I just nudge the stick very slightly so that the ship maintains its course but begins to spin slowly on its axis. And then I walk back to the cockpit.

I love that AuDy is a huge liar, and apparently Liberty & Discovery is right there with them as well.

Also: the transcript keeps "as AuDy" notation, but it's still not clear to me how mixing multiple artificial personalities in one robot chassis works. Do they stack like bricks, together but distinct, or do they mix like a chemical reaction into an altogether new compound?

JACK (as AuDy): You know, Ibex? What I need to know about you now, after ten years, is whether or not the fact that Jerboa is no longer in the picture is something you’ve chalked up as a good thing. AUSTIN (as Ibex): No…  AUSTIN: And he struggles for a second, and it’s hard to tell what he’s struggling against. AUSTIN (as Ibex): It hurts, a lot.

You know, this is probably what I, too, needed to hear from Ibex. Up until now it wasn't clear to me that this fucker isn't completely divorced from compassion, love, or pain that isn't his own. Good question, AuDy-and-Liberty-and-Discovery.

JACK (as AuDy): … Look. This is very strange for all of us, but I think if we all just work together as a crew at this point, we’re going to be able to move forward. In space… and time.

Babygirl (gender-neutral), you're on a moving spaceship >.<

But anyway, this specific sentence is so wooden and uncomfortable, when their speech isn't at all, otherwise. I choose to interpret it as AuDy papering over a feeling of vulnerability.

JACK (as AuDy): I’m the Divine Liberty and the - KEITH: (overlapping) and Discovery. JACK (as AuDy): Divine Discovery. (a pause) Yeah. Those. KEITH (as Mako): Knew it.

Mako really wants to have known about this, when it's blatantly obvious he's only just found out.

KEITH (as Mako): (whispering) I didn’t, didn’t really know that he was a Divine. ART (as Cass): Yeah, I know buddy.

God, this is so sweet. It's never been so evident that Cass is a full decade older, and approximately 100 years more mature

JACK: Uh… [Orth] just goes and sits in the tiny co-pilot’s chair we’ve made and swings it around, away from the group.

My heart is never not breaking for Orth. He's still that aggressively over-promoted pilot who wants to hide in his quarters and watch anime, huh.

JACK (as AuDy): Mako… Mako. You are not clobbering the Divine Candidate Ibex. You are not doing that. KEITH (as Mako): You killed his brother! JACK (as AuDy): Well, we’ve talked about that.  ALI (as Aria): To be fair, all of us are owed like one shot. JACK (as AuDy): Nobody here is clobbering Ibex.  AUSTIN: AuDy, when was the last time that you saw Jerboa as a child?

Hey, Austin? OUCH

JACK: … Everybody in space is sad.

A tagline for this show if I've ever heard one (and also why I can't get enough of it)

AUSTIN: … [Ibex] is older now, and carries himself less aggressively, and that gives him more confidence, and so in a way it’s actually a more powerful pose.

Right, what this guy needed was more confidence

AUSTIN (as Ibex): … So, you’re headed to September? JACK (as AuDy): That was the plan. AUSTIN (as Ibex): What for? ALI (as Aria): Mostly to stop you from killing us? AUSTIN (as Ibex): (quietly) Oh god… I’m in the middle of an invasion, there’s a coup happening … I don’t have time to swat flies. We send those messages out all the time. There’s an algorithm, it plugs in names, it develops threats specifically to upset people so they’ll get in line. I don’t make (chuckles) personal appearances very often. I’m very busy.

That motherfucker! "I'm too busy to send you threatening messages"

KEITH (as Mako): I don’t like you at all. AUSTIN (as Ibex): That’s fair… a lot of people don’t like me. Lot of people don’t like medicine. They still take it. KEITH (as Mako): You can’t just say shit! [mocking tone] “A lot of people don’t like me, a lot of people don’t like mehhh…” [blows raspberries] that doesn’t mean anything!

I really like how Keith's characters take on Ibex. (I was going to say "how Mako takes on Ibex", but Sokrates handled him similarly). They don't argue against his points, they just dismiss them as meaningless wholesale, and it's very effective.

AUSTIN: He reaches out and touches Mako’s head, and like… it’s cold? His hands are cold. And… he, like… runs his hands though your hair as if he’s looking for something. And he finds it, and rests his forehead on yours. And suddenly you feel it too? It’s… like… you’ve been carrying something for a long time? Like… weight that you had been so used to carrying around? That it stopped feeling like weight.

He can just… uninstall Righteousness from Mako by bonking heads together, and without doing a reinstall of everything else that Mako is? I'm shocked that it's even possible, but maybe that's where the metaphor of Righteousness as an operating system breaks down

KEITH (as MAKO): He’s not here! You said he was coming, and he didn’t come, he sent a robot! AUSTIN (as IBEX): What are you talking about? JACK (as AUDY): It stings a little, Ibex, that you wouldn’t… [Ibex scoffs] that you wouldn’t come in person… oh… [AuDy laughs]. AUSTIN (as IBEX): This is it, man…

I am very confused by what this is saying about the whole Ibex-Righteousness situation.

ETA after finishing the episode: nope, still confused. I get that Ibex and Righteousness have basically merged. I don't get how the fact that Ibex has a robotic jaw and voice box got AuDy to conclude that he's being taken over by Righteousness. Lots of people have cyberware, no? (It probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme)

AUSTIN (as IBEX): [long-ass speech about big animals going extinct from cold, and small animals thinking they've done it, and therefore, Rigour is scary] ART: For someone who is so scared, this is an insane way to tell us this information! ALI: It’s incredibly in character.

Seriously, that fucking guy! It's not just he is scared, he also wants to mobilise them and recruit them to his purpose, and long metaphoric speeches are one of his prime tools. He's just a walking wall of sound.

AUSTIN (as IBEX): How you getting on with your [sibling]these days? Sokrates? ART (as CASS): I… we haven’t spoken since the war. AUSTIN (as IBEX): OK, well… if you could send them a letter, that would be good. Don’t… I’m not… just let them know that there’s… something big. I don’t think he’d be a big fan of Rigour.

yes yes yes get more Sokrates in here, i love them. Get Cass talking to their family. Good job, Ibex

AUSTIN (as IBEX): … Rigour devours people, but that’s about it. KEITH (as MAKO): AuDy, do you devour people?  JACK (as AUDY): No. … JACK (as AUDY): I murdered my first Candidate with a saw.  JACK: I’m not saying that… but that’s what happened!

alkfdjhfadjsf well if he hadn't gone around disappointing the Divine by drawing all those Jokers

AUSTIN: When you secure Maryland September, mark experience. If you each escape September alive, mark experience. ART: Is that one each, or one if all of us get out? AUSTIN: It’s one if all of you get out.

F E A R

I can smell self-sacrifice, and people dying while trying to stop each other from self-sacrifice

JACK: Great. I love space. Space is just… Everything’s going fine.

Another tagline, along with "everybody in space is sad"

Final episode thoughts: So much has happened within the space of three conversations! We're not running away from Ibex any more? Ibex is the quest-giver??

It's just as well that Rigour went to September, tbh, because I can't see how Ibex could talk these guys around from running away from him to working for him, otherwise. It was going to take more than a parable about big animal extinction.

[squirrels-are-sleeping]

Counter/Weight 27: An Animal out of Context, Liveblog

(It has come to this, I've got to do reaction posts, otherwise I shall explode)

We're in the past! Austin and Jack are building a religion/history/myth/origin story!

JACK: … And on this planet, things are very, very bad … because something is telling these people exactly how much timber they need to cut, and every day that number is going up, and already we have a name for this thing– JACK: … –and it is called Rigour and we built it. … It’s really, really bad, and we want more than anything else … we wanna chop down trees. We wanna keep producing, but more than anything else, we want to throw off the yoke that Rigour has us under.

So the villain is actually the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?? Or more precisely, something like if Taylorism (my beloathed) and the Protestant Ethic were taken to an extreme and had a very ugly robotic child

AUSTIN: … The relic is a mapping system. … See, normally, your maps are controlled by Rigour. You see where you can go, and normally … your personal lumberjack rigger only can have a zone of operation inside of zones that Rigour determines. … It automatically, like an automated car, drives you to a place. … Now you can move wherever you want. … [T]his is the Liberty in the Liberty and Discovery system. I am the Divine of Liberty and Discovery.

OK, so there's probably a lot to say about metaphors of divinity as they apply to Divines. It's not super clear to me to what extent the Diasporan culture at the time of the Chime imbues Divines with actual godhood, or whether religions even exist as the kind of cultural practices that we would recognise, separate from veneration of big-ass machines.

However, it's clear that, when the events of this Tower game occur, the only Divine that's existed up until now is Rigour, and he is not even called that. It would seem like the only thing framing Liberty and Discovery as divinities is the framework of the game itself.

And yet, one of the first actions that Liberty and Discovery perform is, in effect, world-making. The Pilgrim's world up until now was defined by Rigour, but now he has a map - and in a literal sense, the map doesn't simply describe a different place, it creates a new world for him. In this way, Liberty and Discovery do what divinities do.

AUSTIN: Okay. The Divine names the pilgrimage. This is the Pilgrimage of the Opposite of Alone.

Fuck, that's beautiful and weird, and a little sinister. What's the opposite of "alone"? It's not "together", because for the Pilgrim there's no sense of togetherness.

And in one room, you see a– a single… screen on with a sort of logo on it, an L and a D. The D is holding the L close. They are intimate for a logo.

First of all, what a descriptor to choose for a logo.

Second of all, are Liberty and Discovery separate selves? Or are they a composite self, Liberty-and-Discovery? Is AuDy going to be a triad when they wake up?

AUSTIN: The name, by the way, that it gives you, starts to feel good in your mouth. It’s Chital. C-H-I-T-A-L.

This is interesting. At first I interpreted this piece as him re-discovering what he was called before he was named for his Juggernaut. But no, actually. He doesn't claim a name, the name is still coming from the Divine. He is named, and accepts it.

JACK: [T]o pay off my saw blade… I have a detachable saw blade. So … my ability to chop down trees goes up significantly more. I chop down four times as many trees. … AUSTIN: And this is how you honor my– my relics. Okay.  JACK: I don't know anything about you. AUSTIN: You know a couple things. JACK: Well, you’ve given me a saw blade. AUSTIN: Mm.

Ooof, the world of disappointment and judgement in this exchange. If my deity said "mm" to me in that voice, I might lie down and have a cry

AUSTIN: I think that the way space months work– one of the ways they work here, at least– is that most people don’t know what all of the different seasons are on all of the different major planets. But everyone knows one or two special things about one or two planets, right? And so, you know, everyone knows about the beautiful winter month on the planet of Garden where, for nine months out of the 10-month year, it is this beautiful spring. And then there’s this one month of just fierce winter storms for a week, and then it’s just a beautiful winter playground for the remaining three weeks. Everybody knows the name of that month. No one knows what the third spring month is like, but everyone knows what that one is.

See, here's the reason I fucking love this show. You have to think deeply about human cultures to notice that a calendar is not just for marking the progress of a year, but is a collection of specific meanings entangled with particular cultural circumstances, and what the natural world is doing is only somewhat related to what a month is collectively understood to mean.

AUSTIN: [Rigour] comes across like austerity does now for some people. For those who already have a great deal of power, they hear it, and they go, “Oh, yes, those people do need to be more rigorous, don’t they?”

Let's take a short break to all say "fuck austerity"

AUSTIN: If you’re curious about what the inspiration for Rigour is, it is– JACK: Is it Henry Ford? AUSTIN: –Taylorism and Fordism. It is those practices. Scientific management.

CALLED IT

~Mako's interlude~

AUSTIN: Maybe this is the way you do that, technically you’re in your Larry form, moving around Mako’s memories, you know? I think Larry form just has his hair parted the other way. … KEITH: … Whatever color Mako’s hair and shirt are they match, but for Larry, they match in a slightly different way.

Hold your horses! Is Larry just here now? Hanging out in Mako's brain with Ibex/Righteousness's avatar/whatever that was? AuDy is two Divines (who are maybe one Divine), and Mako is hosting a friendly virus on top of his Evil MIT software?

I'm also extremely here for the Orth/Mako dynamic we discover in this segment, where Orth sets him Tasks and Duties, and Mako acts like a petulant child about it, and both of them are right, and neither of them is right. I daren't go on AO3 because spoilers, but god, I hope somebody has explored this.

Back in the Tower, Chital has installed Righteousness on the L&D mech. Is it now 3 robots in one? Or 1 complex robot?

~Cass's interlude~

AUSTIN: What’s Cass interested in right now? ART: Uhh… I mean, I think, on one sense, Cass is interested in nostalgia right now

…and

AUSTIN: So what’s the meal that Cass had that comes to mind while cooking. ART: I… I think there was a banquet at the beginning of the war … I imagine that [Cass's parents] look… just glorious, right? All five of them, probably. These are their best clothes. … The monarch is wearing a fantastic crown … and all of the family are wearing finery, and they sit and they talk”

The texture of Cass's nostalgia is so interesting. They're grieving for their parent, but the parent was a monarch who'd waged a war of conquest. They'd recently spent a fair amount of time watching a memory in which Sokrates works to prevent mass death from a weapon that their parent had deployed. When they wake, the parent is dead, and Sokrates has taken apart the monarchy and is reigning over its pieces.

Cass flies the mech bequeathed to them, and uses their hereditary cookware to make sad space pasta with fake squid ink, and reminisces about the last time they spent time with their parents and siblings, and it's a huge fucking state banquet.

I'm worried for Cass; they need a hug.

Back in the Tower, Rigour is here :-D The rest of the episode baffled the fuck out of me in terms of mechanics of The Tower. I went back and listened to it twice. Jack drew a Joker, and things became Bad? And then they drew another Joker?

JACK: Yeah. But I don’t think you can judge me based on the presence of the Adversary. AUSTIN: Is that what you think, or is that what Chital thinks? JACK: Oh, no, that’s what I think. I don’t think that you can judge me. I don’t– AUSTIN: Did you live up to your own laws? Did you find loopholes in your own laws? Did you break your own laws? AUSTIN: Did you honor my relics? Did you covet them? Did you disavow them? Distance yourself from them?

Ok but why is Austin so menacing, though

AUSTIN: Did you. Oh, Jack. Oh, Jack. Oh, Jack.

You know things are bad when Austin starts regretfully saying your name like a disappointed school teacher.

Anyway, RIP Chital, you disappointed your judgy mech suit one too many times.

[squirrels-are-sleeping]

COUNTER/Weight 28: A Special Kind of Warmth, Liveblog

Faction game! I love to dread the faction game.

AUSTIN: [Ibex] puts a hand on the old hero’s head. … The press of a button, the flip of a switch, and then a cord pulled from its socket. And there on the bed, Jace Rethal struggles, desperate to feel cool air.

Excuse me, WTF did he do? I'm sure it'll become clear in due time, but for the moment I can't work out if he woke Jace up, or killed him. (ETA: Jace is awake, fine, phew.)

AUSTIN: Minerva does this amazing corporate blast about how important the privacy and security of its consumer citizens are. … [T]hey make it really fashionable to wear a different face that fucks up the alogrithmic read of what all of Petrichor’s face-scan technology is. ... You walk [into a shop], and they’re just like, "Oh, Mr." and then bzzzzt. Just noise. Nothing. It doesn’t know how to read you anymore.

I put to you that fucking up Rigour's ability to match data traces to personal profiles wouldn't be a massive blow.

Scientific management (the gross IRL practice that Rigour is based on, as we've figured out last time) treats people as interchangeable. Not being able to differentiate between them is a feature not a bug. A corporation like Minerva wants to know down to a granular level what somebody likes, so that it can sell to them more effectively. Whereas when you're aspiring to treat people like widgets in the grand machinery of your domain, maybe you want to smooth out the differences between them anyway.

Also, 'consumer citizens' is so spectacularly gross. And sailing straight past this detail adds another layer of existential horror, implying that it's just a normalised, stable part of political discourse, why would anyone even notice it? Nothing to notice here. Fuck Minerva very much.

AUSTIN: [T]he Rapid Evening is not Ibex. The Rapid Evening is not Sokrates. They are not coming to save people. They’re coming to destroy Minerva.

I'm just going to take this casually drawn parallel between Ibex and Sokrates on the basis of their noble intentions, and I'm going to slowly chew on it.

AUSTIN: The Golden Demarchy. So they also want Planetary Seizure here. They want to take over Gemm. Do they have anything on Gemm yet?  SYLVIA: They have a base of influence on Gemm. … And they have a demagogue. AUSTIN: A demagogue on Gemm. Ooo fancy. … What if it was someone who used to be a soldier in the Seventh Sun back when Sokrates was part of the Kingdom fleet?..

This moment, when they decide that the demagogue on Gemm is going to be the ex-soldier, Ariadne, whom Sokrates saved in the Kingdom game, is the faction game at its most thrilling, imo. When they come up with this, it just neatly rearranges canon such that it's impossible to imagine the story any other way. It utterly logical and graceful - but not plotted as much as serendipitously arrived at. I love it so much.

In other news, I'm wondering how Sokrates's PR situation across the Sector is, in places where they don't have a demagogue. Especially in places that are still licking their wounds after the war. Sure, the Demarchy is technically a different state from the old Empire, but that big war, where the rest of the Sector had to beat back Sokrates's parent with sticks, is very recent memory. It seems like, if the Demarchy starts making expansionist moves, everyone would get a little worried.

Mind you, everyone is about to have a big Rigour problem, it'll be a moot point probably.

DRE: Well, Rigour is currently on Ionias… AUSTIN: … You can move it to anywhere within 2 spots of JoyPark. DRE: Oh fuck! AUSTIN: It could be on September if you wanted.  SYLVIA: This just got scary. DRE: Okay. So I'm kind of torn between do I put it on September, because that's where the ground game is going? AUSTIN: Shit! Maybe we can put it on— OHHH NOOO! SYLVIA: OH SHIT! AUSTIN: Oh shit! SYLVIA: Oh shit! SYLVIA: Oh shit!

OH SHIT! Ohhhh no, they've got to do it, right, they've got to put Rigour on September?

AUSTIN: How about— here's the shot … And it's Natalya pulling up the September Institute's HQ on Rigour's scanners. … And it's just that shadow moving slowly toward September in the distance. This is going to be the worst. I'm very excited.

F U C K!!

What did I just say about the faction game rearranging canon in such a way that it's impossible to imagine the story any other way? Of course Rigour is going to September! Of course Rigour was always going to have been going to September?

I am losing! My mind! adksjedfhlaksfh

DRE: It's going to be great when Natalya and Orth get to meet again. SYLVIA: Oh fuck! AUSTIN: It's going to happen. [small moan] Oh, Orth. SYLVIA: I'm not looking forward to that. DRE: Poor Orth! AUSTIN: Oh, precious baby Orth. Fuck. Man. DRE: God, no matter what we do, we just shit on Orth.

Somebody check on Orth!

(Meanwhile, Orth is giving Mako fatherly instructions on how to clean glass surfaces without leaving streaks.)

Okay, deep breath, let's stop freaking out and listen to the rest of this game.

AUSTIN: God, I'm just thinking of the time we were like, "Oh, I guess this faction has a seductress. What's that look like? Uh, what if it's a cool dude named Ibex? Let's talk about that guy. What's that guy? Oh, that guy sounds cool. What's he like?" SYLVIA: Yeah. And now— AUSTIN: And now we have lots of ideas about what he's like. God.

You know what, Ibex is a prime examble of critical worldbuilding in action. They take the stupid, unnecessarily gendered term seductress inherited from the published game, question it, subvert it, and produce, well… THIS GUY.

AUSTIN: In the park at the core of Centralia, a new cadence had taken hold. People laughed. And when the laugh bounced from building to building, it didn't twist. It amplified in joy. As vehicles moved by blasting music through the park and the streets, the songs took the architecture into themselves so that each note was performed at a new venue, an intimate stage.

!! This is just fucking beautiful writing, that's all.

AUSTIN: I remember that it was warm that day, a special sort of warm. I remember, because when Ibex pulled away that fake sky … I shivered. And then he saw me, Jace did. And the warmth came back. And people cheered, but I barely remember that. I barely remember the speeches, or the music, or the food, or the dancing, or that night. But I remember the warmth, and even now I hold onto it. One vice, one gift I let myself have. The warmth.

First of all, I can't with how beautiful Austin's narration is.

Also. Is this?.. Am I reading into it? Because the way Austin says "…or that night" sounds like it's a stand in for a passionate reunion?

Anyway, I'm dying over here, RIGOUR IS GOING TO SEPTEMBER, and Ibex is just fully in charge on Counterweight, and Jace is awake, and I just…