#fatt lb

[swallowtailed]

it’s wild how much memory gets caught up in friends at the table. i haven’t driven the pennsylvania turnpike in two and a half years, but as soon as i got on the road, twilight mirage came pouring back into my head. even driving the opposite direction, in a different season, i recognized the valley that spilled open in front of me as the closing theme came in at the end of futura free. (episode 2, specifically, i think.) (i’ll find the post when i have better internet, but i remember saying something like i think this is how twilight mirage should be listened to. long distances and liminal times.) it’s a weird kind of time travel, especially because i keep circling back to this region. oddly comforting, in a way.

[virginia-werewolf]

damn y'all weren't fucking kidding about the end of pzn 28 huh

[beelijah]

cute date idea: steal a cursed item and try to get your crush to appraise it

[swallowtailed]

catching up on realis (wooden hospitality) while shoveling my car out of the snow after dark. excellent all-around experience highly recommend

[swallowtailed]

palisade 56:

i'm very charmed by xylem taking the form of a tree and of timber and of sawdust in equal measure. internal consistency in selfhood despite drastic change, yeah, but also... like, the self can be defined by the boundaries of the other, right? we're shaped by our circumstances and those around us. when xylem's a tree, it's not in the context of a forest of other trees (light and water availability, mycorrhizal network, etc). its canopy is probably even shaped differently than it would be if it were surrounded by other trees! but it can also be timber, which is produced and shaped and contextualized by humans. so to be wood in the way xylem is wood is to be separate from your peers, and to be shaped by people who are not the same as you. which is to say, a branched researcher leaving home to explore and meeting a delegate of wakeful, whose influence changes it in every conceivable way except its most internal structure and identity. really, really good.

[swallowtailed]

perpetua 02-04

THE MUSIC. love a big opening set piece. that was a banger. shoutout jdq.

and it was fun to slow-roll the opening monologue line by line

i have two main things to say about the pitch of the season (cyclical apocalypse). the first one is that i am interested in thinking about apocalypse and i like how fatt does it—that’s something i come to the show for. so i am seated.

the second thing is that… they’ve done this before. i haven’t listened to winter or spring but i gather that this is especially very hieron. but also, a lot of the prelude, and the opening arc of realis, has felt like easy choices. which is not very interesting to me.

on that, i am also not interested in setting aside critical worldbuilding to lean into archetypes.

(i am, admittedly, kind of a worldbuilding game hater, because i prefer a degree of intention in storytelling that i don’t really find there.)

while i’m on worldbuilding, actually: i’m not gonna dig into the ecology/geography of cartograph or perpetua atp, although obviously i think it’d enhance any approach to critical worldbuilding to consider the material reality of the landscape. however: the requirement for settlements to be on seacoasts is really not it. replicating the untamed wilderness interior, are we

story thoughts

the world ending “a few hundred years” in the future puts me in mind of disco elysium and arctic climate science. the greatest fantasy of perpetua so far is that anyone gives a shit about the world ending in a couple centuries

yukai is the classic fatt-ism of little guy who is Hungry

love the gull knights.

upside down talking forest :)

valte / empire of the blue hour / island city of bats and doves with hot air balloons and a locked door are intriguing

really like hearing about local foods. excellent way to establish a location and start thinking about culture, economy, land relationships, etc etc

scattered pieces of board game sets is pretty cool. gonna be interesting to see how game logic shapes plot & character going forward

perpetua could be about labor rights and ritualized violence. the motif of pieces on game boards plays right into that

[swallowtailed]

am only ten minutes into perpetua 02 but it keeps making me giggle on the street. have you ever been to a community theater production, shakespeare in the park maybe, where they have too many 8-14 year old actors and also the text is kind of difficult, so they cast two kids per minor character and have them either split up the scenes or even show up together as their one character and trade off lines. this is perpetua prelude and it’s great

[swallowtailed]

catching up on realis — ep 12: it’s so funny when austin says “it’s totally normal” over a sudden backing track of intense wind instruments