#but it’s contradictory to what it seems

[rahiwatching]

Liquid Protodermis seem similar to water at first glance, but it actually has some very strange and often contradictory properties when you look into it. In this video, we take a closer look at those properties and establish a theory to explain those contradictions.

This theory includes maths, material science and fluid dynamics - but also hot tubs and Rahi poop!?

Liquid Protodermis may be strange, but theories about it may prove to be even stranger…

New Bionicle Science investigations every month. What part of Bionicle lore do you want to see investigated next?

If you want to support the Knowledge Tower you can donate on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/theknowledgetower

[glass--beach]

hi do you like ok computer (1997)

because i really just don't get it (especially as the second-best album of all time) but i reeeally want to & i respect your opinion on that a lot

yea that album kinda changed the course of my life lol. wall of text incoming

first - don’t let rym or aoty or whatever tell you what’s good and what isn’t, everybody’s got their own taste & criticisms that go against the grain are very important!! i will say anything that’s that consistently highly rated across different websites & publications is probably undeniably significant and worth listening to. whether listening feels like discovering a new favorite or sitting through a history lesson is where taste comes in. it’s important to interrogate the canon too as there is an enormous amount of implicit bias in what even gets in front of critics and in the metrics they grade music by. review aggregate sites have democratized this process a bit & all the good and bad of democracy has come with that lol.

so, the album gets praised for a couple of reasons - its innovative production, its commentary on the historical zeitgeist, and the pop appeal of much of the songwriting.

production - the album makes heavy use of cutting edge effects units, digital editing, computer trackers, sampling, and even features little bits of voice synthesis. most of it is stuff that had existed in music before radiohead, artists like aphex twin (and much of the rest of warp records’ 90s catalog) and bjork were ahead of the curve in a lot of the aesthetic aspects of okc and had influenced radiohead a lot, which is even more evident on their followup kid a. radiohead was not breaking new ground in using these sounds, but they were among the first to put it all in a rock context, taking cues from the weirder cuts on the beatles’ white album, the experimental “krautrock” band can, and miles davis’ classic jazz fusion album bitches brew.

context - radiohead had grown up during the decline of much of the social democratic programs that had helped to facilitate the education and performing careers of much of their early influences such as joy division and the smiths. by the time okc was being written they had lived through the austerity of the thatcher era, the fall of the soviet union, and now were watching the labour party turn increasingly neoliberal under tony blair. there was a general sentiment in the west that the progress of history had slowed or even stopped in favor of the neoliberal order. at the same time, tech was booming and computers were starting to find their way into more aspects of daily life. the album imagines a boring dystopia, where machines are rabidly advancing but humans are stuck in stasis. a major connecting theme is infrastructure - the airbag through which thom yorke is “born again,” the “cracks in the pavement,” the family politics that separate romeo and juliet in exit music, the mechanical voice of fitter happier giving contradictory directions for maintaining the status quo. even the escapist fantasy of no surprises comes in the form of carbon monoxide. and then, the record ends with the “ding” of an appliance that has completed its task.

songwriting - the band’s previous album the bends really is a pop masterpiece. i recommend it to anybody who wants to get into radiohead but doesn’t vibe with their later work. okc expands that compositional style through, for one thing, the more apparent influence of classical music on tracks like paranoid android or the Chopin homage exit music; let down even features polymetric layering characteristic of Steve Reich. it also features some songs that are too good to even need to push the envelope much, like karma police or one of my favorites, no surprises, which seems to reference the beach boys’ wouldn’t it be nice or the velvet underground’s sunday morning.

to be honest, i like okc mostly because it really spoke to me at a formative time in my life, when i was like 15 and felt heavily disconnected from the world around me. the album deals with those feelings in a very different context but it’s a feeling many people can relate to for many different reasons - i was closeted in a conservative culture, not a depressed british rock star lol. it also was an excellent gateway into many of the bands’ influences, who are also favorites of mine now. most people who love the album don’t really go as deep as i like to with understanding it, but maybe what i said here will give you something else to listen for, idk. maybe you just gave me an excuse to infodump about an album i love lol :)

[starmoon-constellation]

okay, so there's something I want to explain...

So! Everyone who follows this blog is likely aware that we use the phrase "trauma-coded endogenic" to refer to our "origins". Which is... cool, I guess. I came up with it, because we don't like the way "trauma-impacted" sounds, as it doesn't convey our experiences adequately for us. trauma-coded — TO US — implies a larger amount of trauma and the impact said trauma has had on our system. We operate so fucking similarly to a traumagenic system, but we are very aware of our original origins.

It's kind of exhausting being endogenic and then also adding the polyfragmented aspect of our systemhood into the equation :/ there's no winning with that one, folks, lmao. But, honestly......... I guess I just want to say: use the labels that help you convey your experiences, even if they seem "wrong" or "contradictory" to use. Just because a term is associated with a particular thing doesn't mean you can't use it. ( <- has been struggling with accepting we're polyfrag because of how deeply associated it is with traumagenesis).

Don't let the hates and fakeclaimers dictate what you do. Don't let other people control your actions. It's not worth it. It's not worth putting yourself to the side to make others happy.

( Rae Lockwood — they/he/she )

[catboygirljoker]

Free Pass Ask to talk about In Depth Luxu Analysis in case of no one sending in the right question to go off with

ok! here's my ~1600 word post about That One Scene At The End Of Dark Road. grins smilingly.

You know the one. Right after we see Baldr easily kill most of the cast of the game, right after a boss fight against him, right after we witness firsthand how powerful he is, we see a flashback of him confronting Bragi with the intention of killing him. And Bragi just...casually flicks his keyblade out of his hand. Bragi fully knows what Baldr's actual deal is, knows that Baldr has killed people, and is completely unthreatened by him. For good reason, it would seem!

So, Luxu's a badass, obviously. He made the big villain of the game into a jobber. And I think that's certainly one of the purposes of the scene. Luxu is about to be one of the primary antagonists of the franchise, and this sets him up to be very powerful!

...But I don't think it's the purpose of the scene. That is, I don't think that's the entire story. Because there are a couple questions left by this scene.

What happens at the end, there, when Baldr runs up to him and attacks him? And why doesn't Bragi reappear until long after Baldr is already dead?

I think we can piece together at least part of an answer.

In the earlier montage where Baldr says he killed everyone, we see a brief scene of Baldr slamming Bragi down onto an island in the Underworld. I assumed that this was a visual representation of Baldr lying and claiming he had killed Bragi when he didn't. But Bragi is the only character in this montage who we don't see die on screen. I believe we're meant to understand that this scene actually happened, and that this is what immediately follows the Luxu reveal cutscene.

Which seems contradictory with Bragi being such a badass, right? Was Bragi disarming Baldr a fluke? The thing is, when Baldr attacks Bragi at the end of the cutscene, Bragi is completely off guard and unprepared for the attack. We already know that Luxu can misjudge people/situations, to his own downfall.

Consider in Dream Drop when he seems to fully believe Sora will join the Real Organization XIII, or Days when he's unthreatened by Xion right up until she knocks him out and leaves, or Re:Mind when he finds out Luxord decided not to simply obey orders without question this time. So him being defeated by Baldr doesn't necessarily mean Luxu is weak if Bragi was defeated due to hubris.

(As a side note—I do think that this would be part of the reason the cutscene cuts off when it does. Luxu still needs to be a threatening villain in the upcoming games, so the audience has to have a strong impression of how threatening he is. We get the full cutscene of Luxu being cool and powerful, and only little glimpses of the fate he meets directly afterwards.)

I think what happened is Bragi sauntered off all cocky and smug, not believing Baldr would attack him. Then Baldr attacked him, and Bragi, realizing what a threat Baldr actually was, pulled a trick we've already seen Luxu pull before. (Seemingly so well that Hades himself is fooled.)

Baldr believed he killed Bragi and saw no reason to be like, "yeah, and also Bragi said some weird mysterious stuff I didn't understand, but the point is that he's dead, too."

Now for the question of why Bragi didn't reappear until long after everybody else was dead. If he's such a badass, surely he could have helped stop Baldr and saved lives. Why didn't he?

From here, I can really only speculate. In my view, there are a few options:

Luxu didn't care about his classmates and left them to die as soon as he realized what a threat Baldr was.

This is...possible, but not very interesting to me. It's the option that results in the least emotional complexity. I think it's most interesting to read Bragi in Dark Road as the second-to-last step on Luxu's downward spiral, rather than just another point on a straight line—that his personality as we see him in the current-day games is informed by the trauma of him losing all of his friends to an opponent he could have stopped but didn't.

Also, maybe this isn't very convincing as evidence, but in his appearance in the graveyard, Bragi's attitude isn't smug or mischievous, it's somber, possibly remorseful. If we were meant to understand that he didn't care about his dead classmates, we'd get, like, a smug grin or something.

So the other options assume that he did care about his classmates:

Luxu sincerely cared about his classmates, and wanted to help them, but was injured so badly in his fight with Baldr that he was physically unable to come to their rescue.

Like I said, I think this is more probable and more compelling than if he didn't care at all. And there's potential tragedy in him trying his best and still failing, or having the best intentions and being unable to follow through on them, for sure. However, in general, I'm more interested in characters failing because of the mistakes they make and the flaws they have, rather than failing due to chance or unavoidable circumstance.

Also...we already know Luxu is the kind of person to stand by and allow terrible things to happen without doing anything to stop it. We know he has been specifically instructed to do so. I think it's more interesting and more consistent with his character if he could have saved his classmates and stopped Baldr, but didn't.

This last option, then, is my favorite, and in my own writing would be the interpretation I go with:

Luxu sincerely cared about his classmates and had the power and strength to protect them from Baldr but, through his own decisions or inaction, still let them die.

Luxu's classmates were all children or barely adults, younger than him by perhaps centuries. But he hung out with them. Actively participated in conversation with them, asked them questions, joked around with them. He seemed to like them. They were his friends. And he let them die.

There's variety in the potential specifics. Maybe Bragi fled and hid until everything was over just to save himself. Maybe he grit his teeth and made the conscious decision to do so; maybe he was motivated by pure animal fear for his life. In either case, he still had a role to carry out, after all. A role that, as I mentioned, has already required him to stand by and allow people to die. If he could swallow the keyblade war, he could swallow the events of Dark Road.

Maybe he believed he had an excuse to run away. In his confrontation with Baldr, Bragi says Xehanort is onto Baldr, and seems to believe Xehanort would be able to stop him. This is before Baldr attacks and seemingly defeats Bragi, but maybe even after that, Bragi still really believed in Xehanort, and believed he could let Xehanort do the rest—misjudging Xehanort's ability to stop Baldr before any more death could occur.

If you wanna get really angsty with it, maybe Bragi did try to save his friends. Maybe he rushed to the scene of Baldr's next murder and saw children with keyblades fighting for their lives, heard the clash of metal on metal, and was suddenly immobilized by the voice of his Master telling him to watch. And by the time he was able to overcome this trauma response, it was already too late.

Whatever the specifics would be of why he left his friends to die, I'm aware that this is the option that casts him in the worst light. If he didn't help them because he didn't care about them, then he's just a coldhearted villain and we can't expect much better from him. If he cared about his classmates and tried his best to help them but failed, then he's a sweet goodboy and uncomplicatedly sympathetic. If he, for any reason, decided not to try to save his friends from a powerful entity that has killed and will kill again, then he's pathetic, morally repugnant, a weakling or a fool or a coward or a combination of the three.

But I like when characters are flawed and stories are messy! I like that, even before you get to the events of Dark Road, Luxu is a messy, complicated, but still sympathetic character! Many of my other favorite Kingdom Hearts characters are messy and complicated in ways that I feel get frustratingly flattened by the fandom. I'm Team Messy and Complicated forever. I hope the games keep making Luxu even worse and more sympathetic and more tragic.

anyway thats my post i hope you liked it haha whee! i once again had to keep deleting detours and tangents about like. redemption arc flags, riku/terra/luxu parallels, luxu/MoM and luxu/xehanort parallels. but the were just that, tangents, and quite a lot of them were more headcanony/watsonian/speculative than i usually like to go with my Analysis. in any case thankyou for coming with me on this journey

[eyestrain-addict]

Every time I start thinking about how we don't know who louis truly is because he doesn't even know who he truly is, I go a little more insane.

[good-beanswrites]

My thoughts on how the Milgram mv machine works based on the evidence we have:

(I know there’s been discussion about where exactly the interrogations take place, but wherever they are,) the prisoners are made to sit in a specific chair near the wall that houses the machine.

It’s ordinarily hidden, but the wall panels shift aside to reveal it when the mechanical sounds play in the dramas. As well as the walls moving, the chair transforms to restrain the prisoner and attach whatever it takes to access their brain. The fact that none of the more frightened prisoners try to run or break it makes it seem like they physically cannot. This is why Fuuta sounds so panicked, and why Amane is suddenly helpless in front of Es in their T1 vds.

(My mind conjures very classic sci-fi mad scientist machines with wires, pipes, lights, nodes, needles, etc, but I’d love to hear how other people visualize it.)

In some vds (maybe all? I’d need to check,) you can hear Es take some steps right before their iconic line -- it would make sense that for safety reasons, the power mechanism is placed across the room. Once again it could be anything, but the sound effect makes me think of one of those giant wall-mounted levers you have to pull down.

The voice dramas don’t really provide the type of crime details that an actual interrogation would reveal, and it’s odd that they’re placed before the extraction rather than after Es gets to see the new details. This leads me to believe the machine functions with priming. All Es needs to do is get them talking about their murder, so it’s on their mind.

The video produced is much like a (non-lucid) dream. Even if the prisoners figure out that this is how it works, they can’t control it just by thinking really hard about something else. The murders produce the strongest emotional affect, and that’s what it picks up on. If someone else used the machine, it would default to whatever gave them the strongest emotional reaction in the ~15 minutes beforehand, hence why Es’ video focuses on their daunting task ahead. (The Undercover theory is still a bit loose, though, given the private shots that Es wouldn't have known about). It’s why the videos are usually closely linked to the vd topics/beats. I also like to think that the reason their prisoner colors appear so much is because they’re looking at those colors on their uniform 24/7.

The bell rings to inform Es that it’s the optimal time to use the machine -- the prisoner has been thinking about things for long enough that the video will be about their crime, and if the conversation lasts much longer they’ll start thinking of other things. It’s at a different time for each prisoner because it’s based on the specific conversation. I guess Jackalope is listening in to the interrogation, timing it perfectly. (The only one that kind of messes with this theory is Yonah, because they just keep talking afterwards lol, but it could just show that the interrogation is still in Es’ control.)

Their “Sing your sins” is the final priming nudge to get them to think of their actions as a sin, revealing their guilt.

Once activated, the prisoner enters a sort of trance/sleeping state. It’s very much like REM sleep, with the machine forcibly activating neurons and recording the output. The prisoners have asked Es what they saw, meaning they don’t remember the mvs. I like to think the prisoners do experience the mv in real time, acting as the major version of themself that appears, but can’t remember it afterwards. It’s when you experience a dream, but as soon as you wake up you’re just left with fleeting emotions and memories right on the tip of your tongue.

The video plays immediately upon extraction -- whether on a huge projection or little screen depends on which room it’s in. It simultaneously saves the memory so that Es can rewatch it later (on those old TVs in the jailbreak mix). The machine downloads the song and video together, but requires special parts to retrieve them. The technology is pretty new and fragile, so if one is broken, there might be a delay between when Es can hear the extracted song and see it with the video. (That’s my justification for Kotoko’s delays -- after 9 prisoners the parts wear out, or maybe Mikoto himself overheats it with his complex situation.)

Based on the lack of conversation we get afterwards, I picture Es leaving before the prisoner wakes from the trance. The machine adjusts their brain back to normal before they awaken, restraints freed and able to return to the rest of the prison.

It’s very much like a dream, so it’s not harmful despite the amnesia/head injuries the prisoners have. It does, however, exhaust them. Brain activity alone takes a lot of energy, so forced brain activity with added emotional strain would cause them to feel pretty drained the rest of the day.

[thecruellestmonth]

"Jason isn't the only one to die and return from the dead. He's not special, so he shouldn't be treated as special. He's not the first, and he's not the last."

"How could Bruce ever anticipate that Jason would return from the dead? Bruce coped how he needed to. The dead aren't supposed to judge how the living treat their memory."

🗣️📣 You can't pick both.

[thedemonsurfer]

-taps mic-

Asexual does not mean sex repulsed

Aromantic does not mean romance repulsed

How you feel about sex and romance are not always related to your orientation, nor do they invalidate them. Allosexual people can be sex repulsed. Alloromantic people can be romance repulsed.

Just, y’know. remember that. People are big and complicated and we all gotta deal with each other.

[spottedenchants]

early ludinus lore

context dates:

544 PD - The Marrow War, a conflict between Dwendalian and Julous forces, begins 16 months later... 545/546 PD - The Marrow War concludes as the Dwendalian Empire overtakes the Julous Dominion less than 25 years later...

~570 PD at the latest - The Eve of Crimson Midnight occurs in Rexxentrum and the Cerberus Assembly is created

a fight between (unspecified) noble-housed/established mages with noble mages of the Julous Dominion

resulted in a lot of collateral damage and innocent casualties

the remaining mages involved in the conflict formed the Cerberus Assembly, subservient to the Crown in exchange for absolution

Ludinus is stated to be an original/founding member of the Cerberus Assembly both in his character blurb in EGtW and on-stream

585 PD - Molaesmyr is consumed by a corruption that results in the Savalirwood

caused by the replication of a failed/incomplete Aeorian experiment intended to create plant life capable of serving as an arcane power source/enhancer

Ludinus's character blurb in EGtW states he fled Molaesmyr to what would become Bysaes Tyl, and then "left his culture behind" to "achieve greatness" and pursue arcane interests in the Dwendalian Empire

(also of note: in 836 PD, Ludinus's annex, Zana Deelio, was helming an excavation into A2, the location of the corrupted arboretum)

dates and durations are pulled directly from EGtW and can also be found on the miraheze wiki

[coriander-candlesticks]

I'm sick so I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, but I've been thinking about the nature of myths recently as I've been exploring hellenic polytheism.

For context: I'm ex-Mormon. I was raised in the church and, because of that, was taught biblical literalism but in, like, a more subtle way than most? I was raised believing that Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark, etc., were literally true, but that the story of Job specifically was not; I also always knew evolution and the Big Bang to be correct, despite there being a verse in the Doctrine & Covenants (a Mormon-specific religious book) where God apparently told Joseph Smith that the world is 6,000 years old- a passage I didn't know existed until my senior year of high school. I didn't realize I had believed in biblical literalism until I'd left the church, actually.

Now that I'm aware of it, it's a mindset I'm actively trying to combat while I explore Hellenic polytheism. It's definitely been a task to separate the nature of the Gods from their myths, as brutal as they often are. And it's something I've noticed within the community, too, which I think is interesting. It makes sense: Christianity, at least, has had a chokehold on much of the world for a long time, and so many of us have experienced literalism as our first interaction with any sort of holy text (though, of course, Greek myths as a whole aren't that) alongside our first experience with divinity as a wrathful God whose flaws are waved away, or ignored, or twisted into positive attributes. This also means that I'm trying to re-approach several deities with an open mind (Zeus, Hera, and Ares in particular, but many of them to some extent) while also trying to un-condition myself. I was already in the process of doing this, of course, but trying to figure out how to interact with a completely different pantheon has made that especially clear.

It extends to things like prayer and offerings, too. Prayers were very formulaic growing up, even though most of the time there wasn't a strict script to follow. There was always something you ask as part of the prayer, even if it's just 'please help me do better tomorrow' (alongside giving thanks, of course), so trying to craft a prayer without adding *everything* I'm used to including in makes it feel incomplete and, therefore, disrespectful. And daily prayer is something I'm resistant to because of prior experiences with it. I don't want to offend any of the gods by asking for something or asking for too much, especially so early on, and there's always a promised offering the few times I *have* asked. Add worries about exact obedience on top of that and it's proving to be a difficult thing to untangle. And I know that the gods are difficult to offend, figuring out how to do this takes trial & error and that's okay, it'll get better the more I do it, etc., etc.; this is more an issue with my own overthinking than anything else (hooray for ✨ mental health issues ✨). I'm not really asking for advice here, necessarily, just thinking out loud because I'm not comfortable talking to people in meat space about it yet.

[imblocking-you]

Reading Turning (I'm on ch. 131) and I'm so damn curious who Nahan actually is and what's his deal like how he knew so much and so detailed and he got to both the Hartan and the Apeto households earlier than the Cavalry did.

Also, I enjoy the Commander being a cryptic mess and Yuder being oblivious as hell.

[goldensunset]

i really can’t get a read on colress

[databent]

why the fuck is it that some people cant seem to acknowledge that people can just... be disabled. not through any fault of their own, not because something "happened" to them, just because, you know, sometimes people have disabilities. like, come on

[aropride]

?!?!!

[selenealwayscries]

theres definitely enough material for someone to construct an interpretation of who's lila as an interrogation of the relationship between the art and the consumer . i just dont have the brain power to do so

[freckliedan]

all this talk about gender (and lesbianism) and dan makes me so happy as a nb lesbian you have no idea!!!

oh but i do have an idea! 💞 i started this blog as an nb lesbian and it'll forever be a loveletter to gender and lesbians and that piece of my identity so i'm SO glad it still resonates for folks 😊💛‼️

some of my related tags, tho i post in them less now: lesbian content, dyke camp, questioning & info tag i made on my main sideblog when i was active here 5 years ago