#narfsrandomthoughts

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"multiple emanations of one cosmic being" is a very old and classic concept in fiction but i have to say, one of the metaphors for it that made the most impression on me still comes from battle for zendikar's story articles... i remember this one sometimes and it makes me happy

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i get that you're just having fun and imagining an alternate way to play around with the ideas, and it is a funny idea, i was just thinking about why it seems not to line up for me.

i always kinda thought the idea behind a lot of story's elves is that elves are like... they exist in a very specific super controlled environment so it's like "this is what top performance looks like". obviously in lotr or whatever elves are mythic beings who literally don't die unless something kills them. but i always kinda thought that the idea in worlds where elves live simply a very long time was that so long as the elves were living in their homelands, which are usually some generic germanic forest somewhere, they were eating a very stable set of food and getting a very regular amount of exercise there and so they exist as a sort of like...

exaggerated ideal of the "noble savage", right? like they're this group of people who live simple lives in the woods and often those simple lives seem to go on for ridiculous amounts of time, in a lot of fiction. from a human perspective the elves are seen as these really solitary people who keep to themselves except when weirdos decide to leave the woods and go on adventures whatever, and it feels to me like there's this sensation of stasis or whatever in an elf's homeland - they aren't doing anything particularly dangerous or eating anything outside of the norm, so they remain balanced. once you introduce external forces though i think they can get stained or whatever. like if you had elves eat big macs every week they would probably die at some point

i do think there's definite weirdness from trying to merge the ideal with "aristocrats", who often indeed were just partying and going nuts on drugs etc. i suppose the distinction goes back to this sort of inherent holiness or otherworldliness elves are often granted, where they are considered to be beings above basal requirements and ideals of the human world. you have to kind of examine, are you writing elves that are meant just to be a different kind of human-like person, or elves that are meant to be somehow distanced from normal life? hmm. anyway that's why i think elves are often written as surprised / sheletered / disliking weird crazy new things, there's this classic "rich guy who's been raised in a box when he has to go outside and sees homeless people" energy to it

Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn't committing to the bit

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in ygo there's a dragonmaid archetype and we had most of them in both humanoid and dragonoid form for years

but there was one that we didn't have a dragon form for and it was very mysterious like hmm what could she be like what is the secret

everyone speculated for years what she would look like well anyway we finally got her dragon form as legacy support and

something about this is so funny to me. she looks so goofy and i dont even know why. her beakie...

my new theory is that she thinks she looks silly in dragon form and so she barely ever transforms and that's why it took so long for her to show up

...anyway to continue their commitment to the bit they added ANOTHER even higher ranked maid with form unknown so check back in in 2030 for when we learn what lady's maid turns into

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Q. By what mechanism is one who makes contact with an Old One driven insane?

A. "Driven insane" is a misnomer. We will answer this by means of metaphor.

When a human makes mental contact with another human, the intermixing can sometimes be complex. However, it is usually not extremely difficult to "see which puzzle pieces go where", so to speak. In close proximity, the identity components naturally bond their siblings, and so the average mental crossover does not cause major identification issues.

Indeed, the components of a mind are generally drawn together, and naturally reject other minds. While some visualize mental mixing as drops of water, limited human to human mental contact is like shuffling two jigsaw puzzles together. It may not be trivial to tell the pieces of either apart. But if their patterns are different enough, separating the components is relatively easy - it is simply a matter of time and effort. The pieces clearly indicate their source and have pieces identifying where they go.

Even when humans become irrevocably mentally mixed, the result is like taking two balls of differently colored play dough and mixing them together. Eventually the colors will overwhelm and become one, but you can still separate much of them if you want to until then.

The problem with humans contacting Old Ones is a matter of scale. We have avoided using water as a metaphor because it spreads readily and cannot be purified by hand. But it is a useful example in this specific case.

Imagine you have a dropper full of red food coloring and you release it into a lake. Would retrieving the red food coloring be possible? For all practical intents and purposes, the answer would be no. Why is this? Because the scale of the lake is much greater than the dropper. We mentioned that this water metaphor doesn't work very well with small scale interactions, because mixing even very small amounts of different coloring creates an inextricable mess. But it is a useful visualization in this case.

So, the dropper might have been emptied, but that doesn't mean it cannot hold water. Rather, if we immediately try to place our dropper back in the lake and fill it again, what we will retrieve will probably contain only a minuscule amount of the red food coloring we released. Now, because minds are more adhesive than water, it is likely that in the real scenario much more of a person's mind will be retained after contact. But this essentially shows the problem: after contact, what remains in their body tends to equalize towards the average weight.

If a dropper contains 1 mililiter of water, and you drop it into a container with 9 mililiters of water and mix it around, any random sample of the water will be 1/10ths the dropper's water and 9/10ths the container's water on average. Most of what returns is not human.

As stated, this is a simplistic metaphor - perhaps we could extend it by discussing how coloring can stain the insides of the dropper, and other coloring might stick to this stain. Another aspect is that intermixing continues over time - it doesn't simply "drop" in an instant. But eventually, if a human mind is allowed to remain in contact with an Old One for too long, and their sense of self is weak, then their mind will disperse into components scattered evenly across its expanse and their body will be nothing more than part of the amalgam.

I hope that despite this extremely wordy explanation, the actual concept remains easy to comprehend. Such is the hope behind the use of a human's metaphor.

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this dumb as hell onion i forgot about, i ate the stem because it was annoying me and i accidentally broke it off and the fucker just grew back again. what the fuck is your problem

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hmm well speaking from a purely strategic angle not entirely. for one thing a lot of early bug types don’t get all that many bug moves in the early games. once you get into the lategame things get simpler cuz you can shift around to other mons. grass is an interesting type because it has a lot of weaknesses but the types its strong against are strategically very important, rock resisting normal is a common early game issue and both it and water are strong because of this. water is an extremely strong and common type and it just so happens to be weak to grass, which is kind of grass’s main niche and helps it a lot. especially since in the lategames you often start surfing everywhere. in kanto games at least bulbasaur’s poison typing means it doesn’t fear tentacools constantly annoying it and poisoning it too, and there’s actually not that many strong users of its weakness types until you’re gonna have a full team to deal with that later. gen 2 chikorita has issues because there’s so many annoying zubat spamming rockets but it actually doesn’t hate the first 2 gyms much because neither of them have a large variety of their STAB moves (this gets worse in the remakes where chikorita has a much harder time though), and in gen 3 treecko can take advantage of team aqua at least

an interesting aspect of all of this is that, in later games you get so much wider a spread of possible options in the early games that what you choose for your starter becomes way less important - i think gen 4 and 5 are when the games start really opening up and giving you much easier ability to cover your bases earlier on, so starter type becomes less important. and as i’ve noted, in the first 3 generations grass is in a fairly decent position really. i think water has always been the “best” starter type mechanics wise because water is just a supremely strong type, versus fire (which hates running into rock types in caves all the time and dislikes when you have to start surfing), but we all always think of fire as being the normal powerful type just because it’s a cool element lol. it’s really not as much of a death sentence as it seems

Honestly people who pick grass type starter pokemon are lunatics like you're already vulnerable to bug, flying, ice, poison and fire just by like. Default. And there's guaranteed bug and flying types in your starting routes in every game. That's fine. This is fine. The world sees your little guy as a walking salad. And if you're playing gold/silver and it's remakes then fuck you and your chikorita because the first two gyms are flying and bug type but whatever i suppose. So you manage to survive this divine sign from the universe you've made a mistake and evolved your little guy, and it's very rare for a grass type to remain only a grass type. Unfortunately, now that you've evolved as a split type it's likely that now you've either made moves that were not very effective to mildly effective.. or opened up a whole new type vulnerability. Grass ground? Now water AND grass type moves pack a decent punch. Grass poison? Sure bugs might not completely devour you, but psychic attacks are going to ruin your day. Arceus looked upon grass types and firmly reminded them they are at the bottom of the foodchain forever and ever amen. Yet people will still pick Bulbasaur. Talk about love man

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i was never very good at math in school. but i don't think it's math's fault, i think it's adhd's. the way math is taught here exacerbates the weaknsses wrt studying consistently and turning in hw, especially when you must focus in class and things are not always explained well. something i realized after i graduated hs was that math felt fundamentally different when i actually read the chapters of the textbook, which i often hadn't done much at the time. i failed abysmally in my first semester of college b/c i did not understand what i needed to do

i see people sometimes talk about math and example problems with derision and it makes me sad b/c even in times like this i never felt math was useless. i had a bad experience with the classes but the math itself is a form of undeniable power. very specifically for me there was a period when i really actually came to understand what a sine and a cosine were, like when i came to truly understand sound waves, that made me inherently get a lot i'd always found theoretical and rather meaningless as a kid

thinking about this once more because of that thing i overheard the other day regarding schooling and people hating "book learning". i quite like learning certain things from books, and often it's the circumstances that frustrate me using them productively... i wonder if people have difficulties w reading that make them associate it w a bad experience, or are poorly taught and motivated w it, and so they come to view books as the enemy. sometimes i feel like my issues came from teachers who weren't well equipped to teach the books...

like, if you read something that you don't understand, and ask a teacher for help, and the teacher doesn't know either but prescribes just memorizing something - i recall situations like that greatly frustrating me as a kid and making me feel like it was memorization w/o goal

in particular this is a criticism i never understood regarding history? people say "history is just memorizing events" which i never comprehended, b/c while that might be how you're tested the events always meant something and connected to what came before and after. an earthquake tsunami occurs in sumatra in 1907, and half the population of the island of simeulue dies. a hundred years later the third greatest recorded earthquake occurs in 2004, and their descendants evacuate the wave b/c they remembered last time. it's all connected...

ultimately i am not a teacher, but i so strongly believe that a great many issues in education come from teacher failure... and it's not like it's their fault, they're in a rough position. it's hard to teach, it's a social job after all

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i think if i ran into a fucked up analog horror creepypasta monster i'd start saying random shit. i'd just start joking with the dude. asking it riddles and shit. running away never really works anyway. start pretending like it's my friend and stuff. like hey what's up man. every idea at once

a lot of traditional mythology beings have like 1 weird specific weakness where you ask it the right thing or hit it with the ol secret trick anyway. might as well just start jokin around and ruin the mood.

now the problem is, you are gonna be the "hah hah it's a home moviey" dumbass guy who gets killed early on in the horror story for not taking the monster seriously instead. BUT if you're choosing between dying to that and dying to running from it and it gettin ya, same shit

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i think laserman mega man battle network is one of the mmbn original masters i most would like to see a fangame feature. his role as a villainous proxy in the game is fairly unique and i think he has much room to apply some weird personality to. the anime shrugs it off and basically makes laserman lack personality entirely and be exclusively a front for dr. regal... the game portrays him as simply Pure Evil... honestly i think laserman would be a cool callback in a theoretical later mmbn too

basically i guess my thought is laserman is so bound to dr. regal that he doesn't have a personality rly, but he's meant to be important, so i think he'd be a good character to have in a "was just invented as a sock puppet but is slowly developing own personality" way. he has so little personality that if he were to come back as a character that develops in a later game it could be interesting. i do like the callback characters in mmbn honestly

but yeah i think given his "central" role in an admittedly quite bad game he has more of a claim to being a character you could write a fangame plot about. especially if you want to make an evil energy/duo themed fangame

his tronnish design and plot of trying to take control of the meteor feel like you could also make him not actually a physical robot. laser man as a computer program that seeks to take control of a powerful machine body for some inscrutable purpose… perhaps duo's body?

i would enjoy it if to some degree laserman's personality is more because he's earnestly afraid of being on the losing side and thinks the only way to succeed is if you can't beat them join them or something hahah. anyway there's a lot you can do with the concept of lasers if you wanted to get creative with it

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i had a sort of strange dream where fantasy towers and floating islands were giant magical creatures that wanted to induce humans to enter them (maybe to live in them?) so they could eat them on an occasional basis.

the towers were kinda like, green solid plates connected by grey connective tissue that could seal up or expand a bit. the one i saw had a bunch of fake "flowers" they would grow near them that would routinely bob their head towards the body and had various colorful patterns on them. they would like. change though. like holographic pokemon cards or a cuttlefish's skin or something. it was like the tower kind of knew what a flower and what a sign and what an usher was but didn't really get that something in the middle was just kind of strange

my family were researching and had investigated a floating island for a while. i thought they couldn't possibly eat enough to sustain themselves but reasoned they would only eat very occasionally and mostly used smth else. kinda like a mix of a bromeliad and a pitcher plant? they generally supported an environment of various inhabitants inside them but like a carnivorous plant they really needed a small amount of a trace vitamin they only got by eating occasionally. i think that for some reason they needed at least some "intelligent" prey or their magic wouldn't work

i think ultimately it was usually not a bad deal to live in one once a map of it was established, but it was good form to let it eat all the corpses b/c otherwise it'd start trying to eat people at random every so often.

floating islands were weirder, i think they were very closely related but they didn't have a stalk. they got wider at the bottom like a round mountain and spent more of their time with plates locked together, whereas towers would often expand and contract based on the day and temp. they would land on a regular basis and then spend time traveling. people would want to take control of them bc they were powerful for movement control. having to feed it people was an acceptable downside for air power

not sure how smart they all were. i got the impression that at the very least they didn't talk, even magically. but i think they had more than instinct. we were pretty sure this tower grew "flowers" b/c it... personally heard... "women like flowers?" from somewhere??? they would just kind of do things like they were trying to keep one step ahead of changing behaviors even in their own lifetimes. so i think they were probably intelligent but they would take a long time to form thoughts and you couldn't really "commune" with one in a systematized way, even if you were a sorcerer. that said if people could control the movement of the islands they probably had some means of manipulating them

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the thing thats so insane about e msk is that if you wrote someone as stupid and incompetent and in power but actively fucking cringe and pathetic people would think of them as an obviously exaggerated unrealistic character, the fact they're a real person is hard to believe. i can't think of a single thing they're good at. not even sucking up to people in power, they see, to be barely competent at that. they're the kind of person who'd be tossed the moment someone power likes better comes along. i guess what they're good at is being a sad little worm who can be cajoled to act as a wealth source in the classic rich man's way

but somehow what really gets me is how much they want to be funny and possess literally the least funny stuff ive ever seen. like i actually don't know how anyone is this unfunny. i think when you're rich you just power through ppl saying "you are utterly bad at this and never improve, stop trying." i've always thought that the smartest thing rich people can do is stay far out of public view and bankroll representatives to act for you. it doesn't matter if you're incompetent or unfunny or pathetic if you're not airing that shit for everyone to see all the time. and indeed the era when he posted less was when he still had plausible deniability even though it was clear with close inspection that he never really accomplished anything himself. now he's just a walking testament to how generational wealth can make the least competent man alive matter

ultimately it's just so apparent that he wants to be a smart and funny ironic online poster nerd with a proven track record so bad. he wants to be an insane FOSS guy who invented half the kernel or some shit but he can't be and he's never going to be happy about that, ever,

i can ramble forever but at the end of the day i am just permanently in a state of earnest shock regarding every part of the situation. i just can't comprehend it sometimes

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zexal villain: hahaha, a pitiful attempt yuma! my monster's two attacks will utterly obliterate your life points! it's over!!!

yuma's board:

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you know what it is? the eyes in hc aren't part of its body. in contra the face-hugger pods are growing directly forth from the hive, it's kind of like it's attacking directly this just isn't the part of the body that does it. but in hc the heart is just beating and it's being protected by completely different organisms in the colony, so it feels more interestingly social to me and the heart feels kind of innocent on its own. it's earnestly just trying to live

hard corps is interesting because the alien cells are a terrifying and disgusting threat that could end life on earth, but the plot of every route is ultimately about them being manipulated and utilized to achieve a human's goals. they're transplanted to create a super soldier, or wired up as the sickly power source of a superweapon, or left to develop in a terrible mutated and nearly necrotic state as the warhead of a missile... it's not really they're fault they're a fleshy death infection

and in contra shattered soldier one of the insane reveals is that the inexplicable contra aliens who keep attacking earth are an artificially created species whose only goal is to protect a relic their creators invented at any cost, so they're kind of an entire species of intelligent beings that are almost "enslaved on a genetic level" - i think hard corps does a good job of bridging that gap. only the red falcon fight has any freedom of its own, escaping just to die by your hand lol

in shattered soldier lance fuses himself with an alien cell out of desperation and discovers that despite being fully intelligent, he can't break away from their guiding principle. so i think there is a sort of sympathy there? you take the alien monster shooty enemy and its like not only are they bound by the restrictions of a greater power that forced them into a miserable and thankless duty, but we started the war and all their actions could have been avoided if ppl hadn't hidden that

i've seen people say that bahamut's urge to start a rebellion for mysterious reasons and take over the world could easily be explained as him also having an alien cell infection. but honestly? having pondered this i like the idea that bahamut is just a powerhungry man better, i think it fits the tropes. though ultimately not telling us either way is the best actually, i like that both are possible explanations of his actions... maybe he was just mad at being used in a pointless war on his own!

tbh i just love the idea that all the intelligent aliens you fight in the series might feel exactly this way, like they might want to speak or explain or find some other solution and they just can't. they just have to survive. anyway! thanks for reading

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sometimes i find a trivia entry on a wiki page that seems really interesting, check the link to the japanese original, and it turns out they're just wrong lmao. like sorry but this is not true

エイリアン細胞のような素晴らしい実験素材を手にいれておきながら 危険を恐れて研究所の奥深く封印する事しかできないような 腰抜けの政府にはあいそがつきてね・・・。 そこへいくと大佐は私の理論を実践する場を提供してくれる。 違法な実験も思いのままというわけさ。

I'll translate...

エイリアン細胞のような素晴らしい実験素材 - Wonderful experimental materials like the Alien Cell(s) を手にいれておきながら危険を恐れて研究所の奥深く封印する - Obtained them and sealed them away in the deepest recesses of the research facility 事しかできないような腰抜けの政府にはあいそがつきてね・・・。 - I've lost patience with a cowardly government that can't do any more than that. そこへいくと大佐は私の理論を実践する場を提供してくれる - The colonel will give me somewhere to put my theories into practice. 違法な実験も思いのままというわけさ。- I'll be able to perform illegal experiments at will!

I don't know where the wiki editor got "sloppy" from, but I get why they were confused about the last point. It's the Japanese topic omission thing. If you ask googl, for instance, the last sentence gets tossed off awkwardly at the end and reads strangely. You could perhaps read this poor translation as implying he's afraid of the current situation allowing for illegal experiments, I guess. But it's just wrong.

The last sentence doesn't specify who's doing experiments b/c they already indicated we're talking about him and Colonel Bahamut now. It's like "The colonel will give me a place where I can put my theories into practice, where I can do as many illegal experiments as I want." It feels pretty clear to me that whoever added it doesn't even have a basic understanding of Japanese conversation and presumably just ran it through bad MTL and got the complete wrong idea. I still don't have a clue where they got "sloppy" from, though.

DeepL does ok btw.

Side note: This is a good example of how Japanese sentences can be rough on Eng speakers b/c they're like 90% a modifying phrase for the noun. The core sentence is "I'm fed up with the cowardly government". The green section describes what the gov did as a modifier for it.

Purple: Fed up Red: Government Orange: Cowardly Green: That can do nothing more than seal away in the deepest recesses of the research facility after receiving the wonderful experimental material known as the Alien Cell(s)

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hello everyone i am sorry to report that the sun has been devoured by darkness (again)

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Kuchisake-onna: Am I... pretty? Ushiromiya Battler: Uwoooh! "Am I pretty?" What sort of question even is that!? The sort of thing a schoolgirl asks her crush!? What is this, some kind of romantic drama? Stop asking random people weird questions like that! Don't you know that a woman's beauty should only matter to the person she loves!? Who told you to project your fears onto other people!? Haven't you heard that "All women are queens?!" Go home and think about your life!!!! Kuchisake-onna: