#pattern recognition and all

[mihai-florescu]

Ok i checked with my roommate and we both are getting sk8 episode 6 vibes of right before everything becomes painful. So now im more scared for the rest of the event...

[rincewinds-hat]

love the fact i just get war flashbacks every time one of my arms hurt for a longer period of time

[102ki]

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

community that has only seen themselves represented in a small handful of romance stories that aren’t explicitly about their real-world oppression, watching a new show or movie where they are represented in a romantic story that isn’t explicitly about their real-world oppression: getting a lot of “that other show with a queer romance that isn’t explicitly about real-world homophobia” vibes from this

[proffbon]

I made many attempts to decipher what my favorite type of video game romance is but due to limits on the options in a lot of games creating a not very accurate sample I decided to try it with just romances I deem my absolute favorite.

And yeah, there is a certain pattern. (And are you surprised it's mostly DA and Owlcat games romances?)

It's basically just slightly different plays on (re-)learning how to love trope. Usually it's a character who for certain reasons, be it their lifestyle, upbringing or past trauma, is wary of deep connections and in the beginning hopes for something casual before inevitably falling for the PC. And a lot of times these characters use facades to hide how they truly feel about the PC or other aspects of their life. (Zevran, Fenris, Davrin, Daeran, Astarion)

And then there's Marazhai...

Marazhai is here for a different reason.

[winged-wheel]

realizing I don't Post™ all that much but had a thought come to mind that I remember having months ago;

I'm not gonna discount the potential influence of recency bias, but thinking about Undertale/Undertale Yellow and their death songs, I always find myself consistently preferring "Justice" from UTY over "Determination" from UT. It's likely just my personal taste, but Determination always felt like it was 'slow' in a way that tended to feel like a jarring tone break from whatever killed you. Which, yknow, could probably also be framed as a positive since it's a DEATH song, but something about it Just Never Sat Right With Me.

"Justice", on the other hand, manages to not only be a PERFECT fit into any death scenario, it's also just??? A better sounding song??? Since the Justice motif is structured the way it is, it hits you with the main identifying bit of the song RIGHT at the start. There's no real buildup to it.

It also conveys a sort of "unfortunate end to a long journey" that Determination doesn't. That seems like it's by design, though, given that the dialogue in UT is LITERALLY YELLING AT YOU TO NOT GIVE UP, whereas in UTY you (ideally) go into the game knowing that Clover's tale is one with a set ending (to a degree) and that it will end in death. Justice, therefore, seems eager to treat any ending with appropriate finality, whereas Determination refuses to treat death as much of an ending at all... because in UT it usually isn't.

To play devil's advocate, however, comparing Justice and Determination as motifs isn't really that fair, at least through the lens of "which one makes a better death song", because Justice's motif is ALL OVER UTY's OST, whereas Determination has only one major (yes, I'm sleeping on Snore Symphony, sue me) reapparance: ASGORE (where it hits with the force of a thousand fucking suns). In UT's case, the Once Upon A Time motif is the one that shows up again for many of the game's more important moments. "Justice", regardless of its merit on its own, is given the opportunity to transcend its status as "the death song" while "Determination" kind of isn't; and when judging how I feel about either of them, it's difficult to be unbiased as a result of that fact.

Ultimately, both songs are awesome, but Justice UTY Good™, thank you for coming to my TED talk

[bestworstcase]

How likely is it do you think that there are/have been Grimm-based cults? I can't imagine there's Never been Grimm cults, and I'm particularly interested in the idea of there being Grimm cults or even just organizations who Actually Understand the Grimm and safely live alongside them. I think it's such a fascinating idea, I'm very tempted to come up with a mysterious faction that respects/admires the Grimm (like how people did/do respect forces of nature in religion) and (mostly) safely lives alongside them. Any thoughts?

two obvious paths. whether the second is viable depends on how well you trust my basic reading of the grimm as sapient beings who reflect back what they’re given—dark mirrors—but the first is textually sound without any extrapolation required.

#1: the grimm as gods of war

these are the salient facts:

the grimm follow groups of bandits around to scavenge in the wake of their raids

criminals in mistral sometimes use captive grimm to execute members of rival gangs

grimm are more strongly drawn by violent anger and hatred than by sadness, fear, or other negative emotions.

it’s possible (per ‘before the dawn’) for one side of a conflict to "ally" with the grimm in battle if the other side is, er, tastier

ok. imagine you have a region where most of the people live in small nomadic groups—perhaps a steppe or a desert, their subsistence base is herding—with smatterings of fortified towns and villages around the edges of the region where there’s arable land enough to support a larger sedentary population. the nomadic groups can’t produce their own weapons/armor (mines, smelters, and forges aren’t portable), so they’ll need to either raid or trade with the towns for that. and conflicts between these nomadic groups over territory and other resources are inevitable.

how do the grimm figure in this region?

well a) the grimm are going to be following the nomadic groups around, with more warlike groups attracting more grimm, and b) grimm will fight alongside people against a common enemy if their "allies" are calmer or otherwise less appealing.

this is like… a perfect storm for the nomadic groups to start venerating "their" grimm as war-gods, in tandem with fostering warrior-cultures that prize tranquility or joy and mercy in battle; there is no honor in hatred or rage or taking pleasure in killing (our grimm turn against those warriors who lose themselves to bloodlust), so a good warrior must be calm, decisive, and swift, and never prolong a fight unnecessarily. but it’s also beneficial to make one’s enemies fearful and angry, or provoke them into hatred.

all it takes is one or two warriors who kept a cool head in battle noticing that the grimm ignored them to go after another warrior who went berserk and then interpreting this as a moral judgment. historically, we know grimm were thought to be the vengeful or corrupted spirits of animals, or animals possessed by demons; both are understandings that encourage this sort of thinking. these are animal spirits that cannot rest because someone killed them without giving due respect, and now they seek to punish those who commit such wrongs… so we’d better take care to treat our adversaries in battle and the animals we hunt with honor and mercy.

and oh, we should pay our respects to the grimm, too. perhaps make some offerings. they eat the corpses of the slain after a battle, so… a) we mustn’t be wasteful when we hunt, it isn’t respectful, and b) we should consider the grimm in our funeral customs.

this is a very basic. BASIC human impulse. humans will try to propitiate the fucking sky because we’re so good at pattern recognition and also anthropomorphizing things that we’ll find patterns and read meaning into the most random coincidences. take that and add it to the fact that it legitimately is possible to form alliances with grimm… fgrhjsv

under these conditions grimm-worship probably tends to look something like:

warrior cultures that prize moderation, calmness, efficiency, and clever mockery or intimidation of the enemy in battle,

funeral customs that ritualize feeding the dead to grimm, and/or ritual sacrifice of captured enemies,

grimm viewed as battlefield psychopomps and/or patron spirits of warriors, whether as a class or as individuals or both, and

incorporation of grimm-like designs or motifs into armor and clothing of warriors, to intimidate enemies.

with wide variation in the details and elaborations. the reason for this common set of foundational practices is that religion is practical. it’s not arbitrary. it isn’t pretend. prayer and ritual are things people do because it works, or it’s believed to work, and the right methods are figured out through trial and error long before they coagulate into tradition. so with something like grimm, whose behavior really can be meaningfully influenced, similar patterns will emerge across different cultures because whether a given practice does or doesn’t work is a) more than random chance or coincidence, and b) extremely easy to identify because if it doesn’t work the grimm will attack you.

& #2, the grimm as nature gods

these are my presuppositions, based on extrapolation from the text:

the grimm have a physiological need for aura, which they can get by siphoning; they eat their prey in order to extract aura from the remains.

grimm attraction to emotions is akin to our attraction to the aroma and taste of food; strong emotions herald deep auras or excite aura so it’s more "nutritious" for the grimm, so they hunt by following emotion.

because aura/soul separates from the body at death, siphoning aura from a living person is much more efficient than killing and eating; grimm will prefer to be fed aura by someone alive over hunting if possible.

because aura can be channeled outward through tools, clothing, etc, it can also be channeled into a repository and stored for a while; this seems to be how the grimm lures in arrowfell work.

grimm are intelligent, emotional, social creatures who can learn to recognize certain groups of people as 'safe' or as friends/allies, without salem.

grimm reflect back the emotional energy they’re given; they’re not "attracted" to anger or pain per se, they just mirror it. bristle and draw your weapon at a grimm, and the grimm will charge at you. remain calm and retreat slowly, and the grimm will keep its distance too.

if all of these presuppositions are true, you can propitiate grimm by saturating an object with aura and leaving that out for the grimm on the regular. i imagine that organic/living things that naturally have aura would work best for this purpose; sacrificing an animal or a portion of your harvest is intuitive, and if fervent religious belief alone isn’t enough to infuse something with aura, then priests or religious officials whose auras have been unlocked and trained will do the trick.

if aura-saturated offerings aren’t possible, then you’d need someone with aura training to channel aura to the grimm through, like, a stick, or bare-handed if they were brave enough or confident enough. this is a more uncomfortable option (like physically) but we have a canonical example of a character doing it: she found it disconcerting, but not painful, and it’s implied that the grimm didn’t attack her at any point during. so a) it probably doesn’t do any more harm than having one’s defensive aura break, and b) stopping the flow of aura to the grimm by moving away won’t provoke the grimm to attack.

as unpleasant the prospect might seem, if it clearly worked to reduce or eliminate grimm attacks on the community, people would do this. people would absolutely do this. the big hurdle lies in discovering that this is possible—like you’d need someone to willingly approach a grimm, lay a hand on it, and channel aura into it without knowing what will happen, and the kind of person who would even think to TRY that is very rare—but once it was known? religious belief motivates people do all sorts of unpleasant, uncomfortable, or even outright painful and harmful things to themselves. fasting. self-flagellation. hermitage.

like… waves hands. if it’s a known thing in a community that grimm won’t attack anyone if a few people go into the wilderness every morning to stand there and pour aura into grimm who pass by until they’re tapped out for the day, lots of people will be fully willing and able to do that. far more than are willing and able to become huntsmen: it’s not dangerous or difficult, it’s just going to tire you out on your assigned days. and if you have say, a village of a hundred people of whom ten are able to do it, you can rotate so no individual has to do it more often than thrice a month. NBD.

and if nothing else except the emotional mirroring thing is true, then you can… more or less propitiate grimm by doing whatever, because in this case what makes propitiation effective is community belief that it works: if you and everyone else around you believes that wearing pendants carved in the likeness of grimm and pouring a libation of wine outside the village gates to entreat the grimm for safe passage through the wilds is effective in making the grimm leave you alone, then no one’s going to panic or raise the alarm upon seeing a grimm wandering around in the barley field, and the grimm won’t freak out either.

if you believe that a grimm is a being that can be appeased and you cross paths with one in the woods, you’re going to do what you believe will keep you safe; for a huntsman, that’s "draw a weapon and attack," but for you that might be "hold up your grimm pendant and recite a prayer to politely wish it well and ask for its blessing in return," which—if the grimm just reflect your emotional energy back at you—will probably make the grimm pause and look at you for a moment before continuing on, which confirms and reinforces your belief that this is the correct way to deal with grimm. This Is How Religion Works.

so all that to say, as long as i’m correct about at least one of these presuppositions—the one with the strongest textual evidence, no less—then propitiating the grimm will reduce their aggression dramatically if not stop it altogether. and if that’s the case then i’d imagine grimm-worship is quite common and also varied in more remote regions where human-grimm encounters are frequent.

the shape of that worship will evolve out of how people in a given community figured out that you can do this with grimm. if one person tries a certain thing and it works, and then more people try the same thing and it works for them to, then that is going to become known as the Thing That Works and it will be gradually refined and elaborated on from generation to generation. and on the other side of the mountains they might be doing the same process but with a completely different thing that also worked the first time.

so you might have a village making huge ritual productions of preparing a feast for the grimm with a portion of the harvest, orchestrated by a coterie of priests who fill the offerings with aura… and in the hinterlands a few hundred miles away you might have a group of nomadic herders who leave the bones of every sheep they eat for the grimm and also have elaborate coming-of-age rituals where you go into the wilderness to prove yourself to the grimm by baring your soul… and up north on the coast you might have a whaling town where sailors pray to something like the leviathan or the feilong as a sea-god because their ancestors happened to stumble into a symbiotic relationship with a giant grimm that preys on whales and realized these little guys in boats make better hunting partners than they do snacks. etc.

basically if you accept a presupposition that the grimm aren’t "soulless evil monsters whose sole purpose is to kill humans" and consider them as beings that have some rhyme or reason as to when they’re aggressive and when they’re not, and the rhyme or reason is something humans/faunus could plausibly figure out how to accommodate and/or influence, there are a lot of ways to build a grimm cult. ’cause religion is at its core humans trying to understand the world so we can keep ourselves safe, healthy, and comfortable; worshipping grimm is just a cultural framework for a threat management program.

think about it in those terms, and take however you think grimm work and ask "what could people Do to lower the risk of grimm attacking them?" and "what might people Do that doesn’t really have an effect but seems like it maybe does?" and then start to elaborate from there with "okay, what stories do people tell to explain why they do these things and how they learned to do these things? how do they conceive of the grimm and their relationship to grimm? how does this shape the social and moral values of this religion?" etc.

praxis comes first, belief second. and the praxis develops through trial and error with the basic goal of "how can we make the grimm leave us alone?" so things that clearly don’t work will be discarded. (with ‘clearly don’t work’ meaning "we did this and grimm immediately attacked us"; people will tend to take "we did this and grimm didn’t attack us for two months" to mean "it worked! we should do it every other month!")

[astercontrol]

Going through old conversations, and I still LOVE the one where we explored the parallels between Tron: Uprising

and

Batman Beyond

in their exploration of the theme: "aging hero trains a young successor to take on his name and role"

...

and how this led my brain into a delighted connection to another famous show that explores a very similar dynamic:

and how in that case, the role and the associated power had been passed down to multiple generations of successors before:

...

...

and how

if you tried to draw a parallel to All-For-One, the original hero the Quirk is named for...

within the world of the Tron succession of heroes

there's really only one possibility...

Alan-One, and One-in-All.

<3

[butchjess]

Well. hrm. the way they all connect to each other. like it’s all starting to look like a circle of some sort. jess as rory’s mirror/reflection/narrative foil but also jess as he pertains to luke and jess as he pertains to lorelai. luke breaking the church bells luke who says he was troubled but they gave him a chance and just bc a kid has issues doesnt mean they don’t deserve that. luke who is a figure placed against the rest of the town, just in the sense that he is not like them, he does not hold their values, he doesn’t even sound like them. which is of course a result of scott patterson’s new york accent, but adds to this theme anyway. and they use jess to build this picture, because they walk the same and talk the same and they’re stubborn—independent to a near self-endangering degree—and emotionally repressed in the same way and luke himself admits that he spent more time working at his dad’s shop than he did at school, which jess also does. but jess and luke are also. very very different when you get past these similar values that are maybe ingrained into them through different circumstances and same genetic makeup. and in their differences you get a lot of jess and lorelai’s similarities. when it comes to their family dynamics and how it’s affected them in particular. it’s made them independent yes, but it’s also made them hypervigilant, almost paranoid in the way they are allergic to accepting help and especially accepting help from the people who hurt them. jess only goes to his mother’s wedding because luke asks him to, lorelai only asks her parents for money because rory needs it for school. and they, and this is where they differ from luke, don’t know how to trust people and so they don’t know how to talk to people. where luke’s particular brand of emotional constipation comes from a general cluelessness as to how to do it—which is why the tapes helped him so much—lorelai and jess’ come from emotional responses to the situations they grew up in. while it was different—lorelai growing up rich, jess growing up poor—the effect it had on them still resulted in something similar. lorelai with her overbearing manipulative mother and (emotionally) absent father, and jess with his neglecting manipulative mother and (in all senses of the word) absent father. the ways that, despite their effort to distance themselves, they still end up with similar mannerisms to the parent they have the most conflict with (lorelai and her controlling nature + that scene where they have the same nighttime routine, jess and his love for books + tendency to run away). and of course, their romanticism. their big confessions and period drama-esque speeches and, yeah, i do think in a way jess was asking rory to marry him in 4x21. come with me. let’s get married. luke and rory both being the most important people in their lives. literati+javajunkie where they are all melding into each other, and luke is rory and lorelai is jess but on the surface level dynamic luke is jess and lorelai is rory and they are all each other. on accident. by sheer nature of making jess as a character for the sole purpose of interfering with luke and lorelai’s relationship (which means he is important narratively to them both) and by making him rory’s love interest/foil (because ASP casted him before she even had the idea for the character) you have now made an accidental blending of them all together. he is like a skeleton key of a character. Okay. okay.

[bacusdraculacape]

"I'll Call You Mine" (2021) by girl in red

reminds me of The Car. the track is a sapphic song with car implicated vocabulary in it.

GIR: "Sittin' in the backseat" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "And you pretend to fall asleep on the way back" - The Car

AM: "We had 'em out of their seats" - Big Ideas (BI)

GIR: "And i'1l call you mine and I know l've been around" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "If you call and have them pull around the car" - Hello You

GIR: "We're drivin' so fast hands out the window" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "The gloved hand's reachin' in to hit the switch" - Mr Schwartz

AM: "Let's shake a few hands" - I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am

GIR: "Takin' my body / And you're taking it down" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "If that's what it takes to say goodnight / Then that's what it takes" - Perfect Sense

GIR: "And I know l've been around and l'II call you mine" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "Sometimes, I wrap my head around it all" - Perfect Sense

GIR: "Come in my way" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "Gradually, it's coming into view" - Mr Schwartz

AM: "Come over here and give your buddy a hug" - Jet Skis On The Moat

GIR: "I'll Call You Mine" - I'll Call You Mine

AM: "The what's it called cafe" - The Car

[mexicanpadfoot]

Oh wow how were you able to predict the plot twist in that movie?

My brother in christ, I read four hours a day. My pattern recognition is no longer a skill, it’s a curse.

[this-user-is-sus]

Scientists this week warn that the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (aka AMOC, contains the Gulf Stream) is closer than they previously predicted, as early as 2025.

This is bad and will lead to ripples in climate, weather patterns, local "normal" temperatures, storm severity, ocean oxygenation and fishery productivity (hello phrase "fish die-offs" 😭), and sea level that will disrupt life as we know it and cannot be reversed in this century or maybe (likely) for centuries to come.

(You can check the Wikipedia page for more information.).

Scream at someone about this.

Go here -- https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ -- or here -- https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials. Start typing. Feel free to use the template I'm putting under the "read more." Press send. Repeat if you have the energy. Ily if you do it even once. Thank you, and keep fighting the good fight!

Dear <NAME OF OFFICIAL>,

<OPTIONAL SENTENCE OR TWO TO INTRODUCE YOURSELF. Say why climate change matters to you. Say if you're frightened. Say if you're depressed. Say if you're anxious. Make it personal.>

This week a study was released (https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/world/gulf-stream-atlantic-current-collapse-climate-scn-intl/index.html, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w) showing that the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is far closer than scientists had previously thought. When this current stops, it will have far-reaching impacts on sea level, weather, storm patterns, and fishery production that will be irreversible for a century or far longer.

I am deeply worried about the future. We need climate change ACTION now, not just voluntary incentive programs. Please take action to improve our electrical grid, transition our power plants to clean fuels, transition to clean modes of transportation, and tax carbon emissions.

Sincerely,

<YOUR NAME HERE>

[rice-crackerz]

"I'm going for gasps."

[taviokapudding]

My dad and I were chatting before bed when he said "damn shame Republicans hate Democrats too much because you almost saved the United Healthcare ceo"

And I stared at him in confusion until I remembered I convinced Democrats to write the active shooter alert system bill in 2022 & Republicans said no. Since my Twitter is gone, the thread of me @ everyone is gone. And when Trump got re-elected, I removed the video discussing the bill concept for public comments. It fully slipped my mind because I went from pulling teeth & being reluctantly patient to full on cussing, cursing, and hexing the government by the end of 2023.

I hope that Twitter DC staffer is having a good laugh- I bet their bosses are pissed wwwwww

I don't remember the exact wording I wrote to the White House when I cussed out Biden for funding war crimes (2023) & the bill itself (2022) but I did list consequences I foresaw that are happening now, so suck to suck if nobody listened & are on the receiving end of massive hexes

I guess my dad is right, the GOP technically killed Brian Thompson in 2022

[bees-bees-fear]

Leliana is voiced by an actual French actress, and is just speaking: wow this sounds so fake

Characters have actual real proportions, instead of hero proportions: wow this looks so weird

Characters converse like people with facets, instead of archetypes: wow this sounds so bad

Writers interact like actual human beings who make art and are inspired by feedback: wow this is so unprofessional

[pattern-recognition]

i think the mug that tsukumizu has is Hasami Porcelain™️ product number #HGD120, which is funny because I’ve always wanted Hasami tableware because it reminds me of the same qualities that appeal to me about their art. anyway idk if it says more about me that mugs remind me of mangaka or that i can instinctually recognize niche ceramics based on one nonspecific photo, some sort of pattern or something