jojolinecarlin

[jojolinecarlin]

I wanted to download We Will Rock You, but…

[jojolinecarlin]

This was posted in to a dnd server but I think it applies to gw2 as well

[jojolinecarlin]

Loreposting about Abaddon

Abaddon doesn’t get a lot of attention. As a deposed god he doesn’t seem relevant to the Guild Wars timeline after Nightfall. But I keep thinking about him because Abaddon is probably the most influential character Tyria ever had.

Let’s just go over where he appears in-game if you start off in GW2. Everyone knows the six human gods. They’re in statues, temples, personal shrines everywhere. The base game story makes you detour through a sunken temple dedicated to Abaddon, while the Orrian temples to the other five gods are still intact on the surface. This is not by chance. It’s also nudging you to notice that there are no Orrian temples to Kormir, because she replaced Abaddon only two centuries ago. This is reflected again later on in Siren’s Landing on the other side of Orr, where the Five, and Abaddon, each have a personal reliquary, and Abaddon’s is central, connected to all the others, and still intact.

Building on that refresher on human divinity, in Path of Fire you visit the actual place Abaddon was defeated by the other Five gods and pushed into a side dimension to keep him out of the world.

And when you visit the archives of the Durmand Priory, they have an imposing Abaddon statue towering over the stairs. Other than being reflected in three major environments, he doesn’t have a role in the plot. BUT.

As Kormir explains to you, the weakness of the human gods is that their excess of power keeps fucking up the world. The Desolation, a map that covers only a part of the sulfur desert, is completely uninhabitable because Abaddon was destroyed there. This happened because Abaddon, who was actually the most powerful of the Six and the leader of the group, wanted humans to share in the gift of magic. He was the god of knowledge, after all. This proved disastrous and the other gods reduced and compartmentalised the magic, and Abaddon went on a whole attempt to overthrow them and become one, single god of all.

The destruction of Abaddon’s temples and relics was intentional. He was wiped from memory. The pantheon was called The Five until Nightfall, wherein the existence of Abaddon was revealed as he tried to drag himself back into the mortal plane. As a god his spheres of power were water and knowledge. Erasing knowledge of him was what made him powerless. (Interestingly, the Priory’s special collections contains the Scroll of the Five True Gods, an ancient record of what the human gods knew about the Elder Dragons, but one dragon is missing - the water dragon, who like Abaddon, has a damaged and erased history. The six Elder Dragons and six human gods have many respective connections.)

When he lived, Abaddon’s followers were the Margonites, who believed him the only real god and worshipped him exclusively, unlike other humans who revere all the Six together. They were rewarded with transformation into etheral beings with an extremely long lifespan, and were imprisoned in Abaddon’s Realm, the Realm of Torment, when he was forced out of Tyria. As the god of knowledge he had a realm to himself, and when fallen, his sphere inversed. Knowledge became madness, the theme his realm embodies. Temples were sunk, records destroyed, because to remove all knowledge of the god of knowledge made him powerless.

I can’t remember where, but it’s implied that by Nightfall comes around a thousand years after his banishment, Abaddon is finally able to claw his way back into Tyria because people are starting to remember him. There’s one side quest that sticks out in my memory called The Search for Enlightenment about a scholar stealing scriptures from an Elonian library which leads to a massive raid by Margonites. The scholar was ‘babbling’ about a forgotten god. Proximity to knowledge about Abaddon seems to bestow insanity, the connection between Abaddon in his inverted realm and his hold over anyone who knows he exists. Though the Five Gods tried, they didn’t erase everything (hell, Trahearne and Sayeh al’ Rajihd give you a guided tour of an Abaddon temple). Over a thousand years, relics popped up and people began to remember The Five was once The Six. As they did his influence returned until he was able to attempt to merge the Realm of Torment with Tyria and become a single, all powerful god in the absence of the others.

But wait how does that make a forgotten god the most influential character in both games?

Well.

Guild Wars lore is nothing if not completely linked together. Every single thing has cause and effect, every event is a domino. The story is consistent from Prophecies to this day. So let’s start with the first GW1 chapter, Prophecies.

It all starts at the Citadel of Flame.

It was built into the volcano Hrangmer. The charr had been displaced, pushed out of Ascalon by the successful expansion of humankind. 450 years before GW2 the Flame Legion found this volcano and, inside, Titans. You know how Mordremoth’s minions are Mordrem, Zhaitan’s minions are Risen, etc? Titans are Abaddon minions, left behind and hidden after his defeat. They change their appearance to suit their environment. In a jungle they’re vegetative, in mountains they’re made of ice, in the Realm of Torment they’re twisted constructs of flesh, in a volcano, they’re fire. The Flame Legion brings the Titans back to the charr, charr worship them, and in exchange, get immense fire powers. Flame Legion completely takes over charr society and makes it a theistic, misogynist nightmare with the Shamans at the top.

Abaddon has just restructured charr society.

Using their overpowered fire magic indirectly from a human god, charr, ironically, rally against the humans and nuke Ascalon to pieces. The few survivors escape to Kryta. Charr are now pretty much unstoppable and invade all the way to Orr. Vizier Khilbron used a powerful stolen scroll to repel the charr with magic, and it completely destroys Orr, collapsing the island into the ocean.

Abaddon has just wiped out two nations of the humans who used to worship him, with Orr as the final goal - to tear down the resplendent city of the Gods who betrayed him. This is referenced, if you know what you’re looking for, in GW2. You can scale the Vizier’s Tower, where he read the scroll that sank all of Orr, and on the wall…

A mural to the lost god, a testament to power that, a thousand years later, one who was expunged from history had a faithful likeness depicted.

Ascalon’s a burning hole and Orr is underwater. Now what? Those Ascalonian survivors in Kryta find the place is controlled by White Mantle. The White Mantle are committing mass murder via bloodstone sacrifice (bloodstones being the power curb the gods introduced after imbuing humans with magic) in order to halt the prophecy of a Chosen One opening the Door of Komalie. Vizier Khilbron turns up, shaking out some mysteriously wet boots don’t worry about that, and leads you against these genocidal cultists. Which, whoops, does lead to the Door of Komalie being opened - and it’s a doorway into Abbadon’s Realm of Torment, out of which Titans power through. This was the apocalypse planned for Kryta. Unlike the first two, this one is thwarted by the player. Kryta lives on. Vizier Khilbron is the final boss and turns out to have been a lich.

That’s 3 of the 5 human nations. What about Cantha and Elona?

GW: Factions is the Canthan chapter in which Shiro Tagachi, the emperor’s bodyguard, continually visits a fortune teller until she inflicts such paranoia on his mindset that he believes he needs to kill the emperor in self-defense. His defeat causes the Jade Wind that creates the Jade Sea. As a spirit, Shiro then engulfs Cantha in a plague that warps people into tumorous mutants. The fortune teller turns out to be an Abaddon minion whose task was the eventual destruction of Cantha. This one also is foiled by the player.

GW: Nightfall is the culmination chapter. Abaddon is now powerful enough, well known enough, to breach Tyria and try to come back. His agent is Varesh Ossa, who slowly transforms into a Margonite over the course of the game. The player confronts the breach between planes and finally enters the Realm of Torment, meeting the shades of Abaddon’s servants that came before, the lich form of Vizier Khilbron, and the spirit of Shiro Tagachi, before facing Abaddon himself.

And that’s the end of it. In Guild Wars magic cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred, so another god ascends in Abaddon’s place. They are once again The Six.

It’s Abaddon that ruined half the Elonian desert, Abaddon whose sinking of Orr gave Zhaitan the perfect mass grave to necromance, Abaddon who froze the Cantha sea into solid jade, and Abaddon whose final death and eruption of magic started waking Primordus, leading to the norn, dwarf and asuran alliance to stop it in 1078 AE– introducing the norn and asura to the rest of Tyria, and making the dwarves extinct, cutting their entire race’s existence short. If it wasn’t for Abaddon, the charr wouldn’t have been taken over by their magic-toting shaman caste, only to come to their senses and rebel and ostracize the Flame Legion afterward. Hell, the current Flame Legion Imperators STILL style their horns in an homage to Abaddon, and probably don’t even remember why! To a human god, gone for over a thousand years, who used their race as pawns in a revenge attempt at wiping out every nation the humans had built!

And even after being thoroughly and completely destroyed, his magic STILL haunts Tyria enough for his statues to punish you for not showing the proper respect.

[jojolinecarlin]

Puppy playing with a butterfly 

(Source)

[jojolinecarlin]

I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

[jojolinecarlin]

what if people made human versions of iconic tumblr posts and shipped them

no. no no no

[jojolinecarlin]

US Helplines:

Depression Hotline: [phone]

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LifeLine: 1-800-273-8255

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[jojolinecarlin]

Black Gold is a quiet and contemplative little game where you enjoy a cold beer with an old friend under the Texas stars.

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows & Mac)

[jojolinecarlin]

You know that tumblr post that's like "Adults: why don't kids go outside?" and then there's a picture of a very pedestrian-unfriendly street from probably somewhere in the US?

I've been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.

I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don't know how to make friends online. Because this isn't a problem that I experience, I've had a tendency to think along the lines of "kids these days" etc. But that's the easy out. Most of the people I'd consider "online friends" of mine are people I met online several years ago or they're people I met IRL and we just don't live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can't honestly say I'd feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.

If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it's harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for "engagement." The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn't to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.

How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.

Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn't chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.

Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It's hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you're saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I'm probably not the only person on this site that feels like I'm either an observer or a performer, but I'm rarely a participant.

The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.

Web 1.0 wasn't perfect in a lot of ways, but I think it was a lot better for community than what we've got now.

[jojolinecarlin]

So, this hasn't crossed my dash yet. (Not blaming anyone, there is soooo much going on in the world and I'd also missed it in the noise).

There is currently a strike at Frito-Lay. in Topeka. These workers are striking because:

They were being forced to work 84 hour weeks. The company's best offer so far is a 60 hour cap. This is shit we fought for a century ago, people.

Their generous offer also includes a whole 4 percent wage increase...over the next 2 years. I'm not sure what COL is in Topeka, but... Well, it's better than the entire 77 cents they've apparently gotten in the last decade.

There's also a report that a worker literally collapsed and dropped dead on the line and the foreman's response was to make them move the body out of the way and put in a replacement. (However, this is unconfirmed and, of course, the company denies it).

There have been multiple OSHA violations at this plant over the last few years, including a forklift accident that's under investigation.

They've now been striking since July 5 but, of course, it only hit the national media yesterday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/frito-lay-strike-forced-overtime/

So, why am I signal boosting this?

Because Frito-Lay is refusing to budge. They are attempting to make the excuse that union leadership agreed to the 60 hour work week and crappy pay cut...when union leadership only agreed to put it to a vote.

And this means that we need to put the thumbscrews on them. Remember, this is about 19th century style working conditions.

So, I'm calling on my followers to boycott Frito Lay's until the strike is involved.

Frito-Lay owns:

Lay's

Doritos (Sorry. I really am. I KNOW there's no good alternative to Doritos, although Zapp's are good if you can find them).

Fritos

Tostitos

Cheetos

Ruffles

Sun Chips

Baken-ets

Chester's

Cracker Jack

Islen plantain chips

Funyuns

Grandma's (the cookies)

Matador Meat Snacks

Maui style potato chips

Miss Vickie's

Munchies

Munchos

Rolled Gold

Sabritones

Santitas

Simply

Smartfood

Stacys

The Walking Taco

NatuChips

PopCorners (this one wasn't on their website, but was bought by Pepsi's in 2019 with the intent of adding it. So best avoided just in case). Yes, this really is more than half of the snack aisle. Suggested alternatives:

Kettle Brand Chips

Zapp's (If you can find them. My supermarket had them once and not since, so I'm guessing the culinary cowards in this neighborhood were afraid of "Voodoo" flavored chips).

Pringles

On the Border for salsa.

Wise Cheez Doodles

Bugles

Utz

Store own brand alternatives, if your store has ones that are any good.

Cheez-its

Check before you buy and let's tell these people they don't get to treat workers like that.

[jojolinecarlin]

did you guys know you can just draw bad if you want?? like u can just have fun w it and get proportions wrong and make the head too big like you can JUST do it nobody is gonna arrest you

[jojolinecarlin]

[jojolinecarlin]

Another point for why it’s important to own your own copies of music and media, and not use streaming services, is because the copy you own can’t be taken back.

(This is also a good time to remind people that yout*be to mp3 converters still exist).

[jojolinecarlin]

Daily Reminder To:

Take your medications that you need to!

Get up, stretch, walk around a bit!

Get some food and water if you haven’t in a while!

Plug in your device!

Feed any pets!

If it’s between 10 pm and 7 am and you have no reason to be awake besides being up on your phone, go to sleep or at least get comfortable and start trying to sleep!

Check around you and stack any dishes and bring them to the kitchen! Including plates, cups, bowls, and utensils!

Do a quick look around and pick up any trash and put it in the bin!

Message anyone to check in on them and yourself! Respond to any messages you may have gotten, answer some asks if need be, let your family know that you’re safe, whatever you need to do!

If you need to and are able to, go take a shower! Or clean your face! Get changed at the very least, put your clothes in the dirty hamper, and feel better about it!

That’s all for now! Good job, I’m proud of you for doing that!

[jojolinecarlin]

[jojolinecarlin]

How does anyone hate kids they are so funny I sold tickets to incredibles to this little girl and her mom and she’s like mom are we sitting next to each other and the moms like ya and the kid screamed YES so loud it broke my ears

[jojolinecarlin]

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL

“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”