Intergalactic Summit

Del'thul and I have all but come to blows. If we are ever in the same place again, I fully expect us to try to kill one another. One of us will likely succeed.



Pretty sure the 'peaceful people attacked and enslaved by bastards with better weapons' has a lot to do with why we're considered savages, and the people who kill entire planets are called 'civilized'.


Ms. Jenneth:

Why would the Amarr show you treachery when you support them? Even the most corrupt politician knows that so long as someone is useful, you placate them and show them what they want to see - and there are many among the Amarr who are not, individually, nearly so corrupt. Many are fine, upstanding people, and I think your experience here on the IGS has to some extent allowed you to choose to affiliate yourself with those who do tend toward the more upright and good-hearted among them. I certainly wouldn't call several of them my friends if I thought they were all evil or corrupt.

There is, as you say, darkness in everyone. It can often be difficult to define ourselves by the elements of our better natures, rather than the shared pain and common focus an external enemy provides. But I think to say that what binds us together is those darker parts misses a far more essential truth:

What binds us together is that we don't insist upon being bound.

Elmund is Sebiestor. Deitra is Sebiestor. I am Sebiestor. Ask us a question about politics or our personal feelings about the line between Andesh and Ohnesh, and where we are each moving along that line - and where we should be, just at this current moment in our lives - and you'll likely get four or five answers as we disagree, consider one another's thoughts, and then disagree in different ways.

At no point does that disagreement make any of us wrong. At no point does that disagreement make any of us less true to our beliefs or our culture. At no point does it make us heretics, or disloyal. We simply disagree, and we're fine with that. We're allowed. We don't need to all fall in line with the proclamations of some distant figure we're not even allowed to go and have a spirited debate with about matters of principle. We don't need to adhere to some directive by a ruler who died a thousand years before we reached the stars.

We agree on our ability to disagree, and to squabble like old women seeking the best deals at a market... because that is what families do, and though we are spread out among the stars and distant from one another in space and blood, that is who we are. It is what we are. It is freedom. It is the mutual respect due one another as free human beings. That is what binds us together. And that is no dark thing.

By the way, if either of us has a bad Voluval, for example, the Slaver's Mark, the rest of us will be obligated to meet our arguments with a 'STFU GB2ARZAD'.

Also, we haven't really started arguing about anything that concerns us personally that we are very passionate about. That, and the fact that I'm not a Clan Chief. If we were all Clan Chiefs and we were instead arguing over land rights on this part of this planet that we were sharing, our arguments will turn out very differently.

We might start quoting some vague Tribal Law (admittedly, our laws aren't very well developed as of current), we will do grandstanding, we will throw verbal barrages at each other and, assuming that neither of us is still convinced that the terms should be that way and neither of us is willing to agree on anything or compromise on anything by the time we ran out of words to throw at each other, we might either drag in a Tribal Chief to settle matters or we might throw fists at each other. Or dance battle at High Noon. I am sure there's something about Dance Battles somewhere.

We might pack up and go home to stew over the matter after the day is over, and the next day, we will repeat all of this all over again. Assuming that we weren't able to settle matters by the time we reach our deathbeds, the dispute is carried forward to our descendants who will argue on our behalf. And if they still haven't settled matters by then, their descendants will inherit the argument. Our Clans will be feuding for generations!

As for why we are still seen as the lesser race, well...

We still organise ourselves via a Tribal structure.
We still have that animism going.
We still have spirit journeys and the Voluval ritual.
We proudly show off our tattoos.
We don't actually have a nudity taboo so clothes are optional in some situations. I know people among us who walk around without pants.
Our Laws can be vague.
We still talk to inanimate objects and dead people. You know, animism.
We still have shamans who talk to inanimate objects and dead people. You know, animism.
It is an annual tradition for our leaders to break into fistfights.

Ms. Arrendis, have you met Nauplius? You blew up one of his towers, I think, but did you ever really interact with him?

He was a hack. A horrible, merciless hack. He's a person who blew up a million luckless people to celebrate each of the first and second anniversaries of the first time he blew up a million luckless people. He wanted to be the harbinger of untold suffering, but even at that, he was a hack. We had to be careful what ideas we printed here on the IGS, because he'd steal any he found interesting-- including, if I wasn't careful, mine-- and make them into Red God worship by adding buckets and buckets of blood.

He's a person who used a freedom fighter's list of the evils of the slave trade-- TCMC's, vitoc, brainwashing-- as a checklist of things to do to everybody.

He's a person who, if he wanted "subtle" to be his middle name, would have had his name formally changed to include "Subtle," and then announced it on GalNet complete with a massive filmed sacrifice of at least several thousand people to his Red God to re-consecrate his new Subtle self in his deity's sight.

That is who he was. And maybe is. I don't ... know.

As awful as it seems to say, he was an okay person to talk to on ... well, any subject but religion. He had empathy. He could even be kind.

But he was insane. Trapped in an awful universe with an awful, malevolent god of blood and hate that existed (I pray) exclusively in his own head.

He wasn't a cunning master manipulator, Ms. Arrendis. He was one of the saddest people I ever knew.

Ms. Arrendis ... no. I'm sorry, but no. The kind of thing you're talking about is the domain of fiction. A real, successful scheme is a blend of insight, luck, and opportunism, a loosely-defined goal or series of goals worked towards progressively, improvising, over time.

Probably Nauplius wouldn't have been sorry to see turning over that many people to my custody and care cause trouble. Probably he would have been, if he'd known how many would ultimately survive. Probably he'd have taken a lot of pride in how many would be permanently scarred. Probably he knew, in any event, that he was giving me a problem, not a gift.

But as for the "trust" issues that would result? ... those were the product of too much complexity, and too many circumstances he had no means of being aware of. I don't believe in free will, but I do believe in complexity. Turbulence. Chaos, if you like.

Nauplius had no reason to think any specific thing about how that would play out, except what he already knew based on the condition of his prisoners: that it would be a struggle at best; that not all would survive; that maybe none of them would; and that their suffering would be ... difficult, for me.

That's the kind of foresight, or "plot," I'll credit him with.

The rest? The specifics? Without going into too much detail, he's not likely to have had information enough to even suspect that things could play in such a way. I decline to credit poor Nauplius with omniscience.

I don't really believe in labyrinthic plots as a real thing real people do to begin with. Mostly, I think people identify goals and then start trying to turn developments toward attaining those goals as they come. If they're good at it, at the end it looks like they planned the whole thing. It's more a matter of resource management and timing than attempting perfect prediction of how a bunch of human (hence crazy-unpredictable) interactions and events are going to play out.

The best strategy is arranging things so you win no matter what happens-- which isn't so much a matter of controlling outcomes as figuring out how to turn every possible outcome to your advantage.

It's usually not actually very labyrinthic, though. "Labyrinthic" tends to mean a lot of specifics, which an actual plot need not and indeed probably should not. It makes a good novel or holo, because in those there is no real chaos-- everything's under the creator's control.

Real life? Real life is messy.

The way I apply it most regularly is just this: "If I defeat you, I win. If you defeat me, I will learn from your strategies and my own mistakes; therefore, I win."

That's how I approach basically any fight.

If Miss Luna will lift my exile, I'll be there Holy Mother.

P.S. are there still any good fishing boats i can charter in Sarum Prime system planetside?

I assure you, it is not the domain of fiction at all. I have watched them unfold, seen the dominos fall exactly as predicted months in advance. Even the best schemers can make mistakes, be blind to unexpected developments, or be too sure of their own infallibility. I've seen that happen, too. What I describe, though... definitely not merely fiction.



He knew the conditions of his prisoners. He knew you're not a person who simply abandons a responsibility once she undertakes it. He knew that you are a deeply empathetic person who has made a long habit of looking at the cluster through others' lives to better understand your own. He knew the people you deal with, and many of their priorities.

That can be quite a lot to work with.

And for the record, "Labyrinthine" (the other is not a word despite the adverbial form being 'labyrinthically'. It's odd, I know.) simply means many twists and turns, convolutions and confusions. They need not be specifics. Rather, they are contingencies intended to create a category of responses. Each potential response then has other conditions and twists that will be put into play, forcing another set of choices, with another set of possible responses. At each decision point, the structure is intended to guide the subject into certain patterns of thought. The longer you work them, the more decision points you force them to react to, the more limited and specific their options become as the aggregate conditions build up.

We sometimes hold lengthy discussions. Lengthy serious discussions. Look each other in the eye and hold lengthy serious discussions about non-frivolous topic. I don't think there's any embarrassment involved.

Sometimes the displayed tattoos also act as a conversation starter.

I wasn't really trying to say it's the same thing, Mr. Egivand. Achura aren't taught that our bodies are really something to be ashamed of, either. Just-- modesty's also expected.