@theartofmadeline
Xuebing Du
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PR's Tumblrdome
oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
noise dept.
wallacepolsom
if i look back, i am lost
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
🪼
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One Nice Bug Per Day
YOU ARE THE REASON
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
izzy's playlists!
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
seen from Malaysia
seen from Colombia
seen from Mexico
seen from Colombia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from Chile
seen from United States
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@voraverb-blog
dark-matter:
vivatregina:
theromanceatbakerstreet:
Beautiful Libraries → Neil Gaiman’s Personal Library (The Basement, Neil Gaiman’s Home)
Take the 3D tour here.
Oh my God, this is stunning.
Yes. A million times, yes.
I just had a nerdgasm.
lesujetmoi:
It’s a lot easier to skim through life unnoticed. Suppressing your passions and convincing yourself that you’re content with what is necessary to survive- or to let the fire dim inside of you so that everyone else feels comfortable around you.
I think there is something inside of everyone that...
anothersilentplace:
So
Practical logic dictates, that if you were living in a time that had no concept of Gravity, you would have no idea the Earth is a big sphere.
Because let’s get real, junk falls DOWN.
But what did people refer to, or think of as the force that brought things in a downward motion before...
The only thing you need to do to satisfy your curiosity is research.
Love and Math
The notion of “the aesthetic” is a concept from the philosophy of art of the 18th century according to which the perception of beauty occurs by means of a special process distinct from the appraisal of ordinary objects. Hence, our appreciation of a sublime painting is presumed to be cognitively distinct from our appreciation of, say, an apple. The field of “neuroaesthetics” has adopted this distinction between art and non-art objects by seeking to identify brain areas that specifically mediate the aesthetic appreciation of artworks.
However, studies from neuroscience and evolutionary biology challenge this separation of art from non-art. Human neuroimaging studies have convincingly shown that the brain areas involved in aesthetic responses to artworks overlap with those that mediate the appraisal of objects of evolutionary importance, such as the desirability of foods or the attractiveness of potential mates. Hence, it is unlikely that there are brain systems specific to the appreciation of artworks; instead there are general aesthetic systems that determine how appealing an object is, be that a piece of cake or a piece of music.
jtotheizzoe:
Study Finds Most Would Choose Cash Over Happiness
Majority of readers instantly say “Yeah, but not me!”
In the study, 2,699 participants were asked to consider a variety of scenarios: One scenario involved choosing between a job that paid $80,000 a year with reasonable work hours that would permit 7.5 hours a night of sleep, or a higher-paying $140,000-a-year job with long work hours and time for only six hours of sleep. Participants were also asked questions about which option they thought would make them happier.
Despite the probability that the less-demanding, lower-paying job would allow them more sleep, free time and make them happier overall, participants tended to choose the higher-paying job.
(via LiveScience)
writeletterstoyou:
Dear You,
It happened again this morning, when you were wandering reality in my grasp. Your fingers were curled around mine and I could taste your voice in my mouth, apples skimming my tongue, falling down my throat. Your laughter felt like rain and reminded me of drops of honey rolling on my...
sayitwithscience:
Everyone knows about infinity, but most people don’t know that there are actually different sizes of infinity: the transfinite numbers. This may out odd at first; after all, how do you define the size of something that is infinite?
For example: there are an infinite number of even numbers....
I’ve wanted to write about this myself, but you terribly simplify things. First of all, you don’t talk about what it *means* for two infinite sets to be equally sized, or what a set is at all. You don’t talk about the different kinds of infinity, and to make matters worse, you make a reference to the lemniscate (the infinity symbol), which is traditionally only used to refer to infinity in the form of a limit.
Your argument as to why the reals are uncountable isn’t valid at all, and you can demonstrate one-to-one correspondence between the rationals and the naturals using much simpler bijections.
Science II: The Fruits of Science
This is my second post in a series that discusses science, its significance, and the manner in which scientific knowledge is derived. It discusses the manner in which scientific theories and laws are formed, and the fundamental flaw of inductive logic. For the rest of the series of posts, look here.
Science yields two types of fruit: the scientific theory, and the scientific law. The difference between the two is oft misunderstood, though I trust the concise definition presented in the article will clear up such confusion. In philosophy, one comes up with an idea via rational thought, and subjects it to the scrutiny of his mind and those of his peers. In science, theories and laws are built in reference to experimental data, and the patterns discovered therein. Only hypotheses, which are never held as remotely accurate, are composed before the experimental data is derived, and whether they hold or not is not important to the scientific process. Because both theories and laws are built with inductive logic, they can never be proven for every single instance. To demonstrate this, I will present a thought experiment. Imagine that before us stood a black box. The box is perfectly regular, and adorned with one red button, and one light bulb. Curious, I press the red button. Immediately, the light bulb begins to glow. The bulb glows until I let go of the button. I do this several times, and we note that, every time, the exact same thing happened; while the button was pressed, the light bulb was on. We will note ‘pressing the button’ was, essentially, an experiment, albeit a simple one. Let’s imagine that I continued to perform this experiment an arbitrary, but finite number of times. Every time, we noted the same thing; while the button was pressed, the light bulb was on. Using inductive logic, we can reasonably assume that, as long as the button is pressed, the light bulb will be on. This, essentially, is a scientific law. In fact, this is the only way in which a scientific law can be discovered. However, note that we have never proven that it truly applies in all cases, only in some of them. In fact, no matter the number of times the experiment was performed, it’s very possible that if the button is pressed a still greater number of times, the light bulb will no longer turn on. It’s quite easy to design such a box. Another comparison could be made with mathematics. Unlike in science, inductive logic is not acceptable in mathematics (what we call induction does not rely on this type of reasoning). Imagine we had a function, f(x). For a given, finite set A, every element a of A yields f(a) = 0. Those of us who are versed in mathematics, know that no matter how big set A is, we could never conclude that the function f(x) is, in fact, f(x) = 0. Thus, the logic by which we assemble our theories and laws is necessarily flawed, because of its inductive nature. In fact, it is more accurate to view a scientific law as a pattern, observed in great amounts of experimental evidence, rather than some principle by which the universe operates. Thus, obtaining a perfect body of knowledge that describes the universe is impossible not only in practice, but also in theory.
But the problem is even deeper than that. Let’s think back to the box analogy again. Let’s embrace the notion of scientific proof, and formulate the scientific law, that pressing the red button will always cause the light bulb to turn on. To explain this law, we can try to compose a scientific theory. We’ll use Occam’s razor and our basic knowledge of electricity to claim that the inside the box contains a simple electric circuit, where the button acts as a switch. None of our experiments -- that is, the presses of the button -- preclude this theory, and it explains the mechanism of the box fairly well. In fact, we could even make the additional assumption that the box will, in all cases, work as though it contained such a circuit. However, once we open the box, we could see all sorts of things inside it. While the idea of an electrical circuit seems simple to us, it may not have been the way in which the box was designed. I’m sure many of us could think of a myriad of exotic ways to design a box that matches the specification. However, if we take the box to be analogous to a physical phenomenon, the act of opening the box is denied to us. In fact, we do not even know if such a thing is possible, or if the physical phenomenon actually has a mechanism that governs it. As such, our only way to study such a physical phenomenon is via empirical data, gathered by performing experiments. Here we can see the necessary evil in inductive logic; it is simply the only means available.
Science: Definition
As previously mentioned, I will write a series of posts regarding science, and its relevance to the underlying mechanics of the universe. This first post in the series will speak of the definition of the term. For the rest of the series, look here.
The term ‘science’ is somewhat ambiguous. Those who subscribe to different philosophies may subtly tint its definition so that it will better suit their own leanings. However, this page presents some common, and decent definitions of the term.
We will immediately note that science is not a belief system. It is a process, an enterprise, or an endeavour. While the end goal of the process is to attain a better understanding of the universe, it can disentangled from that goal, and practiced blindly. For example, one can follow the scientific method without even subscribing to empiricism. Often, however, scientists or laymen will carelessly bundle the idea with significant philosophical baggage, or describe it in colorful ways such as, “Science is the search for the truth,” and so on, whereas these are actually the decidedly non-scientific opinions of the speakers. This baggage, I feel, only serves to confuse the issue at hand. Nevertheless, practicing science without considering the relevance of the endeavor to the physical world seems rather banal. Thus, scientists will usually subscribe to a philosophy that expounds upon the relationship between the two. Any such philosophy must be strongly based on empiricism, as science is only concerned with empirical matters. Empiricism does not answer all of our questions regarding the relationship between the universe and the process of science. These questions are answered by one of the philosophies of science, three major ones being: realism, instrumentalism, and logical positivism. These philosophies are inherently distinct from science, and are certainly not scientific. Subscribing to any of them will not influence the scientific process in any way, only the opinions and beliefs of the practitioner.
Comments: Thoughts: On Science
Hey. In my last post, titled "Thoughts: On Science," I presented a brief commentary about science, its relevance to the universe, and its underlying logic. This post generated surprising interest (in comparison to the tiny amount of participation there was previously), and with the help of this blogger I realized that it did not do the matter justice. It also contained a factual error.
As such, I will expound upon this matter in future posts, equipped with some research, and references.
Thanks for reading :)
Thoughts: On Science
Edit: I've corrected a factual error in the post. I wrote that physical predictions are represented using four types of quantities, whereas in reality, they must be represented with five. If you're wondering, I forgot charge.
In addition, I've decided that this post is much too short to fully explain the ideas outlined therein. I will expound upon these ideas in a future series of posts.
Science, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily concern itself with the inner workings of the universe, and the absolute truth of scientific theories. Instead, it seeks to construct a human-understandable model of the universe that can make accurate predictions. The question whether such models are ‘true’ or ‘approximately true,’ in regards to the inner workings of the universe itself, is one left to philosophy -- specifically, the philosophy of science.
Scientific predictions are represented using four five types of quantities: time, length, mass, temperature, and charge. Such a prediction might specify the position of a particle, in length, after a set period of time, for example. Time and length are quantities that we can sense directly. We can easily detect change in either via our natural senses. We cannot detect temperature and mass this way; in order to discern the existence of these quantities, we need to perform experiments that will usually indicate some change in the quantities we can perceive. Every quantity is quantified, or standardized, by a measurement unit. Essentially, every measurement unit is defined in an experimental process -- a second might be defined by observing the ticking of a clock, and a kilogram might be defined by the change in the state of a balance. Thus, every measurement unit is a reference to a simple past experiment that can be performed at our leisure. When we are speaking of a prediction made using a scientific theory, we are in fact speaking of a comparison between the result of one simple experiment, and the change a particular physical system undergoes. We are not representing this change using a fundamental building block of the universe; if such blocks existed, we would not necessarily have any understanding of them. We are just using whatever descriptive means we have available, chosen because they can be easily detected using our natural senses, or because they are otherwise convenient. In fact, even with our fledgling understanding, certain other quantities, which are represented in some way by our fundamental quantities, might be the building blocks of the universe. Certainly, speed, represented as length divided by time, would seem to be important, because the speed of light plays a major role in many scientific theories. And energy, represented as mass * length2/time2, would seem to be much more meaningful than mass. However, the question of whether science describes the underlying mechanics of the universe or not may be moot. Using science, we can still hold meaningful discussions about the universe, and we can receive some facsimile of its true nature. We can still make accurate predictions regarding everything from the movement of planets, to subatomic effects. Essentially, because our only way to describe the universe is by using the tools that are available -- those aspects of it that can be detected using our senses -- we might as well assume that this is how the universe works, in an application of Occam’s razor.
Prose: Dreamhunt
You come home, muscles aching from a hard day’s work and eyelids dropping unevenly. You take off your clothes and fling them into some dusty corner, too tired to attempt even a semblance of order. You might have a drink of water, tea if you find the energy to brew some, and perhaps a bite of some leftovers from a previous meal. But lethargy would slowly creep through your body and mind, saturating them with numbness. Soon, you abandon all else and collapse onto your bed, ready for sleep. You relax your muscles and muffle the rhythms of your body, reducing them to a torpid thrumming. You exercise some occult neural organ, causing it to exude a cocktail of natural sedatives. This cocktail permeates the membranes of your brain, slowing some mental processes to a crawl but bringing others unexpectedly to life. You fall into a strange sleep. With the closure of one pair of eyes, another seems to open somewhere deep within your mind. You gaze upon a sea of desensitizing darkness, all your other senses numb. Here, you lack a physical manifestation of any kind and possess only the most cursory awareness of your body. As always, you find yourself in possession of a phantasmal antenna of sorts. It is a spiritual tendril that protrudes into some hidden dimensional recess, invisible but felt. You experiment with controlling its musculature, causing it to pivot in jerky motion. You expose its sensitive face to the darkness and pivot it this way and that, detecting strange waveforms as they travel through the vacuum. You feel them as pulsating spikes of energy governed by rapid but irregular frequencies. They are the psychic emissions of dreams. Things inhabit the darkness alongside you. Hyper-spheres hang motionless in the expanse, bound with invisible tethers to an infinitely distant anchor. Each is a microcosm woven by a solipsistic dreamer, constructed from distilled imagination. Whatever may transpire within, they are meant to be safe havens from the dangers of the primeval vacancy they occupy. But your presence defies them. Your metaphysical avatar can breach the impregnable dream-she lls with ease, as if through a kind of reverse osmosis. You can gaze within, gleaning valuable information about the dreamer’s subconscious; or you could destroy the dream-shell, ravaging the dreamer’s sanity and sentience in turn. Some might think to exploit this superlative vantage power to explore or shatter the minds of friends, foes, and strangers. Perhaps, in your spare time, you do as well. But you shall not do so this night. This night, you have been called to the dreamscape by the ancient society to which you belong. You derived its message from systematic application of the imagination on the rustling of leaves, the howling of hounds, and other miscellaneous sounds of the night. It spoke, in poetic cryptology, of a new hunt and a new battle. Perhaps this news excited you; after all, many of your society have become nocturnal predators as vicious as those they hunt. Perhaps it filled you with a quiet melancholy or a deep sorrow, but you could not ignore the call. No one ignores the call. And so, in lieu of the serenity of sleep, you have come here. Your spiritual antenna swivels, more and more vibrations falling across its spectral surface. With a willful action you attune to better to the frequency you seek, partially blocking unnecessary disturbances. It continues its movement, wasting inconsequential time in this non-existence. Before the sliver of a fragmented moment has passed in the waking world, you find the emissions you have been seeking. Unlike the dreams, each the center of a psychic storm, the frequency you detect is almost subliminal in its nature. It is a composite rhythm composed of myriads of muffled heartbeats, each unlike the other. It is the chaotic amalgamation of a city’s beating hearts. Having pinpointed the source, you move towards it in a kind of jerky flux. In mockery of kinetics, you find yourself moving between two distinct points without passing through the intervening space. After a short time of this surreal motion, you arrive at your destination. It is a patch of darkness indistinguishable from any other, except by the dream-spheres that surround it. Someone has erected an open microcosm there, an interstice in which things have shape and more natural senses can be used. You prepare yourself for the temporal shock caused by entry – a sensation caused by moving from one timeframe to another. It suffuses your non-body as you pass through the opaque shell, imagined currents running through phantom limbs and organs. Your real body twitches and contorts in the corner of your mind. After recovering from the disturbing sensation you grab hold of decaying threads of spent dream, the material of faded imaginings. You breathe life into them and they regain their previous luster. At first, they consolidate into wriggling serpents, but this form is quickly shed and they become pliant to your expert hands. You stretch and distend them, then caress and pound them into the desired shape. You forge your chosen avatar from this ghostly substance, complete with clothing and armor. It appears almost real in the ambient, directionless light; as real as anything could be. Others continue to arrive and some are already there. Time flows here faster than in the waking world, and it takes only a couple of minutes for everyone to appear and manifest in their chosen forms. Some of your companions may be neighbors, while others may reside an ocean away. It is meaningless; in the dreamscape, a continent means no more than the length of a side-street. Dreams are not separated by space; at least not the space of the waking world. They arrange themselves in complex patterns through some internal logic you cannot perceive. The dreams of a desert nomad may jostle the fantasies of a king sleeping in his palace or a dragon slumbering in its lair. Here, you fight the same battles against the same opponents. The companions who join you are varied. Unless meaning to disguise themselves, dreamers such as you take a form similar to their true appearance but tinctured with their personal reflection. Usually, the result is cosmetically favorable, with rolls of fat disappearing, muscles lengthening and becoming more pronounced, creases smoothed out, and breasts subtly growing in size. Here, mental diseases can clearly lay their signature. Those suffering from anorexia nervosa might appear comically bloated at first, reflecting their body image. Paranoids, psychopaths, the socially aversive, anxious, or indifferent might manifest in monstrous or pitiful forms. Some may obscure themselves in an amorphous cloak of inky darkness in shame, fear, or some other base emotion. Many neglect to change, finding the discomfort they inspire in their fellows enjoyable. There are twenty of you tonight. Sometimes there are more, sometimes less. Those that aren’t here must be resting. Everyone is never needed for a single hunt, not even a difficult one, and this appears to be a routine action to destroy intruders and uproot infestations. You all stand in silence, waiting for some unknown event. Some of you know each other. You are never friends. You are brothers in arms and comrades in battle. You would sacrifice your sanity for each other, but friendship is out of the question. You lack names, referring to each other by codenames. These are permanent monikers chosen by every dreamer independently. Some may be significant, others meaningless. You do not know where the others sleep or live. You do not know their age or history. These are things made irrelevant in this metaphysical battlefield where only anonymous faith and trust are necessary. An alien presence manifests in the center of the circle you create. It enters the dreamscape through a complex, interdimensional gliding motion that defies observation. It has a vaguely humanoid shape, with a head and a body sprouting four arms and two legs. It is not composed of substance but of lack; as if the original has been violently torn from the cosmic fabric, forming an absence in its shape. It radiates a corrosive luminescence that seems to tear at the microcosmic fabric. This being is the Master and progenitor, an entity of unknown origin and with only one known purpose – the defense of this realm of dreams. It strikes you as foreign and bizarre, yet caring for all that. It has given you your power and may possess the ability to take it back. The Master communicates. It does not do so through speech or any noticeable, physical action on its part. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to be communicating through its own volition, but through yours. Acted upon by an alien force, your surface thoughts break and splinter. They change form with almost mechanical tenacity, recomposing into cold knowledge. Rather than spoken by an outsider, this knowledge appears to have been spawned as an anomaly by your own, tangential thought processes. Even as you attempt to discern its source, it continues to reverberate through your skull in idiot perseveration. Finally, reluctant mental processes come uncertain to life, attempting to comprehend what is already known.
Prose: Biogenesis
Shapeless perversions of flesh bob within sealed brass vats filled with viscous, transparent liquid. They are like cocoons composed of tumor and slumping flesh, pulsating and twitching erratically through the clenching and unclenching of malformed musculature. Each is unlike the others in form, but similar in its revulsion. Organic tubing, viscera wreathed in uneven growth, protrudes from their upper halves and flees their cancerous bulks via patterns of overhanging orifices etched into the vats. Outside, separate vessels fuse in several bulbous junctions and duck out of sight into the yawning apertures of some noisome machine. Unseen, the vessels eagerly clamp their slobbering, voracious mouths around the lips of metallic extensions in a caricature of interracial union. In another part of the great machine arcane runes shift mechanically, briefly forming patterns of power and breaking them once more. Through their intermittent motion they sustain a deep furrow dug in the underlying fabric of the cosmos. Steam-operated pumps connected to the portal klaxon and spurt spent gasses from tiny vents as their dynamic parts draw alien succor from some extra-dimensional reservoir, funneling it through a complex system of piping. It filters through slides of thin gold accumulating a thin, dark precipitation and spews into boiling flasks feeding distillery tubing. It is passed through cavernous atriums, diluted with alchemical solvents, and thrust into pressurizing engines. All the valuable yet unnecessary impurities are filtered in a hundred and one different processes before the liquid is fed into the consumptive vessels which desire it so intensely. The sack-like creatures suck it by contracting their underdeveloped lungs, imbibing it and gaining the sustenance necessary for their continued survival. The bottom of the vat also hosts a number of orifices. Regulated by a strict, programmatic schedule they open at specific times to deplete their accumulations of growth enhancers and mutative agents into the cocoon’s liquid environment. The mixture dissolves in the liquid and permeates the cocoon through its open pores, alongside a host of natural substances. With every regular dose minute changes occur in the unborn being’s genetic code, steadily steering its development away from its original form. The fetuses thrive on this in vitro form of development. The alchemical cocktails they are fed strengthen and mutate their bodies while corroding their intelligence and rendering their sentience questionable. They are nurtured to become mindless drones, devastating in their power but dependent on mixtures only their cruel masters can provide. When they are be born, they will become the front-line soldiers in a war they know nothing about.
Prose: Cthonic
A great orb of blackened rock lies submerged in a mass of barren earth. Great curved beams of uncertain metal strain to contain its expansive bulk, rendering it earthbound to the renitent wasteland. A strange ambience manages to permeate through seemingly impregnable barriers and escape into the natural world beyond. It falls over the dead terrain and somehow debases it further from its nonexistent appeal. Even those unaware of the submerged structure’s significance can feel an odd disturbance at the edge of awareness, a subliminal morbidity that stretches beyond the empirical boundaries of time and space. Bizarre symbols of unknown purpose and meaning, etched into rock and metal and injected with unfading color, mark the outfacing side of the chthonic structure. They encircle a circular, closed portal; a vault composed of the same amalgam of matter as the rest of the orb. No protrusions identifiable as locks or handles emanate from it and its sturdy structure thwarts any thought of battery. Centuries ago, when civilization sought to topple itself, this bunker served as an unhallowed temple built to worship scientific malfeasance and glorified murder. It was marked with the numerals 1157 and given a name willfully forgotten in its obscenity. Within its subterranean halls, underneath tons of rubble and rock, ironic testaments to abiogenesis were made. Minds were perverted into weapons of tempered consciousness and bodies were mutated into soulless drones, oblivious of sentience. These cruel processes thrived on sentient, sapient cattle – the flesh, blood, and mind of captured enemies and dissident “allies”. Entrapped elementals and spirits labored in deep hatred and chaotic fear to accomplish tasks and power devices they knew nothing about. Some were sacrificed for their life energy while others were exhausted through slower but surer processes. The facility’s fate is heralded by many to be an action of karma, of the vengeful justice that underlies the world. During the latter half of the Lost Wars a cataclysm fell over it, resulting in the collapse of communication systems and the isolation of the facility from the outside world. In a last resort to spare the outside world of the horrors birthed within, the disembodied, intelligent security system that oversaw the facility initiated a permanent emergency lockdown. Great bars of smooth, magically reinforced metal were thrust into cramped shafts in almost carnal coupling. In turn, the shafts sprung retractable latches and constraints through which coursed magnetizing energy, locking and shutting vaults and portals through the force of electromagnetic attraction. Maintenance and ventilation tunnels were closed and flooded with corrosive gas and sterilizing, antimicrobial agents to quarantine pathological contamination. Dormant constructs awoke to artificial animation and aggressive emergency protocols. Centuries after the lockdown and abandonment of the facility by the power that operated it, many ingenious and intrepid explorers have stood before its featureless entrance and attempted to pry it open. They used powerful spells and unearthed weapons built with the use of apocalyptic technology. They uttered dark incantations that siphoned blasphemous energy from incomprehensible powers and let loose atomic power, all to no avail. The place has become a sacred ground of sorts and the explorers have become pilgrims, returning every once in a while to perform some fresh quasi-religious ritual.
Prose: Description of the Institute
The Institute of Knowledge has grown and swollen in the centuries since its construction. Once, it sheltered almost sheepishly behind city walls, subsisting on its population like some parasitic organism, but for decades now it has outgrown it. It has extended beyond city limits, both above the ground and beneath it, becoming a polygonal tumor in the otherwise uniform city walls. It has exerted its influence both near and far, erecting observatories of immense size at the peaks of the tallest mountains throughout the known world. It has established minor branches devoted to managing personnel, research, and various other tasks wherever such facilities would be accepted. It has become global and massive, but it has never forgotten its roots. The Institute is marked by its immense size. It is a functional monstrosity of architecture, built for volume rather than aesthetics. No particularly tall towers sprout from its domed roof, but its height is only exceeded by the palace. It has many entrances, some connected to the actual building by occult passageways underneath the city, used by some to travel, unknown and unimpeded, from venue to venue. The structure is situated before a bustling plaza, the well-maintained statue of some long-dead monarch set in its center. A short flight of stairs composed from strange marble leads the way to a pair of milky, translucent double doors. These are set in a walled facet of the polygonal structure. The facet is composed of large, white bricks cut expertly into identical, jagged forms. The bricks interlock with themselves, one notching into the regular recesses of the other. Although the exterior of the structure looks fragile, the materials it is composed of are deceitfully resilient. They are the result of countless years of research and experimentation, made of purified granite that has undergone some lengthy and complex process. They are more durable than many segments of the city walls that surround them. In an event of extreme peril, these walls would serve to save as many city folk as there is room for. Many petitioners climb the aforementioned marbles stairs, each motivated by a different desire. The Institute receives many students, most coming from the wealthier residents of the city, though its main enterance. Those who have already graduated from lesser, remote branches of the organization may also come here to receive honorary degrees or to engage in research. Others attempt to interest the Institute in their private concerns. This latter variety is mostly unsuccessful. The Institute also hires ‘experts’, its euphemism for bodyguards, burglars, thieves, assassins, spies, informants, confidence men, and other, roguish, freelances. These usually come directly to the administrative offices in another, less renowned quarter. The Institute is widely known for its distaste for such potential hirelings coming through the front door. Persons visiting the Institute for more publically appropriate reasons will first come to the visitor’s entrance hall that lies behind the striking double doors. The floor within is tiled with softly patterned white, and various couches and chairs are scattered about it. Some may seat waiting guests, each holding a slip of paper bearing a primitive numeral. A boxy display hanging above the marble counter proclaims the last number to receive service. Its incessant, mechanical clicking contributes something to the calming ambience. There are multiple passages leading out of the hall. One is a door that lies behind the counter, leading to a backroom in which the clerks, most young students of the Institute, can relax on couches of their own. Another passage is set before the entrance, leading to a long hallway marked by doors set in every side. Following this hallway, one can reach the main nexus of the Institute. The nexus is an immense, cavernous aperture within the Institute. Although it is never abandoned, its size assures voice and other noises will always leave echoes in their wake. It leads to different departments, including University, Research, Administration, Offices, and many others. It acts as a juncture, interconnecting the separate facets of the Institute together in a great knot. In fact, its tubular air shafts serve to connect multiple floors as well. Through a twin application of mechanics and arcane force, air pressure and magical repulsion combine to lift humanoids comfortably and reliably, and deposit them at whatever floor they wish. It is a technology seldom seen outside of the Institute, where it was invented. There are few destinations one cannot reach by simply following one of the numerous passageways branching from the nexus. The way will be consistent in its swiftness, without the confusing turns and dubious architecture often present in other, smaller buildings. In fact, the design of the Institute is based on such a consistency. If there are places which require a map or a reference point to reach, their obscurity is deliberate. One of such places is the official entrance to the flesh vaults. Although large, the descent to it, which is done on foot, down a lengthy spiral stairway, is kept in a narrow, oft ignored alley in a little-used intersection. Other entrances to the ominous division, which are used much more frequently, are located behind hidden walls or on unmarked floors, reachable only by supplying complex codes to innocuous airshafts. Most know of the flesh vaults, at least within the Institute. Their existence is revealed as part of matriculation ceremonies, in private interviews. They are excessively justified, first by the lecturers to their students, and thereafter by the students to themselves. Always reluctant to simply leave, despite their discovery, the mountains of work that are dropped into the students’ laps serve to distract them from ethical dilemmas. Afterwards, the commonality of toil in the archives and a growing familiarity that develops with the Institute in general transforms their cold anxiety into an uneasy nonchalance. They learn to ignore, rather than accept, the flesh vaults. However, few ever manage to take their existence for granted. Even wizened officials, who stride for decades with the flesh vaults echoing hollowly beneath their feet, may still shiver when they see one of their half-dead occupants. Outside of the Institute, in the city and the world beyond, the flesh vaults are rampant rumor, no more credible than any other conspiracy theory. Such rumors are but one sort in a brimming kettle of paranoid speculation about the Institute, and belief in one implies belief in all. They are exchanged and traded in taverns and alehouses, under the cover of greasy lantern light. Even those who spread them acknowledge their dubious nature, though they find entertainment in the telling. Those who know the information as fact are swallowed up by the untrustworthy masses. Yet in slums around the world, and perhaps in more reputable places as well, when a dying beggar disappears without a trace, or when a young child is lost in the city streets, someone will always mention the chilling ‘caretakers of the flesh vaults’ in hushed, accusatory tones. As if belonging to some worldwide cabal, there will always be a grizzly old man to punctuate the accusation with a suspicious glance into the distance, where he imagines the Institute must lie.
Prose: Oblivion
DESCRIPTION
This post contains a fragment I wrote a long time ago, about a strange world, and a strange conflict occurring in that world. I know it doesn't make perfect sense.
Cosmology There are four levels of existence in this cosmos. The first is the physical, the mundane. Things are there, and all other layers are merely its shadows. Above this layer is the Fading, a home for the things that were but are still half-remembered. Beyond the Fading lies Oblivion, a place for the possible and the forgotten. Beyond this realm lies the Impossible, containing things that cannot be. These are things that, by their very nature, defy comprehension under the laws of our cosmos. Two Guardians There is a void somewhere at the edge of Existence that the minds of sentient beings cannot touch. There, thoughts unthought can travel unimpeded and myths long dead can find a place. The handful entities that have knowledge of it call it Oblivion, the Void, the Edge, or Twilight Surreal. Before a thing passes into the Impossible it remains in this place for countless millennia, awaiting the stirring of old memories and recollections of times long gone past. Few things hear this call and fewer have the will sufficient to heed it. It is a place where things lose all passion, hope, and willpower. But it is also a place that grants a kind of immortality to its denizens. Thoughts, minds, feelings, and ideas can exist in Oblivion for timescales incomprehensible to the mortal mind. Should a being find a way to sustain its energy in this place, it would gain a semblance of eternity and immortality. However, only two have managed to do so since the Genesis of Time and that only because they lacked any other choice. We, two lovers, drift formless across these seas of stark emptiness where space is inconsequential. Here time is a painfully slow thing, moving in relentless torpidity as if forcing its way through some viscous liquid. We are of the 3rd Kind, an order of being whose time is long past. Only we two have retained sentience, driven by the greatest purpose and shielded by the greatest love. It is the true, original love. Such love that hasn’t been seen since the passage of the 3rd. Mortals and even gods may try to imitate it but not only do they fail, they cannot even comprehend their failure. Since our descent into Oblivion nigh fifty thousand millennia ago, we have been speaking our last words to one another. We have spoken of what was and what may be. We have reminisced events long past and beings long dead. We have aided one another to recall the grand purpose which drives, sustains, and calls for our continued sentience. We have comforted, encouraged, and shared hope sufficient to masquerade our fears. But mostly, we have spoken of our love for one another. For in this place, every word of passion and affection serves to drive the hungry mists away. We do not speak in a tongue but through raw meaning, a form of communication that cannot be ascribed to paper or mimicked through speech. Our statements cannot be captured or studied, merely comprehended – and the mechanism behind this comprehension is unknown even to us. What we lack in body we compensate with our naked minds, each as expansive as a cosmos. We occasionally gaze into the gray horizon, fixing our minds on a point distant from us not in time or space but in plausibility. It is the edge of the Edge we gaze upon, the place that separates what is merely unreal and what, by its very nature, resists the rules of logic imposed on this cosmos. We seek a glimmer, a sign, a disturbance in this otherwise solid and unbroken barrier – though of what sort we cannot imagine. We never seek the reason behind this obsession. We know that if we have forgotten such an important fact, it is by our own volition for our own sakes. A day comes, the first day of our 50,001st millennium, when a revelation passes over me. It is not gradual or spontaneous. It is artificial and almost mechanical – a process wherein my thoughts break and splinter, unbidden. My ability to communicate is suppressed for the interim and a cascade of information, forged from my own thoughts and emotions, falls over me. Things I once knew and things I might have known fill my being and, through the patterns of meaning that emerge from their fusion, I derive a grave significance. Although it can be described in a single word as failure to me it is a complex and compound thought which encompasses every part of my being. When the tide ends, I look to my companion to see if she experienced anything of the sort. Yet she is merely nonplussed at my strange relapse and showing no signs of having one herself. As I realize that she is oblivious to the depth of information I have within me I wonder whether I should tell her and how she would react if I did. I wonder about what I have just learned, weighing every fact and nuance with care and significance. Most importantly, I wonder why it was me this time and not her. After all she had done and all she had sacrificed, shouldn’t she be given this information? Who am I to be entrusted with it, having merely served as a headrest for her greatness ever since our first meeting? Who am I to be given the responsibility of deciding the course of action at such crucial a time? A silence manifests between us. To her it is an awkward pause, anomalous in our eternal discourse. She wordlessly broaches it, communicating through emotion and meaning. I ignore her for as long as I dare, conflicting streams of thought giving rise to a veritable tornado within me. In Existence, my contemplation would have spanned decades; but here time moves slowly. Mere moments pass before I finally reply. Then it is time to await hers. Below, in a physical realm where existence is a concept utterly alien to us, eons dart across space. As if through flash copulation, their sudden passage breeds permanent changes upon the cosmic landscape. Universes shatter and reform as we, uncaring outsiders, continue our discourse. The physical bodies of dead things decay and their spiritual inhabitants are violently abjured from the only homes they have ever known. Naked, they are at once set free from their flesh prisons and imprisoned once more by stark purposelessness. Left to their own devices, they wander the cosmos in a nigh-eternal search for meaning. Some are taken in by gods or pathos intent on drawing out the very last traces of sentience they have left. The less fortunate ones get lost in the turmoil between the universes, eventually stumbling upon the gaping maws of great, carnivorous engines. They are devices purposed with harvesting souls like a peasant harvests grain. The spirits fuse into bizarre, mystical compounds within their nuclear bellies, all for the benefit of a long-dead race. We see all this and a thousand things more, yet we do not care. That is no longer our world and minding it is not our purpose. Our purpose is to love, to live, to forget, and to gaze at that distant border behind which mass all the nightmares the Kinds have ever wrought. Or so I thought. Yet we have ultimately failed in our goal thousands of millennia previously. We have wasted precious time milling fruitlessly about ancient battlegrounds, living in the illusion that the battle has not yet been won My distress meets a wall of unnatural calm in my companion. She is not unnerved by these patterns of meaning as I was. She radiates a kind of melancholy at my realization, but not at its content. Her unhappiness at my discovery is plain to see. Without any other choice, she concedes a truth she has kept hidden from me for millennia. We have, indeed, failed in our task. She explains that this endeavor had been our last resort, a final act of personal sacrifice in the face of an otherwise indomitable nemesis. Every other avenue of action had been exhausted prior to our descent and nothing else has been forthcoming to her throughout her millennia-long ruminations. But failure does not have to be a negative thing, she explains. In failure, we have liberated ourselves from the duty of eternal vigilance. We have finally attained perfect freedom; the freedom to exist timelessly, a part of cosmos and apart from it as one. Here, we shall gain the eternal peace we so righteously deserve. For the sake of everything we have done, we shall receive our sweet, sentient respite. These reckless words charm me at first. I envision a future wherein we two are the only sentient beings both within cosmos and without. I envision the very cosmos pass on into the Impossible as the last sentience is extinguished by the psychotic self-destruction of the Sickness. I envision Existence collapsing into itself and our love, massive beyond the confines of two sentient minds, is shunted into the true void outside. There, where time and space have no dominion and probability reigns supreme; our love blooms and intensifies until it becomes vast enough to birth an Existence of its own. What is this Existence in the face of the Existence our love would create? Something so pure would never be tainted by pathos of any kind. These things would find neither place nor purchase in our cosmos and wherever they would rise, they would instantly succumb.
Dialog with a Pathos
Alone in my purpose, my Kind all but extinct, there are few entities I can turn to. The jealous gods of this era; bastard entities that exist like mental parasites, leeching the faith and sentience of the Kinds, would never listen to me. These beings are far too consumed by their own dreams of grandeur to heed the words of an unknown, omniscient voice. I cannot approach the Kinds directly, for they are far too abundant across the cosmos and many would prove just as resilient as their patron deities. There is only one avenue open to me, though it is the darkest one of all. I must speak to a nemesis of the Kinds, but one as fearful of the Sickness as I am. I must break the first taboo of Kind. I must initiate dialogue with a pathos. The pathos are a solitary, dark-hearted race. They despise one another but mock all other orders of being, especially the lowly Kinds which they prey upon. They take great pride in the obliviousness of their victims and the ease in which they can manipulate their actions to suit their own purposes and desires. They fear only one thing – the ire of their progenitors, but this fear is a terror deeply ingrained into their fundamental makeup. It is their essence, an element which governs their choices and lies behind their most insignificant actions. The pathos do not possess the creative and destructive power of deities or a purpose identifiable with any mortal emotion. They lack a celestial domain in which they can reside and leisurely gaze upon the cosmos. Their consciousness drifts randomly across their ever-growing network of unwilling hosts. Viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and many more are their microbial servants. These things are not alive, nor do they worship their masters like the Kinds worship deities. They cannot be said to be more devoted to their pathos than a hand is devoted to its owner. They are like tangled, amorphous limbs which reach across countless universes in a cosmic embrace, spreading infection with abundance. The infectious agents utilized by the pathos are bound to it through a sort of servitude rather than parentage. They were never made by the pathos itself; rather, the pathos was made by them. These microbial entities evolved into their present form as other creatures. It was only during this evolution, when they began utilizing primitive forms of psionic communication, that the pathos came to be. As microbial species spread, their psionic networks and the volume of their communications grew larger. Eventually, bizarre patterns began emerging from their mindless discourse. They were corruptions of information brought about by psychic interference, malfunctioning microbial nodes, and simple chance. In time, some self-sustaining patterns emerged. Essentially informational viruses, they spread across networks, oblivious of the irony that lies in infecting the infectious. While many toppled networks, others uneasily co-existed with one another; and where there is co-existence there will be evolution. As viruses eradicated one another and the laws of viral procreation and mutation resolved themselves, the outline of the pathos came to be. It began as a flexible virus, one which could alter its abstract form to its advantage. But at some point it became more than that – it became intelligent and, alongside this intelligence, came sentience. Pathos lack physical manifestations of any kind, short of the physical manifestation of their servants. The sentience that is the only part of their being flows from one servant to another across cosmic networks as blood flows through veins and arteries, nurturing vital tissue along the way. Initiating dialog with one is not impossible, but it is a tricky endeavor. Any creature can call the name of a deity, angel, or demon but calling the name of a pathos is an incomprehensible task. However, we of the 3rd Kind have some minor control over some forms of lower consciousness. The lack of physicality does not hinder me. The difficulty lies not in that, but in making the pathos heed my words. It is not that I know the pathos to which I communicate by name, for pathos lack any sort of comprehensible moniker. But pathos are sentient, and as such they shine like beacons through the clouds of indiscriminate fog which encircle me. Even from my abode, distant in more than time or space, I can see into the cosmos and point out pathos at work. Powerful streams of thought rushing across distances great and short, shining particulates in a network of conscious thought, seemingly irrelevant patterns which compose the connections required for self-awareness. They are all obvious to me and every section of the whole is like an opening in which I can inject information of my own making. It may be an aggressive, intrusive form of communication – but it is my only option. As with my previous companion, the information I inject into the pathos cannot be easily converted into an understandable form of language. The information I inject takes the form of the pathos’s own code of sometimes binary electrochemical pulses.
I am of the 3rd Kind, an order of being long gone from this cosmos. Fifty millennia ago I embraced a solemn duty of protection – to guard the cosmos against the Sickness, a pathos which bears some similarities to you. The sickness began as the pathos of the 1st Kind, the order of being which gave birth to this cosmos – and perhaps, many others. Sometime during the Period of Geneses, perhaps as far back as the Origination, the pathos managed to infect the 2nd Kind. The 2nd Kind was not sentient at first. It was a construct designed to continue the Geneses, first aiding the 1st Kind and, after the Abandonment, acting on its own. Before the Abandonment the pathos remained dormant, only taking action when very specific circumstances presented themselves. This is due to the pathos’s deviance and caution. It feared the 1st Kind, for they had terminal power over it. Most pathos had been exterminated in the 1st’s own cosmos, and those that survived did so only because they hid themselves well.
After the Abandonment the pathos began aggressively asserting itself, for when the Abandonment occurred all links between this cosmos and the 1st’s were immediately severed and have not been rejoined since. This severance cut the pathos into two, the greater portion remaining in the cosmos of the 1st. The portion which remained here was transformed from the whole. The deviance and caution which led the pathos’s every move were stripped. All it knew was how to use its influence to fulfill its immediate desires, and it began doing just that. This aggressive action led to the pathos’ quick discovery. But the 2nd Kind was not to be trifled with. Although it had not been prepared for a pathological attack, various counter-measures had been instituted into its creation. The first of which was sentience, knowledge, and self-awareness triggered by emergency. After the birth of its consciousness, it quickly detected the opponent which presumed to take control of its mind. Informational antidotes were prepared and applied into the 2nd Kind’s basic programming. These antidotes, almost sentient themselves, engaged the pathos in desperate conflict. Although the superior nature of the pathos led to triumph after triumph, the doggedness of the 2nd Kind and the intellectual and mental resources left in its disposal meant the war would continue for many years to come. During these years the 2nd Kind could not aid in cosmic construction and supervision, and so much of the cosmos was left to its own devices in terms of evolution. This led to startling anomalies which were eradicated at a later point. This period is called the Frozen State. The pathos was eventually destroyed, or so the 2nd Kind thought. In truth, the pathos’s superior descent made it resilient to mere spatial destruction. Although it inhabited our cosmos, it was less restricted by its dimensions than its planned inhabitants. The pathos receded into deep seclusion, burrowing whole into the Fading where dead, half-remembered things formlessly await resurrection. Unlike its other denizens, the pathos retained its form in this otherworldly space. It waited for a time when the 2nd Kind would be gone as well, so it could finally propagate and attain control over the entirety of the cosmos. That time came in the Exile, when the 2nd Kind decided to disappear. Some decided to become members of the 3rd Kind, while others disappeared into the Fading themselves. They may still exist there, in some form or another. Many chose to become unknown, stripping their existence from the minds of the 3rd Kind and passing into Oblivion – the place of the forgotten and the unreal. Few opted to remain and keep an eye on the cosmos, observing from afar and taking action when absolutely necessary. Rather than remaining in the cosmos in their present form, they travelled to the Prime, a microcosm and a medium of quasi-genetic data governing the passage of the cosmos through time. A millennium after the Exile, in the peak of civilization, the pathos once again reasserted itself. It spread not through physical microbes but masqueraded as raw meaning and information – the preferred method of communication of that time. The prevalence of psychic communication led to rapid infection. Pathos were well-understood during that time, and some had been eradicated. However, rather than contributing this knowledge led to a grave underestimation of the threat posed by this one. No antidote managed to affect this pathos and no pathologist could reveal its nature or composition. Willing surrender to this alien mind was briefly considered but was fortunately averted when one of my Kind conceived a desperate proposition: to ask the 2nd Kind for aid. Those that have gone into the Fading and Oblivion out of their reach, the only option remaining to them was those inhabiting the Prime. And so the first and only expedition to the Prime went underway. The party purposed to find the surviving members of the 2nd Kind and ask for their assistance – in the face of utter subjugation by this all-powerful pathos. I do not know what transpired in that strange microcosm. I only know that the party found two entities capable and willing to assist. One was called the Gardener and the other was called the Watcher. Living in the Prime, they saw the pathos as a strange influence corrupting the cosmos. It manifested as a black blight upon the land, devouring living matter at its leisure. They could tell it was an alien thing, something that should not belong in the cosmos, though they could not remember facing it previously. By examining it through the Prime, they concluded it was too complex and powerful to be faced using the tools of the 3rd Kind alone. However, even with the tools of the 2nd, it could not be eradicated. They spoke of its nature and its weaknesses, none of which the 3rd could exploit. Just when all seemed lost, the Watcher proposed a dark plan. It was a last resort in the face of an indomitable nemesis.
