Your Dumbest Theory

[scott-martin]

ATYAR is really just ARK(Y)AT spelled sideways. I'm as skeptical as you are but it ultimately resolves more problems than it creates. 

[mfbrandi]

6 hours ago, scott-martin said:

ATYAR is really just ARK(Y)AT spelled sideways. I'm as skeptical as you are but it ultimately resolves more problems than it creates.

I ask the court to recall Citizen @Joerg’s previous comment:

On 3/13/2024 at 7:28 AM, Joerg said:

I like how the mystic’s head is devoured by Chaos.

• In the process he founded the cult of the Horned Skull,
  whom he named Atyar, Devourer of Knowledge.
  — CoT Classic, p. 54

And perhaps that is the nub of it: the more chilled mystic is happy to have her head devoured, but those following in the footsteps of Arkat–Atyar must always be doing the devouring. In the end — logic says — every wannabe Arkat must swallow her own head. If you have seen it done, it is a very impressive trick. All done with mirrors, apparently.

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

swallow her own head

"Arkat blows a horn, Atyar has a horn. What's the difference? Your angle on " - Jaccius Lacanicus

I was thinking about that head trip in the recent return to Drastic . . . the resemblance is striking



The angel rises, the head ignites, the skeleton drops.

 

[Eff]

The Imperial Bodyguard typically accompanying the Red Emperor/proxies, they have a well-developed body of work around crowd control, ensuring orderly autograph queues, and methods of safe restraint, which have spread far and wide among thief-takers and more activist juridical magistrates within the Lunar Empire. A plate from a popular manual, showing a method developed by the Bloodspillers, is attached. The studious viewer will note the classical symbology on the illustrated Bloodspiller's helmet.

[mfbrandi]

We think we want “psychology” in our games — motivation, character, and all that jive — but …

• It may be that, when late capitalist civilisation is replaced by this violently mutagenic landscape, we should expect our familiar configuration of ‘human drives’ to warp into a commensurately novel form. But then again, because we’ve seen … that a chronic smallness of mind can persist in even the most extreme circumstances, perhaps we should expect that office politics would pass almost unchanged … Or …  perhaps we should expect a radical simplification, so that people would only be vengeful, protective, greedy and so forth, with any subtler shades of feeling blasted away
  — Ned Beauman, Surrealist Circus Animals

Actually from a review of Jeff VanderMeer, but it made something ping.

[mfbrandi]

There is a notion that the gods are big and we are small, that a humble shaman couldn’t take Orlanth down, but I wonder if that is right. On a bad day and with the wrong approach, surely they will fail, but there is also a Gloranthan strain — not necessarily attractive — of human supremacism: let go of a single thread at the right moment and I can be done with the lot of them.

There is a nasty whiff of power tripping, certainly, and yet it may be that casual mass deicide is a metaphor for spiritual liberation. And so the superpowers and the rank odour hang around illumination.

I fought, we won. Each of us faces the end of the world alone, but then what? The power tripper faces it down — temporarily? — or so they think. But the trick is to let it come. And that is the difference between grim-faced Sheng and a laughing not-so-failed mystic? (The theist refuses to choose, splits the gods into good and bad, crushes one lot, and makes mock obeisance to the other?)

Arachne Solara is the powerless ghost of the tiniest spider you ever saw, and that is wonder enough.

[Yes, this is tugging at the thread of the doubleness of illumination — again — but also an expression of discontent about the POW economy: bigger is better and crushes all opposition. Yuck!]

[Eff]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

There is a nasty whiff of power tripping, certainly, and yet it may be that casual mass deicide is a metaphor for spiritual liberation.

A punter asked Great Sister one day, "How can one achieve liberation from the world and still live within it? Do not the Sevened still eat and drink and breathe, such that Oria and Oslira and

Spoiler

Entekos

still hold them in subjugation, chains wrapped around their necks, strangling them should they ever attempt to act on their liberation? How can anyone be liberated without total annihilation, of themselves or of the gods?" 

Great Sister asked, "When my mother proclaimed the First Manumission, did those who were freed by it burn down all of Torang, slaying the people who had traded in human flesh?"

The punter said, "Stick to the point," and then he saw Great Sister's face, and then he mumbled, "No."

"And yet they were free to do so! They had been fully armed and regimented, brigaded and accompanied, and yet they decided that, though it was in their power to kill and burn, they would choose not to do so generally, and so it was only the grandees who were flogged to death with their own whips. So, too, does the decision to eat and drink and maintain the functions of the body say nothing about whether the spirit is free to leave it or not by itself." Great Sister folded her arms. "Any more questions?" she asked. 

[scott-martin]

This is clearly the golden age of gloranthan studies. 

[John Biles]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I fought, we won. Each of us faces the end of the world alone, but then what? The power tripper faces it down — temporarily? — or so they think. But the trick is to let it come. And that is the difference between grim-faced Sheng and a laughing not-so-failed mystic? (The theist refuses to choose, splits the gods into good and bad, crushes one lot, and makes mock obeisance to the other?)

 

The biggest difference between Sheng is that he takes 'none of this is real' as an excuse to unleash his ID and slaughter people for pleasure, break everything, and generally be an asshole casual mass genocider of people, while the laughing mystic simply seeks more enlightenment and escape.

It's pretty clear that if only fear of consequences holds you back before enlightenment, it will only make you a monster.  The Kralorelans didn't understand that or they would have never tried to enlighten Sheng. 

[Eff]

17 minutes ago, John Biles said:

The biggest difference between Sheng is that he takes 'none of this is real' as an excuse to unleash his ID and slaughter people for pleasure, break everything, and generally be an asshole casual mass genocider of people, while the laughing mystic simply seeks more enlightenment and escape.

It's pretty clear that if only fear of consequences holds you back before enlightenment, it will only make you a monster.  The Kralorelans didn't understand that or they would have never tried to enlighten Sheng. 

Did they? I thought they sentenced him to hard labor for life with a veneer of mystical teaching to assuage any guilt at the sheer disproportionality of their actions. Strange how the mind wanders.

[mfbrandi]

Although it pains us, we may feel we have to concede that in the end Sedenya is the empire and the empire is Sedenya. Perhaps she is also Rimbaud: a wannabe seer and a poet — a producer of Illuminations — become “a successful profiteer and a conniver in slaving” whose end will be “metastasised cancer and paralysis”.

• [T]he oddball trader, surrounded by the knick-knacks in his compound, pottering like a dangerous crone in an African fable, still toying with the dark arts of self-transformation, long after the magical make-over of the world through language has been junked. This is Rimbaud’s not quite human side.
  — Jeremy Harding, Fleeing the Mother Tongue

Edited March 30 by mfbrandi
empire’s end

[scott-martin]

22 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Rimbaud

Tight Indigo Trousers, last known surviving white moon hierophantess and my favorite novelty NPC, has entered the chat. This is the empire. It is the way. Step inside. They have something like a passover and something like a christmas and even something like a dream of life but no easter. As she says, "the world starts after the fourteen year old drug addict version of your life quits and then stops again when you quit quitting . . . Sedenya came to liberate that world from itself. Say you like it. Say you need it even if you don't."

[Nick Brooke]

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Although it pains us, we may feel we have to concede that in the end Sedenya is the empire and the empire is Sedenya.

Speak for yourself. As She sings in the final act of Sedenya! The Musical:

“And as for the Empire
And as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired.
They are Illusion,
they’re not the solutions they promised to be
The answer was here all the time
I love you, and hope you love me...” 🎶

[mfbrandi]

So we have the RG–Rimbaud–Peron sung by Patti Smith dragged up as Elaine Paige? It might just work. I will call the toad-faced one now.

[mfbrandi]

6 hours ago, scott-martin said:

last known surviving white moon hierophantess

You made me skip ahead from Sheila Jordan singing Robert Creeley, but that is OK because:

• And I spin, come down through time
  Oh, watch them say you’re too high
  And I swim through …
  Hey Sheba, hey Salome, hey Venus eclipsing my way, ah
  Her vessel, every woman is a vessel, is evasive, is aquatic
  Everyone, silver ecstatic, platinum disk spinning

[John Biles]

Someone probably said this already, but the real secret of Dwarf Food is that it is marimite.

 

[Ynneadwraith]

On 3/29/2024 at 8:32 PM, mfbrandi said:

Arachne Solara is the powerless ghost of the tiniest spider you ever saw, and that is wonder enough.

This I really like! In my own creative works I've taken a lot of influence from Miyazaki, ATLA and folklore with 'little spirits'. Yeah the big powerful ones are fun and all, but to build a truly rich spiritual world I'd want to see a whole menagerie of little spirits doing little spirit things.

One of my favourites are these sorts of blood demon that well up from the ground where battles have been fought. In actuality, they're tiny little earthworm spirits. Normally they spend their time guiding earthworms to little morsels of food just beneath the ground, but when their little world gets flooded with blood from battles they get really pissed. That lasts until the rain washes it all away, and they can get back to their regular routine.

I feel like anyone wanting to make the Gloranthan spirit world rich and vibrant should add all sorts of these little folkloric/spirit critters 🙂 love the idea that Arachne Solara might be one of them (which explains why we never really hear of her before or after, because the gods are too self-important to pay attention to the little things...).

[mfbrandi]

10 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

I feel like anyone wanting to make the Gloranthan spirit world rich and vibrant should add all sorts of these little folkloric/spirit critters … love the idea that Arachne Solara might be one of them

I don’t claim to have originated the idea — I am sure it is in the original texts somewhere. (I was just too lazy to go dig out the source. Shocking!)

[mfbrandi]

On 4/1/2024 at 9:32 AM, John Biles said:

Dwarf Food … is marmite.

Is this the new Lutheran face of Mostal? Ennobled by Mad King Ludwig seems about right for our technological but sometimes impractical friends.

         

• The production of all organic substances no longer belongs just to living organisms. It must be seen as not only probable, but as certain, that we shall be able to produce them in our laboratories … Of course, we do not yet know how to do this
  — Liebig & Woehler (1838)

Edited April 2 by mfbrandi

[Ali the Helering]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Is this the new Lutheran face of Mostal? Ennobled by Mad King Ludwig seems about right for our technological but sometimes impractical friends.

I am puzzled.  Ludwig was Roman Catholic.

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, Ali the Helering said:

I am puzzled.  Ludwig was Roman Catholic.

Justus von Liebig worked in Gießen, in Hesse(n), but "Mad" King Ludwig was a great admirer of scientific progress and chose to ennoble him for his achievements making the dreams of alchemy come true. Liebig may well have been a Lutheran.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Liebig may well have been a Lutheran.

• Although Liebig was Lutheran and Jettchen Catholic, their differences in religion appear to have been resolved amicably by bringing their sons up in the Lutheran religion and their daughters as Catholics.
  — Wikipedia

[Ali the Helering]

Fair enough, it just seemed a little abstruse to a bear of very little brain😁

[scott-martin]

On 4/2/2024 at 6:20 AM, mfbrandi said:

I don’t claim to have originated the idea — I am sure it is in the original texts somewhere. (I was just too lazy to go dig out the source. Shocking!)

I recall a specific phrase like "then a spirit that had never been important before spoke up" but I want to say it's pretty archaic. Later development prefers to fudge the question of whether or who she was before the Compromise.

The mystic link in Troll Gods between herself and relatively profane Aranea (profanea) might be a tempting thread to unravel. IMG this is "pact" or understanding is the mythic basis for how her/their Divine Intervention works, with one representing the other in something like a legal as well as a semiotic framework.

----

Modern "folk" narratives around a theoretical Great Darkness or "Gods War" are not as traditional as the priests think, but are instead draw heavily on the apocalyptic malaise that sensitive participants in the Jrustelan Empire felt for the world they wrecked. In this model, popular characters like "Orlanth," "Pamalt," "Devil" and "Only Old One" who are now deified went through a more literary phase, symbolic forms available to magicians and poets for working through their nostalgia and regret . . . and then in a less urbane era the artifacts of authorship and exegesis are unsustainable, leaving something like a hoax behind.

This is best seen when we compare the rhymed "realms of beauty were lost" construction common to Pamalt in RM and the original Orlanth cult writeup to the doomy Jrustelan epigrams that survive. ("Too late too late / to save the dreams.") Prove me wrong! Point me to something authentically cyclopean in the textual evidence or archaeology that we can use to date the historical collapse a full millennium before the Close. 

Of course there are those who argue that the collapse is cyclical and every dying civilization goes through similar crises: 300 ST, 900 ST, now.

 

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

This is best seen when we compare the rhymed "realms of beauty were lost" construction common to Pamalt in RM and the original Orlanth cult writeup to the doomy Jrustelan epigrams that survive. ("Too late too late / to save the dreams.") Prove me wrong! Point me to something authentically cyclopean in the textual evidence or archaeology that we can use to date the historical collapse a full millennium before the Close.
 

How about Avanapdur's reign of illusionary plenty in the East? No archaeological evidence (for obvious reasons, illusions don't leave any artifacts behind) but textual evidence with that keet sage to whom the survivors complain about the loss of those islands of plenty in Revealed Mythologies.