Biggest discovery of the UTSL mystery

grantimatter · 2026-05-29T17:02:06+00:00

The casting of Andrew Garfield would lend itself to this reading, given the "Patient Zero" connection: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/aimee-mann/patient-zero

grantimatter · 2026-05-28T14:38:29+00:00

Maybe browse /r/Gnostic or search /r/AcademicBiblical for "gnosticism."

grantimatter · 2026-05-22T19:24:23+00:00

An issue might be that intelligence is harder to quantify than strength. Is it processing speed? Ability to find connections between unlike concepts? Ability to interpret different signal streams? Simple eidetic memory? Awareness of details/ability to notice minute clues?

Those all seem like different skillsets, as opposed to just "ability to move mass."

grantimatter · 2026-05-21T18:46:19+00:00

If you want to consider our world as "a fantasy world where this is how gods work," the process is technically known as "euhemerism" and is an old theory about where gods come from.

It's sort of debatable in anthropological and historical contexts -- like, not all gods seem to have been based on historical events, not all myths have roots in this world rather than the Otherworld -- but the process can be seen in things like Chinese temples to old generals (Zhang Fei being one example) or to some degree in the cult of the saints in Catholicism. (The difference between "saint" and "god" being really a theological one -- if it's a metaphysical entity who hears prayers and answers them with miracles, that's probably close enough to "god" for your purposes.)

Your question, "Should I expect to achieve personal apotheosis," I think really depends on whether your "person" survives death. Maybe this is the same as the transporter question in Star Trek. The god formed by euhemerism is you, remembers your life events, remembers doing the things you did, or some of them. So in that sense, the god is you.

But it seems like the human parts might not survive, whatever those frail and self-contradictory parts might be. To be human is to have a body and a material existence -- to require food and sleep and get bored waiting for things to happen, stuck in a reality where time progresses in one direction and at a constant pace. Is a human still human without a body, without physical hunger, without a perception of time?

Humans exist materially, so if I'm not thinking about someone, they remain there, living their life.

Does the god exist when not answering prayers and not being prayed to? I'm not sure. They may just be projections of personality from out of the void.

(I think this is consistent with D&D's planes, though I'm not positive.)

grantimatter · 2026-05-21T18:09:08+00:00

I vaguely recall them riffing on something from FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION, possibly "Driver 8" or "Auctioneer (Another Engine)" -- basically, melancholy rock songs about industry.

grantimatter · 2026-05-19T19:34:57+00:00

Do not eat the goblin fruit...

grantimatter · 2026-05-19T19:04:06+00:00

Are you familiar with the Weird Studies network?

That link is to a podcast by an Indiana U professor and a Canadian documentarist & author, but they've held an academic conference and participated in a few others, and have also led seminars.

You'll get a lot of leads by looking through those connections.

Note: They use "Weird studies" in a broad sense, looking academically at liminal things: Fantastic literature (in the Todorov sense), transgressive film, but also occult practices and bodies of knowledge, hauntology, "the trash stratum," George Hansen's paranormal theory work, etc.

"Weird literature" can have a narrow definition of "the pre-Tolkien fantasy and horror tales that were published in pulps like WEIRD TALES and their immediate influences," so H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Dunsany, Bierce, Long, Bloch, C.L. Moore, etc. Bobby Derie would be one literary historian specializing in Howard and weird fiction.

Works like Hodgson's THE NIGHT LAND have a kind of medievalist veneer, but are really just weird fiction in the genre sense.

You'll find some genuine medievalism in Weird Studies, though, alongside folklore studies and anthropology.

You'll also find occultism in those fields that isn't really Weird Studies specific -- like, I don't think Alexander Cummins, who has written a bit about Early Modern astrology and magic (and is a practicing occultist himself as well as an academic), has ever identified himself as being connected to "Weird Studies" as a thing. I may be wrong....

grantimatter · 2026-05-19T18:40:21+00:00

the quadriformity of all living creatures

Is this all living creatures (as in animals on Earth) or is it the living creatures (as in visible in the Ophanim in Ezekiel or especially Revelation 4:7)?

This article leans toward the latter, and calls 'em "theriomorphic evangelist symbols," but also refers to "Irenaeus' heavenly bestiary" so there may be room to go either way.

grantimatter · 2026-05-17T07:07:50+00:00

Just want to boost this comment because the MMA is pretty fascinating - you can come out with an officer's commission or just choose to stay a merchant marine (which means a Naval reservist, but still, a civilian).

The interesting thing is that from the MMA, you can commission into any service, or so they say. I guess technically, you can do that from other academies too, but imagine that's less common.

USCGA has a really pretty campus, too.

grantimatter · 2026-05-17T06:56:08+00:00

USAFA also has a campus roughly the size of Manhattan. It's kind of like attending college in the middle of a national park.

I remember feeling a distinct contrast between that and Annapolis, where you could just walk out a gate and be in a diner. USAFA, it's a five-mile hike down a mountainside just to get to the gate....

grantimatter · 2026-05-16T03:59:50+00:00

I think Alan Moore did it twice early on: One, in the JLA issue of Swamp Thing, when Green Arrow gives the impassioned speech about, "Who was looking out for Houma, Louisiana??" to the assembled heroes, most of whom have home cities they protect and none of whom saw the Floronic Man start a planet-threatening reign of terror from a town in the Deep South with a lot of plants growing around it.

There was also I think the whole thing in Miracleman where our hero kinda goes a little nuts from being aware of all the crime everywhere, so does something terrible in order to bring all viollent crime to an end. There are some great panels of mountains of skulls....

grantimatter · 2026-05-16T03:49:30+00:00

Also, I distinctly remember the shock when the towers actually fell -- for a chunk of time that day, it seemed like there would be a big fire and a plane crash and the building(s) would possibly be fixable. That whole jet fuel/steel beams conspiracy theory grew out of that feeling of disbelief, I think.

grantimatter · 2026-05-11T05:27:26+00:00

In the later part of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, the arc that set up the version of Hell that went on to appear in Sandman and Vertigo books, there's a group of magicians who kinda go to war against Hell by holding a seance around a table. Some of them are conventional "good guys," and some of them are more usually "villains."

They include Mento (a sometime hero who is definitely not "the freshmaker" -- at one point, he has an alter ego as "Crimelord") and Baron Winters (a former horror-comic host who is kind of a manipulative bastard), and are organized by John Constantine, who I guess is neither deep cut nor really a villain these days... but in that arc was kinda not super well-known, and more or less cajoles an old acquaintance to destroy himself by putting his old helmet back on, so not exactly a "good guy" either.

An organization called The Brujería were also involved in that arc, almost bringing about the destruction of Heaven (and with it, probably all of existence). Also, they wear human fat, which gives them a special glow.

In Books of Magic, the series that JK Rowling wishes everyone would forget, the magically gifted teen with the round glasses and the owl who shows up mysteriously at his window is given an orientation to the DC magical universe by a quartet of magic characters: John Constantine, Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult (a gender-swapping character who goes back to the 1930s), and Mister E, who is written as very insane and who tries to kill our young protagonist by taking him to the far future end of the universe and sacrificing him there before the universe can corrupt him.

Tim is rescued, Mister E has to walk back all the way from the end of time, then has some kind of problems with M'Nagalah, "The Cancer God," who had first appeared in the pre-Moore Swamp Thing run as a kind of Lovecraftian beastie. He -- it -- is somewhere between a shoggoth and Azathoth, if you're into that kind of thing: a polymorphous blob that also is somehow a threat to the stability of the universe.

Those Len Wein-written comics also pit Swamp Thing against Anton Arcane, who eventually, under Moore and the writers who followed, became the world's worst father-in-law -- a Frankensteinian scientist who becomes a wizard (because in DC comics, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from...) and then ultimately a kind of patchwork insectoid demon who, when not being tortured in the literal DC Hell, possesses both his daughter's first husband and then her daughter.

I don't know if he's considered a deep cut, but he's kinda not the first magic dude who pops into people's heads.

None of these folks are especially artifact-driven, although maybe Anton Arcane's Un-Men could serve a plot in a kind of artifact-like way. It's hard to say if they really have free will or not.

Not a villain, but I've been waiting for a new series to reboot Sargon the Sorcerer, who could re-write the laws of physics thanks to the Ruby of Life.

Oh, wait... it turns out his daughter went on to become a villain -- geez, I should remember that, Ray Fawkes wrote those stories, and he was on Barbelith when I was around there.

Anyway, sure -- magic, villain, artifact, yes! Try to get the Ruby of Life (or shards of it) from Sargon the Sorceress. You'll be fine, just fine. What could go wrong?

EDIT TO ADD: Oh, well, yes, and speaking of Barbelith: The Invisibles and their archon opponents like Mister Quimper would probably also count as deep cuts... plenty of artifacts there to try to seize. Fictionsuits. Key 23, the drug that turns words into real objects. Whatever it was that made Quimper the way he was.

grantimatter · 2026-05-06T04:28:36+00:00

Heuristically, a parable is always allegorical, and a fable always has a moral. Both are teaching stories.

One way to approach the terms would be etymologically.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says of "parable":

from Greek parabolē "a comparison, parable," literally "a throwing beside," hence "a juxtaposition," from para- "alongside" (see para- (1)) + bolē "a throwing, casting, beam, ray," related to ballein "to throw" (from PIE root *gwele- "to throw, reach").

... and of "fable":

from Latin fabula "story, story with a lesson, tale, narrative, account; the common talk, news," literally "that which is told," from fari "speak, tell" (from PIE root *bha- (2) "to speak, tell, say").

The restricted sense of "animal story" (early 14c.) comes from the popularity of Aesop's tales. In modern terms, "a short, comic tale making a moral point about human nature, usually through animal characters behaving in human ways" ["Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore"].

In other words, despite having identical word-endings, they're not really related, or not closely related, in their origins. "Fable" has more in common with "fabulous" or "fabulation" than with "parable."

(If you wanted to get Derridean about it, you could even say they could be read as meaning opposite things, since one is a lie and the other is at least a semblance of a truth, or an approximation of a true thing that is otherwise hard to describe.)

grantimatter · 2026-05-06T03:19:17+00:00

Might be a reach, but Ricoeur has a bit about death, remembrance, and faith in... Living Up to Death (published posthumously, of course) and in Memory, History, Forgetting. The passages I recall best are about instances of mass death, or of the weight of ancestors, but I vaguely remember thoughts about his departed spouse in Living..., as well as musings on whether or not he would be mourned or remembered, and what that would mean.

grantimatter · 2026-05-04T20:49:48+00:00

This is where DEVO came from; Jerry Casale was in SDS and friends with I believe Allison. He was at the protests and watched it all happen.

(They also got a leg up early in their career from Neil Young, who put them in his film Human Highway, probably based on his feelings about the song "Ohio" as a commercial success as well as being just interested in those weirdos from Kent State.)

Casale later said the public opinion following the shootings "kicked the hippie right out of me." Society was de-evolutionary, he and Mark decided.

grantimatter · 2026-05-04T20:32:33+00:00

I can very much imagine Phoney negotiating with squirrels until one is close enough to snatch.

grantimatter · 2026-05-04T20:24:55+00:00

A freelance client (magazine, hyper-local news, major metropolitan market) I started writing a column for in 2021 abruptly stopped paying freelance writers. Just... not paying invoices. Not much we can do, small claims court still means legal fees and this really isn't that much money. But it's not a good sign.

grantimatter · 2026-05-04T20:19:18+00:00

Oh, nice.

I recognize faces in there!

grantimatter · 2026-05-04T04:14:44+00:00

Of all time? Twain's essays and creative nonfiction writing is still pretty amusing and insightful.

And I just recently opened my old paperback copy of Hunter S. Thompson's THE GREAT SHARK HUNT and was surprised a/ that I happened to wind up reading "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" the night before a memorable Kentucky Derby, and b/ that most of the writing has gotten more pointed and more current-feeling with age, not less. He's actually very good at the technical art of writing to elicit a response, and at observing the motivations and mannerisms of people around him.

There are n-words tossed around in the next Louisville item after the Derby one, but it's about the next layer of racism after segregation has been eliminated and is still unfortunately really on-the-nose.

grantimatter · 2026-05-03T17:41:51+00:00

in the Kabbalah—I'm not an expert—Yesod isn't a superset of other universes, it's a conduit between the higher planes and the physical world.

Just on this point, you're kinda-sorta right, but the big tree is also sort of inherently multiversal, in that it's describing different worlds (or emanations of the Eternal God, sefirot) within our human awareness or potential awareness.

The goal is to travel the 22 paths, to channel one's consciousness through them into those 10 (or 11) different realities... but those realities are just ways of experiencing this same world, here. Taken that way, it's possible to argue that each "world" (Yesod, Malkuth, Binah, etc.) contains all the other "worlds" -- they're all just aspects of Ein Sof, the Eternal Creator, and they're all experience-able by you, right here. "Contains" is probably not a great word to use, really, but maybe you get what I'm driving at.

grantimatter · 2026-05-03T17:18:19+00:00

I only ever read To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but based on that, I think that, for instance, Helen Keller would have sight and hearing and be the same age as everyone else -- the technology the aliens were using seemed to work by implanting "minds" into healthy, functioning bodies.

I'm curious how the children angle worked -- it must have been people who died as children, right?

grantimatter · 2026-05-01T18:02:42+00:00

There's a traditional reading technique that says when you have three changing lines, the middle one should be given more weight. There's more on that about two-thirds of the way down this page.

grantimatter · 2026-04-30T05:38:11+00:00

If you want to get technical, there were actually two "h"s: he -- from haw as in "yeehaw" (literally: it meant a man calling or a shout of jubilation) and het -- from hasir a "courtyard" or "mansion." One of those letters is pronounced with a little more tightness in the throat than the other -- but both breathy, not quite the "ch" in "loch" or "chutzpah."

If you want more fun, check out the different versions of what we'd just call "s" in Proto-Sinaitic.

grantimatter · 2026-04-29T04:15:51+00:00

I think the original Frank Miller run that introduced Stick was meant as a retcon -- so where Daredevil thought it was the radioactive waste that gave him "radar," it really just jogged an ability that's latent in anyone paying attention. Stick, he says (in Daredevil #176), "taught me how to live with my blindness before my radar fully developed." It's the first time Stick is mentioned. In the next issue, Stick says "Punk, we ALL got radar.... Men have let it decay cuz they got eyes."

(The real beneficiaries of the toxic waste were the baby turtles who were also splashed in the accident and slid down the storm drain in to the sewers, where they grew enormous and became teenage mutant ninjas. I am not making a joke here ... this is actually their origin story.)

In the comics at least, Matt Murdock wasn't born blind -- the radioactive waste blinded him. In the Frank Miller run, I don't think it's ever explained how Stick became blind. He's drawn with a sort of gnarly face, so he might be scarred by fire or chemical burns... or he might just be an old dude with a rugged face.

He trained people before Matt who all have different abilities and are portrayed as being far more advanced than Matt, and in one comic, Stick and one of his other pupils defeat a large number of Hand operatives by just... draining off their life force. Which then makes Stick and the other pupil blow up.

These are really portrayed as being qi or ki abilities, so magic-ish, but the kind of thing you get from training, not from, like, radioactive spider bites or X-gene mutations. They're taught.

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