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I reckon the Blast should be memory loss, since both UFOs and Men in Black cause it. Starts at 1 hour for a Minor Charge, maybe a Day for a Major and longer for a Sig Charge.
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May 29, 2017 02:00
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Count Chocula posted:I reckon the Blast should be memory loss, since both UFOs and Men in Black cause it. Starts at 1 hour for a Minor Charge, maybe a Day for a Major and longer for a Sig Charge. I like that! Lost time is a symptom of abductions. Though I figure I should fit in cattle mutilation and alien autopsy/dissections somewhere -- right now the minor blast deals firearms damage to livestock, and the significant blast lays out whatever it destroys neatly on the nearest flat surface, a la dissection tables.
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May 29, 2017 04:30
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I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story.
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May 29, 2017 04:46
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Impermanent posted:I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story. How about Alantutorial? Something with the Fool, maybe? Edit: Oh, I forgot about Children of the Mirror; you could almost just drop that in straight as a cult in a UA game.
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May 29, 2017 04:48
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Yeah Alan tutorial is about a fool avatar getting stuck in a room of renunciation.
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May 29, 2017 04:52
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Along similar lines, Too Many Cooks is what happens an old school Videomancer scores a Major Charge and uses it to take revenge on everyone who's ever wronged him.
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May 29, 2017 14:06
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Impermanent posted:Yeah Alan tutorial is about a fool avatar getting stuck in a room of renunciation. I think Visitor Information is just about a room.
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May 30, 2017 22:21
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I enjoyed the new Roleplaying Public Radio episode featuring Unknown Armies. It's a worthwhile one-shot to give a listen if you've the extra time on your commute.
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May 31, 2017 00:17
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Oh man I'm all over that. Are there any other Actual Plays of UA online anywhere?
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May 31, 2017 02:16
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Strange Matter posted:Along similar lines, Too Many Cooks is what happens an old school Videomancer scores a Major Charge and uses it to take revenge on everyone who's ever wronged him. I first encountered that video in this thread, so it's always linked to Videomancy in my mind.
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May 31, 2017 02:29
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Strange Matter posted:Oh man I'm all over that. Are there any other Actual Plays of UA online anywhere? I think I posted this before, but there's this write up here -> http://cucullus-non-facit-monachum.obsidianportal.com/ I've started a campaign last week (well, we did character generation and such, but with UA3 that took us about 4 hours to have the finished characters and local setting), so I plan on writing that up if it gets off the ground.
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May 31, 2017 07:55
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Strange Matter posted:Oh man I'm all over that. Are there any other Actual Plays of UA online anywhere? Unknown Armies – The Great American Bakery Ascension
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May 31, 2017 19:50
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That's the one I was referencing.
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Jun 1, 2017 00:35
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Memnaelar posted:That's the one I was referencing. I keep clicking over to the tab this is playing and looking for a video. Real quick, somebody animate a 3 hour companion video to this.
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Jun 1, 2017 03:35
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Impermanent posted:I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story. I just watched "This House Has People In It" after having never heard of Alan Resnick, and holy poo poo. Can anyone recommend more media along those lines, whatever you happen to feel "those lines" are?
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Jun 1, 2017 04:52
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Kestral posted:I just watched "This House Has People In It" after having never heard of Alan Resnick, and holy poo poo. Can anyone recommend more media along those lines, whatever you happen to feel "those lines" are? Watch the rest of Resnick's stuff, and after that you're in the realm of internet creepy stuff and I'm not great for recommendations there. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is pretty fun, I guess?
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Jun 1, 2017 05:27
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Impermanent posted:Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Alan in LFAYAN is now my mental image of a renounced archetype on Earth: obviously and completely disconnected from the mundane human experience, consumed by their own fantastically bad nonsense ideas, and yet compelling enough that people still go along with it. (It doesn't hurt that, like LFAYAN, whatever they're selling is probably based in deep-seated human desires and fears -- the kind of thing that regular ol' weirdos can sell, let alone Statospheric weirdos.) I'm still thinking about This House Has People In It, but I suspect it's a better UA ghost story for not being readily explicable or mappable to archetypal stories. "This is a terrible arbitrary supernatural event, complicated by unstated but lurking non-supernatural problems, and there will be fallout" is hella Unknown Armies just as it stands, even before you consider the framing device. Unedited Footage of a Bear strikes me as what happens when someone splits into multiple people, Bill-Toge-style, and one of them realizes it and decides to "fix" it, whether via an attempt at the Ritual of Unity, or just old-fashioned "kill the other and take their place." An alternate, long-winded theory: due to the force of human appetite and aspiration applied to advertising in the modern era, commercials have functionally become an Otherspace. Most of these are rather flat and uninteresting cosmically compared to the real world or more organic Otherspaces, but pharmaceutical commercial Otherspaces -- a world powered by human agony and desperate hope, stuffed full of novel chemicals with psychological side effects -- have a tendency to get very weird, very fast, and generally not a safe or productive sort of weird. This is a major reason for the rise of animated commercials; as unappealing as they are, anthropomorphic cartoon intestinal tracts or copper-pipe stick figures don't have the metaphysical weight of humans or the same likelihood of causing cosmological disturbance. Fear of disruption of the pharmaceutical-commercial Otherspace is also a non-trivial concern of the FDA in the drug-approval pipeline, although only a few well-connected officials know it. Any number of drugs have been held up in the pipeline, not because of concerns about safety for human patients, but because of concerns about safety of the Otherspace and the connected fields of the collective unconscious.
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Jun 1, 2017 08:45
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Kestral posted:I just watched "This House Has People In It" after having never heard of Alan Resnick, and holy poo poo. Can anyone recommend more media along those lines, whatever you happen to feel "those lines" are? Anything by Brian Evenson will feel as unsettling, the new Twin Peaks, comics by Josh Simmons, the film Clean, Shaven was a big influence on John Scott Tynes and thus UA.
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Jun 1, 2017 09:24
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Kestral posted:I just watched "This House Has People In It" after having never heard of Alan Resnick, and holy poo poo. Can anyone recommend more media along those lines, whatever you happen to feel "those lines" are? its also important that you know, and i'm trying to say this with as few spoilers as possible, that watching that video is the smallest amount of interaction you can have with this house has people in it. google or sleuth your way into easily 16x more content if you found it really captivating.
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Jun 1, 2017 18:47
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So in prepping for the first session tomorrow, I've been re-reading the books a bit. But I'm a little confused about the character sheet still and wanna get on top of it. With the shock gauge, can you fill it in from either end, so it looks like this? [green for failed, yellow for hardened] 
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Jun 3, 2017 07:58
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Cassa posted:So in prepping for the first session tomorrow, I've been re-reading the books a bit. But I'm a little confused about the character sheet still and wanna get on top of it. Nope, hardened notches go from left to right. Failed notches don't go on the skill gauge at all, but in those square boxes to the right of it.
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Jun 3, 2017 08:23
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OK, that's a huge help. I really wish they'd done a little more visually in the first book with the character sheet, I'm not great at reading blocks of text to learn. Like I thought those were to keep track of failures for XP.
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Jun 3, 2017 08:26
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Where are the rules on how to process checks at the end of a session? I know I saw them somewhere, but I can't find the rules for increasing stats through failures/successes.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:49
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Page 45 of Book 1, under 'Improving Identities'.
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Jun 3, 2017 10:18
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Okay, Joymancers, take two. More significance on using games to divine fate and chance, more focus to the spells (although there are some sig spells that slip the theme as I do want at least a few weird effects), and I've made the preference for simple "childish" games into text instead of subtext. I did not include ties to the Gambler archetype or notes on a second "Eurogame" school, cuz I should just focus on getting this right before letting ambition take over. Comments can be left on the file so you don't have to make a post on the forums just to say "Don't do this thing right here."
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Jun 5, 2017 03:32
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Crossfire x Significant Charges For a number of seconds equal to the dice roll, gunfights become significantly less deadly. Anyone hit by a gunshot takes damage equal to the sum of the firearms dice roll, and is flung back an equal number of feet. Also, for the duration of the effect, all firearms have unlimited ammunition. Don't Wake Daddy x Minor Charges Let's you flip flop a secrecy roll against any male character who has at least one living child. It also allows adds 20% to any roll directly related to getting access to a refrigerator. Attempting to sneak past sleeping male parents while trying to access a refrigerator while this spell is in effect succeeds automatically, allowing the character to magickally bypass locked doors, pit traps, or even bank vaults. As a note, if you're attempting to hide something valuable from a joymancer, don't store it in a refrigerator.
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Jun 5, 2017 04:24
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Impermanent posted:I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story. thank you so much for these. I saw Too Many Cooks years ago but didn't know the same guy kept making awesome, outland videos. I'm of the mind that each of the videos should be taken at face value on their own. I'm confused about why there are secondary videos that dissect the original video that are like 10x longer than the original. they're awesome weird stories man, don't ruin them by trying to explain and verify every single thing in them.
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Jun 5, 2017 20:39
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Freaking Crumbum posted:thank you so much for these. I saw Too Many Cooks years ago but didn't know the same guy kept making awesome, outland videos. Different guy; Alan Resnick wasn't involved in Too Many Cooks, they just all aired as part of Adult Swim's Infomercials block. quote:I'm of the mind that each of the videos should be taken at face value on their own. I'm confused about why there are secondary videos that dissect the original video that are like 10x longer than the original. they're awesome weird stories man, don't ruin them by trying to explain and verify every single thing in them. While you have a point, another part of it is that the video itself isn't the entire thing for some of his projects. Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People In It in particular have a ton of additional secondary content hidden away that you basically have to hunt for online using hints in the videos to uncover. THHPII has an entire second video associated with it (the full version of the clay sculpting video the grandmother's watching) that you can only find by digging through clues, that gives a little more insight into it. Idran fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 21:15
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Probably want to take the alantutorials and the associated Twitter feed as a body of work instead of looking at each one on their own.
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Jun 5, 2017 21:15
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Alpha version of the Xenomancers! Adepts who justify the overwhelming evidence against alien intervention inherent to UA's You Did It cosmology by declaring a higher truth and a lower truth a la Gnosticism; their magick manipulates the "hologram" (think Philip K. Dick) signifiers of extraterrestrial life in service of making the public believe... allowing xenomancers to simultaneously believe in an alien conspiracy and spend all their time on manufacturing hoaxes and false sightings, the same kind they take as proof. The formula list isn't done yet -- I know I have to work out a spell called War of the Worlds just because it's so obviously flavorful, and probably another for building a fake alien out of biomass (Space Invader), but I'd appreciate any suggestions you may have.
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Jun 6, 2017 03:30
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Idran posted:Different guy; Alan Resnick wasn't involved in Too Many Cooks, they just all aired as part of Adult Swim's Infomercials block. yeah, i saw that, and found the main google doc for the ARG that i guess was all the tertiary details for THHPII. honestly, i still would rather just think the main 11 minute video is the entirety of the content in-and-of itself; to me all of the other ARG stuff like the fake websites and the prequel and sequel videos and the other little clips still water down the whole. not that they aren't well made or that they don't flow together, but it feels to me like the creator realized he hit upon a really cool, weird concept with THHPII and then went a little overboard trying to expand upon the idea and create more mystery when really the main video itself is weird and unsettling enough. i don't know, i always hate it when there's a cool mystery and then the creator wants to oversell you on how weird it all is and they keep adding more and more detail, but by building a world around the initial weird thing, they start to give it context, which normalizes it, which makes it not weird-fun, if that makes any sense. like sure, if THHPII was just its own thing it'd be weird and unsettling and cool, but the more detail that gets developed around the central video makes the central video safer, somehow. no matter how weird the other details are or try to be, they start building a pattern and that completely deflates the initial mystery, for me. I also watched only the main video for UFoaB and that was uncomfortable to watch at several different points, but like uncomfortable in a good way. but knowing that apparently these are all part of some bigger mythos, or some loose association of stories, means i will intentionally avoid any other filler information about UFoaB because i don't want the explanations to ruin my impression of the video.
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Jun 6, 2017 04:52
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Impermanent posted:I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story. Don't forget Robert Morgan, Ben Wheele and David Firth. And while we're at it, 01A51CD0 Speaking of, I don't know if this has been posted in the thread already, but there's a guy call Benjamin Bennett who live streams himself sitting perfectly still for 4 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmrXakd_r6I&t=9400s In the video you can see somebody break into his house and he still doesn't stop. And in this one he apparently forgot to go to the bathroom before recording and peed himself
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Jun 6, 2017 17:49
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Freaking Crumbum posted:like sure, if THHPII was just its own thing it'd be weird and unsettling and cool, but the more detail that gets developed around the central video makes the central video safer, somehow. no matter how weird the other details are or try to be, they start building a pattern and that completely deflates the initial mystery, for me. THHPII: the nice thing about the THHPII extended universe is that while certain questions are answered, they are only answered with more questions. You get more detail, but never more clarity. Like the fake disease the family is scared of having? Never 100% if its real, or if that pink monster has anything to do with it. UFoaB: as far as I can tell, they learned from the tendency to oversteer into creating more details in the elements around this one. The only things you learn can be reasonably surmised by reading into the subtext of the actual video.
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Jun 6, 2017 18:27
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Impermanent posted:THHPII: the nice thing about the THHPII extended universe is that while certain questions are answered, they are only answered with more questions. You get more detail, but never more clarity. Like the fake disease the family is scared of having? Never 100% if its real, or if that pink monster has anything to do with it. I really liked that UFoaB goes bugfuck crazy off the rails and never makes an attempt to come back to the original premise. like, if I was just sitting around watching t.v. and then that commercial just played out in its entirety in the middle of a t.v. show commercial loop (it looks like their group AB got something on IFC now?) it would be completely surreal and likely get me to start questioning whether or not I was really going crazy or something. edit: also the implicit and explicit violence in THHPII and UfoaB really serve to make the whole thing more real and more unsettling for me. I watched LFAYAN and the clay sculptor video, but the lack of anything threatening left me less excited. they both imply other weird stuff happening, but too vaguely to be spooky, and in the case of LFAYAN, it was almost too close to a comedy skit about a bad infomercial to really seem weird. OTOH I saw the visitor center or welcome video or whatever it's called that's supposed to be the first thing in the THHPII series, and it was also unsettling in a really cool way. Alan does a really good job of clearly demonstrating that someone is in danger (either real or imagined) but also can't just directly state what is wrong, which helps imply that there is something very threatening lurking just out of frame. Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 18:39
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Freaking Crumbum posted:I really liked that UFoaB goes bugfuck crazy off the rails and never makes an attempt to come back to the original premise. like, if I was just sitting around watching t.v. and then that commercial just played out in its entirety in the middle of a t.v. show commercial loop (it looks like their group AB got something on IFC now?) it would be completely surreal and likely get me to start questioning whether or not I was really going crazy or something. If I remember right, they put it on late at night, with no hints, when only stoners are up watching dumb shows. That would have been nuts to see.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:02
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:If I remember right, they put it on late at night, with no hints, when only stoners are up watching dumb shows. gently caress, if only I was 19 and in college again I'd be able to catch that poo poo live with no context
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Jun 6, 2017 19:30
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:If I remember right, they put it on late at night, with no hints, when only stoners are up watching dumb shows.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:46
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Freaking Crumbum posted:gently caress, if only I was 19 and in college again I'd be able to catch that poo poo live with no context
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Jun 6, 2017 20:11
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This thread got me to watch THHPII. I hate you all. Now I'm afraid of houses again.
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Jun 6, 2017 23:21
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In "real life resembling UA" news, interesting footage of a bunch of turkeys circling around a dead cat here. Now, apparently there's a reasonable explanation out there for it (flocking behavior in the presence of a predator as I understand it), but it's not like rational alternate explanations have to interfere with going with a crazy one for UA. If nothing else, "animals performing ritual-like behavior" is a dandy weird thing to throw at players. Not sure how you'd explain it in UA terms; my personal thought would be somebody taking "As above, so below" and instead of trying to influence Heaven/spiritual realms with behavior by humans, try to influence humans with behavior by "lower animals".
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Jun 6, 2017 23:57
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