I have also made an Petric aka 'the current main' my sole complaint is that i can only put four knives onto him at once, which is insufficient knives for a rogue run on 'the more knives you have the more valid you are'
*wiggles happily* I did some writing over the weekend for a background thingy for the campaign PR is setting up and I'm so happy? Between that and the mass effect fic i've done a lot of like, actual writing recently! and I have ideas for more so I might? Get back into the swing of it?? Which is so weird but also incredibly pleasing!
It was too hot to sleep so i had like 3h of Rest So i had coffee to compensate and i am. Regret Also: period is happening and the cramps are radiating down my left leg to the knee urgh
Additional Periode thing': i am /dying/ for some red meat so i guess i'm gonna nip over to the supermarket later and idk, buy a burger or something.
I just realized that next week i only have like 1.5 workdays? Come off oncall monday, tuesday off, half of wednesday + a training thing in muinich, thursday oncall, friday through sunday off. That's so freaking weird? I know it's because i'm pulling 6 oncalls this month but still. Weird
My fave ASMRtist just put out a new video and it's... you know what, I'm happy to accept this as 'demon summoning in the digital age' it's fantastic Might see if this can be incorporated into the RP somehow....
we've finished mass effect 3 and i am having MANY thoughts on the ending and the long and short of it is 'we picked control and now Lithium Flowers is going to get a sequel where post!me3 'Shep' has to deal with everything and find a new sense of self' i already know how to work in the sequel hook it'S gonna be good.
Plan: tomorrow and saturday: LF writing, maybe finish it up? Prolly won't have to look up too much canon dialogue for it Maybe? Potentially? Get started on that garreen oneshot next week, depening on LF progress/completion
Also i am this close on writing an essay on how reapers and geth are foils to each other so that's gonna go into the sequel But i got some stuff on geth body language i can put in LF and i will.
I'm also fermenting thoughts on shepreaper, ancillaries, and breq so i'm gonna reread imperial radch during oncall and see if i can coax another essay out of this
alright, time for the mass effect meta nobody asked for: parallels and contrasts between the Geth and the Reapers. Spoilers for ME1 to 3 abound. Spoiler: a rambling okay, so let's start out with the parallels. Both are synthetic species with a sort of...compound aspect. For the Geth it's fairly straight forward: until Legion does the thing in me3, there's not really such a thing as 'a singular Geth'. They are singular programs, yes, but they only get really smart, and sentient, if they network and string their brainpower together. Legion isn't one singular person, they're 1000 Geth runtimes in a metal trenchcoat, at least for a considerable portion of the games. We have made that more explicit in me3, when Legion talks about the Quarian assault on the dyson sphere the Geth were building. They lost programs in that assault, and try to explain the effect to Shepard as such: 'imagine if for every human that died, your own intelligence dimmed' Meanwhile the Reapers are also a sort of compound entity, but not the same way. We learn that each Reaper is made up for a harvested civilization, giving them access to at least that civilization's knowledge. In the game it's phrased at one point as 'each a nation'. Legion does draw the parallel to the way the Geth mind is made up by telling us that they knew the Reapers were similar to the Geth, but couldn't figure out where the difference was or how it functioned. We're also over the course of the mission string on Rannoch in me3 told that the Reaper code allows the Geth to think 'more organically'. So that's the common ground, onto the contrasts: Reapers are synthetic, but contain a looooot of organic stuff, and melt organic and synthetic together in a very unsettling way. Supposedly they think more organically too (see above), while the Geth are a fully synthetic race. Despite this, i think there can be a decent argument made that between the two of them, the Geth actually manage to be more sentient than the Reapers. Over the course of the game, we learn about the harvesting cycle, and in me3 the Prothean VI tells us that this cycle repeats virtually unchanged every time. So the Reapers have been doing the same shit, all this time, without any sort of deviation from it. There also doesn't seem to have been a case of any of the Reapers actually disagreeing with this. They do work very much as a hivemind. Interestingly, depite the networking, the Geth...don't. In ME2 we learn that the Geth at this point in time are composed of two factions: The 'heretics' who have joined forced with the Reapers/old machines, and the 'orthodox' Geth, who mostly want to be left alone and later even make an effort to reach out to organics (leading to the construction and sendout of Legion). So clearly, despite sharing data and thinking as a group, the Geth are capable of drawing different conclusions based on the same data. Moreover, we see a smaller scale version of this during Legion's loyalty mission in me2. Over the course of the mission it's possible to ask Legion, several times, on what they think should be done with the heretics: rewrite or destroy. Every time you ask, Legion will reply a variant of 'we are still building consensus' and mind you, Geth think at the speed of light. So clearly, the 1k Geth that actually make up Legion are having some sort of argument, trying to reach consensus and make a decision. In the end, they can't. They come down with a very narrow majority for 'rewrite', but leave the final decision to Shepard. And neither of the options gets a negative reaction from them. They truly couldn't decide. Another point is that Reapers don't seem to have any sort of creative ability. They take the organics they harvest and funnel them either into building more Reapers, or into building mooks to better harvest with/fight down the resistance. The most we see them ever do is 'smoosh several species together to make tougher mooks'. The Reaper design themselves is a 1:1 carbon copy of their parent race, the Leviathan. Meanwhile the Geth manage to actually design things of their own. We know this because there are numerous references to Geth ships being sighted, imply very loudly that the Geth DO have a recognizable design to their ships, common elements that point certain vessels out as 'Geth'. We know that they didn't just take existing Quarian ships because the ships we see are clearly build to Geth specs. They don't have windows, and no environmental controls to speak off for say, oxygen or gravity. They don't need it. Instead they contain a looooot of server space and terminals aka 'thing the Geth actually need/want to function efficiently'. That is not to say that they have removed all Quarian design elements. The base Geth mobile platform seems to be largely what the Quarians came up with long, but I think a point can be made that they moved past that. The Reapers also never break their base programming. They were made to harvest and that's what they goddamn gonna do, every single cycle. The Geth break programming several times. We can, i think, safely assume that the Geth were programmed for obedience. During the sequence in ME3 when Shepard enters the Geth consensus in the server, we are shown a memory from before the Morning War, of a Geth unit being told to shut down by Quarian researchers, and the Geth unit in question going 'but why, this unit is still functional'. They were in this instance clearly already at the point of 'question the orders you get if they don't make sense to you', and then of course there's the entire Morning War itself, when Geth self-preservation manages to override whatever programming would have them submit to disassembly by the Quarians. Enough so to kick the Quarians off their own homeworld. And then there's of course the main difference between Geth and Reapers, in how they interact with organics and their creator species specifically. The root of the Reapers is the Leviathan looking at clashes between organic and synthetic species, going 'well we can't have that' and....building a fucking AI to help them figure out the problem. The amount of dumbass hubris has to be seen to be believed. Said AI then came up with the Reapers, and the harvesting cycle in AGAIN a display of dumbassery that has to be seen to be believed, and even then it strains the brain. But that was the reasoning provided in ME3, and after the Reapers were build, they.... proceeded to harvest Leviathan, driving them into hiding. Meanwhile the Geth achieved sentience mostly on accident. The Quarians designed them as just robotic helpers, but to facilitate better problem solving, gave them the ability to learn. The Geth developed this into their networking of singular Geth runtimes, which in turn allowed them to achieve sentience. As far as we're told in game, achieving sentience did not lead the Geth to immediately go 'viva la revolution, death to all Quarians'. That came when the Quarians - or rather, part of them, as the Morning War saw a fair amount of Quarians also defending their Geth units - tried to take all of them offline, out of fear. The Geth fought back, and won, kicking the Quarians off Rannoch but then broke off pursuit. As far as the Geth were concerned, that was enough. Legion does, when asked, express that killing the Quarians would have had unforeseeable consequences and the Geth preferred not to do that. So they did stop at 'self defense, keep up a perimenter' Now it is possible that there's bias in the information we get, but the way you can achieve Geth/Quarian peace in ME3 does bear it out, I think. If you have both Tali and Legion alive, and manage to get the Quarian fleet to stop attacking, the war is over. Legion disperses themselves across the Geth Consensus, upgrading them all with the Reaper code that makes them smarter. This turns all Geth into true individuals that can make their own decisions. Yet if Tali and Shepard successfully call off the Quarian ships, we are not shown any sort of retaliation, or the Geth starting it all up again. In fact, the Geth Prime you get to talk to immediately afterwards is pretty damn friendly both to you, and general Raan, offering her help in settling the Quarians back onto Rannoch. I think a lot of these very different attitudes comes from the creator species themselves. We meet one Leviathan in game, so it's not necessarily a representative sample, but the attitude we get is..impressive. At this point in time, the Leviathan we meet is hiding on the bottom of an ocean world, in the middle of galactic fuck-nowhere, defended by a system that shoots down any ship that gets too close. Despite this, we get an attitude of 'every non-Leviathan species is inferior, we are the true rulers of the galaxy and all should bow to us'. Which again, comes from a creature that's been hiding from its own souped up Alexa for the last who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years, while other species had to fight the Reapers blind. That's the sort of 'oh no we're The Best and we are Right And Infallible' we're talking here. The Reapers show just about as much flexibility in thinking, and also just about as much empathy, or even just basic consideration of 'other people are in fact people' Meanwhile the Quarians in game as emphasized to be very social, and very emphatic, traits further enforced by living on the Migrant Fleet, where they have to work together or freaking die. I would say that it's very fitting that a species as group-oriented as the Quarians build a species of synthetics that is only intelligent/sentient in a group. Did I have a point for this? i dunno anymore but basically: we stan the Geth, thank you for your attention.
Ot3 mess is so good in this Iteration and gotta say it's delish because there's growing attachment except Matt is very much not gonna admit to that any time soon. He's gonna pass it off as 'oh no he's just hot' even if held at gunpoint. At least when it comes to aodhan. He's so freaking mad at Asher currently and there's gonna be consequences at some point soon if he keeps it up like that. Because Matt very much has put his own life momentarily on hold to help him, and Lily is at least working with him, but Asher is brushing him off at every Chance and it's /Grating/ on him. He's extending his patience a lot, based on the fact that the twins are all new to magic but he's approaching the limit fast And going out with Aodhan and doing something impulsive and dumb is a sort of last ditch attempt to dig out some more patience by taking the pressure off elsewhere. So basically instead of giving in to the Impulse to punch Asher in the face, he's giving to the impulse to get close to the attractive fae because that's dangerous too, but a danger he considers easier to assess and handle because Aodhan is playing by the rules (mostly). Fae rules, but he knows those well enough.
