#average harrow the ninth reaction

[dyke-in-crisis]

I have never physically screamed onto my desk like this over a book before and I fear I will never know true love again

[lemon-natalia]

Harrow the Ninth Reaction - Chapter 32

okay now we’re two months out from the Emperor’s murder - time’s really speeding up now. speaking of, interesting to consider who’s the one who might try to kill him. possibly Harrow, but i feel like any & all of the Lyctors & whoevers been puppeting Cytherea are in play. and the Blood of Eden of course.

Harrow is so dedicated to the Emperor, and a lot of whats happened so far has been making him seem more… normal. absurdly powerful and old, but concerningly normal still. i wonder if there’s something that will just shatter her belief in him at some point

also i think its interesting to consider how we're seeing him through Harrow's perspective here, and if he'd come off any different in the eyes of someone less reverent, like Gideon

we’re getting slightly less frequent flashback chapters now - whatever’s going on there is interesting, but i will admit i’m a little more intrigued by the Lyctor timeline, namely what drama went down between those guys lol

in which Harrow discovers the joy of going on a mental health walk

‘a hole might also be filled with worms’ see i would’ve thought as a bone necromancer, Harrow might actually be more fond of worms than your average person, but i guess not

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 30 of Nona the Ninth

The tower has returned as the image for the chapter

I'm not exactly sure what Paul was trying to do by putting the truck in a bubble, or why Nona and Pyrrha don't think it will work. I guess maybe he thought the bubble would protect them from the ghosts, but Nona and Pyrrha want to be able to see where they're going and don't think Paul can navigate well enough from inside the bubble?

In my first draft of that paragraph I wrote "Palamedes" instead of "Paul". FFS

Back at the beginning of Harrow the Ninth, it wasn't just the ghosts that were the problem with going physically through the River, John also claimed that non-Lyctors would have their souls leave their bodies if they tried that, but Kiriona and Corona seem fine here. Paul probably qualifies as some kind of Lyctor at this point, and Pyrrha might have some special dispensation due to once being part of a Lyctor and Nona is fucking Elder God and it's not clear whether Judith is actually ok or not. There's also a lot of other people in the truck who aren't Lyctors in any way

The ghosts abandoned the River earlier because Number Seven was nearby, and it does speak through Judith again later in the scene, is it protecting them from the ghosts as a favor to Nona? Or is there something else going on with the River as hinted at by Ianthe?

This sounds like maybe the truck is being treated specially here because there is one, maybe two, resurrection beasts on board

Did this telling actually happen on screen at some point, or was it during one of the periods where Nona was unconscious? Presumably Kiriona does know about the tower in the River, since she traveled through the River to New Rho not too terribly long ago, but I don't think she's mentioned it on screen yet

Lmao, of course there's a reference to losing the game in this book

Oddly, that is actually an effective way of communicating what's going on with her, that there are things she doesn't want to remember and she doesn't want to think about how she doesn't want to remember them because then she risks remembering them. She recognizes this tower, so I guess it might be Canaan House, or it might be something related to the Ninth, since that's where they're trying to get to? Harrow did wind up in part of the River that seemed to look like the Tomb the last time we saw her. But Pyrrha must have traveled to the Ninth via the River when she went there to kill Wake, and she doesn't recognize this

I guess Harrow technically did build a version of Canaan House inside a River bubble during the last book, but at the end of that book it was coming apart at the seams. But this might be something else that Harrow built in the River in a more permanent capacity, and maybe it resembles some real place that Alecto remembers

So on the second readthrough, it's definitely sounding like their safe passage through here is because of Number Seven. I don't know what it's talking about, though

Ok, but earlier, Pyrrha said that it was people with "necromantic bodies" that had this reaction to the resurrection beasts' speech, and Paul doesn't have a necromantic body. Also, Palamedes using Camilla's body didn't have any reaction to Number Seven speaking through Judith the first time that happened. This seems kind of inconsistent

That's like kind of weirdly sweet, she doesn't care about dying, and she doesn't care enough about the people she's with to save them, but she cares enough about saving Noodle that she'll save everyone else so that Noodle doesn't have to die. Just your average eldritch monster that only cares about its favorite dog

It's interesting to contrast the Nona parts of this story where Nona is talking about not being afraid of death and wishing she could just die because she is tired of trying to stay in her body and Harrow saying in the last John chapter that Alecto was afraid of dying

That's also an interesting use of the word "home", does Nona consider the Ninth House to be "home" in some way? Because Alecto's body is locked in the Tomb? Because she has residual memories of being Harrow?

[itsbenedict]

I saw a post recently that was like "I like it when stories are more confusing and ambiguous", and my initial reaction was to go "Yeah, I agree! I love being confused!"

But the thing is- I don't always love being confused. Confusion, in an of itself, is not the experience I'm looking for. What I like is the feeling of becoming more and less confused. What I'm looking for is the... average absolute value of the derivative of confusion.

Let's graph some stuff:

A good story- or at least, the kind of story I enjoy- should be something like... a roller coaster:

Some stories, like, say, your average coffee shop AU fanfic, are never confusing. These are like riding a train- you ride them to get to your destination, and there's some pretty scenery along the way, but you know exactly what you're in for and the whole thing stays at a minimum of confusion.

Other stories, like your average horror story, ramp up the confusion and just stay there, never going down, because the confusion is there to build tension and scare you, not to be resolved or anything like that.

Neither of those are my cup of tea. I want some movement- which is why I like mystery so much.

Many more straightforward mystery stories build up a stock of confusion right up front, and then reduce the confusion gradually over time, occasionally spiking a bit when a strange new clue is discovered, but mainly sloping straight downwards, like biking down a big hill. Exhilarating!

The best mysteries are the ones that are always going up and down in confusingness- introducing new questions and new answers at a pace that ensures you're always at some point becoming less confused about one thing and more confused about another, until it all wraps up at the end. The... rollercoaster analogy breaks down a bit here, since it can't be going up and down simultaneously...

The different colors are different plot threads, I guess. You've always got something resolving and something building.

Sometimes the medium is something like a long-running franchise, a series, a cinematic universe- where you can't tie every piece of confusion up at the end. Gotta have something for the next installment. These sorts of media tend to have slightly less satisfying pacing, because when you chop up a story like that, you're sacrificing satisfying conclusions to maintain an audience's interest over periods of the story not happening. You can try to find places where lots of plot threads have local minima of confusingness to break on, but it's often not going to be natural.

And sometimes you get things like Harrow the Ninth, where it stays at an 8 for most of the book and then rapidly oscillates back and forth:

or Blaseball, which just intends to monotonically increase in confusingness forever:

or… uh, whatever Homestuck thought it was doing.

[daleisgreat]

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns is renowned for being one of the most acclaimed documentarians of our time. He has made countless award-winning films on a diverse range of themes such as national parks, jazz, baseball and the Civil War. His latest project was his most ambitious yet and premiered last year on PBS as a 10-part special simply titled, The Vietnam War (trailer) and came out on DVD shortly thereafter. Each part is not your average 30-60 minute telecast, but instead a 1 ½ to 2 hour long feature. Tallying it up including the extras and the set is nearly 20 hours all together. That would seem like a chore to get through, but Burns is such a master of his craft I was invested 100% before the end of the first part and even with my crazy schedule I was able to get through the whole series in just over two weeks. Going into this series I knew the broad strokes from history classes and what I gleamed off other media over the years and how it was the only primary war America lost. This was my first time taking in the minutia of all the major and minor details that happened before, during and after the war. As expected, I came out of it with a much deeper perspective of the war and learned countless new things from all the endless amounts of reference photos, journals, audio tapes and interviews presented here.

The Vietnam War states from the beginning it is not taking a side, but primarily presenting both sides as an observer. Each of the 10 parts is on its own DVD. The first DVD covers the 100 years leading up to the war, and the final DVD is the aftermath of the war in the past 40+ years. Each of the 8 DVDs in-between has a thorough breakdown of each year of the war. The first part was mostly an eye opener of material I either never knew of or long forgotten where it chronicles Vietnam being occupied by France for nearly 100 years before finally finishing off part one by successfully driving France out. I recalled hearing how Kennedy first started America’s involvement in Vietnam, but never knew much about the scope of it, and was really fascinated how he first sent thousands of American ‘advisors’ to assist with South Vietnam’s military before Lyndon Johnson escalated it with air strikes and eventually sending in hundreds of thousands of combat troops. Parts three through six feature how Johnson handles the war while dealing with increasing protests on the American homefront. Parts seven through nine feature Richard Nixon taking over during the height of American involvement in the war and how a majority of America was against the war and returning veterans during his time in office. Eventually the film’s ninth part features Nixon getting his gradual removal of troops approved in Vietnam, and the 10th part is how the North obliterated South Vietnam in the next couple of years and how Vietnam and American veterans have existed ever since.

Again, this is not just the American point-of-view, as there are a plethora of Americans as well as North & South Vietnamese interviewed throughout. While a lot of time is focused on the reaction to the war in America, ample time is also given to the North Vietnam perspective with how Ho Chi Minh and eventually his successor, Le Duan’s military tactics and their off and on assistance from communist allies China and Soviet Union. I am surprised Burns’ team tracked down so many Vietnam veterans. In the behind-the-scenes extras, the crew said Vietnam veterans were initially trepid going into the interviews, but then eased and opened up once they realized how the interview unfolded. There are too many poignant moments from the interviews to recount in their entirety, but many of them paint a vivid picture, and combined with brilliant use of reference photos and a mesmerizing score from Atticus Ross & Trent Reznor that only helped accentuate their tales. There are quite a few descriptive stories of being in the midst of ‘the shit’ and how PoWs were treated on both sides of the battlefield. John Musgraves’ interviews really popped out to me from his harrowing battlefield experiences to coming home and eventually joining the protestors and throwing out his medals he earned overseas.

Three scenes that especially stood out for me was on one episode, members of a veteran’s family are interviewed off-and-on throughout and they eventually come to the moment they learn of their family member’s death and they made sure I felt it along with them. On the flipside of that is PoW survivor Hal Kushner, who was one of the longest Prisoners of War throughout Vietnam. He is featured in nearly every episode with updates from his PoW tenure, and you really feel for him after several years of captivity when he explains the sensation of finally coming back home to America. Finally, the scene dedicated to how the Vietnam War Memorial came to be and footage of veterans and family members coming to visit and talking about their experiences there shook me up in such a profound way I cannot even begin to describe it. It made me deeply regret not making it out to that memorial when I was in DC several years ago. Apart from being moved from a lot of these candid interviews, the history nut in me was soaking in all the tidbits about the war that were new to me after viewing The Vietnam War. A few of the many new-to-me events of the war featured here that resonated with me were the ‘Pinkville Massacre’ where American troops went rogue and killed innocent Vietnamese civilians, the concept of ‘fragging’ military superiors who were not in favor among the lower ranks, the deadly protests at Kent State and South Vietnamese civilians being sentenced to re-education camps for up to 18 years after the unification of Vietnam.

With all ten parts of the main feature approximately tallying up to 18 hours, it felt like the Ken Burns’ team could have went double that. For such a long war, there were at least a couple times on each part where I felt a certain scene or moment could have been expounded upon or went into another angle. This is not a bad thing because eventually the crew had to pick which topics deserved more time than other and I can only imagine the hours of material that got left on the cutting room floor. The first and final discs of the set contain the extra features. The first disc has about an hour of extras, and the main one to check out there is the making of special that is nearly 40 minutes long where the crew breaks down how they tracked down all their reference material and interview subjects and why they went with the Vietnam War as their next documentary. The final disc has 45 minutes of extras and there are two features I highly recommend. Fellow Warriors is 20 minutes of footage from a military veterans’ support group suffering from PTSD and the whole thing took me to another level listening to the veterans explain what they are going through and how they are coping with PTSD. Captured Spy & American Interrogator is an 11 minute piece with the highest ranking North Vietnam PoW and a CIA interrogator detail their multi-year relationship and a few moments from their interrogations that made me feel they could make a unforgettable movie from their perspective coming out of it.

I give the highest of recommendations to The Vietnam War regardless of if you are a history nut, war buff, documentary fan or just seeking out top shelf television. It is quite an investment of time to get through, but if a person with a busy everyday life like myself got so invested into it that I made time and sacrificed sleep to power through it in a couple of weeks, then I am positive you can too! Past TV/Web Series Blogs 2013-14 TV Season Recap 2014-15 TV Season Recap 2015-16 TV Season Recap 2016-17 TV Season Recap Adventures of Briscoe County Jr: The Complete Series Angry Videogame Nerd Volumes 7-9 Mortal Kombat: Legacy - Season 1 OJ: Made in America: 30 for 30 RedvsBlue - Seasons 1-13 Roseanne – Seasons 1-9 Seinfeld Final Season Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle Superheroes: Pioneers of Television

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 26 of Nona the Ninth

A fourth skull, so another skull that corresponds to zero characters in this book that I know of. Aim/The Angel/The Messenger also isn't in this one, it's just the kids

Dark and blueless night - heh

Good on Palamedes

What is their plan, here? Camilla is going to have some conversation with Gideon/Kiriona while hopped up on a ton of pain meds? If they planned this out earlier, Nona didn't report it. And I see Pyrrha trying to get in a probably-family-related conversation with her there. Actually, I think everyone else other than Judith probably has more to talk about with Kiriona than Camilla does

At this description, I was like, oh, yeah, the Convoy was definitely 100% some BOE shit, wasn't it? Also, more of Pash's weird fear of Gideon/Kiriona's body

I really hope Judith makes it out of this book alive at this point

I'm sorry, Corona, Linkin Park has permanently ruined that line for me

So that is stuff that Honesty said when telling his story about the Convoy, and in that scene he was eating Nona's fruit, which was described as

but Nona gave away all of her fruit, just like she always does, she didn't eat any of it. Maybe she's eaten that kind of fruit before and knows what it tastes like, she seems to know how to eat it, anyway - but why would she associate the memory of tasting this fruit with this story when she didn't actually eat that fruit here? Like it sounds like she was somehow experiencing Honesty's tasting of the fruit in this scene. Maybe additional evidence of some telepathy thing?

You know, I think this ship could be a lot of fun, actually

I don't know if this means that Alecto's like, OG resurrection beast form is going to turn out to be some kind of cosmic spider, or if Nona is just missing normally being a lot taller than Harrow is, which seems likely if the body that John made for Alecto was approximately average

I need more scenes of Pash interacting with these two

Honestly, my first reaction to this was "earlier this week? That was like a month ago, wasn't it?" But no, this really is still just day five from when this book began, the whole thing has happened in less than a week, it just was like a month ago when I read that part. God damn

Does Nona know about something that could be termed "double death" at this point? I don't think she knows anyone or anything who's died twice, has she? There are some people who died once and came back (although, I'm not sure if she actually knows that Palamedes and Pyrrha died), and there's Naberius's corpse that's been wandering around lately, but I don't think she's seen anyone die twice yet, unless you count herself getting headshotted twice, but that "double death" was not final

So this is not some weird translation that Nona did, her name actually means "hot sauce" in the language that she speaks natively

I think this is probably the end of Hot Sauce and Honesty in this book. We've tied up the story behind Hot Sauce's name, the Convoy story, the map from the classroom, and Hot Sauce telling Nona she was out of the gang, so I don't think there are any remaining plot threads to resolve with them. I wasn't real invested in these characters originally, but I think I'll miss them now. I wonder what Hot Sauce would think if she ever found out that Nona wasn't just a "zombie" but actually like Varun the Eater's sister? Would she be out of the gang again?