Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Therefore you have an argument that Kargan Tor and is in fact the first Power for without that division, there would only be the One  or the Infinite . 

Or the None Ø and Chaos if we follow the Old Testament:

• Others claim this to be the first of the Runes,
  citing the separation of the world from Chaos
  as the first action in creation.
  — RQ2 Classic, p. 58

Or we might see as Terminus — boundary, limit, end — which might include dividing lines but leave actual fission to . The point is not to decide but to call into question — nothing more — the opposition of and thought of as coming together and splitting apart, respectively. I should probably crawl back into my barrel, now.

🎼 Love, love will tear us apart … again 🎶

Edited January 14 by mfbrandi
left -> leave

[metcalph]

9 minutes ago, Ian_W said:

My dumbest theory is Jeff's involvement in the Glorantha Project was an Good Thing.

Sir, this is dumbest theories, not cheap abuse. 

[metcalph]

17 minutes ago, Ian_W said:

Replace Jeff with Nick, or yourself, or MoB, Simon, or Laurence, or most anyone else, and do we have a worse result ?

 

And by worse, I mean narrower, more brittle, more reliant on canon by Word Of God and less reliant on being some combination of true, beautiful or making sense without reference to authority ?

I am generally happy with the editorial decisions and output that Jeff has made and doubt that anybody else in the same position would have been substantially better.

You are free to disagree but to phrase your opinions in the form of personal attacks is just wasting people's time.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Richard S. said:

barley being cheaper in Peloria, and thus beer

2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

premodern beer … slightly sour water

Maybe the Lunar lands’ wise tolerance of a little chaos allows them to employ Mallia’s gift of Lactobacillales (and other bacteria) to produce cheese, yoghurt, sour beer, and other goodies. Whisper it: Kethaelan wine-making may involve malolactic fermentation, which even namechecks our Apple Girl, right @Joerg?

Spoiler

For those who still doubt the existence of Gloranthan microorganisms: Word of Jeff would seem to be that Gloranthans had a word for prokaryotes.

[Joerg]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

  Hide contents

For those who still doubt the existence of Gloranthan microorganisms: Word of Jeff would seem to be that Gloranthans had a word for prokaryotes.

Yes: Darkness.

Fouling is a Darkness process, release of foul egg aroma included. Less smelly forms of anaerobic digestion (and digestion in general), too.

[mfbrandi]

Zorak Zoran eats the sun (or “wrestles fire powers from Yelmalio” if that suits you better) and this positions him as the ur-phototroph? Either he taught Mallia or she taught him, but surely she gifted photosynthesis to the world at large.° Without darkness, the sun lacks all utility.

Zorak Zoran eats Flamal. Is this the same myth recast? (FLAY-mul → Flame All?) Is it vegetable propaganda, a mendacious attempt to claim that not originated the trick of eating light? Did ZZ consider Flamal an usurper?

The world tree — burning from the inside — named “ash” for its future state.
 

————————————————————————————
° ZZ may have preceded all life, and that may be why animated skeletons come easy to him — life, no life: what’s the difference? As Styx comes between and , so viruses are liminal for , as is Uncle Zeezee. Just how intimate are Zorak Zed and the Mistress of Microbes? In the dark, everything is on the down low. Is Sister X the midwife of life itself?

Edited January 23 by mfbrandi
pronunciation

[Richard S.]

Dumb Theory: the Dara Happan Sacred Alphabet is written top to bottom, left to right - i.e. in columns instead of rows.

Dumb Reason: solely because I've been using it to write private notes recently and it feels more comfortable that way (which of course means those stuffy Buseri probably do it the other way). I also think it looks nicer in columns.

[mfbrandi]

GLORANTHAN KARAOKE

Haven’t had one of these for a while, but they seem like the perfect expression of the maddest of the lozenge’s mad loves. (Think Ring of Swords.)

Damn but the Swampers have gotten good — There’s a Riot Goin’ On period Sly with hints of Miles and Coldcut. Who knows what sorceries they’ve mastered and what pond weed they are smoking these days? YO and ZZ have taken a leaf out of Cat Power’s book and ditched the choruses as they trade Eurythmics tunes:

•    [cracked and Cohenesque]
  
  The language of love slips from my lover’s tongue
  Cooler than ice cream and warmer than the sun
  Dumb hearts get broken just like China cups
  The language of love has left me broken on the rocks

  The language of love has left me stony grey
  Tongue tied and twisted at the price I’ve had to pay
  Your careless notions have silenced these emotions
  Look at all the foolishness your lover’s talk has done
   

•    [sweet like stevia]
  
  It’s savage and it’s cruel; it shines like destruction
  Comes in like the flood and it seems like religion
  It’s noble and it’s brutal; it distorts and deranges
  And it wrenches you up, and you’re left like a zombie
  
  It’s guilt edged, glamorous, and sleek by design
  You know it’s jealous by nature, false and unkind
  It’s hard and restrained, and it’s totally cool
  It touches and it teases as you stumble in the debris

The newtlings go into an extended jam on The Aubergine That Ate Rangoon before closing the set with Nefertiti.

Edited January 27 by mfbrandi
punctuation & spelling

[mfbrandi]

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

the number of dragnewt survivors …

• I am now imagining RuPaul judging Jack Webb in a skin.
• Pantomime dragnewts to make up the numbers.
• Now we know where Stan Freberg got the idea.

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

… is lower than the number of dragonewts active on the cusp of the Hero Wars … might be a “proof” for dragonewt propagation by other means.

• The Dragonewts’ Dream always makes me think of Brackett’s “The Last Days of Shandakor .”
• Perhaps — rather than the Martian case of covering a retreat into extinction — it masks the solidification of past dragonewts into “today’s” Glorantha.
• We have wyverns and dream dragons, and I wonder whether we have a dragonewt equivalent.

[Joerg]

9 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

• We have wyverns and dream dragons, and I wonder whether we have a dragonewt equivalent.

My own theory is that a dragonewt is a dream-dragon-like projection of the immature dragon in the egg, a vehicle for making experiences while growing to size. Whether this dream experience has to follow normal time or whether dragonewt experiences now may be part of an already adult dragon's experience - provided that a dragonewt egg conserves some of the timelessness and potential for non-sequential experiences.

If this is the case, then one and the same True Dragon could have manifestations of its own egg all over History and Godtime, in all manner of stages.

That would frame the Dragonkill War as self-defence, unless one and the same dragon is able to branch out in all manner of experiences, including the Magisaur or the Dinosaur paths.

The role of Hykim and Mikyh as ancestors of all animals actually suggests such a branching out.

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, The Prettiest Parrot said:

[T]he mice aren't really hurting the goddess, are they? … If you take the angle that grain is the body of the goddess, … then the mice are kind of cannibals.

• He told Lavretsky how Glafira Petrovna before her death had bitten her own hand — and, after a short silence, said with a sigh: “Ev’ry man, master, sir, is destined to eat ’isself.”
  — Turgenev, Home of the Gentry°

“Plants and animals, both wild and domestic, are her children.” But her children (even mice) have to eat — and they have to eat each other, except for the plants who mostly eat . (If light looks a lot like zero to you, welcome to Nysalor, the Golden Void.)

If her children/gifts are her body, then not just cannibalism but divine autocannibalism, and at harvest time autumnal cannibalism? If you are the earth and everything that’s in it, how else can it play out? We are all us. We are all lunch.

• Autosarcophagy. Self-cannibalism. Listen to them. Words of the night. What music they make!
  — Vivamort

To the extent that the circle of munching is not 100% efficient, then yes, chaos mice. The demand for perpetual  seems unreasonable, though. So the averse are to take shelter in cults? But is a world in which nothing happens an improvement on one in which nothing is? From the inside, at least, they are indistinguishable.

Do chaos mice have six legs? Do they know their own mother? In the end, can we tell the Devouring Mother from the Devoured Mother, the feaster from the feast? There is always another way. The Void is generous: it has room for everyone. It is fruitful, too, for what is the Void but the womb of Cosmos (and its grave, too)? So is Ernalda an imposter or just a mask to be cast aside?

• This is the frontier, this is where I change, and wait between two worlds to take refreshment.
  — C. Day Lewis, From Feathers to Iron°
   

 

———————————————————————————————————————
° Turgenev and Lewis quotes shamefully nicked from MJH’s Viriconium Nights (Gollancz, 1985)

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

This is reflected in the dragonewt rune which represents something akin to Jung's description of the relationship of consciousness and the unconscious to an iceberg, with the smaller consciousness sitting above the huge unconscious, which again serves as an analogy for Dragonewts and their relationship to dreams, consciousness, the unconscious, and their mysticism, which permeates all other mystical traditions.

That is one take, certainly. I see them as the anti-Pink Floyd: pure dragonewt consciousness is nonrefractive — “white light” passes straight through without splitting. Iconographically, this is surely a very good thing.

Edited January 27 by mfbrandi

[Darius West]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

That is one take, certainly. I see them as the anti-Pink Floyd: pure dragonewt consciousness is nonrefractive — “white light” passes straight through without splitting. Iconographically, this is surely a very good thing.

I like this take, and the rune you made, but what I was getting at was perhaps unclear the way I expressed it, so let me fix that...  The rune also represents the dragonewt separate reality where their dragon bodies grow inside dreams.  They don't like using dragon magic, as this causes their dragon bodies to prematurely and temporarily materialize, and they must then regrow the spent part.  Non-dragon pathers cannot interact with dragonewt separate reality, but can get a taste of it by visiting the confusing extra-dimensional reality of dragonewt cities that are built using dragonewt eggs as part of the construction materials, which cause the effect.  This effect is a bit like the architecture one experiences in dreams.  

We might also view he dragonewt rune as a negation of the law rune without being chaotic or disordered.  Law crossed out.  But I prefer to see law (triangle) as the consciousness sitting above this larger deeper principle.

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

They don't like using dragon magic, as this causes their dragon bodies to prematurely and temporarily materialize, and they must then regrow the spent part.

Corresponds to splitting the white light of pure DN consciousness into a spectrum and messing up the rune.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

We might also view the dragonewt rune as a negation of the law rune … Law crossed out.  But I prefer to see law (triangle) as the consciousness sitting above this larger deeper principle.

As suits a diffident pseudo-mystic with the soul of a sorcerer manqué, I often wonder what a geometrically perfected set of runes would look like. I don’t think the line through the triangle has to be thought of as negation — a slashed zero is still a zero, and the undisturbed ray passing through the prism of Law leaves both “intact.” As the mystic grasps that Law and Chaos, Cosmos and the Void, and Ø are the same, perhaps we can add to the pile of not-really-opposites both –Ø and –, expressive of Nysalorean and draconic illumination, respectively (which can be the same or different to taste: I am not the fantasy nirvana police).

Anyway, back to your iceberg. With a slight tweak, we get:

That should suit the Lizard King: “Three to one, baby; one in four / No one here negates the Law.” The ray is the dividing knife, but Cosmos is fractal, a Sierpiński triangle. “You walk across the floor, utuma knife in your hand / Trying to tell me no one understands.”

Edited January 27 by mfbrandi
he → the

[Darius West]

19 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Corresponds to splitting the white light of pure DN consciousness into a spectrum and messing up the rune.

As suits a diffident pseudo-mystic with the soul of a sorcerer manqué, I often wonder what a geometrically perfected set of runes would look like. I don’t think the line through the triangle has to be thought of as negation — a slashed zero is still a zero, and the undisturbed ray passing through the prism of Law leaves both “intact.” As the mystic grasps that Law and Chaos, Cosmos and the Void, and Ø are the same, perhaps we can add to the pile of not-really-opposites both –Ø and –, expressive of Nysalorean and draconic illumination, respectively (which can be the same or different to taste: I am not the fantasy nirvana police).

Anyway, back to your iceberg. With a slight tweak, we get:

That should suit the Lizard King: “Three to one, baby; one in four / No one here negates the Law.” The ray is the dividing knife, but Cosmos is fractal, a Sierpiński triangle. “You walk across the floor, utuma knife in your hand / Trying to tell me no one understands.”

*Grins* I like it !  Perhaps being a crested dragonewt is like waking up as an amnesiac on LSD ?  I do like your DN rune tweak, probably more than the Pink Floyd rune 😀

I suppse the only other thing I'd add is that DNs are left handed, sugestng right brain dominance, and humans who want to enter the Dragon path need to get their tongues split, and have their brains split as well.  People who have had this done to them have had some strange things happen, like their left hand interfering with things it apparently didn't like, independently of their left brain consciousness.  If nothing else, it did help neuroscience determine that consciousness seems to be in the left hemisphere.

[radmonger]

Jeff's FB post on how the destruction of the Spike broke the ling between the moral and divine worlds prompted some thoughts on that probably belong in this thread.

While the Spike existed, travel to meet the gods was only marginally more difficult than travelling to meet the neighbors. With it shattered, that stopped. As Magasta's Pool replaced the Void, the Otherworld was saved from annihilation, but now split in two.

Using shamanism (and possibly also sorcery), there were now two ways of accessing magic. You could access the local spiriit world, below the divide, including the Underworld. Or you could use ancestor worship to establish a connection with someone who died before the Spike exploded. 

The latter is Daka Fall shamanism, and is the source of all Rune Cults. A shaman discorporates, and travels to a place in the God's world their ancestor visited. Once there, they know the way, and so can not only repeat the trip, but invite others. This is a spirit cult, which becomes a Rune Cult once shrines and other magical infrastructure are created. Rune cult initiation is an assisted and focused form of shamanic initiation. It allows travel to one spot in the Otherworld; hopefully one where there are a lot of useful magical secrets to be learnt.

This is why Theists say the God's World is timeless; they are not actually visiting it, but merely a magical memory or echo of the way it was at a particular time. Each new initiate starts from the same point,like a fresh player loading a save game file. They experience ;Orlanth steals the Sandals of Darkness', and now they have that ability.

If you wanted to reach the real God world, you need to physically plunge down Magasta's pool and survive But there is only one person in Glorantha who ever did that. And Jar-Eel killed him.

 

 

 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

more than the Pink Floyd rune

Ah, well, that one had to be ugly to serve its purpose. 😉

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

[B]eing a crested dragonewt is like waking up as an amnesiac on LSD …
strange things happen, like their left hand interfering with things it apparently didn't like …
consciousness seems to be in the left hemisphere.

As a left-hander, I can confirm what the accursed righties have long suspected — that is exactly what we are like: our consciousness is merely apparent (our heads are filled with kapok), and yet we are permanently bombed on powerful hallucinogens (we fell into Getafix’s cauldron soon after manufacture). We don’t have to reach out and touch the Void — we are the Void.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, radmonger said:

the destruction of the Spike broke the lin[k] between the moral and divine worlds

I know it is only a typo, but that is one way the truth leaks through to us.

Now, who wants to cut up all their vintage RQ books and rearrange the sentence fragments into something illuminating? What, no  one?

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, radmonger said:

the destruction of the Spike broke the link between the mortal and divine worlds

Let us suppose this is right important but that it is a myth about attitudes to death (not a chapter of The True History of Magic in Glorantha™) — what then?

We are used to the idea of the creators of the setting seeming to sneer at folk like the dwarfs and the Brithini for clinging to indefinitely extended life at the cost of being uptight and hidebound and failing to embrace the hippy butterfly lifestyle. But perhaps we malign them: death is easy; life is hard. It is a work ethic.

Ordinary humans seem to be totally down with Death, either because they are delusional about afterlives and/or metempsychosis (“fake death”) or because they really have grasped that all good things come to an end — Humakt as the Lord of Terror who is no terror, at all (of course he is an illuminated deity, and let’s forget the misstep that had all gods having something like illumination). Mortals are redeemable because they can “adapt” to the “post-Spike reality” (i.e. reality, pure and simple).

So where does that leave most of the gods, who are terrified of extinction? Do they represent a psychological tendency far worse than the most hard-bitten and mean-spirited Brithini? Is a charitable reading of Argrath’s godwhacking that it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees?

I don’t know.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

If Storm Bulls didn’t have a useful purpose in fighting Chaos, they would be completely socially unacceptable, hardly any better than Gagarth.

Secret Urox Lore
Once upon a time a mighty storm khan heroquested back to whisper a “foolproof” plan into Ragnaglar’s ear. Thus the future of the cult was secured.

[Darius West]

12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

As a left-hander, I can confirm what the accursed righties have long suspected — that is exactly what we are like: our consciousness is merely apparent (our heads are filled with kapok), and yet we are permanently bombed on powerful hallucinogens (we fell into Getafix’s cauldron soon after manufacture). We don’t have to reach out and touch the Void — we are the Void.

I hope you didn't just out yourself as a psychopath 😂.  That sounds like a paraphrased line from American Psycho.🤣

All left handers are secretly serial killers ? Who knew ? 🤣

[Ali the Helering]

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

All left handers are secretly serial killers ? Who knew ?

All left handers, presumably?  😁

Come to that, what does this say about the ambidextrous?🤣

[Darius West]

53 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Come to that, what does this say about the ambidextrous?🤣

Perhaps they are bi-serial ?

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

All left handers are secretly serial killers?

Spoken like a true Gloranthaphile: empty & tripped out → malicious & violent.

Now where did I put those plague vials? I have some “faith healing” to do.

[mfbrandi]

Illuminist Graffiti
written in sand
or chalked on the pavement:

• Nothing is true
  Everything is permitted

Theist Dogma
incised on the temple portico
and inked with the blood of apostates:

• E V E R Y T H I N G    I S    T R U E
  N O T H I N G    I S    P E R M I T T E D

Voidist Propaganda
scratched lightly in miniscule
on the wall of the deepest, darkest cave:

• nothing is hidden