Regrets Of The Dread Wolf

in the hawk(e)s shadow

My beloved

I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why Veilguard feels so hollow is because it makes an attempt to reckon with Solas’s fatal flaw, but completely fails at actually doing so.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think pride is Solas’s fatal flaw. It's a symptom, not the origin point. Solas’s fatal flaw is his inability to trust others. It's a threadline all the way through Inquisition, from the things he says to you (I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory) to the very structure of his personal quest (which does not trigger if you're on low approval with him). He's tragic (in the literary sense) because even in the case of a high approval Inquisitor, the person most likely to listen to him and capable of acting upon it, he doesn't ask them for help. Hell, we know he was planning to tell a romancing Inquisitor, but chickened out at literally the last possible second, that's how deep it runs. That's why it's Tragic.

And I think Veilguard tries to contrast this with the Team™. Which is fine, I guess, until you realise that Solas’s original Team was the Evanuris. None of Rook’s Team™ can betray them. If they don't do the companions personal quests they die, rather than become disloyal in some way. They're all 100% in accord about their politics and what is Right, without real argument. Which is nice, but if your advice to someone with severe trust issues is 'skill issue' that's...unhelpful.

And yeah, Solas did have his rebellion, but he had the rebellion in the sense that the Inquisitor had the Inquisition, not in the sense that Rook has the Team™. And as he says, any powerful organisation inevitably falls to betrayal and corruption.

And he had Felassan, but Felassan also betrayed him (with good reason, but he did actively undermine an operation he was on on behalf of Solas. That is a betrayal), which can only have cemented the inherent trust issues.

But, thinking about it, there is actually a paralell with some of the companions having experienced some kind of betrayal. Lucanis and Illario, Bellara and Cyrion, Davrin and Isseya/the Wardens, Taash and Shathann. And pretty much all of these experience a last minute change of heart, or otherwise come to the companion's POV if allowed to. Is this what they were going for with Mythal in the Atonement ending? I can kind of see the logic.

The problem is, I don't really see why this suddenly turns Solas around. He doesn't overcome his fatal flaw in order to avoid his tragedy. It always comes down to the fact that Solas’s actual reasons for bringing down the Veil are never truly addressed, and likely changed at some point in production between Trespasser and Veilguard. The political and systemic issues of the setting are pushed aside by Veilguard's narrative for individual and personal issues, even well established issues like systemic racism and slavery. It's incoherent to say 'Solas was destroying the Veil because he couldn't trust people, so fixing the trust means he doesn't want the veil to come down', when the issue was 'Solas can't trust anyone else to help solve the harm caused by the Veil because of the betrayal'. The harm doesn't go away because the betrayal did, you know what I mean? And Rook, and by extention the entire narrative, never displays willingness to even acknowledge those issues as existing in the first place, let alone needing addressing in some way. Rook interrupts Solas when he tries to talk about the suffering of the Spirits. So why does he suddenly hand over the dagger, symbolically handing the matter over to Rook?

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads

Dark Sun Gwyndolin

My paladin again!

The original Emerald Knight. Definitely went in an unexpected direction, but it was a good excuse to have more practice with gradient maps. Btw, this isn't done in color and then a grey scale layer added on top, it's done completely in grey scale AND THEN colored with about 1000 different gradient map layers, as well as a some extra blending layers AND and overpaint layer. Also, totally unintentional, but with his hair pulled up like this is kind of gives me Koga from Inuyasha vibes? I'm trying to figure out prints. I've tried INprint, but the quality just isn't where I want it. Any tips?

I feel like some of you guys think "bad art" is like someone gluing rhinestones to a water melon, or a guy who made his own armchair out of Ohio license plates, or a trashy romance novel where someone says "the blue-eyed one kissed the brown-eyed one," when in reality bad art is a 1000000 Billion Dollar movie where none of the workers got paid and every single creative decision was market tested to see how lucrative of a profit it could foreseeably make to wow shareholders.

my fav part of origins is the fact that it's a love letter to "the end does not justify the means". the entire game, in almost every quest, this is the constant question that's thrown at us. everyone in the story tells us that they did what they did because it would achieve the best outcome. from uldred's uprising in the circle tower, to zathrian's cursing of the werewolves, to bhelen's coup. loghain himself uses this as justification for the retreat at ostagar - that it was the morally correct decision to abandon the field, because it guaranteed some of the army would survive and could regroup for a new assault on the darkspawn in ostagar. and it's so specific that loghain, as the primary antagonist, loghain is the one arguing that the ends justifies the means because he is either your parallel, or your mirror.

to be more specific, my favourite thing about origins is that you, as the player character, are faced with the exact same choice. you will always resolve the circle tower uprising. you will always resolve the issue between the dalish and the werewolves. you will always settle the secession crisis in orzammar. you will always fight the archdemon and win over it. but how? what are your means? will you murder a child to spare redcliffe? will you slaughter cornered circle mages trapped in a tower with no escape? will you kill innocent werewolves who had nothing to do with a tragedy that happened hundreds of years ago? will you support a king that has his own family's blood on his hands because he wants change or a king that's more committed to culture & tradition over justice?

does it matter? to you? to anyone? why does it matter, if you're going to get to the same place in the story at the end?

and the story tells you. again and again. it matters. it matters because the ends do not justify the means. to roughly quote ursula k le guin, it matters because there is no end - you start the awakening dlc as your own warden if you survived, or as an orlesian warden if not. so, all you have left is the means.

it's very clumsy in a lot of places, and there's obvious issues if you look at each case in closer detail (e.g. the ideas around social justice re: dalish elves & mages), but overall, this is the kind of story that makes origins so special to me tbh. it really holds up a mirror to this kind of cold, utilitarian morality that's so often rewarded in "dark" fantasy genres. like idk it's very good to me.

Aliwarden art cause I miss them :>