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talesfromsigil · 7 months

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Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/74124/theseus/chapter/1346263/the-plan

Bit of a shorter chapter tonight. Aisling shows up and discusses where the crew is headed next. Honestly, I kinda wonder if I should rewrite this one, but it's time to publish so... here you go!

It didn't take much alcohol in my system before I started feeling better about being surrounded by unfamiliar bar patrons outside of my ship. I wouldn't say that I was comfortable, but alcohol certainly took the edge off and helped me loosen up more to the crew.

Not too long after, I spotted Aisling walk in the door, and upon seeing us in good spirits, her own shoulders dropped and a smile grew on her face. I raised my glass toward her and exclaimed "Captain!" The others took note of her as well and raised their glasses in kind to join me. This gave her a little laugh as she approached the table.

"Seems they got you to lighten up, huh?" She said as she sat down on the opposite end of the table from Ray and started to spread some papers around the table, pushing food aside "We still got a few days before Meryll's ready to take off again, and I got something to keep us busy for that too, but for now, let's talk our next job."

I had to wonder if it was normal to discuss tactics around a table in a public place like this while half the crew was getting drunk, but I had no objections.

"Please tell me it's not salvage again, that's left a sour taste in my mouth." Joel whined.

"It's not, but we're not out of that business in the future." Aisling warned, eliciting an annoyed grunt from Joel "First we got a supply drop. Tribals down on Earth requesting aid. They had a blight this year, won't survive winter on their own, so we're dropping rations, gonna sneak some medicine in there too. Skulls insisted."

We were doing... humanitarian work? I hadn't expected that. "Skulls?" I had to ask.

"One of the bigger gangs." Aisling explained "Good people, even if they are profit-mongers. This tribe's good with their farms and their taxes, ain't gonna leave them high and dry cause they had one bad harvest."

She'd said they were profiteers, but they actually took care of their people when things went wrong. Things really were different on the inner worlds.

"Sounds good. And the bounty?" Joel asked.

Aisling rolled her eyes and shuffled some of the papers around, showing a photo of several men "Exclisive contract. Group of three, been causing trouble with those same locals. Skulls would let them handle it on their own, but they crossed the line and nicked the last aid shipment. Been trying to sell it back to the tribals for extortion prices."

"Dead or alive?" Joel asked.

"Skulls want 'em alive for public execution." She replied casually. A public execution for theft seemed a bit overboard to me, but no one else was saying anything "We come to blows, though, shoot to kill. They'll give us partial payment for proof of kill, and I ain't risking any of you on some small-time idiots thinking they're too good for the rules."

"Any leads?" Mouse spoke up.

"Gonna have to talk to the locals, they move around a lot. Shouldn't be a hard job though." She leaned over and started gathering the papers up again. "Had to give the skulls a bit of a discount since we gotta sit in port for a bit, but the pay will be more than enough to make up for the last month."

I had to wonder my own role in this. Sure I'd be hauling the goods in my cargo hold, but would I be much use chasing thieves on the ground? "So... do I get like... a gun or something then? Never shot anyone before."

"Oh you will." Joel chuckled darkly.

"You have nine guns." Aisling declared. I hadn't taken much stock of my weapons systems, but that sounded about right. But she knew what I really meant. "You won't be joining us on the ground, Meryll. At least not for that portion of the job. Even in a small skirmish, the advantage of having aerial support and an evacuation plan can't be overstated. You and Doc will stay on board Theseus."

I was a little bit relieved to hear that. I wasn't sure if I could keep my nerve together surrounded by gunfire, never mind be effective in a real fight. But Theseus versus small arms fire was a different story altogether. "What about Mouse?" I asked.

"Mouse is ground support. We need the numbers on this one." Aisling explained. The boy didn't seem phased by this news, and just nodded along. "Don't give me that look. Kid knows how to shoot."

I had to shrug at her, not really having a good argument to oppose it. He did seem like he was far more capable than I wanted to give him credit for. In fact, I noted, nobody else even seemed to treat him like a kid. He was just another member of the crew to everyone else. Maybe it was time I stopped looking at him like he was too precious to let him be in danger.

"Sounds like we've got a plan." Ray nodded "So what are we doing while we're in port then?"

"Dock work." Aisling declared, eliciting a groan from the crew collectively "Unless you got something better to do?"

"Captain, not to object, but I am... not strong." I mentioned as I watched her rummage through her bag "No one's going to hire the girl who's got the strength of a particularly frail puppy to haul goods."

As if to answer me, Aisling pulled a circuitry blade from her bag and placed it on the table "That's because you'll be busy training." She pushed it toward me "Simulator system. Your piloting needs work, so you're going to be learning the basics, and you won't need to be in the core module to use it. It'll teach you how to maneuver in space and atmosphere, take off, land, act as a support gunship, and dogfight. Now, it's designed to work for a standard ship core, so it's probably not gonna play nice with you, but you'll still learn a lot from it."

As I took the blade in hand, I wondered if this would be at all similar to actually being in the ship. I really hoped it would. Looking down at my hip, I saw the enclosure cover wasn't screwed into place anymore, instead accessible by a sliding panel, so I wouldn't need tools to replace it. I popped it open and slid the blade in next to my personal one, like I would with any other modular machine at my old job, securing it into place and taking a deep breath as I felt the data stream exploring its new hardware. "Alright, what else?" I asked, looking up to see that Aisling had taken a mug of beer for herself and was chugging it down rapidly.

She let out a refreshed sigh and declared "For now, we drink and feast!" To which the others raised their glasses and smiled again.

It would be a long night.

#creative writing #writing #transhumanism #science fiction #Theseus

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devouring-hive · 11 months

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Recycling???? Like they're gonna take your pieces that can be salvaged.

"Are we still talking about this? Very well. The Ship of Theseus, does its name mean anything to you?"

#[ic]#[yami]#[asks]

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iamded-dev · 1 year

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Upd8

So that post down there I made about that zombie game idea was back in twenny-nineteen, that’s like 4 years ago! And I haven’t thought about that game at all! But there are other game ideas that have stuck with me all this time. I have my notebooks and more recently, my Google docs (because paper will wither and fade, but the cloud is immortal) which I keep track of these all along with all the details and tid-bits that come to mind. But to list them quickly, I have dreams of making...

• Junkyard salvaging game based on TWRP songs “Built 4 Love” and “Computer Wife” - This one I’ve put a lot of thought into in terms of gameplay and how to actually make it, as well as art style etc. Initially inspired by those two songs as well as RamHeadedGirl’s character generator “Ship of Theseus” (nsfw)

• Tamagotchi but with anime girls - This was prompted almost entirely by the Steam game "Your amazing T-Gotchi!” and my wish for a brighter outcome. I haven’t the programming knowledge or gameplay ideas to pursue this one too far, but we’ll see

• Monster-girl dating game - I’m gonna be real, that Dead by Daylight dating sim spin-off spoke to me. Romance, horror and mystery blend very well together. After a quick Steam browse I found “Occult Rewrite” and “Project Vostok” that fit the same vibe and provided some good inspiration. Also, the visual novel game engine ‘Renpy’ is incredibly easy to learn.

• Necromancer game - This is an ultimate dream of mine, but one I haven’t put nearly enough thought or time into. I mean look at me, I’m ded. Skeletons are my pals! I want a game where you can raise an undead army and cause mayhem! “Boneraiser Minion” and “Necrosmith” are two games that fit the vibe and nailed some of my ideas before I got there, but I’ve still got plans...

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shootybangbang · 3 years

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[Talking Bird] 17: In which beans are ruined

[Ao3 Link]

At the mention of Trelawney, Arthur dimly recalls a scrap of half-remembered conversation from last year, when he’d idled with the man in a Lemoyne saloon while waiting for a mark to arrive. The first flicker of your existence, passing him by unknown. Like the brief touch of a licked finger through candle flame: deceptively benign, with just a whisper of the burn to follow.

Somewhere between his first and second glass of whiskey sours, Trelawney had mentioned the burgeoning demand for opium in Chinatown. A former contact of his had recently left the high stakes poker circuit to get in on the profit, and he’d lamented the loss.

“It’s a shame,” he’d said, absently swirling the ice cubes in his emptied glass and regarding the swirling wood grain of the countertop with a pensive, faraway look. And for once, the sentiment had sounded genuine. Knowing him, the man was grieving a lost business opportunity more than anything else, but it’d been a long time since Arthur had heard him even bother to feign emotion for a stranger. “She’s not suited for smuggling in the least. Can’t say I can see this ending well.”

Less Trelawney’s gift for prophecy and more stating the obvious, now that he knows exactly who he’d been talking about. Prickly disposition, clueless when it comes to violence, and far too trusting of strangers. The cavalier attitude of someone who’d never been exposed to serious conflict and who, having since been exposed, lacks even the conviction necessary to put a bullet in the man holding her hostage.

And far too delicate besides.

When you’d pulled the blanket down your shoulders to untie your braid, Arthur had tilted his head back just enough to catch an eyeful of your backside. A pretty thing to put to paper: the wet swathe of hair draped over your shoulder, the faint shadow of your spine a dark curve flickering with the shifting of firelight. Soft, dappled lines wrapped in the body of someone who’s caused him nothing but grief in the past weeks.

The view had confirmed something he’d already been suspecting: your lack of threat to anything larger than a rat terrier.

Judging by your physique, you’d probably struggle to lift anything more than fifteen pounds. Maybe twenty, on a good day. A veritably pathetic amount of muscle tone with none of the etchings that rough living leaves behind.

Some foreign high society girl fallen on hard times, he guessed. But oddly, none of the clumsy caution people of that strata have when confronted with any sort of real work. You’d fallen into the rhythm of whittling bark off the cottonwood branches too comfortably for someone unacquainted with physical labor, handled the knife with a deftness that comes only from rote repetition.

“I knew Trelawney had connections to some gang out west, but I never thought…” You shake your head slowly, dazed by the absurdity of this new development. “Did he know? When I sold them those bonds, did he realize they were yours? And why—”

“Nah, he wouldn’t have known. I, uh… wasn’t too keen on tellin’ folk I got robbed by a woman.” He rubs the back of his neck and lets out an embarrassed huff. “Told ‘em the whole thing was a bust.”

Looking back, he may as well have told them the truth. The lie hadn’t done much to salvage his pride, and had prompted weeks of jibes at his own expense. Snide little asides from Micah, overt ridicule from Bill, and the painful ordeal of Sean.

“Gettin’ sloppy in your old age,” he’d quipped. “I’ll tell you what you need, Morgan. You need to let someone else hold the reins for a change. Someone quick on the uptake, someone young and hot-blooded and—”

“Get back to me when you’re done complimentin’ yourself,” Arthur had replied, already walking away.

“Wait, Morgan — take me with you next time you ride out! I’ll scout somethin’ out, and we can…”

Sean had been insistent as a mosquito and twice as annoying, but ultimately bearable so long as he had a beer in his hand or a pillow over his head. His own head, though he’d been sorely tempted otherwise.

No, what had really driven him to leave camp had been Dutch.

Dutch and his put-upon fatherly air, all stern mouthed disapproval and downward sloping shoulders. His pointed observations of Jack’s tattered jacket, well on its way to becoming a patchwork Ship of Theseus. Pearson’s dwindling supply of seasonings, so scarce that the stews have become bland to the point of near inedibility. The stocks of medicine running low, bandages boiled so many times that their fibers have since frayed to a cobwebbed consistency.

“I know you’re doing your best, son,” Dutch had sighed, casting a weary eye over his threadbare kingdom. “God knows you’re the only man I can depend on to get anything done around here. But folks are… well. Folks are struggling.”

Arthur’s eyes had slid momentarily towards Dutch’s tent, resting on the golden gleam of the gramophone and the crisp cotton sheets laid across the bed. An unbroken sea of white, with not a stitch out of place. And not twenty feet away, Hosea’s shabby lean-to, the older man’s bedroll bearing the same disjointed array of colors as the rest of the camp’s accoutrements.

Dutch always did have a taste for the finer things in life. A level of refinement proportionate to the depth of his ambition, which in earlier days had been tempered by kinder, simpler ideals. Feed those that need feeding. Shoot those that need shooting. Robin Hood-esque, with a western (and occasionally lethal) twist. Evelyn Miller had been a fixture even then, but in those halcyon years Dutch had not yet twisted the author’s words to the tottering worldview that he’s since constructed.

The gang’s nascent success had bred standards and attracted new followers. A ragtag flock all too eager to nourish their leader’s growing, malignant appetite for grandeur.

“Just one last score, and we’ll be clear of all this… this manmade rot.” Dutch said, gesturing in the direction of Blackwater. “But for now, we’ve got to play their game. Get our hands dirty for the time being so we can wash ourselves clean of all this when we’ve finally got the means.”

Arthur had departed under the pretense of retrieving the missing bonds (impossible) or locating some cache of similar value (near impossible), but in truth he’d done so primarily for the preservation of his own sanity. More and more these days, he’s been seeing cracks in the foundation of the man who’d given him this life, dragged him out of the gutter and set him with a previously unwavering sense of purpose. And it feels treacherous — traitorous, even — to take any of it into question.

But as always, the open road and the unabiding sky of the prairie settled him into a different mindset altogether. The cycles of flora and fauna in untouched wilderness exist completely separate from the artifices of men, with the legacies of countless tiny lives encapsulated in the fine grit of the dust to which all things return. And in that certainty comes an overwhelming comfort. Everything else seems trifling in the wake of the vast perpetuity of nature.

A few days spent wandering would do him good, he’d decided. Spend some time away from all the trappings of civilization, then rob some poor sap on the side of the road so as not to return empty-handed.

And then you’d ruined his plans entirely by literally walking into him as he’d been passing through Strawberry.

“Well,” you say, offering up a small, nervous smile. “What now?”

What now, indeed. Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. “Guess we take a visit to Trelawney’s,” he replies, already dreading the inevitable embarrassment of explaining the whole sorry situation to the man. “And if it turns out you’re tellin’ the truth, I’ll give you a ride from Rhodes to St Denis.”

You frown and furrow your brow. “Rhodes?”

“Yeah, Rhodes. Trelawney’s got a caravan there on the outskirts of town. You didn’t know?”

“You can’t take me to Rhodes,” you say automatically, as if stating the obvious. “I mean… look at me.”

“You’re a woman?” he asks stupidly.

“I’m an Oriental, you moron. And Rhodes is a fucking… it’s a fucking Raider town.”

“You’d be with me. I’ll keep you safe.”

You shake your head and set your mouth into a grim, flat line. “That’s worse. They might think we’re together. And they don’t take kindly to miscegenation.”

Your words have to them the quality of a veil being drawn back, exposing a corner of this country’s ugliness he’s not often been privy to. A familiar knot of guilt tugs at his innards, accompanied by the unpleasant, impotent sensation that surfaces each time he catches the ungracious stares of the crowd when walking into town with Tilly by his side. Each time he hears the practiced courtesy in a shopkeep’s voice drop away when the man turns away from him to address Charles. Each time he watches Lenny reread for the thousandth time the letter from his dead father, the creases in its paper worn so deep that it would have long since fallen apart were it not for the boy’s careful, reverent handling.

“You know those big plantation houses just south of Rhodes? They hire Chinese sometimes to work the fields. Cheaper than sharecropping, apparently.” The look on your face is drawn and bitter. The bite in your voice suggests something personal, the sting of an injury not yet healed. “One of the boys got involved with a white housemaid. He’d saved up for train tickets to Philadelphia, and they were… he was going to marry her there. Wanted an August wedding. The number eight’s lucky for us, you see. So August 8th, 1898… he thought it was all very romantic. Used to make this stupid joke that he wished he’d met her ten years earlier. Raiders strung him up in an oak tree a couple weeks before they were set to leave.”

Arthur’s tongue lies silent and heavy in his mouth.

You take in a deep breath that rattles with the failing determination of someone struggling not to break their composure, then look to him with a desperation so absolute that it seems almost indecent to witness. “Why don’t you just leave me here? Keep me tied up if you have to. Come back for me when you’re done with Trelawney.”

In the short span of time that he’s known you, you’ve made enough of an impression to warrant several conclusive classifications. A haughty, pampered little thing. An ineffective liar. A self-destructive fool — but not stupid. Definitely not stupid.

The sheer idiocy of your suggestion indicates a fear so deep that it’s completely severed you from your senses. Just a frightened little bird caught in a trap, scratching and clawing for the narrowest possible opening for escape.

“You’re tellin’ me to tie up a woman and leave her in the middle of nowhere? May as well just hand-deliver you to the wolves. No,” he says firmly, trying to shake off the unwanted pang of sympathy. Dutch had been right about one thing — the gang did need money, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let this opportunity for it slip away out of misguided compassion for a woman who’d literally robbed him as he’d bled out. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Soon as we near Rhodes, I’ll tie you to Boadicea the same way I did when we left Strawberry.”

You blink and utter a disbelieving, “Excuse me, what?”

“Reckon they’ll treat us both a hell of a lot nicer if they think you’re a bounty. Gives me plenty excuse for keepin’ you in one piece, too.”

Your face ventures on a quick journey through the five stages of grief. The grief in question being for the loss of your dignity. The blank look shifts to a glare. You open your mouth to spit out something no doubt acerbic and very rude, but a flash of uncertainty crosses your face and you quickly bite your tongue. Then you lower your head and squeeze your eyes shut. When you finally open them again, there is a defeated resignation in them that attests to a lost mental argument.

“You better ride slow if you don’t want a repeat of this morning,” you say wearily.

Arthur shrugs. “Can’t throw up if you got nothin’ in your stomach. We’ll just skip feeding you breakfast tomorrow.”

To his relief, the atmosphere lightens to blessed, familiar hostility. You tell him to go fuck himself. That you’ll literally fight him for the apples you know he has tucked away in his saddlebags. That maybe you’ll throw up anyway purely out of spite. That he’s a miserable piece of shit who you wish—

A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the outcrop for a fraction of a second, painting everything beneath it into harsh shades of white and black. It strikes as sudden and violent as a fiery whip crack, leaving behind it the bittersweet scent of burnt grass and a curl of grey smoke like a departing ghost. Its near-simultaneous clap of thunder drowns out your last sentence with an ear splitting boom so encompassing that the vibration of it seems to rattle down to the bone. The silence that follows has in it the anticipatory hush of the void prior to Genesis. You shatter it with a quiet but appropriately placed, “Jesus Christ.”

The land outside is hedged low in the horizon, and the vastness of its sky swallows all else. It crowns as its dominating feature the movement of its anvil-shaped clouds. They shift leaden and portentous, translucent bellied and lit up by the jagged tongues of lightning darting throughout quick and sporadic as pale dragonflies. Roiling violet like the murky blood of some vast organism, pulsing membranous over the prairie with a fury of near biblical proportions. And below, the buttes with their strange eroded shapes like scattered islands in a black sea of grass. In the torrential dark, their silhouettes flash ivory with every strike of lightning only to sink back into the hushed umbra of night.

There is a muted look of awe on your face, as if witnessing for the first time the true scale of a storm. Something that before now had been glimpsed only through the gaps between high-shuttered buildings. Tempests caught in concrete snares and, not unlike the men that build them, diminished until they are but a feeble whisper of their former selves.

“It’s beautiful,” you murmur. “I never knew rain could be like this.”

With a jolt of displeasure, he finds that the soft expression on your face renders you unexpectedly pretty in the fire’s flickering light, the amber reflection of it bright as copper in your eyes. A gentle chiaroscuro, the smooth line of your cheek and shadowed hollow of your throat the anchor points to which his eye is drawn.

You shuffle a little closer to the outlook’s rain-veiled edge. The roughspun blanket, still drawn tightly around your shoulders, shifts. Arthur quickly averts his eyes, but even so is met with a sliver of bare skin that runs neck to navel. The subtle outline of a breast, the mild fishbone curve of a rib.

And all at once he’s unbearably, disastrously hard, filled with a painful but directionless longing — not just for intimacy, but for the simple reassurance of another body pressed close, skin to skin and breath to breath. A kind of tenderness he’s been deprived of for so long that the memory of it brings not warmth but the brittle cold of hoarfrost. Absence like a thick pane of ice, the things he’s lost visible just underneath.

From the periphery of his line of sight, you’re but an indistinct blur in the vague shape of a woman. How appropriate then, that you should be the focus of this formless arousal. And how infuriatingly pathetic. He hadn’t lied when he’d said you weren’t his type, and yet here he is, his cock stiffer than it’s been in months at just the suggestion of a woman’s naked body.

In desperate search of both distraction and something to obscure himself with, Arthur pulls back the front flap of his satchel and fishes out your blue notebook. He glances briefly in your direction, already anticipating your angry shout of indignation — but you’re far too occupied with watching the progression of the storm to so much as glance in his direction.

The notebook’s contents are far more legible than he’d initially assumed. Most of the foreign characters seem to be either names or places, which makes it possible for him to pick out the main thread of most sentences.

Its first half consists of what looks like a ledger. Neatly organized columns with foreign characters and numbers that he hasn’t the slightest idea how to parse. When he flips past it, a slip of paper scrawled with the same strange, flowing text flutters from the pages and alights delicately into his lap. Arthur picks it up, and as he examines it, it occurs to him that he has no idea how to orient it.

Prior to this, he’d only ever seen Chinese characters painted on the roadside food stalls accompanying railroad workers on their long trek westwards. A strange, complex syllabary. He’d once read somewhere that each word of the language had its own unique character. A sort of pictograph that, when studied, relays its meaning to those who knew how to read it.

He scrutinizes the slip of paper in his hand, but finds himself unable to pick out even the vaguest of resemblances. The corner of the paper bears a square seal of red ink, inset with an intricate consortium of straight lines. Curiosity spent for the moment, Arthur slots the document back in place.

The rest of the notebook looks to be an odd mixture of field observations and long, ornate paragraphs about various landscapes. A few pressed wildflowers, field observations of city flora and fauna, crudely drawn animals reminiscent of the scattered petroglyphs he’s found carved in long-abandoned settlements. An earmarked passage describing the wetlands bordering St Denis, full of strikethroughs and hastily added phrases squeezed into the margins. Another describing what sounds like Cotorra Springs.

“The amber fields are dotted with sprigs of larkspurs and wild flax like blue-violet stars,” Arthur reads aloud.

You turn to face him so quickly that your wet hair arcs through the air like an ink-stained brush, scattering water droplets that sizzle and hiss when they fall into the fire. Wild-eyed as a spooked horse, but frozen into a horrified silence as he licks his finger and traces the rest of the line across the page, continuing, “And even further north, viridian-blue pools from which rise plumes of white smoke, the water still and clear as glass. Hills of black obsidian —”

You scramble towards him and, while clutching the blanket around your shoulders shut with one hand, slap the notebook out of his grip with the other. It lands perilously close to the fire, but you snatch it up without giving a second thought to the nearness of the flames.

“That’s private,” you hiss, hugging the notebook to your chest the way one might accidentally smother an infant.

“Thought it was fair turnaround, seein’ as you never extended that same courtesy to me,” he retorts.

The memory of that miserable morning after surfaces in him like a bloated corpse too persistent to stay hidden. His billfold emptied, ill-gotten gains vanished, and his journal speckled with smeared, bloodied thumbprints from beginning to end. Above a sketch of a mountain wildflower he’d drawn a question mark next to, the word “crocus ?” written in an angular, jagged scrawl.

“Yeah, because I thought you were going to die!” you argue back. “Figured you probably had your next of kin listed somewhere in there!”

Next of kin. The phrase pierces through like a stitch popped out of place, and Arthur nearly flinches. It’s an unintentional blow on your part, but nevertheless he deflects the only way he knows how. When bitten, bite back.

“Oh that’s real charitable, comin’ from the dope-peddler,” he jeers. “You save this compassion for everyone you fuck over, or just me?”

A clear and unguarded expression of hurt crosses your features. The same you’d worn when he’d had to pry his shotgun out of your hands. Forlorn, helpless as a wounded prey animal. But it passes quickly into a cold disdain, your head raised high again and your eyes hard as flint.

“Do you know,” you say quietly, lip curling with contempt. “I seriously considered cutting your throat when I finally realized who you were. I should have.”

Then you blink, forehead wrinkling as you sniff at the air. You glance at the fire, where his forgotten can of beans is beginning to burn.

Arthur curses. He hastily swipes one of his discarded riding gloves from the grass and pulls it on, then grabs the can and blows on its contents, fanning away its delicate wisp of black smoke.

You retreat to the far inner corner of the outcrop and frantically page through the notebook until you find the red-sealed paper sheafed inside. With a sigh of relief, you slump against the rough granite wall, the tense set of your shoulders loosening as though some secret string stretched taut through the frame of your body had suddenly been cut loose.

A sullen silence permeates the shelter, punctuated only by the grating scratch of metal as he scrapes burnt food off the edges of the can with a spoon.

“You forgot to mention that the whole place smells like shit,” Arthur says finally. He keeps his eyes on the can, attention focused squarely on the arduous task of excavating beans.

“What?”

“Cotorra Springs. Smells like week-old shit. Especially around the pools.”

The rustle of blankets. From the corner of his eye, he watches you tentatively scoot closer. “You’ve been there?” you ask. Your voice is still deeply reproachful, but touched with genuine curiosity.

“You haven’t?”

“No. I’ve just seen pictures. And notes from people who have.”

“Huh,” he says. He scrapes another carbonized mouthful from the can. “Could’ve fooled me, the way you wrote about it.”

You raise your eyebrows. “You think so?”

“Sure.

The corner of your mouth quirks upwards in a reluctant smile that unfolds like the breaking light of a clouded dawn. “Well, that’s… that’s good to know.”

“You writin’ a book or something?” he asks.

“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” The smile wilts slightly, and you drop your gaze down to the notebook on your lap. “No. Just a favor for an old friend’s husband. The man fancies himself an explorer, but can barely string a sentence together. He’s paying me to pretty up his notes for him. Half of which I think are made up. There’s some bullshit in there about an enormous rainbow colored pond full of boiling water.”

Arthur laughs. “Naw, that bit’s true. I’ve seen it. It’s a hell of a thing.”

You seem skeptical. He doesn’t blame you. Even after having walked the rust-banded edge of that craterous spring himself, his memory of it still carries with it the preternatural awe of a place half-dreamed. He tells you about the slow gradation of color leading inwards from the rim. Ochre to cadmium, to turquoise, to a deep cerulean with the unreal brilliance of a painted ocean. Steam hanging like a pungent fog. Entire stretches of ground covered in a thick, boiling mud, bubbling ominous as something out of Dante’s Inferno. A constant gurgling of earth and water, as if he were treading upon some living thing in the midst of an infernal digestion.

Halfway through his description, you flip the notebook to a clean page and ask him for a pencil, then begin scribbling down his words with an unceasing, determined hand. This bemuses him. That anyone might find his drivel meaningful enough to commit to paper is a new experience altogether. It’s an odd feeling, but not at all an unpleasant one.

That is, until you begin peppering his narrative with so many questions that it takes the better part of an hour to accommodate them.

What kind of plants grew there?

“Bunch of disgusting slippery shit around the edge. Algae or something. Other than that, can’t think of a single thing that’d lay roots in boiling water and sulfur.”

Did the mud boil like roiling water, or was it more the viscosity of a slow simmering stew?

“More like wet cement, really.”

Were there animals?

“No. Nothing there for ‘em.”

Birds?

“Didn’t see any.”

Insects?

“A shit ton of gnats, but not much else.”

How wide were the prismatic bands around the crater? What was the geology like? Did the surrounding forest taper off gradually in the vicinity of the spring, or was the loss of vegetation sudden and absolute as a drawn border?

“Give me your notebook.” he says, having finally reached the point of exasperation. “Easier if I just draw it for you.”

To his faint surprise, you hand it over without hesitation. He sketches out what he’s able to recall, all the while acutely aware of the madness of the situation. Fucking illustrating an account of his own wanderings for the woman who robbed him while they both sit in varying states of undress. Scribbling out a messy landscape in the same notebook whose contents he’d derided just a little while ago. Focusing all his attention on Cotorra Springs so as to ward away the unfortunate possibility of another inopportune erection.

The mediocre drawing he finally manages to scratch out would have disappointed him under any other occasion. Instead, he feels a warm flood of relief at its conclusion. If this doesn’t shut you up, then nothing will.

Nothing will, it seems. To his immense chagrin, the drawing sparks another round of questions. After silently admiring his work just long enough to spark hope of your satiety, you ask him about the species of the trees. Had he explored the nearby forest? Were there flowers? What season had he visited in? Was the acrid smell of sulfur present even here?

“Look,” Arthur says wearily. “You clearly come from money. Why don’t you just hire someone out to take you sometime?”

You snort at the suggestion. The corner of your mouth lifts upwards into something that’s only nominally a smile, and more the type of grimace that accompanies an old wound. “The only two men I’d trust enough to take me out into the middle of nowhere are dead. And with the money I owe, I can’t… I can’t just… you know what?” you say abruptly. “It’s getting late and I’m fucking exhausted. I’m going to sleep.”

And with that, you tug the blanket tight around your shoulders and huddle against the ground like a felled shrimp. You lay with your back to him, the words left unsaid hanging over you both like an unripe fruit of a question.

Arthur fetches his bedroll and unfurls it close to the fire. A battered pillow emerges from the worn tarp as he spreads it flat. After a moment of contemplation, he picks up the pillow and tosses it in your direction. It hits you square on the head.

Immediately, you sit up and snarl at him. “What the fuck is wrong with — oh.” You pick up the pillow and grasp it tight, as if at any moment he might change his mind and demand it back. Your small “thank you” is puzzled and uncertain.

“I’m gonna put out the fire,” he says. “You try to slit my throat in the dark, I’ll wring your neck.”

But the threat comes out empty and toothless, and judging by the renewed sarcasm in your voice when you tell him you’ll keep it in mind, you seem fully aware of it.

Arthur douses the flames by kicking dirt over the embers, which glow dim and vermillion for minutes afterwards, fading slow to dull, crumbling ash when the heat finally bleeds out of them. The pleasant smell of smoke lingers inside the shelter for a good while longer, but even that dissipates eventually, leaving just petrichor and the crisp, clean scent of early autumn rain.

The worst of the storm has shifted westwards. Water drips in a steady stream from the outer edge of the overhang, churning the ground below to a soup of mud. The cloud cover is still dense, but it’s thinned enough that moonlight gleams through the feathery underbelly in a pale and spattered mottle. With it, he can make out the dim outline of your body, the rise and fall of your chest in a slow, steady rhythm he sorely doubts you’d have the patience to feign.

He lies awake there in the dark for a long while, shuffling through a jumble of discordant emotion. It’s as if the pieces of several sets of puzzles have been mixed together and jammed into an incomprehensible mess, so hopelessly and thoroughly muddled that he can no longer tell where one thing starts and another ends. He sorts his way through it until the rain weakens to a grey drizzle and the drip of rainwater turns from the unbroken stream of a faucet to a series of droplets beating out an abstruse morse code against the ground.

In the end, he’s only able to definitively place a single solid sentiment. Pity.

———

Couple notes:

Arthur's understanding of Chinese is incorrect, but aligns with the assumptions a lot of Western scholars during that time period had regarding it. There was a big tendency to treat it like Japanese, which despite using some of the same characters, uses a completely different structure.

Cotorra Springs seems to be based off Yellowstone. The big boiling rainbow spring is actually real: it's called the Grand Prismatic Spring and seriously does look like something out of a fever dream. Yellowstone also does smell like sulfur in some places, but it’s not so much like week old shit as it is the potent fart of someone who’s eaten far too many deviled eggs.

No algae grows in the spring. It's actually cyanobacteria, but there's no reason Arthur would know this. It does look pretty gross up close.

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan/reader #arthur morgan/oc #fic #red dead redemption #rdr2 #my work #talking bird

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faithbooksfiber · 3 years

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Inadvertent application of philosophy?

Was just reading about ship of Theseus (if you replaced an entire ship one piece at a time, is it the same ship or different one?) and realized we did that with our garage.

Our tiny lot had an old one-car garage on it. Rotten supports, whole sections of wall rotten out, leaky roof, full of junk from previous inhabitants. You could shake the whole thing by leaning on a corner. We wanted to knock it down, haul away the rotten stuff, and put up a new outbuilding. When we went to get the building permits, the township told us that due to new regulations since it was built, if we put up a new building, we could not put it in the same place; we’d have to move it six feet over away from the fence. This would move it off the concrete pad and too close to the house, so we’d also have to make it smaller. We asked, what if we just fix what’s there? Answer: that’s fine.

So we hauled away the junk it was filled with, put new walls up inside, just inside the old rotten walls, then pulled down the old walls. Salvaged most of the roof joists and put on a new roof. Replaced all the electrical wiring. Refurbished the inside, adding a wall; front half shop for tools and stuff, back finished into a nice room to use as a library.

There is very little original; it’s not even a garage anymore, but to the township, it’s the same building.

#ship of theseus #letter of the law #ridiculous regulation

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proxycrit · 2 months

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(Takes your kneecaps)

HEHEHEHEHEHE

Au’s Salvaging the Ship of Theseus! Gotta figure out how to draw these guys. Inconsistency my beloathed!

#submas #pokemon #art #salvaging the ship of theseus #warden ingo #subway boss emmet #…#help i got lost in the woods of hisui emmet #eelektross #submas au #sketches

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theemptyquarto · 5 years

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Free books

I’m purging out my shelves which were overflowing, and thus have a ton of books to give away. Before I haul them off to charity I thought I’d see if any of them could find homes with any of my followers. They will be for free, but I will ask you to pay your own postage. I live in the continental US so if you do not I suggest it’s likely to be prohibitively expensive for them to be sent.

All are in good or very good condition except as noted. There are several popular bestsellers as well as some miscellaneous crap. First come first serve, message or ask me and we’ll figure out how to get them to you. Below the cut:

Fiction:

“V.M. Straka’s ‘Ship of Theseus,’” J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (HC, boxed, extras)

“Song of Years,” Bess Streeter Aldrich (PB)

“The Heart Goes Last,” Margaret Atwood (PB) some minor water damage

“The Birth of Venus,” Sarah Durant (PB)

“The Pillars of the Earth,” Ken Follett (PB) some minor water damage

“Star Trek Into Darkness: The Official Novelization,” Alan Dean Foster (PB)

“The Russian Concubine,” Kate Furnivall (PB) some damage to cover

“The Poisonwood Bible,” Barbara Kingsolver (PB)

“The New Annotated Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’” ed. Leslie S. Klinger (HC)

“The Namesake,” Jhumpa Lahiri (PB)

“This Census-Taker,” China Mieville (PB)

“Ceremony in Lone Tree,” Wright Morris (PB)

“Bright’s Passage,” Josh Ritter (HC)

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” J.K. Rowling (HC)

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” Helen Simonson (PB)

“Breakfast of Champions,” Kurt Vonnegut (PB)

“Salvage the Bones,” Jesmyn Ward (PB)

Nonfiction:

“Star Wars Origami: 36 Amazing Paper-folding Projects from a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” Chris Alexander (PB)

“My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-up,” Russell Brand (PB)

“Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine,” Adrian Miller (HC)

“Hamilton: The Revolution,” Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter (HC)

“The Bookseller of Kabul,” Asne Seierstad (PB)

“The Actor’s Book of Movie Monologues,” eds. Marisa Smith and Amy Shewel (PB)

“Who-ology: Doctor Who, The Official Miscellany,” Cavan Scott and Mark Wright (HC)

“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Michael Wolf (HC)

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synechd0che · 2 years

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You know, I keep reblogging and then deleting the various commentaries going on about old vs new styles of construction, mostly because they each have a gem of wisdom that’s like, not all the way fleshed out. At any rate:

There’s value in taking care of what already exists so that it lasts, instead of buying and building new (which takes fresh resources and fresh land).

There’s value in designing proactively so that dwellings take advantage of airflow and thermal mass, passive heating and cooling, climate, and local materials. This reduces long term costs and prolongs material lifespan.

There’s value in utilizing old styles of construction because they often are fine-tuned for local climates.

There’s value in applying newer engineering concepts to keep buildings accessible, sustainable, safe, and durable.

There’s value in salvage material to reduce material waste.

Trying to argue ship of Theseus logic games about the best way to preserve or mimic an old style is… pointless. See above points.

Beauty is not static - newer trends are not worse simply because they’re younger. “I wish I lived in the fifties” type pitfalls of nostalgia (consider: motivated by what biases?).

Newer is not always better - I would argue that the loveless, consumable, and ultimately disposable nature of newer styles, which many people find unappealing in their shallowness even if they can’t explain why, is because of capitalist drives to produce faster, consume faster, keep up appearances, and maximize profit. There’s not room left for Soul.

Green is not always green - like vegan leather is just plastic, keep in mind the actual cradle to grave lifespan and cost of your building materials.

Housing solutions will have to change radically to accommodate population, climate, and environmental stewardship needs.

A need for new solutions does not negate the joy people find in beautiful craftsmanship and dwellings that feel like homes; the two are not mutually exclusive, and the need for innovation does not even preclude the utilization of older styles.

The reason many people gravitate to older styles is the care and attention to detail in craftsmanship, from thoughtful room design to decorative embellishment. Many people find this lacking in cookie cutter developments that prioritize speed of construction over good architectural theory.

Housing snobbery is shitty. Stop it. Gatekeeping blows.

Beautiful old homes are often a reflection of years of slow, piecemeal design and decoration. It makes very little sense to try and build/restore a house with the mentality that you can pay for it all and it will all be done at once. Adopting a mentality of learning new craft skills, working at your own pace, is much more attainable. Communal sharing of tools and knowledge, y’all. Put practical trade classes back in schools, too.

To be honest, we can’t talk about housing without talking about classism, racism, decolonization, and how lack of equity is the seed of disposability. I’m really not the one who should occupy the spotlight on this topic. But basically, green design, thoughtful land use, and sustainable resource use is really useless if it’s not informed by and led by decolonial perspectives.

#let me know if I missed something #feel free to add your own info as well #this includes infodumping your building knowledge #while I am knowledgeable about many of the topics discussed here there’s only so much I can say in one post #and talking about land back here is not me using it as a gotcha sort of rhetorical tool #it really needs its own post I just thought it was one of tje pieces missing in a lot of the recent discussions

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adriereus-blog · 6 years

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𝓘 𝓶𝓾𝓼𝓽 𝓫𝓮 𝓬𝓻𝓾𝓮𝓵, 𝓸𝓷𝓵𝔂 𝓽𝓸 𝓫𝓮 𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓭.

After numerous attempts have failed and she was on the verge of losing hope that she will ever be able to leave Crete for good, the perfect opportunity came to her as she witnesses the ships filled with the tributes to be given to Asterion. The opportunity came in the form of a man named Theseus. She has seen far more tributes than she would have liked over the years but she knew as she watched him disembark from the ship with many like him, she knew that he was different. There is strength and resilience to him that would make him the perfect candidate to win the maze. Along with being the perfect gate away for her to leave this hell finally, adjusting the veil over her head as she runs back to the castle before she gets discovered.

It is a mix of timing, luck and patience that had allowed the thread to be in Theseus’s hands. He had been unsure in the beginning, suspicious of her true motives of helping him when she managed to get the both of them away from the eyes of others after the opening ceremony. She does not blame him: it is not everyday that you hear the princess wanting to assist someone from the clutches of death as set by the king.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Take me with you. Promise to take me with you on your ship and your success is guaranteed by this thread. That is the only thing I ask in return.”

He had promised her that he will do as she asks and she knows that he is capable of getting out of the maze in one piece taking his wits and his strength into account. However, that does not stop her nonetheless from worrying about the things that could go wrong, pacing back and forth on the shores as she waits for him. There is only so much she could have done on her end. The rest was up to Theseus.

Her worries proved to be nothing when he came running to her, grabbing her hand and running alongside the others he had freed from the king’s cruel game as they board Theseus’s ship. Chaos was everywhere around them as she sees people frantically putting up the sails and pulling out the anchor to depart on their ship while in the distance, she could see the soldiers trying to salvage whatever that is left of their ships while awaiting orders from the panicking king on what to do.

It was not easy for her to make the decision of leaving. Not because the act of leaving was difficult but rather knowing what it would take for her to be able to leave: for Asterion to be slain. It is with a heavy heart to know that a family member has to suffer in order for her to be free but she likes to believe that with Asterion death’s, he would be free from the pain of his current existence and move on to a different life where he could truly be happy. He would no longer have to suffer under their father’s hands now that he is put to rest.

As the ship drifts off further and further away from Crete, she sees the kingdom that her father desperately wished to uphold was slowly crumbling down into nothing. She is not sad to see her home falling apart, regardless of the memories that were made and shared in those walls. She is not ashamed to know that she has crushed the dreams and the hard work her father has put to become a king and to hold his reign. She takes pride rather in knowing that with just the simple action of hers, she has ruined her father’s life in a night.

She did tell him to mark her words, after all.

With his sons dead, his wife gone and his daughter who no longer wants to be with him: he is not living much of a life, is he?

#crete.#mazes.#verse: will love you till kingdom come

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theanthropist · 5 years

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The Accumulation of Small Changes

In a story, the Greek hero Theseus leaves for a long sea journey. During his voyage, one by one, each plank of the ship was broken and replaced as the ship travelled from harbor to harbor; the sails ripped and new ones were raised; masts burned and new ones set in their place; supplies exhausted and replenished. Every man of the crew, one by one, decided to stay on one exotic shore or another, caught some disease or tasted the blade of a sword, and all along new members joined and were hired.

When all was said and done, and the ship made it back home, none could recognize it. It shared nothing in common with the ship that had left the port decades before.

Was it the same ship that left? And if not, when did it stop being the same ship?

One can imagine countless variations of this thought experiment, commonly known as the Ship of Theseus. What if you could salvage the original parts of the ship and rebuild it, would that be the original ship, or would the ship that arrived at the port be the original? What if two sister ships left each on their own journey, and came back vastly different, at which point did they stop being ships of the same make?

The questions are of course largely rhetorical. The truth is, there is no ship. There are only atoms. But we can't respond to that which we don't recognize, and we can't recognize that which we don't categorize. Things separated by only small differences fit in the same box, while those with large differences belong in different boxes. The trouble comes when small changes accumulate into large ones.

The accumulation of small changes is core to the theory of evolution. It is an observable fact that children are slightly different from their parents, but only slightly: human parents give rise to human children. Siblings are more similar to eachother than first cousins, who are closer than second cousins, but all still the same species. But eventually the differences are way too big for to fit our boxes: a dolphin and a hippopotamus, while very different, are simply distant cousins, a relative stone's throw away in evolutionary terms.

Of course the dolphin's mother was still a dolphin, and so was the hippo's mother. So were their mothers' mothers and mothers' mothers' mothers. In fact, every mother in that chain was the same species as her daughter and the same species as her mother. Yet, somewhere along the dolphin's chain, we find animals that aren't dolphins, and eventually animals that aren't even whales. Yet at no point do we find a non-dolphin giving birth to a dolphin, or a non-whale giving birth to a whale. Each change is subtle, but just because a single step doesn't carry you far doesn't mean ten thousand can't.

At some point in the chains, the distant ancestors of the dolphin start to look almost indistinguishable from the distant ancestors of the hippo. Eventually, the chains are connected: one daughter of this four-legged, amphibious creature would go on to be the ancestor of the dolphin, and in fact of all dolphins. Another daughter could trace its descendants down to the hippo, and all hippoes everywhere. Yet they share a striking resemblance to their mother and each other, and little resemblance to their eventual progeny.

Even more confusing is the concept of ring species: a species is traditionally defined as a group of organisms that can produce viable offspring. But this definition too has its limits: if lizards of subspecies A can breed with those in subspecies B, which can breed with those in subspecies C, the members of A and C might be too different from each other to crossbreed! Thus As are the same species as Bs, which are the same species as Cs, but Cs aren't the same species as As. It is like a ring with a section missing, whence the name.

"Species" are thus not something that is inherent in nature. It is a way for us to satisfy our desire to categorize. Often it is useful; sometimes it produces only confusion.

Another phenomenon that works much like life is language. Anyone who has ever read Shakespeare can attest that the English language has changed in great ways across the centuries. In fact that change continues now too, just slow enough that you can convince yourself the language is staying in essence the same. And decade to decade, it is. Just not century to century.

The word "word" can trace it's lineage back to the word "werdʰh₁om" sharing the same meaning, 4000 years ago, all the way back in the language only known as "Proto-Indo-European", dialects of which would go on to become Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and indeed English, Russian and Hindi.

"Werdʰh₁om" would develop in one dialect into the Proto-Germanic "wurdą", from which came the English, German, Swedish and Dutch words, among plenty of others. In another branch, it became the Proto-Italic "werβom", from which came Latin "verbum", from which English "verb" was borrowed.

So when did English diverge from Proto-Germanic? When did Proto-Germanic diverge from PIE? Any answer more precise than a century or two will be unsatisfactory, because there is no moment at which a language stops being a distant dialect and starts being a close language. If you want to viscerally feel this as an English speaker, this video on the Scots language in said language is a great demonstration. There are even analogues of ring species in languages, known as dialect continuums, where all nearby people understand each other, but one end of the continuum is incomprehensible to the speakers of the other.

Even more interesting is the way stories can evolve by small changes. While some try to shock us by comparing Disney's retelling of Cinderella to the much more violent Aschenputtel by Brothers Grimm; but Disney's story was instead based on Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre by Charles Perrault, a much lighter and more fanciful version of the story.

Which version is then the original? Neither.

Both are well preceded by Cenerentola by Giambattista Basille, itself wholly different in the details from either of the stories that followed it. All are based in local variations in the story, as well as the authors' own embellishments.

Cinderella, more accurately its ancestors and cousins, have existed since time immemorial. In Ye Xian, a Chinese story written down around 860, a girl abused by her evil stepmother is dressed up in fancy clothes by magical fish bones to go to a festival, but has to run from it and accidentally loses her golden shoe. The shoe ends up in the hands of a king, who wanted to find who the shoe belongs to. When his search leads him to Ye's house, the king is instantly stricken by her beauty and they go on to marry.

At which point does a story become a different story, rather than a different version of the same story? By this point, you surely know that there is no answer.

Even my retelling of the Ship of Theseus, right at the beginning, is significantly embellished from the barebones thought experiment I originally learned, and even further changed from its original version, in which the ship is simply preserved as a museum piece, long after Theseus's time. So should it be further retold, the story itself will become an example of the very phenomenon it describes.

And wouldn't that just be appropriate.

#evolution #language #fairytales

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