haverian-hermeneutics - Tumblr blog

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

I think a surprising amount of writers don’t realize that tragedies are supposed to be cathartic. They’re intended to result in a purging of emotion, a luxurious cry; the sorrow caused by a great tragedy is akin to fear caused by a good horror movie – it’s a “safe” sorrow, one that is actually satisfying to the audience. It can still be beautiful! It’s isn’t supposed to just be salting the earth so nothing can grow.

But that’s how you get grimdark: writers who don’t realize that they’re supposed to be doing something with the audience instead of to the audience.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

I don't think I'll ever be over the way that the thesis statement of OWK is represented, more than anything else, even more than Reva's plotline honestly, in Haja.

Like.

Genuinely? The one "twist" I wasn't emotionally prepared for was that Haja was legit, and he really was trying to help, and there really was a massive grassroots shadow-network underground railroad evacuating Jedi survivors and Force-sensitive kids across the galaxy, and he really was part of it.

Because the thing with his whole setup--the magnet tricks, the motion-controlled windows, the cold-reading, the crowd-working kid identifying obvious offworld marks, the "audience plant" stormtrooper playing along over the comm? Yeah, they're cheap tricks, but it's a SOPHISTICATED setup.

This guy is a straight-up conman. He really is every bit the sleazy grifter he appears to be.

That matters. That's important. Haja is not an angel. He's a mid-level fake psychic, callously cashing in on the Jedi's legacy to do, like, bullshit fortune-telling. It's--it's the way you can see this guy's whole backstory in a few minutes of screentime. Because we DO see him identify a Force-sensitive kid....and the escape he offers them is genuine.

So: Haja. And the story we can see in him at a glance.

He's a scam artist! He's dressing in knockoff porn-vid robes, waving his hands, and babbling half-remembered vague tropes before murmuring generic platitudes and sending rubes on their way. The Jedi are dead, right? It's not like they're around to be offended. He's not even really lying, right? He gets people what they want! The Jedi stuff just lets him upcharge! He's just skimming a little, a man's gotta make a living.

And then, one day, someone came to him who'd used all their hope just getting there. Someone with a Force-sensitive child, and the Empire on their heels, stumbled terrified into his little den of cheap tricks, because they'd heard a whisper of a rumor that there was still a Jedi alive on Daiyu.

And in that moment, Haja learned that he was a better person than he'd ever realized.

They must have staked everything on reaching him, and then they found him, and what they found was...Haja. Just some guy in a cheap costume. Just some guy, and not a particularly great one. How much is the bounty on a Force-sensitive youngling? Enough to retire on. Enough to set you up for life. And Haja is just some guy, who had just been slapped in the face with the reality of what he was capable of doing in the next five minutes.

There are moments when you learn who you really are, and sometimes you surprise yourself.

After all that time "acting like a Jedi," when given the opportunity--he chose to act like a Jedi.

Ultimately, the thesis statement of OWK is: There is a galaxy full of Hajas. And that's hope enough to keep going for.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Kanan and Fulcrum are twins.

Ahsoka Tano and Caleb Dume were not twins. They were born on different days three years apart and raised in different crèche clans. Caleb wrote his name in a grammar textbook beneath Ahsoka Tano with Sakshi Adelė and Olub Bolane between them.

But Caleb and Ahsoka died on the same day.

Caleb Dume died with Depa Billaba in the Kalleran snow. He was killed by blaster bolts that never touched him and was cremated in a pyre that burned only a padawan braid.

Ahsoka Tano died on a Venator above Mandalore with the click of a button and a “don’t make me regret this.” She was buried in a mass grave she dug herself.

Agent Fulcrum and Kanan Jarrus were born on the same day. They were both born in the snow. They swaddled themselves in tattered cloaks; their first cries were choked sobs. Tears froze to their cheeks. Around them, the Force wept at thousands of deaths and millions of minds robbed of their will.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

The reason tabletop RPGs use polyhedral dice – in spite of them being such an unlikely thing to have on hand in the pre-gaming-store era, and rare even in the roleplaying hobby’s tabletop wargame predecessors – is because there just happened to be an educational supply store where they could easily be sourced near where the designers of Dungeons & Dragons lived.

The reason that D&D dragons are colour-coded is because the game pre-dates the widespread availability of fantasy minifigs, so they represented dragons using plastic dinosaurs from the local five-and-dime, and those are just the colours that the plastic dinosaurs used to represent each type of dragon happened to be.

The reason that iconic D&D monsters like the bulette, the owlbear and the rust monster exist is because one day, a bunch of bootleg Ultraman kaiju figurines just happened to be mixed in with the plastic dinosaurs, and – being unfamiliar with Ultraman, and the bootlegs in question being almost unrecognisably shitty anyway – they statted up what they thought the figurines looked like.

Sometimes I wonder what the history of the tabletop roleplaying hobby would have looked like if any of those coincidences had lined up just a little bit differently.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

The further I get into rebels, the more I realize that Hera Syndulla is only the voice of reason among the Ghost crew by default.

Like, this woman is not normal. She could have anybody in the galaxy and she went for a wanted criminal with superpowers. She ran away from her family's palatial mansion to go live in a camper with said criminal boyfriend. Her job experience includes "getaway driver" and that's it. Some punk tried to steal from her and she immediately went "where are the adoption papers, I'm ready to sign". The only reason Hera seems normal is because her family consists of a kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, a man who spent the first fifteen years of his life in a monastery and the next fifteen years of his life getting drunk, a mass murderer trapped in the body of a trash bin, and a guy who probably lists aggravated assault as a hobby on his Grindr profile.

Hera is the most reasonable member of the Ghost crew. Which is kind of like being the tallest Ewok.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that

you're gonna get tired very quickly

tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—

you're not gonna be as composed as you expect

humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)

DO NOT GET STABBED (generally good life advice)

DO GET A SPEAR

knights are faster than you think

[haverian-hermeneutics]

TALES OF THE EMPIRE | May 4th, 2024

"Just be glad you're not a Jedi anymore."

#OH NO OUR GIRL IS GOING THROUGH IT

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Oh, that hurts.

God though just.

She looks just like Luminara. She looks exactly like her master.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Absolutely fascinated by the Fairy Walrus Discourse. Naturally, I have a take:

This actually is also a fantastic illustration of a truism about Telling Stories that we all implicitly know but rarely acknowledge aloud: the improbable is far less believable than the impossible.

When you invoke the impossible, you silence the critically thinking, reality checking, lie detecting circuitry. Simpler rules reign supreme.

The Walrus, however implausible, is a thing which is real, and so whatever narrative you imagine either precedes or follows the reveal will be constrained by the envelope of the possible.

This is a webbed site all about Narrative.

The person answering the door to a Fairy is in a fairy tale, and frankly most of us would be overjoyed to find ourselves in a fairy tale. Fairy tales have sensible rules, structures we understand, tropes we love and hate.

A Walrus on your doorstep is just one more giant reminder that the world is a maelstrom of chaos, incomprehensible in its complexity, full of moving parts which obey no narrative. It’s another dose of “what fresh hell is this?”

A Walrus on your doorstep is a burden. A Fairy on your doorstep is an escape.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Suzanne Collins gripping my face with her hands: listen listen the first step to evil is dehumanisation, always, the second you start to see people as less than people no matter what they've done to you that's when you start heading down a path of selfish destruction and violence

[haverian-hermeneutics]

monoculture forests are deeply unsettling in a way that is hard to explain to people who do not spend a lot of time looking at forests

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

[haverian-hermeneutics]

Watch Tracy Chapman Start a Quiet Revolution

You guys may be too young to remember, but I remember tuning in on TV with 600 million other viewers to watch Stevie Wonder live at Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday celebration tribute in 1988. There were technical difficulties and Stevie Wonder couldn’t go on yet. The crowd was antsy, milling around, singing their own songs. The TV cameras were rolling and the show had to go on, so TOTALLY UNKNOWN ARTIST TRACY CHAPMAN GOT UP ON STAGE AND PLAYED FAST CAR ARMED WITH ONLY HER GUITAR.

The crowd fell silent. Captivated by the absolute raw honesty and talent on display. Did we know we were witnessing history? A black queer artist who would rocket to fame and win a Grammy for this song the following year? I don’t remember.

What I do remember is getting to the end of the song and not caring about Stevie Wonder any more. I wanted to know who this woman was!

Watch Tracy Chapman stun a rowdy crowd into silence:

[haverian-hermeneutics]

The core of Star Trek is optimism about the future, and this is why one of the quiet, ongoing themes of every show is adults spending their free time engaging in table top games, pretend play, sports, music, art, and other hobbies. No matter what crazy space conflict or reality-warping improbability they've gotten wrapped up in, someone is still running around, pretending they're robin hood. Someone is painting a sunset. A pair of friends are playing cards. A group has formed a chamber ensemble. This is utopia.