#for a given value of 'up' since like...still in a time loop

[annasofthe11thdimension]

These...fake covers are...WAY too fun to draw.

Anyway, here's another cover for the start of the 3rd act of my fic series 'Like a Wheel Ever Turning', since apparently I wasn't satisfied with only having one of the damn things.

If you like wanna see Odile stuck in a time loop, and Loop slowly being forced to be an actor in the drama (VERY much against their will), here's the link.

[himehomu]

With Walpurgisnacht Rising coming in 2024, I want to talk about something that has been bothering me since Rebellion. It was never the “plot twist” of Homura separating Madoka from her godhood nor her taking those godlike powers for herself thus becoming the devil. It was always people's reactions to Homura doing this and the way they based her entire character around this specific moment that really rubbed me the wrong way. Saying she's a selfish monster who's trapping Madoka in a fake world for her own personal gain or that she's taking Madoka's agency away from her and making decisions for her that directly rebel against what Madoka wants... And, to that, I just want to know.... do literally any of you know what Madoka actually wants or are you just basing her character around her sacrifice?

Yes, it was for the benefit of all Magical Girls and yes it freed them from their cycle of selling their souls in the name of hope just to die at the hands of their own grief and despair, but Madoka didn't plan to abruptly cease to exist at the cost of it?? She didn't want to be stuck between life and death only existing as a deity meant to eradicate Witches for all of time. Madoka wished to erase Witches before they are born from the past, present, and future. Going back years upon years in time, destroying Witches and mercy killing Magical Girls; fighting forever, past and future, for all time. Ceasing to exist as an individual, only able to materialize and interact with someone when they're dying of grief and sadness and pain; relieving them of that pain so that their last moments won't be in agony, so they can die in peace, but there's none of that for Madoka. There's no death, no closure, no release, no freedom from this hell of being a weapon and nothing more.

But, Madoka would never voice these struggles and frustrations. Because Madoka isn't that kind of girl. She's the kind of girl who shoves all of her problems down and bases all of her self worth on how much she can do for others, how happy she can make others, and how useful she can be. She forces a smile and masks her pain because she doesn't want to burden anyone with her problems. She puts herself down constantly, risking her life trying to help others because she cares so little for herself. Without being useful, she believes her life has no value. And Homura knows this. Because Homura knows her. I feel like most people take Madoka's bright pink colors and smile at face value and don't realize she's chronically depressed. That's why in the first timeline, she and Homura naturally got along so well: they were both girls who hated themselves and based their self worth on how they made others around them feel, both self-loathing girls who deem themselves worthless if they're not useful in some way. Madoka was just better at hiding it than Homura was. And she still is by the 100th loop.

But, in Rebellion, when her memories of being a god are taken away from her, and she's given a hypothetical scenario of her fate, she says "wow that sounds awful and scary and lonely and I would never do something like that." The Flower Field scene is one of the most brilliant and misunderstood scenes in all of anime. Majority still to this day argue that, since Madoka doesn't have her memories, her words hold little to no weight, and Homura is simply hearing what she wants to hear. So, naturally, they disregard what Madoka is saying, assuming it's just Homura being selfish. And that's where they mess up. Because, the fact that Madoka doesn't have her memories here is the whole point! Homura is already well-aware that if Madoka had her memories, her self loathing would result in her caring so little for herself that she sacrifices herself every time which is why immediately after Madoka's words, she assures Madoka that she is indeed "strong enough to make that decision." Homura just wanted to confirm if Madoka would still miss her life pre-godhood in spite of that, which she outright says she does.

There are also arguments that Homura was somehow influencing Madoka in the labyrinth aside from just not remembering becoming a god, but Shinbou already stated in an interview that this wasn't the case, and that these were Madoka's honest words. In fact, Madoka's true feelings regarding her godhood are revealed for the first time within the lyrics of Madoka's character song (sung by her VA Aoi Yuuki) that played as the ep 1-2 ED titled “Mata Ashita”. The song is about Madoka post-series which consists of Madoka wandering around aimlessly, quietly observing as humanity resumes without her, lamenting on the life she lost after becoming a god and wishing she could have been more honest about her feelings to Homura in ep 12, asking her to realize she's lonely.

[I'm pretending that I'm used to being alone, but I'm not really that strong.

The scenery is the same as always, the city is the same as always.

Even though I think everything will stay unchanged.

I still feel like I'm the only one who's tiny. Instead of "See you later."

I should've said, "I'll stay for a little longer."

I wanted and hoped that you would realize it.

But with the words "See you later,"

I lie to myself again.

And hide my true feelings beneath my usual smile. Saying, "See you later," I wave my hand.

Cracking a smile, yet I'm feeling lonely.

The truth is, I still have more to talk about.

But even my voice saying, "See you later"

is so near yet far from you that it can't reach you.

So let me say this like I always do, just once more: "See you tomorrow"]

This is definitive proof that even BEFORE Rebellion, this was already confirmed to be Madoka's true feelings.

The second time Madoka's true feelings post-godhood are adressed is via Madoka and Homura's concept movie quotes explaining that the God (Madoka) is clearly suffering in her “heaven”, which is more like a prison of isolation. The lizard girl (Homura) takes pity on her and separates her humanity from her godhood, thus making her human once more. Here are also some direct quotes from Magia Record which provides even more context for what Madokami is experiencing:

All of this, with the addition of Madoka's words in the Flower Field scene being confirmed to be her real and honest feelings, puts the whole “pulling madokami down from heaven” scene into a different perspective. Considering the entire reason why Madoka even became powerful enough to become God in the first place was because Homura's 100+ time loops linked multiple parallel universes together with Madoka at their center, and it's confirmed Madoka was suffering as a god, I would think people would be happy to see Homura reverting Madoka back to a human being and rewriting the entire universe to be a world where Madoka is happy and free, surrounded by her friends and family???

The fact that Homura's love for Madoka was so strong throughout 12 years of 100+ time loops, it turned Madoka into a goddess but when Homura was able to see just how isolating and lonely godhood was for her, she took her godlike powers for herself because she loved her and was willing to take on the exhaustion and isolation of immortality as the devil to spare her of anymore pain and sadness. Homura freed Madoka from a nonexistential purgatory prison and a decade later she's still demonized for it, how insane is that??

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

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/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[kohakurin8]

~ Elevator Hitch ~

What Does it All Mean!?

A brief theory on the symbolism and lore behind a really cool game

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️

This post will contain SPOILERS for the game and all 14 endings. If you wish to play Elevator Hitch before reading, you can download it for free at this link.

So, Where do we begin?

Elevator Hitch is a really cool isolated-loop surreal horror game. For those of you who aren't familiar with this concept, an "isolated-loop" is a time-loop scenario which only affects a single person, small group of people, single room, etc. — but does NOT affect the entire world or universe. This is where it's common to see things like acquiring an item in your inventory, getting murdered, then waking up again at the beginning of the day with the item still in your inventory.

This concept has been used in various different media, and to varying different degrees of complexity. But, honestly, I think this game is my favorite instance of it so far.

So our story revolves around Protag, a somewhat meek and nervous lil guy who comes to this office building to take an interview for a new job. All he knows is that his interview isn't on the first floor, so he gets in the elevator in an attempt to find it. Before the door closes, Coworker forces his way in, and the elevator suddenly shorts out and jams before you two can begin your journey. The rest of the game is your various attempts to exit the elevator (alive) which get increasingly bizarre — especially after Protag realizes that whenever he dies, time restarts to when they first entered the elevator!

Shame Coworker doesn't seem to remember anything, though...

Now, since the lore within the game is pretty cryptic, none of our questions about the situation ever seem to get totally answered. It's up to the player to theorize and surmise just what exactly is happening to Protag and Coworker, and that's exactly what I've come here to do.

Death and Clues on Every Floor...

Literally! Every floor is a single room containing at least 1 clue, and at least 1 possible death — including the elevator itself. But what's even more important than that is the lore that all of these scenes show you.

Interestingly enough, the lore all seems to revolve around who Protag is as a person, to the point that one of the floors is actually his childhood bedroom.

Kind of intriguing that everything about this environment is centered around him, huh?

Hold onto that thought.

Every room and scenario is increasingly more bizarre, featuring anything from Eldritch-esque beings to settings that could almost pass for torture chambers. Every puzzle requires something from a different floor, making it ridiculously easy to screw up and croak, meanwhile Coworker is so maddeningly unaware that even when he tries to offer advice it's just as cryptic as the situation itself.

It all feels a lot... Like Hell...

Not just as an expression, but actual Hell. Mind rending stimuli navigated through tedious puzzle solving, where the penalty is gruesome death and the only reward is more torture. A neverending loop of suffering and confusion. It's all quite hellish!

At first this feels a bit superficial. "Of course it's hellish, this is a horror game!" But, honestly, good horror like this game is rarely ever bizarre and incomprehensible for the sheer shock value. If all of these allusions were superficial, why would we have such a detailed and cryptic conversation with Manuel, the maintenance worker?

Why would every single "correct answer" to the puzzles have sinister undertones?

Why would the religious subtext in Protag's room be so subtle and yet so distinct at the same time?

So if we humour ourselves and follow this train of thought then that leads one to wonder...

Why would Protag be in Hell?

Good question! After all, he doesn't even seem to be aware of having any initial death!

But, we are given breadcrumbs to what sort of person Protag is through the various different scenarios that ensue. Some things are minor details, like his lack of remorse for feeding an innocent rat to a hungry black hole. Others are more intense and significant, like the clues in his bedroom...

Let's start with pointing out the obvious direction that Protag's dialogue trees nudge you in.

After all, this game is a visual novel, so of course there are points when your dialogue options matter and can very well change the outcome of the situation. However, most VNs have options that are distinctly "good" or "bad" for the story directions, often leading the player on a journey of teaching the protagonist how to be a better person.

But Protag.... doesn't become better...

All of his dialogue options are either:

• Confusion, Frustration, Disbelief

• Self-Deprecating, Meek

• Deceptive

• Lashing Out

Obviously some of these options are better for certain scenarios. Deceiving Coworker into giving you his lighter is a way better idea than trying to steal it and burning you both to death.

And deceiving your Doppelgangers into trusting you before your brutal betrayal is arguably better than trusting them and getting betrayed in return.

But none of these options point to Protag being a good person. As much as he learns to adapt to his environment, nothing he does teaches him how to be a better person than he started out as. In fact, some of them even lead him to commit murder himself!

Of course, this isn't saying that Protag is necessarily a bad person either. After all, his initial reaction to the Doppelgangers is to trust them and even show them pity.

We also get a lot of information about Protag from the floor that mimics his childhood bedroom. He was monitored constantly by overbearing and religious parents, to the point that one of the Bad Ends is his parents entering the room.

He couldn't sleep, plagued by nightmarish beings which he even made drawings of, and had to take sleeping pills just to cope (which may or may not have been hidden from his parents as well)

Considering this, and just the sheer amount of existential dread Protag has upon visiting this floor, it's very possible that his parents were abusive. His personality issues are probably a result of that abuse, meaning even though he isn't necessarily a good person, he also isn't inherently a bad one.

The Allusions of Suicide...

This should honestly come as no surprise, but this game does have a lot of potential allusions to suicide. Especially when taking into account what suicide means in Christianity...

I first noticed this in the dialogue on Floor 9 with Normal Guy, as well as the dialogue contained in Ending 13 (screenshot above). During the interview on Floor 9, Protag seems to struggle with answering most of the questions. When asked why he wanted a new job, all of the answers imply that he doesn't actually know why, and when asked why he left his old job, Protag states that "it wasn't a Real Job" or at least not one viewed as respectable.

Then, when attempting to leave the Lobby on Floor 1, Protag is blocked by an alarming figure who berates him. The figure taunts Protag with phrases he's likely told himself, like "you worked so hard to get here" and especially "you NEED this job"

Now, this game absolutely LOVES its workplace puns, and something about these ones just struck me as significant. Upon further reflection on everything going on, I realized that these phrases are almost synonymous with suicidal thoughts.

As someone who's experienced this myself, I understand that a lot of suicidal thoughts are rooted more in the desire for change, and not the desire for death. So consider this...

Protag isn't looking for a new job, he's looking for a new life. His old life didn't feel "real" or "respectable", likely because of whatever abuse he endured from his parents. After all, his childhood bedroom is described by him as his "old place", meaning he likely was living with his parents until somewhat recently.

So then when he finally passes the interview — passes this hellish elevator trial of self-discovery — and tries to flee, he's stopped by the thoughts of regret for taking his own life.

"You worked so hard for this new life, why are you throwing it away?"

"You NEED this change."

"You can't go back to what you were before."

Then there's the Sleeping Pill found in Protag's bedroom. It's not found in a pill bottle or any other typical storage, but rather it's under the bedsheets. This gives the impression that the pill either fell out of Protag's hand in bed, or that he was hiding the pills from his overbearing parents.

Then there's the fact that sleeping pills are a very common medium for attempted suicide.

This leads me to suspect that Protag either overdosed in an attempted suicide as a child, causing his parents to become even more protective.

Or... This is how Protag ended up at the office building in the first place...

Welcome to Protag's Purgatory

Yeah, you may have guessed it already, but I am in fact suggesting that Protag has committed suicide and is currently trapped in Purgatory. After all, if you consider the distinct hint at his religious background, it's not unlikely to be following the Christian belief that suicide will condemn you to Purgatory. In fact, the opening of the game, where Protag feels like the only one who doesn't know where he's going, is a reference to the nature of Purgatory.

Consider, also, the nature of the game. Everything you do in it is a sort of trial, and it all tests the nature of Protag's true self. Not to mention that Purgatory is an unchanging limbo, just as the game paints a picture of an unending time-loop on repeat.

Protag took his own life, and his penance is to be trapped in an unending trial of self-discovery. Floor 9 resembles Heaven, like Cloud 9, where Protag is administered one final test. Normal Guy gives Protag the option to have become a better person, and possibly pass on to a better afterlife, however our dialogue tree tells us that Protag hasn't reached that level of self acceptance yet.

Therefore, the only options are what appears to be working in Purgatory (possibly like Manuel), enduring the trial over and over again, or as hinted by the eerie staircase downward in Ending 14, descent into Hell...

You're probably wondering if this theory accounts for Coworker, and it certainly does. After all, he seems rather unperturbed by the events he's undergone. I suspect he also committed suicide, but didn't have the same background of religious guilt that Protag had growing up. Coworker knows that he's supposed to go to the top, that he's supposed to pass on. He's at peace with who he is and where he's going, therefore he doesn't endure the same personal torture that Protag does.

No matter what ending you get in Elevator Hitch, nothing truly changes for Protag, because he himself hasn't changed. It's possible that there is some sort of future where Protag can change and move on — in fact, Normal Guy even hints that speaking to Coworker more could be the key to his salvation — but this possible future is one we will never see.

Because that's not the point of the game. The point is to become immersed in the torture which Protag goes through, and to try and unravel the mysteries of who he is and what he's enduring.

So there's my thoughts on the game. I hope you all enjoyed reading, and I'd love to hear any comments or input you have!

[glitteringcrab]

Why is Evil Morty still next to the Central Finite Curve?

He killed so many people to get out of the CFC and then he stopped running just as he crossed the CFC's metaphorical doorstep...!

Why did he anchor his minecraft base on a CFC universe???

No, they hadn't! The shockwaves had just as much range as they should! And Evil Morty deliberately insulted Rick immediately afterwards, to derail this train of thought and stop him from pondering over the implications or his calculations too much. And it freaking worked. (And might I add that Evil Morty stuttered just a little bit at that point: "l-look at this scan array". Nervous, boy?)

Evil Morty is a lying liar, he lies about everything...! (I still love him with all my heart). I-I-I no longer know how much of what he says or does to take at face value. In season he said he wanted to escape the Central Finite Curve, and it was clear he desperately wanted to do so, but he stopped running immediately after he exited. What is happening?!?! Why?

Theory 1: Home

Assuming he is a clone Morty, there is a universe from which the natural Morty whose memories he got originated. He was therefore created loving this version of his mum, this version of his dad, this version of his sister... Maybe he has not lived there once, he switched 20 Ricks since he was manufactured, and has spent more time in the Citadel than outside it, but in his heart this is were his home is supposed to be, so he anchored his space base on the limits of this one universe, just so he could be close.

Theory 2: Hiding

Since a Rick can hide from other Ricks by being next to a Morty, I'd assume that it also works the other way around: a Morty can also hide by being close to a Rick. And maybe if Evil Morty worries that someone will scour the multiverse searching for him (inside and outside the CFC) then maybe staying close to a CFC universe hides his own brainwaves when someone is doing a really wide (multiverse-wide) scan for him (of course, I doubt it'd work if the scan was more focused).

Maybe this is just a variation of the "Mortys of the Morty Dome thing": he needed a lot of alive Mortys to hide amongst then, he needs CFC universes to hide amongst now.

This could be just a precaution in case e.g. a Rick survivor of the Citadel or something comes after him (which is not so unlikely).

(eh. Would staying near a CFC universe, which might not even have a Rick inside at times, really be enough though?? I just stopped believing my own theory)

Theory 3: Time shenanigans

"Rick and Morty, a hundred years, forever"

...Were you being cute, Rick, or is this literal???

Is there a time loop of some sort? Is this why they say things like "how many thanksgivings have we had" or are they simply breaking the fourth wall?

Is this what the "Rick Experiment" that Evil Morty threatens to blow up if he gets pissed is? Is this why Rick hates to mess with time travel stuff, because it's already an ugly mess?

Does staying close to the time mess allow Evil Morty to stay young for longer or something? (but would he really want that???)

I'm skeptical about Ricks being able to mess with time in that scale because of (a) the existence of a pretty strict time police and (b) Rick apparently had to purchase illegally a small time crystal... whatever time shenanigans are needed for a hundred-year-loop, it'd need a lot more than that.

Theory 4: He likes something in that universe

Like, a friend he made a long time ago, who he plans to visit in the future when he finds the courage to do so (right now he's wiped out).

Or Morty Prime, so he didn't run very far away so that Morty Prime could find him in the future.

Or he's trying to make amends for his past misdeeds and visits CFC universes in secret, batman style, to fix stuff.

(I don't see that theory really playing out. He doesn't seem to be working towards anything, he's just on vacation... And I think he has given up hope of Morty Prime joining him)

Theory 5: THE WORLD IS A BIG, DANGEROUS PLACE

The world outside the CFC is filled with even more dangerous, power-hungry and evil people and governments than those in the CFC. Living in (or near) such a universe is stressful for a lone boy, so he'd rather stay close to the Curve and its brand of familiar, known evil (which he knows how to deal with) rather than face the absolute chaos that reigns beyond. (If there is a specific government or organization Evil Morty is worried about, I can see him considering asking Rick C-137's help... "Maybe I can use that some day"?)

Alternatively, the rest of the multiverse still believes that the CFC is unbreachable, so they keep their distance. Staying close to it is just safer.

(yeah I don't buy my own theory. I think Evil Morty would gladly face whatever crazy evil is beyond the Curve, as long as it wasn't a Rick. Could be he already tried and barely escaped with his life though, so he had no choice)

Theory 6: Not a clue!

I mean, we couldn't have predicted the existence of the Central Finite Curve in a million years...! It might just be a bit of unrevealed lore.

And it's impossible to guess or know what Evil Morty is thinking or feeling almost at any given time. He is always expressionless, always flat-toned, always cautious, always lying, and the way the scenes with him are built, we're not even sure when it's him on the screen half-the time and missing scenes can turn the whole plot on its head. He tricks the other characters, and he tricks us as well.

[tokiro07]

Undead Unluck ch.231 thoughts

[Do You Remember~ The 17th Night of November~]

(Topics: criticism - pacing/narrative focus, character analysis - Gina/Feng/Julia/Billy, speculation - Soul/Ruin)

Juggling Glass and Rubber

Damn, Tozuka, you weren't lyin', that Unjustice can sweep the Master Rules!

I'll admit I am a little disappointed by this turn of events because, like I was saying the last several weeks, I expected there to be an extra wrinkle that kept Unjustice from trivializing all of the MR fights, especially the ones that hadn't actually happened yet!

Yusai I was always pretty shaky on, and since she never got much characterization going in, I'm not exactly surprised, but the rest were definitely bummers

I've said before that I'm fine with skipping the Sick fight since Rip and Latla's climax already happened, but it's not like there was nothing to be done with it, like focusing on Sick's desire for revenge or having Rip look back on the mistakes he made in L100

Same thing with Billy and Tatiana's reunion - technically the climax of their joint arc was at the end of L100 when they promised to stay by each other's side until death, but I always thought of that as the setup to an upcoming payoff, not the payoff itself. It's definitely still salvageable here, but I think having Tatiana come in to save Billy when he's having trouble would have felt a lot more cathartic if it was focused on and analyzed rather than just...happening. Some insight as to why Billy was having trouble using Unjustice, like perhaps being overloaded with too many new Rules or reconciling with the choices he'd made, would have given Tatiana something internal to save him from as well as something external

I guess my issue here is that we're not really getting to see the effects that Remember is having on the cast as a whole, which I think would have better served as the focus here. I don't know if it's that Tozuka has been given a set number of chapters to work with by Jump or what, but it seems likely that Tozuka had ideas for how he wanted to execute everyone's arcs and fights but had to prioritize who to give the lion's share of the focus to for the sake of maximizing narrative impact

Case in point, the characters who he did manage to analyze here each had a pretty unique interaction with Remember

Remember Who You Are

Despite how brief their scenes are here, I do think that Gina and Feng's moments illustrate Remember's value remarkably well

Gina starts referring to everyone by the old nicknames she used for them in L100, only to amend "L'il Lucky" back to just "Fuuko," directly demonstrating the mental gap between the present and past. Gina naturally picks up her old habit, but isn't restricted by it. The respect and love she has for Fuuko goes beyond what can be expressed by a cute nickname, and those feelings were forged through L101 Gina's relationship with Fuuko. It's subtle, but it's a nice little cherry on top of Gina's arc

Feng, meanwhile, is noted to be getting stronger as Time ages him. This could be taken two ways: either he's stronger because of Remember and Time misread the situation, OR because Feng knows that he would have spent his time training and improving, his body, mind and soul are developing proportionally rather than being aged in a vacuum. The latter is thematically appropriate to countering Time's philosophy that age's function is to weed out those who have outlived their usefulness, while the former is a direct result of all of Feng's accumulated years across loops compounding simultaneously. Could be a little of both, honestly

What's even better about Feng's moment, though, is what he says in response to Julia's help: "I'm not deserving of your charity." In the past, Feng definitely would have been mad about getting help, resenting the idea that anyone thought he couldn't hack it on his own, but that's not what he said here. He believes he's done nothing to earn Julia's aid, that whatever Time was going to do to him, he had coming, and this is certainly because he remembers what he did. All of the people that he's ever killed, the lives that he ruined, especially his own son's, he now knows and can look back on from the perspective of having just abandoned the mentality he had back then

If Feng still believed in individual strength before receiving Remember, he probably would have looked back on the failures of his past as the results of his own physical weakness, not because of a flawed philosophy. Instead, Feng has already proven that he's stronger now after learning the true value of his age and legacy, so while he can still improve thanks to the lessons he can learn from his past self, the current Feng is able to retain his new outlook because he has an objective point of comparison that this was the farthest he ever made it

These are the sorts of subtle advancements I wanted to see from the whole cast, and again, while we still can see them, I think having a chapter dedicated to showing each little vignette would have been more effective than either breaking them up like this or showing such a notable imbalance between them

At the very least, though, even without being the primary focus of the chapter, Julia's interaction with Remember is far and away the most interesting one

Welcome Back, Juiz

Julia's behavior just before and after Fuuko actives Remember easily provides the most contrast of everyone and best demonstrates the tremendous growth rate that Remember allows

Prior to Remember, Julia was only able to use Unjustice involuntarily. To great effect, mind you, but still by accident: first when she stopped Soul's attack, and (seemingly) second, when she used it to reduce the damage of Soul's attack and ride it back to the surface. It's not explicitly stated that that's what happened here, but if Soul's intention was to kill Julia with that, he really dropped the ball, so I choose to believe that his bloodlust was negated by Unjustice

Afterwards, Julia was using Unjustice like a pro. She dropped War down a phase, got Time to bring Feng back to his prime, and even got Death to take out Luck, a feat that Fuuko objectively wouldn't have been able to accomplish with Unluck alone since Luck would have been able to avert Death's inadvertent attack with his good fortune. The most impressive part to me, though, is that she was able to channel Unjustice into her soul!

By putting Unjustice in her saber, Julia effectively injected Unjustice directly into Change's body, ensuring that she couldn't live by her own philosophy of constant change, even if Julia wasn't physically there to make visual contact. Juiz never learned soul manipulation, and Julia only just now mastered Unjustice thanks to her memories, so the fact that Julia was able to integrate those two abilities into such a high level technique is proof that her current self has in no way been overtaken by Juiz's memories, the most major worry that everyone had for Remember's use

That's not to say that none of Juiz's experiences made it to Julia, she still did remember Juiz's entire life after all. Beyond just Juiz's techniques and physical abilities, Julia went from panicking over Soul's attacks and Victor's injuries to calmly and confidently taking out the MRs one by one. She knows now what she's capable of and the weight that she carries, and she remembers what kind of relationships she had with everyone else. This is likely why she went to Billy first - both to give him access to Unjustice to make him stronger and to remind him that, despite their pasts, they aren't enemies anymore

The look of shock on Billy's face suggests that he was paralyzed by the realization of his past actions, and it's Julia's words that snap him back into the present and bring a smile back to his face. That's really what I was talking about earlier; giving Billy an internal conflict with his memories would have provided an angle that no one else really had while also allowing him a stronger character moment with both Julia and Tatiana

Still, even if it's a weaker moment than it could have been, I do appreciate Julia's direct acknowledgment of Billy as an ally, as it at least subtly harkens back to their previous encounter. Where previously Billy stole Unjustice and lost the ability to use it after Juiz had some time to think about his motivations as an enemy, this time Julia is willingly entrusting Unjustice to Billy as an ally

Actually, I wonder if perhaps that's why Tozuka had Billy fail to use Unjustice on Sick, because he is still fighting that internal conflict...for now, I'll choose to believe that Tozuka has that in his back pocket, but I won't be redacting any of my criticisms until he makes good on that, as this review is based on my immediate interpretations and I don't want to erase all of this and redo it...

Along the same lines, not only does Tozuka still have a backdoor for analyzing Billy, he also still has one for giving us some more cool moments for the rest of the Master Rules as well

Put Me Back in, Coach!

Despite one-shotting seven MRs all at once, Julia didn't actually manage to clear the field. The Union's gearing up to face Sun, but they seem to be forgetting: they didn't actually beat Soul. He's still in the Roundtable Room, and he's undoubtedly more pissed than ever

I'm not sure if I would have caught this on my own before seeing their post on this, but Webmantis on twitter pointed out that the MRs' souls must all have been sent to Subspace, the cosmic waiting room that all souls go too between loops. They note that, since Soul hasn't entered Phase 3 yet, he'll most likely be able to bring everyone back

However, they also note that doing so would be an odd narrative choice, as it would make Julia's steamrolling seem kinda pointless. Why bother killing off a bunch of characters just to revive them in the next chapter?

Fortunately, I think I've come up with the perfect answer to that very question!

Firstly, it's to show off Julia's post-Remember Unjustice; we were promised a sweep, and Tozuka made good on it in spectacular fashion. Second, and more importantly, their deaths are necessary for Soul to reach Phase 3

Fuel for the Fire

You may recall from a few weeks ago that I described the mechanism that the MRs use to reach Phase 3 is absorbing their Rule directly: Change absorbed the change in her shape when she was cut in half, Time absorbed Shen's lifespan, War absorbed Billy and Tella's violence, Justice absorbed Yusai's resolve, etc. This is why Death only just now reached Phase 3, because no one was dying the entire battle until she was forced to personally kill Luck, and Luck was likely being prevented from absorbing any fortune by Unluck

So now that all of the MRs other than Soul are dead, their souls are free of their vessels. I don't know if their vessels were actually preventing Soul from accessing their souls, but since he seems to consider the others his friends, he probably didn't want to resort to absorbing them either way, but now? It doesn't matter if he could or couldn't before, now he has to, otherwise it's all for nothing

Now, the question may be how he'll be able to reach them. Webmantis' proposition was that reaching Phase 3 would give Soul access to Subspace, but I'm saying that he won't be able to reach Phase 3 without the souls that are there - that's a pretty clear logical paradox

Well, not to speculate too much, but I think we already have our answer to that one too: Soul's finally going to change

Another topic I've been going on and on about lately is the stagnation and inflexibility of the Rules, the most notable being Soul's rejection that souls are connected. However, Soul saw that new facet of his Rule be added in real time, by Negators that aren't even his vessel. The only one who should have control over his Rule is himself, and yet he's seen others interact with their souls through reinterpretation time and again (Andy vs. Ghost, Gina vs. Change, etc.). In other words, he should know full well by now that his Rule isn't as set in stone as he once thought, and if everyone else can control their souls through their perspective, then why couldn't Soul himself?

With the lesson that Julia just taught him about souls, Soul can connect himself to his fallen comrades and drag them back from Subspace (or prevent them from reaching it in the first place), and achieve Phase 3 by adding their souls to his own. Whether this would mean gaining power over their Rules or reviving them is another question, but at the very least it would show tremendous growth in his character

I'll go into more detail on this if it comes to pass, but Soul learning to change his perspective on his Rule would make him more like the Negators, more like a human. This would also make him the most well-rounded and developed UMA to date, which I think would more than make up for any loss of characterization among the rest of them

Now, I would definitely prefer that he brings back the MRs, if only so we can see Luck's Phase 3 (c'mon, he's Fuuko's foil for cryin' out loud!!!), but even if he just integrates them into himself, I think that would create the perfect parallel to give the final member of the Union a chance to demonstrate his growth

The Man Who Would be King

While fighting Soul, Sun and Luna are all clearly the most important boxes to check off right now, there's still one more that Tozuka alluded to in this chapter: Ruin's return

How Remember will affect him exactly, I won't speculate on, but I think it will give him the final push he needs to join the Union and help fight God. If my previous speculation about Soul comes to pass, then that would make Soul the ideal matchup for Ruin

Not only would they have the parallels of being "multiple souls in one body," it would also be the ultimate payoff to Ruin's designation as The King of Negators. If Soul is Master Rule #1, then it's Ruin's destiny as the Negator King to negate all of the Master Rules in his reformation and rebellion against the God he so thanklessly devoted his life to

This would also present the opportunity for Ruin to reform the MRs too and unify both Negator and UMA as I've speculated on before, but again, I don't want to go too far into it here. As it stands, this is just me making things up, and I don't want to either raise my hopes too high OR preemptively run out of things to say, but the parallel is so interesting that I can't help but get excited by the possibility

Conclusion

As always, it's entirely possible that I'm wrong about all of this. Maybe Soul's gonna try to go Phase 3 and self-destruct because of Unjustice; maybe Soul is gonna fuse with Sun in Phase 3 and they'll become "SOL;" maybe Kururu's going to use Unchaste to aggro Sun into shooting Soul dead. I don't know. There's always a chance that what we get isn't as interesting as what we envision; the best we can do is be open to what we do get rather than insisting it has to be the way we want

If there's one thing I hope I've gotten across with this review, it's that I don't want to get hung up on the negatives, but I also don't want to just ignore them either. I am disappointed that certain plot points are being glossed over, and that's a valid response for any of us to have, but I'm not going to go so far as to say this was a bad chapter because of it. Good things definitely still happened within this chapter, and there's plenty of chance that good things will come out of what this chapter set up

As I said, all there is to do now is be patient and open-minded. If this ends up just being a lull in an otherwise fantastic finale, so be it. If it ends up being the start of a rushed mess, so be it. The only way to know is to be there to see it

Until then, let's enjoy life!

[cescalr]

wait hello?? please elaborate on the green haired lalna, i never watched soi

oh sure!

In... hmmmmm one episode, The Hand? maybe? where Honeydew and Xephos head into an ancient technological ruin (implied to be a giant death robot of some ilk), they find a whole bunch of "evil" honeydew clones that have degraded to mindless violence (implied they're non-sapient, lacking the mental capacity to go beyond base instinct because of how long they've been down there multiplying ad nauseam, each clone generation worsening with nobody to maintain the mechanisms), and tonnes of broken vats. However, one single cloning vat is still working - and there's a guy inside! That guy is fully buttoned up labcoat LividCoffee, with, for some reason, green hair. It's neat :D and fascinating. Lore wise. Extremely fascinating.

I went looking for proof - it's not The Hand (that's the "finale" lol); it's Doppelgängers - for some reason those episodes merged together in my head.

I also appear to be remembering him being alive completely wrong - for a uh, given value of 'alive'. given he's a zombie! and there's two of him. Whoops? I can't actually see good TM (hi, blind here) but people kept saying their hair was green back in the day and i absorbed that information. if it's wrong, I refuse to agree with reality! green haired lalna my beloved.

Also, again, my brain clearly likes to lie flagrantly to me, because while the honeydew clones are made by broken old machinery, that's because honeydew and xephos were fucking around again <3 idiots. I wonder what happens when you stand in the goddamn cloning vat and flick the lever.... buddies..... c'mon.

Anyway - there's two zombie (green haired! I'm not delusional!) Lalna's, which is even more fascinating than my shoddy memory allowed the situation to be, because that implies YogLabs devolved to making clones of clones at some point - along with giant death robots, but they were already doing that - after the Honeydew clone had to replace his original body because Testificate Betrayal Incident, even though Xephos knows with certainty that that's been worsening the quality of the cloning process due to.... well, all the failed Honeydew clones. and the Honeydew graveyard. That he makes Honeydew clones dig up. No he's not gone mental with grief what are you talking about.

Ahem. Judging by the state of SOI!Honeydew's clones, i think it's a mix of SOI!Honeydew being a pretty late-on clone-of-a-clone himself (remember, in Yogs canon all respawns are because of YogLabs, so in SOI for them to respawn - since they can respawn, I should say - they have to be clones.... though the time loop makes me question the metaphysics of it all; do they need vats in the present if the future is the past? Existential. Too existential for me. I like to think they do have vats in the present, in the bowels of what remains of YogLabs, deep in the heart of the desert (imo, it's the source of the desert, given that one YogLabs episode where, surprise surprise, Xephos had his team invent a thing that did the sand-ening process you see in SOI; in SOI, sand is like this organism that eats everything it touches, turning it into more sand, which works with YL lore because, hey, that's what the thing they made did! Tangent. Sorry).) and the machines being super borked. Amnesiac 1st gen clone Xephos* (original Xephos is currently running around as Israphel, imo - protag Xephos is a clone of an earlier, more stable version of the man who did a lil' rebellion <3 because orig!Xeph went. Um. Megalomaniacal) obviously wouldn't know any better than to flick the lever, lol. Just noting all that as I think it corroborates the ideas about YogLabs and cloning the canon gave me. (though i clearly need to rewatch the canon, given all my minor inaccuracies add up pretty heavily towards bad meta, and I hate making bad meta :( I love meta! I have an creative writing degree!!! I don't wanna make bad meta!!!!!!!)

Anyway: Green Haired Lalna! The reason it's so fascinating to see our zombie boy duo is that this is his first and only appearance(s) in SOI; we never meet an alive Lalnable Hector or Lalna LividCoffee. This implies a lot; there's no Lal alive because all his anchor clones are dead, perhaps. Or his clones are the characters Duncan Jones portrayed, made unrecognisable by time, the time-loop amnesia, and mechanical mishaps with the cloning process so they look a lil' different - it could explain why everyone in SOI is.... Like That. (Everyone in SOI acts like a faulty clone(-of-a-clone-of-a-clone-etc); a little not all there, in some respects, and extreme caricatures of themselves besides). There's a bunch of options! All of them pretty valid, 'cause of how fast and loose YogsMC plays with its own continuity, as an improv semi-scripted series with.... plenty of unfinished storylines. More for me to mess with! As a writer i appreciate the sandbox. As an audience member I shake my fist at the sky in great torment! /joke. Am a bit miffed still, though. Over a decade later (jeez. youch. augh. I was 11, holy shit....).

I think I'll have to change what I said in the tags of the Lalnable post, though, because i was working off of bad memory for that opinion.

I still think FB!Lalnable Hector is a direct clone of anchor lalna, but i'm no longer certain either of the lalnas we see in SOI are original lalna - rather, also direct clones of anchor lalna used to created manpower for the operation of the giant death robot; why hire a 12 man crew when you can clone one from the same man at 2x speed? And as we can see in YL 2nd gen (clone-of-clone) clones aren't unstable enough for this to be a bad idea; Honeydew post-replacement may have less.... wherewithal... but he's not entirely incapacitated by clone degeneration - current YL!Honeydew may be a poor imitation friend for Xephos, but he could still pilot a death robot! So I think I'm going with: whatever war YogLabs was fighting in to warrant the death robots (we know Xephos is spending a lot of YL prepping for war with various foreign nations, so this isn't an unlikely event - in some ways he appears to be actively seeking that outcome, because he's speedrunning self-fulfilling time-loop shenanigans i guess.) got desperate enough they used cloning to bulk up manpower numbers, and in typical YL fashion they borked it by cutting corners on the mechanisms of this fact, by using sub-par machinery and clones-of-clones-of-clones, who can definitely pilot death robots but may not have the sheer brilliance of their original (lalnable hector, in this instance, being a certifiable genius, and his clones are smart, but less-and-less so due to the way YL cloning works) so they fuck up more often and thus the systems in place start failing, and lo and behold you have two zombie Lalnas in cloning vats, how did they zombify?????? How??????? What was in the genetic material sludge they were floating in for [time loop confusing the timeline; no actual idea how long it takes for All That to go down] to do that.

Anyway; now i have thoughts!!! So many of them. Thank you for the ask or I'd have gone on with my goldfish sieve memory assumptions about SOI/YL/Lalna and been worse off for it. Also, I just like canon accuracy. Being able to fuck with canon and take it to its logical extremes is what i find fun, personally. Canon complicit, i heard it called - I like that one. Not compliant. That implies bowing under pressure. No no. I'm in on the evil scheme entirely willingly. Enthusiastically, even!

Anyway: Yeah. Green Haired Lalnable Hectors / LividCoffee(s) my beloveds. I do wish one of them had been alive, because I love SOI's silly little grandfather paradox (Xephos = Israphel, and all it's horrible no good brain melting implications) interpretation, and if one of them had been alive then you could infer a second grandfather paradox - lalnable hector's clone is his original existance; wait, what? - because fucking with whatever 'original' timeline absolutely screwed and destabilized this one. And it didn't even work! Xephos, you never cease to amaze me in the many ways you can fail spectacularly at things. Pathetic main character that never wins long-term <3 Doomed by the very narrative he created! Glorious.

... this was a Lalna ask. Lol. Sorry! I never get to talk about yogsmc. I have so many thoughts.

Anyway: that's basically it, I think? Lalnas in vats; do with this what you will! Fascinating stuff, truly.

(That was not particularly well constructed, lol, but i hope it was interesting anyway!)

[nhaneh]

running into this awkward "problem" of having a good chunk of the things I learned about making code go faster back in the day that just isn't all that relevant anymore. Sure, there's also a fair amount that still is - minimising branching and conditionals, using switch/case instead of extensive if-else if-else statements where possible, using hash map lookups instead of lengthy loops through arrays when able and all of that stuff is still every bit as viable as it once was.

The thing I keep running into however is floats - floating point numbers.

See in mathematics there's this thing where the number of possible fractional values that can exist in between two integer numbers is basically infinite - you can always just add another decimal place for greater precision. Computers don't have infinite space however, so for a computer to store and process a number, you have to first define how much memory will be allocated to that number, and that in turn decides how large that number can be - how many possible digits it can store.

Floating point numbers tackle this situation by allowing for varying degrees of decimal precision depending on the number - in between 0.0 and 1.0 there's room for loads of different fractional values because the integer side is really small, whereas there are far less possible decimals in between 1000000000000.0 and 1000000000001.0 because the integer part requires a much larger amount of the allotted space.

Either way, the point I'm getting at with all of this is that floating point operations are a lot more complicated than regular integer ones, and it used to be that processors required a lot more time to process them than they usually do nowadays - it used to be that if you wanted your code to run fast, you'd also want to avoid using floats whenever possible in favour of using just integer numbers because they were so much faster to work with. That, however... really isn't the case anymore - at least not on full-size CPUs with fully integrated FPUs, or Floating Point Units (used to be we called those "Maths Co-Processors" back when they were located on their own optional chip)

Like when id Software released the source code for Quake III Arena, there was this really interesting algorithm people found in it that exists solely for the purpose of getting an approximate value for the inverse square root, ie. 1 / √x, but the way it does that in... well...

Don't worry if this makes absolutely no sense to you, it doesn't really to me either to be honest - it's basically a combination of something called Newton's method with some really weird bit hacking that gets... decently close to a correct answer. It's not exact, but it's close enough to suffice. And on processors of the day, it was also notably faster than just doing 1 divided by the square root of a given number - especially since this calculation was one likely to be done millions of times each second.

Thing is... it actually isn't faster than just doing the straight up calculation anymore - not on modern PCs at least; your typical 64-bit PC CPU can just straight up calculate the inverse square root as a single instruction, making that just way faster than any other roundabout way of doing it. A lot of the time, trying to avoid using floating point numbers is now straight up slower than simply just using floats and calling it a day.

It's weird to work with sometimes because my instincts keep telling me not to use floats unless I really need to, even though with the way modern processors work, most of the time yeah I should really just use floats and call it a day.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[katgametable]

TAZ Balance Episode 54: The Suffering Game Chapter 4

Written 24 May 2025, shortly after relistening, having listened to the entire Balance arc some time ago.

Time to spin the wheel four times. Merle goes first; he loses an eye, but the Elves do give him an eyepatch. -2 to ranged attacks, but +2 to intimidation checks. Magnus goes next, and loses ten years, going from thirty-two years old to forty-two. Taako loses some of his vitality, losing 17 from his max hp. The Elves are disappointed with how well the Bois are taking all this.

Magnus feels something tracing a pattern on his hand, Thieves Cant symbols for “silence” and “confirm”. Magnus uses his other hand to trace “confirm”. “Secret”, “confirm”. Magnus confirms. “One”, “room”, “magic afoot”, “room”, “transformation”, “wait for signal”, “confirm”. Magnus confirms.

Merle takes the fourth spin. He has to offer an object of similar value to what was lost previously to wager. He offers the Adamant Spanner, his main weapon since Petals, the wedding ring on a chain around his neck, and his proficiency in battleaxe. He puts the objects down, and his memory of learning the battleaxe fades and leaves him.

Magnus decides he might as well strap Cam to his shoulder. He also traces out the Thieves Cant for “room”, “trap”, “confirm”, and gets “confirm” back.

The next room is another round of Trust/Forsake. Magnus notes that there seems to be a loop; wheel, Trust/Forsake, fight, repeat. The Elves tell them it’s not a loop, just a cycle, there will be an end. They claim to have given out thirty prizes already this year. Taako is chosen as the player, and asserts he wishes to choose Forsake. Magnus argues that they can’t screw over the others, but Taako goes ahead and chooses Forsake. Griffin rolls a dice, and declares the other side chose Trust.

They go into the next room; it looks like a deadly-trapped board game, but the Elves say that’s wrong, and it remodulates. They’re now on Heart Attack: The Dating Game. The Elves come out, performing for a crowd. Taako complains about them saying “inescapable”, and the black mist appears - some is siphoned off in a different direction. The Elves (Lydia and Edward) explain that they’re going to have their compatibility tested. Magnus is really upset, black mist billowing. He tries to refuse. But the Thieves Cant for “not yet” and “confirm” trace themselves. He confirms, and agrees to participate.

The Elves start asking questions. What’s your ideal first date? Magnus will be nice but make it clear he’s not interested in dating; Merle will just be a horrible date. What if a fan interrupts your date? Taako says Ignore the date, please the fan. Magnus vacillates before deciding to prioritise the date - he’s getting competitive. Why shouldn’t the prospective date choose either of the other competitors? Merle says Magnus is too rough and Taako too much a workaholic, whereas he’s old and mellow. Taako just asserts that he’s Taako from TV. The potential date doesn’t like that, so Taako casts Hideous Laughter; the date falls over, their head pops off, but they laugh a lot. Magnus is asked what makes a good hero, but Taako casts True Seeing on him without warning, so Magnus just suddenly sees the audience is marionettes, and the Elves semi-skeletal, black robes with glowing red eyes, clearly liches - and the Red Robe, who’s siphoning off some of necrotic energy as Taako complains. When it sees Magnus looking at it, it puts a skeletal finger to its lips.

This does look like it might be an endless cycle, and they are taking mechanical hits. I’m kinda curious about what the board game might’ve been, but I’m really touched by how much Magnus loves his lost bride Julia. I don’t like the wheel. I get that it’s ratcheting up tension etc, but it also feels a lot like suffering for the sake of suffering - but that’s what Griffin is aiming for with the Elf liches, isn’t it? I hope there’s a restoration at the end (aside from anything else, I like Merle still having that spanner). This is going to get nasty.

[centrally-unplanned]

Okay so since we did Chinggis, how about the other Big Conqueror Generals? Alexander of Macedon, Attila, Timur, Napoleon?

(Several asked for some of these in other asks)

Alexander the Pretty Good: So at this point I think everyone knows that his father Phillip was the "state builder", who created the new systems of Macedonian drill and mobilization infrastructure, handing Alexander a strong army he did not build. And Greece really was hitting a nadir of power, the post-Spartan era fragmenting alliances and exhausting the stronger city states. So it is fair to say that Alexander is overvalued, any Macedon king probably could have taken over Greece at that time. Additionally, when you study his "vast" conquests, its actually really just Greece & then Persia like five times, its him beating one opponent and then mopping up, and having the material advantage most of the time once you get rid of the hagiography.

But starting from Alexander the Great's height gives you an extremely long way to fall; he is overvalued, but still incredibly high VOR. He has the irreplaceable synergistic value of ambition & charisma; he decided to conquer the world, and got a huge list of allies, often ones he had himself fought in battle, to help him do it. Most people never conceive of that as actually being possible - in particular Alexander was not provoked or forced into his confrontations with Persia (establishing hegemony over Greece was more of a coincidence, but I think he would have found an excuse). And while his military achievements are exaggerated he obviously was talented, particularly at logistics - projecting power that wide is a nearly unparalleled feat in his time, and not something Macedonia was built to do before him. So I will go with A+

Atilla is discussed here, weak, C-/D+

Timur - never studied him actually! Its my issue being a Europe & East Asia guy, I know Gengis/Temujin because he is tied up with the Jin, but Timur never quite got around to the Ming conquest

Napoleon: Very complicated, provisional opinions. The Napoleonic wars scope is in fact quite contingent; its a constant back and forth of revolutionary ambition from France to spread itself, reactionary forces in the monarchies to fight back, rebellions and opportunities. Napoleon was not someone who engineered the whole thing by any means, he was given a chance to shine and he took it. Revolutionary France, constantly at war, was pretty much always going to arrive at something like a military leadership.

Additionally, he often gets too much credit for civil reforms of things like the Napoleonic Code; the process for formulating the Code started in the first National Assemblies in 1791, and multiple drafts of a new, universal code had been made when Napoleon was in power. He ordered it to stop dillydallying and make it happen, don't get me wrong, that is points. But its also the kind of thing dictators can do, right? So its a bit of a question of how likely a military ruler centralizing authority at all in France was. I think kind of high? I don't view Napoleon as an Augustus figure. So I think his VOR would have had kind of similar power. Napoleon did not have grand insights into what the legal code should, from what I know. On things like these I think he is getting credit for the fact that his name in in the title that maybe he shouldn't.

But there is a reason he became Emperor of France - he is a grade A military genius. His rep here is deserved - of course he was taking advantage of smart officers, existing innovations, etc, dude ain't forging cannons himself. But he put it all together, truly did push the use of artillery forward, and he was tirelessly creative on the battlefield. He was a famous workaholic, memorizing every map and coordinating every part of the battle himself, in ways that just put him ahead of the curve of his opponents. He is a classic OODA loop guy - he is getting information, putting a plan forward, getting new information, and pivoting the plan faster than everyone else, and he keeps winning on the back of it.

And then the rep you get from that string of wins inspired morale, commitment, diligence, and more from his men and officers that compounds. That last part is important - making an army takes time, its about relationships. You couldn't just slot the Duke of Wellington in as commander of the French and expect it to work the same. Due to that, the VOR for having Napoleon leading your armies in 1805 is literally irreplaceable. There is not single other person in existence who can deliver greater value, and I think that is very clear - and at margins that are very rare.

But of course he has his share of mistakes, particularly in naval affairs, over time his enemies internalize his innovations, and his reach exceeds his grasp. In particular he had multiple opportunities to "settle" for gains where France is first amoung equals, and he doesn't take it, and it all comes undone. He could have been S tier if he learned that. But alas, I think it puts him at A.

[drbased]

just wanted to thank you again for your symbolic states posting 💕 its been a little over a year since I've been reading it and at this point I've started internalizing some of it, I'm grappling with other parts, and there are some parts yet I've decided don't work for me (at least not where I'm at rn in life) and I'm setting aside for the time being. It's a fascinating lens on being alive and I feel like engaging with these ideas has made me so much more of a confident person. Thank you for all you do (and all of your beautiful & impactful writing!) ❣️

OMG OMG OMG thank you so much this is such an amazing message!!!! 💖💖💖 you're so lovely omggg

It's so wonderful knowing I'm making a positive impact on people's lives. I'm still living it, still slowly but surely reconnecting with material reality/causality piece by piece. Like you, certain things I once swore by are currently not working for me, so instead I'm finding other ways to build trust in myself. Allowing myself to be a subjective human being in a world of other subjective humans, where the only objective 'truths' are simply that of observable cause and effect, has been phenomenally grounding and maturing for me. I have had a very rocky last year, and I have had depressive moments, but no brain fog, tiredness, real suicidality, or the kind of low moods and negative thought patterns I used to have. My emotions are smaller, which I am sad about, but they're also much more self-contained and representative of the thing I'm actually bothered about, which stops them from seeping out into some grandiose depressive/symbolic feeling - I'm respecting my feelings for what they actual are, and how they're a result of what I value. I can have a miserable day and then spend time with people, not expecting it to be transcendent and lift me out of hell, but rather enjoying it for what it is. I am much less fragmented, much more tolerant of myself and generally less afraid. Things that once used to bother me so much and get stuck in a thought loop in my head I can now address and accept as a valuable part of my subjectivity, my selfhood - I'm building that resilience and consistency of self which I once craved. It's all so... connected, so grounded in reality. I am strongly hoping that I'm setting up a wonderful foundation for myself where I will one day be able to achieve things that used to utterly terrify me. As you put it, viewing things through this lens of being alive has given me hope for the future in a way I didn't believe was possible before.

[densi-mber]

Rushing Home with their Treasures

“Ooh, what about this?” Deeks asked, holding up a tiny green and red elf costume.

“I don’t know,” Kensi said, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. “It’s cute, but also kind of ugly.” She rested her hand over her stomach, absentmindedly rubbing a few times. “Those dresses are really cute, though,” she added.

Deeks followed her gaze to the smallest imaginable velvet dress with a poofy skirt.

“That is adorable,” he agreed. “We could get it.”

“But then we’re going to end up with three possible sets of everything to cover all the possible girl/boy scenarios. Besides, we’re supposed to be getting gifts for family and friends, not the twins.”

They’d taken advantage of a afternoon when neither of them had any appointments or work to knock out some of their holiday shopping. The giant display of baby paraphernalia had sent them on a half hour detour.

“Ok, where do you want to head first?”

“Well, I thought since Rosa’s gift is probably going to be at least partially custom-made, we should probably get that taken care of before it gets too busy,” Kensi suggested.

“Sounds like a plan.” He saw Kensi give the baby clothes another look before finally turning in the direction of the jewelry department.

“How can I help you today?” the assistant at the jewelry counter asked as they approached. “We have some lovely pieces on sale today and all earrings in this display are 50% off.”

“Thank you, but we’re actually looking for a pendant for our daughter,” Deeks explained. “This is what we had in mind.”

An hour later, they walked away from the counter with pamphlets, paperwork, and the promise of their personally designed necklace in a week’s time. In the end, they’d settled on a design a series of interlocking hearts that incorporated each of their birthstones, with space to include the twins’ once they were born.

To some, it might sound slightly cheesy, but Rosa valued anything that linked her to her found family. From the pictures spaced throughout the house, to Deeks and Kensi’s names on her school forms. The necklace just happened to be a very purposeful and more extravagant addition.

“I think she’s going to love it,” Kensi said, examining the example pictures they’d been given. They strolled past a couple food vendors on their way out and she inhaled deeply, closing her eyes. “Mm, cinnamon rolls.”

She gave Deeks a sly look, and he chuckled, veering off towards the Cinnabon. “C’mon, we can’t let you and the Pastry Babies starve. Especially when there’s literal pastry to be had.”

Kensi looped her arm through his, leaning her head on his shoulder. “I love you.”

“So, where to next?” Deeks asked once they both had cinnamon rolls the size of his head in hand.

Peeling off a strip of glaze-covered dough, Kensi slowly at it while she considered his question. “That boutique Anna likes is across the mall, we’re getting Rountree and Fatima’s gifts at the Christmas market, so maybe your mom’s?”

“Sure. Though we are definitely not getting items 2, 3, or 7 from her wish list.”

“Oh, you mean the lingerie, dirty truth or dare game, and aphrodisiac gift basket?” Kensi said, licking icing off her finger. “Yeah, I’m thinking we need to pass those on to Arkady.”

“Ew,” Deeks commented, giving a full-body shudder. “Ok, you want to meet up in the accessories? I’m gonna grab some coffee to wash down the sugar and hopefully burn the thought of aphrodisiacs, my mom, and Arkady from my mind.”

Snorting, Kensi leaned in for a kiss. “See you in a few.”

Deeks joined the line for one of the many coffee shops sprinkled around the mall’s main floor. When Kensi was out of sight, he ducked out of line, making a beeline for the baby department. It only took a few minutes to locate the racks of Christmas outfits they’d looked at earlier.

He grabbed the tiny green dress, smiling as he headed for the register.

***

A/N: So much fluff this densimber! And yes, I’m still manifesting twins all day, every day.

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Norman ratri fuckery or maybe Norman in lambda scenario if im understanding this right!

For an AU with greater canon divergence, I like tinkering with the idea of Peter being more hands on in interacting with Norman to better contrast with Emma and Ray getting Lucas and Yuugo for father figures.

22194 has been a child of interest since he scored a perfect 300 on his first test at age four. Potentially even earlier than that, if, like Ray, the demons kept track of his pedigree and his mother was also a full scorer. Regardless of exactly when it started, he continues to capture the attention of researchers and the demon nobility alike, so by the time Legravalima gives approval for him to be sent to Lambda so she can avoid handing him over to the demon god, Peter was already aware of his general existence.

He's thrown for a loop when he meets him in person though. The only potential photographs he would have of Norman would be from when he was an infant at headquarters. His incredibly light/white hair on its own wouldn't have been enough to give him much pause, but now that his features have had more time to develop, Peter's a bit startled at the Ratri ones he can pick out.

(@bon-nii's comparison of James and Norman from chapters 173, 152, 126, and 154)

(Chapter 74)

There's a bit of vanity in him saying he's too young to be Norman's father (never mind he was eighteen when Norman was born), but combined with the boy's looks, the phrase sits at the back of his mind, nudging him until he can't ignore his curiosity any longer. He looks into the genealogy records at Grace Field headquarters until he can't find any recording of a sperm donor, which isn't more than a few generations back. Odd, given that Grace Field is the top premium farm, but sometimes such documentation snuck through the cracks, and it wasn't unheard of for the occasional scientist to consort with the Sister candidates prior to the refinement of artificial insemination.

It's one of Norman's blood samples that confirms someone from the family—either from the main one or the branch Andrew's from—fathered a daughter with a Sister, and that daughter went on to have a daughter who then bore a son.

Pulling this bit from an earlier post:

…I still have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of Peter knowingly and willingly [putting a Ratri child in the farm system] on the basis of viewing them as an extension of the clan rather than as individuals, so it’s almost like it’s a worse reflection on him not being able to restore the honor of this wayward branch of it by “salvaging” the traitor’s children and raising them “correctly.” He places such great value in being a Ratri and displays such disdain when speaking of the cattle children as food, it’s hard to see him sullying the line in any way by condemning a member to the fate of the latter as opposed to just outright killing them, even if said member was an infant. That’s still Ratri blood—his blood—that would be going into the farm system, and he would never let anyone as lowly as food have any sort of claim to such a noble and prestigious status. […] However, I’m more inclined to entertain the idea of another family member taking advantage of their position as a Ratri to have a dalliance with a Sister candidate, as @officersnickers brings up in this post. It’s not something Peter would ever approve of, but what’s done is done, and importantly there was no explicit denouncement of the clan in this act, which I feel he would take personal offense to. There’s nothing he can do to save these children—the one-drop rule thoroughly entrenched in his mind, and their blood is thoroughly tainted—but maybe their Ratri lineage will win out and they’ll be able to rise above their pitiful status, so he does keep tabs on both as he approves of them being sent on their separate ways in the system.

This is where one has to make the concession that Peter cares more about having an heir and/or believing a child's Ratri heritage trumps their fate of being born into the farm system. Shirai never confirms if he has a partner, but regardless, no mention is made of biological children of his own or if he knows of any potential ones on the way.

And maybe that's getting to him as the thirty-sixth head of the Ratri clan who's going to turn thirty next year, along with this boy looking so much like James. He knew his brother had no children, and despite his traitorous ways knew he'd never father one with a Sister for a variety of reasons. Yet here is this distant relative whose genes were still so prominent even after being diluted with multiple generations of cattle blood (him being vain enough to include Norman's intelligence as being another gift of Ratri inheritance). He decides to take it as a sign and as a duty to reclaim and "salvage" this wayward line of the clan.

Norman knows something's off when he doesn't receive all of the drugs he normally does for the day. Everything else proceeds as routine until dinner, when he's escorted not by scientists or demons, but men dressed in suits to an area of Lambda he's never been to before. They arrive in a lavishly decorated room with Peter seated at a relatively small but well-furnished dinner table. Norman's never seen so much food meant for one person, but as Peter invites him to have a seat, he realizes it's meant for two people.

There's some small talk regarding the spread, Peter's recommendations and whether Norman's favorite dish is there. By sheer coincidence there is some chickpeas and meat stew present, and while Norman is still wary of the entire situation, he doesn't refuse the bowl placed in front of him by the butler. It's the most delicious thing he's ever tasted. Peter makes sure to clarify one of his personal chefs made it.

This segues into a brief discussion about the daily tests Norman's been taking at Lambda. He confirms they're harder than the tests at Grace Field, but he enjoys the challenge, the tiniest bit of smug pride seeping in in the event Peter had any ego tied up in his being bested by one of these tests. The proud tone in the response throws him off before his brain registers the words "as to be expected of a Ratri." Peter then apologizes at the small but still noticeable change in his expression, lamenting how he probably should have started out with that to ease any of Norman's worries.

He goes on to explain how he discovered this, interpreting Norman's silence as positive before moving on to provide a brief overview of how the Ratri clan came to be the mediators between two worlds and then explaining how his life will change now that he'll be staying in the Ratri visitors' quarters for the remainder of his time at Lambda. The process to remove his tattoo and brand will begin the following day, and he'll be weened off the remaining drugs he's been given.

Norman knows it's beyond his consideration, but he still can't believe the gall of this man.

As for what [being a Ratri] would mean to Norman, he’s never indicated any sense of loss related to not knowing members of his immediate birth family or fretting over his origins, but for him to be related to the clan that’s perpetuated this system of abuse over a millennia and with how his rigid sense of morality lent itself to the idea of exterminating every single demon, if he was in a particularly negative thought spiral, it might eat at him on some bad days.

Where Peter expected rapturous or reverential awe at being a long-lost member of the clan, he felt sick. He never knew his birth mother or other forebearers, but imagining everything those women had to endure after seeing what it turned Isabella into, all being said so casually without a hint of guilt over the horrors his clan perpetuated like he's discussing the pedigree of a thoroughbred animal instead of a human being, it's nauseating.

And his neck tattoo…the Lambda brand he wouldn't give a second thought to losing, but the tattoo has this paradoxical sense of kinship attached to it that I briefly go over in this post regarding the children still keeping their tattoos years after being in the human world. Even with it being a horrible symbol of their dehumanization under this system, it's been a familiar sight to him since his earliest memories. It's one of the physical markers of his connection with Emma, Ray, and the rest of his family, and this man will be flippantly erasing that. How easy it is for him having never bore the grief that comes with it.

This is already long but a tangentially related conversation to this eventually comes up with Peter asking about Emma and Ray. On the surface it's to connect with Norman and learn more about his life at Grace Field, but the ulterior motive is to see if there's any information he can glean about these kids to find and capture them quicker. Norman will give it to him for having the tact not to slip and refer to them by their numbers like he's sure he wants to do, but he's still incensed at their names in his mouth. There's also the chance that Peter might reveal a crumb of information himself about their status (because Norman can't see why he would be asking unless he had something to gain from it, so that has to mean their escape was a success and they were all alive. The alternative would kill him), so he entertains the conversation. He tries not to give any tells, but when he talks about them his thumb might have grazed the spot where his number used to be before covering it up with a cough.

Norman's never taken in by Peter's seemingly genial demeanor, but it's odd how personal and almost…amiable the man can be with him. Still, the love he's offering is contingent on Norman's continued assistance at Lambda (Peter sees it as their shared duty to solve the conundrum of faster high quality meat production) and at least the appearance of respect toward the clan. It's not unconditional like Lucas' and Yuugo's.

The clearest hint of this might be Peter mentioning how much Norman resembles James one night at dinner, building his brother up with the same admiration he displays in chapter 173 before lamenting his fall from grace, stressing the sacrifice he had to make by murdering him but still ultimately going through with it because the clan and balance between two worlds takes precedence above all else.

Alternatively, another scenario that's easier to work into canon is the Ratri clan realizing Norman's lineage when the cattle children arrive in the human world, also prompted by the databases at Grace Field sparking further investigation with a DNA test. Once it's confirmed, they keep pestering Norman about leaning into this kinship and actively working for them, along with having his family and friends seemingly on good terms with the clan for some PR optics. Norman finds the idea insulting and revolting, but he can't ignore the benefits that would come with it.

Like some other fans, I greatly dislike Norman becoming a CEO during the final major timeskip, as well as Lambda sickness being conveniently treated with no chronic aftereffects and absolutely no issues with them integrating into human world and being welcomed with open arms by everyone. I understand Shirai wanted to wrap up the series on his own terms after years of dealing with the strain that is weekly manga publishing, and he needed an explanation for how the kids could easily fund their expeditions to search for Emma, but oof, do I hate it lol. All of these remain a concern for the cattle children here, and while the Ratri clan wouldn't outright abandon them if he refused, Norman wouldn't put it past them to drag their feet on certain matters. Their finances and prestige shield them from any misguided resentment some people may hold for them. Their connections are a boon for securing future educations and careers. And god would it expedite the search for Emma.

I like to imagine a late night benefit-cost analysis between Norman, Ray, Don, and Gilda taking place at some point after they've settled in enough. The other three reaffirm that if Norman felt it was going to kill his soul to work for the Ratris, his friends and family would stand by his refusal, but they would be remiss not to acknowledge the pragmatism in further solidifying the relationship (particularly poignant coming from Ray, though not completely analogous situations). The conversation drifts off for a bit before Norman, looking exhausted across the table they're seated at with his hands on his knees, states, "I want her back with us."

Working with the clan would be odd in so many ways with how they would laud his status as a cattle child and how he was taking the lead on amending relations between the Ratri and the cattle children while never wanting to fully interrogate what that meant. There's a hierarchy with Norman at the top and the mass production farm children at the bottom in many of their minds. At one point in private after a publicity event someone says offhand, "you can cover that up now, you know," referring to his ID. Even in the winter he tries to make a point not to wear scarves or turtlenecks when he knows he's going to be around them.

I hate the idea of there being one good and upstanding Ratri member that befriends him just because it's too convenient, and if we're being real Norman would never let down his walls enough and let them into his personal world after everything he's been through, but I do like the thought of him maybe getting along with a few scattered members, probably younger, who recognize the terrible fate that befell the children from another world and are genuinely amiable with him without beholding him to form a meaningful friendship with them. A small attempt at a personal level of atonement that he can recognize and appreciate while still maintaining that mental distance. I also think he'd appreciate the very youngest children of the family who could give him insight into what the adults might really think of him and his friends with their uncensored commentary lol.

[spookythesillyfella]

soo if it wazn't obviouz . ive been sorta crazy about thiz song for a hot minute [itz my blog aesthetic atm like c'mon] and i feel like itz about time i give it a proper analysis

"I Should Be Unfinished" – Dobu no Awa with the boy . HV! Tony

"From right to left over and over and over and over again" – thiz could reprezent the fact Tony feelz stuck in that neverending loop of suffering . and how he seez no point in trying to live anymore

"I feel my ears overflowing with blood" – not only iz thiz a parallel to DHMIS 2 . but i also think it fitz in with HV! Tonyz lore phenomenally ; the "blood" can reprezent "life" in thiz scenario and . given who he iz after all . thiz "blood" iz no longer a part of him – figuratively and literally

"I'm tired of hearing it // I've had enough of this // I've memorized it // And yet I've fallen into the habit of pretending that I had forgotten" – once again . representative of the neverending cycle he feelz trapped in ; could also symbolize the fact people around him are alwayz of the mentality of "it getz better !! don't give up !!" and that he feelz sick of hearing thiz . since hez been around for so long and "nothing haz gotten better" – still . he haz thiz facade of arrogance that he uzez to brush off said commentz and "forget" about them . and the constant reminderz that they bring

"It's futile, no matter how much time I wasted // I'm still unfinished" – Tony seez himself az a very one dimensional person – he feelz like . even with all the time hez spent in the world . he hazn't been able to recover from The Event ; he still feelz incomplete becauze of the fact he can't let go . hence him being "Unfinished"

"'Like that–' // 'Such a thing–' // 'What's happened?' // 'Was that not it?'" – i feel like thiz part iz actually in relation to the fact hez been through so much and . in each era of hiz life . he hazn't been able to find something – someone – that would help him feel alive and / or hazn't ended horribly

"Even if I cried out // Even if I tore my hair // You should have a look, // It's not like I can disappear" – still . deep down . he cravez connection and having a sense of safety and belonging – he wantz someone to look at him with compassion . even if he'z so broken and bruized ; he cannot disappear completely . he'z already dead . so might az well forget looking forward to a peaceful . everlasting slumber

"Why don't we end that escape drama? // are you worn out? Let's take a break..." – personally . i see thiz az the shift in HV! Tonyz life – it goez from the bleak . isolated everyday to a slightly more tolerable and exciting experience after meeting Sketch ; stop running . even for just a moment . and letz sit down together . breathe and take a break – you must be terribly tired ...

"Suppose you've wasted that much to complete it? // Can you really say that it's right, in all sincerity, // Without averting your eyes?" – now met with care and love from people around him . he can't accept it – he must prove to people that someone az wretched az him should be left to rot . not be cared for . az hez just dead weight ; i also think that thiz iz a genuine question that he pozez to otherz . az he cannot understand completely why or how hiz loved onez can find themselves to put up with him – maybe by finding an answer . he can finally start learning to value himself properly az well

"Even if I grieved // Even if I made a fuss // You should have a look at what remains of me" – even with all hiz flawz . maybe Tony can at least accept that he still cravez to form a bond with otherz – to have something he once had again . even if he'z now "wrong" . "broken" . "Unfinished"

"I don't want to deceive myself anymore. // Are you worn out? Then let's take a break." – you're with people who love you and who you love – stop running from the truth . sit down . take a break.

"Even if I cried // Even if I was sorry // You should have a look // Give it back to them!" – i have shown you all there iz to show – all the remorse and how much i lament thiz event – give thiz happiness back to him . to her . to everyone else ; give it back. to them.

"This is how it should be, I'm alright..." – "Unfinished" . "broken" and "wrong" – thatz all i'll ever be . and thatz fine by me ; nothing can be done to alter who i am . and thatz just how thingz are going to be

"This is how it should be. I'm alright. // Hey, I'm worn out already // Goodnight..." – "Unfinished" . "broken" and "wrong" . thatz it.

[critical-skeptic]

The Blame Game

It’s laughable to pretend that cultural fragility emerged spontaneously from any given generational cohort when the historical record shows the entire human race has been hypersensitive and dangerously reactionary since it first learned to bang rocks together. The current climate—replete with so-called “woke” social justice zealots, quack-MAGA conspiracy drones, and every other variant of cognitively stunted ideologue—exists not because humanity suddenly became frail, but because an expanding global population and relentless hyper-connectivity have transformed what were once pitifully small, laughable fringes into colossal, self-perpetuating mobs. You have only yourselves to blame for letting technological conveniences and endless content streams embolden the previously voiceless hordes, and for refusing to accept accountability for your own intellectual deficits.

The convenient excuse that some era—take your pick, the South Park-watching ’90s kids or the Family Guy-obsessed early millennials—must have toughened people up is a flaccid, nostalgia-driven delusion. The reality is that everyone has always been a delicate flower when poked in the right spot. The only difference now is the speed and scale at which these hysterical meltdowns are broadcast, archived, weaponized, and looped into infinite cultural feedback. The result: Both left-wing and right-wing “snowflakes” spend their days lobbing digital Molotov cocktails at each other, making sure the inferno of stupidity never burns out.

And if you’re determined to pin this on specific birth cohorts, then let’s not mince words: all generations share the blame. Generation Z and Generation A? A legion of perpetually offended infants who mistake hashtag activism for real achievement. Millennials? Overly sensitive edgelords and spoiled brats, produced by Gen Xers who were too busy sulking in their own post-boomer bitterness to teach resilience, and enabled by the indulgent older generations who pretended that showering them with worthless praise and passing them smartphones would somehow offset the Boomer-made crises scalding the planet. Boomers themselves, still clinging to life thanks to modern medicine and an utter refusal to exit the stage gracefully, persist in hoarding resources, vomit forth their antiquated value systems, and do their utmost to ensure that every ensuing generation is saddled with debt, polluted air, and an economic landscape as barren as their moral imagination.

None of these generational tribes is innocent. The global human population, expanded and interlinked like never before, continues to ignore science, deride empirical evidence, trash the environment, and generally behave like a lemming colony sprinting toward the nearest cliff. Meanwhile, reproductive habits remain locked in some medieval pattern of “breed first, think never,” further straining resources and exacerbating divisions. In short, everyone shoulders a portion of the blame—no generation or ideology gets to hide behind a tired historical reference or a cherished TV show. It’s time to own up to this grotesque collective failure instead of flinging blame and shrieking in self-righteous indignation.

[bronze-bell]

(The border appears scratchy, yet there is something winding around, softer, as if to keep such things from going too far. The letter's ink is black, the paper tinged with blotches of watercolor at the sides that blur the border further.)

Dear Victor Grantz,

It's good to know that the two of you were involved in reading these letters. I'll have to be more conscious of my delivery timings, especially for more... sensitive things.

It helps that this place brings people back, and with any condition comes the recovery period. Certainly, there are... many unpleasant ways for one to meet one's end. I'm glad this experience was... not one of those, by the sound of it. I have so, so many questions.

Don't worry about it, however your voice comes out, I quite enjoy it. When you know the pain of not having the ability to live expressing your own voice, you learn to value the chances you get to share your own and hear others in return. I... feel confident in the case we're all lonely, given what I know. But we have each other now, don't we?

I... see. I don't want to ask too many questions, especially since Aesop has also told me very little and I doubt prying would do much good for any of us, but the limited information I do have... Aesop told me how nervous he was about everything. How afraid he was that he'd mess something up, make you hate him. He said other things I don't understand due to my lack of knowledge in embalming, of course, but it's evident he cares a lot about making sure you're okay, as comfortable as possible. I'm glad his fears did not come to fruition. I've sent a response reassuring him. Maybe a third party telling him it's okay will help.

None out of the three of us expected this, then. I... suppose knowing us, I shouldn't be surprised we were caught off guard by how fast this all happened. I shouldn't be so worried I'm glad you two get along so well. I won't pretend I've had the chance to experience these kinds of relationships myself, but I've seen plenty and heard enough people gossip about their partners that I have... a picture. You two wouldn't do that, though. If either of you do... I cannot guarantee I'll take it well.

Of course I enjoy our conversations. I truly feel like we're both a part of this, as opposed to an unbalanced mess where only one person steals the spotlight. If you need someone to advise where to place your bets, I'll be here. Who knows if the dice are loaded in some tables.

Sincerely,

Frederick

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The letter set is mostly plain pale red, with small darker stars printed on both the paper and envelope encasing it. It's a pleasing set of shades, bleeding into each other in contrast to black writing that stands out quite easily.

[Dear Frederick,

It probably shouldn't be a problem if people find out we're talking, per se (although I'd still like to avoid that prospect if I can), I'm mostly just worried about if they find out what we're talking about.

If you have questions, maybe you could ask us in person? I'm honestly glad as well. Death being temporary here eases a lot of my worries, truthfully. I hope if I get stuck in a painful loop forever that you'll at least try to save me... There is definitely a recovery period, I'll say that. Partial paralysis, and a very uncomfortable coldness. Next time I'll prepare a blanket in advance.

It's... Admittedly strange having someone to talk to. Even as "a mute who can speak" there was definitely not a lot of talking even before they It's very nice. I like talking to both of you a lot. Thank you for not forcing me to making me speak verbally, I've never been good at it. We have eachother. It's wonderful.

It's very sweet of you to assure him. The secret of him telling you these things is safe with me. I didn't know how worried he was, but I suppose it's understandable. It's always It must be nerve wracking to kill someone, especially someone you care about so much. With his anxiety, I did expect something like this. It's very considerate of him. If I see him I'll tell him how kind he is again.

It's okay to be worried, things do seem to be happening very fast. We are not "partners" though, to be clear. I don't think I could fall in love that fast romantically, although I could and have platonically. I have also seen many... marriage disputes, in my line of work, so I know exactly where you're coming from here.

I trust both of you tremendously, I feel like you need to know that. They said I was too loyal and I think they're right I am glad we can all have our turn in this play of life. Please don't leave me or hurt me of die like s

I'm sorry. I don't know what's coming over me today. I'm certainly lonely, aren't I? Thank you for being patient with me so far. It's more than I'd ever ask of you.

Kindest regards, Postman.]