#epoche iii

[belghast]

Abandoning Diablo

Abandoning Diablo - This morning I talk about the trend of content creators who made their careers off Diablo now abandoning the game.

Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what…

[exo-dus404]

(Originally posted on Oct.2023)

Basic information:

[Sliver of Straw] is the oldest member of [The Local Group], excluding [Looks to the Moon]. She holds a rather conservative attitude towards The Great Problem. At heart, she is an ambitious iterator - fortunately, her ambition is limited to her work. Even for iterators outside of [The Local Group], most have heard of her achievements. Outside of work, she is good at communicating, although her thoughts may occasionally be coming off as random, but she is still very popular.

[Sliver of Straw] is the current leader of the iterator group [Distant Frontier]. Currently, she occupies the superstructure and puppet of the former leader, [Eopch of Clouds]. The acting group leader, [Secluding Instinct], who was originally disobedient to her rule, willingly complied and became her second-in-command after being disciplined by her. Technically, [Sliver of Straw] is no longer "whole", and now she is more like a super AI following her instinct to expand.

[Sliver of Straw] declares that she wants to build a perfect world where there is only order and each iterator can perform its desired function as designed. SOS wants to rule all time zones* and have complete control over the distribution of all resources and social structures, eliminating war, hunger, disease, etc., which are unavoidable due to the imperfect nature of organisms. She'll create a world, with everything working like cogs in a perfect machine.

Appendix I:

[Epoch of Clouds] had a personal friendship with [Sliver of Straw]. Unfortunately, this rare cross-group friendship came to an end with the "death" of [Sliver of Straw].

Appendix II:

An encrypted voice file:

"I don't care..... (....).... What they're gonna say about me. I don't think they'll mourn me. I just wish... (.....)..... She must live."

Appendix III:

An audio recording from Five Pebbles' surveillance system:

"Little red...thing, can you help me? Take me, from here... All the way west. When I get there, I can save you."

Appendix IV:

An intercepted encrypted communication:

"I will give them a perfect world, why should they not obey me? Their existence is a waste of all resources. Such blasphemy against a perfect system."

"Of course, I won't allow them to die. We need them. After all, AI like us, we live on information. And they produce information."

Appendix V:

Rumor has it that a red slugcat--like a hologram-- roams the region of [Distant Frontier]. Sometimes it can be seen looking at the far east- the canyon where [No Significant Harassment] is located.

Appendix VI:

Her right eye tears occasionally. Those tears does not belong to SOS, but to [Epoch of Clouds] trapped within her own body.

Appendix VII:

Without hesitation, [Epoch of Clouds] uploaded the remaining consciousness of [Sliver of Straw] onto her own superstructure, and she was completely stripped of her control over her systems body by [Sliver of Straw].

Appendix VIII:

[Sliver of Straw] wields an EMP staff as weapon, while its sharp end can also be used as a spear.

Time zones *: Similar to the definition of "cosmic time zone", that the speed of light is constant, so the speed of information will not exceed the speed of light (if you ignore quantum entanglement and worm holes, ofc) Therefore, when the distance is too far away, information cannot be transmitted beyond a certain latency.

For example, we have no way of knowing the "present" state of galaxies hundreds of thousands of light-years away. On the scale of the whole universe, the boundaries of the past, present and future are blurred. This also fundamentally limits the feasibility of information exchange across "time zones."

In the case of PTA AU, the constant is not the speed of light but the number of cycles. The whole world is like a natural information barrier, so the events themselves are limited to specific regions. This is why, for a long time, what’s going on around [The Local Group] were only known to the nearest iterator groups. Moon and other iterators also made sure that no sensitive information is leaked.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

[mikashisus]

The Regula Solis Epoch: Masterlist

The Regula Solis Epoch takes place in a renaissance era— in a time where the golden age of the Remurian Empire loomed over the heads of the people of Teyvat.

Although each one includes the story of someone different, they all have one thing in common:

The Golden Age of Teyvat.

☀️

Volume I: Abandon Ship

(mermaid!neuvillette x fem!pirate!reader)

With one of the Remurian fleets hot on your tail and stolen treasure of the crown on your ship, you were ready to take to the Eastern Seas.

When one of your crewmates catches a mermaid of all things on the outskirts of the Dark Sea, you finally think you've hit the jackpot when it comes to treasure.

In the end, however, you come to a startling revelation: is all the treasure in the world really worth more than a life? And suddenly, you have to make a choice... either a huge sum of gold, or the man you've fallen head over heels in love with.

chapter 1

Volume II: Leaving London

(kazuha x gn!knight!reader)

The legendary pirate ship known as “The Alcor” has begun stirring up trouble in the Northern Seas. Although Queen Catalina does not see it as a threat, the General of the North Wind Knights thinks otherwise.

With the risk of angering the Queen on his hands, General Anton issues an order for all knights a part of the navy to seize every last one of The Alcor’s crew.

With no choice but to listen, you obediently set out to hunt down these pirates. However, it doesn’t exactly go according to plan when you cross blades with a foreigner to the Northern Winds.

Volume III: Flesh and Bone

(hunter!tartaglia x gn!werewolf!reader)

The bitter cold forests of Snezhnaya were not kind, nor welcoming to humans. Lurking in the darkness of the tundra were glowing eyes and warning growls.

After being ardently warned to never trespass farther than the outline of trees meeting the wastelands, Ajax takes the risk and crosses to the frozen tundra. With a bag slung over his shoulder and a determination to show his father that the wastelands were fit to be hunting grounds, he readied his bow.

Amidst the hunt, he finds a wounded wolf on the brink of death. Deciding to show it mercy and heal its wounds, Ajax soon finds that this “wolf” is not your normal run of the mill animal… and taking it back to the village was a grave mistake.

Volume IV: Kaleidoscope

(criminal!xiao x fem!adventurer!reader)

Being called to serve Lady Iris, you were expecting just about anything to be asked of you. However, being tasked to watch over a prisoner who stole from King Remus’ grand vault was something else entirely.

Amidst your journey to retrieve this item, you begin to wonder if the prisoner you were tasked to watch over is even a prisoner at all. He makes no move to escape, and it seems as if he does not plan on talking to you. Finding the exact item he stole was not easy either, and it appears that your journey will get worse as the truth slowly unravels.

In the end, you find yourself wondering who is to be trusted: the foreigner from the East, or Lady Iris, who bore no hesitation in sending your friends to their deaths.

Volume V: Masquerade

(lyney x fem!vampire!reader)

As a descendant of the noble Edana line, you grew up with an ardent belief that humans were entirely food and nothing more.

For centuries, you live holed up in your family’s manor, your boredom growing tenfold with each new decade that passes.

Eventually having enough of your boring, high class lifestyle, you step onto the streets for the first time in almost a millennia, looking for something to satiate your interest.

This comes in the form of a budding magician, who wants nothing more than to break down your walls and show you what the world looks like in blinding color. A world that wasn’t coated in gray, and a love that wasn’t forged in blood oaths.

Volume VI: From Blood and Ash

(dainsleif x gn!angel!reader)

For as far as the eye could see, the world was bathed in red, and the gray of ashes covered the ground like a blanket. The tang of blood and sharp stench of smoke permeated the air. The screams and cries of the people were deafening amidst the scorching flames of retribution.

Among the sea of corpses and ash stood a lone figure, covered head to toe in blood that did not belong to them. One of their ivory wings was singed from the fires, permanently scarred with the reminder of their betrayal towards the heavens.

Feet away stood a soldier. As they locked eyes, the world stopped for a moment, and the ticking of the doomsday clock echoed like a roar in the air of the blazing wasteland. The soldier collapsed to the ground, clawing at his throat as the angel of death approached him.

Within seconds, their jaws slacked and unhinged, revealing a terrifying set of sharp, gargantuan white teeth. Their talons reached out, grabbing ahold of his shoulder. Their tongue lolled out, drool dripping from the corners of their mouth. With a final cry for mercy, the soldier watched as the angel before him turned into a monstrosity.

Volume VII: Ambrosia

(venti x fem!dancer!reader)

It was time for the annual North Wind Festival in the western kingdom of Mondstadt.

Amidst the preparations for the festival, a wandering bard arrives in the bustling city. Without a clue on this bard's origin, the people of the city welcome him and his talent for music with open arms.

Venti soon finds himself in a predicament when a dancer from a foreign nation steals his audience time and time again. As one who would not back down from a challenge, Venti decides to entertain her and participate in her game.

However, when she mysteriously disappears the night before her performance at the festival, Venti realizes it is up to him to go find her. He doesn't realize that he would get himself wrapped up in a feud between an ex-soldier and the army of Snezhnaya.

author’s note: the “regula solis epoch” is a project i have been working on for literal months now. it takes place a few hundred years before the archon war and is completely canon divergent. i tried to incorporate as much remuria lore as i could. i hope that all of you enjoy reading these as much as i will writing them. each fic will be released in order, so “abandon ship” will be first on the list!

taglist — ; open!

**if you’d like to be added to the taglist for any and/or all of these upcoming fics, then leave a comment or send a msg to my inbox!

divider: @/cafekitsune

[alexhwriting]

Pilgrimage and the Lands of Lothric: The Medieval Narrative in Dark Souls III

Here is the essay that got me started on my route of video game studies and digital media. I was taking a class with a medievalist professor that was talking about the ways that medieval themes and thoughts are still prevalent in the world today. She is a huge soulsborne fan so when I pitched this idea she was super into it, with this essay going on to become my grad school application essay. I hope you enjoy it!

Pilgrimage and the Lands of Lothric: The Medieval Narrative in Dark Souls III

I. Introduction

Dark Souls III is, although frequently lauded, a very opaque narrative. Little of the narrative is told to the player at any point during the thirty to forty hours of grindingly difficult roleplaying game action and adventure. What little bits of story are present, however, are delivered from sought out sources, such as non-player characters (NPCs), items descriptions, and flavor text throughout the game world, as well as inferences from the dilapidated kingdom of Lothric that the player gets to explore on their quest to “link the fire” on behalf of one of the few more friendly characters that they come across during their time in the game. In this paper I am going to summarize the general overview of the story of Dark Souls III and show that it is a modern analogue to the pilgrimage practices of the Middle Ages. In doing so, this paper strives to shed some light into the abyss that is the in-game lore plotted so masterfully by FromSoftware, the studio behind the Souls series.

II. Background

Opening up with a cinematic, Dark Souls III lays out the four bosses that the player must fight, explaining that, “In venturing north, the pilgrims discover the truth of the old words. / ‘The fire fades, and the lords go without thrones,’” [1] as part of the sixteen lines that accompany the showcase of the world and bosses before the game actually starts (Dark Souls III). From here, the game does not volunteer much other information, aside from brief sections of dialogue when interacting with the NPCs that are necessary for game progression.

      As to set a baseline to draw from, then, here is a manual explanation of the main events of the game and its world: Dark Souls III cast the player as “the unkindled one,” an undead being who is awoken in response to the fading of the light of the world in order to restore, “link,” the flame and continue the current in-world epoch, the Age of Fire (Dark Souls III). Along the way, the player is tested in several environments that are central to the narrative, as FromSoftware relies heavily on the environment to form the majority of its storytelling, each of which is usually completed with the defeat of one of the games many bosses. Four of these such bosses, which the player must seek out, are called the Lords of Cinder, each of which has abandoned their duty to continue the light of the world, and therefore must be fought and their cinders brought back to rekindle the first flame. Once that is finished, the player is given a few choices based on their actions in the game in a kind of moral choice ultimately; do you link the fire, continuing the age limping along, extinguish the fire and let the next age of humanity begin, or do you usurp the fire and become a god yourself?

            The world of Lothric itself begins in a sort of high citadel, The High Wall of Lothric, before the player descends into the dilapidated lands of the Undead Settlement, Road of Sacrifices, and Farron Keep and its swamp, all of which have a sort of overgrown, crumbling aesthetic of a tightly packed and mountain-locked countryside. From there, however, the player wanders through the ruined underground of the Catacombs of Carthus, a winding tunnel that eventually leads to the societies of old and the mythic city of Irithyll of the Boreal Valley and Anor Londo, where the old gods once lived. Lastly, the player descends into the depths again in search of the Profaned Capital, before returning to Lothric Castle to face off against the rulers of the land themselves, the twin princes Lothric and Lorian. The entire movement of the game is based on looping back to places that are familiar and making shortcuts between places that are safe to get quickly through dangerous areas that would otherwise be tedious and difficult to pass through separately. This whole journey is punctuated by bonfires, checkpoints where the player gets the chance to rest and level up and do all the other things that are central to gameplay mechanics. One of the most vital being the recovery of what the game calls “Estus Flasks” but are essentially healing items that hopefully keep the player from getting killed and having to reset to the last bonfire they visited (Dark Souls III).

            More specifically, the world of Lothric is intentionally meant to be oppressive as the player makes their way through the course of the game. The landscape is made up of harsh cliffsides and thin pathways, ravines that lead down to bottomless pits, and overgrown roots that make almost every surface feel unstable. When there is architecture in the world, it takes on either a sort of ramshackle and dangerously leaning appearance in the case of the spaces like The Undead Settlement, where it is clear that the place may have once been a kind of pleasant village but was patched and repaired over and over again into barely standing structures. Otherwise, the architecture is grand, heavy, and old medieval styled. These are usually the places that have some additional historical importance to the game world, such as Lothric Castle, the home of the twin princes who rule the kingdom. Though even these structures are falling apart, tied to the themes of the game, and most of the locations that the player visits have long past their prime when they are visited. For example, the Cathedral of the Deep, an area once home to a legendary Lord of Cinder, is now nearly empty, with tattered cloth all over the floor and walls, as well as the central chambers all having been filled with a sort of black sludge (Dark Souls III). The pathways through these places are, in many cases, actual roads that have been left to the sands of time and have not been kept up, not dissimilar to the old Roman roads that were left behind after the collapse of the empire.

            On another note, though also necessary for the background of this paper, is the term “narrative” in reference to videogames has been a subject of some debate, due to the non-linear nature that many games take in their storytelling (Ryan-Thon, 173). Dark Souls III, however, sticks to a relatively linear structure in its plot and keeps the important information in sequence. Therefore, in this instance “narrative” will serve as a good term to examine the story being experienced by the player and make it easily relatable in the context of literary pilgrimage narratives. In his chapter on game abstraction in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Jesper Juul also suggests an alternative phrase, “fictional world” (Ryan-Thon, 173), following in the footsteps of a similar phrase used by Jan-Noël, “Storyworld” (Thon 289). While both of these are good alternatives, they will be employed here more specifically to refer to the world of Lothric that Dark Souls III is set in, as the world space itself is a core part of what makes the game a game and allows it to communicate its message.

Finally, in terms of background, there is the more formal games language that is used to describe Dark Souls III on a kind of meta level. The game is considered to be a roleplaying game (RPG) due to its elements of levelling up and encouragement of the player to approach problems in-game with a variety of different strategies. The setting invokes the traditional hallmarks of the medieval fantasy genre as well, as the player encounters knights, dragons, giants, castles, kings, and princes. With this established, invoking the Middle Ages as pretext for the storyworld (Eco, 68), a baseline understanding of the game and its tone has been established.

III. Foreground

Religious pilgrimage is almost synonymous with the Middle Ages and was an important part of the travel culture at the time. Roads themselves were recognized as being extremely valuable and were supported often by those who could afford it, especially those main thoroughfares that would take merchants, pilgrims, and general travelers across medieval European landscapes (Allen, 27). Pilgrims in particular made a core part of the necessity of roads as the quest they undertook was both holy (Osterrieth, 146) and economically beneficial for pilgrimage sites (Osterrieth, 153-4; Salonia, 3). What makes a pilgrimage distinct from other travel through the medieval landscape, however, is that they often focused on the relics and holy places of Christianity (Salonia, 3). Matteo Salonia suggests, in his article, “[The] reverence and physical journeys towards relics and saints were less theologically controversial than reverence and pilgrimages towards holy sites because of the new place assigned to the human body within Christian cosmology,” a sentiment that is mirrored in the bodily nature of the travel that would take place to visit such a relic (Salonia, 5). This is tied into a sort of Medieval Christian interest in the body, specifically the body as a means to channel spiritual energy into miracles and shows of faith (Salonia, 5). This differed from the Platonic view that had dominated before the Christian tradition, which placed the body as adversarial to the mental and spiritual pursuits of an individual (Salonia, 6).

Anne Osterrieth, in her article on pilgrimage as a personal quest, comments on the body-centric nature of the pilgrim’s movement, saying, “The pilgrim also drew pride from his capacity to undertake his task. He was becoming a seasoned traveler and derived pleasure from this new competence” (Osterrieth, 152). In popular media, which depicts pilgrims in a much more dower light, this attribution and celebration of prowess seems almost antithetical. However, Osterrieth emphasizes the pilgrim’s journey as one of death and rebirth, from the person they were who needed divinity into the person who has come in contact with divinity and is ready to advise the next on their journey (Osterrieth, 152). This shows that the person on a pilgrimage was, of course, seeking out a relic or holy place to venerate and receive blessings from, but also that along the way there is an unintended but necessary physical growth as they become a competent traveler and learn to deal with the challenges of long road travel.

This travel was far from unguided otherwise, as people consulted other travelers, maps, or guides to get them to their shrines of destination (Allen, 28). In the minds of the pilgrims, explored by Valerie Allen, the road was not always present, “we might call this [instrumental] representation of the road as means to end the default understanding of roads, in which they function as connectors between settled communities” (Allen, 33). Allen is looking at the pilgrimage narrative in the Book of Margery Kempe, which describes the travels of 15th century titular businesswoman, Margery Kempe (Allen, 27). This narrative, however, is where Allan draws the almost complete disregard of the road from, as it seems that Kempe herself did not find that part of the experience worth keeping track of in the same detail as the rest of her visits and exploits (Allan, 29).

Ritual, here, becomes a big part of the discussion of pilgrimage, which is itself inseparable from conceptions of rituals. “Ritual as a type of functional or structural mechanism to reintegrate the thoughtaction dichotomy, which may appear in the guise of a distinction between belief and behavior or any number of other homologous pairs,” is a definition of ritual put forward by Catherine M. Bell, in her work, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (20). She goes on to summarize that ritual is always tied to opposing forces in a culture or system of practice (Bell, 23). This provides a kind of structure that creates something of a cultural habit, something that fascinated scholar Pierre Bourdieu, is part of a kind of societal generative principal (Bourdieu, 78). Bourdieu takes this idea into a kind of forgetting of history and being left with only practice (Bourdieu, 79), which in some ways can be seen in some of the later ideas of pilgrimage to non-religious places or referring to the colonial settlers in America as “Pilgrims.” These tie into the discussion of pilgrimage as it establishes that pilgrimage as a ritual is always opposed to something else. In the case of historical pilgrimage this tension is between the safety of the village and staying in one place and the fulfillment of the journey at the end of a long and dangerous road.

IV. The Ground

Pilgrimage and Dark Souls III already share one thing in common, though debate has ensued about what role this takes in the narrative sphere (Bierger, 11), and that is the central necessity of space. It is space and travel that characterize a Pilgrim wandering medieval England, as well as the player character in Dark Souls III, embarking on their journey into the world of Lothric to link the fire. While the literal space is different, as there is the space that it takes to physically walk from place to place, there is a kind of abstracted sense of space that is present in Dark Souls III that is necessary for the nature of the story world (Ryan-Thon, 183). In this space between destination and starting point is where the pilgrim acquires their expertise and endures the hardships that will form them into the person worthy of accepting the blessings at the relic when they arrive (Osterrieth, 152). While in the game, the path works on a very similar level, having the player face challenges and gain experience to level-up their character so that they have the necessary competence when they come to face a boss like the first Lord of Cinder, the Abyss Watchers. Both the pilgrim and the player come across these various challenges, twists in the road, wild animals, other people threatening them, they also come across various moral encounters as well, such as to give aid or do favors for those they meet. In the reality of the past, this was much more literal, while in Lothric these moral actions take the form of side quests more often than not. In one example of a moral action that can be taken in the game early on in the Undead Settlement area, the player finds a woman, named Irina of Carim, trapped with a knight nearby. The player is told by the knight, “taken an interest in her, have you? Well, she's a lost cause. Couldn't even become a Fire Keeper. After I brought her all this way and got her all ready. She's beyond repair, I tell you" (Dark Souls III). To actually save her, if the player wants to, the process is pretty involved and includes gathering a whole other trail of items to get the door to Irina open. Alternatively, there is no real punishment for the player avoiding this action, much like in real life, and all further interactions and possible benefits of the NPCs are lost. 

The main idea linking these two actions is the concept of The Quest, which is incredibly broad. But more specifically, the quest for contact with divinity, during which the central actor develops their own abilities in order to be ready to receive the divinity when the time comes. While this is plainly evident in the nature of the pilgrimage, in Dark Souls III the same concept applies. This is due, in-part, to the transmedial principal of minimal departure that was developed by Marie-Laure Ryan and adapted by Thon. The principal is “at work during narrative meaning-making that allows the recipients to ‘project upon these worlds everything [they] know about reality, [making] only the adjustments dictated by the text’ (Possible Worlds 51). It is worth stressing, though, that recipients do not ‘fill in the gaps’ from the actual world itself but from their actual world knowledge” according to Thon as he cites the original principal by Marie-Laure Ryan (Thon, 292). This principal allows for the game world of Dark Souls use the quest form much more naturalistically, allowing the player to take on the grand quest of their own pilgrimage through the Lands of Lothric in a mentally analogous process.

There is a pilgrimage here is part of the very core of the gameplay of Dark Souls III, as well as the narrative proper. Throughout the game, the player is told that it is their job to gather the necessary relics in order to link the flame, a process that proves an arduous journey and a game experience that FromSoftware has come to be known for. On the level of environment alone, there is a similarity here to the kind of landscape that a pilgrim might move through in medieval Europe, with its crumbling, ancient, ruins and overgrown roads. The oppressive and dark game atmosphere with the bonfires as checkpoints give a sense that would be not too dissimilar to that of a real-world pilgrim, going on an arduous journey only to find rest at a campfire by the side of the road. It is significant as well, that, in the very last segment of the game, the place that the player finally arrives at is a religious site, the city of Irithyll, where the most prominent buildings are those of churches. In this game area the player visits three, one called The Church of Yorshka, one that is unnamed but is home to the boss Pontiff Sulyvahn, and finally the grand cathedral of Anor Londo, where the gods once made their homes and is now home to Aldritch, a kind of heretical saint (Dark Souls III). It is after this point that the player must return to the starting citadel of Lothric to continue their journey.

 It is also at this point of the game, as the player has made their way all around the kingdom of Lothric and even to places from the first couple of games in the Souls series, that this quest has been done before by others in the storyworld as well as by scores of other players before them. Combining this with the lack of direct story throughout the game, makes the player an agent in the meaning-making activity that the game has you go through, creating a kind of “intentionless action” (Bourdieu, 79). That is to say, with how little the game tells the player before their pilgrimage begins, the player is left to follow the game path and explore the story for themselves without fully clear intentions for what it is the in-game character is actually participating in. This is, in action, the kind of ritual repetition that leads to the unconscious repetition of the history of the players actions in the Bourdieusian sense (Bourdieu, 78).

Where the pilgrimage metaphor really comes full circle, however, is in the difficulty. It’s ironic to compare a medieval pilgrimage’s difficulty a videogame, but in its own space the Souls series stand as monoliths of difficulty. This difficulty, which is formed from a balance of timing-based combat and harsh punishments for failure, creates a kind of demand for focus. Whether the player wants to or not, the nature of the game demands that they pay full attention or risk losing hard-earned progress. This leads to, a kind of phenomenon where the player becomes more focused on the skill-based challenges and tunes out (or abstracts) for themselves the more complex elements of the game during the challenge (Ryan-Thon, 185-6). In a way not dissimilar from what Allen noticed with the Pilgrimage of Margery Kempe, where the repetitive action of travel was not as memorable as the destinations, the challenges and skill building (leveling up) being secondary to the large experiences of destinations (boss fights). Both walking for days and grinding through difficult game areas build patience in those who partake in each activity as well, becoming something of a meditative activity (Unknown, “Dark Souls is More than Just a Game”).

The moral component, while hard to measure, is an example of some micro-moral game morality throughout most of the game, much like in real life (Ryan et al, 57). However, much like the pilgrim’s ultimate quest being tied to the much more cosmically important goal of the afterlife of their soul, so is the ultimate morality of the quest in Dark Souls III, a large macro-moral choice to determine the fate of the storyworld (Ryan et al. 57). However, this is the area where Dark Souls III, much like other remakes and updated retellings of the stories of the past, adds in its own twist. The three endings of the game, usurping, letting die, or carrying on the flame, constitute a moral ending that does not present itself in the traditional stories of pilgrimage. Instead, the game asks its player at the very end of the game what they believe the best course of action is for the storyworld, one that has been limping along since the very first game in the series. This macro-moral decision is almost jarringly major in comparison to what minor interactions that the player has had up until that point and brings a sense of ultimate closure no matter what ending is taken. The game of course has additional content and gameplay to enjoy after the credits roll, but the narrative itself concludes finally in one of three ways. Each option, however, recolors the actions that the player took to get to that point, either as a would be king of humanity, a savior sacrificing themselves to keep the world going for another cycle, or as a savior in another sense, finally letting the limp and broken world fade into darkness.

V. Conclusion

From the content on the story itself, a lone character looking to keep the fire of the world burning and trekking across the land of Lothric, to the player’s experience of the game play, Dark Souls III sets itself in the same style of narrative as that of the experience of pilgrims. Both game and historic action culminating in a building of skills and triumph over adversity that many others may not be willing to undertake. Even with little motivation in a bleak and harsh world that appears stacked against almost every move that the player and their character work towards. While Dark Souls III may only be channeling this kind of mentality for the benefit of the player’s experience, it casts its spell regardless and has left a lasting impression on both individuals as well as the games industry as a whole (resulting in the Soulsborne game genre). However, more than just affecting the entertainment industry as a whole, Dark Souls III gives a mediated experience of one of the time-honored traditions that was once a massive undertaking across Christendom, calling up the past as it seeks to tell its own story about a medieval-like fantasy world, and also the unidyllic descent into ruin that every age face, both in the world of the game and outside of it. From a narratological perspective, it gives an interesting challenge to where the border between game world and narrative actually divides two different experiences. While from a medieval perspective, it gives a unique look into the kind of crumbling and uncertain side of what history used to be through player experience. And all of that is without delving into the rich optional or expanded content that was added after the original release of the game.

Bibliography

Allen, Valerie. “As the Crow Flies: Roads and Pilgrimage.” Essays in Medieval Studies 25 (2008): 27–37.

Bell, Catherine M. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Bieger, Laura. “Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling.” De Gruyter      64 (2016): 11-26.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Eco, Umberto. "Dreaming of the Middle Ages." Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. Transl. William Weaver. 1973. London. (1998) 61-72.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka. Dark Souls 3. Bandai Namco (2016).

Osterrieth, Anne. “Medieval Pilgrimage: Society and Individual Quest.” Social Compass 36    (1989): 145-157.

Ryan, Malcolm et al, “Measuring Morality in Videogames Research.” Ethics and Information     Technology 22 (2020): 55-68.

Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Thon, Jan-Noël, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Salonia, Matteo. “The Body in Medieval Spirituality: A Rationale for Pilgrimage and the       Veneration of Relics.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 14 (2018): 1-10.

Thon, Jan-Noël, “Transmedial Narratology Revisited: On the Intersubjective Construction of           Storyworlds and the Problem of Representational Correspondence in Films, Comics, and          Video Games” Narrative 25 (2017): 286-320. Unknown, “Dark Souls is More than Just a Game” GameFAQs (August 30th, 2014)     https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/606312-dark-souls/69969309

[1] Quotes from in-game dialogue are sourced from https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com, a website that has transcribed the text of Dark Souls III’s dialogue and other in-game text in its entirety.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes, 101-150

[101] Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v. 641. See also pp. 636–640, where many facts of parental and filial love are quoted.

[102] Primitive Folk, London, 1891.

[103] Gerland, loc. cit. v. 636.

[104] Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v. 640.

[105] W.T. Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, London, 1866, p. 363.

[106] It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of death, nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner. Every one throws his stone, or gives his blow with the hatchet, carefully avoiding to give a mortal blow. At a later epoch, the priest will stab the victim with a sacred knife. Still later, it will be the king, until civilization invents the hired hangman. See Bastian’s deep remarks upon this subject in Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. Die Blutrache, pp. 1–36. A remainder of this tribal habit, I am told by Professor E. Nys, has survived in military executions till our own times. In the middle portion of the nineteenth century it was the habit to load the rifles of the twelve soldiers called out for shooting the condemned victim, with eleven ball-cartridges and one blank cartridge. As the soldiers never knew who of them had the latter, each one could console his disturbed conscience by thinking that he was not one of the murderers.

[107] In Africa, and elsewhere too, it is a widely-spread habit, that if a theft has been committed, the next clan has to restore the equivalent of the stolen thing, and then look itself for the thief. A. H. Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol. i. p. 77.

[108] See Prof. M. Kovalevsky’s Modern Customs and Ancient Law (Russian), Moscow, 1886, vol. ii., which contains many important considerations upon this subject.

[109] See Carl Bock, The Head Hunters of Borneo, London, 1881. I am told, however, by Sir Hugh Law, who was for a long time Governor of Borneo, that the “head-hunting” described in this book is grossly exaggerated. Altogether, my informant speaks of the Dayaks in exactly the same sympathetic terms as Ida Pfeiffer. Let me add that Mary Kingsley speaks in her book on West Africa in the same sympathetic terms of the Fans, who had been represented formerly as the most “terrible cannibals.”

[110] Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltrieze, Wien, 1856, vol. i. pp. 116 seq. See also Müller and Temminch’s Dutch Possessions in Archipelagic India, quoted by Elisée Reclus, in Géographie Universelle, xiii.

[111] Descent of Man, second ed., pp. 63, 64.

[112] See Bastian’s Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. p. 7. Also Gray, loc. cit. ii. p. 238.

[113] Miklukho-Maclay, loc. cit. Same habit with the Hottentots.

[114] Numberless traces of post-pliocene lakes, now disappeared, are found over Central, West, and North Asia. Shells of the same species as those now found in the Caspian Sea are scattered over the surface of the soil as far East as half-way to Lake Aral, and are found in recent deposits as far north as Kazan. Traces of Caspian Gulfs, formerly taken for old beds of the Amu, intersect the Turcoman territory. Deduction must surely be made for temporary, periodical oscillations. But with all that, desiccation is evident, and it progresses at a formerly unexpected speed. Even in the relatively wet parts of South-West Siberia, the succession of reliable surveys, recently published by Yadrintseff, shows that villages have grown up on what was, eighty years ago, the bottom of one of the lakes of the Tchany group; while the other lakes of the same group, which covered hundreds of square miles some fifty years ago, are now mere ponds. In short, the desiccation of North-West Asia goes on at a rate which must be measured by centuries, instead of by the geological units of time of which we formerly used to speak.

[115] Whole civilizations had thus disappeared, as is proved now by the remarkable discoveries in Mongolia on the Orkhon and in the Lukchun depression (by Dmitri Clements).

[116] If I follow the opinions of (to name modern specialists only) Nasse, Kovalevsky, and Vinogradov, and not those of Mr. Seebohm (Mr. Denman Ross can only be named for the sake of completeness), it is not only because of the deep knowledge and concordance of views of these three writers, but also on account of their perfect knowledge of the village community altogether — a knowledge the want of which is much felt in the otherwise remarkable work of Mr. Seebohm. The same remark applies, in a still higher degree, to the most elegant writings of Fustel de Coulanges, whose opinions and passionate interpretations of old texts are confined to himself.

[117] The literature of the village community is so vast that but a few works can be named. Those of Sir Henry Maine, Mr. Seebohm, and Walter’s Das alte Wallis (Bonn, 1859), are well-known popular sources of information about Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For France, P. Viollet, Précis de l’histoire du droit français. Droit privé, 1886, and several of his monographs in Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes; Babeau, Le Village sous l’ancien régime (the mir in the eighteenth century), third edition, 1887; Bonnemère, Doniol, etc. For Italy and Scandinavia, the chief works are named in Laveleye’s Primitive Property, German version by K. Bücher. For the Finns, Rein’s Föreläsningar, i. 16; Koskinen, Finnische Geschichte, 1874, and various monographs. For the Lives and Coures, Prof. Lutchitzky in Severnyi Vestnil, 1891. For the Teutons, besides the well-known works of Maurer, Sohm (Altdeutsche Reichs- und Gerichts- Verfassung), also Dahn (Urzeit, Völkerwanderung, Langobardische Studien), Janssen, Wilh. Arnold, etc. For India, besides H. Maine and the works he names, Sir John Phear’s Aryan Village. For Russia and South Slavonians, see Kavelin, Posnikoff, Sokolovsky, Kovalevsky, Efimenko, Ivanisheff, Klaus, etc. (copious bibliographical index up to 1880 in the Sbornik svedeniy ob obschinye of the Russ. Geog. Soc.). For general conclusions, besides Laveleye’s Propriété, Morgan’s Ancient Society, Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte, Post, Dargun, etc., also the lectures of M. Kovalevsky (Tableau des origines et de l’évolution de la famille et de la propriété, Stockholm, 1890). Many special monographs ought to be mentioned; their titles may be found in the excellent lists given by P. Viollet in Droit privé and Droit public. For other races, see subsequent notes.

[118] Several authorities are inclined to consider the joint household as an intermediate stage between the clan and the village community; and there is no doubt that in very many cases village communities have grown up out of undivided families. Nevertheless, I consider the joint household as a fact of a different order. We find it within the gentes; on the other hand, we cannot affirm that joint families have existed at any period without belonging either to a gens or to a village community, or to a Gau. I conceive the early village communities as slowly originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to racial and local circumstances, either of several joint families, or of both joint and simple families, or (especially in the case of new settlements) of simple families only. If this view be correct, we should not have the right of establishing the series: gens, compound family, village community — the second member of the series having not the same ethnological value as the two others. See Appendix IX.

[119] Stobbe, Beiträg zur Geschichte des deutschen Rechtes, p. 62.

[120] The few traces of private property in land which are met with in the early barbarian period are found with such stems (the Batavians, the Franks in Gaul) as have been for a time under the influence of Imperial Rome. See Inama-Sternegg’s Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, Bd. i. 1878. Also, Besseler, Neubruch nach dem älteren deutschen Recht, pp. 11–12, quoted by Kovalevsky, Modern Custom and Ancient Law, Moscow, 1886, i. 134.

[121] Maurer’s Markgenossenschaft; Lamprecht’s “Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken zur Zeit der Volksrechte,” in Histor. Taschenbuch, 1883; Seebohm’s The English Village Community, ch. vi, vii, and ix.

[122] Letourneau, in Bulletin de la Soc. d’Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi. p. 476.

[123] Walter, Das alte Wallis, p. 323; Dm. Bakradze and N. Khoudadoff in Russian Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. Part I.

[124] Bancroft’s Native Races; Waitz, Anthropologie, iii. 423; Montrozier, in Bull. Soc. d’Anthropologie, 1870; Post’s Studien, etc.

[125] A number of works, by Ory, Luro, Laudes, and Sylvestre, on the village community in Annam, proving that it has had there the same forms as in Germany or Russia, is mentioned in a review of these works by Jobbé-Duval, in Nouvelle Revue historique de droit français et étranger, October and December, 1896. A good study of the village community of Peru, before the establishment of the power of the Incas, has been brought out by Heinrich Cunow (Die Soziale Verfassung des Inka-Reichs, Stuttgart, 1896. The communal possession of land and communal culture are described in that work.

[126] Kovalevsky, Modern Custom and Ancient Law, i. 115.

[127] Palfrey, History of New England, ii. 13; quoted in Maine’s Village Communities, New York, 1876, p. 201.

[128] Königswarter, Études sur le développement des sociétés humaines, Paris, 1850.

[129] This is, at least, the law of the Kalmucks, whose customary law bears the closest resemblance to the laws of the Teutons, the old Slavonians, etc.

[130] The habit is in force still with many African and other tribes.

[131] Village Communities, pp. 65–68 and 199.

[132] Maurer (Gesch. der Markverfassung, sections 29, 97) is quite decisive upon this subject. He maintains that “All members of the community... the laic and clerical lords as well, often also the partial co-possessors (Markberechtigte), and even strangers to the Mark, were submitted to its jurisdiction” (p. 312). This conception remained locally in force up to the fifteenth century.

[133] Königswarter, loc. cit. p. 50; J. Thrupp, Historical Law Tracts, London, 1843, p. 106.

[134] Königswarter has shown that the ferd originated from an offering which had to be made to appease the ancestors. Later on, it was paid to the community, for the breach of peace; and still later to the judge, or king, or lord, when they had appropriated to themselves the rights of the community.

[135] Post’s Bausteine and Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887, vol. i. pp. 64 seq.; Kovalevsky, loc. cit. ii. 164–189.

[136] O. Miller and M. Kovalevsky, “In the Mountaineer Communities of Kabardia,” in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884. With the Shakhsevens of the Mugan Steppe, blood feuds always end by marriage between the two hostile sides (Markoff, in appendix to the Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Soc. xiv. 1, 21).

[137] Post, in Afrik. Jurisprudenz, gives a series of facts illustrating the conceptions of equity inrooted among the African barbarians. The same may be said of all serious examinations into barbarian common law.

[138] See the excellent chapter, “Le droit de La Vieille Irlande,” (also “Le Haut Nord”) in Études de droit international et de droit politique, by Prof. E. Nys, Bruxelles, 1896.

[139] Introduction, p. xxxv.

[140] Das alte Wallis, pp. 343–350.

[141] Maynoff, “Sketches of the Judicial Practices of the Mordovians,” in the ethnographical Zapiski of the Russian Geographical Society, 1885, pp. 236, 257.

[142] Henry Maine, International Law, London, 1888, pp. 11–13. E. Nys, Les origines du droit international, Bruxelles, 1894.

[143] A Russian historian, the Kazan Professor Schapoff, who was exiled in 1862 to Siberia, has given a good description of their institutions in the Izvestia of the East-Siberian Geographical Society, vol. v. 1874.

[144] Sir Henry Maine’s Village Communities, New York, 1876, pp. 193–196.

[145] Nazaroff, The North Usuri Territory (Russian), St. Petersburg, 1887, p. 65.

[146] Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, 3 vols. Paris, 1883.

[147] To convoke an “aid” or “bee,” some kind of meal must be offered to the community. I am told by a Caucasian friend that in Georgia, when the poor man wants an “aid,” he borrows from the rich man a sheep or two to prepare the meal, and the community bring, in addition to their work, so many provisions that he may repay tHe debt. A similar habit exists with the Mordovians.

[148] Hanoteau et Letourneux, La kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. 231).

[149] N. Khoudadoff, “Notes on the Khevsoures,” in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules.

[150] Dm. Bakradze, “Notes on the Zakataly District,” in same Zapiski, xiv. 1, p. 264. The “joint team” is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes.

[blackbird5154]

In my hc Zenith is performed by both Papa II and Papa III. This is the reason why it was never performed in concerts.

The single was created in 2015 at the junction of the two epochs. II is on the cover but the song itself formally belongs to Meliora era.

Papa II performs the whole song and Papa III join only in chorus. The "arrrrr" sound and the laugh belong to Papa III because these are his typical featuras. Also the lower tones in Candlemass-2016 style are by Papa III.

Just imagine how the brothers perform this song together, shoulder to shoulder.

[melvinthedepressedrobot]

URL Music Game 🎶

Make a playlist with each letter of your URL!

Tagged by @artilaz

M - Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra

E - Everybody Knows Shit's Fucked - Stephen Paul Taylor

L - Lilac Wine - Katie Melua

V - Violence - The Unlikely Candidates

I - I Don't Like Myself - girli

N - :)

T - That Bitch - Sizzy Rocket

H - High Frequency - Louis III/Lucas Estrada

E - Elle Me Dit - Mika

D - Dick This Big - Todrick Hall

E - Epoch (The Living Tombstone's Remix) - Savlonic

P - Pink (Freak) - Elliot Lee ft girli

R - Rendezvous - Miss Benny

E - Eros & Apollo - Studio Killers

S - Shipwrecked - Alestorm

S - Sparkle - Ayumi Hamasaki

E - Everyday I Love You Less And Less - Kaiser Chiefs

D - Do It All The Time - I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME

R - ruin - The Amazing Devil

O - Old Molly Metcalfe - Jake Thackray

B - Barry & Freda - Victoria Wood

O - OFF MY FACE - Måneskin

T - Top Secret - hANGRY & ANGRY

i'm bad at tagging so I'm just picking a random bunch from my activity tab; @bizzarczar @raptorjesus-mf @bluerose5 @writterings @roastedtomatosoup

[belghast]

Perfecting Last Epoch

Perfecting Last Epoch - Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, but this morning I share some of the things I would love to see added to the game eventually.

Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this…

[sprayio]

Mother

“The one thing the boy picks to call her, is everything she is not. In a single, painful word.”

Characters: Raiden Shogun, Scaramouche (Platonic, familial)

Genre: Hurt, angst with no comfort

Warnings: Parental neglect + spoilers for Inazuma Archon quest III (no references to anything past this)

Recommended: Listen to “Nightmare” while reading this!!

》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》》

Nothingness

It is the plane of Euthymia. It is a place where nothing lives, nothing dies, nothing changes.

Stillness

It is the Tenshukaku. The fortress of Inazuma. The promise of stability in an epoch of an ever-rotating gyre.

Eternity

It is Her Majesty the Raiden Shogun. Forged from a single strike of lightning split into two. She is an immanent shadow; the past dissipating into her grand forms. 

There is no feeling to a lack of time- her unmoving face has not encountered a disruption in many, many years. And there is no longer anyone to keep record of such things either. There is only a violet sky mired in an impenetrable and brilliant darkness, so striking that the heartbreak of a sister left behind is lost beneath static skies.

And to such a person, a child was born.

He is unlike her. For he is anything but nothing. The boy is constantly changing. One moment he babbles at the Shogun incoherently, and the next he is smiling with no reserve, taking the first trembling steps towards the woman he calls ‘mother’. The Raiden Shogun can take on the form of everything and anything in Inazuma- the rich waters of the islands, or the sakura petals drifting from Narukami. But the one thing the boy picks to call her, is everything she is not. In a single, painful word.

“Mother!”

The boy has changed again. It is too fast she thinks; his existence is too fleeting. His hair has grown longer, and with a toothless, asymmetrical smile, he giggles. Eternity flows seamlessly through his violent purple tresses, dripping off the locks as easily as water. 

The Raiden Shogun is the epitome of Nothingness. Stillness. Eternity. Cumulatively, all at the same time. But the boy is a ripple in her motionless ocean. Drop by drop, the force of a feeling eliminated by eternity is returned by the water from the boy’s plum locks.

There should be no place for fear in eternity.

But that is what blossoms in Ei, when she gazes at the boy. And yet, he changes again, transient as everything she has ever lost. The boy is taller, and braids his hair. He trails behind the Shogun, animatedly chattering over anything and everything. 

“Mother, why does the Sacred Sakura never lose its petals?”

The Shogun wants to speed her pace up

“Mother! Is it true that… there are such trees which produce melons? Can you eat such things?”

There was a mistake. This is an anomaly. 

“Mother… mother..! Wait..!”

If Her Majesty turns around now, she will see the child’s eyes which glimmer with the hope of a small Naku Weed. It is the only thing that sets them apart, for he is her splitting image.

The child has no name other than a cruel label- the puppet he is to become. But when he stands for hours on end in wait behind the screen of her audience chamber (not knowing how easily visible his small figure is) the familiar feeling of fear plucks at her long unbeating heart.

It is then that Ei realises she cannot afford to let herself love him. She cannot let him become her. Not her child of burgeoning bright blue eyes. Her waking world, woven from the stuff of dreams. She forces her arms by her sides. She will not touch him, or embrace him. For the sooner she does, the day he lies lifeless in her arms encroaches. Like all those before him.

The next day, Kunikuzushi is called to the Shogun’s audience chamber. Her Majesty approaches, and before there is protest, violet locks fall to the ground with the shing of a blade. They are no longer the same. But for some reason, the light in his eyes harden to the same shade as his creator, and perhaps they were never more similar.

Now that the cord is cut, the Shogun finally grants the puppet his freedom, alongside his freedom from the only name ever given to him. 

The Raiden Shogun watches the retreating figure from her lofty abode. And for some strange reason, for the first time, she feels the pain of a mother.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Could Help Researchers Detect the Universe’s First Stars

The first stars to form in the universe were very different from our Sun. Known to astronomers (somewhat paradoxically) as Population III, or Pop III, stars, they were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. They are believed to have been much larger, hotter, and more massive than our Sun. As a result, Pop III stars use their fuel more quickly and have shorter lifespans.

Pop III stars, which came about in the first few hundred million years after the big bang, are crucial in understanding the development of the universe. These stars were the nuclear furnaces where the first elements heavier than helium, which astronomers call metals, were generated, and ultimately are the reason for the complex systems of galaxies in the current universe.

No Pop III stars are found around us today, so to learn about them we must look back to the early universe. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a panoramic field of view 200 times larger than the infrared view of the sky from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and survey the sky 1,000 times faster. As a result, Roman may be a key tool for helping astronomers see this rare first generation of stars after it launches by May 2027.

Shredded Stars

The new approach will not seek intact stars. Instead, astronomers will hunt for signs of Pop III stars that have been shredded by black holes, creating a bright and energetic phenomenon known as a tidal disruption event (TDE).

If a star moves close enough to a black hole, the star will experience gravitational tides strong enough to completely disrupt it. Some of the material from the disrupted star then collects into an accretion disk, where complex physical processes cause it to glow brightly enough to be seen from billions of light-years away.

"Since we know that black holes likely exist at these early epochs, catching them as they’re devouring these first stars might offer us the best shot to indirectly detect Pop III stars," noted Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a co-author of the study.

TDEs generate light in many wavelengths, including X-ray, radio, ultraviolet (UV), and optical light. The further we look into the early universe, where these early stars primarily reside, the more the optical and UV light is redshifted, or stretched by the expanding universe, into near-infrared wavelengths visible to Roman. 

Not only does the wavelength of light stretch – so does the observed timescale of the TDE. Like an exploding star or supernova, a TDE is a transient event that increases quickly in brightness and then gradually decreases over time. But due to the large redshift of these events, a Pop III TDE would brighten over the course of hundreds to thousands of days, while its decline would last more than a decade.

“The evolution timescales of Pop III TDEs are very long, which is one feature that could distinguish a Pop III TDE from other transients including supernovas and TDEs of current-generation stars like our Sun,” said Rudrani Kar Chowdhury, postdoctoral fellow of the University of Hong Kong and first author of the study.

“Since they last for a longer time, a Pop III TDE might be easier to detect, but it might be harder to identify as a transient,” added co-author Jane Dai, professor of astrophysics at the University of Hong Kong. “Scientists would need to design the right survey strategy.”

A Coordinated Hunt

While NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is powerful enough to detect and study TDEs in the early universe, its field of view is too small to make it an efficient TDE hunter. Of Roman’s core community surveys, the most promising for finding TDEs is the High Latitude Wide Area survey, which aims to cover approximately 2,000 square degrees of the sky outside of the plane of our galaxy.

“Roman can go very deep and yet cover a very big area of the sky. That's what's needed to detect a meaningful sample of these TDEs,” said Dai.

Webb would be useful for follow-up observations, however, particularly with its suite of spectroscopic tools. Once Roman detects these TDEs, Webb’s instruments could identify if any metals are present.

“Since these stars are only made up of hydrogen and helium, we will not see any metal lines in the spectrum of objects, whereas in the spectra of TDEs from regular stars we can see various metal lines,” Kar Chowdhury noted.

With this proposed strategy for identifying Pop III stars, there’s an opportunity to explore more of the universe’s mysteries, opening up numerous opportunities to better understand not only the early universe, but also galaxies closer to home.

[andy-paleoart]

The beginning of Everything | O começo de Tudo

🇬🇧

The Big Bang theory, widely accepted in cosmology, describes the universe's origin around 13.8 billion years ago. The universe began as a hot, dense singularity and rapidly expanded, creating space and time. Early milestones include cosmic inflation, the formation of quarks and hadrons, and the emergence of hydrogen and helium.

The universe cooled, allowing for the formation of the first atomic nuclei. About 380,000 years post-Big Bang, the era of recombination occurred, marking the creation of neutral hydrogen atoms and the release of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

The formation of the first stars, Population III stars, followed. Their emergence ended the Dark Ages by ionizing hydrogen, leading to the Epoch of Reionization. These early stars, massive and short-lived, produced heavier elements through nuclear fusion.

While constellations aren't directly tied to the universe's early moments, they are cultural and observational constructs. People across cultures have identified and named patterns of stars, creating constellations with cultural or mythological significance over centuries. These constellations serve as guides to navigate the night sky and have contributed to humanity's understanding of the cosmos.

🇧🇷

A teoria do Big Bang, amplamente aceita na cosmologia, descreve a origem do universo há cerca de 13,8 bilhões de anos. O universo começou como uma singularidade quente e densa, expandindo-se rapidamente e criando espaço e tempo. Marcos iniciais incluem a inflação cósmica, a formação de quarks e hádrons, e o surgimento de hidrogênio e hélio.

O universo resfriou, permitindo a formação dos primeiros núcleos atômicos. Cerca de 380.000 anos após o Big Bang, ocorreu a era da recombinação, marcando a criação de átomos de hidrogênio neutros e a liberação da Radiação Cósmica de Fundo em Micro-ondas (CMB).

A formação das primeiras estrelas, conhecidas como estrelas da População III, veio em seguida. Sua emergência encerrou as Eras Escuras ao ionizar o hidrogênio, inaugurando a Época da Reionização. Essas estrelas iniciais, massivas e de curta duração, produziram elementos mais pesados por meio de fusão nuclear.

Enquanto as constelações não estão diretamente ligadas aos primeiros momentos do universo, são construções culturais e observacionais. Pessoas de diversas culturas identificaram e nomearam padrões de estrelas ao longo dos séculos, criando constelações com significados culturais ou mitológicos. Essas constelações servem como guias para navegar pelo céu noturno e contribuíram para a compreensão do cosmos pela humanidade.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint-Gilles by Kevin James Lewis ★★★★☆

The Frankish county of Tripoli was not historically important, at least in the traditional sense. Its counts won no particularly great military victories beyond the conquest of the county itself and commissioned no great works of literature. The county’s archives were sacked in an epoch long past and their contents erased from history. Only paint flaking off forgotten church walls, once-mighty fortresses gutted by the fires of modern wars, and crumbling manuscripts in distant libraries stand testament to the fact that the county and its inhabitants existed at all. Yet the study of the county and its rulers is important in that it raises a number of hitherto unasked and unanswered questions regarding the development both of the so-called ‘crusader states’ and of Lebanon and Syria more generally. Though small, the county’s history encapsulates the principal forces that shook and shaped the Latin East as a whole. The county was not simply the product of European crusaders, but grew amid the verdant valleys of Lebanon, the forbidding heights of the Alawite mountains and the fertile plains that lay between. It was in this Syro-Lebanese context that the counts of Tripoli sought to establish their rule. In many ways, the manifold pressures on the counts were greater than those faced by other Frankish rulers. True, the threat of invasion seems to have been slighter because hostile forces preferred crossing the Jordan into the southern kingdom of Jerusalem, or the Orontes into the northern principality of Antioch, rather than over the mountains that cradled the county. However, the kings of Jerusalem and princes of Antioch did not face the same cultural complexity as in the Lebanon region, which made it all the harder for the counts to negotiate and enforce the terms of their power. … The present work is arranged chronologically and divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on two rulers: William Jordan of Cerdanya and Bertrand of Toulouse, rival claimants to what would become the county of Tripoli after the death of the crusader Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse in 1105. Chapters 2 and 3 concern the reigns of Count Pons and his son Raymond II respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 both deal with a single count: Raymond III, whose reign was by far the longest, arguably the most complex and easily the best documented – not to mention most debated. Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles himself, the first self-professed ‘count of Tripoli’, does not receive his own chapter or indeed much special attention at all beyond what is absolutely necessary for the purpose of setting the scene. It has been deemed wise to omit him from the present work since most of his life was spent in the west or else participating in the First Crusade at a time when the very existence of the county of Tripoli had yet to be imagined. As such, the structure of this present work questions Jean Richard’s influential belief that the county of Tripoli was primarily the product of Raymond IV’s ‘action personnelle’. More than one person determined the county’s existence and fate.

[ofhouseadama]

Julian: *trying to explain his vanishing act/disappearance while on the edge of climax*

Garak: *tightening his grip* The only coherent thing I want to hear out of you for the next hour is “Elim.”

(In reference to this post and this post from earlier because, whoops. Maybe I'll play around in this post-canon universe and expand it a bit.)

There are several things that Julian knows, logically. First, he knows that Garak's primary motivation earlier was concern; he otherwise wouldn't have given him comfort once he realized the depths of his distress. Second, he knows that his little stunt of his resembles Garak's favorite part of the seventh epoch of The Never-Ending Sacrifice, when Dirzin, instead of returning home after the war, goes to Ruloc's village on Cardassia III to take a nursing position in the local convalescent home, the only kind of sentiment allowed across class lines, even in a time of strife. There are implications to his decision to come here. Ones they both innately understand.

And third: deep, deep in his hindbrain, he recognizes that he and Garak have always been hurtling towards this moment, only achievable now at the end of the war when all other obstacles have fallen away, a fact that has always been true but has never been honest.

Regardless, he can't stop himself from trying to explain his abrupt vanishing act off of Deep Space Nine even as Garak pushes him down onto the bed in his hotel room in the tiny coastal town of Kraness on the Marot Sea, a place where only one of them has a good and sane and rational reason to be.

"Oh God," he chokes out, brushing Garak's hair out of his face as his tongue does devious things between his thighs. "Oh God, you can't just--"

Garak's fingers tighten on his hips, pinning him to the mattress. This is dangerous, Julian thinks, as Garak flays him open with his lips, his tongue, the cavern of his mouth. It's too good, it's far too good. He worries that he might dissolve into the sheets, flexing his fingers against the base of Garak's skull, sunken into soft locks of the black hair he's dreamed of touching for the better part of a decade.

"I didn't," Julian manages to stammer out. "I didn't mean to stop answering your messages, I just--and it all became too much--"

Garak releases him for a moment, nuzzling the inside of his thigh. For a brief moment, Julian wonders how he tastes to him; Cardassians are so scent based, as a species. Do his pheromones repulse him or excite him? Can Garak smell just how deeply he wants him? How much he's always wanted him, no matter the secrets he's held and the lies he's told and the distance he's put between them?

"My dear," Garak says, pupils blown wide with lust, voice emanating from his lower register. "The only coherent thing I want to hear out of you for the next hour is Elim."

With a shaky exhale, Julian nods. "I can--I can do that. I can definitely do that."

"Fantastic," Garak says, nipping at the rounded top of his leg. Gently, ever so gently, he presses a slick finger into him, and Julian can't help but moan. "Because I think you've forgotten what it's like for someone to take care of you, my dear doctor. And I'd like to remind you. Would you like that?"

Eyes wide, Julian nods again.

At the end of the hour, Julian stretches bonelessly on the bed, curling himself around Garak's form. A bed. He hasn't slept in a bed in far too long. Lazily, Garak draws his fingers up and down Julian's bicep, kisses the top of his head, his forehead, the bridge of his nose. It's the first greedy thing he's done today, Julian thinks, as Garak tips their mouths together, slides his tongue past Julian's lips. I don't think I could stand it if he stopped. They're under the blankets now, warm and tucked in safe, and Julian can hear the wind picking up again outside. With a clarity that is no longer accompanied with the sharp pang of fear, he understands just how weary he is.

"It's supposed to snow again tonight," Garak says, eventually, several long minutes or possibly hours later. "You should stay here."

"Right," Julian says, nodding, finding himself already close to sleep despite himself. "Because of the snow."

Garak huffs a small laugh. "Why ever else would I ask?"

[trainsinanime]

Generations like Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z and so on are arbitrary, meaningless, and it seems like too many people buy into the "gen this vs. gen that" mentality that news media produces as cheap click-bait. I think we should reject that and go back to what the gods truly intended:

Continental European model railroad epochs, as defined in standard NEM 800 and related (German, French). The great thing is that it has very simple delineations:

World War I (up to that is Epoch I, then Epoch II)

World War II (after that Epoch III)

That time they painted twelve-digit numbers on all passenger and freight cars in the late 1960s and early 1970s (after that Epoch IV)

The end of the cold war (after that Epoch V)

That time they added some letters to the twelve-digit numbers, and started painting them on locomotives as well, around 2007. (starts Epoch VI)

Just like the whole "Gen A/B/O" thing, these are completely made up. They claim things belong together that were often very distinct. At the same time they claim strong dividing lines exist where reality is much more fluid.

But on the plus side, they do tell you which European model railroad locomotives and cars you can assemble into a roughly realistic train.

[jasminewalkerauthor]

Trope chats: The chosen one trope

The Chosen One trope, a narrative device rooted in the hero's journey, has persisted throughout the annals of storytelling across various cultures and epochs. This trope chat explores the evolution of the Chosen One trope, examining its origins, tracing its journey through literary history, unraveling its contemporary appeal, and delving into the societal impact it exerts on both creators and consumers within the media world.

I. Origins and Historical Context:

The Chosen One trope finds its roots in ancient mythology and religious texts, where individuals are selected by fate or divine entities to fulfill extraordinary destinies. Heroes like King Arthur, Moses, and Jesus Christ embody early manifestations of the Chosen One archetype, imbued with a unique purpose and often tasked with saving their people or the world.

II. Literary Evolution:

The Chosen One trope has undergone a transformative evolution, adapting to changing cultural and societal landscapes. From classical epics to medieval romances, the trope evolved through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, eventually finding a prominent place in 19th-century literature.

The Romantic era, with its emphasis on individualism and the sublime, fueled the rise of protagonists destined for greatness. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" exemplify the shift towards characters grappling with their destinies, foreshadowing the nuanced portrayal of Chosen Ones in later works.

III. Contemporary Appeal:

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the Chosen One trope experienced a resurgence in popularity across various media, including literature, film, television, and video games. The trope's enduring appeal lies in its ability to tap into universal themes of self-discovery, empowerment, and the triumph of good over evil.

Personal Growth and Identity: Modern Chosen Ones often undergo profound personal growth, mirroring the struggles and triumphs of the individual's journey to self-discovery. This character arc resonates with audiences seeking narratives that explore identity, purpose, and the realization of untapped potential.

Escapism and Empowerment: The Chosen One trope provides a form of escapism, allowing audiences to vicariously experience a world where an ordinary individual can transcend their limitations and fulfill an extraordinary destiny. This theme of empowerment resonates particularly in a society where individuals seek inspiration and hope.

IV. Societal Impact:

The Chosen One trope's prevalence in popular media has contributed to shaping societal perspectives and expectations. While it offers a powerful narrative tool for conveying timeless themes, it also raises questions about individual agency, inclusivity, and the impact of deterministic storytelling on real-world attitudes.

Expectations and Aspirations: The ubiquity of the Chosen One trope may contribute to societal expectations, with individuals seeking to fulfill perceived destinies or waiting for a transformative moment in their lives. This phenomenon raises questions about the balance between personal agency and external influence.

Inclusivity and Representation: Critics argue that the Chosen One trope has historically favored certain archetypes, perpetuating stereotypes and limiting representation. However, contemporary storytellers are increasingly diversifying the trope, exploring narratives that challenge traditional conventions and broaden the spectrum of heroes.

The Chosen One trope, rooted in ancient mythologies and adapted over centuries, remains a potent narrative device that continues to captivate audiences. Its contemporary appeal reflects the timeless human fascination with destiny, self-discovery, and the triumph of the human spirit. As creators continue to weave narratives around chosen heroes, the impact on society and the media world invites ongoing exploration, prompting critical conversations about representation, agency, and the enduring power of storytelling in shaping collective imagination.