mfbrandi

Monk & Mingus for everyone, no?

Now I want you to come to an amicable agreement, but which is it going to be? (I’d have hoped jazzy mathematicians would be more at the Elvin Jones/Tony Oxley end of things. But I probably took one blow too many to the head as a child.)

Orlanth, for sure. Perhaps.

Ah, well, I came to bury Uleria, not to praise her (and without any of that complex Shakespearean irony — I am a simple fellow). 😉

As a measure of how unhip I am, I owe my knowledge of their existence to my high-school maths teacher. The first three albums are all good, but start with Real Life. It was falling apart a bit by the end — the live album and Magic, Murder & the Weather — but then Devoto turned in a decent solo album. (Government health warning: these are just Brandi’s opinions — discount as necessary.) A friend of mine spent time in Manchester in the ’80s and knew a bunch of people on the scene (man). Sadly, he reports that Devoto was too taken with the “look at me, I’m a rock star”-ness of it all. Ho hum! 😉

I tend to think — and I must stress that I do not know this to be true; I can live without the hate mail — that the “porno chic” Uleria appeals to people (dare I say boys?) who have a cop-in-the-head Puritan to throw off. Those of us who never had a bad case of that (or so we tell ourselves) may be seen as sneering at other people’s sex-worker fantasies — so “anti-sex”, “uptight”, or “no fun”. Sounds like the ’70s redux. And you know, I have been called worse. So I was maybe poking a little fun at an imagined Gloranthaphile who railed against anything Chaos “tainted” but — what shall we say? — trouser-tented over the sex/love/life three-for-one bundle of heteronormativity we could label “Uleria”. Me? I’m with .

On a flipper tip, Gbaji karaoke!

Although even dipping into the Well of Daliath might lead one to think her an impostor or a pathetic remnant. (And I am sure we can cook up something more heterodox than the WoD version.) And Uleria does seem to tie into some whoppers — no one is going to buy any of this nonsense (without some prince of lies as (m)ad man): A cult whose devotees are taught a skill whose “tools and media are human bodies” has to sound a bit creepy, right? And presumably erotocomatose lucidity comes to us via ‘the wickedest man in the world’, ‘the great beast’, who — “even if unlike most braggarts had actually done some of the things he boasted of” (I forget who said that) — is best described as what, the Christian fundamentalist id let off the leash? The return of the repressed? Don’t you just want the Uleria cult to be a hiding-in-plain-sight mask of capital ‘D’ Devil worshippers? I mean, subbing for the true “energy which can fill and permeate anything” — — as it slouches toward Bethlehem to be born: MGF! And if you want a Mallia connection (I don’t, really): The feminists might do well to shun all of this feminine mystique. I hear that Shulamith has done a deal with the Mostali to free women from childbearing — “Feminists have to question, not just all of [Gloranthan] culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature.”

I think you are getting into the spirit of Chaos wordplay: treating ‘a hole in existence’ as ‘a hole which exists’ or ‘a hole which is located in existence/cosmos’? And I am proposing play with all of these notions of Chaos: the void state preceding creation the gap or abyss created by the separation of heaven and earth space the expanse of air the nether abyss infinite darkness /dev/null nothing not anything How can one fail to see Umath–Orlanth in there? The rebels against Yelm are legion but they are also one: the separation of heaven and earth. We can put this in the mouth of a Sky pantheon theologian: “Chaos separates Heaven and Earth, mortals from God.” An unusually reflective Storm priest might say: “We raise our eyes to the Void but we see only the dome of the Sky, and thus we mistake Heaven for God. But the divine surrounds us, unseen. This is one meaning of ‘Invisible Orlanth’.” (This is helpfully ambiguous between the Void before and the Void beyond the dome of the Sky — but perhaps Orlanth’s blow struck against Yelm renders this a distinction without a difference.) And we can ‘answer’ the riddle of why some Nysalorean illuminates are enlightened and others are corrupt: “Nothing can make them see the error of their ways.” (Echoing Homer’s Polyphemus: “Nobody has hurt me.”) Now I have no beef with real-life Buddhists — who have written screed upon screed over thousands of years, so much that it is doubtless inconsistent; how could it not be? — but for the purposes of rehabilitating our fantasy Buddhists, the Nysaloreans, why not take seriously the meaning of ‘nirvana’ as being blown out? If a flame is blown out, it ceases to be. And IRL people love to talk of the death of the ego, the self. And what is the source of the universe? If it has one, it must be nothing, because as soon as you have something, you have the universe (even if it is nothing like present reality) — and yes, we can play on “it came from nothing”/“it did not come from anything”. The hardcore mystics take the nothingness of Chaos to the limit, beyond merely darkness, a gap, an expanse of air: “What is Chaos? It is not anything. Where is Chaos? Nowhere.” Surely, I cannot be the only one for whom this reeks of MGF. (Although, that is exactly the sort of thing I would be wrong about.)

Where’s the fun in that? 😉 But I was trying to get at Jörg’s attitude (the theorist, floating above the thing), rather than the attitude of — say — a PC of Jörg’s. But maybe he was in character.

I already knew you thought this, but I would like to draw you out a bit more. I will repeat the case for the prosecution; it goes something like this: The Godlearner perspective seems to be that of the putative origins of the universe, the Void takes priority with the Plasma being at the opposite — reality — end of the umbilical cord, whether or not the cord represents a temporal development. (I know: coals to Newcastle.) Then Greg says: A natural way to take this — according to me, anyway — is to equate Chaos with the Void. Chaotic features are of the world — they are horror vacui made flesh — but Chaos itself is not. And so Chaos terrifies some, is a solace to others, and leaves others wondering what all the fuss was about: “don’t the concepts of presence and absence come as a job lot?” This is why Nysalor — love him or loathe him — is ineluctably a Chaos deity, because his gift is ‘nirvana’, being ‘blown out’, the big zero. And it lends irony to the Darkness and Air forces claiming to be opponents of Chaos when they are themselves — according to some, anyway — manifestations of absence, which is Chaos. The ‘chaos monster’ is one who reacts badly to touching or contemplating the Void: they feel the horror, it is written on their bodies, they are the tormented. So Chaos-as-Void seems to fit the pre-Gloranthan, IRL understanding and (IMO) key bits of exposition of Glorantha. It also allows people to take varying attitudes toward Chaos: we can feel differently about it without having to argue about what it is. So what is wrong with this picture? You surely think something is, so help me see the other viewpoint. Pretty please!

Although, to be charitable to Greg, we can say that he wouldn’t expect a single rune ever to provide a solution: won’t really fix your medical problem without or . But in the context of trying to distinguish the domains of two runes, one wouldn’t emphasize that. A rune’s power is only a virtue in the right context. Ompalam had until retconned.

Yeah, but I say it so often I figure (a) people are sick of it & (b) it goes without saying. 😉

There is being a doctor and there is healing. Sometimes when a patient has cancer, accommodating it is the right course of action: the cancer is progressing slowly and something else will kill the patient first, so leave it be. I agree, of course, that this is not healing the patient of their cancer. Consider the case where someone has an immune system which would overreact to a stimulus if exposed to it: is there harmony before they are exposed to the stimulus? If we say that there is and that exposure to the stimulus would cause disruption — because it would cause inflammation — what would we conclude about healing as restoring harmony? Remove the stimulus? Put a barrier between the stimulus and the patient? Alternatively, treat the patient with immunosuppressants to enable them to live with the stimulus. Now this is a return to the prior state in the (thin?) sense that previously there was no inflammation, but the new situation has features that the prior ‘harmonious’ state lacked: the presence of the stimulus and a less hair-trigger immune system. ‘Restore harmony’ is not really a theory of medicine, it is a vague picture. Perhaps sometimes it will suggest helpful courses of action, but if it is the only thing one thinks of, it might perhaps mislead. Taking the more general case of restoring harmony, suppose a refugee population (the newbies) arrives in an area where the existing population (the grogs) had previously enjoyed a ‘harmonious’ existence — this might be disruptive and produce ‘dissonance’, but what is the best way to think about the problem? The grogs might think that harmony should be restored by sending the newbies ‘back where they came from’. Well, that might fix the grogs’ problem — ‘heal’ them (yes, I know) — but what about the newbies? Maybe the newbies old home is now radioactive slag or a vampire nest and those problems are not going away any time soon. They cannot achieve ‘harmony’ by winding things back, they need something new. Sure, to be acceptable their new situation will need to have some features of their life before the bombs or the bloodsuckers arrived, but it will need to have new features, too, notably location. And the grogs may have to change to accommodate the newbies. Now maybe we can still file finding an acceptable synthesis under ‘harmony’, but that is not harmony conceived as restoration of a prior state in all its concrete details. Of course, one can always say ‘the old state was acceptable, the new accommodation is acceptable — you see: healing = harmony = restoration!’ — you can push toward generality till you find something in common between the old and new states, but how helpful is that in finding the new accommodation? The grogs new life may be as good as their pre-newbie life, but it may be very different, perhaps in profound ways, no? If you have a picture that is not a testable theory, it may be hard to disprove(!), but that doesn’t mean that it is right or helpful. That is not to say we should all be little Karl Poppers in every aspect of our lives, nor that ‘pictures’ that are sometimes unhelpful are not also sometimes suggestive of solutions.

Err, really? So world-negating and world-affirming mythologies both regard life as a disease but differ as to the prognosis. JC sounds as depressed as Tiptree: is the Plan the Plan is (and a bunch of others). As for “the natural conclusion of the joining of a man and woman in love is the birth of a child” — at least now we know what made the Spider throw up. “Healing, however. Healing falls in the realm of Harmony, of returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted.” Now this may be a narrow way to look at medicine, but if I read it right, it is worse than that implying harmony [is] returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted. (Good luck running the sand back up the hourglass to a point where everybody is happy. The unspoken assumption is that we wind back to the point where we are happy and screw them?) I don’t think I would include that in a training package for diplomats. Definitely no thesis (prior state) + antithesis (disrupting stimulus) = synthesis (new normal), here. Let’s say Greg was trying to think like a Gloranthan: “Who moved my cheese? I must destroy them utterly and anyone who knew them even slightly. Then I can move my cheese 2 mm north, restoring it to its cosmically ordained position.” But yeah, this does all sound very CA and Uleria.

May as well have its own “info graphic”:

Cannot fault the Sun–Spider on orientation or appetite. You won’t catch her fretting about Chaos and purity. The less charming version of the hourglass model of the cosmic cycle is that the Spider — head down — vomits forth Cosmos, flips 180° and sucks it/us all back in again, flips 180°, rinse and repeat. But I am lazy and repeat myself. Bring me new heresies to digest!

But remember poor old Huntun who started out with none and had extra drilled out of ‘gratitude’ — although Gloranthans might shrug and say, “Probably Utuma.”

I think of as an hourglass: as the sand (matter–energy) flows through from one half to the other, one Void is polluted/one Cosmos born … and the universe next door reverts to nothing; flip and repeat; time in a bottle. (See also Orlanth’s self-trepanning.) I cannot help but see as a bow tie and the undead as clowns. But taking your lead, the ‘stake’ is a barrier between the chambers of the hourglass overdetermining the no-flow condition — the thing is horizontal, anyway. The vampire as cut off from Life, the interplay of Chaos and Cosmos. I didn’t know that, but it figures. I don’t go for as linked to communication — nothing touches — but that is old Issarian ground. where art thou? Try something like this … We could say that unlike Mallia, she can only see ‘half’ of life. If she succeeded in wiping out the children of Mallia, she would wipe out the children of Uleria, too: eukaryotes need prokaryotes. But maybe even this undersells it: she sees what is going on, but she refuses the ‘taint’ of Chaos Mallia brings to all Life. Does this make her a Death goddess in disguise? Maybe better an Unlife goddess: when the scribes wrote perhaps lighting conditions were poor or wishful thinking strong; perhaps this was there to be seen: Undeath is not made by toppling Life and staking it — why would a vampire in its undead condition already be staked? — but from a simple twist of Fate combined with ownership of Harmony. Fate as fatalism. Harmony as parallel lines that never touch, as communication and contact refused. Zombiedom as the ultimate asceticism — supreme purity — cutting oneself off from Life but denying Death. The bug broom is not to save the children of Gorakiki and Aranea but to emphasize and ensure the ascetic’s purity. Life requires Death, Communication, and Chaos, else nothing flows. Chalana Arroy refuses this, so she is a deity of Unlife, not sister to Uleria or Mallia. Like Clark Kent and Superman, did you ever see Chalana Arroy and Gark the Calm together? There is no ‘Resurrection’ spell and at least the more honest ‘Create Zombie’ is cheaper. When Humakti and Death Lords put aside their differences and get blind drunk together — without fail — they will begin plotting to torch the nearest ‘nest’ of White Ladies. The sober Humakti know that the project is politically impossible. The hungover Humakti reflect on their own asceticism and possible zombie status. If a Zorak Zorani is close to their god, they know that we are all zombies but that at least some of us have a fire inside. Or you know, something like that …

Because I am a miserable old cynic, I kick against attempts to run together sex, sexual reproduction, love, and life … … and even the mainstream would seem to allow the possibility of alternative or more capacious understandings of ‘Uleria’. If Uleria is the goddess of love, the broos could probably do with some. If Uleria is the Old Survivor, the cup from which the whole world was poured, perhaps she is the chief god of Chaos.

I don’t know how that stands vis-à-vis current canon, but I cannot see why the Telmori should not tell that story. It is almost enough to make one think that Orlanth and Eurmal are just misunderstandings of aspects of Telmor. Excuse me while I find an appropriate moon to howl at.

Today in Your Dumbest Theory, some of my dumbest biology … Once upon a time — before the Spike exploded — Gloranthans recognised two deities of life: Uleria (mother of eukaryotes) and Mallia (deity of prokaryotes: bacteria and archaea). In the Greater Darkness, attitudes distorted and hardened: although Mallia and their children — and so life — predated love, sex, and Uleria, the very existence of the prokaryotes was denied, and Mallia was anachronistically reconceived as a goddess of death and the goddess of disease — wrong on multiple counts. As a survival of the early universe, Mallia is associated with Chaos, but did not conspire with Ragnaglar and Thed to admit Chaos into the world: the world came from Chaos, has always been shot through with Chaos, and will collapse back into Chaos. Every child of Uleria with cells containing mitochondria (the ‘powerhouses of the cell’) or plastids (e.g. chloroplasts) owes a debt to Mallia and is therefore ‘tainted’ by Chaos. Interestingly, many disease organisms are eukaryotes, children of Uleria: Entamoeba histolytica (amoebic dysentry) and Plasmodium falciparum (malaria), for example. Although syphilis (via Treponema pallidum) may be seen as Mallia’s ‘revenge’ on Uleria. Distortions and echoes of the true story persist in the official version: ‘Mallia was a fertile goddess who … eventually broke from the alliance [with Ragnaglar] … Mallia is pervasive’; ‘[Uleria] may be the only deity of the Celestial Court to survive the Great Darkness, though some believe that that being which is worshipped in her name is only a small portion of the whole of Uleria.’ If ‘Uleria’ is meant to be synonymous with Life, then we may perhaps doubt one or more of these: (i) that the entity worshipped in that name is truly the Life rune’s owner; (ii) that means Life; (iii) that ‘Uleria’ has a stake in ; (iv) that there are no survivors of comparable or greater antiquity. But some sexually reproducing eukaryotes like to attempt to remake Cosmos in their image … and to sentimentalize ‘love’. Perhaps the Uleria cult will have its Monrogh who will ‘prove’ that Uleria and Mallia were one all along, thus ending the small local difficulty. Maybe there was a long-standing scribal error concerning the sense of ‘predate’ in ‘Mallia predates Uleria’. PS: Perhaps vampires like to drink blood because the mature mammalian red blood cell lacks both (Mallian) mitochondria and a(n Ulerian) nucleus; and they definitely won’t eat their greens.

Sorry for any confusion. I didn’t mean to contrast it with the RQG description (which I don’t have to hand). The point was that the players get a short statement, while the characters may get a vision or something requiring interpretation (and certainly capable of misinterpretation). It is not that the character shoots the breeze about attitudes to life with their deity who — terse bugger — speaks to the caster the meagre seven (or ten) words that the GM gives the player. At least, that is how I read “there is always the … chance … that the character will read the signs wrong” — that is not normally how we would describe mishearing (or even, strangely enough, misreading) a short sentence, is it? But I have been wrong before and will be again. What surprised me rereading the spell description after a long time is that it doesn’t say what you get for your money: you don’t get information about the future; if the roll fails, the answer is misleading; but if the roll succeeds, then what? What relation to the truth of the matter or the god’s belief about the matter (which may of course be false) does the god’s answer bear? The spell description doesn’t say. My guess is that the idea was that the spell was a way for players to get facts out of the GM.

Oops — sorry. Didn’t mean to pass off your own idea to you! Is pursuit of power — enough power to stand a chance of killing a Devil able to gobble up most of the gods in short order — usually all-that rational? Even if some aspect of the result is agreeable (a safer, thinner world), the whole enterprise is barking, no? I was thinking of storing it up, as in a battery. Taking down Wakboth is presumably not meant to be a small matter, if I have the Gloranthan way of looking at these things right. (I suspect that IRL myths measure power scales with a stretchy rubber ruler, but most RPGs and superhero comics not so much. As ever, I may be way off.) The gods are “real”, but what kind of reality are they? Aren’t we often told that they lack free will — whatever that is — and aren’t we to imagine them as stuck in a Godtime loop “eternally” repeating their mythic deeds? Can they even “see” the world of Gloranthan mortals? I tend to think of a god as a vending machine attached to the game of Operation: if you are very careful, you can punch a hole into Godtime and extract a magical humerus or a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste of soup. For the sake of your sanity, your Glorantha certainly should vary. What determines a god’s answer? Are their answers true and consistent? If they are, how hard do Gloranthans have to work to create religious schisms? I tend — foolishly, no doubt — to imagine that NPC diviners have ways of getting from (dictating to) the gods the answers they want: priest thinks “no” -> god says “no”. I don’t say this to preserve a notion of liberal, tolerant, politically correct gods with unfortunately nasty cults; I am just not sure “what the god thinks” even figures. If we were to look at the RQ2 Divination spell description … … we would guess that the players got a seven-word answer, not the characters — they have to read the signs/entrails/goose flights — and that the status of a successful roll is unclear. I suspect the spell was for the players to get straight answers about “factual matters” from the GM, not for worshippers to doorstep deities with attitude surveys: “On a scale of 1 (coldly furious) to 5 (warmly embracing), Mr Orlanth, how do you feel about werewolves?” I totally get the Telmori-are-people-too thing and that they deserve our sympathy for their curse and impending doom, but what is the motivation for making them non-chaotic? If a bunch of left-handed humans were being persecuted as supposed dragonewt sympathisers, would we immediately reach for “they are not really left-handed”?

I guess this can be looked at as “why them?” or as “why genocide?”. I won’t attempt to say why the Telmori were singled out: others have made a better stab at it than I could, and I don’t really feel like grubbing around looking for reasons to wipe out one group rather than another. As for the other, I will attempt that — with the usual risk of being wrong and/or unpopular. I have a feeling that we are supposed to see Glorantha as a place with a very straightforward magical economy: sacrificing two chickens yields twice as much magical power as slitting the throat of one … and feeding grain to a hungry chicken gets you no power at all. (Possibly it is even grimmer than this, but this will do.) Also: more magical power = more mythical significance. Why? Because we are to think of myth as the actions of the gods — prayer POWered machines — rather than as stories? Another way of looking at things might have the betrayal of a single unexceptional person — or a single act of compassion — as yielding as much magical power, as much mythical significance, as good a story as the skinning of an entire nation. But there is a current in Glorantha — presumably, not the only one, or we wouldn’t be here debating this — that says the bigger, the bloodier, the more revolting (wearing your victims’ skins) the better. In terms of entertaining us and “in world”. So why would Argrath indulge in genocide? Because he is gathering magical power to remake the world — in his own image, presumably. Does this mean he is only “game mechanically” a hero? Not a bit of it — hero: a person admired for bravery, great achievements, or good qualities. It is very much or, not and. Through the magic of selective quoting, I can maybe even make it seem like I am not the only one to have entertained these thoughts, that it is the standard model: