Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

potatos can kill: you just use the "eyes", which contain glycoalkaloids.

They save the eyes for their even more secret weapon.

Spoiler

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

potatos can kill

Well, it is no surprise. Think of the Blue Moon Assassins as the pretty ladies who cut the thread.

When potatoes were retconned, what happened to the rest of the Solanaceae? We wouldn’t want to be done out of chillis, aubergines, and tomatoes, would we?

Spoiler

Edited April 8, 2023 by mfbrandi
illo

[Qizilbashwoman]

43 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

When potatoes were retconned

i don't know this retcon but I imagine they all arrived half a milennia ago when Moon flora were able to be grown again. Presumably they were unavailable after the Blue Moon cracked.

[scott-martin]

5 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

squish the baby [with the Block] (don't squish the baby!)

Arguably the deepest cut in this thread.
 

 

[mfbrandi]

15 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

When potatoes were retconned

i don't know this retcon

Yeah, you do. Just in case, here it is.

[Nick Brooke]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Yeah, you do. Just in case, here it is.

Now in its rightful home, at last.

[mfbrandi]

  Elf diets and wood-fired stars (escaped from Elmal construction site):

8 hours ago, scott-martin said:

at least one of the little suns was a friend to the elves in the dark. Did they warm their hands at his heat, even though the fuel was unspeakable?

I thought the cold little sun was the elf friend, but that aside aren’t all elves vegetarians, so hardly squeamish?

I don’t know whether vegetarian elves are a joke or whether the Aldryami are determined not to rely on non-vegetable life for their existence. That is why they kid themselves that Mee Vorala is descended from Flamal: they really cannot do without her. Meanwhile, the “black elves”, Venus fly-traps, sundews, and pitcher plants are chuckling at Aldryami memes on their social networks.

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

the cold little sun was the elf friend

Yeah, I bent that a bit to protect the brown mysteries. In the nuclear winter of Yelm's absence what they really craved was the light and what terrified the usual factions was the flame. How convenient it would be to engineer and promote a new sun with access to the heat stripped out. How lucky to participate in a grand project to swap out an old sun for a new one. How sad for hapless trolls!

But I do think now that some frozen forests turned to man's red flower in their desperation and in the absence of any other sources of the germinating heat and the feeding light. Call it an oakfed (so an oak can be fed while other "oaks" or lesser plants feed the flame), a survival covenant. Another high[land] sun now plowed under after centuries of religious debate. A way to burn elf bodies like the human nations do it today, to liberate trapped emotional / chemical energy and give back to a fresh generation. Like a lot of their true things, it was controversial. They get shy talking to outsiders about it.

Obviously they would have wanted to train the raw material along friendly lines, taking a hot little sun that won the mountaintop fight and pruning the dangerous heat from it across a few generations. When it could no longer reliably produce anything but light they were satisfied. A few who were there are still present in the deep groves of Peloria and beyond. I don't recall Monrogh consulting them. Instead, he had access to hotter little suns that grew up around the Yellow Way of Teshnos so his project would have had more of that going on.

Once the "regular" elves resolved their differences with and without Arkat's help, the forest sun cult was itself pruned almost to irrelevance and so we now have vague cosmological vestiges of a Yelamal or Falamalio or whoever depending on where you go, dream whispering in the gloom. "Why not a Palamalio," the embyli insist. "It's working ever so well for us."

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

I don’t know whether vegetarian elves are a joke or whether the Aldryami are determined not to rely on non-vegetable life for their existence.

IMG it's the serious kind of joke. But my elves are mostly a separate kind of human(oid) consciousness, a different way to figure out Man Rune mysteries through a variant relationship to death and the eater principle. As people, they need to eat something. Efforts to sit in the sun and grow their own internal sugar have been iffy at best. As "plants," the northern forests want to stay as insulated from the meat economy as possible: no herds, no dairy, not a lot of animal hunts for the table. So they developed a different kind of arrangement where some plants would be eaters (elves) and some would be eaten (crops) much like you have in the Prax covenant. 

This archaic religion, older than farming and developing along parallel lines to how Foundchild grows up into Waha (he said, reviewing the "odd" obsession in Campbell with food systems, good to eat not necessarily as good for thinking until something gets left out to ferment), survives in the Grain Goddess complex.

By the way, thanks for that thing. Reciprocating when I get a chance.

 

Edited April 11, 2023 by scott-martin

[mfbrandi]

  Still trying not to derail poor old Elmal.

10 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Opening up the notion of a Sun Dome LBQ with this association makes me wonder what independent non-Orlanth Sun Domes do at Sacred Time. I don't know if it's possible for them to reinvigorate the world in quite the Orlanth way . … their version might preserve or recover ritual elements that otherwise didn't really survive the Bright Empire. This is probably not quite an annual Hill of Gold, which IMG remains a more personal spiritual adventure. Do they integrate into the Orlanth LBQ with some form of Protects the Stead?

Well, Yelmalio doesn’t need a quest to bring back the light, because there is a light that never goes out, and it is him … although he aches to go out. For he is more than half in love with easeful Death — the little death, the grave, and the cosmic death of the Void. But he endures and he “wrestles” with my uncle, my uncle who promises it all.

And the hill of gold is a darkened underpass, and it is the problem, though the solution is clearly indicated.

Spoiler

Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I don’t care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought “Oh God, my chance has come at last”
But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask
Take me out tonight
Oh, Take me anywhere, I don’t care
Driving in your car
I never, never want to go home
Because I haven’t got one

Ahem! The quest, yes, the quest: surely Yelmalio’s quest is to bring back warmth to the world. There again, Zorak Zoran is his man: between them they contain the full power of Aether. (They are the perfect couple. We really need to make YO–ZZ shipping a thing. I sneer at your K/S fanfic.) Maybe this is why some people insist that Yelmalio is not horsey: they don’t want to frighten the horses.

[mfbrandi]

32 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

How convenient it would be to engineer and promote a new sun with access to the heat stripped out. How lucky to participate in a grand project to swap out an old sun for a new one …

Obviously they would have wanted to train the raw material along friendly lines, taking a hot little sun that won the mountaintop fight and pruning the dangerous heat from it across a few generations. When it could no longer reliably produce anything but light they were satisfied.

This is perfect.

The elves stole Yelmalio’s heat — sending it where? — and used his light to survive in Yelm’s absence. He was rescued by ZZ who had warmth to spare. Then the tale of Nysalor and Arkat — clearly misunderstood, but the question has always been just how — recapitulates or extends the love story of the OG odd couple.

————————

EDIT: Of course, this makes one wonder whether the Aldryami were the source of all the trouble. Orlanth says it was him that slew Yelm (that drunken old ham playing the sun) — and perhaps he did for all it mattered, the real action was elsewhere — but then he always liked to be the centre of attention, and Aldrya is happy to hide many secrets in the wild wild wood. Death as separation: light from heat.

Edited April 11, 2023 by mfbrandi
PS

[radmonger]

Light is just heat far away. Seperated by distance, you might say. Distance that was introduced when Umath inserted himself into the picture.

But the Mostali look deeper and say, it was the Grower who, in growing, made things bigger. That created a gap that Umath merely filled. Perhaps that in itself was merely an emergency repair to the damage the Grower wrought, putting  a small amount of newly-created stuff into vigorous motion to ward off the Void.

In any case, the Genertalan elf forests no longer entirely burn, save by hostile magic.

 

 

[mfbrandi]

51 minutes ago, radmonger said:

But the Mostali look deeper and say, it was the Grower who, in growing, made things bigger.

Don’t listen to anything the Mostali say. They deliberately obfuscate and misrepresent their cosmology so that no one will quite take on board that they think the big bang setting the world machine in motion was a mistake — a mistake they fully intend to rectify. The only good Mostal is a stationary Mostal — that is what they really think.

They are onto me. They are at the door. Please remember to mention me in tapes you leave behind.

Spoiler

We stood still
We all stood still
Still stood still
We're standing still

[scott-martin]

21 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Don’t listen to anything the Mostali say

If the ancestors of many people now living were once elves from the days when we still all lived in the forest the ancestors of all dwarves were once people who sometimes sleep fitfully, heads crowded with sky. Man Rune is a work in progress.

(Now do the triolini: it's too bad that our friends can't be with us today / the machine that we built would never save us.)

[mfbrandi]

11 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Now do the triolini: 
it's too bad that our friends can't be with us today
the machine that we built would never save us.

“It's impossible for man to live and breathe underwater forever,” was their main complaint.

I am listening to the Gil Evans version in your honour, although YO was pressing some Hawkwind gatefold into my hands — he has just discovered “The Golden Void” — pupils like saucers. Saucers, I tell you!

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Now do the triolini

The angry young Piscoi only listen to Drexciya these days — and there’s your undermining of the fish origin story.

And the Pamaltofuturists among the Ouori are not happy about their GtG write up — blatant racism, they say.

Spoiler

They wear no clothing, use no tools, and build nothing. Their primary interests are in eating, which takes up about half their time, and lolling about in great heaps in the sun. — Guide to Glorantha, p. 105

But you know what — the Triolini united will never be defeated!
I have seen the marine Wakandas they are building out there.
Rumours are they are making contacts ashore among the Rote Armee Fraktion trollkin
— the ones with the Janis Joplin shades and the stories about drinking with Peter Brötzmann.

Rock & roll politics.

Spoiler

Piscoi and Cetoi, I want to see a sea of fins out there
Let me see a sea of flukes
I want everyone to splash up some noise
I want to hear some revolution out there, Piscoi
I want to hear a little revolution
Piscoi and Cetoi, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide
    whether you are going to be the problem
    or whether you are going to be the solution
(That's right)
You must choose Cetoi, you must choose
It takes five seconds,
    five seconds of decision,
    five seconds to realize your purpose here in the ocean
It takes five seconds to realize that it's time to move, it's time to get down with it
Triolini, it's time to testify and I want to know, are you ready to testify?
Are you ready?
I give you a testimonial …

Edited April 11, 2023 by mfbrandi
tweaks

[svensson]

The Yelmalio cult is the DDR [aka East Germany] of Glorantha.

They're desperately xenophobic, incredibly close-minded, and highly pissed off that their more relaxed neighbors are doing just about everything better than they are.

There. I said it.

Edited April 12, 2023 by svensson

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Sacred Time IMG is a collective rite where everyone within a community comes together to recreate their sense of how they're all united and how they all fit together to make a larger world. For Lightbringer people, this starts with the LBQ and ends with the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise. OK.

Hill of Gold is a solitary ordeal, like initiation. You make a pilgrimage to the hill and you learn from your suffering. You might go and come back in a group but there's a sense that you experience it alone. "I fight," definitely. Fans of the cold sun like to fight like hell.

But how does that "I fight" cross the gap to "we win" in Hill of Gold? Or does it? Does it need to? Maybe this is not the way cold sun people recreate the world and reweave the compromise.

Well, I think I agree with you about sacred time, but that is probably why it gives me the willies. We are all us is fine when it means they are not them and so we don’t have to genocide them, but when belonging is compulsory, it becomes oppressive.

Sometimes the loners will feel sorry for themselves while everybody else is carousing, bonding, and otherwise sinking into the Bork Collective — OK, it was a typo, but Swedish Chef: the Next Generation, why not? It happens. It is boring. We don’t need a Morrissey cult. Let’s move on.

Sometimes the loners will embrace being monsters and go bite someone’s face off. This can be fun. ZZ? Sundry Chaos cults. Maybe Mother Hyena. One way or another, we have this covered. Next.

Join us — any us, but some us: they all have a place ready for the stray, the prodigal — or you will have to be a monster. There must be something else.

When Yelmalio goes off the rails, he provides the possibility of a path for non-mopey, non-monstrous loners. He fights. He loses. He loses power. He gets up. He carries on. He continues to bring light to the world even though he is himself denied illumination — Yelmalio as failed mystic. He hasn’t won, yet. He is a Kwai Chang Caine who gets his arse handed to him every week, but he remains a ray of sunshine, not a Byronic storm cloud.

This is the Yelmalio that never dies, so he is not Lightfore: there is a rod set to rotate about its midpoint; one end is stuck up Yelm’s butt, the other up Lightfore’s; round and round they go, antipodes; Lightfore was a constant in the Darkness because Yelm was dead, unmoving — if Yelm now dies every day, so does Lightfore. I think we have a diagram for it: . But Yelmalio is definitely unbalanced, or at least not balanced by Yelm.

Outsider Yelmalio doesn’t have an equivalent of “the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise.” He hasn’t been taken apart and rewoven, he is the ever lit, the holdout, the holdover from the previous dispensation. He is also Gloriana, the unfulfill'd queen. From his point of view, he is surrounded by zombies and revenants. He is Robert Neville. He is yesterday’s man. He knows no compromise — it is his glory and his limitation.

As time begins, the story is over for most of the gods: they have been sold out by Arachne Solara and are basically waiting in a kind of stasis — or perhaps a tight loop — to be eaten by Wakboth, although most of them don’t know it yet. There are some oddballs: Arachne herself, perhaps; I couldn’t say what truly binds Trickster; Sedenya has chapters still to play out; Belintar and sundry mortal gods-in-waiting. Probably there are more.

I always like to think of ZZ as one of the wild cards: unmoored in time, more than likely the chaos he claims to fight, and slain by introjecting his ultimate enemy, Aether, even before Aether was born — doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any. When the superheated void/darkness met the supercooled cosmos/light, how could they not hit it off? They are both carrying their pain. In ZZ, Yelmalio finally has a zombie who is honest about it — and his Arturo Quire. The perfect deracinated odd couple.

But crucially, Yelmalio’s ultimate lostness is something that plays out in Time, when most everyone else is remade and he is not: there is no myth of Yelmalio’s finding his place in the world, because it hasn’t happened, yet. Maybe ZZ can show Yelmalio the way to illumination (as his black mirror). Maybe Yelmalio can show ZZ how not to suffer from his (laving his burns in cold rays). But these are not Godtime stories, not stories to be told at sacred time. They are rough, tender, personal stories, as yet without ends.

When the cold light people and the hot darkness people move their stories on sufficiently, will that recreate the world, reweave the compromise? I tend to think not. They will find their place in the world — although they had to do it in hard, slow ways — so you might want to say their worlds change in a no-change, aspect-flipping way. But no, the world about them — the worlds of others — will not have changed. No one else will be affected. That would be … crass.

And yet, and yet … what would a world with a peaceful ZZ be like?

So Lightfore can do manly man things with long pointy sticks and argue with Elmal about whether they should enter the gymkhana, but Yelmalio will be off in the corner playing out his queer outsider sex magick mystical romance soap opera. That sounds like more fun, right? No? Just me, then. 😉

[mfbrandi]

7 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Yelmalio will be off in the corner playing out his queer outsider sex magick mystical romance soap opera.

Or less windily, it is Apollo and Dionysus doing the dance.

(If you don’t think boozy Dionysus is the demon ZZ, you haven’t seen the maenads in decapitation mode. Pop! Spurt! Squelch!)

[mfbrandi]

18 hours ago, svensson said:

The Yelmalio cult is the DDR [aka East Germany] of Glorantha.

Yeah, but the DDR wasn’t all bad: it gave us the great Zentralquartett and provided a home for Brecht and Eisler. 😉

18 hours ago, svensson said:

They're … highly pissed off that their more relaxed neighbors are doing just about everything better than they are.

Yeah, but being pissed off is its own punishment. Their more relaxed neighbours should just chill in the confidence that their blood pressure isn’t going through the roof. If you let the bastards get to you, they’ll grind you down just as they are grinding themselves down. If you keep a file on the Stasi take care lest you yourself become the Stasi — as Nietzsche never quite said.

[radmonger]

It is a Chalana Arroy cult secret that the birth of the red goddess was a perversion of a resurrection ritual, peformed by the apostate priest Deezola. The innocent young Teelo Norri was slain by the murderer Danfive Xaron, so that Rufelza could be brought back in her vacant body.

Somewhere in the lunar provinces, someone believes that the lightbringers quest was the same deal. The elderly loyal thane Elmal was murdered by Orlanth, as his weak light was no longer capable of sustaining life. The emperor Yelm took possession of the vacant body, shining brightly again.

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, radmonger said:

It is a Chalana Arroy cult secret that the birth of the red goddess was a perversion of a resurrection ritual

I thought that CA Resurrection was itself a perversion — that is what Humakt, Mallia, & Mee Vorala told me, anyway — as it denies the natural processes of decay and recycling. Zombie cults seem cherubic in comparison.

Giving the heavenly bodies personalities and casting their cycles as death and resurrection was a CA public relations stunt, so blame her for the Sun Tyrant and the Malicious Moon — before CA’s jiggery-pokery, they were just fusion fire and rock respectively. The White Lady twists the world into ugly shapes. Never trust a ‘pacifist’ with a psychopathic bodyguard.

Did Arroin truly greet his mother at the Dawn, as the stories tell?

Spoiler

He was wounded several times, and at the end lay near to death himself. Finally, he hid in the physical plane, and so survived long enough to see the Dawning, and to greet his mother back to the world. — CoP, p. 65

Or did the sight of her son’s torn and rotting corpse drive her mad? That was when the world was remade into its current terrifying form. Arroin has no magic because he is mere matter, a soulless shambling corpse. Would you dare tell CA this — and find yourself suddenly sans immune system, bone marrow transmuted to iron?

If there is a secret to sane ‘resurrection’, it is Gorakiki’s child Scarabaeus Sacer who keeps it. Darkness holds all the secrets of Aether.

[Revilo Divad Of Dyoll]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

that is what Humakt, Mallia, & Mee Vorala

Sir, my friend Onar Onari would like to introduce you to Bladger, his ax.

[DrGoth]

16 hours ago, radmonger said:

It is a Chalana Arroy cult secret that the birth of the red goddess was a perversion of a resurrection ritual, peformed by the apostate priest Deezola. The innocent young Teelo Norri was slain by the murderer Danfive Xaron, so that Rufelza could be brought back in her vacant body.

Somewhere in the lunar provinces, someone believes that the lightbringers quest was the same deal. The elderly loyal thane Elmal was murdered by Orlanth, as his weak light was no longer capable of sustaining life. The emperor Yelm took possession of the vacant body, shining brightly again.

Which is the dumb theory, the first paragraph or the second? 😁

[Eff]

There is a secret phrase known only to those who have been to the Red Moon and in the presence of a moon goddess, whether the big S herself or one of the ancient ones. It reads as follows:

Spoiler

E pluribus plūra.

 

[mfbrandi]

The anthropophagous elf caught red-handed protests her vegetarianism:

Spoiler

The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field — Isaiah 40:6