idek this turned into Myst-verse ramblings.
I decided just now that in order to stop not posting for months on end, I should just post between classes.
Of course this either means you're going to get a combination of random babbles and spamming of flist. Or something.
Actually, I was sort of reading The Book of D'ni yesterday (still trying to decide whether to spend the money on it since it's my least favourite of the Myst novels), and ran into a passage where Marrim was narrating about something or another, and she pulls out her journal and comments that she never used to keep one and didn't see the point until she found an unused one one day and decided to copy Atrus, and found it helped her put her thoughts in order. Then again, I generally do that sort of thing internally.
I am seriously considering changing icons, which is something considering I haven't touched them in something like three years. I'd have to check. After flipping through four pages of journal, I found a post in 2007 referring to waaaay back during the short period I had a plus account, so the current set is dated to at least two years. Most have been longer than the plus thing. (a better check later zeroes switch from plus back to basic to about July 07) Anyway, I just... don't think some, well, Cloud, Link and the Hagaren symbol, are that uh useful? Cloud is sort of my angry/wtf icon, Laughing-Man is happy, sarcastic, and hiding feelings, and the Riven icon is sort of my journalling icon. And Ebs is never leaving I tells ya. Um. My point is I don't use the three as much as the others, which is weird since FMA is the only thing I'm really still involved in (reading the manga and watching the new anime for the lulz), but I never use it. I've never done anything in the FFVII fandom, just watched the movie and played the first game and Crisis Core, and I ignore half the plot of CC. Link... iunno, it's sort of my hiking icon, that's my only explanation. I mean, come on, I talk about Pokemon more than either FF or LoZ. At the same time, though, since I've had them for well over two years I don't really want to change them. Looking at my folder of icons I wouldn't mind having, I don't see any decent FMA replacements, but I have an idea of what to replace Cloud/Link with. Vaguely. Maybe.
Pretending for a moment I have better things to do with my time than to consider LJ icons, uh... I forgot how I was going to end this sentence. Eh. Onto other things
Re: Myst Exile, Revelation and End of Ages again (yes I'm using the subtitles not the number, it's easier to refer to them this way). For Exile, ignoring some obvious logical gaps (why is The Stranger back in Myst world after Riven, why are there linking books to Tomahna in Narayan rather than to Myst, and where are the J'nanin, Voltaic, Edanna, Amateria and Narayan original books if Sirrus and Achenar burnt the entire library excepting the original four Myst ages are the chief examples) I rather like it. It suggests that there's more fallout to Sirrus and Achenar's deeds than just emptying Stoneship, Channelwood, and Mechanical and destroying the links to other Ages. I can't help but think that Saavedro's end isn't quite so easy as the game takes it to be, considering he has been alone for twenty years and is almost certainly somewhat crazy (see him scolding himself in Narayan), but I kind of hope he gets through it.
Revelation is a different story. For one thing, it completely changes how the first two games played, and while I know that's how the linking books are actually supposed to work, it means that the extra two endings in Myst can't work, and basically every ending in Riven can't work. There's only one that doesn't involve trapping Gehn in the prison book, and in that one both the Stranger and Atrus die, so it can't be canon. On the other had, by changing the first two Prison Books into actual ages, you actually retcon Riven into a completely different thing, since Gehn if Gehn is paranoid enough to make Stranger link through first, it'd trap both of them, and since Stranger is around for the next three games, it means that either Gehn didn't have a test (except maybe with Cho, since he does appear in one of the trapped endings as the test) or uh... I don't actually know. Basically Riven turns into a problem for both Exile and Revelation. On the other hand, I don't mind the wrapping up of the Sirrus and Achenar stories, but they kind of don't make sense. And it just makes me feel sorry for Achenar, but then, the Achenar in Revelation is a very different person from Myst; Myst's was giggling, desperate and much more outwardly mad than his brother, but in Revelation he's gruff, and while I can sort of see him morphing into someone who doesn't talk much, his entire character changes, and it just doesn't jive. It doesn't help that his voice drops like two octaves for no real reason. He also stops showing a good portion of the insanities he did in Myst, like while he has a few things that allude back, I'd think that in the setting he was placed in he'd continue with them. Honestly, I don't know how likely it'd be that he'd reform according to his original character in the setting he was placed in, if he was that interested in other people's pain then I think he'd be likely to shift to animals when people were removed from the equation. Maybe not. I'm not a psychologist. It just doesn't seem quite right. Sirrus I have no problems with, he essentially continued along the path laid by Myst. My only question is why did he bother to free Achenar? If Achenar did abandon him right before they completed a plan that didn't make sense, then why would he tempt fate and free someone who has shown himself not to be trustworthy? Did he really need Achenar that much? From what I've seen of the game (the Let's Play is missing most of Haven and the second half of Spire, so for all I know I really am missing obvious things) he didn't so uh. Yeah. Another thing that kind of depresses me is that this one is the only one I hear echoes of the original Myst music in, and I love the original Myst music. Even Riven doesn't have it, and it was done by the same guy. Except Catherine's Freedom, and that's practially the stand-alone track from Riven. In the Making of Riven video, they use it three times and don't use anything else. Oh wait, I'm digressing. Point is, I miss my Myst music, and the Revelation composer seems to think that all the original music consisted of three chords. Sigh.
I can't like End of Ages. I can't see how Yeesha turned into the person she did, unless her brothers' deaths actually did warp her, but even then she doesn't show that. Esher makes sense to me, since in my head he's like Gehn and wasn't one of D'ni proper but just learned everything from books and histories. The problem is that he implies that he's one of the D'ni that lived while D'ni stood, and it just doesn't compute how he could look younger than Atrus (while yes, technically Atrus is a quarter-blood, in The Book of D'ni basically all the remaining 17 Guildsmen are described with varieties of "old") and yet be older than Atrus' father. Then there's the world itself. They place K'veer at the top of the Great Shaft, when in every single other media K'veer is in the city proper, just on an island in the lake. Also, they introduce random elevators, which I'm sure Anna would have been able to figure out to use when she travelled down, and all the rest stations are unlocked and have working Linking Books, when in the books I'm pretty sure none of the rest-stations were open to Anna since Gehn had to unlock the ones he and Atrus used, and then in the third book they collected all the books together, which would have certainly included any in the rest stations, assuming they survived the Fall. And both Yeesha and Esher Link without books, in Esher's case several times to completely different locations. How? He appears to touch a place on his left breast, but there's no way in canon for someone to do that. I guess it's possible he has some sort of linking device hidden there back to some hub where he has umpteen Linking Books, but honestly? How could he? There weren't that many books left by the D'ni, and while he did take the journey himself, I highly doubt he knows exactly how long you'll take to get from place to place. Then there are the Bahro. Yeesha implies that only her and Calam learned about the Bahro, but then apparently Atrus knows, and all of D'ni knows since they put pedestals literally everywhere, including in the middle of their arena world. On a platform that only lowers when someone's on it, even. I mean come on, it's not that hard to see the logical fallacy here. Even better, it's implied that every single person who took the Tablet quest before you did something like, I don't know, go muahaha the Bahro's power is mine, but then there's the fact laid out in the Book of D'ni which says the D'ni do no enslave. Yet the Bahro are enslaved. Oh, and, better, since Atrus knows about the Bahro he either took the Tablet quest and faile to free them against previous character building or failed to act on the knowledge of slavery amongst his people when he helped destroy slavery in their sister-civilization. Honestly, this stuff is simple. Especially since he implies that it's his family's burden, which just implies bad things about everyone. Oh and then there's Esher the enslaver, who I took to have also taken the quest, but for some reason didn't take the Tablet for his own, nor... gave it to anyone else? I can't even tell what people who take the quest besides the Stranger do with that thing, since at the end you can't take it for yourself, but it got implied Yeesha did and Esher didn't and the entire thing doesn't make sense. Oh, and all of this is ignoring the fact that, according to D'ni physiology, this is probably taking place more than a hundred years after Myst. Actually, according to what we see of Myst itself, it's much longer. I guess that yes, after a time without maintenance every Age would decay, but what kind of maintenance? Writing? If that were true, then every Age after the Fall would be corrupted, and lots of those had people living in them. Then do they need people living in them? But what about the Ages that are uninhabited, like the Ages that supplied D'ni with food? Okay, I'm going to go find a timeline now.
Back. New paragraph because I've gone entirely Wall of Texty. If this wasn't alreeady tl;dr, then it's going to worse. Basically the only timeline I could find with dates seemed to think Atrus was a ripe 332 in End of Ages, which makes me think they're more than a little off. So my estimation of something like a hundred years later, which shouldn't be that much of a change in Myst itself, especially since I'd like to believe that Atrus would try to keep it up somewhat seeing as Anna's buried there. (Edit of much much laterness: Apparently he is 300 odd. Games, I do not get you. I still think Myst shouldn't have decayed that much. There's about 175
between Revelation and End of Ages, apparently) The only think I like about the game, actually, is the revisit to Myst. Having not played the game, just watched a playthrough, it looks much easier than the earlier games, and I have this itch to go explore empty Myst Island to see what's there and what isn't. Is the cabin still there? The generator room? The great tree? What happened to the Selenetic book, sealed inside the rocket, now that there's no power to its prison? Did someone take the other three ages out of Myst? After all, Rime got taken to Tomahna, and all the burned books seem to have vanished. What about Anna's grave?
Honestly, the only think I'd like to see from Myst now is a remake that, if Revelation really is retconning things, fits the rules laid down so they apply to every part. Oh, and add in the household stuff into the formerly inhabited ages. I think it'd be interesting to see where Atrus, Catherine, and the boys lived in Myst, the former quarters of the six people of Mechanical, where the people of Stoneship lived. I want to know why or how the Stranger returned to Atrus' life. Then again, I also want to see a fireplace that isn't an elevator or overly complex mechanism of some kind, and we know how well that's going to turn out.
I am slightly impressed I rambled about Myst for two and a bit hours. I hit "Update" at 1:11 PM, class started at 3, and I typed sometimes during the movie on Austrilopithecus africanus versus Piltdown Man. Dr. Raymond Dart seemed like a jolly sort of man. Anyway, since I finished on the bus, the time "posted" is the time finished at, I'm getting/got home later. I also need to finish my two animated icon projects, where both consist of cropping 17 frames to 100x100 in a matching fashion. It's horribly tedious.
Of course this either means you're going to get a combination of random babbles and spamming of flist. Or something.
Actually, I was sort of reading The Book of D'ni yesterday (still trying to decide whether to spend the money on it since it's my least favourite of the Myst novels), and ran into a passage where Marrim was narrating about something or another, and she pulls out her journal and comments that she never used to keep one and didn't see the point until she found an unused one one day and decided to copy Atrus, and found it helped her put her thoughts in order. Then again, I generally do that sort of thing internally.
I am seriously considering changing icons, which is something considering I haven't touched them in something like three years. I'd have to check. After flipping through four pages of journal, I found a post in 2007 referring to waaaay back during the short period I had a plus account, so the current set is dated to at least two years. Most have been longer than the plus thing. (a better check later zeroes switch from plus back to basic to about July 07) Anyway, I just... don't think some, well, Cloud, Link and the Hagaren symbol, are that uh useful? Cloud is sort of my angry/wtf icon, Laughing-Man is happy, sarcastic, and hiding feelings, and the Riven icon is sort of my journalling icon. And Ebs is never leaving I tells ya. Um. My point is I don't use the three as much as the others, which is weird since FMA is the only thing I'm really still involved in (reading the manga and watching the new anime for the lulz), but I never use it. I've never done anything in the FFVII fandom, just watched the movie and played the first game and Crisis Core, and I ignore half the plot of CC. Link... iunno, it's sort of my hiking icon, that's my only explanation. I mean, come on, I talk about Pokemon more than either FF or LoZ. At the same time, though, since I've had them for well over two years I don't really want to change them. Looking at my folder of icons I wouldn't mind having, I don't see any decent FMA replacements, but I have an idea of what to replace Cloud/Link with. Vaguely. Maybe.
Pretending for a moment I have better things to do with my time than to consider LJ icons, uh... I forgot how I was going to end this sentence. Eh. Onto other things
Re: Myst Exile, Revelation and End of Ages again (yes I'm using the subtitles not the number, it's easier to refer to them this way). For Exile, ignoring some obvious logical gaps (why is The Stranger back in Myst world after Riven, why are there linking books to Tomahna in Narayan rather than to Myst, and where are the J'nanin, Voltaic, Edanna, Amateria and Narayan original books if Sirrus and Achenar burnt the entire library excepting the original four Myst ages are the chief examples) I rather like it. It suggests that there's more fallout to Sirrus and Achenar's deeds than just emptying Stoneship, Channelwood, and Mechanical and destroying the links to other Ages. I can't help but think that Saavedro's end isn't quite so easy as the game takes it to be, considering he has been alone for twenty years and is almost certainly somewhat crazy (see him scolding himself in Narayan), but I kind of hope he gets through it.
Revelation is a different story. For one thing, it completely changes how the first two games played, and while I know that's how the linking books are actually supposed to work, it means that the extra two endings in Myst can't work, and basically every ending in Riven can't work. There's only one that doesn't involve trapping Gehn in the prison book, and in that one both the Stranger and Atrus die, so it can't be canon. On the other had, by changing the first two Prison Books into actual ages, you actually retcon Riven into a completely different thing, since Gehn if Gehn is paranoid enough to make Stranger link through first, it'd trap both of them, and since Stranger is around for the next three games, it means that either Gehn didn't have a test (except maybe with Cho, since he does appear in one of the trapped endings as the test) or uh... I don't actually know. Basically Riven turns into a problem for both Exile and Revelation. On the other hand, I don't mind the wrapping up of the Sirrus and Achenar stories, but they kind of don't make sense. And it just makes me feel sorry for Achenar, but then, the Achenar in Revelation is a very different person from Myst; Myst's was giggling, desperate and much more outwardly mad than his brother, but in Revelation he's gruff, and while I can sort of see him morphing into someone who doesn't talk much, his entire character changes, and it just doesn't jive. It doesn't help that his voice drops like two octaves for no real reason. He also stops showing a good portion of the insanities he did in Myst, like while he has a few things that allude back, I'd think that in the setting he was placed in he'd continue with them. Honestly, I don't know how likely it'd be that he'd reform according to his original character in the setting he was placed in, if he was that interested in other people's pain then I think he'd be likely to shift to animals when people were removed from the equation. Maybe not. I'm not a psychologist. It just doesn't seem quite right. Sirrus I have no problems with, he essentially continued along the path laid by Myst. My only question is why did he bother to free Achenar? If Achenar did abandon him right before they completed a plan that didn't make sense, then why would he tempt fate and free someone who has shown himself not to be trustworthy? Did he really need Achenar that much? From what I've seen of the game (the Let's Play is missing most of Haven and the second half of Spire, so for all I know I really am missing obvious things) he didn't so uh. Yeah. Another thing that kind of depresses me is that this one is the only one I hear echoes of the original Myst music in, and I love the original Myst music. Even Riven doesn't have it, and it was done by the same guy. Except Catherine's Freedom, and that's practially the stand-alone track from Riven. In the Making of Riven video, they use it three times and don't use anything else. Oh wait, I'm digressing. Point is, I miss my Myst music, and the Revelation composer seems to think that all the original music consisted of three chords. Sigh.
I can't like End of Ages. I can't see how Yeesha turned into the person she did, unless her brothers' deaths actually did warp her, but even then she doesn't show that. Esher makes sense to me, since in my head he's like Gehn and wasn't one of D'ni proper but just learned everything from books and histories. The problem is that he implies that he's one of the D'ni that lived while D'ni stood, and it just doesn't compute how he could look younger than Atrus (while yes, technically Atrus is a quarter-blood, in The Book of D'ni basically all the remaining 17 Guildsmen are described with varieties of "old") and yet be older than Atrus' father. Then there's the world itself. They place K'veer at the top of the Great Shaft, when in every single other media K'veer is in the city proper, just on an island in the lake. Also, they introduce random elevators, which I'm sure Anna would have been able to figure out to use when she travelled down, and all the rest stations are unlocked and have working Linking Books, when in the books I'm pretty sure none of the rest-stations were open to Anna since Gehn had to unlock the ones he and Atrus used, and then in the third book they collected all the books together, which would have certainly included any in the rest stations, assuming they survived the Fall. And both Yeesha and Esher Link without books, in Esher's case several times to completely different locations. How? He appears to touch a place on his left breast, but there's no way in canon for someone to do that. I guess it's possible he has some sort of linking device hidden there back to some hub where he has umpteen Linking Books, but honestly? How could he? There weren't that many books left by the D'ni, and while he did take the journey himself, I highly doubt he knows exactly how long you'll take to get from place to place. Then there are the Bahro. Yeesha implies that only her and Calam learned about the Bahro, but then apparently Atrus knows, and all of D'ni knows since they put pedestals literally everywhere, including in the middle of their arena world. On a platform that only lowers when someone's on it, even. I mean come on, it's not that hard to see the logical fallacy here. Even better, it's implied that every single person who took the Tablet quest before you did something like, I don't know, go muahaha the Bahro's power is mine, but then there's the fact laid out in the Book of D'ni which says the D'ni do no enslave. Yet the Bahro are enslaved. Oh, and, better, since Atrus knows about the Bahro he either took the Tablet quest and faile to free them against previous character building or failed to act on the knowledge of slavery amongst his people when he helped destroy slavery in their sister-civilization. Honestly, this stuff is simple. Especially since he implies that it's his family's burden, which just implies bad things about everyone. Oh and then there's Esher the enslaver, who I took to have also taken the quest, but for some reason didn't take the Tablet for his own, nor... gave it to anyone else? I can't even tell what people who take the quest besides the Stranger do with that thing, since at the end you can't take it for yourself, but it got implied Yeesha did and Esher didn't and the entire thing doesn't make sense. Oh, and all of this is ignoring the fact that, according to D'ni physiology, this is probably taking place more than a hundred years after Myst. Actually, according to what we see of Myst itself, it's much longer. I guess that yes, after a time without maintenance every Age would decay, but what kind of maintenance? Writing? If that were true, then every Age after the Fall would be corrupted, and lots of those had people living in them. Then do they need people living in them? But what about the Ages that are uninhabited, like the Ages that supplied D'ni with food? Okay, I'm going to go find a timeline now.
Back. New paragraph because I've gone entirely Wall of Texty. If this wasn't alreeady tl;dr, then it's going to worse. Basically the only timeline I could find with dates seemed to think Atrus was a ripe 332 in End of Ages, which makes me think they're more than a little off. So my estimation of something like a hundred years later, which shouldn't be that much of a change in Myst itself, especially since I'd like to believe that Atrus would try to keep it up somewhat seeing as Anna's buried there. (Edit of much much laterness: Apparently he is 300 odd. Games, I do not get you. I still think Myst shouldn't have decayed that much. There's about 175
between Revelation and End of Ages, apparently) The only think I like about the game, actually, is the revisit to Myst. Having not played the game, just watched a playthrough, it looks much easier than the earlier games, and I have this itch to go explore empty Myst Island to see what's there and what isn't. Is the cabin still there? The generator room? The great tree? What happened to the Selenetic book, sealed inside the rocket, now that there's no power to its prison? Did someone take the other three ages out of Myst? After all, Rime got taken to Tomahna, and all the burned books seem to have vanished. What about Anna's grave?
Honestly, the only think I'd like to see from Myst now is a remake that, if Revelation really is retconning things, fits the rules laid down so they apply to every part. Oh, and add in the household stuff into the formerly inhabited ages. I think it'd be interesting to see where Atrus, Catherine, and the boys lived in Myst, the former quarters of the six people of Mechanical, where the people of Stoneship lived. I want to know why or how the Stranger returned to Atrus' life. Then again, I also want to see a fireplace that isn't an elevator or overly complex mechanism of some kind, and we know how well that's going to turn out.
I am slightly impressed I rambled about Myst for two and a bit hours. I hit "Update" at 1:11 PM, class started at 3, and I typed sometimes during the movie on Austrilopithecus africanus versus Piltdown Man. Dr. Raymond Dart seemed like a jolly sort of man. Anyway, since I finished on the bus, the time "posted" is the time finished at, I'm getting/got home later. I also need to finish my two animated icon projects, where both consist of cropping 17 frames to 100x100 in a matching fashion. It's horribly tedious.