do you ever think about how moon is one of the few Iterators to ever be "born"? (having her umbilical severed)
I wonder if that was intentional symbolism; Moon has a renewed perspective that gives her (ironically) more hope and vitality for life itself, despite almost dying.
of course, as death and birth are connected like a ring (or maybe a spiral?) I suppose it makes a ton of sense, actually. Something really fun to think about.
God I love rain world.
I wanted to make this some Full Ramble tm but I'm honestly too exhausted / busy from Job rn so this is just a twitter crosspost. but I hope this can spark some meaningful rumination / discussion. ^^
and in case anyone is confused — the umbilical refers to the puppet's wires, not the armature that supports it. I think it was very purposeful that it was called an umbilical specifically.
This symbolizes iterators as unborn, a trait they seem to share with Echoes, who often assume a somewhat fetal position. Echoes also exist in the Interstice instead of as living beings within the material plane who experience death and rebirth. Iterators do not die easily, and so they are not born easily, either. There are some notable differences of course — Echoes are partway towards ascension; if they can let go of what keeps them from moving on, they can experience the final "death" and final "rebirth" — Ascension. The ultimate change and the culmination of one's thread. Iterators, meanwhile, are designed not to ascend (without finding the Solution first). Of course, entropy shall inevitably claim them, and the Void Sea shall inevitably claim their structures as it eats away at the world beneath them.
So, in the end... everything moves on. but there's plenty to talk about before that end, and I do find the imagery of Iterators as unborn to be quite fascinating. I don't think it's mere coincidence that Moon seems to be accepting and at peace with her place in the world while ALSO having her umbilical severed. Again there's a lot to ramble on about with moon being changed so drastically it is a sort of rebirth in itself but I am. tired. Apologies for any poor / confusing wording.
what if the slugpup thats not the watcher that we see in the opening cinematic actually kicked the shit out of that mean slugcat with the spear off-screen
Now with some hit-or-miss doodles I made to visualize the pearls. They might be incredibly compressed idk...
Interesting… It is a debate forum on the punitive ruling of a homicide. To thrust an enlightened individual across the cycle was considered abominable.
However, the presiding Just Order decided that the perpetrator embodied “The Remorsive Luminance Within”, and recommended her for temporary exile to a temple.
The discourse over the sentencing is… vulgar, to say the least. Many of my citizens did little else but talk, and thus the political landscape mutated into a frenzy of dozens of quarreling factions.
Most systems were commanded by the dynastic Concepts, so the remaining scraps of governance were subject to vicious competition by these factions. Power changed hands constantly.
The perpetrator was lucky. Had it been any other cycle, the ruling Order would throw her in a sensory deprivation tank or wipe her memory. Or perhaps she would be declared unsalvageable and turned into fodder for ritual combat.
It’s a bit baffling that they rarely just transcended their criminals in a Void Fluid bath instead. Probably because it would defeat the point of their bickering…
Oh? This contains a very old intellectual offering to the 52nd Great Mind, or the Aetherial Mast west of here. It consists of a very flattering, complex riddle.
Since you’ve been to Five Pebbles, I imagine that you’ve seen those grand towers piercing into the sky. They once formed a communication network between iterators, but a few of them - such as this particular one - are actually older than iterators like me.
After the Void Fluid Revolution, people quickly discovered that if any construct got complex enough, it would gain sapience.
So they threw as much computational power as they could into these towers, and waited. They expected the Aetherial Masts to quickly discover a method to implode the cosmos into the earth, achieving global transcension.
It inevitably failed. The 52nd Great Mind was later connected to a larger, more deliberate construct, and underwent apotheosis to become Looks to the Moon. Which is me!
The first of us iterators were reborn from these Great Minds. Afterward, most Masts were created with an iterator already in control.
Thank you, little creature, for this memento from my distant past.
It's a treatise on memorykeeping. There’s a crypt nearby here, under Five Pebbles - piles and piles of cabinets, holding the legacies of my departed creators.
Through a complex bombardment procedure, the storage components of a person's mind would grow a twin lump, which contained cherished memories. The "memory fruit" was then removed and placed in a cabinet.
When the crypts began to acquire a hefty pile of cabinets, my creators discovered that all the fruits had united via a network of roots. The formation bulged outward endlessly, breaking into a factory far, far away. The cleanup effort was monumental.
Now, a microbe system continually expels the fruits' boundless energy, and kills them if the defenses fail to keep the fruits from getting too large.
Rare as they are, mass fractal neural emissions are a worrying phenomenon. Please keep your distance if you see a fruit that has grown into a tree.
Don't touch it - I don't know what might happen to you.
James Bearden, "Cathedral cabinet," USA, 2022,
Plasma-carved steel with metallic polywash finish,
26¾ h × 63 w × 22¼ d in (68 × 160 × 57 cm)
was anyone going to mention this one asset having blue
Everyone clap for non consensual body modification everybody loves a character whose body has been altered against their will
THE IMPERATIVE THAT WAS IN THEM REMAINS IN ME
rain world and its themes of impurity and kegare through the use of death, rot, and mud. and why bitter tea and gravel and embalming and mummification were ritualistic and why the karma gates are referred to as "decontaiminating you" by james somewhere that I need to go find again