leflaneurbrutalistedefees

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

Pale lore in Sacred and Terrible Air

I pulled together some of my favorite descriptions of the Pale from Kurvitz's novel. All excerpts are from the excellent fan translation by Group Ibex, which I think really nailed the style of the game in these quotes.

Warning: Full of SPOILERS and extremely LONG!

The Pale, up close:

The main characters take a road trip to the Lemminkäise zone of entroponetic catastrophe in Katla. They hire a racecar driver and drive to the very edge of the disaster zone, where matter is actively dissolving into the Pale.

The border point disappeared behind them, along with the invisible boundary of winter’s orbit, beyond which is eternal winter. The asphalt also disappeared over time; they encountered rural families on sleds along snowy gravel roads. It is their great privilege to have seen the pale with their own eyes, where it has towered behind the silo since childhood. 

Kenni sees the black mass of the forest slowly drifting into the sky. The earth crunches and cracks as the spruce trees tear themselves out of it, roots and all. The wood screams, and the frozen earth too, like they’re in a dentist’s chair. A cloud of limestone gravel flies into the air, and far above in the dark, the first trees are subsumed in the pale. 

Tereesz, Khan, and the mad Suruese driver look outside, their heads tilted back, as the pale approaches from behind the house. Inside, the bass drum thumps robustly, and outside, behind the silhouette of the building, the dark mass of the forest rolls up into the sky across the entire visible horizon. The pale rises vertically from the spruce forests like a wave, from the mountain ranges above the expanse of the world. Its horror moves slowly, humming over the world, but the world is made of matter, and matter is evergreen, ancient; it sustains itself with surprising dignity even at the moment of disappearance.

The pale can lift up entire houses! Holy shit! Our boys make a narrow escape from the edge of the encroaching pale as a house is torn away from its foundation.

In the yard, where the wheels of the motor carriage have drawn a loop in the snow, Inayat Khan looks up at a farm building that hovers above him like a ghost. Electrical wire entrails hang out of the rotating object, black against the expanse of the starry sky. It drifts on into the pale with a self-evident calm. Up above, a trail of its furniture and crumbling foundation remains. In the yard in front of him, Khan watches how a startled Tereesz and Kenni follow the object’s path, their heads tilting back until they hit the wooden fence behind them.  In a strange, panic-free concern, they all look in the direction of Ulv’s crumbling house. It seems as if every little crack comes from its limestone foundation. Soon it will rise up. But nothing happens. The pale freezes in place far away, behind the house; the creaking of the forest stops, and the music in the house also stops. Somewhere in the perceptible distance, on the edge of the frozen pale above, the farmhouse falls apart and disappears.  […] The engine revs up and the carriage’s wheels spin in the snow. The mass of the pale can no longer support its phantom weight. It breaks down. The vast clearings crumple under it in an instant, exploding with powder snow; a collapse like a shock wave whirls over the world. Spruce trees bow under the blow, and the pale blasts open the windows of the old decaying manor house. It arches around the edges of the house, as if hesitating for a moment, and then explodes together, encompassing it. The pale grabs the manor in its lap, and somewhere inside, in a room with a low ceiling, the young man puts on his headphones. He reads the sweeping pale like a magnetic reader reads a Stereo 8 tape. […] The pale blows across the fields, on both sides of the village road. Its avalanche crashes onto the gravel; the rumbling wall approaches, glowing crimson from the motor carriage’s tail lights. 

Travel through the Pale:

Floating magnet trains seem common, and they even go through the Pale. There's a brief mention that Tereesz once spent a week on a magnet train and was then told he wasn't allowed to travel for a year afterwards due to the dangers of pale exposure.

Outside on the platform, giant buffers are being pulled off the train. The umbilical cord is cut and thus, freed from the connecting bridges, the entire weight of the train with its five-fold carriage slats sinks onto the magnets. They howl at full power below the train cars. And then the flight begins.  The magnetic support splits the North Sea under it in two. It’s quiet inside, the generators humming as the train whizzes by fifty metres above the water. The three of them stand together, laughing. Tereesz extinguishes his smoke in a bronze ashtray, and they turn their back on the observation windows. Ahead, the pale awaits, and past it begins a big world. […] Through the windows, all that’s left of the city behind them is the light pollution, a golden glow in the distant darkness of the snowstorm. 

This floating train station has an illustration Rostov by the way.

For a historical travel example: the famous disappearance of the airship Harnankur. This airship was referenced in the game in the form of the 50-real vodka in the special edition commemorative bottle! Rostov's illustration from the novel is here, showing a model of the ship in Khan's basement.

One hundred and fifty years ago, on another isola—the Graad isola—it snows in the city of Mirova. It’s a midwinter evening, but thousands of people have gathered in the harbour. The quay bustles with them. In the background lies imperial Graad—church steeples and chimneys. The crowd is waving, bidding farewell to the airship rising into the sky. A swan made of wood and nickel rises into the blizzard, and the passengers of the world’s first interisolary flight wave to the crowd from its balcony baskets: well-dressed boujee people, with a never-before-seen adventure ahead of them. It’s the pale—terrifying, but at the same time such an upbeat and unforgettable experience. Modern technology, in the form of a luxuriously upholstered airship, now makes such an experience possible for an ordinary, if perhaps slightly better off, citizen. And on the other side of the pale—oh mystical pale!—the land of Katla awaits, with its royal capital of Vaasa.  […] Two days later, the interisolary flight enters the pale, and then, barely six hours later, a deviation occurs in the airship’s course. “Harnankur” has gone missing with fifteen hundred passengers on board. The flight is believed to have drifted into an uncharted entroponetic mass, the pale superdeep. 

Sound

The pale makes a hissing sound. Here Khan receives a phone call from one of the missing presumed dead girls, who may be a ghost or part of the pale, it's all left very ambiguous. It reminds me of the part in the game where you can call Slipstream SCA and hear a ghost trapped in the phone.

He picks up the receiver, and the hallway fills with the hiss of the pale. It grates in his ear.  “Hello?” asks Khan. But no one answers. “Hello, who is it? Please tell me who you are!” he repeats, more and more pleading each time. The hissing becomes louder and louder, until finally it deafens him, the pressure in his inner ear goes awry, and only that vibration from who-knows-where remains, its centre. The silence goes through his flesh and bones like waves. It’s cold. 

Later, we learn that the pale can actually come through the phone lines?? Creepy!

The speaker switches to a long-distance call; the pale seeps into the hall air from the fabric-covered ziggurat. The signal runs as an entroponetic sequence through the Great Unknown, from Katla to Graad. Relay stations clear the call from the noise of history along the way, but something always creeps into the wires—a ghost radio station. Its quiet voice in its unintelligible language reminds us what it’s here for. To end life. 

It's also similar to the sounds of the pale latitude compressor! During a long distance call through the pale, a voice is heard spelling things out using an “international alphabet” like the real-world NATO phonetic alphabet.

This is how matter degrades, drop by drop, like an analog rhythm running from red through the colourless world. The international alphabet is hidden in the low-frequency waves, “... Nadir-Ellips-Gamut-Azimuth...” and so on, to the border of the settlement. 

Culture, ideology

Zigi as a teen is a total edgelord when it comes to talking about the pale:

But above all, Zigi is still a nihilist. He reads dia-mat [dialectical materialism], says that animals are automatons, is a fan of behaviourism, and adores the pale and the nihilistic innocence of Mesque, Ambrosius Saint-Miro. […] The geography teacher sent him to the principal’s office, and Zigi stopped at the door, the zippers of his leather jacket jingling. “See you in the pale,” he said, and ran his index finger across his throat. Back when entroponetics was not discussed at school, many people gathered around Zigi during recess, and the corridor echoed with his half-truths: “The pale is made of the past,” he said. “All the lost things are jumbled up there, sad and abandoned. The pale is the world’s memory of the world. It accumulates matter and sweeps away everything in its path. This is what’s called entroponetic collapse.”  “But when will it happen, Zigi?" “Yes, Zigi, when?” “It will happen in your lifetime, little Olle. At least, I hope so. History swallows the present; the world of matter disappears, desaparecido... That’s why there’s no point in our generation going to school. There will be no future. When you grow up, don’t have children like your underdeveloped bourgeois parents did. You’ll get to see them die, and that’s it. Compared to the pale, there’s only a small amount of the world left! In the end, the isolas will sink, dozens and hundreds of square kilometres of land mass, can you even imagine? Like a ship keeling over into the pale. Fwooom...” Zigi makes a sinking ship gesture with his hands, the zippers of his leather jacket jingling; the children gasp. “Don’t worry, Olle, this will be the peak of humanity.” 

In the game, Zigi's brand of entroponetic nihilism gets two very brief (and kind of hidden) mentions, where it's named as entropolism. I've got those quotes saved in my post here.

Waves

The pale seems very wave-like in that scene where it lifts a house, and apparently it's also like a wave according to science:

“It’s an oceanographic myth. The Killer Wave.” Little Khan points in the direction of the body of water. The four of them watch from the safe warmth of a beach towel. Insects buzz in the dark, around the gas lanterns. “For a long time it was just that—a myth, a sailor’s tale. Arda even has a mythological name for it: ‘halderdingr’. But now they’re a scientifically documented phenomenon, they really exist, you understand? This explains the dozens, hundreds of missing ships. […] “And you know what’s the most fucked up thing about it?” Khan asks slyly. He wipes his diamaterialist glasses and then puts them back on. His almond eyes squint behind the magnifying lenses, filled to the brim with popular science mystique. “The same effect—don’t ask me how, I don’t know—but the same non-linear effect also explains the pale. They use it in entroponetics. This is how the pale behaves when it sweeps over the world.” 

Mold

I've heard that in Estonian the word used for Pale is Hall, meaning both frost and mold, like a pale gray film that covers the surface of things. As the Pale takes Vaasa, fruits begin to grow mold. Some people choose to stay rather than leave the disaster zone.

The panic has cooled. In the strange indifference of the evacuation, whole families stay behind in Vaasa. There they play board games, in their houses, in their spacious apartments. They love vitamin-rich food, and when the pale is only a few days away, it’s always signalled by the same beautiful event. Fruits go mouldy. It grows vigorously on them. Children listen to oranges crackling on the table. Spores sprout from the pulp, apples are hairy with it. If you try to touch them, they crack open. No one knows why it’s like that. But few can muster the energy to be afraid of that time, and that’s why I say it’s beautiful. 

And later, when Zigi is living in a forest that's been taken by the Pale, even the animals have been consumed by it although they're still alive:

And to the dark forest, to the museum of natural history, where mould grows on the horns of the males and puffs of steam no longer rise from the kids’ nostrils. They still breathe—not oxygen, but pure pale. 

Turning into a protein mass

The mother of the missing girls sits in her home, waiting for the pale to take her:

Ann-Margret Lund also sits there somewhere in her kitchen, in the middle of the pale; her rooms are quiet and clean. The former teacher wears a beige jacket and an above-the-knee skirt, and watches the moulding apricots. […] Like everyone else, she can’t do anything in this extended stay, where one’s sense of the present slowly drifts away. But whereas the others dissolve into their memories, she simply disappears. It’s as if her life had never happened. The past is not awaiting her return. She just wanders around the rooms, adjusts her grandmother’s lace doily and bedspreads, arranges the curtains on the rails. And thus, tastefully, she refuses to indulge in those ecstasies which visit the human spirit when the world is disintegrating. Nothing leaves her hands, and nothing returns.  When Katla finally sinks into the pale, Ann-Margret Lund turns, without the slightest pleasure, into a protein mass. 

Hanging out in the Pale with the ghost of Ignus Nielsen

Years later, as an adult, Zigi has become immune to the effects of the Pale, and even stays in the middle of it in a tent, hanging out with the cytoplasmic spirit of a dead communist.

Human speech sounds out of place in the silence of the pale. It echoes in the gloom of the trees as Zygismunt trudges through the snow. There’s an old trick coined by the great entroponaut K. Voronikin, that you have to shout in the pale. Otherwise, you start to feel gloomy, and the past comes up. But Zygismunt needn’t be afraid of that. When he first entered the pale, he discovered to his great dismay that he couldn’t return like everyone else. Or rather—he could, but not where he really wants. This makes him indispensable to Mazov’s idea. The disappearance of the Lund children has literally given Zigi special entroponetic powers. 

He goes hunting for pale-poisoned ibexes. The phrase ‘protein mass’ comes up again. It seems that any human or animal in the pale for long enough eventually turns into a protein mass.

The entroponaut shakes himself. Snow falls from the shoulders of the anorak coat. He goes on alone. An hour of frozen machine tracks and hoofprints in the snow run along in the flashlight beam. And when a herd of ibex finally emerges from the darkness, they are frozen in place in the middle of the road, like an exhibit in a natural history museum. Some of the females sometimes jerk in place, sneezing; this is a nervous impulse, a muscle tremor. The backs of the stuffed animals are already covered with snow, but their snouts are still steaming, they’re still breathing—some for a few days, some for a week. An anorak-clad figure moves through the herd with the indifference of a professional until the beam of his flashlight casts the alpha male’s crown of horns as a shadow on the wall of spruce trees. Zygismunt looks into the animal’s glazed eyes. Its sense of time has broken down. An automaton’s primitive fragment of a brain strays in the pale faster than that of a human. This is how hunters from the outskirts go hunting in the entrokataa. Of course, they’ll eventually go mad from it as well, and one day they won’t return. But not Zigi, he has special abilities. He takes a pocket knife from his belt and slits the protein mass’s throat. 

#disco elysium #sacred and terrible air #Püha ja õudne lõhn #pjõl #disco elysium lore #the pale

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

Tysm I've wanted to do one of these for *ages* @mairithepotato 😊

Last song: Hares on the mountain by the local honeys

Favourite colour: Deep bottle green or very blue-biased violet

Currently watching: Pan's Labrynth (I'm about halfway through) which is gorgeous and imaginative and horrifying in equal measure. Also Yaratilan, a TV show re-imagining Mary shelley's frankenstein set in the ottoman empire that somehow manages to be more faithful to the book than ANY prior screen adaptation.

Spicy/Savory/Sweet: a tie between the last two 🍕🍮

Relationship status: Aroace so nothing romantic but I have had the best platonic coven I could ever ask for for the last 2-3 years 🩶💚🤍🖤

Current obsessions: Too many to list! But amongst others, Guilmerro del Torro, Neil Gaiman, Silent Hill, science fiction involving ecosystem-size superorganisms, and collecting flowers from my surroundings to a) improve my ID skills b) wear in my hair (◕‿◕✿)

Tags (I don't know enough people on tumblr to do 9 aaaa): @ltwilliammowett @moths-daily these accounts are lovely pls go check them out. OK I'm going go cross into my non-@mairithepotato IRLs to make this ✨️slightly more respectable✨️ @noughticalcrossings @dicesmasher

Nine people I'd like to know better

I was tagged by @quatregats 💖

Last song: Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran

Favourite color: purple (currently wearing an all-purple outfit 💜)

Currently watching: Downton Abbey

Spicy/savory/sweet: savory or (not too) sweet

Relationship status: single

Current obsession: none actually, it's been a while since I've had one 😕

I tag @fluencylevelfrench, @lemonadeandlanguages, @marilearnsmandarin, @mediocrelanguagelearner, @pawprintedpages, @ruhua-langblr, @segledepericles, @sprachgefuehle, and @slavic-roots-western-mind (no pressure!).

#asks

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

In case you lost it - a link to the eSIM donation guide. Even if you feel sick and powerless, you can at least do this. And even if you really, really can't donate, you can always at least share this and remind others.

https://gazaesims.com/esim-purchase-tutorial/

#palestine #esims for gaza #free palestine #gaza

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

for real true detective s4 going full on into the magical realism that s1 scratched the surface of while remaining firmly rooted in the reality and pain of the oppressed is everything I could’ve wanted for a s1 follow up. that mix of cosmic horror and the ‘commonplace' evils of a mining town poisoning its indigenous inhabitants while an estranged member of that community resists against her racist stepmother's attempts to assimilate her into whiteness etc is so far pretty balanced.

it doesn’t leave reality behind to focus on fantasy and keeps the two entwined.

this is such a crucial part of crafting magical realism, like I talk about it with the terror, with twin peaks, and disco elysium, etc. without the realism magical realism is rendered hollow and meaningless. in these stories fantasy has to be a lens with which you further explore your relationship with reality, if it isn’t than its just there, doing nothing, being disparate

#ok so true detective is magical reslism #AND is like twin peaks the terror and disco elysium #instantly sold this is literally made for me in heaven

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

northern lights over iceland, harald moltke, 1899

#northern lights #northern lights over iceland #harald moltke #1899 #It looks so unearthly and ghosly im in LOVE

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

Me too! It's like I have inside me an inherent fuck-upery essence that attaches itself to whatever seems most likely for me to mess up.

always vaguely feeling like im in trouble for something but idk what

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

The difficulty with creating stories with a-spec characters is that a lot of people still aren’t very familiar with a-spec identities, so most stories need to incorporate some kind of explanation of what these identities are, which often makes being a-spec the main aspect of a character’s plot and/or personality. It means we get a lot of stories about people who are new to identifying as a-spec. (Not to mention how many a-spec characters feel crafted to fit the piece of media they’re in, rather than to show an a-spec experience.)

And I honestly think a big part of that is that if you simply use a-spec terms in a story, a lot of people will be confused if you don’t explain it to them; some people know a-spec terms but still have broad assumptions about a-spec experiences. (Plus, a lot of a-spec characters who use labels are teenagers at an age when it makes sense for them to be discovering and coming to terms with their identity and desires.)

But if you introduce a character who has very clearly a-spec experiences without labeling it, most people will label that character as some other identity, and then a-spec people are worried about seeming mean if they insist the character’s experience are explicitly a-spec experiences.

Honestly, I don’t entirely know how to improve this, it’s just an observation. But I want it to get better because we deserve more a-spec stories and ones that show lots of different experiences without having to build characters’ experiences around an audience’s lack of knowledge.

#aromantic #asexual #aroace #i feel this so much #you have to block against “oh just because they dont mention any interest in allo stufd doesnt mean it doesn't exist #but also that comes at the cost of just ... subtelty?? and not explaining character through infodumping???

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

#The Quiet Girl #An Cailín Ciúin #fixing the picture for the previous tags after my last meme

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

*It is better to have loved and suffer than to have never loved at all* he repeats to himself, crying uncontrollably

#an cailín ciúin #the quiet girl #compartment number 6 #hytti nro 6 #livingfilm #livingkazuoishiguro #why must i suffer like this god #all of these films deserve so much love and adoration #and their creators too #someone else please watch these I NEED discourse on them ; - ;

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

YOU - “So I went to sea aged 12, and I began to build myself a great gilded life that didn't humiliate me to live. And so all of those stories that you would have my biographer tally as courage… it's all vanity. It always has been. And we are at the end of vanity.”

DRAMA - Well, thanks for that, old boy. Really makes someone feel good to hear they’re no longer needed.

CAPTAIN CROZIER - Francis claps both of his hands on your shoulders. This is the warmest touch you’ve felt since leaving the ships. It may be the warmest touch you’ve felt in the past year, or in your entire life.

“Then you are free. Mine your courage from a different lode now. Friendship. Brotherhood.”

- “Are we brothers, Francis? I would like that very much.”

- [Suggestion: Formidable] “You can mine my lode anytime you want, hot stuff.” SUGGESTION: 5 LOW 28% +1 Not fully English -1 Dying of scurvy -1 Currently having a moment

- [Say nothing.]

SCREAMING CRYING HOWLING ETC

#disco elysium #the terror amc #i wont accept any other kind of video game adaptation of the terror #i feel compelled to do some cross fandom-fanart #but alas #exams

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

Hey, here's the full set of the brand new Disco Elysium pics!

Prints are available, and maybe these work well in poster format (which inprnt started doing a while ago)?

I'm sad I didn't get to draw any cars, would be nice to do 1 more, but I need to move on... Also, there has been a promo on all summer at inprnt that might end soon, so these are at 35% off right now!

#disco elysium #these are GORGEOUS #i love how dynamic they all are

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

My friend sent me this 💀

#disco elysium #newsflash satirical video game article accidentally sums up my entire personality #like no seriously #its uncanny

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

I feel like aroace rage as a concept does not get enough air time

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

How do I tumblr as a newbie?

Um so,,, it seems like everybody over here has been here for basically ever and I'm just ... struggling to figure out how to actually *do tumblr*, y'know?

Like, how does one form mutuals? What even are mutuals? How do you form a community? and actually form reciprocal blogging/reblogging chains rather than just passively liking and posting stuff with no direct engagement?

So far I've just kind of been using it like Instagram but it seems clear to me that I'm only experiencing a small fraction of what you're supposed to do here.

I see super long answer chains and reblogs and all of that everywhere but when I do I just feel kinda anxious about joining because I'm worried I don't know how to properly work with these and that everyone on these chains will either just ignore me or think I'm old and boring and am not getting it.

Any help for this young person who feels like a very old and out-of-touch one would be greatly appreciated.

#new to tumblr #tumblr help #tumbler #new on tumblr #new on here #new blog

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

Holidays at sea

Since we are approaching Christmas with great strides, I thought I would take a look at how this was practised at sea. Surprisingly, even though there were many different nations on the ships, Christmas was usually celebrated to some extent during the 17th and 18th century. Of course, you can’t expect a Christmas tree or presents that were then exchanged among each other. It was rather the case that the morning was spent wishing each other a Merry Christmas, and then, if the time and situation allowed (during a battle or a hunt, this was not possible), a prayer was said after breakfast. After that, the daily routine went on, and only at dinner, if the captain was in a good mood, could there be something extra rum or grog or wine, or a special dinner, which usually included meat. The captain usually ate dinner with his officers.

(x)

On Whalers, on the other hand, there was more going on. There, the festivities usually revolved around the meal, which was sometimes restricted to the captain’s table, but sometimes open to all. When Christmas became popular from the middle of the 19th century, families on the whalers took over the festivities ashore, decorating the cabin, hanging up stockings, exchanging gifts and eating well.

Sometimes the good humour spread to the crew. On the John P. West in 1882, Sallie Smith made popcorn balls to help her husband’s men celebrate. William B. Whitecar, who spent several Christmases on the Barque Pacific in New Bedford, wrote in 1864 that one year the captain sent a cheese to the crew to celebrate. In another year, the daily routine did not change. In another year, all crew members received mince pies.

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

thinking about unconventional sophont aliens, here's some quick little sketches of "star whales"/bioships that were left to form their own societies when the species that engineered them went extinct

[leflaneurbrutalistedefees]

christopher eccleston do you know that i would die for you (1 2)

#what he needs is the captain shakespeare treatment #stardust #robert de niro