#didn't finish sd yet either :(

[a-la-campanella]

Diamond and the Ten Stonehearts; who are they?

This was going to be part of a more comprehensive post about the Myriad Celestia IPC video, but fuck it, I've been scratching my head over this for hours now.

The Ten Stonehearts represents ten members of the IPC, led by Diamond. We know a few things about Diamond courtesy of this text. ->

This is from a larger post about the IPC, posted here. (According to the note left on Diamond's fandom wiki page, there was an official English translation, but it seems to have been deleted now.) Regardless, here's a translation for the above:

The Strategic Investment Department possesses the corporation's second-most long-term vision, and their investments are never constrained by short-term returns.

The investment department established an elite organization(1) of "Non-Performing Asset Liquidation Specialists" led by the mysterious supervisor "Diamond", one the few confirmed Emanator of Preservation leaders. They travel around the universe, actively liquidating lands with bad debts(2) produced by the Cancer of All Worlds.

Something to note, 使团 (which I translated as an organization above) refers to specifically a diplomatic corps or mission, like something more along the lines of an ambassador or representative for foreign relations.

It's basically the Topaz in Future Market situation. That's their job.

Note: I used a dictionary for most of the above translation, so it's a very literal reading on the text. My Chinese isn't good enough to translate this alone.

We can infer that the so-called Specialists probably refers to the Ten Stonehearts and maybe some other members of the IPC, or at bare minimum there's some level of overlap between these Specialists and the Ten Stonehearts. There's a reason Topaz was sent to Jarilo-VI instead of some low-ranking grunt, and those kinds of projects tend to be managed by people who can pull rank.

So we can confirm Diamond's the leader, and we assume to know what the Ten Stonehearts do. What else?

In the Myriad Celestia Trailer about the IPC (or what I like to call the IPC Recruitment video), we get an overview of how the IPC works and the different departments within it. We also get to see the gem representations of the Ten Stonehearts when the video starts talking about the Strategic Investment Department. What Owlbert says isn't important, he's talking fluff for the most part. What is important is what we're shown.

The picture on the left is cropped from before the person in the video picks up the gems. The one on the right is from after the gems are thrown, which is the image everyone else I've seen has been using.

But if you count these, there's nine gems before they get picked up, and eight after they're thrown.

I tried to match the numbers in both pictures to keep track of which gems were which, based on their colors and shapes.

Next train of thought: what's with the 9th gem?

A few theories, speculations, whatever you want to call it:

The boring answer: the producers working on this video straight up forgot about it. I find this hard to believe given the company's track record with lore in general.

It's hidden behind one of the other gems. I'm also skeptical of this answer, mostly because when you go frame by frame, it's still only eight gems, no ninth one. Besides, the only gem big enough to cover the missing one completely is the diamond, and for what reason? All the other gems are on display, why hide one?

Or? It's supposed to be missing.

In that case, why?

Whoever that gem is supposed to be is being withheld from working by the IPC board directly. The big guy who holds all the gems got to choose which ones to toss into the world, after all.

The person behind that gem is actually gone. Like, they no longer exist. Maybe it's a Garden of Recollection moment or something more sinister, or they woke up and decided to leave the IPC one day.

My friend's answer: that gem represents Topaz. She was, after all, demoted after her failure in Jarilo-VI. I personally don't believe that would've kicked her off the Ten Stonehearts group, but this is still worth considering.

There's more things we can consider, but this is what I think so far.

And what about number 10, the last gem?

I'm inclined believe it's actually represented by this heart-shaped gem seen right after the zoom-in on the diamond, in the Talent Motivation Department. It's literally a (gem)stoneheart. This one could not be any more obvious. Why are they here and not with the Strategic Investment Department? No fucking clue. Nobody said outright that all Ten Stonehearts had to be from the same department, I guess(?)...

We see the heart gem throughout the Talent Motivation Department section, so they're probably a big name in that part of the IPC. There's not much else to say here; we don't know enough to make any decisive comments and the readables about the Talent Motivation Department are rather scarce.

Fun fact, I guess! The two heads of the Talent Motivation Department? One of them named Yan Shiluo. Yan Shiluo is also the name of a cult leader in Honkai Impact 3rd. The more you know!

...that honestly isn't relevant to HSR players, since Yanqing was a rotten old man in HI3 and he becomes some Guy in HSR.

[fantasyinvader]

Current Status: Mindfucked.

I finished reading The Man in the High Castle today and that endings was wow. It's almost like the I Ching is alive in it, trying to guide people into realizing the truth about their world.

It was consulted to write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and Julianna's readings of it led to her saving the life of it's author. With Frank Frink leads to him creating jewellery that allows people to see another world, one where the Axis powers didn't win. But first it led him to going to Childan's shop, revealing one of his artifacts is a forgery (possibly made by Frink himself) which causes Childan to have a crisis which leads to him deciding to move towards selling handmade American trinkets rather than (possibly forged) antiques. Childan sells it to Tagomi, who ends up seeing the other world with it while his own readings led him to killing some supposedly German officers. Tagomi then stops the Jewish Frink from being sent to Germany to be exterminated, allowing Frink to make more of these pieces.

The novel talks a lot about real versus fake. We can say something is real because it has some form of documentation saying it is real, like a slip of paper saying that a lighter was in FDR's pocket when he was assassinated. But that paper itself could be a forgery. The guys Tagomi killed had papers that said they weren't SD officers, but they were sent by the SD to kill Baynes. Julianna kills the assassin, who initially presented himself as a dark-haired Italian rather than a blonde German, and the papers say she was his wife (she is, in fact Frank's estranged wife). We're told things like the Nazis drained the Mediterranean sea, a SALT sea, to create fertile farmland, wiped out the native African populations and have sent people to Mars and Venus... but they can't figure out how to make a color TV. And this is all by 1962. Or that Japan could take over the West coast, Germany the East, yet the middle of America and Canada were not conquered. Everyone knows that Hitler is a sick man, currently living in a hospital with syphillis, but no one wants to think about how the world was shaped by a madman.

The I Ching said that the truth is that the Axis powers lost the war. The author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is scared of that revelation. Does this mean that the entire cast was simply led to believe that was the case, and that Tagomi didn't really travel to our world but saw the world for what it was? But then again, Grasshopper doesn't follow how things played out in our world either.

In a world plagued with misinformation spread through the internet and media, Man in the High Castle is still relevant.

But then you remember how Dick's research for this novel also led him to writing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel Blade Runner is based off of, and how mankind can justify it's treatment of a synthetic slave race by saying “they aren't human, they don't have empathy”. All this while people use machines to give themselves specific emotions or take care of animals as a status symbol (with others taking care of fake animals and pretending they're real). Ebert described the film version of Deckerd as “a Nazi measuring noses” as part of why he didn't like the film version, but that was a point in the novel. Electric Sheep ultimately said that life is life, regardless of it being natural, synthetic or even mechanical, so long as you believe it's life.

So if we take that sort of mindset, what is High Castle saying about our world? I mean, considering the current spike of antisemitism, the increase of authoritarianism in elections, as well as society's history of racial discrimination... It makes you question the world we're living in to say the least. Maybe it's just trying to urge us to see such problems, rather than just listening to what our governments have to say. Because let's not forget, Man in the High Castle was written during the Cold War with it's threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, and part of it's ending is ruminating on the fact that the Nazi's are supposedly planning on nuking Japan and may end up destroying the world through such warfare. Even today, the threat of nukes is still out there.

It's stuff like this that makes me love PKD's writings. That literary contact high that makes you paranoid and question reality. Have to find a copy of A Scanner Darkly someday, though maybe will watch the movie tomorrow night.

[umhuhwellthen]

Me: I am going to work on Single Dads and Fake Marriage AUs

Evil Me: oh so we're making fankids?

Me: what? NO! I'm finishing FM AU art wips and either ch 2 or a one shot for SD!

Evil: gotcha, timeline for Usatello Single Dads AU, research yokai, amphibians and birds of Japan, rabbit breeds and size of litter to roll die on how many kids the couples will have, look up kanji for names...

Me: no, No, NOOOOOOOOOO

This image contains the Usatello kids planning but the back of the papers has TomoSagiMariKen kid plannings and Next Gen AU stuff

I used a dice roller and random name picker to choose how many kids, what bio parents(for UY Fake Marriage AU), what gender, species the kids are, then for their names

Fake Marriage AU;

TomoSagi Kid, either a cat or rabbit, leaning towards cat, son, either has fur pattern/coloring like Swiss Fox or Tan Rabbit, Swiss Fox because i made Tomoe a Somali Cat which are called Fox Cats sometimes and Tan because of Tomoe's pretty fur colors.

MariKen Kids, plural, son and daughter, hija has Kenichi head, eyes, and ears, Mariko hair, eye shape and nose. Hijo has Kenichi eye shape, nose, chin, Mariko's face, ears and eyes. Haven't decided which kid yet but one will have Himalayan or Californian fur pattern and the other piebald/broken fur pattern

Oh I should also mention that my evil genius brain had me researching Renaissance artists and artists of art movements that came after the Renaissance AND Surrealism because Frida Kahlo was considered part of that art movement and there was word that the Rise!Turtles missing sister would have had that name

Usatello Single Dads AU

Waffling between artist names, Japanese names, or flower names(Usagi likes nature and Donnie has a passion for botany; still has a theme to follow but it isn't artist name this time)

Random name picker rmy beloved/beloathd

So I always had plans for turtle/rabbit hybrid because heheh fusion go brrr, particularly a daughter that's named after Inazuma's 'dead' name Tomiko

And then I saw @/quartergremlin had the galaxy brain idea of including PSDD as one of Donnie's kids and redesigning it so I rolled a die for how many kids, then put in all bio, all adoptees, psdd and bio, psdd and adoptees

P.S.D.D and adoptees won, so then I went to yokai.com to see what they got to get the ideas flowing, put birds I was thinking of making ocs with and basing Rise! Karasu-tengu off of

Ended up with a hane-no-haeta kappa kid and a Daruma Pond Frog kid, adopted son and daughter respectively

Usagi came across the kappa boy on one of his misadventures and Donnie came across the frog girl in the Hidden City

P.S.D.D uses ve/vir/vis pronouns (because it sounds a lil like virus which ve finds hilarious)

D.D.'s design is based off of Don's fantasy mech from Down With The Sickness and tmnt 2012&2003 Fugitoid

But then I got attached to the flower names, especially the poisonous ones so Middle Name Time!!!

Tomiko Amaryllis Hamato-Miyamoto (iiii don't think amaryllis were in my poisonous list but they were in my Victorian era/hanakotoba flower language list I think)

Shigeru Larkspur Hamato-Miyamoto (the kappa child, Shigeru is made up of either the kanji for Rabbit[ie Usagi] or lapis lazuli and something else i can't remember off the top of my head)

{Mountain} Laurel Koyuki Hamato-Miyamoto (Donnie named her because He's Extra, and she didn't have a name as an orphan street rat, lil iffy about her middle name, thinking of keeping the flower middle name thing but Shelldon/P.S.D.D/Jotaro dont have one and her name is ks already a flower sooooo...)

D.D. and Tomiko have already been designed and have color palettes everyone else is still in the works...

[insidiousflame]

1/11/22

The sushi dinner with Maya and Evie went well. We had a nice time catching up and spent two hours at the restaurant. Most of it just chatting. We gave each other our gifts beforehand and the sushi was pretty good. The only thing I did notice that was weird for me was that I noticed how on edge I was. Or how much I felt the need to put on as nice a front as possible. Rather than just being relaxed, I kept actively telling myself to look engaged, come up with topics for discussion, am i smiling too much? Am I being too loud? And I didn't want to say anything too negative either. Like I said in my previous post, I couldn't fully relax. But that's because I care a lot about how they perceive me. I wish I didn't. I wish I could relax but...I guess I can't because I feel like being completely myself in the past has bit me in the ass. And they have proven to not truly understand me in my vulnerability. I forgot to give Maya her SD card AGAIN. So I'm gonna have to give it back at some point. They asked me if I was going to holmat next year and I was like "i dont even know...Depends how things go this year I guess." I have no idea where I'm gonna land by then. Am I going to stop doing idol stuff? What reason do I have to go to conventions if I'm not performing, cosplaying and/or hanging out with friends? Panels don't really interest me and the merch hall is only entertaining for a couple hours. I'm still unsure where our friendship is even at and how hotel accommodations would be. If they would still want to include me. I'm not sure following them around for their idol activities would be enjoyable. In other news, the rest of my closing shifts were taken this week and I was able to snag a mid shift in place of those hours. And I'm glad because apparently TL Cheeks is going to replace Alex as a closing Lead. And I fucking hate her. The way she treats us and throws us under the bus saying we don't ever do shit is straight up insulting and absolute bullshit and I made sure Alex knew before I left. I will tell anyone I need to so I can avoid closing with her because I tell you what I will NOT be tolerating that crap. I STILL haven't gotten my OG song video yet and I'm officially pissed about it. I'm giving her the rest of this week before I'm asking for some kind of refund/compensation for this absolute negligence. Especially since I paid in FULL. There's only so many excuses you can make and you are well past them. Couldn't even make the new deadline I asked for. I also haven't heard anything on the instrumental I'm commissioning that I ORIGINALLY wanted to do as a birthday video. But. lol. I bet that isn't anywhere near finished either. I've attempted to diet by restricting my calories under 1200 and I lasted about a week. The only weight I lost was all water weight and it's already creeping back up after one hefty meal day. And my app told me I wouldn't reach me goal until right before my birthday and bitch I just can't keep that up for that long. It's too much and I'm putting stress on my body. I know if I just replaced my meals with healthy alternatives instead of straight carbs and sodium I would lose weight a LOT faster and effectively. But that requires a whole new level of planning, effort and willpower on my end. I don't like having to restrict what I can eat. Thats why i would rather restrict my calories. But that's not working for me either. I hardly know what I want to eat as it is...so coming up with healthy meals that will satiate me is super challenging. I'd basically have to fill up on straight vegetables the majority of the time which...cmon. Who wouldn't get absolutely sick of that and crave everything. There would be a lot of grocery shopping, cooking recipes that end up failing, trial and error. But I really...really don't like my body and i hate looking at it. I feel so defeated honestly. I want to like what I see. :( Or at least be okay with it rather than grimacing every time i see myself.