Good lord I take a week off of tumblr and now there’s a lot of you
Hello to everyone who’s just followed me in the past week! Most of you have come from a long ramble of mine on interdisciplinary learning, medieval head trauma, and Gallus’ well-wishings on my recent graduation (https://www.tumblr.com/gallusrostromegalus/727017193756327936), thank you to Gallus for that. Thank you to those of you who’ve commented with kind words as well. Specific shout-outs, links to relevant rambles, and questions are below, in the section “Link Roundup and Shoutouts”.
Yes, this is a post with sections. This is how we roll here.
Introduction to Spider
For those who don’t know, I’m Spider! I’ve just gotten my PhD in Mammalian Genetics, having gotten a Masters in Informatics and a Bachelors in Medieval Studies before that. I’ll quite happily ramble about any of them, with the following caveats: an undergraduate degree means I know the basics, but they may be increasingly out of date. And advanced degrees are increasingly specialized in their scope as you go along—you gain the skills to more easily understand things from related specialties, but you only become truly, deeply knowledgeable on very specific topics. However, these topics are not always limited to the field of study generally expected by the degree-granting institution! My focus ended up being significantly divergent from everyone else’s, which resulted in an interesting challenge of communicating my project to others at the institute.
The field I dove into for my PhD was systems genetics. Rather than studying individual genes and how they function, my work examined the wider view: think the difference between a local weather forecast versus modeling the global climate. Both synthesize vast amounts of information, just on different scales and levels of detail.
Many people love studying the tiny details around individual genes, because they can dig down into the mechanisms that make the gene work, how it might break and cause disease, and maybe how to fix those diseases. My love is for the global view of things, which gives you the ability to characterize general statements about how genes are regulated and modified. It’s a field that’s very hard to study without good data that’s complicated to acquire, so it’s a very exciting subject to work on! I’m looking forward to carrying that on into a postdoctoral study, in which I’ll work with a new lab and learn the dreaded skill of grant writing. I’ll be starting this month!
…As Gallus mentioned, my time until then is very much devoted to Baldur’s Gate 3. Happily for me, the new research group I’ll be joining has also been going nuts for Baldur’s Gate 3, so I’ll have a lot to talk about with my coworkers once I’m back to the lab.
In my free time, I’m happy to ramble upon request about the subjects I love, including but not limited to my fields of academic study, my constructed language hobby, scientific ethics and its portrayal in media, creepy-crawlies (always appropriately tagged for people’s phobias), and Baldur’s Gate 3.
…Lots of Baldur’s Gate 3. (I’ve only just reached the Lost Light Inn, please no spoilers!)
Link Roundup and Shoutouts
For those who are interested to see my ramble about why European medical texts in the medieval period tended to be terrible, it’s available here: https://www.tumblr.com/cellarspider/680342023316930560/hi-please-rant-about-medieval-european-medical
Thank you to all those who dug up the name of the academic text I’d forgotten! Its title, in all its wordy glory, is Injuries of the skull and brain, as described in the myths, legends, and folk-tales of the various peoples of the world, with some comments on the significance and reliability of this information in evaluating contemporary concepts as to their nature and lethality by Cyril B. Courville, 1967. It’s a fantastic book, and good lord that title just does not stop
Thank you to fellow spiders @one-spider-from-mars and @vaspider for their comments. We are many. We are mighty.
Thank you to @belovedbright for the fantastic story of the death of Conchobar mac Nessa via brain trauma inflicted by a brain https://www.tumblr.com/belovedbright/727132485919604736
To @doomhamster's question on whether egg whites were used in the medieval treatment of burns: I don’t know! Unfortunately I can’t access the translation of the medical manual I referred to back then (https://worldcat.org/title/1123716578), and the only version I can find online at the moment is in 14th century French (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Sloane_MS_1977). Egg whites do appear 33 times in the translation, according to the limited ability I have to search the text, and they show up throughout the book.
So. I want to talk about Dune, and how its subject matter overlaps with my professional training as a geneticist, and how Dune: Awakening got me thinking about ways to mess with it. But to get there, I want to go on so many tangents that it's spawned an entire series of posts, because I looked at the thousands of words I'd written and realized "maybe this has become a bit much."
Dune's got overarching themes of future human evolution, and how humans might one day deliberately modify themselves both genetically, chemically, and behaviorally to direct the course of the species. And along the way, your great-great grandma might start talking to you through your genes.
Let's discuss that. Because Frank Herbert was big into genetic memory as a plot device, and biology is big into that not being a thing. Let me explain why, and tell you about some other cool stuff along the way!
I'll be discussing material from both the books and movies, with most of it pitched toward an audience that has seen one to none of these. I will also be discussing a lot of concepts in genetics and biology in general, which I've attempted to pitch toward a general audience. Feel free to use reblogs or comments to leave questions or comments! Dune is up to interpretation in a lot of ways, and the sciences discussed here have a bajillion nuances and sub-specialties, of which I've only personally worked in a few, so I'm always happy to learn more.
Content warning for Lady Jessica's horror movie face. If you want bonus rambles on all sorts of topics, check out the image descriptions!
Since there's some people who've expressed interest but haven't ever seen or read Dune, let me give a quick summary of the relevant plotline: Dune follows Paul Atreides, as he continues the ongoing blood feud with the Harkonnen family and also finds out he's a result of a program by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood to create a manufactured messiah, using the same tactics as contestants in the Westminster Dog Show: breeding together the weirdest people you've ever seen, until they check off all the boxes for the space-witch kennel club.
The Bene Gesserit, via years of intensive training and drinking a specific kind of poison, are able to unlock a portion of their genetic memories, granting them the wisdom of the ages. Paul's mother undergoes this process, and Paul eventually does too, unlocking his entire bloodline. This gives him so much knowledge that he's able to predict the future by seeing how the past played out. It goes great for everybody. Don't worry about the holy war, I'm sure that'll be fine.
Right, so, first off, let's just make this a clear no: The genome does not contain memories. There are two things we have that could be termed genetic memories, and neither of them are what Frank Herbert describes.
First, we have instincts. These are hard to positively identify in humans because we're such social animals and love learning things by imitating each other, but we do have some that we can point to: babies crying, the instinct to nurse, how to swallow food without choking, that kind of thing. These are things that just help you not die.
And not dying is good! That's just not what we're looking for here.
What the genome itself does have are little chemical doodads that can be broadly classed as epigenetic modifications: "epigenetic" literally meaning "above the genetic", so this is an added layer of coding, separate from the DNA itself, that alters how genes are used, rather than changing the genes themselves. Unlike the genome, epigenetic modifications are dynamic, and they aren't all the same across the body. They're different in every cell, they can change throughout the day, and respond to different conditions. Some last fractions of a second, some can last for basically a whole lifetime. A subset of them can even be inherited from your parents!
This means that events within the life of a single individual can in fact alter the way an offspring's genes are used, moving faster than the pace of genetic mutation. That's often very slow, changing the makeup of an entire population on the scale of multiple generations. But if you have a famine? You need something quicker.
And indeed, that's one of the first places we saw evidence for this kind of epigenetic inheritance. The Hongerwinter of 1944-1945 that starved the Netherlands during WWII has resulted in greater rates of several chronic health conditions in granddaughters of mothers who were pregnant during the famine. This is called transgenerational stress inheritance, where extreme physical or psychological hardship can have long-lasting effects in a family, even if parent and child never meet.
These studies controlled for all the factors that might complicate these findings, leaving only the intergenerational effects of starvation as a clear culprit. So, if we know that parents can pass down their stress responses to famine, or other epigenetic factors, what else might be carried? Could you inherit memories?
Well, no. While we don't have a great understanding of how experiential memories are formed (as opposed to instincts and reflexes), remember back to something. I said earlier: epigenetic marks are not shared across the body. Even if epigenetics probably plays a component in memory formation, your brain and ovaries are in a long-distance relationship, with shitty cell service. This is why we can have vague, intergenerational stress responses encoded in epigenetics, but nothing more concrete than that.
Also, the majority of epigenetic marks get stripped off during early embryonic development, leaving only a few that get carried over. There's a lot we're still learning about it and it's an active area of research, but hopefully you can see why you're not humming your great-great-great-great grandmother's favorite songs unless she left the family some sheet music.
But what if we want to bullshit a reason for how genetic memory could work, in a universe that isn't ours, with genetics and epigenetics that work completely different from our own?
jpegs.
I have to emphasize, what I'm about to propose is not the way anything works in real life. This is pure science fantasy.
Compressing data is a very useful process that we use all the time in computing and in communication. Like, a workout routine will tell you "do two thousand steps today" not "step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step. step." for three pages. And if you were wondering, yes. I actually checked how many pages it would be. Compression acts like that: a series of instructions that tell you how to build a digital file, do a task, or make something. Some methods are lossless, which means that the compressed instructions will always result in the same end product. Others are lossy, which means that certain data we find less important is thrown out entirely, preserving a decent facsimile of the original template. PNGs are lossless, and often bigger. JPGs are lossy, but are smaller file sizes.
And we need a lot of storage space to pack in twenty bajillion generations into one brain.
A hypothetical system of genetic memory would require compressing vast amounts of information about how to structure a brain, on a level of detail that our actual genetics doesn't do. We all end up with brains shaped approximately the same way, but not exactly the same. Everybody has an amygdala, and it grows into a predictable structure, but this ain't exactly precise. Brain cells show up, they go where they're needed, and nobody's taking role call.
I mean, not unless you're somewhere like the Allan Brain Institute, but even they don't pretend like they're gonna do a one-and-done here. There is also the deceptively named paper "Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain", which is an amazing achievement that takes a couple sentences before you find out they're talking about an adult fruit fly.
Anyway! Connections between neurons start out quite wild and woolly, then get pruned back as we learn: this process basically makes highly complex biological circuits that encode skills, memories, habits, addictions, and everything else you can think of. Like, literally. Everything you can think of is determined by these connections. And some you don't think about, like unconscious movements, subconscious processes that run in the background, etc. etc. As mentioned, some instincts are pretty hard-wired in there, indicating that those structures are constructed to a high degree of similarity in everybody.
What we would basically need would be to extend that a lot. We'd need to add in systems that encode bloodline-specific patterns of neural circuit formation, which are generally not consciously accessible, but can be consciously activated if a person is exposed to the right psychoactive compounds, temporarily or permanently unlocking some other neural mechanism that makes the switch.
If we wanted to make this only mostly entirely impossible, we could say that this is an epigenetic mechanism, one that isn't wiped out during the purge of epigenetic marks within the first few days of development. I want to emphasize, this would require a lot more of these marks to be maintained, but hey, some preservation is possible, so we can say more could stick around. Once the brain develops, it starts a process of preferentially pruning connections between neurons, to make the circuits that encode these ancestral memories. The epigenetic encoding of ancestral memory would be basically compressed into a series of complex but lossy biochemical algorithms, which would allow memories to be retained up to a point. Each generation would lose some data, freeing up more for the next generations. The brain can hold a lot, but even when bullshitting, I'm not willing to say we've got anything like infinite capacity in there.
We still have the logistical problem of getting this encoded information from the brain of a parent to their freakin' gonads, but I'll take a swing at that as well.
Make an entirely new regulatory system in the body. When a memory is formed, nerve impulses that reflect the new structure of the memory are sent to a purely hypothetical organ that can transmit the information. I have two options I can think of:
The organ creates cells, which act as messengers. These cells produce RNA that signal where in the genome needs new epigenetic marks. These circulate through the bloodstream, eventually finding the gonads, where they interact with tissue there. The signal is then propagated through to developing eggs or sperm via… something. Gap junctions, I guess, I don't study intercellular signalling.
The organ creates RNA that is packaged into endogenous retrovirus-like particles and sent into the bloodstream. What the hell does that mean? Well, your DNA has ancient virus genomes accidentally stuck in it, some of which have been coopted for regulating cell behavior. But sometimes, at specific stages or development or in specific biological fuckups, some viral genes get properly reactivated and actually make virus-like particles! Usually it is not ideal when these regain the ability to be infectious, but we can make that a thing for Dune! Give them surface proteins that latch onto reproductive cells and infect them with RNA, acting as both a messenger for the modifications we need, and to make more viral particles. Preferably without exploding the cell in the process, because that would be bad.
I cannot stress enough how much bullshit I'm having to put out here while ignoring the many gopher holes of various biological impossibilities, trying not to fall into one lest I break a leg.
If we want to make this even more impossible, we could say the DNA itself is being altered. That would get around the issue of epigenetic marks getting removed during reproduction and also give a plausible reason why these memories wouldn't be accessible without a chemical signal that activates the brain to form new connections, plus also creating a handy way to cause the dreaded status of Abomination. What's that, movie-watchers and others ask? Good question! Let's ask Horror Movie Face Lady Jessica what that's all about.
Abomination is what happens when genetic memories are unlocked in someone who is not sufficiently trained to control the weight of countless generations bearing down on their consciousness. Strong personalities within the memories can go progress from speaking to the original personality, influencing their behavior, or even go as far as to suppress the original personality entirely, producing an effect that basically manifests as possession by a ghost in their genes.
While Dune itself doesn't include any Abominations per the story as written, the line may be fuzzy, and Dennis Villeneuve seems to have leaned into that. Jessica's personality radically shifts after she unlocks her genetic memory. We've arguably witnessed manipulative behavior from Paul's visions as well, which pushed him into doing things he hadn't wanted to do, and ending with a personality shift similar to what happened to Jessica. Some of the things he says in the movie are not found in the books: his realization that both he and his mother are Harkonnens by lineage has more weight in the movies, with his comment being "We're Harkonnens. So this is how we'll survive: by being Harkonnens."
So, Villeneuve may have been making the suggestion that Paul, trained in the Bene Gesserit ways but not sufficiently trained to safely unlock his genetic memory, may have been partially taken over. It's the best explanation I have for why the Reverend Mother Mohiam calls him "Abomination" in Dune: Part Two, rather than the I-won't-totally-spoil-who she directed that toward in the book. Jessica probably had something similar happen, as she wasn't actually on a path to be a Reverend Mother.
Oh hey and you know who really didn't have training?
I'm sure that won't be a problem later.
We already have regulatory regions coded into the genome, so adding in more isn't a stretch. They would probably be subject to more rapid degradation than genes themselves though, because they're not critical to, y'know, living. So expect mutations to up in these regions, leading to imperfect recall, or even false genetic memories.
But how would you actually make changes to the genome within the lifetime of a person? In humans, outside of a couple of really special contexts that aren't relevant here, that's something that doesn't happen.
Well, it's simple! We just need humans to be like bacteria.
no, that's not it.
CRISPR/Cas gene editing is a technique we scientists have stolen from distant cousins of strep throat, and we're using it for genome editing. Basically, bacteria can get infected by a virus too, and they don't like to be infected by a virus. So, because they're a single cell, they need in-house solutions to find viral DNA in their own genomes and snip them out. Geneticists have used that for gene editing in laboratory settings: add in a DNA template sequence for the cell to use as instructions for what to put in the gap, and bam, you can insert a new DNA sequence. There are a load of caveats, but that's the basic idea. Load a CRISPR/Cas system into one of the fictional delivery mechanisms I mentioned above, and you've got a genetic memory.
I have to stress that humans are not, in fact, bacteria, having a programmable CRISPR/Cas system in your body would probably be a great way to shred your genome due to some side effects it can cause when it gets a bit too exuberant, and I am not proposing this as any sort of real thing. How would you encode the guide and repair templates? Not my problem! I've already thought about this way more than Frank Herbert did.
Now, this could in fact lead to terrible psychological effects, beyond the Abomination thing. Like, beyond destabilizing your genome, obviously. Like, there's a lot of sensory information that we filter out 99% of the time. What's your tongue feel like right now? You probably weren't conscious of that until I mentioned it, and now you're thinking about it. Imagine that, but it's twenty-five thousand years of your ancestors. People who have exceptionally strong autobiographical memory often report all sorts of distressing events sticking with them, because they don't get as much relief from forgetting details over time, and, unlike in Dune, it can make it harder to plan for the future, because there's an often exhausting parade of memories running "in splitscreen" all the time.
The fact that we only see one character in the books go absolutely bat-guano because of ancestral memory seems like it's lowballing the danger here.
In summary!
Dune has a major plot point about genetic memory, which is unlockable with special training, partially accessible with special genetics, and by overdosing on worm juice.
This is not a thing in real life, with intergenerational memory limited to very basic instinctual behavior, and less literal memory that tweaks the likelihood of certain health outcomes depending on extreme stress exposure in recent previous generations.
If we wanted to bullshit our way to making genetic memory a thing, we would need to compress a lot of information, and transfer that information from the brain to the gonads via a Rube Goldberg machine of biology.
This machinery would probably involve memories being encoded via epigenetic information (more malleable, but more likely to get erased, harder to do the plot points around unlocking them via special training), or genetic information (more permanent, matches the story more closely, but more likely to go absolutely bananas and break you)
The transfer itself would either be done by some sort of fictional class of transport cells, or a fictional class of endogenous retroviruses, the little viral pals that hang out in your genome.
Adding the modifications that encode memory would either be done by altering some pre-existing class of epigenetic targeting system, or by giving us a CRISPR-Cas9 system, something only found in bacteria IRL.
I'm not done yet, though. Because this only talked about the concept of genetic memory, not some of the major plot points around accessing it, and who can access it.
Next time, we have to talk about chromosomes, and why a female bird could be the messiah.
We are happy to announce the publication of a new research paper by University of Miami coral scientist Dr. Allyson DeMerlis in collaboration with Coral Morphologic. This paper studied the genetic changes staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis aka ACER) underwent when transplanted from an offshore nursery to the inshore urban habitat at the Coral City Camera in PortMiami. Typically, staghorn corals are grown for restoration in offshore hanging ‘tree nurseries’ under stable, ideal water conditions. However, the reefs most in need of restoration are typically inshore of these nurseries and/or have suffered coral mortality due to deteriorating water quality. Understanding how endangered staghorn corals adapt to less-than-ideal conditions is the first step towards selecting strains that can survive long-term and restore Florida’s reefs. The paper, titled ‘Transcriptomic response of Acropora cervicornis following transplantation to a marginal, nearshore environment’ was published in the research journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
The Coral City Camera site at PortMiami offers an ideal location to study and monitor experimental coral transplants from offshore. By transplanting nursery-grown Acropora cervicornis into the highly urbanized, marginal habitat of the Port of Miami, Dermerlis’ research explores the frontier of urban coral resilience. Four months after outplanting, these staghorn corals demonstrated an impressive 92% survivorship. Despite facing greater thermal extremes and the dynamic stressors of a man-made waterway, the corals successfully persisted. This proves that the city’s coastal edges can serve as a vital real world laboratory for testing the acclimatization capacity of reef-building corals.
The secret to the staghorns’ survival appears to lie deep within their molecular biology. The transcriptomic data reveals that these urban outplants underwent a massive genetic shift, significantly upregulating 961 host and symbiont genes compared to their offshore nursery counterparts. The corals achieved this by maintaining a sustained activation of environmental stress response and innate immunity pathways, actively synthesizing heat shock proteins, managing unfolded proteins, and boosting cellular defense mechanisms. This persistent genetic plasticity suggests that they are actively acclimatizing to their novel environment. Ultimately, this research underscores that the future of marine conservation depends on leveraging this molecular flexibility, guiding us to select the most rugged, stress-tolerant genotypes to populate the resilient coral cities of tomorrow. We look forward to supporting further research and collaboration with Dr. Demerlis and the University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef restoration program to help rebuild Miami’s nearshore reef communities.
Read the paper in full @ https://coralmorphologic.com/b/2026/05/26/transcriptomic-response-of-acropora-cervicornis-following-transplantation-to-a-marginal-nearshore-environment
I've been obsessing a bit over Dune lately, thanks to Dune: Awakening giving me the chance to really steep my brain in the vibes.
At the same time, I'm a geneticist, and Frank Herbert's ideas about my field were... not correct. But he's not correct about a really fun and wacky subset of it.
Does anybody want a series of essays that lay out, among many other things, why any given alligator could become the messiah of their species, but male bees couldn't?
Because that's a thing I'm currently drafting out
also I have feelings about how Awakening adds to the long history of creators trying to compensate for Herbert's failure to communicate his intended messages in Dune, including Herbert himself
also I have feelings about Dennis Villeneuve's portrayal of the Harkonnens with a more religious angle, and how cannibal concubines can easily be analyzed as a commentary on the alienating forces of capitalism and oppressive hierarchies in general
it's become a whole deal and a weird crossover fanfic
Perfect time to post an update in a fic that probably seemed abandoned. T'wasn't, I was just struck with The Malaise Of Our Present Era. I recently received a lovely comment that was the pleasant kick in the ass I needed.
So! If anybody was looking for a Qunari-centric Dragon Age fic that includes codex entries, I improbably have something for you:
Wise and Ignorant, Great and Ruined, Triumphant and Despairing, Chapter 2: On Saarebas.
What video game can you not complete without cheat codes?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Huh. So this is the thing this year
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was a quite good first person stealth/shooter. There is, however, one level I constitutionally did not get on with:
In escaping from from a space-prison ward, you tackle a guard down into a deep pit to kill him and cushion your fall. The guards decide not to bother trying to kill you, because "the dwellers will get him".
Great. It's very dark down there, and you're likely to be eaten by a dweller. But you have the light on the guard's shotgun! But it's been damaged by the fall, and is going to fail in some number of minutes, so you have a time limit.
This is supposed to be a reinforcement mechanic that forces a particular behavior from the player, for a very good reason: unbeknownst to the player, the enemies in the next section are infinitely spawning, and this is the first time the game has openly done this to you. You are supposed to run. You are supposed to stumble through the subterranean maze with a flashlight and not enough supplies while being hounded and occasionally jumpscared by the mutated denizens of the old tunnels beneath the prison.
What happened instead was that when the first Rake-ass motherfucker came screaming at me from a dark corridor, I almost-calmly blew its head off with the shotgun, paused the game, and sat down on the floor behind my chair to eat a grapefruit about it.
When I finished the grapefruit, I looked up how to toggle collision and just walked through the walls and avoid the maze entirely.
In 1604, astronomers first caught sight of Kepler’s Supernova Remnant, a massive explosion some 17,000 light-years away. Twenty-five years of observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory went into making this timelapse, which shows the supernova remnant’s material pushing into the surrounding gas and dust. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/Pan-STARRS; via Gizmodo)
the Reins of History - A FFXII 20th ANNIVERSARY ZINE
The second planned event for the 20th Anniversary of Final Fantasy XII - this one will be commemorating the October 31st release date of the NA version of the game.
This zine will be free, digital-only and will contain art, fanfiction, and multiple alternate mediums, such as graphics, meta essays, recipes, playlists/fanmixes, in-universe articles and anything else you can think of that isn't conventional zine work.
All additional information and FAQs can be found on the carrd link below - any further questions, please reach out via an Ask, DM or by speaking to @4th-make-quail!
TIMELINE
Sign Ups: Feb 1st - March 1st
Invites Out: March 2nd or Earlier
Creation Period: April 1st - September 1st
Sales Begin: October 31st 2026
I'll be writing a piece for this one! Currently lined up to be an in-universe essay on the history of domestication in the world of Ivalice, with special consideration given to the interaction between domestication, feral animals, wild populations of the parent species, and how all of those are influenced by changes in technology. Particularly, artificial life. There's just. Straight-up artificial life in this fantasy game, that does animal things while being fully made of synthetic materials.
This game is insane and I will happily share my love of it with everybody
A man's cap with turned up cuff, of off-white linen embroidered in a pattern of rainbows arching over clouds with rain falling, with snails and caterpillars interspersed. In blue, green, yellow, red and pink silks and silver metallic yarns.
Since this post is very popular now, I will edit to add a little more information! This bug is Calyptocephala attenuata, a species of tortoise beetle. It lives in Central and South America.
Further reading: Wikipedia , iNaturalist , and ResearchGate
if anyone's looking for a nice palette tool that's free of useless bloat AND allows you to customise th palettes while visulizing their rapport to one another, i highly recommend paletton
there's a bunch of export settings as well. really cool website
Join us for the first of two events this year to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Final Fantasy XII! @ffxiievents will be running a Randomised Job Run of the game from 1st-31st of March to commemorate the Japanese release of the game in 2006.
Sign up here on google forms with your username (this can be your tumblr url, bsky, discord or any nickname you want) and select from the following two options;
Fully Randomised Job Run: Two random Jobs generated per character. All Jobs will be unique and you must not change any for the full playthrough
Simple Run: No job randomisation, just a simple full playthrough of the game
All updates and randomised jobs will be tracked based off the form you submit, and the selection can be edited if you change your mind.
The event will begin on the 1st of March (whichever timezone is the 1st for you) and will conclude on the 31st. There will be a weekly check-in post held on FFXII Events on a Sunday where all participants can update their progress and discuss the playthroughs, and I will be reblogging any posts discussing playthroughs for the whole of March. Please use the tag #ffxii20thRandomJobRun or #ffxii20th for any posts!
The aim isn't necessarily to complete the game within the month, nor to have the fastest completion - just to have fun replaying the game with a timeline and an optional challenge via restricted Jobs, and to commemorate the game we love!
If you have any questions, please send an ask or reply to this post!
