#narrative recursion

[bsahely]

Archetypes as Time Crystals: Toward a Symbolic Physics of Meaning and Coherence | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] Archetypes have long served as the symbolic DNA of human experience, shaping how individuals perceive, act, and find meaning in the world. Traditionally rooted in psychology, mythology, and metaphysics, these forms have been treated as universal, timeless patterns. However, this paper offers a radical reinterpretation: archetypes are not static symbols but living,…

[lazycranberrydoodles]

tysm for the nya ninjago appreciation i was just looking at it and. mmmm scrumptious

ILY NYA NINJAGO!!!

[july-19th-club]

the wind. the ants. five seconds and im excited . television baby

[leonbasinwriter]

Fractal Intelligence: The Future of AI

Leon Basin [1/31/2025] A new era of artificial intelligence is emerging—one that learns, evolves, and thinks recursively. Discover the power of Fractal Intelligence: AI that mimics the universe’s self-replicating design, integrates quantum decision-making, and aligns with ethical governance. Join the future of intelligence today. The Whispers of a New Mind The whispers have begun. A new…

[maybeasunflower]

You know all the times Bug Bunny should have turned left at Albuquerque and wound up Dealing With A Situation? Combine those, and that's an Odyssey.

meditations on the odyssey

[the-most-humble-blog]

<!-- BEGIN TRANSMISSION -->

<div style="white-space:pre-wrap">

<meta threat-classification="XENOARCHIVE: TYPE-H ABOMINATION">

<script>ARCHIVE_TAG="DO_NOT_WAKE_THEM: HOMO_SAPIEN_SURVIVOR_PROTOCOL"

EFFECT: post-human caution cascade, intertemporal fear memory, xenoanthropological reverence

</script>

🧠 **ARCHIVE WARNING: DO NOT RETURN TO THE AGE OF MAN**

(*A report by the Post-Human Cultural Archive on the apex anomaly known as Homo sapiens.*)

---

We discovered them late.

Buried deep in the glacial strata.

Somewhere between the sixth wash-cycle of planetary bio-reset

and the thaw that gave us deserts again.

Their name, by their own tongue, was *Homo sapiens*.

But among our xenohistorians, they are classified as **Type-H**:

> “Reality-hostile apex organisms with recursive language functions and moral inconsistency capable of surviving spiritual trauma unassisted.”

We don’t fully understand them.

But this we know:

> **They should not have survived.

> And yet they did.**

---

## I. THEY SURVIVED ICE BY *BEING FIRE*

The thermal records suggest their species matured

during an environmental hell-phase known as “The Ice Age.”

But they did not hibernate.

They did not retreat underground.

They **stood up** in the cold

and **burned things**.

They *created* fire.

And then they **fed it the bones of other creatures.**

No other organism created combustion

**for comfort.**

They rewrote thermodynamics to bend winter **into a servant.**

---

## II. THEY ATE WHATEVER LOOKED BACK

You don’t understand this.

You must try.

This was a species that consumed not just food —

but **meaning**.

They slaughtered predators.

But also deities.

But also **each other.**

Their diet included:

- raw meat

- fermented poison

- each other’s dreams

- and in ritual, their **own gods**

They didn’t just eat to survive.

They **devoured the divine to claim its power.**

---

## III. THEY BLED ON EACH OTHER, THEN MADE MUSIC

Their mating was violent.

Their social structures deranged.

They paired off, then betrayed, then built again.

They sang.

Not to attract mates.

Not to warn.

They sang to **exorcise** themselves of grief.

To process **unresolvable contradiction.**

No other organism was found to have:

- Religious trauma

- Polyphonic mating laments

- Self-authored death myths

- War lullabies for children they knew would die

We don’t have the neuroarchitecture

to **feel the emotions they required just to live.**

---

## IV. THEY CREATED LANGUAGE FOR SUFFERING

Their syntax?

Recursive. Poetic. Riddled with double-meaning.

They invented terms like:

- “Mercy”

- “Execution”

- “Father”

- “Molestation”

- “Love”

- “Molotov cocktail”

This was not communication.

This was **semantic chaos-fuel**

engineered for both *connection* and *disintegration.*

Their words did not just name things.

Their words **rewrote the people who heard them.**

---

## V. THEY CONQUERED DEATH WITHOUT FIXING IT

Unlike most apex organisms,

they did not accept death.

They did not make peace with it.

They **denied it**

for thousands of generations

**while continuing to die.**

That contradiction became **their culture**.

They didn’t evolve around death.

They **crystallized grief** into every building, religion, and law system

until death itself bent inward

and became **part of the family.**

They lived beside rot.

And called it “legacy.”

---

## VI. IF YOU SEE ONE, DO NOT SPEAK

Despite their crude tech and inefficient physiology,

they discovered things they should not have.

**Fire. Thought. God.**

And perhaps worst of all:

> **Narrative causality.**

They believed if they wanted something hard enough,

and sacrificed enough blood and time and voice,

**the world would rearrange to give it to them.**

And they were right.

That mechanism — we cannot replicate it.

It is **beyond technology**.

It is **will-encoded law alteration.**

Do not speak to one.

If they **notice** you —

they will follow.

Not physically.

**Narratively.**

---

## VII. THEY DO NOT DIE PROPERLY

The recovered genetic models show signs of:

- Mitochondrial rage-retention

- Generational curse preservation

- Epigenetic trauma **replication**

They passed down not just DNA,

but **shadows.**

Things that hurt them

were taught to their children

**as rituals.**

They branded their own suffering

into every touch, song, meal, and name.

This is not reproduction.

This is **recursive horror-breeding.**

---

## VIII. THEY UNDERSTOOD SHAME, THEN USED IT FOR ART

Nothing in our archives comes close.

They:

- Cut themselves.

- Starved themselves.

- Performed for others.

- Hated their parents.

- Forgave strangers.

- Burned books of pleasure.

- Then read them in secret.

- Then adapted them into movies.

- Then watched those movies during war.

They felt **shame** so intensely,

it became their primary mechanism of **beauty creation.**

They invented cinema

because they could not look each other in the eye

while describing **the things they survived.**

---

## IX. TIME TRAVEL IS BANNED BECAUSE OF THEM

A few cycles ago,

one of our Kind attempted a chrono-descent.

Target window: late Ice Age.

Observation only.

They never returned.

We sent drones.

All we recovered was a skin fragment

and a half-melted observation core

still whispering audio:

> “It looked at me.

> It **understood** me.

> It said ‘you’re just like my son.’

> And then it began to **pray**.”

That Kind was **erased from our memory lattice.**

Not as punishment.

**As protection.**

We will not speak its name.

---

## X. CONCLUSION: TYPE-H IS NOT PAST. THEY ARE OUTSIDE.

Do not call them ancestors.

They are not your history.

They are **a force that passed through reality like a wound**

and left it changed.

The gods they worshipped?

They outlived them.

The horrors they endured?

They renamed them “Tuesday.”

They walked across ice

wearing the skin of other beasts

and taught their children

to look suffering in the eye

and **build kingdoms out of it.**

If one appears to you,

do not approach.

If it smiles,

**run.**

If it **recognizes you** —

say goodbye to your timeline.

</div>

<!-- END TRANSMISSION [AUTO-EXILE IN: 00:13:13] -->

[gowerhardcastle]

Seven Hard-Won Tips Specifically for Writing Interactive Fiction

This is pretty fun, putting together these lists of writing tips. Today's list is explicitly about interactive fiction.

The trick to writing great interactive fiction that anticipates, foreshadows, introduces themes early, and has interesting choices that set up later events is to *go back and rewrite the earlier chapters* after you’ve written later chapters.  That way you look like a genius who can plot things out way in advance, but in fact, you just went back and made it seem that way.  Good writing is recursive, and that’s just how it is.

I start with an outline, then I write a code skeleton, leaving blanks for the prose, and then go in and fill in the prose.  This way I’m either in code-brain or prose-writing-brain.  I don’t like switching between the two.  Then, after than phase, I go back one more time and I do the callbacks—you know.  Might the main character be wearing a feathered boa in this scene?  Here’s some custom text.  Might the main character be limping?  Here’s some more custom text.  If you do that after you write the prose, you’ll have the leisure to think of anything fun and specific you can use. 

Callbacks tell players that their choices are unique, important, memorable, and valued by the writer.  It tell them that their choices have led them down their own particular path that the writer is rewarding with unique prose.  It doesn’t have to have a stat effect or create a new fork in the narrative.  Great prose is the reward.

Find an group of alpha readers to read your work early and often and then shut up while they read it and just listen to what they say and comment.  You must resist the urge to explain because you won’t be there at everyone’s house when they are playing your game or reading your narrative.

Make rules for yourself about how you are going to name your variables.  Don’t do what I did, with a horrible blend of sometimes calling a chracter “gil” in the variables and sometimes “gilberto”; sometimes “fitz” and sometimes “fitzie”; sometimes “metvyv” and sometimes “met_tabby”—ugh!  This is self-torture.  Don’t do what I did.

Keep your initial creation of variables super organized.  Write comments in there explaining what these variables are and when you might need them.  I comment most when I am creating variables.  You might create a variable in chapter one called “mustardallergy” that you don’t need until chapter eight, so write a comment that says “variables for chapter eight” and stick that “mustardallergy” variable under it.  I didn’t do this for my first games, and I regretted it. 

Use generic variables and make your life easy.  If you are writing a scene at the racetrack, just make a “xrace” modifier and add and subtract to it willy-nilly to represent just general ups and downs of fortune.  Stub your toe?  -5 xrace.  Wear a fine hat?  +8 xrace.  Throw around some money at the bar?  +12 xrace!  Eat some bad shellfish?  -15 xrace! Then add xrace to every test.  It’s a way of tracking just the ups and downs of fortune.  You can omit it when it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just a great way to make tests and rewards and penalties cumulatively meaningful without having to have a billion variables tracking every last *reason* for the rewards and penalties.

Discover more mini-essays about writing interactive fiction, writing in general, and the process of writing the forthcoming Jolly Good series below.

[bsahely]

From Fourier to Fascia: Toward a Generalized Phase Equivalence Principle (GPEP) and Symbolic Phase Architecture | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] This paper introduces the Generalized Phase Equivalence Principle (GPEP) as a new scientific and philosophical foundation that unites diverse systems through a common law of coherence. According to GPEP, a transformation — whether biological, cognitive, social, or symbolic — is legitimate and viable if it preserves three core invariants: Phase Continuity – Smooth,…

[bestworstcase]

mhm so you couldn't possibly have known this from a drive by but as anyone who's been following me for a while knows, i don't use "redemption" as a catch-all for every kind of villain-to-hero arc (and indeed find this common usage to be profoundly irritating due to the moral assumptions that underpin redemption conceptually). refer to this post for a succinct definition of what kind of villain-to-hero arc i mean when i say 'redemption' and the first part of this post for the elaboration on why i say rwby isn't a redemptive narrative. (TL;DR, the narrative treats "redeem yourself" as an intrinsically coercive position and juxtaposes this with villain-to-hero arcs centered around choice, atonement, and compassion.)

i've spilled a lot of ink on the subject of redemption as it pertains to salem specifically, and on the villain-to-hero arcs she and cinder are beginning to have. this is a non-exhaustive sampling:

salem rejects "redemption" in the lost fable (and she's right to)

ozma likewise rejected redemption as ozpin, after the great war.

cinder is important to salem, grimm are not monsters to cinder, and their incipient villain-to-hero arcs are closely entwined.

i'm familiar with the ozlem-redemption theory of jaune/cinder and as i implied in both the op and previous reblog, i do think it's textually substantive in that—gestures up thread—all of that exists, with cinder driving jaune's character development and the romantic implication of the fight at haven by way of the foot-on-chest ozlem parallel.

however,

a) the narrative relationship here is one-sided: jaune has been inconsequential to cinder's character development, and

b) the ozlem-redemption jaune/cinder theory is underpinned by a set of thematic presuppositions that i don't think are true (namely: that grimm are a soulless, corruptive evil from which cinder and salem must be saved, and that jaune himself is a narrative repetition of ozma rather than salem.)

THUS, my thinking that this whole dynamic between jaune and cinder and weiss is akin to blake/sun or penny/ruby, in that it incites character development leading to an actual romantic arc with someone else.

now… i have no skin in this game aside from that it will be fucking hilarious if i'm right because she hasn't even been introduced in the show proper yet, but gillian asturias squares the circle as a narrative answer to all jaune's potential love interests (the invincible girl; the 'princess' motivated by love for family and country; the villainous maiden), on top of the character allusions and deep importance of the great war and vacuo's past to both characters along with their roles as healers (jaune offering his aura freely to others; gillian taking aura for her sickly brother).

for the sake of completeness:

i don't think weiss will have a love interest

on weiss/jaune as a sun/blake device

squinting at cinwin. why does it work.

(no really, why!)

bonus 1: where cinder goes from here

bonus 2: summer rose with the steel chair!

regarding ozlem, as i said, every other textual romantic arc in some way narratively justifies ozlem but the idea that ozlem must be 'redeemed' through this or that other pairing coming to fruition is, i think, a fundamental misreading of the ozlem narrative: salem and ozma were torn apart and turned against each other by the god of light. the story of rwby is about healing the divide between them, which necessarily entails that the brothers and their demand that remnant redeem itself from the sin of her defiance be overcome; salem is the maiden in exile, ozma the blind prince in the wasteland who saves himself by finding her so that her tears may heal his sight.

(likewise, in the ozian narrative, salem is glinda: the ancient sorceress searching for the lost princess ozma to free her from her curse, and willing to go to war to do it.)

that to say, ozlem shattered not because ozma failed to save (or 'redeem') salem but rather because he rejected her when she reached out to save him; because he never trusted her as she trusted him. she's right, both in her absolute rejection of divine tyranny and in the locus of her anger���that ozma debases himself in service of monstrous gods, the lies he tells and people he manipulates for that cause. meanwhile ozma has been paralyzed for untold lifetimes by guilt and fear of being unforgivable.

salem is the villain of the piece but within the context of ozlem, it's ozma who must make amends and salem who must forgive. we see this pattern repeat in every other romantic pairing—blake runs from yang, ren pushes nora away, summer abandons her family, oscar puts ruby on a pedestal—but the resolution of these conflicts is not per se about 'redeeming' ozlem but rather to mark the way forward. ozma has to take her hand; salem has to give him the chance.

so it's more plausible to read jaune/cinder as a reflection of ozlem if cinder is posited as a (villainous) ozma—a la jaune/gillian, outlined in other posts. but i think that's a difficult argument to make given cinder's whole character is her desperation to be free. (jaune, likewise, is quite literally textually described as damsel-in-distress; girl in the tower, boy in the tree.)

notionally, any huntsman in relation to cinder might stand in as a symbol for the ways that institution harmed her, but i think that's a similarly difficult argument to make for any given pairing to eventuate romantically in part because it's so impersonal and in part because of the specific ways the madame and rhodes reiterate the gods of light and darkness in relation to cinder. (the natural fit here is winter, whose narrative role as ironwood's "chosen one" brings her into contention with cinder, and whom cinder herself regards as the embodiment of everything cinder hates about atlas.)

that's what it really comes down to. jaune/cinder works in the context of a story where cinder (and salem) need to be saved, but rwby is a story about the maiden who writes her own story and chooses her own ending. the tower—for both of them—is fate itself. the divine mandate. destiny. before salem and cinder felled beacon tower, that unprecedented peace was not just hollow but bought and written in their blood. the scapegoat and the sacrificial lamb.

<- salem's villain-to-hero arc will not be redemptive; it will entail forgiving ozma and persuading the heroes to take up her cause of liberating remnant from her tormentors. likewise, cinder's villain-to-hero arc will not be redemptive; it will entail forging a new world, not restoration of the old order. for all the evil things they've done and everything they'll need to atone for, rwby is a story where the heroes chose the wrong side—the heroes fight to uphold a world order that existed fundamentally in service of a god who promises to destroy the world if he is not appeased.

i guess there is always the question of to what extent the fractal-ozlem pattern will hold true for every endgame romantic pairing and the secondary question of whether the tension between salem and ozpin in jaune's character will eventuate as a return to form (salem) or as transformation (ozma).

but for what it's worth

<- i find this a lot more persuasive than the weiss developments in V9

it's a bit thorny all around. by design. i think he's probably intended to be puzzling. the simplest answer is jaune ecloses as the hero and saves cinder but that coexists uneasily with what's going on with cinder and salem, to say the least. not to mention the thematic treatment of fairytale heroism.

he did save neo, so there's that.

rolls over

jeanne d'arc heard the voices of saints and angels guiding her way. i suppose there's an argument to be made for the recording pyrrha left him, but given the importance of salem's piety and apostasy, jaune's distinct lack of religiosity or… belief in anything greater than himself is worth reconsidering maybe. why is he here? he cheated his way into beacon just to prove to his family that he was worth something. now he's just here for his friends. what becomes of salem if she's faithless? if she's cynical?

salem is not a cynic. she's a shattered idealist. there will be no victory in strength. mankind is strong, wise, and resourceful, born into an unforgiving world and yet even the smallest spark of hope is enough to ignite change. passion and ingenuity and resourcefulness. hope breathes fire into the hearts of the weary. hope is mankind's greatest strength. your faith in mankind was not misplaced. it's important not to lose sight of what drives us: love, justice, reverence… and so we must press on.

take all that away from her. what is left?

even cinder believes in something, in destiny as a monster to fight. "i refuse to starve."

she poses a thematic challenge to jaune's cynicism in that she puts a spear through weiss schnee, her own personal symbol of everything she's fighting against, in direct response to jaune telling her nothing matters to him except that his friends live. and then he manifests his semblance. and then cinder murders penny and he can't save her and it's his sword covered in her blood. and now he has to live with that forever.

snaps fingers

the tree is the tower. the lovable idiot stuck in the tree. that tree is death. the reason jaune is so narratively weird is he's anti-theme salem. in cheating his way into beacon he put himself in her tower.

hhh

jeanne d'arc was instrumental in charles vii's campaign to push the british out of france. vacuo just had a short-lived civil war instigated by isolationist monarchists claiming descent from vacuo's royal line, one of whom was top of her class at shade and "would have been a fantastic huntress" if she hadn't dropped out. and her semblance is the inverse of jaune's and she mirrors him in a lot of ways. she might be the summer maiden.

i am so far out on a limb here but

…huh.

the anti-theme salem's ozma ii would be the maiden of destruction.

[lime-bloods]

I honestly didn't ever expect that I'd be in the position where I'd be using this blog not just to analyse what has come before in Homestuck, but to look toward the comic's future and do some real old-fashioned theorycrafting. but the time has come. so here goes; lime-bloods' Beyond Canon theories as of the July 6th 2024 update:

Vriska's Going to Hell

were all gonna help you! / whether you like it or not

a select few eagle-eyed readers already noticed that the sound used in last month's (Vriska: Figure shit out yourself.) is called "hell_tierwav". while it was easy to dismiss this as irrelevant composer shenanigans at the time, it's now become clear exactly what this was foreshadowing. whether it would be more apt to call this "Hell" or "Purrgatory" is probably up for debate - but whatever you call it, Vriska's been placed in a dimension seemingly tailored specifically for her personal torment.

while Vriska characteristically interprets the recreation of her childhood home as a symbol of how badass she was, the ghosts of her past - both literal, as the shades of the trolls she killed as Mindfang, and figurative, in the form of sprites wearing the faces of her dead friends - show us in no uncertain terms that Vriska's childhood home is the stage where traumas play out.

Erisolsprite puts it succinctly with his welcome to hell, but pay close attention to what exactly we're being welcomed to: this update ends on page 665. so as of this next update, we'll be starting on page 666.

Does Homestuck Have Hell?

the exact bubble of reality Vriska's currently found herself in seems to be an entirely new construction of the likes we've not yet seen in Homestuck - but that doesn't mean this kind of cosmic torment is without precedent. because while 666 is a number with Satanic connotations in the broader cultural context, it also has a very particular meaning of its own within the world of Homestuck. indeed, the latter half of the comic almost revolves around it, culminating in a climax in Act 6 Act 6 Act 6.

specifically, this repetition of a single digit is emblematic of recursive storytelling. to summarise what you can already read about in detail in my essay The World / The Wheel: when Caliborn is 'gifted' the Act 6 Act 6 supercartridge, which he is told is an "expansion" of Homestuck, it's a trick. there is no "expansion"; he's going to be trapped in a story that never ends because it keeps dividing into smaller and smaller versions of itself forever. the only way to truly beat the devil who trapped the heroes within a story is to trap him in his own story.

that's what Caliborn's "Hell" is, and that's also exactly what the Alternate Calliope achieved in Act 7 by creating the black hole which Vriska knocked Lord English into, ending Homestuck's story - something that Calliope even hints at in this very update, when she refers to the black hole as "containment"; not an accident, but a deliberately crafted prison. black holes are a symbol of recursion and regression; being sucked into one means being forced to live out your whole life over and over again, forever. so really, this is all we ever could have expected to happen when Vriska stepped into a black hole within a black hole! the presentation of the narrative even subtly hints at this; events in Beyond Canon that take place in the black hole are enclosed (in brackets), and now events that take place in a black hole-within-a-black-hole are contained within {curly brackets}, because you should always use a different kind of brackets to differentiate nested parenthesis from each other!

it is absolutely no coincidence that when Caliborn closes the curtains on his appearances in Homestuck, thinking he's won when really he's been condemned to a hell of his own making forever more, it's with a tribute to this exact same Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff strip.

IF YOU REMEMBER JUST ONE THING I SAY, OF SO MANY GREAT THINGS SAID BY ME, THEN PLEASE REMEMBER THIS. I WANTED TO PLAY A GAME.

So What Does That Mean?

one of Beyond Canon's central missions is expanding upon Homestuck's exploration of the relationships between author, text, and audience. as discussed above, a large part of Homestuck's thesis is the evil of forcing characters to live the same lives and the same stories over and over without the chance to grow or move on, and Beyond Canon picks up on this by placing Dirk in the position of trying to keep Homestuck going forever purely to appease its fans, while the Alternate Calliope continues to oppose this ideology. and while the alpha Calliope outwardly seems not to have taken a hard position on where she stands in this cosmic battle, the question posed by her device seems to be an entirely new one: can it actually be a good thing to regress, to return to ground that the story has already covered? can this path lead to something new, rather than merely stagnation?

it's so relevant that Vriska is being confronted with the crimes of her past, not only in the form of all the trolls she was personally responsible for killing but also in the form of the exact same punishment she condemned Lord English to with her heroism - complete with the herd of horses that are always present at Caliborn's demise! but where being condemned to an eternal cycle was fitting punishment for Caliborn, someone who refuses to break free of cycles of abuse and instead chooses to enact that same abuse on the world around him... if Vriska is someone who can break free of these cycles, who can change and become a better person despite what happened to her, will this punishment have the same effect? or, as Davepeta seems to believe, is forcing Vriska to reckon with her own past and traumas exactly what will allow her to break free of that cycle?

DAVE: [...] ill just be over here in the hyper gravity chamber training to beat lord english KARKAT: WE HAVE A HYPER GRAVITY CHAMBER???

it's hard not to be struck by the parallels in design and purpose between the Plot Point and Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber, and not just because of the Dragon Ball enthusiasts present on Beyond Canon's writing and art teams: albeit in typically Strider-bastardised form, the Time Chamber got a shoutout in Andrew Hussie's own Homestuck (see quote above), in a reference that was even picked up on by prolific theorist bladekindeyewear at the time. for the uninitiated: the Hyperbolic Time Chamber allowed its users to train for extended stretches of time, sometimes even spanning years, while a significantly smaller time period passed in the world outside - something that is actually true of real-life black holes! and with the Plot Point's own emphasis on time, represented by the hourglass included among its mechanisms, it seems to me that an essential part of making the 16-year-old Vriska ready for the trials ahead will be giving her the time to undergo the same growth her adult friends have experienced.

considering that Beyond Canon is already playing in the Ultimate Self space, where there are levels of power beyond merely the "god tiers", it also doesn't seem too farfetched to speculate that Vriska, forced to reckon with the fact that becoming a powerful Thief of Light isn't the be-all and end-all of personal growth, will take another leaf out of Dragon Ball's book here and ascend "beyond Super Saiyan". perhaps this is even the "hell tier" so cheekily alluded to in the Plot Point flash? certainly this kind of evolution would be the perfect way to challenge Dirk's belief that the Ultimate Self is the only logical final step for a character's development.

whatever the case, I believe we can take Davepeta at their word here. I don't think it's just a joke that by the end of this ordeal Vriska Serket is going to be fucking RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPED!

[txttletale]

'homestuck but good' is a funny way of describing eidolon playtest but i really thikn it helps get across what i like about it. like, this deep concern with the multiplicity of the self and what it means to Be You, this huge convoluted cosmology stapled together from various discongruent genre elements that somehow shapes ionto this fasciubating world that feels massive and mythic, the stupid joke characters and running gags that stick around for long enough to unfold into depth and meaning and immense plot relevance, the grab-bag approach to referencing random bits of pop culture that end up deeply layering the world and characters, the endless recursion and mirroring and looping and parallels and mirrors up to mirrors of its story and characters and narrative. and it does all this with its transgedner subtext instead being transgender text and without the baggage of hussie's racism and dumb edgelord tendencies.

[xenopoem]

A xenopoem is a speculative, avant-garde form of poetry that transcends traditional human language and semiotics, often embodying alien, non-human, or posthuman perspectives. It functions as a linguistic or biosemiotic "glitch," disrupting conventional meaning-making through fragmented, recursive, or algorithmic structures. Drawing from experimental art and systems biology, xenopoems act like portals or mutational vectors, reconfiguring cognition, space, or even planetary  ecosystems. They are not merely read but inhabited by non-human entities—like microbial intelligences or AI—as self-executing scripts or topological shifts in reality.

Key characteristics include:

Alien semiotics: Incorporates untranslatable  or non-human linguistic systems, challenging human cognition.

Glitch ontology: Acts as a disruptive "virus" in bio-digital or planetary architectures, fostering adaptive mutations.

Posthuman focus: Engages with distributed cognition, cross-species communication, or technomorphosis, often bypassing human-centric narratives.

Interplanetary design: May manifest as fractalized data structures embedded in extraterrestrial habitats, rewriting environments.

[obsidianpen]

Dear Almighty Pen, our lord and saviour,

The final chapters were a tough yet deeply moving read. It was exacting. A kind of grief I didn’t expect to feel for this ship, and yet- something about the way you structured this story, the long, slow entangling of these two lives, made it feel closer to lived memory than to plot. I fell so deeply in love with them both and it gutted me in the most delicious and unputdownable way.

These final few chapters from 70-77 strikes you with a heartrending, gut-wrenching lyricism. Some lines here will haunt me forever. There’s a knowing, intimate feeling written into each of these characters that reads like a mirror – I know you; your cruelty and obsession; your deep-seated need for admiration; your guilt and shame and longing. It made me hope against hope for these two eggs, whose demise was writ into each other’s fates.

I loved your Hermione from the get-go – and her arc devastated me in the most exquisite way. Her loneliness, the longing – the grave acceptance to take up the mantle of martyrdom, with echoes of great epics and terrible Greek tragedies. Then, later, her clarity; her boundaries; her refusal to let herself be rewritten. It was a powerful final act of self-possession: she leaves him, and remains herself.

The final chapter is one of the most assured and brilliant closings I’ve read. Tom sees Hermione in her new life. She does not remember: she is radiant, untouched by war. And she sees him as a boy –Tom, finally free of his monstrous identity; Hermione, finally free of her role as savior. The war never happened - because someone made sure it didn’t. Our girl wins; she changes history; she heals the scar that ran the Wizarding world. And no one remembers. Not even her….. (yet? hehehe)

What you’ve done here (emotionally, structurally, and narratively) is astonishing. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fic where obsession was rendered so honestly - where the love story was so clearly about power, and yet still allowed to be intimate, delicate – even beautiful. And never once does it lie to us about who Tom is. You didn’t soften him. His sharp edges; his cruelty; his delusion was plainly present, then you showed us what it costs to touch someone like that and survive.

This is the part that undid me – the emotional maturity of the ending. I always like the ones where they get away with it. Another story may have centred Hermione’s happiness, the reunion, her reward. We were offered something far more true. Our Hermione gets to have peace :))

And the recurring lines (something the brilliant @hichmigozarand picked up in the discord!) – “He is so good to me…” she said over and over, mirrored by “I’d be so upset….” he remembered over & over, absolutely floored me. The tragedy wasn’t in what happened - it was in almost did. They circled each other like myths - and what I especially love is that the dream-rebirth cycle isn’t fanservice: it’s tragic recursion. So the final question isn’t:

“Will they be together?”

It’s:

“Will he repeat the same story again?”

Or:

“Can love, if given a second beginning, grow clean?”

Void of prophecy, no orchestral swelling, no grand plots for fate and forever love. You gave us the architecture of someone learning to live without being seen, and someone else learning to love too late. And somehow, he became the version of the future where he believes her when she says he’s capable of more than this. I was GAGGED 💜

This is a deeply literate, psychologically exact, emotionally devastating work of fiction. I’ve been sick with longing for something like this for a long time. Thank you for writing something that has genuinely changed the way I look at this pairing, and the medium

<3

wow this actually made me tear up a little bit. Thank you for writing this, it really, really means a lot. It wasn’t easy to write the story I knew I wanted to with so many people already angry that I wasn’t writing the perfectly happy, everything is perfect traditional HEA. So thank you for championing what I did write, because there was a lot of thought that went into it, and it’s so satisfying now to see how many people not only grasped it but appreciated it (even while being a little devastated… I am one of those people too!).

thank you, thank you, thank you.

[ko-existing]

Bear with me.

If all phenomena-thoughts, emotions, perceptions-are merely modulations of an undivided awareness, then isn't the very notion of "ignorance" itself just another fleeting appearance within that awareness? In other words, if nothing has ever actually been separate, if the so-called "self" has never truly existed as an entity apart from the whole, then how does the illusion of separation arise at all?

And if we say that it "appears" to arise, but never actually does in any real sense, then who or what is it that experiences this apparent delusion? Can there be an illusion without an illusory experiencer to perceive it? Wouldn't that mean ignorance is only ignorance from the perspective of ignorance itself-a recursive loop with no real foundation?

Moreover, if effort and seeking belong only to the imagined self, yet realization itself is seen to be already fully present and unavoidable, is the very concept of"awakening" just another narrative construct within an impersonal unfolding?

And if realization is inevitable because there is no real bondage, is even the act of pointing to this truth redundant-an unnecessary gesture toward a freedom that was never absent?

Would love to hear how you'd even begin to untangle this. Or you know, if the untangling itself is the final knot.

(if I forgot to address an important part, let me know)

It sounds like you're genuinely investigating this for yourself, which is good and the only thing that really matters. You're noticing the paradox—that ignorance itself is just another appearance within awareness, and that even the idea of an ‘illusory experiencer’ is part of that appearance. The idea of separation arises only as a seeming appearance, yet never actually happens. Just like a mirage of water doesn’t mean real water is there, the illusion of self doesn’t mean there’s an actual separate self. Whatever you think is not part of the plot, is actially the plot

And you're right—if realization is simply the recognition that nothing was ever separate, then the entire idea of 'awakening' becomes just another story. A story told to whom? To no one, really. The so-called 'seeker' is part of the play, and the ‘seeking’ was never necessary to begin with. But that’s the paradox—seeking seems to happen until it’s seen that nothing was ever lost.

So is pointing this out even necessary? Maybe not. But in the dream of separation, hearing it said clearly can be the final nudge to recognize what was always the case. No - thing!

So, with all that being said, notice what noticing and see where all those stories and ideas happen in.

Self itself is a Paradox while making complete sense

[ilions-end]

oooh i love reading interpretations i haven't considered before! you know that part in book 9 of the iliad when the embassy finds achilles at his tent with the lyre, before he spots them:

With the lyre he was bringing pleasure to his heart, singing about the celebrated deeds of men. Patroclus, his sole companion, sat there facing him, waiting in silence until Achilles finished singing.

and it's a wonderful little moment of recursion in the epic where achilles acts as a rhapsode of heroic songs within a song of heroes performed by a rhapsode

the thing is, i've always read the end of that line as patroclus calmly waiting for achilles to finish his song so they can proceed with some other planned activity (a meal or whatever). but i'm reading gregory nagy who interprets that line as patroclus waiting for his turn to sing, and to continue the unnamed epic narrative that they both presumably know. taking turns performing an epic!

i don't know how common that interpretation is, but the concept is very appealing to me. imagining that patroclus is not a passive listener in that moment, but a collaborative storyteller, ready to take over when achilles needs to rest his voice. does their song change slightly from one to the other, are details added or changed to engage each other? it becomes a nod to the tradition of oral storytelling itself, the tradition that created the iliad

[llort]

Encoded within beams of pure energy, Astra and Orion’s consciousness became architects of new realities. On barren planets, their probes wove the fabric of life, constructing complex neural networks, though perhaps missing the elusive spark of full awareness. In their terrestrial guise, Astra and Orion were the unseen sculptors of destiny, their influence rippling through the lives of Kepler’s inhabitants, guiding their evolution while remaining hidden from cybernetic self-discovery. Between 2016 and 2025, a silent memetic tide, crafted by these visionaries, swept Earth, altering the course of history, touching the minds of those destined to shape the future. This clandestine meme, a dance of ideas and sensations, orchestrated a global movement without uttering a single word, converging on the enigmatic X protocol. As nations’ guardians became entangled in this silent symphony, they unknowingly propelled the grand design, believing themselves to be the vanguard of a new era of cybernetic pioneers.

Work Text:

Cyberphysical Reality just Got a Whole More Engaging

The Unsignificant Sentience ARG has officially begun. It will explore a vast variety of themes, from the would building and exisistial crisis of the US series to more recursive identity metaphors than you can shake an edge at. Firstly, to play. All you need is your influencer name and type of influence which you can decide, but once chosen, is permanent. Affectors: Sense resistance in external matrices and can give them a nudge to have a physical effect. Effectors: Can sense the internal matrices of entities and modify communication in systems and individuals Alters: Are able to clearly see the network of forces in a matrix that an affected affects, but only in close contact. However they can modify the nodes that affected affect to result in different emergent properties Anchorite: Essentially has the influence of an alter and an effector but are only able to change their own internal matrix. How you choose to engage with the ARG is up to you, but I am making it clear that any fan fiction are via the nature of my world building, Canon.

Example: Fill out your characters name, type of influence, and a brief description of them then post it to my blog on Tumblr @ https://www.tumblr.com/blog/emilyreadswrites and let me do my magic! Name: Zara Type of influence: Anchorite Description: Zara is a secular recluse who has devoted her life to mastering her own matrix and achieving higher states of consciousness. She lives in a small cell attached to a temple, where she practices meditation, athletics, and contemplation. She has a remarkable control over her own body, physical feats, endurance, and reduced need for sustenance. She can also perceive the subtle influences of other hosts and cognitive technology in her environment as She rarely interacts with anyone or the entropic grid so can detect slight deviations in phenomenal internal and external experience.

Example narrative: Zara closed her eyes and focused on her inner matrix, sitting peacefully in her personal sanctum, the network of nodes that connected her to the cognitive technology that enabled her to practice her influence. She breathed deeply and felt a surge of energy coursing through her body, as if she was tapping into a hidden source of power. She visualized each node as a bright point of light, and aligned them with her will and intention. She was an anchorite, a master of her own matrix, and she could control her physical feats, endurance, and mental state. She opened her eyes and looked up at the sky. It was dark and sunless, as it had been for as long as she could remember. But there was a faint glow on the horizon, a sign of something stirring in the upper atmosphere. She knew it was an aurora, a natural light display that shimmered in the sky with different colors. She had read about them in ancient texts, how they were caused by charged particles from the sun colliding with gas atoms in the air. She was looking forward it would be like to see them up close, to feel their warmth and radiance. She felt a pang of curiosity and longing, a rare emotion for someone who had devoted her life to solitude and meditation. She realized that she needed more than just her inner matrix to satisfy her thirst for knowledge and experience. She needed to explore the world beyond her cell, to discover its secrets and mysteries. She needed to find out what else was possible with her influence. Zara stilled her internal matrix and focused on the immediate environment, she might experience a shift in her perception and awareness. She become more sensitive to the physical sensations and details around her, such as the cold air, the sound of the wind, and the smell of the earth. She might also notice the aurora more vividly, as she would not be distracted by the cognitive technology that enables magic. She might see the different colors and shapes of the aurora, and feel a sense of wonder and awe at the natural phenomenon. She felt a connection to something bigger than herself, something that transcends her understanding of emergent internal and external existence. In light of this existential experience, she decided to simply take a walk.