Happy anniversary of My House Burnt Down. We are so back.
Basedt will be back to updating with a new page on Saturdays again… usually… I say “usually” because I am still stumbling through the wreckage of last year, and I am realizing this is a period in my life where I have to be flexible with what I can realistically expect from myself.
Part of the reason it has taken so long to build up my page buffer is because the construction of the secondary border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border— and the protection of certain sites along it—is occupying my personal time. Probably the best thing you could do for me, if you rrrreaaaaaally want Basedt to update more, is to spread the word or call your reps and oppose the double wall. I hate to put it that way, but them’s the realities of the world we’re living and making art in. It sucks. I hate it. Selfishly I just want to make my webcomic and my twine game, but nobody is coming to save us, you know?
Wherever you are reading from, I hope you’re finding ways to put good into the world, and seeing small victories from that. Our struggles are bound up together, and sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of that when we are stuck fighting our own fires.
… And speaking of fire… Let’s find out what this guy’s fucking deal is
Stop Construction of a (Second) Border Wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument ▶︎
Stop the construction of the wall in Big Bend Ranch State Park & Big Bend National Park ▶︎
Draw a line anywhere in the Southwest, and you can’t walk it without stumbling into something special. Saguaro forests, sacred springs, age-old geoglyphs, missions, mines, migration routes, rivers, and rock art. You catch my drift? There’s an invisible line in the sand and it means something to me. I live and work in service of this place. This is my Sistine Chapel, my place of emergence, the body of my mother. And some men of power want to run that body through with steel bollards. Again. I guess it didn’t work the first time?
Countless cultural sites and natural wonders lie along the U.S.-Mexico border, and they face renewed threats under the proposed expansions to the border wall. The DHS wants to put a wall in places where the wall was never a consideration, such as Big Bend National Park. Secondary walls are proposed for places that have already been permanently damaged by the construction of the last border wall, such as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and Coronado National Memorial. This would expand the footprint of the wall exponentially and enclose sacred sites like A’al Vaipia (Quitobaquito Springs) and La Lomita Historical Park. They could be cut off entirely—not just from the surrounding landscape, but from public access, too.
This does not have to happen. There is no mandate to trade our common heritage for the illusion of safety. From the bottom of my heart, from my humanity to yours, please advocate for these places.
More info + action items at No Al Muro, Sky Island Alliance, and the Center for Biological Diversity.
As I was making these, news coverage was still thin and scattered for some of the affected areas, but there is now an excellent summary:
The aggressive pace of expansion has alarmed advocates who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites.
The Las Playas intaglio is a 15 by 83 meter etching in the ground at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s thought to be more than 1,000 years old and is significant to the Hia-ced O’odham and their relatives, who have skillfully made a home in one of the driest sections of the Sonoran Desert.
This painting is a celebration of the intaglio’s life. I know that many people will be learning of this little intaglio on the heels of its bulldozing, and I feel deep, deep sadness for that, because knowing that it exists has brought me a lot of joy, even in the two short years I was aware of its existence. How much more joy and mystery it must bring to the O’odham, whose relatives traced and re-traced it into the earth over many generations! And the Martynecs, the archaeologists who rediscovered it in 2002! There is so much to grieve because there is so much to celebrate. I’m going to try to capture some of that for you, OK?
Image source: AN IMPERILED INTAGLIO by Richard Martynec
This intaglio is unique for Southern Arizona because there are so few of them out here. The closest I’m aware of are further south, in Mexico. This intaglio is actually etched into the same lava field as those intaglios—it’s at the northern edge of El Pinacate, a young volcanic field studded with crater-like maars, volcanic cones, and lava flows.
El Pinacate likes to hold its water in secret and unexpected places. You will find centuries-old footpaths leading seemingly to nowhere, stumbling along a vast black plain that even the cacti haven’t quite found a foothold in. And then suddenly the land collapses, a sheer ravine opens like a crack in mud, and there it is: a dense thicket of ironwood trees enclosing a tinaja. This is a basin in the bedrock that can hold rainwater for months, if not years.
These tinajas are part of an assembly of springs, seeps, charcos, and arroyos that make the Sonoran Desert a rich and nurturing place for those who know how to find water. The intaglio itself is just south of a playa, a salty flat where rainwater collects for a short time after it rains. Rain often comes in dramatic but spotty bursts out here, hammering one mountain range and completely missing another just a few miles away. Being able to read where rain has fallen (and not fallen) allows people to access resources that are otherwise unavailable to them. I imagine that Las Playas were very special places in years when they were a riot of wildflowers and spring color.
The location of the intaglio is certainly not accidental. It’s wedged between two places of seasonal bounty, and it also belongs to a wider landscape of trails going to and from the Sea of Cortez, another place of plenty. This region is like the gateway connecting Central America to North America. Everything must pass through here. How beautiful is it that, in a place that holds no water for many months out of the year, we are reminded of its constant power and presence? Water was here and will be here again. People were here and will be here again.
The intaglio is described as fish-shaped, and that’s probably one of our better guesses of what it represents. Fishing in the Sea of Cortez was (and still is) an important source of food. But the intaglio was maintained by people dabbling in a mix of Patayan, Hohokam, and Trincheras regional styles, with a particularly strong Patayan slant. What is interesting to me about Patayan art is that their designs are often highly abstract. People sometimes dismiss these abstractions as “primitive,” merely squiggles and shapes compared to the more literal representations of people or animals found in other parts of the Southwest. But to me, these are highly sophisticated designs because they defy outsider interpretation. How much knowledge had to be passed from person to person to interpret and recreate these symbols? How much of it embodies cultural perceptions of beauty or the natural order of the world? Is it the process of etching that takes precedent over the outcome? I see that abstraction mirrored here, and that is part of what makes the intaglio so compelling to me.
And there is so much to be said about the intaglio’s design. There are several large stones strewn about the surrounding lava field. Some were deposited naturally, and some were moved around. Many of the stones within the bounds of the intaglio were undisturbed, and seem to have been incorporated into the design itself, or at least worked around. Was this part of the siting intentional, too? Was this place chosen because of these stones? While painting the intaglio, I struggled to interpret where the design begins and ends, because it is beautifully fluid with the landscape. I ultimately chose to incorporate those surrounding stones, which are represented in the painting as pale nodes in the outline. In doing so, I noticed that the northernmost chain of rocks resembles the Big Dipper. In O’odham, this constellation is the Kuipud, or cactus hook, a long, cross-shaped tool that is used to gather saguaro fruit. The harvest is an important precursor to the summer rain ceremonies, and the act of hooking down saguaro fruit is likened to hooking down the clouds that give rain. Is the resemblance a happy accident? Intentional? I don’t know, and it’s beautiful that I don’t!
The intaglio is oriented almost perfectly North to South, with its body slanting slightly east. It lines us up nicely with El Pinacate and the Sea of Cortez. It also makes me wonder what the sky must look like in different parts of the year out there, because the North star is the spoke around which everything turns, celestially. Was that an anchor for the design? Or just a tool to locate north and communicate something essential about the two directions? The orientation is surely intentional, but we can only guess at the “why.”
The Martynecs mention many faint trails inside the intaglio that are not very visible from these aerial images, and are best viewed on the ground at sunset. What else was in the landscape that we can no longer see today? The intaglio itself defies the human eye. It’s set in flat lava plains and low basins with few high points to look down on it. It was created on the ground, and yet people never would have experienced it the way many of us do today, in aerial imagery.
Its location, scale, and aesthetic abstraction lends to its subtlety. Prior archaeological surveys missed it. Western archaeology has only known about it for 20-odd years. Others who might have known about it haven’t identified themselves, and probably with good reason. Like so many sensitive cultural sites, it has been safe in obscurity. Now it finds itself on an arbitrary line and that safety is compromised.
During the construction of the primary border wall, the Martynecs and co. went to a lot of trouble to protect the intaglio:
The Martynecs wanted [the intaglio] preserved, so they recruited some friends and set about encircling it with small rocks, along with an adjacent gravesite that would definitely encroach on [the Roosevelt reservation, a 60 ft. strip adjacent to the U.S. Mexico border set aside for border security.]
The construction supervisor arrived and demanded to know what they were doing. They explained, and he left. When he returned, he was accompanied by a crew. To the Martynecs’ surprise and delight, the contractor ordered large boulders to be arranged around the site to protect it. In addition, they diverted the road fifteen feet, to secure the grave.
I love this anecdote, I think it’s so illustrative of our common humanity and the value of educating each other. It’s true, there are hazards that come with knowing, sometimes things are safer when they remain unknown. But we also can’t protect what we don’t know about, and this was a victory in a time of excruciating loss.
The same efforts have been made during the construction of the secondary barrier. The Tohono O’odham nation, Cabeza Prieta staff, archaeologists, and concerned community members have all converged to protect this intaglio. I wish the story had ended here. I had naively believed that I would someday see this little intaglio that I had read and talked so much about. If I do see it, I will see it in fragments. We have lost something precious and irreplaceable and there is so much now that we will never know.
But I also am not willing to sing funeral songs for something that is not yet lost. After I learned of what had happened to the intaglio, I was gutted, I knew that I cared about it but not to what an extreme extent it would affect me. It was like the stages of grief hit me all at once. And I am not even in close proximity to it! How devastating must this feel to those who have seen it themselves? To those who came ahead of the construction to see it, to run and to pray for it? To those who fought so hard to protect it through the devastation of the last wall, and now this one?
But in that sadness I was also overwhelmed with this powerful, almost uncontrollable compulsion to try to paint it. I didn’t know why at the time, it seemed absurd and arbitrary, but I think I get it now. The Las Playas intaglio was maintained by people choosing to retrace it, to remember it. And although we have lost so much, it is still here with us—transformed, transfigured, split in two, but still here. And how infinitely worth remembering! How beautiful! How resilient! How critically important to carry into the future! The loss is incomprehensible and yet commensurate with the joy. That is what I felt, painting and reading about the intaglio. I found I could not let go of my sadness any more than I could stop this uncontrollable joy and affection from entering me.
There is still time, after all, for this to be the final injury of the border wall. So much remains along the border that is worth the joy and heartache of fighting for. 25 miles to the east, the sacred oasis A’al Vaipia (Quitobaquito Springs) remains, a silent witness in the shadow of the previous border wall. It has endured so much, and I know it will endure what may come, but that enduring will require allies that are as willing to give for its life as it has given life to all who visit it.
Walk anywhere along the border and you will find something just as special and irreplaceable. Our struggles at Big Bend, Coronado, La Lomita, Cabeza Prieta, Organ Pipe Cactus, Mount Kuuchamaa, and elsewhere are bound up together. What has happened here does not have to happen to us again, or to our neighbors. Let’s carry this little “fish” with us, OK?
Threadbare is a “visual” “”novel”” about a martyr exacting revenge on the prophet who foretold her death. Make him pay! Fail upward! Change nothing! Fulfill your awful, awful destiny!
Threadbare features:
The indomitable power of spite, through which all things can be accomplished!
One-sided(?) tension(??) with the guy you’re doomed to kill!
The machinations of a deeply stupid meritocracy, which asks “what if we put wealthy art patrons in charge of a communications & intelligence agency?”
Running errands against your will!
High effort low art! Low effort high art? Low effort low art. It still took me nine months. And it’s not even done!
What I can only describe as a slideshow with quicktime events scored by industrial noise metal!
This guy, I guess !!
This is like… a pre-alpha demo. It covers maybe a third of the story, and its code is held together by duct tape and a wish. Mostly this is an excuse to get other people to break it so I know what to fix. Enjoy!
I pushed some quality-of-life and accessibility tweaks for Threadbare... You can toggle the typewriter animations and expand the dialogue chains all at once and selectively mute the UI/vox sfx now... never been a better time to bother Kairos, if you haven't already
My friend told me to send you my e1dols despite not having this collection finished,,
Sighh peep my ultrakill layer yuri (Greed and Fraud)
Wish I could put warnings on these images for realistic heart/gore,,
I do plan to make more of these e1dols btw, my next focus is the Violence layer in Ultrakill and after that I think was Gluttony and then Wrath
WOAHHHHH THESE ARE TIGHT AS HELL!! a certain very meaty and bloody hell even. I look forward to seeing the series as a unit! and also I have to say that I love Fraud taking the appearance of the "victim" in the archetypal pairing pose. I think of the pose as reciprocal, like bothering an overstimulated cat, or schmoozing for a kiss. and far be it from them to deny Greed!
compulsory "more stuff in da shop" announcement...
Keepsakes from a doomed world.
I'm most excited about having my No Double Wall protest art on a shirt. I don't make a dime off of them, they're really just there for me and the 2 other people in my community who are pissed off enough to do shirts about it. so they're cheaper than everything else.
Teemill is also doing a sale from the 16th to the 23rd. EARTH10 at checkout for 10% off.
OK. I think that's enough consumerism for one day or I'm going to throw up
.i accidentally spread e1dols to a big friend group server and one of them has now somehow made an e1dol 3d model that they can project e1dol drawings onto for the texture and it works
hello??????? HELLO??????????????
getting up and walking around my house about it. losing my mind. at the intersection of hooting and hollering. This is SICK AS FUUUUUCK and reminds me of the randomly assigned textures in LSD dream emulator, my fav kind of computer-human collaboration... thank you so much to you and your friend for sharing, this made my day!
i made me an e1dol. because i cant draw i made the m with photos instead
he lives in my computer and keeps me safe from malicious hardware of course
WOHHHHHHH BIG fan of the patterning that the slight offset to the text makes on him! he reminds me of the punchcards that they used to use in computer programming... thank you for making an e1dol and with the unique tools that you have available to you! I'm inspired now... Collage e1dol... HmmMMmm
hello. can I interest you in this hard rock cover of Bad Romance. and this warmup of miss thang that got away from me while I was trying to do threadbare panels
edit: forgot to put her contacts in ): the former sibyl has inverted irises and sclera. but i like both versions so you're getting both versions.
Hey it’s me again I wanted to show off my updated e1dols who I am calling Paprika and I wanted to ask if you could put her on your website with the description of “slowing down for protection”
HI AGAIN!! So happy to see her in shiny new digs, especially as one of the first e1dols made by others! digging the addition of stars in her eyes *_* (Here is her previous look if anyone is curious)
I have added her to the roster, let me know if anything looks funny o7
hello these are some freaks i made. i really like e1dols and also ultrakill so i turned two of my favorite enemies into them
#1 -- "god is in the rhythm" / be not afraid, sinner
2 -- "no devil lived on" / i look like jesus, so they say - but mister jesus is very far away
they are based on the idol and deathcatcher respectively. they make me sad
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUYUGGHHHH THIS RIPS
i too am busting out of the stone puppeted by a traitorous heart, creepy and wet. jazzed out of my mind about these, thank you so much for sharing (and let me know if you would like them on the roster... because i certainly would like them on the roster... but no pressure aha)
"dreams with wings", "caped", "electric color", and "psychosymbiosis", made for my online friends!
"superstar", made for my IRL friend!
"i'll be your eyes", an e1dol one of my online friends (the one i made "caped" for) made for me!
"moon waltz", an e1dol made by the receiver of "caped" to protect the artemis II NASA mission!
.if you wanna put these on the roster, feel free! the former five were made by me (credit as edenmachine5457, you can link to my tumblr that i sent this ask with) and the latter two were made by the one who received the caped e1dol (credit as eyemoisturizer, with this link https://eyemoisturizer.nekoweb.org/)
.u can also make up ur own descriptions for these (if those are already made by you... i forgor. idk if those phrases are made by the people who submit them or by you) except for moon waltz its desc should be "perhaps we'll meet at tycho" (if you need descriptions i can reblog with submitted descriptions i made up!)
E1DOL DELUGE!!!!
My heart grew three sizes tonight! whadda hell!!!!!!!! I am so touched you jumped on using these little guys to brighten your friends' days... that;s what an E1DOL is made for... that's what it's all ABOUT
I also had to get up and go to the kitchen and white-knuckle the fridge for a minute because of moon waltz
gravity carrying our shared night sky carrying artemis ii carrying glover, wiseman, koch, and hansen carrying an unadulterated vestige of human curiosity and our inimitable desire to know the world. and if it makes it an iota lighter, we have a loadbearing e1dol to do some carrying too...
P.S. you and your friends are totally welcome to write blurbs for the little guys and send them my way! i am also happy to write blurbs for them if you don't want to, cryptic one-liners is my passion o7
Stop Construction of a (Second) Border Wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument ▶︎
Stop the construction of the wall in Big Bend Ranch State Park & Big Bend National Park ▶︎
Draw a line anywhere in the Southwest, and you can’t walk it without stumbling into something special. Saguaro forests, sacred springs, age-old geoglyphs, missions, mines, migration routes, rivers, and rock art. You catch my drift? There’s an invisible line in the sand and it means something to me. I live and work in service of this place. This is my Sistine Chapel, my place of emergence, the body of my mother. And some men of power want to run that body through with steel bollards. Again. I guess it didn’t work the first time?
Countless cultural sites and natural wonders lie along the U.S.-Mexico border, and they face renewed threats under the proposed expansions to the border wall. The DHS wants to put a wall in places where the wall was never a consideration, such as Big Bend National Park. Secondary walls are proposed for places that have already been permanently damaged by the construction of the last border wall, such as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and Coronado National Memorial. This would expand the footprint of the wall exponentially and enclose sacred sites like A’al Vaipia (Quitobaquito Springs) and La Lomita Historical Park. They could be cut off entirely—not just from the surrounding landscape, but from public access, too.
This does not have to happen. There is no mandate to trade our common heritage for the illusion of safety. From the bottom of my heart, from my humanity to yours, please advocate for these places.
More info + action items at No Al Muro, Sky Island Alliance, and the Center for Biological Diversity.
As I was making these, news coverage was still thin and scattered for some of the affected areas, but there is now an excellent summary:
The aggressive pace of expansion has alarmed advocates who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites.
I have started to put together one of the things I was really excited for when I recreated my website, a mirror of my personal wiki for Moribund. It's a humble space right now, but I have been quietly adding to it. Check it out if you want to read deranged essays about things that aren't real. (And don't tell Sadren that I'm taking credit for his work...)
In the spirit of that, there is a new article about the Arkoloteri, one fractious cog in the machinery of Old Sond:
[...] Most outsiders see Arkolote as House Sarikote who were too devoted to the old regime to give it up. Rather than falling in with their relatives, who searched for a way to live in a transformed environment, they quit the surface world and retreated into Sond under the guise of self-sacrifice. They nominally admit their wrongdoing and consider Sond to be their apology to the world, but they are not meaningfully different from the people they were thousands of years ago. They simply choose to subjugate their former masters, rather than the masses.
The Arkoloteri, for its part, does little to assuage these fears. Their purpose is to conserve and protect a bio-cultural heritage, not convince their critics of the necessity of their work. Maintaining the old machinery is a necessary evil in ensuring their legacy survives… Or so they say, anyway[...]
It has pretty pictures and everything aha... take a looke
I was rereading the Sond lore recently and I’m curious. What inspired Sond? Architecturally, culturally, aesthetically, etc?
oh boy! oh boy! oh boy! oh boy! you activated my trap card: getting in the weeds with it
Sond coalesced in 2016, after I finished playing Morrowind for the first time. I started drawing Roan, my Nerevarine, in increasingly abstract situations, and realized I needed to start a solo career e.g. port her into moribund.
I've loved Morrowind since I was little, too little to even play it LOL. I would religiously watch my uncle and brother play it in the livingroom. as I've gotten older I've really latched onto TES' worldbuilding philosophy of taking everything, even things that seem familiar on the surface, and Making It Weird.
Back to morb. In a superficial way, I just wanted permission to mess around in my own sandbox without having to explain its increasingly bizarre and tenuous connection to the source material, so I found or created analogs for different elements of Roan's story. The idea of a ruined labyrinth-library shrouded in darkness was already floating around with this draft version of Sentin and her cohort, which I commandeered for the story.
At the time, Sentin's "domain" I guess was literal darkness and hidden/forgotten knowledge, which she guarded from the violent light of knowing. Her counterpart took care of the biggest library in the known world, so her gimmick was taking care of the biggest library in the unknown world. She and her city were molded into the space left behind by the dwemer in Morrowind, a people we only know through their material culture and mythologized interactions with others. They are TES' take on the fantasy trope of a hyper-advanced, technologically sophisticated culture that has either backslid, vanished, or collapsed in the present day. Put a pin in that thought.
By this time, I was starting to integrate the history and ecology of the Sonoran Desert into my art more. it's shaped me from day one in the way that any home does, but this is when I was making a conscious effort to learn more about it, and started flirting with the idea of studying it in an academic setting. Moribund bent towards this interest and it's been hopelessly bent ever since.
Anyone who lives in the Salt River Valley can probably tell you the founding myth of the City of Phoenix. It goes something like this: An industrious people were here, called the Hohokam*. They dug the most complex system of canals in the Southwest, maybe even all of North America. They bent the water to their will and studied the stars and raised mounds and constructed great cities and thrived—and then, suddenly, they vanished. Then the settlers came, and they found the canals, and worked them, and created the City of Phoenix anew in the ashes of a bygone civilization.
This narrative gets repeated a lot. It's not a very honest one. I kinda orbit it in my professional life because it has taken a tremendous toll on the desert and the people around me. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the U.S., gorged on the water of five rivers, one of which was rerouted from hundreds of miles away to feed it. All of them were perennial rivers, and all but one of them run dry before they reach their destination now. But back to the story.
Dig a little deeper and you realize the Hohokam didn't "disappear," their way of life dramatically changed. Their descendants are the O'odham and others, who carry on variously as dryland farmers, river people, and seasonal travelers, despite active and violent efforts to settle their homelands—building dams to displace them, arresting them, harassing them, building walls and freeways through their land, the works. I digress.
Dig deeper still and you learn that the passing of the mantle from Hohokam to O'odham is also complicated, a cocktail of disastrous flooding, climate change, and sociopolitical unrest. O'odham oral history positions them as both the descendants and the adversaries of the Hohokam:
[Akimel O’odham] oral histories describe the development of factions between the Hohokam and the Sivany (or Sivanyi), chiefs of the great house settlements (Bahr 1971; Bahr et al. 1994). The Sivany had command over the rain and became arrogant, belittling the Hohokam culture hero Elder Brother and eventually plotting to kill him (Bahr et al. 1994:182). Elder Brother fled south and recruited an army of people whom the historic [Tohono O’odham] and [Akimel O'odham] identified as their ancestors (Teague 1989:157). Elder Brother returned north with his army and attacked the homes of the Sivany, commencing his campaign at Casa Grande and moving west along the Gila River (Russell 1908). Oral history subsequently reports that the attacks then shifted to other sites with Great Houses on the Salt River (Teague 1989:158), described as the last point of major resistance (Russell 1908). After the Great Houses were destroyed, local populations dispersed and resumed farming in small settlements. However, both O’odham and Hopi indigenous histories also document migrations of former Hohokam populations to the Verde River Valley and Hopi mesas (Fewkes 1907; Teague 1993).
- McDowell Sonoran Preserve Cultural Resources Master Plan (2016)
While the O'odham in 1492 or 1600 may not have been engaged in a capitalist mode of production, this does not mean that they knew nothing of desires and pressures to accumulate wealth[...] the O'odham's apparent ancestors participated in a diverse and far-flung regional economy, which supported elites with differential access to goods and services. Both archaeological evidence and the O'odham's own oral traditions point to elites (sivan or sivanyi) who abused their privilege and power (Fewkes 1912:71), perhaps threatening the Hohokam's/O'odham's successful yet fragile adaptation to the Sonoran Desert.
- Prehistory and the Traditions of the O'odham and Hopi by Lynn. S. Teague
So we have these two stories that have uncanny symmetry with one another, and yet couldn't be more different in their messaging. One of the rebirth of a settled, hierarchical way of life, and another cautioning against that very same way of life. It makes me feel insane in a very specific way about the Sonoran Desert, but it does tap into something more universal, I think, which is the stories we tell about our ancestors. Not the ones we respect, but the ones who kinda sucked.
Remember that pin? Let's go back to it. There is a fun, throwaway document in Morrowind prepared by the Inquisition describing the big bad Dagoth Ur's gameplan. Apart from the magical mind control, it's insultingly believable. In the grips of the orange one's administration, I had been thinking a lot about White nationalism and the way it mythologizes about an idealized past from which society has fallen, one which never really existed in the first place. Storytelling is powerful, these myths hold some kind of power, even if it's flimsy and doesn't stand up under scrutiny. Evidently that's all a charismatic leader needs to mobilize against their foes. I need not talk about Motu and co. at this time.
Nobody has a monopoly on doing this, of course, nostalgia for the ancient past can be used to justify anything. But you see this and then encounter this narrative of a hyper-advanced, "fallen" people again and again in fantasy, it all starts to get jumbled together in your brain.
The story of the Sivanyi seems to draw a different conclusion from all of this. These ancestors, they weren't living in a way that was very admirable. Their leaders sucked, they exploited their power over others, and the land suffered in the end. Thinking about this is what makes me tick. How fun is it to imagine that the modern Sarikote look at the mighty earthworks of their ancestors and yawn? Let others think of them as sublime, because they know better now. They have sophisticated technologies of their own that allow them to thrive in the desert, but these technologies aren't the material culture left to them by their ancestors. They're mostly immaterial, knowledge inherited from the Houseless herdsmen and nomads who lived in the margins for thousands of years while the House Sarikote rerouted rivers and carved megacities into Mother Mountain. Their way of life has been a better fit for a desert that increasingly could not accommodate the demands of their House ancestors.
Sond kinda crystallized around that, asking "what if you could talk to your ancestors, but only the mediocre ones?" Passenger to this is Asthaom being set in a kind of post-post apocalypse. There is the Thousand-Year Drought, for which the ancestral Sarikote seem to feel responsible for. A lot of people run from it, dispersing into the Ser, Akiat, and Satikkeans. Some refuse to give up their way of life and retreat deep into Sond, but even this way of life is forever transformed and molded around the wound that they left behind. And others pick up the pieces and carry on in a new-old way.
Within the post-post apocalypse metaphor, Sond is kind of like an atomic bunker. I admit I've never played Fallout but, part and parcel to TES, I grew up watching my brother play it a lot, and I'm endeared to its satirical mythology about the Old World. This is also where I began fixating on the idea of a people who have never seen the sun or the stars. This came back in a big way when I saw the Milky Way for the first time at age 25, I think.
The protective, sterile, carceral nature of Sond emerged later, towards the end of my environmental science degree. I started thinking of mausoleums, museums, archives, nature reserves, seedbanks, botanical collections, cryovaults as different kinds of prisons. Not in a disparaging way, necessarily, just a funny metaphor for the different kinds of fumbling I was observing in western science. There is an image of the past that we are trying to freeze in the present, rather than allowing it to change or grow. It's mostly noble and totally impossible in the way that science is. This way of thinking could really only find a home in Sond, with a people obsessed with preserving a period of time before everything changed.
(I also just thought it was funny if the different conservation ideologies were like warring factions. and we could give the prairie ecologists flamethrowers, of course.)
In the same vein, I like to think about what drives people to live in unusual places. I don't think of deserts as an especially unusual or extreme environment, but maybe this is desert brain speaking, that I have this desire to find similarities between my home environment and other parts of the world. Cliff dwellings and underground cities emerged to escape conflict or persecution. I guess something similar is happening at Sond. Why would you choose to live in a labyrinth? Why would you retreat underground and never emerge again? It's definitely not the path of least resistance in the outsider's eyes, but for its residents, it's the only logical way out.
The last element I can think of is, of course, burial effigies and tombs, because if Sond isn't one big prison then it's certainly one big grave. I just think they're fun. The ego works of powerful men and their immortal fear of death gives me life, but in the most basic and shallow way. I don't think the House god-kings or their cohort realized that when they achieved immortality they would become forever burdened with the impossible task of Staying The Same. it's also just funny to trap them in the same vessels they tried to trap others in, in this life or the next. And we're back to the prison metaphor.
Other stuff:
off-brand warhammer is in a feedback loop with Sond. they don't have the same thesis at all, but it's fun to appropriate the bones of it to tell different stories.
guild wars 2 gave me mordremoth, which gave me tamahuaq, which gave me brainfungus.
The Cedar and the Aspen voted the scaffolding for daydreams of all time 3 years in a row
the mechanical constructs and eternal skies in AER: memories of old
tired mountain syndrome
bone architecture and qarmat
Looming by Gregory Weir
C0DA by Michael Kirkbride and co.
well... you know
more stuff I'm probably forgetting
* i didn't forget the asterisk. Hohokam is an archaeological term for a material culture that is also colloquially used for the people who made that material culture, the Huhugam, the ancestors of the O'odham. These terms are used very differently and are interesting to unpack. I use "hohokam" because I am talking about the settler imagination more than anything.
