they/them
Some people can't @mention me, I don't know why.
Warning: I'm going to tag gifs with photosensitive warnings from now (2023/07) on, and I'll go back and tag recent posts, but older posts are not properly tagged
format for all other warning tags:
tw: thing
cw: thing
Spoilers are tagged #spoilers and, for recent stuff, also a specific tag like #Warframe spoilers.
Currently playing:
▪ Warframe
▪ Odd Giants
▪ a secret third thing
Hmm. You know, I’m going to use my platform here to be a little self serving. You see, I’m finally giving Warframe a proper try and finding I really enjoy it. And while simple compared to other frames, I am enjoying playing with the Rhino warframe enough that I’m willing to buy the Rhino Prime Set. But I’m unfamiliar with the trade process in warframe since it doesn’t seem to have an auction house equivalent. So, ideally, I’d like to find someone who has what I’m willing to buy and the patience to guide me through it, if possible.
this last image demonstrates selling rather than buying, so, to clarify:
when you're buying, you press the Buy button on warframe.market and copy the suggested text
then paste that text into your chat window in Warframe and send it
the seller will then invite you to their dojo, most likely
they'll probably invite you to trade as soon as you load in, unless they're busy with another buyer, in which case it might take a moment; you don't have to go looking for their trading post, which is good because it could be anywhere lol
if neither of you has a dojo, I think you can trade on the Maroo's Bazaar location in orbit of Mars? you'd have to meet up on the same instance of Maroo's Bazaar
generally, a seller just wants to complete each trade as quickly as possible, so there's no need for socializing beyond a nice little "thx :)" or "ty :)"
(leave their dojo as soon as you've said your thanks, because when they invite you there, you're added to their squad, and if they're very busy they might need that squad slot open soon)
don't worry about anything! these notes make it sound like a situation where there's some pressure on you, but there actually isn't! you get the hang of it very quickly and no one's going to get mad if you're a little slow. if they notice your low Mastery Rank, they'll understand why, too. as someone who's sold a lot of stuff in Warframe, I can assure you the seller is--or should be--prepared for all kinds of delays and hiccups. everyone's internet connection quality is different, some people have Warframe installed on an HDD and they take forever to load, sometimes there are glitches, and sometimes RL needs attention at an inconvenient moment
speaking of glitches, if the other person says they can't invite you, and you also get "failed to accept invitation" when you invite them, try restarting Warframe. note the person's name so you can DM them again when you get back in
speaking of Mastery Rank, a lot of new players try to buy weapon blueprints and parts that can't be traded to them because they're below the item's MR requirement. make sure to check that to avoid disappointment; warframe.market displays it near the top of the page under "Mastery Lvl" when you search for the item
some items, like really rare mods, require the buyer to pay a high fee in credits. warframe.market includes this info, too, under "Trading Tax". in your early days, even relatively small fees might catch you unprepared if, for example, you just spent all your credits on ranking up mods (it's happened to all of us)
if you need credits quickly, Seimeni on Ceres is good until you unlock The Index
And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly
Albrecht's Requiem logs are such a gorgeous bit of prose, and I wanted to do a deep dive into them because I have many thoughts on how they really set the tone and scope of the conflict between Albrecht and the Man in the Wall.
Xata. (Truth). It began long before us, we who now live our perfect and dull, endless lives. It began long before these moon-palaces and body-markets hurling around our golden sun. It began long before our light-coil thinkers, our radiation wars, our oil, smoke. It began with us. The continuity and its twin, wanderlust. The need for unseen shores deep in our marrow. No judge, jester, queen, or king can escape this old blood. We are nomads, eternal. And when no ocean, mountain, or sky could contain us... our gaze hungered star-ward. Afar, they mocked us with their brittle light. Winking and jeering like dangling Ayatans, forever out of reach, illuminating the truth: immortal as we are - we die with the sun. That's where I come in.
It should be noted that the longing to explore and lay sights on unseen shores is not inherently wrong. It is neutral and an old human instinct, that took homo sapiens out of Africa and into all other continents. It only becomes wrong when it becomes about taking. About the excessive extraction of resources in pursuit of power and vanity.
I have many other thoughts about Warframe's alternate history and how it might stem from a different expansion, dissolution, and fallout of the not-Mongol Empire and its many offspring, and how the Scaldra/Orokin might stem from people who are both descended from and who intentionally bastardized the ancient not-Mongols, not-Romans, etc to claim legitimacy. I think this might be lightly implied (or, at least, unintentionally implied) through a few things, and sadly makes 1999 less focused than I would prefer, but that's another post entirely. But it's loosely relevant, when Albrecht describes the Orokin and their predecessors as "nomads." The Mongols were nomads who revered the sky and established the first empire to reshape the world in terms of connecting it across vast distances - particularly the Jochid ulus, the Golden Horde, the territory of which would have loosely corresponded to and bordered where Warframe's Earth map is centered.
Jahu. (Form). My departure was a day less than any other. When I stepped inside the Bell, I saw no crowd through its seriglass. No skeptical onlookers. No regal sendoff. They all had given up on me and my paradoxical formulations. The wasted years had shown the Void to be just that. Nothing. No energy. No entanglement. No form. To space-faring ambitions, a dead end. On the day, my laboratory was mostly vacant of witnesses, most of all, of expectation. Only my sluggish attendants, my sagacious Kavat, Kalymos, and of course, my daughter. I had raised her alone but with inconsistent vigor. In those eyes, her mother's, I did see a terrible reflection. Of a man that did not exist. A brave and principled man about to make history. In truth, he was a Void himself. A outcast, a joke, a nothing. Driven by my humiliation. Failure had made me bitter and reckless. I would dive into the depths myself to prove them all wrong. I gave the signal. My daughter grasped the lever. Kalymos, then, belted out a desperate, rasping growl. But it was too late.
Vome. (Order). The calipers yawed open the wall between worlds, stretching there a black, trapezoidal gap. A door. A mouth. It yawned in the light of the room, splintering it to mesmerizing, unearthly hues. And I, inside the Bell, dropping obliquely towards it from my gallows. Mass and time rippled as a sudden vortex jawed before me. My head was vapor, my feet, lodestone. The Bell around me, flexed like a rat paralyzed in a winding, gulping snake. I faltered in the awe of it, stumbling against the seriglass and, with that, shifted the Bell's path through the wall. It grazed the caliper membrane, the edge of the door. No worldly edge was as thin, as sharp as could split even light. As the bell faintly grazed it, the seriglass was all at once rendered like strips of flesh by Dax blade. My enclosure was beheaded in an instant, but still, I fell... sideways... Into the void.
Fass. (Chaos). Death was on me; I was certain. I was face-down, eyes clenched. My heart pulsing the last of its seconds, and my lungs burning the last of its air. A sudden nostalgia gripped me. I grasped desperately, for memory, of a storm, just passed, the fumbling pitch of a child's song... yet all these thoughts seemed to steal away from my mind like smoke through a vent. I would die empty. I then became aware of another sensation. Physical. A web of pain, needles itching into my arm. At once I realized: I was alive! Laying in the Bell's shattered seriglass! I groped the ground. Warm stone. The floor of my laboratory. So: I had never left... and so: I had failed. Again. I heard a crunch alongside me. Someone stepping through the shattered glass. With great shame, I gasped and rose my head to face my daughter above me. But as I opened my eyes, it wasn't her. It was me.
When Albrecht first enters the Void, it's beautiful. He is tinting it with his assumptions ("profane in color"), but the way it's described is beautiful and leaves Albrecht awestruck.
He tries to ground himself with a memory of childhood - a foundation. Maybe the Void is drawn to this because the Void itself is foundational to reality, described in many ways like it's the memory of the world. The memory slips away, and Albrecht finds that he is alive and intact. The memory and Albrecht's presence in the Void have summoned or awakened or created the Man in the Wall.
Ris. (Light). The senselessness of it, the paradoxic, the vague untime form. I was alone, but not. For I stood there confronted by myself. A twin, but no brother. A reflection but with dimension. Behind him, no horizon, but a vast broiling sea of caustic light pierced at random by black-pin stars. And closer, around me, a gale of flowing vapor. Profane in color, billowing relentlessly into the nascent lack, seeking all directions. I was standing on a precipice of familiar stone, jagged and unanchored, as though cleaved directly from the very floor of my laboratory. I wondered at the vapor's path, smoking outward more, leaving behind now, the walls, the filigree gold, the rare cuts of marble from my home. I knew at once the vapor's source. I turned away, back toward the wall, the trapezoid I had yawed into it. Vapor erupted inward at the gap, but not just from there. For as I rolled my eyes back, I saw the same... A great-steam of scintillation, smoking from my skull. Dumb in awe, I faced toward my chimerical twin. He spoke.
Khra. (Time). An old name, unspoken in the centuries since my mother reared me. A soft hiss, soothing as a viper's gaze. Little Bengal. The other me reached out, offering his hand, gliding toward me without moving, as though the distance between us was now collapsing. A confusion, most euphoric, filled my mind. With the shred of wit that remained, I decided that I should run for my life. At once, crazed and frantic, I fled. But I made no forward progress. Instead, the world compressed evermore around me, as though I were an anchor pulling the shore to reach. When I arrived at the door, or rather, the door arrived at me, I howled, hurling myself inside. Out. And then and there, I was. Lost and unlost. Howling on the floor in harmony with my wretched Kalymos. Lacerated in flesh and heart. Scattered as the bell glass. Spilling blood and stomach on the cold, stone floor. But I sensed the other there, at the wall's breach behind me, reaching still. I screamed, but my voice was gone. Forever. I looked, but my eyes would never see again. I swept my fist across the floor, snatching broken shards. And in gripping tightly, I filled my hands with ink. Close it! I wrote.
The entity calls out with a nickname from Albrecht's childhood. Albrecht was frightened and reached out for a comforting memory, and the Void reached back with one. This is its first act, or perhaps its second one, since Albrecht is shocked to find himself alive, and the Void may very well have coalesced into a material form (his laboratory floor) to save him. Regardless, the Void's first act is empathetic. It reacts to fear and pain by offering what Albrecht sought to ground himself with.
Albrecht doesn't see this through his fear. And this is where I get a little more into interpretation rather than simply looking at what's been written.
Netra. (Decay). Time, to us, is all but conquered. Our sacred Kuva moves us on to new skin. We numb to our daily, yearly, trifles... and remedy those memories that bring lasting misery. With all our misdeeds, our excess, our indignity... we are haunted by nothing. But not for me. For with each passing day, there grew within a tumorous idea. It was minute in those early days: The pale reaching digits severed on the floor... studied with reverence, with greed. And it swelled larger in the latter days: the regal domes, the Rail dedications, the unholy Zariman parade. I had put the stars within reach, but at what cost? I never spoke of him, that man, trapped in the wall. And while there have been countless souls who have followed me through, with their light-skippers, and field-wave skins and vari-eyed instruments... not a single one ever saw him. Me. And so it is that I will not take the Kuva now. Or ever again. This is the last skin I'm in. Because of this idea: That I cannot be sure. That in all that smoked commotion, in all that panic and fear, in that bending light and blinding dark... was it I who escaped? Or the other?
I think Albrecht is more of a career man than a genuine, passionate scientist. His automatic assumption, when he thinks himself back in his laboratory, is failure and shame, even though he just witnessed and experienced a flash of something that, to his knowledge, no human being had ever laid eyes on before. That is enormous and awe-inspiring. That is an overwhelming success, and a typical one for scientific study (slow, intermittent, frustrating, half a step forward at a time). But all Albrecht can see is failure. And when he sees something strange that he can't make sense of, he reacts with fear.
And listen. I think a scientifically-minded person, who is genuinely passionate and in it for the love of the game, would be THRILLED. I grew up in some very swampy backwoods, so I've come face-to-face with dangerous wildlife on occasion, and my reaction has only ever been a bone-deep thrill - no room for fear when I'm thinking "this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me." If I encounter something I don't understand, I want to get close to it to learn everything little thing that I can, or else bask in the not-knowing and the mystery. (Everyone read "The Cloud of Unknowing" by Anonymous 14th Century Christian Mystic right now.) If a strange entity from another dimension extended its hand to me, I would simply shake it. If that's how I die, then that's how I die. Outta my way, gayboy, I'm boutta get it.
Contrast Albrecht with Yonta, who can't help but be ecstatic about and enamored with it all even after the Void has torn her apart and put her back together.
And Albrecht's fear is still understandable. Survival and fear are deeply wired biological impulses. He is witnessing something far beyond his experience, and he is Orokin - he has had an unimaginable range of experiences, so something beyond that is overwhelming.
But that's the underlying factor, I think. It's not just survival instinct and fear of death. Albrecht bookends the Requiem logs by talking about the crimes and mindset of the Orokin. He is not studying the Void out of a passion for understanding and connecting with the world. He is doing it to maintain status and to advance and expand the Orokin Empire.
Albrecht doesn't see the Void's empathy for what it is because he is not reaching out in empathy. He is an invader in the Void, and he knows it. He is setting foot in a place to which he has not been invited, in order to take from it, and therefore what he expects is for that place to retaliate. Considering how the logs are bookended, I think that is driving his fear more than anything.
Notably, he does not suffer the extreme injuries until he runs through the metaphorical door, something he initially entered through the safety of the seriglass bell. His injuries may very well have been accidentally self-inflicted due to his panic.
And then comes the crime. The fear, the severing of the finger(s), all of that can be considered an understandable misconception and mistake. But despite being a scientist and an intelligent man, Albrecht doesn't stop to reconsider his reactions and assumptions. He doesn't stop to be curious about what it is that he actually saw. He made, to his knowledge, first contact with a non-human species, and he doesn't care. He only fears it. That alone makes him a utter failure as a scientist, even as his scientific advancements reshape the world through use of the stolen fingers. Flayed flesh for stolen stars.
It's also notable that Albrecht doesn't do the severing himself; he makes his daughter complicit in it. He makes the entire world complicit in what he has done, because he never speaks of the man he saw trapped in the wall, not until it is far, far too late. (And note the wording he uses - trapped.) Which is a consistent theme throughout the game: the Orokin inflicting complicity on others through ignorance, threats, and force.
Albrecht fears what he sees within the Void and expects the Void to retaliate because he is an interloper there with intentions to take and plunder. He flees and proceeds to inflict violence on what he has discovered in pursuit of greed and status, and he does not stop until it is too late. And the Void is a mirror. The Void reflects, and so what Albrecht expects and what he inflicts is what he creates.
Lohk. (Void)
From brooding gulfs are we beheld by that which bears no name
Its heralds are the stars it fells, the sky and earth aflame
Corporeal laws are unwrit, as suns and love retreat
To cosmic madness, laws submit, though stalwart minds entreat
In luminous space, blackened stars, they gaze, accuse, deny
Roiling, moaning this realm of ours in madness, lost shall die
Carrion hordes trill their profane accord with eldritch plans
To cosmic forms from tangent planes, we end as we began
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