#metastructure

[dougielombax]

Okay!

To summarise.

My hypothesis is that the Backrooms (at least the Kane Pixels version) is a hyper advanced, neural physics-based (possibly involving nanotech too, in conjunction with eldritch organic technology), organic data processor and incomprehensible eldritch supercomputer created through reading the minds of those inside it, one so utterly vast it’s borderline incomprehensible and possibly infinite.

At the least.

Less of a megastructure, more of a megastructure, an omnistructure even.

[clemkesh]

now people might think the reality show im best suited for is the traitors. but actually i would be really bad at the traitors due to (gestures vaguely at my the traitors is not a real hidden role game rant) and my real calling is the devil’s plan. hi netflix can u make a united states version that i can eat for breakfast

[transmutationisms]

So, I’m becoming increasingly interested anti-psychiatry but there is one thing I’m really struggling with that I’m wondering if is something that you’ve ever struggled with/been bothered by or had to find some way to deal with. I have a brother who doesn’t believe in mental health. Like, the concept of mental well-being. He doesn’t believe in medication or therapy either. But, he also doesn’t believe in germ theory, or vaccinations, or frankly, most science. He isn’t explicitly a flat earther but he also argues that it hasn’t been proven either. For most of my life, I’ve argued with him about the mental health stuff because I’ve struggled with depression and adhd (or, I guess, the handbag of symptoms that gets called depression and adhd). I’ve had to insist “No, I can’t just go for a walk,” and “No, I don’t just need a planner.” So now here I am, learning about anti-psychiatry, finding a lot of it resonates with me, and also finding out a lot of what I have been told is scientifically proven, is not scientifically proven at all (like schizophrenia being genetic, for example). I guess what I’m asking is, is my brother right in this specific issue? Is the concept of mental health or mental well-being bullshit? And whether it is or isn’t, do you ever find it difficult to reconcile that being anti-psychiatry is going to make you look like an anti-scientific conspiracy theorist? I’ve had this same thing happen to me with fat-acceptance and still struggle with the fact that if I try to explain to anybody that the way we’ve been taught weight loss and weight gain work, and the way we perceive fat medically is largely false or unproven, people look at me like I said the moon-landing was faked. It’s especially difficult because I’m a teacher at a university and I feel like I have no choice but to just play along there when these things come up, or else my credibility as a teacher could be drawn into question.

right so this is rather precisely the problem with treating Science as intrinsically an arbiter of Objective Truth lol -- you can't just make metastructural rules about how to know when a scientific assertion is true, you do actually have to evaluate what is being argued & on what evidentiary basis. science is a human form of knowledge-production & it is fallible to the same biases and ideological commitments and weaknesses as any other human inquiry, & the scientific establishment can and sometimes does rally behind all kinds of nonsense -- like psychiatry. the difference between psychiatry and germ theory isn't that psychiatric claims are structured differently or are patently nonsense on the surface, it's that the underlying epistemological principles of psychiatry are circular, the evidence is consequently lacking & always will be, & its assertions continue to be clung to & defended because they are economically useful whereas germ theory has an extremely robust evidentiary base supporting assertions that are demonstrable & have borne out in both lab and real-world observations & trials. incidentally, treating germ theory like it must be true simply because Science Says So is imo not in fact good for scientific literacy & communication bc it results in many people having very little understanding of how to defend or evaluate it when it's on the ideological-hygienic chopping block. & it also leads many people to vastly misunderstand the incredibly slow & piecemeal process by which germ theory was even assimilated into mainstream scientific thinking in the first place: hygienists for decades after pasteur were perfectly capable of 'accepting germ theory' while in practice operating off a number of environmental-miasmatic principles, smth i would argue many people still do in practice today. im sorry i don't have a generically Im Pro Science answer for you here, i don't actually think science should be exempted from the same rigour & consideration we apply to literally any other form of inquiry and knowledge-production.

[seat-safety-switch]

Hey. Close the door. Sit down. I've got something I want to talk to you about. No, it's not that kind of thing, I don't even care. You did what to your car? That's weird but we're not talking about that right now. What are we talking about? What are we talking about? Soup.

When I was a kid, I didn't like soup very much. As an adult, I don't really like it now either. The flavour is fine, the texture is alright, and there's lots of varieties that are delicious. What I don't like is the efficiency. If you draw a chart of "most efficient" to "least efficient" foods, there's some obvious winners.

Potato chips. A fresh-fallen apple. Whatever mushrooms keep making me see the innate folds of the universe's metastructure. Banana is somewhere in the middle. You gotta peel it, but then you can slam the entire thing down and get back to what you were doing. Soup is way off the "goddamn waste of time" edge, saved only by how delicious and cheap it is.

Cheap. That's a beautiful word, that one. It's why birds sing it into my ears in the morning to awaken me from my slumber. Soup is so inexpensive that I've started making it more often. Thing is, that obsession with efficiency still exists. To optimize my time spent cooking, I make a whole lot of it, in repurposed thousand-litre soy sauce drums that the railway company auctions off. Sure, the heat is probably not great for the plastic, but when it bursts I've got some duct tape. Tonight, we're making shoyu ramen, because everything I make in this kinda tastes like soy sauce.

Tomorrow, I'll eat this bounty of delicious salty broth in the most efficient way possible: from a Super Soaker pointed into my mouth. I have learned not to do it in public, though. All those cops bothering me really brings down the calories-per-minute statistic.

[plaidos]

what are your thoughts on The Retcon (of homestuck fame)?

i really like it. every metastructure we are introduced to in Homestuck is subsequently torn down & subverted — as early as act 1, characters are rejecting the player commands etc. it makes perfect sense to me that eventually this would expand to include the narrative itself; homestuck has always been metafiction, a story told from the perspective of it being a story — we see characters reading Homestuck in Homestuck, we see characters writing Homestuck in Homestuck, the main villain even kills the author.

with these themes, Homestuck was paradoxically set down a path that would mean the characters would inevitably have to contend with their own fictionality. the fact that the retcon is unsatisfying and detaches our main character from the off-screen character development of his friends — that’s intentional. they broke the story in half saving themselves, and the Epilogues are the consequences of that.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

By using new geometric shapes in the shock-absorbing material, researchers at the Universities of Gothenburg and Isfahan have developed a bicycle helmet that provides better protection against head injuries. The material absorbs shock by contracting bilaterally. Bicycle helmets are important for protecting cyclists from head injuries, but traditional designs have limitations in terms of impact absorption and fit. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Isfahan in Iran designed a bicycle helmet whose shock-absorbing material utilises what is called auxetic metastructures. The material is designed in special geometric patterns that behave differently under impact conditions compared to conventional foam liners.

Read more.

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

What does the Web of Time look like?

What does the Web of Time look like?

🕸️ Structure and Appearance

The Web of Time isn't just some ethereal concept; it's a grand, sparkling metastructure holding the universe’s history in place. Think of it like a gigantic spider web spread across space-time.

Threads and Nodes: Picture thousands of shimmering threads, each representing a timeline or event, all anchored to nodes. These nodes are like the heavy-duty nails keeping the web steady, ensuring it doesn't fall apart.

Machine-Heart: At the core, there's a powerful machine-heart, the Eye of Harmony, acting like a hitching post, keeping all these threads 'anchored'.

Caldera: Due to some ancient Yssgaroth shenanigans, there's a caldera (massive gap) at the centre. Within this caldera, the Untempered Schism sits. Through this, you can see the whole of time and space; all the threads and all the nails and the genuine fragility of the entire universe. And that's what Time Lords make 8-year-old Gallifreyan kids stare at before they can go to school.

🕰️ Perks of Being a Time Lord

Time Lords have a special connection to the Web. Their biodata is woven into the very fabric of the structure, allowing them to sense its fluctuations. Time Lords can feel which events are fixed points (the nails) and which are more flexible.

🌀 Resilience and Adaptability

The Web of Time can adapt and reshape itself around minor disruptions. For example, if someone quiet and unobtrusive dies prematurely, the Web can absorb the shock without much fuss. But mess with a major event, like the eruption of Vesuvius, or the rise of the Nazis, or the perpetual existence of Jack Harkness, and you're looking at a domino effect of catastrophic proportions, with timelines collapsing and entire civilisations disappearing in the blink of an eye.

🏫 So ...

In essence, the Web of Time is a network that keeps the universe’s concept of time intact. Mess with it at your own peril, because if you so much as step on one of the gazillion spiders weaving it, or waggle one of the nails a bit, the entire thing might break. If it ever breaks, we'll be back in the Dark Times, and that's really going to ruin your life plans.

Related:

💬|📱🖥️How does the Matrix work?: What the Matrix is and how it can be accessed.

💬|🧬🖥️What is biodata?: What biodata is and what you can use it for.

💬|📱🛸⭐Did the Time Lords invent black holes?: Whether the Doctor’s telling you a porky.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any orange text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →📢Announcements |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts → Features: ⭐Guest Posts | 🍜Chomp Chomp with Myishu →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[exilley]

I mean in the most literal capacity it's not a timeloop, but put together motifs of cycles and memory and you do kinda get the silhouette of a time loop. I think it's more pertinent to ask what time loops as a premise seeks to emulate in allegory, and if Utena embodies some of those characteristics itself (it does). I'm not gonna write an essay about the metanarrative structuralist postmodernism of a microgenre over a Tumblr post. But understanding the recursions of narrative ideas as occurring within a metastructure contextualized by a culture + authorial intent rather than the inverse (the paranarrative content coming after the metastructure) of that could supply more nuance and discussion for fandomposters everywhere.

[a-wartime-paradox]

Paradox of the Thirteenth, or "There's a surprising amount of Faction Paradox in Series 11-13"

Despite not being many fan's top choice, the Thirteenth Doctor's era shared concepts with the Faction Paradox series surprisingly often. Some of these were explicit, such as The Paradox Moon featuring Siblings Same and Different (although these Siblings' Faction is otherwise unrelated to the FP Faction, as of 2023), whilst others are simply similarities in creative choices, again varying in how obvious they are, from the "Ashad" (Series 12 - The Timeless Children) resembling FP's technosapiens, to Time Lords "binding" time in Once, Upon Time (part of Series 13/Flux)

So, here I will attempt to list every possible connection between the Thirteenth Doctor/Chris Chibnal's era of Doctor Who and the Faction Paradox mythology

Firstly, an explanation as to why this is all happening...

Explanation as to why the Thirteen Doctor is meeting Faction Paradox-esque entities.

The War has been ended for a long time, and the Great Houses have finally, actually, fallen (see The Timeless Children) leaving no one to hold up their imposed metastructure of history. Why didn't anyone invade in Series 1-7, before the Time Lords returned?, you ask. Well, it's not because The Day of the Doctor is a bootstrap, as I don't believe in perfect bootstraps, but rather because well... They did. During Series 1, the Reapers arrived, explicitly due to the lack of Time Lords (Father's Day), and so did a lone Dalek (Dalek), and finally the original Dalek Emperor's last Time War fleet (The Parting of the Ways). Then in Series 2, the Cult of Skaro arrived (Army of Ghosts/Doomsday), followed by Davros (The Stolen Earth/Journey's End)- who along with the Supreme Dalek, somehow survived the Crucible's fall (The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar)- and then the New Dalek Paradigm emerged, from survivors of the War (Victory of the Daleks). All this interference from War-time participants is what's preventing pre-Anchoring entities entering the Third Universe, as it echoes the status quo which was so hostile to their very existence.

Oh, and "Dvapara Yuga" means "the Dark Times, as understood to not be an early period of universal history, but rather the state of history metatemporally predating Rassilon's anchoring of the thread"

She is born out of an interaction with a past Doctor (Twice Upon a Time) - if it wasn't for acausal (and unintentionally) intervention of the First Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor never would have existed. This is a bit of a stretch, as interference forwards in a timeline is much less paradoxical than the reverse, but this is her first appearance so...

The Solitract, from It Takes You Away, is an intelligent & conscious universe, exiled from the main universe in order to allow for it's creation. "Creation" here probably refers to Event One/The Big Bang, but, if one is on the train of "the universe before the Anchoring of the Thread didn't have a beginning, and the Big Bang was retroactively added by Urizen [Rassilon]", then this is very easily re-interpreted as a mention of the early Sun Builders (a.k.a Time Lords) cleaning up their area of spacetime in preparation for imposing rationality on it. To be even more bold, I may suggest that this isn't a universe at all, but instead an intercreational, a class of being first mentioned in The Book of the War, although one type was first mentioned in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Taking of Planet 5, as a "Swimmer". I propose that the Solitract is not a Swimmer, or a Leviathan, but rather a smaller intercreational, perhaps growing out of the Third Universe (the main DW/FP universe), before being banished by the Great Houses. See Explanation as to why the Thirteen Doctor is meeting Faction Paradox-esque entities at the top of this post.

The Ux, from The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, are clearly some gods from the Dvapara Yuga.

Orphan 55 features a future version of Earth which deviates heavily from most other depictions of it. Speculatively, this means the Thirteenth Doctor travelled to an aberrant timeline, or that the Ghost Point has somehow worsened since the degradation of the Great Houses's imposed metastructure, rather than healing.

During Fugitive of the Judoon, the Doctor interacts with Gallifrey's distant past. I can't really explain this even by the standard explanation at the top of this post. However, one thing interesting to note is that the ancient Time Lord "Gat" considered "Mutter's Spiral" to be a "tiny galaxy". This is notable because Gallifrey is basically always said to be in the centre of Mutter's Spiral - that is, the Milky Way - and naming a galaxy as "tiny" kind of implies that you aren't from it. Maybe Gallifrey wasn't always in Mutter's Spiral, and got moved? Or maybe Gat and the Division come from some alternative Gallifrey? I don't know, just interesting to note.

The novel At Childhood's End (written by Sophie Aldred, actor for Ace) featured Ace meeting the Thirteenth Doctor, and descriptions of the former's fractured timelines. Notably, the next time Ace and the Doctor met (in The Power of the Doctor), neither one of them mentioned this, almost as if the timeline in which it happened had fractured...

Rakaya and Zellin from Can You Hear Me? are clearly some kind of pre-anchoring gods like the Ux. In Time Lord Victorious short story The Guide to the Dark Times, it was confirmed that they were, specifically, Eternals (not the MCU kind), and another Time Lord Victorious text, a novel called The Knight, the Fool, and the Dead, claimed that Eternals were among the other inhabitants of the Dark Times, the "Old Ones". Interestingly, multiple Eternals do indeed appear in the "classic" series of Doctor Who, implying that the Anchoring did not fully remove them, but as they didn't appear in NuWho until now, I feel safe in speculating that the War somehow barred them from it - perhaps they'd joined the conflict, on the side of both the Time Lords, Daleks, the Enemy, and others, "helping out" wherever it benefited them?

Ashad, first appearing in The Haunting of Villo Diodati, and then in the following serial Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children, is an "emotional Cyberman". Any readers of Faction Paradox could immediately draw the connection between this and Faction Paradox's "technosapiens", named as such partially to avoid infringing on the BBC's trademark, but also because The Book of the War showed that many sects of posthumanity had become cyborgs, but many were not emotionless and evil like the Cybermen.

The Timeless Child, first appearing in The Timeless Children, is vaguely reminiscent of the idea hinted upon in The Book of the War that the Great Houses stole the power of regeneration from another species, in The Book of the War being the Great Vampires, and in The Timeless Children being the titular Timeless Child. This note of continuity was expanded upon by the writer @aristidetwain in his short story Out of the Box introduced the "Child-That-Was-Taken", intended to be a member of the Yssgaroth species, and to be the Timeless Child itself. Additionally, this Child was the motivator for the Great Vampires' war with the Great Houses, the Eternal War (a.k.a First War in Heaven).

In The Timeless Children, Tecteun is shown alongside Rassilon and Omega. Previously, the figure alongside Rassilon and Omega was the Other, a version of the Doctor from before he was the Doctor. My personal fix for this, which I admittedly took from @/aristidetwain, is that there were many Others, assisting Rassilon and Omega at different points in time. Other Others may be the human Dr. Who from the novel Human Nature, the Eleventh Doctor "Cheesemaker" (The Lost Dimension), Osiris (in his car future), and the Sixth Doctor (The Scrolls of Rassilon)

In Shadow in the Mirror, the Thirteenth Doctor released Aphasia / Daughter of Mine from her mirror of entrapment, despite the fact that Aphasia mentioned a "ginger haired doctor" who "believed himself to be the last" (likely Muldwych/Merlin), meaning that the Doctor had been interacting with Aphasia out-of-order, which is... Reasonably dangerous.

Throughout Flux, the villains "Swarm" and "Azure" attempt to remove the Mouri from the planet Time, effectively de-anchoring the thread. They're method, strangely, is to try to destroy the entire universe using "the flux".

Village of the Angels features the first instance of Weeping Angels being shown to posses proper intelligence, as they ally themselves with Tecteun, presumably in exchange for something, and even more interestingly, they have a rogue member, suggesting power structures in their ranks. This isn't particularly Faction Paradox -related, but it feels like it is, and I hope Faction Paradox writers use Weeping Angel - analogues to continue to explore this.

Eve of the Daleks features the Doctor "resetting" the TARDIS, causing a localised time loop. However, perhaps more notably, the Daleks which appear in this episode are "Dalek Executioners", which make their debut in Time Lord Victorious.

The Power of the Doctor won't be mentioned here, perhaps I'll grant it a full post going over all of its batshit-insanity (affectionate?) some other time.

This post was made after I saw @familyparadox remark at the high amount of Faction/Thirteen content

[jkl-fff]

Silly Game Time: Worst fictional illness to have?

After skimming a list of fictional diseases, since I couldn't really thibk of any off the top of my head, I'm going to go with AMPS (Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis Syndrome) from "Pontypool Changes Everything" (which I've never read or even heard of). Apparently, it is: A "metaphysical, deconstructionist" virus spread by the English language whose symptoms begin with palilalia as they repeat certain words (usually terms of endearment), proceeding to full aphasia, and finally cannibalistic rage as the affected individual grows insane from an inability to express themselves clearly.

As an anglophone AND someone whose whole shtick is communication (language, literature, communication, and creative writing) AND someone very preoccupied by concepts like self-control (being a martial artist) ... Yeah, that all sounds like a particularly bad way to go. One that'll drive me to drag others down with me.

[entomoblog]

Des scientifiques en nanotechnologie s'inspirent de ces étranges excréments d'insectes pour créer un camouflage ingénieux

See on Scoop.it - EntomoNews

Des scientifiques de la nanotechnologie s’inspirent des étranges excréments en forme de ballon de football d’un insecte pour concevoir un camouflage ingénieux Des versions artificielles de structures en forme de ballon de football à l’échelle nanométrique, appelées brochosomes, pourraient être utilisées pour créer de nouveaux types de camouflages […]

  2 janvier 2025

ByJosé Garcia

  ------

NDÉ

Les études

  Geometric design of antireflective leafhopper brochosomes | PNAS, 18.03.2024 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2312700121

  Brochosome-inspired binary metastructures for pixel-by-pixel thermal signature control | Science Advances, 01.03.2024 https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adl4027

  Image1 Fig. 1. Thermal signature manipulation by BLPs.

  (A) An optical image of a leafhopper Gyponana serpenta. Scale bar, 1 mm. Insets: A scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of leafhopper-produced brochosomes. Scale bar, 500 nm.

(B) Top to bottom: Three-dimensional (3D) models of BLPs with op-BLPs and cp-BLPs, respectively.

(C) Schematic of information camouflage and display by BLPs. Information is concealed in the binary array formed by BLPs, which is camouflaged in the visible range but can be displayed under infrared (IR) imaging systems.

    Image2 : Structure of brochosomes.

  (a,b) Model of a typical brochosome, based on present results and published ultrastructural data [12,13], a three-dimensional reconstruction by O. Karengina, showing a general view (a) and cross-section (b).

  (c) Brochosome on the surface of eye of Athysanus argentarius, note that the wall compartment in the centre allows seeing through the entire hollow particle.

  (d) Brochosomes of Alnetoidia alneti accidentally trapped between two layers of polyvinylsiloxane and torn in halves when one layer was peeled off; note the holes connecting the central core with the outside.

  (e) Brochosomes of A. argentarius; the touching particles are in fact connected.

  (f) Brochosomal coat on the intact hindwing of A. alneti. (g) Same, brochosomes interconnected in branching chains. Scale bars: 50 nm (a,b), 100 nm (c–e) and 1 µm (f,g).

  via Brochosomal coats turn leafhopper (Insecta, Hemiptera, Cicadellidae) integument to superhydrophobic state | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 07.02.2013 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.2391

  Bernadette Cassel's insight:

  Précédemment

  Le secret du camouflage des cicadelles, ces insectes qui sucent la sève des végétaux - De www.lemonde.fr - 14 novembre 2024, 07:00

[mazamba]

"Hmmm, I wouldn't bet on that, but you do you I suppose," figured Q, "still, I will admit to being concerned. These creatures are drawn to universes with spacetime damage like this one, but they're still much too early. We expected them to show up months from now."

"Are you and Beyonder sure that your powers are compatible?" pointed out Rutherford.

"Elaborate please."

"Well, you're both omnipotent, but you're also from completely different sides of the multiverse. There's a chance that your powers only look like they work the same way, but the underlying metastructure is completely different. Like how two plus two equals four, but so does three plus one."

"Hmmm, I see what you mean. I will discuss this with him later. The fact is, neither of us planned for Loom. The only good thing is that they're not sentient, and they are outstandingly dumb."

A tentacle grabbed his shirt, which he phased through in annoyance, and pulled the cloth through.

"Ironically, your best defense is to be pedestrian," he scoffed, seemingly disgusted at the suggestion, "Beyonder and I have both found that it's best to wear multiple layers of clothes and pull them off as they tug. Wear a cape you don't mind losing, and you'll be fine. Teleporting works too, but once you're past the threshold even we won't be able to help you."

Closed RP w/mazamba

This planet Jason was on was once thriving world. A planet full of trees, water, animals, and people. All who lived peacefully on the planet, until a war broke out in this sector. This left the planet in ruins, all of its resources plundered, and its people nearly wiped out. Centuries have passed and the planet has been nearly forgotten.

Jason was told the planet was under the control of a group called the Klingons. He didn’t think too much about it and knew he would be out of here before they found out or one of their allies.

He walks over towards his prize. A box containing a valuable item that he knew would come in for a pretty penny…or whatever currency the people of this universe use. He walks over and begins to disable any security systems around, before getting his prize. He wipes away the dirt from it, opens it, and smiles when he saw what’s inside.

“Just like the buyer said,” Jason whispered before putting the box in his bag. 

@mazamba

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

8/52 Red Team Blues - A Review

Cory Doctorow has shaped my thinking and opinions a lot, ever since I started reading his writings on Tumblr.

I'm probably going to write a post in the future about him, actually - the way he outlines the root causes of ALL THE WORLD'S ILLS is intriguing. (1)

So, I was quite…curious, to see how that would be reflected in one of his actual books.

Too bad that I didn't consider this was a narrative book, not a sequence of essays 😂 (2)

Which doesn't mean it was a bad book - I actually liked it quite a bit!

But it's not an intellectual edifice that will let you see society in a new light.

What it is, is an interesting example of what cyberpunk looks like in the real world.

What I mean is; right now, we live in what would've been cyberpunk fifty years ago.

There are wars fought with drones and deep fakes, nascent AIs and crypto stakes.

This is the world that Martin Hench lives in, and works in as…. basically an investigative financial auditor, with a deep IT expertise.

Now; I consider myself as a technologically literate person (certainly in comparison to the average Italian citizen) - and even then, there were a lot of passages where I had to actively think of what was being said; this is not a book for people who “aren’t good with computers”. Or struggle with unfamiliar situations or mental flexibility.

Martin Hench deals with very obscure financial crimes that move billions of dollars around the world in ways that’d make actual financial experts spin.

That said; I did actually enjoy it. Especially since the first half of the book is basically a mystery novel - which gets solved!  

Usually in a mystery you realize when the end is coming because the book physically stops - but here, the fallout from solving the mystery and how to deal with that take up the latter half of the book.

Overall, medium recommendation.

Usually, I'd sneer at this as a kind of conspiracy thinking, since seeing a singular cause for every bad thing is a hallmark of this- except he talks about incentive structures and naturally forming stable metastructures, which don't require superhuman competence from anyone.

You know, I'll start using emojis more and more know. I already do so at work, and they're useful in conveying information - specifically, tone.

[jhavelikes]

specially designed nanophotonic structures can take input waveforms encoded as complex mathematical functions, manipulate them, and provide an output that is the integral of the functions. The results, demonstrated for microwaves, provide a route to develop chip-based analog optical computers and computing elements.

Inverse-designed metastructures that solve equations | Science

[natalieironside]

"Dr. Park is a brilliant scientist. His work on metastructural informatics has been groundbreaking."

"Are you sure? Because one time he gave himself scurvy on accident."

The two narratives in the space story converge when Lizzie the space linguist realizes that the weirdo libertarian boss everyone is making jokes about is in fact the famous physicist Dr. Solomon Park with whom she's collaborated on several studies

[c-is-for-circinate]

So uh, would the end of runs count as an escalation of the abuse? Like Ik it's a last resort to stop Zagreus from leaving, but it also shows that he has no qualms with hurting Zag to get what he wants.

I definitely had not yet gotten to the end of a run when you sent this ask, nonny, and I was all set to scold you gently for spoilery stuff, but you were actually trying very hard to be nonspecific and this only pinged as a spoiler because I was already pretty sure how things were going to end anyway.  So good job trying to be vague!  I have now fought through to what is fairly clearly the final boss, and my answer is, categorically, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING YES.

(We are going to just keep putting Hades posts under cuts until they stop being about a parent abusing their kid! I realize this helps nobody on mobile and I am tagging for that purpose but hey, at least I might save someone's dash! I swear I will talk about other things in this game eventually! Until then, once again, CW abuse.)

It’s not even about the violence, entirely.  Like, yes, it’s about the violence--but Hades has shown all along that he has no qualms with hurting Zag (with killing him, over and over again) to get what he wants.  Even if we take most of the enemies we’re facing as general nuisances of the zones we travel through, and not Hades’ doing (and oh, if Hades wanted he could give Zagreus a safe escort through those zones in an instant), there are obstacles put in our way that are obviously and deliberately commanded by Hades to stop us at all costs.  The level bosses, for one.  (Also, remember the Hades voiceovers we get at every ‘survive for 45 seconds’ level?)  He wants us to stop.  He wants us to die, and yes we’ll come back, but he’s still setting his employees to hurt us, so like, that’s very much a thing to begin with.

The fact that he’s willing to take up arms against us and kill us himself probably feels like a big escalation to Hades personally.  What really gets me is the dialogue.  “I have always kept my temper, unlike you.”  Wildly revisionist history, placing all of the blame for what’s about to happen on Zagreus the victim for ‘making me do this’. The absolute disgust and disdain, when he finally gets us.  “I have slain titans, boy.”  He’s spent a lot of time throwing scathing remarks in our general direction, wanting us to bow under them, being blandly sarcastic and self-satisfied and smug, but he's never sounded like that.

Because, before now, he thought we couldn’t do what we set out to do.  He thought our suffering as we tried was its own punishment, and he enjoyed watching that punishment.  He did not watch us fail with the affectionate resignation of a parent watching a child learn a harsh lesson.  He watched us and gloated. 

The thing that infuriates him now is not that we’re trying to do the thing we literally said we were trying to do ninety-eight runs ago at the start of the game.  He could have stopped us from trying at any time.  Hypnos to put us to sleep.  Literal chains.  Had he bothered for five seconds to actually step into the courtyard beyond our room, we could be disarmed and helpless.  But it’s fun for him to watch us fail, and it proves that he’s right about us and how pathetic we are, and it reassures him that he’s right about the universe, that nobody can escape from Hades, that we are stupid and foolish and weak.  What drives him to such absolute fury now is not that we’re trying, but the fact that we’re about to succeed.  We’re going to prove him wrong, prove that he was wrong about how he handled this situation in the first place, and that’s flatly unacceptable. 

There is no interpretation of this fight that does not include Hades wanting us to feel inferior, subjugated, crushed.  It’s not about keeping us in his realm.  It’s about breaking us, for daring to try to escape in the first place.

No matter why he’s doing it.  And let’s get into that for a sec, the “it’s a last resort to stop Zagreus from leaving” bit.  At this point in the game, I don’t know why Hades is so desperate to stop Zag from leaving.  I haven’t found out yet!  Don’t tell me!  Don’t hint about it!  But from where I’m standing, I can see, hmm, five main possibilities?

He is trying to protect Zagreus from something on the surface.

He is trying to protect the world from Zagreus, whose arrival out of hell will destroy something/everything in some magic way that Hades knows about but keeps secret.

Zagreus is actually a prisoner, meant to be chained in the Underworld for crimes he doesn’t remember committing, Tisiphone is right, and we were meant to be as condemned as Sisyphus all along but Hades has been generous.

Hades made it law a long time ago that nobody and nothing escapes the Underworld, and Zagreus cannot be allowed to break that law because nobody breaks Hades’ laws, period.  He could have chosen to make an exception but he did not, so all of this is flagrantly illegal and needs to be punished.

Hades himself is trapped in the Underworld, or at least feels that way, and is projecting and taking it out on his kid.

My best guess is that it’s some combination of a few of those (like, I am fairly sure that #5 is absolutely true no matter what other reasons are in place as well).  Thing is?  While I’m curious about this mystery for the story’s sake, I also really fundamentally do not care.

Any one of these things could better have been accomplished by telling Zagreus literally anything.  Even if there’s magic and prophecy bullshit binding Hades away from explaining the whole truth, it is not hard to hint at vague disaster befalling innocent bystanders “because of cosmic reasons I am beholden to keep secret”.  Hell, Hades’ own life becomes easier if he restrains himself just the tiniest bit in an effort to make Zagreus not want to leave in the first place.  Hades clearly does not want this to be happening!  He doesn’t seem to regret any of his actions, but he sure is annoyed and infuriated that he has to go through the trouble of doing them.  Literally one explanation could solve so much.

If the reason is to protect Zagreus?  Then it is one thousand times bullshit, and I think the game knows that.  (The game has to know that.)  When your kid is so miserable that they’d rather flee straight into traffic to escape you, then your kid is not safe.  Nothing that could hurt him on the surface--finding out that Persephone doesn’t love him and never did and in fact wants him dead and tortured for eternity--is any worse than what he’s facing down here.  He already knows one parent feels that way.  At least out of the Underworld he has the option to find some relatives who don’t.

And yet this situation doesn’t ping the “stupid plot that could never happen because it entirely rests on unrealistically shitty communication” sensors.  Because it absolutely, categorically makes sense for the Hades we’ve come to know to refuse to explain himself.  Whether he’s got good reasons or bad ones, HIS WORD IS LAW, and how dare anybody ask him to justify or clarify it, ever.

I am very very sure that Hades has lots of reasons: reasons for being furious, and bitter, and for making rules about his son never leaving the Underworld, and for being so desperate to enforce those rules, and for all of it.  Some of them may even be good.  What makes him an abuser, what those reasons do not and cannot justify, is the verbal and physical violence he uses against the people in his care to cope with those problems.