Pastelbat @pastelbat@awoo.space

I think about these panels a lot

[Wicked + Divine spoiler warning]

Going through my photos and

Gosh I haven't thought about my RPG combat system in a while

That was/is rad

The sunset yesterday was pretty spectacular

When I spend the whole day drained and lethargic and unable to function

Then get a pretty consistent high-energy period each night

..Which I then medicate myself to suppress and sleep poorly through

It makes me wonder if sleeping semi-normative hours is really worth the effort of purposely sabotaging so much of my functionality/energy/creativity

De Sade: Main is inherently and violently horny

Mirbeau: Main has lost touch with true horny, it is violent only in boring ways instead

Foucault: Attempts to define NSFW are horny on main about main by main

LRT:

One is the robot that longs to be human, the other is the robot that wants to destroy all humans

holy heck, Hellboy 2 had a lot more physical VFX and costuming work in the creatures than I realised (I assumed CG was pulling more of the weight)

This is a really great article: https://monsterlegacy.net/2018/06/28/hellboy-2-mister-wink/#more-11324

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uI1KXHJVO8&list=PLfCf5y-R1T07UQ7XU4xw5p4dloBH9M5eg

This album..

Big fan of The Knife generally, but Silent Shout is so good

owwwww

I use f.lux just as 'software with screen dimming functionality' because that's surprisingly rare, so no colour-tweaking, no automatic time-of-day stuff required at all.

And it still goes "Hey!!! It's retina burning brightness time!!!" every single dawn.. Even with all that stuff switched off, even with timed-colour all set to the same level.. It messes up consistently. x_x

is there any Windows-compatible "just dim my screen, on my terms" software out there?

welp

what horrible people are setting off fireworks

*hides*

"Welcome to City 31, a model of peace in a post-invasion world. However, not all of Earth's inhabitants support interspecies alliance. Chimera Squad, an elite force of human and alien agents, must work together to destroy the underground threats driving the city toward chaos."

Get a creepy bloke in sunglasses say that, and you've just summed up half the cutscenes in XCOM2

..Pop culture sure is a rollercoaster experience sometimes

morbidly fascinated that the new XCOM game has gone with "XCOM 2 but you're the bad guys" as the pitch, seemingly without a trace of irony

Bonus Round:

- Mycroft raised Bridger
- Mycroft taught Bridger his worldview
- Mycroft taught Bridger Greek Mythology, with Apollo's Illiad as *the* central text in his education
- Bridger changed reality with miracles, sometimes subconsciously
- By the time of the first book, Bridger is 14

Is the Pantheonic nature of world politics actually accurate in-fiction because the narrator raised a kid with godlike abilities, who then internalised his cultural episteme and made it into literal-truth?

[SFX: Metatextual explosion]

This is, btw, a fantastic elaboration of the classic future-SF trope of weaving your own setting's history into real world history; The "I will join the ranks of great physicists like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein or Freep Gargolbort!" style of worldbuilding

Terra Ignota takes it a step further, where those fictional-historical figures (the founding figures of the Hive system, for instance) are deeply immersed in the history and the people that came before them, but interpret a narrative of that history close-but-different enough to our own to feel familiar but distinctly 'off'.

They are then narrativised in turn, and those that came before them remain, take on wildly different cultural associations (Thomas Hobbes), etc, as the culture shifts. The whole fabric of history, as a story we tell ourselves of where our foundations lie and how we got here, is permeable and recursive in Terra Ignota in ways that go almost entirely unnoted and unscrutinised in STEM SF.

Foremost example being Thomas Carlyle's historical narrative ("Great deeds of Great Men") being taken as a baseline established piece of academic truth

This shows itself not only the political makeup of the setting, but how it is portrayed (and on yet another layer of metatextual weirdness, how it is portrayed then impacting the setting itself; The first two books are published in-universe at the end of book 2, and have been widely read by the start of book 3)

So you have this perspective that feels *jarringly* monofocused on what's basically a classical pantheon of gods dictating the course of human history, in the form of the Hive Leaders and major political influencers like The Anonymous or Madame. The whole narrative and the characters within ends up giving those vibes, being more a story of gods and tragic heroes than an overview of human affairs at a time of massive upheaval.

And not all of that is explainable by "Mycroft misrepresents things", though much of it is down to who he focuses his story on and how he chooses to portray them. But Mycroft both comes from that culture, and (if we take his baseline 'factual info about setting' as truthful, which other narrators appear to confirm) is quite overt about its leaders-as-gods cultural trappings;-

Their sacred burial site for great political figures is literally called The Pantheon, after all.

I think both a large part of what makes Terra Ignota such a great series and what contributes the most jarring sense of missing or altered parts of the narrative is that the narrator is embedded in a cultural episteme that's familiar enough to us to not be utterly alien, but results in many visibly "off" things to someone approaching it from outside that perspective.

So while Mycroft is a *massively* unreliable narrator, the unreliability of the resulting text is not entirely (debate topic: is not primarily?) an individual quality so much as a result of his culture.

Being able to pause & slow down time makes it a heck of a lot more accessible when learning or brainfoggy, as well as like

If you've followed me long enough, you know I basically treat every Total War as a very bloodthirsty Pokemon Snap game

https://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-shogun-2-is-going-to-be-free-to-keep-on-steam-for-a-limited-time/

Total War: Shogun 2's gonna be free from the 27th-1st, and is generally agreed to be one of the best games in the franchise.

Shogun 2 was the game that got me into the series, it's very good stuff, and Total War's prettymuch the only realtime-combat strategy battle type thing I play.

I've settled into a pattern of using audiobooks for fiction & visual reading for nonfiction

I think cuz the I generally use former for more relaxation or while doing something with my hands, whereas nonfiction stuff tends to require more undivided attention

Not always, but generally?

I still have The Power Broker audiobook to finish, but.. I think I made it through 10 or 16hrs, and after that much I *really* needed to wash the taste of grubby 20th century US politics out of my head